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The kid wouldn’t miss her. He’d be fine. He’d be sleeping and the door would be locked and he’d be just fine.

*  *  *

Their names were Jim Durbin and Mike Brady. They were from Cedar Rapids and they owned a couple of computer stores and they were going to open a big new one in Denver. Ordinarily, Jim would fly but Mike was scared to fly. And ordinarily, they would stay in a nicer motel than this but they couldn’t find anything else on the road. Her excuse for knocking on their door this late was the front office didn’t have a cigarette machine and she was out and she heard them still up and she wondered if either of them had a few cigarettes they’d loan her. Jim said he didn’t smoke but Mike did. Jim said he’d been trying for years to get Mike to quit. How do you like that? Jim said. Guy doesn’t mind risking lung cancer every day of his life but he won’t get on an airplane?

They had a nice bottle of I. W. Harper and invited her in. It was obvious Mike was interested in her. Jim was married. Mike was just going through a divorce he called “painful.” He said his wife ended up running off with this doctor she was on this charity committee with. Jim said Mike needed a good woman to rebuild Mike’s self-esteem. That was a word Angie heard a lot. She liked the daytime talk shows and they talked a lot about self-esteem. There was a transvestite prostitute on just last week, as a matter of fact, and Angie felt sorry for the poor thing. He/she said that’s all he/she was looking for, self-esteem.

Angie got sort of drunk and spent her time talking to Mike while Jim took a shower and got ready for bed. Angie could tell he was taking a real long time to give Mike and her a chance to be alone. And then they were making out and his hands were all over her and then she was down on her knees next to his bed and doing him and he was gasping and groaning and bucking and just going crazy and it made her feel powerful and wonderful to make a man this happy, especially a broken-hearted one.

When Jim came back, wearing a red terry-cloth robe and rubbing his crew cut with a white towel, Angie and Mike were sitting in chairs and having another drink.

“So, what’s going on?” Jim said.

“Well,” Mike said, and he looked like a teenager, excited and nervous at the same time, “I was going to ask Angie if she’d like to come to Denver with me. Spend a couple of weeks while we get the grand opening all set up and everything.”

Jim said, still rubbing his crew cut with the white towel, “This is a guy who does everything first-class, Angie, let me tell you. You should see his condo. The view of the city. Unbelievable.”

“You like Jet Skiing?” Mike said.

“Sure,” Angie said, though she wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

“Well, I’ve got
two
Jet Skis and they’re a ball. Believe me, we could have a lot of fun. You could stay at my condo and do what you like during the day—shop or whatever—and then at night, we’ll get together again.”

Jim said, “God, Angie, you’re a miracle worker. This sounds like my old buddy Mike Brady. I haven’t heard him sound this happy in three or four years.”

Mike grinned. “Maybe I’m in love.”

And he leaned over and slid his arm around Angie’s neck and gave her a big whiskey kiss on the mouth.

All she could think of was how strange it was. Maybe she’d met the man who was going to make her into a kept woman. And this one wasn’t married, either. He could marry her somewhere down the line.

She said, “Wait till I tell Jason.”

Mike gave her a funny look. “Jason? Who’s Jason?”

Jim came over, too. “Yeah, who’s Jason?”

“Oh, sort of my stepson, I guess you’d say.”

“You’re traveling with a kid?” Mike said.

“Yeah.”

Mike didn’t have to say anything. It was all in his face. He’d been outlining an orgy of activities and she went and mined it all with reality. A kid. A fucking kid.

“Oh,” Mike said, finally.

“He’s a real nice kid,” Angie said. “Real quiet and everything.”

“I’m sure he’s a nice kid, Angie,” Jim said. “But I don’t think that’s what Mike had in mind. Nothing against kids, you understand. I’ve got two of my own and Mike’s got three.”

“I love kids,” Mike said, as if somebody had accused him otherwise.

“He wouldn’t be any trouble,” Angie said. “He really wouldn’t.”

Mike and Jim looked at each other and Jim said, looking at Angie now, “You know what we should do? Why don’t we take your phone number, you know where you’re staying in Omaha and everything, and then Mike can give you a call when he gets settled into his condo?”

Mike didn’t have nerve enough to say good-bye so Jim was doing it for him.

A ball and chain, she remembered Roy said about Jason. Mike wasn’t going to call. Jim was just saying that. And she’d be somewhere in Omaha, maybe with a waitress job or something. And pretty soon school would roll around and she’d have to worry about school clothes and getting him enrolled in a new school and everything. While somebody else would be living with Mike in his Denver condo, and Jet Skiing, whatever that was, and using Mike’s American Express to buy new clothes and stuff.

She said, “You know if there’s a river around here somewhere?”

“A river?” Jim said.

“Yes,” she said. “A river.”

Next morning at seven
A.M
. she knocked on the door. A sleepy pajamaed Jim opened it. “Hey,” he said. “How’s it goin’?” He sounded a little leery of seeing her. He’d obviously hoped they’d put the Denver matter to rest last night.

“Guess what?” she said.

“What?”

“I said I was sort of Jason’s stepmother? Well, actually, I’m his aunt. My sister lives about ten miles from here and has troubles with depression. She wanted me to take him for a while but she stopped by the room here real early this morning and picked him up. Said she was feeling a lot better.”

Mike could be seen over Jim’s shoulder now. He said, excited, “So you don’t have the kid anymore?”

“Free, white and twenty-one,” she said.

“You’re going to Denver!” he said.

Jim said, “I’m going to get some breakfast down the road. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He got dressed quick and left.

They did it their first time right in Mike’s mussed bed. Only once or twice did she think of the kid, and how she’d smothered him in the room. She hadn’t had any trouble finding the river. She had to give it to Roy. The ball-and-chain business. She had liked the kid but he really was a ball and chain.

A few hours later, they left for Denver. That night, they had spare ribs for supper at a roadside place. They drank a lot of wine, or vino, as Jim kept calling it, and Mike as a joke licked some of the rib sauce off her fingers. She was scared about later, when she went to sleep. Maybe she’d have nightmares about the kid. But she snuggled up to Mike real good and after they made love, they lay in the darkness sharing his cigarette and talking about Denver and she ended up not having any dreams at all.

Al Sarrantonio

THE ROPY THING

Joe R. Lansdale, Hisownself here. Writing about Al Sarrantonio. He was too modest to do it, so someone had to do it, and I’ve read just about everything he’s written and have known him for years and love his short fiction
.

When I was learning to write, one of the writers I was most impressed with and wanted to emulate was Al Sarrantonio. Here was a guy who had a unique point of view. He was always his own man, but he reminded me a bit of the best of Bradbury, had that same poetic echo. He reminded me a bit of an unsung short story writer, Kit Reed. Had that same sort of inexplicable subtext that spoke to your most inner self but wasn’t something you could define in words
.

That’s what Al’s done here. He’s written another of his beautiful little fables via horror fiction. It has that special thing that makes a good story more than a story. It has echo beyond the words
.

—J.R.L. (Hisownself)

T
he ropy thing got most of the neighborhood while Suzie and Jerry were watching Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Then the cable went out and Jerry’s dad put on the radio but then that went out too. By then Suzie and Jerry were watching the ropy thing from the big picture window in Jerry’s living room. The ropy thing was very fast, and sometimes they saw only its tip stretched high and straight, or formed into a loop, or snaking over a house or between trees or moving over cars. It hesitated, then shot into the moving van in front of Suzie’s house across the street, pulling a fat uniformed mover out, coiling around him head to toe like a mummy and then yanking him down into the ground. It pulled Suzie’s mom into the ground too, catching her as she tried to run back into the house from where she had been directing the movers from the curb.

“We’re getting out!” Jerry’s dad shouted, giving Jerry a strange look, and the ropy thing got him in the front yard between the garage and the car. Behind him was Jerry’s mom, with an armful of pillows, and the ropy thing got her too. It got Jerry’s sister, Jane, as she was sneaking away from the house to be with her boyfriend, Brad, down the block. Suzie and Jerry watched the ropy thing jump out of the bushes in front of Brad’s house like a coiled black spring, getting Jane right in front of Brad, just as she reached to hold his hand. Brad turned to run but it got him too, shooting up out of the lawn and over the sidewalk, thin and fast. It whipped around Brad and squeezed him into two pieces, top and bottom, then pulled both halves down.

Suzie and Jerry ran up to the attic, and the ropy thing snaked up around the house but didn’t climb that high and then went away. From the small octagonal attic window they watched it wrap around the Myers’ house and pull the Myers’ baby from the second-story window. Then it curled like a cat around the Myers’ house’s foundation, circling three times around and twitching, and stayed there.

“This is just like—” Jerry said, turning to Suzie, fear in his voice. “I know,” Suzie said, hushing him.

When they looked back at the Myers’ house all the windows were broken and the porch posts had been ripped away, and the ropy thing was gone. They spied it down the block to the right, waving lazily in the air before whipping down; then they saw it up the block to the left, moving between two houses into the street to catch a running boy who looked like Billy Carson.

The day rose, a summer morning with nothing but heat.

The afternoon was hotter, an oven in the attic.

The ropy thing continued its work.

They discovered that the ropy thing could climb as high as it wanted when they retrieved Jerry’s dad’s binoculars and found the ropy thing wrapped like a boa constrictor around the steeple of the Methodist church in the middle of town, blocks away. It pulled something small, kicking and too far away to hear, out of the belfry and then slid down and away.

“I’m telling you it’s—” Jerry said again.

Peering through the binoculars, Suzie again hushed him, but not before he finished: “—just like my father’s trick.”

*  *  *

They spent that night in the attic with the window cracked open for air. The ropy thing was outside, moving under the light of the moon. Twice it came close, once breaking the big picture window on the ground floor, then shooting up just in front of the attic window, tickling the opening with its tip, making Jerry, who was watching, gasp, but then flying away.

They found a box of crackers and ate them. The ropy thing’s passings in front of the moon made vague, dark-gray shadows on the attic’s ceiling and walls.

“Do you think it’s happening everywhere?” Jerry asked.

“What do
you
think?” Suzie replied, and then Jerry remembered Dad’s battery shortwave radio that pulled in stations from all over the world. It was in the back of the attic near the box of flashlights.

He got it and turned it on, and up and down the dial there was nothing but hissing.

“Everywhere …” Jerry whispered.

“Looks that way,” Suzie answered.

“It can’t be …” Jerry said.

Suzie ate another cracker.

Suddenly, Jerry dropped the radio and began to cry. “But it was just a trick my father played on me! It wasn’t real!”

“It seemed real at the time, didn’t it?” Suzie asked.

Jerry continued to sob. “He was
always
playing tricks on me! After I swallowed a cherry pit he hid a bunch of leaves in his hand and made believe he pulled them from my ear—he told me the cherry pit had grown inside and that I was now filled with a cherry tree! Another time he swore that a spaceship was about to land in the backyard, then he made me watch out the big picture window while he snuck into the back and threw a toy rocket over the roof so that it came down in front of me!” He looked earnest and confused. “He was always doing things like that!”

“You believed the tricks while they were happening, didn’t you?” Suzie asked.

“Yes! But—”

“Maybe if you believe something hard enough, it happens for real.”

Jerry was frantic. “But it was just a trick! You were with me, you saw what he did! He buried a piece of rope in the backyard, then brought us out and pulled the rope partway out of the ground, and said it was part of a giant monster, the Ropy Thing, which filled up the entire Earth until it was just below the surface—and that anytime it wanted it would throw out its ropy tentacles and grab everybody, and pull them down and suck them into its pulsating jelly body—”

He looked at Suzie with a kind of pleading on his face. “It wasn’t
real
!”

“You believed.”

“
It was just a trick
!”

“But you believed it was real,” Suzie said quietly. She was staring at the floor. “Maybe because my mother was moving, taking me away from you, you believed so hard that you made it real.” She looked up at him. “Maybe that’s why it hasn’t gotten us—because you did it.”

She went to him and held him, stroking his hair with her long, thin fingers.

“Maybe you did it because you love me,” she said.

Jerry looked up at her, his eyes still wet with tears. “I
do
love you,” he said.

They ate all the food in the house after a week, and then moved to the Myers’ house and ate all their food, and then to the Janzens’ next door to the Myers’. They ate their way, uninvited guests, down one block and up the next. They ran from house to house at twilight or dawn. The ropy thing never came near them, busy now with catching all the neighborhood’s dogs and cats.

Even when they did see the ropy thing, it stayed away, poking into a house on the next block, straining up straight, nearly touching the clouds, black and almost oily in the sun, like an antenna. It disappeared for days at a time, and once they saw a second ropy thing, through the telescope in the house they were living in, so far away from their own now that they didn’t even know their hosts’ names. They were near the edge of town, and the next town over had its own ropy thing curling up into the afternoon, rising up like a shoot here and there, pausing for a moment before bending midriff to point at the ropy thing in their own neighborhood. Their own ropy thing bent and pointed back at it.

Suzie looked at Jerry, who wanted to cry.

“Everywhere,” she said.

*  *  *

As the summer wore on the squirrels disappeared, and then the birds and crickets and gnats and mosquitoes. Jerry and Suzie moved from house to house, town to town, and sometimes when they were out they saw the ropy thing pulling dragonflies into the ground, swatting flies dead and yanking them away. Everywhere it was the same: the ropy thing had rid every town, every house, every place, of people and animals and insects. Even the bees in the late summer were gone, as if the ropy thing had saved them for last, and now pulled them into its jelly body along with everything else alive. In one town they found a small zoo, and paused to look with wonder at the empty cages, the clean gorilla pit, the lapping water empty of seals.

There was plenty to eat, and water to drink, and soda in cans, and finally when they were done with the towns surrounding their town they rode a train, climbing into its engine and getting the diesel to fire and studying the controls and making it move. The engine made a sound like caught thunder. Even Jerry laughed then, putting his head out of the cab to feel the wind like a living thing on his face. Suzie fired the horn, which bellowed like a bullfrog. They passed a city, and then another, until the train ran out of fuel and left them in another town much like their own.

They moved on to another town after that, and then another after that, and always the ropy thing was there, following them, a sentinel in the distance, rising above the highest buildings, its end twitching.

Summer rolled toward autumn. Now, even when he looked at Suzie, Jerry never smiled anymore. His eyes became hollow, and his hands trembled, and he barely ate.

Autumn arrived, and still they moved on. In one nameless town, in one empty basement of an empty house, Jerry walked trembling to the workbench and took down from its pegboard a pair of pliers. He handed them to Suzie and said, “Make me stop believing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Get the ropy thing out of my head.”

Suzie laughed, went to the workbench herself and retrieved a flashlight, which she shined into Jerry’s ears.

“Nothing in there but wax,” she said.

“I don’t want to believe anymore,” Jerry said listlessly, sounding like a ghost.

“It’s too late,” Suzie said. Jerry lay down on the floor and curled up into a ball.

“Then I want to die,” he whispered.

Winter snapped at the heels of autumn. The air was apple cold, but there were no more apples. The ropy thing spent the fall yanking trees and bushes and late roses and grass into the ground.

It was scouring the planet clean of weeds and fish and amoebas and germs.

Jerry stopped eating, and Suzie had to help him walk.

Idly, Jerry wondered what the ropy thing would do after it had killed the Earth.

Suzie and Jerry stood between towns gazing at a field of dirt. In the distance the ropy thing waved and worked, making corn stalks disappear in neat rows. Behind Jerry and Suzie, angled off the highway into a dusty ditch, was the car that Suzie had driven, telephone books propping her up so that she could see over the wheel, until it ran out of gas. The sky was a thin dusty blue-gray, painted with sickly clouds, empty of birds.

A few pale snowflakes fell.

“I want it to end,” Jerry whispered hoarsely.

He had not had so much as a drink of water in days. His clothes were rags, his eyes sunken with grief. When he looked at the sky now his eyeballs ached, as if blinded by light.

“I … want it to stop,” he croaked.

He sat deliberately down in the dust, looking like an old man in a child’s body. He looked up at Suzie, blinked weakly.