Authors: Michael Jahn
“Shut up,” he said urgently. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want you to listen . . . will you listen to me?”
Wide-eyed, Magda nodded.
Frank released her, and she immediately backed down the hall, yelling, “Steve! Steve!”
There was a frantic clumping and banging and then Bayliss ran out of the bedroom, hurriedly pulling on clothes. He gave Frank a terrified look.
“Get out,” Frank snapped.
Steve turned and fled the house, pulling on his shirt as he ran.
Magda backed into the living room. “You sick bastard,” she spat. “I’m calling the police.”
As she reached for the phone Bannister said, “The cops can’t save you, Magda—but maybe I can.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, picking up the phone.
“Was anything unusual just happening in here?”
She laughed, drunkenly and bitterly. “Yes, my perfect evening was interrupted when the walls started moving in and out. Then you showed up and spoiled the party. You’re a freak, Bannister. I’ll see to it they put you in a cell and throw the key away.”
Magda had just begun dialing the phone when the Reaper oozed out of the wall behind her.
“Look out!” Frank gasped as the creature slid its hand into Magda’s chest. She gasped in pain and moaned, “What’s happening to me?”
“Don’t fear the Reaper,” the dark spirit said in its silky, syrupy-sweet voice.
Frank threw himself forward, grabbing Magda’s shoulders and hauling her away from the Reaper’s reach. But the creature spun around inhumanly fast, snarling at Frank the way a cornered animal snarls and snaps at its attacker.
Frank took a punch at the thing, but his arm passed right through it. He tried again with the other hand, but that also slipped through the spirit. It was like punching a cloud. But with an almost casual sweep of its hand, the Reaper hit Frank in the chest and threw him against the wall.
Undaunted, Frank lunged at the Reaper again. This time ignoring Bannister, the Reaper moved again on Magda. He walked right through Frank to get to her, and Bannister winced in pain at the sensation. The creature then reached down for the woman, who had fallen to the floor.
Frank desperately tried to grab her ankles, meaning to haul her away from certain death. But seeing only him, not the dark spirit that was the real danger, she grabbed a floor lamp and smashed it against Frank’s head. He fell to the floor, stunned.
The Reaper’s fingers slid into Magda’s chest one more time. This time they grabbed her heart and began to squeeze. She gasped in pain and would have died in that instant, but for an old and crusty voice that came from the living-room door.
“Hey, son,” the Judge said.
He staggered into the room, sweeping his long coat back to reveal a pair of rusty Colts. Still recovering from having been hit with the lamp, Frank could only watch as the Reaper spun around and snarled at the Judge.
“Get ya filthy fingers outta the lady’s blouse,” the old lawman ordered, drawing both Colts at once. The house was filled with the roar of .45s as the Judge pumped ghost bullets into the Reaper.
The creature hissed and staggered back, reacting to the ghost bullets pumped into its body. It fell back into the living-room wall and disappeared.
Frank looked up in pride and amazement at the Judge, who held his smoking six-guns aloft and blew the smoke off their barrels.
“When ya got .45-caliber Colt Peacemakers, 1874, who needs a Magnum?” the Judge said proudly.
Eleven
S
till unaware of the fact that she was being rescued, Magda screamed louder than ever. She scooped up the ice pick and swung it at Frank’s head even as he recovered from having been hit with the lamp. He rolled to one side as the ice pick came stabbing down into the carpet.
“Damn,” she swore.
“I’m trying to save you,” he said, scrambling to his feet. His head was throbbing.
“Get out of my house!” she yelled, standing and coming at him again with the ice pick. He backed away.
“You don’t understand. I think the killer responsible for these ‘heart attacks’ has picked you as his next victim.”
“If anyone is a killer, it’s you!” She swung at him again, this time just missing his cheek. He kept backing away, until he found his back to the wall.
“Please listen to me,” he pleaded.
“I have a witness that you attacked me. This is it for you, Bannister. You’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.” With that, she stabbed straight at him, missing his neck. The ice pick embedded itself in the wall and wouldn’t come out.
“I’m sorry to have to do this the hard way,” Bannister said, cocking his arm and socking her. Stunned, she slumped into his arms.
“I don’t know what I think about this caveman kind of courtship, son,” the Judge said, shaking his head.
“Who’s talking about courtship? I’m trying to save her life”
“She don’t look like she appreciates it too much.”
Bannister said, “I’m sure if she could see you, everything would be clear. Come on, help me get her out to the car.”
“Carry the lady yourself,” the Judge said. “I’m only here to ride shotgun.”
Grumping, Frank swept Magda up into his arms and hurried her across the living room and down the hall to the front door.
“Where do you think he’s gone?” Frank asked, fumbling the door open.
“Who, that young whippersnapper I saw pullin’ his pants up? You scared him so much he must be halfway to Topeka by now.”
“I don’t mean him. I mean the Reaper.”
“He ain’t far, I can tell you that. Evil is never very far away.”
Bannister carried Magda out the door and down the path to his car. He pushed her into the passenger’s seat, then ran around to the other side of the car and got behind the wheel. The Judge slipped through Magda and sat behind her, holding her arms from behind as she regained consciousness.
Bannister started the engine and gunned it, and his car screeched onto the road, nearly sideswiping a black Mercury Tracer that was parked with its engine running. Ahead . . . under a ghostly streetlight, was the dark figure of the Reaper. He stood squarely in the middle of the road, an apparition that seemed to be defying Bannister to hit it. Frank grimly steered his car toward the creature. He had a lot on his mind and failed to notice that the Mercury had pulled out of its parking spot and was struggling to keep up with him.
Meanwhile Magda struggled against the Judge’s unseen hands. “Where are you taking me?”
“To safety, I hope.”
“Who’s holding me?” She looked down and saw the impressions of invisible hands on her arms, then looked at Bannister with wild eyes. “I . . . I . . . I’ve got money,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me. Please, I’m sorry.”
“I’m trying to save you,” Bannister said.
“I’ll put your ad back in the paper. I’ll even kill the astrology column. Bannister, I’ll do anything if you just stop this car and let me go.”
The Reaper stood silently as Frank’s car bore down on it. He pulled his wooden scythe from beneath his cape, raised it, then tapped it firmly on the pavement. The steel blade swung out and up and locked in place with a click that Bannister swore he could hear a hundred yards away.
The creature raised the scythe at the car. Frank hung on to the wheel with one hand and grabbed Magda’s head with the other. “Down!” he said, pushing her down and ducking.
At the same time the Reaper swung his ghostly scythe at the Ford. The razor-sharp blade cut through the car, narrowly sweeping over Frank and Magda’s heads but chopping the Judge neatly in half just below the armpits. The top half of the Judge’s body tumbled onto the backseat.
“Goddammit,” he swore.
“Are you okay?” Frank yelled, seeing the bottom half of the Judge sitting alone on the seat.
“I been better,” the Judge replied.
“I’m not okay, what do you think?” Magda yelled from her position on the floor.
Now the Reaper was running behind the car, leaping on the trunk and then climbing onto the roof. Bannister gunned the engine and the car speeded up, but the creature didn’t budge. It stood with its feet spread, cape billowing out behind it, slashing at the humans inside with the scythe.
The blade sliced through the car without actually cutting the metal. It grazed Frank’s shoulder, drawing blood. He yelled out and clutched his shoulder, trying to steer the car with his other hand. Magda looked up, saw the blood oozing between Frank’s fingers, and began to scream. The car careened through the deserted streets of town and headed into the hills, in the direction of Bannister’s house.
Frank was driving so fast and so wildly that he was soon leaving the Mercury in the dust. As Frank made a vicious, squealing one-hundred-and-twenty-degree turn onto a side street, the Mercury tried, and failed, to duplicate the move. It ran off the road and wiped out two garbage cans and a large basket of beer cans that had been put out for the morning recycling collection. The small car then came to rest in a vacant lot and stalled, its front wheels in a rut, jerking hard enough to release the air bag. Its driver, Steve Bayliss, was thrown against the back of the seat and had the air knocked out of him. Then the air bag refused to deflate, so he sat there, squeezed like a piece of salami between bag and seat, half-naked, stunned, and surrounded by empty beer cans.
Frank drove like the wind, struggling to maintain control of both the car and the woman he was trying to save. Magda couldn’t see it, but the Reaper viciously twisted the scythe from side to side. Frank ducked the blade when he could, but he also had to steer the car, now traveling in a part-residential, part-wooded area above town. An occasional house light could be seen, but mostly the landscape consisted of moonlight and trees. The trees cast long slivers of moonlit shadow on the car and its unearthly rider, who kept slashing away at it with his monstrous weapon.
Then the blade passed through the car seats and hooked Frank under the chin. Gasping, he let go of the wheel and clutched at the blade with both hands. Unconsciously, he also pushed down on the gas pedal as his car squealed onto familiar territory—Holloway Road, the scene of Debra’s death.
Seeing he had caught a victim, the Reaper pulled up on the scythe. The blade began to cut into Frank’s throat.
“Hold on, son,” the Judge, now a disembodied head and shoulders, yelled. He reached forward and yanked one of his ghostly six-guns from its holster, which was still strapped to his lower half in the front seat.
He aimed up through the roof and shot blindly. The Reaper howled in pain and tumbled off the roof.
Frank looked ahead and his eyes widened as he recognized where he was and thought he saw—or maybe it was something he had seen years before when it was Debra in the car with him—a log lying across the road. Magda screamed just the way Debra screamed years before as Frank grabbed the wheel with one hand and hauled it round, sending the Judge spinning out the car window.
The car roared off the road and crashed through the undergrowth, bouncing down a steep bank and into a patch of woods. It glanced off a couple of trees, then hit an open area covered with pine needles and spun around on the slippery surface. At last the Ford came to rest against a big old oak.
The forest floor was lit with shadowy moonlight. The shapes of trees loomed out of the darkness. The car had stalled when it spun around, and now sat there creaking and steaming. Madga desperately scrambled out of the wreck. She was battered and bruised, and her expensive robe was covered with dust and dirt from the floor of Frank’s car.
Frank came to at the wheel, shaking his head and feeling to see if the scythe had cut into his throat; it hadn’t, at least not far enough to draw blood.
Then he spotted Magda Ravanski staggering to her feet in the pine-needle-strewn clearing. “Magda!” he called out.
She looked fearfully at him, then got her balance and began to run.
Frank kicked open the door and got out of the car and tried to follow her, but his legs gave way and he collapsed in a heap, gasping for breath. A memory flashed before his eyes—Debra crawling out of the car ten years earlier, calling his name and crying.
Magda half ran, half stumbled away from the car. She couldn’t see anything but moonlight and shadows, and the forest floor was rough beneath her bare feet. She was drunk and frightened and feeling very alone, and every shadow seemed to move, every tree appeared to be a demon of some kind. Then, ahead of her, the unspeakable occurred. The Reaper oozed out of a tree, opening his cape to gather her in as she rushed toward him, unaware.
“No!”
Frank cried out.
He scrambled to his feet and rushed to save Magda—or was it to save Debra? Dazed and confused as he was, the two accidents, ten years apart, were becoming one in his mind.
“Debra!” he called out as the Reaper thrust its hand into Magda’s chest and squeezed. She stopped in her tracks, a surprised and dazed look on her face.
Frank reached her then, grabbed her around the shoulders, and tried to pull her away from the Reaper’s grasp. There was a distant rumble, and a flash of fire from the muzzle of a gun. Frank let go of Magda and fell to the ground. He grabbed his head, as if in excruciating pain. Then there was a thud as Magda’s body hit the ground next to him. Images spun in his head, and he saw Debra’s body falling beside him.
He looked around in a daze. The Reaper was gone, and Magda’s corpse lay on the ground next to him.
White light suddenly flooded down from the sky and onto Magda. The vertical beam of intense light parted the trees and extended as far as the eye could see, finally disappearing into a thicket of storm clouds that had appeared in the otherwise clear and moonlit sky.
Magda’s spirit rose from her body. Sensing this wasn’t going to be one of those peaceful acceptances of the corridor, Frank backed away.
“You killed me,” she yelled. “You killed me, you bastard.”
Bannister shook his head as Magda began to drift away, up the corridor of light, her stream of invective never letting up. Frank stared helplessly up the corridor at her.
“You’re sick,” she yelled. “This is how you get your kicks, huh? You like to kill people? Did it feel good killing me . . . huh? Did it feel good killing your wife? Everybody knows you did it, Bannister. You’re a murderer!”