THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (12 page)

             
Now they'd been together for more than a year and she had seen too many people die.

             
It had to be her fault. It ate at her like a slow fire, burning and smoking low in her midsection so that she couldn't enjoy being loved. Jake's attentions only reminded her people were paying with their lives. Every time he touched her, she cringed, thinking of another funeral, another casket, a grave yawning. Would it never end? Would the debt never be repaid?

             
She might have been able to live with the guilt--might have--for she loved Jake and their life together. She couldn't contemplate a time in her life without him. She might have found a way to accept the deaths if it hadn't been for the headaches.

             
"I can't read anymore, it hurts so bad!" Jake threw the latest vampire fiction across the room from the bed and grabbed the sides of his head with both hands. He shook himself as if to shuck off the pain and then he groaned.

             
Dessy went for a cold wet bath cloth to bathe his neck and forehead. She brought back aspirin and a glass of water. Nothing seemed to help.

             
"You'd better go to a doctor," she said, worry creasing her face.

             
#

             
Weeks later, after a series of debilitating headaches, Jake let himself me taken to a doctor--who sent him to specialists. Brain tumor, they said. Three of them, consulting, rubbing their chins, standing around his bed in the hospital where Jake lay nearly comatose from a morphine drip. Definitely a brain tumor, that's what the scans showed. It was large. It was deadly. It was like a fat hand with extended claws reaching out into all areas of the brain.

             
Jake was going to be taken away from her.

             
She must set it all straight again if she could. That first fear had turned her heart to stone and now there was volcanic lava scoring her, leaving her racked with tremors, her cheeks wet with tears. She rushed home to the apartment house, ran up two flights of stairs to the third floor, to Apartment 311.

             
She knocked, banging on the door with both fists, screaming with the terror and dread of losing all that she had ever loved, all that had ever loved her in return.

             
The battering went unanswered. Dessy called and no sound came from within 311.

             
Down the stairs again, racing, leaping down them three at a time, staggering, she hit the first floor and banged on the super's door. "Let me in! I have to talk to Vera. Let me in now!"

             
The door opened on a chain and Mr. Caramini looked out at her, concerned and not a little frightened. "What's all this about?"

             
"Where's Vera? Three-eleven!"

             
"Dessy Mitchell? What's wrong with you? You look a mess, crying that way. There ain't no one in three-eleven, you know that."

             
Dessy's voice rose an octave. "Vera, the woman in three-eleven who put the sign in the lobby door..." She turned to point and only then did she see there was no sign. But it had been there just the day before, she was certain of that. She swallowed past a lump in her throat and put a cap on the panic that was trying to shatter her mind. "Vera." She said it just as plainly and unemotionally as she could so he could understand. "She had apartment three-eleven, third floor, down the hall from my apartment.

             
She kept a sign in the window. Right there." Now she did point. "It was there for months."

             
Mr. Caramini closed the door, undid the chain, and stood facing her. "Honey, you're mistaken.

             
Three-eleven's empty. Been empty for a couple years. You never heard from the other tenants about the murder happened in there?"

             
Dessy felt her knees go weak. She sagged against the door frame, her breath whistling out of her like steam from a kettle.

             
"That was before you moved in. I'd have thought someone would have gossiped about it to you by now, though I do see you and your young man tend to stay to yourselves a lot. Was a terrible thing, messy. I had a time, I tell you, getting folks to take the other apartments for a while. Bad karma, you know."

             
"What happened? In three-eleven?" she asked. Not that she cared. It didn't matter, did it, what happened; what mattered was that she had struck a deal with a mirage, a phantom, and there was blood to pay.

             
"It was a middle-aged couple, devoted you would have thought them, like lovebirds. Always holding hands, or he'd have his arm around her shoulder or waist, always kissing in the lobby when they thought no one was looking. Well...sort of like you and Jake."

             
Dessy saw the hospital room in her mind, the doctors ringed around the bed like white vultures, hanging over their patient they could not save, but intrigued by the claws of destruction in his brain.

             
They had sighed and exchanged guilty glances and told her how it might turn out all right, you never could tell with these things, it could stop growing, there had been miracles, they'd seen them. Lies. Lies to keep her from cursing them, from falling apart and making a scene of such grief it would bring down the walls.

             
Mr. Caramini's voice was like a glass chime, tinkling in a soft breeze. She tried to listen to him, to make out the words.

             
The woman, Veronica Oren, found out her husband had cheated on her, he had betrayed her, the love wasn't as strong as she thought--it was false and fake. Driven to a jealous rage, she'd waited behind the door of 311 for him to come home one night. She stabbed him so many times there was blood all over the walls and even in the hallway. There were pools of it, rivers and streams of it that leaked down the stairs, dripping over one stair after the other, down and down.

             
Dessy left before he finished the tale, moving up the stairway in a trance, mumbling. She knew how it ended. Vera/Veronica had been put to death by the state of Texas for her crime of passion. Paid for her love with blood.

             
On the third-floor landing Dessy paused, went to the closed door that had opened for her a year ago. She stood with her hand pressed against the cold, unyielding wood. She whispered pleas, promised her entire family, her firstborn, promised anything to save him, to save Jake.

             
From inside only the shadows whispered back, gathering from the empty corners that were darker than dried blood, darker than love scorned and lost.

             
Dessy thought she heard them.

             
You will be alone again,
they chorused.
You gave away too much,
they hissed.
You betrayed the
people around you and in return your betrayal comes home, just as it always does.

             
Dessy leaned her forehead against the door, listening. All she could say to those hard spirits was,

             
"I'm so sorry, I was wrong, I only wanted to be loved. And now too many people have died."

             
Too many!
the voices cried out.
Not enough, not enough, not nearly enough!

             
Dessy stepped back, feeling the evil like a cloud of darkness trying to get through the door. She rushed headlong down the stairs, through the lobby, and into the street.

             
She needed a palm reader. She needed a spiritual adviser. She had to redo the pact and get it right this time, get it right for Jake. She'd find someone to help her, someone with a potion--someone not dead, she hoped, not dead and seeking revenge.

             
She needed a witch.

             
THE END

Billie Sue Mosiman

First published in INVITATION TO MURDER as "A Pretty Boy," Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg, 1991

Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012

             
I never should have gotten involved with a pretty boy--especially one who could commit murder.

             
Not all of them will end up doing that, but you just never know.

             
Grandma had married a pretty boy much to her distress. He was vain, she said years after his death. So vain about his clothes and his tortoise shell comb set, so vain, she said in her creaky old woman's voice, that when he came down with pneumonia he wouldn't let her call a doctor for it was improper anyone should see him disheveled and incontinent in the cherry four-poster bed. Being pretty, Grandma concluded, had killed my grandfather before his time.

             
But I didn't think about these admonitions when I met Bobby. There are some experiences in life that defy common sense and the validity of good advice.

             
It was the winter of 1967 and I had come to Louisville by way Atlanta where no one wanted to hire a nineteen-year-old college dropout.

             
They didn't much want to hire me in Louisville either so I took a job selling candy behind the counter at Stewart's Department Store. The boyfriend who had come to Atlanta to drive me to Louisville, where he attended television repair school, worked in the mail room of Stewart's. I figured he could stand it, I could stand it.

             
It was Christmas season and he was busy wrapping gifts and mailing them worldwide. I was busy eating all the chocolates I could stuff into my mouth when the other sales girls weren't looking.

             
Swiping candy kept my appetite abated and stretched my paycheck considerably.

             
I was content with my job until Christmas Eve. Customers flocked to the counters ordering last minute gifts of filberts, pounds of pistachios wrapped in red foil, boxes of fancy mints and divinity and bridge mix chocolates. I hadn't a moment to filch a lemon drop, my feet hurt, it had begun to snow hard and my walk home to an apartment on Chestnut Street promised to be a miserable cold one.

             
As if all this were not punishment enough for my sins of minor theft, Jerry, the boyfriend working in the mail room, wandered up to the counter during this mad rush and handed me a small black felt ring box.

             
"Marry me," he said.

             
Just that. No preamble, no romance, just marry me.

             
"I'm busy, Jerry. Please."

             
"Open it. This isn't a joke, I promise."

             
"Miss, could you wait on me? I'd like two pounds of walnut fudge and a pound and a half of the pecan. Could you wrap it?"

             
I gave the fudge-hog in the mink a look insuring she wait another minute. Beyond that and I'd hear from her was the look she returned. After all it was Christmas and her time was more valuable than mine.

             
"I can't accept it. You know that, Jerry." I pushed the little box back across the shiny glass counter top. "I'm busy, I have to go."

             
While weighing and wrapping the fudge I glanced twice at where Jerry stood with his hands hanging at his sides staring at the jewel box. I hadn't meant to be so cold about it, but what did he expect? He knew I didn't love him; I didn't love anyone. Besides, he was a year younger than me and his parents would kill him if he got married. Just because I let him drive me from Atlanta to Louisville didn't mean we should spend our lives together. What was wrong with his head? And then proposing just before Christmas? In the store when it was rush hour? Ye gads.

             
The day after Christmas I began looking for another job. Stewart's was too far to walk and too close to Jerry. Across the street from my apartment house stood Louisville General Hospital. The building was a solid piece of craftsmanship, the best looking architecture within four blocks. My apartment house, a sleaze bag resort for the poor and semi-stupid nineteen-year-old like myself, was a red brick dwarf compared to the soaring many-storied structure of Louisville General.

             
If I found a job at the hospital I could come home for lunch, save a dollar or two. That was my main interest, saving money. I had big plans Jerry knew nothing about. I was headed for the golden west, for San Francisco and the famous Haight-Ashbury district where flower children danced through one long carnival night. I knew I was missing something, maybe even a part of history, and I just had to go there no matter what. But I could never get there if I didn't save traveling money and a stake to sustain me when I arrived.