Tales from the Nightside (3 page)

***

"So," Joe said near the end of the shift, "he would finish wrapping up the dead, see, and take them to something like a courthouse where they'd be judged for whatever they did when they were alive. But Wes, I don't understand what all this has to do with Terry."

Wes smiled weakly, said nothing, and as soon as the morning shift began filing out of the office, he waved a brusque good-bye and headed for his car. He drove for several hours, aimlessly, though keeping to the back roads to minimize contact with other cars. Then, when he could no longer see without squinting, he returned to his apartment and threw himself onto the couch, one arm over his eyes.

He slept.

Did not dream.

Woke only once: when the telephone rang and a man, his voice officiously contrite, said,
I'm sorry, Wes, but that's the way it goes. Good luck.

It was nearly nine when he roused himself again, showered the sleep and fog from his mind, and dressed in the near-military uniform of khaki and green he was required to wear. Then he made himself a dinner of steak and potatoes, carrots and lima beans—the steak he had been saving for the celebration of freedom. He tasted almost nothing, spent most of the time chewing absently and staring at the wall clock over the counter by the sink.

I am an engineer, he told himself; I do not believe in what I saw last night.

But he could see how others might, and that's what frightened him. Times were bad—not for everyone, but for enough—and when this town becomes intolerable you look toward the next one. The same with worlds. When life is lousy, like butting against a wall that doesn't even show the marks, you look for the afterlife; it has to be better there, right? It sure as hell can't get worse. And with organized religions falling apart under the weight of secular advancement and no scientific proof, it didn't take him long to see that somewhere, someone decided that maybe the good old days might hold the answer—and in this case, those "good old days" were numbered in the thousands of years. Someone who was steeped in Egyptology. Someone who deluded himself into thinking that if this life wasn't fair, maybe the gods would be.

After all, gods don't die; they simply go into retirement until someone believes again.

And if enough people believe, if enough people are miserable...

“Nonsense," he snapped at his knife and fork. "Damned utter nonsense."

But, something told him, you can't deny the coins and you can't deny the light, and you can't deny the fact that Terry has gone.

He raced into the living room and scrambled for the phone book, found Terry's number and called it.

"I'm sorry," a man's voice said, "but there's no one here by that name."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, believe me. I've lived here for six years."

He tried Peter Hawkins, who had lived with two friends.

"Hawkins? I'm sorry, there's no one here by that name."

He tried Dave Sparker, who lived with his parents.

"Is this a joke? We ain't never had any kids, Mac."

I'm sorry, Wes, but that's the way it goes.

He closed his eyes to imagine Terry as he'd last seen her: hands clutching the wheel, eyes determinedly straight ahead; but the look she had given him before she drove off... relief. Sad, but relieved.

He shook his head and left for work, found Joe already seated at the table in the break room, and slid in beside him with a cup of coffee. "I'm cracking up, kid," he said, and explained.

Joe listened attentively, tracing designs on the table's plastic top until Wes had done. "Interesting," he said. "But for crying out loud, Wes, you know it can't be true."

"I know what I saw."

The young man grinned. "You know what you think you saw, right? Look, Wes, just for the sake of argument let's assume that what you're saying is true. Then why are there still ghettos and rundown slums and unemployment and stuff like that? I mean, if life is so rotten, why haven't all those people taken this way out? It doesn't make sense. Terry just decided it was time to get out before she cracked, that's all. She was doing something for herself for a change."

But the kids!"

"Did you ever see them?"

Wes frowned. Shook his head. “But,” he said, “our whole society is based on the reach of the automobile, right? How many really poor folks have one? The car gets you out, see. You wake up one day and your fare is in the glove compartment and off you go. A little sad, maybe, because you're leaving your friends and what all, but you know it's going to be better, so you go."

Joe shook his head, grinning. "Wes, you should have been a writer or something. For an engineer, you got a hell of an imagination. But," he added quickly, a hand up to quiet him, "assuming one more time that this is all so, what do you and I have to worry about? We're not starving, are we? I'm getting good grades all the time, and you're getting more and more interviews so that you're bound to hit one sooner or later. You're too good. It's just a matter of time."

He clapped Wes on the shoulder, pointed at the clock on the wall, and reached up for the fur-lined jackets they would be wearing that night. He helped Wes into his, Wes returned the favor, and they trudged out to the tollbooths to begin the shift.

He's right, Wes thought, as he nodded to the man leaving his booth; I'm letting myself panic, that's all. I'm losing faith in myself, and I can't let that happen.

At the first break, neither of them had been handed the silver pyramid coins.

At the second, Joe had had one.

Wes decided to do some figuring and, for the next few nights, kept a record of the fake coins as they flowed into the booths. Joe was getting worried, but like Terry he replaced the fares with money of his own. So did Wes. And by the end of the month, he noted with curious calm that there was an increase in the number of cars that passed along the road between the hours of twelve and three, so much so that the authority was toying with the idea of putting on two extra men. And as the cars increased, so did the coins. There was no geometric progression, only one or two more each night, but in no case was he able to catch a glimpse of the driver after he'd realized what he'd been handed.

"If this keeps up," he said to Joe one January night, "we're both going to be broke."

"Not me," Joe said, grinning. "You'll be happy to know, sir, that this toll taker is giving his notice."

"What?"

"That's right, Wes. I just got word there's a scholarship waiting for me on the West Coast, and I'm taking the first flight to San Francisco I can get." He slapped at the table and laughed. “Done, pal. This boy is done taking quarters for the rest of his life."

"I'll kill him," the supervisor said when Joe left an hour early, laughing, shrieking his delight that his nights would now be his own. "I'll get that punk if it's the last thing I do. He can't leave me short like this, damnit! He can't!"

Wes tsked and shook his head. "Revenge is not charity," he said, unable to keep back a grin.

He slept well that day, rose just after six, and made himself breakfast. Then he checked his mail, opened one rather thick envelope, and threw the rest into the air. It had come. In Iowa, a firm was looking for an electronics man with just his qualifications; and more importantly, it had the funds to offer him a salary not much less than he'd been making with his own company. Unashamedly he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, shaving, crying, shaking his head and wishing Joe had waited one more day to hear his own fine news. And Terry; he rinsed the razor under the faucet and wondered if he would have had the nerve to ask her to marry him. It would have meant instant family, of course, but it would have... might have stopped her from...

He scowled and threw the razor into the sink, stalked into the bedroom and pulled on his clothes, so viciously that he tore two shirts at the shoulder before calming enough to get one on properly.

"Knock it off, pal," he muttered to himself as he hurried downstairs to the parking lot and his car. "You got the wrong number, and she took off someplace else. Someplace real, pal, someplace real."

Hawkins.

Sparker.

His mood grew heavy, grey, like a storm grumbling on the horizon. He snarled at everyone at the office, including his supervisor, and it was well past midnight before he was able to force himself to relax and remember the job. The job. He laughed aloud as a car pulled into the gap and a hand reached up to him. He leaned down to take the coin, still laughing until he saw Joe's face in the dim dashboard light.

The young man was unshaven, pale, perspiration running down his face as though it were the middle of summer. His jaw trembled, his lips quivered, and before his hand slapped back to the wheel as if magnetized, he gasped one word: "Supervisor."

Wes yelled as the car shot out of the gap and vanished down the black road, the taillights glaring at him redly until, abruptly, they vanished.

He had no intention of looking at his palm.

He knew what would be there.

For several minutes he stood there numbly, unthinking, then snapping back to the day Joe had quit and the supervisor had ranted for the rest of the night.

Wes groaned and threw the coin away.

Joe believed. Joe knew.

That Wes's intellectual game-playing was not playing at all, that he was right about the depression that had fallen on people, the need to escape, the need for comfort. But he was also wrong about one vital matter: those gods, all of them shunted aside in the glare of science's advance, were not calmly returning to embrace their people again.

They were angry.

They hated.

Wes bolted from the booth and ran for his car. As he rounded the corner of the building, the supervisor slammed open the rear door and began shouting at him, cursing, then running to the exit and grabbing for the open-windowed door as Wes slowed for the narrow gate.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"Iowa," Wes said, punching at the hand until it fell away.

"Fine! Then take this, and don't expect to be paid!"

Something flew from the supervisor's hand into Wes's lap, but he ignored it until he'd pulled onto the highway and was heading rapidly west. Then he freed a hand from the wheel and picked it up. It was his time card. He laughed, made to toss it out the window, then decided to hang on to it as a souvenir of his tenure in the booths. As his headlights turned the air grey in front of him, he leaned over and dropped the glove compartment lid, took his eyes from the road long enough to shove the card in... and saw the silvered coin.

"But I don't believe it!" he screamed to the steering wheel that refused to release him.

"I don't," he insisted when the light engulfed him and the car stalled and the slope to the river pulled him gently.

"Please," he whispered to the dogheaded man, "I don't believe in you."

"That," said the man with the head of a jackal, "is no longer my problem."

David told himself there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. It was, of course, only the delicious sense of anticipation he was feeling and not the fear that he could be mistaken.No. After all these years, all that pain, all that twisting of what he thought he knew... mistaken. No. No, it wasn't that at all. He was not afraid. He knew he wasn't. And yet, in spite of what he knew, he vacillated between the very real danger of disobeying his mother and running inside, now, away from the sun.

Crazy, he thought. God, if I'm wrong, I'm crazy.

But are you really crazy if you think you're crazy?

He grinned broadly, almost laughing aloud, realizing that he sounded like any one of a hundred different characters on a hundred different channels at two o'clock in the morning.

Am I really nuts, Doc? I can take it. Let me have it straight.

This time he did laugh, shaking his head slowly at his own dark whimsy.

Nevertheless, the thought remained.

And he sighed at the unfairness of it all.

Of a life fully nineteen years long that not once moved from a place called Oxrun Station; of a search that could have ended years before if only he had had the wit, the brains, the pure and simple imagination to pursue it; of a girl like all girls and unlike any other he would have to leave behind.

If, that is, he was not crazy.

Vagrant spears of melancholy light pierced the heavy November overcast and repulsed him, convinced him completely that he was physically agonized. Obsidian eyes squinted, fighting the dim glow that seemed determined to sear from what remained of his soul the memories of shadow—delightful shadow, enticing shadow, shadow that writhed away from the sun, silently screaming. He glared at the sky and despised the way that sun, in behind a grey veil, disregarded his pale, almost ivory skin, reddening it, puckering it, sloughing it off like a leprous serpent and twisting it into a mocking dark brown. He shrank from the light as often as he could, as best he could.

But there were his instructions.

And to get what he wanted—after all these years, all this pain—to get what he wanted now, he had to endure.

Another glance heavenward, and he decided to be grateful for the clouds, whispering a brief and undirected prayer for the added comfort of a light and steady rain. That, however, was icing on the cake. He had his instructions, and he was determined to obey them. And to wait. The time had come. He believed it now; he knew it. The time had come indeed, and there would be no more thwarting the reunion with his friends.