Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  Our town?

  No, no. A distant place. Boston.

  In my mind the British were too awful to see. They were large, dark, hairy, and smelly, they came by the thousands and crouched in shadows and dust and hid among Electrolux hoses in the unlighted hallway that led to our attic stairs.

  Why there? In that corridor was wallpaper similar to that described in the story. Not as detailed but it was from an older time, a different place. It was from that wallpaper that I annealed a terror of “the British” with a fear of blood hunting.

  As mentioned, I have no brother or sister. I am my own sibling. I am Raymond. I banished me to that wall, the place of blood and death bordered by deep forest, distant villages and, somewhere invisible, to a castle of my own making. I built that room, the dainty place within. I filled it with the machineries of wonder…

  Oh, yes. That.

  Once upon a time, the rods for our kitchen curtains vanished. My grandmother had taken down the curtains to wash them and left their spring supports on the table. They vanished.

  Where had I put them?

  I didn’t know. Truly. The taking of and hiding the things had slipped from my five-year-old consciousness and the rods truly had vanished. Magic.

  I finally admitted I’d hidden them. I didn’t remember but it seemed better to confess.

  Where were they?

  In a “dainty dish” I insisted. Which notion I suspect I’d cribbed from the nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Eventually, I allowed that they were in a dainty place rather than just a dish. I stuck to that. For weeks, I insisted I’d put them in a dainty place.

  Eventually, someone found them in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I did not remember putting them there, I do not remember. It must have been magic.

  RAF LAKENHEATH: AT ANGELS SIXTEEN

  “It is well that war is so terrible—lest we should grow too fond of it.” —Robert E. Lee

  1966 through 1969 I was in the U.S. Air Force. For most of that time I was in England, some of it near Cambridge, most of it in London. At 24 in that era of Vietnam I was older than most just entering the ranks but still, I was a kid. Now and then something from those years will pop up and I write. Typically, I mothball what emerges. Why? No idea.

  I wrote this story when another writer and I thought we might package and sell an anthology of war-themed horror. I dipped into memories and out came RAF Lakenheath near Brandon, Suffolk, England. The night I drove there from London, the farmers of Suffolk were burning chaff from their fields following the fall harvest. When I got to the Heath, USAFE (United States Air Forces, Europe) was conducting a practice alert and RAF Lakenheath was locked down. I spent my first night in-country in the base jail, safely out of the way of colonels and master sergeants who wandered the evening dropping smoke bombs and telling people they were dead and their posts destroyed. Apparently, the brig was not part of the game and we FNGs were out of the way.

  My eventual home on base was a World War II-era Quonset hut, a corrugated steel structure that looked like a silo lying on its side and half buried in the earth. Most of the guys assigned to them hated the huts. I loved mine. I had my own little room at the rear of the building, my own kerosene stove. My own back door opened onto a field where cattle grazed. I even had my own cow who greeted me mornings at the fence. A hundred yards beyond my cow was a forest. What’s not to like?

  Lakenheath hadn’t been a base during the Second War. It had been a target. German night raiders tasked to bomb RAF Mildenhall, about 4 miles away, were expected to pound the dummy flightlines, mock aircraft and bogus buildings of Lakenheath.

  The core of At Angels Sixteen came from an article I read when I was about 10. Boys’ Life, Reader’s Digest, not sure which. The story was about a man who survived a fall from an airplane. He survived in circumstances much as the German doctor posits about our tail gunner in the story.

  I didn’t buy the explanation when I was 10. Obviously magic saved the guy, but you’re free to accept the Nazi version of the story.

  B-17s. I love them. I got a ride in one at an air show in Reading, Pennsylvania when I was about 7. There were plenty of the old war birds doing such work in 1949. One or two still fly. The noise, the smell, the bone-chatter was magic, magic to the core. See? We boys love the machinery of warfare. It isn’t until we’re grown that we realize that combat is terror, boredom, loss, flesh, and pain.

  There’s the story. Our proposed anthology never came about and I never submitted it until the editor of the zombie book-that-never-was asked if I had any World War II-centered horror/fantasy tales for an anthology to be called A Dark and Deadly Valley.

  I did.

  FIRST VOYAGES: SOME STAGES ON THE ROAD TOWARD OUR FAILURE TO REACH THE MOON

  There once was a sub-realm of science fiction called First Voyages. These were stories of mankind’s baby steps off-world. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote one, ditto Jules Verne and countless more. Kids of my generation had Lester del Rey’s Mission to the Moon and Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo. We had films too. I can’t tell you how many wet summer afternoons I spent in my Uncle Jim’s Lyric Theater in Chester, PA, watching Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M, a first voyage that does not end well for the intrepid explorers.

  Yes, this story is autobiographical. My dad was not killed in Korea or any war. Reinhart’s name was not Reinhart. The hat had a major’s gold oak leaf on it and had been my Uncle Bonney’s and he remained alive long enough to divorce my Aunt Ida and move out of all our lives. I did pray to be the first guy on the moon. I drew countless pictures, made hundreds of plans. There was a well traveled-in refrigerator carton in our basement. Other than not getting to the moon, that’s it. In the ’80s of the last century, I had occasion to pick up Buzz Aldrin at O’Hare Airport and deliver him to a book signing at THE STARS OUR DESTINATION bookstore in Chicago. That’s as close as I got.

  Some Stages was written because my writers group, Twilight Tales, decided to hold a benefit on the second anniversary of the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. The goal was to honor not only Columbia’s but all astronauts, cosmonauts, and dreamers who died trying to kick our monkey asses out of the cradle and into the real world, the universe. Twilight Tales regulars Jody Lynn Nye, Richard Chwedyk, a few others, and I were asked to read something personally meaningful at the event. It was a good evening. We heard a few first voyage pieces by Heinlein and others. Money was raised for the families of the Columbia crew and we spent time together over drinks and good tales.

  Jody and I wrote original tales. Her story was excellent and, as you might expect, featured a space-faring pussycat.

  Mine was the story you just read.

  DeAngelo is younger than I, but we both planned for ours to be the first feet on the moon. I was in 7th grade on the evening of October 4th, 1957. I’d been to my eye doctor and came home bespectacled, a four-eyed flight-school wash-out to-be and learned that the Soviet Union had beaten us to space. Like DeAngelo, I felt my country had been cheated out of its proper place in history. That night, like DeAngelo, I decided, hot damn, I’m going to fix that.

  There was no cat.

  “Reinhart” and I stayed friends throughout grade school and junior high and fell out much later over Carol Devine and because he remained a gearhead and I…?

  Well, I’d fallen in love with distance.

  “Reinhart” and I planned many trips to the moon, the planets. Then we became convinced that dinosaur bones lay just beneath the surface in the cemetery near our homes. Who needed to mount expeditions to the Gobi Desert or anywhere? We had Charles Evans Cemetery. We sifted through tons of damp soil gravediggers had conveniently put aside for us. We found suspicious things, things that may have been… who knew what? We found meteors, which were most probably bits of slag from the Carpenter Steel plant not too far from there. We found curious markings on sheets of shale. I was convinced Neanderthals had lived in our town and had sketched saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths on those slabs of yel
low shale. Better yet, perhaps those shadow blots were… Well, maybe, perhaps, might have been… Could they be accidental “photographs” made by a marvelous coincidence of ancient lightning and the magical chemistry in the soils of Reading, Pennsylvania!

  Eventually, “Reinhart” explained the fissiparous nature of shale and how intrusions of impurities into… Well, something. And that was that and…

  And maybe I never forgave his explanations and maybe Carol Devine wasn’t to blame. I recognized, finally, that we’d taken separate paths to our personal stars. See? He wanted to know. He wanted accuracy about rocks, bones, and rockets. I wanted the rock I held in my hand to have had ghosts within.

  What I said about falling in love with distance. That’s not quite right. I had fallen in love not with the stars but with the space between stars. The moon? It was great. Other planets? Wonderful. But like many travelers, I fell in love with the going to rather than the being there. Science and its handmaiden, engineering, were about smoothing it out, turning a voyage to the moon into a trip to the grocery store.

  Wrong. Obviously wrong. A lot of people hung their soft and fragile asses out there. Quite a few had to die to earn us our first trip off-planet.

  I didn’t lose interest, not exactly. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, I was living in London, not serving in DaNang. My across-the-hall neighbor, a producer for the BBC, and I sat on the edges of our seats. I thrilled to Armstrong and Aldrin’s descent and touchdown. Then… “Tranquility Base here.” Ahh! He nicknamed God’s place! No longer part of a distant planet, where the Eagle landed was now a Base. Humans are there. Americans. I waited for the first words on the surface. There they were. Small step. Giant leap. Good but rehearsed. Nice sentiment. His next words were about soil compressibility. Important, things Reinhart would have drooled over. The dream was concluded. Reinhart had beaten me to the moon and Carol Divine.

  It also occurred to me that night in London, that all the books on that first voyage had now been written. There’d be no more First Men in the Moon, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Rocketship Galileo. Our first voyage was now history. And it was, well... kind of dull.

  Apollo 13 changed that for a bit, but the dream was over. We beat the Russians and, cripes, what a lousy reason to make history.

  Understand. I am not saying I was disappointed that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins’s flight hadn’t been a disaster, but the DeAngelo in me really wished that something had been lurking in the space between here and there, something no one had counted on, something the Reinharts hadn’t factored in.

  When I thought to write a story to commemorate the loss of the crews of Columbia, Challenger, or Apollo 1, the dead of Soyuz and other losses along our way, what I really wanted to memorialize was the dream that took us to the edge. Too many of us are left, still looking toward the horizon or into the shadows.

  Back to Buzz Aldrin. He’d been scheduled for a bookstore appearance. At the last minute, I was the only one with both car and time enough to get and deliver him. When I got to O’Hare, he was walking down the onramp, bag in hand, about to hitch a ride. I gathered him. “Fine thing,” I said, “you can send a man to the moon but you can’t pick him up from the airport.” He laughed. He did that easily for a man who’d almost been left by his hosts to find his own way. I had an hour or so of gridlocked privacy with the second man on the moon, the man who had in fact uttered the very first words on the moon. Look it up: “Contact Light. Okay, engine stop.” Significant here is that in that hour, I met a guy who was earthy, human, bright—this is the guy who taught NASA orbital mechanics, the guy who suggested using water submersion for zero gravity training—this was the ultimate Reinhart. And I found that he had as deep—if not a deeper—capacity for dreaming than DeAngelo.

  Well, Buzz wasn’t the first on the moon either.

  REAL GHOSTS: THE BOY’S ROOM

  For me, The Boy’s Room is the most disturbing story in this collection. It is also one that was rejected for publication, turned down not by distant editors but by one I considered (and still do) to be a friend.

  The story was written for an anthology called Spooks. Ghost tales. Simple, yes, but there I was, bitten in the ass by my avoidance of tropes. Cripes, the world will not end if I write a vampire story featuring the toothy undead, or a zombie story with shuffling corpses.

  Tycelia and I had just married, our fortunes newly merged. She was going through pictures, telling stories of life in Mississippi. She mentioned a part of an old home-place the family called “the boy’s room.” The place was a separate shack behind her grandmother’s main house where some boys of a boy-heavy family of brothers, step-brothers, and half-brothers could sleep. There are photographs. The name tweaked my fancy and I melded the pictures and her stories with some of recollections of sleepovers at cousins’ places during my own summer holidays in eastern Pennsylvania.

  What makes this story so disturbing to me? The ghost is not that of the boy, Rafe, or of the old conjure woman; it isn’t the spirit of anyone dead in the common sense of the word at the time of the girl’s experience. The ghost of the tale is Melissa, her life attending her from her own empty future of missed opportunities.

  With age, that strikes bone. At 60, a lot of looking-back accompanies forward-peering hope. These years I catch echoes, glimpse earlier iterations of Larry; I see him in his hopes and wishes. He knows deeply that such and such a thing will—no: must—absolutely must happen.

  And I know now, of course, it did not and so dearly wish I could reach back, advise, nudge, speak to that life that is still alive in me.

  As said, my friend did not buy this story. As said, the story still makes me shiver.

  BECAUSE I HAD TO: LITTLE GIRL DOWN THE WAY

  This is a ghost story. It posits the not very original notion that heaven and hell are the same place, depending on who you are. It’s also about love in some form or another. It was written quickly, in a passion, fast as I could type it. Here’s how it came to be.

  I write for a living and I write because I want or have to. For a living, I write for the City of Chicago. When I write fiction, I write because a notion has popped into my head and I think it’s pretty neat.

  Sometimes, though, I write out of passion. Some scream. I write. Anger, fear, sorrow, hatred. The pieces that come from these screams are frequently harsh, brutal, nasty. I call them my “Vile Tales” after a comment I once made to a friend about a story of mine called “Catching.”

  She called it “erotic.”

  “It’s not erotic,” I said. “It’s just vile.”

  There are a lot of these. Typically, they begin with a person in crisis and often end in mayhem, blood and pain.

  “Little Girl Down the Way” is one of these Vile things; it comes from sorrow and anger. Here’s where the anger came from.

  I live on the Northside of Chicago. Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play, is three blocks to the north. Lake Michigan is three blocks east. During the season, my neighborhood, Wrigleyville, becomes… Remember in It’s a Wonderful Life, when Jimmy Stewart wishes he’d never been born, his guardian angel shows him a world without his influence? Potterville! That’s my neighborhood: sports bars, frat-rats and bunnies. In winter it’s just a place where the overcompensated come to hoot and puke out the butt ends of youth.

  In the decade before the housing bubble busted, Wrigleyville was undergoing a facelift. People with far too much money and far too little imagination wanted to move here. They came because this had been a place they prowled when young, a place to get drunk, to get laid, to piss unchecked in alleys.

  When they came back to live, they looked up and said, “We can’t have this...!”

  They are not the source of my passion.

  A malignancy came with yuppie infestation: 19th-century frame houses were dissolving; overnight, cheaply-built, enormously pricey faux-brick condos arose in their place, a form of urban cancer that both destroys our collective memory and offers us a glimpse of mid
-21st-century slums-to-be.

  But this isn’t from where my passion that formed this tale comes either…

  One afternoon, late in the 20th century, I was driving up the alley. I passed a muddy pond where a house and garage had been the day before. The site was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. On hand was the usual cast: police, paramedics, plain-clothes bureaucrats, photographers, rubberneckers. The demolishers had uncovered the bones of a small body at the end of the walkway from the old house to the alley. The corpse was the body of what was presumed to be a 2-3-year-old girl. Apparently, she had been there for many years. Decades.

  The old, sad tale went to the papers and disappeared.

  Three years later, the story oozed back into the news. Chicago homicide had not given up on the little girl; they had done their job of speaking for the dead, a yeoman task when you consider that the victim the murder-police had to speak for in this case was about 50 years into her measure of eternity. The story returned as a page 5 news item: on her deathbed, a woman in Nebraska confessed to having killed her child in Chicago, in this place, now gone, in the late 1950s. The details were scant but moving by the bareness of their bones.

  The woman had been identified and been found in hospital dying of congestive heart failure. When questioned, she confessed to having given birth to the girl in the late 1940s and had kept her a secret from the world. Reasons? No reasons. Or if there had been a reason, it probably derived from some unrecognizable form of love. See, when the mother became pregnant again, she kept the little girl locked in the basement to keep her new child from… From what, remains unknown. Love, of some unimaginable species.