A Bone To Pick—Tales of Terror by M. Jones
© copyright M. Jones, 2010. All rights reserved.
Smashwords edition, first electronic edition.
This is a work of fiction. There is no resemblance to anyone living or dead, and any such resemblance is purely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Long Winded Tale
The porch was a favoured spot in summer, the high heat doing its best to draw them all out into its lazy embrace, where wicker chairs baked in the sun, and a soft, green and white porch swing with cushiony seats beckoned children to drape themselves on it, to rock back and forth beneath its canopied shade. It was a wonderful place to curl on in the onslaught of an August afternoon, to take a book or a collection of bugs in a jar and inspect them in turn. The quiet and solitude of it was appreciated by all, and the porch had evolved into a section of the house reserved for quiet contemplation, regardless of how many people occupied it. Such was the case now, as Jeremy read his book, "The Children's Guide to Medieval Life", and his sister, Celine, sat on the second last bench, a magnifying glass in hand and the soft sizzle of ants beneath it.
"Well, well, isn't this a hot day!"
Jeremy grimaced. The sanctity of their silence had, of course, been disturbed by their visiting Uncle Bill, who by all accounts was very much a red and burnt and large oaf of a man who rolled across their porch in a gait similar to an uneven marble. "Hotter than hell, that's for sure." He settled his wide girth onto a wicker chair near the porch's far railing, the small woven seat groaning with the strain of his bulk.
Jeremy tried to concentrate on his book, ignoring the huffs and phlegmy coughs of his uncle whose presence was belying the entire purpose of the porch. He wanted his uncle to obey the rules, but as it was, Uncle Bill didn't know the rule of silence and contemplation for this place, and though the rule existed, it had never been spoken so much as evolved. So, Uncle Bill had to be forgiven, the rule of their sanctuary forgotten, and the silence now disturbed by his coughing and his muttering on the heat.
"You having a good summer, Jeremy?"
He nodded, nose still in his book.
"In my day we would have been working gathering crops at your age." The old man picked up a paper fan lying on a table beside him and began stirring the air around his slightly yeasty smelling flesh. "We didn't have time to do things like read books or play with bugs. It was all work, work back then. But we were happy," Uncle Bill qualified. "We were damn happy, I can tell you that. We always found a way to fit play in somewhere, after we worked. Maybe by swimming in the pond over yonder there, it used to be a lot bigger." He pointed in its direction, a highway cutting through the section of trees he was referring to. Only a small pool that was more a puddle than a pond remained there now. Uncle Bill scratched the stubble of his beard thoughtfully, his loud, brusque voice cutting into the still air. "At least we used to, till your daddy caught polio. That was another thing you kids don't know about. People got sick back then, we didn't have those vaccines."
Jeremy yawned. He'd been hearing this particular lecture for the past two days that Uncle Bill had been staying with them, and it had been boring the first time it had been told. He closed his book, giving up on the thought of reading any more about mediaeval life, and in particular the more grisly aspects of its history, such as the iron maiden, and the truth-extracting torture of the rack. He closed his eyes, and swung back and forth on the padded swing, the sun glancing on occasion from the steel bars holding it together.
"A lot of people died," Uncle Bill said. He wiped at his large, leathery neck with a handkerchief. "That's just the way things were, back then."
Jeremy's sister looked up at those words, only to dismiss them to return to her rather grisly task of torturing ants. She was a cherubish creature, with tiny blond ringlets of hair and wide blue eyes, the illusion almost complete with her frilly pink dress. Celine's sadism was typical of her age, though perhaps her three year old perceptions had been moulded, just a tad, by Jeremy's insistence on reading her the exploits of mediaeval Europe.
"They say almost all of Europe was wiped out by the black plague," Jeremy said, hoping his uncle would get the point that there was no way death could have arrived on that kind of scale in his lifetime. "And World War One killed the most people than any war combined up to that point." He pointed to his book as if it were a scale of humanity's demise. "It says so here in the back page notes."
Uncle Bill wiped another trickle of sweat off of his back, but his apparent distress at the heat didn't stop him from reaching into the pocket of his cotton shirt to take out a cigar. He lit it with a lighter fished out of his khaki shorts and leaned back, puffing smoke into the heat, and making the world seem as though it were smouldering.
"Kind of morbid to be thinking about death so much, on so hot and sunny a day," Uncle Bill said.
Jeremy shrugged, and leaned back on the swing, deciding to open his book again, and tune his uncle out.
"The dead have strange ways, you know," his uncle said, hampering Jeremy's efforts. "You might think you have it all figured out, how life and death work. But it's not as simple as it looks."
Jeremy thought about mentioning that it wasn't he who had brought up the subject of death, but telling one's elders they were wrong never resulted in anything other than a tongue lashing and a trip to his room where he'd have to sit for an hour as punishment. So Jeremy bit down on his knowledge, his eyes scanning bloodied illustrations, his uncle's voice wafting over the mediaeval horrors laid out in colourful detail in his book.
"You might think that books will tell you everything, my boy, but books don't follow the course of reality most times. The facts are, it can only detail what a person dies of or how, but it can't delve into the finer points. You just get an overview, you don't read about all those tiny little things of one person somewhere there who managed to dig themselves out of a grave. You just don't see that kind of thing, not in the books you're reading. And even if someone wrote about some of the stranger pieces of death and life, well, what they say is only half right and the rest is all wrong and of course, nobody takes what's said on the pages of 'those' books all that seriously."
The words on the page of Jeremy's book weren't being read now, the pictures even seeming kind of lacklustre. He found himself listening to his uncle, a rarity to be sure. He wouldn't allow him the visual victory, however, of his attention, so he kept his eyes falsely reading the page.
The wicker chair creaked as Uncle Bill leaned back and forth on it, balancing it a little like a makeshift rocking chair. "There's strange things none of us are meant to know about, and sometimes they leak their way into our lives." He looked at his cigar. "They crawl in like smoke. You aren't even really sure it's there until it collects enough, and you notice that the air looks more grey, and there's a smell like things burning." Uncle Bill glanced at the door, as if making sure no one was coming out of it. He leaned forward in his chair suddenly, his cigar clamped in his mouth. "I'm going to tell you a story, my boy, and it's true, every word. I haven't been able to talk about it for years, and I dare say your momma would kill me to put the truth in your head. But I think you're the kind of person who could appreciate what needs to be said, who can benefit from knowing the little line between life and death isn't so tightly pulled as we think."
Celine banged the magnifying glass down on a large, black ant, severing it in half.
Uncle Bill leaned back, sweat trickling down his jowls, his watery blue eyes staring up at the ceiling of the porch, but not really seeing it. He sighed.
"It was during the war," he said. "You get used to death. It's all over you. It's in your boots, it's in your pores. You watch while some guy you called your best friend gets blown to bits in a flash of light that looks and sounds like thunder, but it isn't. You know he's gone for good. You don't go looking for him, because you'll only find the pieces. He's too quiet, see. That's how you know."
He coughed into his handkerchief, a phlegmy, diseased sounding act. Jeremy winced at it.
"I worked in the hospital," Uncle Bill said, "in the mainland in Korea. I saw a lot things in that place and suffered through a lot, my boy. I pray every day that peace remains, that you don't know what war is, or how broken and cut up people can be." He pointed to the book in Jeremy's hand. "You might think it tells you the truth, boy, but all that's in there is the most sterilized props they could find. You can't smell the stench of rotting blood, you can't hear the moaning issuing from dying lips. It's all a false promise, those books of yours. They tell you nothing."
Uncle Bill took another long drag of his cigar, the smoke acrid and polluting the air of the porch.
"This is a nice spot," Uncle Bill said, changing the subject just a little. "A good place to sit and think."
The swing Jeremy was on rocked back and forth, the sun still bearing down on them all. He thought about going inside to beg his mother for some cold drinks or even some popsicles, but just the effort of moving was too much. The heat had been slowly mummifying them all, reducing them to lumps that could barely move. Uncle Bill was slowly puffing his cigar, the added heat coalescing and competing with the air around him.
"There was this one guy, a terrible case. Bullets had ripped his chest to near shreds, punctured a lung, one lodged on the bottom half of his heart. He was brought to us while he was still alive, and damn if I can't still hear that horrible wheezing while he tried to breathe. You know what's the most terrible thing about a dying man, boy?"
Jeremy shook his head, though he was still pretending to read his book.
"It's the look in his eyes. All glassy and unseeing, fixed on the Unknowable. You'll never see anything emptier in your life than the eyes of the dying."
Celine brought the magnifying glass up to hers and viewed Jeremy through it, her large blue eye now hugely proportioned.
"He moaned for well over an hour before he finally died. There wasn't anything they could do, you see. His chest was one big open maw, you could see his ribs and guts and there was nothing that could be done. They cure horses better of what ails them than they do human beings, boy, that's the truth. They let people suffer right up to the end in the cruellest way they can. No amount of painkillers was going to take away the pain of having your chest blasted open, that's certain." The cigar was puffed, the air surrounding him in grey ringlets. "He was a young guy too, about twenty or so. We found a letter to a university and a picture of his wife and kid in his back pocket. Bright young thing, ready to start studying to be a doctor. That's the way life can be sometimes, my boy, it just takes things."
"It can rearrange things too," his Uncle added, after some small reflection. "Things you just can't imagine."
He gave Celine a bemused glance as she peered at him through the magnifying glass. "Here now, Sunny, and I'm calling you Sunny because that's what you are, like a blast of light out of the sky. Go on in the house, you, and ask your mother for some cold drinks and things before we all burst into flames right here on this little porch."
Celine, understanding, giggled and tossed down her magnifying glass to run into the house, her little voice high and shrill as she demanded from her mother, "We want cold drinks!"
Uncle Bill laughed. "She'll always get what she wants."
A quiet was now edging its way over the porch, the kind that comes in hushed whispers and confidences shared. Uncle Bill rocked back and forth in his wicker seat, his cigar puffing rings of smoke, his sweat smelling sour and ashen on the stale air. He glanced a few times at the back door, and when he was confident that no one was running back out of it, he began to talk again.
"This here that I'm telling you, nobody's to know. I'm telling you, my boy, because you're a bright lad, and maybe someday you'll become a scientist or a doctor or something to that effect, and cure my worry with all that information mucking about in that head of yours. All I really want is to be proven a frightened fool, because that makes a hell of a lot more sense than trying to think what happened was really as I thought it had."
Jeremy didn't look up from his book, but he listened just the same.
"I was telling you about that young man, the one with the big hole where his chest should have been. He'd died, of course, like we were expecting, and since I was the one doing the morgue duty that day, it was up to me to wheel him into that room we had set up for the dead. I hated the morgue duty, I hated seeing the row upon row of stinking dead. It's a terrible smell, death. Like rotting trees, only with an oily undertone to it, just the foulest thing in the universe."
The chair creaked under his weight as he rocked it. Creak. Creak.
"I brought that poor young man in, and stood there for a while in all that human rot, wondering how it could be that we could think of all kinds of miracles, like going to the moon or curing smallpox world-wide, and yet here we came, to become rotten meat under a hot sun no matter how damn brilliant we are. I was moody back then, I guess, not that the situation helped any. The war felt like it just dragged us in forever, and I was tired, and missed my home."
He puffed on his cigar, ash colouring the air.
"So, I was standing there, thinking about this, when I figured hell, the poor bastard I just brought in was too young and too full of promise to be laying here without some kind of small ceremony to bid him goodbye. I'd been there at the moment of his death, after all, I figured I owed him that extra respect. I pulled down the sheet away from his face, and stood there looking at him for a little while. He was young, and a good looking guy, like I said before. All I could think before I even bid him a proper good-bye was how this just shouldn't have happened."
Jeremy turned a page of his book, though he wasn't reading, the images of severed limbs a grisly red hue.
"Damn, if he didn't open his eyes and gasp!"
Jeremy bolted a look directed at his uncle, his book now officially forgotten. "What do you mean?" he asked, but Uncle Bill's expression was one of a man who was lost in the moment of his story, the details spilling from him separate of his will.
"I stood there, just not able to breathe or even speak. And there that guy was, not only looking right at me, but starting to sit up, his guts just about spilling out of that hole in his chest. He weren't alive, I can tell you that now, he weren't alive in any sense you and I can make sense of, but there was his heart still beating, because with that hole I could actually see it, and there was his blood running. He glanced around the morgue a few times and then his chest, like he damn couldn't believe he was there himself. And as God as my witness, and hell, all his angels too, didn't he just grab the white sheet covering him and stuff it against the hole in his chest and just get off that stretcher and start walking!"
Uncle Bill's handkerchief wiped at his brow. "I should have done the right thing, then, son. I should have got out something, a chair, whatever I could get my hands on and just smash that young man back into death where he belonged. But I was so scared, and this guy was just walking towards me... I ran, damn him. I ran back into the hospital screaming my ass off that the dead were rising up to get us and make us pay for taking them when it weren't their time to go." He shook his head. "They never did find his body. The war ended not a week later, and I came home, with that extra knowledge I didn't want. As the years passed, I sometimes thought it had been hallucination, you know, the way the horror of a war can get to a man. I was ready to think it didn't even happen."
He sighed, as if wondering if it would prudent to continue. Jeremy's white knuckled grip on his book and his surprised, wide eyes at his uncle weren't entirely forgiving.
"A couple of years ago, I was in New York. You should go there sometime, boy, it's an interesting place, filled to bursting with all kinds of people and things, a real city. None of the other cities in the world come closer to being a true 'city' like New York does. Rich people living right there amongst the poor, and crazies and sane people in all the different levels in between live in New York. It's the great big example of the entire world, right there, no culture hasn't found a home in it to mix right in. I was going to the Bank of America, which was across the street from the bank of Hong Kong. New York is the world's town, that's right."
"I was outside, and it was a spring day, kind of chilly, still needed a coat, because it gets damn cold in New York in March. I was ready to nab myself a cab, when I happened to glance behind me.
"Boy, there's few things in this life more horrifying than seeing the dead acting like the living."
If Jeremy had been nothing but a ball of disinterest before, there was certainly no evidence of it now, not with the way he was staring, wide-eyed and frightened at his Uncle Bill, whose own gaze was lost on a moment far removed from their little back porch, and was instead somewhere in a significantly more personal horror.
"He was older, of course, but I knew him. He looked right at me, and turned away as if I'd caught him with a prostitute. That's how I knew, you see. That guilt, after all these years, of living when he knew damn well he was supposed to be dead. He flagged down a cab before I did and disappeared. I hope to never see that face again."
He sighed. He shook his head.
"It doesn't matter, I keep playing it in my mind, you see, the thought of him, walking around, the hole in his chest stuffed by a sheet-- Who knows? Maybe he even uses rubber prosthetics, they do that in the movies, you know. To keep up the illusion and prevent people from knowing the reality."
He scratched at his chin, his cigar now burnt down to a dull brown and ashen stub. "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? Just how many people are there in this world, walking around when they've got no business doing so. I wonder about that, with every person I meet. Just who is alive in this world, and who isn't?"
The back porch door swung open, and Celine bounded through it, a tray of drinks not so expertly balanced in her small hands.
"Cold drinks!" she shouted.
Uncle Bill gruffly wiped at his face and rose from his seat. He bent down to her and nodded politely. "Thank you little lady. I think we all needed some refreshment, especially on this hot, hotter than any level of hell, day." Ice clinked in his glass, and he gave Jeremy a warm smile that, somehow, was more about empathy than simple manners.
His name was called from inside of the house; Jeremy's father had come home from work and had just been informed of his brother's current visit. Uncle Bill 'hallowed' back, leaving the porch to meet the matching depths of both his and Jeremy's father's voice. The porch door swung shut behind him. Celine had placed the tray of drinks perilously close to the edge of the white plastic patio table. The magnifying glass was back in her hand, and she returned to her grisly task of spontaneously combusting insects.
The porch was theirs again, to sit and contemplate quietly. To meditate on all things beneath the sun, and the odd flashes of light that reflected off the steel bars of the porch swing Jeremy was in.
A place to sit and think.
Truth be told, he wasn't sure he wanted to anymore.
Bucktooth Moose's Enlightenment Haiku
It wasn't very kind to speak of one's own sister as an eyesore, but that was exactly what Kathy McNeil thought at the moment, especially with the oddly shocked, half open mouth frozen in place the way it was. She sighed and wiped a layer of dust off of her sister's shoulders with a fuzzy pink duster. "Something has to be done about that Moose," she said to her friend and neighbour Celia.
Celia nodded from her seat at the kitchen table, a worn out faux marble creation from the early seventies. The seat she had placed her girth in was in gross contrast to the flowered housedress she was wearing, bright pinks overtop of brown and yellow daisies, giving the effect of a dying flowerbed in Kate's kitchen. She sipped at her mug of tea and took three more cookies off the plate in front of her with a fat, stubbily fingered hand. "When's everyone else due?" she asked Kate, crumbs from the cookies falling onto the printed bouquet at her ample bosom. Kate didn't have time to answer, since the low sounds of several men and women at the front door caught her attention. She fixed her frozen sister's dress at the shoulders, as well as ensuring the plant hanging behind her wasn't crooked, and then trod heavily to the main door to let her visitors in.
The screen door was still closed, but she could see Arthur McCormick in the frame, his grey hair frizzed out like a mini halo from beneath his baseball cap. He didn't take it off as he walked in, his boots stepped out of like he'd just walked into his own home, and couldn't see the point of avoiding dirt being dragged in. His wife, Martha, tsked behind his back and flew a few curses at him as she grabbed his boots and put them up against the baseboards properly--Not, it must be explained, in the way Kate herself often arranged her own shoes, but then, at least Martha was trying. Arthur headed directly for the kitchen with only a slight glance at Kate's frozen sister and sat down beside Celia with a heavy sigh. Martha stayed behind with Kate, while several other people from the town began to file in one by one. Most of them said hello, unlike Arthur, while others kept their heads bent and unseeing as they headed directly for the kitchen and then around the corner where a wall blocked off the view of the living room. One couldn't entirely blame Arthur or the others for their strange rudeness. Arthur had been one of the lucky people who hadn't yet had anyone in his own family meet up with Bucktooth Moose and his pearl of petrifying wisdom. He glanced over at Celia, who nodded at him again, crumbs shaking loose from her huge bouquet. He turned away, and concentrated on the floor's cracked yellow tiles instead.
"Father Turner should be here in the hour," Martha was saying, crisply and with that hint of anger that was always just bubbling beneath her words. "Really, that man should be taking a much more active role in this, don't you think? Being the town's *conscience* and all--If anybody should have stopped Moose it should have been him, it's a damn sorry thing if you ask me."
"I'm sure he's been busy dealing with the families who've been affected," Kate said to Martha, coldly. Martha gave Kate's frozen sister a disapproving once over and then turned to Kate again.
"If people didn't mind that silly Moose in the first place, none of this would have happened." Martha said.
A young man with a brush cut and striking blue eyes shot a glare at Martha from across the room. Randy Pourier was a good friend of Moose and had only come back to town after a stint in Halifax doing construction on the new Xerox towers. He'd come to home to find his entire family standing frozen in the middle of his kitchen, mouths agape, in a pose like they'd been photographed at a surprise birthday party. It had been two weeks and they were still in the kitchen, their frozen postures too unsettling to look upon or move. Randy had been living with his ex girlfriend on the other side of town, the thought of going back to that house too terrifying to even consider.
Certainly, it was a bold thing for Kate to be keeping her sister, whose name was Evelyn (Evie for short) in the front room like a large ornament. The people who had gathered to her meeting at her house were all looking increasingly uncomfortable. At this point, with more than half the town in the same state, and no one doing a thing about Moose, she felt that a good jolt of the reality of the situation would be just what they all needed. Most people avoided staying in the living room, and had moved to the kitchen, which with their collected girths and jostling was becoming far too crowded. The fridge had been opened, and several men were standing near the sink, bottles of beer in hand, Kate's husband among them.
"It's not entirely Moose's fault," Randy said, suddenly. A bottle of beer was handed to him by Arthur McCormick, and Randy twisted it open with the palm of his hand expertly. He took a deep swig before talking again. "He's not a bad sort, not at all. I feel right bad for him too, I'm sure he didn't expect any of this." Randy's cousin Caroline was sitting beside him, a slight girl with a haughty pout. Kate noticed she didn't have any fear at all as she looked over Evie standing shocked in the window, in fact she pressed up her wire framed glasses as though giving Evie a good scientific once over. The coldness of the gesture irritated Kate. Breaking the uncomfortable ambiance that had pulled itself over the kitchen like a blanket of mold, Randy tapped his thumb against the lip of his beer bottle, a gentle clink overturning the general murmer of voices that began at his small outburst.
"Moose is alright," Arthur agreed, leaning back in his chair, his feet splayed before him, searching out an invisible footrest. "It ain't his fault he went learnin' 'bout them hookoos."
"Haiku," Caroline tersely corrected him. Arthur gave her smirking glare, and Kate herself folded her arms across her chest in annoyance. Caroline was going to Dalhousie next year on a scholarship, and the little whip was already putting on airs.
Martha was busy at the kitchen counter, shoving the men aside as she filled up a kettle with brown tinged water. "If he weren't so keen on knowing stuff no one's got no business learnin' he'd be a lot happier and so would we," she said, her voice angry, clipped, the flame on the stove bursting into flame as she lit a match against the gas and settled the kettle onto the burner with a loud clang.
"That's an ignorant way of thinking, especially for a teacher," Caroline replied, and sniffed as though she did, in fact, take great pleasure in learning everything Martha would never have a hope of understanding--and would likewise have a good time rubbing such things in her face in a long and gloating future.
"Moose is just an open minded soul," Kate's husband said, gravely. "I've long ago decided that people like that aren't so bad--He was a right funny fellow to talk to, and probably still is..." He looked around the kitchen searching for support, but even Kate had to turn away. "He's a hard worker, a good man, and he's had a rough deal for his life, yes he has. There has to be a reason someone like Moose got this pushed on him, and it's a judgement, I think, a message from somewheres else and not here. We keep on forgetting that."
Martha turned on him, dark beady eyes lined with wrinkles and sweat. There was a slightly yeasty smell off of her, like spoiled milk. Her lips were permanently downturned, as though a smile had never greeted her face. Her voice was shrill when she shouted out "If it were a proper message it'd be something we'd all be happy or miserable about, not staring stalk still into naught at all, and looking as shocked as the day we was born!"
Celia nodded from her position at the table, and took another cookie off the plate.
A hesitant knock at the door was the saving grace for Randy. Kate left her kitchen to walk through her living room, to see Caroline had made her way near her sister Evie, and was looking her over with intense scrutiny, like she was a sculpture of odd materials. She caught Kate's eye as she paused at the door, brown eyes strangely large underneath owl like wire glasses. Caroline pushed a stray strand of long brown hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ear where it inexpertly joined the ponytail tied on the back of her head. "It's like she's stuck in time," she said. "Trapped in that moment." She actually touched the stiff edges of Evie's pink flowered shirt, the fabric as stiff and unmoving as granite. "There has to be some explanation, a measure of physics not yet discovered. We should pack up all the people who have been affected and ship them to the NASA, to see what their scientists think of it."
"I'm not selling my own flesh and blood to a scientist to be used like a lab rat," Kate said to Caroline, angry. "If that's how you want to get the rest of your university tuition, selling your parents to a lab, well, that's up to you Caroline. I guess that's the cost of knowing everything, you don't bother to care about anyone else." She was tight lipped as she put her hand on the doorknob, ready to twist it open. "Everyone knows you had no trouble hauling your whole family into the basement to forget about them."
Caroline was about to protest, but Kate opened the door only to find her front porch empty. She frowned, and stepped out onto the front porch, wondering who it had been who had just knocked.
"Who is it?" Arthur asked from inside the house, his thick voice heavy with worry.
"Nobody," Kate said, and shut the door.
Caroline was still staring over Evie like she was a bug under a microscope. Kate finally got fed up and hauled her by her shoulder into the kitchen with the rest of the gathering, the girl screaming in pain over the pinched grip Kate held. A conversation had been brewing in the few moments from when she had left, the way talk often did around here, discussion ebbing and flowing with more frequency as the beers were consumed. "I don't think it's so wrong to learn new things," Arthur was saying. "In fact, I think if we're smart enough we should go after knowing--I'm just saying a person has to have the right kind of open mind, you know what I mean, to accept they don't know anything at all, even after they get the answers."
"I wonder what kind of answer Moose got," Randy thought aloud.
"It weird how the people all just stay frozen like that," Kate's husband also thought aloud. "Like they're living somewhere else and we're just seeing the echo of them once being here."
"I suppose you could get religious," Arthur said, and took a sip of his beer for more courage. "Maybe it's like the apocolypse, only really quiet. Even on Evie there, she don't look unhappy, just pleasantly surprised." He chanced a glance in the direction of the living room and then quickly returned his gaze to the cracked linoleum floor. "Maybe that's how we're to go. Just yanked out of the physical world so fast, it causes a rip in the way things are supposed to be."
Martha swore under her breath. "Oh shut yer yap, Arthur, like you know anything. No use going about scaring us all like that with that ignorant nonsense, everyone knows it all just that damn Moose's fault!"
A small quiet hung over the kitchen, like the pall one finds in funeral wakes, only this time it was for a person still alive and wreaking havoc on the world for no known reason. Kate sighed, thinking about poor Moose, because even if Martha and Celia and Caroline didn't think the poor guy was worth thinking about and feeling bad for, Kate certainly did. It had to be hard on him, having this kind of power, especially for a simple guy like Moose who never did anyone any harm, but had plenty done to him over the course of his life. They used to call him Bucktooth Moose, until his father had smashed his face in with the butt of a beer bottle when he was thirteen. He lost a good chunk of teeth in that brawl, and never did get the dentures to fix his empty smile. He'd left home to go live with Randy and his family, and was probably more brother to that young man than friend.
Most of the town hated Moose now, but Kate couldn't feel that way about the poor boy, not with that memory of him with his bloodied face after his father had been done with him that awful day. Evie had always been especially taken with him, Kate recalled, and always made sure he was taken care of in the food department, especially since Randy's parents weren't all that wealthy, and Moose needed a lot of food for growing.
He was a hard worker too, no mistake about that, and even if he didn't learn all that well in school, it wasn't for lack of trying. None of the teachers had much time for him, even if Moose did keep saying he wanted to be better at reading. Kate used to help him at the library where she worked, showing him books he might be interested in. Folks in town even cast an evil look to her these days because of that, thinking maybe it was her who had put the haiku into Moose's mind, but she'd had nothing at all to do with that. The only other thing Kate had done for Moose was make sure that he got in touch with Father Turner, who'd been instrumental in getting the boy into a good trade apprenticeship. Moose had helped build most of the new houses here in the town. It was his efforts that put the drywall up, the beams and frames of their homes. It just wasn't fair. He was a good sort, and didn't deserve the fact that most of the town laughed at him behind his back because he was a little slow and missing most of his mouth.
There was another knock on the door, and Kate muttered "Now who's that now?" under her breath, and brusquely walked fearlessly towards it, her hand on the doorknob, twisting it quickly and flinging the door open.
Again, there was no one on her porch.
"Oh go to, whoever you are! I'll go tan your ass if you keep playing this stupid game!" She flung the door wide open, and walked out onto her small, neatly decorated porch, little pockets of forget me knots sitting in white flowerbeds along the railings. She crossed her arms over her chest and made her way down the small steps. Behind her, Arthur, Randy and her husband followed her out, ready to make sure whoever it was playing such stupid pranks on so serious a day should be scared the bejeesus out of.
There was a figure at the sidewalk, looking as if he was about to bound up the front lawn and onto her porch, but couldn't, of course, not with the way he was so stuck in time. Kate frowned, and journeyed further out to see who it was, and she saw Father Turner's face, smiling like it was beautific, his mouth open like he'd let out a huge laugh. Arthur, Randy and her husband were now directly behind her, and they, too, gasped at the sight of Father Turner, frozen in joy at the sidewalk leading to Kate's house.
"Lor' thundering Jaysus, 'bye--He's gone and got the Father done too!" Arthur exclaimed.
They were about to turn back, fearful of what might happen should they run into more trouble, when he appeared suddenly before them. Moose, his big gapped smile, his soft blue eyes and wild brown hair descending on them from the top of the street.
Kate didn't have time to tell him to stop--Moose was already talking, and he looked infinitely pleased.
In Paradiso
It's been fourteen days since he found the heart.
He held it in his hand, fascinated by the way it kept pumping. He turned it this way and that, trying to get a handle on why, when it didn't have a body to live in, was this thing still working away, as though it had a will to live? He poked at it with his thumb, and it indented a little. There was a little squelchy noise as he applied more pressure. He never did go so far as to poke a hole right into it, though. That simply would be impolite. Ugly, grotesque and downright hell bound it may be, but the damn heart was still alive and he wasn't a man prone to killing.
He pushed his cart further along the filthy street, his few belongings blowing in the wind. Scraps of paper and rags followed the course of the wind, eddying into tiny spirals that collected in the corner of his favourite spot. He gruffly wiped at his cheeks with a stunted, grubby hand, forcing a measure of warmth through them. The heart in his shopping cart was still pulsing underneath its wrapping of newspapers. The paper crinkled unnaturally with the steady thump-thump of the sentient muscle. Oh, and he was sure it was thinking, after all it was still alive without its owner, and thus was an entity in its own right. He patted the stained newspaper with something akin to affection, and began his nightly ritual of arranging his various blankets and bottles into the semblance of a home. Beside him he could hear a nasty cough from one of his fellow fallen companions, and with a worried glance in its direction he grabbed a half empty bottle of scotch and shuffled his way closer. An old woman he'd seen plenty of times before lay on the cold, wet concrete, her home a cardboard box with pictures of happy people pasted inside of it. People with money and smiles.
She let out another phlegmy cough, and he coaxed her at the entrance of her box with the bottle of scotch, his own movements shuffling, and uneven. Every day his bones felt less attached to his frame, his muscles more and more stiff, as though he were turning into the stone he slept on every single night. The old woman looked up at him and smiled toothlessly. Her words were garbled, and her gnarled hands reached out of her stained box to cradle the bottle in her palms. She took a deep, satisfying sip before handing it back, her rheumy eyes full of gratefulness.
"It's too cold," she complained. "You need a bit of warming up sometimes."
He nodded and made his way back to his corner, his feet hurting from the ill-fitting shoes he'd gotten from the local Salvation Army. It wasn't quite ready to snow, but there was a snap in the air that suggested winter wasn't too far off. Maybe it would be wiser to join the others beneath the bridge, where they would set fire to the trash barrels, and use them as effective methods of heat. He wasn't sure, though, not with the way the junkies kept coming around the place, and you could never trust a junkie. The drunks were easy enough, only one or two of them really nasty when they got pissed, but those other ones...The ones full of youth and anger and already ancient lives of abuse--They didn't know anything but hurt or be hurt.
He cast a worried glance at his cart, and decided against the bridge. He didn't want one of those living zombies to get his heart.
The old woman was coughing again, and he toyed with the idea of just giving her his bottle of scotch. He wasn't sure it would be an effective enough medicine. The health worker who came around to them in their van last week had said they had to worry about tuberculosis. He realized he wouldn't be able to safely drink from the bottle again anyway. He trudged back to her with it, and handed her the remainder wordlessly. She spat out a few curse words asking him if he thought she was some kind of drunken lush, but then remained silent and free of coughing when he left. Charity was difficult to understand in this kind of place, but it happened more often here than anywhere else in their world. True charity lived here--raw, ungrateful, and beautiful.
He sank onto his pile of blankets and arranged the pieces of cardboard beneath him to better hold the water seeping through the concrete back. It was only a temporary measure, and the cardboard would have to be replaced in about an hour. Sleep would come in fits and starts, one eye always open, waiting for the police to oust him, or a gang of youths to beat him up and steal from him, or even a fellow dweller deciding he'd had enough of this life and was going to take out the next guy who crossed him by looking at him. He knew how it was, he knew how to survive by now. The streets were easy, compared to the hospitals and their electrodes and mind controlling substances. It was easier here, the devils couldn't find him, and he could be what he always knew he was at his core, at his heart. He was a good person. Bad things happen to them, too, it's true. Especially out there, in that world the old woman pasted onto the walls of her cardboard house.
He couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd found himself here, on the street, without a home or a job, or anything to tie him to that imaginary world in the magazines. He had a vague recollection of working hard,of being in an office, of going to work everyday and coming home, and all of it alone. He'd worked hard, he remembered that. He had nice clothes back then, and there was this fond memory lurking inside of him of good meals at restaurants, and hot, hot baths in clean bathtubs. That was before the devils came, before they invaded his space, and started taunting him, stealing things and ripping up his perfectly okay life.
One of them peeked around the corner now, he noticed, it's tiny red face full of teeth and malice. He turned away from it, and cast a worried glance at his cart. He could hear it giggling.
He grabbed the heart, still warm and beating, and kept it close to him. Blood seeped through the newspaper it was wrapped in, further staining his tattered wool coat.
The devil looked surprised, and to his own surprise it seemed to shrink.
It jumped up and down just a few feet away from him, shaking a tiny red fist. He moved closer to it, the heart in his hands, and the little devil let out a shriek, a small one, like a mouse whose tail has been stepped on. He waved the heart towards it and it ran off, away from the corner like it had been stung by a hot poker.
Satisfied that his treasure was not only safe, but useful, he cradled the heart close to him. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the devils were shrinking. They used to be a lot larger, as tall as buildings sometimes, but now...Now they were like little rodents, and shrinking further still into the size of insects. Just this week he'd often mistaken a cockroach for one of them. He'd found the heart around the time they'd shrunk to the size of a cat, so he was already on his way, but now he knew the heart had helped. Soon, with the heart in his hand, he could shrink them into nothingness, and he would at last be freed.
A razor thin shadow passed his doorway, and he looked up to see a shred of a girl walking down the alley, a fat man whistling behind her. Without dropping his heart, he got up from his position in the shadows and ambled towards them. When he closed the gap between them, he bid a cough low from his diaphram and with one heavy shove of air, threw the phlegmy contents onto the fat bastard's back. The girl's customer screeched like one of the little devils, and even his girth appeared to shrink. He ran off, away from the girl and from street bums who used yellow spit as a weapon.
He was laughing, but the girl was swearing. "What the hell? That was money, you asshole!"
He couldn't help it, he couldn't stop giggling. "Look at him run," he said.
The girl shook her head, and swore as she stomped off, her high heels digging like carpenter's nails into the cracked concrete. But he saw it before she could hide it, that barest hint of a sly grin.
He held the heart close to his own, its rythmn in sweet warmth against him, the blood it seeped hotly finding its way past the woollen fibres of his coat, through the layers of flannel and dirty cotton, to find his scab ridden skin beneath. He sighed with great satisfaction and headed back to his corner. The old woman in her cardboard box glared out of her home at him, her cloudy eyes seeing his outline and finding fault.
"What's that you got there?" she asked, her gums smacking loudly.
He warily regarded her gapped smile, wondering if he could actually take this kind of a step with another human being. It wasn't entirely impossible to be able to confide in someone else, after all plenty of other people on the streets understood he always had an open ear to their own troubles. He paced his foot in front of him, still unsure. She was just an old lady, probably dying of tuberculosis, what harm could it do to show her his heart?
He approached her, and crouched down. She was still lying down in her cardboard home, her empty mouth smacking on gums as she stared at his bloodstained package, her eyes squinting, trying her best to really,truly see.
He held it out, and with a gentle tug on a corner of newspaper, unwrapped it.
***
The office was busy this morning, full of phone calls that were answered in clipped business voices. The aisles were rife with women in tight black skirts running from desk to desk with blue and red folders, their nails perfectly done, hair just right and coiffed to perfection. He smoothed down his tie as one tossed a thin blue folder into his 'in' box, and tried to give her a smile as she passed. But the speed of the office was too much for him, and she was already long gone, and was replaced instead by the empty promise of work and more work.
He sighed and picked up the folder, going over the figures that were sparsely printed on the page. He wasn't entirely sure what it was supposed to tell him, but the owner of the company certainly felt these kinds of things were important. He'd paid an actuarial firm close to six figures to give him this one eight and a half by eleven piece of paper. He'd have to craft some creative bullshit to give meaning, and make the boss happy. Then, if he did enough of a bullshitting job, he could get a promotion to Keith's position, the one he'd had his eye for the entirety of the year.
It didn't matter that Keith wasn't from money, not like he was. Keith had a small family to support, with a tiny little wife who worked on the weekends as a grief counselor. He needed the job a hell of a lot more than he himself did, but facts were facts. Keith had the upper position and he was getting damned sick of Keith's talk of 'charity' and 'hope'. White collar philanthropists were his other great hatred, the first one being second on the ladder when he knew he was destined to be number one.
He tapped his pencil on the surface of his desk, the rubber hitting the leather in dull thumps. It sent out a patter in rythmn to his heart, a kind of resolution that was more about determined living than actual existance.
No, Keith had to go.
He took another look at the sheet of paper in front of him, and made a few notes in the margins:
a) Keith put more money into risky charitable organizations than was necessary
b) refer to appendix ii and vii
c) stocks I have recommended are doing well, and the risk venture was profitable
d) make sure Keith's successes are downplayed in the overall scheme of the meeting
He smiled, looking over his notes. They'd be headed for the shredder soon enough, but it always felt good to write these things down on paper. He picked it up and gave the corner a teasing kiss.
"Bye-bye Keith", he said to it.
***
They both sat in the old woman's cardboard home, mutually admiring his prize. The old woman smacked her gums at intervals, her breath rattling and full of disease. "You ought to do something with it," she said.
"It does look healthy," he said, eagerly. He hovered his hand over the beating heart, as though it were a source of fire keeping them both warm. "I was thinking...If I found some doctors...They could give me this one, and take the one I've got now."
The old woman looked up at him, startled, her cloudy eyes momentarily shocked into clarity. "You wouldn't! You mustn't!" She swore in toothless grimaces, a long litany of curses that would have made some of the more seasoned hookers on the street in front of them blush. "Don't be a fucking eedjit. You've got a good heart just the way it is."
He clutched at his chest self-consciously, not sure that what she was telling him was true. It didn't feel like fact, not with the beautiful heart that chased away devils pumping so beautiful and warm and alive in front of them on her filthy purple and wool scarf. Silently, he began wrapping up his special possession once again, taking care to keep the edges of the paper from cutting it in any way.
"How do you know," she said, disturbing his thoughts all the more, "That the heart in your hand don't belong to those devils you're always going on about? How sure are you that thing is more about the devil than you think? Serve you right, it would. Thinking of getting rid of your own heart for that imposter--Bah! At least you know where *your* heart came from!"
She shuffled her way into the recesses of her box, and threw a dirty blanket over her head, shutting herself in for the night. He sighed and trudged back to his own corner, his blankets already wet from the ineffectual sponging of cardboard beneath his own collection of blankets. He felt a vague sense of hunger, and wondered if he could peddle on the curb to earn enough for a warming cup of coffee,or something reasonably stronger.
Yawning, he shoved the heart under his overcoat, into a deep pocket where it fatly swayed against his thigh as he walked. He made his way out of the hiding section of walls and bridge that kept the homeless out of the hair of the city's citizens, and found a bustling sidewalk full of people with purpose. He walked among them, where he was mostly ignored and he was seen was treated as though he were a human devil--A damaged, shuffling version who had no hint of red to him, not at all, but was part of the psyche nonetheless. Heavy irony, he thought, for a man who had been running from his own demons all his life. Irony, indeed.
A little devil with a pinched, red face peeked at him as he laid down to sleep for the night. It hobbled its way towards him, fiery eyes full of curious anger. He watched it as it moved, his own lids half closed, the little devil pacing in front of him, baring tiny teeth. It wasn't any bigger than a field mouse at this point, always shrinking while the heart inside of the paper wrapping kept getting healthier and pumped more strongly. He held the heart close to his own, and could feel his body syncronizing with it, as though it longed to give the heart a new home. He spread his hand wide around its circumference, and clutched it like a beloved teddy bear. A child with hope in his arms.
***
Richard decided against a cab and figured he'd take a walk instead. It was well past the hour that many party-goers felt was fun, with the rising sun just a couple of hours away from waking. He took in the fetid smells of an inner city walk late at night, the strange quiet as all its more respectable residents were collected in nice homes, warm and clean and asleep. There was another city awake and full of a half life at this hour, Richard knew. A city full of the discarded, where a soul cost you only fifty dollars--Probably a hundred since he was dressed well this time.
A young girl clacking gum was leaning against a broken fence. She caught his eye and he smiled at her, his bottom lip jaunting out as though he was about to taste something sweet. She left the comfort of the fence to give him a haughty once over.
"Eighty bucks," she said, and clacked her gum. He could see the barest outline of braces against her stained teeth. "I got a place around the block."
Behind her an argument between two junkies was brewing. Someone had given their friend a quarter of a gram less than they should have, and fury was the menu of the evening. "You fucking theif!"
He could just imagine the kind of place she was offering in this kind of setting. He winced at the thought of some lice ridden hotel room that took payment by the hour, where roaches crawled on your body like fleas. He shook his head. "You can come with me."
She hesitated. She clacked her gum and looked over her shoulder, maybe towards her pimp. He tried to gauge her age and couldn't get a perfect handle on it. She might be ten years old for all he knew. He really didn't care.
"I'll give you a hundred and fifty," he offered. Might as well make the night a memorable one.
Her hesitation left her, and she was now all smiles. She cocked her head in a grotesque mockery of someone innocent. "Let's go," she said, and wrapped her arm into the crook of his.
Richard couldn't believe his luck. Hell, he would have settled for just a blow job in the alleyway, but this would be special. He'd make her dress up, give her all the painful little jabs and clips he'd picked up at that S&M club he'd been to last week. He'd make her pretty white flesh bleed, and then he'd fuck her until she couldn't walk. He'd be a source of nightmares and evil long into the short life she would have. He couldn't wait to get started. He'd managed to ruin Keith's life, but toppling 'good' people was hardly a challenge. One little hurdle and down they'd go. No, getting into the psyche of a survivor, that was a special kind of skill, one he'd like to practise tonight--Ruining this girl anew would be a precious reward.