Ante Mortem
Edited by Jodi Lee
Published by Belfire Press
Box 295
Miami, Manitoba
R0G 1H0
Copyright © 2010 Belfire Press & Respective Authors
Cover & Interior design by Jodi Lee © 2010
ISBN: 978-1-926912-23-3
Multi-Format Ebook/Digital Download
Smashwords Edition
A catalogue record for this title is available from the
National Library of Canada.
This anthology is a collection of works of fiction. Any resemblance to place, person or event is strictly coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.
Belfire Press – http://www.belfirepress.com
Smashwords - http://www.smashwords.com
* * * *
Table of Contents
Introduction - Jodi Lee
Tiny Fingers - Aaron Polson
The Good Friend - Natalie L. Sin
To Survive the Beginning - Gina Ranalli
Hit the Wall - David Dunwoody
From the Bowels - Benjamin Kane Ethridge
The Dubious Magic of Elliot Prince - KV Taylor
Hunger Pains - Myrrym Davies
Fetching Narissa - David Chrisom
Beauty Ritual - John Grover
Territory - Kelly M. Hudson
A Little Help in the Kitchen - Jeff Parish
Contributor Biographies
* * * *
Introduction - Back From the Abyss
Jodi Lee
Much has been made in the past months of editors and publishers that don’t continue and follow through on contractual obligations, or that don’t even stick around long enough to see their vision through to the end. This has become far too common-place in the last while, too many small presses or one-off groups popping up over night, and then disappearing just as fast. Sometimes, writers are lucky and retain their stories. Other times, unscrupulous people go ahead and publish the stories anyway, without contract, without payment, without permission; in the worst cases, stories are stolen outright and published in someone else’s name.
Those of us who were accepted to a particular anthology, one that did not materialize, were lucky enough to keep our rights, to keep our stories intact. While the ‘publisher’ may not have been real, using a pseudonym and drop-box to conduct business, at least for this, he was honest. All rights were returned to those who wished to retain them.
I was angry when I was first told of the deception, and while I’d stewed over it, steamed and waited for my contract to run out, I thought about the other authors, some of whom I’m proud to say are more than ‘table of contents acquaintances.’ I’m very proud to call them my friends. What of their stories? I then contacted as many as I could, with the seed of an idea.
Belfire was in its infancy, we hadn’t even released a single book yet, and I had two other projects on the go besides Belfire proper, but I didn’t care. Something about these stories and these writers thrilled me, there was a spark. Within a week, we’d germinated the seed and Ante Mortem became a reality; within a month, everything was set. The hideous project from the past would not haunt us evermore: we had turned back the clock, and re-entered pre-death.
Each of these stories has something in common. Each has either been accepted to an anthology or a magazine that subsequently, for whatever reason, did not publish the piece. For this, that we have been able to give these stories a new home, a proper home, we are very, very grateful. We all hope you enjoy the selections in our own life before death - Ante Mortem!
Jodi Lee
New Bedlam, December 2010
* * * *
Tiny Fingers
Aaron Polson
Isaac Bauer’s fingers twitched, looking for something to hold. He’d quit smoking a month ago, but Anne was late. Anne was never late. He shoved a hand in his pocket and rummaged for a pack of gum. The gum would have to do. The sky over Springdale faded from pale grey to granite as he waited at the corner of 15thand Arthur, scraping the cracked sidewalk with the side of his shoes. Forty-five minutes after their planned meeting time, Isaac surrendered.
He had already left two messages, but he tried dialing her cell phone again. “Shit,” he muttered as Anne’s voicemail greeting sounded in his ear. He snapped the phone shut and breathed a long slow sigh, counting slowly in his head to steady his frustration. His nervous fingers found the small jewelry box in his jacket pocket and traced the corners and angles of its soft surface. She stood me up, he thought, and then, maybe she’s in trouble. “No. Nothing ever happens in Springdale,” he said to himself, shaking off the thought.
Before Isaac turned toward his apartment, he traced the path Anne would have taken to meet him at the corner. He walked down dark neighborhood streets and felt the closeness of the houses. He walked as far as the new playground, a slab of concrete with two looming lamps reflecting an odd orange hue from the sea of grey. A slight chill forced him to flip his collar around his neck and rubbed his hands together for warmth. Isaac surveyed the playground for a moment. He thought of Anne and felt a pit grow in his stomach. The grey air iced over, and Isaac walked home.
Isaac called Anne thirty times over the next few days. Nothing. Anne was gone. He drove to her house only to find black windows and her car in the drive. Without the car she couldn’t have gone far. His initial frustration had burned away, giving space to a solid fear, a growing unease about her safety.
“Springdale Police. Can we help you?”
“Yeah. I need to report a missing person.” Isaac’s hand trembled as he spoke. Calling the police made her disappearance serious, and that frightened Isaac.
“How long has the person been missing?”
“About three—” Isaac glanced at the calendar on his refrigerator. “She’s been gone about a week.”
“Name?”
“Excuse me?”
“What is the name of the missing person?”
“Oh... yeah. Anne. Her name is Anne.” Isaac’s neck started to burn and his stomach tightened.
“Last name?”
“Sorry. Renner.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, trying to see Anne’s face, her smooth strands of maple hair, her green eyes, and porcelain smile. “Anne Renner...” he repeated without thinking about his words.
“Sir, are you a member of Anne’s family?”
Isaac sighed. “No, no I’m not.”
“Relationship to the missing?”
“I’m her fiancé—er, boyfriend.” Isaac slumped to his bed. “She doesn’t have any family. No close family anyway.” One hand held the phone while the fingers of the other raked through his cropped hair. His eyes scanned the room, resting on the jewelry box on the edge of his desk.
Isaac drove past Anne’s house every day after work. He walked in the evenings, sometimes taking long, meandering trips through dark, quiet neighborhoods that would lead him down Anne’s street. He placed signs bearing her photocopied picture around town—little handmade posters that included his telephone number. The signs seemed unnecessary; Springdale was a small town, and news of a missing person traveled faster than a flame across an oil slick. Isaac called the police repeatedly, usually receiving an explanation that adults pick up and leave all the time; it wasn’t a crime.
Four weeks—almost a month—burned from the cal
endar, and his phone rang.
“Hello,” Isaac said.
“Yeah, uh, are you the one who left the flyers up around town,” a voice said on the other line. “Uh... Isaac?”
He had dealt with pranks before, people who would call, harass him, joke about seeing Anne. “Yes,” he said.
“Look, I’ve got something for you. I’ll meet you at the bakery—you know the one downtown, Tasty Pastry. Tuesday, 7 AM. My name’s Nick.”
Isaac opened his mouth, but the line was dead.
Isaac arrived early. The late October air grew colder each day, and he was dressed in a simple blue sweater with an insulated flannel jacket. He stepped into the bakery and staggered in the warmth. Taking a seat with his back to the wall and next to the front window, he slipped from his jacket and waited.
Most of the bakery patrons were old—retirees out for coffee and socializing on a Tuesday morning. An occasional younger man or woman would rush in, exchange a pleasant but hurried exchange with some of the retirees before snapping orders at the clerks, paying quickly, and zipping from the place. The door swung open, and a young man, probably in his twenties although not a native of Springdale—Isaac didn’t recognize him from high school—stepped into the bakery and moved his head from side to side, surveying the room.
“Nick?” Isaac asked.
He turned, showing a lean, long face, pale cheekbones at contrast with almost black hair, and foggy grey eyes. The man sat in a chair opposite Isaac, almost gliding like a ghost.
Nick studied Isaac for a moment before speaking. “Take this. I can’t explain more. I’d be in deep shit if someone knew I copied that.” He pushed a small envelope with a bulge in the middle across the table.
“What is it?” Isaac asked.
“Just watch it. I don’t know if it will help, but it will make you think.” Nick looked into Isaac’s brown, almost black eyes before he pushed from the table, muttered, “good luck” and slipped out of the door.
Isaac picked up the envelope and tore off a corner. A little black bullet—a plastic flash drive—fell out and rattled on the table.
On the computer monitor, he watched the pixilated Anne Renner cross the street from Larry’s Market to the new playground. He looked at the picture of Anne above his desk, the smiling photo snapped at a picnic last summer. His eyes came back to the screen. Evidently Nick—or a friend of his, while operating the security camera in Larry’s parking lot, caught Anne and followed her. Isaac didn’t want to know why. The perspective zoomed closer until she nearly filled the screen. The image was blurry and a little grainy—especially after the zoom—but it was clearly Anne. Isaac recognized her coat and knew her walk. He watched as the video Anne passed behind a row of bushes, emerging on the other side as she cut across the basketball court.
And then she was gone.
Not gone as in a dark figure leapt from behind the bushes and kidnapped her gone. Not gone as in she walked out of the frame gone. Just gone, snap. Isaac’s stomach went cold, and his hand tightened on the mouse. He leaned forward, scrutinizing the monitor as he clicked the rewind icon. The mystery happened in reverse—one moment no Anne, then she walked backwards across the open slab.
He paused the video, reduced the frame rate, and played back the scene. Anne walked across the concrete again, and then disappeared. At the reduced frame rate, half of normal speed, Isaac noticed something. He reversed the clip again, set the disappearance to loop, and played back. The small, monochrome Anne vanished again and again until he clicked pause, and advanced frame by frame. One frame she took a step, in the next her face changed—a dark blotch where her open mouth would be, almost a look of surprise. Something lined and grey seemed wrapped around her ankles, but the image was too rough to make out enough detail. In the following frame, Anne’s body seemed half devoured by the court. She was totally gone when he advanced another frame. Isaac hunched even closer to the screen. His stomach vaulted and blood thickened.
He sat there clicking forward and back, entranced by the odd sequence of images: one frame surprised, the next half gone, and finally no sign of her. He studied the time stamp on the video—6:49 PM. She would have been on time.
Snatching his cell phone from his desk, he punched the number for Larry’s Market. He stood and began pacing in his small apartment.
“Hello, Larry’s. How can I help you?” a withered voice asked.
“Yeah, hi. Can I speak with Nick.”
“Nick? We don’t have a Nick here.”
Isaac slumped into his old rust-red recliner. “A security guy—Nick?”
“I’m sorry. Our security guy quit yesterday, but I don’t remember his name. Moving out of town, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Isaac muttered.
“Sorry buddy.”
“Look, calm down Mr. Bauer,” the sergeant, a ruddy-faced man with bushy moustache and eyebrows, placed one hand on Isaac’s thin shoulder, urging him to sit in a nearby chair. “We looked at the video. It must be a hoax.”
“Hoax?” Isaac’s voice was distant and disbelieving.
“Look, you get some two-bit hooligan who knows a little about digital video, and you can come up with all sorts of odd mash-ups.” The sergeant leaned on the edge of his desk. “You’ve been posting these flyers all over town, right?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. He took the seat as the police officer suggested.
“Some wacko does a little doctoring with a surveillance video, and wham. They know they’ve got you.” He grabbed the flash drive from his desk. “We’re going to keep this, if you don’t mind. Evidence and all. But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sorry some jerk had to yank your chain like that.”
Isaac’s face was pale, lost in thought. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah. Kind of a raw deal.”
He drove to the playground after leaving the police station. The concrete slab stretched away from the sidewalk, looking pale and insignificant in the late afternoon light. Isaac stepped from his car, looked across the street at Larry’s, and noticed the high lamppost that was home to the small, seeing eye of a security camera.
He stepped away from his car, and shivered because of the cold fingers in the air. Isaac’s shoes whispered through the grass and then tapped lightly on concrete as he stepped onto the court. The breeze faded, leaving the playground in silence. A dog barked in the distance.
“It’s not a goddamn hoax,” Isaac said aloud, kicking at the edge of the grey concrete. The wind jumped at him again, and he thought a voice whispered Anne’s name.
Isaac hadn’t been in the Springdale Public Library since high school, and that had only been because his art teacher required a journal entry detailing the interior architecture of the Carnegie building. When he asked if he could read old articles from the Sentinel online, a friendly librarian laughed and ferried him into a dark room lined with shelves full of musty folios containing the last thirty years of the local paper. He was looking for anything about that playground.
After an hour of old, yellowed newsprint, Isaac found what he was looking for: on the front page of a Sentinel from the previous year, a picture of five men in hard hats stood in the center of a vast expanse of grey concrete. The caption read, “Conco Pours Slab for Donated Playground.” As the Sentinel was a small paper, the picture was only accompanied by a brief article, but Isaac had what he needed. An old buddy from high school, Jarrod, started working for Conco after dropping out of college.
He left the dusty interior of the library after saying a cursory thank you to the librarian. Outside of the dark building, the day was cold but clear with a bright sun hanging in a brilliant blue. As he walked to his car parked on the street, Isaac flipped open his cell phone, dialed for information, and requested the listing for Jarrod Wagner in Springdale.
After three rings, a voice muttered “hi” on the other end of the call.
Isaac, now sitting in his car as a shelter from the cold outside, said, “Hey, this is Isaac, Isaac Bauer. Am I talking to Jarrod?”
&nbs
p; “Isaac. Holy shit. Meg—you know the curly brunette down at the Tasty Pastry—she said she saw you the other day. How long have you been back in town?”
“A few months, sort of. I still commute.” Isaac felt dizzy and awkward, talking to someone from whom he had grown apart after college and starting a career. “Look, Jarrod. I don’t know if you’ve seen my flyers.”
The line was silent for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, hell of a deal,” Jarrod muttered. “Look, I’m sorry buddy, I should have called, just to send some sympathy, you know. I didn’t know what to say.”
Isaac closed his eyes. “Can you help me now? Do you still work for Conco?”
More silence, then: “No... not anymore.”
“I see. Were you working for them when they poured the playground last year?”
“Yeah. Look, if you want to know about that playground, I can’t tell you much,” Jarrod’s voice shook slightly and he rushed his words. “Conco was just a subcontractor. Evergreen Development, they donated everything, part of a deal they had with the city. That’s all I know.”
Isaac paused this time, thinking about the nervousness in his friend’s voice, trying to make sense of his apparent anxiety. “Evergreen Development? Didn’t they build those condos, The Legends, out west of town?”
Ante Mortem Page 1