Anthology - Dark Whispers Part 3

12.

FOR PAUL, THE hardest one was the first one. He found her down in Brickton, near the factories. She was not pretty, and looked to him to be at the end of her days from drugs and too many men and too many pimps beating her up. She had burn marks on her arms, and when she got into his car, he thought: I won't be doing anything too awful. Not too awful. It'll be like putting an animal out of its misery.

"You a cop?" she asked.

He shook his head. "No way. I'm just a very desperate guy."

He told her he knew this place, an old apartment, not real pretty, but it was private and it got him off. When they reached Swan Street, she laughed. "I been in these apartments before. Christ, they look better now than I remember them."

He nodded. "Will you be impressed if I tell you I own them?"

"Really? Wow. You must be loaded."

Paul shrugged. "They went for cheap. The city was going to tear them down, but I got that blocked, bought them up and fixed them up a bit."

"They look empty."

"Just started getting them ready for tenants," he said.

They went upstairs, the green lights of the hallway like haloes around her red hair. Inside the apartment, he offered her a drink.

"All right," she said.

"Need to use the bathroom?" he asked, opening the freezer door to pull out the ice tray.

"If you don't mind," she said.

"Go ahead. Take a shower if you feel like it."

"Well, you're buying," the woman said.

When he heard the bathroom door close, he went and took the key from the dresser. Standing in front of the bathroom door, he waited until he heard the shower turn on.

He checked his watch.

It was two minutes to midnight.

From the shower, she shouted, "Honey? You mind bringing my drink in and scrubbing my back?"

He drew open the bathroom door. Steam poured from under the shower curtain. When he was inside the bathroom, he turned and locked the door. He put the key in his breast pocket.

"That you?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "I'll join you in just a few seconds."

He crouched down. Beneath the sink, a large wooden box. Opening it, he lifted the cloth within. He grabbed the hand-ax and then closed the box.

He set the small ax on top of the sink. He unb.u.t.toned his s.h.i.+rt, and took it off. He hung it on the hook by the door. Then, he stepped out of his shoes. Undid his belt, and let his trousers fall to the floor.

"Baby?" she asked.

"In a minute," he said. "We'll have some fun."

Pulling off his socks, and then his briefs. Grabbing the hand-ax. Looking at himself naked in the mirror, ax in fist.

For a second, the gla.s.s flashed like lightning, and he saw her face there.

A glimpse.

Then, he pulled back the shower curtain and began opening the door to Heaven.

Ice Cream Man by Sean Logan Sean Logan is a relative newcomer to the field of horror. Nonetheless, this tale, upon my first reading, struck a cord in me. In one word, original. Recently he graduated from San Francisco University with a degree in journalism, and formerly served as a staff writer for "Prism Magazine," and has previously appeared in such other publications as "Shadowland," "69 Flavors of Paranoia," and "Dread: Tales of the Uncanny and Grotesque" where this eerie tale was first published.

IT WAS NEARLY two a.m. when Joel Caplin went to bed, and as he climbed the stairs he noticed how low the oak banister seemed. The last time he'd walked up those stairs his shoulder was about even with it, and now it only came up to his waist.

He'd spent his first seven years in this house, which he barely remembered, but being there gave him a strange sense of recognition. Everything was the same, only smaller than he remembered.

The bedroom was hot. Katherine was already asleep, sprawled out in bed with the covers thrown off her. Joel opened the window to let the cool air in, then went to the bathroom. He washed his pale, narrow face, gargled and brushed his teeth. As he did, he noticed a few more gray hairs striping his temple. He grabbed his tweezers, toothbrush poking from the side of his mouth, and plucked the four hairs. It was frustrating to be going gray at thirty-two. He seemed to be going bald as well. He pulled hair from his brush more and more often.

He crawled into bed next to his wife. She was wearing her blue silk nightgown that felt good beneath his palm, so he stroked her side, the curves of her hip, the side of her breast, the mound of her belly.

Consciousness began to fade and his thoughts began to wander, becoming more abstract. Thoughts of the house, the house from his childhood, his father, the funeral...

Music. He heard music. It sucked him back out of his dreams. The sound was faint. A neighbor had the stereo up too loud, he figured. Rude at two in the morning.

The music was getting louder. It didn't sound like a stereo. More like bells, and he could make out the tune; it was "Pop Goes the Weasel," but it was being played wrong. It was too slow and the bells rang out of tune with a dead clank.

Joel got out of bed and went to the window. He looked down at the street below, and what he saw coiled his stomach. Driving slowly, with his lights off, was the ice cream man.

The street was lined with large sugar maples, and the dull-yellow light of the street lamps s.h.i.+ning through their leaves cast jagged shadows on the street. The white trucka"short and square, a freezer on the back, covered with the stickers of the ice creams the man solda" was moving in and out of the shadows, up Evergreen Lane, toward Joel's house. When it reached the corner on the opposite end of the street, it stopped in the darkest of the shadows that sliced across the road.

"This is nuts," Joel said aloud. "What's the G.o.dd.a.m.n ice cream man doing out at this hour?"

The truck stopped but the horrible music kept playing. What's this guy thinking, Joel thought.What parent would let their kid go out for ice cream in the middle of the night?

Just then, the doors on the houses at the end of the block opened. Children, led by their parents, started walking toward the truck. It was a hazy night, but Joel could see that the boys were in their pajamas and the girls were in nightgowns.They walked slowly, lethargically, behind their parents.They slipped into the shadows where the ice cream man waited, and Joel couldn't see what happened there. Each child returned home, ice cream in hand, but looking almost too tired to eat.

When the last parent and child had returned inside, the truck began to move again, the light of the street lamps flickering on its white surface as it pa.s.sed between shadows. When it pa.s.sed his house, the shadows were too dark to see who was driving. Joel watched as it disappeared around the corner.

He crawled back into bed and shook his wife. He felt bad doing it; she hadn't been sleeping well the last few nights. She was in her third trimester and still occasionally got morning sickness which kept her up half the night. She was predicting that she wouldn't sleep well again tonighta"first night in the new house and all. It turned out to be the first good night's sleep she'd had all week, but he had to wake her; he was troubled and wanted her rea.s.surance.

"Katherine, are you awake?" he said, knowing she wasn't.

She didn't answer. He shook her again. "Katherine, wake up."

"What is it?" she mumbled without looking at him.

"Didn't you hear that?"

"What?"

"It was the ice cream man."

She rolled onto her back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. "So?" she said in a tired, irritated voice.

"So? It's two in the morning!"

She rolled back onto her side. "If they want to eat ice cream at two in the morning, let them."

Joel sat there a moment, staring at her back. "But didn't you hear that horrible music?"

She mumbled something he couldn't understand and a few seconds later he knew she was asleep.

He didn't want to wake her again, so he scooted up beside her and held her tightly, like a child holds his mother after waking from a nightmare.

JOEL WAS OVER forty minutes early for work. He wasn't sure how long the commute into the city would take him, but since he wasn't able to fall asleep, he decided to leave early to be safe.

He put on a pot of coffee and decided to get a little work done before the rest of the group arrived. Joel was a legal secretary with Goldstein, Hernandez and Heinzman. His work mostly involved research: looking up old court cases, local ordinances, criminal backgrounds. He planned to be a lawyer himself, but still had another full year of law school and the bar exam and needed to save some money before he could continue his schooling.

It was his father's idea to become a lawyer. Joel had wanted to be a teacher. The idea of educating young minds had always appealed to him, but his father didn't like the idea. "Teachers don't make d.i.c.k for money," he'd said. "You work your a.s.s off and they treat you like s.h.i.+t. Law's where the money's at." Joel's father had wanted to be a lawyer when he was young but had to drop out of school and get a job when Joel was born.

Joel's bossa"the Heinzman in Goldstein, Hernandez, and Heinzman a"was the first to come in. "Why ya here so early, Joel?" he said, way too chipper for eight-forty in the morning. "Trying to get on my good side? Jesus, you look like s.h.i.+t. Come on into my office."

Joel got up from his notes on Isaac vs. the city of Las Vegas and followed Heinzman. "So what's up? The wife keep you up all night?" Heinzman said with a chuckle.

"No," Joel said, "not my wife." He was a little reluctant to say why he really hadn't slepta"he didn't want to look too stupid in front of the man who signed his paychecksa"but he was glad to get it off his chest.

"This might sound a little strange, but the ice cream man came by last night and it was, like, two in the morning. I don't know. It bothered me. I had a hard time sleeping after that."

Heinzman got a big chuckle out of that. "So, you couldn't get to sleep because you were bothered by the ice cream man?"

Joel's cheeks felt hot. "No, no ... I mean yes,but, you see;the kids ... they were all coming out..."

"Joel..."

"...and it was two in the morning..."

"Joel! Go home. Start your weekend a day early. I know you're un-der a lot of stress with your father's death and the move and all. So just go home, have a nice long weekend, get lots of rest and come in Monday, ready to work your a.s.s off. Sound good?"

"Yeah, all right," Joel said, without the enthusiasm Heinzman was probably expecting. He opened the door to leave.

"Oh, and Joel," Heinzman added as Joel left the office, "if you see the ice cream man again, get yourself a Popsicle and try not to lose too much sleep over it, okay?"

d.a.m.n, lawyers are a.s.sholes, Joel thought as he shut the door behind him.

ON THE WAY home, Joel drove slowly, giving himself an hour and forty minutes to put things into perspective. Heinzman was right about him being under an inordinate amount of stress lately. He couldn't deny what he sawa"kids were flocking to the ice cream man at two in the morning, that was not imagineda"but maybe the horrible knot it put in his stomach, the nightmarish feeling it gave him, was amplified by the stress.

It occurred to hima"and not for the first timea"that he didn't cry at his father's funeral, not even when he looked at his body lying in the casket. He remembered that even in death his father looked tense, like he was worrying how he was going to pay for the funeral expenses. The mortician was able to add color to his cheeks, groom his bushy gray hair, make the bags under his eyes look a little less baggy, and put a touch of a smile on his normally down-turned mouth, but he couldn't make him look any more relaxed. Even as Joel looked at that face for the last time, the face he'd looked at for thirty-two years, he didn't cry.

A co-worker had once told Joel that several years back he had survived a plane crash, then, walking away from the wreckage, began crying hysterically because he realized he'd ripped his new pants. Later, a counselor explained that he didn't know how to deal with such a huge tragedy and needed something small to use as a catharsis. Maybe that's what he was doing. Maybe he was incapable of expressing himself at his father's funeral, and now he was using the ice cream man to let out his emotions.

He was probably more surprised to find out about the old house than his father's death. When Joel was seven, his father was promoted to vice president of Dylan Palms Realty, so they sold the family home and moved to San Francisco. Twenty-five years later he found out he had inherited the old house. His father had held onto it all those years and now it was his, and with the baby coming, the timing was perfect. The paperwork took about five weeks, but Wednesday when it all went through, they began moving in.

The house was s.p.a.cious, a beautiful two-story Victorian with a big back yard, and in a nice neighborhood. Or, at least, it seemed like a nice neighborhood. Joel was beginning to have his doubts.

JOEL DREADED GOING to bed that night. He went to bed early with his wife, so that if the ice cream man did return, he wouldn't have to know about it.

He kept his mind occupied by rubbing the mound of his wife's stomach, thinking of the son he would have in less than three months, imagining him growing up to be a teacher like he never was. Soon his thoughts sank into dreams.

At some point in the night his dreams were interrupted by the sound of bells. They pulled him from the comfort of his dreams like a doctor pulling a baby from his mother's womb. He opened his eyes, knowing that again there would be no sleeping. He went to the window. How his wife could sleep through that wretched music, he had no idea. It was another hazy night, but he could see the ice cream truck driving up the street toward him. It stopped deep in the shadow of a large maple tree, halfway up the block. Just as before, the children from the surrounding houses were led out by their parents. And also just as before, Joel found the whole scene horribly disturbing. What the h.e.l.l were these parents doing? These kids should be in bed.

He was seized by a sense of responsibility. He should go down and find out just what the h.e.l.l was wrong with these people. He pulled on his black terry cloth robe and his leather slippers.

He trotted downstairs and when he went outside he realized that the fog looked much thicker from the street. He could no longer see the truck up the street, but he could follow the music; it seemed even louder now and each dull clank set his nerves on end. He remembered singing the song as a child...

A penny for a spool of thread, a penny for a needle; that's the way our money goesa"

POP! goes the weasel.

EVEN AS A kid, Joel hadn't liked the song, but now, being played so slow, being played wrong, it was much worse.

He walked toward the sound of the music, toward the shadow up the street. He saw a tall, gray-haired man walking in the same direction, so Joel decided to follow. The man was holding a young boy's hand, giving an occasional tug on the arm when his pace slowed. The boy was wearing light blue pajamas adorned with cartoon elephants and several sizes too large. The feet of the pajamas ended a few inches beyond his toes and curled under his feet as he walked. The boy's head hung forward, bobbing occasionally, as if he were falling asleep.

The fog was dense and Joel had to draw close to the pair to keep from losing them, but then a breeze came through, clearing much of the haze. The man, now just a couple feet in front of him, spun around. His face was hard and square, teeth clenched, jaw taut. His eyebrows were big gray bushes and his eyes were squinted in a scowl that petrified Joel.

The man's son turned around too, and Joel swore that the boy was asleep. His eyes looked completely closed and his head hung loose on his neck, as if the muscles no longer worked there.

Joel couldn't move. The thought hadn't even occurred to him to do so.

The breeze died and the fog returned, swallowing the man and his son, but Joel didn't follow. The thin slits of the man's eyes, his hard expression, left Joel frozen.

He stood motionless for a few moments, then heard the bells begin to fade. He didn't hear the truck's engine as it drove off, only the sound of the bells getting more and more quiet until nothing was left but the sound of the wind whistling quietly in his ears. He pulled his robe tighter around him as another strong breeze pa.s.sed through, clearing the fog, and revealing to Joel that he was now standing in the middle of the street completely alone.