Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (35 page)

“That’s not
exactly
how I remember it, but go on. Finish up your story.”

“Well, like I said, it was already too late to save Red Shirt. He was dead, and Moses had taken off, running across the field toward the woods. He was moving pretty fast, and I wasn’t sure I could catch him, so I took one of the flares The Finn had brought and lit it. Then I tied it to the wire Moses had tried to strangle me with and, swinging it around my head like one of them Argentine
bolos
, I chased after Moses until I was close enough to throw it.”

“That was quick thinking,”
Lorraine said, hoping by her praise to assuage any hurt feelings Hellboy might have.

“Yeah, and I guess I got lucky,” Hellboy said, “’cause the
bolo
caught him around the neck. After it spun around a few times, the flare landed on his back, between his shoulders where he couldn’t reach it.”

“It was an amazing sight, I will grant you that,” The Finn added, smiling now and nodding with satisfaction.

“So Moses is running across the cornfield, stumbling as flames spread across his back.” Hellboy leaned forward in his seat, fully enjoying the climax of his story. “There’s pieces of burning straw and smoke streaming out behind him. He looked like a comet, streaking across that field. But he never made it to the woods.”

“You mean he burned up?”
Lorraine asked.

Hellboy nodded solemnly. “All the straw did, yeah, but before it was all gone, something else happened. It wasn’t just fire and smoke that was coming out of him. As he was running, I—we saw this thick, black cloud shoot out of his body and up into the sky. It was his spirit—his soul, departing.”

Lorraine gulped audibly and looked back and forth between Hellboy and The Finn.

“You
both
saw it?” she asked, her voice hushed with awe.

“Well, we saw ...
something
, that’s for sure,” The Finn said, staring directly at Hellboy. “I be damned if I can say exactly what.”

“It was his soul,” Hellboy said emphatically. “It was getting dark, and I’ll hold open the possibility it could have been an illusion or something, but I’m sure I saw a dark, human-shaped thing streak out of the scarecrow as its body was consumed by flames. And then, as soon as the scarecrow’s body was gone, a huge flock of crows cawing real loud flew out of the trees, like they’d been waiting there. They swooped over...whatever it was, and carried it away.”

“Which is odd because crows are scavengers … daytime birds.” The Finn said.

“My God,”
Lorraine whispered, covering her mouth with both hands and staring back and forth between Hellboy and The Finn.

For a moment or two, everyone at the table was silent. Finally,
Lorraine cleared her throat and said, “But there was nothing you could do ... for Red Shirt, I mean. He was really dead.”

“Totally,” Hellboy said.

When he clenched his fist and pounded the table in anger, his hand grazed the cooler and knocked it over. The impact snapped the latch, and it opened up, spilling its contents onto the table. Lorraine let out a piercing scream when she saw a large, wrinkled object that looked like a gigantic dried prune. She stared at it until she realized she was looking at a human face. The lips were dried and cracked, peeled back into a terrible grimace that exposed the top row of rotting yellow teeth. The nose was caved in, leaving a dark inverted
V
-shaped divot, and the eyes were closed and sunken in, the lids looking like thin layers of moldy onionskin.

Lorraine
pushed herself violently away from the table and tried to stand up, but her legs were nowhere near strong enough to support her. She sagged back in her chair, gasping for breath and keeping as far away from the object as she could. She was afraid to breathe the sour, sickening smell that wafted from the severed head.

“Jesus! Is that
him
? Is that
Red Shirt
?” she managed to say between gasps for air. Her stomach clenched furiously, and a thick, sour taste flooded the back of her throat. She knew she was going to be sick.

“Oh, no … no,” Hellboy said casually as he scooped up the severed head, placed it back into the cooler, and snapped it shut. “That’s something else entirely.”

“Jesus
God!
” Lorraine said. “It … that didn’t even look human.”

“Oh, it used to be,” Hellboy said as he slid the closed travel cooler across the table to the Finn. “About two thousand years ago, anyway.”

The Finn stared at the cooler, his expression impossible to read.

“You
found
it,” he said in a whisper. “Where in the hell did you
find
it?”

“Don’t ask,” Hellboy replied grimly. “Just be glad you got it back. It was worth the bruises just to get you off my back.”

The Finn didn’t even acknowledge Hellboy’s gruff comments. He looked closely at the cooler a moment longer and then put it on the floor next to his chair.

“Well, then,” Lorraine said, struggling to regain her composure now that the terrible object was out of sight but not out of mind. “It’s getting way late, and I ... my sister must be wondering where I am. I’d best be going.”

She stood up shakily from the table, unable to determine if it was the beer she’d drunk or the shock of the cooler’s contents. Her first and strongest impulse was to run out the hell of there, but she stood for a moment, making sure her legs weren’t going to give out when she started walking.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Hellboy said. “Where you going?” He was looking at her, sort of, but his gaze was shifting and unfocused.

“Now that The Finn’s here, and you know the whole story, aren’t you going to toast to Red Shirt’s memory with us?” he asked.

Lorraine
licked her lips, all too aware of the sour churning deep down in her gut. She didn’t know if she wanted to run away or pass out or what. Maybe this was all a horrible dream, and she’d wake up soon. At least now that the head was, mercifully, out of sight, she didn’t quite feel so bad.

Finally, she shrugged and said, “Ahh ... What the hell?” and slid back into her seat.

For the first time that evening, Hellboy smiled as he raised the empty pitcher above his head to signal Kyle that they were ready for another round. Outside, the cold, autumn rain lashed against the window as the late October storm blew toward the distant Maine coast.

The back of my hands started looking like a man's back when I was—oh, maybe ten or eleven years old.

I remember how fascinated I was by the curling, black hairs I saw sprouting there; how amazed I was when I flexed and unflexed my hands, and watched the twitching blue lines of veins, the knitting needle-thin tendons, and the bony white knobs of cartilage and knuckle. Sometimes, I used to constrict the flow of blood to my arms—you know, like a junkie—to make the veins inflate until they fairly bulged through the skin. The bigger they got, the more "manly" I thought my arms and hands looked.

It might seem laughable now, but I still believe hands are a God-given miracle. They let us touch and manipulate the world outside of ourselves. Sure, scientists say that vision is the only sense where the nerve connects directly to the brain, but hands are the only things that let us reach out … to touch and explore the world. They allow us
to feel
love and to
create
what we know and feel, both internally and externally. They're our only
real
solid connection to what's "out there."

Our other senses—sight, sound, taste, and smell—can all deceive us. They trick us into thinking we're experiencing something that might not really be there.

But when we touch something, when we hold it in our hands and caress it, we have no doubt whatsoever that it truly exists. When I look at my own hands now, though, I can't help but be filled with revulsion and horror.

Yes,
horror!

That's probably an overused word these days, but there's no better word for what I feel.

These hands—
my
hands—have done things so terrible, so hideous that I can truly say they are no longer mine.

They've acted as if powered by a will of their own—a will with a dark, twisted purpose. And in the process, they've ended the life of someone—of the one person I've ever really been close to in life … a life I should have cherished above all others.

Okay, let me start at the beginning.

The easiest part was killing my twin brother, Derrick.

No problem there.

I'm serious.

It certainly wasn't very difficult to orchestrate. You'd think I was a musician, talking like that, but when it actually came time to
do
it, to aim the gun at him and squeeze the trigger, I didn't flinch or have the slightest hesitation.

And I've had no qualms about it afterwards, either.

Sounds cruel, I know, but why should I?

Derrick had it all. Everything. He was
everything
I wanted to be … but never was.

I know, I know ... sure, he worked just as hard for it as I did, maybe even harder; but everything came so easily to him as if it fell out of the sky and landed in his lap, the bastard!

* * *

It never came to me.

Certainly not as easily, anyway, and no way near as much.

You see, he was the one who was born with all the talent. I couldn't help but think that because I'd heard it my whole life, growing up. All through high school, Derrick was an honor student—popular, handsome, smart, and talented. He had it all. He graduated at the top of his class from college, too, married a gorgeous, intelligent, charming woman, had a wonderful family—three kids and a beautiful country home about two hours north of
Portland and a winter place down in Fort Myers.

Far as I could see, he had it all.

And what did I have?

Nothing.

Doodley-squat.

The leftovers.

Sloppy seconds, if you'll excuse such an inelegant expression.

All my life, I've had to listen to teachers and friends' parents—even our
own
parents—exclaim with surprise that sometimes bordered on absolute shock how Derrick was so amazingly gifted, and that I was so ... well, that I didn't quite measure up to the standard
he
set.

The worst of it was when people would question, sometimes even to my face, how identical twins could be so
different
. Oh, we looked enough alike, so anyone who didn't know us well couldn't tell us apart, but it always seemed to me as if the majority of the intelligence, personality, and talent went into his half of the egg, and I was left with ...

Well, with sloppy seconds, like I said.

Maybe that really was the case.

I used to wonder about it, mostly late at night as I lay in bed, staring up at the bottom of Derrick's upper bunk. I still lie awake at nights, wondering. Now I have plenty of time to think about things. Back when we were kids, I could hear my brother's deep, rhythmic breathing coming from the top bunk, as if even sleeping was something he did better than I ever could.

*  *  *

It didn't surprise anyone that Derrick and I both ended up being artists. Ever since we were kids, we'd both shown unusual talent for the visual arts although—as usual—Derrick's paintings and drawings … hell, even his throw-away sketches were always several notches … several quantum leaps better than anything I ever produced.

Not that my stuff was bad, mind you. I do have some talent.

Now that I think about it, when I first started drawing was probably when I first really noticed the back of my hands. I remember how I'd spend a lot of the time not even paying attention to whatever it was I was drawing because I was so fascinated by the interplay of muscle and tendons and bone beneath my skin as I held the pencil or brush in my hand and rolled it back and forth or whatever. Probably the one thing I ever did better than Derrick was anatomy drawing. Especially hands. I have quite a knack for drawing hands.

So like I said, it didn't surprise anyone when we both went off to art school—the same school, of course. Mass. Art. We both worked hard—I worked even harder than he did, but my grades never quite measured up to Derrick's ... and neither did my work. He graduated
summa cum laude
while I was simply lucky to graduate
cum laude
. I never heard it, but I have no doubt my professors wondered and commented on how Derrick was the superior artist.

Following graduation, we both landed jobs within our chosen field. Derrick started right out as a painter—an "artist" with a capital
A
. Within a year or so, he was having one-man shows of his work at galleries in Boston and New York. The "art scene" had apparently already taken notice of him, and his paintings were selling for astronomical sums. Personally, I thought his paintings weren't worth the price of the canvas they were painted on, but there's no accounting for taste, now, is there?