Theater Macabre (2 page)

A slight rise here as she passes the turnoff to the Lincoln Travel Center.

A rough, fissured patch there where half-hearted attempts have been made to repair holes in the road.

The sign telling her where she is:
Route 50
.

The hill, lost in clouds of gray-white, the graveyard somewhere beyond the phalanx of warped ancient trees to the right, hidden from view so travelers have no reminder that death sees this road and visits often.

She shudders at the thought of those silent plots, those vaguely human-sized mounds in the lush grass, those endless rows of chiseled names, all lost in the fog, but most definitely there, for they have nowhere else to be, and no place else will have them.

Behind her, lights blossom in the gloom. She looks over her shoulder, but maintains her pace. She could not have slowed even if she'd wanted to. The distant sound of tires sizzling through puddles. The drone of an engine. She almost smiles, feels a small flutter of excitement in her belly as the car approaches, the lights bullying through the fog to find her. A faint squeak of brakes and the sense of weight pushing along beside her, the whirr of a window being rolled down. Then a voice. Her smile fades, the flutter dies. It is not The Poet, the detective, her friend. It is no one she knows.

"Hey there." A man's voice. Cheery, laced with concern. "Hey Miss, is everything all right?"

She ignores the voice, and knows she's being rude, but can't help herself.

She doesn't want to acknowledge the man because then he will talk, and ask questions for which she has no answers. He will assume the role of guardian, and it does not belong to him. So she walks, and bows her head, her hood hiding her face.

"Miss? Were you in an accident?"

She shakes her head. Maybe if he thinks she's okay, he'll leave her alone.

"Do you need a ride?"

Again, she shakes her head, and strains her ears, hoping to hear another car on the road. But there's nothing. The thought that he might not come tonight saddens her, so she quickly dismisses it. He will come. He always does. He'll come to see her home.

But she is running out of road, and the man she doesn't know is still watching her, his car keeping pace with her, his concern tangible, and vaguely irritating.

"Miss?"

At last she looks his way. The darkness inside her hood shields her for the briefest of moments.

"I can give you a ride if you like."

Then the moon penetrates the protective veil of dark inside her hood and the man's breath sounds like air escaping a punctured tire. He doesn't say anything more. Doesn't even pause to roll his window up. He just jerks back in his seat, hits the gas and the car roars away, spraying water and skidding on leaves, and then there is nothing but red eyes blazing in the dark. Suffused and muted, and gone.

The night grows colder, the fog so thick now that there is nothing to see but white. But she knows the road, knows the feel of it so well.

Sometime later, another car, and now she is nearing home. The road turns sharply to the left and she has almost rounded the bend when she hears an engine growling. A song, faint, turned low, and a window slides down with a hum.

Then he is there, and she allows herself a small smile.

"I was wondering when you'd come," she says softly.

For a moment, The Poet says nothing.

She risks a glance around the edges of her hood.

He looks almost ghoulish, bathed by the green glow of the dashboard lights. His face is sunken, his eyes dirty coins above bags heavy with regret. His thinning hair is unkempt, uncombed. The hand on the steering wheel is like a denuded tree branch, the thin fingers tightening, making the rubber squeak. He does not look at her as he speaks:

"
'It is not how you walk, or where, or how far. It is all in the sound of the steps and how the night receives them
.'"

She frowns, looks away and concentrates on the road. "Did you write that for me?" she asks.

"I didn't mean to let you down," he says, ignoring the question. "I promised I'd keep you safe."

"I know," she says.

"I couldn't."

"Did you write the poem for me?"

"We found them, Carrie. We found them all. He'd taken the...faces, but before he died he...told us where to find them."

"I don't want to talk about that."

"He made some kind of perverse mural."

"Please...don't."

He shakes his head. A sob escapes him. "'The Surgeon of Salem', they're calling him. He'll be remembered, you can be damn well sure of that, but you, and the others? Only we'll remember you, and that isn't right. He'll be remembered by virtue of his sins. The innocent don't even have their fa—"

Sobs wrack him; he struggles to compose himself.

Alarmed, she glances at him, then away as his eyes turn in her direction.

"When they bury you," he says quietly. "They'll bury you as you were in life, not as he left you in death. It's something, I guess."

"Tell me about the poem. Tell me what it means."

Another car swishes by, but it is traveling in the opposite direction, back where there is nothing but memory. Carrie sees the pale smudge of a woman's face studying them before carrying on.

"He wanted your beauty. Your identity. He wanted to take it from you. To own it." He dries his eyes on his sleeve, talks in a strained voice. "Why? For God's sake, why...?"

Ahead, hazy rectangular lights shimmer in the murk.

Almost home.

"I'll drive this road every night until I can't do it anymore."

She smiles. "I'd like that."

"I see you, you know," he says wistfully. "Just as you were on that last night, and I will always see you that way. You were the bravest, most stubborn girl I'd ever met. Maybe I should have tried harder to convince you not to walk alone."

She clucks her tongue. "But I'm not alone. I have you."

He stops the car and kills the radio. The night becomes a held breath, caught in the throat of fog.

With a shaky sigh, he leans forward, places both hands on the top of the steering wheel, then presses his chin against them.

The girl stops too. The amber lights ahead beckon.

She turns and steps close to the car, puts her pale fingers on the door and faces The Poet.

"Will you tell me what those words mean? What your poem means? Did you write it for me?"

"You're safe now," he replies. "No one will hurt you again." She stands there, smiling, watching the man who will never be frightened by the running darkness that fills her red hood, and she leans forward and kisses him softly on his cheek. He doesn't move, but his breath slows and he turns, looks directly at her.

"I can't see you anymore" he whispers, the tears in his eyes trapping green light.

"It's okay. I'm almost home," she tells him, and thinks of her mother, whom she suspects will be drunk, and high, and not at all happy to see her.

"I think I might love you," she says as she gives the man a shy finger wave and moves away from his car, leaving him awash in the verdant glow until the fog erases him and everything else. Then she listens carefully to the sound of her footsteps, to how the night receives them, and hears nothing at all.

The Acquaintance

I got into town just after nine, the lack of adequate street-lighting conspiring with the darkness to make it seem later. On the weekend, Dungarvan would be full of life and the cursing and shouting of drunks, the jubilant carelessness of the young, armed with fake ID’s and fresh livers, all making their way across the Devonshire bridge toward the night clubs. But this was midweek, and I suspected the rain dripping from the heavy boughs overhanging the bus stop would be the only sound I would hear once the wheezing vehicle pulled away after coughing me out. I was right.

Head thick from a semi-doze on the epileptic bus, I reviewed the options available to me.

No, not options.

Obligations.

Family and friends awaited me on the other side of that bridge. Some of them would be glad to see me, others wouldn’t, but all of them would say the same thing, “Ah, yer back”—a common Irish expression generally reserved for immigrants which somehow manages to make you feel welcome and ashamed at the same time, as if your return is the fulfillment of some smug prophecy that was made as soon as you went abroad.

So, fuck it, I decided. They could wait.

I headed for the nearest pub. Figured if I were going home, it would be best to prepare myself. Dulling the senses would make it just that little bit harder for them to get to me. Might as well make them work for it. Hard drinkers don’t make for easy targets. Not in my family, at least. We have a short temper. Not a mellow one among the lot of us, and because of it, we’re accorded a kind of perverse respect. See us in our cups, best not to get in our way. Last time someone did, they ended up in hospital with a broken arm, a fractured skull, and a couple of more injuries the prosecutor rattled off to me before the gavel came down and punctuated that chapter of my life.

The next one started in prison.

I served thirteen months and got beaten on average twice for every one of those. That’s justice for you. Forget the courts. All that legalese is just so much preamble. The real sentence is doled out inside. Throw in a couple of gang rapes and I came to realize I wasn’t half as tough as I thought I was going in. Didn’t change me, though. Only made me more careful about the people I associated with once I got out. Not that it was a problem. Folks hear you’ve been inside and if they have any decency about them at all, they’ll steer clear of you. The kind of guys who don’t are split evenly between those who hope some of your reputation will rub off on them, and those who wish to exploit it.

But I’d left all that behind now. London, though less than an hour’s plane ride away, might as well have been another continent for all the attachment I felt to it. When I’d walked out of that apartment on Camberwell New Road three days earlier, I’d left behind me two young guys and a girl out of their minds on coke. I wouldn’t miss them, nor the stark reminder of how many times I’d shared their beautiful inertia with them. I’d kicked the habit months ago and as such had outstayed my welcome. They seemed hardly to notice my departure, but as the cab pulled up at the terminal at Heathrow, my cell phone hummed in my pocket, and I snapped it open.

“You still have me fuckin’ lighter, prick,” said Nancy, the girl I had once shared a bed and considerable amounts of coke with in that dismal flat.

When it became apparent that she had not called for any other reason, “I’ll mail it you,” I said, and hung up.

Thus ended another chapter.

*

I had hoped to find some kind of peace waiting for me in Dungarvan, some kind of welcome that did not come in the form of another human being, but in the feel of the place itself. In the past, any amount of time away from my hometown had given it a kind of romanticism in my mind, though I’d hated living there and had left it in a hurry with scarcely a look back. My prolonged stays in Cork, Dublin, Galway, the American Midwest, and finally London, had served to persuade me that my heart is in Ireland, as the song says. Everything would be much simpler back home, I told myself. Everything would be familiar, safe. But even as the bus seemed to canter unsteadily down the long curving slope and the sickly yellow lights of the town and the still black mass of the encroaching sea came into view, I knew I’d been deceiving myself. The twist in my guts was not excitement, but dismay. The lights were beacons meant, not to guide me home, but to cull from my addled brain all the memories of why I’d left here in the first place.

Dungarvan itself is a beautiful town. The people, for the most part, are friendly. But neither aesthetical beauty nor man will lift a finger to help you realize your dreams. Such things do not belong here. They are not understood, nor appreciated among the locals, who themselves do not dream. They merely exist, and aspirations to anything further are regarded as fancy.

How deep.

I wanted to be a writer. Crime noir was my thing.

Didn’t happen. Didn’t write. Lived that shit instead.

What happened was I discovered drinking and drugs and sex.

And rage. But that was easily dealt with by pummeling some poor fucker who didn’t realize he was dealing with half a madman. Many a night I’d stagger into a bar and tear some sad bastard off a stool where he was enjoying his pint and kick the living shit out of him until someone pulled me off him. Never seemed to bother me either. Never seemed to regret a single bad thing I did in my life until I gave up cocaine. That’s when it all came to get me. In those first few weeks I visited Hell and was roasted on a spit by every demon I’d ever invited in. Then I was sorry. So sorry I lost forty pounds, grew a beard, and developed a slight limp for no reason I could fathom unless I’d punched something loose while I was in detox.

Home. And it wasn’t what I’d wished it to be. The romantic scribe in my brain threw his hands up in disgust, and I walked on, the sound of the sea beyond the town square less a soothing whisper than a request to keep my complaints to myself. Lighting up a cigarette and shuddering off a chill, I turned onto Mary Street, a narrow road flanked by the usual businesses on both sides: bookstore, travel agent, department store, lawyer and accountant and social services offices, and of course, more than its fair share of bars. At the second of these I stopped, stuck the cigarette in my mouth and shoved the door open.

It swung wide, heat rushing out to greet me.

I got the impression of empty space, nothing unusual on a weeknight in a small town, then a voice said, “Can’t smoke that in here.”

I paused, frowned and looked at the speaker, a bulbous woman behind the bar whose glass polishing slowed as she peered at me, as if gauging my potential for resistance. Fucking anti-smoking laws. Yet another of the Irish government’s attempts to Americanize itself, crippling one of its most popular sources of income and stunting a way of life that preceded their grandfather’s grandfathers. Taking cops off the streets to supervise the bars to ensure no one lit up, while all over the town dealers were peddling coke to school kids. Brilliant. Made me wonder how many kids ever robbed and murdered their parents for cigarette money.