|
 |
||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
Pressure of the Dead
A "Halloween Contest" Honorable Mention
by
Alex Kreitner
The autumn leaves swirled around in the invisible tail of air created by the van’s wake, but the groups of costumed children, in tow behind their parents, barely took notice of it as it sped by. Inside the van, the driver’s humming competed with a whimpering from the back, where an athletic young man struggled against his bonds to escape the van, or at least edge away from the wooden coffin next to him that emitted a putrid stench.
“So,” began the driver. “I suppose you thought that no one would ever find out. After all, it’s been so long that even her family must have given up by now, right?”
His only response was another whimper.
“But I knew, from the moment I saw it on the news, I knew. You only fooled the rest because they didn’t know her.”
The young man in the back was silent.
“She told me all about you; how you wouldn’t stop asking her out, and bothering her, and following her around. She didn’t tell anyone else; there was no one else she could tell. And when I heard that she had been found in a ditch next to Lover’s Lane, I knew you had done it. I knew you had killed her.” Though he spoke quietly, his hands tightened on the steering wheel, invisible to the young man behind him.
The bound figure in the back renewed his whimpering, this time with an anxious, negative undertone. Over and over the young man shook his blonde head and grunted-whined a two-note reply into the cloth over his mouth. “Uh-uh. Uh-uh.”
“It’s a little late for the innocent act, now, Stephen. You weren’t smart enough to cover up your tracks, and you aren’t smart enough to talk your way out of this, gag or no gag. Besides, I had a little talk with your buddy, Jason, about your alibi. He was surprisingly forthright when I threatened his grades but promised not to turn him into the police.” The driver smirked and shook his head full of ruffled, dark hair. “I guess his football career was worth more to him than his friendship to you.”
The protests of innocence from the back devolved into more whimpers, then sobs, and finally a mix of growling and muffled yelling punctuated by thrashings as the student smashed his body against the side of the van and back against the coffin.
“It doesn’t really matter, anyway, Stephen. Tonight is the only night that I’m going to get a chance at this; because as you can tell, my beautiful Sharon isn’t getting any fresher.” The man took his eyes off the road for a moment and turned backwards to look around his writhing captive to the oak coffin, and frowned. His heavy, wide face looked worn and tired.
“Pretty soon there will be nothing left for her spirit to return to. I can only hope at this point that the damage you did to her can be repaired once she is transferred back into her shell.”
When the driver turned back around he braked the van hard as a boy draped in a sheet crossed in front of the van. The man behind the wheel smiled a knowing smile at the little ghost and nodded at the nervous mother who scrambled along with him. Behind the driver, his unwitting passenger twisted back away from the coffin again, his eyes rolling up and away into his head. He moaned.
“What’s that? ‘Why tonight?’ you ask?” The driver tilted his head and sped his vehicle back up. “No, wait, I forgot, you don’t have any scientific curiosity.” He spat out. “You just think I’m crazy.”
A partially articulated yelp from the back cut the driver off; a yelp that sounded a lot like a frantic: “yes!”
“Though you’re being very rude, Stephen, I’m going to be a generous teacher and offer you some extra-curricular, extra-credit. You know, so that when the police ask after you, I can tell them that you were a quiet, but model student.” He laughed and then his voice shifted into a lecturing tone. “I know you didn’t pay much attention in any of my classes, but even you know that tonight is Halloween.” He gestured towards a line of glowing jack-o-lanterns that squatted on someone’s deck, and paused for a moment; but when no reply came, he continued. “They say that this time of year is when the barrier between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. Right now the wall between the lovely girl next to you and us is as breachable as it can get. Understand?” He asked. “So then, we’ll treat this like a standard electrical problem; as everything in life can be treated.”
The young man in the back let out a sound that could have been terrified frustration, or even an expression of mounting boredom.
“Let’s think of the afterlife like an electrical circuit, and according to legend, that means that tonight the resistance in the circuit it at its lowest point all year. And I’m going to assume that you already know Ohm’s Law by heart, so you know that with less resistance, the voltage, or pressure-if you use the old water pipe analogy-, is increased. Which means that the voltage of the spirit world has reached its peak right now; or in other words, Stephen, the pressure of the dead is at its highest this time of year.”
Only silence from behind greeted his physics lesson and the van continued along a quiet lane between rows of skeletal trees and piles of red and yellow leaves mixed in with discarded candy wrappers. The groups of strangely masked children had thinned out as the time got later and the even stranger group in the van headed further out from the more populated areas.
“I realize that you’re barely keeping up right now, Stephen, but bear with me for just one more minute,” he paused again, though he expected nothing in return. “If I want to tap into this spiritual circuit, right now, when its pressure is the greatest, I simply need a good conductor for the energy to connect with. Now, can you guess what I’ve chosen as the best conductor of spiritual energy, Stephen?” he asked. “The human body,” he answered himself, without pausing, his words speeding up into a tumbling flow. “You’re going to be my conductor. And instead of taking advantage of this thinning of the barrier to get some quack medium to contact my departed darling, I’m simply going to use you to pry open a hole in the spiritual circuit and draw her energy back out,” he stopped and considered something, and his mouth twisted into an expression somewhere between amusement and a grimace. “I might even have to go in, myself, and drag her out and into her body.”
The student in the back let out a long groan.
“Here we are now, Stephen,” the driver said. He pulled the van over into a flat, dusty spot of tramped-down dirt. The flattened area overlooked a panoramic view of the city, where teenagers had parked for years to do their amorous business in a faux-romantic setting. It was there, or rather in the filthy ditch that bordered the hill, that Sharon’s body had been found almost a year before. The teacher spared little attention to the view, but looked down at the dirty ditch-covered in colorful, fallen leaves-for a moment’s thought. The sight galvanized him anew and he quickly made his way to the back of his van, where he threw open the rear doords and dragged the struggling and kicking student out by his feet. Though the student was fit, the teacher’s large frame gave him an advantage.
Still, the young man growled into his gag and flailed his feet, refusing to be taken quietly. Only when the teacher pulled a stun gun from his coat and jabbed it into one of his jeans-clothed legs did the youth’s body jerk for a moment and come to a stop.
“Now we can go about this a little more civilly, right, Stephen?” he punctuated with a jerk on his captive’s leg. “And don’t worry, my gun is only set to stop you, not hurt you or render you unconscious. Though if you keep it up, and I’m forced to use it again, you may end up tearing your own muscles,” he said as he pulled the young man’s limp body out of the back of the van and tossed him onto the ground.
In the cool moonlight the student looked drugged as his blue eyes rolled around inside his skull and his body squirmed with exhaustion. His clean, fashionable clothes were crumbled and his pullover sweater had ridden up to expose a swath of white t-shirt and tanned skin.
The teacher, dressed in plain jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, along with a pair of long rubber gloves on each hand, pulled out the coffin next, carefully setting it on the ground beside his living student. He looked down at the ditch, moving his eyes up and down its length and back at his two pieces of cargo. Then he picked up one end of the coffin and dragged it down the decline. His footsteps and the coffin made crunching sounds over the fallen leaves, until he reached the bottom of the ditch, where the wet leaves made little noise as he trod them into a mush. Once at the deepest part, he set the coffin down.
“Does this look about right from where you are, Stephen? I studied the crime scene photos, and I remember pretty well where they sprayed the outline around her body. I believe it was right about here.”
The young man turned his head away from the ditch and looked into the dark sky at the bright, full moon.
“I’ll take that as agreement,” the teacher continued. “I understand that you did most of your damage here, and she finally bled her life out right at this point. Which is important, you see. The conductor should be placed exactly where a similar, opposite energy remains,” he explained as he walked back up the side of the ditch to retrieve his other component. “What is left here is Sharon’s death energy, which I can only assume is the opposite of your own life energy; and as we all know, opposites attract. We just have to reverse the polarity of yours, first.”
The teacher grabbed his student, who began his struggles anew, having realized his teacher’s final plan. The older man ignored his cries and pulled on the younger man’s sweater with both hands, and yanked him down into the ditch with a series of jerks. The teacher growled with each jerk, only then breaking his façade of calm, and lifted the student up onto the coffin with a final, animalistic snarl, leaving himself out of breath. His victim swung his bound hands up to try and smash into his teacher’s face, which forced him away, and the younger righted himself to run.
“Goddamnit, Stephen,” the teacher said, and pushed the young man back with one hand, then pushed the crackling stun gun into his student’s body with the other. “Stop fighting this. It’s not like you don’t deserve it.” The young man’s head whipped back against the coffin with an audible crack and the rest of his body followed after, and he was left draped limply on top-his heaving chest the only sign of life.
“You better not have knocked yourself out, Stephen,” he said, grabbing the young man’s hair and shaking his head. He pried open the student’s eyelid to find that his pupils were still responsive. “Good. I want you to be awake for this; as I’m sure she was,” he explained, then punched the student in the stomach twice, and again in the mouth. “I have to rough you up a bit, I’m afraid. You messed up Sharon pretty badly before you killed her, and you’ve got to be in much the same condition.”
Before the student could say anything, or fight back, the teacher slammed his own knee into the young man’s groin, crushing his genitals against the coffin. The student bucked and threw up over the side, into the already-wet leaves. The teacher pushed the youth’s shoulders back and drove his knee between the student’s legs again, harder.
“I had to do that, Stephen,” he explained through deep breaths. “I can’t bring myself to ‘interfere’ with you in the same way you did with Sharon, so this is the next best thing I can think of,” he took another deep breath. “Though I would prefer not to have had to do it, I hope it hurts like hell,” he said, then reached into his coat’s pocket and pulled out a wooden handled, folding hunting knife. “You recognize this, though, don’t you?”
The student’s face was twisted into a grimace, but he managed to twist it further when he saw his own knife in his teacher’s hands. He tried to squirm away again, but could only manage a weak flopping movement through his pain.
“That’s right, I broke into your room when you were at practice, while your parents were out. As scared as you must have been about being found out, I figured you would have kept the murder weapon. You didn’t even bother to hide it very well, I found it in a drawer next to your bed; nor did you bother to wipe off all her blood, which is for the best.”
The young man started to weep and his sobs were audible around his gag that had begun to fall off.
“It will make this so much easier,” his teacher said. “When you die how she died, it should synchronize your energy with hers, and as yours travels over, hers should be catapulted back out.”
He took the knife’s blade and slit the student’s pullover sweater enough to tear it open. Then he did the same with the undershirt beneath. Finally, he smashed an elbow into the young man’s face to distract him while he yanked the youth’s pants and underwear down and off his legs.
“Now that you are in the same condition that she was, you are ready to be exchanged.”
The brisk air caused the student to shiver uncontrollably, and he weakly tried to hide his nakedness with his bound hands. The teacher cut the bonds from his hands and pulled off the scraps of his shirt and sweater. With the beatings and the shock of the stun gun, the young man’s strength was nearly gone, and he struck out at his tormentor like a small boy: with feeble, open-handed slaps. But the teacher fended them off with little effort and leaned his knee into the young man’s stomach to brace him, and yanked the youth’s head back by his blonde hair with his free hand.
All around him he could sense forms and eyes pushing in, but he ignored them. “Happy Halloween, Stephen,” he said, and gripped the opened hunting knife, surveying the vulnerable boy like a fresh, un-carved pumpkin, then swung it down in an arc and sliced open his neck. The blood flowed out in spurts across the teacher’s body, and down onto the deal girl’s coffin. The student screamed for a moment, as his gag fell off, but the hole in his throat cut off the sound.
The presences around them grew stronger as they pushed forward to surround the scene. Shadowy forms like faces peered down at the thrashing body on top of the blood-soaked coffin. On top of the dying student, the teacher rode out the spasms like a grim cowboy, trying to keep the young man’s death as close to his fallen love as possible. He continued to ignore the spirits around him and focused his attention through the draining vessel to the girl within her supposed final resting place.He let out something between a cry and laugh when he heard a sound coming from the coffin. But still he kept the dead body pressed up against the lid until he distinctly heard a pounding coming from the inside. Then he picked up the corpse by its armpits, flung the empty shell aside, and pressed his ear up against the coffin. He could feel the wetness of the youth’s blood seeping into his hair, but he only cared about the growing sounds coming from within. He reached down to the handle of the lid as he prepared to fling it open and welcome his love back to life. But the sound of his name being called from above stopped him from prying open the lid, and he looked up into the field of shifting forms and figures that forced themselves up against him and his love.
Through the crush of astral bodies, a face appeared distinctly, calling out to him. It’s long, dark hair, delicate features, and perpetually sad eyes caught the man’s breath. He stared at the transparent face of the girl that had enraptured his life for years, and paid no more attention to the sound from beneath him that had increased into a mad rapping upon the inside of the lid.
In front of him, the ghostly face spoke with her voice.
“John. No,” she said, and shook her beautiful head, then looked down at the coffin that contained her mortal remains.
He also looked down to see the lid banging open in response to the pounding, jumping like a boiling, witch’s cauldron, despite his own weight upon it. The smell of death seeped out and excited the circling dead. He instinctively backed up, suddenly repulsed by what might be trying to get out. The figure that hovered above the coffin shook her head even more vigorously, but the spirits around her pushed her out to get closer to the thing that waited to be released into the living.
A frightened, backward glance fixed an image in his mind as he saw the coffin lid thrown open and the desiccated body with its ruined face and wild expression that crawled out and followed after him. He told his body to run, but the pressure of the dead around him hindered his movement, and the thing that was once his love closed in behind.
TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY CLICK HERE
© Kreitner, 2006
Alex Kreitner is a graduate of the University of Washington in WA State and recently moved to New Bedford, MA to live with his girlfriend and her two children. He's been practicing writing for years, but only recently has been seriously submitting stories and even a finished-though rough-novel.