Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala

by Rick Hautala

  “No,” she said softly. “I guess you wouldn’t need to breathe.”

  “So if you didn’t need to breathe, and you didn’t want to burn, where’s the safest place in the world to be hide when you weren’t out killing people?”

  “In the pond,” Lorraine said.

  “Absolutely!” Hellboy shouted.

  “And the safest time to be out and about would be on rainy nights,” The Finn added in a measured, controlled voice as Hellboy nodded solemnly.

  Lorraine was sure Hellboy was totally plastered by now and was about to pass out. His voice dragged terribly when he spoke.

  “So we were down there by the pond,” he said, “The Finn, Red Shirt, ‘n me. It was getting dark, and it looked like there might be rain brewing in the west.”

  Lorraine shivered as she cast a wary glance at rainwater streaming down the window beside her.

  “Look,” said Hellboy, “I gotta take a leak.” He heaved himself up and stood beside the table for a moment, weaving unsteadily, trying to keep his balance. “You tell her the rest of it. Just make sure you get it right.”

  With that, he started toward the restroom, taking short, halting steps and touching the other tables and chairs to give him guidance.

  “Okay,” The Finn said, hunkering down and leaning forward, his arms hooked over the chair back. “You have to try to picture it. We’re out there in the middle of this cornfield. It’s getting on toward night. There’s a steady wind rustling through the dead leaves of the cornfield, but the first thing I notice—the creepiest thing about the whole thing is, there’s no wildlife around.”

  “What do you mean?” Lorraine said as a strong shiver ran like teasing fingers up her back.

  “I mean nothing. No birds singing. No late season crickets buzzing. No dogs barking. Nothing! Absolute, total silence … except for the wind blowing through the dried corn. Red Shirt tells us he’s gonna follow the tracks around the pond. It wasn’t very big.”

  “What about the farmer ... the person who owned the field?” Lorraine asked.

  The Finn lowered his eyes and shook his head grimly. “He was already dead. Him and his whole family. They were the first of Moses’ new victims, once he’d come back as the scarecrow. I went back to the car to get some things—some flashlights, guns, a cigarette lighter, and some road flares.”

  “Road flares?”

  “We thought of making some torches, using the cornstalks, but they were too damp and brittle. I figured road flares would burn better, even if it started to rain.”

  “Hey, I was the one who suggested that road flares would work,” Hellboy said, coming up to the table so suddenly even The Finn jumped when he spoke. “If you’re gonna tell the story, tell it the way it really happened.”

  “Yeah, okay. It was your idea,” The Finn said with a half-smile on his thin lips that he thought no such thing.

  “Boy, you guys don’t cut each other any slack, do you?” Lorraine asked, eyes wide, amused.

  The Finn’s smile disappeared. “He lost something of mine, a long time ago. Call it a family heirloom. I’ve been torturing him for it ever since.” He glanced at Hellboy. “Look, are you going to let me finish the story or not?”

  “No, I’ll take it from here,” Hellboy said as he sat back down in the booth. Before going on with the story, though, he took the second, untouched glass, filled it with beer, and slid it over to The Finn. Then he refilled his own glass and slammed the empty pitcher onto the table.

  “Glad you made some room for that,” The Finn said.

  Hellboy nodded. “So where were we?”

  “Down by the pond,” Lorraine said. “The Finn had just gone back to get guns and road flares.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Hellboy said. For a moment, his eyes fluttered as he leaned back in his seat. Then he focused. “I went down to the water where the tracks led and was leaning over it, trying to see to the bottom, when I hear someone coming up behind me, but I figure it’s The Finn, returning with the equipment, so I don’t look up until it’s too late.”

  “It was Moses, right?” Lorraine asked, anticipating the story.

  Hellboy nodded. “Yup,” he said, the word sounding more like a burp than a word. “And he’s got this garrote he’s made with barbed wire that he wraps around my neck and starts pulling. Fortunately, I had just enough of a warning, and as I turned around, I got my right hand up between my throat and the wire.”

  “Your right hand,” Lorraine said, glancing at the huge stone hand resting on the table next to the cooler.

  Hellboy nodded. “Yeah, ‘n lucky for me, too, ‘cause once he started twisting that garrote tighter, I’d have been a goner if I hadn’t reacted so fast.”

  “The problem was,” The Finn said, “with his hand up so close to his face, ole’ Hellboy here lost his balance and fell headfirst into the pond.”

  “I didn’t fall. I slipped,” Hellboy said, glaring at The Finn. Lorraine saw the dull orange of his eyes intensify. “The edge of the pond was all muddy, and I slipped and fell.”

  “Fell. Slipped. Either way, you ended up headfirst in the water,” The Finn said. “And with that big stone hand of yours up around your head and weighing down, you were helpless as a baby.”

  “How do you know?” Hellboy said, leaning forward and pounding the table with his stone fist. The impact made the pitcher, beer glasses, and cooler all jump. “You weren’t even there!”

  “That’s when I returned,” The Finn said softly, looking directly at Lorraine and ignoring Hellboy. “I saw him hit the water, and then he—the scarecrow, that is—saw Red Shirt coming back, and he attacked him. I shot at Moses twice with the shotgun, but if I hit him at all, it didn’t have any effect. He was charging at Red Shirt, but I knew I had to help Hellboy before he drowned.”

  “I wasn’t all that helpless,” Hellboy said.

  “What do you mean?” The Finn shouted. “You were stuck headfirst in the mud at the bottom of the pond, and you were drowning!”

  Hellboy looked intently at Lorraine, his eyes flaring as he said, “I wasn’t all that helpless. Honest. I’d already started to loosen the wire some.”

  The Finn sniffed derisively. “Sure. Whatever. But the way I remember it, I had to make a split-second decision. I could either light a flare and help Red Shirt fight the scarecrow, or I could drop everything and keep Hellboy from drowning.”

  “I wasn’t drowning,” Hellboy said, slurring the words horribly and wavering in his seat.

  “Okay. If you say so,” The Finn said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I reacted without thinking and dove into the water and got him up to the surface before he was dead.” He nailed Hellboy with an angry stare. “I saved your goddamned life, and believe me, it wasn’t easy. The least you could do is show a modicum of gratitude.”

  “What’s a modicum?” asked Lorraine.

  “A tiny bit.”

  “But I didn’t need your help,” Hellboy said. “I was just about free of the wire by the time you got to me.”

  The Finn scowled angrily. “Given the choice to do it over again, I have no doubt what I would choose to do.”

  Hellboy smirked and shook his head, letting his gaze go unfocused for a moment.

  “Look,” he said, “either way, I got out, but it was already too late to help Red Shirt because Moses—the scarecrow—had another piece of barbed wire with him and strangled Red Shirt so hard his head came off. I saw that happen just as I broke the surface with The Finn clinging to me so he wouldn’t drown.”

  The Finn leaned back and shook his head slowly with disgust.

  “That’s not exactly how I remember it, but go on. Finish up your story.”

  “Well, like I said, it was already too late to save Red Shirt. He was dead, and Moses had taken off, running across the field toward the woods. He was moving pretty fast, and I wasn’t sure I could catch him, so I took one of the flares The Finn had brought and lit it. Then I tied it to the wire Moses had tried to strangle me wit
h and, swinging it around my head like one of them Argentine bolos, I chased after Moses until I was close enough to throw it.”

  “That was quick thinking,” Lorraine said, hoping by her praise to assuage any hurt feelings Hellboy might have.

  “Yeah, and I guess I got lucky,” Hellboy said, “’cause the bolo caught him around the neck. After it spun around a few times, the flare landed on his back, between his shoulders where he couldn’t reach it.”

  “It was an amazing sight, I will grant you that,” The Finn added, smiling now and nodding with satisfaction.

  “So Moses is running across the cornfield, stumbling as flames spread across his back.” Hellboy leaned forward in his seat, fully enjoying the climax of his story. “There’s pieces of burning straw and smoke streaming out behind him. He looked like a comet, streaking across that field. But he never made it to the woods.”

  “You mean he burned up?” Lorraine asked.

  Hellboy nodded solemnly. “All the straw did, yeah, but before it was all gone, something else happened. It wasn’t just fire and smoke that was coming out of him. As he was running, I—we saw this thick, black cloud shoot out of his body and up into the sky. It was his spirit—his soul, departing.”

  Lorraine gulped audibly and looked back and forth between Hellboy and The Finn.

  “You both saw it?” she asked, her voice hushed with awe.

  “Well, we saw ... something, that’s for sure,” The Finn said, staring directly at Hellboy. “I be damned if I can say exactly what.”

  “It was his soul,” Hellboy said emphatically. “It was getting dark, and I’ll hold open the possibility it could have been an illusion or something, but I’m sure I saw a dark, human-shaped thing streak out of the scarecrow as its body was consumed by flames. And then, as soon as the scarecrow’s body was gone, a huge flock of crows cawing real loud flew out of the trees, like they’d been waiting there. They swooped over...whatever it was, and carried it away.”

  “Which is odd because crows are scavengers … daytime birds.” The Finn said.

  “My God,” Lorraine whispered, covering her mouth with both hands and staring back and forth between Hellboy and The Finn.

  For a moment or two, everyone at the table was silent. Finally, Lorraine cleared her throat and said, “But there was nothing you could do ... for Red Shirt, I mean. He was really dead.”

  “Totally,” Hellboy said.

  When he clenched his fist and pounded the table in anger, his hand grazed the cooler and knocked it over. The impact snapped the latch, and it opened up, spilling its contents onto the table. Lorraine let out a piercing scream when she saw a large, wrinkled object that looked like a gigantic dried prune. She stared at it until she realized she was looking at a human face. The lips were dried and cracked, peeled back into a terrible grimace that exposed the top row of rotting yellow teeth. The nose was caved in, leaving a dark inverted V-shaped divot, and the eyes were closed and sunken in, the lids looking like thin layers of moldy onionskin.

  Lorraine pushed herself violently away from the table and tried to stand up, but her legs were nowhere near strong enough to support her. She sagged back in her chair, gasping for breath and keeping as far away from the object as she could. She was afraid to breathe the sour, sickening smell that wafted from the severed head.

  “Jesus! Is that him? Is that Red Shirt?” she managed to say between gasps for air. Her stomach clenched furiously, and a thick, sour taste flooded the back of her throat. She knew she was going to be sick.

  “Oh, no … no,” Hellboy said casually as he scooped up the severed head, placed it back into the cooler, and snapped it shut. “That’s something else entirely.”

  “Jesus God!” Lorraine said. “It … that didn’t even look human.”

  “Oh, it used to be,” Hellboy said as he slid the closed travel cooler across the table to the Finn. “About two thousand years ago, anyway.”

  The Finn stared at the cooler, his expression impossible to read.

  “You found it,” he said in a whisper. “Where in the hell did you find it?”

  “Don’t ask,” Hellboy replied grimly. “Just be glad you got it back. It was worth the bruises just to get you off my back.”

  The Finn didn’t even acknowledge Hellboy’s gruff comments. He looked closely at the cooler a moment longer and then put it on the floor next to his chair.

  “Well, then,” Lorraine said, struggling to regain her composure now that the terrible object was out of sight but not out of mind. “It’s getting way late, and I ... my sister must be wondering where I am. I’d best be going.”

  She stood up shakily from the table, unable to determine if it was the beer she’d drunk or the shock of the cooler’s contents. Her first and strongest impulse was to run out the hell of there, but she stood for a moment, making sure her legs weren’t going to give out when she started walking.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Hellboy said. “Where you going?” He was looking at her, sort of, but his gaze was shifting and unfocused.

  “Now that The Finn’s here, and you know the whole story, aren’t you going to toast to Red Shirt’s memory with us?” he asked.

  Lorraine licked her lips, all too aware of the sour churning deep down in her gut. She didn’t know if she wanted to run away or pass out or what. Maybe this was all a horrible dream, and she’d wake up soon. At least now that the head was, mercifully, out of sight, she didn’t quite feel so bad.

  Finally, she shrugged and said, “Ahh ... What the hell?” and slid back into her seat.

  For the first time that evening, Hellboy smiled as he raised the empty pitcher above his head to signal Kyle that they were ready for another round. Outside, the cold, autumn rain lashed against the window as the late October storm blew toward the distant Maine coast.

  The Back of My Hands

  The back of my hands started looking like a man's back when I was—oh, maybe ten or eleven years old.

  I remember how fascinated I was by the curling, black hairs I saw sprouting there; how amazed I was when I flexed and unflexed my hands, and watched the twitching blue lines of veins, the knitting needle-thin tendons, and the bony white knobs of cartilage and knuckle. Sometimes, I used to constrict the flow of blood to my arms—you know, like a junkie—to make the veins inflate until they fairly bulged through the skin. The bigger they got, the more "manly" I thought my arms and hands looked.

  It might seem laughable now, but I still believe hands are a God-given miracle. They let us touch and manipulate the world outside of ourselves. Sure, scientists say that vision is the only sense where the nerve connects directly to the brain, but hands are the only things that let us reach out … to touch and explore the world. They allow us to feel love and to create what we know and feel, both internally and externally. They're our only real solid connection to what's "out there."

  Our other senses—sight, sound, taste, and smell—can all deceive us. They trick us into thinking we're experiencing something that might not really be there.

  But when we touch something, when we hold it in our hands and caress it, we have no doubt whatsoever that it truly exists. When I look at my own hands now, though, I can't help but be filled with revulsion and horror.

  Yes, horror!

  That's probably an overused word these days, but there's no better word for what I feel.

  These hands—my hands—have done things so terrible, so hideous that I can truly say they are no longer mine.

  They've acted as if powered by a will of their own—a will with a dark, twisted purpose. And in the process, they've ended the life of someone—of the one person I've ever really been close to in life … a life I should have cherished above all others.

  Okay, let me start at the beginning.

  The easiest part was killing my twin brother, Derrick.

  No problem there.

  I'm serious.

  It certainly wasn't very difficult to orchestrate. You'd think I was a musician, talking like th
at, but when it actually came time to do it, to aim the gun at him and squeeze the trigger, I didn't flinch or have the slightest hesitation.

  And I've had no qualms about it afterwards, either.

  Sounds cruel, I know, but why should I?

  Derrick had it all. Everything. He was everything I wanted to be … but never was.

  I know, I know ... sure, he worked just as hard for it as I did, maybe even harder; but everything came so easily to him as if it fell out of the sky and landed in his lap, the bastard!

  * * *

  It never came to me.

  Certainly not as easily, anyway, and no way near as much.

  You see, he was the one who was born with all the talent. I couldn't help but think that because I'd heard it my whole life, growing up. All through high school, Derrick was an honor student—popular, handsome, smart, and talented. He had it all. He graduated at the top of his class from college, too, married a gorgeous, intelligent, charming woman, had a wonderful family—three kids and a beautiful country home about two hours north of Portland and a winter place down in Fort Myers.

  Far as I could see, he had it all.

  And what did I have?

  Nothing.

  Doodley-squat.

  The leftovers.

  Sloppy seconds, if you'll excuse such an inelegant expression.

  All my life, I've had to listen to teachers and friends' parents—even our own parents—exclaim with surprise that sometimes bordered on absolute shock how Derrick was so amazingly gifted, and that I was so ... well, that I didn't quite measure up to the standard he set.

  The worst of it was when people would question, sometimes even to my face, how identical twins could be so different. Oh, we looked enough alike, so anyone who didn't know us well couldn't tell us apart, but it always seemed to me as if the majority of the intelligence, personality, and talent went into his half of the egg, and I was left with ...

  Well, with sloppy seconds, like I said.

  Maybe that really was the case.