Time & Space (Short Fiction Collection Vol. 2) (7 page)

Effortlessly she leaps up out of sight, up into a nearby tree, coming to rest above the prey, her tail twitching out of control as she waits for them to walk below, unable to suppress the joy of the hunt from rumbling up from deep in her chest, making the distinctive hoarse coughing sound of her kind.

The three figures are grouped closely in place, searching for the source of the odd sound, their fear smell thick in the moist air.

Still she hesitates for another moment, peering down through the leaves, making another coughing-growl as she tenses for her attack…

***

The evening news was full of the ferocious vigilante attack on the Laughing Death Gang members in the park–the three boys almost torn apart by their attackers–the authorities estimating at least half a dozen suspects armed with some kind of sharp knives.

Marcela, lying on the couch, watched, but was only marginally interested in the gruesome details of the apparent ambush of the three teenaged boys.

The phone interrupted the program.

It was Peter.

“I’ve been thinking, Babe,” the unfaithful bastard said, using the hated nickname. “Maybe we were too hasty. I’ve had second thoughts about our separation.”

Separation–a temporary state?

“Maybe we should talk,” he continued.

Marcela paused a moment before shrugging to herself. “Okay,” she agreed in a hoarse voice.

“Are you running tonight?”

“Yes, in a few minutes.”

“Good,” he said, his voice rising slightly in pitch. “I’ll meet you in the park. We can jog together and talk. You’d like that, right, Babe?”

Oh, she’d like that, yes, indeed. Marcela coughed, then whispered, “That will be fine, Peter. Can hardly wait.”

She looked down, feeling the vibration, an almost purring sensation against her chest where the silver jaguar pendant rested.

STORY NOTES

Time can heal all pain. Well, that’s how the saying goes, anyway. It’s a nice, happy little expression but not exactly true. Sure, physical pain will fade as the days, weeks, months, and years go by, but psychological pain usually doesn’t go away quite as easily and time really doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s people who heal themselves, I think. Humans are extremely adaptable and no matter what a man or woman goes through, their minds have wonderful survival mechanism that allows them to deal with the pain, anger, and grief and move on with life. We never forget though.

Never.

Marcella Transmuting is a story that I co-wrote with my friend and sidekick, Gene O’Neill and at its heart it’s a story about change. And revenge, I suppose. Bad things happen to people all the time and it inevitably changes them for the better or worse. Some can rise above the anger and turn the other cheek, while others can’t. Either way, they change and become different people from whoever they thought they were before.

When you talk about someone changing in a horror story, most readers and writers automatically think werewolves and full moons but Gene and I wanted to come up with something different. Gene doesn’t like to follow the rule or the familiar tropes of the genre so we settled on using Voodoo as our catalyst of change, thinking that was something strange enough for us to work with. After all, Gene and I are a little strange ourselves. They don’t call us the Butch and Sundance of Horror for nothing you know; but that’s another story for another day…

ALL THAT GLITTERS...

“Mr. Carson… my associate and I have a problem.”

Brad Carson, killer for hire for the Chicago Mafia, was five feet eleven inches tall, and two hundred and ten pounds of solid muscle. He had dark black hair cropped short on top, but grown long and tied up in a ponytail at the back. Dressed in a pullover gray sweater, black jeans and a brand new pair of high-top Doc Martins, he looked casual but undeniably tough. Carson had a real bad feeling about this meeting, and was in no mood to screw around.

“Hey, don’t we all,” he sarcastically replied. “Get on with it fella. I haven’t got all night.”

The man who’d spoken was in his late fifties, fat, balding, and had a flat face and a block-shaped head. He spoke with a slight German accent. The other man in the room was around forty, trim, had shoulder length sandy-brown hair and nervous shifty eyes that constantly roamed the room.

Without warning, the thin man suddenly bolted up and nervously blurted, “You won’t believe it, man… this’ll blow your mind. We found a gold mine, you see, but now everything’s all fucked up. Everything!”

“You found a
what?
” Carson asked.

“A gold mine, man. An honest to freakin’ God, gold mine. It’s worth a fortune. Millions, man… maybe
billions
.”

Carson asked the most obvious question that popped into his mind. “And this… is a problem?”

“No, that’s not the problem, man. I told you already. Everything’s all fucked up… aren’t you
listening
? We go and find a lake of gold and can’t get at it. That’s the
freakin’
problem.”

“A lake of Gold?” Carson turned toward the fat man still sitting stoically on his left. “What’s he babbling about?”

The fat man ran his pudgy fingers through his thinning hair, then held up his hands as in mock surrender. He was clearly frustrated but trying to stay calm.

“Let’s slow down a minute. We should introduce ourselves. My name is Karl Stein and my rather excitable colleague here is Roger Bishop. Incredible as it may sound, Mr. Bishop and I have indeed found, for a lack of a better term, a deposit of liquid gold. Bear with me for a moment and I’ll get to all that. There are a few things you need to understand first. Okay?”

This time Carson was too stunned to respond.
Liquid gold? Were these guys fucking with him? Did such a thing even exist?
Mr. Stein took his silence as a sign of compliance and carried on.

“This began about seventeen months ago, last May the tenth to be exact. Mr. Bishop and I are both geologists who were employed by the State of Illinois to do some research in an area known as the Lincoln Hills Karst. Karst is simply a Yugoslavian term describing an area with natural Limestone bedrock. These areas all have similar characteristics, such as sinkholes, underground caverns…”

“Tell him about the monster,” Bishop interrupted. “No, better yet, show him the pictures, man. That no good dirty rotten son of a
freakin’
…”

“Easy, Roger,” Stein silenced him. “Let me tell this, okay?”

“Whatever, man… whatever.” The thin man shrugged his shoulders and sulked back into his chair.

What was Carson supposed to make of that? Had Bishop really said…
monster?
And they had
pictures?
This meeting was getting weirder by the second. Carson wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest, but decided to stick it out a few more minutes. Stein carried on with his story, barely missing a beat.

“So we were working in the Lincoln Hills region, mapping some of the caves in the area, when suddenly we stumbled into every treasure hunter’s dream come true. There was gold everywhere we looked.

“Not gold nuggets, but something that nearly defies description.
Liquid Gold!
We believe a super-heated geothermal pocket lies directly beneath the cave floor. Maybe it’s something volcanic? Regardless…
something
in the immediate area is hot enough to have liquefied a rather substantial deposit of gold. We tested a small sample, and it’s not pure gold… there are a lot of other compounds mixed with it, but Roger was correct when he appraised its value earlier. It’s worth millions. If, that is, we can ever get our hands on it.”

“I take it this is where your problem comes into the picture?” correctly guessed Carson.

“Exactly. Since our discovery, we legally purchased the farmland and wooded area surrounding our particular cave, and we also received a mining permit from the State. We should be on easy street by now… but obviously we’re not. Someone is hiding in our woods, guarding the entrance to the cave, and sabotaging us. They’ve already murdered seven men we hired to help us start reclaiming the gold.”

“Why don’t you call the police?” Carson asked.

“No way! We can’t go to the cops, man.” Bishop nervously shook his head, waiting until Stein gave him the okay, before explaining their dilemma. “The land is legit, sure, but the money we used to buy it wasn’t. It costs a whole whack of cash to front an operation like this, man. We didn’t have squat, so we talked your mob friends into helping us.

“They fronted the money to buy the land, greased a few government palms to get our mining permit, and bought all the necessary tools, supplies, and whatever else we needed. Now we mine the gold, then sell it to them for less than half market price. They get filthy rich reselling it on the black market, but Karl and I still get our millions without any of the hassles. It was a cut and dried deal, man.
Cut and freakin’ dried
… until that psycho monster showed up.”

“So you can understand why we can’t run to the police,” Stein interjected. “Like I said, my associate and I have a problem… so we’ve come to you for a solution. We’ll give you fifteen thousand dollars. Cash, of course. Half now… half later. Can you help us?”

It wasn’t an easy question and Carson certainly wasn’t going to rush into making a stupid decision. Something about all this was wrong – something he just couldn’t place. He needed the cash, but all the money in the world wouldn’t do him any good if he got himself killed. Whoever was killing the mineworkers obviously was good at what he did, so killing him wouldn’t be easy. And he would certainly be on guard, and more than ready to defend himself. No, this sounded a little too crazy. Carson didn’t want anything to do with it.

“Sorry guys… it’s too damn risky.”

His decision made, he stood up to leave. He noticed the look of spreading panic on Stein and Bishop’s faces and said, “Don’t worry… I’m not the only game in town. Call your contact man. He’ll probably set you up with either Charlie Barnes or Jack Clinton. They’re both good.”

The best action always seemed to get split between him and these two rivals – Barnes and Clinton. Carson considered them both closet psycho’s, but even he had to grudgingly admit that they were damn good at their jobs.

He turned on his heels and began to walk out of the room. From behind him, Stein stopped him cold by saying, “We already have, Mr. Carson.”

“What?” he asked, spinning back around. “Which one?”

“Both, actually.”

“Well, hell… that settles it. If you think I’m gonna go get my ass shot off just because the first two people you wanted turned you down, you’re…”

“They didn’t turn us down” Stein interrupted. “They both accepted. Rather eagerly, if I remember right.”

Yeah, they would
, Carson thought. This kind of thing was right up those two lunatics alley. He had to ask.

“What happened?”

Mr. Bishop pulled a brown envelope out of his briefcase and flicked it into Carson’s hands. Before he even opened it, Carson knew what he was going to find inside. Photographs.

Carson removed the stack of color prints and immediately wished he hadn’t. The damage inflicted to the bodies in the photos was so incredible he could hardly believe his eyes. Carson had been in the killing business for a long time and to him violence was an everyday companion. He’d thought he’d seen everything – until now. Who the hell were they dealing with here?

“Are you trying to tell me that these… these lumps of hamburger, are Barnes and Clinton?” he asked in shock.

“Only Barnes,” Bishop replied. “Some of the other men we sent into the mine, too. What’s left of them, anyway. We don’t know what happened to Clinton. He went into that freakin’ cave, but he never came back out.”

“These men weren’t killed… they’ve been
mutilated
. Have you considered the possibility it might be an animal that attacked them? Maybe wild dogs are living in the cave? Maybe it’s a bear?”

Bishop was quick to respond. “I told you earlier, man… it’s a monster. It’s some kind of kick ass, mother
freakin’
monster!”

“Oh shut up Roger… please,” Stein begged. “Don’t make this any more complicated than it already is. As for your animal theory Mr. Carson, we initially thought the same thing, but there are no animal tracks anywhere. With each murder, we find a set of human footprints walking away from the carnage. They disappear at the entrance of the cave. No, it’s a man all right. A maniac for sure, as those pictures can attest, but a man nonetheless. What if we offer twenty-thousand?”

“I’m still not interested. Goodbye.”

“I’m sorry to hear that… but not as sorry as Mr. Scarpelli will be. He said to say this was a personal favor you’d be doing for him. Of course, if you’re too busy, I can…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Carson exploded, having heard more than enough. “Don’t try playing the heavy with me, fat boy. You ain’t got what it takes.”

Arlo Scarpelli was the head of the Mafia family in Chicago. When Scarpelli asked for a personal favor, there weren’t many people stupid enough to turn him down. If what Stein was saying was true, Carson might be about to make the biggest mistake of his life. He went with his gut feeling anyway.

“You’re full of shit, Stein. You and your little sidekick here don’t have nothing to do with Scarpelli. Right from the start something didn’t feel right about this meeting and now I think I’ve finally got it. You’re on your own… aren’t you? Scarpelli would never let a couple of schmucks like you handle such an important hit. Oh sure, you might have greased somebody in the family to get them to contact me, and maybe they’re even kicking in some money, but that’s as far as it goes. Scarpelli doesn’t know what you’re up to. If he did, he’d whack both you clowns and take all the gold for himself. See you later guys, I’m out of here. Good luck on the monster hunt.”

Before Carson had taken three steps toward the door, Stein was shouting in panic, “Okay… you win. We are on our own, but don’t leave. Just hear me out… okay? Everything else we’ve said is true. The gold is there. I
swear
it is! I apologize for the charade, but we needed your help. We’re desperate, Mr. Carson. Name your price… Okay? Just please don’t leave.”