by S. T. Joshi
He stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. He could hear the other man’s footsteps travel across the hall ceiling as their owner walked towards the bathroom. But then Graeme became aware of another set of footsteps—outside. The letter box clanged and a single envelope landed on the hall floor. In three quick strides, Graeme reached the front door, picked up the letter, noticing it bore his name, and stuffed it in his back pocket, then returned to the foot of the stairs. He climbed them quickly and quietly, becoming aware as he did so of the sound of the other man using the toilet. Graeme reached the top of the stairs, stepped on to the landing and looked into the bathroom. The other man had left the door open, which Graeme might also have done, but only if alone in the house. He—the other man—was standing in front of the toilet urinating and looking out of the window towards the backs of the houses beyond the rear garden. His stream diminished to a trickle, stopped, returned briefly, then stopped altogether. For a moment, the other man’s legs bent forward slightly at the knee. Graeme moved towards the stairs that would take him up to the second floor. He managed to get out of sight before the other man had finished washing his hands.
Graeme risked a look back around the banisters. There was something lying on the carpet in the middle of the landing. He felt his back pocket. The letter wasn’t there, and now the other man was coming out of the bathroom. Graeme watched as the other man started to cross the landing and then stopped, his eye drawn to the letter on the carpet. The other man bent down and picked up the letter. He read the front and then turned the envelope over and tore it open. He withdrew the contents, which comprised a single sheet of paper folded into three. He unfolded it, read it, folded it again, and returned it to the envelope, and then he went back into the bedroom. Graeme listened to him moving around, opening and closing drawers. After a minute or two, the other man came out and went downstairs. Graeme heard a couple of doors being closed—the doors to the living room and kitchen—and then the other man put the alarm on and left the house, double-locking the front door.
Graeme waited a minute and then went downstairs. The alarm started beeping quietly, so he keyed in the code and it fell silent. In the kitchen, Graeme’s keys were gone from their normal place. He helped himself to a spare pair and closed the kitchen door after him. Taking a jacket from the coat rack, he keyed in the alarm code and approached the front door. He turned the key in the lock and opened the door, stepping out into the fresh spring air.
There was no one at the bus stop, so Graeme sat and waited. The bus came and Graeme got on. He looked out of the window as the bus crawled through the student district and then entered an area dominated by Asian restaurants. When the bus reached the outskirts of the city centre Graeme got up and pressed the bell. The driver brought the bus to a halt, and Graeme thanked him as he disembarked. He walked a short distance and entered the building where he worked. He crossed the atrium and climbed the spiral staircase. On the second floor he stepped inside the photocopy room and checked his pigeonhole, which was empty. He then proceeded along the corridor to his office.
Closing his fingers around the handle, he looked through the glass panel in the door. The other man was sitting at Graeme’s desk running his finger under the flap of a self-sealed envelope. He turned to look towards the door, and Graeme shrank back. He pressed his spine against the corridor wall, and his knees gave a little. He allowed his back to slide down the wall, but then he heard the door to his office being opened from the inside. He immediately got to his feet, turned, and walked away down the corridor. He had no way of knowing if the person opening the door was the other man or one of the colleagues with whom Graeme shared his office. He pushed open the double doors at the end of the corridor, and once he reached the stairs he took them at a run.
Reaching the ground floor, Graeme crossed the atrium and left the building via the revolving door. He stopped immediately he was outside to recover his breath, but finding himself in the middle of a crowd of smokers he moved on.
Graeme started walking home. His route took him past Sarah’s place of work. He went up to the sliding doors, which opened automatically, but then he backed away again and walked up and down on the pavement for two minutes. He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and looked at it. He found Sarah’s number in the address book and his finger hovered over the call button, but then he cancelled it instead and put the phone away.
He walked home, and when he got there he stood outside the house looking up at it. He checked his watch, waited a moment, and then walked on. He walked beyond the shops, through the housing estate and past the rugby club and the allotments until he reached the river. It had not rained for a few days and the river was low. He walked on the path that followed the meander of the river. His watch told him it was lunchtime, but he was not hungry, even though he had had no breakfast.
Later in the afternoon, he returned home. He entered the house, switched off the alarm, and went straight upstairs. He waited in the spare bedroom, from where he had a good view of the street. He watched one of his neighbours come out of her house and put a compostable bag of food waste in her green bin. She then picked up a confectionery wrapper from her front path and placed that in the regular dustbin before going back inside and closing the front door.
The other man walked up the road and approached the house. Graeme stepped back from the window and paced slowly across the floor. As he heard the front door being opened, he suddenly stopped and became aware of the exaggerated sound of his own breathing. He had not put the alarm on before coming upstairs. He stood absolutely still and listened. He heard the other man enter the kitchen and then move around the ground floor from room to room.
Graeme sat down, leaning against the wall. When he heard the front door again, he stood up.
“Hello-oo,” Sarah called as her heels struck the wooden boards of the hall floor.
Graeme heard the other man respond and guessed he would be offering to make her a cup of tea. Taking care to minimise any noise, Graeme walked down to the first-floor landing and sat on the top step of the stairs that went down to the ground floor. Because of the half-landing and the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, there was no way they could see him. He listened to them swap stories about their respective days. It sounded mechanical, listless, routine. He listened while they prepared food, poured wine, switched on the news.
When he heard Sarah coming upstairs he retreated to the next flight up before she reached the half-landing. Peering around the newel post he watched her enter the bathroom and listened to her using the toilet. She came out and stood for a moment on the landing. She looked tired. Maybe she was trying to remember if she had come upstairs for anything other than to go to the bathroom. Her face wore a strained expression. After a moment her facial muscles relaxed and she moved towards the stairs. Graeme gave it a few seconds before getting to his feet and taking an initial step to follow her, but then he stopped, staring at the spot on the landing where Sarah had been standing a moment earlier, and he raised his hands and ran them over his shaved head. He turned around and climbed the stairs back up to the top floor. He went into the spare bedroom and curled up on the bed.
* * *
GRAEME AWOKE AND LOOKED AROUND THE UNFAMILIAR room. At some point in the night he had got under the duvet, but he had not got undressed. His clothes were a bit rumpled, but they were not damp with sweat. He could hear noises from one floor down: one person in the bathroom, another moving around. He lay on his back and listened.
He became aware of footsteps leaving the bedroom, moving on to the landing, starting to climb the stairs. As quickly and quietly as he could, he got out of bed and stood by the door, eyes wide, senses alert. The approaching footsteps were light enough to be Sarah’s, but it was hard to be sure. He looked around. The guest bedroom contained no hiding places. The footsteps stopped outside the door to the room. He held his breath.
The door opened slowly.
Sarah stood in the doorway.
Fro
m downstairs came the sound of the other man’s voice.
“Have a nice day, darling.”
Graeme looked at Sarah.
He could hear footsteps on the main stairs going down, a bracelet jangling, and then a voice—he would have said Sarah’s voice—called from downstairs: “See you later.”
The other man shouted back, “See you later.”
Graeme took a step towards Sarah and looked into her eyes. He saw himself reflected in her pupils. But otherwise they looked empty.
* * *
Waiting at the Crossroads Motel
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Steve Rasnic Tem’s newest novel is Deadfall Hotel, published in 2012 by Solaris Books. New Pulp Press brought out a collection of his dark noir stories, Ugly Behavior, in August of 2012.
* * *
WALKER NEVER THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS ANY KIND OF genius, but he knew that at least his body was never wrong. If his body told him not to eat something, he didn’t. If his body told him not to go into a place, he stayed outside. If his body wanted to be somewhere, Walker let his body take him there. He figured he got his body from his father, who he never knew, but he knew his father had been someone remarkable, because his body knew remarkable things.
“Blood will tell,” his mother used to say, in pretty much every situation when an important decision had to be made. He eventually understood this referred to the knowledge he had inherited from his father, held in his blood, and which informed his body which seemed to know so much. Walker’s blood never said anything too loudly—it whispered its secrets so softly he couldn’t always hear. But he could feel it pull in this or that direction, and that had been the compass that had brought them here.
The motel was small, all one story, just a row of doors and square windows along the inner side of an L-shaped building, with a dusty parking lot and no pool. Walker heard there used to be a pool, but they’d had a hard time keeping the water sanitary, so they’d filled it in with sand. A few cacti and thorny bushes now grew in that faded bit of rectangular space, but none too well.
The maid—a withered-looking woman well into her seventies—tried confiding in Walker from day one. “There’s something wrong with this dirt, and the water ain’t never been quite right. You buy bottled water for your family while you’re here—especially them kids.” But Walker made them all drink right out of the rusty taps, because that was the drink his own blood was thirsting for.
If anything, Walker felt more at home at the Crossroads than he had anywhere in years. He’d drink the water and he’d breathe the dry desert air, taking it deep into his lungs until he found that trace of distant but unmistakable corruption he always knew to be there. He’d walk around outside barefoot at night, feeling the chill in the ground that went deeper than anyone else could know. He’d walk around outside barefoot during the middle of the day letting the grit burn into his soles until his eyes stung with unfamiliar tears.
Angie had started out asking nearly every day how long they’d be staying at the Crossroads, until he’d had enough and given her a little slap. He didn’t really want to (he also didn’t want not to), but it seemed necessary, and Walker always did what his body told him was necessary.
That was the thing about Walker—he could take people or he could leave them. And he felt no different about Angie. His body told him when it was time to have sex with her, and his body told him to hide her pills so he could father some kids by her, but Walker himself never much cared either way.
“The four of us, we’ll just stay here in the Crossroads until I hear about a new job. I have my applications in, and I’ve been hearing good things back.” She never even asked how he could have possibly heard good things, waiting there in the middle of nowhere. He never called anyone. But she’d never asked him any questions about it. Angie was as dumb as a cow.
Somehow he’d convinced her that the Crossroads Motel was the perfect place for them to be right now. From the Crossroads they could travel into New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or turn around and head back towards Denver. They could even go back home to Wyoming if they had a particularly desperate need to visit that state ever again. In order to do any of those things, though, they’d have to get a new car—theirs had barely made it to the Crossroads before falling apart. “But we have a world of choices.” That’s what he told her. Of course he’d lied. She was an ignorant cow, but the dumbest thing she ever did was fall in love with him.
Their fourth day there he’d made an interesting discovery. He’d always whittled, not because he liked it particularly, he just always did. He’d grabbed a piece of soft wood and gone out to that rectangular patch where the cacti grew and the swimming pool used to be—he called that area the “invisible swimming pool” sometimes, or just “the pool”—and sat down cross-legged in the sand, the sun bearing down on him like a hot piece of heavy iron pressing on his head, and started to carve. He was halfway through the piece—a banana-shaped head with depthless hollows for eyes and a ragged wound of mouth—when suddenly the hand holding the knife ran it off the wood and into the fatty part of his hand—slow and deliberate and unmindful of the consequences.
He permitted the blood to drip, then to pour heavily into the sand before stopping it with a torn-off piece of shirttail. Then it thickened, blackened, spread into four flows in different directions. Then each of those flows hardened and contracted, rose from the sand into four legs attempting to carry the now rounded body of it away. It had begun to grow a head with shining eyes when the entire mass collapsed into a still shapelessness.
Not strong enough, he thought. But that will change.
Walker spent most of the next few days sitting in an old lawn chair he’d set up behind the motel. The cushion was faded and riddled with holes—rusty stuffing poked through like the organs of a drowned and bloated corpse. The whole thing smelled like sea and rot—odd because it was so dry here, miles from anything larger than a car wash puddle—but it was an aroma he’d always found comforting. It was like the most ancient smell of the world, what the lizards must have smelled when they first crawled out of the ocean.
He had the chair set up so he could gaze out across the desert that spread out behind the motel, away from the highway that fed out through the southwest corner of Colorado and into the rest of the West. That desert was as flat and featureless and as seamlessly light or as seamlessly dark as the ocean, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun and the moon. So much depended on those relative positions, and the things who waited beyond, much more than most human beings were destined to know.
Out on the distant edges of that desert, out at the farthest borders the sharpest human eye could see, lay shadowed dunes and hard rock exposures, ancient cinder cones and mesas, flattop islands in the sky. He had never been to such a place, but it had been a location fixed in his dreams for most of his life.
Every day Walker sat there in the chair, the eaves of the motel roof providing some minimal protection from glare, a notepad in his lap, a blue cooler full of beer at his feet, and watched those barely distinguishable distant features, waiting for something to change or appear, or even just for some slight alteration in his own understanding. “I’m working out our future plans and finances,” was what he told Angie, and of course she’d believed him. If she’d only taken a peek at that notepad she would have seen the doodles depicting people and animals being consumed by creatures whose only purpose was to consume, or the long letters to beings unknown using words few human tongues could say. But no doubt she would not have understood what she was seeing, in any case. If he had a sense of humor he might say, “It’s a letter from my father.” But since he had never seen the utility of humor he did not.
Angie had never asked him why they had to travel so far just to wait for the results of some job applications, especially when there were no jobs at Crossroads or anywhere within a hundred miles of that place. He hadn’t even bothered to concoct a story because he’d been so sure she wouldn’t ask. This wo
man was making him lazy.
Once or twice he’d told her directly how stupid she was. She’d looked as if she might break apart. Part of him wanted to feel sorry for what he’d said. Part of him wanted to know what the feeling was like, to feel like your face was going to break. But he didn’t have the capacity in him. He supposed some people were born victims. And some people were born like him. Predator was a good word for people like him, he supposed. There were a great many predators on this planet.
