Broken Shadows

by Tim Waggoner

  Her name was Nicole Patterson. She’d graduated high school this year, though she’d been working part-time at the Speed-Thru for a couple years. Tom had never spoken to her, but he knew who she was, had seen her around school. She was pretty, if not spectacular looking, and he’d heard that she was dating a college football player, but he didn’t know if it was true.

  She lay on her side, eyes wide, mouth open as if she’d started to scream but had died before she could get the sound out. Her throat was a yawning red gash, and blood spatter covered the walls of the cashier’s cubbyhole. The floor around Nicole was covered with even more blood, so much that Tom couldn’t see how a single human body could’ve contained it all. He inhaled the mingled stink of blood, urine, and feces—a smell that was only now starting to filter through the store. From what he remembered reading, the Speed-Thru had stank like “hell’s own slaughterhouse” according to the deputy sheriff who’d first arrived on the scene.

  Tom looked at the girl’s body for another moment before turning away from the counter and walking toward the rear of the store, where the restrooms were located. Halfway down the aisle where the magazines were displayed, an elderly man in a light green shirt and khaki pants lay in a widening pool of blood. His name was Peter Dewey, and he’d come into the Speed-Thru to pick up a copy of Newsweek. He clutched the crumpled magazine in his hand, likely never knowing that he himself would be news before the day was out. There was so much blood—splattered on magazines, spreading across the tiled floor—that Tom didn’t think he’d be able to step over Mr. Dewey without slipping in it. He turned around, walked back to the end of the aisle, and went down another. This aisle was mercifully free of corpses who’d had their throats slashed, and Tom was able to make it to the rear of the store without any problem.

  As he approached the restrooms—more specially, the women’s—he heard soft moist sounds, as if someone were gently patting wet clay. Tom stepped up to the door of the women’s restroom. There were no words, just a simple white design of a circle atop the point of a triangle with two narrow rectangles for legs. He gripped the metal handle and was surprised at how warm it was. He’d always imagined it would be cold. He looked down, saw blood flowing outward from under the door. The wet sounds became louder now, and they were accompanied by grunts of exertion, as if someone on the other side of the door was hard at work.

  Tom continued gripping the knob, but he didn’t turn it. This was it, a moment that he’d imagined over and over for twenty-some years, a moment he’d both dreaded and longed for. The question now was, did he have what it took to turn the knob and open the door? Or would he wuss out at the last minute and go back to Donald’s Nova?

  Donald’s voice was muffled by the restroom door, but it came through clear enough.

  “Go ahead. You know you want to.”

  Tom took a deep breath, and then he opened the door.

  Donald knelt next to a woman in her late twenties. She lay on the bathroom floor, head near the sink, feet near the toilet. Her name was Sheila Henry, and she was a kindergarten teacher who’d only stopped at the Speed-Thru to relieve her aching bladder. She had curly black hair, delicate fair skin, and a belly swollen to the size of a basketball. She wore an over-sized T-shirt, shorts, and a pair of sandals. The shirt was soaked with the woman’s blood, and Donald had pulled it up to expose her pregnant belly. Her flesh—face, neck, hands, arms, and legs—was covered with deep crisscross slashes along with numerous bite marks. Tom had the sense that they formed some sort of pattern, but he couldn’t quite decipher what it was. He had no trouble making out the image Donald had carved on the woman’s belly, though. It was a Have-A-Nice-Day smiley face.

  “So here you are, Tommy. Now what?” Donald had so much blood on him that it looked as if he’d been dunked head-first into a vat of red paint. He pulled the woman’s T-shirt above her breasts and cut the front of her bra open with his razor.

  Tom couldn’t take his gaze off the woman’s aureolae. They were large and dark brown, and there were clear pearls of colostrum on the nipples.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Donald touched the straight razor to the woman’s right breast and began drawing a slow circle around the nipple. “Now what are you going to do?” Without waiting for a response, he continued. “Do you know why I killed these three people? Well, four I guess, if you count junior there.” He nodded to the woman’s smiley-face belly.

  Tom watched blood well forth from the circle Donald carved into Sheila Henry’s breast. “No,” he whispered.

  “Because I felt like it.” Donald finished with the right breast, examined his work for a moment, then started in on the left. “I may have been a lot of things when I was alive, but at least I was honest with myself, Tommy. I know who and what I was, and if I wanted to do something, I did it. No hesitation, no regrets. And that’s what you admired most about me, wasn’t it? No, not admired. Envied. Because you never do anything without thinking it through first, and when you finally do something, you almost always regret it afterward. You’re afraid you made the wrong choice, done, said, or even just thought the wrong thing. I was free, Tommy, even when they locked me away and pumped me full of psychotropic meds.” He finished carving a circle onto the second breast and turned to look at Tom. “Because I was free in here.” He tapped the blood-smeared razor to his chest.

  “You’re just like me, you know. Deep down where it counts. But you’ve never been able to accept your true nature. Oh, you’d cut up the occasional dog or cat with me, but that’s as far as you could take it. You couldn’t bring yourself to go to medical school because you knew you’d have to dissect cadavers, and you couldn’t allow yourself to get that close to the real you.”

  Donald held the razor to his mouth and cleaned it with his tongue, licking one side, then the other. Tom couldn’t keep himself from wondering what it tasted like.

  “But I’ve come to give you a second chance.” Donald pried open Sheila Henry’s mouth, took hold of her tongue, and with a single deft slice, cut it out.

  He held the red wet treasure out to Tom. “Here. Take it. Take it and become who you really are.”

  Tom stared at the piece of meat Donald held gently, almost lovingly, in his hand. Tom wondered how many flavors that tongue had tasted, how many words it had helped form, how many men it had kissed, how many cocks it had licked. He wondered what consistency the meat had, what it would be like to chew raw. All he had to do was reach out and take it…

  He stepped back and shook his head. “No.”

  Donald looked at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Tom wondered if his friend would lunge for him then, slash that razor across his throat, then carve designs into his skin before cutting off bits and pieces of his body. Finally, Donald just grinned.

  “Your loss, Tommy. Too bad. It’s the sweetest part.” And he put the tip of Sheila Henry’s tongue in his mouth and bit down.

  * * *

  “Don’t look so depressed. Not every Scrooge listens to Marley. It’s no biggie.”

  They were back inside Donald’s Nova, traveling down the obsidian road past the bone trees. Only now the heads hanging from the skeletal branches turned away as the Nova rolled by, as if they were too disappointed in Tom to look at him.

  Donald was rapidly aging. He was in his mid-twenties now, and his clothes had reverted to the orange coverall he’d been wearing when Tom had first seen him. The blood that had covered him had long since dried, and it was beginning to flake off Donald like red-brown dandruff.

  “Besides, it was good seeing you again, Tommy. Even if it was a short visit.” Donald was in his late thirties now, and still aging.

  “I’m sorry I never came to see you while you were…away,” Tom said. “I just…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Partially because he wasn’t exactly sure why he’d never gone to visit Donald, and partially because Donald had hit his forties—the age he’d been when he’d died—and was now beginning to rot. His sk
in had become dry and leathery, his lips thinning and drawing back from his teeth, giving him a permanent grin. His hair began to fall out in clumps, evaporating like snowflakes as it drifted downward.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Donald’s voice had become guttural, his enunciation stiff and awkward thanks to his desiccated lips and rotting tongue. “I knew That Day would bond us forever.” He took a nearly fleshless hand off the steering wheel and tapped a bony finger to Tom’s chest. “In here. Where it really counts.”

  The Nova’s engine—which had never run smoothly at the best of times—started to sputter and choke. Spiderweb cracks appeared in the windshield and the windows, and the upholstery on the seats began to crack and split, allowing yellowish foam rubber to poke through. Tom felt his guts twist into a cold knot as he realized that Donald wasn’t the only thing decaying away to nothing: the car was, too. The car, which at that moment also contained Tom and was—he glanced at the speedometer—traveling 72 mph along a dark road that stretched endlessly through an even darker world.

  Donald’s eyes collapsed into viscous jelly that ran down his leather-skinned cheeks like tears of slime. Then the remainder of his flesh fell away to dust, leaving only a hollow-eyed, grinning skeleton dressed in a baggy, moth-eaten coverall.

  “Time for me to make like a banana and split.” The skeleton’s mouth didn’t move; Donald’s voice echoed from the air within the car, coming from all directions at once. “But don’t cry for me, Argentina. I go to my damnation knowing exactly who and what I was. Will you be able to say the same thing when your time comes, Tommy?”

  Before Tom could reply, the skeleton disintegrated into a shower of grayish-white powder that fell onto the seat, slid down onto the floor. The Nova was now driverless. Tom grabbed for the steering wheel, hoping to keep the car from going out of control. But before his hand could grip the wheel, the Nova followed its owner into Nothingness, exploding in a cloud of rust particles and leaving Tom to hurtle through the air.

  He had time for a single short scream before smashing onto the glossy surface of the dark road.

  * * *

  “—listening to me, you sonofabitch?”

  Tom blinked. He was standing on the road, the one in the real world, where he’d rear-ended the Grand Torino. Snowflakes, no longer held immobile in the air, drifted down around him. Standing in front of Tom, face so red it verged on purple, was Mr. Nascar.

  “Christ almighty, you are one fuckin’ space cadet, you know that? One second you’re talkin’ about insurance, and the next you’re staring off into space like you’re retarded or something. To hell with makin’ you pay for the damage you did to my car—I oughta just beat the shit out of you right now!” Spittle flew from Mr. Nascar’s mouth as he shouted these last few words…spittle that splattered onto Tom’s face.

  Tom gazed into Mr. Nascar’s eyes and saw the anger that burned there, wild and unreasoning. But it was a sputtering match flame compared to the fury that blazed within him. He immediately started to repress his anger, grab hold of it and shove it down deep inside himself. But he hesitated.

  I go to my damnation knowing exactly who and what I was. Will you be able to say the same thing when your time comes, Tommy?

  As Tom wiped the spit from his face, he felt something in his front pants pocket. He reached in and his fingers closed around a folded straight razor. A faint voice whispered in his mind.

  Don’t say I never gave you anything, ass-wipe.

  Tom smiled slowly at Mr. Nascar. “I understand you’re upset, and I don’t blame you a bit. But it’s really cold out here. What say we go sit in your car and exchange insurance information until a cop gets here?”

  Mr. Nascar sputtered for a moment, as if this was the most ridiculous suggestion he’d ever heard. But then he let out a long sigh, and the exhalation seemed to carry away a good portion of his anger. “Yeah, all right. Beats having all these other assholes look at us as they drive by.”

  Mr. Nascar turned and started heading back toward his car. Tom followed, his hand still in his pants pocket, his smile widening.

  * * *

  Officer Williams hadn’t had the greatest shift today. She’d been called to a “domestic disturbance” at an apartment on the town’s east side, only to discover that two latchkey kids had called 911 after fighting over the TV remote. Then she’d responded to a call at a drugstore where some bastard had left a cardboard box full of dead kittens in the dumpster behind the store. The drugstore manager was obviously a big PETA type, and she kept demanding to know what Williams intended to do to bring the “Kitty Killer” to justice. So when she turned onto Willowstock Road and saw a Saturn and a Grand Torino sitting in the street blocking one lane of traffic, she flipped on her lights and nearly cheered. Finally, a simple fender-bender. Probably no injuries, just a couple of PO’ed drivers. All she’d have to do was calm a few ruffled feathers, have the drivers pull the cars off the street, then take down some information for her accident report. Easy-peasy.

  She parked behind the Saturn and got out. There was no one inside that vehicle, so she continued to the Grand Torino. The doors were closed and the windows rolled up, but the glass was fogged on the inside, which meant someone was in there. Williams walked up to the driver’s side, undoing the snap on her holster as she went, and rapped her knuckles on the window.

  “Police. Anybody in there?” She waited a moment, and when no one answered, she began to wonder if maybe the accident had been worse than it looked, if maybe someone was hurt after all.

  She opened the car door.

  A red-smeared face turned to look at her from the back seat.

  “You know something? Donald was right. It really is the sweetest part.”

  Then he popped something into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and grinned.

  GHOST IN THE GRAVEYARD

  You approach the black wrought-iron gate that stretches between two squat red-brick structures that remind you of stunted turrets. The metal sign bolted to the brick of the turret on your left reads WEST BRANCH BURIAL GROUND. You’ve been coming to this place now and again since you were a child, over fifty years, and you wonder why you’ve never noticed this sign before.

  You’ve only been outside the air-conditioned comfort of your Camry for a few seconds, and even though initially your body is still cool, your skin is beginning to react to the heavy, moist August heat. You feel a strange, almost numbing sensation as sweat begins to build, as if your nerve endings are in shock from the sudden transition from cool to hot as hell. You don’t plan to be here long, you tell yourself. It shouldn’t be so bad.

  You reach out and grip one of the gate’s bars. It’s hot and slick in your hand and you realize that it’s not metal you’re touching, but rather black paint covering the metal. Something else you never noticed before.

  You peer through the gate and see that the grounds are as well kept as ever—the grass neatly trimmed, no broken tree limbs or leaves in sight. You have no idea who takes such good care of the place; you’ve never seen anyone working here. Perhaps, your imagination offers, the place looks after itself.

  The gate isn’t locked; as far as you know it never has been. You push your way inside easily, the gate moving smooth and silent, well made, well maintained, perhaps both. You step into the graveyard—or is it cemetery? You always get the two confused. Burial ground, then. After all, that’s what it said on the sign, right?

  You step into the burial ground and regard the rows of headstones. The markers are smaller than in more modern cemeteries, certainly smaller than in the one you just left. And while there may be less space between each stone, there’s more between each row.

  You don’t want to look at the headstones, not yet, so you turn and look at the historical marker, set on a pole on the other side of the wall. You’ve never really read it before, only ever gave it a passing glance. You wonder why the marker faces inward instead of outward, so folks driving by might see it and be tempted to stop and take a look. Perha
ps so they won’t be tempted? Then why have a marker at all?

  You read, for the first time, the marker in its entirety. West Branch Quaker Burial Ground. Erected 1948 in memory of Samuel and Anna Jay Jones. The wall contains brick from the Friends meetinghouse which stood across the road in active service from 1804 to 1906.

  You’re surprised. A Quaker meetinghouse stood across the street? For a hundred and two years? You crane your neck so you can look around the sign. All that rests across the country road now are small, nondescript houses that wouldn’t be out of place in any suburb. You wonder how you could live your entire childhood here, just down the road, and never know about the old meetinghouse. You wonder what happened in 1906 that spelled the church’s end. Fire? Age? Or perhaps its members simply grew old and passed away, and their progeny moved elsewhere. You know of no other Quaker churches in the area.

  You turn away from the sign, and look at the simple gray wooden building in the far left corner of the burial ground. You stride toward it, the summer heat finally starting to get to you. This isn’t the proper atmosphere for a graveyard, you think. It should be overcast, gloomy, with a hint of a chill in the air. You wipe sweat from your forehead with the back of your hand, but there’s too much and some drips on the lenses of your sunglasses. You consider wiping the glasses off, but decide instead to remove them. You carry them in your right hand as you near the building, as if to underscore to yourself the fact that you don’t intend to stay here long, otherwise you’d put them in your shirt pocket, right?