Dark Screams, Volume 8

by Dark Screams- Volume 8 (retail) (epub)

  “Why tell any story more than once unless it still needs to be told, unless there are people still around who haven’t yet heard it? You are not the only one who forgot where he came from. This modern world encourages you to forget, and to be fair, it has been a long time since you had cause to remember.” He tilts his head, and in the pale narrow face, the salesman’s smile is the slash of a straight razor through a bowl of shaving cream. “But you have to remember now.”

  The chill in the old man’s bones deepens as he registers just how insane his customer has revealed himself to be. “Remember what?”

  “Who you are.”

  “And who am I?”

  The salesman moves closer. “Salvation for those who choose it. A lesson to those who don’t.”

  Oscar’s grip on the scissors tightens enough to hurt. “I don’t understand.”

  “The story,” the salesman explains with marked impatience. “The story is true. It happened, and it will happen again. Whenever society loses its way, when evil eclipses good in the shadowy corners of this world, the razors come out to crop it back down. They must, or what remains will be nothing worth saving. Chaos, Oscar. The job of ensuring that the spirits never overrun us falls to you and men of your ilk. It’s been this way always, though the patience of the spirits is stronger than the memory of man. You’ve forgotten your place. Today, you must begin to remember.”

  Another step forward and the straight razor comes up between them. Without thinking, for he does not have the luxury nor the time, Oscar lunges forth with the scissors, the blades shut, the handle buried in his fist, and watches with panicked horror as the edges sink into the breast of the man’s shirt.

  There is silence, and in that silence, no blood blossoms on the salesman’s clothes.

  Both men stand still, Oscar sure that the hammering of his heart will bring people running to the store in search of thunder. He suspects they may find him dead.

  Then, incredibly, the salesman plucks the scissors free in irritation. The blade is unmarked and gleams in the light as he tosses it aside. The straight razor is still extended, and now Oscar sees that the other man was not brandishing it, but offering it handle-first for him to accept.

  Shocked and confused, he nevertheless does as requested, unable to meet the irritated look on the other man’s face. Instead, he focuses on the large straight razor in his hand, on the ancient handle and the grotesques contained within it, and only raises his head when he hears the chime of the bell above the door.

  The salesman is standing in the doorway, the darkening night behind him. Across the street, a young man in the throes of either madness or withdrawal or both tears at his hair as he walks by.

  “They don’t deserve what’s coming for them, Oscar. Not yet.”

  Oscar shakes his head, his head pounding with the strain of trying to reconcile all he has seen and heard with the unyielding demands of sheer logic. “I don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

  “Yes, you do,” the salesman tells him. “It’s why you’ve been faithfully attending to a business that died years ago. You’ve held out hope that someday the customers would return. That day is coming, Oscar. Soon. Whether or not you’ll be ready for it is your decision to make.”

  Although he knows the situation is absurd and can already see the incredulous expression on his wife’s face as he relates the tale a half-hour from now, something compels him to indulge his strange visitor, a small voice inside him that feels older than his own and no longer dormant.

  “What if I’m not?”

  “Failure,” the salesman replies, “will cost you nothing.”

  And then he is gone, leaving Oscar standing there, watching the lost souls wandering back and forth through his reflection in the glass door. For a long time he does nothing, because he doesn’t know what to do. Reason becomes an insistent tapping, demanding he disregard the preposterous claims of his unusual customer, and the idea appeals. And yet, as the strength drains from his feet and the sudden exhaustion leads him to sit on the chair the salesman has just vacated, he wonders.

  It is quiet out there in the night but for the self-chastisement of the night people.

  The Christian bookstore has emptied, and the lights are off. The owner is no longer watching from the window.

  Oscar leans forward and sets the straight razor into the jar next to the combs and the scissors. At worst, he decides, it will be a curio to discuss with his customers, assuming they ever come. The feeling that they will indeed come, and that it will have more significance to them than just a mere conversation piece, is one he finds difficult to shake.

  Sometime later, he rouses himself, and for the first time in decades does not sweep up before locking up the store.

  The strangeness of the day occupies his mind as he makes his way home through shadows that seem to grow longer around him.

  India Blue

  Glen Hirshberg

  “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”

  —C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary

  When I was twelve, my friends and I almost got arrested—shot, actually, though I didn’t realize that until afterward—trying to stick up an ATM. That is, we were trying to film a stickup, decked out in cowboy hats and sweaty ski masks despite the scorching desert heat, and one of us hadn’t been able to find his squirt gun, so he’d brought a hoe. But somehow, the cops who happened to be passing missed the movie camera we’d filched from Enrico’s dad’s stuff, mistook our blue plastic pistols for the real thing, decided the ATM might have thought we were serious, and got us all facedown on the pavement. They actually handcuffed Amir, kicked halfheartedly at my ribs a couple times, confiscated the camera (which really could have gotten Enrico killed, if his father had ever sobered up enough to notice), and booted us out of the lot. Only after the cops had peeled out and left us sullen and bruised on the empty San Bernardino street did Enrico pull a pistol from his sock, and only after he shot it in the air did I realize it was not only real but loaded.

  “Where the fuck did you get that?” I asked.

  “Same place I got the camera, pendejo, where do you think?”

  All of which is only to say I kind of liked Blue Shirt. I mean, I liked them both, but everyone liked Frankie Violet. How could you not?

  Blue Shirt, though, he was just a trier, trust fund or no, like Enrico, like most of the guys I knew when I was a kid, and San Bernardino was just poor, not murderous, or not as murderous as now anyway. He spent his life sticking his face into places he’d been told, in no uncertain terms, that it was not welcome and would never belong. He might even have been a little stupid, but only ambition-stupid. And he sure as hell didn’t deserve what he got, no matter what you think that was, which version you believe.

  And the thing is, I was there. I saw what I saw. And no one—not Frankie Violet, and not Blue Shirt, either—deserves that.

  I never even met the guy until the day of his game. Match—sorry, dude. Fixture—how’s that?

  When the call came in offering me the gig—my usual, running sound and doing PA announcing at the Fault—I said sure without a second thought. Barely even blinked at it. Some Indian trust-fund kid’s start-up professional cricket league in the middle of July in the drought-strangled heart of the postindustrial wasteland in the dead center of the thousand-square-mile sprawl that is the Inland Empire? To be presented in a minor-league baseball stadium that has never once attracted one thousand people to any single event, ever, not even to Blow Up Your Boss’s Mercedes Night?

  Well, as long as Indian Trust Fund was paying me. I couldn’t exactly afford to be picky. I’d long since chosen my pieced-together, contract-work life, and I liked it. And hell, for all I knew, trust-funded professional cricket was exactly what the good people of San Bernardino County—whoever they are, whichever shady bunkers they find to hide in on mid-July Wednesday nights—craved most. I’d seen and done sound and public address for far stranger nights. The Westside Bloomas vs. Ghos
ttown Crips vs. Oriental Lazy Boys jalapeño fry and eat-off, say. You think I’m kidding?

  So I did my homework, learned my stumps from my leg byes, spent some quality time listening to different commentators from all over the British Empire pronounce the word googly. I discovered that Twenty20, the variant that Blue Shirt (though I didn’t call him that, then; hadn’t met him yet, hadn’t seen the shirt) proposed to have his players play, was the arena football of cricket, a bastardized, sped-up, thundering-hits-and-bouncing-breasts-and-pom-poms spectacle for the impatient or the philistine. All of which I translated to mean: cricket for people who had to work for a living and could spare or afford only a couple hours for entertainment, ever. And that made me think maybe Blue Shirt was onto something, after all.

  I didn’t actually meet him until ninety minutes before the match, in the parking lot of the Fault, our local pre-abandoned cavern of a minor-league stadium. The joke went that in lieu of expensive retrofitting, the Fault’s builders had simply had the cracks in the façade and paving pre-installed. In reality, I think the heat had probably done it, baking down like the earth’s convection currents in reverse, forcing hot air through cracks in the cheap concrete and fake stone into the sand underneath, spiderwebbing the place in preparation for its inevitable implosion on the day the big one finally hits. The only silver lining being that there probably wouldn’t be many people in it at the time.

  Other than my own dust- and sand-laminated Buick, I counted exactly four other vehicles in the lot when I got there. The Porsche, of course, belonged to Blue Shirt, and he’d parked it in one of the luxury VIP spaces up by the front gate, the ones with the stretched canvas sunshades on tent poles. The other three were clustered, grill to grill to grill, in the far northeast corner, like wolves around a kill, and I wasn’t happy to see them there. They’d all been black or maybe silver before the desert got them. Two were SUVs. A couple of the guys skulking around them were the brooding, scary-ass, pants-dragging teens you’d see on CSI: San Bernardino, if you can even imagine the existence of such a show, or anyone to watch it. The others were ropy, balding car-mechanic types, the only fat on them around their jowls, which made them look like boxers. As in the dogs, not the athletes. Theirs were the eyes you really didn’t want to meet. They were all smoking, barely even talking to one another, just leaning against the cars with their rib cages rattling to the racket pumping out of their overloaded car speakers.

  I had a sudden and completely misplaced burst of affection for them, right then. As if they were all just kids playing drug deal, or whatever they’d planned, in what they’d reasonably assumed would be the empty lot of the Fault tonight. Filming a fake robbery of an ATM, maybe, before heading home to whatever was left of their families. None of them so much as glanced Blue Shirt’s way, and I saw only one with a gun in his hand. So the prospects for a peaceful night really did seem comparatively promising, at that point.

  Blue Shirt was standing at the front of the lot, waving me forward by windmilling both arms, directing me toward the other VIP spaces. I headed that way but parked on the other side of the curbed barrier, in one of the paying-customer slots. I knew my place, even if Blue Shirt didn’t. He stopped windmilling, hopped anxiously over the curb toward me, and I had just enough time before he reached me to get a good look at that shirt.

  You know Chinese movies, where #1 Wife steps out from behind a lacquer screen in her robe, and you have to blink, think maybe there’s a fire somewhere and it’s tinted the air with California wildfire light, because nothing natural has ever been that red? This was the blue equivalent. Blue like people who’ve never been out from under the smog have been told the sky should be. Like the color El Mirage Lake must have been before it became El Mirage Lakebed. Like the eyes on the woman who will never even turn toward you long enough to let you see them.

  True, the picture of the giant, grape Popsicle stamped over the heart, with the words REAL KUCHI ICE! in eye-popping purple thread underneath, spoiled the effect a bit. But still.

  That blue.

  “Mr. Sifuentes, thank you for coming,” he said as I eased out of what passed for my Buick’s air-conditioning into the heat, in his musical, Indian singsong.

  “Please, right away, the players need the keys to the locker room area, and we need to open the restrooms. The crowds will be here soon.”

  I felt my tired, sun-dried, craggy face crack a little. Optimistic blue bugger, he was. “Keys,” I said. “They didn’t give you keys?”

  “Who? Mr. Sifuentes, we have little time, and we have to—”

  My face cracked a little wider. “Uh-huh. Listen. Mr….?”

  That actually stopped—or, really, slowed—him, just for a second. Then he grinned. That’s when I really started to like him. “You couldn’t pronounce it,” he told me. “You can call me…Sachin.”

  “As in Tendulkar?”

  That was when he probably decided he liked me. Certainly, I’d surprised him. For a second I thought he was going to leap into my arms. “You know Tendulkar? You are a rare American indeed.”

  “I skimmed the Wikipedia page.”

  His grin barely wavered. “Well. Thank you for doing that, at any rate. You are a most professional man.”

  “Can I call you Blue? Or Blue Shirt?”

  He glanced down at himself, then up again. His grin went positively radiant. “It is a very blue shirt. Now come. The fans are waiting to get in.”

  It took me a second to realize he meant the guys in the northeast corner of the lot. I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. That felt good, actually. It had been awhile.

  “So, my new Blue friend. I’m thinking you didn’t actually meet the distinguished owners of this establishment”—I gestured, Vanna White–style, at the stadium—“when you chose it for your opening-day festivities.”

  Blue Shirt just looked impatient. He kept looking not at the Fault or me but out of the lot, down the empty, dusty road. Maybe he was watching the sunset. On evenings like that one, when the wind’s just kicking up and the particulates are flying, the colors can take your breath away. If the particulates don’t.

  “They took my payment over the phone,” he murmured.

  “Yeah. I’ll bet they did.” I’d met the guys who owned this place, once. They really had come to town once. Didn’t stay for a game or anything. “Did they tell you I would have keys?”

  That registered. His attention came back to me. He clutched his leather messenger bag—so new, I could smell it—against his chest, as though I’d just tried to rip it from him. And in his eyes, I saw something I thought I recognized. I’d seen that expression on kids around here, ballplayers, mostly: the ones who’d been to college, who’d just started to comprehend where they were, what that meant, and still couldn’t quite believe anything in their lives could ever have landed them here.

  “They said…” he started. “They seemed to suggest that you would have…that your grounds crew and security team…”

  “My grounds crew and security team. Uh-huh.” My smirk wasn’t for Blue Shirt, but he probably read it that way. I wiped the look off my face, patted his arm. “Don’t worry,” I told him, and started off around back toward the grounds-crew entrance with its broken deadbolt. “I’ll have at least one set of gates open in a sec.”

  “What about the restrooms?” he called.

  I didn’t even stop, just waved. “That you might want to worry about.”

  Wind gusted past. Barely even a breeze, by Inland Empire standards. The parking signs hardly even rattled as they shook.

  By the time I’d reached the walkway around the stadium, another couple cars had caravanned into the lot. Instead of continuing forward, though, they peeled off toward the northwest corner. Away from the fun patrol skulking in the eastern quadrant. Might want to worry about that, too, I thought. But I didn’t see any point in saying anything.

  Then a real wind swelled out of the sand like a rogue wave and flung itself across the lot. Flagpoles juddered
in their postholes, chassis clung to their wheel wells, and in the northeast corner, one of the bald guys tossed his cigarette into the air like an offering, and the wind grabbed it and spirited it off down the desert.

  Blue Shirt’s players must have all carpooled or convoyed together, because by the time I’d slipped it in the unlocked door and popped the ruined, rusted padlock the grounds crew always left on the even rustier FAULT FAMILY FUN ZONE ENTRANCE gate for show, there they were, maybe two dozen strong. Nearly all were brown, clad in white or khaki pants that were probably meant to match, yellow or blue polos that did, 99-cent-store beach thongs, and athletic socks. They milled together around Blue Shirt’s Porsche, and Blue Shirt was calling them each by name, clapping them on the back, practically chortling as he checked them off on a list, like the world’s happiest camp counselor. The San Bernardino natives in the group were easy enough to pick out; they were the ones keeping their shoulders hunched in anticipation of the next wind, and also glancing—casually, carefully, and only occasionally—toward the northeast or northwest corner whenever Blue Shirt got too loud.

  To my surprise, I recognized a few of the faces. One long, stringy kid, Wasim, a community college student, worked weekends as a concessionaire at the Fault and sometimes came up to the booth to smoke with me after the baseball games. He’d make me blast the Katy Perry “Last Friday Night” song again and again, to the empty stadium, and then just sit there grinning and grooving and smoking. “I could never play this at home,” he’d tell me.

  When I pointed out that he was a big boy now and lived alone and could play whatever racy song he wanted, he’d shrug and stare out past the center-field fence into the vacant lots, the crammed-together subdivision roofs, and empty strip malls stacked out there in the desert like abandoned shipping containers. “It’s still my home.”

  Now, when he saw me watching him, he threw his arms out, as though modeling his kit. He had big, foamy shin pads strapped to the front of his spindly legs, and took strides as though he strode often in those things.