Phantasma: Stories

by Charnock, Anne

  Still, seeing him flopped back on the ground, a red well of blood where his chest had been, his eyes glassy, but still wide with fear, Billy’s heart softened, and doubt as to the rightness of his act crept in. No. He forced the fear away. His hand had done the good Lord’s work. Now his mama could rest easy.

  Billy started walking, heading toward the edge of the clearing, at first favoring his hurt ankle, then realizing the pain had mostly faded. Other than the sound of dry pine needles crunching beneath his feet, the world had fallen silent. Billy’s consciousness fell deep into himself, and he wandered in silence till he found himself beyond the tree line, standing again at the edge of the road, a bit south of the place where it crossed the railroad track. He stood there frozen in place, running the words he’d share with his papaw through his head. He’d done it. He’d avenged his mama’s honor. He’d put her soul to rest. More than that, he’d done what no person had done before. He’d freed the world from the devil himself.

  A distant rumble worked its way into Billy’s awareness. His eyes searched out the sound’s source, coming from the east. In the distance he could make out the red engine of an approaching train. A low woot of its still distant whistle offered up a hallelujah.

  Another sound. A louder, nearer, more insistent horn pulled his eyes away from the east and turned them south. Coming toward him was the same struggling robin’s egg-blue delivery truck that had brought him to the crossroads.

  Mo reached his arm reached out through the window and waved at him in a wide arc. “I’m slowing down,” Mo called as the truck pulled near. “Can’t stop. Afraid she won’t start up again if I do.” The van punctuated his words with a loud backfire and a dense puff of blue smoke from its tailpipe. “You gotta run and hop in.”

  Billy felt his head nod and then found himself running around the slowing truck before he was fully aware of his own movement. Mo swung the side door open and Billy lunged through the opening, nearly toppling over onto Mo before he righted himself at the last moment.

  Mo smiled up at him. “Good shooting?” He pulled the lever to close the door.

  “Good enough,” Billy said.

  The truck rolled on a few more yards, then shook and rattled, seizing up and dying as steam boiled up from beneath the hood. Mo’s brow furrowed and his mouth puckered as he shifted into neutral and started cranking the ignition. “I told Mr. Boardman she was givin’ out.” He leaned over the wheel then turned his face toward Billy’s.

  It surprised Billy to realize that from this angle, with the indent between his eyes, the ridges of Mo’s brows stuck out almost like tiny horns.

  The shriek of a whistle caused Billy to jump. He turned right to see the train approaching. Billy jolted, realizing the truck had stalled right over the tracks. “We gotta get out of here, Mo,” he said, reaching for the lever and swinging the door open. He started to climb out of the truck, but Mo’s hand reached out and caught his.

  “I gotta get her started back up. Mr. Boardman, he’ll kill me if I don’t get her home.”

  “We gotta go, Mo,” Billy said, fear causing his voice to rise in pitch.

  Another furious shriek of the train’s whistle pierced his ears. It was nearly on them, and it didn’t look like it was gonna make any attempt to stop. It screamed again and again, furious, advancing on the delivery truck like a raging beast.

  Billy’s heart pounded. A bead of cold sweat formed between his shoulder blades and ran down his spine. He gave Mo one last glance as the poor fool sat there, turning the key again and again, the grinding of the ignition inaudible beneath the screech of the oncoming fiend.

  Billy looked back east at the face of the red beast bearing down on them, and it was then he realized he had failed. He hadn’t killed the devil out in that clearing in the pine grove at all. He’d only wounded him. Made him angry. And this was no ordinary train. This here was the angry devil himself, all dressed in steel and fury, intent on payback.

  Billy hadn’t finished the job. Not yet. But he was bound and determined to do so. He forced himself to stop shaking, deadening his ears to the violent cries of the oncoming demon. He squared his shoulders, just like his papaw had taught him, and lifted the rifle, keeping it buttstock high on his chest. His slid his left hand to the forestock and pressed his cheek against the stock.

  The devil must have realized he was about to get another taste of Billy’s gun, ‘cause now he tried to stop, and the screech of the whistle was joined by the scream of brakes. Metal strained against metal. Sparks flew as the train tried to slow, but it was too late. Billy’s finger had already found the trigger, and pressing it straight, pulled in until the rifle fired.

  ***

  Sarah Mizalle stood naked in her bedroom. She’d started for the room the second she felt sure Billy Goat was headed in the right direction. It took her time to make it there from the porch. It took her knob-jointed fingers even longer to undo the buttons on the front of her dress. There wasn’t a limb on her stiff, aching body that would move without protest. After all, she was an old woman. Once again.

  She felt it the second the change had begun. As if the light had been swallowed whole, the room around her dimmed in an instant. Then there was a thunderous cracking sound, followed by a sharp shock of pain, like her scalp had been parted by a hatchet, which caused her to first see sparks and then dim floaters.

  That was when the real pain got to going. It felt like being turned inside out, and in fact, that was very close to what was happening to her. She collapsed to the floor, as her skin ripped open in a jagged seam that ran the entire length of her form, from the top of her head, through the center line of her body, clean down to her privates. She forced herself to move, inching along, relying on the friction of the wood floor against her bare skin to help widen the seam, to allow her to begin to slough off the wrinkled and mottled shell in which age had trapped her.

  She daren’t scream—she mustn’t risk alerting her neighbors—even though the pain that seared through her struggled to shut down the part of her brain that sought to prevent her from crying out. She could make it through the pain. She’d suffered through it before, five times to be exact since stepping foot on the shore of the Americas. Her Lord always kept His bargains, though she well knew He delighted in honoring His promises in ways that offered Him up a little more pleasure, and the other party a whole lot more pain.

  Knowing what needed doing, she set her searing fingers to work on the seam between her breasts, tugging until it ripped clean apart. She shrugged the skin off her torso like a dirty old coat she’d never wear again, letting it fall into a pulpy mound behind her.

  The pain didn’t matter. She focused instead on the fresh, young skin that revealed itself as the wrinkled and puffy flesh sloughed off. The sight emboldened her, and she forced herself up into a sitting position, turning her attention to ripping the old woman skin from her legs, peeling it off like it was a pair of worn-out stockings.

  The agony lessoned. Gone was the feeling of being pulled along a path of razorblades. All that was left was the sting of salt in an open wound. She knew the pain would cease as soon as she shed the shriveled remnants of her old skin. She spun her legs beneath her, and forced herself to her knees, pausing only for a sharp intake of breath before standing and taking those first few careful steps on the still-slick new soles of her feet.

  She teetered over to face the mirror. Her reflection revealed the glistening, perfect figure of a young woman on the cusp of her prime, wearing an ill-fitting mask of a hag’s face. She drew a deep breath and raised both slimy hands to grasp either side of the split flesh and peel it away. She dropped the mottled skin of her face and scalp, with the few straggly strands of gray hair still attached to it, to the floor and leaned in close to admire the thick chestnut tresses that had tumbled across her new and perfect, if clammy, ivory shoulders. She couldn’t resist. She leaned in toward the mirror and pressed her newly plump and rosy lips against the glass.

  Her phone began to j
angle, but its intrusion on this sacred moment didn’t startle her. She’d been expecting the call. She took quick, easy steps to the hall, the stiffness of age that had slowed her only minutes before now a distant and gladly forgotten inconvenience. She snatched up the receiver and spoke before her caller could. “Remember, Mrs. Metcalf,” she said in a loud, sharp tone, “this is a party line.” Sarah delighted in the youthful timbre of her voice, and the sensation of her tongue running over a full mouth of teeth.

  There was a pause, long enough for Sarah to run the palm of her free hand over a round breast and down her taut stomach.

  “It worked,” Mrs. Metcalf finally breathed into the other end of the line.

  “Of course it did. I told you it would. My Lord honors those who honor Him.”

  “It was terrible . . . at first,” Mrs. Metcalf said, disbelief ringing in her voice. “Shad started screaming, screaming like somebody was tearing him clean apart. But then the brace just fell off him. And his leg straightened. I’m telling you, right before my eyes, my boy grew four inches and filled out like a normal boy . . .”

  Sarah dropped the receiver back into its cradle. She didn’t have time for any more of the other woman’s twaddle. Sarah smirked, hoping that Mrs. Metcalf, she who had so long denied that the Master even existed, would remember the delight she felt at this moment once her time to join Him had come. Sarah’s part of the bargain this time had been to deliver Him two unclaimed souls and seal the deal with the death of three innocents at the crossroads. Mrs. Metcalf, straddling disbelief and desperation, had jumped at the offer. She’d even paid for the special delivery order that put Mo out on the road.

  Didn’t take much magic at all for Sarah to see to it his clunker of a truck died right on the tracks.

  No, Mrs. Metcalf had been more than happy to play a role in the sacrifice. So had Ralph Gibbons, Billy Goat’s grandfather.

  Soon, Ralph would show up at her door, as young and fit as he’d been back when he was a teenage boy, back when Sarah had first welcomed him into her bed. Of course, she’d sweetened the deal for him. This time, the two of them, free of his freak grandson, would take off together and leave Rome behind forever. Unlike that scrawny little wife who’d died birthing his one simple daughter, Sarah would give him strong, healthy children. Plenty of them.

  After all, she’d need a supply of fresh, new souls to bargain with in say, forty or fifty years.

  ***

  J. D. Horn is the author of the WITCHING SAVANNAH series and SHIVAREE. He was raised in rural Tennessee, and has since carried a bit of its red clay in him while travelling the world, from Hollywood to Paris to Tokyo. He studied comparative literature as an undergrad, focusing on French and Russian in particular. He also holds an MBA in international business and worked as a financial analyst before becoming a novelist. He and his spouse, Rich, and their pets have settled, at least temporarily, just outside Sisters, Oregon. You can connect with J.D. on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JackDouglasHorn and on Twitter: @AuthorJDHorn.

  THE GUARDIAN FROM THE SEA

  by Jason Kirk

  for Terry

  Author’s Insights:

  Lately I’ve been working on a book-length collection of four long poems that I’m calling WOMEN IN WHEELCHAIRS. One is a reimagining of Gemma Galgani—the Catholic patron saint of students and pharmacists, among other things—as a drug-addled, paraplegic arena-rock superstar, told from the perspective of a scalper who’s also a huge fan of her band. The second is “A Fabulous Hag in Purple on the Moor,” my homage to Wallace Stevens’s famous poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” recently published by Bitterzoet Press as a handsome handmade chapbook sold only on Etsy. (Is that not an adorable publishing model?) The third poem is called “Landfill.” True to its name, it’s a mess.

  The last is my favorite, “The Guardian from the Sea.” This narrative poem stars a wheelchair-bound mermaid who works at an adult-video store (and, at one point, accepts an on-camera gig). It was always fiction, but as I began to think of the story in the context of PHANTASMA, I saw it for the first time as fantasy—never mind the monster, warlock, gargoyle, banshees, houseborg, dragons, and magic. As originally composed, each section of the poem formed the shape of a bird shadow via long symmetrical lines, some of which spanned the page. But poems with shorter lines fare better in e-books, so the version here has been “recast,” and I’m grateful for what I learned from having to rethink it entirely for this anthology.

  “The Guardian from the Sea” takes place in Southern California. Most of its local flavor, real and imagined, was inspired during a two-week stay in Redondo Beach with a friend whose own experimental poetry continues to challenge my attempts more than fifteen years since we first met. That’s the extent of what’s real. The rest is (im)pure fantasy.

  ***

  Cast

  Meredith: a mermaid

  Ozzie: her boyfriend

  Her mother: a diplomat

  1

  Masticating broken glass

  the beholden of the land paused

  Bird shadows went clang

  Sunshine ricocheted

  off Meredith’s shades

  Kelvin governor sheepish

  blasted silent ex aspirado

  I have gone elsewhere of combat ready

  why didn’t you save me in the first place

  poses for cuff me on location sessions

  In the beginning

  there were different scenarios

  than before that

  Cliffs factored a number of small

  arrogantly cherishable moments ruptured

  into bandit aficionado disasters

  Wives performed miracles

  Traffic lights inconvenienced street pissers

  The beach was gravy

  Schoolchildren wrote lists of possible

  divorce shower theme park costumes

  Valium value world order

  Welcome to the inheritance management

  brokerage valley where gifts from the past

  play out across the habit forming graft

  enthusiasm specialist outfit factory floor

  read the sign out front of Meredith’s shop

  window reflected in the washerman’s

  brand name blinking visor

  These days a person

  looking at a person looked

  like more than one squirrel

  getting their nuts unscattered

  for something about the future

  Something about that Meredith

  glinted an early rock garden face

  2

  There was magic about

  and we all agreed

  or didn’t think about it

  Businesses existed

  Right angles began

  and ended sentences

  Stanley they said to it

  when the new houseborg asked

  A real convenience to email

  the ambassador home about

  Long and plural ways to get

  from the cradle to the ice machine

  indeed but only grief for Meredith

  to have had a diplomat instead

  of an escape artist for a mother

  Drivers with immunity hanging

  from the accelerator pedal hurling

  into the symbolic carport of her youth

  No comfort but in the hours between

  when Spanish steel workers break

  to nap and when the combustion

  engine in the pipe dream rose

  over the deepest part of the ocean

  The ground moved

  Water kept flowing about

  the places it had flown earlier

  The air would not shut up

  and sit still until spoken to

  like grandmother did in her day

  the way her father taught all of them

  As for entertainment

  Meredith crouched into porn

  even traded her gl
ass bangles in

  for a mermaid banshees

  on motorbikes flick

  Helpful chemical flowers painted

  in blatant colors by kindergarten paws

  possessed of siesta inscriptions

  Excellent plans excellent people

  Garden variety furniture

  danced the motion locution

  The fertile and the barren were astir

  and no one asked any ludicrous questions

  Each of her crescent wrists tensed

  Each of them did not let go

  3

  Give me your tired

  and your horny

  your parched

  anvils and bulleted

  blade axe silhouettes

  your mashed one of many ways

  Lend me your silos

  packed with rotting ears of corn

  Let your treasured reconstitute out

  Let your hair down

  4

  Three plywood weeks went by

  before the Richtermographs

  began sliding off tables

  before the china in which people

  placed their underdelicate pride

  came crashing downward

  gorgeously and sharded grace light

  in pinwheel figurines across

  the floor of the well off track

  Waxed by other people’s labor

  lives lost luster of greenback self

  assurance crouched eye stun glare

  Meredith do the leathered

  beach jogging tremors teach

  arrhythmic lessons

  Does Ozzie your admiring

  customer rent tape

  in your imaginative flavor

  Would you one day administer

  death and death rights

  to a hopeless lover

  in twelve dramatic colors

  agua marrying sand dollar

  bay for your pleasure monster

  shatter caramel treasure abuse

  Ozzie eyes

  Meredith’s streams flowing

  rainbow dream clatter

  fast forward abuse

  Ozzie the wicker chair splinter