Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (28 page)

“Oh great,” he said out loud, thinking
they would stop and ask him if he needed help.

“No. I’ve merely gone crazy. Go on.
Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

The car was basically just rolling as
it came up the last ten yards. Sully was able to see its window
come down. He then saw a head come out of that window, and it
screamed his name.

“Sully! Run! Look out!”

The car took off quickly, squealing
its tires as it went. The next thing Sully heard was the thing
screaming. He turned around and looked up on time to see it coming.
In the short time he had to look at it, all he could make out was a
large human form in an even larger envelope of darkness. He didn’t
have time to move. It came down on him. There was black. There were
talons.

#

The road was back, unfolding in front
of him. This time he had not stopped completely. He was creeping
along. This time, no vehicle passed by, blowing its horn. But, in
his rearview mirror, he could see the headlights of one
approaching. Sully moved onto the shoulder so he could go as slow
as he wanted. That was somewhere between twenty and thirty miles
per hour. He took the next exit.

He found the hotel and sat in the lot,
not trying to understand what had happened, just stunned. He didn’t
want to think right now. He had thought earlier, when he was on the
side of the road. He had confirmed that things hadn’t been real, no
shadow had been on the road, nothing had been on his roof. He had
confirmed that the psychotic vision was over. All had felt real and
okay. Safe. Logic had confirmed that he was safe. Then, in the end,
logic had failed miserably. Illogic’s monster had come from the sky
and gripped him in its talons.

This was not a math problem now. No
chart or formula was going to help him solve this problem.
Deductive reasoning was irrelevant. So for now, there would be no
logic. Just resting. Hoping nothing bad would come again. It was an
hour before he was able to walk into the lobby.

Inside his room, he left the lights on
as he lay in bed. But they did no good. He was still afraid. He
still shivered. He had felt that thing crash into him. Inside the
blackness, he had felt its sharp talons touching him, squeezing
him, and he could still feel them a little, just a tickle on his
skin. It took him an hour to go to sleep.

#

He’s walking in the mist again, so
light his step. And he can breathe. It’s been like this only one
other time. And like then, the coma men are not here
now.

#

The next morning, Sully was back on
the road. He was tired, having gotten up earlier than his body
wanted to. But he wanted to be home, to the familiar. He thought
that then he would be able to stop dwelling on the night before,
stop feeling those talons tickling him.

He called Anna early and told her that
he had gotten real tired the night before and had to stop. He
apologized for not calling her. Surprisingly, she said that was
fine, because she had fallen asleep early too.

Sully had not told Anna about his
flashback, and he decided he would not tell her about whatever had
happened last night either. He wasn’t sure why as of yet. He
thought it had something to do with wanting to do this alone, to
face it on his own. But that explanation didn’t feel totally
accurate. It felt incomplete. But then again, he doubted he could
trust much of what he felt right now? He thought it best to just
wait.

Whatever the reason he didn’t want to
let her in, it was not hard to hide his inner turmoil from Anna.
She was passionate when he got home, and in that passion, what he
had been through and the repercussions he was suffering, were lost.
Then, after so much making love on Saturday, she entered her
writing world on Sunday, leaving Sully alone. He stewed by himself,
waiting for Monday to come so he could be lost in his
work.

#

When Sully walked into the teachers’
lounge Monday morning, he saw the school’s principle, Kyle Edwards,
and the vocational agriculture teacher, Flip VanHouse, having
coffee at the square table. Both Kyle and Flip, like Sully, had
graduated from Little Axe. Kyle, a bald businesslike man and
retired Army Captain, had graduated many years before Sully. Flip,
a lifelong redneck that somehow managed to earn a college degree,
had been a sophomore when Sully was a senior. It was always comical
to see the two of them together, Flip going on about adventures
that a person probably shouldn’t share with his boss, rambling like
he couldn’t control himself. Kyle, always nodding, an expression on
his face that Sully thought had to be half disgust, half pretended
interest. Flip was the son of Art VanHouse, a long-time Little Axe
native and owner of the town’s granary. Politics would not allow
Kyle to fire Flip. But at the same time, Flip gave out enough
information for Kyle to justify passing him up for the
local-initiative-tax-driven merit raises that he distributed. It
was a balance. And Flip wasn’t that bad of a vo-ag
teacher.

“Hey, Sully,” Kyle said, as Sully got
his coffee. “How was your trip?”

Most everybody knew about Sully’s
trips by now. His fear of traveling had not been something he could
hide in this small town, so most people knew that he had
anticipated for the trips to be difficult. Of course, Caitlin
Barr’s death had taken the town at the time, and the townspeople
hadn’t asked much about his first trip. But he knew he would have
to deal with questions a little more this time.

“Pretty uneventful,” Sully lied. It
was the exact same lie he had told his mother when she had called
and asked.

“Oh yeah,” Kyle said. “Old Flip here
can’t say the same about his trip Friday night, can you,
Flip.”

“No, sir. I can’t.”

Sully pivoted with his cup of coffee
to see both men turned in their chairs, looking at him. He supposed
he was going to have to hear about it. “What happened, Flip?” Sully
asked, just to get it over with.

Flip half tilted his head and leaned
back in his seat, the redneck version of a ponderous pose. “Well,
me and old Joe Berry drove up to Elk City Friday night. We just did
a little bar hopping, tried to pick up a couple of gals there.
Didn’t work out. No big deal. Anyway, we got headed home. And long
about the time we were to hit Thirty, I rolled the window down and
could smell smoke. I didn’t think much of it and neither did Joe.
Thought maybe someone was burning off a field. No big
deal.”

Flip nodded as if to ask if Sully
understood what he was saying. Sully nodded back, not really
thinking there was much about this story that could have lost him
yet, but humoring Flip.

“Anyway, a little bit after we exited
onto Thirty, we got passed by a fire engine. Old Joe was driving
and didn’t want to fuss with it. But I was pretty hammered still,
so I got him talked into following that fire engine.”

Flip folded his hands behind his head
and looked up at the ceiling. “We followed that fire truck about a
mile down a dirt road. And we come upon this farmhouse that’s just
a blazin away. Hell, looked kind of like the homecoming bon fire,
only twice as big. There were a couple of cops sitting there
already. Old Joe told me I shouldn't get out on account that I was
drunk. I told him I probably knew the cops anyways, and I
did.”

Flip smiled proudly. “One of them was
Claude Allen from over in Erick. He told me that he thought people
was inside. I asked him if there was any way we could help and he
said no, just to stay back. So I got in Joe’s truck and we pulled
down to the road out of the way. We sat there and watched the whole
show.”

“My, God!” Sully said. “Are the people
all right?”

Sully had intentionally looked at Kyle
when he asked the question. If people had been hurt, he didn’t want
Flip to have the sick pleasure of being the one who told the story,
at least not this time.

Kyle seemed to understand. He shook
his head. “Whole family’s dead. A fifteen-year old girl and her
parents.”

“Girl went to school in Erick,” Flip
added.

Sully shook his head. They were quiet
for a few seconds, and then Sully asked, “Do they know what caused
it?”

“Propane tank exploded,” Kyle
said.

A lot of the country houses ran their
stoves and heaters on propane, the natural gas lines not out that
far in the country. It seemed strange to Sully, though, that the
family would not have heard the blast and gotten out on time.
Still, that depended on how close the tank was to their
house.

“Damn,” Sully said. “That’s just
terrible.”

Sully walked out, not wanting to hear
Flip go on about his various theories about what ought to be done
or whose fault it was. As he walked to his classroom he thought
about how the people in Erick, just down the road, would be facing
something a lot like what had happened in Little Axe two months
earlier.

#

The next Sunday, Anna left in the
morning to pick up Monica. They arrived home a little after eight
that evening. Sully, having been deprived of his daughter for over
a week, was ready for a kid fix. But Monica couldn’t deliver. She
had not slept on the trip home and didn’t have the energy left to
entertain dad. They put her to bed together and then walked into
the dining room, where Anna patted the manuscript on the
table.

“Well,” she said. “What did you
think?”

Anna had taken a break from her novel
to write a short story. She had left it for Sully to read while she
was off to pick up Monica. It, like any of her new works, would not
go out under her name, Anna Streets. Instead, it would go out under
her penname, Taylor Wolfe. Anna had written under her own name
until she published her first novel at the age of twenty-four. The
publisher told her it would be better to use a fake identity,
because readers liked to think the books they read came from middle
aged to old writers, who, because of their advanced years, could be
considered wise. It would probably be another ten years before she
could come out and say, “It was really me.”

“I liked it,” Sully said.

Anna looked at him warily. “How
much?”

Anna had told him the most important
rule of being her first reader was that he could never lie. And
Sully never had.

“
Well,” he said. “I didn’t
like it as well as your books. But it was at least as good as the
other short stories you let me read. I couldn’t put it
down.”

Anna nodded. “Yeah. It wasn’t really
good enough to be a book idea. But I thought it would be fun. And
if I send it to a magazine, it will get my fake name out a little
more before I publish book number two.”

Anna had actually written three
novels, all before she met Sully. Sully had read and loved them
all. Evidently, the publishers didn’t agree with his sentiments, at
least not on the first two, which had gotten Anna nothing but two
stacks of rejection letters. The short story he had just read was
about the twentieth she had written as his girlfriend, and this one
had set him to thinking.

“Anna, let me see if I got this
straight. In the story, this guy murdered his wife, then buried her
out in the garden. Then, that summer, the garden grew this
incredibly big tomato. He ate it, then died.”

Anna sat down at the table, and Sully
followed suit.

“That about sums it up,” she
said.

Sully thought for a few seconds, then
asked, “So the woman reincarnated as the tomato?”

Anna smiled. “I guess that’s one
possible explanation.”

Sully knew the question was stupid.
Anna had told him before that in some short stories it was good to
leave things vague. That way the reader could fill in for
themselves, making the story more exciting.

But the explanation of the story’s end
wasn’t really what he was after. He was serious about Anna now, way
more serious than he had ever been about a woman, even the one he
had been married to and had a child with. Yet there was so much
mystery to her, mystery he loved to gradually understand, not for
the sake of probing, but for the slow trip itself.

“So do you believe in that sort of
thing?” he asked.

“Reincarnation?” Anna said.

“Yeah.”

Anna seemed to consider the question,
but briefly. “I don’t disbelieve in it.”

“Oh,” Sully said. Then he laughed.
“Just don’t tell my mom. She’ll smack you upside the head with her
Bible.”

Anna smiled, then shook her head. “I
don’t see why. I don’t disbelieve in that either.”

Sully was a little perplexed, but more
than that, intrigued. He expected that Anna would be famous some
day. And she was his. He got to read all of her stories first, and
then he got to pick at her mind. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, the two basic ideas are not
necessarily contradictory. Say western religions are right. We are
endowed with one body. And once that body dies, the spirit is set
free.”

What she said left a lot of things
open. But Sully could go with it. He nodded his head.

“Well, consider this possibility. For
some reason the body dies. Maybe it grows too old, becomes sick, or
some jerk with a knife renders it unlivable. And the spirit
remains. It no longer has a body to dwell in, so it can either
enter the spirit world or start from scratch.”