But not the gray man.
The gray man shrank and burned and popped, collapsing in a small heap on the chamber’s clean stone floor. But he retained some mass, some presence, even under the incredible onslaught Hal directed at him.
Penny watched Hal and realized that he was changing, too—dissipating, as though the effort of blasting sunlight at the gray man was using him up.
That’s just what was happening, she understood suddenly. Whatever Hal discharged at the gray man didn’t come just from some external source, but from within him. It was Hal, in a very real way—his own essence.
Finally, the stream of light dried up, like the trickle of the Colorado River as it, dammed and diverted and hoarded, tried to make its way to the Gulf of California. As it faded, so did Hal, burning more brightly than ever for a moment, then blinking out altogether.
She stood with Ken, hands clasped tightly as if they’d never let go. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if words could begin to describe how she felt about what had happened here. Awe, she thought, overused but apt nonetheless. She had witnessed something glorious, maybe miraculous, as selfless an act of sacrifice as she’d ever imagined.
But the price had been high. Hal was gone, used up. With the light gone, the room had been plunged back into darkness, only the light mounted onto Ken’s gun illuminating the cavern’s interior. But he played the light over the floor where Hal had been, where now there was only a faint scorch mark.
Finally, Ken broke the silence. “He’s just…gone,” he said. Sorrow was evident in his trembling voice.
“Yeah,” Penny agreed. “Whatever it was he did there, it took him with it.”
“It wasn’t just him,” Ken replied. “It was all three of us. He started before you got here, but he couldn’t really get it going until you joined us. Then the power flowed through the three of us and he was able to…I don’t know, to pull down the sun’s own power, or whatever that was. If you hadn’t made it, Hal and I’d both be dead by now, I expect.” He spat onto the cave floor.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Anyway, it’s gone now.”
“What is?”
“The magic,” Ken clarified. “I’m pretty sure. I can’t feel it any more. Do you?”
She reached out and touched his hand. Warm flesh. A tingle, but not an electric shock. Something different. Maybe more real.
Human contact.
“You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing there. Well,” she amended with a smile. “Not ‘nothing.’”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just not the kind of magic we’re used to.”
As Penny’s eyes began to re-acclimate to the darkness, she remembered the gray man, or what little was left of him. He wasn’t much more than two feet long, now, curled on the floor, still smoldering at the edges. “What about that?” she asked. “Do we just leave it there?”
Ken shrugged. “Maybe back in the hole?”
Penny felt a chill run down her spine. “You want to touch it?” she asked him.
“Don’t reckon it’s going to make much difference now,” he said. “Not like we’ve never touched evil in our lives.” He went over to the ugly gray mass, picked it up with one hand, and tossed it without ceremony back into the hole it had come from. Then he beamed his light at the slab of rock that had covered the hole.
“That was over it,” he said. “That rock.”
“I’ve seen it before. It must weigh a ton,” Penny said. “No way we’ll be able to move it.”
Ken shrugged again. “Won’t know until we try, will we?” he asked.
Penny supposed he was right. She came around to the back of the pit, where the massive piece of rock leaned against the hole’s low wall, like a lid from a well. She squatted—lift with your knees, she remembered, not your back—and got a grip on the slab’s right side. Ken did the same on her left. But before they started straining to lift it, he touched her cheek. The gesture was somehow innocent and intimate at the same time, just a brush as if to move a stray hair. But there was a buzz just the same; she felt it to her toes.
And when they lifted the rock, it moved in their hands as easily as if it had been hollow, or made of wood instead of stone. They positioned it carefully over the top of the pit and let it rest there.
“Guess maybe it wasn’t a hundred percent gone after all,” Ken observed. “Maybe it never is. Or maybe we’ve been looking at it all wrong, thinking it comes from outside us. Maybe it’s been in us all along.”
“You could be right,” Penny said. “Good thing, either way, or we’d never have lifted that slab. But…if it was over him in the first place, then did we really do any good by putting it back?”
Ken rubbed at the stubble that had grown up over his chin and cheeks these last couple of days. “I don’t know what this place is,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s real, or some kind of symbolic construct, or maybe all in our own fevered brains. I know what we’ve agreed the gray man represents—Hal saw him as a kind of bloodless white cockroach, by the way—and if he is what we think he is, then there’s no getting rid of him altogether anyway. Best we can do is put him back in his hole and hope it’s a good long while before he gathers the strength to make another try.”
“Well, it’s done, then,” Penny said. “And I miss Hal like crazy already. I bet Virginia does too. Can we get the hell out of this place?”
“Sure,” Ken replied. “I’m kind of anxious to see the sun again myself.”
***
At the Slab, the gunfight petered out, almost as if those shooting had come to a gradual realization of their own actions. People put down their weapons and began to look about, instead, for first aid supplies, for bandages and disinfectants and tape. Fires still burned all around the Slab, but sirens were audible now in the distance, coming closer. Some began to believe that help was on the way, that they’d get through this night.
But across the Slab, with bizarre suddenness, others collapsed and died on the spot. Billy Cobb, Carter Haynes, Virginia Shipp, Nick Postak, Jorge and Diego Alvarez, Heather and Royal Justice, Gray Boonton, Darren Cook, Mikey Zee, Lettie Bosworth, almost a dozen more. Away from the Slab, the same thing happened to others, including one Colonel Franklin Wardlaw, USMC, who had left his office in Yuma and gone looking for a shovel. The life blew out of them with no warning and no apparent reason. Lucy Alvarez and Eddie Trujillo watched Lucy’s brothers stop digging and look up briefly, startled expressions flitting across their faces, and then their muscles went slack and they slumped onto the blood-soaked earth they’d been digging in.
Years later, living in Los Angeles, Lucia Alvarez wrote an account of the whole experience in a journal, which she shared with no one, and she described the moment. “It was almost like they had been inhabited by something—that whatever was making them dig was a presence inside them that had forced out everything that I knew, everything that made them my brothers. And then, it went away, suddenly and completely. When it did, there was nothing left, no life essence, and while Diego and Jorge had both been dead for some time, their bodies had been compelled to go on until that moment.
“It wasn’t until later that day that I learned from my mother that my father had run from the house at about the same time my brothers began to dig—that he had jumped into a truck and sped away. Still later, we learned that he had been driving south on the 111. Probably heading for the Slab, I thought, and still believe. Probably to join in the digging. But he died behind the wheel, and the truck slammed into an oncoming eighteen-wheeler on the highway. Fortunately, he was gone well before the impact.
“That was the last day we stayed in the Imperial Valley, me and my mother and grandfather Oscar. The last day we’ve seen it. Mama died, this last summer, which is when I decided I really needed to write this all down. She never wanted to go back, and neither do I. I haven’t missed it for a moment.”
***
Ken led the way with his gun-mounted light, through the cave that was no
w empty of mushrooms—a fact which added to its overall unnatural quality, since there was no other life, no spiders or insects or worms, no coyote scat or bat guano. It was a Hollywood version of a desert cave, an unreal place. He had to wonder if it would even be here tomorrow, or had been here a week ago, before Penny had arrived and needed to find it.
He was torn by a dozen conflicting emotions, to the point that he couldn’t even get his own internal bearings. What had they really done, if anything? How did you define Hal—accessory to mass murder, or savior of the world? Both? And how much did the gray man contribute to those murders, if anything? How responsible was he for the madness that had overtaken the Slab during the night, and how much of that was just simple human nature?
“Trouble with seeing what we’ve seen,” he said as they neared the cave’s mouth, “is that we didn’t really get any questions answered. But before, we didn’t even know the questions were there. Now they’re just about all we’ve got.”
“I know what you mean,” Penny said. “My mind is reeling with them.”
“Same here.”
Casually, she wrapped her fingers around his. No surge of power, but it felt fine just the same. “But we have plenty of time to puzzle them out, right?”
“Here’s hoping,” Ken replied.
“Listen, Ken, I…I’m gonna need someplace to stay for a little while. At least until I figure out what I’m going to do now, where I’m going, you know? Think there’s any room at your place? I’m a quiet sleeper and I don’t take up much space.”
The suggestion took Ken by surprise, but it wasn’t an unpleasant prospect. And he hadn’t had another soul in the house for longer than he could even remember—the price of being handy was that you didn’t need plumbers and electricians coming around when things went wrong. “I reckon that’d be okay,” he said, after what he hoped wasn’t too much hesitation. “It’s not much but it’s cheaper than the Motel 6.”
As they came out of the cave, the desert seemed to spring to new life around them. The sun crested the hills to the east, its slanting rays throwing coronas of light around the tops of the fuzzy chollas, limning the branches of mesquite trees against shaded ground, painting the slopes across the valley with warm yellow light. With it came an explosion of sound and motion; the zigzag flight of bats angling toward shelter, the joyful swoop and noisy chirp of wren and starling and shrike, the gentle susurrus of a breeze that rattled creosote bush and smoke tree and the broad, daggered leaves of agave.
The desert awoke like this every morning, Ken knew, but he didn’t. He felt like a bear emerging groggily from his den after a long hibernation, blinking against the forgotten brightness of day. Something had changed during his absence from this earth; everything had changed. The magic was gone—most likely, he believed, for good. But neither that, nor Hal’s death—or transformation, if that’s what it was—left the hole in his heart that he found himself expecting they might have. Instead, when he reached around inside himself he came away with a new sense of something very right, an unfamiliar sensation of comfortable fullness there. He glanced at Penny, a triangle of sunlight on her cheek bisected by a strand of brown hair, a curious half-smile playing about her lips as if she were still deciding whether she liked a flavor she’d never tried before. Then she caught him looking and the smile blossomed until her face rivaled the morning sun for sheer radiance.
Her hand felt good in his, her strong fingers holding on as if he were something precious that might blow away in a strong wind. He had no idea where they went from here. He didn’t even have a name for the alien sensations he felt. He was half afraid that if he searched for one, the feelings would go away, back into whatever deep internal cavern from which they’d been lured. It wasn’t magic, though, he knew that. The one word that came to mind didn’t seem quite right, but he thought he’d take it anyway.
The word was peace.
It would do for a start.
The End
Author’s Note
This is, obviously, a work of fiction, and I’ve used my auctorial license to rearrange geography as needed to suit my story.
That said, the reader should know that the basic settings used here are very real. The Salton Sea is where I put it, with most of those communities—except Salton Estates, which more accurately resembles a place called Salton City, on the other side of the Salton—are where I put them. Moreover, the amazing history of the Salton Sea, the accidental ocean, two hundred and some feet below sea level, is as I’ve presented it here—except, since this is a novel and not a work of history, there’s really a lot more to it than I have detailed.
The Slab is real, too, and basically where I placed it, between the Chocolate Mountains and the Salton. But it’s really called Slab City, and, like life itself, is wilder and both more bizarre and more vital than could possibly be represented in a single novel. People like Linda, the Slab City hostess, and Leonard Knight, folk artist and the driving force behind Salvation Mountain, are larger than life in themselves, and would have overwhelmed this story if I’d tried to include them. Slab City can be visited online at http://www.slabcity.org, and photos by the author can be seen at http://jeffmariotte.com; or better yet, the reader can get in a car and go see it in person. It’s not an experience soon to be forgotten.
About the Author
Jeffrey J. Mariotte has written more than forty novels, including original supernatural thrillers Cold Black Hearts, River Runs Red, and Missing White Girl, and the Stoker Award-nominated teen horror quartet Dark Vengeance. Two of his novels have won Scribe Awards for Best Original Novel, presented by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.
His nonfiction work includes the true crime book Criminal Minds: Sociopaths, Serial Killers and Other Deviants, as well as official series companions to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. He is also the author of many comic books and graphic novels, including the original Western series Desperadoes, some of which have been nominated for Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards. Other comics work includes the horror series Fade to Black, action-adventure series Garrison, the bestselling Presidential Material: Barack Obama, and the original graphic novel Zombie Cop.
He is a member of the International Thriller Writers, the Western Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. With his wife Maryelizabeth Hart and partner Terry Gilman, he co-owns Mysterious Galaxy, a bookstore specializing in mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He lives on the Flying M Ranch in the American Southwest with his family and pets, in a home filled with books, music, toys and other relics of American pop culture. Find him online at http://www.jeffmariotte.com and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeffrey-J-Mariotte.
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