Skull Full of Kisses

by Michael West

  Becky.

  His granddaughter.

  It seemed only yesterday that Ira was tucking her into bed. She’d been a nurse working second shift at the hospital downtown. Three nights ago, headed home after work, she was in an accident. Becky drove a sporty little Saturn coupe. The drunk who killed her was behind the wheel of a Dodge pick-up. They met at an intersection just a mile from Tyler’s bed, probably as she was on her way to kiss him goodnight. She had the green, the drunk had the red, and neither stopped till they hit one another.

  They said she died instantly.

  Ira brushed the hair from Tyler’s face; his hand soft and decorated in liver splotches. “Did you know I had a twin brother?” It was not an answer to the question he’d been asked, not yet anyway, but the boy didn’t seem to care. He shook his little head, his eyes half-lidded. “Yep,” Ira told him. “Identical down to every hair on our heads. This was back in 1932, back when I was about your age.”

  Tyler’s sad, sleepy eyes widened a bit at that. Ira thought his great-grandson looked shocked at the idea of this haggard old specter as a little boy.

  “I remember it so well,” he went on to say. “Peach and apple pies cooling in mother’s kitchen window...playing hide and seek amid sheets drying on the clothesline in the backyard…running through our father’s corn...”

  This last memory clouded the old man’s dawning smile.

  Whenever he’d been out there in the rows with Isaac, his twin, Ira’s imagination would always play tricks on him. Thick leaves hid dark spaces where anything might live. There were times when Ira could hear stirring in the distance and his mind would bring forth the worst nightmares it could conjure. Of course, the sounds they heard were made by unseen animals, maybe even their father or one of his hands working to de-tassel the crop, but they’d been seven-year-old boys. There was no television at that time, and Ira had yet to see his first movie. The only entertainment the family had back then was the radio and the radio plays. He would sit there on his living room floor, staring at this wooden box with the lighted tuning dial, and—if he closed his eyes—the sound would give him everything he needed to make a movie in the darkened theater between his ears. When they played in the corn, Ira and his brother Isaac, the sounds they heard weren’t animals or people. Those were the sounds of monsters from the radio plays.

  Ira shook his head and stared ruefully at Tyler, resuming his tale.

  “We’d hear these scary noises, then turn and hoof it back to father’s barn—laughing at who’d been more chicken before leaping into the piled hay. One day, when we went and jumped into that haystack...Isaac...he got hurt.”

  In Ira’s mind, they always ran in slow motion. The sound of their giggling seemed to echo through the air. It was just like a movie—one where the audience knows something the characters on screen are ignorant of. In this particular film, the audience knew about the pitchfork in the hay. Ira could almost hear the music building as they went to jump, as Isaac did his dive right onto the skewer.

  Tyler rose up on his elbows. “You mean he died.”

  Ira’s frown deepened. He remembered yellow hay stained red, remembered shock and agony shaking hands across Isaac’s face. Most of all, he remembered his father crying as he scooped up his son and ran with him back to the house. By the time they reached the front step, Isaac had passed out and Dad was soaked down to his knees in blood.

  Ira put a hand to his face, pulled his weathered cheeks down to his chin, then gently pushed Tyler back onto his pillow. “He didn’t die right then and there. Not then. But my parents knew, if they didn’t get some help, he would.”

  “Daddy says an ambulance came for Mommy. He said the Firepeople tried to save her, but she’d already gone to Heaven.”

  Ira’s smile returned. “That’s right, Tyler. See, some people go to Heaven right away and others...well, they stay around a while.”

  “So your Daddy called an ambulance and they saved your brother ‘cause he—”

  “Oh, no. See, back then we didn’t even have a phone. Back then; Harmony was just a bunch of scattered farms somebody somewheres decided they’d call a town. We only had one doctor—Doc Blake his name was—and he was off visiting family that day. There was a hospital in the next town, though, and Dad went to fetch somebody to help.”

  “They didn’t take your brother with them?” Tyler asked softly.

  “No. They were too scared to move him. Besides, doctors came right to the house back then. They came out and gave you an exam right there in your own bed. Except, I noticed they didn’t put Isaac in his bed. They put him in mine. Mom had wrapped his gut up good—that’s where he was hurt—” Ira gave Tyler’s belly a pat. “—the gut—and she was crying the whole time. Dad had gone off to get the Doctor and it was just the three of us in that hot little room. Mom sat down in a rocking chair next to the bed. Her lips kept moving and I could tell she was praying. I could tell this was bad. I asked her, ‘Is he gonna die?’ And she looked shocked that I’d even thought such a thing. She told me, ‘He’s gonna be fine, Isaac. He’s gonna be right as rain.’”

  “She lied, didn’t she? She said he’d be fine and then he died.”

  “No. What she said she believed. Even if she had her doubts, she wouldn’t want to scare me. But she also got our names mixed up.”

  “ ‘Cause you were twins.”

  Ira nodded. “And that gave me an idea. It was a silly idea; now that I look back on it, but at seven...I thought it was the best idea ever. See, if Mom thought I was Isaac... and if the Angel of Death was looking for Isaac...why, I thought I’d fool Death into thinking Isaac was fine. I thought, if Death came for him, I’d show him my belly and he’d go away. And then Isaac wouldn’t have to die.”

  Tyler offered his great-grandfather a skeptical look. At seven, he’d already begun to question things adults told him. “This is a Fairy story,” the look said. “This isn’t real at all.”

  “You believe in angels, don’t you?” Ira asked.

  The boy looked suddenly hurt. “Sure. Mommy’s with them right now.”

  “That’s right.” He squeezed Tyler’s shoulder and went on. “Anyway, like I said, it was a silly idea, but I went with it. That night, we waited for Dad to come—waited for the Doctor, but they never showed. It got dark outside and Mom kept wiping Isaac’s sweaty face with a towel. I pretended to be asleep, pretended not to see her crying and praying. After several hours, holding Isaac’s hand in hers, sleep just overcame her. When I think back on it, I think the Angel of Death put her to sleep—made it so she wouldn’t see what was gonna happen.”

  Tyler swallowed. “What happened?”

  “After a few minutes, the room got real cold and I see this shadow in the doorway. At first I thought it was Dad, thought he had trouble finding help and he was back to watch his boy die. Then the shadow moved into the room and I realized it wasn’t a shadow at all. It was a figure... dressed all in black...Black robe...Black hood...Black wings...”

  “It had wings?”

  Ira nodded. “Just like an angel, ‘cept these were all black—like a raven. He came into the room and walked right over to the end of my bunk—the one where they’d put Isaac. He reached out and grabbed hold of the wooden footboard, and I could see his hands. They were white as ash and you could see each and every bone in his fingers. It was like there was no muscle at all, just skin over bones. The worse thing, though, was the fingernails. They were like bits of that harvest candy corn you like so much ‘round Halloween—yellow at the tip and black where they went under the skin.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I sat up in bed and I says, ‘You’re here for me, aren’tcha?’

  “Death turned to look at me and I shuddered. I could see a face now, swimming in the dark under that hood. It was a withered face—the face of a man who’d never had so much as a crumb to eat, and it was albino white. There were two holes in his head where his eyes should’ve been.” Ira pointed at his own eyes for emph
asis. “Like caves.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “I was so scared, I thought I might just go and wet my brother’s bed. But I didn’t.”

  “What did the angel do?”

  “Well, he actually walked over to me, and I could smell him way before he got there. Like fruit that’s gone bad and drawn flies. He walked over to me, looked me up and down, then he says, ‘I was sent for Isaac.’ So I tell him, ‘I am Isaac. But, I’m fine, see.’ And I pulled up my shirt to show him my clean, tanned stomach.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “No. Told you it was a silly idea. The angel knew who he’d come after, and he knew I wasn’t it. He just turned around and took a step back toward Isaac.”

  Ira remembered what happened next all too vividly, but he didn’t think he should share it with his great-grandson. Even now, after the eighty years that followed, he still didn’t like to dwell on it.

  Death had turned around, had taken a step toward his dying brother.

  Ira reached out to stop him, clutching a fistful of the specter’s cloak (it felt rough, like frayed rope) and a glut of imagery doused his brain. He saw the sons of Egypt crying out in the night...witnessed children covered in black welts, lying on streets of cobblestone...spied men through a wall of barbed wire—yellow stars on their striped shirts and numbers on their arms...beheld a light brighter than the sun and watched it burn a little Asian boy to a cinder...watched helpless as a soldier put a gun to a man’s head and fired it...saw a woman bleeding from her eyes beneath a shroud of mosquito netting...witnessed two tall towers crumbling into clouds of debris...saw the end of days. Ira fell back against his pillow; releasing his grip on the garment, and the tour of mortality came to an abrupt halt.

  Death glanced back over his shoulder. His face was no longer the malnourished visage of an old man. It was a fanged skull with bonfires blazing in the pitted, hollow sockets of its eyes.

  Ira covered his face with his hands. He thought if he looked into those flames he might just turn to salt—the way Lot’s wife had on the mountain. God told her not to look at His wrath, not to watch the Angel of Death at work, but she went and did it anyway. He could just see his mother waking up the next morning with one son dead in his bunk and the other a statue. If that happened, he thought the angel might have to come back tomorrow night for her.

  “What did Death do?” Tyler wanted to know.

  Ira rubbed his eyes. “I screamed at him, ‘It’s not fair!’ Part of my brain was telling me to be quiet, that I might wake up Mom, that Death might do something to her. But I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop. I just kept screaming, ‘It’s not fair! It’s not fair!’ Just like you’ve been screaming it these last three days.”

  Tyler said nothing, but his eyes could not hide their surprise. He’d been shrieking out at the injustice of it all, but he didn’t think anyone knew about that. He’d done it in the silence of his mind, crying himself to sleep at night.

  “I told the angel, ‘Why was he even born if you just have to go and take him now?’” Ira wiped a racing tear from his great-grandson’s cheek. “Wanna know what he said?”

  The boy nodded.

  “He says, ‘He was here so that you would know him, so that your life would be all the better for the experience, so that you could carry his memory with you as long as you might live.’ Well, I don’t mind saying I thought that was a mighty poor excuse. I didn’t want my brother’s memory. I wanted him.”

  Tyler nodded his agreement.

  “But then Death said something else, he says, ‘He will never leave you. He will watch over you. And you will meet again.’”

  Upon hearing that, Ira remembered opening his eyes—seeing that Death had returned to his kinder, gentler appearance. He watched the hooded figure bend down and stroke his brother’s hair with those spindly fingers. The action was tender and loving, but it made Ira’s stomach roll just the same.

  “And then the angel grabbed hold of Isaac’s hand,” he wanted Tyler to know, “and the boy just kind of sat up out of himself. He was still lying there on the bed, still holding Mom’s hand, but he was also getting up to stand next to the bunk, holding Death’s bony fingers in his own. And you know what? He was smiling. That’s what’s always stuck with me. My brother was holding this horrid, skeleton hand...and he looked happy about it.”

  “Did you get to say anything to him? Did you get to tell him you loved him?”

  “No, Tyler. I couldn’t have said sh—poop if my mouth had been full of it. Besides, he knew all that. All I could do was sit there, watching him. And he just kept smiling, and then he looks over at me and he says, ‘Goodnight.’ Not, ‘Good-bye.’ He just said, ‘Goodnight.’ You know the difference?”

  “I think so.” Tyler rubbed his eyes, losing his fight against the coming sleep. “Then what?”

  “Then the angel spread his black wings and I was out like a light. The next morning, Dad and Mom were crying. They told me Dad’s car had broken down, said he had to walk all the way to the next town. By the time the doctor drove him back it was too late. Isaac died.”

  “Did you tell ‘em what you saw?”

  “No. Not then. They were too upset. I told my Mom years later, though. She thought it was a dream I must’ve had.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  Ira thought of all the images he’d seen upon touching Death’s robe—images of doom both past and future. He saw them again over the years that followed; saw them as they actually occurred. They were all too real.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

  “And your brother watched over you, like Death said he would?”

  There were so many times in Ira’s life when he felt a presence. When he graduated from high school. On his wedding day. When Becky’s father, Richard, had been born. So many times he knew Isaac was with him.

  Ira nodded.

  “And did you really meet him again?”

  The old man smiled. “Yeah. I did.”

  Tyler yawned, and then—for the first time in days—he too was able to form a grin. Slowly, his eyes fluttered closed and sleep finally wrestled him to unconsciousness.

  Ira ran his hand through the boy’s hair one last time. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew it was time. He wanted to be there to greet Becky, wanted to tell her that her son would be just fine—that Tyler knew she would always be with him. He leaned down, placed a gentle kiss on his great-grandson’s forehead, then rose to his feet.

  “Goodnight,” he whispered.

  Ira Howard turned, walked through the wall of the boy’s bedroom, and evaporated into the night.

  ####

  NOTES

  Consider this your “spoiler alert.” I’m about to talk about the stories featured in this collection and how they came to be. In some cases, I’m going to let details slip that might ruin the endings and thereby rob you of your ability to enjoy these stories to their fullest. So, if you’re a faithful reader who has touched every page of this volume, please, by all means, read on. But, if you’re one of those anxious people who like to skip ahead, well...you’ve been warned.

  ***

  Jiki

  This story was inspired by my love of Asian horror, the films of Takashi Miike in particular (Ichi the Killer, Audition). Much of Miike’s early work deals with Yakuza codes of honor and tests of loyalty. One day, as I was doing research into Japanese folklore, I came upon the Jikininki—demons who eat the dead—and I thought, “That would be a unique way for the mob to get rid of bodies. A thousand times better than cement shoes!”

  After I stopped laughing, the started hammering away on my keyboard.

  In an early ending, Jiki came right out and told the dying Koji, “I’m not Emiko.” One of my pre-readers, David Lichty, urged me to remove this line. I was reluctant at first, but I do think the story works much better without it.

  “Jiki” first appeared in City Slab magazine. And, when I opened my contributor’s copy, I found my tale right
next to an interview with...Japanese director Takashi Miike. Amazing how things work out.

  ***

  The Bridge

  “The Bridge” was written as the prologue to a novel. I cut it early on due to pacing issues, deciding it was better to let Kim relay this story to a friend in her own words rather than watch it as it happens. In this way, the reader can see how the event still haunts her, and can question whether or not they really believe it took place.

  Despite its removal from the manuscript, I loved the tension in this scene, the creepiness of it. It had the feeling of a great campfire tale. And, when Wicked Karnival magazine put out a call for Halloween-themed stories, I sold it to them.

  ***

  Dogs of War

  I wrote “Dogs of War” in the first person...and it just didn’t work. Readers immediately suspected that the narrator was crazy. But when I changed it to third person, it had just the opposite effect—they didn’t get that he was crazy at all. Then an editor suggested adding the newscaster at the end and it all came together.

  When I wrote the final line about the kids, I have to admit, I got goosebumps.

  ***

  Trolling

  As with so many of my tales, the ending of “Trolling” came to me in a dream. Most people have sex dreams about movie stars, musicians, etc., but mine get directed by H.P. Lovecraft. I wrote it up for a market called, appropriately enough, Cthulhu Sex, but the magazine folded. Finally, it saw print in the Indiana Horror Writers anthology, Dark Harvest.

  ***

  Einstein’s Slingshot

  I’ve always been fascinated by dinosaurs. I regularly watch Discovery Channel specials and read news reports on paleontologist’s new discoveries. One day, I found a gallery of artwork—paintings of feathered dinosaurs, and I was inspired to write about them.

  When I’d finished, I sent the story to APEX: Science Fiction and Horror Digest. Editor Jason Sizemore liked the tale, but ultimately rejected it because he said it made him think of Jurassic Park. Of course, it was hard for me to be angry; in his letter, Jason compared my writing to O’Henry.

  As you might have guessed, I’m a huge Twilight Zone fanatic, so the ending was a tip of the hat to Rod Serling.