Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  “Would you be disappointed if it didn’t?”

  “There’s no easy answer to that. Sometimes, yeah, I wish the façade would drop away. All this,” she said, with a gesture at the brewery in its entirety, “it seems like an awful lot of effort to go through just to see it all end up this way. To know it will. I don’t see any nobility in pretending that I actually matter. Sometimes I just want off this treadmill.”

  How do you talk to somebody who feels that way? How do you tell her she’s wrong? How can you even be certain that she is? The only thing that made it bearable was that she didn’t sound the least bit depressed about it, merely resigned—a relief, since I’d always remembered something I’d heard as a teenager, and it seemed no less true now: that when a girl cries, the most useless thing on earth is a boy.

  “I think I sense it sometimes,” she said. “Just out of reach, but it’s there, almost close enough to touch. It’s never closer than in places like this.”

  How would she see it? As I did with Tara, I tried to run perceptions through an approximation of Marni’s filters. She was fascinated with the end of everything, and here, in these abandoned places, the end of the world had already come. They were the early adopters, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. This was her worldview, and she sought it out, and in the moment I thought she was the bravest person I’d ever met, and that I wasn’t ready for any of it.

  Why are you doing this to me?

  Without warning, she hopped up to her feet. Marni’s default exploration garb included army surplus pants with lots of pockets. She dug around in the big pouch on her right thigh and pulled out a fat Sharpie marker, then made a furtive glance around to make sure she was in the clear.

  “Don’t tell the others,” she said, and scooted a few yards down the catwalk, to a floor-to-ceiling girder still pale with its last paint job. She dashed off something on it, then stepped back with a nod of approval. “There. My cry into the void.”

  I went to see. Just seven words in block letters:

  GIVE ME IMMORTALITY OR GIVE ME DEATH

  “That’s a pretty safe either-or,” I said. “I can almost guarantee you that you’ll get one or the other.”

  “Secret to life.” She twirled the Sharpie and put it away. “Set yourself up to win.”

  —

  In early October, with the air starting to chill and the trees to turn, Tara went on an important buyer’s run to San Francisco, so it was just me for a few days. Except that wasn’t technically true, not with Marni under the same aggregate roof. In truth, I welcomed it when she suggested, hey, why don’t we pool resources for food and a movie? No reason for two neighbors to eat alone when they could be pathetic together.

  I picked the food, Thai, and she cued the movie. I knew it would be something like this.

  “Do you ever kick back with a normal chick flick?” I asked. “Are you ever even tempted?”

  She made a gagging sound. “But I could be tempted to give you a concussion for suggesting it.”

  The movie she’d been in the mood for was Escape from New York. That’s the one where a young Kurt Russell plays a hardcore felon threatened with death if he doesn’t infiltrate Manhattan, now an island prison colony, and retrieve the president and, more important, a tape about nuclear technology that he’s supposed to play at a wartime summit with the militarized world poised on the brink of catastrophe.

  “Those aren’t sets,” she mentioned halfway through. “Those were real places in Saint Louis where they filmed. It really was like that then.”

  “They would’ve been fun to explore.”

  “Yeah, but who’s to say they won’t be like that again someday.”

  At random intervals I would glance at my phone sitting in front of me, as if that would be its cue to ring, only it never did. Except for a pair of texts that Tara had sent to let me know she’d landed, then got settled at the hotel, she hadn’t been in touch. As if she couldn’t bear to pick the wrong time, when I wouldn’t or couldn’t answer, and my phone would go to voice mail. Marni noticed this parallel vigil, but had the discretion not to mention it.

  Instead, she kept her focus on the movie and made me laugh.

  “You know,” she said, “for a guy with an eyepatch, his depth perception is off the charts.”

  In the end, the antihero delivers, but swaps the tape and shreds the real one, to leave the President mortified as an unexpected fanfare of big band music plays. I didn’t understand it when I first saw it as a kid, and didn’t understand it now, how a single recording could be so vital. Whatever was on it couldn’t be memorized, summarized? Nobody back then believed in duplicates?

  But now I saw it for what it was: just a McGuffin. Some arbitrary thing to chase that was more important than any number of human lives, whose loss could then be rendered meaningless in an instant. Sorry you’re dead, but I’m just in a mood.

  “I think most people have it all wrong, why he does that,” Marni said. “They think he just doesn’t give a shit. Or that he’s doing it to get back at all the people who manipulated him. But I think he’s taking the long view. He’s hitting the reset button on civilization.” She looked at me with an interrogator’s air. “What would you do if you had that kind of power in your hands? Would you take it?”

  Sure, easy to contemplate this from your neighbor’s sofa. “Maybe a world whose existence hinges on playing a tape on time isn’t worth keeping propped up any more.” I was surprised to hear myself say this. “It’s going to topple over one way or another, so might as well be me that gives it that last push.”

  She nodded, dour and disappointed. “Way to throw me under the bus, Aidan.”

  “That was a trick question.”

  “Those are the best kind,” she said, and gave me a playful poke.

  For maybe the twentieth time that evening, I looked at my phone and lacked the mojo to make it ring. Of course, connection goes two ways. I could’ve been the one to initiate a call. So maybe I was as afraid as she was to get no answer, and wonder why.

  “Do you think there would be any problem letting Tara join us when we go exploring?” I asked.

  “Really? She’d be into that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’d be okay with belly-crawling through spiderwebs and the occasional rain of cockroaches?”

  “Probably not that,” I said. “But the brewery’s not bad, and we’re nowhere near through it all. I think she’s feeling left out lately. It would be a way to bring her in. She’s just not into running, but something like this, go your own pace, she might be more likely to give it a try.”

  “That’s sweet,” Marni said. “Sure, why not. She can only run away screaming if the cockroach thing goes bad.”

  And it took the pressure off, left me feeling as if I’d met some sort of obligation.

  And then?

  I wish I could say I wasn’t complicit in what happened over the next couple of hours. But I was.

  I wish I could say it was meaningless. But it wasn’t.

  I didn’t want to be that guy. But apparently I was.

  I wish I could say I didn’t want for it to happen again. But I did.

  If only to see if it would be a little softer next time. Her body was so hard, it was like being battered by the inevitable.

  —

  In a way, urban exploration is the art of hitting a slowly moving target.

  Unlike ancient and medieval ruins, their modern counterparts don’t always linger forever. Often, they’re the victims of circumstances that will eventually resolve. They come about because renovation and demolition are both expensive, and sometimes neither option is affordable. They come about because they’re built on land that nobody else wants right now, or if someone does, there’s a lot of bureaucracy to navigate: zoning ordinances and objections raised by historical societies and tax liens and other modern migraines.

  Given enough time, though, things can change.

  Which was why we had to s
tep up our sense of urgency if we were going to explore the entire brewery complex. Drew, who liked to research these things, learned that the site was scheduled for demolition in a few weeks. Knock it down here in the fall, then clear it throughout the winter to get it ready for spring, when a developer would break ground to build, what else, condos.

  So it was an ideal time to bring Tara in, a crash course in playing hard and coming home filthy. Surprise—she not only said sure, that she would like to be a part of the team, but took to the whole paradigm of creeping around more eagerly than I thought she would.

  She fell in love with the Barnstormer Brewery before we’d even gotten there, when it was still a soiled behemoth a couple blocks ahead of us. Something about the logo touched her. It was still visible, but just barely, a huge, faded ghost of itself on the red brick of the main brewhouse: a dashing pilot with leather goggles and a jaunty scarf, and a biplane soaring past behind him. I suspected they’d designed it sometime around the First World War and hadn’t changed it since, because why mess with a good thing?

  “He’s so sad,” Tara said. “Up there like that, just trying to hang on and be seen.”

  She had a penchant for old things that I never realized was present. She was no fan of the relentless grime, but was willing to endure it because of what was beneath it, beyond it. To Tara, the process became all about looking through a portal into decades gone by and deciding these relics represented a time that was, on the whole, better.

  “Imagine getting up every morning knowing you had a place to go to, thinking you’d have it the rest of your life, if you wanted it,” she said. “Even if there were days you hated it, you’d still know you didn’t have to be afraid.”

  To Tara, a chipped mug, coffee-stained and now a mausoleum of dead bugs, could inspire a whole story of who’d sipped from it. In an office, inside a desk drawer, she found a framed photo of a family of six and obsessed over why it had been left behind. Every artifact was a narrative, and she was eager to uncover it all, and in that way, she fit right in with everyone else.

  “I love her!” Marilisa said. “Why did you keep her under wraps all this time?”

  And it was good, genuinely good, to see Tara taken in so readily by these people who could’ve quite literally done cartwheels around her. It was good for us to have, for a change, something new again to share.

  Yet I couldn’t get past the feeling that the time for a truly shared commonality had already passed.

  Where she saw antiques, I now saw grave goods.

  It might have been enough once: to bear witness to the passing of these places, like mourners at an unattended funeral. You could feel good about that, that you cared, even if no one else did.

  But more and more, I started to see the distinction that Marni made between her own approach and everyone else’s. The rest were there to see bygone aesthetics and honor the legacies of forgotten lives. They were on the hunt to look at life as it had been, not as it was. They were archaeologists, with an overlay of college mischief, sneaking around, getting away with rule-breaking in the late nights and the daytime shadows, dodging police and security guards, whom I now saw as lackeys dispatched to protect a status quo of stasis and decay.

  To my new friends, just to walk through it all was a declaration of being alive.

  But I could no longer regard it like this. Marni had spoiled that for me. She had spoiled me for it. She had tuned me to notice the frequencies behind the decline and fall of empires big and small, their whispers and their hums.

  As I’d observed, the end of the world had already happened here, in these abandoned places. They were, like the overlapping squares of that peculiar sigil I kept finding, a collision of past and future here in the present. But it was worse than that.

  While they may have been empty, these places were anything but idle.

  They were cancerous cells in the skin of everyday, where the decay might metastasize and spread. They were incubators, where hidden things, unknowable things, could gather with impunity, unsuspected and undisturbed. They were holes in a fragile imposed order, left untended and unguarded, where disorder could take root and grow, could strengthen and become…

  Tangible.

  Which, I guess, is why my stomach did a slow roll when Tara approached me during our second excursion into the brewery, all smiles, cupping a bird’s nest in both hands, like a bowl.

  “Look what I found! It’s flawless. Not a twig out of place,” she said. “I know exactly where to put it at home.”

  I glanced at Jill, our sergeant-at-arms, our enforcer of the rules. Now her partner in crime. What happened to no taking, no breaking?

  “Just this once,” Jill said. “It’s not like it’s an actual piece of the brewery.”

  It is now, I thought. But by all means, bring it home, and everything that comes with it. Like a seed.

  —

  How many times had we been to the Barnstormer by mid-October? Three. I think three.

  It was a weeknight, and I was up late channel surfing because I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t sleep because something in me didn’t want to, but wanted instead to remain vigilant. Call it precognition. It was as if on some level I knew that my phone was going to alert me to a text, and it would matter.

  From Marni: Are you awake?

  I texted back that I was.

  How about alone? Can you meet me outside?

  At first I thought she meant out front, by the lions, or in back. But no, she told me that she was down the block, and when I got there, I found her in tights and a hoodie and running shoes, sitting on the low retaining wall that held in the elevated plot of ground for the house on the corner. She looked monochrome, illuminated by the stark sodium glow of the streetlamp.

  “I was out for a run,” she said. “A normal run.”

  “You shouldn’t be running by yourself at night.”

  “No lectures, okay? I’ve got my pepper spray.” She dropped her voice to barely above audible. “For all the good it would do.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “I think there’s something that’s been following me. I need to know if I’m crazy or not. Could you do that for me? And not lie? Not humor me? Tell me the truth?”

  I had to process this a few moments before I could even respond.

  She pointed past the sidewalk and strip of verge, to the curb, where the concrete lip curved around in a 90-degree arc. Then she took me by the wrist and tugged me into the empty street, so we could look directly at the storm drain.

  “Tell me what you see,” she said.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for, but then, I guess that was the point. No hints meant an honest answer.

  It was a bog-standard storm drain, with enough width and barely enough of an opening top-to-bottom that someone slim could have wriggled through, to follow wherever it led beneath the streets. Marni could’ve squeezed through. Was someone down there—was that what she was getting at?

  I stared at the opening with a sudden surge of nostalgia, remembering one like it from a rainy day when I was a kid, and it seemed like the thing to do was fold paper boats and let them sail down the gutter toward the drain, and in my imagination what was really happening was that they were sailing off the edge of the world…

  Until it scared me, when all at once I got it in my head that another boy, just like me, was waiting down there for each boat, because he had no other toys. He wasn’t bothered by the water pouring across his face, because he didn’t have to breathe.

  “Anything yet?” Marni asked.

  I watched for a minute, perhaps two. Maybe she was, if not crazy, letting her imagination run away from her. It was a high-contrast scene, the concrete lit sharply from above by the streetlamp, but past the opening, the light died after a few inches. It was nothing but shadow, solid and deep.

  Until it moved.

  I don’t mean that something within it moved. The darkness itself moved. Maybe it had been moving all alon
g, and I was only now becoming aware of its pulsations and fluctuations. It was something deeper than mere shadow. Instead of stemming from an absence of light, this was something that gathered, with just enough detail within to set it apart from the benign shadows of night. The colors became apparent only after a while, a spectrum of light that withheld itself until it could be sure of us.

  I wouldn’t have thought it true, but it was: Once you get past the urge to run, the hardest thing to do is look away.

  “What’s that inside it?” I whispered.

  Marni didn’t answer right away, just relaxed her hand on my wrist and breathed a soft sigh. I suppose if I feared for my sanity, I’d be relieved, too. At first.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But it looks like stars to me.”

  At some point, though, I would really have to decide which was preferable.

  “I know what prophets are now,” she said. “They’re the ones the universe has decided it hates the most.”

  Eventually I went to bed, although I have no idea how long it took to get there. Under the covers, Tara stirred, burrowing in close to me.

  “You smell like the out-of-doors,” she murmured. “At least you don’t smell like her.”

  Then she turned onto one shoulder, her back to me, and we both pretended to sleep.

  —

  The countdown to demolition was running out the clock, and we hadn’t been back to the brewery as a group in nearly a week. Life gets in the way, and I was willing to let it. Content to let the behemoth fall and something else rise in its place, to perpetuate the cycle—a fresh potential ruin for our grandkids to explore, or huddle within in some future fallen world.

  Until Marni came one evening after dinner, banging at the door with the urgency of barely controlled fear.

  “Can you guys gear up and get your grubbies on?” she said.

  There was normal Marni, calm and at ease when speculating about the end of the world, even her own sanity. Then there was this new Marni, eaten with worry and stress, that I’d never seen before. The normal Marni probably would’ve noticed the cool reception she was getting from Tara.