Evil Jester Digest, Volume 2

by Holly Newstein

  They drove several moments in silence, moving at a good clip through Ash Creek’s newly refurbished commercial district, past shopping centers, discount jewelers, upscale coffee shops, and restaurants struggling to look as if they weren’t only a step or two above fast food joints. Daniel tried several times to ask Billy what the holy hell those shadow creatures were and what the fuckers wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. He wondered if he might be in shock, but he decided that if he was, that was okay. Fine and dandy, as a matter of fact. He didn’t think he was ready to know what the shadowmen were yet, and what’s more, he wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready. And that was cool. Copacetic, as they used to say in the sixties. Just as long as he never had to see the goddamned things again.

  It was Billy who broke the silence first.

  “Sure was lucky you came along when you did. I owe you my life, man.”

  Daniel’s first thought was Who says “man” anymore? But then who was he to talk? He’d just thought the word copacetic a couple minutes ago, hadn’t he? Least I didn’t say it out loud.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it luck,” Daniel said, surprised to hear his own voice, and even more surprised by how calm he sounded. “I was just out…shopping.” He didn’t want to admit the real reason he was driving around Electronixx’s parking lot.

  “Didn’t find anything, huh?” Billy said. When Daniel didn’t reply, he added, “The backseat’s empty.”

  Daniel thought about making some excuse to explain his lack of purchases, but he couldn’t think of anything, so he just kept his mouth shut and continued driving.

  “Lucky for me, anyway,” Billy said. “Just like that one day back in high school, right? ’cept this time turned out a hell of a lot better.” Billy turned toward him, his eyes seeming to gleam in the dim illumination of the dashboard lights. “Kind of weird, huh?” His lips toyed with a smile, revealing teeth in dire need of a dentist’s attention. There was something about that almost-smile that disturbed Daniel, a kind of sly knowing that belied Billy’s words, as if the man was making fun of him for some reason.

  Now that Daniel had the chance to observe Billy up close, he noticed other odd details. The man’s hair was so short it was almost a buzz-cut, and his scalp had several bare patches dotted with scabs, as if he’d cut his own hair with an electric razor and done a piss-poor job. The cuffs of his windbreaker were frayed, his jeans were splotched with stains, and only one of his tennis shoes had strings. And then there was the smell…not just his coffee-and-cigs breath, though that was bad enough in these close quarters. The ripe-sour stink of a body that hadn’t been washed in Christ only knew how long wafted forth from Billy like some olfactory version of radiation. It was so bad Daniel imagined his nose hairs shriveling up with each inhalation. He had no idea what had happened to Billy after high school, but now he wondered if the man was homeless. He sure as shit smelled like he was.

  Homeless and chased through a parking lot by four shadow monsters, Daniel reminded himself. Wouldn’t do to forget that little tidbit.

  “You probably don’t even remember that day, do you?” Billy said. “I’ll never forget it, though. It was sophomore year, and we were in same gym class. With Mr. Briggs, remember? The guy was so fat he couldn’t walk more than three steps without pausing to catch his breath. Some example of physical fitness. We weren’t doing anything special; it was just open gym time, and the girls were playing basketball at one end of the gym, the boys at the other. I was picked last for a team…I always was.”

  Daniel felt an urge to say something to make Billy feel better, tell him that he hadn’t always been the last to be picked, and even if he had, he’d been a decent player. But the truth was that Billy sucked big-time at sports. He’d always been short, skinny, and uncoordinated, but adolescence—instead of granting him height, muscles, and a deeper voice—had instead robbed him of what little grace he’d possessed. The other boys had joked that Billy was the only person they knew who could trip while standing still, and the sad part was it hadn’t been much of an exaggeration.

  “We were on the same team that day, though you probably don’t remember that either, do you? Things went like they usually did for me back then. No one passed the ball to me, and I got a lot of ‘intentional fouls,’ which meant I got shoved around, punched in the arm, and knocked down.”

  Billy was right. Daniel didn’t remember the details of that particular game, but then he didn’t really need to in order to envision the scene Billy was trying to paint for him. Variations on it had been common enough in the gym, on the playground, and after school as far back as Daniel could remember. For some reason, there was always a scapegoat in school, a sineater whose only purpose in life was to take shit from the other kids. Back in the day, it had been Billy Wallace’s great misfortune to be elected King of the Shiteaters for Ash Creek High School.

  Billy went on. “It wasn’t so bad, I suppose. I mean, I didn’t get a bloody nose or anything. I figured the worst I’d end up with was some nasty bruises, and I was used to that, so no big deal.” Billy fell silent and turned his head to look out the passenger window. They had reached the end of the commercial district and were now traveling down the tree-lined streets of a suburban neighborhood. Mounds of sodden leaves were piled next to the curbs by those residents industrious enough to get an early start on their autumn lawn work. Daniel had once had a yard, and he’d hated dealing with the leaves every fall, even with the aid of a leaf blower. Now he’d give anything to have a home with a lawn that needed tending instead of his cramped, lonely crackerbox of an apartment that needed nothing from him and gave it back in equal measure.

  Daniel knew where Billy’s story was heading, and it wasn’t territory he wanted to revisit, especially right now. He’d recovered enough from the encounter with the shadowmen to finally talk about them, and he thought that subject was a wee bit more important at the moment.

  “What were those things back there? Why were they after you?”

  Billy didn’t answer right away, and Daniel thought maybe he was so lost in his memories that he hadn’t heard. That, or maybe he was in shock. After all, he was the one the damned things had been chasing. Daniel was about to repeat his questions when Billy spoke once again.

  “It was a different story in the locker room, though. Mr. Briggs might’ve been a lazy fast-ass, but he only tolerated bullying in his gym up to a point. He never came in the locker room, though, so in there, anything went. A few of the boys—Chris Milligan, Bob Lewis, and Douglas Sanderson—started ragging on me for losing the game for them, whip-cracking their towels on my ass. It sucked, but I could handle it. Then their taunts began to turn ugly, and the anger on their faces became hatred. They made a circle around me and started pushing me back and forth between them, like I was some kind of exercise ball or something. Then they started hitting instead of pushing. Hitting hard. The other boys gathered round and started laughing, cheering them on, yelling for them to hit me even harder…”

  Daniel felt a cold prickly sensation in his gut that had nothing to do with the shadowmen and everything to do with Billy’s story.

  He had to swallow twice before he was able to speak. “It was a long time ago, Billy.”

  Billy turned away from the passenger window to face Daniel once more. “Not so long as you think.” Then lower, almost a whisper. “Not for me. You were there, too, watching with the others, but you didn’t laugh or cheer. Do you remember what you did?” Billy rushed on before Daniel could answer. “You told them to stop it and leave me alone.”

  Daniel remembered. How could he not? He also remembered what had happened next, and that was something he didn’t want to think about right then. So he was almost relieved when he glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw a dark shape framed there. At first he thought it was a car running with its lights off, but while it had the general shape of a car, there was something profoundly wrong about it. The edges were too rounded, the proportions uneven, and there was a lack o
f clearly distinguishable surface details. No dividing line between windshield and metal, no wipers, no visible headlights, no front bumper, and—worst of all—no engine noise. The vehicle, whatever it was, moved swift and silent, and it was right on their ass, the dark machine so close it might as well have been welded to the Cherokee. Daniel knew who rode inside.

  “They’ve found us.”

  Billy spun around in his seat and looked out the back. “Fuck!” He faced forward and looked out the windshield. “How close are we to the edge of town?”

  Daniel couldn’t take his gaze off the rearview mirror and the shadowy mass shaped into a crude approximation of a vehicle filling the glass. “About a mile, maybe.”

  “Head for the country. Once we hit a good long stretch of road we can go fast enough to lose them.”

  “What makes you so goddamned certain we can outrun the fuckers?” Daniel demanded.

  “I’ve been dealing with them for a while now. They’re scary as shit and dangerous as hell, but they’re not all-powerful. Trust me.”

  Everything had gotten strange so fast that Daniel hadn’t had the opportunity—let alone the capacity—to think rationally. But he decided to do as Billy said. The man seemed to know what he was talking about, and besides, it wasn’t as if Daniel had any brilliant ideas on how to escape the shadowmen.

  The suburbs of Ash Creek soon gave way to weathered-gray telephone poles and cornfields bordered by rusty wire fences. The road they traveled was straight and flat, no sign of any other vehicles for miles. The feeble glow of the Cherokee’s headlights preceded them, and beyond that, only darkness was visible. For a moment Daniel had the impression that nothing existed in front of the Cherokee, except what was revealed—or perhaps brought into existence—by the vehicle’s headlights. If that was true, what would happen if he switched the headlights off? Would the road beneath them disappear, sending the Cherokee, not to mention its occupants, into an endless descent of nothingness?

  “Faster!” Billy urged. “They’re catching up!”

  His passenger’s frantic voice snapped Daniel back to reality—or at least what passed for it this night. He checked the rearview and saw the shadow-car closing fast, its shiny black surface tinted a sinister red by the Cherokee’s brake lights. Daniel still couldn’t see into the vehicle, but he didn’t need to. He knew the four shadowmen were in there; he could feel them…feel their eagerness, their hunger, almost as if they were broadcasting their all-consuming need on some psychic frequency.

  The Cherokee was already doing close to eighty, but Daniel pressed the accelerator down further. The engine resisted at first, but then its rumble deepened as the vehicle slowly began to pick up speed. In the rearview, the shadowcar receded, but only by a few yards. It still managed to keep up just fine. A terrible thought occurred to him them: maybe the shadowcar wasn’t a vehicle after all. Maybe it was the shadowmen themselves, the four merged together as one, disguised, their strength combined so that they could travel swiftly and run their prey to ground.

  Beads of cold sweat dotted Daniel’s forehead, and he felt a queasy tightness in his jaw muscles, as if he were on the verge of throwing up. “I’ve had enough of this shit, Billy! I need to know what the fuck’s going on, and I need to know now!”

  Billy didn’t respond immediately, and Daniel thought he was going to avoid answering again. But Billy began speaking in a voice so soft that his words were barely audible over the roar of the Cherokee’s engine.

  “They don’t have a name, at least, not one I know. I’ve never heard them speak. Maybe they can’t.” He shrugged. “You know those fish that just lay there on the bottom of the tank, sucking up all the other fishes’ shit?”

  “Bottom feeders,” Daniel supplied. He glanced at the rearview again. The shadowcar was no closer, but it was no farther away, either.

  “Yeah. That’s what I figure they are. Not fish, of course.” He let out a snuffle of a laugh. “But they do the same sort of thing. I guess you could say they eat the garbage of existence. I’m not talking about the kind of crap people throw out of car windows as they drive—empty coffee cups, crumpled fast-food bags, that sort of shit. Not physical trash. They clean up the other stuff we leave behind. Painful memories we try to suppress and forget. Uncomfortable emotions that we struggle to cast out as if exorcising demons. We can’t see these things, but they’re real. You can feel them. Ever been in an empty room and felt that the atmosphere was emotionally charged? Maybe you sense lingering hostility or a profound sadness. That’s what they feed on. Good thing, too, because if all that shit were allowed to build up…” He shuddered. “Well, it would be one fuck of a mess, I bet.”

  Billy’s explanation sounded insane to Daniel, but then it was no more insane than the reality of the four shadowmen. Daniel doubted that even the most logical and plausible of explanations—and Billy’s didn’t count as either—could’ve satisfied him. How could something like the shadowmen ever truly be explained?

  Daniel checked the rearview again, and this time he had to look twice before he could bring himself to believe what he saw. The shadowcar had fallen back at least a dozen yards, maybe more. Wild exultation filled him, and he nearly let out a whoop of delight.

  Billy must’ve sensed his reaction, for he turned around and looked out the back window. “Hot damn, Daniel! You’re doing it!” He gave Daniel a congratulatory punch on the shoulder. “Keep it up. If we can put enough distance between us and them, we can cut the lights and pull off onto a side road or maybe into a farmer’s driveway. They’re simple-minded and act mostly on instinct. Once they set out in a direction, they won’t deviate from it without a good reason. If they don’t see us turn, it won’t even occur to them that we did so. They’ll keep on going straight for miles before realizing they lost us. And by then, we’ll have pulled back onto the road and hauled ass in the other direction.”

  Billy’s plan seemed like nothing more than wishful thinking, like a child who believes that once he’s covered his eyes no one else can see him. But then Daniel remembered something he’d witnessed when he’d been a child himself. He’d spent a week visiting his grandfather at his farm, and he’d watched one day as his grandfather’s German shepherd chased a rabbit. Just as the dog was about to move in for the kill, the rabbit veered off at a ninety-degree angle and bounded away in a series of long leaps. The shepherd continued running straight while the rabbit fled. Eventually the dog stopped running and trotted back and forth across the field, confused, sniffing the ground in an attempt to pick up the rabbit’s trail. But the rabbit had broken the trail by leaping, and though the shepherd continued searching for the trail for the better part of a half hour, the dog never found it again.

  Maybe Billy was right about the shadowmen; maybe they did operate on instinct, just like Grandpa’s dog. And if that was true, then maybe Billy’s plan had a chance of working. For the first time since he’d gazed up the shadowmen, Daniel began to feel a slight glimmer of hope that he just might survive this night.

  Another check of the rearview mirror showed that the shadowmen had fallen so far behind that their dark vehicle was almost lost to sight.

  “Now?” Daniel asked.

  Billy glanced over his shoulder. “Almost. Give it another minute or so.”

  Daniel wondered whether his Cherokee would last that long. He kept his vehicle in good condition, but it was overdue for servicing, and any car, no matter how well made and maintained, could only run flat out for so long before something went wrong. A burnt gasket, a leaking hose, a thrown rod—any one of those would put an end to their flight and allow the shadowmen to catch up. And once they did…Daniel wasn’t exactly sure what the damned things would do, but he doubted it would be much fun. Not for him and Billy at any rate.

  “You said those things have been chasing you for a while now. If they feed on leftover emotional gunk, why are they after you?” Daniel had almost said after us but he didn’t want to put himself into the same category as Billy. Let Billy r
emain the shadowmen’s chosen victim. For as long as he could, Daniel wanted to continue to pretend he was the guy who’d come to Billy’s rescue and not a victim himself. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had to hold down the ocean of terror roiling beneath the surface of his mind, and it would have to do.

  Billy’s sigh was heavy with weariness. “There are some people who become a focus for others’ negative emotions. They absorb those feelings, whether they like it or not, store them like living batteries.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe more like a steak soaking up a marinade before it’s cooked.” He looked at Daniel and gave him a sickly grin. “Makes for good eating, I imagine.”

  Daniel’s stomach lurched at the imagery Billy’s words conjured in his mind. “And you’re one of these people, one of these…psychic batteries?” But before he finished asking the question, Daniel already knew the answer. Billy Wallace had been a pariah in high school, a punching bag, a dumping ground for any negative emotion someone felt like hurling at him, force-fed like a farm animal bred for slaughter. He was a fatted calf, and to the shadowmen he would be a feast, a banquet of emotions darker than their own ebon substance.

  “I didn’t do much after high school,” Billy said. “But then I wasn’t voted most likely to succeed, was I? I worked at a gas station for a few years, but the owner never liked me, and eventually I was fired. Same thing happened at all the other jobs I ever managed to land, until finally I couldn’t get work anymore. I guess by that time I’d soaked up so much of other peoples’ shit that no one could stand being around me for very long. I was homeless for a while after that, lived right here on the streets of Ash Creek. You probably saw me around a dozen times as you drove around town, but you never noticed me. No one did. Not until they showed up. I figure they were drawn by my psychic scent, or whatever you’d call it. That was six months ago and—”