The Dark Page 9

  I held the darkness with my eyes, daring it to slip into new rooms, consume new Andys. With all the bright rooms at my back, I held it at bay with my eyes and Connie’s words, Connie’s skipping song running through my mind.

  Urging me. Connie the natural urging me to turn around.

  I did so, looked over my shoulder at the eight-o’clock wall.

  And there was dead-black night filling the glass, night the hunter pressed to it like a face at a window. The shadowing at two had been the bait.

  I tipped forward in shock, slammed hard against the floor, reached for the first thing I could find—the candle stand—meaning to angle it up, to fling it at the dead-black wall of glass.

  But stopped in time. Barely managed. Do that and I’d be in darkness when it shattered. Night would be everywhere, flowing out.

  I scrambled to the eleven-o’clock corner, reached for the tiny button.

  Yellow light filled the rooms. Most of the rooms. The black wall held at eight like onyx, obsidian, a membrane about to burst. The darklands shadowed off at two, but just the lure, just the distraction.

  Now I flung the candle stand. Now it struck the glass, grazed and shattered the wall. The pieces clashed down, left dead-gray Besser brick beyond. At two o’clock, the darklands were no more.

  WHEN PAUL ARRIVED fifteen minutes later, Connie was with him. They found me standing by the front gate in the wind and rain, cold and shivering.

  “Janss didn’t know he had to turn around,” I told them as I climbed into the back seat. “He never turned around.”

  AFTERWORD

  Because of how and when it happened for a fifteen-year-old living in Sydney in 1962, my favorite horror story has to be Fritz Leiber’s “A Bit of the Dark World” from the June issue of Fantastic from that year. I have read it a dozen, maybe two dozen, times since, unable to keep away from Rim House and that unnamable presence amid those canyons. This Leiber connection continued with his 1978 novel Our Lady of Darkness, my all-time favorite horror novel. I took a copy with me when I explored Corona Heights in 1988 and then visited Fritz’s home on Geary so he could sign it for me, a truly special occasion. If anyone was midwife to my own sweetly darkened life, it’s Fritz. This story is for him.

  MIKE O’DRISCOLL has always believed his spiritual home to be the American West, despite having been born in London and brought up in the southwest of Ireland. Raised on cowboy films and science fiction, he grew up wanting to be the next John Wayne, but Clint Eastwood beat him to it. Undeterred, he ventured out to discover the world, cramming ten years into two so he could take the rest of the time off to fall in love, get married, raise a child, and teach a new dog old tricks.

  He finally settled in Swansea, where he ran a video rental business for five years, and began writing short stories to fill the hours that might otherwise have been occupied with customers. His stories have been published in The Third Alternative, Interzone, and a number of anthologies in the U.S. and the U.K. O’Driscoll has also written film articles, and has a regular comment column on the TTA Web site, www.ttapress.com, and a horror column at the Alien Online (www.thealienonline.net).

  THE SILENCE OF THE FALLING STARS

  MIKE O’DRISCOLL

  NOTHING IS INFINITE. In a lifetime, a man’s heart will notch up somewhere in the region of 2,500 million beats, a woman’s, maybe 500 million more. These are big numbers, but not infinite. There is an end in sight, no matter how far off it seems. People don’t think about that. They talk instead about the sublime beauty of nature, about the insignificance of human life compared to the time it’s taken to shape these rocks and mountains. Funny how time can weigh heavier on the soul than all these billions of tons of dolomite and dirt. A few years back, a ranger found something squatting against the base of a mesquite tree at the mouth of Hanaupah Canyon. It was something dead, he saw, and the shape of it suggested a man. Curious, the ranger crouched down and touched it. The body, or whatever it was, had been so desiccated by heat and wind that it started to crumble and when the desert breeze caught it, the whole thing fell away to dust.

  No way to tell what it had really been, or if it was heat alone or time that caused its naturalization.

  Fifty-year highs for July average 116 degrees. Anyone caught out here in that kind of heat without water has a couple of options. You can try to find shade, which, if you get lucky, will cut your rate of dehydration by about fifteen percent. Or, you can just rest instead of walking, which will save you something like forty percent. But the ground temperature out here is half again higher than the air temperature. Ideally, what you want is a shaded spot elevated above the ground. If you’re lucky enough to find such a place, and if you’re smart enough to keep your clothes on, which will cut your dehydration by another twenty percent, then you might last two days at 120 degrees max without water. If you’re out of luck, then just keeping still, you’ll sweat two pints in an hour. If you don’t take in the equivalent amount of water, you’ll begin to dehydrate. At five percent loss of body weight, you’ll start to feel nauseous. Round about ten percent, your arms and legs will begin tingling and you’ll find it hard to breathe. The water loss will thicken your blood, and your heart will struggle to pump it out to your extremities. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent dehydration, you’ll die.

  Which goes to show there is, after all, one thing that is infinite: the length of time you stay dead. There is no real correlation between what I’m thinking and the SUV that heads slowly south along the dirt road. Even when it pulls over and stops beside the dry lake running along the valley floor, I can’t say for sure what will happen. I’m unwilling to speculate. Even when nothing happens, I don’t feel any kind of surprise.

  I scan the oval playa with my binoculars. Indians are supposed to have raced horses across it, which is why it’s called the Racetrack. There’s an outcrop of rock at the north end that they call the Grandstand, but I don’t see any spectators up there. Never have. Below the ridge from where I watch, there are clumps of creosote bush and the odd Joshua tree. Farther north, there are stands of beavertail and above them, on the high slopes of the Last Chance Range, are forests of juniper and piñon pine. A glint of sunlight catches my eye and I glance toward the vehicle. But nothing has moved down there. I shift my gaze back out on to the playa, trying to pretend I don’t feel the cold chill that settles on my bones. I look away at the last moment and wipe the sweat from my face. Thirst cracks my lips and dust coats the inside of my mouth. There’s plenty water in my Expedition, parked half a mile further south along the road, but I make no move to return to the vehicle. Whatever is happening here, I have no choice but to see how it plays out.

  A shadow moves on the playa. When I search for it, all I can see are the rocks scattered across the honeycombed surface of the dry lake. I scan them closely, looking for a lizard or rodent, even though nothing lives out there. The air is still and quiet, no breeze at all to rustle through the mesquites. Then something catches my eye, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A movement so painfully slow I doubt it happened at all. Until it rolls forward another inch. From this distance, I estimate its weight at eighty to a hundred pounds. I glance at the rocks nearest to it, but none of them have moved. Only this one, its shadow seeming to melt in the harsh sunlight as it heaves forward again. There’s no wind, nothing to explain its motion. All the stories I’ve heard about the rocks have some rational explanation, but there’s no reason at all to what I’m seeing here.

  Except maybe that SUV and whatever’s inside it. I look back to where it was, but it’s not there. I scan the dirt road to north and south and still don’t see it. I search the playa in case the vehicle drove out on the mud, but there are only scattered rocks. The sun is at its highest now, yet I’m not overheating. I don’t feel nauseous, and my heart isn’t struggling. Maybe it’s because I’m barely breathing. I stare along the dirt road for an age, looking for something I might have missed. But there’s no trail of dust or anything else to signa
l anyone was ever here.

  THE GUY WORE jeans and a loose-fit shirt; the woman had on shorts, T-shirt and a baseball cap. He was leaning over beneath the open hood of the Japanese SUV. A rusting stove lay on its back beside the road, and beyond it, two lines of rubble were all that marked a building that had long since gone.

  The woman’s face creased in a smile as I pulled up in front of the Toyota Rav4. I got out of my vehicle. “You need a hand here?”

  “I think we’ve overheated,” she said. I didn’t recognize her accent.

  The guy stood up and wiped his face on his shirt. “Bloody air-conditioning,” he said. “I guess I was running it too hard. We’re not used to this kind of heat.”

  I nodded. “How long you been stuck here?”

  Before the woman could answer, a young girl stuck her head out the back window. “Henry Woods,” she said, reading my name tag. “Are you a policeman?”

  “No, I’m a park ranger.”

  The woman leaned over and tousled the girl’s hair. “Ranger Woods, meet Cath. I’m Sophie Delauney. This is my husband, Paul.”

  I shook hands with both of them and asked Delauney if there was anything they needed. He frowned, then laughed and said he doubted it. “I suppose you’ll tell me I should have hired an American car.”

  “No. You just had bad luck, is all.” I leaned in over the engine, saw there was nothing I could do. “Could happen to anyone.”

  “Yeah, well, it happened to us.”

  I got some bottles of water from the cooler in the Expedition and handed them around. Delauney went back to fiddling with the plugs and points, unwilling, I figured, to accept that all he could do was wait for the engine to cool.

  “How’d you find us?” Sophie Delauney said.

  “We have a plane patrols the valley. Must have seen you here and called it in. I was up at Zabriskie Point, twenty miles north of here.”

  “I didn’t see it,” she said, shielding her eyes as she looked up at the cloudless sky.

  “I saw it,” the girl said.

  “Did you, baby? You never said.”

  “I did. You weren’t listening.”

  “Where you folks from?” I asked.

  “England,” she said. “We live outside London.”

  The girl frowned and shook her head. “No we don’t—we live in Elstree.”

  “I know, dear, but Mr. Woods might not have heard of Elstree.”

  “I always wanted to see England,” I said. “Just never seem to find the time.”

  “You should.”

  Delauney finally saw that merely willing it wasn’t going to get the engine to cool any faster and came to join us. “Where you headed?” I asked him.

  “Not far, by the look of things. Can you recommend anywhere close by?”

  “About an hour’s drive will get you to the resort village at Stovepipe Wells.” I don’t know why I didn’t mention the inn at Furnace Creek, which was closer.

  The girl piped up. “Do they have a swimming pool?”

  I nodded. “Sure do.”

  Sophie drank some water. She wiped her hand across her mouth and said, “Do you ever get used to this heat?”

  “Breathe lightly,” I said. “It won’t hurt so much.”

  After a quarter of an hour, I told Delauney to try it again. The engine turned over and cut out. He tried again, and this time it caught. “There you go,” I said. “You should be okay now—just keep an eye on the temp gauge.”

  “Thanks for your help, Officer Woods,” Sophie said. “It’s much appreciated.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.”

  They got in the vehicle. “Thanks again,” Sophie said. I watched as they drove off, the girl hanging out the window, her mother, too, staring back at me. Alone in the ruins of Greenwater, I tried to imagine what she saw, wondering if she had seen something in my eyes I didn’t know was there.

  I PAID RENT to the government for the bungalow I occupied near Stovepipe Wells. It was small but even after six years, I didn’t seem to have accumulated enough belongings to fill the available space. Rae Hannafin said it looked unlived in, said if I hated it that much, I should ask to be rehoused. She thought I was stuck in a rut, that I had been in the valley too long and that I should apply for a transfer. But I didn’t hate Death Valley, or even the bungalow. Though I used to imagine that one day I would move on, over the years I’ve come to realize that I had reached the place I’d always been heading toward. It’s not just the solitariness—it’s the valley itself, which gets under your skin.

  I sat in Arcan’s Bar drinking Mexican beer. It was quiet; a dozen or so people, mostly couples, a few regulars shooting pool, half a dozen familiar faces perched on stools at the counter. Kenny Rogers, someone like that, on the jukebox. The young Hispanic behind the counter made small talk with a couple of girls. I caught his eye, he fetched another beer, set it down in front of me, gave me a scowl, and went back to work his charm on the señoritas. Jaime had been working there nearly two years and still complained about the customers treating him like shit. Just because he was Mexican, he told me one time. No, I said, it’s because you’re an outsider.

  “That s’posed to make me feel better, man?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Because we’re all outsiders here.”

  That was about the most I’d ever talked to him at one time. I’m not good at small talk. As a rule, I only talk when I have something to say. This is probably a failing on my part. Hannafin says that talk is a social lubricant, that it’s part of what makes us human, even when it doesn’t mean anything. I’m not convinced. Everything we say means something, even if it’s not what we intended. But I had to admit that it worked for her. She seemed to be able to get through to people, make them understand her meaning without spelling it out. Maybe that was what made her such a good ranger, why she would maybe one day make assistant chief.

  I took a pull on my beer and stared in the mirror behind the counter, looking for something to take me out of myself. It was getting to be a habit. I’d watch other people and imagine their conversations or what they were feeling, see if that made me feel any more human. Sometimes I’d see other men just like me, that same soft hunger in their eyes as they searched for someone or something to help them discover meaning in their lives.

  “Hey, Ranger.”

  I came out of my reverie and stared at the guy who’d spoken.

  “I was right.” It was the guy whose SUV had overheated. “I said to Sophie it was you.”

  I saw her sitting at a table by the window, with her daughter. The kid waved. “You’re staying in the motel?”

  “You recommended it,” Delauney said. “Look, ah, let me buy you a drink.”

  I was about to decline when I looked at Sophie Delauney again and saw her smile. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll have another beer.”

  While he ordered drinks, I walked over to the table. “Ranger Woods, what a surprise,” Sophie said, and asked me to take a seat. “You live in the resort?”

  “’Bout a mile away.”

  “Where’s your hat?” the girl said.

  “That’s for keeping the sun off my head, not the stars.”

  “You look different, but I knew it was you. Daddy thought you were someone else.”

  “You must have what we call the eagle eye.”

  “What is that?”

  “It means you see too much,” Sophie said as she stroked the girl’s hair. I wondered what she meant, what were the things the kid saw that she shouldn’t have seen. “Since you’re off duty, is it okay if we call you Henry?”

  I told her it was fine. Delauney came over with two bottles of Dos Equis, a glass of red wine, and a juice for the kid. I still felt a little awkward, but something about Sophie made it easy to be in her company. She steered the conversation so that I didn’t have to say too much, mostly listen as they talked about their own lives back in England. She taught history in high school; Delauney was an architect. They’d made their first tri
p to America nine years ago, when they got married and spent a week in New York. Now, with their daughter, they’d come to see the West. They’d flown to LA, spent four days down there, doing the “Disneyland thing” and the “Hollywood thing,” which was the way Delauney put it, rolling his eyes. They’d driven up to Las Vegas, had two nights there, before rolling into the valley this afternoon along Highway 178. The Greenwater detour seemed like a good idea at the time. Sophie’s charm made me feel something like a normal human being. Sometimes I lost sight of that, and I was grateful to her for reminding me who I was.

  I got another round of drinks and when I returned, Delauney asked me about the valley.

  “What are the best places to see?”

  “How much time you got?”

  “A day.”

  “Don’t try to squeeze in too much.”

  “He won’t listen,” Sophie said. “Paul has to turn everything into a major expedition.”

  He laughed. “Okay, tell me what I can’t afford to miss.”

  I thought about it a while. “When you start to look closely,” I said, “you’ll notice all the things that aren’t there.” I wondered if Sophie understood, if she was capable of seeing what was missing.

  She started to say something, but Delauney talked across her. “I’ll stick with what is here. Like Badwater, and maybe a ghost town.”

  I nodded. “Chloride City’s an old silver-mining town about a half hour northeast of here. Not a whole lot left up there, but there’s a cliff above the town will give you some great views of the valley.”

  The girl said, “Ask about the rocks.”

  “The rocks.”

  “Daddy said they move.”

  Delauney seemed a little embarrassed. “Guide book said that rocks get blown by high winds across the surface of a dry lake.” He sounded skeptical but willing to be persuaded. “Said they leave trails across the surface.”