The Call of Distant Shores Read online

  “Righty, tighty,” I gasped.

  “What?” Linda said.

  “Lovely Lucy,” I muttered.

  I spun the valve. My knees had gone rubbery, and when I wrenched on the valve stem, Linda let go of my shoulders, leaving me to find my own balance. I never had a chance. The world lurched, and I toppled. For just a second, I held onto the vice grips and pressed my hand into the wall, but it was no good. I fell, turning slowly. That moment stretched into a surreal eternity.

  As I turned, the lot behind me came into view. I couldn’t see any of it clearly, but what I did see wasn’t possible. Linda held the hose, her hand on the metal spray nozzle, gripping tight. Water arched up and over the spiral of statues, except, something was wrong. The statues were moving, and they weren’t …white. Not exactly. Some still were, in near the center, but the others were moving. The spiral hadn’t broken – it spun. The larger statues – creatures – moved steadily inward. The smallest, in the deep center, were still solid, and the larger ones, moving in, crushed them to white dust.

  The water slowed them. Just as I hit the ground I saw Linda’s father, like a professional wrestler bursting out of a pile of bodies, press to the surface, coated in white slime. He fought through the sliding, chattering horde toward the trough of mortar, now overflowing with water.

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell him to look out, as one of the creatures spun on him and lifted a huge claw. Water splashed into the thing’s face, and I remember hearing Linda’s voice.

  “Daddy!”

  The throbbing in my head hit a crescendo, and darkness swallowed me whole.

  When I woke, I was in my apartment. Light streamed in from the window, and my head felt like it had been used for a drum. I heard something move, and it all came back to me in a flash. I scrabbled back, hit my head on the headboard, and cried out.

  “Hey! Take it easy!”

  Linda was there then, sitting on the edge of my bed. She’d changed clothes, and she was smiling.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Your father?

  “Everything is fine,” she said. “You were wonderful.”

  I sat up a bit straighter, shook my head, regretted it, and frowned. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and staggered to my feet. I realized in that instant that I was only wearing boxers, but I wasn’t in the mood to worry over it. If she was there, she’d probably been there when I was brought in – as likely as not she’d stripped me. I left my room, and I heard her following close behind.

  “Really,” she said. “Everything is fine.”

  I hurried to the back door, flung it open, and stepped out onto the back steps. Then I stopped and stood very still, staring. I felt Linda’s hands rest on my shoulder. I started to shrug them off, but couldn’t find the strength.

  “How?” I asked.

  The back lot was empty. The trough stood right where it had been, but it was empty. There was a light misting of white powder on the ground, and there were heavy tire tracks, as if a truck had been backed down the alley and in on top of the ground when it was wet. The statues were gone. All of them. There was no sign that anything odd had happened. The hose lay on the ground like a dead snake, and no one was in sight. There was a large pile of canvas bags piled against the wall beside the back of Linda’s apartment. Small mounds of white powder had leaked from the torn corners of a few.

  “What is that?” I asked, uncertain what else to say.

  “Mortar,” she said. “It’s mortar. Daddy will have to go back to work soon.”

  I turned to stare at her. She didn’t take her hands off of my shoulders. We were very close.

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “He almost died. We almost died. What were those things? Why were they in that spiral, and what happened with the mortar, and the water? Jesus, I…”

  Linda leaned in and kissed me full on the lips. The scent I’d been unable to identify wafted around me – something with a hint of trees and the ocean. Something damp, but compelling. I tried to speak. I really did. I tried to pull away and ask again about that horrible spiral, those crustacean monstrosities crumbling, chittering, rushing in around the back lot toward the center where…what?

  I felt Linda’s hands slide beneath my shirt, and I made a last attempt to push her away. I saw her father’s face, the wild terror in his eyes as the white powder sloughed off the largest of the lobster things and they lurched inward over their smaller brethren, scrabbling inward toward that obscured center. How small had the innermost statues been? What would have happened if those larger ones had forced their way to the center? Where were the statues now?

  I remembered the truck tracks. I thought about the trough, and the bags of mortar.

  “What about the faucet?” I gasped.

  Linda paused for just a second. She pulled back, and her smile widened.

  “We sent for a plumber,” she said. “Daddy is paying. I told him…you’d be busy.”

  Keeping the tenants happy is my job, and it was obvious that only one thing was going to work at that particular moment. I intended to go back to the rear of the building to inspect the faucet. I meant to check out that mortar and the tire tracks, and see what I could find out about my psycho Maine tenants…but somehow it seemed less important than my new business connections.

  I spent a lot of time with Linda after that day, and with her father. I met the drivers of the truck, strange pale men with heavy New England accents who showed up like clockwork once every three months. There was a lot of work to be done, keeping the apartments in good repair, and working out back. The spiral had to remain complete, after all, and mortar isn’t an easy medium – even if you have a latent artistic streak.

  Someday I’ll walk the spiral to its center and see where it leads. I feel drawn to it. For now, I’m happy with Linda. She’s a bit of a tart, but she’s very affectionate. I even get up early on Saturdays. After all, as building superintendent, I set my own schedule.

  The Milk of Paradise

  The flick of a thumb, bright sparks and the faded Zippo lighter with the Grateful Dead emblem emblazoned across its front, came to life. The scent of lighter fluid mingled with Sandalwood and hemp. Shadows slid along the floor, wavering and dancing as long slender fingers raised the lighter, bringing the flame to rest beneath a dangling metal ball. The ball was perforated, an old tea ball – an infuser, Art had called it – dangling from a silver chain, suspended about a foot beneath an arching wrought iron frame. Beneath it, glittering and green, sat a glass, half-full of a liquid too odd in coloration to be taken seriously. Art had a name for the liquid, as well. He called it Flubber.

  Leaning in close, long dark hair dangling over her wrist, Belle watched the ball intently, holding the flame to its base. The heat from the lighter set the chain in motion, buffeting it ever-so-slightly as the point where flame met metal grew hotter. Or maybe it was her breath. It didn't matter – not as long as the pendulous motion didn't carry the ball beyond the boundaries of the glass beneath it.

  The sickly sweet stench of burnt sugar wafted across the room like the aftermath of a bad caramel, but Belle paid it no notice. She watched the ball spin in lazy arcs over the glass, and, at last, the sizzle of thick brown liquid as the sugar inside melted and slipped through the infuser. Dripping.

  Art watched, though not as closely as Belle. He sat back in an overstuffed faux leather armchair with one hand curled around a bottle of beer, and the other held up and to the side. He held a slender pipe between thumb and forefinger, angled carefully away from his face, as if anything could have prevented smoke from burning his eyes in a room so full of fumes. Incense. Tobacco. The hash that was charring to ash in his small bowl. The sugar in the infuser, dripping, each drop splashing into the green liquid beneath with an odd sizzle as heat met room-temperature liquid.

  Art had played a game much like this with his high school buddies. A baggie, a glass of water, and flame. The dripping, molten plastic made a distinctive sound when it hit the cold
liquid. ZILCH! He heard that sound now, drifting through memory as he brought the pipe to his lips again.

  In the glass beneath the infuser, the green shifted with each zilching drop, growing more amber – less flubber. Art grinned at the thought. He imagined the glass rising and floating about the room as Belle, irritated, grabbed for it with long fingernails, trying to keep it from spilling.

  "It'll never get off the ground," he said to no one in particular. Belle either didn't or wouldn't hear him, and no one else was in the room. The image of Robin Williams, tiny fists pounding against the inside of the glass as the molten sugar dropped around his head like lava and the glass drifting toward the ceiling momentarily captured his attention, and he snorted, barely containing the laugh. Barely containing the last hit off the pipe. No smoke wasted.

  Belle had been at it for hours. Hell, she'd been at it for fucking days – maybe her whole life. Chasing the green. To Art she looked like some sort of demented alchemist trying to will her lead into gold.

  "It's just a fucking drink," he said at last, irritated by her inattention to anything but the glass. He watched a few moments longer, the silence echoing more loudly as the sound of his own voice faded, ignored. He stood, downed the rest of his lukewarm beer in a single swallow and slammed the bottle on the table.

  Belle turned to him for just a second, tilting her head at an inquisitive angle, her eyes deep in some other place. Fevered.

  "It's just a fucking drink." Art repeated. He turned away and slipped out through a set of green plastic beaded curtains that separated the room they were in from the dingy kitchen.

  Belle turned back to the glass. On the floor to her left a spiral notebook lay open near the center. A pen lay atop the pages where lines were carefully filled with letters and numbers. Many of these were rubbed out, erased, or, in a single instance, scribbled over with such force that the page had torn. There were stains on the page as well. In the dim light, they might have been from tears, or the dripping of sweat – the condensation from a bottle of beer – or the deep green, shifting-toward-amber liquid in the glass.

  1885 - France - Incomplete

  .025 kilograms of dried wormwood

  .05 kilograms of anise

  .05 kilograms of fennel

  .95 liters of 85 percent ethanol

  .45 liters of water

  .001 kilogram of Roman wormwood

  .001 kilogram of hyssop

  5 grams of lemon balm

  (All original numbers divided by 100)

  Let the mixture steep for at least 12 hours in the pot of a double boiler. Add water and apply heat; collect distillate. To approximately half the distillate, add Roman wormwood, hyssop and lemon balm, all of which have been dried and finely divided. Extract at a moderate temperature, then siphon off the liquor, filter, and reunite with the remaining distillate. Dilute with water to produce approximately 1 liter of absinthe with a final alcohol concentration of 74 percent by volume. AND – SOMETHING – FUCKING – ELSE ...

  The lettering grew deep and frustrated at this point, slashing across the lined paper at angry angles. Words were scrawled, then marked out and replaced with other words, also marked out. In the center of the page, about three lines beneath the recipe itself and underlined so deeply the page was scored, the word Peppermint remained. Alone, of a small battlefield of herbs and obscure terms, Peppermint survived.

  Belle leaned closer over the glass. She'd removed the flame from the tea infuser and was watching the liquid intently. Where globs of molten sugar had struck, whirling tendrils of yellowish hue spun down into the thick liquid. Belle's hair dangled dangerously close, interwoven with several feathers and a small chain of beads. Her eyes glittered – green eyes so dark they hinted of black. Her tongue slid back and forth across her teeth, touching the cheeks on either side, then swirling.

  Belle waited until the peppermint in her mouth had faded to such a thin wafer it threatened to melt over her lips and disappear, then she bent quickly and slipped her tongue into the absinthe, letting the ghost of the mint slide into the green depths. Her eyes closed, just for an instant, as she made contact with that slick, wet surface, then she drew back. Peppermint. Ghosts and hints in books she'd spent long hours poring over hinted that this was the secret. She'd been told it soothed the stomach. She'd been told that slid round and round a lover's cock with the tongue, it could bring hallucinations. She'd been told it belonged in the Absinthe - told by voices long dead, preserved on parchments and the leaves of tattered books. Recipes penciled into the margins of notebooks and tucked into unlikely hiding in diaries and family bibles.

  Absinthe was the key, but it had to be the Absinthe. His absinthe. Was it right? Were the caves of ice raised from stalagmites of peppermint? Did they tingle with too-clean, too-bright taste, or would that fail as it blended with the wormwood's bitter kiss? What did he see?

  The mint drifted slowly, so thin it resembled a coin-shaped shard of ice. Belle watched, waited, as it fluttered down to the bottom of the glass. Fluttered and melted, flew and flown and – gone. The absinthe had swallowed it completely.

  Art shuffled back into the room, but she paid no attention to him. She was staring into the green depths of the glass, mesmerized. He watched her, sipping on a fresh beer and frowning. Her hair dangled over and around the glass, and with the dim candlelight flickering, he could catch green glimmers. The wink of some huge, forgotten emerald. The eye of a great cat. Spider webs of dark hair shimmered around it, slender pale arms braced against the floor.

  "Found the Flubber, then, did you?" he asked softly, tipping the bottle up again. He tasted the beer, but he remembered the bite of the Absinthe. He remembered her concentration, and how it shifted. He remembered long fingers and curved nails wrapped around a different glass, a slightly different green. He remembered the taste, and the burn. He remembered.

  Art turned away and lurched through the room, down the hall that branched left and right. He turned left, not bothering with the lights. Two doors ignored, the third entered and he stopped, tilting the bottle up and closing his eyes. It was there. He knew it was there, didn't need to see to know. Moonlight streamed in the window and glowed on the surface of a canvas, reclining on an easel and watching him in return.

  To one side, on a dresser that had been recruited as a workbench, his palette sat, paint dried on the surface in careless blobs, brush dry-tight in the deep blue. The palette itself was a work of art, a reflection of pain. Art stepped closer and tipped the bottle back, gazing at the canvas. He turned, grabbed a candle from the dresser and lit it with a match pulled from ratty jeans.

  The light flared. Heineken bottle candelabra gleam lit the surface of the canvas with a dim, yellow glow. Art drank, and stared, and drank again. He reached out with one hand, tracing the brilliantly hued parapet of a domed cathedral, drawing down to rings of fruit trees, littered with bright-colored fruit, rooted in beds of flowers. Ice coated the surface of the cathedral-like doors. Behind, rising up and up, the mountains disappeared into clouds that shimmered with colors, a cotton-candy treat for the gods.

  The temple was an entrance, doors swung wide to reveal a jeweled cavern within, lights placed strategically, every brilliant beam reflected and refracted, reflected again, dancing from surface to surface. Ice. It was a cave of ice. Art drained his beer and wished it was something stronger, something with ice he could swirl around in his mouth as he had when he painted. Cold, biting, distant. Footsteps drifted in, quiet and rhythmic, but Art didn't acknowledge them.

  The scent of jasmine teased his nostrils. Art felt a small shiver run up his spine, but still, he didn't turn. It was Sammy. She made little sound, even when she was in the room you had to concentrate to realize she wasn't part of one of the tapestries on the wall, or an oversized doll. Sammy was an afterthought to the world, so paper-thin, frail and pale she shimmered and sometimes, if you didn't look closely enough, she wasn't there at all.

  "It's like she's made of ice," Belle had said one day, watch
ing Sammy flit about the room. "The ice you see, just after it freezes, so thin on top of the water you know that if a wave rose up from inside, it would shatter."

  Art set the empty beer bottle beside the dried palette on the dresser and placed the candle in the top, dripping hot wax around the rim to hold it in place.

  "Pretty," Sammy whispered, standing very close to his side and staring at the painting, as he knew she'd stared a thousand times before, when he was there, when he was out. When he was sleeping. Sammy was fascinated with the painting, and when she wasn't playing her music, she was staring at the painting.

  At first, Art had been jealous. He liked Sammy, and he loved the painting. Both meant a lot to him, but neither would share. Sammy didn't ignore Art, but she didn't adore him. She adored the painting, worshiped it, and that was supposed to have been Belle. The painting was not for Sammy. The house, its walls dripping thick with images and angst, dreams and nightmares leaking into them, all of it was an extension of Belle. The painting was a failure. Art had failed, and for his pain, a woman he quietly and privately loved had fallen in love, instead, with his failure.

  Art turned, pinched the wick of the candle between his thumb and forefinger, relishing the heat as he held tight. The burn. It took his thoughts away, for an instant. He turned and headed to the door. Sammy didn't move. She stared at the painting as if the light had never shifted. As if seeing the same image she'd seen by flickering candlelight. As if she had never seen what Art had seen at all, or what he'd painted, but something more.

  Head pounding, Art paced back toward the kitchen for another drink. Stronger, and more final. Something tall and amber and clinking with ice that would burn his throat as the candle had burned his fingers, numbing the pain.