New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  Her phone is on the kitchen table beside a glass of water and a book she hasn’t gotten around to opening yet.The name and number flashing on the screen are her grandmother’s. It doesn’t register that tonight is not one of their regular nights to talk until after she’s accepted the call.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  “Lindsay King?” It’s a man’s voice, gentle and with a drawl. Something cold tiptoes up Lindsay’s spine. She straightens in her seat.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this Lindsay?”

  “What’s happened?”

  He clears his throat. “My name is Gus Winkler. I’m a neighbor of your grandmother’s. A good friend too.”

  “Please, what’s going on?”

  “I really hate to be the one to tell you this,” he says. “Denise had a stroke this morning.”

  “Is she—” Alive? Okay? She can’t finish the sentence.

  “She hasn’t woken up yet.The doctors aren’t sure she will. They’re suggesting, if you want to say goodbye, you might want to do it soon.”

  She and Paul work at an industrial engineering firm. She’s in the front office, while he does HVAC installation at large-scale commercial properties. The city’s in the midst of a construction boom. Downtown is a forest of cranes and skyscraper skeletons. Paul’s slammed, and she tells him she doesn’t need him to come with her, but he does anyway. She knew he would. By the next afternoon, they’re on a plane flying west.

  At first, she finds it odd that Denise has never told her about her good friend Gus, until she thinks that maybe she has. Her grandmother makes frequent mentions of a neighbor with whom she’s always making plans—outings to movies, museums, and restaurants, and regular visits to each other’s homes—but she’s never used a name, nor, Lindsay now realizes, a pronoun. Lindsay has always assumed the friend was a woman, which was doubtless her grandmother’s intent.

  Paul rents a car at the airport, and they drive straight to the hospital. It’s night when they arrive.The ICU waiting room is on the third floor.There are several people scattered around, slumped on couches and chairs. Gus Winkler recognizes her right away. He’s an old man with dark skin and arms like broomsticks. His Hawaiian shirt looks to have been slept in. When he introduces himself, there’s a moment when she can see in his eyes that he’s considering hugging her.To her relief, he decides against it.They don’t even shake hands. Paul stands just behind her and off to the side. In new situations, he likes her to take the lead, keeping just close enough that she can sense the weight and size of him.

  Gus leads them past a nurses’ station to her grandmother’s room.

  “Do you want me to wait out here?” Paul asks.

  “Absolutely not.”

  Denise looks small in her bed. Her hands lie atop her sheets. Her face has lost its shape, like someone vacuumed all the meat out from under her skin.

  “You should say something,” Paul says. “So she knows you’re here.”

  “I’m here.” It’s all she can think of, and it feels stupid. She takes hold of her grandmother’s hand. It’s hard and cold.

  They stay with Denise until a nurse informs them that visiting hours are over. When they return to the waiting room, Lindsay’s not surprised to find Gus fast asleep in one of the seats. Lindsay and Paul find a couch for themselves. Paul reclines into a corner and invites her to rest her head on his chest.When she’s settled in, he uses his jacket as a blanket to cover them both. The contours of his muscles press into her cheek. For a while, she sleeps.

  When she wakes up, the room is silent. Paul is out cold. His mouth hangs open. A spit bubble poised on his bottom lip quivers with each exhalation of breath. She slides out from under his jacket. At the disturbance, he shifts and snorts, but his eyes remain closed.The clock on her cell phone tells her they’re still a couple hours from sunrise. The sensible thing would be to try to steal a little more sleep, but there’s an acidic anxiousness in her stomach. She wants air.

  An elevator carries her down to the main lobby. It’s not quite deserted. She crosses it, passes through an automatic sliding door, and steps out onto the sidewalk.

  The air is warm and smells of car exhaust. Until she moved away, she hadn’t known that the whole world didn’t smell like this. It’s not an odor she’s missed. Across the street, the parking garage stands against the sky, dark and severe. It’s the tallest structure in sight, taller even than the hospital whose employees and patients it services.

  Was moving away a mistake after all? There will be no getting those three years back now. She considers what it will mean to be the last of her family, then thinks about the fact that very soon, she and Paul will be starting a new family. First there will just be the two of them, but that won’t last long. Paul wants kids. He’s been clear about that. She does too, she thinks. Her family has contracted. Next it will expand. It feels cyclical, natural. Sad, but also okay.

  The sound of a car engine coming to life pulls her out of her head. It sounds tinny and hollow, like the last dregs of water boiling in a kettle. She glances around, searching for its source.When she finds it, her breath catches in her throat.

  Her parents’ station wagon is parked at the curb thirty feet away. Somehow, it’s even filthier than the last time she saw it.The crust of mud on its side is thick and chunky. Pale clouds of exhaust rise up around it. Past the windshield, the inside of the car is dark. She can’t see the driver, but she can sense eyes fixed upon her, taking her in.Within the shadows, she sees something—a sudden flash of yellow light the size of a tennis ball. A moment later it winks out, leaving her uncertain as to what it could have been. A cigarette lighter, maybe? Involuntarily, she takes a step towards the car for a closer look.

  The headlights click on, capturing her in their glare. Fear erupts within her. She imagines the Volkswagen surging forward, grinding over her like roadkill. For a moment, she cannot convince her legs to move. The engine’s rattle gets louder as the car shifts into gear. Lindsay manages a step backward, then another, through the automatic doors into the dreary safety of the lobby. As the doors slide shut, she watches the Volkswagen speed past and disappear.

  She rides the elevator back up to the ICU with sweat beading down the sides of her face. The doors open on a different scene than the one she left. Nurses and doctors whisper in clusters while others rush in and out of the room. Lindsay sees a man in a security guard uniform jog down an adjoining hall. Paul and Gus are awake now, standing together. They spot her as she emerges from the elevator and approach.

  “Where’d you go?” Paul says.

  Before she can begin to figure out what to tell him, Gus steps forward and declares,“She woke up.”

  At first the words don’t register.When they do, she starts forward, ready to run to her grandmother’s room, but Paul stops her with a hand on her arm.

  “We don’t know where she is,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The nurses’ station got a disconnect alert from her monitoring equipment. When they went into her room to check on her, she wasn’t there.”

  “When was this?” Her voice comes out pinched and strained.

  “Five minutes ago? Ten?”

  “The doctors think she must be disoriented, confused,” Gus says.“Doesn’t know where she is. She wandered off.”

  Paul nods.“They’re telling us there’s nothing to worry about. She can’t have gotten far.There are nurses’ stations, watchmen, security cameras. She’s still in the hospital, and there’s no way she’s getting out. She’ll turn up.They’ll find her.”

  An hour passes; then another. The squawks and hisses of security guards’ walkie-talkies become the waiting room’s new soundtrack. She and Paul sit together while Gus walks laps around the room, stopping to question anyone wearing any kind of uniform who’s willing to listen. Lindsay can see in the slump of his shoulders as the understanding slowly sets in that something is deeply, deeply wrong here.Whatever words of encouragement Paul keeps whispering to her do
n’t sink in. She’s hearing the tin-kettle sound of the Volkswagen’s engine, picturing the yellow flicker through the dark windshield.

  At dawn, the police show up. Officer Button-Eyes is with them. Lindsay doesn’t think he recognizes her, until he pulls her aside for a private conversation.

  “I want you to know, there’s absolutely no reason to think this has anything to do with what happened to your family.”

  She nods. He’s wrong, of course. They’re the Kings, the family that disappears.The family that gets taken. It’s amazing to her that she could ever have considered tying Paul to this family, let alone having children. What would she be sentencing them to? How long would it be before someone came for them? She makes her way back to Paul’s side, takes his hand, and threads her fingers between his. She’s already decided—when he gets on a plane to fly back home, she won’t be going with him.

  * * *

  The gun is wrapped inside a knitted red blanket. Lindsay’s on a laundry kick, gathering everything she can find to which Denise’s scent still clings for a massive haul to the laundromat. When she digs the blanket out of a drawer beneath the bed, it uncoils and the gun slips out. It hits the floor with a quiet thump. She picks it up. The grip is matte black with grooves for her fingers. Her face reflects back at her in the barrel. She’s never touched a gun before. Until now, she would have assumed the same about her grandmother. It feels as though she’s stumbled upon something private and embarrassing.The gun might as well be a vibrator. She returns it to the drawer.

  It takes her a few days to work up the nerve to ask Gus what he knows about it.

  He says, “For the past couple of months, Denise was getting… I hate to use the word paranoid. Suspicious. She thought someone was following her. Said she was hearing noises outside at night.”

  “Did you ever hear anything?” Gus’s trailer sits just across a narrow lane from Denise’s.

  “Can’t say that I did.”

  After that, she moves the gun up to the top of the nightstand.

  It’s her fourth month living in her grandmother’s trailer. Paul spent a long time refusing to believe she wasn’t going to change her mind and come back to him, and a while after that too furious to interact with her at all. Eventually he sent her things, but by then she’d grown so used to her grandmother’s stuff that she never got around to unpacking much beyond her clothes. The trailer doesn’t offer much in the way of storage, so the boxes have become furniture in their own right. They’re stacked in columns in corners and piled against the walls.

  Gus approves of her moving into Denise’s place so much that he’s never asked her about the fiancé she never mentions. “Someone’s got to keep those plants of hers alive until she gets back,” he said. Lindsay failed to keep them alive—she doesn’t have the talent for it—and her grandmother hasn't come back. It is just like before. For the first couple of weeks, Officer Button-Eyes contacted her daily. Then he delegated those phone calls.Then the police stopped calling altogether.

  Finding work has been a struggle, probably because she left her last job with no warning and broke the heart of one of their favorite employees in the process. That’s assuming anyone’s bothering to check her references, which they might not be. Lately, she’s managed to pick up a bit of temp work, but it doesn’t help much. Her savings weren’t great to begin with. Four months later, they’re gone, and she’s sinking quickly into debt. Her sleep schedule has twisted itself into something unrecognizable. Her days are broken up by naps, and her nights are interminable stretches of alternating nervousness and boredom.

  She spends her free time driving the flat, wide streets with her head on a swivel, on the lookout for a filthy white station wagon.The town is a broad grid. Residential neighborhoods give way to shopping centers and then back again with metronomic regularity. She does her best to stay ten miles per hour below the speed limit. There’s never any worry of creating traffic. Everyone here moves slowly. The cars creep along. Pedestrians are somnambulistic. Kids on scooters move as though through transparent gel. The world’s motor has been set at half-speed so that Lindsay won’t miss anything, won’t miss the fact that there isn’t anything to miss.

  One afternoon she wakes up on her grandmother’s couch with her stomach stinging from hunger. A perusal of her refrigerator and cupboards comes up with nothing. She glances out her window and sees Gus on a wooden folding chair in front of his trailer. He spots her and offers a wave, which she returns. When she doesn’t step away from the glass, he waves again, this time with a beckoning motion. She changes into a fresh T-shirt and goes out to him. His feet are propped on a white cooler. He holds a Bud Light bottle in his lap.

  “Beer?”

  “I probably shouldn’t,” she says.

  “Too early?”

  “I haven’t eaten anything yet today,” she says.Then, “You know what? I’d love one.”

  He lifts his feet off the cooler.“Help yourself.”

  She does, twisting off the cap and flicking it into an empty terracotta pot nearby. It clinks against thirty others just like it. The first sip hits her empty stomach exactly as hard as expected. Once she’s recovered from her wince, she says,“You and my grandma spent a lot of time together.”

  “Sure did.”

  “I guess I’ve been kind of a shitty neighbor. I should be visiting you more.”

  “No you shouldn’t,” he says. Seeing the look on her face, he quickly adds,“Not that I’m not glad for the company.And I think it’s a good thing you’re doing, keeping the home fires burning. But I don’t think for a second you’re a surrogate Denise. People don’t get replaced. You probably know that better than anyone.”

  He invites her to stay for dinner. They cook hamburgers on a grill. She eats two. When the sun sets and the air turns cold, they go inside, where she drinks several more beers. By the time she emerges, she feels sleepy and nourished in a way she didn’t realize she’d been missing. Gus has nodded off in an armchair. She tries and fails to find a blanket to put over him.A rectangle of light spilling from his doorway forms a path from his trailer to hers.When she closes the door, the path vanishes.

  She’s just crossed the lane when a car rolls up behind her. She feels the heat of its engine on her back. With a heavy clunk, it drops into park. A barbed-wire ball of dread comes together in her stomach. Even before she turns, she knows which car it is.

  For several seconds, nothing happens. It’s as though the driver wants Lindsay to have a chance to take this all in. She tries to. Her sister’s car seat sticks up into the frame of the back window. It’s patterned with multi-colored elephants with big dumb smiles marching trunk-to-tail in horizontal lines.The passenger door opens, and she’s looking across the seat at the driver.

  Inside, it’s dark like a tool shed. She can make out a floppy cap pulled low, a thick, ratty coat with the collar popped up, a pair of gloved hands on the steering wheel. The car stinks of mildew. The driver shifts to look at her. Lindsay’s mouth goes dry.

  The head is impossibly long and narrow, bulbous at the top and coming to a phallic point at the chin, like an autumn gourd. Coarse dark hairs cover it.They quiver, exploring and tasting the air. The face has no mouth to speak of, just four inky orbs arranged in a vertical line down its center. Lindsay finds herself thinking of them as eyes, though they give no indication of sight, thought, or feeling.

  Part of her knows that this is the time to start screaming, but something is happening with the orbs, and she can’t look away. The color is growing lighter, turning first to amber, then yellow. The fading darkness leaves behind a shape in each orb’s center, a black squiggle suspended in urine- colored murk. Four people, one in each orb.They are posed identically—arms out, heads bowed, legs dangling. From the top down, her father, mother, sister, and grandmother, suspended in liquid, not quite heavy enough to sink. No one has aged, not even the baby, plump and limp.

  Lindsay says,“Are they dead?”

  By way of an answer, the dri
ver nods at the empty passenger seat. An invitation. Only one way to find out. It would be so easy.

  She takes a step backward. From inside the car, there is a rustle, then a sudden burst of movement. It happens almost too fast to see. The driver launches itself toward her. Like a newspaper in a gale-force wind, it sails over the passenger seat and lands on its feet before her. Free of the car, it’s able to rise to its full height. The driver is all joints and strange angles. Unfolding, it towers over her and gazes down.

  Lindsay could succumb now. The inside of her head is a waterfall of noise and fear. She could collapse under its force, literally collapse into a pile and let the driver scoop her up and toss her into the backseat. It could take her to her family in that yellow-lit place, to answers. Depending on how much of her mind remains by then, she might even understand some of them.

  Instead, she runs inside. The driver chases. It moves with a whispering sound. She slams the front door shut behind her, then hears it bang open again a moment later.A kitchen stool she tips over on her way past gets flung against the wall with enough force to rock the whole trailer. No lights are on.The trailer is cramped and difficult to navigate. Her shins catch the corners of furniture, her shoulders the frames of doorways. Stumbling, she keeps going, not looking back. She doesn’t turn around until she reaches the bedroom, until she holds her grandmother’s gun in both hands.The driver rises up before her. She doesn’t have to aim.

  Three shots, three flashes.The driver flops back, bounces off the wall, and hits the ground. It lies still, a heap of clothes and jutting angles. For a while, Lindsay stands there, panting, gun outstretched. Then she sets it down on the nightstand. Three shots. It took little more than a second to end everything. It was so easy, so meaningless. Her hand stings from the gun’s recoil. She wants to cry. Instead, she goes to a window and peeks around the edge of the flimsy curtain.