A week later he heard it. Something behind the closet door. It was crying. Crying.
Don got home late, stumbling into the apartment. After work he went to the corner bar and got himself stupid drunk. His throat still burned from the sting of whiskey. He lay on the tweed couch, half undressed, rubbing his arms when he heard those chocked, faint cries coming from the closet.
What the hell?
The sound persisted, a small whimpering noise. Pathetic.
Can’t be, can it?
Don stumbled down the hallway, pressing one hand against the wall to stay upright. Yelling, “What the hell?” as he wobbled toward the bedroom. Don leaned into the room, his head waving at the end of his neck like a searchlight. He swatted at the switch and the light flickered on, then off.
“Sonofabitch!”
Don slid along the wall in the dark room, heading to the closet. A lone streetlight shined through the window, casting an unsettling, nauseating pink-yellow glow into the room. He stepped toward the pathetic, whimpering sound. Faint, but distinct. Whining like a child’s voice. Sad and afraid.
“Waaah,” it yowled.
A sour taste filled Don’s mouth. He thought he was about to puke.
Once Don creaked opened the door to the closet, a heavy waft of a sour, vinegary smell hit him hard as a fist to the face. He recoiled. Spinning around, he put a hand to his mouth, covering his nose. He gagged hard, but nothing came up except questions.
“What the hell?” He moved back to the closet, hand still over half his face. Then he saw two small, glowing elongated dots. It took a moment for it to register the circles were eyes peering up at him from the corner like a pair of greedy exclamation points.
“No, no, no. This isn’t right,” he said.
Eyes! Dear God the thing had eyes!
Don swallowed back a scream as he gazed at the creature, now taking shape in the shadowy dark.
The strange, sunken eyes weren’t the worst of it. Beyond the hollows of the eyes were the jagged dark cheekbones. The pointed chin jutted out like an angry dare. Defiant. The long forehead held a few unruly sprigs of light hair. The same color as the boy from the accident.
As Don’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that hung open jaw holding a row of sharp, pointed teeth. Like some kind of nightmare shark’s mouth stuck on a small, lopsided and beaten human head. Sagging, heaving breaths came from the painful, swollen mouth.
Beneath the head, a weak body quivered with each awful breath. And at the base of its ugly body Don saw it. The bloody little sock. It covered one foot, and the other was a mangled knot of flesh.
What kind of twisted joke was this?
“H-e-e-l-p,” it’s voice crackled.
Don couldn’t look at it. He turned away, heart pounding. Terrified. What was it?
Something from the remains of the boy. Some kind of ghoul or demon. A figment of my imagination.
“Just how drunk am I?” Don asked.
It gasped in a long, hissing breath. The cry came again, low and mournful.
It was horrible.
It was breathing.
It was alive.
***
Don glanced up at Jae and shrugged his shirtless shoulders. He brought his elbows to the table. “Maybe it’s time we get going,” he looked back down at the mug in his hands. He wasn’t about to leave her alone in the apartment, not with as curious as she was today.
Jae strode back to the bedroom and swung open the door. The stench hit her before the reality of what she saw.
“Dear God what the hell is that?” Jae screamed. She staggered back, gagging, repulsed by the sight and stench of the creature, who’d grown only slightly in the months that passed.
It sank into the corner as the light hit it, hissing at her. It coiled those strange spindling arms around itself. Its eyes glared at her like she was prey.
“Don!” she screamed.
Don rushed into the bedroom after her, his loose jeans strained against his stride. “Shut the fucking door!” he yelled. He smacked the wall as he entered the room, trying to get it to move back, out of the light. Away from Jae’s judging eyes. How could she understand? How could anyone?
“Dear God, Don, you have to kill it! Put it out of its misery!” Jae pleaded.
Don shook his head. The stream of uncontrolled rage bubbled from him. His words came one at a time, like slow rifle shots, each one reloading with heavier force. “I. Won’t. I can’t. I can’t do — that.” As he spoke, each word took on a solemnity, like a private oath to a horrible demon god.
The creature dragged itself to the front of the closet, scraping its bony fingers into the wood floors. It tapped on the floorboards like it wanted to be let out. Each lurch forward took seconds as its arms stretched out before it. It’s withered, shrunken flesh sagged from its tiny bones. One dangling leg became visible, its horrible sock stuck at the end. Its scrawny torso wobbled as it pulled itself in painful lunges toward the bedroom. Into the light.
“You’re not going to let that live? It doesn’t belong on this earth, whatever it is,” Jae’s plea became wretched. Now she was crying. Tears streaked her face as she backed to the door. Away from them both.
“It?” the thing said, voice cracking. It turned those hollow eyes toward Don.
Don shook his head, turned to Jae. He didn’t know how to explain. How could he? But now she knew. She’d leave him. Tell the world what he had there in his closet. Photograph it. Send it to the zoo. He couldn’t let her do that. He moved toward her, his arms outstretched. Defeated, but aggressive.
“Baby, I can’t hurt it. It’s alive,” Don said slowly.
“You’ve got to release it,” Jae said, sobbing. Her body quivered as she stood there, staring at the ungodly thing as it wobbled toward them. “Please,” she pleaded, “end the suffering.”
“You mean kill it,” Don said. His voice was slow and stern. His eyes didn’t waver from hers. “You mean destroy the little life that flickered from nothing. Like magic.”
“You’re not making any sense, Don. Look at it. Put it out of its misery!” she said.
“You mean kill it,” Don repeated.
“Kill it?” Its voice was a garbled froth of saliva and pain.
A tear welled in Don’s eyes. He couldn’t take Jae finding it any easier than he could take hiding it. Pressure built in his head until he thought it’d explode. Sweat beaded on his face as he glanced between them. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in a deflated voice.
“Kill me?” it croaked.
***
When Ely arrived at his friend’s address, he didn’t know what to expect. A knot formed in the back of his throat that made him think he’d throw up. He felt more than a little shaken up when he swung open the door. Two bodies lay on the apartment floor. The coroner arrived minutes later. An apparent murder suicide.
“Jesus, Don. Why?” Ely asked. “I thought he was doing better, but he was faking it,” he said to the crew.
Ely looked around the bedroom. Two bodies. One strangled, one shot. In the corner sat one bloody white sock.
There was a time when you couldn’t pass a playground during recess without hearing the familiar sounds of glass marbles rolling and clanking into each other. But marbles aren’t just for children, as is the case with these five glass orbs. Sometimes they collect spirits.
Author/Editor Anthony Servante had these displayed on his desk before bringing them to us. He is a retired college professor of English Literature who writes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in the genres of Horror, Science Fiction and Crime Noir.
CAT’S EYES AND PURIES
Anthony Servante
THE first thing Jeffry Novacs noticed as he drove toward his new home in the gentrified college town of City Terrace was that every telephone pole had a sign for Tarot readings:
SE LEEN CARTAS TAROT–$20.00
WE READ TAROT CARDS–$20.00
Prices ran as high as one hundred dollars. What kind of a
neighborhood had he moved into? As he looked for Porto Lindo Drive, which would take him up the hill to his new home, Jeff noted the Starbucks Coffee shop, the Peets Tea, the Armenian Bakery, the Chipotle Restaurant, and all the upscale shops and stores and felt confident that he had made a wise purchase in the university community. This move was a new start for him and his wife Marge. He screwed up big time at Boston College by breaking the unwritten rule: Don’t mess with your teacher assistants. But how could he resist the sexy graduate student, Rosa Ramirez? She was a Latin beauty with deep green eyes and a bronze tan that hugged every inch of her perfect twenty-two-year-old body. He stifled the memory of Rosie’s beauty and resumed looking for the address of his new house.
The second thing he noticed was that his pregnant wife was jotting down some of the Tarot card phone numbers. “They’re all rip-offs, Marge,” he said, glancing at the addresses on each house as he drove by. “Maybe it’d be better if you kept your eyes open for 1343. I can’t be driving and looking for the address.”
“I am looking. Besides, how do you know they’re rip-offs?” she asked with a challenge in her tone. “You sound like your mother warning you about the evils of Lotto tickets. It’s just harmless fun, like Astrology.”
“It’s a matter of money. First it’s twenty dollars, then fifty, and then once they have you hooked, it’s the mortgage money. My mother knows what she’s talking about: Don’t take chances. That’s another reason why I chose to move to LA—to be close to my mother during your pregnancy. I’m going to have to call her and have her visit with you while I’m at work tomorrow.” He sighed and realized he wasn’t looking forward to calling his Mom. But he needed someone to keep an eye on Marge. His wife loved spending his money. It was her way of getting revenge. “Look, there’s 1117. We’re almost there.”
“Well, you don’t give me enough of an allowance to pay more than twenty dollars, so those are the only ones I wrote down,” she said, folding her arms in an exaggerated show of anger.
“We’ll talk about it inside,” he said, pointing to the house overlooking the freeway. “That’s it. We’re home.”
Jeff pulled the car into the tight driveway and parked under the shoddily constructed car port. The wood was warped and a lot of sunlight was shining through the gaps between the planks. He said, “Damn port can’t keep out the sun, so how do we expect it to protect the car from rain?”
“It doesn’t rain in Los Angeles,” Marge said with a guffaw.
“Damn driveway is going to need to be repaved,” he said as he stepped onto the rickety porch. “House is going to need a lot of work too.”
“It’s not as bad as you describe,” she said, making a mental list of all the junk and weeds in the small yard surrounded by a bent and rusty wire fence. Marge walked to the end of the driveway and looked down the steep hill. “We’re going to need a new fence in the back. There’s nothing to keep us from falling down the hill except for this rusty thing.”
“Sure don’t want to drive over in the dark,” Jeff added. “Did you notice that there are no streetlamps up here? We’re going to have to install sensor lights in front of the house and in the back of the driveway.”
Jerry’s left cheek twitched as he tried to smile through the anger. He saw Marge at the periphery of his vision taking inventory of the house, its dirty yard, the graffiti on the front walls, and the cracked cement in the driveway. He just couldn’t get a break. She wanted everything perfect. Nobody’s perfect, he almost shouted at her, but he promised he would learn to control his temper. This was their new start.
2
Jeff and Marge sat on a blanket tossed across the floor in front of the kitchen and unwrapped the take-out Mexican food. Jeff had Googled the local cuisine and found a place called El Tepeyac that had perfect scores and impressive ratings. Marge called in the order and Jeff drove to pick it up.
As she waited for Jeff, she walked around the empty house. She knew the furniture would be arriving in the morning. It was mostly the furnishings from their small Boston apartment; it wouldn’t come close to filling up the big house. Marge checked each of the three bedrooms and selected the biggest room facing north to be their bedroom. The room next to it would be the nursery. The extra bedroom would be Jeff’s study. He could buy his own desk and chair. She was concentrating on the extra furnishings the bedrooms would need. Whatever was arriving in the morning would have to suffice for the front room and kitchen, but the extra money that Jeff’s mother had given them was designated for the baby’s things and new beds.
As Jeff chowed down on his omelet, Marge nibbled on her chile relleno. It was a bit spicy. She offered half of the stuffed pepper to her husband. “Is it hot?” he asked.
“No,” she lied, and he readily munched on that as well. Marge smiled as she wondered if Jeff’s gastritis would flare up from the hot chili.
“What’re your plans for tomorrow?” Jeff asked.
“Meet the movers in the morning and shop online for new bedroom furniture,” Marge answered, then paused a second before adding, “and then I’m calling some of those Tarot card readers. I promise to hire a cheap one.”
“Geez,” Jeff said with a whine in his voice. “My mother’s right about you. You are superstitious.”
“It’s good luck to get a reading for our new house, especially on a hillside,” she said in a joking but ominous tone. “I read about all the landslides in this area during the rains.”
“It never rains in California,” Jeff laughed. “They write songs about it.”
“Anyway, that’s what I’m doing tomorrow,” she said, and that was that.
Before Jeff could complain anymore, his stomach rumbled, he cringed and ran for the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. “Dammit,” he shouted, “there’s no toilet paper in here.”
Marge began cleaning up the take-out food while she pondered Jeff’s dilemma.
3
Jeff was sitting on the toilet all night and had to use the napkins from the take-out food to wipe his sore bottom. His hemorrhoids had flared up. Damn red chili sauce. When the movers arrived, Marge greeted them with fresh cups of coffee before putting them to work. Jeff had already cleaned himself up, showered, and headed for the university before the moving truck could block him in. Marge laughed to herself as she thought of Jeff moaning on the bathroom seat. Hope he wasn’t late for work. He can’t buy the bedroom sets if he loses his teaching post at the university. Oh, well.
The security guard at the university parking lot kiosk gave the new professor his packet that contained a parking permit, faculty restroom key card, photo ID, and a map of the college with his classroom circled in red ink. There was a note from Dean Wallace Wasserman, head of the U.S. History Department; he wanted to see Jeff after his class. He placed the packet into his briefcase and made his way to his classroom. He was tempted to buy a cup of coffee from the vending machine by his classroom, but thought better of it. Chili and caffeine were his enemies right now. He stood at the door, took a deep breath, and entered the class for United States History 101: 1492-1702.
Seated at the front of the class on the stool meant for the professor was the love of his life, the beautiful young Latina named Rosa Ramirez. He recognized the raven black hair tied with a red ribbon in a pony-tail resting on her left shoulder, her long shapely legs ending in the red four-inch heels, and the seductive smile that she wore as her eyes followed him each step that he walked down the staircase to the podium. The room was already packed with students.
“Ms. Ramirez,” Jeff said slyly.
“Professor Novacs,” she said somewhere between a hiss and a coo. As she unfolded her leg and scooted off the stool, half the males, and some of the females, tried to catch a glimpse of the sites made available by the shortness of her skirt.
“I’m Professor Novacs,” he said to the class of nearly forty students, “and this is your TA, Ms. Ramirez. He wrote his name, office number and hours of availability on the whiteboard in black ink. He always li
ked the chemical scent of the dry markers. He nodded to the teacher’s assistant to write her information on the board as well.
As Rosa wrote on the whiteboard, her skirt rode up to the borderline of her ass cheeks as if it were designed for that sole purpose. A couple of students whistled. Jeff turned sharply for the students, but he didn’t catch the punks.
He pulled the textbook from his briefcase and gave the syllabi to Ms. Ramirez to distribute to the class. Jeff found himself mesmerized by her seductive dress and wiggles as she passed out the papers. She returned the extra handouts to the professor.
“Let’s go over the syllabus, class,” Jeff said with a strong authoritative voice. Rosa Ramirez sat to the right of the professor, and as she watched him begin his lecture, she felt herself getting wet. Just like old times, she thought. Welcome to LA.
After class, the room emptied until Jeff and Rosa remained at the front of the class. “How was the flight?”
“Take it or leave it,” she said with hurt feelings. “Couldn’t you afford anything better than coach?”
“I’m married, remember?” Novacs insisted.
“That didn’t stop you before,” she reminded him. “You know I can’t live on a TA salary, right? You’ve got the big job now. You can afford to help me out a bit, right? Just like old times.”
“I got you this job. I know how much it pays,” he said without conviction, and Rosa noticed there was no anger in his voice. “I’ve got to see Dean Wasserman. I’ll see you afterward. I’m sure a dozen professors will want you in their classes if you need the extra cash.”
“You’re not planning on sharing me with your colleagues, are you?” Rosa said, placing a soft hand on Jeff’s. He didn’t pull it away.
“My mother’s going to be keeping Marge busy this afternoon. Did you make the arrangements?” he asked. “Marge’s even calling Tarot card readers to bless the house.”
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