Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  "They're taking them out tomorrow night. I'm not sure where."

  "To sell?" asked Grundy.

  “Yes.”

  Grundy pulled back, but before leaving the room, he looked at Stone once more, and Stone's shadowfilled eyes were drenched with a shame that Grundy had never before seen.

  When Stone, purposefully hiding in the shadows of Vodeni and De Gracy, stepped out into the main hall, seeing the five dark ghosts shuffling down the floor of the Pit – his Pit - he felt defeated. The men around him, the men like him, applauded the arrival of these five young men, and here he stood, complying, hiding, his body finally spiriting away.

  But it was when he saw Grundy that Stone realized that all this was the truth. Every single thing around him, Vodeni's sly smile, De Gracy's emotionless eyes, Grundy's tears, they were all real, slowly happening around him, and Stone knew that it was his truth; becoming the very world he feared would drown him.

  The five men were locked down the hatch, shoved into the deep. And Grundy had disappeared from across the room, his absence leaving a gaping hole in the mural of shadows on the wall.

  Stone looked at Vodeni's and De Gracy's backs.

  "We're not waiting," he said, his voice deep and commanding. Vodeni and De Gracy looked at him. "We're not waiting for Björn," said Stone. "We're doing it tonight."

  CHAPTER 27

  Solomon's face was lit up by the flame in the dark theater hall. The light from the torch he was holding only lit up the very first rows of seats. There was a sound of wood softly creaking.

  He imagined the theater as full of people, all of them watching him cry, all feeling sympathy for the character that he had dragged on stage, but then, curtains down, lights off, they would pick up their things, leave the hall, and wander home to forget all but the few words that they could somehow use in their own lives. They would later use the words, but they'd mean nothing.

  Solomon sat on the edge of the stage, slowly fanning the torch left to right, right to left, illuminating as much of the stage as he could. The stage floor boards creaked. He looked at the intense fire, letting himself be hypnotized by the haunting flame. He kept moving it, left to right, right to left. The flame was cold, so he put it closer to his face, and closer, and closer. The boards gave off more soft creaks. He moved the torch closer, but the flame was so cold, and he was crying, the floor boards creaking, and when he moved the flame so close that he was about to scream, the stage collapsed from under him, and he fell down in a roaring whirl of splinters and flame and dust.

  Solomon broke through the layers of wood that were piled on top of him, the flame next to him disappeared. It was a dark room, but a small pillar of light shone all the way from a hole in the ceiling and down through the stage. Solomon coughed. He felt his face, his smooth, glossy face. He stood and shook off all the dust and wood, his lungs full with the fine powder of the collapse. The room was filled with costumes, makeup and mirrors. There was a little pulley system next to him with a platform that led up to a hatch in the stage. Solomon looked at the hatch from right underneath it, and he felt a darkness envelop him, like the shrill of a bad omen. Farther down the room was a dressing room mirror, and Solomon walked towards it, hypnotized as he had been by the flame. He sat by it and studied his weakly lit reflection, turning his face to see both sides of it, and as the moon came down through the rooftop windows, it only lit up half of it. The dressing room table was of a light wood, finely carved, its mirror a stage in itself, the soft lights dancing off its reflective surface. Solomon opened the drawer, and it was as if a wind blew out and into his face, calming him, settling him, like a sea breeze would a dying fisherman.

  The guard was sitting in the middle of the main hall. He was whistling, steadily tapping his knee, and casually scanning the room. There was the boxing ring, no one in it. The hatch was on his left, no one there either. He felt ultimately useless as he sat there in the dark, tapping his knee, pushing his chair slightly off its front legs. He whistled a tune he had heard, but he could not remember from where. The windows in the ceiling were painted with moonlight, the crescent moon hiding in one of the panes. Then a rustling sound behind him, as if a breeze blew open a little door somewhere. He turned around lazily, but the darkness revealed nothing. He went back to observing the room, but as he did, it was if the entire room started to breathe, as if the farthest corners took in enormous gulps of air with immense bellowing lungs, and a heart started to pound with the rhythm of faraway drums. The guard rose quickly, but a pair of hands grabbed his throat, forcing him back into the chair. The hands were big and leathery, throbbing around his neck with a primal rage, constricting the guard's flow of air. The hands then grabbed the chair and turned it around, and the guard now stared into a pair of ungodly eyes.

  “I remember you,” said the man, a squeal in his voice. “I remember you.”

  “Let... let go! What are you talking about--”

  “I remember all of it, and even though you don't recognize me now, I know you remember it as well, but unlike you, I've changed. And now I'll finally have retribution for what I let happen... for what I kept letting happen.”

  “Look, you don't--”

  “See my face!” the man screamed. “This is what I had to do to myself out of fear for being found by you, by those men that butchered my family. The fear that someday someone would recognize me.”

  “There's--”

  The man punched the guard, who fell straight to the floor. His eyes opened upon hearing keys being unhooked from his belt, and as he struggled to stay conscious he saw the man move towards the hatch.

  "There's nothing there," said the guard, still on the floor. "It’s empty. You're wasting your time."

  The man opened the hatch and looked down, speaking softly to the darkness below. "I am here," he said. "I will get you out."

  He threw down the rope and let it hang, but it kept hanging with no motion to it, no one grabbing it, no one climbing it. The man looked down as if through the darkness.

  "S...S...Stone!" stuttered the guard. "And De Gracy. Stone and De Gracy took them not two hours ago. Turns out Stone couldn't wait to deliver the niggers."

  The man started pulling out the rope. The man said no more.

  Stone was maneuvering the slow truck along the hilly roads. The sun was still coming down when they had left the Pit, but now it had descended far below the distant hills, and Stone couldn't remember the last time he had been this far from Plissbury. The only things that were close now, the only things in his narrow world, were the wheezing sounds of De Gracy's breathing, the raw hum of the truck's engine, and an odd sense of silence from the back of the truck that seemed to crawl in through to the front and cling to Stone's back and neck.

  "How come you didn't wanna wait for Björn?" asked De Gracy.

  Stone took a short glance at him before answering.

  "It ain't a three man job. They're bound up back there, locked in. No reason to keep a man back there. Besides, it was never his job to do."

  "But yours?"

  Stone shook his head, his gaze staying on the road.

  "This ain't no ones job, Frank. This ain't a job to begin with."

  "A job's what gives money."

  "And how does this money smell? How do you like the smell of the back of this truck?"

  "The business now is business, and that means any business, and however you see it, however you think any of this smells, in the end, this is all just business. It's all money."

  Stone looked at De Gracy, who was pushed up against the door, his face glued to the window.

  "You've got a new hat," said De Gracy.

  Stone nodded.

  The cars on the road were few, but in the distance, after the next three bends, Stone could see a line of cars that had slowed down.

  "God damn it," muttered Stone.

  "Don't turn around, they'll just come after us."

  "I know, but there's no chance that--"

  "They might not even be re
al officers, just some Joes with uniforms sucking on people hiding bottles of booze."

  Stone looked behind them, but there were no cars following.

  "See," said De Gracy. "There's only one cop. I'm sure he's a con."

  "We'll see," said Stone, looking at De Gracy.

  He saw him pull his hand to the gun by his chest. One car left. Stone started to sweat, and he kept looking at De Gracy. Then the last car drove off and Stone slowly moved the truck up beside the police officer.

  "Good evening, officer," he said.

  "Good evening," said the police officer. "Do you mind if I check the back of that ther' truck?"

  Stone was just about to answer when De Gracy leaned in and interrupted.

  "How come you're alone out here?" he asked.

  The police officer flinched, as if he hadn't heard the question.

  "How come you're alone?" repeated De Gracy.

  "Please step out of the vehicle, both of you," said the police officer.

  Stone and De Gracy stepped out. The police officer walked around the hood of the car to De Gracy's side.

  "You stay right over there," he told Stone, where after he took De Gracy to the back of the truck. Stone could hear them pacing. There wasn't a car in sight. He heard them talking and he heard them go all the way around the back. Stone was still, concentrating to hear what was going on, but then the terrible roar of a gunshot blared up and down the side of the hills.

  "Get in!" yelled De Gracy. "Let's get out of here!"

  But Stone was already at the wheel of the truck, and while De Gracy was still pulling the door open, Stone stepped on the speeder and forced the truck onward, the recoil of its sudden and violent acceleration ripping away De Gracy's balance, felling him to the ground. The truck pulled away steadily, and Stone could hear De Gracy's swearing somewhere far behind him.

  Grundy rememberd.

  He remembered.

  He remembered the man that had saved him from the bottom of the stage that he had found himself prisoner in after the debris had come down. He remembered the rope being thrown down, the dressing room mirror, the fresh scar across his face, and from hearing that same man's name just this once from a guard on the floor, that man disappeared entirely from those memories, and Grundy now only remembered pulling himself up, and in the distance he heard nothing but five distant screams. Always five there were.

  One for each.

  The truck's engines roared along Stone's mind. It was easy now, he thought. The hard part, the impossible part, was over. He thought back at De Gracy, and for a moment he felt nothing, his emotions filled only with what to do with the five other souls in the truck. But that was the easy part, he told himself. The hard part was over now. Now all he needed was to empty the truck and tell them all to run, to run far away, and then he would go back, he would go back for Julia, he would go back for Grundy.

  He drove off past the quarry and brought the truck to a halt by a clearing that led into a forest. He stepped out of the truck, went to the back and opened it up. The five people were just sitting there, chafed from darkness. They looked at Stone with empty eyes.

  "You're free," said Stone, expecting to feel a surge of redemption through his heart, though nothing came. "You're free," he said again, but none of them moved at all. Stone grabbed one of them by the arm and gently pulled him out, showing him that it was ok, that it was ok to run away. It then started to rain, and Stone's clothes quickly got soaked. "It's ok," he said. "You're free now, run off. There's no more now. No more."

  Another one followed from inside the truck, stepping out onto the mud. He looked up at the falling rain. Stone signalled towards the forest, wildly gesturing, as if he was sending off a dog or some other animal. "Go, come on now, go! Please, go!" he said, his voice breaking in the rain. "Please go."

  Some of the others followed from inside the truck, and soon they were all outside, looking up at the rain, and Stone felt surrounded by something that he couldn't quite understand or describe. "You're free," he said. "Free!"

  And finally they started walking away from the truck, away from Stone, and as he looked at them, he felt nothing.

  The five shades continued into the woods, their shadows long since soaked into the ground, and then they disappeared, the light leaving them completely. Stone saw what he thought would be the freeing of souls, but he felt no different from that one cold night, now long ago, when he had hid from those rising moonlit shovels.

  The night the light had left him as well.

  As Julia Sedgewick turned from the window through which she had watched the darkness, she accidentally knocked down a vase with flowers. She cursed herself for putting it there. The vase had broken into very big pieces and they lay among the flowery water like continental plates. She picked them up into one big heap and put them on a table, next to an open newspaper.

  “THE BODIES OF FIVE CHILDREN FOUND IN SILVER FOREST”

  Julia sat down and stared out the window, the flowers still on the floor. She sighed.

  When Stone arrived back at the Pit the truck was empty. He slouched out from the driver's seat, wet and cold, and he slowly moved to the entrance. He walked inside, but the main hall was in darkness, the moon long since disappeared from the windows in the ceiling. His coat was dripping rain onto the floor as he moved around. He coughed and wheezed from the cold air that had entered his lungs.

  "Is there anybody here?" he called. He knew he'd be back before De Gracy, seemingly done with the job, and they would let him inside, and he could have gotten to Grundy and escaped before anyone knew anything. But there was no one here, only darkness. He switched on the lights above the boxing ring, and light flooded the room. The first thing he saw was one of the new men, one of the slavers, lying on the floor. Stone ran to him and saw that he was unconscious, bleeding across his face, but still breathing. The hatch was open a few paces next to him, unhinged like the broken jaw of a giant.

  "Grundy!" called Stone, but as he turned around, as he turned to face the boxing ring, he saw a big shadow hanging down from one of the posts that ran across the ceiling.

  "Grundy!" screamed Stone, rushing to the ring and through the ropes. He turned the dangling body, but it was not Grundy. Stone shook his head. This was not Grundy's face. No scars, no wrinkles, only a beautiful, glossy face that he had never seen before. Stone grabbed a stool from one of the corners and stood up to untie the noose, but as he did, the body still dangling, the enormous body fell down on top of Stone.

  Stone screamed from pain, his arm crushed. He rolled over the body and freed himself. The body was now on the ground, eyes closed, back down. Stone still panted from the pain as he stood to look down at the hanged man. It was a beautiful, scarless face, but it was Grundy. It had to be Grundy. Stone gently opened the giant's eyelids, and there they were; Grundy's eyes. Stone was about to cover his face, but then something moved behind him. The slaver had stood up, now running towards the exit.

  "Hey!" called Stone. "Get back here!"

  The man left the Pit, and Stone heard the sound of the truck's engine.

  "God damn it!" screamed Stone, his voice breaking as it had earlier near the forest. He turned to Grundy and started rolling him off the boxing ring. He pushed him through the ropes and down on the floor.

  "I'm sorry, Grundy, but this is the only way."

  He grabbed the body under the arms and started pulling, his arm still throbbing with pain, his muscles tense and nearly ripping. It took Stone fairly long, but he had brought Grundy's body outside, and now that it was outside he had no idea what to do with it. He decided to bring it back to the alley, dragging and dragging, his jaws tense and taut to avoid screaming in pain. He reached the alley and opened up one of the big dumpsters. Stone looked down at Grundy's dirty body. His face so beautiful, thought Stone, but he also saw a hostility in Grundy's eyes, as if he had been severed from himself long before he had died. It was as if he didn't die as Grundy, but a different man entirely, one unfamiliar to Stone.
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  Stone heard a sound from the other side of the Pit and hurried to lift the body into the dumpster, his arm finally cracking completely. Stone drowned out his scream, and moved to one of the windows that led into the main hall. There it was, thought Stone. Grundy's room was just past that door, and if he could just...

  But then someone came into the room, and Stone ran out the alley and away.

  He ran and ran, oblivious to any destination, impervious to any change in direction at all. And he ran on, the earliest light of the sun tugging at the shadow near his feet, throwing it long and far into the still dark city.

  P A R T I V

  THE LETTER

  [ DECEMBER 13th – DECEMBER 15th ]

  [1928]

  The boy was careful not to make any noise as he touched himself. He knew what his father would do if he found out. He had moved in as close to the crack in the door as he could, careful that they did not hear his breathing.

  The boy watched how he moved, how he heaved himself up and down, moving in and out of her, how he changed position; moving behind her, pulling her down, holding her ankles.

  He knew that she wanted to scream; he had heard it when she was with his father, but now she couldn't. She had to remain quiet, because she knew that the boy was still in the house, studying his French homework. But he was by the door instead, looking into their forbidden pleasure and creating his own.

  He watched him give one final thrust, how he lifted his head and grunted with delight, finally falling on his back from exhaustion. And in that time, when he was outside of her, his gaze softly resting at the door, the boy imagined that they were looking at each other, their love finally hatching into this world.

  CHAPTER 28