Balustrade

by Mark Henry

  PRAY to GOD ABOVE for STRENGTH!

  Turn back now, SINNERS!

  And Hilary's personal favorite: Sodomites burn in HELI! The final “L” having been blasted into an “I” by what was probably a shotgun.

  “Ah!” Jack laughed.

  “Yeah. Ah. But they’re not exactly vendors,” she said, to be contrary.

  “Oh but they are. They're selling the lord.”

  “To anal sex enthusiasts? If they were serious about it, they'd at least put a polite spin on it. God forgives even buggerers.”

  “They do seem pretty angry.”

  Hilary grinned as they came up on the next structure; no bigger than a highway berry stand. Two teenaged girls, in dresses that would have cleared their ankles if it weren't for those reputation-shielding ruffles, axed at the air with picket signs. One read: GOD HATES. The other: HIPPIE WHORES.

  “Should we stop for the full spiel?” Hilary asked, flippantly. “They seem like nice girls.”

  “Uh...fuck no.”

  Hilary shrugged. “They might have lemonade. Just saying.”

  Twenty minutes deeper into the nowhere, and not seeing another soul, Hilary began to wonder who had decided those two girls were the last stand against the evil contained in the black sedan. Their “big guns” against the heathens? The effort didn't seem to be the brainchild of a mastermind. In fact, Hilary could have come up with a stronger campaign to keep people away from Balustrade in her sleep. A recent news report on flesh-eating bacteria on a cruise ship had nixed every one of Hilary's future plans of lounging on the lido deck drinking mai tais—well, maybe not that last bit.

  But just as she'd thought it, she saw them.

  A dense thicket of fanatics, dressed in a similar fashion as the lemonade stand girls. Holly Hobby-esque. If Holly weren’t such a slut. Hilary was certain these two zealots would take offense at such a secular reference.

  “What the?” Jack's words wisped out of him. He stepped on the brake as the gathering came into view, gravel spewing then sputtering as they slowed to a crawl.

  Their arms tightly linked and their practiced scowls perfectly mimicked—one face to the next. They swayed in an unnerving unison. Side to side. In the center of this ménage, a giraffe of a woman dressed all in black with a wide-brimmed sun hat shading her face, held out her palm to their approaching car.

  “Jesus Christ.” Hilary gripped the dashboard with one hand, the fingers of her other rubbing the ink off the instructions.

  “Maybe we can just go around them,” Jack suggested.

  “Well, whatever you do, don't stop.”

  “I can't just run over them.”

  “Maybe we can call the fire marshal.”

  Jack glowered.

  The drab protesters’ lips were moving, chanting it seemed, but the engine noise drowned out the sound. Hilary couldn't help herself. She reached for the button and opened the window, just a crack, turning her head to listen.

  “Go back now. Only God can save your marriage. The devil will fuck the soul out of you.”

  Hilary glowered, unusually shocked at the woman’s declaration. “That's really offensive,” she said.

  Jack nodded, glanced toward the edge of the religious nuts’ defensive line and then stepped on the gas, swerving and tearing across the dry prairie. The fanatics, sensing their plan was falling apart, broke ranks and rushed for the car, bounding over furrows and sagebrush. Soon, they were beating at Hilary's side. Pushing through, framing herself in the center of the cracked window, their leader.

  “It's true!” The dark woman screamed, running alongside them now, her eyes wild, seemingly genuinely terrified.

  They were crazy. Unhinged.

  Like those freaks that picketed “suspected” gay funerals and screamed horrible things at grieving parents and lovers or the wives and children of the dearly, but very-much-heterosexually departed. It made her sick and before she could think it through, Hilary’s middle finger sprang up in the female minister's grimacing face.

  “Suck it!' she mouthed. “Suck. It.”

  The woman’s palm splayed against the window and then was dragged away down the side of the car as Jack sped up. Hilary turned as they passed, keeping her focus on the figure who stood apart from the others now. Her hands clasped together at her waist and her head slowly shaking from side to side.

  Once past the group, Jack maneuvered the car back onto the dirt road and sped up. A cloud of dust veiled the zealots, skittering gravel muffling their cries. Breathless, Hilary held a hand to her chest.

  “What the?” was all she managed to say.

  Jack reached out and slipped his hand into hers, drawing it away from her heaving chest. “I don't know,” he said. “I really don't know.”

  A few minutes later, they reached the edge of an arid field. The prairie gave up any pretense of fertility here and the dirt road widened infinitely stretching as far right and left as they could see.

  2

  Miles of constant vibration lulled Hilary into an uneasy fugue. She was vaguely aware of motion, of the car moving, of rocks popping in tinny orchestrations on the car’s underside, of Jack’s monotonous humming, but beyond that, shit started to blur. Images of the gauntlet holding vigil behind them floated into her consciousness like dust motes in dim light, superimposed on the static desert of the scablands…

  More rocks.

  Stick-straight horizon.

  Construction paper clouds incapable of an ounce of moisture.

  In the dream, the minister, face shaded under her sun hat orchestrated a mournful prayer circle at the mouth of the road. Candles flickered in their hands. The parishioners sang softly, some weeping, some wailing. Not a single one stepped a foot on the rocky loam of the field; not even to venture the crinkled tip of a pointy boot. They actively avoided it as though some invisible barrier was there, some division, a warning, reticence creasing their faces as they watched Hilary and Jack drive further away.

  As if fear itself dwelled in that flat field.

  Hilary’s eyes fluttered open. Her heart hammered inside her.

  She twisted sideways in her seat and focused on the side of Jack’s face. His jaw pulsed as he ground his teeth. Nervous.

  “Suppose,” she started, suddenly breathless. “That those people weren’t crazy. That they truly were warning us away. Where would that put us?”

  Jack winced. “What do you mean, Hilary? Of course, they were crazy. They don’t come any crazier than when they’ve got God on their side.”

  She nodded. “Of course, right. But what if this place isn’t what it seems? What if we’re heading toward some kind of danger? Not demonic and ass-rapey, obviously. That’s ludicrous. But something.” Even as she said it, she felt silly. Riled up by an incredulous dream.

  Jack rolled his eyes and slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “You promised not to—”

  “I didn’t promise to walk—or ride—blindly into a bad situation. I’m more than willing to work on what’s left of us, Jack, but this is beginning to feel...unsafe. At best, weird.”

  More jaw-clenching on his part.

  Hilary braced herself for the impending argument. She turned to look through the windshield just in time to see the placid sky she’d become used to seeing as flat and vaguely beige begin to roil and billow.

  “That settles it,” Jack said, pointing at the phenomenon.

  “What is it?”

  “Dust storm. It’s about to get really windy out here.”

  The only dust storms Hilary had seen were on internet videos. They lived in Seattle, Washington for Christ’s sake? Who even knew there was a desert in the eastern half of the state? It didn’t seem feasible considering all the rain. But she couldn’t deny the weather was getting nastier by the minute. Dust devils spun across the rocky flat.

  “We should be nearing the retreat.” Jack squinted into the distance.

  Hilary followed suit, spotting the mysterious Balustrade spring onto the horizon, small a
nd boxy to the point of pixilation. When blinking didn’t clear the square glitch, Hilary rubbed her eyes and when she took a second glance she saw the first of the black cars, similar to the one they drove in, but parked sideways, a tumbleweed tucked under its fender like a drunk driving fatality.

  “That’s strange,” Jack mumbled. “That’s quite a ways from the building.”

  But apparently it wasn’t all that odd as two more cars sat beyond it, five beyond that.

  Then nine.

  Soon Jack was jogging the car slowly left and right to maneuver through an elephant graveyard of black Mercedes.

  “It’s like the rapture.” Hilary rubbernecked to look inside the inconceivably open door of one of the cars. A lizard slipped from the black leather seat onto the rocks and slithered into the shadows of its undercarriage. “For drug dealers,” she finished the joke half-heartedly.

  But the distraction of the cars was momentary. A shadow fell across her face and as she glanced up, the black building seemed to loom out of nowhere. A massive black cube of a thing. A windowless monolith. The closer they came to it, the more menacing it appeared.

  “What the fuck?”

  “It’s gigantic!” Jack’s voice, all excitement, zero suspicion.

  Hilary stared at the thing. To its right side, more of the haphazardly parked cars studded the landscape and beyond that the ballooning dust of the windstorm. Nothing moved between them, no exhaust drifted. Jack flanked the nearest car and clicked off the ignition.

  “You ready for an adventure?” he asked.

  Hilary blinked. Stunned that they were actually considering getting out of the car let alone approaching the monstrosity.

  “What is it?”

  She broke away from the image towering before her and glowered at her husband, wondering why the hell she'd agreed to come at all. “What?”

  “You were shaking your head. You're not chickening out. We've come too far.”

  “Of course not,” she said, tossing off the disquiet that clung to her like a thin bead of sweat.

  “Well good.” A smile sprang back on Jack's lips and for a second Hilary was glad to see him happy, as though the journey had reignited her last flicker of caring.

  But then he said in that know-it-all tone, “Quite a wonder of architecture don't you think? Bauhaus, perhaps?”

  Hilary stole a glance at the approaching wall of dust and reached for the door handle. “We better go.”

  They stepped out into a blustery warmth. Hilary’s hair whipped around her face and dust snuck past her lips, coating her tongue. She spat as she ran for the trunk.

  They left everything but a small overnight bag in the car. Hilary refused to leave her wallet, or Jack's, though stickler for the rules that he was, he'd slipped his out of his pocket and dropped it into the trunk at the airstrip. She quickly retrieved them and buried them beneath the toothpaste, mouthwash and hair styling accoutrements.

  “I'll carry it,” Hilary said, shutting the trunk, but when she looked up found Jack wasn't nearby anyway.

  He'd begun to wander toward the only feature to visibly mar the obsidian façade, a doorframe, presumably. His hand shielded the windward side of his face like he was telling a secret. As she stepped beside him, Hilary noticed what he had: the door had no handle, no slot for a key, not even a peephole. Jack’s head swayed side to side, taking in the monstrous structure that seemed to have grown out of the earth like a great necrotic canker.

  “How did they build the fucker?” he wondered aloud glancing over his shoulder at the shear distance, the isolation of the locale. “It must have taken forever to get all the materials out here.”

  “I'm sure they had flat beds trucks and cranes, whatever.”

  Jack responded, but Hilary wasn’t listening anymore. She shuffled toward the door, turning once to see Jack following eagerly, boyish wonder plastered on his aging face in a not so unwelcome way. He looked good, she had to admit it.

  Pressing her hand against the cold metal, she thought to herself, “Here goes.”

  But it didn't.

  The door didn't budge an inch. Hilary pulled back, rubbing her palm. Jack reached forward and rapped a few times. They waited and listened. Crows called from the edge of the roof, or more accurately the edge of the cube and the sun was setting on the horizon, turning the pale sand and grit at their feet black as the building before them.

  Hilary parted her lips to complain but was shushed by a hiss from the edges of the door. She gasped, stumbling backward as it cracked open with a sound like a bottle opening, air sucking inward. A pale light flitted from the edges and then escaped in a dusty column that pooled around their feet.

  The opening cut into a long, empty, white—very white—hallway. It was like looking into a cinematic vision of a clinic. Sterile. Antiseptic. And totally at odds with the dusty, arid landscape whipping around them.

  Jack leaned his head in a bit. “Hello?”

  The woman appeared in the hallway like an inkblot, a spot of black in patent leather stilettos. She wore a tight obsidian dress with sleeves to the elbow and a starched white collar that hung down like fangs. The only spot of color was the pout of her fuck-me red lipstick.

  She held up her hand and strode toward them, a half-hearted wave.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Carson-Bartleby, yes?” the woman asked her tone pleasant, almost buttery, her expression concerned…but not overly so.

  They both nodded, Hilary trying on a smile but not so wide as to welcome another mouthful of dust.

  “You'd better come inside,” the woman said. “There’s a storm whipping up soon and you’re the last to arrive.”

  “It’s already whipping,” Hilary gestured toward the wind.

  The woman glanced passed them. “So it is.” A shrug.

  How could she not know? Hilary thought, giving Jack a suspicious look. He frowned and shook his head slightly as though his discouraging gesture might be misconstrued as a facial tic.

  The woman turned back toward the interior, the light catching her profile and revealing the stern, tight jaw of a boarding school headmistress, or for that matter, a prison warden, and cheekbones so high and beautiful New York Fashion editors could have carved them. Jack followed directly behind her and Hilary behind him, wondering if she should bother closing the door. She opted to leave it in a half open state, just like her mind in relation to Balustrade—it seemed fitting.

  But the door shut on its own closing out the storm so completely, the sound of the wind silenced like a scream cut off by a final blow.

  “I am Chantal. I'll be your host this weekend. You’ll have a wonderful time here and so much fun, you’ll wish you’d paid us. We’ve got a very interesting group this weekend and I’m sure you two will get along famously. In addition,” she continued, her words changing into what Hilary detected as official lingo. “We’re certain you’ll reacquire the love and intimacy you’ve misplaced along the way. Our techniques are foolproof, our staff dedicated. I’m sure your visit will be both fruitful and relaxing. Anyway, that’s the spiel. You’ll get out of it what you put in. Results vary. And so on. I hate to rehash. Dr. Madrigal has already prepared you. Correct?”

  “No, but it’s okay.” Jack assured her.

  Hilary had disengaged when Chantal spat up a sentence pulled directly from the brochure.

  They passed through a long, low-ceilinged hall, which hollowed their voices. Chantal’s didn’t change however, steady and even and somewhat seductive in its measured quality. “I hope the journey has been a pleasant one.”

  “Well, your welcoming committee is certainly exuberant,” Hilary joked.

  Chantal stopped and twisted her head toward Hilary, as though she'd been slighted. “I apologize if I've said something—”

  “No, no.” Hilary was mortified. The shock on the woman’s face was evident, real; she hadn't translated Hilary’s sarcasm. “I meant the...how did the instructions put it...roadside vendors.”

  Chantal nodded brusquel
y and resumed her stride down the hall. “Yes, the Mother and her flock are quite a handful.”

  “The Mother?” Yeah, that fits. “Are they always out there?”

  “I'm sure I don't know that. I've only ever seen them once. Though I have heard tell of them from time to time, so I suppose they like to keep up a presence. Be generally menacing and terrible.”

  Jack laughed. “You're not kidding. I nearly had to mow them down with the car to get past their last stand. They were linked up like Hands Across America.”

  Chantal gasped with laughter, finding Jack's statement inordinately funny, Hilary noted. Overly so for such a dated reference. The woman was literally bent over at the waist, choking with broad, breathy guffaws.

  “Oh, that is rich!”

  Hilary bit her tongue.

  Chantal led them through another arch into a long hall to her well-appointed office. She gestured to a pair of chairs in front of a maple writing desk, seemingly too small for its purpose, the kind of desk Victorian ladies would use to compose correspondence, but apparently big enough to contain the contract.

  “Dr. Madrigal informed you of the policies of Balustrade, correct?”

  “You might need to reiterate,” Jack said, before Hilary could open her mouth to ask for clarification on the matter of payment. She’d certainly caught Chantal’s odd joke about wishing they’d paid for it. If they weren’t, who was?

  “I know Hilary was unclear as to the need to schedule twelve days away for what is ostensibly a weekend retreat.”

  Ostensibly, Hilary thought. Good word. Perhaps but possibly not, just like their marriage.

  “Dr. Madrigal discussed the need to commit to community service hours as payment? We’re not going to be collecting trash on the highway, are we?”

  Chantal laughed. “Of course not, though if you could fit a few religious zealots into bags on your way out, that would be just fine.”

  The woman straightened a stack of paperwork, tapping the edges.

  “Yes,” Hilary said. “She mentioned the community service, but not directly as payment.”