People of the Dark

by Wright, T. M.

  I poked it with the stick for a good long time. I never got up the nerve to poke it hard enough to put a hole in it, and I envied whoever had been able to put that first hole in it. After a while I got tired of this game, threw the stick into the bay, and started to make my way around the body. I stopped. I had looked at the face before, of course, but now I studied it. The eyes were open and the tongue—big and white and bloated—filled its mouth. I thought that if I waited for a while, it would at last look like a dog and I'd feel sorry for it. That didn't happen. It was still just the fat caricature of a dog.

  I had my first nightmare about the dog several nights later. I continued having nightmares about it for years.

  It was a lot less tidy around Martin's house than I had imagined it would be. What I'd seen of it from the road had suggested money, which suggested neatness, but I was wrong.

  A yellow Arctic Cat snowmobile stood near the house—to the right of the wide wraparound porch. Its hood was open; various tools were on the seat, and its right-hand tread lay behind it in the mud. A red Bombardier Skidoo, intact except for a missing headlight, stood at right angles to the Arctic Cat, as if someone had pulled up there to help out.

  Another red Bombardier Skidoo—orange flames painted on the engine cowling—lay on its side twenty feet away, near a four-car garage. Snowmobile parts were everywhere around the garage—hoods, seats, engine parts, treads. Some of the smaller parts had been trampled into the mud by footfalls.

  A battered and rusty Jeep CJ-5 was in the rear section of the garage, its right front tire gone, the axle up on cinder blocks. An ancient Dodge Dart, apparently in the process of being restored, stood next to it. Its driver's door was open wide, its hood up; a thermos bottle lay on its side near the left front tire—what looked like coffee had pooled around it.

  Two overhead fluorescent shop lights were burning. The one above the Dart flickered occasionally.

  It was clear that lots of things had been eaten in the garage: Frito's Corn Chips and Schweppes Ginger Ale, curd cheese, Snickers bars, Genesee Light Beer. Wrappers, cartons, and bottles littered the place. Like the snowmobile parts, they had been trampled underfoot, too.

  Footprints were everywhere. The prints of boots and shoes, even the prints of small, naked feet.

  There was a woman in the driver's seat of the Dart. I saw her first at an angle, from behind. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a delicate white flower print on it, and it was this dress and her calves and bare feet that I saw first. Her left arm hung at her side, fingers curled. I could see the side of her head, a mass of brown curls, a long, gently muscled neck. I said, "Hello?"—although I believe I realized at once that she was dead. "Hello," I repeated, then added, "Are you all right?" Something inside me—some comedian who's inside all of us and who surfaces at such times solely to keep us sane—said, "Of course she's not all right, asshole. She's dead!" I took a couple of steps to my left, so I could get a better look at her and keep her at a distance at the same time. "Are you all right?" I said yet again. The phrase gave me a little comfort somehow. "Do you need help?" I added. "Can I give you some help?" Martin's words—"You're fooling yourself"—came back to me.

  I took a step into the garage then, closer to the woman in the Dart. "Huh?" I said to her, which was an extension of my question, "Are you all right?"

  "Huh?" Are you all right? "Huh?" Honey, said the comedian.

  The dress she was wearing was short-sleeved, puffed at the shoulders, 1940's-style, and her skin was dark, as if she had a good, even tan. "What are you doing there?" I asked her. Her head was tilted slightly to her right, and her right arm was on the back of the seat, as if she were in the process of putting her head to the side to rest. But her head had stopped halfway.

  I was close enough now to see that there were keys in the ignition. "Were you going somewhere?" I asked and felt foolish saying it because I could dimly see the reflection of her face in the windshield and I could see that her mouth was open slightly; her eyes, too. I could see, also, that she looked quite a lot like Erika. I thought she was Erika, in fact, and I panicked. I ran to her, leaned over into the car, put my hands on her shoulders, started babbling at her, "Erika, oh my God, Erika," again and again. I stopped when I saw that the woman was not Erika. I backed out of the car, hit my head on the top of the door frame, backed away further, into the Jeep CJ-5. I saw myself doing all this and I thought it was comical in a grim way, a very grim and slapstick sort of way, so of course, I started laughing. I heard myself laughing and through it I said to myself, "Stop it, goddamnit!" several times, until I finally did stop.

  The woman in the Dart had fallen over in the seat. I came forward and reached into the car, as if I intended to sit her up again. But I backed away. Squeamishness, I think. Mundane and reasonable squeamishness. I muttered to myself something about good sanitary habits, and it brought a small, self amused grin to my lips. I fought the grin back, reached to my left, took hold of the car door, leaned over again. The Dart was a two-door and I saw that the other door was locked. I locked the driver's door, closed it gently, tried it. It wouldn't open. I smiled and nodded, congratulating myself for my presence of mind. No one would have an opportunity to tamper with the body until the authorities arrived.

  Martin's house stood on what was apparently a man-made plateau jutting out of the side of the mountain. Nothing had been planted on this plateau except grass, and it was in sore need of cutting; it crowded up to the sides of the garage and the gravel driveway, and had all but overgrown several fieldstone walkways.

  I heard rock music coming from inside the house as I approached it, an old Blood, Sweat, and Tears recording, "God Bless the Child," and I listened to it a moment.

  It wasn't piercingly loud, but it was loud enough that I'd have to knock very hard. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to knock softly because the thing I had to say was very somber—"I'm afraid there's a dead woman in the car in the garage"—a thing that required quiet and thoughtfulness and tact.

  I was twenty feet or so from the house when these thoughts came to me. In hindsight I realize that the reality of the situation was almost cloying—I see the snowmobile parts lying about, the remains of quick lunches trampled underfoot, I smell the faint and unmistakable odor of the cedar logs that the house was made of, I hear "God Bless the Child," I feel the brisk, chill air. And I think how terribly motionless it all was, as if it were some gritty and depressing piece of art I'd gotten caught in.

  The music stopped abruptly, before the end of the song. I said to myself, It'll start again, so I yelled, "Hello? Martin?" I waited for an answer, got none, took a few steps closer to the house, stopped again. "Martin? It's Jack Harris, your neighbor from across the road." The music started at the point it had ended—"God bless the child who can/stand on his own"—and I cursed, glanced back at the garage, at the Dart, at the litter, at the snowmobile parts, the winking shop light, the footprints everywhere. "Martin?" I yelled louder, to be heard above the music—"God bless the child who can/stand up and say/'I've got my own . . .' "—"Martin, it's Jack Harris from across the road." I wanted to go back to my house. The woman in the Dart was none of my business. Erika was my business. I wanted to go back to the house and wait for her.

  The music stopped. I stared dumbly at the house for a moment, called "Martin?" again softly, hesitated at the bottom of the steps, climbed them, crossed the porch to the front door, knocked. "Hello?" I said.

  The door was made of cedar, like the house itself, and had a small, round window in it. I stood on my tiptoes, peered through this window, through the lace curtain on the inside, at what I supposed was the living room.

  I heard rifle fire from well behind me. Across the road, I thought, and to the south.

  The second time I lost track of Erika it was several weeks before my accident. We were on another walking tour of our property, had wandered wherever our feet wanted to take us, and they had taken us north, down the wide grassy path that had once been Goat's Head Road, t
hen to the dismal log cabin that sat close to the path. We began discussing again the idea of burning it down. To my surprise, Erika's feelings about that had changed. She didn't want to burn it down; she wanted to leave it just as it was.

  "Why?" I asked.

  "For anyone who might need it," she answered.

  "Who, for instance?" I paused. "Whom," I corrected.

  "Me," she answered.

  We had been standing in front of it; I'd been leaning this way and that to look into a small, bare window, sans glass, in the front. The place intrigued me. I'd wondered more than once who might have lived in it. Clearly, someone had.

  Its front door was open, hanging inward. Erika went to it, through several yards of stunted quack grass, and walked in.

  I called to her, "Don't go in there, Erika. For God's sake—"

  She called back, "I already am in, Jack."

  I grimaced. I felt certain that the place was alive with insects and spiders and snakes—perhaps even a rattlesnake or two—and I didn't care for the idea of walking through it.

  "Be careful, Erika."

  "I'm always careful, Jack."

  I waited outside that cabin for several minutes. I heard Erika moving about inside it, heard her say, several times, soothingly, "Oh, hello," and I assumed that she'd found a chipmunk, or a mole.

  "Why don't you come out now, Erika?!" I called at last.

  "Yes," she called back, "in a minute."

  So I waited a minute and called to her again. I got no answer. I called again, "Erika? Are you in there?" Nothing.

  I screwed my courage up and went inside.

  The walls were fashioned from bare logs; no attempt had been made at plastering them. Here and there, wide cracks between the logs let sunlight in, so there was a random, horizontal crisscross pattern of yellowish light on the north and east walls, and near-total darkness on the south wall. A short doorway led into the back room, and the random pattern of light made a sharp downturn there because the door was partway open.

  I stood at the center of the front room and called for Erika again. No answer. I called once more and heard, faintly, as if she were speaking from a room well removed from the one I was in, "Oh, hello."

  "Erika, stop playing games."

  "Oh, hello." It was closer, just to my right, near the south wall. I looked. I saw nothing.

  "Erika?"

  "Hello there." Closer still. I took a step forward, toward the south wall.

  The floor of the cabin is smooth, hard earth. And as I looked at the dark south wall, I saw Erika rise up, in the corner, and I assumed she'd been crouching there. I said, "Erika, my God, what have you been doing?"

  She stepped closer to me so her face and body were in the crisscross pattern of sunlight coming through the front wall. She held her hand out; there was a very small mole in it. She said, "Don't be angry, Jack. I've just been talking to a friend."

  CHAPTER THREE

  The German Shepherd I found on the shore of Irondequoit Bay twenty years ago is still there, unless some civic-minded citizen instituted a cleanup of the bay; if so, the carcass languishes in a landfill somewhere. And I think it's safe to say that there's not much left of it. The skeleton doubtless remains intact. Under the right conditions, it could remain intact for several million years. But the soft stuff—the muscle, the intestines, the skin and cartilage, the eyes and the tongue, the brain, the ligaments, the glands—all has been recalled, has broken down, and been pulled back into the earth. And someday the earth will put the puzzle back together. Another German Shepherd will appear. Or maybe a mole. Or an azalea. Or a woman with blue eyes and dark skin whose life will come to its end in a Dodge Dart.

  I saw a man through the lace curtains, in Martin's living room. He was sitting in a soiled white club chair, facing me, his head thrown back so the back of his neck was resting on the back of the chair; his mouth was open slightly. He was wearing dark pants and a short-sleeved white shirt, and his bare feet were together, knees parted. He was a young man, I guessed, in his early twenties. He appeared to be very pale, so it was easy to see that there were jagged, dark areas where his skin touched the chair, at his elbows and forearms, for instance, and around his bare feet. These jagged, dark areas grew very slowly as I watched, as if mud were covering him from where his skin touched the chair and the floor; this darkness stained the skin, retreated, stained it again, higher, retreated. I rationalized this at first. I said to myself that I wasn't really seeing it. I said to myself that since I couldn't explain it, then of course I wasn't seeing it. It was one of the laws of magic—If you think you're seeing the impossible, then of course you aren't. I told myself that I was seeing only the room, the soiled white club chair, the man's shoes—Wallabees—next to it, blue socks stuffed inside. I was seeing nothing magical or impossible. Only more remains of lousy lunches—candy wrappers, ginger ale cans, empty bottles of Genesee Light Beer. And the body of a young man sat in the midst of it. Like a totem. To life! it said, This is life! it said.

  But the dark areas were not just dark areas. They were areas of decay where the skin and tissues were breaking down very rapidly, like sand sculptures being broken down by tides.

  That's when I turned and ran back to my house.

  And found there, at the front door, John, the man who claimed to have shot a woman several weeks before. He was standing with his shotgun held diagonally across his chest, barrel pointing upward. He had a wide grin on his mouth.

  "Good Christ!" I managed; the run from Martin's house had left me breathless. I hadn't seen John until I'd rounded the privet hedge.

  "Hi," he said.

  I cursed again, stopped a good fifty feet from him. "What are you doing here, John?"

  He nodded once at the shotgun. "I got it loaded, Mr. Harris."

  I stared silently at him for half a minute. Then I started walking very slowly toward him. When I was within twenty-five feet of him, I held my hand out. "Why don't you give me the gun, John? Please."

  "And I shot someone, too. I really did."

  "Did you, now?"

  "I did. I shot a man this time." He lifted his chin toward the north. "Over there. I shot a man because he was trespassing. I didn't shoot a woman; I shot a man."

  "What man?"

  "I don't know. A man who was trespassing." He held the shotgun out to me. "Take it. Go ahead. It ain't loaded. It was loaded, but it ain't no more."

  I stepped forward, took the shotgun from him. "Show me the man you shot, John."

  He nodded. "Okay. Careful of the mud this time, though. Don't want you gettin' stuck again."

  He took me down the wide grassy path that had once been Old Hunt's Hollow Road. We walked for five minutes, no longer, then he stopped and nodded to his right, into the woods. "There he is, Mr. Harris."

  I looked. I saw a pair of blue jeans, a brown tweed jacket in the weeds. John saw it, too, and he chuckled. "Must be a naked man now, Mr. Harris—this man I shot. Must be a naked dead man, now."

  And from behind us I heard, "What's in there?" The words were like a sudden pain, sharp and quick; a small grunt of surprise came out of me. Again I heard, "What's in there?" Then: "What do you think you're seeing in there, Mr. Harris?"

  I turned my head. Martin stood several feet away. He had his hands shoved casually into the pockets of his blue jeans, and when he said "What's in there?" again, he nodded toward the blue jeans and the brown tweed jacket as if we were merely out window-shopping and he was asking about a display of luggage.

  A low curse came out of me.

  "Don't swear at me, Mr. Harris. Just tell me what you see in there."

  I shook my head in confusion. "I don't know."

  He stepped forward slowly, hesitated, lifted his head again. "What do you think you're seeing there?"

  And I answered simply, "A man who has died."

  "But there is no man there, Mr. Harris. So that's not what you're seeing at all. You must realize that by now." He stuck his hands into his pockets again. "This
is where they come. Some of them. To this place. Because this is where they were born."

  "That's insane," I said. "Obviously, this lunatic here"—I indicated John—"has actually shot someone this time, and it has nothing at all to do with these creatures you've conjured up."

  "I didn't conjure them up. The earth did. The earth"—he took his right hand from his pocket, made quotes with his fingers—"'conjured them up.' Just like your mother and father conjured you up. And now these creatures, these people, Mr. Harris, are going back to the earth. It's all very, very simple. They're going back into the earth."

  I looked silently at him for several seconds. I sighed. "I'm going to call the police. I'm going to call what's-his-name . . ."

  "Larry Whipple?"

  "Yes. I'm going to go back to my house now, I'm going to call him and I'm going to tell him what's happened here."

  "Of course you are."

  I started backing away, turned, stopped.

  Martin said, "You do have my sympathies, Mr. Harris. These people are very easy to love." And he grinned.

  I was close to him, within arm's reach.

  He added, "It's just too bad they don't last longer, isn't it?" His grin broadened.

  I dropped the shotgun. I didn't hit Martin with my fist. As a teenager, I'd made that mistake. I'd challenged the school bully, had seen a quick and lucky opening, and had hit him square in the cheekbone with my clenched fist. I'd broken his cheekbone, and three of my knuckles as well.

  I hit Martin with an open hand so my palm landed just on the left side of his nose. I felt his nose crumble, and for an instant I experienced immense, almost numbing satisfaction. Then he fell backwards. His hand went to his nose, and a low snuffling sound came from him, like the noise a pig makes. Even before he hit the ground, I was apologizing to him. "Jesus, I'm sorry, my God—"