by Ginn Hale
Bill narrowed his eyes at John. “You’re actually a robot, aren’t you?”
“The politically correct term is Synthetic-American,” John replied flatly.
Both Laurie and Bill dissolved into giddy, sleep-deprived laughter. John looked on with a pleased smile, and Kahlil got the feeling that he didn’t really understand the people of Nayeshi all that well.
“Oh, speaking of strange phenomena.” Laurie straightened and leaned towards John. “We saw the weirdest thing last night while we were up on the mountain.”
“Oh?” John asked.
“Yes. It was incredible. You wouldn’t believe it.” Laurie bounced slightly in her seat.
“And it was?” John asked.
Laurie opened her mouth but didn’t say anything for a moment. She frowned.
“You’re not going to believe it,” she said at last.
“I told you he wouldn’t.” Bill shook his head.
“Maybe you should tell me, and then I can say if I find it believable or not,” John suggested. He reached past Kahlil for the coffee carafe and refilled his cup.
“No.” Laurie grabbed John’s hand. “You have to see it for yourself. Maybe you’ll be able to explain it—I don’t know.”
“I was going to go up and check the run-off levels this afternoon anyway,” John said. “If you two want to ride up with me, you can point out the unbelievable thing.”
“That would be cool.” Bill nodded. “I kind of want to revisit it just to make sure it was what I thought it was. I mean, the entire night was so weird. Very cool, though. There was this bird...” Bill went on at length about the silhouettes of owls and the twisting and swirling branches of the pines. The way human figures jumped and writhed around the red bonfire as the night wind rose and howled across the mountain. Laurie added a few details to Bill’s enraptured descriptions.
John listened. He was good at listening. He rarely interrupted and kept his comments to those encouraging monosyllables that assured a speaker of his interest. John sipped his coffee, but kept his attention on Laurie and Bill.
Kahlil liked the fact that people in this world were not without wonder at its beauty.
He listened to Bill and Laurie while he slowly ate the succulent slices of his steak. The warmth of food and the pleasant sound of the surrounding conversation soothed him. He closed his eyes. It felt so good to close his eyes. He felt the muscles in his back and neck relax.
Laurie glanced at him and smiled in a kind way.
“You look beat, Kyle.”
“I had a restless night.”
For a second time, John gave him that perplexing look.
“I guess you don’t want to come up the mountain with us, then?” Laurie looked hopeful.
“You could sleep in John’s jeep on the way up,” Bill offered.
“No, but thanks for the invitation. I’d love to go some other time. Right now I’ve got too many things to do.” Kahlil glanced to John. “Do we have any spackle?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I was just curious.” Kahlil shrugged, and a sharp pang bit into his shoulder. The yellowpetal was wearing thin. He needed to get back home.
He started to say his goodbyes but was interrupted by the purely social protests that Laurie offered. Before she agreed to let him leave, he had to promise to go with Laurie and Bill the next time they went up the mountain. Bill pointed out that he should go with John, since John was the one who stayed up there for weeks on end. After that, there came a series of brief digressions on a variety of subjects from John’s ecology thesis to faking Bigfoot prints, to the massive fungal mats that linked thousands of trees throughout miles of forest.
“I really do have to go.” Kahlil started to rise; to his amusement, Bill and Laurie both waved at him in perfect synchronicity.
“Hey, Kyle,” John suddenly called to him. “I should be back around six or so... There’s something I ought to tell you about.” John didn’t go on, but something in his expression seemed both tender and guilty. Kahlil couldn’t help but remember John’s naked back and then his glance over his shoulder. His expression then had been the same as now.
“I’ll be there,” Kahlil assured him.
“Great. I’ll see you later tonight.”
Kahlil walked home slowly, enjoying the morning sun, basking in the residual enjoyment of meeting John’s friends. Maybe he would go to the mountain with them the next time they asked. It was such a dangerous temptation, to abandon his watch from inside the cold of the Gray Space and to join John in the warmth and vibrancy of this world.
It was noon when he finally reached the house. The dog had come downstairs and gotten into the trash. Kahlil scowled at her. Then he saw the letter and the torn envelope, and his nascent hopes died in a single word.
Chapter Five
“You know, Toffee, he seemed pretty nice.” Laurie leaned back in the passenger seat of John’s jeep. She pushed her shoes off and dangled her bare foot out of the open window.
“Yeah, when I first saw him, I was thinking he was some fucking vampire or something. But you know, he was okay.” Bill chewed thoughtfully on a red licorice whip he had purchased from the rickety little gas station where they’d stopped two hours before. John spared it a quick glance and then shook his head.
On either side of the single-lane dirt road, dark walls of old forest rose over them. Deep green shadows and shafts of hard light fell across the road like a camouflage, disguising deep ruts and fallen tree limbs. Neither Bill nor Laurie showed any tension as they rounded the sharp curves in the road and bounced over the rough terrain. John supposed they simply trusted his skill and enjoyed the ride, as was their privilege as passengers.
“He didn’t really say much about himself.” Laurie took a drink of her soda. “Usually guys who look like that are all about telling you how tough they are and how bad they’ve had it. He was pretty quiet.”
“That’s what everybody always ends up saying about serial killers, isn’t it?” The last thing John needed was Laurie playing matchmaker. His relationship with Kyle was strange enough already.
“Yeah,” Bill said. “You could be living with the next Ted Bundy.”
“He didn’t seem like a serial killer,” Laurie said.
“You don’t live with him,” John replied.
“Come on, you wouldn’t live with a guy if you really thought he was a serial killer, would you?” Laurie asked.
“Have I mentioned how much I appreciate the fact that he’s never been late with the rent?”
Bill seemed to feel the sudden need to vindicate himself. “When we lived together, I was only three weeks late once. Maybe twice.”
“You were only three weeks late on the months you actually paid,” John said.
“And that’s why you guys don’t live together anymore,” Laurie broke in quickly. “And that’s not even what we’re talking about. Rent money wouldn’t be enough to make you live with a murderer.”
“No,” John admitted.
In a way, he wanted to think unkindly of Kyle. Then he wouldn’t feel so bad about taking his money and opening his mail. But it was an unfair tactic, and he knew it. As soon as he got home, he had to own up to Kyle and give him the key. He had been meaning to come clean with Kyle over breakfast—maybe even mentioning their near encounter at the Steamworks bathhouse— but then they had run into Bill and Laurie.
“He could be a drug dealer, though,” Laurie commented.
“No one ever calls him. No one visits him. He doesn’t seem to have any connections at all,” John replied.
“Maybe he’s a warrior-priest from some kind of weird sex cult like in Erotic Coven II,” Bill suggested.
“You know, it doesn’t matter how many times you work that movie into conversations. We are not going to rent it,” Laurie told Bill.
John had, in fact, already seen much of the movie while Bill had lived with him. It had been difficult to avoid due to the sheer number of times Bill had w
atched it.
“Hey, I’m making a valid point this time,” Bill said. “In Erotic Coven II, there’s this exorcist guy who’s got these tattoos all over his body. They’re kind of like Kyle’s.” Bill leaned forward between the front seats.
“And?” Laurie took one of Bill’s licorice whips.
“And when the naked demonic chicks attack him, the tattoos whip off him like ribbons.” Bill grinned. John recalled the scene vividly and wished that he hadn’t. Bill continued, “So these thick black ribbon things tie the demon chicks up spread-eagle and, you know, do them.”
“The tattoos have sex with the women?” Laurie asked, nonplused.
“Yeah, they get all thick and… It’s a lot cooler than it sounds,” Bill finished.
“I bet.” Laurie turned her attention to John. “So do you have any idea how Kyle got that scar across his mouth?”
Bill flopped back against his seat and opened another package of candy.
“I don’t know.” John down-shifted as the road swung into a steep downgrade. He was only half-listening to the conversation. The summer storm had blown down more branches than usual. As they drove farther into the bush, he had to swerve to avoid several huge shards of yellow stone that partially blocked the narrow dirt road.
“I wish I could have gotten a clearer read from him,” Laurie said. “For a minute I had this flash... An orchard or something. Lots of trees and flowers. And then this terrible pain. It was like teeth or something, ripping into my shoulder. Then it was gone.” She twisted in her seat to address Bill. “Do you think Kyle might have some kind of latent psychic force field?”
“Do you have any idea how flaky that sounds?” John asked.
“It does sound a little like some Star Wars reference,” Bill commented. “The force is strong with that one.”
“There is another,” Laurie wheezed in an impersonation of a sickly Yoda. She turned back to face the front. “That’s the problem. All these cheesy movies come along and pretty soon there isn’t any way to describe a genuine experience so that it doesn’t sound like some knockoff from a B-rated film. You know, I should get to sue George Lucas for rights to the Force. I am way more in touch with the Force than he is.”
“Sweetie,” Bill leaned in between the front seats, “you are the Force.”
“Damn right I am.” She smiled. “Can I have a Sugar Baby?”
“Sugar for my baby.” Bill shook several of the tiny brown candies out of their yellow package and handed them to Laurie.
John couldn’t figure out where these splintered yellow boulders had come from. They didn’t resemble the dull gray rock that he was accustomed to seeing after landslides, and they were distributed much too randomly. They looked like they had dropped straight out of the sky.
He took a tight turn and had to slam down on the brake as a column of gleaming yellow stone suddenly jutted into his sight. The jeep skidded along the dirt road, then stopped dead. Laurie made an alarmed peep at the sudden stop while Bill and his candies flew off the back seat and smacked into the front.
“You all right?” John asked.
“Bill?” Laurie leaned over to him.
“I lost my moon pie,” Bill replied. “I think I’m okay.”
“Where the hell did this boulder come from?” John backed the jeep up.
“That’s what we were trying to tell you about at the restaurant this morning.” Laurie pointed at the column of stone. “They just showed up last night.”
“Brought down by a mudslide, maybe?” John wondered. He leaned forward in his seat and studied the column. It was nearly as tall as the jeep and unnaturally symmetrical. Its surface gleamed as if it had been polished. John couldn’t see any traces of slide. No rubble or washouts.
“They were just here, right after the rain let up. Like mushrooms,” Laurie said.
“I found my moon pie,” Bill announced.
“This is really strange.” John carefully drove the jeep around the column.
“We started finding them just before sunrise. There’s an entire circle of them up at the wolf rock.”
“It’s like a big yellow Stonehenge.” Bill sat back and, this time, buckled his seat belt.
“So they just popped up out of the ground?” John asked.
“Well, not exactly. They didn’t pop,” Laurie said. “It was more like they just were there. Kind of like they could have always been here, and somehow we just never saw them before.”
“That boulder was not sitting in the middle of the road last week,” John stated.
“I know. I’m just trying to explain how it felt. I mean, there wasn’t any noise or anything. They were just there.”
John didn’t find Laurie’s answer particularly satisfying, but he didn’t have any other.
He kept driving, but slower now and much more intently. He was familiar with this tract of land. He knew the curves and turns, the drops and inclines. But now it had altered, and the sensation was like coming home to discover all his furniture shifted around by ten or twelve degrees. It wasn’t much, just enough to make him feel estranged.
“So how did you meet him?” Laurie asked after they had been driving several minutes in silence.
“Who?” John was thinking about the stones. They had looked like marble, and that was very unusual for this area.
“Kyle,” Laurie reminded him.
“He answered my ad.”
“You finally took out a personal ad?” Laurie sounded delighted.
“No, my ad for a roommate.”
“Sorry.” Laurie sipped more of her soda. “I got all excited for a minute there.”
“Yeah,” Bill said. “I’d love to see what Toffee would put in a personal.”
“Reserved, secretive type is looking for other to hold out on.” Laurie grinned.
“Must be grim,” Bill added.
John frowned. “I’m not grim.”
“You’re no barrel of monkeys,” Bill replied, “but then, I’ve never really thought that a barrel of monkeys would be all that fun. There they are, crammed into this tiny space full of excrement and other monkeys.”
“So,” Laurie went on, “Kyle answered your ad, and then?”
“He had enough to cover the month Bill hadn’t paid and a deposit. That was that.”
John turned off the main road onto a steep upgrade consisting of two wheel ruts. The previous night’s rain kept the usual cloud of dust from stirring up in his wake.
“What does he do for a living?” Laurie asked.
“Sexorcist,” Bill supplied.
“He’s a milkman.”
Several moments of quiet followed John’s reply. He himself hadn’t known how to respond when Kyle had told him. It was the kind of profession that he’d thought hadn’t survived past the fifties. He had wanted to ask about it or say something thoughtful, but nothing came to mind. And there was also the fear that he would ask a small, meaningless question and then have to listen to a long and involved explanation of an industry that he simply didn’t care about. It was a singular profession, being at once unusual and at the same time uninteresting.
And that was if Kyle really was a milkman. If he wasn’t, John wasn’t sure he wanted to know where all those crisp hundred dollar bills came from.
“Milkman,” Laurie repeated. “Really?”
“So he says,” John answered.
The road angled steadily upward, and slowly the air grew cooler. Most of the leafy, deciduous trees were behind them. Here, evergreens grew in close walls. They perfumed the air so that even now, in summer, John thought of Christmas.
“He didn’t seem like a milkman,” Bill said at last.
“No.” John pulled off to a flat shoulder and parked.
“He seemed more like a serial killer or a sexorcist,” Bill said. “Or a serial sexorcist.”
“Bill, hand me my pack.” John wished Bill would stop saying “sexorcist.” He particularly didn’t like having the image linked with Kyle. He had to live with th
e man.
Bill struggled to lift John’s dark blue backpack. John leaned into the back and pulled it over the seat.
“That thing weighs a ton,” Bill commented. “What do you have in there?”
“Love.” Laurie pulled her shoes on. “He’s weighed down with love.”
“And water, among other things,” John said.
“What are you going to do, build a swimming pool up here?” Bill asked.
For a second, John considered explaining the contents of his pack—a radio, flashlight, water filter, lightweight Mylar blankets, army knife, first-aid kit, matches, rehydration salts, and more. But that would only lead to a painful attempt to convey the importance of first aid and adequate preparation this far from civilization. It was exactly the kind of textbook lecture that brought out Bill’s strongest juvenile-delinquent tendencies.
“Yes, I’m hauling a pack full of water up to fill my personal swimming pool.” John got out of the jeep, pulled his pack on, and started up the mountain towards the wolf rock.
He glanced back to see Laurie and Bill wandering after him. Laurie had taken her shoes back off after a few steps over the uneven ground. The pockets of Bill’s jacket bulged with Hershey bars and Lil’ Debbie snack cakes. Neither of them looked like they belonged out here. John stayed ahead, but not out of sight. He didn’t want to lose them, but he also didn’t want to listen to them.
He wasn’t like Bill or Laurie, who both could talk endlessly about nothing. They were the kind of people who were uncomfortable with silence. John was just the opposite.
Conversations, even with his friends, tired him. Struggling to comprehend someone or to be understood made him aware of how disconnected he was from other people.
It was different when he said nothing. In wordless calm, the rest of the world flooded the silence. Just like now: the cool wind whispered through pine branches, songbirds trilled over their territories, a startlingly brilliant blue jay cackled and flashed its wings above him.
The air smelled sweet, still humid from rainfall and infused with wildflowers. Old pines shot up, their musky branches spreading out, cutting the bright blue sky to tiny fragments. Between them, thin streams of light trickled down, filtering through oak and maple leaves in a pale, green radiance.
