LITMIR.BIZ

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not existed, but actually lived? Fifty-four years since birth: how many weeks was that? How many hours? Better think of it year by year; it was easier. One year was three hundred and sixty days, give or take a few. Say he slept a third of that. One hundred and twenty days in slumber-land. Oh Lord, already the moments dwindled. Half an hour a day on the john, or emptying his bladder. That was another seven and a half days a year, just doing the dirt. And shaving and showering, another ten days; and eating another thirty or forty; and all of this multiplied by fifty-four years …

      He began to sob. Get me out of here, he murmured, please God get me out of here, and I’ll live like I never lived, I’ll make every hour, every minute (even sleeping, even shitting) a minute spent trying to understand, so that when the next darkness comes along I won’t be so lost.

      At eleven Jose Luis got in the car and drove back down the Hill to see if he could spot the boss somewhere on the street. Drawing a blank there he called in at the Food Stop in the Mall, where they’d named a sandwich in honour of Mr Vance’s patronage (flatteringly, it was mostly meat), then at the record store, where the boss would frequently purchase a thousand dollars’ worth of stock. While quizzing Ryder, who owned the place, a customer came and announced to any who were interested that there was some serious shit going down in the East Grove, and did somebody get shot?

      The road down to the woods was closed by the time Jose Luis arrived, a solitary cop directing traffic to turn round.

      ‘No way through,’ he told Jose Luis. ‘The road’s closed.’

      ‘What happened? Who got shot?’

      ‘Nobody got shot. It’s just a crack in the road.’

      Jose Luis was out of the car now, staring past the cop to the woods.

      ‘My boss,’ he said, knowing he needn’t name the owner of the limo, ‘he was running down here this morning.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘He hasn’t come back yet.’

      ‘Oh shit. You’d better follow me.’

      They made their way through the trees in a silence broken only by barely coherent messages coming through on the cop’s radio, all of which he ignored, until the thicket opened into a clearing. Several uniformed police were setting up barriers at its fringes to prevent anyone straying where Jose Luis was now led. The ground beneath his feet was cracked, and the cracks widened as the cop led him to where his Chief was standing, staring at the earth. Long before he came near the spot Jose Luis knew what lay ahead. The crack in the street and those he’d stepped over to reach this place were the consequence of a larger disturbance: a crevice fully ten feet across, letting on to a devouring darkness.

      ‘What’s he want?’ the Chief demanded, jabbing his finger in Jose Luis’s direction. ‘We’re keeping this under wraps.’

      ‘Buddy Vance,’ the cop said.

      ‘What about him?’

      ‘He’s missing,’ Jose Luis said.

      ‘He went running –’ the cop explained.

      ‘Let him tell it,’ the Chief said.

      ‘This is where he goes running every morning. Only today he hasn’t come back.’

      ‘Buddy Vance?’ the Chief said. ‘The comedian?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      The Chief’s gaze left Jose Luis and returned to the hole.

      ‘Oh my Lord,’ he said.

      ‘How deep is it?’ Jose Luis asked.

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘The crack.’

      ‘It’s not a crack. It’s a fucking abyss. I dropped a stone down a minute ago. I’m still waiting for it to hit bottom.’

      The realization that he was alone came to Buddy slowly, like a memory stirred up from the silt at the bottom of his brain. Indeed at first he thought it was a memory, of a sand storm he’d been caught in once, on his third honeymoon, in Egypt. But he was lost and guideless in this maelstrom as he’d not been then. And it was not sand that stung his eyes back into sight, nor wind that beat his ears into hearing. It was another power entirely, less natural than a storm, and trapped as no storm had ever been here in a chimney of stone. He saw the hole he’d fallen down for the first time, stretching above him to a sunlit sky so far from him no hint of its reassurance touched him. Whatever ghosts haunted this place, spinning themselves into creation in front of him, they surely came from a time before his species was a gleam in evolution’s eye. Things awesomely simple; powers of fire and ice.

      He was not so wrong; and yet completely. The forms emerging from the darkness a short distance from where he lay seemed in one moment to resemble men like himself, and in the next unalloyed energies, wrapped around each other like champions in a war of snakes, sent from their tribes to strangle the life from each other. The vision ignited his nerves as well as his senses. The pain he’d been spared seeped into his consciousness, the trickle becoming first a stream and then a flood. He felt as though he was laid on knives, their points slicing between his vertebrae, puncturing his innards.

      Too weak even to moan, all he could be was a mute, suffering witness of the spectacle in front of him, and hope that salvation or death came quickly, to put him out of this agony. Best death, he thought. A godless sonofabitch like him had no hope of redemption, unless the holy books were wrong and fornicators, drunkards and blasphemers were fitted for paradise. Better death, and be done with it. The joke ended here.

      I want to die, he thought.

      As he formed the intention, one of the entities battling in front of him turned his way. He saw a face in the storm. It was bearded, its flesh so swelled with emotion it seemed to dwarf the body it was set upon, like that of a foetus: skull domed, eyes vast. The terror he felt when it laid its gaze on him was nothing to that which he felt when its arms reached for him. He wanted to crawl away into some niche and escape the touch of the spirit’s fingers, but his body was beyond coaxing or bullying.

      ‘I am the Jaff,’ he heard the bearded spirit say. ‘Give me your mind, I want terata.’

      As the fingertips grazed Buddy’s face he felt a spurt of power, white like lightning, cocaine, or semen, run through his head and down into his anatomy. With it, the recognition that he’d made an error. The split flesh and broken bone was not all he was. Despite his immoralities, there was something in him the Jaff coveted; a corner of his being which this occupying force could profit by. He’d called it terata. Buddy had no idea what that word meant. But he understood all too clearly the terror when the spirit entered him. The touch was lightning, burning a path into his essential self. And a drug too, making images of that invasion cavort in his mind’s eye. And jism? That as well, or else why did a life he’d never had before, a creature born in his pith from the Jaff’s rape, leap out of him now?

      He glimpsed it as it went. It was pale and primitive. No face, but legs by the scrabbling dozen. No mind, either, except to do the Jaff’s will. The bearded face laughed to see it. Withdrawing his fingers from Buddy, the spirit let his other arm drop from the neck of his enemy and, riding the terata headed up the rock chimney towards the sun.

      The remaining combatant fell back against the cavern wall. From where he lay Buddy caught a glimpse of the man. He looked much less the warrior than his opponent, and consequently more brutalized by their exchange. His body was wasted, his expression one of weary distraction. He stared up the rock chimney.

      ‘Jaffe!’ he called, his shout shaking dust from the shelves Buddy had struck on his way down. There was no answer from the shaft. The man looked down towards Buddy, narrowing his eyes.

      ‘I’m Fletcher,’ he said, his voice mellifluous. He moved towards Buddy, trailing a subtle light. ‘Forget your pain.’

      Buddy tried his damnedest to

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