I said no. My eyes never brimmed.
Now I let a fistful of this forgiving dust exhaust itself between my fingers. It whispered through, a gentle earthskin shedding off me and upon Baba’s face. It would carry the scent of my flesh, let him inhale my presence. I leaned down and touched my father’s lips, so white, so cold, and a ghastly image came to me: Baba juddering on my fingertips as I reach inside his mouth, shock his tongue, and watch it jump and thrash like a bloodied carp. Tell me who murdered you, I tell my father’s tongue. Talk to me, speak to me. For I am Resurrection and whoso believes in me will live again.
But his tongue doesn’t quiver. It says nothing.
Someone touched my shoulder and drew me back. It was Ma. Her mouth was a pale scar in her face. She gripped my fingers tightly. I looked down, saw that she had colored her hand with henna, and dropped it.
A shiny flaming orange heart, lanced in the middle, glistened on her palm.
*
It was dark enough to feel invisible. I left Ma praying in her room and went to Kala Pul.
Lights flickered in the streets and on chowrangis. Sad-faced vendors sold fake perfumes and plastic toys at traffic signals. Women with hollow eyes offered jasmine motia bracelets and necklaces and the flower’s scent filled my nose, removing Baba’s smell in death. Children fished for paan leaves and cigarette stubs in puddles, and I walked past them all.
Something dark lay in the middle of the road under a bright fluorescent median light. I raised a hand to block the glare and bent to look at it. An alley cat, a starved, mangy creature with a crushed back. Tread marks were imprinted on its fur; clots glistened between them. A chipped fang hung from one of whiskers.
I didn’t know my right hand was on it until I saw my fingertips curve. They pressed into the carcass like metal probes seeking, seeking. I didn’t even need to feel for a point. In death, the creature’s entire body was an enormous potential ready to be evoked.
I met the cat’s gaze. Lifeless eyes reflected the traffic light changing from green to red. I discharged.
A smell like charred meat, like sparks from metal screeching against metal, rust on old bicycle wheels. The creature arched its spine, its four legs locking together, so much tension in its muscles they thrummed like electric wires. Creaking, making a frothing sound, the alley cat flopped over to its paws and tried to stand.
It lives, I thought and felt no joy or satisfaction.
Blood trickled from the creature’s right eye. It tried to blink and the left eye wouldn’t open. It was glued shut with post-mortem secretions.
My hand was hurting. I shook it, brought it before my eyes, looked at it. A large bulla had formed in the middle of the palm, blue-red and warm. Rubbing it gently, I got up and left, leaving the newly risen feline tottering around the traffic median, strange sounds emitting from its throat as if it were trying to remember how to mewl.
Deep inside the Christian muhallah I waded through rubble, piles of blackened bricks, and charred wood. I stood atop the destruction and imagined the fire consuming rows upon rows of these tiny shacks. Teetering chairs, plywood tables, meal mats, dung stoves, patchworked clothes—all set ablaze. Bricks fell, embers popped, and shadow fingers danced in the flames.
I shivered and turned to leave. Moonlight dappled the debris, shadows twisted, and as I made my way through the wreckage I nearly tripped over something poking from beneath a corrugated tin sheet.
I stooped to examine the object. It was a heavy, callused human hand, knuckles bruised and hairy like my father’s. Blood had clotted at the wrist and formed a puddle below the sharp edge of the tin.
A darkness turned inside my chest; rivers of blood pounded in the veins of my neck and forehead. I don’t know how long I sat in the gloom, in that sacred silence. Head bowed, fingers curled around the crushed man’s, I crouched with my eyes closed and groped for the meat of the city with my other hand’s fingertips. I felt for its faint pulse, I looked for its resurrection point; and when the dirt shivered and a sound like ocean surf surged into my ears, I thought I had found it.
I stiffened my shoulders, touched the dead man’s palm, and let the current flow.
The hand jerked, the fingers splayed. A sigh went through the shantytown. Somewhere in the dark bricks shifted. The ruins were stirring.
Something plopped on the tin sheet. I looked down. Fat drops of blood bulged from between my clenched knuckles. I let the dead hand go (it skittered to a side and began to thrash). I opened both of my fists and raised them to the sky.
A crop of raised, engorged bullas on my palms. One amidst the right cluster had popped and was bleeding. The pain was a steady ache, almost pleasant in its tingling. As I watched, blisters on the left palm burst as well and began to gush. Dark red pulsed and quivered its way down my wrists.
Trembling, I crouched on my haunches and grasped the dead man’s convulsing limb with both hands. I closed my eyes and jolted the Christian muhallah back to life. Then I sat back, rocking on my heels, and waited.
They came. Dragging their limbs off sparkling morgue tables, slicing through mounds of blessed dirt, wrenching free of rain-soaked grass, my derelict innocents seized and twitched their way across the city. I rose to my feet when they arrived, trailing a metallic tang behind them that drowned the smell of the jasmine. Metal rattled and clanged as my last finally managed to crawl out from under the tin sheet and joined the ranks of the faithful.
I looked at them one last time, my people, faces shining with blood and fervor. Their shredded limbs dangled. Autopsy incisions crisscrossed some’s naked flesh. Blackened men, women and children swaying in rows, waiting for me. How unafraid, joyous, and visible they were.
I raised my chin high and led my living thus on their final pilgrimage through this land of the dead.
NICK MAMATAS
–
Exit Through the Gift Shop
WHAT HAPPENED TO the drivers so foolish as to stop for the phantom hitchhiker of Rehoboth? Nothing, really. He’s just an intense red-haired man, eyes wild, musk dripping from his pores. When he vanishes, he leaves behind a cigarette, though it’s been decades since anyone has lit up in another person’s car without asking. And the laughter, the howling maniacal laughter?
What’s so funny, anyway? Anyway, not anyways. That’s hillbilly talk. A remnant of Middle English, preserved by the toothless and inbred lower classes of Scots-Irish extraction. You can always tell that a kid’s some jumped-up bumpkin in town for his college edjumication if she says “anyways”. This is New England. Anyway means one alternative way. Anyways means that there are so many possibilities out there, doesn’t it?
But there aren’t so many, are there?
Rehoboth is from the Bible. Surely the verse is on the tip of your tongue. “And he removed from thence, and digged another well; and for that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said, For now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land.” Genesis! Right near the beginning. Rehoboth is a place of enlargement and flourishing. Back in 1643, when the town was founded, people were familiar with the Bible. They knew what “rehoboth” meant way back when. Rehoboth was once much larger, but until recently it was a dinky little town of ten thousand—
Whoops, almost said “ten thousand souls.” That would have been misleading. Ten thousand warm human bodies of various morphologies.
The joke is that in 1993, Rehoboth’s local leading citizens got all dressed up in colonial gear and marched on Attleboro to reclaim their ancestral lands. That’s the kind of town it is. Quirky. Nobody bothered to ask the local Natives what they thought of all these shenanigans. Dinky.
Speaking of shenanigans: welcome to the attraction. With the decline of the mills and the recession and all that, the town fathers decided that tourism was the way to spark the local economy. There are hiking trails and a clambake, but this is New England. What about the stretch of time between Halloween and May Day, when it snows once a week, and the only wa
y to stop a running nose is to wait for the snot to freeze?
Stretch of time, stretch of time you can imagine some old woman in a peach leisure suit saying, turning the phrase over in she head. Maybe she’s at the one okay restaurant in town, her bubble haircut fresh from her weekly appointment, turning whisky over on her tongue as she concentrates. How can we get some money for the town during that stretch of time? Stretch, stretch, what a funny word that is. What else stretches? Roads! Aha!
And in that old woman’s mind, stretch of road brings to mind the famous Rehoboth hitchhiker. It’s just a local variation on the phantom hitchhiker that any chockful-of-snore town with more cemeteries than gas stations has. Lonely looking girl wants a ride. Lonely looking girl gets a ride. Lonely looking girl vanishes right outside the cemetery gates. Had things gone rather more poorly for the old woman back in her college days, she might be the lonely looking girl, forever young and bored with her own tomb.
The Rehoboth hitcher variation is a darker one. A man, a redhead, not a conscientious passenger. He glares, he starts laughing, then shrieking. He’d kill you if he could, with an axe. He’d do much worse, if he could. It occurs to the old woman to check out the local newspaper’s morgue, to have her secretary examine the death records. Rehoboth is a small town; if there are any red-haired men who died in their twenties, and on the side of the road, it would be in the town’s records. The secretary turns up nothing. It’s not a phantom hitchhiker, after all, the old woman, decides. It’s the demon hitchhiker.
Plans are put into motion. Letters are sent to particular individuals who have, in a fit of irony and pique, taken to living in Salem, sixty whole miles away. In-person inquiries are made in nearby Providence, because that’s just a twenty-minute drive or so down the road. Certainly we can help, was the general response. Nobody had ever thought to have the witchy Salemites work with the fine upstanding Christians of Providence before, but the old woman believes in covering all the bases. In enlarging the possibilities. There is more than one alternative. Anyways, not just anyway. She’s on the Cemetery Commission; her husband is on the Zoning Board of Appeals. Paperwork is signed, then shredded. Wheels are set into motion. She puts her shoulder to the task.
By Halloween it’s done. The Haunted Stretch. No promises save one—you can drive as quickly as you want on the Haunted Stretch, and if you get into trouble, you can always make a hard right into one of the gravel-filled runaway car ramps.
Forty thousand dollars, for two miles. Your tags and insurance had better be up to date. Leave the Garmin in the glove box. GPS doesn’t work on the Haunted Stretch, not anymore, and you won’t need it anyway. It’s a straight shot. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts knows nothing of it, nor does Bristol County. It’s our little secret is the sort of thing the old woman would whisper in your ear, if she were here, and interested in whispering anything in your ear, which she is not.
You meet the crew in the parking lot of Uncle Ed’s Front Porch, a small ice cream joint on Winthrop Street. It closes early, so nobody’s there but the crew, and their flatbed. Two guys, both heavy set and swarthy, eating ice cream. Your breath fogs before you.
“Isn’t it a little chilly to eat ice cream?” you say. You regret it a moment later, then decide not to regret anything. Forty thousand dollars. You should be able to eat ice cream out of the high school quarterback’s jock strap for forty grand, not stand here in the frigid night making conversation with a pair of townies.
The one guy stabs his ice cream with his plastic spoon and says, “Naah.” He’s got a thick local accent. “Everyone here eats ice cream in the winter time.”
“More ice cream is eaten per capita in the Boston metroplex than anywhere else in the United States,” the other guy says. He’s younger. No accent. They could be father and son. “It’s the high fat content; keeps you warm.”
“And in the summertime,” the father guy says. “You’d better eat ice cream.”
“Yeah, you’d better eat ice cream around here, come summertime.”
“Why?” you say without thinking, and then they both smile and shout, “Or it’ll melt!” and have a good laugh. The older guy gestures for your keys, and you hand them over. You glance at his work jeans—the ass is clean, at least. The son tilts the bed and invites you into the truck’s warm cab.
You climb in, belt up, smile at the kid. He’s probably a good kid, just working with his dad and trying to find a place in a small town that he’s already a little too big for. He should be in school, in Boston, mackin’ chicks or suckin’ dicks depending on his preference. You’ll tell him that afterwards, you decide. Maybe slip him a few bucks if he has any weed, to take the edge off the experience with the night.
“So, is this where you dose me with—” you don’t get to say with the chloroform before he hits you with the stun gun.
You wake up in your car, a cherry taste in your mouth. You feel very good, like the jolt you took from the kid charged the juice in your spine. It was all in the watermarked, password-protected, DRMed and self-destructing PDF you received when you sent your money in. Skeptics used to think that the enhancement drug was the core of the attraction—mild hallucinogens and the power of suggestion was enough to give most rubes the experience they deserve, if not exactly want.
The skeptics shut the fuck up after someone wearing Google Glass took a ride down the Haunted Stretch of Rehoboth. That’s when you took out a loan, using your shitty Union City, New Jersey condo as collateral, and got to filling out the proper forms.
You were never even all that much interested in ghosts, or religion, or the supernatural. You just wanted to experience something that most people won’t ever be able to. Everything from cage fighting to summers among the Antarctic penguins are available for anyone with the money and spare time. But to keep out the losers, weirdoes, and journalists, the old woman added a wrinkle to her dark ride—the application came with a text box, and no instructions.
In it you wrote:
Honestly, whenever I think about my past, about stupid things I’ve said or done, I mutter aloud, “I just want to kill myself.” Sometimes I actually sing it to myself, and add “doo-dah doo-dah” to the end. But I don’t really want to kill myself. I just think about it for a few seconds every day, several times a day. Hopefully the experience will help me deal with whatever it is that I’m dealing with.
You were surprised at your own admission. Like how you drop a hot potato before you get burned, your fingers typed it in without you even having to think about it. Anyway, it worked. Either that, or they just have a lottery and you happened to win. Anyways, something happened and you’re here now, behind the wheel of your car, your heart pumping liquid joy to your limbs. You don’t want to kill yourself. You want to dig a hole in the asphalt and fuck the world till she comes. You want to drive so fast you’ll zip past the patch of light made by your headlamps and into the swirling dark of Rehoboth’s winter.
You move to turn the key in the ignition, and only then do realize that the engine is already running. The lights are on, after all. It’s warm in the cab, of course. You’re so fucking stupid. But you don’t think I want to kill myself. You smile; you lick your own teeth to taste more of the cherry gunk; you love being alive. Sing that!
I love being alive!
But you ease on the accelerator. You’ve got two miles for something to happen, and that ain’t a lot. Oh, how you want something to happen. You don’t even care if it’s just an actor, or a hallucination, or both. You don’t even care if the redhead opens a mouth full of yellow tombstone teeth and bites your fucking nose off, like what happened to the guy on the other end of the Google Glass.
The car rolls forward, and you start to sweat ice water. Whatever the cherry stuff it, it’s pretty crazy. Rehoboth should have just packaged the cherry stuff as an energy drink rather than going through all this trouble to balance the town’s accounts. Eh, it’s probably extremely illegal, you decide. Not like charging people forty thousand dollars to drive
down a stretch of decommissioned town road.
Do I step out from behind a tree, thumb out? Should I materialize in the passenger seat, and put my hand on your knee and wink and call you boyfriend? Or just rise up before the car, eyes and mouth wide, palm outstretched.
Fuck it, I take the roof. I don’t feel a thing, but you sure do, when two-hundred-twenty pounds of mostly muscle slams into the slope of your PT Cruiser. I crack the windshield with my forehead, and scream and laugh and howl as you jerk the wheel hard to the left, then hard to the right.
I love.
The screech of the tires.
How they smell as they melt by millimeters.
Tree branches snapping against the windows.
Gravel like hail.
My fist through the window, spiderwebbing it.
Glass everywhere, like thousands of shattered teeth.
You’re a toughie, man. A cookie what won’t crumble easy. You actually throw a punch at me. Right at me. I feel it and everything.
I start laughing and laughing. Oh ho ho ho. That ain’t blood pouring out my nose.
It’s the cherry stuff.
Anyways.
No, as a matter of fact, I’m not from around here.
Hey, sailor? New in town?
Come here often?
I cut your legs out from under you and take a seat on your belly.
You fuck, you fuck!
What I am going to do, with my awesome magic powers, is remove your central nervous system, starting from this little slice at the bottom of your pinky toe.
Forty-five miles of string.
Don’t worry. I work fast. I have all the time in the world. I’m well practiced. I can do three hundred yards with a tug. Leaves me all night to floss my teeth with the stuff, tie little knots where I want them, and to untie the ones you’ve tied yourself.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 20