Suspended In Dusk

by Ramsey Campbell

  The picture hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was a sunrise. Her eyes were twin storms of grey. The narrator’s description made it as far as the delicate crease where her slender neck met her clavicle before he had to stand up from his desk and pour himself a glass of water. When he returned, he found us at a booth away from the noise. She’d heard I was looking for her. She lit my cigarette and I lit hers, and we laughed as the liquor did its work.

  Maybe her hand was a little too close to mine when Four Fingers’ goons rocked up. They had me sliding along on the toes of my boots before my glass had the time to hit the ground. We were almost to the back door when Starla put a candle to the corner of an antique Irma Stern and people started shouting. One meathead turned to investigate. The other I doubled up with an Italian heel to the goonies. As he crumpled, I saw the fine impressions of an adrenal augment spider-webbing beneath the skin of his neck. I took a moment to register how lucky I was before scrambling down to the end of the paragraph and slipping around the edge of the page.

  3

  “She’s really been looking for me all this time?” Starla asked as we sat in the bucket seats of my vintage Vitron. We’d been stealing time since that night in the bar. At first, I couldn’t find the heart to tell her our meeting hadn’t been coincidence. But that night, I’d convinced her to slip her handlers and meet me in the alley behind Four Fingers’ home, and I came clean.

  “Yeah,” I said. I thought of the look in Tabby’s eyes and lied through my teeth. “She misses you. Seems they thought you were dead.” I waited the appropriate amount of time, then continued; “She also says you took something. Something she’d like back.”

  She leant her head down. The light of the old car’s panel display cast her face in a pale blue light. I kept my eyes forward. She may have been smiling. She may have been crying. Then she took my hand in hers and everything was ok.

  “I was never much of a farm girl,” she said, “Mucking around with generator couplings and CO2 sieves… I knew there was more for me. More to me. Then one day, Tabby and I are walking through the north field and the world begins to feel… thin. False.

  “Tabby almost trips over this small box. It’s just lying there, like it was waiting. We open it up and I’d swear that every blade of grass in that field bent towards us. People talk about being the centre of the universe, but to actually feel it? To know it? By the time we began walking home, I already knew I was leaving.

  “I met Keith my first day in the city. Took him a single evening to wine and dine me. He was small time back then—part time bookie, occasional wise guy. With me by his side, he was made in three years. Four years in, I told him about the maguffin.”

  And then she did begin to cry, small tears that slid silently down to her chin then vanished. “It was exciting, at first. Everything began happening so quickly. Keith went from small fry to big fish. We went from down-town to up-town. The cars got bigger and the guns got flashier. But after a time, something didn’t feel right. The world was happening around us, not to us. A bomb in Keith’s car went off a few seconds too soon. Keith walked away with a graze and a smoking suit. His wingman, Vince, spent five minutes trying to screw his own legs back on before collapsing onto a pavement littered with shrapnel. I went to visit a friend in Kingsville. A botched robbery of the first class carriages sent them tumbling off the rails. Thirteen died. I was treated for a graze on my forehead that was gone three days after. Wherever I looked, I found us in the midst of adventure, but never a part of it.” She paused to wipe her eyes. “When I told Keith this, he smiled. Told me I was being silly. Then he took the maguffin from me and locked it in his office safe. That was a year ago. I haven’t seen it since.”

  She looked at me then, and I remember being amazed at how fast a person can fall in love.

  “I’m tired, Hank. I’m grateful, but I’m tired. I want to be a part of the world again.” She smiled then, and I honestly believed everything was going to turn out ok. “I know the combination to Keith’s safe. His new boy Jesse keeps it on a paper slip in his wallet, in case anything ever goes wrong. Phone Tabby. Tell her we’ll bring her the maguffin.”

  4

  The ocean air cut to the bone. A chill breeze rolled off the waves and over the docks, ruffling the pages, and I pulled my jacket tighter around me. I checked my watch, stumped out my cigarette and lit another. The clouds hung low in the night sky. The tip of my smoke burnt like a small meteor.

  The tock-tock of heels turned me around. A silhouette emerged from the gloom, a slender apparition. I opened my mouth to call, but a suspicion made me swallow my words. Where was the mousy, young woman who had stepped into my office six days ago? The shadow approaching moved like a knife through the fog, its footsteps measured, the vapour trail of its breath a series of controlled crotchets floating in its path. Then the breeze caught the fog and tugged it from a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles and Tabitha emerged from the text.

  “Do you have it?” she asked, “Is it here?”

  “I do. It’s back in the car. Just wanted to make sure that you were you.” I shrugged. “Habit.”

  I held up my hand and flicked the flint of my lighter twice. Back in the gloom, an engine started up. Twin headlights crept around from between the corrugated, dock warehouses. They swivelled towards us, pinning us in a circle of light.

  Then everything went wrong.

  The car leapt forward in a squeal of clichés. I grabbed Tabby and swung her aside, tumbling us out of its path just as the hurtling vehicle punched a Vitron shaped hole through the fog where we had just stood. I scrambled to my feet as the car swung back around, yelling at Starla to stop, screaming; “What the hell are you doing?” But when my trusty old wagon leapt forward a second time, it wasn’t me Starla aimed it at. Three pops rang out. Two spiderwebs blossomed in the windshield of my baby, and one of her headlights exploded. I turned towards the gunfire and found the field mouse striding towards the charging car, both hands extended forward, the luger in their grasp throwing fire and lead before her. Four shots. Sparks flew from the Vitron’s bonnet. Five shots. The driver’s side mirror disintegrated. Six shots. The bullet went wide as, at the last second, the car veered to the right and into a spin. Its rear caught a stack of wooden crates and the last I saw of Tabby were two shining points of rage set behind a librarian’s lenses before she vanished beneath an avalanche of boxes and timber.

  The passenger side door flew open.

  “Get in the car!” yelled Starla, miraculously unscathed.

  I looked to the splintered crates. I looked to the car. My feet refused to move. Then:

  “Get in the fucking car, Hank! That’s not Tabby. That’s not my sister!”

  5

  “Maybe we should keep it,” she said as our car sped through the dark towards the final act. I nodded. Yeah, hang onto it for now. Get back to the apartment. Grab some cash and the .38 in my desk. Make like a tree and get the hell out of this shit-eating town. Set up somewhere else. Stick the maguffin in our pocket and wait for life to happen. Let it throw us a couple of bones. Maybe a town house. Ditch it in a lake when we’re done.

  Yeah, we could do that, I thought as we tumbled into my apartment and the adrenaline of the last hour got the better of us.

  We could do that easy, I thought as Starla pulled me down onto the bed.

  7

  My head snaps back as the goon—Jesse, it seems—drives Four Finger Kennedy’s point home. His adrenal augment is buzzing away happily in the side of his neck, its tiny tubes twitching and pumping, his teeth grinding and his veins popping, the micro Higgs-Boson drive happy to churn out energy from now until the universe goes pop.

  “He’d have found us”, Starla had said as Jesse the Goon yanked me from Four Finger’s sedan and stuck a semi-automatic in my ribs. “Keith’s a part of this story, Hank, and stories like this don’t end with a pleasant drive into the sunrise.” She opened The Kennedy Club’s service door with a four digit code and a vocal scan. We stepped
into the covered alleyway. As the thick door clicked closed behind us, she turned, signalling Jesse to wait. “A tale like ours; it needs a villain, and villains don’t let bygones be bygones. The story won’t let them.” She put a hand on my face, then drew from her jacket the small, carved box. She held it between us. “I’m sorry, Hank. This is the way it’s got play out.” Then she turned and was gone. And I was dragged back into the hornet’s nest.

  Jesse’s second punch takes me in the kidneys, and I almost piss myself there and then. Four Fingers is waking around me in circles, cracking his knuckles. He’s a big guy, still carrying a lot of his wise-guy meat—hasn’t had the time to get soft. But a guy in his position has to have a Jesse. A made man keeps his knuckles clean. Then a right hook from five carefully manicured digits topples me and the chair I’m taped to, and the last few sentences go blurry.

  “You got nerve,” says Kenedy, slipping off a heavy ring and massaging the finger underneath. “Takes a lot of balls to come in here and try to take what’s mine.” He takes a seat in front of me as Jesse rights me up. We’re back in the green room, and I’d kill for a drink. But the doors are locked. The poker-cubes are dark. Even the bar staff are ghosts tonight.

  “You think you’re the first?” he continues, “You’re not the first. There’s a joker like you around every corner. The pretty box draws ‘em like flies. Each with a dream. Each with a scheme. Each of them buried six deep in foundations across this sinkhole of a town.” He steeples his fingers and dips his head, as though praying. Then he’s standing and his heel’s in my chest, making that sound you get when you punch a pillow real hard. The back of my head cracks against the floor and I think a rib just popped my left lung.

  I can hear Kennedy yelling, but the sounds are muddy, the sentences strange, the words are wrong, letters come apart, unwrap, a rap-tap the tapping upon my key strokes as they hammer toward an ending when the cold hits me in the face, ice-cubes and bourbon, and I have no fucking idea where I am until four Finger Keith Kennedys fill my vision, so I pick one and I focus and he’s shouting; “It’s mine! Mine! You fucking street jockey! You plodding dick!” His hair’s gone wild and his face is red. He’s standing above me with an empty glass and a firmly placed boot is all it would take to retire me permanently. “My box, in my safe! It’s mine! I’m the hero of this fucking story! Me!” He’s sweating like he’s run a marathon. He’s grinding his teeth. His eyes are wide and shiny and there’s too much white and I realise that, back behind the scenes, away from the newspaper cameras and celebrity clientele and mobster high-life, Keith Kennedy has gone insane. Fruit Loops. Loonie Tunes. Th-the… th-the… That’s all, folks.

  This is my story, I think he whispers, then the door opens.

  I look up from my comfortable spot on the floor. A field mouse just walked into the room. She’s wearing new glasses and a fresh change of clothes. And a nasty bruise down the right side of her face. The docks are no place for a lady.

  “You’ve met Irene,” Kennedy says, suddenly composed (but yes, if you squint, you can still see the crazy). “She’s smarter than you. Know’s which side to pick.” He beckons. She moves to his side, all pretence at timidity vanished. Here again is the shadow I’d seen cutting the fog along the water’s edge. But when he takes her chin in his hand and turns her head so he can see her bruises, does she flinch?

  “Maybe she had ideas of her own. But maybe she changed them. Maybe, after her own plans went bad, she took a long, hard think about who she was fucking with, then decided to call me and spill the beans about your little… arrangement.”

  Jesse lifts me back up. I loll forward against my restraints. There’s a warmth spreading across the back of my head and trickling down the sides of my neck. I open my mouth to say ‘Hi’ to Irene but spit blood onto the floor instead.

  “So I check my safe, of course, and when I see the space where my pretty box should be, I almost forget the deal I’ve made with little Irene here. But then who should call but my runaway kitten, come to her senses. Saved us a lot of looking. Probably saved Irene a lot of hurt too.”

  I check my bonds, but they’re as tight as ever. I square my shoulders as best I can, sneer up at the two through a swollen eye and a cracked tooth and quietly gurgle, “Let me guess; she figured that, if she couldn’t have it for herself, maybe she could manage some trickle-down fortune. Hell, it’s not just the main characters who get to live happily ever after, right?” I turn my attention to Irene. “Hey, has he told you about Vince? Bet he thought he was getting lucky too. They buried him in three boxes.”

  Kennedy steps in with his fist raised and I figure this is the one that finally does it for me, but then the door opens again and my angel walks in. She’s got the box in her hands. Her jacket and blouse are gone. She’s in a dress the colour of a winter sunset and the silk shimmers like oil on water as she moves. How can you stay mad at a woman like that?

  She glides up to Four Finger and plants one on his mug. His hand finds that curve oh-so-recently described. She giggles. If she’s faking, she’s doing a damn good job. Kennedy takes the box with one hand, gives one last squeeze with the other, then turns to me. Big smile.

  “My girl,” he says as he lifts the small, carved lid, “My box”.

  Then the box goes bang. Four Fingers becomes Three Fingers. The narrator laments the loss of alliteration.

  The ruined case falls to the floor with the remains of Kennedy’s left thumb. Starla’s .22 Purse Protector bounces out as the box lands. It takes Kennedy a second to start screaming, but once he does, he’s in it to win it.

  Jesse the Goon’s on the move. He’s got Starla by the neck. But Starla, ever prepared for the dangers the late night city streets might hold, plants a thin tazer into the side of his neck. There’s a flashing blue light and a string of bright pops, like miniature machinegun fire, then a crack and the strong smell of burning insulation as something tiny in Jesse’s adrenal augment explodes. He leaps back, flailing at his neck where already the veins are beginning to swell and distend. He’s trying to scream but his jaw has clenched tight. Hneh! Hneh! he goes, until two of his front teeth shatter outwards and suddenly we can hear him more clearly.

  Starla’s behind me, cutting at my binds. Irene is gone, the door to the main club swinging shut after her. My hands come loose, then my feet. I strip away the last of the tape from around my waist just in time to hear Kennedy scream; “You bitch!”

  He’s coming at us like a bull. The made man is gone. The goodfella is sitting this one out. Even the wise guy is looking the other way. The ninety-five kilos of rage and old muscle barrelling down on us was used to garrotting pensioners for rent money long before any of this maguffin business began. Starla and I aren’t both getting out of the way in time, so I knock her aside and brace for impact. Then Kennedy slips on his thumb. He topples forward and I take his weight. I twist to the side and he’s rolling past us, stumbling as he tries to regain his balance, then colliding with the thing that, only moments ago, was Jesse.

  The goon’s neck has swollen up to engulf his chin. Across his shoulders, where his jacket has begun to split, his muscles are growing muscles. Just below where his right ear used to be, the flesh is leaping and bubbling. Buried deep inside the rapidly expanding muscle tissue, where the augment hides, the micro Higgs-Boson drive must have slipped its bearings. Millions of perpetually spinning particles just got re-introduced to gravity. All that energy’s got to go somewhere.

  The thing that was Jesse roars as the synthesised adrenal cocktail courses through it. A hand, now the size of a dinner plate, takes Kennedy by the top of his head as he tries to pull himself upwards. A short squeeze turns it to pink jelly and red mist. The stitching along the soles of its shoes splits as not-Jesse steps forward. Realising its legs still work, it roars again, then begins lumbering towards us, intent on tearing us apart before its rapidly swelling muscles do the same to its body.

  I turn to Starla, stare into those great big eyes, and scream, “Where the
fuck is it? Give it to me, quick!”

  She doesn’t hesitate. She reaches in between her breasts, and gravity does that weird, reverse concussion. She draws out the maguffin. Reality realigns. I snatch it from her and the universe wraps around me. I cock back my arm and time bends. I throw.

  The maguffin sails towards the warping monster of messy death charging towards us, carrying the weight of reality with it. As it flies, the adrenal augment, borne by the tiny Higgs-Bosson drive, erupts from the beast’s chest in a spray of viscera.

  I grab Starla. Together we leap for the safety of the bar.

  They meet.

  The world goes thick. Reality slows. Across the room, items rise from their surfaces. An ashtray hovers. A chair lifts from the ground. Behind the bar, the bottled liquids become floating bubbles of myriad hues.

  They touch. Gravity meets gravitas.

  The universe goes pop.

  8

  We scramble through the hole in the Kennedy Club’s wall and into the night. My left lung is on fire and I’m breathing hard in the smoke and dust. Miraculously, Kennedy’s sedan has remained intact, minus a couple windows. Starla helps me over the last of the rubble and up to the driver’s side door. But as we’re climbing in either side, she puts her hand on my leg and motions for silence.

  A field mouse creeps from the ruins of Four Finger Kennedy’s club. Her head shoots left and right as she scans the smoke and shadows. The glasses are gone. Her eyes are wild but sharp. She clutches something tight to her breast with both hands as she climbs through the cavity in the blasted, brick wall and flees down the alley. Words tumble after her into the night.