Big Dark Hole Read online

  The flash made the singer lift his arm in front of his eyes and stagger backward, shrieking like a gull. In the fifteen seconds Merle had to let the film develop before he could rip it off and peel it open, the band stopped playing and Ronnie lurched through the spotlight. “You’ve ruined it,” he screamed, going green in the face. Dust fell out of his nose and his hair wave had broken. Abruptly he stopped, looked across to the bartender and yelled, “Don’t just stand there, get the camera. Come on.” The bartender waved to the guys in the band and they put down their instruments and stood up. Merle ran.

  He brushed past the couples on the dance floor and was heading toward the double doors. From the corner of his eye he noticed the bartender coming from behind the bar with a sap in his hand. He looked to the doors again, only to find that the waiter had, in an instant, planted himself in the line of escape. Merle put on speed, determined to make a go at just running the guy over. He had the momentum, but it never came to that, because from off to the right, the dancing lady in the pink gauze came twirling by like a Dervish and smashed into the waiter. The two of them went over like sacks of turnips. Merle leaped and cleared them. He streaked down the hallway, his steps making a racket. Out into the cool night, he ran for the cattails, shoving the photo in his jacket pocket and draping the camera belt around his neck.

  It was dark but he managed to find the bike pretty quickly. As his ass hit the seat and he pedaled, he looked back over his shoulder. Shadowy figures emptied out through the lighted portal of the Thousand Eyes. When he reached the path a car started up behind him. His heart was pounding and the adrenalin was spurting out his ears. He pedaled with the belief that Ronnie Dunn’s flunkies really meant to kill him. “Like Superman,” Merle told Barney, “I was flying down that path, but I couldn’t see a fuckin’ thing. Behind me, I hear the car coming, and they’re getting so close they’ve got me in their headlights.”

  In the midst of the chase, Merle reported having what he called “a moment of genius.” He bet that with the confusion of the flash in the dark, no one could see he had an instant camera. He took it from around his neck and threw it back over his shoulder, hoping they’d at least stop to pick it up and that would buy him more of a lead. In fact, it worked. Not only did they stop, but once they had the camera they broke off their pursuit. Later, on the safety of Frog Road, heading toward Jericho, he realized he’d gotten away and could laugh at the thought of Ronnie Dunn holding the camera, discovering the shot Merle had taken was no longer inside it.

  A lot was riding on that one photograph: the foundation to the grand finale of the Bars of South Jersey series. As he discovered, once back in his apartment, the door locked, that picture was a success in every way. It had that Polaroid-flash glare he’d come to love, sweeping vaguely down from the left corner. The hundred reflections of it off the glass behind the bar were like a distant constellation. Slow-dancing shadows with glowing red eyes. And Ronnie, eyes soulfully closed, with a corona of light around his head and bathed in white fire, his open mouth emitting a beacon of green mist. When he first saw it, Merle couldn’t wait to get down to work, but as it turned out he put off starting the painting for nearly a year. He told Barney the photo had given him nightmares. And so the Bars of South Jersey series sat unfinished.

  In September 1967, Hurricane Doria, only a Category 1, made it to the Jersey coast. It wasn’t bad but for two tragedies it left in its wake. One made the national news; one made only the local radio station in Bridgeton. In the national news story, three people drowned when their boat sank off Ocean City. The local story, which Merle heard late at night while painting, was that the rising tide had swept away the Thousand Eyes. Upon hearing it he immediately went looking for the Polaroid from his visit there and found it under a stack of drawings. The bad dreams hadn’t visited in months, and he laughed at his own foolishness, admonishing himself for not having already finished the series.

  The same week the Thousand Eyes washed into the river and Merle started the painting, he peddled over to Milville for an art-show opening late one afternoon. He got there early and was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for things to get started. Last time he was there they had a tasty White Zinfandel. Across the street, in the shadow of the sub shop he noticed some commotion. Other people on the street were stopping and staring in that direction as well. It was the old couple from Jack’s and the Eyes. The woman was pulling herself out of the grasp of the old man. She yelled, “I got to go. He’s waiting.” She’d move away from him a few feet and he’d run and catch her by the arm. “Don’t go,” he said. “Please, I can’t stay,” she said and pulled away again. “I’ll go with you,” he called. She didn’t look back, and he didn’t follow but leaned against the front of the sub shop and wiped his tears with a handkerchief.

  Merle got blitzed that night at the opening, was shown the door, and could barely pedal home. Still he went back to work on the painting of the Thousand Eyes, putting everything he had into it. Two weeks later all that was left was Ronnie Dunn’s weird left eyebrow, a couple of gray barnacles, and a small section of forehead. The rest was complete, perfect, capturing the Polaroid effects, the singer, and the grim, cold spirit of the lounge. Merle worked with a homemade, squirrel-hair brush to render the uptwist of the pale hair, concentrating so hard he perspired. As he executed the final stroke on the eyebrow, he heard something odd. Backing away from the painting, he reached behind him with his free hand and turned the radio down.

  He listened, and eventually the soft noise came again. At first he mistook it for a mosquito, but then remembered it was the end of October. He closed his eyes and hearing it twice more recognized it as a distant voice. Someone calling out on the street, he thought. He laid the brush down, went to the window, and opened it. He stuck his head out, and above the sound of the wind, he heard the voice of Ronnie Dunn singing “Fond Wanderer.” He laughed, slammed shut the window, and went back to work, figuring someone in one of the buildings across the street was playing the old 45.

  But as he painted on, the voice got louder and louder. As Merle told Barney, “It was like Dunn was out in the street, then in the downstairs foyer, then out in the hallway, then in the corner of the room. And the closer I got to finishing, the closer he got to me. I was shivering scared, but I was damned if I wasn’t going to finish the series. I worked fast, without giving up anything in the quality, hoping that finally finishing would put Ronnie and the whole mess out of my misery.” He finished the painting an hour later, “Fond Wanderer” booming in his head. The second he was done, he put on his jacket and headed for the door.

  Merle said he knew what was happening, and the drive to follow the voice was monumental, like two metal fingers were hooked in each of his nostrils and attached by a chain to the Queen Mary, which was pulling out of port. He got as far as the door and opened it. And here’s where my doubts about the story came in, because Merle attested to having another “moment of genius,” and my credulity can only accommodate one Merle moment of genius per story. Barney convinced me, though, it all made sense. Anyway, Merle flung himself back into the room, grabbed the palette knife, and scraped off down to primer the last gray barnacle he painted on Ronnie Dunn’s forehead. With that, the voice abruptly stopped, and he was no longer compelled to follow.

  Two weeks later, he tried again to finish the series, and again the voice returned. He scraped it quick before Dunn got too loud. He found that as long as he left that swatch of canvas bare, the voice was silent. The kicker, as far as Barney was concerned, was that Merle eventually tried to get a show with the paintings of the bar series that were finished. He saved up and made slides and took them around to the different galleries. The gallery owners were intrigued by the local subject matter, but every one eventually passed, saying something along the lines of, “Really pretty good, but there’s just something missing.”

  “And that,” said Barney, “is the real voice of death.”

  Somewhere ar
ound 1975, Merle said he sold off for cheap, sometimes as low as twenty dollars, each of the paintings in the series, except for The Thousand Eyes. He confessed their presence was turning him into an alcoholic. As long as he had access to the last, unfinished piece, and could still complete it if he dared, it didn’t matter to him where the other paintings were. Once the series was properly finished, it would take on a power greater than the sum of its parts, and Merle would, of course, be dead.

  The painting of the Thousand Eyes hangs, as it has since 1976, above the booths in the back of Jack’s Diner. Jack’s son Dennis understands it’s just for safekeeping. Barney said Merle swears that he’s going to finish the piece any day now, but the old man does a lot more mumbling around town than painting lately, looking everywhere for that street that leads to The Land Where No One Dies.

  Hibbler’s Minions

  It was 1933, and we wintered at the Dripping Springs west of Okmulgee. The Dust Bowl was raging, money was scarce. People didn’t buy what they didn’t need, but one thing they still needed was wonder. The folks out on the Great Plains could always scrape together a dime or two for Ichbon’s Caravan of Splendors, a wandering menagerie of freaks and exotic beasts. We put on shows from Oklahoma to Ohio and back each year. Granted, the custom of carnivals was dying, and it faded another few inches with every town we rolled into. Dying wasn’t dead, though, and in those days that was something.

  Ichbon was an old-timer by then, having started out with Barnum in New York City at the American Museum when still in his teens. The great showman helped set the young assistant up with connections and cash to run the Caravan of Splendors. By the time I came to the Maestro, as we were required to call Ichbon, he had seen all the wonder he could stomach and at nights was given to drinking Old Overholt. Although he’d lost his sense of splendor, he retained his shrewdness for a dollar through those weary years and always managed to keep us in food, drink, and a little pocket money. He dressed like an admiral, complete with a cocked hat ever askew on his bald head. His trucks were dented, his trailers were splintered and rickety, his tent was threadbare, his banners were moth-eaten, and his beasts were starving. A lot of us, though, in the grasp of the Maestro, had nothing but the show between us and destitution. Who would hire a man born with an extra face on the back of his head? I was Janus, the Man Who Sees Past and Future. In reality, I saw neither, and even the present was murky.

  On a day in late February, Ichbon instructed the laborers, also known in their act as the Three Miserable Clowns, to erect the tent so as to check it for repairs. In a few weeks we were due to set out on that year’s journey. I was standing with him beneath the vaulted canvas, the ground still frozen beneath our feet, the sunlight showing dimly through the fabric. “What do you see in the future, Janus?” he asked me.

  “Hopefully dinner,” I replied.

  “I predict a banner year for the caravan,” he said.

  “What makes you optimistic?”

  “People are in such desperate straits, they’ll seek refuge in nostalgia.”

  “Refuge we shall give them,” I said.

  “Nostalgia,” said Ichbon, “is the syrup on the missing hotcakes.”

  Mirchland, the dwarf, appeared then through the tent’s entrance with a stranger following. “Maestro,” he said, “this is Mr. Arvet. He’s come from all the way up by Black Mesa in the Panhandle to see you.”

  I could tell the man was a farmer by his overalls and boots, and that he was beset with hard times by the look in his eyes. His face was a dry streambed of wrinkles. Ichbon took off the admiral hat and bowed low. “A pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. He straightened and put his hand out to the man. “I am Ichbon.” The Maestro’s credo about the public was—“Treat them each like visiting emissaries from a venerable land. It’s good for the cash box.” The two shook hands. I expected the fellow to ask to join the show. I’d seen it before a hundred times. But instead he said, “I have something to sell you.”

  “What might that be?” asked Ichbon.

  “It’s out in my truck in a crate.”

  “An animal?”

  “We had a black blizzard back in the fall. God’s own wrath came barreling across the dead fields a mile high, and in its clouds it bore the face of Satan. You couldn’t touch nobody in the midst of it or the electricity in the air would throw you apart. When it passed it left behind a plague of centipedes and a beast.”

  “Bring your truck in under the big top,” said the Maestro, “and I’ll have the clowns unload it.”

  Big Top, I thought, looking up at the tattered canvas, and my other face laughed.

  I stopped laughing, though, when the Miserable Clowns, using all their strength, unloaded a long crate from the back of the truck. The sounds that issued forth from it reverberated inside the tent, reed thin but raspy, and their strangeness made my hair stand up. A moment later, a horrible stench engulfed us.

  “Pungent,” said Ichbon and drew out his handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. From behind his makeshift mask, he asked Mr. Arvet, “Can you bring it out of the crate?”

  “I made the box so the end slides open,” said the farmer. “Do you have a cage of some sort we can empty it into?”

  The Maestro gave orders for the clowns to bring the leopard cage, the leopard having given up the ghost through the harsh winter. The three buffoons brought the metal-barred enclosure and set it down so that its opening was congruent with the sliding panel of the crate. When all was ready, Mr. Arvet went to the box and pulled up the hatch. Immediately some large tawny-colored beast shot forth. It moved too quickly to see it well at first. The clowns dropped the sliding door of the metal cage and trapped it. Ichbon and I stepped closer to see.

  “What in God’s dry earth?” said the Maestro.

  “Me and my woman call it the Dust Demon,” said Arvet.

  The Miserable Clowns backed out of the tent and fled.

  The thing was as long as the leopard had been, but bulkier, more muscular, the very color of the grit that blew across the plains in those dirty days. Its body was covered with a fine, spiraled wool, and it moved on powerful legs, at the ends of which were paws with long, black, curving nails. There was no tail to speak of, just a stub, and the head was like nothing ever seen outside a nightmare. Its eyes were the tiniest black beads, and it had no ears, only holes that appeared as if they’d been drilled into either side of its skull. The mouth was wide, and there was no jaw, just a thin membrane in the shape of a giant open tulip, the whiskered edges rippling with life. The Demon grunted and then howled to discover it had not escaped. When its maw was wide, farther in there could be spotted rows of sharp black teeth.

  “An abomination,” I whispered from my other face, unable to help myself.

  Arvet looked around as if unsure who’d spoken—he’d not seen my other me—and finally said, “Well, it is a demon.”

  Ichbon shook his head. “You say this came out of a dust storm?”

  “Doc Thedus, up in Black Mesa, guessed it had been hibernating under the ground for centuries, and when the topsoil blowed away, it was awoken.”

  “Maybe,” said the Maestro, “maybe.” I could tell from his expression that he was seeing dollar signs. “How much do you want for it?”

  “A hundred,” said the farmer.

  “A hundred dollars,” said Ichbon and put the hat he’d been holding back on his head as if to make him think clearer. “No doubt you’ve uncovered a bona fide wonder here, Mr. Arvet. I’d like to make a deal with you, but I’ve not got a hundred to spare at this moment. We’ve yet to start this year’s caravan. I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll give you seventy dollars now, and in the fall, we can meet up in Shattuck, where we put on our last show, and I’ll give you another fifty. That’s more than you’re asking. By then, we’ll be flush after our journey to the east.”

  Arvet rubbed the back of his head and stared a
t the ground for a long time. “I suppose I could do that.”

  “Good enough,” said the Maestro and shook hands with the farmer.

  “What do we need to know about the Dust Demon? What does it eat? How do you care for it?”

  “First off, you gotta be careful around it. The thing took down my neighbor’s wife and ate her like a ham sandwich. Luckily he realized there was money to be made from it and instead of shooting it on the spot, helped me trap it. I gotta split the profits with him 70-30 of a hundred dollars. I guess I’ll keep the extra twenty for myself.”

  “Besides farmer’s wives, what does it eat?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” he said. “We had an outbreak of jackrabbits up there, and they were easy food to catch for it, so I fed it jackrabbits. It ate ’em but without any real enthusiasm. One thing’s for sure, whatever you do, don’t put any water near it. Water makes it weak. My wife put a bowl of water in its cage early on like you would do for a dog, and it almost perished on the spot till we come to understand it couldn’t abide anything wet. Keep it covered in the rain.”

  That night, the Maestro gathered us beneath the tent and told us his plans for the Dust Demon and how the creature would save us all. Martina, the Dog Girl, described Ichbon’s delivery as “grandiloquent,” which all but Ichbon knew meant “meandering and tedious.” The tent by then had trapped the Demon’s stench, and we breathed it while the old man carried on. Finally, Jack Sprat, the Thinnest Man Alive, said in a slightly raised voice, “It smells worse than shit in here.” From its cage behind the speaker’s podium the creature let loose a weak cry.

  Ichbon took Sprat’s cue and said, “In closing, I want to reiterate: the Demon will draw them, money will fill the coffers, and the Caravan of Splendors will rise from its economic hibernation to live again.” We clapped once or twice, I wouldn’t call it applause, and everyone made a beeline for the exit. Even the Maestro didn’t stick around. He walked in a stately manner followed by the Three Miserable Clowns pantomiming him in the throes of his speech. They followed him, and I followed them, back to his trailer, where I knew the Old Overholt would flow. It seems that the Falling Angel and Maybell, the Rubber Lady, had the same notion as me. They were there, seated outside, passing the bottle with Ichbon when I arrived. A small fire burned in the center of their circle. There was an empty wooden folding chair, and I joined them.