Slippin' Into Darkness

by Norman Partridge

  But her hand was like a snake that had been charmed. Her fingers burrowed into the dead man’s pockets. A tangle of wet Kleenex was the first thing she found. She threw it into the shadows and wiped her fingers on Doug’s pants, gagging in disgust. She tried again. Found only his wallet. Then came a cheeseburger wrapper from MacDonald’s. Just one.

  Empty. She was coming up empty.

  Doug lay on his side. There was one pocket left, and she couldn’t get to it without rolling him over. She nudged his shoulder with the heel of her hand. He wobbled for a moment before collapsing onto his back, the sound like a huge blob of Jell-O dropping to the floor.

  Doug’s chest sagged. He sighed, and his teeth clacked together sharply. Amy drew back in horror, but not fast enough to escape the cold breath of death that tickled over her cheek.

  Just that one breath. That was all that was left in him. He was dead. He lay there, his lips peeled back in a sick little grin, a sliver of lettuce stuck between his teeth. Amy thought of the pathetic little cheeseburger wrapper and had to look away.

  To his pocket. The one pocket that remained. The pocket which masked a bulge that was completely meaningless in death.

  No. That was a lie. She wouldn’t reach into that pocket. She wouldn’t touch that thing, no matter how brief the contact was…. He was dead….

  But she had to. Unless….

  Quickly, she tugged at the exposed corner of the pocket and pulled it inside out. The roll of film hit the floor. It had to be the roll that Doug had shot outside Ethan’s window, but Amy didn’t even smile, didn’t even take the time to destroy it, because the real treasure came next.

  Doug’s keys. She snatched them up and went to work on the door a second time, trying to loosen the pins, the molding, anything. She worked until her fingers began to ache, with no success.

  She bent three keys before she gave up. There were others, but Amy doubted that they were any stronger. She sighed, long and low. And when she drew another breath through pursed lips, the sigh seemed to continue.

  She turned, confronting pouting lips twisted into an expression that was just this side of amused.

  Amy’s hands curled into fists at the sight of April’s corpse. Okay. Things were getting just a little bit out of hand. She was upset and she was scared. But she had every right to be. She’d spent the better part of the evening playing games with a fat slug who thought that he was clever. Said slug had directed her to the home of a man who kept a dead bimbette in not-so-cold storage, a man who mistook her for some kind of reincarnation of the heretofore mentioned bimbette. She’d watched the man become most distressed when he realized that she wasn’t exactly eager to step back into his life for round two. So he’d locked her up along with the expired object of his affections in said not-so-cold storage before going off to work like it was just another day.

  Oh, and there was a little matter of murder in there somewhere, too—she’d sent said slug to the big flower-bed in the sky.

  Amy laughed. The whole thing was David Lynch weird. If she wanted to appear on Geraldo when she got out of this, or sell her tale to the tabloids, sky would be the limit.

  I WAS A GHOST IN THE CELLAR OF HORROR!

  Hell, maybe this could even be a TV movie.

  AMELIA, AND NECROPHILIA.

  The slim bone of light flickered above. If it out….

  God, she didn’t want to think about that.

  She searched the room again. April’s corpse was there, of course. And there was a fancy La-Z-Boy that looked like it came from the nearest Grandpa Standard Equipment outlet. But there was nothing she could use to free herself.

  A pair of muddy baseball cleats lay on the floor in front of the chair. A Jack Daniel’s bottle sat on a small table next to it. The bottle was half empty, or half full, depending on your perspective. A prescription bottle sat next to the JD bottle, two bullets remaining.

  Amy examined the pills. Halcion. Sleeping pills. Amy had read about them. Critics claimed they could be dangerous. Lawsuits were flying back and forth. She seemed to remember something about psychotic episodes brought on by the drug. The pharmaceutical industry was denying everything, but the standard-issue skepticism of a corporate attorney’s wife told Amy that this stuff was bad news.

  No wonder Steve thought that she was April. He was whacked out of his head on a world-class mindbender.

  A bookcase stood to one side of the door. One of those teak Scandinavian Designs things that weren’t much more than coated fiberboard. Amy examined the spines of the books. Most were worn paperbacks. She wasn’t really surprised by what she found. April’s library had prepared her for it.

  She ran a finger over the cracked spines of a half-dozen books that dealt with the mysteries of dreams. The dream section was bracketed by sections concerning numerology and reincarnation, and there were also books on ghosts and hauntings and out-of-body travel. The library was a near twin to April’s own, though much smaller. Amy studied the titles, trying to remember what Steve had said about April.

  She sighed, brushing Farrah Fawcett curls away from her eyes. She really should take off the wig. She really should get out of the cheerleader’s outfit. But what else would she wear? There wasn’t anything else here in the basement, unless she wanted to swap outfits with a corpse. So she opted for the books. Reincarnation. Ghosts. With enough time, she could read each one and decipher the demons that had invaded Steve’s brain. Certainly, that would happen in her TV movie, AMELIA, AND NECROPHILIA. Plucky heroine Amelia Peyton—portrayed by Morgan Fairchild, no doubt—would do some heavy-duty speed-reading while the bad guy was away, earn a degree from the plucky heroine school of reverse psychology, outwit the nut and get him to deliver her straight to the cops. And if that wasn’t enough plot for two hours of prime time, maybe old Morgan could do some therapeutic role-playing and straighten out the poor confused villain. A happy ending would probably boost the ratings.

  But Amy didn’t need to read anything. She was certain that she already knew the scoop. April Destino and Steve Austin. A match made in eternal-misery heaven. Reincarnation books. Ghost stories. Brought to you by the Trailer Trash Psychic Library.

  April bites the big one, self-induced. Maybe she’s hoping things will be better on the other side of the fence. Steve goes nuts. Drinks too much and drugs too much. And he begins to hope that all the self-diverting nonsense April believed is really true. He stews in these juices good and proper, and then he digs her up. And what happens? Why, he’s real disturbed to discover that April is stone cold, eviscerated, sewn-up dead.

  And then she shows up. Young, thanks to plenty of makeup and subdued lighting. Bouncy, thanks to plenty of tissue. Dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit. Steve is whacked out of his head and just a little confused. So he locks up his best girl together—both of them—and he does what any man would do. He goes to work and figures he’ll worry about the whole thing later, because it’s a little much to expect that something as simple as a man can handle all this stuff at once. After all, a man can’t work and think at the same time. But maybe he’ll have some free time on the weekend or something, between ball games and pay-per-view bikini contests. Get down to brass tacks then.

  In the meantime, he’ll just let his little problem keep.

  Both of her.

  Together in not-so-cold storage.

  Men. They were like little robots. Wind ’em up and watch ’em go. Want to figure them out? Open them up and look at the gears. Metal and wire. The schematic hadn’t changed in several thousand years.

  But April Destino was another story entirely. Amy realized that. April had some part in this, too. She had set Doug Douglas in motion. She had left the cheerleading outfit. And while Amy recognized that her own anger had brought her here, she also knew that her anger had been stoked by April Destino. Her strings had been pulled by an expert, and now she was walking in April Destino’s shoes. Quite literally.

  Amy returned to the corner. The room seemed very small. It didn’t see
m like Steve Austin’s room at all. April’s books were here, and April was here. Nothing seemed as amusing as it had just a minute or two before. Amy stared at her feet, resisting the fear that churned in her belly.

  She stared at April’s corpse.

  She saw what April had become.

  “You brought me here,” Amy said. “You made me come.”

  Silence. Blue lips pursed as if to speak, but now Amy’s hard eyes discerned the dark slivers of thread on those lips. The pursed expression was a result of an undertaker’s shaking hand, a needle worked too fast through flesh that had always been much too pliant. A task performed too quickly, as if fearful that something dangerous might spill from those cold lips.

  “Why did you do it, April?”

  The question was simple. Amy waited for an answer, but none came.

  No words would spill from April Destino’s lips ever again.

  The fluorescent light refused to whisper. The stitched silence was as impenetrable as a locked room.

  8:28 A.M.

  In the dream Shutterbug is standing before the big drive-in screen during the world premiere of his first movie. Rows of cars stretch into the darkness, each car wedged in tight like a bullet in a full clip, each windshield dappled with a summer’s worth of dead bugs that won’t wash away until fall brings the first heavy rain. And all those eyes behind all those windshields watch Shutterbug. All those eyes see his face through mosaics of dead bugs.

  His cricket eyes are as black and round as camera lenses. His yellow-jacket grin is lined with teeth like razors. Cracked antennae warp his perceptions, but that is a natural state of affairs. He is a Shutterbug and he is smiling, and all eyes are trained on him.

  It’s wonderful, all that attention.

  Until Shutterbug realizes that he is naked.

  He’s embarrassed, of course, but not too embarrassed because he can see that the people in the can are naked, too. And April Destino is naked, lying on a pool table parked between a Nova and a Barracuda. She’s naked, smiling a lazy spiked-punch smile and her teeth are little white squares that couldn’t hurt anyone, and Bat and Todd and Derwin and Griz are standing there, dirty jeans swimming around their ankles, and they are smiling but their smiles aren’t at all lazy, and Shutterbug hears April’s tinny moans spilling from the corroded speaker that hangs from one of the corner pockets.

  And Shutterbug knows what’s happening up on the screen because he can hear what’s spilling from the speaker. But now it seems that everyone is watching him instead of the movie, staring at his cricket eyes and yellow-jacket teeth and cracked Shutterbug antennae.

  Let them watch, he thinks. They’re only ghosts. Their bodies are skinned with shadow, each one as light as the breeze that rides the night air. Shutterbug doesn’t fear them. He sees gravel through the waxed bodies of muscle cars, hot oil settling in black engines. He sees vodka bottles and six-packs of beer hidden in locked trunks, along with guys who snuck in for nothing and who won’t get out for any price.

  If he really looks hard, he can see through that Chevy van in the first row. He sees two teenagers locked in a passionate embrace, sees through their skin, their jaws. If he really looks hard, he can see their tongues dancing behind the dead butterfly on the windshield.

  They are only ghosts. Shadows. They can’t do anything to him.

  And then the first one laughs.

  It’s April, sitting up on the pool table, pointing at him, awful laughter rippling over her little white teeth, over lips stained with spiked cherry punch, the sound amplified through two hundred iron speakers.

  And then it’s more horrible than Shutterbug imagined because he was so sure that the things in the cars couldn’t harm him. But each chuckle is like a little knife. He can’t stand up to it and neither can his film.

  The film breaks, and Shutterbug is bathed in white light. Car horns bleat. Rows of headlights switch on as one, and Shutterbug has to close his eyes and he can see red veins and his eyelids are nothing but dark filters throbbing with blood because the light is so bright.

  Just for an instant he can see himself through their eyes. He’s so very black against the very white screen, and his face isn’t insectile at all. It is a face just like Derwin MacAskill’s.

  Everyone can see it.

  His father yells, “Marvis! Cover yourself!”

  But he can’t do that. The light is too bright, so bright that he begins to see through his eyelids. Everything is red and spider-webbed with tiny veins. He sees round bugging eyes in caverns of bone. Ghosts wearing transparent grins, the rows of teeth behind each set of lips sharp and twisted and wolfish.

  And April Destino wears the worst grin of all, though her teeth are little and white and square, and Shutterbug recognizes in an instant that she has been hungry for a very long time. April points at him, and he sees the blood racing through her veins, he sees her heart pounding and knows it is a muscle and it is very, very strong stronger than he ever imagined.

  April says. You missed the best shot, Shutterbug. But that’s okay. I’m still waiting for you, and this time…I’m ready!

  * * *

  Bright light burned a flat line across Shutterbug’s face. The sound of his own gasp filled the room, and, hiding behind it, he imagined that he heard the dull echo of April’s damning words.

  He opened his eyes, squinting at the shaft of morning sunlight that knifed through a crack between the bedroom drapes. His head ached intensely. It didn’t seem possible that sharp rocks had been shoved into his skull in place of his eyes, but that was the way he felt.

  He made the mistake of rubbing his eyelids and the pain intensified.

  Amazing. An amazing colossal hangover. This was all he needed on top of last night. His feet hit the floor—a dull, rubbery sound—and he realized for the first time that he had slept in his shoes and clothes. He had dreamt that he stood naked before his high school class while he’d really been sleeping fully dressed. There was a healthy measure of irony in there somewhere, but Shutterbug wasn’t quite up to finding it.

  He made it to the window and fiddled with the drapes, eliminating the nasty slice of light that had tormented him. The last threads of the dream unraveled, and he began to forget about it. He let himself do that; he didn’t want to spend another second in the company of the laughing ghosts.

  It wasn’t a dream, anyway. It was a goddamn nightmare.

  Every bit the equal of last night. Man, oh man. Last night had been the mother of all nightmares. First those idiots invading his house. And as if that hadn’t been bad enough, he had actually buddied up with them. Now if that wasn’t the ultimate in bad judgment, what was?

  What had been wrong with him back in high school, anyway? He had actually wanted to hang out with guys like Bat Bautista and Derwin MacAskill. He’d thought that they were cool. They certainly weren’t cool now. It was a dead solid given that last night was just a glimpse of the crazy things they liked to do. For Shutterbug, that little glimpse was as damning and ugly as the blinding sliver of light that had spilled through his window and given him a nightmare.

  Well, he had learned his lesson, and not a moment too soon. He yawned and licked at the rusty tang that had set up housekeeping in his mouth while he slept. He still couldn’t quite believe what Bat and company had done. His memory wasn’t completely clear, but it was clear enough. Going to a busted-down drive-in and projecting your old home movies. Weird enough. Even weirder when your old home movies featured rape and torture.

  Just your usual high school hi-jinks.

  Amazing.

  It had gone that far—and that was too far for Shutterbug—and then it had gone some more. He couldn’t remember what had happened after the visit to the drive-in, and for that he was thankful. The beer had been bad news, and the cocaine had been worse. He had lost all sense of moderation with the stuff, and now he was suffering the consequences. Everything was off just a click; even the smallest movement had an edgy, mechanical feel. He didn’t much like it�
��puzzling over how to get moving, and what he was going to think of next, and why he was trying to move at all.

  Like the ad said: this is your brain on drugs.

  Well, a hair of the dog was in order. Shutterbug opened the closet and took a shoebox from the middle shelf.

  Opened it.

  The wrong box. His money stash box.

  He returned the money box to the proper place and found the box that housed his cocaine.

  There was nothing in it but a little gold coke spoon.

  Where was the coke? He checked his pockets.

  Found the Ziploc—its contents considerably reduced in the shadow of the previous evening’s escapades.

  Carefully, Shutterbug dipped the spoon into the bag. He didn’t like doing coke in lines. Macho bullshit, that. He thought a coke spoon was much more gentlemanly. It spoke of moderation, of hungers controlled.

  One little spoonful for each nostril. He blinked, hardrock eyes smoothing into cool river pebbles. His mind fired.

  Let’s get moving, boy.

  * * *

  In the kitchen Shutterbug ground some coffee beans, and that wasn’t a very pleasant task. Even under the best circumstances the whirring Melitta grinder made a sound not unlike a screeching mouse scrabbling against the glass walls of an electric blender. But he managed the task, poured the grounds into a filter, got the pot filled and running without incident. And when the aroma of brewing coffee filled the room, he was convinced that it was indeed the finest smell in the world.

  He opened the refrigerator and was glad to see that the A-Squad hadn’t left any beer behind. The Diet Coke he took from the bottom shelf was pleasantly frigid. He halved a lemon and squirted juice into a thick glass. Then he added ice and Coke. A few deep swallows and the rusty tang was evicted from his mouth.

  Nothing better for a hangover than a lemon Coke.

  Shutterbug felt that he was slowly reclaiming his humanity. Routine of the morning rolling right along. Coffee brewing, a croissant with some butter in a few minutes, maybe an orange if he felt that his stomach could stand more acid on top of the lemon and coffee.