The light was fading. Peter turned right, onto an oblique sidestreet that would take him back up the Soho Road. By now, traffic and pedestrians had left marks on the layer of snow: it was bruised with slush, crusted with broken ice. It wouldn’t last. Then he stopped. Across the road was a large dark building he didn’t recognise. It was at least three storeys high; the windows were all boarded up. The walls weren’t brick, but something like granite: huge grey blocks that were smeared with frost. Peter stared at the building; he felt sure that something had led him here. Was it a school? A church? A hostel? No insight came to him, apart from a sense of being used. After a few minutes, he walked on.
More snow fell before midnight. He slept badly, disturbed by the silence outside. Waking up in bed was both a relief and a disappointment. The flat was cold, but he couldn’t really feel it. He dressed, though it wasn’t yet daylight, and went into his studio. The head was unchanged. From the other block by the wall, the hand was still reaching upward as though trapped in the process of birth. Was this as far as it went? Because there was nobody to witness these miracles, they were lost. He could feel the empty nights moving over him like a chisel. The need for contact screamed in him; he sat down and put his hands over the stone face. The slight texture of the surface mimicked the imperfections of skin. Falling asleep, he imagined that he could feel the eyes opening, biting into his palms.
When he woke, a colourless daylight had soaked through the curtains. His shoulders and arms ached from the position he’d slept in. His hands were numb. There was blood all over the stone face; it had run like a shadow onto the bench, around the dull chips of granite. The blood had dried on his hands, but he could see a whorl of tiny cuts in each palm, like a tattoo without ink. He got up and washed, then rubbed TCP into his hands. It was only then that they started to hurt.
The crowding in the White Lion made him feel more alone than ever. Newcomers shook fresh snow from the hoods and shoulders of their coats, their faces clouding in the sudden heat. Towards closing time, an inertia swept through the bar. The juke-box changed its tune, regressing from Madonna and Kylie Minogue to the Eagles, Chicago, the Walker Brothers. The scarred words were still falling through Peter’s head as he walked out onto the street. Now just beyond the darkest hour / And just behind the dawn / It still feels so strange . . . A pack of late-night buses came up Bristol Street into town, all empty and staring white.
In the flat, he sat with a bottle of gin and watched the snow falling past the window. The drifting flakes seemed to cohere into a pattern just before they reached the glass. If the window-frame were an inch further out, would he be able to see properly? By now, he was beyond crying, beyond the compulsive emotion that came with being drunk. He felt – what was the phrase? – out there. Everything was new and irreversible. The bottle was empty, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Stumbling a little, he pulled his coat back on and went out into the night. Invisible lips brushed against his face.
On the Soho Road, most of the shops had metal shields. It was like a row of garage doors on a housing estate. Someone had sprayed YOUR DEAD on one of the grey screens. He wondered if it could be the end of a message: Bring out your dead. Outside a pub, a few ageing drunks were slumped against the wall. The snow painted their faces. Two were fighting in a slow, confused way, pulling at each other’s coats. Peter carried on towards the crossroads. The image of his own footprints weaving from side to side occurred to him, making him smile. Lamplight glistened on boarded windows and edges of broken glass. But the snow had cleaned the district as easily as correction fluid. No more hedging of bets, he thought. No more going from winter to spring and back again. It was going to be winter.
When he reached the sealed building, his exhaustion caught up with him. The only movement was in the snow that made a blurred thumbprint across each streetlamp. And something on the steps, in the shadow of the doorway: a pile of rags and newspapers, shaking, trying to form. It was the same old woman he’d seen outside the church. Flakes of torn paper fell from her shoulders. She stood up, growing as she moved forward into the light. Rachel. The same pale skin, bruised eyes, long streak of dark hair. Or it wasn’t Rachel, but it was very like her, and that was enough. She recognised him. They embraced slowly; he gripped her arms and felt her breath on his face. By now there was no sensation in his hands at all.
Then she pulled away and began walking along the side of the house. Reaching up, she gestured at the boarded window. Her hand mimed the tearing out of nails. What did she want to get in for? Peter examined the wood; it was firmly secured. He needed tools. “Wait,” he said. She seemed to understand. It didn’t take him long to catch a taxi on the Soho Road. Entering his flat, he felt like a burglar. There wasn’t time for him to recognise the place. In the taxi back into Handsworth, he fought to stay awake. It cost nearly all the change he had. The small hammer and chisel were in his coat pocket.
Working by sight alone wasn’t easy, especially in the poor light at the side of the building. He couldn’t risk being seen from the street. Rachel stood beside him, silently touching the window-frame with her thin hands. Eventually, the board shrieked as he worked it loose. There was no glass in the window. Inside, the room was cold and bare. Rachel felt their way along the blank walls to the bottom of a flight of stairs. There was some light here, though he couldn’t see where it was coming from. It seemed to float, like mist. He sat down on the stairs with Rachel and held her. When she kissed him, his lips went dead as if the nerves had been cut. Her arm was torn, the white flesh gaping open under a flap of cloth. As he watched, crystals formed in the wound and became opaque. There was no blood.
At the top of the stairs, they reached a hallway. The walls were covered with messages and drawings. Not sprayed: carved into the surface. People were sitting in corners, on steps, against the wall. They pressed themselves to the stone, as if for warmth. Nobody moved or spoke. The faint light from the walls shone through them and made their faces seem alive. Peter stopped and tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. He was thinking about the things people did to keep their feelings warm. How the senses came to life when imagination died. And vice versa, sometimes. Rachel stumbled and fell against him. They sat down together, holding each other as if unable to let go. Though he couldn’t feel it, Peter saw Rachel begin to come apart.
When all the flesh had melted, it refroze over his jacket and hands like a white skin. He looked upward, and saw more people huddled on the next staircase and landing. Briefly, he wondered why they had all come here. Perhaps they were just looking for shelter. Perhaps they believed this was a place where they would be looked after, where they would find comfort. Or perhaps (he thought with a growing sense of calm) it was the city itself, trying to restore the balance between flesh and stone.
DOUGLAS E. WINTER
Black Sun
DOUGLAS E. WINTER is a partner in the internationally based law firm of Bryan Cave. He is the leading critic of horror fiction and film, and he has been called “the conscience of horror and dark fantasy”.
He has written more than 200 published articles, reviews and short stories which have appeared in such diverse newspapers and magazines as Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Harper’s Bazaar, Gallery, Twilight Zone, Cemetery Dance and Worlds of Fantasy & Horror, and he is the music and soundtrack columnist for the excellent Video Watchdog. Winter is also the author or editor of a number of books which include Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Faces of Fear, Prime Evil, Millennium, the short fiction collection American Zombie, and a forthcoming critical biography of Clive Barker.
As the author reveals: “A vague precursor of ‘Black Sun’ was written in 1978–79 while listening to the music of Joy Division and trying (as I have tried for many years, without success) to make sense of my mother’s death. Such is the stuff that grim fables are made of. I put the manuscript away, preferring not to think about it, for nearly fifteen years.
“Then Steve Bissette and I started talking, as friends often do
, about collaborating; and in considering which of my stories seemed to match his artist’s pen, my thoughts turned with a curious sense of inevitability to that exiled manuscript. What I found tucked into an old file folder was an awkward fragment, but its spirit still moved me, and at last I had the maturity to find the right words to express my despair. A few of those words belong to Ian Curtis, who took his life fifteen years ago. His music, like this story, lives on.”
for Ian Curtis
I did everything, everything I wanted to
I let them use you for their own ends
To the center of the city in the night
Waiting for you . . .
– Joy Division
NIGHT HAD WOUNDED time. Minutes bled into hours, hours into days, and after a while there was only this dark country, wet with grey. Somewhere in the distance was the city; somewhere in the distance was the dawn. But here and now was night, and the stranger, and the coffin that he carried; and here and now, and forever, were the dead.
The stranger knew them all, not by name or date or place of birth, but by the stories that their broken bodies told. The first of them had been crucified, his limbs pierced and twisted in an ecstasy of pain. Crowned not with thorns, but needles and nails, he cried silently to the science that had forsaken him. At his feet lay his mourners, wrists and ankles bound, heads caved in with bricks and rifle butts. To each side hung those most innocent of thieves, slender and freshfaced girls with hair the color of flax, their naked torsos wrapped in wire and skewered on splintered stakes.
He knew the dead and their makeshift Golgotha, just as he knew the city that shone on brightly somewhere in this darkness, the next destination on the long low road from the Deluge to Jericho, Carthage to Calcutta, Auschwitz to Babi Yar, My Lai to Jonestown: The stations of the cross of human suffering. Parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife, the martyrs gathered like flies on the shadowed corpse of history.
The stranger knew them and believed in them, not the god in whose image they had been made. A lank scarecrow cloaked in black hat and coat and boots, he seemed to have walked this road for eternity. His face was blistered and unshaven; his eyes parched furrows, the eyes of one who has seen and not forgotten.
Dust swam in vague circles around him; the fading wind whipped the long coat like a cape, showed the holsters at his hips. A rope coiled in his gloved right fist, the noose by which he dragged the wooden coffin, its lid scarred with a childlike cross and the name of no one.
Now that the dead had spoken, his journey was complete. He loosed the rope from his grip, took the shovel from his pack. By the time he finished digging, the man from the city had come for him, just as he had promised: Alone. A flashlight beamed from his left hand; no weapons could be seen. His name was Hagopian, and when he spoke, his whisper was chased by the wind, the swift slash of a blade.
“In this world,” Hagopian said, “there are two kinds of people.” The flashlight burned up into his face, showed eyes restless and blue, teeth bared in a ferret’s smile. “Those with loaded guns . . . and those who dig.”
The stranger dropped the first handful of dirt onto the coffin, snug in its shallow grave. “The only kind of people I see are the dead.”
This is the room, the start of it all: A confessional of concrete and steel, lit in the unholy silver of halogen. Glass shards were scattered like diamonds underfoot. Stains seeped through the ceiling, desperate angels whose tears were tainted water.
The control center was unmanned, silent, still: Blank computer screens and video monitors. Dials and digital displays that had died at redline. Clocks winding down in ever slower circles.
“No words can explain what happened.” Hagopian tapped the first of the video displays, and life was born in dull shades of grey: A view down deep inside, where slowly turned the grinding wheels, the mighty turbines of tomorrow and tomorrow. The technicians, robed in the white frocks of their priesthood, scurried back and forth, laboratory mice lost in a maze of corridors. “What went wrong.”
The stranger did not ask, or answer.
“A mistake, some said.” Hagopian activated the next monitor, and the unblinking eye of another camera peered into a roomful of cadavers, laid out like fallen dominoes. “Accidents do happen.” A third monitor flickered, offered a glimpse into a watery abyss where two workers, doomed golems in cowls and contamination suits, floated in exile. “Or was it sabotage?” Screen after screen winked awake, a chiaroscuro of the dead and the dying. “Could it have been planned? Intended? Expected? What should we believe, my friend?”
All the king’s horses, all the king’s men.
“In the end, only we can choose. Truth . . . or the last set of lies?”
“No,” the stranger said. “Only the most recent ones.”
There was light in the distance, a bright hot star that pierced the horizon: The city.
Hagopian led him back into the darkness, past the broken barricades, the body bags, the guards who coughed blood onto the backs of their hands. The great grey domes rose behind them like inverted mushroom clouds, a monument to last the ages.
Through the wire screen, the faces of those standing outside, heedless of the circled triads and words of warning: Faces pressed against the cage of an endangered breed. A bentbacked crone stumbled away from them, a bouquet of torn newspapers and milk cartons held tightly to her breast. She licked at the missing fingers of her left hand and went on her way, following the dirt track that wound down into the valley below, into the sprawl of tents, abandoned vehicles, shelters made of raw lumber and tin siding and cardboard boxes. There pockets of flame and huddled people waited for a new messiah.
“That’s it,” Hagopian told him. “The cancer colony.”
This is the car, at the edge of the road: A Land Rover, hidden in the ruins of a collapsed overpass, metallic blue turned red with rust. A body, unsexed by decay and the teeth of scavengers, stretched across the hood, spikes driven through its forehead and hips.
Hagopian gestured with the flashlight. “This is the way . . . step inside.” The gears shrieked, caught, and the tires churned mud and sand as the Land Rover took to the road. The dead traveled with them: At every turn lay the young and the old, limbs withered with disease, bellies swollen with starvation, butchered and burned and bullet-torn. At intervals, trucks and railcars gasped out payloads of human remains; bulldozers stood watch over gaping ditches where the bodies were heaped like slag, the grey waste of industry.
Soon the stranger’s mirrorshades were awash with dancing phantoms, the backlit afterimages of blasted souls. A blonde giantess smiled down on him, cigarette in hand, inviting unknown pleasures. Beyond the monstrous billboard, the city rose from the darkness, a phoenix of bright concrete and glass.
An imaginary morning. A daydream. Or a dream of day.
“Here in the central grid, lighting is, shall we say . . . encouraged.” Hagopian laughed. “And why not? The power supply is unlimited.” There seemed no end to his laughter.
The Land Rover was drawn like an insect to the light: The storefronts, apartment towers, hotels, government buildings, all vacant and broken façades, were alive with light, an urban furnace stoked to white heat. The streets were colored with neon: yellow and pink, blue and green, an artificial inferno that flamed through the center of the city. Searchlights crisscrossed the sky; floodlights, arrayed in lofty banks, beamed down in every direction. Light, and only light, so bright that even the shadows had melted.
Hagopian brought the Land Rover to a stop and fisted open the door. The air was alive with the scent of ozone, the hum of unseen generators. He loomed off into the flaring sodium, lit, unlit, then lit once more, oblivious to the strewn garbage, the burned out hulks of automobiles, the words, black and spray-painted, along a nearby wall: CARSICK NOMADS.
The stranger followed. Overhead a streetlight blinked its yellow eye, watching over an intersection empty save for the headless corpse of a baby, sprawled in the gutter like a discarded toy.
Its blood tattooed the pavement, slicked the bottom of his boots.
A shot echoed through the neon canyons, then the tread of marching feet, growing ever louder; finally came the voices, a fragile chorus of lost and unheeded words. “Is this a dream we share?” “And the children . . . what about the children?” “They keep calling me . . . calling me.” Down the brightlit boulevard shuffled a procession of ashen women and men, their heads bent, wearing torn hospital gowns and the shame of imagined crimes. Their shepherds sported black hoods and flak jackets, waved their rifles like righteous celebrants. “Can you see?” An elderly woman stumbled from the line, wide-eyed with rapture. She beckoned the stranger to gaze into the processed sky. “Can you see them? The blue and the wind, the blue wind.” She staggered backward, falling into the arms of the nearest of the gunmen. “Who was I?” she cried at him, her fingers like claws on his jacket. “It was ages ago.” Now she was screaming. “And you, then . . . who were you?”
The gunman pushed her away, brought the barrel of his rifle into her stomach. Then he backed her against a wall and shot her; another red stain.
The procession moved on, burned scraps of paper carried on the wind; on and on, toward the edge of the city.
“Her name is Karen,” the stranger said.
“We know that, too.” Hagopian stepped past the latest body, gesturing down the boulevard and into the high noon of night.
In a room on the third floor of a shattered, nameless hotel, the stranger drank schnapps from a dirty soup bowl. Neon pulsed its peacock flare against the walls, the mirror, the straightbacked chair on which he sat. Although his eyes were closed, he felt the relentless pattern of light, the cold and the warm, against his face. An uncovered mattress lay in the middle of the room, its only other furnishing. On the mattress he had placed his two pistols, countless clips of ammunition, a flare gun, and a stack of wrinkled photographs and news clippings.
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