The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 18

“Where, exactly?” His voice had European precision, jarring to hear among all the lazy speech and expletives.

One of the spooks leaned over and tapped the map. “Intelligence says here. Whatever happened, they’re scared.”

“And you are certain my presence is justified?” The silver-haired guy didn’t look up from the map.

“Absolutely Professor Van Diemen. If there’s any truth at all to the reports we’re getting back, you’re probably the only one who could help,” the spook replied.

“The Pentagon said you were the man for the job after you consulted the State Department on that San Francisco business.” A general I’d never seen before.

“You know how serious things are, Professor,” the spook continued. “If things fall apart here, the entire world will be next. We need to stamp our authority on the situation, and anything that can help us is absolutely justified.”

Van Diemen nodded slowly. Finally he did look up at the faces turned towards him. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Operation Cedar Falls begins at eight hundred hours,” the General said. “The 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade will move into Ben Sue. It will distract the VC so we can fly you along the Saigon River to the heart of the triangle with the 242nd Chemical Detachment. There’s a small window of opportunity before the 173rd Airborne move in from Ben Cat.”

Back with the others I could barely conceal my excitement. “Who is it?” Justin had shaken off the dope haze with the speed of someone who always keeps his eye on the main chance.

“A professor. Sounded like he was from the Netherlands or Belgium.”

“Not Ann-Marget?” Chet said wistfully.

“Come on, Will,” Justin urged. His eyes had that hungry gleam he always developed when he sensed an opportunity – for good pictures, good sex or any kind of drugs.

“There’s something big kicking off tomorrow.” I hunkered in among them, whispering. “A push into the Iron Triangle. Operation Cedar Falls. But that’s not the interesting thing.”

I proceeded to tell them what little I had overheard, but it was enough to get their news senses tingling. Not knowing what lay ahead, we were very excited.

Back then we’d never have imagined Saigon falling. Or a lot of things that happened since. I’m tempted to take out the photo from that night, but I know it’s just a nervous habit, imbued with the desperate wishful thinking of a child. It’s taken me weeks to get to this point, following a trail that was not only two years out of date but had also been obscured by the old man himself.

He didn’t want to be found. Maybe he felt guilty.

From the outside the room looks non-descript. BLACKWALL IMPORTS-EXPORTS, the sign says. A front for the secret service and their employees. I never used to care about any of the grubby games the’ ‘adults” played; it had no bearing on my life. Now I’m building up a hard core of hatred in my heart for the lengths to which people will go. Yet I still can’t decide if I want to save myself or if I just want revenge.

My first glimpse of the room is a shock. Religious symbols everywhere: crucifixes, Stars of David, a Buddha, a shrine, the Bible, the Koran. But no Van Diemen. I don’t allow myself to get disappointed, not after everything I’ve been through.

I never took Van Diemen to be a spiritual man. Far from it. What I’d seen of him suggested he was completely mired in the stinking mud of the real world. Realpolitik, not prayer. He’s a symbol of everything that’s going wrong at the moment: frightened, old, white men trying to stop the world turning, going to any lengths to crush youth, hope, innocence at home, to eradicate different ways of thinking abroad. Men who see threats where there is only change. Men who want to seal the planet in a block of ice.

This is the room of someone obsessed. Beyond the religious artefacts are other, more disturbing items: occult books, signs scrawled on the walls in a frantic hand. The distant echoes of what we found that day in the Iron Triangle.

I remember, I remember . . . I spent a couple of hours that night developing the roll of film. The photo taken earlier that evening perfectly captured the moment, carefree grins, lazy, king-of-the-world expressions. Nature’s secret ironies.

We woke to a dawn of fiery reds and hateful purples. Justin was already up, loading his camera bag, checking lenses and stashing film. Alain helped me drag Chet out of his crib; he was bad-tempered and sluggish and it took a shot of Jack in a stained mug to get him moving.

At a five-minute briefing, the captain told us we could accompany the troops into Ben Sue. It was a big day, the start of the war’s turning, and we were there to capture the moment the US became the winning side.

We’d already made our plans, bribed the right people with a small sack of prized grass, and slipped into the back of the chopper just before it took off. Ben Sue was far behind us when we were discovered, and by then what could they do? We were threatened with losing our accreditation, told we’d be shipped out of ‘Nam the minute we got back to camp, ordered to remain with the chopper ready for dust-off. We made the correct contrite noises and then laughed among ourselves when the Captain went back to his seat.

Van Diemen sat with the brass and the spooks as if they were afraid of allowing him contact with the regular grunts. I watched him carefully, thought how troubled he looked, how deeply sad; wondered what he had done in San Francisco that made him such a vital resource for the Government.

We came down in a clearing not far from the silver-gleaming river. The troops fanned out to clear the area; there were about twenty of them, with a further twenty Tunnel Rats from the 242nd Chemical Detachment, for whom I had the ultimate respect. In a country of nightmares, theirs was the worst, crawling into the Viet Cong tunnel system with nothing more than a hand gun, a knife and a flashlight to flush out the enemy.

Finally Van Diemen and his shiny, stiff shadows ventured out and we followed close behind. Nobody told us to get back, and we knew why the minute we were on solid ground and the chopper’s engines were stifled.

When you’d been In Country for a while, you started to develop what the grunts called “Jungle Sense”. You knew when danger was rolling towards you like a tropical storm on the horizon. This was worse than that feeling. I could see it in everyone’s faces the same: an expression of distaste overlaying dread.

The air was dead. No birdsong. No animal sounds. No evidence of human life. It felt like we were trapped in a bubble.

“Is this part of it?” the spook said to Van Diemen ahead of us.

“I think it possibly is.” Something odd had happened to the old man. Once he stepped into that disturbing atmosphere he appeared to come alive with strength and purpose in his movements.

The point man followed the Captain’s directions deep into the trees. It was already growing hot and humid. Nobody spoke. All eyes remained on the green world pressing tight on every side.

After fifteen minutes we reached a makeshift shelter. Smoke drifted up from the embers of a small fire over which hung a pot of water. In the shelter a rifle lay on a blanket next to an oily rag as if it had been dropped in the process of cleaning. A dead radio stood on a splintered fruit crate.

“Where’s the resistance?” The Captain looked like a surfer, sun-bleached blond hair, blue eyes, still younger but ageing faster than time allowed.

“Maybe they ran when they heard us coming,” Chet ventured.

The spook whirled as if he’d only just realised we were there. “No pictures! Of anything! This is a top-secret mission! Any problems and you’ll be shot for treason.”

That sounded a little extreme, even for ‘Nam. The Captain suggested we be escorted back to the chopper, but the spook’s attention had already wandered uneasily back to the shelter.

“The entrance should be around here somewhere.” He motioned to the zone around the shelter. The Captain ordered his men to scour the area and the trapdoor was found within a minute.

“How good is your intelligence?” Van Diemen peered into the hole despite the attempts of those around to drag him back.

“As good as can be expected from within the Iron Triangle,” the spook said. “We have details . . . but there are gaps.”

“So you are not sure if there is a degree of control?”

“We believe there to be.”

“You believe it can be controlled?”

The spook’s jaw tightened. “That’s your area, not mine.”

Van Diemen turned to the surfer. “Captain, you plan to have your men secure these tunnels?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“But what if the source of our mission is down there?”

The captain looked blank for a moment. “I’m not aware of the source of our mission, sir.”

Van Diemen glanced at the spook. “Need to know basis,” the spy replied.

“Then I suggest I go in with you,” Van Diemen said to the captain.

You have to admire the professor’s balls. Half the grunts in ‘Nam wouldn’t have willingly ventured into that hole with the Tunnel Rats.

They tried to talk him out of it with lots of gruesome descriptions of booby-traps and hidden snipers, but he was having none of it.

“If he’s going in there, we should too,” I whispered to Justin.

“Are you mad?”

“Will is right,” Alain said. “Whatever they’re looking for, must be down there.”

“Well, why don’t we just wait here until they bring it out?” Justin said as if we were both stupid.

“Under a blanket or in a box?” I replied. “Nice photo. Make the cover of Life, that will.”

Two of the Tunnel Rats dropped down the hole before Van Diemen shouldered his way forward to go third. I steeled myself and jumped in immediately afterwards. It felt ludicrously dangerous, but I told myself that was what we were about.

A horizontal tunnel barely big enough for a dog ran out about six feet below ground level. I almost turned back then, but with another Tunnel Rat behind me I had no choice but to proceed. It was oppressively hot, the air thin and filled with the choking smell of soil and vegetation. Vermin scurried in the dark ahead of us.

Claustrophobia mounted quickly, fired by the knowledge that some booby trap could bring the whole thing down upon me. The tunnel roof pressed down against my back. My elbows were constricted against the walls on either side so that I had to drag myself along like an animal. With each foot I crawled, it felt like my throat constricted another half inch.

And then Van Diemen was pulling himself out and up. I followed so frantically I almost knocked the old man over. We were in an underground room big enough to stand, with a makeshift table, a stubby candle, still alight, and more guns.

“I don’t get it,” one of the Rats said uneasily. “They wouldn’t leave their weapons lying around like this.”

“Unless the whole place is a trap,” the other Rat mused. He shrugged, did eeny-meeny between the two tunnels that ran off from the room, then ducked into the one he had selected, knife clenched between his teeth.

“What are we looking for, Professor?” I ventured.

He smiled, quite warmly I thought, but knew what I was attempting. “Secrets.” He waved one long, delicate finger in my face. “And mysteries.”

The tunnel system was a maze, switching back and forth and cross-cutting, with room after room that looked exactly like the last one. We could have crawled for miles for all I knew. And the ever-present threat never lessened, so that by the end my chest burned and my muscles ached from the constant alertness. I felt queasy from the feeling that each movement could be my last. I thought about explosions in that confined area, the heat, the ripping shrapnel. I thought about the soil coming down hard, into my mouth, my throat. I thought about a gun emerging from a shadow to blast into my temple. Poison gas. Burning chemicals. I thought about everything. But I didn’t believe the Professor considered any of them. He was calm and focused on the matter at hand, as though these things held no fear for him at all.

I don’t quite know how it happened, but at some point the Professor and I got separated from the Tunnel Rats and the other snappers. We’d been warned against this happening and I thought we’d been taking special care. Maybe not; or maybe the Professor, who was ahead of me, wanted it that way.

We found ourselves in one of those rooms carved out of the earth. In the light of the Professor’s torch it appeared empty, but I caught a glimpse of a doorway to other rooms beyond.

“We should wait.” The pounding of the blood in my brain made me dizzy. “Let the experts clear the place out before we go stumbling around.”

“They will not find anything.” His voice was distracted.

“How can you be so sure?”

“It is my job to be certain.”

“The Government must be paying you a lot of money to take these kinds of risks.”

“I am not here for money.”

“Love, then.” I laughed, trying to ease my tension.

He moved ahead, the light dancing around. I caught sight of something white in the room beyond.

“Are you interested in politics . . . ?” He paused, waiting for me to fill in my name.

“Will Kennet. Politics is for old guys who’ve forgotten how to have fun.”

“There are many your age – and younger – who would disagree, Mr Kennet. Across America, in Australia, Europe, protests against this war are growing. The season is changing. Polarities are coming into opposition.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” We’d reach the doorway into the rooms beyond. There was that white shape again. And another. But he was moving the torch around too quickly for me to get a handle on it.

“The young and the old. The West and the East. Authority and the forces of rebellion.”

He stopped in the doorway. The light fell on the white shapes fully, and I could see it was stone: blocks that appeared to have been exposed in the digging of the tunnels, twin columns, with a doorway between them.

“Order and chaos.” He pointed the torch into my face, blinding me. “Which side are you on, Mr Kennet?”

I knocked his hand down, annoyed by his disrespect. “My own side. I told you, I’m not interested in any of that.” I’d half started to like him, but now I could see something I’d come across before, in the politicians, and the generals, and all the ones fighting to maintain their place in the world. Not something that was bad, particularly, but a hardness. A recognition that if you wanted to keep the world the way you felt comfortable with, you’d have to go one step further than the next guy. I’d decided it came from fear. Some people just didn’t like change.

“There is only one side or the other.” He was moving again; the light painted a path to the door between the stone columns. “If you have not decided yet, you will be forced to do so soon. That is knowledge for you, Mr Kennet, given freely, earned by age. Take a short cut to wisdom and choose your path now.”

I was more interested in the stone. I could see it carried on into a corridor beyond.

“What is this place?”

He carefully examined some carvings thrown up by the play of light and shade. They appeared to be illustrations of some kind, and writing; it didn’t look like any Vietnamese script I recognised. “Great age,” he mused to himself.

“Is this what you were sent to find?”

“I did not know what I was going to find. The reports were vague. But it appeared to be related to my particular sphere of expertise.”

As we stepped into the corridor, the temperature dropped several degrees. Maybe it was the stone, but it didn’t feel right.

“What is that?”

“Metaphysics. The imposition of the rules of logic and reason on the illogical and irrational.”

“You see, Professor, this is why Americans think Europeans come from a different planet. Same words, different language. I come from there and I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

He held an arm across my chest to stop me.

“What is it?”

He hushed me urgently. I peered into the dark ahead; for some reason he had covered the torch with his hand.

“Did you hear something?” I hissed.

“Go cautiously,” he said, as if I was thinking of doing anything else.

I should have gone back. Every sense was telling me to do that; everything I knew about Vietnam warned me about venturing into the unknown. But I was in the grip of the moment and my own fabulous self-image.

We moved ahead together. Chambers lay on either side of the corridor, bare stone boxes that I would have taken for prison cells if they had any doors. Van Diemen placed the torch on the flags to half-light the whole area before proceeding to examine one of the small rooms. I carried on along the corridor and was disappointed to find it came up against a bare stone wall. That was all it was, a corridor with a few rooms on either side. No buried city from Vietnam’s ancient past. No hidden “secrets and mysteries”. As dull as the rest of the tunnel complex. The whole expedition was turning into a damp squib.

“There’s nothing here,” I said. “Let’s get back to the others.” Van Diemen mumbled some distracted reply from the depths of one of the chambers. And then my eyes fell on something out of the ordinary. Hanging from the lintel of the final chamber on the right was what at first looked like a wind-chime. It was a mixture of stones of varying sizes and hard wood, carved into unusual shapes, hung on pieces of wire that showed no signs of corrosion. I carefully lifted it down from its hook and carried it back to Van Diemen.

“What do you make of this?” I was surprised that it was quite robust despite its appearance of fragility.

Van Diemen emerged from the chamber, still distracted. But when he saw what I was holding he became animated. “For God’s sake, put it back!”

“What’s the big deal?”

He snatched it from me and attempted to push past, then stopped in his tracks, his face rigid.

At first I thought it was my eyes adjusting from the torchlight to the gloom, but pin-pricks of luminescence were coalescing in the dark, like fireflies coming together. A definite shape, its outline indistinct.

With surprising strength, Van Diemen grabbed my shirt and threw me behind him. I went down hard on the stone flags and as I hauled myself back to my feet he was already forcing me out of the corridor.

“Get away from here,” he rasped. “Back to the helicopter. Tell the others.”

The tiny, flickering lights were now moving towards us. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but the Professor’s anxiety was catching. I ran across the outer room and dived into the first tunnel.

In the hi-tension atmosphere my panic flared easily. Barely thinking, I scrambled, the claustrophobia fuelling my rising emotions. When I finally burst out into the light, I must have looked like some wild man.

Justin, Chet and Alain were sitting around drinking water from a canteen while a few of the grunts ensured the area remained secure. The spook, the General and the other officers stood to one side, talking conspiratorially. “Get out of here!” I yelled. “Back to the chopper!”

The Pack knew me well enough to heed my warning. Justin grabbed me and pulled me with him as we ran towards the tree-line.

The men surrounded the tunnel entrance, guns pointing into the dark hole. That was the last I saw of them.

We didn’t stop until we made it back to the chopper, crashing to our knees breathless before breaking into anxious laughter.

“You idiot!” Justin roared. “I bet there was nothing down there!”

“There was!” I protested. “Some kind of . . . some kind . . .”

Justin laughed some more at my disorientation; to be honest, I really didn’t know why I had run so hard. Imagination; or instinct?

Yet Chet was growing agitated. “What is wrong, brother?” Alain asked.

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Chet pointed a wavering finger at the chopper. “How could that get here if there weren’t any pilots?”

As I stared into the empty chopper, I knew exactly what Chet meant, though it was only later when understanding came.

Justin ran his hand through his long hair, puzzled. “He’s right. There were no pilots on board. Who was flying it?”

“I can’t remember . . .” Alain tapped his temple. “How many came with us? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-four,” I corrected.

“Twenty-three,” Justin said.

Chet collapsed into a seated position, holding his head in his hands.

“Definitely, twenty-two,” I said. My head was hurting. Had I breathed in some gas? Had we all been affected? I stumbled away from the chopper, trying to get a hold of myself. The sound of running came from the tree-line and I hurried towards it to usher the others back to the chopper.

And that was when the blast stopped my world.

I’ve turned Van Diemen’s room over, but there’s no sign to suggest whether he was there today or a week ago. But as I sit amid the chaos of his Saigon life, a frightened young Vietnamese man appears at the door. I jump up, grab him by the shoulders.

“Professor Van Diemen?” I bark.

He shakes his head, his eyes wondering if it would be better if I killed him before the Communists get here.

“Old man, silver hair?”

“Mr Harker?”

“If that’s what he’s calling himself.”

“Gone. To the airport.”

Typical of his kind. Work their magic, stir up their brew of misery, and then get out when everything starts to fall apart rather than face the repercussions of their actions. I push my way out of the door and run into the crazed city.

Feeble memories. The illusion we construct with our consciousness is such a fragile thing, easily disrupted, altered, warped. But the body on the other hand is a remarkably hardy piece of engineering. One of the grunts coming back to the chopper had stepped on a mine; apparently there were hundreds in that area and it was a miracle we’d all avoided them on the way to the tunnel system.

Talking of miracles . . . Shrapnel took me apart. I was split open from groin to chest. Another piece hit me in the head and went straight out of the back, taking with it a third of my brain. Now you may think it’s impossible to survive having lost that much grey matter, but I can assure you that is not the case. I could cite cases of people who led fulfilling lives only for an autopsy to discover they had malformed brains the size of a walnut, but suffice to say that I did survive, though it was touch and go for a long time.

Only fragments of the subsequent weeks come back to me. Lying on a bed in a field hospital with corpses stacked up all around, jazzed on pain and morphine. People saying, “He’ll never make it,” over and over in easy earshot as if I were already gone.

I remember Justin at the bedside, crying, saying something about being forced to go back home, but he’d keep in touch, check up on me.

And at one point I recall a wrinkled face leaning over me, a shock of silver hair. Van Diemen; I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming. He said he was sorry in a way that, too, suggested I was already dead. I think he sat by my bed for a while, just talking to himself. Snippets come back. Something about fighting chaos . . . winning the war . . . Who cares?

My recovery was a long, slow and agonising process. The drugs became a constant friend. I had to re-learn how to speak, how to hold a pen, write. The physical therapy was excruciating. My brain had to re-wire itself, shifting the functions from the part that was missing to what remained, nestled under the metal plate. Just to cap things, the nice zipper scar up my stomach itched like hell.

They let me leave the hospital two years later and it was another year before I could rejoin the world. Things had moved on – rockets on the moon, bands I’d loved long gone – but the Vietnam War ploughed on regardless. The Americans hadn’t won. Nobody had as far as I could see. But I still had one thing to give me comfort: the photo of that happy, drugged-up night before I fell off the ride, reminding me of the best friends a man could ever have. It was time to look them up.

England was nothing like Vietnam: wet, cold, quiet, safe. I’d only heard from Justin once in all the time of my recovery. That upset me; we’d been so close for so long and when I really needed his support he was no longer around. The one letter I did get from him didn’t sound like Justin at all. He told me he’d given up photojournalism and had gone back to living with his parents in their rambling old pile in Surrey, but there was an undercurrent to all the banal statements that suggested he was scared. I’m not stupid. Someone had got to him, and it had to be one of the spooks. The mission we’d muscled our way in on was top secret and those kind of people had long memories. I’d probably been written off because of my injuries – nobody expected me to be thinking never mind walking around. But Justin and the others had probably all been warned off.

I turned up at his parents’ house late one Saturday night. It took a few seconds for his mother to recognise me – my injuries had made me haggard – but she welcomed me warmly.

She’d heard about what happened to me in ‘Nam from my own family and I spent a few minutes making small talk about my recovery. Then I asked her if I could see Justin and she grew puzzled and then agitated.

“Who’s Justin?” she said, kneading the palm of one hand insistently.

I laughed. “Justin. Come on! Your son!”

Her uneasy gaze ranged across my face. “I have no son, you know that Will. Derek and I never had children.”

I laughed again, but it dried up when I saw she was deathly serious. You can tell when someone is pretending, especially if it’s something as big and obvious as that. My first thought was that she was covering for him. He was hiding out after the spooks’ threat, making a new life for himself.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go along with you. But let me show you this.” I dipped into my worn backpack that had followed me halfway round the world. The photo was crumpled after months of travelling. I handed it over. “Far right.”

She glanced at it, shook her head, handed it back. “That’s you.”

My stomach knotted when I looked at the picture. She was correct – I was on the far right of the group. Of three young men. Chet, Alain and me. No Justin. My head spun; I was still shaky after the injuries and the sheer act of comprehending made me feel queasy.

“I have no son,” she repeated in a strained voice. Another thought broke on her face. “An old man was round here a few weeks ago asking the same question. What is going on, Will?”

I looked around the antique-stuffed study. Photos were everywhere, on the sideboard, the mantelpiece, the wall. They showed Mr and Mrs Glendenning, Justin’s aunts and uncles, family gatherings. But no Justin in any of them. There was one photo taken on our last day of school; in it, I now stood alone. It made no sense that a photo of me alone would be hanging on the Glendenning’s study wall, but when I pointed that out to Mrs Glendenning she became even more agitated.

I went out into the rain with a shattering sense of dread and the desperate feeling that my mind was falling apart.

I visited my father, but he didn’t recall Justin at all. None of my own photos showed him. Every reference to him in my childhood diaries no longer existed. They hadn’t been erased – the writing was mine, the content too, but whenever I had done anything with Justin, I had now experienced it alone. It was as though Justin had never existed.

Frantically, I booked a flight to Paris to see Alain. I held the photo in sweating hands all the way, staring at it so hard my head hurt. If only I could pierce the illusion and Justin would materialise in his familiar place.

Just before we touched down in Paris-Orly, I looked out over the rooftops of the City of Lights and when I looked back at the photo Alain was gone too.

The story was the same. At Alain’s flat and in every one of his familiar haunts, no one had heard of him.

I slipped into a deep depression for a month during which I was convinced my so-called recovery had been a lie and my brain had been damaged irreparably. I tried not to think about what was happening, but it haunted my every moment. Finally, I could bear it no more. Chet was my last hope for some kind of understanding.

At least he was still on the photo: the two of us, arms around each other’s shoulders. The best way to get to him was through his work, so I rang the Picture Editor on Life magazine, an irascible man with the hard-edged tones of a New Yorker. He said he had a number for Chet and disappeared from the phone, but when he came back with his contact book he asked me who I was after.

I mentioned Chefs name again, but this time I only got a blank silence. The Picture Editor had never commissioned Chet, had never even heard of him. I asked a secretary to check particular issues that I knew featured Chefs work, but all the pictures were now different to what I remembered, all by other photographers. And when I hung up and examined my snap, I saw only my own face staring back at me.

Beyond everything that was happening, one other thing disturbed me immensely: why was I the only one to remember these people? But that wasn’t true, I realised. At least one other person knew. He had visited Justin’s parents, and with a little digging around I found he’d asked questions in Paris and called Life. Van Diemen was the key, and I started to wonder if he wasn’t perhaps the cause. The spooks had decided to tie up the loose ends, and their cat’s-paw had been set the task.

Over time it came to me. Somehow it was linked to whatever had been uncovered in that mysterious stone corridor in the heart of the Iron Triangle. Van Diemen knew what it was: I think he had always known. When we ran from the tunnels for the chopper and we couldn’t understand why there were no pilots . . . failed to get a handle on the number of troops that came with us . . . they had all been wiped out like Justin, Alain and Chet. We couldn’t remember them because they never existed.

A sizeable portion of my US dollars buys me a trip to the airport in a ten-year-old car loaded with chicken coops. Somehow we make our way through streets packed with people carrying beds from the houses of the rich, or siphoning petrol, or making fluttering paper rain with their now-useless South Vietnamese money.

I fight my way through the crush at the airport gates – people screaming for blood, shouting for help, wanting to know why they’re being abandoned. The MPs let me by when they see my press accreditation, and I run across the tarmac amid the stink of fuel and the hell of engine noise, wondering when I’ll wink out like a star at dawn. Will I feel something coming for me? Cold talons on my neck? Will there be something beyond that instant? Or just a nothing and a never-having-been?

Searching back and forth along the ranks of men in short-sleeved white shirts and black ties and the very few women, make-up free and tear-stained, I start to think Van Diemen has already made good his escape. But then I see that silver hair shining in the sun and he turns and sees me as if I’d shouted him. But he doesn’t run. Instead his face grows briefly bright, and he smiles before becoming deeply sad. He holds out his arms for me.

Away from the crowds, we face each other. I try to stop myself shaking. For some reason, the words won’t come.

“My boy,” he said with surprising gentleness. “They told me you were dying.” He read my face and added quickly, “Of course. You want answers.”

“I want to be saved.” My voice sounded so pathetic, like a child’s.

He rested a paternal hand on my shoulder. “I came to you to explain. Eventually I tracked down your friends too. For one I was too late. But I spoke to the Frenchman and the American before the end.”

“You killed them.”

“No. I tried to make amends.” He looked away to a plane slowly filling with people; desperate to get away, I thought. When he looked back, his eyes were filled with tears. “The Vietnamese have a legend, of vampirical beasts that feed on life itself. Their name translates, very roughly, as The Teeth of the Stars, but the myths only hint at their true nature. Not vampires as you or I would understand them. These things are bound into the very fabric of this reality . . . silent shadows moving behind a painted scenery.”

“They took Justin . . .” I gulped in air to stop myself shaking.

“They can remove a life from existence itself, so that not only does it not exist, it never existed, and never will exist.”

“Then how can I remember them?”

“Your injuries . . .” He shrugged; we both knew it didn’t matter.

“And you?”

He dipped into his jacket and removed the charm I’d found hanging from the doorway of the stone cell. “It keeps me safe, and lets me see the truth. These hung from all the chambers. The Viet Cong removed them when they found that place and freed what had been imprisoned within.”

I recall the reports of how Operation Cedar Falls had failed so badly, because once the US troops went into the Iron Triangle for the climactic battle they found no enemy. It was as if they had melted away, retreated long before the assault began. But I could see now that wasn’t true.

“When intelligence reported that something unbelievable and dangerous had been discovered by the Communists in the heart of the Iron Triangle it was decided to seize this potential weapon for the benefit of the West.”

“A weapon?” I said, dumbfounded. “Something with the kind of power that you’re talking about?”

“We are all for turning, given the right impetus,” he continued in a flat voice. “I am not a stupid man. Yet I am affected by the weaknesses that shape us all. Petty fears make idiots of even the wisest. I wanted to see order imposed on the world. With youth in open rebellion in our homelands, with the forces of chaos sweeping across East Asia, I was prepared to go to great lengths to hold back the tide.” He removed his glasses to wipe his eyes. “But I never realised there were others prepared to go to even greater lengths.”

Another glance at the plane on the runway, nearly full now. I wanted to hit him for his heartlessness and insensitivity.

“Yes, I helped them contain the power. I thought I was doing the right thing, you see? But the use of it, that was down to them. In the end, they only needed so much of me.” He took a deep juddering breath. “Did you know Kissinger planned to use nuclear weapons here? Can you imagine the loss of civilian life? Those things did not matter to the people I worked for. It was all about order, at any cost. Hard men.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t quite comprehend. “I heard what happened at Kent State University in America. What was happening all over in the name of order. Hard, hard men. They didn’t know how to direct the power. They had to learn to control it. They needed a test before time ran out here in Vietnam . . .”

Realisation dawned on me. We were the test.

“Once I learned what they planned, I attempted to stop it. Naturally, I became an unacceptable burden. I was forced to stay one step ahead.”

“You changed sides?”

“You are talking about politics. I am speaking about moral absolutes. I did not go over to the enemy. I experienced one of those moments when the white light shines into the deep, shadowed parts of oneself. I did not like what I saw. Sometimes there are worse things than an absence of order, as there are worse things than death.”

I eased a little. Perhaps there was hope after all. “So you’re going to kill it? Drive a stake through its heart or something.”

“It cannot be killed. It is part of the universe, beyond you or I or the things we see around us. It can be guided. A little. But not controlled how my former partners wanted to control it.”

The plane was now taxiing up the runway. I could see he hadn’t been anxious to get on board. He’d only come here to watch.

Van Diemen held up the mysterious charm once more. “The key,” he said with smile. “They used to have it . . . and now they do not. Soon those who wanted to do terrible things in the names of their politics will be gone. Indeed, they will never have existed. And the world will be a better place. Yes, Vietnam will be lost. But in the end, is that such a bad thing?”

He was right – there are worse things than failing to impose order. When you confront all the horrors thrown up by reality, all the great spiritual questions, the terrors of the never-ending night, politics seems faintly ridiculous. Who cares about this territory or that? Who cares about money and taxes? Moral absolutes, he said. Rules of existence that should never be transgressed.

“What about me?” I could see the answer in his eyes, had known from the moment I’d spoken to him.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Truly. There is no turning back what is set in motion. But know this: I will remember you. I will never forget.”

He holds out his arms and I collapse into them, crying silently for what is about to happen, for what I have lost. My tears are insubstantial, moisture-ghosts that will soon fade and be gone. Like the past. Like the present.

Like the future.

JOEL LANE

Mine

JOEL LANE IS THE AUTHOR of two collections of supernatural horror stories, The Earth Wire (Egerton Press) and The Lost District and Other Stories (Night Shade Books), as well as two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask (both Serpent’s Tail), and two collections of poems, The Edge of the Screen and Trouble in the Heartland (both Arc). He is currently working on a third novel, Midnight Blue.

“ ‘Mine’ was one of a batch of stories that I wrote for The Lost District,” the author explains. “They all had to do with the myths surrounding death and the afterlife. One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems influenced this story, which I’d been trying to write for years.

“I’ve been reassured by the amount of offence it has caused.”

NIGHT WAS FALLING as he found the place. He’d have liked to wait until dark, but there wasn’t time. He had a gig that evening. It was a ritual: the first night of every tour. Once that had meant small towns in the Black Country; now it meant cities scattered across Europe. But always, for him, it started with this visit. His songs needed it. His voice needed it. He supposed most punters told themselves something similar. And it was always the same time of year: late autumn, as the trees burnt themselves out like cigarettes and dropped traces of frost on the pavement.

It was the same in every town, in every inner-city district. A shuttered window with a sign above it, lit up so as to be visible from the road at night. Always on a main road, close to other shops: being discreet was less important than ease of parking and access. The front door open, leading to a short entry passage; then a hermetically sealed inner door with a bell. As Mark got out of the car, the fading daylight made the buildings seem older: a modern street became grey and close-built, like the terraces he’d grown up in. He shivered and pulled at the collar of his black jacket.

The door was opened by a thin, pale-faced woman in a mauve gown. “Come in, darling,” she whispered. The sodium light caught her cheekbones for a moment before she turned away. Her hair was tied in a long pony-tail. Her feet made no sound on the vinyl floor of the hallway.

The reception lounge had two sofas, a table with a cash desk, and a blue mercury strip light that was just beginning to flicker. Another three men were waiting, their faces blank with a studied anonymity. “Have you been here before?” the receptionist said. Something in her voice and her blue-lit face made him realise that she was a man. He wondered if he’d come to the wrong kind of place.

“Yes.” It was always easier to say that. He leaned forward. “Is Carole here tonight?”

The receptionist’s sleeves rustled as he flicked through a leather-bound diary. “Yes, darling, she is. And she’s free just now. That’ll be ten pounds for the room.” He tucked the note into the cash-box with a movement like striking a match. “I’ll take you to her.”

Beyond the fringed curtain of the reception room, stairs led down into a basement corridor with several doors. The thin man walked a pace ahead of him, his slipper-clad feet and long gown making him almost seem to float. It was evidently a bigger place than the frontage suggested. They walked on to the end of the corridor, and down another set of stairs. He could smell incense and smoke in the air. It was colder down here, and the wall-set lights were the dead white of a smile in a magazine. These places were rarely strong on ambience. A draught made the receptionist’s sleeves tremble as he stopped at the last door.

The room inside was clearly not a bedroom. It had bare stone walls, and a ceiling that glistened with moisture. Mark couldn’t see where the light was coming from. His own breath was a pale smoke in the air. He could hear a distant echo of a woman’s voice crying out, only the rhythm allowing any distinction between pleasure and pain. So faint, it could have been an overdub from his own memory.

The receptionist gestured to an alcove on the left-hand side. Carole was sitting on a narrow white bed, wearing a silvery dress. She was brushing her long dark hair. The light of a smoky oil lamp picked out the individual strands like the strings inside a piano. The thin man went up to her and bent to whisper something in her ear. She smiled at Mark, then held out her left hand. “That’ll be sixty pounds, please.”

He fumbled with his wallet as the receptionist made himself scarce. As he placed the three twenties in her perfectly white palm, he noticed that the gash in her wrist was still open. Ice crystals were forming in it. He cupped his hands to his mouth and breathed into them. Carole stood up and pulled off her dress. He stared at her like a peeping Tom as she unfastened her bra and slipped off her black knickers. She smiled. “Are you going to undress as well?” His hands shook as he unbuttoned his shirt, unable to look away from her.

They lay on the bed and caressed each other. Mark remembered the first nights they’d spent together, in her basement flat on the edge of the park. She still looked about nineteen; only her eyes were older. The skin of her face was pale and neutral, like scar tissue. His mouth crept across her body, kissing the bony ridges of her shoulders, then moving down to touch her injuries. The cuts she’d made on herself, where the ice had formed like salt. The bruises he’d given her long ago, still blooming like ink blots on the white skin. His tongue made her shiver. She turned in his arms to face the wall, and he spread her legs gently. The voices in the wall cried out to him, trapped echoes of need and release. The rhythm track. His fingers probed her, stirred warmth in her passive flesh.

It was time for the bridge. Carole turned again, reached down by the lamp, tore open a foil packet. Her thin fingers sheathed him, then guided him into her. Just as it had always been. There’d be no need to change positions. He kissed her lightly on the mouth, then pressed his lips to the side of her neck. His fingers gripped her ribs, pressing hard where the bruises were. She cried out with pain. “Sorry,” he whispered. There were tears in her eyes. He reached up and stroked her forehead, running his fingers through the soft dark hair. It felt dry, almost brittle. He bent over her and placed a slow kiss in the hollow of her throat. She moved against him and dug her nails into his back. The final chorus.

Submission wasn’t enough for him: he needed her response. It always took time to get her warmed up. Her soft cries rang in his head, where all the lights were going out. His back arched, and he stared at the side of her face. She looked peaceful. She could almost have been asleep. He’d found her like this.

Still out of breath, Mark pulled on his clothes. The sweat glued him to his shirt; but it didn’t matter, he’d be changing soon enough. Carole sat on the edge of the bed, putting on her underclothes, then stood up to pull on her dress. The flickering oil lamp made the silver fabric look grainy, like ash. He reached out to take her hand. “Come with me.”

She stepped towards him, hesitantly. He looked into her eyes. “Will you follow me?” She nodded. He felt a quiet pang of joy, a tenderness mingled with the November ache of loss. Fire in the dead leaves. He gripped her hand, feeling the bones under the smooth skin. Then he let go and slowly walked towards the doorway. He thought he could hear footsteps behind him.

As he climbed the dark stairs, fatigue began to tug at him. It would be easier to stay down here, sleep for a while. Never mind the gig. But he kept walking. In the hallway, the cries of pleasure from behind the closed doors were a coda to accompany the two of them into the starlit night. He shivered. The moisture in his eyes blurred his vision. He stumbled up the second staircase to the lounge. There was no one there but the receptionist, who looked at Mark, then looked at the doorway behind him. He seemed about to say something, but instead just waved them on.

Mark took a deep breath and turned the handle on the inner door, then stepped through. The night was a blue-black curtain at the end of the passageway. He walked on until he could feel the cold air on his face, then turned around. His parting gesture was almost a wave. It could even have been a touch, if she’d been close enough to feel it. But she was already backing off, her face a mask the funeral parlour had been unable to make lifelike. The inner door closed behind her, and Mark was alone on the narrow street.

He waited to cross to where his car was parked. A line of vehicles was crawling past in both directions. Somewhere in the distance, a siren was caught up in the rush hour traffic. The air was stale with exhaust fumes. Mindful of the time, he began to walk between the slowly moving cars. It would be disastrous to be late on the first night of his tour. If you wanted to build a life in music, you had to observe these superstitions. They were part of what it meant to belong.

DAVID J. SCHOW

Obsequy

DAVID J. SCHOW IS A short story writer, novelist, screenwriter (teleplays and features), columnist, essayist, editor, photographer and winner of the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild awards (for short fiction and non-fiction, respectively).

His association with New Line Cinema began with horror icons Freddy Kreuger (A Nightmare on Elm Street: Freddy’s Nightmares), Leatherface (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) and the eponymous Critters (Critters 3 and Critters 4). In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for The Crow and has since worked with such directors as Alex Proyas, James Cameron, E. Elias Merhige, Rupert Wainwright, Mick Garris and William Malone.

For the premiere season of Showtime Network’s Masters of Horror he adapted his own short story “Pick Me Up” for director Larry Cohen, and for the second season he scripted “We All Scream for Ice Cream” (based on a John Farris story) for director Tom Holland.

Schow also wrote forty-one instalments of his popular “Raving & Drooling” column for Fangoria magazine, later collected in the book Wild Hairs. His many other books include his fourth novel, Bullets of Rain, and seventh story collection, Havoc Swims Jaded.

He is currently on the verge of his next book, script, or chaotic house renovation.

“ ‘Obsequy’ was originally written to demonstrate the difference between a ‘half-hour’s worth of story’ versus an hour for the benefit of several TV executives,” reveals the author.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking: That would be like trying to train a dog to eat with a fork. And you would be right. The good part is the story came to life on its own and didn’t need TV for anything. One indirect result was that I was asked to rewrite the 2004 French film Les Revenants (released in the US as They Came Back) for an American production company.

“As American re-takes of foreign horror movies are mandated to provide lots of explanations for everything going on, I had to invent these. The reaction I got on my somewhat anti-linear take was . . . horrifying.

“Horror fiction seems to spawn more dumbass ‘rules’ than any other kind of writing, and one of the dumbest is the assumed ‘requirement’ of a twist ending, going all the way back to H. H. Munro. This story is also the result of a long rumination on how stories are sometimes scuttled or diminished by succumbing to such ‘rules’.

“Another landmine is use of the zombie archetype, which has become polluted with extra-stupid assumptions derived from an endless mudslide of movies featuring resurrected corpses who want to eat your brain. That’s fine, but it’s not what I wanted to explore here.”

DOUG WALCOTT’S NEED for a change of perspective seemed simple: Haul ass out of Triple Pines, pronto. Start the next chapter of my life. Before somebody else makes the decision for you, in spades.

He grimly considered the shovel in his grasp, clotted with mulchy grave dirt. Spades, right. It was the moment Doug knew he could not go on digging up dead people, and it was only his first day on the job. Once he had been a teacher, with a teacher’s penchant for seeing structure and symbols in everything. Fuck all that, he thought. Time to get out. Time to bail, now.

“I’ve got to go,” he said, almost mumbling, his conviction still tentative.

Jacky Tynan had stepped down from his scoop-loader and ambled over, doffing his helmet and giving his brow a mop. Jacky was a simple, basically honest guy; a spear carrier in the lives of others with more personal color. Content with burgers and beer, satellite TV and dreams of a someday-girlfriend, Jacky was happy in Triple Pines.

“Yo, it’s Douglas, right?” Jacky said. Everybody had been introduced shortly after sunrise. “What up?” He peeled his work gloves and rubbed his hands compulsively until tiny black sweatballs of grime dropped away like scattered grains of pepper.

“I’ve got to go,” Doug repeated. “I think I just quit. I’ve got to tell Coggins I’m done. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Graves and stuff getting to ya, huh?” said Jacky. “You should give it another day, at least. It ain’t so bad.”

Doug did not meet Jacky’s gaze. His evaluation of the younger man harshened, more in reaction against the locals, the natives, the people who fit into a white trash haven such as Triple Pines. They would hear the word “cemetery” and conclude “huge downer”. They would wax prosaic about this job being perverse, therefore unhealthy. To them, digging up long-deceased residents would be that sick stuff. They all acted and reacted strictly according to the playbook of cliché. Their retinue of perception was so predictable that it was almost comically dull. Jacky’s tone suggested that he was one of those people with an almost canine empathy to discord; he could smell when something had gone south.

Doug fought to frame some sort of answer. It was not the funereal atmosphere. The stone monuments, the graves, the loam were all exceptionally peaceful. Doug felt no connection to the dearly departed here . . . with one exception, and one was sufficient.

“It’s not the work,” Doug said. “It’s me. I’m overdue to leave this place. The town, not the cemetery. And the money doesn’t matter to me any more.”

Jacky made a face as though he had whiffed a fart. “You don’t want the money, man? Hell, this shit is easier than workin’ the paper mill or doin’ stamper time at the plant, dude.” The Triple Pines aluminum plant had vanished into Chapter Eleven a decade ago, yet locals still talked about it as if it were still a functioning concern.

The people in Triple Pines never saw what was right in front of them. Or they refused to acknowledge anything strange. That was the reason Doug had to eject. He had to jump before he became one of them.

One of them . . .

A week ago, Doug had not been nearly so philosophical. Less than a week from now, and he would question his own sanity.

Craignotti, the job foreman, had seen Jacky and Doug not working – that is to say, not excavating – and already he was humping his trucker bulk over the hilltop to yell at them. Doug felt the urge to just pitch his tools and helmet and run, but his rational side admitted that there were protocols to be followed and channels to be taken. He would finish out his single day, then do some drinking with his workmates, then try to decide whether he could handle one more day. He was supposed to be a responsible adult, and responsible adults adhered to protocol and channels as a way of reinforcing the gentle myth of civilisation.

Whoa, dude, piss on all that, Jacky might say. Just run. But Jacky rarely wrestled with such complexities. Doug turned to meet Craignotti with the fatalism of a man who has to process a large pile of tax paperwork.

A week ago, things had been different. Less than a week from now, these exhumations would collide with every one of them, in ways they could not possibly predict.

Frank Craignotti was one of those guys who loved their beer, Doug had observed. The man had a relationship with his pilsner glass, and rituals to limn his interaction with it. Since Doug had started haunting Callahan’s, he had seen Craignotti in there every night – same stool at the end of the bar, same three pitchers of tap beer, which he emptied down his neck in about an hour and a half. Word was that Craignotti had been a long-haul big-rig driver for a major nationwide chain of discount stores, until the company pushed him to the sidelines on account of his disability. He had stepped down from the cab of his sixteen-wheeler on a winding mountain road outside of Triple Pines (for reasons never explained; probably to relieve himself among Nature’s bounty) and had been sideswiped by a car that never saw him standing there in the rain. Presently he walked with a metal cane because after his surgery one leg had come up shorter than the other. There were vague noises of lawsuits and settlements. That had all happened before Doug wound up inside Callahan’s as a regular, and so it maintained the tenuous validity of small-town gossip. It was as good a story as any.

Callahan’s presented a nondescript face to the main street of Triple Pines, its stature noted solely by a blue neon sign that said BAR filling up most of a window whose sill probably had not been dusted since 1972. There was a roadhouse fifteen miles to the north, technically “out of town”, but its weak diversions were not worth the effort. Callahan’s flavor was mostly clover-colored Irish horse apples designed to appeal to all the usual expectations. Sutter, the current owner and the barman on most weeknights, had bought the place when the original founders had wised up and gotten the hell out of Triple Pines. Sutter was easy to make up a story about. To Doug he looked like a career criminal on the run who had found his perfect hide in Triple Pines. The scar bisecting his lower lip had probably come from a knife fight. His skin was like mushrooms in the fridge the day before you decide to throw them out. His eyes were set back in his skull, socketed deep in bruise-colored shadow.

Nobody in Triple Pines really knew anything bona fide about anybody else, Doug reflected.

Doug’s first time into the bar as a drinker was his first willful act after quitting his teaching job at the junior high school which Triple Pines shared with three other communities. All pupils were bussed in from rural route pickups. A year previously, he had effortlessly scored an emergency credential and touched down as a replacement instructor for History and Geography, though he took no interest in politics unless they were safely in the past. It was a rote gig that mostly required him to ramrod disinterested kids through memorising data that they forgot as soon as they puked it up on the next test. He had witnessed firsthand how the area, the towns, and the school system worked to crush initiative, abort insight, and nip talent. The model for the Triple Pines secondary educational system seemed to come from some early 1940s playbook, with no imperative to change anything. The kids here were all white and mostly poor to poverty level, disinterested and leavened to dullness. Helmets for the football team always superceded funds for updated texts. It was the usual, spirit-deflating story. Doug spent the term trying to kick against this corpse, hoping to provoke life signs. Past the semester break, he was just hanging on for the wage. Then, right as summer vacation loomed, Sheila Morgan had deposited herself in the teacher’s lounge for a conference.

Doug had looked up from his newspaper. The local rag was called the Pine Grove Messenger (after the adjacent community). It came out three times weekly and was exactly four pages long. Today was Victoria Day in Canada. This week’s Vocabulary Building Block was “ameliorate.”

“Sheila,” he said, acknowledging her, not really wanting to. She was one of the many hold-backs in his classes. Hell, many of Triple Pines’ junior high schoolers already drove their own cars to battle against the citadel of learning.

“Don’t call me that,” Sheila said. “My name’s Brittany.”

Doug regarded her over the top of the paper. They were alone in the room. “Really.”

“Totally,” she said. “I can have my name legally changed. I looked it up. I’m gonna do it, too. I don’t care what anybody says.”

Pause, for bitter fulfillment: One of his charges had actually looked something up.

Further pause, for dismay: Sheila had presented herself to him wearing a shiny vinyl mini as tight as a surgeon’s glove, big-heeled boots that laced to the knee, and a leopard top with some kind of boa-like fringe framing her breasts. There was a scatter of pimples between her collarbones. She had ratty black hair and too much eye kohl. Big lipstick that had tinted her teeth pink. She resembled a hillbilly’s concept of a New York streetwalker, and she was all of 14 years old.

Mara Corday, Doug thought. She looks like a goth-slut version of Mara Corday. I am a dead man.

Chorus girl and pinup turned B-movie femme fatale, Mara Corday had decorated some drive-in low-budgeters of the late 1950s. Tarantula. The Giant Claw. The Black Scorpion. She had been a Playboy Playmate and familiar of Clint Eastwood. Sultry and sex-kittenish, she had signed her first studio contract while still a teenager. She, too, had changed her name.

Sheila wanted to be looked at, and Doug avoided looking. At least her presentation was a relief from the third-hand, Sears & Roebuck interpretation of banger and skatepunk styles that prevailed among most of Triple Pines’ other adolescents. In that tilted moment, Doug realised what he disliked about the dunnage of rap and hip-hop: all those super-badasses looked like they were dressed in gigantic baby clothes. Sheila’s ass was broader than the last time he had not-looked. Her thighs were chubbing. The trade-off was bigger tits. Doug’s heartbeat began to accelerate. Why am I looking?

“Sheila—”

“Brittany.” She threw him a pout, then softened it, to butter him up. “Lissen, I wanted to talk to you about that test, the one I missed? I wanna take it over. Like, not to cheat it or anything, but just to kinda . . . take it over, y’know? Pretend like that’s the first time I took it?”

“None of the other students get that luxury, and you know that.”

She fretted, shifting around in her seat, her skirt making squeaky noises against the school-issue plastic chair. “I know, I know, like, right? That’s like, totally not usual, I know, so that’s why I thought I’d ask you about it first?”

Sheila spent most of her schooling fighting to maintain a low C-average. She had won a few skirmishes, but the war was already a loss.

“I mean, like, you could totally do a new test, and I could like study for it, right?”

“You should have studied for the original test in the first place.”

She wrung her hands. “I know, I know that, but . . . well let’s just say it’s a lot of bullshit, parents and home and alla that crap, right? I couldn’t like do it then but I could now. My Mom finds out I blew off the test, she’ll beat the shit outta me.”

“Shouldn’t you be talking to a counselor?”

“Yeah, right? No thanks. I thought I’d like go right to the source, right? I mean, you like me and stuff, right?” She glanced toward the door, revving up for some kind of Big Moment that Doug already dreaded. “I mean, I’m flexible; I thought that, y’know, just this one time. I’d do anything. Really. To fix it. Anything.”

She uncrossed her legs, from left on right to right on left, taking enough time to make sure Doug could see she had neglected to factor undergarments into her abbreviated ensemble. The move was so studied that Doug knew exactly which movie she had gotten it from.

There are isolated moments in time that expand to gift you with a glimpse of the future, and in that moment Doug saw his tenure at Triple Pines take a big centrifugal swirl down the cosmic toilet. The end of life as he knew it was embodied in the bit of anatomy that Sheila referred to as her “cunny”.

“You can touch it if you want. I won’t mind.” She sounded as though she was talking about a bizarre pet on a leash.

Doug had hastily excused himself and raced to the bathroom, his four-page newspaper folded up to conceal the fact that he was strolling the hallowed halls of the school, semi-erect. He rinsed his face in a basin and regarded himself in a scabrous mirror. Time to get out. Time to bail. Now.

He flunked Sheila, and jettisoned himself during summer break, never quite making it to the part where he actually left Triple Pines. Later he heard Sheila’s mom had gone ballistic and put her daughter in the emergency ward at the company clinic for the paper mill, where her father had worked since he was her age. Local residual scuttlebutt had it that Sheila had gotten out of the hospital and mated with the first guy she could find who owned a car. They blew town like fugitives and were arrested several days later. Ultimately, she used her pregnancy to force the guy to sell his car to pay for her train fare to some relative’s house in the Dakotas, end of story.

Which, naturally, was mostly hearsay anyway. Bar talk. Doug had become a regular at Callahan’s sometime in early July of that year, and by mid-August he looked at himself in another mirror and thought, you bagged your job and now you have a drinking problem, buddy. You need to get out of this place.

That was when Craignotti had eyeballed him. Slow consideration at reptile brain-speed. He bombed his glass at a gulp and rose; he was a man who always squared his shoulders when he stood up, to advise the talent of the room just how broad his chest was. He stumped over to Doug without his walking stick, to prove he didn’t really need it. He signaled Sutter, the cadaverous bartender, to deliver his next pitcher of brew to the stool next to Doug’s.

After some preliminary byplay and chitchat, Craignotti beered himself to within spitting distance of having a point. “So, you was a teacher at the junior high?”

“Ex-teacher. Nothing bad. I just decided I had to relocate.”

“Ain’t what I heard.” Every time Craignotti drank, his swallows were half-glass capacity. One glassful, two swallows, rinse and repeat. “I heard you porked one of your students. That little slut Sheila Morgan.”

“Not true.”

Craignotti poured Doug a glass of beer to balance out the Black Jack he was consuming, one slow finger at a time. “Naah, it ain’t what you think. I ain’t like that. Those little fucking whores are outta control anyway. They’re fucking in goddamned grade school, if they’re not all crackheads by then.”

“The benefits of our educational system.” Doug toasted the air. If you drank enough, you could see lost dreams and hopes, swirling there before your nose, demanding sacrifice and tribute.

“Anyhow, point is that you’re not working, am I right?”

“That is a true fact.” Doug tasted the beer. It chased smooth.

“You know Coggins, the undertaker here?”

“Yeah.” Doug had to summon the image. Bald guy, ran the Triple Pines funeral home and maintained the Hollymount Cemetery on the outskirts of town. Walked around with his hands in front of him like a preying mantis.

“Well, I know something a lotta people around here don’t know yet. Have you heard of the Marlboro Reservoir?” It was the local project that would not die. It had last been mentioned in the Pine Grove Messenger over a year previously.

“I didn’t think that plan ever cleared channels.”

“Yeah, well, it ain’t for you or me to know. But they’re gonna build it. And there’s gonna be a lotta work. Maybe bring this shithole town back to life.”

“But I’m leaving this shithole town,” said Doug. “Soon. So you’re telling me this because—?”

“Because you look like a guy can keep his trap shut. Here’s the deal: this guy Coggins comes over and asks me to be a foreman. For what, I say. And he says – now get this – in order to build the reservoir, for some reason I don’t know about, they’re gonna have to move the cemetery to the other side of Pine Grove – six fucking miles. So he needs guys to dig up all the folks buried in the cemetery, and catalogue ’em, and bury ’em again on the other side of the valley. Starts next Monday. The pay is pretty damned good for the work, and almost nobody needs to know about it. I ain’t about to hire these fucking deadbeats around here, these dicks with the muscle cars, ‘cept for Jacky Tynan, ‘cos he’s a good worker and don’t ask questions. So I thought, I gotta find me a few more guys that are, like, responsible, and since you’re leaving anyhow . . .”

Long story short, that’s how Doug wound up manning a shovel. The money was decent and frankly, he needed the bank. “Answer me one question, though,” he said to Craignotti. “Where did you get all that shit about Sheila Morgan, I mean, why did you use that to approach me?”

“Oh, that,” said Craignotti. “She told me. Was trying to trade some tight little puddy for a ride outta town.” Craignotti had actually said puddy, like Sylvester the Cat. I tot I taw . . . “I laughed in her face; I said, what, d’you think I’m some kinda baby-raper? I woulda split her in half. She threw a fit and went off and fucked a bunch of guys who were less discriminating. Typical small-time town-pump scheiss. She musta lost her cherry when she was twelve. So I figured you and me had something in common – we’re probably the only two men in town who haven’t plumbed that hole. Shit, we’re so fucking honest, folks around here will think we’re queer.”

Honor and ethics, thought Doug. Wonderful concepts, those were.

There were more than a thousand graves in Hollymount Cemetery, dating back to the turn of the 19th century. Stones so old that names had weathered to vague indentations in granite. Plots with no markers. Minor vandalism. The erosion of time and climate. Cog-gins, the undertaker, had collated a master name sheet and stapled it to a gridded map of the cemetery, presenting the crew picked by Craignotti with a problem rather akin to solving a huge crossword puzzle made out of dead people. Doug paged through the list until he found Michelle Farrier’s name. He had attended her funeral, and sure enough – she was still here.

After his divorce from Marianne (the inevitable ex-wife), he had taken to the road, but had read enough Kerouac to know that the road held nothing for him. A stint as a blackjack dealer in Vegas. A teaching credential from LA; he was able to put that in his pocket and take it anywhere. Four months after his arrival in Triple Pines, he attended the funeral of the only friend he had sought to develop locally – Michelle Farrier, a runner just like him.

In the afterblast of an abusive and ill-advised marriage, Michelle had come equipped with a six-year-old daughter named Rochelle. Doug could easily see the face of the mother in the child, the younger face that had taken risks and sought adventure and brightened at the prospect of sleeping with rogues. Michelle had touched down in Triple Pines two months away from learning she was terminally ill. Doug had met them during a seriocomic bout of bathroom-sharing at Mrs Ives’ rooming house, shortly before he had rented a two-bedroom that had come cheap because there were few people in town actively seeking better lodgings, and fewer who could afford to move up. Michelle remained game, as leery as Doug of getting involved, and their gradually kindling passion filled their evenings with a delicious promise. In her kiss lurked a hungry romantic on a short tether, and Doug was working up the nerve to invite her and Rochelle to share his new home when the first talk of doctor visits flattened all other concerns to secondary status. He watched her die. He tried his best to explain it to Rochelle. And Rochelle was removed, to grandparents somewhere in the Bay area. She wept when she said goodbye to Doug. So had Michelle.

Any grave but that one, thought Doug. Don’t make me dig that one up. Make that someone else’s task.

He knew enough about mortuary tradition to know it was unusual for an undertaker like Coggins to also be in charge of the cemetery. However, small, remote towns tend not to view such a monopoly on the death industry as a negative thing. Coggins was a single stranger for the populace to trust, instead of several. Closer to civilisation, the particulars of chemical supply, casket sales, and the mortician’s craft congregated beneath the same few conglomerate umbrellas, bringing what had been correctly termed a “Tru-Value hardware” approach to what was being called the “death industry” by the early 1990s. Deceased Americans had become a cash crop at several billion dollars per annum . . . not counting the flower arrangements. Triple Pines still believed in the mom-and-pop market, the corner tavern, the one-trade-fits-all handyman.

Doug had been so appalled at Michelle’s perfunctory service that he did a bit of investigative reading-up. He discovered that most of the traditional accoutrements of the modern funeral were aimed at one objective above all – keeping morticians and undertakers in business. Not, as most people supposed, because of obscure health imperatives, or a misplaced need for ceremony, or even that old favorite, religious ritual. It turned out to be one of the three or four most expensive costs a normal citizen could incur during the span of an average, conventional life – another reason weddings and funerals seemed bizarrely similar. It was amusing to think how simply the two could be confused. Michelle would have been amused, at least. She had rated one of each, neither very satisfying.

Doug would never forget Rochelle’s face, either. He had gotten to play the role of father to her for about a week and change, and it had scarred him indelibly. Given time, her loss, too, was a strangely welcome kind of pain.

Legally, disinterment was a touchy process, since the casket containing the remains was supposed to be technically “undamaged” when removed from the earth. This meant Jacky and the other backhoe operators could only skim to a certain depth – the big scoops – before Doug or one of his co-workers had to jump in with a shovel. Some of the big concrete grave liners were stacked three deep to a plot; at least, Craignotti had said something about three being the limit. They looked like big, featureless refrigerators laid on end, and tended to crumble like plaster. Inside were the burial caskets. Funeral publicists had stopped calling them coffins about forty years ago. “Coffins” were boxes shaped to the human form, wide at the top, slim at the bottom, with the crown shaped like the top half of a hexagon. “Coffins” evoked morbid assumptions, and so were replaced in the vernacular with “caskets” – nice, straight angles, with no Dracula or Boot Hill associations. In much the same fashion, “cemeteries” had become “memorial parks”. People did everything they could, it seemed, to deny the reality of death.

Which explained the grave liners. Interment in coffins, caskets, or anything else from a wax-coated cardboard box to a shroud generally left a concavity in the lawn, once the body began to decompose, and its container, to collapse. In the manner of a big, mass-produced, cheap sarcophagus, the concrete grave liners prevented the depressing sight of . . . er, depressions. Doug imagined them to be manufactured by the same place that turned out highway divider berms; the damned things weighed about the same.

Manning his shovel, Doug learned a few more firsthand things about graves. Like how it could take eight hours for a single digger, working alone, to excavate a plot to the proper dimensions. Which was why Craignotti had been forced to locate operators for no fewer than three backhoes on this job. Plus seven “scoopers” in Doug’s range of ability. The first shift, they only cleared 50 final resting places. From then on, they would aim for a hundred stiffs per working day.

Working. Stiffs. Rampant, were the opportunities for gallows humor.

Headstones were stacked as names were checked off the master list. BEECHER, LEE, 1974–2002 – HE PROTECTED AND SERVED. GUDGELL, CONROY, 1938–2003 – DO NOT GO GENTLY. These were newer plots, more recent deaths. These were people who cared about things like national holidays or presidential elections, archetypal Americans from fly-over country. But in their midst, Doug was also a cliché – the drifter, the stranger. If the good folk of Triple Pines (the living ones, that is) sensed discord in their numbers, they would actively seek out mutants to scotch. Not One of Us.

He had to get out. Just this job, just a few days, and he could escape. It was better than being a mutant, and perhaps getting lynched. He moved on to STOWE, DORMAND R., 1940–1998 — LOVING HUSBAND, CARING FATHER. Not so recent. Doug felt a little bit better.

They broke after sunset. That was when Doug back-checked the dig list and found a large, red X next to Michelle Farrier’s name.

“This job ain’t so damned secret,” said Joe Hopkins, later, at Callahan’s. Their after-work table was five: Joe, Jacky, Doug, and two more guys from the shift, Miguel Ayala and Boyd Cooper. Craignotti sat away from them, at his accustomed roost near the end of the bar. The men were working on their third pitcher. Doug found that no amount of beer could get the taste of grave dirt out of the back of his throat. Tomorrow, he’d wear a bandana. Maybe.

“You working tomorrow, or not, or what?” said Craignotti. Doug gave him an if-come answer, and mentioned the bandana. Craignotti had shrugged. In that moment, it all seemed pretty optional, so Doug concentrated on becoming mildly drunk with a few of the crew working the – heh – graveyard shift.

Joe was a musclebound ex-biker type who always wore a leather vest and was rarely seen without a toothpick jutting from one corner of his mouth. He had cultivated elaborate moustaches which he waxed. He was going grey at the temples. His eyes were dark, putting Doug in mind of a gypsy. He continued: “What I mean is, nobody’s supposed to know about this little relocation. But the guys in here know, even if they don’t talk about it. The guys who run the Triple Pines bank sure as shit know. It’s a public secret. Nobody talks about it, is all.”

“I bet the mayor’s in on it, too,” said Miguel. “All in, who cares? I mean, I had to pick mushrooms once for a buck a day. This sure beats the shit out of that.”

“Doesn’t bother you?” said Boyd Cooper, another of the backhoe jockeys. Older, pattern baldness, big but not heavy. Bull neck and cleft chin. His hands had seen a lifetime of manual labor. It had been Boyd who showed them how to cable the lids off the heavy stone grave liners, instead of bringing in the crane rig used to emplace them originally. This group’s unity as mutual outcasts gave them a basic common language, and Boyd always cut to the gristle. “Digging up dead people?”

“Nahh,” said Jacky, tipping his beer. “We’re doing them a favor. Just a kind of courtesy thing. Moving ’em so they won’t be forgotten.”

“I guess,” said Joe, working his toothpick. He burnished his teeth a lot with it. Doug noticed one end was stained with a speck of blood, from his gums.

“You’re the teacher,” Boyd said to Doug. “You tell us. Good thing or bad thing?”

Doug did not want to play arbiter. “Just a job of work. Like resorting old files. You notice how virtually no one in Triple Pines got cremated? They were all buried. That’s old-fashioned, but you have to respect the dead. Laws and traditions.”

“And the point is . . . ?” Boyd was looking for validation.

“Well, not everybody is entitled to a piece of property when they die, six by three by seven. That’s too much space. Eventually we’re going to run out of room for all our dead people. Most plots in most cemeteries are rented, and there’s a cap on the time limit, and if somebody doesn’t pay up, they get mulched. End of story.”

“Wow, is that true?” said Jacky. “I thought you got buried, it was like, forever.”

“Stopped being that way about a hundred years ago,” said Doug. “Land is worth too much. You don’t process the dead and let them use up your real estate without turning a profit.”

Miguel said, “That would be un-American.” He tried for a chuckle but it died.

“Check it out if you don’t believe me,” said Doug. “Look it up. Behind all that patriotic rah-rah-rah about community brotherhood and peaceful gardens, it’s all about capital gains. Most people don’t like to think about funerals or cemeteries because, to them, it’s morbid. That leaves funeral directors free to profiteer.”

“You mean Coggins?” said Joe, giving himself a refill.

“Look, Coggins is a great example,” said Doug. “In the outside world, big companies have incorporated most aspects of the funeral. Here, Coggins runs the mortuary, the cemetery, everything. He can charge whatever he wants, and people will pay for the privilege of shunting their grief and confusion onto him. You wouldn’t believe the markup on some of this stuff. Caskets are three times wholesale. Even if they put you in a cardboard box – which is called an ‘alternative container’, by the way – the charge is a couple of hundred bucks.”

“Okay, that settles it,” said Miguel. When he smiled big, you could see his gold tooth. “We all get to live forever, because we can’t afford to die.”

“There used to be a riddle,” said Doug. “What is it: the man who made it didn’t want it, the man who bought it had no use for it, and the man who used it didn’t know it. What is it?”

Jacky just looked confused.

His head honeycombed with domestic beer, Doug tried not to lurch or slosh as he navigated his way out of Callahan’s. The voice coming at him out of the fogbound darkness might well have been an aural hallucination. Or a wish fulfillment.

“Hey stranger,” it said. “Walk a lady home?”

The night yielded her to him. She came not as he had fantasised, nor as he had seen her in dreams. She wore a long-sleeved, black, lacy thing with a neck-wrap collar, and her hair was up. She looked different but her definitive jawline and frank, grey gaze were unmistakable.

“That’s not you,” he said. “I’m a tiny bit intoxicated, but not enough to believe it’s you.” Yet. There was no one else on the street to confirm or deny; no validation from fellow inebriates or corroboration from independent bystanders. Just Doug, the swirling night, and a woman who could not be the late Michelle Farrier, whom he had loved. He had only accepted that he loved her after she died. It was more tragic that way, more delusionally romanticist. Potent enough to wallow in. A weeper, produced by his brain while it was buzzing with hops and alcohol.

She bore down on him, moving into focus, and that made his grief worse. “Sure it’s me,” she said. “Look at me. Take a little bit of time to get used to the idea.”

He drank her in as though craving a narcotic. Her hair had always been long, burnished sienna, deftly razor-thinned to layers that framed her face. Now it was pinned back to exhibit her gracile neck and bold features. He remembered the contour of her ears. She smiled, and he remembered exactly how her teeth set. She brought with her the scent of night-blooming jasmine. If she was a revenant, she had come freighted with none of the corruption of the tomb. If she was a mirage, the light touch of her hand on his wrist should not have felt so corporeal.

Her touch was not cold.

“No,” said Doug. “You died. You’re gone.”

“Sure, darling – I don’t deny that. But now I’m back, and you should be glad.”

He was still shaking his head. “I saw you die. I helped bury you.”

“And today, you helped ww-bury me. Well, your buddies did.”

She had both hands on him, now. This was the monster movie moment when her human visage melted away to reveal the slavering ghoul who wanted to eat his brain and wash it down with a glass of his blood. Her sheer presence almost buckled his knees.

“How?”

“Beats me,” she said. “We’re coming back all over town. I don’t know exactly how it all works, yet. But that stuff I was buried in – those cerements – were sort of depressing. I checked myself out while I was cleaning up. Everything seems to be in place. Everything works. Except for the tumor; that kind of withered away to an inert little knot, in the grave. I know this is tough for you to swallow, but I’m here, and goddammit, I missed you, and I thought you’d want to see me.”

“I think about you every day,” he said. It was still difficult to meet her gaze, or to speed-shift from using the accustomed past tense.

“Come on,” she said, linking arms with him.

“Where?” Without delay his guts leaped at the thought that she wanted to take him back to the cemetery.

“Wherever. Listen, do you recall kissing me? See if you can remember how we did that.”

She kissed him with all the passion of the long-lost, regained unexpectedly. It was Michelle, all right – alive, breathing, returned to him whole.

No one had seen them. No one had come out of the bar. No pedestrians. Triple Pines tended to roll up the sidewalks at 7:00 p.m.

“This is . . . nuts,” he said.

She chuckled. “As long as you don’t say it’s distasteful.” She kissed him again. “And of course you remember that other thing we never got around to doing?”

“Antiquing that rolltop desk you liked, at the garage sale?” His humor was helping him balance. His mind still wanted to swoon, or explode.

“Ho, ho, very funny. I am so glad to see you right now that I’ll spell it out for you, Doug.” She drew a tiny breath of consideration, working up nerve, then puffed it out. “Okay: I want to hold your cock in my hand and feel you get hard, for me. That was the dream, right? That first attraction, where you always visualise the other person naked, fucking you, while your outer self pretends like none of that matters?”

“I didn’t think that,” Doug fibbed. Suddenly his breath would not draw.

“Yes you did,” Michelle said. “I did, too. But I was too chicken to act. That’s all in the past.” She stopped and smacked him lightly on the arm. “Don’t give me that lopsided look, like I’m the one that’s crazy. Not now. Not after I died, thinking you were the best damned thing I’d found in a long time.”

“Well, there was Rochelle,” said Doug, remembering how cautiously they had behaved around her six-year-old daughter.

“My little darling is not here right now,” she said. “I’d say it’s time to fulfill the fantasy, Doug. Mine, if not yours. We’ve wasted enough life, and not everybody gets a bonus round.”

“But—” Doug’s words, his protests had bottlenecked between his lungs. (And for-crap-sake why did he feel the urge to protest this?)

“I know what you’re trying to say. I died.” Another impatient huff of breath – living breath. “I can’t explain it. I don’t know if it’s temporary. But I’ll tell you one thing I do know: All that shit about the ‘peace’ of the grave? It doesn’t exist. It’s not a release, and it’s not oblivion. It’s like a nightmare that doesn’t conveniently end when you wake up, because you’re not supposed to wake up, ever! And you know what else? When you’re in the grave, you can hear every goddamned footfall of the living, above you. Trust me on that one.”

“Jesus . . .” he said.

“Not Jesus. Neither Heaven nor Hell. Not God. Not Buddha, not Allah, not Yahweh. Nothing. That’s what waits on the other side of that headstone. No pie in the sky by and by when you die. No Nirvana. No Valhalla. No Tetragrammaton. No Zeus or Jove or any of their buddies. Nothing. Maybe that’s why we’re coming back – there’s nothing out there, beyond. Zero. Not even an echo. So kiss me again. I’ve been cold and I’ve been still, and I need to make love to you. Making love; that sounds like we’re manufacturing something, doesn’t it? Feel my hand. There’s living blood in there. Feel my heart; it’s pumping again. I’ve felt bad things moving around inside of me. That happens when you’re well and truly dead. Now I’m back. And I want to feel other things moving around inside of me. You.”

Tomorrow, Doug would get fired as a no-show after only one day on the job. Craignotti would replace him with some guy named Dormand R. Stowe, rumored to be a loving husband and a caring father.

One of the most famous foreign pistols used during the Civil War was the Le Mat Revolver, a cap and ball weapon developed by a French-born New Orleans doctor, unique in that it had two barrels – a cylinder which held nine .40 caliber rounds fired through the upper barrel, and revolved around the lower, .63 caliber barrel, which held a charge of 18 or 20-gauge buckshot. With a flick of the thumb, the shooter could realign the hammer to fall on the lower barrel, which was essentially a small shotgun, extremely deadly at close range, with a kick like an enraged mule. General J. E. B. Stuart had carried one. So had General P. G. T. Beauregard. As an antique firearm, such guns in good condition were highly prized. Conroy Gudgell cherished his; it was one of the stars of his modest home arsenal, which he always referred to as his “collection”. His big mistake was showing his wife how to care for it. How to clean it. How to load it. How to fire it, you know, “just in case”. No one was more surprised than Conroy when his loving wife, a respected first-grade teacher in Triple Pines, blew him straight down to Hell with his own collectible antique.

Ellen Gudgell became a widow at sixty-one years of age. She also became a Wiccan. She was naked, or “sky-clad”, when she burned the braided horsehair whip in her fireplace after murdering Conroy. Firing the Le Mat had broken her right wrist; she’d had to make up a story about that. With her left hand she had poured herself a nice brandy, before working herself up into enough lather to phone the police, in tears, while most of Conroy’s head and brains were cooling in various corners of his basement workshop. A terrible accident, oh my lord, it’s horrible, please come. She kept all the stuff about Earth Mother religious revelations to herself.

She treated Constable Dickey (Triple Pines’ head honcho of law enforcement) as she would one of her elementary school charges. Firm but fair. Matronly, but with just the right salting of manufactured hysteria. Conroy had been working with his gun collection in the basement when she heard a loud boom, she told the officer. She panicked and broke her wrist trying to move what was left of him, and now she did not know what to do, and she needed help.

And the local cops had quite neatly taken care of all the rest. Ellen never had to mention the beatings she had suffered under the now-incinerated whip, or that the last fifteen years of their sex life had consisted mostly of rape. When not teaching school, she used her free time – that is, her time free of Conroy’s oppression – to study up on alternate philosophies, and when she found one that made sense to her, it wasn’t long before she decided to assert her new self.

After that, the possibilities seemed endless. She felt as though she had shed a chrysalis and evolved to a form which made her happier with herself.

Therefore, no one was more surprised than Ellen when her husband Conroy thumped up the stairs, sundered head and all, to come a-calling more than a year after she thought she had definitively killed the rotten sonofabitch. His face looked exactly as it had when Coggins, the undertaker, had puttied and waxed it back into a semblance of human, dark sub-dermal lines inscribing puzzle pieces in rough assembly. The parts did not move in correct concert when Conroy spoke to her, however. His face was disjointed and broken, his eyes, oddly fixed.

“Time for some loving,” is what Conroy said to her first.

Ellen ran for the gun cabinet, downstairs.

“Already thought of that,” said Conroy, holding up the Le Mat.

He did not shoot her in the head.

Despite the fact that Lee Beecher’s death had been inadvertent, one of those Act of God things, Constable Lon Dickey had always felt responsible. Lee had been a hometown boy, Dickey had liked him, and made him his deputy; ergo, Lee had been acting as a representative of the law on Dickey’s behalf, moving a dead deer out of the middle of the road during a storm. Some local asshole had piled into the animal and left it for dead, which constituted Triple Pines’ only known form of hit and run. If you’d had to guess the rest of the story, Dickey thought, you’d say and another speeding nitwit had hit Lee. Nope. Struck by lightning, for christ’s sake. Hit by a thunderbolt out of the ozone and killed deader than snakeshit on the spot, fried from the inside out, cooked and discarded out near the lumber yard which employed about a quarter of Triple Pines’ blue-collar workforce.

Lee had been buried in his uniform. A go-getter, that kid. Good footballer. Instead of leaving Triple Pines in his rearward dust, as so many youngsters ached to do, Lee had stuck close to home, and enthusiastically sought his badge. It was worth it to him to be called an “officer”, like Dickey. Death in Triple Pines was nearly always accidental, or predictable – no mystery. This was not the place where murderers or psychos lived. In this neck of the woods, the worst an officer might have to face would be the usual rowdiness – teenagers, or drunks, or drunk teenagers – and the edict to act all authoritative if there was a fire or flood or something naturally disastrous.

Beecher’s replacement was a guy named James Trainor, shit-hot out of the academy in Seattle and fulminating to enforce. Too stormtrooper for Triple Pines; too ready to pull his sidearm for a traffic stop. Dickey still had not warmed up to him, smelling the moral pollution of citified paranoia.

Feeling like a lazy lion surveying his domain, Dickey had sauntered the two blocks back to the station from the Ready-Set Dinette, following feeling his usual cheeseburger late-lunch. (The food at Callahan’s, a block further, was awful – the burgers as palatable as pucks sliced off a Duraflame log.) Time to trade some banter with RaeAnn, who ran the police station’s desk, phones and radios. RaeAnn was a stocky chunk of bottle-blonde business with multiple chins and an underbite, whose choice of corrective eyewear did not de-emphasise her Jimmy Durante nose. In no way was RaeAnn a temptation, and Dickey preferred that. Strictly business. RaeAnn was fast, efficient, and did not bring her problems to work. Right now she was leaning back at her station with her mouth wide open, which seemed strange. She resembled a gross caricature of one of those mail-order blowjob dolls.

Before he could ask what the hell, Dickey saw the bullet hole in the center of her forehead. Oh.

“Sorry I’m a little bit late, Chief,” said Lee Beecher. He had grave dirt all over his moldy uniform, and his face was the same flash-fried nightmare that had caused Coggins to recommend a closed-casket service. Beecher had always called Dickey “Chief”.

Deputy Trainor was sprawled behind Dickey’s desk, his cap over his eyes, his tongue sticking out, and a circlet of five .357 caliber holes in his chest. Bloodsmear on the bulletin board illustrated how gracelessly he had fallen, hit so hard one of his boots had flown off. The late Lee Beecher had been reloading his revolver when Dickey walked in.

“I had to shoot RaeAnn, she was making too much bother,” said Beecher. His voice was off, dry and croaky, buzzing like a reed.

Dickey tried to contain his slow awe by muttering the names of assorted deities. His hand wanted to feel the comfort of his own gun.

“How come you replaced me, Chief?” said the late Lee Beecher. “Man, I didn’t quit or nothing. You replaced me with some city boy. That wasn’t our deal. I thought you liked me.”

“I—” Dickey stammered. “Lee, I . . .” He just could not force out words. This was too wrong.

“You just put me in the dirt.” The late Lee Beecher shook his charred skull with something akin to sadness. He snapped home the cylinder on his pistol, bringing the hammer back to full cock in the same smooth move. “Now I’m gonna have to return the favor. Sorry, Chief.”

Constable Dickey was still trying to form a whole sentence when the late Lee Beecher gave him all six rounds. Up at RaeAnn’s desk, the radio crackled and the switchboard lit up with an influx of weird emergency calls, but there was no one to pay any attention, or care.

Doug’s current home barely fit the definition. It had no more character than a British row flat or a post-war saltbox. It was one of the basic, ticky-tacky clapboard units thrown up by the Triple Pines aluminum plant back when they sponsored company housing, and abandoned to fall apart on its own across slow years once the plant folded. It had a roof and indoor plumbing, which was all Doug had ever required of a residence, because addresses were disposable. It had storm shutters and a rudimentary version of heat, against rain and winter, but remained drafty. Its interior walls were bare and still the same vague green Doug had always associated with academia. The bedroom was sort of blue, in the same mood.

He regretted his cheap sheets, his second-hand bed, his milk-crate nightstand. He had strewn some candles around to soften the light, and fired up a portable, radiant oil heater. The heat and the light diffused the stark seediness of the room, just enough. They softened the harsh edges of reality.

There had been no seduction, no ritual libations, no teasing or flirting. Michelle had taken him the way the Allies took Normandy, and it was all he could muster to keep from gasping. His pelvis felt hammered and his legs seemed numb and far away. She was alive, with the warm, randy needs of the living, and she had plundered him with a greed that cleansed them both of any lingering recriminations.

No grave rot, no mummy dust. Was it still necrophilia when the dead person moved and talked back to you?

“I have another blanket,” he said. His left leg was draped over her as their sweat cooled. He watched candle-shadows dance on the ceiling, making monster shapes.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”

They bathed. Small bathtub, lime-encrusted shower head. It permitted Doug to refamiliarise himself with the geometry of her body, from a perspective different than that of the bedroom. He felt he could never see or touch enough of her; it was a fascination for him.

There was nothing to eat in the kitchen, and simply clicking on the TV seemed faintly ridiculous. They slept, wrapped up in each other. The circumstance was still too fragile to detour into lengthy, dissipate conversations about need, so they slept, and in sleeping, found a fundamental innocence that was already beyond logic – a feeling thing. It seemed right and correct.

Doug awoke, his feet and fingertips frigid, in the predawn. He added his second blanket and snuggled back into Michelle. She slept with a nearly beatific expression, her breath – real, living – coming in slow tidal measures.

The next afternoon Doug sortied to the market to stock up on some basics and find some decent food that could be prepared in his minimal kitchen. In the market, he encountered Joe Hopkins, from the digging crew. Doug tried unsuccessfully to duck him. He wanted to do nothing to break the spell he was under.

But Joe wanted to talk, and cornered him. He was holding a fifth of bourbon like he intended to make serious use of it, in due course.

“There was apparently a lot of activity in the cemetery last night,” he said, working his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both ends were wet and frayed. “I mean, after we left. We went back this morning, things were moved around. Some graves were disrupted. Some were partially refilled. It was a mess, like a storm had tossed everything. We had to spend two hours just to get back around to where we left off.”

“You mean, like vandalism?” said Doug.

“Not exactly.” Joe had another habit, that of continually smoothing his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, as though to keep his moustache in line when he wasn’t looking. To Doug, it signaled nervousness, agitation, and Joe was too brawny to be agitated about much for very long. “I tried to figure it, you know – what alla sudden makes the place not creepy, but threatening in a way it wasn’t, yesterday. It’s the feeling you’d have if you put on your clothes and alla sudden thought that, hey, somebody else has been wearing my clothes, right?”

Doug thought of what Michelle had said, about the dead hearing every footfall of the living above them.

“What I’m saying is, I don’t blame you for quitting. After today, I’m thinking the same thing. Every instinct I have tells me to just jump on my bike and ride the fuck out of here as fast as I can go. And, something else? Jacky says he ran into a guy last night, a guy he went to high school with. They were on the football team together. Jacky says the guy died four years ago in a Jeep accident. But the he saw him, last night, right outside the bar after you left. Not a ghost. He wasn’t that drunk. Then, this morning, Craignotti says something equally weird: That he saw a guy at the diner, you know the Ready-Set? Guy was a dead ringer for Aldus Champion, you know the mayor who died in 2003 and got replaced by that asshole selectman, whatsisname—?”

“Brad Ballinger,” said Doug.

“Yeah. I been here long enough to remember that. But here’s the thing: Craignotti checked, and today Ballinger was nowhere to be found, and he ain’t on vacation or nothing. And Ballinger is in bed with Coggins, the undertaker, somehow. Notice how that whole Marlboro Reservoir thing went into a coma when Champion was mayor? For a minute I thought Ballinger had, you know, had him whacked or something. But now Champion’s back in town – a guy Craignotti swears isn’t a lookalike, but the guy. So now I think there was some heavy-duty money changing hands under a lot of tables, and the reservoir is a go, except nobody is supposed to talk about it, and now we’re out there, digging up the whole history of Triple Pines as a result.”

“What does this all come to?” Doug really wanted to get back to Michelle. She might evaporate or something if left alone too long.

“I don’t know, that’s the fucked up thing.” Joe tried to shove his busy hands into his vest pockets, then gave up. “I’m not smart enough to figure it out, whatever it is . . . so I give it to you, see if any lightbulbs come on. I’ll tell you one thing. This afternoon I felt scared, and I ain’t felt that way since I was paddy humping.”

“We’re both outsiders, here,” said Doug.

“Everybody on the dig posse in an outsider, man. Check that out.”

“Not Jacky.”

“Jacky don’t pose any threat because he don’t know any better. And even him, he’s having fucking hallucinations about his old school buddies. Listen: I ain’t got a phone at my place, but I got a mobile. Do me a favor – I mean, I know we don’t know each other that well – but if you figure something out, give me a holler?”

“No problem.” They traded phone numbers and Joe hurried to pay for his evening’s sedation. As he went, he said, “Watch your ass, cowboy.”

“You, too.”

Doug and Michelle cooked collaboratively. They made love. They watched a movie together both had seen separately. They made more love. They watched the evening sky for several hours until chilly rain began to sheet down from above, then they repaired inside and continued to make love. The Peyton Place antics of the rest of the Triple Pines community, light years away from their safe, centered union, could not have mattered less.

The trick, as near as Billy Morrison could wrassle it, was to find somebody and pitch them into your hole as soon as you woke up. Came back. Revived. Whatever.

So he finished fucking Vanessa Billings. “Bill-ing” her, as his cohort Vance Thompson would crack, heh. Billy had stopped “billing” high school chicks three years ago, when he died. Now he was billing a Billings, wotta riot.

Billy, Vance, and Donna Christiansen had perished inside of Billy’s Boss 302 rebuild, to the tune of Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” on CD. The car was about half grey primer and fender-fill, on its way back to glory. The CD was a compilation of metal moldies. No one ever figured out how the car had crashed, up near a trailer suburbia known as Rimrock, and no one in authority gave much of a turd, since Billy and his fellow losers hailed from “that side” of town, rubbing shoulders an open-fire garbage dump, an auto wrecking yard, and (although Constable Dickey did not know it) a clandestine crack lab. The last sensation Billy experienced as a living human was the car sitting down hard on its left front as the wheel flew completely off. The speed was ticketable and the road, wet as usual, slick as mayonnaise. The car flipped and tumbled down an embankment. Billy dimly recalled seeing Donna snap in half and fly through the windshield before the steering column punched into his chest. The full tank ruptured and spewed a meandering piss-line of gasoline all the way down the hill. Vance’s cigarette had probably touched it off, and the whole trash-compacted mess had burned for an hour before new rain finally doused it and a lumber yard worker spotted the smoke.

Their plan for the evening had been to destroy a bottle of vodka in the woods, then Billy and Vance would do Donna from both ends. Donna dug that sort of thing when she was sufficiently wasted. When they awoke several years later in their unearthed boxes, they renewed their pleasure as soon as they could scare up some more liquor. They wandered into a roadside outlet known as the 1-Stop Brew Shoppe and Vance broke bottles over the head of the proprietor until the guy stopping breathing. Then Donna lit out for the Yard, a quadrangle of trees and picnic benches near most of the churches in town. The Yard was Triple Pines’ preferred salon for dropouts fond of cannabis, and Donna felt certain she could locate an old beau or two lingering among the waistoids there. Besides, she could bend in interesting new ways, now.

Billy had sought and duly targeted Vanessa Billings, one of those booster/cheerleader bitches who would never have anything to do with his like. She had graduated in ’02 and was still – still! – living in her parents’ house. It was a kick to see her jaw gape in astonishment at the sight of him. Omigod, you like died! It was even more of a kick to hold her by the throat and fuck her until she croaked, the stuck-up little cuntling. Getting Vanessa out of her parents’ house caused a bit of ruckus, so Billy killed them, too.

Ultimately, the trio racked up so many new corpses to fill their vacant graves they needed to steal a pickup truck to ferry them all back to Hollymount. Their victims would all be back soon enough, and the fun could begin again.

None of them had a precise cognition of what they needed to do. It was more along the lines of an ingrained need – like a craving – to take the heat of the living to avoid reverting to the coldness of death. That, and the idea of refreshing their grave plots with new bodies. Billy had always had more cunning than intelligence, but the imperatives were not that daunting. Stupid dogs learned tricks in less time.

Best of all, after he finished billing Billings, Billy found he still had a boner. Death was apparently better than Viagra; he had an all-night hard-on. And since the night was still a toddler, he began to hunt for other chicks he could bill.

The sun came up. The sun went down. Billy thought of that rhyme about how the worms play pinochle on your snout. Fucking worms. How about the worms eat your asshole inside-out. For starters. Billy had been one super-sized organ smorgasbord, and had suffered every delicious bite. Now a whole fuckload of Triple Pines’ good, upstanding citizens were going to pay, pay, pay.

As day and night blended and passed, Triple Pines continued to mutate.

Over at the Ready-Set Dinette, a pink neon sign continued to blink the word EAT, just as it had before things changed in Triple Pines.

Deputy Lee Beecher (the late) and RaeAnn (also the late) came in for lunch as usual. The next day, Constable Dickey (recently deceased) and the new deputy, James Trainor (ditto), joined them.

Vanessa Billings became Billy Morrison’s main squeeze, and what with Vance and Donna’s hangers-on, they had enough to form a new kind of gang. In the next few days, they would start breaking windows and setting fires.

Over at Callahan’s, Craignotti continued to find fresh meat for the digging crew as the original members dropped out. Miguel Ayala had lasted three days before he claimed to have snagged a better job. Big Boyd Cooper stuck – he was a rationalist at heart, not predisposed to superstitious fears or anything else in the path of Getting the Job Done. Jacky Tynan had apparently taken sick.

Joe had packed his saddlebags and gunned his panhead straight out of town, without calling Doug, or anyone.

In the Gudgell household, every day, a pattern commenced. In the morning, Conroy Gudgell would horsewhip his treacherous wife’s naked ass, and in the evening, Ellen Gudgell would murder her husband, again and again, over and over. The blood drenching the inside of their house was not ectoplasm. It continued to accrete, layer upon layer, as one day passed into another.

In the middle of the night, Doug felt askew on the inside, and made the mistake of taking his own temperature with a thermometer.

Eighty-seven point-five degrees.

“Yeah, you’ll run a little cold,” said Michelle, from behind him. “I’m sorry about that. It’s sort of a downside. Or maybe you caught something. Do you feel sick?”

“No, I—” Doug faltered. “I just feel shagged. Weak.”

“You’re not a weak man.”

“Stop it.” He turned, confrontational. He did not want to do anything to alienate her. But. “This is serious. What if I start losing core heat? Four or five degrees is all it takes, then I’m as dead as a Healthy Choice entrée. What the hell is happening, Michelle? What haven’t you told me?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I’m not sure. I didn’t come back with a goddamned manual. I’m afraid that if I go ahead and do the next thing, the thing I feel I’m supposed to do . . . that I’ll lose you.”

Panic cinched his heart. “What’s the next thing?!”

“I was avoiding it. I was afraid to bring it up. Maybe I was enjoying this too much, what we have right now, in this isolated bubble of time.”

He held her. She wanted to reject simple comfort, but succumbed. “Just . . . tell me. Say it, whatever it is. Then it’s out in the world and we can deal with it.”

“It’s about Rochelle.”

Doug nodded, having prepared for this one. “You miss her. I know. But we can’t do anything about it. There’d be no way to explain it.”

“I want her back.” Michelle’s head was down, the tears coursing freely now.

“I know, baby, I know . . . I miss her, too. I wanted you guys to move in with me. Both of you. From here we could move anywhere, so long as it’s out of this deathtrap of a town. Neither of us likes it here very much. I figured, in the course of time—”

She slumped on the bed, hands worrying each other atop her bare legs. “It was my dream, through all those hours, days, that things had happened differently, and we had hooked up, and we all got to escape. It would be great if you were just a means to an end; you know – just another male guy-person, to manipulate. Great if I didn’t care about you; great if I didn’t actually love you.”

“I had to explain your death to Rochelle. There’s no going back from that one. Look at it this way: she’s with your mother, and she seemed like a nice lady.”

When her gaze came up to meet his, her eyes were livid. “You don’t know anything,” she said, the words constricted and bitter. “Sweet, kindly old Grandma Farrier? She’s a fucking sadist who has probably shot pornos with Rochelle by now.”

“What?!” Doug’s jaw unhinged.

“She is one sick piece of shit, and her mission was always to get Rochelle away from me, into her clutches. I ran away from home as soon as I could. And when I had Rochelle, I swore that bitch would never get her claws on my daughter. And you just . . . handed her over.”

“Now, wait a minute, Michelle . . .”

She overrode him. “No – it’s not your fault. She always presented one face to the world. Her fake face. Her human masque. Inside the family with the doors closed, it was different. You saw the masque. You dealt with the masque. So did Rochelle. Until Grandma could actually strap the collar on, she had to play it sneaky. Her real face is from a monster who needed to be inside a grave decades ago. I should know – she broke me in with a heated glass dildo when I was nine.”

“Holy shit. Michelle, why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Which ‘before?’ Before now? Or before I died? Doug, I died not knowing you were as good as you are. I thought I could never make love to anybody, ever again. I concentrated on moving from place to place to keep Rochelle off the radar.”

Doug toweled his hands, which were awash in nervous perspiration, yet irritatingly cold. Almost insensate. He needed to assauge her terror, to fix the problem, however improbable; like Boyd Cooper, to Get the Job Done. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just go get her back. We’ll figure something out.”

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“Better yet, how about we both go get her? Seeing you ought to make Grandma’s brain hit the floor.”

“That’s the problem, Doug. It’s been the problem all along. I can’t leave here. None of us can. If we do . . . if any of us goes outside of Triple Pines . . .”

“You don’t mean ‘us’ as in you-and-me. You’re talking about us as in the former occupants of Hollymount Cemetery, right?”

She nodded, more tears spilling. “I need you to fuck me. And I need you to love me. And I was hoping that you could love me enough so that I didn’t have to force you to take my place in that hole in the ground, like all the rest of the goddamned losers and dim bulbs and fly-over people in Triple Pines. I want you to go to San Francisco, and get my daughter back. But if you stay here – if you go away and come back here – eventually I’ll use you up anyway. I’ve been taking your heat, Doug, a degree at a time. And eventually you would die, and then resurrect, and then you would be stuck here too. An outsider, stuck here. And no matter what anyone’s good intentions are, it would also happen to Rochelle. I can’t kill my little girl. And I can’t hurt you any more. It’s killing me, but – what a joke – I can’t die.” She looked up, her face a raw, aching map of despair. “You see?”

Michelle had not been a local, either. But she had died here, and become a permanent resident in the Triple Pines boneyard. The population of the town was slowly shifting balance. The dead of Triple Pines were pushing out the living, seeking that stasis of small town stability where once again, everyone would be the same. What happened in Triple Pines had to stay in Triple Pines, and the Marlboro Reservoir was no boon to the community. It was going to service coastal cities; Doug knew this in his gut, now. In all ways, for all concerned, Triple Pines was the perfect place for this kind of thing to transpire, because the outside world would never notice, or never care.

With one grating exception. Which suggested one frightening solution.

Time to get out. Time to bail, now.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “If you don’t get out now, you’ll never get out. Get out, Doug. Kiss me one last time and get out. Try to think of me fondly.”

His heart smashed to pieces and burned to ashes, he kissed her. Her tears lingered on his lips, the utterly real taste of her. Without a word further, he made sure he had his wallet, got in his car, and drove. He could be in San Francisco in six hours, flat-out.

He could retrieve Rochelle, kidnap her if that was what was required. He could bring her back here to die, and be reunited with her mother. Then he could die, too. But at least he would be with them, in the end. Or he could put it behind him, and just keep on driving.

The further he got from Triple Pines, the warmer he felt.

DON TUMASONIS

Thrown

FRESH FROM AN EVENING of overindulgence on the island of Anafi some years ago, Don Tumasonis awoke with a story in his head, and immediately wrote it down.

Encouraged by fellow orgy survivors, to whom he shyly showed the fragment, he realised that honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women were within his grasp. He acquired a Muse, as is recommended, having already been provided with that sine non qua of writers, a long-suffering wife. Two International Horror Guild awards, a film option and a Hawthornden Fellowship soon followed. He still awaits power and riches, but admits that three out of five is not too bad.

His longish tale “The Swing” was recently published in the Ash-Tree Press anthology At Ease With the Dead, edited by Barbara and Christopher Roden. Other projects are in the works.

“Once, I dreamed of becoming an anthropologist,” Tumasonis recalls. “I had, after all, got stinking drunk on cheap plonk with Sir Edmund Leach, so I thought myself eminently qualified. Fired with explorers’ tales, I fixated on northern Nepal. Months of struggle with Tibetan put paid to that fantasy and, suddenly more realistic, I settled for Crete.

“Field work in the glorious mountains of Sfakia produced little of academic value. Penitent, I vowed to cross the Great Island by foot, east to west. As may now be suspected, even that last project was somehow thwarted short of completion. Not all was lost – the narrative of ‘Thrown’ draws largely on events that occurred during several legs of that journey.”

IT WAS STRANGE COUNTRY, cast into tumult by disaster.

Signs of this were everywhere, from the seaside city in the south where they first stayed, to the northern village from whence they would start their walk. Across the neck of the island, debris was visible all over, through the dusty windows of their ageing Mercedes bus, running late. The delay was a result of the massive flood of several days past, with traffic still detoured around the washed-out main highway bridge, to the old road a bit further inland.

When Martin and Marline had first come to Crete two days after the deluge, quasi-urban Ierapetra was drying out from the rampageous torrent that had wrecked its streets and invaded buildings. The branch Agricultural Bank’s records and documents were spread out on sidewalks and streets, stones and bricks neatly pinning papers in place, the sun wrinkling and baking fibres. Nearby, a flower-filled Roman sarcophagus doubling as a sidewalk planter lent white Parian cachet to an adjacent telephone booth.

Floods came often enough on this island of canyons and gorges, but this one had been a monster, by every local estimation. It was the usual chain of events. Heavy autumn rains washed broken trees and branches down a ravine, compacting with clay and gravel at a pinched slot, forming a natural dam. Before anyone even knew, or had time to react, millions of tons of water had built up, until the sudden giving way, and catastrophic release.

A couple had been taken out to sea, drowned in their Volkswagen beetle. Excepting these, and one old woman at an isolated farm, there was no other loss of human life, amazing as that seemed in the aftermath.

But the water, gaining speed, spewing like a jet from the mouth of the deep cleft above the cultivated plain, took all else living with as it ripped through the countryside, crashing to the sea in a few calamitous minutes.

Some short hours after having checked into their room – the cheapest they could find, with a bare concrete floor, the two followed the lead of everyone else: they promenaded, taking in the chaos and damage, trying to assimilate the monstrous extent of the wreckage about them.

Crowds of foreigners from the large tourist complex near the shore mingled with the local Greeks, walking east out of town. Hundreds, clumped together in their scores, their pairs, were heading along the beach, where the detritus of the flooding was spread. All were silent and stunned, even two days after, and talked, if at all, in hushed voices, in the descending light of the sun.

Past the hotels, a new river channel had torn through the shore road, destroying it, and people waded across, past a parked bulldozer there for the clean-up. On the other side, all over the long broad beach, lay hundreds of animal corpses, wild and domestic. Lizards rotted promiscuously with goats. Pathetic lambs, wool matted and muddy, strewn broken amid snapped tree limbs. Snakes, and above all, chickens, were everywhere, half-buried in the sand. Let this their memorial be.

Back at their rundown hotel room, the couple made love. Rattled by what they had seen, they drank to excess, and things ran wilder than usual between them, married ten years.

Marline sat at an angle leaning forward, hands on Martin’s ankles, facing his feet, as he lay on his back, in the reverse cowgirl, pornographic industrial standard pose, provider of unobstructed views. They had started prone, two layers, both face up, with her on top. Disembodied hands stroked her, leaving her too open and exposed, as if naked in public with some unspeakable object inside. She slid upright and forward, into the unpremeditated position, a natural extension of the first, really, looking upward as she rocked.

A single red light bulb, forming the sole illumination, bare, dangled on its brown plastic wire from the ceiling, casting a garish glow throughout the room. The double shutters were closed, and the chamber, already damp from their showering, became even more so, heating up.

The entire tawdriness of the situation inspired Marline to a totally uncharacteristic frenzy. Replying in the dialogue of the flesh, Martin grew enormous, larger than ever inside her, and imagined himself in the cheapest of houses of prostitution, some bold and promiscuous whore working him for all his money’s worth. The red light added to the fantastic aspect, that of being in a Fellini film, or a Turkish camp of ill-fame, where poor young widows, respectable and married the one day, the next, with no one to protect them, are thrown headlong into the wildest of debaucheries, with no escape.

Marline’s face was invisible as Martin clenched her smoothly sculpted, heaving buttocks. Perfectly rounded, they were starting to fleck with pigment from the hours in the Cretan sun, complementing the rest of her freckled body, now writhing like a snake, as she and he both gasped for breath. He held those nether spheres tightly from behind, as it seemed otherwise she would rocket off him in her now fierce motion.

Her short red hair was like a helmet, and under the crimson bulb, dark. At the moment of ecstasy, she turned for the first time to face him, from over her shoulder. Her sharp jaw was distended – like a John dory, the thought came to him from nowhere – and her eyes were wild. She was not looking at him. She saw beyond, to something else. He could not recognise her again; this was the face of an entirely different person: had he met this one in the street, he would not know her.

The more he looked at her frenzied eyes, the more strange she appeared, until he conceived her a demon, the devil itself, no woman, no wife he knew. At their mutual orgasm, a chill of irrational fright ran through him, but he closed his eyes, taking in air in huge gulping heaves, uncaring.

Flush fading, consciousness revived, Martin saw Marline collapsed forward across his legs. He was still inside her, the sticky wetness draining down from his crotch and then his buttocks, turning cold on the sheet beneath him. She rolled off, and resting on her side, eyes closed, a smile across her mouth, murmured something about going out again, a night-cap. Then she yawned.

“Napoleon slept here, did you know? Ierapetra’s ‘holy rock’ in Greek,” he said.

Marline was already putting on her clothes.

Dropped off past the lines of delayed traffic still waiting to cross the old narrow bridge, they had gone more or less straight up from the sea, from the small settlement clinging to steep slope above coastal highway.

At the upper end of the little hamlet, by the trailhead, they tipped their heads back to see the inland range hanging above. It had been his idea to go up it and explore its interior, part of a larger plan to walk the island from east to west. This day’s march would link together sections done previous seasons, thus completing eastern Crete, an opportunity provided by doctor’s orders, after a second, work-related breakdown.

Old women, bent nearly double and swathed in black, assured them they were on the right way, no guarantee in itself, as Greeks would rather die than admit to ignorance of any subject, no matter how far removed from their normal competence. Enormous cliff faces towered to the east; they had come down from there two years back, an epic struggle to find a disappearing track.

Village noise was soon below them, growing ever more faint and distant, replaced by the always present susurrant wind. The trail, an old respectable Cretan path, wound steadily upwards in large or smaller switches. After an hour’s trudge or more in the expanding sunlight, they stopped on a shoulder, the site of some stronghold of Minoan refugees, driven to the heights after their civilisation had collapsed. While Marline put together a picnic, Martin puttered about on the partially excavated ruins above.

There was not much more to see than dry stone walls, crumbling remnants of some ’20s dig, German or Italian, he did not remember what the guidebook said. The overwhelming vista looked north over the Ægean, with Thera somewhere volcanically looming, invisible in the slight haze, on the horizon distant before him.

Only one thing distinguished the fast decaying ruins from any modern wreckage of local revolution: a flat, carved stone bowl, cut into the living rock, like some small birdbath. Cracked in several places, stains covered one side of the interior.

They ate, and before wrapping up after their little meal, Martin looked out over the scene in front of them, and without preamble, spoke out.

“You know, when I grew up in Rochester, I never felt comfortable with the sky.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, there was always something, something about it that never felt quite right. D’you know what I mean?”

“Not really . . .”

“At first I thought it was the colour. Summers were warmer then, or so it seems now. I’d lie back, on the grass of a lawn in July, and stretch out, looking up at the sky. It would be cloudless, and the heavens so deep when I concentrated, I felt I was plunging into them.

“It was then I began to get a strange impression, that the vast inverted bowl I was falling into was somehow wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

He paused, and all was silent but for the wind. “I’m not quite sure how to express it – alien, perhaps?” he continued.

“I thought perhaps it was just the flatness of hue the sky can attain on a clear day in the middle of the year. But with the notion established in my mind – I was only eleven or twelve the first time I conceived it – or rather, made it articulate, since I later realised it was a perception I had had all along, that I was only then putting into words – I came to the conclusion that the feeling was more general.

“It could come upon me other seasons of the year, when the sky had a different colour, under other conditions of time and temperature. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me.

“I developed the odd notion that I was born with an instinct of how a proper sky should look, I mean, in the old days people seldom moved from the districts where they were raised. Rooted in the soil, they might just in some way become attuned, after generations, to the look of a certain latitude and longitude, so that any variation in colour of air or position of sun from that imprinted on their bones, would somehow appear odd.”

He paused. “I mean, some animals have iron in their brains, they’ve found out, onboard compasses that always point north, so . . .” His voice trailed off, and they were silent for a lingering moment.

“You’ve never mentioned that before. If you want to know,” she said with a slight smile, “I think it’s all a load of rubbish.” She flicked out playfully with her foot at his leg, as they sat.

He smiled back weakly, and continued: “I began to think so too, especially after I got older, and started travelling about, first locally, then, around the Continent, and further. I suppose I was always, at some unconscious level, thinking that if I found the right spot, the sky would brighten, things would look up, and all would be right in God’s world.”

She gave him a friendly smirk, hearing that, but he did not react.

“Y’know, at one point the whole idea came back to me, and I started to think, what if we really came from somewhere else, even from off the planet? A spaceship crashes here eons ago, seeds the place with its offspring – it would explain our exceptional place in the world.”

“But DNA.”

“Right you are, dead on. Common kinship. Once the implications of that discovery had percolated through my thick skull, I abandoned the idea. We’re here where we began, all right.”

They set about packing the remains of their picnic lunch; he wrapped the water bottle in towelling to keep it cool, while she cleaned the knife and stowed the food in her sack. Gear ready, they hoisted their packs, and stood a moment in the boiling sun, adjusting their straps and buckles.

Martin rested on his walking stick, a katsouni, store-bought, but being made of rare local wood, some protected dwarf elm that grew here and there in the high mountains, a great conversation starter in the rural districts.

“It has to do with a feeling, more than anything else, a feeling of not belonging here at all. As if . . .”

“What?”

“As if I were some kind of object, something hurled here unwittingly, against its will, like that German philosopher used to claim. To a place not my true home.”

“Oh.”

Martin did not dare mention or even hint at the experience of the night before – that, during their making love, alienation had triggered this memory of an old idea, up to now all but half-forgotten.

They started up the hill.

They reached, an hour or two later, the upper verge of the cliff, a flat ridge separating two peaks. Stalky anisette plants, tall invaders from another dimension, stood all around. Martin and Marline stopped to rest and admire the tremendous view before them.

The sea was far below; ahead lay a vast bowl, surrounded by bare and rugged peaks. The depression was partly cultivated, and they could see a few tiny dark-clad figures taking in the harvest, and few more working the vines. A dirt track threaded through it.

Martin gave Marline a hug, spontaneously, and it felt like he was hugging the air.

The trail descended into the sere arena below, desiccate but for the few irrigated plots chequering its innermost concavities. Small lizards scurried off the path. Marline and Martin headed down, pointing themselves towards the biggest of the summer houses, a massive white-washed affair with a shaded porch.

There were huge rust-coloured plastic barrels with black lids in the shadows; commonly used for storing wine, these gave promise of a kafenion. This hope was bolstered by a few rucksacks, obviously alien, resting above the steps, the bright colours an evidence of foreign wanderers or customers nearby. A peasant woman, middle-aged, in black with a grubby grey apron, walked out from inside, her cheap plastic flip-flops slapping against the concrete floor of the patio. She smiled pleasantly, shaking her head from side to side, the Balkan gesture of query. A trace of concern was in her eyes.

“Xeni. Katse, katse,” she insisted.

Thus invited, the couple seated themselves on a couple of rundown chairs with worn-through wicker seats.

“Nero thelete?”

Martin nodded, and the woman shuffled off to get water, and glasses. While she was inside, Martin looked at the nearby packs leaning on a pillar, and recognised a German marque.

The woman came out again, bearing a tray loaded with pumpkin seeds and shelled hazelnuts, a few garishly wrapped boiled sweets mixed in. Two glasses filled with water completed the ensemble.

They were careful to toast the woman’s health in Greek, before swallowing the cool water. There followed the inevitable questions: Where do you come from? What work do you do? Why are you here? Have you any children? followed by clucks of sympathy at the answer “none”.

It was a formula, probably being repeated dozens of times that same moment across the island, wherever tourists and Greeks were meeting for the first time. Were a man the interrogator, topics would have drifted over to money earned, and yearly wages. A delicate little probing, performed with overt politeness, with always the undercurrent of gaining information, reaping some advantage; the pull, the tug, with little exception always towards: how is this one useful to me?

Her questions tapered off once it was established that the couple were ordinary people doing the familiar if incomprehensible act of travel for its own sake. Martin then took his opportunity, with his kitchen Greek.

No, there was no kafenion. No place to overnight. The mountain over there was Effendis Christos. The people here were all from the village below, and were up to tend their summer gardens and trees; they would go down in the evening. Yes, there were other strangers here, Germans, up on the mountain.

Marline, with better eyes, saw them first. A red spot, a yellow, and two blues – chemical colours of the jackets or jerseys, up near the summit, stretched out along a fairly vertiginous route.

They’ve been up there all day, the woman said.

At which point, as if to confirm her statement, the sounds of a distant yodel echoed from far up the hill. Fun, up on the rocks, Martin thought.

At length, having questioned the woman about the track to the next village, the two set off again, early evening approaching. They went uphill through the dry landscape, east, sun to their backs, up a low pass, then up to another and finally a third, the watershed. No one had been by, and the enveloping silence was profound.

They could see down, back to the brink crossed hours before, at the foot of the northern massif. On either side of the dusty way where they stood, two ranges, here close, ran parallel. To the right, the flat ridgeline of Effendis now sat low, a hundred metres above them. The road had climbed up almost level with the long spine of the peak; it would be an easy walk to the top from here.

Like a shadow-show, Martin thought, and he felt somehow cheated realising that what was so difficult from the one side, could be done so easily from the other. This brought to mind the automata of Descartes, gliding down the streets in cavalier cloaks hiding clockwork, indistinguishable from passersby.

“They are the passersby,” Martin said aloud.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, just a thought about the mountain.”

Marline laughed, her voice echoing with a strange tinny tone.

“Effendis Christos – Jesus! They’re probably all Turks here!” she giggled.

“She didn’t even know the word is from her neighbours to the east, or is it maybe cousins?”

Still laughing, Marline suggested setting up camp. If they went on down a few minutes more, they could still see both ways, but would be shielded from the eyes of any loitering villagers behind them. The deep empty valley, next morning’s walk, opened out long ahead before turning right; beyond, they could see a fair stretch of the south coast.

Going a few metres off the rutted track that now ran over patches of bare rock, they unfurled their sleeping mats and bags. Cooking up a brew on a small gas stove, they drank it with bread and cheese, sitting wordlessly on the inflated cushions.

The view was extraordinarily clear, with every object sharp and definite in the limpid air. Objects that must have been miles off seemed close enough to touch. Shadows were being magnified and thrown vast distances. Clarity imagined, but seldom seen.

Martin felt a gnawing unease, but unable to find words to express it, remained silent.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just – I can’t say it.”

Another long pause, and then Martin said, “It’s really nothing,” and felt his eyes for no reason suddenly fill with tears. Standing up quickly, so Marline would not see, he turned to face the way they had come.

“I’m going up back a little bit,” he said to her. “I just want to see how long the shadows actually are.” She did not reply, so he began to slowly move through the low bushes, sole cover to the treeless earth, through the infinite symphonic tones of yellows and browns and black-greens that reeked of spice and animal excreta. The sky was absolutely cloudless.

Some paces uphill, back on the unmetalled track, he turned to look. The north slopes of Effendis to the right were now in shadow, but every object in the imperfect dark was still visible. He could almost hear the rocks, dusty purple in the shade, crack as they started to cool from the day’s impartible heat.

The rest of the hills, ahead and to the left, and the valley between, were filled with light that tore the heart, obsidian sharp, crystalline, clear. Marline, small and distant below, had packed the few pieces of mess gear, and was now smoking a cigarette, seated arms around her knees, looking the same direction as Martin, setting sun to their backs.

And then he saw the shadow, his own. At first he was not sure, until he moved, and the shadow moved with him. It was enormous, occluding acres of hillside below the horizon up to the valley’s end, beyond, miles away. He felt dizzy, and to steady himself, turned round and stumbled further up, hugging himself with his arms, gulping great breaths, gasping after air.

Coming to a halt, he slowly turned again.

His shadow, since he was higher, had of course moved upward with him. In the flat light, it was now taller than the lofty ridgeline of the farthest range, and covered a reasonably large part of the sky above, darkening the air, which still remained transparent.

Stunned, Martin slowly lifted an arm, and its umbra eclipsed the blue, almost to the zenith.

He began to hyperventilate sharply, and with vertigo and nausea washing over him, panic took hold. He ran down to his wife, stumbling once, falling, cutting open a pant leg at the knee, so he bled, but paid no heed.

She was waiting, with her arms stretched wide, waiting to catch him, to enfold him. He wept, eyes closed, as she held him, crooning, soothing her lost child.

“Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong, you’re here, with me, there now . . .” she said.

“But you saw it, didn’t you?” he repeated over and over again, without her any reply, only the soft caress. Eventually, shaking still, he left her embrace, and stood up.

The shadows were gone now, the sun down at last behind them. At the spot where the world had turned to the dimensions of a shoe box minutes before, the sky was evenly shaded.

It must be my eyes, he thought, the macular degeneration, those spots that float across. He saw one now, thread-like in the air before him, and blinked to make it go away. When he opened his eyes, the hanging string, like a piece of thick shimmering cord, was larger, wriggling in front of him, a dark blue transparent plastic worm vibrating at an impossible rate. He blinked furiously; with each blink, the writhing blue rope gained in definition, and his breathing stopped.

Speechless, mouth hanging open in supplication, he looked back at Marline. But it was no longer her, but the grinning thrust-jawed demon of the night before who looked back at him. Teeth gleaming, this creature shook her head in quick small jerks from side to side, like someone palsied, and small, brilliant blade-like rays of green and blue outlined her silhouette, streaming off her.

Despairing, Martin turned round a last time, and faced the now motionless protuberance. Its hue, he noted on the abstract, complemented, but did not match, that of the air. He heard Yes, yes, come from behind him, but he did not know whose voice.

Reaching out, using his nails, he worried the limp thing loose, except for one solidly emplaced end, embedded in the air.

With a firm grip and a single wrap around his fist, using great force, he jerked the cool and wet object straight down, ripping open – to the applause of his wife behind him, with the satisfying roar of torn canvas and rock-broken waves in his ears – the mountains to their root, and the sky, the traitor sky he always knew was wrong.

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Houses Under the Sea

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN IS A FOUR-TIME recipient of the International Horror Guild Award and a World Fantasy Award finalist.

Her novels include Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels and Daughter of Hounds, and her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Alabaster and To Charles Fort With Love. She is currently working on her next novel, Joey LaFaye, and a collection of science-fiction stories, both of which will be released in 2008. The author lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her partner, doll-maker Kathyrn Pollnac.

“ ‘Houses Under the Sea’ was written in February and March 2004, and was only my third attempt to write a short story as a first-person narrative,” Kiernan reveals. “For many years, I’d avoided fp, for a number of reasons, some perfectly valid and some admittedly questionable. But beginning with ‘Riding the White Bull’ and The Dry Salvages in 2003, I finally became intrigued enough with its possibilities that I began to experiment.

“When I finished ‘Houses Under the Sea’ on March 5th, I was still somewhat sceptical, though, as evidenced by this comment from my online journal entry from March 6th regarding the difficulty I was having finding a title for the piece: ‘If I had my druthers, it would have no title at all. In most cases, giving titles to first-person narratives only compounds the problems of disbelief. Not only am I to believe that Character X sat down and wrote this story for me to read, I’m to believe that she gave it a title.

“ ‘And if she didn’t, then who did? The author? No, Character X is the “author”; to believe otherwise defeats the illusion.’ Finally, I took a line from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ for the title, as it seemed appropriate and the poem had served as one of the story’s central inspirations.”

I

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES, I see Jacova Angevine.

I close my eyes, and there she is, standing alone at the end of the breakwater, standing with the foghorn as the choppy sea shatters itself to foam against a jumble of grey boulders. The October wind is making something wild of her hair, and her back’s turned to me. The boats are coming in.

I close my eyes, and she’s standing in the surf at Moss Landing, gazing out into the bay, staring towards the place where the continental shelf narrows down to a sliver and drops away to the black abyss of Monterey Canyon. There are gulls, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail.

I close my eyes, and we’re walking together down Cannery Row, heading south towards the aquarium. She’s wearing a gingham dress and a battered pair of Doc Martens that she must have had for fifteen years. I say something inconsequential, but she doesn’t hear me, too busy scowling at the tourists, at the sterile, cheery absurdities of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Mackerel Jack’s Trading Post.

“That used to be a whorehouse,” she says, nodding in the direction of Mackerel Jack’s. “The Lone Star Café, but Steinbeck called it the Bear Flag. Everything burned. Nothing here’s the way it used to be.”

She says that like she remembers, and I close my eyes.

And she’s on television again, out on the old pier at Moss Point, the day they launched the ROV Tiburon II.

And she’s at the Pierce Street warehouse in Monterey; men and women in white robes are listening to every word she says. They hang on every syllable, her every breath, their many eyes like the bulging eyes of deep-sea fish encountering sunlight for the first time. Dazed, terrified, enraptured, lost.

All of them lost.

I close my eyes, and she’s leading them into the bay.

Those creatures jumped the barricades

And have headed for the sea

All these divided moments, disconnected, or connected so many different ways, that I’ll never be able to pull them apart and find a coherent narrative. That’s my folly, my conceit, that I can make a mere story of what has happened. Even if I could, it’s nothing anyone would ever want to read, nothing I could sell. CNN and Newsweek and The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Harper’s, everyone already knows what they think about Jacova Angevine. Everybody already knows as much as they want to know. Or as little. In those minds, she’s already earned her spot in the death-cult hall of fame, sandwiched firmly in between Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate.

I close my eyes, and “Fire from the sky, fire on the water,” she says and smiles; I know that this time she’s talking about the fire of September 14, 1924, the day lightning struck one of the 55,000-gallon storage tanks belonging to the Associated Oil Company and a burning river flowed into the sea. Billowing black clouds hide the sun, and the fire has the voice of a hurricane as it bears down on the canneries, a voice of demons, and she stops to tie her shoes.

I sit here in this dark motel room, staring at the screen of my laptop, the clean liquid-crystal light, typing irrelevant words to build meandering sentences, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I don’t know what it is that I’m waiting for. Or I’m only afraid to admit that I know exactly what I’m waiting for. She has become my ghost, my private haunting, and haunted things are forever waiting.

“In the mansions of Poseidon, she will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales,” she says, and the crowd in the warehouse breathes in and out as a single, astonished organism, their assembled bodies lesser than the momentary whole they have made. “Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

“Tiburon is Spanish for shark,” she says, and I tell her I didn’t know that, that I had two years of Spanish in high school, but that was a thousand years ago, and all I remember is si and por favor.

What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?

I close my eyes again.

The sea has many voices.

Many gods and many voices.

“November 5, 1936,” she says, and this is the first night we had sex, the long night we spent together in a seedy Moss Point hotel, the sort of place the fishermen take their hookers, the same place she was still staying when she died. “The Del Mar Canning Company burned to the ground. No one ever tried to blame lightning for that one.”

There’s moonlight through the drapes, and I imagine for a moment that her skin has become iridescent, mother-of-pearl, the shimmering motley of an oil slick. I reach out and touch her naked thigh, and she lights a cigarette. The smoke hangs thick in the air, like fog or forgetfulness.

My fingertips against her flesh, and she stands and walks to the window.

“Do you see something out there?” I ask, and she shakes her head very slowly.

I close my eyes.

In the moonlight, I can make out the puckered, circular scars on both her shoulder blades and running halfway down her spine. Two dozen or more of them, but I never bothered to count exactly. Some are no larger than a dime, but several are at least two inches across.

“When I’m gone,” she says, “when I’m done here, they’ll ask you questions about me. What will you tell them?”

“That depends what they ask,” I reply and laugh, still thinking it was all one of her strange jokes, the talk of leaving, and I lie down and stare at the shadows on the ceiling.

“They’ll ask you everything,” she whispers. “Sooner or later, I expect they’ll ask you everything.”

Which they did.

I close my eyes, and I see her, Jacova Angevine, the lunatic prophet from Silinas, pearls that were her eyes, cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o, and she’s kneeling in the sand. The sun is rising behind her and I hear people coming through the dunes.

“I’ll tell them you were a good fuck,” I say, and she takes another drag off her cigarette and continues staring at the night outside the motel windows.

“Yes,” she says. “I expect you will.”

II

The first time that I saw Jacova Angevine – I mean, the first time I saw her in person – I’d just come back from Pakistan and had flown up to Monterey to try and clear my head. A photographer friend had an apartment there and he was on assignment in Tokyo, so I figured I could lay low for a couple of weeks, a whole month maybe, stay drunk and decompress. My clothes, my luggage, my skin, everything about me still smelled like Islamabad. I’d spent more than six months overseas, ferreting about for real and imagined connections between Muslim extremists, European middlemen, and Pakistan’s leaky nuclear arms program, trying to gauge the damage done by the enterprising Abdul Qadeer Khan, rogue father of the Pakistani bomb, trying to determine exactly what he’d sold and to whom. Everyone already knew – or at least thought they knew – about North Korea, Libya, and Iran, and American officials suspected that al Queda and other terrorist groups belonged somewhere on his list of customers, as well, despite assurances to the contrary from Major-General Shaukat Sultan. I’d come back with a head full of apocalypse and Urdu, anti-India propaganda and Mushaikh poetry, and I was determined to empty my mind of everything except scotch and the smell of the sea.

It was a bright Wednesday afternoon, a warm day for November in Monterey County, and I decided to come up for air. I showered for the first time in a week and had a late lunch at the Sardine Factory on Wave Street – Dungeness crab remoulade, fresh oysters with horseradish, and grilled sand-dabs in a lemon sauce that was a little heavy on the thyme – then decided to visit the aquarium and walk it all off. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of my time at the aquarium on Coney Island, and, three decades later, there were few things a man could do sober that relaxed me as quickly and completely. I put the check on my MasterCard and followed Wave Street south and east to Prescott, then turned back down Cannery Row, the glittering bay on my right, the pale blue autumn sky stretched out overhead like oil on canvas.

I close my eyes, and that afternoon isn’t something that happened three years ago, something I’m making sound like a goddamn travelogue. I close my eyes, and it’s happening now, for the first time, and there she is, sitting alone on a long bench in front of the kelp forest exhibit, her thin face turned up to the high, swaying canopy behind the glass, the dapple of fish and seaweed shadows drifting back and forth across her features. I recognise her, and that surprises me, because I’ve only seen her face on television and in magazine photos and on the dust jacket of the book she wrote before she lost the job at Berkeley. She turns her head and smiles at me, the familiar way you smile at a friend, the way you smile at someone you’ve known all your life.

“You’re in luck,” she says. “It’s almost time for them to feed the fish.” And Jacova Angevine pats the bench next to her, indicating that I should sit down.

“I read your book,” I say, taking a seat because I’m still too surprised to do anything else.

“Did you? Did you really?” and now she looks like she doesn’t believe me, like I’m only saying that I’ve read her book to be polite, and from her expression I can tell that she thinks it’s a little odd, that anyone would ever bother to try and flatter her.

“Yes,” I tell her, trying too hard to sound sincere. “I did really. In fact, I read some of it twice.”

“And why would you do a thing like that?”

“Truthfully?”

“Yes, truthfully.”

Her eyes are the same color as the water trapped behind the thick panes of aquarium glass, the color of the November sunlight filtered through saltwater and kelp blades. There are fine lines at the corners of her mouth and beneath her eyes that make her look several years older than she is.

“Last summer, I was flying from New York to London, and there was a three-hour layover in Shannon. Your book was all I’d brought to read.”

“That’s terrible,” she says, still smiling, and turns to face the big tank again. “Do you want your money back?”

“It was a gift,” I reply, which isn’t true and I have no idea why I’m lying to her. “An ex-girlfriend gave it to me for my birthday.”

“Is that why you left her?”

“No, I left her because she thought I drank too much and I thought she drank too little.”

“Are you an alcoholic?” Jacova Angevine asks, as casually as if she were asking me whether I liked milk in my coffee or if I took it black.

“Well, some people say I’m headed in that direction,” I tell her. “But I did enjoy the book, honest. It’s hard to believe they fired you for writing it. I mean, that people get fired for writing books.” But I know that’s a lie, too; I’m not half that naive, and it’s not at all difficult to understand how or why Waking Leviathan ended Jacova Angevine’s career as an academic. A reviewer for Nature called it “the most confused and preposterous example of bad history wedding bad science since the Velikovsky affair.”

“They didn’t fire me for writing it,” she says. “They politely asked me to resign because I’d seen fit to publish it.”

“Why didn’t you fight them?”

Her smile fades a little, and the lines around her mouth seem to grow the slightest bit more pronounced. “I don’t come here to talk about the book, or my unfortunate employment history,” she says.

I apologise, and she tells me not to worry about it.

A diver enters the tank, matte-black neoprene trailing a rush of silver bubbles, and most of the fish rise expectantly to meet him or her, a riot of kelp bass and sleek leopard sharks, sheephead and rockfish and species I don’t recognise. She doesn’t say anything else, too busy watching the feeding, and I sit there beside her, at the bottom of a pretend ocean.

I open my eyes. There are only the words on the screen in front of me.

I didn’t see her again for the better part of a year. During that time, as my work sent me back to Pakistan, and then to Germany and Israel, I reread her book. I also read some of the articles and reviews, and a brief online interview that she’d given Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country website. Then I tracked down an article on Inuit archaeology that she’d written for Fate and wondered at what point Jacova Angevine had decided that there was no going back, nothing left to lose and so no reason not to allow herself to become part of the murky, strident world of fringe believers and UFO buffs, conspiracy theorists and paranormal “investigators” that seemed so eager to embrace her as one of its own.

And I wondered, too, if perhaps she might have been one of them from the start.

III

I woke up this morning from a long dream of storms and drowning and lay in bed, very still, sizing up my hangover and staring at the sagging, water-stained ceiling of my motel room. And I finally admitted to myself that this isn’t going to be what the paper has hired me to write. I don’t think I’m even trying to write it for them any more. They want the dirt, of course, and I’ve never been shy about digging holes. I’ve spent the last twenty years as a shovel-for-hire. I don’t think it matters that I may have loved her, or that a lot of this dirt is mine. I can’t pretend that I’m acting out of nobility of soul or loyalty or even some selfish, belated concern for my own dingy reputation. I would write exactly what they want me to write if I could. If I knew how. I need the money. I haven’t worked for the last five months and my savings are almost gone.

But if I’m not writing it for them, if I’ve abandoned all hope of a paycheck at the other end of this thing, why the hell then am I still sitting here typing? Am I making a confession? Bless me, Father, I can’t forget? Do I believe it’s something I can puke up like a sour belly full of whiskey, that writing it all down will make the nightmares stop or make it any easier for me to get through the days? I sincerely hope I’m not as big a fool as that. Whatever else I may be, I like to think that I’m not an idiot.

I don’t know why I’m writing this, whatever this turns out to be. Maybe it’s only a very long-winded suicide note.

Last night I watched the tape again.

I have all three versions with me – the cut that’s still being hawked over the internet, the one that ends right after the ROV was hit, before the lights came back on; the cut that MBARI released to the press and the scientific community in response to the version circulating online; and I have the “raw” footage, the copy I bought from a robotics technician who claimed to have been aboard the R/V Western Flyer the day that the incident occurred. I paid him two thousand dollars for it and the kid swore to both its completeness and authenticity. I knew that I wasn’t the first person to whom he’d sold the tape. I’d heard about it from a contact in the chemistry department at UC Irvine. I was never sure exactly how she’d caught wind of it, but I gathered that the tech was turning a handsome little profit peddling his contraband to anyone willing to pony up the cash.

We met at a Motel 6 in El Cajon, and I played it all the way through before I handed him the money. He sat with his back to the television while I watched the tape, rewound and started it over again.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked, literally wringing his hands and gazing anxiously at the heavy drapes. I’d pulled them shut after hooking up the rented VCR that I’d brought with me, but a bright sliver of afternoon sunlight slipped in between them and divided his face down the middle. “Jesus, man. You think it’s not gonna be the exact same thing every time? You think if you keep playing it over and over it’s gonna come out any different?”

I’ve watched the tape more times than I can count, a couple hundred, at least, and I still think that’s a good goddamned question.

“So why didn’t MBARI release this?” I asked the kid, and he laughed and shook his head.

“Why the fuck do you think?” he replied.

He took my money, reminded me again that we’d never met and that he’d deny everything if I attempted to finger him as my source. Then he got back into his ancient, wheezy VW Microbus and drove off, leaving me sitting there with an hour and a half of unedited color video recorded somewhere along the bottom of the Monterey Canyon. Everything the ROV Tiburon II’s starboard camera had seen (the port pan-and-tilt unit was malfunctioning that day), twenty miles out and three kilometers down, and from the start I understood it was the closest I was ever likely to come to an answer, and that it was also only a different and far more terrible sort of question.

Last night I got drunk, more so than usual, a lot more so than usual, and watched it for the first time in almost a month. But I turned the sound on the television down all the way and left the lights burning.

Even drunk, I’m still a coward.

The ocean floor starkly illuminated by the ROV’s six 480-watt HMI lights, revealing a velvet carpet of grey-brown sediment washed out from Elkhorn Slough and all the other sloughs and rivers emptying into the bay. And even at this depth, there are signs of life: brittlestars and crabs cling to the shit-coloured rocks, sponges and sea cucumbers, the sinuous, smooth bodies of big-eyed rattails. Here and there, dark outcroppings jut from the ooze like bone from the decaying flesh of a leper.

My asshole editor would laugh out loud at that last simile, would probably take one look at it and laugh and then say something like, “If I’d wanted fucking purple I’d have bought a goddamn pot of violets.” But my asshole editor hasn’t seen the tape I bought from the tech.

My asshole editor never met Jacova Angevine, never listened to her talk, never fucked her, never saw the scars on her back or the fear in her eyes.

The ROV comes to a rocky place where the seafloor drops away suddenly, and it hesitates, responding to commands from the control room of the R/V Western Flyer. A moment or two later, the steady fall of marine snow becomes so heavy that it’s difficult to see much of anything through the light reflecting off the whitish particles of sinking detritus. And sitting there on the floor between the foot of the bed and the television, I almost reached out and touched the screen.

Almost.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” I heard Jacova say, though she never actually said anything of the sort to me. “Silt, phytoplankton and zooplankton, soot, mucus, diatoms, fecal pellets, dust, grains of sand and clay, radioactive fallout, pollen, sewage. Some of it’s even interplanetary dust particles. Some of it fell from the stars.”

And Tiburon II lurches and glides forward a few feet, then slips cautiously over the precipice, beginning the slow descent into this new and unexpected abyss.

“We’d been over that stretch more than a dozen times, at least,” Natalie Billington, chief ROV pilot for Tiburon II, told a CNN correspondent after the internet version of the tape first made the news. “But that drop-off wasn’t on any of the charts. We’d always missed it somehow. I know that isn’t a very satisfying answer, but it’s a big place down there. The canyon is over two hundred miles long. You miss things.”

For a while – exactly 15.34 seconds – there’s only the darkness and marine snow and a few curious or startled fish. According to MBARI, the ROV’s vertical speed during this part of the dive is about 35 meters per minute, so by the time it finds the bottom again, depth has increased by some five hundred and twenty-five feet. The sea-floor comes into view again, and there’s not so much loose sediment here, just a jumble of broken boulders, and it’s startling how clean they are, almost completely free of the usual encrustations and muck. There are no sponges or sea cucumbers to be seen, no starfish, and even the omnipresent marine snow has tapered off to only a few stray, drifting flecks. And then the wide, flat rock that is usually referred to as “the Delta stone” comes into view. And this isn’t like the face on Mars or Von Daniken seeing ancient astronauts on Mayan artifacts. The lowercase δ carved into the slab is unmistakable. The edges are so sharp, so clean that it might have been done yesterday.

The Tiburon II hovers above the Delta stone, spilling light into this lightless place, and I know what’s coming next, so I sit very still and count off the seconds in my head. When I’ve counted to thirty-eight, the view from the ROV’s camera pans violently to the right, signaling the portside impact, and an instant later there’s only static, white noise, the twelve-second gap in the tape during which the camera was still running, but no longer recording.

I counted to eleven before I switched off the television, and then sat listening to the wind, and the waves breaking against the beach, waiting for my heart to stop racing and the sweat on my face and palms to dry. When I was sure that I wasn’t going to be sick, I pressed EJECT and the VCR spat out the tape. I returned it to its navy-blue plastic case and sat smoking and drinking, helpless to think of anything but Jacova.

IV

Jacova Angevine was born and grew up in her father’s big Victorian house in Salinas, only a couple of blocks from the birthplace of John Steinbeck. Her mother died when she was eight. Jacova had no siblings, and her closest kin, paternal and maternal, were all back east in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1960, her parents relocated to California, just a few months after they were married, and her father took a job teaching high-school English in Castroville. After six months, he quit that job and took another, with only slightly better pay, in the town of Soledad. Though he’d earned a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia, Theo Angevine seemed to have no particular academic ambitions. He’d written several novels while in college, though none of them had managed to find a publisher. In 1969, his wife five months pregnant with their daughter, he resigned from his position at Soledad High and moved north to Salinas, where he bought the old house on Howard Street with a bank loan and the advance from his first book sale, a mystery novel titled The Man Who Laughed at Funerals (Random House; New York).

To date, none of the three books that have been published about Jacova, the Open Door of Night sect, and the mass drownings off Moss Landing State Beach, have made more than a passing mention of Theo Angevine’s novels. Elenore Ellis-Lincoln, in Closing the Door: Anatomy of Hysteria (Simon and Schuster; New York), for example, devotes only a single paragraph to them, though she gives Jacova’s childhood an entire chapter. “Mr Angevine’s works received little critical attention, one way or the other, and his income from them was meager,” Ellis-Lincoln writes. “Of the seventeen novels he published between 1969 and 1985, only two – The Man Who Laughed for Funerals [sic] and Seven at Sunset – are still in print. It is notable that the overall tone of the novels becomes significantly darker following his wife’s death, but the books themselves never seem to have been more to the author than a sort of hobby. Upon his death, his daughter became the executor of his literary estate, such as it was.”

Likewise, in Lemming Cult (The Overlook Press; New York), William L. West writes, “Her father’s steady output of mystery and suspense potboilers must surely have been a curiosity of Jacova’s childhood, but were never once mentioned in her own writings, including the five private journals found in a cardboard box in her bedroom closet. The books themselves were entirely unremarkable, so far as I’ve been able to ascertain. Almost all are out of print and very difficult to find today. Even the catalog of the Silinas Public Library includes only a single copy each of The Man Who Laughed at Funerals, Pretoria, and Seven at Sunset.”

During the two years I knew her, Jacova only mentioned her father’s writing once that I can recall, and then only in passing, but she had copies of all his novels, a fact that I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere in print. I suppose it doesn’t seem very significant, if you haven’t bothered to read Theo Angevine’s books. Since Jacova’s death, I’ve read every one of them. It took me less than a month to track down copies of all seventeen, thanks largely to online booksellers, and even less time to read them. While William West was certainly justified in calling the novels “entirely unremarkable,” even a casual examination reveals some distinctly remarkable parallels between the fiction of the father and the reality of the daughter.

I’ve spent the whole afternoon, the better part of the past five hours, on the preceding four paragraphs, trying to fool myself into believing that I can actually write about her as a journalist would write about her. That I can bring any degree of detachment or objectivity to bear. Of course, I’m wasting my time. After seeing the tape again, after almost allowing myself to watch all of it again, I think I’m desperate to put distance between myself and the memory of her. I should call New York and tell them that I can’t do this, that they should find someone else, but after the mess I made of the Musharraf story, the agency would probably never offer me another assignment. For the moment, that still matters. It might not in another day or two, but it does for now.

Her father wrote books, books that were never very popular, and though they’re neither particularly accomplished nor enjoyable, they might hold clues to Jacova’s motivation and to her fate. And they might not. It’s as simple and contradictory as that. Like everything surrounding the “Lemming Cult” – as the Open Door of Night has come to be known, as it has been labeled by people who find it easier to deal with tragedy and horror if there is an attendant note of the absurd – like everything else about her, what seems meaningful one moment will seem irrelevant the next. Or maybe that’s only the way it appears to me. Maybe I’m asking too much of the clues.

Excerpt from Pretoria, pp. 164–165; Ballantine Books, 1979:

Edward Horton smiled and tapped the ash from his cigar into the large glass ashtray on the table. “I don’t like the sea,” he said and nodded at the window. “Frankly, I can’t even stand the sound of it. Gives me nightmares.”I listened to the breakers, not taking my eyes off the fat man and the thick grey curlicues of smoke arranging and rearranging themselves around his face. I’d always found the sound of waves to have a welcomed tranquilising effect upon my nerves and wondered which one of Horton’s innumerable secrets was responsible for his loathing of the sea. I knew he’d done a stint in the Navy during Korea, but I was also pretty sure he’d never seen combat.“How’d you sleep last night?” I asked, and he shook his head.“For shit,” he replied and sucked on his cigar.“Then maybe you should think about getting a room farther inland.”Horton coughed and jabbed a pudgy finger at the window of the bungalow. “Don’t think I wouldn’t, if the choice were mine to make. But she wants me here. She wants me sitting right here, waiting on her, night and day. She knows I hate the ocean.”“What the hell,” I said, reaching for my hat, tired of his company and the stink of his smoldering Macanudo. “You know where to reach me, if you change your mind. Don’t let the bad dreams get you down. They ain’t nothing but that, bad dreams.”“That’s not enough?” he asked, and I could tell from his expression that Horton wished I’d stay a little longer, but I knew he’d never admit it. “Last night, goddamn people marching into the sea, marching over the sand in rows like the goddamn infantry. Must of been a million of them. What you think a dream like that means, anyway?”“Horton, a dream like that don’t mean jack shit,” I replied. “Except maybe you need to lay off the spicy food before bedtime.”“You’re always gonna be an asshole,” he said, and I was forced to agree. He puffed his cigar, and I left the bungalow and stepped out into the salty Santa Barbara night.

Excerpt from What the Cat Dragged In, p. 231; Ballantine Books, 1980:

Vicky had never told anyone about the dreams, just like she’d never told anyone about Mr. Barker or the yellow Corvette. The dreams were her secret, whether she wanted them or not. Sometimes they seemed almost wicked, shameful, sinful, like something she’d done that was against God, or at least against the law. She’d almost told Mr. Barker once, a year or so before she left Los Angeles. She’d gone so far as to broach the subject of mermaids, and then he’d snorted and laughed, so she’d thought better of it.“You got some strange notions in that head of yours,” he’d said. “Someday, you’re gonna have to grow out of crap like that, if you want people round here to start taking you seriously.”So she kept it all to herself. Whatever the dreams meant or didn’t mean, it wasn’t anything she would ever be able to explain or confess. Sometimes, nights when she couldn’t sleep, she lay in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about the ruined castles beneath the waves and beautiful, drowned girls with seaweed tangled in their hair.

Excerpt from The Last Loan Shark of Bodega Bay, pp. 57–59; Bantam Books, 1982:

“This was way the hell back in the fifties,” Foster said and lit another cigarette. His hands were shaking and he kept looking over his shoulder. “Fifty-eight, right, or maybe early fifty-nine. I know Eisenhower was still president, though I ain’t precisely sure of the year. But I was still stuck in Honolulu, right, still hauling lousy tourists around the islands in the Saint Chris so they could fish and snap pictures of goddamn Kilauea and what have you. The boat was on its last leg, but she’d still get you where you were goin’, if you knew how to slap her around.”“What’s this got to do with Winkie Anderson and the girl?” I asked, making no effort to hide my impatience.“Jesus, Frank, I’m getting to it. You want to hear this thing or not? I swear, you come around here asking the big questions, expecting the what’s-what, you can at least keep your trap shut and listen.”“I don’t have all night, that’s all.”“Yeah, well, who the hell does, why don’t you tell me that? Anyway, like I was saying, back about fifty-nine, and we was out somewhere off the north shore of Molokai. Old Coop was fishing the thousand fathom line, and Jerry – you remember Jerry O’Neil, right?”“No,” I said, eyeing the clock above the bar.“Well, whatever. Jerry O’Neil was mouthing off about a twelve-hundred-pounder, this big-ass marlin some Mexican businessman from Tijuana had up and hooked just a few weeks before. Fish even made the damn papers, right. Anyway, Jerry said the Mexican was bad news and we should keep a sharp eye out for him. Said he was a regular Jonah.”“But you just said he caught a twelve-hundred-pound marlin.”“Yeah, sure. He could haul in the fish, this chunt son of a bitch, but he was into some sort of Spanish voodoo shit and had these gold coins he’d toss over the side of the boat every five or ten minutes. Like goddamn clockwork, he’d check his watch and toss out a coin. Gold doubloons or some shit, I don’t know what they were. It was driving Coop crazy, ‘cause it wasn’t enough the Mexican had to do this thing with the coins, he was mumbling some sort of shit non-stop. Coop kept telling him to shut the hell up, people was trying to fish, but this guy, he just keeps mumbling and tossing coins and pulling in the fish. I finally got a look at one of those doubloons, and it had something stamped on one side looked like a damn octopus, and on the other side was this star like a pentagram. You know, those things witches and warlocks use.”“Foster, this is crazy bullshit. I have to be in San Francisco at seven-thirty in the morning.” I waved to the bartender and put two crumpled fives and a one on the bar in front of me.“You ever head of the Momma Hydra, Frank? That’s who this chunt said he was praying to.”“Call me when you run out of bullshit,” I said. “And I don’t have to tell you, Detective Burke won’t be half as understanding as I am.”“Jesus, Frank. Hold up a goddamn second. It’s just the way I tell stories, right. You know that. I start at the beginning. I don’t leave stuff out.”

These are only a few examples of what anyone will find, if he or she should take the time to look. There are many more, I assure you. The pages of my copies of Theo Angevine’s novels are scarred throughout with yellow highlighter.

And everything leaves more questions than answers.

You make of it what you will. Or you don’t. I suppose that a Freudian might have a proper field day with this stuff. Whatever I knew about Freud I forgot before I was even out of college. It would be comforting, I suppose, if I could dismiss Jacova’s fate as the end result of some overwhelming Oedipal hysteria, the ocean cast here as that Great Ur-Mother savior-being who finally opens up to offer release and forgiveness in death and dissolution.

V

I begin to walk down some particular, perhaps promising, avenue and then, inevitably, I turn and run, tail tucked firmly between my legs. My memories. The MBARI video. Jacova and her father’s whodunits. I scratch the surface and then pull my hand back to be sure that I haven’t lost a fucking finger. I mix metaphors the way I’ve been mixing tequila and scotch.

If, as William Burroughs wrote, “Language is a virus from outer space,” then what the holy hell were you supposed to be, Jacova?

An epidemic of the collective unconscious. The black plague of belief. A vaccine for cultural amnesia, she might have said. And so we’re right back to Velikovsky, who wrote “Human beings, rising from some catastrophe, bereft of memory of what had happened, regarded themselves as created from the dust of the earth. All knowledge about the ancestors, who they were and in what interstellar space they lived, was wiped away from the memory of the few survivors.”

I’m drunk, and I’m not making any sense at all. Or merely much too little sense to matter. Anyway, you’ll want to pay attention to this part. It’s sort of like the ghost story within the ghost story within the ghost story, the hard nugget at the unreachable heart of my heart’s infinitely regressing babooshka, matryoshka, matrioska, matreshka, babushka. It might even be the final straw that breaks the camel of my mind.

Remember, I am wasted, and so that last inexcusable paragraph may be forgiven. Or it may not.

“When I become death, death is the seed from which I grow.” Burroughs said that, too. Jacova, you will be an orchard. You will be a swaying kelp forest. There’s a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea with your name on it.

Yesterday afternoon, puking sick of looking at these four dingy fucking walls, I drove down to Monterey, to the warehouse on Pierce Street. The last time I was there, the cops still hadn’t taken down all the yellow CRIME SCENE–DO NOT CROSS tape. Now there’s only a great big for-sale sign and an even bigger no-trespassing sign. I wrote the name and number of the realty company on the back of a book of matches. I want to ask them what they’ll be telling prospective buyers about the building’s history. Word is the whole block is due to be rezoned next year and soon those empty buildings will be converted to lofts and condos. Gentrification abhors a void.

I parked in an empty lot down the street from the warehouse, hoping that no one happening by would notice me, hoping, in particular, that any passing police would not notice me. I walked quickly, without running, because running is suspicious and inevitably draws the attention of those who watch for suspicious things. I was not so drunk as I might have been, not even so drunk as I should have been, and I tried to keep my mind occupied by noting the less significant details of the street, the sky, the weather. The litter caught in the weeds and gravel – cigarette butts, plastic soft-drink bottles (I recall Pepsi, Coke, and Mountain Dew), paper bags and cups from fast-food restaurants (McDonalds, Del Taco, KFC), broken glass, unrecognizable bits of metal, a rusted Oregon license plate. The sky was painfully blue, the blue of nausea, with only very high cirrus clouds to spoil that suffocating pastel heaven. There were no other cars parked along the street, and no living things that I noticed. There were a couple of garbage dumpsters, a stop sign, and a great pile of cardboard boxes that had been soaked by rain enough times it was difficult to tell exactly where one ended and another began. There was a hubcap.

When I finally reached the warehouse – the warehouse become a temple to half-remembered gods become a crime scene, now on its way to becoming something else – I ducked down the narrow alley that separates it from the abandoned Monterey Peninsula Shipping and Storage Building (established 1924). There’d been a door around that way with an unreliable lock. If I was lucky, I thought, no one would have noticed, or if they had noticed, wouldn’t have bothered fixing it. My heart was racing and I was dizzy (I tried hard to blame that on the sickening color of the sky) and there was a metallic taste in the back of my mouth, like a freshly filled tooth.

It was colder in the alley than it had been out on Pierce, the sun having already dropped low enough in the west that the alley must have been in shadow for some time. Perhaps it is always in shadow and never truly warm there. I found the side door exactly as I’d hoped to find it, and three or four minutes of jiggling about with the wobbly brass knob was enough to coax it open. Inside, the warehouse was dark and even colder than the alley, and the air stank of mould and dust, bad memories and vacancy. I stood in the doorway a moment or two, thinking of hungry rats and drunken bums, delirious crack addicts wielding lead pipes, the webs of poisonous spiders. Then I took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold, out of the shadows and into a more decided blackness, a more definitive chill, and all those mundane threats dissolved. Everything slipped from my mind except Jacova Angevine, and her followers (if that’s what you’d call them) dressed all in white, and the thing I’d seen on the altar the one time I’d come here when this had been a temple of the Open Door of Night.

I asked her about that thing once, a few weeks before the end, the last night that we spent together. I asked where it had come from, who had made it, and she lay very still for a while, listening to the surf or only trying to decide which answer would satisfy me. In the moonlight through the hotel window, I thought she might have been smiling, but I wasn’t sure.

“It’s very old,” she said, eventually. By then I’d almost drifted off to sleep and had to shake myself awake again. “No one alive remembers who made it,” Jacova continued. “But I don’t think that matters, only that it was made.”

“It’s fucking hideous,” I mumbled sleepily. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but so is the Crucifixion. So are bleeding statues of the Virgin Mary and images of Kali. So are the animal-headed gods of the Egyptians.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t bow down to any of them, either,” I replied, or something to that effect.

“The divine is always abominable,” she whispered and rolled over, turning her back to me.

Just a moment ago I was in the warehouse on Pierce Street, wasn’t I? And now I’m in bed with the Prophet from Salinas. But I will not despair, for there is no need here to stay focused, to adhere to some restrictive illusion of the linear narrative. It’s coming. It’s been coming all along. As Job Foster said in Chapter Four of The Last Loan Shark of Bodega Bay, “It’s just the way I tell stories, right. You know that. I start at the beginning. I don’t leave stuff out.”

That’s horseshit, of course. I suspect luckless Job Foster knew it was horseshit, and I suspect that I know it’s horseshit, too. It is not the task of the writer to “tell all,” or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that’s the bastard chimera we call a “story.” I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from any objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what’s left over.

A damned man in an empty warehouse.

I left the door standing open, because I hadn’t the nerve to shut myself up in that place. And I’d already taken a few steps inside, my shoes crunching loudly on shards of glass from a broken window, grinding glass to dust, when I remembered the Maglite hidden inside my jacket. But the glare of the flashlight did nothing much to make the darkness any less stifling, nothing much at all but remind me of the blinding white beam of Tiburon II’s big HMI rig, shining out across the silt at the bottom of the canyon. Now, I thought, at least I can see anything, if there’s anything to see, and immediately some other, less familiar thought-voice demanded to know why the hell I’d want to. The door had opened into a narrow corridor, mint-green concrete walls and a low concrete ceiling, and I followed it a short distance to its end – no more than thirty feet, thirty feet at the most – past empty rooms that might once have been offices, to an unlocked steel door marked in faded orange letters, EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“It’s an empty warehouse,” I whispered, breathing the words aloud. “That’s all, an empty warehouse.” I knew it wasn’t the truth, not anymore, not by a long sight, but I thought that maybe a lie could be more comforting than the comfortless illumination of the Maglite in my hand. Joseph Campbell wrote, “Draw a circle around a stone and the stone will become an incarnation of mystery.” Something like that. Or it was someone else said it and I’m misremembering. The point is, I knew that Jacova had drawn a circle around that place, just as she’d drawn a circle about herself, just as her father had somehow drawn a circle about her—

Just as she’d drawn a circle around me.

The door wasn’t locked, and beyond it lay the vast, deserted belly of the building, a flat plain of cement marked off with steel support beams. There was a little sunlight coming in through the many small windows along the east and west walls, though not as much as I’d expected, and it seemed weakened, diluted by the musty air. I played the Maglite back and forth across the floor at my feet and saw that someone had painted over all the elaborate, colorful designs put there by the Open Door of Night. A thick grey latex wash to cover the intricate interweave of lines, the lines that she believed would form a bridge, a conduit – that was the word that she’d used. Everyone’s seen photographs of that floor, although I’ve yet to see any that do it justice. A yantra. A labyrinth. A writhing, tangled mass of sea creatures straining for a distant black sun. Hindi and Mayan and Chinook symbols. The precise contour lines of a topographic map of Monterey Canyon. Each of these things and all of these things, simultaneously. I’ve heard that there’s an anthropologist at Berkeley who’s writing a book about that floor. Perhaps she will publish photographs that manage to communicate its awful magnificence. Perhaps it would be better if she doesn’t.

Perhaps someone should put a bullet through her head.

People said the same thing about Jacova Angevine. But assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.

I left that door open, as well, and walked slowly towards the center of the empty warehouse, towards the place where the altar had been, the spot where that divine abomination of Jacova’s had rested on folds of velvet the colour of a massacre. I held the Maglite gripped so tightly that the fingers of my right hand had begun to go numb.

Behind me, there was a scuffling, gritty sort of noise that might have been footsteps, and I spun about, tangling my feet and almost falling on my ass, almost dropping the flashlight. The child was standing maybe ten or fifteen feet away from me, and I could see that the door leading back to the alley had been closed. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, dressed in ragged jeans and a T-shirt smeared with mud, or what looked like mud in the half light of the warehouse. Her short hair might have been blonde, or light brown, it was hard to tell. Most of her face was lost in the shadows.

“You’re too late,” she said.

“Jesus Christ, kid, you almost scared the holy shit out of me.”

“You’re too late,” she said again.

“Too late for what? Did you follow me in here?”

“The gates are shut now. They won’t open again, for you or anyone else.”

I looked past her at the door I’d left open, and she looked back that way, too.

“Did you close that door?” I asked her. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have left it open for a reason?”

“I waited as long I dared,” she replied, as though that answered my question, and turned to face me again.

I took one step towards her, then, or maybe two, and stopped. And at that moment, I experienced the sensation or sensations that mystery and horror writers, from Poe on down to Theo Angevine, have labored to convey – the almost painful prickling as the hairs on the back of my neck and along my arms and legs stood erect, the cold knot in the pit of my stomach, the goose across my grave, a loosening in my bowels and bladder, the tightening of my scrotum. My blood ran cold. Drag out all the fucking clichés and there’s still nothing that comes within a mile of what I felt standing there, looking down at that girl, her looking up at me, the feeble light from the windows glinting off her eyes.

Looking into her face, I felt dread as I’d never felt it before. Not in war zones with air-raid sirens blaring, not during interviews conducted with the muzzle of a pistol pressed to my temple or the small of my back. Not waiting for the results of a biopsy after the discovery of a peculiar mole. Not even the day she led them into the sea and I sat watching it all on fucking CNN from a bar in Brooklyn.

And suddenly I knew that the girl hadn’t followed me in from the alley, or closed the door, that she’d been here all along. I also knew that a hundred coats of paint wouldn’t be enough to undo Jacova’s labyrinth.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said, her minotaur’s voice lost and faraway and regretful.

“Then where should I be?” I asked, and my breath fogged in air gone as frigid as the dead of winter, or the bottom of the sea.

“All the answers were here,” she replied. “Everything that you’re asking yourself, the things that keep you awake, that are driving you insane. All the questions you’re putting into that computer of yours. I offered all of it to you.”

And now there was a sound like water breaking against stone, and something heavy and soft and wet, dragging itself across the concrete floor, and I thought of the thing from the altar, Jacova’s Mother Hydra, that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tentacles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been.

Mighty, undying daughter of Typhaôn and serpentine Ecidna – Yδρα Λερvαια, Urda Lernaia, gluttonous whore of all the lightless worlds, bitch bride and concubine of Father Dagon, Father Kraken —

I smelled rot and mud, saltwater and dying fish.

“You have to go now,” the child said urgently, and she held out a hand as though she meant to show me the way. Even in the gloom, I could see the barnacles and sea lice nestled in the raw flesh of her palm. “You are a splinter in my soul, always. And she would drag you down to finish my own darkness.”

And then the girl was gone. She did not vanish, she was simply not there anymore. And those other sounds and odors had gone with her. There was nothing left behind but the silence and stink of any abandoned building, and the wind brushing against the windows and around the corners of the warehouse, and the traffic along roads in the world waiting somewhere beyond those walls.

VI

I know exactly how all this shit sounds. Don’t think that I don’t. It’s just that I’ve finally ceased to care.

VII

Yesterday, two days after my trip to the warehouse, I watched the MBARI tape again. This time, when it reached the twelve-second gap, when I’d counted down to eleven, I continued on to twelve, and I didn’t switch the television off, and I didn’t look away. Surely, I’ve come too far to allow myself that luxury. I’ve seen so goddamn much – I’ve seen so much that there’s no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can’t be anything left that’s more terrible than what has come before.

And, besides, it was nothing that I hadn’t seen already.

Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.

After the static, the picture comes back and at first it’s just those boulders, same as before, those boulders that ought to be covered with silt and living things – the remains of living things, at least – but aren’t. Those strange, clean boulders. And the lines and angles carved deeply into them that cannot be the result of any natural geological or biological process, the lines and angles that can be nothing but what Jacova said they were. I think of fragments of the Parthenon, or some other shattered Greek or Roman temple, the chiseled ornament of an entablature or pediment. I’m seeing something that was done, something that was consciously fashioned, not something that simply happened. The Tiburon II moves forward very slowly, because the blow before the gap has taken out a couple of the port thrusters. It creeps forward tentatively, floating a few feet above the seafloor, and now the ROV’s lights have begun to dim and flicker.