Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  “Sure!” That fear of appearing desperate threatened to surface for a second, but then he remembered she had been the one to approach him. “Where would you like to start?”

  His Calculus class started in less than an hour, but at that moment Colin didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the higher maths. He knew the subject backwards and forwards anyway, and the thought of watching Prof. Eidalwiess scribble on the board held little appeal. As a matter of fact, that thought reeked of the chalk dust and stale caffeine that seemed to permeate so much of his life.

  Instead he spent a glorious afternoon showing off the campus to a girl who smelled of honeysuckle and the promise of summer.

  Once again they chatted easily, her inquisitive nature providing the momentum that got them through his awkward pauses. He talked of campus life, activities, friends, and even future engineering projects. He even managed to learn a little about her.

  Yes, she was new around here. No, she didn’t go to school here…although she intended to. She worked for a temp agency and was currently placed somewhere in the bowels of the Administration building, processing all kinds of forms, but they would be moving her around the university on a day to day basis.

  They walked and talked for two hours, stopping to eat at a campus sandwich shop, before she thanked him for a wonderful time and said she had to get back to work. In hindsight, Colin winced with the knowledge he had already fallen for her before the end of that first day.

  The next day he attempted to find her at the Administration building, but had no luck. He realized he didn’t even know which department within the building she worked, or if she hadn’t already been moved to a new location. He could only hope she would remember where his Physics class had been, and maybe be interested enough to show up again next week.

  As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. That afternoon he had PE class, a required credit that he and his friends chose to blow off by taking bowling. And when he made his way down to the lanes in the cellar of the cafeteria building, he could only stop and stare at the dazzling blond leaning against the front counter. She had a huge, impudent smile and swung a pair of bowling shoes in her hands. Apparently, she had somehow accessed his schedule.

  Since the class was pretty much informal, Colin spent most of it teaching her to bowl. He hardly counted as a much of a bowler himself but it didn’t matter. They had a great time throwing gutter balls, knicking pins, laughing, and both scoring well below a hundred. Then, as before, she thanked him for a great time and left for work.

  And so it went for the next three weeks.

  He would exit a class, or go to an activity, and she would be there. Then they would walk, talk, catch a bite at one of the school snack bars, and a couple of times even caught a movie at the campus theater. It was all very chaste, without even a hint of flirtation, yet every day Colin found himself swept deeper into the experience that was Barbara Laurell.

  She had poise, warmth, humor, and a seemingly inexhaustible ability to be delighted in the dorky things that he and his friends got up to. She looked odd amongst them…a swan in a gaggle of ugly ducklings…yet somehow managed to fit in. Whether it was cheering as Colin and one of his friends dueled with inflatable swords by the library, or eating pizza rolls while they watched the latest bootlegged anime from Japan, she radiated contentment at being along with Colin for the whole thing.

  And in turn, he fell ever deeper in love with her.

  Then one day, as the first winds of November whispered through the branches above, Barbara led him to the duck pond in the University park. The closeness of the gray skies only added to the intimacy of the moment. Her blue eyes merry under her knit cap, she gently teased him about being a slow walker and skipped ahead. He laughed and caught her by a bench along the shore of the pond.

  There they stopped and shared a packed lunch of deli sandwiches and a thermos of hot coffee. They chatted and ate, and it wasn’t long before a third party tried to join their luncheon.

  A resident duck, far too fat and locally established to fly south, waddled up and peremptorily demanded his toll for allowing them to perch by his pond. Barbara giggled and called him “Schultz”, after the fat German sergeant of an old TV show, and tossed him a piece of bread. The corpulent bird made an acrobatic catch that astonished them both. This resulted in more bread flying his way, and the bird didn’t disappoint. Flapping and waddling in desperate contortions, the duck managed to snag most of the bread out of the air and what hit the ground didn’t remain there long.

  All was right and good in the world. And as the pair of them laughed at the fat bird’s antics, Colin felt Barbara lean against him on the park bench. He looked over at her at the same time she looked up at him, and just like that he was lost. For one brief yet eternal instant it seemed to him as if the entire universe came to a stop. Her eyes, alive with laughter, were so vividly blue they seemed to glow against the washed out palette of their November surroundings. Their merry gaze held him like a fly trapped in narcotic amber. Right then, he knew like never before that he could spend the rest of his life looking into those eyes.

  And before he knew it, he had kissed her.

  With absolutely no planning at all, Colin pulled her in and met her with a kiss he had been saving his entire life. Her lips were exquisite velvet, and she melted into him in a way so natural it was as if they had kissed a thousand times before. He couldn’t even think, being so lost in the moment that it had become one impossibly glorious yet endless NOW. But it did end…

  …for in the next second Barbara pushed him away with a cry.

  “No!” She leaped to her feet and backed away, shaking her head in desperate negation, “No, Colin! I didn’t mean it like that! You weren’t supposed to do that!”

  “Barbara?” He rose to his own feet, confused and desperate with fear at her reaction. “Barbara? What’s wrong?” He held out a hand, wanting it to be both arms but afraid that would scare her further away.

  It didn’t seem to matter.

  “Everything! It’s all wrong!” She continued to back away. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! Oh God, it’s all wrong! I have to go!”

  “No! Wait!”

  “Colin, stay back!” Her eyes were wide with alarm, and he had the sudden nightmarish thought that she had misunderstood his advance. Did she think he had assaulted her? As a matter of fact, had he assaulted her? His experience in these type of situations were limited…to pretty much this situation.

  “Barbara, I’m sorry! I wasn’t just trying to take advantage of you! I thought…I thought…”

  “No!” She shook her head again, then took a deep shaky breath, “I know what you thought…I know now, anyway…and I’m sorry. I’m really sorry…but no.”

  It appeared she had collected herself a little, but the tremble in her voice suggested it was only an act of will on her part that kept her from fleeing down the path.

  “Barbara, it’s not like that!” he pleaded. At that moment, Colin understood that anything he had to say would have to be right then and there, because he wasn’t going to get another chance. “Barbara, I love you! I mean that from the bottom of my very soul. Oh god, please don’t look at me like that. I’m serious. I would never hurt you.”

  She actually winced at his words, and despair began its first cold trickle into Colin’s heart.

  “C-Colin…” she stammered. “No! You don’t understand. You can’t possibly understand! Just…no. I have to go.”

  “Wait…please! Just give me a chance!”

  “No! It wouldn’t work! You’re not my type…you’re not…I mean…I can’t…”

  The look of desperation and pity in her eyes damned him with a finality that none of the bullies of his childhood had ever dreamed of achieving.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Barbara closed her eyes and took another deep breath. She clenched and unclenched her gloved hands, then spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Colin, I’m sorry. There is no r
ight way to say this. This is my fault, and I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have let this happen.” She opened her eyes and her voice now steadied. “I am going to leave now. Do not follow me.”

  And with that she turned and walked back up the path.

  Paralyzed with shock, dismay, and the beginnings of grief, Colin could only watch her go. Her receding figure never paused, not even when she reached the bend in the trail that would take her out of his sight. Her head down and arms tightly wrapped around herself, she took the turn in full stride and vanished…gone…her words still ringing in his ears.

  A mistake…

  Not her type…

  That night, as he stared up at the darkness, he tried to connect what she said with the vibrant young woman who exuded happiness every time they shared a moment. It didn’t make sense. He knew he didn’t have much experience with women, but he struggled to understand how everything had gone so wrong.

  Yet another side, a new blacker side, took those words to heart.

  She was just telling you the way it is. You know that. You screwed around all your life with your dorky friends, without taking any chances and doing what it took to get comfortable with women. You were afraid, and so you hid in your silly academic clubs and gamer groups, and stayed somebody that no woman in her right mind would want to hook up with. You just finally pushed things to the point one had to tell you to your face…and because you waited so long, it turned out to be with the woman that mattered the most. Congratulations, you tool…you just lost at life.

  He fought back against that voice. He argued that at least his friends were real…and while his pastimes definitely fell in the realm of “geeky”, that wasn’t what made the man. And his academics were going to make him a damn fine career someday, and he didn’t remember many women looking down on that sort of thing. He couldn’t argue much about the fear part, but that didn’t mean he was some kind of unacceptable troll as far as women were concerned.

  It means you’re weak. And women have no use for weak. “Weak” will keep you in that glorious friend zone you just got a big taste of this past month. Did you enjoy how that worked out? But hang in there, and maybe a few months before you graduate some homely girl who can’t do any better will hook up with you so that career you are counting on can take care of her fat ass the rest of her life. You’ll be a real winner then, right?

  Colin and that voice raged the night away, with the invisible specter of Barbara Laurell looming in the background as an unspeaking referee and judge…a judge who had already rendered her verdict.

  He woke the next afternoon, exhausted but determined to find Barbara. Even if no hope remained of changing her mind, he couldn’t just let it end the way it had. That look of alarm and pity in her eyes haunted him…condemned him…and if nothing else, he wanted to end things on a note that somehow earned him something better than that.

  But she was gone.

  Two different supervisors at the Administration building told him they had never heard of her. And when he pushed to talk to somebody higher up, a Personnel Director came out and informed him they didn’t even hire from temp agencies…they had a surplus of student labor as it was.

  He remembered her saying she lived at Taylor Tower, an old hotel that had been converted into apartments and student dorms. He had dropped her off there a couple of times before. But when he inquired, the clerk at the desk had never heard of her either. The boy vaguely remembered a woman of her description coming into the lobby a few times, but it was never to stay.

  And so it went. Every avenue Colin tried turned out to be a dead end. Some people remembered her, but mostly when she accompanied him. Other than that, nothing. It seemed that every time she left his side, she stepped off the planet.

  Defeated and distraught, he trudged back home and to bed.

  Who was she? Some kind of drifter, hanging out with different groups of people until she felt it was time to move on? Was she on the run from somebody? Had she been in trouble? She didn’t seem to be. Surely she would have known that all she had to do was ask and he would have moved mountains to help her…as a friend, if nothing else.

  No, that didn’t feel right. Barbara had been exactly where she wanted to…until she hadn’t wanted to be there anymore.

  And that had been because of him.

  For the next month, he shambled through life with nothing but an awful emptiness in his chest for a companion. His friends were mere faces and voices that talked to him from the other side of some invisible shell of pain…a crystal dome with an over pressurized atmosphere that crushed his heart and barely allowed him to breath. He still did well in his classes, but only because he had been far ahead. It really didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  What was the point? What difference did a job or career make if it only meant the same miserable existence with a different model car and more floor space? It was just the same agony with different accessories. None of it would take away that look of pity that haunted his every waking thought. And all that torment spun in a turgid whirlpool around the hard black knot of conviction that he would never see her again.

  Except he did.

  It had been almost six weeks since she left him on that park bench when Colin encountered Barbara again.

  Two of his buddies, Eric and Mindy, knew a guy who ran a computer repair shop in a strip mall on the edge of town. The man was going out of business, and offered the pair bargain basement prices on the tools and equipment he had left if they would help him clear out the shop. Colin had let himself get towed along on the mission, simply because he knew he needed to maintain touch with his friends even if he couldn’t put any feeling into it.

  It was a big job, and they worked late into the night finishing it. They didn’t manage to get out the door until sometime after midnight. But they were hardly alone. The parking lot had started filling up because a seedy Country and Western night club occupied the space next door and it was apparently starting to close for the night. Figures in cowboy hats and blue jeans milled around, talking in groups while others headed for their trucks.

  Colin paid them little attention since they were from a culture and side of town as alien to him as Mars. The sooner he got out of there, and back home, the better. So it was a soft exclamation from Eric that brought him out of his reverie, and looking into the surprised eyes of Barbara Laurell once again.

  He almost didn’t recognize her.

  She wore her hair in a style that must have taken an entire can of hairspray to hold in place, and her makeup had an almost painted on look reminiscent of some of the teenage girls he remembered in school. She filled out the tight blue jeans and flannel patterned shirt in all the right ways, but the overall effect still screamed TACKY…an effect enhanced by her position under the arm of one Jerry Saban.

  Colin couldn’t believe it. He remembered Jerry from high school. A big, hard-muscled alpha male, with a shit eating grin and a gaggle of hopeful girls who followed in his footsteps. Jerry’s two favorite pastimes had been hanging around out in the parking lot, and tormenting the boys who tried to get through school life on the lower end of the male pecking order. Needless to say, Colin had been on the receiving end of Jerry’s attention at least three different times.

  Jerry and his world was the kind of thing that he had escaped at graduation. The kind of thing he thought he had left behind forever.

  And now here he stood, facing Colin again in a midnight parking lot on the wrong side of town…with the center of the universe under his arm and clinging to him like a wet leaf.

  “Hey, Nerdbeak!” Jerry crowed, “Holy shit! Fancy meeting you again!”

  “Hello, Jerry,” Colin answered softly, then looked down again at his companion. “Hello, Barbara.”

  Barbara didn’t answer, just looked down at the asphalt. Something about the submissive demeanor she maintained under the big guy’s arm started to crush that former knot of despair inside Colin’s chest into a hard crystal…a little black d
iamond that weighed like a star.

  “Whoa!” Jerry grinned. “You know this guy, Barb? He’s an old friend of mine from high school! I think he managed to fit in every different type of locker they had there…once with no clothes on.”

  “We’ve met,” she raised her eyes, obviously wanting to be anywhere else but here. “How have you been, Colin?”

  “How do you think?” he heard himself blurting, “You just disappeared. Vanished. I realize I caught you by surprise, but I didn’t deserve that!”

  She winced again, just like she had six weeks earlier.

  “Colin, please. Not now.”

  “Holy shit!” Jerry looked from one to the other in astonishment. “You mean you two have history, Barb? You and Nerdbeak?”

  “Let’s just go,” she hugged tighter against his side.

  “Now hold on, Honeybear,” he laughed. “I’m still trying to believe my ears here. You and him?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” she almost whispered. “It was nothing.”

  That little black gem in his chest doubled in weight, and Colin thought for a second he might get sick.

  “Nothing? You sure? Ol’ Nerdbeak is standing over there looking like his mother just died.”

  “I’m sure. Let’s just go, please. I’m starting to get cold.”

  “Well we can’t have that,” Jerry beamed down at her, then glanced back at Colin. “Sorry there, buddy. It’s pretty obvious you tried to play in the big time and struck out with this one. Can’t blame you, really… this girl is H-O-T, hot! And believe me, she can put all that hot stuff to good use. I don’t think I’ve ever stuck with the same chick this long. I just met her a little over a month ago, but I can tell she’s a keeper.”

  If Barbara found anything offensive in this commentary, she showed no sign. She simply looked at the ground again while clinging to the big man.

  Her submissiveness spoke volumes.

  “Oh…” Colin’s mouth tasted of ashes, “Well…I see…I guess it is what it is…”

  “There you go!” Jerry favored him with a leering grin and delivered a hard clap on the shoulder that almost staggered the slighter man. “Well, I gotta get this lady home so I’ll let you get back to…uh…whatever it is you do. Good to see you again, Nerdbeak! Happy trails!”