Authors: Jeffrey Littorno
Inside the blue airport coveralls was a pale young man with curly blond hair, glasses and a bushy, untrimmed beard. All of him covered in blood. Seeing me, he stood up and appeared to be shocked to the point of being unable to speak. His mouth moved, but no words came out. After a few seconds of this, his ability to speak returned, and he bawled, “I found her like this!” He saw me looking at his clothes and seemed to suddenly notice that he was covered in blood. As if to negate what he saw, he yelled more loudly, “I found her like this!”
In a voice I had not used since I was a teacher, I assertively said, “Let’s just take it easy.” I looked at the name etched in dark blue lettering above his right breast. “I believe you, James, but you need to sit down and quietly wait for the police.”
The young man in bloody, blue coveralls looked at me as if he could not believe what he was hearing. Suddenly, he lunged at me, and I thought I was dead. Fortunately, James was more interested in getting out of that room than doing harm to me. He threw me out of his way and ran out the door.
I watched through the still-swinging doors as he scurried like a wild man around the counter and out of the coffee shop. Then I turned to look at all of the blood. The place had obviously been the scene of a massacre. I doubted that James could have done all of this by himself and that all the blood was from one Asian waitress. The thought occurred to me that the people who did this could be coming back. It was a thought which put me on edge as if I hadn’t already been there.
I jumped at the sound of scratching and moaning from just outside the door. I am certainly not proud of this, but I immediately lunged for a nearby cabinet and moved inside. It was a tight fit, but I shut the door and could just see a little of the room through the small slots of a vent. It was not a good vantage point for observing whatever went on in the room, but it got considerably worse when something suddenly slammed against the door and blocked the vent. I huddle there in the dark for what seemed like an hour although I could not actually say since I was too afraid to move even to check my watch then and it did not occur to me to wonder about time until much later. There was lots of banging and grunting and sounds of things sliding. In a surprisingly calm voice, a man said, “I have to catch my flight.”
I huddled there in the dark listening to the strange sounds and expecting the door to be thrown open at any moment. But the door was never opened. Instead, whatever was blocking the door finally moved away and everything was silent. Even so, it was a while before I gathered enough courage to slowly push open the door. Given the surroundings, the creak it made sounded like a roar. I stopped pushing and waited a while for some reaction to the sound. When there was nothing, I again pushed gently on the door.
This time I managed to push the door completely open. Before moving out of the cabinet, I listened for the sound of the people responsible for this bloodbath. There was only silence. Eventually, I managed to unfold myself from the cabinet and step outside. The first thing I stepped in was a wide puddle of blood. The entire cabinet door was covered in blood and, as I discovered to my horror, so was my hand.
All of a sudden, getting my hand clean of the blood became the only thing that mattered. I scrambled to the back of the room and over to a big wash basin, which was clearly used for cleaning the coffee pots as some were still piled next to it. I flipped on the tap and was thankful for the scalding hot water that shot out. I scrubbed my hand with a brush that had been next to the tap. After my hand was raw from the brushing and the hot water, I felt some calm returning to me. I grabbed a dish towel and was drying my hands as I turned to survey the scene.
The young waitress was on her back with her hips twisted one way and her head unnaturally twisted the other way. As I moved closer, I could see that her eyes were open and staring unblinkingly at the ceiling. I caught myself about to reflexively look up to see what had captured her interest. The absurdity of my action brought a stupid grin to my face which was a particularly inappropriate expression given the situation. Any further expression of humor was immediately wiped away as I caught just a twitch from her foot inside her blood-stained white tennis shoe. The movement did not fit in the scheme of things. Everything I saw signaled a corpse. The still pool of blood beneath her, the sightless eyes, and the grotesque angle of her head all painted a picture of a violent death.
My logical mind managed to explain away the movement as simple muscle spasms, and that explanation satisfied me until she tried to get up.
The young woman moved from side to side and raised her head. Her neck was still bent awkwardly to the left. I was struggling to make sense of what I was seeing when she spoke.
“Wha … what … hap … happened to me?” She stuttered and slurred, but her words could be understood. Her eyes were still glassy as she slowly turned her head to look at me.
I took me a few seconds to reply. Replying to someone who was just a moment earlier to all appearances dead has a way of taking your breath away. Eventually, I managed to say, “Well, I don’t really know, I ... uh ... came in and there was a guy in ... airport coverall named James and-”
“I f-feel cold,” she muttered very slowly as if she had not heard me. Sluggishly and with difficulty, she raised herself at the waist. She looked down at her bloody body surveying the damage. Until this point, I had not noticed that her right shoulder looked as if a bite had torn away a chunk of the flesh and her left cheek had four parallel deep scratches as if fingernails had ripped down the side of her face. I could not see other wounds, but blood covered most of her light green uniform making it look black.
“You shouldn’t move!” I yelled. “Don’t move! I’ll go find an airport doctor!”
I was standing a few feet from her, but somehow she managed to twist around and reach my leg. I felt her hand grab hard into the skin of my calf.
“No, s-s-stay here,” she hissed as I yanked my leg free and backed away.
“You need a doctor!” I cried out as I spun around to leave.
When I reached the doorway, I looked back at her. She was still struggling to stand even as she slid her body toward me. A trail of smeared blood stayed on the floor behind her. “Stay,” she hissed again, but I was already out the door.
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Bloom’s Desk
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Chapter 1
Glen Davis didn’t believe in ghosts. But ghosts believed in him.
However, at this moment, such profound philosophical issues had no place within his mind. With his eyes clinched tightly closed, Glen was focused upon the banging of the MRI machine. The dull thuds did nothing but kick off a new round of the tooth-rattling throbs in his forehead. These headaches were part of the reason he had come to the doc-tor’s office and then to the MRI machine. Next came the loud blaring of what sounded like a truck horn and the machine gun clack-clack-clack seemingly designed to twist his spine.
At thirty-seven, Glen had enjoyed relatively good health with only the scattered bouts with the cold and flu. Most of the other teachers at Theodore Roosevelt High School suffered more from the constant stream of ailments students brought into the classrooms. He had been teaching sophomore and junior English at the high school for six years and had no plans to leave.
Finally, the slab under him slid out of the machine, and the nurse came back. “Looks like we’re all done.” She said trying to force cheerfulness into her voice that only sounded like forced cheerfulness. She was a fifty-ish, tall, unattractive woman who brought with her perfume that had a slight vanilla smell. Rather than having a pleasant effect on Glen’s senses, it only made him aware of the room’s other odors.
There was the usual medical facility tinge of disinfectant and medication. Alongside those, Glen detected another odor. This one seemed to be the product of the fear and anxiety caused by the MRI machine. Whether in his mind or elsewhere, Glen heard a middle-aged man worrying about a newly-discovered lump in the left side of his throat. Then there was a little girl struggling to hold back the tears brought on by being forced into the mouth of the scary-looking machine. Finally, loudest of all, there was an older slightly European- sounding gentleman concerned about the cleanliness and health effects of the MRI machine.
“No doubt there’s been a fair share of filth and despair shoved into this bit of machinery.” The observation was made in the sort of calm, unemotional voice that would be used for reporting the time. The detached comment continued, “Probably not an enormous concern to the masses as they open themselves up to the unknown long-term effects of exposure to this sort of magnetic and radio wave energy.”
Glen caught himself about to respond to the voice.
His thoughts were interrupted by the nurse’s cheerfully-forced announcement as she left the room that he could get dressed. He stood near his clothes on the straight-back chrome chair in the corner of the room where he had folded them and took off the gown.
As Glen got dressed and then left the office, he took something of an inventory of his condition. Among a long list of things, the head pains were certainly something that worried him.
Perhaps the pains were simply the result of having to deal with an especially difficult group of students. Throughout his half dozen years as a teacher, Glen had welcomed the new school year and welcomed the challenges offered by new classes. He had gone as far as letting Principal Wells know that he enjoyed teaching the remedial English classes. This certainly put him in good graces with the principal who was used to teachers regularly complaining about having such classes dumped on them.
The Advanced Placement classes for college-bound students were seen as re-wards for the favored teachers. Conversely, the remedial and ESL classes were treated as suitable only for the newest teachers or those stuck at the bottom of the career rung due to some indiscretion that caused a flood of disfavor from administration to wash over them. The fact Glen requested such classes made him the object of amused reaction from other teachers.
“Mr. Davis, you are certainly a dedicated, caring educator.” Jim Fontaine, one of the oldest teachers at Roosevelt, was fond of telling Glen. The comment initially seemed to carry more than a hint of sarcasm. However, as time went on and the two got to know each other better, Glen thought he detected not simply sarcasm but perhaps some remorse over lost purpose. Glen was not sure whether this observation was valid or just a product of a desire to win the approval of his colleague.
The two usually ate lunch in Fontaine’s classroom. The time gave each of them a chance to take a breather from the focus on students and lesson plans and exams and newly-composed teaching objectives and the all-important Yearly Academic Progress used to evaluate teachers and schools.
Sitting at a long table at the back of the classroom surrounded by atlases, maps, a faux-ceramic bust ofAbraham Lincoln, and numerous volumes of the class history texts, the two shared lunch and stories of lives outside the school walls.
Jim Fontaine had been widowed many years before and never remarried. He had served two tours of duty in Vietnam. As is the case with someone who has never fought in a war, Glen had a certain curiosity regarding life as a soldier. Even after some forty years, Fontaine’s memories were clear even if he was still hesitant to resurrect them by speaking of the experience. On days when something brought the war back to the history teacher, Glen listened intently and watched the change in his friend’s face. From behind the bushy gray eyebrows badly in need of a trim, frantic anger shot out as he told of having to drag fellow soldiers from exploded landmines. The well-worn lines of his face and neck momentarily vanished as he described shooting wildly at sounds in the dark.
For his part, Glen had also done a bit of traveling beyond the United States. However, his experience had been quite a bit different than that of his friend. A few years out of college, he had taken a series of jobs teaching English abroad. The first job in an-other country was in Taegu, South Korea. The completely unfamiliar setting intrigued Glen, and he spent many hours simply wandering around the market area with the strange smells and even stranger sea creatures which resembled something from another world. The racket of the market always seemed to ring in his ears long after he had left.
The foreign language simply sounded like chatter to his ears and the only thing familiar was the occasional “Okay?” which jumped from the stream of noise. And he usually just smiled and nodded until it seemed acceptable to move on.
This life as an expatriate was appealing and led to teaching positions in Australia, Kuwait, and Japan. Living as a foreigner in these countries, Glen got used to being on display as the foreigner. It was like living in an aquarium of exotic fish.
After about 8 years, Glen took another teaching job in South Korea. This time the position was in the city of Pusan. He met Christine in the halls of the university where he was teaching English conversation to engineering students. As it happened, his future wife was taking an English conversation course in the classroom next to Glen’s office. The at-first-by-chance meeting at the canned ice coffee vending machine in the lounge became a daily routine. The two spent a great deal of time talking initially as a means of helping to improve her English and later as friends. As many of the students did, Christine had adopted an English name for her language classes. Her real name was Jin-Young. They had dated for over a year before getting had married.