Doorbells at Dusk by Josh Malerman

Author:Josh Malerman [Light, Evans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
ISBN: 9781386249740
Publisher: Corpus Press
Published: 2018-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

BETWEEN

Ian Welke

She wipes her foot across the wet sand erasing a triangle someone has etched into the mud with a stick. Finding a stick of her own, Yolanda replaces the triangle or delta with a long integral ∫. It was the delta that initially attracted her to calculus. The delta is the mathematical representation of rates of change, but tonight’s ritual is all about the past. The integral reverses the derivative, in this case symbolically reversing her history. She draws a sigma next. For she’ll need the sum total of the variables working for her, even the marks on the sand.

The letters for the variables . . . t for time? The hours between sunset on Halloween and the end of Dia De Los Muertos. She’s piggy backing on the shared belief that the veil is thinnest these two nights, this night specifically since there are more unwitting participants, the greater the effect. She is x in the equation. The observer is part of the ritual. She giggles. How’s that for an Uncertainty Principle? There must be a variable for place, as she fully believes this ritual can only work here, the city that substitutes so often for so many other places.

A man with an unbuttoned shirt and his pant legs rolled up to his knees, stands in the surf ahead. She follows the trail of hair up his chest, neck, and muttonchops, and realizes that he is staring back at her.

His eyes are bloodshot, but his pupils are as immense and saucer sized as her own. She’s certain that the spirit staring at her is a young, Los Angeles-years Jim Morrison. And he should stare at her, for she is the L.A. Woman. She is Los Angeles. Born to a Hispanic mother and a half-Korean half-African American father, she worked two jobs while going from LACC to UCLA to grad school at Cal Tech, all while painting and working theater crews and never ever sleeping. She grew up on this beach and in traffic between this beach and her parents’ home in Boyle Heights. She’s seen the absurd wealth in the estates just blocks from people sleeping beneath overpasses. She’s seen her streets double for countless other cities on the movie and television screens. If anyone would know that the barrier between worlds is thinnest in Los Angeles, it’s her.

Los Angeles, Halloween night, she has her coordinates in space time.

She feels the pull of a thousand dark suns as she’s drawn into Morrison’s eyes. But before her vision is engulfed in the black of those immense pupils there’s a light, yellow and pink, she realizes it’s the sun reflected off the waves in front of her. There’s no sign of the man she thought was Morrison’s spirit, it’s faded like so many shades before her, leaving the trace of cigarette smoke on the wind.

How long has she been staring at the ocean? How long has it been since the spirit passed her by? Maybe she shouldn’t have eaten all three-and-a-half grams of the mushrooms.

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