THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (16 page)

             
Three-fourths of the way across the room.

             
"Bobby, c'mon, you have to listen to me. I was crazy about you, don't you know that, don't you know how you treated me? And it wasn't just in Reno--you treated me like shit all the way across the country."

             
Halted.

             
What was the handled thing? How bad was it? If I threw up my arms, could I stop the damage?

             
"You break my fucking heart," he said.

             
"Bobby, you don't want to do this. You're just mad, I admit you've got reason to be mad," I lied breathlessly. He still had that black cloud demon in him and it had driven him right over the dark edge.

             
I didn't believe in the supernatural, I didn't believe in demons and the devil, but here it was right in my room, standing feet away, brandishing a weapon. I had to keep trying to reach him. "But didn't I get you out of the hospital, out of Louisville? Didn't I help you escape prison? Didn't I? Doesn't that count?"

             
"It took me two months to track you down," he said. His voice was just wrong, all wrong. I'd never heard him sound so calm, so utterly insanely calm. Tundra would double freeze from that voice. It was a voice from the pit.

             
I shook Pet violently. She groaned and turned onto her back.
Oh Pet, oh Pet, we have a problem
here, you need to wake up!

             
"I'm sorry, Bobby, I said I was sorry, honest I am. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't take your car. And Pet can get you another one and I'll get some money for..."

             
"You left me
stranded
in Reno. I had to sneak out of that goddamned room. Had to
panhandle
out of Reno, like a fucking hippie, had to panhandle like some buddy of yours off the streets to get coffee money. Had to
hitchhike
. Had to
walk
in the fucking rain and wind in Sacramento. You want to make up for that?"

             
"Yeah, Bobby, I do. I mean I will, just tell me what I can do, okay? We don't have to be enemies.

             
We don't, we just don't."

             
At the foot of the mattresses.

             
Baseball bat. That's what it was. He was going to bash my head in, that's what he was going to do.

             
Fuck me, Bobby Tremain was Death and grimmer by far than the Reaper could hope to be. Whatever had taken possession of him was bent on murder and it had inhabited a man who could accommodate it.

             
"Oh Bobby..."

             
"Get outta the bed."

             
"Sure, sure, right away." I scrambled from beneath the covers and judged my chances of getting around him and to the open door. They weren't good. They were so bad to be nearly non-existent.

             
Bobby was just too big, he took up too much room, his arms were too long, the bat too heavy, the world too goddamned unfair. I was going to die for paying back in kind. I was going to end up a bloody mess of brain and teeth in a Haight-Ashbury condemned apartment house. While Pet slept oblivious and woke to find her drug dreams have invaded the real world. In Bobby's inelegant parlance, what kind of shit was this?

             
It's hard to believe it when you're about to die. You try to think of anything, but that. You do little calculations of your chances and weigh them in your favor. You pray, I don't care if God left you high and dry when you were in the cradle or if you left Him in the dust behind you as you grew up, you still end up praying. You think up great excuses, brilliantly exaggerated lies, and make yourself believe they're working. Because if they aren't, the alternative isn't even thinkable.

             
Bobby came toward me and I squeezed shut my eyes against him. He was Raw Hide and Bloody Bones from my Alabama childhood. He was the Swamp Thing. He was Frankenstein's monster and the faceless intruder who came to people asleep in their safe homes. He was a force of Nature against which there is no recompense. He was a homicidal Shadow.

             
"No, Bobby, please."

             
He gently moved me aside so he could stand next to the side of the bed I'd just vacated. His touch made me jangle and jump like a rabbit in a cage. "Bobby, c'mon, Bobby, Bobby, don't..."

             
"I won't," he said softly and then lifted the long spear of dark in both hands and crushed Pet's skull with one fast heavy downward stroke.

             
"JESUSJESUSOHMYGODNONONONO!"

             
I was behind him and I had his arms and he was off balance and toppling, we were both falling and the floor came up, smacked us hard, and I screamed in his ear, screamed and screamed in his filthy, horrible, inhuman ear. We rolled, I scratched at his face, at his eyes, his nose, his mouth, his neck, his chest, his arms. I screamed and he screamed and the night bloomed explosions of lights as he struck me and I struck back hard as I could, hard as I knew how, hard as my frenzy allowed. The bat skittered under the bed, the bloody weapon was lost, and Bobby was scooting for it, frantic to have possession again, so he could bash me, so he could do to me what he'd done to a poor, sleeping, totally innocent dreamer. His legs flailed to free himself from the lock I had on his body, and I heard one of his legs
crack
the way you hear thunder erupting on the edge of a blast of ozone from a bank of storm clouds.

             
His leg, broken again, shattered I hoped, splintered to a million pieces,like...like...like...Pet...shattered, splintered, broken.

             
Smashed. Beyond redemption.

             
Hit him, hit him, that's all I could think, hit him until he stops, until he vanishes, until he's gone, until he's dead, dead, dead, dead, and gone.

             
Three street loungers, guys hopped up on something or other, stumbled into the foyer led on by our screaming. They tottered into the melee, only sober enough to take Bobby from my fury and hold him while the police came for him and the ambulance came for what was left of Pet.

             
"Man," one of my rescuers kept saying, "Man, this is shit-for-brains, this is bad, dude, this is sick and revolting, you bastard, how'd you think you could do this? Don't cry, you fucking whiner, we don't care if your leg hurts, we
hope
it hurts, by God, we hope it fucking
kills
you, man!" Then he kicked Bobby. And kicked him some more before the cops showed.

             
Well, it didn't kill him. Left him further maimed, but it was the state who killed pretty Bobby Tremain. Not literally. He died in a prison riot, shot right through his gorgeous heart, was the report.

             
Sometimes, like really, there's a little justice out there in the lousy establishment, you know what I'm telling you? Bobby might have been demon-possessed, he might have been ripe for invasion given his mindset and his actions, but it was the real human, blood-and-bone Bobby who took the bullet.

             
I heard in later years Jerry married a radio disc-jockey and set up his own television repair shop in Cairo, Illinois.

             
I drove through Louisville recently to show my teenage girls where I had lived and worked on Chestnut Street. The hospital had been razed to the ground. Only the cement steps remained leading up to a flat grassy expanse open to the sky. The sleazy apartment house was gone too and in its place stood a one-story modern office building. Even the detention center was gone. It was as if none of it had ever been, as if 1967 had been but a fantasy. But lots of people from that year feel that way. You ask them, find out.

             
"I met a boy in that hospital," I told my daughters as we drove slowly past what had been and was no more. "He was the prettiest thing, but..."

             
"Boys aren't pretty, Mom. Boys are handsome or good-looking or cute. Girls are pretty."

             
They have a lot to learn, my young feisty children. But I doubt if warnings will do a bit of good. At least that has been me and my grandmother's educated experience.

             
You can't persuade a girl to stay away from a pretty boy. You can't tell a woman there are demonic creatures parading as angels walking this mean earth.

             
THE END

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

First published in "100 WICKED LITTLE WITCH STORIES," as "Brownouts," edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, & Martin Greenberg, Barnes and Noble Books 1995

             
It wasn't working. Nothing she tried would work. All the spells failed her, and with them her confidence plummeted to its lowest depths.

             
"Can't you do something? We're going to lose the ranch if you don't help."

             
Guida sighed deeply as she glanced from her needlework to her husband. "Then we'll have to lose it."

             
She stuck the needle through the coarse cloth and pulled the scarlet thread through to the other side. It was a sampler detailed with the names of the goddesses. Soon she might not have a place to hang it.

             
"Where will we go? What will I do? I can't feed four kids on some clerk job in town."

             
Brady took that moment to run into the room yelling, "Martha wet her pants, Mama! I told her she was gonna get a whipping if she didn't go to the bathroom and she wet herself anyway."

             
"Tell Martha to come in and I'll change her."

             
"I hope you whip her Mama," Brady said over his shoulder he raced outdoors.

             
Jim put his fingers through his hair. "I don't know how you stay so calm. These kids drive me crazy and here we are going down the tubes, not enough in the bank to buy feed for the cattle, and you sit sewing."

             
She put aside the hoop of cloth. Martha was at the door, peeking from the door frame with an ashamed look on her face. "I couldn't help it, Mama."

             
"Come on in, it's all right, Martha. Mama will fix you right up."

             
"Will you try again?" Jim asked, his voice full of anxiety. He was ignoring his daughter and staring with scared eyes at his wife.

             
"I'll try," she said.

             
"Do you promise?"

             
"I promise."

             
She went into the stable once she had finished cleaning up Martha and putting all the children to bed for a noonday nap. The cattle didn't come here much until the weather chilled and they wanted shelter from winter storms.

             
In the loft where Jim kept bales of hay, Guida had made a quiet place for herself. Behind a stack of bales she had thrown a quilt on the rough haystrewn boards. She kept a candle, matches, and her book of spells on the sill of a dirty window set into the wall.

             
There was no privacy in the house, crowded as it was with all the children, and the stable loft was the only place she could find to concentrate on creating magic.

             
Magic. The most beautiful word in the language, any language. If only she could recover her power to perform it. When she met Jim, when they were young and energetic members of the local coven, she had been one of the most potent witches in all of West Texas. With that power she had helped Jim find the right land and build a working ranch with horses and a respectable cattle herd. Then the children began to come and her power waned with each successive pregnancy. Alarmed, she went to the priestess and asked what was happening to her.

             
It was simple, really. The more children she produced, the more earthbound she was, the more strands she had binding her to the mother soil. The more earthbound, the farther away from her Protector she moved.

             
"Why do you think so few of us have babies?" the priestess asked. "We aren't like normal women.

             
We squander our gifts if we try to live out an average woman's life of motherhood. Sex renews your energy. Birthing and caring for children drain you as if you are a sieve, the children washing through and taking with them all magical nourishment."