The idea crossed his mind to call Kurt, but he realized that he didn’t know where Trish lived, let alone her phone number. Why hadn’t Kurt ever gotten a cell phone? It was just like that weirdo not to have the common sense to buy a damn cell phone.
An air of confusion converged with an ever-thickening mist of despair. Eddy was caught in the middle of this ghastly vapor. None of what was happening made sense.
Sweat began to pool along his hairline like some great river ready to burst over its tree-lined banks. He suddenly had a haunting feeling that he was not alone. Quickly whirling about, sending beads of perspiration flying off in a wide arc, he looked around. He half expected to see the black bag lying there, in the middle of the lot, like some kind of cursed voodoo icon.
It wasn’t.
An unexpected vibration in Eddy’s pocket sent his heart slamming against his chest like a caged rhinoceros attempting to break free. He instantly realized that it was his cell phone. He snatched it out and looked at the caller ID — it was Willie’s number.
His hands shook so hard that he feared he would drop the phone. He pressed the answer icon and slowly put the phone to his ear.
“Hello?” he croaked. There was only silence on the other end.
“Hello!”
The line clicked dead.
Eddy stood motionless for a few seconds, then lowered the phone down to his side. He looked down into the car’s trunk. In the back, behind a pile of dirty laundry, lay a wooden baseball bat. He removed it and slammed the lid shut. “Time to see what the hell’s going on,” he whispered.
His steps reverberated throughout the metal stairwell as he ran up to the third floor. Along the way, he made up his mind — if there was an intruder in the apartment, he was swinging the bat first and asking questions second.
The front door was still locked when he reached it. With the bat clenched in his right fist, he quietly unlocked the door with his left hand and pushed it open. The black bag lay ominously on its side, on the other end of the counter from where he’d left it minutes earlier.
“Hey!”
No response.
“Hey! Come out!”
Silence.
“I’ve got a bat and I’m very fucking pissed off, so either came out here now and let’s talk, or make me come after you, and I swear I will beat you to a fucking pulp.”
There was still no answer.
Eddy gathered the courage to walk inside the apartment and check each room. He couldn’t find anyone.
“I’ve had enough of this shit.” He shoved Willie’s belongings back into the bag and went over to the living room. He sat down on the couch and placed the bat at his feet. As he leaned his head against the wall, he heard a scratching sound and turned to look at the bag. As he did, the kitchen light went out. In the cold silence, he shook.
The scratching ceased. An immense, all-consuming tiredness stole over Eddy. His eyelids sank. The sensation’s sudden onset vaguely reminded him of the first time he’d gotten high on weed. It felt like sections of his brain were rapidly shutting down, millions of neurons at a time. All he wanted to do was sleep, escape this living nightmare. It seemed the perfect answer. When he awoke, things would be normal again. Willie and Kurt would be in the kitchen talking about what they were going to do this summer. They would all joke around a while and say their goodbyes. Before he knew it, he would be heading home along I-57, feeling the warm breeze whipping through the car’s open windows, rolling towards another summer of girls, beer and sun. Until then, sleep.
○
Eddy heard a flat thump, like a large pillow hitting against a wall. He opened his eyes; still on the couch, still in the apartment, still alone. So much for sleep being his salvation. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he noticed that he could see his breath. The hair on his head, wet earlier from the rinse-off he took in the kitchen sink, was frozen solid against his face and scalp. He tried to stand up, but couldn’t move. His mind told his legs to straighten out and his arms to push him up, but they would not respond. Despite his struggles, his body refused to budge.
From the very periphery of his vision, he noticed something move in the shadows. It came from up in the corner of the living room ceiling, to his right. He blinked and rotated his eyes as much as he could, his neck incapable of movement. From out of that corner, a mysterious image took shape. It looked like the figure of a small person, but not quite human, and not more than two feet in height. Eddy’s innards felt as though he’d just accidentally walked off the edge of an unseen cliff. He sucked in cold currents of air in unsteady gulps.
The figure scampered out of sight.
A heavy, cold pressure began to push against his chest. He tried to twist his torso around to relieve himself of the immense squeezing, but with no luck.
Something clammy brushed against his lip. Eddy looked as far down as he could, straining his eyeballs until they felt as though they would rip out of their sockets.
Just under his nose, he saw a small, hairless head. The head tilted upward and stared back at Eddy with its black eyes. Its face was hideously disproportioned and unaligned. What must have been its nose was positioned more at the side of its face than at the center. The left eye was much bigger than the right — both were spread too far apart and nested in its forehead. The thing smiled at him, exposing an upper and lower row of jagged, barbwire teeth. Eddy attempted to cry out, but only could manage a harsh, dry bark.
“Gonna take care of Eddy,” the creature said in a cracking, high-pitched voice, the sound of which felt like icicles poking deeply into Eddy’s ears. “No one else will.”
A small, bony hand appeared next to the nightmarish face. It held the black bag in its crooked fingers. Before Eddy could register his next thought, the mouth of the bag was over his face.
○
Kurt found the front door open as he approached the apartment. He gently rapped twice and entered.
“Willie? Eddy?”
He placed his book bag on the counter and went over to the couch. Pulling out a pair of black gloves from his pocket, he put them on and picked up the bag.
“Still pretty cold, aren’t you? Of course, you’ve been busy tonight,” he said, walking back to the kitchen. He placed the black bag into his book bag and walked outside.
As he flicked off the light switch and closed the door, he smiled. “Quite a collection we’ve got.”
Mike Fudali, born on the Ides of October, currently lives in a rural suburb far west of Chicago. He celebrates the victories of life with his patient wife and two highly energetic children. He has had his work appear in Nocturnal Ooze Magazine and an anthology entitled The Psyche Corrupted. In between the demands of his otherwise taxing adult life, he continues to write short stories and has recently tried his hand at acting in independent films.
She’s Not There
by Brian Wright
I have never believed in ghosts. And it’s nothing to do with me being an atheist.
I see our supposedly more secular era, in fact, as a continuing age of unreason. Religion and superstition have always gone hand-in-hand. Now — in Europe at least — one half of the partnership is dying. The holy spirit is fading away. And yet we remain obsessed with spirits of the unholy kind. It’s as if fear of the unknown is crucial to the human condition.
Not to this human, it isn’t.
George Orwell, in one of his essays, stated that modern man continues to be as gullible as his forebears, believing everything he is told. As an example of this, he cited what would be the inability of most people to put up a case for the roundness of the Earth to someone from the Middle Ages.
His words always put me in mind of my friend David. He is a middle manager, someone who went to a university with humanist traditions. He can access the internet from every room in his house. Yet, in some respects, he is not that many steps up from a mediaeval peasant in a mud hut.
You know those ghost-chasing shows o
n certain cable channels? The ones where groups of strangers are locked together in dark places, and hearing noises, freak each other out in next to no time? Hard to credit, but they are David’s preferred choice of viewing. He doesn’t watch them for cheap laughs either. “Got to be something in it,” he muses in the pub.
To me, his standpoint is as credible as shaping your worldview through the Old Testament. But there it is. He more than half-believes what he is being told.
Or he did until quite recently. Now, he tells me, his attitude has changed. Now he absolutely knows. David has become convinced that he’s seeing a manifestation from the other side.
I wish Suzanne was here to share the joke. She was never skeptical in any scientific way — just too down-to-earth, too practical to believe in things that go bump in the night. However, she’s been gone for three years now.
My friend’s surrender to the supernatural also involves a close but missing relative. His dad vanished off the radar about six months before and hadn’t been seen since. Without a shred of evidence, David was convinced he’s dead.
Mind you, he wasn't the only one who suspected the worst. His old man was always a gloomy sod, prone to the black dog, and even the police had stopped looking for him, almost certain that he’d thrown himself off a bridge somewhere. He tried much the same a little while back, actually complaining when a passer-by hauled him out of the water. I would have left him to it.
The strange thing was that David’s mom seemed to be taking it really well. Probably glad not to have to listen to the old man whining. No, it’s my friend who had apparently lost his marbles.
When he first told me that he had seen the ghost of his dad, I couldn’t help quipping, “So his disappearance is literally haunting you?”
To my surprise, he didn’t appreciate my witticism. David is not a natural comedian, but he likes to laugh. Unlike his father, funnily enough, who always had the sense of humor of a Teutonic undertaker.
Now, when I saw what looked like authentic hurt in his eyes, I switched tack, asking him to tell me more. It was like giving the signal to open the sluice gates after a bad storm. David knows how I feel about the paranormal, but was bursting to get it out.
He finished a largely garbled account of events with the words, “I’ve seen him three days running now.” I had to stifle the comment that it was a lot more often than when the old man was known to be alive.
David’s voice broke the ensuing silence. “I guess you think I’m mad.”
I wanted to say, Yes. I said, “No.”
“I haven’t told Polly about it. She’d probably freak out.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said, still nagged by the suspicion that it was his idea of a wind-up. “You keep seeing your father?”
“Yes, mostly out and about, shops and stuff. But twice in the house.”
I giggled at the picture that came to mind; David’s wife is the sort of woman who can go into hysterics over a broken nail. Suzanne had never been able to stand her. “Yeah, it’s just possible that Polly would freak out.”
David looked upset again for moment, but then saw the funny side. As he went into amused mode, however, I could tell how genuinely troubled he was. Even his laugh sounded nervous.
I tried common sense. “You don’t know for sure he’s dead.”
“He’s dead.”
I tried again. “Could you be confusing him with someone else? I often think old men look a bit the same. All that silver hair.”
“In my house?”
I gave up.
David looked at me. “I’ve been thinking of getting in touch with that guy on TV, you know, the one I told you about, the psychic detective.”
I always try to avoid any reference to the false prophet, but for once the word slipped out. “Jesus, say you’re joking.”
I had a second lapse later on. I normally never dream, which strikes me as one more indication that I am immune to the irrational forces that seem to dominate so many lives. So you can imagine how I felt when I jerked awake in the middle of the night with an image of Suzanne still in my head. It made me wonder if madness was catching.
David begged me to go for another drink the next evening. He was even more agitated, downing three large whiskies in quick succession. “Saw him again today,” he finally got out, “wandering through the office.”
I put on the sort of face that was expected of me. “Not good.”
Then a thought struck. “Has anyone else seen him? You know, like your work colleagues?”
David looked a little sheepish. “Um, I don’t think so.”
“Yes or no?”
“No.”
I wanted to say, I rest my case. I said, “Perhaps you ought to see a doctor?”
David reacted as if I was hiding a straitjacket behind my back. “This is nothing to do with me,” he practically shouted. “This is to do with dad.”
More likely to do with Mr. Jack Daniels, I thought, after I finally managed to extricate myself from his company. He was knocking back his umpteenth double as I stumbled out of the pub.
Perhaps it was the fact of being sozzled well above normal levels that brought about my own David moment. The sensation, just for a second, that Suzanne was in the room with me when I shuddered into bleary consciousness at three in the morning. As I tossed and turned until dawn, I vowed to stay away from my friend. Let the TV people sort him out.
You may be familiar with Dylan Thomas’s address to his old and frail father: Do not go gentle into the good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The words ought to strike a chord with all non-believers. I, for one, intend to rant at the end, hurl curses at the impending darkness.
I thought of the poem when David rang me a few days later. “The TV people have turned me down. Said there’s nothing doing unless I can arrange a group tour of my brain. Still, never mind.”
He gave the impression of being not at all drunk or stressed; unnaturally calm in fact, and my intuition kicked in right away. I can smell heresy even over the phone.
I struggled to keep my voice under control. “Please tell me you haven’t.”
David, a man who had previously given God about as much thought as the really hard part of the theory of relativity, seemed impervious to my admonition. “I spoke to a priest yesterday. Could be a bell, book and candle job.”
He sounded anaesthetized, the sort of effect you might get by washing down Prozac with whisky. The same thing has happened to other people I know, brainwashed into happy clapping their way to oblivion. I was reminded of a further snatch of poetry: This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
“Not my world, you old Anglo-Catholic snob.” After slamming down the phone and throwing a couple of things around, causing heads to turn in the office, I decamped to the pub and mourned the end of friendship through the bottom of a glass.
I contemplated making a detour on the way home and venting my fury on David. Not a wise move, I told myself, remembering that my temper, at its worst, wasn’t a pretty sight. Instead I diverted myself with Olga, a Russian lady who is good to me so long as I am equally good to her. I noticed for the first time that she resembles Suzanne. It was something about her walk. It gave me the shivers.
After making my excuses and leaving early, I lay awake for hours. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the same thing over and again.
Feeling shitty gave me another reason to berate David when he rang the next day to express his regret at upsetting me. It’s always been a motto of mine: spread a little unhappiness. “Please let’s meet up,” he kept pleading, “so we can talk.”
Finally, I agreed to see him that evening in our favorite watering hole. The normality of the arrangement gave me cause for optimism. I felt certain I could get him to change his mind.
No chance.
The first thing I noticed — when I greeted him with the words, “Has God talked your old man into pissing off yet?
” — was that his funny bone that had been shot to pieces.
He winced. “The Reverend Tucker is still arranging things, if that’s what you mean.”
“So you’re still seeing the evil spirit?”
“Saw him today.”
Glad about one small mercy at least, I asked, “So is the good reverend able to explain why it’s happening?”
“He says that there are more things in heaven and earth.”
I was beginning to enjoy myself. “What does that mean?”
David shifted about as if a heavy-duty hair shirt was cutting into his skinny torso. “Um, I’m not sure exactly.”
I rubbed salt in the wounds. “Have you told him that you never liked your dad? Said he carried a black cloud everywhere.”
His expression went from pained to downright abject. “He was ill, I should have seen that.”
For a moment, I felt sorry for him. I softened my tone. “You know this whole thing is a waste of time, don’t you?”
David had the grace to look shamefaced. “You might be right.” A shrug of the shoulders. “But I’ve got to try.”
Give me my due, I persevered with the temperate approach. I even threw in some humor. “I always thought blind faith was a super group from the Seventies.”
Barely a flicker of amusement; and then a frown of defiance. “Not everything is a joke, Tony,” he retorted.
And that’s when I exploded. “You traitor,” I hissed. “Fucking traitor.” Suddenly I badly wanted to punch him.
David did a passable imitation of a Christian being attacked by a wild beast, his arms fluttering in front of his ugly mug. As Suzanne crossed my mind again, I lowered my fist and rushed out of the pub.
I walked the streets for hours after that, afraid to return home, of being closeted with my memories. Somehow I knew they would be stronger than ever; taking me back to the bad time, three years ago. ‘Suzanne,’ I whispered to myself. And for a second the smell of her perfume was so strong that it caused me to stumble.
Fear of the Dark: An Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 26
