The Nameless Dark: A Collection, page 7
Thursday arrived, and so did The Screamer. Perhaps Boyd brought it back through his dream. He excitedly closed his door, taking in every note, every nuance. He was studying.
Boyd wasn’t sure how long he was enthralled, when he noticed that someone had opened his door. Poking his head out into the hall in search of a culprit, he didn’t see the man fall past his window behind him. A snap shadow of violent descent.
The scream came again, and Boyd set his jaw.
Find The Screamer.
Sidestepping new temps had become a full-time job. Hired to replace the six veteran employees who had recently quit, they flitted to and fro, eyes sparkling with the enthusiasm of new walls and unformed impressions. MacIntosh was in his office with his door closed. He never closed his door, unless he was arguing with his wife. His wife died three years ago.
Boyd sped toward Sandi’s desk, where the phone rang incessantly, all the lines lit up, all unanswered. She paid it no mind, glued to her computer screen with sunken eyes, tapping her mouse so quickly it sounded like chattering teeth. The phone continued to ring, irritating Boyd enough to pause in his quest. “Um, is anyone hearing these phones?” She said nothing, scratching a bleeding groove into her arm as she clicked through hundreds of images of death, dismemberment and mutilation on several websites at once. Sandi’s desk had since been cleared of its usual cheery accoutrements. Her eyes darted over the gruesome pictures as she clicked and scratched. “Sandi?” Boyd said.
“No…” She drew the word into a carnal groan, consumed by her obsessive mental upload of atrocity. Boyd missed tacky felt flowers and pictures of children he didn’t know.
Just then, screams filtered in from the lower levels. They weren’t the screams Boyd cared about, because everyone in the suite heard them, too.
He pushed through the stunned horde assembling outside. A semi-circle had formed around a spectacle. Cell phones sprang up to capture the moment for posterity, dispersing the tragedy into the networked ether.
A pulpy mound of gore and blown out fabric lay in front of him. This was the body of a man, splattered onto the scrubbed marble fronting the building. The impact of the fall had pulverized his body and exploded it through his suit. Large hunks of bone and flesh and brain diffused in a wild but vaguely human shape, like smashed tubes of crimson oil paints arranged into a crude chalk outline. Rivulets of blood ran unimpeded across the smooth stone, leaking toward feet that scurried back from the creep of warm fluids. A bright red stream collected around an ejected shoe. It was a white and green wing tip, its immaculate shine reflecting a glint of sun.
Boyd looked at the lump of tissue and skin. His eyes opened wide, remembering the last thing the exuberant little man said to him. He smiled.
“Check you later, guy,” Boyd said aloud, his voice ringing out amongst the hushed din. A collective gasp, then frowns of disgust. Everyone backed away as he started laughing. The cell phones turned on him. A beefy man in gym wear shook his head ominously. He laughed harder, rattling his organs, before approaching sirens drowned him out. Boyd’s explosive laughter seized up his pharynx and he started to choke. He fell to all fours, spitting phlegm onto the tile, frosting the sanguine ponds that were beginning to coagulate like day old pudding.
Boyd rolled over. The broken window 18 floors up gaped like a missing tooth in a titan’s skull. A few floors below, Boyd could barely make out Mr. MacIntosh looking at the scene from his corner office. Security emerged, moving everyone back into the building, entreating the crowd to go home. But Boyd didn’t want to leave, even though Century City was now a deafening mess of gossip and bullhorns.
A beefy shadow towered over him, and a foot came down hard on his face. This guy wasn’t wearing wing tips.
In the car, Boyd held an ice pack to his fractured cheekbone. Only an hour before, he had regained consciousness as the trauma crew scraped the body off the ground, scooping remains into plastic bags. The area was free of civilians, save for a few haunted co-workers being questioned by police. Boyd got to stay ‘til the end. The EMT suggested a ride to the hospital, but he refused, insisting he was fine and had to get home to let out his incontinent Labrador. Boyd didn’t have a Labrador, and he certainly wasn’t fine. Worse, he had missed The Screamer, and now had to wait one more day.
A speeding police car whizzed by, nearly clipping Boyd’s side mirror, its lights flashing and sirens yelping. Feeling woozy, he opened his window to get some air. The raw howl of ambulance and firetruck came from a dozen different directions, but only a few headed toward Century City. There were other acts of disorder occurring nearby. Maybe a wildfire in the hills. Maybe a riot…
Something was heating up in the city.
A honk startled him. To his left, Mr. Resnik waved from behind the wheel of a sensible tan Volvo, smiling like he was on a pleasant Sunday drive through Amish country. Boyd waved back. They were too far apart to talk about the Dodgers. He looked ahead, still sensing Resnick’s ghastly grin aimed at the side of his face. He tapped the steering wheel impatiently, desperate to move forward, to flee this awkward stand-off. The light changed, but Resnick’s smile didn’t, as he pealed out, raced up the street and disappeared around a curve.
Boyd clicked on the radio, trying to fog over his hyper-alert brain with the clang of instruments, but all the music stations were overtaken by emergency broadcasts, reporting scattered acts of violence and gathering mobs. A bombing at the Mondrian Hotel. Mass stabbing on 3rd Street Promenade. Heavily armed man holding hostages at a Brentwood school. Burning buildings in the Beverly Hills shopping district just off Doheny.
He slammed on his brakes, narrowly avoiding rear-ending a line of stopped cars at the green light ahead. He squeezed the steering wheel, steadying himself, as traffic lurched forward. Boyd followed suit, joining the slow moving parade of rubberneckers as they passed an accident. A tan Volvo had plowed into a café on Pico. Broken bodies were laid out on the sidewalk. The injured lined the curb, heads in bloody hands. As Boyd crept by, he saw a man lying under an insulated blanket, receiving oxygen and medical treatment. It was Resnick. His body convulsed as if hooked up to an electro-shock machine. He was still smiling.
The apartment was cleared of most of his furniture, including his girlfriend. She likely fled to a different, now familiar home with all of her belongings and the body of a dead rabbit sealed in a freezer bag. Boyd took in the vacancy around him. Three rapid gunshots came from outside.
He sat in the middle of the floor, unable to feel the grooved hardwood beneath. He was expanding, hovering in-between worlds. His skin tightened, ready to burst through a throbbing eye socket, spraying fizzy goo onto the peeling wall. Something in the foundation moved, like ancient larva coming to the surface, eating sinkholes into decaying urban blocks. The four corners moaned, as the building vibrated ever so slightly. It was trying get up while it still could. The giant movie screen, refracting all the light and noise down to the near-sighted city that created it.
Something detonated a few miles away. Boyd wanted to run to his car, drive back to his two cold windows, but he had no key.
So, he’d wait, as he had been waiting all his life. If he could only get through this night in one solid piece, he’d find out everything tomorrow. The ticking seconds of hermetic time were suffocating.
With his good eye, he stared down the horizon until it sweat and broke, grudgingly giving up the first rays of dawn with a defeated shrug.
Boyd was on his way before the sun could wax hesitantly from behind the bluffs ringing Hollywood. He’d survived the night, and now the day was his. He’d find The Screamer, and demand an explanation.
The streets were devoid of the usual bustle at this hour. A dark silhouette loped from an alley. Flailing arms seized something heavy from the sidewalk and pulled it back into the shadows. At the next light, Boyd spied someone at a bus stop waltzing with what looked like a floppy, life-size rag doll, twirling it ‘round and ‘round like an enraptured dervish.
Morning slid from gray to pink, framing plumes of smoke lazing up into the sky like slowly unspooling phantasms. The radio played a song that Boyd once knew but no longer recognized. I’m standing next to a mountain, chop it down with the edge of my hat. These chords, the end of the world. The lyrics, a eulogy. Pick up all the pieces, make an island, might even raise a little sand. Skinny palm trees, on fire, swayed like dancing birthday candles.
Boyd’s autopilot had disappeared, replaced by an innate magnetic pull to a destination lying due west, flagged by the framework of a hulking crane. He felt his eyes closing, but still saw everything that lay ahead of him in stark relief.
As he neared Century City, abandoned cars littered the streets, strewn about like Hot Wheels around shuttered shop fronts. The Scream had escaped, taking in the surrounding neighborhoods, turning all life into specters. The second story of a nondescript synagogue spewed ash, as flames licked out from blackened holes. No one attempted to douse them. Ghosts didn’t like water. They liked synagogues even less.
From Pico onto Century Park East, Boyd dodged debris: discarded clothing, a gutted snack cart. A long, broad streak of scarlet stained the pavement, as if someone hit a deer and dragged it under their drive train until it ground down to nothing.
Up ahead was a wall of demolished trucks, stacked thirty feet high two blocks in front of his building. Boyd killed his engine and got out of the car. He looked at this bulwark of crushed steel not in shock, but as a challenge. The sound of a muffled jackhammer zigzagged off the skyscraper canyons. He began to climb.
His arms and legs torn, Boyd jumped from the barricade and jogged toward the front entrance. A disheveled woman roamed aimlessly, naked from the waist down. Her tank top covered in blood, a clump of white hair in each hand. She passed a man slamming his head against a dumpster, trying to scream. Nothing but a dry wheeze came out.
Boyd dashed across the driveway, approaching the street crew somehow still hard at work. They were splattered with what looked like tar, jackhammering something spongy into the asphalt. Something giving and wet. Viscous chunks of matter splashed up onto their tattered coveralls. Boyd didn’t meet their eyes, didn’t care to be amongst them anymore. His business was elsewhere.
The lobby was devoid of security and the elevators were out. Boyd kicked open the emergency exit doors and took on the stairs, bounding up three at a time. He had to get higher, to his two cold windows. He had to be in position when it came.
He entered the suite through the back, past quiet cubicles and barren offices. Nothing seemed out of place. Everyone was just gone, even Margaret. Her absence, and the silence of her favorite copier, made the depopulated workplace all the more desolate.
At the end of the hall, Mr. MacIntosh’s door was closed. Boyd went for the handle.
Amongst the bad art and impressive diplomas adorning the walls, MacIntosh hung in the center of the room, his head nearly severed at the shoulders by a garrote of wires reaching down from a tear in the ceiling. His fingers, gripped like talons, had come to an unholy rest clawing the air for paper.
Boyd felt dizzy and staggered to the couch. He hadn’t slept in days. The world was closing in on him. The buildings were bending again.
He wasn’t sure if he heard it at first. The mind sometimes doesn’t want to give up the intoxicating apprehension and accept the moment.
The eerie wail reverberated through the panes of glass, immense in its inexplicability. It cocooned him, soothing his spirit while igniting his thoughts. From the converging wall of windows ending in a sharp isosceles point, Boyd could see where it was coming from. This was the catbird seat, taking in the full measure of the Scream. He could feel it, drawing him in, daring him to fly. He knew that he could.
The thud of MacIntosh’s body hitting the desk snapped Boyd out of it. He moved back from the windows, away from the hungry triangle, and stumbled over the decapitated corpse of his boss draped over a high-backed chair. The head had rolled to a stop in a corner, regarding Boyd with mushy eyes and a swollen, jutting tongue. MacIntosh must have known all along, and kept it inside. Goddamn him.
The Scream came again.
From somewhere in the office, a hint of elegant typing gave him pause.
Neil sat completely naked at his computer, his ears free of their pretentious music. He was surrounded by a bunker of inked-up parchment stacked like sandbags, protection from the outside world. Blood caked his truck-tire belly, smeared down to his knobby genitals and matted pubic hair. The thick ankle of a middle-aged woman stuck out from behind a cabinet, away from its usual post at the copy machine. Neil looked up, his eyes fevered with insanity. “I heard it, Boyd! I heard it!” Boyd yanked a fax machine from the wall. “They died for our sins,” Neil said. Boyd raised the machine high over his head. “They died for our sins!!” Neil’s sweaty face caved into the back of his cranium, as fragments of plastic and brain decorated French philosophy.
Ignoring pockets of slaughter and destruction, Boyd sprinted to the cusp of Century City, where his magnetic pole awaited. Nothing barred his way. Everything within earshot was wrapped up in their own private hell.
Boyd barely touched the grated stairs as he climbed upward, ever upward, in his ascent to salvation. Though, he wasn’t safe inside this beast. It had no skin and couldn’t hide him, which made it the perfect place for The Screamer to be. No one ever looks at the bones when there’s so much else in full rot.
At last, Boyd stood at the top of the unborn building. He could see the ocean, the mountains. He could see where he’d never live again.
The whole world was ablaze, and it was beautiful.
Just then, something moved. A figure, huddled on the end of the crane’s gargantuan arm. The Screamer.
Boyd scrambled toward it. He needed to get close, needed it to scream again. The shape stirred. It was a child. A little girl, pale in complexion and eye, as if all her color had been drained. She looked at Boyd, then through him, her lips beginning to part. He couldn’t believe it. This was the scream.
Without making a sound, the girl rocked back onto her heels and dropped from the crane. Another small thing, falling like hail from the blue skies, born to paint the world below.
Boyd ran to the edge and watched her flutter gently downward, as if she weighed nothing. A husk of skin, sketched as a human but empty inside. She caught an updraft and began to twirl like a helicoptering maple seed, drifting off into the smoldering horizon. Boyd never knew if she touched the ground.
He fell to his knees in anguish. He never got to hear the last scream, never got to know what it wanted.
Just then, another scream split the air.
He leapt to his feet and searched frantically. It was close… It had to be right here. Where was it?
The scream erupted again just yards away, knocking him flat with a blast of concussive modulation. His ears ringing, he peered around the platform, discovering a minute dent in the thick concrete spine that held up the ribs of the building.
On closer inspection, he found that the divot was really a small hole bored into the super structure, corkscrewing down into the stone and steel. Something tiny scurried out of the aperture and stopped at the lip of the opening. Boyd squinted and leaned in, making out the details of a delicate arthropod creature a centimeter long. At first glance, it resembled a hatchling praying mantis influenced by the lingering genes of the cuttlefish. Its body was firm, yet malleable and totally translucent. Indescribable colors whirled and pulsed inside, and the sense of a boundless intelligence radiated outward. It was exquisite, yet horribly alien in its erratic gestures. More unsettling was the play of the rising light, which seemed to arc around the organism, displacing the air, as if our reality recoiled from it in revulsion. It didn’t belong here. It was antithetical to everything in our existence.
Boyd had never been so terrified in his life. Not of death, but of a destination more inconceivable, from which this exiguous being had sprung. The sheer idea of what was before him threatened to heave Boyd into unconquerable lunacy. His skin crawled with the sensation of a million needling legs. Bile clogged his throat and his heart hammered his chest, yet he still sensed himself moving closer to the miniscule thing, compelled by a primal yearning that he couldn’t understand. Boyd reached out a hand…
When his quavering finger nearly touched the creature, it froze, hunkered down and released a sonic discharge, which in this place was understood in terms of longitudinal waves, translated into a booming, sonorous scream.
This was The Screamer. This was what screamed.
Boyd’s mortal shell disintegrated. His consciousness catapulted through space, moving inside an immeasurable helix of compressed notes; a cosmic symphony where light had not yet reached. A resonance that bred madness when poured into a single shriek, created beyond the rim of comprehension.
He wanted to shut it off, but it was too late. The information came in painful tides… Born in the elemental swirl of the unquiet void… Sent across the gulf of Space and Time… Do the bidding and spread the chaos...
It screamed, as Boyd groveled in supplication to something no larger than a silverfish, which possessed the knowledge of a billion spent galaxies and paths to dimensions unimaginable.
His ears burst and red tears dripped onto the platform, as it screamed again and again. He’d never hear anything else. Boyd felt something crack inside him, below him, as his brain filled to the saturated brink, intertwining with the sentience of the tiny entity.
The Screamer was a pawn, utterly alone in a place so incongruous and insanely aligned. So it screamed, as would a confused and frightened child banished from home. Its very presence here didn’t fit, and that which sent it knew this. It would tear through the carefully stitched order of this insignificant rock.
