Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,36
mass had sunk, its roadway, ridged and as gap-toothed as a railway trestle, had settled into the water’s surface—so that midway across one must slosh through ankle-deep water, feeling beneath the scum for the solid segments of roadway. Spanish moss festooned the fraying cables; green lichens fringed the greener verdigris of bronze faces staring out from the rotting concrete pylons. Inscriptions, no doubt explaining their importance, were blurred beyond legibility.
It was always a breathless relief to reach the upward-sloping paving of the far end, scramble toward the deserted shoreline beyond. His chest would be aching by then, as though the warm, damp air he tried to suck into his lungs were devoid of sustenance. There were ripples in the water, not caused by any current, and while he had never seen anything within the tepid depths, he knew it was essential not to linger in crossing.
His companion or guide—he sometimes thought of her as his muse—always seemed to know the way, so he followed her. Usually she was blonde. Her bangs obscured her eyes, and he only had an impression of her face in profile—thin, with straight nose and sharp chin. He sensed that her cheekbones would be pronounced, her eyes large and watchful and widely spaced. She was barefoot. Sometimes she tugged up her skirt to hold its hem above the water, more often she was wearing only a long T-shirt over what he assumed was a swimsuit. He realized that he knew her, but he could never remember her name.
He supposed he looked like himself. The waters gave back no reflection.
It—the building—dominated the shoreline beyond. From the other side he often thought of it as an office building, possibly some sort of apartment complex. He was certain then that he could see lights shining from its many-tiered windows. It appeared to have been constructed of some salmon-hued brick, or perhaps the color was another illusion of the declining sun. It was squat, as broad as its dozen-or-more stories of height, and so polyhedral as to seem almost round. Its architecture impressed him as featureless—stark walls and windows, Bauhaus utilitarian. Either its creator had lacked any imagination or else had sacrificed external form to unguessable function.
The features of the shoreline never impressed themselves upon his memory. There was a rising of land, vague blotches of trees, undergrowth. The road dragged slowly upward toward the building. Trees overhung from either side, reaching toward one another, garlanded with hanging vines and moss—darkening skies a leaden ribbon overhead. The pavement was cracked and broken—calling to mind orphaned segments of a WPA-era two-lane highway, bypassed alongside stretches of the interstate, left to decompose into the wounded earth. Its surface was swept clean. Not disused; rather, seldom used.
Perhaps too frequently used.
If there were other structures near the building, he never noticed them. Perhaps there were none; perhaps they were simply inconsequential in comparison. Sometimes he thought of an immense office building raised out of the wilderness of an industrial park or a vast stadium born of the leveled wasteland of urban renewal, left alone and alien in a region where the genius loci ultimately reconquered. A barren space, encroached upon by that which was beyond, surrounded the building—sometimes grass-latticed pavement (parking lot?), sometimes a scorched and eroded barrier of weeds (ground zero?).
Desolation, not wholly dead.
Abandoned, not entirely forgotten.
The lights in the windows, which he was certain he had seen from across the water, never shone as they entered.
There was a wire fence, sometimes: barbed wire leaning from its summit, or maybe insulated balls of brown ceramic nestling high-voltage lines. No matter. All was rusted, corroded, sagging like the skeletal remains that rotted at its base. When there was a fence at all.
If there was a fence, gaps pierced the wire barrier like the rotted lace of a corpse’s mantilla. Sometimes the gate lay in wreckage beneath its graffitied arch: Abandon Hope. Joy Through Work. War Is Peace. Ask Not.
My Honor Is Loyalty.
One of his dreams is a fantasy of Nazis.
He knows that they are Nazis because they are all wearing Jack boots and black uniforms, SS insignia and swastika armbands, monocles and Luger pistols. And there are men in slouch-brim hats and leather overcoats, all wearing thick glasses—Gestapo, they have to be. White-clad surgeons with button-up-the-back surplices, each one resembling Lionel Atwill, suck glowing fluids into improbable hypodermics, send tentative spurts pulsing from their needles.
Monocles and thick-lensed spectacles and glass-hard blue eyes peer downward. Their faces are distorted and hideous—as it he, or they,