Strange Magic (3 page)

In a flurry of well-practiced maneuvers, the Stranger flipped the lid shut and quickly buckled up the thick leather straps, sealing the poor old man inside. Duke’s screams were somewhat muffled, but still sweet music to the dark man’s ears. He climbed out of the truck bed, humming happily along with Duke’s tune, and slipped behind the Ford’s wheel.

Without further delay, he started the pickup and
screeched out onto a gravel road that would lead him to the highway. From the highway, he’d be in Pennsylvania in no time, and from there, nothing could stop him from getting his hands on his bitter enemy.

While he drove, he killed Wilson Kemp a thousand times in his sick mind, and each death was more painful than the last. He was going to make all hell break loose when he finally held Kemp in his grasp. That entire town was going to learn what fear really was and this thought nearly brought a tear of joy to his eye.

“What a glorious morning this has turned out to be,” he shouted out the window to the magic trunk behind him, as light rain began to fall from the ever-darkening morning sky. “Right, Duke, old buddy?”

Duke never answered; he’d finally stopped screaming. The Stranger reached U.S. Highway 80, and passed a sign that said:

10 MILES TO PENNSYLVANIA BORDER

Revenge was near at hand. He slammed the pedal to the floor, gunning the engine for all it was worth. The old Ford responded with a healthy roar, rocketing the grinning Stranger into the stormy morning like a fiery red lighting bolt racing anxiously toward Armageddon.

Wilson Kemp’s nose had fallen off again. Not a particularly good way to start his new career, certainly not like he’d hoped. This was the day he’d been nervously awaiting foralmost two months. He’d marked off the days on his magnetic fridge calendar with a brand-new felt marker he’d bought just for this purpose. He’d planned, and dreamed, and hoped everything would go smoothly, that maybe today would finally be the start of something good. He knew if this afternoon went well, he’d be able to find steady work, make a little money, and maybe—just maybe—start to pick up the pieces of his shattered dreams again.

Things weren’t going well.

Things had gone sour right from the start. He should have known better than to have one little sip of vodka “
to brace his nerves
,” he’d lied to himself. What a load of crap. His one little sip had led to another, then another, until in no time at all he was sloshed.

Stupid, crazy fuck.

Recovering alcoholics just never seemed to learn. To be a bit more truthful, Wilson wasn’t exactly a recovering alcoholic. He was more of a full-fledged alcoholic, who happened to have a severe case of denial on his
hands. Every night, he’d go to bed convinced he’d raised himself to the lofty level of a recovering alcoholic but sometime during the night, fairies or demons or whoever the hell plotted against him always seemed to mysteriously transform him back into a hopeless drunk again by daylight.

He’d tried countless times—hundreds—to put away the bottle, but always failed. He hardly had any confidence left to try. There were reasons why he was a drunk, though sometimes it was hard to remember what they were. His wife had left him three years earlier, taking his beautiful four-year-old daughter with her. He wasn’t completely clear anymore as to whether he’d started drinking because she’d left him, or if she had left him because he’d started drinking. Either way, it didn’t really matter—his life had fallen apart without her.

He’d quickly lost his good job down at the post office. One day in a deep vodka haze, Wilson had sent every last piece of mail he could get his sweaty hands on, firstclass, to the post office in Anchorage, Alaska. To this day, he still had no idea why—it had just felt like a fun thing to do at the time. Neither his boss nor the United States Postal Service had shared his sense of humor, with the former, on behalf of the latter, firing him instantly.

Wilson had moved around from one dead-end job to the next, hitting the bottle hard for about two years. It was only about eight months ago that he’d sobered up enough to seriously think about going back to his one great passion in life: magic.

Magic had been a part of Kemp’s life for as long as he could remember. As a shy, skinny, freckle-faced kid, magic had been his only friend and only means of escape.
He’d practiced long and hard, becoming better than he had ever dreamed he could be. He wasn’t a Houdini or a Copperfield, but he was damn close. He’d really made something of it too, or had been about to, but then his life had taken a downward spiral. One day, the crowds had been cheering his name, the next he was running scared, hiding in a small town that never guessed who he once was. No one, not even his ex-wife and daughter, knew what secrets lay buried in his past. He tried not to think about it; simply pushing it to the back of his mind, hoping the memories would go away.

Unfortunately, they never did.

Wilson could easily keep his past secret until the day he died, but he couldn’t keep his love for magic buried forever. Which was why when he finally hit the bottom of the barrel, he thought of magic as his possible savior. He decided to revive his career. Nothing like the last time, of course, nothing even close, but something using his vast talent in magic to earn a living. Maybe, he’d thought, he could get his wife and kid back too.

So Wilson had struggled to stay out of the vodka as best he could, worked on his rusty act, and had marked off the calendar waiting for his first big gig. Finally, September the eighteenth had rolled around and he’d been too stupid to just walk out of the house and leave the damn booze behind. Now he stood, or swayed rather, in front of about fifteen nasty kids at an after-school birthday party dressed in full clown garb: white face paint with a big red smile, rainbow-colored baggy jumpsuit with a golden belt string, and matching electric blue fuzzy wig and floppy, oversize shoes.

The kids were all screaming and bawling—generally
unimpressed with the stupid magic clown named Mickey, who stumbled around and kept losing his fake red nose.

“Who wants to see a magic clown, anyway?” Wilson muttered to himself as he bent down to recover his big sponge nose again.

This was the second time it had come unstuck and fallen off. The last time, right in the middle of his vanishing-turtle trick, he’d tried to catch the falling honker as it dropped. It had been a big mistake, what with his reflexes and coordination all fouled up by the booze in his system. Not only did he drop the nose, but in the process knocked over a glass lamp, a table, and dislodged the turtle into the birthday boy’s ice-cream bowl. He’d received his best applause of the performance for that little stunt but the young boy’s father hadn’t looked happy cleaning up the mess.

This time, Wilson’s nose had dropped all the way to the floor, rolling off the dark green throw rug that had become his stage, and disappeared under a nearby love seat. He probably should have just left it there, but seeing as his entire audience was diving after it and paying no attention to him anyway, he decided he might as well join in the great nose hunt himself.

Wilson took two awkward steps before tripping over his big floppy feet. He tried to regain his balance but was unable to do so. He landed with a loud
thump
, facedown in what was left of the spaceship-shaped chocolate birthday cake. This was when all hell broke loose. The birthday boy was the first person to start screaming, but within seconds every other person in the room was screaming too. The kids were only screaming because the cake was demolished and some of them hadn’t even
had a piece yet, but the parents who’d gathered around to watch the nice magic show didn’t give a damn about the cake.

They were screaming at Wilson.

By the time Wilson stumbled back to his feet again, vainly trying to wipe the chocolate icing out of his eyes, a group of seven angry parents had formed a circle around him. They were all yelling and jabbing his chest with pointing fingers. Wilson tried his best to calm them down, but that was impossible. Things rapidly moved from bad to worse when one of the ladies marched in close enough to smell his breath. There are people who drink vodka because they think it’s one of the only drinks people can’t smell on their breath, but they’re wrong. Drink enough of it, and drink it day after day and the sickly sweet smell of vodka will start oozing out of your pores, as well as on your breath. Maybe not as prominently as bourbon or tequila perhaps, but it can’t easily be masked. For Wilson, it was impossible.

“Oh my God!” the woman screamed. “I think he’s been drinking. Smell his breath, Reggie. He smells like a distillery. No wonder he’s falling all over the place…this guy’s wasted.”

Reggie, who was the birthday boy’s father and six foot four to boot, thundered closer, already pissed off over having to clean up the first mess. When he smelled Wilson’s breath he nearly went ballistic. With one large hand he grabbed Wilson around the throat and backed him up against the wall.

“You son of a bitch. You got nerve to come into my home all pissed up in front of my friends and all our kids. I ought to knock your stinking block off, that’s what I ought to do.”

“No, wait,” Wilson tried to explain. “Take it easy, will you. I’ll just get my things and—”

Reggie’s fist cut him off midsentence and he slumped down the wall to lay prostrate on the floor. No rest for the wicked, unfortunately. The pissed-off father dragged him back to his feet and prepared to punch him again.

His wife, much to Wilson’s relief, came between them—narrowly missing being whacked herself.

“Reggie, stop! He’s not worth getting in trouble over. Janet already called the cops and they’re on their way, so just leave him alone, okay?”

“Okay? No, it’s not okay. This imbecile comes over here drunk as a skunk, ruins Timmy’s birthday, smashes an expensive lamp and table, and expects to just walk? Maybe get a slap on the wrist from the cops? I don’t think so. He deserves a bit more of what he’s getting so move out of the way, Alice.”

The argument waged on for several tense minutes, but Wilson had no intention of sticking around to see who was going to win, so at his first opportunity he ran as fast as his floppy feet would take him. He ran past Reggie and Alice, past the group of bewildered children and past the finger-jabbing group of parents to make it to the outside door. It wasn’t until he hit the fourth step down on the front porch that his feet tangled up again, causing another nosedive to the ground. This time, there was no soft chocolate cake to cushion his fall, his hands and face scraping painfully along the cement walkway leading to the house. This was definitely not the way he’d hoped his day would go. Wilson wished he could just lie there and die.

What a damn day
, he thought.
I get drunk and blow my first good job in months. Then I get punched out by a
pissed-off macho dad who I’m sure isn’t gonna pay me. What else can go wrong?

It was then Wilson looked up into the smiling face of a Billington police officer.

“Heard you were causing trouble again, Wilson,” the blond-haired policeman said. “What the heck have you been up to now?”

Wilson was on a first-name basis with most of the police in the area, seeing as most of them had scraped him out of one gutter or another during the last few years. He recognized the officer as Jacob Jackson and breathed a sigh of relief. Jacob was a whole lot nicer to him than some of the other cops in town.

“I’m not causing any trouble, Jake,” Wilson slurred, staggering to his feet. “I’m just…ahh, I’m just—”

“You’re just coming with me, clown-man,” Officer Jackson said as he led Wilson toward the waiting backseat of his black-and-white.

“Yeah, okay, Jake. Whatever you say.”

Jackson closed him in, went up to the house to get a few statements, and returned with something in his left hand. He climbed behind the wheel and started driving away.

“They’re pretty pissed back there, Wilson. When are you ever gonna get your act together? Huh?”

Wilson put his head in his hands in a display of honest shame. “That’s what I was trying to do, Jake. I guess I just fucked up again.”

“Yeah, you did. Here, Reggie said to give you this.”

He tossed Wilson’s big red sponge nose. Wilson picked it up, and with no place else to put it, stuck it back on his scratched and bleeding face.

Officer Jackson took a peek at him in the rearview
mirror, shook his head sadly, and said, “You’ve been acting like a clown for years, Kemp. At least today you decided to dress the part. It’s real sad, man. Pretty pathetic.”

Tears ran down Wilson’s made-up face. “I know, Jake. I know it is. I’m working on it.”

It took another fifteen minutes for the cruiser to make it into the Billington Police Department’s parking lot. Wilson’s luck was looking up—his nose had stayed glued to his face for the entire trip.

The shades were drawn and the lights were out. A distraught man, naked as the day he’d been born, sat hunched over on a high-backed wooden desk chair with his head resting in his sweaty hands. The room was almost as bare, scantily furnished with a scarred rolltop desk and one other chair matching the one on which he sat. The walls were bare as well as the hardwood floor, save for a small pile of discarded clothing the man had recently removed.

Twilight rays still snuck their way into the shadow-filled room between the cracks in the blinds, casting a distorted silhouette of the troubled man against the far wall. He didn’t know the exact time of day, but he guessed it to be around 9:15 P.M., not that it was important. All that mattered was the sun was nearly gone, only a tiny sliver hung on the horizon, and soon the sky would be dark. He hated the dark, or to be more precise, he hated himself when it was dark. When the sun abandoned this part of the world, a transformation sometimes happened to him. He changed. Nothing as drastic as sprouting hair and long, sharp teeth like the legendary werewolf; but a change nonetheless.

Ordinarily, the frightened man would have turned on
every light in the house rather than sit in the darkening gloom, but he had to keep the room dark and keep the shades drawn for fear anyone might see him change. Exposure frightened him almost as much as the metamorphosis itself. He rubbed his throbbing temples, rocking back and forth in the fading light, and waited.

The urges were strong tonight. That wasn’t a good sign. Sometimes weeks would go by without them being this strong, but usually it was more likely to be just a day or two. When the urges were only whispers, he could sometimes will them away and he’d be left alone, but that wasn’t going to happen tonight. Tonight, it was as if the voices had slipped into his head, conveniently sucked out his brain, and replaced it with a big bass drum that steadily pounded to the urges’ beat.

“Please stop,” he begged. “I don’t want to go out tonight. I don’t want to go back out again ever. It’s wrong. Do you hear me? Wrong!”

The urges beat their drum harder and faster, heedless of his pleas. The tempo and volume spiraled ever higher, pounding and reverberating in his head like the sound of cannon fire. The pain was intolerable and getting worse, as if at any moment his skull would surely split and spatter the walls red. The urges drowned out all rational thoughts until the man knew he’d either have to obey them or go stark raving mad.

“All right…
All right
!” he screamed, dropping to his knees, cradling his aching head. “I’ll go, I promise. Just get out of my head. Please. Give me peace and I’ll do anything you want.”

The pounding in his head increased momentarily, then dropped away to a distant rumble. It never fully died away, choosing rather to linger in the back of his
mind, just as a warning. The heavily sweating man’s relief at the receding noise was so great he temporarily lost consciousness. It was like slipping into a crystal clear pool of cool water on a scorching summer day. He slumped all the way to the floor, curled into the fetal position, and enjoyed the swim…

When he regained his senses, the change in him was complete. He was a different man now. This new person liked to call himself Tom, though he knew it wasn’t his real name. His real identity was rendered insignificant when Tom was around. His real name was forgotten, gone with the weakling who’d earlier wanted to resist the urges. That side of him was nothing more than a pathetic fool who didn’t realize how many sweet things there were in this world just waiting to be tasted. Tom wasn’t scared to taste the sweeter things in life; on the contrary, he thrived on them. When the urges began to drum for Tom, they did not have to ask twice. He was off the floor, on his feet, and heading for the door in an instant. Whistling happily, he walked naked through the dark house toward the back door.

He brushed the curtain aside to peer out, checking to see if the way was clear, then backed up a few steps to open the hall closet. Inside was everything he would need for tonight’s fun and games. Tom loved fun and games, but then again, most perverts did.

Yes, Tom was a pervert, and he had no qualms about admitting that to himself. His other side, the weaker part of him, might have a problem with it, but that was why Tom got to have all the fun. He never kidded himself. He believed in calling a spade a spade, so seeing as he
was
a pervert, why not call himself one?

If the truth be told, Tom was more than just your average everyday run-of-the-mill pervert, he was also a rather accomplished Peeping Tom. That’s where his name had come from. Everyone knew the old story about how some poor bastard named Tom had opened the curtains at the wrong time, and mistakenly watched some stupid bitch ride by his window naked on a horse. It was a silly story, but apparently the well from which the legend of the Peeping Tom sprang.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Tom whispered, “any broad who’d ride down the middle of the street naked on a freakin’ horse was asking to be gawked at. She’s just lucky I wasn’t there.”

In this modern day and time, most people referred to this indecent act as voyeurism, but Tom still preferred to describe himself in the ways of old. Remember, according to his admittedly twisted self-logic, a spade would always be a spade, and a pervert would always be a pervert, so naturally it followed a Peeping Tom would always be a Peeping Tom. In his disturbed, fragmented mind, it was simple common sense.

From separate hangers in the hall closet, Tom dressed in a pair of black Levi’s jeans and an even darker black pullover sweatshirt. On another hanger, a black wool winter jacket hung, which he considered putting on but decided against. It was still a bit early in the year for that part of his disguise. On a shoe rack on the floor, a pair of black Adidas sat next to an equally black pair of Kodiak hunting boots. Tom selected the running shoes and quickly laced them up. From the wooden shelf near the top of the closet, he took down his hat and gloves. He pulled the black wool ski mask over his face first, then struggled to tug the tight leather gloves onto his
sweaty hands. The only thing left on the upper shelf was a bright red high-powered flashlight.

“Everyone needs a little color in their life…even sicko perverts,” Tom said, smiling behind his mask.

Flashlight in hand, Tom walked over to where a full-length mirror hung on the otherwise bare wall. He always paused at this mirror to admire himself before heading outside. It never failed to thrill him, seeing his powerful six-foot frame wrapped in black. His penis started to harden at the thought of what other people must think when they see him emerge out of the darkness, revealing himself to them like this. They would fear him, of course, and it was their fear that gave him power. Craving this rush of power was what drove Tom out into the night, and also caused the urges within him to beat their drums.

“Look at me. I look like something straight out of a sadomasochist’s wet dream.” Tom couldn’t help but laugh, loving every second of this. “Let’s go see what kind of fun we can find on the quiet streets of Billington tonight.”

As his gloved hand grasped the back doorknob, his conscience, or maybe his real personality, broke into his dark thoughts and begged him to put away the flashlight and mask. The smile slid off Tom’s face, leaving him confused, but then the urges began to pound their drums again to the hypnotic, insane beat only he could hear. He stood leaning against the wall, flickering back and forth between his dual personalities. For a few moments he didn’t know what to do, but as the earth has no choice but to spin, and the waves of the ocean must obey the moon’s pull, the urges in his head could not be denied.

The side of his psyche that called himself Tom snapped back in control and he quickly locked his weaker side away in the back of his mind. Back in undisputed control, with no more hesitation or doubt, Tom quietly slipped out the back door and disappeared into the chilly yet familiar embrace of the night.