Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

“Well, I wish I’d catch it,” I said. “With me, it’s same old same old. Drudgeree, drudgeroo. Except for Andrea’s back.”

“Andrea? You mean you guys are dating?”

“I mean back as in back in my house. Living with me.”

“Damn!” he said. “That’s incredible!”

We sat in two chairs like two inverted tents on steel frames, as uncomfortable as my upstairs couch, and I told him about it.

“So it’s going okay?” he asked.

“Terrific, I think. But what do I know? She said it was a trial period, so I could get home tonight and she might be gone. I’ve never been able to figure her out.”

“Andrea. Damn! I saw her at the club, but I didn’t realize she was with you. I just had time to wave.” He leaned across the space between us and high-fived me. “Now maybe you’ll stop going around like someone stole your puppy.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said.

He chuckled. “Naw. Which is why the people of Black William, when asked the date, often reply, ‘Six years, two months, and twelve days since the advent of Vernon’s Gloom.’”

We moved on to other topics, among them the club, business, and, as I made to leave, I gestured at Rudy’s grotesque trophy and said, “While those creative juices are flowing, you ought to design a fishing lure, so I can watch you hook into the Loch Polozny Monster.”

Rudy laughed and said, “Maybe if I have a couple of minutes. I’m going to keep working on the comic. Whatever this shit is, it’s bound to go away.”

I was fooling around in the studio one evening, ostensibly cleaning up the tape we’d rolled the previous weekend at the Crucible, hoping to get a live rendition of “Stars Seen Through Stone” clean enough for the EP, but I was, instead, going over a tape I’d made, trying to find some ounce of true inspiration in it, finding none, wondering why this wave of creativity—if it, indeed, existed—had blessed Rudy’s house and not mine. It was after seven; Stanky was likely on his way home from the library, and I was thinking about seeing if Andrea wanted to go out, when she leaned in the doorway and asked if she was interrupting. I told her, no, not at all, and she came into the booth and sat next to me at the board, looking out at the drum kit, the instruments, the serpents’ nest of power cords.

“When we were married, I didn’t get what you saw in this,” she said. “All I saw was the damage, the depravity, the greed. Now I’ve been practicing, I realize there’s more or less the same degree of damage and greed and depravity in every enterprise. You can’t see it as clearly as you do in the music business, but it’s there.”

“Tell me what I see that’s good.”

“The music, the people.”

“None of that lasts,” I said. “All I am’s a yo-yo tester. I test a thousand busted yo-yos, and occasionally I run across one that lights up and squeals when it spins.”

“What I do is too depressing to talk about. It’s rare when anyone I represent has a good outcome, even if they win. Corporations delay and delay.”

“So it’s disillusionment that’s brought us together again.”

“No.” She looked at me steadily. “Do you love me?”

“Yeah, I love you. You know I do. I never stopped. There was a gap…”

“A big gap!”

“The gap made it more painful, but that’s all it did.”

She played with dials on the sound board, frowning as if they were refusing to obey her fingers.

“You’re messing up my settings,” I said.

“Oh… sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just you don’t lie to me anymore. You used to lie all the time, even about trivial things. I’m having trouble adjusting.”

I started to deny it, but recognized that I couldn’t. “I was angry at you. I can’t remember why, exactly. Lying was probably part of it.”

“I was angry at you, too.” She put her hands back on the board, but twisted no dials. “But I didn’t lie to you.”

“You stopped telling me the truth,” I said.

“Same difference.”

The phone rang; in reflex, I picked up and said, “Soul Kiss.”

It was Stanky. He started babbling, telling me to come downtown quick.

“Whoa!” I said. “If this is about me giving you a ride…”

“No, I swear! You gotta see this, man! The stars are back!”

“The stars.”

“Like the one we saw at the library. The lights. You better come quick. I’m not sure how long it’ll last.”

“I’m kind of busy,” I said.

“Dude, you have got to see this! I’m not kidding!”

I covered the phone and spoke to Andrea. “Want to ride uptown? Stanky says there’s something we should see.”

“Maybe afterward we could stop by my place and I could pick up a few things?”

I got back on the phone. “Where are you?”

Five minutes later we were cutting across the park toward the statue of Black William, beside which Stanky and several people were standing in an island of yellow light—I had no time to check them out, other than to observe that one was a woman, because Stanky caught my arm and directed me to look at the library and what I saw made me unmindful of any other sight. The building had been rendered insubstantial, a ghost of itself, and I was staring across a dark plain ranged by a dozen fuzzy white lights, some large, some small, moving toward us at a slow rate of speed, and yet perhaps it was not slow—the perspective seemed infinite, as if I were gazing into a depth that, by comparison to which, all previously glimpsed perspectives were so limited as to be irrelevant. As the lights approached, they appeared to vanish, passing out of frame, as if the viewing angle we had been afforded was too narrow to encompass the scope of the phenomenon. Within seconds, it began to fade, the library to regain its ordinary solidity, and I thought I heard a distant gabbling, the sound of many voices speaking at once, an army of voices (though I might have manufactured this impression from the wind gusting through the boughs); and then, as that ghostly image winked out of existence, a groaning noise that, in my opinion, issued from no fleshly throat, but may have been produced by some cosmic stress, a rip in the continuum sealing itself or something akin.

Andrea had at some point latched onto my arm, and we stood gaping at the library; Stanky and the rest began talking excitedly. There were three boys, teenagers, two of them carrying skateboards. The third was a pale, skinny, haughty kid, bespotted with acne, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, black overcoat. They displayed a worshipful attitude toward Stanky, hanging on his every word. The woman might have been the one with whom Stanky had been speaking at the Crucible before Carol made her move. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, Italian-looking, with black hair and olive skin, in her twenties, and betrayed a compete lack of animation until Stanky slipped an arm around her; then she smiled, an expression that revealed her to be moderately attractive.

The skateboarders sped off to, they said, “tell everybody,” and this spurred me to take out my cell phone, but I could not think who to call. Rudy, maybe. But no one in authority. The cops would laugh at the report. Stanky introduced us to Liz (the woman lowered her eyes) and Pin (the goth kid looked away and nodded). I asked how long the phenomenon had been going on before we arrived and Stanky said, “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Have you seen it before?”

“Just that time with you.”

I glanced up at Black William and thought that maybe he had intended the statue as a warning… though it struck me now that he was turning his head back toward the town and laughing.

Andrea hugged herself. “I could use something hot to drink.”