New People of the Flat Earth

by Brian Short

  “You’re a difficult case, Mr. Monk Man.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been out of the game for so long, I guess it comes out in strange ways. I think. Is what.” His hard-on, against the confines of his pants, was hurting, bent, but at least now starting to abate some. “This. Is.”

  “That’s not what I meant. But apology accepted, if unnecessary.”

  “Did you just try to kill me?”

  “It seems I could’ve done so, if I’d wanted. But look, let’s go inside. There’s something else I want for you to see.” She led him into the small, plain building, the front door of which was still unlocked. Proteus wondered, briefly, why he thought it should have been locked, or who would have locked it, other than himself, found no answer, and forgot the question.

  Inside, by comparison to outside, was dim, dark – not in the way of the Ignatius! coffee! Co! whose darkness defied reason, but in the way of a room whose ambient light the eyes simply needed adjusting to after being out long in the sun.

  “Should we be smoking in here?” Proteus asked, and was given a look in response.

  Amanda drifted over to the desk. “I don’t know if you’d noticed these, last time I showed you in here…” she opened the middle drawer and pulled out one of the sheriff’s spiral-bound notebooks, “but I think you’ll find them interesting.” Proteus came and stood close beside her, feeling her warmth, feeling the small hairs on his skin prick up in response. “He was meticulous in keeping these journals. There are probably several more scattered around here. This will only be the most recent of them. Really, the man was obsessed with writing down everything that happened, everything he observed or thought. In the end, it was a compulsion with him. It made him sick. He seldom left this place or his house. He just stayed inside, writing and writing, his back bent, his nose almost touching the page. If he went out, it was at night, when no one was around. He avoided people. He avoided everyone, even me. I guess he had his reasons. You know. Everyone except… well, someone he probably should have avoided, but didn’t.” She appeared lost in thought for a moment, letting her arm, the one holding the notebook, drift slowly, absently downward. Then she snapped out of it again. “But if you want to know what happened with him,” Amanda resumed, “this is where to look. If he didn’t record every last thought in his head, then I don’t know how many more thoughts he could’ve had. It wasn’t like he was some kind of super genius or something. But, finally, this was pretty much all he did.”

  Proteus remembered the last time he’d tried to look at this same notebook and the visceral, all-but allergic reaction he’d had to it. He found himself now only vaguely anxious, but thought of something.

  “What about the jail?” He pointed toward the cage of slatted, black metal, off in the corner of the room.

  She followed his finger. “What? That? What about it?”

  “Did he… were there… any prisoners?”

  Her brow was furrowed.

  “I mean, did that see a lot of use?”

  “The jail? Hardly. Really, you’ve been around here for a while. You know how rambunctious Cleric gets, even without anyone to enforce the laws. No, people pretty well know what they can and can’t get away with. This has nothing to do with what’s on the books, you understand. The law, the real law… it enforces itself, let’s say. For the most part. At least where it matters. I think he may’ve locked old Albert up here, once. Other than that…”

  “Albert?”

  “You saw how he drives.”

  Proteus’s cigarette dropped its ash onto the desktop, which he impulsively brushed away.

  Amanda laughed. “You act as if you think he’s coming back at any moment,” she said.

  “And you don’t?”

  “I know he won’t. For Sheriff Friendly to leave Cleric, once and for good, was inevitable. He had to. He had no choice left.”

  “It was that bad?”

  “Bad? No, not bad. Except for how everyone he got near to disappeared – yeah, I suppose that was bad. But that isn’t what I mean. I mean that… he was compelled to go. By then, we weren’t talking much, except over the telephone, late at night. Not that he was making a lot of sense then either. He was really just talking to himself, I think, with me as a sort of stand-in. But I knew that, for him, leaving the mountain became necessary. Absolutely. If you know something about what he saw… Proteus, if you know what he saw, and what it did to him, then maybe you can understand how things became for him. From my perspective, well, it was clear he needed to leave.”

  “You miss him.”

  Amanda looked up at him, as if startled. “I miss him, yes – like a brother, I miss him. I never had a brother, but like that. It’s right that he’s gone, you know, but I want to know that he’s okay. If I saw him again, that would make me happy. But I don’t need to.”

  Proteus dropped his eyes from her, looked toward some spot on the desk blotter.

  “Are you jealous?” she asked.

  “Jealous… I don’t know,” Proteus said. “Envious, maybe, is the better word.”

  With the hand not holding the notebook, she reached up and touched his cheek. “Aw, Mr. Monk Man, you don’t need to be. And besides. You’re the sheriff now. You’ll be at least as good at it as he was.”

  •

  “You, I never know,” complained his employer as Proteus returned, alone, to the coffee shop, “if you’re on the clock or you are not.”

  “There’s a clock?”

  Exasperated, Ignatius shook his head sadly. “You’re working, you’re not working. I so seldom can tell which.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “At least tell me when… you’re not.”

  “I would, but you were…” Proteus looked into the proprietor’s sad eyes, ill-prepared as they were to accept anything he might have to say. And what would he have told him? That last he’d seen him, he’d been in a trance? Stuck outside of time and unmoving? He dropped the matter and took his position behind the bar, made himself a shot of espresso, mostly to check that the settings of the grinder were correct, then downed the results unthinkingly.

  The shop was full now, or mostly full, of the morning’s local regulars. Chatter floated freely and filled the air. The atmosphere failed to baffle sound as it did the light, so that conversations to the farthest corner seemed as present and unavoidable as those directly in front of one’s nose. No wonder Ignatius was annoyed – he’d faced the rush alone. Never mind how often he’d left Proteus to do the same, the owner seemed to think his money’s worth was in the trouble he didn’t have to take. Which Proteus, upon reflection, decided was actually reasonable to expect. He looked about the busy room, peering through the murk, making out the faces that he knew, if not the names. He watched as Albert took presently to his feet, collected his black, woolen jacket from the chair and wrapped himself in it, then perched his matching fedora on his head and stepped, slowly, deliberately, toward and out the door.

  To return three beats later and with far more urgency, his face flushed, a scrap of white paper squashed in his hand. The old man stormed the counter and demanded of Proteus, shaking the ticket at him, “What… in heaven’s name… is this?”

  THIRTEEN

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  It seemed not so late when daylight failed, when back at home – was this really home? Proteus couldn’t stop asking himself this for long, not yet, so soon – vestiges of twilight streaming a faded yet deeply-hued panorama through dust-specked, bug-specked, pine-saturated, and pitch-flecked wide windows, he arranged the contents of his delivered tubes out upon the floor. Each of the six tubes held four large photographic prints, rolled together, separated by tissue, and now, all twenty-four of them spread out over the concrete, their high-gloss surfaces reflected the remains of sunlight back in high, bright shine. Yet the glare was fast fading. As it receded, the images themselves remained, though these, in the dim light, would soon be hard to see. So he went to the wall
where the light switch was and just as he flicked it on, there came a knocking sound at his door like something machined, too steady and too precise. Because this noise was so perfectly delivered, he stared bewilderedly at the door for a moment, trying to understand what it was, and how it might be connected to the light switch. But when the same sound came again, just as evenly and as perfectly as before, he snapped to his senses and opened it.

  Mary Margaret Mary Alice stood there, blocky and beaming. She said hello, and Proteus stood aside to invite her in.

  “I wanted to see how you were settling in, if everything was… oh.” She stopped when she saw the arrangement spread across most of the floor. “What’s this?”

  “Photographs. I’ve just had these enlargements made. They were on… they were on…” He wanted to say assignment, but couldn’t make himself say the word. It was true, but it wasn’t true, and the word, accurate as it both was and was not, entirely failed to explain what he felt that it should and needed to.

  “These are, what, yours?”

  “Whose would they be, if not mine?”

  But Mary Margaret stepped past him and hovered over the collection, her eyes flicking between them, her jaw hanging open.

  “You’re sure these are yours?”

  “You think they shouldn’t be? What else can I tell you?”

  “It’s just… well, it’s… they look so much like Jim’s, is what it is.”

  “Jim’s?”

  “Jim Lent’s. You’re living in his house. You know that he was – oh hell, is a photographer. I told you that. I told you I represented him. These are… what? You could’ve found these in his darkroom, for all I know.”

  “You act as if I’m trying to pass something off on you.”

  But to watch her reaction was to doubt that she had even heard him, as she responded not at all. Mary Margaret looked instead intently at the photographs as he had laid them over the floor, her eyes flicking from one to another in no especial order, her mind working over something so studiously that he could all but hear it clicking through these many unspoken angles.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Proteus asked, thinking at last that he should try and play the host. It was enough to startle her from her concentration.

  “What,” she asked, seeming startled, “coffee? Do you never get enough of the stuff?”

  “From one moment to the next, perhaps. But overall, no, never. I was just asking. Maybe tea?”

  “Uh huh… I think these might work.”

  “Was that a yes?”

  “What? Never mind. No, thank you.”

  He stood in a little closer. “‘Might work’? As in, might work for what?”

  “Now that I look at them more closely,” Mary Margaret said, “I can see the differences. No, of course this isn’t exactly his style, is it? Jim… for one thing, Jim never worked in color. It was a thing with him. He never worked in color. He was all about tone. He would say that color only distracted. But his primary subject, at least in his later period – later meaning in the past five years or thereabouts – his favorite subject was the sky. Is the sky, damn it. And he would frame… well, he would frame it so, just so, like this, with… uh… What is that?”

  “The sky.”

  “No, what is that?”

  “M-my friend. Mos… Mosqui…” His voice caught. He could scarcely mumble the name, and there came a sudden, sharp ringing deep in one ear, making all other sounds recede.

  “It’s in every one of them,” Mary Margaret carried on as though she’d not heard him, which she maybe hadn’t. He could scarcely hear her. “Like a fault in the film or something. These aren’t Photoshopped, are they? It looks organic. It looks like damage… like damage to the film. It’s in the grain. You can see that. Can’t you see that? I don’t know what I’m seeing. The light is fading. But these should work just fine. They’ll be okay, don’t worry about that.”

  “Okay. Okay for what?”

  “I’ll call you later. I’ll come by and we’ll pick this up again. You can tell me all about it later, okay? I’ll talk to you then.” She already had her cellphone out of her pocket and was dialing a number as she turned her broad back to him and stepped out through the front door, nearly catching him on the nose with the edge of it as she pulled it absentmindedly shut behind.

  •

  And having dragged the mattress back into the center of the room – he’d sealed his photographs once more inside their tubes and cursed Mary Margaret for wrecking his ability to study them – Proteus assembled his bed and lay himself in it for the long night, waiting for sleep to come. But it did not. His body twitched. He turned and tossed. His mind was like a skillet of frying eggs. When at last he felt he might begin to drop a little away, there came, just like the night before, the sound of footfalls on wooden slats – not loud, but loud enough. He wanted to block it out, but that was impossible. He could not forget it. He could not ignore it. The sound came steady and slow and with deliberation, first from high up near the ceiling, each next step a little lower, a little closer, maddeningly, imperiously. He could disregard it no better than he could drips in a sink.

  “Oh dear God,” he said out loud, and turned over. He opened his eyes to face it, but saw nothing in the dark.

  Whoever it was who walked, they walked as if uncertain, testing each step, making sure before taking it, and then taking it, then thinking about the next. This did not frighten Proteus, this noise, however much it seemed it should. It only annoyed him. His body became all the more wound up, his mind alert and absolutely focused. Ghost steps on ghost stairs, even the creaking of ghost wood. Would it never end?

  But that part of it did when the spirit, or whatever it was, reached as far as the floor. Now these steps followed across cement, though no more quickly. Each footfall tapped quietly closer, heading directly and inevitably toward him. At the approaching sound he whinged, “Oh, not again.”

  Was there a pause? Or was that only the same hesitation, no more significant than every other? The feet continued closer. The feet reached the bed. The feet stopped beside him. Then there came the crushing weight, the indent in the bed, the soft foam of the mattress buckling at its center, with him there too, while he was being sat on, like a chair, like he was not even there, when he so demonstrably was.

  There was no transition into what then must have been a dream. He would remember it only later as such. At the time, it seemed as if it was only the natural progression of things. He was with Amanda, in a bright room, in daylight, and she was wearing nothing. This was a blue room. It was a bedroom. The walls were painted blue. Sunlight poured through the fine, sheer drapery that faintly covered the windows, which must have been open, as they wavered in a light breeze, despite the heat. The daylight slid across the smooth skin of her shoulders, fanning through the ends of her blond hair. It curved down over her ribs towards the long slope of her back. He was also naked. He laid on his back on a bed, above the covers, one leg raised, bent at the knee. His cock stood entirely hard and aching. She stood at the wall by one window. She didn’t look at him, but peered through an opening in the translucent curtain, lifted aside by the smallest finger of her right hand. Where the sunlight fell direct on her cheek, it formed a pool of light, like a bright tear. She said, “I’m telling you this – this one thing: I am not her. I’m not here. I’m not the girl you think I am.”

  When she turned to face him, her dark hair, cut short – not as he’d last seen it, when she’d worn it long – bounced with the sudden movement. Her brown eyes glinted in reflected sun. Now her small breasts were held in gently shadowed relief by the side-fallen, scattering light. Her look was scornful, piercing.

  “Vivianne…” whispered Proteus. “When will I see you again?”

  Her lips straight, the muscles of her jaw tensing and releasing, she said, “You won’t. I’m not here. I am not her.”

  “Then who are you?”

  With no build-up of pleasure, no crescendo of its intensity, h
e felt the come suddenly spurt out of him in warm, soft waves, and this woke him with a start. In the night-dark of the Warehouse, the loose and twisting sheets of his bed were stained in thick semen that grew quickly cold and stuck against his skin.

  FOURTEEN

  From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

  [Summer, 2004]

  In the evening. Near-dark. I couldn’t say why but I was afraid to go from the station house. Crickets whispered and whirred down the hillside with that terrible ratcheting noise that wouldn’t stop. These were big crickets. I knew it. I knew it because I saw a few of them outside, in the parking lot. Like thick tubes of living goo with legs and bulging bug-eyes, and they were jumping, and kind-of flying, and rubbing their weird legs together, and for all these few I saw I knew there were hundreds, thousands, millions more, hidden in the scrub.

  These are the lives of insects: they jump, they make that noise, rub-rub. This is This is not why I was afraid. What frightened me was the invisi

  I’d been watching the cage. I’d been staring too long into the jail. The cell was empty, yes, but it wasn’t empty. No. There was something still inside it, something I could almost see –

  And. And.

  The Law is left a living thing inside of me. And when that shadow reappears, it will know that I am here.

  FIFTEEN

  The World

  [Late Autumn, 2005]

  “Morning, Sheriff!” called Lily, the keeper of the small antiques and rock shop on Main Street, out sweeping her section of sidewalk in the morning sun.

  “Good morning, Ma’am.” By the bent and folded, fucked-up brim of his hat, Proteus tilted the Stetson just a little in her direction. An awkward gesture – one intended to be subtle and smooth, but made a bit of a mess of. The brim could not quite support the weight. It flopped, it flapped – the hat – it wobbled. Next time he would think to lift by the crunched-up top. And then also, the thing: what was her name? He couldn’t remember. He would need to make a point of finding that out. When next she came by for her very dry, small cappuccino.