Playing with Fire (Anthology of Horror)

by Chryse; Coral Russell; Brian Fatah Steele; CAV Laster; Nomar Knight; Robynn Gabel; Susan Evelyn Wymer

  I hailed a cab, half-expecting another phone call or contact. But the dull, burning sensation had changed again. Now, I dragged my limbs wearily across the sidewalk and into the taxi. My chest tightened and grew heavy; for short bursts, something strangled me from the inside. No, damn it! It can't end this way. Not in the back of a taxi that smells like stale cheese and armpits. I set my jaw in determination.

  "I need to get outta Capital City," I told the driver. "That okay?"

  "So long as you got the dough."

  I gave him the address. About two blocks away, I changed my mind. "Drop me right here," I told the cabbie.

  "On the berm?"

  "Yep."

  "Turn around and go back the way you came," I said, giving him the fare plus a hefty tip. No need to set off any alarm bells, after all.

  I hunkered down, shuffled towards Crowley's barn and crept inside.

  Willy-nilly, I tossed stuff around, soft but quick. No camera.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Now what?

  "Looking for something?" Jonathon asked.

  Slowly, I turned around, struck speechless. Then, his flannel shirt bunched at the hip, I saw sigils wrapped around his bare pelvic bone. Why would he put sigils on himself?

  Jonathon squeezed a bear hug on me, near tears, and said, "Thank the Lord you're here. He can't be stopped. I thought we were alone, me and the Missus."

  Realization terrified me:

  poinsettias. "I don't mean to interrupt, boys," a voice lilted all around us. I looked up at Elena, a camera dangling from her left index finger. Her other hand was on her hip.

  I lunged at her, reaching for the camera.

  Just one more step. She dodged me and ran for the house. Logic said, why would she run inside? Eliot. That's who Jonathon meant. His son. He and Elena were in cahoots the whole time, and now, it was over.

  Elena ran into the dining room and stood at the bottom of the steps; she pointed the camera upwards, and made a small adjustment in her angle. A flashbulb spotlighted the staircase. "Eliot!" she beckoned. "I have what you've been looking for."

  "Whadda yuh want?" Eliot's voice crackled as he came stomping down the stairs. A painful swath of light, which reminded me of sun glare, smacked his face when the Lady Ariadne took his picture. He froze, as if someone had knocked him backwards.

  Then, he pursed his lips and began to growl out some evocation. Elena grabbed at her own throat, thrashing, struggling to breathe, and fell backwards on the hardwood floor. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she murmured something.

  I saw Eliot's photograph lying at Elena's feet. Without thinking and in fast-forward X32 speed, I pulled a thin-point rollerball pen out of my pocket and stabbed at his picture, right between the eyes.

  He screamed, but it was more like an otherworldly shriek.

  Elena stood straight up, as if magic had propelled her that way rather than her legs.

  "What are you doing?" Eliot's voice was small and frightened.

  "You're such an amateur, my sweet boy. Magic is formed in the mind, not the mouth. I think," she continued, picking up his photograph, "I'll be hanging on to this for safekeeping."

  At which point, I fell into a hardback dining room chair and said, "I'm too tired to think." She turned and explained for our benefit, "Something ugly had been chasing me for months, reaching out with its black claws and…well, I could

  sense it. Everywhere. Following me. Making me into its slave. What amateur practitioners don't understand is that magic creates an imprint on its tools so that when my picture was taken, a part of me stayed in the camera as well. I found the camera by using a tracking spell linked to me. One night, he hid it…in the woods…under leaves and pebbles. The little brat was watching both of us, Charlie. I thought with your intelligence and my instincts, you would lead me to the camera's owner. I didn't care much about my soul. But Rafael, my little nephew, I wanted him to rest in peace. I knew what happened to him." She turned and looked at Eliot. "Word travels fast in the magical community, especially when a bokor like you is on the loose."

  The boy's gaze looked mean but at the same time like he might cross his arms and huff off the way any kid who was beaten at his own game might. "What do you want from me?"

  "Well," Elena said. "I could just throw this picture away if you like, maybe set it on fire."

  "No! God, no! Just tell me what you want." Eliot glared.

  "You have something that belongs to us."

  The boy ran upstairs and came back down with five photographs: Elena's, his mother's, his father's, Rafael's, and mine. He didn't want to let go of Rafael's picture, but when Elena held out her hand for it, he bowed his head and gave in. So delicate, barely the weight of a penny--yet, it had captured our souls.

  "Now what?" the boy repeated, fearfully gazing at us, probably ready to get his punishment done with.

  Jonathon answered, "First, I think you best go cut yourself a switch and think about what you done. Then we'll put everything right."

  "Yes, sir."

  An angry puff of purple smoke filled the dining room, and Lady Ariadne had vanished. Dammit, she was my ride home. Magical types. They always have to be so mysterious.

  I caught a ride back to my untrusty Studebaker from Jonathon. We rode in silence, and as I searched my pockets for car keys, I felt…

  good. Happy, even. I lifted my shirt. The sigils were gone. Silence settled over Capital City-no car alarms blaring, police sirens screaming, or windows shattering. Just…silence. Humanity had returned, and badly needed a nap.

  In a safe deposit box far outside the city, which was guarded by men under sixty carrying high-powered rifles on their hips, I wrapped my photograph in lead box. Some people really should take better care of their souls.

  Things had settled down. Might as well turn myself in. The police concluded that my "suicide attempt" was some kind of brotherly squabble. Even Robbie forgave me, chalking it up to the beer, my telling him the strange story of Darius's death, and mostly, to the bad burgers.

  "That's why I try to live vegan, man."

  # # #

  Table of Contents

  Living with Murder (excerpt)

  by

  Chryse Wymer

  Chapter One

  Cedar Falls, Ohio -- December 2045

  Who killed my son? That's all I wanted to know those couple weeks back, walking into a house full of cops. All of them in tinsel-purple uniforms with matching serious expressions, typing into their matching palm-sized computers, chewing on their nearly-matching lips. Supposed to make me feel like they're doing something. The cops had burned holes in my front lawn, leaving their airmobiles running. I lived in this place my whole life and I didn't know who any of these fresh-faced boys were.

  They called us down to the station. Got to identify the body, they said. My wife and I held hands, and I could tell she was about to cry, the way her breathing was so uneven. Someone pulled the sheet back. My wife turned away and started crying real hard against my chest. I wanted to do the same, but just swiped at my tears and gave a quiet nod. "That's him."

  A police officer came up to us after and shook our hands. "My name's Detective Ellroy. I'm the chief investigating officer. Whatever I can do…."

  "I asked the other boys, but nobody seems to have an answer: who killed him? What happened to my only freaking son?"

  Ellroy's face scrunched up like he was thinking hard, like maybe if he could turn his brain inside out, he could come up with an answer. But he never did. He patted my back and walked away.

  "Hey, Detective?"

  He whipped his head around. "Yes, Mr. Miller?"

  "Just promise me you'll find the man who killed him," I said and shut the tears up tight in my chest. "No one should die this way."

  Ellroy gave a two-finger salute, and kept on walking. A real cocky strut about him, too.

  Seemed to me that police nowadays didn't care for old-fashioned pavement-pounding, door-knocking detective work. It's all about the shine of
their badges and how they carry themselves as Old West cowboys. But I didn't have to abide by any of their proper procedure. So it was time to talk to the Memory Keepers.

  The Memory Keepers had a place near the park, in the middle of the woods. Could hardly find it without a GPS. I closed my eyes and remembered living close to this place as a kid. Just outside town, I would stand at the bottom of the twin cliffs where the waterfalls spilled down. A white mist sprayed cool on my face. But things had changed.

  People got energy anywhere they could: stealing, begging, borrowing from earth, water, wind, and especially fire. The waterfalls went dry, some years. Mine was a world powered by borrowed time.

  Uneven gravel and dirt crunched under my steel-toe boots. Such a blue-sky peaceful day for a walk in the park. If I was a let-bygones-be-bygones kind of man, I might have packed a bologna sandwich and sat down in the grass. Chewed on my avoidance. But once my mind had hooked on to something, smart or not, I was in it for the long haul.

  I stared at the trees, which slanted down towards the gorge where wild violets grew between black cohosh and belladonna. There was a grassy smell to the air, which reminded me of my mom tending catnip in raised beds, until my cat Big Black Tom chewed it to dry nubs. Well, it was time to find out who killed my son. A couple deep breaths later, I stepped into a square hole in the ground, and walked down cement cellar steps. More like I forced my legs forward, and tried to keep myself from puking. Rocky dirt surrounded me and another quick memory of my mother: chipping at the soil, getting it ready to plant, saying, "The only thing this God forsaken land is good for is growing potatoes…and

  rocks." Sweat dribbled down my mom's freckled skin and into the creases of her arms and breasts. All this technology and they still couldn't do anything about the rocks.

  So what if these Memories cost ninety-thousand dollars? It was a real bargain, to know something about the killer and clear my conscience, too. A small part of our retirement fund and all of Brandon's college savings bought seven one-hour sessions. Just seven hours with my son's memories.

  Standing on the bottom step, I leaned against a jagged metal door, pressed an intercom button and said, "Kirk Miller for…um…Chester." My parents didn't raise me to call people by their first names, but the kid hadn't given a last name.

  A

  want fries with that? technological crackling came over the intercom, and then what sounded like someone shuffling papers, and a woman finally gargled, "Just a few moments, Mr. Miller."

  My left hand hung loose; I hid the other behind my back, holding tight to something small but important.

  The door creaked open, and the kid with a brick-red Afro stood in the doorway. Chester smiled, faintly. He patted my back as we walked inside and I knew he meant it as a comforting gesture, but I never particularly liked being touched by strangers.

  "Did you remember to bring it?"

  "Yeah. I just hope my wife never finds out about this." I showed him the baby book, and flipped the small, square cardboard pages, past "your handprint," "your footprint" and "your hospital identity tag," and gently touched the one with the words "your first lock of hair." An early-years scrapbook.

  "Follow me. Remember: you won't be able to talk with him or interact. You'll experience his memories. That's all."

  They should have made me wear a space suit. We moved down long, clean antiseptic tunnels, which reminded me of white, flexible plumbing pipe. Three parallel tubes of light, like from antique tanning beds, flickered in one continuous curve through the long but narrow halls, branching off in right or left-hand turns into perfect-square rooms. This womb-like Mister Wizard atmosphere might have comforted someone else. So

  scientific, so rational…unemotional. Then why did my legs feel heavier, and my acidy stomach slosh with fear?

  What would it be like-to watch, to

  feel, my son being murdered? Totally helpless to stop it.

  The lab tech pulled on latex gloves and waved me over to hand him the baby book; Chester separated the strands of hair with sharp-tipped tweezers and chose a single lock to press between two slides. I closed the book, feeling awkward. Only three people had ever seen Brandon's baby book.

  A brain's a disgusting sight. Looks like a sack of balled-up worms. But when it's your son's brain, it's unreal. I heard other parents mutter that cliché about how it's unnatural for a child to die before his parents. It's worse than that. It's unfair, raising up these little helpless animals from slimy babies with misshapen heads that shit their pants, into these good-hearted creatures that blind your world with light. Then to have it taken away, and with no one to answer for it. And to see someone's brain like that seems worse than seeing him naked for the first time. I couldn't help but stare.

  They got a way to preserve the brain. That's the key to extracting the memories. All I know is they stimulate my brain with this machine so that I can see what's in my boy's brain. Or what was, I mean. There are still these little electrical impulses zapping around in there, until they allow the brain to die.

  What if it hurt? What if we spent all that money only to muddy up my conscience even worse?

  Every couple years, your number would come up to get a high-power brain scan and after that, they say it's all about reading the patterns. The Federal Board of Cognitive Analysis, which was affiliated with the Ohio State Medical Board, also took DNA samples-blood or saliva. I always figured it was so they didn't flub up and scan the wrong brain. Inventory purposes. But this postmortem junk was new, and all I saw was my son's brain in a clear cage with these green lights flashing as it rotated. It looked suspended in mid-air.

  Chester tucked the glass-encased brain under one arm and balanced his clipboard on top. He jutted his chin towards a closet-sized room, which sat behind a window, and said, "I'm going to be right in there. If you need anything, I'll be able to hear you."

  I watched his stiff-starched lab coat whoosh behind him as he left, reminding me of a superhero. Biohazard signs blared warnings across the walls, doors, and near the window. Comforting. Aside from that, there were only high-gloss white walls and over-sterilized linoleum floors, which glinted with pinprick yellow dots from the overhead fluorescent lights. What was I getting myself into?

  Chester stood behind the window, and gave a thumbs-up. He leaned into the microphone and said, "We're ready to start."

  I settled into the chair, and it unnerved me how much it looked like a dentist's chair. A leather contraption was snapped to the chair, and I pulled the rest around my ears and head, fastening it with plastic loops. Next to me, a gelatinous blue box hummed. A low-pitch noise. I flipped each toggle switch in succession as the light turned from red to green. When the final light flickered and then flashed, I closed my eyes and whispered, "Go." And I was gone, replaced by my son's memories.

  You allow your eyes to close, softly, and inhale the too-warm air floating by outside the truck's open window. Like someone's hot breath scratching your neck. The continuous buzz of the pickup leaving all those miles behind. This had been a special night, full of purple fog machines, green laser lights, and music that hissed and thumped. But mostly, you thought about being crowned Miss Fabulous. You carried your tiara in a rolled-up knapsack. In all the adrenaline-charged euphoria of being an instant superstar, somehow, you became separated from your friends. But it's okay--you hitch a ride with a man going the same way. He picks you up on an empty road under a clear, moonless sky, giving you the biggest gap-toothed hillbilly grin you ever seen. Somehow, this makes you trust him. He gives your hand a painful squeeze and then says, "Just Johnny, that's what everyone calls me."

  "

  Brenda," you say with a short nod, and swing one bare foot into the tall truck and then pull your knapsack and your other foot in after. The points of your stiletto heels dig into the knapsack's hemp cloth and scratch your leg just before you slam the door shut. A half-smile plays on your face as you drift off into contented, dreamless sleep. Fabulous Sleep….

  Your eyes spr
ing open. "Why did we stop?" You lean against the passenger side door, slow, and nudge it open with a pinky finger. It clicks, a whisper.

  John stretches out, long and wide, and yawns. "Need to take a leak. No rest stops for miles." Hesitation peppers his voice.

  You look into his all-black eyes and at that smile. Something about the way he smiles…it's wrong. That's when your heart catches in your throat, barely perceptible. You fall out the door and take off running down the dirt road. The knapsack falls at your feet. You pump your arms, cheeks flapping with the speed, and try to lose him in the woods.

  You can hear him behind you, laughing.

  You're running through the woods, flat-out, native drums pounding in your ears. No, not real drums but your clattering, crashing heartbeat. The soundtrack of your inevitable death. And even though you know where all this is headed, you run. You must. Leaping over heavy growth, thick roots, rocks, and maybe even small animals, your arms and legs spin like pistons doing cartwheels.

  Then, it's quiet.

  You stumble and try to regain your balance, but fall. Your dress is torn from thigh to hip, and you clutch a handful of red sequins. He lumbers towards you, that terrible smile still there, and easily saunters across the boulder that you tripped over and now has you scrambling away. You want to squeeze your eyes shut, to let it come, but the fighter in you won't do it. His body thumps down to the ground in front of you, on all fours, and he comes closer. You reach up and bite his chin and then his ear, whatever body parts stick out. He smells like old gasoline. That smile grows wider. Birch trees encircle you in a suffocating grove, towering over you so that they block out the dimmest starry light. There's nothing but darkness. White as bleached-bone, the skeleton trees beckon.

  Shoulders trembling, you sit up and edge away from your pursuer.

  "

  What do you want?"

  "

  Oh, I think you know what I want, Brenda," he snarls. Tears and sweat drip down your face, painfully salty. Too late, you begin to panic. Oh God, oh God . He must know that under your dress, fake blobs of breasts slip around in a push-up bra. That your penis is in a sling and tucked under your butt.