Dark Screams, Volume 3 Read online

  Honestly, I had no idea what to do next. Not for several moments. She lay there, curled up on the bed, crying.

  “Please. Let me leave. I won’t tell anyone. I promise. J-Just let me go now,” she begged me.

  “No. You’ll tell. And you’re a liar. Just like you’re lying about not loving me. And I’m going to prove it to you. I’m going to make you tell me the truth.”

  I looked around the room a moment, lost for a second, but then I had a moment of inspiration and keeping an eye on her I went to my closet and grabbed two of my belts from where they were lying curled up into perfect reels.

  I went back to her and grabbed one of her fragile wrists and lashed it to the spindle in my headboard. How odd, I thought, that my bed was made perfectly for this. Almost…almost as though it were finally serving its true purpose in life. I knew the feeling well. I believe I was feeling it myself as well.

  She fought me. Screamed and kicked and fought me. Which made me think to lash down her legs as well. A trickier prospect, but I knew I had rope in the garage. I ran into the garage and hurried back into the house.

  As I came down the hall, about to enter my bedroom, I was suddenly met with a baseball bat slamming right across the bridge of my nose, crushing the bone and sending me flying back off my feet.

  I had never known such pain. My eyes watered and as I lay there dazed on the ground I could taste blood running down the back of my throat.

  I looked up and focused on Lisa Dorman as she stood over me and hefted the bat, ready to swing again. And swing she did, this time catching me in the left side of my rib cage. I could swear I heard bone snapping.

  “Help me, Lisa!” Stacey cried from the bedroom. Lisa kept a wary eye on me as she helped unlash one of Stacey’s hands from the bedpost. As she worked to free the other, Stacey said, “What the hell took you so long?”

  “Sorry,” Lisa snapped back at Stacey. “I didn’t know the little freak was going to tie you to his bed!”

  Stacey got to her feet, her blond hair clouding in a beautifully rumpled mess around her elegant shoulders. Both girls came up to me, looked down at me as if I were some kind of strange alien from another planet in need of studying.

  “Let’s get him to the bed,” Lisa suggested.

  “Yeah. Next time, you’re the one who’s going to be the bait. I think the little freak was going to rape me or something!”

  Lisa snorted out a laugh. “Oh, stop being so melodramatic.”

  Together they grabbed hold of my legs and hauled me into my bedroom. I felt such blinding pain as they lifted and shoved me onto the bed, I almost blacked out. I could feel myself flirting with the darkness. I was helpless as they tied my hands with my belts and my feet with the rope I had fetched from the garage.

  Once I was securely tied down, the girls stood beside the bed and eyed me once more.

  “Where should we start?” Lisa asked.

  Stacey moved over to her backpack and withdrew a compact. She viewed herself critically in the tiny mirror.

  “I’m going to have a fat lip,” she complained.

  “Will you just get over here!” Lisa said.

  Stacey sighed and closed the compact. She came over to stand beside Lisa again. She judged the situation for a moment.

  “I say fingers. I liked sucking the bones last time.”

  “You’re weird,” Lisa said with a roll of her eyes. “Fine. Fingers it is.”

  Lisa reached behind herself and pulled out a knife she had taken from my mother’s butcher block in the kitchen. She reached for my fingers on my left hand.

  Stacey leaned over me and smiled one of her beautiful smiles just for me.

  “I love you, Charlie Pearson,” she said.

  And this time, I could tell she meant it. I realized then that I was about to become a part of Stacey in a way no one else could claim. I was going to nourish her, sustain her. I would be joined with her on a cellular level.

  I couldn’t have been happier.

  The Lone One and Level Sands Stretch Far Away

  Brian Hodge

  We’d seen people come and go next door before, but this new arrival required the least amount of effort it was possible to take and still call it a move-in. Everything happened so quickly and quietly that we hardly even knew we were getting a new neighbor. A low-key flurry of springtime Saturday activity before we’d so much as had our morning coffee, and she was in, on the other side of the duplex’s adjacent walls.

  Tara decided to hate her on sight.

  “Her T-shirt pulled up while they were carrying in the futon.” Tara’s judgment sounded final and sour. “She’s got abs a gymnast would kill for.”

  Guys don’t think that way about other guys. We scan for weakness, even if we have to invent it. A male arrival wouldn’t have been a threat until the threat actively declared itself, and even then, any plus would have to be negated by a crushing minus. If he’s rich, he must be shallow. If he’s funny, he’s obviously covering up some deep, self-loathing neurosis. If he’s super-good-looking and fit, then he’s either brain-dead or a narcissist. Probably both.

  But for Tara, hating Marni was obligatory. All Tara and her muffin top could see when she looked at this newcomer was something that she herself was not.

  Marni and her abs had been there a week, still a stranger, when there was a knock at the door and we opened it to find her bearing gifts: a twelve-pack of craft-brewed ale and a Mississippi mud pie, homemade. Housewarming gifts, actually, and shouldn’t they have been headed the other direction? Yes, but that was part of her guileless genius.

  “I’ll leave it up to you guys, no pressure,” she said. “You can keep this all to yourself, in which case, enjoy. But I’m really hoping you’d rather bring it over for dinner tonight. You know, so you’re not coming empty-handed.”

  Five minutes later, a big wedge of the evening’s dessert met a premature fate as breakfast.

  “Oh my God. This is the greatest pie in the history of pies,” Tara said. “She even used dark chocolate. How did she know?”

  Tara decided that perhaps she’d been a bit harsh in her judgment.

  —

  Marni lived in a more spartan environment than anyone I’d seen since college, but whereas that had always been a consequence of economics, here it looked like a studied choice. What she did own, it wasn’t cheap crap, and she’d found the perfect place for all of it, each chair, each print, each slim cabinet redefining the empty space bounded by the cream walls and wooden floors into a study of balance and harmony.

  While we shared a duplex, it would be wrong to say that we each lived in halves. It was more of a 60/40 split, and we had the sixty. The house was an old Victorian that went back more than a century, with a pair of weather-beaten stone lions flanking the front walk.

  “It was the lions that sold me on the place. That, and the floors,” Marni told us. “Those lions look like they’ve seen it all.”

  Nobody knew anything about the original owners, not even our landlord, a retirement-age ex-hippie whose name, Bob, was far too dull for someone with such an epic beard, so we called him Gandalf the Tie-Dyed. Whoever they were, it felt as if Marni had rediscovered something about them and their era, because I’d never seen this side of the duplex looking so open, so spacious. They built such big rooms back then, I remarked, but we were the ones with so much more stuff, trying to cram it all into so much less space.

  “There were a lot fewer people back then. They had room to sprawl,” Marni said. “Anyway, for me it’s not about more stuff. It’s about just the right stuff, the stuff that matters.”

  Yeah, about that: When someone chooses to do with so comparatively little, it’s easy to spot what counts. There’s no clutter to cut through. The long, charcoal-hued scarf twining down either side of a curio cabinet? It had to have relevance, along with the seven items on the shelves—an eagle feather, a smooth stone of black and iridescent blue, an old leather-bound book scorched by fire, and more—even if we di
dn’t know their stories.

  But the framed print on a front room wall? This said something about her that was easier to pin down. It showed the wreckage of some statue that had seen far worse days than our stone lions, and even though it was emerging from, and set against, a sea of sand, with nothing for scale, something about it suggested that it was immense, or had been before time got hold of it.

  Across the bottom, eight words:

  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

  “I know that,” I said. “Where do I know that from?”

  “No telling,” she said. “But it’s originally from ‘Ozymandias,’ the Shelley poem.”

  If you connected enough dots, you’d see this was the dominant theme among these just-right things that surrounded her. The print was like a lobby poster for a gallery exhibit: photos of more modern ruins that showed the beauty in decay, and prints that depicted a more dreamlike and surreal take on—what would you call it, a post-human world? Then there were the books. She had three editions alone of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and while I’d never read it, the movie adaptation was the bleakest film I’d ever watched, so much so that Tara left the room before it was over.

  Yet for a woman who appeared obsessed by the end of the world, Marni had a disarming lack of dourness. She didn’t own a dining table, because she disliked the formality of them. Instead, she put us on the floor, all pillows and no shoes, gathered around a low table the height of something you’d find in a sushi place. She served up grilled vegetables and bite-sized pieces of meat and grain salads, all of it spiced to perfection and arranged around a communal bowl, and we scooped out what we wanted with wrappers torn from flatbread.

  “You can’t eat this way and finish as strangers,” she said. “We’ve been neighbors a week. I figured that was long enough to be strangers.”

  I suppose it was. An hour around her and I already felt that I knew her better than half the people who’d settled next to us, and almost everybody up and down the block. Nearly all of them were familiar, like streetlamp poles. I knew them by sight but never engaged them, and they certainly didn’t have names.

  “It’s just easier when you know who’s on the other side of the walls, don’t you think?” she said. “When you know them, and hear their stereo or TV, you want to cut them some slack, because they’re an actual person then, instead of some asshole who can’t find the volume control.”

  Tara looked unsure how to take this. “Is that a warning or a hint?”

  As we ate and talked and ate some more, and emptied the bottles of ale, I watched Marni without trying to be obvious about it, so I could try to pinpoint what it was about her that Tara hated at first. I did that sometimes, tried to see things through Tara’s eyes and run them through her filters, in an effort to not go through marriage as a total ignoramus of what made her tick. If she ever told me, “You don’t understand,” I could at least come back with that it wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d seen this all before, worst-case scenarios. Whenever I saw or overheard my mom telling my dad he didn’t understand, it was obvious that no, he really didn’t, and was baffled that someone could’ve expected him to try.

  So…what’s the trouble with Marni?

  You’d have to call her petite, already a strike against her, but she came off taller than she actually was, because she was so thin, a well-shaped band of sinew and wiry muscle. She was pretty in a chiseled fashion, with black hair that wasn’t quite shoulder length, worn in a simple choppy cut that the wind could blow any which way and still do no harm. Tara was the kind of blonde and unruly that took a half-hour of taming before she felt ready to leave home each morning.

  Marni didn’t have to flaunt anything to be appealing, and it may not have occurred to her to even try. Maybe that was the sore spot. Tara looked at her and saw someone who seemingly didn’t even have to try.

  Now, obviously effort was involved. We’d seen her knocking out pull-ups on the framework of an old, unused grape arbor in the backyard. Tara couldn’t do a pull-up. I couldn’t do a pull-up, not from a dead hang. But Marni made this look easy, as well.

  Smart? She was that, too. She was a code monkey for some local Internet startup, and praised them for being progressive enough to make it easy for employees who preferred working from home. She only had to go in a couple mornings per week, for meetings. The rest of the time, her commute was measured in hallways.

  Which Tara, who logged major travel hours as a buyer for a chain of home-décor stores, could not have known upfront, but then, women are frightening that way. They can look at someone, and pick things out of vapor and molecules.

  “She’s nice, but she’s a little strange, too, don’t you think?” Tara said once we were back on our side.

  “The jury’s still out.” Actually, my jury had already come in, delivered its not guilty verdict, and been dismissed for a job well done, but I wasn’t going to play this game.

  “And what’s with the gloom-and-doom fetish?”

  “She did send us home with the rest of the pie.”

  “Well, of course she’s not going to eat any more of it. That was bribery. She’s probably got her finger down her throat in the bathroom right this minute.”

  Tara tiptoed to our shared wall and pressed her ear against it as if she expected to hear gagging, and that was it for both of us, we had to start laughing.

  Then she went to Tara-land, what I called the mute place she went whenever one group of gears or another started turning in her head. She walked a few steps, stopped and looked around at our copious stuff. Repeat. Repeat. One hand reached across her belly to cup the opposite elbow, and her other fingers tapped her chin. I knew this pose. I dreaded this pose.

  “Do we really need that chair?” she said. “Couldn’t we do without that chair?”

  My heart sank. “I like that chair.”

  But she was beyond hearing. “And that end table. What was I thinking when I picked out that end table.”

  catalyst (noun). A substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. A person or thing that precipitates an event. An agent of change.

  Most weekends, a group of Marni’s friends would stop by, dwell awhile—long enough to down a cup of coffee—and then they would all head out together in one or two cars. Or Marni would take off on her own, and we might not hear the door clunk shut upon her return until that evening.

  But one summer Sunday morning, the assembly set off from her place, on foot. Through our front window, I saw six of them stream down the walkway and, in perfect formation, split into two lines, and one after another they went vaulting lengthwise over the stone lions. A couple of guys hit the ground on the other side, did a forward roll, and popped up running. Another girl did a complete forward flip and landed without missing a step.

  It irked me at first—come on, our majestic beasts deserved more respect than to be treated like pommel horses. Then, abruptly, I wondered: When had it come to this? I might as well grab a cane, shake my fist, and start yelling: You damn kids get off my lions!

  Then they were off and running for real, the entire world their obstacle course.

  Parkour. Marni was into parkour.

  I asked her about it one day the following week, when I was taking a bogus sick day from the market research firm where I tracked trends in painkiller use so mind-numbing they could make you turn to hard drugs as an antidote. Marni was out back, in the shade, working on her laptop. She said parkour was just something to do that was fun, and kept her sociable, since she couldn’t much count on her job for that, and she wasn’t the type for bars. Anybody could sit at a table until they blacked out. It was a lot more fun to treat the table like a track hurdle.

  “You should come with us,” she said.

  “And the rest of you could start a betting pool on the first bone I’d break,” I said. “I haven’t even been running since college, I guess.”

  Her look was frank and inquisitive. “
Why did you stop?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  And this wasn’t good, not any of it. I’d done the math based on a few remarks from that first—and so far, only—dinner, and put her age at twenty-seven, around there. If she was five years younger, we were roughly equidistant on either side of thirty, but it suddenly seemed a bigger gulf than 1,825 days. She and her friends, what I’d seen of them, really were different. A generational chasm in just half a decade, and I hated the feeling of it, even in a world where sixty was dubbed the new forty, so thirty-two had to be the new…what? Why, we were practically born just hours apart.

  Instead, this was a feeling of being left behind, of having turned my back on possibilities I hadn’t even known about. Five years. It had to be five years. Tara and I had been married for five years. Not once had anything come along to make me think I’d made a mistake. But living to one hundred and beyond wasn’t supposed to be any big whoop in our future. We were all supposed to be centenarians in the making. So I couldn’t have waited another five years, just to be sure?

  “Tara says it’s like you’re in training for Ragnarök,” I told her.

  Finally, something that caught her off guard. “Ragnarök?”

  “The Viking Armageddon. It sounds like the worst one, really.”

  She grinned, but underneath it was the sort of wary weariness that came from having had this conversation before. “You noticed that, huh?”

  “Well, it wasn’t like we had to go snooping in the medicine cabinet to see it.”

  “Some people find it a little off-putting. Morbid.”

  “Some people think the world’s gone off its axis when their email server goes down,” I said. And why had I just drawn an example from the Tara files?

  “I don’t know where it comes from. But I don’t suppose that part matters.” Her eyes took on a look of distances and mists. “It’s always been there. I’d have these…daydreams, I guess teachers would call them when they see you staring at the window. I’d imagine everything on fire. Or falling down. Or everything just sitting empty. And what people were left, they’re like mice scurrying around. You know how mice run alongside the walls to try to keep from being in the open? Like that.”