In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  Inside, however, it was just like I’d imagined it would be. There was a main greeting room with mirrored walls, naked gold statuary, red carpet and red, crushed velvet couches. Vera, the madam – I guessed they were called that – was a full-figured, older gal with pale skin, platinum blonde hair and a leopard print top, likely someone who had earned her position here after years on her back. She gave us a warm greeting and called out the girls.

  They came out of a doorway and lined up so Al and his buddies could choose their favorite flavor. I heard them quietly coming to arrangements for what the guys wanted and what it would cost, and then they all disappeared. Before my clients left, they each handed me a fat money clip, Al’s the fattest of all. It must have been close to forty grand in total, and I told them they were smart. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep in a room with a whore while carrying that kind of cash. You’d wake up broke, and she’d be long gone. It was safe with me. I never screwed a client, and I certainly never stole from one.

  While they were in back, I sat in the lounge and chatted with a pair of girls who hadn’t been selected, one dark haired and one light, neither more than eighteen. It was friendly conversation, I didn’t ask judgmental questions and they didn’t try to sell themselves to me. We just talked like real people. It was nice.

  At one point Big Al showed up in the doorway, bare-assed with half a hard-on. “Rocco, you want a spin with them?” He pointed to the girls. “I’ll spring for both, my man.”

  The girls raised their eyebrows.

  “Thanks anyway, Al,” I said, “but I’m working.”

  He shrugged and disappeared again.

  About now you’re ready to call bullshit, right? I’m in a cathouse in the middle of the night, and someone is offering to pick up the tab so I can screw two eighteen-year-old hard bodies at the same time, and I say no? I know, I know, but that’s how it happened. I was working, I was there to get paid, not laid, and now I’m carrying all their money and an unlicensed firearm. Better to stay right where I was and jerk off later.

  Two hours go by, and I’m beyond sleepy, even though the girls have been bringing me coffee. I told them they should just go to bed, but they said they’d keep me company. Out of another doorway comes this guy who’s not smiling, and my brain says muscle. I even got up from the couch, suddenly not so sleepy anymore. He’s bigger than me, wearing a black turtleneck, a real goombah type, and all I can think is, What did those assholes do? I’m just working, man! I’m not their babysitter!

  He asks me to step inside with him and I go, but I unbutton my jacket. Then he shows me into a well-lit business office, and there sits this young woman with glasses in front of a computer screen with a green spreadsheet on it.

  “Can I have your business card?”

  I give it to her, ready to tell her that the limo service – and especially its driver - can’t be held liable for any damage or harm these guys might have caused. Instead she files the card in a Rolodex, taps out some numbers on an adding machine while she’s looking at the screen, opens a drawer and starts counting out cash. Then she hands the cash to me. It’s a little over a grand.

  This is the part where I should say something smooth, but I just stare at the cash with this dumb look on my face. She laughs. “Drivers get ten percent of the action when they bring in clients.”

  “Right,” I manage, and she laughs again.

  “You didn’t know. It’s okay, it’s your first time here. I won’t tell anyone.”

  I fanned through the bills, then tucked them away. “You’re serious. Ten percent?”

  “Yep.”

  “These guys have had ten grand worth of sex tonight?”

  “And you get a piece of every sick twist their little heart’s desire.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. Only in America.

  She looked over her glasses. She was really pretty, much prettier than any of the girls who had lined up earlier, and I had a tough time believing she got her start in the trailer rooms. She looked more like NYC Business School.

  “We like new clients and repeat business. Make a few more runs and we’ll up your percentage. If we decide we like you, we’ll discuss more…lucrative jobs. You seem like a man who appreciates being well-compensated for delivering that extra level of service.”

  It didn’t occur to me to wonder how she’d managed to peg me so well after only a few minutes, but I guess she knew a whore when she saw one. I told her I’d be happy to bring her as much business as I could arrange.

  “Ladies!” I heard the madam yell, her voice carrying throughout the trailers, and immediately there was the sound of opening and closing doors. I started out the door to see what was going on, but the office girl gripped me by an arm and pulled me down into a chair – she was a lot stronger than she looked – and said, “Wait here with me for a bit.” I did.

  Half an hour later I met my three clients as they shuffled back into the entry lounge, shirts unbuttoned, hair skewed and looking exhausted. I got them back to Tahoe as the sun was coming up, then home. They slept through the ride, and when I dropped Al off last he hit me with a three grand tip and a “See you next month, Rocco.”

  You bet your rich white ass, Big Al.

  Al wasn’t the only client I took to the ranch. I knew I had locked into a good thing, and started putting all my efforts into bringing in customers. Bachelor parties were the easiest, drunk and horny young guys eager for some action. I always warned them to bring plenty of cash, and they obliged. More importantly, they came back for more, and I made out. Thirty-five percent on the run since of course they asked for Rocco, a healthy tip, and ten percent of the action at the ranch. It didn’t take long before the girls were calling me Rocco too, and the pretty accountant (her name turned out to be Veronica) quickly bumped me to twenty, then twenty-five percent. My boss was happy. He thought I was doing Tahoe runs, had no idea about the Double D, and he certainly had no complaints about the business I was bringing in. He gave me my choice of gigs, so when I didn’t have a group for the ranch, I was working money runs. And of course there was Big Al and his blackjack every month, my number one whale.

  I saved almost all my cash, wrapping it in tight bundles and hiding it in my apartment.

  And every time I was at the ranch, just as the night was winding down, Vera would yell,

  “Ladies!” and there would be that opening and closing of doors. Veronica always kept me in her office during that time. I asked her what was going on, but she just smiled sweetly and shook her head. I was starting to get sort of a crush on Veronica, and even asked her out once. She gave me a polite but firm no, and I didn’t ask again.

  One morning at the ranch, right around four a.m., I was sitting in Veronica’s office while my clients - a gang of seven frat boys from U.C. Berkeley - were busy in the back. Veronica had stepped out for something, and I was alone when Vera called, “Ladies!” Opening and closing doors, as usual. I looked outside the office, didn’t see anyone, and decided to have myself a look. I went into the back hallway where the girls had their rooms.

  Curiosity. A truly unhealthy condition.

  Just a peek, I told myself, quietly opening the first door I came to.

  One of the frat boys, a redhead with a lot of freckles and a woven bracelet with Jamaican colors, was naked and spread eagle on the bed, his eyelids fluttering. Two of the girls – one was the pretty, dark-haired one I’d chatted with in the lounge – were flanking him in kneeling positions, hands pinning him down, grunting as they worked their mouths at each side of his neck. I must have gasped, made some sound, because the dark-haired girl’s head snapped up, and suddenly I was looking into a pair of yellow eyes with pinpoint pupils. Her face and neck were smeared with blood, as were her fangs. Not the canine-types you’d expect, these were incisors, side by side and long and sharp, like a Nosferatu in a black and white movie. Her black tongue flickered out and she hissed.

  “Oh, shit…” I stumbled backwards out of the room and into the hallway, where
a single hand caught my shoulder and spun me around. Another hand gripped my throat, slammed me against the wall and lifted me off my feet. I started choking, couldn’t breathe.

  Veronica wasn’t so pretty anymore, with her yellow eyes and Nosferatu fangs and generally pissed-off expression. She held me up there effortlessly, staring at me, as the girls came out of the room behind her. In the hallway, more doors opened and the ladies emerged, all with the twin fangs, all wiping their palms and forearms at the blood on their faces. Even Big Vera appeared in the hall. They were hissing, and a few snarled.

  “Why didn’t you stay in the office?” Veronica asked.

  “I…I’m sorry…so sorry…” I wheezed.

  Veronica looked over her shoulder at the others. “Finish up,” she snapped, and they responded, quickly disappearing back into their rooms. Then it was just me and Veronica. She slowly lowered me so my feet touched the floor, and the pressure came off my throat. Her fangs slid back in and her eyes shifted once more to dark brown. She shook her head, a bittersweet smile on her face.

  “Why?”

  I was trembling. I didn’t know, didn’t have an answer.

  “We make the marks go away, we make them forget after we feed,” she said. “They just go home tired. Maybe they have some bad dreams for a while, but no damage done.”

  “Please, Veronica,” I said, beyond being ashamed at my little boy’s voice. “Make me forget, too.”

  She seemed to think about it for a moment, then slipped her arm around my waist and walked me slowly back to her office. She gently pushed me into a chair, and sat across from me. “I don’t think I will. I think you should remember everything tonight.”

  I shook my head, started to speak, but she held up a hand and shushed me.

  “You’ve been doing a terrific job, and your client list is growing. No sense spoiling a good thing. I’m going to up your cut to a full fifty percent of the action. Plus, if you can bring us someone disposable, like a prostitute or a runaway…no vagrants…you’ll get ten grand per head.”

  “Disposable?”

  She nodded. “Someone who won’t be missed. It’s easier that way. The girls get tired of always having to use restraint, to let them live. Sometimes they need to blow off steam, really rip into something.”

  Vera and the muscled goombah walked past the office door then, carrying a long, limp shape in a bloody white bed sheet between them. An arm slipped lifelessly out of the sheet, knuckles dragging on the carpet. The wrist wore a Jamaican friendship bracelet.

  Veronica giggled and looked at me. “Accidents happen. We’ll make your clients forget he was with them. You’re the only one who will know.” She smiled, and the tips of her fangs lowered just the smallest bit as her eyes took on a yellow tint. “And you will keep working, and you will keep bringing them here. Do you understand me?”

  I didn’t respond, and she rolled her office chair over to me and placed her palms on my thighs, leaning in close, her lips brushing my ear. Softly she said, “I want you to remember what happens here, and remember something else. If you try to quit, or run away, or tell anyone…I will find you.” Then she teased my ear with her tongue, and gave my earlobe a playful nibble before standing up, still smiling.

  “Off you go, now.”

  How big of a whore was I? This was the question I asked myself all the way home, my half-empty clients dozing in the back. I asked myself the question all morning, sitting in a Denny’s and drinking coffee, then again later, on a park bench in the sunlight, too tired and scared to sleep. How big a whore?

  Twenty years. I’ve been living here just about that long.

  It’s a Catholic monastery in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border. We get a lot of snow. No, I’m not a monk, but the brothers let me live here in a small attic room, and don’t ask questions. Brother Tobin is sympathetic but not pushy. He says we all wrestle with our own demons. Brother Tobin doesn’t know the half of it. I dropped off the limo and left California that day, drove east until I couldn’t see straight, somehow managed to pull off to the side of the road and catch some sleep, then just kept on going. All those tightly-wrapped bundles of cash went to the brothers as a donation. That could be the real reason they don’t ask questions, but I like to think they keep me here as an act of charity. I attend mass in order to be polite. I read the bible looking for answers, and still haven’t found anything satisfying. I pray, even though I know no one is listening. I’m pretty sure I sold that privilege in Nevada. No one here knows my background, and no one calls me Rocco. I left it all behind.

  I’m not here seeking absolution.

  I’m hiding, nothing more. The 9mm Beretta is the only reminder of that former life, and I keep it under my pillow.

  Twenty years of trying to forget those images, forget what I did.

  It hasn’t helped.

  There’s tapping at the glass now, way up here with a four story drop below. Tap, tap, tap. I ease the Beretta out from under my pillow as Veronica, smiling and floating outside, pushes the widows in with a rush of cold air, and steps barefoot onto my wooden floor.

  The barrel has an oily, metallic taste, and as she reaches for me, I have a fingertip’s worth of pressure to wonder if it will hurt when it goes off.

  EATER OF STARS

  The Mayans were right. And wrong. As the crowning achievement to his postgraduate work at MIT, Lawrence Singh intended to prove both.

  It was a Friday night and he sat at his work station on the third floor of the Media Lab, an intense young man in need of a haircut, six screens working in front of him as his fingers danced over a pair of keyboards like a concert pianist. Eleven empty Mountain Dew cans filled a wastebasket beside the work table, the lab quiet and empty around him.

  On one screen there was a close-up color image of a stone with four columns of ancient glyphs carved into its surface. It had been digitally altered to become a graphic where each column could move up and down independently. Currently they were scrolling upwards at different speeds. Four other screens were busy flowing through rapidly-changing series of complex formulas and algorithms, and the last and largest displayed another graphically-modified representation of a huge disc covered in rings of strange, carved symbols.

  “Their calendar is based on twenties, with repeating sets of nine and thirteen, and four-hundred being a pure number.” His eyes didn’t leave the screens as he spoke. In a swivel chair beside him, her high heels propped on the work table, Kiera yawned.

  “I thought we were going for drinks.”

  “We are, in a little bit.”

  Her taut stomach was bared by a tight belly shirt, and she placed her hand on the smooth skin and played with the little jewel piercing in her navel, tracing a red fingernail slowly around it. She looked at her boyfriend and bit her lower lip.

  No reaction.

  She sighed. I should be dating one of the guys from crew, she thought, muscled upper bodies and shoulders, big arms hard from rowing. Lawrence was brilliant but not much else, and as soon as he got her through her math requirements she was gone.

  Lawrence pointed at the screen with the disc. “This middle ring maintained a five-hundred-eighty-four count Venus cycle, and it’s geometrically aligned with these nine symbols placed closer in, called the Lords of the Night.”

  “Lords? The Mayans were Catholics?”

  He made a face. I should be dating one of the chicks from Anthropology, he thought. Of course none of them looked like Kiera, a sultry mix of Polynesian and black, with dark eyes and waist-length black hair. And he doubted the Anthropology chicks were as flexible. He had noticed her toying with the piercing, but he tried not to. He was so close to completion, and he had to stay focused.

  “No, they were about as far from Catholic as you get. The Nine Lords feature in their mythology, the Aztecs had them too, representing their gods, each ruling over a particular, rotating night. But that’s just part of their religion. What’s significant is the number nine, repeating sets of ni
ne. The Mayans were mathematicians.”

  Kiera looked at her nails.

  Lawrence’s fingers tapped, and he began nodding. “Nines, thirteens, twenties…the core of the randomized algorithm. It’s going to be worth an Order of Magnitude.”

  Kiera, a med student at Harvard, blinked at the screens. Her own studies required a considerable amount of math, but this was so over the top it might as well have been in Martian. “And what exactly is going to win you an Order of Magnitude? In English, please.”

  “Remember when I told you the Mayans were right, and wrong?”

  “Thousands of times.” She could feel a lecture coming, and leaned further back in her chair. It might even sound like new information, since she had paid so little attention the last time.

  “The Mayan calendar stops on-“

  “December twenty-first, twenty-twelve,” Kiera said, “the end of the world, right?”

  “Wrong, and any Mayan who thought so was wrong too. That’s all Hollywood and media bullshit. Twenty cycles of the Mayan long count calendar equals a Baktun, 144,000 days. December twenty-one, twenty-twelve, is simply the day the calendar rolls to a new Baktun.”

  She tipped forward. “That’s it?” He actually had her attention now. “The calendar just starts over?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much the only significance of it. If it didn’t have the capacity to refresh, and you were a Mayan, you’d end up having to carve that monstrosity again and again. It’s pretty clever, actually.”

  “No end of the world?”

  “Nope. The last time it happened was the year 1617. No end of the world.”

  “If it’s no big deal, then why all the hype and panic?”