|
James Delloitte was having a bad week and had his mind on other things when he went through the intersection-without stopping-at the four-way stop sign. A rusted, little Ford Aspire kissed his GMC Envoy on the passenger side, front bumper.
He slammed on the brakes. "Sonofabitch!" he yelled.
As he climbed from the SUV and went around to inspect the damage, a haggard, old woman, almost as small as her car, was already there, a look of surprise awash on her face as she looked things over.
"Are you okay?" she asked in a voice as frail as her countenance when she saw him come around to the front of the SUV.
"I should be asking you that grandma," he said in a voice tinged with irritation. "I could've went over you as easily as going over a speed bump."
She smiled at him weakly and ignored his obvious sarcasm, deciding instead to examine the damage. "Looks like not much more than a scratch for you." She started digging through a dingy hand purse and pulled out an insurance card.
James peered over his abraded bumper and saw the broken headlight and dented quarter panel of the Aspire, but only said, "It's gonna cost you a pretty penny to put another coat of paint on this truck; it's only a month old."
"I won't have to pay for anything," she said sheepishly. "I think we can both agree that it was your fault. You never stopped at your stop sign."
James looked around him. There was no one around, which meant no witnesses. This intersection was usually busy, but he'd left work three hours early for a much-needed long weekend, so rush hour traffic hadn't yet clogged the streets.
He cleared his throat and with a feigned gasp of surprise said, "Excuse me? My fault? I don't think so. You ran the stop sign, not me. And how the hell could you have not seen me? This thing is a beast. Don't you have any eyes?"
The old woman glowered at him. "I have eyes, and my eyes are just fine," she quipped with a voice quivering now as much from anger as from old age. "Just because I'm old doesn't mean I'm senile. We both know who was really at fault here."
James smiled confidently at her. "Yes-you were. You are an old woman who can barely see past her steering wheel. I am a prominent businessman in this town who just happens to employ more people than any other employer in the county. So, who do you think the police would believe if this should be pursued? So, if you would so kindly let me write down you insurance information, we can both be on our way."
The old woman's face saddened at that reality, and she ran her hand along the dented quarter panel. "I don't make much money with my social security. I don't think I could afford it if my insurance went up because of this. Couldn't you just-."
James put his hands up to stop her. "Don't even go there, grandma. I didn't get to where I am today by having a soft spot for boo-hooing. You should've been watching where you were going. Maybe you need to get those bug-eyes of yours checked out." He shook head pitifully. "I don't know how the hell you could miss a beast like this."
She handed him her insurance card and said through a clenched jaw. "My eyes are fine!"
"Yeah, whatever," he shot back as he transferred the information to the back of one of his business cards. "I know a good optometrist if you want to get those babies looked at. It couldn't hurt-especially if you're going to keep driving at your age."
As he gave her back the insurance card, she grabbed his hand in a vice-like grip not expected in a lady of her age and stature. She closed her eyes and mumbled something under her breath. When she reopened them, they glowed an eerie red, only for a moment before their gray-blue tinge returned.
James yanked his hand away; it was now red from her grip. "What the hell was that all about? Are you getting physical with me old lady? Maybe I should call the cops right now."
She smiled at him, a stronger smile than before. "Now, do you think the police would believe that you were being harassed by a little old lady. How would you look in their eyes, Mr. Big Employer, being intimidated by someone like me?"
Rubbing his hand, he said, "Well, we'll see who has the last laugh, grandma. I hope your insurance does go up. Maybe it'll take away the money you need for your heart medication. That'd be nice, hmmm?" He turned to round the front of the Envoy and said over his shoulder, "Get those freaking eyes of yours checked lady. You're as blind as a bat."
As she got into her little car, she said, "You'll soon find out first hand just how well I can see."
James backed up and waived the old woman through the intersection before he headed onward. As she drove by in front of him, she smiled devilishly, and her eyes had the red glow in them again. He'd never seen eyes do that before. Maybe she had some weird disease that made them do that. That would explain why she obviously didn't see him and his big SUV. He didn't care. He'd have his truck looked at on Monday and it would be patched and painted by Wednesday-all without a penny of his own money.
He put the Envoy into gear and headed home.
. . . . . . . . . . .
It was just past midnight when James realized that he wasn't alone in his house. A furtive sound coming from his kitchen woke him from what was already turning out to be a sleepless night. Earlier in the evening, a neighbor's dog had gotten loose and decided to camp outside his bedroom window to serenade potential mates. By its low, mournful bay it had sounded like Lincoln, a black lab owned by the Stuarts next door. His ability to escape chains would have even made Houdini proud.
When it had grown tired of its fruitless task and moved on to more animally-populous parts of the community, heartburn had sent him to the bathroom for a handful of Pepcid AC. Now, almost an hour later, as he lay atop his sheets waiting for the pills to take affect, he swore he heard rapid footsteps scraping across his tile floor.
He leaned up onto his elbows, tilted his head toward the hallway, which ended in the kitchen of the ranch-style house, and squinted as if that might somehow give him better hearing. Five, ten, thirty seconds passed. The only sound he could identify conclusively was a light scratching against the side of the house near his bedroom window from a tree animated by a stray evening breeze. He'd decided that maybe what he'd heard was, in fact, the wind-tossed branches, but then he heard the noise again and was sure it was coming from within his home. Its faint but rhythmic clap, clap, clap sounded oddly similar to that of an animal's paws as it trotted across an uncarpeted floor.
Paws? A dog's paws . . . That dog! That damned pooch must've come back, he finally realized.
It had been such a sweltering night that he'd spent some time before bed cooling off in his pool just off the back patio. Though his mind objected to the late-night usage, he thought back for a moment. As much as he tried, he couldn't remember locking the patio door behind him when he'd decided to retire for the evening. Even so, he lived in one of the safest communities in Kramersburgh so the patio door was often left unlocked but never open. Never ever open. Maybe he'd left it ajar--just a sliver. Maybe enough for some mangy pooch to get its nose in and pry open farther in search of the leftover steak in his refrigerator. Well, the door had been breeched somehow, and now he was being burglarized by a damned dog. It seemed his bad week was threatening to spill over into his weekend.
He cursed under his breath as he got out of bed and groped among the shadows beyond his nightstand for the housecoat crumpled up in his reading chair. Finding it, he threw it on and headed for the bedroom door.
"I'll take a baseball bat to that mutt if he's scratched up the tile," he said as he stepped out into the comparatively darker hallway, tightening up the belt on his robe. "I just had that put in."
The hallway ended and opened abruptly into an expansive dining and kitchen area. The entire space was encased in windows along the outer wall and skylights in the vaulted ceilings above. Even in the darkness, the room gleamed like black onyx, as though it had a luminosity all its own. Although the full moon hadn't yet reached high enough into the night to pour completely unveiled through the sky lights, it took the tree-filtered glow that radiated through the queue of windows at the back of the house and seemed to increase it ten-fold. But despite the sparkle of new tile, polished oak, streakless glass, stainless steel, shadows persisted throughout and clung to the various surfaces like tar.
He looked around but saw no dog-and heard no more noises.
"Hey!" he shouted to see if that would startle anything into movement. His voice reverberated slightly in the cavernous space. Nothing.
Maybe he was hearing things, after all. It must've been that steak he ate for supper, which hopefully the Pepcid would take care of.
Well, there was no sense wasting this time up. He decided that maybe a couple more quick shots of whisky would help him sleep-the first two before bed obviously weren't enough. He walked around the dining table and down into his sunken living room. In the darkness, he felt for and found his coffee table. And there, he found his bottle of Chivas Regal. He might have been well to do, but he was still a man, and men left their whisky out, not put away. Besides, with the amounts he consumed, there really was no sense in putting it back.
James opened the bottle and took a quick swill, savoring it in his mouth a moment before swallowing the burning liquid. While he waited for the burn to subside before taking another drink, he thought for a moment about just how rotten the past week had been, hoping that maybe tormenting his mind would be enough to shut it down and bring about the onset of a much needed sleep. It had started with the break-up of a really good relationship-sexual speaking, that is, though sex was really the only good component of a relationship. Then, it continued it's plummet with budget cuts and the inevitability of having to lay off possibly ten percent of the employees at the refinery, which translated into almost one hundred jobs. And since all things come in threes, he should have expected the accident at the intersection today with the bug-eyed, old woman, though it was her fault, he reminded himself. If she had been driving a bigger car, maybe he would have noticed her and stopped. Well, she clearly should have seen him and given him the right-of-way. And all of those wonderful happenings consummated with the finale of his third sleepless night in a row.
As he took another drink, he turned to look up at the moon peeking in through the trees beyond his back windows--and noticed something odd. The darkness that had blanketed the house-as with most other houses at this time of night-had suddenly come alive. Little red eyes began appearing in the black spaces under the dining table, in the corners, on counter tops, anywhere the moonbeams couldn't reach. They were glowing crimson, like the eyes of an animal when a light hits them at just the right angle.
"What the hell is this?" James demanded. "What'd you do, bring back the whole fucking dog pound to help you eat my food?" He stomped on the floor. "Shew, you damned mutts." He stomped again, but the eyes never moved, never even flinched. Just stared.
It was then that he was taken with the strange notion that these weren't the eyes of dogs, not even the eyes of animals-at least none he'd ever seen before. They were oddly shaped and of varying sizes, but all had a singular quality that made the Chivas boil in his gut: hatred. And that hatred seemed to be locked onto James Delloitte.
A cupboard opened in the kitchen up and off to his right. A glass dish or maybe a coffee cup smashed across the new tile. The sliding glass patio doors slid open then closed slowly, deliberately. It made an eerie sound as it traveled across its track like the sound of a coffin lid being closed over its dead occupant. There were more, little clattering paws then more eyes appeared from around the corner.
When one of these little creatures passed a spattering of feeble light on the tile floor, James could see their misshapen outlines. The fact that they all walked up right, on two feet, affirmed the fearful fact that these, indeed, were not animals. With their molten lava-colored eyes, these things-these eerily animated little mannequins, stared down unblinkingly at him.
One of them gurgled a phlegmy noise then snorted. Another began chattering its teeth, its radiant eyes squinting as it made the awful sound. The strange pack slowly began to close the gap.
Suddenly, sleep was the last thing on his mind, and James let the bottle slip from his grasp and spill onto the floor. He was briefly aware of the stain it would make in the plush carpeting as the liquid moistened the area around his feet, but that seemed irrelevant, now.
He took a step back. His calf brushed up against the coffee table. He reached out into the darkness, found the arm of the sofa and followed it around to the back. He raced down to the opposite end, keeping it as a barrier between him and whatever they were that were gathering at the top step to the dining room.
There had to be six or maybe even eight or ten of them. Panic, darkness and their shifty movement barred him from seeing them clearly, though he was fairly certain that he was seeing as much of them as he cared to.
The queer chattering and clicking and gurgling they made grew slightly, as though they were becoming more courageous with their numbers and with the night on their side. They took another step down into the living room.
James wanted to take another step back but was paralyzed with fear. The foyer and the front door were fifteen feet away behind him and to his left. All he had to do was turn and run, but what he might encounter in the shadows that separated him from freedom scared him as much as just standing there. So, he stood there.
Suddenly, one step from the living room, the group stopped their progression. They all stood motionless, like little pillars, just staring. They made no more noise, and their silence was more chilling than their chatter. Then, with the precision of an army drill corps, the group as one shifted their gaze. They were no longer staring directly at him but somewhere else, somewhere beyond him. Behind him.
The fear that had kept him shackled to the back of the sofa loosened its grip just enough to let him turn around.
The swipe came quickly and hit its mark, tearing out terrycloth and flesh from across his chest. He reeled back from the force of the blow and almost fell over the back of the sofa. It had happened so quickly that initially, he felt no pain. But as he righted himself, his chest suddenly felt as though it was on fire.
I must be dreaming, he thought as he touched his chest and felt dangling pieces of garment, wet tissue and bone. This can't be happening.
Another swipe from something unseen. There was a ripping sound. What was that?
The searing pain cracked like a lightning bolt down his shoulders, his back, his legs. He collapsed to the floor and into a sticky puddle. Was that the spilled whisky? No, it was his blood. He knew that his scalp had just been torn away. He'd just paid for that hair, too. Eight thousand dollars worth of micro-grafts gone in one swipe.
He tried to scream, but it only came out as a weak "Unh, unh."
Something, a darker shadow among the shadows, lifted him into the air with one cold, greasy, claw-like hand around his neck. He couldn't swallow, so he could no longer taste the coppery blood spilling from his scalp.
"Unh, unh, unh."
Big eyes. Big, bulging, vermilion eyes stared at him.
Quiet laughter filled the room from the crew of devilish munchkins in the background.
"Unh, unh."
The shadow-hidden monstrosity spoke through what sounded like a mouthful of broken glass. "As I said earlier, Mr. Delloitte, my eyes are just fine!"
The last thing James heard was the crack of his sternum.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
|
