Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  The boys had parked their bikes in a shelter belt, invisible from the road. One never knew when a carload of high schoolers might drive by and decide to spend their lazy afternoon stealing bicycles or beating the snot out of a couple of younger kids. Or worse, their parents might just happen to cruise by and see the twinkle of familiar metal, busting the two boys at their play. They were supposed to be at practice in half an hour and both boys had been forbidden by their mothers from riding their bikes out to the river, even if the damned thing was all dried up. The boys stood more chance of drowning in the tub, and after Roger pointed this out to his mother, she made him start taking showers.

  Corey found a long, sharp stick in the shelter belt and carried it along with them, swinging it at the dry weeds that sprang up in irregular patterns along the river bed.

  “Do you think Debbie really needs a bra? Or is it full of Kleenex?”

  “Mahoney or Huffman?” Roger squinted in the afternoon sunlight and swatted at a bumble bee that was orbiting his head in a lazy circle.

  “Mahoney. Everyone knows Debbie Huffman stuffs.”

  “I don’t know. They seem real enough. I saw her jumping rope the other day and they were jiggling a little.”

  “Hot damn.” Corey grinned, exposing gappy teeth that would be too big for his face until he was at least fifteen. “I’d give anything to see for myself. Do you think they look like those girls in the magazine?”

  Roger didn’t need to ask which magazine Corey was referring to. Late last spring, the boys had been cleaning the garage for his father and happened upon an old, dog-eared copy of Playboy the old man had likely forgotten even existed when offering them fifty cents each for the chore. Corey had rolled it up and tucked it into the waistband of his shorts for later research. And researched it they had. No grad student in history had ever studied more than the two boys did that evening, camped out in a tent in Roger’s backyard with nothing but a flashlight and a healthy dose of blossoming hormones to illuminate their subject matter. The photos both repulsed and intrigued them, in an uncomfortable, but not entirely unwelcome, way. Ever since that night, both boys had looked at the girls and women in their lives a little differently, mostly wondering what they looked like without their shirts on.

  “Nah. I bet they’re just little. Like…” Roger picked up a rock and weighed it in his hand, searching for the right comparison. “Like cupcakes, maybe.”

  Corey laughed at that and resumed his excavation of a muddy crack in the riverbank, digging the stick in deep and wiggling it back and forth. A rock hit the end of his stick and broke it off in the crevice.

  “Hey! You could’ve hit me.”

  Roger laughed and picked up more rocks, winding his arm up like he was about to pitch a fastball before sending a stone into the dry earth. The impact made the parched soil crumble, revealing a dark chasm in the wall of the riverbed.

  “What the hell is that?” Corey held up a hand to stop Roger’s volley of stones and leaned in close to look at the hole.

  “What the hell is what?”

  “There’s something in here.” He began to dig at the hole with the broken edge of the stick, widening it as Roger wandered over. When he saw what Corey was doing, Roger looked around for a tool, finding a large, sharp stone that felt heavy in his hand, but narrowed to a tip. He pressed his shoulder against his friend’s and began to dig.

  Before long they had widened the opening to the size of a manhole cover. They sat back, sweaty and dirty.

  “What the hell is that?” Corey reached out a hand to touch the object they’d revealed, then pulled it back. It was as big and rounded as half an old basketball, grey and leathery in the afternoon sunlight. A seam split the object across the center, and crinkly skin (Roger was convinced it was skin), surrounded it, disappearing into the dark edges of the crevice.

  “It looks like crocodile skin.” Roger did touch it, a shiver of revulsion wracking him as he felt the rough and dusty surface. “Feels cold. Feels wrong.”

  “Hey. What if it’s some kind of dinosaur?” He smiled and probed the seam. “We could be famous.”

  “Yeah.” Corey’s face split into a smile that almost made you forget his teeth were so huge. “Or a dragon!”

  “Don’t be a dipshit. Dragons aren’t even re—”

  Corey let out a yelp and fell on his butt, his feet scrambling at the crumbling riverbed in an attempt to push away as the thing’s seam split with an audible creak, and the large leathery lids parted to reveal a reptilian eye. Its dark pupil grew wide before constricting again in the bright afternoon sunlight. The orb swiveled in its socket, turning a baleful glare upon the retreating boy.

  “Jesus! It’s an eye!” Corey’s own eyes were impossibly wide and blue against a face gone chalky.

  Roger stood and drew his arm back, and prepared to fire the sharp stone from his fist like a missile, but the eye swiveled again, favoring Roger with the yellow-orange intensity of its stare. Roger froze, a high-pitched buzz piercing his brain as his muscles locked. His head felt as though it might split in two. He couldn’t move anything except his mouth, which stretched into a rictus of pain and fear as the monstrous buzz turned to a squeal.

  “Oh God.” He breathed. Cold dread gripped his chest. The Creature, newly awakened from its slumber deep in the riverbed, spoke in his head, loud and horrible, sly and insinuating. Its language was like nothing he’d ever heard, and yet Roger understood it as pictures formed behind his eyes, a racing kaleidoscope of images.

  A man that can only be himself standing in a garage, he is fat, soft. In his left hand he holds a half-empty bottle of beer. In his right, a dusty and tarnished little league trophy. Filthy children bicker in the yard and a tired-looking woman steps onto the dilapidated back porch of an equally tired-looking house to yell at them. The man wears grease-stained coveralls that strain against his gut and he tosses the trophy back into a broken-down cardboard box before turning away, his eyes dead and exhausted. Another scene. This same, older Roger sits on a bar stool and watches a woman in a low-cut shirt wipe down the bar. He swirls a glass of amber liquid on ice, looking with boredom down her shirt. “So you used to a baseball legend, huh?” Her smirk says she thinks he’s full of shit. “Oh yeah. Little League pitching champ,” says a man, clapping him on the shoulder and laughing. Roger feels a familiar rage grow in his older self, feels it change to hopelessness as old Roger shrugs and drains his glass.

  Roger’s mouth formed a NO that never quite reached his vocal cords, the feelings of desolation numbing his brain. No. That’s not me. It can’t be.

  It is. The voice spoke in his head, sibilant and dark. It is and will be. But you have a choice.

  The Thing probed his brain, snaking along, digging into the wrinkles of his mind with what felt like cold, oily tendrils. The world before his eyes went dark as a new scene formed.

  A different, older Roger stands at a podium, this one handsome, confident. He speaks before a large assembly of people who look at him in awe. Now he’s on a battlefield, soldiers dying in the dirt around him as he thrusts a knife into a dark-skinned man’s chest. The scene shifts again and he’s back home, a beautiful wife in a nightgown handing him a drink as he unties his tie and tosses it across a large, ornate bed draped in fine linens. A new scene again, handsome Roger a little older, in an expensive suit, a little grey at the temples but still in fine shape. He sits behind a desk, a presidential seal on the front of it. The sky goes red, bombs drop. People scream in the street, bloodied and running in panic. His face is in the clouds. Laughing. Grey people in a grey world, working to rebuild, but he stands at a gala affair, his beautiful wife on his arm as he shakes hands with other men, resplendent in the colorful costumes of other nations. There’s a toast; glasses are raised to him. His wife laughs and presses her breast against his arm. All eyes are upon him. The women want him; the men want to be him. It’s so real he can smell her perfume, and under it the burning bodies of a civilization in ruin. Through it all he can
feel the power coursing through him. Dark and dreadful, but exhilarating in the aftermath of the other, hopeless future.

  —

  A woman appeared on the edge of the baseball field, her gait stumbling, shoulders slumped. The coach held up a hand and Roger nodded, tossing the ball into the air and catching it casually in his glove as his coach intercepted the woman. It was Mrs. Doucette. He could tell from where he stood. She looked like she was crying. The coach hunched over as he listened to what she said, shaking his head and motioning toward Roger. The two approached the mound as Roger waited patiently. Mrs. Doucette sniffled.

  “Have you seen Corey?” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “My Corey never came home this afternoon. He said he was going with you this morning.”

  “No Ma’am.” Roger said with a solemn shake of his head. “I never saw Corey today.”

  “Please.” Mrs. Doucette clutched at his shirt, and he realized how old she looked. “You must know. You two boys are always up to something. He said he was going to your house.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Doucette. He never showed up.” Roger’s expression remained soft, his eyes meeting the woman’s and holding them. His brow furrowed and he shook his head again, but inside he was laughing. Roger reached out to her mind with his own. He imagined his thoughts as tentacles or the dirty questing fingers of a little boy digging into a pie in search of a plump slice of apple.

  There is a place in every mother’s mind that is always just a tragic moment away from insanity. Roger found Mrs. Doucette’s, and dug in deep, pouring in images. Her son Corey’s screaming face, eyes wide with terror as the stone crushed his skull. Corey lying dead in the riverbed beside the now closed eye of Roger’s new God, his head a bloody ruin, his buck teeth shattered, eyes vacant. A single black bottle fly lighting upon his face.

  Roger pushed harder with his thoughts, cramming them in deep, assaulting her brain with more truths to come. The rains washing down, so much that roads are washed out. A wall of water, starting in the north and thundering down the walls of the river, burying Corey so deep into the mud that his bones won’t be found until long after her death. Roger pushed until he felt her slip over the edge.

  —

  “No!” Corey rushed forward and stabbed with his stick, impaling the gargantuan eye with a sickening pop.

  An alien scream of agony nearly tore Roger’s head apart as black ichor oozed from the ruined orb and the scaly lid pinched shut, trapping the stick and tearing it from his friend’s hand.

  “Oh Jesus, Rog. We gotta get out of here!” Corey shook Roger’s shoulder, breaking his paralysis, then turned and started back up the side of the riverbed, fistfuls of dirt breaking off and thwarting him in his panic.

  “Did you see it? I saw the most awful stuff. We gotta tell our folks.”

  Choose. The eye was closed now, still leaking its dark poison into the dirt, but still it hissed in Roger’s head. He saw the broken man he was destined to become and again felt the hopelessness of a man who never got out. And he saw the screaming people as bombs fell and bullets fired and he laughed with his beautiful wife and his body thrummed with the electric ecstasy of power.

  Roger realized he still held the rock in his hand, his arm drawn back to strike. His shoulder trembled and his bicep cramped. Again the voice spoke to him, this time softer, nothing more than a dark whisper on the wind. Choose. Roger took several shuffling steps and brought the sharp end of the rock down hard, tearing flesh and crushing bone, hot tears cutting tracks in the dirt on his face.

  —

  Mrs. Doucette screamed once, a piercing wail of agony, before slumping to the ground. Her anguish had caused the people in the stands to jump to their feet while the coach looked on in bewildered surprise.

  “You! It was you! No. God. No! You killed my boy. You killed my Corey!”

  “What?” Roger feigned a look of shocked distress. “Mrs. Doucette, what are you talking about? I didn’t even see him.”

  Roger looked to the coach for help, his eyes wide and fearful.

  “Mrs. Doucette. Please get ahold of yourself.” The coach struggled to haul her to her feet and pulled her away from the mound as she howled and clawed bloody furrows down her face. “For God’s sake. Someone get her out of here. She’s deranged.”

  Roger waited on the mound, his mouth open. The whole ordeal had lasted only a few moments, but the wind had picked up and the gathering clouds were close. Lightning flashed in the distance, answered by a rumble of thunder that made people in the stands jump. A fat raindrop struck Roger on the face, followed by two more. The coach gave Mrs. Doucette to another man who’d come down from the crowd and jogged toward the mound, shouting to be heard over the wind as it shook the trees on the edge of the field.

  “You okay, Roger?”

  “Yeah, Coach. I’m alright. Just worried about Mrs. Doucette and Corey.”

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up. You want to call the game? It’s getting nasty fast.”

  Roger regarded the coming storm for a moment.

  “Nah, Coach. I have one more in me.”

  “Ok Rog. Go get him.” The coach trotted off the field and signaled the umpire who called the game back in session. The people in the stands remained standing, clutching blankets around their shoulders so the wind couldn’t rip them away, holding whatever they could to cover their heads from the rain. Close by, lightning struck a tree with a crack and the thunder that followed sounded like bombs dropping.

  The boy with the golden arm wound up to pitch.

  SHINE, BLACKBERRY WINE

  Eden Royce

  I sat on my best friend’s beige twill sofa, sulfur-rich marsh breeze blowing in through the wide-open windows, mixing with the metallic scent of her homemade moonshine. Distant ocean waves, with their rhythmic Zen-like lapping, gave me a serenity the mewling seagulls didn’t. I licked the sheen of sweat from my upper lip and asked her again.

  “You promise you won’t tell anyone? Swear?”

  Keira nodded. “I swear, damn. When, in all the years I’ve known you, have I ever told anyone anything you said not to?”

  “Never, but—” I shrugged, tugging at the backside of my shorts where they stuck to my thighs. “Why the hell won’t you get air conditioning? It’s hotter than Satan’s bathwater in here. You do know this is Charleston?”

  “My place is in Wadmalaw, actually.” Heat never seemed to bother Keira. Even now, while I sweated like a derby winner, she looked cool and relaxed; her thick, twisted locks hung over her shoulders and down her back to her elbows. She took a sip from her glass of shine, not wincing at the sharp taste. “And you know why. This used to be slave housing and it’s protected property. There’s only so many changes I can make.” It was her turn to shrug. “Not sure I want to modernize it too much, anyway.”

  “Ugh.” I took another sip from my icy glass, the only chilled thing in the room besides Keira, and flopped back on the sofa. She always made the best drinks, crafted from her own home-distilled spirits. This one was somewhere between backyard moonshine and bathtub gin, enhanced with the woody, fresh zing of juniper.

  “Just tell me what it is that you came running over here for so quick-like.” Keira stretched her feet out in front of her; they were bare and a polished walnut not unlike the hardwood floor beneath them. She picked at a flaking piece of red polish on her pinky toe.

  But it hadn’t been quick-like. For over almost two weeks now, I’d been having strange dreams. Dreams had always been a part of my life growing up—my Grandmother, an Afro-Choctaw, used to interpret mine when I was a little girl. But these hadn’t been the normal dreams I’d had as a child. I wasn’t being chased or falling or spitting all of my teeth into my palm. These were—

  “Hello, Randie?” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Planet Earth is calling. Return to us. Come in, Space Cadet.”

  Keira’s sarcasm was strong enough to pull me out of my reverie. “Oh, right. Sorry. Promise me you’ll listen. Just… don’t say anything
until I’m finished, okay?”

  She’d been about to say something snarky when she stopped and looked deeply into my eyes. Whatever she saw there made her nod. “Okay. Promise.”

  “There was a key,” I said. “in the first dream. It started with that.”

  A strange key waits on the dining room table. It’s the length of my palm, but lightweight, almost floaty. When I look at it closely, there’s a pattern of engraved vines on the key’s head and it makes a sort of dense curtain. It feels damp, but my hand stays dry when I touch it.

  Then I feel someone’s stare heavy on me and I glance up. It’s a woman—at least, I think it’s a woman because I remember looking at her lipstick. It makes her lips look like they’re pale green blushed with rose. She smiles, then all of a sudden, there’s… I don’t know… a flash of some kind and I’m on a winding stone path. There’s a city in the distance, glittering with this haunting, almost aqueous glow.

  The scene flashes to algae-covered columns, then statues of these fish-like people. Quick pictures, like a speeded up film montage, you know? Then full screen zoom in on this coral gate. I put the key in the lock and it opens.

  I drained the rest of my moonshine, ice clinking against the tumbler, as Keira watched me, silent. For a few moments, she didn’t say or do anything. The sun had started its descent, and I wondered how long I’d been talking lost in this memory, because the air hadn’t cooled off at all.

  “When I wake up from these dreams, my body is wet with sweat, but I’m not hot. Every morning, I have these faint red circles on my face and chest that I have to cover with makeup. I’m just exhausted. I have to cover the circles under my eyes as well.”