Lean forward in your chair. Come close. Listen for it, can you hear it? Hold your breath. Stop moving. Even better. Stop your heart. Now can you feel it? In your bones? There might be noise around you, laugher, talking… tears. Maybe even screams. Sometimes you can even hear it best when someone’s screaming. I mean look around, do you see hope? If you do, you belong in a prison, or a mental hospital. Or anywhere that makes alcohol. Hope’s the only real thing that can stop the silence, and I lost mine a long time ago. I mean, I’ve seen death. I’ve shook his hand. In fact, if I remember correctly, I winked at him. That is the part I most regret, the wink. Just a quick thing, really, only a bat of one eyelash. From across the room, right into those coal-black eyes. And I could hear the silence. In that raucous, loud, hell hole of a diner I’d heard the silence. I’d felt it whisper to me. The eternal silence of nothing, of death. I should have run, left the diner, screw paying, face criminal charges, hell, stolen that annoying waitresses car. But I never, never should have winked.
I find it ironic really that my death started with a clear bright blue sky.
I stared up at that great dome of a thing, that unchanging eternal blue brightness. The insufferable Arizona heat beat at my face like a hammer on a nail. I can remember spinning under the sun, arms spread out wide, skirt kicking up clouds of sand. There was a wind coming from the West on that summer afternoon, it carried with it exhaust and heat from the interstate. I coughed into my elbow, with my eyes watering I hurried back into my house, the mesh door squeaking close behind me. Snapping closed, shutting the world out, or me in.
I hurried up my age-old termite-tunneled stairs, each one threatening to break underneath me. I had tried to tell myself that I really should get those fixed, call someone to come over and spend hours fiddling around the stairs, using my bathroom. I would have to ask if he would want something to eat, he would say yes. I can actually remember telling myself that it would take too much work, might as well just leave good enough alone. Oh how I wish I had taken the time, wasted the rest of the day wandering around the house, making sure the repair man didn’t steal anything. Do absolutely nothing, anything.
My door knob fell off again, I stared at the scuffed piece of bronze in my hand and threw it on my dresser, I could deal with that later. My eyes did a quick sweep of my room, making a mental list of all the disorder and dust that seemed to creep back in as soon as I turned my back. There were clothes on the floor, bed sheets on the ground, and papers from my last book ‘attempt’ scattered all around my desk. Technically, I was a secretary for some uppity law firm (which pays the bills, but only barely) but I considered myself an author. In total there have been nine book attempts which included two horror novels, two mysteries, a desperate attempt at romance and just recently four, four, tries to write some fantasy, magic, crap. The last one ended when I realized I had named two of the characters (the villains) after my brothers and had somewhere in the middle of the story changed the sex of my main character from a girl to a boy. I didn’t even try to salvage the situation.
In light of my failure to write another book I decided to hit the only, decent, diner in the town of Tombstone, Arizona. Looking back I wish I had picked just about anywhere else to live. And not just because of the name.
This is the part that I have a hard time looking in the eye. I could tell you about how I lost my keys and spent half an hour running around my house before I realized I left them in the ignition, with the car still running. Or I could tell you about the drive to Dany’s 24 hour diner, the bumps in the roads, the cacti, oh god the cacti. They’re everywhere, literally everywhere, spiny little monsters. Or even about the walk up to the glass door of the diner, my glance towards the rotting food in the dumpster, the sudden hurry back to the car to pull my keys out of the ignition, the feeling of the door handle against my skin, the brush of the cold, slightly stagnant, air against my heat scorched skin. I could tell you about any of it, any of it. But not about the devil, not death, not the man with the crooked grin and a face with crags. Not the man who smiled to me when I sat down three booths down, not the man who bought me one of those silly, fruity alcoholic girly drinks. Not the man I winked at. Not the one with the coal-black eyes. The last ones I would ever see.
He slid down across the booth from me, his face splitting into a grin, his flesh parting from his teeth, making his cheeks into valleys and mountains instead of dimples. He said something, I can’t remember what, maybe it was ‘hi’ or ‘what’s up’, he might not even had said anything, I can’t remember, it doesn’t really matter. It startled me, his voice, it was deep and smooth, like the ocean, but also like the ocean, it was quick to temper. I looked up from my cheeseburgers, cheese fries and milkshake. I know, I know, it goes straight to my hips but hey, give a girl a break, it was my last meal.
What I do remember is this; I looked up, straight into those eyes, and shivered. My bones rattled, my head shook, my nose filled with snot, my gag reflex kicked into action, my eyes looked away, anywhere but at him. But I answered him, whatever he did or didn’t say. “Hi”. That one simple word, two little letters, a word I’d used a hundred, a thousand times before, was no longer a greeting, it was a death sentence. I don’t believe, and this is my personal opinion, that anything else, from that moment on, I could have done would have saved me. But I guess that’s up to you to decide. The die was cast.
We talked, we chatted, we conferred, we confessed. Politics, sports, religion, my heinous job, his equally terrible job (I believe he drove trucks, or taxis, or… well he drove something) we talked for hours. I laughed… a lot. At absolutely nothing he said, I just keep thinking about how strange it is, that I thought death was funny. Maybe that was my mistake, maybe it wasn’t.
One thing led to the next and I was in his car, I can’t even remember how, (this was a truck, an old beet up green ford with peeling paint and a speedometer that didn’t work), we were holding hands. His were cold, mine were warm. The whole car ride and his hands never changed temperature.
We drove for a long time, he asked where we were going, I said I didn’t know, that I thought we were going to his place. He grew really silent; he said he didn’t have a place, how about mine? I agreed, never, not once, not even for a moment did I think it was weird. Not even that he already knew my address, not even that he had a key. Of course he could come to my house, that’s what you do to the devil. You invite him in, ask how he likes his coffee (black), to please take off his expensive Italian shoes (though with my house who were we kidding), shoes that no self-respecting fork lift (bulldoze?) driver should ever wear, sit him on your couch and hope he leaves quickly.
I think it was two things that first told me it was time to stop. First it was his lips, oh how cold they were when they kissed me. Colder than any person, any living thing should ever be. I could feel that it was cold all the way down. And second was his breath, the smell. Oh god I can still feel it on my tongue. It wasn’t just disease or the aroma of rot. It was the stench of all things that are dead. Can you smell it? Let it fill your nostrils. His hand was on my thigh, his eyes were open and he was smiling. I leaned back as far from him as I could on my, suddenly way to small, love seat couch, it was a deep purple but with the lights off it was black as pitch.
I looked deep into those pits of his eyes, I saw them peel back and I thought for a moment I saw his soul. They say eyes are windows to the soul, how foolish, the devil doesn’t have a soul. Suddenly, I was frightened, so completely filled with fear that I felt age-old evolutionary instincts kick in. Fight or flight. He stretched himself over the coach, his face still smiling obscenely, and pinned my to the cushions with massive arms. I grabbed his hair and pull, trying to wrench him off of me, to throw him away. Slowly, exhaustingly, his weight, which suddenly felt like an elephant trapping me to the coach, was being lifted off. Until with a sound like a wet slap, his skull pulled back and parted from his bone. It didn’t rip clean, thin sickly tendrils stuck to his cheeks and the crown of his head. His eyes stayed in the place of a pale white, leering skull. They were black all the way around, except for right off center. It’s funny how well I remember it. But right there in his left eye was a sliver of yellow. Just to the right, a little above the center.
  I ran.
Over the coach, stumble on the loose wooden floor boards, storm the stairs. Away. Away. The stairs squeaked and groaned under my weight. I could hear him behind me, or maybe it was just my own breathing, but it was a wheezing almost gleeful sound and I’m sure that I wasn’t the one who laughed. I think.
The stairs are my savior, the stairs are my doom. I think I could have made it, up the stairs, through the door, out of the window to the ground waiting below. And out across the sand, there I feel like I could be safe. As though the sand was a talisman, the cacti and their flowers wardens against the demon in my house. Out there, there was something primeval and dangerous. You could lose yourself in the dunes, but no devil would follow. If only the stairs hadn’t broken. Not under me, but under the Thing that came behind. He stepped on a loose step and he fell right through. For a moment I turned around and saw that speck of yellow glow from the stairs, the rest of him was wreathed in darkness. I could see the jagged edges of the steps which morphed almost beautifully into the perfect darkness of his body. The stairs gave me just enough time to think, and be stupid. My original plan had been to charge right through the bathroom adjacent to the stairs case and out that window. But instead I thought, ‘there’s a window closer to the desert, and the ground, in my room.’ I turned left and sprinted down the hallway. I was by no means a fast runner, I ran an incredible twenty two second one hundred meter in high school track. I pretty much came in last every time, but I swear right then I cut the world record in half.
I hit the door right as the Thing hit the top step. I reached for the door knob, and stopped, where there should have been a glimmering hopeful piece of bronze was an empty hole. I shoved my weight against the door but it wouldn’t budge. The little tabby thingy on the inside of the door must have gotten stuck, and for one bewildered moment I stopped, trying to remember the name. They have a name don’t they? The little lever thingy on the inside of the door, the thing that keeps it locked? Then I remembered what I was doing, what was chasing me, and jumped back into action. I tried to reach up inside the hole to snick the little lever. I never really had a chance; it took me two or three tries on a good day. I realized I was sobbing, right outside the door to my salvation, I was doomed.
He found me and struck me to the ground, something jabbed me in my back. I screamed loud and clear. And in that moment, in that one single instance, you could hear it. Anyone could. That single silence.
As I faced death itself all I could think about was that little pesky piece of wood and how much I would like it to stop jabbing me. Eventually, it did.
I figured out what he drove, it was The Ferry.