The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (30 page)

4

    Mr. Wary handcuffed Franco in a closet and strung him up on tiptoes by means of keeping the belt around his neck and the other end secured to a rusty hook dangling from a chain. Mr. Wary left the door partially ajar. He suggested that Franco remain mum or else matters would go poorly for him, and worse for Carol, who was soon to arrive for her weekly appointment.

    The closet was narrow and stuffed with coats and mothballed suits, but roofless-the space above rose vertically into blackness like a mineshaft. While Franco struggled to avoid hanging himself, he had ample opportunity to puzzle over how this closet could possess such a dimension. Occasionally, reddish light pulsed from the darkness and Franco relived his recent nightmare.

    Afternoon bled into red evening and the stars emerged in the sliver of sky through the window behind the couch. Franco was in a state of partial delirium when Carol knocked on the door. Mr. Wary smoothed his shaggy hair and quickly donned a smoking jacket. Carol came in, severe and rushed as usual. He took her coat and fixed drinks and Franco slowly strangled, his view curtailed by the angle of the closet door.

    Franco only heard and saw fragments of the next half hour, preoccupied as he was with basic survival. He fell unconscious for brief moments, revived by the pressure at his throat, the searing in his lungs. He contemplated murder. A few feet away his lover and the magician finished their drinks. Mr. Wary told her to make herself comfortable while he put on a recording of scratchy woodwind music. He drew the curtain and clicked on a lamp. He cleared his throat and began to speak in a low, sonorous tone. Carol mumbled, obviously responding to his words.

    In due course, Mr. Wary shut off the record player and the apartment fell quiet but for Carol's breathing. He said, "Come, my dear. Come with me," and took Carol's hand and led her, as if she were sleepwalking, to a blank span of the wall. Mr. Wary brushed aside a strip of brittle paper and revealed what Franco took to be a dark water stain, until Carol pressed her eye against it and he realized the stain was actually a peephole. A peephole to where, though? That particular wall didn't abut another apartment-it was an outer wall overlooking the rear square and beyond the square, a ravine.

    Carol shuddered and her arms hung slack. Mr. Wary stroked her hair. He muttered in her ear and turned slightly to grin at Franco. A few minutes later, he took her shoulders and gently guided her away from the wall. They exchanged inaudible murmurs. Carol wrote him a check, and seeming to secure her faculties, gathered her coat and bade Mr. Wary a brisk farewell on her way out.

    "Your turn," he said upon turning his attention to Franco. He unclasped the belt and led him to the wall, its peeling flap of ancient paper. The peephole oozed a red glow. "All this flesh is but a projection. We are the dream of something greater and more dreadful than you could imagine. To gaze into the abyss is to recognize the dreamer and in recognition, to wake. Not all at once. Soon, however." He inexorably forced Franco's eye against the hole and its awful radiance.

    Franco came to, slumped on the coach. Mr. Wary smoked a cigarette and watched him intently. The liquid noises of his own heart, the thump of his pulse, were too loud and he clutched his temples. He recalled a glimpse of Carol's face as dredged from nightmarish limbo. The shape of it, its atavistic lust and ravenous fury terrified him even as a tattered memory. Immense as some forsaken monument, and its teeth-He retched on his shoes.

    "It'll pass," Mr. Wary said. The phone, a black rotary, rang. He answered, then listened for several moments. He extended it to Franco. "For you."

    Franco accepted the phone and held it awkwardly with his good hand. Across a vast distance, Jacob Wilson said, "Franco? Sorry man, but you're done. I'll have my accountant cut you a check. Kiss-kiss." Across a vast distance, a continent and the Atlantic Ocean, Jacob Wilson hung up.

    Mr. Wary took the phone from Franco. "A shame about your job. Nonetheless, I'm sure a man of your ability will land on his feet." He helped Franco rise and propelled him to the door. "Off you go. Sweets to the sweet."

    Franco shuffled down the badly lighted hall. A vortex of fire roared in the center of his mind. He stepped into the stairwell. There were no stairs, only a black chasm, and he plummeted, shrieking, tumbling.

    "Holy shit! Wake up, dude!" Carol shook his arm. They were in her crummy bed in her crummy apartment. The dark pressed against the window. "You okay? You okay?"

    He opened and closed his mouth, biting back more screams. She turned on the bedside lamp and bloody light flooded his vision. He said, "I'm… okay." Tears of pain streamed down his cheeks.

    "It's three in the fucking morning. I didn't hear you come in. Why the hell are you still dressed?" She unknotted his tie, began to unbutton his shirt. "Wow, you're sweaty. Sure you're okay? Damn-you drunk, or what?"

    "I wish. Got anything?" He wiped his eyes. The lamp had now emitted its normal, butter-yellow light.

    "Some Stoli in the freezer." She went into the kitchen and fixed him a tall glass of vodka. He guzzled it like water and she laughed and grabbed the mostly empty glass from his good hand. "Whoa, Trigger. You're starting to worry me." She gasped, finally noticing the lumped and swollen wreck of his right hand. "Oh my God. You've been fighting!"

    He felt better. His heart settled down. He took off his pants and fell on the bed. "Nothing to worry about. I had a few too many at the bar. Came here and crashed, I guess. Sorry to wake you."

    "Actually, I'm glad you did."

    "Why is that?" His eyelids were heavy and the warmth of the booze was doing its magic.

    "You won't believe the nightmare I was having. I was walking around in a city. Spain or Italy. One of those places where the streets are narrow and the buildings are like something from a medieval film. I could see through people's skin. X-ray vision. There's another thing. If I squinted just right, there were these…sort of bloody tendrils hooked to their skulls, their shoulders, and whatnot. The tendrils disappeared into creepy holes in the air hanging above them. The fucking tentacles squirmed, like they were alive."

    He'd gone cold. The pleasant alcohol rush congealed in the pit of his stomach. The tendrils, the holes of oozing darkness-he pictured them clearly as if he'd seen them prior to Carol's revelation.

    She said, "Right before you woke me with all that racket, there was an eclipse. The moon covered the sun. A perfect black disc with fire around the edges. Fucking awesome. Then, there was this sound. Can't describe it. Sort of a vibration. All the people standing in the square flew up to ward the eclipse. The tendrils dragged them away. It was like the Rapture, Frankie. Except, nobody was very happy. They screamed like motherfuckers until they were specks. Wham! Here you were. The screams must've been yours."

    "I rolled over onto my fingers. Hurt like hell."

    "Wanna go to the clinic? Looks bad."

    "In the morning."

    "Fine, tough guy."

    Franco tucked his broken hand close to his face. He lay still, listening for the telltale vibration of doom to pass through his bones.

5

    Carol was driving the car into Olympia's outlying farmland. The day was blue and shiny. A girlfriend had given Carol a picnic set for her birthday- a wicker basket, insulated pack, checkered cloth, thermos, and parasol. Her sunglasses disguised her expression. She always wore them.

    Franco hadn't shaved in four days. He'd worn the same suit for as long. The majority of those days were spent downtown, hunched over an ever mounting collection of shot glasses at The Brotherhood Tavern. His right hand was splinted and wrapped in thick, bulky bandages. His fingers throbbed and he mixed plenty of painkillers with the booze to dull the edge while he plotted a thousand different ways to kill his nemesis, Mr. Wary. Evenings were another matter-those dim, unvarnished hours between 2a.m. that found him alone in his Spartan bedroom, sweating and hallucinating, assailed by a procession of disjointed images, unified only in their dreadfulness, their atmosphere of alien terror.

    He'd dreamed of her again last night, seen her naked and transfixed in the grand lobby of The Broadsword that belonged to another world, witnessed her lift as if upon wires toward the domed ceiling, and into shadow. Blood misted from the heights and spackled Franco until it soaked his hair and ran in rivulets down his arms and chest, until it made a puddle between his toes. He'd awakened, his cock stiff against his belly and masturbated, and after, sank again into nightmare. He was in Mr. Wary's apartment, although everything was different-an ebony clock and shelves of strange tomes, and Wary himself, towered over Franco. The old man was garbed in a flowing black robe. A necklace of human skulls jangled against his chest. Mr. Wary had grown so large he could've swallowed Franco, bones and all. He was a prehistoric beast that had, over eons, assumed the flesh and countenance of Man.

    "You worship the Devil," Franco said.

    "The Lord of Flies is only one. There are others, greater and more powerful than he. Presences that command his own obedience. You've seen them. I showed you."

    "I don't remember. I want to go back." A hole opened in the wall, rapidly grew from pinhole to portal and it spun with black and red fires. At its heart, a humanoid form beckoned. And when he surfaced from this dream into the hot, sticky darkness of Carol's bedroom, he'd discovered her standing before her closet, bathed in the red glow. She cupped her breasts, head thrown back in exultance, sunglasses distorting her features, giving her the eyes of a strange insect. The door had slammed shut even as he cried out, and his voice was lost, a receding echo in a stygian tomb.

    Now they were driving. Now they were parked atop a knoll and eating sandwiches and drinking wine in the shade of a large, flowering tree. A wild pasture spread itself around the knoll and cattle gathered in small knots and grazed on the lush tufted grass. The distant edge of the pasture was marked by a sculpture of a bull fashioned from sheets of iron. The highway sounds were faint and overcome by the sigh of the leaves, the dim crooning of some forgotten star on Carol's AM radio.

    Franco hadn't told her of his apocalyptic visit to Mr. Wary, nor of his resultant termination from Jacob Wilson's security attachment. The job wasn't a pressing concern; he'd saved enough to live comfortably for a while. Prior to this most recent stint, he'd guarded an A-list actor in Malibu, and before that, a series of corporate executives, all of whom had paid well. However, he
was
afraid to speak of Wary, wouldn't know where to begin in any event.

    He lay his head in her lap and she massaged his temples he wondered about this radical change in her personality. He'd not known her to savor a tranquil pastoral setting, nor repose for any duration without compulsively checking her cell phone or chain smoking cigarettes. Her calm was eerie. As for himself, one place to get drunk off his ass was the same as another. The wine ran dry, so he uncapped his hip flask of vodka and carried on. Cumulus clouds piled up, edges golden in the midday sun. He noted some were dark at the center, black with cavities, black with the rot of worms at the core. His eyes watered and he slipped on a pair of wraparound shades and instantly felt better.

    "Mr. Wary and I are through," she said.

    "Oh? Why is that?" Had the crazy bastard mentioned his confrontation with Franco? Surely not. Yet, who could predict the actions of someone as bizarre as Mr. Wary?

    She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lighted up. "I'm cured."

    "Wonderful."

    "My nightmares are getting worse, though. I've dreamt the same thing every night this week. There's a cavern, or an underground basement, hard to say, and something is chasing me. It's dark and I don't have shoes. I run through the darkness toward a wedge of light, far off at first. It's an arch and red light is coming through it, from another chamber. I think. Nothing's clear. I'm too scared to look over my shoulder, but I know whatever's after me has gained. I can feel its presence, like a gigantic shadow bearing down, and just as I cross the threshold, I'm snatched into the air."

    "The tentacles?"

    "Nope, bigger. Like a hand. A very, very large hand."

    "Maybe you should see a real doctor."

    "I've got four pill prescriptions already."

    "There's probably a more holistic method to dealing with dreams."

    "Ha! Like hypnotherapy?"

    "Sarcasm isn't pretty." Franco sipped vodka. He closed his eyes as a cloud darkened the sun and the breeze cooled. He shivered. Time passed, glimpsed through the shadows that pressed against the thin shell of his eyelids.

    Branches crackled and the earth shifted. He blinked and beheld a blood red sky and a looming presence, a distorted silhouette of a giant. Branches groaned and leaves and twigs showered him, roots tore free of the earth and grass, and he rolled away and assumed a crouch, bewildered at the sight of this gargantuan being uprooting the tree. He shouted Carol's name, but she was nowhere, and he ran for the car parked on the edge of the country road. Behind him, the figure bellowed and there came a crunching sound, the sound of splintering wood. A dirt clod thumped into his back.

    Carol was already in the car, driver seat tilted back. She slept with her mouth slightly open. The doors were locked. Franco smashed the passenger window with his elbow and popped the lock. Carol's arms flapped and she covered her face until Franco shook her and she gradually became rational and focused upon him. Her glasses had fallen off during the excitement and he was shocked at how her pupils had deformed into twin nebulas that reflected the red glow of the sky.

    "Drive! We gotta get the hell out of here."

    She stared at him, uncomprehending, and when he glanced back, the monstrous figure had vanished. However, the tree lay on its side. She said, "What happened?" Then, spying the ruined tree, "We could've been killed!"