by Aaron French
The corner of the varnished night table was jutting out of the back of his wife’s head. She was wracked with silent spasms, like an electrified doll or a carp out of water. Then she went still.
Their two girls were away at a sleepover. Roger drank an entire bottle of tequila and spent half the night talking to himself. He didn’t enter the bedroom again. He drank a second bottle, then decided on a course of action.
He burst into the garage and grabbed an axe, the one he’d bought to chop firewood but had never used. Things were happening so fast. He didn’t take time to think. He was sick of thinking. He slinked out into the night. The streets of Burbelle-Parax at 3:15 in the morning were echoic. He covered the blocks to the Parkers’ home not without some hindrance. He tripped a number of times, skinning his hands, arms and chest. He was still bare-chested, but he didn’t feel a thing. The clatter of the axe on pavement didn’t seem to wake anyone. Or if it did, it was ignored.
Angela had been infected. And so was he, and so were the girls. They had to be put down. Like rabid mutts. The heft of the axe felt good. Weightless. The night air was reviving him from the alcoholic haze, but a different fuel was coursing through him now. Infections had to be nipped in the bud before they spread. The Parkers wouldn’t understand. They’d have to go too...
***
By mid-January Burbelle-Parax was under quarantine. Men in army fatigues with automatic weapons patrolled the streets. Expectant mothers were herded up and shipped away, but not without a fight.
Children grew use to the sound of gunfire, distant and sometimes awfully near, keeping them awake at night. Husbands stared into the dark, recalling odd little changes in their spouse’s behaviour. Recalling words exchanged, a shift in the routine, icy glances. Some wondered how they could get their hands on a gun when they couldn’t even drive out of town. Wrestling a soldier was out of the question. But they soon realized that their home was an armoury in itself: hammer in the toolbox, poker next to the fireplace, a stack of knives in the kitchen, handsaw in the garage...
The holo-screens that projected the ancient, beautiful skies of Earth flickered more and more often. Tomorrow peeked through, raw and bloody. People ceased to look upwards or into the horizon.
Every town had its secrets. New mothers sometimes slipped through the fingers of the military. They were camouflaged and hidden.
These secret pregnancies were safe, for the time being. Those women had no trouble falling asleep, to dream of the multitude with their chattering feet.
***
On February 13, six orbiting satellites crashed to Earth.
The holo-skies gave up the ghost.
MEDIC went offline.
About the author: Fel Kian lives in a decaying underwater castle that’s actually situated inside his own head. When he isn’t having philosophical discussions with his cats, he can be found somewhere in the vicinity of a sushi restaurant and a used bookstore. Every year he re-reads “The Colour Out of Space” just to keep sane. He began writing stories at the age of eight and plans to keep doing so until he finds a way out of his room. His first novel, the gothic fantasy/horror tale Indigo Eyes, was recently published by Immanion Press.
Watch for Steve
Ricky Massengale
The six words were barely legible on the yellowed paper. He’d just happened to notice them, almost erased, as he was looking for the copyright date. It was a note to someone: Watch for Steve in this one. Written in pencil, it might have been a note to oneself, a college student cramming the semester’s novels into a single night, except it didn’t look like a college student’s writing; it was too scratchy, too pained, too arthritic.
The writer, more than likely, was an elderly woman who hoped to someday remember something about the book. His mom still did the same thing: a simple sentence of vague relevance.
So, case closed—except the words were haunting. The sentence hung in the corner of his mind like a cobweb as his eyes continued scanning the shelf: Mailer, Michener, Morrison, stacked book on horizontal book like a deck of fat cards.
It lingered like the sweet aftertaste of black licorice, whose sweetness got thick and more bitter, and all you could do was spit the color of oil. The sentence invaded his thoughts as he came around the end of the aisle and looked down another row of stack-crammed books.
Would Grisham have a Steve-note? he thought; but, Who’s Steve?
Just someone an old woman knew—probably her grandkid. Is it really such a big deal?
Honestly?
Honestly, the book in which he’d found that inscription was still curled in his left hand. Of all the Grishams and Faulkners and Le Carrés on the shelf, Mark carried around a drab yellow book simply titled Yellow. There was no synopsis on the back cover, no reviews on the front. There was only the battered yellow cover.
Steve, he thought. I’ve got to figure out who this guy is. It was serious. He wanted to know who Steve was, the same way you wanted to know who the new seven foot tall man on the block was, or the brunette bombshell you just caught a glimpse of, or the odd family that moved in down the street.
But there was one major difference: the man he was chasing was nothing odd or unique. “Steve,” for now, was a scribble of graphite. He had no height, weight, tastes, or personality.
And he was either lost or hiding in these pages.
Of course it did occur to Mark that Steve may not actually appear as “Steve” in the novel, that it might be a codename. He could be a “Clark” or an “Alfonso,” there to whisk some mysterious woman into a further-fictionalized world.
“Geez, listen to yourself,” he muttered.
He was now standing halfway down another aisle, dizzy with stacked books, and pretending to scan the titles, but these titles were foreign words now. He’d forgotten even why he came and knew only that he’d possibly found a book too many had overlooked.
He purchased Yellow and the new Card novel from Crenshaw’s Books—“Rare, Rarer, Rarest, and Then Some New” artfully painted across the green awning just outside the little house.
***
He dreamed he was standing in the back den of his house.
In his dream, he was looking out the back wall of windows at a yard basked orange by the streetlight. A thick wedge of darkness cut across—his being crammed between two overgrown yards—
(that’s what you get for living on this side of town cheaper rent and trashier people didn’t Mom always tell you that you should live on the other side of town tomorrow we’ll move and we’ll take care of this problem)
—caused by the streetlight and the old shed just below it. As perfectly detailed as his dream was (he could feel the hardwood, smell incense lingering, hear the deepfreeze humming, smell the undercurrent of rot sifting up through the floorboards), he knew that if he walked outside, he’d come around the corner of that shed and see the bumper of the landlord’s old Mustang. Two years ago the landlord assured Mark it would eventually be sold and the building torn down. No such luck.
As he stood there, he was aware that he was looking for something. He knew one other thing: he was scared. His heart hammered in his chest, and his eyes cut back and forth from one corner of the yard to the other until, unbidden, his legs carried him across the den, to the window and, unbidden, his waist bent him over, and, unbidden, his arms extended, allowing his unbidden hands to grasp the windowsill—
Then, one of his hands, as though suddenly aware of the fear emanating from his heart, flicked the lock on the window. And he stood there, staring into the darkness, at the dark wedge cutting across, specifically at the darkest corner next to the building where he saw a shape crouched against the dark.
A name came to his lips. Steve. But in his dream he could only stand there, clutching the windowsill and praying for morning.
***
When he awoke, he was surprised to find himself in bed. Some semi-conscious part of him had believed he might wake up, standing stupidly in the back den like a man on an all-ni
ght stakeout. It would’ve been like something out of those horror novels he always read.
He was in bed, though, wrapped quite comfortably around his body pillow. The ceiling fan’s uneven rotation and hum were revealed in the blank TV screen. With each circulation, it came into better focus.
He lay there, the night coming back to him: the unnamed fear, the cool damp resonating from the boards, the darkness. He shivered.
Kicking off the sheets, he resolved to wash the night away. It was Saturday morning, and he had a task to complete: figure out who Steve was. Maybe then he’d find some peace. The whole thing was stupid, but it was there nonetheless.
He strolled down the hallway, which ran through the center of the house like a cold, hardwood spine, giving over to the office, the kitchen, the bathroom, and eventually widening into the den with its long bay of windows dominating the back wall. What did he expect to find as he looked around? Condensation from his footprints? Proof that he’d sleepwalked?
The windows in the den were the only windows without any coverings. He’d just never gotten around to it, and when asked he told people that he liked the openness. This morning, though, it struck him that not only was the world open to him, but he was exposed to anyone who happened to be looking in the windows. Of course this wasn’t an original thought—plenty of colleagues had joked about it, said that he was encouraging the neighborhood prowlers—but those previous times had been balanced by his aesthetic tendency to admire a gray, stormy, or frozen world.
Every time he looked out, a myriad of other eyes could be looking in. And this morning they would see a man in his boxers desperately in need of a shave.
***
Yellow was a disturbingly horrible read. What was worse, there was no Steve in the three-hundred-page narrative; so, even worse now was that irritating kid in his head demanding to know who Steve was!
But Yellow, all in all, was simply about a woman who’d lost her husband to the war, lived a depressing life, and eventually committed suicide. She’d become obsessed with the color yellow. Her suicide note was a scribbling of the word “yellow” on a yellow post-it note. No redemption. No hope.
Mark, angrily awaiting the end of the novel because he was too stubborn to put it down, blasted through the final pages, read the final word (“yellow”) and began to close the book.
Then there he was, hidden on the back cover.
Steve was a one inch tall block-headed stickman. His puny misaligned arms V-ed to one side of the spine. One arm was frozen in the air the way stick figures’ arms always seem to be, and the other was a straight line that terminated in a rather artistically drawn knife. Though large in proportion, there was no mistaking it for a sword, because the handle
(the knife and “steve” had to have been drawn by separate people: two old ladies swapping books?)
was the only thing colored, and it was colored red—
Like blood, he thought and smiled. How could he not? He roared with laughter, took a sip of coffee, started laughing again, and suddenly felt the cold coffee spewing through his nose.
Here it was—all of it. All of Steve. All the mystery that had haunted him for a day and a night. The nightmare. The surrealism of that morning. All of it had culminated in a block-headed stick figure holding a bloody-handled knife.
It reminded him of his childhood. Ms. Tuttle was in his head, still loud as ever, What are we supposed to do when the sirens begin, class? That’s right, Annie
(I hated that little brat)
we drop everything immediately, and everyone will come over to this wall. How will we sit? That’s right, Annie
(Still don’t feel bad about taking the lug nuts off her wheel that day)
we will lace our fingers over the backs of our heads and bury our heads between our knees. Why? Well, that’s right, Annie
(Had she known he had done that?)
so that nothing falls on our heads. In the event this happens—
Mark, a third grader at the time, had raised his hand. He’d been plagued by a question and needed the answer right then: either Dad or Ms. Tuttle, with her fuzzy sweaters and fat lips, was right. They couldn’t both be right.
“I asked her when the bombs were supposed to drop,” Mark said, speaking to the cartoon figure in the book, the smiling caricature with the bloody knife. “It didn’t matter what she told me. Dad had told me that when the bombs fell, it didn’t matter if we covered our heads or stood in the schoolyard. ‘When the mother of all bombs drops, it drops, and we end, Bucko,’ he used to say. And he was right.”
Steve only smiled that crooked smile, and his pen-point eyes never wavered.
“That bomb didn’t fall,” Mark explained, now looking out the window at a day where the sun was losing its dominance. It was fall. Soon, a few more weeks maybe, the skies wouldn’t just be gray but ash and would start spitting white.
“Nope, Steve, the bomb never fell, and every time we had a drill or we discussed the bomb—because Annie always wanted to talk about the bomb because her dad was a general—Ms. Tuttle made it a point to stress that the bomb could fall at any moment...”
Steve just stood there, smiling, surrounded by a dingy, wrinkled atmosphere.
Before Mark closed the book, he saw the penciled words just beneath Steve.
“3 More Days.”
Mark stared, and realized already that he was looking for more than was there. He was trying to find a rabbit hole because his hadn’t even turned out to be a hole. It had just been an indentation, and he wanted a rabbit hole. A mystery.
Three days till... he thought, shrugged, and threw the book on his desk. The afternoon was wasted. Lunch was past due, so he would start there, maybe take a nap, and then he would need to start grading the comp papers on his desk. Of course, before he did anything, he would need to change his shirt
(wasn’t even that funny)
since his was covered in coffee that had been rerouted through his nose.
***
He was standing in the back den again, staring at the corner of the yard where the shadow seemed darkest
(blotched out)
in one spot, especially in the shape of a person.
It’s only a dream, he told himself. Only a dream—
It was a man. It moved. A dark leg had moved. And then he could envision the dark man: buried in shadows as he was, leaning against the shed, his right leg kicked up so that the sole of his foot also rested against the side.
A cigarette flared in the darkness like an ember in a pit.
Steve.
The cigarette traveled an arch back and forth between the dark
(steve)
figure’s side and lips; it flared as a new puff was drawn. The play seemed to last forever, until, eventually, Mark became aware that Yellow was in his hand. He looked at the cover, at the brittle pages, at the blank page inside the cover: $3.00, and, just below it, Watch for Steve in this one in some old lady’s script.
He’s like a caged animal, Mark thought.
“Mm-hmm,” a voice said. A woman’s voice. It was soft and moving, like the fall wind. In his dream, Mark understood that it was the suicidal woman from the novel in his hand.
“And I let him out?”
There was no voice this time.
He had more control in his dream then; he found he could look around, could walk around if he wanted. The thing was, he didn’t want to. He thought of the animals caged at the zoo, of the potential danger bound by those bars, of the dangerous instincts those animals manipulated with their blind cunning.
Mark didn’t want to take his eyes off the man
(steve)
out there until morning came—
Something somewhere in the house shattered—
Mark shot up in bed, blind in the dark and deaf except for the sound of the wind.
***
He stood in the back den trying to convince himself that the dream had been only that: a dream. But it hung like the thick film of morn
ing breath, and even in the light of the sun, he had trouble shaking it—he literally tried to shake it off, shaking his head comically, which only cleared his sinuses.
One of the back windows was shattered. There was no glass to clean up, though, because the window had shattered outward. There was only the single shard of glass, long and curved like the blade of a kitchen knife, on the floor; the rest glittered in the morning grass.
He was simply staring at his backyard... where the shadows were deepest at night. There was no wind this morning; it was going to be a nice day, not a day for kite flying, granted, but a nice day all the same. Arkansas had that kind of unpredictable weather: “If you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes” should have been the state motto.
How could the window have shattered out like that? If someone
(steve)
had thrown something from the backyard, the glass would have spilled across his floor.
Mark taped a garbage bag over the window and moved to the bathroom, where he showered and shaved; the former did wonders for the previous night, as though the water was rinsing the residue from his pores.
***
When he had been a junior working on his undergrad, a boy in his linguistic class had decided to study the graffiti on bathroom walls. The professor’s terminology for that assignment escaped Mark now, but the memory had sparked a new angle to the Steve thing
(you’re looking for a rabbit hole)
worth pursuing. The original “Steve” artist and writer of the cryptic message—whom he’d presumed was an older woman because of the shaky handwriting—was not making a note to herself. One made a note about how good or bad a book was. This woman, he realized, was writing a note to someone. Someone else who would know Steve. And what would this other woman, or man, write back?
What if it were a kid?