Tales from the Crossroad, Volume 1 Read online

  “You’ve got a beef?” Madsen asked, the rage coming up in him fast. First just a few drops of bile, and then all the rest of it just flooding in. He slapped the phone from the kid’s hand and grabbed him by the neck.

  Two sticks of taped together dynamite fell out of the guy’s coat pocket. They hit with a hollow thud, sounding fake, but Madsen had never been around dynamite before and had no idea whether it was real. He had to follow through.

  “Okay, bastard, let’s get this over with.”

  The words had barely cleared his lips when a gleam of light drew his attention low, tot the bomber’s right hand. He knew what was coming but couldn’t quite get himself out of the way–same old story, when you got right down to it. Hey now, here it comes.

  The blade caught Madsen low in the belly but didn’t go in deep. He tried to hold himself steady, laughing because it felt good to be doing what was right. No chance, though, he fell back to the other side of the hall and bumped a gurney shoved up against the wall–with a dirty sheet covering it–

  Friggin’ kid moved forward, terrified and fighting as if in self defense. He accidentally stepped on the dynamite and those two sticks cracked loudly–plastic–spilling ball bearings. A low whining moan crashed up through his chest.

  The knife brushed Madsen again, and once more, but there was no pain. He brought the back of one fist up into that ruined face. The guy’s nose went with an almost gentle snap and he started to scream. Madsen hit him in the same place again. He swept aside and stuck the kid’s inner shoulder with the meaty part of his palm, driving deep into the bone, wanting to break the fucker’s neck. An insane fury was on him but it only emerged second to second, with repulsive moments of clarity between them.

  He kept at it for all he was worth as the blizzard continued, out there and in here. Howls echoed all around, perhaps the wind or maybe the dogs.

  At last, the bastard swooned and tumbled backwards, stepped on the ball bearings and his feet went up from under him. It appeared like a perfectly choreographed move as he hung up there in the air chest high for an instant, before coming down flat on the back of his skull.

  Madsen checked him. The bitter kid wasn’t out yet, laying there chewing his own blood and breathing shallowly. His one good eye tried to focus.

  The knife was still in his hand. Madsen kicked it away.

  Skittering off, splashing drops on the tiles as it spun, all four inches of the blade were wet.

  “Hey now,” Madsen said, a giggle lurking at the back of his throat. He reached down and felt his belly squish aside as he touched it. His hands came away completely red and he realized he’d been nearly disemboweled.

  “Who are you?” the kid whimpered, asking with a real interest. “What are you doing here?”

  Always a good question. Madsen waited as the guy clambered to his feet and then punched him in the mouth once more with everything he had left. The kid went down hard and lay in a heap.

  The blow had set Madsen off-balance and he went to one knee. Blood gushed form his stomach and poured over his shoes, but it still didn’t hurt. He stood again and confronted the gurney behind him like a long-lost resentful friend. The shape under the cloth was as familiar as any obscured face would be, his own or another.

  How much less of himself was there now? When they ground him down into ashes, what would the scale read? Would he be more than a handful for somebody to take home?

  This I want to see.

  His fingers trembled as he reached out to touch the soiled sheet.

  “I’m not dead yet,” he whispered, and the conviction of his own voice gave him strength. “I am not dead yet!”

  Maybe it was true. His crimson fingerprints covered the cloth and bled through to what was beneath.

  “Madsen?”

  He wheeled and in doing so lurched wildly and kicked the gurney. It creaked and slowly rolled away.

  And the little bald girl at the other end of the hall, swathed in gauze as if she’d been flung into fire many times before, smiling and beckoning him forward, the blunt edges of his life growing more and more ugly now, even as he was running, stumbling, and then finally crawling to meet her.

  Woman in the Dark

  By Tom Piccirilli

  Previously appeared in The Anthology of Dark Wisdom: The Best of Dark Fiction

  It had taken more than twenty years to happen but he still wasn’t ready for it when it did.

  Sometimes the world jumped at your face and tried to bite it off, and sometimes life just crept up so slowly that you couldn’t help but shake your head when you saw the utter cunning of what had been occurring by inches for so long.

  Collie was thirty-nine and screaming on the downhill slide into his mid-life crisis. He spent more and more time in the bathroom looking in the mirror at some wrinkled bastard with a growing patch of white in his hair, learning to really hate the guy. His wife was gone, his job was gone, and he had a little less than two grand in the bank. No kids, no health insurance, no retirement plan, and no exit strategy, all of which served to remind him of the small mistakes he’d made since he was about sixteen, which had continued picking up steam over the years until he’d somehow totally derailed.

  He hadn’t been with a woman in six months and didn’t really miss it that much, which also said a lot. Any woman he could nab had troubles of her own, along with three or four kids in tow and a psychotic ex-husband or two, which just made the whole thing spooky as hell. Sometimes they wanted to marry him, and sometimes they started crying the moment he got their blouses off. Their breasts hung like lynchings.

  Occasionally, the middle of the action, the ladies stared at him with such loathing that he started searching around for a butcher’s knife under their pillows, maybe a razor blade hidden under a tongue. He was a part of the brotherhood of pain who had beaten or maimed them. A stern bitter father, a greasy-pawed uncle, the failures of his side of the species thick in his bloodstream. When he climbed against the women they could feel his forefathers’ evils coming along with him into the room, and so could he.

  So he was kicking along Amsterdam Avenue around 71st, looking for a pizza place where he could grab a couple slices of pepperoni–you couldn’t carry your great burdens in the front of your mind all the time, you grew weak, you became part of the hoard, your fingertips let go of the ledge–when he walked past a doorway and heard a minor commotion. The hard slap of meat on meat.

  Collie turned and watched this little runt of a pimp with a pencil-thin mustache and his shirt open to his belly button slapping a whore around. The runt smacked her open handed twice more and then gave her two short jabs to the mid-section, letting out a small grunt with each strike like he was mugging for a boxing promoter.

  She let out a sound of complete surrender and fell over on her face, a dapple of blood flying onto the concrete. It was soaked up instantly and left a black mark. Collie stared at the blood and knew that fifteen generations from now that stain would still be there.

  The pimp kicked her in the ribs and Collie, without truly understanding why, suddenly rose up and seemed to expand within himself, straining against his own contours. Inwardly pressing the confines of his own personality, and feeling it buckle and give way. He was in motion but didn’t know where he was going until he shoved the runt backward through the open door and into the hall.

  Collie watched the guy’s face go from a icy calm to attentive but disbelieving rage. The runt all teeth. His mouth stuffed with what looked like fifty or sixty shards of bone. The fury coming off him in waves, like the tide rolling.

  You didn’t get involved in things like this. It wasn’t chivalrous and it wasn’t manly to try to protect a hooker from her boss daddy. This was a different kind of life. She was probably so used to the beatings that she’d pull a blade on Collie just for jumping in. You never knew.

  But he couldn’t stop himself even as he squared his shoulders and gave two sharp chops to the runt’s throat and knocked him down. Collie had never been
in a fight in his life, not even when he was drinking heavily and used to start shit in bars. He’d never thrown a punch, didn’t know where the chop had come from, the edge of his hand like a blade, but it felt natural. Who knew such a thing could be done after a lifetime of not doing it.

  He stared at his own hand, thinking, Hey, there’s still a few surprises left after all.

  The woman, huddled on the sidewalk, didn’t move. She looked incapable of moving, as if she were nothing more than another cornerstone in a city of ancient, implacable structures. The breeze stirred her hair, and another drop of red sluiced in a wide arc across her cheek, but otherwise she seemed posed, a memorial to all women, lifeless.

  The little pimp squeaked like a dog. He went into a coughing fit and bounced around the hallway on his back. When he could breathe again, he started squeaking once more. It took Collie a minute to realize the guy was yelling at him in Spanish.

  Finally Collie said, “Look, I don’t know what the hell you’re saying.”

  The runt looked up and switched to English. “I’m saying you’re dead, man. You hear that?”

  “I hear that. What’s your name?”

  “I’m gonna cut your gizzard off.”

  Collie thought the threat might be a touch more potent if he knew what a gizzard was. “How about if you just run along now, you mutt.”

  “What’d you call me?”

  “I called you a mutt,” Collie said, and for emphasis reached down, grabbed the guy by the collar, shook him hard, and then punched him in the face. Blood spurted and drained down his shirt front. Somehow, Collie was disgusted by the sight but still liked it. “I also told you to run along.”

  He dragged the pimp past the whore who was now unsteadily getting to her feet. A tickle moved through him and he was a bit stunned to realize he was aroused. The situation had kicked his heart rate way up, his veins juiced, and his heart banging hard. His ex-wife would’ve called him sick. The marriage counselor would’ve steepled his fingers and pressed them under his bearded chin, the corners of his mouth notched into a slightly deprecating smile, silently judging everybody in his office.

  The runt struggled, but Collie just yanked him along until he got to the front stoop and then threw the creep out to the curb. He bounced like a tennis ball left out in the rain. A few folks in the foot traffic stared, but no one slowed or stopped. The pimp got up, backed away, and slid away into a shadowed alley.

  The city, or perhaps it was only himself, took a deep breath then, and let out a sigh that drifted through the centuries.

  Collie turned back to her, took her elbow.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said.

  A simple thank you, it just wasn’t in her vocabulary. His hands were fists and he felt his back teeth grinding together. The counselor said he had anger issues. Who the hell didn’t?

  His brain kept sparking. The man he’d been five minutes ago called to him from a great distance, softly and a little sadly.

  She looked as though she wanted to offer him something. Like an old Jewish lady whose driveway he’d shoveled, like she wanted to hand him a quarter. He gazed at her and spotted the caricature of seduction in her dress and makeup. The reality of ache and acceptance had been long ago written in her expression. He recognized the traits.

  She’d lost one shoe. He found it in the foyer and went to one knee, waited for her to lift her foot so he could place it on her heel.

  These are the actions of fairy tales, he realized. Bards and troubadours of another age had sung of this moment, in wait for him.

  The woman leaned against the wall and put her hand on Collie’s shoulder for balance. The weight of her above him had the texture of sex but none of its endurance. Collie started to back away, wondering where he would go now. He still had nowhere he needed to be. He’d never had anywhere he needed to be.

  She wiped the back of her hand across her chin and smeared the blood into a ruby lipstick. A heavy breath escaped her and he smelled mouthwash and some kind of flowery perfume.

  Collie started away but she was staring intently at him now, and her eyes were filled with amusement and something–

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Lori Ann.”

  They’d gone to the prom together.

  Lori Ann Petrakos, his first serious crush and perhaps even his first love. She was still beautiful, even with blood on her teeth.

  He remembered his fear just approaching her to ask her out that first time. It still lived within him, that fear, and twisted against him now like a beloved pet.

  Halfway through senior year, every guy in the school, in the world, wanting her, and she’d just smile and let them all down easily, say she had plans or preferred to be friends. The kind of thing that created serial killers by the masses. Collie still didn’t know where he got the nerve from, but one day it was there. He asked her to a movie, and she said yes.

  It startled him so much that he never even got her number. He had to look her father up in the phone book, except it was her uncle who was right off the boat from Xios. The guy sold Souvlaki in mid-town Manhattan and knew about ten words of English, but eventually Collie got the right number.

  He picked Lori Ann up in his ’67 Charger–Christ, what a car, and he’d tuned it himself, rebuilt it from the tires up, by himself. It was something to be proud of, having such faith in your abilities.

  He made a little extra change racing down Airport Road and out on Ocean Parkway. He held the door open for her when she got in, and drove to the theater like was taking his road test. They saw some action flick that he couldn’t keep his mind on. Her presence was so strong beside him that nothing would stay in his head for long, not even his lust. Sometimes she had to repeat herself because all he could hear was some strange kind of music, the thrum of his pulse in his ears.

  When they got back out into the parking lot she said, “This car is muscle. You going to open it up this time?”

  “If you want.”

  “I want.”

  He took her out east on Sunrise Highway, heading toward Montauk Point. When they got to the barrens, past all the traffic cop stake-outs, he kicked it up and was rewarded when she gave a throaty laugh. He thought, What the hell, and dropped the hammer until they were in triple digits, shrieking down the highway. She eased beside him and plucked his hand from where it rested on her knee and pressed one of his fingers into her mouth. He figured they might crack up against the rails right there.

  They pulled over onto the first grassy part of the shoulder wide enough to keep from getting racked by a Freightliner, and screwed in the backseat. The whole time he stared into her eyes even though she had them closed through a lot of it, but he couldn’t shrug the feeling that this was a great fortune he didn’t deserve, that he was supposed to do something to prove he was worth it. The music kept playing. It swelled and surged.

  They began dating and immediately a distance grew between him and his friends. His family too. It didn’t have to do with Lori Ann so much as with his own growing understanding of the world. He had a touch of cool but not nearly enough, and he kept trying to figure out what she wanted with him. In the meantime, they made love a lot. His head, already awash with fantasies of a huge brood of babies and house on the hill–why a hill, where the heck were there hills around here?–grew more crowded with intense dreams.

  She liked him to speed but wanted him to stop racing. He didn’t get it but said all right. She laughed deeply against his neck while he peeled free of red lights. She laid in the back and rambled about her life while he took the back streets through the city. Her mother’s insults, the pink scars and the white ones, the proper way to baste a turkey, her favorite passages from Renaissance poetry, the time her uncle made a pass at her. A pass, nothing more, flirting but going right up to the line, maybe a step over it. It was the kind of thing that made Collie sort of crazy.

  Prom night he felt like he’d been brushed by fate and wondered what achievements he might accomplish. There we
re artists and architects in his genetics.

  Unlike the other girls, Lori Ann would only dance to the slow tunes, moving gracefully about the floor and making him look good. He was thankful. He told her he loved her, and she told him the same. A lightning charge filled the air, and he knew it might stop his heart. A couple hours later, while they panted in the backseat of the Charger, she also mentioned she was moving out of state to go to school.

  He saw her three or four more times after that until one of them, probably him, faded away completely out of sight.

  Twenty years later now, he realized he was still invisible, the cries of his forefathers going unheeded, the music gone.

  Blood on stone.

  Now Lori Ann took him by the hand and led him down the sidewalk, checking all around to make sure the mutt wasn’t hiding behind a car or something, ready to jump out. Collie let himself be carried along.

  He’d gone to a prostitute once in his life, back when his marriage was first coming apart. It had been a completely miserable experience. This lady older than his mother working his crank in the front seat of his car, in an alleyway in the meat packing district behind a bunch of other cars with guys getting their cranks worked on. All he could do was think about what a ridiculous situation it was. She kept saying, “Come on, baby, I can’t do it all by myself...you ain’t even trying, you got to try....” There just wasn’t much left when a twenty dollar whore started nagging you worse than your wife.

  Collie and Lori Ann didn’t speak as they walked, with her still in the lead. Finally she tugged him up some stairs. There was a tree in front of her building and a homeless guy curled up behind the trash cans.

  Her apartment was on the first floor. It wasn’t much but it was twice the size of his own. A bottle of JD with an unbroken label sat on a table in her kitchen alcove. He was still hungry. He opened her refrigerator and found a pot of Jambalaya. He went through her cabinets and got himself a bowl and spoon, poured himself a glass of the JD. She seemed fine with him making himself at home.