The tourists had trickled off but John’s enthusiasm hadn’t. Not even a little. Row on row of the faceless heads and he snapped away, merrily click-click-clicking. “It’s strange,” John said, as he rounded a pillar composed entirely of femurs. “No names. Six million people but not a single one has a name. There should be a list of them somewhere – do you think there is, in the hall of records? I once did a shot of The Wall in Washington, you know, the big one. All those people running their fingers alone as if it was Braille. But it was just names.
“There was this kid there –” snap snap, he was snapping away quite urgently now “– and I thought his grandfather must have died, and he’s crying as if it just happened, as if it were a tombstone. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just a list of names, and he’s crying and so I put my hand on his shoulder and I ask him why he’s crying. You know what he says? He says his girlfriend just broke up with him.” John shook his head in disbelief, but he stopped snapping very suddenly, and he clenched Becca’s hand hard.
“I think I’d like to go now,” Becca said. She could smell the hint of fresh air. She almost ran toward it. In fact, she did jolt forward but John was still holding her hand and she was yanked back a pace.
“What’s the rush?” he asked. And his eyes said, “Please say this is great.” But he wasn’t smiling. There was something wrong with his smile.
She tried that ooh-aah trick again, just let her mouth make a series of encouraging sounds that weren’t quite words. He seemed to brighten up. What she was really thinking was that it was just bones. Rooms and rooms of them, skulls mounted on piles of tibias, giant circular ossuaries. Sometimes they would be artistically arranged – a line of skulls outlining a block of thighbones, all the knobby ends pointed outwards. In one place, a giant stone cross was set in the middle. As if we didn’t get the point. Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead! It was all a bit melodramatic, wasn’t it? A thousand skulls would have been enough, but six million? Six million was overdoing it a bit. Six million was too many. They stopped being people at that point; they were just bits of debris, bits of things that had died.
“We can’t go yet,” John said softly, and there was something in his voice, that something edging toward desperation. He tugged on her hand and it might have been playful, but maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t. “What about that chapel, that was pretty good, wasn’t it? And the light – the light didn’t do it justice. I want to try again. I think I could make it work if I gave it another go.”
Becca felt something inside her crawling. She didn’t want to go. It was awful, the chapel was awful, and she just wanted to get out. But John tugged again on her hand, drawing her back, and he smiled that smile of his – the one that was mostly happy, but maybe just a little bit sad.
Becca was returning with coffee for her boss when she had her first, real conversation with John. They were both waiting for the elevator, standing awkwardly next to each other in the lobby of the building. His eyes flicked up and then away. She almost thought he didn’t recognise her, but then they flicked back. A hint of a smile. Did he know her? She couldn’t be sure. She tried smiling back, but he had already looked away. She bit her lip, waited, tried smiling again but now he was looking at his shoes, and then the floor display, and then he was pressing the button again impatiently.
“Coffee?” she asked. It was her boss’s coffee – black, the way she liked it. He wouldn’t like it though; that wasn’t how he took his coffee.
At first, he didn’t respond. Nothing. Eyes on the floor. Then, as if the words had taken a long time to penetrate, he turned to her and blinked once. “Yes, thanks,” he said, and then that hint of a smile became an actual smile, a real one. Not as real as the one in the picture, not as full or as genuine or as happy as that one, but maybe it had a little of that in it. She handed him the coffee. She had no coffee to bring her boss now, but that was all right, she was doing good for the firm, keeping up morale. She dug into her pockets.
“Two sugars, right?” She produced them, and he smiled a little more, so she ripped the tops of the packages, both at the same time, and she dumped the sugar in. “Sorry,” she said, “no spoons on me.”
He took the coffee. The elevator door opened, and they both stepped inside. “You’re Becca, aren’t you?” he asked. “Beth’s new intern.”
Becca nodded. He sipped the coffee, smiled again, sipped again. Silence.
It was the sugar, Becca thought, a good thing I brought the sugar. He wouldn’t like it black, and then we wouldn’t be talking now. And she smiled back, and she surreptitiously patted the pocket of her jacket, crammed full of sugar packages.
But now John wasn’t talking and the elevator was moving inexorably toward the top floor. Becca counted out the floors as they passed them – fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. John sipped. Becca fidgeted. She tried to look at him out of the corner of her eye, squinted so he couldn’t see her doing it. Seventeen, eighteen. She was looking at his hand, his left hand, ringless, like there had never been a ring. Twenty.
“Where did she go?” She didn’t mean to say it. John looked surprised at first, his mouth went through a little series of silent ohs, before it bunched up into a look of intense pain.
“I don’t know,” he said. His eyes dropped. “I really don’t. They ask me sometimes, ask about the ring. I don’t know. One day she was there, and then suddenly, she wasn’t anymore. Pieces of her started to go missing. First it was an eye. Her hand. The whole left side of her body. No one noticed except me, but I could see her slipping away, a little bit at a time. And then she was gone. And then the ring was gone. And then . . . her things. The clothes in her drawer . . . her picture on my desk . . .” he turned and he looked at her, but he wasn’t really looking at her, he was looking past her, not seeing her. “I think I might be going mad.”
Becca didn’t say anything, he looked so sad right then, so terribly, terribly sad. She put her hand on his, touched him very, very lightly, so lightly she didn’t know if he could feel it.
“You’re not going mad,” she said. “Shhhhh, it’s all right. Don’t worry, don’t worry.” Inside, though, she was thinking, she’s gone, she’s really gone, you never had a wife, John. You never knew her, you never loved her.
He looked up, very tentatively, met her eyes for the first time, smiled. The door opened with a cheery bing and he startled guiltily. Half-jumped out of the elevator. But then he paused, turned and put a hand across the door. “This coffee wasn’t for me, was it? I haven’t gotten you into trouble?”
“It’s your coffee now,” she said. “Just for you.” And saying it she felt happy, just happy, and solid. Like he could see her at last. Like she was real to him.
“Right,” he said, “thanks.” But as the doors closed again, she saw that look in his eyes, something speculative, something wondering a little bit – who was the girl in the elevator? – but a happy kind of wondering, a curious sort of wondering, a maybe-maybe sort full of hope and excitement. She saw it there, in the eyes, in the smile. And then elevator began to drop away underneath her with a feeling that might have been a little like love.
And now she felt anger, just the barest hint of anger that he should be sad, here, in Paris, the city of lovers, la Ville-Lumière. He was the one who had wanted all these fucking bones, these fucking dead Frenchman, what right did he have to be unhappy? He should be smiling, he should be smiling, and she should be smiling, like in the picture. But he wasn’t. There was something missing from his face, some part of him that wasn’t quite there, wasn’t quite with her. He should have been smiling.
John was snapping away furiously now, and Becca wanted to go; she didn’t want to be in this dank dark place any more, she wanted to be where there was light, where there were bottles of wine.
“There’s supposed to be something here,” he said, and he was staring at a place in the wall where an ancient skeleton had been composed on a little shelf. “A name. There’s supposed to be a name here
.” Becca looked at John, looked at that handsome face, but the eyes were wrong, they were wide and staring. She wanted to be kissing John, but he was interested in all those bones, all those stupid, fucking bones. They weren’t people anymore, they couldn’t be. They couldn’t talk, they couldn’t fuck, they certainly couldn’t love you anymore. Dead people couldn’t love you. That was the point, why didn’t he understand that? Dead people were gone, they were vanished forever.
John was muttering something now, and his breathing was hoarse. “I can’t find any names, there must be names here, mustn’t there? Who were all these people? Where did they come from? Where?”
“John,” she said, “we’re going now.”
And he took a picture. And another picture. And another picture. So many goddamn pictures. And then he wasn’t taking picture anymore, he was putting away the camera, and Becca thought, thank god, at last, he’s done with it. He doesn’t need pictures anymore, he can just have me. But he was picking up the skull, he was staring at it.
“It’s Laura,” he whispered, and his face made a thousand silent, painful ohs. “I think it’s Laura.” He paused, and he was rubbing his ring finger then, and Becca stared at it, the band of light, untanned skin where that ring used to sit. In the washed-out light, he seemed to be a stranger, she didn’t recognise him anymore, there were dark smudges across his face, the eyeholes deep and sunken. And full of something. Wonder. Love.
“She’s here – she always said . . . Paris . . . she wanted to go to Paris. La Ville-Lumière. She wanted to make love in Montmartre. She wanted to stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower and see all those lights, all those little lights winking at her. She wanted to . . .”
And he was looking at Becca now, and he was holding the skull in his hand, and suddenly Becca could see it too, it was Laura, it had the same loving smile, and it was looking at him, and the word SLUT was written across it in large wobbly writing. And she was angry. You don’t exist, she thought, you never existed. You weren’t real. He never loved you.
“I remember. I remember her, she was there, and then she . . . Why are we here?” he asked, and he was staring, and his eyes were wide and dark as caverns. “Why are we in this fucking place? Why did you—?”
Becca found that she didn’t want him to be there anymore, he wasn’t nice, he wasn’t kind, he wasn’t the kind of man you ought never to leave. Because he was leaving her. She knew it, she could see it, she could feel the little pieces of herself disappearing. He was leaving her, and all for his wife, for his dead wife. She wasn’t a person, she wasn’t anything. There were six million dead people buried here, six million, and how many more? How many more everywhere? Throughout all of time? The dead are nothing, she wanted to scream at him, they aren’t anything at all, just a little whiff of air, a thing that was there and then gone. She was nothing. She was a stone. She was a memory. She was band of white flesh wrapped around his finger.
“She’s dead, John, she’s just fucking dead!” And Becca felt it happening, felt that look in his eyes, felt the darkness of those caverns swallowing her up.
And he kissed the skull, he leaned over and he planted his lips on it, the warm flesh ones against cold, hard, gleaming bone. He didn’t shiver. She thought he should be shivering, that he should be cold, that it would be awful to kiss a dead person but it wasn’t. There was a look on his face. Happy. A smile that was a real smile, and the skull was smiling too. Nice little even rows of super-clean, white teeth.
Why are you doing this, John? she wanted to scream. Why are you doing this? Why can’t you just love me, why am I not enough, why am I not real to you? All those skulls, all those skulls around her were laughing now, they were saying, “You mocked us but you are one of us. You are one of us, you are dead, you are among the dead and now we shall have you.” The teeth. All those dark eye holes and smiles full of teeth.
And then John was looking at her again, really looking. Becca felt herself falling into pieces under John’s terrible stare. And maybe it was a bit like love, that feeling of dropping away.
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Waiting at the Crossroads Motel
STEVE RASNIC TEM followed his 2012 collection Ugly Behavior and the novel Deadfall Hotel with no less than three new collections in 2013: Onion Songs (Chômu Press), Celestial Inventories (ChiZine Publications) and Twember (NewCon Press). 2014 will see the appearance of his latest novel, Blood Kin (Solaris), and his stand-alone PS Publishing novella, In the Lovecraft Museum.
“This story started with a character,” he reveals. “It’s always struck me that someone who believed in the realities posited by H. P. Lovecraft – possibly the most paranoid scenarios imaginable – might be similar to some fathers I’ve known: steeped in conspiracy paranoia and willing to drag their families wherever their fantasies took them.”
WALKER NEVER THOUGHT of himself as any kind of genius, but he knew that at least his body was never wrong. If his body told him not to eat something, he didn’t. If his body told him not to go into a place, he stayed outside. If his body wanted to be somewhere, Walker let his body take him there. He figured he got his body from his father, whom he never knew, but he knew his father had been someone remarkable, because his body knew remarkable things.
“Blood will tell,” his mother used to say, in pretty much every situation when an important decision had to be made. He eventually understood this referred to the knowledge he had inherited from his father, held in his blood, and which informed his body which seemed to know so much. Walker’s blood never said anything too loudly – it whispered its secrets so softly he couldn’t always hear. But he could feel it pull in this or that direction, and that had been the compass that had brought them here.
The motel was small, all one story, just a row of doors and square windows along the inner side of an L-shaped building, with a dusty parking lot and no pool. Walker heard there used to be a pool, but they’d had a hard time keeping the water sanitary, so they’d filled it in with sand. A few cacti and thorny bushes now grew in that faded bit of rectangular space, but none too well.
The maid – a withered looking woman well into her seventies – tried confiding in Walker from day one. “There’s something wrong with this dirt, and the water ain’t never been quite right. You buy bottled water for your family while you’re here – especially them kids.” But Walker made them all drink right out of the rusty taps, because that was the drink his own blood was thirsting for.
If anything Walker felt more at home at the Crossroads than he had anywhere in years. He’d drink the water and he’d breathe the dry desert air, taking it deep into his lungs until he found that trace of distant but unmistakable corruption he always knew to be there. He’d walk around outside barefoot at night, feeling the chill in the ground that went deeper than anyone else could know. He’d walk around outside barefoot during the middle of the day letting the grit burn into his soles until his eyes stung with unfamiliar tears.
Angie had started out asking nearly every day how long they’d be staying at the Crossroads, until he’d had enough and given her a little slap. He didn’t really want to (he also didn’t want not to), but it seemed necessary, and Walker always did what his body told him was necessary.
That was the thing about Walker – he could take people, or he could leave them. And he felt no different about Angie. His body told him when it was time to have sex with her, and his body told him to hide her pills so he could father some kids by her, but Walker himself never much cared either way.
“The four of us, we’ll just stay here in the Crossroads until I hear about a new job. I have my applications in, and I’ve been hearing good things back.” She never even asked how he could have possibly heard good things, waiting there in the middle of nowhere. He never called anyone. But she’d never asked him any questions about it. Angie was as dumb as a cow.
Somehow he’d convinced her that the Crossroads Motel was the perfect place for them to be right now. From the Crossroads they could tra
vel into New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or turn around and head back towards Denver. They could even go back home to Wyoming if they had a particularly desperate need to visit that state ever again. In order to do any of those things, though, they’d have to get a new car – theirs had barely made it to the Crossroads before falling apart. “But we have a world of choices.” That’s what he told her. Of course he’d lied. She was an ignorant cow but the dumbest thing she ever did was fall in love with him.
Their fourth day there he’d made an interesting discovery. He’d always whittled, not because he liked it particularly, he just always did. He’d grabbed a piece of soft wood and gone out to that rectangular patch where the cacti grew and the swimming pool used to be – he called that area the “invisible swimming pool” sometimes, or just “the pool” –and sat down cross-legged in the sand, the sun bearing down on him like a hot piece of heavy iron pressing on his head, and started to carve. He was half-way through the piece – a banana-shaped head with depthless hollows for eyes and a ragged wound of mouth – when suddenly the hand holding the knife ran it off the wood and into the fatty part of his hand – slow and deliberate and unmindful of the consequences.
He permitted the blood to drip, then to pour heavily into the sand before stopping it with a torn-off piece of shirt-tail. Then it thickened, blackened, spread into four flows in different directions. Then each of those flows hardened and contracted, rose from the sand into four legs attempting to carry the now rounded body of it away. It had begun to grow a head with shining eyes when the entire mass collapsed into a still shapelessness.
Not strong enough, he thought. But that will change.
Walker spent most of the next few days sitting in an old lawn chair he’d set up behind the motel. The cushion was faded and riddled with holes – rusty stuffing poked through like the organs of a drowned and bloated corpse. The whole thing smelled like sea and rot – odd because it was so dry here, miles from anything larger than a car wash puddle – but it was an aroma he’d always found comforting. It was like the most ancient smell of the world, what the lizards must have smelled when they first crawled out of the ocean.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books) Page 25
