Supernatural Noir

“When you said you’d give me a thousand dollars,” she went on, “I was angry. I thought you was treating me like a whore. Then I got to wondering why you’re giving me so much.”

Impatient with analysis, he said, “You don’t have to explain this shit.”

“It won’t take a minute.” She peered at him. “You feeling okay? You don’t look too good.”

The time has come for solicitude, he thought. After passion, after anger and despair, after the fear and the trembling, a little friendly concern: the cheese tray of the romantic supper.

“I’ll live,” he said.

Actually, lover, I’m in tiptop shape. I’m sitting here communing with my peeps, the Mojo Demon Elves, the Kamikaze Hellfighter Elves, while you and I discuss, among other subjects, Sexual Politics in the Theater of the Real.

“I told myself, he can’t be giving me all that money just to make hisself feel better,” she went on. “I guess that showed me you wasn’t trying to deny that something happened. And it made me see things your way. Like maybe you were right about us.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” he said listlessly.

“I don’t understand why it’s okay to split up,” she said. “But I guess it is. I never thought I’d say that after last night. I suppose the money helps make it okay. I ain’t a total fool—I know that’s part of it. But I keep wanting to say for us to give it a try. And I keep thinking it’s me who’s right.”

She looked him straight in the eye, a strong look, something certain behind it. The wind strayed a few strands of hair across her cheek, touching the corner of her mouth—she didn’t bother to brush them aside.

“It’s fu

She poked a finger into the black dirt beneath the grass, digging up a clump. Michael was enthralled. There was a new tension in her delivery and he believed she was building toward something important, something that would punctuate or define.

“It may not make sense,” she said. “But the way I see it, maybe we’re both wrong.”

Disappointed, his thoughts shifted miles and hours ahead to Seattle in the rain, new night streets, new opportunities for failure, for fuckup.

“Know what I’m saying?” she asked.

“Yeah, well,” said Michael. “It’d be sort of hard not to know.”

——

The girl drove past the shattered office door and the empty parking lot, past the shops, none of them open, no one in the streets, not a stray cat or a loose dog. Sitting beside her, Michael was spooked but too wasted to react. They had seen only one person in Whidby Bay and now even he was gone. Someone should be up and about, putting out the trash, opening for business.

“I don’t see a hospital,” the girl said.

“I don’t want a hospital. Drive.”

“You should get yourself checked out!”

“There’d be too many questions. They might call the cops. All ma

“You want me to drive anywhere special? Some other hospital?”

“Seattle.”

“That mean we’re sticking together?” she asked in a chirpy tone.

It might add some zest to his latest downward spiral to hang with a chick who possibly could animate elves or transform him into a lizard, and herself as well, and they’d go scampering along the ditches and make scaly, tail-lashing love underneath a yucca plant . . . Or she’d set a fire with her eyes in a trash alley and they’d lean out a window with a cardboard flap for a curtain and toast marshmallows, until one day she got super pissed and crushed underfoot the teensy spider into which she’d implanted his soul. Not knowing about her would be exhilarating. Inspiring. And how could this bizarre uncertainty be worse than what he’d been through already? Or worse than where he was ultimately headed. It was a tough call. Regular Death or Premium? Two blocks slid by before he said, “I don’t care.”

She slowed the car. “What do you mean, you don’t care? I don’t know what that means.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s all good,” he said. “Just keep driving . . . And make sure I don’t go to sleep.”

She stepped on the gas and after another block she said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Talk. Engage me in conversation.”

She pulled out onto the interstate. It too was empty, devoid of traffic. “What you want I should talk about?”

“Fuck, I don’t know! Tell me why there’s no people around, no cars. Where the fuck are we? Limbo? You’re a goddamn motor mouth—it should be easy.”

“Limbo? That some place in Oregon?”

Naw, it’s over in Moontana, Suzi Belle.

“Well, is it? Say.”

“Never mind.”

She sang her tuneless tune and before long a car passed, traveling in the opposite direction.

“See,” she said. “There’s a car.”

“Yeah. Quite a coincidence.” He shifted in the seat, half-turned toward her. “What’s that singing thing about?”

She gave him a quizzical look, and he did a poor imitation of her.

“Oh, that!” she said. “It’s just something I do, you know, when I’m concentrating on stuff . . . or when I get emotional. ’Bout half the time I don’t know I’m doing it.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder. “But I don’t sound nothing like that. You make me sound awful!”

Gray clouds obscured the sun and the world grew increasingly gloomy as they drove. Traffic picked up, but he didn’t see people moving about in the food marts and gas stations along the highway. The sun was a ti

The girl’s singing trailed off—she kept her eyes straight ahead and said, “It’s a big city, dummy. There’s bound to be people.” She hadn’t spoken to him this way before, flat and disaffected, like a woman disappointed in a man she had once held high hopes for. Then, with a lilt in her voice, a distinct hint of sly merriment, she added, “Course, you just can’t never predict what kind of people they’re going to be.”

——

Lucius Shepard’s short fiction has won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the National Magazine Award, the Locus Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

His most recent books are a short-fiction collection, Viator Plus, and a short novel, The Taborin Scale. Forthcoming are another short-fiction collection, Five Autobiographies; two novels, tentatively titled The Piercefields and The End of Life as We Know It (the latter, young adult); and a short novel, The House of Everything and Nothing.

| THE LAST TRIANGLE |

Jeffrey Ford

—

I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.