Monk Punk and Shadow of the Unknown Omnibus

by Aaron French

  Deflated, McKay left Elise packing. He’d taken the nearby pedestrian overpass across the freeway to the park to gather his thoughts. On the way down the enclosed steps to the playground, he stopped after he saw a drawing freshly chalked on the concrete wall. He had visited the park often in the last three weeks, fleeing the silence of the apartment, but had never noticed anything drawn on the wall.

  The image was a man wearing an indigo pea coat with his collar turned up and a black stocking cap rolled down to his eyes. He was looking back over his shoulder, the shadows not completely covering his square jaw, his penetrating eyes, his grim expression. Unlike most graffiti McKay had seen spray painted on freeway columns, there was no tag line. Looking the work over with a technical eye, he realized this wasn’t an amateurish cartoon at all. A competent artist had taken time to carefully outline, shade, and highlight, using minimal colors to make a startling, life-size figure. In fact, the thing was menacing, raising the hair on the back of McKay’s neck. An image of a lowlife with bad intentions, about to step out away from the wall. Turning away, McKay shivered.

  He continued down the overpass steps. His wife and daughter were moving out of town in a week, perhaps out of his life forever.

  The playground was unoccupied at this time of night. McKay sat down on a nearby bench. Sucking in a deep breath, he tried to center, clear his mind, and focus, like Dr. Havlicek had taught him. He stretched his hands out along the seat back, noticing that the trembling wasn’t too bad this evening: only a slight tremor.

  The condition had developed after he’d experienced a seizure at his drafting table last December. Despite the medical help and Elise’s support, McKay had sunk into a black funk, a depression that only regular doses of medication helped partially alleviate. But nothing seemed to help the numbness and trembling in his hands. He was incapable of writing his own signature clearly, much less doing fine art. For eight months he’d done little more than sit and watch the same movies over and over again on TV.

  Then, a month ago, Elise had admitted she was fed up. “If the shaking were really something physical, they wouldn’t have referred you to a psychiatrist,” she’d argued. “Besides, there are other things you could do with your MFA. Teach, maybe...? Anyhow, we need a break, Mac. Ty and I are moving to Jamie’s apartment on Lake Merritt; then, after her dance camp, we’re heading to my sister’s. When you get yourself back on track, call us.”

  McKay glanced absently around the empty park. His biggest concern was that his wife and daughter would remain permanently down at Pismo Beach. His art income had been unreliable at best, fluctuating dramatically. Elise’s Oakland Symphony and several other part-time gigs had mostly supported the family, especially during the last eight months. Hell, after the seizure he couldn’t even draw unemployment.

  Slumping back on the bench, McKay realized he was emotionally drained, exhausted. Looking about, he thought it was peaceful here, the hum of nearby traffic a pleasing background, like one of Elise’s flute CDs. He closed his eyes, drifted off...

  ***

  McKay awoke stiff and chilled on the park bench. It was completely dark now, the fog having moved in from the Bay, settling around him like a fallen cloud. He stood up and rubbed his bare arms. Better head back to the apartment, he thought. Elise would have the last of her stuff packed and be long gone by now.

  But climbing up the stairs to the overpass, McKay stopped at the spot where the graffito had been chalked. The figure had disappeared, the concrete wall clean and gray. He spread his fingers and cautiously placed his hand where he thought the drawing had been. He rubbed his fingertips. No chalk dust. And the surface was dry. Nothing on the steps indicating the wall had been washed clean. It appeared the indigo man had just walked off the wall into the night.

  That’s weird, McKay thought, as he climbed the remaining stairs, checking to make sure he had not just made a mistake in location. But the wall was completely clean of graffiti clear to the top near the overpass. He walked home wondering if perhaps he’d taken too much medication.

  ***

  His cell phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Mac, you have to come over, right now,” Elise said. Her voice was tense. “There’s a man loitering outside. He’s been there since dark.”

  “Have you called the cops?” His attention was suddenly heightened. The air was sharp, the rustle of leaves distracting.

  “No, what can I tell them? Some jerk is down on the street looking up at my window? They’ll think I’m a paranoid crank.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

  ***

  By the time McKay got to Lake Merritt, there wasn’t anyone hanging about in front of the apartments. He carefully checked both side streets of the corner building. He found no one suspicious along either street. He made his way back to the front of the complex and buzzed up to Elise’s apartment on the intercom. “Nobody’s here, Babe. I’ve checked around the building for a block each way.”

  “Oh, great, that’s such a relief, Mac,” Elise answered back. “Actually, the last time I saw him was just before I called. Maybe my nerves have been strung too tight lately. Sorry for the trouble.”

  “You want me to come up?” he asked, his fingers resting on the intercom button.

  There was a brief hesitation, before she finally answered, “No, that probably isn’t a good idea. I’ve got to clean up and get Ty to bed. But thanks for coming by, Mac. We appreciate it...”

  Dismissed, he stood there for a minute or so, staring at the intercom.

  ***

  The next morning, McKay found the graffito back in a different location, about three quarters down the steps to the park. The indigo man stared back at McKay with his same piercing gaze, but there was something slightly different about the pose. It was the angle of the body and head, a little more face exposed now. McKay felt a slight stir of recognition. He felt he knew this man. He shook his head with frustration, not quite able to pull up the memory.

  Later on in the week, on Sunday evening, the mysterious drawing remained in place like a sentinel, no one daring to erase or vandalize it. Of course McKay couldn’t help wondering who had chalked the graffito in the first place.

  Was the face really all that familiar?

  Most of his time at the park he spent trying to figure out some way to prevent his wife and daughter from going to Pismo Beach.

  That next night McKay skipped his medication, wandered into his studio and dug around the desk next to the dusty drafting table. Finally, he found the Jack Daniel’s he’d hid from Elise after Dr. Havlicek had warned him about drinking while on medication. He settled down in front of the TV and drank from the bottle, the whiskey burning his throat. One of his favorite movies, Blade Runner, was showing again on TNT. Only the last few minutes remained, the chase and the great ending in the rain on the gothic building.

  (2nd Movement)

  A lonely stretch of 101, just south of San Luis Obispo, Elise’s bright yellow Jetta speeds through the night. There are no cars in the southbound lanes, only occasional headlights in the northbound lanes resembling Japanese lanterns in the mist...

  A figure appears unexpectedly ahead... In the middle of the highway lane...

  Tall and dark, pea coat and stocking cap, arms raised overhead...

  Braking, the VW veers right in an attempt to avoid striking the man...

  The car skids on the loose shoulder—flips over the fence...

  Slams onto an oak tree...

  Upside down, wheels spinning, no one exiting the car...

  ***

  “Mr. McKay?” A calm female voice on the line.

  “Yes?” McKay was groggy, mouth pasty.

  “This is Lieutenant Melendez of the California Highway Patrol, San Luis Obispo. I’m afraid there has been a serious automobile accident down here, involving your wife and daughter...”

  “Yes,” he repeated stiffly, his hangover forgotten, the highway patrol officer’s words sobering him, as if ice water had
been splashed in his face.

  “Your wife and daughter have been taken to Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, Emergency Services.”

  “Both of them are hurt?” he asked in a hoarse whisper, finding it difficult to grasp the exact meaning of the officer’s words. “How badly?”

  “Mr. McKay, you will need to personally contact the hospital for all the medical details and updates on your daughter and wife’s status. At this time I am not privy to that information.”

  He cleared his throat, focused, and answered, “I understand.”

  “Someone from the CHP-Oakland branch will get in contact with you during office hours tomorrow, with more information on the accident, condition of the car, what is required of you.”

  “Yes,” McKay said, feeling kind of detached now.

  He sat there with the phone in his hand.

  This can’t be real.

  The phone rang again.

  It was Lauren. She made it all too real.

  The next four days were a blur.

  Lauren had taken care of the arrangements, the church service, memorial—even the Lutheran minister for the burial ceremony. McKay just stood off by himself, staring down at the side-by-side graves. He struggled internally, forcing himself to accept that his wife and daughter were inside the two ornate caskets that were being lowered into the ground.

  Someone nudged his arm. “Mac, time to go to Lauren’s.”

  More faces, inaudible whispers, tasteless food. Finally, it was all over.

  ***

  He got home late Thursday afternoon, and immediately went over to the park, still wearing his dark blue suit. Sure enough, the indigo man was on the wall, positioned above the last few steps before reaching the playground, his features only slightly shadowed. McKay touched the drawing; absolutely certain now that he knew the face. But he sighed, just too tired and numbed to expend the effort to recall details. He spent the early evening on the park bench, dozing in his rumpled suit.

  Later that evening, McKay searched around the desk in his studio, looking for another bottle of booze. There was nothing more to drink hidden anywhere in the apartment. Sucking in a deep breath, he decided he’d have to make a trip down to the nearby liquor store. McKay walked the two blocks, then on impulse, he swung by the overpass to the park before heading home. He wasn’t surprised to find that the figure had left the wall.

  (3rd Movement)

  Midnight at San Luis Cemetery: Overcast, stars and moon completely screened by cloud cover. Two fresh graves visible in the darkness...

  After a few minutes a figure, wearing a roll-down cap and coat and carrying something under his arm, moves quietly through the gloom... He approaches the graves, pauses and peers at the headstones... He withdraws an item from under his arm and sets it aside. The figure kneels atop first one grave, then the other... He moves to the side and retrieves the object from the ground...

  For a moment the clouds divide and this part of the cemetery is illuminated by the moon...

  ***

  Friday afternoon, McKay returned to the pedestrian overpass. Coming down the steps, he thought the concrete canvass was completely clean of graffiti. But on the wall over the last step, he spotted a distant scene, two tiny figures, a woman and a child. Their features were vague, but McKay knew their identities. They seemed to be striding purposefully.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, breathing heavily, as if the air had been knocked from him. For a few minutes McKay closely watched the figures. He finally decided that he needed to get home right now and take his medication, perhaps even double up.

  Back at the apartment he couldn’t sit still, wandering around nervously. After a few minutes, he went into his studio. Idly, he flipped over his sketchpad on the drawing board, and to his surprise discovered new work. Still standing, McKay thumbed carefully through a dozen pages of faces. “Oh, my God,” he murmured, studying the chalked drawings. They were actually sketches of his own face being gradually transformed through the series, changed from a mirror image of himself on the first drawing to the rugged features of the indigo man on the last sketch. McKay focused on the man’s eyes, which seemed to be peering back at him knowingly. Absently, he glanced down at his fingers holding a piece of chalk, his grip tremor free, his hand steady as a surgeon’s...

  (4th Movement—With Flute Solo)

  Sometime, long after dark, McKay is awakened from where he dozes in his recliner by a haunting sound... a flute.

  Then, a moment of quiet, followed by a sharp knocking on the front door... And down lower on the door, he hears a lighter rap...

  (Coda)

  About the author: Gene O’Neill is best known as a multi-award nominated writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction. O’Neill’s professional writing career began after completing the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1979. Since that time, over 100 of his works have been published. His short story work has appeared in Cemetery Dance Magazine, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many more.

  Blumenkrank

  Erik T. Johnson

  Because Brother hung himself from our chandelier with fine silk ties, Mother and I had to take in a boarder. It meant Brother’s old room, the larger one next to mine, would be going to a stranger. Almost thirty-eight years I’d wanted that room, for it looked out on a pleasant green field broken by a row of poplars...

  Blumenkrank!

  What a boarder. I hated Blumenkrank from his knock on the door. He sullied our welcome mat the very day after Brother’s funeral. His knuckles on the wood were the somber striking of a tongueless bell.

  “But Mother, isn’t it odd? You didn’t even post the room-to-let sign yet.”

  “Then I’m saved the trouble. Lord knows there’s been enough of that lately.” She glanced at the chandelier, now yanked so low we couldn’t cross the parlor without grotesquely crouching.

  He wore black, black, all concussion black. One gray eye outgrew the other, in size and predatory coldness—its cephalopodan pupil seemed to pulse as if blinking its own translucent lid; his nose was somehow a shambles—I don’t want to get into it—his eyebrows cathedral-arched in disapproval; his pewter hair was overly alive and thick for his anachronistic age; and his mouth was a diagonal line, lips twisted to greet and grin at sideways things. Looming just outside our doorway with the confident, tentatively territorial posture of a man opening his home to us, those bleached lips parted:

  “I am Blumenkrank. I am a cartographer.”

  He didn’t speak—rather he broadcasted. I had the absurd conviction his words traveled far beyond the confines of mere conversation. I’d never heard a voice so dissonant, growly and liturgical, the vowels and consonants somehow lilting in opposite directions.

  Mother, an impossibly practical woman, didn’t care one way or the other “how many carts he made” as long as he paid on time, which he soon did—though he appeared too shabby for the capital required. The only rule she strictly enforced was “no callers after midnight” (Brother’d had a constant effluvial stream of filthy, drunken visitors. Thankfully, we rarely met these ungodly-hour guests. We only guessed them from the bony slivers of violently thrown dice, missing valuables, gambler fingerprints, and nicotine, urine and worse cushion-stains).

  “Do not worry,” Blumenkrank evaded.

  Mother fell for it. Blumenkrank crossed our threshold with triumphant, martial steps, from which rose inexplicably vaulted echoes. Why didn’t Mother hear them? I couldn’t bear to watch; I stared at a stranger’s fake pearl embedded in a wainscoting crack. Then Blumenkrank was on the stair, and I peeked at his unstoppable, ascending form. It seemed many regrettable years had already passed since his hollow knock on our door.

  ***

  Of course my nervous illness, my obsession with puzzles of all kinds, absolutely prevented me from earning a living. My days dissipated in a room the size of an outhouse, and I suppose my life was a constipated one—I’d rather not get into it. Meanwhile Blu
menkrank lorded over Brother’s room, crowding it with cape-sized rolls of parchment and cube-pens (the eight sharp corners nibbed), compasses without hands or markings, impractical rulers that tangled like strings, and other ambiguous devices. He also brought an absolutely black, unmarked globe, darkly glimmering before the window, which obliterated the view of the poplars.

  Blumenkrank transcended privacy; like the great hidden network that spawns mushrooms, he was inaccessibly submerged and indeterminably vast. During the day, he disappeared with small canvas bags that clinked as they swung like shrunken heads from his weathered, gargoyle fists. He returned nights, alone, rent in hand. Over the several occasions I stayed up late enough to spy him coming back, I noticed that clear or rainy skies, he entered dry, hair windblown.

  I’d been sleeping poorly—exhaustedly writhing is more accurate—since his arrival. From my cot I heard him enter Brother’s room. Each time it sounded as though he were walking on different terrain—once like bare feet slapping marble, again like boots in an abandoned hospital, another evening like shoes crackling broken glass, and so on. Where could he be, if he was only too here, yet sounded so there? After his door closed I listened to unrolling sheaves of paper and the careful, linear dragging of bizarre pen-nibs across their victimized skin. I envied what was obviously his skilled technique.

  ***

  One night, about a week after Blumenkrank came, troubling social noises drifted from his room, between moonlit hours I was too drained to confirm. I slouched up in my cot, electrified by the chance to report him for post-curfew entertaining. I pressed my ear against the wall, and heard far more chairs than could possibly fit in that room—a rampant herd of wood legs scraping the floorboards, odd-gaited pacing—how many improperly fitted prosthetics tramped on the other side?—how many limbless struggled to stand?—who was so tall that his demented head disturbed the ceiling light’s tessellated, ornamental crystals?—laughter overdriven by snarls, the expressions of a bewildering number of unrecognizable lack-of-emotions.