Here is the place where the Bleeding Dreamtime deposits little nuggets of red hell: this is the repository for Joseph Armstead's short fiction.   Here you will visit strange worlds and damned dimensions where heroes and villains live their dark adventures, creating new and unsettling mythologies.

Mr. Armstead's short fiction has been featured in various magazines and most recently in WICKED KARNIVAL Magazine, The WICKED KARNIVAL HALLOWEEN SPECIAL EDITION, QUANTUM NIGHT magazine, POETIC DIVERSITY: The Poetry 'Zine of Los Angeles, BURIED.COM, SCARED NAKED Magazine, THE HARROW, UNDERGROUND WINDOW and THE ALCHEMYCOVE.  

** Short Story Compendium **

* Nightblooded
* A Lullaby of Tiny Naked Angels
* Love Song for a Meat Orchid
* The Saint of Bloodstained Children
* The Darkness of Exalted Flesh (The Book of Dark Memory series)
* The Anathema Gallery
* The Stones of Its Walls (The Book of Dark Memory series)
* Like Knives, the Jewels of Her Skin
* Mandrill Park 
* Commuter On a Train
* Pandora's Gates
* Watching Darkness Bleeding From Her Lips (The Book of Dark Memory series)

Fragments and Splinters: An Excerpt from the Journal of Mitchell Kreedy
by Joseph Armstead

Tuesday the 11th --

I can't sleep.   Woke up ahead of the alarm.

My hands are still aching and my fingers are sore.  The scars on my knuckles are throbbing and my shoulders are stiff.  Something wet and viscous is clinging to my skin...

I hope it's not going to be like this all the time.  I like to think I'm in better physical condition than that.  I mean, it's not like I work out or anything, I don't belong to a gym and with my work schedule, running or biking is kind of out of the question.  This being on-call 24/7 really sucks.  I'm afraid to start anything because I just know a call from work will interrupt it, I'll get caught up in taking care of whatever it is they need me to handle, and I'll never get back to what I started.  Things are always getting interrupted.

Not having a life sucks.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

I should have made an entry for Monday.  I made a pledge to myself I'd try and keep this journal of my thoughts and feelings current.  I should have written down something, but I couldn't help procrastinating.  I just felt blank and nowhere.  I felt like I was drained of all my vitality -- such as it is.   It's not like I'm the most active or exciting guy in the world.   I really don't do that much.

But I DO think.  

I should have written something down.  The missing entry makles me look like I'm only doing a half-assed job at keeping a journal.  Now, when I read through the journal, it looks like I lost a day, like Monday never happened.

I can't afford to lose any days.  Enough time slips away from me as it is.

Doctor McMartin from the Behavioral Center, Professor Karen Astor from the University and Jerry Benton from the Parole Office wanted to me start keeping a journal for that reason. 

Ever since my trouble in the Parnelli Case, even though that was four years ago, they have been really good about helping me and watching to make sure I keep track of my appointments, that I take my medications, and that I take the time to slow down and keep my thoughts organized.

I suppose I could resent them for that, but I don't.  Prof. Astor and Mr. Benton helped me get the job at SleepTek, the Sleep Diagnostics & Medicine Clinic.  They recognized my talent with computer technology and got me on as an I.T. worker there.  Got a job, got medical benefits, got an apartment, got a credit card and a bank account.  I take the subway to work and I walk in the park during my lunch.  I have cable TV.  It's almost like I was a regular citizen again.   Almost like the Parnelli Case never happened.

No waking dream-state nightmares.  No missing time where I black out and "dreamwalk" in broad daylight.  No anxiety episodes.  No punching the walls in sudden outbursts of unaccountable anger.  No waking up from dreams of strangers with screaming faces.  No strange looks from the landlord or the building super... 

No police knocking on my door asking about missing women in my neighborhood.  No strange bags of wet red things stuffed away in the back of my closet or behind the stairwell or in a locker at the bus station. 

Normal.

Almost.

And then something like what happened last night happens and I'm right back in the thick of the shit again.

This sucks.  I AM getting old.   I told myself I wasn't going to turn this journal into one long stream-of-consciousness bitch session.   I promised myself that.

But, man-oh-man, it sure does feel like I had a return to the "bad old days" last night...

I'm afraid to go down to the basement closet off the laundry room downstairs.  I'm afraid of what I'll find there.

I found something cold, wet and sticky smeared all over my chest and hands when I woke up this morning.  Lots of it.  Not blood, thank God, but it was definitely biological.  Vague remnants of some kind of a dream, something that was in color and had sounds and textures and smells, were still haunting my mind.  I had an erection, a real painful stiffy.  Thought maybe I had had a wet dream, but there was just too much of the stuff and none of it was on my crotch.  I felt all jittery and agitated.  Like before.  Something must have happened.

Something bad.

I think I must have sidestepped normal once again.

I think I may have had a visit from The Mantis Man.  Damn!

I can't tell Dr. McMartin or Prof. Astor about this because they'll talk with Jerry Benton and that'll be all she wrote for my freedom --- they'll send me back, back to The Big Top, the iron circus, a.k.a. prison.   Klawitter Penitentiary, Cell Block 6, B-Section.  The place even the inmates call "Murderworld".  Not quite supermax territory, but almost.   It's an ugly dangerous place full of angry, dangerous predators.

I never belonged there.  I have a disease.  I sleep too much, even when I am walking around in the daylight.   I sleep and something else takes over, uses my body, uses my mind.  I'm not a criminal, never was.   I have an extreme neurological disorder, one they can't diagnose.

I'm not dangerous, but the cunning, sneaky animal thing that wakes up in my body when I am asleep is.

The Mantis Man.

I'm liking the tired and beat up way my body feels, like I'm an athlete who rose to the challenge of competition and won by a New World Record, like I did something amazing.  I'm liking the feel of the wet stuff a little too much...

I can't let anyone know about this.

No way they'll want to work it out or try to understand or even maybe consider it a one time anomaly, a temporary setback.  All it will take is just a hint of impropriety, just the slightest scent of something fishy.  Zero tolerance.

Damn!  Who am I kidding?

Almost time for the alarm to go off.

I have to get ready for work soon.  I'll have to keep my wits about me and pretend everything is normal.  When I get home tonight, I'll have to go downstairs, I'll have to check out that mildewy, dank basement closet...

A little voice in the back of my mind is telling me that I better wear gloves and bring a large black garbage bag and some duct tape.

Something in the darkest places in my soul is laughing at me...

My face hurts.  With a shock, I realize that my face has been smiling from ear to ear ever since I allowed myself to think the words "The Mantis Man".

I think I'm in trouble again...

This sucks.   I hope all it that's happening is that I'm a little delusional and just getting old. 

I hope that's all it is.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that when I look in the bathroom mirror this morning it won't be my face that I see ---

It'll be the face of The Mantis Man.

Damn.

--- fini ---

This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2005, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission
 

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND HADES (More Fragments and Splinters)
by Joseph Armstead

"C'mon, man, talk to me.  TALK goddamn it!  This is WRONG!  You KNOW this is WRONG!"

No answer.   He wouldn't answer her anymore.

Unbelievable. 

How the hell did crap like this happen to anyone?  What kind of a world was it where you couldn't trust even the people you had known for most your life?

What the hell was she going to do?

She was cold and she was shaking in the center of a dark room so devoid of furnishings and character, she could hear the soft echoes of her own wet breathing.

Part of this was her own fault.   She'd known better than to come a'running when he called.

She should have known it the minute he'd said that Misty was involved, the chunky little pothead shit.  It was always an ugly scene if Misty was involved.  The ugly little white trash diva didn't know how to interact with other peole unless she was in their face about something, arguing, name calling, shaming them, or bullying them. Most people read through Misty's line of crap as soon as they'd met her and they shut her out, but not Lloyd.   It was the tits, Tammy was sure.  One look at Misty's overstuffed chest and a lot of men immediately started making excuses for her poor behavior and crappy manners.  Tammy hadn't known until lately that Lloyd was one of those men. 

Still, when her cellphone went off, she had been surprised to hear Lloyd's desperate urgency as he vomitted out a stream of pitiable complaints about how badly he'd been done wrong. 

She had heard the brittle edge of hysteria in his voice even through the phoneline.  He had always been a co-dependent weakling when it came to his intimate relationships with women. 

But he was her former best friend, they'd gone to college together and she'd seen him through his divorce and through his scare with throat cancer and there was just too damn much history invested in things for her to walk away without a backwards glance.

She should have done it, though.   She should have just walked away.

Now it was going to cost her.  Big time.

Tammy's nose was running and she couldn't stop her face from quivering.  She was seriously upset.  She was in pain.   Her body felt like it was alive with fire ants marching under her skin.  She had come in response to Lloyd's panicked phone message in good faith, interrupting her plans for the evening, plans she knew she wouldn't be able to reschedule or to fix -- she had flaked out on her friends one time too often now -- and she had wound up right in the middle of one of Lloyd's most unpleasant emotional meltdowns, standing knee deep in his self-centered "woe is me" bullshit.  She had refused to play the role of big sister and parent to him, the role she'd always played over the years, and he had not dealt well with her new "tough love" attitude.  He had not dealt well with it at all.

Even with all she knew about him, she hadn't known Lloyd was capable of what he had done to her and to Misty.

The minute she had seen that he was arguing with Misty she should have left.  But this time had been different.  This time the edge in his voice had been less submissive and more demanding.  He'd sounded meaner and colder.  She'd thought that mayber this time she'd just leave him be and let him handle it himself because it sounded like he was really standing up for himself and not taking any more of Misty's self-serving queen-bee crap.

Tammy had decided to just throw her hands up and leave them to it, to let them howl, snarl and swear, to let them accuse and blame one another.

But then things changed, suddenly, abruptly, violently and Lloyd exploded into a tornado of motion with deadly intent.

He wouldn't let them leave.  Either of them.

He had pulled a taser from out the back pocket of his canvas carpenter's jeans and he had hit them each with 25,000 volts of raw electrical current...  Tammy had felt like she'd been set on-fire and then kicked by a mule.

Lights out.

When she woke up, she was already determined to leave and to call the police on the crazy bastard.

But that wasn't going to happen.

What kept her from cursing him out, walking away from him and leaving him in the middle of his mess was the vertical steel frame from which she hung where a series of surgical steel hooks sunk into the exposed flesh of her stomach, thighs and forearms.

Misty was lying on her back on the floor, mouth open and gagged by a red rubber ball held in a neck harness and held immobile with thick leather straps bolted into the floor, and Lloyd was putting the finishing touches on using a curved blade to peel the skin on her face back away from her chin and over her forehead.  A pool of blood the size of a serving platter formed a wet halo around Misty's head.  The woman's thick body was shaking in a series of repeated convulsions.

Unbelievable.

"Lloyd.  Lloyd!", Tammy gasped, her friend's name ending on an upnote as a fresh burst of pain travelled through her pierced body.  "Pay attention!  LLOYD!"

"okay i hear you just fine why are you shouting at me stop it i don't like shouting anymore", Lloyd mumbled by way of a response.  He was still crouched over Misty.  He wouldn't look at Tammy.

"What in Christ's name are you doing?!?!  Look at what you're DOING!  This doesn't make sense!   I mean, LOOK AT THIS MESS!  Ohmigod, you have to stop this, you have to let us loose, stop...!", Tammy spat past her dry lips in a pain-fueled rush.

"no i don't have to do anything like that i don't have to stop i don't have to do things the way you want me to i've had enough and you need to leave me alone", Lloyd said dispassionately.

"You have to stop this", she sobbed, "You have to stop this and you need to let us go!"

He didn't answer.

"LLOYD, LISTEN TO ME!  BACK TO EARTH!  BACK TO EARTH NOW, YOU CRAZY FUCK!  Come ON!!", Tammy screeched.

He stood up slowly, like he was reluctant to stop carving on the exposed muscles of Misty's pulpy red face, and he stared at her uncomprehendingly for a long minute before he said, "You did this.  You did it.  This was NOT my choice."

My God, Tammy decided hollowly, he was gone, his brain had fried itself and he was gone.

"How do you fucking figure?", she challenged.  "You're killing your sometimes girlfriend and hanging the only person who ever gave a damn about you from hooks!  You're a goddman mess!  You're ALWAYS a goddamn mess!  It's just one neurotic breakdown, one panic attack, one temper tantrum after another with you! I'm tired of being your anchor to reality!  You're a grown man, for shit's sakes, so fucking ACT like one!  Get a goddamn grip!"

"See?  See?  You know that, too.  This isn't news to me.  I know I'm a screw up.  I know I'm immature.  I know I hang on you like a life-preserver after a shipwreck, but I can't HELP it!  I'm not made for this life and I don't understand anything any more!", he said with an eerie calmness.

"You think being unable to cope with adulthood gives you the right to do THIS?!?!"

He looked at her and he sighed.   He searched for words that wouldn't come.

"You left me alone", he said plainatively.  He shrugged.  He couldn't explain it any better.

"No, I didn't.  I just wanted to live my life without playing Mommy to you and to all your drama.  I do NOT deserve this shit, Lloyd!  Now unhook me and let me go!"

"I can't."

"Why not, dammit?"

"I think we both know that it's too late for me to stop now.   What's done cannot be undone, right?   No do-overs.  And yes, Tammy, I am insane.  Really.   Honestly", he said unexpectedly, his voice regaining some of that whiny, arrogant tone she had become accustomed to hearing.

"Why?", she croaked.

"There's no other sane way for me to express my outrage and frustration", he said simply.  "I am fully aware that torturing and dismembering you both is socially and morally unacceptable, but my options for letting go of the knot of emotions tying my brain into a tight little ball of pain are at absolute zero.  I honestly don't see how I could NOT do to you what I am doing.  And, because I am aware of how thoroughly beyond the pale such actions are in a civilized society, I am sure that I have lost my sanity."

"You still know the difference between sanity and insanity", Tammy said, her tongue feeling thick, "You still know the difference between right and wrong.  So to me that says that you're still sane."

"Intellectually, yes.  Emotionally, no.  My intellect is relatively unaffected by all this.  But my emotional state is somewhere over the rainbow and over the river and through the woods and in a dark wet place where worms are laughing...", he said, the calmness of his voice devolving into a choked giggle.

"...please..."

He shook his head.  His eyes looked at her without emotion.  Dead.  Unfocused.  Lifeless.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to hurt you rather badly", he said after a moment.  He brought the small curved knife blade up so that she could see it better.   He held it near his chin and he looked at how the dim electric light in the room reflected along the curvature of the sharpened steel edge.  "I hope you don't take it too personally, though.  You just have to know that after all this time, through all the years, I'm still your best friend.  Up 'till now, I had thought that you were mine."

And then, his hand moving with surety and quickness, Lloyd began rapidly cutting out his own eyes...

Tammy's mind shut down.   Blackness and silence ensued.

When the police found her in that dreary apartment a full day later, she was still weeping, still mourning for her friend and her own bad luck, still angry that her world had caved in on itself and turned into a nightmare, still in the grips of horror and shock.

An army of forensic specialists roved the crime scene while a female police officer tried to talk sense to her as the paramedics prepared her for her trip to the hospital.

None of it mattered.

Unseen and unbeknownst to any of the police officials in the room, Tammy had scooped up the awful bloody clumps that were Lloyd's eyes and had stuffed them into her pockets.  Somehow she believed that she kept a part of him alive if she kept the eyes that held the last thing on earth he'd seen before he'd bled out...

Her.  She was the last thing he had seen.  A woman who had turned her back on her friend.

He had been right.  It, what he had done, HAD hurt her badly.  In a way, he had turned HIS back on HER.

As soon as she was alone, she would apologize to those dead, blood-speckled eyes...

What the hell else was she going to do? 

How the hell did crap like this happen to anyone?

--- fini ---

This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2005, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission

DAEMONIQ (Again, Fragments and Splinters)  
By Joseph Armstead

 

"The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are."
-- Karl Kraus

 

Static from the tinny speakers on his cheap, factory-installed car radio was giving him a headache.  He couldn't quite get the station in because of the rain.  Weather always interfered with his reception.  Not that it mattered.  He only listened to that particular radio station because it irritated him less than all the others did.  For the most part he hated the mediocre, disposable pop music it played and replayed on four hour rotations and the stations DJs were rude, overly-opinionated idiots.

But the noise kept him from succumbing to the fury he kept tightly bottled inside him.

He couldn't run from his demons.

** ("Oh, Farris", she had said in that demeaning, long-suffering tone that spoke volumes about how she disrespected him, "You get worked up over every little thing.  Why don't you learn to relax and just go with the flow?  Things aren't perfect and they never will be.  People never act the way we want them to.  They're not going to follow your little script.  That's life.  You can't be in control all the time..."

"But, honey, you're not getting it", he had stammered, barely holding his frustration in check, "I don't want to be in control of anything.  I just want them to do what they SAID they were going to do, that's all!"

"Farris, they don't have to do anything at all, if they don't want to.  You're being pushy and impatient and people don't like that", she explained.

"They transferred money out from our Savings account without my permission!"

"It was a clerical error and they've already corrected it.  We didn't lose any money, dammit!", she snapped.

"They acted like it was THEIR money --!"

"Oh for heaven's sakes, it wasn't even that big an error, less than three hundred dollars in an account with twenty times that amount total", Jennifer pointed out, "You spend more on your stupid tools!  You act like everyone's out to get you, like all people want to do is to steal from you, but no one cares, Farris!  No one cares about you and your lousy ... stuff!  The world doesn't revolve around you and how you think things should be!"

"But what they do is affecting MY life!  Don't I get a say in that?  Don't I get to have a reaction to them inconveniencing me because they LIED?"

"Stop being dramatic.  They didn't lie.  You're upset because they didn't put on a hair shirt apologizing to you and because they're not fixing it as quickly as you'd want them to.

 Oh my God, something happened in the world without your permission!  You know, when you look at it, you're the same way with ME...!"  Crap, there it was, just like always.  She was again managing to turn a simple discussion around and make it into another diatribe about how he was a lousy husband.

"Don't start that!  I mean it, do not start that shit, Jennifer -- !"

"I'm NOT starting anything, Farris, I'm just trying to TALK with you!") **

Damn it, but that was not the way he'd planned his morning.  That had been hours ago, but, as usual, he was having trouble letting it go.

Black waters rushed down the boulevard's gutters, drooling used oil and garbage past rusted gratings into the grimy underworld beneath the city's streets.  Farris watched, mesmerized, and felt like his mind was draining away with the dirty water.

It was bitterly cold out, under the billowing cloud-hood of silvery gray March skies, and it was the height of the evening commute, where rush hour traffic resembled a carnival's game of bumper cars.  Impatience ruled, tempers flared, engines growled, tires squealed, and people resigned themselves to the automotive chaos of trying to traverse the city's main artery out to the suburbs.

He turned the wheel and drove the car past the corner two blocks before his exit to the freeway...

There she was again.  On the corner where a small neighborhood hardware store and a shoe repair shop connected in a dilapidated three story building to form the tip of the street's triangle.  There.  The girl with the red and yellow hair. A Rapunzel-like mane of garishly bright, flame colored hair and pale, sallow skin, unhealthy-looking, and a beat-up leather motorcycle jacket, worn open and without a shirt underneath it, over denim overalls that couldn't quite contain her overly-plush, plump twentysomething body.  There she was.  It was the seventh night in a row he'd seen her standing at that corner and, just like she had been all the other times, she was calmly holding a headless toy baby doll dangling by its arm. 

The plastic doll's torso, dirty and scuffed looking, obviously retrieved from the trash bin, had been painted to look like it had been grievously wounded.

And like always, the girl stared at him with dull eyes the color of stagnant pond water and pointed straight at him through this car's windshield as he drove by.  Like always she soundlessly mouthed the words "Play with me" at him.  Like always she smiled, showing a mouthful of perfect teeth, and, raising one hand to her bosom, ran one of her fingers along the dirty crevice of her unwashed cleavage.

Goddamn junkie prostitute.  Yeah, that's it.  That's the way he discounted what he saw, how he rationalized that unsettling and slightly repulsive scenario, and how he dismissed her as a person.  Lousy street trash.  She had to be a hooker, right?  There was no other reason for her to be there.  No other reason for her to try, night after night, to catch his attention.

The only problem was that, each and every time he saw her, as soon as he wrinkled his face in disgust and looked away, when he let his eyes flash back up to his rearview mirror, she was gone.  There was no trace of her on the street and no evidence she'd ever actually been there.

Quite frankly, Farris had come to doubt that anyone who drove by that corner ever saw the woman except for himself.

And, like always, when he went home and traded sullen, bored pleasantries with his wife, re-enacting their standard routine of a sham of affection, he would take time to himself to go off into the bathroom and undress, where he'd then lay on the floor tucked into a little ball and quietly weep.  Ten minutes.  No more than that.  It was all he allowed himself.  He couldn't control it.  Then he'd get redressed and go downstairs to join his wife for dinner.

Jennifer.  It always came back to time spent with Jennifer.  He tried, Lord knows, but she had changed so much in the past decade that sometimes he felt as if he were living with a stranger.  He was uncomfortable around her, edgy, always feeling like he had to do or to prove something to her, she was waiting for to prove to herself that she hadn't made a lousy choice in life partners.  She said that wasn't at all what was going on, that it was all in his head, but he knew better.  She was sitting in judgment of him.  He didn't like spending time with her all that much any more.

So he went to the city.  He worked harder and longer hours.  He attempted to make himself again worthy of Jennifer's attention, even though he resented being made to feel like he had to do so.  And, at the end of every day, he inevitably went past the corner where the girl waited, haunting the street.

He couldn't run from his demons.

The odd thing about it was that he always, at the end of each work day, looked forward to seeing the girl and the fake dead baby.  Over the weekend, when he had not come to the city, he'd wondered whether or not she was there, at that corner, waiting for him to drive by and mime the words "Play with me".  Street trash.  His mind was abuzz with imaginings about a crazy heroine or crack-addicted prostitute on a dirty street corner in a city he could barely stand to visit.

Yeah, right.  Somehow, in someway he didn't understand, he knew that she wasn't a prostitute.

What the hell was wrong with him?

It wasn't sex or desire.  The thought of touching her skin, the color of skim milk and smeared with streaks of grime, induced shivers of revulsion in him.  No, it wasn't sexual.  She didn't affect him that way.  He didn't want her.  It wasn't some dormant sense of chivalry or social concern.  He didn't want to mentor her or save her or rescue her from her life of squalor.  He simply couldn't get her out of his mind.  It was just as well his wife, Jennifer, hadn't been around all weekend.  They'd had a fight and she had stalked off in a childish snit.  She'd likely gone to her sister's to stay and, truthfully, he was in no hurry for her to return.

When the hell did he let himself get to a state like this?  What was going on?

This night, when he saw her, he came to a sudden decision, overcome by curiosity and by a sense of indignation that someone like her should haunt his waking mind.  It was an impulsive decision and he was unsure of what he would do if the girl cursed him or spat at him or, worse, ignored him completely.  He pulled out of traffic and slowly parked alongside the curb.  He trembled as he did so, wondering what disaster he was courting by taking such action, but he felt compelled to somehow, someway connect with this ugly, unpleasant girl.

The car sat at the curb for almost five minutes, his stomach churning acid, as he watched other traffic go by, afraid to look over his shoulder and see her there, out on the street, waiting for him to come out from his car.

She had to be there, right?   Was he about to find out that she was only an hallucination?

A phrase flashed unbidden through his mind: "The Devil is in the details."

He took a deep breath and mentally plunged into the deep end of the pool.  He grabbed his driver's side door handle...

"Why don't you just relax?  Take a minute.  You're going to stroke out if you keep this up...", a soft female voice said from his vehicle's back seat.

A woman's voice.  From his back seat.  And he'd never opened any of the car's doors.

"Power down, Farris", the gentle voice said kindly.  "Give yourself a moment to adjust."

"H-ho-how'd you get in here?  WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY CAR?", he stammered stridently.

"Darling", she said sibilantly, her voice sounding like the kiss from a rattlesnake, "You invited me."

Slowly, Farris turned around in his seat.  His breath was coming in hot, panting gasps and he was shaking.  His eyes flit to the street traffic and back out the window to stare at the empty street corner.  Then he focused on the figure in his back seat.  The girl.  She was there.  She was inside his car.

Oh God, this wasn't an hallucination.

He couldn't run from his demons.

"What?  I did what -- ?", he blurted.

"You. Invited. Me", she replied slowly, as if she were speaking to a dull-witted child.

"You're crazy", he hissed tensely.

"Nope.  Afraid not.  Of the two of us, I'm the one most firmly rooted in reality."

"Get out of my car!"  He slapped the flat of his hand against the back of his seat for emphasis.

"No, I don't think so.  You went through a lot of trouble to get me here, after all", she said unsmilingly, ignoring his attempt at intimidation.

"I don't know what the hell I'm doing anymore", Farris admitted, "but I know this isn't right.  You need to get out and go away."

"I can't do that, Farris."

"You know my name?  HOW do you know my name?", he asked in a small hesitant voice.

"C'mon, hon, we're not exactly strangers", she replied with icy patience.

"I don't know you.  You have to get out of my car", Farris said, regaining some of his composure.

"No.  I don't have to do that.  We have things to discuss.  Important things."

"I don't know you.  I don't know how you got in my car.  But you'd better get out or I'm going to call a cop", he said letting his anger supply an edge in his voice that masked his dwindling supply of courage.

"But you wanted to talk to me.  That's why I'm here", she said simply.  "And the absolute last thing you want to do is to call a cop."

"And why is that?"

"Because they'll look in your trunk, silly."

He stopped as if she'd slapped him.  His eyes narrowd and he gave up any attempts at suppressing his anxiety and his anger.  "STOP FUCKING PLAYING GAMES WITH ME!  What the FUCK do you mean by that?  There's nothing in the trunk of my car!"

"Don't be rude", she chided, "And you know what's in the trunk of this car, what's been in the trunk of this car for the past week... you know.  You just don't want to deal with it."

"...no..."

"Yes", she said again smiling that unpleasant, slightly off-center smile.  "I'm in the trunk of your car."

He couldn't find words.  He was breathing open mouthed, like he had just run a marathon at full-tilt, gasping and sweating.  The shakes had returned.

"Yes, yes I am.  You remember me now?   The girl from the newspaper kiosk?  Writer, poet, college dropout, volunteered part-time at the animal shelter, sold newspapers from that round, green metal kiosk Tuesdays through Friday.  You passed me every day for a month, giving me the stink eye, like I had no right to be here, and then the one time you stop to buy something you have an attitude with me.  I gave you the wrong change and you accused me of cheating you and I told you off, in some very colorful and imaginative language, I might add.  We both got loud and started making a scene, people began to notice, and then you just stop talking and walked away, throwing the newspaper in my face.  Three hours later, at the end of the work day, when I was closing up my stand, you came up behind me..."

"... no...", Farris said in a whisper, "... no, stop this, stop, please..."

She giggled.  It was a mean sound.  "Those were my words exactly."

"And then you went home and beat your wife, Jennifer -- remember her? -- to death, no, she didn't just go to her sister's, and you stuffed her inside a metal tool locker where she's been for about three days now."

He couldn't run from his demons.

"There's something wrong with me", Farris said quietly, his mood darkening, his mind growing cold and still.

"You mean aside from having a conversation in your car with the spirit of a dead woman?  Yes, there is", the girl answered.  "There's something very wrong with a man who is good at his job, comes from a decent family, who lives in a good home in a good neighborhood and who  makes eighty thousand a year, who is respected by his co-workers, is trusted by his neighbors, and who hates everything in the world around him with the intensity of a supernova.  You had a wife who cried herself to sleep every night because she couldn't get through the iron wall of bitterness you built around yourself.  She felt like a failure, like you didn't love her.  But you didn't see that because you were so busy seeing enemies and monsters behind every face and hearing lies behind every sentence spoken to you.  So, yes, there's something wrong with you, but that's all behind you now, it's okay."

"It is?  Really?  How do you figure?", he asked trembling.

"Because you've crossed the line.  You're not one of the good people anymore.  You're the bad guy", the girl said.  "Everyone has a role to play in this life.   Mine was victim.  Yours is murderer.  I believe that it was Elizabeth Barret Browning who once said: 'The devil's most devilish when respectable'.  Fitting, wouldn't you say?"

Farris thought a somber moment before he said, "None of this was my fault."

"Now THERE'S a surprise.  Of course not, none of it was, hon", the murdered woman commented.

He looked at the dead woman's spirit, seeming so real he could touch it, that he could, if he would, feel the coolness of its etheric skin, and he asked, "Stay with me a while?"

"Oh yes, that was always my intention."

Farris nodded.  Of course.   Why did he even ask?

"Then let's go home", he said.

"Certainly, but you should know that, when we get there, she'll be waiting for you."

He shrugged.  So he couldn't escape her even in death.  It figured.  Sure, why not?  Things in his life always seemed to turn out that way.

He couldn't run from his demons.  

He just didn't yet understand that his greatest demon was always with him, had always been there, watching, judging, in plain sight and it was staring back at him in the reflection in his rearview mirror.

He started his car and pulled out again into the flow of traffic, homeward bound.

 

--- THE  END ---

 

 

This story and related concepts are copyright © Joseph Armstead 2005, and may not be reproduced in part or in whole without the author's express permission.