Steve Rasnic Tem’s newest novel is Deadfall Hotel, published in 2012 by Solaris Books. New Pulp Press brought out a collection of his dark noir stories, Ugly Behavior, in August of 2012.
WALKER NEVER THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS ANY KIND OF genius, but he knew that at least his body was never wrong. If his body told him not to eat something, he didn’t. If his body told him not to go into a place, he stayed outside. If his body wanted to be somewhere, Walker let his body take him there. He figured he got his body from his father, who he never knew, but he knew his father had been someone remarkable, because his body knew remarkable things.
“Blood will tell,” his mother used to say, in pretty much every situation when an important decision had to be made. He eventually understood this referred to the knowledge he had inherited from his father, held in his blood, and which informed his body which seemed to know so much. Walker’s blood never said anything too loudly—it whispered its secrets so softly he couldn’t always hear. But he could feel it pull in this or that direction, and that had been the compass that had brought them here.
The motel was small, all one story, just a row of doors and square windows along the inner side of an L-shaped building, with a dusty parking lot and no pool. Walker heard there used to be a pool, but they’d had a hard time keeping the water sanitary, so they’d filled it in with sand. A few cacti and thorny bushes now grew in that faded bit of rectangular space, but none too well.
The maid—a withered-looking woman well into her seventies—tried confiding in Walker from day one. “There’s something wrong with this dirt, and the water ain’t never been quite right. You buy bottled water for your family while you’re here—especially them kids.” But Walker made them all drink right out of the rusty taps, because that was the drink his own blood was thirsting for.
If anything, Walker felt more at home at the Crossroads than he had anywhere in years. He’d drink the water and he’d breathe the dry desert air, taking it deep into his lungs until he found that trace of distant but unmistakable corruption he always knew to be there. He’d walk around outside barefoot at night, feeling the chill in the ground that went deeper than anyone else could know. He’d walk around outside barefoot during the middle of the day letting the grit burn into his soles until his eyes stung with unfamiliar tears.
Angie had started out asking nearly every day how long they’d be staying at the Crossroads, until he’d had enough and given her a little slap. He didn’t really want to (he also didn’t want not to), but it seemed necessary, and Walker always did what his body told him was necessary.
That was the thing about Walker—he could take people or he could leave them. And he felt no different about Angie. His body told him when it was time to have sex with her, and his body told him to hide her pills so he could father some kids by her, but Walker himself never much cared either way.
“The four of us, we’ll just stay here in the Crossroads until I hear about a new job. I have my applications in, and I’ve been hearing good things back.” She never even asked how he could have possibly heard good things, waiting there in the middle of nowhere. He never called anyone. But she’d never asked him any questions about it. Angie was as dumb as a cow.
Somehow he’d convinced her that the Crossroads Motel was the perfect place for them to be right now. From the Crossroads they could travel into New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, or turn around and head back towards Denver. They could even go back home to Wyoming if they had a particularly desperate need to visit that state ever again. In order to do any of those things, though, they’d have to get a new car—theirs had barely made it to the Crossroads before falling apart. “But we have a world of choices.” That’s what he told her. Of course he’d lied. She was an ignorant cow, but the dumbest thing she ever did was fall in love with him.
Their fourth day there he’d made an interesting discovery. He’d always whittled, not because he liked it particularly, he just always did. He’d grabbed a piece of soft wood and gone out to that rectangular patch where the cacti grew and the swimming pool used to be—he called that area the “invisible swimming pool” sometimes, or just “the pool”—and sat down cross-legged in the sand, the sun bearing down on him like a hot piece of heavy iron pressing on his head, and started to carve. He was halfway through the piece—a banana-shaped head with depthless hollows for eyes and a ragged wound of mouth—when suddenly the hand holding the knife ran it off the wood and into the fatty part of his hand—slow and deliberate and unmindful of the consequences.
He permitted the blood to drip, then to pour heavily into the sand before stopping it with a torn-off piece of shirttail. Then it thickened, blackened, spread into four flows in different directions. Then each of those flows hardened and contracted, rose from the sand into four legs attempting to carry the now rounded body of it away. It had begun to grow a head with shining eyes when the entire mass collapsed into a still shapelessness.
Not strong enough, he thought. But that will change.
Walker spent most of the next few days sitting in an old lawn chair he’d set up behind the motel. The cushion was faded and riddled with holes—rusty stuffing poked through like the organs of a drowned and bloated corpse. The whole thing smelled like sea and rot—odd because it was so dry here, miles from anything larger than a car wash puddle—but it was an aroma he’d always found comforting. It was like the most ancient smell of the world, what the lizards must have smelled when they first crawled out of the ocean.
He had the chair set up so he could gaze out across the desert that spread out behind the motel, away from the highway that fed out through the southwest corner of Colorado and into the rest of the West. That desert was as flat and featureless and as seamlessly light or as seamlessly dark as the ocean, depending on the time of day and the position of the sun and the moon. So much depended on those relative positions, and the things who waited beyond, much more than most human beings were destined to know.
Out on the distant edges of that desert, out at the farthest borders the sharpest human eye could see, lay shadowed dunes and hard rock exposures, ancient cinder cones and mesas, flattop islands in the sky. He had never been to such a place, but it had been a location fixed in his dreams for most of his life.
Every day Walker sat there in the chair, the eaves of the motel roof providing some minimal protection from glare, a notepad in his lap, a blue cooler full of beer at his feet, and watched those barely distinguishable distant features, waiting for something to change or appear, or even just for some slight alteration in his own understanding. “I’m working out our future plans and finances,” was what he told Angie, and of course she’d believed him. If she’d only taken a peek at that notepad she would have seen the doodles depicting people and animals being consumed by creatures whose only purpose was to consume, or the long letters to beings unknown using words few human tongues could say. But no doubt she would not have understood what she was seeing, in any case. If he had a sense of humor he might say, “It’s a letter from my father.” But since he had never seen the utility of humor he did not.
Angie had never asked him why they had to travel so far just to wait for the results of some job applications, especially when there were no jobs at Crossroads or anywhere within a hundred miles of that place. He hadn’t even bothered to concoct a story because he’d been so sure she wouldn’t ask. This woman was making him lazy.
Once or twice he’d told her directly how stupid she was. She’d looked as if she might break apart. Part of him wanted to feel sorry for what he’d said. Part of him wanted to know what the feeling was like, to feel like your face was going to break. But he didn’t have the capacity in him. He supposed some people were born victims. And some people were born like him. Predator was a good word for people like him, he supposed. There were a great many predators on this planet.
Their two kids had been climbing the walls. Not literally, of course, but that’s the way Angie had expressed it. The only place they had to play was the motel parking lot. As far as he was concerned they should let them loose out there—the children could learn a few lessons about taking care of themselves. If they saw a car coming, let them learn to get out of the way. But Angie wouldn’t allow it. He was their father, of course—they had his wise blood in their bodies. He could have insisted. But sometimes you let the mother have the final say where the care of the children is concerned.
Walker’s own mother let him wander loose from the time he was six years old—that had been her way. It didn’t mean she had no caring in her for him. Actually, he had no idea how she felt. She could have felt anything, or nothing. That was simply the way she was.
He’d never met his father, but he felt as if he knew him—certainly he could feel him. She’d lain with a hundred men or more, so it could have been anyone, or anything he supposed. But Walker felt he’d know his father if he saw him, however he manifested himself. It never bothered him. And if he did see this creature, his father, he wasn’t even sure he’d say hello. But he might have questions. He might want a sample of his blood. He might want to see what happened if he poured his father’s blood onto the grounds of the Crossroads.
The boy—they’d named him Jack—threw something at the girl. Gillian, or Ginger, depending on the day. Walker had never quite found a name he’d really liked for her, or even remembered from one day to the next. Walker didn’t know what the boy tried to hit her with—he never saw anything. He didn’t watch them very closely. And there was no sense in asking them—they were both little liars. That was okay with him—in his experience most human beings didn’t respond well to the truth in the best of cases. These children were probably better off lying.
But Angie wouldn’t stop. “They’re going to grow up to be monsters! Both of them! Jack slaps her. Gillian kicks him. This crap goes on all day! Do you even care how they might turn out?”
“Of course I care,” he’d lied. Because it would have been inconvenient if Angie had fully understood his basic attitude toward their children. He couldn’t have her attempting to take the children and leave before things had completed. “I’ll talk to them.” The relief in her face almost made him smile.
The children looked up at him sullenly, defiantly. This was good, he thought. Most children were naturally afraid of him. “Jack, what did you throw at her?” he asked.
“It was a rock,” Gillian or Ginger said. Walker slapped her hard across the face, her little head rocking like a string puppet’s.
“I asked Jack,” he explained.
She didn’t cry, just stared at him, a bubble of blood hanging from one nostril.
“It was a rock,” Jack said quietly. Walker examined his son’s face. Something dark and distant appeared to be swimming in his light green eyes. Angie’s eyes were also that color, but Walker had never seen anything swimming there.
“Would it have made you feel badly if you had really hurt her?”
Jack stared up at him dully. Then the boy turned to his sister and they looked at each other. Then they both looked back up at Walker.
“I don’t know,” Jack replied.
“If you continue to behave this way where other people can see you, eventually you may be detained and imprisoned. It’s your decision, but that is something to think about. Right now, you are upsetting your mother. You do not want to do that. You upset her and she becomes troublesome for me. You do not want that, do you understand?” Both children nodded. “Very well, go play quietly for awhile. Stay out of my field of vision.”
After they left Walker saw that a couple of drops of his daughter’s blood were resting on top of the sand. He kicked at them and they scurried away.
When they’d first checked in the Crossroads had been practically empty, just a single elderly couple with a camper who’d checked out the very next day. But since then a series of single guests and families had wandered in, almost unnoticeable at first since they mostly came in during the night, but the last couple of days there had been a steady stream, so by week’s end the motel was full. Still, more people came into the parking lot, or stopped in the empty land around the building, some on foot with backpacks who set up small tents or lean-tos, others in cars they could sleep in. Despite their numbers, these new visitors were relatively quiet, remaining in their rooms or whatever shelter they’d managed, or gathering casually to talk quietly amongst themselves. Many had no particular focus to their activities, but some could not keep their eyes off that horizon far beyond the motel, with its vague suggestion of dunes and mesas shimmering liquidly in the heat.
“Why are they all here?” Angie eventually came around to asking.
“They’re part of some traveling church group. They’ll be on their way after they rest, I’m told.”
For the first time she looked doubtful about one of his improvised explanations, but she said nothing.
As more people gathered his son and daughter became steadily more subdued, until eventually they were little more than phantom versions of their former selves, walking slowly through the crowd, looking carefully at every one of them, but not speaking to them, even when some of the newcomers asked them questions.
This continued for a day or two, and although Walker could see a great deal of nervousness, a great many anxious gestures and aimless whispering, and although his sense of the bottled-up energy contained in this one location unexpectedly made his own nerves ragged, there was no explosion, and no outward signs of violence. Some of the people in the crowd actually appeared to be paralyzed. One young, dark-bearded fellow had stood by the outside elbow of the motel for two days, Walker was sure, without moving at all. Parts of the man’s cheeks had turned scarlet and begun to blister.
He noticed that the longer the people stayed here, interacting, soaking up one another’s presence, the more they appeared to resemble one another, and him, and his children, as if they had gathered here for some large family reunion. Walker wondered if he were to cut one of them if their blood would also walk, and he was almost sure it would.
He took his morning barefoot walk—why his own feet hadn’t burned he had no idea, he didn’t really even care to know—by the invisible pool. An old woman crouched there like some sort of ape. At first he thought she was humming, but as he passed her he realized she was speaking low and rapidly, and completely incomprehensibly. She sounded vaguely Germanic, but he suspected her speech wasn’t anything but her own spontaneous creation.
He gradually became aware of a rancid stink carried on the dry desert wind. Looking around he saw that those who had sought shelter outside the poor accommodations of the Crossroads were up and about, although moving slowly. When he went toward them, it quickly became obvious that they were the source of the smell.
A tall woman with long dark hair approached him. “You seem familiar,” she said weakly, and raised her hand as if to touch his face. He stepped back quickly, and it wasn’t because he now saw that a portion of the left cheek of her otherwise beautiful face appeared melted, but because he’d never liked the idea of strangers touching him. He knew this made little sense because he’d always been a lone figure among strangers. Angie, certainly, was a stranger as far as he was concerned, and his children Jack and (what was the girl’s name?) little better.
Then an elderly man appeared beside her, and a young boy, all with bubbling, disease-ridden skin. Walker darted past them, and into a crowd of grasping, distorted hands, blisters bursting open on raw, burnt-looking skin. He squirmed his way out, but not without soiling himself with their secretions.
He felt embarrassed to be so squeamish. Was he any different than they? He’d seen the dark familiar shapes swimming in their eyes like the reflections of still-evolving life forms. Clearly, he was no longer alone in the world, because what he had seen in them was both familiar and vaguely familial. But it was an uncomfortable, even an appalling knowledge.
He was some kind of mongrel, a blending of two disparate species, and yet so were they. He doubted any of them had known their fathers. His own children were their blood kin, but at least they knew their father.
The two most familiar children came out of the crowd and gazed at him, their faces running with changes. He felt a kind of unknowable loss, for a kind of kinship that had never been completely his, for the simpler Sunday afternoon picnic world of humanity that would now be forever out of his reach.
Angie came outside for her children then, bellowing the dumb unmelodic scream of a despairing cow, and he struck her down with indifferent blows from both suddenly-so-leaden hands. She had been his last possible door into humanity, and he had slammed her irrevocably closed. Her children looked on as unconcerned as an incursion of sand over an abandoned threshold.
And now they’ve come out of those distant mesas and deserts, on their astounding black wings, on their thousand-legged spines, their mouths open and humming like the excited blood of ten thousand boiling insects, like the secret longings of the bestial herd, like his blood preparing to leave the confines of vein, like his blood crawling out of the midnight of collective pain, the liquid horizon unfolding.
And out of that shimmering line the fathers come to reclaim their children, the keepers of their dark blood. And Walker must collapse in surrender as these old fathers out of the despairing nights of human frailty, in endless rebellion from the laws of the physical universe, these fathers, these cruel fathers, consume.