SOMETHING WAITS

by Bruce Jones

  “Stay another night. One more night…”

  * * *

  Trisha had read little in her life, movies being most of her education, and these proved enough.

  She had exercised caution all her life, had come this far because of it. She exercised it now; melted down the silver crucifix at her neck, took the glistening lump to Fat Freddie who owned a gun shop on Third and Ike. Freddie grinned a toothless ex-Hell’s Angel grin and asked, “What you up to now, woman?” but asked no more. He turned the lump in his hand and told her to come back on Thursday. When she did, with fifty bucks, Fat Freddie had the newly molded silver rounds all ready for her in a clean red handkerchief. “They soft, but they work,” he told her. Trisha loaded them into the shiny automatic herself. Then sought out Angela.

  Told Angela she’d scored a date, a “doubles party” and for a lot of money, more than she’d ever seen before. Then led her up to the little hotel room, let Angela—who looked not unlike her sister Dolce in some ways—enter first into the little room, the darkened room, quickly shutting and locking the door behind her.

  “What--?” from Angela, inside and alone with shadow and full moonlight and something else. Then a quick, sharp scream—the kicking sound an antelope might make under a hyena—then quiet, punctuated by just the lightest dripping.

  Give me fifteen minutes he’d said, and Trisha did, before unlocking the door again, pushing into a room full of streaming moonlight and streaming Angela, Trisha’s silvery gun weighting her small purse.

  He awaited her on the bed, muzzle yet dripping, eyes glowing red, as she’d guessed—so powerful, so dreadful an apparition Trisha thought at first she must flee, though she did not. She undressed quickly instead, temples pounding, purse close at hand, came to the bed and, unable to face eyes so soul-piercingly, hitched skirt up, panties down and presented him pale, moon-kissed buttocks.

  It was the words she wanted most, had never known. Her johns had spoken them—shouted them—many times, accompanying their too-eager discharge, words usually curiously religious in nature—words like “Jesus!” and “Oh, Christ!” or sometimes merely “Fuck, fuck!”—hissed sometimes almost vengefully, other times oddly tender, vaguely forlorn, more prayer than epithet.

  Trisha had never spoken them, never experienced a mind so cleansed white with passion that unbidden words could find voice, force free…never known fulfilled love, sexual or otherwise. Certainly not in childhood.

  While mounted here in full glorious moonlight, the beast’s dark talons at her white flanks, hot stench of blood-breath in her ear, the words came…at first a guttural gasp in the seemingly futile attempt to accommodate the shocking girth of him, then, in a moment—face red, eyes and mouth bulging like a pond frog’s—Trisha cried out, felt the savage tide catch and lift her, rode and let herself go with it at last, to be carried away high and higher, scream the words joyfully now…

  And he—lost in animal grunts, animal thrusts, emptying his soul, filling her and spilling over—filled the small room with a high, lovely, long-buried howl of completion.

  Afterward, both of them changed into something else, they lay together listening to each other’s breath, each other’s hearts, marveling that, amid such crimson carnage—Angela’s twisted remains still under the bed—they could discover such near-forgotten need, such exhausted, long-sought completion.

  “Stay with me?” he breathed hopeful against her. “I have money. Plenty.” And she nodded, snuggling closer, having searched a lifetime, long and alone and finally found this unexpected dark treasure no power on Earth, she’d make sure, would ever wrest from her.

  “We’ll have to travel,” Franklyn said, “Quite a lot, sometimes in hot, lonely places.”

  “Not lonely,” she murmured, “Never again lonely. But first…one more night…”

  * * *

  “The honky peckerwood did fuckin’ what!” from an uncontainable Mojo.

  “Refused to pay me,” Trisha repeated, all innocence and fluster.

  “Uh-huh.” Mojo packed his slender stiletto and Colt Python with savage impatience. “We just fuckin’ see ‘bout that shit!”

  Knocking at the hotel door ten minutes later, impatient with chest-puffed bravado. “Open the door, motherfucker! Mojo want a word with your soon-to-be-dead white ass!”

  “It’s open…” from within moonlit walls.

  Opened by Mojo a moment later, then locked again by someone else, Mojo’s “What the fuck--?” followed by the roar of two quick shots, a frenzied wheezing that exuded bright terror, a clawing of wood at the hotel door that Trisha, from the hall, feared must be Franklyn…then a light popping, like a twig wrapped in wet cloth breaking—a visceral grunt from Mojo as if he’d just come. And silence.

  She faced Franklyn this time, lay beneath him, supine and triumphant, looked straight up into the dark canine face, the flaming eyes, dreadful still-wet fangs… and she reveled, clutched tight thick fur and let him mold her, scrape her, scratch tender breasts blooming angry red lines as she came, yelping…held his hugeness within her, gripping-- until he made her come again, shout the Words, rear back his own shaggy head and make the room echo his plaintive love-howl. Mojo’s head, trunk-less and blood-crusted, watching from a shadowed corner with dead, yolky eyes.

  “We’re alike,” Franklyn said later, changed back and lightly stroking her, “outcasts and hungry. Alike.”

  They traveled the desert states: hot clear days, chill, restful nights, during which she never again dreamed of Shep, his cool muzzle thrust into her palm, his trusting head against her lap.

  In Arizona, in an enormous stucco chalet Franklyn had rented amid flat, sandy mesas, they tarried long and knew sweet peace and quiet. For a time.

  She brought him boys sometimes, but mostly procured him young women.

  “They all look like the same girl,” he commented once absently.

  She said nothing, and it seemed fine. All seemed fine.

  Until the emergence of Franklyn’s great rival, his lurking jealously over the one person he could never exact vengeance upon: himself.

  She found him wandering the desert one night beneath black, moonless sky. “What is it, my love?”

  At first she though he wasn’t going to respond. Then: “It’s not me, is it? It’s not me. It’s him you want—that other me--the beast you covet.”

  And she took his arm, pressed warm against his shoulder. “Can’t it be enough?”

  He watched the ebon sky, sighing. “I want to hunt alone from now on. Just me. Do you understand?”

  She searched his face, hugged the arm again, nodding. “But one more first, darling…just one more…”

  * * *

  Some of the young women were lesbians, overtly so…some merely lost souls not unlike her former self. Some delicate to shattering, others abrasive with hot rebellion, steeped in the hatred of family or marital abuse, like this one tonight, this reedy blonde who looked so much like the others.

  “And this is the guest room.” Trisha showed her.

  The girl, Jana, ever pensive, clearly jealous, shrugged proud indifference. “Can that window be closed? I can’t sleep with the moonlight in my eyes.”

  Franklyn came to see the girl just past midnight. To his shock, Trisha was still there, with no apparent plans to leave. She stood, back pressed to the closed door, and watched.

  Franklyn changed swiftly, with none of the protracted lassitude of the late-night movies. A shadow passed over his face, his sad smile became ghastly, the clear eyes red and burning, and it was done. He dropped panther-silent to the floor, not a panther, nor any longer a man…something dark and feral that rumbled deep in its massive chest and urinated pungently in the small room, then leapt…

  Jana—imperious demeanor crumbled—face a rictus of terrified disbelief—could only run…in a space where running would not be had.

  Thus the chase across moonlit bed and fallen chairs was brief, though long enough to remind Trisha of the neighborhood tomcat of he
r childhood, the one next door that used to trap and play with fat field mice. Jana, who was not fat, did not turn and fight at the end the way the mice had; she screamed instead and clawed the stucco walls, leaving brilliant red behind and most of her fingernails before the dark thing pulled her down.

  Behind the bed, between brass rail and wall, the beast dragged her kicking, pinning her with a satisfied whuff of black flared nostrils, bent glistening jaws and ended screams and struggle with a single bite, eliciting a sob of near-gratitude from Jana, a final spastic flutter of limbs as the big incisors broke something deep down, spraying fine mists of blood and piss.

  Trisha, still pressed silent to the door, listened absently to the feast, a thing of mostly moving shadow…came finally to Franklyn’s hunkered form, stroked the shaggy head, bent and kissed it lightly. Lingered to tongue his still streaming lips, lay back and sit astride him in scalloped gore and shout her words—her glory, her vengeance and triumph against all past pain to the moon’s mindless eye. She yelped fear when Franklyn drew her suddenly down, nipped her throbbing neck, lapped tenderly at what trickled there.

  Later, on smeared, rumpled sheets, lazily sated, pleasantly logy, Trisha reached for and caressed the huge phallus, felt (with disappointment) it retreat, shrink away with the rest of him to become slender, pale and white as the bone-colored moon. She found, turning to kiss his face, smiling at her.

  “You bit me,” she smiled back.

  “My gift to you.”

  A distant chill plucked at her. She ventured, “Gift?”

  “What you wanted, have been asking for all these nights. Death.”

  She started, naked, turned a red-streaked hip to appraise his shadowed face. “Have I asked for death?”

  Smile in place, he stroked her slim back. “Asked for it, demanded it, shouted it with every fevered climax. ‘Kill me!’ you cried. And now I have.”

  “I said that? I said, ‘kill me’?”

  “What did you think you were shouting?”

  Trisha, genuinely awed, considered this. “Something more…erotic.”

  His ever-sad smile broadened tenderly. “It isn’t love you’ve been seeking, sweet, it’s peace. Release from your guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Over your mother. And sister.”

  Trisha, abruptly chilled, glanced at the twisted thing on the floor, withdrew from Franklyn a fraction. “How did you know?”

  “We know.”

  No one was more surprised at the sudden tears than Trisha, or more relieved. “They…hurt me,” she sobbed. “Mother gave me to the men because I was the pretty one. Dolce…Dolce laughed. I hated them.”

  “And loved them. They were killing you. You were killing them. I didn’t know what to do about it, what to do for you. And then I did.” He touched the still tender mark at her neck. “You’re one of us now. The infection has passed. Forever dead, forever living.”

  She pushed herself up, heart hammering alarm, finger tracing an invisible line at her carotid.

  “You’ll never know guilt,” Franklyn told her. “Guilt is not to be found in us.”

  A cloud passed over Trisha’s face. “Will we still be able to…?” and she nodded hopefully at his belly, and below.

  He laughed. “More than ever. More explosively atavistic, lubriciously primitive. And nothing can ever harm us. You’re invulnerable now. Watch…and trust.” He took the silvery gun from under her pillow, aimed quickly, fired casually at her naked surprise.

  She would wonder in her last moments why she had left the silver rounds in the gun, why she had kept the gun at all. That old cautionary guard again? Fearing the beast even as she trusted the man?

  Wondered too, in the fleeting breath between his last words and the white glare of the explosion, if she might somehow have warned him in time…or if she had deliberately, albeit subconsciously, planned it this way.

  …if Franklyn, in his sweet ignorance, had not perhaps done her the greatest favor of all: gifted her—the silver slug tearing through her heart—with that which she’d really sought most of all.

  Dying there in strangled moonlight, the bed a pool, fast becoming a lake, the approaching wail of sirens souring the peaceful night, she found no breath to explain with…could only listen in descending darkness to his agonized sobs, his tortured, howl—wholly human now—of despair…chasing her into the final night.

  Hear a moment later the familiar joyful bark, feel Shep’s cold muzzle against her palm, the two of them laughing and truly free now, racing forever the yellow undulant meadow through soft summer breeze…

  Let’s face it, most writers would be doing this whether we got paid for it or not. Vast riches are for daydreams. But in a way, isn’t that what the act of writing is anyway, another kind of dreaming? When you’re in the moment—as writer or reader—money’s the last thing on your mind. Or should be. You can’t make people love you, to paraphrase Rick Nelson, so you better love yourself.

  I’ve not only gotten a great kick out of going back through the tales (and the years), dusting them off, polishing up one or two, but have gotten an equal thrill realizing the American reading public—the ereaders anyway—seemingly haven’t entirely lost their taste for short fiction. Which is a good thing. In fact, a great thing. I’m not the only one trying to keep alive the art either. Other authors have attempted ebook short story collections, some even making it to the number one spot in their particular genre. For those of you under the age of 30 or so, this may mean seem small cause for rejoicing. Trust me, it’s not. You can just about count on one hand the number of traditional New York Houses who regularly publish short story collections these days. If things keep going as they are, you may well be counting the numbers of publishers, period, on that hand, along with their brick and mortar store counterparts. Whether this is a good or bad thing is fairly moot—given our increasing fascination with all things streaming, it may be inevitable. Now, I love hardcover books, don’t get me wrong. I grew up with hardbacks and have a nascent fondness for the printed word. And it’s been pretty good to me financially so I can hardly complain. And maybe, too, it’s a case of my just hating to see all the old ways die…always rooting for the underdog, ya know, that thing less fashionable? Call me a traditionalist. That said, any platform for reading that can bring back or help keep breathing the waning entity of the story short, I’m all up and perky for. The delivery system is secondary. We need the short form! All of us! When you buy or borrow short fiction, you’ll be saluting a dangerously anemic art form that, believe me, needs any help it can get. Who’s going to practice the form in generations to come if we let it die now? The short story form is unique, never doubt it.

  In fact, someone once said any damn fool (or endless number of monkeys with typewriters) can write a novel. They may have been right. The novel has been called the baseball of literature for its more deliberate, leisurely pace. You can get away with some degree of verbal padding in almost anything novel length, even the novelette-- or novella if you prefer the less precious-sounding term. But the basic short story as we know it, the one Poe purportedly invented along with the modern mystery is no slacker. Just about every paragraph has to count, and be accounted for. Some would venture every word. Some would even venture the novel itself nothing more than a bloated form of the short story (I’m not among them) --that filling up that many pages is never necessary and often excessively self-indulgent, analogous to Gunsmoke going from thirty minutes a week to sixty to sell ad space, or Alfred Hitchcock Presents becoming The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, like just about everything else on TV after 1958. Hey, there are only 7 original jokes as the man says, right? And we all know the first rule of joke-telling: keep it short!

  Those of you out there defending War and Peace and Moby Dick can comb back your dander. Let’s keep it real here, I’m not on a Dennis Miller rant, the novel clearly has its place in history and you don’t need me to tell you that (although, Melville really could go on a bit, could he not?—and then there
’s those chapters from Huckleberry Finn edited-out for generations—and no, we won’t get into the n word here). My point (oh, here it is!) being, the short form is simply harder to make perfect. I happen to think we should all strive for perfection, do our damnedest. But striving shouldn’t mean constant self-awareness while under the muse. All we should be concerned with then is spinning a good yarn, or, perhaps more truthfully, letting it spin itself. But that’s a whole ‘nother topic.

  The little tale at hand deals with its own kind of perfection, I suppose, or one man’s driving obsession with it. Obsession is, to my mind, a grand theme for a story, any kind of story in any form. One of my favorites. Hitchcock’s Vertigo for instance. Or Brian de Palma’s >ahem< “homage,” the thunderously obvious Obsession.

  Hence, the two fellows you’re about to meet. Each, in his own way, obsessed. Either of whom could serve as both the main protagonist and accepted definition of a