Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (15 page)

There is a thump.

Jonah turns onto Main
Street, then into the parking lot of his clinic. Everything blurs
out of focus, but he is still moving, getting out of his car,
walking. He enters a door. Inside, things start to come into
focus.

There is the thump, and
with the thump, the focus goes away, but Jonah is still moving in
the blur. He enters another door.

There is a sudden change,
like he has been lifted up and transported somewhere. Suddenly,
he’s back in his office, giving some woman the measure. This is not
the same woman as before, and he does not have her in the same
position. This one has red hair. She’s lying sideways on his desk,
and he’s standing beside the desk, sliding the snake in and out. He
dwells on none of the details. He can only think of how good the
snake feels.

The room fades. Both he and
the room are changing, just like before, into somewhere and someone
else.

There is a thump. Then he
is lifted up again, out of this scene.

Jonah is being torn apart.
The pain is unbearable. But it doesn’t last long.

There is a crash.

#

Jonah came to fast. It took
him only a few seconds to deal with the afterthought of the pain
that he’d just been in. He could feel the air hitting him. He knew
the crash had been real. He sprung from his bed. He flipped on the
overhead light and immediately saw what had entered his room. It
was just a little sparrow, and it was as dead as could be, dripping
blood on his bedroom floor. A few feet away was the broken window
the sparrow had crashed through.

Instinct taking over, with
his newly sharpened mind, Jonah quickly went to investigate more.
Standing in front of the window, he scanned the lawn behind the
apartments. In the moonlight, a cat scampered away with something
in its mouth. Jonah surmised that it was another sparrow that the
cat was carrying. He decided to investigate more.

Jonah, already wearing his
pajama pants, grabbed a T-shirt and left his bedroom and the dead
bird. He was a little bit afraid, but even more than that,
determined to find out what was going on. In the living room, he
whipped open the front door. He started to open the screen door and
go outside but stopped when he heard one of the cats growl. Jonah
looked outside into the night. Standing in the parking lot lights,
on the grass and on the sidewalk, a dozen or so cats were scattered
about, all of their eyes trained on him. One of them, the
orange-stripped cat Jonah had met before, had a dead sparrow in its
mouth. Most of the cats were quiet, but a few hissed, daring him to
come out.

Jonah shut door.

#

The hole in his bedroom
window became Jonah’s obsession, and he let himself regress for the
time being. He sat in his lit room, focusing on the window all
night. He left the sparrow on the floor, motionless, dead. It
served as confirmation that this was all real, not something that
had happened in his head, or something he had done himself in a
dreamlike state. If it were a part of a dream, or some type of
psychosis, the faulty perception of the dead bird would not
maintain itself all the way through the rest of the night. At
least, that seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

The light of morning came,
and the sparrow was still there. The light brought a mild sense of
invigoration and diminished Jonah’s fear somewhat. He got some tape
and tore up a cardboard box, then used these things to cover the
hole the sparrow had made. Jonah cleaned the sparrow off his floor,
but left it at the top of his trashcan, just in case he needed more
confirmation later. He called and left a message with apartment
maintenance that a bird had flown through his window.

Jonah knew he could
probably sleep now. He could just lie out on the couch and wake up
when the maintenance man came. But he felt like he needed closure
on this before he could sleep. He knew this attitude was obsessive,
but for now, he was willing to give in.

Chuck, the maintenance man,
showed up around noon. There were a couple of maintenance people
that worked at the apartments. Chuck was the one Jonah was more
familiar with. He was a tall man with a blonde mustache. He had a
nasally accent, like he was from somewhere further north than
Stanton.

“Hello, Dr. Singer,” Chuck said,
walking inside.

“Hey, Chuck,” Jonah
replied.

“Hear you’ve had some bird troubles,”
Chuck said, laughing, but not incredulously.

“You ever heard of such a thing?”
Jonah asked.

“No, not here. But I
suppose this is not the first time a bird flew through a
window.”

“Come on,” Jonah said,
motioning for Chuck to follow him into the kitchen. “I’ll show you
the little bullet.”

It wasn’t that Jonah
suspected that Chuck didn’t believe him. People tended to believe
what you said when your first name was Doctor. Jonah just wanted to
check his own perception. In the kitchen, with Chuck behind him,
Jonah opened the pantry door. On top of the trash was the little
sparrow, with its head crammed down into its body.

“Ouch!” Chuck said.

“Yeah,” Jonah said, a sigh of relief
in his head.

“Let’s take a look at that window,”
Chuck said, leading the way out of the kitchen.

“It’s in the back bedroom,” Jonah
said.

In his bedroom, Jonah stood
back, as Chuck removed the cardboard and inspected the window.
After about a minute, Chuck asked, “Do sparrows fly in
flocks?”

“I don’t know,” Jonah responded,
though he doubted that, if they did, they would at this time of
year.

“Well, they must,” Chuck
said. “Because there’s this long crack here.”

Jonah inspected the crack
in the window that Chuck was pointing at. The crack extended above
and below the hole.

Chuck said, “One of them must have
made that crack, then the others softened it up more and more until
one went through.”

Jonah
nodded.
And the cats cleaned up the mess
down below.

A little while later, Chuck
went outside to get the new window. Jonah went into the living
room, where he stayed as Chuck worked.

Jonah was satisfied that it
all had been real. He wasn’t going to talk to anyone about it,
though. At least, he wouldn’t mention it to anyone until Tate got
home.

After Chuck left, Jonah
finally went back to bed. There, he slept dreamlessly.

#

Jonah woke up Saturday
afternoon, ready to check. But, even with the madness in his life,
he wasn’t ready to let the OCD creep back anymore than he already
had. Even with the madness, he still craved the fast and efficient
mind he had found. So, instead of checking, Jonah meditated. Soon,
the checking thoughts coming into his head were merely observed,
and, since they were only observed, and not struggled with or given
into, the checking thoughts had nothing to grasp. Soon, they went
away.

#

As much as having a
meditative consciousness allowed Jonah to deal with negative
thoughts and emotions by letting them pass through his mind, it
allowed him to enhance pleasurable experiences by focusing in on
them. Eating became an offering to the senses. The texture of pasta
and complexity of sauce seemed like it would be a good offering.
With slim pickings for Italian in Stanton, Jonah left his apartment
early Saturday evening, intending to go to an Italian restaurant in
nearby Lake City.

It took Jonah about fifteen
minutes to reach the exit off of I-27 and into Lake City. Then he
drove right past that exit.

Jonah had suddenly found
himself wanting more. He needed people, and a lot of them. He was
going to have a woman tonight, no matter what. Images of a variety
of women flashed through his head. There were different shapes and
sizes, but none were large, none were old, and none were ugly.
Otherwise, he would take what came, and there would be no courting.
It would be just a matter of getting one into his car, or at least
getting one to somewhere secluded.

Lansing seemed good. There
would be big clubs there, with lots of drunk and careless women to
choose from. Just let someone stand in his way, he thought. That
would be fun too.

Jonah sped his car up to
eighty, ninety, then one hundred miles per hour. At this speed,
he’d be to Lansing in less than an hour. Still, that was too long.
He couldn’t hold out until Lansing. He would take the next exit and
go to the first bar he found, and if he couldn’t find a bar, he’d
find somewhere else, a gas station, a parking lot, anywhere that he
might spot a lone woman. Then he would take. There’d be no
ramifications, and if there were ramifications, then fuck the
ramifications. He was going to be alive. He was going to
take.

Jonah was almost to the next exit when
he saw the roadside advertisement.

“Oh yeah,” he said out
loud. He’d seen the advertisement before. It had registered in his
head as he passed by on the road, and just like any man would, he
had pondered it. But he’d never stopped. Tonight, he would stop. He
would live. He would take.

The exit was five miles
ahead. Then he had to drive another ten miles on a highway. It was
hard, but Jonah was able to wait that long.

The strip club was located
out of town. It was a rundown windowless building with a marquee
that read “Mama’s Place.” The lot was filled with vehicles, mostly
cars and pickups, but a few semi trucks. Music and muffled shouts
came from inside. A sign on the door announced the club’s hours.
Right inside that door was a small corridor, where a young man
stood behind a counter. Beyond the corridor was a bar, where men
stood or sat turned away from the bar, watching the show. From his
perspective, Jonah couldn’t see the show.

“Hello, sir,” the young man
behind the counter said over the loud music. “Is this your first
time at Mama’s Place?”

Jonah nodded, not wanting to talk to
the man.

“There’s a ten dollar
cover. Table dances are twenty dollars. Backroom dances are
forty.”

Jonah nodded again. He
reached for his wallet. He hated to give his money to the man. He
was not here to give. He was here to take.

As he got the man his ten
dollars, Jonah noticed that he didn’t have a lot of money in his
wallet. That would certainly make his endeavor more complex, and if
it didn’t make it more complex, it would make it more
barbaric.

“Have a great time,” the man said as
Jonah turned from him.

Beyond the bar, in the middle of a
room packed with men sitting at tables, was a stage, where a
blonde-headed woman wearing only a G-string shook her tits with her
hands out to the side.

Jonah felt his erection
tighten immediately. It became so hard that it actually hurt.
Though it didn’t seem physically possible, it felt as if it had
grown bigger than it had ever been before.

There were too many people.
It would be hard to get enough. Unlike the rest of the men there,
Jonah was not going to settle for what was offered. But how would
he get one out?

Though he didn’t want to
take his eyes from the woman on the stage right now, Jonah had to
look around the room and find some way. He saw other women
scattered about, maybe a dozen, sitting amongst the men at the
tables, men that must have numbered about two hundred. Yes, each
woman would attract a lot of attention. In order to take one, he
would have to find a way around all the other men.

Jonah finally spotted the
solution, and it was only a few feet away from him. Until now,
being so focused on the girl on stage and then on the rest of the
room, he hadn’t noticed the ATM machine near the entrance. Jonah
took his wallet back out and walked over to the machine. He first
took out his debit card. He used that to get the maximum amount he
could take in a twenty-four hour period, $500. He then used his
credit card to get another $500. It was a lot of money, but he
didn’t care. He didn’t intend to use it all anyway, at least, not
right now, not here. He just needed it as a lure.

Jonah turned around with
fifty twenty-dollar bills in his hand. He pretended to count it,
only hoping to be spotted by one of the vultures.

Jonah walked into the room, holding
the bills in front of him.

There was nowhere to sit,
unless he wanted to sit with other men, and he didn’t. Jonah
decided to just roam around for a while, but he didn’t have to roam
for long. Even before the song that was playing ended, Jonah saw
three different women approaching him. All three were making their
way through the maze of tables and men, not acknowledging the
advances made toward them. There were not enough of them to go
around, but still the vultures could smell the kill. That was fine.
Now he could select among them. It was time to think
fast.

Jonah stepped toward the
tables, toward the vulture on his left, the one closest. He made
eye contact. She was the smallest of the three. He moved in closer
and saw that she wore an extraordinary amount of makeup, especially
around her eyes. Her face had angular features, gaunt. There was a
certain weakness, unhealthiness in her walk.