As I Die Lying

This book has been rejected 117 times, and
it’s all the fault of that evil soul-hopping spirit in Richard
Coldiron’s head. Or maybe the other four people in there. By Scott
Nicholson

AS I DIE LYING

By Scott Nicholson

Writing as Richard Coldiron

Or Maybe the Evil Spirit That Possessed Them
Both

Copyright © 2010 Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Books at
Smashwords

www.hauntedcomputer.com

OTHER BOOKS BY SCOTT NICHOLSON

Speed Dating with the Dead

The Red Church

The Skull Ring

Drummer Boy

Forever Never Ends

Disintegration

As I Die Lying

Burial to Follow

Flowers

Ashes

The First

Gateway Drug

Murdermouth: Zombie Bits

Transparent Lovers

Creative Spirit

Troubled

Solom

They Hunger

OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD COLDIRON:

None.

If there were, Scott Nicholson stole them.
After he killed Richard.

Richard Coldiron was
rumored to have completed a draft of the sequel,
The Tao of Boo
.

We’ll see.

CHAPTER ONE

Begin at the beginning.

In an autobiography, that means you have to
relive your life. And that’s the last thing I want to do. Once was
more than enough. And five times was far too many.

Unless it’s six, in which case all that
follows was written by that other guy, the one trying to hitchhike
my story and make me sound worse than I really am. If he wasn’t
such a lousy writer, this would have been published long ago and we
wouldn’t have gotten to the end. Some of us might have lived
happily ever after.

Rest assured, anytime I look cruel, inept, or
sociopathic in this story, it’s because he’s changed things around.
He wants a fall guy so he can get away with murder. My murder.
Maybe your murder, too.

So I look for evidence. Everything else is
just metaphysical tourism.

Photographs and locks of hair, pressed
flowers and postcards, teddy bears and blue ribbons. Memories,
souvenirs, keepsakes, and your girlfriend’s big toe. Old love
letters and other horrors, agonies, scars. Why do we hoard such
things?

I’ve come to believe it’s because we need
proof.

History, even revisionist history, is written
by the winners. So if you want to tell the whole story, the true
story, get it out there yourself and make everyone believe. With
luck and a shrewd marketing push, it’s a bestseller. If you’re
pathetic, you’re filed in Self-Help. If this book is published
under the last name “Zwiecker” and ends up on the bottom shelf in
the fantasy section, then you'll know he’s won.

Publish or perish, they say. We plan to do
both, though we’re not sure in which order.

So when I begin at the beginning, I’ll skip
the part where Mother bled between her legs and Daddy was sitting
on the couch with a bottle of Jack as I squirted into Ottaqua,
Iowa, like a bloody watermelon seed.

Ray Bradbury claims to remember being born.
He’s a great writer, but that’s total bullshit. Nobody remembers,
but people treat it like it’s a big deal. You carry your birth date
around all your life and it nails you to Social Security cards,
party invitations, and all those forms you fill out in school.
Then, on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space
to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels in a set of
meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name
of your favorite candy.

In the end, all you get is a few words.

This is all the proof I can offer:

I was on my hands and knees when memory
cursed me, awareness laughed in my face, and ego slipped into my
head like an ice cream ghost. Light streamed through the window,
golden and warm. Light was good. Light was safe, even though it
tasted like dust.

The brown thing was in the shadows. It was
soft and smelled like Mother, all cigarettes and Ivory soap and
things beyond my vocabulary like “senescence.” My arms and legs
wriggled toward the brown thing, my belly skinning across the
floor. I reached the shadow. My fingers closed on the fur and I was
pulling it closer when the boot came down on my hand.

My hand was on fire and my eyes were sparks
and my chest was a Play-Doh volcano. The boot stretched out and up
into the dark, taller than a tree. It was a man built of midnight
and stitches and thunder. He bent down and picked up the brown
thing. His boots shook the floor as he stomped into the light but
all I could see was the scuffed leather, worn laces, and cracked
tongue of the boot near my face.

Then the boots danced. They licked me and
painted me with bright strips of color. The thunder waltzed me away
from my room to a land that light never reached.

But I wasn’t alone.

“
Hello,” the boy said. Like
the midnight man, the boy clung to the shadows. He might have been
there the whole time and I hadn’t seen him.

“
Who are you?”

“
A friend.”

“
I don’t like friends.” I
put my hand in my mouth and tried to suck the sore away.

“
Chin up, pup. He’s gone
now.”

The boy sounded brave, plus I had nowhere
else to run. “Did you send him away?”

“
No, I dragged you in here
where it’s safe.”

“
Where are we?”

“
I call it the Bone
House.”

“
It’s dark.”

“
Here’s your teddy bear.” He
held it out to me.

I grabbed it and brushed its soft fabric
against my cheek until my tears were cold.

“
Do you trust me?” my friend
said.

I nodded, not sure if he could see me.

“
Okay,” he said. “You have
to leave the Bone House now, but I’ll be here to help whenever you
need me.”

“
Promise?”

“
Cross my heart and hope to
die.”

And he kept his promise, except that “hoping
to die” part. The boy learned how to hide me when we heard the
boots in the hallway. Into the closet, buried under broken toys and
dirty blankets and a Big Bird poster. Under the bed, cuddling dust
bunnies with my nose as the boots walked across the floor, inches
from my face. Behind the desk, chewing my lip, afraid to breathe
until the midnight man gave up and shambled off to find Mother
instead.

When I heard the boots in the kitchen, the
King Kong roar and shattering of glass, Mother's high squeaking
Godzilla cries, I knew I had escaped again. The boots stomped until
they grew tired, until the thunder spent its fury. Then my friend
and I would share a smile. We had lived to hide another day.

My friend taught me a simple game.

Dodge the boots.

Run and hide.

Become invisible when you could, hold your
breath when you couldn’t.

But nobody wins the game every time. And the
odds favored the midnight man. He seemed to grow taller and
stronger and darker the better we got at hiding. When he found me,
plucked me out of my corners and nooks, held me up with a thick
trembling arm, then I knew it was time to let my friend have this
body. My friend would take the punishment while I went away to the
Bone House. I hate to say it, but I think he even liked it a
little.

I’d watch from the window as
the boots did their dance, crushed a minuet across my friend's
legs, waltzed over his kidneys, and jitterbugged up his spine. I
knew it was
me
being beaten,
my
bruised flesh that I would eventually revisit, but at least I
didn't have to suffer. My friend did that for me. That's how much
my friend loved me.

We would talk, after. He would give me back
my body, with its red welts and pink scrapes, and go into his
hidden room in the Bone House. Since it hurt to move, I would
huddle in my squeaky bed with my teddy bear. I tasted salt and
sometimes blood. My friend would whisper soothing words inside my
head.

"You're okay now, Richard. Midnight is
over."

I trembled. For both of us.

"Did you hear the front door slam?" he
said.

I nodded, hugging the raw meat of my legs to
my chest as the plains wind banged against the windows. Any storm
was welcome as long as it hid the sound of boots.

"He’s gone. You can breathe again."

“
Thanks.”

“
That’s why I’m
here.”

My friend didn't have a name back then. There
was only us. He didn't need a name until later, when things got
more complicated and the Bone House became crowded. But I can tell
you the teddy bear was named Wee Willie Winky because one of his
eyes was stitched too tightly. And my name was Richard. I forgot to
tell you that, but you can see it on the cover of the book, unless
that other guy changed it.

"Did he hurt you bad?" Secretly, I was glad
it was him instead of me.

"Not so bad, this time. Not like the time
when the two teeth got loose and I bit my tongue. That time, even
your mother got scared."

"Yeah, remember how she pushed the midnight
man away and picked you up?” I said. “With your arm bent out at
that funny angle, like you had an extra elbow? That was the only
time she ever tried to stop him."

"They were nice to me at the hospital. They
gave me a lollipop, and that pretty nurse said she'd never seen
such a brave young man."

I wished I’d been around for that lollipop.
Maybe he’d tricked me so he could have the lollipop instead of me.
"What does 'brave' mean?"

"It's when bad things happen and you don't
cry." He’d probably learned that from a book in school, or maybe
church, or that one time we went to a Boy Scout meeting.

"Are you brave?"

"I don't know. But when they asked me how it
happened, I said it just the way Mother told me. She made me keep
saying it over and over in the car. 'I fell down the steps, and put
out my arm to stop.'"

"Why did she want you to make up a story like
that?" I didn’t care why, but this was my friend and I liked the
way he talked. Plus he was sharing a very important lesson in how
to lie, and what boy could resist such a thing?

"It wasn't a story. You know how she says if
you believe something hard enough, you can make it true? Well, she
wanted that story to be true. She believed it more."

I pulled the blankets tight under my chin.
The fabric was scratchy, like Father's cheeks. "Do you remember
what really happened?"

“
I didn't hide good enough,
that's all."

"Sometimes, just before he goes to sleep, or
when he's on the couch watching TV, he makes me take the boots off
his feet. They're not so scary when they're off.”

“
Tongues hanging out. Tired
dogs. But they sure are stinky. Wee willie stinky."

I looked up at the ceiling, at the shadows of
trees dancing in front of the streetlights. The room smelled of
purple Kool-Aid and old socks and rats behind the walls, and
sometimes I prayed to Jesus for clean laundry. If my friend wasn’t
around, I’d sometimes throw in a prayer for candy or a Matchbox
car. But the ceiling was in the way, so I couldn’t see the sky or
heaven. "Maybe one night we could hide the boots after he's
asleep.”

"Then he'd really be mad,” the voice said.
Sometimes my friend spoke out loud instead of just thinking it, and
that was a little scary until I got used to it. I’m glad it didn’t
happen when other people were around. Not often, anyway.

“
Maybe it's the boots that
make him mad.”

"Maybe,” he said. “It's stupid to be
brave."

"Does Mother hate the boots?" I asked
questions I was afraid to answer. He never minded when I tricked
him into telling the truth once in a while.

"I don't know. She keeps telling the midnight
man 'I love you.'"

"Maybe there are different
kinds of love. She likes to hold me and sing to me. She says she
loves me and kisses me on the forehead and tucks me under the
blankets even when she knows the midnight man is coming. Even when
she
knows
he's got
his boots on."

"Maybe he would hurt her more if she didn't
love him, so she's afraid to stop."

I swallowed hard. Darkness crawled in from
the corners, its edges sharp. I put my head under the pillow. Love
was easy when it was just some invisible person in your head, but
when you had to pretend to love in the real world, who wouldn’t be
a little crazy and afraid? "Love means you have to be brave?"

“
Sometimes your mother cries
when she says she loves you. That means she's either lying or she's
not brave."