Supernatural Noir (3 page)

Her eyes closed as if she’d dozed off. But then she drew a deep breath, and quietly said, “Liisu.”

“There. That’s what I like—when you tell me things.”

Still not looking at him, she replied flatly, “You killed her.”

Drozdov’s bonhomie peeled away like a mask; the face of the shark returned. “Actually,
I
didn’t.” He raised the large iron. “This did. Would you like to know where I applied it? Ah, you know, I think I won’t tell you. But I will let you find out.”

Meyers’s body was pumping adrenaline. Unable to act, he flexed his muscles, shifted his feet. The guy next to him eyed him sidelong, alert to the pent-up energy.

Yuliya Lukachova bowed her head, and her lips moved as in prayer. Drozdov frowned with disgust. Her breathy syllables grew slowly, steadily, into words, phrases, all of them alien to Meyers. Drozdov’s brow creased. The words perplexed him as well. He looked as if he had run out of patience with her, and his hand closed around the larger iron. She snarled strange words at him, and her hand came out of her pocket and flung blackness into his face. Small objects struck him and rained down onto the table, rolling, some of them, onto the floor. Meyers recognized the odd oily coins he’d seen in her apartment.

Drozdov began to laugh. One coin had stuck to his face, and he flicked it away.

The woman started to rise, and the goons behind her grabbed her by the arms. Drozdov sneered at her and picked up the iron.

The spill of coins didn’t settle. They jittered and rolled, off the table, across the floor as if downhill. In seconds they’d collected in a single spot and begun to spin in place. Only Meyers and his guard seemed to notice. Everyone else was watching the red-hot iron.

Drozdov plucked hairs from her head and touched them to the iron’s tip. They vanished in a puff of smoke. “She wants to be on the table now,” he told the men.

A breeze erupted through the huge space. From all around, loose objects started to skitter across the floor. They flew to where the black lump spun—broken splinters from the pallets, broken glass, papers, empty bottles, cardboard and tape, baling wire and small stones, mousetraps drawn out of corners, bricks that crumbled as they reached the spot. The box on the table flipped and the tools in it shot away from Drozdov. A trash container crashed. Its contents sailed across the floor. The air howled like something alive. The cage of the trouble light collapsed, and it whipped across the room. Drozdov reacted an instant too late, and the iron snapped from his grasp and flew behind it. The cord on the light whipped like a tail, and by the time the irons joined it, the thing had formed.

It stood like a man. For hands and fingers it had pliers, screwdrivers, nails, and the wood-burning irons that smoked and glowed. Black buttons punched the crumpled material of its face into eye sockets. The woman growled, “
Nuku-surnud
,” and the thing lunged at the table.

Vasily had his gun out. He fired repeatedly at the creature. It rammed the arm ending in the large iron straight into his skull. Flesh and brain sizzled. Its other arm buried in the chest of the second man holding Yuliya Lukachova, spinning, bursting out the back of him. It cut up and down, splitting him in half, and then went for Drozdov. He squealed and dodged aside. Meyers’s guard had run forward to help, and Drozdov grabbed him and threw him in the creature’s path, then barreled around the table.

The creature tore the man apart like it was opening an envelope.

Yuliya Lukachova screamed at Meyers. “Get out of here, idiot!” she yelled. “It won’t stop now. Run from here!” She stood proud, tall, as pitiless as stone.

Drozdov clawed at him and Meyers punched him, smashing his nose. Drozdov fell against the table. He lunged for Meyers again, but jerked back so fiercely that his neck cracked. The creature had caught his collar. It slammed him onto the table. The large iron swept once around his throat, and suddenly his head was flying back into the depths of the warehouse while the body kicked and spasmed.

Meyers ran.

He dodged past the car and down the ramp to the open lot. He hesitated for only a second before racing toward the river—long enough to glance back and see the thing wedge itself around the Packard. It left a wet smear on the car.

He bolted across the open lot. The thing lumbered after him undeterred.

Soon he was in the grass, up a gravel slope and over the rails of the tracks that ran past the warehouses. When he looked back next he could feel the creeping edge of vertigo from his ear injury. He listened instead of looking back then, sure that swinging his head once more would tip the world over on him, and for certain if he fell the dingus would catch him.

It crashed noisily through the brush behind him, and that propelled him ahead. He thundered out onto the disused loading dock made of old wooden ties as the creature crossed the tracks and descended the bed.

Reaching the edge, Meyers dove into the blackness of the Delaware. Ships had taken on cargo here. It had to be deep enough to dive. He was depending on it.

He hit the icy water and swam for his life. The current clutched at him but he kicked furiously out into the river, refusing to be dragged under. He thought of the girls Drozdov had tortured and dumped, their corpses down below. He swam harder.

The creation of wood and glass and paper and metal leaped in after him. He heard the splash, dared a look back as it vanished into the black water. It surged up once, thrashed like a crazed animal at the surface, and then sank. This time it did not reappear, but Meyers turned and kept going, driven by the fear that any second, monstrous hands would snag him from below and pull him to his death.

He didn’t stop until he’d crawled up on the rocky Camden side. He was shivering. His breath steamed. He made himself get to his feet and go on, up and into the weeds. He stumbled and shuffled and kept moving, and maybe half a mile up found a service station by the side of the highway that was open and pumping gas. He went inside, pulled out a sodden five-dollar bill and begged the most expensive cup of coffee he’d ever had. The attendant eyed him as if debating whether to call the cops, but Meyers told him to keep the bill, and that settled that.

He held the stained mug in both shaking hands as he drank. Two other men, truck drivers, stared at him as they might have stared at a raccoon that had wandered in for a pack of Luckies. Nobody asked him what had happened, as if they knew the answer would be impossible to reconcile.

He drank a second cup before he set down the mug and headed out. The Delaware River Bridge wasn’t far. He took the footpath up alongside the cars passing from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Every few feet he was compelled to glance back to confirm that the dingus wasn’t pursuing him.
Dingus. That’s right.
He laughed at the word, making a joke of the horror, and the fact that he’d escaped it.

The events rolled around in his head like marbles. The woman had created it, called it into being somehow. He’d seen it with his own eyes. Some kind of witch. She would’ve done the same at the roadhouse. Those coins, buttons, whatever they were. How many did she throw at Cody? Why was he wondering this? It was crazy. Coins that brought trash to life.

He was cold and tired, and he’d just escaped from a goddamn dingus that nobody was ever going to believe in.

Back in Philly, he rode the Third Street Trolley to Fairmount Avenue and caught the Fairmount Trolley up past the prison. He sat away at the back of both by himself. It was coming up on seven in the morning. He smelled like the river; his clothes were damp; his hair was crazy. He looked like someone who’d gotten falling-down drunk in a fountain.

He was never so happy to see his cab as that morning. Tumbling into it, he spent a moment breathing in the stale, wonderful smell of Rosario’s cigars. A fit of laughter burst from him. He pounded the steering wheel and yelled and yelled until he’d worn out the terror. Then he started the cab, drove back to the depot and parked.

Rosie would be showing up any minute for the day shift, but Meyers didn’t wait. He walked the few blocks home, stripped out of the wet clothes, and then, in dry shorts and undershirt, he opened a tin of beans, heated them up on the stove, and ate ravenously out of the pan, mopping up the red sauce with a hunk of bread. He wanted a pot of coffee and a steak.

The night’s events were bending into some warped dream. Meyers furiously scratched his cheek. He kept turning it all over in his head. Had everyone been killed? He tried to remember, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe one of the goons had escaped into the warehouse. And the woman, the witch, she’d gotten away, oh, yeah.

Getting away seemed like a very good idea. If any of Drozdov’s guys were still loose, they’d come after him to find her. Or maybe think he was part of it, in with her from the beginning. Sure. He’d been out for revenge for Kid. They’d think that, wouldn’t they? And what about the cops? The one he’d punched. He couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been recognized. And Bulbitch—imagine trying to sell him this story: a dingus that killed four armed men? Twice? Bulbitch had warned him to stay out of it, and unless the cops could buy into witches and papier-mâché monsters conjured from coins and buttons and crap, they’d hang this on him. If he hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it himself . . .

San Francisco sounded awfully good. Bound to be a morning bus—get him as far as Pittsburgh before anyone knew to look for him. Arnie Slocum had moved out to Frisco to train fighters two years ago. Arnie would hand him a job right away.

As he collected his whirling thoughts, he moved about the apartment, got out his suitcase, filled it with clothes. He needed a bath, but maybe not right now. Some clothes, some cash from the bank on the way. He grabbed his tip box out of the back of the closet and tossed two rolls of bills into the suitcase under the clothes. He’d call Rosie from the bus depot, tell him to hang onto the cab, he’d be in touch to work out the details later. Rosie’d find somebody to take the night shift for now.

Winter in California, that wasn’t such a bad fate. Let everything blow over and all the monsters wash out to sea.

That was the plan congealing as he hauled the suitcase into the foyer. He paused to pull on his pea jacket, then grabbed the door handle in the same moment he heard his feet splash and looked down to see dark dirty river water pooling as it trickled in over the threshold. Meyers thought of Red in his roadhouse reaching for a brass knob, blood soaking into the sawdust below him, as the door of the apartment came off the latch.

——

Gregory Frost
is a writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction who has been publishing steadily for more than two decades.

His latest work is the fantasy duology
Shadowbridge
and
Lord Tophet
, published by Del Rey Books. His earlier novels include
Fitcher’s Brides
, a World Fantasy Award and International Horror Guild Award finalist for Best Novel;
Tain
;
Lyrec
; and Nebula-nominated science-fiction work
The Pure Cold Light
. His short-story collection
Attack of the Jazz Giants and Other Stories
was called by
Publishers Weekly
“one of the best fantasy collections of the year.”

He is one of the Fiction Writing Workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and has thrice taught the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

His website is GregoryFrost.com; his blog,
Frostbites
, lurks at Frostokovich.LiveJournal.com.

Paul G. Tremblay

—

There’s this thing about living in Wormtown that my older brother Joe doesn’t get, or he does get it and doesn’t want to admit it. We live in Worcester, stuck like a dart in the middle of Massachusetts. This isn’t Boston. No ocean, just a river. No quaint historical bullshit that attracts tourists. Just hills, colleges, hospitals, and churches, making the urban decay look a little prettier. It’s not a good place to be, right? But Joe and the rest of the local artsy types, so desperate for the recognition they’ll never get, they pump up and promote the nickname Wormtown like it means Worcester is some legit big city that people would actually choose to live in, like Worcester is somehow important or any less damaged than it is because of a fucking name change. They brand themselves Wormtowners like they aren’t as doomed as the rest of us. So I still use their fun little nickname, but only because it makes me bust a gut laughing.

It’s five a.m. I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of Henry’s rusty Ford Explorer, tucked behind Ace’s Pawn Shop, which is on the corner of Main and Wellington. Engine on, tailgate up, interior lights off. Sitting here waiting for what’s next.

Joe always says I never think ahead, that I only use my lizard brain. Right. He’s a thirty-year-old painter who doesn’t sell any paintings. But he’s really a busboy at some restaurant over by Clark U, a trendy place that just opened and will probably close within the year. He cleans tables and gets no tips from the rich college kids and their yuppie professors. Joe has two maxed-out credit cards and lives with a between-jobs girlfriend and her five-year-old kid in a one-bedroom apartment. So much for thinking ahead, Joe. I’m the one pointed somewhere with both hands on the goddamn steering wheel.

My window is down when it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing that I can’t see from behind the glass. Mike asked me to do it. He said pretty please before leaving the SUV and going inside.

Goddamn, it’s cold out. Didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. No jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. If that’s my only fuckup, we’ll be okay. Winter is coming early. The black gloves don’t keep my hands warm. I take my hands off the wheel and rub them together, then I slouch into the seat.

Gunshots. A quick burst of two. I think. Then a third, after a pause long enough to be uncomfortable for everyone. The shots are all muffled, coming from inside the pawnshop, but still, somehow, they sound like city-sized phonebooks hitting the floor after a big drop. There weren’t supposed to be any gunshots. Gunshots mean big trouble. There wasn’t supposed to be any big trouble.

I suddenly have to go to the bathroom even though I did what Henry said and skipped my morning coffee. I stop breathing so loud. I can’t see anything through the pawnshop’s cage-covered windows. Still alone in the SUV and in the empty lot, I shift from park to drive. My foot is heavy on the brake, and I put my hands back on the wheel where they’re supposed to be. Ten and two.

The back door flies open and they all come running out at once, a group of shadows, arms and legs everywhere. No one shouts; they’re not dumb enough to be human alarms, but they hiss and whisper orders at me, their humble driver, subtle shit like “Go, go, go,” and “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

Yes, sirs. I calmly roll up my window and watch them in the rearview mirror, everything happening slow and fast at the same time. They’re circus clowns going backwards, getting into the car instead of jumping out. Mike sits his heavy ass in the seat behind me, shaking the car. Greg slides in on the other side and rips off his ski mask like it’s burning him, and he throws it on the car floor. He better remember to pick that up later and dump it. Greg isn’t exactly known for paying attention to the details, for paying attention to anything. He shouldn’t be on this job at all, never mind getting to go inside. Yeah, he grew up on the same street as us, but he’s loose with everything, you know? Christ, he was just fired from his bartending gig at Irish Times because he was caught skimming on back-to-back nights. Henry was nuts to use him, but you can’t tell Henry anything. It’s his show. And Henry, his ski mask is still pulled over his ham-sized face. He throws the duffle bag in the trunk, jumps in after it. I take my foot off the brake, start inching forward, still watching Henry, and he kind of flickers in the shadows. He pulls his little jerry-rigged rope and shuts the tailgate behind him.

I roll out of the pawnshop’s rear lot, and they’re all yelling at me. Mike actually says, “Step on it, Danny.” Christ. I turn around to say something smart-ass, something to calm everyone the fuck down, because the truth of it is, them all yelling
go-go-go
has got me on tilt. So scared I feel it in my fingers and toes and my tightening chest. Mike cuffs me in the ear with an open hand, turns me back around. My head rings and everything goes white for a second. Mike hitting me doesn’t make me feel any better, but I manage to turn left on Main Street without crashing.

They’re trying to talk over each other in the back. My ear burns, and I’m looking all over Main Street for blue and white lights, trying to stay focused, and trying to think ahead. I yell over my shoulder, and have to yell it twice, “You assholes gonna tell me what happened?”

Mike says, “Everything was going fine, got the cage open no problem, and then the tough guy over here decides to chuck the old man over the counter.” Mike pauses, daring Greg to say something different. Greg is smart enough to keep quiet.

I can see it happening even if I wasn’t there: The three of them jumped the old man at the back door, right? Henry knew the old guy was going to be there. This was Henry’s gig. They’re always his gigs. So they jumped him and went inside, persuaded the old man to open the front counter’s cage. Henry talked to him slowly, calmly, hypnotizing the old man into believing everything would be okay. That’s what Henry is good at. When we were kids, he’d talk us into stealing cigarettes and porn mags. So Henry was telling the old man that all was well, no one would get hurt, that he was going to go behind the counter with him, go to the register and then to the jewelry and watches kept in the lockboxes. It was then that maybe the old guy said something and Greg didn’t like it, or the guy gave Greg an odd look because Greg was always getting odd looks, with his too-small-for-his-face eyes and a mouth like a cut, or maybe Greg got some wild itch he had to scratch, or he was trying to prove how tough and crazy he was to Henry, and I won’t say it to Mike right now, but it’s still Henry’s fault for taking Greg, for not planning for what Greg might do, which is throw a semiretired old man over the register counter.

Mike says, “And when the old man got up, he was holding—”

Greg cuts Mike’s bedtime story short, and yells, “Hey! Hey!”

I’m looking through the small screen of the rearview mirror again and can’t see much, only Greg turned around, kneeling, hands on top of the back seats, and he’s looking into the trunk. He moves left, right, dancing around like a dog excited to go for a ride. Or maybe he just really has to go to the bathroom like I do.

Greg says, “Where the fuck is Henry?”

Great. The kid is bat-shit crazy. Why doesn’t Henry say something to him? Maybe Henry is waiting for Greg to stick his head over the seat so he can sucker-punch him, knock loose a few Chiclets.

Greg starts bitching at me about leaving Henry, about me fucking everything up, and he bounces off the car walls and seats like one of those superballs you can get for a quarter. Now I’m yelling too, saying, “What do you mean?” and telling him to shut up, telling Mike to shut him up. No one answers me. I wish they would. Mike turns around next, but he’s too big to turn completely around. Mostly he twists in his seat and cranes his melon-sized head toward the trunk.

Mike says, “He’s not in here.” He says it like it’s the last line in a movie.

More Greg: “You left him there? You fucking left without him?”

Mike repeats himself. “He’s not in here.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I say bullshit to all that. “Henry? Henry, quit fucking around!” No answer. He’s still fucking around, right? Hiding in the trunk, the duffle bag on top of him. It’s something he’d do. He isn’t answering me, though.

“What did you do?”

I say, “I watched Henry throw the duffle bag in, and then he climbed into the trunk. I watched him. I swear to fucking God. He used the rope, pulled the tailgate shut behind him.”

Greg jams his head between the front seats and screams into my ear, the same one that got cuffed. The ear isn’t having a good time. “You didn’t see shit. He isn’t there.”

“Enough,” Mike says, and pulls Greg back and sticks him into his seat. “We need to think this through.”

Oh goody. I’d do anything for Mike, but he’s more of a brute-squad kind of guy, more of a cuff-you-in-the-ear kind of guy, not the thinker. Thinking just makes him more mad, more likely to start breaking shit.

“Turn around, Danny. We can’t just leave him behind,” says Greg.

Everything I got inside me drops into my shoes. Goddamn
Henry. Him really not being in the car with us sinks in. Henry isn’t here and it’s my fault. But we can’t turn around. “Yeah, brilliant idea, right? We’ll just swing by, pick him up on the corner, no problem.” Then I say to Mike, “No going back, but I’m pulling over.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what’s in the trunk.”

Greg says, “We can’t leave Henry, man.”

Mike is looking at me. Or the me in the rearview mirror. Maybe that me is different somehow. Mike says, “We’re not turning around. You’re not pulling over. We can’t stop, not yet. Keep driving.”

I nod. Maybe I’m wrong and Mike always was our thinker, not Henry. Mike’s right. About everything. But if Mike told me to turn around, I would. He’s known Henry as long as I have, and we both owe him everything.

We pass hotels, the local arena, and UMass medical center. Highway ramps all around us. I should probably take one, head out of Wormtown. I put on the interior lights instead. “Is the duffle bag there?”

Greg roots around the trunk. “The shotgun and the duffle are here.” He lifts the bag up, and it sounds like a pocketful of change. “There’s a ton of blood. Oh man, what the fuck?”

“Did Henry get hit?” Never did hear the end of the pawnshop story, what happened after the old man went over the counter, and then the three gunshots.

Mike says, “The old man got off a shot, some semiautomatic piece of shit, but I didn’t think he hit Henry. I was right next to him and he didn’t say nothing about getting hit.”

I don’t ask about the other shots I heard. I see now what I didn’t see before. I say, “All right. How did the tailgate get shut, then?”

“Huh?” Mike has his ski mask off. He rubs his shaved, bald head and the thick stubble around his goatee. His eyes closed, arms folded across his chest. Greg sits back down, holding his hands out. Showing off the wet paint. It’s red.

I say, “The tailgate. How’d it shut? While I was waiting for you guys, it was open. Like it was supposed to be. So I’m thinking I didn’t see what I thought I saw, right? Henry was hit, got in the trunk, but because of the blood loss he wasn’t strong enough to pull the tailgate closed behind him, and maybe I started moving before it was totally shut and he fell out onto the parking lot. But that doesn’t seem right. How’d the tailgate get shut? I mean, what, did Henry get up after he fell out and shut it for us, tap the back twice and wish us bon voyage?”

Greg says, “Oh fuck. Nah, that ain’t it. Henry ducked his ass out and he’s gonna turn us in, pin the robbery and shooting on us. That blood came off the duffle bag, man. He didn’t get hit. That bag was sitting in the old man’s blood after Henry took care of him, right, Mike?”

Mike says, “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

Greg says, “That’s gotta be it. He dumped the duffle bag and his shotgun back there to pin the whole thing on us while he slinks away. That fucker.”

Mike turns to look at Greg, and looks at him like a kid staring at a real ugly bug about to get squished. “If he did, I don’t blame him. It all went to shit because of you.”

Greg doesn’t fire back. He’s scared of Mike. So am I. I drive into a residential neighborhood and early morning commuters are starting to fill the roads. Maybe that’s good. We can lose ourselves in the everyday traffic.

Greg says, “So what do we do now, boys? Where we gonna go?”

We’re supposed to drive across Wormtown, into Auburn, to Henry’s old girlfriend’s farmhouse. Seemed like a good plan at the time. Now I can see all the gaping cartoon mouse holes in everything. Maybe my brother Joe was right. I don’t think ahead.

Mike says, “We’re not going to her house. We’re gonna play it like Henry is ratting us out.”

“What if he isn’t?” I say. I mean it too. Because it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like Henry. Even with Greg blowing it all up like he did, Henry wouldn’t play us. Henry has always taken care of us. He’s fifteen years older than me, and he worked at the Mobil just a few blocks from where I grew up. Him and his early gray hair. He looked like someone’s dad. He saved us a couple of times when me and Mike were walking home from school and got jumped by these kids. The second time they jumped us, he busted their heads open with a bike chain. So Henry kept us safe, took us for rides around Worcester, would sit and watch as we bent car antennas and broke windows near the Holy Cross and Clark campuses. Henry would sell us weed, and eventually, we helped him sell to our friends. By
we
, I mean me and Mike. My brother Joe didn’t like or trust Henry, wouldn’t come out with us ever. I tried telling him that Henry was a good guy, that he was fun, that he was one of us, but Joe didn’t care, wouldn’t listen to me. He never listened to me. Stubborn ass would pull the oldest-in-the-family bullshit about knowing what was best. So I went out with Mike and Henry, and Joe, he just stayed home with Grandma and painted his goddamn pictures while she watched TV.