The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities Read online

  Don looked around. The crowd consisted mostly of strangers. But look. Look. Jim was there, and Mack. Dan and Finn, exchanging glances. Mary-Kate, standing on her tippy-toes. A boy with a mop of hair and an elaborately scarred forehead pushing his nose against the glass. Don’s wife was there, and his children. How proud they looked! And how relieved! Their faces glowed with love.

  The man in the white wig held up two white fists. His index fingers jumped up like gangly puppets. The On-Air sign lit, turning everyone red.

  Alan spoke: This is Don…this is Alan Rampart. My compatriots seem to have left me. I have food, but I don’t need it. I pull my nutrition from the flying things in the air. You can’t see them, because they are infinitesimally small, microscopic…but if you lunge forward, tongue out, and bite, remembering to pull your tongue back in, of course, you get them, thousands of them in each bite. It really is rather incredible. No one need starve. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t it wonderful? Hell, they probably cause cancer. But that’s okay. What doesn’t?

  Let me tell you about a dream I had, a long and troubling dream. Let me tell you what happened when I woke from that dream

  Let me tell you of a thousand years without sleep, and of a sleep that does not end.

  Let me tell you about the shadow men. Let me tell you what they told me.

  May I tell you something in private?

  the beginning of the world

  “What is it, Dad? What’s happening?”

  I looked hard at Maisie, looked at that sweet, small face, so familiar to me, so real and alive and present, saw the candles reflected like flickering stars in her wary, weary eyes. I lifted her up, spun her around, sat her on my leg.

  “Sweet girl, sweet girl,” I said. My voice sounded foreign to me, low and stricken and hoarse. I cleared my throat, summoned saliva up into the cave of my palate. “It’s the beginning of the world.”

  The five windows, spanning the width of the wall, displayed a shadowed panorama of the city. No lights shone in the hulking buildings, but the windows glowed like a thousand orange boxes, reflecting the low, burning sky. The fragmented beams of searchlights shuddered through them, making the buildings look as though they were rippling, underwater. Higher up, over the buildings’ tops, the sky went dark blue, then blacker than pitch if you leaned forward and looked up. This Maisie did. “Are we going to die?” she asked.

  “Oh no, honey, no. We’re going to be born.”

  “Born again?”

  “No, not born again, not in the sense that the Wickforts say it. There will be nothing to worship, nothing begging prayer, no hymns, no homilies. We’re going to be born for the first time, born fresh. And clean, sweetheart, cleaner than you are fresh out of the bath, cleaner than your dad when he shaves his beard.”

  She turned and put a hand on my shaven face. I mimicked biting her finger and she yanked it away, cackling.

  There was a calamity out in the hall. “Motherfucker,” a voice said, high and hysterical. “Don’t you fucking dare.” Then the sounds of a scuffle, a struggle, grunting, flesh thumping miserably into flesh. The wall shuddered. A picture fell from its hook, landing face down on the floor. The glass held. I was grateful. I was not yet ready to loosen my grip on my girl.

  There was a knock on the door, rapid, insistent. Even before the beginning of the beginning of the world, I did not like unexpected knocks on the door. I gently covered Maisie’s mouth with my hand, and she stifled a snigger. Her lack of fear sometimes struck me as somehow alien. I smiled with my eyes, though, and she responded in kind. As foreign, as inappropriate as her cheer was to me, I would never dare discourage it.

  “Bricker!” the voice cried, the same one that had been shouting in the hall. “Bricker, I know you’re in there. Your car’s still there and you goddamned well didn’t dare leave on foot. Open up!”

  I stayed silent. Maisie and I regarded one another gravely, though I noted still a modicum of mirth in her eyes. The wall shuddered again. The man had fallen against it. We remained still, and after a time he went away, muttering. I heard his door close. It must have been Ruggeiro. I know what he wanted, too, and it was company. I didn’t want Ruggeiro’s company. I wanted to be born in peace.

  “Where are they going?” Maisie was pointing northwest, toward the mountains. A curving line of red lights flickered like some electric snake in the far dark distance. I laughed. I didn’t answer. There was no answer. The city heaves, the world shudders, ready for the dissolution of old life and the bringing of new, and people clamber brainlessly into their cars, driven by the mad idea that somehow they will be the survivors. But there will be no birth for them, only death, and death is what they are driving to. Now and Soon are their only options.

  Not ours, no, not us.

  Maisie went to the window and put a hand on it, fingers outstretched. Her hands were so small. I rose, my joints popping, and retrieved the picture that had fallen on the floor. It was a picture of Jill, a head shot from her acting days. She was smiling, her teeth perhaps a touch too airbrushed, the curve of her smile just a trifle contrived. My face, reflected in the glass, loomed over it like a warped apparition, a revenant. After I placed the picture back on the wall, I turned. Maisie was staring at me with that look. I did not feel ready for the questions…but we never feel ready for this, do we?

  I sat back down in the chair facing the window. She returned to her place on my leg. Outside a gargantuan purple flume surged into the air, roaring like some great beast, then crackling like fireworks, folding inward, turning to pink smoke that undulated in the firelight like a great dancing thing. Fwoom, belched the waning world, the old world, the tired world. Fwoom. Fwoom. The floor shuddered under my chair. The dishes tittered in the pantry. We gasped, the both of us, a hissing duet, as the windows of the office building to the north blew out. Our candles guttered, some extinguishing, drawing a dismal penumbra over the room. We were getting close.

  “What will being born be like?”

  I closed my eyes, let the new world speak over my tongue. “Darling, darling, we will ride down a chute of fire, but we will not burn. You remember the waterslide at Wickham Park? This will be like the waterslide, red instead of blue, flame instead of water, but we won’t be burned. We’ll ride down together, human flumes, careening down into the black warm muck of the new world.”

  I could see her weighing the merits of her next question, perhaps fearing the answer. “Why did Mom have to get born before us? Why did you give her birth?”

  I looked at my fingernails. I could still see dark lines of blood under the quicks. “Your mother,” I answered, “likes to go first, to know things before we do, so she can be the one to inform us about the lay of the land.” I stopped. I knew I was saying too much.

  I sniffed back my emotions and started again. “Your mom wants to make sure the ride is safe, sweetheart, and that the new world is one that is worth being born into.” I added, “If we don’t hear from her, and we haven’t, not yet, sweetie, and I’ve a feeling we won’t, then that means all is well. We will be born, she will find us, and we’ll all be…”

  She was glaring at me in that way that she has, an exaggerated pout, eyebrows held fiercely down as though pulled by strings. “In this new world,” she said, and I knew she was going to challenge me here, to try to ferret out what she thought I was talking around - the ugly aspect of what was coming. “can I still grow up to be a marine biologist?”

  I laughed, despite myself. “My darling, my sweet. What you will know, what you will learn, what you will be, will go beyond biology. You will be that life, that marine life, the avian life, the arachnid and annelid, the human and the alien. Marine biology will feel pret-ty silly to you then, won’t it?”

  “Daddy, you’re just trying to…” and here she began to quote, from her teacher or her mother or who knows who, for she went into a sing-song, made the consonants snap, “put a pretty face on things.”

  I looked her in the eyes, those green eyes, my eyes, small
er, yes, but my green, looking back at me, and maybe Jill’s eyes too, in there somewhere, in the curve of the lower lid, in the sweep of the lashes. “The face of the new world needs neither my embellishments nor my adornments to be pretty,” I said. “The birth of the world is beauty in itself, the face of fire, the transference of flesh, the sizzle of synapses frying in a great steel pan. Everything will open up like some great flower.”

  A crack formed in the ceiling, split, spitting down white dust, snaked along to the wall, whispering and cracking. Sparks, white and bright and innumerable, blinked madly in the fissures. “Our womb can’t hold us anymore, my doll, my love.” Somewhere I heard Ruggeiro shriek.

  “It’s okay to scream. It’s good to scream. We all scream when we’re born, Maisie.” I grabbed her and held her back against my chest, my arms tight around her body. I could smell her hair. It smelled like fire, like char. Through it I also smelled her skin, her soap and her humanness, her fragility. It smelled like some blue island. The windows opened up in shards and the walls peeled away. We rode the chute, Maisie and I. Our hair jumped up like birds, and we became sunlight. We rode the chute toward our birth, father and daughter, soon to be twins, soon to be one and to be nothing, soon to live forever in the New World.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities was originally published by Dunham’s Manor Press in a limited edition of 150 hardcover copies with illustrations by Dave Felton

  © 2016 Matthew M. Bartlett

  http://www.matthewmbartlett.com/

  Cover illustration by Dave Felton

  http://eldritchetchings.blogspot.com/

  “Carnomancer, or the Meat Manager’s Prerogative was previously published in Xnoybis 1

  “Following You Home” was previously published online at The Siren’s Call April 2015 Issue 20 "Screams in the Night."

  “No Abiding Place on Earth” was previously published in Nightscript Issue 2

  “Spettrini” was previously published as a limited edition chapbook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matthew M. Bartlett lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife Katie and their cats Phoebe, Peachpie, and Larry.