Desperate By Dusk

by Alexander Salkin

  Jessie shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe he picked up some kind of illness from just being here. We're not in our hometown, Ramone. We could be completely susceptible to what even amounts to the common cold out here. Just like how War of the Worlds played out. Or hell, think how the whole thing with the early settlers and the Native Americans played out. Maybe just coming here gives you red eye syndrome eventually, for all I know."

  "This just keeps getting better. Well, now what?" fretted Ramone. "Can't take him to a hospital here, I'd think. Shoot, what if we get sick like he did?"

  Jessie raised his hands assertively, trying to take to the situation with at least an ounce of proactive response. "Hey now, we don't know anything about this place yet. Maybe this is pretty normal? Second, if we get sick out here, there's not a damn lot we can do about it if we drop within a minute or two of feeling it. So, I'm just saying, don't worry about it, because worrying's no good. That said, we can't really take him back to the car either. He'll be in plain sight if this place isn't safe to be seen. And he might be more comfortable here in the shade. I say we treat his issue like any fever. Keep his forehead wet, keep him cool. Maybe get him something to drink if he wakes up."

  "Secondly, you're gonna stay with him. Maybe that lake water wasn't on the up and up. Could've been nasty microbes in that lake that got into him somehow. And you were in contact with it, too. So there's some chance something might happen to you as well."

  That was a troubling thought. "What are you going to do?" Ramone asked.

  "I'm gonna take a chance and see if I can't find a bottle of treated water or something for him. We might have to ride this out until we drift back to our world," said Jessie, sounding resigned.

  "Is that wise? I mean, I know Dresden Port like the back of my hand," Ramone told him. "I'm also faster on my feet and with all due respect, I can probably handle myself better if there's a problem."

  Jessie took a deep breath and sneered. He glared at Ramone, with a squint of his eyes. He knew what Ramone was too polite to say to him- that he was visibly out of shape and his bad knee probably would make anything revolving around running off in case of trouble a near impossibility. "Exciting idea; you're gonna sit there, and like it. Just about an hour ago, you were clearly more banged up than anyone else here. You had a goddamned Niagara Falls worth of blood coming off of your face, the mother of all headaches by your own admittance, and like I said, you had contact with the lake water. If you get sick from that too, I'll at least know where to find you. You're going stay with him and make sure nothing else bad happens, okay? Don't act like I can't do things."

  Ramone blinked. "Woah, easy man, easy. I wasn't trying to insult you. Just figured I'd offer, okay? Yeah, I have a wicked screaming migraine. But I'd still go out of my way to help him out."

  Jessie studied him and nodded, standing about as straight as his body would allow. "Then we have that much in common."

  The two looked at each other with respect earned over the years despite their mutual antagonism. The boys exchanged a slow fist bump. "Okay, straw dog. Do what you think is best. We'll be here," Ramone said with a weary but wide smile. "If someone tries dragging him off? I'm still good for a scrap." It was mainly bravado, but the motivation was there none the less. The three looked after their brothers.

  "You might be out cold when that happens, if you get or have whatever he's got," Jessie reminded, a playful mocking tone in his voice.

  Ramone shrugged and smiled. "I'm a reaaal light sleeper. Go on, have fun. Just be back before supper."

  CHAPTER 17

  Leaving the other two behind, Jessie trudged on through the woods. He was slow of foot and not terribly mindful of how to trail blaze effectively on his own. He simply brushed his way past ferns and saplings. In fairness, he was lost in his own thoughts. How was he going to improve their situation? He wasn't a doctor of any sort. Did they even make bottled water here? He knew nothing of this place.

  Still, the idea of doing nothing was deeply unappealing. In certain situations it was best to wait, he knew that. And maybe he would only make things worse here by going off alone. But he felt like he had to do something and he knew he was the least bear bit of the group. His friends, aggravating though they could be, were still family. And he needed to show the same loyalty to them that they had for him. Jessie knew well that they would have bent over backwards to help him out of almost any situation. Even that braggart Ramone was quick to step up and offer him some living space. Granted, Jessie wasn't certain he could stand to live in mister alpha male's castle, but he appreciated it and it was at least better than Mannington mansion. Opulence did not necessarily mean comfort, after all.

  On another note, he felt a little worse off since Simon was the one to take ill. He knew Ramone was bullishly tough, almost stupidly so. The guy was not a lightweight for any facet of life. But Jessie knew the man was pushing himself to make it seem that everything was alright with him. Simon didn't have that same phenomenal constitution, by comparison. Few did.

  Simon was the kind of guy who sometimes softened what he said. He was the least likely to argue and wasn't prone to anger. He could assertively argue sometimes, but there was a sense of detachment that came with it. Simon, in some ways, was the balm between his natural acid and Ramone's devil-may-care behavior. They needed Simon around. Otherwise, the two of them were basically just some old married couple in denial. Jessie knew this in his more socially introspective moments. Indeed, they did happen on occasion.

  People were more complicated than appliances and gadgets. They didn't have blueprints you could follow to fix them. And sometimes, doing something another person needed or wanted still wasn't the right solution to whatever the problem was. Jessie liked things with non-ambiguous answers. A crossword puzzle would have a single set of correct responses one could fill out to solve the entirety of the challenge. A car, while complicated, had a logical set of components that could basically be set to a math equation to define how the car worked. People? Humans were finicky, difficult, often lacking personal awareness, and just annoying. People were a pain in the ass. Friends, family, it didn't matter. At the same time, that's what made them interesting.

  There was definitely a challenge to understanding and dealing with people. As much as he often loathed others, they were still sort of fascinating. He knew he would never be good at handling them. It wasn't his aptitude and too many brought out a level of casual disgust within that he wasn't necessarily proud of. He also lacked the interest to manipulate other people, which was something he saw in the naturally charismatic, such as Ramone. Only the lunkhead, for his own sake, rarely would do it to any degree other than to get a rise out of him.

  Simon could be a fence sitter, but he wasn't exactly the follower everyone alleged him to be. While it was true that Simon tended to walk in Ramone's shadow, it seemed more to Jessie that behind those sunglasses, he was distracted. Or perhaps mentally projected somewhere else. Simon struck him as a daydreamer, sort of lost in his own head. The person they saw and hung out with kept his inner nature distant from others, only bubbling up when situations or conversations needed it. But to his credit, Simon was the one Jessie felt he could talk to. Well, if he would talk to someone. Simon tended to bring up things that were normally unsaid or on the outskirts of his own thoughts. He was better at working with the vaguer points of life, something Jessie quietly envied.

  Sometimes those things being said went over his head. They usually escaped Ramone's. But there was something refreshing about his friend. There was a sense of neutrality within him. It wasn't the cynical indifference that so many of their peers or Jessie himself knew he possessed, but a feeling of ambient acceptance. Maybe it just seemed that way. Or perhaps, at the end of the day, Simon seemed like who he could have been had things played out a little different. A dreamer more than a logician; a wanderer not restrained by the obviousness of form and linear thought; a person who both did and did not belong within his surroundings.

 
Wandering through the brush and wilds of Dresden Port's perimeter for some time, Jessie made his way to a three way intersecting local road of faded asphalt and numerous clusters of crab grass growing from the cracks within. At the center inside a woodsy border was a large metal roadside with the usual highway gothic font listing off a simple fare of locations, their direction, and distance in miles. In this world, they still remained and Jessie figured it would make good cover to observe his surroundings, while he crested a small embankment of grass and dead leaves.

  Crouching down, much to the appreciation of his strained and perpetually limping leg, Jessie observed the area in relative safety. It made only sense to make use of both natural and man-made cover. What did not add up was everything else.

  Dresden Port did not look right at all. While buildings stood roughly where he remembered them to be, the paint upon them was universally some faded tone of Indian clay or adobe. Parasitic tree vines climbed up their many sides and hung dead, and seemingly no attempt had been made to remove them over the course of decades. There were street signs, but all of them were black, with unfamiliar white symbols upon them. They were a far cry from the green ones found so commonly back home.

  Additionally, many properties were surrounded by walls of stone or iron rail fences, with everything topped in diamond shaped points, not unlike the Picklehaube helmets used in old Prussia and Bavaria. Men walked the sidewalks in groups of threes, dressed in masked ebony robes that looked like that of the Ku Klux Klan, save that their otherwise conical hats were worn languidly back, perhaps more like a sleeping cap or that of a wizard. He could make out peculiar footwear beneath their frocks that looked to be encircled layers of colored yarn wrapped around their feet. And several of these men walked dogs in front of them. They were thin bodied Doberman Pinschers, each bearing a complicated brand on a single side of their rear quarters, like one might mark their cow.

  Of these groups, at least one man (and there may have been women, he couldn't tell) carried a burning incense laden censer before him as he walked. In the other hand, something that resembled a wand or hilt ending in a series of ragged dirty cloth strips, in which he swung in front of him on occasion, dispersing the misty emanations of the pungent incense.

  Able to view down the vista of the street, as well as observe some adjacent roads, he spied no less than five of these wandering KKK monks. The air was warm with an oppressive haze of their burnings, which smelled like a cross between sage and something naturally acrid that he couldn't put to words. Sounds of a droning indistinct chant, the only noise beyond the birds of the forest, echoed throughout the unhallowed decrepit structures of the unsettling mockery of Dresden Port.

  Shaking from unfamiliar anxiety and working up a cold sweat, Jessie slunk down with his back against the embankment, contemplating what he saw. He could not have guessed any of this from the 4 H grounds, or the woods proper that encroached upon the town.

  For once, he wished one of his theories had not come to light. Red eyed Dresden Port sounded so much more charming. But this? He wasn't even sure what he was looking at. This version of home struck an unfamiliar chord with him. Perhaps it was because his home seemed so quaint and decidedly less satanic than… whatever this was. That said, he didn't recognize the new aesthetics in particular. The strange symbols reminded him of things seen in his occult encyclopedia collection, but nothing he could particularly recall. He only took that sort of content so seriously. It was more for reference in regards to their potential weekend adventures, than any vested interest to practice the eldritch arts.

  And what of their distinctive clothing? Certainly, they resembled something from that infamous American hate group, but it wasn't quite the same either. With the censer, the air swishing rod, and the chanting, it seemed more religious than anything to do with one's skin or a nonsensical romanticized notion of one's genetic purity. And much like the buildings, he recognized the general ensemble, but not the color or the worn style. Everything was familiar and yet so foreign, blended together into an unfamiliar combination. Was this what the guys had been dealing with in red eyed world?

  Gazing lost into a copse of trees as he listened to their monk-like droning voices, Jessie found himself undergoing a gut check. He was less than fully certain that he was mentally prepared to deal with this. He knew if he walked into town, he would stand out like a sore thumb. If just by a glance, he knew he understood nothing of what was going on beyond the sign and hill crest at his back. This Dresden Port had been taken over by something that appeared to be a patrolled dark theocracy. If this had been a weekend adventure that was getting out of hand they'd retreat to the car, make a trip to a diner or a bar to review, and let out the tension. Of course, that wasn't an option. Oh, he just had to make a big deal about being capable of 'doing something', which to his chagrin was starting to feel more than a little foolish now. And on top of that, his friends were not in the best shape as they sat quietly in the woods, about a quarter mile down the road. They were counting on him. He had set himself up, blindly, to take on any challenge.

  Peer pressure meant little to Jessie. He was no stranger to taking the abuse of random people, an experience well burned into him in high school and from life in general. But in high school, he also had a friendly face in Simon. And eventually, even that big grinning oaf, Ramone. Did the succor of their friendship not matter to him? "Fuck's sake, I'm dumb as hell," he muttered under his breath, wincing.

  He took a slow, deep breath. Although not prone to anxiety, sometimes things moved too fast. And he was more of a planner than the type who made knee jerk responses. If everything followed a logical pattern, then the problem could be quantified. And a problem could have a solution, even if the course followed had to be a tough one. He was not afraid of that. He was an engineer at heart. He could find a way.

  Of course, people were trickier by his standards. However, what about those holding to coded behavior? Maybe less so, he thought. He noticed the groups walked approximately in three's, sometimes with a dog of the Doberman pinscher breed. He didn't know what the chant was about or if their patrols were specific to a routine. But the fact they wore such fully covering robes meant their ability to discern individual identities, at least on a superficial level, would not be strong. It seemed like it could be a lot of effort and risk just to get some clean water for Simon, but perhaps blending in was the most sensible action. "When in Rome…" Of course, the matter of where to get a spare set of their garments was the next step. He wasn't the stealthiest person around, but with a bit of luck, perhaps he could find a clothesline with just the disguise he needed. From there on, hopefully he could figure things out while traveling incognito. It had to be less suspicious than traipsing about in his day clothes.

  Now, one of the most important things about any new plan is coming to understand that no first draft is perfect, unexpected variables can easily arise, and sometimes life is complete bullshit. That last lesson was firmly instilled from New Jersey itself. It was about this time that Jessie noticed he was not as alone as he thought. He had that feeling of eyes upon him, a little mystery that anyone with base awareness could sense but struggled to explain. With that in mind, he turned to his left, towards the woods strafing further alongside the town, where he happened to see a small figure watching him. He froze, but not before barely concealing a choice obscene slip of the tongue.

  Some forty yards away, standing down alongside the same embankment he rested against, stood a young girl. She reminded him of a much younger Aveirasen, at first glance. So much so, that he almost called her name out in question.

  The girl seemed to be somewhere between a child and a teenager, but he was a poor judge guessing one's age. She wore a black frock with overly long sleeves that nearly covered her hands, but her ankles were visibly mud stained and as bare as her feet. Her hair was black, very similar to that of the Voice from the Silver Light, and worn about as long down her back. She stood staring at him with a blank expression, clutching a large
book to her chest in one hand. Notably, her skin was pale, but with a lifeless faint blue shade. For all practical purposes, she seemed to be standing there, superficially not just ghostly, but dead in pallor. He was not certain how long she had been there.

  He met her stare with a perturbed expression, not sure what to make of the situation, save for the skip of his heart beating. Slowly, he raised his hand, and made a feeble wave. "Oh. Um… hi there…" he said quietly. She regarded him without response.

  The lack of greeting, movement, or anything resembling a social reaction only unsettled him more. Was she one of their children, he wondered? Did they all look like that under their uniforms?

  After a few moments more, she walked towards him with very slow methodical steps, crunching the occasional dry twig and pinecone under her small feet. She stopped once more at a mere ten yards, when his poise stiffened about the shoulders and he swallowed hard. He raised a hand out to her again, less in greeting, and more in forbearance now. "Hey kid, I'm not looking for trouble. Okay?" Not that children intimidated him, but this one was almost corpse-like, and he was already on edge from his reconnaissance.

  She studied him for a moment, tilting her head deeply against her shoulder. He then noticed her eyes were featureless dark orbs, shining like polished marble in the spokes of sunlight through the tree boughs. They might not have been black, but he couldn't discern what color they could have been either. "Dais ale'sh ontigua niev," she whispered to him throatily. Up close, she didn't look real. Now she appeared more like a creepy doll that was designed to resemble a human, standing less than five feet in height.