The Last in Line
New Weird Fiction from E. Avery Cale
If a traveler were to journey to Hot Springs, Arkansas during the warm humid months of summer, he would find a city full of life and excitement. The highway down from Little Rock or up from Texarkana is always busy with new pickups driven by retirees and family men, hauling behind them jet skis and pontoon boats soon to be roiling the waters of Lake Hamilton. Every table in every restaurant is full. Most have a line of hungry patrons waiting an hour or more on the sidewalks. The downtown strip and the lawns of the bathhouses swarm with tourists walking slowly, eating ice cream and taking photos of the art deco buildings and the outdoor springs.
Were the same traveler to return in the winter, he would find a lot of ghosts. On the highways into town there is no traffic, and the wind whistles through the pinewood forests. The surface of the lake is glassy when the wind is calm or tosses small whitecaps if a front is moving through. Shards of ice form on the undersides of the marinas, where the boats hang, hauled from the water, covered and silent. The restaurants, if they stay open at all in this quiet season, sit dark and empty, the owners waiting the tables or perhaps hiring a local kid who they can trust to run the place while they vacation in warmer climes. Above the downtown sidewalks, the buildings loom derelict and menacing, their black-eyed windows gazing down lifeless and brooding on some lone soul darting furtively from their warm car to the warm lobbies of the vacant hotels. From the ground rises a constant and thick white fog issued from those same infernal regions wherein the springs themselves have their lightless birth.
The winter of this city is so damp and lonely that our traveler may be excused for thinking himself in the ruins, not of a tourist city in the off-season, but of a whole civilization, of a people so thoroughly eradicated from the earth by some doom of their own making that even the pigeons and the ravens and the roaches have fled in terror.
And it is to Hot Springs, in the deepest of winter, two days before the nadir of the sun’s journey around the sky, that we find one such traveler.
He is young. Twenty to twenty-five perhaps. He wears a Kuhl canvas jacket with a tear beginning at the elbow. He has curly hair that he wears somewhat longer than he ought, though not to his shoulders. He has no beard, and though we might not find him especially handsome, it is possible that others might. He is sitting at the mahogany bar of the Steinhaus Keller, a German restaurant sunk another story or two beneath the level of the street that, to the discerning eye, obviously predates the town above. The hour is three o’clock, and the restaurant has just opened for the day. The young man, who has arrived here to this desolate place not by chance, but by careful attention paid to those certain and unmistakable signs which always present themselves to those willing to attend to them, prompting him to act for reason he could in no way explain to others, least to himself, as is often the case, is looking over the menu. He has never eaten German food and is unsure what to order. At the far end of the bar is another man, the only other patron. He is a man perhaps twice the age of our young traveler and wore a Filson wool vest of singular cut.
The name of this young traveler was Charles.
Someone laid a book on the bar before him, his head still buried in the menu. He looked up and was immediately struck with the thought that he had never seen a beautiful girl in his life. His face must have betrayed this, for the older man at the end of the bar grinned broadly then hid the smile by rubbing his goatee with his hand. The young woman, who stood awkwardly behind the bar, failed to notice any of this, as she was looking at the ground beneath her feet, ponytail holder held in her full lips, and raising her elbows above her shoulders to pull the light brown curls of her long hair into a loose ponytail. As may be expected this only heightened the young man’s interest, and, consequently, his efforts to disguise this interest. The old man’s smile widened. Charles passed a hand across his face to clear his expression, and when the girl had fixed her hair as she liked it and lowered her arms, he was studying his menu with curious intensity.
“Sorry, had to get my hair all situated. What can I get you to drink?”
Without looking up, Charles managed to say “Oh, water, I guess,” with his voice rising only slightly with the last word. He followed her with his eyes as she went down to the bar to take the order of the old man, who asked for the same pint of Haufbrau he’d had the day before and the day before that.
“You known her a while?”
“What?”
“Or was that just love at first sight.”
Charles felt the blood rush to his face, and he fumbled about with his hands as he tried to stammer out a reply, but by the time he had somewhat groped his way toward one, the swinging of the kitchen doors announced the girl’s return.
“Don’t worry,” whispered the old man conspiratorially, “I won’t tell her. Unless it looks like you’re going to blow it.”
The girl gave Charles an odd look as she sat down his glass of water. He looked down at his hands and saw that he had picked up her book. The older man had turned his attention fully to the beer which the girl had poured him.
“Is it any good?” said Charles at last.
“Oh, as water goes, it’s not bad.”
“Oh. Uh. I meant,” Charles held the book limply and waved the pages.
“Ooooo. You meant my book. Well, I wouldn’t know, someone took it from me before I got a chance to start it. They’ll have to tell me all about it. I’ve got a paper due after I get back from break.”
Charles looked over at the old man and then he looked at the book in his hands. “Well maybe they had better get reading then, haven’t they.”
“Mmhm, maybe they better,” she said with a sly smile.
After she’d walked to the main dining room of the restaurant to light candles and straighten the tablecloths, the older man stood and walked over to Charles and sat in the stool next to him.
“Well. You haven’t dropped the ball yet. After seeing you try to order that glass of water I had my doubts.” He quaffed his beer then wiped the foam from his moustache and pointed to the book. “Ramayana. You’ve got some heavy reading ahead of you. You ever read it before?”
“No. I guess I better get started.”
“Some wild stuff in there. Gods at war. Not quite the Iliad, but it’s not bad. Some people think there’s tale in there of, well, some kind of antediluvian nuclear war. Happened so long ago we only know about it in the legends. Ought to show up on radiographic scans. And some say it does.” He looked his young companion over. “Some people, present company included. I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. There’s more things than those found in your philosophies, Horatio.” He fixed the young man again with his eye, as if studying him, and said, after a moment, “You look like you might believe some pretty strange things yourself”
“I’ve been known to. Get that from my grandpa.”
“I knew it. I can usually tell. Not about the grandpa. You look like you’d believe just about anything an honest man would tell you. Now do you think I’m an honest man?”
The young man owned that he had no reason to think otherwise.
“Well then. It’s a rainy day. But before I make you listen, I’m going to have to make you drink yourself a beer.”
He waved down the girl. “Grace,” he said, “Pour me two beers here. Oh no don’t look at me like that. I know it’s early. One’s for your ghost writer here.”
“Oh no, don’t let him start talking,” she said to Charles, “You’ll be here all night.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Charles. A faint redness bloomed in the girl’s face.
“Don’t worry, I won’t keep him from getting to your book.”
After she’d gone again, the older man held out his hand. “Todd.” “Charles.” “Now we’re no longer strangers, and you’ve been suitably provided by our beautiful hostess with a proper drink.” This done, he wiped his mouth and began his story.
“Now when I was a young man, about your age I guess, maybe a little older, I did a lot of traveling for work. Doing environmental testing mostly, soil samples things like that. Later I did some diving in those big fuel tanks for inspections. Saw some strange things doing that, as you can imagine. But this was before I was doing that. I’d always take the most remote jobs I could find and usually those jobs would get me a few hours of work for good pay and then a few days of camping while I waited for them to come back around and pick me up again. Great work for a young man who doesn’t care about staying in one place and keeping one woman happy. So maybe it ain’t for you.
“I went all kinds of places. Wyoming and Montana and other places out in the Rockies. Some in Canada. But mostly Alaska. That was my first time up there. Loved it so much I couldn’t leave again. Got my shop up there in Anchorage, but I find myself spending more time in Whittier these days. Anyway, I had a couple good pilots I liked to work with but even with the best pilots I’d get stuck out in these places if the weather turned bum. This time I’m talking about I was in an abandoned village. Had only been that way five or ten years before this. And honestly it hadn’t been there more than a couple decades before that. They used to just wander around all year before they put the school up. You wouldn’t believe the money they…we…the taxpayer, pours into those places. And they just up and abandon it. Happens all the time.
“There’s a place called Eagle. But that’s not really here nor there right now. This time I was in Whitefish Lake, that was the name of the old village, checking on the tank farm there. They’d just up and left them, most full or half full. Had my gear with me— a sturdy tent and a good Wiggie sleeping bag and my hunting stuff. Work didn’t take me long, and I had a few days left before the pilot came back. I knew that because I could look back at the range and see how the weather had socked in. I’d brought my new Thompson/Center with me, that first run of Contenders they did, with the .22 barrel for messing around, the .410 for stupid chickens- spruce grouse- and the .30-30. They had a bounty out for black bears around there. Killing too many moose calves. I thought I’d break in the new gun on one, so after I got tired of blowing away the stupid chickens, I decided to get out and stretch my legs and see what I could catch with that .30-30. I wasn’t worried about getting too far out or the dark because that time of year it didn’t ever get truly dark. I’d also hear the plane coming back, though I still left a note for Bill the pilot just in case, saying which way I’d gone and what time I’d left. Anyway, I’d walked for quite a while, crossed a couple creeks, and decided to sit down to have me some drymeat and a cup of coffee from the thermos.
“I never did switch from coffee to tea like a lot of guys do up there. So I sat down on a log there in the trail facing back the way I’d come and had me my coffee, and when I’d finished, I leaned back to stretch, my thermos still in my hand, when I heard something whisper. It sounded like it was right in my ear, and I heard it, clear as you hear me right now, whisper: ‘Gotcha.’
“I hadn’t even finished hearing that before I dropped. Dropped straight down liked a sack of rocks. That’s often the best thing to do, honestly. And a claw, one long one, curved and sharp as a razor, sharp enough to shave with, whistled past just where my head was half a second before. I’d still had my arm up as I fell, and that claw sliced right through my thermos, spilling coffee all over me. I looked back, and where that trail should have been there was… I don’t even know what I’d call it. A city. A highway running straight on where the trail should have been on the other side of the…hole in the world, is the only thing I can call it — a portal or a door made from of some kind of green stone I’d never seen before. It was perfectly smooth, and far away, where I should have been able to see the Range, I saw what looked like a wall made of that same green stone.
“There was a road too, and road was lined with what I can only call buildings, but they weren’t any normal buildings— they were like tubes, like the culverts they stack on the side of the highways when they’re grading them, and these all were surrounded by this rosy sort of light. Not like the it was shining on them or even emanating out of them, but almost like it was a layer of skin, of slime, though you could see through to the stone beneath. And atop all these tubes were these grotesque shapes like gargoyles, but shaped like nothing real I’ve ever seen, like the worst of any of that modern art, and I hate to say it, but I do think those shapes might be the shapes of whatever it was that built those buildings. Sure, wasn’t the one that took a swipe at me or anything like him I’m sure of that. I’ve thought about that one a long time. And there were trees too, with stalks shooting up between the buildings. The tops of these weird trees had tangled masses of what looked like bloodworms, like what you feed to fish, all writhing and such.
“Now I didn’t register all this at the time, of course; it just hit me all at once and seared itself into my brain, like a seal into hot wax, and even if never wanted to see it again. it’d still come to me every night. Believe me, I’ve tried. Probably tried a little too hard. I used to drink pretty hard for a while after that. I lay there looking at the coffee spilling out on the ground and at that city or whatever it was, and then I saw that the edges of that hole were closing up, and my first thought was to get that sonofabotch who tried to take off my head. I was pretty hotheaded in those days. So I took that Thompson from my holster and I dove in there. That sonofabitch was perched there on top of the hole, which as I said was already shrinking, and looking at his claw with whatever expression a monster has to show disbelief and amazement. My head should have been on that big fingernail and he just didn’t understand how it wasn’t. And I let him have it. .30-.30 round right to the chest from near as me to that tap handle right there. .30-30 ain’t the biggest round but I’d hot-rodded mine some. And he came right down on me, and I slipped back through that doorway before he landed on me and sat there breathing hard and feeling proud of myself when…look at this scar here, if you don’t believe me… I felt just the godawfulist pain in my calf. I looked down and that hand had grabbed round me and the nail sunk into my calf muscle. No knife could cut through that skin, and anyways I was in too much pain and couldn’t get mine out of my belt when I heard a sucking sound…schloop!.. and that arm plopped straight down to the ground with a thud. The hole had closed on it. Sliced it clean off. I had enough left in me to tie it off and stop the blood flow, but then I must have passed out. Next thing I know Bill was waking me up. No idea how long I was there. When I came too he was staring at the arm and he wouldn’t go near or even say anything. He seemed to act like he couldn’t even see it, but I couldn’t just leave it laying there. When I picked it up, it was like a spell was broke and then he knew it was real. I didn’t tell him anything about it until we’d gotten back to camp and packed and then up in the air. And when I finished my story, he told me a few himself. And they’re worth hearing too. But that’s for another time.”
As Todd was relating his story, Grace, in a demonstration of that virtue for which she was so aptly named, saw them so engaged in conversation and, after quietly refilling their waters and setting down another round of Haufbrau, retired to the host stand, where she occupied herself in rolling silverware. She had finished one bucket and was about to start on the next when a movement on the periphery of her vision told her to look up. When she did, she started.
There were three figures standing before her. She had not heard the bell ring. They had about them a disquieting androgyny and were dressed as though, finding a bin of clothes donated to a thrift store, they had reached their hands in at random and put on whatever they could grab with no consideration of the weather or the opinions of others. Without a word, one raised a hand and pointed toward the table in the far corner of the restaurant, which sat half in shadow, the candle on it unlit, beneath a heavy set of wooden shutters. The three of them set off in that direction. During all of this, the three had said no word to the girl nor, so far as she could tell, even looked her way. She wondered if they had failed to notice her at all. This notion was dispelled however when, just as the thought had occurred to her, the last of the three turned his head round toward her without breaking his strange gaze, made contact with her eyes, and grinned in such a predatory fashion that Grace felt a shiver run down her spine and a cold sweat form on her forehead.
She stepped into the kitchen for a glass of water to calm her nerves, and finding this did not help, asked the pastry chef, who was preparing the week’s strudels, if she would mind checking on the new table. This was highly unusual, as Grace was never one to ask others to do her work. The sickly pallor of her face so struck the chef that she did so without question. When she returned, she said they were waiting for someone and only wanted water and asked if Grace should like her to take them some.
“No, it’s fine.” The girl had by now collected herself and took them their drinks. As she neared the table, her unease grew more acute. They had an unwholesomeness about them that she could not place, as if they did not belong in their own skins. They had a waxen look about them. They looked like things formed for some arcane and inscrutable purpose and set loose on the world with no understanding in themselves, full of an implacable menace and otherworldliness, their features indistinct and responding to no right place of origin. All this filled her with a sickening disquiet.
Todd was just finishing his story when she walked up. Charles allowed his new friend to order for him: two jaegerschnitzels with spaetzle and kraut. Todd stood, declaring that he would take his meal at one of the tables, as his old legs had grown tired of dangling from those tall stools, and that he would be back around for coffee. As Grace walked away to give the kitchen their orders, Todd said to Charles, “Give you kids some privacy. Shout if you think you’re about to blow it. And try not to come off too strange yet. Plenty of time for that later.”
The two young people made the most of the space he gave them. Their talk grew more familiar and easier, as the evening worn on. She was a student at home from the university in Fayetteville for Christmas break. In the fall, she would be going to Little Rock for medical school. What Charles did she could not detect, and he did not offer, though it was evident that he was well read and educated after what seemed a rather heterodoxical fashion. He was also well-traveled, though again for what purpose she could not decide; and, though he was not openly wealthy, she soon gather that he did not want for money.
Over the bar was an old television that was always playing on mute. Charles happened to catch the show out of the corner of his eye and paused to watch it for a moment with a smile. “What is it you want?” he said, “You want the moon? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.”
Grace turned to look at the television. “I’ll take it. Then what.”
“Then you’ll have to eat it I guess.”
“You know, they’re showing that at the theatre. They should have one more showing after I get off. You should take me, since you forgot to tell me happy birthday.”
Charles looked at his wrist at a watch that was not there. “There’s still time. I’m waiting for the last minute.”
“Then I guess you’ve got a little while.”
In the meantime, Todd, who as we have said took a table in the dining room, somewhat between the bar and the back table where sat the three strangers, had come to study these newcomers, at first with mere curiosity, but soon with an ever-increasing suspicion, and it was not long before he shared in the disquiet, the revulsion at their obvious and unwholesome strangeness. More than anything, he noticed that at all times at least one of that number was tracking the girl with their eyes — eyes filled not with youthful infatuation, as had been those of his new friend, but with the cold measuring aspect of a viper or a mantis.
Having finished his meal, Todd allowed a little more time to elapse for the young folks to have their privacy, until at last he decided that the coffee could wait not longer and returned to his new friend. “I guess I’m going to have to take him off your hands for a minute. Somebody said something about a cup of coffee and I guess that means we better have a smoke too,” producing as he said this two pipes from a vest pocket.
“I’ve got one,” said the young man, producing his own.
“I had a feeling you might.”
“Drinking in the afternoon. Smoking. Talking to strangers. Someday some poor girls’ going to have to break you of all kinds of bad habits.”
“And she hasn’t even heard about the worst ones. I also floss before I brush and drive with my shoes off.”
As Grace went off to start the coffees, Todd said, in a low voice, “Not too shabby there, water boy. Now let’s step outside a minute. Make her miss you a little.”
The courtyard, like the restaurant, lay below the level of the street, and though the hour was not yet even seven o’clock, the midwinter sun, which from its far southerly position cast little enough light into this sunken patio even at noonday, had long sat, removing what meager light could force its way through the white fog of the city and casting all in even deeper shadow. The mist that haunted every alleyway and avenue lay like a shroud over the whole of the city, obscuring, to one sitting in the courtyard, even the top floor of the building above, which rose not but two stories above the street level.
Charles made for a table on the far side of the courtyard, but Todd stopped him. “Let’s sit up here by the window. I know you don’t want to take your eyes of your girlfriend there, and I don’t think you should. There’s something I don’t like about these guys. See that? The way they keep eyeballing her. It ain’t cute like when you do it.” He took a pipe from his pocket and tapped it thoughtfully against the heel of his hand. “You don’t carry, do you?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“Are you now?”
“No. I left it in the car.”
“Huh. Man who’s seen stranger things, which I can tell you have even if you haven’t got around to telling me about it yet, ought not to be without. Seems you’ve seen one you’ll see more. Not sure why that is yet. What do you carry when you sometimes carry?”
“Ruger. The Wrangler.”
“.22. Interesting choice.”
“It was my grandpa’s.”
“The one who also had an affinity for the odd?”
“The other one.”
“Well. Good to carry something with history to it. It counts for something. For a lot. See that? Soon as one looks away, another one locks his eyes on her. Hm. Speaking of history, have a look at this.” Todd unbuttoned his vest and showed the butt of a pistol. “This is that Thompson I was telling you about. Got a short barrel oin her now, .44. She’s hard to conceal, but I’ve found my ways. You probably just thought I had a little belly going didn’t you.” From another pocket of his vest, he took a leather pouch. “You smoke Virginias? I don’t. Growing up on a tobacco farm you get tired of ‘em. This is my company tobacco. Better than what I’m smoking. Last of a can of McClelland Christmas Blend. Never be another like it since they went under. Here, get you some.”
They smoked in silence a little while. Todd stretched his arms and said “I’m going to go check on your girlfriend and see if she’s keeping all our coffee to herself. I haven’t seen her in a minute. Probably hiding out in the kitchen from those creeps.” Charles nodded and puffed his pipe then sat in the mist and enjoyed the dark and the quiet.
Someone cleared their throat at his elbow.
Charles jumped a hair then caught himself and calmly turned around.
Standing there, a hand’s breadth away, was one of the strangers. Without turning his head away Charles, shot a look back inside. One of the other two was standing next to Todd at the bar, between him and the door, gesturing emphatically and grinning and, from the look of it, talking loudly, while Todd nodded along with the air of someone trying to extricate himself from a conversation that already gone on far longer than he would have wished.
“Sure is a nice piece,” said the stranger.
“Thanks.”
“You think I could get me a hit of that?”
“It’s just tobacco, man,” said Charles, wearily. This was a conversation which he risked every time he smoked his pipe out of doors, and it was one that always proved tiresome.
“Tobacco? Naw. Really? You’re kiddin’ me. Sure smell good though.”
The man sat down at the table next to Charles.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Look at the tin,” he said, taking a tin of his own from his pocket.
Returning it to his pocket, Charles sat the pipe down on the ashtray and again turned to look for his friend. The second stranger still had him cornered and Todd was now looking visibly annoyed. Grace was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the third man, though the table was visible. As Charles turned back around he saw the stranger withdrawing his hand from the pipe.
“That sure is a nice one, man. You say it’s tobacco? What kind of tobacco?”
“A good kind,” said Charles, reaching back for the pipe. He raised it to his lips and snapped a match to light it, but something stopped him. It was the way the stranger was looking at him. There was in those eyes an unseemly eagerness. Charles stopped and instead took out his pocketknife, opened it, then reaching out over the ashtray, gently scarped the contents out into the tray. Where white ash and black crumbles of tobacco should have fallen, a fine white crystalline substance rained out.
“I think I’ll wait until I get my coffee to smoke anymore.”
The countenance of the stranger’s face was unmoved, but there was about the whole of his body an almost imperceptible movement, not of muscles coiling and skin tightening but of something beneath the skin where flesh ought to have been drawing into itself, preparing for something.
“Hey man, you say it’s just tobacco. Sure seems like a waste though.”
As he spoke, Charles tightened the grip on his pocketknife. He chanced a look over his shoulder toward the restaurant, and as he did so, he heard the metallic scrape of a car on the concrete and felt a cold hard grip laid upon his shoulder. With his other hand he swung, and the blade of the pocketknife sunk into the wrist of the arm grabbing him and he pulled out and stabbed again. As he burst through the bar, he heard a scream and he looked about wildly. Todd was at the bar and had the second stranger in a headlock.
“You better get after her,” yelled Todd with a nod toward the back of the restaurant. Charles rounded the wall behind the hostess stand and from there could see the back table, now empty, the shutters above it thrown open and behind it was not a bare stone wall, but the entrance to a tunnel. The stone walls were cobwebbed and dusty, with a floor sloping down deeper into the earth. At the terminus of his vision, he saw the bobbing red light of a receding torch and the vague outline of limbs thrashing— a small, girlish fist rising and falling on the unfeeling back of the third stranger.
Charles looked back at his friend.
Todd, on seeing him hesitate, called “I can handle these two. You better go after her. Chances like this don’t come along every day.”
Charles looked once more down the tunnel. Then he flipped over the chair nearest him, and, placing one foot on the leg that lay on the floor, yanked off the leg opposite. Heart thumping, weapon in hand, and with a small smile on his lips, he leapt into the unknown.