by T. Braddy
From somewhere deep inside me, a voice began to speak.
They always kill the dog in the movies, it said.
No, I thought. Not a movie. Not going to happen.
This is where you’ll find a screwdriver in his neck. Maybe it’ll be a dog bowl filled with radiator fluid, his body already limp and decomposing somewhere in the house.
“Willie, you half-blind son-of-a-bitch, please come out here. Please?”
It was then my eyes caught a new detail, one which had eluded me until just this moment.
I realized the back door lay wide open. It had, in fact, been propped ajar on purpose, held open with the small bag of dog food I kept in the laundry room.
The dog was gone.
Willie had disappeared.
sixth chapter
For the next few hours, I wandered the streets of Savannah, a pre-dawn glow outfitting each and every thing I passed with an otherworldly cast. Even the drunken revellers in town had absconded from the bars and gone home, leaving the streets empty and silent, which was unlike anything I’d quite experienced so far.
I didn’t call for the dog. He was old and stubborn and didn’t seem to care one whit about me naming him Willie. He could have been named Gertrude or Ernest or F. Scott, for that matter. He didn’t answer to anything. Mostly, he went about as he pleased, pissing on anything within his targeted range and yacking when the chewed tree branches came back up on him. The only real time he paid any attention to me was when I fed him.
And now he was gone.
Through it all, I could not quite shake the voice that was prodding me from somewhere below the surface of my conscious mind. It taunted me relentlessly about Willie’s location. The dog is dead. The dog is dead. Nailed to a tree. Bitten by a snake. Curled up under the house. The dog is better off, because everything you love turns to shit and dust.
Whoever was stalking me knew I wouldn’t go to the police. I needed to be an apparition while on leave in Savannah. The permanency depended on how quickly I was spotted.
Maybe that time was already up.
I checked the usual spots where Willie seemed to be happiest when I walked him. Nothing. The dirt wasn’t even slightly destroyed near this one oak tree where he liked to do his business. I struggled to keep calm, glancing in all directions at once, which did no good at all.
Over by the Gribble House, I saw the flash of a face in a nearby window, but it disappeared so quickly, I couldn’t make out if it were of this world or not. The needle tipped further in that direction the longer I remained out, and I thought I heard a few more plaintive cries for absolution. Dead souls in the pews of eternity, waiting without patience for a communion with someone – anyone – who could grant them final peace. I wasn’t that man.
I felt the tingle of unease somewhere near Montgomery, and not because I’d heard the whispers of long-dead residents of this grand old town.
A car was making the rounds. I’d seen it ten minutes before, just after leaving the house. Black. Discreet. Unimpressive in every way. Same car as before.
And it was tailing me.
Nobody else on the roads, except for the 9-5 zombies, out to beat the morning rush. I figured if they wanted to take a shot, they would have by now. It reeked of gaslighting. Toying. A cat with a half-eaten mouse.
I peeked behind me, and what I saw lingered in my head, probably would for years to come. A flash of light. Headlights, I thought. But they revealed something more than two-bit hitmen trying to scratch another body on their gun barrels.
The scene revealed to me was something out of my nightmares from Lumber Junction. It was only a moment, but it was a moment I’d never forget. A host of ethereal, somewhat opaque figures ambled along the road. Light pierced their bodies where rats and worms and cockroaches had burrowed into them. Their faces slack with the disinterest of the passage of time, they babbled about what would grant them peace, and I heard every word from every rotten set of lips. Whenever I passed a graveyard, an endless stream of sorrow greeted me, as though I could actually do something about their situations.
It was a tableau of death, a gallery of the supernatural. It was my cross to bear in this world, even though I had no understanding of how or why it had become my responsibility. Without a doubt, the most horrific sight I’d ever been privy to.
There was a darkness to them, something bubbling just below the surface, that I didn’t like. They shuffled along like zombies, and they reminded me not at all of the guitar-picking young man who had exhorted me to solve the circumstances of his murder.
There’s a darkness in you, boy, a voice that sounded eerily like my father said.
At this, the figures looked up simultaneously, gawked in my direction. As though they hadn’t seen me before. As though they agreed with the unsolicited thoughts within my head.
Most of them had no eyes. Their faces were like half-drawn sketches, charcoal portraits with most of the features missing. In the place of eyes and mouths was emptiness, more pure and more unsettling in an existential way than any evil I’d ever experienced.
And the mass of death was traveling directly for me.
In the past, I’d felt a kind of affinity for the beings that stalked my dreams. They wanted help. They needed an advocate, someone who could make things happen in the real world. Emmitt Laveau had no ulterior motives. His being (or post-being, superbeing) was driven only by the need for peace, and I hadn’t seen him in my visions of the afterlife since the night of the fire at the Boogie House. His story had ostensibly ended.
These other spirits, however...they were a different story altogether. It didn’t seem so much a P.I. recruitment strategy as a soul farming operation, and it was evil. Evil as carburetor moonshine is dangerous. One may make you blind, but the both of them will make you crazy.
However, the feeling I got was that this was an evil that didn’t want to consume me or to kill me, but to enlist me. Use me. Make me its minion, like Renfield wailing away in a sanitorium. I guess word had gotten out among the deceased, and I was in high demand.
Get in line, you dicks. There’s a whole queue lining up for a chance to turn me into a soulless puppet.
I glanced from one side of this Thriller video to the other. Lots of ugly, half-assed monsters approached me. I tried to tell myself it’d be all right, that nothing would come of this but some lingering nightmares.
One of the figures opened its mouth, and the jaw slipped from the hinge, dropping soundlessly into the shadows. A puff of dust billowed forth and eclipsed what remained of its face. I felt something go loose in my bowels, a greasy chain linked around my intestines. They, the ghost figures, moved closer. Putrescence filled the air. Roadkill and test specimens in rotting jars, guts, and formaldehyde mixing in an eye-watering combination. The smell of death. Ancient death. 1733 death. Old accents from centuries past filled my ears. I struggled with sanity, struggled with the present.
I waited for death, but sadly, death did not stop for me.
I moved into the middle of the street, gave the headlights my upper torso. Offered myself up to my intimidators. I had been sleeping, thinking myself outside the circle of the blight, but now I had awakened. My hand moved to the spot in my waistband where the balance of life and death lingered, a woeful conglomeration of steel and metal and gunpowder.
Now. Now. Now. If there was a time, it was now.
The car only nudged along, the low rumble of its muffler burbling in the air between us. Playing the game. Lighting the fuse, and it was a long one.
I stopped. Turned. Looked.
If they needed me dead, any of them, they would have taken this opportunity. Ghosts, mobsters, drunk drivers. Anybody.
Instead, what happened was that the car, too, came to a halt, waiting there like Christine in that old John Carpenter flick. Two men sat behind a dark windshield, their visages as concealed as their intentions.
Down the street, some cars started to make their way toward us, and I felt tension rise in the b
ack of my guts. Something was about to happen. This was coming to a head now, and we’d see how the cards were laid out on the table.
I waited, watching the approaching headlights. The dead had congregated around the vehicle, still babbling, still moving as if they had eternity ahead of them, and maybe they did. They moved closer, and I willed them to keep going, as if I were the dead’s Pied Piper.
Get them, I thought. Get them and rip them from their seats. Let me have five minutes alone with them.
Though, with that last thought, I realized I could almost guarantee it would come true, one way or another, and I didn’t know if I actually wanted that to happen.
For a second, I thought maybe it was working. The dead closed in on the outside of the car, and the people inside were seemingly clueless.
A car horn knocked me from my bout of concentration.
The first car had arrived. A morning commuter, no doubt. Poor bastard had no idea what was going on. Probably thought I was a drunk, too plastered to find his way across the street.
Wait, was I drunk?
I blinked. The apparitions disappeared. It was just me and two cars now, and a third was approaching. What was I going to get out of this other than maybe arrested?
The car honked again. The third pulled in behind the second. The first continued to sit and do nothing. I tried again to see through the windshield, but I got nothing except for impenetrable darkness out of the ordeal.
I took a step forward. Nothing happened. The driver in the second car laid on the horn, really gave it a go this time. I took another step forward, seeing how close my pursuers would let me get.
The guy in the second car got out. “Jesus Christ, man,” he said, “ would you get out of the road? Pretty please? I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes, and I haven’t even had my coffee yet. If you need booze or money for booze, I’ve got five dollars for you, but you have got to get the hell out of the road.”
My eyes never left the car. I took a third step forward, this time drawing close enough that I’d be hard-pressed to leap out of the way if the car lurched forward after me. I had to get a look. I needed to see what these men, my tormentors, looked like.
They were playing a game of chicken, and they must not have realized how stubborn I could be. I stared into the headlights, giving them the opportunity they needed.
“Dude,” continued the driver of the other car. “Can you not hear what I’m saying? Are you that fucked up?”
The third car honked as the fourth approached, and the drive of the second raised his arms in a kind of exasperation. He turned and said, “Yeah, I know. This asshole won’t move.”
He turned back toward me. “You know what,” he said, leaning into the car, “I’m calling the cops. Let them deal with your drunk, crazy ass. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a presentation to do in three hours.”
Fuck it, I thought.
I made a break for the car. We were going to have this thing out right now. Why put off the inevitable? If they really wanted to play chicken, now was the time to see who would break.
They did. As I scrambled forward, the car’s engine revved, and it shot forward, coming straight for me. The speed of the car didn’t give me much time to react, let alone yank my piece and fire. I jumped, smacked the hood, and sailed into the air. The guy in the second car – the one calling the cops – screamed in surprise and dismay. I saw his phone drop to his side.
Chicken, I thought, even as I landed with some grievous force on my ass.
Something in my back, some muscle, seized up when I tried to roll over and get vertical. My lower lumbar had never given me any trouble, but I supposed that was something that would have to change. I’d pay a dreadful penalty for my actions tonight, and the physical tally was starting now.
Somehow, I got up, reached for my .45, and aimed it but did not fire. The car was already turning onto a side street. I winced at the pain in my back.
“Holy Hell,” the driver of the car behind me said.
His face was sheet white when I turned to him. “Keep that call up,” I said. “Give them the description of the car. Did you get the license number?”
He hesitated.
“The license number. Did you get it?”
“No, man, I was just– I thought you...”
He trailed off.
“Black sedan. Late model. Headed east. Tell them it was hit-and-run, attempted murder.”
“Y-You can’t tell them that?”
“No,” and before he could ask a follow-up question, I was limping along the sidewalk, finding the quickest way to get the hell out of this situation. If they were smart, the people in that sedan would circle around and finish the job, so I needed to get somewhere secluded in a hurry.
I focused not on the node of excruciating pain but the almost sanguine smell of salt in the air. It put off some of the pain I was feeling. At least I wasn’t dead. At least I wasn’t being gunned down for what had to be a paltry sum of money. How much could possibly be in the case? Fifty thousand? A hundred Gs, maybe? Maybe?
Human life can be worth so little, when the market’s down.
The case would stay closed. If it got Vanessa killed, it’d end up getting me killed, too.
I rolled over someone’s fence and crawled on hands and knees toward my house.
The continued search for Willie the Dog would have to wait.
Questions piled up.
People wanted me, for what I could probably guess. They were the kind of people who folded old notes into origami and left them for the resident. The kind who let little mixed breed dogs wander out into the street in the middle of the night. The kind to follow a man through the streets well past midnight.
They weren’t the kind to take a shot when it came, though it was clear they’d attempt vehicular homicide to keep their identities concealed. Were they people I knew already? Did I see them on a daily basis? Did they go to AA with me?
My paranoia had reached an all-time high. What the hell had I been doing, playing coy with the idea that they weren’t out to get me? I’d been sleeping for six months, had been taking my time getting to the business of keeping my shit together, and now I had no options. It was going to be a full-time gig, in and of itself.
And then there were the guests-in-mourning who had appeared. Maybe the salty Savannah air was reactivating my sixth sense, but it was back. Little sparks, like misfiring wires, had come to me, but nothing like tonight. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe I was fucked up on something otherworldly, and the chickens were coming home to roost. I missed Uncle K, Janita Laveau. They gave me the tutelage I needed to put my world and my nightmare of a life into perspective.
The house was empty, but it was dark. Every shadow made me jumpy. A flash of headlights had me lunging for my pistol.
I didn’t sleep that night, but a few times I drifted into an in-between world, one where my imagination had me back at home in Lumber Junction, living with a version of Vanessa that wasn’t quite Vanessa. It was sleep, but it also wasn’t. The world existed around me, and I had myself convinced I could drop out of it into reality anytime I wished.
In this world adjacent, she wasn’t a zombie but wasn’t quite alive, either. Her eyes betrayed her. They were glazed and dry, made a minuscule but horrible clicking sound when she blinked..
She was halfway between worlds, sickly and pale, asking me how the fuck I let this happen to her. “Rolson, didn’t you ever give a damn for what happened to me?”
I tried to explain to her, to find the words that would mollify her, but when my mouth opened, all that tumbled out was fresh cut grass. Dirt and mulch and probably some horseshit, if I had to guess. She watched me spew the wormy black substance, but she made no effort to stop me.
“You already dug my grave,” she said, “and now you’re going to dig your own with your mouth. Look at you. It’s already full of cemetery dirt.”
Shadows lingered in the background of our little argument. A sky split
in half rained whiskey on the both of us. I smelled it, woke up smelling it. Thought about seeking it out. What harm could it do? Some assholes in a generic car had my plot already sectioned off in the graveyard of their minds. When I was most sick with my addiction, I thought about cancer a lot. Thought it might be a blessing in disguise. Who could blame me for drinking then? Would anyone actually deny me the pleasure of oblivion if they knew my days were limited?
I spent what remained of my witching hour reclined on and old wicker chair on the front porch, gun resting dangerously on my knee.
* * *
The girl who had accompanied Van on her chemical conquest of Savannah called me the next day, while I was washing and cleaning a set of glasses for the bar. I tossed my drying rag over my shoulder and answered.
“You want to get coffee?” Jess asked, after we’d worked through the normal, awkward chit-chat. “Or something else?”
I could only imagine what that implied. She sounded strung out, like she’d been going all night on something heavy and serious.
“Tomorrow night,” I replied. “Somewhere casual and public.”
She laughed, a wretched bark that sent nails scraping across a mental chalkboard. “You afraid I’m going to jump your bones, old man?”
I’d just turned thirty-eight. “Touché,” I said. “Still, somewhere public. Quiet, maybe, but somewhere nearby to me. There’s a place a couple blocks away that brews a mean cup of coffee.”
“You sure?” When she asked, she sounded like she was smiling. It wasn’t a pleasant image to conjure up.
“Yeah, pretty sure.”
“I mean, you want gossip, right? Want me to give you all the darkness Vanessa got into while she was here?”
“That’s the idea.”
I could almost hear the smile broaden. “That’s going to cost you.”
“I’m not paying for conversation. Now, the coffee–”