Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  She dispensed small sips of this ocean as a bank teller, damned as well from her customers behind bullet-proof glass though sometimes their fingers brushed in the crack between them. She also pushed lollipops through the crack for mothers to give to their children, who valued colored sugar over the faces of dead men on greasy bills. Her name was Jonatha, and she thought sometimes that she should work in a candy store instead, because she preferred handing out the colored sugar to the pictures of men long rotted.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, Jonny,” her boss said, calling her by the nickname her co-workers used. Her family had never called her Jonny; her father’s name was Jonathan, and he had died too young, before she was even born, before she could even know him, but she loved him because she had been taught to do so – her name was a tribute and something not to be marred any more than it already was. Sometimes she felt guilty that there was no “n” at the end, just as she had sometimes felt guilty growing up for missing that bit of anatomy that would make her even more of a tribute to the man. She was a walking tombstone erected to his memory, and secretly hated to have that monument chipped or stained in any way.

  But her boss Brett said, “I’m sorry, Jonny, you’re a good worker...you’re very pleasant to the customers...I never hear any complaint from them, or from anyone here. It’s just that your attendance record really works against you.”

  “I get these...migraines,” Jonatha said in her own defense without much conviction, as if she suspected herself of lying. But she was nodding with fatalistic understanding, as if she could agree with Brett’s logic that it was better to be a surly teller with a spotless attendance record than a cordial teller who missed one day a month, on average.

  “Well that must be hard, and you should see a doctor about it if you haven’t already, but I really have to look at the bigger picture here and how absenteeism affects the team. Whenever you’re out we’re short-handed, and that puts a lot of pressure on the rest of the team.”

  Jonatha nodded, flicked a glance up at him, then dropped her eyes again to the tiny speckles of splashed mud on the black of her shoes against the cream of the carpet that looked to her like beach sand.

  Brett leaned forward and said, “You have another review coming up in six months. If you can go until then without any more absences, I’m sure I can get you a raise. But at this point I’m afraid my hands are really tied, here. It’s our policy to stress attendance to the crew.”

  She nodded and muttered, “I understand,” and rose when he rose in dismissal.

  “But you are a good worker, and keep up the good work, and do your best, I know you can do it,” and perhaps he said more of these things as he walked her to the door of his little office, and Jonatha returned to work. She knew the teller to her right, Jessica, had recently received a twenty-five cent an hour raise. And a few months ago, Jennifer – the teller to her left – had received an increase of twenty-five cents. They weren’t supposed to discuss their pay, but both young women had boasted. Jonatha prayed that they would not ask her how her yearly review had gone, meanwhile cashing a paycheck for a man who looked like an auto mechanic which was three times what she made in a week. He must not have terrible, torturing headaches. He must have a great deal of worth as a worker, and a man.

  * * *

  It was a duplex, and Jonatha’s mother lived on the other side of the wall. She had two older sisters who lived in nearby towns, both married and with children. Jonatha lived on her side of the duplex alone. The house was nowhere as big as her childhood home – a dilapidated Victorian -- although childhood can distort the size and shape of things. Her mother had told her that the house before that had been even larger...but that house had burned down before Jonatha was born.

  When she came home from work she put a mug of water into the microwave to heat for tea, put on a soft jazz radio station with the volume turned very low so as not to disturb her mother, then started running a hot bath. Even before she was ready to disrobe, she avoided glancing at herself in the mirror. Peripherally, however, it looked like a man shared the bathroom with her, stealing a sideways peek at her. That intrusive figure had short dark hair, a round face upon a stocky body, glasses with thin frames and thick eyebrows above them.

  In the kitchen again, she dunked a tea bag into her mug. Listened to the water splash in the tub. Listened to jazz and Brett’s words, sorry, sorry, good worker, but sorry...listened to Jennifer and Jessica brag about their raises...a quarter an hour, each. Was it because they were both pretty? Long-haired, short-skirted? Did that elevate their worth in Brett’s eyes?

  A quarter. Twenty-five cents. Twenty-five pennies. A year since her last raise – of a quarter – and she was not worth even twenty-five pennies more an hour. She was not of sufficient value. Despite Brett’s words, she doubted he would fight to win her a raise in six months, since pay reviews were a yearly thing and six month performance evaluations generally only brought money to new employees. Twenty-five cents. You couldn’t even buy a coffee from a machine for twenty-five cents. Twenty-five cents itself had no value, no worth. And she wasn’t even worth that worthlessness.

  She shut off the faucets for the tub, but didn’t disrobe...instead, paced her apartment with her mug in hand. Her step was trained to be soft, so as not to disturb her mother beyond the wall. Jonatha’s sisters had both told her that they couldn’t understand how she could put up with their mother’s...sensitivities. They had also told her, at other times, that she was the one who was most like their mother. While her mother said she was the one who was most like her father. Jonatha took her word for that.

  Thoughts of her father made her drift into her bedroom. Thoughts of quarters made her look in the back of a bureau drawer for those meager treasures of her father’s she had secreted away there, and hadn’t looked at for a long time. She sat on the edge of her bed to go through them.

  A few black and white snapshots; they were all scorched brown along one edge. Father had been handsome, lean, with a wide grin almost too wide. Jonatha thought she didn’t look at all like him, except for the heavy eyebrows she supposed. She hated to imagine that handsome face blackened by flame, the lips seared away to make the huge grin a garish caricature, the lids burned away from staring eyes, strangely intact. She shuddered the image out of her brain and went on to the other articles beside her.

  Father’s humble coin collection. Though they seemed exciting at first glance, she had looked up several pieces and found their value to be negligible. The German coin with a swastika on it, the American coin from the eighteenth century. Too common. But they were special to her, because they had been special enough for her father to keep with some other coins in a little velvet pouch.

  At least she could understand his interest in those coins, but she wondered what his interest had been in a brown-tinted plastic pill vial filled with pennies. She uncapped it, poured them into her palm. The dates were not old...the oldest one she found was from 1962. In fact there were two from 1962.

  She counted the pennies. There were twenty-four.

  What had been his intention in keeping them? She checked the dates again. One from 1970, one from 1972, another one from 1970...

  She spread them all out on the bed, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, to look for patterns to fit together.

  Jonatha quickly realized, when she had finished, that there were two pennies each from twelve successive years. Two for 1962, two for 1963, 1964, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73. He had died in 1973. In the fire. When the big house burned down. Just before Jonatha was born.

  Twenty-four pennies.

  She found that number oddly incomplete. It bothered her. And then she realized why.

  She took the vial to the kitchen. Opened her pocketbook, removed her wallet. She extracted one penny. 1999. She dropped that into the vial, atop the older pennies stacked inside. There. Twenty-five cents. The amount she hadn’t been worth. But these pennies had been worth something to her father...and if he had
lived, she was sure she would have meant something to him, as well.

  * * *

  Awful dreams were as common to Jonatha as her crippling headaches, and awful faces were common to those dreams. But before, the faces had always been burnt. Flesh cooked to black ash, peeling away in rough patches from raw bloody muscle beneath. Yellow steaming pus brimming from the corners of eyes swollen shut or glaring open. Sometimes the faces were indistinguishable, barely human. Other times a face was only too recognizable. Every burnt face was her father’s.

  But tonight, she saw another face in her dream.

  It was a young woman. She lay naked in a dry bathtub. It was Jonatha’s bathtub. She had long hair, and Jonatha thought she looked like Jennifer from work – though the next day, she would wonder if her dreaming brain had merely “cast” Jennifer in the part. The woman’s body, so clinically exposed in the harsh bathroom lighting, was slender but large-breasted, the American ideal. Many times Jonatha had stolen glances of her co-worker in her clingy tops and tight pants, envious almost to the point of an unhappy yearning, or hunger. As if she subscribed to the primitive notion that if she could somehow consume the very attractive Jennifer, she might become like her.

  The woman in the bathtub had a beautiful body, there was no question. But her body was not fully beautiful, just as the bathtub was not fully dry. There was no water, but there was other fluid.

  Jonatha’s dreaming gaze could not linger long on the wounds that marred that taut youthful flesh. Elastic skin had drawn back from some of these gashes in wide, too-wide grins of red meat.

  The young woman’s eyes were gone. Jonatha could tell by the thick, drying bands of blood that ran down either side of her face. But as if to plug the wounds, there was a penny resting atop either socket. As Jonatha watched, the pennies sank further into the sockets, heavier than the blood they floated upon. The pennies sank until the blood oozed over them, and they were gone.

  She awoke in the dark, and instantly remembered her bathtub. She had retired without taking her bath. The water was still in there, cold now. She blamed this for her dream – her subconscious mind trying to remind her of it. She wanted to go right now and let it out...but she was afraid to look in her tub. Afraid even to draw aside her protecting blanket.

  A sharp cough startled her. It sounded as though it came from beside her, in the bed...from a woman lying beside her...her naked flesh almost phosphorescently white, her mouth slack, her long pretty hair matted with half-congealed gore, and eyes glinting copper in the dark...

  The sound had been her mother, she realized, beyond the wall. Perhaps she was having a nightmare, too.

  * * *

  It was Friday, noon time, and the Eastborough Savings Bank was massed with people anxious to cash their checks during lunch break. They were queued up in a roped-off pen as if waiting to get on a ride at Disneyworld...or like pigs waiting to be slaughtered.

  Jonatha looked over at Jennifer as she chirped amicably to a man who appeared to be flirting with her. How could Jennifer stay so cheerful, joke or chat with nearly every customer? Jonatha wondered if Jennifer kept her resentments in a vault, and when she got home, wrote furious diary entries...or made terrible phone calls to elderly people...or stuck sewing needles through pet goldfish to see if they could still swim thus pierced.

  Paycheck after paycheck went through Jonatha’s hands. She nimbly counted and recounted bills, crisp newly designed twenties mixed with dingy old twenties. A tray in front of her held coins in vertical stacks like poker chips. She scooped out the combinations of metal disks she needed almost without conscious thought, unerringly.

  But her gaze focused, suddenly, on the coin tray. The coppery stack of pennies. Their uppermost edges gleamed, highlighted by the overhead banks of fluorescents.

  She was mesmerized by the coins. On each, the face of a murdered man. Like the succession of burned faces in her dreams of her father.

  When she looked up at last, it was because her customer had grown impatient, cleared his voice, and said, “Sir – excuse me?”

  Jonatha was confused for a moment until she realized he meant her. For some reason, she hoped Jennifer and Jessica hadn’t heard him. It would only fortify them, perhaps, in the knowledge of their own prettiness. Instead of correcting the customer, Jonatha said nothing and counted out his change for him. His paycheck came to $384.24. She didn’t give him two dimes and four pennies. She counted out twenty-four pennies.

  As she slipped him his money through the metal tray between them, her eyes were drawn past him, taking in the waiting, staggered rows of customers.

  Between two women bundled in heavy winter coats, there stood a nude woman with long red hair pasted to her shoulders and upper breasts with dried blood. Streaks of it had run down her ribs and over the curve of her belly, making a matted scab of her pubic hair. Her hand that held the dividing velvet rope was missing the tip of every finger down to the first knuckle. Her lips had been sliced away to reveal a Death’s head grin, and two new pennies glowed with reflected light in the streaming sockets of her eyes.

  Jonatha jerked her eyes back to her customer, who had tucked his money into his wallet and turned away from her disgustedly.

  She looked back to the line of people in dread, her heart tumbling down the staircase of her ribs. But the nude woman was gone, and the two in winter coats had closed up the space between them.

  A new male customer approached Jonatha. “Hello,” she said to this one, so he’d hear her voice and know she was a woman. But her voice was shaky, she noted.

  As Jonatha counted out this man’s change – she gave him a quarter and twenty-four pennies to make forty-nine cents – she dropped several pennies to the floor and squatted down to retrieve them.

  “Is everything okay, Jonny?” Jennifer said, drawing close to her side when Jonatha had risen. “You look sick or something...”

  Jonatha half-turned to reassure her co-worker that she was fine, but no words came when she saw the pennies glowing like molten metal in Jennifer’s flowing eye sockets.

  * * *

  In her bathroom’s mirror, Jonatha stared at her bare chest. Her breasts were small, but she did have breasts. She didn’t think Jessica’s were any larger. Jennifer’s were another story. Jennifer’s were so plump, heavy, as if filled almost to dripping with some vital ambrosia that was half milk and half honey. Jonatha pictured Jennifer standing beside her, also topless. As if to compare herself to Jonatha. With her eyes on her reflected, thick boyish hands, Jonatha began to timidly, almost experimentally squeeze her own breasts, running her thumbs over her stiffening nipples. Over Jennifer’s hardening, rubbery nipples...

  Something yawed in Jonatha’s guts, squirmed in her groin, sent hot blood ballooning into her face. Almost instantly she became ashamed, embarrassed, repulsed by herself and the image of Jennifer that had made her do such a thing. The boyishly awkward, kneading hands dropped from Jennifer’s imagined flesh. She imagined herself turning to face Jennifer and her large, boastful breasts with a flashing sharp blade in her hand...

  ...imagined putting pennies where the nipples had once been.

  Jonatha flinched. She actually stumbled back a step, as if to physically recoil from her vision. Why had she thought that? Why?

  A sound behind her made her flinch again. And now, in the mirror, there was indeed another woman in the bathroom with her. Jonatha wheeled about to face her.

  The nude young woman groaned loudly. A drawn-out sound that seemed like it would never end now that it had begun, a kind of irritating whine of “Ehhhhhhhhhhh...” that might have been comical if it were not so ghastly. It was the sound of a dying woman who could not form words, could not even scream or sob. It was a fatalistic moan past despair, even, and just short of a death rattle.

  And of course, pennies in her eyes.

  Jonatha wanted to scream, herself, but she couldn’t find the words, either. Instead, her hands flew to her face, her palms pressing into her own eyes to blind them.r />
  The moan went on until a thumping replaced it. The moan faded. The thumping grew more insistent.

  Jonatha reluctantly lowered her hands. She was alone. She snatched up her turtleneck and slipped into it while moving through her apartment. She stepped outside, into the cold night air, and let herself into her mother’s apartment with a key.

  She found her mother lying in bed, watching the TV at the other end of the room, across her lap the cane she had used to pound the dividing wall. Her glaring face was lit only by the TV’s subaqueous bluish glow.

  “What were you doing in there?” her mother asked.

  “What do you mean?” Jonatha asked weakly.

  “That horrible noise. You almost gave me a heart attack!” her mother snapped.

  Jonatha just stared back at her.

  “Well? That was you making that awful sound, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Jonatha said faintly. “I guess so...”

  * * *

  At the end of each narrow aisle of the library there was a small cubicle-like desk with a chair. Jonatha sat at one of these. Occasionally she would see someone peripherally outside the window directly to her left, and look out at them with a start, but it would only be some passerby dressed in warm winter clothing. Once in a while she would glance up to her right nervously, expecting to see a nude figure standing in the aisle with her, spying on her with a metallic stare. But whenever she looked up, she was alone in the aisle she had selected.

  The books she had taken to the desk were about murders in general, mass murderers in particular. And in the indexes of several books, she found mention of Massachusetts. Two books mentioned nearby Worcester, Massachusetts in their indexes. And one book listed Eastborough, Massachusetts.

  The page given was part of a chapter on a series of unsolved murders that took place in central and western Massachusetts. The sexually assaulted and horribly brutalized bodies of nine young women were found between the years 1964 and 1972. There had been other disappearances of women in the area that might also have been the work of this killer, but no further bodies were ever discovered.