Hi I'm a Social Disease: Horror Stories (14 page)

“
Christ, don’t do that!”

“
Did I scare ya?”

“
No.”
It’s that feeling,
he thought. “Yeah, maybe a little. Old man like me. You gotta be careful. Heart could pop like a firecracker.”

“
Bam!” Janey shouted.

“
Yeah.
Bam
’s right.”

There was a trace of that feeling when Janey had tapped him on the shoulder. Of course, it was very brief contact and he felt it through two shirts and a jacket. When he had helped her up, he had pulled her up by her sweaty little hand.

“
You wanna take a walk, Mr. Silly?”

“
Not just yet. You let me set here for a minute or two. Finish this here smoke.”

“
You really shouldn’t smoke. Mom says it’ll give ya cancer.”

“
She’s right, of course. I find it enjoyable. I don’t really care bout cancer.”

“
If you get cancer, you’ll die.”

“
Only if God wants me to. Some people live with cancer all their life. Sometimes, the cancer just up and goes someplace else.”

“
I don’t think you got cancer yet. But I think you’re sick.”

“
Me too, Janey. Me too. I think I’m pretty bad sick.”

“
I hope you don’t die.”

“
We all die someday. Got to. It’s God’s will.”

“
Why do you think God does that?”

“
Don’t rightly know, I guess. Maybe he needs the comp’ny.”

“
May
be
,” Janey laughed. “Seems kinda mean.”

“
Maybe. At least there ain’t so many people to deal with.”

“
You think it’s scary to be dead?”

“
Don’t rightly know. Guess it would be if there wun’t no one there with ya. Like if ya just died and
poof
, that was it, you was all alone.”

Again, the knife of clarity entered his skin, snaking in at the base of his skull.

The moon made another sound. There was no mistaking this with the sound of the ocean.

“
Yeah. I get lonely sometimes,” Janey said.

“
Me, too.”

He tossed the cigarette out toward the water and hopped up. He took off his jacket and tossed it onto the empty bench.

“
You ever play Tag, Janey?”

“
Of course, big silly.” She reached out and smacked his forearm. “Tag! You’re it!”

He winced. He felt a squeaky thing take off up his arm. He looked for it but it was gone. Janey took off running in the darkness. A vision rushed through Walt’s head. He tried to retain the vision as he took off racing after Janey. It was hard to run on the sand, a task he hadn’t tried since he was a kid. In his head, he saw an empty street filled with ominous black snake alleyways.

He wouldn’t have reached her to tag her if she hadn’t doubled back toward him, trying to jaunt past.

“
Bench is base!” she called. But not before Walt could loop out one of his long arms and tap her on the forearm. The squeaky things raced up his back on dagger legs.

“
Yer it,” he wheezed, attempting to run off into the darkness from which Janey had come. There was another vision, this one a little longer, a little clearer. And again there was the sickening nausea, screaming through his head and guts, threatening to drop him to his knees.

Squeaky things. Bad visions. Nausea. Why the hell was he doing this?

In this vision, Walt saw a low black car. It was a model that he didn’t recognize. The car was an older one, but maintained perfectly.
Restored
, he thought as Janey crept up behind him and smacked the back of his dangling hand, sending a horde of squeaky things shooting up his pantlegs.

“
You’re it!” she shouted. Then: “You shoulda touched base.”

He coughed, nearly falling to his knees. The sensations were harder to deal with when they came back to back like that, almost overlapping.

Walt felt his stomach come up and managed to suppress it back down, swallowing the puke before he tasted it.

He looked up at the moon. More than whimpering, it howled softly.

The vision was this time accompanied by a marrow-scraping feeling of panic. It felt like
him
standing on that curb and watching the restored car, but he knew it was Janey. The visions were seen through Janey’s eyes, or had been so far. The car door opened and a hand reached out. Walt turned to run, as Janey in the vision, as himself there on the beach.

Janey circled around him, knowing he couldn’t catch her on his own. He reached out and tagged her elbow, giving it a little squeeze in the process. The feeling, the vision that accompanied it was so strong he couldn’t even yell, “You’re it!”

A squeaky thing, he was sure, sliced at the back of his neck.

The moon howled, a deep guttural sound blossoming into something nearly metallic.

He went down on one knee, vomiting into the sand before collapsing onto his back.

In the vision he, as Janey, turned to run from the man getting out of the car but there was another man, a thicker man, standing right behind her, waiting. Something went over her head, turning the world to black. From inside the blackness came spinning thoughts of panic and doom. There was an impact, something blunt hitting her head and Walt came out of her head. No longer Janey in the vision, he became some omniscient eye—maybe a ladybug on the ceiling of the car, maybe a bird perched on the trunk, staring intently through the tint of the windows. What he saw was shocking. It brought on another wave of nausea. He turned his head and vomited down the side of his face.

The people in the car with Janey weren’t exactly human. They weren’t like anything Walt had ever seen. Boil-covered skin stretched too tightly over the expansive bones of their faces. Their eyes were too clear, too liquid to really be eyes. And when they stuck their reptilian tongues out to lick their thin lips, their teeth were large and sharp and yellow. And then he saw the squeaky things. Images lent to the sounds that had infected him since childhood. Something like bloated cockroaches with legs that were too thin and antennae that were too long, fat swollen sacs sagging behind their mid-sections. They came out of the men’s mouths, crawled from the cuffs of their suits, swarmed over Janey.

“
Oh God,” Walt whispered to himself as he heard their thirsty suckling.

He looked up at the moon. It seemed whiter now than it had earlier. He thought it seemed, somehow, angry. The sand felt like a welcomed mattress beneath him.

Janey moved closer to him, her wolf mask eclipsing the moon.

“
I guess Tag’s over, huh, you big sillyhead?”

“
I tried, girly-girl. I tried.”

“
C’mon. I’ll help ya up. You remember that time you helped me up?”

“
Don’t recall.” He stuck out his hand, bracing himself.

Janey wrapped her little hand around his big hand.

The moon screamed bloody murder.

Nausea gnawed at Walt’s soul but blossomed into a kind of ecstatic knowledge. He had the answer now.

He got to his feet, the latest vision burning just behind his eyes.

He saw Janey from above. She lay on the ground and from the impossible cant of her head and limbs, her overall
deflatedness
, he knew she was dead. And then, spilling over the vision was the blood and the squeaky things—all over Janey, all over the trees surrounding her, all over the fallen leaves on some unknown forest floor.

“
That was real fun, Mr. Silly,” she said. “I guess I better go now.”

Walt stood silently and watched as the little girl walked toward the ocean, toward her lonely purgatory. He watched as the water crept up to her waist. He watched as she became somehow less substantial.

“
Janey!” Walt called.

She stopped and turned her wolf face toward him.

“
You want some comp’ny?” he shouted, already walking toward the ocean.

She stood still until he reached her. “You know where we’re going?” she asked.

“
Nope. I got a question for ya, though. You ever hear of the squeaky things?”

She looked at him, the moon lighting off the blue of her eyes. He saw something like a flash of recognition. Maybe it was a look of fear.

“
They any squeaky things where we’re goin?”

“
No,” Janey said, shaking her wolf mask from side to side.

“
Then I’m all fer it.”

“
You’ll be my company.”

“
That’s right,” Walt said, waiting for the ocean to rise up through his nose and suffocate the squeaky things away.

Together, they walked out into the ocean, toward a moon that had never been quieter.