black they were swarming with glowing flakes. Yet the more Belfast gazed on this churning blizzard, the more he doubted his interpretation. It wasn’t only that it was April, but, in looking down at the street, he saw no snow on the ground. It wasn’t even raining any longer.
He decided it was his head wound, making faint lights swim behind his eyes, showing up better against the dark. Against black, specifically; he saw nothing, really, in the shadows of the car, but against his coat, dyed the actual color black, he observed the phenomenon with increasing clarity. Only, against the sky the lights were tiny, distant. Against his coat, the lights were large and close, if no brighter.
First, they mesmerized him. Then, as he watched them, he began to feel fear. He had been too stunned by the wound to feel concern before. The reality of his wounding had become unreal. But this phenomenon, which had to be unreality, had engaged his emotion.
Against his black sleeves, he saw rags of membrane sailing past, tumbling, tatters of ectoplasmic tissue floating in a black sea. One of these vague phantasms swam nearer to him, seemed to gaze at him from his sleeve as if it were pressing its face to a narrow window. For it was a face, he realized, this close up. Indistinct, a rough sketch; blurred smudges of dark eye sockets, a mouth gaping and yawning and working soundlessly like that of a fish sucking air from water. Then the face ducked down out of sight. On his other sleeve, another face had been peering at him, but darted away when discovered, trailing its ragged, ethereal vestments.
“Oh God…oh God.” Belfast clamped his hands over his eyes.
“What is it?” Drake asked, startled, turning to look at him. Belfast uncovered his eyes. Saw the driver’s face. The driver’s pupils were black, black as obsidian, and in them, swirling soft lights like fireflies in summer grass. Or will-o’-the-wisps, in cemetery grass.
“What?” Drake asked again.
The shotgun rested between them. Belfast scooped it up, worked the slide
“You did this to me,” Belfast told the corpse, his own voice drowned out by the ringing aftershock of the twelve gauge.
He pushed the second headless man he had seen this night out into the street, scooted over to sit in the puddle on the driver’s side, wiped the windshield with his arm, and put the car in motion again. While he drove, he tried not to look at his sleeves. But above the city, the sky still seethed as if with volcanic ash.
4: REMAINS TO BE SEEN
He left the car a block from his apartment in the suburbs of the city. Large old houses with trees and scraps of yard between them, once the domiciles of the wealthy, now tenements for minorities and cheap housing for students at the college nearby. He didn’t like abandoning the vehicle this close to home, but had no choice; walking just a block so covered in blood was a great risk. Fortunately, Drake had left his baseball cap in the car, and Belfast clamped that over his head after wiping his face as best he could with Drake’s jacket. At least the car belonged to Drake, and not him. He walked to his building without incident. Belfast felt surprisingly well for a man who had been shot in the head; he did not stagger or trudge, but walked briskly and silently. Even the pain in his head was bearable, no worse than one of his hangovers. Trees rustled dreamily in the night breeze. He glanced at his watch to see that it was one o’clock in the morning. A week night, so things were quiet. A car drove by him with rap music booming, the sound forcing his heart to beat in sync briefly, but continued on into the night. Belfast walked with his head lowered to obscure his face…and so that he wouldn’t see the sky. He felt small and vulnerable, exposed under its vastness. All those billowing ghosts.
Inside at last, and he mounted the stairs to his second floor apartment. Somehow, though, he had lost his apartment key. He had done this before, however, and so he kept a spare hidden in a crack in the hall baseboard; dug it out. At last, he let himself into his apartment, locking the door behind him.
He tried to minimize his noise as he put on the kitchen light, then moved into the bathroom. He mustn’t wake Sheila, who had to work in the morning. He thought it was funny, being considerate about that. Never mind that he didn’t want her to come out and see her new husband with a bullet hole in his scalp.
In the bathroom mirror he examined the damage. The wound was clotted, remarkably didn’t even bleed any more. His hair was thickly matted, his face a smear. He should shower before Sheila saw him like this, but was afraid to unplug the wound. He stuck a band-aid over it. Again, he considered his actions amusing—until he noticed his eyes in the mirror, saw little phosphorescent fish swimming in them, and got out of the claustrophobic room.
In the kitchen, he opened a beer. He should call Doc Cool over here. Sheila would want him to go to the hospital, but he couldn’t take that chance. He seemed to be doing well enough. Except for the…hallucinations. No, Sheila didn’t even know that he was a criminal. A hired killer. Mass murderer. She would wake up to a whole new life. He wanted to spare her that horror as long as he could. She wouldn’t stay with him, and why should she? No, he was not anxious to wake her up to lose her. Let her sleep in peace a short while longer. Let him have the peace of her sleeping here a short while longer. The end of a dream.
Beer in hand, he went to look in on her, saw only shadows within shadows, but hers the warm nucleus of that dark cell. No ghosts to be seen, until his eyes fell on one of her enlarged photographs, black and white, framed on the wall. Somehow, its pure black was a window to that other world where mere shadow wouldn’t suffice. He saw movement in the black parts of the photo, and would have stepped back out of the threshold, except that as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he realized Sheila was not at its center after all. He flipped the light switch. A bundle of blankets and pillow, like a soft afterimage of her. So where was she? He turned from the room, leaving also the photo, which had not been stilled with the light.
Not in the living room, either. The one room that remained to be searched was the other bedroom. This, Sheila had made into her darkroom. The door was closed. Perhaps she had waited up for him, despite it being a work night, and was busy at her labors of love. He went to the door, rapped lightly, steeling himself for their confrontation.
Sheila worked for a print shop where she had been their one-person camera crew for two years. But technology had changed and even that old print shop, reluctant to spend the money to update its techniques, had finally given in to it. Artwork was now scanned rather than shot, even though photographs, when scanned, did not have the smoothness of the half-tones Sheila preferred. Still, even with the old technology it had hardly been a craft, let alone an art; just a less computerized mass production. Sheila was now learning the scanner. But he knew it troubled her more than it had already troubled her to work in the plant. When first out of college, she had pursued work as a photo-journalist…but her portfolio had been deemed too artsy, too studied, and Belfast could understand that. She was more inclined to photograph a burned doll than the house fire in progress. He had urged her to employ her talents, her inclinations, toward advertising photography. She had made a slight, defeated attempt. Only her love of photography had remained strong, somehow, when her efforts to live on it had waned. One of these days, she told him, when she had accumulated a worthy enough body of work, she would try to stage her own exhibition. She might be discovered, make a name, be accepted into museums. One day…
He knocked again, more loudly. “Sheila?”
He worshiped her, his young bride. Would do anything for her. Had done things for her, lately, she wasn’t even aware of. He wanted to get her out of that plant. Out of this blighted city. They should travel across the country, across Europe, visiting galleries, bringing her work to show and sell. He had gotten himself involved in shadowy actions. He had gone too far, he knew, through a black doorway, and now…now…people wanted to kill him…he had betrayed someone…but most of all, he had betrayed Sheila…yet the details knotted and blurred in his wounded mind, and he let them go.
Instead of thinking, he turned the knob of the darkroom’s door.
She was not here. Neither the red lights nor the regular lights were on. He put on one of the latter, but even before he did so, he regretted opening this door.
Over the two windows she had taped sheets of red acetate, so that they appeared to be slabs of ruby. The shades were only half drawn, and through the dark red glass glowed street lamps and, further away, city lights. It was an effect they both liked, and they wondered what the neighbors thought, seeing the dark red windows glowing from the other side. They might believe some ungodly supernatural rituals were performed in here.
Their opinions would not have been helped by the color of the walls. Sheila had painted the walls entirely
