by Hixon, Wayne
“No, I’m okay. I’m awake,” she said. “I just feel kind of beaten.”
Rachel smiled and Jacob knew they were not going to sleep without him telling his end of the story. “It’s settled then,” she said. “It’ll be a bedtime story.”
“You won’t like this bedtime story.”
“Then I just want to hear the sound of your voice. Fucking humor me.”
“Fine,” Jacob said, launching into his account of the whole strange evening, beginning with how he came home to the crazy landlady and carrying them all the way up to when he decided the television must be stopped, lest it strike again.
While Rachel stopped him every now and then to make witty, pithless little interjections, Rain was totally silent but awake and more alert than she had looked a few moments ago. Jacob stood up, pulled another cigarette from the pack and handed one to Rachel saying, “You’re gonna get hooked.”
“I’ve been hooked before. At this rate, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to get lung cancer. I have to pee.”
She went into the bathroom and Jacob motioned for Rain to stand up from the couch.
“You’re sitting on our bed,” he said.
“Oh, sorry.” She stood up and moved out of the way while Jacob threw the cushions off the couch and pulled out the mattress.
“Quaint, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
“So, you were pretty quiet during that whole thing. What are you thinking?”
She kind of shrugged, looking resigned. Rachel came out of the bathroom and Jacob knew that, by the sheer small size of the apartment, she had heard his question.
“I don’t really know what I think just yet.”
“Come on,” Rachel said. “Now’s a good time for honesty.”
“Well, have you ever heard the expression, ‘Out of the frying pan and into the fire’?”
“Something like that, yeah,” Rachel said.
“Well, I got away from Bones thinking I could get back to some kind of semi-normal life and now I seem to be in the middle of everything.”
Jacob, standing in front of his busted television at six o’clock in the morning said, “What? This isn’t normal?”
The girl tried to chuckle.
Rachel sensed the doom weighing down Rain’s shoulders. “Look,” she said. “Don’t feel like you have to stay and help us. This isn’t personal with you. If you wanted to go, you might actually be able to get away from them. They might not want anything to do with you. And Jacob and I could help you get out of Lynchville, if that’s what you want. You can stay here for as long as you need to and we’ll help you get away. If you want to leave tomorrow, we’ll drive you out of town.”
“No,” Rain said. “I can’t do that.”
“Then you’ll stay?”
“Of course I’ll stay.”
“Why?”
“Because it is kind of personal with me. In a way, they took Bones from me. I know he was kind of a loser and everything but nobody should have that done to them—promises without results, turned into a killer, which he most definitely was not before. And they are definitely responsible for stealing away the last bit of innocence I had.”
Rachel went to the closet and brought out some blankets.
“I can just sleep on the floor,” Rain said.
“Nonsense,” Rachel said. “This bed can comfortably sleep three, I’m sure of it. I’ll sleep in the middle so Jacob doesn’t hump you while he’s asleep.”
“Thanks,” Rain said, smirking.
Jacob cleared his throat, crushed out his cigarette and said, “So, I guess I’ll be the one to ask what we plan on doing.”
As if the answer was obvious, Rachel said, “We wake up and then we go hunt them down.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “I guess that’s resolved then.”
“We’ll work out the details later.”
Jacob went around the apartment and turned off all the lights except for the one above the kitchen stove, throwing a faint bluish glow over the apartment, complementing the nearly same color glow given off by the newly birthed morning.
Twelve
Daniel Clock lay in bed counting his wife’s snores. They were not loud and grating things. They were not unpleasant. He found them rather comforting. Especially on nights like this. Not that he really had too many nights like this.
He was an insurance agent who worked out of an office in Bryton. He lived in the nicest neighborhood in Lynchville. The only neighborhood that could be considered affluent. Aptly called The Oaks, it had been built at the edge of the nature reserve. Every year, a couple of new, large houses were added to the street. So far, they were up to ten. Acorn Lane was a comfortable place to live. Daniel Clock liked comfort. There had been times in his life when he had not felt so comfortable. There had been times when he didn’t feel like he was making enough money; when he felt like his wife, Julia, might be cheating on him; when the fact they could not have any children bothered him. That was when Daniel decided to see the psychiatrist, Dr. Bettermore. The Comfort Doctor. That was how Daniel thought of him. Dr. Bettermore had given him these wonderful pills and told him he didn’t have any reasons to really worry. The good doctor pointed out how financially stable Daniel and Julia were. How they were pretty much set for life. The doctor told him the only thing that could harm him was whatever his mind could conjure up.
Daniel had practically begged him for the pills.
He didn’t like to think about killing himself. He didn’t like to think how meaningless his life seemed at times. The Suicide Card, Daniel called it. He had never really thought about killing himself. Not seriously anyway. He just wanted to be comfortable. He just wanted the nightmares, both waking and sleeping, to go away. So the doctor had given him the pills and Daniel, once again, became a very comfortable man.
Julia’s snores were the only things making him feel comfortable at this point.
Daniel was convinced there was someone else in the room with him. Well, he didn’t really think it was another person in the room with him. He thought it was something. A Devil.
He wanted to laugh about this. He knew they were only stories. He knew the nightmares and the legends weren’t real but goddamn if there wasn’t a peculiar shape on the far wall, up in the corner near the ceiling. And goddamn if that shadow wasn’t staring at him.
Shadows don’t have eyes, he told himself.
But, then again, shadows didn’t breathe either. They didn’t whisper. They didn’t say things like they were going to come inside his head and eat him alive. They didn’t say they were going to tear him apart. They didn’t say they were going to make his heart stop in his chest. No. A shadow was just a shadow. A blockage of the light created by an object.
That was how he knew the thing in the corner wasn’t a shadow.
Daniel had watched it for some time, his mind circling back on itself, creating dilemma after dilemma. He couldn’t just get out of bed and leave Julia behind. But he couldn’t exactly wake her up and tell her there was a shadow in the room, watching them, and that he was pretty sure it wasn’t a shadow at all but a Devil. No. He couldn’t do that. She would laugh in his pudgy face if he did.
Sweat glistened on his skin despite the coolness of the room.
His heart hammered in his chest beneath his pajama top.
The bed sheets were balled up in his fists.
“I know you’re up there,” he whispered at the shape, half to himself.
He swore he saw it move down the wall, snake-like. It was the size of a human and a more rational part of his mind told him the movement could have been created by a passing car.
The thing whispered inside his head.
“I’m going to cut you out,” it said.
Fear clenched Daniel’s muscles. He was beginning to think the fear paralyzed him. That he wouldn’t be able to move if he wanted to.
“Please. Just go away.”
“Not without you,” the thing whispered, slithering
farther down the wall.
Tears rolled out of Daniel’s eyes. He didn’t know how he was going to solve this problem. He didn’t feel very comfortable right now.
He put a sweaty palm on Julia’s hip. She was turned with her back toward him.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said.
“I don’t want her,” the shadowthing hissed, sliding onto the floor now. “She’s a stupid cunt. I want you. I want to crush your brain.”
“You’re not real.”
Even after saying that, Daniel had to repeat the phrase in his mind, a childish mantra. Not real. Not real. Not real.
A very real, very cold hand touched his cheek.
Daniel was out of the bed with a bolt, running for the bedroom door. He turned the knob and dashed out into the hallway, his pajama bottoms flopping around his ankles. He reached the top of the stairs and felt the thing’s hands on his back, shoving him.
He went tumbling down the stairs, the sound of his skull whacking the stairs and the wall and the railings ricocheting around in his head.
Collapsed twitching at the bottom of the stairs, he felt the shadowthing on him and then, yes, then he felt the shadowthing, the Devil, inside him, sliding up his nostrils and into his ears, a slow burn hiss through his short circuiting mind.
And then the thing was completely inside him, reanimating a body that should have been dying, canceling out his thoughts, scorching the inside of his skin.
Daniel had a thought. A very real thought. The last comfortable thought he ever had.
He thought the Devils were real and everything he had heard about them was true. He thought he now knew the mystery. He thought everything was now exposed to him and just before he could figure out what that was, he went screeching into insanity and death.
Entering the man felt like a sexual climax, like a bucket of come shooting from his balls. Only Bones no longer had balls to manufacture come or a penis to come through.
The resulting feeling was more intense than anything he could have imagined. He was now just a floating spirit and when he squeezed, insinuated, that essence into the body of Daniel Clock, it was like every nonexistent molecule of his ethereal body swelled, nearly exploding, wracking him with shivers. Once inside the man, Bones began to eat what was there. The only things he could remember about Daniel were his last dying thoughts, the shrieking madness, the fear of death. And, while the soul of Daniel Clock no longer existed, his body did, and Bones went about reanimating that with his own soul. Of course, this was not the body Bones would have chosen but he knew it was just practice. It was just part of the teaching before he could take over someone more powerful. Before he would be able to enter someone without that person realizing it and lie dormant like some hereditary disease that has yet to flare up.
Daniel Clock’s body uprighted itself, somewhat jerkily. It had a broken neck. Several vertebrae had slipped out of place. Its leg was broken. But as long as it had muscle and bone for Bones to tug on like puppet strings, the body could move. Julia, the man’s wife, still slept upstairs. She would sleep well into the morning. When she woke up, she would miss her husband but just the mere thought of him would send some inexplicable fear throughout her mind. Once he failed to come home after work, she would be vaguely curious but wouldn’t think much of it. In a few days, she might call the police if her conscience got the best of her. It would end there. Missing persons claims were hardly given the attention they deserved in Lynchville. Maybe, if things got really bad, she would go see Dr. Bettermore. He would assure her that either she never had a husband named Daniel or that husband had abandoned her. Within a month, she would have her lover moved in. He will be an out-of-work construction worker who lives in a ramshackle trailer park on the outskirts of Culver.
And if she still can’t get Daniel out of her mind. If she has the nightmares that so many folks in Lynchville have, then Dr. Bettermore might recommend she be placed in the Signal Point Behavioral Healthcare Center, which was really just a politically correct way of saying the insane asylum. Never mind that Lynchville wasn’t nearly large enough to warrant such a facility. It was simply understood that the town liked to take care of its own problems.
Eventually, if a body ever turned up, it would be put to rest in Lynchville Memorial Cemetery. The name on the headstone may or may not be accurate.
Bones left the house through the back door, getting used to the extra girth he now carried. It was almost dawn. He knew he had to find a place to hide until the sun went down again. This is what he was told by Ilya and Ernst. He didn’t ask questions. It was all part of the learning. He would find out the reasons for things later. Not that he necessarily needed reasons. He had power now. More power than he could ever have imagined and, all in all, he felt pretty good. Maybe he wasn’t just like Ilya and Ernst. Maybe he didn’t get everything he wanted. But maybe this was even better.
This neighborhood was built on the edge of the reserve and Bones went toward the woods, eager to put his screaming soul to rest for the evening.
It was funny how some days went. When he woke up that morning he had been alive and with Rain and doing what he had done for the past few months which, even though it might have been sick and wrong, was what passed for normal these days. The day took a strange turn and he ended up dying at the hands of the very people he sought to please. Only to be given this exotic second life. This life after death. This freedom and power he had searched for his entire life. The gift of being a soul unburdened by any type of human body. The human body was now merely a host and he was there to use that host to serve whatever function he needed. Above human law. Above human punishment.
Once in the woods, he found a place where the earth was soft and began digging. He got down on his hands and knees, his new sizable buttocks pointed up toward the sky, grabbing handfuls of dirt and throwing them around him. He worked incredibly quickly, unaware of how that much effort should have caused his muscles to burn, oblivious to the small stones and thorns and little pieces of glass scraping against the tender pink flesh of his insurance agent’s hands. He was like some kind of burrowing animal. A mole perhaps. A big, fat mole. Digging out the dirt and simultaneously pressing himself farther down into the ground, almost like he was making his own grave.
Only until the sun goes away.
When it was dark again, that was when he could rise and begin to search for new prey. That was when he could begin to further his learning.
Within an hour, he was lying in the ground, reaching out his arms to bring the earth onto his body, to give him coverage from the first rays of the sun. He felt worms and bugs wriggle against his skin. He liked the feeling. The smell of the earth caking his nostrils, dark and rotting yet teeming with life, was something he also liked.
When he finally put his soul to rest, he thought about how it had turned out to be a pretty nice day after all.
Thirteen
Friday morning in Lynchville and Autumn Jackson awoke to the sound of her clock radio bleating to life at 6:37. She was glad the alarm woke her up when it did. She was having a wicked nightmare. In the nightmare, a huge black dog had her pinned to the bed and she was staring at its dripping and snarling maw, preparing for its teeth to rip the flesh from her throat.
But now her eyes were open and there was weak October sunlight streaming in through the window and the deejay from the college radio station in Bryton was telling her it was an unseasonably warm fifty-two degrees outside and they were expecting a high of sixty-three before giving way to the Pixies’ “Debaser.” Never one to lie in bed or hit snooze, Autumn was up, wrapping her terry cloth robe around her scantily clad body, dazedly wandering over to the closet to pick out some clothes for another rousing day of her junior year at Lynchville High. Seeing that it was going to be warm and seeing that she had seemed to grow a nice pair of legs over the summer, Autumn selected a short gray tweed skirt and a black button down shirt. She was going to look sharp today, she thought, even though her skirt was probably going to
be too short for the high school’s dress code. She didn’t think any of the administrators would care. She was and always had been a straight-A student and they tended to turn the other cheek on a lot of things she chose to do and say.
While showering, she knew her nightmare was going to linger with her all day, throwing a pall over everything she chose to do. And just what would she do today? Probably the usual. There wasn’t a lot for teenagers to do in Lynchville. Football, drinking, and fucking seemed to be relatively standard fare for most of the students. She didn’t go in for the football part and hadn’t really found anyone she thought worthy of fucking just yet. That left drinking and she figured she and Charlotte Black could probably manage to do a little of that. Maybe they would go to the Wake Up Screaming Cafe after school, possibly browse through the Den of Iniquity bookstore, both owned by the strikingly gaunt Mr. Stoop, before heading over to Charlotte’s for a campfire and some wine pilfered from her parents’ not extensive but always reliable wine cellar.
She ran the water in the shower until it was nearly scalding, letting the steam fill the bathroom and her head, hoping it would take away some of the icky feeling rattling around inside her. After showering, she wrapped herself in the robe and went into her room, smelling her mother’s morning coffee as it drifted up the stairs. Once dressed, she went downstairs. Her younger sister, Ashley, sat on the couch watching the Disney channel and eating a Pop Tart.
“You look pretty,” Ashley said.
“Thank you, Sis.” Autumn bent over the couch and pecked Ashley on the head. She was in the seventh grade and was continually enamored with her older sister. It made Autumn feel good. She was sure Ashley would grow up to be a great person.
Autumn went into the kitchen where her mother sat at the table reading the skimpy Lynchville Chronicle.
