Dark Railroad and Other Tales
Page 6
Zero
I awoke with Zero hovering over me. She was doing that more and more often these days. It wasn't even a shock anymore to see her looming there next the bed in her yellow rain coat. This morning she had put aside the black umbrella that completed her ensemble. It leaned against the wall by my bed. I looked at it, as always amused that it was a real physical thing. At least it seemed to be. I had never touched it, just as I had never attempted to touch her.
“What do you want?” I asked, as I did every time she appeared to me. It used to be a pleading, frightened question. Then it became more inquisitive. Lately, it had become a grumpy one.
As usual Zero didn't answer. She just stared at me with the black holes that posed for eyes on her mask. Her yellow rain slicker seemed to glow in the early morning light, and it made no sound as she leaned forward, staring hard at me. I stared back. She no longer scared me as she once did. She straightened and lifted one alabaster white hand and flicked her fingers at me. “Get up” that motion said. Then she picked up her black umbrella, and walked out of the room.
I rolled out of bed and stumbled down the hall into the bathroom where I fell into the shower to wash the last vestiges of sleep away. Afterwards, I wrapped a towel around my waist and cleared the steam away from the mirror with the palm of my hand. The man peering back at me was familiar, you could even say he was me; but today, I noticed how my cheeks had hollowed out, and the skin under my eyes had darkened, as if I was chronically sleep deprived. I was only twenty-five, but my hairline had already crept back about half an inch. The man in the mirror resembled my dad.
I picked up my toothbrush and began to scrub the funk out of my mouth. I looked into the mirror again to see Zero hovering behind me. It’s the type of thing that in a horror movie would have been accompanied by a sting of music, and a scream. But it was just Zero. Over the past few months, I had stopped being afraid of her, and accepted her as a sort of roommate; a roommate who came and went at all hours, never spoke, and didn’t contribute to the bills. On the plus side, she never ate my food. Still, I froze, mouth full of faux mint foam that made my tongue curl, and tried to discern what she was thinking, if she ever thought of anything. Her face was a porcelain mask with red painted lips framed by long, bone straight, black hair that fell past the shoulders of her slicker. The effect could have been achieved by anyone wearing a mask and wig, except that behind the eyeholes there was nothing but blackness. I had spent many days and nights looking into those holes trying to see something there, a presence, a sense of being. But I was wasting my time. There wasn’t anything there.
After a moment, she drifted away. I finished my teeth, and then stared at the razor lying beside the sink bowl. Another glance in the mirror, and I decided to skip shaving. In fact, I thought, I might grow a beard. My dad would never grow a beard. I went back to my room - Zero was now at the opposite end of the hall staring out the large window in the living room - and dressed.
When I came out of my bedroom, I found Zero standing by the door, umbrella in hand.
“What?” I asked.
Zero just stared at me.
“You know I can't read minds.” I went back to my bedroom to find my boots. She was waiting from me there. “What do you want?” I asked for the billionth time.
She pointed to my closet. I copied her gesture, and when she made no other movement, I pulled the folding door open. Now floating beside me, she pointed to the olive green army surplus rucksack in the corner. I dragged the rucksack out of the closet and opened it. I began to pull items out, and lay them on the floor in a neat row: canteen, rain poncho, leather gloves, a folding shovel.
Zero pointed at the shovel.
“This?”
She just kept pointing.
I put the stuff back into the rucksack, except for the shovel, and found my boots as Zero watched me with her black, empty eye holes. When we left the house together, she held her umbrella over her head and floated down the rickety stairs bolted to the side of the house. My apartment was on the second floor of an old Victorian era house. My downstairs neighbor was middle-aged woman who spent her days sitting on the porch, no matter how cold, hot, or rainy it was, chain-smoking and watching life go by. I lifted a hand in greeting and she nodded in acknowledgement. She took no notice of Zero drifting down the sidewalk on an unseen breeze.
It was the middle of November. The air was cold and the last of the autumn leaves clung, brown and withered, to the trees lining the street. We passed a house where Halloween decorations still hung from the door and plastered the windows. I began to rethink my decision to follow on foot until Zero took a sudden left turn and wandered into someone’s back yard. There was no car in the driveway, and the blinds on the windows were down. I stepped onto the crispy, dead lawn in pursuit.
We didn't follow a straight path. Zero took a circuitous route, going down one street and up another, zig-zagging through people's yards, and taking a diagonal path through a used car lot. She moved at a leisurely pace, and I hardly broke a sweat. The streets were oddly empty; maybe everyone was at work, or maybe they were still asleep. Or maybe I had finally snapped, and I was presenting a rather unseemly spectacle: unshaven man in ill-fitting clothes shambling about town occasionally muttering to himself, and I was only imagining that the town was too quiet. I soon reminded myself that wasn’t the case. Things like Zero don’t exist. I know they don’t exist. And knowing crazy things don’t exist proves you’re not crazy, right?
Eventually, our journey took a general direction towards the northern edge of town. There at the city limits, the town ends abruptly. There is no sprawl and the open fields of corn and soybeans begin. There is a field where a development company had planned on building a new subdivision, but when the housing market went bust, the project was abandoned before they even broke ground. This was where Zero led me.
I followed her across the field. She never looked back at me as she floated ahead, gripping her umbrella, like a demented Mary Poppins, her yellow coat flapping in the wind. She stopped at a low mound of earth, grown over with brown grass that waved in the wind. She pointed with her free hand at the mound.
“There?” I asked. Zero nodded silently, her blank doll's face, as always, expressionless. I unfolded the shovel and twisted the screw in the middle of the handle to keep the shovel in the open position. It was a short handled shovel so I had to bend over a little more than was comfortable to start digging.
A cold breeze, sharp as a knife, began to blow, but the effort of digging made me sweat. I paused to wipe my brow and to take a glance at Zero where she floated a few feet away from me. She hadn’t moved from that spot since I had started, but I noticed that there was a flaw in that perfect porcelain face: just there across the cheek was a crack, zig-zagging from the corner of her left eye-hole to the edge of the mask, where it got lost in the wave of dark hair. When had that happened?
I didn’t want to think about what the crack might mean. I was afraid of what it might reveal underneath the mask. I went back to digging, but I hadn’t tossed more than two shovelfuls of dirt when a loud clack echoed across the field as the shovel hit something hard in the dirt. I put the shovel aside, and knelt down next to the hole.
There was something there, a grayish white against the darker soil. I reached down and touched it. It was cold and solid. I brushed some of the dirt away, revealing a larger piece of the object. It used to be white, and as I brushed some more, I found some painted red lips, now chipped and dull. I looked up at Zero. It was her in the dirt.
She tilted her head down at me, and I could see her face was now covered in dark, jagged cracks, winding across her forehead and down her temples; from the corners of her eye-holes to her cheeks. Disturbed, I looked away, back into the hole.
There was something else there. At first I thought it might be some sort of thick root, even though there was nothing but grass for five acres. Then I realized that the shape wasn't right, and neither was the texture, nor the color.
“What is this?”
Zero’s black eye-holes bored into me. As I watched, the cracks in her face widened, became fissures, and with a loud crack her face exploded. I ducked to avoid any flying shards, and when I looked back, there was nothing left. No sign of Zero anywhere.