ASH WEDNESDAY
By Chet Williamson
Smashwords Edition Published at
Smashwords by Macabre Ink & Chet Williamson
Copyright 2010 by
Chet Williamson & Macabre Ink Digital Publications
Copy-edited, formatted, and checked for accuracy against the original paperback edition by David Dodd
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The plots of God are perfect.
The Universe is a Plot of God.
--Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka
PROLOGUE:
A Resident of Merridale
For the whole town, I suddenly realized, was something other than I so far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. Their busyness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places.
—Algernon Blackwood, "Ancient Sorceries"
The dogs saw it first.
It was very early on a Friday morning, a few hours before sunrise, when they noticed the glow. The first to start barking were Sim Peters's two foxhounds, lying together on top of their doghouse in Sim's backyard. Mitzi's nostrils flared at the glow, even though she could sense no strange scent. Her low growl woke Mike beside her, who, at the sight of the lights, immediately sent up a shrill baying. A few backyards away the Smiths' Great Dane took up the cry, and soon all three were yelping. As the animals looked from the hill down into the shallow depression that had given Merridale its name, they saw more and more dim pools of light take form below, man-shaped nebulae that gleamed darkly, in muted contrast to the bright streetlamps that poured specks of diffused whiteness across the town in the early-morning mist.
That the images were those of naked and unmoving human beings meant nothing to the dogs. All that Mike and Mitzi and Jocko knew, as Rex and Spike and Butch and King and every other dog in Merridale just as quickly learned, was that they were alien, something that did not belong, and that barking at them might frighten them away, or draw the masters out to chase them off or ask what they wanted in the dogs' dominions.
So the dogs barked, and one by one they woke one another, from street to street, house to house, until all of Merridale resounded with their ragged voices.
And slowly the people of Merridale woke, and rose, and discovered.
Marty Sanders sat bolt upright in his bed, a sheen of terror-sweat covering his body, making his cotton pajamas stick to his hairless back like flour paste. He'd had the dream again. Over six months now and still that damned dream of that damned night. Dotty stirred in the bed beside him and cleared her throat in the darkness. He could make out the large lumpish shape of her in the cool blue glow of the clock-radio numerals.
"Marty?" she slurred sleepily. "Y'okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah, sure," he told his wife, who grunted noncommittally.
But he wasn't okay, and wondered if he ever would be again. He flopped back onto his pillow and looked up at the black ceiling, his tired mouth open in a grimace of self-loathing. He ran his fingers through his damp thinning hair and finally dried his forehead with a tissue. He felt sick.
When he remembered what he had done, how he had done it, he always felt sick. Even though no one would ever know, would ever grasp him by the arm and drag him away to pay for what he'd done, he still felt sick.
One time. One time in thirty years of marriage he had cheated and look how it had ended. It had seemed so safe—Dotty out of town visiting her mother in Lauderdale for two weeks, his running into Sheila Sommers outside the 7-Eleven, her teasing him, talking about last summer at the pool and asking him if he had liked her bathing suit, and then asking where his wife was, and when he told her, her saying how lonely he must be in that big house all by himself and wouldn't a little company be nice and no one would know.
Something had happened then that had totally surprised him. Thirty years of husbandly fidelity, fifty years of moral training had slipped off of him like a robe off a whore's shoulders, and he said yes. A little company would be nice.
Even now, he could scarcely believe he had done it, but he had. They went back to his house. The outside lights were off, and they were out too far for streetlights, so the chance of being spotted by his neighbors was unlikely. Once inside, they had a drink and talked—he about his business, she about her two failed marriages—and finally she just said, "Well, it's about time, isn't it?" and started to undress right there in the living room. By the time everything was off, they were in the bedroom and he was half undressed too. Then they did it, right there on the bed in which he and Dotty had slept for years, and goddamn if it hadn't been good. If he hadn't been good. But then she started teasing him. And right away he knew how stupid he'd been. He hadn't remembered, with her pressing up against him in the car on the way over, how she'd busted up Larry Drebbins's marriage with her big mouth, but now it came back to him all too clearly.
"Did ya like that?"
"Bet you haven't had it that good for a long time.”
“Does your wife do it like that?"
"Wouldn't she die if she knew about us?"
"Maybe we oughta call her in Florida . . ."
And with each remark from the strange naked woman stretching and moving like a cat in heat beside him, his stomach tightened more and more and the memory of what had just occurred grew tasteless, then bitter. He realized that he had no idea what Sheila would do, but it might be something crazy. After all, wasn't she crazy enough to pick up married men outside the 7-Eleven?
"C'mon, let's call her."
He laughed, trying to reassure himself that she was joking. She laughed too, but then looked at him half seriously. "What's the number?"
He laughed again, less jovially. "You're crazy."
"Maybe. What's the number?" He didn't say anything.
"I'll find it," she said, rising from the bed. He followed her through the house until she found the personal directory by the kitchen phone. He could only stand and watch her, his own nakedness forgotten, as she flipped through it. "Here we go. Mom." She moved back into the bedroom then. "More comfy in here, huh, Marty?" When she picked up the phone was when he stopped her, grabbing her hand.
"Are you crazy?" he said, and then she said something horrible and laughed at him, and he got mad, so mad that he pushed her.
To stop her. Just to stop her.
The next thing he knew she was lying there and her eyes were open but she wasn't moving, and when he looked, there was this thing on her head like a lump, a knot. There wasn't even any blood. Just this knot on her head, and he couldn't remember if she'd hit the sharp corner of the headboard or the bedside table or what, and there was just this lump and her not moving or even blinking, and he knew, he knew even as upset as he was, that live people blink.
He was so scared he cried. Just cried and cried until he couldn't anymore. So he blew his nose into a wad of Kleenex from the bedside table and thought about what to do next. He considered calling the police, but talked himself out of it. All that would mean would be that they'd take him away. And even if they freed him, everybody would know. Dotty would know, Pastor Craven would know, Tom Markley—hell, the whole damn town. And it wouldn't bring her back, would it? It wasn't like he was a criminal, was it? What had he done? Self-preservation, that was it—she would have destroyed him. And his punishment wouldn't bring her back. Nothing would bring her back.
Back to tell the truth.
Once he made his choice, the emotion seemed to fade, at least for the moment, and analysis took over. She lived in an apartment house two blocks away from the town square, had probably walked to the 7-Eleven, and he was fairly sure that no one had seen him with her. If he could get her back to her building.
Everything slipped into place then, and he made himself wait until three in the morning, when all of Merridale was sleeping. He dressed Sheila slowly and awkwardly, nearly panicking over his inability to fit her into her panty hose without twisting the legs. But after twenty minutes of backbreaking effort, she was dressed presentably enough that Martin Sanders felt confident that it would appear she had dressed herself. He took the scotch bottle from which she'd been drinking and splashed a bit on the front of her sweater and over her chin. Just enough, he thought. Don't overdo it. She drank, but she wasn't a drunk. And that's why, isn't it? That's why she fell—she wasn't used to it.
He was unable to pick her up, so he dragged her outside to his car and put her into the trunk on top of a blanket. On the way to her building he didn't pass a single car. It all went perfectly then—hauling her out, dragging her up the dimly lit stairway to her apartment, opening her door with her keys in her hand (fingerprints), turning on her lights, leaving the door open, and finally lifting her erect and letting her fall down the rubber-treaded concrete stairs. That was the worst. He was barely able to let her go, but he closed his eyes and forced himself to shove her slightly out so that she flopped loosely down the whole long flight, like a boneless rag doll, to strike her head with a dull crack at the bottom.
He ran then, ran down the steps, leaping fleetly over her, making himself slow down just a hair as he passed the sole streetlight on the way to his car parked in a shadowed corner. Then home. Home to a nightmare of stuffing soiled sheets in the washing machine, looking for long ash-blond hairs on the back of the couch, the upholstered headboard, everywhere, everywhere she'd stood, sat, lain.
The nightmare hadn't stopped there. It had continued even when the sheets were dry, the few hairs were found and flushed away, the glasses were washed and rinsed. It plagued him when the lights were out, when his eyes were closed, when dreams shredded his waking veil of forgetfulness.
The passage of months had not helped, nor did the total and unexpected success of his pulpish plot. Accidental death had been the ruling, had made him at least physically free. But he was still chained by the nightmares, and now he lay there, replaying them involuntarily on the dark ceiling. The pressure of his bladder temporarily took his mind off them and onto his tiring prostate. He rose and padded into the bathroom.
~*~
He had just finished when the dogs began to bark. Damn mutts, he thought. Four in the morning. . . never sleep now. He had just hit the flush lever when he heard Dotty scream.
The sound froze him, and the first thought that entered his mind was insane, irrational, and totally correct. She knows. He shivered, and thought again, She knows.
As he entered the bedroom, the blue glow was brighter than the clock radio had ever been, bright enough for him to see his wife huddled on the floor in the corner, staring and screaming at the slightly transparent corpse of Sheila Sommers lying on the bed in the same position in which she had died. Her eyes were still open and, like her entire accusing body, shone with a pale blue light.
Up to that moment, Martin Sanders had never thought that a man could scream more loudly than a woman.
Brad
A transgression, a crime, entering a man's existence, eats it up like a malignant growth, consumes it like a fever.
—Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
CHAPTER 1
Merridale had had its last sleep for a time. It seemed a village made for sleep, designed for a permanent, contented somnolence. From Interstate 79 it was already said to look like a town of the dead. But this image followed the actual event, the result of journalistic second-guessing, one of a slew of rapidly devised images for a poetry-hungry public.
For only in the poetry of image, metaphor, even parable, could the phenomenon of Merridale be dealt with by the ignorant, which included the entire human race in terms of truly understanding what had happened and how. Why was beyond even the wisest and greatest of the mystical. Poetry triumphed because prose was too stark, too frighteningly clear in the pictures it drew. So Merridale, from afar, was "a town of the dead, nestled among the hills of Pennsylvania like a curled and sleeping giant."
But Merridale had not been as the press later described it. Instead, it had been a bustling little village of 8,000 inhabitants that showed few signs of growth, but fewer still of deterioration. As it did not welcome strangers, neither did it shun them. But one had to have a reason to live there, either ancestral or occupational. No one, thought the townspeople, should live in Merridale who did not either work there or grow up there or have a job nearby, nearby generally defined as within a fifteen-mile radius of the town. It was a town where people worked hard, went to church, seldom cheated on their mates, drank moderately, took only prescribed drugs, and nursed their frustrations without giving them reign. It was strongly Republican, overwhelmingly Protestant, universally white. It was no different from half a hundred other towns in the area—no better or worse, no more tolerant or bigoted.
Merridale sat at the base of a glacial ridge. From the town below, the ridge, denuded of trees and pocked with small ranch houses, looked like the spine of some great beast lying face down just beneath the earth's surface, arching its back as it had for years in an effort to break through the rocky soil and free itself. This stark mound was called the mount, and the town at the bottom, the dale, though why the trappers who had settled the area in the early eighteenth century had called it merry was a secret lost in time.
Like the legs of Ozymandias, the spine above Merridale was the only break in the surrounding landscape for many miles. A rolling hill lay on the other side of the town, but its height was only half that of the ridge, although it enabled the town to be described as lying in a quiet valley, the only valley for as far as the eye could see. All about was the unrelieved flatness of farms, broken by occasional towns and cities, the largest of which was Lansford, fifteen miles southeast, to which a good portion of Merridale residents drove daily to work, or boarded the first or second Amtrak train of the day, depending on whether their collars were blue or white, whether they bore paper bags or briefcases.
The farms were everywhere, rich with the bounty of dark soil. Unlike the withering earth of the plains states, leached out by chemicals and weakened by corporate interests that strove to make the land produce as much in as short a time as possible, most of the farms were still in private hands, many run by members of Amish or Mennonite sects who farmed the way their fathers and grandfathers had before them, caring for the land with a near-religious devotion, almost worshiping it, as further removed ancestors had adored the sun and rain that nurtured that same soil.
Because of the farms, Merridale could easily have been self-supporting had the need arisen. There were hogs, sheep, a few stringy herd of beef cattle, as well as all the vegetation necessary to life, even tobacco, which grew in great fields of flat green. Dozens of chicken farms and egg ranches completed the menu. But Merridale was not and never would be self-sufficient. It was too much a part of its county, its state, its country, to become a separate unit, though before too long county, state, and country alike would wish it out of existence.
~*~
The thought of his town and its people was far from Bradley Meyers's mind when the dogs woke him from a sound sleep. All he knew was that he was mad. It generally took hours for him to drift into a repose as solid as the one that had just been shattered, and his first response was rage. The alarm clock read just past four, and he knew any sleep he could grab until he had to get up at six would be ragged, unsatisfying, pierced with consciousness. He muttered a curse and kicked his feet out over the side of the bed. The covers slipped off Christine's shoulders and he pulled them back up over her roughly, wishing that he could sleep through anything, as she did.
He threw on his terrycloth bathrobe and stepped into the hall, listening for a second at Wally's door to the thick asthmatic snores that told him the boy was sleeping. Brad sighed and ran his fingers through his long, straggly hair. Might as well make coffee, he thought glumly. Those dogs aren't gonna shut up. He went into the bathroom, drained the remainder of the previous night's beer, and was rinsing night fuzz from his mouth when the sirens started up. It was weird, he thought. It was usually sirens first, then the dogs, not the other way around. If there were a fire, it might be nearby. Maybe he could even see it from a window. That would be one way to pass the hours until dawn.
He saw the man in his living room out of the corner of his eye as he was walking to the kitchen. He wasn't sure what he'd expected to see when he turned and looked. Someone with a gun, perhaps, or a knife, someone wearing a look of surprise tinged with aggressiveness, someone who would hiss a warning not to move or he'll shoot. What he did not expect to see was an old naked black man standing half in and half out of the sofa, as though it were quicksand into which he was sinking.
His mind thought, Jesus, but his voice could not even whisper it. Fright had clogged his throat, thickened his lungs, and he could only stand and stare at the softly gleaming figure who looked not at him but at some unnamed spot a few feet to Brad's left. The man was terribly emaciated, and Brad fancied he could see the outline of the backbone pressing against the diaphragm. The arms and thighs were like sticks, and the neck that supported the grizzled head was not much thicker. That head was capped with a gray-white patch of hair and mapped with wrinkles. The genitals were shrunken into insignificance.
The sirens wailed, the dogs howled, and Bradley Meyers stood shaking, waiting for something to happen, for the man to turn, to disappear, to move toward him holding out a pencil-fingered hand. But the man did not move, not at all, not even to sway like a leaf in the breeze. He only stood, his lower legs and feet lost in the worn-out sofa, looking languidly at that spot until Brad turned and looked too, trying to keep half an eye on the withered figure.
There was nothing there, just the wall with the big red, black, and white Nazi flag Brad had had there for years. Could he be looking at that?
What the hell does it matter what he's looking at! Brad thought savagely, turning back to the wispy figure. He tried to speak, cleared his throat, tried again. "Hey," he said softly. "What . . . Are you for real?"
There was no answer, no tremor of understanding in the old man's countenance.
"What are you?"
Still no answer. Just the old man standing there, shining weakly, and as Brad's eyes became adjusted to the poor light, he thought he could see the opposite wall through the man's body. A ghost, he thought with numbing certainty. A ghost.
"Chris," he called, but the bedsprings did not squeak, she was not coming. "Chris!" he barked, and he heard an answering moan from the bedroom. "Come here!" His words did not banish the thing. It still stood silently, as if it too were waiting for Christine.
"What is it?" she called, her speech sleep-dulled.
"Just . . . come here." He heard her bare feet on the floor, the rustle of her robe as it left the hook, her footfalls down the hall, a deep yawn in which irritation was evident. "Jeez, Brad, it's four in the—"
"Shut up. Look at that. Do you see that?"
Behind him, she drew in breath for a scream that never left her. She stood, breath locked, over an abyss that reached up with dark hands to catch her, unable to scream, to breathe, to move. Brad turned and saw her chained features, her mouth like a great black "O" in the blackness around her, and knew that she saw it too. Finally her breath blew out in a whistling whimper that held such terror and helplessness that he put his arms around her, blocking her view of the old man.
But she gazed straight into his chest as though she saw it still, then closed her eyes as the first paroxysm of fear shivered out of her. "Oh, migod, migod, migod," she whispered in a rapid litany. "Who is it, who is it?"
And because he did not know he said nothing.
"Who is it!" she grated, clawing at his arm. "What's he want? Who is he?"
"Let go," he said, pushing her away to where she could see the old man once more. She whimpered again, transfixed by the sight, unable to turn her eyes away. Outside the sirens screamed. "It's a ghost," he said over their wail. "What else? It's a ghost."
"Noon . . ."
"Look at it! You can see through it." Bradley Meyers felt a strange excitement interwoven with his fear, pushing it down on the loom of his emotions until it faded into the background like a neutral color in a field of vivid red, leaving only that intense interest, an overpowering need to know. He had seen too much of life to be scared for long by the semblance of death. Now he felt the adrenaline surge within him, and all he could think was "What is it? What is it?"—concerned only with the knowing, not with fear. He moved toward it slowly, with a healthy respect for the unknown, his tongue licking his dry lips.
"Brad . . . don't—"
"Shut up," he hissed. She knew better than to disobey, but the room seemed filled with her hoarse panting. Brad shuffled closer, until he was only a few feet away, then reached out a hand. But something he could not name stopped him from touching the man, and instead he moved to the side, grasping the arm of the couch, which he slowly slid toward himself.
The couch moved easily enough, its worn casters creaking as they rolled over the carpet. But the old man's body did not move, and soon his lower legs and most of his feet were revealed. It seemed to Brad that the bottom half inch of flesh sank into and became part of the carpet.
"Brad . . ." He looked at Christine. Her face was pinched and she was shaking, tears running down her cheeks. "Go back in the bedroom."
"Oh, Brad . . ."
"Go on." She slowly backed away toward the hall. When she could no longer see the old man, she turned and ran to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her, her frenzied sobs still clearly audible in the living room.
Bradley Meyers swallowed and cleared a piece of phlegm from his throat. Then he walked in front of the old man so that he stood directly before his gaze, staring into the blue-lustered eyes. He felt nothing, no suggestion of being looked inside of, no psychic tingle. It was merely like looking into the eyes of a particularly well-rendered statue. He stepped out of the line of its gaze then, and walked closer to it. It stood, seemingly relaxed, arms hanging loosely at its sides, not noticing that he approached. Now only a foot away, Brad steeled himself as he did when he was a child taking his first plunge off the high board, and tried to touch the old man's arm.
At first he thought that perhaps he was afraid, that though his conscious mind wanted to touch whatever was there, his terrified subconscious would not permit it, keeping his fingers from coming into contact with the blue-black skin. But then he realized with a start that he was touching it, or touching the space it filled. His fingertips seemed to be inside the old man's flesh, although he could still see them, dim and hazy, like phantom fingers. He withdrew them quickly, then carefully put them back again. In, out, in, out, making contact without feeling or sensation. There was not a trace of coldness, wetness, warmth, anything.
"You really are a ghost," he said in awe. But the black man did not confirm or deny Brad's statement. He only stood, unaware of the young man touching him, looking patiently at the spot on Brad's Nazi flag.
"Brad!" Christine's cry came from their bedroom. It was high and fluttery as if the madness that had been stalking her had at last taken hold, and Brad turned from the apparition and ran down the hall, hoping that the black man would still be there when he returned.
When he opened the bedroom door, Christine was standing at the window, the curtain drawn back. She was looking out onto Market Street below. "What's wrong?" he asked curtly. She only shook her head in short birdlike jerks, unable to turn away from the window. "What is it?" He went to her, jostled her aside, and looked out.
The street was filled with ghosts. Blue shapes stood, sat, reclined, all of them gleaming dimly like dozens of broken neon signs. Some were half in, half out of parked cars, just as the black man had been partially encased by the sofa. Across the street in the parking lot where a transient hotel had stood until the late fifties, vertical rows of naked blue bodies, men and women alike, hung stationary in the air. One of them, laden with fat, was in a half crouch, as if in the process of falling. His right arm was up, elbow out, in the position of holding something unseen to his throat, which gaped with a wound from which a gout of dark liquid hung suspended. Brad could see the thick ropiness of the man's severed windpipe.
Near him a young woman lay on her side in midair, her belly bloated with pregnancy. Her hands were jammed between her legs, her eyes were closed, her mouth open in an unheard howl. Most of the apparitions were older, but many were young and middle-aged, and there were more than a few children. Brad noticed one boy no older than ten lying in the doorway to the Murphy Apartments across the street. Only the top half of his body was visible through the door, but Brad could see that he was lying face down like a bearskin rug, arms out in front of him, his chin resting on the rough sidewalk, his head cocked awkwardly. The pale blue glowing eyes looked up toward the window where Brad stood with Christine whining and shivering beside him, and something in the eyes froze Brad for a second, as though they were speaking to him, trying to make him remember something long forgotten.
"Brad . . ." Christine whimpered.
"Shh!"
"Brad, let's go!"
"Shut up!" he snarled, turning to her, furious at her for invading his thoughts just as he almost had it, just as he'd nearly remembered.
But she would not be quiet. She shook her head back and forth, her eyes darting to the window and away again. "No," she said. "We gotta get out—we gotta leave—"
"Leave? Leave what?"
"Leave this place, leave this . . . this . . . this town! We gotta get away!"
"For the last time, Chris, shut up. We're not going anywhere, so just shut the fuck up. Get back in bed and pull the covers over your head, or go hide in the closet, but don't you open your goddamn mouth again!" He shoved her to punctuate his order, and her body rocked back so that she fell weeping to the floor, from which she crawled up onto the bed and under the covers, pulling them over her head.
Now, Brad thought. Now who . . .
"Whassamatter?"
He turned, his teeth grinding together in anger, to see Wally standing in the doorway, his outgrown Fred Flintstone pajamas leaving his round tummy bare and vulnerable. "Go back to bed."
"I heard Mommy—"
"Go back to bed!" Brad shouted, crossing the small room in a bound and pushing the boy across the hallway and against the opposite wall. Wally's lip quivered, but he did not cry, only picked himself up and padded head down back into his room. Christine whimpered loudly under the covers, as if the blow had hurt her as well as her son, but she said nothing. Brad looked out the window at the boy half on the sidewalk, half hidden by the door, and let the sirens drown out her cries.
He struggled, trying to remember, to recall so long ago, so many years, the summers past, the town park, rubber horseshoes and snow cones, and now he was starting to get it, trading baseball cards and drinking Double Cola and riding down those steep dirt paths over the bank on their bikes with devil's head decals and pinwheel spinners and box hockey, oh, Christ yes, the kid who always beat everybody at box hockey, and he could see long ago the knuckles covered with Band-Aids and the same hands outstretched now on the sidewalk with those scabs and cuts and bruises and (Andy) that shock of wheat-colored hair (Andy Koser) and the ears that stuck out too far . . .
Andy Koser.
CHAPTER 2
"Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . oh, what a shame, May." Mrs. Meyers seemed glued to the phone. Her head was shaking back and forth, and Brad knew it was something bad. Probably nothing that touched them of their family because Mom wasn't crying, but something bad just the same. His appetite was swiftly disappearing the longer his mother clucked, and he dabbed at the stiffening Maypo with a spoon, building a small dam to hold the milk from the center. He hoped she would hang up before he had to go to school so he could find out what the news was, but she showed no signs of putting down the phone, and his Hopalong Cassidy wristwatch told him he'd have to leave now if he wanted to meet Al Withers on the corner of Orange and Spruce.
"Mom . . ." he said softly, standing up.
She heard and raised a hand to tell him to wait, still enrapt by what Mrs. Nolt was telling her.
"I gotta go, Mom."
She tightened her face and gave him one of her pruney looks. "Brad's got to go, May," she said into the phone. "Call you right back, 'kay? . . . Uh-huh. Bye-bye." She hung up with a reluctant sigh. "Okay, hon. Got your lunch?" He held up his lunch pail and she nodded approvingly. "Eat all the celery now, okay? And the apple."
"What was wrong, Mom?"
"Oh, on the phone? Well . . ." She looked away—at the sink filled with breakfast dishes, then at his half-eaten Maypo. "Oh, you didn't finish your cereal . . ."
"What was it? Something I shouldn't know about?"
She squared her shoulders as if about to tackle a particularly rotten job, like cleaning the oven. "No. No reason why you shouldn't. Do you know the Koser boy?"
"Andy?"
"Is he the one close to your age?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, he had an accident. You know the Murphy Apartments?"
Brad nodded. He and his cousin had gone to Andy's one time last summer to trade for a Richie Ashburn card. "Well, there's a steep stairway up to the second floor where the Kosers live, and . . . Andy fell down it.”
“He fell down the stairs?"
"Uh-huh."
"Was he hurt?"
His mother's face wrinkled up again and she nodded shortly. "Yeah, hon. Real bad. He's, uh . . . Andy's dead.”
“Dead?"
"Uh-huh."
"From . . . just from fallin' down the stairs?"
She nodded. "Mrs. Nolt said he broke his neck. Died very fast. I don't think he suffered at all."
Brad swallowed hard. The Maypo was dancing and churning in his stomach. "When was it?"
"Last night after supper. Mrs. Nolt found out because Mr. Nolt is on the ambulance crew. Seems Andy was going out to play baseball down at the park and he just tripped or something. "
Brad bit the inside of his lip. He didn't think he was going to cry, but he didn't know what else the feeling that was boiling up inside him could be. "Maybe . . . uh . . . maybe his bat," he suggested in an effort to seem detached, adult. "His bat?"
"Maybe he tripped on it."
"Oh. Well, yes, maybe he did." His mother bent and kissed him on the cheek. "You'd better run now if you're not going to be late." She seemed uncomfortable, as she did whenever his father told a joke that had anything to do with s-e-x. "If you want, we could talk some more about this tonight. Or with your father when he gets home." She smiled wanly. "Go on now. Watch the street corners."
He was a little late, but Al Withers was waiting for him anyway. "Ya hear about Andy Koser?" was the first thing he said.
"Yeah," Brad answered. "Mrs. Nolt called my mom."
"Mine too. Bet she musta started around six this morning. Bet everybody knows." They walked for a while without speaking. "Boy," Al said at last, "it's really weird, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"You ever know anybody else that died?"
"My grandma. But she was pretty old." Brad had been six at the time, three years before. His maternal grandmother had gotten lung cancer after smoking a pack of Luckies a day since her twenties. Her husband, a retired railroad man, had had to quit years before, after a bout with TB. Brad thought his grandfather's house smelled a lot better now.
"All my grandparents are still alive," said Al with a trace of pride. Then his smug smile turned into a frown. "I wonder what happened."
"You mean how he fell?"
"Naw, I mean after. You know, did he go to heaven or what?"
"I guess so. He was kind of a good guy."
"You believe in heaven?" Al asked.
Brad didn't answer right away. "Yeah, I guess.”
“Me too. I guess."
"I don't think my dad does. He doesn't go to church or anything. And when I ask him about God and all, he just says he doesn't have much time to think about that."
"He an atheist?" Al's eyes got big.
"No!" Brad replied. "I didn't say that. He just doesn't think about it much." He spotted a bottle cap on the sidewalk and they shuffle-kicked it back and forth for a while until Al missed and it went into the gutter. "I wonder if he did go to heaven," Brad said.
"Sure. What would God send a little kid to hell for? Cheatin' at box hockey?"
"Andy didn't cheat—he was just good."
"You're not supposed to block the puck with your knuckle."
"Ah, you're just too scared of getting hurt to do it."
"So are you," Al shot back, and it was true. Brad had always admired the nonchalant way Andy Koser had taken the sharp raps of the rough wooden puck on his knuckles without complaint. He'd once asked Andy if it didn't hurt. Andy'd grinned and said, "Sure, but if you wanta win, you gotta get your knuckles stung." Brad didn't think winning was worth that.
"I wonder," mused Al, "how he . . . uh . . . how he looks. You know?"
Brad nodded.
"I mean, how long before he . . . before bodies start to rot?"
"Pretty fast."
"Yeah, I guess. You think he'll have those white worms—what are they?"
"Maggots?"
"Yeah, that's them. Like in that Edgar Allan Poe movie. You think he'll have them?"
"Dunno," said Brad. "Probably not. I don't think you get them when you're embalmed."
"They got tighter coffins today too, huh?"
"Oh, yeah." They walked on. Brad didn't know what was in Al's head, but in his own there were things he hoped he could forget about before he went to bed that night. Things like losing his balance and falling, the same kind of feeling as when the Comet at Dobbs's Park went over the first ridge, dropping the coaster down that long chute so that you seemed to fall forever. But there you never hit bottom—there the pavement never came up smack against your head. To kill you.
Kill you. Brad tried to imagine what being dead was like, but couldn't. He could only think of it as a long sleep from which you'd never wake up. In his heart he really couldn't conceive of heaven, of a place with clouds and harps and wings and white robes and everybody flying around and singing all day about how great God was. It just didn't seem right. He tried, but he just couldn't make himself believe it. Then that worried him, because in the back of his mind he did believe in hell. Or at least in punishment. Now he tried to picture Andy Koser in heaven and found the spectacle ludicrous. Andy Koser, with his turned-up nose and those Dumbo ears that stuck out way past the limits of his butch cut, sitting on a cloud with King David and Moses and George Washington, and all of them singing hymns. . . . If they didn't have box hockey and baseball cards in heaven, Andy was going to be pretty bored. "You think," he asked Al, "they got baseball cards in heaven?"
"You nuts?" Al answered, giving him a funny look. "C'mon, we better run. Gettin' late."
They ran, and made it to school on time. Mrs. Wrigley, the principal, told their class about Andy being killed, and added that any children who wanted to donate money toward a "floral memory" could leave it with their teacher. Some of the girls cried, and so did one or two of the boys, though they bit their lips and jammed their fists in their eyes to stop themselves. Scott Jones, who knew Andy better than most of them in fourth grade, snapped the pencil he was holding in two when he heard Mrs. Wrigley's announcement, then looked at it stupidly as though wondering why he'd done it.
The day went as slowly as any before, and Brad thought and thought about Andy, about his grandmother, about death. At home that night neither his mother nor his father mentioned the subject, although when his father tucked him in he asked if there was anything bothering Brad, anything he wanted to talk about. Brad told him there wasn't, so his father said goodnight and left the boy alone.
He lay there in his bed in the dark, listening to his parents' footsteps as they went back downstairs, the low hum of their voices talking softly so that he could make out only the inflections, not the words themselves, then silence, broken in a minute by the muffled roar of the TV set, of dimly heard lines and the audience's laughter.
He lay there listening to himself breathing, putting his hand on his heart to feel the low but distinct pounding beneath his flesh and bone. Andy's heart isn't pounding, he thought. Andy's heart isn't doing anything.
He put his hand at his side and stared up at the black ceiling, frighteningly aware of the rise and fall of his chest under the bedclothes, going up and down, up and down, unlike Andy's chest that was now so still, and would never rise or fall again. And then thoughts came that had never come before—questions, concerns:
What makes me breathe?
What if I forget?
What if I fall asleep and I forget to breathe? Would I wake up or would I just die in my sleep?
What if my heart stops beating and I was asleep? How would I know to get it started again?
He lay there, afraid to go to sleep, afraid to trust his heart and lungs to keep working without his conscious supervision. And as he lay wondering and worrying, he started to think about swallowing his tongue when he slept and choking on it, of turning his head in a dream so that his nose pressed against the pillow, smothering him, of half a dozen other ways that death could come upon him in the night, quietly, unexpectedly. He had never been afraid before tonight, had never asked for a nightlight or used the feeble excuses most children do to avoid being taken from their parents' side and thrust into the Night, the Dark, where the shadows wait. But now he was afraid to sleep, afraid even to close his eyes.
He lay there.
He lay there listening to the cars pass outside, listening to the TV below, listening as his parents finally climbed the stairs, ran the water in the bathroom, walked down the short hall to their own room, clicked the light switch so that the bright crack under his door died, drowned in darkness. The whole house was dark now, and soon the house would be asleep.
It was not until he heard his father snoring that he started to worry about his parents. They were older than he was, closer to Grandma's age, and he remembered Mel Rickert's dad dying last year of a heart attack in his sleep. He felt suddenly chilled, listening to his father's rumbling snores. He should listen for him too—stay awake to make sure he was all right. And his mother as well.
He slipped out of bed and opened his door, then stepped across the hall and went into his parents' room. His father's snores were louder now, but he could not hear his mother breathing. He tiptoed to her side and leaned down over her. It was too dark to see her covers rise and fall, but he heard a soft hissing and knew she was all right, she was alive.
He knelt by her side then, and finally lay down next to the big double bed, his head against the thinning carpet. It was hard beneath him, and he was glad, because he knew the discomfort would keep him awake. So he lay listening to their breaths, listening for his own, until sleep finally claimed him just before midnight.
His mother's cry woke him the next morning. "Brad!" she said. "Honey? What are you doing?"
"Whazzat?" His father's voice, phlegmy and thick.
Brad groaned as he moved, feeling as though all his muscles had been tied in knots. "I . . . uh . . . I got lonely.”
“Lonely?" She giggled, not understanding.
"F'pete's sake," his father said. "You been there all night?"
Brad shrugged. "I dunno. I . . . I woke up . . . had a bad dream. I didn't . . . I didn't want to wake you up."
"Oh, boy." His father sat on the side of the bed and stretched. "Well, you got another hour before you have to get up for school, so why not sleep in a bed, huh? Come on."
"I'll make breakfast," his mother said, and disappeared. Brad's father ruffled his hair and walked him back to his room. "Whatcher pillow on the floor for?" he asked.
"Guess I knocked it down while I was dreamin'.”
“Rough dream?" He put the pillow back on the bed. Brad lay back against it.
"Uh-huh."
"Anything to do with . . . what happened the other day?”
“Huh?"
"With your friend Andy?"
Brad looked away from his father's face and down at the paisley pattern of his tentlike pajamas. "Yeah," he whispered. Then he started to cry.
"Hey, hey, what's the matter?" His father held him against his thick chest.
"I . . . I don't wanta die, Dad!" He was barely able to get the words out.
"Aw, aw, c'mon, sport," said his father, holding him clumsily. ."Don't cry now, you're not gonna die . . . leastways not for a long, long time. C'mon, hey, don't be a baby."
"I don't wanta die at all. And I don't want you to die neither. Or Mom."
"Everybody dies, Brad. But you won't die for a long time. Not for years and years."
"What about you?"
"Me neither."
"How d'ya know?" he wailed.
"Hey, I just know, okay? Trust me. I'm not gonna die for a long time."
"Andy Koser didn't think he was gonna die either. But he did!"
His father frowned. "Sometimes things like that happen. But not often. Not often enough to worry about. So just forget it."
"I can't!"
"Look," his father said, "nobody knows when they're gonna die, so it don't do you any good to worry about it. So just forget it." He stood up. "I gotta get dressed, I'll be late." Leaning down, he patted Brad's shoulder. "Don't worry," he said, and left.
Brad had never felt more alone. He sat up in bed and waited for his alarm clock to go off. When it did, he dressed, ate breakfast silently, his mother puttering too busily around him, and went to school.
He slept little the following few days, but when he discovered that a week had gone by without any deaths by suffocation, he gradually forgot his fears, and even became less careful on stairs until eventually he reverted back to his old self.
Almost.
CHAPTER 3
"Andy Koser," Brad whispered in awe.
"What?" Christine's voice was muffled by the bedclothes over her head. "What did you say?" She was near hysteria.
"Come here," he said. She didn't move. "I said come here."
"No . . . Why?"
"I want you to see something." He crossed to the bed. "No . . ." She was crying when he pulled the covers off of her. "Please, Brad, please, don't make me!"
He dug a hand into her armpit and hauled her from the bed. She staggered, but remained erect, and he dragged her to the window.
"No," she blubbered, starting to thrash about in an effort to break his hold. "Nooo . . ."
He smacked her across the cheek with his open hand, his fingers stinging from the contact. "Shut up," he said quietly, without malice. "I want you to see something."
"Why do I have to?" The fear was leaving her now. The blow that had reddened her cheek had brought anger in its place. "I don't have to do what you say! I don't"—she gasped for breath—"don't wanta see out there!"
He smiled a smile edged with promises, grim with threats. "I really want you to, Chris," he said. "I want you to do this for me."
In the light of his tone, her anger slipped fearfully away, leaving only the red marks where his fingers had met flesh. Her lip quivered, and she looked at him like a beaten dog that would take the throat out of its master if it thought it could. "You . . . bastard," she said weakly.
"Will you do this for me, please?" His smile faded. "You will, won't you." There was no longer even the hint of a question.
"You bastard," she mouthed, but he could not hear the words.
"Look down there."
She turned her head toward the window. Her face trembled as though made of jelly, and she clamped her eyes shut. "Look," he said. "Open your goddamned eyes."
She did. Her head shook with the effort not to turn away, and he saw the veins in her neck press against the slightly chubby flesh above. Another few pounds, he thought, and she would have wattles. "You see that boy?" he asked her, unable to take his eyes off her face. "That's Andy Koser. I knew him when I was a kid. He's been dead twenty-five years."
She looked at him, disbelief in her glare. "Are you . . .” she began, then turned back to the window. Brad put his arm around her shoulders, and she shivered at his touch.
"Recognize anybody?" he said. "Any familiar faces for you out there?"
"What . . . are they, Brad?"
He shook his head and gave a short barking laugh. "How do I know?"
"Oh, G—" She brought a hand to her mouth.
"What?"
"There," she breathed, pointing to a worn green bench that sat under a streetlight. There was something on the bench that had once been human. But now the body from the sternum down looked like raw, oozing meat. Trunk and legs were indistinguishable from one another. The head and face, however, were untouched, and gleamed, as did the lower chaos of mortality, with the same cold blue light the other figures radiated.
"Oh, Jesus," said Brad, a plunging sadness in his tone. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his jaw tightened and trembled as he gritted his teeth, trying to force back the crying.
"You know him?" Christine asked in awe.
"Yeah," he managed to get out. "Yeah. You do too. It's Rorrie."
CHAPTER 4
"Aw fuck, B. J., you really like that shit?"
"Yeah. Yeah, Rorrie, I think I'm gonna like it. I mean, it's a nice campus, and I liked school, so what the hell."
"I thought you'da had enough of school." Rorrie Weidman put his hands behind his head and sank lower onto the bright red bench. He took off his aviator sunglasses and let the warm rays bake his eyelids. "I'm ready to do something, you know?"
Brad snorted. "Like what?"
"I don't know." Rorrie shrugged. "Maybe Dad's garage for a while, maybe I'll just bum around the country, maybe—”
“Maybe the Army."
"Huh?"
"Man, are you nuts? You'll be drafted for sure if you don't go to school. Hell, Rorrie, you're smart enough. You could get into State easy. They take kids with some really low boards—mine were shitty."
"Yeah, but I'd need a scholarship. I don't have the bread.”
“You could get one."
"Bullshit. I'm not an orphan or a nigger."
"Don't say that, man."
"What, 'orphan'?"
"You know what I mean."
" 'Nigger'? That bother you? Hey, lighten up, B. J. I'm just foolin' around."
They sat for a while, watching the cars go by on Market Street, calling an occasional greeting to a friend, pulling in their legs when an adult walked past. Rorrie lit a cigarette. "What would you do," Brad said, unwrapping a stick of gum, "if you did get drafted?"
"I dunno. I guess I'd go. What about you?"
Brad shook his head. "I don't have anything against those people."
"That's got nothin' to do with it."
"It's got a lot to do with it," Brad answered.
"Crap. You been listening to too much folk-rock. You think they asked our dads in World War Two whether or not they had anything against Germans? 'Mr. Weidman, Mr. Meyers, you do hate Germans, don't you?' Hell, we are Germans. Our grandparents, great-grandparents anyway. I bet ninety percent of the people in Merridale got German blood."
"World War Two was different from Vietnam."
"My ass." Rorrie spat into the street. "You're dumb enough to get drafted, you go where they tell you and fight who they tell you to. Anyway, it doesn't matter. They're not gonna draft me."
"Why not?"
"I got a funny little toe on my left foot."
Brad laughed.
"No shit! I do!"
"Your little toe?" Brad was still chuckling.
"Okay, laugh. You think it's funny, go ahead and laugh. They don't take you if your feet are fucked up, because you can't march, dummy." Rorrie pulled off his left sneaker and propped his foot yoga-style on his thigh. "Lookit that."
Brad looked. The smallest toe curled under the fourth one so that the toenail was only partially visible. "Didn't keep you from playing football," Brad said, realizing that he was actually jealous of Rorrie's curly toe.
"Doesn't matter." He slipped the sneaker back on. "You ever check your toes?"
"There's nothing wrong with my toes."
"Too bad," Rorrie said, grinding out his Marlboro on the sidewalk.
As it turned out, there wasn't enough wrong with Rorrie's toes either. That August, while Brad was working at the A&P to make enough for his living expenses at Penn State, Rorrie Weidman was called for a pre-induction physical, which he easily passed. The examiners dismissed the turned-under toe, laughing gruffly and saying that Army boots would straighten it out. Rorrie was not even permitted to come home, but had to call his parents from Fort Indiantown Gap and tell them to bring the personal things he would need. He started basic training four days later. Through the remainder of August Brad always felt a twinge as he drove his Chevy past the bench by Western Auto and saw it empty, or occupied by kids other than Rorrie. That had been Rorrie's bench for the past three summers. He'd sat on it when he'd finished the workday at his father's garage during the week, wearing his greasy mechanic's jumpsuit, in the evenings with a work shirt and cuffed jeans, on bright steaming Saturdays in a tank top and cutoffs. It was Rorrie's bench, although he was more than willing to share it, especially with his friends and with older people, like Eddie Karl. Rorrie and Eddie would sit for hours on a Saturday afternoon or Friday night, talking, smoking, watching cars, Eddie telling Rorrie (and Brad, when he was there) about old days and old friends, none of whom had ever died in Eddie's mind.
But through the rest of August the bench, though often occupied, seemed strangely empty. Rorrie's presence was gone.
In September Brad went off to State. He found his freshman year difficult, not because of the course material but rather because of the hundred distractions he had never had to overcome when he lived at home. Loud roommates, Saturday night dances, football games (he tried out for the team with no luck), the letters he'd write every two or three days to Bonnie back in Merridale, the dates he had when he was able to forget about her—all these resulted in a 1.68 grade point average his first semester. Instead of trying to correct that semester's flaws, his studies became even more secondary in the spring. He joined the campus civil rights group, one of the two established (and feuding) antiwar organizations, and auditioned for and got a small speaking part in an off-campus production of Lysistrata. In June he learned his average had dropped another half point and found himself on probation for his sophomore year, even though he had not actually failed a course.
During that freshman year he received two pieces of correspondence from Rorrie Weidman. The first was a postcard that his parents brought up to campus one Saturday afternoon in October. It was postmarked Fort Bragg, and was dated three weeks previously. It read:
B. J.—Greetings from beautiful Fort Bragg. The Army food isn't all that bad, and we get to hear a lot of rock. May be heading over to the big V in a month or two, so wish me luck. I'll see you in two years (I hope). Give Bonnie a squeeze for me—not too many ladies here.
Rorrie
Brad hadn't answered. He'd intended to, and had stuck the postcard to the wall above his desk with a piece of Plasti-Tak. The color photo of a row of recruits in front of green-gray barracks under an impossibly blue sky hung there for two months before he finally took it down when he went home for Christmas vacation. He intended to answer it over the holidays, but used it as a bookmark in a library book and so lost it.