Original Tales of Terror and the Macabre by the World's Greatest Horror Writers

by Del Howison

  “Well …”

  Mindy whirled Daniel around. “Honey, look who I just found!” she giddily squirted in her nylons.

  Daniel had no idea who the handsome towhead in his late twenties was, though Mindy waited impatiently several moments for his jubilant recognition. The Adonis tried helping out, spreading a cocksure smile and raising his trademark eyebrow.

  “Uh,” Daniel shrugged, “do I know you?”

  “It’s Jack Conroy!” Mindy squealed.

  Jack nodded with kind understanding at Daniel as if he had a learning disability. “Happens all the time. Everyone thinks I’m an old friend from school or someone they know from work.”

  Daniel, dumbfounded, stared blankly at the man he had never seen before, or even had the vaguest idea of who he might be … or care.

  Mindy jumped in desperately, “He’s Dr. Randy Marshall … from The End of Our Lives!”

  Jack gave a reassuring wink and clamped Daniel’s hemophiliac palm in his meaty paw. “That’s all right, Danny—people act kinda funny around ‘celebrities.’ ”

  “Don’t I have to know who you are for you to be a celebrity?” wondered Daniel aloud.

  Jack threw back his head, bleached teeth unhinged in a forced guffaw.

  Mindy elbowed Daniel in the ribs, a little too hard.

  “What are you doing in Pittsville, Jack?” Daniel edged toward the drink cart. “We don’t get many ‘celebs’ here.”

  “Just winged in for the holidays. My buddy Lance was born here, and I thought it would be fun to see how the country folk live. I’m a city boy, born in Manhattan. Now, that’s a city. Ever been there, Danny boy?”

  “No.” Daniel paused. “Never will.”

  “Why not?” spit Jack, munching an imitation crab puff, then plucking the cartilage from his front teeth. “It’s only a couple hours from here.”

  “I just know … I’ll never go.”

  “How do you know?” Jack scoffed, “I mean … that’s how everyone feels about New York before they actually go there. But soon they’re singing … Newww York! … Newwwww …!”

  Several guests glanced up from their tuna empanadas as Jack’s Juilliard-trained voice rang out, “… Yorrrrrrrk …”

  “Hey, I’ve got that CD!” exclaimed Stuart Macabee, Florence’s “favorite gynecologist,” as he dashed over, turned off Wayne Newton’s Rockin’ Christmas, and popped in Sinatra.

  Jack sang along, booming over “Ol’ Blue Eyes.”

  “Stop singing the bluueess … I’m lucky todayyyy, I want to taste a slice of it … New Yorrrk, Neww Yorrrrrk …”

  Florence muttered, “Those aren’t the lyrics.”

  “Who cares? He’s gorgeous!” Mindy swooned.

  Jack stepped left, found his spotlight, and kicked out his feet for the big finale like the Rockettes. “Look up at meeeee … Newwww Yorrrrrrk … NeeeEWWwwww …”

  Daniel took another gulp of whiskey and observed Mindy, entranced by the handsome crooner.

  “… YORRRRRRRRrrrrrrKKK …!”

  The last part drifted off key.

  Huge ovation.

  Mindy hugged Jack as if he had just dismantled a nuclear bomb. Daniel couldn’t help noticing the discreet pat on Mindy’s flank.

  “So, Danny, what do you do?” Jack inquired, inexplicably out of breath.

  “I’m a watchmaker.”

  Mindy studied her out-of-date pumps.

  “They still got those?” chortled Jack.

  “Yes, I think so,” Daniel deadpanned.

  “Any money in it?” Jack was eyeing Mindy like a pork chop.

  “No, not really,” said Daniel. “Acting?”

  “You kidding me? I made over six hundred Gs last year. ‘F.U.’ money, we call it in Hollywood. How many watches you got to repair for that?”

  Rather than responding, “All the watches in the Northern Hemisphere,” Daniel sullenly slurped his scotch.

  Mindy, Jack’s newest publicist, chimed in, “Did you hear? Jack did a movie!”

  Jack corrected modestly, “Well, Mindy, actually we haven’t started shooting yet—but they have half the financing.”

  “That right?” asked Daniel, “What about the soap?”

  “I’m not going to be stuck on a soap the rest of my life,” Jack scoffed. “I’m taking an ‘out’ in my contract to do this movie. Then after a few films, I’ll start directing.”

  Mindy gazed at Jack like a puppy in a Keane painting.

  Daniel rolled the ice cube around his glass, round and round, faster and faster until it put him into a trance, and when it stopped … he saw his reflection.

  And a lot more.

  As Jack turned away to smile at Holly, the flushed redhead in the corner, Daniel garbled under his breath …

  “Not exactly.”

  “Excuse me. What did you say?” Jack’s cocked eyebrow twitched.

  “Not exactly,” Daniel quietly reiterated.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack was growing irritated.

  “You sure you want to know?” Daniel made eye contact for the first time that evening.

  “Sure, I’m sure!”

  Mindy gave Daniel a “don’t-you-dare!” glare, which only encouraged him.

  “Okay,” Daniel began softly. “Though you’ve left the soap for the movie gig, the film will lose Canadian financing at the last moment—actually, two weeks from Monday. Your agent, Marty, will wait until you don’t pick up your phone to leave the message. Meanwhile, you’re out paying cash for that jade green convertible Jag you’ve been eyeing in the window. But what you don’t know, because you haven’t heard your agent’s message, is that they’ve already written your character off the soap. He overdoses on morphine, by the way, which he steals at Central Hospital. Stay tuned for the upcoming irony. Anyhow, the producers are so annoyed that you’ve abandoned your role that they write your character overdosing and crashing off a cliff as you’re driving to meet your blind mistress. Your character’s face is tragically—and conveniently—burned beyond recognition. Only a face transplant can save you.

  “Anyhow, one day you try to drive onto the lot at CBS in your new Jag, but the security guard tells you your pass has expired. ‘Screw them!’ you say as you screech a U-turn off the lot. ‘Who needs ’em!’ you snort, trying to convince yourself that this is the best thing that could have happened. Meanwhile, your role of Dr. Randy Marshall, as now played by heartthrob Matt Starling, earns him a Daytime Emmy. For several months you sit at humiliating cattle calls with dozens of younger and better-looking men, but you just can’t land a gig. There’s a few callbacks but your acting is too wooden, too soap, or so the casting agents say after you’ve left the room. Then, after a year of ego-crushing auditions, they stop calling altogether. Your agent Marty drops you and signs Matt Starling. You crawl on your hands and knees back to the producers you snubbed on the soap and now beg to get back on. ‘What if my character has a brother?!’ you implore the producer when you finally get her to take your call. But she tells you that Matt Starling is getting a much higher TVQ and the fan letters are flowing. Ratings are up two points since your unfortunate accident. Over the next four years, your gleaming smile yellows and your mane of blond hair turns gray and recedes toward your back. The gorgeous women who used to eye you now look past you as you circle ever-seedier downtown bars, being sucked toward the drain. Finally, you turn to drugs—methamphetamine specifically—and, here’s your irony Jacko, when you run out of rent, you start selling to a few close friends. Actually, this is the closest to a film set as you’re ever going to come. You are invited to a few ‘C’ parties but only if you bring the ‘stuff.’ Never one to acknowledge your bisexuality, the drugs finally free you to take a lover—your old buddy Lance, another skin popper with whom you occasionally share needles.”

  Daniel paused, “Shall I go on?”

  Jack’s mouth was slung open, while Mindy’s eyes brimmed with tears.

  Daniel stumbled into the powder room and splashed
cold water on his face. He dried off on the embroidered pink hand towels—the ones just for display.

  When he looked up, Daniel saw the future in the bathroom mirror.

  Horrendous things: Jack Conroy whiffing amyl nitrate while having anal sex with Mindy; Florence taking out her glass eye, popping it in her mouth, bathing it with saliva and choking to death; Phyllis Burnside, wearing her NHPD uniform, answering a call to 7-Eleven only to be shot in the head by a fleeing robber—the Flanders’s acne-crusted son Jason; The redhead, Holly Weaver, happily on her honeymoon in the Bahamas with Officer Mark Burnside, unaware of her oozing breast implants slowly killing her …

  Daniel tried to avert his searing eyes away from the horror in the mirror, his heart thumping in his chest, a migraine drilling a hole between his eyes, but he was compelled to stare, as he saw more flashing images: Burt grabbing his chest on his front lawn and collapsing with the sprinklers running; Matt Starling, at the Academy Awards holding up his Oscar and thanking Jack Conroy for giving him the role that launched his career (as a disheveled police mug shot of Jack provides a comedic backdrop); Deedee Macabee in her bathroom, gazing into a blood-filled toilet at her stillborn, tears glistening down her cheeks; Mindy, at Dr. Macabee’s office, reacting to some news regarding an HIV test; and, finally, Daniel saw himself sitting in his Buick, wrapping his lips around the chrome barrel of a Glock 9mm and … Blam! Blam! … blood splattered onto an image of Jesus, Daniel’s jaw missing….

  A shattering of glass.

  Daniel stepped out of the bathroom, clenched knuckles dripping blood, as Bing Crosby crooned “White Christmas.”

  Deedee Macabee spotted a droplet of blood on the carpet and shrieked, “Not on the new Berber!”

  * * *

  Daniel reclined on the tufted settee, facing a bookshelf lined with such book titles as Neurology, Pathology, Anxiety, Sobriety, Obsessive-Compulsive, Depression, Addiction, Bipolar, Dependency, Dysfunction—like a run-on sentence. Daniel noted there were no books on suicide.

  He could hear his Bulova ticking, pure precision. Who would hear its last tick? he wondered.

  “So, Daniel, are we still having problems with mirrors?”

  Sheila Merryman rocked back in her ergonomically designed recliner, her blood red fingernails steepled under her chin, balancing her head like the scales of sanity.

  “When did you start having trouble with mirrors?” Daniel retorted, mocking the plurality of her query.

  Sheila didn’t give an inch. “Do you think I have trouble with mirrors?”

  Daniel hated how therapists bent everything back into a question mark. It made you feel crazy, even if you weren’t. For two hundred dollars an hour, you’d think they’d answer a flippin’ question.

  Nevertheless, Daniel continued their cerebral tango, only this time he asked her a question that she couldn’t answer with a question. “Are we really what we see in the mirror, or is our reflection only what we want to see?” Sheila was silent. Check. Then … “What do you think?” Daniel sighed, “A mirror’s just a piece of glass with a silver backing. Our reflection’s merely what our eyes see, which our brain interprets.”

  “So, if we’re blind, we have no reflection?”

  “What do you think?” Daniel parried.

  Checkmate. Or, so he thought.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened at the party?” she volleyed back.

  “No, I want you to answer my question.”

  “Fine,” Sheila replied calmily. “What you’re saying is, if a mirror is in the forest and there’s no one to look at it, then there’s no reflection?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you,” Daniel realized that she had weaseled another question.

  “We’ll never really know that, now will we, Daniel?”

  “Yes, we will. Because, I’ve seen the forest … in the mirror.”

  Sheila had a befuddled expression.

  Daniel continued their philosophical tug-of-war. “It’s not the same for you,” he explained. “I see the future in reflections. So, if I see myself in the mirror with a gun in my mouth, how do I know if I’m seeing myself in the future, or the present?”

  “Have you been having suicidal thoughts, Daniel?”

  Yet another question.

  Daniel knew exactly when he was going to die because it would be exactly like his father and grandfather, who each put a revolver in his mouth at age fifty-three and blew off the top of his skull when he could no longer deal with his “abilities.”

  The pain of knowing how and when you’re going to kill yourself is torturous, especially when you see it as clearly as the shine on your wingtips or the reflection in the mirror.

  “You control your own destiny, Daniel, not the mirror.”

  “You’re missing the point. What I see in the mirror is destiny,” Daniel articulated, growing frustrated. “And it’s never wrong.”

  Sheila nodded methodically, her face a knot of concerned doubt. “But if you’ve seen yourself committing suicide in the mirror, yet you’re here talking with me about it now, isn’t that proof that you can’t truly predict what will happen?”

  Daniel knew she doubted him; they always did until he told them their own destiny. Most of his ex-therapists couldn’t handle that. That’s when they released him as a patient, or retired, or went crazy themselves. It’s hard to live with your future laid out before you like a losing poker hand. The marriages, the children, divorces, accidents, financial hardships, illnesses, and death. And no matter how hard you tried to alter your course, you couldn’t. If Daniel told you that your wife was going to cheat, you might try so hard to stop it that you’d push her into her lover’s arms. Or, if Daniel revealed that you were going to die in a crash, you would avoid airplanes only to die in a car wreck.

  But still they’d always ask….

  “So, tell me, Daniel, do you see what will happen to me?”

  * * *

  Daniel drove home from his psychiatrist’s office.

  Sheila hadn’t taken the news well. But Daniel knew she would delay nine days before the nagging seed that Daniel had planted in her brain would start affecting her sleep. She would finally schedule an appointment with her doctor, reassuring herself that it was a “routine checkup.” She wasn’t about to give in to her delusional patient, suffering from clinical narcissism coupled with paranoia. She even laughed about it with her gynecologist, Stuart Macabee, breathing a sigh of relief when he found nothing abnormal.

  But, seven months later, a blood test would prove Daniel prophetic. Sheila had ovarian cancer.

  It didn’t make Daniel feel better to be right.

  The truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it sets you adrift.

  Daniel didn’t return Sheila’s frantic calls on his answering machine, desperately wanting to know if she would survive chemotherapy? What her odds were? How long she had to live?

  Daniel felt it best not to answer any more questions.

  * * *

  Three years had passed.

  Mindy had since run off with Jack Conroy, Florence had died and left all her money to her diabetic shih tzu, Jason Flanders was back in prison (this time for carjacking), Holly Weaver was featured on TV’s Extreme Makeovers and received new double-D breast implants, and Mike Johnson died of a brain tumor less than a week before his triple-premium policy was funded.

  A Buick LeSabre was parked at the edge of the Pittsville scenic-view overlook. Water reflected off Lake Winnipesaukee, which glimmered beneath the cliff. So inviting. A perfect spring day.

  But Daniel wasn’t interested in the view.

  Mindy had left Daniel the Buick in the divorce and little else, besides the dusty watches in his meager shop. He wound his Bulova gently, put it to his ear, and listened to his fifty-third birthday ticking down the steep side of the tracks like a death coaster.

  He reached into the glove compartment and lifted out his Glock 9mm, which he had bought at the local sporting goods store that morning. The sale
sman, Mark Burnside, had suggested the used model. It had been Officer Burnside’s trusty sidearm before he retired. He had never drawn it on duty, but Daniel saw something in the chrome barrel and knew that the gun was going to commit murder, someday.

  “How’s Holly doing?” Daniel had inquired, making small talk with the ex-cop as he weighed the weapon.

  “Oh, you know,” replied Mark, avoiding Daniel’s psychic gaze.

  Word had gotten around about Daniel’s supernatural talents and he had become a pariah in Pittsville. It was as if Daniel was causing afflictions, not predicting them.

  If only he could have 911’d his psychiatrist, Sheila. But she had expired, on schedule, eight months earlier from ovarian cancer.

  Daniel opened the glove compartment.

  He lifted out the loaded 9mm. It felt cold in his trembling hand as he studied his knuckles, scarred by years of broken mirrors.

  He couldn’t live another second, let alone another year with the excruciating gnawing of knowing how and when he would die.

  He slid the gun barrel between his lips and stared at the cross dangling from his rearview mirror as he breathed through his nostrils.

  A fishing skiff cut across the mirrored lake and Daniel spotted Frank, trolling for bites, a radio in his boat for company where Burt used to sit.

  Daniel suddenly began sobbing, his sputum dribbling down the chrome barrel. He pulled the gun from his mouth and dropped it in his coat pocket. He would no longer be guided by his visions. He would take destiny into his own hands.

  He started the car’s engine, revved it several times, and simply drove off the cliff … as he stared at himself in the rearview mirror.

  * * *

  The Buick was momentarily slowed by a jack pine growing from the rocks. The car nevertheless created a huge wave on impact, rocking Frank out of his boat to dive after the sinking car. It took three attempts, but Frank finally pulled Daniel from the partially submerged car and swam him to the tree-lined shore. He pumped the water from Daniel’s lungs and performed CPR.

  But irreparable brain damage had occurred.

  * * *

  Daniel had lain in a vegetative state for eleven months when Mindy finally came to the convalescent home to visit.