by Jason Davis
What were they laughing at? He didn’t seem to know. His mind seemed frozen. Why was everyone looking at him? He watched as the corners of Tina’s mouth turned up into a smile. Then her mouth opened and she grabbed at her stomach and pitched forward in hysterical laughter.
Then a whistle blew, snapping him out of his daze to hear everyone laughing. The loudest of it came from right beside him. He turned and saw his best friend, his best bud, standing there pointing at him, laughing.
Billy looked down and saw his sweatpants around his ankles, his underwear with them. He was completely naked from the waist down.
And they all laughed. They always laughed. They all still laughed at him.
Billy and his little willy for all the world to see.
The nightmare faces turned into a gray, smoke-like mist. At first they had been solid, then it was as if they faded into a smoke that formed a cloud around him. He saw their shapes and heard their laughter, but now they were all part of the smoke. It began to swirl around him. They were always there, laughing. Laughing faces spinning around him, growing bigger, making him feel nauseated as he tried to pick just one face and watch it.
“People living in small worlds have little else to amuse them,” his mother used to tell him. That still didn’t make it any better. The sounds of laughter still stung his ears, always making him cringe whenever he heard it.
He always saw the laughing faces at night. He could sometimes even recognize them from his nightmares, remembering when and where they had laughed at him. After all, he had been keeping track and taking notes. He had plans for them, all of them, and he wanted to make sure that they would all pay.
****
He heard shouting, screams of torment and agony that melded together, both from the laughing faces swirling around him and the other dark world that just now blinked into existence. He wasn’t sure when the dream had faded around him to the point of him being awake. They both seemed to happen together. Then the laughter was gone, the darkness remained, and he was sitting up in the corner of his bed, his back to the wall, staring at his empty studio apartment.
But there was still shouting. It was different than the shouting from his dreams, the screaming and laughter. This was something alien. It was slightly muffled as it trickled through his ceiling.
“They’re under my skin! The spiders… They’re under my skin!” Billy heard someone shout. Then there was some pounding, crying, then footsteps thundered down the stairs and out the front door.
He was listening to the torment of someone else. In a way, he felt like he was eavesdropping, intruding into the head of somebody else. He wanted to pull away from it, stop listening, but something in him wanted to know more about someone else’s pain. Whose was it?
He closed his eyes and strained to hear more. He thought he could still hear crying from upstairs. He couldn’t be sure. The silence of the building, the buzz from the electrical sockets the only sound, seemed to be deafening. Somehow, it distracted him and made it hard for him to listen.
Then somebody started to laugh. It was quickly followed by another. One after another, the laughter from his nightmare returned. It came from the corners of his room, echoing off the silence. Someday, they were all going to pay, he thought to himself, as he sat in his bed and pulled his legs close. He opened his eyes again, losing interest in the crying upstairs. Maybe it wasn’t upstairs after all. Maybe it was more of his own nightmare changing into something new. Maybe they had found a new way to try and make him go insane. He wasn’t going to let them do that to him. Oh. no, they would never get to him. He was never going to allow them the satisfaction.
He looked over at the LED display of his alarm clock. It was just past four. He still had a couple hours before he had to get up and get ready for work.
He didn’t want to go back to the laughing.
When a gunshot echoed through the silence, tearing violently through the stillness of the night, Billy nearly fell out of bed.
The sound of the shot faded, but there was a residue that stayed in the room. Billy could feel its presence, as though a new shadow had entered and lingered in the corner to watch him.
Something was there. He felt it, as it seemed to create a dark spot on his soul. And around him, as the night fell silent once again, the laughing faces came back in the darkness. He shrank away from them. He would get them. He would get them all. He had his notes. He had plenty of notes.
Chapter 4
Looking at his watch, Bruce walked out to his rig as the eastern horizon blossomed into a colorful dawn. That didn’t seem right. He had been in there for over two hours? It felt like he had just gotten out of his truck and gone in. How could it have been so long?
When he had gone into the little imitation of an all-night truck stop ready to pound a few eggs, he thought maybe he'd see some old friends from around the area. He knew a few would be coming off shift and had hoped that he would come across a familiar face.
He had gone in and found himself a seat at the counter. It was the standard, long stretch of dark green counter in the middle of a color explosion all throughout the room. Bruce's first thought when he had entered was that a color-blind designer had picked the colors and, for that, they should have been put out of their misery. Then again, he thought that just about anywhere in areas where the walls weren't white and the counter wasn't a basic tan.
Don't be goin' and puttin' a bunch of colors in places that don't need color, he would say to himself, but that was largely because he was polite to the outside world.
When he sat, a larger waitress with a beautiful face and a warm, friendly smile came over to him. It was an addicting smile and Bruce found himself smiling back. He wondered how she could have such a smile that early in the morning, but he let it go. He was sure she had a stash of something in her purse that helped.
“Hello. What can I get for you this morning?” she asked. Her voice was just as chipper as her smile. Hell, maybe this was just her normal shift and she was used to not being asleep at this time of day.
He doubted it. He never knew anyone who was “used to it” who was still that happy. There was something about the people who worked third shift or were normally up at this time. There was always something about them, like they had a stick up their ass and were too tired to pull it out.
“Yeah. I'll take a Grand Slam, eggs over easy with toast, no jelly.”
“Well, I'm sorry, for that you'd have to go to Denny's, but I'll whip you up just what you want, hun.”
She walked away, writing on her pad, and he couldn't help but think of her now as being a little bitchy. What kind of place didn’t have a grand slam of some sort? Then again, when he was on a southern run and drove by Waffle Houses in what seemed like the thousands, he knew none of them had a grand slam. Why had he thought they had them there?
Because they used to? Back before he drove for a living, hadn't they had them then? He couldn't remember, but he thought they had. It didn’t matter, but it was something to think about to keep himself awake.
A warm, soft bed. It rested in the center of their large bedroom that was tucked away in the upper corner of their two-story farmhouse. It was one of those Tempurpedic beds. It was warm in the winter, and the sheets seemed to just naturally feel cool in the summer. It was his little slice of heaven away from the road, and he was ready for that peace.
Man, he wanted to get home. He didn't have too much longer, then he would be there.
He looked around the diner, trying to not be blinded by the bad choices of color around the room. He didn't expect to see too many people there. It was way too early. In fact, other than the waitress, the only other sign that there was life was the cook, who listened to some local rock station in the kitchen area, and a man wearing a black coat sitting at the end of the counter.
He heard a crash come from behind the little window, a long line of Spanish fluttering out from the kitchen. From the harsh tone, he guessed they were
obscenities, but he had never been good at learning any language outside of his own. From the loud crash, he guessed a pile of dishes were now scattered over the kitchen floor, pieces flung into the dark corners, some of which might never be found.
When the stranger from the end of the counter sat in the seat next to Bruce, he nearly jumped. He had never even noticed that the man had moved.
Then the smell hit him, and his stomach turned as a strong odor of something gone bad flooded his senses. He was surprised he didn't smell the man before he sat. The rotten odor flowed off the man as though it were a part of him, sewn into his essence. Bruce wasn’t sure even a bath would help. How could anything that smelled like that get washed away with just soap and water? To make it worse, he must have been a smoker because there was an underlining burnt smell. It wasn’t quite what he was used to from most smokers, maybe the other horrid smell made it different, but it combined to make the man smell like he had died three weeks ago, had been thrown into a landfill, and had walked through a campfire on his way to the diner. It all made Bruce want to gag up the fast food garbage he had eaten earlier.
Bruce didn't want to sit next to him. He looked at the man, freezing his expression and trying to give the man the “stink eye” as much as he could. He was tired and hoped it added to the effect.
The man stayed. It was hard to see his face, which was covered by the lowered hat the man wore and the muck that seemed to be covering his skin. Bruce could see the smile, though. The man’s teeth were so white, contrasting to how dark the rest of him was, that they almost glowed. They were unnaturally long and sharp, like someone had shaved them to points.
Bruce sensed that the man could tell how uncomfortable he made him. His smile seemed to widen. “Hello.” It was soft and rough, a sound that seemed to grind out of the man's throat, just barely preceding a phlegm-filled cough.
Bruce recoiled, but could still feel the spit land on his forearm. He looked down at it, then back up. Instead of seeing a lonely, old man's eyes staring back at him, he saw a soulless pit, black holes where his eyes should have been. Looking at the coldness there, a shiver ran through him. He felt a hand reaching into his chest and squeezing his heart.
“Truck driver, eh? That's good. Very good.” Bruce felt his face redden, the heat flaming just under his skin. He continued to stare into the abyss looking at him. “You drive safely. Keep safe. Keep driving.” The voice grated to a stop.
Bruce looked down to see the man’s grime- covered hand on top of his, holding it. He tried to pull away, but the man’s grip was like a vice, his flesh cold. Bruce opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out. He turned to look at the man, silently trying to plead for release. He couldn’t believe a man his age was on the verge of tears, but the grip was getting tighter. He was crushing it, the bones starting to crunch together. He knew they were going to start snapping at any second.
Bruce looked into the man’s black eyes again. They were locked on his. Deep in them, he started to see something. It was a red orb within the pits of that gaze. It was coming closer, coming for him. He wanted to run and get away from it, but knew that, even if he could move, he would never be able to outrun it. It was meant for him. He didn’t know how he knew that, but the knowledge was there.
When the orb reached the crest of the man’s eyes, a searing pain shot through Bruce's temple. It burned his vision, and all he could see was a white haze flash before him. The pain drilled into his head. He eyes hurt so much, he had to force them shut, clenching them closed so tightly, he could feel tears trying to leak out from the sides.
“Here ya go hun.” the waitress called and slammed the plate down onto the counter. Bruce opened his eyes, the pain fading away faster than it had come, his sight returning to normal.
The waitress walked away. She didn't seem to care about how strange he had been acting. He could only assume how odd it must have looked with him sitting there with his eyes tightly clenched. She hadn't even looked twice, probably because of the things she saw there on any given night. It was just another day, par for the course.
“Drive safely. Keep driving-” The man was saying.
“Who are you?” Bruce stuttered, briefly breaking through the mojo as he tried to push back the pain splitting through his head.
“You can call me...” It looked like the man has to think about his own name, but then with a smile he looked back to Bruce. “You can call me Mr. Burns. You won’t remember me, but if you ever do, it will be too late,” came that voice, but this time, it was in the back of his head. It was an invading thought that was not his own. Bruce quickly looked around and realized that the stranger was gone. He must have disappeared when Bruce closed his eyes. There was only the faint trace of a burnt ember smell.
How could that be? He had just been talking to him? Bruce shook his head, trying to clear it and he no longer knew how long he had been sitting there on the counter stool.
“Hey, hun, you heading down 39?” the waitress asked, as she walked back over to him.
“In a little bit. Why?”
“They had to shut down the southbound. Really bad accident. They predict it's going to be shut down most of the day.”
Shit, there went his plans for an early arrival.
“Well, I guess I'll be heading down 23.” Which meant not taking any time to get some sleep. If he was going down 23, the traffic was going to be rough, and with the interstate closed, it just meant he’d have to contend with more traffic.
He suddenly didn’t feel so hungry anymore, the lump that had been forming in his stomach growing. He also wasn’t that tired anymore. His plans to go and lay down for a bit were fading. He just wanted to drive. He had to get back out there, and if he was going to have to route around 39, he might as well get those extra miles in now. There wasn’t a weigh station down that way. He could just start up his second log book, hiding the first, and run the miles. It wasn’t like it was the first time he had to nudge the logs to make a load on time.
He put cash down on the counter and got up. It was time to get back on the road.
Chapter 5
The itch on Marty’s arm was getting worse. He looked down and inspected the damage he was doing by scratching it. He noticed that he had been doing it more and more, the pain and the agitation growing. It was like he had rubbed up against some poison ivy. He hadn’t, so he knew it wasn’t from that.
He had a bad feeling what it was from. It started shortly after he had helped lower John onto the couch. He had looked at him for a while, watched him labor to breathe, then sat in the chair to watch over him.
He wasn’t sure what the hell he was supposed to do. Should he call the cops, an ambulance, get his friend to the hospital? Yeah, explaining the drugs would be fun. Not only that, it would only take one whiff of the apartment for them to want to search the place, then John would wake up in a hospital in handcuffs. Yeah, he'd love him for that.
Not only that, it would take John a lifetime to pay off the bill for the ambulance. The hospital was over forty-five minutes away. He could imagine just how many zeros would be on that bill, and knew it was more than what John could make in a year. Not that it said much. John didn’t make much to begin with…when he was working. So what was he going to do?
The heat in Marty’s arm flared back up. He looked down at the red, irritated skin. When he looked, he saw a little spider, black as ash, that rested just south of his elbow and above where he had been scratching. It just sat there, like it was waiting for him to do something.
Then the spider ran, its little legs a flurry of motion carrying it to where Marty had just been scratching. The spider got to the spot where the skin was a deep patch of red. It stopped there for a moment. Marty could have sworn it was looking at him.
It started to burrow into his skin. The sensational part was that he didn't feel it as it ran down the length of his arm, and when it burrowed into his skin, it was just a little tickle, that little unease wh
en a person didn’t know why they itched. The feeling of what he thought the spider should feel like, or the pressure of it inside his skin, just wasn't there.
What the...? he thought, quickly grabbing his arm, squeezing the spot where the spider had gone in. He pressed against it and felt a faint lump under his skin. It moved and danced under his fingers. It went back and forth, and as much as he squeezed, it still roamed under his skin. He started to scratch harder, the skin bunching up under his fingernails.
“Come on, you bastard!” Marty yelled.
“Get out of here!” John rasped from the couch. Marty had nearly forgotten about him, barely paying attention to him now.
A searing pain pierced through Marty's head, shooting white-hot flashes just beyond his vision. His eyes fluttered and it felt like his left eye was melting. His vision blurred and went red. He had to pull his hand away from scratching at his arm to cover his eye as he doubled over.
“Get out of here!” he heard John sob, his voice rising as he tried to sit up.
“I'm taking you to the damn doctor!” Marty said through gritted teeth, realizing he had formed his plan of action just as he said it. The decision seemed so obvious now that he had made it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t just thought of it before. It was still a long-shot solution, but at least he was trying to do something to help his friend.
“We can go together,” John whispered.
Marty’s arm itched like crazy. A fire flooded his senses up and down the tender skin, and his arm hair felt like needles poking into his skin. The burning intensified, so much so, he had forgotten about John until he looked up and saw that those dull eyes looking at him.
He had changed. He saw the pale, skeleton-like face of what was once his friend. It looked like death had already taken him and a corpse sat there. Marty didn’t even recognize him anymore.