Danse Macabre: Close Encounters with the Reaper

by Nancy Kilpatrick

  They hook me to machines, stab me with some needles, get me on the gurney, and stuff me in the ambulance. The girl makes sure that I see her giving me the finger back.

  The driver doesn’t know how to get out of the mall parking lot. He tries edging out onto Elm, but it’s a one way going in the wrong direction. He thinks about crossing the median but he’ll bottom out for sure. He circles back into the parking lot, passing the dispersing crowd. He heads up and down the aisles looking for an exit onto 2nd. When he finds it, he stomps the gas pedal so hard that all the shit on the ambulance shelves falls. One of the defibrillator paddles jerks loose and smacks me in my mangled noggin.

  Lou’s crouched on the floor, watching the scene. He’s got a sorrowful, haunted expression seared into his features. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of anybody. He’d be beautiful with the soft looks and long golden hair except the lines of his face are filled with the dust of millennia. I recognize him now.

  I want to ask him about the garden. I want to ask him about the desert. I want to know if he’s got a list with all my sins written out in blood. I start ticking them off, but I get bored somewhere between number three and twelve thousand. Besides, we’re rolling into the hospital now.

  The emergency room docs are waiting. They wheel the gurney in and Lou rides along, sitting cross-legged on my chest. He reaches out and puts a hand to my cheek, tells me, “Don’t be afraid.”

  I want to say, Are you kidding? Afraid? I’m done, man, I’m finally done. I want to laugh until I howl like a wolf at a blue moon. No more taxes, no more collection agencies, no more mutts ripping off my last nickel. No more ungrateful kids, no more nagging wife chasing me off the couch when I want to drink one beer and catch five minutes of the game. No more staring in the mirror going, Holy fuckall, what is happening, it’s like some mutant staring back at me, some radioactive monkey with white fur and giant hanging nuts. No more, no more, my name has a red line through it, I’ve been scratched out. Who could ever possibly be afraid of this?

  “They’re going to take your head off,” Lou says.

  My head’s pretty much already off. The surgeons are going hog wild on me. There’s a fleet of them around the operating table. I keep waiting for someone to yell for a retractor, but nobody does. I wait to see a nurse sponge off a doctor’s forehead, but nobody does.

  Then it happens. I leave my body.

  I want to say, Thank God, but maybe Lou will take it the wrong way. A little courtesy isn’t too much to ask for considering he’s been at my side the whole time. My phantom self hovers over the operating table, standing in mid-air and looking down at the surgeons using a buzz saw to take off my skull cap.

  My eyelids are taped down but twitching. I can see the damage my brain has suffered. A .32 will do it to you up close.

  I always thought brains were muscles, tight and tough, fibrous kind of tissue, but mine looks like runny eggs. The trajectory of the bullet has caused a channel to run along the right side, leaving my brain with a hinge-like flap. Maybe I’m not as dead as I thought, but I’m still hoping. I drift above the doctors and curse them for trying so damn hard. Like I need more nasty letters from the hospital for non-payment. I’m surprised the finance department lady isn’t in the operating room asking me about my co-pay.

  Christ isn’t calling me. St. Peter hasn’t opened to the proper page of his enormous book of life. I’m not in any kind of hell they taught us about in Catholic school. There’s no loved ones here to greet me, no long bright tunnel to enter.

  I try flying but it’s a no go. I try to walk through the wall but I notice I’m tethered, a silver leash going from the back of my busted head on the table to the back of my head up here. I tug but I can’t get a good enough grip.

  Lou’s floating with me. I don’t feel any kind of a breeze but his hair is flowing around his shoulders like he’s moving against a stiff wind.

  “All right, Lou,” I say. “What’s the game?”

  “I’m here to take away your pain.”

  “I thought you were supposed to punish bad boys like me.”

  “That’s never been my duty.”

  “That’s not what the big book says.”

  “It’s a book of lies, written by madmen to give voice to an insane god.”

  “Lou! Blasphemy! No wonder you got sent to the furnace room.”

  “No, that’s not where I was sent.”

  I can’t help it, my heart goes out to him. He looks like he’s been on the verge of weeping for maybe twenty thousand years, but he can’t let a teardrop fall. It’s all there, written there in the way he hangs his head. He’s weary. He’s at least as weary as I am. I figure, the two of us, we should go out for a beer together, have a few laughs. Except I’m tapped, and Lou, he doesn’t have any pockets.

  “So if you’re not here to stick a pitchfork in me, then why are you here?” I ask.

  “I’m your guide.”

  “Guide to where? I’m not dead yet.”

  “And I’ll answer your questions.”

  “I just asked one. Guide to where?”

  “Into the next phase.”

  “Next phase?”

  “What lies beyond. The next world.”

  “Lou, just tell me there’s a couch where I can sit in the dark without anybody hassling my ass.”

  “No, that’s not what it’s like.”

  “Fuck!”

  I grab the tether again and pull with everything I’ve got. I try to snap the cord so I can just drift on up and up and up and screw anybody who tries to bring me back down. I tug and bring the cord up to my phantom teeth and bite down on that son of a bitching bastard thing but it won’t break. On the table, my eyes pop open. A nurse has to restick the tape over them.

  I give up and drop my leash. “Damn it.”

  So I hang there, Lou at my side, the two of us alone with our heavy thoughts, both of us looking like we want to cry. From time to time we brush shoulders. Occasionally he reaches out and puts a hand to my face. It’s not the kind of thing I’m all that comfortable with, but I know he’s just trying to show support, build a rapport, share the moment. Maybe it’s part of the next phase.

  The surgeons pop my skull cap back on. It makes a wet hollow sound. Bits of bone and brain are collected in shiny metal dishes all around. I wonder how many memories are gone. It seems like they ought to be pouring out of my ears across the floor. I ought to see myself on my wedding day, watching my kids being born, taking them to college, sitting with my mother at my old man’s funeral, putting the dog down, flushing the fish, telling the Jehovahs to get the hell off my stoop. Somebody uses a staple gun to jam a few staples around my head. You’d think they might put some putty or rubber cement along the edges, some super glue. One good sneeze and the top of my skull is going flying.

  They wrap my head up in a turban. They start stripping off their bloody gloves and yank off their masks. The leash loosens a little at the back of my head. I wrap it up around my shoulder like the garden hose in my yard. I’m drawn along as they wheel me out of the OR and into ICU. They hook me up to about five million bucks worth of noisy machinery. All I can think about is how I have no insurance. Three, four days of this, and my house is gone. For the sake of my wife, I try to will my heart to stop, but my body, it’s stubborn, and somehow just keeps on going despite my efforts.

  “When do we get this show on the road? Why aren’t I dead yet?”

  Lou puts a hand on my shoulder. “There’s more for you to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not much of an answer. You said you’d guide me.”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “So what is this?”

  “I simply don’t know.”

  “Lou, tell me the truth
… are you just fucking with me now?”

  “No. Our god requires greater service.”

  “No matter what you do, it’s just never enough.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  My wife shows up in hysterics. She’s wailing like crazy and already hyperventilating. She keeps this up and she’ll be in a bed right beside me. I try to talk in her ear and tell her to calm down. Now’s the time to be strong. Now’s the time when she has to think about everything I tried to teach her about the bank accounts, dealing with the bills, how to dodge the collection agencies, how to transfer balances from one credit card to the other. None of it gets through. She sobs in a frenzy and throws herself against the foot of the bed. The nurses try to calm her down but it’s no deal, she’s got herself too worked up. A young doc with too much mousse in his stiff pointy hair has to give her a sedative. They prop her on the couch in the waiting room where she slumps over in a daze. Anybody watching would think I must be a hell of a guy for her to react like this. They don’t know my wife.

  The kids come rushing in about an hour later. My wife’s still out of it, red-faced and weepy and only semi-conscious. My daughters have the courtesy of looking upset. They split up and one takes my left hand and one takes my right. They cry and call me daddy with a lot of affection in their voices. The sound of it is so shocking that I sort of jerk around on the end of the leash. For the first time I’m almost sad about what’s happened.

  A thread of blood has worked out from beneath the turban and is inching down the length of my nose. There’s something about watching your blood creep that can really get to you. My youngest daughter wets a tissue with the jug of water on my night stand and dabs at my face until the blood is gone. It’s a sweet moment, the kind I used to believe in. I glance at Lou and he’s watching the scene intently, and there’s somehow even more sadness in his expression now.”Tell me your story, Lou.”

  He stares off through the window towards the sun. The burning sunlight is no less bright than the fiery glow coming off him. His mouth drapes open. His hand tightens into a fist and he brings it up to cover his heart. Then it opens again and he presses his hands together as if in prayer, but only for an instant, before he turns away. A sob that’s been rattling around inside him since the birth of man tries to find its way out but he swallows it down again and again, like he’s done since the garden. “I was the firstborn, beloved above all others, until my master decided I had no grace, and threw me aside.”

  “Rough deal.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the rest of the big book? Is any of it true?”

  “A bit.”

  “Which part?”

  “I’m not altogether certain.”

  “But you were there right from the beginning.”

  “Since before the beginning, yes. But I’ve been lied to as well.”

  I’ve got tubes up my ying-yang. I shit and piss into bags. My kids are embarrassed, listening to the sound, but not like I am. I couldn’t even be left with a little dignity in my death. The nurse comes in and shoos the girls away. My wife is zoned out, stoned on the sedatives. My daughters stutter-walk their mother out of ICU to the chiming and beeping and shrieking whistles of machinery. The guy with brain cancer next door is flatlining. Docs and nurses come running. I want to say, “What’s the point? Show some compassion.” But they don’t. They flip him this way and that way, jab needles in him, stick an air hose down his throat, and hit him with the paddles a few times.

  Lou walks over and puts a hand to the man’s chest. The machinery bloops a few times and all the lights go red. The guy with brain cancer heaves one last time, his final breath hanging in the air like toxic fumes. At least it’s finally over for him.

  “You do that for all of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be so upset, you’re just being kind.”

  “It rarely feels that way.”

  “You’re too sensitive, Lou.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Let me ask you though. Why’d you take my mother’s feet?”

  “I was told to.”

  “By who?”

  “Our master.”

  The tether seems longer, looser. I try making a break for it. I zip through the hospital corridors, glancing it at other poor bastards with their chests opened, heads opened, feet gone, arms gone, eyes gone, minds gone. Out of the whole bunch, Lou only touches one other person, a boy who was mowed down on his bicycle by a garbage truck. The docs and nurses go through the whole show again, the needles, the air hose, the paddles, the chest-thumping, but the boy is gone. It’s a mercy.

  I check my watch. My phantom wrist still has a phantom watch on it, the phantom hours spinning past. We wander some more. We head outside. There’s a park next door. Children are playing, dogs are romping. I wonder what happened to the punk. They couldn’t have caught him yet. He’s probably still behind the wheel, with the hammer down. Flying down 495. He’s got no gun now. Maybe I scared him straight, but I really doubt it.

  I know how to kill time until somebody decides to send me on my way.

  “I want my eighteen bucks back,” I say.

  “Take my hand,” Lou tells me.

  I do. We fly together. I can feel the power and misery within him. It would’ve been a lot easier for him if all he had to do was sit on a throne of bones, waxing his horns and watching lawyers, insurance salesmen, and IRS auditors burn in pits of sulfur. Who wouldn’t dig that?

  The mutt is in a hole in the wall bar off of Route 347. I know the place. I used to drink here, years ago, me and a couple of buddies when we got off work. Nice dark atmosphere, and the local hookers never pestered you too bad. He’s deep into his fourth or fifth beer and orders another double whiskey. The bartender should know better than to serve a punk like this, but in this economy he’s trying to grab whatever he can.

  Kid’s probably spent three times what he took off me. He’s got a face on the verge of crying, the pain bleeding out of him. No different than Lou’s, no different than mine.

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “No.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell him to quit now. Tell him to have a few laughs. Go make more friends. Get out and get laid. Tell him not to take everything so seriously. Life’s too long to waste it worrying. Tell him … tell him I forgive him, he should just let it go.”

  Lou wraps his arms around the mutt and hugs him close, whispering in his ear. The murmuring goes on and on, and I lean in trying to hear what’s being said, but I can’t make any of it out. The kid’s skin is ashen and tight. I can almost recognize the language. The whisper is as old as mankind. It’s inside of us, in our DNA, and has been since the first human wail was heard over the hills.

  The mutt starts sucking air through his teeth. His nerves are snapping, one by one. I recognize the sound of it. On his barstool he leans away from Lou’s lips but Lou follows, becoming more insistent. The kid mumbles and sobs in his beer. The bartender asks, “You okay?” But the mutt can’t answer. He shudders once, twice, and again, then flops sideways off the stool and hits the floor, where he goes into convulsions. In twenty seconds his eyes roll up in his head, he shits himself, and he’s dead.

  The bartender comes around, takes one sniff, and goes, “Goddamn.” He turns away to call 911.

  “Lou! What the hell did you do?”

  “As you asked.”

  “Then why did he croak?”

  “He thought it was a lie. He thought everything I said was a lie. I spoke the great truth, and he was resolved so intently not to believe it that he couldn’t live another moment.”

  “Aw shit! Lou, you’ve really got to work on your delivery.”

  And then I feel the leash loosen and fall away. Back in ICU, I’m dead too. The docs are jum
ping around like clowns with their syringes, and they’re zapping my heart, but it’s all as pointless as voting or spending time on your knees in church. Fuck the co-pay.

  “It’s time for the next phase,” Lou says. “What lies beyond. We must now face our mad master.”

  “Is it going to be bad?”

  “Worse than you can imagine.”

  But I think about it for a second and realize it won’t be. I’ve already crawled on my belly across the cellars of hell. Lou doesn’t know what it means to be human. To fight a daily war you can never win, lacking meaning, devoid of purpose. He thinks he’s got the worst job in existence. He’s never had to punch into a factory for thirty years straight. He doesn’t understand how many people beg for him to show up and snatch them away.

  I reach across the bar and grab the kid’s beer. Maybe it’s a phantom beer, maybe it’s the real thing. It doesn’t matter. I take a long pull from the mug and enjoy the cold taste of it running down my throat. Maybe this was all I needed in my life, more time in dark corners alone, dreaming my dreams, a chance to pretend that the fight was a good fight. Lou’s watching me and I’m watching him. He holds out his hand and I drain the rest of the beer and take it.

  * * * * *

  Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and Le Grand Prix de L’imagination.

  Elegy for a Crow

  By Opal Edgar

  As a person I’d never been a great conversationalist, as a crow it got mildly better as no one expected anything from me. I liked Japan for that; the bird was so common I was inconspicuous. Soaring over Nagoya, a few of the black birds started to join me, smelling the tenacious scent of corpses on my plumage. They swirled around me, in the crisp morning air, sometimes dipping into the organic bins of the neat city, and for just an instant, creating a mess. The mess never lasted; street sweepers were everywhere, popping from corner police stations and unbearably cute vans, ready to chase the birds with large arm movements and quickly order the myriads of bins.