Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (44 page)

Samuel blocked out the quiet sobbing
and muffled laughter of those gathered in the room. He looked again at his
dad’s face, forever asleep amidst the fragrant, arranged flowers, complete with
ribbons strung across the front.

“I know you loved John more. It’s
okay. You didn’t know what to do with a son like me. I’m not really sure how
you managed. You and Mom struggled to understand what went on in my head, what
the hell I wanted from life.”

He felt himself chuckle and turned to
make sure his outburst did not garner attention from the rest of the family.

“I mean, even now, with you lying here
dead, I don’t fit in. Nobody will approach me. But that’s fine. I’m not here to
mend fences with Uncle Frank. I think you loved me. I mean, you did as any man
loves his son, but I think there was a time when it was unconditional. You
bought me the Scout. I didn’t deserve it. The deal was three hits, and I went
2-4. But you bought it anyway, and you bought it with your poker winnings. Mom
wouldn’t have allowed that purchase to come from the family budget. Don’t think
I don’t know that.”

He looked over his shoulder to confirm
the chasm of space still existed. None of the relatives would come near the
coffin until he finished. None would risk a possible conversation with him.

“I wish we could have had this
conversation before cancer got you, but I guess I’ll have to settle for it this
way. I mean, I need to thank you. If I hadn’t been so different than you and
Mom, my siblings, I would still be stuck living in the same shit-hole suburb,
wasting my life away.”

He paused.

“Sorry. Even now, it’s hard for me not
to take shots.”

Several relatives gathered near the
table with the photographic collage and other remembrances.

“I’ll miss you, Dad. Even after
everything we’ve been through, I’ll miss you.”

Samuel stood and shoved both hands
into his front pockets. His right hand struck his phone and then the Scout. He
wrapped his fingers around the pocketknife and held it in his palm. The tears
created a wavering last image of his father in the casket.

“I want you to take it with you. You
never know when you might need to open a package or cut a string in the
afterlife.”

Samuel slid his hand into the casket
and tucked the Scout underneath the edge of the satin pillow, where the head of
his dead father rested.

***

Samuel shook his head as if to dislodge
the cobwebs gathering inside and licked his lips, which felt dry as petrified
wood. He glanced down at his palm and opened it. The knife remained, as real as
the fingers grasping it.

Samuel did the only thing he could think
of. He placed it in his right pocket, where it sunk into the familiar space. He
felt the coolness of the object through thin fabric as it rested against his
leg. He stood and used his hand to clear the surface of the window, revealing
the original, grey landscape of this place. The snowstorm and all its
fury were gone. The ground was dry and he began to wonder if it had happened at
all.

He looked around the cabin and noticed it
was almost identical to the first cabin. The stove, the food, the
coffee, the clothing, the photographs hanging on the wall had all disappeared.
Nothing remained but the chair, the table, the hard bunk and a faint smell of
burnt coffee beans.

Samuel opened the door and stood on the
threshold of the cabin, which faced the western horizon. The advancing cloud
loomed overhead, and the landscape sat in soundless solitude. He turned to face
the east and recognized the path he hoped would lead to the Barren. He was
determined to reach it and survive, unsure if meeting Major there would
really matter.

This cabin is clearly done with me,
he thought.

With his rucksack full of a handful of
meager belongings, Samuel set back off upon the path toward the Barren. He
hiked for hours around the base of the mountain, putting the second cabin and
its memories behind. Every so often, Samuel would thrust his hand into his
front pocket and feel the pocketknife nuzzled there. Then he’d shake his
head, as though more surprised it remained there than that it
appeared in the first place.

***

The pale yellow flame caught his eye as
it danced silently in the distance. Samuel sensed movement, but could not see
anything around it. He hiked the path and realized it was close to night, based
on the aches that come after hours of hiking.

The fire grew in size as he got closer.
After another hour of hiking, Samuel could discern the hot ash floating upward
into the still trees. He saw a campfire and a pack sitting beside a fallen
tree. A thin line of rope stretched from one sapling to another, weighted down
in the middle by a shirt flipped over the top and dripping water to the ground.

“Anyone here?” he asked as the pack slid
from his shoulder. He stretched his arms and looked around the camp.
Before he could ask again, a figure pushed through the trees.

“You made it. So glad you didn’t veer
from the path,” Major said.

Samuel cast his eyes down into the fire,
avoiding Major’s.

“That fire. It makes things worse here.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Major said.

Samuel sighed.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“Duty.” Major shrugged. “The visitor I
expected did not make it.”

“What happened to him?” Samuel asked.
Major ignored the question and stared into the fire. “I’ve been
hiking all day. Can I rest?” Samuel said.

Major swept his arm across his body and
dipped with an exaggerated bow.

“Mi casa, su casa,” he said.

Samuel knew what he meant, even if he
didn’t know how he knew it.

“I’m sure you’ll wake me when I need to
get up,” he said to Major.

“I don’t think we have a lot of time to
mess around. The cloud is coming east at a good clip. I was worried it might
have pulled you under. It can do that, like those huge waves on the Atlantic
seaboard. I remember standing in the surf as a kid thinking they weren’t so
scary, until the current tugged at my ankles on its way back out.”

“A few hours?” Samuel asked.

“One or two, if I can keep track. Then
we’ve got to jump back on the path and get to the Barren.”

Samuel nodded and rubbed his eyes.

Major watched Samuel fall asleep. He
tossed several twigs onto the fire before looking over his shoulder at the
massive cloud inching closer.

***

Samuel felt a hand shake his shoulder.
His leg hurt and he couldn’t feel his right foot. He opened his eyes and saw
that Major was kicking dirt onto the remaining coals of the fire. It was
still dark, as it had been since the sky swallowed the last of the light over
the eastern horizon.

“How long?”

Major shrugged. “How long what?”

“How long was I asleep?”

“I’m not really sure. The fire is burning
differently now, too. If the reversion is moving at the same pace at the
Barren, we may already be too late.”

Samuel pulled himself upright and rubbed
the pins and needles from his foot. “Too late for what?”

“Too late to slip.”

Samuel waited for an explanation. When
Major remained silent, he pushed. “What’s a slip?” he asked.

“I think we should wait until—”

Samuel slammed his fist into the soft
dirt and dry leaves. “I think you need to start filling me in right now. I
don’t know where the hell I am. I don’t know who you are. I don’t remember
shit. Some things disappear and other things come back.”

“What did you say?” Major asked.

“I said you need to start—”

“No,” Major said. “What did you say about
things coming back?”

Samuel paused, disappointed his tirade
had no effect on Major. “A pocketknife.”

“From where?”

“From my father’s casket, where I left it
ten years ago.”

Major bent down, his knees creaking. He
grabbed Samuel by the shoulders and stared at his face. “Do you still have it?”
he asked in a hushed whisper.

Samuel nodded. He reached into his front
pocket and gripped the contents. He opened his fist to reveal a paperclip and
several coins, but no knife.

“I felt it just before I came into camp,”
Samuel said, his words trailing as he brushed the dirt and leaves aside,
expecting to find his knife where it had fallen from his pocket.

“It’s a reflection. It’s gone,” Major said.

“I had it with me during the hike.”

“Are you sure you had it?”

“I don’t know,” Samuel said. “I guess I’m
not sure of much anymore.”

Major stood and rubbed his chin. He
gathered a few items together and nodded at Samuel, instructing him to do the
same.

“I’d feel better if we got moving, put
some distance between us and the cloud. We can talk as we go. I’m guessing
we’re a five- or six-hour hike from the Barren. I can explain a lot before we
get there.”

Samuel brushed the dirt from his pants
and put both hands to his ears as if trying to keep his head together.

“Whatever. I think it would be easier if
I just ended it. I’m tired of dealing.”

“That’s what got you here in the first
place.”

Those who fell from the noose after
a suicide had a certain look about them. After speaking with many people
through many reversions, Major could identify them by the look in their eye.
The majority of souls in the reversion were suicides and the ones that weren’t,
like Mara, remained a mystery to Major.

“C’mon, let’s move. I still worry the
cloud hasn’t gotten to all of the wolves yet.”

***

“Seven.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“No, I’m not. Seven women.”

“At one time?”

Major smiled. The laugh lines in his face
told Samuel the man had enjoyed the finer indulgences in life.

“It was mostly me watching, but I jumped
in when I could. Needed to recharge the battery a few times. Those little pills
sure helped with that. The only problem was getting it back down. That’s where
the whiskey on the rocks came in handy. I’d wake up and they’d all be gone. It
would take my brain thirty or forty seconds to recalibrate, determine where the
hell I was and what happened the night before. I never remembered everything,
but enough to know the high-grade call girls don’t come cheap, and I’d have
some explaining to do to my accountant.”

Samuel pushed ahead as the path widened.
He came up on Major’s right as they curved around the base of the mountain. The
path descended with a gentle slope Samuel assumed would empty them into the
Barren. Samuel felt a renewed bounce in his step as he let the reversion take a
backseat to Major’s tale.

“How far back?” he asked Samuel.

“Huh?”

“Childhood? High School? The drug years?
How far back do you want me to go?”

“How long until we reach the Barren?”
Samuel asked.

“Long enough to get into the good stuff,”
Major said.

He pushed his headband up on his forehead
and looked over a shoulder as if measuring the progress of the cloud advancing
from the west.

“The path turns southwest for a bit
before straightening out back to the east. Just want you to know I’m not
walking us straight into the cloud.”

Samuel nodded. He drew a deep breath and
exhaled an exaggerated gust of air into the otherwise silent surroundings. “I
can’t get used to the silence.”

Major smiled. He paused for a moment
while his brain decided what he would share with Samuel. “We grew up in East
Harlem, Spanish Harlem, before Clinton moved his office there and made it
trendy again.”

Samuel frowned, becoming impatient with
his own memory. The names struck a familiar chord, like recognizing the face of
a lost acquaintance but not remembering his name. He decided to let Major
continue, and he hoped his memory would eventually catch up to fill in the gaps
of the world he once knew.

“My dad was a son of a bitch. He’d come
home from the corner bar and beat the shit out of my mom. My brother and I,
we’d hide under our beds. Not because he didn’t know we were there. He knew. We
stayed underneath it because he couldn’t get his barrel-chest far enough in to
grab us. Anyway, my mom was from the barrio, and I don’t ever remember finding
out how they hooked up. Quite a scene, right? Some pale, red-haired Irishman
with a sassy, Latina girl on his arm.”

Samuel looked at Major’s face and saw the
mix of cultures. The man’s nose was bulbous and red, but roots of black hair
snuck out from under the ponytail.

“By the time I was sixteen, I was running
with all the wrong folks. You know the story. We’d break into bodegas and go
right for the register. Later on, we’d even take a crack at those little ATMs
shoved in the corner of the market. You remember those? The ones that would
nail you with a five-dollar fee on top of what your bank would charge?”

Samuel sniffled.

“School sucked, and by the time I was
seventeen, I’d had enough of the petty shit. I got greedy, just like everyone
else. The subway stop at East 90th would provide us some sweet marks, the
assholes that lived on the Upper East Side in their multi-million-dollar
townhomes with iron bars on the doors and a blinking security pad at the front.
We’d jump ’em and get the cash when they came out of the station. Not sure why
so many got out on the wrong side of Broadway, but we’d make the most of it.

“Summer of ’88 I headed to the Jersey
Shore with the guys in the crew. They had a few dago contacts in Atlantic City
getting into the hooker and blow trades. Seemed like slapping bitches around
was easier than risking a cuff in Manhattan. That’s when I first realized I had
it.”

“Had what?” asked Samuel.

“The nose. I could smell deals a mile away.
Drug deals at first, which I eventually turned into legit businesses, like used
cars.”