Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
It all feels half-imagined, half-untrue.
She looks down. Sees the two syringes.
“Administer these shots.” This time Francine isn’t asking.
From across the unit, Philip is staring into Ellen’s eyes.
“Yes,” Ellen says.
“And wake up! You’re moving like a patient yourself.”
Ellen takes the tray from Francine and enters the unit.
Behind her, the door closes.
Just Ellen and Philip now.
Philip smiles. Sadly?
Ellen knows he knows.
This mystery, this healing, is not for his sake.
“Medicine,” Philip says.
They share a pause and in that pause a question echoes:
Is it? Is it medicine?
29
Greer says, “In the American Civil War, the Union soldiers wore blue frocks that hung to mid-thigh. Buttons and patches displayed their rank. Brown belts secured water canteens and other necessary items to their persons. Majors wore double-breasted coats, the infantrymen were issued single-breasted. Often the men wore shin-high black leather boots. Their caps were usually blue wool kepis.”
He’s looking from face to face around the fire. The Ampex machines hum just outside the circle the platoon makes. So do the hoofprints. Or they seem to make sound, echoing loudly in all of their minds. Greer continues.
“The Confederate soldiers wore gray frock coats that hung to mid-thigh. Bronze buttons and shoulder patches designated rank. They donned gray wool caps. Most of the soldiers wore brown leather boots that went about shin-high.”
Duane looks over his shoulder to the tarp, visible in the firelight. Because the body beneath it is so flattened, the tarp looks as if it covers nothing at all.
“So?” Larry asks.
Greer smiles without humor.
“Those boots”—he’s pointing to the tarp—“are genuine.”
“Genuine what?” Philip asks.
Greer looks him in the eyes. The flames dance in the historian’s glasses.
“Genuine past, private.”
30
Philip wakes in the frigid desert at night.
He’s supposed to be on watch, supposed to be awake, shouldn’t have fallen asleep. He shines the flashlight on the actual watch around his wrist, the same one he took from the manager of the Sparklers, never gave back; it’s 7:16 P.M. in Detroit. That’s 2:16 A.M. here.
Ross.
His friend’s name comes to him with a jolt. As if by falling asleep he’s missed the answer to what’s become of him.
Philip sits up and the tip of his gun digs into his side, through the blankets, through the wool-collared jean jacket he wears. Philip looks down, realizes his gun is pointed at the piano key hanging around his neck, the F. He moves it.
Despite knowing that none of the guns work, Philip had to keep it by his side. The look of it alone could save his life.
Who knows what might have avoided him, seeing the weapon, as he slept?
Standing, he shines the flashlight across camp. None of the remaining Danes wanted to stop. Not even for the night. Ross is out there. Ross is somewhere. The prints that led them to this spot continue beyond it. They have no way of knowing how far they are from whatever made the prints. Philip studies them in the light of his beam right now. Sees where they pass into the darkness ahead.
Philip checks on the others.
It’s colder here than it was by the coast. Greer would know why. Greer is buried beneath his unpacked clothes, blankets, and a canvas tarp. Most of the others sleep this way. Only Lovejoy is using the tentpole like it’s meant to be used, holding up the tarp like American cowboys once used them, sleeping around fires in vast, open prairies.
Philip rubs his gloved hands together.
He breathes deeply and it hurts, feels like the cold has crawled in, has taken root in his lungs. The exhalation is precise in the flashlight’s beam.
He looks out to the desert, to where the hoofprints direct his eyes.
The platoon must sleep. He knows they can’t hike twenty-four hours straight and expect to be prepared, both mentally and physically. They’re no use to Ross parched, pruned, dried up, and dead on a dune.
Philip thinks of the body they found.
Christ.
He looks over his shoulder to where Lovejoy ordered Greer to put it for the night, two hundred yards from this temporary camp. Philip can’t see it. Can’t even see the tarp. It’s the second time Lovejoy has indicated he doesn’t want to be too close to the thing.
But it’s Greer’s reaction, Greer who dragged the body himself on a plastic makeshift sled, that frightens Philip now.
The historian said the flattened man not only resembles a soldier from the Civil War, but actually is one.
Philip’s gotta move a little because it’s too cold to sit still. A Michigander, born and raised, Philip knows winter, but this is a different kind of cold.
He takes two steps in the sand and feels something at the tip of his black boot. The light shows him it’s one of the cords powering the Ampex machines. Philip and Larry set them up when they arrived here. Duane, anxious even more than they are, paced the entire time. The generator hums quietly; state-of-the-art equipment, every bit of it. Philip follows the length of the cord, walks along it to the first of the two rolling machines. He crouches, turns his flashlight off. The Ampex’s red light illuminates his boots and pants; reminds him of the figure he saw on the beach.
Red pants.
Red jacket.
Hooves.
Horns.
But no discernible face. Only the physical rippling of the space between Philip and it.
And now, the memory of it. Coupled with the stories Secretary Mull told on the plane; of Nadoul and Ka, a native of the Namib and his wife who believed something watched her, something attached itself to her, and then left its voice in her ears.
Philip looks over his shoulder. Quiet out here. Only the hum of the gear and the dulcet distant breathing of his platoon.
Bundling up tighter into his jacket, Philip rises and goes to the other machine. Between the red lights and scant illumination of the VU meters he’s in total darkness.
The second machine has stopped recording; the reel is full. Before removing it, Philip rewinds it and watches the meters. The headphones are attached, lying in the sand, and Philip neither hears nor sees any spike in volume; no sound he missed while asleep.
No creaking stairs.
The sound Philip heard when he slowed the tape down. The sound, he now recalls, that played through his dreams as he fell asleep on watch.
Philip, dinner’s ready!
Memories. The home in which he was raised. Wyoming Street. Detroit. Mom calling down to the cellar. The beat-up piano down there. There was no room for it anywhere else in the duplex the Tonkas shared with the Bermans. He used to get scared in the cellar; his back to the furnace and the shadows the furnace made on the concrete wall, his back to the laundry sink, too, that sink veiled by a dull pink sheet that flapped from the open window, always open in the summer to let the cellar smell out.
Coming, Mom!
Usually by dinnertime he’d already run the scales. So boring, those scales! No matter how many times Mrs. Ruth told him they were necessary, they felt like chains to a very young Philip. Like his fingers were being forced to play melodies he wasn’t interested in playing. But Mom’s clockwork call would signify liberation; it was time to play his way, even if for only a few minutes, his chance to ape the bluesmen he heard through the speakers in Apollo Music.
But the stairs . . .
Always the creaking of that first step and Philip would tilt an ear in that direction, behind him, the stairs between him and the furnace and that fading pink sheet, too.
Coming, Mom!
He’d yell it again but he wasn’t going anywhere; wasn’t getting up from that piano until he’d reached it, that deep and dangerous place that even kids know about, the inner cra
wl space where expression can be found, growing dusty, until you decided to take it out.
Creation.
Philip didn’t know what to call it back then, but he knew he had to reach it, once, before—
But then, dammit, those creaking steps. Clockwork, too. Philip with his back to the basement, his fingers mad across the keys like he was typing a letter, telling someone who knew how he felt, what it felt like to reach for it . . .
Creation.
Creaking . . . the stairs behind him . . . the shadows and a flapping sheet behind him, too. A monster, perhaps, something terrible behind the sheet, something wakened by the music and the soul and spirit the kid was putting into it. But Philip wouldn’t turn around, not yet, not yet, not until he got there, touched that place that felt like a joke, a revelation, the future all rolled into one.
Creation.
He played furiously, even then, and the only thing that could rattle him, the only thing on earth that could STOP him, was the hand (clockwork) upon his shoulder, the thing that lived in the shadows, the thing whose breath caused the laundry sheet to ripple, the thing that—
Philip. Mom. Only Mom. Always. Dinner is ready.
Now, in the cold and dark, Philip remembers those creaking stairs. And that rippling sheet that might’ve hidden a Thing in Red, a creature with hooves and horns.
He exhales and his breath is valentine ribbon in the red light.
The reel rewound, Philip removes it from the machine, opens the storage case, and tucks it in beside the others. He gloves a new one, places it opposite the catch reel, and begins to thread the tape through.
Something is moving in the sand behind him.
Philip rises with his flashlight on and gun at the ready.
It’s empty desert. Nothing crawls. Nothing emerges from the shadows beyond the light.
But even the desert, with all its open space, has its corners at night.
Philip steps toward that darkness.
“Ross?” It’s a crazy thing to say. It’s a hopeful thing to say.
Could it be Ross? Returning? Did he escape whatever fate came close enough to touch him?
A second sound. Boots on gravel. Philip turns fast to his right.
To his left.
Only sand. The base of another dune.
He brings the light to its peak.
What if Ross is up there? What if Ross is crawling toward him, near death, unable to speak, unable to stand up?
And what if it’s not Ross. What then?
The cold tightens its grip. Holds Philip in place, rooted to the sand.
Seeing nothing upon the dune, he shines the light to the sand at his feet.
Staring up at him is the flattened face of the body they found.
“Jesus!”
Its eyes, both on the same side of its head, are staring into Philip’s own.
Philip catches his breath, a swallow of cold, raw air.
The canvas tarp has moved; the night wind has partially uncovered the body.
Philip looks back to camp.
Is he two hundred yards away?
He must be. He is.
Before covering the body again, he studies the distorted features, the oblong bearded mouth, the eyes that appear soupy enough to spoon.
Philip reaches for the canvas tarp.
Hears footsteps in the sand.
He turns. Sees nothing. No one.
Philip brings the light to the top of the dune again.
A man is up there.
“Shit!” Philip says, stumbling back. “Halt!”
But the man is coming. The man is halfway down the dune.
“Halt!”
It’s a soldier, Philip can see that immediately. A uniform. A gait.
A weapon.
Philip’s gun feels like a front, like it’s made of plastic, like pretend. But it’s the stranger’s firearm that chills him. Philip experiences the same cold rush he felt when he saw the Civil War body in the sand. The weapon this second man carries is from another era, another time.
Genuine past, Private.
It’s a musket.
The man advances.
“Halt!” Philip repeats.
Philip’s first thought is,
This man is . . .
. . . in costume.
A blue coat, yellow scarf, bloodred lapels, yellow buttons that do not reflect the light. Black boots dig into the cold sand until they reach the base of the dune. A tricorn black hat shadows the soldier’s face.
Is it the Thing in Red?
Philip looks for horns. Looks for a white beard.
“Come on, man! I’m going to have to shoot you!”
It’s a costume. Has to be a costume. Because if it’s not a costume, if it’s really what the man wears, then you’ve lost your mind. You’ve lost your mind!
The soldier steps closer yet, into the full sphere of Philip’s light.
Since finding the body in the desert, Private Greer has talked endlessly about uniforms. He focuses on the Civil War. But he goes on.
The American Revolutionary War soldier commonly wore a blue frock coat. A tricorn hat. A ruffled shirt tucked into tan breeches, black boots that reached shin-high. A yellow scarf that protected his neck from the cold.
This is not the Thing in Red.
It’s a soldier from the American Revolution.
Philip lowers his gun. Useless or not, front or not. This man is beyond threat. This is beyond sensible, admonishing words like threat.
An American, Philip thinks.
“How—” Philip begins, but the man is lowering his musket. He’s pointing to Philip’s other hand.
To the light.
He’s smaller than Philip. To scale.
“Who are you?” Philip finally asks, his words like the smoke of gunpowder in the air between them.
The man, the soldier, is less than two feet from him. He’s reaching.
“Hey, hey,” Philip says. “Don’t do that! Don’t make me—”
But the man grips the flashlight and brings it close to his face. Studies it. Looks Philip in the eye.
“Lantern,” the man whispers.
Not just American, Philip thinks. The first.
“My God,” Philip says.
A savage with an ax would’ve scared him less than this man has.
This impossibility.
This ghost.
The man releases the light. Takes a step back.
“Hang on,” Philip says, lowering his gun. “Wait a second! We lost a friend! Can you help us find him? Can you help us?!”
But the man is backing up, up the side of the dune.
“Wait! Help us! You must know something! Where is he? Where could he be?!” Philip drops his gun, raises his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you! I just need to talk to you!”
But the soldier has backed up out of the range of Philip’s light. A silhouette now, at the peak of the dune.
Philip runs toward him.
“WAIT!”
To the top, at the top, shining his light across the breadth of the dune, into the shadowed pits, sand valleys, surrounding.
No man.
No Revolutionary soldier.
No vision.
But a sound, again, behind him, boots again.
Philip spins.
“Lovejoy,” he says, breathless, seeing the Mad Blond’s face only, revealed in the flashlight’s farthest reach.
The former general is waiting at the bottom of the dune.
Philip descends.
When they meet, Lovejoy takes the light from Philip’s hand, shines it uphill again.
“Lovejoy,” Philip repeats.
Lovejoy turns to face him, his features blackened by shadow.
“I saw him, too,” he says.
“A ghost,” Philip says.
“Not a ghost,” Lovejoy says.
“Then what?”
“Not a ghost. Not a man. A vestige . . .”
Then he scales the dune. r />
Philip looks to the body at his feet. Thinks of the Revolutionary Soldier touching the flashlight. The physicality of both.
A vestige . . .
But a vestige is only a glimmer, only what remains, and Philip knows that both impossible soldiers are more real than that.
Because of time, because of place, they may not be the source of their own sounds.
But they are echoes.
And echoes are neither alive nor dead . . .
31
Philip wakes in the dark. Bad dreams about Lovejoy lost, starving in a cell made of sand.
Because Ellen didn’t give him the medicine she told Francine she would, Philip is in considerable pain. The worst he’s known yet.
I don’t trust it . . .
She’d whispered this and other concerns, as she drew many pictures for Philip. This time he’d asked for weapons. Descending in chronological order. Beginning with a mushroom cloud (what Philip said looked like a giant’s fist, cracking the earth’s surface) to a hand cannon, the earliest-known firearm on the planet.
Philip didn’t ask for the medicine. And while earlier he could rationalize it as needing to know the parameters of the drug, what it does, what it doesn’t do, the bad way has come, and it all sounds like madness to him now.
There are six figures in the unit. Six silhouettes watching him wake.
As he processes this, he understands also that he’s back in his original unit, that somebody has wheeled him out of rehab.
But not these men. These men are moneyed. These men are military. And Philip can tell by the privilege in their eyes, the meticulously casual manner of their clothes, and the ice clinking in their drinks that they come from a shadowed height of the military that Philip will never be able to look high enough to see.
But the pain is even more frightening than the visitors.
An Asian American man lowers his face so that it’s only inches from Philip’s own. His khaki pants and yellow button-down speak more of country clubs than they do of war rooms. But Philip knows better.
“Awake!” the man says. A fluttering, drunk smile appears like fish fins flapping in deep water.
He tilts his drink over the cot, pretends he’s going to spill it.
Philip can’t move to do anything about it.
Over the Asian’s shoulder a silver crew cut appears, then a clean-shaven face beneath. It’s a serious countenance and this man also dresses the part; his windbreaker and khaki slacks suggest he’s above even the rank of general. Presidential is the word Philip thinks. But his thoughts are broken, distorted, by the paralyzing pain.
She looks down. Sees the two syringes.
“Administer these shots.” This time Francine isn’t asking.
From across the unit, Philip is staring into Ellen’s eyes.
“Yes,” Ellen says.
“And wake up! You’re moving like a patient yourself.”
Ellen takes the tray from Francine and enters the unit.
Behind her, the door closes.
Just Ellen and Philip now.
Philip smiles. Sadly?
Ellen knows he knows.
This mystery, this healing, is not for his sake.
“Medicine,” Philip says.
They share a pause and in that pause a question echoes:
Is it? Is it medicine?
29
Greer says, “In the American Civil War, the Union soldiers wore blue frocks that hung to mid-thigh. Buttons and patches displayed their rank. Brown belts secured water canteens and other necessary items to their persons. Majors wore double-breasted coats, the infantrymen were issued single-breasted. Often the men wore shin-high black leather boots. Their caps were usually blue wool kepis.”
He’s looking from face to face around the fire. The Ampex machines hum just outside the circle the platoon makes. So do the hoofprints. Or they seem to make sound, echoing loudly in all of their minds. Greer continues.
“The Confederate soldiers wore gray frock coats that hung to mid-thigh. Bronze buttons and shoulder patches designated rank. They donned gray wool caps. Most of the soldiers wore brown leather boots that went about shin-high.”
Duane looks over his shoulder to the tarp, visible in the firelight. Because the body beneath it is so flattened, the tarp looks as if it covers nothing at all.
“So?” Larry asks.
Greer smiles without humor.
“Those boots”—he’s pointing to the tarp—“are genuine.”
“Genuine what?” Philip asks.
Greer looks him in the eyes. The flames dance in the historian’s glasses.
“Genuine past, private.”
30
Philip wakes in the frigid desert at night.
He’s supposed to be on watch, supposed to be awake, shouldn’t have fallen asleep. He shines the flashlight on the actual watch around his wrist, the same one he took from the manager of the Sparklers, never gave back; it’s 7:16 P.M. in Detroit. That’s 2:16 A.M. here.
Ross.
His friend’s name comes to him with a jolt. As if by falling asleep he’s missed the answer to what’s become of him.
Philip sits up and the tip of his gun digs into his side, through the blankets, through the wool-collared jean jacket he wears. Philip looks down, realizes his gun is pointed at the piano key hanging around his neck, the F. He moves it.
Despite knowing that none of the guns work, Philip had to keep it by his side. The look of it alone could save his life.
Who knows what might have avoided him, seeing the weapon, as he slept?
Standing, he shines the flashlight across camp. None of the remaining Danes wanted to stop. Not even for the night. Ross is out there. Ross is somewhere. The prints that led them to this spot continue beyond it. They have no way of knowing how far they are from whatever made the prints. Philip studies them in the light of his beam right now. Sees where they pass into the darkness ahead.
Philip checks on the others.
It’s colder here than it was by the coast. Greer would know why. Greer is buried beneath his unpacked clothes, blankets, and a canvas tarp. Most of the others sleep this way. Only Lovejoy is using the tentpole like it’s meant to be used, holding up the tarp like American cowboys once used them, sleeping around fires in vast, open prairies.
Philip rubs his gloved hands together.
He breathes deeply and it hurts, feels like the cold has crawled in, has taken root in his lungs. The exhalation is precise in the flashlight’s beam.
He looks out to the desert, to where the hoofprints direct his eyes.
The platoon must sleep. He knows they can’t hike twenty-four hours straight and expect to be prepared, both mentally and physically. They’re no use to Ross parched, pruned, dried up, and dead on a dune.
Philip thinks of the body they found.
Christ.
He looks over his shoulder to where Lovejoy ordered Greer to put it for the night, two hundred yards from this temporary camp. Philip can’t see it. Can’t even see the tarp. It’s the second time Lovejoy has indicated he doesn’t want to be too close to the thing.
But it’s Greer’s reaction, Greer who dragged the body himself on a plastic makeshift sled, that frightens Philip now.
The historian said the flattened man not only resembles a soldier from the Civil War, but actually is one.
Philip’s gotta move a little because it’s too cold to sit still. A Michigander, born and raised, Philip knows winter, but this is a different kind of cold.
He takes two steps in the sand and feels something at the tip of his black boot. The light shows him it’s one of the cords powering the Ampex machines. Philip and Larry set them up when they arrived here. Duane, anxious even more than they are, paced the entire time. The generator hums quietly; state-of-the-art equipment, every bit of it. Philip follows the length of the cord, walks along it to the first of the two rolling machines. He crouches, turns his flashlight off. The Ampex’s red light illuminates his boots and pants; reminds him of the figure he saw on the beach.
Red pants.
Red jacket.
Hooves.
Horns.
But no discernible face. Only the physical rippling of the space between Philip and it.
And now, the memory of it. Coupled with the stories Secretary Mull told on the plane; of Nadoul and Ka, a native of the Namib and his wife who believed something watched her, something attached itself to her, and then left its voice in her ears.
Philip looks over his shoulder. Quiet out here. Only the hum of the gear and the dulcet distant breathing of his platoon.
Bundling up tighter into his jacket, Philip rises and goes to the other machine. Between the red lights and scant illumination of the VU meters he’s in total darkness.
The second machine has stopped recording; the reel is full. Before removing it, Philip rewinds it and watches the meters. The headphones are attached, lying in the sand, and Philip neither hears nor sees any spike in volume; no sound he missed while asleep.
No creaking stairs.
The sound Philip heard when he slowed the tape down. The sound, he now recalls, that played through his dreams as he fell asleep on watch.
Philip, dinner’s ready!
Memories. The home in which he was raised. Wyoming Street. Detroit. Mom calling down to the cellar. The beat-up piano down there. There was no room for it anywhere else in the duplex the Tonkas shared with the Bermans. He used to get scared in the cellar; his back to the furnace and the shadows the furnace made on the concrete wall, his back to the laundry sink, too, that sink veiled by a dull pink sheet that flapped from the open window, always open in the summer to let the cellar smell out.
Coming, Mom!
Usually by dinnertime he’d already run the scales. So boring, those scales! No matter how many times Mrs. Ruth told him they were necessary, they felt like chains to a very young Philip. Like his fingers were being forced to play melodies he wasn’t interested in playing. But Mom’s clockwork call would signify liberation; it was time to play his way, even if for only a few minutes, his chance to ape the bluesmen he heard through the speakers in Apollo Music.
But the stairs . . .
Always the creaking of that first step and Philip would tilt an ear in that direction, behind him, the stairs between him and the furnace and that fading pink sheet, too.
Coming, Mom!
He’d yell it again but he wasn’t going anywhere; wasn’t getting up from that piano until he’d reached it, that deep and dangerous place that even kids know about, the inner cra
Creation.
Philip didn’t know what to call it back then, but he knew he had to reach it, once, before—
But then, dammit, those creaking steps. Clockwork, too. Philip with his back to the basement, his fingers mad across the keys like he was typing a letter, telling someone who knew how he felt, what it felt like to reach for it . . .
Creation.
Creaking . . . the stairs behind him . . . the shadows and a flapping sheet behind him, too. A monster, perhaps, something terrible behind the sheet, something wakened by the music and the soul and spirit the kid was putting into it. But Philip wouldn’t turn around, not yet, not yet, not until he got there, touched that place that felt like a joke, a revelation, the future all rolled into one.
Creation.
He played furiously, even then, and the only thing that could rattle him, the only thing on earth that could STOP him, was the hand (clockwork) upon his shoulder, the thing that lived in the shadows, the thing whose breath caused the laundry sheet to ripple, the thing that—
Philip. Mom. Only Mom. Always. Dinner is ready.
Now, in the cold and dark, Philip remembers those creaking stairs. And that rippling sheet that might’ve hidden a Thing in Red, a creature with hooves and horns.
He exhales and his breath is valentine ribbon in the red light.
The reel rewound, Philip removes it from the machine, opens the storage case, and tucks it in beside the others. He gloves a new one, places it opposite the catch reel, and begins to thread the tape through.
Something is moving in the sand behind him.
Philip rises with his flashlight on and gun at the ready.
It’s empty desert. Nothing crawls. Nothing emerges from the shadows beyond the light.
But even the desert, with all its open space, has its corners at night.
Philip steps toward that darkness.
“Ross?” It’s a crazy thing to say. It’s a hopeful thing to say.
Could it be Ross? Returning? Did he escape whatever fate came close enough to touch him?
A second sound. Boots on gravel. Philip turns fast to his right.
To his left.
Only sand. The base of another dune.
He brings the light to its peak.
What if Ross is up there? What if Ross is crawling toward him, near death, unable to speak, unable to stand up?
And what if it’s not Ross. What then?
The cold tightens its grip. Holds Philip in place, rooted to the sand.
Seeing nothing upon the dune, he shines the light to the sand at his feet.
Staring up at him is the flattened face of the body they found.
“Jesus!”
Its eyes, both on the same side of its head, are staring into Philip’s own.
Philip catches his breath, a swallow of cold, raw air.
The canvas tarp has moved; the night wind has partially uncovered the body.
Philip looks back to camp.
Is he two hundred yards away?
He must be. He is.
Before covering the body again, he studies the distorted features, the oblong bearded mouth, the eyes that appear soupy enough to spoon.
Philip reaches for the canvas tarp.
Hears footsteps in the sand.
He turns. Sees nothing. No one.
Philip brings the light to the top of the dune again.
A man is up there.
“Shit!” Philip says, stumbling back. “Halt!”
But the man is coming. The man is halfway down the dune.
“Halt!”
It’s a soldier, Philip can see that immediately. A uniform. A gait.
A weapon.
Philip’s gun feels like a front, like it’s made of plastic, like pretend. But it’s the stranger’s firearm that chills him. Philip experiences the same cold rush he felt when he saw the Civil War body in the sand. The weapon this second man carries is from another era, another time.
Genuine past, Private.
It’s a musket.
The man advances.
“Halt!” Philip repeats.
Philip’s first thought is,
This man is . . .
. . . in costume.
A blue coat, yellow scarf, bloodred lapels, yellow buttons that do not reflect the light. Black boots dig into the cold sand until they reach the base of the dune. A tricorn black hat shadows the soldier’s face.
Is it the Thing in Red?
Philip looks for horns. Looks for a white beard.
“Come on, man! I’m going to have to shoot you!”
It’s a costume. Has to be a costume. Because if it’s not a costume, if it’s really what the man wears, then you’ve lost your mind. You’ve lost your mind!
The soldier steps closer yet, into the full sphere of Philip’s light.
Since finding the body in the desert, Private Greer has talked endlessly about uniforms. He focuses on the Civil War. But he goes on.
The American Revolutionary War soldier commonly wore a blue frock coat. A tricorn hat. A ruffled shirt tucked into tan breeches, black boots that reached shin-high. A yellow scarf that protected his neck from the cold.
This is not the Thing in Red.
It’s a soldier from the American Revolution.
Philip lowers his gun. Useless or not, front or not. This man is beyond threat. This is beyond sensible, admonishing words like threat.
An American, Philip thinks.
“How—” Philip begins, but the man is lowering his musket. He’s pointing to Philip’s other hand.
To the light.
He’s smaller than Philip. To scale.
“Who are you?” Philip finally asks, his words like the smoke of gunpowder in the air between them.
The man, the soldier, is less than two feet from him. He’s reaching.
“Hey, hey,” Philip says. “Don’t do that! Don’t make me—”
But the man grips the flashlight and brings it close to his face. Studies it. Looks Philip in the eye.
“Lantern,” the man whispers.
Not just American, Philip thinks. The first.
“My God,” Philip says.
A savage with an ax would’ve scared him less than this man has.
This impossibility.
This ghost.
The man releases the light. Takes a step back.
“Hang on,” Philip says, lowering his gun. “Wait a second! We lost a friend! Can you help us find him? Can you help us?!”
But the man is backing up, up the side of the dune.
“Wait! Help us! You must know something! Where is he? Where could he be?!” Philip drops his gun, raises his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you! I just need to talk to you!”
But the soldier has backed up out of the range of Philip’s light. A silhouette now, at the peak of the dune.
Philip runs toward him.
“WAIT!”
To the top, at the top, shining his light across the breadth of the dune, into the shadowed pits, sand valleys, surrounding.
No man.
No Revolutionary soldier.
No vision.
But a sound, again, behind him, boots again.
Philip spins.
“Lovejoy,” he says, breathless, seeing the Mad Blond’s face only, revealed in the flashlight’s farthest reach.
The former general is waiting at the bottom of the dune.
Philip descends.
When they meet, Lovejoy takes the light from Philip’s hand, shines it uphill again.
“Lovejoy,” Philip repeats.
Lovejoy turns to face him, his features blackened by shadow.
“I saw him, too,” he says.
“A ghost,” Philip says.
“Not a ghost,” Lovejoy says.
“Then what?”
“Not a ghost. Not a man. A vestige . . .”
Then he scales the dune.
Philip looks to the body at his feet. Thinks of the Revolutionary Soldier touching the flashlight. The physicality of both.
A vestige . . .
But a vestige is only a glimmer, only what remains, and Philip knows that both impossible soldiers are more real than that.
Because of time, because of place, they may not be the source of their own sounds.
But they are echoes.
And echoes are neither alive nor dead . . .
31
Philip wakes in the dark. Bad dreams about Lovejoy lost, starving in a cell made of sand.
Because Ellen didn’t give him the medicine she told Francine she would, Philip is in considerable pain. The worst he’s known yet.
I don’t trust it . . .
She’d whispered this and other concerns, as she drew many pictures for Philip. This time he’d asked for weapons. Descending in chronological order. Beginning with a mushroom cloud (what Philip said looked like a giant’s fist, cracking the earth’s surface) to a hand cannon, the earliest-known firearm on the planet.
Philip didn’t ask for the medicine. And while earlier he could rationalize it as needing to know the parameters of the drug, what it does, what it doesn’t do, the bad way has come, and it all sounds like madness to him now.
There are six figures in the unit. Six silhouettes watching him wake.
As he processes this, he understands also that he’s back in his original unit, that somebody has wheeled him out of rehab.
But not these men. These men are moneyed. These men are military. And Philip can tell by the privilege in their eyes, the meticulously casual manner of their clothes, and the ice clinking in their drinks that they come from a shadowed height of the military that Philip will never be able to look high enough to see.
But the pain is even more frightening than the visitors.
An Asian American man lowers his face so that it’s only inches from Philip’s own. His khaki pants and yellow button-down speak more of country clubs than they do of war rooms. But Philip knows better.
“Awake!” the man says. A fluttering, drunk smile appears like fish fins flapping in deep water.
He tilts his drink over the cot, pretends he’s going to spill it.
Philip can’t move to do anything about it.
Over the Asian’s shoulder a silver crew cut appears, then a clean-shaven face beneath. It’s a serious countenance and this man also dresses the part; his windbreaker and khaki slacks suggest he’s above even the rank of general. Presidential is the word Philip thinks. But his thoughts are broken, distorted, by the paralyzing pain.