by Vivian Barz
The lights powered back on, and they were gone. No woman, no decaying kids, no blood.
Eric rubbed his eyes. They had only been there for an instant, but they had been there, and he had seen them. They were so real—how had nobody else seen them?
Eric yelped when a small hand fell onto his forearm.
It was Jake’s. “So I just talked to the owner,” he said. “It’s going to be about ten, fifteen minutes until we can get rolling again—blown fuse or something. Care to join me at the bar for a pint? Our freebies have gone piss warm. Such a shame. Alcohol abuse, really.”
It took Eric a moment to process what Jake had said. “Do I . . . want to join you at the bar . . . ?” He managed a smile. “Sure. Just going to hit the head quick. Meet you over there.”
Jake’s face clouded with concern. “You all right?”
Eric flapped a hand. “Just, you know, haunted by old ghosts.” He chuckled flatly.
“The ex, huh?”
Strange—he hadn’t even thought of Maggie.
Eric hesitated. “You, um, didn’t see anything weird when the lights went out, did you?”
“Weird? Like what?”
Like a pack of dead children glaring at me. A sexy dead woman with half her face gone, perhaps? Eric shook his head. “Never mind. See you in a minute.”
Pull it together , he commanded himself as Jake walked away. You are fine. Because not being fine might suggest that you aren’t as in control of your schizophrenic brain as you think. Is that what you want—to be out of control?
No, that wasn’t what he wanted. Not at all .
When Eric got to the bar, Jake was surrounded by a group of fans offering lots of backslapping praise. Jake, though modest, was obviously relishing the attention. Smiling to himself, Eric ordered a drink from the cheery, spiky-haired bartender, whose bulging biceps were thicker than both of Eric’s thighs put together. Eric wondered if the guy also moonlighted as a bouncer. Or a lumberjack.
As he settled back with a beer, a voice to his right said, “You guys are playing really well tonight.”
Eric turned toward the source of the statement and discovered that it had been uttered by a gorgeous blue-eyed brunette. In front of her on the bar was a tall, fizzy soda with lots of crushed ice and the biggest platter of deep-fried food he’d ever seen: mozzarella sticks, fries, chicken strips, popcorn shrimp, and what looked like fried zucchini (because vegetables). She was chowing down unabashedly, which rendered her even more attractive in Eric’s eyes. He liked a woman who could eat.
“Thanks.” Eric smiled. “But don’t give me too much credit. I’m only standing in for tonight.”
“I know,” she said with a wink. “I’ve seen these guys play tons. But I like your modesty.” She elbowed the platter toward him. “Here, help yourself. I think my eyes were bigger than my stomach when I ordered this monster.”
“Thanks,” he said and pinched a fry. A fat gob of ketchup fell down his front as he went to pop it into his mouth. Of course it did.
“You’ve got red on you,” she deadpanned in a faux English accent and then chuckled self-consciously.
He laughed with her as he dabbed a cocktail napkin at his shirt. “Ha! I love Shaun of the Dead .”
Her eyes widened. “I can’t believe you got that! Nobody ever gets my film references.”
“Come on, Cornetto Trilogy? Classic,” he said. “Though Hot Fuzz is my favorite.”
“Mine too—though I also love The World’s End .”
As the woman dropped her hand from her chest, Eric noted that she was not wearing a wedding ring. She nudged the platter. “Have more, if you want. Just try to keep it in your mouth this time.”
“I’d better not. I still have to finish our set.”
“Yeah, might put a damper on your performance if you upchuck mozzarella sticks on the crowd.”
Eric laughed. Hot, and she kept it real. And she liked horror films. He had to get to know this dream woman. Even if she ended up rejecting him, he still had to try . “I’m Eric,” he said, extending a hand.
They shook. “I’m Susan.”
“That’s a big plate of food, Susan. Were you planning on eating it all by yourself?”
Susan threw back her head and cackled. “Was that your sly way of asking if I’m here on my own?”
Eric flushed, but still he asked, “Are you here alone?”
“Maybe.” She smirked. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Maybe.”
“Then maybe I’m here alone.”
In his mind’s eye, Eric was imagining her back at his place: first on the sofa and then in his bed. She seemed into him, so . . . he did a quick mental scan of the state of his bedroom and bathroom—not spotless but not so messy that he’d be embarrassed to bring a woman home. Did he have drinks to offer? Yep. He’d bought a case of Heineken when he’d gone to the store that morning. He didn’t have wine or any hard stuff, but she’d probably be okay with beer, given how she’d plowed through those chicken tenders. He didn’t have to work in the morning, which was good, since it would save him from having to engage in an awkward conversation about her needing to leave so he could lock up before—
“Yes,” she finally confirmed, leaning close to Eric so that he could hear her over the rowdiness of the crowd. “I’m here by myself. My friend actually bailed on me last minute.” Her skin brushed against his, and he practically ached with want. She picked up the cell phone next to the platter on the bar and gave it a small shake. “Which is good, I guess, since I’m waiting for a call that’s kind of for work. Then I’d be the one bailing.”
Eric was having a difficult time hearing her above the chatter of those lined up behind them waiting to be served by the lumberjack. “Oh, you’re on call? Are you a doctor or—”
“Eric! Eric!” Jake calling him to the stage. “Get your ass up here! It’s time to plaaaaaay.”
Eric laughed and waved at Jake, who was wiggling his fingers at him impishly. To Susan he said, “Will you still be here, you think, when we’re done?”
Susan checked the time on her phone. “Should be.”
“Eric!” Jake again.
“Okay, let’s talk some more when I’m done?” Eric said, making a move toward the stage.
“Looking forward to it,” she said with a wink.
As Eric neared the stage, he glanced back at Susan. She frowned down at her phone, lifted it to her ear, and left the bar in a hurry.
Well, so much for that.
Back at home after the show, Jake beeped the horn as he pulled away, leaving Eric tottering on the front porch. He realized just how plastered he was after six failed attempts at getting the damn key to make contact with the damn lock, stumbling over the doorstep once he made his way into the house.
Eric was being a very naughty boy. He wasn’t supposed to drink heavily on his meds—really wasn’t supposed to drink much at all, according to his doctor—but he’d wanted to let loose after their set. Let loose he certainly had, and he was now feeling pretty damn fine because of it.
He’d be feeling even finer if Dream Woman Susan had gone home with him, but . . .
“But fuck it—that’s life!” he chortled loudly in the stillness of the empty house.
As he headed toward bed, he followed up with a silent consolation: It’s a small town. Just a matter of time before I see her again. He didn’t realize how true this would turn out to be.
CHAPTER 20
Two chamomile teas and a hot bath later, Susan was still feeling wound up from the night. She moved around her house edgily, confused and a little frightened about what had happened at the show now that she was all on her own in a quiet house, and never mind the town’s darker history that she’d discussed with Pepper.
She put on music but found it too loud even at the stereo’s lowest volume, then turned to the TV for comfort. She settled on a made-for-television rom-com playing on a station known for its sappy love tales and bad acting. This wasn’t her sort
of entertainment, but tonight it suited her just fine. She needed the silliness of melodrama, the guarantee of a happy ending.
She’d liked the part of the night where she’d met Eric. He was cute and sweet enough that she was now kicking herself for not sliding him her contact information before he’d gone back onstage. She hadn’t expected Pepper to call so soon, but he did—a whole hour early—so she’d had to rush out to meet him. She was glad that she had, despite the missed opportunity with Eric. She’d learned a great deal of interesting, albeit unnerving, information that might be of use in her unofficial investigating. Although she now had a few reservations about the things Ed had been telling her.
The part that she hadn’t liked about her evening was what had happened when the lights had gone out at Luna’s. It was about as close to a panic attack as she’d ever come in her entire life: shortness of breath, the feeling of being closed in on, and an irrational urge to cry out. It had all vanished as soon as the lights had come back on, which was odd, since she’d never been afraid of the dark, not even as a child. It had happened so fast that it had been easy enough to brush off at the time. But now, in the quiet of the night, where every creak and groan of the house conjured images of a hidden boogeyman, the feeling was creeping back, instilling an anxiety within her, when usually home was where she felt the most relaxed.
Perhaps her chat with Pepper had something to do with it.
Pepper himself was jovial enough. He was the type who exuded energy even while sitting still. Susan pictured how he’d be first thing in the morning versus very late at night, and the vision was pretty much the same. He probably eschewed coffee for wheat grass and was a part of some kind of raw-food diet movement.
He was also the type to overshare. After conversing for no less than ten minutes, he’d somehow managed to fit bowel movements into the conversation, toilets specifically. “They’re doing it right in third world countries with their squat toilets,” he’d begun his rant. “Western toilets are bad for the body because they force users to sit at an odd angle, thus pinching the intestines. You’re never really emptying yourself out this way.” Susan had provided him a noncommittal “How interesting,” hoping that he’d take the hint and drop it. He’d powered on. “So the next time someone accuses you of being full of crap, they’re right!” Then, without pause, he’d switched topics to his Saint Bernard, who she’d learned was named Truffle.
Things got a little stranger from there. Later during their chat, Pepper had endorsed Ed’s claim that kids had gone missing in Perrick frequently back in the 1960s. But his follow-up offered a contradiction: they or their bodies had always been found.
The one exception being Lenny Lincoln.
Susan was now feeling uneasy about this new knowledge because of its implications. Either Ed was more burned out than she’d thought and was misremembering facts, or he’d gone out of his way to mislead her, probably in an attempt to dissuade her from further meddling in the Gerald Nichol case. Both possibilities did nothing to put her mind at ease.
She flopped down on the sofa, resting her chin in her hands. There was something else Pepper had said that also did not sit right with Susan. Lenny Lincoln’s disappearance, at least according to Pepper, had been a massive (eyes widening as he’d said it) deal back in the day. Kids back then did not simply vanish without a trace, he’d assured her. It was, he’d said, one of the most talked-about stories in town history, and any local who’d been alive at the time should remember it happening. So why had Ed downplayed it so much—was this yet another way he’d hoped to deter her investigation, or was he protecting her from something—like getting herself fired?
Pepper, though, would have been older than Ed at the time of Lenny’s disappearance; he would have been in his early twenties. After running some quick numbers in her head, Susan figured that Ed must have been around eleven or twelve years old at the time of Lenny Lincoln’s disappearance. Would the event have been significant enough to a young boy that he’d remember it over fifty years later as an adult? Susan herself had never heard the name Lenny Lincoln until the day Mary told her about his disappearance. But she also hadn’t been alive when it had occurred.
Pepper had also told her a great deal about the life of Milton Lincoln, Lenny’s brother, the most pertinent detail being that he was still very much alive. He was, in fact, still living in the same home that he had as a kid. The farm where Lenny Lincoln had gone missing.
CHAPTER 21
Passed out.
drunk
restless
freezing
pillow soggy and sheets damp with sweat and
thirsty
wants a drink of water more than anything but he is too weak to move and if he could just have one sip of water just one sip is all he needs he’ll be good and he won’t kick and he won’t bite and he won’t scream he promises to be a good boy if he could just have some
coughing
suffocating
can’t get air and he can’t see and it’s so black and things scratch and slither against him and bite at his toes and crawl into his ears when he sleeps and he sees nothing only darkness and he’s buried alive and the bad stranger snatched him and he’ll never see his mommy and daddy again and they warned him never to talk to strangers but he didn’t there was only a shadow and stranger danger
pulling
what are you doing to my sister please don’t hurt my sister I won’t tell I won’t tell I promise if you let me go I
Pulling
won’t say a word I won’t tell if you let me go please let me go please
PULLING!
“I won’t tell! I promise! I promise! Please just let me go home . . .”
Sobbing, Eric scrambled back on the bed until his spine slammed hard against the headboard. He clawed at the shriek blustering up in his vocal cords, hands flying instantly to his throbbing head. He felt drunk, thick, tired, and scared, and the blazing light he’d left on in the bedroom wasn’t helping.
Eventually, he caught his breath. He groped for the quilt that had gotten bunched down at his feet and yanked it up roughly. Shivering, he covered his naked, goose-pimpled flesh—
The quilt whooshed back down over him and off the bed completely.
Eric’s mouth dropped open, and a small, surprised yelp escaped him. He gaped at his curled fingers and then down at the foot of the bed, his brain about five steps behind his eyes. It was there a second ago, and then . . . ripped away . . . ?
???????????
Eric rubbed his scratchy eyes, jaundiced and wild. He’d hoped that he was still locked in a nightmare but now suspected he was very much awake when the familiar wheezing started below his feet and drifted higher, higher . . .
Higher.
The boy in denim overalls floated up from beneath the foot of the bed. In his small hands he held the patchwork quilt Eric’s mother had made in 1991, the year before a residually drunk driver on his way to the early shift had struck and killed her while she’d been taking a morning jog through their quiet suburban neighborhood. Eric could see the pink tint of fruit punch he’d spilled on it when he was ten, the hole he’d singed into it while smoking his first joint with Jim at sixteen, and he thought then with sharp, hysterical clarity: People do not imagine details like Kool-Aid stains and marijuana burns on their dead mothers’ quilts when they are hallucinating. This is real.
The boy released the quilt and drifted over the footboard, a squat, slatted rectangle of ugly forest-green-stained pine. A shockwave of nuclear unnaturalness discharged from the boy’s feet as they touched down on the bed.
Eric commanded his leg muscles to move—pleaded with them to run him right the motherfuck out of Dodge—but it was as if he’d been bound against the headboard by unseen ropes that bristled at his wrists and ankles, holding him upright and fetal positioned. He could feel them, these invisible bindings, cutting deep into his raw flesh.
The boy dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward Eric, catlik
e. Slowly, slowly. His palms left reeking imprints of pus and rotten skin on the sheets. Insects squirmed at the surface of his tiny features. Closing in, the boy’s cold, pungent wheezing tickled Eric’s bare skin, a grotesque contrast to the bloated warmth emanating from the boy’s decaying insides.
Eric wanted to scream—he tried to scream—but when his lips parted, a clump of dirt came tumbling out onto the sheets. He gagged as he saw a worm wriggling within it.
The boy sat back on his haunches. He reached deep into the pocket at the center of his overalls and pulled out a handful of . . .
If there is any mercy or goodness left in the world, I will faint. Or some magical force will swoop down and knock me right out, because if I see what that kid has in his hand—rat carcass, some other poor dead kid’s eyeballs—I will go insane and stay that way for a very long time. Maybe forever.
Eric, frightened to such a degree that he’d started to convulse, tried desperately to turn his head. It was as if it had been cemented in place. He groaned. Look away! Why won’t you look away?
The boy uncurled his hand.
“What d-do you want?” Eric sobbed. “Why do you k-keep . . . why don’t you t-t-ell me . . . w-what is it . . . oh God . . . oh God . . . w-w-what is it that you w-w-want f-from m-me?”
The boy rooted around his palm and pinched a spiky silver object between his thumb and forefinger. A jack. He cocked his arm back like he was aiming to pitch a baseball and then let it fly. The jack seared toward Eric comet fast and then stopped six inches from his face, floating directly between his eyes. It hovered there for only a second or two and then exploded like fireworks. Eric screamed. He tasted dirt on his tongue, and grit itched in his throat, but this time, he screamed .
The boy pitched another jack. Then another. Another.
Eric squeezed his eyes shut—pinched them together so tightly that his eyeballs watered and he started to see stars. This is not happening. There is no dead kid, and there are no jacks exploding in my face like little microbombs of death. Nope. Nuh-uh. After everything that’s happened these past few months, it was only a matter of time before I cracked up. Ticktock, baby, and now I’ve finally gone and lost the plot! The men in white coats can come take me away and electroshock the dead-kid hallucinations right from my loony brain—hell, they can zap all my memories, if that’s what they demand. Anything is better than this. Anything at all.
