The Night Market

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Mainly bug spray.

  Jenny leaned against the wall of the tent and sighed, invisible in the darkness of the tent. The lighter snapped again, followed by a coughing fit that was impossible to ignore. Yael rolled to face Jenny.

  “Can’t sleep? What are you doing?”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Smoking.”

  “Smoking what?”

  “Dust.”

  “You mean – ”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Um.”

  Another brief pause.

  “You want some? It’s from that stash we found. They sprayed it on mint leaves, I think. It’s... not bad.”

  Yael shook her head emphatically, her heart pounding at the suggestion.

  “No, thank you,” she said, her voice shrill and prim.

  Jenny laughed and the lighter snapped to life, briefly illuminating the cramped interior of the tent. The breeze picked up, and while Yael was thankful for the cool air drying the sweat on her skin, it also blew the acrid smoke back into the tent. The air tasted of chemicals and Yael started searching automatically for her mask, then stopped herself in embarrassment.

  “I was wondering...”

  “Yeah?”

  Jenny’s voice was dreamy, her response slow and deliberate.

  “What’s it... what’s it like?”

  Jenny’s laughter spilled out of her like a deck of cards scattered across the floor. Yael’s eyes were confused by the multicolored echoes from the flare of the lighter.

  “I don’t know. You ever get high?”

  “No,” Yael said, shaking her head out of habit. “That isn’t... it’s just not my thing, I suppose.”

  “Some help you are. I don’t know how to explain this shit to someone who hasn’t tripped. You sure you don’t want to try?”

  “I‘m sure,” Yael said firmly. “And you should get some sleep.”

  Jenny snorted with laughter.

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Yael rolled over and screwed her eyes shut. She heard the flint strike, smelled the bug spray odor, and felt jittery and sick to her stomach. She worked her way further into the suffocating folds of her sleeping bag despite the heat, her damp nightshirt clinging to her body.

  In the silence that followed, Yael worked her way doggedly toward sleep, breathing deeply and counting backward.

  “Hey Yael?”

  Yael stiffened in her sleeping bag and felt a greater sense of accomplishment than she ever would have admitted. Yael couldn’t remember ever having been happy to hear her own name, and decided to be brave.

  “Yes, Jenny?”

  “Wanna fool around?”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  Jenny wrapped her arm around Yael’s sleeping bag and whispered in rough proximity to her ear.

  “I could be.”

  “But... we’re both girls!”

  “Is that against the rules where you come from?”

  “No! Well, yes! I mean... I guess it’s complicated.”

  “I like complicated. Tell me all about it.”

  “I don’t want to,” Yael said, more harshly than she meant. “Please stop.”

  Yael heard Jenny flop back down on her side of the tent.

  “Oh, fine,” she grumbled. “You are so dull.”

  “I didn’t mean...”

  “Don’t bother. I’m just bored. Go to sleep or whatever.”

  Sleep seemed unlikely, but Yael was willing to settle for quiet broken only by the crinkling sounds as Jenny shifted and tossed restlessly. Yael’s eyes twitched in their sockets and her heart pounded in her chest. She fell back on the practiced routine of her breathing exercises, but her thoughts returned relentlessly to the misery of the coming morning, the circular anxiety of sleeplessness. Time seemed to stretch out indeterminately, minutes or hours measured by counting her heartbeat.

  She was startled from this relative state of reverie by Jenny, as she crawled past her head, freezing partway out of the entrance flap. Yael rose to follow, motivated by a mixture of annoyance and curiosity. The opening was hardly big enough to fit both of their shoulders.

  “Don’t scream,” Jenny warned, with uncharacteristic gentleness.

  Yael immediately wished she hadn’t looked.

  “Keep quiet,” Jenny whispered gravely. “I don’t think they would hear, but I don’t wanna find out I’m wrong.”

  Yael couldn’t think of anything she would have wanted to say. It was like watching a car crash, hideous and impossible to look away.

  The moon was huge, almost as bright as the early-morning sun. Yael didn’t understand, but whatever the rationale, it gave the scene a cerulean tint. The Waste looked as if it were underwater beneath that strange moon.

  This was not night, Yael decided. This was something far worse.

  They were gelatinous, flowing as much as they walked, hunting amongst rock and cracked dirt with eyeless heads. The color of their skin, if it was skin, was difficult to pin down – Yael would have described it as white, but like no white she had ever seen before. There was no way to associate this color with the purity of fresh snow, for example, or the sterile comfort of a hospital. The hue was somehow dirty, as if befouled by something she couldn’t imagine, though their skin was in fact gleaming and unblemished. Yael could not imagine that they had skeletons because their whole body structure was amorphous and fluid, morphing dreadfully from one shape to the next. Their mouths were roughly circular and lined with hooked teeth like leeches.

  Some wore long robes and ornate veils reminiscent of the clothing worn by the Visitors. Others held sinister brass machinery, the shape reminding her simultaneously of a staff and a trumpet – though the way they were held made it clear they were weapons. Every so often, two of them would move close to each other, almost touching, and their skin would glow in a fluctuating mass of unnamable colors, pulsing like jellyfish. They travelled on a combination of varied limbs, though they seemed to favor powerful, jointed hind legs that caused them to move with an odd, hopping gait.

  “What – what are they?”

  “Dunno. Guy who warned me about them called them Toads. I thought maybe they were your Visitors.”

  “I don’t think so,” Yael said hesitantly, studying the Toads. “The Visitors can pass for human, or so I’ve been told. There are similarities, though, in the design of their clothes, and those tools they’re holding...”

  Yael heard repressed anger in Jenny’s voice as she whispered, and it occurred to her that Jenny wasn’t afraid of the Toads – she was furious with them. She resented the necessity of hiding, even as she recognized it.

  “The locals claim they come from the moon in black ships, to take slaves and do unspeakable things to them in the service of some kind of tentacle-god-thing. They show up when the moon is close...”

  “Full.”

  “That look like a full moon? You really don’t want to get caught, that much is for sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Be glad you don’t know.”

  “What does that...”

  “You’re still missing the worst part, princess.”

  “Am I? Well, then, please, Miss Frost, enlighten me.”

  “Look at the sky. Just not for too long. Those clouds are a goddamn blessing.”

  Mercifully, Yael’s viewing angle under the fractured overpass spared her from seeing their vessels directly. All Yael could see was the wake they left behind them, the clouds parting to reveal a narrow strip of clear sky. Sky that was absolutely choked with stars – millions, maybe more, in every variety of hue and intensity. Even in the small portion of the sky she could see, Yael counted half a dozen galaxies the size of the Milky Way, all elongated as they stretched toward some central point.

  “Do you see it? I thought at first maybe I was hallucinating.” Jenny’s voice was soft and awed, anxiety and jealousy intertwined. “It’s like something from a horror movie, or Japanese pornogra
phy. Can you see it there in the middle of everything?”

  To Yael’s misfortune, her perspective on the sky was perfect. Because when she looked into the heart of dizzying cluster of stars, something looked right back at her.

  Yael wanted to scream, but she was either too smart or too frightened. Instead, she shoved her fist in her mouth, and bit down on her fingers until she could taste blood.

  “At first I thought that it was moving, because every time I see it the stars are different. One night, though, I finally realized what was happening. That thing isn’t moving – the stars around it are changing. They are disappearing – and I’m pretty sure that thing is eating them.”

  Yael wasn’t sure about that, but even with her eyes closed and the sleeping bag pulled over her head, she couldn’t escape the feeling that it was watching her. When Jenny retreated back from the tent entrance, Yael found that she didn’t mind their proximity in the tent nearly as much as before. Eventually, she fell asleep with her back pressed against Jenny’s.

  ***

  “Induced.”

  It is summer, and she is walking back from temple with her family, except for her father, who is at work. Her brother is unsteady in the daylight, his muscles atrophied from hours spent asleep, his beard wild and his hair unruly. He holds on to her hand tightly, both for balance and for comfort. Yael looks up at his face fondly, but there is nothing there.

  “Too much with it too soon. A secret even to herself.”

  At school, Ravi and Saul are playing chess in the library. Yael is only there because she has to stay until the end of class. She reaches for a book on the stacked shelves, and is surprised at how heavy it is. She barely manages to drag it to a table, and then she drops it, because it is so cold that her hands sting. The book is bound in worn leather and the title is written in gilt letters across the face of it, ‘The King in Yellow’. Yael is disappointed, certain she has read this book before, though all she can remember is that she didn’t like the first act.

  The house is cold, and Yael cannot find any of her cats. She is worried, because one of them is pregnant, and she has not seen it in weeks.

  The tunnel is too small for Elian, even though he has narrow shoulders for a boy. He says that he will wait for her there, crouched in a passage so small that he cannot even sit, but she doesn’t believe him. She crawls forward, certain that when she turns around, Elian will have retreated to the service tunnel entrance, assuming shame kept him from fleeing altogether. Even with the mask, it smells bad, or maybe that is just her imagination.

  Jenny has a bag, and Yael knows the bag was full of kittens. She can do nothing to stop her as she throws them into the river.

  Smoke from one of the distant peaks. In Vermont, the hills weren’t really hills at all – they were more like mountains, wild and lonely because the Visitors preferred this country. The road winds through fields well-along the process of being reclaimed by the creeping wild. The trees on the upper slopes are impossibly old, and the houses in such poor maintenance that they appear to be sinking back into the earth.

  “There are always alternatives.”

  At the chalkboard, tracing the shape of the Silver Key, the Sign of the Yellow King which allows sleepers to remember their dreams on waking.

  The map, smoldering at the edges as if it had been rescued from a fire.

  “The train.”

  Yael waits at the station, but she doesn’t have a ticket, and she is nervous following her brother on board. She has seen the authoritarian uniforms of the fare checkers who roamed the cars, demanding to see a ticket, and she fears them.

  Ancestral memory, an entire generation lost to the wilderness. A lifetime spent wandering. The sign by which dreams are remembered, inviting revelation, madness.

  “This is the way out.”

  ***

  “Where are we going?”

  “I already told you that. This road ends in Hastur, beside the dry lakebed. That’s where we can find the train station.”

  “I don’t know about this. How do you know where to go?”

  “I saw it in a dream last night.”

  “That’s crazy talk. Also, you snore.”

  “I do not!”

  “Suit yourself. You always do what your dreams tell you?”

  Yael nodded, better able to deal with Jenny with the gas mask on.

  “Of course.”

  “And you don’t think that’s kinda, you know, batshit?”

  “Miss Frost!”

  “Oops,” Jenny exclaimed with a wink. “But how often...”

  Yael interrupted, not certain why she felt so defensive. Maybe it was because the conversation was so similar to any number of unpleasant discussions between Yael and her stepmother.

  “I always follow the instructions I receive in dreams, Miss Frost,” Yael said icily. “And they are always right. How do you think I made it this far? My dreams hold the map we follow. If you don’t like it, then you can go back to walking in circles in the Waste.”

  Jenny kicked a stone in Fenrir’s general direction, earning what looked remarkably like a contemptuous glare from the dog.

  “He’s so skinny,” Yael criticized. “Do you ever feed him?”

  Jenny seemed legitimately surprised by the question, as if Yael had suggested something utterly novel.

  “Why the hell would I do something like that?”

  “So he won’t starve, naturally! How can you be so cruel?”

  “You think I’m cruel? You should see what he eats. Actually, that’s how we met.”

  “What? I don’t follow you.”

  “Fenrir. That’s how I ended up working with him.”

  “He wanted to eat you?”

  “Sure,” Jenny said, grinning. “That too.”

  “I don’t think I want to understand.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice, Princess,” Jenny continued cheerfully, disregarding Yael’s response. “Life really isn’t that complicated...”

  “How old are you, again?”

  “Twenty-four, which is older than you. And shut up. Nothing is really that complicated, and the least complicated thing of all is men.”

  “I thought we were talking about a dog, or whatever Fenrir is?”

  “That is exactly my point,” Jenny said, seizing Yael by the shoulders as if she had said something clever. “It doesn’t make any difference. They can’t see anything but what they want.”

  “Please stop shaking me.”

  “Men can’t hide it when they want something,” Jenny said enthusiastically, leaning her forehead against the top of Yael’s gas mask. “Let’s be honest – despite your flat chest...”

  “Hey! It’s not...”

  “...and your skinny legs, guys are gonna like you. If you ever take that stupid mask off. Actually, some of them might like you better with it.”

  “Gross!”

  “Figure out what someone wants, Yael, and you own them. As long as you make sure they never get it. Understand?”

  Yael extracted herself from Jenny’s grasp.

  “I understand that is the worst life advice I have ever received.”

  “Talk to me again in ten years.”

  “Eight.”

  “Why are you so pissy?”

  “Because you are obscene and annoying.”

  “You asked.”

  Yael stopped in sheer disbelief.

  “All I asked was whether or not you fed your stupid dog! And now I don’t care.”

  “Oh, well, you know,” Jenny grinned, poking Yael in the side. “Fenrir is my associate, not my dog. He eats people, but he prefers little girls. Unless you want to volunteer...”

  “Would you please stop talking?”

  ***

  “There is no safe haven.”

  Yael sits on the rocks and watches the Atlantic Ocean, dead and grey from winter and the Visitors’ ships, waves lashing the shore with half-hearted intensity. She experiences a moment of profound déjà-vu when she
looks to her right and sees her own gas mask staring back at her. Then she notices that it is missing the stickers she plastered all over it and remembers that her brother, whose name she can almost remember, is still behind it.

  Eating stolen bread in the kitchen, white bread, the kind that comes in identical spongy pieces. Her mouth is so full of it that she can barely swallow, and Yael is seized with a terrible fear of choking.

  In the dusty attic of an abandoned building she lets her first boyfriend touch her but feels only a vague sense of disappointment. Eventually, he gives up in the face of her indifference and leaves, too embarrassed to speak.

  There is a blown-glass vase in her stepmother’s room, curved and delicate, and she has broken it. When Yael tries to reassemble it, half-blind with tears, the broken pieces cut her fingers.

  “Nothing is real.”

  Her brother always moved one of his center pawns two spaces on his first turn, no matter how many times Yael beat him.

  “Everything is permitted.”

  ***

  The Waste was depressing in its enormity and the miles they walked were unsatisfying by comparison.

  Yael stopped counting the days on morning when she ran out of clean underwear. She wasn’t sure how many evenings she sat on an uncomfortable rock while Jenny coaxed dead grass and scrap wood into a small fire. Then she finally saw it while staring off in the distance, sparkling at the edge of a vast depression in the wounded land stretched out before her, at the edge of the hills disappearing into advancing dusk.

  “Look,” Yael commanded, pointing at the single light twinkling against the darkening sky. “Look, Miss Frost.”

  “What?” Jenny glanced up from the embers, clearly annoyed.

  “Just look.”

  Jenny sighed and walked over to stand beside Yael, staring in the direction she indicated.

  “Finally,” Jenny said with obvious relief. “I was starting to wonder if you were full of shit.”

  “Miss Frost!”

  “What? You could have been lying. How would I know?”