2nd Spectral Book of Horror Stories

by Paul Finch

  Buck bounded from side to side, did a spin, desperate to get out.

  Dahl wanted to step outside and get a better look, but here he was, not doing it. Instead he stood frozen in place. Beyond the deck, he could just make out the imperfect line where the yard met the edge of the forest and he saw the ghostly forms of the animals disappearing into it. There were more than the two or three he'd seen on his deck. There were enough to convince him that his perception was wrong. It was a doubling of the image or a reflection in the glass.

  Buck gave up his attempt at pursuit and looked up at Dahl with his big pink-tongued, black-lipped smile like this was all good fun.

  ****

  The sun came out briefly in the morning, and there were no curtains on the windows, so they were like ants under a magnifying glass in that bed. Dahl barely even got his two hours.

  They tried to take their breakfast out onto the back patio, but that, of course, was when the clouds came back. Dahl wondered if it was always a little colder up here. He suspected it was warmer down in the valley right now.

  Mia's phone rang. She answered it then held it to her chest. "It's Brasser," she said, meaning Homicide Detective Jerry Brasser, "do you want to talk to him?"

  He declined and listened to her series of "uh huhs" and "okays" and "all rights" until she hung up. "The court date got moved back again," she said, "until the tenth of next month."

  "For Ellie or the other one?" He wouldn't say her boyfriend's name. That name would never pass Dahl's lips if he could help it.

  "Both of them," she said. "And he said you might need to come in to answer some more questions."

  "Of course he did."

  At the time, three weeks ago, the questions started immediately. But he understood-as much as he understood anything in the mangled wreckage of his brain-that they had to ask him questions, rule out any involvement or negligence on his part, before they could turn the full heat of their attention on the pale wretch he had once called his wife and the faded ink and scar-knuckled tweaker she called her boyfriend.

  That first morning, Dahl's reaction was all over the place.

  Cops holding him back as he screamed, his red face swollen and vascular, as he tried to get to his car so he could drive to his old house and beat the boyfriend to death with his bare hands.

  Locked in his studio, curled up on the floor, convulsing with body heaving sobs, snot running down his face.

  Panicked and fidgety, pacing madly around the apartment, light headed, an oceanic roaring in his ears.

  Dahl kept expecting someone to swoop in and make it all better. Someone would surely acknowledge his suffering and take pity on him. Don't you see? Don't you see what's happening to me?

  Mia was there and he clung to her like a rock as the rushing river tried to drag him downstream. But there were times that day that he thought, Is this it? Is this all you have to offer?

  By the time he sat down with Brasser, he was mostly exhausted with sporadic, short-lived bursts of rage, like a boiled over pot set back on the burner.

  "So tell me about your ex-wife," Brasser said.

  "Fuck my ex-wife."

  "What kind of a mother is she?

  "Apparently the worst kind."

  "Did she ever hit Chase? Was she ever abusive?"

  Dahl felt a surge of fury well up inside him. He waited for it to pass before he answered. "Not that I ever saw. And he never said anything."

  "What about drugs?"

  Something about the way he phrased the question enraged Dahl and he refused to answer until Brasser could be bothered to ask his question properly.

  After a few beats, he rephrased. "Did she do drugs?"

  "No," Dahl said. His knee-jerk reaction was to lie, but he caught himself. "Yes."

  "What drugs did she do?"

  "Pot and speed, mostly."

  "And what about you?"

  Dahl thought, That's not a fucking question, asshole. Ask it right.

  "Did you do drugs when you were with her?"

  "The pot, not the powder. Fuck that shit. That's half the reason we broke up."

  "And tell me about Rob," Brasser said. "Is he your ex-wife's boyfriend?"

  "Yeah."

  "Tell me about him."

  "He's an asshole. Just look at him."

  "Have you ever known him to be violent?"

  "Not that I've seen, but just look at the guy. You tell me a guy like that's not beating the shit out of people every other night down at the bar?"

  "But you never saw him physically assault anyone?"

  "No."

  "And what about drugs? Does he do drugs?"

  "I've never seen him with my own fucking eyeballs, but again, just look at the guy. Look at his face. That face has speed freak written all over it. Just look around their house, you'll find something."

  "But you never saw him do drugs?"

  "No, I'm not hanging out with the guy doing rails."

  "But you did see your wife do drugs?"

  "Yeah, I told you that."

  Brasser interrupted the cadence of his questions, taking a moment to give Dahl an appraising look. "Let me ask you something, how often did you have custody of Chase?"

  "Every other weekend."

  He stared a moment longer. "How is it you didn't end up with full custody? Or at least joint custody? How is it you only have him every other weekend?"

  "I don't know."

  "I mean, you know your wife's doing drugs-hard drugs, methamphetamines-and she gets full custody? Did you bring it up in court?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "Because her going to jail wouldn't do anyone any good."

  "Did you even try to get custody? Was it even brought up?"

  "Yes! I don't know! Fuck! I don't fucking remember. It was just kind of understood that she'd take Chase. She's the mother."

  "A mother that does drugs. Living with a man you suspect does drugs. That you suspect is violent."

  Dahl didn't speak. His head felt like it was filled with glass shards.

  "You're going to be moving in a couple weeks, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  "Where to?"

  "On Glen Ellen Road, on the way to Rosewood."

  "That's got to be a good hour out of town, right?"

  "I guess."

  "So you couldn't have taken Chase even if you'd wanted to?"

  Dahl stared at his hands, found some dead skin he could pick at.

  "I mean, you're not going to be driving him to school every day two hours there and back."

  "They have buses."

  "I don't think they go that far. And even just his friends, if he wanted to play with other kids on the weekends you have him, that wouldn't have been easy for him."

  "Look, what the fuck does this have to do with anything? It's pretty goddamn clear what happened, so why are you asking me questions about my goddamn house like that has anything to do with anything?"

  If Brasser realised how inappropriate his questions were, if he had any sudden shame for his heartlessness, it didn't show on his face. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just need to establish how involved you were in your son's life."

  The implication was pretty clear. You weren't involved. You left him with a woman you shouldn't have trusted, and look what happened.

  ****

  Mia breezed in carrying groceries. Dahl hoped she got something microwavable because he was bone tired. He needed to set up his studio and record a sound-alike of a Katy Perry song for a Breast Cancer Awareness 5K ad, but that would have to wait until tomorrow. He loaded his equipment in the studio space downstairs, and it occurred to him that it would have made a great playroom. That thought hadn't even entered his head earlier.

  "I met one of our neighbours at the grocery store," Mia said.

  "Great. Were they normal?"

  "Yeah, we're going to dinner at their house tomorrow."

  "Jesus Christ."

  "You've got to get to know your neighbours. You do
n't want to live someplace without knowing who's around you."

  "What if they recognise us from the paper?"

  "What if they do?"

  "I don't want these people being all sympathetic, walking on egg shells around me. Let's just do it another time. Like the distant future."

  "We're going. Don't bother arguing."

  He didn't.

  ****

  Even after two days of moving and several nights without sleep, he was apparently not due for his collapse yet. It wasn't as if he wasn't tired. He was weary down to his core. He ached to fall asleep, but the grinding in his gut wouldn't allow it. If his mind started to wander, his thoughts would go to Chase and he'd feel like he'd been stabbed just below the sternum.

  At some point in the night Dahl became vaguely aware of the moon looming outside the bedroom window. And then it moved.

  Dahl sat up and faced the window just as something outside it disappeared.

  There were noises coming again from the back deck. Buck was whining in the living room.

  Dahl slipped quietly out of bed. When he entered the living room he saw Buck at the patio door, and something was on the other side. It was what he saw the night before, but it was otherwise unlike anything he'd ever seen, minute but uncannily human, muscular and long armed. It was reaching out toward the glass door, toward Buck, with a hand or a paw that seemed to be tipped with thick, black claws like the talons of an eagle. But Buck wasn't afraid. He sniffed at the spot where the claw touched glass and cried like he wanted to go out and play with his new friends. There was something about the way the moonlight hit the animal's bloodless milky skin that made it seem as if a faint luminescence was coming from within it. And as the glow became more prevalent, the creatures behind it took on the same radiance.

  Dahl must have made a noise. The animal's round head snapped in his direction, obsidian eyes locked on him for a moment before it darted away.

  A queasiness crawled over Dahl, a nightmarish sickness he tried to ignore. He opened the door. He wasn't frightened of the animals, just repulsed. He wanted to go outside and see them, make them more real in his mind to wash away the vague afterimage he held there.

  As Dahl stepped out onto the patio, Buck burst past him, dashing across the deck and down the stairs. Dahl wasn't worried about him attacking the animals and making a bloody mess of the yard - that instinct seemed to have been bred out of him. He used to chase the ex-wife's cat Toby, but Buck just thought they were playing and having a terrific time until one quick swipe to the nose would send him cowering away wondering what he'd done to deserve it.

  From the edge of the patio, Dahl watched Buck chase the animals across the yard. They all disappeared into the tree line. Dahl hoped Buck had the good sense not to get lost because there was no way he was going to follow him in there and get himself lost in the woods in the middle of the night.

  There would be no shutting the door and going to bed until Buck was back, so Dahl went back inside to his coats, still piled on the floor in the guest bedroom, and retrieved an emergency cigarette from a cigarette case in his old motorcycle jacket. He brought it out to the deck and lit it. He leaned back in the rusted patio chair and smoked. The cigarette was old and smoked hot, but damn it tasted good. He looked out at the forest and thought he saw small shapes glowing faintly from inside. When the Internet service was set up he could investigate what those little abominations were, but in the meantime, he found that he was more comfortable not thinking about them.

  When the firefly glow of his cigarette had burned nearly down to the filter and he could feel his nerves beginning to coil tighter inside him, Dahl heard an explosive pained yelp from behind the trees. He jumped to his feet and before he had time to even think about how he could possibly respond, Buck came charging out of the woods. He ran straight past Dahl and into the house in a crouch, tail curled beneath him.

  Dahl flicked his cigarette butt over the balcony and rushed in after him. He was curled up on his bed in a tight little ball, shaking. Dahl knelt down and rubbed his ears and the back of his neck, trying to stop his trembling. He looked him over but didn't see any damage. They'd been leaving the back door open when they left so Buck could get out, but that would need to stop. At least until he got a rifle or some bear traps or an electrified fence. He didn't know what the hell those animals were, but fuck them.

  ****

  "Hey, do you know if they have monkeys around here?" Dahl called into the bedroom. Mia was in the waning stages of her evening out preparedness rituals. Dahl had been ready for forty-five minutes and was on his second pre-dinner bourbon.

  "Monkeys?" she said. "No! I don't think so. They don't, right?"

  "Have you ever heard of a monkey that glows?"

  Mia popped her head out, mid-brush. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "I don't know," he said. "Nothing."

  She finished eventually and came out looking fresh and casually well assembled. As far as Dahl was concerned, she could have taken all night. She took a deep breath and put on a smile, as if lifting something with some heft to it. Dahl stood, feeling as if the couch had its own gravitational pull.

  The house was maybe five or six doors down, but they drove. The space between properties was enough to make it a hike, and the shoulder of the road was a soft, precarious slope. Dahl didn't talk as they drove, trying to tamp down his nerves and preserve his strength until they got there.

  When they pulled into the paved, circular drive in front of their neighbour's house-a notably more refined structure than his own, 'historic' to his merely old-he willed his energy up a level.

  When they rang the bell, the door was opened by a short, round woman, a bright smile amid her rolls of clay-like flesh and a great swoop of yellow hair, as if she'd opened the door to a blast of air.

  "Well, look who it is! Come in, come in, I'm so glad you made it. It's always so good to meet the neighbours, all isolated up here, it makes me a little nervous sometimes. Anything happens, it would take the police darn near forever to come. Or the firemen. Lord! And you must be Dahl."

  The woman brought him in for an enveloping hug that was like embracing a beanbag chair.

  "And this is Carol," Mia said.

  Carol gasped, a grand, theatrical sucking of air. "Oh, sweet Heaven, don't you look gorgeous! This sweater! And that necklace, isn't that just the sweetest thing I've ever seen?" She looked overcome with emotion, as if her favourite granddaughter was graduating from college. She turned to Dahl. "You must be quite a guy to get yourself a beauty like this." She rubbed his arms. "And I'm sure you are. Come on, let's get you a drink, meet the others. Don't want to keep you all to myself."

  The house had the impractical, ornate tastelessness of wealthy retirees, plush white carpet, sparkling mirrors and glistening crystal, innumerable golden accents. In the living room, a couple was sitting on a white leather sofa and a man was standing beside them. The man, who Carol introduced as her husband George, was mostly bald, had a pleasant pink-jowled face and wore a red Hawaiian shirt tucked into his white slacks. The man on the couch had a thick moustache and slightly tinted rimless glasses. He rolled himself forward to shake Dahl's hand and before he'd said a word, Dahl pegged him as a blowhard. He seemed puffed up with the blustery political rants he needed to get out. He introduced himself as Al and his wife as June, who was slender and quietly bohemian, in contrast to everyone else in the room, with long, unsculpted hair.

  "So what are we drinking?" Carol said.

  The women were drinking white wine, but Mia asked for red. The guys were drinking Heineken, but Dahl wasn't playing around. "Do you have any bourbon?" he asked.

  "There's a good man," Al said.

  "Come on," George said, making a big sweeping gesture with his arm. "I don't have any bourbon, but I got a bottle of eighteen year Macallan from a client awhile back and I've been looking for an excuse to open it."

  "What, is that Scotch?" Al said.

  "My family's from Scotland,"
George said, "so we don't call it Scotch, we call it whisky. But yes, it's a damn fine single malt. Too good for the likes of you."

  George took them to a small bar in the other corner of the room. He removed a bottle and three rocks glasses from behind a glass cabinet. He poured a splash into each and gave one to Dahl. They asked him about his job, were interested when he said he was a musician. When he told them he mostly recorded background music for commercials, they showed more interest, rather than less, which was opposite the response he normally got.

  They quickly transitioned to talking about their own former careers. George had been in construction and still owned the company, though he no longer managed day-to-day operations. Al had been in sales, a Vice President, had more than a hundred people under him.

  Dahl listened patiently and drank. He finished his drink and George poured him another.

  Mia sat with June, having taken the seat that Al had vacated. Carol was flitting between them and the kitchen, where Dahl could hear her speaking in hushed frantic tones. She stopped briefly with the men to apologise. "I hope you all aren't dying of starvation over here. Poor Ingrid's having some issues. That prime rib is taking longer than anyone anticipated."

  Dahl assured her it was all right, but maybe it wasn't. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, but he did have plenty to drink, and had no desire to stop.

  He finished his glass. George didn't volunteer to pour him another, so he helped himself. Al seemed inspired by this bold act and likewise filled his glass.

  George talked about his son, who managed the construction business. "The problem is he doesn't have the respect of some of the long-timers on the crew. He gets out of business school and steps right into running things. That was always the deal, but they just see a guy, the owner's kid, with no practical experience. They don't know he's smarter than all of them combined."