by Tim Waggoner
“What else?” ‘Lena said as the water touched her chin and rose toward her mouth. “Keep hope alive. And remember that we love you.”
The darkness in his mother’s sockets cleared like clouds dissipating after a summer shower, and her eyes became human and blue again, just the way they were in the photo albums.
And then he heard a single word in his mind, whispered in a soft, gentle voice.
Yes.
And then they were gone and the river had returned to normal.
For a long, long time, Michael stood on the bridge, sweating in the June heat and watching the water pass by. Thinking.
* * *
“Can I…ask a question?”
She sat in the last row of the risers, a bird-thin woman in her fifties, with glasses and wispy brown hair. Behind those glasses, her eyes shone with a mix of fear and hope.
Michael gave her a reassuring nod. “You can ask anything you want.”
She seemed almost embarrassed, and despite the instructions the producer always gave to the audience before taping, she kept sneaking direct glances at the camera. “Ask my brother…ask him what it’s like where he’s at.” Her voice was hushed, as if she thought she were breaking some divine taboo by asking. “What it’s like on the other side.”
He closed his eyes to shut out the crowd, the lights, and the cameras. A vision flashed in Michael’s mind. Endless, ravenous darkness clawing at the barrier between worlds, desperate to get in, desperate to feed. But now he could see, dwarfed by the Darkness’ unimaginably vast night but still very much present, tiny pinpricks of light. Billions upon billions of souls, everyone who had ever lived and died, struggling to hold the Darkness at bay, to keep it from getting at their children.
Michael opened his eyes. He knew one of the camera operators was zooming in on his face for a close-up, so he forced a smile and prayed it was convincing.
“It’s wonderful.”
KNOCK, KNOCK
There’s a knock at the door. Three knocks, to be precise. Brisk and all business, rat-tat-tat, like the sound effect for machine-gun fire in the war comics you read as a kid. Sgt. Rock and Easy Co. Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. You haven’t read a comic in years, and you sure as hell wouldn’t read one about war and death. Not now. Not after…
The knocking comes again, startling you out of your thoughts. Your mind wanders a lot these days. Only to be expected since there’s not much to occupy it. But it is a bit surprising that it’s happened now, when you’ve just heard the first sounds of life—other than those you’ve made yourself—for the first time in six months. Or maybe it’s been longer than that. Hard to tell since—
The knocking comes again. Louder, this time, almost impatient.
Right. The door.
You step up to it and reach for the knob, but your hand stops before it can come in contact with the metal. As far as you know, you’re the only person left alive on the planet. You haven’t seen anyone else since you woke up one morning to find yourself the ruler of a world full of corpses. What killed them, and why you were spared, you don’t know. There hasn’t been a radio or television broadcast since the morning it happened. That Morning, as you’ve come to think of it. No newspapers, no Internet, just a whole lot of silence. No animals or insects either. Maybe not even bacteria. You cut yourself once, on the palm of your hand, and purposefully didn’t clean the wound just to see if it would get infected. But the cut healed just fine. The plants are still alive, though. Grass and trees, anyway. Not many flowers, not without insects and birds to help them pollinate.
So if there aren’t even any micro-fucking-organisms left, then who could possibly be knocking at your door this fine afternoon half a year after the world ended?
It’s probably an auditory hallucination, you think. You’ve been expecting to start going crazy, have been surprised that you’ve held onto your sanity this long. If you open the door, there’s a damn good chance that no one will be there. And you don’t think you could stand that. Because this knocking—and it’s being repeated at regular intervals, like a signal broadcasting on an endless loop—is the closest you’ve come to human contact since the night before That Morning. That night you had dinner with your daughter who was visiting from college. The two of you had been especially close since the death of your wife from breast cancer a few years earlier, and you were a little disappointed when your daughter cut dinner short to go meet some high school friends she hadn’t seen in a while (though of course you tried not to show it). That was the last time you saw her. She never came home that night, and despite searching through the grim necropolis the city had become, you never found her remains.
You found plenty of other bodies, though. Oodles. All uninjured, except for those who had been driving when whatever happened, happened. Everyone else just fell where they were: on the street, on sidewalks, at work, in restaurants, at home…Everyone except you. You searched for your daughter for days, and then the bodies began to…change. They didn’t rot, not exactly. Just started to become different. You figured it had something to do with whatever killed them and, just in case it might affect you, you hurried home and stayed there. And, with the exception of the occasional supply run, that’s where you’ve been ever since.
So if the knocking is a hallucination, which surely it must be, then you want to keep it going as long as you can, to maintain the illusion that someone’s on the other side of the door. Just so you can remember, if only for a short time, what hope feels like.
For this same reason you don’t peer through the Judas hole in the door. You don’t want to see a fish-eye lens view of your empty front porch, your overgrown yard, the mailbox which hasn’t been opened since That Morning, the vacant suburban cul-de-sac beyond. Hell, you hate looking outside so much that you haven’t opened the blinds over the picture window in weeks.
Slowly, you crouch down before the door and place your hands on its surface. Then you lean forward and press your ear to the wood. You’re trembling and you feel tears threatening. You brace yourself to feel the vibrations of the knocking, to feel—if only indirectly through a barrier—the touch of another. Assuming your auditory hallucination will produce a tactile component, that is.
You wait but the knocking, which had been coming so regularly, doesn’t come anymore.
You begin trembling more violently and you feel a surge of cold, shivery panic in your chest. What if it wasn’t a hallucination? What if whoever it was decided no one lived in the small ranch house at the end of the cul-de-sac, turned away, and headed down the walk, off to try another house? You might have just blown your chance, your only chance, to end your loneliness. To end the days and nights wandering around your empty house, reading books, listening to CD’s on a portable battery-powered player, eating the food you’ve managed to stockpile since That Morning. Talking to yourself too often just to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it’s just your own.
And there’s something else, a thought so unlikely that you can barely allow it to take form. But if you survived, maybe someone else did. And if some kind of disease or biological weapon killed everyone else, maybe you have some kind of immunity due to a lucky genetic quirk. A quirk that might have been passed on to your child. After all, you never did find her body.
So why did she take so long to come home? you ask yourself.
Maybe she came by soon after That Morning, when you were out searching for her, for anyone who might be alive. Or maybe during one of your rare scavenging trips. Maybe you simply missed one another, an awful cosmic joke, but hardly out of the realm of possibility, especially since you were in shock during the early days after That Morning. Maybe she was in shock, too. Maybe she thought her father was dead like all the rest. Maybe now, months later, she’d come back to check one last time before finally giving up hope.
Open the door, idiot!
But still you hesitate. You weren’t much of a bookworm before That Morning. You’d read the occasional military thriller—
the grown-up version of the comics you loved as a kid—but that was about it. But you’ve read an ass-load of books since, a whole fucking library full. And among all the mysteries, romances, science fiction, and nonfiction, you ran across a short story about a magical monkey’s paw that a couple uses to bring their dead son back to life. But he’s not really alive. Instead he’s a shambling corpse.
What if your loneliness and need finally grew so strong that they became your own monkey’s paw and brought your daughter home after all this time? What if she’s like the son in the story—or worse?
So what? you decide. Whatever she might be now, however bad her current state, it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the soul-crushing isolation you’ve lived with for so long.
You straighten and grab the knob with one hand as you throw back the deadbolt with the other. You fling open the door and rush out onto the porch and—with a voice hoarse from disuse—shout your daughter’s name.
She’s on the last step of the front walkway, just about to place her right foot into the cul-de-sac. She stops, turns, sees you and grins.
You take a step back, shaking your head as she starts back up the steps toward you. She’s not a walking corpse; she’s something far worse. And she’s not alone. The cul-de-sac is filled with people just like her, if people is the right word. They’re all standing quiet, motionless, staring at you with eyes that are no longer human and grinning just like your daughter with their multiple mouths.
“It’s been a long Morning, Father,” she says, voice issuing from each of her facial orifices. “But it’s finally over. We’ve come to wish you a good Afternoon.”
You stumble back toward the open doorway of your house as your daughter reaches for you with appendages that in no way resemble arms. And suddenly being alone no longer seems quite as bad as it did a few moments ago. Not so bad at all.
OUTSIDE THE LINES
Cherie was leaning with her elbows on the check-out counter—Terrorizer magazine spread open before her, Bad Religion playing on the store’s speakers—when the man strolled in. She didn’t pay that much attention to him at first. He was a norm, that was obvious from a single glance: late thirties, early forties, red polo shirt, khaki shorts, white socks, running shoes, no tats or piercings. None visible at any rate, and given his age and the way he was dressed, she doubted he had any hidden ones. She figured him for a browser, someone who’d been wandering the mall, saw the store’s wares, items made from black leather and gray steel (or plastic made to resemble steel), as he was passing and decided to take a quick walk on the dark side. He’d stroll around the store for a few minutes, maybe give her a smile—if he met her gaze at all—then leave without buying anything. Later, he’d tell his Stepford Wife and happy clone children all about the freak show he’d witnessed, can you believe they allow a store like that at the mall?
So Cherie was fully prepared to ignore Mr. Norm and keep on reading her magazine until he left. So when after several minutes he stepped up to the counter and stood there expectantly, she didn’t look up right away, figuring he was just checking out the impulse items on display there—kitschy buttons with sayings like EAT DIE AND SHIT, compilation CDs featuring various punk bands, miniature versions of the Dear Dead Dollies…But when he didn’t leave, he finally registered on her consciousness and she looked up.
“Yes?” She didn’t say May I help you since she really didn’t want to help him. All she wanted was to be left alone until Heather came back from her lunch break and they could resume the conversation they’d been having about Kirk, Cherie’s loser-ass boyfriend.
The man smiled as he looked directly at her. He didn’t glance down to check out her tits, which either made him a gentleman or gay. Cherie figured gay; it was a safer bet.
“The name of this store…Eye-Em. What does it stand for?”
There was something odd about his voice, something grating. Cherie wasn’t sure what, since he sounded perfectly normal—no surprise—but she couldn’t help wincing as he spoke. It was almost as if he were producing some sort of ultrasonic signal that accompanied his words, a signal that she couldn’t hear but was nonetheless aware of.
“I’m impressed. Most people who read the sign pronounce it I’m, as in I am.”
She thought but didn’t say people your age. “IM stands for Instant Message. It’s a computer term,” she added, just in case he really was as clueless as he looked.
His smile didn’t waver, not so much as a fraction. In fact, it seemed frozen on his face, as if he were a video image that had been paused. He remained like that for several seconds, and Cherie began to feel uncomfortable. The guy wasn’t old enough to be having a stroke or something, was he? But then someone hit play and he started moving again.
“I see. And precisely what message is it that customers are supposed to get—” He glanced down at the plastic name tag pinned to her anarchy T-shirt—“Cherry?”
She narrowed her eyes as she tried to decide whether the man had mispronounced her name on purpose, if maybe he was hitting on her in some weird, clumsy fashion. She pictured his head clamped in a giant vice grip, imagined the handle turning, turning, his eyes bulging out just before his skull popped like a rotten melon. But she quickly thrust the image from her consciousness. She hated it when she imagined sick shit like that. It made her feel all ucky inside.
“It’s Cherie. And there’s no message. It’s just a name.”
The man looked at her for a moment, head cocked slightly to one side as if he was reappraising her. “So all of this…” He gestured to indicate the entire store, the motion of his arm and hand liquid and smooth, like the movement of a well-lubricated machine. “The leather and studs, the icons of death and violence, the atmosphere of irony and mockery…It’s all simply, what? Fashion?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” Realizing how lame that sounded, she went on. “I mean, sure, this is a store and all. But it’s not like this is the Gap or anything. This place, the people that buy this kind of stuff, it’s all an alternative to the Gaps of the world and the zombies who shop there. It’s not plastic, not fake and hypocritical.” She wanted to add like your kind, but held her studded tongue.
The man had continued smiling the entire time they’d been talking. Now his smile stretched so wide that the skin at the corners of his mouth tore slightly, and small drops of clear liquid that wasn’t blood welled forth. If he felt the injuries, or was aware of them at all, he didn’t show it. What did he have, some kind of skin disease? Was he some kind of goddamned leper or something?
“What of the sign on your shirt, that stylized A. Are you a true proponent of anarchy?”
The way this guy talked—the words he chose, the sense of menace beneath them—was at odds with his appearance. And the more she looked at him, the more she thought his skin didn’t seem like skin, or at least not enough like skin. Its color was too unvaried, and she could see no body hair, no pores. It was as if he were covered in flesh-colored rubber. Condom Man.
“Well, sure. I guess. I mean, who wouldn’t want to live in a world with no rules, a world where you were free to do anything you wanted, any time you wanted?”
The man’s smile didn’t waver as fluid continued to build at the torn corners of his mouth. “You mean a world where anything could happen…anything at all?”
Cherie tried not to stare at the growing pearls of serum gathering at the corners of his mouth. “Yeah, why not? It’s all about freedom, coloring outside the lines if you want. Hell, coloring off the whole damn page if you feel like it.”
A memory of a voice came to her then, mixed with the smells of chalk dust, waxy crayons, and pastels.
Clumsy-fingered little tramp…Inside the lines, inside! Or are you too slooooow to know the difference between “inside” and “outside?” Would you like me to show you the difference, Cherie? Would you?
Cherie shivered at the memory, and—as if the man were privy to her thoughts—his smile widened a touch more, and rivulets of clear
liquid started to run down the sides of his chin. Cherie was beginning to get seriously creeped out now, and when she got scared, she went on the defensive.
“Look, I don’t want to be rude—” which was a lie—“but are you going to buy anything or not? If not, I got some stuff I need to take care of in the back.” Another lie, but all she wanted was to get out of the man’s presence right now, and she’d say or do whatever it took to make that happen.
“Every meaningless day you work here, you’re surrounded by the trappings of danger, of life lived on some imaginary edge. But when something truly dangerous happens, you’re just as frightened as any norm, aren’t you?” Without taking his gaze off her, he reached out and picked up Decomposing Dora, one of the miniature Dear Dead Dollies. “I’ll take this.”
Cherie just gaped at him for a moment, unable to believe she’d just heard what she’d thought she’d heard. This man, this freakazoid, was lecturing her? She felt like telling him to fuck off, but she figured it would be more trouble than it was worth. It would feel good, damn good, but he’d probably just pitch a bitch to her manager, and while this wasn’t the greatest job in the world, it was a hell of a lot better than being a fast-food drone at some greasy burger joint. That was why she took the doll from him and ran its UPC code over the scanner. Not because she was scared of telling him off.
Not!
As Cherie scanned the doll, she imagined wrapping a barbed-wire garrote around Mr. Polo’s neck, twisting the wire, tightening it, the barbs digging into the soft flesh and bringing forth tiny crimson beads of blood.
“Five ninety-five.” She glanced at the doll as she reached for a plastic bag with the IM logo on it. The Dear Dead Dollies were a big seller, especially with teen baby-goth girls. They looked something like the old-fashioned kewpie dolls, cherubic and of indeterminate gender, but instead of a healthy pink their skin was painted gray, green, or white, and they wore tattered, blood-stained clothes. They were four-inches tall, and their features suffered from various malformations—lesions, scars, bloody wounds, stitches, staples—and they all had feral-yellow eyes and tiny pointed teeth. Decomposing Dora had green skin, wiry black hair, and an empty, bloodless socket in place of her left eye. Her black dress was covered with mini-maggots, and ivory bone showed through open wounds on her elbow and knee joints. Cherie thought the doll was cute, in a demented sort of way.
