Pebble Man

Tuesday, March 1st, 1692.

[John Hathorne]: Do you go through the trees or over them?

[Tituba]: We see nothing but are there presently.

Present day.

Haynes stood in the dirty white light of a business park, across the street from Nyquenas Tower, on break, rattling beneath silver-blue skyglow that faded into black like the foamy edge of receding surf. Everything was so large, so distant, so slow-moving as to appear frozen in time. And here he was, at the bottom of everything, collected with the other bits of something else, eroded fragments looking up from the bottom of an ocean.

That was the night he turned around to see the old man, tight-faced and caked in the white powder of drywall, grinning like a stiffened satyr, holding a fistful of crushed gravel. Haynes could feel the tapping at the small of his back, muted poking like the nose of an ass-sniffing mutt, followed by clicking sounds like falling ice. There is something in the air, he thought. You’d be stupid to say otherwise, even if you couldn’t name it, even if you couldn’t touch it, even if the only place you’d ever see it was in the subtle gestures of a stranger, it was something alright. It rendered you dumb and made its way along the stuff inside your bones. And this old man was part of all that.

“Problem, sir?” He wanted to be polite.

“No! Not at all!”

He looked down at the little rocks, accumulated at his heels as if they’d fallen from his asshole, alluvium of his inner-heaven.

“Not me! Swear!”

Haynes looked down his left, then his right, empty pavement on either side, absolute desolation, personless aside from him and smiling Coyote, the once-imprisoned trickster now liberated from his fold in time, here to taunt with a pantomime of high strangeness, embodiment of our uncanny reality. As if the world wasn’t scary enough, we now present to you: almost the world.

The young man turned back to night, the city, post-industrial undergrowth frozen in a half-remembered time he couldn’t be sure was of this earth’s chronology. Downtown, tangled and sticky with concrete spider-webbing, sick and permanent, sidewalks crowded with locals shuffling along while eyes hidden in the church cupolas watched all. And in the middle of everything, the Tower held a loaded round, aimed right at the Serpent, beyond vast distance and time, coiled around the source of everything, all matter, while Haynes stood there, rigid with fear and too solid to touch light. And the old man, throwing rocks and playing dumb.

He went back inside, never to see the old man again.