The Light at the End (18 page)

Sunday morning. The air was muggy and oppressive, bloated with the potential for rain. It was the kind of day that invited inactivity and foreboding thoughts.

The calm before the storm.

Joseph Hunter was riding the D train over Manhattan Bridge, staring out over the harbor at the Statue of Liberty, wondering if and when he was going to get his chance. Allan was still crashed out on Ian’s guest mattress, blissfully unaware that Ian was already up and making plans… plans that would drag them both into the mouth of the dragon.

Danny Young was lying in bed, one arm still draped around the naked shoulders of Claire “De Loon” Cunningham, who dreamed of moving through a Gothic castle that looked like something straight out of a Hammer horror film. She shifted uneasily in her sleep. Danny’s expression shifted from joy to concern, then back again. He had made love to her… he
loved
her now, undeniably and irrevocably… and the emotion was a Ping-Pong ball being knocked back and forth between the light and dark sides of his mind.

T.C. Williams and Tommy Wizotski were at their respective homes, privately dreading the day’s return into darkness. Armond Hacdorian was talking to his priest, his satchel loaded with an unusual amount of holy water.

Stephen Parrish was barely tasting the breakfast he had prepared for himself. He didn’t know it, but he was just waiting for his phone to ring.

And at Josalyn Horne’s apartment, the bedroom door was open just a crack. It helped, in a small way, to ventilate the room.

To air out the ripe, overwhelming stench of death.

The phone rang.

It was now early afternoon. The same chores were still waiting to be tended, but Stephen was farther away from completion than ever. More dishes. More dirty clothes. A paragraph of something new… uncharacteristically, a horror piece… leaving even more unfinished prose on his desk.

And now the phone was ringing. Again.

Hesitantly, fearfully, Stephen pulled himself off the bed and moved toward the phone. On the stereo, David Bowie’s
Scary Monsters
was blaring away at high volume. Stephen sidetracked to turn the volume down, lingered there for a moment, while his mind intoned
it’s nothing. It isn’t Rudy. There’s nothing to be afraid of
…

Then the phone rang again. His hand tightened on the volume knob, then jerked away abruptly. “You idiot,” he whispered, ashamed of his cowardice. Still, two more rings went by before he could bring himself to answer.

“Hello?” he said, trying to mask the quiver in his voice.

“Hello, Stephen?” The voice didn’t immediately register. It set Stephen off-balance for a moment.
But at least it isn’t Rudy
, he noted, sighing inwardly with relief.

“Yes,” he said, adding, “Who is this?”

“This is Danny, from down at
MOMENTS, FROZEN
.”

“Ah!” The inward sigh made its way to the surface. He giggled on top of it, a bit crazily, and added, “Uh… what can I do for you?”

“Well, I… uh…” Danny’s throat, clearing from the other end of the line. “I wanted to ask you about something. Something really… weird.”

“Oh?” Something in the way Danny emphasized the word
weird
made Stephen tighten up suddenly. “What is it?”

“Well, it’s about your friend. The one who disappeared.” In the subsequent pause, Stephen practically swallowed the mouthpiece of the receiver. “You know who I’m talking about, right? I can never remember his name…”

“No.” Stephen heard the word come out of his mouth, but he didn’t believe it.

“Oh, come on. The graffiti artist. Black Bart with eyeliner. What’s his name?”

Stephen didn’t answer. The phone trembled in his hand. He felt an overpowering urge to hang it up and then leave it off the hook, maybe rip it out of the wall entirely. He suppressed the impulse, but not its power over him. Not entirely.

“Stephen?” There was a slight edge of desperation in Danny’s voice. “Are you there, man? Are you alright?”

No
, Stephen thought, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut, his grip on the receiver tight as his chests suffocating pressure on his heart and lungs.
No, I’m not alright. I’m losing my mind
, cried a tiny voice in his head. His own voice was silent.

“Stephen! Jesus Christ!” Danny yelled. “Can’t you hear me, or what… ?”

“Yes,” he managed finally. “I can hear you, Danny. I’m… I’m sorry…”

“What’s the matter?” Danny’s voice quieted, dropped an octave. There was concern there: mixed, to Stephen’s ears, with a wee drop of suspicion. Stephen wrestled with the words that wanted to come out, two conflicting messages that grappled for position:
I’m fine. Rudy who? Go away
on the one hand;
I’m going crazy. What do you know about Rudy? Please help me
on the other.

It was a draw. “I… I…” Stephen stammered, his voice cracking. “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m gonna have to call you back. I’m sorry.”

“But wait! Just let me ask you something…”

“I’ll call you back. Really. In a couple minutes.”
I have to hang up
, his mind warned him, emphatic.
I have to hang up now
.

“Just
wait
a minute, Ste…”

Stephen hung up the phone.

“Christ,” he moaned, his hand still on the receiver.

The phone rang again.

Stephen cried out, jerking backwards suddenly. Automatically, the receiver came up in his hand. He stared at it in shock and horror, as if it had just transformed itself into a lit stick of dynamite. Then slowly, very slowly, he brought it up to his ear.

“Hello?” he said, a trembling squeak.

“Stephen?” The voice was scarcely more than a whisper. He didn’t recognize it, per se; but there was something in it he connected with immediately. A terror very much like his own. Only worse.

“Who is this?” he croaked, his own voice hushed.

“Oh,
Stephen
…” the voice cried out, and then broke apart in a series of heartrending sobs.

Stephen didn’t know what to do. The caller was still unknown; he doubted that he’d ever heard a voice like that in his life. It sounded like a grade school girl who’d just watched her parents get skinned alive, aging ten thousand years in one horrifying instant.

He listened, helplessly. She cried… he knew, if nothing else, that the caller was female… for a solid three minutes before a word could come from either side. When it came, it was from the other end of the line: a plaintive moan, so utterly desolate that Stephen had to fight back his own tears at the sound of it.

“…please help me…”

And in that moment, Stephen knew precisely who he was talking to. The knowledge came like the serrated edge of a long bread knife, cold steel raking along his spinal column with inarguable yes-you-are-dead-now assurance. It came with an audible click in his mind, like the final closing of the morgue slab door. It came as a whisper that rang in his ears, saying
oh, God, he’s going for both of us.

“Josalyn?” he said, a weak hiss into the receiver. The crying from the other end intensified suddenly; he could almost see her sitting in her apartment, unable to speak, nodding helplessly at her blind telephone. The next question came automatically, before he had a chance to consider it.

“What has he done to you?”

The sobbing from the other end subsided as quickly as it rose, dying down to a trickle. He could feel her gathering up the power to speak as she cleared her throat and hesitated, then cleared her throat again.

He waited.

“He’s… going to kill me, Stephen.” The words seemed to have forced their way out of her throat by necessity. The struggle behind them was gruelingly clear. “I know he is. He killed…”

“
Who did he kill?
” He almost shouted it.

“M-my
cat
!” Josalyn screamed back. A fresh wave of sobs escaped her. She fought her way through them. “He k-k-killed Nigel, and…”

“Your
cat?
” He started laughing then: a horrible, cruel sound that seemed to be… no,
had
to be… coming from somewhere else. It scared the bejesus out of him, even as it gushed from him like blood from a spurting artery. “You call me because your stupid
cat
… ?” He was laughing too hard to continue.

Stunned silence from the other end. A sharp intake of breath that seemed to hold and hold forever, but only lasted a second.

And then she screamed.

“HE BROKE HIS FUCKING NECK!” Now she was like a mother, wailing over the corpse of her son. Stephen’s laughter cut off abruptly, a cold sweat patina oozing suddenly from his pores. “BROKE HIS NECK AND THREW HIM ACROSS THE GODDAMN APARTMENT! I WOKE UP, AND…”

“Wait a minute.” Stephen found himself waving away the mental cobwebs with his hand. “Wait just a minute. You mean that Rudy came into your apartment and…”

Josalyn paused for a moment; just long enough for her voice to drop down a couple of decibels. “It was a dream, Stephen. In my dream, it was happening to
me
. But…”

“Now, what kind of bull…” he began, the first ugly bubble rising to the surface and bursting.

“…but when I woke up, Nigel was… he was flying across the room, and… and there was all this
blood
, and…” Her voice decayed into sobbing again, through which she barely managed to say, “…I still can’t… I can’t b-bring myself to… to
touch
…”

Stephen was silent as a stuffed moose head on a wall. The only sound in the room was Josalyn’s anguish, pouring through the receiver, as he struggled to put his reeling thoughts in order.

The anger had gone back to wherever the hell it came from in the first place, another weird phenomenon to try and piece together with the other events of a life gone suddenly and completely haywire. Subway slaughter. Corpses staggering out of the tunnels, or rumors thereof. A friend who mysteriously disappeared, only to come back as a red-eyed, dead-looking sucker of bloody handkerchiefs who made cryptic, frightening phone calls in the middle of the night.

And who, it now appeared, could send out dreams that make you die.

It was a puzzle that should not be able to come together, like a model of the M.C. Escher waterfall that flows down and down until it reaches the top of itself again.

It should not come together. It should not make any kind of sense at all.

But it did. Somehow, suddenly, it did. And the room in which Stephen Parrish was sitting grew somehow, suddenly, extremely cold.

“Listen, Josalyn,” he said finally. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that something is definitely wrong…”

“
No sh-SHIT!
” Her laughter, hysterical and shrill, cut through his words and her tears like an ice pick through terry cloth.

“No, no,” he blurted defensively. Embarrassment flickered through him, then anger, both giving way to the memory of his cruel laughter from mere moments before. He swallowed it all and continued. “You’re not the first one to come to me about Rudy in the last forty-eight hours. And I… had an experience with him myself…”

“You… what?” That seemed to stop her for a moment. Stephen let an oddly triumphant smile flash across his face before continuing.

“Friday night. I… I ran into him on the subway. He was…” Searching for the right words. Compromising, in the end. “There was something seriously wrong with him. I don’t know what. But he was… oh, shit. Listen.”

“I think you should meet a couple of people tonight.” There was an assurance in his voice, as alien as the laughter from before. Telling of the plan that had just arrived, fullblown and utterly unexpected, in his mind. “The people who have been calling me. Like I said, I don’t know what’s going on. But if it’s all of a sudden as important as this, then maybe we’d better find out.”

Silence, from the other end.

“Josalyn?” No sound. It made him very nervous. “Josalyn? Are you there?”

A long moments pause. Then, in a frightened little girl voice, “You wouldn’t… this isn’t a…
trap
, is it? I mean…”

“No. Honest to God, no. It isn’t.” He hadn’t even considered it. But as he spoke, the image came to him: leading Josalyn down to the West 4
^th
Street station, down the first flight of stairs to that ominous level between. And there, in the darkness, his red eyes gleaming over that ghastly self-satisfied grin, was Rudy: his pale hands outstretched, his voice whispering
well done, Stephen. You have served me well
…

“No,” Stephen repeated, to himself this time. To himself, and to the voice that giggled malevolently in the back of his mind.

After he had gotten off the phone with Josalyn, Stephen sat on the edge of his bed and thought. The imaginary betrayal was still fresh in his mind, and it bothered the hell out of him. Like the mocking laughter. Like the fact that he had held out on Joseph Hunter, automatically and wholeheartedly
against
what he now felt to be his better judgment. Like a thousand other things he had done in the past week, and… yes, now that he thought about it… for as long as he could remember.

But that was far too much to think about.

Stephen found himself staring at the wastepaper basket next to his desk, with the crumpled sheets of manuscript and empty Tropicana orange juice containers jutting above the rim. He knew that, not too deeply buried in the debris, both halves of Joseph’s number were waiting him out. Waiting for him to rediscover his backbone, get himself together, and dig them out.

He’d made a point of hiding the napkin from view, in the hope that the old adage would hold true:
out of sight, out of mind
. Well, it hadn’t. Not a bit. He might as well have glued the thing to his forehead.

And now it’s come down to this
, he thought.
I can’t even pretend to ignore this any more. The next mistake might be the killing one
. He shuddered at the thought.

Then, slowly, he pulled himself to his feet and moved to the basket. Knelt in front of it. Meticulously began to remove the refuse, piece by piece, until he found what he was looking for.

Stephen put the two pieces of napkin on the floor and fit them together as best he could. Dampened to begin with, the thin, fibrous paper had pulled apart in the worst possible way: the numerals were blurred and stretched and jaggedly mangled. Joseph’s handwriting didn’t help matters, either: the least damaged number could have been either a one or a seven.

Frustration rippled through him in sickly little waves. “How am I supposed to do this?” he whined quietly, fidgeting with the pieces, knocking them out of alignment. “Oh, God
damn
it!” he yelled, throwing his arms up in a gesture of defeat.

That was when the tiny voice in his mind, very matter-of-factly, said
just dial the phone, stupid. Dial it until you get it right.

He slapped himself across the forehead. “Why didn’t you think of that, you dope?” he moaned; then he got to his feet with the napkin in hand, went over to the phone, and started running all the possible combinations.

On the first try, he got Antonio’s Pizza. “Sorry,” he said, hanging up. Next, he got a recording to the tune of
we’re sorry, the number you have reached is not a working
… That made him nervous. He hesitated for a moment before trying again.

The third call put him in touch with a Mr. Weinstein, who claimed to be locked in a hotel room in Queens. “Where’s Eddie?” Mr. Weinstein demanded. Stephen hung up without another word and tried again.

A sexy feminine voice informed him that he had reached Suzy’s Erotic Fantasies. He tried again.