Doorbells at Dusk

by Josh Malerman

  And I also thought my friends were about to die in my presence, and I was helpless to do anything about it.

  ***

  But they didn’t die.

  Monkey almost bled out, but he got a series of transfusions just in time and spent a few weeks in a hospital getting his strength back.

  Mr. Impossible had cracked a few ribs and punctured a lung. And he had that brutal compound fracture. He spent a month in the hospital and more months in physical therapy, but he still walks with a limp. And on rainy days, he uses a cane. But this hasn’t stopped him from playing Ultimate Frisbee or rock climbing or from doing any of the crazy shit he does.

  While tripping balls.

  He is Mr. Impossible after all.

  And his kids, and all the kids in the neighborhood, wound up coming down from their Larpinol highs, and being mostly all right. Billy woke up. And Betsy stopped believing she was an angel.

  Luckily, no kids died that night.

  I know what you’re thinking. Didn’t Mr. Impossible’s ass get sued? Didn’t he go to prison?

  And the answer to both questions is yes. He spent a year in prison and lost a lot of money in a series of lawsuits.

  And Chapman, too, got locked up for a while. But he doesn’t seem to have shaped up. He even brags about what he did on that Halloween night.

  Hell, even all these years later, he’s still a kid. He might grow up one day. But when he does, I kind of think he’ll just be a grown-up asshole. I’d never tell Mr. Impossible that though.

  And, yes, it doesn’t seem like a year in prison is much time at all for what Mr. Impossible was responsible for. Most of his sentence was suspended. His new employer had a lot to do with that. As soon as Mr. Impossible got out of the can, he started working as a civilian contractor for some shady military intelligence outfit. He doesn’t talk about it.

  He can’t.

  But I know what kind of things he’s doing for them.

  Impossible things.

  BETWEEN

  Ian Welke

  She wipes her foot across the wet sand erasing a triangle someone has etched into the mud with a stick. Finding a stick of her own, Yolanda replaces the triangle or delta with a long integral ∫. It was the delta that initially attracted her to calculus. The delta is the mathematical representation of rates of change, but tonight’s ritual is all about the past. The integral reverses the derivative, in this case symbolically reversing her history. She draws a sigma next. For she’ll need the sum total of the variables working for her, even the marks on the sand.

  The letters for the variables . . . t for time? The hours between sunset on Halloween and the end of Dia De Los Muertos. She’s piggy backing on the shared belief that the veil is thinnest these two nights, this night specifically since there are more unwitting participants, the greater the effect. She is x in the equation. The observer is part of the ritual. She giggles. How’s that for an Uncertainty Principle? There must be a variable for place, as she fully believes this ritual can only work here, the city that substitutes so often for so many other places.

  A man with an unbuttoned shirt and his pant legs rolled up to his knees, stands in the surf ahead. She follows the trail of hair up his chest, neck, and muttonchops, and realizes that he is staring back at her.

  His eyes are bloodshot, but his pupils are as immense and saucer sized as her own. She’s certain that the spirit staring at her is a young, Los Angeles-years Jim Morrison. And he should stare at her, for she is the L.A. Woman. She is Los Angeles. Born to a Hispanic mother and a half-Korean half-African American father, she worked two jobs while going from LACC to UCLA to grad school at Cal Tech, all while painting and working theater crews and never ever sleeping. She grew up on this beach and in traffic between this beach and her parents’ home in Boyle Heights. She’s seen the absurd wealth in the estates just blocks from people sleeping beneath overpasses. She’s seen her streets double for countless other cities on the movie and television screens. If anyone would know that the barrier between worlds is thinnest in Los Angeles, it’s her.

  Los Angeles, Halloween night, she has her coordinates in space time.

  She feels the pull of a thousand dark suns as she’s drawn into Morrison’s eyes. But before her vision is engulfed in the black of those immense pupils there’s a light, yellow and pink, she realizes it’s the sun reflected off the waves in front of her. There’s no sign of the man she thought was Morrison’s spirit, it’s faded like so many shades before her, leaving the trace of cigarette smoke on the wind.

  How long has she been staring at the ocean? How long has it been since the spirit passed her by? Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten all three-and-a-half grams of the mushrooms. No. She shakes her head and the world shakes in jangled frames in front of her. It had to be the whole eighth and it had to be tonight.

  It can’t be as long as it seems. The sun is still above the horizon, if only just. She trips out on its flicker across the waves, but forces herself to stop and concentrate for one moment. The time dilation effect is a double-edged sword. It buys her more time to think and to explore, but there’s the danger that she could forget her task, get too buried in the rite to remember its purpose.

  That’s just one of the dangers. Every time she’s taken psychedelics there’s been that fear in the back of her head, the one where she worries this is the time it lasts forever, this is the time she doesn’t come back. And it’s more important not to give power to that fear tonight, with the greater effects of the ritual, she doesn’t want her own mind to give her power over to any of the dangers. With the barriers between worlds down, there’s the rift wraiths to contend with, and not all the spirits she’ll encounter will be friendly, and of course she needs to do all she can to not mess with Mr. In Between.

  She shakes her head like she can rattle the notion out through her ear. At least she went with mushrooms instead of LSD. She’s taken enough chemistry to know she prefers the simple organic compounds over the complex chemicals.

  Several chemical formulas are etched into the sand underneath her integral ∫. She realizes she’s giggling before she knows what she’s laughing at. Trying to be consistent while mixing weird mathematics with magical ritual. Do the formulas work as well as her tia claimed? Jack Parsons sure thought so when he combined magic with rocketry, and he didn’t have half the math available to him that she does. He didn’t have half the theory of the multiverse, or of the simulation nature of the universe. He did understand that belief informs reality, but he could not have understood the importance of this location on this night.

  Or did he? The man was a black magician as well as a rocket scientist. He cofounded JPL. Was there a reason JPL was founded on Halloween?

  She wonders if she made her way back to Pasadena if she’d see his shade there. He blew himself up not too far from where she lives today.

  There are plenty of spirits out on Halloween night through to the end of Dia De Los Muertos, but Yolanda is looking for two in particular.

  Shades move past her in the windswept sand, but none of them are her parents. She’d hoped to find them here, in an echo from their time together at the beach from her childhood, but no such luck. If she can find them, will they be able to tell her what she should do? Should she stay where she is and take the job she wants researching, or take the better paying engineering job and have to move away? If she stays, her life will be beset with costs she can never afford. If she leaves she will miss her home and will forever wonder if what might have been if she’d remained in academia. Security or achievement. And of course there’s the fear of leaving Los Angeles. For all its faults, it’s her home, and it’s a city with more to offer her than anywhere else. She’s thought about it for so long, she just wishes that she didn’t have to choose.

  She hoofs it up the road. It’s hard to tell some of the more opaque spirits from the living people she sees. People, especially the fast moving little ones already out in their costumes, smear and blur past as the mushrooms do
their work, leaving bright trailers behind. Peering harder, she can tell the shades from the people by their faded colors.

  Yolanda passes the Abbot Kinney Library, and he’s there out front, the founder of Venice By The Sea, he tips his hat to her as she passes.

  A trio of jack-o’-lanterns are on the top step. The tall one has the sideways eight, the infinity symbol carved into its forehead. The magician jack-o’-lantern. The other two have spirals for eyes, reminding her of the Indian petroglyph she’s always assumed means gate or portal. She’s on the right path.

  Birds chatter around her. No. It’s the cackle of seven, eight, then nine small children. Tiny ghosts and goblins parading the street, encircling her and dancing around her like a May Pole. This is not Beltane, this is on the opposite side of the linear time axis. She’d be stunned that they’re so fearless with a stranger, but she realizes this too is part of the rite. Even on a standard Halloween the children practice the sympathetic magic of transformation when they don their costumes. At the doorsteps of their neighbors, the children recite the evocation of the spell with “Trick or Treat” and they are rewarded with sacrifice in sugar.

  She passes two shades, definitely not with the trick or treaters. One she’s certain is Pio Pico, the last governor of Alta California. The other is an African American woman. Is that Biddy Mason? Or is Yolanda’s hero worship of Mason’s history playing on the psilocybin and the disorienting overall nature of the rite? Is this confirmation bias in action?

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Are you Biddy Mason?” she hears her own voice say. It’s a shock to her. Did she mean to speak? If she’s just hallucinating and she’s said this to a random stranger how embarrassing would that be?

  The woman smiles kindly. When she speaks it’s barely audible, a whisper on the wind. “It doesn’t matter, does it, dear? You can’t let yourself be distracted along the way. If I learned anything, it’s that you need to be focused on what you really want.”

  Before Yolanda can ask another question, the woman fades to shadow. The ghosts of Los Angeles rise and fall and rush away like the white foam of a broken wave.

  Yolanda looks up to see that her bus has arrived. She steps onto the 33 Downtown and is surprised that she has the fare already in hand. Maybe the spell is stronger than her. She’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

  ***

  The Central Library is Yolanda’s favorite building in the world. The mosaics on the outer walls and busts of great thinkers symbolize the theme of the light of learning. Climbing the steps many times she’s felt the power growing around her, coming closer into the building that embodies not just learning as a goal and concept but also a wondrous architectural achievement, a symbol of what society can do when they’re motivated by the public good more than individual greed.

  As she forces herself to walk past the steps, to continue tonight’s mission, she wonders if she should have spent more time inside prepping for the evening. Is she knowledgeable? Isn’t the thing she learns most often when she researches, how much there is she doesn’t know? An equation appears on the wall in front of her, glowing in hot red, the limit as K approaches infinity. K must be knowledge. She wonders if the rest of the equation is research or her ability to understand it, then she shakes it off and tries to maintain her focus on her purpose. There is little time. It has to be tonight.

  If she does meet the spirits of her parents, does she have the question worded properly? Will she make the most of the situation, or will she stammer or confuse them until they can’t provide her with any help after all?

  Her parent’s first apartment was in Korea Town. She wades through crowds of drunks stumbling out of restaurants and bars. She waves her hands to balance herself as if she’s surfing an imaginary wave and bending the board around the rocks coming up fast ahead. No not rocks, loose jack-o’-lanterns bouncing and twirling levitated ahead of her. That can’t be real, she tells herself, but whether she believes or not, she takes the time to find the one with the infinity symbol etched in its forehead to make sure she’s on the right path.

  A thousand separate bird chirps chatter around her. She covers her ears. Too many voices at once as the crowd thickens.

  This is nothing. If things go badly she’ll have to brave the multitudes in Hollywood. The thought sends a shiver down her spine. She’s not ready for that. A Hollywood Halloween Night while she has a head full of mushrooms.

  This crowd is bad enough.

  “The overlay of the worlds, tonight that barrier is the lowest.” The voice sounds familiar, but she can’t place it in the crowd.

  “Is it tonight that it’s lowest, or is it the belief that makes it so?”

  “Does it matter in practicality?”

  The first voice is her physics professor from UCLA, but she doesn’t see him in the crowd, certainly not close enough to hear him speaking. The second voice sounds a lot like her own, but older, merged with her tia’s? It seems like there’s something she’s forgotten, probably she should consider how many mushrooms she ate on the beach, but no, that’s not it. She’s sure of it.

  As if they know she’s trying to concentrate on them, the voices die back down to dull crowd murmur.

  Olvera Street to her left is home to some of Los Angeles’ most famous and oldest ghosts, but she keeps moving. It’s her folk’s apartment she needs to check out, her last chance at sparing herself the chaos of Hollywood on Halloween Night.

  A man in an out of fashion suit wearing a hat stands in front of her.

  “My walks are beset with difficulties. It was easier before the freeways. How can I hope to find Cissy now?”

  She looks over her shoulder, but the shade is definitely speaking to her. “I guess we’re all looking for someone. Is Cissy still among the living?”

  He stops and ponders and flickers as the realization passes over him. “No. She passed before I did. I died, and far from here. What am I doing back on these streets?”

  “I think it’s an echo. I think it’s unique to Los Angeles, and possibly elevated by the Halloween and Dia De Los Muertos traditions.”

  “Los Angeles is unique. Thank the Gods for that. At least the Santa Anas aren’t blowing in force tonight. I’ve said it before, on nights like those, every party ends in a fight.” He stops walking and smiles at her.

  Or so she thinks. She turns around to see who he’s really smiling at, but there’s just the empty sidewalk leading down 7th Street.

  “Is that the Athletic Club? At least some things never change. It’s been so many years . . . I hope you find who you’re looking for.”

  She looks back to see if she can read the text over the door, but it’s too far and she’s at too sharp an angle. She turns back around, but the spirit of the man is gone.

  Yolanda spins in place and realizes she’s come off the beaten track and into an alleyway. Spirals the same as the petroglyphs are etched into the sides of the alley dumpsters. But because they’re on either side of her, she’s not sure which way to go.

  The dumpsters start to shake. After a moment the three closest to her are hopping around like an unbalanced washing machine. Wind swirls forming a cyclone of rubbish, and an unearthly howl roars from the sky above. Black smears pinwheel in smoke on the alley walls. The temperature drops around her and the howl jumps up an order of magnitude of decibels. The ground shakes and car alarms blare in the distance, but the shaking feels less like an earthquake and more like an oncoming train.

  She picks a direction and sprints away, unsure of what she’s running from precisely, but she doesn’t stop and she doesn’t turn around to look and find out.

  ***

  Yolanda’s surprised to find that she’s able to cope with so many people around, despite the mushrooms. She’s not sure it will last. Her fear may grow and the shadows that chased her here may grow braver, but for now, the teeming multitude of celebrants seem to be holding the darkness at bay.

  The first Ishtar Gate in Los Angeles was built for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 fi
lm Intolerance. Like many landmarks from Hollywood’s earliest films, it stood in place for decades until it fell into disrepair and had to be torn down. According to the author Ray Bradbury, rebuilding it to its present height as part of a shopping mall was his idea.

  Yolanda stares at the gate now. On a night like this more than shoppers are likely to travel through such a thing.

  The shadows seem to sense this. They scurry around the periphery of the Halloween crowd, flickering in and out of the light, until they glom onto the wall of the gate and instead of an empty space at the bottom a purple reflection starts to shimmer into being.

  Yolanda’s not sure what’s coming, but she knows she’s not going to stick around to find out. She takes off down the side street and keeps running until the crowd starts to thin, but then she realizes she’s vulnerable to the shadows and she ducks into a diner. The place is packed, but a man with a scruffy goatee and a Porkpie hat, waves at the empty seat on the other side of the table from him.

  Something about him looks familiar. She’s seen him on album covers, a younger version of one of her favorite musicians. She stammers, “Aren’t you . . . ?”

  He nods and exhales tobacco. She’s sure no one was smoking when she came in. “I am.”

  “But . . . You’re not dead.”

  “No. Not the version of me in your present day. But the spirits you speak to, it’s not the same as speaking to the dead. It’s just memories. And this memory of this time is just as gone to you as any of the dead. Past versions of yourself are just spirits now, maybe more accessible to you because you remember them the best. Oh yeah you could talk to past versions of yourself tonight. Future versions too, but don’t think about it too much. In your condition you might just bodhisattva out of control and fill the diner with a horde of yous. And then I’ll never get a refill.” He holds his coffee mug up in the direction of the waitress.

  A waitress with a chain clipped to her rhinestone glasses lopes to the table carrying a coffee pot. Her nametag says “Irene.” She doesn’t take Yolanda’s order or even acknowledge her presence. The moment she finishes pouring the coffee she fades away into nothingness.