Twisted Tales Read online

  The police officer tapped on the glass with a fat finger.

  “Mister, please roll down the window, will ya?” The cop had a thick Georgia accent.

  Terry pressed the button to lower the glass. Chilly air swept into the car.

  “Yes, sir?” Terry asked.

  “I spotted ya weaving over the line back there.” The cop hooked his thumb behind him, then bent closer. “You been drinkin’, buddy?”

  “No, sir. I’m only tired, it’s late.”

  “Where ya comin from?”

  “Um ... a party.”

  The cop’s penetrating blue eyes raked over him. “A costume party? What you got on there?”

  “Uh, I’m supposed to be Blade. You know, the vampire slayer from the movie?”

  “The flick with that black boy, Wesley something?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  The cop grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Gimme your license and registration, Blade.”

  Here we go, Terry thought. I’m fucked. First, I hand him this stuff, next he’ll be asking me to get out of the car to take a Breathalyzer test, which I’ll fail, and after that, I’ll be riding in the back of his cruiser on the way to the Clayton County Jail.

  Terry dug the registration out of the glove compartment and slid his driver’s license out of his wallet.

  The cop snatched the items out of his grasp and stuffed them into his pocket without so much as a glance at them.

  Something isn’t right here, a voice cautioned in the quiet, sober part of Terry’s mind. Something about this policeman isn’t quite right.

  But when the cop stepped back and commanded Terry to get out of the car, Terry hesitated only a second before he obeyed. He was a law-abiding citizen, and the policeman was an authority figure. No black man in his right mind resisted arrest or caused conflict with an officer. Look at what had happened to Rodney King.

  “Wait by the car, Blade,” the officer said with a smirk. He strolled back to the cruiser.

  Terry stood beside the car. He didn’t feel drunk anymore. Nothing sobered you up as much as knowing that you probably were going to jail.

  Beyond the circle of light cast by the cop car’s headlamps, the night seemed to shift, like a living thing. Terry found himself staring at a spot in the dark woods, maybe a hundred yards away. He had the oddest feeling that something was out there, watching him, just as he was watching it. He felt the weight of a sentient creature’s gaze, like a pressure on his forehead.

  It’s an owl, he thought. Or a raccoon. Something like that. The forest is full of living shit.

  But he shuddered.

  He was almost relieved when the cop returned.

  “Okay, tell it to me straight,” the officer said. “How much did you drink at the party?”

  Terry shrugged. “A couple of beers. Not much.”

  “That’s all, eh? The punishment for DUI is stiff in Georgia, buddy. But there are worse things than a DUI. Much, much worse.” His pale lips twisted into a strange smile.

  “I’ve never had a DUI,” Terry said. “You pulled up my record, you know it’s true.”

  “You mean, you’ve never been caught,” the cop said.

  Terry didn’t respond. Why had he thought he could fool this guy? Johnny Nabb put the hook on suckers like him all the time. He wasn’t special.

  The cop threw open the door to Terry’s car. He removed the key from the ignition, and then slammed the door.

  “Are you taking me in to the station?” Terry asked. “Aren’t you supposed to give me a sobriety test first?”

  Without answering, the cop pressed the button on the key chain to activate the door locks. The locks snapped down.

  “Do I have to get someone to tow my car?” Terry asked.

  The cop wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher. He hurled the keys into the woods. They tinkled somewhere in the darkness.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Terry asked.

  A deep laugh bellowed from the policeman. Laughing, he turned to Terry, and in the bright light, Terry saw the purplish bite marks on the side of the cop’s pale neck: two small puncture wounds positioned on the jugular vein.

  Terry didn’t believe his eyes. Surely, he wasn’t as sober as he thought he’d become. He had to be imagining things.

  “The master will be pleased with you,” the policeman said, in an oddly formal voice, as though he was repeating words that he had memorized. “Quite pleased, indeed.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going on? Is this a joke?”

  Chuckling, backing away, the policeman shook his head. “Good luck out here, Blade.”

  “Where are you going? I thought you were arresting me!”

  Still laughing, the cop hopped in his cruiser.

  “You can’t leave me out here!” Terry ran toward the car.

  The vehicle sped forward. He jumped aside and grabbed at the passenger door handle. But his sweaty hands slipped away.

  The patrol car shot down the road. Soon, the red taillights dwindled into darkness. Deep silence fell over the night.

  “Help!” Terry shouted. “Someone help me!”

  His shouts echoed into the woods, uselessly. There was no one out here to help him. He was alone.

  Well, not quite alone.

  His gaze shifted to the dark patch of forest that had claimed his attention earlier.

  Something had been out there watching him. It was still watching him. He felt it as surely as he felt the cold October air on his face.

  “Who’s out there?” he asked, in a cracked voice.

  The darkness did not reply. But something out there, a large, shadowy shape, edged closer.

  Within a heartbeat, it was rushing toward him.

  I don’t believe what I’m seeing, but it’s got to be real, because now I’m pissing my pants.

  Weak-kneed, he reached down, and drew his flimsy plastic sword ...

  The Secret Door

  “All I can say is, I hope you do a better job up here than that last loser did,” Mr. Green said.

  He marched down the wide, carpeted corridor like a drill sergeant on his way to boot camp. Mark, pushing the wheeled cart stocked with janitorial supplies, struggled to keep up.

  It was a few minutes after seven o’clock in the evening. The hallways and offices of Adams Laboratories were silent. The only sounds were the occasional squeaking of the wheels on Mark’s cart, and, distantly, a vacuum cleaner humming somewhere else on the fifth floor, another janitor at work.

  The cold March night pressed against the large windows on his left. Mark caught his reflection in the glass—hunched over a trash can, wearing a blue CORPORATE HOUSEKEEPING uniform, sweat gleaming on his dark brown face—and quickly looked away.

  Even after working there for three months, he had never quite gotten used to seeing himself as a janitor. Being somewhere like this in his first year out of high school hadn’t been in his plans.

  “There’s honor in honest work,” he said, under his breath. It was one of his mom’s favorite sayings and repeating it usually bolstered his mood, but that time, it made him think poignantly of her, five months dead, and such a tide of grief washed over him that the cart abruptly felt as heavy as a barrel of bricks.

  He drew in a deep breath, regained his strength.

  The corridor terminated in a dead end, a featureless gray wall. Mr. Green halted in front of the nearby men and women’s restrooms. Light shone on his bald pate; he had an almost perfectly round head that reminded Mark of a polished bowling ball.

  “You’ll start with these,” Mr. Green said crisply. “They’re like the restrooms on the third floor, which you were doing before. There are a total of six restrooms on this level that you’re responsible for cleaning. The layout of this floor is exactly the same as your previous floor.”

  Mark nodded; none of this was news. Practically every level of the ten-story building was the same, down to the location of the soda machines in the vending are
as. Mr. Green had an annoying habit of explaining matters with which his employees were already well familiar—one of the many reasons why Mark disliked the man.

  Mr. Green pointed at the blue door across the hallway. The door, nestled within a recessed, shadowy space in the wall, resembled the entrance to a secret tunnel.

  “That’s your supply closet. The key you already have will fit in the lock. Now, let me tell you something.” Mr. Green cleared his throat, yanking up his baggy slacks over his swollen belly.

  Leaning against the cart, Mark waited.

  “The loser who worked on this floor before you had the bright idea that just because the supply closet was pretty well hidden, he could dick around in there during his shift and whittle away the time.” A cruel smile twisted Mr. Green’s face. “Don’t you even think about it. He wasn’t slick. I caught him in there once, playing a goddamn Game Boy. I docked the loser’s paycheck pretty good for that.”

  There was another thing Mark disliked about Mr. Green: he showed no awareness of each employee’s work record. Mark was a top performer who always finished his restrooms early and pitched in to help others, but here this guy was, talking to him as if he was some lazy bum who needed to be micromanaged. Man, this guy worked his nerves.

  “You don’t have to worry about me doing that,” Mark said.

  Mr. Green tapped his temple with his sausage-thick finger. “The king has a thousand eyes, Markie. Remember that. Don’t ever let me catch you slacking off.”

  The last time I checked, my name was Mark, not Markie, he wanted to say. But he only asked, “What ever happened to Bobby, anyway?”

  “The jerk off quit in the middle of his shift,” Mr. Green said. Indignation colored his face red. “Left his supplies in the middle of the hallway, and walked out. No one even saw the loser leave. I had to come up here myself to clean the restrooms!”

  Mark shook his head, as if this was the worst thought imaginable, when in fact he would love nothing more than to see Mr. Green on his knees scrubbing a toilet bowl.

  Mr. Green clapped his hands. “Now, no more small talk. It’s time to get to work. You’re already behind, Markie, and I was thinking of you dropping down to the third floor when you’re done to clean some offices there, too. You’re so good you can do the work of two people!”

  Grinning like a shark, Mr. Green patted Mark on the shoulder and strode down the hallway.

  “Asshole,” Mark muttered under his breath. Sighing, he pushed his cart closer to the janitor’s closet. He needed to load up on disinfectant, toilet tissue, and other supplies. Once he started cleaning, he didn’t like to stop to restock his cart.

  An elevator beep echoed down the corridor, most likely the sound of Mr. Green leaving.

  Mark unlocked the closet door.

  It looked like an ordinary supply closet. Lit by a bank of pale yellow fluorescent lights, it was an eight-foot by ten-foot room, with a scuffed tile floor. Large cardboard boxes containing rolls of toilet tissue were stacked along the walls, as high as the ceiling. Bottles of disinfectants were arranged in neat groups across the floor, and boxes of garbage bags, paper towels, soap, and other items stood in random piles.

  There was nowhere to sit and play a Game Boy, even if Mark had been so inclined.

  As he began to stock his cart, his thoughts wandered into a favorite daydream: He was fabulously wealthy, living the charmed life of a best-selling novelist. He owned a mansion in a tony Chicago suburb and drove a Mercedes coupe. He’d purchased a nice house for his still-alive mother, and she had divorced his stepfather. Invitations to exclusive parties flooded his mailbox. He did book signings around the country, and at every store, eager fans lined up in droves to get his signature on his latest top-selling masterpiece. He had a beautiful wife who—

  Suddenly, as he was pulling a twenty-pound box of toilet tissue away from a stack, it slipped out of his grasp and crashed onto his foot.

  “Ouch! Dammit!”

  He propped his smashed foot atop the next box in the stack. He removed his shoe and sock. A red blotch throbbed on his big toe. It would develop into a helluva bruise, but at least his toe wasn’t broken.

  “Too bad it’s not broken, maybe I could sue.” He chuckled. What would Mr. Green have thought of that?

  He checked his watch. Twenty minutes after seven and he hadn’t even started cleaning yet. He had to get moving. The injured toe wouldn’t slow him down much.

  He had put his shoe back on and was about to move away when he glimpsed a small, shiny object wedged between the stack of boxes and the wall. The shadows back there were too deep for him to discern exactly what he was looking at.

  He nudged the boxes a few inches, being careful not to knock them over. Then he reached into the blackness, grabbed the object, and brought it into the light.

  It was a Game Boy.

  Frowning, Mark held the miniature video game player in his hands.

  According to Mr. Green, he had once caught Bobby, the last janitor to work on this floor, nested inside the supply closet, playing a Game Boy. It only followed that this belonged to him. No one else would have a reason to go into the room.

  Why would Bobby have left this in here? Game Boys weren’t cheap. It wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot and left behind—no matter how much of a rush you were in to quit your job.

  He peered behind the boxes, wondering if Bobby might have forgotten something else back there, too.

  He didn’t find anything else, but he noticed something odd: there seemed to be an indentation in the brick wall, about four inches deep. The niche began at the floor, and was about three feet high.

  Mark pushed the boxes farther away from the wall, to get a better view of the area.

  Shifting the boxes revealed that the recessed section was about three feet wide, too. Like a large trash chute.

  Mark knelt, and laid his fingers against the depression.

  “Oooh.” He jerked his hand away. The bricks were as cold as a slab of ice.

  Was there some kind of cooler back there? No, that didn’t make any sense. Who would build a cooler in a supply closet?

  He heard, suddenly, a soft hiss, like air escaping a sealed tomb.

  Then, a grinding-scraping sound. The recessed panel appeared to be gliding away, receding into the darkness—as if it was a door that had been activated by his touch.

  Keeping a safe distance, he stared at the portal—if that’s what it was—his heart knocking.

  Cold air billowed from the aperture. His breath fogged in front of him.

  I’m not seeing this, he told himself.

  It was not possible for there to be a door on this wall that led to anywhere. This was the far east side of the building, the very end. Knocking out the wall would place him above the parking lot.

  Yet when he gazed inside the doorway, it seemed to possess depth, as if the darkness beyond the entrance stretched on for a great distance.

  He heard, faintly, a wind whispering in the tunnel.

  He ripped open a box of toilet tissue. He lifted a roll, and set it spinning like a wheel through the portal.

  A few seconds later, a soft thwack echoed back at him, clearly the sound of the object losing its momentum and falling onto its side somewhere deep within.

  As he was trying to reason how this could be possible—and finding no explanations—the panel floated back into its slot in the wall with a soft scraping sound, though the indentation remained.

  The roll of tissue remained on the other side. Wherever that was.

  For the rest of his shift, Mark avoided the supply closet. He drove home in a daze, around midnight.

  The Game Boy lay on the passenger seat beside him.

  While at work, he’d taken the allowed fifteen-minute break in the vending area on the fifth floor. As he leaned against the wall chewing a Snickers bar and sipping a Coke, Sandy, a stout, middle-aged white woman who cleaned the offices on the floor, wandered inside.

  “Break time for you, too, huh?�
� Mark asked.

  “Damn right,” Sandy said in a smoky voice. She stretched. “My back’s killing me.”

  “Hey, I was wondering if you knew Bobby, the guy who used to work on this floor?”

  She fed quarters into the soda machine. “Nah, not really. Know he split town, though. I heard that the day after he quit, his girlie called here looking for him. Sounds like the dude just decided to drop out of sight without telling anybody.” She cracked a wry smile. “You guys do shit like that sometimes. Hell, I wish my old man would.” She barked a laugh.

  Mark responded with an obligatory chuckle, but anxiety had begun to gnaw at him. It chewed at his nerves throughout the rest of his shift and during his drive home, too.

  Bobby had vanished, leaving behind only his Game Boy.

  But where had he gone?

  The image of the improbable doorway spun through Mark’s thoughts.

  At half-past midnight, Mark parked in the driveway of his house.

  Lights burned in the front windows, a reliable sign that his stepfather, Willie, was home, and maybe awake. Mark had hoped that the guy would be out with one of his women.

  Maybe he’ll be asleep on the couch, Mark thought.

  His hopes were dashed when he stepped through the front door and found Willie standing at the gas stove, spatula in hand, cooking bacon and eggs. Six feet tall and soft-bodied, he wore a silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, dark slacks, and shiny Stacy Adams. The mingled scents of Halsten cologne and cigarette smoke hit Mark like a smack to the face.

  Willie had been out partying again.

  “Hey,” Mark said.

  “What’s happening, potna?” Willie asked, turning around. His Jheri curl sat like a wet mop on his head. He grinned. “Chase any giant turds down the toilet tonight?”

  Willie asked him similar crude questions almost every night when Mark returned home from work. He found Mark’s job to be a source of endless amusement.

  The ridiculous part was that Willie didn’t even have a job. Fired from his auto factory position, he hadn’t worked in almost a year. When Mark’s mother died of breast cancer, the life insurance proceeds had been split between Mark and Willie. Mark had planned to use his share to pay for college, expecting Willie to cover the house utilities and incidentals. Instead, Willie had purchased a new Cadillac Escalade and spent another twenty thousand dollars customizing it. Although Willie was fifty-one years old, he got the thrill of his life driving a vehicle outfitted with twenty-six-inch wheels, and mini-TVs in the dashboard and headrests—and picking up young women, too.