Ravenous Ghosts (21 page)

On the screen, in gloomy black and white, he watches a black car winding its way toward a graveyard and wonders if that's really where he should be. A graveyard.

Dead.

Buried.

Worm food.

He shudders, his chest tightening at the thought of that black car waiting outside his house in the morning like a patient vulture.

They
're coming to get you Barb'raaaaaa
.

He switches off the television and sighs, coughs, hacks up bits of brown papery matter. Winces at the sight of them coiled atop his bandaged hand.

He forces himself to swallow a knot of fear.

They can
't hurt me, can they? I'm dead
.

The thought offers him little comfort as he sits there alone, cloaked in shadow.

* *
*

Dawn creeps silently through the world and Sam jerks himself from non-sleep with a stifled cry. The room glows with hazy orange light that might, under any other circumstances have seemed warm, comforting, but now looks like the reflected light of a funeral pyre.

Damn Wilder
, he thinks miserably,
I should stay with Linda. God knows she's a tyrant at the best of times but…I still love her!
This rare admission makes him sure he has felt his rotten heart kick but it might have been nothing more than a memory.

He slowly, carefully gets to his feet to a chorus of snaps and cracks and walks stiff-legged into the kitchen. Thankfully, Linda is still sleeping. He remembers hearing her come home, the feel of her lips brushing against the taut dead skin on his forehead. Rather than wake him, she opted to leave him sleep in the living room and now he aches for her for the first time in years. The ache becomes an almost physical pain, sparking doubts in his mind about the validity of Wilder
's claims. If he can feel sorrow, loss, love…doesn't that make him alive?

No. He looks at his bandaged hand, the discoloration on the gauze. He thinks about his severed fingers, discarded like nail clippings with not an ounce of pain. His nerves are dead, of that there can be no doubt and soon he will shed his skin like a snake, sloughing off his identity to become nothing more than a cadaver exposed for all the world to see and study. The thought frightens him. Just how long will he remain aware of what they are doing to him? Once his eyes shrivel in their sockets and he can see no more, how long will his emotions, his loneliness take to die? If he has to lie on a cold table knowing what they are doing to him despite being spared the sensations that come with their needles and hooks, he does not want to be capable of thought.

Will they take care of that too?

I can
't do this.

And yet he knows he has to. There are no other options available for him now that he knows the truth. All he can do is accept his fate as it has been written and go blindly into the jaws of science. He can only hope that when he finally abandons this crumbling vessel that sags on his bones like an over-worn suit, something infinitely better awaits him on the other side of somewhere.

He trudges up the stairs, head low, spine crackling and makes his way toward the bedroom.

Easing open the door, he looks at Linda; her hands curled slightly as if to maintain their grasp on sleep, graying hair splayed out around her head in a steel corona, chest rising and falling…

Breathing.

Sam puts a frail hand over his own mouth and exhales. Perhaps a slight chill brushes his scabrous palm but nothing more. He swallows.
"Linda…"

Breathing.

His eyes widen.

The sheets rise and fall in soft whispers…

A small sad smile pinches the skin of Sam's mouth.

* * *

The car is waiting just as Wilder promised; a swollen cockroach nestled against the curb with black eyes for windows that stare vapidly back at Sam as he descends the steps of his home with deliberate slowness. He is appalled at the lack of mobility that has suddenly overtaken his joints and muscles, almost as if rigor mortis has been waiting for just this moment to take hold of him.

It hurts, but only his pride.

The car window hums down and he looks up to see a familiar face smiling out at him. "Good morning Mr. Bradley!"

Sam nods and forces his leg down the last step. With a sigh of relief that emerges more like a croak, he approaches the car in a stoop, like a man balancing a stack of fine china on his head.

"You're looking splendid!" Wilder proclaims and Sam summons the memory of a smile. "Thank you. I wasn't expecting to see you here."

Wilder purses his lips.
"Well I think we both know why my presence is necessary, don't we?" His eyes drop to the fresh bloodstains on Sam's hands.

The driver door clicks open and Sam is surprised to see a chauffeur coming around to his side of the car. With a polite nod, the young man opens the door for him. Wilder scoots over in his seat to make room.
"Hop in!"

Sam
's bones click like castanets as he maneuvers himself into the vehicle. Once he is as comfortable as he can get, he looks at Wilder. "I couldn't do it you know. I couldn't do it alone."

Wilder smiles.
"I know. You'd be surprised how often that happens. That's why it was important that I be here. After all," he says with a wink. "I'm the man who breaks the bad news."

Sam stares for a moment.
"How do you think she'll take it?" he asks but Wilder doesn't answer.

They both turn to look back at the house.

And wait.

LEFTOVERS

I love atmospheric tales, the type of story that can unsettle you just by what is suggested rather than shown. One of the movies that sticks in my head that utilizes this technique quite brilliantly is Robert Wise's adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel "The Haunting of Hill House" – a terrifying movie that relies on what you don't see to scare you. And it works. In horror fiction, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Edgar Allen Poe and more recently M. John Harrison, Charles L. Grant, Al Sarrantonio and others have all carried on the tradition of using shadows and light and the unseen evil to scare us silly. "Leftovers" while cheating a little towards the end, is one of my early attempts to do something similar.

The problem was, Alfred surmised, not what he had chosen to eat today but rather the quantity of it that he had forced down his throat. Never one for gluttony, he found himself vaguely repulsed at the heavy feeling in his guts and the greasy feeling on his tongue.

Shaking his head, he hacked up a gob of phlegm that clung to the memory of undercooked meat and herbs and spat it into the fog. The air was damp and his footsteps sounded like rocks being dropped from a height.

Rosemary
, he thought.
Yes, that's what it tastes like
. In the heavy fog, he could see little and the onset of twilight didn't make navigation any easier. As it was, he was moving through the thickening gloom with only the intermittent blobs of hazy yellow light from the streetlamps as a guide. The disorientation made him feel like a moth, being lured eternally onward.

"
Or perhaps Basil," he said aloud and watched his breath vanish like a shifting ghost into the smoky air.

To his right, where he estimated the pier wall began, a shadowy shape slid past, tearing ragged strands of fog away with it.
"Evening," muttered Alfred and turned back to concentrating on his own struggle. It occurred to him that whoever had passed by had not made a sound. This made him wonder if perhaps he appeared obnoxious to anyone who couldn't see him because of his loud approach. With a grim smile and a hand over his gurgling stomach, he carried on.

Thoughts of home preceded his jaunt like a will o
' the wisp, a warm promise to carry him through the murk. He had traveled to town and overindulged--no, not overindulged,
stuffed
--himself and now he felt awful because it was almost certain that Christine would be preparing a special meal for him, a fine feat with all the trimmings, a no-holds-barred banquet for her beloved…and he would have to decline. Decline or be sick, and that would be so much worse, to have eaten her food only to thrust it back up all over the beautiful spread she would no doubt have arranged.

Perhaps he would be in luck and he would arrive home to find she had forgotten their anniversary. He sighed. How likely was
that
? His wife never forgot anything. No. She left the lapses of memory to her husband. His belly roiled at the thought of packing more food into a space he had already filled to bursting.

A distant clang of a buoy, carried on the sibilant hiss of the surf crashing against the slimy rocks. The almost tangible weight of the fog pressing heavily against his skin like the cold lingering kisses of thin-lipped ghosts. Light drained from the air as twilight descended and the silence was amplified, echoed by emptiness as Alfred sniffed the evening and grimaced at an unscheduled belch that sang of seasoned meat.

Something dark was crouching on the pier wall, hunched like a simian and weaving back and forth, searching for a break in the gray through which it might view the walker. Alfred watched it suspiciously, fancied he could see its eyes, paler even than the fog and then nodded. "I ate too much," he told the evening and sensed the watcher slide from the wall and back down to the beach where the breakers hushed all speakers.

Cobblestones slid beneath his feet, almost sending him flying and he grumbled, righted himself and thanked his lucky stars he had not lost his sense of direction. He continued onward, the ground strangely warped underfoot, and realized that the dark had swallowed the streetlamps, but thankfully by now he had a reasonable idea of where he was. With the sea to his right and the cobblestones beneath his feet, he knew he was still on the right path, and that on a clear night he would be able to see his house from here.

Thinking of home reminded him of the feast awaiting him. How would he explain? The guilt bubbling up inside him couldn't have been worse had he cheated on his wife. She took pride in her cooking and he made eating every last bite of it part of a practiced ritual they had shared for as long as they'd been together. Rejecting it would be rejecting her and he was not sure he could muster the callousness to do such a thing to his beloved. Would it really be so impossible for him to force it down? A wet lurch in his stomach was all the response he needed.

He couldn
't. Simple as that. He would have to come clean and tell her the truth. The thought filled him with dread, more so when the road began to rise, taking him up a path that he knew from memory split like a two-headed serpent at the end. One route led to Hawk Point, where he and the kids went to watch the storms rolling in over the horizon; the other would bring him up a narrow path to their house atop Gresham Hill. He swallowed and continued on, flinching once when something wet brushed against his ankle. He kicked out at it. Missed. Heard a low sigh recede into the darkness through the hole it had made. Alfred frowned after it longer than necessary and knew he was milking the distraction. Anything to avoid the scene that must surely unfold at home.

The crunch of gravel was quick to replace the clack of cobblestone and he felt the unease surge inside him like the coiling fog at his heels. He felt peculiarly small as he ascended the stone steps chiseled out of the hill upon which his house sat brooding. He sensed the magnificence of the sea beyond the cliffs, heaving, swelling, hiding untold things beneath the waves, their eyes breaking the surface to watch his progress. And like the waves, the fog receded, slowly, almost unnoticeably until the crisp cool night hung around him like dark curtains suspended before freezer doors.

On the top step, inches from the salt and wind-battered front door of the house, the hands of despair wringed his stomach and he doubled over to watch, through watery eyes, the vomit pour from his mouth. It splattered on his shoes, coated the pavement in steaming red piles and he backed away, cleared his mouth of the foul taste of blood and summoned a weary grin. As unpleasant as the sensation was, he had made room. Not enough perhaps, but some. If need be, he could excuse himself to the bathroom and force himself to make more. The grin turned to a smile. That was the answer. Christine would never know.

He pushed the door with the heel of his hand and followed its wooden yawn into the hallway.
"Anybody home!" he called, knowing there would be no sudden rush to greet him. His family was all about surprises. He had taught them that. Sneaking around the corner, the smell of fresh-cooked meat assailed his senses and, to his surprise he found his mouth watering. This was no pre-vomit bile…No. He was
hungry!
He could scarcely believe his luck as he turned the corner into the kitchen and stopped. His jaw dropped. "Oh sweetie," he said, tears rushing up his throat.

She had outdone herself this time.

The finest cuts of meat were laid out before his place at the head of the table, the candles prepared around the room making the feast look like something from one of those swanky cooking shows he often watched on television. His eyes were not adequately trained to appreciate the spread all at once and he fell to his knees, overwhelmed and breathless, eyes brimming with tears.