by Phoef Sutton
CHAPTER THREE
Matt stared, fixated on the putrid organs he could see clearly behind the latticework of a rib cage.
“Hey, my eyes are up here,” the flight attendant said. Matt wrenched his eyes up to her face, and he could see that what she said was at least partly true. One of her eyes was there. The other one was decomposing into worm food and drooping down her cheek. “Can I help you?”
Matt swallowed. He had to remind himself, yet again, that only he could see this rotting horror. To the rest of the world she was just a fairly unpleasant flight attendant. “Uh, how long before we land?”
She switched the television monitor in the seatback in front of him on to a map of the US and a little image of a plane that moved incrementally across it. “See? About thirty-five minutes. Keep your eye on this and don’t bother me.” And she was gone down the aisle to offer her ministrations to other poor passengers.
Matt caught his breath. It had been awhile since he’d experienced this. The telltale rotting, which only he could see and smell, which was a signal that madness, that violence, that evil was coming. He’d first sensed it when Andy, his old friend from childhood, had gone on a killing spree back home in Deerpark. He’d witnessed it dozens of times since, and every time it had heralded monstrous slaughter.
The process started gradually, with a running sore on the cheek or an infection in the eye. It spread till the victim looked like the walking dead. Victim? Well, yes, he supposed that was right. Although the “victim” in each case became a killing machine. And usually the only thing that stopped these killing machines in their mayhem was a well-placed blow from Matt Cahill’s ax.
He glanced down the aisle and saw the stewardess talking angrily to a mother with a squalling baby. He could just hear her telling the mom to shut that fucking baby up before she threw it out the emergency exit.
Matt tried to calculate how much time they had before the flight attendant succumbed to the evil that was growing inside her and started acting on her threats. Half an hour? Forty-five minutes? Five minutes? He willed the little plane on the monitor to hurry up and get to their destination before all hell, quite literally, broke loose.
The elderly woman next to him, who had mercifully been sleeping for the past hour, turned to him and asked how much longer they had.
“About half an hour,” Matt said, distracted.
“That should give her enough time, don’t you think?”
Puzzled, he turned his head and saw that her expression had changed from one of calm understanding to one of monstrous glee, her smile so broad as to almost split her face in two.
Mr. Dark was here.
Mr. Dark, whom he’d first seen in a dream at Janey’s bedside as she was dying and who had appeared mocking him and teasing him and tormenting him through the long nightmare since. Mr. Dark, whose touch spread the contagion that had cursed his path every step of the way since his resurrection.
Matt swallowed and tried to remain calm. The opportunities to talk with Dark were few and far between. He had to quell his panic and revulsion and try to gain what information he could.
“Hello,” he said, awkwardly. “I thought you were an old lady from Moses Lake.”
“Oh, no. She died over Denver, but nobody noticed. I thought I’d take advantage.” The wicked grin was still there. It was always there. “What do you think that stewardess—excuse me, flight attendant—is going to do with that baby? I say she slams it repeatedly in the overhead compartment, but she could pop it in the microwave. Any bets?”
“We’re landing in half an hour. She’s not that far gone. We’ll be OK,” Matt said calmly.
“You mean she’ll go wacko in the terminal, and you’ll be long gone by then? Could be. Then it’ll be someone else’s problem, right?” The old woman unwrapped a lollipop, took out her teeth, and started to suck on it.
“Why not?” Matt said, trying to remain casual and doing a piss-poor job of it. “I can’t be everywhere at once. These things must be happening all over. In places I’ve never been and never will be.”
“Maybe,” the old woman gummed. “Maybe not. Maybe you’re the carrier. Ever think of that?”
“I’ve thought of just about everything. But I’ve never been in New Orleans. Or Austin, Texas. Or Charlottesville, Virginia. Or Portland, Oregon. Have I?”
The old woman shifted in her seat uncomfortably and looked down the aisle to where the flight attendant was screaming now, trying to drown out the baby. “It’s starting. Too bad you had to check your ax with the baggage, huh? You could really use it about now.”
“What is this about?” Matt asked.
“Pardon?”
“You don’t come to see me unless there’s something you want to tell me, or…”
“Impart? Relate? Give? ‘What fresh hell is this?’ Do you know that quote?”
“No,” Matt said.
“Read a book, why don’t you?”
“Or do you want to stop me? Is that it? Do I know too much? Am I threatening to spoil your plans?”
“Please. I can’t just drop in and visit a colleague?”
Matt wondered what he meant by that. An enemy, an adversary, yes. But a colleague? He decided Dark was just playing mind games with him and he countered with one of his own.
“You’re worried about me,” Matt said. “I’m getting too close to something.”
“I’d be worried about that Waitress in the Sky, if I were you.”
He (or she?) pointed his long, bony finger ahead, and Matt’s attention was drawn to the scene in the cabin in front of him. The baby was screaming its lungs out now, and the stewardess was struggling to grab it from the hysterical mother. A male flight attendant was rushing to the altercation. A few people were trying to undo their safety belts and come to the mother’s aid when the stewardess seized the baby with now rotting arms and bolted down the aisle toward Matt.
Taking one glance at his seat neighbor, who was now a peacefully dead old woman, and thank God for that, Matt thrust himself from his seat (he didn’t wear his seat belt all the time, no matter how much they begged him to) and blocked her way.
The stewardess blinked at him, crushing the howling baby to her bare ribs. “I’m going to have to ask you to remain in your seat for the remainder of the flight.”
The seat belt lights flashed on and the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker to say that they were beginning their descent. No one paid him any mind.
“Give me the baby,” Matt said in even tones.
“Don’t make me call the ground crew.” She sounded reasonable, but her clutch on the squalling infant was vicious. “They will arrest you when we land for hindering a flight attendant in the furtherance of her God-given duty to keep the airways peaceful and clean and free of goddamn, screaming, shit-producing babies!”
“Elaine!” This was the soft-spoken male flight attendant with a bad comb-over, who was now reaching out to the stewardess from behind. “Calm down,” he was saying. “The pilot says to get back in our seats. We’re almost there.”
“Fuck you, Barry!” she said in low guttural tones, like a comic doing a parody of The Exorcist. “Do you want me to give this baby something to cry about?” And with that she raised her talon-like painted nails to the baby’s eyes.
The mother behind her screamed.
Matt took advantage of the distraction to punch Elaine straight in the jaw. Her flesh ripped at the impact of his fist, peeling loose from her jawline like the skin from a rotten peach.
Her neck snapped back with a nauseating crunch, and she looked at him. “Striking a flight attendant on duty is a violation of federal law! You’re gonna burn in hell for that!”
She lashed out with her claw of a right hand, still holding on to the baby. Matt dodged, but there was very little room to maneuver in this cramped space, and he felt his shoulder ripped by her nails. He fell into the aisle and tried to find some room to plant his feet, to launch another blow. He swung his right again, bu
t she wasn’t there.
She was bending over the dead old woman by the window and tearing loose the plastic protection of the exit door, just like she’d taught him when the plane was taking off. He hadn’t paid attention then.
He was paying attention now. Elaine looked back at him in triumph. “I told you to keep your fucking seat belt fastened.”
Then the door opened and flew away.
CHAPTER FOUR
Matt made one desperate grab for the baby, expecting it and everything in the plane to be sucked out the emergency exit door, like Auric Goldfinger at the end of that James Bond movie. He was as surprised as the stewardess that this didn’t happen. Another movie myth shattered, Matt thought, as the roar of freezing wind from the open doorway, the blaring alarm, and all the buttercup facemasks dropping down from above gave the passengers the signal to panic, vomit, and say their prayers.
Reaching out across the dead woman from Moses Lake to Elaine, her skull-exposed jaw snapping repeatedly like she was saying something that was lost in the blast of wind, Matt grasped hold of the baby. The creature that had been Elaine wrenched her body sideways in a grotesque game of tug-of-war that ended with Matt grabbing the stewardess’s right hand and snapping it off at the wrist. The baby came free and Matt pulled it to his chest as Elaine spit bile at him. Then she lost her footing and tumbled out the door and into the endless blue sky.
Matt was going to be a hero.
He could see all the signs. When he had handed the baby back to her mother, after the plane had landed to the applause of the passengers (what would they have done if the pilot had crashed? booed?), he saw that look of gratitude on her face and he knew he was doomed. He saw it in the faces of the other passengers too. He had done the right thing and they were all amazed.
The baby wasn’t. She just grabbed her mother’s breasts and started to look for someplace to suck. The baby (Matt never learned that she was named Amanda Martin and that, at age twenty-five, in the year 2036, she would gain fame by doing a cover version of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” and set the world record for the shortest period of time between hitting number one on the charts and overdosing on heroin: five hours) knew to look for the next comfort and not to live in the past. Matt wasn’t a hero to her—he was just another set of arms to ride in.
The TSA agents and the airline police held them on the plane for another hour, sorting things out. Everyone agreed that Elaine, the flight attendant, had snapped, grabbed the baby, and headed for the exit door. If it weren’t for that hero in seat 17B, the baby would have gone out with her.
The airline police took Matt off the plane to a windowless room and asked him some more questions for some more hours. Matt was fine with that. Anything to avoid the press he knew was gathering out there in the terminal.
They left him alone in the small room at various intervals, then came back to ask him some more questions. Matt got the feeling they didn’t quite know what to do with him. The third time, they came back with two representatives from the airline who brought with them “a standard release form,” and Matt realized that they were just worried he was going to sue.
“I’m going to sue the airline,” Matt said. “Can I speak with my lawyer?” He was bluffing. If they’d asked him for the name of his lawyer, Matt would have been stumped; the only lawyer’s name he could come up with was Perry Mason. Fortunately they didn’t call him on it but rather tried to settle then and there, figuring they could get him on the cheap. The airline was not at fault, of course, but would a hundred thousand dollars as a good-faith offer be enough to satisfy him?
Matt said he’d think about it. In the meantime, he’d like to get out of here. And he’d like to get out of here without talking to the press.
The airline representatives looked at each other, and Matt thought he’d overplayed his hand. They’d sensed that he didn’t want any exposure—that there was a reason he didn’t want his face plastered all over the twenty-four-hour news cycle. They asked him where he’d be staying, and the only address Matt could think of was 1567 Blue Jay Way. As soon as he said it, he knew they recognized it from the Beatles song.
“That’s a nice area,” the thinner airline representative said.
“Is it?” Matt answered. “I’ve never been there. I’m visiting friends.”
“What friends?”
“I’d rather not say.”
The two airline executives looked at each other again. Then they looked at Matt, and all at once Matt relaxed. He had something they wanted, and they had something he wanted. They could make a deal.
Matt sat in the back of the cab and looked at the sights moving by him. Dark clouds gathered above the suburbs of some great metropolis that never quite showed up. He fingered the five hundred dollars in his pants pocket, which was all he was ever going to see from the airline.
He’d signed the “release form”; they’d given him the cash and let him out the elaborate back way. He’d avoided the press, which he saw gathered around the terminal as he was spirited out. The reporters talked with all of the passengers, who were quite pleased to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Let them have it. Matt had been famous once. Once was enough.
He remembered when the fatter of the two airline representatives had led him to a taxi and, before he shut the door, had asked, “You’re that Matt Cahill, right?”
“I suppose there are others,” Matt said.
“But you’re the dead guy, right?”
“I guess I am.”
“I can see why you didn’t want them crawling over you,” he said, eyeing the hordes of reporters that spilled out onto the sidewalk.
“Thanks,” Matt replied, grateful that someone understood at least part of his feelings.
“No reason to give it away for free, right?” the fat rep had chuckled while he fished a card from his pocket. “Here.”
Matt took the card, puzzled. “What’s this?”
“It’s my brother-in-law,” the fat man said. “He’s the best entertainment lawyer in town. He’ll get you a deal that’ll set you up for life.”
“Deal?”
The rep had looked at him with a “don’t kid a kidder” look. “For your life story. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Welcome to LA,” he had said as he shut the cab door.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Traveling Salesman had been a dive hotel once. The sort of place the lower-level television executives or second-string variety show comedians would go to for a quick bang with their secretaries or whores or both. Located in “the heart of Hollywood,” it was a cheap fleapit surrounded by squalor, just across the street from the historic and dingy Farmers’ Market and just down the way from CBS Television City.
Times had changed. CBS, along with the rest of television, had been exiled to the San Fernando Valley, and the Farmers’ Market had been spruced up and turned into the Grove, with all the requisite Victoria’s Secret, Restoration Hardware, and Anthropologie outlets. The area had been gentrified and the Traveling Salesman had been gentrified along with it.
The old neon sign was still out front, but it was retro and ironic now. The walls were freshly painted in bright, primary colors, and flat-screen TVs and iPod docks were installed in every room. The gist of it was that now lower-level executives and second-string comedians had to pay $170 for a lunch break with their secretaries, who were now called assistants, or their whores, who were now called escorts. Inflation was hurting everyone.
Matt pulled the curtain from the window and looked out at the street. The headlights of cars reflected off the rain-washed pavement, and Matt thought, It never rains in California, but girl don’t they warn ya, it pours.
Great, now he was going to have that song in his head all night. It was six o’clock and already dark this time of year. Back in Harrisonburg it was nine at night. It felt like summer here, but it was winter back…home? It was strange that he almost thought of Harrisonburg as home, as the place he was supposed to be. Matt could have put down root
s there, if he hadn’t checked AOL last Saturday night and seen that breaking-news item about the murder in the movie theater in New Orleans. About the word the murderer had scrawled in blood across the screen: “Mörk.”
The news reports drew no conclusions from this, and the comments on AOL were full of jokes about the killer being a mad Robin Williams fan. None of them seemed to know or care about the real significance of the bloody word. Why should they? Even if they had known, as Matt Cahill knew, growing up among Swedish Americans in the logging regions of the Pacific Northwest, what mörk meant in English, why would they have cared? “Dark” was just a word for the absence of light to them.
There were murders every day, and Matt wasn’t sure why this one grabbed his attention. It wasn’t for the reason that it was the talk of the day—Matt couldn’t care less about texting in a movie theater or the growing rudeness of society or all the other things people were blogging about. To tell the truth, he couldn’t imagine anyone having the time or inclination to blog about anything.
No, it was the ax that drew him in. Matt knew how to use an ax. Knew what it felt like to cleave a skull. Knew what it felt like to draw the ax back, feeling the resistance of brains and bone clinging to it as you pulled it free. So he hesitated on the opening page of AOL, which he’d only visited for the weather report, for God’s sake. And then he read about the bloody word scrawled on the screen.
That, coupled with the ax, made it feel like it was a message sent directly to Matt Cahill from Mr. Dark.
He had been waiting for a message for a long time. Was it three months? Four? All he knew was he was riding a motorcycle (an Excelsior-Henderson cruiser from the 1960s that he’d found in a junkyard and nursed back to health) through the mountains of West Virginia, looking for traces of the evil that lurked in the background everywhere he went, traces of Mr. Dark’s contagion. The rotting flesh and putrid stench that only Matt could sense and that signaled the onslaught of senseless slaughter and mindless carnage.
But it didn’t come.