Times Bends Black by Robert T. Tuohey

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Times Bends Black
©2006 Word Count: 4,600

And in this harsh world to draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story…

“And so I learned that Elvis was serving time as a humming grease-monkey in a Purgatory gas station, fueling up farted-out prophets like Crowley who were en route to a fiery auto-da-fe.

Such is the price to be paid for “Love My Blender” and “Do As Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of Thy Flaw.”

That was the conclusion I had just penned for my story for the up-coming, December, issue of Whips ‘N Hard Things. The tale had no title. In fact, it didn’t have a beginning or a middle either. All that it had was what you’ve just read – but somehow I figured that was dead on it, and the place to start. Or to finish.

Of course, I’d been having my usual problems with that temporary death called sleep, and my heart and alpha-waves were only kept regularly irregular via the caffeine and pain killers. But, then again, I always write my stories backwards.

EmiT eht lla sdrawkcab etirw I.

“I” the most interesting, stand-alone palindrome. Go ahead, get a mirror and see…

So, like I said, I was hard at work that morning, Underwood tapping sweet and slow beneath my sure, if slightly shaky, touch, when that irritatingly exciting knock sounded through my door and consciousness. Her knock, like everything about her, was uniquely hers. It was crazy, one-eyed Nadine at my door.

The instant brouhaha which erupted between my good common sense, which screamed for me to head for the window, and my unwashed cod-piece, looking for a swim, was actually a moot point: the window was frozen shut, the fire-escape was covered with a couple inches of frozen snow, and I was in no condition to make a run for it anyway. The closet was useless, too -- single-orbed though Nadine was, it was like she had X-ray vision in that good peeper of hers. So I had to let her in.

As I walked to the door I took a “cleansing breath”, as those yahoos term it, trying to steady my jangled nerves. Eddie, my cat, who had been lying in his fav snooze spot on the couch, did his Carl Lewis imitation, deftly bounding to the top of the overhead bookcase. He knew it was her, and he wanted to be able to scope this whacked chick from his best perch. Every time she’d come over, he ensconce himself up there, safe from her reach, gleaming down at her, kind of vaguely pawing at the air while she jabbered at me.

Under my breath, en passant, I reminded him of what he was. Of course, he didn’t give a rat’s ass, as the promise of a free show was well worth the price of an insult.

I flattened my back against the wall, and then pulled the door open.

She popped through it like a Jill-in-the-Box, and instantly her chatter-switch was flicked. What with the rush of her, her bullshit, and that blast of frigid air (with most of my attention gone south anyway), I couldn’t make tits or tails of her yakking.

“Nadine,” I said quietly, trying to focus, “how long have you been… out…?” (I had to tread carefully here, as both euphemisms such as “institution” and colloquialisms like “bug-house” had equally disagreeable effects on her.)

At this, the senseless prattle suddenly ceased, and her lovely features twisted into a sly grin, her good eye beaming at me, into me.

“Some pals sprung me!” she whispered, sub rosa. Then, just to be doubly sure, she threw one more X-ray glance around, through, the room.

I gave an exasperated sigh, realizing full-well that this “explanation” could mean anything from an official release signed by the governor himself, to Nadine having slipped some senile old janitor five bucks to leave a side window unlocked.

She had now caught Eddie within the net of her searching eye, and the two were regarding each other with that weird brand of mutual fascination that was their wont (albeit mixed with a healthy mistrust on his side).

“Take thy paw out from my heart, and take thy form down from that ledge,” she coaxed with open, waiting arms.

Eddie, however, was well-up on himself and had no intention of responding to this ploy. He wisely remained right where he was, but, with wide eyes, produced the cautious version on his patented “croak-meow”.

Having cased the joint, and greeted her would-be familiar, she violently returned her attention to me. With both hands she seized the worn lapels of the raggedy jacket I was wearing and yanked me so hard toward her that my teeth rattled in my head.

“I’ve got it!” she fired point-blank in my face.

Her good eye was wild, and the patch over the other was askew. Her pale cheeks had flushed, leaving them as nearly aflame as that thick, unkempt mane of hers. I could feel her long, slender fingers, digging claw-like into my shoulders.

A scarred, scarlet woman. And what a woman…

“What’s that?” I said, trying to concentrate.

She looked at me as if I were a complete idiot, and then flashed up her left wrist for my inspection. Gracing that strong, sleek forearm, hung a heavy, gold, jewel-encrusted man’s wristwatch.

For a heartbeat or two, I stared at this gaudy, elaborate affair, trying to place it… It had a broad face, in the manner of a deep-sea diving watch, within which were set several tiny ancillary dials, conveying god knew what. Encircling the circumference, in place of rational numbers, were inscribed what appeared to be bizarre variations on astrological symbols…

A faint fleeting streak of winter’s light crept through the gauze-grey drapes that bandaged my living room window. This fugitive, partial illumination oddly highlighted this very odd object.

I shook it off, and refocused my attention on her. “Ok, Gomez Adams had a garage-sale. So what?” I attempted to put this bagatelle over with a smile, but it even rang false with me.

Nadine, now glaring at me with an unbounded contempt, pulled me in even closer and said hotly, “It was his!”

With an old friend you’re afforded the comfort of being intimately familiar with the obsessions, knowing the insanity at a glance. Nadine, complex crazy that she was, had several to entertain and exasperate me with. This particular trifle wandered a well-worn back alley of her oft-deranged mind. As many times as I’d heard it, though, I don’t ever think I got it quite straight – I believe she kept changing the details as her Holy Guardian Angel, or Grand Spiritual Poobah, or the latest psychic bulletin from the Fourth Dimension, directed her.

The shadowy outlines, as close as I can’t forget, ramble something like this: around 1911 Aleister Crowley had been traveling in the Middle East and had, somehow or other, come into possession of an ancient Egyptian amulet. This object, in conjunction with certain arcane mumbo-jumbo, was said to be capable of “warping time”. Now, what in Amon’s name that’s supposed to mean, I’ve never understood, but, then again, I’m not an “initiate”, and Nadine was known to cut her coke with baby powder.

Anyway, to continue this curious tale, shortly thereafter the thing was purloined from the Great Beast by the “Dark Ones” (again, I’m clueless). The result of their monkeying with this sacred object, Nadine solemnly informed me, was World War I. Erstwhile careless Crowley had decided to get on the ball, forming a counter organization, the “Protectors of Time”. These fine people, via physical and occult battle, retrieved the amulet in 1918. They managed to keep it safe until, you guessed it, 1939. The stink of six more years of worldwide slaughter had elapsed before they had the thing back in their holy hands.

Hereupon, the Great Beast decided to deepen the game by having the amulet melted down and reshaped into a watch. And so it was, safely hanging on Al’s wrist until his time ran out, Dec. 1, 1947. His corpse was still warm when the Dark Ones snatched it off him.

Well, then, what’s holding up WW III? Evidently, when crafty Crowley had the thing shape-shifted, he also had it re-christened with some alternate mumbo-jumbo. And the Dark Ones were, well, in the dark. The best they’d been able to conjure was Vietnam ~ and when you’re shooting for Armageddon, that ain’t shit.

Of course, the up-shot of this rigmarole was that the Dark dudes were always getting closer to being able to blow up the world, and the Light dudes were searching high and low to steal it back and prevent this disaster…

And now here was crazy Nadine with the watch.

Yeah, right.

I saw no immediate, reasonable way out of this tangle, and figured my only half-hope was to play along for the nonce.

“How did you know it’s Crowley’s watch?” I asked (I dared not inquire how she had gotten the damn thing).

With a triumphant, manic glitter in her eye, she snapped the wristwatch-face bottom-up, revealing its secret, nether-side, for my inspection. Reluctantly, I peered down.

TO MEGA THERION. ECCE SIGNUM.

After this there followed, in a concentric spiral, a long line of looping Egyptian hieroglyphs. The entire inscription was made to resemble a snake coiling in upon itself, biting its own tail.

“The sign!” she whispered in awe.

As if in reverence, I closed my eyes ( in fact, camouflaging an irrepressible eye roll). The obvious surmise – that this was simply the work of some half-assed occultist, bogus Enochian dictionary in-hand and local jeweler in-tow, seemed to have slipped, like fine sand, through the cracks of her mind.

But the wheels were turning now, and there was no stopping her.

“It must be returned to They of the Light!” Pleading, desperate, she gripped me by the tee-shirt, pulling me close again.

“To save the world!”

I was about to tell my lovely, nutty Nadine were the world could go, but she was already a breath ahead of me, and so she managed to throw in the clunker.

“And the woman I’m returning it to will give us 500 bucks!” she added with quick, dramatic emphasis. She smiled that beautifully crooked smile of hers, a couple of her chipped teeth gleaming in the dull light.

“Give ya halfsies!” she offered.

Now, despite the fact that I’ve always known Nadine to be as crazy as a roach on Raid, I’d never known her to joke about dead presidents. True, I’d never known her to give a damn about them either, but still, if she said there was 500 bucks in the deal, I felt I could trust it.

As usual I was sadly low on coin. Of course, Eddie and me get by mostly with tuna and coffee, and the generic codeine is cheap. Still, it ain’t free. Only “avant-garde” mags like Whips N’ Hard Things will publish my stuff, and they don’t pay doodley-squat. Artists get no respect.

I gave her behind a little slap, “Man does not live by bread alone,” I said, looking into her green eye.

Nadine produced that sigh of routine-resignation common to her sex, and said, “Alright – but only to save the world!”

My immediate attempt to collect a slight advance was, however, rebuked.

“After we prevent Apocalypse!” she said firmly.

Now I sighed (a la fascinated-and-exasperated male), acquiescing to this feminine whim.

“Well, Dina,” I said (as I used to call her in the old days), “where are we off to?”

The reply was as definite in tone as elusive in meaning.

“Witchway, Mass.!”

This singular pronouncement, I admit, took me slightly aback, and I again found myself wondering if the entire spiel were not some chimera forged on the cracked anvil of her mind. I dared not, however, give voice to these misgivings, what with so sweet a deal just having been struck, and so merely cocked a hopeful, albeit puzzled, eyebrow in return.

“A little backwater burg a few miles north of Salem,” she reassured me.

“Ah…” I nodded, comprehending, now calculating. What with the ice on the roads, and the car being the way it was… a couple of hours…

“By the way,” she (psychically) broke in, releasing me from her grip, “it might be a bit dangerous.” This last she tossed over her shoulder as she tossed my raggedy long-coat to me.

“Better pack that old .45 of yours,” she said as she went out.

I remember Eddie, still safe up in his perch, gently pawing at the air, as if in goodbye.

~

The afternoon sky was a dull, dark grey, with the sun amounting to no more than an impressionistic smudge. To be plain, the weather sucked. The temperature was dropping again, and the air already had a nasty edge to it. As I pulled open the always-creaky, now frost-crusted, door of Bucky (the rusted remnants of my more-or-less burnt-out ’75 Mustang), I began to have visions of us dangerously slip-sliding our merry way down I-95. And, what’s more, if we were so unlucky as to have the cops pull us over, it might be noticed that the only paperwork Bucky had was the old newspapers patching his busted windows. About my license, seeing as I don’t drive much, I misplaced it some years back. It was expired anyway.

Our breaths blowing white, we slammed ourselves into rattling Bucky and I punched in the key and gave him some gas. The expected whine-groan of a winter start-up did not, however, ensue. Instead, an awful grating grind, like something was being torn apart, rumbled from under the trembling hood. It was a wholly unexpected, indeed weird, sound, and I paused before tying again.

This time a horrid, screeching bang sounded from the innards of the engine. The sound was so sudden that both Nadine and I flinched.

A bit shaken, we got out and went to the front of the car. Wisps of white smoke, reeking of some strange, burnt odor, were curling out from the edges of the hood. I looked over at Nadine, but the sight seemed to have plunged her into an eerie fascination.

With hesitation, I placed my gloved hand on the slightly gaped hood (the lock had been long-since broken), and cautiously began to raise it.

Splattered over the top of the engine was a black, bloody mass of smoldering feathers. The combined stench of burnt oil, frozen grease, and mutilated crow was nauseating.

Beside me, Nadine mumbled something, then stepped forward, removing the glove from her left hand. She scooped up some of the feathers and twitching gore, holding the mess up to her good eye for inspection. She studied the clot of red and black as if reading it.

After a few moments study, she threw the mish-mash into the dirty snow of the curb, the wiped her palm across the front of her jacket, leaving a dark smear.

“Let’s go,” she said, getting back into the car and slamming the door after her.

~

I-95 was cold as the grave. I thought the highway looked like a huge, ash-colored ribbon unrolling before us. Our progress, anyway, was good. Maybe too good ~ we seemed to swish along with a kind of steady, nightmare assurance.

Neither one of us spoke, having maintained a numb silence for an hour. There was only the monotonous, annoying sound of the wheels whizzing beneath us.

It’s easy, looking back now, to know that I was right – that we should have turned back. Hell, that we never should have went in the first place, that I should have talked her out of it somehow. For every minute that passed, I felt a vague gnawing in my guts. It’s like you’ve got a disease and you’re afraid – but you’re afraid of the truth, too. So you just keep on. So we kept on.

Just as we crossed the state-line into Massachusetts, it started to snow. Right off, the flakes were as big as quarters and nearly as solid. In minutes, the dreamy drift upgraded into a flurry.

I slowed, clicking on the stodgy, ineffectual wipers. It was difficult to judge if the brakes or the tires were worse, but together they made a perfect combo for a nasty crack-up. As the snow began to fall even harder, this suddenly became a very real possibility.

Now reduced to a crawl, on instinct I edged into the emergency-lane (as I say, there was actually no need to worry about traffic, as we were the only fools on that barren, snow-covered strip of highway). Even the flap of the damned wipers sounded forsaken, ominous.

“Will that woman wait?” I asked.

“They won’t let her.”

I didn’t like the tone of this.

Still gazing through the smear of the windshield, she said, “Keep going. If we get stuck, we’ll just have to walk.”

Of course, to go on now was not only ridiculous, but downright dangerous as well. This entire farrago with the watch was absurd. As for my half of the money, and jumping Nadine later, it now seemed just as inconceivable. None of this would pan-out. We were just headed for trouble…

And, yet, as we sat there, freezing, wipers flapping and car rattling, and snow slowly burying us, I knew we would go on. We had to go on…

I remember wondering, in an odd, abstract way, if somehow her insanity had entrapped me, infected my mind… Or if it were Fate… Or…

“Let’s go,” she told me.

I eased down the accelerator, and we slowly slid back into the empty, white, main lane, with the snow, heavy and silent, falling steady.

~

By the time we crept into Witchway, over an hour later, a good foot of thick snow lay everywhere. The town, or what little of it we could see through the storm, seemed in keeping with its vaguely Colonial name. Main Street was not a half-mile long, replete with large hardware store, a 1950’s–style movie theater, and a dozen or so non-descript little shops. Somewhat oddly, though, no church, steepled or bland, was included in this miniature town.

Other things were amiss, too.

For example, not a single window was lighted. Every building was dead dark. In fact, only the hanging traffic light, rhythmically blinking yellow, served as beacon. What with this absence of light, and no one in sight, I might have thought the place abandoned if not for the several cars neatly parked along the street. But even these were buried in snow, and no fresh car tracks, save our own, imprinted the virgin snow.

As we thickly, slowly rolled on to the heart of tiny Witchway, I knew damn well something was askew, I just didn’t know what. As I think back on that accursed town, it now presents itself to my mind’s eye like a Hollywood back-lot. But when you rip away the façade…

“We want the Red Room Diner,” Nadine said. Either because she was nervous or because the car’s heater had quit, her voice trembled.

Despite the fact that we were bone-frozen, tired, and hungry, I was about to suggest we skip the amenities, just collect the 500 bucks and blow this weird burg when I had to slam on the brakes.

Not a foot in front of the car, illumined in my weak headlights, stood a young person completely dressed in black. Only the Devil knows how, but Bucky stopped on a dime. The shock of almost making an unwanted hood-ornament of this macabre jerk-in-the-box should have elicited from me the most foul and insulting oaths, but I was prevented, by his face.

It had been luridly painted over in the manner of the rock group Kiss. These expressionless, if horrific, features were framed by shoulder-length glossy black hair tied-up in a kind of Kabuki style.

This creature, rendered effectively sexless by the combination of Erebus, flying snow, and the looseness of the Poe-ish garb, directed its stare dead at Nadine, tapped the index finger of its right hand on its left wrist, and then pointed across the street.

Involuntarily, still caught in a kind of grotesque wonder, our eyes followed the sentinel. The Red Room Diner, all ablaze in blurred yellow, met our gaze. Our guide, that reject from a K-Mart Halloween sale, then stalked off in the indicated direction.

“What the hell was that?!” I said.

Nadine had turned paper-white; her right hand, knuckles showing fierce, defensively gripped her left wrist.

“They’re here,” she whispered, looking towards the Red Room.

It was the tone that jarred me, that caused me not to immediately take that oddly convenient, indeed shoveled, parking spot just across the street. I had known Dina a lot of years, in a lot of situations, and I had never known her to be afraid. Now she was. And this unnerved me.

The car was anxiously hum-rattling about us; big flakes were still floating down from the dark, cloud-blocked sky, either sticking and becoming lost in the white mass that clung to the trees, the buildings, and the Earth, or landing, for but a moment, on my windshield, where they were abruptly smeared into nothingness by the clumsy wiper.

“You know what Emily told Susan,” she said.

Knife-edge clear.

Nadine nodded toward the waiting spot.

God curse me, like the fool that I am, I parked the car.

The sidewalk we alighted to, however, had not been shoveled, and so it was with some difficulty that we crunched and high-stepped our way to the Red Room, splintering and crushing the frozen snow as we advanced.

As we neared the diner, it was out of the corner of my eye that I noticed something move behind one of the bank’s pillars across the street. A figure in dark clothing, collars turned high. An uncanny feeling stabbed at me, and I shot a glance behind me. An unbroken expanse of snow met my gaze… On the far corner, almost out of sight, something again moved…

But Dina had me by the arm, was pulling me on, and then we saw what was in the Red Room Diner.

Twenty or so more faces smeared over in the grotesque style of Kiss stared out at us.

I actually stumbled a half step; but Nadine had me by the arm, held me up, and hustled me through the ringing door. Perhaps she had expected something like this. Well, the sight of those painted mugs hadn’t slowed her up a bit.

The entire gang of them was tricked out in black, from their tall, platform shoes all the way up to their dyed hairdos. Of course, it was that white-based make-up with its silver, black, and red lines, that caught the eye of the unfortunate beholder. They were strategically and tritely placed about the diner, like a Norman Rockwell nightmare.

There sits a demon, placidly sipping a cup of black coffee (while he covertly eyes you). Beside him, in similar devilish get-up, a creature of the night piteously ponders the ogling-state of the sunny-side-up eggs he is about to fork. In a side booth, a half-human/half-cat couple sit, green eyes aglow, sharp paws a-hold. A silver-faced spaceman, unsure of Earth gravity, staggers past. A hungry, sexless lover, black-starred eye staring in the mirror, lifts a white-powdered doughnut to blood-red lips…

No one said anything, and I had the impression of a studied indifference being affected. Gratingly, I heard a knife against plate, sawing some soft thing to pieces.

But Nadine pulled us on, deep into the Red Room, finally stopping at a rear table marked number 15.

There sat, in de rigueur black, a person facing away from us. Though, once again, the standard, stylized mass of hair effectively hid the face, something in the set of the shoulders, and the thin, pale hands that rested on the table, told me it was a woman.

Nadine was a step ahead of me, and here warily paused. Perhaps she expected the woman to turn, facing us, that we might get a look at each other. Certainly, she had heard us approach – it was like the whole damn diner was holding its breath. But she didn’t move, she just sat there like a manikin.

Still gripping my arm tight, Nadine moved forward. Both our faces twisted in disgust when we got a full look at the woman. Rather than the five-n-dime Kiss Krap, this crazy bitch had an intricate design of spider webs and Black Widows tattooed on her face. With her black eyes slit, she set a hard look on Nadine.

There was a tense, momentary silence as these two stared each other down. Just slightly, I felt Dina quiver, then saw her blink. I felt that somehow we had lost ground in this contest, and that I should try to pick up the ball.

I edged slightly forward, as if peering at the woman’s face.

“Had a bad childhood, didn’t ya?” I asked.

My jibe, however, was ignored.

“The watch!” the creepy bitch hissed at Nadine.

Though still a bit shaky, Nadine’s wits had returned, and with a defiant glare in her good eye, hissed back, “93!”

Now, for once, I knew what was going on. Long ago, in some fit of insanity, or orgasm, or both, Dina had let me in on this “secret code of the Light”. What in Baphomet’s name this number was supposed to stand for or convey, I no longer recall, but the thing was, to identify yourself as a “Sister of the Light”, or a member of Darla’s clubhouse, or whatever it was, you had to say, “93” in return.

Pretty tricky, eh?

But that spider-and-cob-web-headed bitch just sat there, glaring at us. That was all Nadine needed.

“Burn in hell, witch!” Nadine spit out, grabbing me and making for the door. I was all with her. I just wanted us out of there.

I don’t think we got two steps, and they were all over us.

~
It was some hours later, bloody, bruised, and stone cold, that I came to. They had dumped me in a snow-bank, the greasy faced bastards. Maybe they thought I was already dead when they left me, or maybe they figured I’d just freeze to death. Maybe they just didn’t care.

I had a bit of trouble standing, but when I finally managed to get on my feet, I guessed nothing important was broken. It was a black winter night, and what with the condition I was in, at first I couldn’t see a damn thing. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted, I made out that I was in the middle of a big field, and the snow all around was covered over in a mess of footprints, tire-tracks, and huge gouges.

Where was Nadine?

Panic sort of gripped me, and I started looking around all wild, yelling her name. But there was no answer, and there was nothing in sight.

For a couple of minutes I staggered around in the dark, half-limping, beating myself with numb arms, still looking and yelling.

I knew I was getting nowhere. I needed a road, any damn road, to help me get my bearings, then I could find my way back to that town. I just started walking.

I stopped, dumbstruck, when I came upon my car. My eyes were adjusted to the low light now, and I could see that my junker was parked in a clean-shoveled spot.

Wary as hell, unwilling to trust anything, I walked around it. As I did so I glanced about me, off into the receding blackness, white frosted ground roiled with crisscrossed tracks and steps.

What the hell is wrong with this picture?

Then the outline swept through my mind.

I was standing on Main Street, Witchway. And the whole damn town was gone.

And so was Dina.

~
What freezings have I felt, what dark days have seen

What old December’s barrenness everywhere!

~The End~

Author Bio: Robert T. Tuohey was born in 1961, Danbury, Connecticut. He has studied psychology at the State University of New York in Albany (1988), and California Coast University in Santa Ana (1993). In the U.S., Bob worked in the field of mental health; for the past ten years, he has lived abroad (in Japan and China) teaching English at the tertiary level. His current position is Foreign Expert in the Languages Department of Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, Shanxi, PRC.

Bob’s published works include an introductory textbook on English literature (From Beowulf to Joyce, Taiyuan University press, 2001), several short stories (some to be found on the WWW), his home page at
http://jadedragon.250x.com/welcome.htm
and his bimonthly chess column, Past Pawns, at
chessville.com.

Besides writing, blues guitar and martial arts take up a good deal of his time. Bob’s e-mail is
jadedragon61@hotmail.com.


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Times Bends Black

©2006 Word Count: 4,600