A-Sides

by Victor Allen

He had expected something just like it, but that didn't keep him from being afraid when he awoke and heard the footsteps outside of his trailer. Whatever it was, it could bode nothing but ill. No human being would be here in this place at three in the morning when the blood struggles through cold, pinched veins.

  He could hear whoever it was tramping with bold defiance around the trailer. Around and around, stopping here and there as if inspecting something. Twice, the rustling of leaves stopped directly beneath his window, the dark, shadowy thing only the breadth of sheet metal away from him.

  He had thought he would know what to do when the time came. Too much of a strange nature had happened to him over the past years for him to balk at a strange noise that might be only a roving 'possum. Except he knew that wasn't what it was.

  His eyes were playing tricks on him. Eerie, phantom shadows leaped and swirled in the dark corners of the trailer. The wind leaned against the walls, squeaking and stretching the thin metal skin. The kerosene heater was burning low and its guttering flame gargled and sputtered.

  The rustling noises receded from his trailer and he let out his pent-up breath in a trembling sigh. He hadn't realized he had been holding it, his eyes wide and glazed, his white-knuckled fingers gripping the hard mattress.

  He stayed that way until the rustling footsteps had been silent for five minutes. The heater's glow had diminished to a sullen red ring and the trailer's temperature was falling. It was either get up and put more fuel in the heater or spend the rest of the night not only scared, but cold.

  His first thought when he sat up was not of his fright, but of how the cold would bite into him when the insulating blanket's seal was breached. He pulled the ragged, care-woven quilt around him as he placed his foot on the frigid trailer floor. Metatarsals, stiffened by the cold, recoiled in protest as they were forced to yield to their weighty new burden.

  He navigated the camper's narrow corridor, wobbling sleepily between the beds that ruled both sides of the aft section. His heels made jarring thumps on the linoleum covered floor beams. His feet and ankle joints popped like lady finger firecrackers.

  The heater was a useless lump of metal, cold to the touch, the last of its fire extinguished. There was a fifty five gallon drum of kerosene outside, but Mark's fear of fire ever since the night his barely know classmate had been consumed had not allowed him to bring an extra supply inside. An uneasy calm that was only the result of sleep induced half-awareness settled on him.

  He was at the door, his hand on the light switch, when he saw the man standing outside. His finger froze on the switch. The figure was obviously a man, but something was hauntingly, in its most literal sense, familiar about him. Mark could ferret out no details in the moonless night, only the outlines of long sleeves and long pants snapping in the stiff wind. It was the slight rightward tilting of the head, or the barely hipshot stance that nudged some part of his mind towards recognition.

  Fresh fear burned in his heart like a powder keg set afire by a stray spark. The figure stood alone, almost complacent in its study of the trailer. It showed no sign of retreating, rooted as firmly as any tree to its spot in this darkly enchanted glade.

  A two foot hickory club with a leather thong attached to it leaned against the wall by the door. It was an inch and three quarters thick along its entire length and sturdy as concrete. Kim's father had made it in high school, intending for it to be a table leg. As he had turned it on the lathe, a worm-eaten flaw had emerged, rendering it useless for its intended purpose. He had given it to Kim when she and Mark had moved to the city. She had carried it as she walked to work at the Burger King in the days before they could afford a car. Mark could only guess at how many attacks Kim had thwarted with it, simply by clunking it heavily on the sidewalk as she walked.

  He closed his cold hand around it, hefted it, and found its weight good. He gripped the metal door handle. He levered it up and pushed. The door was stuck in its frame and he had to shove it before it would jar loose from its moorings. It swung outward with a grudging squeal, banging into the thin, aluminum and wire screen door. The night was split by the raucous twangs of the screen's metallic voice.

  “Who is it,” Mark called, his voice sharp and brittle as kindling in his mouth. The wind was an Arctic intruder, prowling his home on soundless feet. “Who's out there?”

  Save for the chilling cries of distant night fowl, there was no reply. The figure's stoic complacency was eerily threatening. Mark turned the outside light on. The feeble glow opened a useless parasol of light that lit only ten feet beyond the rickety wooden steps. He stepped onto the top plank. The make-do staircase wobbled and groaned, tilting sideways three inches. Mark raised his club and smacked it into the palm of his left hand, but was unable to put any real menace into it. He imagined himself, wrapped in a blanket like a feeble woman, shaking with cold and fright, threatening shadows from his stoop like an old man with a cane.

  “Come closer, asshole,” he challenged, swelling his voice with a tinny belligerence that was contrived, wondering if anything he could do would make a difference. “Come closer and see if I can't scramble your brains for you.”

  Any human would have answered the slur with a threat of its own, run, or come closer. This figure did none of those things.

  Dartlike cold prickled Mark's bare feet as he eased down the steps, club at the ready. He stepped onto the earthen floor of the forest. Fallen leaves, thick with a coating of frost, stuck to his heels.

  He thought he knew who it was that awaited him in this place of thick shadows, mirrored lives and endless nightmares. It was the dark Narcissus from the sinkhole.

  He moved towards the shadowy figure like one mesmerized by a rara avis, unaware of the darkness that cloaked him as he retreated from the safe glow of his lights. Dried weeds, snap-happy as arthritic bones, grated across his naked shins. The rip saw of the wind sliced through him, whipping the folds of the blanket up and away as it searched for ingress. Rocks and hard knots of earth frozen into erratic shapes bruised and slashed the soles of his feet.

  The figure remained rock still until Mark was within thirty feet, then began to move backwards. Not walking in any sense that Mark could see. It just seemed to recede away, like the water as Tantalus tried to draw a drink. Trying to catch and hold the phantom would be as impossible as Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

  The figure drew him onward, away from the false safety of his trailer and its logical, man-made walls, and into the lightless, ancient woods where nothing of man's constructs had prospered. It was a fatally hypnotic need to know that pushed him ahead. A humid raft of wind, cold and sharp with the sting of water droplets, bit his eyes and he knew he was near one of the sinkholes. There was something in the sinkholes, perhaps something as wondrous as a wall of gold sunken in its depths, or something as dark and corrupting as a legion of lost and tortured souls that would arise at his bidding, their only need his ability to flesh them out; to make them breathe again.

  A clearing emerged from the velvet wall of night and Mark saw the faint glimmer of starshine mirrored on the rippling surface of the sinkhole, as delicate as a rue anemone. It twinkled and faded, glowing bright then dim as the wind stirred the waves. There were new fingers and freshets of ice under his feet, channels carved by the ever-advancing water. His toes were frozen wooden blocks, his nose a dripping chunk of ice. He still held the club in his hand, but he drew no courage from it.

  Any time now the figure would slip from the edge of reality, tumbling backwards into the fantasy world of the sinkholes. It was at the edge now, and fading. It grew shorter, first its feet, then its legs disappearing.

  Mark trudged forward, gathering speed, needing to see more than just the hazy form of his nemesis. Deep in his mind, warning bells clanged, ordering him to halt his headlong rush. The sinkhole was too close, the ice too slick.

  The figure was only head and shoulders now, peering above the center of the sinkhole like some creature from a hor
ror movie, its body submerged. There had been not a breath nor ripple of water as it had slipped silently and completely into its numbing depths.

  The lip of the sinkhole was ten feet away, now five, yet Mark never diverted his eyes from the puzzling enigma of the man in the lake.

  The figure slipped elusively away. Its shoulders went under, then its chin. For a fraction of a second Mark thought he saw the flash of eyes before they, too, submerged, leaving not even a ripple to mark their passage.

  Mark's leading foot suddenly slipped on a frozen slate, plunging his right leg knee-deep into the paralyzing waters. A cold as painful as the sting of a jellyfish shot down the pathways of his nervous system and violent shudders instantly wrested control of his muscles.

  He jerked his right leg from the freezing water and his balance failed him. He fell to his left, throwing his right arm out for equilibrium. The heavy club in his right hand swung out and its inertia added the final touch to his loss of stasis. As he toppled, the club was thrown clear somewhere in the woods. He heard it snapping off small branches in flight before landing with a crackling thud. The blanket fell away from him and he landed hard on the packed earth, naked to the cold except for his cotton briefs.

  Somehow, both of his feet had managed to find their way into the sinkhole, and he yanked them out. That old, pre-adult dread of something grabbing an exposed limb blotted out his pain. It had been an irrational fear in childhood, now it wasn't. He had seen the thing himself. It could grab him, pull him down with its skeletal arms, hold him under until his lungs filled with water, all his struggles useless. It had happened before, he was sure of it.

  His feet had already numbed to the biting cold settling upon his exposed body. The hair on his chest stung as the wind tore at it. His shoulder where he had fallen ached like frostbite. He pushed the pain aside as he searched for his quilt. His only thought was to wrap himself in the quilt, restore some warmth to his body. He had fallen into such cold water once before, and he knew it could kill him in less than fifteen minutes.

  His groping hand happened on the blanket and he wrapped it around his quaking shoulders, sitting huddled on the ground. He didn't trust himself to make it all the way back until some warmth returned to his body. Just a couple of minutes, he told himself.

  Clear mucus ran from his nose, trembling on his upper lip as the chattering castanets of his teeth clicked together. He stared glassily at the wind-lapped surface of the sinkhole, expecting the phantom to return and take him as he sat swooning and immobile. The circle of trees around him writhed into arcing life, bending and stooping, whipped by a freshening wind. Frozen bark cracked and thick trunks creaked like bone-dry boards. Leaves loosened by fall's imperative fluttered down, some of them falling on the surface of the sinkhole where they floated, odd little boats with no passengers or cargo.

  Frozen starshine refracted and trebled in his watering eyes, as ephemeral as the figure itself had been. Time had somehow sped up and he had been out in the subfreezing temperatures for more than three quarters of an hour, first drawn by the figure, then seduced by his own memories. No good thing could come of it. 'Scilla had said whatever was here cried out to be worshiped, or fed. There was no God here, only something with a ravenous hunger for pain. And if he fed it would it not grow? Become even stronger?

  The light in his eyes burned brighter, swelling into more than starshine. He blinked and shook his head, trying to drive out this new nightmare. But it was no nightmare, unless it was a waking one. Near the center of the pond, a silver-white light burned, coming to life near its unknown floor. It rose from the depths like the lambent, shining eye of a sea monster.

  The disc of light was eight feet across and rising slowly as if on currents, bubbling and pushing the water ahead of it in a gurgling wave. The water roiled and eddied, as if some huge creature were turning beneath the surface. Some pre-human, Lovecraftian abomination with the head of an alligator and the body of an eel, with two gigantic saucers of light for eyes.

  A second flat disc of light slowly came into view, turning from flat profile to hazy full face, slightly glazed and shimmering from the lapping waters. The flat, glassy saucers drifted up with laconic stateliness, as subdued as the headlights of a funeral procession.

  The two spherical lights filled the width of the pond. They never surfaced completely, only drifted dreamily inches beneath the wave crests. Mark watched them, a new rime of fear icing his heart.

  They came in a rush, all their former docility and sluggishness gone. In one second they went from enigmatic, shining questions to active dangers. Their advance was preceded by a slight dimming as they pushed a new depth of water ahead of them in a bow wave. The reflected light from the saucers ran over and over the wave crests, running into a backwash like a wake. Rushing liquid hissed and foamed.

  Mark yanked himself up from the ground with a screech of still-locked tendons in his knees. He staggered backward in a daze as the first wave of dark water crashed over the bank. The icy spray broke apart and washed over him. Spinning water droplets glittered like sparklers in the night, congealing into streaks of shining ice on his skin. His hair froze to his scalp in icy spikes. He waited for the thunderous tremor as whatever was under the waves crashed into the granite walls of the sinkhole. He stared with dreamy apprehension at the sullenly glowing lights that had begun to pulsate slowly, like a tediously beating heart.

  The crash never came. In its place, the water bubbled and swelled. With a heart as heavy as the weight of the endless depths, he realized that it was coming out. It would drag its behemoth, slimy bulk from the black fathoms and take him to sate its endless hunger.

  Mark squeaked out a strangled, incomprehensible cry and turned to run. His legs were too cold and the muscles had stiffened. The blanket swirled around and between legs that moved as rigidly as wooden bowling pins. There was a groaning, sub-bass rumble in his head that almost overpowered the ghost's whistle of the wind. It was the voice of the beast only he could hear.

  He blundered blindly with no light to show him the way but the dim bulb outside of his trailer. And even that light was intermittently masked by hanging vines and the ebony bones of naked tree limbs.

  He raced, white-livered, through the woods, passing the crumbling relic of the church. An orange, Halloween light burned from within, lighting the frost-covered windows with a macabre glow. Its crossless spire strained against the purple blackness of the night sky. Goose flesh from more than the cold crept down his chilled body as a maniacal cackling that was the voice of all-consuming madness shrilled out of the church's open doorway. It was the sound a crazed deacon might make as he poured gasoline over the pew cushions and hymnals while the congregation sat stunned at gunpoint. He would have already shot a couple of the parishioners as a lesson before setting fire to the doused paper and fabric. Mark heard the screams of the trapped parishioners, yelling and yammering like a congregation trapped and set ablaze by a madman.

  Thorns and prickly shrubs blocked his path, as if they had moved stealthily to impede him like the living trees in The Wizard of Oz. One reaching branch hooked his blanket and ripped it from his back. He stumbled on, tearing his gaze from the haunted church, past the open foundation of a destroyed building. A groaning wind blew out of the ground from the wishing well that had magically blown away its cover of boards and vines. Its endless blackness led, perhaps, to an underground cave filled with Native American artifacts and life-sized horses carved from the finest gold, with emeralds for eyes and dried scalps dangling their curly, blond and brown locks from golden pegs wrought into their beaten flanks. A place he had seen before when he was eleven years old, dragged away from his tent one night when he was camping in his back yard by crazy Willy, a drunken reprobate who suffered from emphysema and cirrhosis.

  “You comin' wid me, boy,” Willy had breathed into his pale face, wrinkling it with gin fumes. His one gold tooth had gleamed like a pirate's earring in the moonlight, his face emaciated and cragg
ed by the wages of disease.

  “Willy goan show you somethin', boy,” he had grinned, the last of his sanity faintly gleaming in those rolling white eyes.

  And Mark had gone, following the crazy, drunken old wino deep into the woods, watching him as he staggered over a bolt set into a wooden door in the floor of the forest. Willy had unsteadily scraped leaves from the bolt, then had Mark help him haul the door open. A disturbed cold had bellowed from the hole as the door had squeaked back on its rotted hinges. Mark had followed Willy down into that cavern he had just thought of.

  Willy had died two weeks later, and Mark could never remember where or in what woods around his home those fabulous treasures had lain secreted. But he had never forgotten they were there. Could this have been the spoiled land that Willy had brought him to?

  Mark looked away from the hole. The light of the trailer was close beyond a newly opened clearing. He ran as fast as he could, the pitiful cries of damned souls at his heels, the destructive crashing of the beast from the lake not far behind. He stubbed his numb toes on the stairs as he misjudged their height and his teeth clenched in unendurable agony. His hands shook so badly that the door handle jittered in his fingers and he had to steady them with his other hand to get the door open.

  He fell through the doorway, the meager heat inside the trailer shocking to his numb body. He slammed the door shut behind him.

  The noises stopped.

  It was as if someone had lifted the needle from a record. The night was as still and silent as it had ever been. Still shivering, Mark wiped the condensation from the glass window in his door and peered outside.

  Just within his field of view and off to his left, the steady shape of the church was dark and quiet, as brooding and lifeless as castle lions. He looked at the wishing well. The harsh wind had died to nothing and he tried to see if the parched weeds around it still whipped in that alien, subterranean wind. They showed no movement, rigid as steel beams. He couldn't see the sinkhole at all.

  He switched on the overhead light and sat on his bed, pulling an extra blanket around him. He knew his jaw muscles would be sore the next day from the strenuous chattering of his teeth. He huddled inside his blanket, ragged pain edging into his cut feet as his body slowly warmed. Once in a while the serpent's tail of the wind whipped down and made the trailer lean. He would look up, eyes wide, before returning to hide in his blanket, realizing all at once just how small and used up he had become. How this place had turned him from a man to a withered coward with no balls, whimpering like a whipped animal in its den. He had thought it was because of the betrayal of all those who were near to him, but it was this place that had instigated that betrayal. He had been duped.

  His glance strayed to the faceless Eleanor on the wall, her eyes regarding him with her self-serving mockery, then to Anna's portrait. The brightness and understated sadness he had so lovingly crafted into her expression comforted him a little. Already knowing what he would see, he stood up slowly and went around the bed.

  The blank canvas now had the beginnings of a painting on it. Just the bare outlines of a woman in a black dress, a newborn in a crib in a darkened room, a doorway with another woman standing there…