by Kirby Gann
Something happened during her routine several weeks ago that haunts her. There’s a small TV in her room and she had smoked up after watching Letterman (who she doesn’t care for much but this TV doesn’t have cable and there was nothing else on and even though he’s kind of a dick Letterman sometimes can make her laugh). She turned off the TV before the musical guest played. She opened the window and took two deep hits off her pipe, it was this strong stuff Spunk Greuel had given her that night she had been running around with him and Cole at the abandoned seminary; she thought it special stuff and had been holding on to it, parsing out only small amounts to herself. Everything felt fine as she entered her little dream routine and there was no wind outside and she admired the single pine among the hemlocks in the yard standing straight and strong like honorable dignified sentinels sworn to protect the house. She felt fine; excellent, even, but soon got sleepy too and so lay back on her bed with the window open, protecting herself from the cold with the duvet wrapped around her (a luxurious thing filled with real goose down, she had missed its warmth and felt guilty for missing it the night she stayed under the threadbare quilt at Cole’s house), and looked at the dim bluish rhomboid of porch light on the ceiling and part of the wall. That’s the last she remembers.
Later (she’s unsure how much later, unsure how long she was out) she awoke in complete terror. The room no longer felt like her room, and it was filled with this incredible dark, a dark like she had never seen or experienced before, a dark like the deepest cave at the deepest bottom of the sea, it wrapped her up in this mass of dark that light could never penetrate, and even more frightening was the realization that it was impossible to move: her arms and legs had become unresponsive, she could hardly feel them. She had never felt such an absolute fear like that moment before. What made it worse was that she couldn’t understand why she felt so afraid—she was safe at home in her own bed. It seemed that the room had been taken over by this pure cancellation of life. Which what little part of her mind was working at the time interpreted as evil. Like evil as a pure element.
It was so dark she couldn’t see the digital clock on the bedstand. She didn’t know how long she had been asleep. Though she couldn’t move her head, the position she woke up in allowed her to see the television set, and there the screen gave off a peculiar horrifying glow, soft and dim but perceptibly radiant. Like the glow that comes up immediately after a TV set is turned off, except this glow was the negative of that, a glowing darkness, and it did not die down but instead grew forward and unfurled into the air like the way water spills into fabric—the glow being water and the air fabric. This glow, from what she could surmise, fed the heavy darkness that kept her paralyzed. There was no more light from the porch light; no discernible air; her room had become a coffin stuffed full with this black stuff, this evil stuff that seemed to want her. To want to erase her.
Her mind raced in a panic she did not know she had the capacity to feel. On the bent antenna above the TV she had hung a necklace of charms, tokens and gifts she had added over the years as she picked them up: a heart from her mother; a broken coin from Fleece Skaggs; a small silver cross bought for her by Brother Gil Ponder from a tiny gift shop inside the church, her “emblem of gratitude” given for attending a second Christ World Emergent service. The cross dangled above the area that was filling up with dark and she concentrated on that. The sight of it seemed to snap the entire situation into focus: she understood that this was a religious moment, having to do with her very soul—that something demonic was making a play for her soul. An idea she would later find difficult to sustain as credible, she had studied biology, she was a scientist, but at that instant it made perfect sense. Instinctively she began to pray. She started to pray manically, nothing formal to it, just started to repeat over and over that Jesus is our savior and He is my savior and I accept him in my heart and therefore whatever that was streaming out of that television set had no claim on her, it could not touch Shady Beck.
This did not seem to work. She became yet more terrified, terrified like she imagines she would be to find herself strapped down naked on a table with a room full of men she couldn’t see except for the glint of light off their scalpels. Or more precisely like being tied down to railroad tracks and you can only watch the train’s spotlight grow as it speeds nearer and nearer, your head’s vibrating on the rail with the rhythm of the wheels churning closer and here comes the thundering noise. . . .
The darkness vanished the instant her ceiling light flickered on. She found her limbs and bolted upright; her feet slapped the floor; she found her mother standing in the doorway in a thick flannel nightgown, puffy and dull-faced from pill-aided sleep and half-inside the room, her hand on the light switch. You were whimpering, she said. Bad dreams? Shady didn’t know how to answer her and so said nothing. She looked at the television set. With the whole room bright again it looked like a normal TV set.
Her mother was still standing there in the doorway so Shady mumbled something like Yeah it must have been bad dreams and after flashing one of those “I worry about my little girl but I’m exhausted” faces (a face Shady has provoked often enough to recognize easily), her mother left her alone. But in fact the state of dreaming seemed the exact opposite of the experience. It did not feel like some weird post-hypnagogic state, either (though she considered this possibility and read up on it). She does not consider herself an irrational girl prone to wild imagining. Naturally, and despite the intensity of the terror, she assumed the pot had something to do with what had happened.
She intuited, however, that the pot wasn’t the only factor involved here; contact of some kind had been made. The problem was that she didn’t know what it was that was contacting her, what it signified, what it was trying to say. Perhaps because the pot came from Spunk, and because of her eye falling upon the broken coin given to her by Fleece hanging next to Brother Ponder’s silver cross, she connected this experience to Cole Prather. A warning to her? A warning to warn him? It all felt so mysterious and yet the more she weighed that night in her head the more certain she felt she had been opened to something that was linked to Cole.
She wanted nothing more to do with it and made a point of not thinking about it for several days. She tried to put the event behind her and stayed away from the routine for a while. Yet, after a time, once the immediacy of the terror had softened somewhat, and after she had not seen or spoken to Cole in weeks, the strangest thing began to occur—it was almost like she wanted to experience that night again. Like she longed to feel it again. To be tempted toward that darkness again. As a way of understanding; perhaps to hear the warning more clearly.
So she’s been returning to the entire procedure with the greatest precision she can manage. She tries to set it up exactly as it had gone down that night: hung her necklace on the antenna, smoked off a bowl, endured Letterman and his buddy Paul trade jibes, turned off the TV before the musical guest appeared. But she sleeps through the night undisturbed. She has now repeated the process more times than she cares to count, trying to recapture the greatest terror she has ever experienced, practically making a ritual out of the steps she can remember, practically inviting that bad, evil, negative element to return to her room so that she might find what it meant, what it wanted from her and what she might find in it to bring to Cole. Yet these nights at home disappear in the peaceful sleep of the oblivious.
Paradoxically, that she doesn’t seem able to make the event reoccur has led her to believe more fervently in the reality of that night, that it was not simply the strength of Greuel’s homebatch weed working on her subconscious, but that Evil is real, an element as real as positive energy, at least, and it is capable of engaging a person body and soul. And it’s like you can just bump into it, accidentally. Lately she discovers herself doing the most menial thing, driving alone or checking in at the new job or standing in line at the kwik-stop, and in her mind she is picturing this entire other galaxy, an entirely separate dimension encompassing this wor
ld like a vision out of some medieval fantasy, where there is a perpetual war going on, or at least a yin and yang push-pull conflagration, of Good vs. Evil, absolute energies the human mind can only conceive of as demons and warrior angels going at it in this spinning tornadic vortex for the, what?, the souls of each of us?
Admitting this makes her feel kind of ignorant, and superstitious, and plain silly, which is not how she likes to think of herself. But if she looks at it from a certain angle she can frame it as a kind of gift, too: for whatever reason she has been presented with a brief glimpse into what is actually going on out there, just out of sight. If she’s interpreting it correctly. An acknowledgment she finds even more disconcerting and so she tries to avoid that one, too. What if the warning was for her? How would she know to heed it?
Intuitively she feels this is not the case. If it’s a warning it is not for her, it’s for others. The prophets in the Bible underwent such experiences that were meant only for them to share with the others who could not see what they knew. But again Shady thinks the entire notion is silly; she doesn’t live in the world of the Bible. That world ended a long, long time ago, didn’t it.
Cole finds himself frustrated, brought to stasis, treading water furiously and getting nowhere he wants to go, like he’s caught on the far edge of a rapid current whose violence he feels only as a tug near his body, he can’t tell if the pull is irrevocable or if he can still swim to safety. The sense of adventure and the kick of high-risk remains at each run but he’s no longer petrified by the sight of a state trooper and he wonders if this means he is becoming careless. He’s busier than he would choose to be and yet he has little cash in pocket. Half the state’s on one drug or another and it’s like the responsibility has fallen to Cole to insure everyone receives their allotted share.
Spunk tells Cole he’s already the luckiest of couriers. The others never saw Arley Noe or Greuel himself. The other guys in the trade (Spunk says) think Arley and Greuel are voices on a phone. I’m honored, Cole says, but it’s not helping him get any closer to where he needs to be.
“Oh yeah? Where’s that?”
“You know what I’m after. This is your world, man. I’m a stranger here for my mother.”
“If that’s what you want to believe. You shouldn’t blame your decisions on your momma, James Cole. I mean look at her. You’re here because it’s your life, man, this kind of thing is just what you were destined to do. That other stuff”—he flips one hand in the air between them—“that’s all just high-talkin’.”
Cole lifts his shoulders, drops them. They are standing in what Spunk calls his new base of operations: a self-storage garage rented as a retreat of his own, a hundred-fifty windowless square feet with a rollup for a front door and a screened ventilator fan in the back. The bunker reeks of bong water and feet despite the ventilator fan. Spunk has outfitted the unit with rugs and an old leather battlement of a couch, one that used to reside in Greuel’s basement before Spunk moved his bed down there, the leather peeling and burred in spots, stretched enormous across the wall like some prehistoric rhinoceros that once lay down against the concrete blocks and died. Opposite this sits a Zenith on a rolling stand with an eighties-era VCR—key tabs instead of buttons; atop that is a hi-watt boom box of the latest quality, with a five-disc CD changer and onboard mixer. The VCR no longer works; he uses the TV as a monitor for his Colecovision and Atari games.
A gray pit bull curls into one arm of the couch, a female Spunk rescued from the pack left behind at the seminary. The only one he could get his hands on, he says, and since she has become his property Cole can see Spunk has made up his mind she’s the best of the lot, a pure breed of stellar demeanor, intimidating if he needs her to be, and though Spunk has had her for weeks he has yet to name her. He calls her “my bitch.”
“Check it, I’ve already taught her how to shake. C’mere, bitch!” Cole watches as the dog, which seems either tired or bored, regards Spunk as he tries to get her to raise one paw on command. Her eyes keep flicking away from him, to Cole, back to her master and then to Cole again standing near two potted plants.
“She doesn’t want to play ’cause she’s looking out for me. People think I’m stupid but I can do this business myself. Why I got this place. I don’t know what Arley’s going to do once Daddy’s gone but I got to look after my own self-interests, right?”
A fine haze sifts the ceiling, adding to the ghostly hue cast by a single metal halide grow-light hanging over two small skunk seedlings stuck into gallon buckets. The plants are not thriving. Spunk admits he’s not sure he did right in transplanting them. “I maybe jayed the roots or something,” he says. “My first shot at it. Maybe they’re still shocked from the move.”
“Could be. They look hopeful still. You sure these are females?”
Spunk shoves him sportingly.
“Check’em out. Step up close, don’t be shy.” Cole does as asked, bending closer to study the jagged leaves but they’re too young to make out any resin shining there. As he nears, the pit begins a low growl deep in her throat. “Reach for one,” Spunk says, grinning. Cole barely moves a hand forward when the pit is off the couch and at him, snarling until he’s back into the corner. Spunk’s laughing goofy hard as he grabs the dog’s collar and reins her in. “See how great she is? Don’t worry, she aint gonna hurt you with me here, she’s all show aren’t you, girl? Aren’t you a mean little show?”
At the touch of Spunk’s hand the dog does undergo a remarkable transformation. The violence disappears from her like a wave that has crested and crashed and now recedes from the sand. She trots back to the couch and, regaining her place, stretches on her back so that her master can rub her belly, her long tongue lolling to one side, saliva drawing to the floor.
“Look at that belly,” Cole points out, “is she pregnant?”
“Hell, I don’t know, I just got her a couple weeks ago. No telling what those dogs’ve been doing in that shithole. Grab a seedling there and see if she cares if she’s pregnant or not.”
Cole asks where Spunk got the plants—his father won’t allow growing on their property—but his pal shrugs off the question. He backpedals to the ragged couch and collapses beside the dog. “Need to get my own thing going,” he says, preparing another bowl in a funk-water bong. “You can’t rely on anybody these days to come through for you, not even your own daddy.” His voice turns almost mournful.
Cole studies the wallowing seedlings again. They don’t look good but they might live, he can’t tell. It is a hardy weed after all. Spunk’s attention span scattered in every direction on awakening, but he could concentrate long enough to meet his own needs as well as anyone else.
“Doubt old Blue Note would be thrilled that you’re trying to grow here, either.” The water gurgles as Cole sucks in the smoke, picturing Arley Noe. Something about the man reminded him of soot—the ashy powder of it like bits of cloud discarded behind him anywhere he moved, scouring the air for long moments before it dissipated.
“I’ll make my move after a while, nothing fancy. Daddy won’t be around forever but I aint ever going to cross him, neither. He knows that.” Saying this, Spunk’s eyes clarify and focus briefly, sadly and with deep sentiment, and with also a kind of despairing lonesomeness usually experienced late at night when you had no girl and the bottle of whisky is empty and the music on the stereo hammers at everything you had that once made you joyous, though you might not have realized it at the time, and which now seems gone forever.
“He’s pretty sick, isn’t he.”
Spunk shakes his head slow and silent in angry disbelief. “I tell you, man . . . I know nobody could ever mistake the old man for a saint, but he deserves better than this.”
“He’s only mean because he has to be.”
“That’s it, Cole! You have to be a motherfucker in our business or else you’re gone forever. You’ll see. You still got to learn that yourself, you’re too nice, too considerate.”
“Was that Fleece�
��s problem? He was too nice?”
“Fuck you, Cole. Fuck you for even thinking I’m talking about that. I don’t know where your brother is and I’d freakin’ take you to his right hand and leave you there if I did. Goddamn. Shut up.”
Spunk’s transparency is one of the reasons Cole still loves him: if Spunk knew something Cole would know, too, because the secret would come out soon enough. The only other possibility is that Spunk holds lowdown facts that his brain hasn’t connected to Fleece or to his father—and that’s the kind of information Cole can only wait and listen for it to slip out. He’s not very good at this.
“I figure he’s alive at least,” Spunk squeaking a straw back and forth in the Big Gulp in his lap. “If you think about it, he has to be.”