Chalk Man

by Tony Faggioli

  The gears in the chalk art turned again and now a large claw was reaching from the depths of the earth, coming up the descending stairway. It grabbed Sandi Espinoza, who was at the edge of the painting, around the waist . . . and began to squeeze her like a tube of toothpaste. She looked at Parker with pleading terror in her bulging eyes.

  He slowed but only for a split second. It was only human, and yet, it was also almost his undoing. A third bullet burned through the air not four inches from his right temple, before it struck a tree, sending shards of wood in every direction and causing another round of screams in the crowd.

  It wasn’t luck this time. No. Roland had rushed his shot, and this time, he’d been trying to zero in on a moving target.

  Keep moving! Napoleon screamed as he shot a burst of blue into the tunnel of red light.

  Parker didn’t need to be told twice. He pumped his way through the whipping vines now at his ankles and shins. He broke through the other side of the painting, swiping his left hand violently at one of the totem-soldiers that had just reached them and leaped up to attack. When his hand struck it, there was an odd sense of disconnect, as if two realties were colliding, and Parker’s body was not equipped for it. His arm went numb and severe nausea swept over him. But there was no time for any of this.

  He knew the routine that Roland was going through. Knew the steps.

  Deep breath.

  Rechamber the weapon.

  Pivot firearm.

  Gauge wind and distance.

  Reacquire target.

  Inhale.

  Aim.

  Steady body.

  Steady hand.

  Steady mind.

  Exhale.

  Fire.

  But Parker was only thinking one thing: split the target.

  “Klink! The boy!” Parker screamed. And then he tossed Charlie Henson to his right, like a doll, through the air, up and out of harm’s way, into the outstretched arms of Klink, who in one smooth motion caught Charlie and ducked them both back behind cover. As he did so, Parker dove to his left.

  The fourth bullet grazed Parker’s right ear and cut a thin line across his right cheek. Still, it was enough to snap his head sideways and send him sprawling nearly face first into the ground. He barely had time to get his hands up in front of him and chest-slide across the ground, before army-crawling behind another wood planter, where he finally found cover.

  Another totem-soldier came screaming across the plaza at him, a knife stuck between its blocky teeth. It was just beginning to leap at Parker when it was incinerated by a blast of blue light.

  Three more scattershot rounds rang out, back to back, and fired recklessly. And that told Parker something immediately: Roland was rattled. Probably because he’d figured out that Parker had supernatural help of his own now, too.

  Parker. I can’t do much more. I’m too weak. The bullet . . .

  Parker nodded, completely out of breath and not just a little in shock.

  There’s no way he should be alive. Not on any given day, not in any believable way. Blood was coming down the right side of his face. He felt the wound on his ear and then the one on his cheek.

  “Are you okay?” Klink yelled.

  Parker chuckled defiantly. “Nothing a little Neosporin and a few Band-Aids won’t fix.”

  But the same could not be said of Sandi Espinoza.

  A lady screamed from behind a stack of folding tents. “Oh, my God! Somebody help her!”

  “Are you crazy?” someone else replied from behind a nearby hedge. “Don’t even try it.”

  Parker looked to Sandi and grimaced. Blood and foam were pouring from her mouth, over the rope and down her chest. As the life was literally being squeezed out of her, she shook violently, her arms and legs rapidly firing with nowhere to go, her chest convulsing in deep, heaving gasps for air.

  “Nap. Ya gotta do something to help her man, ya—”

  I can’t, Parker. Look at her tattoo.

  Befuddled, Parker squinted and ran his eyes up her torso. Then, he saw it; tattooed at the base of her neck, neatly between her clavicles, was a pentagram.

  Chalk Man found someone confused enough by the darkness to use today.

  “But . . . I thought he needed someone pure to do the drawing . . .”

  Yeah. And I think that’s why Charlie was sitting in the center of the thing.

  “You mean . . .”

  Yep. Once the drawing was done Roland would’ve aced the kid, pure and simple. Charlie’s blood would’ve done the trick. I think. We prevented it.

  Parker realized something. “That’s why the stairs in the light tunnel crumbled apart.”

  Correct. But now, we still have to find a way to close this portal.

  Sandi Espinoza’s gurgled screams were becoming overwhelming.

  “Nap . . .”

  There’s nothing we can do for her, Parker. She made her choice. Today she had her chance to truly serve the one she claimed allegiance to.

  “And?”

  And she didn’t draw fast enough.

  The screaming stopped abruptly, and Parker looked away as the totem-soldiers stopped stabbing Sandi Espinoza and instead began to dance all over her dead body with gleeful abandon.

  The courtyard went silent except for the stifled sobs of a few people hidden in the crowds, all of whom were too terrified to move.

  “Nap? What next?”

  This, Napoleon said.

  And the air around Parker shuttered in glimmering light as the fabric of space gave way and his body blinked . . . teleported . . . away.

  His eyes were wide with disbelief and air was trapped in his lungs as his body traveled, then he finally came to a stop.

  He was on the rooftop of Pasadena City Hall.

  Opposite him was Alex Roland, his rifle on the ground and his black eyes looking at him in shock.

  Chapter 32

  Parker pulled his gun and drew down on Roland. Strangely, Roland only glanced at Napoleon, who should’ve been the bigger threat by far.

  Instead, Roland pivoted on his feet and faced Parker, his mouth pulled back into a hateful grimace. “You? You dare to come here, a mere human, and stop me from reuniting with my one true love?”

  It wasn’t Roland anymore. It was Chalk Man . . . speaking through Roland. Parker tried to reconcile what he was seeing now: a man, still human, yet being influenced so much by the creature that had attached to him like a parasite that chalk lines glowed on his cheeks.

  Be careful, Parker. I’m too weak . . .

  Parker wished that Napoleon hadn’t spoken. It only made things worse. Way worse. Because, well, Napoleon sounded . . . afraid.

  In reply, Chalk Man swept his hand outward and a cloud of pulsating chalk, glowing in muted oranges and reds, cocooned Parker and Chalk Man, completely blocking Napoleon out.

  “I was so close to getting her,” Chalk Man sighed, “to finally making that little bitch pay for all she did to me. And now? This.”

  Parker told himself not to say a word, but he couldn’t help himself. “You never would’ve succeeded anyway. Attack heaven? You’re crazy.”

  The black eyes flashed red. “One never knows until one tries. And my master? He’s been trying for a long time. Eventually, he’ll find a way. Then? We’ll drink the blood of angels.”

  Parker . . . do not converse with him, Napoleon said, but his voice sounded like it was coming through the shield from miles away.

  Chalk Man shook his head and spread his arms. “Anyway. I have time, eternity really, to try again. I will love her again someday. I will. And until then? I’ve learned how to love everyone I meet, really, at least in the way that my side defines that very ugly word. So? Tell me, Mr. Parker . . . how do I love thee?”

  Parker shuddered. Because there was a third voice mixed in now with Roland and Chalk Man’s. It was the . . . thing . . .

  That ruled over them both.

  Parker freaked. “N-N-Nap—”

  “Shhhh . . .” Ch
alk Man said, a sickening grin coming over his hauntingly ashen face before he repeated his own question. “How do I love thee . . . man of war? Let me count the ways.”

  Shaking his head, Parker tried to reach out to the edge of the cocoon, to claw at it and get out. It was no use. He pointed his gun and fired a few rounds at it, but nothing. In desperation, he tried to run to the other side of the rooftop only to watch as Chalk Man, using only his index finger, drew a white block, right in front of Parker, tripping him and causing him to sprawl forward.

  Stumbling to his feet, he turned and tried to get a shot off, only to see Chalk Man draw an arrow in thin air and with the flick of his wrist send it flying across the rooftop at Parker, who flinched as the arrow grazed his right bicep, almost forcing him to drop his gun as it dug at the flesh in his arm and left behind a burning chalky residue.

  Parker screamed and wiped at the wound, but his body was going numb with partial paralysis, the nerves in his arm tingling with an electricity that spread quickly across his chest and down his stomach. Then the numbness left his upper torso and shot downward, causing his legs to buckle. Helpless, he fell against the side of a large metal A/C unit.

  As Chalk Man walked towards him, the metamorphosis began. Alex Roland’s face transformed into the face of a man painted in chalk. With heavy cheekbones and a sharp nose, his sunken eyes closed for a second, then opened. A thick loincloth was around his waist and a patterned tunic was over his chest. An ornate necklace hung from his neck. It and the tunic were probably very colorful in their own time, but now? Chalk Man was an image in black and white. When he moved it was in rapidly stuttering steps of convoluted animation, as if he were drawing himself as he moved, quickly but not in real time.

  He smiled and knelt next to Parker, his eyes flicking from scribbled chalk to black to what little of Roland was left in his blue eyes, which were fading with death.

  When the obsidian eyes were back, Chalk Man whipped an empty hand in the air, this time like a magician, and produced a single chalk stick.

  Napoleon was yelling and beating on the cocoon as Chalk Man’s smile grew bigger. He drew a single line. “One tally mark. That one’s for that poor little brown bird on the wire by the farm that day.”

  “No,” Parker said, completely stunned by what had just been said. His mind felt like it was trapped in a snare.

  “Yes,” Chalk Man said. “You killed it for no good reason.”

  He struggled to escape. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. With your BB gun that day. You shot it. For fun.”

  “That’s not true. And, anyway, that was a long time ago . . .”

  Chalk Man gave a dark smile. “Ah! Time. You humans always think it’s an eraser of some kind. But take it from me,” he said, pausing to hold the chalk stick up in Parker’s face, “sin is drawn in the darkest color of all. It doesn’t erase easily.”

  As Parker looked on in horror, Chalk Man reached out and drew another line. “Tally mark number two? You mocked Benny Genji at the creek that day.”

  Parker wheezed against the suffocating feeling in his lungs. There was no use denying this one; it had haunted him his whole life.

  “Poor Benny. The only kid from India in your perfect little town of mild-mannered white folk. He just wouldn’t, couldn’t, jump off the rocks that day into the water. Too afraid of heights. And boy did you and your friends mock him for it. Utterly. Mercilessly.” Chalk Man’s voice changed again into that third voice of deeper evil. “Oh, how I loved you that day.”

  Shaking his head violently, Parker looked away. Instantly, his head was snapped back in place by Chalk Man’s free hand. “His toes were so white, weren’t they?” Then he added with a laugh, “I mean, that poor boy’s toes were clinging so tightly to that rock that he could’ve hung upside down from the ledge that day.”

  “Sh-shut up!” Parker managed in a gasping voice.

  Chalk Man shook his head in slow motion as his own voice returned. “Ah . . . but Benny didn’t hang from his toes, did he, soldier boy? He hung from his neck, a few months later, didn’t he? Yes. Swung like a rag doll from the bridge just outside of town. Lights out. His mother screaming from her car when she finally found him. Nighty night, baby boy. No more tandoori chicken for you!” he shrieked.

  Napoleon kept banging and shouting, over and over, as bolts of blue shot from his hands, all to no avail.

  Parker realized that Napoleon had been right all along. They had been in over their heads on this one from day one. He should’ve listened to him. Been more careful. Taken things more slowly. But no. He’d been stubborn. And now this. Napoleon was going to watch him die through this damned force field.

  Chalk Man popped a crick in his neck and then drew another line. “The count continues. Three. There was your girlfriend back home. The one that left you to be a dancer in New York?”

  A look of surprise came over Parker’s face.

  “Oh?” Chalk Man said playfully. “You didn’t know that still hating someone years after they hurt you is a bad thing?”

  Parker said nothing as the wellspring of heartache he thought he’d capped off long ago began to leak.

  “Well. It is, my good fellow. That kinda hate pays dividends, year over year. So much so that you don’t even realize it’s still hindering your love for that pretty little redhead of yours.”

  The air between them smelled like burning hair.

  Parker tried to move but he couldn’t. He felt bolted to the rooftop and frozen in place. Until he wasn’t.

  Slowly, like a puppeteer, Chalk Man raised his right hand, palm up.

  Parker’s body uncoiled from his position against the A/C unit and he stood against his will.

  Then, Chalk Man began using the middle and index fingers of his left hand, as if he were walking with his fingers . . . to make Parker walk. Across the rooftop and towards the edge.

  Shit, Parker thought, this is how he killed Ruiz.

  A wall of blue energy erupted on the outside of the cocoon. Parker smiled weakly. His old partner was still trying, but it wasn’t looking good.

  Slowly, deliberately, within the silence of the space they were sharing, he moved Parker to within a few feet of the edge. Then stopped him.

  “Four,” Chalk Man said, drawing another line.

  One more, Parker thought. One more line and I’m done for.

  “We have the infamous Waheeb.”

  Parker’s head snapped to face him. This time, he had no problem speaking. “No,” he said firmly. “I have let that go.”

  Chalk Man nodded. “But you’ve yet to repent. And that’s what makes you so great, ya know. I mean, like really, really great.”

  “What?” Parker said, confused.

  “It’s why, when I’m done freeing you from this mortal shell that you’re stuck in, I’m going to make sure you train well. I mean, you’re going to make one . . . hell . . . of a good warrior for our side.”

  Parker shook his head violently from side to side. “Never.”

  “Really? C’mon now. I mean . . . you forgive yourself for what happened to your translator in the war . . . and that’s that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly! You think that’s all that’s necessary! As if you’re God and your forgiveness of your own sins is enough. I mean . . . it’s perfect! It’s how we all think where I’m from. God is a liar anyway. Who needs him?”

  Parker noticed out of the corner of his eye that Napoleon had given up trying to break through. Instead, he’d worked his way down the wall of energy that was separating them to a spot behind Chalk Man still in Parker’s direct line of sight. Again, he was yelling something, but this time Parker was able to make out that the sound was one word, being repeated.

  But he couldn’t make out what it was.

  Chalk Man walked Parker one more step forward then held up his chalk stick like a teacher at the head of some class of the damned.

  “At last, we have the last of your five gr
eat sins, Mr. Parker. Because all of life is either counting them up or checking them off. But oh, so seldom do we ever take the time to add them all up.”

  He drew a line diagonally through the other four tally marks.

  “So, let’s do that, shall we? All those men, women and even children that you’ve killed, Mr. Parker.”

  Parker felt panic creeping into his chest. “What are you talking about?” But it was a fake question. Because he knew.

  “How many murders are on your hands?”

  “Shut up. It’s not the same, it’s war, it’s—”

  Ignoring him, Chalk Man sighed and looked at him menacingly. “Oh, you’d better come up with a much better excuse than ‘it was war.’”

  Napoleon was still yelling when an idea hit Parker: try to read Nap’s lips. Try that.

  Ironically, it was Chalk Man’s talk about the war that gave Parker this idea, as many times in the field non-verbal communication required not only hand signals, but lip reading from a close distance as well.

  He focused.

  It was clear as day, almost immediately: Napoleon was saying “Water.” Over and over.

  Parker looked around. There, behind Chalk Man, was a large pipe labeled “WATER MAIN.”

  He was weak and tired but the relief that hit him was like being plugged into a wall socket. Of course. When you were a kid and you played with your sidewalk chalk, there was nothing that made you more angry than the sprinklers going off or the sky opening up with rain.

  Because nothing ruined chalk like water.

  Chalk Man had control of Parker’s legs, but not his arms. At least not yet. So, without warning, Parker brought his right hand up, pointed his gun at the water main and prayed that his aim was true.

  Prayed.

  He smiled on the inside. It had been awhile, for sure.

  He fired off two shots at the pipe. Chalk Man, evidently realizing what he was trying to do, sped up his forced walk to the edge of the roof.