Age steals a secret and an old man must play detective games in his own home. The answer waits impatiently right before his eyes.
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It wasn’t the banging at the front door that woke him, or even the dry, brittle shattering of the glass in the window, but the soft rasp of breath in the bedroom doorway. Joe jerked upright in the sheets and fumbled in the darkness for his glasses. He knocked them halfway across the nightstand. The heavy horn rims grated before Joe managed to snare them in trembling fingers and fumble them onto his face. There was a woman standing in the doorway; a woman who radiated danger like a bloody halo. The gun in her hand, a long, thick-bodied automatic pistol, certainly didn’t detract from the image.
“Rise and shine, old man!” she hissed.
Old man…? Joe looked down at his hand. They were clutching at the edges of his blanket with failing strength, age-spotted and bony, with paper-thin skin alternately stretched and bagging at every joint. Joe shook his head slowly, stupidly. What was going on? She flipped the light switch and his eyes fought to adjust.
“I work for Carson,” the dangerous thing at the door said. “You know what I’m here for.”
Carson. The name tickled at him, persistent as a flea bite. A city in Arizona. Scarlet Carson. The red roses from that silly rebel movie a few years back, but…
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Joe cried sincerely. The woman narrowed her eyes at him, making them into scowls to match the one on her dark lips. “I swear, I don’t!”
She was on him in two steps and half as many seconds, grabbing Joe by the front of his nightshirt and yanking him out of bed. His arms windmilled wildly as he struggled in vain not to fall, but she caught his thin wrist in a vice-like grip and held him up. She jammed the gun against his temple. Her breath smelled like cinnamon and alder.
“You give me the negatives, grandpa, or I make sure you never see the inside of a rest home. You have five minutes to get them, or I’ll put a bullet in your skull. Got it?”
“What negatives?” Joe asked wildly. “What the hell are you talking about?”
She curled her fist in his shirt, choking him. His glasses slipped down his nose, but he didn’t need them to see the bright spots of color suddenly swimming in his vision. What the hell was going on? But all of this seemed familiar and somehow vaguely disappointing.
“Don’t get cute with me,” she said, and let him go.
Joe staggered and caught himself against the nightstand. He straightened and pushed his thick glasses back up to their proper perch. No matter how much he protested, this woman was clearly convinced he had something that her employer wanted. If he didn’t produce it, she would take back an equal payment of blood. The sick knot in his stomach told Joe that the price would be far too high for his taste. She meant to use that gun.
“Okay, okay,” Joe panted. “I just… I just don’t remember where I put them, okay? I need to look for the uh…”
Damn it! He couldn’t seem to put his finger on what the she-goon had demanded. He spread his hands and held them out as if to an animal. His dry old shoulders popped like bubble-wrap. Joe winced. The sound was just a little too much like a gunshot for his comfort.
“The negatives,” she finished impatiently. “Move your skinny ass, old man. Find them and we’ll make Carson a happy man. Maybe you’ll live long enough to die in diapers at a rest home.”
She laughed cruelly. Joe looked anywhere but at her and noticed his bedroom for the first time. His jaw was hanging open in wonder and he had to force it shut. The bed was a huge four-poster affair, with a lush canopy and drapes of dark blue velvet. The nightstand he leaned against was made of gnarled teak and the edges finished in gold leaf.
“Is this my house?” he asked falteringly.
She stopped laughing and cuffed his shoulder. “What the hell kind of question is that? It’s sure not the YMCA.”
All this is mine…? Joe shuffled past her and out into the house. The hallway was so wide that it would have taken both of them stretching as far as they could to touch both sides. Walnut-paneled walls were hung with paintings behind glass and lit with S-shaped lights that shone with a sterile bluish light. To preserve the paint, he supposed.
A broad staircase spilled out into a lavish foyer with marble floors and stylish wall sconces that flickered with fake firelight. Joe stopped and cocked his head at the French doors that led outside. They were flanked on either side by suits of armor that looked authentic, but those were not what gave him pause.
The handles were some brushed bronze-colored metal in keeping with the old-fashioned feel of the rest of the house, but the lock was stainless steel. It shone flatly in the paste-gem light just like the woman’s gun. He looked up and down. There were matching locks at the top of the joint where the two doors came together, and another at the bottom. The hinges were of similar thick, functional and paranoid construction.
Who even needs locks like that? The crime rate here must be horrible.
The goonette jabbed him in the spine with her pistol and Joe couldn’t help the hysterical titter that escaped him. Check that, the crime rate was abysmal. But he couldn’t hear anything from outside: not the grumble of cars or the shrill barking of poorly trained dogs. None of the usual hallmarks of a bad neighborhood. Joe moved on, not willing to risk that the next prod from the woman might be made with a bullet.
The door’s still locked and there’s no broken glass. She must’ve gotten in another way. Maybe another door I can use to get away…
Joe shook his head and felt like his brain was rattling around in his head, bouncing against the bone on a few tenuous tethers. Make a break for it? Not a chance! Her bullets ran a lot faster than his old legs could.
Still… No! No, don’t be an idiot.
The hallway encircled the stairs and split off in two directions. Joe took the left-hand turn and found himself in an expansive kitchen. Just to feed one man? A refrigerator large enough to house a family of misplaced Inuit, an expansive island stove and cavernous oven. There was a neat line of plastic amber bottles on the counter. His captor grabbed one of them and turned the white label up to catch the wan moonlight coming in through a plant-filled bay window above the sink.
“I suppose at your age, everything is falling apart,” she said, and dropped the bottle. It clattered over on the countertop and rolled in a tight circle. Joe picked it up and pushed his glasses high on his nose to read the label.
“Reminyl,” he said, and replaced the little cylinder of pills neatly beside the others. “Isn’t that for Alzheimer’s?”
She shrugged and prodded Joe with the gun again. “I don’t care if it’s for explosive diarrhea, you old bastard. Just find me the damned negatives.”
Joe hurried from the kitchen. There were two doors, but only one with light coming through. A living room lay beyond, set up with a blocky U shape of overstuffed couches and an elegant coffee table in the middle. The table was piled high and precariously with magazines and newspapers. It didn’t seem at all a likely place to find the negatives she wanted, but Joe supposed he had better start looking somewhere if he didn’t want to get shot tonight.
He sat on the edge of the couch, joints creaking, and riffled through the top layers of the pile. He picked up a Baltimore Times.
Mayor Carson unveils plans for new library
Carson? No wonder he knew the name! Of course, Andrew Carson was serving his second term as Baltimore’s mayor. He was the youngest in a century and well-loved by his constituency for his dedication to public works and wholesome family values, whatever those were supposed to be.
The picture under the headline showed Carson standing over a cutout model of the new building, smiling and pointing at some unimportant detail. There was a pretty, if rather stiff-looking, young woman on his arm. His wife, he knew, a locally famous heiress and religious champion.
I don’t even recognize my own house, but I know who the mayor is married to? Who am I? What’s going on? The answer is right in front of me but I just can’t see it!
The woman standing over his shoulder grunted. “Nothing here. Move along,” she said.
She sounded for all the world like one of those policemen who ushered everyone past a gruesome crime scene while assuring them that nothing of interest had happened. Joe put the newspaper down and followed the waving of her gun.
Out the left door, down a short hallway and he was in a library. At least, that was the only thing Joe could think of to call it. The room was no less extravagant than the one he had just left, but slightly smaller and lined in bookshelves. But not a one of them seemed to have a title that Joe could see.
He crossed to the nearest bookshelf, a towering thing that stretched all the way up to the high ceiling and had a wheeled ladder on a track standing in front of it. Joe squinted through his glasses, but his first glance had been quite correct. None of the books were marked. They were thick leather-bound volumes.
How strange!
He had all but forgotten about the gun-wielding woman watching his every movement with sharp, suspicious eyes. There was a mystery in this house and in himself. He found himself a more than willing captive in the search for his own secrets.
Joe hooked a few books off of their shelves and carried them to a monolithic armchair in front of the cold fireplace. They were surprisingly light in his gnarled hands. He twisted the knob under the shade of a nearby lamp and opened the topmost book.
Photographs.
It was a photo album. They were all photo albums. There were pictures of men and woman, many in sharp, smart suits. In parks in kitchens, in hotel rooms, in offices. Not just photographs… Joe turned a page and found a shredded memo painstakingly taped back together and pasted into the book.
Joe slapped the album closed, pushed his glasses up again, and yanked open the next one. More photos and a bill from a massage parlor, brown with some sort of stain. He shoved it out of his lap and stared at the next.
An inspector’s report spotted with rust-colored flecks of dried blood.
An empty plastic bag labeled biohazard in big, stark letters.
A series of photographs depicting a half-dressed girl hanging on a young man’s arm.
Embracing him.
Kissing him.
Joe stopped. He recognized the man in the pictures. Andrew Carson! The raven-haired little minx with a wicked grin and her hand thrust into his back pocket certainly wasn’t the mayor’s wife…
“Who took these?” Joe asked in a faltering voice.
“Who do you think, grandpa?” she said in quiet disgust. “Fifty grand a month for a couple of bad snapshots.”
“I did this to Mayor Carson?”
The woman yanked the album out of his spotty, shaking hands and tucked it under her free arm. “And a hell of a lot of other people, it looks like,” she hissed, gesturing at the bookshelves.
There had to be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of albums. A lifetime of secrets that Joe couldn’t remember. But this library was just a showcase. He was was forgetting something, something right before his eyes.
Safe…
“The negatives aren’t here,” he said. “I keep them somewhere safe.”
Unasked, he was on his feet again hurrying purposefully through a narrower hallway. There was golden light spilling from around the corner. Joe chased it and stumbled into the office. It had none of the majestic overtures of the rest of the house. Here was a small room with a battered desk crouching in the middle, under a lamp with a tacky, dented tin shade painted a hideous pea-soup-gone-bad green. The ugly lamp was switched on and filled the misplaced office with a warm amber light like airborne honey.
The door to a combination safe, thick and black and ominous, dominated the wall to the left of the desk. Joe padded over to stand before the safe. Joe straightened his glasses and stared at the worn, number-strewn knob in the center. All he had to do was get it open and hand over Carson’s negatives. Then he could go back to forgetting all of this.
It’ll be over soon.
“Well? Open it up, old man!” she snapped.
Joe was sweating, his glasses slipping down his nose again on the salty drops. What was the combination?
He pushed his glasses up again. There was something written on the safe, scratched into the dark-finished steel in a jagged patois of his own handwriting:
Right before your eyes
Joe let out a wheezing cry of frustration. What was right in front of him? The safe? What the hell kind of note was that?
“Open it!” the woman yelled at him. “Get it open now!”
Joe didn’t answer. All he could do was stare at the safe, the hideous altar to a career of blackmail and extortion.
“Open it!”
“I can’t,” he cried. “I can’t remember the combination!”
“If you can’t get that beast open and give me the negatives, I’ll have to shut you up with a bullet.” She held the gun to his chest like a challenge. “You’d better figure it out!”
Right before your eyes… He closed his eyes.
“I can’t. Scream and threaten all you want, but I can’t get the safe open,” Joe sighed. Something that may have been regret flickered like a wind-blown candle in the woman’s eyes.
She pulled the trigger. There was a clap of empty thunder and the bullet tore through Joe’s guts, spraying sticky red across the front of the safe. He staggered, sagged and fell to the hard floor. She turned on her heels and stalked out of the office.
Joe stared up at the safe, at all the secrets forever out of his reach. His blood pooled around him in a waxing halo and his vision started going blurry. He couldn’t focus on the safe anymore, only the wide horn rims of his glasses.
There was something written there, right before his eyes.
R19 L28 R14
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Mail Call took first place in group 3 of the 2008 NYC Midnight Short Story competition.
Erica Jolley-Meers
240 Natoma Station Drive #289
Folsom, Ca. 95630
(916) 239-5562
erica@synchrosina.net
1,923 words
The Bone Lantern
“Grandfather, the Furumori legion has marched to the Aisoto pass. They are only two days away now. Will you light the Bone Lantern and summon the phoenix-knights?”
Miushii held his breath. The scent of sandalwood and pine floated on the air; otherworldly, ghostly. The smell reminded the young one of age and power. His short life had been lived in the scents of steel, oil and sweat, a warrior’s aroma. But here, in the ancient house of the eldest, the oldest candles were burned. Even the flames seemed to waver slowly, stately on their slender wicks, tiny but dangerous dancers of gold and orange. The candles glowed in a great, wide fan around the carved altar in the rear of the house that he did not dare look at, so many that Miushii’s fussy mother often feared that her revered father might burn the place to ashes.
His chest ached with worry and Miushii dared to lift his forehead from the threadbare carpet that he knelt in reverent prostration. It was woven of the eldest, mustiest silken threads, the vibrant colors so dulled by the turning of years that the original pattern was long lost. Instead, it seemed a muted script of formality, slow as the groaning growth of heartwood when times demanded speed, Miushii thought.
The old man stared down at Miushii from his high dais, a living version of his forest of candles. A seam-faced ancient with skin like dusty, melted wax and hair like pale spider’s web. Even his long kimono was colorless as unearthed stone, lackluster grey belted with a long sash of flat black. Only his frosty blue eyes gave the elder gave away any semblance of life. Miushii’s face felt hot when he the hard eye met his. He bowed his head to touch his brow to the floor once more.
“Grandson, you come before me again to ask this,” he said, a voice soft as the tread of mice. “And again I tell you that I will not. The Bone Lantern is to be lit in times of only the most terrible of danger.”
Miushii’s heart hammered as he retorted. “Do you not hear my words, grandfather? A legion of the mountain lord’s warriors marches on us! A hundred dragon-knights and ten times that in footmen! We’ve less than two score of our own men to fight. We will be crushed in less than a night! What greater danger can there be, grandfather? We must call on the phoenix-knights.”
The elder’s robes rustled like dead leaves, his ancient joints creaking in weathered harmony as he raised one spotted hand.
“Only in the most terrible of danger,” he repeated, wheezing. “This army can only kill us, grandson. There are far, far worse things than death.”
Miushii opened his mouth to protest, not sparing a thought for the old man’s rather cryptic comment, though he did not raise his eyes to the dreadful old man. But the old man spoke again, silencing his grandson.
“I will not light the Bone Lantern. Go now and I will forget your foolishness,” he said.
Hot-faced with rage and shame, Miushii stood, keeping his head down, and bowed. As he backed towards the door, the elder began to snore. How could the terrible old man sleep now? How could he face the coming slaughter with such peace? The young warrior slid the paper-paned door closed as he left. He sat on the wide, open porch that encircled the hilltop house and pulled his sandals back on. Even through the thick wool socks he wore, split at the large toe so he could still wear the stilted sandals through the mud, the night was wet and bitingly cold.
Miushii finished knotting the laces around his ankles and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was invisible in the blackness of the night, the clouds that birthed it shrouding any sign of the moons or stars, but he could feel even the heavens weeping for him. Then what were the lights that picked at his vision? Miushii blinked the rain from his eyes. The elder’s hill was some distance from the village nestled in the grassy valley below. Every lantern and fire tonight was cradled protectively indoors, safe from the downpour. There should have been barely a shimmer of light.
It was not the village itself, Miushii realized. The far side of the valley was covered in winking, dancing light. It was as though every hidden star had come down to earth. But those lights were nothing so benevolent. Torches.
Miushii swore to the Grey Goddess. They were supposed to be two days away yet! The mountain lord must be pushing his men night and day to come upon them so quickly. They would be on the village within the hour.
Despite the great distance between them, Miushii reached in angry instinct for his sword, then hissed another oath. It was forbidden to bring weapons into the elder’s house; he had left his blade at home with his wife and young daughters.
He was useless to them! By the time he could bolt back down the long path towards the village, the fiery dragon-knights and their men would be wading in the blood of his family and his neighbors. What good would a sword do him then?
Below, Miushii watched as red warning lanterns were lit in the guard towers, one of the other warriors banging on the great brass gong to wake the town. Tears stung in his eyes. What good would it do? There were not enough swords in the village, much less hands to wield them, to save them. Only one way remained to save them all, and that was in the hands of a senile old man.
Miushii set his jaw and turned back to his grandfather’s house, striding purposefully through the thick mud. He would not stand by and watch his people die. One man’s hesitation would not damn them while he drew breath.
Thunder crashed, echoing Miushii as he smashed the fragile rice-paper door aside with a gauntleted fist. Weapons were forbidden, but armor was not. Behind him, another din rose; the screams and cries of the village below as they saw their death crawling down the valley walls towards them. The elder stirred and blinked his eyes at the noise. He sat up straight on his dais, blue eye taking in the broken door, sopping grandson and distant shrieks.
“Pray with me,” he said. The old man’s voice barely broke through the rain and voices, sad and sleepy, but Miushii was closing quickly, already far closer than tradition dictated to his grandfather.
“I’ve no need to pray. I can save them,” Miushii snarled.
The young warrior raised his hand, fingers curled into a tight, angry fist and brought it down across the elder’s temple. The metal plates riveted to the glove smashed against the old man’s skull. He sagged soundlessly. The old man was still breathing, but shallowly. Miushii brushed past his kin without looking back to the altar that stood behind the dais. In the center, flanked by useless relics, was the Bone Lantern. The breastbones of five men, all carved to filigreed translucency and stitched together with red-dyed sinew set into a circular base of blank black stone.
The field of candles flickered in the wind now coursing through the house, puffing out one by one. Miushii caught the last just as it was guttering and shielded it with his hand. When the flame strengthened, he dipped the candle to the open top of the Bone Lantern. There was a quiet wheeze. Miushii froze.
“Grandson, do not do this thing,” the elder whispered. He held a robed sleeve against the dark blood welling up from the side of his head and streaking his hair with gore.
“We must defeat the mountain lord and his dragon-knights,” Miushii replied, hesitating. “The Bone Lantern will call the phoenix-warriors to save us.”
“They will defeat your foes,” his grandfather agreed in a wavering voice. “But they will not save you. The price is far too high. Stay your hand, grandson, and accept the peace of death.”
Miushii thought of his wife and children, still and dead; of the houses of his friends, forever silent and cold. He raised his hand again.
“No!” he cried. “Anything is better than death!”
The elder wailed thinly as Miushii pushed the candle into the open top of the Bone Lantern. The flame instantly ignited the pool of oil set into the bottom. A slender pillar of green flame shot from the mouth of the lamp, washing over Miushii’s hand. He leapt back, dropping the candle, snuffing it out. The young warrior cradled his hand against his chest, waiting for the bright flame of pain to race through his body from the wound.
There was nothing. Miushii looked down at his fingers, expecting to see blistered skin and blackened flesh. Yet his hand only looked perfectly marble white… But he felt nothing. The meat at the end of his wrist felt chill and dead to the touch. Miushii dropped his own hand in horror, but it did not fall useless to his side. Instead, it reached of its own volition to seize a short, curved dagger that lay on the altar.
“Grandfather!” he screamed in terror. He could not felt the fingers as they wrapped around the hilt of the blade.
But the green column of light had split like some kind of monstrous tree. One coil of sickly flame was reaching for the elder, who watched it in weary horror. He looked up sadly at his frightened grandchild.
“My foolish grandson… It is not for play that they are called phoenix-knights,” he breathed. “From the ashes of this deadly, cold fire, we will rise again. And we will fight. We will not live, but we will fight. And no force of the world will be enough to stop us. We will watch in horror as prisoners in our own bodies.”
The green fire of the Bone Lantern snaked across the floor, through the open door. Like hellish jade snakes, the chill fire pushed down the hill, towards the village. Miushii wept in horror as the cold numbness crawled up his arm, as his heart stopped and the scream froze in his still lungs.
Though his body died, Miushii’s soul burned on, bright as the terrible green fire of the Bone Lantern. Through dead eyes, he watched his lurching progress down the hill, his grandfather white and icy by his side. They stumbled on dead, nerveless feet into the thick of battle. Their dead bodies were slow, clumsy… but impossible to stop. A helpless prisoner in his own dead corpse, Miushii watch himself fight.
The night wore on, the sun rose, arced across the uncaring sky, and set again. Still, he fought beside the other the flame had claimed. Without sleep, without eating, the battle raged on. And when the legions of the mountain lord had fled, Miushii and the other slaves of the Bone Lantern marched on tirelessly in search of new wars to wage.
Miushii screamed in the silence of his own mind. There was no weariness to give him the respite of sleep, nor even a throat to grow raw and painful to silence him. As the bloody years rolled past without cease, he could only scream.
There were worse things than death.
