Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  After the first verse, she suddenly heard the strains of Death’s guitar accompanying her. She opened her eyes and saw him bent over the guitar, his hat obscuring his face.

  And then all around her, she had the sensation of no longer being alone. She sang and sang, the woman’s plight becoming even more desperate, and around her, ghostly figures began to appear. Souls, attracted by her voice and Death’s guitar. She recognized many of them; her mother, her sister. Men and women who had died in the hospital tent, people she had cared for until their demise. The young woman she’d sung to; the one whose name she had not known.

  And Ricardo. Her beloved Ricardo, gazing at her with that proud smile she’d seen on their wedding day. She almost faltered when she saw him, but he nodded as their eyes met, and she knew. She knew that it was not her time.

  Finally, there was no more song to sing, and she wept as the woman threw herself into the sea. Wept because she knew that was an unfair ending to the woman’s tragic story.

  Death stopped playing, and the souls of the dead dissipated into the mist. Ricardo was last, and he waved to Ana as he left, and Ana knew it was not a farewell forever. She would see him again. But not now.

  Ana strode up to the bench where Death sat, hunched over his guitar.

  Death lifted his head. A single translucent tear fell down his bony cheek and hung off his chin. A wave of relief passed through her as she reached out and caught it in her palm. It was colder than anything she had ever felt, so cold it burned. She nearly dropped it, but instead closed her fist around the droplet and said, “You have wept.”

  He was silent for a long moment then he rose from the bench, shaking out his lanky frame. “So I have. Very well, you have won our bargain, little Angel. You and your people will escape me.”

  Just before Death vanished, he added, “For now.”

  * * * * *

  Angela Roberts has been writing stories ever since she learned to write, and her second grade teacher published her for the first time in her school’s literary journal. By day, she edits video game texts; by night, she edits and writes for The Gloaming Magazine, an online SF magazine. She drew upon historical accounts of the Spanish Influenza pandemic and elements of her own Portuguese-Canadian heritage to weave together this story of a bargain with Death.

  Therapy

  By Bev Vincent

  Lying on a couch in this brightly appointed room, he feels safe. Here he can share the dark thoughts that plague him day and night. The therapist seems to understand. At least she makes sounds of encouragement in all the right places.

  “I think we’ve talked enough about your work for now,” the woman says. “We’ll come back to it later. Let’s focus more on you.”

  “There’s not a lot to say.”

  “What’s your earliest memory?”

  “My mother. Father was very protective. We were kept on a short tether, never out of our mother’s sight. She saw how we were being smothered.”

  “Sounds like she loved you very much.”

  “She was the one who set me free.”

  Her pencil tip scratches the surface of a yellow legal pad. The comforting sound makes him feel like she is paying attention. Taking him seriously. Previous therapists didn’t take notes, merely recorded their conversations. He likes this better.

  “You seem reluctant to discuss your father.”

  “I told you about the accident.”

  “Yes.”

  “What more would you have me say?”

  “What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”

  “Blood.”

  “Yes.”

  “Blood everywhere. I didn’t mean it.”

  “No.”

  “My mother gave me the blade as a present.”

  “She knew how you would use it.”

  Adrenaline courses through his veins. “You think so?” This idea never occurred to him before.

  “Why else would she give it to you?”

  “It was a gift.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think…?”

  “She set you free. What do you mean by that?”

  He stops to think. He has uttered the phrase so often it’s become ingrained in his nature. His mother was the one who set him free. “She gave me the blade.”

  “The one involved in the accident.”

  “Yes.”

  “The accident that killed your father.”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that you were free.”

  He sighs. The memory is unpleasant, even though it was forever ago. “Yes.”

  “Let’s skip ahead. You were married.”

  “Yes.”

  “Had children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me what happened to them.”

  “You know what happened.”

  “Tell me again. As if you’ve never told anyone before.”

  He points to the hourglass on the table near the couch, marking out the span of their time together. Grain by grain, the upper chamber empties of sand. When the last grain drops, it will be time to leave. “Nothing lasts forever. That’s what the hourglass tells us. Time devours everything.”

  “It devoured your children.”

  “They died, yes.”

  “You were protective of them?”

  “Like my father, I guess. I was afraid for them.”

  “For them … or of them?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Did you never worry that one of them might do to you—?”

  He cuts her off. “That’s crazy. What happened to my father was an accident.”

  “You didn’t look at them and think, ‘Blood everywhere’?”

  “Never.”

  “Never?”

  A deafening silence permeates the room. He imagines that he can hear each grain of sand sliding against the tapered glass as it falls to join those that have gone before.

  “But they all died,” the therapist says. Her voice is soft and tender. She understands him. He nods and knows it’s enough. Knows that she is watching him and that she registers the gesture. “And your wife?”

  “Her time came as well. Too early, our friends said over and over again. Struck down so young.”

  “Losing the children — that must have been devastating. For both of you.”

  He nods again. Some things are too difficult to put into words, even a simple confirmation of the pain they endured. He looks at the hourglass once more. Only a few minutes remain in their session. “What does it all mean, anyway?”

  “What?”

  “This life. This existence. People are born, grow old and die. Some watch their parents pass on before them. Others watch their children perish.”

  “Some see both.”

  “Yes.”

  “Must it have a meaning?”

  He considers the question, but can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. “If not, why must I do what I do?”

  “It’s part of the natural order.”

  “You’re taking this very well. The last therapist I visited couldn’t handle it. My history—”

  “It’s a tragic tale.”

  “It’s my life.”

  “A life full of loss.”

  Suddenly he feels embarrassed. Self-indulgent. He’s not the only one who has suffered great loss. “Your parents passed away recently.”

  Her voice hitches as she breathes in sharply. He can tell she wasn’t expecting this. “First my father, last year. Then my mother, four months later. Once he was gone, she gave up. She didn’t want to continue without him.”

  “I see that a lot.”

  “I was angry with her.”

  “Bec
ause you weren’t important enough for her to want to go on living.”

  “Yes.”

  Fewer than a hundred grains of sand remain in the upper chamber. They always seem to drop faster when there are less of them.

  “Our time is almost up,” he says. The tables have turned between them. It’s time to go back to work. Time — it’s always about time.

  “Yes.”

  He reaches down for his scythe, which has been resting on the floor beside the couch. Its blade is stained, first with the blood of his father and then with that of the billions of others who have followed.

  “Are you ready? It will be quick. I promise.”

  “Yes.”

  He rises with the scythe in his right hand. With his left he picks up the hourglass. Together they watch the final three grains of sand tumble through the narrow channel to the lower chamber, almost in slow motion.

  He closes the door gently behind him on the way out. When he looks at the blade, he imagines it is his father’s blood he sees there.

  * * * * *

  Bev Vincent is the author of the Stephen King Illustrated Companion, which was nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the Edgar Award, and The Road to the Dark Tower, nominated for a Stoker. He is a contributing editor with Cemetery Dance magazine and is the author of over sixty short stories, including appearances in Tesseracts Thirteen, Evolve and Evolve 2, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and The Blue Religion. “Therapy” won the 2006 Wee Small Hours flash fiction contest at Hellnotes.com that invited writers to design a short tale that explains what makes the Grim Reaper so grim. The story appeared in electronic form on the Hellnotes website for two weeks. This is its first print version.

  Me and Lou Hang Out

  By Tom Piccirilli

  I turn as a punk in a ski mask holding a .32 emerges from behind a ‘73 Chevelle. It’s a nice car, almost fully restored, and I’m jealous as hell. I’m driving a Saturn with two hundred thousand miles on it and a transmission that coughs as loudly as my old man did before he died of lung cancer. I let out a ten thousand year old sigh.

  I’ve got a mortgage company breathing hot murder down my neck, I’ve got my mother in a nursing home dying of Alzheimer’s. When I visit, my ma looks at me and says, “Lou, my feet are cold, turn up the heat.” Who’s Lou? She doesn’t know any Lou, she’s never known any Lou. And worse, she’s lost everything under both knees to diabetes. My ma, she doesn’t even have feet to be cold. Somehow, that almost gets me laughing because if I don’t laugh I’m going to bawl in front of her, and what man can stand to cry in front of his mother? Lou, whoever you are, turn up the heat.

  I’ve got a third marriage on the skids and two daughters who never come around anymore. Sometimes I can barely remember their faces. I look through old photo albums and everyone seems to be a stranger. I occasionally recognize myself. Seeing myself always startles me and comes as a shock, like spotting someone who shouldn’t be there.

  “Hand over your wallet!” the mutt shouts. The .32 shakes in his hand.

  I do it without hesitation, practically laughing in the kid’s face. You can’t even go to the mall without getting mugged anymore. The mall, half the stores are shut. I need new underwear. I can’t find a store that sells men’s underwear. All of them, closed up. My wife, she’s gonna be pissed. She washes my briefs and complains that they’re falling apart. They are, but what am I gonna do?

  I can see through his cotton wool eye-holes that he’s got sweat in his eyelashes, hanging there like tears. I’ve got eighteen bucks in cash and three credit cards maxed out to over twenty grand. I’ll never pay them off. I carry Visa around like ninety pounds of bricks on my back. I expect him to break his arm trying to lift my wallet. He can maybe get himself a hamburger with all I’ve got on me, so long as he screws the waitress on the tip.

  He should only know how much worse it’s going to get for him, the prick. He thinks he’s driven to desperate measures now? Because he’s got college loans to pay back, because he needs another hit of meth. Wait until the gray starts up in his beard, his hair bailing out like passengers on a sinking ocean liner. Shit, wait until he loses the job at the factory he’s worked at for twenty-two years, and the bank loans go bad, the roof leaks, your dogs die. The angina claws at your chest, the knees buckle. The flagpole never flies past half-mast. Wait until you turn around to talk to your friends and realize you don’t have any, you’re on the long walk all on your own. They’re dead or have moved out of state or were never there to begin with. You can name them all on your left hand but it would take you six weeks to list all your enemies. Toss a rock and you’ll hit six people who hate you.

  “The rest of it!” the punk screams. And it is a scream, a girlish shriek. He’s already feeling the weight of what’s going to happen to him next in the world. He understands what’s coming. It would make anybody scream if they could see it beforehand. His lips are skinned back. Tip of his tongue darting.

  I shrug and grimace at him. What rest? Like I’m hiding Krugerrands in my shoe.

  I clean the change out of my back pockets. I toss it at his feet. Thirty-seven cents. No, thirty-eight. Live large, mutt. Live like it’s your last day, your very last hour. Because twenty-five years from now you’ll be wandering the streets at two in the morning.

  And you know what you’ll do? You hit the strip clubs hoping for some kind of relief, but the tight poopers and upturned tits only make it worse. You roll over to get some action from your wife and she huffs air like a broken carburetor.

  Maybe the hardest thing to get used to is that your father never leaves you. He’s been dead for twenty years but he’s still there, in your head, listening in on every word you utter, watching every play you make. He comments and critiques. He wises off and gives you big shrugs. He shakes his head in disappointment, punches you on the shoulder. He’s here now, telling me everything I’ve done wrong, everything I’m doing wrong, everything he thinks is going to go wrong in the next few seconds.

  He says, “You’re about to be shot in the head.”

  “I know,” I tell him.

  “It’s a damn shame what the world has come to.”

  “Christ, isn’t that the truth, dad.”

  “I’m not your father.”

  And he’s right, it’s not my old man at all. “Well, who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Lou.”

  The kid says, “You rotten bastard!”

  I take a step towards him. Maybe it’s to give him a smack upside his head. Maybe to give him a hug. Maybe to grab my thirty-eight cents back. No one should steal a man’s last thirty-eight cents, no matter how rough you’ve got it.

  Then the mutt shoots me in the head.

  Then there’s nothing but a vicious sting on the far side of my skull. It’s electrical, all my nerve-endings firing at once, everything inside letting go the way it lets go every time I’m on the phone with the bank or the hospital or the old folks’ home. I want to shout. Where are my daughters? Where are my mother’s feet? I want to ask the girls in the strip clubs, Why the fuck are you looking at me like that? I’m no different from the rest. I’m as disgusting and bangable and righteous as the next guy trying to tuck a buck in your g-string.

  And I must be dead already because there’s no sound. A bullet moves faster than the speed of sound. If you hear the shot you know you made it through. But I haven’t. I haven’t heard the shot, I haven’t made it. And it makes me chuckle. At last, it’s over. I’ve been waiting a long time, but I finally got here.

  Then the sharp noise of gunfire makes the kid drop the .32. He lets out the kind of sound my father made on his death-bed, a deep choke in the back of his throat. He gags and backs away a step. He vomits on the change scattered at his feet and yanks the ski mask off, gasping. Good-looking kid except for the meth-mouth. If he puts the pipe away and cleans up his
act he’ll make it just fine in the world.

  Lou says, “You’re going to fall down now,” but I’m already down, on my knees. The kid nearly backs over me with the rear left tire. I reach out and touch the bumper. It feels important that I make contact with the car, like I’m touching 1973. I’m sixteen again and life’s all out in front of me. I’ve got a cute girl and a Mustang with a rusted out front quarter panel. I’ve got a job and pocket cash.

  The tires squeal and the Chevelle sideswipes my Saturn as he hauls ass up the aisle.

  That fuckin’ little prick.

  “Did you see that shit?” I ask Lou.

  “I saw,” he says.

  “Did you take my mother’s feet?”

  “Yes,” he tells me.

  I’m still on my knees. Feels like I’ve always been on my knees. Blood is running through my hair and down my forehead. It catches in the wrinkle between my eyes that’s as deep as a knife scar. It’s a two-inch trench. The blood picks up speed, like there’s rapids up ahead, and washes down my face.

  I fall over next to the .32. So far as I can tell I’m still breathing. A crowd forms, all these faces like farm animals shouldering each other aside and practically going “Moo” at me. I’m a touch surprised that there’s so many smiles. You’d think looking at spattered brains might ruin somebody’s day. A couple of people snap pictures. A bunch more are on their cells, clucking away. Half of them are calling 911. The other half, they’re talking with friends, giggling, tittering, chuckling, chittering.

  One girl, maybe nineteen, all eyes and lips and hips, excited, “I’m looking at him right now, some old guy dead in the parking lot, I swear.”

  I give her the finger.

  “He just shot me the bird, the fucker!”

  Paramedics arrive and start doing their thing. They keep trying to rouse me, asking me questions, saying, “Sir? Stay with us, sir! 140 over 89. Are you allergic to penicillin?” I think, Penicillin? You think I got the clap? I think, 140 over 89? That isn’t bad at all. Better than when I use the blood pressure cuff at the Safeway.