by Marc Zicree
“Under the circumstances, Goldie, I think you will understand if I do not leap to medicate you. We live in a time of unknowns and we have all been subject to unnatural stresses. Are you willing to wait? To see what happens?”
To see if I go flat freakin’ crazy? Sure, why not? Panic flickers momentarily in my gut. But, no. He’s right. Based on what I’ve told him, any other course of action would be premature. And I am altogether unsure I want to tell more, so I leave the other half of the truth where it lies.
Doc gives me some valerian root tea-surely the most foul-tasting swamp water in creation-and sends me back to bed. He promises it will relax me. I actually drink the tea. It helps. But it doesn’t keep my masochistic mind from poking at itself.
I lie in the dark, wondering if I should have told whole truths and examining the experience-nightmare or hallucination or vision-that sent me to the pharmacy. I am in a dark tower-like a castle keep-full of dead-end corridors, subterranean passages, and moldering stone. This is blurry, indistinct. I know that outside is light and freshness and freedom, and inside is cold, dead murk.
Below, beneath the foundations of this ruin, is a cesspool of something black and oozing and malevolent. It boils there in relative silence, incongruously making a sound as benign as falling rain. But as I explore this dark place, looking for a way out, I feel it wake and begin to rise. With a dreamer’s omniscience, I know it is coming up to meet me, climbing stairways, drowning corridors, filling rooms.
I climb, of course. In horror films, they always climb, while the viewer is thinking, God, what a schlemazel! because the schlemazel always climbs his way into a dead-end corridor.
I’m no different. I climb a stairway that I somehow know leads to a room with only one way out-straight down.
At intervals, I turn back and catch a glimpse of what has oozed up out of the bowels of the Tower. It’s black and oily and gleams like liquid obsidian. And in the bulging tongue of stuff that licks up the stairwell after me, I see myriad almost-faces as if they were a swarm of insects in amber.
But it’s what I hear that really makes my skin crawl. There is a voice for every face, a whisper, a growl, a cry, a shout. It’s enough to make me rethink my certainty about multiple personality disorder. (Maybe Mother’s diagnoses weren’t sheer crap, after all, and I owe her an apology.) It also terrifies me, because in the same way that I can almost see the faces, I can almost hear the voices, almost understand what they’re saying. And the closer I strain toward understanding, the more thoroughly, soul-chillingly scared I get, because I know that this thing wants me to understand, and that if I understand, it will engulf me, and if it does this, I will go ape shit, stark-raving mad.
Or I’ll drown, which is pretty much the same thing.
The only out I see is off the top of the Tower into that cold blue sky, which-unless I should sprout wings and fly-would be fatal. Fall or drown-hell of a choice.
What’s most disturbing about the dream is that it’s progressive. Every time I have it, I’m a little farther up the stairs, and the voices are a little louder.
And this is why I wanted the Tegretol; I had a hope, however absurd, that it might deflate the nightmare/vision, because I suspect that I am not merely in the Tower, I am the Tower.
And the black ooze? I lie in the dark of my hospital room and hold my cupped hand before my face, concentrating on a spot in my palm. A flame sprouts there, cool, blue, and softly bright. It’s pleasant, soothing to the eye, and quite outside the realm of normal human ability. I did this for the first time less than a day after the Change. Not as easily, but I did it. A very handy thing in a world in which batteries are never included.
Back then, I found it exhilarating. Now, my exhilaration is tempered with a little old-fashioned fear.
When I finally drag myself out of bed the next morning, I’m surprised I’ve been allowed to sleep in. I expected we’d mount up and be on our way, but such is apparently not the case. We are not moving on today, Cal tells me. And maybe not tomorrow.
I hope you’re not doing this for me, I say, and teeter on the edge of guilt, an emotion I’ve worked hard to avoid. I don’t need guilt, thank you, I have manias.
Cal tells me that, of course, it’s not just for me, it’s for all of us and for the people here who could really use Doc Lysenko’s help setting up a real E.R. and an effective triage. Just a day or two, he says. No big deal.
Right.
Left to my own devices, I gather up a field kit-jerky, canteen, matches, a knife scavenged from the hospital kitchen-and follow inner promptings to the edge of town. It seems I have a Quest of my own.
From the city limits I can look down a long slope and see the swath of burned grass that marks last night’s adventure. Beyond it, the woods stretch north and west, a giant’s picnic blanket spread out along the Ohio River.
There is something peculiar in those woods, and I have, for some reason, fixated on it. It is a place where Shadows walk and Angels sing loudly enough for dogs to hear.
I look up at the sky, but it’s hard to tell what time it is through the overcast. Mechanical watches still function, but it’s been so long since I’ve worn one, it’s hard to get back into the habit. I figure it’s still fairly early, judging from the place where the clouds are brightest. Leaning against a convenient tree, I check my food stash, swish my canteen, and pat my knife.
“Going for a little stroll?”
Colleen is standing on the opposite side of the tree, looking nonchalant as hell. I suspect her presence is a function of Cal’s concern, and the poor girl was unlucky enough to draw the short straw.
“Contemplating it.”
“You still think there’s something out there.”
“Yup. Besides, I lost my hat.”
“What a shame. You know, you might have been hallucinating.”
“I’ve never once hallucinated while in the throes of mania.”
“That was then; this is now,” she says. “All bets are off, right?”
She has a point, however trite.
“You know, Colleen, I’d love to stand here all day discussing my mood disorder, but with this overcast, it’s going to get dark early.”
“Then I guess you’d better get going.”
I start off; Colleen falls into stride with me. I realize she’s also dressed and outfitted for the bush-belt packs, machete, the works.
“So,” I say, “you got elected to keep an eye on the goof-ball, huh?”
“No. Actually, I figured you’d do something like this and I just thought I might tag along. Call it curiosity.”
I think very hard about minding, then realize I don’t. “You must be bored stiff if you’d rather baby-sit me than tinker with broken machinery.”
“I don’t do baby-sitting,” she tells me. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve been out for a lark in the woods.”
I can’t help but smile. “Not since last night, huh?” “Goldie, if that’s your idea of a lark, you really are crazy.”
Sticks and stones… “You called me ‘Goldie.’ ”
She shrugs. “You called me ‘Colleen.’ ”
An unexpected turn of events: Colleen the Self-Possessed is venturing out on an adventure with Goldie the Strange and Unpredictable, notwithstanding she thinks I’m a raving loon.
We cross the meadow and enter the woods, with her silent as a post and me trying to sniff Purpose on the wind. We have wandered for some time without me sniffing a damn thing, when she says, “So, Goldman, what was all that about your probation officer? Were you just putting me on?”
“I’d never do that. You’re not my size,” I say, and add, “Ms. Brooks.”
She mumbles something under her breath that rhymes with duck doo and then louder, “Don’t be a dipshit. Do you really have a probation officer?”
“Not anymore. He converted. To something unpleasant and slimy, I suspect.”
“Do you ever give anybody a straight answer?”
Why am I
being so ornery about this? “I got into a little trouble a while back.”
“Trouble,” she repeats.
“Assaulting a peace officer.”
Her head swivels around and big green eyes skewer me. “Whoa. You? Assaulted a cop?” Beat. “What happened? Were you drunk or something?”
“I don’t drink. I don’t do something, either. Not without a prescription, anyway. I was living in a tunnel community-”
She cuts me off. “Tunnel community?”
“Subway tunnels. Train tunnels. Under New York.”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘mole people’-I get it. But community? Isn’t that a bit highfalutin’ a word for a collection of losers and misfits?”
“Present company excepted, of course?”
“Sorry.” She sends me a half-apologetic glance out of the corner of her eye, then turns her attention back to the ground, looking for signs of passage.
“No, you’re right. Guilty on both counts. I put myself underground. But everybody’s story is different. Some folks got put there. They… fell through the cracks, I guess.”
“Into the sewer.”
“Subway tunnels. Not a bad place really. There were about fourteen of us in this one compound-under Grand Central. Mostly guys, some couples… a family.”
She’s surprised. “A family? Mommy, Daddy, and kids?”
“Kid. Rachel. She was about four. Her dad worked in a body shop aboveground, saving money to afford first and last on an apartment. One night this cop showed up and started busting up the place.”
The memory, I find, is still painfully sharp. It was late. Agnes and Gino had just put their little girl to bed; Gino was reading to her by Coleman lamp, and in came Officer Jordan on little cat feet. None of us heard him. He was just there, flashlight and nightstick and attitude.
Usually Officer Jordan was a pretty cool guy, a mensch, by any standard. We called him “Petey” and joked with him and talked baseball. Sometimes he’d bring sandwiches and cans of soup, and sometimes we’d invite him to join us for a meal. He even helped a few of our more chemically dependent fellows ease back into some sort of life.
But that night he got his first glimpse of Gino with his family and that big, friendly man turned into something Other.
He was going to take them in, but they couldn’t let him, because they both knew that if he did, they’d lose their little girl to social services and their chances of getting her back would be slim and none. He knew that, too, of course, which made his actions even more inexplicable.
Some of us tried to get in his way, to give the family a chance to disappear. Things got ugly, and he pulled out his service revolver to subdue us, but by then Gino, Agnes, and Rachel were gone. Jordan came unglued. Fired his gun into the roof of the tunnel, over and over. Then he started breaking up the place, one piece at a time. He kicked their little orange-crate bookshelf to pieces, tore up their books, and used his nightstick on their scavenged dishes. Then he did something that just about broke me in two. And that’s when I hit him. Square on the head with Agnes’s toaster oven.
He ended up with ten stitches; I ended up in jail. I look back and think we both committed crimes that night. Weirdly enough, I think we committed them for the same reasons.
Colleen is watching all this storm debris flood back through my head. I wonder what she can read in my face. I look away through the trees, admiring the way the watery sunlight sparkles through their crystalline leaves, and she crouches to examine something in the dry grass and leaf-fall that I can’t even see.
“So you busted up the cop?”
I can still see the shattered remnants of a family’s pseudolife. The Winnie-the-Pooh they’d lifted from some library, torn and lying in a puddle of dirty water, the remains of a bowl of cereal soiling the cover; the clothing Agnes had so carefully washed that day in the warm leakage of steam pipes, shredded and filthy; Rachel’s bed looking like it had exploded.
“He broke Rachel’s doll,” I say, as if that explains everything.
“You assaulted an officer for breaking a child’s toy?” “He ripped it apart with his bare hands.”
She looks up at me-a long, measuring look. “I don’t understand. Why would a cop do a thing like that, anyway?”
“Oh, I understand. He wanted them not to have anything to come back to. He wanted to get that family out of the tunnels, and I guess that was the only way he could think to do it. They didn’t belong there. Crackheads and fuck-ups and psychos belonged there, not real people.”
“Did he? Get them out?”
“They got themselves out after a while. But that time, they just moved somewhere else to rebuild. Somewhere deeper, safer.”
“Kind of like most of the folks out here, I guess,” she observes. “Moving, looking for a life, a home, a safe place.”
I’m wondering if anyone can find those things anymore when Colleen straightens and points with her machete. “This way,” she says, and pushes off into the bush.
Just as I’m about to ask what she’s tracking, we come upon a clear, well-used trail.
“Deer?” I suggest, but Colleen is already down on her haunches, checking out the spoor.
She shakes her head. “People.”
“Anything else?” I ask warily.
“Not along here.” She gives me a dark grin over one shoulder. “But then, I’ve got no idea what kind of tracks Shadows make.”
We follow the trail until it forks. I argue for splitting up, but Commando Colleen is having none of it.
“There’s no way I’m going back into Grave Creek and tell Cal I lost you out here,” she says. “We stick together, you got that?”
“Why Colleen, I’m touched.”
“Screw you,” she mutters, and heads off on the western fork.
We’ve gone maybe fifty yards when I get a whiff of something, metaphorically speaking. It’s as if a car has driven by with the windows open and the stereo blaring. A snatch of sound, a shiver of almost-recognition and poof!, it’s zipped on by, leaving me standing on the curb playing Name That Tune.
Ahead of me on the trail, Colleen realizes I’m not right on her heels. She turns back and gives me this look. “I think I heard something,” I say.
“You think you heard something?”
“Yeah. Like a snatch of music. Only it wasn’t music, exactly. It was, uh, something else.”
She sighs. “Would it totally kill you to be coherent once in a while?”
I sigh back. “That way.” I nod down the trail toward the West Virginia-Ohio border.
We continue scouting to the west. We find nothing, however, except a few stray folks picking wild grasses and herbs in the woods. They take a speedy hike when they get an eyeful of my bodyguard. I’d beat it, too, if I saw Colleen the Barbarian coming at me out of the bushes wielding her wonder-machete.
We shout after them about lurkers and loudly suggest they head south, into Grave Creek. They flee due north.
Colleen insists we track them down and warn them properly. This takes some time off our clock. It also sets Colleen to kvetching at me about the fact that we’ve been out here for hours with no more than the merest hint of anything peculiar. When she decides we’ve gone far enough west, she plops herself down to rest before we head back to town. We’re sitting under a tall but twisted cedar (with comfortingly normal-looking needles) when this little tune pops into my head and starts running in circles up there. I start humming the little tune. Next thing I know, there are words, too. Words calling the poor, the wounded, the huddled masses to refuge.
“ ‘I lift my lamp beside the hidden door.’ ” Hauntingly familiar, and yet …
“Must you?” Colleen asks, and gives me a look that tells me her exact opinion of my vocal stylings.
I stop noodling on the song, which I have just grokked is a sort of lyrically mutated musical version of Emma Lazarus’s inscription for the Statue of Liberty. Appropriate-everything else around here is mutated. And the song won’t leave. It’s circl
ing in my head like it’s got no place to land-words, music, chords and all.
I look at Colleen. She’s just sitting there, back to bark, eyes closed. There are leaves in her sawed-off hair and a streak of dirt down the side of her nose. I decide not to inform her of any of this.
“You hear that?” I ask.
She opens one eye. “Hear what?”
“You tell me. What do you hear?” I watch her with all my senses.
She looks around. People always do that-you ask if they hear something and they look for stuff.
“Wind,” she says. “Leaves rustling-uh, tinkling. Crows-I hear crows. And a stream. What’m I supposed to hear?”
“Huh. Nothing, I guess.” I lean back against the tree trunk.
Colleen can’t hear the music, which means one of two things. Either I am missing my meds worse than I thought or this is not natural music. It’s something else.
I get up.
“Where’re you going?” Her eyes are still closed, but her hands are snugly around the hilt of her machete.
“Gotta take a leak,” I lie, and head off into the woods. I’ve got a bead on this thing and I am homing in.
I walk for about a half mile when I come to a ridge. Below me the twisted woodland drops away below into a streambed. I stop and wonder where to go next. That’s when I hear the music. It’s below me, down in that teeny, tiny river valley.
I slide down the scarp on my butt, ending up feet first in the creek, which is shockingly green and cold. I wade across, doing my laundry on the fly, you might say, climb up the bank on the other side, part a couple of little cedars, and there he is.
The first thing I notice about my music man is that he’s playing a very cool guitar. It’s a jumbo blond maple cutaway with a cedar top, mother-of-pearl perfling around the sound hole, and inlay all up and down its rosewood fret board.
Very cool.
He’s fingerpicking this gentle blues thing to which he is singing the lyrics I’ve been hearing in my head. He has a harmonica in one of those wire neck braces, and every now and then he toodles a riff that reminds me of trains going through sleepy little towns late at night. It’s a sound that tugs at the soul, that says there is a Place, a Safe Haven, a Refuge that I will find if only I go where the music takes me.
