Voices From The Other Side Page 8

  They were feeding.

  Arlene on a green tricycle . . . gone.

  Arlene crying over Barbie’s lost shoe . . . gone.

  Arlene on the porch in her prom dress . . . gone.

  Arlene standing at the altar, two months late.... Arlene at the clinic, her heels in the stirrups . . . Arlene driving to the ocean . . . Arlene at home in a bar at work in class alone together, happy and sad and afraid and angry and all the things that made Arlene gone, gone, gone . . . consumed.

  Sucked away. Sucked dry.

  Gone.

  A sickening heat filled her like black fire as the thing called Talbot arched against her and splattered his juices down her throat. She struggled and heaved and swallowed, delirious with terror and arousal, as the heat reached the bottom of her spine and she came again, bursting, gagging, and again and again, until all that was left of her was the devouring darkness and the shudder of her own febrile flesh.

  His legs still locked around her head, his muscular arms tight as a vise around her hips, Talbot plunged his tongue into her, tasting every bit of her, savoring her . . .

  There was no escape.

  He curled around her like some great pale spider, and fed.

  The two men stood at the foot of the bed.

  “Christ! Can’t you cover her up or something?”

  Piazzo, the hotel manager, a gray-templed company man, was anxious. Marcus, his chief of security and younger by a score of years, was baffled. And amazed.

  The woman who had been Arlene sat cross-legged on the bed, still naked, laughing softly at the shadows that fell across her body when she thrust her hands into the sunlight. There in the emptied room, there was no clue as to who she was or how she’d come to be there. She had no clothing, no money, no identification . . .

  And no memory.

  Marcus had already been over this once.

  “And no, I can’t cover her up,” he added. “She don’t like clothes. I tried to give her my jacket, but she just tossed it back at me.”

  Piazzo was at his wits’ end. He had no idea what to do. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen at his hotel, certainly not during his shift.

  “So, run this by me again.”

  “What, you tryin’ not to get a hard-on? I told you . . .”

  “Tell me again!”

  Marcus shook his head and reached for his notebook. Nine years in uniform as a Chicago beat cop had taught him to always take notes. He flipped to the page, licked his lips and began to read.

  “Housekeeping found her around eleven twenty. Therese, the new girl. She called down at . . . eleven twenty-eight, requested Security and . . .”

  “I got all that. The room. Who rented the room?”

  “Wait. Okay, here. The room was registered to one ‘Ingemar Johansson’ ten days ago. He gave us a valid Iowa driver’s license and paid up front, in cash. White male, forty-two . . .”

  “Ingemar Johansson? The boxer?” The manager groaned, incredulous. “God damnit! Who was on the front desk?”

  “Goddamnit!” the naked woman on the bed repeated.

  “Y’see that? That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” Marcus looked up from his notes, nodded toward her. “When I first get up here, she was out, limp like a wet shirt. Thought she was an OD, ready for a bag. Now, she’s laughin’ and talkin’. An’ look at her, she knows we’re talkin’ about her. She’s like a sponge, soakin’ it all in.”

  “A sponge. She . . .” the woman echoed, then knitted her brow, concentrating, “I . . . am like . . . a sponge.”

  “That’s right, gorgeous.” The ex-cop eyed her, noting her fit, muscular body and flawless, unblemished skin. This chick was hot. He figured she couldn’t be more than twenty-two, twenty-five at the most. “A big, fucking, beautiful sponge.”

  “Beautiful,” she repeated, and her smile reached her eyes.

  His stomach gurgled softly.

  As he dropped his bags on the bed, in a hotel room a thousand miles away, Talbot thought about hunger. He would have another week’s respite, ten days perhaps, before the hunt would begin again. The moon would fill and call his nature, and the hunger would rise within him. Again.

  Locate. Isolate. Predate.

  He moved to the window and looked into the distance. The light of the waning moon filled the city streets.

  There was consolation in knowing he was more than a mere predator. He left his prey alive; changed irrevocably, but alive. His kiss brought not death, but transformation. And that was consolation enough.

  Soon. Soon, it would begin. The hunt would begin again. And he would find himself once more in the darkness, locked in that cruel embrace that left nothing behind, that swallowed whole all memory and vicissitudes and pain.

  Yes, pain. He knew all about pain.

  It was sweet.

  Wilson’s Pawn & Loan

  L. R. Giles

  Eddie dug through a dark cabinet filled with dust bunnies and things that scuttle. He found a shoe box of long-forsaken knickknacks and brought it to the scratched-and-scarred countertop so the woman could see that he was looking.

  “Oh, is it in there?” She dabbed tears from her eyes with a mangled Kleenex.

  “I hope so. Maybe.” It was the truth and a lie. He did hope he found her locket. But, judging from past experience, it was likely—damn near certain—that this woman’s property was sitting in some second-rate jewelry shop on the other side of the world, if not around the neck of a new owner.

  He continued sifting through broken children’s toys, cheap gold-plated bracelets, a rusty tin police badge and other odd things he never imagined his father would pay for.

  Then again, he never imagined his father would do a lot of things.

  Like die so young.

  Or leave Ma with no life insurance or savings.

  Or, by being so irresponsible, condemn his only son to this hell he had liked to call—with affection—“the family hustle.”

  “It has to be here,” she said with weak conviction. “Mr. Wilson said I had ninety days to claim it.” She tapped the handwritten claim ticket with his father’s signature on it for the fifth time. “See? I’m only a week late.”

  For the fifth time, he read it:

  Item 10329754-A

  Gold, heart-shaped locket and chain

  Qty: 1

  His father’s girlishly neat signature verified the ticket’s authenticity. And, like she said, she was a week past the agreed-upon claim date. Still, he felt no better.

  Eddie had been in charge of the shop for the last three weeks, and he hadn’t sold the woman’s locket. Which meant . . .

  It meant his father had broken the agreement.

  No surprise there.

  “Eddie,” Pop had told him on more than one occasion, “sometimes you can look at ’em and tell they ain’t coming back. It’s like instinct. If you got a buyer in the door looking to pay top dollar, you got to look out for the shop.”

  Yeah, Eddie thought, try telling her that.

  The woman let out a series of hitching sobs that scared Eddie into thinking she might go into a seizure. “I shouldn’t have . . . done this. Things were tight, but I . . . shouldn’t . . . have . . . done this.”

  “I could just be looking in the wrong place.” Another lie. He knew where Pop kept the good shit.

  More sobs.

  “How about I keep looking? It might turn up in a day or so.” He didn’t know why he said it, but hope glistened in her watery eyes.

  She blinked away her tears. “Really? You’d do that?”

  Eddie swallowed hard. “Sure.”

  “Thank you so much.” She flipped over her claim ticket and scribbled her name and number. “Please call me here as soon as you find it.”

  The woman turned toward the exit. Eddie couldn’t help but notice the thin patches at the elbows of her sweater and the budding lint balls on the back of her stretched, too-small skirt. A nylon rag tied her hair, and the sole of one shoe flapped like a jaw
bone when she walked. All that going on, and she still managed to scrape up the required ninety dollars to buy back her locket. He wondered whose picture he’d find in it, if it were possible to find it at all.

  Chimes sang when she opened the door. Halfway out, she gushed, “Your father would be proud of you, Little Eddie.”

  Then the pneumatic arm swung the door shut behind her.

  He sighed. “You must not have known my dad very well.”

  He was alone again in a prison of other people’s things.

  Thanks a lot, Pop. Then, as an afterthought: Bastard.

  The blanket of night had been draped over the birdcage called Portside, Virginia. Eddie sat under yellow light bars in the empty store while his mother detailed the minifeast she’d prepared just because.

  “Ma, you don’t have to . . . Why are you slaving over a stove on a Wednesday? I told you . . . Fine, fine. I’m about to close anyway . . . Okay, I’ll lock up and come straight home . . . Love you, too. Bye.” Eddie sat the phone in its cradle and checked the five alarm clocks—priced from ten to thirty dollars—next to it. Six forty-five, fifteen minutes until closing.

  He spun on his stool toward the register. His plan: to eject the tape and do the day’s accounting at home. He nearly wet himself when he saw the man leaning over the knife display.

  “Shit,” he shrieked, stumbling off his perch. “When did you come in?” He hadn’t heard the door chimes.

  “Only a moment ago,” the stranger said. His voice was a mix of Barry White and Darkness from that old Tom Cruise movie, Legend. “I wanted you to finish your conversation with your mother before we concluded our business.” He stood—more like unfolded—to his full height.

  Easily six-foot-six, he could dent the plaster ceiling panels with his head if he suddenly stood on his tiptoes. He wore a dark fedora, and a pale jawline was the only part of his face visible beneath the brim’s shadow. His trench coat was black, its sash double-knotted and cinched so tightly around his narrow waist that the bottom portion flared like a ball gown. Eddie couldn’t see his feet beneath the hem.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, something screamed, That’s Death, man! Irrational fear knotted his insides. “What business do you and I have, mister?”

  “None.” The stranger glided to Eddie’s counter. “My dealings are with your father.”

  Are. Not were. Are. Present tense. This guy didn’t know Pop was dead. If he was Death, or an agent of, he hadn’t been reading his memos.

  Eddie relaxed and cursed his silliness. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but my dad passed almost a month ago.”

  Usually, folks offered their condolences when given the news. This man reached into the inner flap of his coat and brought out a folded, yellow slip of paper. He placed it on the counter. “I have a claim ticket.”

  Eddie retrieved it. The slip was warm with the stranger’s body heat. He was instantly disgusted, but it passed. Unfolding the slip, he saw the shop name—Wilson’s Pawn & Loan first—and instantly recognized the wrongness. It was the ampersand. The “&.”

  The place was called Wilson’s Pawn and Loan. It used to be the other way, when Eddie was still a kid, but he remembered when Pop changed it. An S & K Menswear had opened on the same street as the shop. Shortly after, a billboard went up for the country/western radio show Donkey & Kim in the Mornings. Eddie came to the shop from school one day and overheard his father ordering a new neon sign and stationery; he suddenly felt the store’s name was “too much like the white folk.”

  Still, though unusual, it wasn’t impossible for the guy to have a ticket from back in the day. Whatever he’d come to claim was surely long gone, but the ticket could be authentic. It was the next bit—the item number below the old letterhead—that proved the guy was trying to run some kind of game.

  It read: 1.

  “Okay, man. What’s the deal? What are you trying to prove with this?”

  “I’ve come to claim what’s mine.”

  “With a fake ticket?”

  The man showed no emotion, no signal that he was busted or embarrassed or offended. “The ticket is genuine. Please collect my merchandise.”

  It was time to school this joker. “Pay attention, okay? I’m going to show you why this ticket can’t be real.” He walked to a slip of paper under spotless glass on the wall behind him. “See this? This is a carbon of the first claim ticket my pop ever filled out.”

  The fedora brim tilted in the direction of the frame.

  “The item number on this ticket is two. The reason it’s not number one is because my dad messed up on the first ticket and had to throw it away. He told me when I was six years old. So, your ticket can’t be genuine. The item-number-one ticket was gone before I was even born.”

  “And your father isn’t above lying, of course.” There was no inflection, no indication that the words were a question or a statement. But Eddie’s mind created its own implications.

  Defensive now, he said, “Fine. You want to play games. Since you’ve got the very first claim ticket to ever come out of here, let’s see what it’s for.” He read the description. “An umbra stone? What’s that supposed to be?”

  “It is about this size.” With hands as ghostly pale as the exposed portion of his face, he indicated something roughly the size of a Ping-Pong ball. “An oval-cut ruby.”

  “It looks like a ruby?”

  “It is a ruby.”

  Yeah, right. Eddie pointed to the jewelry display to the stranger’s left. “As you can see, we carry a wide array of all the finest stones, from quartz to precision-crafted cubic zirconia. Unfortunately, rubies are currently out of stock. Jay-Z and Beyonce wiped me out like an hour ago.”

  No smile, scowl or anything from the stranger. “It would be in the safe. The one in the floor beneath the filing cabinet.”

  Sweat beaded on Eddie’s chest and back, pasting his undershirt to him. That safe was his father’s most closely guarded secret. He hadn’t known about it until the old man had revealed the combination on his deathbed. When he had passed the knowledge on to his mother, she had been as shocked as he.

  Of course, he’d checked the safe since his dad’s death—nothing there but two hundred dollars in cash and some pictures from old titty magazines—but, this guy even knowing about it was . . . unsettling.

  “What did you say your name was, man?”

  Still expressionless. “Check the safe, please.”

  Without another word, Eddie went to the back and into the office. He slid the file cabinet aside, pried up the floor tile with his house key and spun the dial left-right-left. The door swung outward, and for a moment, he saw what he’d left in the safe the last time he’d opened it: legal documents regarding the store and a family of dust bunnies.

  Then he blinked.

  When he looked into the safe again, the air wavered like gas fumes on asphalt in summer.

  He blinked again.

  There was a small bundle in the corner of the safe now.

  “What the hell?”

  He reached for it, hesitated, then grabbed it. Something rigid was inside the dirty cloth. He tugged at the folds of the rag and revealed an angular, red corner.

  Eddie glanced toward the front of the store. From here, he couldn’t see the stranger and the stranger couldn’t see him. Yet, he had a feeling that the stranger would know he’d found the stone.

  Fuck it, he thought. He tried his hardest not to think about how he couldn’t have overlooked this item in the tiny safe. Just give it to him. Whatever gets him out of here.

  He swung the safe door closed and returned to the front of the store. “It’s weird, but I guess you were right, mister.”—Please take it and go. “I’ll get a bag for you.”

  The bags were under the counter. He knelt to retrieve one, scanning the cubbyholes beneath the register while he unwrapped the jewel. His fingers tingled.

  He looked at the stone, the apparent source of the pins and needles.

  Oh, God.


  Oxygen lodged in his throat like a chicken bone; his heart raced like a rabbit in a snake pit.

  The flat face of the ruby was a translucent red window, the window to a cell. In that cell, he saw a small, naked man pressing his face to the glass. His little fists pounded silently. His screams went unheard—at least in this world.

  Eddie didn’t mean to speak. His body remembered how to breathe, though, forcing him to suck down a lungful of air and immediately vomit it back up in the form of a single word.

  “Dad?”

  He stood quickly and backed into the worktable behind the counter. His feet scrabbled at the floor; he was going nowhere fast.

  The stranger extended one hand palm up and said, “Hand over my property, please.”

  He was smiling now.

  At the age of five, Eddie had been introduced to his first can of SpaghettiOs by Chef Boyardee. He had been instantly hooked on the mushy noodle rings and synthetic tomato paste. So much so that when he dreamed, the one constant was always a goofy man in cooking whites with a handlebar mustache. Good dream, wet dream or nightmare, it didn’t matter. Nine out of ten times, the chef himself, Mr. Boyardee, made a guest appearance in his fantasy world.

  It was weird. He knew that.

  He never shared this oddity with anyone and had wished on more than one occasion that the chef never showed up in his dreams again.

  Now, behind the counter, with the stranger demanding his merchandise, it was the opposite. He wanted the chef, prayed for him to come through the door, dancing, with a can of SpaghettiOs in each hand. That would mean he was dreaming. He needed to be dreaming.

  “That’s my property you’re holding,” the stranger said. “Give it to me.”

  “What is this?” Eddie held up the ruby. “What’s going on?”

  That chalky grin widened. “I don’t think I really have to tell you. I believe you’re smart despite the things your father told me. You can figure it out.”

  Maybe. In the back of his mind, there was a theory, a twitching, scurrying thing that wanted to come into the light. Eddie shut the hatch on it, refusing to go there. Yet.