Nelson slid Em behind him. “I think we should talk to the manager–”
The bartender laughed and thumbed his chest. “We are.”
Nelson nodded. “Alright, whatever. We’re not giving you a goddamn cent. You can’t go threatening your patrons–”
The redneck took another step and put two thick fingers against Nelson’s chest. He felt an intense pressure on his breastbone. It reminded him of the broken spring in their mattress on his side of the bed. “Hey, hey, we don’t–”
A dye-job divorcee with a spray tan appeared in the bar’s doorway. “Matty, you gonna come back in here anytime soon and get me a shot of Goose? Night’s bad enough drunk, I don’t wanna get sober.”
Matty cocked his head back and shouted, “Yeah, I’m coming in right now, Jewel.”
Nelson took a backward step.
Matty withdrew his finger. With a bemused smirk, he said, “You two have a good night, see you next time. Now you keep your eyes on the road and drive safe.”
They backpedaled toward his sedan, watching Matt curl his fingers in a goodbye wave before joining Jewel in the doorway. Nelson walked Em around the car and opened the passenger side door. After she slid inside he waited a second until she locked the door before crossing back to the driver’s side and letting himself in.
“What was that?” she said.
“Guess I forgot to drop this on the counter.” Uncurling his fist, he dropped a five-dollar bill onto the dashboard. Sighing, he latched his seat belt. “I meant to, but…I guess I’m just tired.”
Turning the key, he slid the gearshift into drive, and dropped his foot onto the gas pedal. He pulled out onto the unlit rural highway and ignored the speed limit. Getting some miles between them and The Yearling’s Den was all that mattered.
Em sunk back into her seat and yawned. She rolled onto her side, closed her eyes, and frowned. Reaching out, she touched his face with her fingertips. They were cold. “Nel, how long has it been?”
“Been? Since what?”
One finger glided down his sideburns. “Since you last slept.”
He pushed her hand away. “I’m fine.”
“You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”
“That’s ridiculous.” But when he glanced into the rear view mirror what he saw was a skull painted the color of flesh, dark smears under his eyes, hair matted to his head.
Em reached across her chest, snagged her seat belt, and latched it. She closed her eyes. “It’s not ridiculous. You haven’t slept since I died.”
“What–”
He turned his attention away from the mirror, glancing over at Em, not seeing her, seeing the short-haired girl in the casket, but freshly dead, wounds still seeping, broken bones still protruding through her flesh–
He screamed.
The deer in the headlights was a large six-point buck.
He caught it in his peripheral vision, a blur of fur and glowing eyes on the roadway, growing larger as the car careened toward it. Nelson moved to slam on the brake pedal–
But he had no legs.
(ONE)
Nelson’s toy car collided with the one in Em’s hand, spun over on the playground blacktop, and flipped upside down while he whistled out the sound of brakes squealing and an explosion. Em smiled. He knew she would rather play something else, but she always did whatever he wanted.
Billy Bruckner had told Nelson that she liked him–liked him–at the lunch table a week earlier. He’d scrunched up his nose and snorted, Billy laughed, but a part of him hoped she did. More than hoped.
“What happens to the passengers?” she said.
He shrugged. “Huh?”
“In the car. Did they get hurt, or are they okay?”
He considered it for a moment. His older brother Mark was an emergency squad volunteer and told him about plenty of accidents. “Well, I dunno. It depends on–you know, things like how fast they were going and how hard they hit and stuff.”
“How fast were they going?”
He grinned. “Too fast.”
She frowned. “And how hard did they hit?”
“Hard.”
She stared at the overturned car for a moment, then plucked it off the blacktop, blew the dust off, and set it down on its wheels. “But maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe they weren’t going so fast. And maybe they didn’t hit so hard. And maybe they’re both okay.”
“Maybe,” he conceded, but he didn’t believe it.
Mrs. Vanderbanks, their homeroom teacher, sat near the doors in a folding chair, watching the other students run through the playground behind the schoolhouse. She checked her watch and smiled. Nelson knew that meant recess would be over soon and she would call them inside.
But maybe there was enough time.
“Hey, Em, you wanna see something?”
She bit her bottom lip. “See what?”
“It’s just–well, it’s a surprise.”
“Where?”
Nelson pointed to the edge of the field, behind a tall hedgerow. It was off-limits, of course, but he and Billy had explored the woods before during recess and Mrs. Vanderbanks had never caught on. “A lot of the boys know about it, but none of the girls. We took a pledge that we wouldn’t tell any of you.”
She smirked. “So why show me, Nel?”
He blushed, coughed, and said, “No reason. Just, you know, because.”
Em glanced at Mrs. Vanderbanks, saw her daydreaming, and nodded. They bolted across the playground, running side by side until they reached the hedgerow. Pulling back a few thornapple thickets, Nelson helped Em to duck through to the other side, and then followed.
As they walked the path, Nelson watched Em’s hand dangle at her side, and wondered what it would feel like to hold it in his. Would she let him? Or would she scream, run back into the schoolyard and tell her friends?
He folded his arms and kept walking.
The path ended at a dry dirt oval by the side of Highway 34. Cars and big rig trucks roared by, kicking up dust and gravel, and Em brought a hand up to her face. Nelson pointed to the far edge. As they approached, he said, “Jimmy Cochran found it and told my brother. Said it got hit last Sunday and that a trucker dragged it off the road while it was still breathing.”
The dead deer was a large six-point buck.
Em gagged but didn’t look away. A cloud of insects buzzed over its corpse, a halo of flies, while their offspring writhed in its wounds. One large, pink incision ran down its chest like a zipper on a winter coat. There was movement inside, thousands of newborn larvae consuming their first meal.
“Gross,” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah…but cool, right, kinda?”
She curled up her nose. “…I guess.”
Nelson smiled. “Should we get back?”
Em nodded. As they walked back to the school, she folded one of her hands into his. Chills spread up his arm, but his hand tightened on hers.
“Nel?”
He didn’t look at her, just kept staring at the path ahead. “Yeah?”
“You know that I like you? I mean, I like you.”
He didn’t answer, not immediately. Then, when words finally came to him, he said, “I like your hair.”
She giggled. “Then I’ll never cut it.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Nel?”
“Yeah?”
Her hand went limp in his. “It’s time to throw out those People magazines in the bathroom.”
(ZERO)
The deer in his doorway was a large six-point buck.
Nelson screamed as he swung himself into the wheelchair.
The deer shook its maw and snorted, a jerking motion, like a puppet. It took a step into the bedroom and sloshed as it moved, as if its body were a canister full of water. Nelson reached back and fumbled with the bedside lamp until it flickered on.
White light exploded across the room. He squinted while his eyes adjusted, expecting the deer to evaporate with the recedin
g glare. It didn’t. The buck stood fully a foot inside the room, its cloudy eyes watching him, nostrils flaring with each breath.
He reached into the bedside table and retrieved Em’s steel chopstick–the one she had worn the night they went to The Yearling’s Den, the one that they’d removed from the upholstery after the accident. He held it out, threatening the deer as it stumbled toward him.
Closer now, Nelson could see the rips in its fur, the old wounds still flapping open, the dried blood caked on its hide. It fell to its knees and collapsed to the floor.
He lowered the chopstick.
A frail human hand reached out of the buck’s chest, through the large gash that ran down to its belly, and clutched the edge of the bed sheets. It pulled, and as it did, the deer’s gullet yawned open. Nelson caught a blurry glimpse of a pale naked body pulling itself out of the carcass just a moment before the top sheet fluttered off the bed, floated for a moment, and settled over the carcass.
Nelson dropped the chopstick.
A figure stood up, shrouded, and stepped toward him. Snagged by an antler, the sheet began to fall away as she approached, arms outstretched.
“Too fast, Nel,” she whispered, “and too hard.”
Tears bubbled in his eyes. “–Em?”
The sheet drifted away.
Her short, blood-streaked hair dropped over her pale, distorted face as she loomed over him. In each hand she held a long, rotten length of festering meat. “Darling, I’ve brought you your legs.”
Lorne Dixon lives and writes off an exit of I-78 in residential New Jersey. He grew up on a diet of yellow-spined paperbacks, black-and-white monster movies, and the thunder lizard back-beat of rock and roll. He is the author of the novels Snarl, The Lifeless, and Eternal Unrest. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including the second, third, and fourth +Horror Library+ volumes.
-By the Time I Get to Five
by J.S. Reinhardt
He was standing in the street. Wet blacktop reflected the pale glow of the almost-full moon. Looking up from his sneakers, Teddy started walking across the pavement between the black skid marks that went from one side of the road to the other. As he looked down through a hole punched into the scrub at the edge of the forest, his gut told him to hurry home, where it was safe.
The clinking sound of metal cooling, like the coils of a stovetop, and the smell of gasoline came to him from the chasm below.
Teddy didn’t want to see what was down there because some things you can’t un-see. He didn’t know why, but there was no question that what was down there wasn’t some scary movie or dream. It was real and he was close enough. He turned around and looked up the road, knowing that the sounds and smells would be with him for the rest of his life.
“Help…help me.”
Teddy took another step, pretending he hadn’t heard.
“Help. Me.”
Except that voice was familiar; it was that of a woman, and there was pain in it. Teddy’s heart beat loud in his ears. He hoped the lady down there couldn’t hear it, didn’t know he was there. The moans that came up from the darkness, where two deep troughs disappeared into the trees, made Teddy’s breath stop in his throat. He closed his eyes and saw a mangled mess of blood and meat wrapped in a car that didn’t look like a car anymore, but more like a crumpled soda can.
She was dying.
Teddy stepped down into the mess of broken tree limbs and torn-up earth, pausing at the edge of the thicket to listen again, wishing he wouldn’t hear her so he could just turn around and run home to his parents. They could be the ones to take care of things, they could be the ones to talk to the police, and they could be the ones who would have to try and un-see what was down there.
The lady’s moan was long and wet. Teddy closed his eyes and stepped forward into the darkness…one, two, three, then four steps.
The smell of fresh-tilled earth was down here. Teddy opened his eyes and saw a faint red light, flashing, making the path ripped through the undergrowth look like a tunnel ending in smoldering embers. His hands hurt from being clenched into fists at his sides, but he couldn’t stop. Teddy felt like he was being pulled down to the car, he didn’t have a choice. He was going to see it.
He walked deeper into the pulsing red light. Broken tree limbs reached out and tugged on his pajamas. Glass sparkled like coals on the forest floor, pulsing and flickering with light. Something was burning and made his eyes water. He kept walking.
He knew it wasn’t good, that he shouldn’t see.
A wheel from the car was rammed into the ground like it had fallen from space. There was a chunk the size of Teddy’s head taken out of a maple tree, and a door from the car lay twisted on the ground. Teddy saw a hand and part of an arm lying in the dead leaves. He couldn’t stop his lunch from coming up, and when he felt like he could look again he saw the mangled car just ahead.
Unidentifiable shards of twisted metal and plastic were strewn around the large shattered stump of a tree, the massive trunk lying over, a crown of splinters seeming to sprout from the rear axle of the car, which had been torn from the chassis. The wreckage rested cockeyed on the trunk of the tree, the driver’s side peeled back to the rear door, the roof smashed down. Teddy walked around the stump to the rear passenger door, which was open and twisted into the dirt.
The lady moaned again and Teddy walked as quietly as he could toward the smashed-out passenger’s side window. The wet ground soaked through his Chuck Taylors, the smell of freshly cut pine mixed with the gasoline.
Teddy held his breath and leaned over to look inside.
“One. Two. Three. And Four. Come on back Teddy.” The doctor’s voice ripped him away from the window before he could see what he knew was in the car. Teddy took a few more seconds to open his eyes, trying to make the image materialize. If he could see it again, maybe the counting could stop.
When he opened his eyes and saw the ceiling in Doctor Kohn’s office, Teddy knew that wasn’t going to happen today. His hands felt like chunks of lead at his sides. It took some effort for his grip to slacken, for the color to come back to his knuckles, and he saw a compacted tissue in each palm. The doctor’s voice was somewhere far off on the other side of the pain, the numbness of pins and needles began to set in.
“Teddy, you’re back now. Everything is okay.”
He sounded like he really believed that, but Teddy knew better.
“I’m exhausted, are we done today?”
“Yes Teddy. Now I’ll be on vacation the next two weeks, so we won’t see each other until September 13th. Will that be okay for you?” His voice took on that tone, the one that reminded Teddy that the doctor didn’t believe everything really was okay when it came to Teddy.
“I don’t like that day. Thirteen is unlucky, everyone knows that doc, and there are 20 days between now and then, which isn’t ideal.”
“Yes, that’s right, I’m sorry Teddy. How about you meet with my colleague, Doctor Petraum, while I’m gone. You’ve met her in the lobby several times and I trust her implicitly. She is very thorough, which I know you prefer. How does that sound?”
“I don’t know doc, P E T R A U M, that’s seven letters. Sixteen, 5, 20, 18, 1, 21, 13, and that is 94, and that is just overwhelming, and not in a good way if you know what I mean.” Teddy didn’t like the way Dr. Petraum always smiled at him in the waiting room, either.
Or the way her patients always cried.
“Okay, Teddy. What I’ll do is give you an appointment card to meet with me September 16th.”
“What is wrong with the 14th doc? That’s a good day.”
“Yes, I know it is Teddy. What I was going to say before you interrupted me, Teddy, is that I am going to have Doctor Petraum give you a call next Wednesday while I am away, and again the following Wednesday, just in case you need to talk. We cannot meet on the 14th because I have a conference. Remember I had you put that in your phone?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember doc. Sorry, I
’m just really tired. Wednesday is good doctor Kohn, thank you.” He didn’t want to mention that Wednesday was the 31st, and that Julius Caesar had added those last two days onto August in 45 BC, which was a bad year. Even though Julius Caesar seemed like a good name because it had twelve letters separated into six for each name, his whole name was Gaius Julius Caesar, which wasn’t good at all. Most people didn’t know that, but that wouldn’t change anything.
“Very good, Teddy.” Kohn was good at snapping him out of his thoughts; Teddy thought maybe doctor Kohn was the best doctor he had ever talked to. Eleven, 15, 8, and 14 equaled 48 after all, which was one of the best numbers. “Now, do you need a refill on your prescriptions? Dr. Petraum can handle refilling them, but I want you to think about it right now before you leave. Do you need me to give you slips to have them refilled now?”
“No doc, I have 68 pills total, 24 Abilify and 44 Effexor, plenty until you get back.” Teddy thought maybe the doc could tell he hadn’t taken his medicines in the morning, and that was why he was being so funny with him, treating him like a little kid. “You know I’m not a little kid, right doc? Not like I am when you have me under, right?”
“Yes Teddy, but I can tell you haven’t taken your meds today.”
Dammit.
“Be sure to take them as soon as you get home, okay Teddy?”
“Yep, have a nice vacation.” Teddy went to shake his therapist’s hand, which he knew would be soft and warm compared to the clamminess of his own. He almost forgot to throw the small compressed hunks of tissue away. They looked like they had been through the washer and dryer, forgotten in the pocket of a pair of jeans, maybe his favorite jeans–
“Have a good day Teddy, and be sure to take some time to talk to Dr. Petraum while I’m away. She is good. Remember, take your meds as soon as you get home.”
Teddy touched his right thumb one at a time to his index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers, one-two-three-four-out-of-the-door, then reached out and turned the oblong brass doorknob. Halfway across the waiting room, Dr. Petraum opened the door to her office and Teddy heard someone sobbing inside. He rushed through the hallway door and closed it quickly behind him. Teddy didn’t want to talk to her; he wouldn’t talk to her. Sometimes her patients would scream and make Teddy jump up from the couch. She was no good. Ninety-four was never good. Forty-eight was a good number, much better than 94.
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 6