by Steve Vernon
The next thing I knew I was falling, spinning, whirling, crashing until I hit the floor in a fractured shout of tempered glass. Did you ever drop an ice cube tray and see all them little cold boxes shout and scatter on the floor? That was me, only I hadn’t cut loose all together. Not yet, anyway.
I pulled myself back together to stand in front of her, a young John Travolta, accoutered in cool white polyester; striking a mad akimbo disco pose. That ghost had pulled me right into the dream and I was embracing it like a virgin geek in bed with a Spanish flying cheerleader, wet and prepped by a half dozen rampaging halfbacks.
I stood there, poised and posing, a study in studly choreographed symmetry.
“If you want to dance, honey,” I told her. “The Gypsy has got all of the rhythm you need.”
A little bit of blind confidence can go a long way towards success in this world. The Olivia Newton John Latex Love Doll stepped towards me and a bongo back beat mamboed in the hollow drum my heart.
I was determined to dance this out as hard as I could. It was still only a dream but even a Gypsy has his pride. If this bimbo of whimsy wanted to dance she had come to the right partner.
I cut a whole rug factory there on that nightmare chimera prom floor, dancing as hard as I could. My sweat was a thousand salty sea snails dissolving down my face. My vision stung and salted, spattering my eyes.
This was dangerous territory. I was playing into her nightmare and if I wasn’t careful I could get caught and trapped and shattered just the same as that poor whiskey-drumming asshole upstairs.
And then I caught that phantom-dream in a long embrace and caught a glimpse of the face that danced behind the crystalline mirrors of the Olivia Newton John Latex Love Doll’s peepers. This was her, the one who did it, the one who killed the salesman. I hadn’t known for certain because there were so many damned ghosts hiding in the nooks and crannies of Kelly and Blowers. It was always possible I’d stepped up with the wrong partner.
But now I knew. This was her and I had her right where she wanted me to be.
“I know who you are,” I said.
My voice broke like the resistance of a drunken prom virgin. The notes fissioned like an Easter marble bag, alleys splintered and rolled and tumbled. She blinked a step closer, a vision of a nightmare cracking towards me, a dissection of slow frozen inches creeping closer with every blink.
I know what she was. A fractal demon, a minor demo-godlet constructed of razorblades, nail clippings, and mirrored ice slices. Fractal demons lived on minutiae and meat, seizing the moments of a person’s existence and slicing them finer and finer, an endless reflection in a thousand broken microscope slides what-if-and-or-but-echoed in the thought and second thoughts moving in slow arthritic checkerboard strokes of flash-frozen-senility.
She moved towards me. That was the way fractal demons worked. A step, a half step, a half a half step closer. They mesmerized you with their endless excruciating glints of apprehension.
I moved towards her. This wasn’t the stupidest stunt I’d ever tried but it sure as hell ran a close second or third. Her spell was working just fine and I was playing into it. The fact was, I wanted her. I wanted to grab that Olivia Newton John Latex Love Doll and bend her backwards and screw her sideways until sundown even though I knew it would be like shoving my cock into a television screen. I saw a vision of static and glass and arcs of angelic electricity, long endless ribbons of rerunning reruns. She’d peel me and sect me, di-and-tri-and-quadrify, the jigsaw of a jigsawed jigsaw cut fine.
I wanted to run. I wanted to take up performance art and jazz ballet. I wanted to sing calypso and learn to yodel, simultaneously. Rabbits of desire ran through me, counter-producting my urge to move forward, holding me like a thousand thumbtack body slams. That was one of her tricks, conjuring the innate need to diversify. Fractal demons invented multi-tasking. Chasing rabbits tired you out and made you a lot easier to catch.
I thought away from my hand and away from the notion of reaching up into my pocket. I thought away from the sketch of the idea of pulling that bottle from my pocket. I tried to think of anything except that bottle dangling from the red silk thread, spinning and dancing and catching the slices of venetianed light, catching and glinting from the bottles.
The last thing I needed was for her to see me coming.
I pulled out that bottle of whore piss that Momma Cooze squeezed out for me. I had tied it with a long white ribbon stolen from a dead nun’s hair. I swung it over my head like a bull roarer, catching that fractal demon in a multi-snare of light glinting from the bottle of Momma Cooz’s purest whore-piss, the crystals of all of that concentrated sin juice catching and sparkling in the light, dancing it off of the many bottles I’d scattered around the room like a multi-legged force-field-shield trapping and holding her.
She tried to step back but her fractal energy worked against her, stepping back, half-a-step, quarter-step, one-eighth-step, going nowhere fast.
I spun the bottled whore piss faster, whirling it like a sling. The pieces of her began to shiver, shake and shimmy. A mosaic of memories and madness danced before me. Erections of refracted light, the kidney salt crystals catching and etching at the disco-lit dreamscape. All of my memories, diced and sliced and served in broken glasses, the memories of all those transient hotel residents, nights spent staring up at strangely shadowed ceilings, the memory of the meat below, fed into endless sausage coils, link by link by link.
“Let’s get physical, bitch!”
I howled.
My teeth chattered.
The bottle whirled faster, the long white ribbon threatening to break, the arc spinning independent of my arm. I spun it faster, feeling it spin me, until I let it fly straight through the bedroom glass window. The window pane shattered out into the night, yanking the glints of the fractal demon’s existence splintering and glintering into the day lit shadows.
It was over.
Folks dreamed a little restless that night, and the streetlights winked a little brighter and the stars seemed to snigger over a devil’s dozen quiet dirty jokes. The music in the taverns was a little hotter and the love-making a little more lascivious and the conversation a bit more disjointed.
An entire schoolroom of Kelly Street 6th graders were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Syndrome and I slept the day away in that broken room until evening woke me up and Fat Hilton banged on the door demanding a full day’s rent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Vernon is a storyteller. The man was born with a campfire burning at his feet. The word “boring” does not exist in this man’s vocabulary - unless he’s maybe talking about termites or ice augers.
That’s all that Steve Vernon will say about himself – on account of Steve Vernon abso-freaking HATES talking about himself in the third person.
But I’ll tell you what.
If you LIKED the book that you just read drop me a Tweet on Twitter – @StephenVernon - and yes, old farts like me ACTUALLY do know how to twitter – and let me know how you liked the book – and I’d be truly grateful.
If you feel strongly enough to write a review, that’s fine too. Reviews are ALWAYS appreciated – but I know that not all of you folks are into writing big long funky old reviews – so just shout the book out just any way that you can – because I can use ALL the help I can get.
Also By Steve Vernon
Sudden Death Overtime – A Tale of Hockey and Vampires
(an excerpt)
Prologue
In the beginning of the world there was no death.
No one knew the sorrow of that final ending.
No one knew the grief of losing someone they loved.
No one had tasted a single bitter tear.
The People grew fat and abundant.
Far too abundant.
The land grew crowded.
The food was harder and harder to find.
The People grew unhappy.
So the Great Raven looked down from his high-looki
ng mountain and saw all this.
“This is a bad thing,” the Great Raven said. “There is not enough food and water and land for the People to continue to live on in peace and harmony.”
So the Great Raven decided that he would do something about this problem.
“I will create a gift so that the People can rise up and leave this world to make room for those who will follow in their path.”
And so the Great Raven – in his wisdom and his sorrow – created Death.
Tuesday night 9pm
No one noticed quite exactly when the long black bus stole into the parking lot of the Anchor Pub. As far as anyone knew the bus just sort of drifted into the Labrador coastal village of Hope’s End like an unexpected snow flurry.
Things happen that way in the town of Hope’s End.
Slow and unexpected and all at once.
Judith Two Bear leaned her elbows against the wood grain of the unvarnished table top. Her cigarette glowed like a lighthouse’s lonely beacon, bobbing as she nodded three slow beats behind the music of the static-ridden radio. She had parked herself at the window seat since dinner time. She liked to watch the world go by from the sanctuary of the town’s only drinking hole – the Hope’s End Drink and Drop Tavern and Grill.
Several long slow warm beers later Judith Two Bear found herself staring vaguely at the names and dates carved and inked into the table top. She knew some of them. She could guess at some of the others and she wondered just who the hell the rest really were. How many lonely souls had made their mark on this table and had then just sat here like so many half-finished glasses of warm draft beer – just waiting to be swallowed but not quite yet.
Truthfully, she didn’t think of any of this.
Not in those exact words, anyway.
People don’t really think that way – only in books and poetry and movies and other such bullshit. Rather, Judith Two Bear felt it, perhaps. She breathed it in with the stale pub air. Her grew her own sort of loneliness, nursing her drink and her evolving disappointment and her unvarying boredom that were as much a part of her as was the blood that sludged through her tired veins.
Nothing was left.
She had lived her life and had nothing but time left to her lonely keeping. She had seen her kids grow up and run away, her lovers grow cold and run away, she had seen life pull up to the curb and wave gaily once or twice before passing her right on by.
Her hands weighed heavy on the scarred pine tabletop. Her knuckles were cracked and leathered like old alligator skin, tattooed with nicotine and age. Her eyes had grown dull and nothing that hinted of girlhood was left to her save a shotgun blast of freckles playing hide-and-seek within the wrinkles and worry-lines that troughed down her cheeks like a memory of tears.
She stared at her flat beer.
The time drifted past the hope of anyone offering to take her home for any other reason but pity. Fergus McTavish had said he’d see her here, but so far he hadn’t showed. She believed he’d only told her that to be kind. Fergus McTavish was a good man, after all, although he spent far too much time out there on that damned hockey rink with old Sprague.
What in God’s frozen earth did grown men see in the rattle of sticks, the slashing of steel over ice and hockey sweaters worn way beyond funk?
Judith Two Bear sat there, disinterestedly listening to the soft current of gossip prowling through the Drink and Drop Tavern; folks wondering just where the black bus came from. Perhaps it was a fresh oil rig crew, or perhaps a wandering rock band. Perhaps a pack of tourists, far off course, with their pockets jingling with cartwheels of American silver and the promise of better days.
Judith Two Bear knew better.
No one in their right mind would ever WANT to come to Hope’s End, Labrador where the only thing that kept the town going was the influx of oil rig workers who stopped here between shifts to get drunk and fed and laid; the three weeks of seal hunters who would stop here to get drunk and fed and hopefully laid; and the occasionally dangled promise of incoming government money.
There were a lot of them - so many promises washed up like waves on the rocky beach, only to be pulled away just as fast.
She stared at her beer.
The lights dimmed as the town generator kicked up a notch.
The last tune on the jukebox crackled out, only to be replaced by another goddamn hockey game.
Judith Two Bear stood up carefully.
Fergus McTavish wasn’t coming, she decided.
She laughed to herself.
There had never been a hope that he would come.
Life doesn’t really work that way.
Love is nothing more than a lie told in a midnight poker game where everyone cheated and nobody truly won.
She leaned backwards and listened to the creaks and cracks in the fossil that her doctor laughingly referred to as a spinal column.
The evening had passed as slowly as a yearlong bout of chronic constipation.
Time had moved inexorably.
Judith Two Bear was six beer older – without a candle to show for it.
Maybe seven beer – who the fuck really counted?
The television commentator shouted as someone banged the puck home. A few onlookers moaned and someone listlessly cheered. No one noticed as Judith emptied her glass of warm beer and turned it bottom-up on the table top.
She walked out the front door.
It was cold for a January evening. She pulled her shawl about her, holding it close. The shawl was the last gift that Little Whalen Pinto had given to her before he’d got drunk five months ago and had fallen from the ferry, halfway home to Newfoundland.
Whalen Pinto had washed ashore three days later. The current had carried him to the beach, shrouded in seaweed and picked at by the gulls. There were nights when Judith nightmared over Whalen Pinto’s tide-swollen memory, the tears drowning in the memories his eyes, a crab picking listlessly at a bit of unfingered ear wax.
Other nights she dreamed of him singing - tone deaf and lustily bawling out that old Gordon Lightfoot standard, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, over and over – the only tune he knew straight through. The nightmares were her only company these days. She welcomed them as a lonely woman welcomes the nightly visit of a phantom lover.
“Damn it,” she swore at the shadows.
She had truly hoped that Fergus McTavish would have shown tonight. She had hoped that he would replace her memories with a little actual companionship.
But Fergus wasn’t coming.
“God-be-Jesus damn it.”
The wind was cold in the parking lot.
There were only a few cars. Most people lived close enough to walk.
The black bus loomed in the darkness. There was no other word for it. It loomed – like the shadow of a mountain cast over a lonely gray tombstone.
It was heavy.
Solid.
Black and implacable.
For just a half an instant Judith Two Bear felt the urge to turn and run back into the pub and scream her panic – drowning out the hockey game and the clink of beer bottles and the tired rattle of conversation.
But what the hell would that accomplish?
She drifted a little closer to the black bus – as if she wanted to prove something to herself.
This close she saw that the windows were painted over.
Even the front window, all black.
How could a driver see his way through the night?
It might have been one-way glass, she supposed. You could see out, but nobody else could see in. But it looked more like the window glass had been spray painted over. All black, as if something were trying to hide. A part of her wanted to run from the bus and the parking lot but she was too tired to listen.
She leaned over and gently touched the side of the bus.
She felt a rhythm, like a tide, like a heartbeat, throbbing within the strange blackened walls of the vehicle.
Music, perhaps?
Her h
and sank inwards into the cold black paint, like she was reaching into a basin of cold black water. Then she leaned a little deeper. Something purred, deep within the color of the bus. Something purred and something drew her in. She felt the color of the bus inhaling – like an old man sucking in his last puff of cigarette smoke.
Judith Two Bear’s knees buckled slightly.
Her skin paled and the paint on the bus greedily darkened.
She could see the grill and headlights grinning at her. She wondered just how that was possible. She was leaning on the side of the bus, nowhere close to the grillwork. She shouldn’t have been able to see it.
She didn’t care.
Fergus wasn’t coming.
She leaned there against the bus, allowing whatever was hiding inside it to drink its fill.
She wasn’t trapped - only comfortable.
The bus door grated open.
Judith Two Bear drew her hand from the lulling cloy of the paint and freely entered the bus, still dreaming of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The bus door closed behind her. If there was any screaming it was drowned in the lonely swallow of a North Canadian night sinking home. It began to snow, soft fat flakes that promised a hard storm to come. The snowflakes melted and slid across the grinning grillwork of the night-dark bus.
Fergus McTavish showed up at the tavern, one hour too late.
Read the rest of the novella…
TATTERDEMON
(sample)
PROLOGUE - SUMMER 1691
Preacher Abraham Fell stared down at the witch Thessaly Cross, breathing like he’d run for a good long stretch. He leaned over, bending at the knees to lay another slab of fieldstone upon her chest.
“We beat you with hickory and we beat you with iron,” he said. “And you have withstood every blow.”
He stooped down and picked up another rock, never taking his eyes off her, as if she were some kind of dangerous viper who might strike at any moment.