Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  Chasing the Sandman

  Tales of the Macabre

  By Brandon Meyers

  Copyright © 2012 by Brandon Meyers

  Cover photo Copyright © 2012 by Brandon Meyers

  Contents

  Graveyard Shift

  A View from the Top

  Runaway Train

  The Untimely Death of Jimmy Gums

  Slippery When Wet

  Spilled Ink

  Fare Thee Well

  Into the Deep

  Seeking Shade

  1st Appearance

  Pit Stop

  Marbles

  Nicky’s Show

  Spirit House

  Spirit of Christmas

  Last Call

  Table Stakes

  Stone Cold Love

  Hell of a Deal

  The Last Christmas

  After Ours

  Denatured

  Graveyard Shift

  It was six degrees out and Mickey O’ Houlihan had the windows rolled down. He was not a happy man. Car 4891 reeked of wet dog, despite the fact that no four-legged officer had been inside the vehicle for over three hours. Since his usual cruiser was still in the motor shop, Mickey had been assigned an alternating shift sharing one of the active K-9 units for his interim patrol car. For the past couple days there hadn’t been an issue, but today it had snowed like hell.

  Mickey wheeled the Chevrolet Suburban down an industrial stretch of the West Town neighborhood of Chicago. At this late hour, his lone headlights danced off the two-lane stretch of black ice and illuminated the faded brick buildings lining either side of the street. Mickey scanned the area with a snort and spat out the open window. He turned down the heat, lifted his radio, and pressed the call button.

  “Dispatch, this is Unit 4891, responding to the loitering call on West Fulton. Officer on scene, and the street’s deserted. Over.” A glance in the rearview mirror showed the reflection of the dismal and decrepit apartment complex half a block behind him, where the call had been made by a harried old Ukrainian woman. The sleepless broad had probably caught sight of a drunk wandering between bar stops.

  “Copy, Unit 4891. Over.”

  Mickey scratched his mustache and loosened the zipper on his coat. Now that the car was stopped, he was drowned in the stench of wet fur. No matter that the windows were down, there was no escape from it. Even if he took to the road again, it would still float there, a foul ghost in the undercurrent of winter air. He was ready to barf.

  With a glance down the barren street, Mickey fingered the rectangular lump of the cigarette pack in his breast pocket. It was almost midnight anyhow.

  “Dispatch, this is Unit 4891 again. I think I’m going to take a look around here anyway. Over.”

  “Copy that, Unit 4891. Over.”

  Mickey killed the engine and slipped out of the truck. He automatically tugged his baton, Gladys, from between the seat and slid her into her steel loop on his belt. Some old habits can’t be quit.

  He plucked the pack of Marlboro Lights from inside his coat’s breast pocket and tapped out his single nightly allowance of nicotine. He let the match snuff itself in the snow. There, in the empty street, beneath a few irregularly spaced sodium lights, Mickey took his only unofficial break of the evening. He savored the first inhalation, feeling dry warmth fill his lungs. A swirling mix of smoke and steam drifted out through the aging sergeant’s nostrils, clouding the night like the breath of a tired dragon.

  He huffed and kicked a chunk of ice free from the fender well of the patrol truck. It landed with a surprisingly loud report, which echoed briefly across the walls of the surrounding warehouse district. And that was when Mickey saw it. At the sound of the rocky echo, a shadow detached itself from the gutter, forty yards down the street, and shot across the snowy sidewalk toward the nearest building.

  Mickey sputtered a surprised cough. The cigarette plummeted to the ground as he drew Gladys with his right hand. His left went for the heavy aluminum tube of his Mag-Lite.

  “Hey!” Mickey called. His voice, like the falling ice, bounced briefly across the buildings of the abandoned street before being damped by the snow. “Hey, you! Police!” He took off at a start, slid, and barely caught himself from slipping to his ass on the urban tundra.

  What the hell was that? A kid? From the corner of his eye, he judged that the dark figure had been too big to be a dog. But it didn’t have the body mass of an adult. Did it? This neighborhood wasn’t gang territory, but with the poor lighting and stretch of industrial structures, it was a prime location for punks and wannabes to practice their artistic endeavors in Krylon. A graffiti arrest was a waste of time in regards to paperwork, Mickey knew. But, maybe he could just scare the hell out of them.

  “Damn it,” Mickey said, regaining his balance by grabbing the grimy bumper of his cruiser. “That was one of my last cigarettes, you little bastard.” He shuffled forward quickly, but with more caution. When he reached the front of the building, he traced his flashlight beam across the overhead sign. Keller’s Kars was written in rusting, faded script. And there was a sun bleached “For Sale” sign in each of the nearest windows. To the left, two fifteen-foot rolling doors sat atop the defunct loading dock.

  “I said this is the police,” Mickey called. “I know you’re in there.” He felt foolish after saying it, because the door was firmly shut, secured with two heavy padlocks.

  He drew the bead of the light to the ground and snorted. There were no footprints, just a mess of polka dot dimples in the snow, leading all the way back to the storm drain at the gutter. It was a dog after all. But, where the hell had it gone?

  Mickey retraced the path of snow prints with the light and saw that they didn’t actually stop at the door. The prints wandered off the edge of the porch and climbed the surface of the wall, leaving a brief trail of snowy polka dots over the maroon brick.

  “What the hell?”

  With the light, he traced the vertical trail across the front of the building and over to the closest of the recessed loading dock doors. There, where the base of the closed door met the concrete dock at chest height, a three foot hole had been torn through the metal. The edges of the corrugated steel were rough and jagged; whoever had done the job certainly hadn’t been concerned with finesse. No sound came from within the warehouse.

  Mickey paused to take a quiet breath and consider the situation. Non-residential break-ins in this weather typically resulted from vagrants trying to escape the cold. But, the prints were all wrong. Still, it had been snowing all night, and some ballsy tramp’s footprints would have been gone in ten minutes. But how had he made the hole? With a damn cannon? And the bum had a dog with him...well, the lip of the loading dock was four feet off the ground. It would have to be a monster of a mutt to jump such a height. Mickey tightened his grip on the night stick and shone his flashlight into the crevice.

  “Hello?”

  Like most defunct properties in the area, this one looked to have been rented out as storage space. From his vantage, all Mickey could see were stacks of cardboard boxes and shipping crates, and a few dust covers flung over the square frames of sleeping vehicles. He passed the beam across the undercarriage of one exposed car, and it alighted on something solid. In a fury of staccato clicks, the figure disappeared. Moments later, the scuttling echoes were followed by a thunderous crash and the tinkle of glass raining down on concrete.

  Mickey sneered. Some bum had just cost him one of his last cigarettes, broken into private property, and was smashing the shit out of things. In his younger days, he’d relished the promise of ass-kicking. He’d have gone through the hole without a second thought, fists swinging. Now, at least he paused long enough to call dispatch. He squeezed the shoulder
-mounted radio and told the dispatcher he was headed in for a look around. She promised to send the next available car and an Animal Control unit once the pile-up on the I-290 on-ramp had been cleared.

  “Alright, you bastard. Let’s do this the hard way.”

  Mickey hefted himself carefully atop the ledge of the loading dock and grimaced when something gave an uncomfortable pop in his lower back. He crawled to his feet and cleared the area around him in a glance. The air was dank, like stagnant water and wood rot. A flurry of microscopic dust motes turned his flashlight into some kind of Asimov-ian laser weapon. More boxes, arranged in mountainous stacks, stood to the left of him. On the right was a row of half a dozen hibernating cars, hulking Detroit ghosts beneath their bed sheets.

  “Chicago police,” Mickey said in a deep, warning tone, while he surveyed what he could of the enormous warehouse. “This is a privately owned property, asshole. Come on out and let’s get this over with. It’s a comfy seventy degrees in the jail tonight, and they’ve got hot food.”

  Again, the erratic clicking pattered across a hard surface on the opposite end of the room. The sound was unnerving, and even the veteran of nighttime danger felt a tickle run up his spine. And, if there was one thing Mickey would not tolerate, it was fear.

  “I’m not playing games here,” Mickey said. “If you screw with me, I’ll beat the living bejesus out of you and throw your ass in the river.” This was partly true. Although Mickey was neither in favor of drowning perps nor using them to exercise aggression in excess, many a criminal had been in need of stitches and a painkiller cocktail after putting Mickey and Gladys into a tight spot. More often than not, a believable threat worked just as well. “You hear me, asshole?”

  No response.

  Mickey slid Gladys back into her loop, and drew his service pistol from its holster. In his fingerless gloves, the steel was like ice against his fingertips, but the jolt of his rising blood pressure helped. The weight of the automatic weapon was reassuring, as it led him forward. In slow, measured steps, Mickey began walking the path on his right, toward a windowed enclosure that looked to have been a small office at some point in the past. The door was locked and he could see through the dust-filmed windows that the space was empty, except for a pile of papers on the ramshackle desk.

  And then something cut the air beside him, hissed for a fraction of a second past his ear, and crashed down to shatter at his feet.

  He dove to the side, tripped over the corner of a wooden pallet, and landed hard on his elbow. As pain jolted up his forearm, Mickey heard his pistol clatter across the concrete floor. Like an agitated dog, he clenched his teeth and growled away the pain. He flailed with his good arm to recover the flashlight and jerked himself upright, readying for another attack. But none came. Mickey huffed; steam rose from his lips in choppy plumes.

  While the fingers of his right arm tingled and tried to take hold of Gladys, Mickey trained the heavy flashlight to where he’d been standing. Amid the scattered glass of a broken light bulb, he saw the busted remains of a round, steel-caged light fixture. Had it hit him, the thing would have rendered him unconscious, at the very least.

  “Holy shit.”

  Mickey thumped the feeling back into his right hand by beating it on his chest and took firm hold of Gladys. He jerked the flashlight beam upward, toward the rafters, and gasped.

  At first, it was like looking into the guts of a storm cloud. The wooden ceiling joists were coated in a stringy mess of reflective white silk. It was as if gravity had given way and allowed an indoor snowstorm to bury the ceiling.

  “What the hell?”

  At once, Mickey was dragged three decades into the past, to the most regrettable day of his life. In his childhood, Mickey’s parents had owned a farm. He and his younger brother Paul would spend their summer days escaping the humid Illinois heat by playing in the barn. Mostly they played Mister Ed with the horse, or watched the cats hunt mice. But, one day, when Mickey was nine, in the middle of a game of hide-and seek, he was stomping through the hay loft when he heard Paul scream. When he reached the corner where his wailing brother sat, Mickey saw them. Crawling all over his brother’s neck and arms, there were dozens of them. Even with Paul’s frantic swipes, he couldn’t rid himself of all the baby spiders. Mickey batted and pounded at them as best he could, but Paul would neither sit still, nor stop screaming. By some miracle he wrangled the smaller boy down the ladder and out of the barn. His skin was white as a bleached sock, except for the dozen red lumps that had already begun to swell his neck and face. By the time their father’s truck skidded into the dirt lot in front of Doctor Brannigan’s home office ten minutes later, Paul had stopped screaming. He could barely breathe. As Mickey’s father carried him in, the boy clutched at his throat, wheezing. The swelling was too much for his airway. Within five minutes, Paul was dead. The spiders had killed him. Mickey’s father fell to pieces in Doctor Brannigan’s living room, wailing as the man folded a sheet over the dead boy. Hide-and-seek had been Mickey’s idea. And now his brother was dead.

  So, as he stood there in the freezing darkness of the storage warehouse, Mickey’s heart quickened, and the space between his frosty breaths drew short. There, twenty feet above him, the ceiling had been transformed into an elaborate blanket of webbing. Everything from the ancient oak framing to the dangling light fixtures was covered in silvery white, reflected by the beam of his flashlight. At the center of the room, a man-sized sac bulged outward. It was held aloft by dozens of supporting strands, each a thickly woven rope of silk. And it was writhing.

  “You have got to be shitting me.”

  On instinct, Mickey’s hand shot for his radio. But, for the second time that night, a shadow extracted itself from the scene and began to move. Directly over his head, the circular shadow grew larger, like a falling chandelier. By the time Mickey trained the light on it, it was too late. All he saw was a giant, prickly claw descending upon him.

  “Shit!”

  With the weight of a bowling ball, the giant spider smashed into him and latched onto his shoulder. It slumped over his back, dangling by two legs, while the others scratched and fought for purchase on his slippery winter coat. Mickey spun, backing into the glass wall of the office, and sent wild stabs over his neck with Gladys. Along with the sandpaper grating of the thing’s legs on his vinyl coat, Mickey was aware of a series of sharp jabs running up his back. The thing was biting him, or trying to, at least. He jerked to and fro and rammed himself against the transparent wall.

  Mickey swung Gladys backward with a furious grunt, and heard the wall of glass behind him crack. He swung twice more, in panic, and was taken off balance when the barrier gave way. Like icy rain, the sound of falling glass echoed through the storage facility. Mickey fell with a howl. He toppled backward, taking the remaining lower half of the window down with him. His thick gloves and coat took the brunt of the damage. However, a dagger-like shard sliced through the coat just below his bulletproof vest, and sent a lance of pain through his lower back and down his left leg.

  The giant spider released its hold during the concussive fall. It skittered across the crunchy floor, and was swallowed by the shadows beneath the nearest car.

  “Fucking Christ!” Wincing, Mickey reached behind him. He found the slim shard and grated his teeth as he pulled. A white hot electrical current ricocheted up and down every branching nerve of his spine. The pain brought tears to his eyes. It quickly subsided, but was replaced with a deep, aching throb at the base of his spinal cord.

  As a police officer, Mickey’s body had been conditioned by decades of tense self-preservation. Therefore, without really thinking, his hand shot for the fallen flashlight. He needed to get to his feet. That monster was out there, probably only feet away, and preparing to strike.

  At the cost of a great amount of pain, Mickey pushed himself to a knee, and rose. His back protested with a series of fiery stabs, but he clamped his jaw together and stood. He slid Gladys into her loop on his belt an
d reached for his radio. Where it should have hung, just above his shoulder, he found only a stiff, coiled cord, with exposed wires at the end.

  “Shit.” Backup would be there soon. Wouldn’t they? Mickey could not recall the relay with dispatch. All he could focus on was the sound of his own labored breaths, the chill of the freezing sweat on his brow, and the incredible silence surrounding him. He slowed his breathing, tried to steady both his thoughts and body.

  “Spider.”

  Mickey pointed the flashlight at the hollow beneath the nearest car, and found the reflection of a dozen oily marbles staring back at him. The spider retreated a few feet from the intrusive halogen beam. The fucking thing was the size of a collie.

  “Holy shit.” He instantly drew the baton again and shifted on his feet. He was bleeding, but had no idea how badly, beyond the warm trickle running toward his boots from his beltline. To hell with Animal Control, he thought, what they needed was a big game hunter. And a large bore rifle. Mickey’s mind flashed to the shotgun holstered in its brace in the front seat of the cruiser. He barked a laugh. Keep dreaming, pal. If he dared make a break for it, that thing would be on him in seconds.

  “Looks like it’s a standoff,” Mickey said, ever a man for simplicity. “You ugly little bastard.”

  The spider appeared to do a little dance as it repositioned itself and hunkered down behind the vehicle’s front tire.

  Mickey licked his lips while he mentally assessed the weapons he had on him. Besides Gladys and the now missing pistol, all he had on his person was a can of pepper spray and a pair of handcuffs. If the pepper spray had the same effect on spiders that it did on humans, it would royally piss the monster off. That was not an appealing thought. And unless he had mistakenly packed three extra sets of handcuffs that evening, he was shit out of luck. So, locked in a staring contest with the bloodthirsty arachnid beneath the car, Mickey did the only thing he could think to do.