The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

The rent was still paid through the end of January, but after his mother left, Eric had worked longer and longer hours at the store, and then, one morning, he didn’t bother going home. What had he been thinking, anyway, living at home with his mother? He was a high-school graduate. He had his whole life in front of him. The All-Night, and Batu, they needed him. Batu said this attitude showed Eric was destined for great things at the All-Night.

  Every night Batu sent off faxes to the Weekly World News, and to the National Enquirer, and to The New York Times. These faxes concerned the Ausable Chasm and the zombies. Someday someone would send reporters. It was all part of the plan, which was going to change the way retail worked. It was going to be a whole different world, and Eric and Batu were going to be right there at the beginning. They were going to be famous heroes. Revolutionaries. Heroes of the Revolution. Batu said that Eric didn’t need to understand that part of the plan yet. It was essential to the plan that Eric didn’t ask questions.

  Ne zaman gelecksiniz?

  When will you come back?

  The zombies were like Canadians in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different, where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

  The zombies didn’t talk at all, or they said things that didn’t make sense. “Wooden hat,” one zombie said to Eric, “Glass leg. Drove around all day in my wife. Did you ever hear me on the radio?” They tried to pay Eric for things that the All-Night didn’t sell.

  Real people, the ones who weren’t heading toward Canada or away from Canada, mostly had better things to do than drive out to the All-Night at 3:00 A.M. So real people, in a way, were even weirder, when they came in. Eric kept a close eye on the real people. Once a guy had pulled a gun on him—there was no way to understand that, but on the other hand, you knew exactly what was going on. With the zombies, who knew?

  Not even Batu knew what the zombies were up to. Sometimes he said that they were just another thing you had to deal with in retail. They were the kind of customer that you couldn’t ever satisfy, the kind of customer who wanted something you couldn’t give them, who had no other currency, except currency that was sinister, unwholesome, confusing, and probably dangerous.

  Meanwhile, the things that the zombies tried to purchase were plainly things that they had brought with them into the store—things that had fallen, or been thrown into the Ausable Chasm, like pieces of safety glass. Rocks from the bottom of Ausable Chasm. Beetles. The zombies liked shiny things, broken things, trash like empty soda bottles, handfuls of leaves, sticky dirt, dirty sticks.

  Eric thought maybe Batu had it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be a transaction. Maybe the zombies just wanted to give Eric something. But what was he going to do with their leaves? Why him? What was he supposed to give them in return? “You keep it,” he’d tell them. “Dead leaves are on special this week.”

  Eventually, when it was clear Eric didn’t understand, the zombies drifted off, away from the counter and around the aisles again, or out the doors, making their way like raccoons, scuttling back across the road, still clutching their leaves. Batu would put away his notebook, go into the storage closet, and send off his faxes.

  The zombie customers made Eric feel guilty. He hadn’t been trying hard enough. The zombies were never rude, or impatient, or tried to shoplift things. He hoped that they found what they were looking for. After all, he would be dead someday, too, and on the other side of the counter.

  Maybe his friend Dave had been telling the truth and there was a country down there that you could visit, just like Canada. Maybe when the zombies got all the way to the bottom, they got into zippy zombie cars and drove off to their zombie jobs, or back home again, to their sexy zombie wives, or maybe they went off to the zombie bank to make their deposits of stones, leaves, linty, birdsnesty tangles, all the other debris real people didn’t know the value of.

  IT WASN’T JUST the zombies. Weird stuff happened in the middle of the day, too. When there were still managers and other employers, once, on Batu’s shift, a guy had come in wearing a trenchcoat and a hat. Outside, it must have been ninety degrees, and Batu admitted he had felt a little spooked about the trenchcoat thing, but there was another customer, a jogger, poking at the bottled waters to see which were coldest. Trenchcoat guy walked around the store, putting candy bars and safety razors in his pockets, like he was getting ready for Halloween. Batu had thought about punching the alarm. “Sir?” he said. “Excuse me, sir?”

  The man walked up and stood in front of the counter. Batu couldn’t take his eyes off the trenchcoat. It was like the guy was wearing an electric fan strapped to his chest, under the trenchcoat, and the fan was blowing things around underneath. You could hear the fan buzzing. It made sense, (Batu said) he’d thought: This guy had his own air-conditioning unit under there. Pretty neat, although you still wouldn’t want to go trick-or-treating at this guy’s house.

  “Hot enough for you?” the man said, and Batu saw that this guy was sweating. He twitched, and a bee flew out of the gray trenchcoat sleeve. Batu and the man both watched it fly away. Then the man opened his trenchcoat, flapped his arms, gently, gently, and the bees inside his trenchcoat began to leave the man in long, clotted, furious trails, until the whole store was vibrating with clouds of bees. Batu ducked under the counter. Trenchcoat man, bee guy, reached over the counter, dinged the register in a calm and experienced way so that the drawer popped open, and scooped all the bills out of the till.

  Then he walked back out again and left all his bees. He got in his car and drove away. That’s the way that all All-Night stories end, with someone driving away.

  But they had to get a beekeeper to come in, to smoke the bees out. Batu got stung three times, once on the lip, once on his stomach, and once when he put his hand into the register and found no money, only a bee. The jogger sued the All-Night parent company for a lot of money, and Batu and Eric didn’t know what had happened with that.

  Karanlik ne zman basar?

  When does it get dark?

  Eric has been having this dream recently. In the dream, he’s up behind the counter in the All-Night, and then his father is walking down the aisle of the All-Night, past the racks of magazines and toward the counter, his father’s hands full of black stones. Which is ridiculous: his father is alive, and not only that, but living in another state, maybe in a different time zone, probably under a different name.

  When he told Batu about it, Batu said, “Oh, that dream. I’ve had it, too.”

  “About your father?” Eric said.

  “About your father,” Batu said. “Who do you think I meant, my father?”

  “You haven’t ever met my father,” Eric said.

  “I’m sorry if it upsets you, but it was definitely your father,” Batu said. “You look just like him. If I dream about him again, what do you want me to do? Ignore him? Pretend he isn’t there?”

  Eric never knew when Batu was pulling his leg. Dreams could be a touchy subject with Batu. Eric thought maybe Batu was nostalgic about sleep, collecting pajamas the way people who were nostalgic about their childhood collected toys.

  ANOTHER DREAM, ONE that Eric hasn’t told Batu about. In this dream, Charley comes in. When she gets up to the counter, Eric realizes that he’s got one of Batu’s pajama tops on, one of the inside-out ones. Things are rubbing against his arms, his back, his stomach, transferring themselves, like tattoos, to his skin.

  And he hasn’t got any pants on.

  Batik gemilerle ilgileniyorum.

  I’m interested in sunken ships.

  “You need to make your move,” Batu said. He said it over and over, day after day, until Eric was sick of hearing it. “Any day now, the shelter is going to find someone to replace her, and Charley will split. Who knows where she’ll end up? Tell you what you should do, you tell her you want to adopt a dog. Give it a home. We�
��ve got room here. Dogs are good practice for when you and Charley are parents.”

  “How do you know?” Eric said. He knew he sounded exasperated. He couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all. If dogs are good practice, then what kind of mother is Charley going to be? What are you saying? So say Charley has a kid, you’re saying she’s going to put it down if it cries at night or wets the bed?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Batu said. “The only thing I’m worried about, Eric, really, is whether or not Charley may be too old. It takes longer to have kids when you’re her age. Things can go wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?” Eric said. “Charley’s not old.”

  “How old do you think she is?” Batu said. “So what do you think? Should the toothpaste and the condiments go next to the Elmer’s glue and the hair gel and lubricants? Make a shelf of sticky things? Or should I put it with the chewing tobacco and the mouthwash, and make a little display of things that you spit?”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Make a little display. I don’t know how old Charley is, maybe she’s my age? Nineteen? A little older?”

  Batu laughed. “A little older? So how old do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. He squinted at Batu. “Thirty-five? Forty?”

  Batu looked pleased. “You know, since I started sleeping less, I think I’ve stopped getting older. I may be getting younger. You keep on getting a good night’s sleep, and we’re going to be the same age pretty soon. Come take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

  “Not bad,” Eric said. A car went past, swerved, and honked, and drove on. Not a Chevy. “Looks like we’re running low on some stuff.”

  “It’s not such a big deal,” Batu said. He knelt down in the aisle, marking off inventory on his clipboard. “No big thing if Charley’s older than you think. Nothing wrong with older women. And it’s good you’re not bothered about the ghost dogs, or the biting thing. Everyone’s got problems. The only real concern I have is about her car.”

  “What about her car?” Eric said.

  “Well,” Batu said. “It isn’t a problem if she’s going to live here. She can park it here for as long as she wants. That’s what the parking lot is for. But whatever you do, if she invites you to go for a ride, don’t go for a ride.”

  “Why not?” Eric said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Think about it,” Batu said. “All those dog ghosts.” He scooted down the aisle on his butt. Eric went after him. “Every time she drives by here with some poor dog, that dog is doomed. That car is bad luck. The passenger side especially. You want to stay out of that car. I’d rather climb down into the Ausable Chasm.”

  Something cleared its throat; a zombie had come into the store. It stood behind Batu, looking down at him. Batu looked up. Eric retreated down the aisle, toward the counter.

  “Stay out of her car,” Batu said, ignoring the zombie.

  “And who will be fired out of the cannon?” the zombie said. It was wearing a suit and tie. “My brother will be fired out of the cannon.”

  “Why can’t you talk like sensible people?” Batu said, turning around. Sitting on the floor, he sounded as if he were about to cry. He swatted at the zombie.

  The zombie coughed again, yawning. It grimaced at them. Something was snagged on its gray lips now, and the zombie put up its hand. It tugged, dragging at the thing in its mouth, coughing out a black, glistening, wadded rope. The zombie’s mouth stayed open, as if to show that there was nothing else in there, even as it held the wet black rope out to Batu. It hung down from its hands, and became pajamas. Batu looked back at Eric. “I don’t want them,” he said. He looked shy.

  “What should I do?” Eric said. He hovered by the magazines. Charlize Theron was grinning at him, as if she knew something he didn’t.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” It wasn’t clear whether Batu was speaking to Eric or to the zombie. “I have all the pajamas I need.” Eric could hear the longing in his voice.

  The zombie said nothing. It dropped the pajamas into Batu’s lap.

  “Stay out of Charley’s car!” Batu said to Eric. He closed his eyes, and began to snore.

  “Shit,” Eric said to the zombie. “How did you do that?”

  There was another zombie in the store now. The first zombie took Batu’s arms and the second zombie took Batu’s feet. They dragged him down the aisle and toward the storage closet. Eric came out from behind the counter.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “You’re not going to eat him, are you?”

  But the zombies had Batu in the closet now. They put the black pajamas on him, yanking them over the other pair of pajamas. They lifted Batu up onto the mattress and pulled the blanket over him, up to his chin.

  Eric followed the zombies out of the storage closet. He shut the door behind him. “So I guess he’s going to sleep for a while,” he said. “That’s a good thing, right? He needed to get some sleep. So how did you do that with the pajamas? Are you the ones who are always giving him pajamas? Is there some kind of freaky pajama factory down there? Is he going to wake up?”

  The zombies ignored Eric. They held hands and went down the aisles, stopping to consider candy bars and Tampax and toilet paper and all the things that you spit. They wouldn’t buy anything. They never did.

  Eric went back to the counter. He sat behind the register for a while. Then he went back to the storage closet and looked at Batu. Batu was snoring. His eyelids twitched, and there was a tiny, knowing smile on his face, as if he were dreaming, and everything was being explained to him, at last, in this dream. It was hard to feel worried about someone who looked like that. Eric would have been jealous, except he knew that no one ever managed to hold onto those explanations, once you woke up. Not even Batu.

  Hangi yol daha kisa?

  Which is the shorter route?

  Hangi yol daha kolay?

  Which is the easier route?

  Charley came by at the beginning of her shift. She didn’t come inside the All-Night. Instead, she stood out in the parking lot, beside her car, looking out across the road, at the Ausable Chasm. The car hung low to the ground, as if the trunk were full of things. When Eric went outside, he saw that there was a suitcase in the back seat. If there were ghost dogs, Eric couldn’t see them, but there were doggy smudges on the windows.

  “Where’s Batu?” Charley said.

  “Asleep,” Eric said. He realized that he’d never figured out how the conversation would go after that.

  He said, “Are you going someplace?”

  “I’m going to work,” Charley said. “Just like normal.”

  “Good,” Eric said. “Normal is good.” He stood and looked at his feet. A zombie wandered into the parking lot. It nodded at them, and went into the All-Night.

  “Aren’t you going to go back inside?” Charley said.

  “In a bit,” Eric said. “It’s not like they ever find what they need in there.” But he kept an eye on the All-Night, and on the zombie, in case it headed toward the storage closet.

  “So how old are you?” Eric said. “I mean, can I ask you that? How old you are?”

  “How old are you?” Charley said right back. She seemed amused.

  “I’m almost twenty,” Eric said. “I know I look older.”

  “No you don’t,” Charley said. “You look exactly like you’re almost twenty.”

  “So how old are you?” Eric said again.

  “How old do you think I am?” Charley said.

  “About my age?” Eric said.

  “That’s sweet,” Charley said. “Are you flirting with me? Yes? No? How about in dog years? How old would you say I am in dog years?”

  The zombie had finished looking for whatever it was looking for inside the All-Night. It came outside and nodded to Charley and Eric. “Beautiful people,” it said. “Why won’t you ever visit my hand?”

  “I’m sorry,” Eric said.

  The zombie turned its back
on them. It tottered calmly across the road, looking neither to the left nor to the right, and went down the footpath into the Ausable Chasm.

  “Have you?” Charley said. She pointed at the path.

  “No,” Eric said. “I mean, someday I will, I guess.”

  “Do you think they have pets down there? Dogs?” Charley said.

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “Regular dogs?”

  “The thing I think about sometimes,” Charley said, “is whether or not they have animal shelters, and if someone has to look after the dogs. If someone has to have a job where they put down dogs, down there. And if you do put dogs to sleep down there, then where do they wake up?”

  “Batu says that if you need another job, you can come live with us at the All-Night,” Eric said. He was shivering.

  “Is that what Batu says?” Charley said. She started to laugh.

  “I think he likes you,” Eric said.

  “I like him too,” Charley said. “But not like that. And I don’t want to live in a convenience store. No offense. I’m sure it’s nice.”

  “It’s okay,” Eric said. “I don’t know. I don’t want to work retail my whole life.”

  “There are worse jobs,” Charley said. She leaned against her car. “Maybe I’ll stop by, later tonight. We could always go for a long ride, go somewhere else, and talk about retail.”

  “Like where? Where are you going?” Eric said. “Are you thinking about going to Turkey? Is that why Batu is teaching you Turkish?” He felt as if he were asleep and dreaming. He wanted to stand there and ask Charley questions all night long.

  “I want to learn Turkish so that when I go somewhere else, I can pretend to be Turkish. I can pretend I only speak Turkish. That way no one will bother me,” Charley said.

  “Oh,” Eric said. “I didn’t know you let anyone else—you know, other people—ride in your car.”