Ashes and Entropy Read online

  “Oh, hello, Liza. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  You turn toward the voice – a mild and not unpleasant tenor – and see a man enter the gray room from small hallway that presumably leads back to an equally gray bedroom. Although from what you’ve seen of the apartment so far, it might be best to avoid making such assumptions.

  You expect the man to look strange, perhaps even inhuman, but he appears perfectly normal. Middle-aged, balding, medium height, clean-shaven, dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt with the collar buttoned, black slacks and black shoes. But then you notice that what hair he does have looks as if it’s been painted onto his head, and his shirt is preternaturally white, so much so that it almost glows in the room’s dimness. And his pants and shoes are so black it’s as if they’re a void, drawing in the surrounding light and snuffing it out.

  He smiles as he sees you and makes his way carefully around the bone-and-wire construction to greet you. He’s still smiling when he gets there, and you see his teeth are as white as his shirt, so white it hurts to look at them directly. You also notice that every tooth is exactly the same size and shape – perfect little squares aligned in twin rows. His eyes look normal enough, except that they give the impression that they have no pupils, but rather small openings that, if you wished, you could fit the tip of your pinkies into them.

  He extends his hand for you to shake, and you hesitate a few seconds before doing so. His flesh is cool and rubbery, and the feel of it causes you to shiver with disgust. He gives no sign that he notices. Instead he releases your hand, smile still in place.

  “Please forgive the plastic,” he says. “The Spiritus Mori leaks sometimes. You are . . .?”

  You give him your name. He nods, continuing to smile, as if it’s a very fine name indeed.

  “I’d give you mine, but I’m afraid I don’t have a name. Never had any use for one, I suppose.” He claps his hands together and rubs them vigorously. They make a sound like two snakes sliding against one another. “Let’s get down to business. You’ve come to sample my wares, yes?”

  You nod. “How much?”

  The man looks offended. “I don’t charge!” Then his expression turns sly, and he adds, “Not the first time.”

  He turns to Liza.

  “And you wish to partake as well, my dear?”

  Up to this point, Liza has seemed confident and relaxed, completely in control. But now she bows her head, almost in supplication, and when she speaks her voice is plaintive, as if she’s begging.

  “Yes. I’ve brought the first half of my payment.” She gives you a quick glance before turning back to the man in the too-white shirt.

  “So I see. Are you prepared to pay the remainder?”

  “Yes.” She whispers the word.

  “Excellent!” Another hand clap followed by more sliding snakeskin. The man walks over to the Spiritus Mori and taps the head of a tiny bird skull, once, twice. He then holds his right index finger up to the skull’s beak and a single drop of a thick, tarry substance emerges and falls onto his finger. He quickly switches hands and catches the second drop on his left index finger. He then returns to the two of you. Whatever the substance on his fingers is, it doesn’t drip or slide off. It remains on his skin like a pair of black beads.

  “This doesn’t have a name either, I’m afraid. Not the best marketing, I’ll grant you, but then again, my product sells itself. Put your tongue out.”

  This situation has long gone past the point where you can tell yourself that none of this is real, that it’s all some elaborate practical joke. You may not understand exactly what’s happening, but you damn well know that it’s real, all of it. You can feel it in the core of your being. And whatever that black goo is, you know it will deliver the experience Liza promised. All you have to do is open your mouth and stick out your tongue.

  So you do.

  The man in the too-white shirt places the drop on your tongue, but before he can place the second on Liza’s, she grabs hold of his wrist and shoves his index finger into her mouth. She sucks on it, sucks hard, as if she’s trying to pull the meat off his finger, too. The man’s lips purse in disgust, and he places his other hand on Liza’s head and shoves her backward. His finger comes free from her mouth with a wet schlurp, and she stumbles backward, almost falling. She doesn’t care, though. She’s too busy laughing.

  You watch this happen, but it barely registers on your consciousness, for the drug has already been absorbed into your tongue and is beginning to do its work. The first thing it does is shut down your senses. Sight goes first, followed swiftly by hearing. The drug left a sour tang in your mouth, but when your taste goes, the sourness goes with it. The apartment’s dead earth odor cuts off as your smell dies, and then your nerve endings follow, and you can no longer physically feel anything. It’s like you no longer exist, except you’re still conscious, still you, but you’re nowhere and nowhen. This non-sensation should be the opposite of a high. After all, it’s nothing. But there’s an almost euphoric feeling of deep peace, and rather than your sense of self being diminished, it instead feels enhanced, strengthened. You are, after all, the only thing that inhabits this noplace. That makes you God, doesn’t it? You wonder what would happen if you said, Let there be light.

  If this was as far as the experience went, if it was all the black drop had to offer, it would’ve still lived up to Liza’s promises. But it’s only the beginning, a mere appetizer for what’s to come.

  You feel yourself begin to expand rapidly, growing at a rate beyond comprehension. You become aware of the physical world again as you grow, becoming larger than the building, larger than the city, the state, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, the world . . . and still you continue growing, expanding outward in all directions, past the moon, the sun, the other planets in the system. And then, although you wouldn’t have believed it possible, your growth accelerates exponentially, and soon you encompass hundreds of star systems, millions, then this galaxy, then the neighboring ones, then all the galaxies until you are everything that was, is, or ever will be. You are All.

  It should be too much for a single human mind to withstand, and your tiny limited psyche should be obliterated by the experience. You’re overwhelmed, to put it mildly, but that’s okay. You can handle it, with the drug’s help. And you think this – this – is the ultimate, that there can be nothing beyond this. How could there be?

  And then you feel it, feel reality dying. It’s been happening since that timeless instant everything came into being, an inexorable process, unimaginably slow but constant, like the dripping mineral-rich water that over centuries forms stalactites on a cave ceiling, or the trickling stream that over millennia carves out a vast canyon. You are All, and you can feel yourself dying, giving forth an endless moan of pain and despair that is the true song of existence, a discordant symphony of glorious hopelessness, of absolute and utter futility. The universe was born to die. It has no other purpose, and knowing this, being this, is truly the ultimate drug.

  Then you’re shrinking, even more rapidly than you grew, and with a dizzying rush and a hard jolt, as if your mind has been thrown back into a cage, the door slammed shut and locked tight, you are you again. Small, limited, and oh so empty.

  You open your eyes, see the man in the too-white shirt smiling at you, see Liza standing close by, looking even thinner now, little more than a skeleton, really, but with an expression of bliss on her skull-like face. Then her eyes, now sunk deep in their sockets, open and she lets out a despairing sob. You know just how she feels.

  The man looks at her, eye holes growing wider, the darkness within them roiling. But when he speaks, his voice is not altogether without sympathy.

  “Are you ready, Liza?”

  You can sense she isn’t. Who would be?

  “Does it matter?” she says.

  “Not in the slightest,” the man replies. Then he opens his mouth and inhales deeply.

  Liza remains standing for a moment, unaff
ected, but then bits of her begin to flake away like ash and drift toward the man, who’s still somehow drawing air into his lungs, though they should’ve been filled by now. The man breathes the pieces of her into himself, only a few at first, but then more and more, faster and faster. Liza is being dismantled, pulled apart, as if she’s a dying flower whose petals are falling away one by one. Her face is halfway gone when she looks at you, and the remnant of her mouth attempts to say three words. No sound emerges, but you think she says It’s worth it, but you aren’t certain, and then she bursts apart into thousands of tiny fragments which swirl and tumble as the man in the too-white shirt sucks them in. When the last piece of Liza passes between his lips, he closes his mouth and gives a contented sigh.

  You don’t know what he is, only that he’s a terrible, awful thing, but still you step toward him, moving slowly on legs that are thinner than they were before, plastic crinkling beneath your feet. You reach out and grip his arms with hands that are weaker than they used to be, look into the dark holes where his pupils should be, and speak a single word in a tremulous voice.

  “Again.”

  It’s a demand as much as a plea. You’d do anything, sacrifice anything to experience the Dying All again. Absolutely anything.

  “Easily done,” the man says. “All you must do is leave here and came back with a friend, just as Liza did. Then you have to pay the same price. Sound fair?”

  It sounds more than fair, sounds fucking excellent, in fact. You smile, showing your new teeth, now soft and gray, and your hands drop away from the man’s arms. You turn and head for the door, already thinking about where you can go, who you can make your sales pitch to. You have no doubt you’ll find someone who’ll buy what you’re selling. There are lots of fools like you out there. And after all, the first one’s free.

  THE HEAD ON THE DOOR

  by Erinn L. Kemper

  May 5, 1986

  Trevor had only been on the job a few days when he spotted the head on the door.

  He and Greg were taking a break after being on the scaffold all morning in full sun. From up there they could see the Berkeley Hills dropping down into the morning fog of San Francisco Bay. A scattered jigsaw of old paint littered the grass in jagged pieces. The edges of the flakes showed a transition from red to white to yellow and back to white, like geological stratum that held the secret history of the earth.

  Trevor leaned against one of the porch’s cool stone posts. Dusty pencil taste coated his mouth. A long toke on the joint and a gargle with Coke just made it worse.

  Greg came around the corner, Van Halen thumped from the boom box he carried on his shoulder. “You got more of that?”

  Trevor tossed him a can. Greg caught it, put down the boom box, and held his hand out for the joint.

  “I can’t believe you like Hagar. Seriously, if you had a choice between them, who would you want for your front man?” Greg said, continuing the debate they’d been having all morning from the top of the scaffold. “Diamond Dave. No fucking doubt.”

  The argument held for a moment while the painters passed the joint and squinted at the house. A classic three-story Victorian on a street of classic Victorians. The houses here had big yards—big for the area anyways—picket fences and sculpted hedges. With gingerbread bargeboards, multi-paned bay windows, and a spired turret, the restoration was going to take a while.

  The porch wasn’t even half done. It had been rebuilt, years ago, but being sheltered from sun and rain, the paint still adhered. All they’d managed to scrape totally clean were the big oak double-doors. The coating of jelly-soft stain had sloughed off in easy clumps. Trevor took another drag and admired the bronzed sheen of the bare oak through a haze of smoke.

  “Hey, check it out. There’s a head there, on the door.”

  “The fuck you talking about, man?” Greg took the joint back, pinched it for a long hit, tipped his head back and held his breath.

  “That knot.,Right door, close to the top hinge. Kinda looks like a face.”

  ~

  The street was usually quiet. That’s why he liked living here. Why he kept this house, right through the recession and the realtors coming by working their angles. There’d been work on the old house years before. But that had gone quickly. He’d worried that the family who owned the house were planning to come back, but they didn’t. The house stayed empty.

  Moving would be complicated. And he wanted to stay close.

  He peered through the curtains at the young painters across the street. Splattered work pants, long hair, thin mustaches. Crazy drugged-out hippie musicians. One lifted his leg and played it like a guitar in time to the brittle squeal that came from their ghetto blaster. Music that sounded more like metal being ground to pieces, sharpened to points.

  He let the curtain drop and went back to the kitchen to prepare lunch.

  ~

  “John says the gig’s been moved to Friday. Gonna have to do a short day at the house to fit in showers before sound check.” Trevor raised his voice to be heard over the after-work bar crowd. He set the beers down and sat on a spindly wood chair, bumping the table, sending everything sloshing. “Could be worse, I guess. Could be Sunday.”

  “Yeah, or we could get bumped for that guy with the toilet plunger on his dick. Fuckin’ hate that guy.” Greg took a sip of beer. “Hey, is Cheryl gonna come for the gig?”

  “Nah. She’s in Ohio, at her sister’s. Says she still feels weird. Weak. I honestly don’t know if she’s coming back.”

  “Bummer.” Greg leaned forward, his expression one of wary concern. “You know, life’s long, man. There’s tons of time to do it all. Now we focus on the band. Live the dream. Later we do the kids and little league thing.”

  “Don’t really feel like talking about it, Grego. Thanks, though. We’ll just see how it goes.”

  Trevor tipped back in his chair and watched the happy hour crowd. Office workers, ties pulled loose, students in tight little groups, the occasional all-day drinker. One old dude sat on the corner stool at the bar, swaying to his own groove. Was he drinking to forget, or drinking just to drink? Trevor hoped it was the latter.

  The TV over the bar played the local news, the anchor’s face blurred red, radiated. Greg focused on the screen, burping between long gulps of beer. He sat up straight, excited, and pointed at the monitor.

  “You see this? They found that guy. The poet who left his Plymouth by the Bridge in the 50s and vanished.”

  “Where’d they find him? Roswell? A corn field?” Trevor couldn’t help but mock Greg and his obsession with conspiracies and crop circles.

  “Turned up dead in Mexico. Down there painting folk art, they’re saying.”

  “So, not aliens? Too bad.”

  ~

  Three knots marred the façade of the house, so far. The one on the door, another next to a bay window, and the third on the inside of one of the jig-sawn spandrels that decorated the space between the tops of the porch posts. Not remarkable for the wood to have knots. But whether Trevor and Greg were straight, or stoned out of their gourds, they saw heads: Faces, ears, specific hairstyles.

  “Fuck me.” Greg was reading the newspaper. The house kept getting deliveries, and they were saving them up to tape to the window glass when it was time to paint. “Listen to this. They just found that milk-carton kid. The first one. He was on his way home from basketball and pulled a runner or got kidnapped or whatever. Turned up in Kansas. He’s, like twenty-five now. Our age.”

  “Weird.” Trevor only half-listened. Most of his attention focused on the music coming from the boom box. Joe Satriani was back in town for a few shows and Trevor was getting geared up for a wicked tribute during their gig Friday. A nod to the great guitar man.

  Greg was flipping through the box of newspapers. “Not weird, man. Fucking weird. Check it.” He held up the picture of the kid. Then the photo of the poet they found in Mexico.

  “So?”

  “So—look.” He held the poet’s ph
oto next to the head on the door.

  Trevor squinted, tilted his head a little to the side.

  “And this!” Greg’s voice had taken on the fevered tremble usually reserved for his alien abduction and crop circle theories. He went over to the other side of the porch, climbed the rail and held that day’s paper in front of the spandrel. “It’s definitely him.”

  “Okay. I see it.” The dark patches matched hair, eyes, nose. A crack near the center of the knot matched the grim line of the mouth. “What about the one up there?”

  “We just scraped her out today. Guessing from these other two, she’ll probably be in tomorrow’s paper.”

  ~

  He waited until dark to take a look. He checked the road for cars before he turned on his penlight. An envelope in his hand from the cable company, delivered to his house by mistake, his excuse for going over. With the small circle of illumination he scanned the front door of the house until he found the spot that had drawn the painters’ interest.

  A knot. That was all? Crazy guitar-hippies.

  He turned to leave and something crinkled under his feet. It was the newspaper the blond hippie had been flapping around. He picked it up and scanned the front page: Recession Recovery Brings New Development; Good Day for the Bay—Athletics take Jays, 17/3, Giants over Pirates, 7/2; Poet Found Dead in Mexico.

  There was a picture of the poet. He held the paper next to the knot, like the painters had done. Looked from one to the other and considered what it meant.

  ~

  “The fuck are you doing?” Trevor got to work first and found a woman, mid 40’s, dressed in overalls and a tattered men’s shirt, scraping the side of the house.