Night Echo

 Night Echo

by Graham Swanson

Kale enjoyed the quiet hours of midnight in the village between time zones. She worked at the gas station between two village hotels and the abandoned theatre. She scrolled on her phone and made nasty remarks on social media until the censors banned her accounts. During the usual night, a few young cops might come in to use the bathroom, unless a bus stopped. Then she faced the nightwalkers, midnight drifters, and mystical gypsies as she rang up blue Gatorade and cigarettes coming in from smoking borders behind the darkened rails.

The magical woman asked Kale if she wanted to see the love of her future, the outcome of a journey, the wealth of gold. Astrology. Tarot cards. Crystal balls. Magic amulets. Kale watched them all shuffle back onto the bus and turn to steam under the currents of freezing rain and speeding bursts of light. On their way fast to nowhere. Sleeping like angels. 

  Overall Kale enjoyed her job but the way some of the hooded men lurked in the parking lot looking into the windows without coming in made her wish that she had a co-worker there with her. She kept her cell phone at hand, leaving it on the charger, looking out at the sifting wind dragging strangers with the red wheat. Sometimes they waited in their cars outside the building, sometimes they walked out of the wheat fields and grouped together around burning barrels in the alley. Sometimes they turned up beaten and stabbed in a turned over boxcar not far from the gas station. Most soared away into the speeding oblivion of highway traffic and joined the blank faces on the wall. 

     Kale just turned 28. She hoped to resume classes at one of the small local schools along the riverfront for outcasts. She quit school the first time. Every single day she woke up and thought about finding a shotgun and shooting him in the face or smacking his skull with a baseball bat. He married a stripper from the dance club down the road. She didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t like to call it that. She just scrolled on her phone, tightened her mask around her ears, and looked out for tramps getting gas. 

At the flickering of lights, a stranger pressed against the fogged glass walls. This hooded figure didn’t wander off into the ether, he breathed into the glass and left bloody handprints on the condensation. He burst through the doors gasping, one arm missing, blood jetting onto the linoleum tiles and smearing across the glass, leaking down his jacket, pant legs. Buckets of blood splattered onto his boots as he hobbled over to Kale, blue faced, his eyes reddened and his pink mouth balking, soundless moaning for her to call for help. Kale reached for the store phone and pressed the emergency key but no tone rang on the other end. She dialed 911 on her cell phone just as the power went out and the man fell to the floor. 

Only his twitching boots made noise scraping on the floor, blood gushing out of his socks. A stick of bone still grinded on the tiles. Kale bowed over the counter to examine it under her flashlight. Little bite marks gnarled the wet joint bone. A heavy shadow fell over the gas station and even the lights outside the pumps went off, and then the cash computer went off, and the beer cooler shut off and melted under the door. 

Kale kept telling herself that a car is coming. A car will come and help will arrive. Something scraped at the ceiling over his head. It started with small scratching but then it turned into long deep raking sounds. The heater stopped working as the air conditioner and vents fell from the ceiling and crashed down on the coffee station she just finished restocking. Heavy breaks of thunder fluttered overhead, and the shadow lifted from the store. The ceiling pressed down as a tornado of cold air cycloned the building, shattered the glass and hurled the dumpster into the gas pumps. On the other end of her phone call, 911 emitted a tornado siren.  She kicked the lottery machine. Outside a fire started over the gas pumps.

Late January snowfall built up around the ditches. Kale stole a bunch of food and stuffed it in her jacket. She hurried out the door to find her car flipped upside down on top of one of the hotels. The clouds dropped lower and lower as horrendously warm winds thawed the frozen moisture on her cheeks. She hurried to reach the lobby of the hotel before whatever lurked above the clouds found her there. Once inside she began to eat the snacks she pulled from the shelf. Instead of a cool, lit up lobby with the night clerk she has a crush on waiting at the desk, she found wind blowing against curtains, and shattered fountains. No one around. A lamp lay broken on the floor. The paintings lay face down. Only one room light burned under the door. Kale finished her snack and left the garbage in a broken pot. She knocked. “It's an emergency. Let me in. Let me in.”

The door floated open and inside sat a pretty redhead at a table with a glass orb and desert crystals all around her bed. The magical woman from not long before. Kale saw her sometimes with a backpack asking for rides in the parking lot. The strange woman recognized Kale too but she never learned the face that went with the name.

 “I am the mistress Night Echo of Silverchair ,” she told Kale, and offered her a glass of bitter elixer next to the table amid a ring of candles. 

Kale shook her head. A shattered mirror lay on the table. A dagger buried in the hardwood sparkled in the candlelight. She thought she heard whispers from the tiny purple flames. The strange woman looked younger than her, yet tattoos covered her shoulders, fingers, and bare feet. A deep resentment fell over her face when she looked away from the light, like she was waiting for someone to die. 

“No, no." Kale said. "We need to get out of here. Something just wrecked the gas station. Someone is dead.”

“Yes, I know. You can leave if you want, but it won't go away. Yes, Kale. I've seen you around. Slip out of those terrible work clothes. You don't need them anymore. I have some nice comfortable robes in the drawer. You’re welcome to them.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I've been waiting for you to come. That thing outside. I saw it. It won't be coming back for a long time.'' She touched the largest crystal with love and care. Inside, a heartbeat. “You see, I summoned him. I summoned him here, Kale.”

“That's not possible.”

“Not at first, but here, where the time zones never change, I find that there are many stars that don't shine in the rest of the world, there are places that don't appear on any map, and there are lost men and women who come and go like a bus stop.”

‘Why, why did you do that?”

“Sit down. It's 60 degrees outside. Soon tornados of ice will fall, and you’ll freeze to death before you can reach your… little home. That's right. That must really bother you. I see it in the crystal, Kale. Sit down, it's warm in here, there are two nice beds, and there’s me, the arms of Night Echo, the sorceress of doom.”

Kale looked into the crystal beyond on the center of the table, and she felt the dark rings around her eyes pull her under. The door slammed shut. The chair felt comfortable. She’d been standing all day. Warm too. Despite the frost growing on the window, the power lines down sparking in the parking lot, the fields of snow melting under the small fires, warm clouds blowing fog from empty field to empty field.

“Now, let me read you.”

art: The Sorceress, Jan Van De Velde II, engraving, 1626