Pete Aldin
Alec broke the surface of troubled dreams with a snort, jerking upright in bed as sleep’s soft threads fell away like torn gossamer.
To his right, Jen snored on, her rumpled hair discernible in the light of the streetlamp outside their apartment. To his left...
The Intruder was huge, head bowed beneath the ceiling, features hidden within what looked like a long hoodie, shoulders wide enough to belong to a running back. Strangely, Alec felt no shock at the sight of this hulking home invader, only whispered, “Well, shit.”
The blur’s massive shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “I so hate it when they wake up,” it said, its voice distorted, like three throats speaking at once: one hissing; one grating like a low-budget BBC monster; one a cultured, professorial murmur. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you going back to sleep like a good boy, before... ”
“Before what?”
“Well, I’m not going to say it out loud. That would be indecorous.”
The Intruder raised a hand to toy with his hood. In the low light, Alec caught a glimpse of rail-thin arm and pencil-thin fingers. He rubbed at his eyes, gritty with sleep.
“I’m still dreaming.”
“Ah!” The Intruder coiled his fist in a thumbs-up gesture. “Yes! Precisely. Go with that. So lie down, dear boy, and let the dream, er, take you.”
The arm lowered slowly, forefinger tracking toward Alec. As it neared his forehead, he felt a chill: cold radiated from that hand the way heat might radiate from a grill.
Finally alarmed–and thinking it was about frickin’ time he was–Alec scooted sideways from the refrigerated digit and bumped against Jen who snored on. He shook her quickly without taking his eyes from the home invader but she did not respond. He’d always said she’d sleep through anything.
The Intruder bent at the middle and the finger closed the distance. Tangling in blankets, Alec made an undignified exit down the center of the bed and struck his toe on the wheel of Jen’s chair on his way to the doorway.
Gargling curses, he limp-ran into the kitchen and wrapped his fingers around the biggest handle poking from the knife-block. Intending to return to the bedroom before Coldfinger—he barked a hysterical laugh at the wisecrack—could molest Jen, he whirled around.
He pulled up just short of crashing into the giant. The hunched freak towered over the fridge and reeked like wet earth.
He pressed back against the bench, knife up, robbed of the ability to speak. There was more light in the kitchen, what with Jen’s laptop still on and the blue LED microwave clock but the light was making things worse, not better. The Intruder’s hoodie was, in fact, a cloak. And the cloak was rippling–a crawling mass of earthworms, roaches, earwigs and some specks too tiny to identify in the gloom. Worse even than this horror was the face revealed within the cowl—a melted mask, a lump of potter’s clay—shimmering and flickering as if revealed by capricious candlelight, the human features of eyes and nose and mouth a suggestion, as if someone had referenced humanity and with irony.
Alec managed a kind of strangled squeak. “What are you?”
The shoulders rose and fell again, sending bugs scuttling and writhing. “This is the problem with them waking–they always want conversation. You’ll be bargaining next.”
Alec slid sideways along the bench, sweeping a cereal packet to the floor as he went. The Intruder kept pace, silent on the linoleum floor. Alec glanced down. The creature’s feet were as odd as its face. One was a human foot but skeletal and gaunt with nails that appeared to have faces and tiny mouths opening and closing without sound. The other was shaped like a bird’s with three talons. One talon–a snake–writhed and wriggled. The middle one was gnarled and cracked, a tree branch or root. And the last resembled the head of an eel—it snapped at him and he slipped in the Sugar-O’s on the floor, had to catch himself on the bench.
“What are you?” he repeated, righting himself. He slashed the air with what he hoped was gangsta gravitas.
“Alec,” the creature chided gently. “You know me.”
“I…?”
He saw it then in a flash of insight–or was memory? The one never far below the surface–all he had to do at any given time was scratch the veneer of Now and the images and sounds and smells and emotions would come screaming into center-camera as if it was happening all over again. The wreck. The flames. The blood. The screaming.
Nineteen years old and just having fun, out driving with Mike. Stupid drunk Mike who never should have been behind the wheel even when sober. Mike driving without lights while Alec cranked up the stereo and hollered in testosterone-inspired glossolalia. The little Toyota appearing from nowhere at the intersection, the pickup hammering into it and sending it spinning spinning spinning until the telephone pole arrested its dance. Mike bleeding from the forehead and nose, slumped back in his seat, groaning…
Alec sobbing no no no as he stumbled on bruised legs toward the other car. Fire leaping from under the hood. Inside the driver enmeshed in metal, his brains leaking from his head and his clothes dyed red; the front passenger crying and jiggling her door which wouldn’t budge even when Alec reached it and used all his strength against it; and the girl in the backseat–a girl named Jen–unconscious, slumped against her seatbelt. Her door worked, so–
He growled, blinked it away and put his head in his hands. “Stop it! You’re making my life flash before my eyes, you goddamn cliché!”
“I’m not, I assure you.” The Intruder had been begun sliding closer, but it stopped and put a finger to its approximation of a mouth. “Although when I say I, I really should say we. But it’s just so complex speaking in multiple composite identities. The pronoun we doesn’t really do it justice. Another problem with conversation. Another reason to avoid it.”
“Multiple...”
“My boy, as the story goes, we are many.” Coldfinger’s fingers scraped the chest, parting the cloak, revealing a second swirling mass beneath the creepy crawlies. Across this pale phantasm, faces boiled and swam, climbing over each other as if surfacing for air. Alec saw the tiny heads of lizards and Neanderthals, lions and lambs, marsupials and mammoths, a Native American in battle headdress, a bearded Mongol, a woman peppered with pustules, a serene face in a nun’s habit, a raven.
He reached deep inside him for every swearword he’d ever heard and found them all, spewing them out in what must have been a full minute of invective.
“Inventive,” said the Intruder. “I hadn’t heard some of those combined that way.”
Alec leaned on the bench, panting—all that swearing had winded him.
“Of course, vulgarity does nothing to prevent the inevitable.”
With one foot coated in Sugar-O’s and the other throbbing like a bastard where he’d cracked it on the wheelchair, he replied, “If you have to kill me, can you at least stop talking like that?”
“You mean like an aged theatrical actor?”
“…Exactly.”
“Actually, I prefer it. Helps the gravitas, you see.”
The roach-and-worm cloak fell back into place, covering the ribcage of heads. That cold-radiating finger stretched toward him.
“Wait, I have more questions.”
The Intruder dropped the hand and sagged against the bench. “Here we go.”
“What’s actually wrong with me? What am I, you know, suffering from?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters!”
“The result’s the same.”
“I have a right to know.”
It shrugged. “Aneurism. You worry too much, eat too many saturated fats. Is that your only question?”
“No. I have more. So you’re… you. Okay. Freaking me out, but…you came here, specifically for me. What’s so special about me?”
“Nothing. Why would there be?”
“It’s just that I didn’t expect, well, you.”
“I visit everyone.”
“What, like Santa Claus or something?”
“If you’re asking whether or not I’m omnipresent, then the answer is yes. Certainly. Name me a place where things don’t die. Where I’m not required.”
Alec shifted and cereal crunched.
“You’re evil.”
The Intruder regarded him with forced patience. “I’m evil. I’m good. I’m value-neutral. I’m mediocre. I’m everything and everyone that ever was. You think I’m here out of cruelty? Perhaps I am. We certainly have enough of that wriggling around under here.” He tapped his cloak.
“Well, if there’s good in you, then let me go.”
“Bargaining. I knew it.”
“I’m not bargaining, I’m asking you to be compassionate and let me go.”
“Go where?”
“Back to bed?”
“And live another thirty, forty, fifty years? I’ll still come for you. What’s the point?”
“I’ll have had another thirty, forty, fifty years.”
“And what will you do with it? Start a charity? Write a world-changing self-help book, My Brush with the Other Side?” The visitor looked him over, the approximated mouth turned down. “You’re not one of the memorable ones, Alec. Nothing special about you, I’m afraid.”
There had to be more. There had to be something. His last moments and he was standing in crappy cereal in his t-shirt and undies, arguing for his life by the light of a laptop. And he couldn’t think of a single reason why his life should go on. But there must be something. What else could he do with it? What had he left unfinished, except a good night’s sleep, except—
He was back in the memory then, yelling, “I’ll be back for you” at the front passenger, trying to raise his voice above the ringing in his ears and the cries of the woman whose legs he’d found out later were trapped beneath the dashboard and who was watching the flames with increasing panic. “I’ll get her safe and then I’ll get you out!”
Manhandling Jen as best he could from the wreck, carry-dragging her ten feet, then twenty, then forty–was this safe enough?–sliding her onto the grass, turning to run back, the flames reaching gas tank, the Toyota erupting, the screams of the trapped woman…
The years of self-punishment, wondering how he could have done it different. If he’d told Mike they should just get pizzas and DVDs. If he’d been driving and with the headlights on. If he’d been faster out of the pickup. Then none of the last twenty years would have happened.
Jen’s hero worship that he’d never deserved. Her unreserved love for the man who’d risked his own life to get her out of that burning car–as if he could’ve stood by and done nothing. The months of operations she’d endured, always smiling, always positive. The way she’d decorated her first wheelchair with decals. Her gratitude that he would visit her ward so often…
Her proposal. His acceptance, painting a smile on his face he didn’t feel deeper than his skin, accepting the jokes about it not even being a leap year.
The chain of days since. His forced happiness at anniversaries. Saying I love you and every time meaning I’d leave you if I could…
And that was his life since that night. Always helping her. Always sparing her pain.
Always sparing her—
“This is my purpose?” He asked it as a question, but he knew the answer. The purpose of his life was up to him. It always had been. Coldfinger’s shrug seemed to agree with him.
I’d leave you if I could. He’d wanted to say it a thousand times. Ten thousand. Well, now he could. And he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to because he didn’t want to die. And he didn’t want to die because…
“Let me,” he began and had to clear his throat to continue, “let me leave a note for my wife at least.”
The putty-mask within the cowl pinched. Perhaps it squinted at him. “A note for your wife? This is your last wish? Not that I grant last wishes, of course.”
Alec tossed the knife aside. It was redundant. He folded his arms across his t-shirt. “This is my last wish. Let me tell her all the things… all the things I should have told her every day. How brave she is. How pretty the curve of her neck is when she has her hair up. How she still makes me laugh unexpectedly. How amazing she is to find a way to exercise everyday despite the chair. How I respect the way she fights me on important things, the way she fought to have me to herself. How committed she is to a dope like me. How–” His voice snagged in his throat. “How much I love her.”
He did. He loved her. Sheesh! It must have happened sometime when he wasn’t looking.
Coldfinger peered closer and gave a low whistle. “You’re a good man.”
Alec huffed a laugh, wiped at his eyes. “You sound surprised.”
“I am. We are. Thought you were one of the selfish ones.”
He sucked in air, tasting hope. “So you’ll let me live.”
“No. But it’s nice to know we’ll have someone else in here to redress the balance.”
“Balance!”
“Balance, Alec. If the world were kinder–if the creatures who currently rule it were kinder–I would be too. You’re a kind man. You’re needed in here.”
Alec kicked Sugar-O’s across the floor and thought of diving through the window. But a four-storey plunge to the pavement would only result in his new pal—
“—scraping your soul off the concrete anyway,” the Intruder finished for him. It added, voices soft, “Alec, these things happen. They must. But we can make this one kind for you. And for Jen.”
He sucked air again and this time it tasted of powdered cereal and stale coffee grinds in the trash.
And of wet earth.
It tasted like inevitability.
He wiped at his eyes again, cleared his throat. “Kind, how?”
The Intruder shifted to peer past him. “You could sit in your armchair over there. The green one you love and Jen hates. You like sitting there, don’t you? She could find you there. It would be quite peaceful. And less traumatic than waking to find a cadaver in the bed with her.”
“This is the best I can hope for?”
The Intruder nodded slowly. “It will be kind for her,” it repeated.
“Dead man walking,” Alec muttered as he trudged into the living room and stopped by his favorite chair.
He ran his palms along the rough, frayed fabric. He put his feet up on the coffee table. The living room air was thick with the ozone tang of electricity creeping from a dozen appliances and with the sweetness of wet earth, freshly turned earth. Jen’s recent birthday card stared back at him from the TV shelf. Thirty-four. She was still young.
He lowered himself into it. “Dead man sitting.”
She might find him in the morning and think about the shortness of life and how much she could still pack into it for herself. She might realize she didn’t need him to make her feel safe, that she was brave enough and strong enough to have whatever life she chose from here on out.
And young enough perhaps find another man, a man who didn’t take so long to realize all of this.
If he’d had a prayer, that would have been it.
When the hand reached for him this time, it did not seem so cold. And Alec took it.
D is for Death
