by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
Cara really had to have a good time tonight. The way that beagle at work had looked at her, obviously knowing he was about to die…
She didn’t mind assisting when animals were euthanized— in other words, killed, helped to die. The vets referred to it as “put down.” People outside the profession called it “put to sleep,” which made it hard to fall asleep herself when she went to bed that night. She was actually sort of drawn to that part of her job— not something she’d tell anybody, but she kept thinking she’d understand what death was if she was present often enough, touching the animal at the exact instant it passed from alive to not alive.
The vets said animals only understood they were sick, and that’s why they hid sometimes— it was a self-protection instinct. But Cara loved animals more than she loved people, and she knew it was something else. People could stare death right in the face and say it wasn’t there for them. But animals knew.
This morning she’d walked in, and one of the other assistants was holding the dog on the table while the vet prepared the injection, and the dog had looked right at her. When she moved, the eyes stayed on her, those brown eyes surrounded by so much white, strained into a teardrop shape. Dogs didn’t cry— their tear ducts drained out to their noses, one of those vet things that were kind of fun to bring up in casual conversation and gross people out about. But dogs and other animals could still show sadness, and give their eyes that desperate shape, and stare at you, even when you moved all around the room trying to escape them, the eyes following, like a final sad dance.
Then it was done. The dog had gone limp. The owner had cried. The vet had spoken gently. Cara had stood back, waiting to clean everything up. The dog’s brown eyes had stayed open.
Cara really wanted to forget about all that and have a good time. But this was not her idea of a good time. It was hot sitting here in the car, even though the sun had gone down behind the buildings. Her AC wasn’t that great. She was tired from work. The new outfit wasn’t as cool as she’d thought when she’d paid too much for it. The weed was only okay. Eli was being uncommunicative and she didn’t know him well enough yet to interpret his long silences and few words; by the time she did, she wouldn’t care.
Hopefully she’d get decent sex out of this before she lost interest. A kiss at least. So far, they’d barely held hands. What was up with that?
“Night market,” he’d called it when he’d invited her to come. “A carnival for adults.” That had sounded interesting. She liked carnivals and markets well enough.
And this new relationship with Eli wasn’t very boring or irritating or demanding yet. Cara had always been better at getting into relationships than staying in them.
“There,” Eli muttered.
“What?” But he didn’t elaborate, leaving her to figure out for herself what he was talking about. An ordinary-looking box truck was pulling in off the street, then two more.
Fear prickled in her stomach and she took another ineffective toke, imagining her dorky little Subaru surrounded, trapped, crushed by the square, plain, sinister trucks, more of which were arriving. But they all kept going to the far end of the lot and lined up around the edges.
Eli hadn’t mentioned the trucks. Even if he had, she probably wouldn’t have thought until she was in their midst about the one that had almost killed her years ago. Now they were streaming into the gravel lot in this warehouse district Cara hadn’t even known existed this close to downtown. Some of their headlights were eerily pale in the twilight; others didn’t have theirs on at all, as if they were prowling and didn’t want to be seen.
She’d been in high school and getting out of a relationship with her usual lack of finesse when she’d encountered that truck just like these. Its brights had blinded her. She’d been drunk and stoned and seventeen and angrier than the silly argument at the party had warranted. The truck hadn’t hit her. It had filled her windshield and forced her off the road, totaling her car and landing her in an ICU. She’d never seen the driver. She had seen an old woman sitting in the gravel, watching her and smiling around the shadows in her face and fingering the tear-shaped buttons down the front of her shirt that had caught Cara’s lopsided headlights and the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles.
That thing about the buttons had never made any sense, of course. How could she have seen the shape of something that small? For that matter, how could she have seen any details about the woman at all? She’d been driving so fast and she’d just noticed this figure— waiting, watching, judging her. The woman could have been any age. It could even have been a man. Whatever, it was like it had been waiting for her to have an accident. Like her parents waiting for her to screw up again, both of them when she was growing up and then just her father enough for both of them, though for all she knew her mom might be watching and waiting and sending her “I told you so” messages from beyond the grave, wherever that was.
By the time Cara had been coherent enough after the accident to try to find out who that had been by the side of the road, anybody who might have also seen the person — cops, EMTs, other motorists — had disappeared. The driver had never been found, so somebody was going on with their happy life not knowing if Cara was dead or not, maybe not even wondering.
For a while then, Cara’s life had been all about recovery, physical therapy and meds and rest and exercise and her parents talking about her responsibility in the accident, by which they really meant it was all her fault. She’d just wanted to escape, to crawl off and hide like some animal waiting until death happened, or life. Only gradually had she realized just how close she’d come to dying that night.
So what was she supposed to do with that realization? It hadn’t made every day more meaningful, as some people claimed a near-death experience would. It hadn’t cleared her mind. If anything it had just made her more anxious about what each day might bring. Did dogs have that kind of anxiety? She didn’t think so. It seemed to her they expected death eventually but they didn’t know whether they’d be just sick or if they’d die at some particular moment. For sure they didn’t cry over it.
Not that she’d cry over it, or tell anybody. When things got to her, she was the only one to know, so she wouldn’t have to listen to how she’d brought it on herself.
She almost never drove at night anymore. Good thing Eli liked to drive. It wasn’t that she trusted him-she didn’t trust anybody— but so far, anyway, he was fine with driving her wherever she wanted to go. Maybe she should trust him less for that very reason. You could never tell people’s real intentions. And yet you had to rely on them, you had to tangle up your life with theirs, so that if they messed up you were screwed and if you messed up they were. How many people had been killed because of violent or careless or overwhelmed or stupid other people? Probably lots.
In a way it bothered her that Eli didn’t ask or even seem to notice that she didn’t drive at night. Anyway, it wasn’t as if she was scared of the dark— she wasn’t a baby. But she also knew the world wasn’t the same in the dark as it was in the daylight, no matter what her father, Mr. Rational, used to tell her. He’d say anything to calm her down, whether it was true or not, which meant she hadn’t been able to trust what he said and that’d made her even more nervous.
“You just can’t see all the details, so your fears fill in the blanks.”
Bullshit. Cara knew that if you stared into the dark long enough you could sense the doors, giant rectangles that hadn’t been there in daylight. Ever since right after Mom died, she’d tried it now and then, and she could see them. Rectangles. Doors. Big enough to let a truck through. Certainly big enough for an old lady to come in and out of. Was that what she had been— some kind of escort? She’d looked frail, but perhaps strong enough to take her father when the heart attack had silenced his constant advice.
Someday Cara herself would go through one of those doors. Maybe tonight, maybe in the next five seconds. Or maybe when she was a hundred. Maybe by herself, but maybe with an escort. But someday.
More snuffling box trucks were in the parking lot now, and more regular cars, and more people, some of whom must have walked or taken Light Rail because there weren’t that many cars. And beyond that, out past the reach of the light, more rectangular patches of darker dark.
“Okay.” Eli dropped his roach into an empty beer can and got out of her car.
She weighed her options: leave him here, but that would mean she’d have to drive home in the dark. Take a taxi or get somebody else to drive her home. Wait for a while and watch. Catch up with him now just to see what would happen.
Stay, she decided. Join in. Experience whatever this was. Life was too short to miss anything. And who cares if it’s dangerous? You’re going to die anyway. Everybody is.
As she made her way toward the line where Eli was standing at the open back of one of the trucks, odors of weed and beer and things cooking and incense washed over her even though the air was heavy and still. She really shouldn’t be doing pot, with brain aneurysms running in her family; talk about tempting fate. But what difference did it make? Fate would get you when it damn well wanted to, tempted or not. She was already on borrowed time, twenty-one months more than Mom had had. And counting.
“What’s going on?” she asked Eli, no doubt pointlessly. “What is this place?” That was probably the wrong word, since this “place” didn’t exist without the trucks.
Eli said, “Come on,” and somehow he’d already escorted her to the front of the line.
They stepped into a country diner, complete with a curved counter and high stools, Dolly Parton singing from what Cara guessed was a jukebox. The big-haired waitress plunked two bowls of mac and cheese down in front of them. Eli leaned over and whispered, “It’s the only thing on the menu.”
Cara didn’t want to eat. Mac and cheese was fattening. And who knew what was in this stuff? Or how sanitary the kitchen was? Or who’d had their hands in it? Did the Health Department even know about this “carnival for adults”?
“It’s great,” Eli said with his mouth full. For him, that was practically a treatise.
Cara took a tiny bite, and it actually was good, suspiciously good. She scooped up a larger spoonful and some of the fluorescent glop spilled on her sleeve, which made her think of that morning in college over breakfast with the guy she’d spent the night with and was seriously wishing she hadn’t when she’d spilled hot coffee on herself and for some reason had run out of the café.
Talk about making things worse for yourself. The coffee hadn’t been hot enough to burn, so the only damage would’ve been the stain on her jeans. But she’d forgotten about the steps and fallen all the way down and cracked her head and gotten a concussion. It would have been humiliating if she’d been conscious, but she’d just lain there like road kill.
They’d kept her in the hospital for two or three days because they hadn’t liked how her eyes looked or something. One of the doctors or orderlies or whatever who’d come by in the middle of the night had had tear-shaped glittery buttons on his coat. It was an odd thing to remember, or so she had thought at the time. The seven gleams of them had caught her eye as he’d leaned over to tend to her, and she’d tried to look into his face, but because of the gloom could see only the thin curve of his mouth and the pale patches that must have been his eyes.
What if he didn’t know what he was doing? There was no way she could tell. People died all the time because medical professionals were incompetent, or worse, one of those “angels of mercy” you were always hearing about. They could kill and kill and nobody knew. Cara’d tried to stay awake the rest of the time in the hospital, as though that’d keep her safe, as if anything would keep her safe, but exhaustion and the meds had made her sleep a lot so who knew what had really happened?
The waitress wore a pale pink uniform. Tear-shaped buttons sparkled over her impressive chest every time she came back, to ask how everything was, to bring more napkins, to bring Eli a second chocolate malt, to ask again how everything was. Cara stared at the buttons, which was embarrassing— it must look like she was staring at the boobs.
When she forced herself to look up into the waitress’s face, there was something weird about the smile. And the eyes— big and beautiful, but fixed, too perfect. Were they glass?
Cara looked down at her plate. No cheese could be that orange. And if you were a waitress, you could poison so many people. Cara was sure she’d read about cases like that. She bit her lip, and her mouth tasted like blood and fake cheese and something bitter hiding underneath like some terrible secret. She got up, excused herself, and hurried out of the truck, leaving Eli to finish his mac and cheese and hers, too, she didn’t care. Leaving him to wonder what was wrong with her, except he probably wouldn’t. She slipped on the ramp but managed not to fall.
The parking lot was now full of people, climbing into these dark boxes, climbing out again. In and out of these shadowed doors. People had even brought their kids. Little kids. It wasn’t safe.
Eli caught up with her. “Okay, let’s go.”
Cara didn’t know him well enough to read his expression. Pitying? Repulsed? High? “No, no, I don’t want to leave,” she said, even though maybe she did.
“You sick? You look pale.”
“Sorry, sorry. I don’t know — something about the atmosphere in there — so close. Or the food. Let’s try some more— it’ll be fun.”
“Fun” was not exactly the word for it. The next truck had been converted into a strip club, every bit as tacky as a real one. It was packed. Once again, somebody shut the door behind them. Cara told Eli she didn’t like it when the door was shut. “Effect,” he explained, not explaining a thing. “But we can leave.” She shook her head.
On the tiny elevated stage, a teenaged boy slowly took off his clothes to the accompaniment of canned drums and horns. He was pretty cute, in an unfinished sort of way. Then a girl wearing nothing but a bowler hat and fishnet stockings with sparkles sang a bawdy song and swung around a pole. Not wanting to draw attention to herself, Cara finally sang along with the crowd. She didn’t especially want to be staring at the girl’s open crotch, but Eli was probably enjoying the show, in his so-low-key-you-wondered-if-he-was-breathing way. What she could see of his face looked relaxed and expressionless.
The girl came over, swinging her hips and lowering her head. Past the sparkles that were now inches away from her face so she couldn’t miss their tiny tear shapes, Cara saw eyes, but there weren’t any eyes, really, just two empty holes. In the dancing girl’s hand was something shiny. A knife. To cut out Cara’s eyes and make her into something like the girl. What was this, some sort of especially bizarre S&M place?
But it was just a piece of jewelry. A sparkly pin. A necklace. It was just a tear-shaped necklace made of layers of tear-shaped stones, or tears turned to stone, or maybe even actual tears— the necklace appeared to fade, to dry up into wisps of hair and light as Cara reached for it. Why would she have accepted a thing like that from a girl like this anyway?
Experimentally she put her hand on Eli’s thigh. When he didn’t respond, she took her hand away and pretended she hadn’t done that. Why had she? She was anything but turned on.
Two women were now having oral sex onstage. Then a young girl came out twirling tassels from her nipples. Something for everyone. Huge silver tears were painted on the child’s dimpled cheeks. She turned her head, disgusted. Surely this was an illusion— the girl must have been a midget, or some sort of lewd puppet. There were laws.
She wanted to leave, yet couldn’t make herself leave. They stayed for the whole show, which by the end involved a German shepherd and pee and a gun shooting, hopefully, blanks.
The dog had stared at her, as if asking her what can I do about it? There’s nothing I can do.
The rowdy energy in the club — really just the back of an ordinary box truck — made the crowd seem bigger than it could possibly be in this confined space. The performers, still in their costumes or lack thereof, came around holding out containers for tips. It really looked as if none of them had eyes. Dropping a five into the pseudo-child’s plastic Halloween pumpkin didn’t make Cara feel any better.
Without saying anything, Eli got up and left. Maybe he’d spotted somebody he knew— it wouldn’t have hurt him to introduce her. Maybe he was stealing her car. Or he was just using the restroom, most likely a porta-potty in the parking lot or some twenty-four-hour fast-food place nearby; she ought to figure out where it was before she actually needed it herself.
The crowd she was part of was moving out of the strip-club truck. Without exactly deciding to, Cara went, too. Another crowd was waiting to come in for the next show. Outside like this, uncontained by the box of the truck, it didn’t look like as many people, probably no more than twenty.
Not seeing Eli or a porta-potty, she decided, since she was here and probably never would be again, why not try more of the fantasy night-market trucks, other people’s special places where they shut the door and trapped you inside and made you see what they wanted you to see and share their secrets and dreams. Why not?
Maybe she’d make her own fantasy world and bring it here to the night market. That’d be cool.
There were all kinds of reasons why she wouldn’t, of course— she’d have to buy or rent one of those creepy trucks, she’d have to drive it at night, and she’d have to actually come up with her own fantasy world which she had no clue about. Did she have any secrets or dreams? Not really. But it was cool to think about. Maybe she and Eli could do it together, if she could ever find him. If they kept seeing each other. She saw her car where he’d left it, so at least he hadn’t stolen it and left her to figure out how to get home.
There was a “dream library” where you wrote a dream on a scroll of paper and the “librarian” rolled up your dream and slid it into one of the many pretty jars and bottles on the many shelves. The lower part of his face was blanked out and he just had tear-shaped empty holes for eyes; what a creepy, real-looking mask. People around her scribbled down their dreams enthusiastically, furiously, some of them even pulling on her arm to get her to write hers but she couldn’t— she didn’t have any dreams anymore. Could a person die of dreamlessness? She made up something about eyeless faces and broken glass, and the librarian nodded and hid it; she didn’t even see what jar he’d put it in.
As she left, she and everybody else crunched over stuff that she hadn’t noticed coming in. Down on the dark earth, she caught glimpses of droplets of glass like frozen tears.
For a while then, Cara went randomly from one truck to another, wherever she could get through the throng. There was a spaceship with aliens inside anxious to pull her apart and see what made her tick, see if they could make her cry. There was a funhouse with distorted mirrors and when she looked at herself in one she couldn’t see her eyes and the smile on her face was someone else’s— a waitress’s or a librarian’s or that of an old woman wanting nothing more than to die.
Did Cara want to die?
No, she was scared of dying.
But did she want to be dead?
Thinking about that made her stop still. People bumped into her and went around her, some of them saying sorry and some telling her to move it or worse and some not seeming to notice her at all.
She couldn’t come up with the answer, so she just walked on to the next truck. Now that she’d been inside some of them, they didn’t necessarily seem like threatening places anymore. She wondered whether the truck that had run her off the road and almost killed her had had somebody’s fantasy world inside it, too.
The next truck she went into was a church with a stained glass window and incense and organ music and a bloody cross. Other than the performers, if that’s what they were, she was alone. They told her there was nothing to fear, death was just another door and once you opened it you’d be inside God’s own special dream. Cara did not find this especially reassuring.
Now the priest was tossing holy water on her, drops like God’s own tears that flew and burned and would have dissolved her flesh if she hadn’t shaken them off. They made a loud clatter when they hit the floor in this echoey place.
“Why don’t you just take me and be done with it?” She didn’t think she really meant that, but that’s what came out of her mouth almost automatically, as if she’d been rehearsing the line for years. The priest just smiled, his eye holes widening and his teeth falling out, skin so thin his head was like a grinning skull. Cara left and no one tried to stop her.
The crowd had begun to thin out, and it seemed to her there weren’t as many trucks now. She was surprised to realize she didn’t want the Night Market to end before she’d experienced every one of these boxed fantasy worlds. She didn’t see Eli. Her car was still there. The stench of weed was faint, and the aroma of beer was faded and stale in her mouth. From habit she wished for a joint or a brownie, but in a way she was glad to be doing this on her own and not high.
The disco dance truck, where the ball spun multicolored flecks of light that might look like tears if you really worked at it, didn’t do much for her. The post office truck was just plain boring. A post office? Really? Somebody fantasized about a post office?
Then, somewhere between the slaughterhouse truck and the Inquisition torture chamber, the conviction came to her that if she didn’t get out of the Night Market right away she would die. Now. Tonight. And if she didn’t stay until it was over, she would die then, too. Maybe not right now, but she would. No matter what she did, she would die.
Well, of course. Everyone could say that. But most people wouldn’t dream of speaking such a thing out loud.
Her brand-new shirt and pants were ruined, spattered by drops of blood from the slaughtered animals and the tortured people. Surely the human victims, at least, had been actors, and the blood had been fake. But with her luck it would stain anyway.
A vague despair over her ruined clothes and not particularly wanting to see Eli again and the general weirdness of the evening made her burst into tears. It had been such a long time since she’d cried it felt as if the tears were etching her skin, dissolving her eyes. Her vision became distorted. Her eyes ached. She didn’t even try to stifle her sobs, didn’t care much that it would ruin her make-up or what people would think if they saw her this way.
She realized she was leaning against one of the box trucks, one she thought she hadn’t been in but they all looked alike from the outside and it could have moved from one parking space to another. Where were the drivers? Had they just mingled in with the crowd? Were they napping in the cabs? Did they know what they were hauling? Was there a big market for this sort of thing?
Tears were running down her face and wetting her collar. The force of her sorrow or fear or release or whatever it was bent her over, and her tears fell onto the pavement, tinkling like broken glass when they hit. Her mother used to call this, what? “Crying your eyes out.” Could you really cry your eyes out? Had Mom cried like this when she’d realized she was going to die? Had she known? Did Dad have a premonition that his heart would break at just that instant?
“Cara.”
From that blurry border between the night market’s bright lights and what passed in the city for total darkness, Eli was coming toward her. She thought this might be the first time he’d actually said her name. He had a dog on a leash.
Cara crouched and held out her arms to the dog, crooning, weeping. She couldn’t tell its breed or its color— mixed breed, probably; dark-colored. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, and she didn’t want to think of it as “it.”
He was old and sick. His slack, toothless mouth hung almost to the pavement. Both his eyes were capped by milky cataracts. He snuffled loudly, turning in her direction, her smell in his nose.
Crying now for the dog in addition to everything else, Cara murmured “Come here, pretty boy” and “Poor baby,” and the dog followed her smell and the sound of her voice and made his painful way toward her, pulling Eli with surprising strength so that the leash was taut between them. Cara didn’t especially want Eli to come to her, just the old dog, which paused to lick at the pavement. There was a brittle clatter as hard things struck together. My tears, she thought, all my tears from my whole life, and squinted to see the glistening glass piled like jewels in the lights of the parking lot. Eli bent and scooped them up.
The dog was determined to get to her. Some animals could sense when a person was sick. She’d seen dogs at work who could sense a seizure before it happened, and she’d read about some who could smell or in some other way detect cancer earlier than doctors could. This dog’s big runny nostrils were flaring as he made his way toward her, tugging Eli along.
Eli slung the tears at her. Her own tears, sharp and hard. Cara twisted but they struck her on her back, arms, chest, belly, and everywhere they hit they drew blood.
“Stop it!” She stood up, swaying, and tried to move out of range, but he was rapidly closing the gap between them, or maybe she was inadvertently gliding closer— she wasn’t sure which direction she was moving. Her intentions kept leading her the wrong way.
The three of them stepped around the parking lot, circling, dancing, a clumsy ballet. Blood and tears made her eyes sting. The dog moaned and squealed, almost a song, then in slow motion jumped up against her softly and slid down her body to collapse at her feet.
Just before Eli’s arms closed around her and their open mouths joined in their only kiss, she saw the tear-shaped buttons on his shirt flowing in an endless stream.
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Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and several of her plays have been produced. Stories have recently appeared in Interzone and Crimewave.
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2013 saw three new short story collections from Steve Rasnic Tem: Onion Songs (Chomu); Celestial Inventories (ChiZine); and Twember (NewCon Press). This spring PS Publishing is bringing out his stand-alone novella In the Lovecraft Museum.