Karen and Travis stood in the living room, listening.
Travis had moved away from the foot of the staircase to stand next to his mother, who reached out and grasped his hand. The two of them stood in silence for a full minute, straining to listen.
The late afternoon sun bled between the thin curtains, casting a yellowish streak across the dusty hardwood floors. The place was a little more rumpled now than it had been a year ago, but it was still home. Karen tried to keep the place as tidy as she could, but it was hard working fifty hours a week and taking care of a twelve-year old boy as a single parent. No matter how hard you worked, you could never keep the place as tidy as you would want.
And sometimes when they were away from the house during the day, things got rearranged.
To the way things had been before Jerry had been killed in that car crash.
Karen's heart thudded in her chest. Her palms felt sweaty. She heard a muffled sob toward the dining room. Beside her, Travis gripped her hand. She could sense his body tremble; it wasn't fear that made him tremble, but nervous anticipation.
“Why won't he leave, Mom?” Travis whispered to her.
“I don't know, honey,” Karen whispered back. “I don't know.”
And as they stood there listening to the sounds of her dead husband, Karen realized that Jerry was right about one thing—he would never leave them.
INN CLEANING
By Stephen R. Bissette
The dark preacher paused on his way up the stairs.
This inn harbored so many lost sheep in need of his salvation. If he moved quickly, he could save them all, every one, tonight.
En route to this place of no vacancies, he had eased the burdens of a man sitting at a park bench alone by the nearby river, who had been seeing night-things men shouldn’t see anyway. They’ll leave him be; he will not be joining them. The man sees nothing, now, his soul at rest. No soul left behind.
The preacher lingered on the staircase, gazing out the bay windows. Despite the bright moonlight, he caught sight of the child only fleetingly, a mere shadow blowing like a dried leaf in the expanse of the parking light. Ah, a new one—he'd make his way outside soon enough, well before dawn. The helpless fledgling would clear the palette after the feast.
The door at the top of the stairs creaked open, revealing the old woman who had died there, alone and abandoned, in 1912. Her photo hung in the front entrance hall, the last of the original estate's proprietors. She smiled before evaporating. She'd materialize again in precisely one hour.
He'd be ready for her then.
He slid up the steps and into the hall, noiselessly catching the teenager who'd stupidly snuffed it in room three a mere two years ago. The kid put up a feeble struggle—still weak from the overdose, no doubt—before being pulled into the preacher’s terrible jaws. They gaped wider, wider, stretching over his tar-veined arms, his vomit-flecked Kurt Cobain t-shirt, his foaming lips and nostrils, the off-white shock of hair. Up, and over, and down he went, in one swallow.
The tabby cat who'd died shivering within the walls bolted across the hall, hoping to elude the preacher while he was preoccupied with his meal. A deft move pinned her underfoot, allowing him to pluck her from the floor at his leisure. One gulp, and she was history once again.
He eased into the master suite, surprising the old couple caught in the blaze of 1936. Done to a turn, they were, and quite succulent. Another seemingly prepped for the tasting was a troubled hit-and-run victim named David; how was it he resided here? No matter. Tenderized, he was, almost pre-masticated. Down he went, troubled and troubling no longer.
The little ones were slight confections, curious, delicate, delicious. There were so many. He savored them, one and all: the little girl hiding in the closet with a hand-carved wooden doll, her dreams of the bleeding stones adding to her petite peanut flavor; the waxy-skinned and wan pony-tailed Pingree School lass with doleful eyes (“why didn’t you help?”) was but a morsel, but her classmates made for a more filling repast; the ice-cold, still-wet, blue-lipped lad who went down like a frothy Foster beer. He left behind the tin-cans-on-a-string “telephone” and a pair of empty soda pop bottles—their redemption would have to wait.
The old man shivering in the bathtub in room four was cold and rather pasty, so the preacher washed him down with two of the runaway slaves quivering between the walls as he made his way back downstairs via the secret walk.
Jeff-who-was-many-Jeffs was a mouthful, a many-course-meal in one. There was a scarred woman, hidden in the mirrors, sleek, slick and slippery; a Hilton lass, bony and tasting of dirt; Kiera-who-might-not-be-Kiera, plagued with those migraines no more—pop, pop, pop, down they went.
A banquet awaited him in the dining room: an argumentative pair of sisters who'd choked to death within minutes of each other in 1953; the toddler who sat happily gurgling but otherwise oh so still in the tipped highchair in the corner, her head flattened at an obscene angle against the broken serving tray; a distasteful salesman whose heart had given out a decade before, still spitting up his salad greens. So many easy meals, all in one room. The preacher darted like a crow from table to table and clucked them all down, one after another.
Downstairs, an untidy room filled with potato-diggers, their faces withered and overgrown (eyes as root-white) as old spuds; they tasted of Maine soil.
There were two soggy lovers in the basement pool, wizened like raisins, and a red thing in the bathroom that tasted like saltines.
Delicious.
If only he’d had a bit of Mother’s milk to wash them down.
Then the old dear at the top of the stairs made her brief appearance again. Anticipating her cameo, he plucked her like ripe fruit as the door slipped open the merest crack. She whispered something before her face slid down his gullet, though he couldn't make out the words—a prayer, perhaps?
Wiping his lips daintily, the dark preacher paused again before the bay windows, gazing hungrily at the child sobbing in the parking lot. Ah, another little one. No longer windborne, the poor thing looked as if someone had carelessly backed a car over his spine, leaving him broken and writhing in the dirt.
The preacher slithered between the panes.
Dessert.
So many souls had eluded him during his lifetime. He'd lost so many, let so many stray from the flock. However devout, a man is just a man in life, and the world offers many temptations. He'd saved so few, though he'd traveled far and wide, from inn to inn, offering salvation for oh, so long. Salvation!
They lacked his appetite for repentance and salvation, that long and lonely road—but he saved them all, nonetheless.
In the end, his flesh had failed him, but his faith burned on.
What he couldn't accomplish in life, he could achieve in death.
So many wayward lost lambs, so many inns in need of cleaning....
BREATHE MY NAME
By Christopher Golden
There came a time when Tommy Betts thought they’d all have been better off if the mine had collapsed on top of them, crushing them under tons of stone and earth and coal. Better that, by far, than dying a little bit with every breath of poison air. Better that than seeing the fear in the faces of men he’d looked up to all his life, and desperation in his own father’s eyes.
As a boy, Tommy had told his dad to be careful, worried that if they dug too deep, the miners might break through into Hell. His mother had still been making him go to church in Wheeling every Sunday back then, and Hell presented a special terror for him. His father and the other miners would come back with their clothes caked with black dust, faces painted with the same crap that filled their saliva when they’d spit, and Tommy worried they might one day encounter demons down there.
At eighteen, Tommy had gone into the mine for the first time and discovered that the church had a pretty simple vision of Hell, and what waited in Shaft 39 was a different sort of damnation altogether. In the seven years since, he’d learned that even the bravest man disco
vered claustrophobia in the deep underground, with the walls pressing in and the weight of a mountain hanging above him. The slightest tremor might be the end of days. Two miles into the heart of a mountain, they might as well have been floating in space. That first trip down, Tommy had understood that no matter how many precautions might be taken, the miners were on their own.
Rick Nilsson, one of his father’s drinking buddies, had said the life of a miner was like playing Russian roulette every day for the rest of your life. You could find the chamber with the bullet any time, without warning. For Tommy and his dad, Al, and for Nilsson and Jerry Tolland and Rob McIlveen and Randy Wisialowski and a dozen other guys, it happened on the tenth of April.
It was raining, but no one complained about the black storm clouds or the soaking they got on the walk up from the parking lot. Underground it didn’t matter what the weather was like outside. In fact, as far as Tommy was concerned, the shittier the day the better. It was the beautiful days when he wished he could be at home with Melissa, tossing a ball in the backyard with their boy, Jake, doing a little barbecue. Jakey was only five, but sometimes Tommy let him flip the burgers.
Stormy days, though, he didn’t mind the mine so much. At least it was dry down there.
At the entrance to the mine, they waited for Wisialowski to show up. The guy was always fucking late and almost always hung over when he did show up. But Hanson, the shift supervisor, wouldn’t let them go down until the whole shift had arrived. They were supposed to be there by 7:30. At a quarter to eight, just when Hanson was about to let them go down and dock Wisialowski for the whole day whether he showed up or not, the guy pulled into the lot.
“Standing out here in the rain waiting on this asshole,” Tommy’s dad muttered, standing next to him.
“I’m in no hurry to get down there,” Tommy replied.
His father grunted. “Ain’t the point.”
Tommy didn’t say anything to that. There was never any arguing with the old man. Even his eyes seemed chiseled out of stone, made of the same stuff they were digging into. He had a scar on his left temple from a fight years back when one of his crew had gone stir crazy down in the mine. Al Betts had been the one to finally subdue the head case, but not before the guy tried bashing his skull in. The rest of the crew looked up to Al. He wasn’t the kind of man who started shit, but he’d be the one to put an end to it.
Hanson walked into their midst, hands up to get their attention. “All right, listen up! Wisialowksi, you paying attention?”
With the rain streaming down his slicker and spotting his glasses, the supervisor looked like an alien species standing amongst the miners. Wisialowski nodded, red-rimmed eyes anxious.
“This is the last time you’re late, Randy,” Hanson told him. “I’m saying this in front of everyone, so nobody can complain you weren’t warned. Every time you’re late, you cost us money. You’re all going down twenty-five minutes later than scheduled. Multiply that by eighteen, and you’re looking at seven and a half hours of accumulated time. So the next time you’re late, I’m docking you—and only you—for the total accumulated time you’ve delayed the entire crew. And if there’s a time after that, you’ll be fired.”
Nobody said a word. They stood in the rain and waited until Hanson sent them on their way. The whole crew climbed aboard the mantrip—the cable car that lowered the men into the mine and drew them back up again later. Only when they were on their way down into the ground with the lights flickering around them and the mantrip’s wheels squeaking on the metal rails did the miners start to grumble. They cussed out Hanson, now that the supervisor wasn’t there to hear them. Tommy said nothing. Every member of the crew had said much worse about Wisialowski themselves, but now that management had singled him out, the wagons would be circled. The guy was a drunk and a slacker even when he made it to the job on time, but he’d been down there in the tunnels with them and Hanson had probably never had coal dust under his manicured fingernails. At least, that was the way they looked at it.
Tommy thought the warning to Wisialowski had been more than fair, but he wouldn’t dare say so.
Jerry Tolland sat next to him in the mantrip. He scowled and looked at Tommy. “Fucking Hanson.”
Tommy just nodded, rolling his eyes.
“What’d you guys do this weekend?” Jerry asked.
That brought a smile to his face. “I’m building a tree fort for Jake. Ain’t much of a carpenter, but it’s coming out all right. Took Melissa out to dinner Saturday night to that new place, Evergreen. No place to go for beers, but you want to make the wife happy, bring her there.”
“Expensive?”
“Not like you’d think. Shit, they know nobody around here can afford expensive.”
They fell silent after that. Something about the mine had that effect. The deeper they went, the quieter the miners became. It often lasted well into the first hour after work began, until they became acclimated again. Some people might have thought it was fear that made them quiet, but Tommy thought of it as respect. You worked down there in the ground, you had to give the mountain its due.
The mantrip squealed as it slowed, then rocked them a little as it came to a stop.
The crew stepped out of the contraption, cables swaying. There were burned out lights along the length of the shaft, but down here, they were all working perfectly. Not so much as a flicker. When it came to the workspace, they didn’t fuck around. The dim yellow light washed over the stone.
“You smell something,” Jerry asked.
Tommy didn’t. Jerry was always smelling something. Of the entire crew, he was the most paranoid, but nobody thought if it like that. More than once, Al Betts had told his son that paranoia could save his life. So Tommy took another whiff.
“I got nothing.”
Jerry nodded. “Probably just me. McIlveen and I found that methane leak on Friday while we were drilling a bolt hole in the roof. Patched it up ourselves, so I’m not worried about that. But it’s got me on edge.”
“I’m never not on edge,” Tommy said.
They fell into line with the rest of the crew, shuffling down the tunnel and into Shaft 39. Tommy’s dad shouted something to Nilsson and the two older guys—closing in on fifty and the senior members of the crew—laughed in such a way that Tommy knew whatever it was had been filthy. The second shift had a few women on the crew, but they’d never had any. Tommy thought maybe the big bosses knew what they were doing, keeping his father and Nilsson away from women miners. What a combination that would be.
They were deep in Shaft 39 when a frown creased Tommy’s forehead. He caught a scent that made his nostrils flare and his upper lip curl. It reminded him of the odor that filled the house every time Melissa ran the self-cleaning program on the oven.
Jerry Tolland moved up beside him. “You sure you don’t smell something.”
“I smell it now,” Tommy replied.
“What the fuck is that stink?” someone called from the back of the line, which made Tommy realize that the smell was coming from behind them.
A dull whump echoed along the shaft and the ground shook, just once. A kind of grinding noise reached them, and then only silence. Tommy searched the faces of the miners around him and saw them blanch. He glanced at his father and saw a momentary flicker of fear before Al Betts recovered from the moment.
“Holy shit,” Rob McIlveen said.
Wisialowski put his head into his hands. “We’re screwed.”
Jerry started to cough and then to choke. He covered his mouth and nose, panic in his eyes. Tommy tasted the gas on his tongue and then black smoke started billowing down along the tunnel after them.
“Fuck,” Al said. “All right, this way. Everybody with me, and follow procedure. We’re gonna be fine. We’ve just gotta buy ourselves some time until Hanson gets a team down here to get us out.”
Nobody but Tommy had seen the flicker of fear in his father’s eyes. They all nodded and fell into step behind him. But Tommy coul
dn’t ignore the fact that they were going deeper into the mountain, further away from the surface and clean air with every step.
Tommy watched as McIlveen and Jerry Tolland hung a plastic curtain across the shaft. All three of them wore emergency oxygen packs—rescuers, the miners called them—and over the top of Jerry’s rescuer, his eyes were wild. His hands shook as he tucked the curtain up as best he could.
A steady, clanging noise came from behind Tommy. He turned and watched as his dad swung a sledgehammer against the plates and bolts that supported the walls and ceiling of the mine around them. Normally that kind of thing was ill-advised, but right now all they wanted was for someone up above to hear them. By now there would be a rescue attempt going on; folks would be looking for some sign of their location. The hammer on metal might be the only way to signal them.
Nilsson had found the sledgehammer, but now he sat on the floor against the back of the coal rib, his face covered with a bandanna—no rescuer for him. Of the eighteen men, only ten had working oxygen packs. The other rescuers were faulty. The guys who had working oxygen packs were taking turns, just like they were taking turns with the sledgehammer. Tommy felt like puking when he thought about it. These things were supposed to save their lives, give them enough air to last until someone could get to them, but nobody bothered to test them now and again to make sure they were working?
Someone tapped his arm and he turned to see that Jerry and McIlveen had gotten the curtain up.
“What do you think?” Jerry asked. “Cozy, huh?”
“Just like home,” Tommy said.
Home. He’d been trying not to think of home, of Melissa and Jake. Had they heard the news by now? Would Melissa tell Jake that daddy was trapped down in the mine? No way. She wouldn’t do that to the kid; he was only five years old. But Melissa would be trying to find someone to stay with him so that she could come and stand out there at the mouth of the mine, waiting.
Mister October - Volume Two Page 9