My place is on the edge of town, out on the north side where there’s lots of trees and the greenbelt river snakes in endless circles, making it smell like a swamp with the soul of a big city. There ain’t any bodies buried out here. Believe me, I know.
FERNANDEZ CEMETERY AND FUNERAL SERVICE.
You can hardly read the sign out front, it’s so weathered. They’ve been out of business for ten years, officially. It’s quiet at the end of my street, not like on Congress Avenue, which is a lot noisier than it used to be. See, the bodies are all buried downtown.
I click off the Walkman and grab the silver urn from the seat.
My backyard is a country acre of headstones, all of them blank, most of them waiting.
Over two hundred headstones.
I helped out the family that owns this place. A nasty situation with an ex-son-in-law. They had no cash to pay me, so they let me live in the abandoned house rent-free for a few years. It was a unique fixer-upper opportunity, but I gave up on that. Now it’s just a flytrap. I pay rent these days, but it’s dirt cheap, even for a guy like me. A few bills a month, and the landlord is almost dead. The eldest child of the Fernandez clan tells me I’ll inherit this shithole, lock stock and barrel, when her grandmother finally passes on. That’s the way the old lady wants it in her will. Because of what I did for her grandkids.
Because I saved their lives.
I set the urn near the porch and dig the grave as the morning sun beats down, tired as hell, but it never takes long. The remains of the child killer swimming inside me makes terrible noises now—the soul of a maniac crying that it’s scared.
Scared of what happens next.
Wherever it decides to go.
The marks make the choice themselves, that’s what Tom always says. Nobody knows what really happens to a ghost when it’s brought across and buried. Some people are just better than others at attaching names and labels and religions to things they can’t understand. The Blacklight is the only thing I know for sure, burning me on the next level of sight, and the levels after that, down and down until you get into the worst places, where the really bad ones end up, swimming in nothingness, lost forever. I’ve only been to the bottom once, and it nearly made me blind. We call it the Big Black. It might be where they all go in the end. Might be heaven and hell, all rolled up into one endless stretch of nowhere. Not that heaven and hell were ever real to begin with.
That’s something else most people don’t understand.
Everything you think you know about life and death and some sort of God that loves you or a devil that hates us—well, guess what?
You’re wrong about all that.
And what I do ain’t about blessings or rituals or holy symbols, man.
It’s about what’s inside us.
That thing that never dies.
To send bad ones home—the trapped ones—you have to become responsible for what’s left of them.
All that takes is a silver urn and a shovel.
And a special talent like mine.
The gravestones came with the place when I moved in. They’re a nice touch, but you don’t really need them. You just need to be able to reach out and grab the mark’s madness. Then you put what’s left six feet under.
Sometimes I think I know these things because my parents knew them. I’d like to think that, anyway. It’s easier than believing in God.
I have the remains of seventy-six marks buried back here.
They’ve all gone home.
To the Big Black.
The place no one can see—not even me.
I can tell they’ve all gone because if they were still around, this place would sound like a stadium full of really unhappy football fans.
The summer sun pins me to the earth, and I shiver in the heat for a moment, lost in the earthen smell beneath my feet.
Summers are really hot in Texas.
And when it gets really hot in Texas, really bad shit goes down.
I pick up the urn and go inside, through the squealing screen door and across the rotten back porch, five locks and a deadbolt on a thick steel slab that keeps the bad guys out. You make sure your shit is sealed up tight in my line of work. Inside, the place is wasted. The work of a bachelor who ain’t looking back. The kitchen needs a facelift, the dining nook filled with stacks of unpaid bills, a laptop on the table that barely works. One urn left in the cabinet above the fridge. It’s made out of brass, plated on the outside with a thin sheen of flecked silver. I have the real thing today, etched with Jesus and Mary and holy crosses, so I leave my last one up there. Anything to save a buck. I’m behind on my rent by four months, and the city is going to shut my water off tomorrow. The cash in my pocket should cover me for a while, at least another few weeks.
The child killer rumbles in my guts.
Dammit.
Let’s get this nasty shit over with.
The metal feels cool. My hands are hot.
Silver urns only.
I usually get the cheap ones these days, but you have to play by the rules, even if you cheat. I broke a lot of the rules when I was a kid. Most of that came back to haunt me later. Literally. That’s when I dealt with it.
One problem at a time.
On the cabinet shelf where I keep the urns are rows of bottles with no labels—my own special mixture. Sea salt and Kaopectate in a castor oil base.
Really gross stuff.
This part also took me years to figure out. When I was younger, I’d sit around all day watching TV, swallowing all kinds of junk to force the marks up. The first one came out easy—the remains of the old lady when I was just twelve years old. But it got a lot harder every time after that. The other dicks told me to get drunk, like Tom always does, but I saw what that kind of thinking did to those guys. I really would be dead if I used booze to make myself puke. Most mediums self-medicate just to silence the voices—I tried it once and ended up constipated and fucked up, muttering curses at the mirror. I have enough problems without all that shit. Not that the alternative is much better when the chips are down, but I like being in control of myself. So fuck it.
I grab some old newspapers and spread them on the kitchen floor.
I uncap the urn and set it in the center of the newspapers.
I kneel down and pick a spot on the wall, holding my breath.
I raise the castor oil to my lips.
Don’t ever do this.
The bile hits the back of my throat with a sting as it comes up in a black spasm—right into the urn, because that’s where I tell it to go.
Then I swallow the castor oil and do it again.
And again.
And one more time after that.
It takes nearly an hour to get what’s left of the child killer out of me.
Every single goddamn drop of it.
My guts are sore, the gag muscles clenched and hard as I choke one last time on a dry heave. So bad. The worst one in years. Fucking goddamn child killer…
I lie on the floor of the kitchen, staring straight up, the crying voice of the mark bubbling low inside the magnetized silver plating of the urn. It’s trapped there now, and my own soul swims in hammered shit.
They tell me this is what a hangover feels like.
I can’t imagine anything feeling worse.
The sickness that shreds my soul and my body. The cure that makes my hair white. I gauge reality by the beating of my heart, making sure I’m still all there, wishing I were dead and taking back the wish in the same second. I lie there a very long time. My body finally finds peace for a moment, but I never really relax, even after I win these little battles. Cry me a river, right?
I take the urn out to the graveyard and bury it in the fresh hole.
I’m thinking about nothing while I do that.
I want to sleep for a million years.
The shovel is rough and splintered in my hands, and when I am done with the task, I leave it leaning there against the grave marker, like some kind of reminder.
A reminder of everything.
The fall.
I don’t think about it much when I’m awake, but it creeps up on me in my dreams. That’s why I never sleep much these days, even when I’m dog tired, like I am now.
My second pilgrimage into the desert to find my parents.
I quit the first time and came back to the real world because the old man with one tooth had convinced me I was wrong for looking, that it was like searching for a dead man in a sea of dead men. I heard his voice every time I thought about going back on the road, and that voice told me:
Nobody cares, son.
Nobody at all.
But then the train came.
The Jaeger Laser.
There’s a place in my house, just above the fireplace mantel, where I keep all the souvenirs I’ve pulled back from the Blacklight. I’ve lost track of how many mediums and hunters I’ve shown these things to, but not one person has been able to give me a decent explanation for why I can pull a solid object like that—not even the guys who can trance themselves deep enough to actually see what I see for a few seconds. And not all of those artifacts have given me familiar vibrations. The camera, for example. I think it probably belonged to another family that lived in that house, maybe one of Raina’s distant relatives. But the more I looked at the broken shaving mirror, the more I could feel the scent of my mother’s anger. The more I held that old toddler shoe in my hands, the more I regressed to the frustrated level of a two-year-old whining in the dark.
And the map.
Always something new there when I looked at it in the Blacklight.
In the world everyone else can see, it was just a moldy, torn-to-hell scrap of paper. But when I looked through the eyes of the dead—flickering backward through time in random bursts, like channels flipping on and off in shadows of phosphorescent darkness—new details of the map would become visible, sections long rotted or torn away reappearing for just a moment. I got crazy about putting together the pieces. I would pull a mark and keep it inside me long enough to look. I’d scrawl it out from memory on new scraps of paper. One entire wall in my bedroom became a hand-drawn map of southeastern California, where I knew the end of the line was located. I would volunteer for jobs with no pay just to get more than one in me, so I could go deeper and deeper, looking for more details. The more you have in you, the blacker and brighter it gets.
I remember the day they announced they were building the Jaeger Laser.
A prototype bullet train connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas, running directly through a bad spot near the Nevada border, a place most guys like me never go near.
Some of us call it the Blacklight Triangle.
A lot of fucked-up business out there.
A lot of dead mediums left in the dark corners.
I didn’t give a shit.
I followed the trail scrawled on my wall.
I followed the trail to the letter.
I shadowed the surveyors and construction teams they had out there working on the rail project, always staying out of sight, always looking just ahead of them.
Until I found what I was looking for.
It was in a spot just off the area of the map that had been torn, where the vibrations were so powerful that even a dumbshit palm reader without much juice could have picked up on it. The call was like a homing beacon and I zeroed right in. The Jaeger people hadn’t gotten that deep yet—a stretch of burned earth just off the freeway in Teighlor where something was buried. Something screaming for help in wordless terror and straight-cold hatred. I dug it up. A mark, put six feet under—just the way I do it now, except that the urn was made of copper, not silver. That was why I could hear it and feel it. The job hadn’t been done right. I didn’t even think to wonder why at the time.
All I knew was that this had been left for me.
It was on the trail of my mother and father, and the spot had been marked on the map, right there where I found the shallow grave.
I had passed over hundreds of spots just like that on my first trip, but I hadn’t heard the marks because they’d been put to rest the right way, encased in the magnetic void of a silver tomb.
This one was pissed off and unsettled.
The sloppy burial had left it hungry.
I kept the copper urn with me as I continued into California, and the vibe got worse. There were bad things all over the place. None of them were coming near me, though. I even tried to pull a few of them, but it didn’t work. I was so close, but I needed to see as they saw. Needed to see through the eyes of the dead.
Finally, I got desperate.
I was holed up in an abandoned motel, and the mark in the urn was speaking to me. It had been pulled by my mother and father. It knew the secrets of where they had gone—I convinced myself of that, wrapped myself up in my own shameless mantra, rationalizing what I was about to do in so many hateful, obvious ways. I still can’t believe I did what I did. It disgusts me to think about it, so I try not to.
And then it all comes back.
Unscrewing the cap of the urn.
Smelling the putrid, unbound remains boiling in there, swimming in traces of castor oil and blood from when it was regurgitated, years ago.
Sewage muck from a dead man’s soul.
Rotten.
I picked a spot on the wall.
I held my breath.
It all went down in a few mighty gulps.
And the mark was inside me, doing its dance, oozing along my guts, filling me with sonic flashes and kilowatt bursts of terrible torture and murder and self-mutilation—not fully formed images, but diluted, half-digested slurs of insanity, a grotesque swarm of sick twitches and spasms. I couldn’t feel anything but animal lust, primordial passion, the desire to kill and eat and be full of blood. It was an alien feeling, but it was also a terrifyingly human feeling—the basest feeling of all, the feeling that hurts most when we dream about bad things that touch us and turn us on with jaded cruelty and hopelessness. It wasn’t the soul of a man, at least not anymore. It was the mulched remains of brute instinct and animal lust, mainlining directly into my brain. And I was a dog lapping up shit on the sidewalk and rushing from it like some delirious junkie wallowing at the wrong end of a suicide tear. At first I wanted it out of me. Then I rationalized some more. Then I called myself names. I put my fist through the mirror, repulsed at the sight of my own face.
Then I put on the goggles and let the Blacklight flow over me.
This time, I didn’t hurt myself to come back.
This time, I stayed there.
I allowed the world of shadows to consume me, falling down and down. I knew it didn’t matter, and I knew it would kill me. I wanted death to come so I would see the truth. I just walked into nothingness. The way doomed people do it.
I came to maybe a few days later, maybe a week, I’ve never been sure.
I was walking through the desert with the sun scorching my skin.
Two more marks inside me.
I can’t remember how I pulled them, I was that far gone.
I kept thinking I could see something just over the horizon—images of people, blood, something like the sound of a gunshot ringing in my head, over and over.
The voices of my parents, screaming and screaming.
Finally—their voices.
The marks manhandling my soul and my mind, ripping at the walls, taking me down a little at a time.
I phased roughly in and out of consciousness.
The world flicked on and off in static bursts.
It was the end, I thought.
The end of my life and the end of my search.
They were right there.
Right in front of me.
If I just went a little farther.
Just a little more.
Just…
When I went under for the last time, I could hear the marks screaming in victory, and I knew that I was dead, that it was all over.
And I didn’t care.
When I came up from the blackness, I wasn’t dead at all.
I’d been found in the desert by a man with skin like red leather and feathers in his hair. His eyes were wise and calm, full of secrets. I was naked in a tent, surrounded by the smell of strange medicines and burning candles. I’d heard about the Kumeyaay tribes and the settlements in Southern California, how they were into all sort of mystical shit, but I’d never bothered to look into it. Always in my own world. Nobody really looks outside his own world unless his back is against the wall. Kind of pathetic, really.
I felt like a defeated child under the old Indian’s wise eyes.
He said I’d outpaced the rail-line surveyors by more than a hundred miles, that it was a miracle anyone had found me, and I believed him. He said he’d taken the bad spirits out of my body, forced me to regurgitate them in my sleep. But it hadn’t been easy.
Then he told me about his son.
One of the marks had gotten into him during the ritual.
Killed him.
I didn’t want to believe it was true, but then I saw the body. The child had been torn to pieces from the inside out—a pile of human wreckage in the rough shape of a little boy, steaming in his own blood, watched over by eyes filled with tears. His mother, wracked with the worst loss a woman can know. Her silent, weeping form, hunched over what was left, praying in words I would never understand.
I felt the bottom of the world drop out.
Down and down, I fell.
The old man never cursed me, never told me I was a bad man, never even punished me, and that probably made it worse. He said I was one of many men he’d found in the Blacklight Triangle, and that it was his son’s duty to stand by his side. He told me the bad spirits would never have the boy the way they’d had me or the others. That the boy had gone to a different place—a better place. He said it all with those wise eyes and never spoke of it again, never wept for the child.
Something glowed in his eyes.
Something familiar there, but I was too far in the zero to wonder what it was. Too ashamed of everything I had allowed myself to become.
Everyone feels that way eventually.
Everyone falls.
We only need to wait for it.
The old man never said a word to me again. Just gave me some new clothes and drove me to a bus. And I felt like a lost kid, just the way I’d felt when I was twelve, standing at the station with old Granger, not knowing what I had been trusted with and having no idea what the future would bring.
The old man waved good-bye.
I had no idea what to tell him, what to tell myself.
I didn’t cry for the boy either.
I still haven’t.
So I quit instead. Turned my back on the house and Raina and the horrible half-lives of evil men and women inside me. Turned on some loud music and tried to forget.
It was easy to become nothing.
Easy to pretend the world had no use for me.
I had done so much wrong by Raina, allowed her in and pushed her out so many times, that it almost felt right. Staying away from her, I mean. Ignoring her calls. Not coming to the door when she knocked. I knew it must hurt, but it was probably better than the alternative, which would have been holding her close to me in the dark, then running away again before morning. Every time I thought about picking up the phone to apologize, or returning to the house to see her, the more useless it seemed. I felt the terrible sadness Raina would leave with me on my front porch every time she came and went, like a wave that broke and rolled back, but her sadness left me cold, unmoved. I just sat there.
They built the train.
More time rolled by.
I told myself I didn’t care.
Over and over, I told myself.
But the Blacklight always knew I would be back.
There’s always a second chance to fall.
I look back at the grave again, and the shovel.
I roll up my sleeve and look at the scars covering my arm.
Reminders.
I don’t want to be reminded. I spent almost two years running away from reminders. But things are changing now.
The nexus, slowly forming again.
It’s always been there, hasn’t it?
I can sense that coming thing in the hot Texas wind, the sun higher now and stretching my shadow long across the graveyard. There’s a sort of comfort in that. I don’t allow myself to feel it for long. I go back in the house and into the living room, which is filled with dusty light coming through windows that haven’t been washed in years, and there’s a dead man sitting on my couch.