by Paula Guran
The cassette had given a fair impression of the band’s sound. What it had not conveyed was the intense focus with which they performed. In my car, on my bed, listening to the guitar and keyboard clashing with one another, I had imagined a group whose members were struggling for control of whatever they were playing, and I would have predicted a certain amount of tension, if not outright animosity, amongst them. (Think Oasis.) Everything The Subterraneans did, however, was deliberate and smooth, intentional. The antagonism between the pipe-organ keyboard and the surf-rock guitar, the way the singer’s voice overrode and was overridden by them, the drums’ steady, almost monotonous beat, all were precisely as they were supposed to be. The band finished their first song, and, before the audience had started applauding, slid into the next one. This was the way they acted, as if the club were empty and they were performing for themselves. Maybe they were annoyed at the low turnout for their show; though I had the impression that had the place been filled, they would have behaved in the same manner.
When the band took the stage, my internal soundtrack was about two-thirds of the way through their tape. By the opening notes of the second song, however, my interior music had synchronized with the concert. The sensation was strange, as if I were the margin where two versions of the same song by the same band converged. I kept to the rear of the space in front of the stage. Jude stationed himself at the stage’s foot. In such a confined area, the sound was overwhelming, deafening. As The Subterraneans progressed through their set list, the stage lights went from white to a deep blue that had the effect of rendering everything on stage fuzzy at the edges, as if it had slipped out of focus. At the same time, I seemed to hear the music in a way I previously hadn’t. The keyboard and guitar weren’t fighting; instead, the keyboard’s chords were creating a vast space off whose walls the guitar’s notes echoed. The drum buttressed the enormous structure, while the singer was the point around which the great architecture arranged itself. A feeling of the sacred – sublime, terrifying – swept through me.
This was the moment the breeze tickled the hairs on my neck, and I turned to witness the alleyway that had replaced the bar. It seems incredible to me that I should have walked toward such a thing, but I couldn’t come up with any other response to it. As my feet crossed the floor, I noted the tall forms gathered at the far end of the passage: members of the Watch, there to meet any trespass. Air moved over my face, filling my nostrils with the damp smell of the sea. My body felt curiously light.
Then Jude shouldered past me and strode to the edge of the worn cobblestones. There, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder to see if I was coming. I wanted to, but it was as if his contact with me had robbed me of my ability to move. Not to mention, the Watch had shifted into the alley proper, and there was something about the way they moved, a kind of liquid quality, as if they were ink rather than flesh, that filled my stomach with dread. I hesitated. Jude did not. He turned to the passage and crossed its threshold. I took one step, two, closer. The keyboard’s solo rang off the alley’s walls. Jude must have seen the black figures drawing nearer, but he did not alter his pace. The Watch allowed him to reach the halfway point of the alley – it may have been a border they had to observe – before they took him. One second, they were ten, fifteen yards from Jude; the next, they encircled him. It was like watching a group of snakes, of eels, slither around their prey. Jude looked from side to side, his eyes wide, his mouth moving. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, nor could I read his lips. The guitar echoed up the alleyway. The members of the Watch raised their cloaks; although it looked more as if their cloaks raised themselves. Their masks rippled, the beaks lengthening, the eyes melting into them. Jude lifted his hand, begging for more time, perhaps, asking them to hear whatever else it was he had to say. The Watch fell on him. His hand kept its position amidst the black swirling around the rest of him. I could swear I heard high, hysterical laughter, worse, it was Jude’s. I ran for the alley, but it was already gone.
Instead, I collided with one of the bouncers, who was first annoyed with my clumsiness, then panicked by my shouting about what had happened to my friend. Drugs, I’m sure he thought. He ejected me from the club, and told me to get lost before he called the cops. I did, because I couldn’t think of what else to do. I’m not sure how I made the drive home. The following morning, after rising for church with my family, I claimed a bad stomach and spent the day in bed. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t fall asleep for any length of time. The image of those tall figures lifting their cloaks, their masks flowing into blades like scythes, would not leave me. When I did sleep, I dreamed of crows, hunched around some poor, pale thing, their beaks poised to strike. I was horrified, by what I’d seen and was certain had happened to Jude, and by the prospect of his parents, or worse, the police, showing up at the front door and asking me what I knew about his disappearance. Alongside my horror, guilt gnawed at me. I wasn’t responsible for Jude’s fate, not directly, but I hadn’t done anything to stop it, had I? Probably a lawyer could argue the case for my innocence, but I knew better. I was complicit in what had befallen my friend.
Secretly, I wanted the cops to ring the doorbell. I wanted to confess my role in the events at The Last Chance and be punished. For all my disagreements with the Church over the years, I have always granted it the power of the sacrament of Confession, and the penance that accompanies the rite. It’s what the law provides, or can provide, on the secular side of things. No police appeared, however. If Jude’s parents knew he’d intended to meet me at the club, they chose not to follow up on it. I actually went to Confession the next Saturday, but after listening to an abbreviated version of what I’ve written here, the priest gave me a prolonged lecture on the perils of drug use. Had I attempted the same thing with your grandparents, the result would have been approximately the same.
I considered trying to find my way back to that alley; though I’m not sure what I thought I would find. Jude’s remains? Evidence he was still alive, held captive in some alien prison? Whatever I hoped for, the other world was closed off to me. In the days after the concert, I realized that The Subterraneans’ music was no longer playing its endless loop in my mind. When I listened to the cassette, the songs refused to stay in my memory. In the weeks to come, as the summer unfolded, I continued to play the tape, hoping the air in front of me would waver, and I would once again see the alleyway opening in front of me. It appeared Jude had been right, though. Whatever had been started by the recording of the band’s music had been completed by its live performance. Eventually, the week before my senior year was to begin, the cassette unspooled in my car’s tape deck, and was so badly damaged as to be unplayable, its songs lost to me.
For years afterward, every time I was in a record store, I kept my eyes open for a copy of The Subterraneans’ tape. At the same time, I was on the lookout for information on the band, itself, who its members were, where they were located. I had no luck with either search. Last year, I spent a couple of days researching the band and its music online, but found little of any use.
As for Jude: at the start of senior year, I joined Lorrie for lunch in the senior lounge. We exchanged pleasantries about our respective summers, the classes we would be taking. I turned the conversation to Jude. How was he doing? I asked. Oh, she said, no one had seen him around for a while. Supposedly, he’d left for Boston, which he’d been talking about doing for years. Boston, I said. Yeah, she said. He wasn’t very happy here. He had a lot of stuff going on at home. Well, I said, wherever he was, I hoped he was happier. “I doubt it,” Lorrie said. “Some people just aren’t, you know?”
I said I did.
As I told you at the outset, I’ve never shared this story with anyone, not your mother, not Liz. Maybe I shouldn’t have with you. If it’s easier – if I send this letter to you – you can trash it, pretend I answered your question in some other, innocuous way. That might be better. I’m not sure what more there is to say about any of it. That is, except for the questi
ons I still can’t answer.
Love,
Dad
For Fiona, and for JoAnn Cox
Simon Strantzas says of “Alexandra Lost”: “The story may take its title from Leonard Cohen, but it takes its trappings from old Howard Phillips. I found myself thinking of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ and of the essential salts that so many are reduced to in that tale, and I began to wonder about how much salt there was in the world, and the part it played. There’s an inevitability in ‘Alexandra Lost’ as there is in the best of Lovecraft, and a suspicion that we are all cast in a play we don’t know the ending to, and our lines are being written by something beyond our comprehension. I hoped to explore that here, while also drilling into the head of someone who has never been anything but lost. Perhaps it’s that, the sense of never belonging, that cuts most to the heart of Lovecraft. All I can say for sure is it cuts most to the heart of me.”
The author of four collections of weird and strange fiction, including the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press), Simon Strantzas is also the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications), Shadow’s Edge (Gray Friar Press), and guest editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3. His writing has been reprinted in various “best of” anthologies; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Ontario.
Alexandra Lost
Simon Strantzas
——
The sunlight through the windshield bounced and refracted, filling Alexandra Leaving’s eyes with wriggling stars. Leonard drove his Chevrolet across upstate New York with his foot pressed firmly to the floor, and though she pleaded with him to slow down, he met her protests with further, more dangerous weaving. She eventually stopped asking, and instead kept her eyes focused on the map.
“How much longer do you figure before we reach the coast?” he said.
She checked the clock.
“It’s about ten hours from Buffalo, but we hit that traffic so now I have no idea.”
The map in her hands was the most important thing she owned. She clung to it: her tether as she drifted out into the unknown. She would not use a GPS – technology could not be trusted to tell her where she was going. Only a paper map made sense, something on which she could chart their route, drawing for hours before they left. Every hour on the page marked; she knew where they were supposed to be each step of the way. Her father had become lost when she was seven; lost and never found. She was terrified the same might happen to her. Having their journey carefully plotted made her feel safer. But she hadn’t anticipated how fast Leonard would drive, and how that speed would compromise the work she’d done. “We’ll get there faster,” he assured her, but it was impossible – they didn’t have a clear idea where they were. If they missed the ramp to the next highway, she worried they would never realize it and simply drive on forever.
“There’s an end to the highway,” Leonard said, reading her thoughts. “As long as we keep driving we’ll get there. At the end of every highway there’s an ocean waiting to be found.”
She smiled, anxious. For a moment, she forgot how much of a mistake she’d made. For a moment, she remembered why she’d let Leonard take her so far from home. She did it for him. To prove that despite the anxieties and worries that clouded her head, she was good enough for him – even if she didn’t believe it. When he realized she had never seen the ocean, he spontaneously decided he had to take her, and she pretended she was spontaneous enough to go.
“I read this article about a couple who just flew off to Europe for a few months without packing anything but their phones and a charger,” she said, explaining all the research she’d done before they left. She saw his lip quiver, but she wasn’t sure of the cause. “They bought new toothbrushes wherever they went, washed their clothes in strangers’ houses, and just met as many people as they could. It was like there was this whole world of people working together to help them get by. It was surprising.”
“Surprising, how?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She ran her hand over her shorts to dry it. “I guess I asked myself if I’d do the same – if I’d help a stranger like that.”
“I think you probably would.”
She didn’t say anything. She wanted to believe he was right even if it sounded unlikely. But more importantly, she wanted him to continue believing that sort of thing about her. It was important he not know what kind of things dwelt within her head. He wouldn’t understand. No one had ever really understood. Not her father when he was around, and certainly not her mother once he was gone. “My little lost girl” was what he’d called her as he held her tight in his arms. They sat in their warm backyard as the sun set earlier each summer day. “My little lost girl,” he said, and squeezed her the way no one had squeezed her since. And she didn’t know what he meant, not until he was gone. Then she knew the feeling well.
She looked out the window at the passing scenery. She and Leonard had not spoken in some time, and she liked the quiet rhythm of the wheels on the road. Between the Chevrolet and the horizon the grass dipped and sloped upward, and tiny farms dotted the distant landscape. Farther still lay a series of hills obscuring what lay beyond. All she knew of that land was it was occupied by giants. Wind turbines, more that a dozen in a row and sprouting upward, blades moving in slow endless circles. They stood so far away that Alexandra could not fully grasp their enormity.
“You can tell how big they are by their spin,” Leonard said. “If they were closer, the blades would be moving a lot slower. Those turbines are huge – you just can’t tell how huge things are from so far away.”
“I can feel how huge they are, though, if that makes any sense. They make my head loopy.”
* * *
They almost missed the ramp onto the interstate. Unending miles of highway banked with forest, giant trees too thick to see between, covered in oranges and reds and golds like a burning sunset. Alexandra felt insignificant beside them, no better than the insects crushed against the Chevrolet’s windshield. When those trunks petered out, she saw, in the distance, the glint of cars moving away.
Her map – she needed to consult her map.
There, the forest was demarcated with a faint brown line, and almost upon it the blue ink of her pen where she’d traced their route onward. She looked from the map, afraid it was too late, and saw the green sign on the shoulder pass in an instant, hanging branches covering its warning. The ramp was imminent.
“Here. You want this exit here!”
“What?” Leonard slurred as though awoken from a dream. Alexandra watched the exiting lanes rush toward them. Panic seized her.
“This is it! This is the ramp. Take it. Take it. Take it.”
Leonard snapped awake, pulled the wheel hard after the marked lanes had already split. A symphony of honks trailed, and the Chevrolet shook from the forces pulling it in multiple directions. Alexandra was flung aside as the car wrenched itself into the proper lane, and as Leonard tried to straighten its path, the tail began to wag. He spun the wheel all the way to the left, then again all the way to the right, trying to keep the car from skidding as the horns blared louder. Back and forth, back and forth, the tail swung until finally, with only a minor tremor, he regained control over the car. He accelerated away from the complaining motorists.
Once safely out of danger, Leonard turned with another grin.
“I hope we didn’t go the wrong way,” he said.
Alexandra did not understand Leonard’s obsession with the ocean. He hadn’t been born on a coast; he had lived in the same small dry town as Alexandra long before she met him. The ocean never arose during their courtship’s early months, and why would it? It was not typical dinner conversation. And yet, he seemed aghast when she reveled in passing that she had never seen the ocean herself. His dumb silence eventually gave way to incredulity, and it was from that point that his dreams became consumed with taking h
er there.
“Wait until you see it,” he promised. “It’s so immense you’ll feel completely insignificant.”
The idea terrified her.
Water was never something Alexandra was comfortable around. Small amounts of it for cooking and bathing didn’t bother her, but once the bodies became larger – fountains, pools, lakes – her anxiety increased. It wasn’t a phobia – she did not fear water like some feared snakes or spiders – but instead it seemed to whisper to her whenever she was close. The words were too quiet to make out, but they left her with an unfathomable urge to submit herself to it. To walk bare-footed into the waves and let them consume her. Mind. Body. Soul. The water unnerved her because the water wanted her submission, wanted her to lose herself to its power, and the sensation that swirled in her head was as suffocating as any drowning.
They pulled off the interstate for dinner at a small unnamed restaurant, dark branches draping over its burnt-out sign. Alexandra folded her map carefully and placed it in her bag where it would be safe at hand. Leonard watched her, the hint of amusement twitching in his lips, but said nothing. When she stepped from the car Alexandra realized the parking lot was nearly empty, and inside the restaurant, it seemed no more than three of its dark wooden tables were occupied. The rest had places set and menus out, prepared for occupation by a host of souls who would never arrive. When the teenage hostess finally greeted Alexandra and Leonard, her hair tied in a tight bun against the back of her head, Leonard immediately asked where all the customers were. The girl shrugged as she marked their table off her list.