A Shape In The Nothing, by Chris Deal

The psychiatrist I’d been seeing, a lovely woman by the name of Dawn, with a face pale as the moon and hair like sky between the stars at midnight, she liked to trick me every time we had a session. She would ask me those questions she reserved for her clients, the $250-an-hour housewives, the pro bono cases at the clinic. “Were you abused as a child?” Or the fall back, “How was your relationship with your mother?” Between the sheets, she’d laugh and break confidentiality.

The one question she never asked in jest was, “How are you sleeping?” This was after our dalliance, always, as the sweat dried cool on our skin, as we caught our breath.

Together on my lunch break, we occupied her bedroom as her husband worked across town, and she asked again, her voice calm, soothing in her practiced tone, giving nothing else away. “How’ve you been sleeping?”

“Fine,” I said. A lie. I never approached the topic of the dreams with her, the form unseen.

“Is work all right?” With her finger she traced a small circle on the center of my chest.

“Yeah. You know, I had a weird customer this morning.”

“Weird how? Like, someone I’d schedule a meeting with?”

“Maybe. You might know him, actually.”

“Uh-oh,” she laughed. “How’s that?” Her hand went underneath the covers. I pretended not to notice.

“He’s a professor in the History department over there.”

“I don’t see too many teachers. They can afford to pay, but not what I charge.”

“True. He’s a regular of mine. James Rebadow.”

“A numismatic, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah. The way he told me, he’s obsessed with the pre-Civil War era. Man loves any coin he can get from then, which is good for me. He’s helped out on a few months of rent. He’s got a hard-on for the first ten years of the Longacre three-cent piece. I’ve almost gotten him the full set.”

“I bet he loves you.”

“Everyone does,” I said. She was quiet. “He was there waiting on me this morning when I went to open the store. He’s normally in on Friday afternoons, not Mondays, but I figure, I don’t know, he got out of class early.” If I ever asked anything about her husband, it would be if he ever compliments her smile. “He looks rough, like he hasn’t slept all weekend.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah. Anyway, he’s got his entire collection with him. Says he has an emergency that’s come up, needs the money, and wants to sell the whole caboodle. Has to be a damn big emergency, he’s easily bought over ten-thousand from me the last couple years.”

“Wow.”

“Since I couldn’t make it to the bank on Friday,” I said, causing her to hide the flush of her face in the crook of my arm, “I had enough for him. He said he would be back for it all, that it was a temporary situation, and he would buy it back in a week. I say to him, ‘I’ve got eight that I can front you right now.’”

“What are you, a loan officer?”

“Unofficially. I say, ‘I can promise not to sell these if you can promise you’ll pay me back next week.’ I didn’t even get into the interest and he jumped. He’s puts this old satchel that he brought the coins in up on the counter, and he’s so damn eager for the cash he’s practically dancing. I go back to the safe in the office, count out the money, and when I get back up there, he’s gone, just gone, and the satchel is right where he left it, and there’s a twenty-thousand dollar collection of coins and this dusty,.”

“Christ,” she says, her eyes large at the mention of the money.

“Yeah. He gave me his number a while back, on the chance I got anything in that might pique his interest. I give him a call and nothing, no answer. Call him again, nada. Third time, though, and he sounds like he’s in a damn wind tunnel. ‘Sorry, I had to run,’ he said. I ask him about the coins, and he says, ‘Keep them as collateral,’ and he hangs up.”

“So, what, he just leaves you with twenty grand and a book?”

“Twenty grand and one hell of an old book. Handwritten. Says it was written in 1702. The thing is in French, and I can’t make heads or tails of it.” I get up and out of the bed to go to my briefcase, and it’s so cold away from her. I brought the book over to show her. “Cultes des Goules, by Comte d’Erlette,” I say

“Cults of Ghouls,” she says.

“Hmm?”

“That’s what the title means. Cults of Ghouls. Looks like an old grimoire or something.” She reaches for it as I get back in her bed. Carefully, she flips through the archaic tome. “You know, this could be worth something. To a collector, I guess.”

“I guess.” I take the old thing from her as I softly kiss her neck, right at her pulse. It beats three times before I break contact, and go back to the book. “It looks like Rebadow decided to do a little defacing. Probably knocks a few grand off the street value.” I turn midway through the folio, to a page marked with a deep, dark red ink counter to the fading prose. A sentence, indecipherable to me, is underlined, and beside it, Rebadow had written, “The Black Guild?”

“Mean anything to you?” she asks.

“Unless it has to do with coins, or certain parts of your body,” I said, placing the book on her bedside table, “it’s voodoo to me.”

* * *

After one last session, I leave her, and her husband’s, apartment. After grabbing a quick bite from the sandwich shop three suites down, I go to the store through the front door, same as ever, reengaging the lock as I go inside. The alarm started in the back, same as ever. Around the display counter and past the living room tableau of a leather couch and matching chair around a coffee table covered in old magazines and newspapers and full ashtrays, all in front of the television that serves as an alter to whoever wants to use it. I go past it all to the office in the back. Never have used the back door, but that’s where the alarm panel is set. I enter four digits and the alarm goes silent. Set the briefcase in the desk’s chair and bend down for the till in the lower drawer, and something breaks the routine.

In the exact center of my desk, there is a business card beside a human eye.

The card is Rebadow’s, with a thumb print in blood over his name.

My cell phone vibrates in my pocket. Unable to take my eyes from the gore, my stomach muscles seizing, I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I say, weakly.

A voice like the buzzing of bees says, “We want the book.” After ten seconds of silence on my end, it repeated the sentence in the same horrific modulation, and the line went dead. The number is Rebabow’s.

My stomach lurched again, and I was bent over my trashcan, hacking and coughing up bile the color of grain.

Once the dry heaves pass, and my legs go steady, I grab the briefcase, the damned book the voice demanded tucked inside. I press the code into the security panel again, and go for the front door, unlocking it and slamming it shut, shaking the thick glass on the metal hinge. In the afternoon sun, my stomach quaked again. I lock the door and run to my car, tossing the briefcase into my passenger seat. Turn the ignition and slam the accelerator to the floor. Out on the road, I go down Independence, towards my apartment.

That’s where I keep my gun.

* * *

I never told Dawn about my dreams. Never told anyone. I can’t say ‘dreams’, though. There’s just the one dream, the only one I can ever remember. The only one that repeats.

I shut and locked the door as soon as I got home. Three locks, each one set. I replaced the apartment’s front door as soon as I signed the lease. Anyone could have kicked it in. The new one was three inches thick of solid oak. Coupled with the locks, and the specially installed security system, my place was impenetrable.

I dropped the briefcase on the kitchen table on my way to the bedroom, straight for the nightstand. At all times, the pistol is in the nightstand, oiled and loaded. I keep my rare pieces here, not at the store. The pieces only connoisseurs even know to ask for. The 1969 Lincoln cent with the obverse struck twice, thirty-five thousand to the right bidder, that’s pocket change. The most valuable ones are the silver eagle-sized slugs, each one with a swastika stamped on one side, the coins that, according to macabre rumormongers, are made of the gold teeth pulled from the bleeding mouths of the Holocaust. Blood money. One of those would cover for three months rent, both the apartment and the store, with plenty of spending money left. They’re one of the reasons I don’t humor the thought to call the police.

With the gun heavy in my hand, I go back to the front door, glance through the peephole.

No one.

The whole building is quiet. I keep thinking that I can hear that damn voice, like bees, so I turn the television on, the volume up.

From above the refrigerator, I grab the nearest bottle of unopened bourbon. Like I always do when I’m drinking alone, I pull straight from the mouth. The burn slows my heartbeat to a steady thump I can hear above the television.

Forcing a calm manner, I take the bottle with me to the kitchen table, and faced with the choice of holding the gun or the drink, I choose the gun. Placing the bourbon on the table, with one hand I open my briefcase, and pull out the tome. Holding it under my arm, I grab the bottle and go into my wreck of a bedroom. Dawn never comes here. None of the women do. I take another sip, and another, as much as I can drink.

Sitting back on the bed, the gun in my lap and the bottle on the nightstand, I use the light of my lamp to look through the book, the red leather binding, the frail paper, the barely readable script. I recognize a few words in French, very few. Some of them are wrong, though. A mixture of syllables that have no analogs in English, or any other Latin-based language near as I can tell. The letters shouldn’t go that way, words that would twist my tongue even if I hadn’t drank a quarter of the bottle. I try to sound one of them out, a hard C, and that’s as far as I got when I cell phone rings, shaking against my leg through the pocket.

The caller ID says “Rebadow.” I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t answer, but I can’t stop myself.

That same wrong voice, those foul sounds that shouldn’t be words. The human mind finds order in chaos. Shapes in the stars. Jesus Christ in the rings of a tree. “We want the book” in the sounds of bees.

* * *

That dream, that nightmare, it’s always the same. The funny damn thing about it, it’s like I’m awake whenever it happens. It feels as if I’m waking up from the stupor of sleep, staring into the black nothing above, around me. It’s never normal darkness, but an absence, of light, of everything; it’s an abyss like the dead of space. If Heaven is the glory of the presence of God, then Hell is the annihilation of being, a disconnect, like the nothing they say there was before Creation. I’m awake, I’m conscious, even though I don’t know my name, I don’t know if I exist at all. I don’t have a body, I’m just there, in the space where there should be stars, it’s me, and that’s all, except for a shift, a shape out past where even light could stretch. Beyond the dark, there is something coming forth, and if it was God, then I grew to fear Him.

* * *

I didn’t even know I was asleep and the claustrophobic expanse of nothing was closing in on me. Prone on my bed, the afternoon light that had been pouring in through my window the last time I opened my eyes was gone. There was nothing to see outside.

Trying to sit up, it’s the sound of bees that replacing the trembling silence, and a limb comes from the dark to my chest, forces me against the mattress.

Instinctively I struggle against the obstacle, but it’s stronger than me, than a man should be, crushing me back.

The only light to be had is from the alarm. In the nothing that was there is a face, a crude imitation of a man’s. My brain beats against my skull with the effort of giving that thing order, of trying to understand it. Its flesh was the color of bloody bile, its triangular face more crustacean than man. “We want the book,” the vibration from the phone, that damnable sound shook everything from me, and I tried to scream as something like an antenna thrusted, hot and wrong, down my throat. I try to think of anything else, something normal, the sessions with Dawn, finding a 1970-S Lincoln with a doubled die obverse in my change at the coffee shop, anything not the thing on top of me, the falling over me.

In the darkness that came over me, the nothing of before the stars was everything and then there was a droning, starting low, then working its way up, louder and louder as the shape in the dark approached, got closer than every before, and it wasn’t God, it was worse than that, and I tried to scream but there was nothing to scream with, no body, nothing between the shape and me, nothing to stop it, nothing at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Deal has published several poems and short stories around the internet, most recently Glasgow Simile in Darkest Before the Dawn and four poems in Bicycle Review.  He also regularly writes about literature at Creative Loafing.  He has several stories and poems coming out in the months to come, and will be publishing a collection of micro-stories through Brown Paper Publishing in early 2010.  You can find him online at cdeal.blogspot.com