Free The Light at the End by John Skipp, Craig Spector

were spinning it around and around: in a sense, that was what it was there for. Participation Art.
    On one side of the cube, the word IMAGINE was rendered in large, spray-painted letters. It happened shortly after John Lennon’s senseless, pathetic murder. Nobody had seen fit to paint over it.
    New York City loves its graffiti artists.
    They crossed in silence, watching out for the cars that blasted by with little or no regard for pedestrian safety. There was one singularly deranged taxi driver who must have been doing 60 mph; he seemed to be deliberately bearing down on them. Danny took Claire’s hand and took off running. She followed, not resisting. The cab missed them by less than two feet.
    “CRAZY BASTARD!” Claire yelled from the safety of the curb. The cabbie shouted something back, swallowed by the sound of his own squealing tires. She flipped him the bird as he raced into the night, then laughed and turned to face her companion.
    Danny let go of her hand, feeling suddenly awkward… presumptuous, even. It took a second before he realized that she hadn’t minded; by then, it was too late to just grab it back again. You putz , he informed himself silently, and hoped for a lot of traffic when they hit Broadway.
    They resumed their pace, heading down 8 th Street toward Greenwich Village. For the moment, they remained silent, immersed in their own internal dialogues. Neither was sure as to what the other one was thinking. If they’d known, they would have been amazed by how strong their psychic link actually was.
    Because they were both thinking about the same two things: the vampire in the tunnels, and what it would be like to sleep together. For Danny, the priorities were reversed, but that hardly mattered.
    But since neither of them knew for sure, neither one dared or cared to say anything. Then, because he sensed that the silence had become overlong, Danny cut off his train of thought and cleared his throat loudly.
    But before he could think of something ridiculous to say, they heard the voice shouting from down the block, near the subway entrances. The words were drunken, slurred, more than slightly hysterical. As they drew nearer, they listened carefully to what the voice was trying to say.
    “…DOWN THERE! IZ’WUZ DOWN THERE, AN’ IT GOT FRED! OMMA… OMMAGOD, IT WAS. HE WAS SCREAMIN’, AN’ I… OH, LORDY, SUMPIN’S DOWN THERE! ”
    They stopped dead, turned to stare at each other apprehensively. Claire asked him quietly if he heard that. He nodded, mute.
    And though it was a warm night, they shivered, as though a cold hand had reached up from Hell to take the two of them in its grip.

 
    CHAPTER 8
     
    In her dream, she was standing over Glen’s open grave again. A thin wet mist descended from the sunless heavens of a chill gray autumn sky. Josalyn was smoking a cigarette, cupping it in her hand protectively as she stand down at the coffin in its hole of mud and formless shadow, watching the scattered clods of dirt on the fiberglass lid lose form themselves as the rain slowly, painfully, broke them down.
    Inside, she felt cold: cold as the rain, as the sky, as the grave. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing but a sense of flat stupid finality: life as a series of elaborate, meaningless figures on a mathematician’s blackboard, rendered in chalk and wiped away by a clumsy block of wood and felt and padding.
    It’s so stupid, she thought, staring down at the muddy pools on the coffin’s lid. So stupid, and pointless, and cruel. She’d have liked to know what she’d done to deserve this, what crime so heinous that it demanded this smack in the face, this deliberate blow of her belief that life was good and sensible and fair.
    But she knew the answer, no sooner than the question was posed. Nothing. She’d done nothing, short of being born in a world that had long before lost its bearings and gone cartwheeling off toward madness and oblivion — perhaps at the time of the Apple, perhaps even earlier than