by Rob Heinze
Charley said nothing, did not intervene. What could he do? He watched as Eve hesitated. Anger flash across John’s face, his lip twitching. She glanced to Charley, not happy, and then she dutifully went to John. Charley felt sorry for her, for himself. Could Charley Allen defend her? From John? That was highly improbable, sir, and you should never make that suggestion again! John had more muscles in his one arm than Charley had in his body.
Weakly, Charley said: “I’ll be back to the house in a few minutes.”
John nodded, seemingly satisfied. Eve got her bike and walked it back across the bridge towards John. They began to walk away, and then Charley was alone.
I’m sorry, he thought. I’m really sorry, Eve.
He sat down on the bridge. He didn’t want to go back to the house. He’d give them some time to work out whatever issue they have.
He’ll beat her, you know that? You know that, don’t you?
“Shut up,” he whispered, hating himself.
He waited, not happy, and thought about Sarah. The question came immediately to his mind: if Eve was Sarah, what would I do?
What would he do?
16
When they were up the block and away from Charley, John’s hand shot out and encircled Eve’s arm.
“What the fuck were you doing with him?”
“Nothing! Ouch, John, you’re hurting me!” She yelped, trying to wrench herself free.
His grip tightened and tightened on her skinny arm; his eyes burned with jealousy and anger. She looked at him, felt pain on her upper arm, and fear of him flooded her body. He must have noticed something on her face, a hint at her terror, for his grip tightened.
“Why was your hand on his back?”
He squeezed. She hissed.
“Stop it! Oww! John, he was upset! Nothing happened! I only want you!”
His grip relaxed, but the smoldering jealous in his eyes took longer to abate. He let her arm go slowly. They walked on in silence towards his house. Eve stayed well away from him now, and he kept glancing her way, as if to make sure she wasn’t trying to escape. Her arm hurt (and would for days). Charley’s house came into view, and they went into it. It was silent, empty, and they stood in the kitchen. John wanted her. He wanted her then and there, right on the kitchen table, and he was going to take her. He started to un-zip his fly. Eve looked at him. She hated him—and Charley too. Why couldn’t he have stood up for her? Oh, true, John would have murdered him and nothing would have been solved, but—men!—please couldn’t someone help her?
Watching John approach, thinking of Charley, something that had once been tiny inside of her suddenly ballooned outwards, like the Grinch’s tiny heart growing three-times too large in Dr. Seuss’s classic cartoon.
He wants me, she thought sanely. He won’t get me. Not this time.
Unbuttoning his pants now, John came towards her, his face slack and devoid of humanity.
Come on, she mouthed. You’ll have to fight for it this time.
John suddenly halted. He was still four feet from Eve, his pants now dropped down around his ankle and a conical protrusion of his penis was aimed at Eve. Eve, confused, watched him. His eyes, once strange, had suddenly grown stranger. He was glancing at something, something in the refrigerator. His eyes were a good inch too wide, the lids drawn back so far that she could see the hints of the red capillaries in the back. A tiny, mouse-like fart crept out of him. Eve felt an absurd desire to laugh, and she had to bite her tongue; whatever had happened to him would at least get his mind off her. She hoped, anyway. And laughing would only alert him to her again. She stood watching him, his face motionless, his eyes wide. It was as if he had forgotten she was there.
She backed away from him, moving out of the kitchen. He made no effort to pursue her. She noticed, before she went slowly up the stairs, that his erection had receded.
What happened? She wondered, as she ran upstairs to lock herself in a bedroom. What did he see?
John had caught a glint out of the corner of his eyes as he approached Eve. It had come off the refrigerator. He had stopped, looked again, and he had seen them.
Those of the Dark.
He knew that Eve had gone, and he didn’t care. He cared only for his own safety. If they touched him, God! He couldn’t let them touch him!
John backed out of the kitchen, and soon he was in the basement. He found a set of boxes and snuggled himself between them.
They won’t find me, he thought. They won’t get me here.
Then, in the dark and with brutal clarity, his mind replayed the incident that haunted him.
* * * * *
The man he had killed was a guy named Craig. He had met him wandering around, and the guy had followed him for a long time before John had agreed that they could go together. Craig, for some strange reason, had thought that he was smarter than John. They would sit and think about this place, about where they were, and Craig would give suggestions. He would never—never—ask John for his opinion. John didn’t know when the man had started to grate on him, but it didn’t take long.
You are the muscle and I’m the brains, Craig had once said tritely.
He was a tall, thin guy with a wild whip of hair. His skin had a mocha cast to it, and he said it came from his father, who was Italian. His hair was black, his eyes were brown, and he did have an intellectual look to him, but John didn’t really think that fucking mattered. John was still alive, so John had to be smarter than him, no?
There was no motive, no reason for John. One night he had just decided that he’d had enough of Craig. He walked over to the man as he lay sleeping, his hair in disarray, his face quasi-peaceful. They were camped in some shit-hole of a house somewhere close to where John had lived. Craig had been in the living room, and the dying candle light wavered against the man’s face. John’s shadow loomed over him, blocking out the light. Craig shifted, as if in response to John’s presence. John slid the knife from its sheath, the sound it made poetic and indescribable.
Craig’s eyes came open blearily. They caught the glint of the knife. They strayed absently to John’s face.
“What are you doing?”
“Killing you,” John said.
“Why?”
The tone of voice with which Craig asked that last question was almost conversational, as if the true meaning of what John was saying held no value, no truth. John had no real reason to kill the man, so he didn’t answer. Instead, he just fell on him with the knife angled down so that it took Craig in the gut. He lurched up, eyes wide, a horrid wheeeen sound bursting from his lips. John, powerful, forced the man onto his back and leaned into his belly deeper. Craig, bucking, coughed and coughed, trying to feebly fight his way out from under John. His eyes stared in disbelief at him.
John yanked the knife out and then slammed it down on Craig’s chest. It encountered resistance as it struggled through the breast-bone. But John persisted, and soon his efforts paid off, as the knife finished the descent towards the man’s heart. That was when Craig jerked spasmodically, his wise, intelligent eyes staring haplessly off into the darkness of the shit-hole house’s ceiling.
John had stayed on top of the man for a long time. Later, he would not be able to remember what he had done immediately after that, but there was some point in time when he decided to leave the house and strike out on his own. Shortly later, he had fatefully met Eve in an alley, crying and alone, and they had been together ever since. And now Charley was here, and was Charley anything more than a disguised Craig? No, John did not think he was. Already he and Eve schemed! They left him out of their decisions and discussions; they did! And was he so unimportant that his thoughts didn’t matter?
He remembered the way Eve’s face had looked as he had penetrated her the other night. She had enjoyed it; he knew she had. She was no better than a whore. He remembered Craig, eyes popping open as the knife slammed into his gut.
John remembered a lot as he sat in the darkness of the basement, the closeness of t
he boxes comforting. He thought that it would be nice to move on from this place. There was something waiting for him on the path he had been treaded, close now, and he thought that he wanted it. What that something was, he wasn’t sure, but something told him it would be good. It would be good. He just had to get moving, had to continue down the path.
He had to get moving.
Interlude - Sarah II
I have started to dream about Greg and Lily. In the dreams I am lying naked in a field and bleeding phosphorescent liquid. I am praying that no one can find me: the grasses are tall. I can see the arc of sunlight above me. I can’t tell exactly where I am bleeding from, but it seems to be coming from underneath me. I can’t stop it and I can’t move. The man that Greg and Lily had chased away comes shifting through the grasses. His face is human, but his body becomes an ever-changing mass of lightlessness.
“I’ll help,” he says, falling to his knees and crawling towards my feet.
He shoves my knees apart and, with an eagerness that was terrible, he starts to go down on me. I tried to move but couldn’t, and there was no pleasure but pain. I screamed. He took his face up and his chin was lathered with the same phosphorescent blood from underneath.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
His face changed to black, soul-less, and I felt a gravitational pull towards him. I looked down and saw his face rotating with the back-drop of space: colorful galaxies, lights, strange iridescent flashes and quirks. I knew then that my insides would pull out towards this creature, and I started to scream as loud as I can.
There was a brilliant flash and I felt the pull of the creature’s gravity leave me. I looked up and saw Greg and Lily standing there. Their bodies were outlined and glowing—brilliant and amazing. I started to cry in joy. They fought the black shape. There were massive sparks and explosions. Then the bright faded to normal, and Greg was standing over me.
“Don’t leave him,” Greg said.
I woke up terrified in my bed at home. It was early in the morning with the sun just coming up, but I knew I had to get to the hospital. When I got there, visiting hours had not yet started.
I saw the man from my dream, and I went cold all over. He was waiting in the hospital lobby, checking his watch. I walked past him, shaking, and checked in. The front desk gave me a badge and I went upstairs. I was certain that the man would come into elevator with me, and after the dream, nothing good would come of it. But the doors shut and I was alone. On your floor I was surprised to find the room next to yours empty. I asked the nurse on duty where that patient had gone. She told me that his family had decided to take him off life support.
“He was in a coma for almost a year,” she said. “The financial burden was catching up to them.”
I felt a terrible fatigue come over me, and I sat at your bed, unable to cry and unable to get beyond the thought of “the financial burden catching up”. It was absurd but inevitable. Cost would catch up. And it wouldn’t be me to make a decision; it would be your family, Charley.
I wished that Greg was there. I wanted him to tell me something prophetic again. I wanted him to say you had gotten somewhere, or where strong, or you loved me.
But Greg didn’t come. Or Lily. Or the dark man.
Your mom and dad came and that helped to pass time, but it was sad and horrible too.
Part Three - Ad Libitum
1
About six days passed, and there was no sign of Those of the Light. Things slowly began to deteriorate in a way that Charley could not have predicted. Once, in the City of New York, coming back to his home in Jersey had seemed like the correct idea. Yes, home, that place—it would give him some hint as to what he should do. But that had been wrong. Home was a dead-end. There was nothing here, and their plan to follow Those of the Light was all they had.
Charley wasn’t too concerned about Those of the Light; his true fear was of a man named John.
John was now dangerous.
Eve was not helping the situation. John had been dangerous before Eve had tried to kiss Charley.
It was a night when they had been laying together, Eve and Charley, just friends, her hand on his chest and her body snuggled against his. They were talking about their dreams. Eve had started telling him about how she had always wanted a family—three or four kids, she’d said. She would stay at home and raise them, and her husband would come home from his job and she would cook dinner.
That’s a pretty traditional route, Charley had said.
I know, she had replied. But it’s what I always wanted.
They had gone quiet. She had shifted, nudging in closer. Now she was almost on top of him, her body weight pressing against his side. He should have known. How could he not have known? His thoughts were too innocent, too focused on other things and not sex. She had leaned over him and tried to kiss him. She had gotten about an inch from his mouth before he realized what her intentions were.
“Eve,” he said, “No.”
He turned his face away and sort of wiggled out from under her. She looked over at him, obviously hurt, and Charley felt sorry for her.
“I can’t. I can’t kiss you.”
She was quiet for a long time, looking down at her hands. “I know. I’m sorry. I…I just...”
“I understand.”
She looked at her hands for a long time. Then, as if making a decision, she looked up at him.
“She’d never know. We could…we could just be close. Once?”
“I would know, Eve,” Charley said.
Eve, ashamed, said: “I know. I’m sorry I said that.”
“If I didn’t have Sarah waiting for me, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But I do.”
He sounded pretty cliché, but he didn’t know what else to say. He knew she was hurt, and he felt sorry for her. But Sarah was more important, the sole reason why he still had a focus, a purpose in this no-world.
Charley’s dreams about that strange place had grown more frequent and more vivid. Eve’s too. They talked about them, about standing on the brink of that stone bridge which stretched across the red glowing chasm. They talked about it a lot. They compared details of the dream. A lot of stuff was different, like the intensity of the glow, the length of the bridge, what the structure on the other side actually was. But there was one thing on which they could both agree and that something was this:
At the other side awaited salvation.
They couldn’t explain how they knew this. They just did. They had to find that place. And they had to sit tight until Those of the Light showed them the way. But they couldn’t sit tight here, not with John lurking about, and so they made a decision.
Charley didn’t know if it would work, but they had no other choice.
2
“We should leave soon,” Charley said to John.
He was outside on the front steps. The sky was a peaceful, retreating blue with purple-red stitched into the lower portion of it. John’s slumped shoulders looked broad and powerful. He had his knife out. He let it dangle slightly in front of him, and with his free hand he ran his finger across its blade. Charley had approached him and now stood above him, looking down from a goodish distance. Charley focused his eyes on that knife. There was blood on it; John was cutting his finger and he seemed unaware of it. He was staring off into the sky, a haunting smile on his face, as if someone was tickling him in a good spot. Charley shivered.
“John?”
The man blinked. His smile vanished. He looked up at Charley.
“We should leave soon,” he repeated.
“Leave?”
“We’d talked about moving on. We can’t stay here forever.”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. That place in our dreams…it’s important.” Charley paused, then looked down at the man. “Have you dreamed about it recently?”
“No,” he lied. His finger ran along the blade, leaving a maroon streak that was now starting to drip. In John’s dream, the bridge was narro
w and he shoved both Charley and Eve off, listening to their cries as they fell to the molten glow below.
“We need to find Those of the Light.”
“Those of the Dark have been here,” John whispered.
Charley felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. “When?”
John looked up at him, a light smile on his face. “I’ve seen them.”
Charley could not tell if he was lying or not. He felt like a child listening to an older sibling telling a tale about some evil trolls that come to take bad kids away: he didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it, but somehow he still did.
He pulled his head up and looked off into the silent land. Houses stood dark and empty. The land was slowly being blanketed in a blue dusk. The quiet, the peace, all of these things would have once felt good. Now they did not. They felt wrong now, like a jarring piano key being struck again and again in an otherwise beautiful symphony.
“We’re leaving tomorrow, John. You can come if you want.”
Charley waited for an answer, got none, and so he went back into the house and left John brooding in his odd state.
Leaving tomorrow, are you? John thought. Leaving tomorrow, are we?
John.
A timid voice in his mind spoke up. It had once been the voice of his normal self (though it could be debated if John had ever been normal). It was a scared voice, a frightened voice.
John. Is it possible that you might have already left?
Shivering, smiling, wanting to laugh and cry, John knew that he had left—his sanity, anyway—and before he would kill Charley, he thought he’d take a nice walk.
And so he did.
3
When he came back, he withdrew the knife and walked methodically down the driveway. He wove slightly, as if drunk, but he hadn’t had a drink in a long time. The knife felt hard and assuring in his grip, and he couldn’t wait to slip it inside of Charley. God, how he couldn’t wait for that! Then he and Eve could move on by themselves…or stay here for that matter. They could do whatever they wanted without that woman-stealing bastard around.