by Michael Shea
And stumbled as he leapt, and fell headlong.
“My foot? My fuckin’ foot!”
Everyone converged, hauling him up off the ground and sitting him down against the wall. Flooding him with queries about his injury.
“It’s my foot! I stepped in a hole! My foot broke through! Christ, it hurts!”
Jack, their foreman, was right on him. “Where? Where’s the hole?”
“Over there!”
Alert to any flaw in his pit, Jack rushed there, the whole crew rushing with him.
“I don’t see any hole.”
“There’s kind of a little dip here, Jack. That feel soft to you?”
Half a dozen heels tried it in turn.
“Feels hard. What dip you talkin’ about?”
“Feels solid to me.”
“Me too.”
There was in fact no hole to be found, but there was something about Roger’s twisted foot. It looked wet, a thin, viscous sheen on the boot, the sock, and the ankle…
“It hurts, man! Jack, it hurts! It burns!”
“Don! Get Rodge in your truck! Take him down to General Emergency. Help him, guys. Toby—tell the formers the hole’s all theirs.”
Jack was no dullard. The chance of a flaw in the ground, of some buried pollutant even, was best not dwelt on, but quickly sheathed in concrete. Then the job would get done, and they’d get paid.
They shipped Rodge off and got themselves and all their gear out of the hole. Rick got the backhoe onto the flatbed and chained down. Jack called coffee time.
Jack had many admirable qualities, but the best thing was his seriousness about coffee. He had an urn of quality dark roast, bolted into its own specially welded frame in the bed of his pickup. When the Hoe Down crew gathered around the bed of that pickup, they drank the good stuff.
Daryl appreciated it this morning as he’d done for years. In the last hour his body had finally, as his friend Brad would say, come back on line. He put aside the thought of how much more slowly it would do so through the years to come, and enjoyed his membership in this loose, basically good-natured band.
Everybody joked about the Toxic Sinkhole that only Rodge could manage to step in, while no one else could even find it. “But it is weird,” said Tobe. “I did for a fact feel a soft place, almost a hole under my heel, but then the whole thing was hard again!”
“You thought you felt…”
Jack’s truck was parked alongside the shale-tiled terrace, and now Mike Love and Amy Robideau reappeared on it, strolling toward its brink to overlook the next phase of the pool-to-be. Love was a big, handsome guy, flawlessly clean-cut. Rich homeowners loved Mike Love. He got on a warm, joshing footing with the wives, used a cordial, manly candor with the husbands. They all felt that their affluence and image were in good hands with Mike Love.
Amy Robideau came out laughing at some joke Love had told, and was asking, teasingly, “So, Mike, are we going to come back from Nice next week to find the pool all done, and full of sparkling water?”
“That would be a miracle, wouldn’t it?” The pair of them stood at the terrace’s edge, watching the formers down in the raw hole. The crew was unhooking bundles of re-bar from the cable lowered by the boom on their truck. “On the other hand,” Love smiled, “anything’s possible.”
Here the dirt-crew traded looks, and Jack rolled his eyes. He’d often expounded on how the general contractor could blow all kinds of smoke up the customer’s butt, promise them the moon, while the subcontractors doing the actual work looked like the bad guys Taking Forever to get it done.
“You’ve gotta realize what I’m up against though, Amy,” Love was saying. “Here’s a case in point, the kinda stuff I gotta deal with. I got this fax from one of my suppliers this morning. Humor me here, and just read this out loud—I mean just try to read it out loud.”
Mrs. Robideau scanned the sheet with amused disbelief. “My God!” And read out, “’Eeya Fuh Thaggin Thoo Loo Eeya Shaw Gaw Thoy!’ This is incredible! His fax must’ve gone bonkers!”
“I tellya, Amy, not a day goes by…not a day goes by. But hey, why not think positive? Maybe your bathing suit’s the first thing you’ll unpack when you get back from Nice.”
Jack spat quietly in the dust beside the truck, and when the two had gone back into the house the crew had some fun on the subject of the general contractor.
Hoe Down’s day rolled on. They crossed the Bay to trench an irrigation system in the Berkeley hills. Daryl’s gloom resettled on his soul. Digging your own grave…the thought nagged him as he worked.
And that little scene on the terrace kept coming back to him. That was the oddest little moment there, when Amy Robideau stood and intoned those uncouth syllables above the pit. And it was all the odder because those syllables rang some kind of bell for Daryl. It was far and faint, but they rang a distinct note of familiarity. It seemed he’d heard those syllables somewhere, long ago…
∴
Along with free rent, Daryl received, for his graveyard shifts in the cage, a key to one of the Hyperion Hotel’s staff showers.
The Hyperion was a faded, century-old hotel in the Mission District—a decent but decidedly frayed and funky habitation. The ‘shower’ was a big old clawfoot tub with a ring of dingy curtain suspended within it. The bathmats were soggy and the walls a bit greenish and dank. But the hot water supply was generous, and a pleasant breath of San Francisco night came in through the airshaft window.
Daryl put his clean clothes on the little bench and stripped out of his dirty ones. From the darkness of the airshaft came a breeze that stirred the shower curtains, and they touched his nakedness as he stepped in between them. Their clammy caress was faintly adhesive, like cold tongues on his skin…
He cranked up the hot water and hunkered down under the blast.
Ahhh! Hot water! It made you feel like you were getting a brand-new skin! Wonderful!
And just then someone—someone very big—whispered right behind him. Someone in the shower with him.
He spun around in the spray. Found, of course, just himself in this small hot rainstorm…
And then, once again, came a breath of speech, rain-blurred. Again he whirled…and found himself alone.
He realized, amazed at his own confusion, that the Whisper was just the peculiar rattle of the water on the shower curtain. As the spray deflected from his head and shoulders and hissed against the plastic, it was, by some auditory freak, damnably suggestive of something whispered.
Daryl marveled. The mimicry was so precise. It seemed to whisper, over and over, two words that he couldn’t quite make out…
His body wanted to shower some more, but that insistent, intricate hiss was…irritating. He turned off the water and got out.
He was indeed tiring himself out lately. He felt his limbs’ weariness as he toweled off, turning his back to the shower because he found the sight of it repellent. Its dingy plastic shroud seemed…fleshlike.
He was pulling on his cutoffs when a freakish cold gust from the airshaft muscled into the room. Shivering, he checked the window—nothing of course but darkness out there—but as he turned he saw that cold gust ripple through the curtains.
And saw in the curtains’ shuddering, glossy folds a face emerge, a rippling face as pale as the moon.
More exactly, the lower half of a face: a long-jawed mouth that moved between hollow, haunted cheeks, and whose lips shaped two soundless syllables.
A drowned half-face it seemed, as if the curtain were a liquid surface that it floated under. Filling half the curtain, it was almost a giant’s mouth, both mournful and afraid. Once more, it mouthed two soundless syllables…and was gone.
Daryl stood there. It wasn’t exactly terror, and it wasn’t exactly astonishment that filled him. He felt as if he were covered with fur, and all that fur was bristling.
Woodenly he climbed the two flights up to his own floor. He was not terrified. He was…split. Halved. He was he. This hotel was itself.
But the man in the bathroom a moment ago, the man being whispered to by a giant’s face in the shower curtain…that was someone else.
Sane, tired people Saw Things. Accepted wisdom. He could accept it. But why see that? It seemed to Daryl he was confronting two distinct strangenesses in himself: the strangeness of Seeing Things at all, and the strangeness of hallucinating huge, speaking mouths…
You never realized how much you trusted your eyes, until they did something like this to you. His eyes cringed now from what they saw, distrusting these long-familiar halls. He forced himself to stand and stare, challenging the doors, the walls, the worn carpeting to erupt with some second strangeness.
Back up in his little room, Daryl sat at his desk and uncovered his old Olympia Portable typewriter, a relic from his college days. Sat there a long time, his calm returning slowly. Here he was, himself. His mind, his memory, themselves. A fifty year-old guy, a strong old guy, but tireder than he’d realized. And in a little stack of text by his typewriter was his remedy for that weariness.
For the past few months his old college bud, Brad, had been giving him copy-editing jobs for users’ manuals and the like, humoring Daryl’s computerless seclusion, accepting his typescripts and scanning them into his own computer.
Brad was keeping his eye out for a full-time opening at Digitel. If one came up, he promised to get Daryl into it and bring him up to speed. Daryl had been noncommittal, but he was noncommittal no longer. It was time to put the old white collar on. His heart had been telling him so since sunup, and his weary senses had just dramatically seconded the motion.
He found his place in the text. But his fingers, touching the keys, withdrew from them again. He looked at his airshaft window, as if some new strange thing might blow in through it.
When you “saw” things, they were the briefest blips, were fragmentary glimpses that your mind, instantly afterward, filled in with interpretation, with explanation. But this half-face…had persisted just a beat too long. Had been too truly there.
Unless that sense of duration had been part of the delusion.
Daryl had a well-developed will to work. He buckled down to the revision. Brad was coming by to pick this up in the morning, and Daryl had to be down in the cage at midnight.
The text was a user’s manual for an answering machine. Since even before his college days, Daryl had been a good prose technician. He sank, comfortably at last, into the pleasures of skill, combing out tangles of prepositional phrases into limpidly concise directions. The clatter of his keys floated up the airshaft into the deepening night.
At length he was amazed to realize, while his fingers still danced, that he was within a page of finishing. He was typing fast, as he always did in the home stretch, and it suddenly began to seem that his keystrokes were echoing strangely. The clatter of them was accumulating around him, filling his room. His heart felt a stab of premonition, and the corner of his eye caught a visual hint, so that when he turned his gaze straight to the airshaft window, his shock was profound. It seemed every nerve in him melted, ran out of him through the soles of his feet: such was his terror to see, hanging outside the window, a pale face—a face entire, and man-sized, hanging within a sixty-foot pit of empty darkness, gazing in at him.
There was that lantern jaw, a mouth slightly agape, and black eyes wide, aghast. Eyes that seemed the very nailheads of madness spiked into the brain…
Daryl’s fingers hung frozen. Through one whole heartbeat and its after-echo, the face hung there within his gaze, and its mouth made two soundless syllables in a silence so absolute that the two of them, the face and he, might have suddenly been sunk a hundred miles underground.
And then the face was gone, and the silence became the hotel’s normal creaky quiescence in the hour before midnight—a hum of flourescent lights, a remote faint creak of beam and joist, a hint of muffled voices boxed in rooms here and there…
Daryl stood up. Dazedly put his head and shoulders out into the airshaft. Saw a lit window or two far below…saw a dim star overhead.
He sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the window. This…this was exceedingly scary.
It was exceedingly scary if it was real, and it was exceedingly scary if it wasn’t real.
But how could he even consider its being real?
For one thing…
For one thing this face was familiar to Daryl. It was a face he’d seen before somewhere. Long ago, he was sure of that, but definitely seen. There was some comfort in this, the more he thought of it. The brain, he reflected wisely, was complex. It burned its own fuel and could sometimes see its own contents like realities.
So these hallucinations were partly like flashbacks. They weren’t something out of nowhere; they were elements of his own psyche, of his memory stirring.
Daryl was solidly sane. He had never in his life doubted that, and he could not doubt it now. This was some inner prompting of his memory that was revealing itself to him through the scary new channel of visions. There was some meaning to these two hallucinations, and the meaning lay within his own memory.
He had never been the panicky type. He felt, in fact, a certain sense of excitement. What next?
His watch told him he had just time to finish the copy-edit before he had to be down in the cage for his last graveyard shift of the week.
He sat back down to his typewriter. Hands poised above the keyboard, he gave a long look to his airshaft window and then went back to work.
∴
2:45 A.M. Daryl buzzed up the last of the bar-closers. He could go to sleep now, catch his four hours before the graveyard shifters began buzzing the street door. He lay sunk in his armchair, but found himself too anxious to sleep. Fear cruised his thoughts like sharks, fear for his aging body, fear for his perhaps too isolated mind. It dawned on him that we were sunk in our minds after all. And if visions seized us, really took hold of us, how were we to save ourselves?
The darkness that pale face hung in had been a solid thing. That darkness had bulged inward from the air-shaft, swelling its blackness against the bubble of lamplight Daryl sat in…
He had to admit he was chronically short of sleep, and depressed by his situation in life. Look where he was living! This century-old carcass of redwood, seven stories high, full of a creaky, cobwebby aura. And all around, the silence of sleep, a hundred people pumping sleep out into the night. He was also surrounded by a residue of past generations, all those strangers who’d moved through here and left their psychic echoes in the halls. All the transients come and gone, each one unpacking his little suitcase of solitary thoughts on yet another empty bed…
In short, this was the kind of atmosphere that people called “haunted,” and after a while it could damn well make you see things. End of story.
At long last, Daryl’s tired flesh claimed its due. He sighed, settled deeper in his armchair, and slept like the dead.
Till the first harsh rattle of the street door roused him, the returning nightshifters ringing to come up. Between buzzing them in, he ducked into the cage’s tiny bathroom, threw cold water in his face, did a wet-towel wipedown of his upper body, put on a clean work-shirt…
Then he took out his typescript and did a last scan for flaws. The pages read smoothly. All fine…each paragraph error-free…all good…
Whoops. Near the top of the last page, he read:
The Messenger 2020 get one also features a…
Get one? Where did that come from? He smiled. Subliminal advertising had no place in the user’s manual—the reader had already gotten one.
And then he found the same senseless interpolation twice again in the last two paragraphs.
Get one get one get one. Some glitch in his fingers had transmitted this phrase three times to the page.
And Daryl realized that all these interjections had occurred after he’d hallucinated that face out the window.
The street door rattled once more, and he jumped in his seat. He buzzed back, and it was Brad who came up
the stairs, tall, well-fleshed, humorous—but seeming to find something strange in Daryl’s face this morning.
“You OK, Dare?”
“Sure! Just tired. Look here”—he was dabbing whiteout on the last page—“I just found these. Will these three little fix-ups here scan OK?”
Brad smiled. “Not a problem for current technology. Wanna grab some coffee on your way to the Bart?”
“Yeah, lemme wake up Kevin.”
Daryl rousted the touseled day-clerk from his lair, then he and Brad headed down the stairs to the street. As they stepped out into the wakening roar of traffic, Daryl was hearing two soundless syllables—the same face mouthing their message to him from the shower curtain, from his air-shaft window. And the message was: Get One.
He said to Brad, “You know that Messenger 2020? Could you get me one, and help me set it up?”
∴
A couple hours later, up on a sun-drenched slope in the Valley of the Moon, Daryl felt a world away from last night’s apparitions. Not that they vanished, but they were distant, put in their place, boxed in the gloom of the far-off Hyperion Hotel. Daryl worked the innocent earth, laying irrigation pipe, and those apparitions were wisps at most, small brief things compared to this wide world, and his work in it.
But that evening, as he Barted back into the City from Hoe-Down’s yard, that twice-seen face grew into a much more solid thing again. Being in the train rocketing through its great sinus under the earth brought the face back to him. The wild subterranean sensation of it was connected somehow to that mournful mad apparition…
It was humbling to find himself moved by such cryptic manifestations, but as soon as he got out at the Sixteenth Street station he went to a pay phone and called Brad.
Within an hour after that, his friend had come over and installed the Messenger 2020 in his room. He rose from splicing the phone-line of Jack’s room to a modern phone-jack. “You’re all hooked up. I’ve gotta say I don’t see the point. The desk takes messages, and who ever calls you anyway? Who do you ever call?”
