“Let’s go,” the woman said, picking up her pace.
“Who are they?”
“They want me to go back there. Come on, hurry. We can talk at my place.” She started off again.
“Wait a minute?” Sanchez said. “Go back where?”
“That place,” she said as she went. “It’s a hotel called Strawberry Fields.”
“In New York? I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of a hotel by that name.” This has got to be some sort of Joke. Sanchez turned and saw that the car was now about a hundred feet back and crawling slowly toward them, predatory. He upped his pace catching up with the woman. They emerged from the alley at W. 48th Street and headed south toward 42nd. The city was turning gray, washing out, like an old black & white photograph. As daylight receded to dusk an impenetrable blanket of cold and an inexplicable pall of dread settled over Manhattan. There were few pedestrians on the streets now; Sanchez imagined people huddled in their apartments waiting for . . . what? He could not shake the image of the fire from his mind; children; smoldering bodies on stretchers, shapes beneath sooty sheets. Firemen with haunted eyes, bent like broken toys, hacking black phlegm from their lungs.
He kept glancing over his shoulder watching for the car to emerge from the alley. When that did not happen he sprinted back for a look. Despite the cold his face felt flushed and hot, like a low-grade fever. He wondered if he’d been sunburned by the fire’s intense heat.
“Don’t be stupid,” Deb called after him. “Those guys are dangerous.”
Sanchez peeked into the alley. Sure enough, the car was gone. Impossible, of course, there was no place to turn around, and backing up would have been a real bitch, sooty brick walls close on both sides. Yet that could be the only explanation. He turned and sprinted back to where the woman stood waiting for him. “What the hell’s going on?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
Sanchez grabbed her arm spinning her. “Bull shit! You just said they were dangerous.”
“They’ve been following me. The others are all dead and they were followed too. They made them go to that place. Please, listen to me, the only connection is John Lennon.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I knew them all. We were sort of like a . . . club. We called ourselves The Wives of John Lennon. Women he had, sometimes separately, sometimes . . . together. We dressed the way he wanted us to, did the things that made him happy.” She gave a laugh that sounded more like a retch of agony, bitter, regretful, looked away, the glint of unshed tears in her eyes, one tear breaking free, crawling down a red-chapped cheek. “None of us was capable of a life after . . . you know.”
Sanchez stared. “You’re telling me you were his whores and you were incapable of moving on?”
Stiles glared at him. “We were his wives. He loved us all. Every day he would give us each a beautiful red rose. I still have one. I kept it in his memory. Only now it’s dried and wilted, like me. After John we all just seemed to drift, no direction, one failed relationship after another. Couldn’t get serious about anything, couldn’t settle down. Like we were all living in a dream, waiting for . . . something.”
“Something?” Sanchez said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. After what happened at the Dakota building in 1980 . . . well . . .”
“Well?”
“We made a deal with him before all that; if anything should happen . . . it was almost as if he knew.”
“Knew?”
“About what was coming. His death, I mean. I think it was the place, and the room.”
Sanchez frowned. “Room?”
“Room Number 9.”
“You’re telling me you saw him in room number 9 at a hotel called Strawberry Fields? Do I look stupid to you?”
“Please, you have to believe me, everything I’ve told you is the truth. If anything should happen that’s where we’d meet him. He’d be there for us. That’s what he said. He’d come back so that we could continue with . . . what we had.”
“What you had?” Sanchez said with incredulity. “What you had was sex with a rock star. He’s dead and he’s not coming back. Understand? He used you guys. Get over it. Get over him.”
The tears were bright in her eyes now, wet on her cheeks. “But he did come back.”
“Shit!” Sanchez said. “I’m talking to a fucking loony.”
“No,” she said grabbing him by the arm. “Please.”
“Look,” Sanchez said. “I want to know where that place is.”
“I need to prove something to you first. Then I’ll tell you. I promise.”
“You’d better not be fucking conning me, lady?”
“Please,” she said again, her voice low, her wet eyes downcast. “You’re my only hope.”
“Christ,” Sanchez said. “Lead on.”
She turned and started off.
He hugged his arms to his chest and hurried to catch up.
Sanchez had been born in the city and he’d lived here his entire life. Even so, he had no love for the place. Despite a multitude of improvements of late the city seemed to be in the process of dying. It had started with 911 and seemed to be worsening. All the false optimism in the world could not shake his feeling of dread. It was in the eyes of those he passed on the street, as if all the light had gone from their souls.
3
Her apartment was in a reconditioned warehouse just off 11th Avenue, several blocks north of the Lincoln Tunnel. It used to be an industrial area, old warehouses and tenements now gentrified into lofts and nightclubs and art galleries. Owners cashing in on the real estate boom of the 1980s had turned everything into money. Now it had all gone to shit.
They took a freight elevator up to the third floor. She took a key from her purse and put it in the lock. The apartment was small but functional.
“Seat?” she said, taking off her coat.
He remained standing. “I need to know why I’m here.”
She went to a stack of papers on a stand. “He gave these to me,” she said, handing them to Sanchez. “Said I was his favorite and that they were some sort of eternal gift.” She pushed her hair back away from her face. “He was a romantic, you know.”
Sanchez leafed through the papers, frowning. They appeared to be hand-written lyrics, musical notations, guitar chords. “Why should I believe these are Lennon’s?”
She sighed. “Don’t.”
“Listen, lady.”
“Just look at them. They’re signed.”
Sanchez scanned down to the bottom of the sheet. John Lennon’s signature was there. He leafed through the stack, and there were quite a few. Each was signed. He smiled, shaking his head. “No . . .”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Deb Stiles. “But they are real.”
“Do you know what these would be worth—?”
“I don’t care about that. I just want to live.”
“What else do you have?”
She went into the bedroom, came back with a cherry sunburst Rickenbacker guitar. “To Deb,” it said on the face. And below that, “My eternal rose. Love, John Lennon.”
“There’s more,” she said. “Do you want to see?”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Yoko used to give him other women just to appease him,” Deb said, seeing the question in Sanchez’s eyes. “She alone couldn’t satisfy him. In 1973 he began a romantic relationship with May Pang, a former aid to the couple.”
“Yeah, I know the story,” Sanchez said. “It came to be known as his ‘Lost Weekend,’ even though it lasted for nearly a year and half. It was with Yoko’s full knowledge and consent. But what does it have to do with you and these other women?”
“Yoko bears responsibility for emasculating Lennon as a creative force by persuading him to abandon the brilliant work he did with the Beatles,” Deb told Sanchez. “Yoko never knew about the room. She never knew about the work he did there or about us. That wa
s his place, protected against outside influence. But something went wrong. When he knew he was going to die he made us promise.”
“Jesus, this is weird.”
“He said he could live vicariously through us. That all we had to do was come back to him from time to time and he could go on living. But I don’t want to do it anymore. Every time I go there I lose another piece of myself. And I don’t have that many pieces left. I don’t want to be afraid anymore.” She went to Sanchez, put her arms around him and placed her wet face against his chest. “They’re going to make me be with him again.”
“When?
“Tomorrow.”
“Who are they?”
“You saw them today. I don’t know who they are. Not from here, that’s for sure.”
“Can’t you call the cops or something?”
“I’ll not be believed. Besides they’ll kill me.”
“You mentioned an old man.”
“He’s the one that rented John the room. That’s where you come in. I want you to talk to him. Please? Maybe he can do something. Give me a reprieve.” Stiles pulled away from Sanchez and began taking off her clothes.
Sanchez shook his head. “Don’t,” he said.
“Please,” Deb Stiles said. “I’ve been so lonely.”
Her body was beautiful, more than he could resist, and the sex was like nothing he had ever experienced, nearly supernatural in its beauty and rough urgency.
4
When Sanchez finally slept he didn’t dream exactly. At least there was nothing coherent, just a jumble of random images: Cold blue light engulfing the city washing away all other colors. Streetlights disappearing in a haze of gauzy gray. Cold then hot. Fire. Millions of errant sparks scattering into a dead sky. The bodies of children; stretchers; smoke. A whirlpool of confusing lights. And in amongst all of it; a beautiful red rose.
He woke at dawn, dressed and slipped out of the apartment before Stiles stirred.
5
The hotel was in one of those eerie lost quarters of the city, neither commercial nor residential. Streets of warehouses and ugly tenements broken up by vacant lots. Traveling there by taxi, Sanchez realized that he was right in his assessment of the city. It was dying, perhaps already dead, leached of color and heart. He watched it roll by; bleak, grimy brick and rusting steel, ancient graffiti, as if it was no longer worthy of defacement.
The snow had begun in earnest before dawn and six inches or more had already fallen. Now the wind was picking up. The taxi pulled silently up in front of the building.
All Sanchez wanted to do was talk to the guy, see if he was real. See if any of this was real. Above the entrance there was a small sign that said simply: STRAWBERRY FIELDS.
Odd that he’d never been to this section of the city. Strange how one can live an entire life in a place and not know its secrets.
He paid the cabbie, got out and told him not to wait.
In an alley beside the hotel the black vehicle with the reflective windows purred like a sleeping cat. For a moment Sanchez thought about walking over and smashing the window, pulling the driver out and demanding to know what was going on.
Instead he went inside the building. A tiny bell rang as he entered. A man that had to be at least a century old hobbled into the small lobby from a back room.
“Ah, yes, Mr. Sanchez, is it?” the man said with a wry smile. “My name is Raul. Duncan Raul.” He smiled again.
“But how did you know . . .?”
“No need to get into that. They’re expecting you.”
“What? Who?”
“Why, Mr. Lennon and the ladies, of course. That’s why you’re here isn’t it?”
“I just wanted to talk.”
“I see, sir. You weren’t sure of your . . . instincts. You needed to know if it was . . . real.”
“Yes, I guess so,” whispered Sanchez.
“Well, now’s your chance to find out,” said Duncan Raul. “Just down the hall, sir.” He gestured. “Room Number 9.”
Sanchez turned and made his way in the direction the old man had indicated. Although he understood how ridiculous this all seemed, he could not stop his feet from moving.
“No need to knock,” the old man called after him. “When you get to the door just go on in.”
Sanchez found the door to Room Number 9 ajar. There was music from within. A vaguely familiar melody. “Well here’s another place you can go, where everything flows... ” When he pushed the door open the room was in semi-darkness. Then he saw the impression of a man on his back in a bed, long brown hair, the contour of a familiar nose on the well-known face, and several naked young women above and on him, gauzy, convolutions, shimmering, alive, but somehow not alive.
He moved a few steps into the room, straining to see; guitars on stands; notebooks; scrawled lyrics. A bouquet of luscious red roses. An errant eye catching his, recognition, the gossamer convolutions intensifying, animal-like, plumped mouths, red, hungry, devouring.
The errant eye winking, a lascivious tongue licking, wet, plump, too large to be human. Predatory life in the probing eye;
“Too late,” said a voice that might have been Deb Stiles. “They found me. It’s really not so bad after all. Why don’t you come over here and join us.”
Crying out in an unknown language; distinct but meaningless, a snaffle of sound; snapping, contorted movements of bodies. Bending, jerking whiplash movements of hair.
Sanchez plucked one of the roses from the vase, stumbled back falling, picked himself up and ran.
There was a wheezing breath behind him and a kind of chocking sob; then that voice again, crying out. “For God’s sake! For the sake of your soul, get out! Get out before it’s too—”
He did not hear anymore. He ran past the desk, threw the door open and stumbled out into the snow, retching, falling to his knees. Black soot from his lungs. Firemen standing over him. Oxygen mask.
“You saved those kids.”
“What?”
“We thought we’d lost you. No pulse. No heartbeat. You ran into that burning building and brought those three kids out alive.”
“No,” Sanchez said, but his voice was weak, muffled by the mask.
“What’d he say?”
“Take the mask off.”
The mask was lifted from Sanchez’s face. He tried to say something else but they put it back on.
“He was talking about John Lennon.”
“Must be the smoke. He’s delirious. The paramedic noticed the beautiful red rose lying in the snow beside the stretcher. Where the hell did that come from?
Lennon’s alive. I know where he is, Sanchez thought but he never got the chance to speak the words. It was then that he realized he was on a stretcher and several paramedics were working on him. He felt his heart failing and thought about the dead city. He seemed to be floating above it, looking down. It was then that he heard the music again, that vaguely familiar melody from so long ago. “I told you about strawberry fields, you know the place where nothing is real . . .”
The Kindred
“The guests should have started arriving by now,” I told my wife Megan. I looked nervously at the clock. It was eight PM, Halloween night, and our annual masquerade party was officially underway. Well, at least we were there. I went to the door and peered out. The moon was a brilliant silver dollar set into a black curtain sprinkled with glittering solitaires. Outside the air was filled with frost.
Megan came and stood beside me. “What’s wrong?” she said. “You’ve been acting weird all day.”
“I don’t know,” I said, but it was a lie. I was trying my best not to alarm her. Something was wrong and I’d been trying to find a delicate way to tell her about it.
“Come on, Bobby, out with it.”
I sighed. She looked a little nervous, too, I thought, even through the Peggy Sue-Got-Buried sexy ghoul outfit that she’d chosen for the party. I tried to shrug off my anxiety, but inside, my gut was churning with tension. I’d had
a strange dream the night before. I rarely dream. And when I do they’re almost never frightening or prophetic. But this dream had been both. A ghoulish-looking creature had come crawling in through our bedroom window and had sat there on the edge of my bed telling me a strange story.
“On the eighth Halloween of the third millennium,” the ghoul had said, “three nights past the full moon, and one night before All Saints Day, the membrane between this world and the netherworld will be thinner than it has been in more than five thousand years. It will be a rare opportunity for the kindred to find a weakness and come rushing through. They have been waiting, biding their time, and they will not waste this chance.”
I remembered lying there propped up on one elbow, watching my visitor with a strange kind of detachment, knowing that I was dreaming but feeling strangely cognizant.
“Kindred?” I asked, barely able to contain a smile. “You’re kidding?”
“Not in the least,” my visitor replied in a perfectly sane and rational voice.
So, what are the kindred?”
“A distant relative of humans. Long ago there was a terrible conflict. Neither side won. In the end it was a draw. Humans chose the light, Kindred chose the dark. They made a terrible mistake, but realized it too late. Their ace in the hole, however, was in getting humans to acknowledge the reality of a dark side, and the acceptance of an annual day to celebrate it: Halloween. That was your mistake. Each year since then, on Halloween, the membrane between this world and their world has eroded steadily, weakening by degrees, until we have come to the point where we are now.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked the creature.
“Because you are the only human with a chance to defeat them.”
Servants of Darkness (Thirteen Creepy Tales) Page 6
