The Dead Man: Eater of Souls (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Joseph Nassise

  Shaking his head, Matt went back to work but stopped again only a few feet farther down the hall.

  This time he thought he’d heard the echo of someone’s laughter coming from around the corner.

  Matt grabbed the push broom and swiftly unscrewed the head, dropping the front section on the floor and leaving him with a long wooden handle that could double as a quarterstaff if necessary. He wished he had his axe with him, but unfortunately, while the students would ignore many things, the sight of the janitor wandering the halls carrying an axe like Jason Vorhees wasn’t one of them. He’d left his grandfather’s axe with the rest of his tools in the back of the electric cart outside.

  Cautiously, he crept to the end of the hall and peered around the corner, the staff held at the ready.

  The hallway beyond was empty.

  But halfway down its length, one locker hung open a few inches, swinging slightly in a non-existent breeze as if someone had brushed against it on his or her way past.

  Matt stared at that open locker door.

  It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence; students failed to close their lockers all the time. Any given hallway would have half a dozen or so left open accidentally and Matt normally just nudged them shut with his foot as he came by with the broom and thought nothing of them.

  But this one was different.

  For no reason he could put his finger on, this locker seemed to give off an air of menace, as if a wild animal lay in wait in the darkness of its depths and the minute Matt grew closer it would burst out in a savage frenzy and attempt to eviscerate him on the spot.

  A chill ran down Matt’s spine and he found the hair on the back of his arms standing at attention, as if it could sense something that he couldn’t.

  Come on, he told himself, trying to laugh at his own sudden nervousness. Don’t be a pussy. It’s a freakin’ locker door for heaven’s sake!

  Then why is it hanging open? that voice in the back of his head asked and Matt found he didn’t have a good answer.

  “See?”

  Matt shook his head, chasing the voice away. No way was he going to let his own subconscious spook him out. He marched down the hall and stopped in front of the locker in question.

  As he reached out to open the door, his subconscious spoke up again, but this time it did so in tones that eerily resembled those of his nemesis, Mr. Dark.

  Curiosity killed the cat, you know.

  Matt’s hand slowed, then stopped, just an inch or so from the edge of the door.

  The darkness inside the locker seemed to mock him, daring him to open the door, to face what he was going to find in there…

  “Fuck this,” Matt said aloud to the empty hallway around him and wrenched open the locker door.

  It was empty except for the single red lollipop, freshly licked, that rested on its wrapper on the shelf inside.

  Matt jerked back away from the locker, staring at the lollipop the way one might stare at a particularly large and poisonous breed of spider as it scuttles across your pillow, his heart trip-hammering in his chest.

  He whirled around, his gaze flitting about the hallway and the doors that lined its length, looking for Mr. Dark. The lollipop was his calling card; find one and you were almost assured of finding the other.

  But there was no one here but him.

  Just to be sure, Matt used the keys on his ring to open and search every classroom that opened off that hallway, eight in all. Every single one of them was empty and Matt saw no sign of Mr. Dark.

  Convinced that he was alone, that if Mr. Dark had indeed been here he had long since fled when he became aware of Matt’s presence, Matt locked the last classroom behind him and turned to finish his work for the day.

  Olivia Drake was standing right there, close enough to touch.

  Matt shrieked like a schoolgirl; he couldn’t help it. After all the tension of the last half-hour her sudden appearance surprised him so badly that the sound was out before he could put a stop to it.

  Drake jumped in turn, her hand going to her chest as if to quell her beating heart. Matt knew exactly how she was feeling.

  “Damn, you scared me,” he managed to gasp out, when he could get air into his lungs again.

  “I scared you?” she asked, incredulous, and then they were both laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Drake?” Matt asked, when they both managed to stop laughing.

  She laid a hand on his arm. “Olivia, please.”

  That was a change from earlier, one he gladly accepted. He smiled to show there were no hard feelings. “Okay, Olivia it is. What can I do for you?”

  She looked down, hesitated for a moment, and Matt realized in the space of that silence that she still had her hand on his forearm. A gentle heat was radiating out from under where it rested on his forearm.

  He was in no hurry to pull away, either.

  “I saw you working on that tree by the library earlier. You seem to know what you were doing with that axe,” she said.

  Matt shrugged. “I’ve had a bit of practice,” he said simply, wanting to laugh aloud at the understatement.

  The fact that his “practice” included using the axe against things both worldly and otherworldly probably wouldn’t have won him any points with her thought.

  “Really? Where at?”

  “I worked in a lumber mill in a small town in northern Washington for a long time before deciding to do some traveling.” It was an explanation he’d used before and one that didn’t require him to go into the whole back-from-the-dead thing, which, he had to admit, was a bit hard for most people to wrap their heads around.

  “And here you are,” she said.

  “And here I am,” he acknowledged, turning away and looking down the hall for a moment. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  She smiled, as if embarrassed that she’d gotten off track. “Yes, sorry. The storm we had the night before last brought down an elm tree in my yard and after seeing how handy you are with that tool of yours...”

  “Sure, I’ll break it down for you,” Matt said interrupting her, embarrassed by how her word choices had started a movie playing in the back of his mind, one involving the two of them and...

  “I’m happy to pay you whatever the going rate might be.”

  He waved her off. “It’s on me. Don’t worry about.” He pretended to give it some thought, not wanting to seem too anxious. “Tomorrow after school okay for you?”

  “That would be great. I’d really appreciate it,” she said.

  She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket and passed it over. “My address and phone number,” she said, grinning sheepishly. “I was hoping you’d say yes.”

  “Tomorrow it is then,” he told her.

  Later, after she’d gone, Matt found himself thinking about the warmth of her hand on his arm and wondering just what it was that had changed her attitude toward him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When work was finished that afternoon, Matt grabbed his axe, slipped it into the straps he’d made for it on the side of the motorcycle, and then headed for Olivia’s place. It turned out to be a nice three-bedroom house on a side street not far from the campus. The elm she’d been talking about was impossible to miss, as it filled most of the front yard, its branches sticking out in every direction.

  Matt didn’t even bother letting Olivia know he was there – he figured she’d probably heard the bike anyway – but instead dove right into the work. He loved swinging the axe and from the looks of it he’d have plenty of time to do so with this job.

  He started with the branches, chopping them free of the trunk and then pulling them off to one side where he broke them down further into pieces that would easily fit inside a fireplace or wood-burning stove.

  About halfway through the job he heard the screen door open on the front porch and when he looked over he found Olivia leaning against the side of the house with what looked like a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. U
nlike earlier, when she’d been dressed professionally in a well-tailored suit, now she had on a pair of faded blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a men’s button down shirt over a brightly-colored tee. Her hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail.

  She didn’t say anything, just stood there watching him, and so he simply nodded and got back to work. As he did so he realized that he liked being watched, provided it was Olivia doing the watching, and the creepy feeling he’d had twice the day before was replaced by a sense that she’d enjoyed watching as much as he enjoyed being watched.

  It was an interesting start to what he hoped would be an interesting evening.

  When he glanced over again a short time later, he discovered she’d gone back inside the house with nary a word.

  He worked for two straight hours and managed to get the branches cleared from the trunk and the trunk cut into more manageable pieces. He was about to start splitting the logs when Olivia came back outside and announced, “There’s a fresh change of clothes in the bathroom inside, stuff my brother left behind last time he was here. Go in and get cleaned up and I’ll take you to dinner on me.”

  Matt had no qualms with that and forty-five minutes later they were parking Olivia’s Honda in the lot outside Molto Bene, a local Italian joint that Olivia promised was as good as any you’d find on the south side of Chicago.

  Having never been there, Matt had to take her word for it.

  To his delight, the food and the conversation, turned out to be as good as he’d expected it to be.

  They talked a bit about their childhoods, his in he cool northern woods of Washington and hers amidst the wheat fields of the Great Plains. She gone to school in Chicago, done her residency at Northwestern Memorial, and then found work as the staff psychiatrist at Harpers Bay Academy.

  Talk of her current position gave Matt the opening he’d been waiting for to ask about his number one suspect.

  “So what’s with that kid who came in earlier, David Bateman?”

  “You know David?” she asked, surprised.

  Matt shook his head. “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure. Or the misfortune as it may be. Just curious.”

  “David’s just having some difficulties right now, that’s all.”

  “Sounds like it. Trouble at home?”

  Olivia shook her head. “Sorry, but I can’t get into specifics. Doctor-patient relationships and all that. Let’s just say that I’ve been seeing a lot of him in recent months.”

  He nodded. “Sure, I understand. I was just curious after breaking up that fight earlier in the day.”

  He tossed it out there like bait and she grabbed at it, hook line and sinker.

  “Fight? I don’t think I heard about that,” she said.

  So he told her. About how he’d seen the jocks harassing him and how David had waded in rather than backing down.

  “Seems like a pretty fearless kid,” he said.

  “Yes, he is that. Unfortunately, I don’t think he knows when to back down and when to stand up for himself. This afternoon’s incident was a prime example.”

  She went on to tell him that just an hour after the incident that Matt had witnessed, David had been involved with an altercation with another student, this time not fairing as well physically as he had earlier in the day.

  Desert turned into after dinner drinks, after dinner drinks turned into a nightcap back at her place. Before long one thing led to another and Matt found himself in her bed, watching as she stripped off her clothing, revealing a body as lithe and gently curved as he’d imagined it would be. She came to him with an eagerness that shouldn’t have surprised him but somehow did and he found himself responding just as ardently, until their cries filled the small bedroom as they were both carried over the edge into abandon.

  Later, Matt was on the edge of sleep, when he heard her say in a sleepy voice, “I just figured it out. Where I’d seen you before.”

  Matt’s eyes blinked open and he stared at the ceiling, waiting for her to mention that she knew he was the “man that refused to die” as the papers had once taken to calling him, but she mumbled something about him looking like an actor in a recent sitcom as she slipped off into dreamland herself.

  Gonna have to tell her sometime, a voice in the back of his head said, but he shrugged it off. For her own sake, he couldn’t afford to tell her the truth about what he was doing here. They would enjoy things while they lasted and then he’d have to be on his way.

  Evil waits for no man, he thought, and Mr. Dark certainly had enough evil in him to satisfy even the most indulgent of tastes. Success here wouldn’t mean his quest was done, only that he’d won a minor skirmish in what he imagined was going to be a very long war.

  With that cheerful thought in his head, Matt drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Olivia’s comments the night before had increased his interest in David Bateman and Matt decided he wanted a look at the teenager’s file. He waited until after hours, when the admin building was mostly deserted, and then used his keys to enter the campus health center and rifled through her filing cabinets until he found it.

  What it contained was more than he expected.

  He’d known from her comments that Olivia had been treating David, but he hadn’t realized that it had been going on for almost six months. Notes in the record said he’d been having trouble sleeping, was prone to fits of anger, and recently had begun having feelings of persecution and paranoia. His parents had been informed but had chosen to ignore Olivia’s recommendation of more intensive therapy, according to her notes. Matt wasn’t sure exactly what was considered to be “more intensive therapy”, but he could read between the lines as much as the next person. The school was a bit worried that David was going to have some kind of breakdown and was covering its butt to be sure the family couldn’t sue them later on.

  There was no doubt that David Bateman was an angry, aggressive kid, but on the other hand, from what Matt had seen the day before, he might just have good reason to be. He was feeling persecuted because that’s exactly what was happening to him. There wasn’t any big mystery there. Some of the other students had chosen to target him for his differences and David was stuck dealing with that on a regular basis. If Matt were in his shoes, he’d be pretty angry, too.

  The question Matt had to answer was whether David had reached the point where his anger and need for revenge against those he thought were persecuting him would move from fantasy to reality.

  In order to do that, he needed more information.

  As it turned out, David was a day student and lived here in town with his parents and younger sister. Matt wrote down the Bateman’s home address, replaced the file just as he’d found it, and slipped out the door, intent on paying the family a visit.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later Matt was cruising through Bateman’s neighborhood on the newly rebuilt Yamaha. The bike handled the wide, winding streets without difficulty, leaving him to observe the homes around him as he sped on past. The Batemen’s lived in a fairly well-to-do part of town, he saw, with big lawns and houses set back a ways from the street.

  He turned onto Covington Place and drove past the house, fixing its location firmly in his mind. A quarter mile later he made a left onto Olgonquit, turned off the engine and let the bike coast to a stop behind several other vehicles parked along the side of the road.

  It seemed like a much better place to leave the bike than along the empty stretch of Covington. This was a small town; things outside the normal routine stood out and a lone motorcycle parked in front of an empty house was sure to call attention to itself. Given what he was about to do, the last thing Matt wanted was to get hassled by the cops.

  After clipping his helmet to the bike, Matt walked back down the street until he reached the Bateman’s property.

  The house was dark and looked empty, just as it had been when he’d driven by moments before. There weren’t any cars in the driveway, but the light over the door was
on, suggesting that the Batemans might have gone out with the intention of being home after dark.

  On the other side of the street was an undeveloped wooded lot that looked like the perfect observation post to Matt. He walked a few feet into the woods and stood in the shadow of a clump of trees, confident that he wouldn’t be visible from the street.

  Not ten minutes after he’d settled into position a pair of headlights appeared in the distance. Matt instinctively pulled back a little deeper into the shadows of the trees around him and watched as the headlights turned into an entire car, a dark, maybe blue or black, Mercedes that turned into the Bateman’s driveway. A couple in their early fifties got out of the front while David climbed out of the back.

  No one said a word as they walked up the drive and went inside the house.

  Happy family, Matt thought.

  From his hiding place he watched the lights come on inside and used them to track their progress as they moved through the house. After a few minutes they seemed to have settled into three specific locations; the light in the kitchen was most likely Mrs. Bateman, the flickering blue light of the television in the den was probably Mr. Bateman, and the single light that went on in the last room on the second floor had to be David.

  Keeping to the shadows, Matt crossed the street and then moved around to the side of the house where there were several trees growing close together not far from David’s window.

  It had been years since he’d climbed anything but a ladder, but a boyhood spent in the wooded vales of Washington had given him the necessary skills and, once learned, it was something you never forgot. He used his hands to guide him, letting his legs do most of the work, and made sure to put his feet on the part of the branch closest to the trunk of the tree, where it would be strongest. Hearing the crack of a branch and falling twenty feet to the ground would not improve his evening by a long shot. It took him ten minutes to reach a point slightly higher than and directly across from David’s window, a position that let him see into the room with ease through the open curtains.