The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  And then, despite all assertions that she never could, Camilla got pregnant with the girl they’d really wanted. So Brian went from being a regrettable burden to be being an unnecessary, regrettable burden. Sister Ariana’s birth sent Brian’s life into eclipse. The adopted son became nearly invisible, his problems all his own.

  He couldn’t easily beg off from this text message invitation-cum-summons from his father. His parents knew his work schedule and that he’d have the day off. They also knew he didn’t have a social life to speak of, so there went that excuse. The past legal woes his condition had spawned meant he couldn’t just sever all ties and blow off his family, not until after he turned twenty-one in several months.

  See you then, he sent back to Derek.

  The day just kept getting better. And it wasn’t even 10:00 a.m. yet.

  Chapter Four

  “Dude, you look like six pounds of shit.”

  Brian gave Sidney a weak smile. “I’m sure that you mean that in the best possible way.”

  “Ain’t no good way to look like a heap of shit.”

  The two shared the Orange Star Trucking Terminal gatehouse. In contrast to Brian’s para-police uniform, Sidney wore a dark blue coverall with the trucking logo on the back. He had it unzipped to the waist, which only made the tall, gaunt man look leaner. Sweat glistened like diamonds against his dark black skin. He wiped it away with a dirty rag from his pocket.

  The narrow gatehouse building covered a slim island between the yard’s inbound and outbound security gates. His first week there, Brian had managed to suppress his initial anxiety about having some truck barrel into the little shack in the middle of the night. The room was a tight fit for two. Sidney had to stand. But since it was the only air-conditioned space on the yard, he didn’t complain.

  Brian covered evening shift security at the terminal, from 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Sidney, ten years Brian’s senior, ran the crane. The terminal worked what were called combis, fifty-two foot commercial trucking containers. They got loaded on a rail car somewhere, and Sidney used the crane to unload them here and drop them on a set of wheels. Then a trucker would pick them up for their final destination. Train arrivals tended to be about as irregular as the digestive tract of the fiber-free, so the entire trucking schedule was in constant flux. The evening shift never had any supervision due to a lack of need. Sidney unloaded the combis, gave the train manifest to Brian, and Brian signed the loads out to arriving drivers. It was a hard job to screw up.

  Working at Orange Star included a lot of waiting time. Cops sometimes describe their job as hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror. Orange Star provided hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of mild activity. Brian gravitated to the job because of the slow pace and solitude. Quiet acted as a perfect salve for his tendency to unsubstantiated panic.

  Sidney, however, seemed to have ended up there by default. From what Brian could tell through their minimal conversations, the crane operator had been driven there by child support payments and a sketchy personal history.

  “I didn’t sleep well last night,” Brian said.

  “We ain’t having no bonding experience here.” Sidney stuffed the rag back in his pocket. “I’m here for the cold air, not to be your shrink or nothing.”

  A train whistle sounded outside the yard. Sidney checked the clock on the wall. He zipped up his coverall.

  “Saved by the whistle,” he said. “The one-oh-five is right on time, several hours late.”

  Sidney left the door half-open as he departed the guard shack. Brian rolled over in his chair and pulled it closed. His phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. The screen read ‘Message from 2263’.

  This number wasn’t familiar. He opened the message.

  Awake at last.

  “Damn it!” he said to himself. The New Age whatever-it-was had his email and his cell phone number. This was going to get old fast. Brian hit the Delete button, and sent the message into the electronic netherworld.

  Sidney wouldn’t be back until the end of the shift, so except for a few perimeter patrols and whatever truckers rolled in, he was in for a dull evening. He flicked on the tiny desktop TV. As long as it wasn’t raining, the antenna picked up the three major Tampa networks and four static-filled stations with preachers touting Jesus, one in Spanish. It wasn’t Netflix, but it also didn’t eat up his data plan. He tuned in the local evening news.

  Headlights lit the booth as a semi rolled up the long road to the gate. Brian turned down the TV volume. His minutes of mild activity had arrived. Hip hip hooray.

  He picked up the clipboard carrying the evening’s manifests. Headlights flashed up to high beams and lit the inside of the shack like a solar flare. Brian shielded his eyes and squinted at the oncoming truck. Its diesel engine roared, loud and deep enough to make the shack shudder. The truck leaned left as it swerved head-on for the little house. The big silver grill yawned open like the mouth of a killer shark. The truck’s horn blasted, not to warn, but to trumpet triumph.

  Fear swept through Brian like wildfire. He jumped up from his rolling chair and sent it sailing to the shack’s rear. Suddenly, feet from the shack, the truck bulls-eyed a protective concrete bollard. The post pulverized into a cloud of gray dust.

  Brian launched himself out the side exit door. His foot hooked the threshold. He slammed face-first onto the oil-slicked asphalt and closed his eyes.

  The truck smashed into the guard shack. It exploded in a thundering shower of wood and glass.

  Everything went silent. His expected pelting by flying debris didn’t happen. No semi tires crushed his feet. Brian rolled over and opened his eyes. The guard shack still stood, completely unmolested. The access road stretched out dark and empty.

  Brian’s heart pounded hard. He stood on shaky legs and reentered the shack. A high-pitched, shrieking cackle sounded behind him. He spun around. A white top hat covered in yellow stars spun on its brim in the driveway. Then it vanished.

  He remembered the warning about withdrawal-induced hallucinations. That little excursion into The Twilight Zone wasn’t what Brian had envisioned. Hallucinations were supposed to be like being trapped in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine movie or seeing a Cheshire cat. What he’d just experienced was his subconscious trying to scare him to death. He did not want to do that again.

  At the driveway’s far end, headlights flared in the darkness. Brian’s heart beat faster as the truck approached. He gripped the edge of the desk, ready to run when this semi spun out of control. It pulled up alongside the shack. Brian froze. A wide, redfaced driver stared down from the window, Atlanta Braves hat askew on his boxy head.

  “Well, you gonna sign me in or what?” the driver asked. “Ain’t got all night.”

  Brian shook his head and admitted everything was normal. He grabbed his clipboard and stepped out to sign in the trucker.

  The remaining hours on his shift promised to be long ones.

  Chapter Five

  Brian sagged, bone-weary tired, by the time he made it home that night. Between yesterday’s poor sleep and the long, anxiety-ridden day, he fought to stay awake. He skipped food, skipped a shower, and just collapsed onto his unmade bed. He was out the instant his head hit the pillow.

  * * *

  It isn’t a dream his subconscious spins for him tonight, so much as it is a memory. He’s a boy, or he must be because he seems small in his bed and he’s in his childhood bedroom. The setting sun bathes the wall in rich ochre stripes through the window blinds’ slats. The schoolbooks on the desk and the pictures on the wall tell him he is in elementary school, fourth grade if he remembers correctly. All is silent, not because the scene lacks natural sound, but because he is cut off from it, as if his dream has decided to exclude all senses but sight.

  It must be one of those childhood nights where his anxiety had taken control. Perhaps he’d made a m
ess eating, dropped something and broken it, or embarrassed Derek and Camilla in front of company. In the pre-medication days, or during the windows when they went out of balance, such occurrences were commonplace. This was always the result, sent to his room for the night, to bed no matter the time.

  The awful mix of emotions that plagued his younger years is at full boil. Frustration at his lack of control, humiliation at his familial ostracism. But over both reigns fear, a combination of acute panic, layered over a chronic trepidation that such terror will haunt him all of his life. In this present-day playback, he can so much better dissect the multiple threads that weave the screwed-up emotional tapestry of his life.

  His sentence to solitary confinement only stokes the fire of his anxiety. The oncoming sleepless night, and the upcoming morning’s potential for punishment, are simply more fuel for the flame. Despite the fall swelter outside, his room is over-chilled, a Sheridan family hallmark, though the cold of the family’s heart needs no physical manifestation to match it. His right leg begins to bounce beneath the sheets and he knows Mr. Jitters is about to come over and play.

  A shadowy figure appears, sitting on the desk. The sunset stripes divide him into red-frosted layer cake sections from the neck down. His arms and legs are both impossibly long and impossibly thin. His right leg crosses over the left, and the dangling foot dances in perfect time with Brian’s fidgeting leg.

  Brian startles, and yanks the bedspread out from under the mattress’s foot and all the way up around his neck. The desk lamp snaps on by itself. It delivers more illumination than it possibly could, a near spotlight on his intruder.

  In the light, his clothes are nearly blinding. A blazing-white jacket and over-flared bell-bottomed pants. Wide, red stripes run up the pants and accentuate his spindly legs. The jacket’s vertical stripes are bright blue, a jarring juxtaposition with the pants, but not near so much as the neon-yellow T-shirt he wears beneath it. The tight shirt reveals every ripple of his emaciated ribcage. A white top hat with a constellation of yellow stars completes the ensemble. Brian remembers the hat from his hallucination in the guard shack. No strands of hair protrude from under the hat.

  The jacket sleeves also flare, and from them extend hands too delicate to be real, fingers twice as long and half as thick as normal, but somehow proportional to the gangly arms and legs. The visitor’s face is gaunt, his eyes wide and incredibly white, the sockets around them coated black as night. Ashy greasepaint covers the rest of his face. Black makeup paints his head in the style of a skull, complete with a toothy rictus drawn over and around his own thin lips. Somehow, an actual skull would have been less terrifying.

  He is all the more horrifying because in this flashback dream of Brian’s childhood, amidst all he sees and feels as so familiar, this specter is not. Like the stain on white linen, like the black cloud in a blue sky, like the madman outside the asylum walls, he does not belong.

  “Brian!” the figure shouts, his voice a high-pitched shriek. It shatters the dream’s silent-movie soundtrack like a clap of thunder. Young Brian jumps under his bed sheets.

  The intruder leaps from the desk, arms extended. For a second his fingertips flash as if made of sparklers, then extinguish with ten overlapping firecracker explosions. He lands upon the edge of the bed, running in place at a cartoon-character pace, sending the mattress bouncing. “I’m back, man!”

  No introduction is needed. Brian has never met this manifestation, but can feel the familiar, dreaded connection. The amorphous presence he called Mr. Jitters now has a face, a body, a voice. The beat of Brian’s bouncing leg doubles. Panic swells.

  Mr. Jitters lets rip a high-pitched cackling laugh that sends a chill up Brian’s spine. He perches on the foot of the bed. He reaches down with his incredibly long arms, and with one hand on either side of Brian’s tap-dancing foot, pounds out a perfect accompaniment with the flat of his palms. “It’s the beat, it’s that groovy beat, can you dig it?”

  He drops down and straddles Brian across the waist in a low squat. He only clears Brian by millimeters. Both Brian’s legs now thrum with anxiety, jumping back and forth in a synchronized rhythm. Mr. Jitters bends close, face inches from Brian’s so that white makeup and that horrid painted-tooth smile fill his field of view.

  Brian’s heart slams in his chest. Sweat rolls down from his temples. The adult part of him wants to scream, wants to punch Mr. Jitters in the jaw and send him flying. But he is trapped in his younger self, bound by the deeper fears and more desperate insecurity of a seven-year-old boy. He cannot move, cannot speak, and that fury he cannot release only fuels the evil rush of Mr. Jitters’ transmitted anxiety. He bites the sheets bunched up around his mouth.

  “No meds, no restrictions,” Mr. Jitters screeches. “We’re bonding like never before. I’ve always been part of you. Soon you’ll be part of me!”

  Mr. Jitters reaches forward with one elongated finger. He stabs at Brian’s chest. The finger slices between his ribs and pierces Brian’s heart like a dagger laced with cayenne pepper. Anxiety radiates through him like a nuclear blast wave.

  Finally, he screams.

  * * *

  Brian jolted awake with a shriek. He was back in his apartment, back to being almost twenty-one. Sweat soaked his T-shirt and his chest galloped like a wild horse in flight. Daylight pierced the edges of the cardboard window coverings. The clock read just after six in the morning.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered. He focused on taking deep, cleansing breaths, on counting heartbeats and slowing them down. He looked at all the details of the real world around him and pressed back the horrific memories of the one he’d just dreamt.

  Mr. Jitters’ image hung tough, unwilling to be banished and consigned as a product of imagination. In his childhood, when he’d told himself Mr. Jitters was on the way, he’d never created such a fully formed vision of his anxiety’s alter ego. He was a concept, not a character. But this adult version, fueled by drug withdrawal and a more developed imagination, was far more real than Brian wanted. It was certainly more real than his seven-year-old self could have handled. He even doubted his twenty-year-old self was fully prepared for it.

  No sleep could follow that nightmare, at least not now. His eyes burned red and itchy against the unwelcome daylight. He rolled out of bed to start the day.

  An hour later, recharged with coffee and a goat cheese omelet, he pulled up his email. Nothing from Daniela. But two missives from the Totally You Institute awaited him. Be More Than You’ve Ever Imagined! demanded one. Time To Grow Into Who You Should Always Have Been ordered the other.

  These self-help gurus ought to go a few rounds with Mr. Jitters. If they could keep him quiet, Brian would sign right up. He deleted the emails.

  Chapter Six

  That evening at work felt fuzzy. From the moment he’d released Terry from day shift, Brian felt as if he was watching the world through teased cotton. The last few days, he’d barely slept and the physical and psychological effects of dropping his meds were getting worse, not better with time. The sun had set and the yard’s hazy lighting only made him feel worse. He added an extra spoonful of coffee to his standard evening brew for a caffeinated boost to get him through until the night shift arrived.

  Eventually, the guard shack got to everyone, even Brian. Too cramped, too stifling, and too isolated, no matter how much audio and video entertainment he tried to pump in. His two security checks of the yard each evening weren’t enough of an escape, and every now and then, he just needed air, even if it was thick, humid, and tainted with the fumes of diesel trucks. His pent-up energy had to be spent. Brian had to admit to himself that the need had grown greater since he dropped his meds. Not a good reason to go back on them, but still not deniable.

  No trucks were due for hours, so he left the shack. Once out of the air-conditioning, he broke out into an immediate sweat. The setting of the sun hadn’t abated the heat. The heavy ai
r seemed to crawl down his throat, intent on his suffocation. He headed down an aisle between the containers on his way to the crane.

  Halfway there, tapping sounded from the top of the containers to his right. A simple rhythm. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. He paused. The sound stopped. He looked up into the gloom, and saw nothing. He started walking again.

  The tapping restarted, this time from up on his left, a bit faster. Brian kept walking. The tapping paced him. Then the high-pitched, shrieking laugh of Mr. Jitters shattered the night’s quiet.

  Anxiety swept through him. The combis stretched twice as tall as usual. They canted inward, ready to topple in on him from both sides. The tapping along the combi roofs accelerated to match his soaring pulse. He didn’t need this, didn’t need hallucinations plaguing him awake and asleep, at home and at work. He broke into a run for the end of the combis.

  Footsteps pounded the combi roofs alongside him. He imagined Mr. Jitters, gangly legs and skull-painted face, matching his moves, ready to jump down and block his way. Blood thrummed in his ears. He sprinted for the end of the row.

  And slammed head on into Sidney. Sidney staggered back a step, but Brian bounced backward and went sprawling to the ground. He scrambled back to his feet and scanned the combi roofs. Nothing. The tapping and the pounding of Mr. Jitters’ feet were gone. The combis were back to normal size.

  “Damn it, what the hell is wrong with you?” Sidney said. “Why you even out of your damn box?”

  “S-some air…stretch my legs.” Brian couldn’t think straight, still reeling after Mr. Jitters’ stalking.