THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (11 page)

             
He said, "Don't worry, I'll make sure your things are back in your car, except for the two tapes, of course. I'll have to burn those. I can still drive, you know. I'm old and it is true my heart is in terrible condition, but I can still drive your car into the river where they won't find it for ages. Not until long after I've departed this old Earth. They will probably publish your book anyway. You had enough interviews to fill it already, didn't you? It was grand of you to care so much about this place. This wild, unrestrained, backwoods place."

             
"I thought…you…said…" She gurgled low in her throat and a scarlet ribbon of blood slipped from the corner of her mouth. She had stopped trying to reach the letter opener in her back. She lay now with her arms at her sides like an obedient child taking a nap.

             
The light in her eyes was fading, flickering in, flickering out, a candle flame in the wind.

             
"You should never have taken the word of a murderer, young lady. I never did experience that day of reckoning, that day when the urge left. I wouldn't know what that might feel like and expect that never happens to people like me." He smiled beatifically. "I haven't killed anyone for a long time, though. I'm so old, and yes, I'm weak, and I can't go on the hunt the way I used to do.

             
"I have to wait for the prey to come to
me
."

             
She cried tears that wet his bed, she whispered a curse against him, and then she died.

             
After the tedious efforts of disposing of her car, catching a ride back to his house, and burying her in the woods behind his place, Hank Borden decided not to burn the tapes she had made of his life. He opened the tin suitcase and dropped them, along with a driver's license from her purse, onto the mounds of material he had collected over a long lifetime of carnage.

             
Some day someone would find all this.

             
After he was gone, after his pitiful old pump stopped pumping and he stepped into that void, they would come here and go through his things and they would find out about his past. Only then would they know the real Hank Borden. The tapes would help them.

             
And all except for the profound remorse he said he had experienced, and the resultant change he claimed came over him, everything that he confessed on the tapes was God's gospel truth.

             
             
THE END

Billie Sue Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

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

             
Too many people were dying.

             
Dessy felt Jake's hand brush over her naked left breast, but it was a mindless action. He was deeply entrenched in a paperback vampire novel and not really noticing her. He often did that, touched her as if to be sure she was there, and it made her feel beloved. If she came near him while he worked on the Volvo's old worn-out engine, he would forget the grease on his hands and reach for her hip, patting it a bit, the way you pat the head of a faithful dog. Or he might be watching a late-night horror movie and have his hand pressed between her thighs, warming her. At night in bed he couldn't sleep unless he had his arms cocooned around her body.

             
"Too many people are dying," she said now, unable to repress her thoughts.

             
"Hmmm. What people?"

             
She reached over and took the paperback from his hand. He didn't want to let go so she had to tug at it. He frowned, looking at her in consternation. "What people?"

             
She ticked them off on her fingers. "Last year I lost Uncle Ray. Remember the drowning accident, the riptide down at the beach?"

             
She waited until he nodded before going on.

             
"Then three months later it was my cousin Jamie. It was liver failure, but of course it was AIDS that killed him."

             
"I don't think I want to talk about this," Jake said, taking back the book from her. "It's morbid."

             
"Then my grandmother died," she said, pulling down the third finger and holding it to her palm. "I loved my grandmother so much."

             
"She was old. I liked her too, Dessy, but she was very old." He tried to find his lost place in the book, riffling through the pages until they made a whirring sound.

             
"Today I found out my cousin Lily has melanoma. Knots rose up all over her neck. She has maybe two months to live."

             
Now he looked up at her, the book forgotten. "Lily? The one with five kids? Lives in Tennessee somewhere? Jesus."

             
"Yeah, she called yesterday and told me. Then there's your buddy, Connor. Got himself run down by a Metro bus. Now that's just crazy, Jake. Walking in front of a bus that way. He must have meant for it to happen."

             
"I
sure
don't want to talk about Connor." He brought the book close to his face, blocking her out.

             
He and Connor had been friends for more than ten years.

             
"Don't you think that's too many people?" She couldn't let it go. She had never been able to let anything go until she'd resolved it to her satisfaction.

             
"When it's somebody you care about, it's always too many." Jake wouldn't meet her eyes.

             
"Do you believe in witchcraft, Jake?"

             
"Hmmm."

             
"Black magic? Bad mojo or juju or stuff like that? I mean, you read about it all the time. What do you really think about the supernatural?"

             
"I wish you'd let me read this, that's what I think."

             
Dessy let him read. She couldn't tell him about the woman down the hallway, could she? Couldn't tell him she'd struck a bargain and a bad one.

             
That strange, glowing afternoon in her cramped apartment more than a year ago Vera had promised, "I can get you a man."

             
"I feel like such a ninny talking about this," Dessy had replied. "I know I'm not pretty. There are hundreds of pretty girls in this town and I'm not one of them. I'm overweight--okay, I'm fat. No one's ever been able to do anything with my hair. The cut's never right, the permanents frizzle. I buy good clothes, expensive clothes, and they hang on me like rags."

             
"I can still get you one," Vera said, standing by a scarf-draped table. "A man." She glided to a wall of shelves and took out one of the glass-stoppered bottles there. She sat at the table again and her face looked aged in brine in the soft amber sunlight spilling across from the windows.

             
"What's that?" Dessy felt hesitation setting in. Did she really want to be involved in witchcraft? It felt so archaic. It also felt dangerous, like walking along a railroad track on a trestle bridge, waiting for a train.

             
Vera smiled. It was like watching an icicle first crack and then hang precariously from an overhang. "It's what you drink to have a man love you. Take it."

             
Dessy licked her lips and thought this had been one of her more lame-brained ideas. Imagine going to a witch who advertised spells on a hand-painted sign in the door glass of the apartment vestibule's door. She didn't even believe in witches. She believed in
palm readers
. One had told her when she was sixteen that she would move away from that two-horse, dry, West Texas town into Houston. And she had--was offered a job when she was eighteen and took it. Predicted she would go on a trip to an exotic clime, and the first year she worked for the oil company, her boss, impressed with her capable and efficient skills, took her along as his secretary to Mexico City for a conference. It had been a fabulous trip, broadening her horizons.

             
That must have been what caused her to timidly knock on the door of Apartment 311 and ask for a session from the witch. If a palm reader could tell the future, couldn't a witch
arrange
the future? And her future was so bleak, so empty, it needed the utmost arrangement.

             
"How much does it cost?" she has asked Vera that day. "I don't have a lot of..."

             
"The fee is nominal. The monetary fee, that is." Vera smiled and unease spread through Dessy like a chill from swallowing a chunk of ice.

             
"What do you mean? What other fee is there?"

             
"Love is paid for in blood, dear Dessy."

             
There it was. Dessy wanted to head for the door.

             
"I still don't know what you mean. Maybe I should go...I don't know why..."

             
Vera took hold of her hand across the table. The light was fading fast from the room. Shadows advanced from the corners, gathering like whispering old women at the funeral of a madman. Vera leaned forward and lowered her voice. "Not much blood. Just some, Dessy. A life on its way out anyway, one life here...and there. You'll hardly notice."

             
Dessy left then, her heard like a stone lodged hard beneath her ribs, a thing big enough and cold enough to kill her. "I can't," she had said, "that's unspeakable." She escaped Vera's grasp, hurrying from the dim, dusty room for the hallway and her own apartment.

             
A week later she was back. It was the loneliness that took her feet tracing the way to Vera's door.

             
"Remember me?" She peered through the gloom at Vera's knife-edged face at the door crack. "The potion?"

             
"Ah, yes, the man to love you." Vera stepped back and swung the door wide to sweep her inside.

             
It had been explained to Dessy the deaths would come to those she knew, but it was coming anyway for everyone, and soon for these--the ones Vera must take in order for Dessy to pay for the potion.

             
"But why must you?" Dessy asked, still distraught and not sure if she could actually go through with it.

             
Vera shrugged. "Blood has to pay," is all she would say.

             
Dessy knew that was cryptic and evil and if she took part in this...agreement...she would also be taking part in evil. Her mind was a swirl, tormented with morality, with the possible ramifications of her selfishness. Her
need
.

             
In the end Dessy signed the pact by nodding her head. That was all. She relented, feverish for a lover, for a friend and a mate, for someone to look at her the way men looked at women they loved.

             
Didn't she deserve love? She nodded her head in acquiescence, took the stopper from the bottle, her hand shaking, and drank down the sweetly vile potion from the blue bottle, gagging at the last, and then she had wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and asked, "Will I meet him soon?"

             
Vera smiled that smile that set Dessy to wishing she hadn't done any of this, took the few bills from Dessy's trembling fingers, and led her to the door. "It will be soon. No more than a few days."

             
And so it had been. Dessy met Jake at the company Halloween party. She was dressed as a ghost; she knew she hadn't any imagination, so why try to disguise herself as someone pretty like Cleopatra or a rock singer? Besides, the flowing white shroud covered her heavy hips, the football captain's wide shoulders, and full, ponderous breasts.

             
Jake stood in the corner, dressed as Count Dracula--for she came to know he loved vampires. He watched as she entered the room. He wore a black suit, cape lined in red satin, and fake fangs that made him look boyish rather than sinister when he grinned.

             
He followed her to the buffet and offered to pour her wine (dyed black for the occasion) into the crystal goblets. He talked to her all night about vampires and sex and bats and old movies and sex, and finally Dessy was so hot for him she thought she might fling off the shroud and grapple him to the floor right in front of the company president if he didn't stop talking.