The Best of Lucius Shepard (122 page)

I walked off
several paces and stood on the curb, facing the library. That rough cube of
Pennsylvania granite accurately reflected my mood. Patches of snow dappled the
lawn. There was a minor hub bub near the science truck, but I was enraged and
paid it no mind. Andrea came up next to me and took my arm. “Easy, big fella,”
she said.

“That
asshole’s been under my roof for what? Two months? It feels like two years. His
stink permeates every corner of my life. It’s like living with a goat!”

“I know,”
she said. “But it’s business.”

I wondered
if she was hammering home an old point, but her face gave no sign of any such
intent; in fact, her neutral expression dissolved into one of befuddlement. She
was staring at the library, and when I turned in that direction, I saw the
library had vanished. An immense rectangle—a window with uneven edges—had been
chopped out of the wall of the world, out of the night, its limits demarked by
trees, lawn, and sky, and through it poured a flood of blackness, thicker and
more sluggish than the Polozny. Thick like molasses or hot tar. It seemed to
splash down, to crest in a wave, and hold in that shape. Along the top of the
crest, I could see lesser, half-defined shapes, vaguely human, and I had the
thought that the wave was extruding an army from its substance, producing a
host of creatures who appeared to be men. The temperature had dropped sharply.
There was a chill, chemical odor and, close above our heads (five feet, I’d
estimate), the stars were coasting. That was how they moved. They glided as
though following an unseen track, then were shunted sideways or diagonally or
backward. Their altitude never changed, and I suspect now that they were
prevented from changing it by some physical limitation. They did not resemble
stars as much as they did Crazy Ed’s enhancement: ten or twelve globes studded
with longish white spines, the largest some eight feet in diameter, glowing
brightly enough to illumine the faces of the people beneath them. I could not
determine if they were made of flesh or metal or something less knowable. They
gave forth high-frequency squeaks that reminded me, in their static quality, of
the pictographs in Rudy’s cartoons, the language of the stars.

I’m not sure
how long we stood there, but it could not have been more than seconds before I
realized that the wave crest was not holding, it was inching toward us across
the lawn. I caught Andrea’s hand and tried to run. She screamed (a yelp,
really), and others screamed and tried to run. But the wave flowed around us,
moving now like black quicksilver, in an instant transforming the center of
town into a flood plain, marooning people on islands of solid ground bounded by
a waist-high flood that was coursing swiftly past. As Andrea and I clung
together, I saw Stanky and Liz, Pin and Patty, the rest of the kids, isolated
beside the statue—there were dozens of such groupings throughout the park. It
seemed a black net of an extremely coarse weave had been thrown over us all and
we were standing up among its strands. We stared at each other, uncertain of
our danger; some called for help. Then something rose from the blackness
directly in front of me and Andrea. A man, I think, and fully seven feet tall.
An African Negro by the scarifications on his face. His image not quite real—it
appeared to be both embedded in the tarry stuff and shifting over its surface,
as if he had been rotoscoped. At the same time, a star came to hover over us,
so that my terror was divided. I had from it an impression of eagerness—the
feeling washed down upon me; I was drenched in it—and then, abruptly, of
disinterest, as if it found Andrea and me unworthy of its attention. With the
onset of that disinterest, the black man melted away into the tar and the star
passed on to another group of stranded souls.

The largest
groups were those two clustered about the science van. Figures began to sprout
from the tar around them, and not all of these were men. Some were spindly as
eels, others squat and malformed, but they were too far away for me to assign
them a more particular identity. Stars hovered above the two groups, and the
black figures lifted them one by one, kicking and screaming (screams now issued
from every corner of the park), and held them up to the stars. They did not, as
in Rudy’s cartoons, suck in the meat through one of their spikes; they never
touched their victims. A livid arc, fiery black in color, leaped between star
and human, visible for a split-second, and then the figure that had lifted the
man or woman, dropped him or her carelessly to the ground and melted back into
the flood, and the star moved on. Andrea buried her face in my shoulder, but I
could not turn away, transfixed by the scene. And as I watched these actions
repeated again and again—the figure melting up, lifting someone to a star, and
then discarding him, the victim still alive, rolling over, clutching an injured
knee or back, apparently not much the worse for wear—I realized the stars were
grazing, that this was their harvest, a reaping of seed sown. They were
harvesting our genius, a genius they had stimulated, and they were attracted to
a specific yield that manifested in an arc of fiery black. The juice of the
poet, the canniness of the inventor, the guile of a villian. They failed to
harvest the entire crop, only that gathered in the park. The remainder of those
affected would go on to create more garden tools and foundation garments and
tax plans, and the stars would continue on their way, a path that now and again
led them through the center of Black William. I must confess that, amid the
sense of relief accompanying this revelation, I felt an odd twinge of envy when
I realized that the genius of love was not to their taste.

How did I
know these things? I think when the star hovered above us, it initiated some
preliminary process, one incidental to the feelings of eagerness and
disinterest it projected, and, as it prepared to take its nutrient, its
treasure (I haven’t a clue as to why they harvested us, whether we were for
them a commodity or sustenance or something else entire), we shared a brief
communion. As proof, I can only say that Andrea holds this same view and there
is a similar consensus, albeit with slight variances, among all those who stood
beneath the stars that night. But at the moment the question was not paramount.
I turned toward the statue. The storefronts beyond were obscured by a black
rectangle, like the one that had eclipsed the library, and this gave me to
believe that the flood was pouring off into an unguessable dimension, though it
still ran deep around us. Stanky and Liz had climbed onto the statue and were
clinging to Black William’s leg and saddlehorn respectively. Patty was leaning
against the base, appearing dazed. Pin stood beside her, taking photographs
with his cell phone. One of the kids was crying, and his friends were busy
consoling him. I called out, asking if everyone was all right. Stanky waved and
then the statue’s double reared from the flood—it rose up slowly, the image of
a horse and a rider with flowing hair, blacker than the age-darkened bronze of
its likeness. They were so equal in size and posture and stillness, it was as if
I were looking at the statue and its living shadow. Its back was to me, and I
cannot say if it was laughing. And then the shadow extended an arm and snatched
Stanky from his perch. Plucked him by the collar and held him high, so that a
star could extract its due, a flash of black energy. And when that was done, it
did not let him fall, but began to sink back into the flood, Stanky still in
its grasp. I thought it would take him under the tar, that they would both be
swallowed and Stanky’s future was to be that of a dread figure rising blackly
to terrify the indigents in another sector of the plenum. But Black William—or
the agency that controlled him—must have had a change of heart and, at the last
second, just as Stanky’s feet were about to merge with that tarry surface,
dropped him clear of the flood, leaving him inert upon the pavement.

The harvest
continued several minutes more (the event lasted twenty-seven minutes in all)
and then the flood receded, again with quicksilver speed, to form itself into a
wave that was poised to splash down somewhere on the far side of that black
window. And when the window winked out, when the storefronts snapped back into
view, the groaning that ensued was much louder and more articulated than that
we’d heard a month previously. Not a sound of holy woe, but of systemic stress,
as if the atoms that composed the park and its surround were complaining about
the insult they had incurred. All across the park, people ran to tend the
injured. Andrea went to Liz, who had fallen from the statue and tearfully
declared her ankle broken. Patty said she was dizzy and had a headache, and
asked to be left alone. I knelt beside Stanky and asked if he was okay. He lay
propped on his elbows, gazing at the sky.

“I wanted to
see,” he said vacantly. “They said....”

“They?” I
said. “You mean the stars?”

He blinked,
put a hand to his brow. As ever, his emotions were writ large, yet I don’t
believe the look of shame that washed over his face was an attempt to curry
favor or promote any agenda. I believe his shame was informed by a rejection
such as Andrea and I experienced, but of a deeper kind, more explicit and
relating to an opportunity lost.

I made to
help him up, intending to question him further; but he shook me off. He had
remembered who he was, or at least who he had been pretending to be. Stanky the
Great. A man of delicate sensibilities whom I had offended by my casual usage
and gross maltreatment. His face hardened, becoming toadlike as he summoned
every ounce of his Lilliputian rage. He rolled up to his knees, then got to his
feet. Without another word to me, he arranged his features into a look of
abiding concern and hurried to give comfort to his Liz.

In the wider
world, Black William has come to be known as “that town full of whackos” or
“the place where they had that hallucination,” for as with all inexplicable
things, the stars and our interaction with them have been dismissed by the
reasonable and responsible among us, relegated to the status of an aberration,
irrelevant to the big picture, to the roar of practical matters with which we
are daily assailed. I myself, to an extent, have dismissed it, yet my big
picture has been enlarged somewhat. Of an evening, I will sit upon the library
steps and cast my mind out along the path of the stars and wonder if they were
metaphoric or literal presences, nomads or machines, farmers or a guerrilla
force, and I will question what use that black flash had for them, and I will
ponder whether they were themselves evil or recruited evil men to assist them
in their purpose simply because they were suited to the task. I subscribe to
the latter view; otherwise, I doubt Stanky would have wanted to go with them
... unless they offered a pleasurable reward, unless they embodied for him the
promise of a sublime perversion in exchange for his service, an eternal tour of
duty with his brothers-in-arms, dreaming in that tarry flood. And what of their
rejection of him? Was it because he was insufficiently evil? Too petty in his
cruelty? Or could it have been he lacked the necessary store of some brain
chemical? The universe is all whys and maybes. All meanings coincide, all
answers are condensed to one or none. Nothing yields to logic.

Since the
coming of the stars, Black William has undergone a great renewal. Although in
the immediate aftermath there was a hue and cry about fleeing the town,
shutting it down, calmer voices prevailed, pointing to the fact that there had
been no fatalities, unless one counted the suicides, and but a single
disappearance (Colvin Jacobs, who was strolling through the park that fateful
night), and it could be better understood, some maintained, in light of certain
impending charges against him (embezzlement, fraud, solicitation). Stay calm,
said the voices. A few scrapes and bruises, a smattering of nervous
breakdowns—that’s no reason to fling up your hands. Let’s think this over.
Colvin’s a canny sort, not one to let an opportunity pass. At this very moment
he may be developing a skin cancer on Varadero Beach or Ipanema (though it is
my belief that he may be sojourning in a more unlikely place). And while the
town thought it over, the tourists began to arrive by the busload. Drawn by
Pin’s photographs, which had been published around the world, and later by his
best-selling book (co-authored by the editor of the
Gazette
), they came
from Japan, from Europe, from Punxsutawney and Tuckhannock, from every quarter
of the globe, a flood of tourists that resolved into a steady flow and demanded
to be housed, fed, T-shirted, souvenired, and swindled. They needed theories
upon which to hang their faith, so theory-making became a cottage industry and
theories abounded, both supernatural and quasi-scientific, each having their
own battery of proponents and debunkers. A proposal was floated in the city
council that a second statue be erected to commemorate Black William’s
visitation, but the ladies of the Heritage Committee fought tooth and nail to
perserve the integrity of the original, and now can be seen twice a year
lavishing upon him a vigorous scrubbing.

Businesses
thrived, mine included—this due to the minor celebrity I achieved and the sale
of Stanky and his album to Warner Brothers (David Geffen never called). The album
did well and the single, “Misery Loves Company,” climbed to No. 44 on the
Billboard charts. I have no direct contact with Stanky, but learned from Liz,
who came to the house six months later to pick up her clothes (those abandoned
when Stanky fled my house in a huff), that he was writing incidental music for
the movies, a job that requires no genius. She carried tales, too, of their
nasty breakup, of Stanky’s increasing vileness, his masturbatory displays of
ego. He has not written a single song since he left Black William—the stars may
have drained more from him than that which they bred, and perhaps the fact that
he was almost taken has something to do with his creative slump. Whatever his
story, I think he has found his true medium and is becoming a minor obscenity
slithering among the larger obscenities that serve a different kind of star,
anonymous beneath the black flood of the Hollywood sewer.