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THE DEAD MAN
Eater of Souls
By
Joseph Nassise
CHAPTER ONE
Just before he deliberately stepped in front of the 12:15 express train to Milwaukee, the soon-to-be dead man turned to Matt Cahill and spoke in a voice not his own.
“Littleton. Blackburg. Nickel Mines. Red Lake. Harpers Bay.”
Matt started; he’d heard that voice before and the sound of it made his guts churn with dread. He’d been standing on the station platform, lost in thought, when the voice brought him back to the here and now with a sudden jolt. He glanced up to find a stranger watching him intently from near the edge of the tracks. The man didn’t look all that remarkable at first glance; average build and height, dressed in the typical corporate uniform of dark-colored suit, white shirt, red power-tie.
But his eyes...
Like his voice, his eyes were not his own. Gleaming craftily out of bruised and sunken pits in the midst of a pale, sweat-shined face; they were the eyes of a demented madman, a madman Matt knew all too well.
The mysterious entity known as Mr. Dark.
The man’s tongue came out and with a quick, darting lizard-like motion, and he licked his lips as if to be sure he sucked up every drop of misery that he was squeezing out of this poor, unfortunate soul.
Matt’s axe was tucked away in the duffle bag at his feet, the end of the handle sticking out through an opening in the bag’s zippered top. He resisted the urge to reach down and pull it out. Having it in hand would make him feel better, sure, but the sight of a man wielding a wood-cutter’s axe on a Chicago subway platform like a crazed Michael Myers might make some of the other would-be passengers a little jumpy.
With my luck, some jackass would whip out a cell phone and ten minutes later the video would be generating a million hits on YouTube.
For a man who was doing his damndest to lay low and not call attention to himself, that didn’t sound like a good idea.
More than a year ago Matt had awoken in a hospital bed after having been frozen to death in the wake of a massive avalanche. Despite a massive search by the local sheriff’s office, his body hadn’t been found for three entire months. By some miracle his heart had started beating as his body thawed out in the morgue and he’d nearly given the assistant coroner a heart attack when the man realized that the “dead guy” he was supposed to autopsy was very much alive.
After his revival, it didn’t take long for Matt to discover that he’d been given a second chance for a reason. His journey back from the land of the dead had left him with the ability to see the evil inside of people. That evil manifested itself as gaping, open sores on the person’s flesh; sores that spoke of the rot within, and other equally horrifying things that only Matt could see. It all started with his friend, Andy Goodis, whom Matt had eventually been forced to kill in self-defense with his grandfather’s axe when Goodis had gone on a murderous killing spree. Things had continued in the same vein ever since. His strange new calling had forced him to leave his lover, Rachel, behind for fear that something horrible might happen to her as a result of their connection to each other. He’d left Deerpark, Oregon, where he had made his home for as long as he could remember. He went on the road, hunting for any information that might help him understand his connection to Mr. Dark or why had had been brought back to life in the first place.
After travelling southeast for awhile, his search took him north through the Great Plains toward the Windy City. He had arrived in Chicago less than forty-eight hours ago and had already decided that he didn’t like it. Or rather, it wasn’t necessarily Chicago, actually, that he didn’t like, but cities in general. The sights, the sounds, the constant movement and noise that city folk took for granted unnerved Matt far more than he imagined it would. He was constantly looking over his shoulder, trying to deal with a sense of unease and the feeling that he was constantly being watched by some unknown enemy that was going to pounce at any moment.
And now this.
The stranger had yet to look away from him or even to blink, for that matter. Along with the never-ending stare, the man was sending off creepy vibes that would have set a pack of hounds howling in dismay at the sight of him. Yet none of the other people standing on the platform seemed to notice anything unusual. It was as if Matt and the stranger were bound up in their own little bubble of reality. That sense of dislocation had happened before, too, most notably before his wife, Janey, had succumbed to the cancer that had eaten her alive and then again after Matt himself had awoken in the hospital in those first few hours of his new life. He knew the bubble might burst open at any minute, but for now, it provided some insulation from those around them.
“What do you want?” Matt asked.
That horrible voice came again. “Is that how you greet an old friend?”
“Fuck you. We’re not friends.”
“But we could be, Matt. If you’d give it a chance.”
Matt said nothing, just glanced down once at his axe, considering. He knew that it wouldn’t do any good, though; all he’d manage to do was get himself locked up for chopping some poor guy to pieces after Mr. Dark’s influence fled. Matt wasn’t about to throw his life away for nothing.
“I just wanted to say hello, Matt. Invite you along for some fun. If you think you can handle it, that is.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mr. Dark chuckled. “Harpers Bay. If you hurry, you might still get there in time.”
The stranger grinned then, revealing row after row of oh-so-sharp incisors.
Matt felt the platform suddenly begin vibrating beneath his feet. He’d been in Chicago long enough to know what that meant; a train was on its way into the station. He glanced to his left, saw the locomotive rushing down the tracks toward them, and turned back to the stranger just in time to see the man take a step backward, putting him right at the edge of the platform, his heels all but dangling off into space.
Matt realized at that moment what Mr. Dark intended.
It was too late to do anything about it, but that didn’t stop Matt from trying.
He ran forward, his arm outstretched, a shouted, “No!” falling from his lips even as the roar of the train surrounded them, drowning everything out.
The stranger’s gaze never left Matt’s face as he took that last step backward, directly into the path of the 12:15 Express as it raced past.
In that final second Matt thought he saw the stranger’s eyes clear, thought he saw the madness replaced with bewilderment as the stranger came back to himself and tried to understand where he was and what was happening.
Then the train slammed into the man’s unprotected flesh and pulped his body from the inside out, the kinetic force generated from an object of that size moving with that much speed smashing bones and organs indiscriminately until the body was tossed aside haphazardly.
Matt staggered to a halt a few steps from the train, fighting against the wake of its passage, his head bowed, his fists clenched at his sides. He could hear the crowd around him screaming in counterpoint to the shriek of the train’s brakes and Matt fought to keep from screaming himse
lf, though his screams would have been screams of rage and not of horror. Dark had once again reached out and corrupted another life, letting his poison loose in the world to wreak havoc and destruction in its wake, and Matt was growing weary of it. He had vowed to hunt Dark down and destroy him. This fresh incident only made him more determined to do so.
That man, whoever he was, died just so Dark could send a message. A message!
The very idea of it set Matt’s blood to boiling. Maybe that man had a family; maybe there was someone waiting for him at home even now: someone who would never again see him walking through the door at the end of a hard day’s work. The thought of it made his heart ache with righteous sorrow and anger.
Transit police were already spreading out on the platform, trying to impose some order to the chaos, and Matt knew that if he stayed around much longer he would be caught in their net. The last thing he wanted to be doing was standing around answering questions, particularly if some other passenger had seen his interaction with the victim.
Better to get out now, while I still have a chance.
Matt returned to his bag, picked it up, and joined a group of others making their way toward the street.
CHAPTER TWO
Matt didn’t go far. A few blocks away he came upon an Internet café. With the dead man’s words ringing in his ears, he went inside.
He paid with cash at the counter for some time at one of the computers and then settled in at a station in the back. He turned the screen slightly to keep what was on it from being seen by those around him. The waitress, a desultory-looking brunette with an expression that looked to Matt as if she’d just spent the last hour sucking lemons, wandered over to take his order, but he waved her away. After what he’d seen, he didn’t think his stomach could handle anything.
After logging in he went to Google and entered each of the terms the dead man had given him, one at a time. What came back both horrified and fascinated him.
Littleton. Blackberg. Nickel Mines. Red Lake. Harpers Bay. He thought he’d heard them before and now he understood why. They were the names of towns scattered across the United States, towns that had each endured inexplicable tragedy in the last several years.
Littleton, Colorado was the site of the Columbine Incident, where on April 20, 1999, high school seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold had shot and killed twelve people while wounding another twenty-four before turning their guns on themselves and ending it all.
Blackberg, Virginia was home to Virginia Tech and the worst school shooting in U.S. history. On April 16, 2007, senior Seung-Hui Cho had gone on a shooting rampage, slaying thirty-two people and wounding twenty-five more before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.
Nickel Mines was not only the name of the town in Pennsylvania where a shooting occurred, but also the name of the school itself. West Nickel Mines was a one-room Amish schoolhouse and on October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts IV had shown the world that they have their fair share of crazies down in Amish country, too. He’d shot five little girls and wounded five others before turning his gun on himself.
Matt was starting to see a pattern. He’d have to be a bloody idiot not to, he thought, when it was standing up, shouting his name and punching him in the face, all at the same time.
He knew what he’d see before the entry for Red Lake, Minnesota came up on the screen. Another shooting, this one ending with seven dead, five wounded, and another gunman, Jeffrey Weise, who also decided to take the easy way out rather that face the music for what he’d done.
Last, but not least, came Harpers Bay.
Except that’s where the pattern ended. There was no record of a school shooting in Harpers Bay. None at all. He did find three high schools, one public and two private, but couldn’t find a record of anything horrific happening at any of them.
The dead man’s voice echoed in his mind. “If you hurry, you can still catch all the fun.”
It hadn’t happened yet, he realized. The shooting hadn’t happened. Dark was taunting him, daring him to try and put a stop to it, just as he had dared him in the past.
Question was, did he intend to take him up on it?
It was a trap; that was plain to see. Dark wanted him there for a reason; Matt would be a fool not to recognize that.
And yet there were reasons to walk into that trap, Matt knew, such as the fact that Mr. Dark would most likely be monitoring the effectiveness of the trap himself and would no doubt want to be on hand should Matt finally succumb to his schemes. That meant that Matt wouldn’t have to hunt for his nemesis. For a certain length of time, he would know exactly where Dark was.
Equally pressing was the moral obligation the situation raised in Matt. He had information, in advance, that a horrible act of violence was going to be committed against a group of innocent school children. Didn’t that require him to act in order to prevent the tragedy? If not, then why else had he been given the ability to see the hand of evil at work in the world?
What was that line from Spider Man? With great power comes great responsibility?
He wouldn’t necessarily consider his newfound abilities “great power” but that didn’t change the fact that there was great responsibility attached to them.
He really had no choice.
It was time to pay a visit to Harpers Bay.
Of course, he had to figure out where the heck the town was first.
A little more computer time told him all he needed to know. Harpers Bay was a suburb of Chicago, located about thirty miles southwest of the city. Population 25,000 at the 2010 census, according to Wikipedia.
The private high school there was called the Harpers Bay Academy for Academic Excellence and as soon as he saw the name he knew that was where he was supposed to go. He didn’t know how he knew it; he just did. It was as plain to him as had been his decision to leave Deerpark behind and dedicate his second chance at life to stopping Mr. Dark.
Thoughts of Deerpark made him think of Rachel Owens, the woman he had left behind. She’d been there for him when he’d woken up after being dead for three months and his heart had died all over again when he’d been forced to leave her behind to in order to keep her safe. He stared at the computer in front of him, wondering what she was up to and fighting the urge to reach out to her. He could do it, too; all it would take was an email. Just one little note to tell her he was alive and well and still searching for the mysterious thing that had turned his life upside down...
In the end, he couldn’t do it. Not because he didn’t want to, Lord knew he did, but because he refused to bring that kind of danger back into her life.
Besides, it had been more than a year now. She must have moved on; she was too incredible a woman to remain alone very long.
Matt stopped, took a deep breath, bundled all the pain and longing and desire up into a tight little package and buried it somewhere in the depths of the thing he called a heart. He couldn’t afford to let it out right now. Not until he had dealt with Mr. Dark.
Maybe, just maybe, it was time for a reckoning.
A quick check of the local bus schedule told him that there was a Greyhound that went from Chicago to Harpers Bay two times a day; once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
If he hurried, he could catch the last one.
CHAPTER THREE
The Harpers Bay Academy for Academic Excellence turned out to be a private boarding school on a sprawling two-hundred-acre campus. It reminded him of someplace in New England; long rolling lawns, historic-looking architecture, even a white marble bell tower for heaven’s sake. It shouted money and lots of it.
After arriving at the bus station, Matt walked to the taxi stand and asked to be taken to the school. The driver had barely looked at him as he’d climbed into the cab and didn’t say a word during the fifteen-minute drive to the campus. Once there, the cabbie drove through the front gates and dropped Matt off in front of the administration building as if they received scruffy-looking visitors from out of town
every day of the week.
Matt hustled inside the administration building, asked a student for directions to the main office, and quickly found his way there before coming to an abrupt halt just outside the entrance. He stood off to one side, pretending to look at the community bulletin board hanging on the wall next to him as he tried to get his thoughts in order. He’d marched in here with some vague intention of warning the powers-that-be that there was trouble on that way, that at some point in the near future a student was going to have a psychotic break with reality and climb into that bell tower with a rifle or something to that effect. He had been so caught up in his urgent need to protect those who had no idea what was coming that he hadn’t stopped to think about how that revelation would look to those in charge.
They wouldn’t take it well. He understood that, understood the reason, too. If he were in their shoes, he would have a hard time believing a complete stranger’s story about a possible massacre if the stranger couldn’t back that story up with some pertinent information. Things like the names of those involved or exactly what they planned to do to carry out such a threat. Details he didn’t have.
The minute they realized who he was, they’d dismiss him immediately, he had no doubt about that. In the early days of his revival the news media had gone crazy, talking about the “man who had cheated Death,” flashing his picture on the screen so often that sometimes Matt thought every person in the country knew who he was. The people who were after him, like the greedy fucks who ran the university hospital where he’d been revived for example, had picked up the story and spun it further, painting him as a crazed fugitive who might be a threat to himself and others. Everyone knew that if you saw something on the news it had to be true, right? He wouldn’t stand a chance of getting anyone to take him seriously if that information came to light.
He was standing there, caught in indecision, when a voice intruded on his thoughts.
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