The Collected Horrors of Tim Wellman Page 4

  "I stopped being shocked when I learned the truth about Santa Claus," I said.

  "Well, we were lovers," she continued. "She found some boyfriend a couple months ago, after that she cut me off." She finally seemed satisfied with her hair and turned back around. "My name is Karen, by the way. What's yours?"

  "Tommy," I said. "Tommy Marlin."

  "Well, Tommy Marlin, you still haven't told me why you're standing here in a not-so-innocent girl's hotel room playing with your... gun."

  "You watch Susan leave earlier?"

  "No, not past the door," she said. "I was sleeping off an afternoon cocktail. We're supposed to leave this dump tomorrow. Susan said her man was funding us, sending us up to Vermont to a big country house he has up there, so we were celebrating a little early."

  I nodded. I didn't particularly care whether I hurt her or not, but I was having trouble blurting out what had happened to Susan. "Susan is dead." It was easier than I thought.

  Karen rushed me and grabbed the lapels of my jacket. "Dead?!" Her eyes were wide in disbelief and mine were watering from the remains of alcohol on her breath. I don't like strangers getting too close to me and out of instinct I pushed her back and she stumbled and fell across the bed. She rubbed her lips with the back of her hand, checking for blood even though I never went near her lips. Must have been used to being shoved around. "Dead? But how?"

  "Jumped off the Cole building over on 53rd and Wilmont," I said. "Sorry."

  She started crying and hid her face in a pillow. I used the time to look around the room. There was a book of matches on top of the TV, Top Heavy Club; neither girl would have qualified. I glanced at her, still sobbing, and decided I had enough time to rifle through the dresser drawers... part of a candy bar, a stub from movie. As I turned around, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at me. "She wouldn't have jumped."

  "I saw it, she was alone, she jumped," I said. I took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She refused. I lit one up and took a long drag. "You know anything about monsters?"

  She looked at me, her face as cold as stone, and then slowly nodded. "She said her new man had been talking some weird shit like that," she said. "Monsters. We both laughed at the thought at first, but then Susan said she saw one following her. Then one day she just stopped talking about them but I could tell she was still worried."

  "After she made her big hit debut on the street, one of the things grabbed her up before she could make a curtain call," I said. "Cops emptied their guns into the son of a bitch until their hands got tired. Didn't phase it at all."

  She stood up and opened the only drawer I hadn't had the chance to check and pulled out a small address book. "Her man's number is in here. Steve Saunders." She thumbed through till she found it and picked up the filthy old phone and dialed the number. She waited. There was no answer. "Let me try this other number." She got the same result.

  "He work at the Top Heavy Club?" I said, twirling the matchbook between my fingers like a two-bit coin.

  "Yep," she said. "Owns the joint." She grabbed her purse from the dresser and walked toward the door. "I need some answers."

  I nodded. I didn't need answers, but I wanted answers. I followed her out the door.

  ***

  The place was a dump. I wasn't sure how they could afford to give away free matches. But whatever money they were making, they sure as hell weren't spending it on pretty dancers; they reminded me of my mother. Karen grabbed my hand and pushed her way through the crowd and got us to a door in the back wall behind the stage. I had decided she was an okay gal and was pretty sure she was too dumb to be deceptive. "This is his office," she said. She knocked and when there was no answer, she pounded on the door with her fist.

  "I ain't seen him come in tonight," someone said from behind us. We both turned and looked up. He was a big guy, the kind of frame that usually balances a tiny little brain on top, but he didn't seem threatening. "Ya can go on in if ya wants, though, Karen."

  "Thanks Vance," she said. I nodded, not caring to make solid eye-contact. She turned the handle and we both went through the door and closed it behind us.

  It was a normal enough office with an old desk full of papers, a couple of gray metal filing cabinets, and a badly stained sofa. It wasn't really what I was expecting, though I wasn't sure exactly what I was expecting... a doorway to hell, maybe, well-marked with a neon sign.

  "Not here," I said.

  "He's always here at night," she said. "He says if he's not here these bitches will steal 'im blind." She walked to his desk and picked up the phone and dialed the numbers again. There was still no answer. She looked at me and cocked her head. "How do I know Susan is really dead?"

  "Because I told you," I said.

  "That ain't enough," she said. She plopped down on the sofa and lifted her legs up into a reclining position. "And you ain't jack-shit to me and I just bit on the first worm ya dangled in front of me."

  I pulled a cigarette from my pack with my lips and picked up a pack of matches from the desk. "I know what I saw," I said as I struck the match. "You can believe whatever you want to believe." I held my pack toward her. "Sure you don't want a smoke, dollface?"

  She reached out and dug a filter king out with her long fingernails and I tossed the matches on her stomach. "Thanks."

  I nodded my head toward the door. "You ever think about how much that big oaf looks like a monster?"

  She took a long draw. "I ain't never seen one of the things, remember?"

  "That's right," I said. "If you hadn't been drunk you could have looked out the door and seen a van full of them," I said. "Susan got in that van."

  "How do you know that?" she said. She sat up and put her feet back on the floor.

  "That bum outside your room..."

  "Johnny?"

  "Yeah. Johnny saw them," I said. "And saw her get in with them."

  Karen sat silently for a moment, staring at the floor. She took another draw and flicked the ashes on the floor and rubbed them out with her shoe. "So, she went with them?"

  I nodded. "Like they were bosom buddies," I said.

  "She got a call right before she left," Karen said. "She acted like it was nothing, but I could tell it spooked her."

  "You remember the phone number in your room?"

  "Yeah, 555-5654," she said.

  I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed, not the hotel room number, but a friend I knew I could wrangle a favor from. "Detective Johnson, please." I waited for the police station switchboard to connect me. "Terrence? It's me. Listen, I need a favor. Yeah, I know. By the way, how is that little whore you got holed up out on Route 27? Ya need to invite me to her eighteenth birthday party. I thought so. I need you to run down a call for me. Yeah. Someone called 555-5654 about four or five hours ago; I need to know who. Yeah, okay. Call me back... number here is 555-4327. Yeah." I hung up and looked at a few of the photos on the walls. Not my type, really, too artsy. Naked women should be photographed in direct light.

  "Hey, what's your angle on this, anyway?" she said. She pointed to a photograph. "Needs a shave."

  I nodded. "I don't have an angle. Just an innocent bystander who saw something that was never supposed to be seen." I looked down at her, a good foot shorter than me. "I like stories with neat and tidy endings."

  "That simple?"

  "Yep."

  "You fall in love with her?"

  The question cut me to the quick because I had asked myself that same thing several times throughout the evening. Why else would I give a shit about her or anything else. I could be home drowning in a brandy snifter instead of going from one seedy shithole to another, searching for something that, even if I found it, wouldn't make the ending any better. "What if I did?"

  She shrugged. "Don't mean nothin' to me," she said. "Everyone else she ever come in contact with did too."

  "Including you?" I said.

  She nodded. "Me more than anyone."

  The phone rang and broke
the moment and I walked across the room and answered it. "Yeah? Oh, okay. Yeah, I see." I picked up a pencil and scribbled the address down on a piece of paper. "Okay, thanks Terrence. Your secret is still safe with me, pal. Yeah. See ya."

  She stood behind me and looked around my arm. "That's Steve's address," she said. "I ain't never been there, but I seen the address enough."

  "So, he called Susan," I said. I had another piece of the puzzle to put in the bag but not enough to pour it out on the table and start assembling it yet. But then help arrived.

  The door burst open and a little guy with slicked back hair and greasy face, but a too-expensive suit and shoes, sauntered in. Karen jumped as if she had seen a ghost, then ran over to him and grabbed his arms. "Steve! We been looking for you!"

  He looked over at me, paused for a moment, and then nodded. I nodded back. "A new boyfriend?" he said.

  "Steve," there's horrible news. Susan is..."

  "Susan is what?" Susan was not dead; she just walked into the room.

  "Susan?!" Karen jumped off the floor with excitement and then grabbed her up in her arms and swung her around. "You were supposed..." She suddenly let go and turned and pointed at me. "You liar!" She stomped over to me and took a swing but I was able to duck out of the way. "You fuckin' liar!"

  "Hey, what's going on?" Steve said.

  "He said Susan was dead!" Karen yelled. "He said... said he saw her jump off a building."

  "Is that so?" Steve said. I watched as Susan, or whoever the woman was, walked past the desk and stood facing the wall. I was beginning to lose my crush on her. She wasn't looking at the pictures, I could tell. She simply seemed to be hiding her face from me and Karen. Steve looked at me. "Did you see anything else?"

  I nodded. "I saw the monster." There was no reason to lie, I had witnesses and I knew what I had seen. I had touched her dead body.

  Steve nodded. "I see."

  "I wish you hadn't decided to butt in," Susan said. She seemed to begin crying; I could see her shaking.

  "Hey, Susie Q!" Karen said. "What's wrong baby?" She ran across the room toward Susan, but Steve punched her square in the face, dropping her to the floor immediately. And then for good measure he kicked her in the stomach, flipping her over on her back. She was out cold.

  "What you saw was a game," Steve said. "Something we have to play."

  "People always rise from the dead in your game?" I said. I figured my life was measured in minutes, now, at most. I wasn't scared, really, you can't be scared when you have no other options. Fear comes when you have choices.

  "If it's played correctly," he said. "She ran, I recovered. As much as possible, anyway." He reached back and stuck his arm out the door and motioned. The big brute and a couple of others at least equal in size showed up and stood behind Steve and he took a pair of gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on. "Human is a matter of grays, not black and white." The last thing I remember was him lunging toward me and the skin of the big guys turning red.

  ***

  I woke up in a dumpster someplace different than anyplace I had ever been before. A quick glance at the skyline revealed a sign, then another. Spokane. It was hard to breath, and I rubbed my nose, a big mistake. It was smashed up and caked full of dry blood. I picked around at it gingerly until I tunneled a small passageway. That too was a mistake because I could smell the shit and refuse I was lying in. But there was something else, something beside me. I managed to refocus my eyes and discovered I was grabbing Karen by the breasts. Not a bad way to wake up under different circumstances, I thought. But she was alive and warm, though Spokane was colder than a motherfuck.

  I managed to throw a leg over the lip of the dumpster and then slid out and immediately puked my guts out. I've woken up in worse condition, but that had usually been my own damned fault. I pulled myself back up and reached into the dumpster and grabbed Karen's shoulders and shook her. There was no response. She had a bloody nose, but otherwise there were no visible injuries. I slapped her, then harder, until she stirred. I started to slap her again, but she grabbed me by the wrist.

  "Enough!" she moaned. "I'm awake." She opened her eyes and blinked several times. "You look horrible." She stretched her back and took a deep breath before she sat up. "A dumpster, huh?"

  I nodded and reached my arms around her back and legs, lifted her out, and sat her down on solid ground. "It doesn't get better," I said. "We're in Spokane."

  She shivered and rubbed her arms. "It's colder than a motherfuck!"

  I nodded. "I don't guess your purse is in there anywhere?"

  She looked inside the dumpster and used a discarded plunger handle to rake around in the slop. "No."

  "My wallet is gone, too," I said. I knew what had happened. We got too close to something and it turned around and bit us on the ass. It had happened to me before, but the bite was never this bad. Why they didn't just kill us, I didn't know. Maybe if they killed us we'd end up like Susan, whatever the hell she was, and their game would get too crowded.

  "You sure she was dead?" Karen said. "Susan, I mean."

  "Yep, splattered into pieces," I said. "And I'm sure about seeing the monster, too."

  "So, whoever that was, it ain't my Susan," she said. She pulled her pumps off and banged the heels on the edge of the dumpster until they came loose and then slipped them back on her feet. "Then, let's go."

  I was really developing a thing for the girl. "You think we can walk two thousand miles?" I reached into my pocket, still had my smokes. I pulled out the pack and shook one out for Karen, then slid one out for myself. I had to search a couple of pockets, but finally found a matchbook in my pants. "Hah," I said. I showed it to Karen. It was blank. There was a lot more going on than either of us had wanted to be involved in, but sometimes the fight comes to you. "We can walk to a place with a phone," I said as I lit both our cigarettes. "I got a number I can call, get us back east." I felt her loop her arm around mine and we began to walk.

  "Whatcha gonna do when we get back there?"

  "Don't know," I said. "It'll be hard to find a trail. I'll bet you a dollar to a donut that every trace of the Top Heavy Club and Steve Saunders will be gone."

  "You got a plan?"

  "Nope."

  "Nothin'?"

  "Nope," I said. "Might be best for the both of us to just forget what happened and get on with our lives."

  "Could you live like that?" she said.

  "Nope," I said. I couldn't live like that.

  The Girls In Room Three

  Miss Evelyn Crone climbed the seven worn stone steps up to the old school house double doors, turned the knob, and began her new life. The news had come as a shock, but a welcome victory after three years as a substitute. But now, finally, she would have her own class, even though it meant moving to the tiny town of Ceres, West Virginia, population, assuming all was well at the retirement home on the particular day they were counted, 2316. The building itself was an old wooden two story and had six classrooms, one for each grade, two bathrooms, and an eighth room used as a combination Principal's office, library, and supply closet, all on the ground floor. The second floor was only used for storage because the floors were considered unsafe for students to gather on for fear of falling through. When the Principal had shown her around the week before, he had briefly alluded to it, but nothing more was said. A smaller, newer brick building served as the cafeteria and completed the school campus, apart from an old dormitory building in the adjacent lot, rarely used now since most teachers felt more comfortable living in their own apartments or houses.

  "Ah! Miss Crone," the balding, middle-aged man said, stepping out of his office as she walked by. "I wanted to check up on you. How do you find the teacher's dorm?"

  "Oh, Principal Stevens," she said, as she fought to control the armload of papers and books the sudden stop had loosened from her tight grip. "It's fine. I wouldn't expect more than a quiet room and a comfortable bed."

  "Well, it might be 2013 everywhere else in the w
orld, but we Ceresians believe in taking things a bit slower," he said. "Hell, most of us are still watching VHS tapes and listening to cassettes."

  "I'm sure I'll get used to it, sir," she said. "Even come to love it. It's not so much smaller than my hometown."

  "Fine, fine," he said. "Do you remember where your classroom is?"

  "Yes sir, room three," she said.

  "Fine, fine," he said. "Do carry on, then, and have a great day!"

  She smiled, and then continued down the hallway until she reached her classroom. She looked through the window first; the room was full of new third graders, talking, reading, standing around desks. But one thing was odd, all of her students were girls. She turned back toward the Principal's office. "Sir!"

  "Oh, yes?" he yelled.

  She quickly walked back to where he was standing. "Sir, there are only girls in my class."

  "Ah, yes, about that." He fidgeted with his tie and cleared his throat. "You see, Miss Crone, is it okay to call you Evelyn, all of last year's second grade boys were... well, there was an accident."

  "An... an accident?"

  "Yes, well, I suppose we should have told you, but other things came up, and it's so rare for the county to allow us a new teacher, we didn't want ta spook ya. You see, all the boys that would have been in your class went on a fieldtrip a week before school was over this past summer. A fieldtrip to one of the old coke ovens out on Route Fifty-Two, just out of Kenoa. And, well, you need to get to your class, so I'll make it short. All the boys decided to go inside one of the ovens, and when they did, it collapsed on them. Damnedest thing, they seemed solid as houses. Their guide said they'd be safe. But it killed them all, thirteen little lads gone in a matter of seconds. So, the only third graders we have left in this town are girls."

  "Oh my," she said. "I... that's horrible."

  Yes, well, we live on as best we can," he said. "But most all of us at least knew one of the boys personally."

  "Yes," she said. "Well, thank you for telling me."

  "Fine, fine," he said. "Well, let us be about our work. My office is always open if you need anything."