"My cherie Rosalie," she hears the voice of her lover whispering.
And then the rain pours down again.
▼
Unpleasant.
I tore myself screaming from Rosalie—screaming silently, unwilling to wake her. In that instant I was afraid of her for what she had gone through; I dreaded to see her eyes snap open like a doll's, meeting me full in the face.
But Rosalie was only sleeping a troubled slumber. She muttered fitful disjointed words; there was a cold sheen of sweat on her brow; she exuded a flowery, powerful smell of sex. I hovered at the edge of the bed and studied her ringed hands clenched into small fists, her darting, jumping eyelids still stained with yesterday's makeup. I could only imagine the ensuing years and torments that had brought that little girl to this night, to this room. That had made her want to wear the false trappings of death, after having wallowed in the truth of it.
But I knew how difficult it would be to talk these memories out of her. There could be no consolation and no compensation for a past so cruel. No treasure, no matter how valuable, could matter in the face of such lurid terror.
So I assure you that the thing I did next was done out of pure mercy—not a desire for personal gain, or control over Rosalie. I had never done such a thing to her before. She was my friend; I wished to deliver her from the poison of her memories. It was as simple as that.
I gathered up my courage and I went back into Rosalie's head. Back in through her eyes and the whorled tunnels of her ears, back into the spongy electric forest of her brain.
I cannot be more scientific than this: I found the connections that made the memory. I searched out the nerves and subtle acids that composed the dream, the morsels of Rosalie's brain that still held a residue of Theophile, the cells that were blighted by his death.
And I erased it all.
I pitied Theophile. Truly I did. There is no existence more lonely than death, especially a death where no one is left to mourn you.
But Rosalie belonged to me now.
▼
I had her rent a boat.
It was easy for her to learn how to drive it: boating is in the Cajun blood. We made an exploratory jaunt or two down through Barataria—where two tiny hamlets, much like Rosalie's home village, both bore my name—and I regaled a fascinated Rosalie with tales of burials at sea, of shallow bayou graves, of a rascal whose empty eye sockets dripped with Spanish moss.
When I judged her ready, I guided her to a spot I remembered well, a clearing where five enormous oaks grew from one immense, twisted trunk. The five sentinels, we called them in my day. The wind soughed in the upper branches. The swamp around us was hushed, expectant.
After an hour of digging, Rosalie's shiny new shovel unearthed the lid and upper portion of a great iron chest. Her brittle hair was stringy with sweat. Her black lace dress was caked with mud and clay. Her face had gone paler than usual with exertion; in the half-light of the swamp it was almost luminescent. She had never looked so beautiful to me as she did at that moment.
She stared at me. Her tired eyes glittered as if with fever.
"Open it," I urged.
Rosalie swung the shovel at the heart-shaped hasp of the chest and knocked it loose on the first try. Once more and it fell away in a shower of soggy rust. She glanced back at me once more—looking for what, I wonder; seeing what?—and then heaved open the heavy lid.
And the sixth sentinel sat up to greet her.
I always took an extra man along when I went into the swamp to bury treasure. One I didn't trust, or didn't need. He and my reliable henchmen would dig the hole and drag the chest to the edge of it, ready to heave in. Then I would gaze deep into the eyes of each man and ask, in a voice both quiet and compelling, "Who wishes to guard my treasure?" My men knew the routine, and were silent. The extra man—currying favor as the useless and unreliable will do—always volunteered.
Then my top lieutenant would take three steps forward and put a ball in the lowly one's brain. His corpse was laid tenderly in the chest, his blood seeping into the mounds of gold or silver or glittering jewels, and I would tuck in one of my mojo bags, the ones I had specially made in New Orleans. Then the chest was sunk in the mire of the swamp, and my man, now rendered trustworthy, was left to guard my treasure until I should need it.
I was the only one who could open those chests. The combined magic of the mojo bag and the anger of the betrayed man's spirit saw to that.
My sixth sentinel wrapped skeletal arms around Rosalie's neck and drew her down. His jaws yawned wide and I saw teeth, still hungry after two hundred years, clamp down on her throat.
A mist of blood hung in the air; from the chest there was a ripping sound, then a noise of quick, choking agony. I hoped he would not make it too painful for her. After all, she was the woman I had chosen to spend eternity with.
I had told Rosalie that she would never again have to wriggle out of flimsy costumes under the eyes of slobbering men, and I had not lied. I had told her that she would never have to worry about money any more, and I had not lied. What I had neglected to tell her was that I did not wish to share my treasures—I only wanted her dead, my Hard Luck Rosalie, free from this world that pained her so, free to wander with me through the unspoiled swamps and bayous, through the ancient buildings of a city mired in time.
Soon Rosalie's spirit left her body and flew to me. It had nowhere else to go. I felt her struggling furiously against my love, but she would give in soon. I had no shortage of time to convince her.
I slipped my arm around Rosalie's neck and planted a kiss on her ectoplasmic lips. Then I clasped her wisp of a hand in mine, and we disappeared together.
The Man In The Passenger Seat by Bentley Little
Of the thousands of writers who've submitted material to this series over the years, only one has managed to place a story in every volume thus far—Bentley Little. A winner of the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 1991, he is quickly establishing himself as a major voice in HDF for the Nineties. For me, his short stories, even the ones I reject (and there have been many), have a compelling quality about them. They make you want to keep reading, even if you don't really "like" them. He has the ability to create images that are so singular, so bizarre, that you can't get them out of your head. When a writer does that on a consistent basis, he is nothing less than wonderfully original, and that's why Bentley has been along for the ride three times running. And speaking of rides, check out the modern fable that follows.
Brian was already late for work, but he knew that if he didn't deposit his paycheck this morning he'd be overdrawn. His credit rating was already hovering just above the lip of the toilet, and he couldn't afford another bounced check.
With only a quick glance at the clock on the dashboard, he pulled into the First Interstate parking lot. He grabbed a pen, deposit slip and his paycheck from the seat next to him and sprinted across the asphalt to the bank's instant teller machine. Behind him he heard the sound of a car door slamming, and he glanced back at his Blazer as he pulled out his ATM card.
Someone was sitting in the passenger seat of his car.
His heart lurched in his chest. For a split second he considered going through with the deposit transaction and then going back to his car to deal with the intruder—Kendricks was going to be climbing all over his ass for being late as it was—but he realized that whoever had climbed into his vehicle might be attempting to steal it, and he pocketed his card and hurried back to the Blazer.
Why the hell hadn't he locked the car?
He pulled open the driver's door. Across from him, in the passenger seat, hands folded in his lap, was a monstrously overweight man wearing stained polyester pants and a too-small woman's blouse. Long black hair cascaded about the man's shoulders in greasy tangles. The car was filled with a foul sickening stale smell.
Brian looked at the man. "This is my car," he said, forcing a toughness he did not feel.
"Eat my dick with Brussels sprouts." The man
grinned, revealing rotted stumpy teeth.
A wave of cold washed over Brian. This was not real. This was not happening. This was something from a dream or a bad movie. He stared at the man, not sure of what to say or how to respond. He noticed that the time on the dashboard clock was five after eight. He was already late, and he was getting later by the second.
"Get out of my car now!" he ordered. "Get out or I'll call the police!"
"Get in," the man said. "And drive."
He should run, Brian knew. He should take off and get the hell out of there, let the man steal his car, let the police and the insurance company handle it. There was nothing in the Blazer worth his life.
But the man might have a gun, might shoot him in the back as he tried to escape.
He got in the car.
The stench inside was almost overpowering. The man smelled of breath and broccoli, old dirt and dried sweat. Brian looked him over carefully as he slid into the seat. The man was not holding a gun in his hand, there was no sign of a weapon at all.
"Drive," the man said.
Brian nodded. Hell yes, he'd drive. He'd drive straight to the goddamn police station and let the cops nail this crazy bastard's ass.
He pulled onto Euclid and started to switch over to the left lane, but the man said, "Turn right."
He was not sure whether he should obey the request or not. The police station was only three blocks away, and there was still no indication that the man was carrying any sort of weapon—but there was something in the strange man's voice, a hint of danger, an aura of command, that made him afraid to disobey.
He turned right onto Lincoln.
"The freeway," the man said.
Brian felt his heart shift into overdrive, the pumping in his chest cavity accelerate. It was too late now, he realized. He'd made a huge mistake. He should have run when he had the chance. He should have sped to the police station when he had the chance. He should have—
He pulled onto the freeway.
Several times over the past two years, on the way to work, he had dreamed of doing this, had fantasized about hanging a left onto the freeway instead of continuing straight toward the office, about heading down the highway and just driving, continuing on to Arizona, New Mexico, states beyond. But he had never in his wildest imaginings thought that he would actually be doing so while being kidnapped, hijacked, at the behest of an obviously deranged man.
Still, even now, even under these conditions, he could not help feeling a small instinctive lift as the car sped down the on ramp and merged with the swiftly flowing traffic. It was not freedom he felt—how could it be under the circumstances—but more the guilty pleasure of a truant boy hearing the school bell ring. He had wanted to skip work and shirk his responsibilities so many times, and now he was finally doing it. He looked over at the man in the passenger seat.
The man smiled, twirling a lock of hair between his fingers. "One, two, eat my poo. Three, four, eat some more."
Brian gripped the steering wheel, stared straight ahead, drove.
There was no traffic, or very little. They travelled east, in the opposite direction of most of the commuters, and the city gradually faded into suburbs, the suburbs into open land. After an hour or so, Brian grew brave enough to talk, and several times he made an effort to communicate with the man and ask where they were going, why this was happening, but the man either did not answer or answered in gibberish, obscene non sequiturs.
Another hour passed.
And another.
They were travelling through high desert now, flatland with scrub brush, and Brian looked at the clock on the dashboard. Ordinarily, he would be taking his break at this time, meeting Joe and David for coffee in the break room. He thought of them now. Neither, he knew, would really miss him. They would file into the break room as they always did, get their coffee from the machine, sit down at the same table at which they always sat, and when they saw that he wasn't there, they'd shrug and begin their usual conversation.
Now that he thought about it, no one at the company would miss him. Not really. They'd be temporarily inconvenienced by his absence and would curse him for not being there to perform his regular duties, but they would not miss him.
They would not care enough to call and see if he was all right.
That's what really worried him. The fact that no one would even know he'd been abducted. Someone from Personnel might call his apartment—the machinery of bureaucracy would be automatically set in motion and a perfunctory effort would be made to determine why he was not at work—but there would be no reason to assume that anything bad had happened to him. No one would suspect foul play. And he was not close enough to any of his co-workers that one of them would make a legitimate effort to find out what had happened to him.
He would just disappear and be forgotten.
He glanced over at the man in the passenger seat. The man grinned, grabbed his crotch. "Here's your lunch. I call it Ralph."
Shapes sprang up from the desert. Signs. And beyond the signs, buildings. A billboard advertised McDonalds, two miles ahead, State Street exit. Another, with the name of a hotel on it, showed a picture of a well-endowed woman in a bikini lounging by a pool.
A green sign announced that they were entering Hayes, population 15,000, elevation 3,000.
Brian looked over at his passenger. A growling whirr spiraled upward from the depths of the man's stomach, and he pointed toward the tall familiar sign of a fast food restaurant just off the highway. "Eat," he said.
Brian pulled off the highway and drove into the narrow parking lot of the hamburger stand. He started to park in one of the marked spaces, but the man shook his head violently, and Brian pulled up to the microphoned menu in the drive-thru. "What are we getting?" he asked.
The man did not answer.
A voice of scratchy static sounded from the speaker. "May I take your order?"
Brian cleared his throat. "A double cheeseburger, large fries, an apple turnover and an extra-large Coke."
He looked over at the man in the passenger seat, quizzically, but the man said nothing.
"That'll be four-fifteen at the window."
Brian pulled forward, stopping when his window was even with that of the restaurant.
"Four—" the teenaged clerk started to say.
"Gonads!" the man yelled. "Gonads large and small!" He reached over Brian and grabbed the sack of food from the windowed shelf. Before the clerk could respond, the man had dropped to the floor and pushed down the gas pedal with his free hand. The car lurched forward, Brian trying desperately to steer as they sped out of the parking lot and into the street.
The man sat up, dumping the contents of the bag in Brian's lap. The car slowed down, and there was a squeal of brakes as the pickup truck behind them tried to avoid a collision.
"Asshole!" the pickup driver yelled as he pulled past them. He stuck out his middle finger.
The man grabbed a handful of french fries from Brian's lap.
"Drive," he said.
"Look—" Brian began.
"Drive."
They pulled back onto the highway.
A half-hour later they caught up with the pickup. Brian probably would not have noticed and would have passed the vehicle without incident, but, without warning, the man in the passenger seat rolled down his window, grabbed the half-empty cup of Coke from Brian's hand and threw it outside. His aim was perfect. The cup sailed across the lane, through the open window of the pickup truck and hit the driver square in the face. The man screamed in pain and surprise, swerving out-of-control. The pickup sped off the shoulder and down an embankment, colliding with a small palo verde tree.
"Asshole," the man said.
He chuckled, his laugh high and feminine.
Brian looked over at his passenger. Despite his throwing capabilities, the man was grossly overweight and in terrible physical condition, no match for himself. He turned his attention back to the road. They would have to stop for gas soon—at t
he next town if they weren't pulled over first—and he knew that he would be able to escape at that time. He would be able to either run away or kick the shit out of the obese bastard.
But though he wanted desperately to kick the shit out of the crazy fucker, he wasn't sure he really wanted to escape. Not yet, anyway. He didn't seem to be in any physical danger, and if he were to be perfectly honest with himself, he was almost, kind of, sort of having fun. In some perverse, almost voyeuristic way, he was enjoying this, and he knew that if he allowed the situation to remain as is, he would not have to go back to work until they were caught—and he wouldn't even be penalized, he could blame it all on his abduction.
But that was insane. He wasn't thinking right. He'd been brainwashed or something, riding with the man. Like Patty Hearst.
After only a few hours?
"Holy shit," the man said. He laughed to himself in that high-pitched voice. "Holy shit."
Brian ignored him.
The man withdrew from his pants pocket a small, lumpy, strangely irregular brown rock. "I bought it from a man in Seattle. It's the petrified feces of Christ. Holy shit." He giggled. "They found it Lebanon."
Brian ignored him, concentrating on the road. On second thought, he wasn't having fun. This was too damn loony to be fun. But the man was finally talking to him, speaking in coherent sentences.
"We need gas," the man said. "Let's stop at the next town."
Brian did not escape at the gas station, though he had ample opportunity. He could have leaped out of the car and ran. He could have said something to the station attendant. He could have gone to the bathroom and not come back.
But he stayed in the car, paid for the gas with his credit card.
They took off.
For the next hour or so, both of them were silent, although Brian did a lot of thinking, trying to guess what was going to happen to him, trying to project a future end to this situation. Every so often, he would glance over at his passenger. He noticed that, out here, on the highway, the man did not seem so strange. Here, with the window open, he did not even smell as bad. What had seemed so bizarre, so frightening, in the parking lot of the bank, in the business-suited world of the city, seemed only slightly odd out here on the highway. They drove past burly bikers, disheveled pickup drivers, Hawaiian-shirted tourists, and Brian realized that here there was no standard garb, no norm by which deviation could be measured. Manners and mores did not apply. There were only the rules of the road, broad guidelines covering driving etiquette.
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