Mark Rogers - The Dead

“Wife left me,” Duncan said.

“No, really?” Gary answered, trying to sound upset about something which didn’t matter to him at all. “That’s a real shame.”

Duncan nodded. “I thought I’d come back, spend some time with the folks.”

“Any chance you might be able to patch it up?”

“I don’t even know where she went.”

“Oh,” Gary said.

“Don’t have a clue,” Duncan said.

“Ah,” Gary said.

Another pause, longer and more embarrassing than the last.

“What’s with the telescope?” Gary asked.

“Bought it the other day. Always wanted one. I’m going to take it out on Duck Island and stargaze.”

“Why the island?”

“To get away from town. It says in the manual that lights make it hard to see anything.”

“Full moon tonight,” Gary said. “It’ll blot out most of the stars.”

“I’ll look at the moon then.”

“Well, you don’t have to go out to the island for that. It’s bright enough even with the-”

“You always were a pain in the ass,” Duncan said, jokingly, but with an edge in his voice. “I’ll just wait till the moon sets, then look at the stars.”

“Going to be a long time.”

“Maybe I just feel like sitting out there alone, okay?”

“Sure, sure. Hey look, I’ll be seeing you, Dunk.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Gary started off down the street. He took the flask out and had a sip. Behind him, he could hear Duncan muttering to himself.

That was one friendship Gary didn’t feel the slightest temptation to renew. Episodes from its collapse came rushing back to him. Duncan sure was a stubborn bastard; once he got an idea in his head, there was just no talking to him. But if he thought something was going to be great, that was a sure sign it would leave him totally dissatisfied-whereupon he’d stick with it until the wheels came off, making everyone furious in the process. He was probably going to go out on the island and stay there for hours, even though he was going to be bored silly in fifteen minutes… Gary knew just what had happened to Duncan’s marriage.

But I bet Dunk doesn’t have the foggiest.

Gary drifted off toward the beachfront. Hitting the boardwalk, he went north. Most of the concessions and arcades were closing up; there were few people about.

He walked all the way up to the north end pavilion, which bordered on the Squankum Inlet. There he watched the boats coming in, passing between the piled-granite jetties.

He remembered fishing off the south jetty with his father when he was seven years old; his eyes began to mist over. Three brief days before, his father had been more than just a memory. Now he was nothing else.

Unless you wanted to count a hunk of meat at Van Nuys and Monahan’s, about to be (or perhaps even now) carved up and filled with embalming fluid.

And where was Mom? Was she another potential job for those funeral-parlor ghouls? What had happened to her? To all those people who had disappeared?

Gary’s head spun. He was totally exhausted, running on vapor. But horribly, he didn’t feel at all sleepy yet.

He decided to go out on the jetty and watch the waves come in. Heading back toward the beach admission booths, he went down the steps and out across the sand.

As he moved farther and farther from the boardwalk lights, the sky seemed to brighten, becoming a pale blue-grey, sprinkled with only the most brilliant stars. Moonlight gleamed on the sand, glinted off the swells rolling beyond.

He passed over the crown of the shallow slope that marked the high-water line, striding over piled seaweed, popping small bladders underfoot; the air was full of the weed’s salty smell. The fringe of a wave nearly caught him, but he leaped back.

Out at sea, several fishing-boats were going by, superstructures ablaze with lights. Farther east, a huge tanker was a massive dark outline.

Close ahead the low rampart of the jetty stood out clearly. At its end rose a skeletal metal tower, some thirty feet tall, with a flashing lime-green beacon at the top.

Gary came to the rocks and pressed up toward the top of the jetty. In the moonlight, the white paint favored by local graffiti artists was positively fluorescent; he puzzled briefly at several cryptic messages, Vikings 37X Eat It being perhaps the most obscure.

He went some distance along the jetty’s top, spotted what looked like a good place to sit down, and parked himself, facing south with his back to a boulder.

The moon looked as if it were hanging directly over the border between sea and beach; the surf was a silverlit fury of water and spray.

Hell, Gary thought, if that moon was any brighter, there’d be a rainbow . He took a hit from his flask.

The wind began to blow harder. Despite the warmth the liquor sent coursing through his veins, the breeze still cut.

God, is this really July?

He began thinking about that nice warm bed back at the house. Yes, it was time to head on home. Maybe there’d be news about Mom…

“Dammit, God,” he said, “I know I don’t believe in you, but please let her be okay.”

He was about to get up when he noticed something drifting in on one of the combers. Dark and rectangular, it looked like a piece of plywood, no, was too thick for that, riding a bit high in the water, although the stability of its movements suggested that most of it was beneath the surface…

Back of a chair , he decided.

Then he took one step farther.

An airline seat .

The waves pushed it closer to the shore. Soon it was in the surf. Gary sat motionless, hoping his worst suspicion wouldn’t be confirmed. He tried to think of something else that could be attached-

(With a seatbelt, Gary?)

To an airline seat, something else besides a…

The object tilted in the surf, and a wave caught it, tumbling the whole mass over. Sitting there serenely, as though he were asleep and not a day-old drowned corpse, was a dead gentleman in a business suit. It was hard to tell at that distance, but he seemed to have a large crab clinging to his face.

Gary felt suddenly sick, but parts of his mind remained strangely objective about the whole business. Should he try to haul the guy up on the beach? What exactly should he say when he phoned the cops?

Still he hadn’t moved. Civic duty or no, he found he had no inclination to. Used to dead bodies neatly tucked into coffins, behaving themselves at funeral parlors, he was totally unprepared to deal with one in the process of washing ashore. And this one was an Italian tourist, no less. All the way from Rome, maybe, four thousand miles to drown off the Jersey coast.

The seat shifted with each wave, but it had pretty much run aground. Surf sloshed over the man’s face, but the crab was still clinging to him. Looked like it had him by the mouth. Big damn crab.

No seafood for a year, Gary told himself.

That was when he saw the corpse reach up and tear the crustacean off.

What the-

A wave splashed over the body. When it receded, the corpse’s hand was back at its side.

Old eyes playing tricks on you, Gary thought. Too much scotch. Wasn’t any crab to begin with-

This line of argument was cut short as the corpse’s pale hands whipped to the seatbelt and undid it.

Gary pressed himself slowly back against the boulder, trying to melt into the stone, even as he ran through the very compelling reasons why he had nothing to fear and couldn’t possibly have seen what he’d just seen…

With a fearsomely quick movement, the corpse rolled from the seat, knocking it on its side as it passed over the armrest; then in an explosive splash it jacknifed up into a sitting position. Chin dripping foam, it appeared to be eyeing the jetty.