The Devil's Note (Upmarket, First 5 pages)

[Tifffany]

 

 

 

 

 Apocalypse 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That year, everyone believed in numerology. 

Our calendars were conveniently marked with the exact date of Armageddon:

December 31^st, 1999.

It was a year of impending digital apocalypse.  Even the disbelievers among us prayed that nothing would get lost in the translation of time to the strange new language of zeros and ones.   

All of us expecting our computers to detonate at the appointed hour like time bombs.

The same year the South African son of a polygamous infidel passed his thorny crown even as it still dripped with the blood of Apartheid.

It was a year of ancient land cracked open by supersheer earthquakes.  Shaking the ground beneath the sultan’s great palace.  Hyenas and jackals fled Istanbul in terror.  The daughters of the fallen Ottoman empire called out for their grandchildren lost in the rubble.

None of us planned to get out alive.

 That year, we held hands together in Times Square, mesmerized.  Expecting the ball to drop on New York and explode like a supernova.  Obliterating us all.

Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.

That night the kid woke Raymond with a berserk look in his wild green eyes.  “Get dressed.  Hurry.” 

It’s a reckless thing, to give a psychopath a key to your apartment. 

His creepy black car was waiting outside like a bad omen.  Parked crookedly with the engine still running.

He drove with maniacal disregard for civil decency.  Past the glittering festivity of New Year’s Eve partygoers foolhardy enough to have hope for the coming thousand years.

And I, his dark passenger, along for the ride.  Chain smoking with the windows rolled down.

The world seemed to tilt at an angle.  The way the camera tilts in a movie scene and you are expected to understand that something is off. 

No surprise to find that the little weirdo had a freak show for an apartment.  You could just see him here eating every meal alone in the dark.  Filthy glasses reeking of gin and scattered on every surface.  The rank smell of scummy armpits and expensive cologne.  A countertop crowded with packets of Ramen noodles and kiddie cereal. 

The two of them sat beneath a bare lightbulb strung from the ceiling over his kitchen table like the hard light of an interrogation room. 

“What the fuck am I looking at right now, Jack?”

Spread out before them were the fragments of a nightmare photographed in thirty-five-millimeter black-and-white film.  Dozens of girls.  Unconscious naked girls with bodies twisted awkwardly on the floor like broken dolls.  Girls in Lolita lingerie on their knees.  Sleeping beauties drugged into oblivion with their eyes rolling back in their heads.

Girls of fourteen or fifteen.  Younger, maybe.

“This one.”  He pointed to a photo of a girl in a Catholic school girl’s pleated skirt that was shoved up over her ribcage.  She was naked from the waist down.  In a state of comatose or possibly dead.  Jack handed Raymond a magnifying glass.  “Look closer.”

“No.  Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t act like you’ve never seen this shit.  You were a war correspondent.  In Kosovo?  You think I don’t know what went on there?  Now, look again.  No, not at her.  Look at the guy in the mirror behind her.  See him holding his camera there?”  The kid trembled with depraved jubilation.  A sick sort of joy lit his face.  “Is it him or not?” 

 “Yeah, it’s him.”  

“Who is it?  Say his name.”

Raymond didn’t want to say his name.  It was a jinxed name like a curse on his tongue.  

Jack’s face flashed a lunatic’s broken smile in the volcanic light of firecrackers erupting outside.

Midnight exploded in the sky.  

And to my great sorrow, the world did not end.