Suspended In Dusk (33 page)

A scrape and moan sounded behind her from the dark stairs cutting into the hotel’s underground space.

She kicked the bones out of the way, felt blood slosh in her shoe. The door didn’t budge. Locked. She bit her tongue against the scream rising from her gut and pulled a sconce from her pocket. The impact of the brass against the reinforced glass knocked her teeth together, rattled her joints. The glass held, fogged over with her rapid breath.

The smell of rotting fish filled the stairwell. Something rough scraped against the steps and splashed in the puddle behind her.

She turned for the stairs. A pale, lumpy figure reached the edge of the ring of light cast by the dim bulb above. It hissed, and she saw the flash of fangs before she threw herself onto the door lever. She felt the lock strip—heard the mechanism crack. She tugged at it till it swung open, scattering fragments of the lock around her feet.

More wet bones filled the dim hall. They smelled salty, like the fried pork skins she’d eaten, unknowingly, before her dive.
The
dive. She’d enjoyed them until Rob told her what she was eating.
Flesh.
He’d laughed.

She ran through the hall to the lobby, and the shrieking siren followed her.

The white tiles were smeared with red. No movement or signs of life. She slipped around the corner, into the open foyer.

The smell of stagnant tide pools made her eyes water. Sulfurous ash clouds drifted in through the open entryway. The roar of the ocean mingled with the growling of the mountain, the crash of falling debris. Cracks threaded through the walls and ceiling. In the floor, fissures ran with blood.

Andrea inched around the perimeter of the lobby. She kept her back to the wall, holding the sconce in front of her.

At the back of the lobby lay the wide hall leading to the restaurant and bar. To Santino, with his warm eyes and lingering fingers.

She turned and ran.

Bloated figures lay across the floor, their skin grayed, their limbs convulsing. Their eyes reflected dull silver like tarnished nickel. Bloody wounds, necrotized and oozing, covered their prone forms. They moaned as she passed them, reaching out for her ankles, but a spreading slime stuck them fast to the floor.

The thick, grey metal door behind the bar opened a crack.

Andrea jumped, nearly stumbling into a pool of rot.

“
Macha
,” Santino called.

She ran to him and slid into the room. He slammed the door and locked it behind her.

“I heard you coming,” he said.

She turned to him.

“
Ai, Jesus
,” he shouted. He grabbed her hair at the back of her head, pulled her face skyward.

When she opened her mouth to scream, he jammed the neck of a bottle between her teeth and tipped it. A corrosive tide of tequila stripped her throat.

She dropped to the floor, her hair wrenched from his grip.

“Andrea, can you hear me?”

She moaned.

“Shit,” he said.

“Goddammit, Santino.” She slapped him. She forgot she was still holding the sconce.

He ripped into a stream of foul Spanish.

She pulled herself up, gripping a wall that felt like it rolled in the surf.

He rubbed his face. “Your eyes,
macha
… you’re turning.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. The room spun.

“Where are you hurt?”

She reached down and pulled off her shoes. Black blood poured from the soaked leather.

He poured liquor over her feet, and sponged away the blood with a bar rag. She didn’t feel a thing. He handed her another bottle. “Keep drinking. Nothing can grow in you with that in your veins.”

“Is tequila all you have?”

“Only the best. Top shelf.” He pulled down another cardboard box from a chrome rack.

She sniffed the rim of the bottle, flinched, squeezed her eyes shut and drank deep.

“This doesn’t look good,
macha
,” he pulled the blanket from her pack and set it behind her head. “Drink till you pass out. I promise, if you turn, I’ll kill you in your sleep.”

* * *

Crabs pinched her toes. Slick sea-worms slid under her clothes, like Rob’s roaming hands, and pushed themselves into her wounds, chewing at her insides. She opened her mouth to scream, and warm, salty water rushed in.

* * *

Her head weighed heavy as an anchor. She moaned, but stopped short, her raw throat burning.

Water touched her lips. Not the hot, salty seawater of her dream, but cool water. Fresh. It burned her throat.

“You still in there,
macha
?”

She opened her eyes. The dim light had grown cloudy. Santino’s face shifted in and out of focus. She rubbed her eyelids.

“There you are,” he said. He smiled. One of his teeth was missing, and a sharp point poked through the gum.

“Santino…” She reached for his face.

He pulled back from her touch. “It’s not a good look for me, I know.” His grin wavered.

“How long was I out?” She asked.

“Don’t know. I fell asleep, myself.”

“You were supposed to be watching me.”

“Oops?” he shrugged, and held up an empty bottle. “Besides—when I look at you, how can I tell if I’m dreaming?”

Andrea shook her head, waved away his flirtation. “Your skin…”

“And you’re as silver as a fish belly. We’re turning,
macha
, both of us. It’s a race.”

She stared at her arm. Her skin had lost its glow.

“If I was a gentleman, I’d let you win.” He brushed her hair back from her forehead.

“You’re not?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

She looked down. Her feet were black to the ankles, the skin of her legs grey and scaly. She’d had her first wax for this trip.
Another condition.
Waste of money, either way.
She sniffed.

“I don’t smell like one, yet. Neither do you.”

He tipped another bottle to his lips, then passed it to her. “At the finish line, one of us will smell like fish, the other fish food.” He grinned. The serrated tooth slid further through the puckered skin of his gum.

“Well, no point in running our race sitting down.” She reached up to the chrome bars of the shelves and pulled herself up. Her numb ankles shook.

“What? Where are you going?” he stood, swayed on his feet, reached out and steadied her.

She grasped his wrist. “I don’t want to be eaten alive in a closet. And I don’t want to eat you. I guess I’ll go for a walk on the beach. Feel the sand between my toes.”

“
Macha loco
, you’ll never make it to the beach.”

“Better than sitting here. And I only saw one
thing
walking around on my way here. I think they’re all in town, now.”

He stared at her, his eyes dull. “You’re right, let’s go.” He picked up the pack and dropped two more bottles into it. He dug around on the floor for the sconce she’d hit him with and stuck it in the waistband of his khaki slacks. “With all the tourists shuffling off to town, maybe I can finally see my beach.”

“You don’t have to come,” she said.

“If I’m to be a staggering fish corpse, better to do it where the action is, not locked away in here to starve.”

She nodded. He took her hand and squeezed it.

Sooty air rushed in through the open door, burning their eyes. They squinted through the smoke and stepped out into the bar.

The bodies on the floor had sprouted. Fine filaments of purple, yellow, orange sprung up from their mouths and eyes. Calcified protrusions burst from the skin at their joints. Cloudy pools of water spread from where they lay.

Andrea and Santino wove a path around the reef bodies, down the wide hall to the lobby. The piles of bones had grown over with green fuzz. The earthy smell of chlorophyll combated the sulfurous smoke.

They stepped out of the open entryway. The sky was the color of charcoal, glowing red from the hidden sun and burning mountain. Smoke poured off the bright forest on the slopes to the north, and ran down to town. To their left, surf roared.

They turned toward the beach.

A dozen wrecks bobbed in the shallows, tossed in the waves of an encroaching tide. The waves lapped at the edge of the parking lot and nudged cars into scattered piles. Bodies stuck to the boardwalk, sprouting bright corals. Small fish flapped in the new pools, and nibbled at the clouds pouring off the corpse reefs.

Shuffling fish-figures, their bleached coral bones branching out from fissures in scaly skin, splashed along the flooded path, a new ecology blooming in their footsteps.

Andrea waded into the water. Santino hesitated, then grabbed her hand and followed.

“They’re ignoring us,” he said.

“I don’t think we smell like food anymore.”

“But we don’t smell like they do.”

She lifted his hand to her nose, breathed him in. “You smell like tequila.”

He grinned. A wide, serrated triangle grazed his lower lip, drawing a line of dark blood.

She pulled his face down to hers and licked it clean, sucked gently, drawing more, tasting the warm salt of him. He pushed his hands through her hair. Her curls came away in his fingers. He shook them free into the waves.

Water lapped at their chests as they walked deeper into the sea. The scales on her legs rippled with pleasure in the tug of the current.

She pulled Santino under.

Bubbles trailed from slits in their necks as they kicked through the dark water, silver eyes darting through the cloudy debris of an era at its end.

Pink crepe umbrellas floated on the waves like paper lanterns.

A Keeper of Secrets

Benjamin Knox

By the third day, Anna had long since given into the restless boredom of children her age, and decided to explore the house. It had been, until recently, her grandmother’s house. Her parents had come to organize the old woman’s effects and prepare the wake. Anna thought that it was a silly name for it. Grandma wasn’t about to wake up, even she knew that. Adults were so weird.

She had been left mostly to herself, however, and since it had been raining relentlessly since they had arrived, her exploration would have to be limited to the house. The long sloping back garden was ‘off limits’ her father had told her. It was a pity—she was sure she could see, through the rain streaked window panes, an old weather-worn tire-swing hanging from the large oak at the far end of the garden where the sloping grass and shrubs met the stream that marked the edge of the property. There were probably crabs and even fish in that stream, but the sky had wept continuously and kept her from finding out.

Besides, her mother would go on and on at her if she got even the smallest smudge on her new dress. At first she’d been excited at the prospect of a new dress. Then she saw what her mother had in mind. “It’s respectful,” her mother had told her, but Anna thought that it looked like a big black hanky, with frills. She wasn’t a baby anymore, but her mother was impervious to her protestations. In the end she found herself draped in the silly thing which puffed out at the sides and was itchy all over. She even had to wear the silly little white socks and shiny black shoes. The black bow in her hair was the cherry atop the cake of her humiliation.

Her parents said that she looked lovely and that Granny would have been proud of her. Evidently they didn’t remember Grandma Harris very well.

Hence Anna—trapped in the silly itchy dress and feeling more like a doll than she ever had in her whole life—took it upon herself to count the rooms on all three floors of her Grandmother’s house.

* * *

It was by accident that she discovered the attic; and the door on a string, with its folding stairs. It wasn’t difficult to open at all. The mechanisms were all well-oiled. At first the darkness of the attic had made her feel nervous. It looked to her, at least for a moment, like the yawning maw of some strange beast. It reminded her of a nature programme she had seen on television where crocodiles would lie in the sun with their mouths open and birds would wander between their jaws oblivious of the danger. She felt a little like that bird now, as she mounted the attic stairs. A naked bulb hung from the darkness, and the image of the attic doorway being a mouth came back to her, the bulb the beast’s uvula, and the steps the creature’s tongue.

The air of the large and dark space was cloudy with dust and smelled musty. Mould, dust and old wooden scents writhed in the newly disturbed air. Anna reached up and tugged the cord. The light cast by the bare bulb was sickly and weak but enough to navigate the attic space by.

Square ghosts of draped luggage loomed out at her in the electric glare. These ghosts were accompanied by racks of old plastic-sheathed clothes and even older furniture.