by Ellen Datlow
“It’s not a big deal,” Charley said. “We can do it some other time.” Suddenly she looked much older.
“No, wait,” Eric said. “I do want to go for a ride.” I want to come with you. Please take me with you. “It’s just that Batu’s asleep. Someone has to look after him. Someone has to be awake to sell stuff.”
“So are you going to work there your whole life?” Charley said. “Take care of Batu? Figure out how to rip off dead people?”
“What do you mean?” Eric said.
“Batu says the All-Night is thinking about opening up another store, down there,” Charley said, waving across the road. “You and he are this big experiment in retail, according to him. Once the All-Night guys figure out what dead people want to buy, and whether or not they can pay for what they want, it’s going to be huge. It’s going to be like the discovery of America all over again.”
“It’s not like that,” Eric said. He could feel his voice going up at the end, as if it was a question. He could almost smell what Batu meant about Charley’s car. The ghosts, those dogs, were getting impatient. You could tell that. They were tired of the parking lot, they wanted to be going for a ride. “You don’t understand. I don’t think you understand?”
“Batu said that you have a real way with dead people,” Charley said. “Most retail clerks flip out. Of course, you’re from around here. Plus, you’re young. You probably don’t even understand about death yet. You’re just like my dogs.”
“I don’t know what they want,” Eric said. “The zombies.”
“Nobody ever really knows what they want,” Charley said. “Why should that change after you die?”
“Good point,” Eric said. “So Batu’s told you about our plan?”
“You shouldn’t let Batu mess you around so much,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t be saying all this, I know, because Batu and I are friends. But we could be friends, too, you and me. You’re sweet. It’s okay that you don’t talk much, although this is okay, too, us talking. Why don’t you come for a drive with me?”
If there had been dogs inside her car, or the ghosts of dogs, then Eric would have heard them howling. Eric heard them howling. The dogs were telling him to beware. They were telling him to fuck off. Charley belonged to them. She was their murderer.
“I can’t,” Eric said, longing to hear Charley ask him again. “Not right now.
“Well, I’ll stop by later, then,” Charley said. She smiled at him and for a moment he was standing in that city where no one ever figured out how to put out that fire, and all the dead dogs howled again, and scratched at the smeary windows. “For a Mountain Dew. So you can think about it for a while.”
She reached out and took Eric’s hand in her hand. “Your hands are cold,” she said. Her hands were hot. “You should go back inside.”
Rengi beenmiyorum.
I don’t like the color.
It was already 4:00 A.M., and there still wasn’t any sign of Charley when Batu came out of the back room, rubbing his eyes. The black pajamas were gone. Now he was wearing pajama bottoms with a field at night, and foxes running across it toward a tree with a circle of foxes sitting on their haunches around it. The outstretched tails of the running foxes were fat as zeppelins, with commas of flame hovering over them. Each little flame had a Hindenburg inside it, with a second littler flame above it, and so on. Some fires you just can’t put out.
The pajama top was a color that Eric could not name. Dreary, creeping shapes lay upon it. Eric felt queasy when he looked at them.
“I just had the best dream,” Batu said.
“You’ve been asleep for almost six hours,” Eric said. When Charley came, he would go with her. He would stay with Batu. Batu needed him. He would go with Charley. He would go and come back. He wouldn’t ever come back. He would send Batu postcards with bears on them. “So what was all that about, with the zombies?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Batu said. He took an apple from the fruit display and polished it on his non-Euclidean pajama top. The apple took on a poisonous, whispery sheen. “Has Charley come by?”
“Yeah,” Eric said. He and Charley would go to Las Vegas. They would buy Batu gold lame pajamas. “I think you’re right. I think she’s about to leave town.”
“Well, she can’t!” Batu said. “That’s not the plan. Here, I tell you what we’ll do. You go outside and wait for her. Make sure she doesn’t get away.”
“She’s not wanted by the police, Batu,” Eric said. “She doesn’t belong to us. She can leave town if she wants to.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Batu said. He yawned ferociously, and yawned again, and stretched, so that his eldritch pajama top heaved up and made Eric feel sick again.
“Not really,” Eric said. He had already picked out a toothbrush, some toothpaste, and some novelty teeth, left over from Halloween, which he could give to Charley, maybe. “Are you okay? Are you going to fall asleep again? Can I ask you some questions?”
“What kind of questions?” Batu said, lowering his eyelids in a way that seemed both sleepy and cunning.
“Questions about our mission,” Eric said. “About the All-Night and what we’re doing here next to the Ausable Chasm. I need to understand what just happened with the zombies and the pajamas, and whether or not what happened is part of the plan, and whether or not the plan belongs to us, or whether the plan was planned by someone else, and we’re just somebody else’s big experiment in retail. Are we brand new, or are we just the same old thing?”
“This isn’t a good time for questions,” Batu said. He jerked his head toward the security cameras in a meaningful way. “In all the time that we’ve worked here, have I lied to you? Have I led you astray?”
“Well,” Eric said. “That’s what I need to know.”
“Perhaps I haven’t told you everything,” Batu said. “But that’s part of the plan. When I said that we were going to make everything new again, that we were going to reinvent retail, I was telling the truth. The plan is still the plan, and you are still part of that plan, and so is Charley.”
“What about the pajamas?” Eric said. “What about the Canadians and the maple syrup and the people who come in to buy Mountain Dew?”
“You need to know this?” Batu said.
“Yes,” Eric said. “Absolutely.”
“Okay, then. My pajamas are experimental CIA pajamas,” Batu said, out of the side of his mouth. “Like batteries. You’ve been charging them for me when you sleep. That’s all I can say right now. Forget about the Canadians. They’re just for practice. That’s the least part of the plan, and anyway, the plan just changed. These pajamas the zombies just gave me—do you have any idea what this means?”
Eric shook his head no.
Batu said, “If they can give us pajamas, then they can give us other things. It’s a matter of communication. If we can figure out what they need, then we can make them give us what we need.”
“What do we need?” Eric said.
“We need you to go outside and wait for Charley,” Batu said. “We don’t have time for this. It’s getting early. Charley gets off work any time now.”
“Explain all of that again,” Eric said. “What you just said. Explain the plan to me one more time.”
“Look,” Batu said. “Listen. Everybody is alive at first, right?”
“Right,” Eric said.
“And everybody dies,” Batu said. “Right?”
“Right,” Eric said. A car drove by, but it still wasn’t Charley.
“So everybody starts here,” Batu said. “Not here, in the All-Night, but somewhere here, where we are. Where we live now. Where we live is here. The world. Right?”
“Right,” Eric said. “Okay.”
“And where we go is there,” Batu said, flicking a finger toward the road. “Out there, down into the Ausable Chasm. Everybody goes there. And here we are, here, the All-Night, which is on the way to there.”
“Right,” Eri
c said.
“So it’s like the Canadians,” Batu said. “People are going someplace, and if they need something, they can stop here, to get it. But we need to know what they need. This is a whole new unexplored market demographic. The people we’re working for stuck the All-Night right here, lit it up like a Christmas tree, and waited to see who stopped in and what they bought. I shouldn’t be telling you this. This is all need-to-know information only.”
“You mean the All-Night, or the CIA, or whoever, needs us to figure out how to sell things to zombies,” Eric said.
“Forget about the CIA. Nobody has ever tried it before!” Batu said. “Can you believe that? Now will you go outside?”
“But is it our plan? Or are we just following someone else’s plan?”
“Why does that matter to you?” Batu said. He put his hands on his head and tugged at his hair until it stood straight up.
“I thought we were on a mission,” Eric said, “to help mankind. Womankind, too. Like the Starship Enterprise. But how are we helping anybody? What’s new-style retail about this?”
“Hello,” Batu said. “Did you see those pajamas? Look. On second thought, forget about the pajamas. You never saw them. Like I said, this is bigger than the All-Night. There are bigger fish that are fishing, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” Eric said. “I don’t.”
“Excellent,” Batu said. His experimental CIA pajama top writhed and boiled. “Your job is to be helpful and polite. Be patient. Be careful. Wait for the zombies to make the next move. I send off some faxes. Meanwhile, we still need Charley. Charley is a natural-born saleswoman. She’s been selling death for years. And she’s got a real gift for languages—she’ll be speaking zombie in no time. Think what kind of work she could do here! Go outside. When she drives by, you flag her down. Talk to her. Explain why she needs to come live here. But whatever you do, don’t get in the car with her. That car is full of ghosts. The wrong kind of ghosts. The kind who are never going to understand the least little thing about meaningful transactions.”
“I know,” Eric said. “I could smell them.”
“So are we clear on all this?” Batu said. “Or maybe you think I’m still lying to you. Or maybe you think I’m nuts?”
“I don’t think you’d lie to me, exactly,” Eric said. He put on his jacket.
“You better put on a hat, too,” Batu said. “It’s cold out there. You know, you’re like a son to me, which is why I tell you to put on your hat. And if I lied to you, it would be for your own good, because I love you like a son. One day, Eric, all of this will be yours. Just trust me and do what I tell you. Trust the plan.”
Eric said nothing. Batu patted him on the shoulder, pulled an All-Night shirt over his pajama top, and grabbed a banana and a Snapple. He settled in behind the counter. His hair was still a mess, but at 4:00 A.M., who was going to complain? Not Eric, not the zombies. Eric put on his hat, gave a little wave to Batu, which was either glad we cleared all that up at last, or else so long!, he wasn’t sure which, and walked out of the All-Night. This is the last time, he thought, I will ever walk through this door. He didn’t know how he felt about that.
ERIC STOOD OUTSIDE in the parking lot for a long time. Out in the bushes, on the other side of the road, he could hear the zombies, hunting for the things that were valuable to other zombies.
Some woman, a real person, but not Charley, drove into the parking lot. She went inside, and Eric thought he knew what Batu would say to her when she went to the counter. Batu would explain, when she tried to make her purchase, that he didn’t want money. That wasn’t what retail was really about. What Batu would want to know was what this woman really wanted. It was that simple, that complicated. Batu might try to recruit this woman, if she didn’t seem litigious, and maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the All-Night really did need women.
Eric walked backward, away and then even farther away from the All-Night. The farther he got, the more beautiful he saw it was—it was all lit up like the moon. Was this what the zombies saw? What Charley saw when she drove by? He couldn’t imagine how anyone could leave it behind and never come back.
He wondered if Batu had a pair of pajamas in his collection with All-Night Convenience Stores, light spilling out; the Ausable Chasm; a road, with zombies, and Charleys in Chevys, a different dog hanging out of every passenger window, driving down that road. Down on one leg of those pajamas, down the road a long ways, there would be bears dressed up in ice; Canadians; CIA operatives and tabloid reporters and All-Night executives; Las Vegas showgirls; G-men and bee men in trenchcoats; his mother’s car, always getting farther and farther away. He wondered if zombies wore zombie pajamas, or if they’d just invented them for Batu. He tried to picture Charley wearing silk pajamas and a flannel bathrobe, but she didn’t look comfortable in them. She still looked miserable and angry and hopeless, much older than Eric had ever realized.
He jumped up and down in the parking lot, trying to keep warm. The woman, when she came out of the store, gave him a funny look. He couldn’t see Batu behind the counter. Maybe he’d fallen asleep again, or maybe he was sending off more faxes. But Eric didn’t go back inside of the store. He was afraid of Batu’s pajamas.
He was afraid of Batu.
He stayed outside, waiting for Charley.
But a few hours later, when Charley drove by—he was standing on the curb, keeping an eye out for her, she wasn’t going to just slip away, he was determined to see her, to make sure that she saw him, to make her take him with her, wherever she was going—there was a Labrador in the passenger seat. The back seat of her car was full of dogs, real dogs and ghost dogs, and all of the dogs poking their doggy noses out of the windows at him. There wouldn’t have been room for him, even if he’d been able to make her stop. But he ran out in the road anyway, like a damn dog, chasing after her car for as long as he could.
AFTERWORD
“Hortlak” means “ghost” in Turkish. There are several different kinds of ghosts in this story, but, more important, there are several different kinds of pajamas. As for Ausable Chasm, I’ve driven past the exit sign, but I’ve never stopped.
Two of my favorite ghost stories, “Lodgers” and “The Cold Flame,” are by Joan Aiken. The third is H. R. Wakefield’s “The Red Lodge.” In both of the Joan Aiken stories, it’s not the ghosts who are terrifying, it’s the living people. “The Red Lodge,” on the other hand, is crawling with ghosts and all of them are malignant. When I was a kid, I would lie in bed at night and read Helen Hoke’s anthologies—it was in these anthologies that I (covers pulled up to my neck, not daring to sleep) first encountered these stories.
GLEN HIRSHBERG grew up in Detroit and San Diego. He received his B.A. from Columbia University, and spent a sizable chunk of his college years watching Val Lewton movies at the Theatre 80 on St. Marks and bowling in the haunted alley under Barnard College. From there, it was off to Montana, where he received his M.F.A. and M.A., wrote incessantly, found his wife, and hung out at Freddy’s Feed & Read (R.I.P.). He also has lived in Galway, Seattle, Charlotte, and now Los Angeles, writing and teaching all the while. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was published in 2002. His ghost stories, most of which were created originally to tell his students on Halloween, have appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best New Horror, and Dark Terrors 6. The Two Sams, a collection of his supernatural fiction, has just been published.
DANCING MEN
GLEN HIRSHBERG
These are the last days of our lives so we give a signal maybe there still will be relatives or acquaintances of these persons … . They were tortured and burnt good-bye … .
—TESTIMONIAL FOUND AT CHELMNO
I
WE’D BEEN ALL afternoon in the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the green light filters through the trees and lies atop the tumbled tombstones like algae. Mostly, I think, the kids were tired. The two-week Legacy of the Holocaust tour I had organized had tak
en us to Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, where downed electrical wires slither through the brittle grass, and Bebelplatz in East Berlin, where ghost-shadows of burned books flutter in their chamber in the ground like white wings. We’d spent our nights not sleeping on sleeper trains east to Auschwitz and Birkenau and our days on public transport, traipsing through the fields of dead and the monuments to them, and all seven high-school juniors in my care had had enough.
From my spot on a bench alongside the roped-off stone path that meandered through the grounds and back out to the streets of Josefov, I watched six of my seven charges giggling and chattering around the final resting place of Rabbi Loew. I’d told them the story of the Rabbi, and the clay man he’d supposedly created and then animated, and now they were running their hands over his tombstone, tracing Hebrew letters they couldn’t read, chanting “Amet,” the word I’d taught them, in low voices and laughing. As of yet, nothing had risen from the dirt. The Tribe, they’d taken to calling themselves, after I told them that the Wandering Jews didn’t really work, historically, since the essential characteristic of the Wanderer himself was his solitude.
There are teachers, I suppose, who would have been considered members of the Tribe by the Tribe, particularly on a summer trip, far from home and school and television and familiar language. But I had never quite been that sort of teacher.
Nor was I the only excluded member of our traveling party. Lurking not far from me, I spotted Penny Berry, the quietest member of our group and the only goy, staring over the graves into the trees with her expressionless eyes half-closed and her lipstickless lips curled into the barest hint of a smile. Her auburn hair sat cocked on the back of her head in a tight, precise ponytail, like arrows in a quiver. When she saw me watching, she wandered over, and I swallowed a sigh. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Penny, exactly. But she asked uncomfortable questions, and she knew how to wait for answers, and she made me nervous for no reason I could explain.