Supernatural Noir (13 page)

“Bring it, bitches,” he said, slurring the words.

On Sleazy, on Spongehead, on Ratfuck and Groper.

He gave an amused grunt. Now this was some funny shit. I mean, really. Elves. They were almost in striking distance, cudgels lifted, knives at ready, their scowling faces knotted in fury. In their original context, they might have been seen as brave and resolute, the defenders of a helpless village. Rambos among elves. Forest guerrillas. Hardy little fuckers. Here they could only be misunderstood.

At the last second fear eroded his intention to meet death head on, and he made a panic move, stumbling forward in an attempt to break through their defenses. Something cracked the top of his head, and he found himself gazing into the depths of the whirlpool, into a funnel of blackness at whose blacker-than-black bottom a convulsed flower revolved, a bloom with a thousand petals that rippled and undulated like those of some vast and complicated sea creature sucking him down into its nothing-colored maw.

——

An orange glow penetrated his lids and his first thought was that the breezeway lights had come back on, but on opening his eyes he realized it was the early sun. He lay at the base of the wall and everything ached, especially his head. His clothes were soaked with dew. Laboriously, he made it to his knees and saw over the top of the wall other cliffs, stratifications of reddish sediment towering above the ocean. Beneath the shadows of high cumulus the water was dark purple, and among the cloud shadows lay swatches of glittering orange. The soft crush of the surf was constant and serene. He touched the crown of his head and couldn’t tell whether he felt his scalp or the pads of his fingers.

“Thank goodness,” said the girl’s voice behind him. “I thought I was going to have to call nine-one-one. What happened?”

Her hand fell to his shoulder and in a reflex of fright he knocked it away and scrambled to his feet. She retreated, bewilderment plain on her face. At her rear, a couple of yards distant, stood the elves—an evil Walt Disney platoon prepared to follow their hillbilly Snow White ditsy queen into battle. He was fairly certain they were grouped and posed differently from when he had initially seen them. Dizzy, he sank down in the grass and leaned against the wall.

“You got blood all over you,” she said, and held out a packet of tissues. “I bought you some wipes.”

If she were a witch, if she had almost killed him and was gaming him now, she had a smooth fucking act.

“Did you know the office door’s busted out?” she said. “That have anything to do with how you got bloody?”

“You tell me.”

She took to running her mouth, saying there was so many criminals these days, why, even in a piddly place like her hometown, people were always breaking into Coulters, this big old department store, and robbing the Dairy Queen and all. His paranoia ebbed and, though with half his mind he believed that her asinine rap was designed to put him at ease, make him let down his guard, he permitted her to kneel beside him and dab at his injuries with the wipes. The astringent stung, but it felt better than it hurt. He kept an eye on the elves. Sunlight glistened on their caved-in faces, charged the tips of their weapons. Their scowls seemed diminished. They approved of this union between Magic Girl and Action Lad. What the fuck, Michael said to himself. If you believe what you think you believe, you should render her ass unconscious and beat it—but he wasn’t sure he could drive.

“You’re wrong to be doing this,” said the girl as she finished her cleanup.

“Doing what?”

“Breaking up with me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you don’t think so, there’s nothing to say, ’cause when you go and think something you’re bound to believe it. I may not know much about you, but I know that.”

He rested his head on his knees. “I don’t want to talk.”

After a while the girl said, “I’m sorry.”

He cocked an eye toward her. “What for? Did you do something to me?”

“That wasn’t my meaning. I’m just sorry about everything.”

The wind gusted, flattening the grass; a thin tide of light raced across the lawn and from somewhere below the rim of the cliff came the crying of gulls. Michael felt weak and lazy in the sun.

“You really going to give me a thousand dollars?” she asked.

“I meant it when I said it.”

She plucked a handful of grass and let the wind take it from her palm. “I been trying to think how to convince you we’d be good together. I know what I was feeling last night. It was just a start—I understand that. But it was real, and if you can’t remember how it was, if it got knocked out of you or whatever, maybe you should hunt up what you felt and take a chance on it. ’Cause that’s all feelings are—things you catch and ride as far as they’ll take you. It’s sorta like hitchhiking.”

That Tennessee mountain homily, pure as moonshine trickling from a rock.

I hear you, Sonnet darling, but things got a tad too freaky for me.

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I . . .”

“Let me talk, all right? I ain’t asking for nothing.”

She tugged at the crotch of her cutoffs; her face was calm.

“When you said you’d give me a thousand dollars,” she went on, “I was angry. I thought you was treating me like a whore. Then I got to wondering why you’re giving me so much.”

Impatient with analysis, he said, “You don’t have to explain this shit.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She peered at him. “You feeling okay? You don’t look too good.”

The time has come for solicitude, he thought. After passion, after anger and despair, after the fear and the trembling, a little friendly concern: the cheese tray of the romantic supper.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Actually, lover, I’m in tiptop shape. I’m sitting here communing with my peeps, the Mojo Demon Elves, the Kamikaze Hellfighter Elves, while you and I discuss, among other subjects, Sexual Politics in the Theater of the Real.

“I told myself, he can’t be giving me all that money just to make hisself feel better,” she went on. “I guess that showed me you wasn’t trying to deny that something happened. And it made me see things your way. Like maybe you were right about us.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” he said listlessly.

“I don’t understand why it’s okay to split up,” she said. “But I guess it is. I never thought I’d say that after last night. I suppose the money helps make it okay. I ain’t a total fool—I know that’s part of it. But I keep wanting to say for us to give it a try. And I keep thinking it’s me who’s right.”

She looked him straight in the eye, a strong look, something certain behind it. The wind strayed a few strands of hair across her cheek, touching the corner of her mouth—she didn’t bother to brush them aside.

“It’s funny how when you’re surest about things, at the same time you’re scaredest that you’re fooling yourself,” she said.

She poked a finger into the black dirt beneath the grass, digging up a clump. Michael was enthralled. There was a new tension in her delivery and he believed she was building toward something important, something that would punctuate or define.

“It may not make sense,” she said. “But the way I see it, maybe we’re both wrong.”

Disappointed, his thoughts shifted miles and hours ahead to Seattle in the rain, new night streets, new opportunities for failure, for fuckup.

“Know what I’m saying?” she asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Michael. “It’d be sort of hard not to know.”

——

The girl drove past the shattered office door and the empty parking lot, past the shops, none of them open, no one in the streets, not a stray cat or a loose dog. Sitting beside her, Michael was spooked but too wasted to react. They had seen only one person in Whidby Bay and now even he was gone. Someone should be up and about, putting out the trash, opening for business.

“I don’t see a hospital,” the girl said.

“I don’t want a hospital. Drive.”

“You should get yourself checked out!”

“There’d be too many questions. They might call the cops. All manner of shit could go wrong. Just drive. I’ll get myself checked out later.”

“You want me to drive anywhere special? Some other hospital?”

“Seattle.”

“That mean we’re sticking together?” she asked in a chirpy tone.

It might add some zest to his latest downward spiral to hang with a chick who possibly could animate elves or transform him into a lizard, and herself as well, and they’d go scampering along the ditches and make scaly, tail-lashing love underneath a yucca plant . . . Or she’d set a fire with her eyes in a trash alley and they’d lean out a window with a cardboard flap for a curtain and toast marshmallows, until one day she got super pissed and crushed underfoot the teensy spider into which she’d implanted his soul. Not knowing about her would be exhilarating. Inspiring. And how could this bizarre uncertainty be worse than what he’d been through already? Or worse than where he was ultimately headed. It was a tough call. Regular Death or Premium? Two blocks slid by before he said, “I don’t care.”

She slowed the car. “What do you mean, you don’t care? I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all good,” he said. “Just keep driving . . . And make sure I don’t go to sleep.”

She stepped on the gas and after another block she said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk. Engage me in conversation.”

She pulled out onto the interstate. It too was empty, devoid of traffic. “What you want I should talk about?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! Tell me why there’s no people around, no cars. Where the fuck are we? Limbo? You’re a goddamn motor mouth—it should be easy.”

“Limbo? That some place in Oregon?”

Naw, it’s over in Moontana, Suzi Belle.

“Well, is it? Say.”

“Never mind.”

She sang her tuneless tune and before long a car passed, traveling in the opposite direction.

“See,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yeah. Quite a coincidence.” He shifted in the seat, half-turned toward her. “What’s that singing thing about?”

She gave him a quizzical look, and he did a poor imitation of her.

“Oh, that!” she said. “It’s just something I do, you know, when I’m concentrating on stuff . . . or when I get emotional. ’Bout half the time I don’t know I’m doing it.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “But I don’t sound nothing like that. You make me sound awful!”

Gray clouds obscured the sun and the world grew increasingly gloomy as they drove. Traffic picked up, but he didn’t see people moving about in the food marts and gas stations along the highway. The sun was a tinny glare without apparent vitality or warmth that leached the evergreens and billboard images of color. The girl began to sing again and Michael noticed that she had an erratic, glowing silhouette—the light dimming and brightening around her ever so slightly with the rhythm of the tune. His vision still wasn’t right, flickering at the edges, but he chose to accept that what he’d noticed was not the product of a concussion. That’s my girl, he thought. My special Jesus groupie, my Mary Magdalene. He settled into the ride, stretching out his legs, unkinking his neck, and said, “This country’s deader than shit. I hope Seattle’s got some fucking people in it.”

The girl’s singing trailed off—she kept her eyes straight ahead and said, “It’s a big city, dummy. There’s bound to be people.” She hadn’t spoken to him this way before, flat and disaffected, like a woman disappointed in a man she had once held high hopes for. Then, with a lilt in her voice, a distinct hint of sly merriment, she added, “Course, you just can’t never predict what kind of people they’re going to be.”

——

Lucius Shepard’s
short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His most recent books are a short-fiction collection,
Viator Plus
, and a short novel,
The Taborin Scale
. Forthcoming are another short-fiction collection,
Five Autobiographies
; two novels, tentatively titled
The Piercefields
and
The End of Life as We Know It
(the latter, young adult); and a short novel,
The House of Everything and Nothing
.

Jeffrey Ford

—

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.

You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that
Twilight Zone
where you make your own hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep, and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I told her I was sick.

“I’ve seen you around town,” she said. “You’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”

And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.

What could I say? I took the money, and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was to laugh. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.

I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high, downtown, still feeling shitty, when I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The mannequin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.

I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”

At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”

Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. There was a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground.

Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for: suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp shining right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.

One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”

Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something. “I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”

“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was 99 percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.

Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m six foot four inches, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”

Just past the library, we cut down an alley, crossed a vacant lot, snow still on the ground, and then hit a dirt road that led back to this abandoned factory. One story, white stucco, all the windows empty, glass on the ground, part of the roof caved in. She led me through a stand of trees around to the left side of the old building. From where we stood, I could see a lake through the woods. She pointed at the wall and said, “Do you see that symbol in red there?” I looked but all I saw was a couple of
Fuck
s.

“I don’t see it,” I told her.

“Pay attention,” she said and took a step closer to the wall. Then I saw it. About the size of two fists. It was like a capital
E
tipped over on its three points, and sitting on its back, right in the middle, was an
o
. “Take a good look at it,” she told me. “I want you to remember it.”

I stared for a few seconds and told her, “Okay, I got it.”

“I walk to the lake almost every day,” she said. “This wasn’t here a couple of days ago.” She looked at me like that was supposed to mean something to me. I shrugged; she scowled. As we walked home, it started to snow.

Before I could even take off the dead man’s jacket, she called me into her office. She was sitting at her desk, still in her coat and hat, with a book open in front of her. I came over to the desk, and she pointed at the book. “What do you see there?” she asked. And there it was, the red, knocked-over
E
with the
o
on top.

I said, “Yeah, the thing from before. What is it?”

“The Last Triangle,” she said.

“Where’s the triangle come in?” I asked.

“The three points of the capital
E
stand for the three points of a triangle.”

“So what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Here’s what I want you to do. Tomorrow, after breakfast, I want you to take a pad and a pen, and I want you to walk all around the town, everywhere you can think of, and look to see if that symbol appears on any other walls. If you find one, write down the address for it—street and number. Look for places that are abandoned, rundown, burned out.”

I didn’t want to believe she was crazy, but . . .

I said to her, “Don’t you have any real work for me to do—heavy lifting, digging, painting, you know?”

“Just do what I ask you to do.”

Ms. Berkley gave me a few bucks and sent me on my way. First things first, I went downtown, scored a couple of joints, bought a forty of Colt. Then I did the grand tour. It was fucking freezing, of course. The sky was brown, and the dead man’s jacket wasn’t cutting it. I found the first of the symbols on the wall of a closed-down bar. The place had a pink plastic sign that said
Here It Is
, with a silhouette of a woman with an Afro sitting in a martini glass. The
E
was there in red on the plywood of a boarded front window. I had to walk a block each way to figure out the address, but I got it. After that I kept looking. I walked myself sober and then some and didn’t get back to the house till nightfall.

When I told Ms. Berkley that I’d found one, she smiled and clapped her hands together. She asked for the address, and I delivered. She set me up with spaghetti and meatballs at the kitchen table. I was tired, but seriously, I felt like a prince. She went down the hall to her office. A few minutes later, she came back with a piece of paper in her hand. As I pushed the plate away, she set the paper down in front of me and then took a seat.

“That’s a map of town,” she said. I looked it over. There were two dots in red pen and a straight line connecting them. “You see the dots?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Those are two points of the Last Triangle.”

“Okay,” I said and thought, “Here we go . . .”

“The Last Triangle is an equilateral triangle; all the sides are equal,” she said.

I failed math every year in high school, so I just nodded.

“Since we know these two points, we know that the last point is in one of two places on the map, either east or west.” She reached across the table and slid the map toward her. With the red pen, she made two dots and then made two triangles sharing a line down the center. She pushed the map toward me again. “Tomorrow you have to look either here or here,” she said, pointing with the tip of the pen.

The next day I found the third one, to the east, just before it got dark. A tall old house, on the edge of an abandoned industrial park. It looked like there’d been a fire. There was an old rusted Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. The
E
-and-
o
thing was spray-painted on the trunk.

When I brought her that info, she gave me the lowdown on the triangle. “I read a lot of books about history,” she said, “and I have this ability to remember things I’ve seen or read. If I saw a phone number once, I’d remember it correctly. It’s not a photographic memory; it doesn’t work automatically or with everything. Maybe five years ago I read this book on ancient magic,
The Spells of Abriel the Magus
, and I remembered the symbol from that book when I saw it on the wall of the old factory last week. I came home, found the book, and reread the part about the Last Triangle. It’s also known as Abriel’s Escape or Abriel’s Prison.

“Abriel was a thirteenth-century magus . . . magician. He wandered around Europe and created six powerful spells. The triangle, once marked out, denotes a protective zone in which its creator cannot be harmed. There’s a limitation to the size it can be, each leg no more than a mile. At the same time that zone is a sanctuary, it’s a trap. The magus can’t leave its boundary, ever. To cross it is certain death. For this reason, the spell was used only once, by Abriel, in Dresden, to escape a number of people he’d harmed with his dark arts who had sent their own wizards to kill him. He lived out the rest of his life there, within the Last Triangle, and died at one hundred years of age.”

“That’s a doozy.”

“Pay attention,” she said. “For the Last Triangle to be activated, the creator of the triangle must take a life at its geographical center between the time of the three symbols being marked in the world and the next full moon. Legend has it, Abriel killed the baker Ellot Haber to induce the spell.”