“Is he?” I asked.
“No,” Scott said, “not there. But there! He could be there!” Yet again he ran, heading between two buildings, and the lonely pad of his footsteps sounded like a riot in that silent place.
I ran after him, terrified that he would lose me in a maze of alleys and streets, parks and squares. “Matthew!” he called, still running, calling again. His voice came back to me and guided me on.
I did not want to be lost. I’d spent my whole life being lost and found, lost and found again, sometimes the same day, emotionally tumbled and torn down by the doubt and fear that time was running away from me. My mind could not cope with the complexity of life, I had often thought, and while others found their escape in imagination and wonder, I wallowed, lost in a miserable self-pity. Now, in this place, lost was the last place I wanted to be.
I spun around a corner and straight into the figure of a lady of the night standing against a wall, smiling at me, making some silent offer as I ducked by. Her fingers snagged my sleeves and brushed against my skin, and in that brief instant I saw abuse more terrible than I could have imagined. I gasped, fell to my knees and crawled forward, desperate to escape this dead woman’s cursed touch. I turned and glanced back at her. She was laughing, pointing at me as if that could touch and show me again. I stood and ran, wondering just how mad a dead person could become.
Scott’s shouts drew me on. I was darting around corners blind, not knowing what would be revealed beyond. A long alley once, the blue light of the dead faded here as if swallowed by the walls. Then a square courtyard, filled with so many wandering shapes that I could not help but touch several of them as I ran by, sensing them stroke my skin but unaware of any weight, any substance to their presence. At each touch, I saw something of their reasons for being here. This place was an unbalanced concentration of pain and suffering, I knew, but before long I began to despair that there was any good left anywhere in the world.
I wondered what these dead things saw or felt when I touched them.
“In here!” Scott called. “Or over there!” His voice angled in from several directions at once now, the city juggling it to confuse me. I passed from the courtyard into another narrow alley, this one turning and bearing downward, no square angles, only curved walls to enclose its sloping floor. There were shapes sitting in doorways like black-garbed Greek women, but they all looked up at me with pale, dead faces. Some reached out to show me their stories, most did not. One of them turned at my approach and passed through a doorway into the building behind it, and I could not help but stop and look inside. There were things apparently growing in there, strange dark fungi breaking from the floor and reaching for the ceiling, but when one of them moved and cast its dead gaze upon me, I turned and fled.
Some dead people walked, some ran. And some stood still or sat down, forgetting to move at all.
Scott’s voice rang out again, and for the first time I realized that it was only his voice. Footsteps no longer accompanied his cries. He had either stopped running, or he was too far away for me to hear them. Yet still he was crying out for Matthew, and somewhere he looked upon ghosts and did not see his dead son’s face, because his call came again and again. I ran on, but with every step, and whichever direction I took, his voice grew fainter.
I came across a district of timber buildings, most of them squared and severe looking with their ancient saw marks, a few seemingly made from the natural shapes of cut trees; curved roofs, irregular walls, windows of bare branches where leaves may have chosen to grow, once.
There was no greenery, only dead wood.
I wondered who had built this place.
The ground was scattered with fine sawdust, ankle deep in places, and I saw no footprints of any kind. My own were the first, and I imagined them as prints on the moon, no air movement to take them away, destined to remain for as long as time held them. Yet the dead were here too, though leaving no trace. Remains were scattered against the timber walls, just as they had been in the caves and tunnel leading down from the surface, and as I accidentally kicked a skull out of my way I had a brief inkling of its owner’s fate—
Standing in the woods as strange sounds came in, weird visions lighting their way between the trees as the hunt drew closer, the air grew warmer, and the fear became an all-encompassing thing as the first of the arrows twanged into trees and parted the air by his head. The voices called in a language he could not know, though he recognized the universal sound of laughter, vicious laughter, and that made him turn to run. The knowledge of his own death was there already, as if he had seen what I was seeing many times over—
I kicked the holed skull away just as I heard the sound of an arrow parting the air.
The place was utterly silent once more as I looked down into the sightless sockets. Where was his ghost? I wondered. Is this it? Do even ghosts fade away in the end? And as I mused on this, wondering where I was and why and just how I would ever escape, I realized that Scott’s voice had bled away to nothing, and that I was alone and lost.
I despaired. My breath came heavy and fast, and the air tasted of the blue light, cool and devoid of life. I could not be here, or anywhere like this, because cities like this did not exist. I saw and smelled this place, but I was lying to myself. In fleeing, Scott had taken his open mind with him, leaving me with my own weak, insipid perception of things.
I found a small courtyard, the fossilized remains of plants clinging solidly to the walls. The well at the centre was dry as my mouth. There were no dead here and no remains on the ground, so for a time I could pretend that I was alone. I sat beneath an overhanging balcony. There was no shade from the unvarying bluish light, but the balcony gave me the psychological impression of being hidden away from prying eyes. So I sat there, held my head in my hands and looked down at my feet, striving to forget that the dust around them was in a place that could not be.
There were dead people all around me. And the blue light, the light of the dead, giving me no day or night, brightness or darkness, cold or heat . . .
I believed none of it, because I could not. I was more willing to accept that I was mad, or dead myself.
My breathing became slower, gentler and more calmed, and eventually I fell asleep.
Upon waking there was no telling how much time had passed. I was still not hungry or thirsty. I had not dreamed. I was in the same position in which I had dropped off. Time eluded me.
“Scott!” I shouted once, loud, but the sound terrified me more than being alone. It felt so wrong. Even though my voice sailed away I had the distinct sense that it was ricocheting from walls and angles I could not see, not from these buildings that stood around me. The resonance sounded wrong.
My old friend did not answer. Perhaps he’d been as dead as this place all along.
I leaned back and closed my eyes, and a sudden breeze blew a handful of dust across my face, a hundred images screaming in and destroying the relative peace of the moment, assaulting my sense with smells and sounds and views from too many different places and times to take in. Each scrap of dust stung, and each sting was a past life striving to make itself and its suffering known. I opened my mouth to cry out and felt grit on my tongue and between my teeth. Held there by my saliva, these old ghosts had time to make themselves and their reasons for being here known—
She runs along the dock, the animals chasing her, jeering and laughing and tripping as they try to drag their trousers down, readying themselves—
Where had that breeze come from?—
A man stands against a wall and stares down the barrels of a dozen guns, hating them, hating what they are doing, hating their uncaring eyes as they see a rat in front of them, not a man, not a human being—
Something must have caused it!—
She should never have left him, never, not when he could do this, not when he could stroke his wrists this way and open the skin, the flesh, the veins, she should never have left him, never—
There had been
no movement before, nothing, and now a wind to blow the dust over me?—
The rattle of machine-gun fire tears the air above him, just as his stomach has been torn asunder, and the sand is soaking up his life as he cries out for help that will not come—
There were more, more, so many images crowding in and flooding my mind that for some time, seconds or days, I forgot just who I was. I stood and ran and raged, shaking my head, running blind, and each impact with a wall only gave me more painful deaths to see, more wronged lives ripped away by unfairness at best, evil at worst. I remember faces watching me, and for a time these faces seemed even more alive than I felt, true observers rather than mere echoes of who and what they had once been.
For a while, I was just like them.
Perhaps that was their way of trying to chase me away.
I walked. Through the city, past the barren buildings, dodging fleeting shapes of dead people where I could. Some of them glanced at me, one even smiled. I always tried to look the other way.
Eventually, after hours spent walking, I found myself at the base of a cliff, and without thinking I began to climb. Up must be good, I reasoned, we had come down here so up must be good. Hand over hand, feet seeking purchase, fingers knotting with cramps, muscles twisting and burning as I heaved myself higher, higher. I refused to look back down, because I knew that silent city was below me, watching, and that somewhere Scott still pursued his own wronged ghost. I could not bear to see him.
I had no thoughts of trying to find him in a place so endless.
Time lost its meaning. The blue light of the dead lit my way. I went up, and up, and though I once thought of sleep there was nowhere to rest. I moved on, never pausing for more than a few seconds to locate the next handhold or footrest, weightless. I did not tire. My heavy breathing fled into the massive space behind me, swallowed away without echo. I wondered how far the sound would travel before fading away. Perhaps forever.
I was hardly surprised when I tumbled on to the same ledge Scott and I had fallen from. I had no idea how long had passed since then. I was not hungry or thirsty and did not need to urinate, but I was certain that I had been in the city for days. Its grime seemed to cling to my skin, giving glimpses of the multifarious fates its inhabitants had suffered. And much as I thought of my wife and children right then, they seemed like memories from ages ago, the past lives of someone else entirely. It was the city that had taken the bulk of my life.
I plunged into the tunnel without a backward glance. If I turned I may have seen something impossible to ignore, a sight so mind-befuddling that it would petrify me, leaving me there to turn slowly to stone or a pillar of salt. I simply ducked away from that impossible place and entered the real world of darkness once again.
The blue light abandoned me immediately. I was in pitch blackness. I must have kicked through the shapes at my feet, though I could only visualize them. I kept one hand held out, fingertips flitting across the stone wall to my right. Perhaps it was because I could imagine nothing worse than that place I was leaving behind – and the fate that must surely await Scott there, given time – but I walked forward without fear, and with a burning eagerness to see the sun once more.
I walked, and walked, and all the time I thought back to Scott running from me, wondering what had made him do so, why he had not turned to say goodbye.
He should never have left me like that. Never. Not on my own down there.
The tunnel seemed far longer than it had on the way down. The slope was steeper, perhaps, or maybe I had taken a branch in the darkness, a route leading somewhere else. I walked on because that was all I could do.
As light began to bleed in, its manifestation was so subtle that it took me a while to notice. I could not see and then I could see, and I did not discern the moment when that changed. My fear was dwindling, fading away with the darkness. We are all energy after all, I thought. There’s nothing to us but space and power. Our thoughts are an illusion, and the world around us even more so.
An illusion . . .
“Where is that coming from?” I whispered, and my voice was curiously light. Those ideas, those images and concepts, all so unlike me. Given time perhaps I could have thought them, but it had only been a while since I had left the city, only a while.
He should have never left me alone . . .
I heard Scott calling my name. His voice floated to me from afar, nebulous and ambiguous, and it could have been a breeze drifting through the tunnels from above. I made out carved symbols on the walls, recognized them from our journey down here. In the bluish light issuing from my skin, eyes and mouth, the ancient words were beginning to make some kind of sense.
I heard Scott again from up ahead, but his voice was fainter now, fading, retreating somewhere and some place lost to me forever.
Voices rose behind me to call me back, and sounds, and the noises of a city coming to life.
At last I could hear the dead.
GLEN HIRSHBERG
Safety Clowns
GLEN HIRSHBERG LIVES in the Los Angeles area with his wife and children. He has won two International Horror Guild Awards and received four World Fantasy Award nominations. Both The Two Sams, a collection of ghost stories, and The Snowman’s Children, his debut novel, are published in the United States by Carroll & Graf.
Hirshberg’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Trampoline, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Cemetery Dance, The Mammoth Book of Best New Terror, Acquainted With the Night, Shadows & Silence, Dark Terrors 6 and The Dark, as well as online at SciFi.com.
He has just completed both a new novel, Sisters of Baikal, and a second story collection, The Muldoon.
“I have also driven an ice-cream truck, for one day, with an ex-marine named Randy,” recalls the author, “and that’s all I’m prepared to say about that particular experience.
“Loubobland is an actual place, though a very different kind of place, and the proprietor really did once seem that remote, that driven by a code of ethics entirely of his own devising.
“The clowns, meanwhile, got in my dreams and then down on paper thanks to a mug my dastardly son, then barely two-years-old, selected and kept sticking in my face during a visit to the circus that sometimes seems never to have ended . . .”
“and
the
goat-footed
baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee”
—E.E. Cummings
AS SOON AS I SPOTTED THE AD, I knew I’d found what I wanted.
LIKE BEING THE GOOD GUY? LIKE HAPPY FACES? SAFE DRIVER? SAFETY CLOWN NEEDS YOU.
One phone call and thirty seconds later, I had an interview appointment for 5:45 a.m. the following morning with Jaybo, dispatcher, founder and managing owner of the Safety Clown Ice Cream Truck Company. “Bring your license,” Jaybo half-shouted at me, voice hoarse as a carnival barker’s, and hung up.
Replacing the phone, I lifted the red dry-erase marker out of its clip on the message board and made a tentative check next to item #7 on my mom’s list: Find USEFUL summer employment. Help people. Have stories to tell. Make enough to concentrate on school in the fall. Then I sat down on the tiny lanai to watch the evening marine layer of fog roll in off the beach and fill the ravine between our condo complex and the horse-racing track down the hill.
My condo complex. I still couldn’t get used to it.
My mother had scrawled her final message board list for me in the middle of the night, three hours before I drove her to the hospice to die. That had been a little over a month ago, orphaning me on the eve of my twentieth birthday. She’d left me our one-and-a-half bedroom condo, enough cash to finish my sophomore year at San Diego State without taking any new loans or other job beyond my work-study at the library, and her cactus garden. “No way even you can kill those,” she’d told me, touching her fingers one final time to the tiny prickles in each individual wi
ndow box. It had taken me less than four weeks to prove her wrong.
The morning of my interview, I set the alarm for 4:45 a.m. but woke a little after 3:00, prickly and unable to sleep any more. After this, the only undone item on her list would be #1: Celebrate your birthday. And it was a little late for that. So. No more mom lists. Nothing left to do for anyone but me. Already, I was certain I’d sell this place, maybe before September. And I’d slowly lose the memory of air-conditioners hissing in all the condos jammed up against ours. I’d forget 4:15 a.m. garbage trucks and dogs snarling through screen doors at the hot-air balloons climbing with the light to lift rich people into the sunrise.
But I probably wouldn’t forget the summer afternoons playing skateboard tag with the thousand other kid residents in the alleys of our sprawling nowhere of town-home blocks, stealing each other’s wish-pennies out of the fountain by the guard shack, and waiting for 3:30 p.m., when the ice cream trucks descended en masse and we engulfed them. Hours after the trucks left, the buzzing tinkle of their music stayed trapped in our ears, like the bubble of pool water you can’t quite shake out.
This would be my farewell, not just fulfilment of my mother’s wishes but tribute to her. To my father, too, although what I mostly remembered about him was the smell of the strawberry air-freshener he insisted my mother spray all around to hide his sick smell, even though it didn’t, and the way he’d died, holding his wife’s and his seven year-old son’s hands in his surprisingly strong ones, croaking, “God. Damn. I can feel myself going down.”
At breakfast, alone in my condo, I watched the marine layer through the open lanai door, hearing horses nickering as stable-hands led them to the beach. Right on time, I left, pointing my mother’s battered blue Geo down the empty I-5 freeway. I kept the window down, and the fog buffeted my face as though I were piloting a speedboat. Jaybo’s directions pointed me above 10th Street into a motionless neighbourhood of empty lots and warehouses. At that hour, even uphill and inland, mist streamed from the lampposts and chain link fences. Reaching C Street, I slowed, turned, and began creeping east, looking for a street number or sign. What I saw, mostly, were human-shaped humps curled under newspapers or garbage bags along the fencing. I was about to turn around when I spotted the hand-lettered poster board lashed by its corners to a post at the end of an otherwise deserted block:
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