Germany! “Great.” With no amusement at all, Frank thought, She hired a Nazi!
Faith continued, “There’s no phone in the basement,” Frank thought, No, there’s not, “so that will account for a short wait before I call the cops. I’ll claim I wasn’t certain the murderer had left. Finally, after I’ve given the hit man a decent head start, I’ll call the police.”
“Good Lord!” said Frank. Hearing her describe his murder made it vividly real in his mind.
“I’ll tell the police I had a bad dream that woke me up. The kids will back me up on that. I’ve woken them up a lot lately with my nightmares.”
Frank shook his head. Actually, there was only that one time but that certainly made an impact on the boys. Particularly Bobby.
“No way! The kids will be gone that night. I’d never subject them to all this. It’s going to be hard enough on me when they make me identify his body.”
Bitterly, Frank thought, Imagine how I’m going to feel!
It was spooky how calm Faith sounded, “I’ll say I was getting a drink in the kitchen when I heard gunshots. I’ll say I panicked at that point and hid in the basement. I’ll claim to have heard the guy ransacking the house. I’ll say I didn’t hear him leave.
“Finally, I’ll claim after I waited a while to make certain he was gone, I came upstairs and called out but got no answer. I want my reaction to be raw when they take me to see the body. It’s going to be awful, I know, I dread it,” Not half as much as I do, thought Frank, “but I really think it will work.”
Frank thought it probably would work . . . if she hadn’t just told him the plan.
“The kids will be crushed, of course, but they’re young. They’ll get over it.”
Gooseflesh prickled Frank’s arms. Of all the things he’d heard Faith say in her sleep, that was the most chilling.
“I haven’t even thought about the funeral yet. I don’t want to. The less prepared I seem, the better. I want it to look like this hit me like a bolt from the blue.”
That’s the way I feel, darling.
Her final comment tonight was, “Only a few more days. Then it’ll all be over.”
Then you’ll be free to start a new life.
Without me.
Suddenly, Frank was on the verge of tears. He hadn’t cried in ten years, not since his father died. He rolled out of bed and rushed into the bathroom, where he closed the door and began to weep.
Over and over he remembered Faith saying, “The kids will be crushed, of course, but they’re young. They’ll get over it.”
******
The next night, Thursday night, as Frank lay awake in bed, waiting for his wife to dream, he held his gun in his hands, clasped against his chest.
Tonight Faith had very little to say in her sleep. She announced, “Tomorrow night’s the night. Pray for me.”
Pray for me? “Pray for me?” Hearing that made him absolutely furious. Glaring at Faith in the dark, he thought, Since when have you ever in your life ever asked anyone to pray for you? You’re an agnostic, honey. It’s one of the reasons I married you!
“Pray for me,” he grumbled bitterly.
Obviously, this was more nonsense she’d gotten from her lover.
Frank was tired of this.
Tomorrow night, it ended, one way or another.
When the hit man came to his house, Frank would be waiting. He would kill the bastard who took Faith’s money as payment for taking Frank’s life. He would shoot him the minute he walked through the door. He would treat him like an uninvited vampire.
Afterwards, before involving the police, he was going to ask Faith some questions.
Like who the hell her secret lover was.
One way or another, he would get some answers. . . .
Tomorrow night.
******
Friday began as expected. Frank learned Blake was staying at Howie’s tonight and Bobby was again spending the weekend with Faith’s parents.
Frank’s work day was brutal. He was bleary with exhaustion. He couldn’t remember when he last got a good night’s rest. He spent the morning in a daze and the afternoon fighting his eyelids.
When Frank arrived home after work, Faith was waiting for him.
Grimly, she told him, “We need to talk.”
“What now?”
“Sit down, honey.” She pleaded, but without any of the whining she exhibited in her sleep, “Please.”
Warily, Frank took a seat across from his wife. “What’s up?”
She hesitated, biting her lower lip. She took one of Frank’s hands and squeezed it. “I can’t take it anymore. I need to talk to you about something.”
“I can’t take it anymore.” He thought, Weren’t those the first words I ever heard you say in your sleep? As he did that first night, Frank asked, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Annie.”
“Annie? Again with Annie?” He was too tired for this crap.
“Just listen, okay? I know you aren’t going to believe any of this. I’m crazy to even tell you but I just really need to talk to somebody.” There were tears in her eyes again. He couldn’t believe it. “I’m having a really hard time dealing with this alone.”
Will you just spit it out? “What’s going on, Faith?”
“I guess I should just say it.” Faith took a deep breath. “I think Annie might have been abducted by aliens.”
He knew she meant extraterrestrials and not illegal Mexicans. Already tired and flustered, he was now rendered speechless.
“Let me tell you what happened.” Faith looked down, breaking eye contact. “About a month ago, Annie took her kids to visit her mother for the weekend. Her mom lives way out in the country. Annie was driving home alone when she saw these strange lights in the sky. She’s not the only one that’s seen them, you know. A whole bunch of people have seen them. The next thing Annie is aware of is arriving back home. She discovered she had some strange bruises she couldn’t explain. Worse, she couldn’t account for about three hours of time. She arrived home much later than she should have. She was a little disturbed about the lost time but she eventually just went to bed and forgot about it.
“Then, a few days later, she started having nightmares, and strange pains. She’s afraid all the time, afraid of shadows, afraid something is hiding in the dark. Remember when I said I thought something traumatic happened to her? Well, at that time, I thought maybe she’d been attacked on the way home from her mom’s and then repressed the memory of it.”
Frank blurted out, “But now you think she’s been abducted by extraterrestrials?”
Faith sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“My God, Faith!” He snapped, “A couple bumps and bruises doesn’t mean—”
“There’s more.”
“What?” He didn’t have any patience for this. It was nonsense, particularly in light of the fact that someone was planning on killing him tonight.
“Remember her surgery?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“They found something.”
“Found what?”
“That’s just it. They don’t know. It’s some kind of shard . . . almost like a piece of crystal, like glass, only it isn’t.” Faith shook her head. “They don’t know what it’s made of or how it got there.”
“Got where?”
“In her neck. At first, the doctors were frightened it could actually kill her, it was so close to her spinal cord.”
Frank shook his head. “That’s crazy. How did it get there?”
Faith shrugged. “Nobody knows for sure but. . .”
“Annie thinks E.T. put it there.”
“Actually, no. Annie’s in denial. Annie made a little progress when she went to the psychiatrist I took her to but then she just quit going.” Faith sighed with exasperation. “Annie thinks Stan is her biggest problem.”
Frank squealed, “So you’re the one who thinks she was abducted by aliens?”
Faith became snappish, “Whether you believe it or not, it makes sense! I’ve done some research on this and what’s happening to Annie fits a pattern. Do you realize how many people report being abducted every year?”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Do you realize how many people report Bat-boy sightings every month?”
Getting to her feet, her face clenched, Faith says, “I knew it was a mistake talking to you.”
“So why did you bring this up now, darling? Huh?” Is this all some kind of Red Herring to distract me? “If this has been going on for weeks, why are you just now bringing it up?”
“Never mind. Just forget it.”
Crying, Faith fled the room.
Angry, Frank let her go.
******
He had never been so nervous, so keyed up, while simultaneously so exhausted.
Faith went to bed early.
Frank waited a while, and then finally went to bed about 11:00.
He held his loaded Beretta to his chest, pulling his covers up to hide it. For a long while he just stared at the ceiling, his heart beating fast.
Faith was already breathing the soft breaths of slumber.
Frank turned on his side, facing the closed door to their bedroom, his pistol still tightly gripped beneath the covers.
For the next ninety minutes, he didn’t feel the slightest bit tired. He squirmed, wanting to turn over on his other side but he remained always facing the door.
Then suddenly sleepiness hit him hard.
He fought his eyelids for supremacy and lost.
******
As Frank regained consciousness, he was aware of three things simultaneously.
He had fallen asleep!
Someone was trying to quietly open the door to his bedroom and that meant. . . .
He was about to be killed.
Beneath the covers, he released the safety on his gun. Opening his eyes, he thrust the pistol forward and pulled the trigger.
The dark figure in the doorway lurched. Screaming inarticulately, Frank fired the gun again and again and again.
The third shot was the one that caused his target to drop to the floor like a bag of concrete.
Frank had shot right through his covers, which were now smoldering. Pushing them off him, he looked over and wasn’t the least bit surprised to find his wife’s side of the bed was vacant.
He knew where she was: downstairs in the basement.
Drenched in sweat, terrified, understanding that because he felt asleep he was nearly killed, Frank steeled himself and turned on the light.
The figure lying on the floor in a spreading puddle of blood wasn’t a stranger.
It was Faith.
Gun smoke wafted through the bedroom.
He winced, averting his eyes.
Frank had never seen so much blood in his life.
His stomach lurching, he realized, The hit man is still out there!
Faith must have been on her way downstairs to let the assassin in!
Frank tried to avoid stepping in Faith’s blood as he slipped past her, out of the bedroom, but his heel caught part of a puddle and he tracked red all the way down the hall.
His gun raised, clutched in two sweaty hands, Frank rushed outside to confront Faith’s hired hit man.
His street was deserted. The only sign of life was the neighbor’s black cat slinking across her yard.
Frank circumnavigated his house, searching the back yard, his shed, his garage.
He found no one.
Where is he?
Frank assumed the assassin hadn’t shown up yet. He would probably need to wait a little longer.
As he went back inside and locked the door, he decided to search the house. Just as he began, the phone started ringing, startling him.
He wondered who could be calling at this time of night. He wondered if the neighbors heard gunshots.
His hands trembling, Frank picked up the phone.
“Frank? It’s Annie. It’s an emergency! I need to talk to Faith!”
“Faith is . . .” Dead, was what he thought, then almost edited himself and said indisposed. Instead of choosing either word, he avoided the question altogether. “What’s wrong, Annie?” He could hear her crying.
Annie whined, “Someone broke into our house! I was in the kitchen at the time and I heard gunshots upstairs, up where Stan is! I hid in the basement! I didn’t know what to do! I think they were looking for money!” She wailed, “I think they shot Stan!”
Frank’s entire body went cold. He was shocked to his core, too staggered to think.
“I need to talk to Faith, Frank!” She whined (and her whining sounded very familiar), “Can I please talk to Faith!”
Barely able to breathe, Frank asked, “Have you called the police yet?”
“Not yet . . . I was about to . . . I was just so scared, I wanted to talk to Faith first!”
Nearly frantic, Frank lied, “Faith and I are on our way over there! Give us at least ten minutes before you call the police!”
“Okay, but— ”
Frank hung up the phone.
A bundle of nerves and a bag of sweat, Frank grabbed his car keys and rushed out of the house. He didn’t bother with shoes and was unaware he was barefoot.
He drove like a bat out of hell.
Frank found himself remembering how Faith always referred to ‘the kids’ when she talked in her sleep.
That wasn’t like Faith. Faith always referred to Blake and Bobby as ‘the boys.’
Annie and Stan had two girls and a boy. They refer to their children as, ‘the kids.’
“No,” Frank gasped. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Was Annie the one who was having the affair?
“This can’t be happening!”
When he arrived at the Katzenberg house, there were no police cars in sight. Good, he thought, determined to talk to Annie alone.
As he rushed up the sidewalk to her house, the front door opened and Annie stepped out onto the porch. Immediately, she asked, “Where’s Faith?”
Frank gave Annie a violent shove, pushing her back into the house.
Annie squealed.
Frank entered the house and closed the door behind him. “We need to talk.”
Annie looked nearly as panicked as Frank felt. She wanted to know, “Where’s Faith?”
“Faith—” Frank choked up. His voice quavered as he finished, “is dead.”
“What?” All pigment evaporated from Annie’s face.
“Faith was trying to kill me, or at least I thought she was, but,” he took his gun out, “I killed her first.”
“Oh, Sweet Jesus, no!”
It dawned on Frank that Annie was religious. He remembered Faith saying, “Pray for me” in her sleep and knew that sentiment was Annie’s, not hers.
“Oh my God, NO!” Annie collapsed as surely as if her legs just turned to butter.
Frank knew Annie was to blame for all this. Hatred filled his heart with black fury. He strode over to Annie and grabbed her by the hair.
Annie shrieked, “I HATE YOU!”
In their mutual loathing, the connection was formed.
Images flooded Frank’s mind.
He saw Annie in her car, Annie looking up at bright lights in the sky.
He saw Annie become paralyzed as a gray-skinned otherworldly creature approached her. Just as in one of the nightmares she unwittingly shared with Faith, Annie gasped, “He isn’t human!”
He saw Annie in a dazzling white room (inside a spaceship), strapped down on a table, shrieking at the top of her lungs as aliens manhandled her.
He saw Annie being placed back into her automobile. An otherworldly being then wiped away her memories of the last three hours.
Frank now knew when the alien shut down one part of Annie’s mind, he accidentally awoke another part.
As mind-boggling as the images of the gray extraterrestrials were, Frank was even more rattled when he saw Annie and Faith in bed together,
naked, making love. He saw blissful expressions on Faith’s face that he hadn’t seen since they were newlyweds. When Annie performed cunnilingus on his wife, Faith made sounds Frank had never heard before.
Faith was having an affair but not with a man. Faith was sleeping with Annie!
And just as Annie and Frank had now been connected telepathically by their hatred, Annie and Faith were previously linked by their love.
Neither Faith or Annie were aware of it but when Annie dreamed, it was Faith who sometimes talked in her sleep. Because of an alien touch, Annie’s subconscious was brimming with the newly-awakened ability to connect her to her most cherished soul mate… in her dreams.
Annie hated Stan. She hired a man named Franz to kill him, a man now on his way to Germany.
It was Annie who was desperate to end her marriage, not Faith.
It was Annie. It was all Annie!
Frank Farnsworth pushed Annie Katzenberg away from him, severing the mental connection.
Behind him, outside, Frank heard a car door slam and assumed the police had arrived.
He raised his pistol and shot Annie over and over and over.
He was still shooting her when the police broke down the door and shot him.
He died on the floor next to Annie, a believer in extraterrestrials.
On the police band radio, an officer across town radioed in a report of strange lights in the sky.
THE END
Graveside Games
“Truth or dare?” asks Jack.
“Truth,” says Jill.
Strolling through the remote old cemetery just after midnight, Jack pauses to read a crumbling tombstone before turning to Jill and asking, “How old were you the first time you were kissed?”
Jill understands the meaning hidden behind the word: “kiss.” She tells him she was only, “Sixteen.”
Jack hopes she will elaborate but she doesn’t. She asks him, “Truth or dare?”
“Truth.”
Instead of mimicking his question (as so many normal girls would) and inquiring about his first kiss, she surprises him by asking, “How old were you the first time you penetrated someone?”
Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) Page 23
