by Tim Waggoner
TIM WAGONNER
Your Turn to Suffer
FLAME TREE PRESS
London & New York
*
This one’s for David Lynch, dreamer of the dark and wondrous.
Prologue
“Can I ask you a question?”
Lorelai Palumbo – who preferred to be called Lori – didn’t register the man at first. She’d just left work, and her mind was on the last client she’d had, a twelve-year-old boy named Stevie. He’d been struck by a hit-and- run driver, after running into the street in an attempt to catch his new chiweenie puppy, which had made a mad dash for freedom when he’d opened the front door to go out to play. The dog had escaped being hit, but Stevie hadn’t been so lucky. He’d needed multiple surgeries, and the bones of his right arm and left leg were held together by so much metal he joked that he qualified to be called a cyborg now. Today hadn’t been his first physical therapy session, but it had still hurt like hell, so much so that he was in tears by the end of it, and she felt as if she’d been torturing the poor boy. But Stevie wasn’t the only thing occupying her thoughts. After Stevie and his mom left, her supervisor, Melinda Dixon, had gotten on her ass about taking it too easy on the boy toward the end of his session.
We have to help them fight through the pain, Melinda had said. Help them not be afraid of it. But in order for that to happen, we first have to let them feel it. All of it.
Melinda’s words had infuriated her, especially because she feared the woman was right. She hadn’t intentionally gone easy on Stevie, but seeing him cry like that had torn at her heart, so she wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d subconsciously backed off and not made him work as hard as she should’ve.
And if all that wasn’t enough, she was also thinking about last night’s phone conversation with Justin.
Just because I’m not comfortable with your ex-boyfriend staying at your place until he ‘gets on his feet,’ doesn’t mean I’m insecure. I think my reaction is perfectly reasonable, given the circumstances.
The accumulated stress had given her a headache, a bad one. Her head pounded like hell, and she was beginning to see flashes of light in the corners of her vision. She was on the verge of triggering a stress-induced migraine, and if she didn’t want to lie in a dark room for the next three days feeling as if her head was going to explode any second, she needed to take some Fiorinal – and fast. She’d been meaning to get her prescription refilled, had even called it in, but with one thing and another, she hadn’t stopped by the pharmacy to pick it up yet.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Luckily, the pharmacy was only a couple of blocks from where she worked. She’d decided to walk instead of drive. She knew from experience that her headache would worsen faster if she tried to drive, so she wasn’t going to get behind the wheel of her car until she got some Fiorinal into her system. The medicine made some people drowsy, but she’d been taking it so long that it didn’t affect her that strongly. Still, she might call Justin and ask him to drive her home – assuming he still wasn’t too pissed off at her. Screw it. She didn’t feel like dealing with him right now. She’d call an Uber instead.
So, with Stevie, Melinda, Justin, and her raging headache on her mind, if the man hadn’t stepped in front of her and repeated his question, she most likely would’ve continued walking down the sidewalk, passing him by without ever noticing him. But she definitely noticed him now – had to stop abruptly to avoid colliding with him, in fact.
He was in his sixties, maybe seventies. He had a neatly trimmed white mustache and wore a brown suit with a garish yellow tie. He wore a fedora, and she couldn’t tell if his hair was as white as his mustache or if he was bald. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him, nothing concerning. At least at first glance. But then she saw the haunted look in his eyes, and a chill rippled down her spine. He looked as if he’d seen something awful, and her first thought was that the man was in shock. That, or he was insane.
He smelled of a cologne she didn’t recognize, as well as the lingering scent of tobacco. He was a smoker. The combined smells turned her stomach, and caused her head to pound even harder. The pain was so intense that for a moment she thought she might throw up on the man. She didn’t, but it was close.
She saw something move in the man’s eyes then, dark threads that passed across the whites like fast-moving storm clouds. Then they were gone. She put them down to a visual hallucination caused by her migraine, and she forgot about them.
His words registered on her consciousness then – Can I ask you a question? – and without thinking about it, she said, “No.” She quickly stepped around him and continued down the sidewalk, moving at a faster pace than she had before.
Her reaction to the man had been an instinctive one, without thought or consideration. Her head felt as if it was going to split open any second, and that look in his eyes, as if whatever he had seen that had bothered him so was playing on an endless loop in his mind, had warned her not to talk to him.
She couldn’t stop herself from glancing back over her shoulder at the man, even though she knew that by doing so she might encourage him to approach her again. He stood on the sidewalk looking at her, a sad expression on his face, but he made no move to come after her.
She looked forward once more.
You need to get your medicine, she reminded herself. Besides, he was probably going to try to sell you something, maybe ask for a donation to a church or charity. Either way, he’d be used to people not wanting to talk to him, right? He wouldn’t take her rejection personally.
Would he?
An SUV drove past then, and late-afternoon sunlight flashed off its windshield, piercing her eyes like a pair of white-hot metal spikes. The pain in her head intensified, driving out all thoughts of the man who’d tried to ask her a question. Squinting to block out the light, she continued down the sidewalk toward the pharmacy and the relief that awaited her within.
Chapter One
Where the hell is the garlic powder?
It was a week after her terrible migraine. Lori stood in the baking aisle of FoodSaver, a plastic shopping basket gripped in her left hand, purse slung over her right shoulder. The basket contained ingredients for her dinner – wheat pasta, low-sodium marina sauce, grated parmesan cheese, vegetable-oil-based margarine, and a package of French bread she’d picked up in the store’s bakery section. She was going to make spaghetti tonight, and she planned to accompany it with what remained of the chardonnay she’d picked up earlier in the week. Larry wasn’t going to be home this evening. He actually had a gig, the first one in a couple weeks, and Justin had to work late tonight. She was on her own, and she intended to enjoy this rare night of solitude. She’d go home, make her food, pour the wine, and sit on the couch and eat while she watched the new season of her favorite comedy series that had dropped on Netflix today. There was a problem, though. She always made garlic bread to eat with spaghetti – she hated the premade frozen kind – but how was she supposed to make her own without any goddamn garlic powder?
She faced the shelves where containers of spices had been arranged in neat rows and organized alphabetically by the ingredients they held: allspice, anise, basil, bay leaves, black pepper…. Garlic powder should’ve been between fennel seed and ginger, but it wasn’t. Not only was it absent, there wasn’t an empty space where it should’ve been. She’d bought garlic powder here before. Did FoodSaver not carry it anymore? No, that was crazy. Garlic powder wasn’t some exotic spice with a hard-to-pronounce name that no one had heard of. It was a normal, everyday ingredient that people used all the time. It made no sense for it not to be here.
May
be someone put it in the wrong place, she thought.
She started at the beginning – allspice – and slowly read the label of each container on the shelves. She knew she was being foolishly stubborn. She could have spaghetti without garlic bread, probably shouldn’t eat it in the first place. There were enough carbs in the pasta as it was. She didn’t need the extra in the bread. But once she’d fixed her mind on something – such as creating a perfect night for relaxing – she didn’t give up easily. Besides, she needed to relax. Melinda had busted her metaphorical balls at work today for going too hard on an elderly woman who’d recently undergone hip replacement surgery. This after chiding her for going too easy on Stevie last week. She wished the woman would make up her goddamn mind on how hard she wanted Lori to work her patients. She went through the spices all the way to the end – vanilla extract – without finding garlic powder. She knew it was going to be a wasted effort, but she decided to go through the spices a second time, in case she’d somehow missed the garlic powder. She’d barely started when she heard the sound of a shoe scuffing the tiled floor to her right.
She didn’t stop her second search to look at the person. She figured it was just another shopper, making his or her way down the aisle, searching for baking ingredients. Whoever it was, she hoped they had better luck locating items than she was having. The person came closer until only a foot separated them. She could see her – it was a woman – in her peripheral vision, and while she was annoyed by the woman’s physical proximity, she was determined to finish her second scan of the spices.
You’re a stubborn thing, her mother had once told her. Goddamn right, she thought and smiled.
“Confess.”
The woman spoke so softly that at first Lori wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. For that matter, she wasn’t certain that the woman had been talking to her at all, but she looked over at her just in case—
—and immediately wished she hadn’t.
The first thing Lori noticed about the woman was her eyes. They were too large for her face, and they were watery, so full of moisture that tears should’ve been running down her cheeks, but somehow it remained in her eyes, as if the woman held it there by some trick. But the worst part was the woman’s pupils. Instead of being round, they were black horizontal rectangles. Like goats’ eyes, she thought. There was something wrong with the skin around those eyes, too. It seemed soft, doughy, more like putty than flesh. She imagined she could reach out with an index finger and push those eyes back into the woman’s head without any resistance, and the putty-flesh would flow inward to cover up the spaces where the eyes had been.
Lori was by no means a physician, but as a healthcare professional, she’d had a certain amount of medical training, and she’d never seen or heard of any condition that could account for the woman’s bizarre eyes. The rest of her looked normal enough. She was of medium height – about the same size as Lori – and wore a pale-blue sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. Lori guessed she was in her early forties, although the weird skin around her eyes made her seem older. She wore no makeup, and her shoulder-length brown hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed in a while. A strong ripe scent of body odor emanated from the woman, as if she were surrounded by a dense cloud of stink. The only other odd detail about her – so minor that it seemed unimportant compared to the others – was the nail of her left pinky finger was painted red. Her other nine fingernails were devoid of polish.
Lori was so taken aback by the woman’s appearance that she didn’t fully register her words.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
The woman – goat eyes fixed on Lori – took half a step forward. The smell of her body odor became more intense, and Lori wrinkled her nose and half turned her head in a vain attempt to mitigate the stench’s effect.
“Confess and atone – or suffer.”
The woman’s voice was sandpaper-rough, and her breath had a strangely fruity smell. Lori wondered if she were ill.
The woman leaned her face closer to Lori, and although it wasn’t, couldn’t be possible, her rectangular pupils rotated in opposite directions. Startled, Lori stepped backward quickly, colliding with the spices on the shelves and knocking a number of them to the floor. She lost her grip on her shopping basket, and it fell to the floor as well, tipping over as it landed, the ingredients for her dinner spilling forth. Her purse slipped off her shoulder and slid down to her forearm, but she managed to keep it from falling.
The woman stared at her a moment longer, but made no further effort to come closer. Then, without saying anything more, she turned and started walking down the aisle, away from Lori. She walked with slow, shuffling steps, and it seemed to take a long time before she reached the end of the aisle, turned, and was lost to sight.
Lori hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until her lungs began to ache. She inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it. The combined smells of the woman’s strong body odor and her strange fruity breath still suffused the air. She wanted to get out of there, and she was tempted to leave her groceries where they’d fallen, haul ass out to the parking lot, jump in her Honda Civic, drive off at full speed, and never come back. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t have been much of a physical therapist if she didn’t know how to keep going when the going got tough – or in this case, bizarre.
She slid her purse back up to her shoulder, then knelt down and began picking up items and putting them back into the plastic shopping basket. She breathed shallowly to minimize the impact of the woman’s stink, and she tried not to think about those goat eyes and how they had appeared to rotate in their sockets. No, it hadn’t been the eyes themselves that moved. Only the pupils had rotated. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. Still, did it matter? Either way was equally fucked up.
Once she’d retrieved her meager supply of groceries, she picked up the spices she’d knocked down and put them back in their proper places on the shelves. Feeling better now that she’d restored at least a small bit of order to the world, she picked up the shopping basket and headed toward the self-checkout. She still didn’t have any garlic powder, but it didn’t matter anymore. She intended to buy the groceries, but right now the notion of making food – let alone eating it – nauseated her. All she wanted to do was go home, put her groceries away, and take a long hot shower, using copious amounts of body wash to cleanse the woman’s stink from her skin and hair. She’d toss her uniform into the wash as well. And if she couldn’t get the stench out of the fabric, she’d throw the uniform away. She had others.
Look forward, push onward.
She told her patients this, but it was something of a personal mantra for her as well. It had gotten her through a lot in her life, and it would get her through an encounter with a crazy woman in FoodSaver. But despite her determination to put the incident behind her, she heard the woman’s rough voice speak once more in her mind.
Confess and atone – or suffer.
* * *
Lori left the store, carrying her groceries in a single plastic bag that dangled from her left hand. A pleasant breeze caressed her body, and the sky was a bright, clear blue. Small trees had been placed throughout the parking lot, and while most of their leaves were still green, some had begun to change color. A few dry ones had fallen, and they made soft skittering sounds like small insects as the wind blew them across the asphalt. The scene wasn’t perfect, of course. It was the tail end of the evening rush hour, and while downtown Oakmont, Ohio, was hardly a busy metropolitan hub, the traffic flowing past FoodSaver was steady, and the air held the faint tang of exhaust fumes.
It would smell worse if the wind wasn’t blowing, she thought, and she reminded herself to be thankful for small graces. Not that she was religious. Her parents were more or less devout Lutherans, but both she and her sister had stopped going to church years ago. She still considered herself spiritual, though, in a loosey-goosey nondenominational way
. Besides, it never hurt to appreciate the good things in life, even the small ones.
The lot was full for a Tuesday night, and she’d had to park farther away from the store’s entrance than she usually did. That was okay, though. She had an app on her phone that recorded the number of steps she took in a day and how many calories she burned by walking. So as far as she was concerned, the more she walked, the better. Her car was parked close to the street, next to a tall lamppost. She always tried to park next to one, day or night. She could more easily find her car that way, and at night the illumination was a good security measure. She headed straight for her Civic, feeling better with every step she put between herself, the grocery, and the goat-eyed woman. Maybe by the time she got home, her appetite would’ve returned.
As she passed a pair of SUVs parked next to each other, a flash of movement caught her eye. Without thinking, she turned to look in that direction, and she saw…something. It moved too fast for her to get a good look at it, but she had the impression of a tall person with thin arms and legs, dressed entirely in black. But whoever it was slipped in front of the vehicles with silent, liquid grace, blocking her view. It happened so fast that she wasn’t certain she’d seen anything at all. It had probably been her imagination, she decided. She’d been creeped out by the goat-eyed woman, and now she was seeing sinister shadows flitting around the parking lot.
She frowned. That was odd. Why did she think it was sinister? The way it moved? Or…. An image came to her then of the dark figure she’d glimpsed. Originally, she’d thought she’d seen a person dressed in black: black long-sleeved pullover, black pants, black shoes…. But now she realized that the figure – she was having an increasingly hard time thinking of it as a person – had been black all over. The hands had been black, and so had the head. It was as if the figure had been garbed in a black skin-tight outfit that completely covered its body, making it look like a living shadow.
