by Rob Heinze
You don’t have to tell me, Charley thought, but didn’t say.
“I got out of the building somehow. I went down those fifteen flights of dark stairs, falling once and twisting my ankle pretty badly. When I got outside, I saw that it was full daylight. New York City’s population appeared to have disappeared. I was alone, in New York, in broad daylight. You can almost laugh, can’t you? I sat on a bench for a long time. I looked around, I listened, I thought. In fact, I probably would have stayed on that bench forever if I had never seen…never seen one of them.”
He whispered the last three words. Outside the wind moaned. Charley waited patiently for the man to continue. Ray was gazing off at the dark corner again. For no reason at all, Charley felt a burning desire to chew his gum. He fumbled the packet out of his pocket and popped a piece into his mouth. There were only four pieces left. He would have to conserve. He relished the crushing, crumbling sound and the over-whelming mint taste/aroma that flooded his mouth and nose. He was about to offer one to Ray when the man continued talking.
“I saw it down the street. It was standing stock-still on a corner. I didn’t know what it was, still don’t, but I followed it. It was a figure, a white figure, and eddying all around it were these vibrant white—God, I can’t even describe what it was. Some sort of smoke, I guess, but the word smoke gives the wrong impression. It wasn’t gray; it was the most perfect white I have ever seen.”
Follow Those of the Light, Charley thought, remembering that omen he had seen from the highway overpass.
“When it moved, it left behind trails of that white glow. It was marvelous, honestly, but I felt fear too. I knew that I wasn’t dreaming—at least not in the traditional sense—and I wasn’t in reality—again, not in the traditional sense—because what I started to follow wasn’t from any reality I know. It led me cross-town to the Queens-Midtown tunnel.”
“I followed it into the tunnel. I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I don’t know what happened to me, why I did that. Maybe on some level I thought that I had actually died and that…that thing was supposed to bring me to God or Jesus or whomever. Maybe I even thought it was Jesus. I don’t know. All I know was that the only moment of doubt I had was half-way through the tunnel. The thing was ahead of me, always at the same distance no matter how fast I walked. Its brightness was insane, Charley. I can’t emphasize that enough. It practically lighted the whole tunnel’s curve. It left those entrails of glowing white that danced on gusts for a moment before they fizzled out soundlessly.
“Then, in the middle of the tunnel, I thought: it’s a trap. I had a sudden premonition that I was being led to my death. I was following the ploy and suddenly they would descend upon me from all sides. I didn’t stop, but I wanted to. I can’t imagine if I had stopped in there. I would have been stranded in that dark tunnel. I would have died in there.
“I must have slowed, or something, because when I got out to the other side—right where I found you laying today—that thing was gone. I don’t know where it went. I don’t know what it was. I haven’t seen it since, but I go back to that spot everyday, hoping to catch sight of it. It was unnerving, Charley, but it was hopeful too. Somehow it was hopeful. To see something so bright, it’s evidence that there’s life here. I used to think that I was the only one here, that I had died and that this was some sort of penance. Now I know that’s not true. There’s you. And if there’s you, then there has to be others.”
He finished and took a draught of water. Charley watched as the air bubbles slid down the bottle’s length. Charley hadn’t touched his Coke. In truth, the carbonation was making his stomach hurt. Tiny little cramps ransacked his belly in successive cycles. He hoped that it was only gas. If he had diarrhea, he didn’t know where he would go.
“How long have you been here?” Charley heard himself ask.
Ray shook his head. “I long time. I don’t know exactly. I wish I did know.”
Ray’s voice had changed; it had become heavier and more solemn.
“I had a family. My wife…we fought but we loved each other. We had two kids. Gregory was eleven. Sarah was fifteen.”
Charley’s eyes perked up. Sarah. Did he say Sarah? His own memories began to haunt him.
“We had a nice house in Connecticut. I commuted everyday to Manhattan. I miss it like hell.”
Charley’s own memories stilled. He looked at the man, who now had tears running down his face.
“Why didn’t you try to go home, Ray?”
Ray shook his head. “I want to…I want to, but I can’t. I’m stuck here now.”
“Why?”
“I can’t leave. It’s…I have a place here. I can’t go back through the tunnel.”
“There are bridges too. If you really wanted to go, there are bridges.”
“I know, Charley, I know that.” He paused and seemed to brood on a thought. “A journey like that…how long do you think it would take? Ball-park?”
“Days. Maybe a full week.”
“And what if there’s nothing there? What if it’s the same as it is here? What if there are no answers? How long would it take me to get back here? The same amount of time. What might happen to this place in the time that I’m gone? What might happen to me if I fail?”
Here was a truth Charley learned then: Ray was afraid to leave. However long Ray had been in this small empty house didn’t matter; it was too long. Humans are creatures of habit and have trouble breaking that to which they have become accustomed. Even if there was hope beyond this little house, the fear of nothing was enough to keep Ray clinging to that which he knew, that which was sane and ordinary, even if it wasn’t sane and ordinary.
All at once Charley felt sorry for the man.
“Maybe Those of the Light will come again,” Charley said.
Ray perked up. “What did you say?”
Charley looked puzzled. “What?”
“What you just said…”
“Those of the Light,” Charley whispered, not realizing he had said it.
“That’s good,” Ray said, his face going strange. He looked like someone in a mad spree of brainstorming. Charley didn’t like it.
“How’d you come up with that?” Ray asked.
Charley decided that he better tell his story completely. “I’ll tell you from the beginning.”
With the wind as his back-drop, Charley began to tell his story.
10
When it was over, Ray closed his eyes and seemed to think. He sat like that for a long time. Charley had told the man that he planned to get back to New Jersey and his house. There had been sadness in the man’s eyes but only for a fleeting moment. Now the man seemed deep in concentration. Charley had to admit that he was disappointed that he, Charley, was the only person Ray had ever run across here. And how long had the man been here? Months? Years? Still, Charley told his story with the hope that maybe—together—they could come up with some theory on what had happened to them.
Ray was sitting with his eyes closed, obviously thinking.
“So you were struck,” he said, opening his eyes.
“I think so. I don’t know. I just know that this bum asked me for money, I told him no, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. It wasn’t the look of someone with all their tools in the toolbox. I went into the basement, I remember that, and then I awoke here.”
“Okay,” Ray said, sitting forward. “What do you think happened to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those headaches,” he prompted. “What do you think happened to me, to put me here?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
Ray sat back on the couch. “If you were hit, it would have to be an extremely well placed hit to kill you. The odds are that you probably wouldn’t be killed if you were hit.”
“Unless he shot me…or stabbed me.”
“But you would have felt it. You would have had time to die.”
“Okay,” Charley said. “So?”
&n
bsp; “So could it be that…that I had a stroke or aneurism? I know of people who had strokes and woke up in the hospitals and couldn’t remember a thing. If that happened to me, could it be that you and I are just…”
He let the thought go unfinished, and it didn’t take long for Charley’s mind to catch what Ray meant.
“You think we’re in comas?” Charley asked, his voice hoarse.
“It makes sense, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s the only thing that makes sense. This can’t be the after-life. I mean it could be, but the odds are highly against it. If you were dead, wouldn’t you know you were dead?”
Charley had no idea, since he had never been dead.
Ray suddenly began to cry again. Charley sat there awkwardly, his stomach pinching at him with gas and cramps. It gurgled and groaned. He thought that he might have to use the bathroom—knew it, at this point. After a while, Ray said that he was going to sleep. He needed to think. Charley was free to do as he pleased. Ray brought out a cache of blankets and even more candles that he put in a bag, which he gave to Charley. Charley didn’t feel tired at all. There was too much uncertainty to feel tired.
“Good night,” Ray said, standing near his bedroom in which hung a poster of Britney Spears.
“You can come with me, Ray. Back to Jersey.”
He still planned on heading back there, even with Ray’s coma theory—a theory with which he was not yet entirely comfortable.
The small man stopped, his head down. He stood with his back to Charley for a long time. In that time Charley discerned one important thing: the man would not go with him. For whatever reasons, the man would not go with him. Ray nodded minutely.
“I’ll sleep on it,” Ray said.
No you won’t, Charley thought.
“Ray,” Charley said.
“Yeah?” He didn’t turn.
“What do you do for a bathroom?”
That was when the man began to laugh.
11
Charley had come out the back door from the basement. There was a mad array of locks on it, many of which Ray had installed himself. Now Charley squatted in the neighbor’s yard. He had come over the fence. Without a designated spot, Ray had told him he was free to go where he wanted. He, Ray, usually went in the neighboring yard; Charley had heeded the man’s advice. The insane quiet and the heavy darkness made him more uncomfortable. His stomach clenched and unclenched, giving him some pretty sharp pains and doubling the discomfort. It took only a little longer. Then the diarrhea spilled grossly out of him in a painful, rolling contraction. He felt better after it was over.
He went quickly back over the fence and stood on the stone patio of Ray’s house. The silence was unnerving, and he didn’t want to linger outside. He had never thought anything could be so silent. He hesitated only a moment longer, and then he was back in the basement. He drew all the locks on the door and shuffled through the basement. The small dark bar, at which he had envisioned a rotting monster with a party hat on, stood solemnly in the corner. He passed it and entered his bare room.
He had lighted all of the candles, and the small room glowed sacredly. It was chilly, Ray was right, but Charley thought it might be okay once the candles burned for a while. He shut the door to the room and lay on the mattress. He heard small sounds of feet across the floor upstairs, and he wondered what Ray was doing. He thought about what the man had said—their being in a coma. If they were, how did they awake?
Follow Those of the Light.
He didn’t know why that had come into his head. The phrase made him remember Ray’s story of coming through—being lead through—the tunnel out of Manhattan. With a childish curiosity, he wished that he could see the strange figure Ray had described in such detail. His thoughts strayed to Sarah. He wondered what she was doing. If he was in a coma, was she by his side? The grim thought of her, alone and having to face his comatose body, made tears prick his eyes. If the situation was reversed, he didn’t know how he could last.
I’m okay, baby, he thought. If you’re there and listening, I’m okay.
“I’m okay, Sarah,” he said lightly to the empty room.
Outside the wind sighed down around him. What could he hope to find in Jersey? Some solution? Some way out?
Follow Those of the Light.
Sleep came slowly that night for Charley Allen, and when it did he dreamed—
He was in an ancient, stone basin. Rock walls rose all around him, so high and far that there was no sky; only blackness rolled above him. There was a strange, still calm in the air. He moved towards a chasm over which stretched a rail-less stone bridge. At the other end of the bridge was a ledge and beyond that ledge was an odd structure, apparently carved into the rock. He was on the bridge and the ground fell away below to reveal a faint pinkish molten glow. In fact, Charley noticed that, in the cracks around the cavern, a pinkish red glow seemed to pulse minutely.
I’ve been here before, he thought. I know this place.
Yet his mind could draw no connections to how he knew it. He felt unnerved—terrified, in fact—but he was walking across the stone bridge anyway. Déjà vu. This is Déjà vu. When? How? Why?
A sudden scream, disjointed and twisted, rolled out to him. He spun, and saw nothing.
There was nothing on the other side of the bridge but shadows.
It was the personified abandoned house he suddenly heard: but the shadows, Young Friend, are not shadows. Look closer.
He did. He did not like that which he saw. He started to back up. A vicious panic took hold of him for no rational reason except that this was a dream and, in dreams, people knew when a situation was going to turn bad. His eyes, round white ovals, gave hint to his stirring panic. Shadows moved again, as if caught by a light he couldn’t see.
Christ, God Christ those are not shadows!
That was when the dark shapes emerged from the darkness. They blossomed like ink spread on a paper, taking up humanoid shapes. They flew towards him, filing onto the stone causeway, and Charley felt all of the energy drain from his body.
The shapes came at him, their mouths (or what passed for mouths) opening wide. A disjointed scream rolled out of their black maws. It was loud, deafening, and it penetrated Charley’s mind deep and hard enough to jolt him awake.
* * * * *
Someone was banging on the door outside. All of the candles had burned down except one, and terror took hold of Charley. He imaged those black shapes, flooded into the basement en masse. No, it can’t be them, not here, oh God not here! He scrambled out of bed and backed himself into a corner. He glanced around frantically, searching for an escape.
There were no windows in this room! Ray had set him up! He had done this on purpose! He should have known! It was all some plan, some scheme, and Ray was the single perpetrator of it!
The door opened a crack, and Ray stuck his head in.
“You okay?”
Charley was too terrified, too stunned to speak. His mind wouldn’t accept that he saw only Raymond Chandler, possible stroke-sufferer, bald and glasses-clad.
“You were yelling,” Ray said, opening the door cautiously.
He stepped into the room. He was still in the same outfit. He carried a lantern with him, and his soft face looked ghoulish. He must have seen something familiar in Charley’s face, for his own face seemed to relax.
“You had the dream, then.”
It was a statement, not a question.
Charley took a deep breath and let it out. He opened his mouth to speak, didn’t know where to begin, and closed it.
“There was a stone bridge, and on the other side was a structure of some sort?”
Charley looked at the man stupidly. “How…?”
“I had it. I still have it.”
“Why?”
Ray shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know it’s only a dream, it can’t…it can’t really hurt you.”
Why did he hesitate? Charley wondered.
Ray stood there and looked as i
f on the verge of disclosing something to Charley. But in the end he only swallowed and said:
“Rest well.”
He shut the door and left Charley alone.
Charley listened to the man’s footsteps as they passed along the floor above him. Had he really been screaming?
What did I see in those shapes’ mouths? He wondered.
He searched and searched his memory but couldn’t remember. Either his dream-mind hadn’t really seen it, or his waking mind was censoring whatever he had seen. He sat against the wall for a long time until fatigue overcame him. He crawled back to his bed and put himself deep under the covers. This time sleep came and he dreamed only of Sarah and in the dream they had a picnic on a bright blue summer day and she made him a PB&J sandwich, smearing peanut butter on her index finger and he licked it off and she laughed—oh God how she laughed!—and it was the sweetest sound he had ever heard and they made love as the warm sun bathed them gently in light, the initial penetration like being reborn, and when he awoke early the next morning alone, he cried, and when he tried to go back to sleep, tried so hard to recapture that dream and found he couldn’t, he cried some more.
12
Ray was not in the house the next morning. Charley stood stupidly in the living room and scratched his head.
“Ray?”
No answer. He went down the hall past the man’s bedroom, saw it empty (Britney Spears looked at him coyly), and then continued to the front door. The house had the smell of peachy-peach and burned-out candles. The sun was shining outside, and Charley passed through light-beams that entered the windows in the hallway. They felt good, warm. He went to the front door and opened it up. The sun was high and bright, and seeing it made Charley feel good.
So there are cycles here, he thought, shading his eyes against the sun.