Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

George looks up to see a sketch of a man with a round bald head, round neck, round torso, and round arms, just like he saw, the one bathing in the bloated spring river.

“Holy shit,” George says. “That sure does look like him.”

“You gotta call the Staties, George? Let ’em know?” Kemper says, but with questions littering his words.

Several people in the bar mutter, “What?” with scrunched brows, questioning whether any of George’s tales could possibly have an ounce of truth.

“No fucking way that’s George’s phony bologna bare-ass snowman,” Pete says, to which daft Bob scoffs and laughs, but with less assuredness than when he told his own George tale.

George considers their comments while looking at the screen. He takes his filled thermos as Kemper hands it to him, turns, and walks to the door. He knows he saw a bare-ass man made of a stack of circles bathing in the river this last spring, just like he said, but these muggers always make him question his own tales. I know what I saw. Right?

Anyway, whatever, whatever! He yells at his own mind. You can think more on it as you snowcat tonight, don’t listen to these muggers putting doubt in you. Focus on the plan with Karen. Tonight is the night no matter what!

As George goes through the motions of slipping back into his spikes and Richard’s Mountain coat, placing his eggs-n-bacon pocket snack and thermos in coat pockets, and walking to his truck, he sets his intention on Karen, but also on the lost love in his life. Ten years ago, George had love in his life. Ten years ago, in fact, he was with his beloved Martha, a fellow Vermont duck hunter who he’d met in the guild.

One day, after one year of dating and duck hunting together in Vermont, George bit his bottom lip, as Martha perused used copies of poetry books in New York City’s Strand Bookstore, where they liked to go on mini-weekend vacations to browse poetry, for Martha, and mysteries and thrillers and fishing and hunting guides for George, and also for Martha. And sometimes historical fiction, if it involved tales of royalty. To them, amongst the “eighteen miles of books,” as the Strand advertised, they felt they were in a “heavenly displacement.” Yes, indeed, the Strand for them was a celestial atmosphere that allowed for a feeling of floating above the otherwise green-shining, leaf-littered, snow-packed, streams-rushing, beautiful but predictable, seasonal cycles of home-base Vermont.

On this day in the Strand with Martha, having near bit through his bottom lip, Martha pulled from a shelf a rough-leather copy of Emily Dickinson poems, which copy George knew she’d pull, for he’d planted it there. He’d previously rushed in ahead of her, saying he had to find a bathroom, and in the process and hurry he accidentally stomped another man’s foot. He was so nervous and wanting to surprise Martha so bad, he simply couldn’t stop to help or apologize. His entire attention became laser focused on his mission with Martha.

And there’s something in George’s subconscious about all of this, the rushing, the foot stomp, that has always been an unsettling undercurrent to him. For he shouldn’t remember that part at all, but he does. And today, in walking in his spikes in a blizzard back toward his company truck, that beginning part, the rushing and colliding with another in the Strand, is strangely clear as a bell.

But George shakes away strange thinking and continues on in his remembrance of Martha. Steeped now within the outside world of the blizzard, a howl of wind greets him, or some howl. Cope? Nahh, just the wind. It ain’t Old Cope. Can’t be still out in the world, no, not Cope. I miss you, Cope. I miss you, Martha.

George walks on in the onslaught of snow. He walks slow, safe, in his grip shoes.

Back in that high emotion day in the Strand, as he knew she would, when Martha flipped to the copyright page to check the copyright date in the planted leather Dickinson, for she had a collection to curate, Martha gasped. Therein, written on Richard’s Mountain letterhead, was this note:

Martha,

Live, extended

in this heavenly displacement

in this 99th way

in this run of ducks;

In our pages of,

crimes of love

tangled by, magnificent lies—

devil-tooth spies

slick guys and Queens.

I love how you love them

Hover above the tree lines

and gorge streams;

Rise beyond their laws and their lessons

Engraved for those, stuck in snows,

Hiding in grasses,

deep treads in spring mud

Float in our world of lawless reigns

on page prints with cracked spines

Our time or no time

In book aisles,

By wolf dens,

Bar stools and dog walks

I ask thee,

Please save me.

Marry me,

It might not have been worthy of Dickinson, but it was nature centered and spoke of the freeness that love brought. The protection. He’d wanted to throw into a magical maelstrom all the locations where they loved being together, Vermont, duck hunting, walking Cope on mountain trails, the Strand, in books about all kinds of tales, as if some gravity-free, magical heaven in which they lived, always in love’s safety.

Anyway, this was his intention, a rather subjective inspiration he gleaned in sneaking reads of Martha’s Dickinson collection, after Martha fell asleep at night. This proposal, this very poem, was a full year, night after night, in the planning and editing and fretting he’d be able to rise to the exalted pedestal Martha deserved.

He watched while she read, her eyes widening in surprise.

He held his breath.

Martha looked up, at first in a stare, no smile.

And then, Martha smiled. Martha broke down and cried. Martha said yes, and Martha gasped, and said yes, yes, yes , a gorgeous, unending song of yesses.

“This is the best poem ever written in the history of all poems,” Martha said through yesses and tears.

They forehead-to-forehead rolled their heads together in the poetry section of the Strand; Martha clutching the proposal note to her heart, and George clutching the Dickinson to his heart. George swears that in memory of this moment, a blackness, or a presence, some something was watching them with evil eyes, in the shadows of the perpendicular stack. He swears he felt that evil presence exactly then, and not in retrospect, after what happened to Martha four hours later.

George is five feet off his truck now, and those four lines he drew on the side are all gone. The Richard’s Mountain decal has been re-covered in side-swept sticky snow. Drifts of snow lean half-up the chained tires, and the white roof of the truck has its own flat hat of snow, as does the hood. So isn’t it odd, George thinks, that his footsteps are still visible by his driver’s door?

Those aren’t my boot prints.

George quick presses the unlock button on his universal company fob, yanks open his door, and his heart fills with fire. Raging, wild, destructive fire.

The cubby is empty.

Martha’s special leather Dickinson is gone.

So, too, is George’s hunting knife.

George backs away from the door. Looks everywhere all over the parking lot, but it is hard to see. The snow is falling sideways, and seemingly, upside down in this wind. He sees no moving person. The howling wind further obscures his senses. He notes the outlines of cars and trucks in the parking lot. Kyle’s is gone.

Had to be fucking Kyle, that prick. Bob, Eli, the others, they’re still in the bar and wrapping up to come to shift. Kyle’s got a universal fob. That prick.