Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Oh God…oh God.” Belfast clamped his hands over his eyes.

  “What is it?” Drake asked, startled, turning to look at him. Belfast uncovered his eyes. Saw the driver’s face. The driver’s pupils were black, black as obsidian, and in them, swirling soft lights like fireflies in summer grass. Or will-o’-the-wisps, in cemetery grass.

  “What?” Drake asked again.

  The shotgun rested between them. Belfast scooped it up, worked the slide (clack-clack), pressed the truncated barrel under Drake’s jaw and hollowed his head out like a jack-o’-lantern, which softly caved in on itself. Drake thumped against the door, and Belfast reached across to the wheel. The car swerved off the street, up onto the sidewalk, but Belfast steered quickly and Drake’s foot had come off the gas. Belfast was able to work his left leg over the dead man’s to press the brake, and nuzzled up to the curve.

  “You did this to me,” Belfast told the corpse, his own voice drowned out by the ringing aftershock of the twelve gauge.

  He pushed the second headless man he had seen this night out into the street, scooted over to sit in the puddle on the driver’s side, wiped the windshield with his arm, and put the car in motion again. While he drove, he tried not to look at his sleeves. But above the city, the sky still seethed as if with volcanic ash.

  4: REMAINS TO BE SEEN

  He left the car a block from his apartment in the suburbs of the city. Large old houses with trees and scraps of yard between them, once the domiciles of the wealthy, now tenements for minorities and cheap housing for students at the college nearby. He didn’t like abandoning the vehicle this close to home, but had no choice; walking just a block so covered in blood was a great risk. Fortunately, Drake had left his baseball cap in the car, and Belfast clamped that over his head after wiping his face as best he could with Drake’s jacket. At least the car belonged to Drake, and not him. He walked to his building without incident. Belfast felt surprisingly well for a man who had been shot in the head; he did not stagger or trudge, but walked briskly and silently. Even the pain in his head was bearable, no worse than one of his hangovers. Trees rustled dreamily in the night breeze. He glanced at his watch to see that it was one o’clock in the morning. A week night, so things were quiet. A car drove by him with rap music booming, the sound forcing his heart to beat in sync briefly, but continued on into the night. Belfast walked with his head lowered to obscure his face…and so that he wouldn’t see the sky. He felt small and vulnerable, exposed under its vastness. All those billowing ghosts.

  Inside at last, and he mounted the stairs to his second floor apartment. Somehow, though, he had lost his apartment key. He had done this before, however, and so he kept a spare hidden in a crack in the hall baseboard; dug it out. At last, he let himself into his apartment, locking the door behind him.

  He tried to minimize his noise as he put on the kitchen light, then moved into the bathroom. He mustn’t wake Sheila, who had to work in the morning. He thought it was funny, being considerate about that. Never mind that he didn’t want her to come out and see her new husband with a bullet hole in his scalp.

  In the bathroom mirror he examined the damage. The wound was clotted, remarkably didn’t even bleed any more. His hair was thickly matted, his face a smear. He should shower before Sheila saw him like this, but was afraid to unplug the wound. He stuck a band-aid over it. Again, he considered his actions amusing—until he noticed his eyes in the mirror, saw little phosphorescent fish swimming in them, and got out of the claustrophobic room.

  In the kitchen, he opened a beer. He should call Doc Cool over here. Sheila would want him to go to the hospital, but he couldn’t take that chance. He seemed to be doing well enough. Except for the…hallucinations. No, Sheila didn’t even know that he was a criminal. A hired killer. Mass murderer. She would wake up to a whole new life. He wanted to spare her that horror as long as he could. She wouldn’t stay with him, and why should she? No, he was not anxious to wake her up to lose her. Let her sleep in peace a short while longer. Let him have the peace of her sleeping here a short while longer. The end of a dream.

  Beer in hand, he went to look in on her, saw only shadows within shadows, but hers the warm nucleus of that dark cell. No ghosts to be seen, until his eyes fell on one of her enlarged photographs, black and white, framed on the wall. Somehow, its pure black was a window to that other world where mere shadow wouldn’t suffice. He saw movement in the black parts of the photo, and would have stepped back out of the threshold, except that as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he realized Sheila was not at its center after all. He flipped the light switch. A bundle of blankets and pillow, like a soft afterimage of her. So where was she? He turned from the room, leaving also the photo, which had not been stilled with the light.

  Not in the living room, either. The one room that remained to be searched was the other bedroom. This, Sheila had made into her darkroom. The door was closed. Perhaps she had waited up for him, despite it being a work night, and was busy at her labors of love. He went to the door, rapped lightly, steeling himself for their confrontation.

  Sheila worked for a print shop where she had been their one-person camera crew for two years. But technology had changed and even that old print shop, reluctant to spend the money to update its techniques, had finally given in to it. Artwork was now scanned rather than shot, even though photographs, when scanned, did not have the smoothness of the half-tones Sheila preferred. Still, even with the old technology it had hardly been a craft, let alone an art; just a less computerized mass production. Sheila was now learning the scanner. But he knew it troubled her more than it had already troubled her to work in the plant. When first out of college, she had pursued work as a photo-journalist…but her portfolio had been deemed too artsy, too studied, and Belfast could understand that. She was more inclined to photograph a burned doll than the house fire in progress. He had urged her to employ her talents, her inclinations, toward advertising photography. She had made a slight, defeated attempt. Only her love of photography had remained strong, somehow, when her efforts to live on it had waned. One of these days, she told him, when she had accumulated a worthy enough body of work, she would try to stage her own exhibition. She might be discovered, make a name, be accepted into museums. One day…

  He knocked again, more loudly. “Sheila?”

  He worshiped her, his young bride. Would do anything for her. Had done things for her, lately, she wasn’t even aware of. He wanted to get her out of that plant. Out of this blighted city. They should travel across the country, across Europe, visiting galleries, bringing her work to show and sell. He had gotten himself involved in shadowy actions. He had gone too far, he knew, through a black doorway, and now…now…people wanted to kill him…he had betrayed someone…but most of all, he had betrayed Sheila…yet the details knotted and blurred in his wounded mind, and he let them go.

  Instead of thinking, he turned the knob of the darkroom’s door.

  She was not here. Neither the red lights nor the regular lights were on. He put on one of the latter, but even before he did so, he regretted opening this door.

  Over the two windows she had taped sheets of red acetate, so that they appeared to be slabs of ruby. The shades were only half drawn, and through the dark red glass glowed street lamps and, further away, city lights. It was an effect they both liked, and they wondered what the neighbors thought, seeing the dark red windows glowing from the other side. They might believe some ungodly supernatural rituals were performed in here.

  Their opinions would not have been helped by the color of the walls. Sheila had painted the walls entirely black. Only the floor and ceiling had she spared, though had it not been for the landlord she would have coated them as well.

  But now, for Belfast, it was like the room had no walls at all. He was reminded of staring into the great central tank, several stories tall, in the city’s aquarium. Watching sharks and rays glide past like deformed angels. But again it was as though there were no walls, not ev
en the foot thick glass of that tank. It was as though he faced the void of deep space itself…and saw the creatures that lived between stars.

  The apparitions swarmed, full size, in great numbers. For the first time, he could clearly take in their entire forms. They fluttered like jellyfish, lazily flapped their limbs like stingrays as they drifted, would suddenly change direction and dart away like startled fish. And they were all looking back at him. They pressed their sketchy faces and the smoky, long-fingered suggestions of hands to the walls, as if to push through to reach him.

  Somehow, he knew he was not hallucinating. Somehow, the bullet in his head had made him a new eye. An eye that could see into the world where he had sent the men he killed. The world he had cheated tonight. And that was it, wasn’t it? These specters, jealous, demanded that he join them…

  Belfast backed out of the room. “I won’t,” he whispered, shaking, but strong. “I’m not going with you.” Now so many of them pressed unmoving to the walls that it was like looking out on a rapt audience. “Leave me alone!” he hissed, and slammed the door shut.

  He turned, and there was Sheila, and she screamed, and in his terror he tore his gun out of his coat and pointed it at her face.

  5: DOUBLE ODD

  “No, please!” Sheila blubbered, raising her arms to cover her face. “Don’t!”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Belfast groaned, lowering his still inoperative weapon. He took a step toward her.

  “No!” she cried again, backing against the wall of the hallway, trapped there, still cringing. “Don’t hurt me!”

  “Sheila.” He reached out to gently touch her hair. He loved her hair. Honey blond, it fell to the small of her back.

  “Who are you?” she sobbed hopelessly. “What are you doing here?”

  His hand halted, doubted itself, lowered. Was his face so stained in blood that she didn’t recognize him? “Baby, it’s me—Ron.”

  “Ron!” she shrieked, at last looking straight at him, meeting his eyes. Hers were red and raw as if she had been weeping for hours, before he had even startled her with the pistol. “You aren’t Ron! Who are you? You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who killed him!”

  “Killed him?” Belfast chuckled nervously. “Honey, wh…what are you talking about? Are you all right? Look, it’s me…”

  “I don’t know you!”

  “You’re talking crazy, okay?”

  “You’re the crazy one! You are! You killed my husband, didn’t you? And then you come here and tell me you’re him?”

  Oh…of course…he understood. Someone must have called, told her he’d been shot in the head. Of course she would think he was dead. And now, his face brown and flaking with dried blood (face like a burned doll) and hair caked with it, she didn’t know it was him. “Baby,” he went on soothingly, “it’s Ron. I didn’t die. I…”

  “Ron did die!” she blurted at him, her eyes going crazed, tendons standing out in her long neck. A vein showed in her forehead. In her fear of him, she was still strong enough to show him rage. “I just came from seeing him! All that you left of him! He doesn’t have a head! My husband doesn’t have a head! I had to identify him by his clothes, his wedding ring, the tattoo on his chest! But he has no face! No head! And you killed him! I know it was you!”

  Belfast studied this woman. She was acting like someone else, someone he didn’t even know. But…but he did know her. He remembered their wedding. She had been transcendently beautiful in her gown, tall as she was, a commanding work of art in her own right. He remembered their honeymoon in Florida; it had emptied their pockets. (Someday, he had promised her, they would see the world, not fabricated fragments of it at the Epcot Center.) He remembered when they had met at college. He was immediately taken with her. She was taller than he, slender, long-legged, long-haired. She had a prominent nose that would not be flattering were it not for her pretty eyes and mouth; instead, it gave her a distinct, unusual look that made her all the lovelier. He first realized she liked him when they were chatting outside between classes, one afternoon, and she stretched her arms above and behind her head while they conversed. He had had women do this with him before. An unconscious, instinctual action, like a dog walking in circles to clear imaginary grass before it lies down. She was arching her back, thrusting out her chest in a peacock’s posing, but more importantly, he felt, shooting little pheromone darts like Cupid arrows from her underarms. Animal signals, big smiles, talk of art. They had connected on every level all at once, in a delirious moment that he still thought of as one of the greatest of his life.

  Now, looking into each other’s eyes, they seemed not to know each other…

  “It was Drake,” he muttered, unsure of his words, of everything now. Drake had no head. It had to have been Drake she saw. But she wouldn’t know that name…

  The hall was lined with more of her photographs. One of these was indeed a burned doll. It had one good eye, and the black empty skull socket showed white larval forms wriggling inside. Another photo, less grim, colored, showed the two of them in Florida. An old woman had snapped the photo for them. Hair blowing, eyes squinted in the sun, arms around each other…

  But, reflected in the glass of a photo closer to him, Belfast saw another face. It wasn’t the face in the photograph, the face of Ron Heron. It was the face from the mirror when he had arrived home. It was…another man’s face…

  He was thus distracted, thus confused, when Sheila took another photo down from the wall and swung its side against his skull like an ax. Glass broke. Belfast dropped to his knees. Sheila whirled to bolt, shrieking for help. Belfast’s vision began to go black…and he fell forward.

  But as he did so, he reached out and caught Sheila’s ankle; held on tight. She fell with him, still screaming, and Belfast felt as though they tumbled together down a deep, black well.

  6: A SIEGE OF HERONS

  “Stop,” Johnny Belfast murmured, pointing his gun at her with his right hand, still grasping her slim ankle with his left. She was kicking out at his face, as if she hadn’t caused enough damage with the metal picture frame; blood was oozing around the band-aid on his forehead.

  She didn’t know the gun was inactive, and obeyed him, her hoarse screams dwindling to ragged gasps and whimpers. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet over her. She remained lying there, drawing her long body into as small a ball as she could, hugging her knees to her chest.

  “Sheila,” he began, but he stopped. Yes, he knew her name now because he had heard himself say it, but he didn’t know what she looked like naked. He did not know what she had looked like in her wedding gown. He did know, now, that he was not her husband, any more than this was his home. Any more than Ronald Heron had been a hired killer. Heron had gotten himself into deep, dark waters. He had made a man want to kill him. But it was he, Johnny Belfast, who was the murderer. Somehow, his memories of himself had become tangled with those of the man he had been sent to kill. Their bloods mixed in his mouth, their brain cells blended in his skull by the shot ball which had merged them in some perverse intercourse.

  “Sheila,” he started anew, “I…I did kill your husband. Well…I didn’t. My friend did. But I…meant to kill him. But your husband…he got inside me. He’s still inside me…”

  “Go away,” the tall woman moaned in a very small voice, a traumatized child. “Please…just go away…”

  “Listen. I’m…I’m sorry, what I did. I understand why you hate me. I feel his pain…your husband’s pain. I’m sorry, Sheila.” A stream of blood trickled into his eyebrow. A tear dropped onto his cheek. “I love you,” he husked. “I’m sorry. I love you…”

  From behind the door of the darkroom, he heard the cries of the dead. Growing louder, piercing his skull. But no; sirens. The night was alive with them, like harpies.

  He knelt by her, timidly touched her leg. She flinched slightly, that was all.

  “Sheila…remember in Florida?” he croaked. “In Disney World…in the Haunted Mansion? While w
e were on the ride, it broke down or something? We were stuck in one place for about fifteen minutes, and the mechanical ghosts kept popping up over and over? Do you remember that?”

  “Stop it,” Sheila whispered.

  “To save money, we didn’t use the hotels…we pitched a tent on a lot in the Fort Wilderness campground? And every morning we’d get our coffee at that little store, and sit on the back porch and feed those ducks that pant like dogs?”

  “Ron told you this. You aren’t Ron. Please don’t…please…”

  “He’s here. I’m here. We’re…together…”

  A moment, and then: “What did we find near the porch?”

  “What did we find? You mean…the nest?” They had found eggs in a nest right against the side of the porch. One of the ducks, too greedy for snacks to lay its eggs in a safer place, away from curious children. One day they had discovered the eggs missing, and had been of the hope that the eggs had been safely moved by some employee.

  Sheila raised her head from the floor. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God…Ron…”

  “Police! Don’t move!”

  Of course, Belfast moved. He spun toward the voice out of sheer surprise. At the end of the hall, a police officer with a gun steadied in both fists. The screaming, someone had heard the screaming, or found Drake’s car close by, and the police had come in unheard, Sheila had left the door unlocked, and the cop saw the gun in Belfast’s fist, and Belfast saw ghosts playing across the visor of the cop’s cap and across the metal of his gun…

  “Don’t!” Sheila cried at the officer, even as he opened fire.

  He was a better shot than Heron had been. Belfast was kicked backwards, his weight bursting open the door of the darkroom. He fell on his back on its floor.

  “No!” he heard Sheila cry. “No!”