by Jay Sigler
Using what little light remained, I aimed the gun and shot at it with six quick pulls of the trigger. However, instead of bullets, six black and yellow wasps flew stinger first out of the gun like darts into the rat. They stung it to what should have been its death. The sounds emitted from the creature with each sting reminded me of a colicky baby crying for its bottle. Still screeching, its oversized tongue spun around and swatted at its attackers. One after another, the wasps were curled into the oversized pink tongue, crushed, and eaten. Blood poured freely from the sting wounds in the rat’s body, legs, and even the scar tissue covering the right eye socket. It stopped for a moment and I was sure it was going to die, but instead it launched itself into the air, aimed straight at me.
I knew that it would kill me if it fell on me, so I threw the empty gun aside and got into a batter’s stance with the staff. I prepared to hit the thing as it descended. In a panic, I quickly flashed back to the memory of Vicky’s and my first date to the batting cages, where I misjudged a ball and ended up with a broken nose. I wasn’t about to let that happen again. I couldn’t miss. When the rodent came down, I swung as hard as a lumberjack trying to take down a tree with one swing.
I missed.
The rat didn’t.
It hit me squarely in the chest, directly over my heart, its claws sinking into my bare skin. I felt each individual digit of each paw slip into and under my skin, securing its grip on me. I grabbed its bloody, greasy fur and ripped it away from my body. Instantly, four strips of flesh ripped from my chest like Band-Aids and warm blood flowed down my torso. The writhing animal nearly slipped from my grip as it attempted to latch back onto my flesh with swimming motions of all four appendages. Its head craned forward, tongue lapping at the sweat freely dripping down my neck; I could feel its hot breath as it looked for any means possible to attach itself to me.
I threw it to the ground and it landed at my feet, momentarily stunned. I raised the staff over my head with both hands and prepared to bring it down on its head. As I brought it down with all of my force, I saw that the staff had become a human arm, hand attached, both stiff with rigor mortis. I did not complete the swing due to shock, and dropped the arm to the ground, where my instinct took over. I bashed the rat’s skull in with my bare heel, stomping on it over and over until the parched ground drank everything that flooded out of its corpse.
Crouching over the lifeless body, I felt the arm grab hold of my ankle. It was trying to claw its way up my leg. Just before the final speck of golden light dotted out of existence and threw everything into complete blackness, something sparkled on the hand wrapped around my calf. It was the engagement ring I had given my wife over nine years ago.
Chapter 8
The Happy Couple was out again for the third consecutive Monday. I could no longer convince myself that they were just on vacation or had finally decided to tie the knot and were on their honeymoon. A vacation takes you away for a week, a honeymoon possibly two. This was week three. I was more paranoid than I was when Sheila took that sick day four weeks ago, my stomach constantly flipping end over end. At least with Sheila, the sickening anxiety only lasted a few moments before I found out that she was just out for the day. With the Happy Couple, I had no idea where they were or when they’d return. Each day last week when they hadn’t shown up resulted in a night of my not eating or sleeping. The consistency in my life abandoned me, my pattern was broken, and I realized that I was, too.
With the Happy Couple was gone, a new train acquaintance gave me a temporary solution. I didn't classify him as a friend yet, but the first time I saw him across from me on the upper level of the train, he was drinking out of a flask. He saw me looking at him, and sitting back with his black leather boots perched on the metal rail in front of him, he lifted the flask up to the brim of his black cowboy hat. With a nod of his head and a “here’s to you” gesture, he took a swig. He tilted his hat down over half-closed eyes, crossed his arms over his chest, and sat there with a content smile spread across his face. He seemed relaxed and at peace with himself. I envied that.
That same night, as an experiment, I found some Stoli vodka in the basement and filled one of the many flasks I had dutifully collected from standing up in various friends’ weddings. I was never much of a drinker, and skeptical that the idea would work in the first place, but I soon found that a few sips while watching TV relaxed me enough to stop worrying about Gina’s and Rob’s whereabouts. The alcohol also helped me sleep and worked great for a few nights. But a week later, I didn't want to sleep. Because a week later, I dreamed of them.
In my dream, Rob, Gina, and I were on the train like any other normal day. However, when we arrived downtown, for some reason, instead of heading west to my job, I followed them east. Something told me to follow them closely without being seen, so I blended in with the crowd of other pedestrians while remaining close enough to hear. Gina was using her indoor voice to yell at Rob for not feeding the cat.
“But it’s your cat,” Rob interjected, the smug look on his face suggesting that he had already won the argument.
“Yes, but it’s our house, Rob. We share responsibilities and you need to start doing more to help out.” This could have been a scene from my life with Vicky. The constant stream of drabble going in one ear, not processing, and then going right out the other. Even in my dream, I wondered if things would have been different had some of Vicky's words actually stuck and if I had paid more attention.
“But I don’t want the cat. I’m allergic to cats. If you really wanted to make a life together, wouldn’t you get rid of the cat so that I could be happy?”
“You’ll learn to deal with him. We can get you medicine or shots to help with your allergies.”
“So, basically, I have to change my life to accommodate your cat?”
They went on and on and on, back and forth. It was one of those debates that no one would win until one side accepted change. They still held hands as they walked, so I knew that the argument wasn’t too serious.
When they got to the end of the block, they cut through an unfriendly looking alley that contained only graffiti and garbage cans. There were muddy puddles filled with wet garbage placed sporadically on the ground, and the sky somehow seemed darker over this particular section of the street. I thought it was very strange that they would take a shortcut that personified every parent’s warning to their kids about cutting through alleys. Not to mention this alley didn’t appear to lead anywhere. There was a tall cement wall at the other end.
Gina’s cream coat hopped and skipped over the ground as she walked. I could see mud soaking into it every time it touched down. Rob’s white rubber soles matched the rest of his black Converse shoes as he walked directly through the sludge. The farther they walked into the alley, the more the color drained away from everything, fading into a black and white photograph, until only the black was left. The sun was gone and it was suddenly night, a dangerous dark gray sky filled with fat purple thunderclouds that threatened a storm. Neither of them noticed as Gina continued to scold him, their steps almost in sync. She had moved on from the cat and now droned on about tracking mud into the house. They almost reached the wall at the end of the alley. The entire time, I saw only their backs. Then, about ten feet from the wall, they stopped and faced each other, nose to nose, still holding hands, Rob hunched over Gina’s tilted head. Their faces were so close together I could see the silhouette of a tilted wine glass spilling against the dark backdrop.
Keeping in constant contact, they slowly rotated against each other, foreheads touching, and looked in my direction, seeing me as a movie star sees the camera. Their conversation ceased and they were both possessed zombies, glazed eyes housed in touching heads, tilted at awkward angles.
I wanted to break the silence and ask them why they stopped, but I was cut off when a clothesline shot across the alley. There were no windows in the crumbling brick walls that encased this nightmare diorama, so I had no idea where it came from. The thi
ck rope was simply anchored in the bricks of one side of the wall and disappeared into the other side. Plastic infant dolls spanned the entire length of the clothesline, each hanging from its own little noose. From the motion of the rope, a few dolls were still clicking together in a sadistic Newton’s Cradle. In the center of the line were two larger nooses. Rob and Gina stepped towards these and slipped them around each other’s necks, tightening the premade knots. They kept their empty gaze upon me and their eyes had gone as pure white as Neil’s hair. Then they spoke one word to me.
“Stanford.”
Each took one syllable and repeated it in sequence over and over, speaking in the same monotonous tone. It was not their natural voices. It sounded forced, as if some other source plucked their vocal cords like guitar strings to form each half of the word.
As the vocal symphony repeated endlessly in the background, a jelly-like substance slid out from the closest garbage Dumpster. The only association I could make was that it looked very similar to the shock propaganda the anti-abortion people passed out on the streets. The red bubbly mass gurgled its way over to Rob and Gina, and rose up in the air behind them by transforming into the shadow of a man. There were no distinct features on this new form, just the basic shape of a human coated in all black.
Time slowed down; everything moved at half speed. A shin-length trench coat manifested and wrapped itself tightly around the body. A wide-brimmed hat appeared, still dripping with mucous. The man tilted his head in my direction in a “here’s to you” gesture, flicked open a switchblade knife, and without a word, wrapped his left arm around Rob’s forehead. Cradling his forehead in the crook of his elbow, he used his other arm to slit Rob’s throat. The arm holding his forehead pulled back slightly so that the red-hot blood spurted forward. In less than ten seconds, Seurat’s newest painting appeared on Gina’s face.
Gina didn’t move or even seem to notice. She sat there like the blank canvas she had become. When Rob’s neck stopped spurting blood, the shadow man let him go and he hung there from the noose like an unused puppet. The noose caught just under his Adam’s apple, slightly pushing the cartilage out of his body, like a turtle peeking its head out of its shell. His lifeless white eyes looked straight into the sky, while the rest of his body just hung there, limp.
The shadow man turned to Gina, whose red face almost blended in perfectly with her hair, and began punching her eye sockets. Still in slow motion, left hand met left eye, right hand met right eye. Left then right, sometimes both at the same time. The noose held her upright, acting as a pendulum to continually swing her back to his fists. He pounded each eye countless times, long enough for each punch to produce a thick wet sound like raw meat dropped on a counter. He paused momentarily and from out of his trench coat he pulled a familiar wooden staff. The staff was an extension of his being, formed to shape from the same black sludge he himself had manifested. It was the same staff I had tried to kill the rat with in my first dream. I shuddered, recalling how it had turned into Vicky's arm right before I woke up. The staff exposed, the man began hitting Gina in the face with broad powerful swings. When he was either done or too tired to continue, he dropped the weapon, which then transformed into a brown and yellow snake that slithered off under a Dumpster. Gina’s head looked like a smashed pumpkin on Halloween. Two gaping eye sockets, made even larger from the collapsed bones, stared out into nothing. Her eyeballs had been popped and I could see a twinkle of green trapped in the blob of jelly slowly sliding down her right cheek. I had never seen a caved in skull like that, not even in the movies.
Whether it was out of shock, fear, or just the way things are in dreams, I was frozen where I stood. My legs were like oak trees planted in the ground. Helpless to run, trying to escape the horror directly in front of me, I looked up at the walls and saw that the bricks were bleeding. Dark red blood ran down both walls in streams towards the clothesline. The line soaked up the blood, sucking it from the wall like a straw; the exact amount measured by how far the red stain traveled. As the blood traversed the noose of each doll, the line turned from an object to a living umbilical cord. The dolls started crying and twisting, coming alive one by one as the blood fed them. Writhing and shrieking at the end of their nooses, their faces became as red as Gina’s. The walls stopped bleeding just as the two infants farthest in began feeding from the cord. There wasn’t enough blood to get to Gina and Rob’s lifeless bodies, so they just hung still and dead in the center of the clothesline, surrounded by hanging, choking, dying babies.
While I watched this horror, the shadow man disappeared. Time resumed its normal progression and I was able to move again. More importantly, I was able to scream. And that’s what I did until I woke up in a pool of my own sweat.
Chapter 9
It took me until the fourth Monday without the Happy Couple to realize that my flask-drinking acquaintance was the shadow man from my dream. The cowboy had been habitually boarding the morning train with Sheila, Frank, Neil, and me, so I upgraded him to my newest train friend. Unlike my other friends, though, he sat alone on the top level. I had no way to find out his real name through an overheard conversation so I decided to name him myself. I considered a list of possible names.
Tom. Tom Cruise. Tom Hanks. This guy did not have movie star qualities.
Dick. Dick Cheney. I really wasn't that into politics.
Harry. Harry Caray. I didn't like sports, either.
I named him Shawn. A name I associated with nothing.
Shawn wore the same shin-length trench coat and wide-brimmed hat that I saw in my dream. His black leather boots had silver clasps over each ankle – a real modern-day cowboy. Other than his attire, he had no real distinguishing features and never spoke to anyone. He preferred to sit in the upper level of single seats facing the center, across from me and over my friends. He carried no briefcase, backpack, or even coffee for that matter; nothing that would suggest he was on his way to a regular nine-to-five job, nothing that really attached him to anything.
We shared the hobby of people watching. Hearing any conversation from my friends below, he would crane his neck to get a better listen, to indulge in the joy of being a silent part of an actual relationship. I’d watch him watch my friends and every time he caught me looking at him, he gave me that same tilted head nod I saw in my dream. Each nod seemed to say, “They’re our friends now,” and would send a twinge of jealousy right through my gut.
With Shawn’s presence also came frequent disruptions in the train schedule. I’d been taking the same train to work for close to seven years, since Vicky had encouraged me to suck it up and deal with the long commute if I really wanted the job in the city. It had rarely ever broken down. Shawn had been a regular for just one week when it broke down twice – not including the time that a car accident near the gates knocked a cement wall directly into the path of the train and delayed it for two hours while the scene was cleaned. I couldn’t decide if these were just strange coincidences or if they actually meant something. Given my recent dream, and that Rob and Gina were still missing, I began to wonder. And worry.
I got to work late that day, thanks to a stuck door at the third stop of my commute. It wasn’t safe to continue travel until the door was shut, so we had to wait for a guy to drive all the way in from the station near my house to fix it. While we waited, Shawn caught my eye and gave me an empathetic shoulder shrug as if to say, “What are you gonna do?” As he tilted his hat down, I thought I saw something else glimmer just behind the surface of his eyes – something devious yet almost playful at the same time. I thought about it during the entire walk from the train to my building, and I could not shake the feeling that Shawn’s sudden appearance in my life was not by chance. I tried to come up with a reason why until I was rudely interrupted by my actual job.
Julie was waiting for me at my office door. Lately, it seemed like she was constantly near me, taking an interest in whatever I did, and always with an extra button or two undone. I wondered what her angle w
as. We had always been close at work, but even before Vicky’s passing, things had gotten kind of weird between us. She gave me guilt trips for not walking out to the parking lot with her after work, frowned at me for not eating lunch with her, and berated me for not immediately emailing her back after she sent me something. I think she might have misinterpreted our friendship for something more, so I had been trying to distance myself. I had a wife at home and didn’t want Julie to think anything would ever happen between us. I made sure she knew my feelings towards cheating. Cheating was one of the worst things you could do to a person and if that’s where Julie was headed with her misinterpretations, I wanted nothing to do with it.
“Hey, there! Stark just emailed us a new equation. Says it needs to be done before we go home tonight.”
“Before we go home? Why? What the fuck is it even…?”
“….Even for?” she finished with me, grabbing a lock of her blonde hair. Her face flinched, surprised at my foul language. Consoling me, she said, “I know, it sucks, but that's the job. What are you gonna do?” The more she twirled her hair, the more I could tell she was actually looking forward to working late.
“Yeah, I know. But why is getting it done on this very night so important?” I asked, knowing there was no way she had an answer. When it came to the equations we solved, we were in the same boat, paddling in the same foggy lake.
“Not sure, of course. Just know we... Gotta. Get. It. Done.” She hit my desk with every word, mocking Mr. Stark’s words from her last review. She had told me that was his attempt to motivate her before sending her off. Her playful smile indicated that she was looking for a laugh, but I just wasn't in the mood and she could tell.
She sighed and her shoulders dropped. “You know, before… you always tried to stay late, to stay away... well… we always had a great time. Now, you just want to rush home. It's not good to spend so much time alone so soon after. Freud says...”
