by H T G Hedges
It turned out that the Old Town Motel had seen better days. It was raining harder than ever by the time we reached the fabled establishment but what we could see through the cascading downpour looked far from inviting: paint peeled and bubbled, brickwork crumbled and gutters wept. A handful of once white free standing lodge cabins rose out of a muddy courtyard that was fast becoming a swamp of mulch, like bleached bones.
"Nice taste our man has," Corg observed drily.
Loess tsk’d and pulled us up outside of the manager’s office that was little more than a shack, a flat, wooden building painted in flecked, faded pink and illuminated by a single grey bulb, ensconced behind a mesh cage, that crackled and hissed in the falling rain.
"As you boys are wanted felons I guess I’d better brave the weather and get us a room," Loess said.
"Don’t know what we’d do without you," I said in reply, and meant it.
She threw me a wink before bolting off into the rain, reappearing a few minutes later with a set of keys.
"Surprisingly enough," she said, putting the car in gear and pressing forward onto a lot that was a seething sludge of churning mud with some nominal gravel scattered on top like marshmallows in cereal, "We would seem to be the only guests." She held up a warped, chewed, key fob shaped incongruously like a Christmas tree.
"Cabin one."
We pulled up outside the tattered, wood framed shed and raced through the driving rain into the cabin. Inside, aside from the cold and musty smell, our new home turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. Two small beds took up the back of the main room, their linen old but clean enough. To the left of them was a small bathroom complete with tiny shower and hand basin, at their foot a small kitchenette and seating area with a black vinyl table for eating. The whole thing didn’t seem to have been redecorated since the time when the motel was used as a conference centre for crime-lords but at least it was dry and quiet. A small electric heater was even pumping out enough heat to make the atmosphere somewhere just shy of cosy.
"The manager told me there was a bagel place in the next town, a couple of minutes down the road," Loess said, shaking droplets from her hair. "Fancy anything?" The looks on our faces must have said it all as she gave a small laugh and nodded. "Okay," she said, "I’ll be back soon."
I watched her run back through the lot to the car, the headlights lighting up the swamp and sweeping away, before turning to find Corg exploring the contents of every drawer and cupboard in the room.
"Never know," he said, catching my eye. No, I thought, I guess you don’t.
Loess returned a little while later bearing a brown paper bag, much droplet speckled, packed full of styrophome containers that she passed into our eager hands. The enticing smell of rich cheese and grease went straight to my growling gut and I felt myself start to salivate in anticipation.
I don’t know if it was just the fact that I hadn’t eaten since I didn’t know when, but that bagel was a slice of heaven. Grilled pastrami, two types of cheese, mayo, dill pickle all came together to make a sublime, toasted, greasy delicacy that filled my mouth with flavor and my belly with satisfaction. I wolfed down two in quick succession with definite gusto.
"Good?" Loess asked, nibbling delicately at her own.
" ’Mazing," I managed thickly through a mouthful of half chewed greasy bread before licking the last sweat sour tang of pickle from my remaining digits.
She looked pleased, then produced something else from the bag: a bottle of single malt. Corg let out an involuntary whoop as she tossed him the bottle.
"You are an angel fallen from heaven," he said seriously, snatching the whiskey out of the air.
"Thank you, I try," she said.
"I wasn’t talking to you," he responded, cradling the bottle like his newborn child.
"Though I am grateful," he added after a beat.
And so we waited, each lost in our own thoughts.
Now and again the world of our cabin was lit by a flash of lightening followed by the ominous peel of thunder rolling across the sky.
Corg drank, seriously and continuously, propped up on one of the small beds, a battered old glass in one hand, the ever diminishing bottle in the other, eyes fixed on a horizon I don’t think the rest of us could see.
"You know, he talked about you," Loess said suddenly, talking to me in a low voice that I had to lean in to hear. "Mr Happen." She corrected herself, "Not about you, about the Unlucky Man. He’d say the name after some of his trances, or before some of his crazier plans got put in motion, he’d say the Unlucky Man would come and end us all. I think he was scared of it, like the boogeyman or something."
"Scared of me?" I said, uncertainly.
"No," she said, reaching out and touching my hand, a small reassuring gesture that sent electricity dancing through my fingertips. "I mean, I know what I said just now, but he never talked about you, just about the shadowy figure in his head. That was the Unlucky Man, not you. He never talked about Jon Hesker."
I liked how my name sounded on her lips.
Time passed slowly. Loess took up a seat at the plastic table and set about the delicate business of disassembling and cleaning her weapons, fingers working with a speed and dexterity that told me that this was a common, ritual occurrence.
For my part, I positioned myself at the window, staring out of it but not really seeing. Warm and fed, I found myself drifting in and out of a waking dream. In truth it had been recurring since the mist; the same feeling of nothing beneath me but falling shadow, the world disappearing and reappearing with each heartbeat, melting and coalescing back to life over and over again until I shook myself, told myself to focus and gained a few minutes grace before the whole thing started over again. Drift and settle, break and fall, wake and dream and fade to black.
It was gone midnight when we heard the sound of an engine, a low growl that startled us all from a half sleeping inertia. We waited, silent, breath held in tense anticipation. Then came a knock at the door. It was a small, surreptitious noise, a knock that sounded almost like it hoped it wouldn’t be answered.
Gun held low by her side, Loess padded to the door and, with a glance back at us, threw it open. The figure she revealed was a short man, bedraggled by the fallen rain, reddish hair spilling out from under a porkpie hat rammed down hard over his ears. He was pale with heavy bags under eyes which roamed around constantly like he was trying to see everything all at once.
He was dressed pretty much as I remembered from my previous quick glimpse of him, another florid shirt beneath a sodden and dripping beige trench-coat. Everything he wore clashed like the colours of a cocktail you might buy in a Caribbean theme bar.
"Whimsy?" Loess asked.
He nodded. "Funny," he said, "When we spoke, I didn’t picture you for a blond." He smiled ingratiatingly but it froze on his face when he saw me. He whistled. "So you really aren’t dead?"
"Nope," I said, gesturing him over the threshold, "Come on in."
I proffered him a tumbler and he took it appreciatively. His movements were jerky, like he was wired on too many energy drinks. Taking off his hat he shook his head like a dog then apologised, taking a seat at the table, steaming in the warm air from the heater.
He looked me hard in the eye. "I’m sorry," he said, much to my surprise, "That I couldn’t help you. Before. Back at the station." He looked like he honestly meant it. "I’ve been moving around so long, I didn’t dare get caught in the open. I thought maybe I should, I don’t know... and then it was too late."
I shrugged. "So help me now."
With a sigh he drained the whiskey and Corg, only a little grudgingly, refilled it.
"I’ll tell you what I can," he said. "But before I do I got to warn you, what I know doesn’t amount to much and some of it is going to sound pretty crazy."
Corg snorted. "Believe me," he said, "Our litmus test of crazy has changed a lot in the last few days."
The little man nodded again. "Well I guess you’ve earned the right to hear it, but
don’t say I didn’t warn you." He grimaced. "How to start though?"
"The drug?" I said, thinking about the now oddly familiar way the black substance in that little capsule had rolled and coiled on itself, round and round into oblivion. It seemed as good a place to begin as any.
"The drug," he echoed darkly. "No, we’ll get to that. Let’s start with the man who shot you. Work up from there. His name is Wychelo. My understanding is he used to be a gun for hire, but now he’s on a chain for the power behind all of this."
"And who is behind all of this?" Corg interrupted.
"I wish I could tell you," Whimsy said, spreading his hands flat against the vinyl of the table, "But they’re official, that much I do know. Under the radar but they’re an agency for sure, sanctioned by some part of government, somewhere. They supersede the cops and they operate under a total media blackout."
"And you don’t know who they are?"
"No," he said, "I’m sorry. I know that they report to a body named Control, but that's about it. I don’t even know for sure if Control is a person or a group of people. I’m not sure most of them even know for definite." He paused and took a heavy slug of whiskey as the lights flickered.
"So the drug," he said, "This is where things get strange." We all drew in a little closer. What did I imagine was to follow? Not what did.
"Have you ever been to a place and thought, I don’t know...There are places," Whimsy said, seemingly slipping off track, "Where the world gets... thin."
"What?" Corg demanded, "What does that mean?"
Whimsy pulled a pained expression and tried again.
"Places where strange things happen. Places where the shadows stretch too long, where everything just sort of feels wrong."
"What is this?" Corg said, pushing himself back from the table. But I was thinking of what I’d seen, what I’d felt, as the mist rolled in, crowding with half glimpsed shapes, and his words didn’t seem so odd to me. Whimsy carried on determinedly, directing his words at me exclusively now. Perhaps he could see something in my face.
"You know what I’m talking about, I know you do, I see it in your eyes. There’s a place – I don’t know where but in the mountains somewhere – they call it the Black Well, or the Hole or sometimes just the Pit and it is a pit, a chasm full of shadows that aren’t really shadows at all. There’s something down there, in its depths, a reaching, waiting darkness. They found it, and they harvested it, somehow, and they made it into pills."
He took a deep breath. "That’s what Mackay was bringing when he fell onto your car. Somehow he had got a pill out of the lab and was bringing it to me. But Wychelo sniffed him out first."
"But why to you?" Loess asked, "What’s your angle here?"
Whimsy rubbed at his eyes, "I was part of a group dedicated to following this through, bringing it to light. Scientists mostly, not spies or anything like that, ordinary guys who got mixed up in this simply by being a part of the wrong lab at the wrong time. They brought me in when I was still a licensed investigator to help them make sense of things. They wanted to let the world know what was going on."
"But why?" Corg asked. "What are they doing?"
"They’re making an army," Whimsy said darkly and I noticed a small tremor run through his hand holding the glass. "Someone’s using the drug to create their own personal army of unthinking, unflinching soldiers."
A shocked silence followed his words. They begged so many more questions but it was Loess who spoke next, voicing a concern at something that Whimsy had said that had passed me by.
"Why do you say were?" she asked. "You were part of a group."
He fixed her unblinkingly. "Smart question. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. You sure you want to know?"
She nodded.
"All dead," he said plainly, "Bar one, my man on the inside. I haven’t heard from him since what happened to Mackay." He laughed, one sharp exhalation. "In fact that’s the only reason I’m here at all – I waited longer than usual to burn my number in case he called."
He swallowed the last of the whiskey, coughing as it hit the back of his throat.
"And call he did," he said with a flourish. "He wants to meet me – meet us. Tomorrow, says he has something huge."
In the silence that followed, I surveyed Whimsy with new eyes: beneath his diminutive and scruffy facade there was a toughness, something unyielding and oddly impressive.
"Your source ever mention an unlucky man?" I asked at length, deliberately not catching Loess’ eye as I said it. He thought about it for a moment then shook his head.
"Doesn’t ring a bell," he said, dismissively. In truth I wasn’t even sure exactly why I had asked.
The small, rumpled figure looked around at us, his audience, assembled in a half moon around a sticky vinyl coffee table as the lights flickered and, outside in the storm, a long drum of thunder rolled.
"Are you in?" he said, a shade hopefully. I got the impression that Whimsy had been alone for a long while, existing in a solitary confinement of his own making to ensure his survival. Having found like minded company I didn’t think he was keen to lose it so soon. He seemed slightly uplifted too, as if sharing the burden of his knowledge had given some unexpected catharsis. Looking around at the faces of the others I saw in their eyes a look I guessed was mirrored in my own: what choice did we have?
"We’re in," I said at last, and it felt very final. In the morning we would head back into the city and everything that waited there for us.
Dreams
Once, long, long ago, when the world was still young, the beast had stalked its surface and hunted beneath the heat of the sun and the cold of the moon. Its shadow had been cast long over the face of the world and it had known no boundary, its only compulsion was hunger, its only desire to consume.
And then Man came. At first the beast was wary of this new creature, so alike the other beasts it had hunted and yet so different. It watched as Man developed, became increasingly complex, increasingly able, increasingly hungry; and it saw in Man something of itself. And Man fed the beast.
Swiftly it came to realise that, in their actions, these new people could revere the beast, make it strong. With every base action, the beast was worshipped, strengthened, confirmed and it knew in Man a power like no other it had ever known before, and exulted in it.
As the years passed, many came to understand the beast and to fear it and they built fires to keep out his dark and huts to shut out the night. They daubed symbols on the walls of their caves and shunned the dark places of the world. They huddled in the light as their holy-men chanted and burned spices and wove twigs and painted their faces and did everything else they could think of in the hope of keeping it at bay.
Later, they built churches and consecrated the ground and built stronger walls of stone and slept with lights burning to keep out the cold winds of the dark on which the voice of the beast might still be heard. And some of their measures worked and some did not.
There were others though who welcomed the beast with open arms. They worshipped it, built their own churches of bone and blood in its honour, long halls of painted skulls and sharp spikes within which were carried out dark acts in its name that fed and nurtured its dark soul.
To these people the beast was generous, granting them power and dominion, bought at a price, over their peers. Many was the village sheltering in the dark forests of the old world as the shadows lengthened, shutting out the night with candles and lanterns safe behind heavy shutters and doors locked and bolted whilst the tall castles of those who had thrown in their lot with the darkness loomed terrible above them and the night echoed with the screams of those giving their lives in honour of the beast.
In this way, the beast was kept strong without the need to hunt and feed for itself and less and less did it venture abroad beneath either sun or moon and in this lay its undoing. As time passed the beast became ineffable, a thing of legend, an idea out of nightmare, out of superstition. Still fed, bloated
on the supplication of dark deeds, it crawled into the dark like a bulbous fat spider and slept, safe in the knowledge of its own never-ending superiority.
For a long, long time it slept, and when it awoke it was alone.
The world had changed, Man had changed. No longer did it worship the beast for the beast had become a part of its own consciousness. The dark acts of Man were now simply that and no longer an offering to the old dark god. No longer was it fed.
When it emerged from the dark it found it no longer had substance, could no longer rend and tear and alter the minds of men save those already disposed to hear it. For an age it crawled the surface of the earth searching for a way to return to what it once was until at last, defeated, it slunk into the deepest, darkest hole it could find and in the shadows waited sullenly in a state of hibernation for the world to change once more.
As it slept the shadows grew long and deep around it.
It didn’t awake until it felt, for the first time in many ages, a mind it could reach out to. It was the mind of a young man, part of a scientific expedition, almost entirely devoid of anything that might have been deemed humanity, ruled entirely by an all encompassing ambition and desire for power. Into this emptiness, the beast, now nothing more than shadow and suggestion, found it could pour itself like poison and be heard.
The owner of this mind was named Horst and the beast gave unto him what he wanted: the power to bend others to his will, even allowing Horst to take away some of itself, its shadow, for in awaking and making this connection, the beast found itself more whole than it had in centuries.
But it was not yet fully whole, nor could it be, although its presence was felt more strongly by many as it reached out to those minds that could feel it, searching without success for one who could set it free. Many minds were tipped into madness by the probing of the beast’s feelers, and many dark actions could probably be attributed to its suggestion. Still, however, it was trapped, despite its own and Horst’s attempts at liberation. But the beast understood now what it needed. Its bonding with Horst had weakened the boundaries keeping it at bay, holding its old world from leaking back through into this new one of Man’s creation.