“Now that you’ve met the committee, do you understand the seriousness of this interview?” Dr Kincaid asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a wife named Debbie and a daughter named Lori?”
“No.”
“Do you own a home at forty-eight Arroyo Road?”
“No.”
“Are you a vice-president at Sheperton Enterprises?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t remember. I know it isn’t Sam Wentworth, even though that’s the name I thought was mine when I came here.”
“And which we’ve decided is convenient for you to use inasmuch as we don’t know what your real name is.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps one day, you’ll remember your actual name or your actual social security number, and we’ll be able to connect you with your past. But for now, the best we can do is prepare you to be a productive member of society. We’ve arranged for you to have a valid social-security number. We’ve tried to get you employment in the area you claim to be expert in, real-estate development, but your condition and lack of qualifications made our efforts unsuccessful. However, since you enjoy spending most of your time with books, we’ve obtained employment for you as a custodian at a branch of the Phoenix public library. We’ve also obtained a room for you at a boarding house near that facility. You’ll be obligated, of course, to pay the rent and to keep taking your medication.”
“Of course.”
“Do you understand that you’ll be arrested if you go anywhere near Debbie and Lori Bolan or their home on forty-seven Arroyo Road? Do you also understand that you’ll be arrested if you go anywhere near Joe Sheperton or Sheperton Enterprises?”
“I do.”
“Have you any questions?”
“One.”
“Yes?”
“What happened to my Ford Explorer?”
“Since the license plate and VIN numbers were invalid, the car was impounded and sold at public auction.”
“I see.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“If the Explorer wasn’t mine, I don’t have a right to it.”
“Exactly. I commend you on your progress.”
“Thank you.”
Careful, Sam thought as he stepped from the car. He thanked the driver, a male nurse at the mental-health facility. Squinting from the sun, he watched the vehicle proceed along the shimmering street. Then he turned toward the two-story, Spanish-style boarding house. A stern man stared from the front door. Picking up the cheap suitcase a social worker had given him, Sam approached. For the past two years he had thought only about his lost life, about Debbie and Lori, about the family he’d taken for granted, about hugs and kisses and not being able to see his daughter grow, about family meals and Lori’s piano recitals and all the things he’d never made time for. Now they were the most precious things imaginable. With all his heart, he wanted to rush to Debbie and Lori and beg them to help him understand. Free at last, he needed to . . .
Careful, he warned himself again. The police and Dr Kincaid will keep an eye on you. The guy who runs this place will report everything you do. Remember what the police said about the penalties for stalking. You’ll never learn the truth if you end up in jail or back at the nut house.
The motorcycle, which had taken him a month to make a down payment on, transferred every punishing jolt as he followed the primitive road next to I–10. Replicating the route that had destroyed his life, he’d left the highway at Gila Gulch and now headed toward the hill behind which he’d found Meridian. The arms on the human-shaped cactuses looked even more droopy, black-specked, and diseased than two years earlier. Heat waves radiated off the rocks and the sand. The bleak hill loomed closer. Staring along the road, he noted in distress that it didn’t curve to the right of the hill as it had that evening. Instead, it went to the left, remaining parallel with I–10.
Leaving the road, veering to the right, he felt increasingly torturous bumps as he rounded the hill and came to more black-specked cactuses. Beneath the goggles that protected his eyes from blowing sand, tears welled. It was a mark of his desperation that he’d managed to convince himself that Meridian would be here when he returned. Maybe you are insane, he told himself. Isn’t thinking of yourself as “you”, as someone apart from you, isn’t that one of the signs of schizophrenia? Maybe you’re as crazy as everybody thinks you are. Admit it – whatever happened to you out here, it had nothing to do with a place from 1882 that appears and disappears like a literal ghost town, like some kind of evil version of Brigadoon. If you believe that, you are crazy.
He stopped the motorcycle where he estimated he’d parked the Explorer that evening. Amid rocks and sand, he recalled where the livery stable, blacksmith shop, and general store had been. Where you imagined they were, he thought. And stop calling yourself “you”.
The restaurant with the fifty-cent steak dinner had been farther along the street, and the saloon with its swinging doors and its sign for whiskey, beer, and sarsaparilla (he still had trouble with the word) had been even farther along. He could see it in his mind so vividly.
But obviously, it hadn’t been here. Heartsick, he got off the motorcycle and propped it on its kick stand. He took off his helmet and felt a dry hot wind on his sweat-matted hair. For a time, after his release from the mental-health facility, he’d followed orders and taken his medication. But it had made him feel so groggy, so out of touch with things, that whatever cure it was supposed to be seemed worse than what Dr Kincaid had said was wrong with him. Each day, he had taken less and less, his consciousness regaining focus, his senses becoming more alert. And each day, he had felt more certain that he was in fact Sam Wentworth, that he did have a wife and daughter, that he worked for Sheperton Enterprises. The only problem was, nobody else in the world agreed with him.
How could it seem so real? he inwardly shouted. Is that what schizophrenia’s like? Do you become convinced that a false world’s true?
Damn it, stop thinking of yourself as “you”.
Sick at heart, he shuffled along the non-existent street that he could see so vividly in his memory. Here and there, he noticed charred tips of boards poking from the sand, just as he’d noticed them the evening he’d wakened here. He paused and pulled one of the boards free, studying the scorch marks on it. He stared at the partially exposed bones of a large animal. He had a mental image of the cowboys shooting at each other, of the muscular man carrying the sack of flour. He plodded farther along the non-existent street.
Here, he thought. The saloon had been just about here. The swinging doors with the gaps at the top and bottom. The tinkly music from the player piano. He stepped through where he imagined the doors had been. He glanced to the left where cowboys had smoked and silently played cards. He looked to the right where other cowboys had leaned against the bar and drank. The saspa . . . sarsaparilla bottles had been just about . . .
Here. This is where you woke up, he thought, staring down at the sand. Something small moved among rocks. A scorpion? So real. So false. You shouldn’t have come back. All you’re doing is making yourself worse. With a palpable sense of horror, he backed away, as if retreating through the swinging doors, and stopped when a glint in the sand caught his attention. Sunlight reflected off something. A shiny piece of stone, he told himself. Fool’s gold or whatever. The reflection seemed to pierce his eye. Before he realized what he was doing, he walked toward it and kicked his shoe in the sand. He expected a glinting pebble to roll free. Instead, his shoe dislodged something bigger, something solid enough to resist his shoe.
A circular tip of glass beckoned. He stooped, gripped it, and pulled a bottle from the sand. The bottle was empty. It was the same kind of bottle that had contained the liquid he’d drunk. Despite the sun’s heat, he shivered. How could you have imagined something that you never saw, something that was buried under the sand? he thought.
That’s when he knew he was
truly in Hell.
The next day, he pulled a collapsed tent from the back of the motorcycle and quickly set it up, using a rock to drive the extra-long stakes deep into the sand. The tent had a reflective exterior that made it an excellent shield against the desert sun, he’d been assured. He zipped the entrance shut so scorpions and snakes couldn’t get inside. Then he unstrapped a fold-down camp shovel from the motorcycle, opened it, and thrust it into the sand where he’d found the bottle. That was all the equipment he’d been able to fit on the bike. The next time, he’d bring more. If he was going to live out here when he wasn’t working at the library, he had to make himself as comfortable as possible. A sleeping bag. A Coleman lantern and stove. A cooler. A portable radio. Maybe a sun umbrella. His janitor’s salary didn’t allow him to afford all that and, given his lack of history, no bank would give him a loan, but his junk mail (the only mail he received, all of it addressed to “current occupant”) brought a never-ending stream of invitations to apply for credit cards, and credit-card companies, he’d discovered, would give a card to everybody, no matter how broke or crazy they were.
Frenzied, he dug the shovel into the sand.
“Sir, you can’t stay here,” a voice said.
Sam dug harder. After two months, he’d excavated almost the entire length and breadth of where the saloon had been. Mounds of sand marked its perimeter. Stacks of burnt wood rose next to a huge scorched section of the bar. Piles of glasses and bottles lay to one side.
“You can’t do this, sir. This is private property. You’re trespassing.”
A special hoard lay near Sam’s tent: the generic-looking soft-drink bottles, from one of which he’d sipped two years ago. He’d been praying that he’d find one that had fluid in it. Maybe, if he drank from it, he could make Meridian return. Maybe he could reverse what had happened. Maybe he could get his soul back. But to his dismay, enough to cause him to whimper each time he made a discovery, most of the bottles had been broken, and the few intact ones had been empty. He dug faster.
“Sir,” the deep voice insisted.
A hand touched his shoulder.
Trance broken, Sam whirled.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” a hard-faced man said. He raised his callused hands protectively in case Sam tried to use the shovel as a weapon. He wore a metal hat, a faded denim shirt, jeans, and construction worker’s boots.
To Sam’s astonishment, trucks, bulldozers, back-hoes, and other earth-moving equipment raised dust, rumbling into view from the side of the hill. He’d been so focused on digging that he hadn’t been aware of anything else. Construction workers got out of numerous vans. An SUV jounced across the bumpy terrain and stopped, SHEPERTON ENTERPRISES stenciled on its side. A man in a dress shirt and loosened tie, his sleeves rolled up, got out, put on a metal hat, and barked orders at some of the men. His stomach was more ample than it had used to be, his chin more jowly, his dark hair a little thinner, but there was no mistaking him.
Joe, Sam thought.
After yelling more orders, Joe stared in Sam’s direction. “What’s going on over there?” he shouted to the worker. “Who the hell’s that guy? What’s he doing here?”
“Digging,” the worker shouted back.
“Don’t you think I can see that!” Joe stormed over.
“Looks like he lives here.” The worker pointed at the tent. “Homeless. He’s scavenging glass and stuff.”
“Jesus.”
“Joe,” Sam murmured.
“Tear down the tent, and get him out of here,” Joe told the worker, then turned to leave.
“Joe,” Sam managed to say louder.
“What?” Joe looked back and scowled. “Do I know you?”
“Don’t you recognize me?” Immediately, Sam realized how much his sun-leathered skin and two months of beard had changed his appearance. “It’s Sam. Sam Wentworth.”
“Sam?” Joe asked blankly. Apprehension crossed his beefy face. “That nutcase? Sam Wentworth? The guy who thinks he’s my vice-president, for crissake? Call the cops,” Joe told the worker. “Tell them he’s a stalker. When I come back from Grand Valley, I want this crazy son of a bitch out of here.”
“Grand Valley?” Sam asked.
Joe marched through the dust toward a group of workers.
“Did you say Grand Valley? Joe! My God, don’t tell me you’re talking about Grand Valley Vistas outside Tucson?”
Joe scowled back harder. “How come you know about Grand Valley?”
“You went ahead and bought it?”
Joe straightened cockily. “In two hours, just about the time the police lock you in a cell, I’ll be signing the papers.”
“Carson talked you into it?”
“Carson? What do you know about Carson? And nobody talks me into anything!”
“Yeah, right, like that Hidden Estates deal you so regretted getting tricked into that you hired me to double-check the deals you were tempted to make.”
“Hidden Estates?” Joe stormed back to him. “Have you been breaking into my building again? Reading my files?”
“I can save you ten million dollars.”
“That’s exactly what Carson wants for the land! How did you know? You have been reading my files!”
“And I can save you another ten million in lawsuits.”
“Jesus, you’re crazier than I thought.”
“It’s not going to cost you anything to wait another day, but it’ll cost you at least twenty million if you sign those papers.”
“Okay, you know so much about my business? Prove it.”
“What?”
“Prove I’ll be making a mistake.”
“And if I can?”
“You poor dumb . . . The fact is, you can’t prove it. But maybe that’ll make you realize how deluded you are. Maybe you’ll finally leave me alone.”
“But if I can?”
“You mean, will that convince me you used to be my vice-president? No damned way.”
“It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I want. I don’t care about that anymore.”
“Then what do you want?”
“One of the lots here.”
“What?”
“This lot.” Sam pointed toward his excavation. “If I prove buying Grand Valley Vistas would be a disaster, giving me this lot will be the best investment you ever made.”
“Fat chance of that happening.” Joe looked amused. “Fine. Prove I shouldn’t buy Grand Valley Vistas, and the lot’s yours.”
Sam held out his hand. “Shake on it.”
“Yeah, sure, right.” Joe smirked as he shook Sam’s hand.
“You’ve got your faults, Joe, but breaking your word didn’t used to be one of them.”
“And it sure as hell isn’t now. This man’s our witness to the deal. Where’s your proof?”
“In the fifties, Grand Valley Vistas used to be a toxic dump site.”
“What?”
“From a chemical plant that used to be there. It’s got enough poisons buried there to cause multiple birth defects and give anybody who lives there cancer.”
“And you can prove this?” Joe’s normally florid face paled.
“I can tell you how to contact a man who was on the crew that dumped the chemicals, and a man who quit working at the plant because of the dumping. They’re old now, but their memories are excellent. I can also tell you how to get your hands on the company’s records, the ones that authorized the dumping before the plant shut down.”
For the first time in Sam’s experience, Joe had trouble speaking. “If you’re right . . .”
“You save twenty million, and I get this lot.”
Sam’s shovel clinked against another bottle. In the sweltering sun, he raised the glass container, heartsick that it too was empty. One day, he thought. One day, you’ll find a bottle with dark liquid in it, and when you drink from it, you’ll have your wife and daughter back.
Around him, saws whined, and hammers pounded as homes went up with
the speed Joe Sheperton was famous for. Here and there, portable radios played golden oldies or frenzied conversations on political call-in shows. Sam barely noticed them. The saloon was all that mattered. Meridian. Getting his soul back. Impressed with the accuracy of Sam’s information, Joe had offered him a position in the company (“Maybe you’re a natural.”), but Sam had meant what he said. He no longer cared about his former job. Hell, if it hadn’t been for that job, he thought, you never would have lost your family.
What he needed was to retrieve the life he’d taken for granted. One day, you’ll find a bottle filled with liquid in it, he kept telling himself. One day, you’ll be able to return to Debbie and Lori. You’ll hug and kiss them. Overjoyed to see you, they’ll wonder what kept you all these years. They’ll stare in amazement as you explain. In the meantime, maybe the town’ll reappear, just as it reappeared two years ago. Maybe that’ll be another way to get your soul back. But how can that happen – a sudden panic seized him – if a new town’s here to take its place and keep it from reappearing? Not much time. You don’t have much time. As the searing sun reached its meridian, he dug with a greater frenzy.
CLIVE BARKER
Haeckel’s Tale
CLIVE BARKER WAS BORN in Liverpool, England, where he went to all the same schools as John Lennon before attending Liverpool University. He now lives in California with his partner, photographer David Armstrong, and their daughter Nicole.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 51
