It might well be Fetcher, since it was performing the trick all the posters had shown. It was rearing up to beg even though nobody was offering it a treat. Before Violet could distinguish more than a large vague silhouette, it dropped to all fours and dodged around the corner. When she reached the corner both roads were deserted. She mustn’t be distracted by it or by wondering why nobody had come out of the houses to catch it. “Lawrence,” she shouted as if she could dismiss the creature and recall him, but only the dark chill wind came to her through the open windows. She hadn’t seen or heard any hint of his whereabouts by the time she reached the village green.
Had she left the streets behind too soon? Had she managed to miss out some of them? She stared at the dark huddle of bungalows as if by making her eyes ache she might bring Lawrence into the open, and then she fumbled her phone out of her pocket. She was hoping it might have regained some of the power it had lost in Striders Halt, but it was still as dead as the rectangular stone it resembled. She had to believe Lawrence wasn’t out here; he couldn’t have been faster than the car.
She didn’t know how many times she drove through the lightless streets—how often they brought her back to the green. How frequently did she pass the Jaguar, which was once again parked on its drive? There might well be more than one, taunting her with the illusion that she knew where she was. Her voice had grown hoarse and dry with calling out to Lawrence. Even sounding the horn failed to bring any life to the introverted streets, which she could have imagined were dreaming of themselves. She was driving desperately faster now, as though she could overtake Lawrence in the act of losing himself. While she knew that one of them would eventually have to lose the other, she could never have dreamed it would be anything like this. She had the sudden awful thought that he hadn’t been truly lost until she’d told the woman that he might be. If this was in any way possible, oughtn’t it to mean that she could bring him back as well?
She cried his name and leaned on the horn, and saw the only other creature in the streets dodge beyond the limit of her headlights. It was yapping again, however much this sounded like a voice struggling to tell her to go, go, go. She could even have imagined that it was fleeing the light, as though ashamed to be seen. Suppose it could lead her to Lawrence? She wasn’t quite confused enough to believe that, but she saw that she was following it anyway, having forgotten which way she’d meant to drive through the streets, which had begun to seem malevolently unhelpful. She lost sight of the creature well before the streets led her yet again to the green.
She braked with a screech that sounded like her dismay rendered audible, and then she clambered out of the car. She felt as if the mob of lightless houses had cast her out—would continue doing so every time she searched for Lawrence. She strove one last time to think she was having a nightmare, a distorted version of her wish and Lawrence’s to bring some magic back into their life. Soon she would waken to find herself in the passenger seat, but she knew that wasn’t possible; Lawrence had never learned to drive. Her hands were shaking so much that she could hardly cup them around her mouth. “Lawrence,” she cried, “come back.”
Her words were aching not merely in her ears but throughout her entire self when she thought she heard a voice somewhere among the houses. “Let it go.”
She couldn’t tell whether it was addressing her. As she strained her eyes at the mass of bungalows, she saw a figure dart out between them. The headlight beams were splayed across the green towards the larger darkness, making it harder for her to distinguish the shape. It was yapping and panting, and the face on the blurred shaggy head seemed more fragmentary than it ought to be, fluttering in the chill wind. When the figure reared up in front of her she didn’t know whether it meant to beg or plant its paws on her shoulders and nuzzle her face. All she could do was cry “Lawrence.”
Matthew M. Bartlett
RANGEL
Leeds, Massachusetts lived in Gaspar Bantam’s memory as a city of perpetual gloaming, of eternal October. In every memory, in every dream, the faces of jack-o’-lanterns flickered from cornhusk-garlanded porches, treetops glowed orange and red under a sky of charcoal clouds, leaves crunched under your shoes like the snaps and cracks of radio static. The baskets at the farmer’s market spilled over with red and yellow peppers curled like beckoning fingers, and bulbs of garlic hung from knotted strings like clustered nests of pupae. You’d pull the comforter around you for warmth in the mornings but throw your jacket over the bike rack in the sun-seared afternoons before playing Pirates of the Woods. The whole village thrummed and hummed to the constant soundtrack of the peepers and the crickets and the whoosh of trucks on the rush and rumble Interstate. Autumn is said to solemnly herald a kind of dying, but in Leeds, in that shadowy little city tucked into a curve of the mighty Connecticut River, the season is an ecstatic celebration of the fury of death’s rebirth.
It was the height of autumn when Gaspar’s baby sister Rangel disappeared into the woods, never to return.
###
Gaspar, now forty years old, the whole of the country between him and Leeds, stared up from his bed at the morning-grey ceiling. His wife Laura lay curled beside him, lightly snoring. He had awakened from the latest iteration of a dream in which he was walking through the Leeds woods at dusk, his sister’s voice calling to him from the treetops, from the tangled brambles, from the thorn-spiked deadfalls. Trees began to burst up out of the ground, spraying dirt, opening like gargantuan umbrellas as they rose, blocking the light in steady increments, turning the woods into a coal-black prison thick with woody bars. He had stirred awake, gone for a piss, returned to the warm bed. Now, cocooned back in, he allowed himself for the first time in months to replay in his head the Halloween just after Rangel’s disappearance, thirty years ago as of this coming Saturday, back in faraway Leeds.
###
As dusk crawls along State Street, the porch lights come on one by one, on all houses but number 131, the Bantam house. In that shadow-swaddled Victorian cottage, decorations are folded and boxed somewhere in the darkness of the cellar, where Gaspar is not allowed. No candy graces the table by the front door, and bedtime is 8 p.m., no arguments, no negotiations, buddy. Against the strict rules of the Bantam household, Gaspar slips from his bed on the second floor and soft-foots it to the window. He kneels and watches as the little ghouls and princesses and Frankenstein’s Monsters, led by doting parents, go in lantern-lit clusters from house to porch-lit house. Kneeling there in his darkened room, he cries, pushing his fists into his eyes, his mouth curled into a grimace. He cries for his lost sister, yes, but mainly he cries for himself, selfish, selfish Gaspar, because Rangel, snot-nosed friendless and lost little Rangel, has stolen from him his last Halloween as a child.
The next Halloween, his 11th, is drenched in downpours, and if it were any colder, it would all be coming down snow. As it is, his werewolf costume is hidden under a puffy blue winter coat (which his mother won’t let him rip open to heighten the effect), his furry mask moist and stinking despite the umbrella that hides it from the world. The festivities are further dampened by the smug insistence of his friends that Halloween is for kids, and dressing up? Well, you might as well be a queer, for middle school kids, the worst thing you could possibly be. The year after that, he barely acknowledges the holiday, though he does take his place at the window to watch. That year there are no tears. He has learned to stifle them.
###
Gaspar rose quietly so as not to rouse Laura, showered, as much to wash away the dream as anything else, put the coffee on, fried and plated a couple eggs, and sat, looking out the window of the ground-floor condominium. In the city there were no falling leaves, no October aromas, only bus fumes and acrid smog. L.A.’s attempts at being seasonal seemed to Gaspar half-hearted and overcompensating, and maybe they weren’t, but to the provincial New Englander that smoky, fire-lit season can’t be fully realized anywhere else. At that thought a city bus slid by with a green, grinning witch on its side, winking, mock
ing him, a wart protruding from her nose, a distorted white square on the surface of the wart to suggest that it shone. A hand landed on his shoulder and he started, nearly spilling his coffee.
“Jesus!” he said.
“Keep it together, kid,” Laura said, jostling his shoulders like a boxer’s trainer. Again his coffee started riding up the sides of the cup. He put it on the table, shot her a narrow-eyed look. “How are you holding up?” she said.
“Thirty years,” Gaspar said. “Thirty.”
“I know.”
Gaspar stood up, turned, and hugged Laura close to him. He pushed his fingers up into her long, brown curls, held the back of her head and kissed her gently. When he had first met her nearly 15 years earlier, having only recently arrived in L.A., at what was otherwise a dud of a party, there had been an immediate attraction and an easy rapport. They had talked about movies, about food, about politics (both leaned left), and about religion (she was agnostic, he an outspoken atheist). She had lost a baby brother to cancer, and so they had talked about loss. At the end of the night, she said she wanted to see him again. The last thing he wanted her to do, he told her, was leave. She left anyway. But he knew she would come back, and she did, again and again. She was the first woman to whom he did not cling, afraid that out of his sight, she might disappear, abandon him as in a dark wood. There was something about her—an ineffable aura of permanence, of solidity. She was hard-edged while he was dreamy and sentimental; she was forward thinking while he traveled through the past like a tourist fixated on sites of historical atrocities. She kept him in check.
“I’m going to go back this year,” he said, before he knew he had decided, before he knew he was going to say it.
But the moment he said it, he knew he had to do it. Why it seemed so important, so imperative that he go, and go this year, he did not even bother to consider. It had been enough, before now, to remember the Leeds of his childhood, suspended in autumnal amber, to willfully deny the existence of the changes he knew must have taken place. It was time to face Leeds as it was now, just a city, not a tainted place of nightmares and secrets and loss.
“You should call your parents, let them know you’re coming,” Laura said.
“Maybe I’ll surprise them.”
“Do you need me with you?” Laura asked.
Laura and his parents had met only once, when his folks had flown to L.A. for the wedding. They had all gotten along well, trading embarrassing stories about Gaspar until he had all but begged them to block their mouths with wedding cake. But his parents would likely be away traveling and, in some deep, shadowed part of his brain, he feared that if Laura came to Leeds, she, too, might wander into the woods and be taken from him forever.
“I don’t think I do,” Gaspar said. “I think I’ll need to be alone, to, you know, walk my old paper route, check out the town, look at the old house…”
“To pretend that time hasn’t passed?” Laura began scratching his head with her long fingernails, looking at his prematurely graying hair.
###
Rangel won’t touch her broccoli. She pouts. She cries crocodile tears. She clasps her small, pink hand over her mouth. “Come on,” says Gaspar. “It’s good with pepper on it.” To demonstrate, he twists the pepper mill over his plate with a dramatic flourish.
“I’m with her,” says Red. “That shit is disgusting. She can skip it this meal.”
“Absolutely not,” Shirley says, her voice shrill. “She can pretend it’s monkey brains.”
“Mmmm, monkey brains,” Rangel says. “Wait a second, cauliflower is monkey brains. Not broccoli. Cauliflower.”
“Have a no-thank-you helping,” says Shirley. She is done with this argument.
“Hey Gaspy, why did the monkey fall out of the tree?” Red says, his mouth full of steak.
“Because it was dead,” Gaspar answers.
“That’s goddamned right. Dead as a fucking doornail.”
“Language,” says Shirley.
Meanwhile, Rangel has started in on her broccoli.
###
That night, after Laura had gone to bed, Gaspar pulled from the high closet shelf in the guest room a wooden box with a metal clasp. He placed it on the marble coffee table, sat on the couch, and pried open the lid. The picture on top, caked in dust, was of his parents at a party in some large, twilit room. It had to have been taken in the early ‘seventies: Red was wearing checkered pants, and his sideburns and his collar were comically large. Shirley wore stylishly pointy-framed glasses and a green polyester dress with a self-belt. Her hair was swirled atop her head like soft serve ice cream. Both were grinning widely, their teeth slightly out of focus, white and blurred, as though their mouths were full of clouds. They were toasting the camera with their wine glasses.
He pulled that one out and started going through the rest one by one, piling them to the side of the box. Not a quarter of the way down, he found what he had been looking for, the one picture of Rangel and him he’d allowed himself to keep. In it, she sat on the sheared stump of a tree in her grey wool jacket, her pink and purple scarf wound about her neck. She was pale, ginger-haired, freckled. Her expression was inscrutable as she squinted into the fall sun. A miniature Gaspar stood behind her, his hair in a bowl cut, a study in brown corduroy and narrowed eyes, much too cool for picture-taking. He could not remember having posed for the picture. He focused again on her, at the vertical lines between her brows, the fine, almost translucent hairs there, the long, horizontal freckle on her left eyelid.
What would she look like now? Would her hair would still be that same glowing red, or would it have faded to a strawberry blonde, as his had? He couldn’t even remember that much about their interactions beyond earnest conversations of childlike confusion, of underdeveloped minds trying to make sense of a puzzling world of adults and their inscrutable doings. Beyond that, she was what most every little sister is in the eyes of a ten-year-old boy: a nuisance. What Gaspar had lost was not as much a person as a mystery—the full person his sister was going to be…or, if she was alive somewhere, was.
Ah, it was all just conjecture. He was not going back in order to storm into those dark, dense woods in search of bits of clothing stuck on tree branches or a small shoe stuck in the mud of some remote embankment. Which is not to say that in his dearest dreams he didn’t imagine spotting her looking in shop windows on Pleasant Street, turning her by the shoulder to face him, the shock of recognition, of years shorn away...but in his waking hours he knew those thoughts were a little too close to hope.
Hope was among the most destructive forces Gaspar knew, a force that had nearly laid waste to his already fragmented family. Hope could stab you with its cold blade. When the phone rang but once. When you saw a redheaded girl down the wrong end of a one-way street. When a car pulled into the driveway, that crunch of tires on gravel, a sound that should herald a homecoming.
Five years after Rangel’s disappearance Shirley and Red had seen that it was time to stop hoping, so in their hearts they effectively declared Rangel dead. They arranged for a funeral with an empty casket, purchased a plot at Leeds Memorial Cemetery. Gaspar was determined to remember, though: he stored Rangel deep within him, and in the middle of the night he would take her out and turn her over and over in his mind like a rare coin. He wondered if his parents still did that too, in those infrequent times when their lives were silent and still, awake in those pitch, hourless vistas of time that stretched beyond their midnights.
If they did, there was not the faintest hint.
Gaspar rarely spoke with Shirley and Red now. Before Rangel’s disappearance, they had been a happy pair, or at least they had shielded him from any discord. They would both show (or lovingly feign) interest in his youthful obsessions, no matter how dull. The change had been sudden and final. It was as though they imagined Rangel was in some unearthly realm, some parallel universe, and they spent all their time and attention wishing themselves there. Not only had Rangel robbed him of his Hall
oween, she had robbed him of his parents, turned them into strangers. No, he would absolutely not let them know he was in town. He would not surprise them.
Before going to bed, he logged on to the computer and booked a flight and a room.
###
Four policemen and his parents conferring by the tree stump. Raised voices, his mother’s sobs. Questions, rephrased and repeated, and then a search of the house, unknown men, tramping in and out, smoking, occasionally laughing, as though there could possibly be something funny. The next weeks are a haze of unreality: lines of townspeople, hand in outstretched hand like paper cut-outs, eyes to the ground, slowly making their way through the fields and the forest. Dogs, all lolling tongues and eager eyes, summoned to sniff at Rangel’s scarf, then cast scrambling into the countryside to seek the scent. It seems to go on forever, and forever, and forever, and then it just…stops.
Gaspar is surprised to find that he misses the attention as the real, hard ache of loss begins to settle among his family like some great, crouching monster proffered by the callous gods to take Rangel’s place.
It is a time of loneliness and fear, the Bad Time. His parents have stopped going to work, and when he asks why, they evade the question. They evade him, as much as they can. When he wakes screaming, an occurrence that is not infrequent, no one sees to him, no one cradles his head, no one sings him back to sleep. When he walks to the bus stop or to Danny Trask’s house for a sleepover, he takes care to avoid the edge of the woods. What exactly he fears will happen he does not know.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three Page 26
