Stalking the Nightmare Part 12

"I've waited two years, Billy. I've waited and I've tried to talk to you, and every time we started, when it got too hot for you, off you went. Off to sleep, off to work, off to the bathroom to sit in there and work crossword puzzles till I forgot where the starting place was. That's all the waiting anybody should have to do."

"But, Vinnie, for Christ's sake! He's been sniffing around you like a hyena for the last six months."

"And you knew it."

"And I figured you wouldn't be co-opted that easily. I thought we still had something going here."

"It was going, Billy; and it went. "

"Yeah... well..."

And that had been the end of it. Oh, it had crawled along for another six months, a thing that had had its back broken; but it was finished.

And he had taken one hundred dollars, and he had gone to the bus station, and he had slept most of the way to the edge of the world where now he stood staring down at the uncomplicated symbology lying in the sand at his feet.

He hunkered down and looked at the plastic frames, the one empty eye circle, the broken gla.s.s in the other--that had once caught sunlight and thrown it back. He picked it up and held the twisted thing in his hand, warm from the sun of August in Maine. Then he slipped them into the side pocket of his light windbreaker, and stared out at the ocean.

The thought came to him that it was raw justice that he should come to the edge of the world and find himself at the ocean. He had never liked the ocean. There was an undercurrent of genuine fear when he thought of the great waters lying at either end of the continent.

The ocean, the sea, the great waters didn't give a d.a.m.n for the little two-footed things that came down to the sh.o.r.e to fish and skip flat stones. The deeps held secrets like haughty society doyens, and they only gave them up when accompanied by death. He had lived in California for a while, after he'd come back from the Nam. And one night, with a woman he had met in a bar, he drove to Malibu during a spring thunderstorm. The Pacific had been deranged, rising up and hurling itself at the beach with the sound of great armies in conflict.

The woman had been a little drunk, had pulled off her shoes, and had run down the crumbling hillside to the beach. Into the darkness. He had screamed for her to come back, that he wasn't going down there. He didn't scream that he was afraid, that he knew this insensate beast was furious, would sweep over them as if they were driftwood. He knew the ocean could simply belch once and swallow the whole f.u.c.king state. And he wanted to get away from there.

He stood on the hillside above the conflict and screamed for her; but she had run up the beach, or into the water, or had vanished into the night... and he was too terrified to stay.

So he had dashed back to the car and had driven away; leaving her there.

He remembered that now. And Gwen. He had dashed into the night and left her behind. He had finally cometo a place where he could run no farther. Raw justice had brought him to the place he feared the most.

No. There was one place he feared more.

It no longer existed, it was gone into ashes and charred bodies; but in his memory it still stood. In Vietnam.

The town had once had a name, but if he had ever heard it, he could not remember. It had been six kilometers from Bien Hoa City, during the Tet period in 1968. His rifle platoon had been pinned down by sniper fire, and the tanks of the 2nd Battalion, 47th Mechanized Infantry were still fighting it out at the prisoner compound east of Bien Hoa City. They were all alone. Cut off and one by one being turned into meat for the earth's dining table.

Lying in the ditch with three men he didn't know, he heard the whump of a grenade launcher and the insect whine of the incoming round... and he knew this one was for them. He tried to scream Get out! but they wouldn't have heard it: he was already out of the ditch, scrambling through the saw-gra.s.s and the mud away from them.

When it hit, they went up and sprayed. Parts. .h.i.t him in the back and knocked him flat. He wouldn't lie there; he kept scuttling on all fours, leaving his rifle behind, leaving the crater behind, leaving the wet things in the saw-gra.s.s to drain into the hungry earth.

The ocean was only the second most fearful place in the world. Even here at the edge, only second most terrifying.

Billy Dunbar sat on the rocky beach and thought of flight.

He had walked into Wisca.s.set for something to eat late in the afternoon. A sandwich, an Indian pudding, three cups of coffee.

He sat alone on the beach. Once, a little girl wandered past, stopped and looked at him, and sat down beside him. He looked at her, not wanting to get involved: there was always the chance her mother was somewhere nearby, watching; there was always the chance someone would think he was bothering the child. So he just looked at her.

She had Dutch bangs that came down to her eyes. She was wearing a playsuit. Perhaps ten years old.

"I am going to make a big boat," she said.

He didn't answer.

"And then I am going to sail it to the moon," she said.

He smiled. "You can't get there from here. "

"Can too."

"How do you propose to do that?"

She thought about it for a moment. Her face worked itself into a scrunch of concentration. Then she bit her lip and said, "I will use magic stuff."

"Ohhhh," he said, "well, now, that makes a lot of sense. And what will you do when you get there?"

"I know 'zactly what: I will get a cheese sandwich."

He nodded, losing interest. "Good thinking."

After a little while, she went away, and he was alone once more; as night descended gradually, dimming the ocean and shrouding the land behind him. He continued to stare out across the edge of the world, hoping his thoughts would come together and he would get an idea where to go and what to do.

But this was the edge, and there wasn't any other place to go.

He was thirty-eight years old, he had left behind everything that had made itself available: family, home, wife, career, friends. He was approaching the midpoint and he was alone.

But he knew that somewhere behind him he had missed the question, and the answer.

The moon was shaped like the blade of a scimitar. It cast very little light. He thought about the little girl with the Dutch bangs. A cheese sandwich. He smiled, thinking that very soon she would cease being a kid and turn into a human being; and then all the rest of her days would be spent chasing the memory of what she had left behind.

Something moved out on the ocean.

At first he thought it was flotsam, something the deep had thrown up. He wondered whose death had made it possible. He watched as it moved in toward sh.o.r.e. The waves slid quietly toward the beach and vanished in the rocks and sand, but the tide seemed to come no closer.

It was a woman. She came walking in from nowhere, coming straight for him. He couldn't make out her features, or what she was wearing. Just a woman, with hair wet and hanging like seaweed. He watched, feeling the fear building in him again. Who walks out of the ocean in the night?

When she was close enough he saw she was wearing a dress, and she was barefoot. The dress was soaked through and her legs were dripping with mud and sea-sc.u.m. She stopped in front of him and looked beyond, toward the land.

There was something familiar about her. He thought for a moment that she might have been one of the tourists who had strolled past him during the day.

She didn't speak at first, and he felt he should ask her if she needed help. She seemed lost.

But he didn't want to start something. Who walks out of the ocean in the night?

"How are you, Billy?" she said. Her voice was thick and cold. It was a voice that had not been used in a long time.

"Some friends are going to be dropping by a little later,,, she said. She was still looking past him, toward the town. He stole a glance over his shoulder, but the beach was empty, and nothing moving from the town. He thought of the ocean, of the sound of armies in conflict.

"I wanted to say goodbye; you left and I didn't have a chance to say goodbye." Billy Dunbar knew who she was. He thought of flame-throwers and saw-gra.s.s and the sound of incoming rounds in a far place.

"Get away from me," he said. But she didn't move.

Oh, Christ, he thought. I'm losing it. I've got to get out of here.

And the ocean turned to black gla.s.s and flowed off into darkness beyond the edge of the world.

Gwen, he thought, and wanted more than anything to go back to the moment when he had slapped her and knocked the sungla.s.ses from her face.

"I have to go now," she said. "But don't be afraid. The others are coming later."

Then she turned, still a little bit drunk and in love with the sound of the Malibu storm, and she walked back across the sea of black gla.s.s, into the faint glow of the scimitar blade hanging above him. And she was gone.

When he got to his feet, to get out of there and find a place in Wisca.s.set to sleep, the world was, of course, no longer there.

He had sought the edge of the world, and he had found it almost without trying, and here he would sit till the ghosts of Christmas Past had had their way with him.

The terror was in not knowing. What, precisely, was the charge; what crime was he being set up to pay for?

He was thirty-eight years old. He had outlived his father, and his mother, and was still here when others had already gone under. That was an achievement, of sorts. Simply to hang on, to maintain, to still be there when the last wave rolled back out to the deeps. Wasn't that worth something? To survive! Wasn't that worth the price of a little consideration?

Three of them came walking in across the black gla.s.s.

He knew at once who they would be. He still didn't know their names, but he knew who they would be. He remembered a ghost story he'd heard at summer camp when he was a child, about the monkey's paw, and about the thing that came to the door when the old couple wished for their dead son to return to them... and he was certain they would look horrible. They had sprayed.

He tried to run, but there was nothing behind him. The Maine coast was gone, Wisca.s.set was gone, the world from which he had come on a bus--was gone.

And he was here with those who, unlike him, had not survived.

They came close and stood staring past him. And he understood now that, like the woman, they were looking beyond him to the world they had had stolen from them; the world he had fled. They could not return, but they wanted to see.

And the realization overwhelmed him: he could not return. Even if he had wanted to.

One of them had lost both his arms. He seemed to be reaching toward the vanished world. Like the recent amputee still lying in his hospital bed, feeling the itch of his phantom limb, he seemed to be reaching toward the years of his life that had never been lived. Another had only half a face. The wistful look that he cast into the darkness at the edge of the black gla.s.s was sliced off. But he seemed to be content at the knowledge that his children were growing up well. The third man had a gaping hole where his abdomen should have been. He carried parts of himself in his b.l.o.o.d.y hands.

They stared past Billy Dunbar and murmured softly.

"Thanks for the word," the one without arms said.

"h.e.l.luva guy," said the one with half a face.

"Long time no see," said the one without a stomach.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Billy said. He tried to keep his voice even, level, quiet, unashamed. He wasn't ashamed; he hadn't done anything wrong; he had survived; there wasn't any sin in that. "There isn't any sin in staying alive," he said.

"Okay," said the one with no arms.

"Have it your way," said the one with half a face.

"Absolutely," said the one without a stomach.

He turned and walked away from them. He tried to walk back into the darkness, but there was pressure in the air; as if some quivering, invisible membrane had been erected from sh.o.r.e to moon. So he walked away from them, parallel to the sea of black gla.s.s. Because he could not go back the way he had come, back to the world that no longer existed for him.

He would not walk out onto that smooth plain of dangerous nothingness. They had come from out there, she had come from out there, and he had known enough emptiness.

He put out his hand, toward the pressure where Maine had been, and as he walked away from them he pushed, hoping he could find an opening. But the pressure was there, insistent, pressing back toward the palm of his hand.

"Leaving again?" the one with half a smile called after him.

"Getting the h.e.l.l away from you guys!" he shouted back, not turning. "Just getting the h.e.l.l away. I've had enough."

And the one with no arms had the last words: "Not nearly enough, fella."

Billy kept walking, and in a few moments they were lost in the darkness and he was alone once more.

The moon did not move, there were no clouds, the sea was black gla.s.s and was content to keep its treasures.

He walked until he could walk no more. Then he sat down, and waited. He was tired of running to find the answer. He would wait for the answer to come to him. Wasn't that the way these things worked: there was an answer,someone somewhere had a point to make and would let him know what was in store for him soon enough. Then he would get through that, he would maintain, he would survive, d.a.m.ned well survive and worry about what came after...

after.

He put his hands in his jacket pockets, and felt the broken sungla.s.ses he had picked up from the rocky sh.o.r.e.

He let his hand stay there, hoping a bit of the warmth of the day still lay trapped in the wreckage. But it was cold; and he wondered why he wasn't cold. There was nothing but night out here, at the edge of black gla.s.s; and it should have been cold.

He sat, he waited, but no one came to tell him what he had done.

And he survived.

The woman from Malibu beach never came again. The three nameless shamblers never came again. Gwen did not come; the little girl who wanted a cheese sandwich from the moon never came; and he sat and waited.

There on the sh.o.r.e of black gla.s.s, unable to return, unable to follow them to the place where those who had not survived found peace, he sat alone. Surviving.

And sometime later, very much later, he knew what his crime had been, and why he would sit there on the sh.o.r.e for a time without end, a time without sunrise.

His crime was not in surviving; it was that he felt no guilt or shame at having survived. He could not pay the price for his life. And now the checkout counter was closed at end of day.

Final Trophy

It was the grisliest trophy of them all. Hanging there in the main club room of the Trottersmen, it was a grim reminder that not all the members were idle playboys who had bought their members.h.i.+ps with animals shot from ambush in the interdicted kraals of Africa or the blue mist-jungles of Todopus III.

It was a strange trophy, plaque-mounted between the head of a c.o.ke's hartebeest and the fanged jaws of a szlygor. There was the d.a.m.nedest watchfulness in the eyes.

It had been Nathaniel Derr's final grant to his club. A visitor to the Trottersmen's gallery (invited down for the weekly open c.o.c.ktail party) could walk through room after room filled with the b.l.o.o.d.y booty of two hundred hunting expeditions Derr had commissioned. A visitor (whether hip-booted s.p.a.cer or effete dignitary) would surely marvel at the quant.i.ty and diversity of wildlife Derr had mastered. Photoblox showed him proudly resting one foot on the blasted carca.s.ses of Mountain Gorilla and Cape Lion, butchered Hook-lipped Rhino and puma. Hides with the Derr emblem branded on them festooned every wall: cheetah and javelina, Huanaco and Sika Deer, deeler and ferrl-cat. The mounted heads were awesome: bull elephant and prestosaur, king cobra and desert wolf. The word hunter seemed weightless when applied to Nathaniel Derr; perhaps agent of destruction might have approached the reality.

Even among the Trottersmen he had been sui generis. His fellow clubmen had called him a fanatic. Some even called him butcher--but not publicly. Nathaniel Derr had left the Trottersmen almost thirteen million dollars.