“What was the name of the card game you guys always played?”
“Cribbage. Joe always tried cheating me on the counts.”
“Nah, you were just too dumb to count the points right and Joe would call you on it and . . .” Mike stops talking and slow fades out.
I scream his name and he comes back. He looks like Greg did. Bleeding from everywhere. There’s a dime-sized hole in his forehead, and it’s growing. He opens his mouth but can’t speak.
I call his name, not that his name works anymore, right? I ask him if he’s still with me. I ask him to say something.
Mike whimpers like a goddamn dog that just had his leg stepped on, and he slides across the back seat, out the door and onto the shoulder of the highway, carrying the shotgun.
I get out, sprint around the front of the car, my own ears ringing, but not because of the cuff in the head he gave me forever ago. Mike stumbles, turns around aimlessly, his feet lost in a circle. His eyes are rolled back in his head. He puts the barrels of the sawed-off in his mouth. He pulls the trigger and disappears. He disappears and pulls the trigger. Which came first? Fuck if I know, but there’s nothing left of him but a fog of blood, and the shotgun drops to the pavement after hovering in the air for an impossible second.
——
Earlier, after telling Greg and Mike my getaway plan, I was more than a little worried that I wouldn’t remember how to get to the lake house. But I remember. Every turn.
I’m not feeling so great. Don’t know if it’s because I watched Greg and Mike (and goddamn Henry, I saw him flicker in the rearview, in the dark too, you betcha) and I only think I’m feeling what they were feeling. Joe always said I was nothing but a follower. Fucking Joe.
So there’s that, and now I’m thinking about the shots I heard. Did I hear three? Or was it four? The first two came in a quick burst, one right after the other, piggybacking. Then a pause. Then a third. But it could’ve been three shots in that quick burst. And how long was that pause? I really can’t remember now.
I drive down the long dirt road. I’m the only one out here. Within sight of both lake and house there’s a small chainlink fence across the road. I plow through it and park next to the house. The white shingles have gone green with mold. The roof is missing tiles and tar and is sunken in parts. The screened porch is missing its screens. If a house falls apart in the woods and nobody’s there, will anyone miss it?
This is where I spent so many quiet and solitary summer weeks with Grandma and Joe, but not really with them. Joe painted, and she smoked and walked. This place here, this is where I learned to hate them.
In Wormtown, it was different. I had Mike and Henry. I kept busy and didn’t have time to think about how fucked up it all was. I miss Mike. Really miss him already, like he’s been gone for years instead of minutes.
Now that I’m here, I’m afraid of the house. Like if I stare at the porch too long, I might see Grandma there, sitting in a chair, looking out over the lake, seeing whatever it was she saw, and smoking those Lucky Strikes. And what if now, right now, she finally turns to look at me, to see me?
I spin the car around, and park it so I’m facing the lake instead of the house. It doesn’t help. I feel the house and Grandma somewhere behind me.
Not sure if I’ll get reception out here, but I take my cell out and call Joe. It goes through. He picks up, says, “Hey.”
“Hey.”
We don’t say anything else. We sit and stew in the quiet. It feels, I don’t know, thick. Like it always has. I’m thinking Joe maybe feels it too. What’d Mike say? Being around me and Joe was uncomfortable. Sounds about right.
He says, “What do you want now, Danny? You want to borrow money that I don’t have? Bail you out of jail again? Go call Henry if that’s it.”
“Joe,” I say. “Hey, Joe. I got something to tell you. It’s important.”
I pause and imagine what Henry, Greg, and Mike felt after they were shot, and before they disappeared. “Hey, Joe,” I say again. “Listen carefully. I’m up in Vermont, at the old place.”
I roll down my window. Goddamn, it’s cold out. Like I said earlier, didn’t wear the right clothes for this. Just a brown flannel and some black jeans, steel-toed boots laced to the ankle. Still no jacket, and I left my black hoodie at the apartment. Too bad all that stuff I left behind won’t just disappear like they did. Like I might. Three shots or four.
Winter is coming early.
“What?”
“Yeah. I’m here, by myself, Joe. The place looks fucking terrible. Rotting away to nothing.”
“What are you doing up there?”
“I don’t know. Trying to get away, I guess. Can’t, though. Doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I decided to call you. Because I’m thinking I should’ve told you something a long time ago. You listening? Here it is: Fuck you, Joe.”
I drop the phone. It disappears somewhere below me. The black gloves I’m still wearing don’t keep my hands warm. I rub my hands together, and I slouch into the seat. I’m not feeling good at all. Things getting heavy. Lake getting blurry.
The shotgun is on the seat next to me. I might pick it up, and then fade away.
——
Paul G. Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, both of which feature narcoleptic private detective Mark Genevich; the short speculative-fiction collections In the Mean Time and Compositions for the Young and Old; and the novellas City Pier: Above and Below and The Harlequin and the Train. His stories have appeared in Weird Tales, The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three, and Best American Fantasy 3. He served as fiction editor of ChiZine and as coeditor of Fantasy Magazine. He is also the coeditor of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch, and Phantom anthologies with Sean Wallace, and of Creatures! with John Langan. Paul is currently an advisor for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He still has no uvula, but plugs along, somehow. More information can be found at PaulTremblay.net and TheLittleSleep.com.
Richard Bowes
—
When I think of death, what comes to mind is the feel of an ice-cold knife racing up my leg like I’m a letter being sliced open. When that happens in my nightmares I wake up. In real life, just before the blade of ice reached my heart, the medic got to me where I lay in that bloody field at Aisne-Marne, tied and tightened a tourniquet above my left knee and stopped the flow before all my blood ran onto the grass.
——
That memory of my war came out of nowhere as I sat in my little office in Greenwich Village on a sunny October afternoon. It felt like someone had riffled through my memories and pulled out that one. Beings that my Irish grandmother called the Gentry and the Fair Folk walk this world and can do things like that to mortals. A shiver ran through me.
My name’s Sam Grant and I’m a private investigator. Logic and deduction come into my line of work. So do memory and intuition. My grandmother always said a sudden shiver meant someone had just stepped on the spot where your grave would be.
I could have told myself it was that or a stray draft of cold air. But I’d felt this before and knew what it meant. Some elf or fairy had shuffled my memories like a card deck. And that wasn’t supposed to happen to me.