by Joshi, S. T
I walked outside and kept on going off the end of the boardwalk. This was late summer, so the big, rounded hills bordering the port were slowly vanishing beneath gauzy purple brushstrokes, but the sea and sky mirrored one another in a white blaze. I sat abruptly in a ditch, the tractor that dug it cold and still a few feet away, and gazed into the muck and scum that lay upon the bottom. The two fellows from the tavern came upon me there and kicked me until I lay face down in the mud. One of them held my ankles while the other stood on my neck.
I didn’t struggle as much as you might suppose. Too weak, too sad, too sick of the whole rigmarole.
After what seemed an age, I climbed up out of the ditch and watched the murderers with their victim. As in the saloon, none paid me any heed. I turned west and moved like an arrow to the night water.
* * *
Yes, I searched for her all those years ago when she vanished into the ether. Of course I searched. She was my love. I drove along dark and desolate highways and winding dirt back roads, checking every culvert, every ditch. I prowled unlighted paths among the black spruce of hill and marsh.
I returned to Hatcher Pass and retraced the steps that led us into the shadow of the mountain vault. Nothing inside except dust and guano, the remnants of hobo fires. I could’ve sworn the soot had crystallized upon one wall as the silhouette of a person in profile. My flashlight was dying and I had to leave.
Home again, I got wasted and lay around flipping through her photo album. The plastic was so cold it burned my fingers. Toward the back were several pages of pictures that obviously had been shot on a Hollywood film set; some kind of blockbuster fantasy–science fiction mashup. Hovercars, soldiers in bubble helmets toting elaborate rayguns, gargantuan and baroque structures. A weird-ass moon that dominated the sky in a sickening fashion.
The phone rang. Rob was on the line. He sounded way drunk, yet unnervingly lucid. “There’s nothing back there where we came from. A skeleton world in a universe sliding toward heat death. It was the end of days. They arrived and they ate everybody. Kid, you hearing me?”
I was hearing him, unfortunately. I chugged booze right from the neck and that didn’t help.
He said, “You gotta die to go back an’ if you go back you die. She went back and she’s dead.” He was silent, then he sobbed and I heard the unmistakable clatter of glass against glass and ice cubes spinning like lotto balls. “This place doesn’t possess the technology to build what we’d need … and the only man in this universe or the next who could put it all together had his brains vacuumed out a trillion light years from here. If I had the Machine, I’d go find her. Believe it, kid.”
I waited him out. Then I said in a voice thick with grief and alcohol poisoning, “Could I do it?”
“Do what?”
“Could I … walk to wherever she went? She thought I might be able to.”
“Sure. Sure, you could. Gotta understand that your physical body won’t make the trip. It’s them twenty-one grams constituting the primal you that will pull the freight. Boy, just don’t. You’ll be dissolved like a tab of antacid in the guts of a whale. The real you, snuffed. Or worse, you’ll make the crossing and reach where we fled from.” He stopped and sobbed uncontrollably. Finally he said goodbye and hung up. We never spoke again.
* * *
I step onto the sea and begin to walk toward distant twin hemispheres cresting the horizon. One black, one white. They radiate fearsome energy and a sound—angels, devils, damned souls, singing and screaming. I am a seed floating within the grip of a current, capable of steering down one fork in the stream or the other, and little more.
I choose the black sun because it’s a cavity in reality and it’s where she went a billion years ago, thirty years ago, seconds ago. Passing through the portal is to step through a doorway into the violence of a blizzard, a blast furnace. The angels and the demons chorus and if I had blood and flesh it would surely boil from every millimeter of me.
Then for an eon there is the void, smooth and cool as the barrel of a rifle. I sail weightless at a velocity greater than the speed of light. I am a tachyon knifing through the fibers of space and time, a star hurled from the hand of a vengeful god toward the heart of everything. I am drawn with inexorable finality toward her spark in the endless gulf of night.
I fall from the sky with the impact of a meteor and find myself trudging through the ruins of a forest. All is gray and cold. Ash swirls around me, lies in a thigh-deep blanket upon the ground. Great trees have been uprooted and scattered. This is Tunguska. Perhaps not my Tunguska, but someone’s nonetheless. After a while I leave the forest and enter a plain. It too is covered in ash. Mountains rise in the distance, and the outlines of the Cyclopean city from my nightmares. No longer walking, I’m projected forward like a thought.
She awaits me atop a foothill in the shadow of the range. She is as I remember her. Her flesh is cold as arctic ice, her eyes … And the inimitable Achilles crouches at her side. The beast is red and black. His gaze is the gaze of the basilisk.
She smiles and reaches toward me. Her whisper carries across the gulf. “You made it.”
I want to say that I love her, have always loved her, will always love her, here and in every universe. But the sky blackens directly overhead and I think of Damocles and of the man in red plaid, his boot descending to crush my life.
Her finger brushes my lips, shushing me. She embraces me and says, “Don’t say anything and maybe it’ll stay like this forever.”
I’m a fool, but not a damn fool and I keep my mouth shut. So maybe it does.
ON THE SHORES OF DESTRUCTION
KAREN HABER
IN THE MIDDLE AGES, A PEASANT WOMAN IN NEED OF UNBURDENING herself would go out into the fields at night, dig a hole, and whisper her secrets into it. That done, she would kick over the traces. This is my little whispering hole. I haven’t decided whether to bury or burn what I’m writing here when I’m done.
My name is Kate Rankin. I live in Galveston, Texas. I was born here fifty-seven years ago. I’m setting this down in order to try and make sense of recent events that have taken place here, events I can scarcely believe happened even now, months later.
I don’t want to believe what I saw, but I can hardly deny it. And I feel oddly compelled to recount these events as I lived them.
Galveston looks harmless enough, a barrier island southeast of Houston, a narrow sandy wedge sitting just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The city is a little worn around the edges but alive with day-trippers and sun-browned locals. The Spanish moss drips from the trees in ghostly veils, the fog blows in even on the warmest days. The Gulf keeps a humid grip upon the air. But in bright sunlight it’s easy to forget all the dark shadows that haunt the place. Galveston’s history is filled with harrowing events.
Years before the killer hurricane of 1900 swept away 6,000 residents and reduced the city to rubble, Galveston already had a monstrous history of horror and blood, of cannibal rites celebrated by Indians who filed their teeth to deadly points, of thievery, witchcraft, torture, and murder by pirates like Jean Lafitte. Things are not what they seem here: even the dead don’t always stay put; not when walls of water propelled by storm surges can yank coffins out of the ground and into the streets. Some say those ghosts still persist, walking the land. The winter winds may be warm, but they whisper of dire memories, angry specters, and terrible deeds. I should know. I made a living writing about them. I edit the weekly Island Chronicle.
The crowning irony of my life is that I can’t report the biggest news story I’ve ever stumbled over: no one would believe me. If they did believe what I’m about to tell, the panic and horror that resulted would haunt me forever.
Despite the city’s grisly legends and the clammy grip of the air, I felt at home here. Being near the water, near the beach, has always helped my peace of mind. But I’m beginning to think that I never really knew Galveston, its real face, nor its true dangers, until now.
Perhaps because of it
s gruesome past, Galveston is a good place to go if you want to disappear. Out on the west end of the island there are people hiding, living way off the grid. There’s a strange community on the west end. No one goes there. I never paid much attention to it until recently, when I connected the dots between a certain disappearance and everything that came after it.
Looking back, I see that something changed after the last hurricane. Yes, I know about the deaths, and the millions of dollars’ worth of damage to buildings, and the mess it made of the island—let alone Seawall Boulevard—and the trees, homes, and lives that were destroyed forever. That was bad enough. But even worse, I think, is what came after. As though some thing had been disturbed by the pounding waves and howling winds, the driving rain, the storm surge and tumbling rocks along the shoreline. Something that was even more dangerous than a hurricane.
Now that I think about it, even the air turned bad, stinking of rotting fish and sea bottom at low tide. Walls dripped from humidity; even air conditioning didn’t help. We spent our days swimming through the nasty soup of the atmosphere, gagging.
Last July, in the middle of a heat wave that killed five people, a man seeking relief was snatched off the beach in the middle of the night by … something. A something that was large, smelled like rotted seaweed, and looked worse. Two kids driving by got a dark cellphone photo of the something. It looked, well, unearthly. Dark green, with way too many tentacles. For a while people talked about whether some man-eating super-octopus had emerged from the depths to snatch a victim, but eventually everyone decided it had to be a bad joke. Those kids were fooling around, had to be.
When, a week later, shrimpers found a man’s arm in their net, that was written off as collateral storm damage. But I don’t remember any reports of people being torn apart by that hurricane. The thought of human body parts being fished out of the Gulf haunted me. Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the chilling thought that something terrible had happened, and more would follow.
I tried to forget it as weeks passed. Just in time for the dog days of August, when the air was at its clammy, stinking worst, my sister Liz’s youngest boy, Josh, moved into the spare bedroom in my cottage. The fall semester at UTMD was about to begin, and he was staying at my place to save money while getting his undergraduate degree at the School of Health, hoping to specialize in sports medicine one day.
I’d thought I was fine flying solo, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed having company. His cheery presence almost dispelled my lingering uneasiness. All I asked of Josh was that he make occasional use of the lawn mower, deploy all garbage cans in the driveway the night before pickup, and try to wash his own dishes. I would handle the cooking and, yes, even the laundry. Josh had a sucker for an aunt, no mistake.
Until Josh moved in with me, my most intimate relationship for at least a decade had been with Lilac, my bluepoint Siamese. Josh surprised me. With his curly dark hair, hazel eyes, and lively smile, my nephew reminded me of the boys I’d dated in college, and even a few I’d known later in life, before I gave up on men. So, yes, I suppose his gray-haired old aunt developed a quasi-maternal crush on him. If I had even suspected how near to danger and death Josh would come because of me I would never have allowed him to move in.
As I’ve said, a lot of eccentric people wash up here: fishermen, nature lovers, drunks, real estate developers, surfers, even astronauts. With NASA just down the road on the mainland, Galveston is a prime location for flyboys looking for nests by the water. And for strange folks with stranger ideas.
I can’t say that it was a surprise when I began to receive poison pen letters and e-mails about Bob Courtney—yes, that Bob Courtney, the shuttle pilot who claimed he saw God in space. I shrugged them off as the sour grapes that inevitably accrue to celebrity like iron filings on magnets.
Bob is a golden boy, married to his second wife, Fabiola, the beautiful Brazilian eco-activist he’d met on a good will mission to South America. His flying days are behind him, of course. Now he’s rich from inspirational speaking gigs. Spends most of his spare time sailing his Gaia II down past Pirate’s Cove, golfing with old NASA pals, and promoting his nonprofit pro-environment group, Gaia’s Children. He’s a handsome son of a bitch, is Bob: six feet of rugged man with a head of white hair and a face that could have made him a movie star—or a politician—if he’d cared anything about either career. But he was smarter than that.
As I said, Bob Courtney had a lot to envy. I was accustomed to getting letters to the editor from local cranks. I never took them seriously. But those letters about Courtney were different. They sounded frightened. And they frightened me.
When Josh and his chem. lab partner Matt Westerby, a charming, funny kid with freckles and a shock of red hair, went boogie boarding off Stewart’s Beach, I wished them luck and told them not to be too disappointed: the surf was low and muddy this time of year. As consolation, I promised them hamburgers for supper. But only Josh came back.
My nephew swore he saw something in the watery depths drag his friend under. And there was a foul-smelling green slick on the surface of the water near where Matt disappeared. But there were no shark or riptide warnings, no Portuguese man o’war sightings, nothing dangerous spotted. Josh dove, searched, called the local police and the Coast Guard, but it did no good. His friend was gone.
With Matt’s death—and Josh’s account of it—the drumbeat of fear began a steady slow pulse in my head. Dark rooms looked foreboding, empty streets frightened me, and the water appeared murky and threatening. The humidity and smell of the air was such that every day felt as if we were walking through a cloud in which something was rotting.
Of course, the Galveston Chamber of Commerce pretended that Matt’s disappearance was another hoax. They had to, didn’t they, with precious tourist dollars at risk? They floated the rumor that Matt had decided to leave school rather than try to improve his failing grades, and had staged his disappearance. There was no danger in the water, folks, none whatsoever. One or two inconvenient little deaths mustn’t dam the mighty fiscal stream. Bastards.
Poor Josh. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I’d hear him rattling around the house before dawn, find his iPod lying in the middle of the living room floor or the TV on in the dining room with a bowl of cereal fossilizing nearby. His pal’s death had upended his easy-going take on the world. Josh told me that he was considering quitting school and going home. I almost agreed with him. I could sense something wrong here, very wrong. But fool that I was, I convinced him that Matt wouldn’t have wanted him to quit. Eventually, after a fair amount of moping and hiding out in his room, he agreed with me and stayed, although his easy-going demeanor had changed. Josh was more closed, in, watchful, wary.
Why didn’t I keep my big mouth shut? Why didn’t I send him home?
The next disappearance had another witness. Unfortunately, it was Ben Mattox. a local character who was not exactly a reliable narrator. The last survivor of what had been a fine old island family, Ben lived in the falling-down remains of the family mansion and got by doing odd jobs, some yard work if he couldn’t avoid it, maybe a little smuggling, and when times were really tough, he cadged drinks and meals from everyone he saw, tourist or local. Ben was famous for telling whoppers. But I decided to be a good journalist, hunt him down, hear him out.
He’d make more sense if I could catch him before noon. When I suggested buying him breakfast he gave me a hard look from under his thick gray brows, then turned it into a grin. His two front teeth on top were missing. “Okay, yeah, Katie, I know you just want to laugh at me. Nobody believes me.” But he followed me into Jake’s Saloon and sat down at the counter.
“Ben,” I said, “I’ve known you all my life, so spare me the self-pity and get to the point.”
He ordered whiskey and garlic fries. “Girlie, I’ve done some stuff and seen some stuff, but I ain’t never seen nuthin’ like this. Strange doesn’t cover it.”
I pretended not to hear the “girlie.” “How
strange?”
He muttered about smart-ass NASA flyboys fooling around with stuff they don’t understand. “Got a coven going and don’t even know it. Damn fool.”
“Ben, those witchcraft rumors were old before you were born.”
He ignored me. “S’wife’s a goddamn Brazilian witch, is what she is. Husband’s a fool.”
“Are you going to talk about the guy who disappeared, or am I just wasting my time and money here listening to you carp about the locals?”
“Maybe both.” He washed down the fries with a solid belt from his glass. “That damn truck. It just up and went. Big bright light in the middle of the air, like a green star, took it, driver and all.”
It was already public knowledge that a water truck driver—and his truck—were missing. But the detail about the big bright light—that I didn’t like. Also, his reference to a coven. Ben’s words stripped back more of the insulation on my already frayed nerves.
“What bright light, Ben?”
“Like a searchlight, maybe brighter. Just lit up, and then it went out. Kinda greenish looking. Rays waving at the edges like a starfish. Stunk like a dead whale.”
“Are you telling me that a big green bad-smelling starfish searchlight ate the truck?”
“I said you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Drinking breakfast, Aunt Kate?” Josh sauntered up to the bar looking freshly minted. I’d forgotten that we’d agreed he could meet me and borrow my car. He sat down, ordered a Coke, and listened as Ben told his story again.
“Bright light just vacuumed up that sucker,” Ben said. “One minute it was there, the next it was gone, and that light went out like someone flipped a big switch.”