9 Tales Told in the Dark 3 Read online

  “Just like taxidermy,” Dale had laughed.

  Johnny shuddered at the word then. He shuddered at the word now. What was Dale trying to tell him, he wondered. From time to time in their conversation, Dale had sounded a little crazy. Maybe he really was crazy. Could he have snuck the body of Elizabeth Pryor out of the hospital and back to his house? No, that was ridiculous. But what if he had? What if he really was a skilled taxidermist and had preserved the corpse? Johnny’s first inclination was to get up and leave but something, concern for an old friend perhaps, kept him glued to the couch.

  Over and over in their talk, Dale had expressed how distressed he felt dealing with the living. Did he really prefer the company of the dead? Johnny could hear a clanging noise from the basement. Someone or something was on the move.

  Johnny was no psychiatrist but he knew people. He could get Dale in touch with the right doctor. The noise was louder. It was a series of bumps. It sounded as if something metallic was being pushed up the cellar stairs. Before he could get up to see what was going on, Dale had wheeled a gurney into the parlor. There was something on it, definitely a human shape but it was covered with a sheet.

  “Look, Dale,” Johnny said as he rose from the couch, “maybe we should talk about this.”

  His face was white. Dale, on the other hand, appeared unperturbed by Johnny’s anxious manner.

  “For a doctor, you always were a squeamish one, Johnny.”

  “In my line of work, I…”

  “I understand. Me, I’m a taxidermist. I work with dead things. I had a job in the mortuary for the longest time but I quit that. I’d rather work from home. It gives me more time with my sweet little Bess.”

  “But she’s…”

  “Did you want to come closer?”

  He beckoned Johnny to stand beside him at the head of the gurney but he backed farther away.

  “It’s okay. I don’t have to…”

  “Bessie, I want you to meet my good old pal, Johnny.”

  Dale flung back the sheet, someone said “hi” and Johnny collapsed on the floor.

  “Damn!” shouted Dale. “Did I say Bessie? I meant Jessie. Jessie Lyons. You remember her. It was just a joke. Taxidermy. Elizabeth Pryor. That day of our first autopsy when you nearly lost it. I am a taxidermist but you don’t think I stuff humans do you. I did do my own hamster. I was gonna show you her at first. She’s my stuffed little Bessie. But then I decided what a great idea it’d be to have Jess lie on the gurney and jump out at you.”

  As Dale rattled on, Jessie sprang to her feet and knelt down beside the fallen Johnny.

  “Should I call an ambulance,” Dale blurted out.

  “You’re the doctor,” said Jessie.

  “Is he dying? It must be his heart or something.”

  Jessie looked up at him pale-faced, sobbed gently, “I think he’s dead.”

  “Dead!” exclaimed Dale. “Well that’s all right then.”

  THE END.

  THE LONELY-EYED STRANGER-----By Jason Palmer

  The hooded stranger cut a tall man shape out of the wind-ripped silver sea beyond the door. Layers of rough-cut hides covered his head and body and dangled in strips around his knees looking as cold and hard as concrete. Coils of snow bounced over his shoulders and dusted the floor while the presence of him entered ahead and silenced the room.

  I stopped with a mug full of soapy water and soda taps warm in my hand. The draft that came across the bar cut into me. At the first table inside the door, four hunters stopped conspiring around their table.

  The hooded figure moved inside. He stopped beneath the moose head and stared straight on while my guests leaned in their chairs trying to get a look at the crazy bastard. No bush pilot would fly into this storm, so where had he come from? It almost made me want to laugh. Just a tickling in the gut.

  He must have felt their eyes, moved deeper inside to rob them of the view of his face. His boots – skins bound with leather thongs - chuffed on the plank floor. I couldn’t see his features beneath the fur-lined hood, which was like a cave. The clothes were the kind only seen in old photographs. Every once in a while some hunter or backpacker who’d gotten lost would come staggering out of the woods days after disappearing, but from the look of this guy, he’d have to have gotten lost about a hundred years ago. Again something about it almost made me want to laugh. I stood waiting with a rag over my shoulder.

  Then the door swung closed like a blast from a shotgun, cutting off the sound of twisting river ice and razoring northerly winds. Cutting off any half-formed notions about the stranger.

  He kept his head low as he approached, then perched himself creakingly on a stool, staying hunched and disguised and leaning his elbows on the knotted pine bar. His layers of leathery rags reeked of fish, and the stored-up cold of them swallowed the surrounding heat. For a second I thought I heard something outside to the north, on the lee side of the building. I imagined I heard the low whinnying and yelping of dogs, like a ghost on the air. But a person imagines hearing a lot of things during a storm like this. It’s a funny time when the oldest part of the mind near the base of the spine kicks on and listens for things that nowadays are only found buried beneath rock and ice.

  I stood not quite in front of the stranger, placing my hands on the bar. “Jesus, mister,” I said. “Where did you come in from?”

  He straightened to his full height on the stool then, and his chin came up, the hood falling back just enough for me to see his face. I threw up my arms and backed into the shelves behind the bar with a clank of bottles.

  ###

  I gaped. I gaped at his Y-shaped, grey-green face. At the branches of the bony Y were two big black sea-grape eyes. At the nexus were two tiny black slits, so neat they were almost pretty. Below that a mouth so bitter and puckered that it might have been scratched out by razors. Tiny flat teeth like dog’s teeth scraped along each other as the jaw worked.

  The stranger just stared into space just below the horizon, swart in his hides. I couldn’t move, could hardly breathe.

  I felt all eight of my boarders sitting as frozen as I was. Watt Jenson’s blue-grey eyes were hard triangles like a jack-o-lantern’s eyes, and this was as close to round as I’d ever seen them. But all they had was the intuition that something was wrong. They weren’t looking at what I was looking at.

  Eventually my transmission stopped slipping and my brain started working again. Seconds pounded by, making deep footprints in time. Nobody moved. No one spoke. The mug full of taps and warm soapy water grew heavy in my hand. The stranger’s fine nostrils flexed just slightly as it breathed.

  Part of me started to get exasperated by the silence. If this had been a movie or a tv show, something would have happened by now to move things along. Somebody would have said or done something. One of my boarders. The stranger. But they didn’t. I looked at the stranger. The other eight men in the room looked at me. It seemed to go on and on. Then I realized that the person – the only person – to do something here was me. It was my place. I was responsible.

  I didn’t know what to say – who would? - so I just said what anyone who happened to be wearing an apron and standing behind a bar would say: “Maybe you’d like a drink.”

  I felt Watt’s eyes twitch to me, saw his salt-and-pepper mustache click to one side.

  The stranger just kept staring, if that’s what those great dark eyes did, at all that brown and green glass lining my shelves. After a moment, he took down the hood of his parka, and sound burst from the tables: gasps, a shout, and the scraping of chairs as their leg muscles fired in surprise. One of the younger men from the back table started to stand, then slowly sat back down. Watt and his group of older fellows shared a table in the middle of the room, and they stared quietly, their moustaches twitching like mouse whiskers. One of them glanced out the window and then back at the stranger, calculating his chances of escape.

  No one could get more than few hundred feet on foot. Even if they did, they wouldn’t l
ast out there, and the storm would have to pass before the amphibian could take off from the Narook.

  It took an effort to steady my hand. I poured a whiskey and set it near the stranger’s arm, not getting too close.

  At first it didn’t touch it. I didn’t know why it would. But a moment passed, and then — small miracle — the stranger picked up the drink and knocked it back. Whatever it was, it drank whiskey like a veteran alcoholic.

  Then I thought maybe the fluid would poison him or he’d throw it up again. I tried not to stare. The black eyes glazed over and seemed to roll back, and two minty membranes slipped up half covering them, and something about the stranger seemed to sag. The stillness and silence returned. I didn’t know what else to do, so I offered it another.

  Beyond not knowing what else to do was another reason. I wanted to stranger content, doing something with its hands. Better that way. Because almost immediately I had sensed – at least, if it had been a man, this would have been the feeling I had about him – that the stranger was dangerous.

  Without taking its ragged mitten off, the stranger moved the shotglass around the surface of the bar, seeming to consider it.

  It hadn’t taken much, but I was out of ideas, at least until the stranger got tired of drinking. I looked into the restaurant, where there seemed to be two different ideas about what was really important, now: Watt and his friends stared at me. I was the one with the gun, the working telephone (as far as I knew). But the younger boys near the door stared at the stranger’s back. Occasionally they stole glances at each other.

  That struck me as odd. The younger boys, not Watt and his bunch. It was as if, for them, no one else was here but themselves and the stranger. I knew of no reason why that should be…only that their behavior reminded me kids worried about the authorities. Something about last night stirred in my memory. It had been warm. I remembered that. It was hard to think with the stranger perched on a stool in front of me. It was hard to do anything but look and wonder.

  The sheer cold lonesomeness radiating off it did not abate. If things had been otherwise, I would have had endless questions for it. It was clearly intelligent. But the stranger sat there like a living winter gravestone, strangling my words in my gut. The room seemed to revolve slowly around him.

  I didn’t get too close. I didn’t move too far.

  ###

  The stranger did not react to the third shot I placed in front of it except that his head inclined ever so slightly; then I knew what he wanted. Of course I did. I laid the whiskey bottle near the crook of his elbow.

  As the stranger poured another drink, my eye caught movement at the other end of the room. Instinctively I did not react to it, didn’t look up or give any sign that I had seen anything.

  One of the young hunters stood up with a 20-gauge in his hands and was preparing to point it at the stranger. He slowly and quietly pumped a round into the chamber. I remember looking at my own hand on the bar, and feeling that concrete had dried around it.

  I felt the stranger tense as the boy raised the weapon.

  Without looking up, I shook my head just slightly, hoping the boy would see. I could feel instinctively that the stranger knew everything. Where the boy was, what he was doing. What I was feeling and probably everyone else in the room.

  The boy set the stock firmly against his shoulder and raised the barrel until I could see the black-eyed bore out the corner of my eye. I didn’t know whether he really intended to shoot. I couldn’t seem to think why he would or wouldn’t. Nothing made sense, and everything did. Fear made his face livid, red from holding his breath, lips liver-hued, eyebrows jacking up and down as he tried to focus through sweat.

  That was when it came back to me, in that hyper-real moment before the shot went off. Maybe it was the moment of my death, the one that is supposed to stretch on and on. Maybe that moment is just an incredible lucidity when the mind tries to make up for all the reflecting it’s about to miss out on.

  They were out-of-staters come up for big game a week ago, and they’d started out getting up early and staying gone most of the day. But gradually they’d gotten around to drinking more and sleeping in, hunting close by enough that I could hear them popping off rounds in a woods. Last night they’d wanted bottles and stayed out late, drinking and shooting. It had been unseasonally warm – the kind of warm that can visit for a few hours before the worst storms – and I’d heard them stammer in at some darker-than-hell hour sounding drunk and worried. Their boots clomped in the upstairs hall outside my bedroom door, and I’d heard fierce whispering. At first they all went into their room, but a few minutes later, two or three of them had come back into the hall and whispered and growled at each other some more.

  They’d looked in the morning the way they’d sounded at night, the four of them hunched over a table far from where I could hear them, tracing their fierce words in the air. They didn’t talk; they made speeches.

  Nerved up like he was, I thought the boy was just as likely to hit me. I felt my blood turn to lead. Who to betray? The boy who could put down this specter but might hit me instead, or the stranger who hadn’t actually done anything wrong?

  It was quickly out of my hands.

  The stranger had stored up momentum in the subtle twist of his body so that when he struck he was like a mongoose. He spun on his stool and planted his heels. A pistol leaped into his hand, a big old six-shooter with electrical tape around the grip. The mitten had disappeared. He aimed mechanically, with no more emotion than if he’d been about to plink a beer can off a fencepost.

  I threw my arm across my face.

  The explosion sounded like the day the old gas range blew, putting the iron stove lids in the wall. The young fellow slid down the door beneath the moose head leaving a moon of blood on the door. The smell of the discharge filled the air near the bar. The gun hung suspended in the air for a minute, challenging anyone else who wanted to try it. Then it stuck the long-barreled weapon back through its belt and sat down for another drink. Its jaw worked.

  I couldn’t move again. The situation had changed. There were words for this, now. Violence. Murder. Police. But if the stranger knew these words or cared for them, it showed no sign. It sat, and drank, and gnashed its little dogteeth. And nothing was going to happen here except by its consent. If it had been a man, I’d say the world had not seen such a man for a long time. Full of sorrow, damned even, but formidable. Its face had the strange quality that some animal faces do, of seeming to be intelligible to human beings.

  I was still in front of it, feeling like a barkeep in one of those old western saloons where bad men walked tall. I thought about the phone on the wall. I was ten feet from it. It hung there at the end of the bar between the Psalms calendar and the fake jackalope head one of Watt’s friends had donated as a gag years ago. The phone was off-white and seemed to glow like a talisman, an object so ordinary and now like a magic drainplug on this crazy situation, if I could just get to it.

  I looked at the phone and back at the stranger. It paid no special notice to my glances toward the end of the bar but always gave off the feeling of being very aware.

  In fact, I doubted it knew what a phone was. Not just because of its otherworldly appearance but because of its ancient rags and the fact that it seemed to have nothing modern with it. Even the ice-blue frostbite scars on that terrible face were old. Yes, they were old. It’d been here a long time. Even something about the oddly intelligible expression said so. What it made me think of was a movie line. One from way back. ‘I’d never seen a man so….” It was from Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam flick. ‘I’d never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart.’

  I’d never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart. I wondered where it’d come from. But whatever it was, wherever from, in here it was the one with the gun. And what were the rest of us, hostages?

  The phone was so close…so far away. As sure as I was that the stranger didn’t know a phone from a rock – not to look at – I was j
ust as sure that someone who had traveled as far as he must have would know a communication device when he saw it. I thought it would know instantly. Then that big six-shooter would come up.

  Lines might even be down anyway because of the storm. Probably were. And once they go down up here, the county doesn’t bother fixing them until spring. I imagined them finding us in April or May when the river was up and our dead flesh was just beginning to thaw. Six of us, anyway. Or was the stranger good enough to re-load before someone took him down or got away?

  No one looked at the man who’d been shot. His friends seemed frozen in their seats; Watt and his bunch had become transparent eyeballs. They waited for me to do something. I needed time to think. I’d been in a few scrapes when I was younger, and now I remembered that hateful crowding sensation in the brain, a hundred different decisions bunching into too little time like a train collision.

  Whatever else was coming, all I could think of was to try and put it off a bit more. It sounded crazy to me, but I said, “Maybe you’re hungry. I can get you something to eat.” Then, not knowing whether it was necessary or wise, I touched my fingers to my lips to indicate what I meant.

  The stranger didn’t reply. I imagined him listening only to some gruesome inner voice. The face was legible only to a certain point. Beyond that point, I didn’t know what emotion I was seeing. But a man could be that way, too. I didn’t want to say anything else. Instead I bent down – slowly – to get the little wire rack with the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, and A-1 sauce on the shelf under the counter.

  And just like that it seemed like I was totally removed from the situation…until I came face to face with the walnut stock of my old Winchester .22, laid across a low shelf. I froze in a squat, looking at it.