Supernatural Noir

It didn’t matter. I thought I knew. I drove up Main Street until I found the right storefront. I parked and walked around back to the separate apartment behind the shop. Two windows bordered the back door. One to the left and one to the right. The left was new, with a plastic-frame screen instead of wood like the others.

Emily hadn’t known about any secret key stashed under a rock in the family yard. She’d visited here three months ago and smashed a window in. She’d come back before seeing me and gotten the gun. This is where she’d gotten the little house. It’s where she found a small gun and thought its power might help her to discover the answer to the question that haunted and tainted her life. It’s where she fell into bed with a man and whispered in his ear that her dead mother was asking for his help. It’s where the father of her baby lived.

——

I’d never been much of a burglar but I didn’t have to be. The new window was open. I slid it open and climbed inside.

John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—lay naked in his bathtub with an X-Acto blade pressed to his wrists. He glanced up at me as I entered but said nothing. Emily’s death had given him the idea. There were hesitation cuts all up and down his forearms. It looked like he’d been trying to slash his wrists for days, but he wasn’t nearly as strong or single-minded as she had been.

He let the blade slip from his fingers and started to cry.

I closed the toilet lid and sat and listened to him weep. I lit a cigarette and smoked and stared at him, noting the half-moon scars on his chest and back made by a fierce woman who liked to cause her men to bleed.

He bawled like a colicky newborn. I couldn’t take the sound anymore. I stood and walked around his apartment. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. Old takeout-food containers littered the kitchen table and counter. A sweat-stained pillow and some balled blankets at the foot of the couch showed me where he’d been sleeping. His soiled bed still bore the signs of feverish lovemaking from months ago.

I thought about what could have led Emily here. I wondered how she had known John Acton had been one of her mother’s lovers. It couldn’t have been difficult. The ward is full of men who mutter and hiss about the women who had destroyed them.

I wondered how many of Katy’s lovers stalked the white halls of Sojourner in their slippers, and hid themselves away in the corners of the work room fondling wet clay like they were still touching her body.

I stood in the bathroom doorway.

“What were you going to do with the .22, John? Kill yourself?”

He responded with a whisper.

I leaned in. “What?”

“I want to die,” he whimpered, “but she won’t let me. They’re under my bed—”

“Stop it.”

“—right now. All three of them. The whole family. Look if you don’t believe me. Go look!”

My pulse beat furiously in my wrists. My hands became fists. I wanted to wreck something. I wanted to hurt someone. An icy shiver worked through me and I had to cross my arms over my chest to keep from shuddering. “Did you do it, John? Did you murder Katy and Ron?”

His features shifted as if invisible thumbs were working themselves into the muscles of his face. His eyes widened as his cheeks sagged. “Christ, no! Don’t you understand? I loved her! I always loved her! I still love her! Nothing else works. No other woman means anything to me. Why do you think I’m still alone all these years later?” His eyes found mine. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“You know because you’re marked too.”

“Yes.”

“You know because you’re exactly the same way! You’re just like me!”

I didn’t know what to do with him. The cops could do a DNA test to discover he was the father, but there wasn’t enough evidence to lead them from there to here. I could kill him but there didn’t seem to be much point. He was either going to eventually dig into his wrists deep enough to do the job right or he’d wind up in Sojourner himself.

But I had to do something with my hands. I worked him over until his nose was broken and he was spitting teeth, but watching his blood pour off his chin onto the dirty tile floor did nothing to empty me of the rage, sorrow, and fear that continued to swell inside me.

Because he was right. I was just like him.

——

There was too much space under my bed. My fiancйe forced me to buy a king size and never spent a night in it as my bride. She had screwed around, but it wasn’t her fault. I’d pushed her away because, deep where it counted, I hadn’t needed or wanted her as much as I’d once craved Katy Wright. Once you’ve enjoyed something so wild, vicious, and bitter, no one else could ever matter again. I’d been marked. I bore scars.

There was more than enough room for four or five or even more bodies beneath the bed. For them to lie there, contorted, swollen, black faced, and crawling over each other, mewling and brooding and conversing. I spent a lot of nights on the couch downstairs now, looking up the steps and listening to the noise of the squirrels in the attic, the wind in the trees, the soft whispers and sighs that might be angry voices or only the sound of my next anxious breath.

——

“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.” —Elbert Hubbard, Epigrams

——

Tom Piccirilli is the author of twenty novels, including Shadow Season, The Cold Spot, The Coldest Mile, and A Choir of Ill Children. He’s won two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, as well as having been nominated for the Edgar, the World Fantasy Award, the Macavity, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.

| THE BLISTERS ON MY HEART |

Nate Southard

—

Shelly keeps her eyes glued to the scorched two-lane as she reaches for the radio. With frantic fingers, she twists the dial, finds Jack and Squat with a whole mess of Not-a-Damn-Thing in between. It’s the quiet radio that scares me the most. Whoever said silence is golden was a goddamn liar. Silence is terrifying, and don’t ever let nobody tell you different.

Shelly whines a split second before she hits the only pothole for miles. I brace myself, but it’s too late. The Mercury jolts up and down, and the hole in my gut tears a little, ripping a barking scream out of me. When I look down, blood weeps between my fingers. That can’t be good, not that anything good is coming down the pike.

“You okay?” she asks.

“No.”

“What do you need?”

“A . . . bed. Just get me a bed.”

Her face pinches, and she shakes her head without once tearing her eyes from the road. “If we stop—”

“I know. Just get me a bed.”

She nods, biting her lip. We both know there’s no outru

After a moment of road noise, I spot a motel on the left, a squat, dirt-caked building that would probably be ringed with buzzing neon if it were night. I point with a bloody finger. Shelly gives me another one of those nods and eases onto the brakes.

“Careful entering the lot,” I say. “Please.”

We enter the lot at a speed that wouldn’t even count as a crawl, and still my gut burns liquid fire. I hiss out my pain as tears leak from Shelly’s eyes.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “Just park . . . by the rooms.”

“But you’re bleeding!”

“Been bleeding a long time. Blisters must’ve popped.”

“Stop it.”

“Wish I could. Just . . . Just not that easy.”

The Mercury groans to a stop, splitting a pair of parking spaces. Shelly turns to me, her face lined with worry, black hair a tangle.