A Lonely and Curious Country (36 page)

Jeb didn't see Thompson. He glanced at the bus and saw no more rescue activity. On the roadside, someone pulled a sheet over the driver. Whether the man had been thrown clear or dragged there to die, Barksdale couldn't determine. He saw no other bodies. Stretchers bore some people.

A face drew Barksdale's attention. He felt a chill. The regal man from the Jackson terminal. The man mingled with the bus passengers. Probably performing the duty of condolences and promises of investigations. How had he arrived on the scene of the accident so quickly? Strange coincidence the man had been in the vicinity.

Barksdale took a long look at the man. Tall, regal. Tan-skinned with a high forehead. A forehead that would not appear out of place beneath an Egyptian pharaoh's headdress. The man's gaze fell upon Barksdale. Barksdale thought the man's eyes flashed in a strange, deep black and purple swirl of sickening color. A trick of the flashing lights, certainly.

Maybe the man would have a roster of passengers, and Barksdale could bring the disappearance of Thompson to his attention. Like the driver, a freak flip might have thrown Thompson clear of the bus and no one appeared the wiser.

Barksdale approached the man, turned his attention briefly to the woods. When he returned his gaze to the crowd of injured and their rescuers, the regal fellow was gone. Out of sight around the back of a vehicle, probably. Barksdale desperately wanted to believe he didn't feel a chill climbing over his soul.

Barksdale grabbed the large arm of a paramedic. The man's hair had grey at the temples and Barksdale could feel muscle under the dark skin.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"Can't find the man I was sitting with. Thompson. Lonnie Thompson. Had a guitar. Would've held onto it to the last if he could have. Young fella. Blues player."

The paramedic's eyebrows lifted.

"Lonnie Thompson?" The paramedic shook his head. "The only Lonnie Thompson I know playing the blues 'round these parts died fifteen years ago. He was young then, but he's long dead. Died young."

"Dead?"

"Shit, sure!" The paramedic gave a rueful smile. "Died around here. Poisoned by a jealous girlfriend, they figured. Classic stuff. Real Robert Johnson, right? Thompson's gal cooked him some cream of mushroom soup. Only it was more cream of toadstool." The paramedic shook his head. "Bus driver kicked him off the bus right around here. Thought he was just another stumblin' drunk. Someone found him by the highway side, called it in. Never forget that one."

"You were there?"

"Shit, sure. Never saw a black man look so pale. Caught his last breaths, but we were too late." The paramedic rubbed his chin with his large hand. "Must be some other whippersnapper lifted the name. Not like Thompson's using it anymore."

"Yeah, yeah I guess. But you haven't seen him?"

"No, no. I ain't."

"I'm worried he got thrown clear or something," Barksdale said.

"I haven't heard anything, but it's a little crazy right now. He'll get tended to."

The paramedic turned his attention back to splinting a woman's injured arm.

A
movement at the edge of trees caught Barksdale's attention. The myriad flashing lights and oncoming darkness of night played tricks. Barksdale saw a man running down the embankment toward the woods, stumbling in a drunken, breakneck gait. Barksdale recognized the cut of the back of a suit coat, and a fedora on the head.

"Lonnie!"

Barksdale looked for help, but at the moment other needs held every rescue personnel's attention. He spotted the regal man again. The regal man's gaze held Barksdale's eyes and Barksdale could not deny the shudder convulsing along his body from head to toe. Barksdale looked to the woods, and so did the regal man. And then the regal man disappeared again. Barksdale thought he saw an another outline in the woods who looked like the regal man, too. No man could have traveled so fast.

Someone screamed in the woods.

Barksdale ran into the woods, his vision barely able to pierce the gloom. A rotted log gave way under his foot and he sprawled onto the ground, a stench of mushrooms and rot assailing his nostrils. He dug his lighter out of his pocket. Again, he swore an oath to throw it away but it would need to happen later. He needed the light now.

The log he tripped over rotted as he watched. Sickly white fungus with black and dark purple swirls expanded rapidly over the surface even as Barksdale watched. Barksdale whipped the lighter about, thought he saw movement in the shadows, but saw nothing definitive. Once or twice, the wind soughed in the trees.

And then Barksdale knew he wasn't looking at a log, at all. Somewhere under the mass of consuming fungus, he caught glimpses of white bones, patches of brown flesh both desiccated and wet with slimy moisture. Fungus enveloped the fedora brim as he watched.

Barksdale stared at the consuming fungus, watching its baleful progress, until nothing remained but the left hand suit coat pocket.

After
the chaos of the crash, the police statements, reclamation of luggage, transfers, and the overdue departures, the substitute bus pulled into the Memphis bus terminal after midnight. The bus line provided for the overnight stay, and everyone received a hotel room and meal voucher for the evening.

Before heading to the hotel, Barksdale went to the lost and found desk.

The regal man waited behind the counter. He no longer appeared quite so official as a manager. The regal man was just a desk clerk now.

"Can I help you?" The voice held beauty and madness.

"I'm here for a guitar," Barksdale said. He handed over a yellowed luggage ticket.

The clerk nodded, and then spent long minutes in the back room. He returned with a guitar case in hand.

"How long ago did you lose this guitar?"

"I thought you'd know how long," Barksdale said.

The clerk, the regal man, feigned innocence. "Judging from the stub - fifteen years?"

"Got a little sidetracked in Winona."

The clerk double-checked the tags. "The dates and claim numbers match," he said. He shook his head. "Something this old should have been moved along to the auction block years ago! You're lucky."

Barksdale took possession of the guitar.

"I don't know about luck," Barksdale said. "But I'm just a strummer so I don't think I'll be playing anything too fancy. Maybe just enough to get back to where I was."

The regal man gave a sardonic grin.

Barksdale headed out to find his hotel room.

The next morning, Barksdale traded his Branson ticket for a ticket to Nashville.

In the Forest, with the Night

Aaron J. French

We stood in the field, Alex on my left, Kristine and Diane on my right; Jess was in the middle in his black cloak, complete with cowl, a rope tied about the waist. The costume had looked totally absurd when he showed it to me online; doubly absurd when it arrived in the post and he’d put it on. But for some reason, now—out here in the night, with the trees and stars behind him—seeing him dressed this way gave me chills.

Lightning flashed, triggering thunder, and the dark purple clouds mounted toward the big bright moon currently casting its glow upon the forest. The air smelled of pine needles, sap, and musk.

I looked at Alex, whose hand I held, and saw he had his eyes closed. His broad, bearded face and round chest gave him the appearance of a football player. But he was bookish at heart and had never set foot on a football field. He preferred the chair at his computer desk to anything else.

His lips rambled slightly and I knew he was chanting the mantra Jess had instructed us to chant. Jess had plucked the mantra out of that fucked-up book, the one he held in his hands. The book, too, had been acquired on the Internet.

Jess thought himself an occultist, but in reality he was just a single child and high school dropout, the guy who hated his mom and preferred alcohol to attending college classes. It didn’t seem likely he’d amount to anything.

Except for tonight.

Tonight he had... changed in the most subtle way.

As soon as he’d put that black cloak on, his eyes had gone bulging and mean, and he looked serious as a heart attack. Once he began reading from that book, I saw him grinning, almost fiendishly beneath the cowl, his voice inflections different, lower in tone, articulated.

The guy was taking all this very, very seriously. I wasn’t sure if that was an improvement or a type of teenage regression. Jess spent most his time in the bars around campus, getting drunk and trying to pick up chicks: succeeding in the former, failing at the latter. In a way, it was nice to see him applying himself.

I turned to Kristine, who held my other hand, and she too had closed her eyes, muttering the mantra; beyond her Diane, a bit taller, appeared in the same state of concentration. Both girls were attractive—Kristine a little full-figured, Diane tall and thin. Blondes. This was the second time I’d ever met them outside of class. Both were in Professor Vadalini’s course on Quantum Physics. A specialty seminar, being held this semester only. Jess, Alex, and myself—all fans of the outre, and science nuts too—were taking Dr. Vadalini’s course, even though we didn’t need the credit.

But I still couldn’t figure out how the hell Jess had convinced these girls to come and do this. It really made me chuckle. I mean, this was the first time Jess had
succeeded
in picking up chicks!

I seemed to be the only one with my eyes open. Even Jess, where he stood in front of the circle, his head bowed reading in the book, had his shut. How the hell that was possible, reading with closed eyes, I had no idea—which led me to believe he was simply making shit up, and not actually reading.

I also wasn’t repeating the mantra. Why the hell should I? This was all a silly fantasy for Jess and Alex. I didn’t subscribe to their occult bullshit. Modern Darwinist and proud of it. But they had managed to get the girls to come. That was cool. I hoped we’d all get drunk afterward.

My attention returned to Jess, listening to the steady stream of weird syllables and unusual phrases pouring from his mouth. None of it English, nor a foreign language I could recognize. It sounded like gibberish.

***

After a while, I started getting angry. There was something about all this that just wore on my nerves, like sitting through a fucking church service. I’d done enough of that as a kid. Mom and Dad basically hogtied me every Sunday and dragged me to the car. There had never been anything more offensive to me in my youth.

Then I noticed what Jess was doing. Every couple of beats his eyelids would flutter, just enough for him to glance at the page. So
that’s
how he was “reading” with his eyes closed. No magic, as usual; just sneaky illusions. I smiled, relishing my own sardonic humor. Funny to see them taking this all so seriously. It showed how much smarter I was.

A sharp movement—a shadow, but different—caught my attention in the nearby pines. I turned, peering across the grass to where, yes, a shape was slipping in and out of the trunks.

I squinted as more moonlight freed itself of the clouds. I spotted a creature, an animal, a deer perhaps, hiding, ducking, dodging. I’d have called
it a deer and satisfied my apprehension but for one thing: it had octopus tentacles—like the stems of an undersea plant—trailing along behind it.

Jess’s stream of alien speech oozed into the night, filling the air. I glanced at each of them—Jess, Alex, Kristine, then Diane—and saw that none had noticed the creature, their eyes still closed, lips muttering.

Maybe I had imagined it.

Nothing to be afraid of.

But when I looked again toward the screen of trunks and shrubs lining the patch of grass where we stood, sure enough the creature was there, now stationary, half concealed behind a pine trunk, its face glaring out. It wasn’t a human face but something like a crazed demon: an angular jaw, nostril holes, high, bony brow. Its eyes: wide, yet slitted, bright red.

Staring at me—

But wait...
was
it?

Why not staring at the others?

Then I realized—

The creature had noticed my eyes were open.

I hadn’t closed them like everyone else.

I had
looked.

Now whatever weirdo shit Jess had summoned—from whatever crazy-ass freako source on the Internet—was here, staring at me.
The Laws of Science be damned because I was fucking seeing it,
right now, in reality
, and no amount of blinking could remove it.

Suddenly it took flight, wings, more like gauzy sea fins, hoisting it up through the canopy where it thrashed among the branches. A moment later it broke free, soaring like a star into the night sky.