by David Connor
Table of Contents
Two Hearts
Book Details
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
About the Authors
Two Hearts
DAVID CONNOR
E. F. MULDER
Following a lightning strike that causes his nervous system to go haywire, Frank is left unable to touch another living thing. Though resigned to being a lonely freak, he ever hopes that someone, somewhere, might love him.
But his life goes from bad to worse when someone does…
Two Hearts
By David Connor and E.F. Mulder
Published by Less Than Three Press LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.
Edited by Amanda Jean
Cover designed by Aisha Akeju
This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.
First Edition November 2016
Copyright © 2016 by David Connor and E.F. Mulder
Printed in the United States of America
Digital ISBN 9781620048733
Print ISBN 9781620048740
Thank you SO MUCH to everyone at Less Than Three--my editors, proofreaders, and Megan and Sam!
I dedicate this book to lovable oddballs and weirdos everywhere.
Prologue
The Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show just two months prior. The country was still on edge, over a year and a half after the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy. NASA was promising a manned launch into space in the spring, and race and politics were on everyone's mind. America was entering a new modern age amidst a feeling of civil unrest.
Frank Stone felt unsettled as well. The world he saw on TV and read about in the daily paper seemed far removed from his day-to-day existence. He fancied himself more like a character plucked out of a five-hundred- page gothic novel and dropped into the 1960s rather than a twenty-four-year-old man raised in upstate New York. He even spoke that way at times, and often shunned the rest of the world for the woods.
Loneliness enveloped Frank like the late-evening summer fog. A house long gone used to occupy the spot where he sat in his work pants, an undershirt, and bare feet. The woods had taken the Stone family property back over time. Where there once was mowed grass and spring and summer flowers, now there were thorny, twisted brambles, uncontrolled brush, and exposed roots. Where several single trees once stood, now there were a dozen more crowded between them, trying to catch up to the older ones' height and girth.
Frank still owned the once-cleared acre, though now neither he nor anyone else could tell where it ended and the woods began. The small red-and-silver trailer he currently called home—and had since he'd burned down the family house at age nine—would look to strangers as if it had been dropped in the middle of nowhere, perhaps by a twister, like Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz.
Frank looked skyward, pushing his black-framed glasses up his pointy nose. "Ash, Maple, Oak…" Long legs outstretched, his lanky torso lounged against a large root. His white cotton shirt, damp and dirty from a hard day, lay in a ball beside him as he pointed up, identifying aloud each genus comprising the canopy above for anyone who may have been listening.
No one was.
Frank's mother had left the family long before the fire, back when Frank was only four. His father, Franklin Stone, Sr., had perished from cancer bit by bit, then completely and for good the first year Frank had been away at college, back in 1959. Six years later, Frank still missed him terribly. Frank had no children, no spouse or loving partner.
"Of course I have no one." He touched his cheek. "Who would be so blind as to want me?"
He had always dreamed of becoming a teacher, a hope that was virtually dashed by one of his whilst still in grade school.
"I have been asked to send some volunteers over to the second grade classes to tutor." Mrs. Bollow chose three, passing over Frank, even though he had the best grades among his peers and his hand had shot up first.
"I'm afraid the children would be frightened by your appearance." Mrs. Bollow had held him after the bell to tell him so. Perhaps she had always been put off herself.
So some days Frank playacted the fauna were his pupils, but that day every branch, every dangling leaf was dead still. The creatures were gone—fled. There were no chirping birds, no squirrels bounding like acrobats from limb to limb, not even a mosquito to swat at. It was eerily quiet. "Some might say… ominous."
Frank was used to talking to himself, often in character. He was a coinsurer of music and the printed word. Most evenings, he would rush home, turn on the portable radio or record player, and listen to current hits from Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Four Tops while reading obscure stage plays set in days long gone by. He loved novels about evil scientists or mad genius doctors too, as well as classic literature, like Hemmingway and Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray was an all-time favorite, given to him at age thirteen by the town mortician, Vaughn Hellier.
Vaughn had given Frank most everything he read, though at times he regretted it. "I shall stop bringing you the stories from the library and book stores, Franklin, if you cannot separate fiction from real life."
"You talk funny too, sometimes," Frank would protest.
"I am old and foreign. When I do it, it's eccentric, possibly even endearing. You do not even sound like yourself."
"There is a reason for that, Vaughn. Being anyone else is often preferable."
Frank had given up caring if people thought he was strange. Still, when conversing aloud when no one else was about, he felt it better to pretend he was talking to the creatures of the woods. "Where has everyone gone?" he asked the emptiness of the forest. He had a pretty good idea why, if not where.
Thunder boomed in the distance. Frank wondered if he should hurry up and get inside before the rain came. He decided not to bother. Buzzed short, his black hair dried rather quickly, and since the day was done, sodden work clothes would hardly matter.
"With the temperature so abysmally hot, I can only believe getting caught in a downpour might feel rather pleasant." Frank spoke to an ant that searched about at his elbow now. He questioned why there weren't more. "I know why I'm by myself," he said to the single scout. "Look at me. But why are you? Don't you normally travel with mates? Dozens? Hundreds?" The tiny black creature skittered across Frank's palm, between his fingers, and partway up his wrist. "Have you upset them somehow, or are you just so bold?" He actually stroked it, using only one finger, as if the bug was a tiny cat. "I pray, if ants have feelings, you were not shunned, like me."
Frank let the ant go free, then took an orange from the paper bag he'd taken his lunch in to work. He had joined Hellier's Mortuary as an apprentice the summer he'd turned thirteen, because Frank Sr. no longer trusted his son home alone and they had run out of townsfolk willing to babysit. Eventually, Frank had worked every day after school, then whenever he was home from college. Vaughn Hellier had generously provided the costly education that had turned out quite pointless. Frank had known from the start he would likely never get to be what he truly wanted. He now worked full time as a mortician's assistant, and that was all he would ever be. Dead people never judged.
; Frank peeled the orange and sucked from the first segment broken off the round. The little hairs on his arms and those at the back of his neck stood up. The juice of the orange was both sweet and tart on his tongue, really good—but not that good. The reaction came from something else.
"You want some?" The ant had not gone far. Most creatures, human or otherwise, were more than a little wary of Frank. "Here you go."
Frank squeezed a few drops of citrus onto the dirt and then brought the plump segment back up to his lips, sucking in hard to draw in its flavor. Another shiver followed. The act reminded Frank of something. It reminded him of someone.
It was a rather large orange, and as he worked the one wedge in and out of his mouth, a part of him much lower down started to tingle like his spine. Frank put his hand in his pocket. He touched himself through it, and then looked up again.
"Not a creature was stirring, little ant… Wrong season, I realize." Frank smiled at his clever pun with the side of his face that still could. "Dig this," he added, in a vernacular more befitting his age and the decade. "If you come back in winter, at Christmastime, I will tell you that tale."
Confident in the fact that he couldn't be seen, Frank took his hand from his pocket and put it down the front of his undershorts, allowing himself to get lost in supposed sinful pleasures. He rubbed himself hard, fantasizing about someone from his past. "Renny." Frank exhaled the name as he stroked his rigid appendage.
"I was in love once with a man named Renny." It was not the first time Frank had whispered his feelings to the trees or the creatures who lived and frolicked just behind the mortuary. They knew the whole story and could share it amongst each other. "Kiss me, Renny. Put your hardness ins— Oh!" The shiver came again. Frank had only a moment to realize its true cause, only a moment to think before his entire body went rigid, not due to lustful thoughts or sexual self-gratification, but rather nature's tumult, her raging power.
Crack!
Frank fell over, partially conscious but not totally. He heard a second clap of thunder and smelled an odd aroma, one that brought back the memory of his childhood calico rescued from the burning house just in the nick of time. The leaves above him rustled now, disturbed by a gust that teased at the start and then a gale that attacked. Some foliage fell to the forest floor where it would die, while greenery in all shapes directly above Frank began to dance. It was a happier image to conjure, as huge droplets of rain worked them like a marionette master's hand.
Some of Frank's senses were still in tune—still alive. He could see, hear, and smell. He could think, about the dying leaves and the happier ones, giggling, perhaps, as leaves could only do amongst each other.
The orange had left Frank's open hand and now lay in the dirt beside him. The little ant crawled upon it, pausing to look at Frank as if ready to be shooed, or asking, perchance, if Frank was near death. Frank wondered himself. He could not move, not any part of his body, nor could he feel the rain or the hard ground beneath him. He had no voice to call out for help, because it, like his sense of touch, had left him too.
What good would it have done to scream out, anyway? What difference would it have made? No one was there. No one would come. Frank was alone—like always. If the end was imminent, would that be so bad?
Chapter One
Nearly one year later…
It was Memorial Day, the beginning of another summer. Frank hated Memorial Day. He wasn't fond of weekends, either, and Memorial Day always made a long one. Frank was painfully shy, a tad depressed, anxious, super-intelligent, a little bit odd, and quite odd looking—all according to Vaughn Hellier, said one day when he probably thought teenage Frank couldn't hear.
Eavesdropping all around town, Frank discovered before he'd graduated high school most people who knew him thought the same. A history of mental instability in the family provided plenty of fodder for gossip.
"Celia Stone had problems, you know. She was some sort of crazy. Nerves… schizophrenia… You only had to talk to her to know."
"Why else would a mother abandon her young child?" A couple of church ladies had this conversation while viewing Frank Sr. in the main funeral room at his wake, with Frank just several feet away. Their shrill voices carried. How could they not know?
"Maybe he is mentally disturbed," Frank's high school principal had speculated with his secretary one day. "He's certainly… abnormal. Could be he's the one who scared the mother off."
Frank had often been picked on after the fire, even by his so-called friends. Everyone teased him—everyone—except Melissa. Melissa sat behind Frank in homeroom and was always kind. Frank liked Melissa. Maybe he even loved her.
Spending most weekend nights with a mortician, rather than doing the mashed potato to rock and roll tunes in the high school gymnasium, like other kids his age, didn't help Frank's reputation back then. Tending to dead people earned him a certain label beyond that attached because of his scars. It was the same sort of childish notions that kept trick-or-treaters away from the Helliers' home on Halloween, even though Vaughn set out a bowl filled with the biggest and the best chocolate bars the supermarket carried. Boys who had grown into men still tittered and whispered to this day. They called Frank a "weirdo" whenever they happened to encounter him. Frank definitely acted weirder now, since that day ten months ago in the woods, since being struck by lightning. Even he knew it. He had been called a freak for no real cause most of his life. Now, there was reason—a good one—though no one knew what it was.
"Do not come any further," Frank cautioned a daddy longlegs spider that had settled just above his bare chest. It hung from a single thread of translucent, delicate webbing connected to an oak tree just behind Hellier's, not far from the spot where the lightning had changed him. "I tell you there is reason to fear, but is it so obvious to others without my warning? Was it always? Even before…?" Frank was acting again, speaking in character. He sometimes wondered if he was schizophrenic, like his mother might have been.
"I'm sure you don't see yourself that way either—as a terrifying monster. Yet many run from you too, out of misplaced phobias. My naiveté once left an inkling of hope I might someday fill young hearts and minds with not only facts, but also a love of knowledge. The best time to reach a child is before their parents have imparted their own superstitions. Of course, if there was little chance before, now there is none. Now I would not only frighten children, I would hurt them."
Frank was happy at the funeral home, anyway. Settled, at least, if not truly content. He was a full-on partner, now, caring for the bodies of people's loved ones before they were buried. Frank's career path had shifted from developing the minds of those who were just starting out in life to being the last person to see someone when theirs ended. He didn't mind the work, and Vaughn Hellier was like a father to him now, who he truly loved—lately, from a distance.
Vaughn was in his late sixties. He and wife Marion had come to America right after the war. "We arrived as of nineteen forty-five from the old country." If Vaughn had ever been more specific than that, Frank couldn't recall. Judging by the accent, Frank figured they had come from Germany, maybe Austria. English was Vaughn's second language. He was much better at it than Marion, at least according to him. "She does not speak it so well as I."
Frank had never actually met Marion Hellier. Sometimes he wondered if Vaughn kept her away on purpose. He had a mental picture of Marion from Vaughn's vague description, of a "short round woman" with "beautiful eyes" and a "radiant soul". In his head, Frank made her look a bit like Aunt Pittypat from Gone with the Wind—from the novel, not so much Laura Hope Crews from the 1939 film. Frank wondered if he'd ever know if he was anywhere close. Probably not. Maybe Vaughn feared Frank's face would frighten her too.
"I wish you would come and visit me daily," Frank said to the arachnid. "I promise never to touch you—to bring you harm. Maybe you could be my companion…my pet." Frank often watched with envy now as someone wrestled with a friendly pup in the park or cuddled a f
at, lazy tomcat on a front porch. Considering his current affliction, it was fortunate he'd never brought home one of his own.
After the events of that July evening a year ago and the days that followed, Frank didn't even want to think about what might happen if he accidentally stuck his finger into a goldfish bowl while tending to their feedings. Then he did imagine, and the farce of it made him smile. "Not so funny for them," he said. "Unlike a character in a silly movie-house cartoon, in real life, the bug-eyed, sideways floating fish would not come back to life in the next act, good as new." That made Frank frown. "I am a freak," he told the daddy longlegs. "Perhaps the curse sought me out because that was my fate, my very nature from the start."
Frank had recently reconciled himself to the notion that the only loving being he would ever have in his life was Vaughn Hellier, and that was only from eight to five, at work. "But you deserve more," Vaughn had protested around last Christmastime. "Why shouldn't you have someone as wonderful as yourself to be your mate, a perfect creature, like my Marion?"
"There's no use hoping," Frank had responded. "There was a one in a million chance of it happening before, because of the way I look. Now, there's no chance at all."
"'Why would you say such a thing, dear boy?' Vaughn asked me." The spider had come to rest upon Frank's leg. The thickness of Frank's trousers seemed to provide enough safety, so he conversed with it, and it sat and listened. "I told him I didn't wish to talk about it, but he persisted, until I walked away."
Frank felt suddenly nervous, not only because the sun had disappeared behind thick, menacing clouds, but also about the closeness of the bug. He stood and shook his pant leg, forcing the daddy longlegs down upon his shoe.
"I better go," Frank told him. "Forgive me if that was too jarring." The spider did not scurry off, but moved rather slowly, seemingly unperturbed. "Perhaps I will see you tomorrow," Frank said as it made its way to the ground. "Perhaps not," Frank added, as a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. .