Dark Gods

by T E. D Klein

  And even earlier, on page 1°<:

  There's something up there who means :<> do us harm.

  It was on page 11 that he saw it-two simple words on a line all their own, written without explanation:

  The Hungerer

  He sat there dumbfounded, the words burning themselves into his brain like a squigglc of hot wire.

  Suddenly the cheap plastic one-piece telephone hanging from the kitchen wall gave a single startled chirp, echoed immediately by a ringing from the bedroom.

  Nadelman was on his feet and dashing toward the kitchen before it rang again, hoping it hadn't awakened Rhoda and fearful that it might, just might, be Cele, reaching out to him in the grip of some post-coital passion. He yanked the thing from its plastic cradle.

  "Hello?" His voice was louder than he'd intended, and the silence afterward stretched on too long. "Hello?"

  There was no voice in reply, just the sound of wind, a hint of far-off traffic.

  He was about to whisper Cele's name, when it occurred to him that it couldn't be her on the line; he intentionally hadn't given her his new unlisted number. Softly he replaced the receiver.

  This is crazy, he told himself. He'd had the number changed less than two wtcks ago and was already getting crank calls.

  Perhaps it was the thought of cranks that triggered it-the sudden realization of who the caller had been.

  Huntoon. of course; who else? The unlisted number was vicariv no hurdle; if the man was able to divine what lav buried in Nadelman ^ old notebooks and to lathom a god's secret name, he could certamiv

  figure out a phone number. Maybe, in some mysterious but no doubt perfectly logical way that would someday be explained by science, he'd contrived to read Nadelman's mind.

  Unless, perhaps, he had somehow managed to gain entry into the apartment ....

  Nadelman's eyes strayed to the window, but he was thinking again o! the phone call. What he'd heard in the background had been traf-fic, he was sure of it. On impulse he returned to the kitchen and peered through us grimy side window overlooking the corner and, across Second Avenue, a lonely pair of pay phones. Squinting, he moved closer. At first it looked as if there were a body curled at the foot of one of them, but the headlights of a passing car revealed that it was only a sack of garbage someone had left piled there.

  He was tempted to call Huntoon back and talk to him-there were so many things he needed to ask-but it was far too late at night, especially with the guy's old mother probably asleep hours ago. He contented himself with muttering "creep!" for the dozenth time that night and resolved to phone Huntoon in the morning.

  He returned one more time to the notebook, wondering what in the world had possessed him to write that stark, disturbing name in the middle of page 11. One thing he noticed, as he studied the pages that preceded and followed the entry, was that this particular section was filled with childhood dreams. Maybe he had recently read a paper-back on the subject, or maybe it was the influence of some friend at school; in any case, he appeared to have been much taken'with his dreams in those days, faithfully recording them each morning in all their perplexing detail.

  He read through a few such entries.

  "In a meadow, like the one at camp, only there's a city at the edge of it... ."

  "In study hall, it's really hot, and then this girl comes in ..."

  He soon gave up. They were alien, boring, like the dreams of another person. They meant nothing to him.

  He forced himself to read a few more. Despite the subtlety and detail with which his daytime fantasies were composed, most of his dreams tended to be trite, childish affairs, the crudest of melodramas, like fleeing from a lion, or holding a bear at bay on the other side of a door. The most common of all, whose meaning needed no explanation, involved wandering through the corridors of foreign hotels searching vainly for a bathroom.

  He envied those whose dream worlds were built on a grander scale, opulent and colorful as a Hollywood epic-like Lovecraft's, which pro-vided the plots of his stories, and Fuseli's, which were so vivid the artist would eat red meat before going to bed in the hope of inducing them. Kubla Khan's Xanadu, the subject of Coleridge's grand dream, had itself been inspired by another dream half a millennium before, the Emperor having conceived its design in his sleep, complete with stately pleasure dome.

  Maybe, in the same way, he himself had conceived of "The Hungerer." Perhaps those very words had been the product of a dream. Was that why he'd committed them to his notebook? Now that he thought about it, he did seem dimly to remember waking up one morning and jotting the phrase down, just as he'd done with other dreams.

  Or was this simply his imagination? Why, after all, would he have scribbled two mysterious words and stopped right there?

  Behind him, in the kitchen, the telephone emitted another chirp. He jumped to his feet and answered it.

  "Hello?" His voice, this time, was guarded.

  No answer. Again the whisper of traffic, then a closer, more intimate sound, like the soft, deliberate, liquid stir of mud-mud opening its jaws, yearning to speak words. A tiny click now, and someone breathed directly in his ear. "Hello?" It was his wife's voice, hoarse from sleep. He heard the shift of sheets.

  "It's okay, honey. Just a crank. Go back to sleep."

  He heard a muffled crackling, as of crumpled paper pressed against the speaker of the phone. He doubted it came from the bedroom.

  "Hang up, honey. It's okay."

  He waited until she got off the line, then gave vent to his fury. "Listen," he said, trying to keep from shouting, "I know it's you, Huntoon, and it isn't goddamn funny. You want to talk? Okay, good-let's talk!"

  He waited. There was no sound.

  "Okay, schmuck, have it your way! I'm just going to call you back, and I don't give a shit if I wake up your mother."

  Trembling, he hung up, then picked up the phone again and dialed 516 information.

  There was an unexpected delay in finding the number. "No," the operator said at last, "we have no one by that name in Long Beach. Are you sure that's the right spelling?"

  Then Nadelman remembered: there'd been no return number on either of Huntoon's two phone messages. In fact, the secretary had said something about his sounding "like he's calling from a bar." Maybe the guy had no phone. Maybe he always called from phone booths ....

  Nadelman hurried back to the window. There was no one standing at the pay phones on the corner. Even the bag of garbage that had been lying there was gone.

  The kitchen suddenly felt very cold. All he wanted now was to slide into his cozy, wife-warmed bed. Wearily he scooped up his college papers, like a child putting away toys, and dumped them back in the suitcase. He stared at the notebook for a moment, but knew he didn't dare reopen it, and dumped it in on top of the magazines.

  He flipped one last time through the scribbled yellow manuscript of the poem; here, in this hodge-podge of handwriting, cross-outs, and arrows, was the jungle where the mystery lurked. On the next-to-final page, right after the Invocation, another crossed-out passage caught his eye-not just a line, this time, and not merely rearranged wording, but an entire four-line rhyme; imprisoned on the page behind a row of heavy X's, it had never made it into the typed version. Aside from the god's name, it appeared to be the only element in the poem that had been totally altered. The substituted passage, printed neatly beside it, was much easier to read-"Success at lastl/Across the miles of space/Appear the vast/proportions of His face"-but Nadelman could just make out, through the latticework of X's, the original lines:

  The ritual works!

  for God at last breaks through

  A god who smirks and says, "The joke's on you!"

  Saturday, drizzly as somehow it had to be, he slept late, as if unwill-ing to leave the world of dreams, however shabby they might be com-pared to Kubla Khan's. He lay in bed long after Rhoda had gotten dressed and gone off to her indoor tennis lesson, then spent the after noon with Michael, whom he'd promised to take to Macy's f
or new boots and another in a long line of pocket video games. All day, so much that even the boy noticed, he remained grave and uncom-municative, weighing how he was going to deal with the new facts in his life, like one who's just received bad news from the doctor.

  On Sunday, a day set aside for visiting Rhoda's parents in New Rochelle, Nadelman bowed out of the expedition.

  "I've got to confront this Huntoon character," he said over breakfast. "The creep's driving me crazy, he's a terrible pest, and he could mean real trouble some day."

  "I'm worried about you going out there all alone," said Rhoda, solicitous in a way she hadn't been in years. "How do you know he's not dangerous?"

  "Well, he seems to take awfully good care of his mother."

  "Sure," she said, "and good care of his record collection. That doesn't mean anything. I just don't think it's a good idea to go challenging people like that. You don't know what he might be capable of. I've read those letters."

  "Look, I'm not going to challenge the guy," said Nadelman. "I'm going to be very very nice to him. You know how nice I can be, once I get going."

  "I'd almost forgotten." She gave him a worried smile. "What bothers me is the thought of him getting you inside his house. Why don't you just meet him at some coffee shop somewhere? Wouldn't that be safer?"

  "I keep telling you, honey, he doesn't have a phone. I have to go inside just to talk to him."

  "Well, if you still insist on schlepping all the way out there, at least don't stay long. Just poke your head in and tell him to come for a walk or something. I don't like the idea of you going inside that house. God knows what he's got in there."

  "What's he got in his house, Mommy?" asked Michael. He waited in vain for an answer. "What's he got in his house, Daddy?"

  "I've heard he's got all the handkerchiefs you keep losing," Nadelman said, pushing himself back from the table. "And all the gloves."

  Michael gave a shout of laughter until Rhoda hushed him. "Sweetie, go inside and get your shoes on. We don't want to be late to Grandpa's." When he was out of the room the worry returned to her face. "Honey, I mean it. Promise me you'll speak to him out-side. And don't let him take you on that roof."

  "I promise," he lied.

  He drove the two of them to Penn Station, then kissed them both goodbye as he slid from the car and left the wheel to Rhoda. Wat-ching them drive away, he felt a quickening sense of excitement, as if he were a boy setting off alone on an adventure, in pursuit of some unknown he would have to face squarely, eyeball to eyeball, the way Davy Crockett had grinned down bears. His train, waiting noisily for him in the depths of the station, was a great silver tube that would carry him to the sea-and to knowledge. As he found his seat and heard the doors slide irrevocably shut, he felt his heart beat faster, and reminded himself that he was merely going to see a man who had somehow managed to read his mind. It had to be a trick; and it was one he had to learn.

  He settled back in his seat with Advertising Age and The New Yorker, and only when the conductor came to take his fare did he notice the woman seated across the aisle from him, idly picking her nose as she sat immersed in a paperback. On her left cheek, jagged and obscene-looking, was an upside-down five-pointed star. Life had clearly taken its meat cleaver to her-her face was lined, the skin sagging and roughened-but he recognized her, after a moment, as the homely, pockmarked girl he'd seen ten years before in the S & M bar in Chelsea. Only then she had been naked from the waist up and had worn a pair of chains across her chest. Now she sat bundled up like a child in a light blue quilted ski-jacket. The design on her cheek now looked old and pale instead of dark, like the scar from a bygone operation. Wrinkles had formed amid the lines of the star, like vines growing over a trellis.

  Christ, he told himself, it really had been a brand! These people were for real. He was intrigued to see her in mufti, looking so ordinary, and to think that he alone knew her secret. Unattractive as she was, he found himself aroused by the memory of those small naked breast. How bizarre she had looked, there in the crowd; how brazenly she'd marched from man to man! Was there anything a woman like this wouldn't do?

  Leaning in her direction, he attracted her attention by waving the magazines. "Excuse me," he called, "didn't I once see you in a bar on Twenty-first Street?"

  She glanced up with none of the suspicion a normal woman might have displayed. "You mean the Chateau?"

  "That's right."

  She grinned, showing her gums. It was not a pretty grin; her teeth were long and yellow. "Yeah, that was me," she said, her face a mix-ture of embarrassment and pride. She'd been sitting next to the win-dow, but now she slid into the aisle seat. "Wow, I'm so amazed you recognized me." She pronounced it reckinized; there was more than a hint of Brooklyn in her voice.

  "Well, you made a pretty strong impression," he said, reluctant to tell her he had merely recognized the brand.

  "I don't think I remember you," she said. "Were you a member?"

  He shook his head. "No, in fact I only went once."

  "I went every Thursday night," she said proudly. "I never missed a single open house, as long as the club lasted."

  "It closed down?"

  "Uh-huh, it must've been-oh, four or five years ago, at least."

  He nodded politely, wondering who else in the car might be listen-ing to their conversation. "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "I'm not," she said. "I haven't been part of that scene in years. I'm miles beyond that now."

  He stared at her. "You mean, even rougher stuff?"

  "No, I'm trying to channel more energy into the spiritual side of my nature. That other bullshit, it was like eating junk food, you know? What I'm doing now is getting integrated with who I once was."

  "Ah." Nervously he clutched his Ad Age.

  "I found out that I used to be a sorceress in a tribe of Celts."

  Nadelman nodded, smiling, but he was already depressed.

  "And before that I was a sybil in a pharaoh's court."

  "Amazing!" It was invariably the celebrities these people claimed to have been-never the commoners, the peasants. "And where are you off to now?" he asked. "Some kind of meeting?"

  "Oh, no," she said, giggling, "I'm seeing my girlfrin' Linda." The phrase came out like a single ceremonial title. "She used to work in my department at Woolworth's, but she got a job with the phone company and I haven't seen her since summer. I get off at Kew Gardens. See, she's only four blocks from the station." She paused, twirling a strand of hair around her fingers. "Where you going?"

  "Oh, out to Long Beach," he said.

  "That's a long way's away." She thought a moment. "My friend's grandmother got put in one of those nursing homes out there. You from there?"

  He shook his head. "I haven't seen the place since I was around ten. I had an aunt who rented a house near the boardwalk, and my family used to visit in the summer. We lived a couple of towns over, in Woodland Park."

  "Oh, sure," she said. "I know where that is." She picked at something on her nose. "You stopping there, too?"

  Nadelman shrugged. "I hadn't planned on it."

  "You should. Believe me, it's no good to lose contact with the past-bad things can happen. You get cut off from things."

  Her stop had come. Standing, she smiled her toothy smile and pat-ted the book she'd been reading so that Nadelman could see the title: Discover Your Past Lives.

  He hadn't been back to Woodland Park m-how many years had it been? His family had moved to Rye in the late 1950s-around two years after his bar mitzvah, he recalled-and just before his mother had retired to Florida in '77 she'd made a trip back there on her own. She had wanted him to accompany her, but there'd been some kind of crisis at the office and he'd been unable to get away. That's right, the Ocean Spray account, which had later fallen through. So how-long had it been? . . . God! Nearly thirty years.

  The train reached Woodland Park shortly after one. The first thing Nadelman noticed was that they had modernized the station. Stepping from the
train, he wondered if anything from his childhood would be left. He had checked the timetable and knew he'd have nearly an hour and a half to walk around. Whistling tunelessly, he buttoned up his coat, dug his hands in his pockets, and headed toward the main street of the town.

  Two blocks from the station, he passed his old brick grammar school; it was still standing, like some huge empty monument to his childhood. The building looked the same as he remembered it, but a decade ago, with the post-Baby Boom shortage of children in the area, it had been turned into an administrative center; the playground, he could see, was now a parking lot, inhabited only by ghosts. Its high metal fences, today guarding nothing but a Mercator-like grid of white lines, had once enclosed a microcosm of humanity: lovers, adventurers, bullies and their victims, team players, compromisers, and, somewhere, the misfits. Nadelman walked on, not caring to look back; thank heaven Michael went to a small school.

  The village looked much the same too, though once again it was only the buildings themselves that stood unchanged; the individual signs they bore were new. The bright front windows of a computer store and a shop that sold nothing but jogging shoes made a strange contrast to the old brick buildings that housed them, like modern pictures set in ancient frames, but it was the frames that interested him more. He saw, above one window, a plaque that said "1943," and his heart beat faster. That woman on the train had been right; he was glad he'd come. He had made a great unexpected loop in time, returning himself to the center of things.

  Still whistling, he left the village behind and strolled past blocks of suburban homes that looked cozy and secure against the grey November sky. The frontyards stood empty today, except for a teenager in one of the driveways, waxing his Toyota. The rest were probably inside watching football. Recognizing the outlines of a wide Queen Anne-type house that stood on the corner, Nadelman turned down the curving little lane where he had lived, forcing himself not to break into a run as he passed two more large homes, a smaller red Cape Cod, a row of evergreens; he was trying to prolong the anticipation.