Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (25 page)

“It’s in your head, I think,” said the doctor, looking down at a clipboard.

“No, it’s in my chest, doc. I can hear it. Pounding.”

“Your heart is beating normally, Mr. Carr. I’m sorry, there’s just nothing I can do for you. You are, in fact, in perfect health.”

And so it goes.

Now Adam finds himself standing in the heat and the sunlight, listening to his heart, and knowing without a doubt that he’s very much
not
in perfect health.

Something is wrong. Very wrong.

Adam first noticed the louder-than-normal beating two weeks ago. He’d been in bed with his girlfriend. They’d had a particularly vigorous lovemaking session and he’d been out of breath, reveling in his manliness. His heart, as one would expect, had been hammering away in his chest. Loud and persistent. Hell, he could feel it rocking his entire body. At the time, Adam had grinned. After all, his hammering heart was evidence of a job well done.

And so he had lain back, smiling.

That should have been the end of it. Except for one problem… his heart continued thudding in his chest.

Thump, thump, thump.

Louder and louder.

“What the hell?” He’d sat up and asked his sleeping girlfriend if she could hear his heart, and she rolled over and went back to sleep.

Now nervous, Adam had gotten out of bed and paced the small bedroom, listening. Yes, his heart was as loud as ever. He was sure of it. He felt his chest. His heart didn’t seem to be beating any faster. He counted the beats per minute and did a quick internet search for average heart rates. His heart rate was average. Sixty beats per minute. Nothing to worry about, right?

Then why was it pounding so damn loud in his ears?

Why indeed?

He didn’t know, and now two weeks later, neither did his doctors. Yes, Adam was officially worried. Who wouldn’t be?

A psychologist,
Dr. Mann had suggested.

Hell, maybe he
was
going crazy.

Adam Carr didn’t know, but one thing was for certain, he was burning up out here in the sun.

Discouraged, he heads to his car and gets in even as his heart begins to pound louder still.

Traffic is heavy.

Worse, drivers seem to rush about particularly crazily this afternoon. A result of a full moon or something? Except, does a full moon excuse count in the middle of the day? After all, it is night
somewhere
in the world, right? He doesn’t know much about astronomy. And, really, he doesn’t much care.

No, all he cares is about is getting to the bottom of his beating heart.

Or rather, his unusually
loud
beating heart.

“I mean,” he says to his empty Toyota Prius, “what the hell is that all about? “As he’s taken to doing these past few weeks, he drives with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his chest. Of course, he probably
shouldn’t
be driving. He’s too distracted. Too weirded out.

“And how does no one else hear it?” he asks the empty car. His heartbeat is so loud, so thumping loud. Thumping in his ears, his chest, throughout his whole goddamn body.

Adam is, admittedly, scared.

That something is wrong, he has no doubt—whether in his head or body.

To make matters worse, the beating is getting louder. This morning, it had literally woken him from a fitful sleep. Pounding in his chest. Seemingly up through the bed itself. The walls themselves. The earth itself.

Jesus…

The past two weeks, Adam has known only this incessant pounding. It’s driving him crazy. Literally.

“Sweet Jesus help me!” He rubs his chest as he stops at a red light. Today, has been different. Today, the sound intensified. And it only seems to grow stronger.

Adam rubs his temples and is not surprised that a tear squeezes out of his tightly shut eyes.

The beating is so loud, so frustratingly loud. Frustrating because no one else can hear it.

He runs his fingers through his unkempt hair. He knows he looks like a mess. He doesn’t care. Hell, he doesn’t care about anything anymore—not until someone can figure out what the devil is wrong.

As he goes back to staring at the light, waiting for it to turn green, Adam is certain that his heart is going to explode in his chest.

The sound consumes him. He may as well be on a construction site, with a jackhammer nearby. But he isn’t. No, he sits in his little car, scared shitless, knowing without a doubt that he’s going crazy.

Or he’s about to die.

More tears appear, and as he looks up to see himself in the mirror, he sees something else there, too.

He sees a big rig truck bearing down on him from behind.

Adam stares in the mirror as his pounding heart fills the car, fills the air, fills everything.

Mercifully, the last sound Adam Carr hears is not the sound of his own beating heart, but the sound of metal crashing into metal.

t was Tommy’s stupid idea to go to the cemetery on Christmas Eve.

Me? I like to keep a healthy distance from cemeteries. Just thinking about all those dead bodies beneath my feet gives me the heebee-jeebees.

I said as much to Tommy on the way over to Oak Park Cemetery. We were driving in his old Ford Explorer past the disgustingly festive displays that I was certain—damn certain—would pick tonight to break down in the middle of the goddamn cemetery. I said that, too.

“Jesus, Bill…have you always been such a worry wart? Good God, man, live a little!”

“By hanging out with the dead?”

“Exactly! It’s called irony. They’re dead. We’re alive. It’s a beautiful thing!”

Tommy took a right down a side street, away from all the boozy merriment, past lines of cold, lifeless fence around a local military base. It wasn’t far now. The cemetery on the hill was coming up on the right. That it was coming up wasn’t exactly good news. Then again, maybe Tommy was right. Maybe I was a worrywart. It was just a cemetery, after all. The dead were dead. The place was usually empty at night, anyway, as far as I could tell. Meaning, I drive past it often at night and I never see any lights on. Once or twice I’ve heard about kids from our high school partying in the cemetery, but that doesn’t happen very often. But this was Christmas, and the odds of meeting another dumbass dwindled to… zilch.

You see, we came here tonight because we’re idiots.

And we were also bored. Not to mention, neither of us had girlfriends. In fact, I’m certain it’s a universal equation:

Bored + idiots - girlfriends = jail time.

Anyway, Tommy slowed, then made a right into the dark cemetery. Oh, joy. He killed the headlights about halfway up the hill; headlights, after all, could have been seen for miles around. At least from the cemetery. Yes, we might be idiots, but we weren’t stupid. Okay, maybe a little stupid. Still, we didn’t want the sheriff sniffing around.

Now driving in the dark with only the December moonlight guiding our way, we hit some rough ground, the Explorer juddered.

“I think you veered off the main road,” I said.

“There is no main road; it’s all dirt.”

“There’s a dirt main road, and then there’s grass. I think you’re on the grass.”

“I think I would know, Billy. I’m the one driving. Besides, there’s a lot of moonlight—”

He stopped when the truck went over something big. I bounced in the passenger seat. I looked back and saw it lying flat in the grass, gleaming in the faint moonlight. By
it
, I meant—

“Jesus, Tommy. You knocked over a tombstone!”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “We have to go back.”

“Forget it. Those things weigh like a ton.”

“We have to do something. We can’t, you know, desecrate a grave.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Tommy. “I didn’t shit on no grave.”

“That’s defecate and a double negative and you’re an idiot.”

“Whatever. We’ll leave a note and say we’re sorry.”

I always knew when Tommy was fucking with me, and he was fucking with me now. But there wasn’t much we could do. Yeah, the thing did look like it weighed a ton. I sighed, rubbed my face, not liking the idea that we had just knocked over someone’s tombstone.

“Well, keep this thing straight.”

“No, problem,” said Tommy, grinning, “we’re almost there.”

By
there
, he meant, of course, the back parking lot next to the big, central tree. That tree, if you asked me, had to be the most haunted tree in the world. Then again, out here, late at night—and having just run over someone’s tombstone—it was easy to believe in haunted things.

Which is why, of course, we were here in the first place.

To test our ghost radar apps on our phones.

Did I mention we were idiots?

Tommy hit the brakes and we came to a stop next to the Spook Tree. He killed the engine.

“We’re here.”

The night was quiet. Too quiet.

Okay, fine, the night was actually as quiet as it probably should be on a holiday. A normal amount of quiet. But, dammit, it still sounded
too
quiet. As if someone had used a giant remote control and turned the sound way down. And why the control had to be giant, I don’t know. And who had access to this control, I didn’t know that either. But that was the visual I received, and I was sticking with it.