You want to see how quickly you can empty a diner? Just picture me walking through the door. And it was all done so politely. No one said anything; somehow they just slipped discreetly away. Leaving the waitress there with a fixed smile that was warm as ice.
No wonder I had to get away.
First: I tried to hide away in the whiskey.
Second: When that didn’t work I took the boat for a midnight trip.
That brought me to the good old ghost town of Lewis.
It took a little while to get all my senses back one by one as I sat there in the boat in total darkness. There were no sounds except for the kissing noises of waves lapping against the ferry terminal quay where I’d tied the boat.
Only I don’t remember mooring it there, of course. That whiskey had been more powerful than it had seemed at the time. For a good ten minutes I sat motionless while my brain reacquainted itself with the cold reality of being awake. Presently my eyes adjusted a little to the dark. I could see the empty bottle in the bottom of the boat, the jacket I’d draped over the seat. After that my eyes followed the pale line of the mooring rope, then ran up the concrete steps to the harbor wall.
Now was as good a time as any. Time for a little walk. I climbed out of the boat and made it up the steps without stumbling in the dark. At the top I looked across in the direction of Sullivan, now sleeping as innocent as a baby. With it being after midnight the electricity would have been cut. No streetlights or house lights indicated that the fucking lunatic town even existed.
Hell, that’s what it had become, an insane town. But it masked that insanity with a terrible, glittering sanity. It was like a drunk who does everything with absolute precision in the hope no one thinks he’s juiced out of his stinking mind. Sullivan was like that. Everyone pretended to be so perfectly sane it sent a great blazing message into the sky. The words might have crackled above the rooftops: WE’RE INSANE. WE KNOW WE’RE INSANE. ONLY WE’RE PRETENDING WE AREN’T.
So tomorrow life would continue normally in Sullivan. People would make believe that the world outside continued as normal (even though all they need do was switch on a radio or a TV to find nothing but dead channels). Residents would wash cars, have lunch by their pools, take in a movie, dine out, play tennis, walk the dog, chat to their neighbors about little Joey or little Mary’s school show.
So you see, I had to get away from the place. It would send me crazy, too.
Now I walked along the harbor into the ghost town.
Or what was left of it. Most of the downtown area had been burnt to the foundations. Elsewhere buildings had become skeletons. And everywhere it was dark. The more I walked through that silence, smelling the rot and the still sharp reek of burnt wood and plastic and human skin, the more I sensed that this wasn’t the kind of darkness you’d experience at night. This wasn’t so much a case of there being no light. This was dark, dark, dark. Dark… as if a black fog had crept out of the lake. Darkness that poured in through doors and windows, or swept like floodwater along a street. Black dark. Wet dark. As they say, “a darkness to be felt.” You could reach out and run your fingers across that cold, damp darkness like you could run your fingers over the cold, still face of your dead grandfather.
Outside a Burger King that was now as dead and cold as any corpse ever was, I found a wooden bench. I sat there to breathe in the darkness. This is what it was like to be in a ghost town alone in the middle of the night. SILENCE and DARKNESS. They were twin phantoms that haunted the lonely roads.
Junk littered the streets. Cars thick with rust. Broken glass. Dollar bills mushed by rain. A broken rifle. Lumps of concrete. Cardboard boxes. I even saw a diamond necklace trailing over a woman’s shoe. There were human skulls, too. Hundreds of them. And long thighbones, some with strands of boy and girl meat stuck to them. Maybe the rats didn’t have enough appetite for all that carrion.
I sat there feeling the darkness of the town wash over me. It came in crushing waves. I found myself being pressed down by the weight of it. Images bloomed out of the dark of Lynne lying there, breathless. The bricks piling up on her breasts. The crushing weight.
My own heartbeat thudded inside me. The darkness seemed to be changing, becoming even more intense, even darker. I breathed it in. I sensed that velvet dark filling my lungs like black lake water. It oozed through lung tissue into my blood. I sensed it mingle with my blood to coil through my veins. A dark purple tide that poured into my heart.
These were the ghosts, I told myself. These were the ghosts of all those men, women and children who were slaughtered when our nation crashed and burned last year. They were envious of me being alive. Here they were to suffocate me with that liquid darkness.
Thud, thud, thud… my heartbeat grew heavier and slower.
I gazed up at the dead bones of buildings. Empty windows like eye sockets stared back at me. Darkness swirled and coiled inside them. Pulsing with purple blooms. All around me pockets of an even deeper darkness exploded.
Black lightning. I repeated the phrase inside my brain as darkness pooled there, too, thickening like congealing blood. This is black lightning.
Black lightning’s going to kill you. Black lightning’s going to strike.
Darkness pouring out of the ruins. The ghost town looming over me. It’s gonna swallow me whole.
Ghosts emerging from the buildings. They’re coming for me at last. They’re here to take me down to hell, where I will go on suffocating in darkness forever.
Shadows move slowly out of the doorways. They have tumors for heads. Stones for eyes. Toadstools for tongues. They have long dark arms to wrap around me. Mouths that are wet wounds to suck on my lips .
Time’s spinning like a falling plane… turning in slow motion forever and ever… never reaching the ground… never crashing
… never exploding… but always-ALWAYS-feeling that terrible sense of falling…
Black lightning is erupting all around me. How long before it detonates inside my head? How long, Valdiva… how long?
I opened my eyes.
The ghost of a boy stood there just in front of me. He looked about ten years old. His face had the white waxy look of a candle. His eyes burned with a luminous glow, a bluish light that made you think of phantoms. He reached out a long bone of an arm, his fingers stretching out toward my face.
I moved my head back to stop the ghost boy from touching me with his tomb-chilled fingers.
His mouth snapped open, exposing the hard white glint of teeth. I recognized the expression. That was the look of shock. The boy turned away, tripped over the broken rifle, then recovered his balance and ran.
I snapped to my feet and shouted after the running figure. “Stop!”
He didn’t stop. If anything he ran faster, his arms windmilling like he was running in terror.
Or to warn his own kind that a stranger was in town. At that moment I knew I couldn’t let him escape. I raced after him through the darkness. One thought pumped through my mind: Catch him. Catch him. Catch him…
Fourteen
Ghost be damnned. That kid was meat and bone.
“Wait!” I called as I ran after him. “Stop. I won’t hurt you!”
Wouldn’t I, now? That kid might be dirty with the Jumpy virus or whatever the hell it was.
“Wait!”
The kid didn’t wait. He ran hard, kicking aside human skulls, scrambling ’round torched cars, raising dust with his flashing feet.
He was in a hurry all right. Maybe in a hurry to tell his own people that he’d found a weird-looking stranger who’d sat on the bench staring into space. His own kind might be just a bunch of survivors who’d wandered into town. Or they might be bread bandits. If that were the case they’d do their darnedest to rip me to pieces. Either way, my gut instinct told me to catch the kid.