Shocker

by Randall Boyll

  Don stood up abruptly and tossed a few bills on the table. “Just because I’m your father doesn’t mean I have to listen to this crap. You can do your Rod Serling routine on somebody else.”

  He stalked away, grumbling, and went out. Jonathan sprinted after him, caught him on the sidewalk, and grabbed his arm to turn him around. “Dad, listen! I know I’m not—”

  Don spun suddenly and pinned Jonathan against the nearest wall, twisting his arm behind him and hissing in his ear. “What the hell is with you? Are you on drugs or something?”

  Jonathan groaned, but managed to say, “Did you find tracks of a truck in the driveway? Did you?”

  The pressure on his arm lessened, then fell away entirely. Jonathan turned around, seeing in Don’s eyes that this one had struck home. “I saw it all, Don,” he said. “I even saw his truck.” He frowned as a new memory resurfaced. “God, Don, I saw what was written on the side of the van. His name was on it. I bet I can take you to where he works.”

  Don sighed, looking grim and defeated. Then he nodded. “Go ahead and tell me. I’ll check it out.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Sorry, but I’ll have to show you. I want to be in on this.”

  “That’s against departmental procedure. You know that.”

  “We’ll get him tonight. You do want this guy, don’t you?”

  It almost seemed as if Don were ready to smile. He flipped his cigarette into the gutter, where three days of downpour were chugging their way to a sewer grating. The smell of old rain was still heavy in the air.

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” he said. “We’ll do it tonight.”

  Night came. So did trouble.

  The street was named Claybourne Boulevard, a fancy enough name for an upper-crust English boulevard, or perhaps a street in the ritziest part of Manhattan. For Maryville, Claybourne was a breeding ground for rats and winos, derelicts and drunks. A sodden moon hung in the velvet black of the sky on this night, creating weird shadows and apparitions among the railyards and slum tenements. It was here that Jonathan led Don Parker in an unmarked car, with two black-and-whites close behind. They pulled over to the curb and killed the engines.

  Jonathan looked around in the sudden silence, trying to spot something familiar. There was an eerie feeling gnawing at his guts, the sensation that it was here where the terror lurked, and nowhere else. He studied the black hulks of ruined buildings and abandoned railcars, trying to make his eyes adjust from the glare of the headlights.

  Don lit a cigarette, filling the car with smoke. “What does the radar say now, son? On the fritz, is it?”

  Jonathan shook his head, and pointed. “There it is.”

  Don followed his finger. “Over there?”

  “There.”

  Don clicked his door open and got out, then motioned to the uniformed cops. Two got out of each car, hunkered down low, as if expecting a barrage of machine-gun fire. Jonathan got out too, feeling that same brand of apprehension, the sense of being in an area where terror was commonplace and death lurked behind every shadow. He shivered involuntarily. Death was here indeed, and here its name was Pinker.

  “I see it,” Don whispered, cocking his head. “Pinker’s TV Repair. But hell, Jon, it’s closed for the night.”

  Jonathan sniffed the damp night air as if attempting to smell the evil that lurked there. The only smell was the stench of rotting wood and rusting iron. Yet …

  “He’s in there,” he said, nodding to himself. “Watching.”

  The other policemen joined them, still tense, their faces creased and hard under the moonlight.

  “Alright, it’s like I said,” Don whispered. “Just a simple look-see here, no pieces out, no bullshit. Far as I know, this guy could be a frigging Eagle Scout.”

  One of the cops snorted. Jonathan could see the three yellow hash marks on his sleeves, denoting sergeant. He was the only one who looked unafraid. He glanced at Jonathan. “We’re actually here because this kid had a bad dream?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Don said. “Besides, you guys volunteered for this. Sergeant, deploy your men.”

  The sergeant smiled. “Yessir. I can’t wait to tell the old lady about this one. She’ll have a shit-fit.”

  “Just deploy, okay?”

  “Consider us deployed, Lieutenant.” He cocked his jaw toward two of the men. “You two, you take the alley over there. Me and Jones, we’ll just take us a little stroll. Right, Jonesy?”

  Jonesy didn’t seem very sure of himself. Even under the weak light of the moon he looked ready to collapse of fright, but obediently followed his sergeant toward an overgrown railroad spur where weeds sprouted in a wild tangle.

  Don turned to Jonathan. “This is screwball beyond belief, Jon.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Yesterday I might have agreed with you. Maybe I am nuts, but after we talk to this guy we’ll know for sure.”

  “Huh? How?”

  “If I’m not nuts, we’ll recognize each other from the dream.”

  Don rolled his eyes, but headed across a weed field with Jonathan tagging behind. After a few moments Jonathan could see a ghostly bluish light streaming out of the windows of a dilapidated tin hut. His mind jumped back to the dream, the blue lights, the nightmare that followed. He hurried to keep pace with Don, the skin of his back crawling as reality seemed to merge with the dream. The air felt suddenly cold and murky.

  They came to the hut, where the sergeant and the rookie cop were already peeking through the gaping holes where windows once were. Don tried the door.

  “Locked. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Jonathan shook his head, peering inside. More than two dozen television sets were spitting out the bluish image of some gruesome horror show, filling the place with dancing light, all on the same channel. “He’s in there,” he said. “I can feel him.”

  Don was quiet for several moments, studying Jonathan. He sighed and turned to the sergeant. “Break in.”

  The sergeant blinked. “Sir, we got no warrant. That’s breaking and entering.”

  Don let the hint of a smile play across his face. “The place was already broken into. We are investigating an apparent burglary. Get me?”

  The sergeant grinned. “You’re got, sir. Jones, please open the door.”

  Jones complied, hurling himself against the flimsy plywood twice before the door swung open, the lock a chunk of old metal surrounded by splintered wood. They tromped inside, squinting at the eerie light the tin walls reflected from the myriad of silent televisions, and inspected every possible hiding spot. After a few minutes Don came over to Jonathan.

  “I thought you said he was in here.”

  Jonathan rubbed his hands together, uncertain and chagrined, no longer sure of anything but the damp night air and the acidic, burned-electric smell the TVs were putting out. “I thought he was,” he said miserably. “I could have sworn it.”

  “I don’t fault you,” Don said. “I’ve played hunches before and lost.”

  Jonathan frowned, pressing his fingertips to his temples. “No, no hunch. He’s here. I swear to Christ I don’t know where, but he is here.”

  Don leaned against a steel table piled high with ancient television guts. He flipped his cigarette away and lit another. “If it makes you feel any better, we’ll hang around for a while and see if the owner comes back. I don’t say it’s a hunch, though. I just say it’s the least we can do, and hell, what harm could it be?”

  For Don and Jonathan, no harm at all. But for the others …

  … The grumpy sergeant’s name was McKay and he was not happy at this moment. The fact that he had mere seconds to live was not on his mind, for it was not on the agenda of his life that he be killed at the ripe young age of forty-three.

  He had gotten tired of this whole ridiculous search business long before the others. A few minutes ago he had found a corner in the building that went to nowhere, simply dead-ended at a parts rack, and it was here that he paused long enough to have a smok
e and kick back while the others worked this idiot assignment. As he dug a Marlboro out of his back pocket (he would have preferred to keep them in a breast pocket the way most folks do, but departmental regs said you couldn’t have any protuberances in your breast pockets), Sergeant McKay once again observed, why in hell did they sew pockets on the damned uniforms in the first place? The point was quite moot, for at the moment he was straightening a crumpled Marlboro into something resembling a cigarette, death was stalking him from behind.

  “Dream on, Lieutenant,” he muttered, leaning against the shelving and digging in his pocket for his Bic.

  He heard muffled footsteps, coming from nowhere, coming from everywhere. He lit his cigarette, straining to hear. Whoever was walking here had one hell of a bum leg. The footsteps were mechanical, somehow strange beyond the apparent fact of the limp. They sounded like something Boris Karloff would do in a Mummy movie. Stomp-scraaape. Stomp-scraaape.

  He flipped ashes onto the floor.

  A hand smashed through the parts rack, a hand dark with bizarre tattoos. It clamped over McKay’s mouth just as he was bringing his cigarette back up.

  A section of the parts shelving swung open. McKay was jerked backward, his eyes bulging with mad fear, his feet flailing and his face going rapidly purple.

  The shelving swung back to normal.

  Sergeant McKay’s whole day was ruined.

  If there could be such a thing as a dying, unheard scream, Jonathan was on the same wavelength as McKay when the sergeant died. Jonathan was startled out of a weary slouch into full military attention, cocking his head, hearing things echo away and away to nothing. And above that, grim, mocking laughter, as near and as real as the floor under his feet. He sprinted to the other side of the building, following those echoes, following that obscene laughter.

  He came to the short hallway that dead-ended in shelves littered with wires and debris. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as he looked into this hallway to nowhere. He was possessed by the frightful certainty that someone was watching.

  Don drew up beside him, looking puzzled. Jonathan pointed a shaking finger at the floor.

  A cigarette was lying there, burning with an innocent orange glow.

  “Wasn’t one of your men just here?” he demanded.

  Don glanced around. “How the hell should I know?”

  “Wasn’t that sergeant guy just here? I could swear he was.” He loudened his voice to a cry. “Sergeant! Hey, Sarge! Where’d you go?”

  The rookie cop charged across the room and came up behind them, breathless. “Where’s the sarge?”

  Jonathan felt abruptly faint. He grabbed the wall for support, staring at the fallen cigarette and the sluice of blood that was flowing on the floor now, a thin red river that engulfed the cigarette and extinguished it with a somber hiss. “Oh, shit,” he breathed. “I knew it.”

  Don spun suddenly and grabbed the rookie cop by the shirt. “Call for backup!”

  The rookie stared dazedly at the floor and its new varnish of blood, mindlessly staring as if contemplating his own tombstone. Don shook him, and his eyes lost their haze and became normal again.

  “Go!” Don shouted.

  He went. He was already through the front door when Don shouted again. “Tell the guys out back! Tell them we’ve got a homicide on our—”

  But the rookie was gone.

  Jonathan and Don threw themselves at the shelving, tossing junk aside by the handful. The sound of clattering parts and smashing television glassware rebounded off the walls, adding a bizarre harmony to the hum of the TVs as they ground out their hideous porno film with that swaying, dancing light that made the metal walls seem electric.

  “God damn him,” Don growled, throwing debris over both shoulders. “God damn him to hell.”

  Jonathan looked at him, those familiar lines of a face he had grown to love. God damn Pinker yes, you bet. But not quite yet. There was even more to come, once again not for Jonathan or Don, but for …

  … He had always hated the night shift part of police work, and he had always hated his own name. Officer Tzeidszick, a name so impossible to pronounce that he often had difficulty with it himself. For a while, after he was admitted to the police academy, people had tried their best to call him by his true name. Unable to do this, they reduced him to a nickname: Alphabet. But by the time he had graduated and received his assignment, he had acquired a nickname so heinous and hilarious that he had sometimes sworn he would attempt a legal change of name. But that would never stop his fellow officers from calling him … Diseased Dick.

  As it happened, Diseased Dick and his partner were out near the end of the alley on this night, staring out across the glittering expanse of Maryville after dark, delighted with the colors and the symmetry of the streetlights, the wink and flash of automobile headlights and taillights as people went about their lives without chaos and without disorder. Because Officer Diseased Dick was a man prone to bad habits, he had within the confines of his uniform shirt a small silver flask of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes, neither, of course, in his breast pockets. Police work might pay lousy and it might be dangerous, but with that flask and those smokes Diseased Dick the cop could handle any emergency.

  Except, maybe, this one.

  Forty yards behind him a door swung open with the brief chatter of bad hinges, then was eased shut. Footsteps scraped across the weeds and gravel, one footstep solid, the other a rasping irregularity, as if their owner had received a particularly bad war injury. This was not the case, but for Diseased Dick and his partner, it didn’t matter anymore.

  The footsteps came closer. Stomp-scraaape. Stomp-scraaape. Diseased Dick heard this, but had no way of knowing that the feet in the borrowed shoes belonged to no one on the force anymore.

  He turned in the dark with a cigarette in one hand and the flask in the other. Woe unto him if the lieutenant ever found out about this drinking business. Jobs were getting hard to come by in Maryville, and discharged alcoholic cops stood no chance at all. So Diseased Dick pocketed his flask, one of the last things he would do in this life, and tossed his cigarette in the wet weeds in case some fool might breeze by and mistake it for marijuana.

  “Who’s out there?” he said into the dark. “Sarge? Lieutenant Parker?”

  The man doing the stomp-scraaape routine came forward, and in the light of the moon Dick saw the uniform. He turned to his partner, relieved. “One of us,” he said, and dug his flask out again. He tipped it to the sky and let the wonderful waters of oblivion slide down his throat. Everybody but the bigwigs on the force knew about this drinking thing. None would ever snitch on a fellow blueshirt.

  He turned again to offer the newcomer a drink. He noticed that this particular officer had pants on that were far too short, flapping practically at his knees. His face was a black mask.

  “A little sucky-sucky, partner?” Dick asked, waving the flask so that the cold flat moonlight winked on its shiny surface. “Might warm up the bowels on this chilly night.”

  He lifted the flask high, smiling, not about to get into any trouble with that pesky rookie Jones. He was young and didn’t know the ropes. A little Jim Beam would show him the light.

  Jones—Sarge—Lieutenant Parker—who could tell in this light?—lunged forward. Diseased Dick felt something cold and sharp puncture his stomach, but it wasn’t pain, really; more like having a sharp icicle pressed into his skin just above the navel. He opened his mouth to ask about this mysterious coldness in his belly, but suddenly hot salt water was in his mouth, an odd regurgitation of something he had not eaten. He chewed on it, this lousy-tasting blood, his eyes wide with wonder, and then the icicle sliced upward to his sternum, allowing his guts to fall out in a heap on his shoes.

  He said something unintelligible. It might have been “goodbye” and it might have been “sweet Jesus.” It didn’t matter. He dropped down with his own knees plopping into his own entrails, staring now with entranced wonder at the pile of gray ropy pudding
that had been his insides. Then he fell forward on his face. His flask upended itself in the weeds.

  It was easier for his partner. Before he could swing around the knife was at his throat, slicing, cutting, slitting him from ear to ear. He fell beside his old pal Diseased Dick, spurting blood in a pulsating fountain that mingled with the stinking entrails of his former friend.

  Together they slumbered, no longer caring about their jobs as cops, no longer worried about anything at all.

  Jonathan’s groping fingers found a crack in the wall between the rusting metal shelves. He dug his fingernails into it, able to pull it open a crack. “Right here,” he shouted at Don, and both of them worked in a frenzy. Reluctantly the hidden door swung open.

  The sergeant slid out with it. His skull conked the floor with a sound like a fresh melon being slung against a stone wall. His face was contorted into a portrait of agony; beneath his chin was a throat slit wide open. White cartilage glistened inside. Jonathan turned his head, not wanting to see this, not wanting to smell it. That now-familiar stink of fresh blood assaulted his nostrils and made itself at home in his brain. He realized he was standing in it.

  Revolted, he looked into the room the door had opened on. It was full of terrifying occult paraphernalia: pentagrams chalked onto the floor, chains and hooks dangling from the ceiling, a half-dozen dead cats hung by their tails with clothesline.

  “Holy Jesus,” Don mumbled. “What in the hell have we gotten into?”

  Jonathan pointed. “It leads off that way. Can we risk it?”

  Don jerked his service revolver out of an unseen holster under his armpit. “You bet your ass we can.”

  They ran through the tiny house of horrors Pinker had created. A narrow hallway branched off, leading to the alley. They smashed through the door, nearly knocking it off its hinges, and ran down the slick gravel of the alley. Jonathan felt somehow relieved that they hadn’t brought a flashlight along; if the two cops were out here they were bound to be dead.