Bleed

by Lori Michelle

  The rest of the audience followed suit, each lifting their glass of champagne to their lips and drinking.

  Everyone except Bruno DeAngelo.

  There was a standing ovation as Bruno rose to his feet and made his way to the lectern. He thanked everyone politely, gently trying to urge them all to their seats. It wasn’t going to take long now.

  It had been a laborious task, but one that he didn’t seem to mind. Ten cases of champagne had been delivered to the Gleason Theater (named after the great Jackie Gleason, another hero of television that today’s audience demographic had probably never even heard of), with each case containing twelve bottles of champagne. A quick trip back to the CBS studio’s wardrobe facility and Bruno had the appropriate costume to blend right in with the catering staff. Some would have said it was his finest acting yet, mixing in with both the theater’s Latino crew and the caterer’s banquet team. All he needed was time alone with the champagne and with the poison he used to spike it.

  He’d gotten the idea from Monk, the very episode where his character kicked the bucket at a wedding where a jilted lover poisoned the punch at the reception. Bruno remembered Tony Shalhoub as being one of the nicest guys he’d ever met, and was secretly thankful that Tony wasn’t among the guests that were about to take their last breath. One hundred and twenty bottles of champagne (not Dom Perignon but the cheaper stuff), each tampered with just enough to inject a quick syringe of toxins, waiting to be uncorked and consumed by the unsuspecting crowd.

  To hell with them! To hell with them all,with this condescending rouse to somehow make me feel better for being the laughing stock of Hollywood.

  The first victim began to gasp. It was an extra he’d worked with on Tales from the Crypt. The man, a portly fellow that had gotten acting gigs as the stereotypical “fat guy” (and if that didn’t seem like something to be ashamed of in Hollywood . . . and yet he took those gigs with a smile and carried it all the way to the bank) stood to his feet and began to jerk at his tie and collar. There was a murmur of whispers in the crowd as guests watched the man’s face turn white, then purple. The man panted and gasped and wheezed until his throat finally seized on him, and then his chunky frame fell hard to the ground.

  The crowd gasped, watching in helpless terror as the waitstaff rushed over to help. And then the theater’s security team was rushing in to offer further assistance. From outside the theater, the wail of an ambulance siren further distressed the evening’s activities.

  Walter “Wally” Merrill pushed past Bruno to the lectern and began to speak.

  “Calm down, everybody . . . please, if you just take your seats and calm down . . . just let the paramedics do their . . . ”

  Wally’s face also began to turn ash-white. He coughed for a few moments, turned, and threw up his meal all over the podium. He was still hurling and choking as his knees buckled below him and he collapsed, dropping into his own vomit. He writhed for a few more seconds before his life passed from his body.

  In the audience, a young starlet also began coughing and hacking. Bruno recognized her immediately, recalling the sordid tales of her falling onto a casting couch to land her first big break. She had signed contract to appear as the heroine in a new Marvel Comics superhero movie, but that plan now winked out of existence like a falling star.

  She looks like Lydia, he thought. She looks just like how Lydia did just before she passed away on me. All skin and bones and . . .

  Bruno thought of his late wife, and how it was just before she died. The cancer had robbed her of everything that made her the stunningly attractive redhead he first fell in love with. Lydia had discovered the lumps while he was off filming that Stephen King miniseries in ’98. He took some time to be with her during the radical mastectomy, hoping and praying they’d saved enough money away to cover the medical bills, along with their day-to-day expenses while he was out of work. He could still hear himself whispering to her, “We’re going to beat this,” as he stroked her sweating forehead. The chemo and radiation treatments had put an end to that long, beautiful red hair of hers. Bruno had purchased a few wigs for her, but Lydia had always refused them, instead taking to wearing silk scarves or colored bandanas. He remembered toward the end how he broke down and cried, wailing, “This isn’t fair! I’m supposed to die first,” at the top of his lungs. Lydia simply looked up at him from her bed and smiled. “Sweetheart, I’ve spent years watching you die first. This time, it’s my turn.”

  Another audience member clutched his chest and began coughing. Then another. Then another. People were getting out of their seats in a wave of panic, all screaming and crying and running for the doors, but falling down stone dead after only a few steps. Bruno scanned about the room to see if Shatner was still around, but that slippery shit had beat feet just after offering his congratulations. He hadn’t even stayed long enough for the toast. No matter. The rest of the room was awash in vomit and piss and shit as body after body collapsed and died. It was simply amazing. After forty-five years in the business, it appeared that Bruno still had a lot to learn about the way people died in real life.

  Chaos reigned. The living guests were now crawling over dead bodies, bumbling and stumbling and trying to find their escape. It was, in a word, pitiful.

  Just like Bruno’s career. Just like Lydia’s death.

  The ordeal lasted almost five whole minutes (way longer than that first death scene he shot back on Star Trek), but for him, it was the best five minutes of his career. After five minutes, he was the only living person left in the room. Even the rescue team had fled, fearing that perhaps a toxic gas had been released, which they weren’t prepared to deal with. It was thrilling, captivating to watch.

  Bruno smiled as he gazed at the corpses on the floor. He had one last scene to perform, but now there were no cameras, no audience to watch.

  It was Bruno DeAngelo’s finest performance.

  “Here’s to you, Lydia,” he said, and felt the tears begin to well up in the corners of his eyes. “I’ve missed you so much since you’ve been gone.”

  He picked up his champagne flute and took a sip.

  THE CALL

  Rick Hautala

  A New York Times Bestselling author and recipient of the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association, Rick Hautala was a prolific author of speculative fiction between 1980 and 2013. He graduated from the University of Maine in 1974 where he received a Master of Art in English Literature. A devout family man with a strong work ethic, Rick was a mentor and inspiration to many young authors, a fact evidenced by the massive outpouring of remembrances and tributes following his untimely passing in early 2013. His final novel, Star Road (with Matthew Costello), will be released in hardcover by Thomas Dunne Books in early 2014.

  I’ve been working on this journal for almost thirty years. Ever since I was twelve years old. You’d think I would have finished it by now and gone on to write something else, but I have to keep writing and re-writing it if only to make sure the memories and the fear stay fresh and alive in my mind.

  I want to remember.

  I have to remember because I don’t want to have what happened to my father happen to me. So at least four or five times a year—sometime a lot more often—I take down the old journal and read it straight through, and then I write . . . and I revise . . . and I remember.

  I have no idea when it started for my father. It had to have been long before I was born, back when he was a kid, growing up in Hilton, Maine. I do remember that, at some point, the dreams got so bad for him he told me one morning at breakfast that there were times when he actually couldn’t distinguish between waking and sleeping.

  That idea really bothered me.

  I was just a kid at the time, remember. Couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, but I’ll never forget that particular morning. My dad and I were sitting across from each other in the breakfast nook, in our usual places, eating what we always had for breakfast—cereal, usually Cheerios, a
nd orange juice for me; scrambled eggs, wheat toast, juice and coffee for my dad.

  My mom died when I was three years old, so I don’t have any memories of her that aren’t colored by the old photographs I’ve seen of her and how my father’s described her. But memories of my dad—and that morning and what happened afterwards—are still sharp and clear.

  I work at keeping them that way.

  My father was a good man . . . a good father. I don’t remember him as anything other than patient and understanding, even when I screwed up royally. Now that I’m older, and married, and have a son of my own—he’s named Matt, after my father—I think I understand a little better why my father was the way he was. At the time, though, especially that morning, all I knew was that I was worried sick that he was going to die, that I was going to lose him like I’d lost my mom.

  That morning . . .

  It was spring, maybe March or early April. I remember how the sun was shining warmly in through the kitchen window, but the view of our back yard out the kitchen bay window was of a brown, dead world. The only snow left on the ground was in the shadows under the pine trees that bordered our property, and I remember a swarm of brown sparrows fluttering around the feeder my dad and I had built together the summer before. I could hear them chirping even through the closed window.

  I also remember being confused and frightened by what my father had said, and then he told me a story that confused and frightened me even more. He said it was something called a Zen koan. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something about a man who was upset because the night before he’d dreamed he was a butterfly. His friend or teacher or something asked him if he could be sure that, right then, he wasn’t a butterfly, dreaming he was a man.

  I still not sure I get it.

  But then my dad proceeded to tell me how for the last several nights, when he was dreaming—when he was in his dreams, they were so vivid that he felt as though he had been awake all night. When he awoke up in the morning, he said he felt so tired he might just as well not have slept at all.

  He didn’t look so good, either.

  I remember thinking that. His eyes had puffy, dark bags under them, and his face was pale and drawn, really pasty-white. To my little kid’s eyes, he sure looked like someone who might be living two complete lives instead of one with no time left over for any real sleep.

  My dad worked at Martindale’s Rope and Twine Factory, in Biddeford, Maine. It wasn’t a glamorous job, by any stretch of the imagination, but he worked hard, and we got by. I don’t remember ever going without food or clothes, although—like any kid, I suppose—there were toys and stuff I wanted that I didn’t get, even for Christmas.

  It wasn’t until a little later, once I was in junior high school, that my father died, and that’s what this is an account of, as best as I can write it. Of course, there are lots of things—especially what my father was thinking and feeling at the time—that I can only guess at.

  But I was there when it happened, and I saw what I saw, no matter how unbelievable it might seem even to me.

  Even now, thinking about it, I get a chill deep in my gut. No matter how much over the years it seems more and more as though it had to have been a dream or a nightmare, I know it really happened. I know because it killed my father.

  But even if it didn’t happen the way I remember it . . . even if it was just a dream, I know dreams and nightmares, no matter how intense, fade over time . . . like memories, and I have to remember this one. I have to keep it fresh in my mind so I don’t end up convincing myself that it didn’t really happen, and then fall into the same trap my father fell into.

  The whole time I was growing up, I remember thinking how my father didn’t look very healthy. He was always on the thin side, even in his wedding photos, but by the time I was in seventh grade, I remember lying awake many nights worried sick that my dad had cancer like what had killed my mother, and that he was going to die, too, and leave me all alone in the world.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  He died, and from the seventh grade on, my aunt and uncle, Pauline and Mike, raised me, but my father didn’t die of cancer . . . not unless it was cancer of the universe.

  Now there’s a concept!

  Cancer of the Universe.

  Every now and then, especially in the months before he died, my dad talked to me about his dreams. I remember many mornings when he looked haggard and tired, and he would ask me over breakfast what I had dreamed the night before. He taught me early on to pay attention to my dreams, but I’m sure now that it wasn’t just out of interest or curiosity. He was checking on me . . . making sure I was okay . . . not being threatened. No matter how casual he tried to be about it, I always felt like there was an undercurrent of danger when he asked me about my dreams, as if he didn’t quite trust his own dreams and was afraid that mine would get to be as bad as his.

  He never told me any of the details of his dreams, at least not that I recall, but he seemed to move through life with a dark cloud hanging over his head, shading his face even on the sunniest days. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  Anyway, it was a bright, sunny morning in spring when I was in seventh grade that my father looked particularly worn when we sat down at the table for our usual breakfasts. By then I was convinced he was wasting away from some dread disease he didn’t know about or he did know about and didn’t yet have the heart to discuss with me. So I got really nervous when he told me he wasn’t going to work that day, and that he was going to call school and tell them I wasn’t coming today and we were going for a drive.

  I protested.

  Not that I wanted to go to school or anything, but there was something about the way he said it that I could tell something was really wrong. All I could think was, he’s going to take me to the doctor’s office or he’s going to check into the hospital where the doctor would break the news to me that he had only a few weeks—or days—to live.

  “Hey. What’s the matter, Sport?” he asked, scruffing my hair.

  He called me “Sport” a lot.

  “You got something against missing school and spending the day with your old man?”

  “It’s not that,” I said, and I remember that I was burning inside, dying to ask him if he was okay, or if he was going to die. Instead, all I could manage was a feeble, “So what are we gonna do?”

  “I was thinking about taking a little drive up north,” he said with a thin smile. The circles under his eyes looked like smears of black shoe polish.

  “You mean up to Hilton?” I asked, and he nodded.

  I remember thinking how his smile looked forced . . . not at all natural or normal. And I remember that all I did was nod in agreement and focus as hard as I could on the cereal floating in the milk in my bowl, all the while thinking, He’s going to die! . . . He’s sick, and he’s going back home to die!

  Crazy thought for a little kid, don’t you think?

  Anyway, we finished breakfast, cleaned up the dishes, and got into the car. As we backed out of the driveway, I wanted desperately to ask him why he wanted to drive to Hilton, especially today, but I couldn’t because I was still tingling with the dreadful anticipation that he was going to admit something horrible once we were on the road . . . something I didn’t want to hear.

  The drive north went okay. I’ve never been much for long car trips, even now. After two or three hours in a car, I start getting a little twitchy. But this particular day, I remember, was mild and sunny. The grass was green, and leaves were bursting out all over the place. As we drove, my dad told me he wanted to take the long way and see some of the scenery while we were at it.

  My father was born and raised in Hilton. It’s not much of a town, but I always had fun whenever we’d visit. I remember thinking how it must have been kind of a cool place to be a kid. Although I haven’t been back in ages, probably only once or twice since he died, I can imagine that, even now, in spite of the Internet and MTV, it’s probably r
etained some of that quaint “small town” charm it had back them. There are places where the Twenty-first Century still hasn’t happened.

  We stopped along the way and ate lunch at Moody’s Diner on Route One before heading west along Route 201. My father didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t in a bad mood or depressed or anything. I do remember thinking how he seemed . . . distant, maybe, is the word. It was like he was preoccupied, thinking about something other than the drive. I’m sure now that it was his dreams he was mulling over. He was living half of his life, and right up to his dying day, I’ll bet he was trying to figure out how those two lives he led—the one awake, the other dreaming—might coincide.

  We got to Hilton a little past three o’clock in the afternoon. We drove through downtown but didn’t stop even though my father recognized a couple of people and waved to them as we passed. At the edge of town, I could see Watcher’s Mountain through the trees, off to the west. We turned onto a narrow dirt road that wound through a dense stand of pine trees. I didn’t recognize the road, and I was suddenly afraid.

  “Where we going?” I asked.

  This wasn’t the road to the old family homestead—I knew that much. My father’s parents were both dead, and my dad had only one brother, my Uncle Mike, who lived with his family in Saco. I’d been thinking all along that we had come out here so he could drive past the old house, and my dad could reminisce.

  “I just wanna check something out,” my father said.

  At least now, I remember hearing a certain tension in his voice, but at the time, I think I just shrugged and settled back in the seat, waiting to see where we ended up.

  The road was a typical dirt road, the kind you find all over Maine. It wound through a long corridor of dense pine forest that shut out the sun except at high noon. I had my window open, and I remember the strong smell of pine resin wafting around me. I’ve always loved that smell, but for some reason, on this particular day, the smell made me sick to my stomach. I could hear birds singing, deep in the forest, but their songs didn’t seem very cheerful.