Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Wally didn’t know the particulars, but he had seen that pale face at the pane, and seen Tommy go darting out to meet up with it. Wally wasn’t much closer with Tommy than his brother was, but he’d put his life on the line for a fellow veteran.

  “God damn kids,” Bob raged. “I lied about my age so I could join the Navy and fight for my country. Now you see kids twenty-years-old or older who don’t do anything but skateboard and play video games all day. We should be calling the police down here to arrest these bastards!”

  Hank went to the window where they had seen the blond man and cupped his hands around his face so he could peek out into the night. “I don’t see any of them,” he related, his voice muffled by the glass. Not the blond man, not Tommy, not Wally who had just gone out after them. Not even those two children he had spoken to earlier.

  “Wait...” he amended. Then, Hank was reeling back from the window as if a bolt of lightning had stabbed him through the pane. “Jesus!” he cried out. “Sweet Jesus!”

  “What is it?” Donna asked, starting toward him.

  He waved her back, and stumbled backwards toward her, reluctant to take his wide eyes off the window. “I saw another of them...”

  “Another of what?”

  “People. Out in the parking lot.”

  “What people? What were they doing, Hank?”

  “Just standing there. Staring at me. This guy with dark hair. Maybe an Indian or something. An India Indian. And he had blood all over his shirt. He looked like he was ripped open across his body.” Hank made a slash with his hand, from his right shoulder down to his left hip.

  They all wheeled in one synchronized motion toward the door as it banged open...expecting to see the dark-haired, dark-skinned, darkly torn stranger framed in its threshold.

  Instead, they saw Wally in his baseball hat upon which was embroidered the name of his ship, and on which were little enamel pins regarding WW II, the VFW, and Scotland. Tommy’s arm was slung across Wally’s shoulders. Both men were drenched, as if Wally had pulled Tommy out of the sea itself. Dick bolted forward to take Tommy’s other arm. Together, the men walked Tommy to one of the tables and sat him heavily down. The beefy bartender was whimpering to himself inaudibly, tears welling in his eyes.

  As soon as Tommy was settled, Wally rushed back to the door and practically fell against it, locking it against the night.

  “Well?” Dick said, looking from Tommy to Wally and back. “What happened? Did somebody jump him?”

  At the bar, Wally hunched over his pad and scribbled madly. Dick drew close to his side, and saw how Wally’s hand shook, and how the knuckles were gouged and the gouges were filling up with blood, and how blood and water dripped off him to make the ink blur. Wally roughly tore most of the sheet free of the pad and thrust it at the younger vet, who took it and read it. The funny thing was, Wally had a hard time hearing, but he wasn’t mute. People wrote him messages, but he didn’t need to write them himself. This time, however, he seemed to have lost his voice.

  Dick stared at the smeary note in his hands, trying to digest it.

  “What does it say?” Donna demanded.

  “Never mind,” Dick mumbled.

  “What do you mean, never mind? Let us see it!”

  “What time is it?” Dick glanced up at an illuminated clock advertising a brand of low-grade beer. “Only nine thirty. Two and a half hours to midnight. Two and a half hours until Halloween is over.”

  “I’m going to go lock the back door!” Wally announced gruffly, moving around the bar toward the half-open door to the kitchen.

  “I’ll come with you,” Dick said, stuffing the note in the pocket of his jeans and jogging after the older man.

  “For Chrissakes, Dick!” Donna bleated.

  “I don’t think it’s a prank, Donna,” her husband whispered, huddling close to her more out of security than secrecy. “I don’t think these are kids fooling around.”

  “We killed them,” Tommy said aloud, suddenly, as if to explain or only to give voice to his madness. “We killed them...”

  “I’m going out there!” Bob announced, shuffling with determination toward the front door, brandishing his cane like a club.

  “The hell you are, B. T.!” Hank exclaimed, jumping between the gnome-like elderly man and the door.

  “Get out of my way!”

  “Bob, you can’t go out there! Did you see your brother’s face? Take a look at Tommy! It isn’t safe.”

  “They’re our dead, B. T.,” Tommy joined in. “They’re our dead. Come back for us. ‘Cause it’s Halloween, ya know? It’s Halloween and all the doors are open...”

  “It’s the people we killed, Bob,” Hank told him.

  Dick and Wally returned safely from the kitchen. Dick had a huge bread knife in one hand. Wally’s right hand, Bob saw for the first time, was bleeding from lacerated knuckles. Bob gestured at the wounds. “What happened? Did they do that to you?”

  “I took a swing at that guy we saw in the window,” Wally said. “My hand went right through him. I hit the shutter instead.” He added, “He had a hold of Tommy. Him and this other one. They had a hold of him, but I couldn’t hit them.”

  Tommy nodded, his eyes feverish. “Mm-hm,” he agreed. “Mm-hm.”

  “The one I swung at was a Nazi,” Wally said gravely. “The other one was a Korean, I think.”

  Bob sat down at one of the tables. Suddenly it seemed that he couldn’t stand up even with the aid of his cane. “Hank,” he said. “The one you saw, that was torn open across his front.” He repeated Hank’s diagonal slashing motion. “You said he was an Indian. Could he have been...an Arab?”

  “Yeah, I guess, Bobby. I guess he could’ve been.”

  Bob nodded grimly. “They have no right,” he said, but in a softer voice than his characteristic tirade. “They have no right to want revenge. We were right. They were wrong. It was black and white. It wasn’t about us being white and them being Japanese or Vietnamese or whatever the hell they were. We killed Germans and Italians and every kind of man.”

  “And women,” Dick said so very quietly. “And children...”

  “Maybe in your war. That’s what you doped-up killers did!”

  “I have one word for you,” Hank barked at Bob. “Hiroshima!”

  “Listen.” Bob pointed at the locked door. “These people were Nazis! Killing millions of Jews and gypsies and gays and everything! They were bad people! They don’t have a right to do this! To come back!”

  “I guess no one was watching them,” Hank joked very humorlessly.

  “I’m going to call the police,” Donna said. She hurried to the pay phone, and the others watched as she waited for her call to go through. They watched as her face grew rubbery and slack, and Dick thought he could hear a high female voice from the ear piece clamped to Donna’s head. She slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

  “Well?” Bob said.

  “It was a woman talking in another language,” Donna replied, on the verge of tears. “She sounded Vietnamese or Japanese or something.”

  “My God,” Hank breathed.

  “Maybe I should try to make a run for our car, huh?” she said. “I’m not a vet...I didn’t kill anybody. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. And I can get help.”

  “You aren’t going out there!” Hank snapped.

  “No way!” Bob grumbled.

  “We wait,” Dick said. “Until midnight. Until November first.”

  On the opposite wall from the window by the pay phone there was another window, near a glass showcase containing commemorative plaques, framed medals, photos of past Commanders. Wally had built the showcase. The face in the window was like a war trophy inside another glass exhibit. A trophy rather like the human skull Bob had brought back with him from North Africa. It was little more than a skull held together by shreds of flesh and some sodden autumn leaves that had fallen and stuck to it. A hand like a chicken’s gnarled claw scratched feebly at the glass.

  �
��Go away, damn you!” Wally thundered, taking a threatening step toward the apparition. “I sent you to hell and I’ll do it again!”

  The face withdrew, or perhaps faded, and was gone. They all wondered if Wally had, indeed, frightened the thing off.

  Behind them, the door rattled. They saw the knob trying to turn. Then, a thump at the window by the phone, and another face there as gaunt and translucently white as milk poured over a skull.

  “We’re sorry, okay?” Donna sobbed. “We’re sorry!”

  “No we aren’t sorry,” Bob said.

  “Bob, look!” Hank shouted. “It’s your Arab!” He pointed at the back window by the showcase.

  Bob followed Hank’s finger, and shuddered hard. The face pushed up against the glass so that its lips and nose were bent and distorted was dark-skinned but still ashen despite that. Though it had been night when he killed this man, and he had only seen him closely after he was already dead, he knew it was indeed the stealthy murderer who had killed the dock guard when his ship was at port. It could have been him on the pier that night, and that other young sailor safely up on the deck instead. Him with his throat cut. Survivor’s guilt had plagued him ever since.

  “What if they get in?” Donna wailed. “What’s to keep them from getting inside, if they’re spirits?”

  “Go away,” Bob whispered at the face smeared across the glass, orange glimmers reflecting in dead fish eyes. “It’s too late for revenge. I’m old. It’s all over now.” He was beginning to shake, and he put a hand to his chest, afraid that his laboring heart would gallop faster and faster until its legs folded beneath it. Tears of rage and frustration and fear came into his faded eyes. Yet through them, he saw another face rise up over the shoulder of the man at the glass. Another apparition with vacant eyes. But this one had a gaping crescent wound at its throat. And it wrapped its arms around the first apparition. It pulled it away from the window. Both of them, in this embrace, receded into the darkness and were gone.

  It was a reversal of what Bob had seen that night over fifty years earlier. The murderer with his knife coming up on the guard from behind.

  “Someone pulled it away!” Dick blurted, pointing at the window by the pay phone. “Someone grabbed that one!”

  “Maybe the police are here!” Donna babbled.

  “We never called them,” Hank reminded her. “And how could they grab these things? How could they?”

  Wally ventured to the window by the pay phone and dared to put his forehead against the glass. Were those two figures struggling in the parking lot, stumbling closer to the one streetlight? Now they were under the light, but the illumination only seemed to make them look misty, insubstantial, whereas in the dark they had had a faint bioluminescent glow. He swore he was not only seeing the rain in front of their wrestling forms, but through them.

  Then there was a gust, and the figures seemed to tatter, to shred like tissue paper in water, and then they were both gone. Both the man in the Nazi uniform...and the man in the British World War Two uniform who had seized hold of him.

  “They’re gone,” Tommy said, as if he could sense it. “They’re all gone now.”

  Bob came up beside his taller brother. He, too, wore a baseball cap festooned with pins and buttons, the seal for Post # 153 embroidered on the front of his. Shoulder-to-shoulder, they stared out into the night and saw that the rain had diminished to a mere drizzle. The storm was moving on.

  “Let’s have another beer,” Wally Thompson said to his brother.

  Together, they shuffled to the bar. Wally poured one for Tommy, and brought it to him. Tommy sipped it with gratitude.

  Bob raised his glass of Irish red. The others saluted him with their own preferences.

  “Slainte!” he said. And then, “Go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo aris!”

  “What’s that mean, B. T.?” asked Tommy.

  “It means, ‘May we be alive at this time next year,” Bob told him.

  The End

  Apples and Oranges

  (with Scott Thomas)

  I suppose that living next door to the Silvestris was both a privilege and a curse. Mind you, I've never been good at distinguishing between the two. I've never been good about hints and cues or the interpretation of omens and dreams. Maybe I see too many things in simplified terms, or not at all. I mean, sometimes the only difference between the truth and a lie is who's doing the telling.

  Even stumbling about in puberty's oversized shoes, I maintained a certain ambivalence about the stories the other kids would tell about Mr. and Mrs. Silvestri. Funny, but the stories sounded stupid when the other boys told them, but delicately terrifying when from the lips of the girls. But girls were a separate universe of flesh then, desirable even in their colt-legged maturation while we boys were bumbling and gangly and, I'd imagine, about as sexy as the Straw Man in The Wizard of Oz.

  I lived with my parents and younger brother in Eastborough, Massachusetts, a small inland town, seemingly snug in the valley region of Worcester County. Our house was a perpetually grey Victorian brontosaurus that overlooked the Silvestris’ compact pink ranch house. My mother scoffed at their house, said it looked more like a trailer, “and that color...”

  Despite the gossip, they seemed to be a law-abiding pair, although the police quietly spoke to Mr. Silvestri when one summer he put a curious wooden sculpture in his backyard (within view of Mrs. Franklin's kitchen window). It was something he had carved and painted, an image of Josephine Baker and Mata Hari, obscenely entangled. A high fence went up around the Silvestri yard following that little conversation. Too bad; I was rather drawn to the totem pole.

  For my thirteenth birthday my Uncle Ralph gave me a pair of binoculars. Before long I grew tired of watching the robins and blue jays and even the goldfinches that visited the thistle that my father (in honor of Scotland) refused to mow down. Most of my memories about the binoculars are set in summer.

  Perched in the humid shadows of my second floor bedroom, I would watch the vague shape of Mrs. Silvestri as she lounged in her screen-house, repositioning her long pale legs while she painted her toenails. Sometimes I would spy on her husband as he pushed the mower around their yard. He was an ominously tall and thin man, and it struck me as odd that someone who spent so much time shirtless remained so pallid. At any rate, I tried to view the fabled scar on his stomach.

  Rumors hovered like flies around Mr. Silvestri's scar. Supposedly he got it during “the war,” but which war he got it in was never made clear. Though I couldn’t have guessed his age, except to say he was rather older than his wife, he was much too young to have been in World War II and probably too young for Korea, too. Vietnam, I supposed.

  It was alleged that Mr. Silvestri took a broom handle and went out one night during a blizzard; he stood there like a ghost in the snow, carving the shape of his scar into the cold white pallet of the yard. The shape was believed to resemble some type of magical rune or something of the like. I was in the school library when one of the girls told me about it – I can still see the way her mouth moved as it shaped the words and the way the afternoon sunlight slickened her lips.

  Better still was the story about the hitchhiker that disappeared over in Sutton. She was a fetching thing there in black and white on the front page of the Telegram, her hair a mysterious waterfall of smudged halftone. There was something guiltily provocative about missing teenage girls.

  Mandy Rogers was last seen walking along Route 146 wearing blue jean cut-offs and a T-shirt. It was summer, of course. August swallowed her whole.

  The story goes that Mr. Silvestri picked her up while driving home from his greens-keeper job (in Sutton). Supposedly he amused himself in ways best not repeated, even hypothetically, before killing her (in some titillating manner, like a gasping strangulation, or a sensuously symbolic stabbing). He then, according to legend, removed her fingers with garden shears and opened his scar, feeding the digits into the moist darkness so that they could play cat's cradle with his intesti
nes while he stood in blizzards, watching for rare winter lightning, as the snow crept up around Josephine Baker's wooden ankles.

  * * *

  It was so hot that I expected to find palm trees growing in the Silvestris’ yard when I went over to mow the lawn, pushing my candy-apple red machine. The mister had cut his hand at work, and Angeline – her name was Angeline – had poked her head up over the wooden fence that divided our yards, had spoken to me when she heard me cutting the grass.

  I remember the smell of the damp, cut grass mingled with gas fumes and the subtle impression of her sweat and perfume whispering between the fence uprights. I glanced at the bottom of the fence – it didn't quite reach the ground – saw her glossy red nails as she stood on her toes to peek over (her nails were the same color as my lawn mower). Her eyes were visible – greenish grey – the terminating points of the fence giving her jack-o’-lantern fangs.

  What thirteen-year-old boy could have said no to five dollars, lemonade and red toenails? When I finished with the family yard, I wheeled the mower around to the gate in the Silvestri fence and, for the first time, stepped inside. Angeline stood there nearly naked in the heat with her lazy copper hair, her lazy gaze and a lopsided grin that an older male human might have construed as lurid. She had a cigarette in one hand and a glass of vodka-laden lemonade in the other. She was thirty-seven at the time.

  While the Silvestris had no swimming pool, her black bikini was damp, plastered to her rounded pallor like leaves from seaweed. I half-heard her remarking about the heat, laughing her dark laugh as I stared numbly at a lone bead of sweat that worked its way down from the lower edge of her rib cage – it hovered precariously above the musky little mouth of her navel. I imagined that her words came from in there.

  “It might be weeks before Mr. Silvestri can do anything around here,” Angeline said, shifting her weight in the grass, drawing at her cigarette.

  She glanced at the house and I turned to look, saw Mr. Silvestri walk past the big glass sliding door. He was naked and his hand was in a mitten of bandages, pressed over his scar.