Dead Reflections (24 page)

I heard the words like distant wind chimes playing discordant notes in my ear. I felt inside myself, watching myself direct my gaze towards the sliding patio doors where I’d been planning on serving us supper this evening once Jennifer and Tia arrived home. I rehearsed, in my numbing mind, the scenario I’d imagined: how I’d have made a pitcher of Sangria for Jen and I after supper so that we could sit on the deck and watch the weather system move out past us over the lake, past our spot of Nirvana which she’d been frantically trying to reach when she’d met the monster head-on.

And in the glass, again just for seconds, I saw her walking towards me, her hands outstretched, her hair wet and flowing behind her in the wind, her smile sweet and timeless. As the clouds finally broke and a beam of sun ribboned out, I heard her sing her sweet song, and this time I saw both officers turn their heads, puzzled, to also listen. That’s how I knew it was true; that she was really dead.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby…

The hairs came up on Honey’s back and I saw her staring at the glass. Then her tail began to wag.

The weather system blew out, and with it, the image of Jennifer walking towards me over the lake, the sliding doors of the patio framing her in the last remnants of the cloud banks dispersing in the distance. I knew we’d watched the storm pass through together, she and I like we’d done for years, and like the system, both were now gone. Honey let out a mournful wail as she ran towards the glass, sniffing along the floor. A thin trickle of water appeared out of nowhere on the tiles, in it a fragile wisp of lake grass.

And I knew that I’d be watching the clouds in every storm thereafter, for the rest of my life, while listening for her song. Traditions die hard.

The End

Night when rains prevail and winds

Pry fingers cold around head stone

Its flesh gone soft, its glistening entrails

Jaw swings pendulum from its chin

Held loose with cartilage

Pale as moon, phalanges scrape the landscape grim

Mission set in eyeless sockets

Dark as wings, the crow sets flight

There’s no point in locking your windows

Cadaver’s crawling, eyes alight

It smells your fear and feels you tremble

Drawn to terror with rising zeal

You wait with breath held, listening…out there

Imagination? Or truth revealed

Along still glass the wind does travel

Whistling low close to the ground

Or is it bone that lingers near by

Seeking, prying, horror-bound

You

Slide down beneath your covers

Eyes squeezed shut, hands set to prayer

On this windswept night it finds you

Glass shatters inward, moist cool air

You feel it enter, lingering nearby

Glides in with you, like a lover

Cold and warmth embrace together

Lipless teeth over yours, they hover

Bone enwraps you, circling, tightening

Femur, fibula, hard skull kisses

Teeth that sever, nails gone yellow

Cadaver embrace, carnal wishes

With mission set, it’ll always find you

Your terror bittersweet perfume

On windswept nights, the bone-man rambles

To drag you back, a waiting tomb

By

Carol Weekes

It rained on the day the limousine showed up. Before I begin this tale in earnest, you need to know something. Tayside isn’t a big place. Everything here is as predictable as clockwork. The last census listed our population at 2,006. Anything different from the ‘norm’ stands out. The center of town consists of two blocks of stores, a garage, small businesses like a lawyer’s office, a medical clinic, a hairdresser, an insurance company, and the local high and elementary schools that sit side by side in matching brown brick. If a stranger drives through in an ordinary vehicle, like a nondescript old Honda or pickup truck, that’s enough to turn heads and jaws to gossip.
Who the hell is that?
Heads shake.
I dunno; tourist, maybe. Or somebody lost
. If it’s a fancier vehicle with shiny rims, it’s
drug dealer or pimp
. Then the stranger will move on and so will the conversation, back to the mundane and expected.

The limousine pulled into town on a Tuesday, out on R.R. #5. Weather had turned ‘funny,’ bringing heavy rains that knocked leaves from their branches and freezing puddles over in thin veils of crunchy ice. Jay Bening, who grows most of the town’s corn, soy, and alfalfa saw it coming along the road under a watery morning sun.

“Moving like its wheels weren’t even touching the ground,” he told the rest of us. “Just floating like a big, fat shadow.” We sat around a wood stove in Kenny’s Sports Bar. Kenny Goodman wiped beer glasses dry and set them beneath the counter, his ear cocked to the conversation.

“Its windows (Jay pronounced this as ‘winders’) were as dark as smoke. Couldn’t see the driver or any passengers. Never heard it coming, either. I looked up to scratch at a bug trying to land on my forehead and there it was…big ugly car…right in front of me. Gave me a chill. Smelled funny too, like its exhaust was made out of a big, old fart.”

“Diesel fuel?” I queried.

Jay shrugged his shoulders. “Diesel’s tend to have noisy engines and I ain’t heard of a limo with one, but I never heard this bastard sneaking up on me.” He groaned a little and rubbed at his belly for a minute.

Dewey Newman, one of the barmen, paused in his wiping potato chip crumbs from our table. “I saw it just before I came in today, over on Grant Street.”

“What was it doing there?” I asked. I hadn’t liked the mention of this car in town when Jay first saw it, although why, I couldn’t say. A limousine’s an odd thing. Any time the local high school has a graduation, the grade twelve kids will rent one or two of them from the city and get ferried to and fro half the night. But those ones were long, white stretch limos. Not like this one, dark as soot. And being October, I couldn’t imagine a reason for it being here.

“Just sitting there, idling,” Dewey said. “In front of Pickerings.”

“Maybe some movie star is passing through.” I grinned at the raised eyebrows.

“Through Tayside?” Dewey snorted.

“Well, we do keep good gas prices compared to the other towns around here. It was in front of Pickerings?”

Pickerings is one of two small grocers in town, the other being a franchise IGA in the south end. Pickerings catered to the more expensive and unusual items. If you wanted something different, like pickled catfish or fresh oysters or even some odd vegetable like arugula, you went to Pickerings for it. My wife once did a full order there and I had a word with her for it too. Cost me $250 in groceries that week instead of the usual $125 so that she could ferry a basket home full of things like some fancy bottle of pomegranate syrup and fresh figs. Figs. Sounds like a perfectly good cuss word to me. Fig. Fig on that, I told her. You don’t shop there again. They’re ripping people off for these big city items. Plain old pork chops and mashed potatoes will do. I don’t want to be eating things on a cracker that look like they might fight back on their way into my mouth.

Old man Pickering didn’t do without. He was one of the few in town to drive around in a spanking new vehicle every year, this year being a grey Lexus; him chewing on a Cuban cigar like he had a penchant for wet wanker. Roll down the window and knock ash from the end of the thing, he would, letting the sun catch and form a prism off his diamond ring.

Word had it Pickerings was a front for other kinds of business; underground enterprise and maybe why vehicles with shiny rims or with unidentified faces often cruised in and out of the town. Figs on the outside, illegal pharmaceuticals, and I even heard porn and snuff films on the inside. It was all talk, grant you, and talk in a small town often comes out of a bad mix of boredom and speculation. But I had to admit that Donny Pickering with his fat, pink fingers and heavy jowls left a bad taste in the mouth. He had what my wife called ‘fish eyes’—opaque and cold. If he looked directly at you, you felt like you needed to wipe something from your face.

“Maybe someone’s coming for payment,” Kenny said. We nodded. Could be criminal, although the choice of car was conspicuous for something sneaky about to go down, unless they wanted to make their presence known and shake things up.

“Someone’s gonna get killed one of these days. Don’t think it can’t happen in our town.”

“Couldn’t say I’d care if it did happen to him,” I cut in, dry. “Fig.”

“What?” Kenny asked. I ignored him.

“It kind of hovered there, like whoever was inside of it was studying me,” Jay resumed his story. “Then it sped up and over the hill, leaving its stink in the air. Gives me goose bumps.” He rubbed at both arms and took a long swallow of beer, then grimaced.

“Taste bad?” I asked him.

“Bad gut.”

“Oh, go on,” Dewey waved a hand at him. “Next thing you’ll be saying you saw the grim reaper peering at you through the back window.

Jay’s face was solemn. I felt a little chill move along the air just then, as if someone had cracked open the bar’s front door and let a breeze in.

Jay scowled. “There’s something not right about that thing.”

No one said anything for a long moment. A knot of wood popped in the stove, making us jump.

Kenny resumed his glass-drying, cutting the moment in two and breaking the immediate tension. “You’s imagining things.”

Dewey laughed and walked back to the bar.

Jay looked pissed. “Never mind,” he said. “I won’t be mentioning it again.” He ordered scotch in place of beer and slung it back, swallowing hard and squeezing his eyes shut to the burn. We changed the topic to football, and when everyone went home that evening, I can’t say any of us thought of the limousine again.

The next morning I heard that old man Pickering had been found dead in the back office of his store, just before the lunch hour. According to his employees, who spread the gossip to customers, Pickering had been giving some instructions to an employee, Brett Hilstrom, about how he wanted imported jars of antipasto stacked near the dry goods, when Pickering’s face went a little pale. He’d been talking and suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence, looking past Hilstrom’s shoulder like he’d seen a mouse or something skitter across the floor. Hilstrom said Pickering’s words just faded out and his mouth fell open. When Hilstrom turned to see what had caught Pickering’s attention, he didn’t note anything unusual—but he later admitted he smelled something a little “off,” like “meat gone bad” for a few seconds.

“What’s up, boss?” Hilstrom had asked, but Pickering didn’t answer him. Instead, he’d walked past Hilstrom and stepped toward a shelf containing a wall of soda cracker boxes on sale. Pickering had been cautious when he peeked behind the display stand, his fists curled and his neck craning forward.

“Weird,” Pickering had said.

“What’s weird, sir?”

Pickering shook his head. “Never mind. I have some paperwork to finish in my office. Get those jars up before noon.”

“Yes, sir,” Hilstrom complied. He’d watched the big man saunter away. Then he’d taken a look for himself around the soda cracker stand, his curiosity eating at him. He hadn’t seen anything amiss and whatever smell he’d detected moments earlier had dissipated. That was the last time anyone had seen Pickering alive. But as more gossip spread, it was learned that two of the employees who worked cashier positions at the front of the store had, just like Dewey Newman, seen a black limousine idling in front of the store. It had been a little past nine-thirty in the morning. No one had seen anyone step out from the limousine, but then there’d been a lineup at both cash registers and everyone had been busy. It was only after someone went to knock on the boss’s office door, had pushed the door open when they got no response, and that person had screamed when they found old man Pickering slumped over his desk with blood running from one nostril and his eyes wide and scared and already clouding over, that the one cashier saw the black car pull out and move into traffic. But before it did she swore she saw old man Pickering’s face peering at her through the car’s open rear passenger window. He’d mouthed the words ‘help me.’ Then a long thin hand had appeared over Pickering’s left shoulder and hauled him back from the glass. The limo’s window slid up and became a square of darkness again. Impossible, she’d later been told. Pickering was dead at his desk. He hadn’t gotten into any car, never mind a limo. I know what I saw, the girl insisted, but she looked scared.

“What do you think she saw?” Kenny asked us that afternoon. We’d gathered again after work for a pint and a game of darts.

“I think she’s looking for attention from the media is what,” I said. “Everyone wants their moment of fame.”

Kenny scratched his head. “Queer is what it is. I wonder where that car’s gone. Anyone see it around lately?”

Dewey shook his head. “I ain’t seen it at all, and I’ll tell you another thing. I’m not worrying about it. This is just a bunch of hocus.” We all let out a titter. Jay nailed a dart smack center of the board. We howled, impressed. The moment of unease and the limousine were forgotten.

A few minutes later nature called and I walked into the men’s washroom at the back of the bar. It’s a small room with a single toilet inside a private stall, a urinal on the opposite side, and a cracked porcelain sink with a yellow stain where the hot water tap continuously leaks. Jay keeps a couple of those blue disinfectant pucks in the urinal to cut back on the smell of piss. Jay pushed through the door as I stood at the urinal, relieving myself.

“You think the Wildcats are gonna…” I began and noted his face. He looked like he was going to up-chuck his cookies. I finished and hurried over to where he stood in the toilet stall, one hand balancing himself against a wall.