No Light in August: Tales From Carcosa & the Borderland (Digital Horror Fiction Author Collection)

by Digital Fiction

  My mind spills away like sand, and I run.

  Rachel stares after me, mouth half open and unbelieving. It’s better to look at her and not at what’s on the bed.

  My wife is on her way up the stairs, drawn by the beating of my feet. I open the door and run onto the path, and even the cool night air isn’t any comfort. Nothing can be after that.

  “DADDY!” Rachel screams behind me, but I don’t look back as my feet pound the concrete, picking up speed all the time.

  When you’re drinking, time becomes compressed. Almost in line with every beer you have, time starts to pool in around you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The same is true of dreams, or when your mind suffers a break.

  Drunk, you can function on autopilot, more or less.

  I opened my eyes, though they were never closed, and didn’t immediately know where I was.

  Time didn’t compress for me. I stepped outside of it, and I haven’t really stepped back. I think I’d lost time before; I have memories of being a drinker before, but those memories are even hard to grasp by necessity of the booze. I think it’s why I was able to ground myself, for however short a time, when I came back up for air.

  Light from streetlamps lay on top of the water, like oil on water. Running, but unmoving with the direction of the current. Tremors twitched up my fingers and along my hand, but stopped when I looked away from the water. Neon lights dazzled me from across the street; washed-out promises lighting a strip of bars and clubs.

  I knew where I was, more or less.

  As I stepped into the road, a car blasted its horn and swerved to avoid me. I caught words, sucked away in the backwash of its passing. I didn’t see it because it wasn’t there before, like I wasn’t all the way back up yet — only breaching the surface by inches. I was aware enough to know where and when I was; the rest came back only gradually as I drifted back to the surface of things.

  The door to one of the bars was open, it being a cool evening. I stepped in, if only for somewhere to go. I was afraid if I didn’t stop for a second, I’d never find my way back.

  The bartender asked me what I wanted for the second time. His voice was dulled, like he was speaking through water or as if my ears were filled in.

  “Scotch.” He slid the drink across to me and I handed over a fiver. I had forgot my wallet was even in my pocket; only my keys were still in the house.

  The house, my dau—daught…

  My first sip kicked the back of my head, hauling me into the bar. Spluttering and coughing, I found my feet and swayed my way towards a dark corner where there weren’t any people.

  The whisky sloshed around in my mouth, its warmth now more familiar. Sinking into the padded leather of the seat, I realized how much my legs and back ached. How long had I been running? Where was I going?

  The drink burned the questions away. Enough of my reasoning was sifting itself together, but it was like trying to fit together a picture you didn’t really understand. There were gaps notable by their absence, only there was no way to know exactly what was there before.

  So many pieces of your mind fit together in such a way that you only realize they’re gone when it’s too late.

  By the time I noticed the woman, she was already sliding along the seat opposite me. The leather creaked under her thighs, rubbing against the fabric of her dress.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked, then fished a pack of cigarettes from her bag, stuck one between her lips, and lit it with a slab of slender steel.

  “Mind if I have one of those?”

  The words were like familiar actions, muscle memory more than anything else. The whisky helped, but I needed something else. The flame jumped, shaping itself into a flickering blade. The first draw stuttered in my lungs, but the second was better.

  “You look like you could use some company.”

  “Do I?” What I’d seen of my reflection said she was right. “Rough night?”

  “Something…something like that.”

  She was pretty. High cheekbones and full lips painted red. Her hair fell straight, framing her face like a painting.

  “Angela,” she introduced herself, sliding her hand across the table and offering it, all very businesslike.

  Her grip when I took it was warm; it pulled me forward without actually doing anything like that.

  “Buy me a drink?”

  Slips of logic started to come forward in my head; a way things might go if I just held on long enough.

  “Why not, sure.”

  She gave me the keys to her car on the condition we were going back to my place.

  “You have your own place?” She isn’t slurring her words, but she sways on her feet. “Yeah, I do…it’s not far,” I said, hoping I would know the way once I got behind a wheel and on a road I knew.

  Her car is small, but practical for the city in its own way. She flopped into the seat and her hand bounced onto my leg, where it remained for longer than I expected.

  “Welll,” she stretched the word and ran her lips along her teeth. She wasn’t a hooker, just someone out to have fun, maybe meet someone and see where it went. Nothing wrong with that, just a shame she met me.

  The door of my house is closed. I thought it would be because whatever was now in my house wouldn’t want to be disturbed.

  I could feel a tickling sensation down my neck and back; the sand of my sanity again dribbling through the open cracks. The pouring increased the closer we came to my home. When I stepped out onto the pavement near my front drive, I was sure she could hear the rattle-patter of grains falling out.

  “Nice place.” She walked a little steadier, but still took my hand for support. She didn’t need to.

  Standing in front of my door, I turned the handle, but found it locked. “No keys?” she asked.

  Reaching into my pocket, I found them…only, I’d never picked them up on the way out. Or had I? Did anything actually happen before, or was I back drinking again?

  Drinking again? Did I have problems with it before? “C’mon, it’s getting cold,” she prompted.

  I put the key in the lock, and my hand took a long time to turn it. What was I going to find inside?

  When they found me standing outside, clothes ripped and arms bloody to the elbows, it was open and shut. History of alcohol abuse, which they said explained why I couldn’t remember much; they said I had something called Cotard’s syndrome.

  I’d never heard of it, but they fixed on it as why I had a hard time seeing faces. Did I feel alive or more like I was out of myself?

  “Sometimes one or the other.” I’m in leg irons and an orange jumpsuit. The doctor writes something on a pad and looks back at me; one of his eyes is filled in now, but it wasn’t before.

  “What do you see now when you look at me?”

  “Your face…more or less.” They’d put me on medication not long after they picked me up. “Your daughter, you saw her face?”

  “My real daughter, yes.” “But not the other?”

  I screwed my eyes shut, refusing to remember and doing a good enough job to keep from convulsing in my chair.

  “Your wife?”

  “I saw her face when I came home,” I told him, but in my mind, I couldn’t remember it. It was hard to separate the memory from what happened. Something in me had shifted out of place and wouldn’t go back.

  “No, that isn’t what you said.” His other eye was gone now, just a pink cover of skin over the socket. His nose was losing definition, so I focused on his mouth.

  All the electroshock hasn’t stopped the faces from disappearing, because they’ve all been marked. My wife was marked first, I know that now, but it saved my daughter as bait.

  It knew me — knows me, I should say.

  I wonder if I’m dead, like they say. I might start to think so. I hear things when I sleep sometimes, and once, in the corner of my room in the hospital, I saw something quivering in the corner where the shadows are deepest.

  There was
only one of my wife and one of my daughter in the house when they found me. The woman they never found, but I do think I killed while it watched.

  It’s feeding off me; stripping what’s left of my mind a piece at a time. This morning, I found a carved shank under my pillow. I don’t remember making it, but I think the end is coming soon. Not for me — it doesn’t want me to kill myself. It wants me to give a face to everyone who doesn’t have one, to carve under their pinkish fill-ins and find what’s underneath.

  The last thing I’m not going to see is my own face, because I’ll think it will fill it in too.

  That’s when I’ll do it to myself, and all this will end — until the next time.

  It won’t be me, which is all I care about.

  Part Three: The King’s Subjects

  It’s a woman. She’s thin – too thin. Her arms are more like sticks than flesh and blood. Her skin is pallid, a washed-out grey, which is why her shape was hard to pick out.

  Art Terroir

  Laura’s an art critic, and her coffee table is often buried under a pile of brochures and guides from the exhibitions she writes up. One of them caught my eye, and it brought back memories I’d tried to put away in the box in my mind that the therapist said I needed to construct.

  “What’s wrong, Eve?” She stood, trapped in her doorframe, on the threshold with a cup in each hand.

  “Nothing,” I said, lifting the brochure without looking at it again. Once was enough. “This, are you going?”

  She came forward, reassured a little. “Oh that? Yeah, it’s this weekend.” She set the cups down, and they sat lopsided on the pile of papers and laminated books. “Want to come?”

  I’d seen the paintings before, though not the one on the front cover. It was the style that set my eyes stinging, but if Laura noticed, she didn’t say anything. Most of my friends are good like that.

  I knew the artist from another place; the only time Lucia and I had ever met. She had still been able to see then, but if the painting on the front of the brochure was anything to go by, she could still see — just not in a way easily understood.

  Would she remember me?

  I wanted — needed — to know.

  “Yeah, if you don’t mind…I know her.” “Really? Where from?”

  I lied, because the truth is something I have a hard time with, especially from when I encountered Lucia.

  Would she remember me? Would it be better if she didn’t? Maybe if she didn’t, then I could convince myself that none of it happened. That I was lying to myself, and lying to my friends wasn’t something I was responsible for.

  Living rough since the breakup, not because I have to, but because I want to; there’s a freedom in it. After Kyle, I need to be free. Not only from him, but from life. Society and friends too; there’s nothing there for me right now. I wonder if there will be again.

  People move around me as if I’m not there. When they do look, they either turn away or look through me. I’d thought that was just a cliché before. How many times did I do that? Just let a person fade into the background so they formed a void, a life-shaped hole.

  The Others are not like me and see me for what I am: a faker, a tourist because I have somewhere to go back to. I’m just visiting, not living it like they are. Still, when Jake speaks with me, he acts like he understands.

  “We’re all runnin’ from somethin’, just is most of us can’t go back.” He smiles through cracked and broken teeth, but apart from that, he’s not bad looking. His smile adds rather than subtracts years. Even under the dirt, beard, and hair, it’s hard to say how old he actually is.

  “Been on the street since eighty-five,” he said in our first conversation, which tells me nothing useful.

  I go days without seeing him, but he turns up when it seems like I need someone to talk to.

  Moving in the same circles would make it inevitable; it’s not like there are many places people like us can go where we won’t meet Others.

  It was near the square. I forget which one; when you’re detached from reality, names have little permanence unless you’re being specific. He sits on a bench, sipping a cola. People give him a wide berth, forming a semicircle around him as if he’s contagious.

  “Hey.” He smiles up at me, and I sit next to him. “How you been?” “Same, you?”

  “Good, actually.” Jake’s feet shuffle back and forth; heel-toe-heel-toe. “Kind of met someone who seems kinda interesting,” he says, then catches my smile and waves one hand. “No, no, not like that.”

  “Like what, then?”

  “She’s a street artist, just moved in under the bridge.” The bridge meant any one of the four crossing the river. “Saw her in the park the other day, and we got to talking.”

  Looking closer, I notice a sheen across his eyes, like he’s on something, but he’s too lucid and Jake’s never been tempted. He always says there are plenty of things can kill a person, no need to help them out.

  “I think you’d like her. I’m seeing her today, wanna come?” “Sure, you know where she’ll be?”

  “She’s got a sweet spot in the park, right on the corner.”

  We arrived early at the gallery, about an hour before the doors open. The only people inside were some low-key glitterati and press, along with the curators. The paintings were covered over in white cloth, like in a house unopened for years or one where someone died.

  Laura drifted away pretty quick, probably going to speak to other critics or the curators about the show — things they’d heard and so on. I wondered if she would mention I knew Lucia. No one had ever heard of her when she could still see; it seemed logical they would want some idea of her art when her eyes worked.

  I strolled around, looking at the covered paintings and fighting the urge to peek behind the sheets. I doubted anyone would stop me, or at least they wouldn’t have time to before I saw what was underneath.

  The gallery is split into six smaller exhibition rooms, with a seventh larger space in the middle. All of them are connected by open doors. I found myself alone in one with five paintings on the walls, each about the height of a full-length mirror. Murmured conversation drifted through, echoing from the shiny walls into the room.

  Stopping in front of one, I looked, my eyes becoming defocused like in a daydream. The murmurs flitted around in a cloud — buzzing in my ears, almost vibrating in my head.

  “Please don’t, miss.”

  A young man, one of the curators I supposed, was leaning around a door and looking at me. I looked back at the painting. My arm had stretched forward with the hand half open, fingers almost touching the fabric. I hadn’t been aware of moving and pulled it back, though it moved slowly despite myself.

  “Sorry, couldn’t resist,” I said, and managed a smile that put him at ease.

  “No worries,” he replied as he came into the room and stopped next to me. He wasn’t bad looking, but had a light dusting of acne on one cheek. No more than twenty; a student here on internship, most likely. “I hear it’s going to be pretty good.”

  His smile is sheepish, but he probably knows it. It softens his eyes and makes him seem more like a boy than a man. He likes me, and while it’s nice to be liked, I don’t have much of a taste for men anymore.

  No need to get ahead of myself and tell him that. He’s cute, and it’s been a while since I talked to someone who doesn’t know me.

  “Been here long?” I point at his black shirt and dress trousers. The curators wear them as a badge of office, by the way some of them walk.

  “Only my first year, but I feel lucky. It’s competitive to get into any gallery these days; funding’s drying up fast.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Have you seen her work before?”

  “I didn’t know she’d exhibited before,” I replied. Not strictly true. “Yeah, a couple of places actually; it’s kind of a coup that she’s here.” “Eve,” Lisa called, appearing in the door that I came through.

  The curator
turned, and then faced me again.

  “Gregg,” he said as he offered his hand. His grip was gentle and his hand felt soft, unused. “See you soon, I guess.”

  Lucia is a small woman, her hair prematurely grey. I never found out why that was.

  We met her at her spot in the park, where she was sketching with charcoal. A few pieces of her work were mounted on cork boards along the fence rail. I was impressed, even though I won’t claim I know too much about art.

  “Lucia, this is the woman I told you about.”

  She looks up from her work, setting the nub of charcoal down and wiping her hands on jeans already covered in smears of black. Her face is round without being chubby — almost too young, and in contrast with her aged hair. It’s her eyes that grab me: one blue and the other green. A mismatched set for a broken doll, both clear like glass beads.

  “I like your work.”

  “Thank you, you’re very kind.” She points to one of the drawings on display. “I prefer paints, but charcoal’s best for out here.”

  Looking from Jake to Lucia, I notice their eyes are the same — not in color, but in texture. Glassy and bright, like they’re in on something I’m not.

  Living outside the confines of society means you encounter all kinds of characters. People with stories to tell and who have been places no one else has. Lucia seems to be one of those people, but not in any easily definable way.

  “Jake says you’re under the bridge.”

  “Not anymore, old news.” Her hand absently plays with the charcoal stub, stroking it, turning it around and around. “With some people now, other artists in a squat near the park.”

  “This one?”

  “Nope, other side of town.”

  “How many?” Jake asks, old habits meaning he’s always looking for the chance of a bed somewhere, even for a night.

  “Five and Billy.” The way she singles him out means he’s the leader or head of the house.