by Patti Abbott
The strangest part is that none of this really is all that remarkable if you're not paying close attention; it's only noteworthy because I'm bothering to emphasize the oddity of the man up close. All the same, Mr. Noble could pass you on the street and you wouldn't give a second look save for his puritan hat straight out of Robert E. Howard and his novelty-store skull cane that the eyes light up when Noble gets particularly animated and shakes it.
I'd say I was listening to his 'nobleness,' but since Fox had me the day before at free drugs, Mr. Noble's words of explanation were superfluous, and I suspect he knew he already had an enlistee.
"So, am I invited inside your house?"
"Yeah, whenever."
His pale, bony claws release the water glass on the bar countertop and clasp my arm. "I asked. Am. I. Invited … Inside?" His stern, narrowed eyes focus squarely on me, then give way to the beatific smile, returning in full force, acting like a used car salesman before the buyer's signature is scrawled down.
"Kinda cliché, aren't we?" I avoid adding 'for a devil' but I could tell he knew it was implied despite that his pasted on smile held. "Okay, whatever, you are invited to my house and come inside. Have a cup of coffee. Sit on the couch and kick your feet up on the table and watch TV. Good?"
He backs off, clutching his cane. "Very good … very satisfactory." His eyes dart to the glowing sockets of the cane's head.
* * *
I turn off Mill Street onto the long gravel driveway lined with a row of tall pine trees, and I park next to the mobile home that sits about 100 yards from the peaceful sounds of Fall Creek in the pastoral outskirts of Freeville. It's more than just a trailer, it's the home that once belonged to my grandparents, lovingly cared for by the both of them for nearly fifty years. That's before Grandpa died from complications following a stroke, and then a decade later, when my grandmother's Alzheimer's was undeniable, she was shuffled off to a nursing home in Texas—against my protests. And that's when I moved in, inheriting Grandma's orange and white tabby, Sammy the Cat, with the house.
I walk the pathway to the side door, stepping on a blanket of rust-colored pine needles and fallen cones that crackle under my feet. It's an Indian summer day in Upstate New York and I inhale a deep lungful of warm, earthy air. The haze in the sky is typical for this kind of autumn day but not rain, yet I can feel it's on the way … I can smell the moisture in the air.
The trailer is not so much to look at, that is, unless it's one of the first places you laid your eyes on as a kid and played there with your sister growing up. Then it takes on another entity and becomes home. I feed Sammy and grab a bottle half full of Arak Brandy and flop on the couch. I slow on the junk—getting low—Mr. Noble is making his Grand Poohbah visit tonight.
I leaf through my new book, finding an interesting factoid that the six to twelve minutes after the body has died, the brain is still flourishing. Enough time to live an entire life again.
After a time, a car pulls in the driveway. It's gotten dark outside, and I can't make out who's here—I gotta replace the spotlights.
It must be Noble, and I admit I'm a bit anxious as I head to the car to greet him.
As I walk up to the classic Oldsmobile 88 convertible, I relax when I see my friend Aiden behind the wheel, a girl sitting close to him on the bench seat.
"What do you think of my new ride, man?" Aiden asks.
"Nice," I say, nodding my head. "What are you doing driving around with the top down? It's supposed to rain."
"What? You're crazy, man, it's a perfect night," he says, ignoring the cloudlets forming. "C'mon, get in. I'm taking Anna for a ride to Buttermilk Falls."
I look at Anna and smile at her, and she smiles back coquettishly.
"Nah, I can't. I got someone else dropping by soon."
"Don't be such a drag. I'll have you back in an hour."
Anna snugs up even closer to Aiden, and pats the seat next to her.
A godlike snap of thunder roars. I look up, shaking my head, when I see the phantoms coming closer.
I throw open the car door and squeeze in the passenger side. "Let's go!" I say, not letting on about what I'm witnessing.
Aiden tears out of the driveway and down the street. "Where have you been anyway?" he asks. "I've been trying to get a hold of you for a while."
I rub the stubble on my chin as I check the rearview. The flickers are closing in on the bumper, one demon has an outstretched staff like he's aiming a weapon.
"Shit!" I say out loud.
"What?" Aiden says. "What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing. Hey, how fast can this old rattletrap go?"
A sly grin passes over his face as he stomps on the accelerator. The trees along the road are whipping by in a blur and tangles of dead leaves on the shoulder of the road are being kicked up. I look over to see Anna white-knuckling the sleeve of Aiden's jacket. The ghosts fall back but regain their momentum as the Olds goes into a curve then straightens out.
The car hits a frost heave and we bounce up off the seat. I thump my head into the raised visor, and as I'm coming down, I look over to Aiden and Anna. But they aren't there. Jackson Pollock, the artist himself famous for his drip-style paintings, falls into the driver seat where Aiden was and Anna is vaulted into the back seat. For a moment, we're careening out of control on a curving Long Island road, when the lane turns into a familiar route nearer to home, by Cornell University. I'm reeling from the wild ride and Anna is clutching the backrest of the front seat. Around a final bend we plow straight into the stone wall for the university. Anna screams "NO!" just before impact.
I'm not wearing a seatbelt and my body begins grinding movie slow-mo through the dashboard. I can feel my body working its way through the console and then the engine but there is no pain. Passing over. Floating upward and away from the car. I look back to see my listless figure crumpled on the floor. I hear the girl yelling for me to stay "with her." Pollock is gone and being carried away by two flickers but not my own. I'm angling toward my two handlers who are hovering above me in the sky and their faces are just now becoming recognizable when I hear Anna yell my name.
I'm hurtling back. Grabbing handfuls of air. Time to wake-up. Swimming back to the life. Fighting to remain.
The book on dreams drops to the floor. Sammy is perched on the armrest observing me with cold feline bemusement. I check my watch. Seconds. A trickle of moments. I try to switch the light on but must have blown the bulb. I feel my way into the bathroom and douse my face with water.
Stay awake, motherfucker, I tell myself. I turn on the television and flip the channels. It blots out the sound of the soft droplets pelting the roof. I stop on an old film. Forgotten actors to entertain my fading day, walking through their black and white landscape, lower my resolve once more.
* * *
"Perchance to dream," a voice calls out. A silhouetted Hamlet appears before me.
"Asleep or not asleep?" the Prince of Denmark sneers while creeping around my couch. Long, gangly fingers reach over me as the shadowed prince morphs into a hairless Nosferatu.
Did I really invite a stranger into my house? To collect my soul? Absurd.
I see the ghoul's outline cast against the dancing hues of the television screen. A dank wet smell compresses the room as the shadow settles into Mr. Noble's illuminated pallid face.
I'm caught in a schizophrenic trance of some kind. Thoughts are passed by Noble's voice. Many times faster than usual, maybe six times normal cognition. Repeating and revising some algorithm, something to do with death. A doctor, dressed in black hovers over me, filling an opening in his cane with my blood. My mind reaches back to those flickering apparitions—souls inside the skull—the devil's own lantern.
"Eraweb Fo Elbon!" My mind grinds over like tumblers of an unused lock. BEWARE OF NOBLE.
I surge up, hitting Noble. Flesh into sickening, cold marble. I punch him again. He doesn't budge. I roll sideways to get away. "Fuck you!"
"Your soul is mine!" H
is shadow thunders as he billows in height until his ghost has spilled to every corner, enshrouding the room. An animal stench washes over me mixed with a smell of sulfuric corrosion. And another smell: blood. My blood, dripping from the cane and finding a tributary along his elongated fingers and down his wrist.
Drops of sweat bead on my forehead. "I didn't agree. To this."
"Oh, yes," his gravelly voice spits out the words, "but you did." The last of my blood that he had collected seeps into the vial. He moves the container to his vest pocket, tapping it down in.
An explosion of light blinds from outside my windows. A blink of an eye transformation as dyed yellowish silver swarms my house. Wind bursts through the window, opening it with pounding force and smashing a table lamp to the floor. Noble's shadow collapses to appropriate size. He grasps his cane a bit more secure. The eyes of the skull top, which had been vibrantly illuminated, darken.
"Your master must be bored this evening," Noble taunts outwardly into the waves of blackness.
There's no audible answer, but I detect a conversation is going on. Low, almost undecipherable hums lifting and then dropping away.
And time is at a standstill: brave Sammy slowly in mid-retreat, the rain's droplets like hail now frozen as they entered the open window, and a sense that we are far, far away from New York. It was my narrow living room, but it wasn't. Not anymore. We're a million years in the past, in the drenched lands of earliest evenings.
Whoompf!
A reddish burst of energy erupts from Noble's cane. Surrounding almost everything leaving only me and two opposite corners of the living room untouched. The 'others' don't appear to be fighting back. Just protecting and keeping Noble's anger sequestered.
"What's so special about this one?" Noble snarls, a look of loathing contorts his features.
Another short blast from Noble's cane is deflected inches from my head and fades away in a shower of sparks. Two hooded priest-like figures are transfiguring, each holding a wooden staff in a horizontal position in front of me. The flicker phantoms that have been following me. My hand reaches out to touch—nothing. More booms from Noble's cane, bouncing harmlessly off their gnarled wooded staffs and spinning away into thin air.
"Using those abooghanys won't stop me forever." The tendons of Noble's neck cables like a frilled lizard's hood. Both of Noble's hands grip his cane aiming the skull dome directly at me as the hooded defenders raise their staffs higher to a more strategic position. Another hellish gust of energy hurtles toward us and is collected on the tips of their abooghanys. Swirling dynamos of electricity and light.
Bit by bit, my guardians lower their staffs and Noble's own energy rebounds back, hurtling him against the book shelves in a clattering din. One of the flickers steps forward with outstretched arm and the vial of my blood floats out of Noble's inside pocket, hovers over the demon's head and pops, raining crimson.
I fall back through the shifting sand of centuries to my adjoining dining room table, fumble a cigarette from the pack on top, and light it. Soothing savage nerves and peering through sulfur fumes I gamble, "What fun is it to collect from an unwilling participant? Where's the challenge, mister ignoble?"
The old man gradually rises, brushes his clothes, and extends his right hand. His cane rushes to his waiting clutch. His posture relaxes, with chin to his chest, his gaze skims the room, settling on an exposed weakness, the bottle of Arak Brandy that I left on the floor by the couch. He smirks as a cigarette from my pack crosses the room, lights en route, to his waiting lips. He inhales with religious fervor. "One way or another. We'll uphold this contract, young man."
His disconcerting smile remains plastered as his lean figure snaps apart in a swirling fairy-tale smolder and evaporation. The two flicker phantoms, my two heroes, turn toward me. Familiar movements, both. Friendly warm smiles, from a photo—the pictured past— taken long ago when we were all still full of life. Fox and George. I blink, and they're gone.
The conversation with Fox had seemed real enough but was, in fact, REM sleep. Fox had died like George of heart failure before his twentieth birthday.
After a time, I retire to the porch, my small writing alcove that I've dressed to write letters and poems and to sort my problems. I salute the picture of me, George, and Fox taped to the right of my desk. I begin by typing into my journal, I had a dream I sold my soul to the devil for drugs. Sammy the Cat wanders into the bower, leaps onto the table, and waits to be petted. I oblige. "Real brave there, buddy."
On the skyline, a gray horizon turning to blue in the cold morning haze.
I crack my knuckles over the keyboard, and I begin typing again, hammering away rather, finishing up recording these latest dreams.
I hear a sudden chortle and look up. Noble's face pushes up close to mine. I shove the swivel chair back and the malignant grin—a projection—disappears.
Another dream?
I take a swig of brandy, calming myself, trying to ignore my overactive imagination of friends departed and demons—like the outline of wet footprints from the passed storm, fading like a bad dream, on the wooden floor.
†
"the needles" copyright © 2005 Kyle J. Knapp, copyright © 2014 Meta L. Knapp. Used with kind permission.
A woman from the ambulance stepped toward me. "You might want to sit down and let me check that." She was looking at the side of my forehead. I pressed my palm against it, felt bits of something pressing sharp pain into open flesh, like a clumsy root canal. She pulled my hand away, worked latex fingers into my face, pulling out bits of ground, shards of gravel. In a couple of minutes I was leaning down in the back of the ambulance while she squirted a bottle of something into my forehead, blotting it with gauze, flesh tender.
* * *
They sewed me up pretty quickly once I got to the ER, put a bandage on my forehead, up near the corner. If I still had hair there, it might have been a problem. I put the paperwork they'd given me in my pocket. Then I signed some other papers at a counter and asked about Brent.
"Brent Rumbelow?" she asked.
I nodded.
"And your name?"
"You just had my name. On all the forms you just did."
"I apologize for the inconvenience, sir, but I am in a different screen now."
I wondered how many responses she had memorized. I told her my name again.
"Yes. I have the record here, but I can only release that information to his next of kin."
Brent's parents had been killed in that small plane crash outside Denton a few years back. It was on the news, our sophomore year of college. He didn't have brothers or sisters that I knew of. "Who is that?"
"Well, sir, I can only release that information to his next of kin."
"You can only reveal the next of kin to the next of kin? Can you just tell me where my friend is? Is he at this hospital?" I wheezed a little, heavy in my chest and could feel the skin on my forehead, the skin they'd deadened before, tingle with heat, tender flesh on display. "Can you just tell me that?"
"Only if you are his next of kin, which," she dragged a finger along the screen, "it appears you are."
"I am?"
"Yes, Mr. Crawford. Your cousin is in O.R. number three. That's on the second floor in the Louisiana Farmers' Credit wing. You can take the elevator at the end of the hall to the O.R. waiting room."
I turned away.
"Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr. Crawford?"
* * *
The woman at the information desk on the second floor said that Brent had been in the O.R. for about an hour. She said I could sit in the waiting room and someone from the trauma team would be in to update me soon. Then she handed me a beeper and a voucher for a meal in the cafeteria. "We'll let you know if anything changes," she said. "Is there anything else I can help you with today, Mr. Crawford?"
I sat down in the waiting room. Television turned to the news. A window with cheap blinds bent and broken, looking onto another wing of the hospital t
en feet away. A chip machine. A coffee machine. Brent's new girlfriend wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans, sitting on a couch and reading a gossip magazine.
She stood up. "Danny?"
"Hey. When did you get here?"
"I got the call about Brent. How is he?"
"I don't know," I said, touched my head, leaned back in the chair. "What did you hear about Brent? They just told me he was in O.R."
"Cop I know called. Said there was a shooting at Adams Creek. What happened?"
"He came with me to talk to the guy over on Merganser."
"The squatter?"
"I don't think he's a squatter. I think he used to live there. Think we all scared the hell out of each other."
"He had a gun?"
"Yeah. Pistol. Little thing. I mean, whatever that matters. I don't know. But it was little."
Angie shook her head. "What were you two thinking?"
"Well, somebody had to do something."
"Not this." She waved an arm around the room.
"No," I said, took a breath deep enough to feel the pain. "I guess not."
Angie and Brent had been going out for a year or so. There'd been another between her and the ten years he'd spent with Bonnie. I'd liked Bonnie.
A woman in blue scrubs walked into the room. "You here with Brent Christopher Rumbelow?"
I said I was, leaned forward, told her my name. Angie said her name.
"They're still working on him. He seems to have a metatarsal fracture. Some bumps and bruises. The problem seems to be the comminuted fracture in the left forearm. He's in surgery now. We'll know more soon."
"Fractures?" I asked. "That sounds like it could have been worse."
"Well," she said, "it's not good. But yes. It could have been worse. I suspect he'll need to stay in a plastic cast for the next six to eight weeks for his foot. A hard cast for the arm for a little longer."