Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Bethany‘s voice answered back, sounding like she had just woke up. “Hey, you? Where are you? I got movies and I was just getting ready to call Domino’s.”

  Lisa glanced down at her plastic sacks. “I’m at the Food Town, and I got fixing’s for salad and some ice cream. Go ahead and call, I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so - I want to run home and change first.”

  “Good. Pepperoni and sausage, right?” Bethany asked.

  “Oh, that sound’s perfect. Be there in a flash.”

  She hung up and started for her car. She was going to run home and change and hopefully be at Bethany’s before the pizza even got there.

  He was putting her registration back when he saw her coming. It had been in the visor above her seat just like in everybody else’s car, and it had told Jack her name and age and address.

  She was coming and he was about to get out and scamper away and then he remembered her tape. He popped it out and pocketed it in one smooth motion, sliding out of the car and quickly closing the door behind him. He moved off up the row of cars, not looking back until he got to his van.

  She was jingling her keys, her bouncy blonde hair moving gracefully in the light wind. She was carrying two blue plastic bags of groceries, and Jack could see tomatoes and lettuce and a gallon of ice cream. Probably making dinner for herself and her boyfriend.

  She climbed in and put the groceries in the passenger seat where he had just been, and then she turned around and started up the car.

  Her hands came up to beat on the dashboard, and then they stopped.

  Jack watched greedily as she sat there for a few long seconds, doing nothing, and then she began fumbling around inside her car for a moment or two, presumably looking for her tape. After a few seconds she switched her radio off and sat back, as if she were trying to think. He could almost read her thoughts, and he felt a sudden surge of glee run through him, almost overpowering him. She was thinking had the tape been in there, or had I taken it out on my way out of the car? And if I took it out, where was it now? Had I lost it?

  He smiled and popped the tape into his own stereo, rolled down his windows, and cranked it up as loud as it would go. It was the new tape from R.E.M., a fairly good band from somewhere in Georgia that Jack had heard of off and on the past few years. Not a particularly good band, but he was sure that there was at least one person in this parking lot would appreciate his new-found taste in music.

  Yeah, he liked R.E.M. just fine right now.

  Jack was looking right at her when her head came up, abruptly. Her windows were still up but she had heard the music anyway, and she rolled hers down and listening intently, looking around curiously at the other cars in the parking lot until her head came around and she spotted Jack, listening to the music and beating his hands energetically on the steering wheel and the dashboard.

  He smiled and waved at her.

  She glanced away in an almost demure fashion, but then looked around again, slowly. He could feel the curiosity coming off of her in thick waves.

  Jack Terrington took one more long look at her and started up his van, pulling away. He got back on the 132 and headed east, back out of town, out in the direction of the Interstate and the new Mall. After a few minutes he saw her little red Tercel creeping up behind his van, staying several cars back, almost as if she was trying to tail him without his knowing like in one of those cheesy police movies he sometimes caught on the TV on those rare occasions he stayed in a hotel room. He had been followed by drivers far more experienced then her, and it hadn’t been difficult to spot her, especially in that bright red car of hers. He reached down and turned the music down a little, and slowed the van down a bit to let her catch up.

  Highway 132 was a four-lane road for most of the way through Liberty, and Lisa Stevens had driven every inch of it a hundred times. The weird guy with the crazy eyes and that ragged leather jacket was in the white van about four car lengths in front of her, heading east out of town, and she could still hear her tape playing, even now. He must really have it cranked for her to hear it over the traffic noises.

  Of course, the tape might not have been hers. She might’ve lost hers, or he might’ve found it after she dropped it, but he wasn’t going to keep it if it was her tape. R.E.M. was one of her favorite bands, and this latest tape was a great release with several really good songs on it. She had paid full price for it - Mel never sold anything at the employee discount for the first two weeks something was out, and she had had to have it the day it was released - and she was going to get it back, even if she had to use her famous center-kick on this creepy guy.

  Trailing him, she studied his van in case she had to make a police report or something. It was your typical white van, dirty and mud streaked. It looked a little longer than normal, as if it had been lengthened or something, and there was a pair of small, black curtains covering the twin square windows in the back doors. She also memorized his California license plate number - this guy had come a long way to steal a tape, if that’s what had happened.

  She had no idea what else to do, and her impatience and age got the better of her after a mile or two. She pressed down on the accelerator, moved around to the lane on the left of his van and pulled up even with the guy, looking up at him sitting there, driving.

  He glanced over and down at her and smiled, raising one fist up to her. She thought he was going to wave at her again and smile at her, but this time she saw that his hand was clenched in a fist. Why was he doing that?

  After a moment he opened his hand. Her crystal globe appeared, falling about six inches or so before catching on the short silver chain that the man had looped around his palm.

  She gasped and glanced at her rear-view mirror to where the globe should have been. It wasn’t there. When she looked back at the van, it was already rapidly accelerating off, away from her.

  She hadn’t even noticed her crystal globe was gone! She swore and slid into the lane behind him and floored it. This guy had broken into her car! She knew she had locked the car - there was no way she would’ve left it unlocked with all her books in here, even if she was in a hurry. He had broken in and taken her stuff, and now she felt violated and angry and embarrassed all at the same time. She was getting her stuff back from this weirdo, no matter what.

  The van was faster and more powerful than it looked, and when he pulled off onto a side road four or five miles later, she was still well behind him. He turned onto a smaller, less populous side street and led the red Tercel on a chase through a small subdivision and back out onto some country roads that wove around in the woods to the west and south of the new mall.

  She was good, and she knew it. She had driven all the way through high school and had managed to do a good job of keeping up with the white van and its bearded driver, but now she was getting frustrated. She followed him through what seemed to be a dozen little side streets and country roads, weaving in and out of housing areas and quiet fields and acres and acres of trees. He had taken a few sharp turns on these backcountry roads, and all of the trees blocked her view. There were no houses or anything out here in the middle of nowhere, just trees and open lots and backcountry roads.

  He led her deeper and deeper into the woods and she knew it, but her pride was there and it demanded that she go on following the van and get her things back. She knew that the mall was close by, just to the north, and if she really needed help, it was there. But for now, she felt okay, even if she was getting a little creeped out chasing this van through all of these dark country roads. She drove, weaving down a skinny back-roads trail that she had never been down before, and when she rounded a sharp corner, she saw the van and stopped behind it.

  The van was by the side of the road, stopped. The drivers’ door was standing wide open. The van looked odd just sitting there on the dirt shoulder; she had been chasing it for the better part of an hour in the fading light of dusk and here it was now, just sitting here.

  Lisa Stevens could feel a hard, cold ball of
fear in her stomach; it just didn’t feel right. She sat in her idling car for several minutes, just watching the van and the road and the trees around it. There was no movement as far as she could tell, nothing around the van to betray what, if anything, was going on inside it.

  She shut off her engine and opened her door slowly.

  The first thing she noticed was just how quiet it was. She could hear the slow ticking of her car’s engine as it cooled off under the hood, the red paint of the hood looking dull and dark and bloody in the deep shadows and gathering dark. Other than that sound and the exaggerated, hurried sound of her own breathing, the silence was ominous. There were no sounds of animals, chirping or rustling or buzzing their way through the underbrush. She could hear no sounds coming from the direction of the Mall or 132, and she realized that she was much deeper into the woods south of the Liberty Place Mall than she had previously thought.

  She swallowed her fear, her throat feeling thickened and warm, and started over to the van.

  The driver’s door stood open and a thin light shone out. As she stepped around to take a look inside it, her stomach in her throat, she saw a sparkle of reflected light, standing out in the relative gloom of the van’s interior. Her crystal globe, which she had bought because its sides and facets reminded her of a soccer ball, was hanging from the rear view mirror, reflecting the dim light of the van’s overhead lamp.

  And she could hear nothing else.

  There was no one in the cab, and certainly no sign of the strange bearded guy that had evidently broken into her car and stolen both her R.E.M. tape and the crystal ball she’d bought at a concession stand in the Chicago airport last year.

  She stepped up into the open door and stretched up on her tiptoes to peek inside. Except for the dull overhead lamp between the drivers and passenger’s seats, there was no light inside the van at all. She could see all the way to the end and the black curtains she had seen before, but she couldn’t make out any details. There was a table or something like it just behind the passenger seat, and there seemed to be cabinets or something like them lining both walls all the way back. The area back by the rear doors was wider and seemed to be missing the cabinets.

  She bit her bottom lip as she appraised the mysterious interior of the van, debating whether to just grab the crystal globe and bail out of here, or explore the van more fully.

  But if she was going to report all of this to the police, it only made sense that she try and figure out the whole situation first. And she had to get her tape back.

  Jack was excited. He watched the beautiful, long-legged girl climbed up onto the doorway of his van, stretching to peek inside. Her tight dark skirt rode up until he got a clear view of her white panties. She stood like that for a moment or two, and Jack felt his excitement grow as he stared at her from behind the trees that concealed him.

  And then, without even a look back, she climbed up and inside his van and disappeared.

  He shook his head as if to clear it and stepped out of the trees, moving towards the van. He had had the tape in his left hand and now transferred it to his right hand to distract it from the bulge in his pants it had been caressing, moving the tape around deftly with his fingers in a little dance, momentarily forgotten. Jack was altogether too busy thinking about those long legs, taut and tanned and muscular, as she had stood up on her tiptoes, to think about the tape anymore.

  He slid up closer to the door, quietly taking his keys out of his pocket.

  Lisa Stevens slid between the two seats and moved back into the van. Her tape hadn’t been in the old stereo or on the console between the two front seats, but she’d grabbed her crystal globe from around the rear-view mirror and now held it in one fist like a weapon.

  On her right was a small refrigerator/stove/sink combination unit, and across from those, instead of the usual sliding door, there was a small dinette with room for two around a tiny wooden table. The top of the table looked pitted and scarred like an old cutting board that had seen a lot of use.

  Past these were four or five feet of low wooden doors, evidently cabinets of some sort, but by the time she had wandered that far back, her attention was held by only one thing.

  Lisa Stevens was looking up above the cabinets.

  Two rows of large glass jars stood atop the wooden cabinets, one row on each side, and they were secured by wooden slats that would evidently prevent the jars from moving or sliding off of the cabinet tops.

  And there was something inside the dusty glass jars.

  Actually, it looked like there were lots of little something’s inside the big jars. The jars were topped with tight seals, like the ones people used on jars of preserves.

  She stepped a little closer. The jar looked to be about half-full, and the objects in this jar all looked similar, and familiar. The objects all looked to be about three-quarters or maybe an inch long, and ranging in color from a light pink near the middle of the jar to an almost blackened gray at the bottom of the jar.

  She glanced around and noticed that all of the jars in the racks seemed to be between half and three-quarters full of similar looking objects.

  The light from over the drivers’ seat was the only illumination back here, the light thin and dusty, and she leaned a little closer to the jar she had been looking at, putting one hand up to clean some of the dust off of the side of the big glass jar. She saw something small and whitish and square on one of the objects, and it took her mind a few seconds to recognize it for what it was. The final clue was her own hand up on the glass jar, next to the whitish square.

  It was a fingernail.

  They all had fingernails.

  All of the little objects in this jar had fingernails, and that meant that they were all...

  She jumped back, gasping, one hand to her mouth. There were at least forty or fifty fingers or pieces of fingers in this jar, and a quick glance around told her that the other jars held similar objects. Now, with more opened eyes, she saw that the jars sitting atop the wooden cabinets all held what had to be fingers and finger joints and toes and thumbs. One jar on the other side of the van held what looked like several dozen of larger, floppy objects that looked like thick leaves, laying one on top of another like gray pancakes.

  Ears.

  Lisa felt her gorge rise up from her stomach, wanting to get out, and all she wanted to do now was just turn and run, run until she couldn’t run anymore...

  Music blared suddenly from every direction, incredibly loud. R.E.M. blasted from speakers, and she screamed and clapped her hands to her ears, dropping to her knees.

  She looked up at the front of the van and saw him.

  He was standing between the pair of seats at the front of the van. He was the guy, all right, and she saw that he was wearing a huge grin that reminded her dazed mind of the Joker in Batman. The overhead light was right over his head and shining its weak light down onto his head and the light made him look completely insane.

  The guy was holding something, her mind told her. The music was still pounding into her ears and she tried to focus on his hands and she saw that there was something there, black and shiny, and then he came at her, not hearing or not caring about the music that blared so loudly that her eyes were starting to water.

  She saw a spark like a little blue piece of lightning in the man’s clenched fist and her clouded mind told her that he was holding one of those stun-gun things like she’d seen on TV. The man brought it up and buzzed it a couple of times in front of her face, making a sound like one of those backyard bug zappers. She didn’t know how she could hear the buzzing over the music, but she could.

  He moved it slowly around, watching her stare at it, numb with terror.

  All of the strength had run out of her legs, and when he finally moved in and jabbed her with the two sharp points of the stun-gun, she didn’t even try to move away.

  Bethany was starting to get a little worried.

  The pizza from Dominoes was getting colder by the minute, and so far,
no sign of Lisa. Hadn’t she said twenty, thirty minutes at the most? Bethany had hung up from talking to Lisa and immediately dialed Dominoes, putting in their order. It had taken a half hour for the pizza to arrive, and now it had been here for at least that long. Where was she?

  She glanced at the clock that hung on the wall of her paneled downstairs family room, and it read 5:10. Lisa had been off at 4:00 and had called at around 4:15 or 4:20, and here it was, over 45 minutes later.

  Should she call Lisa‘s house again? Bethany had thought that maybe Lisa had stopped off there on her way over, and had called over there about ten minutes ago. There had been no answer, but then, that didn’t mean anything. Lisa’s parents were probably out or something, and even if Lisa had been there, she might not have been answering the phone. Bethany knew that Lisa had been looking forward to coming over tonight, and probably didn’t want to spend time trying to get rid of an unwanted telephone conversation.

  Bethany’s parents were out of town on a cruise, and Bethany had the house to herself. Funny how things worked out - months ago, when she had first heard that her parents were going to be out of town for three weeks for a cruise to Alaska, the first thing she had thought of was having David over. She had gotten very excited at the prospect of having David stay over for several nights, and she had been looking forward to the things they would do with all of that privacy. But now David was gone, on his way to California and here she was, just sitting here in this big house all by herself, with only a pair of cold pizzas and a couple of rented movies to keep her company. She’d gone by early and rented them from work after she’d given the binder to David. She’d wanted to talk to him, to say something, but she hadn’t known what to say - or even how to say it - and she decided to just let the binder speak for itself. She knew he would read it, but she didn’t know if it would matter, and so on her way home she’d gotten a couple movies and talked to Lisa about coming over after her shift.