A Mountain Walked, page 50
At this point on the job, my disillusionment with today’s malcontent youth was at an all-time high. Where was their anti-establishment gumption? I’d encountered no diabolical viruses, no signs of malicious hacking, in a mainframe that more richly deserved mayhem for every day I stewed in cloying Mobymart culture. Then again, no sabotage during my watch may have been just as well, as I’d have had to thwart and track down the perps to the best of my ability, despite wishing them untrammeled success.
One measly memo encapsulated everything I hated about my stifling employ, not least for its officialese prose, as oafish as it was overbearing. A week after the unexplained power failure, old basset-eyes, with reflexive frown at my clip-on tie, dropped a printout on my keyboard and went his laconic way. The sender’s name and rank were no sooner skimmed than forgotten, but the text, practically verbatim, is branded on my cortex:
To all Fellow Members of my Mobymart Family
This is a reminder to you in reference to my recent directive re: spreading unauthorized or unconfirmed information. Despite of my prior appeal to your loyalty and discretion, inappropriate speculations about certain alleged incidences have escalated to a disturbing level that may be detrimental to morale and the public trust in us. Therefore I am expanding on my previous warning re: these incidences which include, but are not limited to, reports on the loading docks of intruders that “disappear” when pursued, the erroneous assumption of stockrooms being “haunted” because of unverified footsteps and voices in them, and especially, the actionable rumor that one or more shoppers late at night has gone missing. It must also bear repeating that our standards of cleanliness insure we have no rodents or other pests at this or any Mobymart. Employees are imperatively directed to refrain from bringing up or discussing these and further reports that may arise among yourselves and with our shoppers. Strict disciplinary measures will be enforced if future infarctions are brought to our attention, including dismissal and legal action. Like in any family, I am sure the good name of Mobymart is of utmost importance to you, and I will not have to remind you again to not circulate hearsay that will damage the reputation and confidence that are a keystone of our success.
The mealy-mouthed bastard, whoever he was. Nowhere in that minefield of deadly verbiage did he deny the truth of sensational “hearsay.” And I grudgingly admired, “despite of” stylistic handicaps, his skill at dodging the weightier issue of safety and lives at potential risk. No, the corporate good overrode whatever else, and he might have believed that sincerely until his own neck was on the block. Of course, most of the workforce and I might never have heard of these “incidences” if he hadn’t listed them. I was tempted to shoot back an anonymous e-mail criticizing his omission of luminous eyes floating in the dark, but amateur sleuthing could have easily retraced my electronic trail.
As events panned out, I should have posted my gesture of disdain. I’d have gotten away with it. The store was out of business by the time the grinches in charge would have busted me, or so I calculate in tidy hindsight.
The light was turning red that final night as I drove up to the intersection and switched on my left blinker for the access road to the parking lot, though I was signaling to no one. In the pre-Mobymart era, this traffic light hadn’t existed, or the intersection. This stretch of highway was also much wider now.
I couldn’t conjure further memories of how the landscape used to look, as if they too were casualties of the bulldozer. Had nothing except brambly woods replaced primeval swamp, or had isolated homes and shops started nibbling away at them? In either case, local merchants and hundreds more had petitioned the Zoning Board to veto the proposal for this Mobymart, but even thousands might have lacked the clout to jam the spokes of “progress.” And someday, cold comfort though it was, this big box on its desolate acre of tarmac would also exit the geography and sink into oblivion. Naturally, I had no inkling then that the process was already underway.
I snapped out of my brown study as high beams raked by in the left lane. How many green lights had I sat through? Luckily no traffic was waiting behind me. Few customers came after 10 PM, but on some ornery principle Mobymart peddled its wares 24/7. I could have picked a space much closer, except I preferred a minute’s buffer between the car and my timecard.
Would the careerists in their cubicles ever conceive of this building, this company, as eventual dust, or did they smugly assume it would be flourishing here in a thousand years? They seemed to consider their windowless lair so bloody sacrosanct, it was a wonder they didn’t escort me in blindfolded. These downbeat musings took me to the sliding doors, on which I almost banged my forehead. Why didn’t they whoosh apart as usual?
Gawking around only fueled my confusion. The fluorescents were on, and people were rushing about, but nobody was manning the cash registers. The shatterproof glass muffled any soundtrack to the commotion and made it even harder to interpret, beyond the sense of staring into an aquarium. Or, rather, a shark tank, I reluctantly corrected myself. Consumers, or so they seemed at first glance, had become predators. Revulsion and self-preservation alike dictated headlong retreat, but I couldn’t move till kaleidoscopic violence formed some intelligible pattern.
Singly or in gangs, “consumers” were jumping and latching onto everyone with turquoise Mobymart smocks or more managerial apparel, biting down and loosing streams of blood, not just on the neck as per standard vampire practice, but anywhere on the body from which they’d ripped the clothing. These must have been the trespassers who had haunted loading docks and stockrooms, and had tampered with the electrical supply, and had snatched an unwary shopper or two.
At the worst extreme, a mound of attackers covered a victim, like a pileup of rugby players, but with egregiously more squirming and struggling. It projected an obscenely sensual aura, as disgusting as it was difficult to look away from. My assessment of the chronic scritching under the floor, that first night on the job, had been metaphorically correct. This slaughter of salespeople boiled down to a vermin problem, like a grand-scale infestation of fleas, a cloud of mosquitoes, or an assault by “mighty clever rats,” as I’d so unpopularly put it during the blackout.
Peering helplessly at the feeding frenzy, I mentally withdrew to safer vantage and speculated, Who am I to say these creatures aren’t behaving like “proper” vampires? After countless run-ins for millennia with garden-variety ghosts, no one can conclusively anatomize them. Why be any more cocksure about an entity all the rarer?
In further contrast to their haggard stereotype, these legions of undead were positively chubby, some of them Titianesque. Their physiques were shamelessly on display, because linen gowns and winding sheets had rotted into the vestigial condition their wearers had unnaturally avoided. Underlying torsos were the white of mole rats, maggots, termites, or any species foreign to the sun.
Several of these fiends were staggering slackjawed through the aisles, less glutted than intoxicated on the blood they still licked dreamily from wide smudges around their lips. Their skin was taking on a rosy tinge, as if their diet had encouraged postmortem tissue to revascularize.
I had to be in shock. What better excuse for my readiness to accept the reality of vampires, of this whole vile spectacle at face value? The sane alternative, that the entrance was locked because a film shoot was underway, never even occurred to me, though I’m pretty sure it would have if a camera crew had actually been there.
My reaction, if I could call it that, was no less detached than if this had been a movie of bitten, lacerated corpses in pools of their congealing blood, at which were lapping, like famished kittens, buxom girls with blond antebellum ringlets and gouty grandfathers in disheveled periwigs and husky children with smallpox cavitations. How many decades or centuries had expired since their last meal? A liberal amount of vampirism figured in our regional folklore from Colonial days forward, but this order of atrocity belonged more to the realm of Grand Guignol.
In my numb pseudo-objectivity, the solution to at least one mystery, of where these creatures had come from, seemed self-evident. As I’d conjectured back when a mere sinkhole was the extent of the problem, the smothered swamp, with the graveyard at its heart and formerly quiescent denizens within, was staging a resurgence in the most brutal manner.
I was, in fact, so oblivious to any danger stalking me that at first I thought my own reflection in the glass had usurped my attention. But my mirror image wouldn’t stare with egg-white eyes loose in necrotic-looking sockets, and its skin wouldn’t belie a zaftig flush by harboring a crackled pattern like Bakelite in decay, and its hair wouldn’t be commingled with cobwebs, and it wouldn’t have blood on its chin. My mirror self also wouldn’t dress in mildewed rags of white shirt and black trousers that ill-concealed a slew of double punctures from head to foot, like the perforations of underlying needlework that now held flesh together. Otherwise, the ogling nightmare did bear daunting resemblance to me.
My great-great-great granduncle was no longer among the missing, much as I might have preferred that he was. His fate was no longer steeped in obscurity. Nor did any comfort accompany the realization I’d seen his glimmery eyes before, aloft like hoverflies in benighted office doorway. And here we were as if I’d unwittingly kept an appointment with him.
In his eyes I read no hostile or predatory intent. Not that any affect was readable in those filmy windows on the soul. He absolutely wanted something, though, to justify watery focus on me when he could have been feasting on salesclerks. The sight of him put me on tenterhooks, or maybe I was suspended between emotions, not panicky, not threatened, at a loss for how to feel, for any inkling of what would happen next, and that mental limbo produced its own unique malaise.
Mindful only of this death’s head with my face, I’d been unwary of the waxy hands that acted now on their own apparent cognizance, as my long-lost uncle and I prolonged our staring match. One hand reached out and flattened against the big glass door, right where it said “Unbeatable Prices,” and the other snaked beneath the waistband of soiled, shredded trousers, to extract a black book about the size of a pocket Bible. Had he been shoplifting paperbacks? Meanwhile, the hand upon the door pressed hard, as arm bent at the elbow, straining to empower the squidlike force of suction in outspread fingertips and palm.
My uncle pulled with literally inhuman strength, and the door slid open inch by grudging inch. Strangest of all at this fraught juncture, I wasn’t fearful for myself and watched in naive fascination. When the gap had widened enough for him to slip through, he flipped the book underhand out onto the sidewalk, and a cloud of nasty black dust billowed up in the storefront fluorescence. Nope, it certainly hadn’t come from Mobymart racks. His hand pulled free of the glass with a vulgar kissing sound, and the door snapped back.
Some of his throng had begun flaring their nostrils in our direction. Uncle never turned away from me, but seemed aware of developing situation just the same. “Get that to Carter!” he ordered. His voice was simultaneously gurgling and raspy.
Carter? Who the hell was Carter? Hundred-year-old kinsman must have automatically taken for granted that I’d know. Perhaps disregard for the passage of time was another undocumented trait of the genus Vampire. Rather than quibble, I bowed to scoop up the book, though my skin crawled on contact with its sooty, slick cover.
He suddenly stretched out his arms and smacked the glass with a resounding clack of long, split fingernails, surely more to startle than to menace, and he snarled, “Now go on! Beat it!”
Outmoded slang from a vampire, let alone a vampiric family member, gave me brief pause until I glimpsed ragged, bulbous figures gathering in the background, leveling their gaze at me one by one, crouching for a pounce at the entrance. No second warning had to jolt me out of there and to my car, which I unlocked and started up with minimal futzing, in welcome contrast to the nonstop mishaps that always hinder movie escapes. Like a fugitive from wicked Sodom, I never dared check my rearview mirror, never bade my spectral flesh and blood goodbye, never confirmed I wasn’t imagining the hailstorm of bodies against shatterproof glass amidst the rumble of my badly tuned engine.
Sirens, as of police or rescue, were definitely audible in the distance. I was speeding away from them; not that I had to worry about being pulled over while holocaust raged at abattoir-cum-“whale of a place.” Someone trapped inside had evidently vented final breaths on screaming into cell phone at 911.
And when the police arrived? What then? I couldn’t say. I’ve refused to read a paper or watch the news ever since. The media couldn’t possibly have gone public with a showdown between cops and vampires, and based on rumors about teenage gangs and Satanists I overheard at post office and supermarket, they hadn’t. I wouldn’t want them to. I had no urge to learn the body count, or how the bloodbath had played out around my workstation, or how a bulletproof swarm had vanished with impunity into burrows, and whether it had dragged along exsanguinated victims to join the ranks or left them to the stakes and axes of the authorities.
What’s more, I’m gratified no cops have beaten a path to my door, leading me to guess I wasn’t on that night’s surveillance footage, or else as lowly freelancer I didn’t even make the list of “Mobymart family” MIA.
Every time I’ve driven past the scene of midnight massacre, yellow tape has cordoned off the width of boarded-up façade. From the road I can’t make out if it says “Crime Scene” or merely “Caution.” A much bolder sign, pasted to the plywood and already dog-eared, trumpets “Under Reconstruction,” but I’d bet that was a bald-faced lie. And though I’m overjoyed there’s one less Mobymart in the world, I’d never try to paint that as the upside of the carnage. Nor should I be deemed mean-spirited because I’d still describe pursuing a Mobymart career as classic example of backing the wrong horse, impossible as a rerun of that same mayhem elsewhere would be. Then again, it was impossible in South County until it happened.
As for the squalid little book, it promoted anything but enlightenment for the few days I possessed it. To identify its rightful heir “Carter” or his progeny would have been a fool’s errand, so to claim it as my de facto own sat fine with my conscience. But expectations that it might reveal why ancestral Warren had carried it, what had brought him to the graveyard, or what more general skeletons lurked in family closet were doomed to frustration. I couldn’t even tell if scribe or printer had assembled the contents, which consisted of impenetrable script most similar to Hindi, but more elaborately hieroglyphic. The letters were disturbing, as if they might take on a third dimension, shake off the horizontal bar yoking them to the text, and skitter like spiders across the table.
Yet I forged along from page to page, mechanically scanning each line in a daze of incomprehension, and no sooner did I turn a leaf than shaggy purple fungus sprouted and pungently luxuriated, eradicating glyphs and then the paper itself at a borderline discernible pace. Arguably I had no more cause to balk at this implausibility than at the circumstances that had handed me the book.
I had a single chance to read each page and squandered every one of them in short order, compulsively, as if gorging on potato chips instead of glossing priceless arcana, until two moldy covers and a spine containing nothing were all I had, and those too disintegrated without trace sometime when I wasn’t looking. A moot point, whether exposing frail leaves to air had triggered hungry spores to multiply, or baleful grimoire simply didn’t want me delving into it.
Would a perusal by Carter have fared any better? I lumped that with the rest of my recent windfall of fruitless questions. And on a less academic note, will my heart rate always skyrocket when a branch scritches against the windowpane or my chair legs scritch across the linoleum?
Meanwhile, “despite of” itself, the book had managed to impart a message, or at least renew my awareness, that nothing of the past was amenable to real understanding, and purported actualities within the firmest grasp would crumble, with or without a Mobymart to blot out every clue.
Or might vampires pose an exception, with minds ruled by appetite but embedded in the past, indifferent to the present, insensible of the future? Why would great-great-great-granduncle otherwise presume I’d be acquainted with his defunct pal Carter? Could vampires reconstruct the chain of decisions that led them to perdition on their last mortal day? Every contributory event had to have gestated within such period-specific context. Could they recollect all that? I knew where to unearth the answer to those riddles, but what’s the good of knowledge that gets the finder killed?
A GENTLEMAN FROM MEXICO
MARK SAMUELS
Barlow, I imagine, can tell you even more about the Old Ones.
—Clark Ashton Smith to August Derleth, April 13, 1937
Víctor Armstrong was running late for his appointment and so had hailed a taxi rather than trusting to the metro. Bathed in cruel noon sunlight, the green-liveried Volkswagen beetle taxi cruised down Avenida Reforma. In the back of the vehicle, Armstrong rummaged around in his jacket pocket for the pack of Faros cigarettes he’d bought before setting off on his rendezvous.
“Es OK para mí a fumar en tu taxi?” Armstrong said, managing to cobble together the request in his iffy Spanish.
He saw the eyes of the driver reflected in the rearview mirror, and they displayed total indifference. It was as if he’d made a request to fold his arms.
