Dark Gods

by T E. D Klein

  "Mama never comes in here," Huntoon said off-handedly, fiddl-ing with a turntable on the floor by the bed. "I don't allow her to. She'd just mess everything up."

  "Are these things safe?" asked Nadelman, nervously examining a knife whose handle was a set of brass knuckles.

  "Oh, yeah. You just have to know how to use 'em."

  "Are you sure they're legal?"

  "Listen," said Huntoon, suddenly angry, "that's another thing about old man Braverman. You know what that fucker did? He tried to deny me my constitutional right to own a gun. Hell, he damn near got me in trouble with the law."

  "What do you need all these weapons for anyway?" asked Nadelman. He had taken a position near the doorway.

  "I've got to protect my mother, don't I? I mean, Mama's housebound. She don't go out anymore."

  The logic seemed twisted, but Nadelman didn't pursue it, for by

  this time Huntoon had dragged forth his invention, it iooked straightforward enough, a turntable mounted on a wooden base with an overturned motor to drive it in reverse via a short rubber bell. Eyes glistening with excitement, Huntoon played two cuts backward from a Judas Priest album, but Nadelman was unable to make out the reierences to Satan that the other assured him were there. Huntoon then did the same with Jizzmo's Walpurgh Night album "It's even harder to pick up on this one," he explained, playing a section of "New God on the Block," "you really got to know what you're listening tor"-but all Nadelman could hear was an alien wail that rose and fell endlessly, close enough to human to be frightening.

  He studied the Jizzmo poster on the opposite wall. "Did you perform the Invocation in here?"

  Huntoon looked up, startled. "No," he said. "On the roof. Don't you remember? You've gotta do it underneath the stars-'beneath the void of space.'"

  "Oh, yeah, I remember," said Nadelman, abashed to have forgot-ten his own poem. He felt more than ever like an imposter. "Speak-ing of that god of mine, there's something I've been meaning to ask you-how'd you know I called the thing 'The Hungerer'? Even I didn't remember that."

  "I told you in the letter-He spoke to me."

  But how did he communicate?"

  "You know," said Huntoon. "The way a god's supposed to talk to you."

  "You mean, with a Ouija board?"

  Huntoon eyed him skeptically, as if Nadelman were putting him on. "Come off it, that stuffs for old ladies."

  "Did a voice speak inside your mind, like the born-agains claim?"

  Huntoon shook his head. "No, I heard Him just as plain as I hear you. Just the other night, too. It's like the song says-I heard Him in the thunder."

  Nadelman gasped. "And that's when he told you his name?"

  The other nodded.

  "Well-" Nadelman chose his words carefully-"it certainly came as news to me."

  Huntoon's wolfish features widened in a grin. "Oh, come on, pal. You knew! Maybe it was even you that named Him."

  Later, pondering Huntoon's words as he descended the stairs to the lobby, Nadelman recalled the unpleasant odor of garbage in the man's apartment, and realized that the smell had been the strongest in Huntoon's bedroom.

  Hurrying away from the Huntoons', escaping from their squalid lit-tle neighborhood, he took deep breaths of the chilly air. It tasted good to him. But now he was hungry; Huntoon, that goyische jackass, had never thought to offer him so much as a glass of water. He knew he'd probably be able to find a candy bar at the station, but he yielded instead to the demands of his empty stomach and to the rush of nostalgia that had gripped him earlier that afternoon: he would make a brief pilgrimage to one more childhood haunt, the boardwalk several blocks away.

  He knew it wouldn't be the same; it couldn't be. In those days, when he'd spent whole week-long stretches of his summers with his mother's brother's family at their rented yellow bungalow on Michigan Street, the street names had been a way of learning the states, the skies had been much bluer, the boardwalk down the block a place of fun and danger, of Ski-Ball coupons you collected for a prize, jelly apples that got you sticky, and dizzying Tilt-a-Whirl rides that rivaled Coney Island's. The town's commercial district; in his memory, was a frontier outpost to which one made forays, accom-panied always by grownups, to stock up on comic books and candy, and to thumb endless stacks of pennies into the charm machines at the supermarket. The bland suburban landscape he found himself in now, on this grey November afternoon, was like waking up after a dream.

  Checking the time once more before the last train, he strode past a succession of nearly deserted streets that led down to the board-walk, hidden in places by the line of hotels that crowded up to it like great beasts before a wooden trough. Just off the main thoroughfare he found a brightly lit coffee shop at the end of a row of darkened stores; it was one of the few places he'd seen that still looked open.

  There were only four people inside. The quiet fit his mood. An elderly man down the counter to his right was holding a newspaper up to his face, peering at the classifieds with the intensity of a lost motorist studying a map. It was Saturday's Pest, already limp and tattered, grown old along with yesterday's news. Periodically the man would tap the ash from his cigarette into his empty coffee cup. Nadelman, ordering a cheeseburger and a Coke, found his gaze drawn, as it inevitably was, to the headline:

  SAMARITAN CRUSHED RETURNING 50c.

  Another poor slob who had fallen victim to some god or other. When his burger arrived he stared at the greasy reddish liquid oozing from it onto his plate, and, momentarily sickened, thought of a slaughter-house floor. Pushing the plate away , he ordered a melted cheese and tomato on toast.

  What he really needed was to think. Reviewing the events of the afternoon, he realized what expectations he'd come with; he had arrived at Huntoon's half convinced, or at least hoping, that the man would prove to be a kind of home-grown sorcerer, wise and benign, the suburban version of some character out of Castaneda. He would reveal how he'd magically read Nadelman's mind or, with equal magic, gained entrance into Nadelman's private files. Anything to affirm that the god they had talked of so familiarly was merely a shared fiction.

  But Huntoon had affirmed nothing. Indeed, judging from the stench in his room, he already had the makings of another creature hidden in his closet. And he'd refused to explain away The Hungerer.

  Worse, in their final conversation Huntoon had all but suggested not only that the god was a reality, but that Nadelman himself was responsible for its existence.

  Nadelman swirled the watery amber of his Coke and wondered if it could be true. "Maybe," Huntoon had said, "it was even you that named Him"-as if, on that forgotten day thirty years ago when he'd first inscribed "The Hungerer" in his crisp new leather notebook, he had introduced something new into the universe, something con-jured up within his brain, a being that had sprung into existence with the mere stroke of his pen. (Unless, of course, he had dreamed it into existence, his notebook entry a mere record of the fact, a kind of birth certificate. Who could say where it had actually begun?)

  Was it possible?-that, in some latter-day Naming of Names, he had given the god life in the very act of naming it, and given its flesh substance with every new line of his poem?

  How weird that would be: the notion that the universe might in fact be listening to him, waiting upon his decisions, his carefully chosen words, responding to his commands. How had that line from the poem gone? '' 77/ create Me a Creator,' He would say"-a god made to order!

  But what a dreadful responsibility to contemplate! For it meant that he might in some way be the original cause of the very things that had always appalled and horrified him, all the work of the dark god he'd invented: the fathers stabbed, the mothers raped, the children left to starve.

  To his right the old man stood and, before leaving, pointedly slid the paper toward him, proffering another cause for guilt, another death for which he was responsible: the hapless fifty-cent Samaritan.

  The pages of the newspaper were greasy, but he couldn't resist reading the stor
y. The night clerk of a small midtown hotel had step-ped out for his usual evening's sandwich. Upon returning to his post, he'd discovered that the cashier in the all-night deli had given him half a dollar's extra change; and, being an honest man and a good Christian, he'd informed his superior that he was going back to return it. Halfway there he'd been killed by a heavy chunk of cornice that had broken off the ledge of a building.

  It was too perfect. The god had shown His hand too clearly. Dumb! Why, they'd be onto Him any day now.

  He forced himself to scan the other stories, toying with the possibility that he was responsible for each of them as well. A Jersey mother and four kids had been killed when a drunk teenaged driver veered from his lane and plowed head-on into her car. (The teenager was in serious condition in a Passaic hospital, but Nadelman knew that he'd pull through.) Five members of a family in the Bronx, four of them children, had died in a fire that night. Arson was suspected. (And surely in the background there lurked a spurned husband, jealous lover, or unscrupulous landlord; and behind him, a god.) Police were still searching for the head of the dispatcher employed by a local truck-ing firm, whose mutilated body had been found earlier that week in the company's Long Island warehouse. The article hinted at Mafia connections. (Nadelman knew that the hit man would never be caught.)

  Could something he'd created be responsible for such carnage? It was inconceivable.

  Picking his teeth, Nadelman crossed the empty street and strolled the three blocks to the boardwalk. The beach beyond looked grey and ragged, littered near the water's edge with mounds of wood and garbage that had been washed up by the tide and would have to be removed before summer. Two old women in black overcoats were picking their way carefully over the sand, their backs bowed with age or concentration. Seagulls screamed overhead. Beyond the tidemarks the ocean plunged and retreated, hungry and disconsolate, spilling its power across a narrow barrier of sand.

  Prey to its mood, he ascended the ramp to the boardwalk. The sun was sinking toward the line of hotels to the west; beyond them, far below the horizon, lay the city. Nadelman turned his back to the blin-ding glare and walked in the direction of an overturned lifeguard's stand, watcinng his shadow stretch an impossibly long way down the rough wood of the boardwalk.

  Aged figures sat unmoving as gargoyles on the benches, many of them in yarmulkes, silently watching the ocean. There was nothing else for them here; everything was boarded up now-the few food stands that had not been torn down, a tiny row of game booths whose corrugated metal gates were covered with graffiti. AMUSEMENT ARCADE, said the sign, the letters cracked and peeling.

  He had known, in some buried memory, that it wouid be like this; he and his father or friends had often come here in the winter. This time of year had its own austere beauty-cold, lonely, and bracing. But the boardwalk was different today. The once-grand hotels, which, even when he'd been a boy, had had a certain shabby glamor, were now turned into rest homes and nursing homes, though they had kept their old names-the Paradise, the Palace, the King David Manor-as if in hope of some future resurrection. Elderly faces gazed blankly from their windows. Some of the figures who sat huddled on the ben-ches out front, bundled up like babies, looked more dead than alive. One old bearded man sat folded up like a jackknife, eyes shut. Here and there tall black attendants stood like sentries beside rows of unmoving figures in aluminum wheelchairs, or walked with aching slowness down the boardwalk while their bent and shrunken charges clutched their arms. A bike rider sped by, wheels thrumming on the boards, then a jogger with a Walkman. Several of the youuger faces Nadelman passed struck him as crazy: vacant of expression, or with a birdlike glint of lunacy in their eyes.. One gaunt man in a raincoat and scarf was talking angrily to himself, but stopped for several seconds as Nadelman approached, as if still touched by remnants of embarrassment. Nadelman felt sorriest for the ones who stared bleakly at the sea; he wished that he could conjure up a ship for them to watch, or even, small fishing boat. But the ocean, clear to the horizon, was as empty as a desert.

  A waning of the light reminded him that it was time to return; the wind was cold, and he had to get back to the city. He turned and retraced his steps, the light no longer blinding now, the sun settled behind further layers of cloud and the distant hotels' ornamented roofs. Ocean and sand seemed bathed in a sad, nostalgic glow, the final scene in some half-remember sd travelogue. Ahead of him the brown strip of the boardwalk receded almost to the vanishing point, then curved gently toward the water.

  Something in the quality of the light released a few stray childhood memories, images from an ancient slide show. He remembered walk-ing just this stretch of boardwalk as a boy, staring at that same almost-vanishing point. He'd been happy, he remembered; but of course, it hadn't taken much in those days: a pinwheei, a few unbroken seashells, a mass of cotton candy on a white paper cone, the anticipa-tion of a Cracker jack prize. Today the world was changed, or rather, it was he who had changed; he felt as if everything he gazed upon- the boardwalk, sea, and sand-were doomed to pass away with the dying light, and that the passing would be bitter.

  It occurred to him at that moment there was a third and more likely explanation for the crabbed words that his boy-self had written in the notebook-one that explained, as well, the source of Huntoon's knowledge. It was, quite simply, that he hadn't invented the god after all, hadn't created Him in giving Him a name; imagination had had nothing to do with it. The being that he feared, this force, this plague, really existed, and had existed long before he'd ever become aware of it. He'd had only the briefest glimpse of it; that bee-sting on the hand had been only a warning. And in recording those two words in his notebook, he had set down its identity as faithfully as any good reporter.

  Hadn't there, in fact, been one particular moment of vision, when the glimpse had come? He was sure that there was; it lay just off the edge of his memory-a day long ago, in the faintly lurid world of his childhood, when the god had made His presence known.

  The more seriously Nadelman considered the possibility-with each ne w step westward, back toward the place from which he'd started-the more certain he became. And with the certainty came memories, long-buried snapshots floating lazily to the surface of a pool, soggy but still recognizable after years of lying hidden in the depths.

  He remembered-it felt like a memory-a certain morning; a haze across the sun; pussy willows in a patch of woods. Spring. He'd been on his way to school, well pleased with the world, a Scout knife in his pocket, or a magazine to sneak into class, or maybe his brand-new leather notebook; school in those days had not yet grown oppressive. He remembered the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the buds on the trees, like tiny green sprigs of broccoli, the slap of his shoes on the sidewalk, the sound of birds, the unnerving buzz of bees . . .

  How strange to think it could have happened then, for morning had represented safety to him in those days, ever since his earliest childhood. Often waking long before dawn, he would greet the morning with a smile of relief, free at last to lie back and let his guard down, the terrors of the night got through once more, the world returned again to visibility, the noise of traffic, the comforting presence of people on the street, whistlers on the sidewalk, human footsteps, voices. Everything would be all right if only he could hold out till morning.

  But this one morning had been different. Something had intruded on the day-a darkness suddenly filling the sky, like the dark before a storm, only much worse: for in this darkness lurked the suggestion of a face ....

  Wait. Was that a real memory, or merely the memory of a dream he'd once had? It was maddeningly hard to be sure.

  Or had the vision perhaps come at home? For now another memory had surfaced, of lying alone and ill in bed one afternoon in his old room, where pastel animals smiled from the wallpaper and, through the window by his head, the shingles of a neighboring roof curled brown and familiar through the maples.

  Yes, he remembered now. He had lain there staring dazedly at the ceiling, listening
to a distant airplane recede in wave upon wave of sound-and suddenly he had heard in it a note of horror, the whisper of a monstrous voice that spoke and sang and threatened.

  Unless, of course, that, too, had been a dream. Or a boy's half-delirious fantasy.

  But dream or daydream, what was it he had heard at that moment? What secret had he stumbled upon, back there in the hazy light of his childhood, that he'd recorded so cryptically-yet so correctly-in his notebook?

  He no longer knew. All mysteries paled beside that of his own vanished past. He walked on, the boardwalk wide and empty before him, but he felt as if he'd come to a dead end. The trail had simply disappeared, like words on a blackboard wiped clean with a swipe of the eraser; like the long-demolished houses on his old block.

  And then a gull cried sharply, hungrily, above him, and he remembered.

  He hadn't been in bed or on his way to school. It had happened here, on this very stretch of beach, at the height of the summer, with the ocean filled with bathers and the cloudless sky an eggshell blue.

  Something had inexplicably felt wrong; a terror had come over his young heart as he walked along the sand. A sudden insight A vision. For a moment the view overhead had flickered, as from a loose connection-a momentary darkening of the sun-and he'd thought he glimpsed a face that leered across the sky, too wide for him to take it all in: a vast inhuman shape that grinned and mocked, like a figure gazing down into a fishbowl ....

  But might not this, too, be mere fantasy-some infantile memory of a face peering into his crib, but blurred now, dimmed, distorted by the intervening decades until, gigantic and malevolent, it filled the sky?