9 Tales Told in the Dark 6

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  In answer, Sandra only cried harder. She felt the back of her seat being pulled, and suddenly Laura’s face was next to her. The girl was now leaning into the front seat and spoke directly into Sandra’s ear. There was a powerful odor coming from her, something Sandra hadn’t noticed before. Something…rotten.

  “If she’s sooo pitiful, then how could she do this to me?” Laura pulled off her sunglasses, and in the last light before they drove into the tunnel, Sandra saw the source of the liquid that had been running down the girl’s cheek. Only the right cheek. Because of the wound in her right eye. The eyeball on that side was a pale, rotted orb, cut straight through the middle with a red slice. It looked swollen and pregnant with the running fluids, which by the smell must be a mixture of puss and whatever liquid filled the inner eye. God only knew how old the wound was.

  Sandra screamed as that last lit image occupied her vision, and continued to scream as they drove into the black maw of the tunnel. Laura, still near enough to smell, shrieked incoherently. Sandra suddenly felt freezing cold hands clutch around her neck and squeeze with more strength than the small, pixyish girl should possess. Somewhere in her mind, behind the terror, she realized that she hadn’t turned on her headlights, and that the tunnel they drove into was little more than a black abyss. But at that moment, the only things that concerned Sandra were the hands around her throat, cutting away her breathe.

  Suddenly, Sandra’s car smashed into the tunnel wall and everything inside was thrown to the right. The grip on her neck loosened a small amount, and she drew in a ragged breath. Both women screamed, Sandra in fear and pain, Laura in anger and madness. The tires squealed, and a moment later, the car, having jutted across both lanes inside the tunnel, crashed into the wall on the opposite side. Sandra’s head smashed into the driver’s side window, shattering it, and dots of white light swam over the blackness of her vision. Then, the car was flooded by twin beams of light from directly ahead. Tires squealed again, and a horn sounded briefly before being cut away by a head-on collision. The airbag blew, smashing into Sandra’s nose, breaking it, and in the moments before she lost consciousness completely, she thought that she could no longer feel Laura’s hands on her.

  Sandra woke. She was first aware of a throbbing pain in her head, and a sharp, stinging pain in the crook of arm. Then, a steady, high-pitched beeping made its way into her awareness. She stirred, moved a little, realized she was lying on something soft, and opened her eyes to a blindingly bright light. Sandra squinted against it and tried to look around. Her mouth was dry. She attempted to speak, but produced little more than a rasping rattle in her throat.

  “Nurse!” a familiar voice said in the background somewhere. Familiar. The voice. It belonged to Danielle. Her sister.

  It all rushed back in then. The hitchhiker, Laura. The tunnels, and the darkness they produced. How it had changed the young woman. How she had grown more and more disturbed as they drove through the snow. The feeling of Laura’s hands on her throat. And finally, the terrible image of Laura’s dripping, ruined eye. Sandra began to cry. The nurses rushed in. Doctors came next and took over. They put some sort of sedative in the IV attached to her arm. Soon, she was relaxed and staring at the far wall, while Danielle sat next to her, holding her hand. Danielle’s hands were much warmer than Laura’s had been, Sandra mused.

  “I know this is a terrible time to bring it up,” Danielle said in a guilty voice from where she sat beside Sandra. “But what were you thinking picking up a hitchhiker? The police were here. You wouldn’t believe what they told me about that girl.”

  Sandra turned and looked at her sister, who had tears in her eyes. “The weather was terrible. She was so small and a truck sprayed her sopping wet when it passed. I couldn’t’ve just left her there.”

  Danielle made a face like she wanted to argue, but Sandra knew she couldn’t. Her sister would’ve done the same thing.

  “Is she okay?” Sandra asked.

  “Is who okay?”

  “Laura. The girl I picked up.”

  “You’re asking if the murderer, who was planning on doing who knows what to you, is okay?”

  “She’s not a murderer, Danielle. What happened to her brother was ruled an accident.”

  “Her brother? I didn’t even know she had a brother, Sandra. I’m talking about her mother and sister.”

  Sandra looked at Danielle, confused.

  “Jesus, Sandra, she killed them. Stabbed them both to death with a kitchen knife. The police have been looking for her for over a year. She’s wanted for questioning on a few other cases as well. Attacks on random motorists, a killing in Memphis, things like that.”

  Sandra’s eyes began to drip.

  “What happened while she was in your car?” Danielle asked.

  “I picked her up. There was something wrong with her. She’s got like a multiple personality disorder, I guess. Kept speaking as two different people, as her real self and as her mother. I started to fear she was going to hurt me if I stopped and made her get out, so I wanted to drive to this police station I saw right outside of all those tunnels you go through down there. She attacked me in the last tunnel and I lost control of the car.”

  Danielle squeezed Sandra’s hand and they both began to weep.

  “She had a wound in her eye,” Sandra went on. “I think she did it to herself when the two parts of her were at odds. It was awful, Danielle… just awful.”

  “I’m just glad you’re alive,” Danielle said.

  Sandra wiped tears from her eyes. “But is she okay? Did she survive the crash?”

  Danielle nodded. “She was injured pretty badly because she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when you hit the other car, but she lived. The police were all over the place. They took her away already, to some other hospital.”

  Sandra had forgotten all about the car she’d hit head-on. “My god, what about the people in the other car, were—“

  “They were fine,” Danielle assured, squeezing Sandra’s hand again. “No injuries or anything.”

  Sandra nodded, then looked away and laid her head back on the pillow. Laura was alive. The police had her and she wasn’t in this hospital. All of those facts calmed her nerves. It was over, she thought. She was safe, Danielle was here, and it was over. She drifted back to sleep to the sound of her pulse beeping steadily from the machine beside her.

  THE END

  Sculptor Man, Sculpt Me Something Awful by Alex Živko-Clark

  The mattress felt like a sack of porridge and the blanket itched like you wouldn’t believe.

  Pictures torn from magazines of semi-nude women had been stuck to the walls with toothpaste.

  “Can you lend me a cigarette?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke.”

  Why was I apologizing for being a non-smoker?

  “Do you have the right time?”

  I deliberately gave him the wrong time.

  “Good film on soon, then. Keanu Reeves is in it.”

  It had started fifteen minutes ago.

  “Want to hear a joke?”

  He mistook my silence for acquiescence and told me a prolix and humorless story about homosexual men with Aids. When it ended I rolled over on my bunk and suffered the most severe panic attack of my life. It left me feeling exhausted, sad and confused. Dozens of pairs of eyes stared at me from glossy pages. I had a powerful urge to tear them all down and stamp them into the waste paper basket. I wanted no audience that night.

  The man named Grainger in the bunk below mine began telling another joke. This one I didn’t hear. I was too busy crying.

  Killing’s the easiest thing in the world.

  It just happens.

  My partner and I were preparing a meal in the kitchen. We argued and I snapped. I hit him and he fell down. I dragged him into the basement and cut his throat with a Stanley knife. He died quickly.

  I shrouded his face with my shirt, wrapped his body in a piece of carpet and pushed him behind a retired dresser.

>   There was never any sound. I remember that clearly. It was like I was starring in a silent movie. Shock and adrenaline is a dangerous cocktail.

  Then I went upstairs and for two hours I drank neat vodka and watched televised snooker. I never knew who was playing, or who was winning.

  I woke the next morning and wondered for a moment why David’s side of the bed hadn’t been slept in.

  Then I remembered.

  When the film starring Keanu Reeves had finished, Grainger told me his story. He was playing cards with a friend in his lounge one night. He caught his friend cheating, so he hit him with his baseball bat. Four days later the friend was cremated. Grainger was ordered to spend the remainder of his life in prison.

  He was an alcoholic. He’d been sober for fifteen years, but he craved beer constantly (“Though I’d settle for a glass of wine. Wine! Can you fucking believe that?”) and the stress had caused him to pull his hair out. He was as bald as porcelain except for an island of hair about the size of a pound coin at the crown. For some reason he couldn’t touch that.

  “The mind’s a funny thing,” he told me. “Nobody knows how it works.”

  You’re not allowed to take anything into prison. You hand over your personal effects on arrival and they’re put into storage until the day you’re released.

  If you are deemed an escape risk—if you’re a professional locksmith, or if you’ve escaped from custody in the past—they issue you with a yellow and blue one-piece uniform that looks like a jester’s costume so that if you went over the wall you’d be easy to spot in a public place.

  Everybody else is given a baggy purple jogging suit and a pair of soft boots. To compromise the ability to run, or kick, the boots are two sizes too large.

  Once your wardrobe has been dealt with, they lock you in an anteroom that has wooden benches bolted to the floor. When I was in there I saw that someone had scratched WELCOME TO HELL into the wall. I wondered how they’d managed it since all items that might be used for cutting were meant to have been confiscated.

  You’re never alone in that room. You share it with fellow prisoners. Some sit quietly on the benches. Others bang on the door and demand to see the ‘boss’.

  Before going upstairs to your designated wing—six of them radiate out from a central rotunda, giving the prison the appearance of a wagon wheel when seen from above—you’re taken to see a man from the security department. He shakes your hand and asks you to sit on a scanning device. It can tell whether you have a cell phone secreted in your anal canal. It’s correct a hundred percent of the time and anyone caught smuggling is taken to Segregation; a kind of prison within the prison. It’s a dark and hermetic place. When you are in there, day and night the seasons are just things that you hear about.

  I didn’t have a phone inside me. There was nobody on the other side of those of those 15 meter gritstone walls that I wanted to speak to.

  But I did go upstairs with a bullet of contraband working its way through my insides. I’d beaten the system.

  After Grainger told his last joke (subject: dead babies), he began masturbating. I didn’t see him, but it was there to be read in the music his bedsprings made. By then the condom I swallowed was out in the fresh air again. I tore it open and laid the contents on the bed.

  When Grainger finished his task, I dropped a balloon model of a garden rose that I’d spent a few moments crafting over the side of my bed. It fell sedately and unseen by Grainger to the floor. The transformation on impact from an imitation rose into an actual rose was silent and instantaneous. From where I was it looked flawless.

  I waited for Grainger to notice it. I could already smell the flowers’ subtle perfume. Grainger, apparently, could not.

  I was a professional balloon modeler for forty years. A journalist reviewing my act for The Times said This artist treads where no illusionist has gone before. I am a man of sound mind and I cannot and will not suggest that he is a magician in the true sense, but I have studied his show and I cannot for the life of me see through the veil.

  “Hello, what’s this?”

  I watched Grainger pick the rose up and tentatively exam it. He’d reason to be surprised, for flowers in prison are as commonplace as bus stops on the moon.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “Me. It’s a gift to you.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  By then I’d prepared another treat. This time Grainger saw it coming and was about to catch it. “Don’t!” I snapped. Once when I was in college I was performing for some friends at a party and a pal caught one of my models as it fell. The damn thing—a vase of flowers—fused with his hand.

  Grainger retreated and allowed the object to continue its descent unimpeded.

  The balloon likeness of a teddy bear touched the floor and was a balloon no longer.

  “Bloody hell,” Grainger said, his voice reflecting sharply off the brick walls. “Bloody, bloody hell.” He picked up the pintsized bear and screamed laughter.

  The sound of footsteps in prison at night is constant as officers patrol the landings. Their steps are slow and metronomic. Now one of those metronomes had gone haywire as an officer, alarmed by Grainger’s outburst, ran to our cell door. His boots hammered the ironwork and his keychain jingle-jangled. I hid the balloons in my pillowslip and I heard Grainger covering himself and his treasure with his blanket. The metal latch that covered the viewing portal in the door snapped back and the officer put his eye to the glass. “Name and numbers please, gentlemen.”

  It was a test. If the answers came back slurred the officer would suspect that drugs were being used in the cell and the door would be opened very quickly indeed.

  We answered calmly and he was satisfied. There was a stand-up comedian on the television. It’s likely the officer presumed that Grainger was laughing at some joke.

  The latch was dropped back into place and the officer walked away, reestablishing his adagio tempo.

  I leaned over the side of my bunk to look at Grainger. He’d thrown the blanket off of himself. The toy was sitting on his chest. Mindful of the consequences this time, he laughed into his hand. “Stitching,” he said. “Paws… feet… eyes… ears… a little nose… It even smells like a real teddy bear.”

  “That’s because it is a real teddy bear.”

  “It was a balloon. I know it was. I saw it.”

  “And now it’s a teddy bear—your teddy bear. I hope you enjoy it.”

  I was tired. I wanted to sleep and get that infamous first night in prison—every bit as bad as they say it is—behind me. I might’ve known that Grainger would have more questions. If ever there was a man that’d rip into the golden goose…

  “How does it work?”

  “I’m afraid that’s a professional secret.”

  I was drifting into sleep. The smell of the rose influenced my dreaming. I was in a glade where the flowers and grass were still wet with morning dew.

  “Could you make a key that would open that door?”

  “Ha!” That woke me up better than a slap in the face. “I once made a flute that was used during a concert at the BBC Proms.”

  “So you could do it, then…?”

  I was thinking about the flute. It was beautiful in sight and sound.

  “Hello up there, can you hear me?”

  “Oh, pardon me. Yes, I should think so. Those old locks wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out.”

  I’d underestimated the man. I thought he was joking. The silence was anticipatory and uncomfortable.

  “Yes, I could probably make a key that would unlock that door. But I won’t do it.”

  Grainger squirmed and groaned loudly. I thought he was going to bring another officer to our door, but it didn’t happen. Those metronomes ticked steadily.

  “What would be the point in opening the door? You wouldn’t get far. The moment you step onto the landing, half a dozen uniforms are going to jump on you. You’ll go to Segregation and this relatively comforta
ble lifestyle you’ve cultivated will go up in a puff of smoke.”

  Grainger didn’t respond, but I was too revved up to leave it at that. “Really, it’s a ludicrous thing to have suggested. You’d be better off trying to tunnel your way out.”

  The silence was ominous and I didn’t like it. I could tell that Grainger had another idea in the works.

  “Will you make us a woman?”

  Scary thing was that he said will and not could. He knew what I was capable of doing.

  “I beg your pardon?” I was stalling. I know now that I should’ve flushed the remaining balloons down the toilet. And then I should’ve throttled Grainger.

  “I asked if you’d make us a woman. You know, to have sex with.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted your shirts ironing.”

  I was furious, but I forced myself to be diplomatic. “Look, I’m a magician. I’m uncomfortable with the appellation because it brings to mind those ghastly end-of-the-pier variety shows, but it is appropriate. I can create anything I want providing I can shape it with balloons. Your teddy bear is perfect, as was my flute and thousands of other inanimate objects that I’ve made during my career. As for producing organic material, I’ll do flowers, but that’s where I draw the line.”

  “Are you trying to say that you won’t make me a woman?”

  “I have said it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s downright unethical and for that reason alone I won’t do it. Furthermore, it would be badly flawed. I can’t create the image of a human mind. Who can? What you’d get is an absolute retard; a person who is incapable of thinking.”

  “It’s not like we need her for anything special.”

  Grainger was a demon.

  “I’ll even let you have the first ride. I’ll go in for—”

  “Sloppy seconds? That’s the parlance, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are a dangerous man and prison is the best place for you.”

  That pregnant silence again. I hated it.