The Light at the End (24 page)

Ian Macklay drained his third pint of Guinness stout and set the empty down beside his kitchen sink. He had a slightly-more-than-respectable buzz on, which suited him just fine as he whirled and headed for one last check in the bathroom mirror.

He saw himself: long blond hair and thick mustache, wide patriotic eyes (red, white, and blue), shirt three buttons open to reveal a stretch of unevenly tanned flesh that extended up to his scalp line.

He made faces in the mirror. He gawked. He leered. He preened like a model. He stuck a finger in either corner of his mouth and stretched the skin away, wagging a coated tongue at his reflection. His reflection gestured insolently back. He stopped clowning and checked himself out again, seriously.

I look drunk
, he admitted.
My eyes look like meatballs. Other than that, I’m dashing as hell, but… maybe I should wear a pair of sunglasses.

He giggled at the thought, but the reason for it remained.
I look drunker than I really am
, he confirmed unhappily.
Or maybe I just don’t realize how drunk I really am. I dunno. Whatever the case, I look drunker than I want to when I’m going to see a lady.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m so tired.

That’s the answer
, he decided.
You get two and a half hours of sleep, you run around in the hot sun like an idiot for about eight hours, and then you expect to look like Prince Charming when 9:30 rolls around. Christ, Macklay, you’re one clever son of a gun. No wonder all the girls are beating down your door.

He had one more rueful laugh at his own face’s expense and flicked off the light, turning back through the kitchen on his way out the door. He paused by the living room light switch, taking in the entire apartment in one sweeping glance.
It’s a nice place
, he flashed.
A little on the shabby side… a little trashed-out… but, basically, really a nice place to live.

Ian caught himself, wondered why he’d become so maudlin all of a sudden. “You’re a rathole,” he informed the room, lest his thoughts betrayed him. “You’re a sleazy little fleabag apartment near the buttocks of modern-day Sodom.” He thought of a thousand complaints he’d had with the apartment since he first moved in; but none of them could successfully contest the warm feeling he got as he looked around at his little niche in the world… the place that he called home.

“Weird,” he said, feeling suddenly and decidedly detached, like somebody else watching a man named Ian Macklay stare around the apartment with eyes like a displaced baboon’s. He shook it off, became one again, went through the door, and locked it behind him.

*

Just short of 14
^th
Street on Seventh Avenue South, Ian picked up a 16-ounce Bud for the road. He popped it open luxuriously and poured it into his mouth, the cold, gold carbonation dancing over his tongue and down his gullet in a joyful flood. A thin tributary wandered down his chin and onto the front of his shirt. He cursed between his teeth, wiped it off, momentarily considered the wisdom of having yet another beer, and then brought the Bud back up to his lips again.

So sue me
, he thought.
Tomorrow, we’re gonna be chasing a vampire through the streets of New York City. I will definitely want to be sober for that. Joseph would mash my skull in if I wasn’t.

He drank to that, staggering slightly on his way to 25
^th
Street and the East Side. He wove a semi-diagonal path toward the Flatiron Building, where 23
^rd
Street happened by to catch the big intersection between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Then he crossed the street, moving to the perimeter of Madison Square Park and wavering at the nearest entrance. The stern-faced statue of William H. Seward stared down at him from its pedestal; he stared at it for a moment, then doffed an imaginary hat in its direction and proceeded down the pathway to the center of the park.

Not more than thirty steps in, it suddenly occurred to him:
where is everybody? I’ve been in here for over a minute, and nobody’s tried to sell me any drugs.
It was bewildering. He paused for a moment in the middle of the path to light a cigarette, taking in the smoke and the stillness together.

Nothing. No motion. Not even a breeze to rustle through the branches, stir the litter at his feet. Up ahead, he saw the new array of brightly colored benches. They were empty.

There was nobody in the park.

“Well,” he told himself aloud. “At least I’m not gonna get mugged.” He laughed a little, but the sense of strangeness pervaded his thoughts, telling him that
this isn’t right. This doesn’t make sense. I mean, it’s a miserable hot sticky night out, but… come on. I’ve seen people out here through rain and snow and… come on!

He took a troubled swig off his beer and stared into the darkness, unmoving. His eyes adjusted to the intensified shadow of the trees, and he looked deeper, saw blackness within blackness, each level farther away from the light and a greater triumph over it.

But no movement.

At all.

“Christ, this is weird.” The flatness of the words didn’t fail to impress him. They sounded empty. There was nobody around to hear them.
Nobody
. Spoken internally, that word had weight. It thudded in his temples like a big bass drum.

It occurred to Ian that he might want to get his bad self out of the park. He might want to do it soon, before whatever wasn’t out there got him and turned him into nothing, too. In his drunken state, he envisioned a big old
void
sitting in the middle of the park, just waiting to suck up anything that moved. The idea cracked him up; he stood there, laughing in the middle of the path, until it wasn’t funny anymore.

Then he fell silent, and started thinking again.

“Well, Mr. Macklay,” he informed himself in his soberest tones. “Either you will retreat like a coward or keep going like an asshole. Or you will stand here all night like an idiot, which isn’t much of a choice, either. So… vich vun vill it be, eh?” he concluded in his best sinister Nazi voice.

He wavered through a moment’s indecision.

“So it’s an asshole, is it?” he finally announced. “Well, have at you!” And he moved deeper into the park, toward the heart of the mystery.

He reached the area with the colorful benches and paused again. There were little slogans written on them, a different one for every bench. He took a moment to check them out with growing curiosity.

WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR GOVERNMENT? the first one read. Instead of using the word
bridge
, they had a little stencil design of a suspension bridge that seemed to be the recurring device in every little slogan. WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR FAMILY? WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR COMMUNITY?

On the bench that asked the question WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR HEALTH? some wiseguy had inked out the word
health
and substituted the word
death
.

WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DEATH? the bench now read.

“Oh, that’s cute,” Ian observed. “That’s just adorable.” He moved closer, dragged his finger across the addition. It smeared; it was fresh. “Who wrote this shit?” he wanted to know.

The park answered him with silence.

And then he saw, way off to the right-hand side in the center of the park, that they’d actually
built
a bridge of sorts. It looked like something for kids to play on: a big wooden hulk, maybe thirty feet long, very cubic in design but still suggestive of a bridge’s general contours.

Actually, it looks stupid
, he noted.
Whose brilliant idea was this? Some civic organization, turning our city’s parks into monumental think pieces that we can savor for generations to come.

Except that the only people who ever come here any more are junkies, whores, bums, and dealers.

None of whom
, he remembered abruptly,
are currently present.

Ian glanced around the park again. He was at a much better vantage point now; the center of the park was essentially a clearing, and the central promenade extended away to either side of him. Still nothing. Still nobody.

“Well, obviously,” he told himself, “this is a setup. They built this bridge because they knew I was coming. They did this just to confound me. You bet.

“Well, I’ll show
you
!” he announced to the emptiness. “This isn’t any garden-variety twisto you’re dealing with here! This is
primo loco
!” He drained his beer, tossed the empty behind his back toward a handy waste receptacle, and actually made the shot. “
Ta da!
” He bowed for his nonexistent audience, did a sweeping gardyloo. Nobody applauded, and the joke wore thin. It occurred to him that Josalyn was probably worried by now; he was roughly forty-five minutes late, by his guesstimate. And here he was, posturing like a clown for nobody at all to enjoy.

In the middle. Of the deathly silence. Of the park.

A thought struck him, suddenly and reassuringly. It had the down-home tone of reason to it, firmly ameliorating the state of mind produced by his wilder flights of fancy.

There was probably just a big bust here
, he reasoned.
A knife fight, or a big dope deal that brought the cops in en masse. And all that bridge shit really is the work of some stupid civic group, spending thousands of tax dollars on some idiotic renovation that they think is really clever because, gosh, they’ll make us think about how lucky we all are to be rich Manhattanites with this kind of money to throw around in ludicrous fucking displays. Yeah, that’s probably it to a tee.

All the same, I think I’ll check out yonder bridge there. See if they put a sliding board on it, or anything decent. Maybe Josalyn and I can come back here and have a little fun.

If da boogyman don’t git us.

He hummed the theme to the
Twilight Zone
as he vaulted over the bench marked WHAT IS THE BRIDGE BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DEATH? and into the center of the park.

All the way over to the bridge, he felt fine. There was an oddness to knowing that he was alone, and that civilization was getting farther away to either side with every step; but it wasn’t anything grimly foreboding. No alarms were going off in his head. No cold chills were racing up or down his spine. He felt great.

He had shifted over to the
Perry Mason
theme by the time he reached the bridge, scrutinizing it from every side. No slides. No stairs. No fun stuff at all. He sighed in disappointment, realizing that namby-pamby community spokespeople actually
were
responsible for the whole silly affair after all: only well-meaning people could possibly build toys that were no fun to play with.

Oh, well
, he thought.
At least it brought me to this side of the park. I’ll write a letter to my congressman in the morning.

He started to saunter away, toward Josalyn’s apartment.

Suddenly, for some reason, a scene from Stephen King’s
The Shining
leapt to mind. It was the one where Danny, the little kid, was playing in the snow outside the Overlook Hotel, and he found one of those big concrete tubes that kids like to climb through, and he got in, and suddenly he became aware of
something else
that was in the tube there with him: a kid who had climbed in there and couldn’t get out, who had died there, who clamored toward Danny with a pathos that bordered on revulsion and then surpassed it, clearly wanting Danny to die there, too, to stay with him, forever…

Ian found himself simultaneously wondering why Kubrick didn’t put that in the film and thinking,
Momma, get me outta here, this place is starting to give me the creeps.
He was not surprised to find himself walking at a highly accelerated pace.

“This,” he told himself aloud, “is ridiculous. Fucking Stephen King. This is all his fault.” But he couldn’t joke away the terror that was building inside of him, like a tornado gathering fury, as he moved step by step toward the promenade.

He reached the first of the inner ring of trees, a massive oak that could easily hide a man. He peered behind it cautiously, stepping away gingerly, though he knew that there was nobody behind it. There wasn’t. He patted the tree like an old pal and moved beyond it.

And something stepped into his path.

“I knew you’d come,” it said, with a voice both mellifluous and menacing. “I’ve been waiting here for you.”

Behind the next tree
, Ian’s mind blurted irrationally.
It’s always behind the next tree.
But he didn’t show any of this to his assailant, opting instead for what he hoped was dispassionate cool.

“I don’t suppose you baked me a cake,” he said, freezing in his tracks and grinning like Dr. Sardonicus.

Rudy grinned back. His teeth gleamed in the diffused moonlight.

“No, I didn’t,” Rudy said, taking a long step forward. It made Ian recoil despite himself, made him edge backwards entirely against his will. “But I brought you something else that you might find reassuring.”

He extended his hand toward Ian. His fingers were wrapped around a sharp wooden stake.

“That’s what we’re traditionally killed with, the way I understand it,” Rudy said. “Since you think you’re such a hotshot, I thought you might like to give it a try.”

“I don’t suppose you brought a hammer with you, either,” Ian replied, shaking in his shoes and trying hard not to betray it. “What am I supposed to do: chase you around with that thing and wait for you to let me stab you? Come on. That’s ridiculous.”

“It certainly is,” Rudy quipped, “That’s why I wouldn’t put it past you.”
Touché
, said a sick part of Ian’s mind: the craziest part, the one that’s suicidal.

Ian wrestled severely with that part of his mind as he dragged out the best response he could come up with, under the circumstances. “You’re a really funny guy,” he said. “Why waste your time with this Bela Lugosi shtick? You should check out Robin Williams. He’s got a lot more to say to the eighties.”

“Keep laughing,” Rudy said. “Keeping hamming it up. The fact of the matter is that I’m going to kill you. Unless you kill me first.”

“Zat so?” Ian did his best to suppress the laughter, purely hysterical, that wanted to climb up through his throat. Some inner well of strength… the same one that had bailed him out the night before… whispered softly in his ear before exploding outward.
Be cool
, it said.
Buy time. Wait for your moment and get out of here alive.

“Zat a fact?” he repeated, taking an unexpected step forward. Rudy jerked back a step by reflex, and Ian smiled. “Maybe we oughta just go back and forth for a while. I mean, hey! We could trip the light fantastic out here! Just you and me, baby: dancing the night away.” He took another step forward and did a simulated cha-cha-cha.

Rudy didn’t back off; Ian found himself suddenly closer than he liked. Fear rippled visibly through him; he stopped dancing and stood there awkwardly.

It was Rudy’s turn to smile.

“You still don’t understand what you’re up against, do you?” He shook his head and went
tsk-tsk
. “You don’t realize what I’m capable of.”

“Do
you
?” Ian grinned fiercely, put on his best Cecil Turtle imitation. “Help, Mr. Wizard!” he yelled; then, in his regular voice: “Have you seen those cartoons, or am I wasting my time?”

“You’re wasting your time,” Rudy growled, taking several quick steps forward. Ian was backing off before he even knew it. “You won’t make a fool of me tonight, my friend. Tonight, you’re mine. Tonight, and forever after.”

“You don’t say.” Ian’s voice sounded remarkably calm and glib, but it was a facade. The cold hand of fear had wrapped itself around his nuts and was squeezing him slowly, flooding his guts with weakness and sickly discomfort. His heel struck an exposed tree root, and he stumbled, nearly losing his composure entirely. His mind told him to
be cool, buy time
, but there was a rising note of panic in the voice.

“You’re not so tough after all, are you?” Rudy asked, stepping closer, keeping Ian off-balance and in retreat. “I’m a lot scarier when you’re not with a bunch of your little friends, aren’t I? Oh, yes. Much scarier indeed.” His eyes flashed bright red, almost blinding, for a moment. “You little shit. This is too easy.”

“Oh, YEAH?” Something snapped in Ian at that moment; he lurched forward, knocking Rudy back a couple of feet, and stood his ground in shivering anger. “Well, let me tell
you
something, pinhead! You’re not
nearly
as scary as you are obnoxious! I oughta snap your ass in half!”