by Mark Parker
Carter Johnson calls the house on Friday and I answer the telephone. He asks me what’s wrong and I tell him I’m sick and I’m sorry I didn’t call this morning. He asks if I’ll be in later and I tell him probably not.
“Is this about the drug tests, Gideon? You have to understand—”
I hang up.
My mother doesn’t leave her bedroom. She sits there on the edge of the bed, mimicking the way my father sat that night with his handgun, and she stares silently out her bedroom window. Children play in the street. I, too, watch the children on occasion, but it just makes me angry. This whole city makes me angry. There is nothing to BELIEVE in this city, so who are they kidding? And these kids—there’s no future here. So it just makes me angry, and although I’d lied to Carter Johnson about being sick, by Friday evening I am aware of a slight temperature working its way through my system. The result of moping around in the rain, no doubt.
Friday night, I move silently through the apartment toward the front door. I hear floorboards creak somewhere ahead of me and I freeze, imagining my father standing somewhere in the darkness. Down the hall I see shapes move.
“Dad,” I whisper.
“Gideon.” It is my mother. She steps into the living room, wrapped in a cloth robe, and her skin looks blue and translucent in the gloom. “Did you miss the bus?”
“What?”
“Will you be late for school?”
“I’m not going to school, Ma,” I say. “I haven’t been to school in a long time.”
“I can pack you a lunch,” she says. Her eyes are black and like two pits in the center of her head. Looking at her, I’m more conscious of my fever. “You don’t eat properly.”
“I’m going out,” I say, and slip out the door. Hurrying down the stairs and out onto the street, I imagine my mother in the kitchen preparing me a bagged lunch to take to a school I no longer attend.
I make it to Glad Street in time to see the angel skipping down the sidewalk in the dark. I shout and feel something rupture deep in my throat. I pursue the little girl, my hands stuffed deep into the pockets of my jacket, my teeth rattling in my head. My body feels frozen and numb on the outside, aflame on the inside. I follow the angel toward the intersection of Glad and Charles. She pauses here and begins to spin with her arms straight out. The street is silent and dark and I can hear the scuff of her sneakers on the pavement. I shout again—I am shouting her name, although my brain hardly registers this at the moment—and I look around to see some tenement windows light up.
“Come here!” I shout, but the girl—the angel—does not come. Instead, she pauses and faces me, giggles…and vanishes into the night.
I am bad with time. I have no idea how long I have been out here shouting. But soon I hear police sirens tearing up the street. Like a thief, I hustle back down Glad Street and disappear down an alley. I run harder, faster, and break through to the cobblestone semicircle that is Water Street. My fever is rising and my lungs are fit to burst. I can’t remember the last time I took a breath.
Two police cruisers sail past Water Street, their flashers on, their sirens blaring. I freeze in mid-stride. A sharp pain rips through my left hand and I taste blood. I am biting my hands again.
The little girl in the angel costume appears at the end of Water Street. She is staring right at me, waiting for me to see her, and when I do she turns and runs. I chase her, my legs pumping for all they’re worth, my breath harsh and abrasive burning up through my throat.
I cross the street in pursuit of the little girl and I am suddenly aware of police sirens and flashing lights all around me. I am burning up with fever and am not all here. I feel I am floating somewhere just above myself. Turning down another alley I slam into a chain-link fence and quickly scale it, rat-style. I drop down on the other side into an alley swollen with garbage. This does not slow me down. I run faster, my heart about to burst from my chest.
The alley is a dead end. I come face to face with a brick wall, eye level with a BELIEVE poster. I tear the poster down, wrap it around my face, then hunker down in the swill. The poster pressed against my face, my breath strikes it and echoes in my ears. My eyes are pressed shut. I am thinking of our old duplex and my father scooping gunk out of the gutters. I am thinking of my mother’s skin, brittle and yellow and like wax paper. I picture her now, at this very moment, searching for mayonnaise in the refrigerator.
I am suddenly aware of a presence beside me. I hear plastic trash bags shift and empty cans roll across the cement. I am not alone. Yet I do not remove the BELIEVE placard from my face. I hear the movement beside me and I feel my own hot breath against the cardboard. Mourning breath.
The girl, she giggles.
“What?” I whimper. And in my head I hear my father’s booming voice: Real men don’t whimper like little girls, Gideon.
More giggling. It’s suddenly all around me.
“What?” I manage again. And think: There’s no rest for the dead.
I tear the poster from my face and see the girl just a few feet from me, also hunkered down in the trash. She is forever young, her eyes wide and lost in innocence, and she is giggling behind a cupped hand.
“Stop,” I tell her.
“Trick-or-treat,” the angel whispers.
I reach out a hand to touch her but she quickly vanishes, and my hand goes right through the air, unobstructed. I touch the cold brick wall on the other side.
Police cars whiz by the mouth of the alley, and I pull the poster back over my face. My cheeks are burning. I can’t tell if I’m breathing.
I wait for the sirens to die. When I remove the poster from my face and look around again, I see that I am alone. I remain crouched in garbage, unmoving, unthinking, until the first rust colors of dawn blossom between the cracks in the tenements across the street. Daylight, and I feel wiped out, exhausted. I toss the placard aside—had I really held onto it all night?—and stare down at my hands. My palms are covered in blood. There is a hunk of skin peeled away from one of my fingers, unrolled like a party favor.
I get up and start moving back toward home, feeling grimy and cold and sick. There is a dull pain on either side of my stomach, and just below the waist of my jeans. The groin area. By the time I reach our building, the pain is sufficient enough to cause me to pause halfway up the apartment stairs.
It is fully daylight now. I enter the apartment quietly. The place seems empty. I move down the hallway toward my parents’ bedroom. I pause here and look at the framed pictures on the wall. There are two photographs in particular that attract my attention. One, it’s my mother and sister and me at the kitchen table in our old home, a melting ice cream cake bristling with candles in the center of the table. The other photograph is from last Halloween. Having grown out of the tradition, I am standing against the railing of our home, looking slightly annoyed, slightly bored. My sister, dressed in her angel costume, smiles a gap-toothed smile at the camera. The sun must have been facing us that day because the shadow of my father, who is taking the picture, covers half my face. Only my sister is in full view.
I turn away and continue down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom. My mother is there, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring out the window. My father is nowhere to be found.
“Ma,” I say, “where’s Dad?”
“Oh,” she says, turning to see me in the doorway, “Gideon. Is it breakfast already? What would you like, dear?”
“Ma,” I begin, but then say, “Eggs. Lots and lots of eggs. Do you think you can do that? I haven’t been eating.”
“Yes!” She says this with startling enthusiasm. “Yes, Gideon! I’ve been telling your father—that boy is not eating properly. That boy is getting too thin, just too thin, and he’ll never make the football team. What did you say?”
“Eggs,” I tell her.
She moves slowly off the bed and I stand in the doorway and watch. She pulls on her robe even though she is fully dressed and even though her skin is slick with sweat, then mov
es past me and out into the hall. When I hear pots and pans clanging from the kitchen, I cross the bedroom and open my father’s top dresser drawer. His handgun is hidden beneath some socks. Beside the gun is a small box of bullets. I removed both the gun and the bullets and sit on the edge of the bed. It occurs to me that I must look just as my father had that night, sitting here with this gun in my hands. Last Halloween, a group of teenagers—most of them younger than me—were raising a commotion along Glad Street while I chaperoned my sister’s trick-or-treating. City kids, they do things that even they can’t fully comprehend, so how can I? And things just happened so fast. I heard gunshots before I even knew what they were. And when I went to grab my sister’s hand, her hand was no longer there.
My sister. She was strewn across a pair of tenement steps, bleeding from the head.
Some many months later, after we’d moved from the duplex to this apartment, I walked in on my father sitting on the edge of this bed, turning this gun over and over in his hands. I watched in silence from the doorway, the heel of my right hand pressed firmly in my mouth, my teeth nervously biting down. I watched him without him knowing, and at one point I felt very certain he was going to do it—that he was going to put the gun to his head and end it.
But he didn’t. He put the gun away and just cried for a long time.
I hear my mother humming from the kitchen. Her headaches started around the time of my sister’s funeral. I think about that now as I load the gun. Before me, the single bedroom window looks out on a group of children playing in the street. Is there any hope for any of them?
Believe, I think. Believe in what?
I say nothing to my mother as I step out the front door. My belly cramping, my fever racing, it takes some effort to maneuver down the flights of stairs to the street. Outside, the sun is too bright and I wince. It hurts my eyes.
I carry the gun down the street, walking quickly for someone in such pain, and I think about my father shaving in his underwear. I think about his slow physical decline that started with my sister’s death and continued throughout his visits with me at rehab. See, I was arrested one night on Glad Street with a bag full of weed in my back pocket. But the call didn’t start out as a drug bust. The call started out as a disturbance. Apparently a number of people heard me shouting my sister’s name from their apartments that night and called the cops. The dope—well, that was just an added bonus, I guess.
The sun is hot and I’m burning up. When my eyes adjust to the light, I manage to open them wide. It seems both sides of the city street are papered in BELIEVE posters.
I start to laugh. It hurts my belly, but I laugh anyway.
City kids—they’re all a bunch of hopeless animals when you get right down to it. The good ones are gunned down, and the bad ones, well, the bad ones just grow weaker and weaker and smoke their lives away.
This is not a guilt thing.
Please don’t think that.
I cross over to Glad Street and find it teeming with young children playing in the street. If their lives meant anything—anything at all—would they be so easy to end?
A ripping, agonizing pain tearing through my gut, I raise my father’s handgun and begin shooting.
Other Books by Scarlet Galleon Publications
2014
Dead Harvest: A Collection of Dark Tales
2015
Dark Hallows: 10 Halloween Haunts
2016
Dark Hallows II: Tales from the Witching Hour
Darkness Whispers: A Limited Edition SIGNED Novella
(Illustrated by Jill Bauman)
2017
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror *
(Vol. I – Seas & Oceans)
Fearful Fathoms: Collected Tales of Aquatic Terror *
(Vol. II – Lakes & Other Bodies)
Dark Hallows III: Blood Moon *
2018
Stalking Stuffers: A Collection of Christmas Killings *
* forthcoming