Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  But Autumn was no stranger to Scott. From his earliest years, he had loved it as a special time. A time when the blistering heat-death of summer finally faded, when the evenings seemed to linger, and the woods blazed with spectral color. When you could rake enough leaves into piles taller than your head, and smell them burning in someone’s back yard; when there was mist at morning and fog at twilight; when the moon seemed somehow fuller and bigger as it sailed against the blue aisle of the night.

  Arriving at his “post,” Scott peered up and down the tree-choked lane. Across the intersection, a street lamp defined a small cone of light sharply edged by the darkness beyond. A memory flashed into his mind: riding his big red Schwinn bike down to this corner to intercept the Good Humor Man every night at about this time. Unlike so many people he’d known, he had enjoyed a happy childhood.

  So how the hell did he grow up to be so miserable?

  He had moved back to his old neighborhood after Trish threw him out because he felt the need to be in the midst of comfortable, familiar surroundings during such a traumatic chapter in his life. Thomas Wolfe had instructed us, in a long, long book, that you can’t go home again, and Scott wondered how axiomatic that notion might be.

  Dusk crept through the streets like a predator, stealing the color and shape from everything it passed. Darkness filled in all the missing spaces as the moon began to rise. Jack-o-lanterns glowed and grinned from front porches and picture windows, and as though on cue, he heard the advancing vanguards of the kids, ready to launch their raiding parties for a few pieces of candy.

  Flicking on his flashlight, Scott announced his presence to any who approached, identifying himself as a symbol of safety to the children of the Park. He watched them shamble past him in ragged little groups, up one walk, down another, cutting across lawns and almost crowding each other off some of the small front porches and landings. The cool night teemed with their unique sounds: rustling paper bags, rapid footsteps, and endless cries of “trick-or-treat!”

  The pageantry of the evening made Scott think of his own childhood, and how Halloween had always been so grand to him. He remembered how he’d loved to create a new costume each year, and how he’d started planning it by the end of August, usually. A pirate, a space man (they didn’t call them “astronauts” back then), a mummy, a cowboy, a robot…he had been a succession of cinematically-inspired images, but every one of them handmade with love and care.

  Things were different now, he could see.

  Almost all of the kids paraded past him in cheap ready-made costumes that you could find in any K-Mart and Woolworth during the month of October. Made from the flimsiest synthetic materials, they were usually just black coveralls with some Saturday morning cartoon character’s picture appliqued across the chest. The accompanying mask was usually a one-dimensional, micron-thin shell of plastic with florescent paint hastily applied. Any connection between these “costumes” and something creative was purely accidental, and wholly unlikely.

  But worst of all, the costumes weren’t scary.

  Scott smiled as two little kids passed him, one dressed as a woman named “Xena,” the other a skeleton. The former, judging from the breast-plate-picture, was a shameless rip-off of Robert E. Howard, while the latter’s chest resembled an illustration page from an anatomy text.

  Whatever happened to those neat old skeleton suits with the bones painted down the arms and legs, front and back, and the rubber masks that covered your whole head so that you really looked like a skeleton? Whatever happened to wigs and greasepaint, and rags and old clothes?

  These thoughts soughed through him like a breeze, long and warm and slow. He noticed the moon was high in the trees now. It still appeared to be a bloated sphere of pale harvest-orange, but it would be casting off the color as it continued its journey skyward. Memories reached out for him like opened window curtains touched by the nightwind. The smells and sounds of the evening seduced him, carrying him into the mist of a time long ago, but not forgotten. He found himself longing for the innocence and the industry of childhood, forgetting the fears and terrors that nightly accompany most kids to their beds. At this point in his life, for Scott Fusina, being twelve years old again seemed like a great idea.

  He smiled at the notion as he detected movement in his peripheral vision. A flash of dull whiteness, kiting through the darkness like a windblown piece of paper. Turning quickly, he spun about to see…nothing.

  Nothing there.

  But I’d have sworn there was…

  For some reason, the experience made him edgy, and more than slightly paranoid. He scanned the darkness beyond his post, beyond the pale zone of the street lamp, but saw nothing. He could hear the laughter of trick-or-treaters on the next street over, but his own territory was desolate and quiet.

  Again, the night breeze reached out to him with a long, slow touch. There was a warmth in the air, like the breath of an unseen creature, and it smelled of crisping leaves and carved out pumpkins. Turning his head, Scott looked up the street.

  That’s when he saw the figure step from the shadows. It moved with a dark grace, as though materializing from the essence of the night. Although the sudden appearance startled him, he could see by the small stature of the figure it was just a kid in a costume. Scott started to relax.

  But he could see that this was no ordinary costume. A K-Mart special this was not. No, he thought as he watched the figure stride closer, there was a unique look to this costume…a familiar look.

  The figure was dressed in the red and white regalia of a British Revolutionary War soldier, complete in most details from the brass buttons to the muslin-wrapped boots. He wore a full-flowing riding cape, which fell gracefully away from his broad shoulders.

  But above the shoulders there was…nothing.

  Scott smiled as he watched the Headless Horseman approach. True to Washington Irving’s tale, the figure carried a brilliant jack-o-lantern under his arm—a surrogate head in search of his real one.

  It was a beautiful costume—as good as the one Scott had created when he was ten years old…just like this one.

  The Headless Horseman stopped perhaps ten feet distant, half-embraced by the shadows.

  Just like this one. The thought echoed through his head as Scott studied the work of the costume. Wasn’t that red jacket the same one he’d found in Aunt Maude’s trunk? And wasn’t that cape the one he’d made from one of his mother’s tablecloths?

  A chill passed through him like a point of cold steel. The Headless Horseman stood before him, silent and somehow defiant.

  “Who are you?” asked Scott, his voice croaked.

  A pause. Then, from within the depths of the costume: “You know who I am…”

  “Do I?” Scott had a terrible urge for a cigarette, wishing for an instant that he’d never given them up.

  The costumed figure placed the jack-o-lantern on the sidewalk, and with a few quick, practiced moves, unfastened the breast buttons of his jacket. The false chest and shoulders fell away to reveal the thin, angular face of a pre-adolescent boy. Dark hair fell across even darker eyes, which gazed at Scott with strength of the years which bound them together.

  “This is impossible…” said Scott weakly.

  “Perhaps,” said the boy, shrugging artfully. “But that doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “But how…?” Scott still protested with shocked confusion.

  The boy tilted his head. “Don’t know. But look, here we are. Let’s just accept it for what it is…it simply is.”

  “Oh man, this is crazy…I must be nuts!”

  “Not yet, but you’re on your way,” said the boy.

  “What’re you doing here?” asked Scott. “How can this be?”

  “This night always is, and I am always here…”

  “What do you want with me? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “For starters, you’re doing this to yourself. To both of us.” The boy almost grinned. “You were missing me, callin
g out for me…”

  “No I wasn’t,” said Scott. “This is crazy!”

  “Maybe I should start with a few questions.”

  Scott laughed. “You sound like a cop!”

  “What happened, Scott? What happened to all the dreams we had?”

  “I don’t know…gone, I guess.”

  “Dreams are never really gone…they just change their names to things like ‘crazy ideas’ or maybe ‘regrets’.”

  “Maybe you’re right…”

  Scott nodded as he remembered being ten years old and dreaming of being an architect, and how he built miniature houses out of balsa wood in his basement workshop. In that instant, he recalled so many things. They flashed through his memory like cards thumbed through a deck: the first guitar he bought for ten bucks, his collection of E.C. horror comics, his Gilbert chemistry set, the microscope, the motorbike he tried to make from the old lawnmower, and so many other projects conceived out of boundless energy…

  “Do you remember when you made the mummy costume? How it started to unravel in the big parade, and how you wouldn’t give up trying to ‘fix it,’ right up until it was too late?”

  “Right up until I reached the judges’ stand with only a few strips left…”

  Scott smiled at the memory. He hadn’t thought about it in thirty years. “Yeah…and what about the tree house I built out in Smith’s woods…?”

  The boy nodded solemnly. “Or the jungle riverboat, or the soapbox racer…it was all great stuff, always will be great stuff. We had something special, remember? And somewhere along the way, you’ve let it get away from you…”

  “You wouldn’t understand…it’s different when you grow up. You have to have responsibility…”

  “Yeah, sure…I know all about it: credit cards and mortgages and that kind of stuff.” The boy paused, then stared deeply into him. “Listen, do you really like selling life insurance?”

  “No, I hate it. I’ve always hated it.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “It’s a good way to make a lot of money, I guess.”

  The boy snorted. “Nobody grows up dreaming to be an insurance salesman.”

  Scott nodded. “I’ve always hated it.”

  “And maybe yourself too? For doing it?”

  Looking up at the boy, Scott nodded. “Well, maybe…”

  “Then I’d say it’s time to quit, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, maybe…”

  “And what about this Trish? Do you really still love her? Did you ever?”

  “I…I don’t think so. It was all a mistake—a mistake I never wanted to admit.” Scott looked down at his shoes, feeling very embarrassed.

  “So admit it now. Really, is all this kind of stuff worth killing yourself for?”

  Scott shook his head. “No, I guess not.”

  “Don’t try to live for any of them,” said the boy.

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you learned yet—the world doesn’t like dreamers?”

  “What?” asked Scott.

  “Most people don’t want us seeing things differently than them. It’s too uncomfortable, too scary.”

  “Man, you are right about that!” said Scott, starting to feel better.

  “That’s why you can never try to please them.”

  Scott nodded. “So young to be so wise…”

  “I’m as old as you.”

  Scott smiled ironically. “Yes, I guess you are.”

  The boy hunched down and picked up his jack-o-lantern. “Listen, I gotta go now.”

  “So soon? We just got started.”

  “No, I think we’re okay now.”

  The boy turned, began walking off into the shadows. Scott watched him move with an easy grace, a confident stride. It was an infectious kind of swagger.

  “Hey!” called Scott, just as the figure reached the outer zone of the street lamp’s glow. “Wait a second!”

  Turning, the boy looked at him. “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to tell you how much I liked your costume. Nice job. Really beautiful.”

  The boy smiled. “Thanks. But wait till you see the one I’ve got planned for next year…”

  “You’re right,” said Scott. “I remember it…it was the best of them all!”

  Confession time: I sent Peggy Nadramia that last story before I actually read her magazine—yeah, I know, a real faux pas. And the sin was compounded when I realized I would have never sent her a quasi-sappy, still-got-that-Ray-Bradbury-jones kind of story you just read.1

  No, Grue was not about pleasant nostalgia and inspirational messaging. It was grim and dark and relentless. And after spending some real time with the ’zine, I liked its… starkness…both style and artwork, and also its fiction. At a following NECON, I told Peggy I’d like to do another story for her, if she’d have me, and this time I’d try to make it harsh and weird and hard-edged so it would feel right at home in Grue.

  So I checked this file I keep on the laptop (it used to be a little tin box of index cards, but Luddite I am not…) called “Ideas,” which contained lots of lines or phrases that I key in whenever an idea or a scene or an image or character comes to mind that might someday make a good short story. When I was younger2, I used to get these great ideas and they would stay with me till I actually wrote the story, but as I grew a little longer in the tooth, I started to realize I was actually forgetting some of these brilliant ideas, and if I didn’t start writing them down, I would be depriving the world of some of its greatest writings—mine.

  So, moving right along, I look down my list of ideas and I see a line that says: highway, guy just stays there…

  It’s mental shorthand to myself, but I remember what I was talking about, and I start typing. Hours later, this is what printed out…

  1 Actually, it turned out to be a decent enough theme, which was ripped off in a Bruce Willis movie many years later called The Kid. But now you know, friends, I was there first.

  2 There was something else that happened a few times when I was younger and would have a typically great idea for a story…I would get this cool idea and I would tell it to somebody (usually another writer or a friend) and then this totally weird thing would happen: I would never write the story. At first I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I soon realized if I let the story out of its mind cage, it was simply gone. I didn’t feel the drive, the need to actually write it down. It had been told in some fashion and that was, apparently, enough for my subconscious. So I knew from then on, I could never even talk about an idea for a story until after I’d written it.

  Another one was coming up behind him—the one, he knew, to finally get him.

  Looking in the rear-view mirror, John Sheridan watched the headlights of the car approach his position on the Interstate. There were no other cars in sight. Even though he was doing sixty-five—the most he dared in drizzling rain and ghost-tread tires which should have been replaced months ago—the lights were gaining on him. Homing in like a missile or a sparrow-hawk.

  He white-knuckled the steering wheel with both hands as the dark, rain-flecked vehicle pulled abreast of him in the left lane. It seemed to hang motionless for a moment, keeping pace with John. Sensing its dark presence, he wanted to turn, to look at it, but could not. It was as though his neck had become paralyzed. He tensed for the killing blow…

  Now!

  But suddenly the other car was moving off, punching a hole in the misty rain, marking its path with a smear of red taillight.

  John sagged behind the wheel, and was suddenly aware of his pulse thudding behind his ears, his breath rasping in and out, between clenched teeth. The whole fear-fantasy of someone creeping up on you on the highway and blowing you away was not an isolated nightmare. John had mentioned it to strangers in bars over lonely beers, and many had admitted to the same crazy fear. A couple of the weirder-looking guys had even said they imagined themselves, at different times, as both victim and predator. John knew what they meant—h
e’d imagined it too. Even though sometimes he thought he might be going goddamned crazy.

  A lot of road-time could make you like that.

  The wispy rain appeared to be easing off, and he angrily cut off the windshield wipers as he remembered the gun. The panic had throttled him, choked off all clear thinking, and he had forgotten he now carried something for the predatory sedan if it ever caught up with him—and he had a preternatural feeling that it would eventually catch up with him.

  But there was no sense in punishing himself. He would simply be ready the next time. The highway ahead and behind him was empty and dark, like the flat and wetly shining hide of a giant eel. John found it comforting. He licked his lips, reached for a cigarette, lighted it.

  Once again, death had slipped up beside him, but had passed him by. He felt the terror slip away from him as he accelerated and pushed towards Woodbridge and home. It was past four a.m. and he was glad the road was clear, even if just for the moment. He sometimes wondered how long he could hang on, being on the road so much. All this driving was making him more than a little crazy.

  But like they said: if you want to make a lot of money, and you can’t be a doctor or a dentist, then be a salesman.

  And John was a hell of a salesman, that was for certain. At thirty-six, he was easily the best pipe-hawker Bendler & Krauch Plumbing Supply ever had. John’s territory comprised of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, and he’d posted more plumbing fixture accounts with more clients in that territory than any other sales-route in the country.

  His secret was simple: stay on the road. The more you traveled and talked to possible clients, the more you sold. Of course the guys in the office with families just couldn’t stay out on the road for two, three weeks at a time the way John did. But what did he care if he didn’t see his tacky little apartment in Suburban Virginia? He had nobody in his life, parents both dead, and not even a pet to worry about. Besides, if he kept it up at his present pace, by the end of the year he would have earned more than a hundred and fifty grand. Not bad for a guy with a degree in Cultural Anthropology.