Judas

Raker pays a visit to a dear friend.

 

The Dead Man’s footsteps drift over the black asphalt arteries of the dormant city, lured onward, coaxed forth by a blurred recollection. The Devil cackles atop his throne, ensconced and fortified in the fertile recesses of his captive’s mind. He steeples his fingers and waits for the next move, the next crack of sulfuric thunder as sweet Vengeance spreads her burning gunpowder wings.

The hired-gun had been clean; a parasite, a mere insect to be crushed underfoot. The next would be a spectacle.

The Dead man walks on, swift though he knows no hurry; resolved though he knows not what may face him when the Devil which perches behind his eyes decides that his destination has been reached. His boots tread quietly against the ghost-strewn asphalt, tapping out the cadence of a funeral march with every step, making no more sound than the light rasp of his breath as he stumbles on, the man who lived, died, and still yet lives.

Who would be next?

The Devil just smiles and shakes the reins. The Dead Man does not ask again.

***

Zachary Frost’s ears rang.

Even the earplugs he wore every night couldn’t fully blunt the keening wail of Gerrard’s Gibson at full blast from ten feet away. And Gerrard had been on a kick tonight that should have, by all rights, melted the solder in his old Marshall and popped every window in the joint. But the old ’79 custom had held strong and shrieked its widow song, layered in equal parts old-bone crunch and quicksilver high-end, even through that pulse-pounding solo that capped off the title track for the newest album, Bleak Season.

Man, but they had rocked hard. Whiskey Tango’s had been packed, filled to the brim with fans of every stripe and station. Yuppies from the North Side, hippies from the South, suburbanite wage slaves from everywhere in between, and those same six bleached-blonde groupies from God-Knows-Where, they’d all paid the ten-buck cover, braved the sketchy atmosphere which stank of stale beer, nicotine, and the vague musk of old sex…all to see Thirty Pieces play live.

And he sure as hell was not the only one to walk away with a four-alarm headache, either. They’d been pretty heavy from the first spine-crunching chord of “Smoking Hole” to the final weeping bittersweet solo of “Stretched on your Grave.” The crowd had eaten it up and begged for more. Zach had taken his bow and smiled like the Devil himself, basking in the riot of well-deserved adulation.

Zach lived to play live. The rush was unbeatable.

As he turned the key in the ignition quieting the bass roar of his moderately trendy SUV’s engine, he found himself meeting his own gaze in the rearview mirror. He wasn’t a bad looking guy by any stretch of the imagination. His red-brown hair was cut in the messy, shaggy-chic style favored only by entertainers, disillusioned students, and the unemployed. His mischievously boyish face was flecked with the requisite bad-boy dusting of stubble; a few days growth which served to add the rough edges required to front a rock band. His eyes were green, quick, alert, and still bright from the lingering stage-high. He puckered his lips and gave himself a rakish little wink as he opened the door and stepped onto the concrete strip which fronted his house and served as his driveway.

The chill of the evening air did not even draw the slightest reaction as Zach padded over the cushion of grass as he crossed his yard to his front door. Even with only the meager protection of a thin t-shirt and jeans to ward off the cold, Frost paid it no mind.

It was perhaps for that reason that the chill of the doorknob went unnoticed as he took hold and slid his key into the lock. Any other man might have decided that the night’s lingering bite was not nearly cold enough to warrant the icy sheen of condensation upon the brass surface.

The deadbolt drew back and Zach pushed the wooden portal inward, taking a step into the velvet darkness. His footfalls echoed for a moment over the tiles of his entryway before they were muffled by the carpet which swathed the floor of his living room. He fished into his pocket for his keys, his earplugs (flesh-tone, of course…), and a few loose coins and set them all, unsorted and with no further ceremony, into a waiting ceramic bowl on the coffee table in the center of the room. The action was as automatic as stepping around the beige leather ottoman in front of his recliner or counting his steps as he made his way toward the kitchen so that he wouldn’t run into the side of his entertainment center.

He didn’t turn on the lights. His profession demanded that he always be bathed in the florid glow of a spot-light, blinded and burning before a faceless crowd of onlookers. It was perhaps only to spare his eyes from further stinging that he didn’t reach out to flick the light switch and bathe the room in incandescent brilliance. Instead, he reached for the waiting handle of the refrigerator and clenched his eyes shut against the pinprick burn of the solitary bulb which cast its light like a handful of gravel into his face.

“Damn…” He rasped as he fished for a beer. Practiced fingers closed upon a glass bottleneck and Zach was quick to close the fridge and turn away. The spots which swam before his eyes seemed to turn with him and he swore again, blinking to clear his vision.

When it seemed as though the world had faded back into the correct proportion of light and shadow, Zach groped along the tile counter until his hand settled on the boxy plastic form of his universal remote. He carried both the remote and his beer into the living room and lowered himself with a sigh into the welcoming folds of his couch. His booted feet found purchase against the sturdy rise of his coffee table. With a well-practiced brush of his thumb, he keyed the stereo on the far side of the room to a dull roar, queuing one of his favorite playlists and flicking the remote expertly across the couch.

His head succumbed to gravity as he let the muscles in his neck go slack. As it came to a rest against the back of the couch, he twisted the cap off of his beer and brought the hoppy liquid to his lips just as the opening riff of “Bleak Season” pounded through the speakers like a raw bolt of sonic fire. By the third mouthful of beer, the intro had ended and his own voice, clear and sharp as the sword of an archangel, cut through the wall of guitars in a grand rush. Zach couldn’t keep the smile off of his face.

Damn, but he was good.    

In fact, he was so swept up by the ebb and pulse of the song that he did not feel the eyes upon him. The sudden tautness to the air, the subtle sliver of menace, the pricking up of the small hairs on the back of his neck which would have warned him to be more on his guard were quickly shrugged away. Zachary Frost quietly filed away what little he did feel into the very back of his mind, discounting such feelings as little more than feedback and static from his time on the stage. A little bit of unspent adrenalin. Nothing more.

“Bleak Season” ended and the bass groove intro to “Pariah” thumped through the speakers. Zach was in desperate need of another beer. He set the dead green-glass soldier on the coffee-table and stood, tracing his way through the blue-velvet half-light thrown by the stereo and on toward the kitchen. Again he didn’t reach out to flick the lights. Again he ignored the soft gnaw of unease in his gut.

Zach’s eyes clenched against the blinding glow once more as he swung the fridge door open and fished for another brew. With a small grunt of satisfaction he pulled the bottle out and was surprised to encounter some sort of resistance behind him.

A hand!

 A hand had fastened itself to the back of his elbow, not really squeezing or doing any sort of damage, but holding it fast. Zach’s brain puzzled over this newest problem for perhaps a heartbeat before the beer was lifted from his fingers and the pressure was gone.  

Zach whirled around, his arm flashing out toward the light switch as he shouted, “Who’s there?” The switch flipped up and the room was washed in buttery incandescent light. Only the hiss of an opening beer broke the slowly reassembling silence.

“I think of all the things I missed, I missed your s****y taste in beer the most.” The figure now crucified under the florid illumination was familiar. The face was one which Zach knew. They had been close once. Once.

Before.

Zach pressed back against the refrigerator, unconsciously putting distance between himself and the man before him. All of his rockstar bluster was gone for the moment, fled for its life. Zach’s jaw flexed and then shut itself sharply with a bare click of teeth.

 His dead best friend chuckled his familiar you’re-an-idiot chuckle and brought the beer to his lips. “Grab another, Zach. Let’s go sit a while.”

Zachary Frost was a man who prided himself on having a witty reply to just about everything. This left him cold. He felt his arm rising, a hand questing out to put his eyes to the test. When he rested his hand on the dead man’s shoulders, the rational part of his mind still howled in protest.

“Dorian?”

“Mmmhm.” Raker affirmed as he took another slug from the bottle.

“How?”

“Long story.” He paused, his eyes narrowing. “Will you grab a goddamn beer so we can go sit down?” One death-pale hand gestured nebulously toward the still-open fridge.

Zach remembered himself and reached for another beer, keeping one eye on the figure of his former friend. If he turned away, the spook would no doubt vanish. As a hand closed on another chilled bottle, Zach plowed through the logical explanations. He’d helped carry Raker’s coffin. The guy had to be dead. All signs pointed to it.

So what the f**k is he doing in my kitchen?

Logic. He had to reason it out. Zach didn’t do drugs anymore. This didn’t have the dreamy, unreal feel of a flashback. Nervous breakdown? Too much stress? Second-hand high? Too little sleep? F*****g swamp-gas?

“Jesus.” Zach breathed as he turned with his beer and gestured toward the living room where “Let ‘er Rip” was still roaring dully. Raker’s lips split as he brushed past, the stale scent of damp earth and something sharper and vaguely menacing lacing through the air between them.

“Not quite, Zach.”

Raker led the way back into the living room and settled himself comfortably into Zach’s recliner, folding himself into it as though he meant to never leave it. A contented sigh passed his lips, made grotesque in Zach’s imagination by thoughts of Raker’s lungs, dead and unused for more than a year in an airless wooden box under six feet of funerary soil. Still, the dead man’s smile is friendly.

“So how’ve you been, Zach? Looks like you’re doing pretty well.” Affable enough, Zach supposed, as he took a seat on his couch and reached to lower the volume on the music which still thrummed through his stereo.

“It goes on, Dorian.” Zach fought to keep his voice level, to grip the tattered edges of his calm. This wasn’t happening. “What’re you doing here?” A simple question turned utterly absurd when conversing with a corpse.

Raker’s lips split into a familiar smile. “I can’t check in on an old friend?” He took a pull from the beer and let it rest casually against his knee as he crossed his legs and settled back. “To be honest, you’re being kind of a dick about all of this.”

That did it.

Zach’s calm broke under the pounding waves of unrelenting surrealism, pushed beyond its outer boundaries. Every camel had its limit. One straw too many.

“What the f**k are you doing, Dorian? You’re dead!”

“Fine,” Raker sighed. “No more small talk.”

He set the half empty bottle of beer on the coffee table and raked a long-fingered hand through his hair. For a moment the darkness closed in and silence reigned as the dead man framed his words carefully.

“Yes, Zach. I am dead.”

Zach let a breath his between his clenched teeth. This was nuts. He’d fallen asleep, still sprawled on his couch and listening to Bleak Season, an empty beer by his boots; a post-jam nap. Nothing more. Wake up, Zach!

“But I’m not the six-feet-under, creepy-crawly food, pushing up daisies, permanent, decomposing sort of dead.” His smile this time was vaguely unsettling; like juxtaposing a child’s doll and a rusty cheese grater. Nothing overt.

But wrong.

“I’m the other kind of dead.”

Zach failed to keep the derisive little laugh out of his voice. “Other kind of dead?” His incredulousness gave him courage. “I saw them wheel you out of your house. I saw the trial. S**t, Dorian. I helped Monica move her stuff out of that slaughterhouse. I carried your coffin and watched them lower you into the goddamn ground! What other kind of dead can there be?”

The dead man did not answer right away. Instead he let his eyes close and brought the bottle to his lips and tossed off the remaining beer. Gingerly he set it down again, sliding it away from the edge and closer toward Zach. He drew a long breath through his nose and let it out.

When he opened his eyes they were devoid of the glint which Dorian Raker had possessed in life. They were weary. Colder. “The kind where I’m not done yet.” His lip twisted up just a hair, a sort of half-snarl as his tone dropped to a conspiratory rasp. 

“Jesus, Raker…” Zach shook his head in disbelief, whistling through his teeth as he traced the three day dusting of stubble along his jaw with one long-fingered hand. “This is the strangest hallucination I’ve ever had…”

Raker chuckled softly, a gentle rasp against the familiar satin of his voice. Something which Zach couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Oh, Zach. You’ve got no idea.”

Their conversation lapsed for a moment, filled only with the dull, hissing roar of the music in the background. The quick and the dead met each other’s gaze and for a moment, it seemed as though the events of the past year melted away in a flash. Zachary Frost and Dorian Raker sat in the comfortable darkness of Zach’s living room, sipping beers, catching up.

Almost like two human beings.

“You’ve got no idea,” Raker repeated, that same rasp fading into a sigh as he stood and walked toward the kitchen once more.

Pity, Zach decided. It was pity that had crept unbidden into the dead man’s voice.

A moment passed.

It crawled by like moss overtaking a stone.

Zach reached out to silence the stereo, straining his ears to catch the faintest trace of footsteps. Nothing moved in the next room.

Raker didn’t return.

Zachary Frost found that his breathing steadied. The short hairs on the back of his neck slowly lowered, aware of the danger which had seemingly missed him by mere inches. Unspent adrenalin lined his veins like sheets of ice, and he found the unbidden shudder rocking his system as something of a surprise. A low rasp of a breath forced itself into his lungs, ending in a chuckle that was more of an afterthought than the product of conscious whim.

The hallucination was over. Whatever anomaly of thought or environment had brought forth the apparition of his best friend was gone, and it had taken the impossible figure with it.

And yet the gnawing in his gut.

It wasn’t painful, only a slight twinge. A biting unease. An icy knot in the pit of his stomach.

Zach found himself taking his feet, rising from the comforting embrace of his couch and making for the kitchen. Without conscious thought, he stepped through the dining room, brushing past the dining-room table, thickly draped in crawling late-night shadow. Tentatively, he poked his head across the kitchen’s threshold. 

Only the garish green glow of his stove-top clock cut the gloom. Nothing breathed.

Zach’s brow furrowed as he peered into the darkness. It had been so real. Not even the diaphanous gauze which wrapped his eyes and dulled his senses whenever he entered the haze of a high had blunted the edges of this hallucination.

Footsteps rang against tile. Soft and muted.

After a moment, Zach realized they were his own. He stepped into the kitchen and stared across the counter-tops and into the little cutaway in front of his pantry. The breakfast nook, the realtor had called it. Nothing there either. He cast a suspicious glance toward the door to the backyard.

Could Raker have slipped out into the dark and quiet of the suburban night? Was he out there waiting for him? What the hell was he playing at?

Zach shook himself. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been.

He stepped closer to the door, settling his hand on the latch and swinging the little wood and glass structure wide, perhaps a little harder than he’d meant to.

It couldn’t hurt to check anyway…

It was cold. Zach’s breath came in little nimbuses of frost. He folded his arms around himself, pushed the tingling already starting to spread through his fingers out of his mind, and scanned the little patch of turf which comprised his back-yard.

“Raker?”

Idiot. Raker’s dead.

No response.

Zach groaned, turned back to the door and stepped out of the cold and dark and into the relatively warmer dark of his home. He raised his hands and ground the balls of them into his eyes. “Get a grip, Zach.”

But before Zach could drop his hands from his face, something dawned on him.

The music had started again.

“Stretched on your Grave,” a weeping kiss of Novocain against the broken bones and seared flesh of the rest of the album. The sole ballad. It danced against the air, running in rainwater rivulets like molten gold.

Along the edges of time and space

His ethereal footsteps crept

Till aching eyes met familiar face

Now he knows why Jesus wept

His own recorded voice crooned the words to the somber acoustic melody, leading into the grand cathartic rush of the sobbing-widow wail of an electric guitar solo. And beneath it he heard the click.

It was a sound he knew only from the action movies.

Zach ran his tongue over his lips. Sandpaper against ragged rock. He turned slowly to see Raker, a bleak and desolate smile creasing his familiar hawk-face. The revolver in his hand drew level with Zach’s forehead, a fresh chamber cycling into place, a bullet ready to be fed down the tube and into his brain.

“So now we come to it, Zach…” Raker’s eyes were wrong. No longer the haunted azure orbs of his former best friend, but something altogether darker, hungrier.

Zach’s voice failed him, instead only a hissing sigh of confusion broke past his lips. Reflexively his hands drew up to head level, palms forward in the universal symbol of surrender.

Raker’s free hand drifted forward ever so slowly, a parody of Zach’s own gesture in the kitchen. It settled upon Zach’s own shoulder, and the desolate smile on the Dead Man’s face grew by degrees.

Blood dribbled from Raker’s left eye, a streak of crimson tear against the graveyard pallor of his flesh. And it was then that the chuckle began. A low humorless thing, void of mirth. Bereft of humanity. Or pity.

“See! Dead Raker’s wounds open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh!” The voice which issued from between Dorian’s lips was not his own. Or rather it was too cold to be his own. It hissed and burned against Zach’s ears, vile and merciless.

“Raker, what the hell?” Zach’s voice finally was his to command again. He twisted away from the grasp of the corpse, turning away to bolt, but Raker was quicker. He interposed himself between Zach and the doorway, the gun never dropping from it’s resting place between Zach’s eyes.

“Blush, blush, thou foul lump of deformity.” The words were staccato and harsh, a cross between the growl of a bear ripped from Satan’s own menagerie and the hiss of a dying rattlesnake, still ever so eager to strike one last time. Raker’s free hand lifted to point to the blood dribbling now in a steady stream from the blackened orb of his left eye. “For this is thy doing, oh accomplice to my death.”

“I don’t know what you’re—“

The crack of the pistol against Zach’s skull was like the strike of a thunderbolt, a quick blinding flash and a dull roar as blood rushed to the point of impact, rendering the left side of his face a florid red against the velvet blue of diffused stereo-light.

“Do not speak, traitorous snake. I know only too well the venom in your honeyed words.” The voice slowly resumed the quality of Raker’s own speech, the cadence slowing and a human tone returning to oust the accent of the Devil himself. “Damn it, Zach…don’t tell me you don’t know what you did.”

Zach tasted blood, a copper penny tang against the back of his tongue. He raised a hand to the burning sting of his cheek, his jaw already working on a variety of pointlessly incomprehensible noises. “Raker,” he managed, “I—”

“Oh, don’t worry, Zach.” Raker’s voice was as haggard and breathy as a man who had run a mile, colored with the strain of holding back an enormous force. He was the boy with his finger in the dam. And the cracks were getting bigger. “Let me show you.”

He took a step closer, stooping ever so slightly to stare into Zach’s eyes, the muzzle of the revolver pressing uncomfortably against the bony shelf of Zach’s sternum. Blue eyes bored into green. Pools of glacial murder grinding into an Irish meadow. Sadness rasping a hole into Envy. And Envy did it’s best to turn away, but long fingers caught hold of a chin and forced it back.

The world parted, the walls dripping like candlewax as reality lurched and halted.

Zach tried to scream, but he had no mouth. No lungs to hold air. No heart to freeze. Nothing to distinguish him from the burning background which gave a tortured scream as it fell away and became…

***

Darkness.

People paid for it on this side of town. They paid, heedless of the fact that it could be found no further than the edges of one’s vision. It slid over the sidewalks, past the streetlamps, through the back-alleys, into the seedy little bars, and peeped through the windows of the motels which invariably charged by the hour.

Zach emerged from Zeppo’s, stepping into the garish glow of the streetlamps which only gave the illusion of stabbing through the city ink. He’d had more than a couple beers after his last gig three blocks down at the Rundown, but the time had come for him to stagger back home. In a few hours he would have to drag himself, hang-over and all, out of the narcotic warmth of his bed and trundle off to his nine-to-five as a waiter at the Hamilton Cafe on twenty-eighth.

He hated catering to the posh little yuppies who sidled into the upper-class noveau-boheme café, but it paid the bills.

Zach stepped toward the edge of the street and raised a hand to flag down a passing cab. Interestingly enough, the black and yellow sheet-metal ferry ground to a halt, even though he looked like nothing so much as a disaffected, poorly-groomed, college drop-out with one too many beers in him and without a prayer of coughing up enough cash for fare. Zach didn’t waste time questioning the driver’s willingness to act the part of a decent human being (which often precluded being a cab-driver in this city), but instead opened the door and swung himself into the scarred leather which reeked of pine air-freshener.

“Eighth and Farrow.”

The cabbie didn’t offer a verbal acknowledgement, only a slight bob of his cleanly shaven head.

Zach’s eyes rolled toward his left just in time to catch a familiar form getting out of a cab opposite his own. She was tallish as she was helped out, even without the four-inch heels she wore, five six perhaps, and with the legs of a dancer. She was thin in that lithe, sinuous sort of way, a feature which met its mate in the unhurried grace of her stride as her escort twined his fingers into hers. But it was the hair that rang the alarm bells in Zach’s head; tresses like a cascade of liquid fire which flowed unbound and untamed down to the middle of her back.

Monica. Dorian’s girl.

But it wasn’t Dorian who held her hand and pulled her toward the doorway of the motel. No, Dorian’s hair wasn’t clipped into that style which gently hinted at respect and power, nor did he dress with that immaculate sort of quality which quietly whispered money. Dorian wore jeans and long-sleeved black t-shirts. The man who had shifted his hand to the small of Monica’s back as he fiddled with the key to a red motel door wore a suit-jacket and slacks.

Zach pressed himself against the window and squinted as his taxi began to lurch forward into traffic. His eyes strained toward the retreating pair, but in a matter of heartbeats, they had retreated into the room and he was hurtling home.

S**t.

Monica? He couldn’t be sure. It had sure as hell looked like her.

Better not to tell Dorian. Better to not get…

***

“…involved.” Raker hissed.

Zach greedily sucked in a breath he had not realized he had been unable to draw. It suffused his limbs and the dimly remembered night which he saw in his beer-addled recollection slid away with his exhale. However, the barrel of the revolver still pressed against his sternum and with that cool kiss of gunmetal against thin polyester and fevered flesh, Zach knew that he was not assured of another breath.

Raker’s blue eyes had gone black in the collection of moments or seconds he had been absorbed in the torrent of his memory. They had drained of everything that still bordered on sympathy, or mercy, or humanity. All that was left was a void, a hole which led only into darkness; a portal into the skull of a dead man.

“You were involved the moment you set eyes on them Zach. From that moment on, you were as dead as I was.”

Zach’s life ended in a rush of sulfur and flame and a cacophonous riot of thunder.

***

The Dead Man’s vision returns like light at the end of a tunnel, a hollow brightness which shatters the shadow like a breaking-glass dawn. His hands are stained red and the corpse at his feet is already growing cold.

Another brass shell is tangled into his hair and it clinks against its mate as he looks down at the ruined shell of his former best friend.

“Judas at least had the decency to hang himself…”

The Dead Man does not ask the Devil in the back of his head whether or not what he has done is right. The Devil does not soothe the hurt which gnaws in the pit of the Dead Man’s heart. Instead the two turn as one and leave, unwilling to play their roles. Or unwilling to acknowledge that they have come to an uneasy accord.

One glance back. A moment to reflect on the corpse which lies slumped against the wall. A moment to absorb the hideous art which the Devil has wrought in his absence. Streaked in crimson against the white wall, cast in blue-velvet stereo-light.

I know why Jesus wept.