When he arrived at the old river bridge that led into town, his cell phone began beeping. He had four text messages from Jennifer, sent a few hours ago.
12:05 a.m. - Hey Shakespeare, I had the most god-awful dream something bad happened to you. This may sound strange, but I’m kinda psychic and sometimes my dreams really happen. This was a nightmare. People were hurting you. You okay? Please call or text that you’re all right.
12:15 a.m. - Me again. Can’t sleep. Wondering if you’re OK.
12:32 a.m. - I must seem paranoid now. You’re probably asleep. Please don’t think I’m a freak. Just worried about you. Call or text so I know you’re all right.
1:03 a.m. - Off to bed. Hopefully you’re somewhere safe and this time I’ll have sweet dreams. Maybe you’ll be in them, reading me poetry. :) Text me.
Marty felt his spirits lift. Not only had Jennifer reached out to him, but she seemed genuinely concerned. Her last message sounded like she might even have deeper feelings for him than she had ever shown before. He started to text her back that he was okay, but wasn’t sure what to tell her. I’m dead and haunting the roads at four a.m. But otherwise okay. Sweet dreams?
Instead he texted: I’m still here, but my life has changed. Need to see you.
Marty kept glancing at the screen to see if she would reply, but she was certainly asleep.
Cerulean, who had taken over the wheel, seemed agitated. “You have no use for her anymore.”
“I want to see Jennifer again,” Marty said, looking at the dark eyes in the rearview mirror.
“We have unfinished business.”
“One last time…” Marty insisted. “I have to see her.”
Marty’s will took over the steering wheel. His protector grumbled, but allowed Marty to turn the car towards the center of town.
The chapel’s bell tower pierced the night sky. The campus buildings were all dark, except for a few lights in windows.
As Marty parked behind one of the buildings, Cerulean said, “Be quick about it.”
Using his custodial keys, Marty entered the employee locker room. The changing area and adjoining break room were empty. Only a skeleton crew of janitors and security worked the graveyard shift. If he was careful, he could avoid running into anyone.
He changed out of his bloody clothes and switched to a clean uniform stored in his locker. His hands were stained red, so he covered them with rubber sanitation gloves. He put on a St. Germaine baseball cap, which concealed part of his head. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses to hide his eyes. There was nothing he could do about all the words inked across his face and neck. He would just have to keep to the shadows.
He burned his old uniform in the incinerator. He then crossed the freshly mowed campus lawn to the chorus of chirping crickets and entered through the back door to the girl’s dormitory. Fortunately, the residents appeared to be asleep. The empty hallways were mostly dark patches with a few dim lights spaced far apart. In a couple hours these halls would be teeming with dozens of girls headed for the showers, breakfast, classes.
“We better be out of here before dawn,” said Cerulean.
Marty went to the janitor’s supply closet and pulled out a mop bucket and rolled it down the hall. He had to pass through the lobby, where Lyle Dinkman was sitting at the security desk, eating powdered donuts and playing a video game on his cell phone. He was the worst of the guards. They all harassed Marty, but none more than Dinkman.
Marty stuck to the shadows as he rolled the mop bucket past the lobby as quietly as he could.
Lyle looked up from his game and scrunched his face. “Is that you, Marty?”
“Just doing my rounds,” he mumbled and kept walking. He held his head low.
“I didn’t know you were on graveyard.”
“Yep.”
“Wait a minute.” Dinkman stood, resting his hands on his utility belt. He was six-four and built like a tower of flab. “Come back here.”
Marty shuffled back, coming into a cone of light.
Lyle’s jaw dropped. “Jesus, your face… What the hell did you do to yourself?”
Marty thought of a quick lie. “Covered up a skin rash. Better not come near me.”
Lyle stepped closer, scrutinizing. “What’s all that writing on your face?”
“No time to talk. Gotta mop the bathrooms.” Marty turned and walked away, hoping the guard would drop his interrogation.
“You are one weird dude, you know that, Creepy Marty?”
Marty stopped. His fists squeezed around the mop handle.
“That’s what the college kids call you, isn’t it? ‘Creepy Marty, Creepy Marty, better not let him crash your party.’” He laughed like it was the funniest joke in the world. “I better not catch you peeping at the girls in the shower room, Creepy Marty.”
The sound of that nickname roiled the black water inside him.
“I got a written complaint here from Skylar Herron saying you been stalking her. You being on probation, this could be your last strike.”
“Let ’em fire me tomorrow. I got work to do.” Marty kept walking.
Lyle grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “Hey, jackass, I’m not done talking to you.”
Cerulean punched a fist into Lyle’s mouth, so hard his teeth were knocked down his throat. As the big man choked on blood and broken enamel, Cerulean jammed the mop’s stringy end into his mouth, muffling his cries. Lyle stumbled backward, his eyes wide with shock. Cerulean pushed him against a wall and drove the mop in so deep, his jaw unhinged. The security guard convulsed and struggled until the last of his life spasmed out.
“No one fucks with my friend.”
Marty couldn’t believe that his protector had killed again. Lyle Dinkman had been a jerk, but Marty never wanted him dead.
Lyle’s ghost, when it rose out of his body, wore the same confused expression that the others had. He looked down at his lifeless body and started crying. Immediately, the lights began to flicker. The walls and floor started to shift, as if the physical world was melting away to expose a hidden one beneath. Something screeched from the far end of the hallway. Marty couldn’t watch what he knew would happen next. He ran into the men’s restroom and hid in a stall until Lyle’s ghost stopped screaming.
Marty thought the soul snatchers were gone, but then heard the bathroom door open. The lights flickered. The tiles behind the commode loosened and rattled. Some kind of creature hissed from the doorway. Marty dared to peek under the stall’s divider to see solid black tentacles squirming across the tile floor. He backed to the far corner of the stall beside the toilet. The greasy, eel-like appendages wrapped around one of the stall’s chrome legs.
“Cerulean, keep them away!”
“Relax, you’re under my protection.” Then in a demonic voice Cerulean addressed the creature. “This one’s with me.”
The tentacles withdrew and the hissing-screeching trailed off.
Chapter 19
Marty put Lyle’s corpse in his desk chair and rolled him down the hall to the janitor’s closet. Fishing through the dead man’s pockets, he retrieved the building’s master keyring. He then mopped up the blood on the hallway floor and stowed the mop bucket.
Marty took the stairs up to the third floor. The hall was empty, quiet.
He walked to a familiar door covered in colorful floral stickers and the stenciled names “Megan” and “Jennifer”. He touched his beloved’s name. If he still had a heart it would be fluttering with excitement right now. The water inside his chest mimicked a similar sensation. So many days he had cleaned the floor outside this room, wondering about the girl who lived beyond this door. What was her personal world like? What secrets did she keep?
Now he held the key to unlock Jennifer’s inner sanctum.
Being as quiet as he could, he slipped inside the dark room. The blinds were partially open, and slivers of moonlight offered a view of two desks, dressers, twin beds and walls covered in posters. Each bed was occupied by a slee
ping girl. The one to his left snored softly, her brown hair tangled over her face. She wore a sleep mask and earplugs.
Marty crept across the carpet to the bed by the window. His body filled with joy as he saw his sleeping beauty. In the gossamer light, Jennifer Dalton’s porcelain face was perfection, her full lips slightly open. Her honey-blonde hair spread across the pillow. He loved the way her fingers curled around the edge of the comforter. She looked like a deep sleeper and her slight smile suggested the sandman was sending her pleasant dreams.
On a shelf above her head sat a row of teddy bears. Her walls were adorned with posters of celebrity tennis players and one large poster of ballet dancers, along with her ballet shoes. This was her world. Soft and feminine, full of graceful adagios and pirouettes.
Jennifer’s chest rose and fell silently with each breath.
What Marty would give to caress her cheek. Kiss her lips. Climb beneath the covers and hold her. How many nights he had lain alone in bed, fantasizing about being this close to her.
You can hold her now, Cerulean said.
Marty shook his head. The thought of waking her frightened him. He noticed on her desk was a journal with a sunflower on the cover.
You know you want to look, Cerulean tempted. Do it.
Marty’s curiosity got the best of him and he opened it. To his surprise, he found Jennifer had tried her own hand at writing poems. Some were outpourings about her mentally sick mother in rehab. Some were sing-song rhyming verses about love and the coming of spring. One of the poems even referenced taking walks through the gardens with Shakespeare.
The water at the heart of Marty’s chest surged. She likes me? He found a section of pages written in diary form. He saw his name mentioned several times. Took another walk with Marty today. He’s so smart and cute in his quirky way. He smiled reading her secret confessions about meeting a boy who had touched her heart and shown her that the world through the eyes of poetry was magical. She now heard poetry in songs, saw it in the brush strokes of paintings, the patterns of flying birds in the evenings, smelled it in the sweet-scented blossoms of the trees. My friends make fun of me for hanging out with him, but I don’t care what they think. As Marty once said, love transcends the darkest of forces. I wish he would ask me out already, but he’s just so shy. The good ones always are.
Oh, my God, he thought. She really did like me.
Another page revealed a fantasy she had about making love with him in the gardens, the sun glowing warm on their naked bodies.
Marty began to get turned on.
Jennifer made a mewing sound, shifted and kicked off the sheets and comforter. Marty feared she would wake. Still he gazed at her bare legs. The moonlight illuminated the fine blonde hairs on her thighs. She wore pink panties and a tank top that formed around the softness of her breasts.
Go on, grab her tits, you know you want to, Cerulean said.
Marty shook his head.
A storm of emotions suddenly raged inside him―love, lust, sadness. She was everything he desired and she had almost been his. Now he could never have her. He was death. She was life.
You want her? Take her, Cerulean urged and started to reach for her breast.
Marty pulled his hand back and shook his head.
It’s time you had the fun you never got to have, Cerulean said. I’ll take care of her roommate, while you have your way with Jennifer.
No, don’t! Marty pleaded.
Without his control, his hand reached for a letter opener and held it like a knife.
Stab her, son, his father’s voice spoke from his cell. She’s nothing but a whore like your mother. Jennifer needs a good knifing.
Shut up! Marty mentally screamed at his father.
The angry force inside him held the sharp point over her chest. His free hand grabbed the wrist of the one holding the letter opener.
No, I won’t! Not Jennifer!
Marty fought his father’s desire to stab her. Images of a knife puncturing his mother’s flesh, over and over, filled Marty’s vision.
He hurried out of the room before his dark side made him hurt the girl he loved. In the hallway he leaned against the wall. “Jennifer is off limits to you,” Marty told Cerulean.
“I was just trying to get you to seize the moment. That was probably your only chance to ever see her naked.”
What disturbed Marty most was that his father’s voice had taken over.
You and I come from the same foul blood, boy.
“You’re wrong. I’m not like you.”
Maybe Marty had committed a lot of sins, but opening his heart to Jennifer was the one thing he’d done right, and he wasn’t going to let Cerulean or his father harm her. Marty noticed that his inner demon seemed threatened when Marty was in a state of love. The demon controlled all the darkness within him, but Marty had full reign of his good side. Knowing that Jennifer had been attracted to him all this time boosted his courage to finally let her know how he felt.
He unzipped his coveralls. He searched his patchwork of paper flesh until he found the right poem and peeled it off. It was the love poem he’d read to the lake earlier that night. He folded it and slipped it under her door. Perhaps in some invisible realm connected by poetry the two of them could be together. He also intended the love poem to protect her threshold from any of his evil crossing over.
“I don’t like that you’re going against me,” Cerulean said.
“I’m not your puppet,” Marty shot back.
“I made you. I can destroy you too. Defy me again, and I’ll walk you straight to the incinerator and make you jump into the fire.”
The threat scared Marty. Was his dark friend bluffing? And if he did destroy Marty’s body, where would his spirit go?
“I just want to go home.”
Down the hall, the elevator dinged and the doors opened. A drunk girl stumbled into the dark hallway. She was wearing a tight dress and high heels as if she had just come home from a night of partying. Skylar Herron looked Marty’s way, narrowed her eyes. “Is someone there?”
Marty hid around a corner. She didn’t seem to distinguish him from the shadows. She hiccupped, teetered on her heels, then made her frequent walk of shame to the community bathroom at the end of the hall.
Pent-up anger stirred inside him.
Skylar was the bitch who had made his life hell. Last semester he had gone into the girls’ bathroom at 5:00 a.m. to mop the floor, which was part of his morning routine. When he entered, he found Skylar standing at the sink wearing only a towel around her waist, her wet hair hanging over her breasts. He had apologized and backed out immediately, but the damage was done. She freaked out, accused him of being a “Peeping Tom”, and tried to have him fired.
Marty had had a good record at that point, so his boss only put him on probation. When Skylar saw that she’d failed, she spread the “Creepy Marty” nickname around the girls’ dorm, and every so often girls chanted the horrible rhyme as they passed him.
Against Marty’s wishes, Cerulean charged down the hall. He burst into the girls’ bathroom to find Skylar snorting cocaine on the sink with a dollar bill. She looked up at him, her nostrils covered in white powder.
She saw the name on his uniform and smiled. “What are you doing in here? Come back for another look, Creepy Marty?”
Her eyes widened when Cerulean clamped a hand over her mouth. “You like to humiliate people, don’t you?” He nodded her head for her.
“Don’t hurt her,” Marty said, doing his best to control his urges.
But Cerulean was feeding off the pent-up rage. “You’re nothing but a slut, aren’t you? Fucking your professors for grades.” He dumped the contents of her purse on the sink and opened a tube of red lipstick. Gripping her arm, he made her write the word “SLUT” on the mirror. He stood behind her, forced her to look at herself in the mirror.
“Marty did nothing to you and yet you taunted and humiliated him in front of your friends.”
Skylar was te
aring up in his arms now. It hurt Marty to see her like this.
Cerulean held her from behind, looking at their reflection. “Bet being the daughter of a senator’s not so grand after all. Maybe Daddy didn’t pay enough attention.” When this got no reaction, Cerulean switched tactics. “Or maybe he paid you too much attention.” Skylar’s eyes lifted; there was shame in them. “Bingo. Did he visit your bedroom at night while Mommy ate sleeping pills and pretended not to know?”
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