Crude Sunlight 1

by Phil Tucker

  Contents

  Crude Sunlight

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Other Books by Phil Tucker

  CRUDE SUNLIGHT 1

  by Phil Tucker

  Crude Sunlight 1

  Phil Tucker

  Published by Phil Tucker at Smashwords

  Copyright 2011 Phil Tucker

  Acknowledgments

  To my first draft reading crew, fearless and honest, and to Jeff Vandermeer for the encouraging words.

  Many thanks to Lukasz Kapa for allowing me to use his photograph for the cover.

  Chapter 1

  Dusk was falling by the time Thomas arrived in Buffalo and parked his Mercedes outside his missing brother's building, the sky a deep shade of blue that darkened to cobalt toward the east. He got out and slammed the door, invigorated by the cold, pausing to look up at the sky, at the ragged, collapsing castles of cloud that were fading to darker shades of gray. He felt good. He felt energized by the drive, by the aggressive way he'd handled the car on the way up from New York, the manner in which he'd courted the cops, daring them to pull him over. Escaping the problems at home, cauterizing frustration with speed. It was a near miracle that he hadn't been stopped.

  His brother's apartment complex was grim, hunched and sullen looking like a pair of crossed arms, rising some six stories into the air. Spatterings of snow crusted the window ledges, were scraped into low drifts lining the approach to the glass lobby doors. A vague attempt at an ornamental garden had been made and then abandoned before the entrance, leaving a circular swathe of withered grass around a bare gravel pit. It was his second time out here, the first having been August last year when he'd helped Henry moved in for his Junior year. He'd never found the time to come back to visit. Ah well. He'd been busy. Missing Henry could ask missing Michelle if he didn't believe him.

  Suddenly chilled, Thomas hunched his shoulders and stepped up onto the curb, crossed the wide cement pavement and up to the doors. They were locked. A small steel panel with an LCD screen emitted a dull green glow to his left, and leaning down he squinted at the blocky text and pressed the pound key several times till he came to a list of names. Scrolling, he searched and found and then buzzed Materday, the superintendent.

  A long pause. Finally the panel crackled to life. "Yello?"

  "Mr. Materday, this is Thomas Verkraft. I've come about Unit 457?"

  "Oh... the missing kid. I see." Thomas pursed his lips and waited as the super processed this information. Materday had been the first to notice Henry's disappearance, calling Thomas when the second month's rent had gone unpaid. A chill wind picked up suddenly, blowing through the parking lot, lifting his collar. Thomas checked his watch--almost 7pm. The stock market would soon be opening in China, and things would be picking up at the office in New York. Nothing else seemed forthcoming from the panel. Suddenly annoyed, he opened his mouth to say something sarcastic but the door buzzed before he could so. "Come on in, then. I'll meetcha in the lobby."

  Materday backed out of a service door next to the elevator and turned to stare at Thomas. He hadn't improved since the last time they had met. Short, fat, and swarthy, the superintendent had small eyes and a large, splayed nose that must have been broken several times over the course of his life. His chin was practically nonexistent, giving him the appearance of a sly frog in a hunter's cap with the ear flaps down.

  "Verkraft?" Thomas nodded, and the super looked down at a massive ring of keys he held in one hand. After a few nervous, darting gestures he finally removed one and gave it to Thomas. "Here's the spare. When are you gonna be done?"

  Thomas took it, impressed by the man's indifference. No questions, no concern over the tenant that had been missing for three months now. "Probably by tomorrow afternoon. I'm going to see how much there is tonight, and call the moving guys tomorrow morning."

  Materday sniffed loudly, pointedly, and nodded. "All right, good. Have the key back to me tomorrow by 8pm at the latest. Anything left behind gets chucked out on Monday. Got it?"

  Thomas looked down at the man and struggled to stay calm. Don't get upset with this little turd, he thought. Just ignore him. He nodded, and something about his stare unnerved the super, who turned and bustled back through the service door. Left alone in the lobby, Thomas glanced at the key and then turned to summon the elevator. Entering, he hit the button for the fourth floor and let his eyes unfocus. He'd filed a missing persons report when Materday has called him a month ago, but nothing had come of it. Just disappeared, had been the cop's verdict, like thousands of others across the country. The legion of the vanished. They had interviewed Henry's friends, spoken to his professors, given his apartment a cursory search, but the police had come up with no reason to suspect foul play. Their conclusion: that Henry had simply taken off, another kid inspired by On The Road or Into The Wild. Materday had called yesterday to see if Thomas as the co-signer would pay Henry's rent. He'd agonized over the decision all night long, and when he'd finally called to say no it had felt like telling a doctor to pull the plug.

  The elevator shuddered to a stop, the doors rattled open, and Thomas stepped out. The hall reeked of wet dog, and was the kind of place that roaming site locators for zombie movies would die for, sending back copious photographs and floor plans with adjectives like "creepy!" and "moody-esque!" written all over them. It was poorly lit, the ceiling lights placed a little too far from each other, the carpet a dull, neutral vomit color somewhere between brown and beige. Each end terminated in a fire door, large and ponderous, the iron looking like it had been beaten with hammers. Behind each small, wire-meshed window flickered the lights of the stairwells, and Thomas easily imagined a bloody hand suddenly smacking against the glass.

  Henry had lived but two doors down from the elevator, and Thomas quickly unlocked the door and escaped the fetid stench into the dark apartment. Which, Thomas noticed immediately, still had a faint, lingering smell of incense in the air. Henry hadn't been a fan of the dog stench either, it seemed.

  The grey light of dusk came in from the broad window on the far side of the living room, illuminating the small apartment with clear, wintry hues. The last time he'd seen it the place had been almost empty. Henry had brought a few boxes of books, a closet full of clothing, a mattress, and little else. Thomas stood in the tiny entrance hallway and remembered the fierce pleasure that Henry had felt for his new apartment, how he had stood with his hands on his hips gazing out through the window as if surveying his kingdom. The sunlight then had been golden, autumnal. Now the light was cold and hard, and nobody stood framed in its pale radiance.

  Taking a deep breath, wishing Michelle were here to help, to make a wry comment or simply give his arm a squeeze, he stepped forward, past the small kitchen on the right, cramped and dark, a mess of dirty plates and glasses in the sink. Henry had acquired some furniture, the kind of items you might pick off the curb or buy cheap on the internet. A battered blue couch was set against one wall, facing an ancient, bloated TV set on a short, wide bookcase against the other. A desk was set under the window, its surface dominated by a computer.

  Turning, Thomas poked his head through the bedroom door. A rumpled single bed under the window, the sheets littered with large print photographs, casually shaken out of a manila envelope. An open closet door filled with what looked like mostly monochromatic clothing. A bookcase, a bedside table.

  Bare basics. Reaching out, he flicked on the lights and fluorescent bu
lbs bathed everything in an immediate wash of stark, sterile white light, the dust suddenly visible and ubiquitous, lying thickly on the table top and photographs, on the barren length of the window sill, on the framed picture of their parents. It covered everything in sight.

  Melancholia took him by the throat. He'd never been very close to Henry; seven years his senior, and preoccupied with his career, he'd paid little attention to his strange and introverted younger brother. When was the last time he'd seen him? Six months now, perhaps, since Henry had come through New York en route to beginning his junior year. Thomas and Michelle had taken him out to a fancy restaurant--D'Orsia--and then dropped him off to go meet up with some of his friends. Thomas had had an early meeting for the next day which had dragged until late afternoon, and by the time he'd managed to escape he'd only had time to take Henry to the airport.

  Still musing, distracted, he wandered over to Henry's bed. Thick, slightly curved glossy prints in atmospheric black and white lay over the rumpled sheets like strange autumn leaves. Had the cops gone through them? Reaching down, he picked one up at random and examined it. At first it was hard to determine the subject matter. And then, like a ship emerging from the fog, he saw it. It was a large tunnel, smooth-sided with an iron ladder affixed to the left wall. The flash had caused the water running along the tunnel's bottom to shine like a river of mercury, and in the distance a vague figure could be seen running away into the darkness.

  Frowning, he turned it over, and saw a note scribbled in Henry's spider crawl in the lower right corner: Nov. 17, 3:43am, Steam tunnels under State Hospital. Thomas turned the photo over again and examined the fleeing figure, holding the photograph to the light. It was small, a smudge of arms and legs, a pale face turned over its shoulder as it ran away from Henry. How odd.

  Dropping the print, he lifted a second one. It was much more morbid, a close up of a dead, withered bird, its little spine twisted into a vicious arch so that its beak nearly touched its tail. Bones and dust on a filthy floor. Pulling a face, looking quickly away from the empty eye sockets, Thomas flipped the photograph over and read: Oct. 3, 6.47pm, Dead pigeon #3 in Radley Hotel. Thomas clicked his teeth together and dropped the print onto the others. Avoid the Radley Hotel, he thought, and picked up a third.

  This one was very different from the first two. It showed a naked girl lying on a bed, a long white thigh in the foreground, filling most of the bottom and left of the print, the rest of her body extending away into the depths of the photograph, shadowed declivities, pale breasts and a laughing face almost drowned in gloom. Thomas stared, mildly shocked, taken aback at once by how attractive the girl was and that his brother had been taking nude photographs. He felt suddenly like a prude, an old man; after all, Henry was twenty. Flipping the photograph, he read: Nov. 12, 1.28am, Julia.

  Thomas let the photograph fall onto the bed and gazed down abstractedly at it. There must have been at least fifty or so such photographs lying on the bed, most of them showing dark rooms, more tunnels, views of overgrown gardens through mullioned windows. They were dark, evocative, strangely disturbing. Turning, Thomas looked about the bedroom. Where had he developed these photographs? At school? Had he been taking a photography class?

  Frustration reared within him. He knew so little about his brother. So little about his life, his interests. He hadn't even known he'd had a girlfriend until the he'd read the police report. Julia. A very attractive girlfriend, at that. He debated searching the photographs for more prints of her, and paused. Pervert, he chided himself, and snorted. Just keeping it in the family. What had this Julia told the cops? Had she told them everything she knew?

  He drifted out into the living room, and over to the computer, where he sat down and looked about the desk's surface. There was a pile of blank CDs spitted on a central spoke, and a number of papers scattered over the keyboard. Stacking them off to one side, Thomas leaned down and pushed the computer's power button. The tower hummed to life and he leaned back in the chair. A sheet of type caught his eye and he picked it up. Sunday, August 3rd, 2009, read the first line. Leaning back, crossing one arm over his chest, Thomas began to read.

  When I was young, my family would often picnic at the edge of the Hume Reservoir, driving off the dirt road that encircled it onto a shallow spit of land that fanned out some thirty meters into the water. The reservoir was vast, the still surface a soft and sullen green. As my parents extracted the collapsible garden table from the trunk, and my older brother remained in the car listening to the radio, I would shed my shirt and sandals and tentatively enter the water. Arms crossed over my chest, I would gaze at a massive and solitary tree that grew in the center of the lake, emerging directly from the water, and dream of swimming out to it. The ground beneath the water was rough, the reservoir's edge flooding and ebbing regularly over the stiff grass that grew in irregular tussocks from the mulchy mud. I would wade out till the water had passed over my hips and stand gazing at the tree, too scared to swim out that far, till my parents called me back to land.

  We went only once to the reservoir during that last summer before my parents' divorce. I remember the tension in the car, my gaze fixed on the shoulders of land that would slide into the reservoir's surface as we rounded them to reach our promontory. It had been a dry summer and the sparse grass was bleached to a brittle brown, the dirt gray and soft where the water had receded. As always, I shucked my shirt and sandals and stepped out to the water's edge where the ripples lapped at the dirt. My parents were arguing quietly in flat voices behind the car, and Thomas had walked away along the water's edge, listening to his CD player.

  The tree still stood, closer perhaps than it had ever been, a heavy looking branch emerging ponderously from its trunk, close enough to the surface that I could have surged up and grabbed it if I had been treading water beneath. I stepped out into the water, arms crossed over my chest, resisting the cold that goose-pimpled my skin. Pale sunlight broke through the cloud cover to occasionally warm me, to transfigure the water around me from a dull gray green to warmer tones of brown.

  When the water reached my ribs I let myself fall forwards and began to swim with tense, rapid breast strokes, heart pounding, losing contact with the muddy floor. I ducked my head under the surface and swam like a frog through the green murk. My head broke surface, I gasped for air and saw that I was still far from my goal. Experimentally, I straightened and tried to touch bottom; my foot penetrated a zone of numbing cold, as distinct from the warm layer above as if drawn with a razor. I yanked my foot up with a gasp, and ducked under once more, to gaze into the depths.

  The sun broke free as I did so, so that the water near the surface blazed from dull to emerald green, vivid and dusty, gradating softly down into darkness. I hung suspended, and stared into the velvet black that massed below, a void without light, without warmth, depthless and old, conscious of my presence as I hung before it. I sensed something within it, something looking up at me from the bottom of the reservoir, something inimical to me and mine, and all thought of reaching the tree fled my mind as I turned and surged back towards the shore in a blind panic.

  When my feet once more found purchase in the tusseted muck, I rose, breathing heavily, and saw that nobody had noticed my frantic swim towards the shore. My father was rooting around in the cooler with stiff, annoyed motions, while my mother sat in the car, smoking a cigarette and gazing away. I stood shivering, knee deep in water, and realized that I couldn't talk to either of them about the darkness. Instead, I emerged and took up my towel, wrapped myself in it and sat down on the grass, water running down my face, gazing out at the tree that stood miraculously alone in the reservoir's center.

  Thomas sat back and closed his eyes, reached up to pinch the brow of his nose. Of course he remembered those summers. The stupid trips their parents had insisted they take to spend time together, which, as far as he could remember, hadn't been particularly fun for anybody. He tried to remember Henry, tried to remember this tree that seemed to have been so
important to him, and drew only a blank. It had been so long ago.

  A couple of chirpy beeps announced that the computer was ready. A password prompt. Thomas paused, fingers frozen an inch above the keys. Password. Hesitating, he moved the mouse over to the question mark button and clicked it. A little beige box opened up, saying, Hint: I am.

  I am? What sort of hint was that? He'd hoped for something like date of birth or mother's maiden name, but no luck. Clicking on the password box, he typed Therefore I think. He pressed Enter. Nothing. He typed Henry. Again, nothing. He stared at the hint. I am. He had no idea.

  He knew that he should be thinking about how much storage space he would need, but he couldn't rouse the enthusiasm. He opened the desk drawers and rifled through their contents. Textbooks, folders, wads of paper, random pens, loose change, a pair of shades, CDs and more. Perhaps he should go through it methodically, sniff out more information, but he felt restless. With a pang he regretted not having brought Buck; he would have attacked this problem with an energy and enthusiasm, which in turn would have galvanized Thomas. As it was, he felt uneasy, listless, subdued. What was Michelle up to, he wondered. Was she thinking of him?

  He could feel a large and all-consuming funk coming on, the sort of hellishly introspective mindset that could swallow him for the rest of the night, so instead he stood and walked over to the couch. He sat down heavily. It was comfortable, he decided, despite the metal framework that he could feel through the cushions. Leaning forward, he picked up the remote control and turned on the television.

  A blue screen snapped into life. What, another password? he wondered in annoyance, and then realized that it was the video channel. Curious, he shifted around and dug out another controller. VCR. He examined it quickly, then pointed it at the Video Player and pressed Play.