“He knows where we live. He’s a big boy.”
“Rebecca,” I said, but realized I didn’t know what I was going to say. What came out was, “I don’t know. There’s something . . .”
Around us, the sea stirred, began to slap against the shore and the pilings beneath it. We could feel it through our feet. The reassuring beat of the blood of the earth. There was a mist now, too, and it left little wet spots on our exposed skin.
Rebecca shrugged. “It’s just where my dad is. Where he’ll always be. For me.”
Then we were walking. Again, our footsteps sounded strange, made almost no sound whatsoever. There was still no moon overhead, only grey-white clouds, lit from behind from millions of miles away. The fishermen had remained in their places, but they’d gone almost motionless, leaning over their lines into the night as though every single one of them had gone to sleep. I saw the guy who’d caught the ray, but the ray was no longer in his lap, and I wondered what he’d done with it. Looking up, I saw the blacked out buildings of old Long Beach, seemingly further from us than they should have been, wrapped in mist and scaffolding like mothballed furniture in an attic. By the time we reached our car, the feeling in my chest had eased a bit, and I was no longer crying and still couldn’t figure out why I had been. Rebecca was shivering again.
“Let’s wait here for him,” I said, and Rebecca shivered harder.
“No.”
She got in the car, and I climbed in beside her. I turned on the ignition but waited a while. When Rebecca looked at me next, she was wearing the expression I’d become so familiar with, this last, long, sweet year. Eyes still bright, but dazed somehow. Mouth pursed, but softly. “Take me home to see my girl,” she said.
I didn’t argue. I stopped thinking about Ash. I took my wife home to our tiny house.
That was Friday. Saturday we stayed in our neighborhood, took strolls with our child, went to bed very early and touched each other a while without making love. Sunday I got up and made eggs and wondered where Ash had gone and whether he was angry with us, and then we went hiking up the fire trail behind our subdivision into the hills, brown and strangled with drought. I didn’t worry, really. But I started calling Ash’s Oakland bungalow on Monday morning. I also called the hospital where he worked, and on Thursday, right when he’d apparently told Ms Paste he would return, he turned up as scheduled for his shift on the ward. I got him on the line, and he said he had rounds to do and would call me back. He didn’t, though. Then, or ever.
After that, I stopped thinking about him for awhile. Itwasn’t unusual for Ash to disappear from our lives for months or even years on end. I already understood that adult friendships operated differently from high school or college ones, were harbors to visit rather than places to live, no matter how sweet and safe the harbor. Rebecca never mentioned him. Our baby learned to walk. The next time I called the hospital, maybe six months ago, I was told Ash no longer worked there.
Last night, late, I climbed out of my bed, looked at my daughter lying sideways, arms akimbo, across the head of her crib-mattress like a game piece that had popped free of its box slot and rolled loose, and wandered into the living room to read the newspaper. I opened the Calendar section, stared at the photograph on the second page. My mouth went dry, as though every trace of saliva had been sucked from it, and my bones locked in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think.
Staring out at me was a photograph of a merry-go-round horse, tipped sideways as it was hauled out of its storage closet by movers. Its front teeth were chipped and aimed in opposing directions below the oversized, grinning lips, and its lifted hooves seemed to be scrambling frantically at the air.
LAST ROOFF HORSES SOLD AT AUCTION, read the caption.
I flew through the story that accompanied the photograph, processing it in bits and pieces, while fragments of that tune – the one from the pier – floated free in my head but never knitted themselves into something I could hum.
Once, these vibrantly painted, joyous creatures spun and flew on the soon-to-be-razed Long Beach Pier . . . The last great work of a grieving man . . . His final carousel, populated with what Rooff called “The company I crave” after his longtime business partner and reputed lover, LosAngeks nightclub owner and kgendary gambler Daniel R. Ratch, took his own life following a decades-long battle with a degenerative muscular disease in September of 1898.
The reclusive Rooff and notorious Ratch formed one of the more unlikely – and lucrative – financial partnerships of the fin-de-siecle era, building thousands of cheaply manufactured carousels, fortune-telling machines, and other amusements of the time for boardwalks and parks nationwide. They envisioned the Long Beach Pier as their crowning achievement, a world unto itself for “All the laughing peopk . . .,” in Rooff s memorable phrase at his tearful press conference following Ratch’s death . . .
Rooff completed only the carousel and the now-infamous Lite-Your-Line parlor before being fired for erratic behavior and the agonizingly slow pace of his work . . . He disappeared from the public record, and his death is not recorded.
There was more, but the words had stopped making sense to me. Shoving the paper away, I sat back in my chair. The trembling started a few seconds later.
I can’t explain how I knew. I was thinking of Rooff under that hat, hidden by curtains, working furiously in the candlelight, chanting his dead lover’s name. I think maybe I’d always suspected, hadn’t admitted. But Ash had made it back to Oakland, hadn’t he? And we’d made it here?
Then, abruptly, I was up, snatching my keys off the hook next to the kitchen sink and fleeing toward our car, while that incomplete tune whirled in my head and the whole last night with Ash spilled in front of my eyes in kaleidoscopic broken pieces. I don’t remember a single second of the drive down the freeways, couldn’t even tell you whether there was traffic, because all I was seeing were the homeless men and the sores on their arms and the way their mouths moved as they chanted their rhyme. Then I was seeing the ray flapping in midair, lifted out of the waves just as we passed, as though the whole scene had been triggered by our passing. The disappearing blonde children, the arcade machine attendant’s graceful shuffle and the sound he made. The rose-petal poker chips. The tinkling machines. The glide of the rollergirl, and the skater kid’s moonwalk, and the American flag man. And the poodle-skirt women’s perpetually smiling faces. Most of all, their faces, and it was their laughter I was hearing as I skidded into that giant, empty parking lot and jammed my car to a stop and leapt out, hoping, praying.
Even the streetlights were gone, and the dark pier jutted crookedly over the quietly lapping water like the prow of a beached ship. No magician’s hat. Nothing on the pier at all. Overhead, I saw stars, faint and smeared by the smog, as though I were viewing them through a greasy window. Behind me, the new old city, safely shut down and swept clean for the night, rocked imperceptibly on its foundations. A wind kicked up, freezing cold, and I clamped my arms to my chest and crouched beside my car and wished I’d remembered a jacket, at least.
Finally, I let myself think it. Sortwhatl’d been hoping. Which had been what, exactly? That I’d find the auctioneer still here? That the movers would still be emptying the last pieces out of the warehouse, and maybe I could . . .
“What?” I said aloud, and slammed my palms against the pavement and scraped them badly. Do what? Pick up my friend’s body like a cigar store Indian, tie him to the top of the car, bring him to our house, which he’d never seen, and prop him on our little porch in our choice of vests? Maybe bring along a poodle-skirt woman so we could make set-pieces?
Staggering to my feet, I took a huge breath and let the ocean air cut my lungs. In my pocket, I realized, I’d jammed the newspaper article, and I removed it now, uncrumpled it, ripped it to pieces, and set the pieces flying. Rebecca could never see that article, could never know what I was thinking. It was bad enough – it was flat, fucking murder – that we’d left Ash down here. I didn�
��t even want to imagine how she’d react when she realized what really might have happened to her father.
How did it work, I wondered? Were Rooff s ghosts, or machines, or whatever they were, selective about the company they brought him? Had they let us go, or had we refused? Had Ash known, before it was too late, that he had a choice? Had the rest of them – the rollergirl, the flag man, the kid, maybe even Rebecca’s father – chosen to stay, because it was bright and musical and happy in there, and smelled of the sea?
It was almost light when I fumbled my car door open and collapsed back into the driver’s seat. I could be wrong, I thought. I could go home right now and find Rebecca with the kitchen phone dangling from her ear, smiling in the way she didn’t anymore as Ash told her where he’d vanished to this time and she spooned minced carrots to our child. But I didn’t think so.
Not until I was off the freeways again, just pulling into our little driveway, did it occur to me to wonder where, exactly, Rooff s last merry-go-round stopped. At the edge of the white curtain? Or at the end of the pier? The ray could have been part of it, and the fishermen, and the beggars, too. Or maybe they’d just wanted to be.
I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor’s windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind-chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating the power of Rooff s last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still – Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast – bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone’s favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can’t help but hope they’ll join us, hope they’ll understand before we did that there really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they’ll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.
KIM NEWMAN HAS WON the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.
His novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSR (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence – comprising the title novel, plus The Bloody Red Baron and Judgment of Tears (aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha). An English Ghost Story is currently being developed as a movie from a script by the author, while The Matter of Britain is another collaboration with Byrne.
As “Jack Yeovil” Newman has published a number of novels loosely inspired by the heroic fantasy “Warhammer” and Apocalyptic “Dark Future” role-playing games. These include Drachenfels, Beasts in Velvet and Genevieve Undead. Silver Nails is a recent collection of five stories set in the Games Workshop universe and featuring the author’s recurrent character, vampire heroine Genevieve Dieudonne.
Under his own name, Newman’s extremely clever short fiction, which is often linked by recurring themes and characters, has been collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories and Dead Travel Fast. Where the Bodies Are Buried contains four interconnected novellas, and Time and Relative is a prequel to the BBC-TV series in Telos Publishing’s “Doctor Who Novellas” series. Newman has also edited the alternate history music anthology In Dreams with Paul McAuley.
As the author recalls, “Once, long ago and far away, John Skipp and Craig Spector edited an anthology called The Book of the Dead, of mostly fine stories set more or less in the world of George A. Romero’s ‘Living Dead’ films. It was so well-received that the editors produced a further volume, Still Dead. Then, remembering that there were three Romero dead movies, they set out to do a third volume, which may well have been called Deader Than Ever or Deadest Yet.
“Since, in my other life as a movie critic, I had written extensively about Romero in my book Nightmare Movies, I was pleased to be asked by John to come up with something for this third book. I did a little rewriting at Craig’s suggestion, got paid (as I remember it) and waited for the story to appear.
“Years passed. I’m not really privy to what happened, but various publishers and editors fell out with each other and, though the third dead book nearly happened at least twice (I once received page proofs of the story) it never managed to stumble into print. If you’ve been picking up recent anthologies of original horror stories, you’ve already read quite a few ship-jumping tales from the collection (Douglas E. Winter’s wonderful ‘The Zombies of Madison County’ is one).
“For a while, Amerikanski Dead’ was due to come out as a chapbook – but that never quite happened either. Then, with the bogus Millennium looming, I was asked by Al Sarrantonio if I had anything he might look at for what was then called 999: The Last Horror Anthology, intended to be one of those genre-summing, uber-collection doorstops that the field needs every so often to stay alive. I dug out this, and it wound up as the lead story in the somewhat more modestly-titled 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense. For that appearance, the story lost its subtitle (a quote from Jean-Luc Godard) to keep the list of contents tidy, but I’m restoring it here.
“Though the rising of the dead is supposed to be a global phenomenon, Romero’s movies – Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1984) – are all about America. One or two of the stories in the dead collections are about foreign parts (Poppy Brite’s ‘Calcutta, Lord of Nerves’) and Clive Barker was connected with a comic book spin-off that had dead folks (including the Royal Family) in London. But Romero’s films belong now to the era of the superpower face-off, and I thought it would be interesting to see what might be happening in the then-Soviet Union during the time between Dawn and Day and, more importantly, what it might mean. The title is a riff on The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, the British release title of the Spanish-Italian movie No profanar el sueno de los muertos (1974) – known in America as Don’t Open the Window or Let Skeping Corpses Lie (rarely has one film had so many great titles).
“The business about reconstructing faces from skulls is mentioned in Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, but I remembered it from a 1960s BBC-TV science documentary (Tomorrow’s World?) in which the skull of Ivan the Terrible was used as a template to recreate his head. For Rasputin details, I drew on Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, Sir David Napley’s Rasputin in Hollywood and various unreliable movie and TV performances by whiskery scenery-chewers like Lionel Barry-more, Boris Karloff, Tom Baker and Christopher Lee.”
AT THE RAILWAY STATION in Borodino, Yevgeny Chirkov was separated from his unit. As the locomotive slowed, he hopped from their carriage to the platform, under orders to secure, at any price, cigarettes and chocolate. Another unknown crisis intervened and the steam-driven antique never truly stopped. Tripping over his rifle, he was unable to reach the outstretched hands of his comrades. The rest of the unit, jammed half-way through windows or hanging out of doors, laughed and waved. A jet of steam from a train passing the other way put salt on his tail and he dodged, tripping again. Sergeant Trauberg found the pratfall hilarious, forgetting he had pressed a thousand roubles on the private. Chirkov ran and ran but the locomotive gained speed. When he emerged from the canopied platform, seconds after the last carriage, white sky poured down. Looking at the black-shingled track-bed, he saw a flattened outline in what had once been a uniform, wrists and ankles wired together, neck against a gleaming rail, head long gone under sharp wheels. The method, known as “making sleepers”, was favoured along railway lines. Away from stations, twenty or thirty were dealt with at one time. Without heads, Amerikans did no harm.
Legs boiled from steam, face and hands frozen from winter, he wandered throug
h the station. The cavernous space was subdivided by sandbags. Families huddled like pioneers expecting an attack by Red Indians, luggage drawn about in a circle, last bullets saved for women and children. Chirkov spat mentally; Amerika had invaded his imagination, just as his political officers warned. Some refugees were coming from Moscow, others fleeing to the city. There was no rule. A wall-sized poster of the New First Secretary was disfigured with a blotch, red gone to black. The splash of dried blood suggested something had been finished against the wall. There were Amerikans in Borodino. Seventy miles from Moscow, the station was a museum to resisted invasions. Plaques, statues and paintings honoured the victories of 1812 and 1944. A poster listed those local officials executed after being implicated in the latest counter-revolution. The air was tangy with ash, a reminder of past scorched earth policies. There were big fires nearby. An army unit was on duty, but no one knew anything about a timetable. An officer told him to queue and wait. More trains were coming from Moscow than going to, which meant the capital would eventually have none left.
He ventured out of the station. The snow cleared from the forecourt was banked a dozen yards away. Sunlight glared off muddy white. It was colder and brighter than he was used to in the Ukraine. A trio of Chinese-featured soldiers, a continent away from home, offered to share cigarettes and tried to practise Russian on him. He understood they were from Amgu; from the highest point in that port, you could see Japan. He asked if they knew where he could find an official. As they chirruped among themselves in an alien tongue, Chirkov saw his first Amerikan. Emerging from between snowbanks and limping towards the guard-post, the dead man looked as if he might actually be an American. Barefoot, he waded spastically through slush, jeans-legs shredded over thin shins. His shirt was a bright picture of a parrot in a jungle. Sunglasses hung round his neck on a thin string. Chirkov made the Amerikan’s presence known to the guards. Fascinated, he watched the dead man walk. With every step, the Amerikan crackled: there were deep, ice-threaded rifts in his skin. He was slow and brittle and blind, crystal eyes frozen open, arms stiff by his sides.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 50