By Kiran Pandey
In the silence, Steve watched the ocean. All around him the salt breeze beat coolly, draped his cheeks like curtains, and prickled his skin with a sensation almost like touch. His eyes were fixed into the middle point of the darkness, upon the thick blue crease where sky met sea.
It was one of those long July evenings that seemed to cling onto the sun, holding fast to the ephemeral light as if a bulwark against the dark. Those gleams reflected in Steve’s slick black tuxedo and similarly slicked back hair, off his loosened silk bow tie which hung limply about his neck. Dizzied in the stillness, he gripped the coarse rail of the balcony with one tremulous hand, as if it were the stern of a ship. Between the first two fingers of the other dangled a half-smoked joint. Beneath him, the waves crashed and soared.
Steve took a deep sodium inhale and could detect something of childhood within it: the ossified shouts of summer vacation, the splintering of cedar wood and the kneading of sand between your toes. The old memories kept him calm, fixed his footing to the earth. There was no boardwalk here, but Steve could almost hear the delirious yells from the roller coasters up on the northern end, and almost taste the buttery staleness of the popcorn.
He raised the joint, took a long hit, and let the smoke escape his lips of its own accord. It drifted up, up, up, Steve’s eyes following until it could no longer be seen. He squinted. Above him was a white pinprick of light surrounded by a dim halo, and he wasn’t sure if it was a star or not. They weren’t so visible out here, and besides, he couldn’t see nearly as well with his contacts in. Perhaps there was one, or it could have just been an airplane.
The sliding door opened behind him, and concurrent with the noise Steve dropped his hand in a practiced recoil so that the joint was hidden behind one of the slats. Half-hunched, he turned to see Sarah joining him outside, her soft periwinkle dress fluttering about her heels.
“Steve-O,” said Sarah. She walked up beside him—more like floated, he decided, ethereal in the breeze—and placed her hands over the rail so that her left arm was just inches from his right. In the last light of the day, her brown eyes and brown hair, usually in curls but straightened for the ceremony, accrued a shade that was closer to gold. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Yeah, I’m all right. Just getting some air, you know.”
“Is it me you’re trying to convince there, champ, or yourself?”
“What, I am!” he said, and Sarah gave him a wry smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Gee, why wouldn’t you be? Why wouldn’t you if all of a sudden you went all pale and ran out in the middle of my speech—”
The wind wafted, and Sarah’s nose wrinkled. It was the same face she made when she laughed, her nose all scrunched up and snorting out these delicate little wheezes. Steve thought it was the cutest thing; he had thought so ever since sophomore year of college when he had told her that joke about the bartender and the blind man, and he couldn’t help but smile.
Sarah was not smiling.
“Come on, Steve. Are you serious with me right now?”
“What?”
“You know what, don’t even fuck with me,” she said. “Are you fucking high right now?”
Behind the irritation, there was such concern in her eyes. Steve looked up again, and in the sky above he saw what looked to be the exact same dot of light as before. So there must be a star, at least one. Or another airplane. How many planes passed by in one night?
“Steve, I’m talking to you, look at me!” said Sarah. “I am not entertaining this right now, look at me when I’m talking to you!”
He turned back to Sarah, spoke with hesitation. “Just a little bit, okay, and it’s not like I was planning on doing it anyway—”
“Steve, for Chrissake, it’s Christa’s wedding—”
“I know that, Sarah! I know it’s fucking Christa’s wedding, what—you think I got lost out here and all of a sudden forgot where I was—”
“Don’t you snap at me!” said Sarah. “Don’t you do that! You know how her family is, her mom’ll lose her shit if she comes out here and gets a whiff—”
“I’m sorry—I—I am. I’m sorry.”
Sarah sighed, folded her arms on the rail. Soft gusts whispered between them in the silence.
“But seriously, dude,” Sarah finally said, “what is up with you?”
Again Steve looked away, heaved another deep breath, and gripped the rail almost imperceptibly tighter. In his other hand, between thumb and forefinger, he rolled the cylindrical lump of what remained of the joint. Now the light was even fainter, the sun all but gone, only visible in the pale flecks cast upon the undulation of the water.
“Steve?”
“I saw them again.”
Sarah’s eyes widened, like little pools of moon they reflected her terror and recognition, and Steve rued the words as soon as he heard them on the air. Sarah moved her mouth to speak, her jaw moving like a puppet, but no sound issued.
“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” said Steve. “I’m sorry, I really—I didn’t want to say anything. Really I didn’t.”
“When did you—”
“Now. Here. Right inside.”
Sarah took a deep breath. “Steve. I was just in there, and there is nothing—I didn’t see a thing and no one else did—”
“Sarah, I swear to Christ, I know that! No shit no one else saw them, otherwise the whole reception would be going nuts—”
“Steve, please—”
“No one else can see them. I don’t know why. It’s just me.” He hesitated again. “One of them was wearing Big’s face.”
“Steve, Jesus Christ—”
“Listen, you asked, okay, I didn’t want to say it—”
“Did you stop going to therapy again?”
“That’s beside the point—”
“Beside the point? That’s exactly the fucking point! You—you need to deal with this, dude, you can’t keep unloading this on me every time you have a nervous fucking breakdown—”
“Jesus, Sarah, is that what you think this is?” As he yelled, Steve became acutely aware of the high in his throat and his nose; his eyes suddenly blazed with smoke. “What exactly do you think happened that night?”
She turned away from him, arms crossed, staring into the sea, or maybe at nothing in particular. “I’m not about to do this—”
“Sarah, you know! I know that you know! Something happened, something not right—how did Big die that night?”
“This is not—we are at Christa’s wedding—”
“How did Big die?”
Sarah turned back to him. Tears rimmed her eyes; her mascara had begun to splotch and run. “You know how he died,” she said, “and you’re a fucking asshole for making me say it. He fell. He went up to the top floor, went out on that fixture where the molding had rotted and all of a sudden it collapsed beneath him, and he fell three stories and died. Don’t you remember that?”
“Of course I remember that,” said Steve. “But explain to me this. Why do I also remember those, those shadow things—ripping him the fuck apart? Don’t you remember that? Jesus, those screams, Sarah—how could you forget those screams? The way he pleaded—he was still alive in that basement, I know because I watched it happen! How could he still have been alive if he had fallen before and died?”
Sarah said nothing, only turned back away. Steve sighed and turned again to the sky.
There it was again, the same star-plane speckle. A dot, like a signal, flickering from above.
He looked back to Sarah. “Sarah—I’m sorry, Sarah, I’m sorry.”
Again, she said nothing; she did not even look at Steve. Deepest blue filled the horizon, all traces of orange had bled from the sky. From inside the hotel seeped out music and cheers of celebration.
Steve felt the house still around him. If he reached out, just far enough, he knew his hand would meet splintered wood, rotted drywall, the gazing amorphous faces and their shriveled gray limbs like the spokes of a spindle. One memory attested that it had been six years since the weekend in the house; another crooned that no time had elapsed at all.
Despite what Sarah and the others said, he remembered. He remembered running away, leaping into the truck and accelerating out of those woods as fast as it would let him. He remembered the stillness that followed on that delicate drive, the tears and the phone calls in the ensuing weeks, the sense that nothing would ever be the same, and nothing ever was. He remembered all these things, just as he remembered every day of his life, and in between and around those recollections were always the dark truncated slivers of night, the suffocations of the shadow people, reminding him that he was still there, that he could never escape, like sweat-slickened feet pushing out against bedsheets.
On the balcony, it had become fully dark. Waves crashed unseen, their salt tingle in the air.
Steve looked at Sarah where she stood, barely a silhouette, runnels of light and music spilling out from the hotel. Her dress was a dark cloak, her hair the streams and puddles of ink. How could she be standing there next to him, when he knew she was dying in the room next to his?
“Sarah?”
“Yeah, Steve?”
“What if none of this is real?”
Her head turned, and Steve thought she might have smiled. “This isn’t college anymore, champ, you don’t get to keep using those fake deep lines on me.”
“I’m being serious.”
A sigh, far-off. “I know. I know.”
Inside the hotel, the music changed. It was an older tune, top of the charts in their college days, a strain that Steve had not heard in years. It stirred in him a familiar youthful pull, some inebriate haze that at the time had been nothing but air. He took a step to Sarah and held out a hand to hers.
“May I have this?”
“Steve…”
“Just a dance, Sarah. One dance. All I’m asking is for one dance.”
“All right.” She stepped forward. “One dance.”
Illumined by the light that drifted from the hotel, Sarah and Steve held each other in the endless night. The music swayed, and so did they. Steve felt her head slowly come to rest on his chest, and eventually the music no longer reached his ears, he could hear nothing but the little whistle from her nose as she breathed out and in. He knew he could not be here, that this could not be real. Even now were the shadow people rending him apart, forcing his lips in the shape of ceaseless scream. Steve knew all this, but did not know why, so he could only hold Sarah close to him, could only dance as long as their song still played, could only hope to absent its sound and its signal that it had not yet ended.
The waves crashed against the shore all night long……