Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala (41 page)

“Thanks,” he said, happy to hear a slight measure of strength returning to his voice.

“Goddamn!” the man said. “You are some beat up. We thought you were dead, for sure when we first found you. What the hell happened?”

“I ... I had to get away,” Jack said, groaning as he leaned forward and vigorously rubbed his eyes with both hands. “It was ... Jesus! I can’t believe it really happened! I mean ...”

“Did someone jump you and leave you for dead?” the man asked.

“No, no.” Jack groaned again as he shook his head. “I was ... We were ... Did you find him? ... Did you see him?”

“Find who?” the man asked.

“Ryan. My friend ... I was hiking with my friend Ryan, and last night ... we were ... someone—”

Before he could continue, his voice choked off, and he had to take another, longer sip of water before he could continue. In spite of the pain, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he said, “We set up camp under the oak tree by Outlaw’s Cave.”

“Ohh,
that
place. It’s ‘spozed to be haunted,” said one of the women.

Jack couldn’t see her face against the glare of the sun, but he couldn’t help but sniff with laughter.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, licking his lips. “Someone else was out there last night, too, and they ... they killed my friend.”

“You’re shitting me,” the man tending to him said. He cast a wary glance over his shoulder at his friends and then looked back at Jack.

“Yeah. They ... I don’t know how,” Jack said, “but sometime during the night ... when we were sleeping, someone ... killed my friend … cut off his head.”

“Jesus,” said the man kneeling in front of him, his voice barely a whisper. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I—I saw it, but I can’t believe it really happened. It can’t be true, but I ... I saw it! I saw his head! It was lying there in his sleeping bag, not connected to his shoulders anymore, and I ... I panicked and ran.”

“Can’t say as I blame you,” the other man in the group said.

“I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going. All I knew was I had to get away, so I ran. You understand, don’t you? I had to get away!”

“Yeah … sure. Of course I understand,” the man tending him said, but Jack thought from his tone of voice that he might be patronizing him.

The man looked away from Jack, and Jack noticed that his gaze shifted to where his backpack was lying on the ground by his feet. A quizzical look crossed the man’s face as he leaned forward and gingerly touched the corner of the backpack.

Jack looked down, and in a frozen instant realized what had drawn the man’s attention. The bottom of his backpack was saturated with … something dark … as if something inside had spilled and was seeping through the green nylon, turning it black.

A cold spike of terror drove through Jack as he watched the man slowly extend his hand and grasp the edge of the flap. The other man and the two women standing behind him moved in closer, their heads craning forward as they watched in hushed silence.

The tearing of Velcro was the only sound as the man slowly opened the backpack.

Jack couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t swallow.

He couldn’t even blink.

The man’s face was flat, expressionless until the pack gaped open, and he looked inside.

Then he made a low, strangled gurgling sound in his throat as he pushed himself away. He scrambled across the ground to get away from the pack as if it contained a rattlesnake. As he did, his foot kicked the backpack and knocked it over. It gaped open like a hungry mouth, and the morning sunlight was angled just right to illuminate what was inside the pack.

The sight froze Jack where he sat.

“Oh my God! Oh, my sweet loving Jesus!” the man said, his voice rising steadily until it twisted off to nothing. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you bring it with you?”

Before he could say anything more, he leaned forward and vomited between his legs.

Jack tried to tear his gaze away from the backpack, but he couldn’t do it.

Nestled like a huge, horrible egg inside a nest was his friend Ryan’s severed head. The skin, drained of blood, was sallow and pale, like old parchment. The dark, heavy eyelids were closed, but as Jack watched in fascinated horror, Ryan’s eyes slowly opened. Then his bloodless lips peeled back into a wide, sickening grin, and before Jack could find the strength to block his ears, Ryan opened his lifeless lips and began to scream … and scream.

Diary entry one
: approximately 10:00 AM. Valentine's Day—How ironic.

If you've ever spent any time in academic circles, you've no doubt heard the expression "Publish or perish." Simply put, it means that if you want to keep your teaching position, at least at any decent college or university, you've got to publish occasionally in academic journals. I suppose this is to prove that you've been doing important research, but it also contributes to the prestige of your school.

My experience, at least in the English Department here at the University of Southern Maine, is that the more obscure and unread the periodical, the more prestige is involved. I mean, if you don't write novels or stories that pretend to "art"—well, then, you can kiss your chances for tenure good-bye.

Bob Howard, a good friend of mine here, did just that. He wrote and sold dozens of stories and two novels … to major publishers; but because his work was viewed by the tenure committee as "commercial" fiction, he didn't keep his job. After he was denied tenure a few years back, he and I used to joke over drinks about how he had published and perished.

I have reason to be cynical. The doctor who talked with me last night might have some fancier, more clinical terms for it, but I'm tempted to translate his conclusions about me to something a little simpler: let's try—
crazy as a shit-house rat
.

That's crazy, all right.

But keep reading.

I'm writing this all down as fast as I can because I suspect … no, I know I don't have much time. I'm fighting the English teacher in me who wants to go back and revise, hone this sucker until it's perfect, but if I'm right. .. Oh, Sweet Jesus! If I'm right … Okay, I'll try to start at the start. Oops. Got a little redundant there. Sorry. Anyway, as I've always told my students, every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Life, I've found, unfortunately doesn't always play out that way. Oh, sure—the beginning's at birth and the end's at death—it's filling up the middle part that can be such a bitch.

I don't know if this whole damned thing started when I first saw Rose McAllister … ah, Rosie. She was sitting in the front row on the first day of my 8:00 AM
Introduction to English Literature
class last fall. It might have been then that this all started, but I've got to be honest here. I mean, at this point, it may not matter at all ... or it may be
all
that matters. I think I'll be dead … and
really
in Hell within ... possibly less than four hours.

One thing I do know is, when I first saw Rosie, I didn't think, right off the bat-—
Goddamn! I want to have an affair with her
.

That sounds so delicate—"have an affair." I wanted to sleep with her, sure; but that was only after a while, after I got to know her. Once we started, though, we slept together whenever we could … which wasn't often, you see, because of Sally, my wife.

Ah, my dear, departed wife Sally.

I guess if I were really looking for the beginning to this whole damned mess, I'd have to say it was when we started our study of Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
. You know—your classic "deal with the Devil" story. I didn't mention too much of this to the police shrink because—well, if you tell someone like that … that you struck a deal with the Devil … that you sold him your soul—yes, I signed the agreement with my own blood—you've got to expect them to send you up to the rubber room on P-6. If I'm wrong about all of this, I don't want to spend the rest of my life writing letters home with a Crayola.

Wait a minute—I'm getting ahead of myself, but as I said, I don't have much time left … at least I don't think so.

Okay, so sometime around the middle of the semester, Rosie and I began to "sleep together." A deceptive expression because we did very little
sleeping
. We got whatever we could, whenever we could—in my office, often, or—once or twice—in a motel room, once in my car in the faculty parking lot outside Bailey Hall. Whenever and wherever.

The first mistake we made was being seen at
The Roma
, a fancy restaurant in Portland. Hank and Mary Crenshaw saw us.
The Roma
. As an English teacher, I can appreciate the irony of that, too. Sally and I celebrated our wedding anniversary there every year. Being seen there on a Friday night, with a college sophomore ("young enough to be your daughter," Sally took no end of pleasure repeating once she found out), by your wife's close (not
best
, but
close
) friend is downright stupid. I still cringe whenever I imagine the glee there must have been in Mary's voice when she told Sally.

Hell, I'll admit it. Why not? I
never
liked Mary, and I know she never liked me. Hank—he was all right, but I always made a point of telling Sally that Mary was
her
friend, not
mine
.

So, Sally found out.

Okay, so plenty of married men (and women) get caught cheating. Big deal. Sometimes the couple can cope and work it out. Sometimes, they can't. We couldn't. I should say, Sally couldn't. She set her lawyer—good ole' Waletr Altschuler—on me faster than a greyhound on a rabbit. That guy would've had my gonads if they hadn't been attached. You must have heard the joke about the lawyer and the shark … well, never mind for now. I have to tell my story.

I'm not the kind of guy who takes this kind of stuff … from anyone. And in an ironic sort of way, I guess I'm getting paid back for that, too. Bottom line? If someone sics a lawyer on me, I'm gonna bite back.

Now here's where it starts getting weird.

If I told the police shrink any of this, he'd bounce me up to P-6 for sure. I mentioned that we'd been reading
Faustus
in class, and that's when I decided to do a bit of … let's call it “research.” I dug through the library and found what was supposedly a 16th Century magician's handbook. Not sleight of hand magic. I mean something that's called a
grimoire
.

And I decided to try my hand at necromancy.

Look, I'm not crazy. I went into it more than half-skeptical. And I want to state for the record here that I...

Diary entry two
: two hours later. Time's running out, for sure.

Sorry for the interruption. I'm back now after wasting two hours with the police shrink again. He ran me over the story again, but I held up pretty well, I think. At least I didn't tell him what I'm going to write about now. But like I said earlier, I want to have this all recorded so if I'm right ... Oh, Jesus … If I'm right …

Where was I? Oh, yeah—necromancy … a deal with the Devil. Yes—yes—yes. A deal signed in
blood
.

The library on the Gorham campus had an ancient
grimoire
. Well, actually it was a facsimile of one, published a few years ago by the University of Nebraska Press. It's amazing what gets published these days. I wonder if the person who edited the text got tenure. I can't recall his name just now. Anyway, I looked up the spell for summoning the Devil and … now I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but you have to believe me on this. I did it.

I actually summoned the Devil.

Go ahead. Laugh. What does it matter? I'll be dead— and in Hell—soon enough.

I have a key to Bailey Hall, so I came back to my office late one night—sometime after eleven o'clock, so I could be ready by midnight. After making sure my office door was locked, I set to work. Pushing back the cheap rug I had by my desk (to keep the rollers of my chair from squeaking on the old pine floor), I drew a pentagram on the floor using a black Magic Marker. I placed a black candle—boy, were
they
hard to find—at each of the five points of the star and lit them. Then, taking the black leather-bound book, I began to recite the Latin incantations backwards.

Actually, I was surprised that it worked. My Latin was so rusty, I was afraid I'd mispronounce something and would end up summoning a talking toadstool or something.

But it worked—it
actually
worked.

In a puff of sulfurous fumes, the Devil, "Old Scratch" himself, appeared.

Looking around, he said dryly, "Well, at least you're not another damned politician." Then, getting right down to business, he said, "Okay, what do you want in exchange for your soul?"

With his golden, cat-slit eyes burning into me, I had the feeling that he already knew—more clearly than I did at the moment. Anyway, I told him. I said that I wanted an absolutely foolproof way of killing my wife and not getting caught. I told him I was willing to sign over my soul to him—-
yes! Dear God! In blood!
—if I could just get rid of Sally and be absolutely certain that I wouldn't get caught.