The Collected Short Fiction, page 48
Kenshi remembered nothing after the blue door and he was thankful.
Months after their second and last reunion, Swayne rang him at home and asked if he wanted to meet for cocktails. Swayne was in New York for an auction, would be around over the weekend, and wondered if Kenshi was doing all right, if he was surviving. This was before Kenshi began to lie awake in the dark of each new evening, disconnected from the cold pulse of the world outside the womb of his apartment, his hotel room, the cabs of his endless stream of rental cars. He dreamed the same dream; a recurring nightmare of acid-filled barrels knocked like dominoes into a trench, the grumbling exertions of a red bulldozer pushing in the dirt.
I’ve seen the tape, Swayne said through a blizzard of static.
Kenshi said nothing. He breathed, in and out. Starless, the black ceiling swung above him, it rushed to and fro, in and out like the heartbeat of the black Atlantic tapping and slapping at old crumbling seawalls, not far from his own four thin walls.
I’ve seen it, Swayne said. After another long pause, he said, Say something, Ken.
What?
It does exist. Van Iblis made sure copies were circulated to the press, but naturally the story was killed. Too awful, you know? I got one by post a few weeks ago. A reporter friend smuggled it out of a precinct in Canada. The goddamned obscenity is everywhere. And I didn’t have the balls to look. Yesterday, finally.
That’s why you called. Kenshi trembled. He suddenly wanted to know. Dread nearly overwhelmed him. He considered hanging up, chopping off Swayne’s distorted voice. He thought he might vomit there, supine in bed, and drown.
Yeah. We were the show. The red door people were the real show, I guess. God help us, Ken. Ever heard of a Palestinian hanging? Dangled from your wrists, cinder blocks tied to your ankles? That’s what the bastards started with. When they were done, while the people were still alive…. Swayne stopped there, or his next words were swallowed by the static surf.
Of course, Van Iblis made a film. No need for Swayne to illuminate him on that score, to open him up again. Kenshi thought about the empty barrels near the trench. He thought about what Walther said to him behind the shed that day. He thought about how in his recurring dream he always chose the red door, instead.
I don’t even know why I picked blue, mate, Swayne said.
He said to Swayne, Don’t ever fucking call me again. He disconnected and dropped the phone on the floor and waited for it to ring again. When it didn’t, he slipped into unconsciousness.
One day his copy arrived in a plain envelope via anonymous sender. He put the disk on the sidewalk outside of his building and methodically crushed it under the heel of his wingtip. The doorman watched the whole episode and smiled indulgently, exactly as one does to placate the insane.
Kenshi smiled in return and went into his apartment and ran a bath. He slashed his wrists with the broken edge of a credit card. Not deep enough; he bled everywhere and was forced to hire a service to steam the carpets. He never again wore short sleeve shirts.
Nonetheless, he’d tried. There was comfort in trying.
Kenshi returned to the Indian port town on company business a few years later. Models were being flown in from Mumbai and Kolkata for a photo shoot near the old monastery. The ladies wouldn’t arrive for another day and he had time to burn. He hired a taxi and went looking for the Van Iblis site.
The field wasn’t difficult to find. Developers had drained the swamp and built a hotel on the site, as advertised. They’d hacked away nearby wilderness and plopped down high-rise condos, two restaurants and a casino. The driver dropped him at the Ivory Tiger, a glitzy, towering edifice. The lobby was marble and brass and the staff a pleasant chocolate mahogany, all of whom dressed smartly, smiled perfectly white smiles and spoke flawless English.
He stayed in a tenth-floor suite, kept the blinds drawn, the phone unplugged, the lights off. Lying naked across crisp, snow-cool sheets was to float disembodied through a great silent darkness. A handsome businessman, a fellow American, in fact, had bought him a white wine in the lounge; a sweet talker, that one, but Kenshi retired alone. He didn’t get many erections these days and those that came ended in humiliating fashion. Drifting through insoluble night was safer.
In the morning, he ate breakfast and smoked a few cigarettes and had his first drink of the day. He was amazed how much he drank anymore and how little effect it had on him. After breakfast he walked around the hotel grounds, which were very much a garden, and stopped at the tennis courts. No one was playing; thunderclouds massed and the air smelled of rain. By his estimation, the tennis courts were near to, if not directly atop, the old field. Drainage grates were embedded at regular intervals and he went to his knees and pressed the side of his head against one until the cold metal flattened his ear. He listened to water rushing through subterranean depths. Water fell through deep, hollow spaces and echoed, ever more faintly. And, perhaps, borne through yards of pipe and clay and gravel that hold, some say, fragments and frequencies of the past, drifted whispery strains of laughter, Victrola music.
He caught himself speculating about who else went through the blue door, the exit to the world of the living, and smothered this line of conjecture with the bribe of more drinks at the bar, more sex from this day on, more whatever it might take to stifle such thoughts forever. He was happier thinking Hendrika went back to her weather reporter job once the emotional trauma subsided, that Andersen the Viking was ever in pursuit of her dubious virtue, that the Frenchmen and the German photographer had returned to their busy, busy lives. And Rashid…. Blue door. Red door. They might be anywhere.
The sky cracked and rain poured forth.
Kenshi curled into a tight ball, chin to chest, and closed his eyes. Swayne kissed his mouth and they were crushingly intertwined. Acid sluiced over them in a wave, then the lid clanged home over the rim of the barrel and closed them in.
Catch Hell
First published in Lovecraft Unbound, September 2009
1
For years she awakened in the darkest hours to a baby crying. She finally accepted the nursery they’d sealed like a tomb was really and truly empty, that the crib was empty. She learned to cover her ears until the crying stopped. It never stopped.
2
Olde Towne lay forty miles east of Seattle in hill country, a depressed region populated by poor rural folk who worked the ranches, dairies, and farms. Forests, deep and forbidding, swept along the hem of tilled land. Farther on, the terrain rose into a line of mountains that divided the state.
The town’s streets were bracketed by houses with peaked roofs. The houses were made of brick or stone with tall brick chimneys. People had settled here long ago; many homes bore bronze plates designating them as historic landmarks. Shops squeezed tight, fronted by wooden awnings and boardwalks; signs were done in gilt script over double-paned glass, or etched into antique shingles. Ancient magnolias and chestnuts reared at intervals to shade the sidewalks and the lanes. The police station, firehouse, and city hall occupied the far end of Main Street; art deco structures bordered by lawns, hedgerows, and picket fences. One could imagine the police gunning down the McCoys on the courthouse steps.
Sonny and Katherine Reynolds waited for the light to change at the intersection of Main Street and Wright. Options at the airport had been limited, so they rented a sedan—a blocky gas guzzler that swallowed most of its lane, but, happily enough, possessed far more than sufficient trunk space to accommodate their luggage and Sonny’s carton of research texts and notes. He told her several times during the drive it was like steering a boat. Katherine wanted a chance behind the wheel. Sonny laughed and said he’d let her drive it on the return leg of their journey. She called him a liar, but the ease of his humor, so removed from his usual melancholy, surprised her into a smile and she reached across and clasped his hand. Their hands on the wheel caught fire and burned orange, then red, as if they’d renewed an unspoken blood compact.
“Wow, a real live soda shop,” she said. The sign outside of town claimed a population of three thousand. She estimated two or three times that number seeded throughout the surrounding countryside. Such a small, insular community—no wonder it clung to its heyday.
“Stuck in the ’50s,” he said. “Cripes—is that a wooden Indian in front of the barber shop?
“Yes indeedy.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“I’ve never seen so many weathervanes in one place,” she said. This was true; she spied one on nearly every roof, lazily revolving in the westerly breeze. Most were iron roosters.
“Wisconsin, it’s cheese, he said. “Here, the fascination seems to be with cock. Gotta watch out for them cock fetishists.”
“It’s a left. Up ahead past that pink building.” She shook her road map open.
“Looks like the set of a modern gothic. I read there’s a big institution just down the road with the lights still on and everything. Guess they weren’t all closed in the ’80s.”
Katherine immediately withdrew from him, embittered by his indifference, his callous disregard for her aversion to such places. “You fuck,” she said and turned away and rested her forehead against the window.
“Yeah, I’m a fuck,” he said cheerfully, and played with the radio dial. The local station crackled in. Apparently the afternoon DJ was a transcendentalist; she spoke in the monotone of an amateur hypnotist and played recordings of wind chimes and the periodic rattle of what might’ve been gravel shaken in a jar.
The street narrowed to a bumpy stretch of country road, and climbed a series of bluffs that gave them a view of the entire valley. Sonny turned onto a blacktop drive that made a shallow, quarter-mile curve through a field of wild flowers and blackberry thickets and overgrown wooden fences, until it ended in a lot before the Black Ram Lodge. The building sat at the edge of a forest: brick and mortar and half-timber; three floors with a long, sloping tile roof flanked by hedges and a stand of enormous magnolia trees. The windows were dark and impenetrable.
“Nothing looks the same in real life,” he said.
“It seemed way smaller in the pictures,” Katherine said, even though she’d suspected otherwise all along. She’d taken the brochure from her purse, comparing black and white photographs against the real artifact. “God, I hope this place isn’t as empty as it looks.” Why’d I have to say that? Another excuse for him to think of me as a needy little bitch? Being alone isn’t so bad. Not like I’m alone, anyway. I got you babe, ha. She glanced sidelong at her husband, checking for the oblique signs of contempt. Maybe I am a needy little bitch. I’ll say something stupid just to get a reaction. Some attention.
There was no denying her dread of aloneness. She’d made peace with loneliness and sorrow, become accustomed to her own bleak thoughts, her recriminations and regrets. True isolation was a different proposition entirely. It seemed as if she’d dozed off during the drive from shiny, metropolitan Seattle and woken to find herself lost in a green wasteland. The town wasn’t even comfortably picturesque anymore. Far below in the deepening gulf, lamps blinked on like the running lights of a seagoing vessel in fog. Sunset wasn’t for another hour, yet a soft curtain of twilight had settled over the land. This was nowhere. I hate you, Sonny. Selfish asshole.
“I hope it is,” Sonny said.
“Huh? Hope it’s what?”
“Empty.”
A wooden garage lay a hundred yards or so off in what had once likely been a cow pasture. Perhaps the garage was built from the bones of a massive barn, the place where they’d milked the cows, or slaughtered them. According to the pamphlet, more buildings were hidden beyond the central structure: a series of bungalows, a walled garden, a small distillery.
Two men stood in conversation on the cement steps of the main building. One was tall and lean, an older gentleman whose snowy hair touched the shoulders of his gray suit. The other man was a bit younger and heavier and dressed in slacks and a dark polo shirt.
“Welcome to Fantasy Island,” Sonny said, and laughed. He put on his sunglasses and climbed out of the car. Katherine watched him approach the men on the steps. Exhaustion had stolen her will, melted her into the seat. She chafed at his ability to adopt a genial demeanor with such casual efficacy, like a chameleon brightening to match the foliage.
“Mr. Reynolds,” the taller man said as he shook hands with Sonny. His voice was dampened by glass. “I’m Kent Prettyman, humble steward of the Black Ram. This is my accomplice, Derek Lang.” As a group, they glanced at the car as Katherine emerged, a badger driven from her burrow. “Ah, Mrs. Reynolds! I’m Kent Prettyman. Call me Kent, please. And this is—”
Her sunglasses were the oversized variety worn by actresses and battered wives. “Kat. Just Kat.”
“Meow,” Mr. Lang said. His face was almost as dark as his shirt and he was brutishly muscular beneath the softness of his shoulders and belly.
Mr. Prettyman explained that Mr. Lang managed the grounds. There was a significant measure of yearly upkeep on the buildings and environs, a monetary burden divided between the state, the county, and the owners of the estate. When Katherine inquired who these owners were, he said the landlords, a family of hereditary nobility, resided in Europe. The family possessed numerous holdings and cared little for the lodge, leaving its management to intermediaries, most lately (as of 1995) a nonprofit foundation for the preservation of historical sites. All rather boring, he assured them. Did they have many bags? One of the boys would fetch their luggage and park the car.
The lodge predated Olde Towne and the very weight of its history settled upon Katherine ‘s shoulders when she followed Mr. Prettyman through the double doors of age-blackened oak into the grand foyer. The Black Ram had been established as a trading post in the 1860s, doing a brisk business with settlers from Seattle and tribes from neighboring Snohomish Valley. The post was expanded and refurbished as the manse of the Welloc family, the very same who carried the deed to this day, until it finally became an inn directly following the Great Depression, and thus remained. Slabbed beams crisscrossed the upper vault and glowed gold-black from the light passing through leaded glass. Katherine squinted to discern the shadowed forms of suits of armor and weapons on display, moldering tapestries of medieval hunts, and large potted plants of obscure genus’ that thrived in gloom. The flavor was certainly far more Western European than Colonial America, or America of any other era, for that matter.
She stood in the semicircle of men, oversized shades dangling from her fingers. Her arm brushed Sonny’s and each of them instinctively flinched. She opened her mouth to mutter an apology and saw the gesture would be fruitless; he’d already forgotten her. His white shirt shone in the encroaching darkness and it illuminated his inscrutable, olive face, lent it the illusion of life. Mr. Prettyman said something to Mr. Lang, and Mr. Lang slunk away.
“No phones?” Sonny said, incredulous enough to drop his fake smile for a moment.
“There is a house phone,” Mr. Prettyman said. He pointed to a wooden-paneled booth across from the front desk. Another bit of bric-a-brac from a dusty period in European history. Doubtless the lodge sported a billiards room, a smoking den, tables for baccarat and canasta. “And another in my office. No wireless internet, I’m afraid. We make every attempt to foster an atmosphere of seclusion and relaxation here at the Black Ram. Guests needn’t trouble themselves with intrusions from the city while in our care.”
“A house phone….”
“It’s all in the brochure,” Katherine said. “Didn’t you read the brochure, honey? It’ll be an adventure, like the hotel we stayed at in Croatia, or the other one in Mexico.” Remote, decrepit half-star hotels, the pair of them. It rained torrentially during their stay in Mexico and the roof leaked in a half dozen places, water fairly poured in, truth be told, and sent cockroaches skittering across the bed sheets in search of high ground. “Who cares. I’m sure we’ve got plenty of bars on this hill.” She flipped open her cell phone and checked.
“Are we the only guests?” Sonny asked.
“Oh, well, there are several others. Fewer than a dozen, at the moment. Midsummer doldrums,” Mr. Prettyman said. He rubbed his hands together when he spoke, absently polishing the malachite ring on the third finger of his left hand—Katherine couldn’t make out the symbol embossed upon onyx; a star, perhaps. “At our peak we can host on the order of eighty or so guests. I’ll give you a tour of the property—tomorrow morning, say? Allow me to introduce the staff.” Even as he spoke, a pair of strapping boys laboriously rolled a baggage cart overstuffed with the Reynoldses’ belongings through the lobby and onto the elevator at the opposite end of the room. The elevator was flanked by a pair of marble rams and appeared as ancient as everything else, a wide platform caged in wrought iron. It lifted almost silently, except for the soft ding of a bell and the hum and slide of well-oiled gears.
As promised, Mr. Prettyman walked them through the lodge, and Katherine smugly noted there was indeed a den containing card and billiard tables, an abundance of big game trophies, and the largest stone fireplace she’d ever seen—larger than the ones found in the proud old rustic ski lodges in Italy they’d frequented before Sonny broke his knee and gave up skiing altogether.
“Naturally it gets rather soggy during the winter, but summer storms are also fierce in these parts,” Mr. Prettyman said. “A front will roll down out of the mountains and positively deck us with thunder and lightning. Nothing like a roaring fire and hot cocoa to steel a soul against the weather….”
The proprietor oversaw a chef and bartender and their requisite assistants, a handful of maids and custodial personnel, two porters (Billy and Zack, the burly farm boys), a maintenance man, and the concierge, a gaunt, clerkish gentleman named Kristoff. Kristoff had jaundiced eyes and old-fashioned false teeth that didn’t quite fit his mouth. He smelled sharply of alcohol. Katherine thought the dour fellow probably kept a flask of something strong under the desk. As Mr. Prettyman swept them along to the upper floors, he mentioned Mr. Lang was responsible for nearly a dozen carpenters, laborers, and gardeners. In addition, Mr. Lang stood in as the de facto chief of security—he handled the infrequent trespasser; hunters, mainly. Poachers who slipped into the wooded preserve beyond the lodge in hopes of bagging a deer or one of the wild boars or black bears that roamed the hills. The land had once doubled as a private wildlife preserve.
