Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

It took me the best part of an hour to find my vehicle and by then night had settled on the valley. I stared up, overwhelmed by the immense darkness. There was no moon, and the night seemed blacker than usual, as if half the stars were missing from the sky. It seemed the only way to account for the intensity of the night. I sat in the cab, radio in hand. I wanted to speak to someone, hear some familiar voice but I was stopped by a doubt that I couldn’t explain. The feeling of wrongness persisted and had grown stronger in my head. It didn’t make sense at first, not until I’d grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler, turned the key in the ignition and flicked on my headlights. The road in front of me was empty and I was alone with the fallen stars.

I sat in the Expedition in the parking lot, feeling a deep weariness in my bones, the sort that can hold you for hours on end. My hand was on the door but I couldn’t move. I watched cars come and go, people walking by, like this was normal, like nothing at all had changed. I even saw Sophie Delauney walking across the parking lot, hand in hand with her daughter. She stopped halfway across the lot, turned, smiled and waved at me. She seemed unaware of the people around her and I felt my mind melting, my sense of being fading away in her presence. I thought that maybe there were things she wanted to say, words she’d left unspoken. I felt the wrongness of letting her go without talking to her again, at least one more time.

But before I could go to her, Delauney himself walked past, though he appeared not to see me. He carried two large suitcases, which he stowed in the back of the Rav4. A vein began to throb in my temple. Drops of sweat stood out on my brow though the sun was low in the sky and the air-con was blowing. He got in the driver’s seat and started the Toyota. Sophie stood by the passenger door and glanced my way again. She looked right at me but I knew she wasn’t seeing me at all. Whatever look she had on her face, it didn’t mean anything. By the time I got out of the Expedition, she’d climbed in beside Delauney and they were pulling out of the lot.

Later I sat in Arcan’s, nursing a beer. Troubled by what I’d seen, I tried to cloak the strangeness in reason but I couldn’t make it fit. The feeling that I was thinking about someone else had taken root in my brain. That I had no control of my own life nor any clear idea where I was heading. Maybe I’d spent too long in the Valley. Maybe it was time to leave. Only I wasn’t sure I could.

Old Arcan himself came in the bar and made one of his regular attempts at playing the host. He claimed to be a direct descendant of one of the first men to cross Death Valley, but nobody believed it. His ex-wife told someone he’d been born plain Bill Judd. I watched him move from one guest to another, carefully selecting those on whom he wished to bestow his hospitality. Thankfully, I wasn’t among them.

I found myself thinking about Sophie Delauney. They were the kind of thoughts I had no business thinking, that caused pleasure and pain in equal measure, but I thought them anyway. Some lives were full of certainties but mine seemed to be made up only of “what-ifs” and “maybes”. It should have been no surprise that it had become less real to me.

I ordered another drink and stared into the mirror behind the counter. The people in there seemed to have purpose in their lives, to know what they were doing, where they were going. If I watched long enough, paid attention to the details, maybe I’d discover how to make my life more real. Arcan was holding forth to the group of Japs sitting round a table across the bar. Jaime was working his routine on a blonde girl at the end of the counter. She looked bored, and I guessed the only reason she was tolerating his bullshit was the lack of any other diversion. I wondered if the real Jaime was having any better luck than the one in the mirror. And here was Sophie Delauney, standing just a few feet behind me and watching my reflection watch her, or maybe it was her reflection watching us. Do mirrors take in sound the way they do light? I don’t think so. I couldn’t hear anything, no music, no talk, not even the clink of glasses. It was a long time before I remembered myself and thought to say hello. But a second before I did, she beat me to it. she climbed up onto the bar stool beside me and caught Jaime’s eye.

He was there in a shot. She pointed to my half-empty bottle of Dos Equis, told him to bring one of those and a glass of Merlot. I said I hadn’t expected to see her again. She shrugged and told me they’d had a long day. Drove down to Badwater where Delauney had decided to hike out on the salt flats. Went half a mile before the heat got to him and he returned to the car. Later, they went to Chloride City. She wasn’t looking at me as she talked, but at the guy in the mirror, the fellow who looked just like me but whose thoughts were not the same as mine. The ache in her voice seemed to hint at some inner turmoil. I wanted to offer words of comfort and reassurance, tell her everything would be okay. But thinking the words was easier than saying them.

I asked if she’d seen any ghosts up there. She shook her head and smiled. No ghosts, just dust, heat and silence. I understood about the silence, but with all those ghosts up there she’d expected something more. Why hadn’t the inhabitants from Chloride City ’s second boom period learned anything from the first? I told her there were more fools in the world than she might have imagined. Gold wasn’t the only illusion that drew people to the Valley.

Did I mean that literally? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if Delauney had seen anything out on the salt flats beyond Badwater, if his mind had been troubled by visions he couldn’t explain. But I saw no sign of his existence in the mirror and didn’t think to ask. Sophie wanted to know about my life and I told her some things that seemed important, others that kept a smile on her face. She told me Paul wanted her to have another child. She wasn’t sure what to do. The dreams and ambitions she’d once had were largely unfulfilled, there were things she hadn’t yet grasped. I understood her to mean that this was something she’d never told Delauney.

And then he was there, clapping me on the back and giving Sophie a proprietary kiss on the cheek. She fell quiet then, seemed to retreat into herself. I tried to maintain the connection to her but his voice kept intruding on my thoughts. There was nothing to distinguish his words from the other noises in the bar, a wavering chorus of sounds whose real purpose was little more than to fill the silence. A feeling of despair grew inside me as I watched Sophie close herself off. Her smile was gone and the lines around her eyes signalled the dreams she could no longer give voice to.

Delauney was asking me if it was possible to go to the Racetrack and join route 190 heading west without coming back on himself. I told him it would add sixty or seventy miles to his journey, most of it on poor dirt roads. He nodded and said they might make the detour on their way out of the Valley tomorrow. I asked him what he hoped to see up there. Same as anyone, he said: he wanted to see the moving rocks for himself or, at the very least, the trails they left in their wake.

I told him he wouldn’t, no one ever did. He believed me, he said, but seeing beat believing any day of the week.

I watch the shadows compose themselves. The way they move across mountains or desert dunes reveals how fluid identity really is. What we think of as solid has no more real substance than a whisper or a lie. It’s just light and shadow which make the unknown recognizable, which sculpt unfamiliar surfaces into configurations we think we know. We stare a while at these faces or shapes, glad they mean something to us even if we can’t name them, and then we blink and when we look again the face has changed to something we can’t recognize. We try to retrieve the familiar face, needing to see it one more time to confirm that it was who we thought it was, but the new image persists, erasing the old. It’s like trying to see the two leading faces of a line drawing of a transparent cube at the same time — it can’t be done. One face is always behind the other. We close our eyes again and when we look one more time there isn’t even a face to see, just a shadow moving over rock, sliding into all its dark places. It was the kind of illusion that made me feel less certain about my place in the world.