Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (3 page)

It was none of these
things. It was his mother. “Hi, Jonah. I got your message that
you’ve moved to Michigan. I’m so proud of you.” There was a short
pause and then the sound of her sobbing. “I hope you can come see
me soon.”

There was another message, some
salesperson about a credit card offer, but Jonah barely heard it,
because the memories came rushing in.

“It’s your fault!” his
mother screamed at him. He had forgotten to take out the trash. “I
had to leave my family because of you!” she screamed. What was she
talking about? Why wouldn’t she tell him what she meant? “B- in
English!” she screamed, coming into his room waving the report card
at him. “After all I sacrificed to get you away, you make a B- in
English.”

Get away? Get away from
what?

Jonah
shook his head violently to make the memories stop. He rushed from
the room. He wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while. In the living
room, he pondered the TV.
No!
He considered the computer, the Internet.
No!
He got his cigarettes
from off the top of the entertainment center. There were two
left.

“Fuck!” he said out loud.
He would have to stop on his way to work tomorrow. It was all the
earlier he would have to get up. And it was late now. Tomorrow, he
was fucked.

But right now, he put all
that aside. He slipped on the pants he’d left on the living room
floor and went outside to have a smoke. Outside, halfway through
the second cigarette, feeling all the sicker, but forgetting the
phone call, Jonah noticed that he wasn’t alone. An orange-striped
cat lay on the grass, not too far from the sidewalk where Jonah
stood. It stared at him with beady eyes for a few seconds, then got
up and moved away. He would remember that on another
night.

#

Walking in South Hall. Why
the hell is he here? This is supposed to be over. Jonah has already
defended his dissertation. Why have they called him
back?

He walks past the main
lobby, to the corner door, where the three professors are waiting
inside. They sit behind a large table. Dr. Paul Ross, the head of
his committee, is in the middle. Why does the old man want him back
here? Jonah is done. The two auxiliary professors, Dr. Cindy
Wanewright and Dr. Christopher O’neal, are on either side of Dr.
Ross. Dr. Ross nods, as Jonah walks up and stands before
them.

“Jonah,” Dr. Ross says, his
voice echoing. “We’ve found a problem.”

Anger wars with feelings of
vulnerability. He waits for Dr. Ross to continue. But Dr. Ross
doesn’t. Instead, from behind the thick gray beard, he just smiles,
big, mocking. The other two professors also smile.

Jonah notices that he is
naked from the waist down. He covers himself with cupped hands but
knows that he can’t leave. He can’t leave until this is
settled.

“What is the problem?” Jonah
asks.

Dr. Ross is suddenly very
serious. “You have concluded that impulsivity predicts violent
behavior.”

Jonah nods.

“And you have concluded that, when
impulsivity is accounted for, neuroticism does not predict violent
behavior.”

“Yes!” Jonah shouts. “And
it is done! I’ve finished. I have a Ph.D. now.”

Dr. Ross laughs, and the
other two profs join him. The anger and embarrassment well up more
inside Jonah, then Dr. Ross says, “No, Jonah. This study is not
done. You have yet to give the measure.”

“What?” Jonah asks. “I ran
my subjects already. All the data has been analyzed and
interpreted.”

Dr. Ross points to the
corner of the room, behind them. A girl stands there. She’s young,
eighteen or nineteen. She has blond hair, tied back and above her
head. Innocent looking. She’s wearing a black sweatshirt with the
letters “USC” in burgundy. She also has on a black pair of gym
shorts.

“You have to give her the measure,”
Dr. Ross says, but Dr. Ross is gone.

It’s just Jonah and the
student in the room.

“Hi,” she says in a sweet
little southern voice. “Is this the study? I was told I could get
bonus points.”

Jonah now has pants. He
knows what he has to do. He has to give her the measure. “Yes,” he
says.

She smiles and comes
forward, to the front of the table. He wants to help her. He has to
give it to her. He approaches, gets right in front of her and puts
his hands on her waist. Her smile grows. He moves one hand up, into
her hair, and pulls her head to his. He kisses her hard, tongues
moving with force, teeth grinding.

With his other hand, he
gets hold of the rim of her shorts, slides them down, then slides
down her little panties. She steps out of her bottoms, then he
pushes her back on the table. He takes off his pants, exposing his
cock, hard and red, visibly throbbing. He spreads her legs. Her
bush is neat and trim, her lips pink and smooth. He presses into
her. And now he’s giving her the measure.

She’s tight and dry, the
burning pain that feels so good. She squirms and moans, and he
likes it. This is what he is supposed to do.

There is a voice, some kind
of alarm. She’s gone from underneath him, then the room
disappears.

#

When Jonah woke up Tuesday
morning, his hand was wrapped tight around his penis and he was
about to explode, but he realized where he was and that it was just
a dream and lost the climax. He got out of bed and began to prepare
for another long day.

#

Wednesday had left him with
thirty-two reports to do. He had knocked off twelve of those on
Thursday. He planned to split the remaining twenty between Saturday
and Sunday. Friday morning, Jonah drove down to Lansing for
supervision.

David Meade was a vigorous
looking man of fifty-three years. Every time Jonah had seen him,
David had on a suit. The suit always looked new and always looked
expensive. David had five offices scattered about the state. He did
a little clinical work himself, but mostly supervised people who
could not legally practice on their own, then took the bulk of the
money they earned.

He was a cordial enough
boss. He smiled and answered all the questions he could, usually
with an experience he’d had in his twenty some years as a
shrink.

On this Friday, David
apologized for not returning Jonah’s call earlier this
week.

Jonah then told him about his first
client of the week, the one who had stormed out.

David, from behind his
large oak desk, laughed with his usual confidence, then said, “I
wouldn’t worry too much about it. Just call it in like you would
any other report. Instead of giving the usual information, describe
what happened.”

Jonah said, “All right,”
relieved by David’s calm.

David said, “You might want
to call SSI’s main office and tell them what happened too.” He
looked calmly at Jonah, obviously waiting for a response. Jonah
nodded.

They moved on to other
things. Not big, just odds and ends about differential diagnosis
and other technical issues.

Near the end of the hour, Jonah asked,
“So, you ever have anyone leave like that?”

David laughed. “Oh yeah.
Many times. But I usually don’t get so lucky as to have them leave
before the interview gets started. Most the time it’s half way
through or near the end. I had this one I tested who left right as
I was getting ready to ask the last question. He just all of the
sudden started shouting that I was a Communist and stormed out. I
didn’t see the connection, but I guess it’s all the same. I just
called it in and described what happened. SSI paid for it.” David
smiled again, lustfully. Jonah felt uncomfortable with that smile.
He felt like he could all of the sudden see into David’s
heart.

“Just like they’ll pay for
the one who walked out on you on Monday,” David said.

After supervision, Jonah
walked into the secretary’s office. He asked the secretary to see
his timesheet for the week, and she got it for him. He amended it,
adding an hour for the client who had walked out.

#

Jonah got home that
afternoon and went to the gym. He pumped iron for about an hour,
then went for a dip in the pool. Afterward, he had a smoke in the
parking lot before driving home. He had just gotten out of his car
when Tate came walking from his apartment.

“Jonah! Bro! What’s
up?”

Tate stood there on the
sidewalk like he was waiting for Jonah.

“Not much,” Jonah said. It
was strange for him to see Tate now, tired from the drive and his
workout, but not nearly as tired as he had been the other night. It
was as if now he could confirm that Tate wasn’t some strange
hallucination he had experienced.

Tate lifted his eyebrows,
just as he had at the waitress the other night, his hazel eyes
growing almost inhumanly big. “Really!” he said, then gave the
high-pitched laugh, which still didn’t trail off, but ended
abruptly. And then there was cool, friendly Tate.

“So what’s doing, bro? You
just get through working out?”

Not so
amazing that you know that
, Jonah thought.
He had on his workout clothes and was carrying his gym bag. “Yeah,”
he said.

“Just the weights, huh? No
cardio?”

Okay,
that’s a little better.
“Well, I hit the
pool.” He’d not done much in the pool, other than cool off, but
Tate didn’t have to know that. But did he?

In the next few seconds,
Tate just stared at Jonah, a frozen, relaxed look on his face. In
that time, Jonah wondered if Tate knew that he had tried to mislead
him, but he waved the thought off as ridiculous.

Then Tate said, “Ever worry
about a heart attack?”

Tate had him. It was a
dangerous combination. The weights kept him looking good enough,
but did nothing for his cardiovascular system. On top of that, he
smoked and ate whatever was convenient. He was a big ball of
nerves. Yes, he was a prime candidate for some cardiovascular
incident. And yes, when he thought about his health, he did
worry.

Tate’s laugh spared Jonah
the indignity of trying to answer. After stopping fast again, Tate
said, “No, bro. I’m just fucking around. But, hey, you got anything
going down tonight?”

“No,” Jonah said. “Not
much.” Jonah had no social contact whatsoever here. So freaky mind
reader or not, Jonah would jump at the opportunity to hang out with
someone tonight.

“All right. Why don’t you
come down to my place around eight? We can cruise over to Mikey’s
and shoot some pool.”

#

Mikey’s was a sports bar: A
different TV visible from any place in the building, banners of the
different Michigan schools and autographed pictures of various
athletes on the wall. Half the bar was a game area. There, Jonah
and Tate shot pool.

Jonah was not the worst
pool player in the world, but he wasn’t good either. Tate, on the
other hand, might have vied for the title of worst pool player in
the world. It was their fourth game, and Jonah had seen him hit
five shots so far, and two of those seemed completely accidental.
Tate hadn’t said much, and he wasn’t paying much attention to the
games he was losing. He seemed to be focused on the room in
general, watching the little groups of people, smiling, laughing at
them.

People amuse
him.

“Nice place,” Jonah said.

Tate shrugged. “It’s all
right, bro,” he said, then stepped up to the table and missed a
corner shot. “It’s off the main drag, so you don’t get a lot of the
college kids.” Tate went back to observing the room, indifferent to
the conversation Jonah had started.

Jonah felt pretty good. He
was working on his third pint of beer. They had taken Tate’s car,
which meant that his car and his stuff were all far enough away
that he didn’t have to obsess about them. He was, however, smoking
almost constantly.

Feeling somewhat loose, he
decided to mess with Tate a little bit. “Don’t like to be around
college kids, huh,” Jonah said.

“Not when I’m out,” Tate
responded.

Jonah walked up to the
table and hit a shot into a side pocket. Then he asked, “They make
you feel old?”

Tate shrugged again.
“That’s it, bro,” he said in a sincere voice. “I can’t fit in
anymore. I’m so fucking out of the loop. Totally fucking lame,
bro.”

In his
head, Jonah laughed, exasperated. Tate hadn’t given the defensive
reaction he had been going for.
Never kid
a kidder
, he thought.

Jonah hit two more shots
before he missed again. Tate stepped up and missed his next
shot.

“Never give me a rest, do you,” Jonah
said.

“I’m sorry, bro,” Tate
replied. “I suck at pool.” Again, he sounded sincere.

He’s good.

Jonah sunk one more shot, then the
eight ball.

“Play again?” Jonah asked.

“Nah,” Tate said. “I feel
like just chilling out. You want to sit for a while?”