by Billy Wells
“By the way, the mystery of the dead cat has been solved.” Debbie wheezed, gasping for breath. “Amber let the president of the Vampire Club’s dog, Corky, stay in our basement the same night you put Shaharazod there to kill the mouse. She figured it was okay since we never use the basement except for storage. Vlad, her boyfriend, couldn’t take his pet with him to a convention that night, so she thought it was the perfect solution. She didn’t know Shaharazod was there until the next morning. Amber is very sorry about what happened to George’s cat, but it really wasn’t her fault. It was just an unfortunate accident.”
Mike looked at her as if she had two heads, but didn’t try to argue. He thought of the horrible beast Amber had brought into their home. It was more like a wolf than any dog he’d ever seen, and he certainly wouldn’t want to come upon it in the light of day much less in the dark of his creepy basement.
“Oh, one more thing. About those open doors.” Debbie said matter-of-factly with no consideration for how badly the incident at the stadium had upset him. “Amber let Vlad stay in our basement a few times instead of him spending money on a motel. She knew you’d overreact if she asked for your permission and again because we never used the basement, she didn’t think you’d ever know.”
Debbie turned to him, and seeing the look of disbelief on his face, said, “I think she did the right thing, based on the circumstances and your phobia, don’t you? After all, what’s wrong with a young boy spending the night in our basement?”
Mike thought of the unexplained open doors the night Amber lied, but held his tongue and departed into the den. The thought of Vlad creeping about their house in the middle of the night while he was asleep made him shutter. The possibility of the corpse-like creep sleeping with Amber in his own house made his blood run cold.
He watched TV for a while, but couldn’t concentrate. At about two o’clock, he went to bed. Praying for a good night sleep after so many restless nights in a row, he listened to Debbie’s heavy breathing and closed his eyes.
It was hopeless; the images of the show at the football field weighed heavily on his mind and were resurrecting the dreadful feelings that had plagued him before his breakdown. He felt the migraine beginning to hammer in his temples. He could feel the barriers he had built against the old monsters starting to crumble as he plummeted deeper into an abyss where only dead things live. He could no longer hide from the dark shadows of teeth and claws tearing at him in the darkness. His eyes rolled backward in his head as the nightmares began just as they had so many years before.
He found himself in a black forest running as hard as he could to outrun the howling pack of wolves behind him. He could feel their hot breaths on the back of his neck. Large bats swooped down from above as he darted back and forth, and kept running.
He tripped over a root and went sprawling. He saw a group of teenage vampires approaching in the distance. Their eyes glowed in the dark, and in the light of the full moon, he saw their white pointed teeth. Backing up against a fallen tree, he watched the wolves bounding toward him. His heart pounded in his chest as he emptied his bladder and picked up a baseball bat lying on the ground on a bed of leaves. Scrambling to his feet, he saw Amber in her vampire gown rushing toward him. He felt her long nails rip down his cheek as he sidestepped and swung the bat with all his might. Her pale face exploded as the side of her head caved in from the blow. He saw the fury in her remaining eye as she struggled to her feet with her bloody claws groping. A vicious downward swipe took out the other eye, and she crumpled in a bloody heap at his feet.
With his adrenalin flowing like a river through his sinews, he caught the first wolf in midair with a bone crushing upward thrust as the beast’s gnashing grisly teeth opened to grip his throat in a death lock. When he looked down at the wolf’s battered head, he saw the open eyes of his son Kyle staring up at him.
The horror of the son’s face startled him awake. The forest and the monsters had disappeared. He found himself in the upstairs hall of his home on Loving Forest Court amid the twisted, battered remains of his wife and children still swinging the bloody, baseball bat.
* * *
The Shell Game
Herman put on his heavy, woolen overcoat and gloves and prepared himself for his afternoon constitutional. Locking the door behind him, he painfully proceeded down three flights of stairs and continued to the sidewalk that led to Sinclair Park.
As he hobbled past the redbrick ruin that had been his home for the last twenty years, he looked up at the small window of his efficiency apartment and wondered how long it would be before the wrecking ball would find it. The World War I relic across the street had been leveled to make way for condominiums only a month before. He thought of all the little people who would be displaced, very old ones and very young ones, so many with nowhere else to go. He shook his head and decided that he probably wouldn’t be around to see it anyway.
As he hurried along, he thought of his lonely life and the barren woman he’d slept beside for thirty years who never learned to know him. The gray clotheslines behind Sherwood House crisscrossed into the leafless trees where his wife had fallen long ago. It had been a day just like today, cold and overcast, with clouds that looked like snow.
He remembered the cemetery and the few friends that had taken the time to pay their last respects. It saddened him to think that most of those who attended would not be in attendance at his funeral since the majority was pushing up daisies themselves. The hardest part of growing old was watching your own so-called loved ones disappear one by one as the years whispered by.
The north wind began to stir in the trees as he finally reached the park. He looked at his watch and shook his head sadly. The walk had taken three more minutes than yesterday. His heart fluttered, and he stood totally still, waiting. The feeling passed, and he walked on.
His favorite bench had been taken by a wino that had covered himself with newspapers. He passed the middle-aged derelict with little interest, and even less compassion, and proceeded to his second-favorite bench next to the birdbath. He grimaced with pain as he positioned himself for his favorite pastime—the pedestrian parade.
Ten minutes passed. The sidewalks were empty.
Twenty minutes passed. The wino arose, and the newspapers scattered on the ground around the bench. He stretched with a groan and staggered away in the direction of the Salvation Army soup kitchen.
Thirty minutes more passed. The old man kept checking his watch as if he were waiting for a train that was late. A few snowflakes passed on the sidewalk, but no people.
The temperature was falling as the sun began its descent on the horizon. His feet were getting numb from the cold, but he was determined not to be denied. He continued his vigil defiantly.
Thirty minutes later, his suffering turned to rage. He arose and cursed the silent walks that waited for him in the snow.
Another precious day had passed without fulfillment. Tears rolled down his cheek from his tired, lonely eyes as he stood in the empty auditorium that was the park. He looked in all directions, but there was no one visiting the park that day.
“Winter,” he grumbled, “the worst of all God’s creations.” Pain pounded in every one of his arthritic joints as he shuffled off into the bitter cold night in the direction of his apartment. The wind whistled through his ears and cut into every pore like a frozen scalpel.
“Oh, but to be young again,” he lamented, “to be renewed once more, to be dealt another hand of body and mind.” It wouldn’t be the same as it was. His failures passed before his eyes like a thousand clowns, each with a gaudy, ludicrous face. He covered his ears, but he couldn’t stifle the laughter that haunted every waking hour.
Ahead in the distance, he saw the church where he had worshipped God for forty years. It filled the sky with beams of light that ascended into the clouds like a golden stairway to heaven. He stood there in the wind and the snow as the message of the twenty-third psalm drifted into his thoughts.
“T
he Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.” But he had wanted all his life and had never received.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Lies! Peace, tranquility, security, these were feelings he had never known.
“He restoreth my soul.” An untruth! His soul had died with his youth and was buried in an unmarked grave with all his broken dreams.
The streetlights faded in the fury of the storm. The great limbs of the trees along the deserted street were swept down upon him. The wind’s icy fingers held him fast in its arctic grip as he staggered blindly onward.
His heart fluttered, and fear gripped his mortal soul. “How stupid,” he thought, “to doubt God with eternity so near.”
He had earned the right to heaven by following God’s laws all of his life, and now, on this night, which could very well be his last one on earth, he had blamed God for his failures.
He threw up his hands to the sky and cried out, “Forgive me, God!”
His words were met with a wall of frozen rain that lashed at his face like buckshot.
“Forgive me, God!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs. And the wind swept up behind him and, with all its force, tried to steal his overcoat from his back. Holding on with a death grip and pulling his scarf tighter about his neck, he teetered on shaky legs and leaned in the direction of the church. The howling wind swirled away like a boomerang and came roaring back into his face as he begged for solace. With each plea for salvation, the wind blew harder and harder.
After hobbling along as fast as his aching, exhausted limbs could carry him, he approached the wrought iron fence that stood in front of the tower of God. But as he extended his hand toward the great door of the cathedral, his foot slid on the ice, and he fell with a sickening thud onto the frozen, clinging cement.
“God! Oh, God!” he screamed and tried desperately to regain his footing. His knees buckled, but he grabbed the wrought iron fence and pulled himself upright.
He stood there in the torrent, groping for shelter, shouting for anyone to rescue him from the penetrating cold. He looked back and forth, but the street was empty. His pleas were unanswered. He tried to keep his balance, but again his feet shot out from under him. When he hit the icy sidewalk, his senses shattered on the pavement like glass.
Dazed and dying, the old man lay still on the sidewalk. His strength was gone, and he couldn’t move. All he could think to do was to pray.
“God!” he cried. “Please forgive me.”
Suddenly, the wind subsided, and a voice answered, “I have come to take you home.”
His heart fluttered, and a smile creased his lips as he opened his eyes and beheld the cross shining on the wall of the church before him.
“I am the life,” said the voice, and the wind was snuffed out like a candle.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock…” said the voice, and the snow stopped in the blink of an eye.
“If any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him,” said the voice. And a sudden, heavenly stillness fell upon the lonely street.
The pain left his body, and a peaceful feeling engulfed his senses. He arose effortlessly. His savior beckoned to him, and as he took his hand, he said reassuringly, “We must hurry, my son, for your time on earth will soon be over.”
His savior’s cloak covered his body like a cloud as they disappeared together into the silent night.
One heartbeat later, a stream of light shone down from the heavens upon the very spot where the old man had fallen on the sidewalk.
“Where is he?” said a voice.
“I fear the answer, Gabriel,” replied another regretfully.
“Let us hurry! Possibly there is still time since Father has scheduled his release at precisely this time on the clock of life.”
The old man and his savior had reached the pearly gates when the two messengers stood frozen in fear in the distance and began to weep.
The old man never saw them as he passed through the hallowed gates. A broad smile beamed on his face as his heart fluttered and began its final beating. He recited the beginning of chapter three of Revelations, “Behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking to me; which said, come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”
And just at that split second, his heart stopped forever; the gate slammed shut on his soul. A mournful bell began to toll as the beautiful songs of the angels were obliterated by a hellish thunderclap. The rich green mansions of the valley crumbled into dust. His mouth fell open as he looked across a great barren wasteland of smoke and fire, alive with the shrieks and screams of pitiful beings writhing in excruciating, perpetual agony.
The old man sobbed as he fell to his knees, “This can’t be….”
“Heaven?” cackled the Devil fiendishly as he plucked the old man’s soul from his dead body and cast it into the flame.
* * *
The Troll
“Another one?” Lieutenant Ramsey snarled into the phone at his desk at Police Headquarters. “That’s the seventh kid we know of in the last six months, and there may be more. Keep the parents occupied until I arrive. I should be there in ten minutes, traffic permitting.”
Ramsey pulled into a no parking zone in his Crown Vic near the New York entrance to the Black Shadow Bridge. Above the roofline of the low rise tenements, he saw the sun disappearing in the distance. His partner, Muldoon, was standing on the corner with a young couple. They were all holding cups with the Dunkin’ Donuts logo. Ramsey joined them and immediately noticed the woman’s eyes were red and her cheeks wet with tears.
“This is Curt and Jean Reston. Their eight-year-old son, Aiden, is missing since about 4:30. An elderly woman they encountered under the bridge may have kidnapped him,” Muldoon explained.
“Tell me about it,” Ramsey said, pulling out a small notebook from his suit pocket.
“The young man cleared his throat and said, “We went for an afternoon walk across the bridge about quarter to four. We just wanted a little exercise before dinner. It was a beautiful day, not too hot, not too cold. On the New Jersey side, we saw something shiny close to one of the pillars down near the water line. We didn’t see anyone under the bridge so we went down the stairs to investigate.”
“Don’t you know about the children who have disappeared around here lately?” Ramsey interrupted.
“Sure, we know about it.” Curt responded. “We live in a three-floor walkup only five blocks from the entrance to the bridge. Jean and I grew up here. In spite of its reputation, this is home to us. Wherever we go, we keep an eye out for trouble. It’s a way of life around here.”
“I told you we should have moved away when your father offered you that job,” Jean snapped, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.
“Tell me when you discovered Aidan missing,” Ramsey said, writing in his notebook.
“We found what looked like a diamond ring on the ground,” Curt continued. “We immediately thought about the possibility of a reward or pawning it if no one claimed it. After both of us scrutinized the ring, we felt an odd sensation of dizziness come over us. Suddenly, from behind a pillar, a shriveled up old woman came from out of nowhere. I’m not shitting you when I say she was the ugliest woman I’d ever seen. She had a gigantic mole on the tip of her nose, and one eye looked like a big black marble bulging from one socket. It didn’t move at all. While I stood there gawking at her, she grabbed the ring from my fingers and claimed she’d dropped it earlier in the day. I started to object, but there was something about her that was so frightening and intimidating, I was afraid to.”
“I told Curt to forget the ring,” Jean agreed. “We both had a bad feeling about the old hag. She was the closest thing to an honest to God witch I ever saw. An evil presence about her chilled me to the bone. Her voice sounded like a frog croaking.”
“And when she appeared from out of nowhere, I could feel the po
wer of her mind on mine like she was casting a spell on me. I felt like I was walking in a dream for a minute or two,” Curt explained. “And when I awoke, Aiden was gone. The ring, the ugly woman, and some kind of weird feeling had distracted us long enough for Aidan to disappear without a trace. Jean had the same reaction to her as I did. Afterward she seemed to disappear like magic. Neither of us saw her go up the stairs to the street, and we couldn’t find a place for her to hide under the bridge.”
Three more policemen arrived dressed in black uniforms and started combing the area.
Turning to Curt, Ramsey looked him square in the face, “Had you been drinking or taking drugs before you took your walk? It seems impossible for the woman and your son to disappear right before your eyes.”
“No, I swear we didn’t take anything. I know it sounds impossible, but the woman must have hypnotized us or something. Maybe she was a real witch and cast a spell on us. Look, we’re upstanding citizens, and my son is missing. What are you gonna do about it?”
“Settle down,” Ramsey said trying to calm the weary couple. “I’m going to do everything humanly possible to find your son. My men are searching the area for clues as we speak, and I’ll put out an APB with a description of Aidan. The first thing tomorrow, I want you to come to the station. We’ll have an artist make a composite drawing of the woman you saw under the bridge. Here’s my card, call me when you’re ready, and I’ll send a car.”
He called to Muldoon and left him with the grief-stricken couple. Looking at the men searching the area under the bridge and at the top of the stairs, Ramsey was almost certain the boy would never be found. He didn’t have the heart to tell the Restons their story was identical to the ones six other parents had told him when their child went missing.
After the Restons left for home, Muldoon remained with the search team while Ramsey returned to the precinct to review his files on the other children who had disappeared in close proximity to the bridge. Sitting down at his desk, he started opening each file and making notes on a white board with a black marker. Three victims were male; four were female. None had been found dead or alive. An ugly woman and a shiny object under the bridge had distracted each of the parents. After handling the object and coming into contact with the woman, the parents had fallen into a stupor and lost track of time. When they returned to normal, their child, the ugly woman, and the shiny object had vanished.
