The Fringe Dwellers

by Patrick K. Ball

  “Since you heard A-Train’s story, have you heard of any other deaths where the body was found, uh, looking like it was scared to death?” Ed asked.

  “Yeah. More than I’d care to admit. I always tried to dismiss ‘em, tried to find sumthin’ different ‘bout the description of the bodies, but even if only half of those were the same, we’re talkin’ about a whole shit-load. I-I think sumthin’s out there, Eddie, and I think it’s sumthin’ real, real bad.”

  “If something’s real, real bad, I hope you’re talking about the food and not the way you feel,” said Dr. Austin as he walked into Kane’s room.

  Startled, Ed jumped at the sound of the voice. He’d been so engrossed in Kane’s story that he hadn’t heard Dr. Austin entering the room. “Hi, Dr. Austin,” Ed said after he regained his composure.

  Dr. Austin stuck out his hand to Ed and asked, “How’s the patient today?” It didn’t seem like the doctor knew what they’d been talking about before he entered the room.

  “He seems fine to me,” Ed said while shaking the doctor’s hand.

  “Helloooo,” Kane said, sounding agitated. “I’m sittin’ right here. You can ask me directly, Doc, and then you can let me outta here.”

  “You know it doesn’t work like that, Kane,” Dr. Austin said. “You have to give us a chance to find out why you were acting like you did yesterday, so we don’t have a repeat performance. I’m still waiting on some tests results from yesterday, and I’d like to run a few more before I give you clearance to go. I also want a chance to sit down and discuss what happened. Something was bothering you yesterday and you were scaring people. It could’ve been because you, yourself, were afraid of something. I don’t like to see fear in anyone regardless of whether it’s a patient or someone walking down the street. Fear can be overcome.”

  Kane seemed to calm down. Whether it was due to the soothing tone of Dr. Austin’s voice or from Kane’s previous experiences with the system here, Ed didn’t know. All Ed knew was that he was suddenly tired; he wanted a nap.

  “Eddie!” Kane repeated, more forcefully.

  “Yeah,” Ed said. Dr. Austin had left the room, but Ed never saw him go.

  “I was talking to you. Did you hear anything I said?”

  “N-no, Uncle Kane. I’m sorry, I must’ve drifted off there for a second.”

  “I was sayin’ that since that croaker won’t let me go, then I might as well get me a little shut-eye. Besides, I’m feelin’ kinda sleepy right now. You come by later, Eddie, and we’ll talk some more. Okay?”

  “Yeah, that’s fine, Uncle Kane. I’ve got some stuff to do anyway. I’ll see ya later,” Ed said and left the room.

  That was weird, zoning out like that, Ed said to himself while walking down the hall towards the clinic’s entrance. Probably just over-tired and over-stressed.

  Ed decided that a nap was probably exactly what he needed, but then he remembered Torrie. He didn’t want to leave without at least saying goodbye. Besides, he didn’t know what time or where he was supposed to meet her for their date that night.

  It’s not a date. It’s just two old friends who haven’t seen each other in awhile getting together to catch up. What possible interest could Torrie have in a guy like me?

  “Hey there, handsome,” Torrie said as she poked her head out of her office doorway. Ed had walked right by it without even noticing. “Where ya going to in such a deep thought. You’re not trying to ditch me, are you?”

  “No way!” Ed said, a little too loud and defensively.

  Torrie smiled. Ed blushed.

  “I mean, no, I wouldn’t leave without at least poking my head in,” Ed said quickly, trying to hide his embarrassment. “I-I was just thinking about Uncle Kane.”

  “How’s he doing?” Torrie asked.

  “He seems fine, but Dr. Austin wants to keep him here for awhile longer for observation and to run some more tests.”

  “I’m glad he’s okay . . . and it’s a bonus if his extended hospital stay keeps you in town a little longer. Besides, we have a date tonight.”

  Ed’s mind exploded. She only means date in the sense of a meeting, not as a romantic rendezvous. Don’t freak out here.

  “You haven’t forgotten, have you?” Torrie said.

  “No, of course not.”

  “It just seemed like you had this look of terror on your face for a second, like you’d forgotten or something.”

  “Really, I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Good, ‘cause there’s nothing to be afraid of. I won’t bite—unless you want me to,” she said with a mischievous smile on her face.

  Is she flirting with me? Ed couldn’t believe his ears. He also couldn’t speak.

  “Here’s my home address and phone number,” she said as she wrote on the back of a business card. “Pick me up at seven. Okay?”

  “Seven, yeah,” Ed said blankly. He was still in shock.

  “See ya then,” she said and gave him a peck on the cheek. Then, she turned around and walked back into her office without looking back.

  That was good because Ed must’ve stood there for a full minute with his mouth wide open.

  CHAPTER 9

  Corpse: A human been.

  —Kay Goodman

  Ed was having a hard time focusing on his computer screen. He was trying to kill the six hours he had remaining until his date by getting some work done. But his lack of concentration was from more than just the apprehension of the impending date. It was also from more that the memory of the kiss from Torrie earlier. The story Uncle Kane told him at the clinic had his mind going in all sorts of different directions. He didn’t know what to think.

  Ed had always been so close to Uncle Kane, even as a kid, for the exact reason that was now disturbing Ed’s thoughts. Uncle Kane was always good for spinning a yarn of epic proportions. His chronicles of the adventures of some fictitious hero or explorer filled Ed’s imagination on countless afternoons. It wasn’t too far from the realm of possibilities that the story Uncle Kane told him this morning was just another one of his mythic sagas. Maybe he was just trying to entertain Ed like he’d done so many times in the past. But what if he was telling the truth this time? What then?

  That was the second part of Ed’s dilemma. What then? What if there actually was some mysterious creature or force that was roaming across America, sucking the life-blood out of random vagrants. If that were true, then the odds of anyone ever linking the deaths was basically nil. For one thing, there was never any evidence of foul play. Nobody investigates a death from presumed natural causes no matter how weird the deceased appeared. Coroners are too busy in a big city and too inexperienced in a small town. No wires go out asking if any other jurisdiction has come across a similar discovery.

  The biggest factor though was the identity of the victims themselves. If Uncle Kane was right, and only derelicts were being targeted, then there was no one to care. There would be no death notice in the local paper, no press to write a retrospective of his life. These type of people are invisible, even in a big city. Ed thought about all the times that he’d walked by some homeless person begging for change and barely even noticed him. If Ed happened to walk by the same place the next day and the homeless person wasn’t in the same spot, Ed never wondered where that person was. He never wondered if the person was all right, never cared if he were dead or alive. The bum was forgotten; not even a memory survived.

  The Crash Test Maven also fell into this category. Although he wasn’t living on the streets, he was an outsider as far as society was concerned. He had no family, no friends, no one who cared. He was a fringe dweller. It was only random chance that someone found his body as soon as they did. In fact, Gibsonton’s population of showpeople had a lot in common with Edge Key’s transient population. Both circus freaks and vagrants were outcasts from normal society and both had found a little place to carve out a home for themselves.

  But The Crash Test Maven’s death did add another layer to the mystery. T
he fact that he wasn’t homeless meant that anyone who wasn’t living in the midst of normal society was at risk. So, how close to the center of the norm did a person have to be to be safe? People in the public eye would be safe under this theory, but what about a single person living alone, working for a large factory where everyone is basically faceless? Would that person be safe? How public would your life have to be in order to be safe from having the life-force sucked out of you?

  Uncle Kane had also said that this creature would hunt random victims. Ed knew without calling Behavioral Sciences in Quantico that serial killers are so difficult to catch because there’s nothing to link the victims to the killer or to even link the victims themselves, outside of a possible physical resemblance. Those cases are usually solved by pure luck.

  Given these circumstances, a human serial killer could kill at will for as long as he wanted without fear of prosecution or capture. But Uncle Kane had told Ed that it wasn’t a human stalking victims, but a creature feeding on prey. Even if Ed could find a definitive pattern of similar deaths, who’d believe him?

  “I’m Kochak the frigging Night Stalker!” Ed said to his computer as he threw his arms up in disgust.

  Then, the most disturbing thought he’d had so far hit him: If the killer wasn’t human, could such a creature be stopped even if he could get people to believe him, even if they knew what they were looking for, even if . . .

  “Jeez-Louise, Ed. You gotta stop thinking about this. You’re gonna give yourself a coronary,” Ed said to his reflection in the mirror across the room.

  Enough of this. No more work. Think happy thoughts, Ed thought while still looking in the mirror. Happy thoughts. Yeah, right. His life was crap. What happy thoughts were there to think of?

  Ed’s mind drifted back to earlier that day. Soft lips touching a cheek. The lips from the most beautiful girl in the world against his cheek. Torrie. You couldn’t ask for a happier thought. Ed smiled as he relived the moment—and dreamed of the moment repeating itself later, during his date.

  His mind floated back to another time when he’d felt those lips touching him. The first time he’d tasted those lips. The first time he’d tasted any lips. His first kiss. She’d kissed him and ran off—or did she fly off like an angel? He strained to remember what happened after the kiss. It wouldn’t come, so he tried to remember what happened before the kiss. Maybe that would jog the memory.

  Wanna see a dead body, kid? Heh, heh, heh . . .

  “Where the hell did that come from!” Ed yelled into the mirror.

  Before she kissed him, Torrie had told him about the police discovering a dead body over in Vagrant-ville. She was trying to convince him to go see Uncle Kane so they could find out the scoop on the dead guy. That’s why she’d kissed him. It was a bribe. A dead body. Uncle Kane had talked about a dead body. Rico’s body. The victim of the creature stalking the fringe dwellers. Was this the body Torrie had been referring to?

  There had to be hundreds of bodies found over in Vagrant-ville over the years. The chances of the two bodies being the same were astronomical. But still . . .

  * * *

  Boo! the gruff voice said as a blanket was pulled back from the body.

  Eddie could hear laughing from somewhere deep in his mind, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. All his senses were glued to the image in front of him. Eddie’s eyes were shocked wide open in horror, his mouth agape as he stared at the body. It wasn’t just a normal dead guy—he’d been to an open-casket funeral before—the body seemed to be frozen, a snapshot of the final terrifying moment of its life. Its mouth was wide open, but Eddie heard no scream coming from the body. Its hair was an odd, unnatural shade of white as if the color had been sucked out at the last second. But the worst was the eyes—they weren’t there. Only bloody sockets remained where the eyes should have been. Eddie followed the trail of dried blood from the eye sockets to its destination. The trail of blood ended at the body’s hands. The hands were staring back at Eddie. The hands had eyes! The mystery of the empty eye sockets was solved.

  Eddie heard screaming from somewhere far away and then realized the sound was coming from him. The blanket covering the body was quickly pulled back over the body, but Eddie continued screaming—right up until he blacked out.

  * * *

  Torrie and Eddie had gone over to Vagrant-ville to find Uncle Kane to ask about the body. It all came rushing back to Ed in a sudden flood. There was a huge commotion on Goldust Avenue when they got to the area of Vagrant-ville. Torrie and Eddie had run up to the crowd surrounding the source of the excitement, but they were too short to see over the adults’ heads. They couldn’t see what was at the center of the crowd. Ed remembered several adults scolding them and telling them to go home, that this wasn’t something for young kids to see. Most of the adults, however, were oblivious to their presence. At some point, Eddie was separated from Torrie. That’s when he was able to wiggle his way up to the front of the crowd as if making his way to the front of a street parade.

  When he got up to the front, an older policeman was standing in the middle of the crowd with several other officers milling around behind him. The officer in front was telling people to stay back from something. “Stay back six feet from the crime scene or I’ll run ya in for obstruction.” There was a blanket covering something just behind his feet. The cop seemed pretty grumpy, until he spotted Eddie.

  The old cop smiled and bent down to one knee. “Come here, kid. I wanna show you something. I think you’ll like it.” All the while, he had this strange grin on his face.

  Eddie tentatively walked over to the policeman.

  That’s when the bastard asked him if he wanted to see a dead body. That’s when the bastard pulled the blanket off. That’s when Eddie saw the body. The horror of that day had been suppressed in Ed’s mind for over thirty years. That bastard-cop had purposely traumatized a little kid.

  Ed was fuming at the realization, but revenge wasn’t something that came naturally to Ed. Then again, neither was anger. He was used to being everyone’s doormat. That was his personality. Ed never fought back—until now.

  An idea struck Ed. Not only could he get some payback against that bastard-cop, but he would be doing some necessary investigative journalism into the apparent tie-in between the Edge Key body and the Gibsonton body. He’d go down to the police station and pull the file on the investigation into that strange discovery. There had to be records of it somewhere even if they’d been transferred onto microfilm. They couldn’t deny his access to the records. Not only was he a member of the press, but these were public records. Thank God for the Florida Sunshine Laws that allowed public access to all public records.

  There would be a report listing all officers present at the scene. All he had to do was cross-reference those names with their personnel files and look for the oldest officer present. Once he had the officer’s name, he would write an article about the Edge Key discovery and its likeness to the discovery of The Crash Test Maven. Of course, he would tell a related story about how the bastard-cop felt the need to traumatize a little kid on the scene. And he would name names. Ed would trash that bastard-cop’s reputation. The sweetest dish of all is revenge, and it’s a dish that’s best served cold. Ed decided he was hungry for a nice, cold plate of revenge—for once in his life.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Hello, Officer Moore,” Ed said to the desk sergeant sitting behind the counter at the Edge Key Police Department. In front of her was a large name-plate with, “Sergeant Moore.” Behind her were a phone, computer and radio. She apparently did double duty as both the desk sergeant and dispatcher. She was short and chunky, not your typical looking police officer. Her hair, dyed jet-black, was styled in a poofy, bouffant permanent and she had reading glasses dangling around her neck attached by a silver chain. She was also an older lady, probably pushing sixty or so, with a grandmotherly feel to her. Officer Moore looked more like a librarian than a cop—except for the nine-millimeter in her
side holster.

  “Shoot. We ain’t that formal ‘round here. Call me, Shannon, please,” she said with a pleasant smile.

  Ed smiled back at the officer. “Okay, Shannon. I was hoping you could help me.”

  “Well, that’s my job, boy. We don’t just protect, we’re also here to serve,” she said with that same, high-pitched, bubbly drawl that reminded Ed of Dolly Parton.

  “I grew up here in Edge Key-”

  “Well, ain’t that a hoot. There ain’t too many people around who can say that. Most just come and go, but no one lays down any roots no more.”

  “Honestly, I left the Key after high school, so I guess I’m one of those with no roots anymore.”

  “Long as ya got memories of where ya came from, ya got roots. Bet you still call this old town home. Tell me if I’m lyin’.”

  He couldn’t argue. He hadn’t lived here in more than twenty years—had never wanted to return—but it was still the place where he’d grown up. It was home. “No mam, you’re not lying.”

  “Well, now that we’ve established that I ain’t no big, fat liar, what can I do for ya?”

  “Have you worked here for long?”

  “Bet I’ve worked here longer than you’ve walked God’s earth.”

  “About thirty-four years ago, a dead body was found over in Vagrant-ville-”

  “Shoot, we find bodies over there all the time, especially since that crack cocaine nonsense came along.”

  “You’d remember this body. It was different. When it was found, the hair had turned white, the mouth was frozen open like he’d been screaming and he’d clawed out his own eyes.”

  Shannon’s pleasant demeanor was gone, replaced by a nervous frown. “Why you want to go draggin’ up ugly stuff like that for?”

  “You do remember, then?”

  “What’s your name, boy?”