9 Tales Told in the Dark 6

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  The discharge drifting in the toilet bowl the following morning wasn’t nearly as disconcerting as it had been on the previous day, but it was enough to convince her that she didn’t want to risk waiting another day for Dr. Taft to run more tests. She scheduled an appointment for that afternoon—the soonest they could squeeze her in—popping another sedative into her mouth while she spoke with the receptionist. When her pain didn’t diminish after the phone call, she reluctantly took a second one and drew herself a hot bath.

  A soothing, lengthy soak in the tub helped her feel better. The acute pain wracking her midsection felt hazy and indistinct, barely noticeable anymore. Even so, the confines of her townhouse made her feel oddly claustrophobic, so she dressed and went outside, relishing the feel of warm sunlight on her face as she stepped onto the bustling Manhattan street outside her apartment building.

  The spring air was invigorating, and since her appointment with Dr. Taft wasn’t for two more hours, she popped into a baby furniture store en route to the doctor’s. She was examining furnishings for the empty nursery when the baby began to thrash. Lydia grasped the handrail of the crib in front of her while she waited for the shockwave of agony to die down.

  “Miss—are you all right?” An elderly saleswoman asked, rushing forward to help her stand.

  “I’m…” But her response was cut short by another crippling blast of pain—worse than anything she’d ever experienced before.

  “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” the concerned saleswoman offered. “Is the baby coming?”

  “No, I…” Lydia gritted her teeth and doubled over; her insides felt like they were turning inside out. Disengaging from the saleswoman’s grasp, she staggered out the front door onto the bustling street, immediately feeling disoriented by the dizzying throng of activity outside. When another blast of pain ripped through her stomach, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to make it to Dr. Taft’s.

  Mercifully, an empty taxicab was parked only a few steps away. She stumbled forward, falling against the vehicle as she fumbled to get the door open. The annoyed driver glared at her unsympathetically in the rear view mirror while she crawled inside. “Lady—I’m off duty.”

  “Please,” she pleaded, her body dampening with cold sweat. “You’ve got to get me to a hospital. My baby…”

  Taking stock of her pregnant condition, the cabbie’s face immediately went ashen. “Cornell Medical Center’s two miles away,” he informed her, throwing the taxi into drive. “Hold on, lady—I’ll have you there in a few minutes.”

  Lydia didn’t bother trying to explain to him that she wasn’t in labor. It was all she could do to avoid blacking out when a another rending tremor exploded within her churning belly. It felt as though her guts were being torn apart. She closed her eyes to prevent herself from losing consciousness as the driver weaved in and out of traffic on the congested city streets, blaring on his horn to induce slower moving driver’s to get out of his way.

  The sound of the AM station he was listening to filled the cab, and she couldn’t process the confusing information being relayed by the report. “…attacks have now been reported in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other parts of the eastern seaboard. Scientists from the Center for Disease Control refuse to comment the phenomena, despite rumors that the White House today authorized the deployment of the National Guard to supplement law enforcement in areas where the attacks seem to be occurring in the highest concentration…”

  “Please,” she begged. “Turn it off.”

  The cab driver quickly obliged, casting another furtive glance over his shoulder before laying on the horn again when another driver cut him off. Her stomach turned somersaults when he swerved into another lane to bypass traffic congestion.

  After the cab screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room, she was helped onto a stretcher by a group of male nurses who immediately whisked her inside, past a group of armed guards stationed at the hospital’s entrance. The preliminary examination performed by the attending physician was so painful that she nearly blacked out. Her vision blurred while she was pushed through the waiting room, past a television where agitated CNN reporters furiously debated the veracity of reports that the dead were somehow rising from the grave.

  After being ushered into an empty operating room, her gurney was quickly surrounded by a team of biohazard suited doctors. Before she could ask any questions, an anesthetic mask slipped over her face. The sweet smelling vapor seeping into her lungs sent her spiraling toward unconsciousness, unburdened by concerns about the well-being of her baby as the doctors prepared her for surgery.

  THE END

  Social Studies by Tim McDaniel

  Emma Cook, nine years old in her overlarge overalls and blonde pigtails made dirty by a day's play out by the pond – well, more of a swamp -- near the Miller place, dug into the moist earth and extracted a long, black worm. She dropped it into the jar with the grasshopper.

  Then she found some tadpoles. They squiggled about, trapped in muddy water in the landlocked holes she'd scooped out earlier at the edge of the pond. And there were frogs and salamanders to be found hiding from the warm spring sun beneath rocks and old bricks. The undersides of the bricks were sticky and crawling with potato bugs and earwigs.

  In old jam jars the potato bugs and earwigs would survive for weeks, crawling among the leaves and twigs Emma had put in there for company, all but invisible until the jar was shaken a few times.

  Looking up through the tall grass Emma could see her neighbor Sarah Miller sitting on her patio stairs, singing to herself in that seven-year-old way, studiously applying crayons to the coloring book open on the top stair. Sunlight brushed her yellow hair and he brow was furrowed in concentration. If she had looked up, she might have seen Emma. But Emma crouched low over her insects in the tall weeds, and remained quiet, and Sarah didn't notice her.

  It was a warm spring, and the windows of the Miller house were open.

  Emma finished her day’s collecting, and waited.

  The first sound from inside the house was an inarticulate wail. There were raised voices, then, and Sarah Miller, sitting on the stairs, dropped her coloring book and looked back through the open door. She crouched, as if ready to spring to her feet and flee.

  Mr. and Mrs. Miller must have moved into another room, a room with a window, because suddenly their voices were clearer.

  "She's fifteen years old, for God's sake! She came to our house to babysit Sarah, to watch our daughter, and you—" Mrs. Miller was saying.

  "I never touched her! No way!"

  "God, Mike! Her name is written on her underwear – that's what a child she is!"

  "I'm telling you, I never—"

  Then they must have passed into another room, because their voices became unclear again. Sarah edged closer to the door, on her hands and knees, and peered inside.

  Emma fished her notebook and pencil out of a plastic bag. She opened it to a certain page and made a quick note. She put the notebook away again and picked up her jars and headed for her own house.

  She'd be back later for more.

  "Well, except for the concerns I mentioned about her not seeming to have many friends, I just want to say that we're very happy with Emma. She's been making great progress." Mrs. Barker interlaced her fingers and looked at Mrs. Cook.

  Mrs. Cook shifted in the tiny chair. Her gaze moved from the papers Mrs. Barker had given her, records of assignments done and units covered, to the walls with their student artworks and maps and posters of famous musicians, to the shelves of books and plastic dinosaurs and ecosystem dioramas. "That's good," she finally said, tucking a faded blond tress behind her ear. "Emma really enjoys school."

  "I have to tell you, she is a remarkable student," Mrs. Barker said. "And how she loves science! I suppose you and Mr. Cook—"

  "My husband left, several months ago."

  "Oh. I'm sorry. I was saying, I suppose you've encouraged that love in her. When she was doing her ecology pro
ject, I caught just a glimpse of that little journal she always carries around. 'My experiments,' she said. She's very careful and thorough. At her age, it's hard to believe."

  "Yes," Mrs. Cook said. "She is very thorough. She is. Always finishes what she starts. My husband noticed that, too.”

  Emma’s tadpoles were growing legs. She stirred the green water, two inches deep, in her little aquarium, making the mud swirl and the tadpoles dance. She had a couple of black twigs and a stone in the aquarium, too, but none of the tadpoles had tried climbing out of the water yet. She’d put one on a rock, to see if it was ready to be a frog, but instead it had dried out and died.

  So she turned to her insect jars. She’d been gradually removing the dead leaves and twigs, just to see what, really, the insects needed to survive, and how long they could do without. It was a kind of hobby. She took another leaf out now, this time from the grasshopper’s jar.

  Mrs. Barker was driving along the little road that swung past the Cook’s house, and caught a glimpse of Emma swinging from a rope hanging from a tree branch, screened from the house by a scraggly line of alder and uncontrolled blackberry vines. It was a Saturday and Mrs. Barker didn’t have to teach, and the shopping could wait a few minutes, so she pulled the car onto the wide shoulder and got out.

  “Hi, Emma!”

  Usually kids did double takes when they saw their teachers out of the classroom, unable to imagine them in jeans and with lives and concerns outside the school. But Emma regarded Mrs. Barker with quiet eyes. “Hi, Mrs. Barker.”

  Mrs. Barker crossed the road to stand next to Emma. “My, isn’t it a beautiful day!”

  Emma looked around, and nodded.

  “Won’t be long now until school is over and you’ll have your summer vacation. Do you have any plans?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Emma said.

  Mrs. Barker saw in the deep grass a notebook with an imitation-leather cover. “Something tells me, though, that you kind of like school. I did, too, when I was a girl. But that’s not something I could tell my friends. They’d think I was a nerd.”

  Emma leaned back, pulling on the rope, and then swung.

  “You know, that grass looks so cool and dry, I think I’ll just have a seat in it.” Mrs. Barker sat on the grass. Her hand fell on the notebook. “Why, what’s this?”

  Emma dropped from the rope and took the notebook. She pressed it to her chest. “It’s my records. Of my experiments.”

  “Really! Well, that is something. When I was a kid I had a little telescope, and I used it to chart the movement of the little dark spots that are on the sun. You can use a telescope to project the image of the sun on a piece of paper, so you can look at it all you want and it won’t affect you, it won’t hurt your eyes. What kind of experiments are you doing?”

  Emma shook her head. “They’re not finished.”

  Mrs. Barker paused, and then spoke in a gentler and less animated tone. “I hear your neighbors, the Millers, have had some trouble lately.”

  “Mr. Miller left.”

  “Yes. And I know that you lost your father, too. It can be a hard thing to talk about, but I hope you know you can talk to me, Emma. About your feelings, about anything.”

  Emma opened her notebook and looked into it. Mrs. Barker couldn’t see what she was reading.

  “You are quite an impressive young person, you know,” Mrs. Barker continued. “You’re going to have just an amazing future. Science -- that’s my guess. Am I right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “OK.” Mrs. Barker sat in the grass for a short time longer, then got up and brushed her slacks off. “Well, I got to do some shopping. See you Monday, Emma. And remember what I said, OK?”

  “Yes.”

  Take away the last of the rotting wood, and the white ants crawl all over each other, searching the slick glass, until they fruitlessly work themselves to death.

  Take away the last leaf, and the grasshopper doesn't notice for a long time, then slows down, and then goes dormant, and finally dies, and a dried shell rattles in the shaken jar.

  Mrs. Barker sat next to the doctor and his wife in a pew in the second row.

  Doctor Hammond said to his wife in a hushed voice, “A child so young – there’s no way she could have known that mixing bleach and ammonia could be so dangerous. She was just playing around, that’s all. An awful accident.”

  “It’s the internet,” his wife answered. “And if was an accident, why did she lock herself in the bathroom that way, towels under the door and the window closed? What did she think would happen?”

  “She may have been told anything, any kind of misinformation,” the doctor said. “That the fumes would make her high or something. Who knows? God knows since her father left—“

  “That wouldn’t be suicide, then, that would be murder,” his wife said.

  Mrs. Barker opened her mouth, but found she had nothing to say.

  Mrs. Miller was curled up in her pew like a dying black beetle, huddled over, limbs retracted. Her eyes were clenched tight, but she had stopped crying. Still, her body shook, and her mouth opened spasmodically from time to time, gasping in long painful draughts of air.

  Mrs. Barker had driven past the Miller house on the way to the funeral. The Miller’s porch was slowly drowning, nearly swallowed by a creeping tide of blackberry vines and nettles. No one had cut the plants back since Mr. Miller had left.

  Now she sat in the hard wooden pew, head bowed. She hadn’t really known Sarah Miller, but she had seen her around school. And this was a small town. It was important to stick together.

  The minister was talking, but Mrs. Barker wasn’t paying attention. How could anyone explain the loss of such an innocent? How could it ever make any sense?

  She felt a tentative hand on her shoulder. She turned her head. Emma was sitting behind her, perching on the forward edge of the chair. In her arms she carried her notebook.

  "Mrs. Barker,” she whispered. “You said I could talk to you about anything. Do you want to see my journals now? I took a lot of notes."

  THE END

  Treasure by Kenneth O’Brien

  Oscar glanced at the wild pig as it strained against its tether. He was satisfied that it was going nowhere and returned his attention to Sofia’s funeral pyre. The orange glow lit up the cold night sky, crackled against the frosty silence and sent glowing embers floating upwards to dissipate in the darkness like so many of his hopes.

  The plague had claimed another victim but this was a very different type of death. There was no virus insidiously replicating itself within the host DNA, nor was there any necrosis forming bacterium eating away flesh and bone. This new victim had simply succumbed to despair.

  The acrid smoke stung his eyes and he wiped a bloody tear from his cheek. As she burned, he thought of Sofia. They had been friends for over two hundred years and now she was gone. He had discovered her impaled on a sharpened shaft of wood she had thrust through her own heart. Now, Oscar found himself trapped in a maelstrom of conflicting feelings. Shock, sadness and despair all vied for the right to infect his emotional core but it was the anger that prevailed. He couldn’t tell why he was angry. Was it because Sofia had taken her own life? Or was it brought on by the jealous realisation that he had neither the courage nor the inclination to take that path? Despite everything that had happened, despite the seemingly hopeless situation, there still lived within him a kernel of that ancient survival instinct. However, that overpowering urge to continue to exist did nothing for his self-respect. Is this how it’s going to be? He wondered bitterly – reduced to the role of scavengers?

  He glanced at the object hanging from a tree close to the pyre and gave a grim smile. Perhaps he should have taken more notice of her mental decline but he was too wrapped up in his own self-pity to worry about the others. Each of them had manifested their frustrations in different ways. He had become more introverted, often seeking solitude where he could wallow in his despair. Werner had taken to hunting wild animals
for blood with a vicious passion. Sofia had become manic and filled with wild ideas. He remembered the first time she’d showed him the lamp. It looked so much like an ordinary storm lantern that he frowned in confusion when he first saw it.

  ‘I call it The Bloodlight,’ she had declared.

  When Oscar asked its purpose, she gave a rambling explanation, stating that it was a device built to detect pure, untainted human blood.

  ‘It will save us,’ she rasped.

  Oscar merely stared at her, trying to keep his thoughts to himself. It was pointless. Sofia understood only too well, shook her head and stalked off into the night. But even Sofia had given up in the end as her lamp remained as dark as her moods. Was it the failure of her invention or Oscar’s scepticism that drove her to suicide? He would never know for sure but the sense of guilt was almost tangible.

  Werner, a tall German with blond hair, moved to stand beside him. ‘Poor Sofia. I suppose it just became a bit too much to bear. Do you ever think about it? Ending it, I mean.’

  Oscar nodded. ‘All the time but it always comes to nothing.’

  ‘Me too,’ Werner agreed in his thick, Teutonic accent. ‘Sometimes it just seems so pointless going on but then, the need for blood becomes too great to resist and look at us now.’ He gestured to the pig aimlessly wandering in circles around the stake to which it was tethered.

  Oscar inclined his head in the direction of the pyre. ‘Sometimes even the need for blood isn’t enough.’

  As he made his way to the cave entrance, Oscar noticed his companion go to collect Sofia’s lamp.

  ‘Leave it where it is,’ he said.

  Werner gave him an inquiring look.

  Oscar shrugged and gestured at the burning body. ‘Something to remind us who these ashes belonged to.’