Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (71 page)

“Ouch!” Ted said, looking over his
hand.

“There’s a good poker face,” Adam
said. “How many new cards would you like, Ted?”

“I’ll take four.”

Adam flipped four cards to Ted.
“Sonnie?

“I’ll have what he’s
having.”

Adam laughed and then gave her four
new cards.

“Jacob?”

“
Four.”

Adam gave Jacob his cards, then said,
“You guys are not going to believe this, but the dealer is going to
take four.”

Sonnie laughed lightly and then
started coughing. “Sorry. I choked on my drink,” she said, coughing
between the words.

Jacob went to comfort her, but Ted
beat him to it. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Just give me a
second.”

“It’s all right, my dear,” Adam said.
“Four bad hands is nothing to get that choked up over.”

Sonnie seemed to have it under control
now. “It’s not that. It’s just that you called yourself the
dealer.”

Adam laughed. “Well, I am what I
am.”

Jacob watched as Sonnie looked at all
the faces around the table.

Ted left for a minute and came back
with a box of tissues. “Here you go. You coughed so hard it made
your eyes water.”

Jacob looked at her as she dabbed her
eyes. He saw her smile with her face up, and then saw that smile
disappear when she ducked her head a little.

“All right, Ted,” Adam said, “What do
you want to do?”

“I’ll bet a quarter.”

All eyes went to Sonnie. She pushed a
quarter to the center of the table.

Jacob put his cards down. “I
fold.”

Adam looked at Sonnie and then at Ted,
as if he were looking for a sign. “I see your quarter, and I raise
the pot fifty cents.”

“Ohh,” Ted said. “We’re talking big
money now.” He folded.

“All right, Mr. Masters,” Sonnie said.
“I see your fifty cents and raise you a dollar.”

Now it was a staring game between the
two of them. Adam smiled, but Sonnie’s look was stern.

Adam laid his cards on the table. “The
lady wins.”

Sonnie laughed triumphantly. “I know
this is against poker etiquette, but I have to rub this in Master’s
face.” She laid her cards face up on the table.

“You beat me with nothing but a high
seven!” Adam flipped his cards over. “And I thought I was
bluffing.”

“
High card nine,” Ted said.
“I could have beat you both with my ten.”

“Wow!” Jacob said.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a rare
moment of excitement from Jacob Sims,” Adam said in a radio
announcer voice.

“What Jake?” Sonnie asked. “Could you
have beat a ten?”

“Of course,” Ted said. “He had to
have?”

Jacob shook his head. He placed his
cards on the table.

“High six!” Ted exclaimed.

“Did anybody have a face card at all?”
Sonnie asked. “I mean before the second deal even.”

“Not a one,” Adam said.

“Nope,” Ted said. “Jacob?”

Jacob shook his head.

Adam reached for the deck of undealt
cards in front of him. “Let’s see. There are fifty-two cards in the
deck. I dealt five initially and then everyone took four. That’s
thirty-six cards. So there should be sixteen left over.”

“There are four Jacks, four Queens,
four Kings and four Aces,” Sonnie said. “That’s sixteen
total.”

Adam flipped the deck over and spread
it out.

“No way!” Ted said. “They’re all
there, nothing but face cards.”

“Nothing but the best,” Adam
said.

“All right,” Sonnie said, “What are
you trying to pull, Masters?”

“Nothing. It wasn’t me, I swear. I’m a
mathematician, not a magician.”

“But the odds of that happening are
virtually nothing,” Ted said. “You’re up to something
Masters.”

“I don’t know, Ted,” Jacob said. “I
saw him shuffle, and it looked clean to me.”

Ted shook his head. “But it’s not
possible. The odds are that it can’t happen.”

Adam smiled, and Jacob thought he
might have seen deception in it. He couldn’t believe what Adam said
next.

“Well the odds are that seven young
people from the same small town won’t die in the same year, but
that happened.”

Jacob saw Adam sink back in his chair.
He looked at Ted and Sonnie who were both staring at Adam in
disbelief.

Jacob thought that maybe he shouldn’t
say what was in his head right now, but his curiosity was strong.
“I thought it was eight.”

Sonnie turned to him, and now he was
the one facing her appalled stare. He was glad when she looked
down. “One of the people was not from Nescata,” she
said.

“Oh.”

Everyone was quiet for a few seconds.
Jacob looked around the table and saw that no one else was looking
at another person. It was Ted who finally broke the
silence.

“Yeah. There was some guy with Shane
that wasn’t from Nescata.” He paused for a second. “They died a few
miles from here, out on the Northwest Expressway.”

Everyone was silent again. It was
about a minute before Adam finally broke the silence.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been here half
an hour and already I’ve managed to taste my foot.”

“No,” Sonnie said. “It’s kind of nice
to actually hear someone make light of it. People are always so
serious around town anymore. I hear it every night. It’s the main
topic of conversation at the bar.”

Adam gathered the cards. “All right.
Let’s make a pact. Tonight we drink beer, play cards and talk a lot
of nonsense. But under no circumstances does anyone talk about
work, school, or death. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Sonnie said.

“Me too,” Jacob said.

Ted took a big swallow of his beer.
“Damn straight!”

They all laughed. Adam smiled as he
passed the stack of cards to Ted. “And by the way. You’re right,
Ted. It was a trick.”

“I knew it!” Ted said.

Jacob wasn’t sure of what happened in
the room for the next few seconds. He wasn’t sure because he knew
what he experienced in those seconds couldn’t be real. The room
became blurry and the sounds of their voices faded. When everything
came back into focus, they were all staring at him. Ted’s and
Sonnie’s looks were both serious. Adam’s look was evil.

“You knew it was a trick, didn’t you
Jake the Snake?” Adam said in a sharp whispery voice that didn’t
sound too much like his voice at all. “You know that when such an
improbability occurs, you can assume that there has been
intervention from an outside agent.”

The blur came back, and when it went
away again, they were still all staring at him.

“Jake, are you okay man?” Ted
said.

Sonnie had leaned toward him and her
hand was on his shoulder. “Jacob?”

He looked down and saw the five cards
in front of him. “I’m fine, really. I just kind of dozed off for a
minute.” He saw the disbelief in their faces and couldn’t handle
it. “What’s the game?” he asked, kicking in his nickel.

“Three card draw. Fours are wild,” Ted
said.

Jacob
picked up his cards and tried not to look surprised when he saw
what they were. He thought he would just get rid of three of them
at the discard. Nobody else would have to know.
Outside agent
, Jacob thought, as he
put three of the four aces facedown on the table.

#

Things lightened up in the next few
hours. They held true to their pact. There was no more talk about
work, school or death. The three men at the table continued to
drink heavily, especially Jacob. It was well after midnight when
the game stopped. Adam decided to crash at Ted’s. Sonnie, who had
stopped drinking a few hours earlier, volunteered to drive Jacob
home in his car. Ted and Adam both smiled at him coyishly as he and
Sonnie walked out the front door. Jacob shook his head like they
were silly, but in his mind, he was aware of the possibilities. And
he wondered what it would be like to have sex with her
again.

They rode without speaking for a
little while. The music from some good-time-oldies station drowned
out the sound of the road. Sonnie tapped her finger on the steering
wheel, and Jacob caught occasional glimpses of her face as they
passed by the city lights. Once, she was smiling at him. He was
starting to think about how he was going to make his move, when she
finally spoke.

“I can turn this if you want. I know
it’s not your style.”

“No. It’s fine. I like old music
sometimes.”

“Really? I never knew that about
you.”

Jacob laughed. “I never knew that
about me either.”

She reached over and slapped his
shoulder. She left her hand there for a moment. Then she dropped it
down on his thigh. He took that hand in his and felt very
confident.

Again, they were both silent for a
little while, then Sonnie said, “It must be exciting for you to
come home and see your friends. I mean, you’re all so damn
successful.”

Jacob stopped caressing her hand. “You
know, I hadn’t really thought about that.” He hadn’t either. And
now, that seemed weird. And it seemed important somehow.

“So how much longer are you going to
be in school?” Sonnie asked, distracting him from his
thoughts.

“Two more years, if everything goes
right.”

Jacob watched as her chest moved up
and down slowly in a deep breath. “So do you think you’ll come back
after you get out?”

Jacob thought about lying. He had seen
the way her chest looked when she had inhaled so deeply, and he
liked the way her hand felt on his thigh. But he knew that kind of
manipulation would not feel right, not with Sonnie.

“I don’t think I will,
Sonnie.”

He felt her hand lift out of his and
away from his thigh, but it was only for a moment. Then, when she
brought it back down, she started moving it around, caressing the
inside of his leg, making him crazy.

She pulled that hand away again,
suddenly—which was even more maddening. “I’m sorry. I’m going to
make you sick.”

Jacob sat up straight. “No, I’m fine,
if you can believe it.”

“I can’t believe it, as much as you
drank.”

“Really. It’s the weirdest thing. I
don’t feel sick at all.”

“You gave us all a scare back at Ted’s
house. One minute you were with us, and the next you wouldn’t
respond. It was like you just went somewhere else for a little
while.”

“I guess I did.”

“What do you mean?”

Jacob suddenly felt very anxious, like
he was having a panic attack. And he felt like this was a
premonition somehow, a sign screaming for him not to tell her. “No,
I was just messing around. I wanted to scare Masters a
little.”

Sonnie laughed. “I guess he had it
coming.”

She put her hand back on his thigh.
She moved it around again, and after a little while, she moved it
over. She gripped him between her thumb and four fingers. The
sensation was incredible, a warm fire burning slowly.

He moved his hand to her. He went
quickly between her legs. He caressed her slowly with one finger,
then two. She began to stir.

She laughed gently, alluringly. “We
might not make it back tonight.”

“Oh?”

“You want to find some
place?”

“I think we better.”

Jacob stared at her. She
giggled.

“This is new,” he said.

“Yeah. I know. It’s exciting. All
those times we had to find back roads or wait for your parents to
go out of town. Now it’s as simple as finding a hotel down the
road.”

Jacob looked ahead and tried to think
about what they would do. He had been with girls before her, and he
had been with girls since, but none better. It had always been so
easy with the two of them, like clockwork. And now that he hadn’t
been with her in years, he expected that the time they had spent
without each other—and with their imaginations—would make it even
better.

A picture of her lying on a bed came
to him. He would start down low and work his way up her legs,
feeling her soft skin on his lips. After he had kissed every part
of that skin, he would move into her.

A jolt came, and Jacob lost the scene.
The old song that had been playing was gone, and there was no other
sound, not even the road. Sonnie had undone his pants and was now
working inside, but he could just barely feel it. His eyes became
fixed on the road ahead. It was calling him somehow, inviting him.
And all he could want was to keep moving down that road. Once
again, he was closing in on something.

After a long pause, a new song came
over the radio. And like the road, it grabbed hold and pulled him
in. It started with the drums and then a heavy guitar kicked in.
The bass and a second guitar joined in seconds later. The song was
nearly halfway over when Jacob first began to register that
something was out of place. The name of the group playing on the
radio was Candor. Jacob had followed them for years. He had
listened to them well before radio would play their fast and
explicit sound. He took pride in the fact that he liked Candor
before liking Candor was cool.