by SM Reine
Was she the source of the goose bumps and chills? I didn’t know, but there was something else about her.
Do I know her from somewhere?
Maybe I was hallucinating. I had started doing that a few months ago. It was freaky as hell, and I was certain it had something to do with my drinking. Either that, or those ghostly blobs and shapes I saw during my late-night binges really did exist just on the periphery of my vision.
Or maybe you’re going crazy. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.
As I debated my sanity, standing there on the street corner, the real world got crazier than my head could ever have dreamed.
She stepped out into traffic.
Cars screeched to a stop. Horns honked. A truck swerved hard and went up on the curb and into some bushes. Had those bushes been people, they would have been injured or killed.
She doddered shakily across the street. She used a cane and she didn’t seem to give a damn about the cars piling up around her. I didn’t hear any actual collisions—I’m always alert for accidents, thanks to my job—and the further she got across the busy boulevard, the more clearly the coming cars saw her, and they were able to brake without hitting anything, her included.
She was headed, I was certain, for me.
My heart was hammering hard in my chest like a convict in a tin box, and I had broken out in a cold sweat. My throat was tight and my breathing was restricted. I swallowed with difficulty and opened my mouth to suck in some air.
Christ, I should really quit drinking.
But I couldn’t deny she was real, or that she was heading straight for me.
Horns honked. Someone shouted out a driver’s-side window. Most drivers seemed to resign themselves to a crazy old lady in their midst. A few seconds of delay and distraction, and maybe entertainment if they were lucky, and she’d be across the road and they could all get on with their life-and-death business.
And now she was across the street, and she stood in the littered gutter in front of me—
Who is she? Somebody my ex knows? That would make sense. They’re obviously both crazy, and like attracts like.
Of course, at one time, I had been highly attracted to my ex, as well.
I held my breath, rooted to the street corner. In front of me, the crosswalk light signal had turned green. The students were pouring across the street. I should be pouring with them, heading to the Great Wall of China.
But I didn’t move. Instead, I found myself staring down at the old lady as she approached me.
I definitely know her.
I didn’t know whether to run or help her up onto the curb. She didn’t give me time to decide.
She gripped my hand. And when she did, it all came back to me....
Jimmy and the mouse.
2
My eyes shot open.
Disoriented, I had no idea where I was, the world a glistening canyon of glass, steel, and reflected clouds. Then I heard the rumble of traffic, felt the sun hot on my face, and smelled something old and slightly foul, like a wino under a park bench or yesterday’s moo goo gai pan.
It’s lunchtime; I’m on Harbor Boulevard.
The old lady...
She was still there, still real, still holding my hand. I snatched it away and stumbled backward. Had I not quickly regained my balance, I would have stumbled all the way out into traffic. I steadied myself, fighting a strong sense of vertigo.
What the hell happened? Did I black out?
I remembered her reaching out to me, taking my hand, and then...nothing. No, not nothing. I had relived a memory. A very disturbing memory, one that I had done my best to keep locked away in the deepest vaults of my mind. But those vaults had somehow been opened....
The instant she had taken my hand.
The old lady stepped forward, directly in front of me. Despite myself, and despite the manic taxis and runaway mopeds zipping behind me, I took a small step back. I was disoriented. I felt...invaded somehow, as if something or someone had accessed my mind, and it was a disturbing sensation, to say the least.
We’ve all seen the movies where the demon comes into somebody’s head and makes that somebody do weird stuff. But I know movies from real life, and believe me, my life at times could have made a good horror movie. But I’d never felt possessed like that, where the closets of my brain were thrown open and the stuff stored in there had been dumped into the daylight.
Because that memory had been buried deep.
My best friend Jimmy, bitten by a mouse when we were kids rummaging in his dad’s garage for girlie magazines. The bite had been nothing serious, but enough to draw blood. In a week he was dead from rabies. From a damn mouse bite.
That mouse, nearly as big as a rat, black with a white streak down its back, had come to me in many a nightmare, but rarely did it creep into my waking life.
And this old lady had brought it out.
A wave of dizziness hit me and I grabbed the signal pole at the corner. I did my best to keep myself on my feet, hoping my fellow pedestrians wouldn’t notice. All I needed was for word to get around that I was wobbly on the concrete. That plus the chronic stench of booze would lose me my job. Which would evaporate my drinking money. And then where would I be?
I got it together, told myself one last time that possession and mind-reading and senior-citizen stalkers were only in the movies, even in southern California, and I scooted sideways, parallel to the curb, and then eased down the sidewalk.
The old lady followed.
Sweat was pouring from my brow, but that inexplicable chill lay beneath it like an iceberg in the tropics. Gone were my thoughts of fitting my lunch in. Hell, gone were all thoughts of eating altogether.
I’d be lucky if I didn’t dry heave.
Safely away from the street, I looked again at the old lady, still unsure if she was real or something that had been hidden away in that dream closet with Jimmy’s mouse. She was small. Barely five foot, if that. She had dark brown eyes, almost black. The skin around her face was so heavily wrinkled I had trouble finding the slit of her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or frowning. She looked ancient and displaced, as if she belonged in another country; hell, another time. She wore black clothing and a black, old-fashioned cap with a bit of dark lace or veil. Her dark shoes were scuffed, and her wardrobe was rumpled, drab, and out-of-fashion.
They were like something you’d have buried your weird aunt in, the aunt nobody really liked that much, whose passing left everyone sort of relieved she’d moved on to another plane.
“Who are you?” I asked, surprised that my voice sounded anything like my own. I half expected some sort of rodent’s squeak, or maybe a demonic groaning, as if I were a ventriloquist’s dummy of the damned.
She didn’t answer, and the river of the crowd flowed on around us. We were just two people of millions. Except one of us was crazy and the other was, well, me.
“What happened?” I asked her, more forcefully.
“The black mouse,” said the old lady, grinning. At least, I think she grinned. The fault lines near her mouth seemed to curve up. “The mouse with the white stripe.”
She knows about the mouse?
Was it she who had broken into the lock box of my mind, like a thief in the night? What the hell was happening? My God, I was just going to lunch, like any other day, thinking about not thinking about a drink....
“Do I know you?” I asked finally. I didn’t know what else to ask or say. She still looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. I was sure I had seen her somewhere before. Maybe here on the streets. Maybe she was part of the local homeless brigade.
“It does not matter, Albert Shipway. Because I know you.” Her voice was steady, with a very strong accent, vaguely European.
Pedestrians continued by, lucky people with lunches in their bellies. The sun continued to shine down on my face. I was here. This was really happening. I could feel my heart beating. Feel the warm wind on my cheeks. I wasn’t
dreaming. Was I?
She smiled crookedly, showing a couple of ochre teeth, her eyes searching my face. “I was coming to you, Albert, but you came to me. Isn’t that nice? Sometimes things just work out that way.”
She knows my name? Jesus, who is this woman?
I wracked my brain, but there was still no memory of her. Then again, my brain didn’t seem to be working right, anyway. As an insurance investigator, I’d learned that the simplest explanation was most often the right one. And the right one in this case seemed to be that she’d read my mind.
She knows about the mouse!
All of which added up to one thing: I didn’t like the simple explanation.
A small wind swept down the boulevard, blowing my tie up over my right shoulder. The wind was uncommonly cold for a summer day.
“Do I know you?” I repeated.
“It is easy to forget an old lady, no?”
“I don’t mean any disrespect, but—”
“Then perhaps you remember my daughter, Albert. You remember her very well, I imagine.” Her accent was so thick I was having a hard time understanding her. I was certain she said something about me knowing her daughter.
This is craziness. You seriously need to stop drinking, Al.
“Oh, I see you still do not remember. Ah, such a poor memory for someone so young.”
She reached up for my face with a slightly shaking hand. I flinched at first, but then watched as her impossibly small and shriveled hand drew closer.
And that’s when she slapped me. Hard.
“Jesus Christ! Why did you do that?” I touched my face, certain she had cut me, perhaps with a ring or a nail. I looked at my hand. There was indeed blood on my palm.
“And now it’s sealed, Albert Shipway.”
“What’s sealed?” I asked, touching my cheek again. My face felt as if it were on fire.
We had attracted a small crowd now. A man who had been talking on his cell phone snapped it shut and came over to us. He had a head like a rock dropped on a sack of mud, his menacing unibrow lowered in a caveman glare. He asked the old lady if everything was okay, eyeing me suspiciously, eager to play hero or at least stomp a white-collar guy back to the Stone Age.
The scene was so strange that I nearly laughed. And I would have laughed, too, if not for that lingering chill. One moment I’m walking to get Chinese food...and the next I’m being slapped across the face and challenged by a stranger.
And possessed, I thought, holding my stinging cheek. Don’t forget possessed.
Both of us ignored the man, and he stood there a moment, huge arms folded, before he drifted back toward the closest building, a bank fronted by fake granite. As he did, I stared at the old lady, surprised and shocked by what I saw: hate. Pure hate.
“We all have fears, Albert Shipway.” Her features softened, almost sympathetic now, or maybe a little pleased and smug. “You are about to meet yours.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” I shouted the words, surprising myself. I surprised even the man leaning against the wall. He bounced off and came over again. If I wasn’t so rattled I would have turned on him, glad to have something to punch, but the old lady had me completely shaken.
She raised up on her pointy tiptoes, and I flinched again, but she did not slap me. Instead, she reached up and touched my face. Her hands were as dry as parchment, the kind that would contain secrets written in blood. She cocked her head slightly and studied my face. The hate was gone from her eyes.
“You brought this on yourself, Albert Shipway. And you brought this on my family.” Her accent was so thick I could barely understand her. “Family” came out like “fem-lee.”
“Brought what on your family?”
“The boy is gone, but he will be found.” As she spoke, I had a feeling she was gazing through me like a crystal ball that held bad news. Her rheumy eyes grew distant and her eyelids fluttered. She could have been in a trance. Or having a seizure, some old-lady thing they get when they are riled and vengeful and looking around for a cane to beat somebody with. “But will he be found alive? Ah, that is the question. I see you will be with him. Maybe. I also see you dead, consumed by your fear. The future is always unknown. But I know a little bit.”
That narrows it down. In the future, I’m either dead or I’m not.
She gripped my face a little tighter with those wiry talons. Though I wanted to step back, I sensed a strange, almost electric connection, a spiritual bond, and that if I broke it too soon, something bad might happen.
Or you might just be losing your mind. What can be worse than this?
She squeezed tighter still and said, “There is good in you, Albert Shipway, but you brought this on my family, and you will receive no mercy.”
And with that she released me, and as she did, the strange connection was broken. I blinked as if I had just walked out of a carnival funhouse, only it hadn’t been so much fun.
She turned and quickly shuffled off. Just a little old woman with baggy clothes and crazy hair. She didn’t look back. Not sure what the hell had just happened, I don’t think I blinked or breathed for a full minute. The man on the cell phone watched her go, too, looked over at me, then turned and went into the bank.
What was all that nonsense about a boy?
I glanced at my watch. No time left for lunch.
But a drink only took seconds if I did it right.
And I planned to.
3
Still rattled and still hungry, I pushed my way through the glass doors to American Auto Insurance, carrying a cold, greasy sack of fries I’d picked up at the bar. I hated eating at my desk but today I had no other choice.
As crazy as my life had been over the last few years, I should have been used to it, but somehow crazy kept itself fresh, always coming up with a new twist.
I hate it when that happens.
And I was beginning to connect the dots between crazy past and crazy present.
But I wasn’t sure. I needed to make some calls.
As I entered my building, the two fingers of tequila burning in my gut like jalapeños, I saw them waiting just outside my office. There were two of them, both dressed in dark suits. One, a woman, stood looking at the painting on the wall near my door. The second was a man, and he was sitting in a client chair, legs crossed, playing with the seam of his trousers.
Detectives.
The dots connected themselves without any help from me. My stomach sank and the last shred of hunger faded. The tequila sluiced up the back of my throat like lava and I swallowed it down, wishing I had something stronger to pour on top of it and put out the fire.
Something bad had happened. I still didn’t know what, or to whom, but I had my suspicions, and they grew stronger with each step I took into my office and toward the waiting detectives. And I knew they were detectives, too. I had worked with too many of them to not know the look, and my ex had brought around her share, and I’m sure I wore the look of somebody who’d done something wrong.
Even though I hadn’t. Well, not recently and nothing more than a misdemeanor.
The young receptionist staffing the front desk watched me eagerly, glad for a break from boredom and driver complaints. As I drew closer, she said, “They’ve been waiting here for you since just after lunch.”
“Who are they?” I asked, but I knew the answer. I think, more than anything, I was buying time to gather my thoughts.
“Police,” she said. “Homicide detectives.” Her pretty face was trying its best to look professional, but her excited eyes gave her thoughts away: Police detectives! In our offices! Are you in trouble? Can I watch? This is just like television. I can’t wait to tell the boss!
“Hold my calls,” I said.
She nodded in disappointment and studied me as I passed her desk. All eyes were on me in the office, wondering what I’d gotten into this time. I ignored them all and headed toward my glass-enclosed office, which was part of a long row of such offices that ran along the
east wall. I was what was called a “negotiator,” which meant I often worked with attorneys to craft settlements. Which meant that attorneys and I, usually over the phone, often got into it, because they billed by the hour to act like they cared. Which meant negotiators needed enclosed offices to do their jobs. It was nice having my own office. I felt important. I had worked many years to reach this level, and only a few of us could tell the receptionist “Hold my calls.”
All that work and ambition suddenly felt for naught. The old lady had foretold this bad turn of events. The old lady had also known about the mouse. She’d also said something about my death. Hopefully, two out of three was as good as she got.
I slowed as I approached my office and the waiting detectives. As I did so, the woman caught me in her peripheral vision and turned her head away from my Magritte print of a faceless man. I’d have given anything not to have a face right then.
But I was stuck with the mug I had. The door was too far to make a run for it, and, anyway, curiosity doused whatever anxiety I felt. Not as good as a drink could have, but I took what I could get. I smiled weakly...and approached them.
4
The two detectives showed me their badges—Fullerton P.D.—and I pretended I’d never seen one before. They asked if we could speak in private, and I suggested my office. They thought that was a grand idea, and I showed them in, shutting the glass door behind them. Although we were alone in my office, we weren’t really alone. Two dozen prying eyes watched us curiously.
Just a rat in the cage.
I motioned toward the two client chairs in front of my desk and as they moved toward them, I stepped around my wide desk and sat behind it. My bowels felt like water. Or booze.
“You are an insurance negotiator,” said the male detective. He was adjusting the seam to his slacks again. As he did so, he looked from the seam to me, and then back to his seam again. I could sense anger within him that I couldn’t quite understand. He was younger than me, but he looked tougher, meaner. He also looked like he wanted to kick my ass, and focusing on his seam, diffusing his anger, was the only thing keeping him from doing so.
