Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Shooter and me, we can’t die. It’s that simple. Those things and the being they serve, they made us immortal, and I think back on it and I wish to hell we’d never even heard of Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy. I finally heard the song, you know? The Stan Kenton original. Dumbest song I ever heard, but it’s got a tune I can’t get out of my head, just like I can’t not see those creatures everywhere.

  “That’s the story, my friend. Believe it, don’t believe, it doesn’t matter. What’s an ant’s story worth, anyway? We’re all just scrambling around, serving an invisible friend up in the sky, past the clouds, who if he exists is probably a sadist and doesn’t even know it. And the other being, the ancient one those creatures serve, is just sitting there, watching the bubble, watching the bubble, watching the bubble. Any given second “—he snaps his fingers—” it all just stops, just shatters into darkness, into nothingness, and there’s not a damn thing you or me or God or the Pope or all the king’s horses or all seven dwarfs can do to stop it.”

  Shooter laughs at this and continues his quest for death—click-click-click-click-click-click—while you slowly stand up and thank Rafe for his time, for the cigarette, for the company. You say nothing about the story he’s just told you. You can’t. Talking about it would mean some part of you accepted it as fact, and on the face of it the story is just the rantings of a man who’s seen too much death, too much war, done too many drugs.

  But as you walk away, finally lighting Rafe’s cigarette, you can’t help but notice that the curling smoke exhaled from your lungs lingers a bit longer than usual, is a bit thicker than cigarette smoke usually is. You slow your steps as you realize the smoke is keeping pace with you, following along like a loyal pet at the end of a leash. And you can make out shapes in the smoke, twisted shapes, maybe agonized faces, maybe twisted bodies, maybe flowers and birds and happy little sprites from a children’s fairy-tale book for all you can tell. Another drag, another exhalation, and this new smoke joins the previous, making the shapes a little more visible, a little more defined. You stop as the smoke stops next to you and you look at the cigarette. It’s hand-rolled, not store-bought, and for a second you wonder—Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy?—then, just as quickly, dismiss it. Rafe wouldn’t have given you a cigarette laced with that stuff, would he?

  You continue along, smoking happily away, feeling oddly free, oddly… liberated somehow, and the smoke cloud, it’s dancing around, dancing to some music only it can hear, the echo of a beautiful voice escaping from the throat of something decayed and putrid that’s not part of your world. But then, as the smoke reveals something misshapen with its hungry mouth open and its clawed hands reaching, you throw down the cigarette and crush it under your boot.

  The feeling of liberation remains, and now you can hear the echo of a voice singing to you, singing a song that the smoke-shapes were dancing to, and you grow cold and frightened. You begin to quicken your steps. You try to not look at the shapes in the bricks and stones of the surrounding buildings, the fragmented reflections from the puddles of water left behind after yesterday’s rain, the shapes in the mud that has gathered in the gutters, now drying, forming cracks that seem to outline something trying to—

  —no. No, you don’t see that, you couldn’t have. You’re just a little unnerved by Rafe’s tale, that’s all. And who wouldn’t be? You close your eyes, take a deep breath, and for a moment smell the scent of a rose about to crumble into dust. You open your eyes and move into the still-lingering cigarette smoke. It was just a madman’s story, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.

  The smoke surrounds you. You can’t get away from it or the shape coming into existence within it. The voice sings of forever, of lifted veils, and you choke back a cry of terror as a clawed hand with seven triple-jointed fingers reaches out and begins to pat the top of your head.

  There, there, child. There, there.

  THE OMEN

  Joyce Carol Oates

  A voice sounded close in my ear: Here we are!

  It was early, before the sun had begun to burn off the coastal fog. The cries of gulls awakened me rudely. Why, louder than usual?—more penetrating, chilling? I lay in my bed and listened and decided that the cries were human cries, terrible to hear.

  And yet—so early? When no one would surely be on the beach, still less swimming? In this secluded, windswept place, on a narrow spit of land three miles from the nearest village, and twenty miles from the nearest town. The great presence here was the Atlantic Ocean, and the sky.

  How rapidly, when you have left your former life, the very landscape of that life becomes an abstraction, like a map.

  A map you can fold up, put away and never trouble to look at again.

  Yet the cries awoke me. I had no choice. I dressed rapidly, with shaking fingers. Since coming to live in this remote place at the edge of the ocean I had become invisible, no longer required to see myself through others’ eyes. I fumbled now with my clothing like a child not knowing how to push “buttons” through “buttonholes,” tug up “zippers” against their natural resistance.

  I had no time for shoes, but ran barefoot down the beach.

  We were in midsummer now, but the air was cold. Goose pimples formed on my arms. The damp salt air stung my eyes. Gulls were excitedly circling in the air—but, yes, there were children too, on the beach, by the water’s edge, just below my cottage. They were crouched over something that lay in the surf. Sighting me, one of them waved, and called out words I couldn’t hear; another poked him, as if in rebuke. These children ranged in age between approximately eleven and eight; I recognized two or three of them, among the group of six, but I did not know their names, nor did I know their parents. The cottages here are hidden from one another and from the sandy road that joins us with the mainland—that is the reason, after all, that we came here.

  As I advanced upon them, the children fell silent, and began to retreat. The breakers were rough, windblown; the white froth riding the waves had an old man’s look of incoherent rage. On the beach, the surf swept over and washed back from, something that lay entangled with seaweed, motionless.

  “What is it?”—I heard my voice, the voice of adult authority, cry out to the children.

  But the children did not reply. Exchanging glances with one another—were they frightened? defiant? lewd? bemused?—they laughed and trotted away.

  What a strangely shaped piece of driftwood, or debris, there on the beach…. Was it a human, naked body, a corpse? washed in by the tide? But it was too small to be a human corpse.

  It was too small, about the size of one of the herring gulls so noisily circling overhead. At first I thought it might in fact be a fledgling gull, featherless, fatally out of its nest before it could fly: a limp helpless creature about twenty inches long.

  As I stooped over it, I heard myself whistle in astonishment—in shock.

  The thing at my feet was not a bird, but, incredibly, a man—a fully mature man, the size of an infant. It was tangled in seaweed dark and shiny as eels, it was so pale as to seem, in the pallid dawn, faintly luminescent; it was naked, dead. Not a baby, nor a human fetus, but a man, of any age between thirty and fifty, with a large head hairless except for a fine, dark down, and smooth jaws, and thin bloodless lips drawn back tight in a grimace from small uneven pearly-gray teeth. The eyes were slightly protuberant, the bluish lids not quite shut over them. I saw the eyelashes quiver.

  My God, how could it be!—what could it be!

  I came closer; to squat over it. My heart was beating rapidly as if to warn me away.

  The thing was dead, yet as the surf washed over it, rocking it gently, it gave an appearance of being alive.

  It was lying on its left side, with a look of serenity after enormous effort and pain. The bony legs were bent at the knee, the gracefully curving back showed miniature knobs of bone along the spinal column. The head was disproportionately large for the body, I thought. Had it lived—had he lived—for this was, not it, bu
t he—his neck would surely have been too frail to support his head. His shoulders too were abnormally narrow.

  I was blinking, rubbing at my eyes. Had the mist affected my vision? Or was I still asleep, mired in a nightmare as in the soft, wet, shifting-sucking sand beneath my feet?

  But this was no dream, the little man was real enough. I would have poked it with my foot except the gesture would have been too rude, I would have touched it—him—with my hand, but I could not bring myself to do so.

  Him, not it. For clearly he was human, like me; and, like me, male.

  The bluish eyelids quivered as if about to open. The little forehead was furrowed as if stitched, somber, resigned, with thought.

  A sensation of horror ran through me. Was it—he—alive?

  Between the legs, in miniature, were perfectly proportioned male genitalia, pale like the rest of the body, flaccid and smooth as something skinned. The thighs were painfully thin, the bones at the hip joints prominent, as if about to poke through the skin. The belly, however, was round, and tight, a little potbelly, virtually. Which led me to think that the man was of young middle age, like me.

  His navel was like a tiny gnarl or knot in the flesh. Like a tiny eye.

  No sun had yet appeared, only a pale-glowering light devoid of warmth. Yet, by degrees, as it did most mornings, the fog began to fade. Objects defined themselves. The children had retreated nearly out of earshot but the gulls continued to circle the air not far away, vexed and impatient.

  I became aware too of an unusual amount of debris on the beach this morning, as after a storm. (But had there been a storm? I did not think so.) Numerous sizable clumps of seaweed, driftwood, paper, shredded bits of Styrofoam, a briny smell as of dead fish. There were elongated pale figures here and there in the scattered debris but I didn’t look too closely.

  I was staring at the thing at my feet. The little man. The man.

  In recounting this episode, I am conscious of arranging words with care; I am always conscious of arranging words with care. For misunderstanding frightens and angers me. Yet, my recounting of the episode with such care is a misunderstanding: for, at the time, I was weak with horror, a sense of helplessness, despair… certain repudiated emotions that, in fact, I had retreated to the edge of the continent, to escape. Seeing the little man made me realize that the physical world that gives birth to us, nurtures us and contains and defines us, is not really our world. It is not the world we would have invented.

  And yet—“Here we are!”

  (Had I spoken? The words came back to me, borne by the wind, a sound of anguish, wonder.)

  Did I imagine it, or did the little man’s hollow chest rise, as if he’d inhaled a sudden deep breath… and did his lips move, just perceptibly, as if he were about to speak?

  But I was standing, I stood at my full height, quick to cover sand and debris over his pathetic little corpse. I kicked with my bare feet, I dragged clumps of seaweed to bury him, quick! quick! to save him from the gulls.

  I was shivering almost convulsively. That cold east wind, blowing relentless from the open sea. That glowering east sky, so grudging to turn transparent, to let the sun’s light through. Icy-cold tendrils of water washed over my feet, mad-lapping froth-tongues tickled the soles of my feet. “It’s better, this way! You’ll see! It’s the only way!”

  Again, my words seemed to come at me from the outside, borne by the wind. My lips moved clumsily, as if far away, on the very outside of my being.

  I buried the little man as best as could be expected of me. When I could do no more, I turned and walked swiftly away, not looking back.

  Of course, it was impossible to return to sleep that morning.

  —

  And subsequent mornings… it seems I no sooner lay my head on my pillow in the dark when, abruptly, it’s dawn, and I’m awakened by cries and shouts down on the beach. Why this has happened to me, if it is a curse against my person, or, as so much in the natural world, sheerly an accident, I don’t know.

  This morning, waking groggily, I staggered to the door against my better judgment, and looked out. Another time, the figures of children on the beach. Not directly below my cottage, thank God, but a few hundred yards to the north. There was quite a gang of them this time, as many as eight or ten, and they were circling something the tide had washed ashore, the boldest of them poking at it with their bare feet. I knew the place: it was where a crumbling concrete wall juts out purposely into the crashing waves, and where every kind of garbage seems to be funneled, seaweed, dead fish, jellyfish, God knows what all else. But what is that to me?

  SOMETHING IN THE WATER

  Douglas Wynne

  If he’d been thirteen, or even twelve, it might have been the other way around, but Tommy Shayne was eleven when the newlyweds came to town, so the first thing he noticed about their car was the raised hood and the second was the lithe white leg jutting out of the passenger window. The leg disappeared from view as Tommy rolled up on the driver’s side and resisted the temptation to peer through the window at the thigh that belonged to that calf. There was something playful in the way the lady’s white shoe dangled from her toes, but as he passed the car, its own curves regained his attention. It was a Pontiac Bonneville, two-tone green and gleaming in the sun. Tommy, a collector of car magazines, put it at a ‘58.

  The raised hood didn’t offer any shade to the man bent over the engine, his tie loosened and his crisp white shirt drenched with sweat at the armpits. His hat lay atop the battery and Tommy could tell from the look on the man’s face that he wasn’t accustomed to peering beneath the hood of his car, however fine he might keep the paint job.

  Tommy coasted his bike around behind the fellow, off the road and onto the crunching gravel.

  “Afternoon, Mister. Nice car.”

  “Thanks, but it’s not running so nice right now. I’m afraid it may have overheated.”

  “Like everything around here today.” Tommy laughed. “Where are you headed?”

  The man sighed, turned away from the confounding engine, and looked Tommy over. “New Hampshire. My wife and I are on our honeymoon to the White Mountains.”

  Tommy looked at the back of the car. “Where are the cans?”

  The man smiled. “I think the last one fell off about a mile back.” He wiped his hand on a rag and extended it. “I’m Bill Braddock. And the pretty lady riding shotgun is my wife, Angela.”

  “Tommy Shayne, sir.”

  “And the name of this town we’ve had the unexpected pleasure to stop in?”

  “Dunbury.”

  “Does Dunbury have a mechanic, Tommy?”

  “Mr. Geritson. His garage is just up the road.”

  “I reckon he has a tow truck?”

  “Yes, sir. Want me to go and fetch him for you if he’s around?”

  “That’d be swell.”

  Tommy mounted his bike and pointed it toward town just as a black sedan from that direction came up on Mr. Braddock’s stalled Bonneville and slowed to a crawl. A round-faced man with ruddy cheeks and tawny hair leaned out the window and raised a chubby hand in a lazy wave. “Need a lift?”

  “Well, that’s kind of you,” Mr. Braddock said. “But I think our young friend here is about to fetch us a tow truck from town.”

  The red-faced man looked Tommy over, then shot a glance back in the direction from which he’d come. “Dunbury, eh?”

  “So I’m told,” Mr. Braddock said.

  The man in the black sedan rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. “Well, I’m heading to Greenport, which you probably just passed. It wouldn’t set you back too many miles to ride with me and send a tow from there. Then, if you need a lift to a hotel, I can help you further. I wouldn’t mind.”

  Mr. Braddock picked his hat up off of the car battery and waved the heat of the engine away from his face with it. “Something wrong with the mechanic in Dunbury?”

  The man’s eyes widened and he said, “Oh, no. Not that I’m aware of anyway.
Just trying to help.”

  Tommy spoke up: “Mr. Braddock, my parents run the Dunbury Inn. It ain’t far from the garage, if you find you need a place to stay.”

  Mr. Braddock looked indecisive. “I’m sure we’d be in good hands either way. Let me check with the missus.”

  But before he could, the red-faced man waved him over. Braddock hunched at the window to hear something the Greenporter said in a low voice. Tommy couldn’t sift the words through the sound of the idling engine, but Mr. Braddock’s brow was furrowed when he stepped away from the one car and leaned into the other to confer with his wife. The red-faced man regarded Tommy darkly.

  When Mr. Braddock reemerged, he patted the roof of the Bonneville and said, “She’d like to keep heading north to make the mountains by nightfall if the repairs don’t take too long. But we’re much obliged for the offer, sir. And son, you’ll be the lady’s hero if you can ride that bike fast enough to help us make good time.”

  The man in the black car was already rolling. He gave a curt wave and said, “Suit yourself. But I’d stick to pop and beer in Dunbury.”

  —

  “Are you planning on having children?” Mama asked over dinner.

  “Now, Sarah,” Papa said shaking a thick dollop of mashed potatoes from the wooden spoon onto his plate. “Don’t pry. We’ve only just met these folks.”

  “Sorry,” she said with a remorseless smile. “I hope you do is all. You seem like you’d make great parents. But it changes everything, having children does.”

  Papa sighed.

  “I remember I was taping crepe paper to a float for the Seashore Festival when my water broke.”

  “Was that when Tommy came?” Angela Braddock asked.