Fenton cupped his ear, trying to catch it, then shook his head.
“Oh. Well, this is the place,” I said.
Pine branches parted onto a pitch black clearing, where moonlight and starlight never reached earth. A figure in the clearing stood how I recalled Jack standing, legs wide, arms in motion, chin tilted upward as he spoke, and then it vaporized. Jack made words of the shadows, wrote them down, shoved them through my mail slot, and ran, back to motion, back to the road, fleeing or chasing as he had most of his life, leaving me with mere words to fill the cavities in my memory. Words too frightening to read. Except I did. I read them the day Jack left town, line for line, page after page, every one of them filling me with unvoiced screams and bitter laughter until blackness overcame me, and I woke up on the couch, Gregory holding my hand, all Jack’s words erased from my thoughts as if I believed I’d never seen them.
A lie I reinforced every day after that.
A monstrous lie from a monster unwanted by family, lover, or friend.
“I shouldn’t have come back here,” I said.
“Why? What do you hear? I want to hear it too. Help me hear it.”
The music sounded like Jack said. All the mouths in the world blowing across an infinite number of empty bottles. But in the vibration, and the whisper of discordant notes, and the weight of their sound swaddling my flesh and throbbing against my skull, I knew those mouths came from a place much vaster than the world. They blew not across bottlenecks, but pipes, flutes, and horns as alien and disordered as the sitar-like thing the Sultans had played that night.
I bolted for the trail. Fenton grabbed me, crushing my arm.
“Wait a goddamn minute!” he shouted.
He shoved me. I tumbled into the center of the clearing, hitting my head on the ground. Fenton stood over me, a spread-legged, hunkered-down wrestler, hands opening and closing.
“Hold on, dammit! I didn’t mean for you to fall. I’m sorry about that, but tell me what you’re hearing. Describe it. Please! I have to know. You’ve got to tell me. Help me listen. Why can’t I hear it too?”
I tried to stand. Pain exploded in my skull where it’d struck the ground.
Dizzy, I fell.
Amber and white flashes filled my sight.
I closed my eyes tight then opened them onto the night peeling back like skin and visible waves of muscle curling up the way the edges of burning paper do. Jack’s ghost stood nearby, handsome, burly, and grinning drunk. I saw right through him and found the Sultans, who had never left that hill but become part of the clearing, petrified with their instruments frozen in hand, embedded in trees and stone. Blood dribbled from their ears, cold-syrup slow. Their eyes stared as wide as coffee mugs, funnels of dark motion tugging on me with pinches of gravity and widening as I watched. Through them I gazed at musicians playing complex, asymmetrical instruments carved of unearthly materials, piping blistered melodies and hypnotic notes with an urgency that made my hands shake.
The musicians spun and hopped from foot to foot in ragged, arrhythmic steps. Sinuous dancers, stretching mottled skin of indigo and ebony, scaled limbs raised, pressing mouthpieces to inhuman lips, a dancing circle orbiting an immense, churning, incomprehensible confusion on the edge of wakefulness, one best left to slumber and dream. Its naked pulse bled into the music, the universe, the world and every part of it, a hidden beat beneath all things like Jack had once sought, but nothing like the grace he’d searched for all his life. He heard and saw this that night we walked into the hills. We both did. The dancers ringed around the madness at the center of all existence. The words, the beat, the drugs, the travels—they had opened Jack’s mind to what the Sultans showed him while mine rejected it even in the form of words on paper given me by Jack, until grief and loneliness shredded my barriers and opened my ears.
I rose to my feet. Fenton stood rigid beside me.
The Sultans’ paralyzed faces glared. Trapped awarenesses. Not petrified but slowed to its appearance and part of this place now, simultaneously part of all places, joined to the gyrating ring and the eyeless pipers, linked through the music, and the dance, and the revel that sated chaos until some inevitable day came when it grew tired of the melody and awoke.
Jack and I didn’t walk back down the hill that night in ‘64. We stepped through the doors the Sultans opened into the shadow of a throne made of night and stars, the cosmos molded like a mother’s hand cupping the skull of her mad son filled with cyclones of conception and notion shredded like words on cut-up paper scattered into a maelstrom. The scraps streamed and flowed to form a brutish man, with skin as lightless as empty space and eyes like carved black obsidian. He approached us, a word stillborn on his lips that cracked like old blacktop, a name Jack and I refused to hear as we turned away from the music, sought the trail, and then—
—the maelstrom ejected us—
—and I awoke in the parking lot behind my apartment, wedged between a dumpster cockeyed against the back alley wall, and Jack returned in an odd crook of the gazebo in the harbor-side park. Nightmare’s end, except here in the hills, where the song we left played on and forever as if we’d never departed and I’d never lost Jack or Gregory, leaving me to return tonight alone. A tiny, drawn-out voice, a whistle among the din of a jet engine cacophony, drew me to the Sultan playing the sitar-thing, which now seemed ancient and derived from musical traditions long dead and forgotten in other worlds. I picked out his voice, like a record slowed down to the barest spin, taking what seemed an eternity for him to whisper: “Help me!”
“I don’t know how,” I said. Then I closed my eyes.
Frigid breath blasted my face. A stony, cold hand gripped my chin.
For a moment, I felt wanted again. A monster desired by other monsters.
A demon fit only to dance in madness, enslaved to hideous music.
Jack’s words on those pages I read so long ago rushed back to me.
What other planet, the sounds of an entire world now swimming through this window, and who knows but that the universe is one vast sea of indifference, the veritable cruelty and apathy, beneath all this show of compassion and yearning? Microbes warring in the innards of Mercury, microbes dreaming, and oh, the void, oh, Hozomeen, great mountain, the void to my eyes, blinded then, before the mountain Mien Mo, and the mountain Coyocan, lush with sacred darknesses, hungers, and temples burnished with gold, opened my sight, my graceless soul craving salvation, non-existence, or the winding-down of experience to having never known the infinite roads upon which nothing ahead, nothing behind, and all the false idols of life and living receding to specks in the easy leaving, unexpected, bleak, and necessary, a dreaming which ultimates outward to the endless vast empty atom of this imaginary universe, never born, ending nowhere, never significant, the hollow beat, the deceitful beat, music that hesitates death rather than inspires life, fickle, mad, desolate, and the true life of all things that dwarfs our tiny souls, so fragile, hobbled, meaningless, and lost…
The cold hand’s wanting died. Its fingers lifted from my face, my monstrous nature unfit even for madness and despair.
Jack’s words ended. My mind refused to remember anymore.
All the doors in the universe slammed shut around me, all but one.
I stepped through and fell into absolute cold, ice, my bones cracking with impact, frigid water embracing me, and gray light stabbing my eyes. Liquid silence, sloshing bubbles and air, yelling voices, knives of winter stabbing me, hands and feet numbed to oblivion, and then finally warm grips raised me and dragged me onto hard-packed earth and rocks, a crowd of foggy masks staring down at me with gasps, prayers, and swearing, a familiar face among them.
Spence. And he said, “Holy shit, Sal, where the hell have you been?”
Then came a flurry of recovery and reorientation and questions for which I had no answers, and my body and mind aching for anesthetic booze, and then finally obtaining it after the town decided to let me be, my disappearance of more than a month and no
sense of what had happened to me written off as another in a long history of occurrences without explanation in this town full of witches. My December deadline for Saul Norris had come and gone, but when life returned fully to my body, I finished painting the Martinson cliffs, with the unwanted shadows and uneasy textures, and Saul grimaced when I showed him, and Spence told me I needed more rest, and when Fenton Grive turned up, banging on my door, calling to my window for me to tell him where I’d gone, how I’d simply blinked out of reality that night in the Aztakea hills, I took my painting and Jack’s pages, meaning to burn them all in the kitchen sink. I got no further than piling them up and opening a window to let out the smoke before I sat drinking whiskey by candlelight, smoking with winter air trickling in, and staring at the jumble of canvas and paper, the sharp white corners losing focus as warm alcohol haze kicked in, understanding, maybe, why Jack never strayed far from the bottle after that night, and fearing if the truth of the universe at the height of the hills and the end of his search had killed him, what it might now do to me.
THE LONGDOCK AIR
William Meikle
I’m glad it was a straight line down the last hill into Longdock—the old truck’s steering had been slowly stiffening up for the last hundred miles. Now it had finally gone, only a little give in it either way, just enough to get me into an auto shop that was, luckily for me, just inside the town boundary—I wasn’t going to get much farther. The mechanic looked at her for five minutes. He sucked his teeth, chewed on the butt of a smoke, and told me it would be three days before he could get the parts, and twenty bucks to fix it, neither of which I could afford. I got my guitar and bag out of the trunk and walked the rest of the way into town in thin, gray drizzle that perfectly matched my mood.
My search for the song wasn’t off to a promising start—but at least I’d gotten here, and I started to feel happier about the situation when I walked over a small hill and got my first look at the town proper. Longdock had once been a vibrant port on the river, back when the big paddle steamers ruled trade; the long quay and wooden buildings looked like they had not changed greatly since those days. John Gilthrop—the man I was here to see—had promised me a song.
I’d had fragments and snatches of it in my head for months now, a mostly forgotten thing from my childhood I guessed, but recently it just wouldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t work—not that shoveling coal in a rail yard was much in the way of intellectually stimulating—and even sleeping was punctuated by far away voices singing in the wind, just too faint to make out, just too loud to ignore. So three weeks ago, I’d walked out of the yard, put everything I owned—which wasn’t much beyond a change of clothes and a guitar—into the truck, and headed out, looking for an answer, looking for a song—my song.
I asked around clubs and among songwriters up and down the East Coast, playing what snatches of the song I could remember to anyone who would listen. Nobody knew the tune exactly, but there were many who swore they had heard it before—somewhere. Finally I was pointed toward John—Missouri John they called him. I sent him a letter, and he responded by inviting me to stay. The exchange of notes had excited both of us it seemed. Although I had to spend the last of my meager supply of cash on gas for the trip, the song was old to John, new to me, and for that alone the trip was going to be worth it.
And at least I didn’t have any lodging expenses to pay. Old John had a large house looking down over the quay.
“I’m rattling around like a marble in a bottle in here on my own—I could do with the company. You’ll have no trouble finding it,” he’d said on the phone. “It’s yellow.”
Yellow was an understatement. The house was perched high on a rocky outcrop and seemed to shine, luminescent despite the gray skies overhead. An elderly man—John, I presumed—waved at me from the doorstep as I walked up onto the rock. I heard a loud curse from my left and looked down to where two workmen seemed intent on demolishing part of the quay. They wore face masks as they tore long pieces of wood off the walkway, sending fine dust spraying all around them, and bringing fresh curses.
Old John’s waving got more frantic, motioning me to come to him faster. He almost bundled me into his house with no wait for welcomes, and closed the door tight behind us before speaking.
“It don’t do to be getting that crap into your lungs, lad,” he said with a smile that never reached his eyes. “It’d be the end of your singing days for a while, just for starters.”
John was just about the thinnest fellow I’d ever seen—all bone and stringy sinew under skin that stretched too tight over his frame. Liver spots ran like paint spatter over the backs of his hands and under the thin fine hair on his scalp—but his grip was firm and warm as he shook my hand.
“I thought you’d be driving down?” he said. That led us into a discussion of my trouble at the repair shop, and on to my initial views of the town, so that it was only later—too late—that I noticed how skillfully he had diverted attention from the men working out on the quay.
—
That first evening is something of a haze. I was tired after the long drive. After eating some hearty stew, drinking a couple of pints of strong home-brewed beer, then starting in on the rye almost straight after that, I was half asleep before I broached the subject of the old song.
“It can wait, lad,” John said. “Something you’ll learn when you get to my age—you need to take your sleep when you can get it—store some up against your dotage. There’ll be more than enough late nights and early mornings to come later—trust me on that.”
He showed me to a tidy, well appointed bedroom at the front of the house, looking out over the dock to the slow stir of the river.
“It used to be our room—the wife and I,” John said softly. “After she was taken, I couldn’t look out that window any more.” He turned away, but not before I saw the sudden tears in his eyes, tears he wiped away angrily, as if ashamed of them. “In the morning, if Betty is willing, I’ll teach you the old song—the way I was taught it. And you’ll see for yourself what I mean about the view.”
He left me alone, looking out over the water as the sun started to go down in the west, painting the sky pink and orange before going over to ever-deeper purple. I lay on the bed watching the shadows flit across the ceiling as the darkness gathered, and before I knew it I was soundly asleep.
Given my tiredness, that should have been that for the night, but I was woken, disoriented in the dark, sometime much later. The guitar rang in its case, the sound box vibrating in sympathy with whatever noise had woken me. I was used to the guitar’s moods—garbage trucks, school buses, even loud motor cycles could set it off back at home—but I never expected anything here to be loud enough.
I lay there for a while waiting to see if the noise would be repeated, but all I heard was the soft sound of the river passing by. Shadows shifted on the ceiling—at first I took them to be just the play of moonlight on water, but then they took on a yellowish tinge—someone was outside with a lantern.
There was still no sound, but my interest was sufficiently piqued that I stood and went to the window. It wasn’t just one person with a lantern—there were half a dozen lights, bobbing in unison as they moved along the quay down below the outcrop. It was too dark for me to make out details, but I saw enough to know that the people holding the lanterns were part of a small procession, three in front and three behind six men carrying what I couldn’t help but assume was a coffin.
The whole scene took place in complete silence. The procession went to the end of the quay and went down out of sight but, presumably, into a boat. Several minutes later I heard the soft put-put of a two-stroke engine, and saw a small boat move away, heading out into the main stretch of river. It was mere seconds after that when I saw the flash, then heard a soft whump as the boat went up in flames. The lantern-lit procession stood on the edge of the quay watching until the flames did their job, burning the boat to its end. When it sank it went quickly,
like a match being snuffed out.
The bobbing lights came back along the quay toward me, still in complete silence. I stepped back away from the window, suddenly afraid of being seen, and saw no more until the darkness once again filled the room and the procession went off and away into the impenetrable shadows of the town’s streets beyond.
The last thing I heard before I lay on the bed, suddenly wide awake, was the soft noise of someone—John—returning to the house and closing the front door firmly behind him.
—
When I woke again sunlight was coming in through the curtains. I dressed and went downstairs where I found John out on his front porch, coffee in one hand, a smoke in the other, staring out over the river. If I was going to bring up the topic of the overnight procession, that would have been the time, but I kept my mouth shut, helped myself to some coffee, and went to join him in the morning sun.
We drank our coffee in silence—there was plenty of it. The sun might be up, but the town seemed to be still mostly asleep, and even the swooping gulls that flew overhead hadn’t yet mustered up enough energy to make any noise. I looked out over the water but there was no sign that anything at all untoward had happened—there was no debris; not so much as a smear of oil on the water. Whatever the townspeople had been doing, the night and the river had successfully swallowed all evidence of it.
As we drank, the town slowly woke up. A truck coughed and barked its way out of a parking area, somewhere in the distance a chain saw chugged, twice, before starting up, and a workman, already putting a mask over his face, walked along the quay below us, obviously intent on getting back to work on the timbers. He seemed to be alone today, but if John wasn’t going to remark on the fact I certainly wasn’t going to press him.
Just when I thought we might get all the way through coffee without speaking, John flicked the butt of his smoke away and down to the river beneath the outcrop. I watched the red tip fizz and smoke as it hit the water, giving me yet another opening to mention the antics of the previous night. But John was already talking.
Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 Page 4
