Maze of Dementia and Other Stories
Copyright © 2011
Evan Morris
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, except in accordance with fair use policy, without written permission from the author.
ISBN 978-0-620-51900-7
Published by Evan Morris at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedicated to Mr Edgar Allan Poe
Humilia opera mea
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Joe Vaz, the editor of Something Wicked, for first publishing three of the stories that appear in this collection. Joe’s mag is a real labour of love but also a fantastic read. I urge you to get hold of it. If you type “Something Wicked SF & Horror Magazine” into Amazon’s search engine, you’ll find it.
The image used on the cover of this collection is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The source image can be found at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gnuckx/4816756390/sizes/l/in/photostream/
The details of the Creative Commons license can be found at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Matt Brown is driving a tired Ford Taurus into a tornado. At first he doesn't recognize the signs because it's November, and it's Florida. Wrong freaking month and very wrong freaking town. It's supposed to be warm with mild humidity, people out swimming or playing golf. Instead a hot, low wind is battering his car out of a clear blue sky, and he looks up and sees clouds less than a hundred feet up moving fast across his line of sight, brushing the tops of the palms along Florida 400. It seems to him that as the clouds hit the tops of the trees the world makes a groaning noise, like chains being dragged over concrete.
He doesn't recognize what this means just yet. Matthew Brown, of Matt's Amusements and Attractions Co, is not expecting tornadoes. Things have become crazy lately, but tornadoes in Florida is just one element of crazy more than he's prepared to countenance. Instead he's still worrying the nightmares from the night before, and the hallucinations from last week, these ragged terrors that have been plaguing him. He's trying to make sense of what he knows makes no sense: it's just a nightmare, kid, he tells himself. Just nightmares.
But he knows it's more than that. Why else has he been barreling down from South Carolina, foot to the floor, living off McDonalds, trying to get back to the source of it all before the source evaporates again? Why else has Matt Brown come down to Orlando one year on, if not to confront that gypsy bitch who started it? Find her, and confront her. Maybe slap her some. If he can find her.
Matt Brown is visualizing the way the gypsy's face is going to whiten up with shock when he pops her one on the jaw, and he's calming down a little, almost smiling, and then the low wind hits and his eyes go up and it's - what the hell is all of this? Low moving clouds and the hammering wind and suddenly Matt Brown's mind catches up with the world it's living in, and he thinks: twister. He knows where it's all been heading all this time. Back to a long, long time ago. Back to a girl named Ellie Howser. Back to Kansas, years before. He's ready to quote sardonically from The Wizard of Oz, but instead he just hisses out a hiss of disbelief, and says, to no one: "You have got to be freaking kidding me."
-oOo-
One year ago Matt Brown was also in Orlando. It was the first time in his life he'd attended a conference, and he expected it to be the last. Matt Brown didn't conference, at least not at the Orange County Conference Center in amongst the theme parks and the tourists. Matt Brown conferenced sometimes in abandoned parking lots, and sometimes in trailer homes, and maybe in a truck stop diner on an interstate. Those conferences usually ended badly for at least one of the other delegates.
But Matt Brown was at this conference - the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Expo - because someone had invited him. Someone who had told him something that piqued his interest. In the old days, during the 70s and 80s, people would have contacted Matt Brown through the trade magazine Amusement Business. It was common among carneys to give their address care of the magazine, because they were always on the road. Matt had a copy of Amusement Business and a copy of Showtime, another trade magazine, sticking out of his luggage in the hotel room, reminding him of how things used to be. But the woman who'd contacted him this time had called his mobile phone. That's how it was nowadays, and Matt wasn't nostalgic at all. He didn't think about the past, or tried not to, and if he had to, he thought only about the good bits: banging women, making money, telling other people what to do. Matt owned three traveling funfair operations and he made damned sure the people working those operations knew all about it.
The only vague hint of nostalgia Matt ever felt was when he thought about the Topeka Twister, which he had invented. A great ride, that was. Revolutionary in the 1980s. All right, maybe invented was too strong. Maybe stole it from the guy who invented it was better. But that didn't matter because that guy wasn't Matt Brown, he was just brown: as dirt, six feet under. And who cared? Not Matt Brown. You could take the past and shove it, far as he was concerned. He'd trade the old ways for new every day of the week. Take mobile phones. You could get calls on mobile phones from mysterious women who wanted you to come to conferences. And on the self-same mobile phones you could look at pictures of women's snatches. That was progress. Get your own private cootch show right there on the little screen.
Matt had on his light blue Seersucker and felt refreshed after a night's sleep. The hotel room was done up in orange and burnt red and yellow, and outside the window was Florida, all breezes and high sky. Things were good. If he wanted he could head outside right now to the hotel pool and sit on a recliner and throw back some tall drinks with straws in them. Watch the tourists jiggling around in their bikinis. If not for the appointment with his mystery woman, he might've. Matt was sixty but could pass for fifty, no problem, and women weren't that fussy anyway.
Instead he wandered out into the hotel lobby - white tiles and plush purple sofas - and made his way out to the bus-stop in front. As he went he caught a glimpse of a woman he thought he knew. It might be a woman who used to hang around one of his fairs, tacked on to a showman who operated an age and scale gig, guess your weight, that sort of shit. Matt had eighty-sixed that guy's stall for playing short cons and then he'd banged the woman after. That was how he rolled. He watched this woman briefly, wondering, and thought it could be her, could be not. Didn't matter, and either way if she was staying at the hotel he'd give her some when he got back.
Pamphlets told him it was a short hop from the hotel to Universal Studios, Wet & Wild, Seaworld, Magic Kingdom, the Epcot Center, all that stuff. If you were a mark it was heaven. But Matt wasn't a mark, he was a showman. Matt caught the bus from the hotel to the conference center, which turned out to be an enormous campus of white buildings with weird shapes attached. To Matt it was meaningless: concrete circles, iron half-circles, skyscraping hoops, all white, and lots of glass. Inside was what he'd expected: crowds of morons. Crowds and crowds of gaping, laughing, munching, schmoozing schmucks and imbeciles, gawping at attractions and exchanging business cards. Drinking over-priced bad coffee out of paper cups. All the lunacy of the theme park industry was collected into these massive halls, and you had to push past fake Egyptian sarcophagi, fake Buddha heads, life-size zombie models, miniature roller coasters, replica fighter aircraft suspended from the ceiling. It was stuffy and it stank and Matt Brown didn't give a shit. He oriented himself on a map attached to a giant model of bee, and ploughed down the alleys of stalls, ignoring everything, seeking the woman. Most of this stuff was useless to him anyway, intended as it was for city amusement parks and mall arcades. Matt was a high grass operator, moving his fairs from patch of land to patch of land, and there were limits to what you could successfully move and set up. Couldn't be too big to move easily, and couldn't be so small it wasn't worth the payday.
The woman turned out to be waiting for him, as if nothing else was happening in the world. Afterwards he would think that was eerie, but at the time he was too distracted by the junk and noise all around to notice. Her stall was in a pokey corner nearby a guy selling "thousands of styles of playing card". The woman was rigged up to look like a gypsy or something: red robes with gold trimming, and a tiara on her head, heavy make-up. She was a looker, he thought; dark hair and smoky eyes and crimson lips.
"I'm Matt," he said simply, and she said what she'd said on the phone. "Gulshat, Mr Brown."
She did a good spooky accent and stayed in character, not winking or anything. When she'd told him the name on the phone he'd tried to make it funny, but the only two things he could think of were gut-shot and gull-shit, and neither amused him much. He was sure then, and more sure now, that she was an operator. She was no more mysteriously Eastern than his brown loafers. Probably she was a dago. You could dress a dago up to look Turkish easy. He'd done it a thousand times himself. Most marks wouldn't recognize a Turk if the Turk was stabbing them in the ass. This chick's name was probably Gina Di Woppola, small-time ex-hooker from Bensonhurst, with a talent for tale-spinning. And speaking of tail, she had a hot one. That's what kept him looking at her. That and her promise.
"You said you had a unique attraction."
"That's correct, Mr Brown. A unique attraction. I warn you, it is not for everyone."
Matt snickered. "Spare me the ballyhoo. Show me the thing." As he said it he was thinking, show me the thing in your pants, lady, and maybe if all went well he could use that line later. But now it was business.
Inside her stall was a man-sized booth, like an old-style telephone box. Above the booth her banner read: Maze of Dementia. "I like that," Matt said. "Dementia. You don't hear that often. It's good. What's in the box?"
Gulshat took his arm at the elbow and guided him closer to the metal structure. "It is a maze, Mr Brown."
"Is it a maze for tiny people?" Matt was figuring this was some kind of illusion show, maybe you went inside and they used projected images to mess with your head. He'd seen similar things before. "You said on the phone this was just for me. And you said it was a return to the Topeka Twister. What I'm seeing is what? Is this some kind of virtual reality thing, music and noise, you spray odors in my nose?"
Gulshat smiled calmly. "No Mr Brown, this is a maze. A maze of dementia, just as the name says. And it will take you back, personally, to the Topeka Twister. The original Topeka Twister."
Matt frowned. "What original? I invented the original."
"Just so, Mr Brown. Would you step inside?"
Suddenly Matt felt uneasy. He glanced over his shoulder and the whole thing was still there, the idiots strolling by, the stalls full of stupid gimcrack. He could back out of Gulshat's stall and walk away. And he should have. He knew that. She was playing him, feeding him a line, luring him here to sell him her half-assed made-in-China phone booth.
Gulshat watched him carefully, and said, "In your jargon, Mr Brown, this is what you call a 'dark ride'."
She opened the door to the booth and nudged him into it. Before he knew it the door had shut behind him. For a moment there was complete blackness and Matt had to reassure himself that things could not go bad, this was the middle of a convention center, thousands of people were yards away. It felt stuffy and he stretched out a hand to lean against the inner wall of the booth, only to find nothing there. He tried again, then with the other hand. Then he stepped backwards, quickly, feeling his heartbeat quicken. Nothing there. Nothing left or right or front or back. He felt nauseous, trying to reconcile the dissonance. He had stepped into the booth, and then - bang. Emptiness.
"Pretty impressive," he said, so he could hear himself say something. There was no echo, just his voice. A piece of normalcy. Okay, a maze. So you have to find your way out.
Matt walked. At first he trod carefully, still worried that his shins might hit the booth walls at any second, but after a few strides those concerns fell away. It was surprisingly easy to accept that he was walking through a vast, dark expanse, although - of course - he couldn't be. But his footfalls made footfall noises as he went, perfectly synchronized with what he assumed was his imagined motion. He believed he was hypnotized or asleep, and he was pretty sure whatever the booth was doing to him was one hundred per cent illegal. But it didn't feel dangerous, and he was willing to go with it, as long as something happened soon. It was getting boring.
"Matt?"
He started and let out a little cry. "Jesus, what?"
He looked around and something light, a figure, moved off at an angle to his left. Moved quickly. Small. The size of a child, maybe. In its wake, Matt stood and relistened to the voice he had heard. A child's voice? Could be, if you factored out the echoes. It wasn't creepy except for the fact that it had said his name.
He changed direction and headed after the figure, and there it was again, flitting quickly out of sight. It was odd, that. Matt couldn't see any structures for the person to hide behind, and he didn't encounter any as he walked. You're in a tiny booth, he reminded himself. There is no open expanse, and there's no figure. Impressive that the equipment could speak his name, but then again, Gulshat knew it and could be doing the speaking herself. Right? Right.
"Matt Brown!" the voice said. "Don't you remember me?"
This time it was coming from behind him. He turned to look at it, expecting to see the white shape dashing away again, but there was a girl sitting there, maybe eleven or twelve years old. Matt Brown recognized her and it confused him. "What?"
"Don't you remember me, Matt Brown?"
She was eleven and a half, to be precise. She would always be eleven and a half. Dressed in a frock her mother had made out of a table-cloth, but with brand-new mary-janes on her feet, her brown hair bobbed to the chin. She wasn't merely sitting on the chair, either, she was tied to it. Tied to it just the way Matt Brown had tied her to it in 1964.
"Do you remember, Matt?"
Matt stared at her. Part of him was awestruck, punched in the gut, while another part was trying to figure out how the hell this was happening. And then, why this was happening. Why this? Why this memory, why now, why Ellie Howser? And hadn't Gulshat said "the original Topeka Twister"? How the hell did she know that?
Before he could speak, the girl vanished. When she was gone, Matt said, again: "What?" Unlike the voice of the girl, his own voice did not echo, but instead hung flatly in front of him before dissolving. Matt swallowed. This was weird. This was - very, very weird.
"Hello?" he called. "I've seen enough!" He tried to keep his voice firm and clear, and it came out that way, and he was pleased. Because he didn't feel firm and clear. He felt annoyed. "Gulshat? Lady? Open the frigging booth, okay?"
There was no response, but he could imagine her saying to him: "Mr Brown, it is a maze."
Okay. Okay, it's a maze. You find your way out of a maze. And it's a fairground attraction, it can't be that hard. He swallowed again, thinking: yes it can. Sometimes the mind just got stuck on things, couldn't see past the obvious. Matt had, himself, once or twice, been stuck inside simple mazes. He wouldn't admit that outside the confines of his own head, but it was true. And one thing about a maze: if you got frustrated or started to panic, it just got more confusing.
Stay calm, he told himself. Forget the girl. For now, anyway. Deal with that later. Right now, walk.
He walked. He seemed to be walking for a long time, but it was hard to judge time. Might only have been a minute or two, but everything was dark out in the distance. It was light enough nearby. You could see your own hands and so on, but out there, beyond, was night. Worse than night. Nothingness. A dark ride, she'd said. She meant 'dark' as in spooky, but this was just dark. And no good as a ride, either. You couldn't put this in a fairground, what the hell would you tell people? Get in this booth and walk around the dark for a while? What's the hook?
"Crappy attraction," he said, affirming it. "You hear me out there? It's no fun."
"Not like the Twister, huh, Matt?"
A different voice this time, male. Right next to his face, making him hop to the left, turning. "You?"
"Hey there, partner."
And then the man was gone. Matt knew him too, of course, although he didn't want to think about him. The man who built the first Topeka Twister, in a barn. Matt said: "I'm through with this, okay? I designed that ride. You just built it." It wasn't completely true, but it felt good to say out loud what he'd been saying inside since 1982. "It was my ride, but I couldn't get it out."
There was no answer. There was no one there. And there didn't seem to be any sensible approach to exiting the maze, either. Keep walking? Stop walking? Stand on your hands? Matt felt a slight tinge of real fear, way down underneath everything, a tiny worried idea that if you couldn't see the maze, you couldn't escape the maze. But he would not let that fear take hold. He let it turn to anger instead, and then to a clear and brutal sense of determination. He would get out. Of course he would. Because - it wasn't a maze.
"That's the trick, is it? I fell for your suggestion, just like an ordinary mark. You told me it was a maze and I didn't question it. But it isn't a maze. Thinking it's a maze is what makes it a maze. Right?"
He said all this out loud, a little smile on his face, but nothing happened. His smile faltered and he felt frustration gassing up in his craw. He was forming his mouth into a violent snarl, ready to turn on a horror show of invective, when - snap - a light came on and he was standing in the booth, the door popping open softly behind him and letting in the rumbling sound of a few thousand conference-goers talking and walking in the world beyond.
-oOo-
Gulshat was nowhere. Matt stood blinking in the neon glare and bustling noise of the convention, feeling slightly stunned. The operator at the card stall caught his eye and his face lit up with the familiar gleam of one about to fleece, which brought Matt back to himself. Before the guy could speak Matt said: "Do I look like a chump, buddy? Where's the gypsy at?"
The guy shrugged indifferently and turned his attention to two young women whose arms were already overloaded with asinine gunk they'd bought at other stalls.
Matt waited all of thirty seconds and then pushed his way back out of the convention center into the sunlight. If Gulshat wasn't even going to hang around to talk to him, so be it. She had his phone number. And frankly, he wasn't even sure he wanted to talk to her. The booth was useless to him. It seemed unfinished, as if only part of the features had been built. If Gulshat was looking for investment capital she'd come to the wrong Matt Brown. He knew, without acknowledging it, that there were other reasons to speak to her, reasons unrelated to the viability of her business venture. But he didn't want to think about those reasons. As a matter of principle Matt Brown did not reflect on things. He noted, though, that there might be more to this, some sort of shakedown building. Maybe, somehow, Gulshat had come into some information, and maybe the next time he spoke to her she'd be asking him for a pay-off. She didn't seem the honest type, so turning him over to the so-called authorities was out of the question. If this was about things he had done in the past, things that society might frown upon, then it was almost certainly blackmail.
The thought gave him a headache.
Matt waved away the efforts of various dummies to entice him into tourist traps and took the bus back to the hotel. He had intended to leave the following day, but figured he might as well check out sooner, get back to work. All his fairs were down in the south now, heading into winter, and he could be back in the thick of things in under twenty-four hours. That was what he wanted. This digression had been a mistake.
First he'd have a drink, though. Might as well lubricate, and maybe get some ass, too. Flush out the demons. Inserting the key card into the hotel room door, he paused. Demons? Matt, what demons? He snorted and shook himself, then thought: if you have to physically shake yourself, something big is wrong.
He got room service to bring him a bottle of Scotch. It was a short argument: "Listen, genius, you can bring me thirty singles, fifteen doubles, or a bottle and a glass. You decide." Sitting with his first tumbler full he tried to get some porn on the hotel TV, but you had to phone the front desk to "enable the service" and he didn't feel up for it. He put the TV on ESPN and tried to watch a hot-dog eating contest while the Dewars eased out the kinks in his head. Little Jap munching fifty freaking hot dogs, sixty, Jesus. Guy no bigger than a child, not even fat or anything. Matt wondered if there was a gimmick, and it depressed him to think that there wasn't: the nip was just eating the sixty frigging hot dogs, no false stomach, no sleight of hand. This was what the world was coming to.
On his third double Dewars and tepid water Matt gave over to remembering. He didn't want to, in fact he fought against it hard, but the morning's visions in the booth had done something to him, sunk some sort of anchor in him, and he couldn't budge them. He tried to gee himself up, tell himself to get out to the pool and eyeball some of the cattle, maybe get a handful and bring it back, but he felt rooted to the edge of the bed he was sitting on. ESPN was now showing a poker tournament; more ruthless honesty, no tricks, no ploys, no marked cards. Matt felt like an alien. An alien with secrets. Or at least memories.
Throughout the 70s Matt had acted in various capacities at travelling funfairs and carnivals. He could pull a few minor sleight of hand stunts and sometimes had to, but for the most part he did odd jobs, acted as a back yard boy for funfair owners, helping out with putting things up, taking things down, slapping folks around, if need be. By the age of 30 he had graduated to being a twenty-four hour man, travelling ahead of fairs ostensibly to mark out their route with signs and arrows, but more importantly to hook up with the various bag men and fixers you had to slip the juice to, to buy protection. Guys who would turn a blind eye to various violations, or at the very least would not make up violations that didn't exist. On one such advance journey Matt had run into someone he thought he'd never see again, a man his own age named James Howser. Matt called him Jamie.
This was outside Topeka, Kansas, about a hundred miles east of the last place he'd laid eyes on Jamie, in Salina. A hundred miles and fifteen years, during which Matt Brown had traveled more or less the length and breadth of the good old USA, and Jamie Howser - slow Jamie, dumb Jamie - had managed to migrate an hour's drive eastward from their mutual home town. Matt had hoped never to see Jamie Howser again, but it turned out to be for the best. Because despite being an addled chump of no imagination, it turned out that Jamie Howser was a god-damned mechanical engineer. Living alone, writing to his mama, and holding down a decent job at a factory that made aircraft parts. Jamie Howser, the citizen, coming to the funfair one Friday night, probably in search of ferris-wheel romance, certainly in the company of a dim-witted school teacher named Florence or Josephine or something Matt didn't give a rat's ass about. At first Matt tried to avoid being seen but Jamie recognized him and was, insanely, friendly to him. Even tried to hug him, which Matt fended off brusquely. He didn't have anything to say to Jamie Howser, and he was shocked that Jamie Howser had a good word to say to him. Was the guy a moron? Did he not remember Ellie?
Matt had been swinging dribs of cash from his bosses for years, trying to build up a nest egg, and he had ambitions well beyond odd-jobbing at a fairground. Matt wanted to own a funfair, maybe two or three. Be the boss himself. But he had no meaningful capital and he wasn't in anyone's will, as far as he knew. What he did have was an idea for the greatest funfair ride of all time, or at least a good enough funfair ride to earn a bunch of dough off. How funny was it that the guy who would help him build the thing was the brother of the girl who inspired the ride in tragic circumstances, all those years ago?
Now in his hotel in Orlando, Matt poured whisky four or whisky five, and said aloud: "Schmuck."
James Howser designed and built the prototype Topeka Twister in a barn Matt rented. Jamie was so dumb he asked Matt why it wasn't called the Salina Twister, since that's where the idea was born, and Matt said: "You ever hear of alliteration? Besides, we're in Topeka."
Jamie was so dumb he gave Matt all the designs, in his frigging hand, trusting Matt to keep Jamie's interests at heart. He probably didn't even believe it when Matt personally shot him in the face. It wasn't even complicated. Matt had intimidated the school teacher out of Jamie's life early on, and over the next two years he'd been in and out of town on only a few occasions. People knew that Jamie knew people at the funfairs, and when Jamie disappeared they probably figured he'd become a carny. People were stupid. They'd believe the unlikeliest shit. The idea that straight-up dufus Jamie Howser could do anything as intelligent and spontaneous as join a travelling funfair was so ludicrous it had made Matt spill tears of mirth, at the time. Meanwhile Jamie Howser was down in the dirt on the road to Auburn and Matt Howser was the patent-holder of the Topeka Twister, a ride he sold on to funfairs all over the country and ran successfully in his own fairs when he got them going. Did Matt think about Jamie Howser? Hardly ever.
Hardly ever until now. Matt offloaded his bladder in the spinning bathroom and when he got back to the whisky bottle he dispensed with the tumbler and threw the stuff straight down his throat. He swayed, watching two citizens catching a fish on ESPN. He flipped through the channels, but found nothing. Nothing. There was nothing. More whisky, and he thought: I should go back to the conference right now, grab that trumped-up bitch and punch her in the gut. Kick her in the mouth. Or better, bring her back here and bang her in the ass, then wring her neck. Getting inside my head like that, who the hell was she? How the hell did she know?
And what, exactly, did she know? He flashed onto the image of the girl he'd seen inside the booth, tied to the chair. It was the very chair, in the vision. The very chair, the very rope, the very same smock made out of old tablecloth. The very same shiny, brand-new mary-janes, with silver buckles. Jesus, Ellie Howser.
Matt knew he would not go back to the convention, and he knew why too, although he didn't like it. He was frightened. Not worried. That was too genteel. He was downright scared, the way a child gets scared sometimes, by clowns, or the stupid music from the carousel and the unseeing horses going mindlessly, relentlessly up and down and round and round. The gypsy bitch had unlocked something down inside of Matthew Brown, and he couldn't lock it up again. Nor could he confront her.
He sat down and drank more whisky, then lay back on the bed, eyes shut. The images were coming swiftly now, jumbled and incoherent. Voices, noises, faces. And the far off rumble of something horrible, coming fast, tearing up the world before it, stretching from the dustbowl to the sky, a twisted monster full of black wind and shrieking things and the shattered artifacts of people's lives. A tornado was coming, carrying rooftops and chimneys and picket fences and cars and Old Mad Anna's piano, with the strings plucking and jangling in the noise. The tornado was ravenous and foul, a prehistoric maw of filth come back to crush mankind before it, and it ate the world as it went. It was full of broken birds and half of a cow and the ruined skeletons of cottonwood trees. It was clawing at the sky with an infernal, shredding thunder even as its mighty feet tore up the Earth. The tornado was coming, and it was coming to find Matt Brown.
Because in the heart of the tornado was a broken wooden chair, the strap from a mary-jane, with a gleaming buckle still attached, and the diminishing echoes of a girl's voice, crying desperately: "Matt, don't leave me here!"
-oOo-
Matt needs to get back to the gypsy woman. Since leaving town a year ago he's tried to find her in every way he knows how, including personally visiting the IAAPA offices in Virginia, trying to track down the details of a woman with a stall called Maze of Dementia. The woman at IIAPA made him register for the forthcoming expo before she'd tell him anything. Two hundred and sixty dollars later, when he showed her the location of the stall on the map, all she could tell him was the same stall was registered again, to someone named Gulshat Isabek, with a phone number. The number turned out to be for a costume shop in Los Angeles, and the guy who answered swore they knew no one by that name. Maybe it was where Gulshat bought her get-up.
This was all much later, just six weeks ago. Before that he'd tried to find her on the Internet and learned only that Gulshat was a Kazakh name. He'd had to look Kazakhstan up on Google Maps, and when he found it, it meant nothing to him.
He's more convinced now than ever that Gulshat is just a front. She's a showman, and the only way to find her is to come back to the convention.
But in doing so, it seems, he's brought the nightmares into the light of day. He continues down Florida 400, travelling south, slower now, watching the weather build up all around him. The sky is still blue in patches, but there's a lot of cloud moving in, very low. A lot of thin and jagged cloud, cruising across the sky in front of him at the speed of his car. He's wondering if anyone else is seeing this, and he turns on the radio expecting storm warnings the way you'd be hearing all across Kansas by now, but no. It's every kind of shitty music you can imagine on there, from Christian rock to hip hop, country, even smooth frigging jazz as he searches for a talk station. He finds Real Radio out of Cocoa Beach and they're talking about Governor Rick Scott's job creation performance, not the fact that their state's weather has gone balls up to the balloons.
Matt snaps the radio off because he doesn't need confirmation any more. The clouds are getting denser in places and he can see them rapidly forming spirals. He's seen this a dozen times before. Soon those spirals are going to start to descend. Probably they'll fall and retract, fall and retract, like the horrible tongues of the old gods of death, tasting humanity. And then one of those descending spiral tongues will form into a tunnel. It'll happen right in front of you while you're looking at it, and the tunnel will pierce downwards like an arrow, into the ground. At which point, hang onto your nuts, people of Florida.
The people of Florida seem unperturbed. Matt gets off 400 at Universal Boulevard, passing the Universal resort on his right. Enormous, garish amusement park with the lines out front of fat-assed rubes from the Midwest, camera-clicking Asians, no one paying attention to the meteorological madness above their heads. The clouds are forming now above the rides, above the smooth green curves of The Incredible Hulk's Roller Coaster. They have to see it, surely? But they don't.
Matt passes Sand Lake and now the sound is insane, a roaring noise sounding exactly like what it is: high-speed winds hammering in from different directions. In Matt's mind the sound is conflated with remembered sounds, mainly people praying or talking in quiet, stiff tones about the clean-up after, about staying safe before, about the frigging tornado, people!
Matt's crotch has that familiar tightness he'd always get when he was a boy and the world turned dark like this. The need to piss, but also the desire to rub your cock on something. You'd be sitting on the edge of your seat, feeling it coming, long before the storm sirens started wailing their panic out over the schoolyards. Once when he was twelve he'd seen a red Chevy split lengthwise down the middle, one half standing on its nose and the other half gone to hell with the twister that did it, and the idea of the power that could do that made him want to grab someone and punch them. Not just punch them once, but punch them bloody and bruised and broken right down, flatten them flat and lick the blood.
This time he has that same feeling and it terrifies him. He knows it will only bring the nightmares again. Jesus, it's already brought the biggest nightmare of all, right out into the open. Two twenty-something women are coming out of Pointe shopping mall, the breeze flicking at their high skirt hems, legs flashing on their heels, and instead of thinking what he would always think, he thinks: they're going to die. Everything, everyone, is going to die.