His wife, Sarah, answered the phone and he did is best to sound as normal as possible. However, knowing him as well as she did, she immediately sensed that something was wrong. “Charlie, are you all right? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“Yes, Honey I’m fine.” He lied with as much conviction as he could muster. “I am just a bit tired from the trip. But, for the most part I am getting along without it pretty well, even without my phone. It is just a small adjustment for me, is all. Besides, I am sure you will remember to send it to me tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t worry, Charlie.” She replied. “I won’t forget about it. If I stop at the store, first thing tomorrow morning, you should be receiving it at the hotel by 10:00 am Tuesday morning. Speaking of your cell phone, did you ever get around to picking up a burn phone?”
For a moment, Charles was silent, not knowing quite how to respond; the question and the use of the term ‘burn phone’ catching him off guard, and now the phrase had a whole new meaning to him than it did before. “Burn phone.” He thought to himself. “Burning fires of Hell phone.” The very thought of that horrific phone and what it had done earlier to that man in the alley caused him to break out in a cold nervous sweat. “N...No” He lied again, with what he hoped sounded like sincerity, but which he didn’t believe sounded sincere at all. “No… I couldn’t get one, No stores were open … so… I .. I.. figured… I would just wait and maybe try again tomorrow or else I may simply wait until Tuesday morning.. you know… when my real phone gets here.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You, surviving without a cell phone in your hand until Tuesday morning. I don’t think that is possible. It might be easier for you to survive without food or oxygen.” She teased. “But not without your cell phone. Honey, you even brought that stupid cell phone of yours on vacation last year, for God’s sake.”
“Maybe so.” He said carefully trying to avoid the real issue, “But … believe it or not well…I am kind of enjoying being out of touch from the rest of the world for a while. I might find it to be a nice change.” All the while that he was speaking with Sarah, his eyes never left the blood red phone sitting ominously across the room. “If you have an emergency, you have my number here at the hotel, and here is the number at the office of the client where I have a meeting tomorrow morning.” He waited for her to get a pencil and paper then gave her the number.
“I was thinking that it might actually be nice to slow down a bit and do things the way we used to do them. You know, ‘old school’, as they say.” He had no idea if what he had just said sounded convincing to his wife or not, but it sounded like an incredible mountain of garbage to his own ears.
“Yeah right Charlie. I believe you.” She replied sarcastically, “I’ll give you till noon tomorrow. If you can hold out that long, I will be amazed. And, if you can somehow last until Tuesday morning when your phone arrives, then the next time we go on vacation, that cell phone of yours stays home. Understand?”
“Yes I understand.” Wilson said surrendering, “It’s a deal.” Then Wilson thought about the old man in the store, recalling how the man had said that the phone was ‘meant for’ him. He also thought about how the old man seemed to know everything about him; who he was, where he came from, the four suicides. He inquired. “Honey, are you certain that everything is alright at home, no problems or anything?”
“Everything is fine Charlie.” She replied, “Why wouldn’t it be? There is nothing new happening around here since you left, other than the fact that I now have to make a special trip into town tomorrow morning and mail your stupid cell phone.” She hesitated for a moment he asked again, “Charlie, are you sure you are ok? You sound a little worried?”
“Yes, I am fine. I just hate being half way across the country while you are at home. You know what I mean. Sometimes I get irrationally concerned about you being home alone.”
She replied, “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about Charlie. You have been traveling all over creation on business for over twenty years and I have never had any problems while you were gone. Why should this trip be any different?”
Charles thought to himself that ‘different’ hardly began to describe the events of this overwhelming business trip. If he truly had experienced all that he believed he had in the past few hours, then he had shot an old man through the skull, thinking him a demon, and watched another man devoured by strange creatures conjured up by some sort of sinister cell phone. Yes, ‘different’ scarcely covered it.
“You’re right”, Wilson replied trying to sound confident, “I guess I am just a bit exhausted. I am going to try to get a good night’s sleep so I can be ready to hit the ground running tomorrow morning. If I seal this deal it will be one of the biggest deals of my career. And it will mean a large commission check for us, as well as a potential promotion for me.”
“That would be so great for you, and something you deserve. Good luck with your meeting tomorrow, Honey.” She said, “I know how important it is for your career. Be sure to get a good night sleep. I have complete faith in you Charlie and I am sure you will leave that meeting with a signed contract. By the way, your boss, Mr. Edmondson called. He had been trying to reach you. I explained to him that you forgot your phone and that I would be heading into Yuengsville tomorrow morning and sending it to you overnight. He sounded sort of angry. Maybe you should give him a call first thing tomorrow morning.”
“That old fart always sounds angry. He is an irritating pain in the butt, the way he always insists on micromanaging me and checking up on me all of the time. Don’t pay any attention to him. He has always been annoying, but since his heart attack last year he has for some reason gotten really bothersome.”
Sarah said, “Yes, I remember last year when he was out for about a month after his attack and you filled in for him. You seemed to be in much better sprits, back then as well.”
“That was the best month of my career at Edmondson Systems. While he was gone, the place functioned perfectly. I managed to keep everything running smoothly and with less frustration and much less personal stress.” Wilson interjected.
“Maybe some day you will have the chance to run the place again. Who knows? Mr. Edmondson isn’t getting any younger or any healthier.” Sarah suggested.
Charles said, “That would be a nice change, but I seriously doubt that that old turd would ever voluntarily give up command of that company. I suspect the only way he will ever leave that office is feet first at room temperature.” He gave a gruff laugh then said, “Again, don’t concern yourself with his call. It’s nothing. That foolish old man can wait for me to call him until after my meeting. Then when I have a signed deal in my hands he will be too busy counting his dollars to bother giving me one of his ridiculous lectures.”
His wife chuckled on the other end of the phone then reminded him, “Make sure you call me as soon as you can when the meeting is over. I can’t wait to hear the good news.”
“I promise I will call you first thing.” Wilson said, “Now you be sure to take care honey. I love you.”
Charles and his wife said their goodbyes then he hung up the phone. He truly did intend to call his wife after the meeting the next day. However, at the time, neither he nor his wife realized that the call would never occur; that he would be much too preoccupied to remember to call her. Nor did they know that calling her would be an exercise in futility, since by late the next morning, she would be lying dead in a battered heap along a lonely highway.
Chapter 7
Wilson hung up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed going over every detail of the night’s events, as much as his exhausted and half-inebriated mind would allow.
He hoped to figure out exactly what had actually happened this evening, what portion of it was real and what might be imagined, why it happened and specifically why it happened to him. He believed that every problem in the world could be solved easily if only people would first look closely at the big problem then break it down into s
maller more manageable parts to find the solution. He felt that if he broke the night’s events down into individual elements, stepped through each one, sorted out what was real and what he might have imagined, he believed he could figure out what to do next to resolve his bizarre situation.
Wilson started with his arrival at the hotel but there appeared to be nothing too eventful or out of the ordinary that he could remember. He had checked into the hotel, then carried his luggage up to his room and put his clothing put away in an organized fashion. He could recall no strange activities during the check-in process, nothing eventful during the elevator ride up to his room, and nothing strange about his room in particular. As far as he could determine, the initial introduction to the hotel was not a problem. The girl at the front desk had been an attractive young thing and did not appear threatening in any way. He continued with his analysis.
Once settled in his room he had decided that he had better go out and attempt to find a pre-paid cell phone right away; especially since he was having such rotten luck locating one so far. He had gone back down to the front desk. Yes, that was where things started to get a bit different. The young girl who checked him in was no longer watching the desk. A young man was in her place; one that he thought of as a reject from Mickey D’s, but he certainly hadn’t seem threatening either. Wilson remembered asking the kid where he could buy a cell phone and the young man told him where he might possibly find one… no wait a minute… that was not quite correct either. At last, Wilson felt that he might be making some progress.
The young man did not know where to get a phone, but now that he thought about it, Wilson recalled that there had been a man sitting alone in the lobby reading a newspaper who had walked up to return the paper to the counter mentioning that he had overheard Wilson’s request. He told Wilson that he could buy a phone at any one of several stores down the side street. That was right, Wilson recalled. That stranger was the one who directed him down that dark street, not the clerk at the front desk.
He tried to call to mind what the stranger looked like, but could not. The man must not have had any distinguishing features or else Wilson would surely have noticed such details. However, the more he thought about the man the more he remembered. Wilson believed that the man had been over six feet tall and muscular, with dark hair. Then a realization struck him… the robber! That man in the lobby could very well have been the same man in the alley who had tried to assault him.
During the attempted mugging, the robber had told Wilson that he was “not an uneducated thug”, but that he was someone skilled who took pride in his work, who specifically picked and targeted his victims. That man would have known that the alley was abandoned and that every store was closed. What better way could there have been to lure Wilson into the alley alone? The thief likely waited a few minutes after Wilson left the hotel then followed him down into the side street. He was probably surprised to see that Wilson was not in the alley, when he was in fact, inside of the strange store at the time. Wilson assumed that the store looked as abandoned to the robber from the outside as it did to Wilson after he had fled the store. So the man must have walked right past the building then turned around and started back toward the hotel in time to see Wilson leave the store and stagger off of the pavement into the street.
Wilson thought that for a moment that perhaps he might simply be getting paranoid, though not without good reason. Maybe the stranger in the hotel lobby actually was just being a Good Samaritan; pointing Wilson toward what he believed was a solution to his problem. Wilson was not certain that the man who had given him the directions was even the same man who had tried to rob him but the logical part of him that was not prone to believe in coincidence, thought it might be so. It made no less sense and anything else that had occurred on this strange evening.
Then Wilson remembered how the inexplicable old store owner had known his name. If the so-called innocent stranger had overheard Wilson checking in, he would have known his name and that he was from Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Good Samaritan was not so good after all. Maybe he and the store owner were working together. However, to make that assumption, Wilson would have to admit to himself that the store owner was real and so were the unearthly events that followed. Besides, how could the store owner know about the four men from Wilson’s past that had committed suicide? That was something that only Wilson knew and kept to himself. Even his wife, Sarah, was unaware of his connection to the four men.
Furthermore, if the robber was working with the store owner, then why had he not known to look for Wilson in the abandoned store? The harder Wilson tried to make sense of everything the less sense everything made. Perhaps he was just too tired, maybe he was losing his mind after all, or possibly, it was the effect of too much whiskey.
Wilson recounted walking down the side street as a light rain had started to fall. By the time he had gotten to the front of the store, the rain had become torrential. He remembered that he had not passed a single open store along the way and had looked further down the street, not seeing any sign of activity anywhere else along the dark alley.
He had turned and looked into the store window where he saw the sign advertising prepaid cellular phones. Up until that point, nothing had felt odd or out of place, but he remembered that as soon as he had entered the store he had begun to get a strange sensation down deep in the pit of his stomach. The hair on the back of his neck had started to stand on end for some unknown reason; it was the type of feeling he got just before a business deal was about to go bad; and that deal certainly had gone about as bad as possible.
Wilson tried to remember as many details as he could about the store’s interior reviewing them in his mind. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, everything about the store and that old man was wrong from the very beginning and his own intuition had told him to turn and run long before everything had gone down the crapper. From that point on, his life had become a surrealistic nightmarish landscape with penis grabbing satanic statues, merchants transforming into demons and muggers sucked into the bowels of Hell. Bowels of Hell? He stopped for a second to regroup his thoughts.
Chapter 8
“Bowels of Hell.” He thought once again. Maybe that was it. It felt right, or very wrong depending upon one’s perspective. What exactly was that phone? Was it some sort of evil device capable of opening up a portal to another dimension, to another world, or perhaps opening a gateway to Hell itself?
He began to think that perhaps his chance arrival at the mysterious antiquities store was not so much by chance but was actually set up in advance, in order that a series of events could take place for whatever the unknown purpose. That might actually be it. Perhaps he was an unknowing innocent pawn that someone or something was using to make a series of events occur. Wilson thought pawn, perhaps, but maybe not so innocent, as he recalled the four suicides once again.
Why him? Why now? Those four men had committed suicide long ago, the most recent being at least five years ago. Why would someone wait so long for some sort of cosmic retribution?
Could it be simply because he had been foolish enough to forget his phone on this trip? No, he did not think so. Suppose he had not forgotten his phone, what then? Then would the scenario play out differently but with the same result? Would someone at the hotel have directed him to a dismal dusty restaurant for dinner where he would find himself the only patron? In addition, would a decrepit old waiter with filthy hands and a torn tee shirt smelling of death and decay have handed him a strange looking blood red menu with chrome skulls on the cover? Then would the waiter have next handed him a gun, then grown into a gigantic demon? Or would someone else have been chosen instead of Wilson? He did not believe so. He believed that he was chosen and no matter what the scenario, he was somehow destined to play a role. He wondered if perhaps there was some sort of tarnished aura surrounding him that only certain people could see which marked him as the one to choose. Perhaps he was damaged goods; a blemished soul.
Moreover, why
had he forgotten his phone anyway? He never forgot his phone. Why did he do so this time? Could these unknown forces have been at work all the way back in Pennsylvania, before he even left for this trip? Had these forces caused him to forget his phone on purpose, in order to assure that he would end up in that store and in that alley? The idea that some mysterious power could have that much control over his life was too much for Wilson to comprehend.
And what about that dreadful looking damned phone? “Damned indeed,” he heard the old storekeeper say in his mind. Wilson shuddered. What was he supposed to do with the phone anyway? He had seen some of what it was capable of this evening and that horrified him. But, what did it have to do with him specifically? He had no use for such a device. He was an executive, a family man, not some common street thug. What would he do with such power? Then he thought about it again, power. Yes, the phone did have incredible power, which meant that the holder of the phone also possessed and controlled the power.
He recalled how when the robber had threatened him, all he had managed to do was press one of those single skull shaped buttons then all Hell broke loose, literally. He had no idea if he had actually pressed the ‘9’ button as he had intended or which button he had pressed. He suspected that no matter which button he would have pressed the results would have been the same.
He supposed it might have happened even if he hadn’t actually pressed a button but simply held the phone in his hand. Wilson recalled how just before pressing the button, a rage of anger greater than he believed he could ever muster welled up inside of him. He somehow instinctively understood that the buttons, like the phone itself were just symbolic, not actually functional. The real power of the phone came from somewhere much deeper inside. “Deeper inside?” He thought about that for a few moments. Then he wondered, deeper inside of the phone… or deeper inside himself?
Burn Phone Page 5