It seemed ominously appropriate, and as he lowered his face and spat rain, his breath like the chug of a steam engine, he decided to keep moving forward. Behind him was a life that had been robbed of love and color. Ahead might be the possibility of salvation or, at the very least, a kind of closure. If that closure came in the form of his own expiration on the sodden streets of this caliginous city, then so be it. It would still be an end, and that, he knew, was what was needed, was all that was even remotely attainable at this late hour.
But as he walked, something else began to nag at him. Head bowed against the strengthening deluge, he thought again of the sign. It had once been an advertisement for a travel agency, a summons to the sedentary to leave it all behind in favor of an escape, of a temporary reprieve from the familiar and the mundane. Respite from the gloom so pervasive here. Given the proximity of the billboard to his house, he was not surprised that he remembered it, but there was something else about the sign or the message it conveyed that thrummed a chord deep in his chest and brain, something that suggested he did, in fact, at some point in his sixty years, accept that invitation. But if that was true, he recalled nothing about the destination, retained no warm memory of sunshine or tropical beaches. There was only the vague notion that he had once upon a time not been where he was now, the billboard triggering the synaptic suggestion that THE LAND OF SUNSHINE had been where he’d ended up. If so, he wished he could remember, for even the notion of such a place perforated a pinhole of light in the wall of black behind his eyes.
The street curved to the left, the cracked macadam giving way to cobblestone that glistened like gray boils in the rain. Here the street grew narrow again, the tops of the buildings leaning over on both sides as if eager to engage in congress with their brethren. As he squinted into the murky light, the source of which eluded him, he saw a shadow detach itself from a doorway on the left, cross the street, and scurry into another on the right. Another few steps, his knees aflame, and he discerned that it was from this building the foggy, feeble light emerged.
For a long time he watched that building, the memory of it the tip of an iceberg in frigid water, the greater truth an immense form beneath the surface. He was cold, so cold now, his muscles aching from the strain of not relenting to the shivers that danced in his bones. He would have to enter that building if only for the shelter, but even as this awareness settled upon him, he knew it was a deception. There was another, much more significant and infinitely awful reason why that building was here, why he was here, dallying on the threshold. This was where the night had been leading him all along. It was why his old and long-lost friends at the bar had not admitted him. To do so would have been to halt the greater journey, to deny him his ultimate destination, to muddy his thoughts with saccharine sentimentality when the time and opportunity to indulge in such things was long gone.
He was here, without fully knowing where here was, unable to move as surely as if his feet had grown roots to bind him to the rain-slick cobblestones.
Again the sign: THE LAND OF SUNSHINE.
And: WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
He knew what he was waiting for. Here, in oblivion, there was no further hurt, no revelation that might destroy him, reduce him to a further degree of nothing. Here, right now, he was still safe in ignorance, even as he admitted to himself that that had never really been the case. Not really. There had been inklings and suspicions, decades spent close to home for fear of seeing the cues Out There that would force him to accept what had been done, force him to come face-to-face with whatever entity had expelled him from the Land of Sunshine and erased even the tiniest recollection of the happiness he had found there.
Here, in that building, the answer, the closure he sought, awaited.
And so, frozen on this cold, wet street, he would not move.
On the first floor of the building into which the man had run, dirty yellow light began to breathe through a mullioned window. He watched that jaundiced light, watched it swim as figures moved within it, and in an instant knew who was there.
In agony, he forced himself to move, his legs feeling as if metal spikes had been driven through the soles of his feet into his thighs, and found himself in the doorway. It was open, revealing an old wooden stairway littered with trash. The walls were marred with smudged handprints, perverse messages, and crude cartoons written with whatever the author had had on hand. He ignored them as he grabbed with a shaky hand the equally unsteady balustrade and hoisted himself up the steps. On the landing above, a light hung from a fraying cord, the bulb stained and smoking, filling the stairwell with the smell of burning dust.
There was no sound from up there, only his breathless grunting and the shuffle and squelch of his saturated shoes on the steps.
Halfway up the stairs, a figure appeared on the landing above and stood for a moment, looking down at him. It was a man, his angular face lined and haunted, his eyes like pools of oil, the sockets turned to shadowed craters by his position beneath the naked light. He held his hands together like a man about to pray.
“You too?” he said.
The old man did not reply, but, possessed of the absolute certainty that an affirmative response was in every way the correct one, nodded slightly.
The man’s passage down the stairs felt like a hollow breeze, his feet making not a sound on the steps, and then he was gone.
The old man took a breath and continued upward until his face was level with the landing and he could see the stranger’s footprints in the thick layer of dust on the floorboards. With gnarled, aching fingers, he reached the landing almost on all fours and collapsed against the wall, his trembling body obscuring the salacious script tattooed on the crumbling green paint.
Behind his eyes, veils were falling away. He did not want to be here, shouldn’t have come, but this was, for his purposes, exactly where he needed to be. He thought of his wife sitting quietly at home, not blind but refusing to see him, refusing to hear him. Waiting. And now, finally, he knew what it was she was waiting for, too.
To his right, a door stood slightly ajar, the light within flickering and casting strange shapes against the visible sliver of wall. A vintage song he could not place played on an old radio and reached him through curtains of billowing static. He slid along the wall until he was at the door, reached shaking fingers toward the wood, and gently prodded it farther open. The hinges were mute; the door opened liquidly. He looked down at the threshold, at the long, deep scratches in the wood, and knew if he was to change his mind about how this night would end, he would have to do it now.
Then, in an instant, the choice, assuming it had ever really been his, was removed. There came a shuffling scraping sound. Down on the floor, just inside the door, an ornate mahogany box was shoved into view. Behind it, a pale, slim hand with chipped red fingernails withdrew, leaving him paralyzed with terror. He knew the owner of that hand, knew he had always known her.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
With great difficulty, he reached down and retrieved the box, fearful that the woman’s hand would shoot out and latch on to his wrist. But she did not interfere, and there was no need. They were beyond that now.
He cradled the box, took a moment to wipe away the patina of dust with the heel of his hand, and moved his fingers to the latch. He unclasped it, then paused, suddenly possessed of a soul-shredding horror that almost took the legs out from under him. He staggered, the wall to his right the only thing that prevented his fall. Paint chips sprinkled to the floor. He could not breathe, could not keep his grip on the box, but was terrified to let it fall. Instead, he allowed himself to slide down the wall until he was sitting with his back to it, and set the box down beside him. He closed his eyes only briefly, long enough to see dark red notes pulsing in the darkness there, and when he opened them again, she was standing before him, as he knew she would be.
This was the ending.
Amusement had characterized her strange face the night he had met her, and it was no
different now. He did not recall, however, her skin being translucent enough to see the blue worms of her veins through it, or her eyes being quite so dark, her hair so dead, but then the years here had cloaked his mind in verdigris, and clearly if anything was absent from this place, it was the notion of beauty.
She said nothing, just stared down at him. Like her skin, the gown she wore was sheer enough to allow him to see what there was to see beneath it, but he had no desire to look. It was hard enough to look upon her face, with its queer smile and eyes that swam with malevolent cheer.
Once upon a time he had sought this woman out, willfully departed the Land of Sunshine to be with her, and with a few ropes and a carving knife, she had condemned him to the Land of Darkness, where he existed still. The answers and the memories had come slowly, but he had found them now, and felt a small pulse of satisfaction that he had been right all along in knowing something had been taken from him, and that she had been willing to give it back.
An eternity passed beneath her silent attention, until abruptly, and with a wider smile than he had seen thus far, one that tore the corners of her mouth and almost split her face in half, she leaned over and shoved her face into his, the sparks in her eyes burning coals in a dying fire, and she spoke two words on a breath of ashes.
“Go, lover.”
Only when she was gone, the shadows on the wall revealing her orgiastic gyrations somewhere inside that room, the taste of ash on his tongue, did he get to his feet. The pain in his knees and hands was not nearly as bad as before. It had migrated to his chest and head. Like a drunken man, he staggered down the stairs, the memory of her burning eyes scalding his mind.
A short forever and he was outside on the street again, and alone. He was gratified at least to see that the rain had stopped.
His shadow vanished as the light behind him went out.
Without a look back at the building in which he had lost everything that mattered, he went home.
—
She was not awake when he entered the bedroom, and for this he was relieved. There was no reason to think that she would feel compelled to speak to him ever again, or accept the words he offered as truth. But now there was an element of hope, the possibility of maybe. Resolution was a myth. Such a thing could never exist here. The best he could expect was some small degree of understanding, but maybe even that was preposterous.
Exhausted, he slipped out of his wet shoes and carefully lowered himself down onto the bed, where he sat for some indeterminate amount of time, long enough to see the sun not rise and the sky not lighten from anything other than permanent dark.
On his lap was the box, the clasp undone.
He thought again of the sign, and remembered. Remembered the other place, where the sun indeed rose and the sky knew color other than black, which was no color at all, only the absence of it, and he remembered the warmth of that sun on his face, the light in his wife’s eyes. He remembered knowing her love, and filling her with his. There had been no shadows there, and he felt an ache at the loss of it because it was the only thing he could never get back.
Behind him, his wife stirred. He turned to look at her and saw that between the unkempt locks of her iron-gray hair, one blue eye regarded him coldly.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and handed her the box.
She accepted it, but did not open it.
He removed his shirt and slipped into bed beside her, his hands by his sides, his eyes on the cracks in the ceiling he had grown to fear would one day open up and swallow him.
At some point in the night, his wife’s fingers found the edges of the gaping cavity in his chest, but she did not replace what had in some other place and time been removed. Instead, she held the box close to her chest as if it were a child, and to him, that was just fine.
His heart belonged to her now, after all.
As he sank into sleep, he allowed himself the thought of a smile but did not allow it to reach his mouth. Even if he’d wanted to, he could not remember how.
No hope, perhaps, and no light, but some indefinable something in place of nothing.
For now, and forever, that would have to do.
Mechanical Gratitude
Del James
A true American classic if ever there was one; even the name had a catchy ring to it.
Camaro.
The Camaro was Chevrolet’s response to the most popular car of the era, the Ford Mustang. First generation Camaros (1967–69) offered plenty of performance, appearance, and comfort options. Produced in coupes and convertibles, they immediately became the must-have street machine among fast-car aficionados.
In order to own a 1968 Camaro SS with a 396 engine, some men would gladly sell their souls and come out feeling like they got the better end of the deal. Eternal damnation be damned, this rare breed of car embodied beauty as well as precision and plenty of rubber-burning power.
A big-block Super Sport 396 with 375 horsepower came stock with chrome hood inserts that imitated velocity stacks. The introduction of Astro Ventilation, a fresh-air-inlet system, made it so that the side vent windows were eliminated from future production. The 1968 models sported a more pointed front grille, and the front running lights were changed from circular to oval.
It took corners like a shark cruising on asphalt.
It embodied outlaw sexy without even trying.
Arnold Rinaldi loved his ’68 Camaro SS with a 396 engine almost as much as he loved his lovely wife, Beatrice. Both had been constant fixtures in his life for as long as he could remember. While a war masquerading as a “military action” was all the rage in Southeast Asia, Arn purchased the car brand-new from a Chevy dealer in Pasadena for a little over three thousand dollars.
What little money he had left over went toward buying an engagement ring for Betty.
Both proved to be exceptional investments as he managed to hold on to the perfect gal and the perfect car for more than forty years. Not bad for a guy who couldn’t catch a Frisbee.
Almost six feet tall and well built, the blue-eyed California native was neither a troublemaker nor a pushover. He understood his civic duty when he registered for the draft, but luckily his number never came. While many of his high school friends were running through the jungle, he spent a good portion of his time driving back and forth from university and courting Betty.
With a speedometer topping out at 120 miles per hour, Arn’s muscle car packed plenty of muscle and could probably do about 130 under the right conditions. Despite what his gearhead pals said about sticks over manuals, Arn preferred the two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission to a four-speed manual shift. With all of the stop-and-go traffic that Southern California was famous for, an automatic offered a lot less work with the same result.
Baby blue, with pearl-white striping: If Arn’s Camaro was a woman, it would surely be a heartbreaker…but no matter how much he loved driving that badass machine, the glorious ride was not what he felt most proud of. That accomplishment came after he convinced Betty to take his name and become his lawfully wedded wife.
Except for tragic events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the My Lai Massacre, 1968 proved to be a really good year.
Naturally flirty, Betty was one of those fair-skinned daughters who no one could ever accurately peg their ancestry. Green-eyed, with a slender nose and a curvy build, she might be of English descent with some German thrown in. Or maybe she was Irish with a touch of Dutch.
Arn had never seen a woman who could be so graceful without even trying, but her grace was not a result of years of charm school indoctrination; Betty just knew how to conduct herself. She spoke properly, but with wit and intelligence. Her leggy walk was captivating, and while many a man enjoyed the visual, only Arn got to enjoy the ride.
With one hand on the steering wheel, he always made sure to hold Betty’s hand with his right hand. Absolutely no one ever was allowed to ride shotgun when she was around. The queen seat was reserved for her and the ent
ire universe understood this unwritten law. Hell, it even seemed like the car knew her place.
Whenever Arn drove somewhere without Betty, it felt like a part of the equation was missing. The engine didn’t purr as perfectly. The perfectly balanced chassis seemed to be slightly off. The radio played music, but rarely the songs he wanted to hear. These issues were never anything to wrench on, because they always seemed to work themselves out when Betty slipped into the passenger seat.
Or even better…into the backseat.
The delicious scent of new leather mixed perfectly with the muskiness of youthful passion as eager Arn and ready Betty ran afoul of local decency ordinances. Sharing space in the cramped rear of the ’68 while skillfully maneuvering into the sixty-nine position, the blissful couple discovered the ecstasy that a moonlit sky and FM rock-and-roll radio conspired to promote. His anxious hands explored her soft, heart-shaped ass while his tongue took to her wetness with ravenous intentions.
Not very conducive for naked calisthenics, these cramped confines never stopped the promiscuous newlyweds from turning the backseat into a mobile passion palace where black leather upholstery contoured their every activity. Always enthusiastic to find a private spot to park, the driver and passenger initiated the private activities, but there were never any objections from the host. Not only was the 1968 Camaro SS built for speed, it was also built for action.
One night during the early 1970s, the couple lay in their comfortable bed when Betty heard a strange sound coming from the garage. At first she tried to ignore it, but when it happened a few times, she woke her husband.
“Did you hear something?”
“You,” he mumbled, and tried to go back to sleep.
“Arn, I’m serious.”
“So am I. Go to sleep.”
“I heard a sound in the garage,” she firmly stated.
Upon hearing the location, the sleepy man immediately snapped to.
Dark Screams, Volume 5 Page 7