Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala Read online

  His mother reached out again and took hold of the edge of the mask on either side below the ears. Her eyes narrowed as she lifted up, but now it felt like she was actually ripping the skin away from his face. The pain was like nothing Jimmy had even experienced before.

  “What did you do, get some gum or somethin’ stuck under there?” she asked. Her frown deepened with growing worry.

  “No … No, I—” Jimmy said, shaking his head wildly from side to side. He was telling himself not to panic, but the fear of being trapped inside this mask was getting stronger.

  Don’t panic, he told himself.

  He knew he had to calm down so he and his mother could figure this thing out. She’d take care of him … like she always did.

  Wouldn’t she?

  Or was he going to have to go to the doctor’s … or maybe have the police come to the house and cut the mask off?

  The kitchen door suddenly flew open, and Jimmy’s brother, Ben, entered. He was wearing a half-hearted attempt at a hobo costume, something just so he and his friends could justify trick-or-treating even though they were now in high school. Ben was carrying an old pillowcase that sagged heavily with treats as he hefted it up onto the kitchen table.

  “That all you got, wimp?” he said, sneering as he looked at Jimmy’s stash. “Heck, I ate that much on the way home.”

  “’N don’t come crying to me when you have a stomach ache,” his mother said.

  Jimmy wanted to say something, too. He wanted to tell his brother that he was more than satisfied with what he’d gotten, that he wasn’t a pig like Ben, but he was too frightened to speak.

  “We—uh, we’re having a bit of trouble with his mask,” his mother said, but Ben apparently didn’t care. As if he hadn’t even heard her, he said, “I gotta take a wiz,” and tromped down the hallway to the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him and locking it.

  “Aw’right, now,” Jimmy’s mother said, kneeling down in front of him. She pulled Jimmy closer and, leaning forward, carefully inspected the mask. Jimmy watched her, frighteningly aware of the rubber eyeholes he was looking out of. “You got it on, so it’s gotta come off, right?”

  “Right,” Jimmy said without much conviction. He couldn’t stop thinking how distorted and strange his voice sounded.

  When she grabbed the bottom of the mask again and started to lift it, it felt like his face was on fire. He let out a shrill scream that set his mother back on her heels. She looked at him, pale and trembling, as she shook her head slowly from side to side.

  “Did you, like, glue it on with Super Glue or something?” she asked.

  “No … Nothing like that,” Jimmy said.

  Seeing her through the eyeholes of the mask was like looking at her at the end of two long, dark tunnels. And as he stared at her, another thought—an impulse, really—took hold of him. He had no idea where it came from, and it nauseated him, but there it was. He had to fight back a sudden urge to lunge at his mother and bite her. He couldn’t stop staring at the white, flabby flesh of her arms that stuck out from her short-sleeved blouse, and all he could think about was sinking his teeth into that mass of warm, blood-filled flesh.

  The thought shocked and terrified him. He tried to look away from her, but she reached out, grabbed him by the upper arms, and held him tightly.

  “Don’t you go anywhere, mister,” she said, sounding angry now as she stood up. “I’m gonna get some scissors.” Her voice had an echo-chamber effect that made it difficult to understand what she had said, but Jimmy was too scared to move.

  His mother walked over to the kitchen cabinets and slid open the top drawer. Jimmy watched, fascinated by how, when she moved, she left behind a blurred after-image, a streak of light like a jet’s contrail.

  From a long way away, he heard the sound of rushing water. It took him a moment or two to realize his brother had just flushed the downstairs toilet. Jimmy looked past the kitchen table and down the hallway as his brother exited the bathroom. He moved with the same strange, sludgy motion his mother did. By this point, Jimmy’s pulse was thumping wildly in his ears, sounding like someone hammering on a tin roof. He winced with every step his brother took as he ran upstairs and then slammed his bedroom door shut.

  “Ahh … Here we are …” his mother said.

  A bolt of terror as clean and sharp as a fork of lightning shot through him when he saw the pair of scissors in her hand. She gripped the handle so tightly her knobby knuckles went white as she started moving toward him. The cutting edges of the scissors telescoped in his vision until they looked like polished steel blades six inches long … or more.

  Jimmy was filled with the sudden irrational fear that his mother was going to kill him. He wanted to back away from her, but it was like he was standing ankle-deep in thick, heavy mud. He was convinced that he was going to die … that his mother was going to slice him open right there on the kitchen floor and let him bleed to death. But as much as he wanted to get away, he couldn’t move. He narrowed his eyes, feeling the rubber mask mold to his expression as he prepared for the sudden jab of pain. He prayed that it would all be over quickly.

  “Here, now … Lemme see,” his mother said. She spoke mildly, but to his ears, her voice sounded like a tape recording being played at so slow a speed every word dragged out for what seemed like several seconds.

  It took some effort, but his mother wedged her fingers under the edge of the mask and brought the scissors around to position them for a quick snip.

  Jimmy cringed. When the cold metal touched the mask, it was as if the blades were pressing against his own skin. His mother shifted from side to side, positioning herself carefully as she pulled out the edge of the mask as far as she could and then snipped.

  Jimmy let out a piercing cry that even Old Lady Harding, who lived next door and was hard of hearing. must have heard.

  “Everything all right down there?” Ben hollered from upstairs.

  “We’re fine,” his mother yelled back, but all Jimmy could think was that he was definitely not fine. That single clip had felt like a cold razor slicing across his throat, and now blood—his blood!—was seeping from the edge of the mask and trickling down his neck.

  “What in the Dickens?” his mother said as she leaned forward and inspected what she had done. “Did I nick you?”

  Jimmy was too frightened to speak. His throat had gone bone dry. The pain radiating from the cut spread a chilly numbness across his face and down his chest. The thin trickle of blood was searing hot against his flesh. He found it close to impossible to take a breath. It was as though huge, unseen arms had wrapped around his chest and were squeezing the life out of him.

  “Oh, my God! You’re bleeding,” his mother said. Her voice was so low and dragging he barely understood her. “Lemme get something to clean you up with. Good Lord, I’m so sorry.”

  His mother let go of his arms and stood up, moving toward the counter to get a paper towel. When she turned on the tap, the sound of running water hissed like a nest of snakes inside his head.

  “How the devil did you get that damned thing on so tight?” she asked as she knelt down again and started dabbing at his neck.

  Jimmy watched her the whole time, frightened by the look of gradually rising terror that was spreading across his mother’s face. Frowning, she leaned closer and inspected the wound, but Jimmy already knew what the problem was.

  It wasn’t his neck that was bleeding.

  It was the mask.

  Worse than that, the mask was now a part of him. His mother had cut the mask as if it was his own flesh. After a long moment, she leaned back and looked at him, an expression of total confusion on her face.

  “Are you playing some kind of joke on me?” she asked.

  Her voice was still oddly distorted, but he understood the gist of what she was saying by the expression on her face. He wanted to lash out at her and sink his teeth into her throat for what she had done to him, but he checked himself. Raising both hands to hi
s goblin face, he ran his fingertips over the dark, wrinkled surface. It felt absolutely no different from when he touched his real face … or what used to be his real face.

  “No,” he said, hearing the chest-deep growl that was his voice.

  His mother must have heard it, too, because she pulled away from him with a look of genuine terror on her face.

  “Jimmy? … Are … are you all right?”

  Jimmy was desperate to answer her, to reassure her that he was fine, but he was afraid of what would come out of his mouth next if he opened it. He wished he could tell his mother that he was just fine, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t sure how or why this was happening to him. It didn’t seem possible, but it was definitely not in his imagination.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have lied to his mother earlier, he thought.

  Maybe he should have confessed that he hadn’t avoided the shortcut through the woods tonight like he’d told her.

  But even if he did confess to that, one thing he could never tell his mother or anyone else was what he had done to the Hopkins twins when he met up with them on the narrow wooden bridge in the woods. Jimmy might be one of the “little kids” in the neighborhood who was always being picked on, but tonight he had caught the Hopkins twins unawares as they were crossing the bridge on their way downtown to go trick-or-treating. When Jimmy leaped out from underneath the bridge wearing his goblin mask, one of them—he had no idea which one—went running off, screaming like a scared little girl.

  That had been hysterical.

  But Jimmy couldn’t remember exactly what happened next.

  Somehow, the other twin ended up with a carving knife sticking out of his back between his shoulders. He only got about twenty feet away from the bridge before he fell down on the path. After twitching a little and making a weird bubbling sound in his throat, he stopped moving altogether. Dark foam ran from his open mouth.

  Jimmy knew he had been alone at the bridge, so he must have done it, even though he had no memory of it.

  But maybe this was the price he had to pay for what he had done.

  He was only ten years old, but maybe his years of living in a home with a loving mother and father were over. Even though his big brother was a royal pain in the butt most of the time—well, all of the time, actually—he generally liked it here at home. He didn’t want to lose it.

  But now, he feared, he would have to go back into the woods and start living under the bridge where he would wait … and wait … because—who knew?

  Maybe some night the other Hopkins twin would happen by … or someone else … maybe even his older brother would be foolish enough to go out there after dark. And then Jimmy would get to do to him what he had always imagined doing.

  Jimmy made a terrible snarling sound as he scrambled away from his mother. He mumbled, “I’m sorry, Mama,” but he could tell by the astonished expression on her face that she didn’t have the faintest clue what he said. Truth to tell, even to his own ears his voice sounded more like the angry snarl of a rabid dog than a little boy.

  He stared at his mother, amazed as he tried to understand the sudden change he had experienced. Once again, he was filled with a powerful compulsion to latch onto her and sink his teeth into her warm flesh.

  But he didn’t do that.

  He couldn’t.

  Not to his mother.

  Instead, he turned and, howling like a coyote in the light of the full moon, he burst out of the house, the door slamming shut behind him like a gunshot. He dashed across the front yard and down the street and raced down the road until he came to the turnoff onto the shortcut. Then he plunged into the woods and made his way along the dark shortcut to the bridge. There, he decided, he would sit in the deepest shadows under the bridge, listen to the gurgle of running water and the songs of the night birds, and wait … wait to see what would happen next.

  The Hum

  “Can you hear that?”

  “Huh? Hear what?”

  “That …”

  Dave Marshall rolled over in bed and struggled to come awake. He blinked a few times, trying to focus his eyes in the darkness as he listened intently.

  “I don’t hear anything, Sweetie,” he said as he slid his hand up the length of his wife’s thigh, feeling the roundness of her hip and wondering—just for a moment—if she might be interested in a little midnight tumble. He felt himself stirring.

  “Don’t tell me you can’t hear that,” Beth said irritably.

  Dave realized she was serious about this although he’d be damned if he could hear anything. It didn’t matter, though, because the romantic mood had already evaporated.

  “Honest to God, honey, I don’t hear anything. Maybe it was a siren or—”

  “It wasn‘t a siren. It’s … I can just barely hear it now. It’s like this low, steady vibration.” Beth held her breath, concentrating hard on the sound that had disturbed her.

  “Maybe it’s the refrigerator, running.”

  He chuckled, remembering that old prank phone call joke.

  “No, goddamnit. It’s not the fridge.”

  Dave was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Pressures at the office, he supposed, were getting to him. He sure as hell didn’t need to be playing “Guess That Sound” at 2 AM.

  “Just put the pillow over your head and go back to sleep. I’ll check it out in the morning.”

  “I can’t sleep with my head under the pillow,” Beth grumbled, but she turned away from him and put her head under the pillow just the same. He patted her hip a few more times, feeling a little wistful. He remembered those nights …

  “Isn’t that better?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  Ignoring her sarcasm, Dave leaned over and kissed her shoulder as he whispered, “Goodnight, honey.”

  She pretended not to hear him.

  * * *

  Dave awoke early the next morning feeling like every nerve in his body was on edge. His eyes were itchy, and he could feel a headache coming on.

  This is really weird, he thought. I was in bed by ten last night. That’s nine freakin’ hours of sleep. I shouldn’t feel this beat.

  He went downstairs to the kitchen. Beth was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked at him bleary-eyed.

  “How’d you sleep?” she asked, and he caught the edge in her voice.

  “Before you woke me up or after?” He forced a grin.

  “Very funny. That goddamn hum kept me awake half the night.” She took a sip of coffee and opened the newspaper, making a point of ignoring him.

  “Beth …?”

  “Yeah?”

  Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that right now he could hear … something. There was a low, steady vibration, a throb just at the edge of awareness. He could feel it in his feet.

  “Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know … ? I think I can hear it.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “No … Seriously … There’s this … sound.”

  Beth looked at him like she didn’t quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I was going insane.”

  Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn’t in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth standing in the middle of the yard, crying.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” He came to her and put his arms around her, feeling the steel-spring tension in her body.

  “I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house, “ she said, sobbing into his shoulder.

  “So?”

  “So �
�� That means it’s not coming from inside the house. It’s gotta be out here somewhere. It’s like it’s coming from the ground or the sky or something.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I’ll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It’s gotta be a problem with the wires.”

  “Sure,” Beth said, not sounding at all convinced.

  “They must have equipment to, you know, locate the source.”

  She forced a smile and wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve. Then, without another word, she turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her go, knowing that she didn’t believe it was an electrical wire problem.

  By the time he left for work, he wasn’t sure he believed it, either.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, things got worse.

  A lot worse.

  Like a sore in your mouth you can’t stop probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, commented on how distracted he was. At first he said with amusement on how Dave didn’t seem to be “quite there,” but that his comments changed to concern and, finally, exasperation.

  But Dave couldn’t help but notice that everyone else in the office seemed to be a bit distracted, too, and as the day wore on, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone was sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring up at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at the edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn’t talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.