Ravenous Ghosts (6 page)

Bill Cates awoke restrained. Muscles aching, he allowed panic to surge inside him and the hair on his neck to prickle with cold fear before he sighed and let the tension run from his throbbing arms.

Feet and wrists bound, he rolled his eyes around, wincing at the starbursts of pain at the base of his neck where the skin felt like stretched leather.

He tried to move his neck to relax the muscles but couldn't, felt resistance.

When had she bound him?

The panic ignited again but he choked it down. If she had bound him this tightly then she hadn't gone far, hadn't left him in such a dangerous state where at any moment he could pass out from the lack of blood circulating to his brain. Because now he was sure she had cinched a rope around his throat too, not tight enough to strangle him but enough so that his head sat atop the loops of cord as if severed.

Only his eyes would move and he used them to take in the room in which he
'd allowed her to make him a captive in pursuit of the utmost sexual pleasures. Paintings. Strange depictions of tortured creatures, all in various stages of transformation, all displayed in vibrant living color, were propped up against all four walls. It seemed she spent her free time painting monsters and binding men.

He looked straight ahead. Something was different. Something that hadn
't been there the night before. He didn't remember much but he remembered the darkness, no light filtering through from anywhere.

A window.

Impossible
.

And yet it had to be possible because he was looking at it—a small square window looking out onto a gleaming sunlit hallway better suited to a college or government building where cleanliness was a priority seldom neglected and not a crumbling tenement building in…well, wherever he was. At the far end of the hallway, a set of glass double doors filtered the sunlight onto the tiled floor. A ground floor.

Why would someone put a window at the end of a hallway? Especially if it looks nowhere but into a shabby apartment on the top fl—

Wait a minute. She had taken him to her apartment on the top floor. He remembered because he
'd been out of breath and sweating like a baked hog by the time they'd navigated the endless stairwells to get there. Why then, he wondered, was he now looking through a window that showed a hallway leading to doors that in turn led out onto what appeared to be a ground floor courtyard?

He stopped his bewilderment in mid-mutter and listened.
Voices
. He tried to cock his head but was forced to strain mentally toward the sound instead.

Yes, definitely voices but from where he couldn
't tell. The loft appeared reluctant to proffer any clues and he slumped inwardly, constantly aware of the rope biting into his wrists and ankles, growing annoyed and hoping at the same time there would be no marks. Marks would be noticed.

This enforced paralysis began to anger him and he tried to lean forward. Nothing happened. His brain had apparently been labeled a pariah by the rest of his body and the only sensations allotted him were gnawing fear and increasing discomfort.

Where the hell is she?

He tried to close his eyes and his heart lurched.

I can't close my eyes
.

The calm he
'd forced himself to muster dropped like a theater curtain torn from the rails and he tried to open his mouth to set free the scream trapped in his throat. His mouth wouldn't open.

Oh God.

Remember her. Start by remembering her
, he thought, his mind spinning so fast he was almost able to convince himself it was really his body circling the room, somehow released from the vicious constraints.

What good would it do to remember her? Would recalling her name send her running to his aid?

It should damn it.

But you can
't scream
his mind countered and ice flooded through his veins at the spoken and yet not spoken truth of this waking nightmare.

She drugged me. The bitch put something in my drink
.

Yes, that was it. Had to be. What other rational explanation was there? He was paralyzed, unable to move anything but his eyes. But then, why bind him?

Of course, she would have had to seduce me into this so that the drug had a chance to work
.

A bar. He
'd been in a bar after a meeting with the insurance folks. One of their workers in the plant was threatening to sue after a routine check had shown his lungs were clogged with asbestos particles. It was a potentially lethal situation business wise and Bill had been drafted in to tackle the situation, to offer a significant amount of money to keep everybody happy and more importantly, keep it out of court. Five figures they could afford to part with for the sake of maintaining their good name; seven or eight was out of the question.

The meeting had gone well, though afterward he wasn
't entirely convinced that they were going to escape the guillotine. Still, he'd done his part and done it well and when the blonde chocolate-skinned woman at the bar had started giving him the glad eye, he decided he had earned the reward.

Fresh anger bloomed in his chest, his hands begging to clench but frozen, a denial that further inflamed him.

A whore. I've been fleeced by a goddamn whore.

Rage poured into his eyes and suddenly the urge to blink it away became a need and the need became desperation. And that led to torture as the inability to blink began to make his eyes boil.

She had brought him back to her apartment, whispering promises of acts he was sure his wife had never even heard of. After the grueling ascent to her place (she told him the elevator was broken), she had led him inside. Told him to take a seat. This is where memory failed him.

Now he prayed to God to stop the madness and felt an itch wind its way like an army of fire ants over his wrists. His teeth tried to clench, eyes flitting madly from one dank corner of the sunlight-shunning loft to another. Finally, aflame with agony, he looked straight ahead, through the small window and the shimmering hallway, looking less impossible now and more like the path to salvation, held cruelly out of reach for men who awoke to find themselves bound and frozen.

Oh Jesus
.

And then someone swept into the doorway. He paused and watched, feeling sweat inside his skin looking for an exit that wasn
't there.

It was a woman, wearing an ankle-length black coat, her auburn hair dancing in the breeze before the door hissed shut behind her and left it drop to her shoulders. As she strode purposefully down the corridor, a plastic name badge flashed in the sunlight, the light hitting him straight in the eyes. His mind compensated for his mouth
's uselessness and shrieked, echoing hollowly through the canals that were his nerves, setting his soul ablaze and wracking his body with shudders that rippled through his innards and broke well before the surface of his frozen flesh.

Inside, he wept, knowing no tears were spilling from his eyes because that would have taken away the burning and it was obvious to him now that no reprieve was forthcoming.

She'd left him here to die or go mad. Or both.

But then he remembered the woman in the hallway, his eyes swiveling toward the window again. She was coming right towards him. Surely she
'd see him if she came close enough?

He listened to the clip-clop of her high heels on the tile, imagined her peering in at him and gasping, running to fetch someone to break the window, or to come round and kick in the door of the bitch
's apartment, untying him…

The spit had long since dried in his throat but he tried regardless. Nothing, of course. He began to whisper promises that if he somehow escaped this he would never again cheat on his wife. It wasn
't worth it; adultery was becoming a lethal practice.

The woman drew nearer the window and now he saw how tall she was.

She'll see me
, he thought, allowing rays of his own personal sunshine to chase the shadows off his brain
. She'll call someone and they'll get me out of this goddamn chair. I'll be in pain for days but anything will be better than…

The woman was so close now that he could see how pretty she was and how wrong he
'd been in assuming she was tall.

She wasn
't tall, she was enormous. Impossibly so and the closer to the window she came, the more anxious he became until anxiety dissipated under the sheer weight of horror that descended upon him, teeth bared.

Her face filled the window. Or rather, her eyes did.

He felt like a bug, someone in the front row of the theater, a doll in a dollhouse, a little boy looking at the doctor's magnified eye, an insect… He felt like prey. Anything caught beneath an eye that big must surely be the victim, be it insanity or the supernatural wielding the upper hand.

His whole being erupted in a trembling panic but never moved; wouldn
't move. Everything he was faltered in the face of what must surely be a god or a giant or a product of incredible trickery. It made a mockery of his hope, an idiot of his sanity.

This is wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong.

The face moved back from the window, the expression on that porcelain countenance one of disgust, of confusion as if unable to understand how he had ended up in—

"
This painting…" a booming voice said suddenly, sending pulses of sound vibrating through his body and his heart ceased fuelling his torture for a moment as the loft thrummed along with the speaking giant. "…It's hideous. Why would anyone want to hang such a thing on the wall of a public building? If this is what's passing as art these days then it's no wonder the world has gone to hell."

Another voice, another giant chuckled. It felt like hands clapping against his ears. His guts roiled.

Who are these…things?

"
I thought a picture of a man bound would have appealed to you, Detective Chambers," roared this new voice.

Detective? A picture? What are they talking about?

"Funny. You have breakfast yet?"

"
Not unless you count coffee. I've been down to Flaherty's Tavern on Third. The barman says he remembers the guy leaving with a dark woman, blonde hair, dressed kind of funny."

Bill
's brain pulsed with agony, ears near-bursting as the glass rattled between him and the giants.

No, they
're not giants. It's a television screen. I'm watching a television screen that bitch set up to scare me.

The room began to vibrate again as the man
's thundering voice continued. "Kind of funny?"

"
Yeah, her clothes were stained with paint but the barman couldn't swear on it. Says it might have been part of her costume. Good-looking broad, weird eyes; says she wore some odd gold symbols around her neck too, one like a crooked pentagram, the other of a bound man."

They both looked in at Bill, who summoned the last vestiges of strength from where they had pooled somewhere in the depths of his pain-ravaged body and tried to scream. Silence filled his throat, sweeping aside the tears, ushering them away to wherever his voice had gone and in the end he sat still, motionless. Watching.

The floor continued to hum.

"
Like
this
guy."

"
Yeah."

"
Looks like he wants to scream."

"
Gives me the creeps."

"
I guess. See how the eyes follow you around the room?"

"
Yeah. Like those pictures of Jesus."

He watched them, waited to wake up. Waited for salvation he had no choice but to believe would come, whether by cruel of kind means…

"So our boy was diddling around behind his wife's back. Maybe he ran off with the voodoo lady?"

"
It's a possibility. I'm hoping some of his co-workers here will be willing to enlighten us on what our Mr. Cates got up to after hours."

"
All right. Let's go check it out."

The window cleared.

Bill watched, waited and screamed in silence from inside his frame.

THE WRONG POCKET

This story stayed in a dusty drawer for a long time until I was approached to contribute a story to a crime anthology. Partly out of laziness, I took this one out, dusted it off and sent it off to the editor. I promptly forgot about it. Much to my surprise, it was accepted and since then has proven to be one of my more popular tales among readers. Strange indeed. But if nothing else, it shows how, when asked to write a crime story, I can't resist adding a little otherworldly spice to the proceedings.

This one was going to be a breeze. Stan sensed as much and penguins would fly before his instincts were proved wrong.