by Rob Heinze
It’s the wind, he told himself. The wind is moving into the house, just like wind always would…right?
For a long time he was certain that he wouldn’t be able to go back into the house. He glanced up the street, all the row-houses falling away in empty succession. It was a stark, bleak place. He turned back to the house and thought about Sarah. The house was the way back; it had to be. What else could it be?
He stepped inside and immediately the urgency of the wind being sucked into the house increased. He staggered, then went down the foyer. In the kitchen he stopped and looked down the stairs to the basement up which he had just come. At the bottom of the stairs was darkness and that darkness was so thick that Charley could imagine himself emerging from it like a shape from an ink pool.
I can’t go back down, he told himself.
The boards that had been hung on the windows and doors blotted the daylight. In the living room the light framed each board from underneath as if the planks were on fire. He looked around, to the torn carpets, to the ceiling with plaster drooping down like dead skin. He checked all rooms of the house, each step deeper into it a violation of his survival instinct. Upstairs the bedrooms were as they had been: terrible and empty. He stopped in the room where he had first seen those messages.
There was no good light in the room. The single window had been nailed shut with a board. There was a single jagged hole in the wood, perhaps placed there by a woodpecker trying to get in…
Probably out, he told himself.
The light coming through the hole was a beam, dust and specs cycling therein. The beam touched the wall on which the messages had been written, and now Charley was almost certain that had changed. He took a step closer to the wall and the light.
“What had they said?” He whispered.
Love is Love, Love is Pain, and something else.
The new message read: They’re Watching…They’re Waiting…Which do We Follow?
Charley swallowed with great difficulty. There was an audible click in his throat. His ears strained to catch sound of something. How could the messages have changed? Had I imagined those other messages?
He left the room. There was a figure standing in the doorway to the bathroom, and Charley screamed. He staggered back against the wall, his face contorted in comic horror, and when he saw that the figure had been only a shifting shadow, he still didn’t think it was funny. He had to leave. He had to get out of this house. It had offered him nothing besides the cryptic messages, which had changed since he had last seen them.
He went quickly down the stairs, nearly falling half-way down, and got out (was the house pulling him back, as if he were some morsel to digest?) the front door. He went down the steps, not even comfortable on the porch. He looked to his car, which was his anchor to before…before whatever had happened to him. He went to it then, suddenly wanting very badly to be inside. He opened the door, closed it, and sat shaking in the quiet.
Okay, Dr. Allen, think very hard. What happened to you?
“I don’t know,” he said.
You were in that house, and something happened. You awoke on the basement floor, in the dark. So what happened?
All at once Charley thought of the bum, who had asked him for a dollar. That bum had left, though. Charley had watched him go up the street, weaving slightly from polarity working in his mind or body.
5
There was nothing specifically that got him moving. He probably passed about two hours just sitting in the street, listening, watching, and looking. During the time that had elapsed, Charley had learned a few things. First, there was no one else here. Second, he was positively not dreaming. Finally, he had to get moving. The last one was difficult to understand. He didn’t know why he should move. He thought that, at best, he could stay where he was and the house—the place in which this had happened—would present some way for him to return to…to normality, for lack of a better word.
This isn’t Kansas, he thought, his mind not far from laughter. And he knew that he couldn’t laugh; if he laughed that would mean he was crazy.
Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat, why are you so flat?
Oh, Charley, please don’t laugh, okay? Just stay sane.
He stood and looked again to the house. Its hopeless, peeling façade concealed the secrets that lurked in the cold darkness. The shutters were eyes and the front porch was a chin. It was a sinister face. It seemed to smile a Mona Lisa smile, as if to say: I know what happened to you, Young Friend, but I will not tell you. The brightness of the paint was muted and terrible. The house had had its revenge. Build me here and let me rot. Give me insanity and let me die with that knowledge. I know, you see. I know what he did, the lover: he stabbed her a hundred times, each one a varying interval of insanity, Young Friend. Then he had left those messages just for you.
Charley had felt something in that house. He had felt something as soon as he had pulled up. The bum, the house, the premonition: could he have known this was going to happen? What the hell was this, anyway?
It took him another forty minutes to actually start walking up the street. He felt how a person in withdrawal must feel. He didn’t want to leave the house. His car was still there, and his car and the house were the only links to…to before this. But he didn’t think he could stay with that house looking out at him; he didn’t like that house. It was just wrong. When he reached the corner for the second time that day, he paused and looked back.
Shit, he thought, I left the car door open. Someone might steal it. I should go back and close it.
No. You have to move. You cannot stay here.
He didn’t know why he thought that, and more importantly, he didn’t know why it felt true.
Because if you stay, Charley, that house will watch you knowingly, and you will go crazy.
He began to walk up the avenue and away from the house. He was shaking. His legs felt wobbly and weak. He fumbled with the packet of Dentyne and popped a piece out. He stuffed it in his mouth and chewed maniacally. The crackling, crunching noises did little to calm him, but it was at least something.
Before long, his car and the house were blocks behind him.
6
There was something unnerving about hearing your own steps when you walked. He was on the main avenue, trying to remember the directions back to New York City. The way he figured it, he needed to get back to his home in New Jersey. He had no logical reason for this decision, but he thought that there might be evidence of what had happened to him. He felt that the trip, if not the destination, would reveal something deeper to him.
Sarah will be there, he thought. She’ll be there and everything will be okay.
The avenue was large and wide. Not a single car moved on it. A faint wind stirred the air around him, somehow sinister, dragging with it a loose paper that scuttled and scraped the asphalt. The paper fell away behind him and the sound of it scrapping the asphalt seemed to last for hours. Dark and empty stores watched him pass. Some doors stood ajar, inviting him into their beautiful darkness.
Come in, Stranger. Stay a spell!
There was a distant glow of sun behind the clouds. That thought comforted him slightly—the fact that the sun was still there. He walked for about twenty unnerving minutes when a thought occurred to him: he had forgotten the map of New York and the Boroughs in his car. He had to go back and get it. Then, when he got back, he could try the car again. Maybe it would start this time. Maybe his phone would ring too or—
He was about to turn around and start back when a voice, which was not his voice, spoke in his mind.
Come on, Charles. Don’t go back. The phone is dead and the car is too. It’s okaaaay, Charles!
A small shiver went through his body, as if a cold finger was slowly sliding down his spine. He found himself glancing around, searching for the source of that voice. He started to walk again, his thoughts turning deep into his own mind. He did not feel good. That voice had triggered a terrible thought, which corresponded to a recurrin
g childhood dream. Was that where the voice had come from?
It had always been a dream with his mom. He had no idea then from where it had come, but now he suspected that it had been his guilty conscious, for he had been a class clown and not the best of students. In the dream, he would come home to an empty and dim house. There would be a light on upstairs, and its low glow was the only hint of life. He would never want to go up the stairs—never!—but he would always have to. He’d go up slow like an actor in a movie, and the camera would pan around so that now it was behind him. The whole while, the hall light would grow brighter and brighter. Sometimes he’d hear a strange noise from the bedroom upstairs: a light titter or a lilting chuckle of shy girl glimpsing a man’s genitals for the first time, though most of the time there was only the noise of his footfalls. He’d pause on the landing to discern the source of the light; it would always be his mother’s bedroom light. He would continue up the stairs towards the bedroom. He would stop at the door, and from that opened door there would issue a strange, foreign smell—some odd combination of Church incense and sulfur. He would hesitate, knowing that he must enter, but not wanting to. He was in trouble, and he knew it. He had done something wrong. “Charles,” his mother’s voice would purr, seeming to roll out of the doorway—and in that voice was a barely hidden malevolence; in that voice was Jekyll and Hyde; in that voice was all that had terrified him as a child: insanity, incongruity, nonsensical things. “Charles, come here, Charles.” His skin would crawl and his bladder would wobble. But he would still enter the room. His mother would be on the bed, her back to him. Her hair would be in a wild, Einsteinian-wave. Her body was normal, but it was that voice. And God, oh God he didn’t want her to turn around! If she turned around and he saw those eyes, he would go crazy. Immediately his little heart would start to lub and dub. In his bed, he would likely have squirted out a warm gush of urine. “Come here, Charles, it’s okaaaay,” his mother cooed. And he knew that nothing was okay. His mother was luring him onto the bed, and when he was set on it, she would turn and descend upon him. His own mother! He would sit on the bed, his eyes never leaving his mother’s back. Her hair, so tall, would point in mad frizzles and frazzles. Maybe his subconscious had conjured that image from the bride of Frankenstein comic-image; he didn’t know. All he knew was that the absolute malignance in his mother’s voice made his heart hurt. She’s doing something, he would think. Her hands moved minutely. She hummed, and that was when he would realize that she was putting on make-up. And as soon as he realized that, the mirror she was holding shifted and came into his view. He saw her face, red eyes blazing like deep cancerous tumors. The she would spin around and descend upon him, mouth drawn back so wide that he could see the jagged wisdom teeth poked violently from her gums—gums that crawled with lice—and he would awake screaming.
* * * * *
That was what he recalled as he walked through the empty city. It wasn’t such a good thought to have now. The low-rise buildings looked darker and more threatening. He imagined that haunting mother-figure emerging from a dark doorway, madness and crazy love in her eyes.
He moved off the sidewalk, putting distance between the stores and himself. He crossed between two parked cars and walked down the center of the street. He felt odd walking in the center of the street. There had only been one other time in his life in which he had walked down the center of a busy street, and that had been during a massive blizzard in Jersey. That street had been empty, just like this street. And then, as now, Charley had felt that the situation was aptly apocalyptic.
Am I the last person alive?
His boots scuffed the asphalt. He found himself thinking about end-of-the-world movies and books where entire cities lay vacant and dark; sometimes a terrible evil like a wandering stranger called Randall Flagg lurked in those vacant cities and hunted the survivors. Could Charley Allen have been knocked out during the apocalypse? It didn’t seem likely. But what the fuck did seem likely? Certainly not this.
He had no idea how long he was lost in thought. Eventually he saw signs on the avenue for the Van Wyck Express Way. That would bring him north to 495 and then he could swing west towards the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. His understanding of New York and the Boroughs was elementary at best. He wished he had brought the map. He walked on. The light behind the clouds glowed glumly but it couldn’t break through. It was trying, at least. He had no watch (he had always relied on his cell phone for time) and could not sense the time of day because of the clouds.
He felt as if he had been walking for hours. The avenue he was on widened out and familiar, chain stores began to pop up. He spotted a McDonalds, a White Castle, a Seven Eleven. He wasn’t hungry and didn’t think that anything would be cooking. Food was the last thing on his mind, actually. He was focused only on moving further, getting closer to New Jersey, even if only with baby steps. His thoughts dwelled constantly on what could have happened to him, but that brought only frustration and confusion…and fear. He passed a squat, seedy looking structure that proudly proclaimed: Checks Cashed! It wasn’t long before he saw the access ramp for the Van Wyck, and he started up it.
It was strange going up a highway access on foot. The steepness of it made his legs burn, and he was huffing when he reached the top. When he got there, he stopped and took a deep breath. North and south, the highway was completely empty. Only the lonesome wind scuttled across it. He took the sight in, not totally unnerved by it. At least up here no one could pop out from a dark doorway or a parked car and murder you.
Come in, Charles!
He started walking. The highway stretched on and on. Around him the city lay in a vegetative state, its houses empty, doors open, windows cocked. Maybe a Dark Man strolled leisurely in and out of those doors? The cars sat dead at curbs like bloated walruses that had died in the sun. He walked on. He wouldn’t think about it, about how the world was empty, about how everything was dead. His legs were burning and his feet felt sore and tender. Hours must have passed.
Even if I get back to New Jersey, he thought, what the hell am I going to do there? The truth of the matter was that he didn’t know what he was going to do there.
By the time he got to 495, the sun had slipped down past the cloud cover and brightened the distant sky in bloody red hues.
Night and day, he thought. They still happen. Could it be that the world ended and forgot about me?
The graffiti that made him stop on his westward track was on the side of a building. He didn’t know where he was, but he thought that the city around him might be Jamaica, Queens. The building on which the graffiti was written looked run-down and old. The windows were mostly knocked in. The façade was an all-color brown that made the structure look as if it had been built of mud—or shit. The roof was bi-level and on the lower level there was a wall. The graffiti was written on that. He had spotted it from a far, far distance.
What the hell? He thought, numb, as he read the message.
He walked towards the edge of the highway. The wind coasted past him, swirling his hair and making strange, alien noises down in the abandoned city. He suddenly felt vulnerable again, felt that if he looked down the highway—back the way he had come—he might see some lurching shape moving up the road after him. That shape might be dark save for a pearly white grin, and in its hand would be a scythe. He put his hands on the guardrail and looked out across the city at the building and the message.
The message had apparently been written in white spray paint. He read it.
Follow Those of the Light.
It was clear that the messenger had meant for the message to be visible to a passerby. Had that always been there? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t traveled the Long Island Expressway often, but he thought that a message like that would have stuck in his mind. It was…it was too abnormal. And the paint was so vibrantly bright that he knew no one could miss it, especially against the muddy building as backdrop.
“Those of the Light,” he whispered.
Around
him the wind suddenly kicked up, moaning lugubriously against the highway’s underside. His hair flapped around and he staggered. He looked east, from the direction in which the wind had been borne, but saw no dark colors in the sky, nothing that would indicate a storm. He was suddenly afraid. He turned and started to head west again, going faster. The dull ache in his feet from the hours of walking was forgotten.
The sky in the west grew bloodier as the sun slid downwards. That message haunted him. Those of the Light. It sounded almost biblical. Let there be Light and let the World go still and let one man roam the Ruins.
Stop it, man. You have to stop.
The roadway inclined inconspicuously to a maximum, and when he got up his legs were on fire. He didn’t rest, though; he continued up over the hump and then down the hill. Manhattan’s sky-line came clearly in sight. He could see the rise and drop of buildings that gave the impression of looking at a pseudo-plateau. The Empire State Building stood taller than the other structures, its top almost hidden in the clouds. There was a faint blue-purple haze across the city as if it were in the grips of some magician’s spell.
The scene was mysterious, beautiful, and unnerving. It made him feel as if the entire place was a massive graveyard. There was nothing in city, like here, and there would be no solace. He knew that. Each window would gaze down upon him suspiciously and he would feel vulnerable. He found himself wondering if there might be another way to New Jersey. There was, he knew; he could go back the way he had come to the Belt Parkway, to Staten Island, and then across to New Jersey. He wouldn’t do it, though. If he’d had a car, he would have done it. On foot, no way. Not happening. He had no idea how long a journey like that might take on foot. The way the sky looked now, he knew that he wouldn’t make it out of Manhattan before nightfall. He might not make it into Manhattan by nightfall. Trying to go back that way would probably take two days and two nights—maybe more.