Stories: All-New Tales

Reading this, I felt like I’d been slugged. My God…My God…I literally gasped. I’d been set up.

It was suddenly clear. From the moment Annabelle Young had sat next to me in Starbucks, I was being suckered into their plan. The nemes…they knew I’d take on the mission of trying to become her therapist. And they knew that I’d see that the neme within her was so powerful and represented such a danger to those around her that I’d have to kill her. (I’d done this before, of course; Annabelle was hardly the first. Part of being a professional therapist is matching the right technique to each patient.)

And where did the nemes pick their host? In the very county with the prosecutor who represented perhaps the greatest threat to them. A man who was winning conviction after conviction in cases of impulsive violence—locking away some of their most successful incarnations in the country: abusers, ra**sts, murderers…

Well, that answered the question that nobody had been able to answer yet: yes, nemes communicate.

Yes, they plot and strategize. Obviously they’d debated the matter. The price to eliminate Glenn Hollow was to get me off on an insanity plea, which meant that I would be out in a few years, and back on the attack, writing about them, counseling people to guard against them.

Even killing them if I needed to.

So, they’d decided that Glenn Hollow was a threat to be eliminated.

But not me. I’d escaped. I sighed, closing my eyes, and whispered, “But not me. Thank God, not me.”

I saw a shadow fall on the newspaper on my lap. I glanced up to see my fellow patient Jack staring down at me.

“Sorry, got the chair first today,” I told him, still distracted by the stunning understanding. “Tomorrow…”

But my voice faded as I looked into his face.

The eyes…the eyes.

No!

I gasped and started to rise, shouting for a guard, but before I could get to my feet, Jack was on me, “My chair, you took my chair, you took it, you took it!…”

But then, as the razor-sharp end of the spoon he clutched slammed into my chest again and again, it seemed that the madman began to whisper something different. My vision going, my hearing fading, I thought perhaps the words slipping from these dry lips were, “Yes you, yes you, yes you…”

PARALLEL LINES

Tim Powers

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THEIR BIRTHDAY TODAY. Well, it was still hers, Caroleen supposed, but with BeeVee gone the whole idea of “birthday” seemed to have gone, too. Could she be seventy-three on her own?

Caroleen’s right hand had been twitching intermittently since she’d sat up in the living room daybed five minutes ago, and she lifted the coffee cup with her left hand. The coffee was hot enough but had no taste, and the living room furniture—the coffee table, the now-useless analog TV set with its forlorn rabbit-ears antenna, the rocking chair beside the white-brick fireplace, all bright in the sunlight glaring through the east window at her back—looked like arranged items in some kind of museum diorama; no further motion possible.

But there was still the gravestone to be dealt with, these disorganized nine weeks later. Four hundred and fifty dollars for two square feet of etched granite, and the company in Nevada could not get it straight that Beverly Veronica Erlich and Caroleen Ann Erlich both had the same birth date, though the second date under Caroleen’s name was to be left blank for some indeterminate period.

BeeVee’s second date had not been left to chance. BeeVee had swallowed all the Darvocets and Vicodins in the house when the pain of her cancer, if it had been cancer, had become more than she could bear. For a year or so she had always been in some degree of pain—Caroleen remembered how BeeVee had exhaled a fast whew! from time to time, and the way her forehead seemed always to be misted with sweat, and her late-acquired habit of repeatedly licking the inner edge of her upper lip. And she had always been shifting her position when she drove, and bracing herself against the floor or the steering wheel. More and more she had come to rely—both of them had come to rely—on poor dumpy Amber, the teenager who lived next door. The girl came over to clean the house and fetch groceries, and seemed grateful for the five dollars an hour, even with BeeVee’s generous criticisms of every job Amber did.

But Amber would not be able to deal with the headstone company. Caroleen shifted forward on the daybed, rocked her head back and forth to make sure she was wearing her reading glasses rather than her bifocals, and flipped open the brown plastic phone book. A short silver pencil was secured by a plastic loop in the book’s gutter, and she fumbled it free—

—And her right hand twitched forward, knocking the coffee cup right off the table, and the pencil shook in her spotty old fingers as its point jiggled across the page.

She threw a fearful, guilty glance toward the kitchen in the moment before she remembered that BeeVee was dead; then she allowed herself to relax and looked at the squiggle she had drawn across the old addresses and phone numbers.

It was jagged, but recognizably cursive letters:

Ineedyourhelpplease

It was, in fact, recognizably BeeVee’s handwriting.

Caroleen’s hand twitched again, and scrawled the same cramped sequence of letters across the page. She lifted the pencil, postponing all thought in this frozen moment, and after several seconds her hand spasmed once more, no doubt writing the same letters in the air. Her whole body shivered with a feverish chill and she thought she was going to vomit; she leaned out over the rug, but the queasiness passed.

She was sure that her hand had been writing this message in the air ever since she had awakened.

Caroleen didn’t think BeeVee had ever before, except with ironic emphasis, said please when asking her for something.

She was remotely glad that she was sitting, for her heart thudded alarmingly in her chest and she was dizzy with the enormous thought that BeeVee was not gone, not entirely gone. She gripped the edge of the bed, suddenly afraid of falling and knocking the table over, rolling into the rocking chair. The reek of spilled coffee was strong in her nostrils.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay!” she said again, louder. The shaking in her hand had subsided, so she flipped to a blank calendar page at the back of the book and scrawled OKAY at the top of the page.

Her fingers had begun wiggling again, but she raised her hand as if to wave away a question, hesitant to let the jiggling pencil at the waiting page just yet.

Do I want her back, she thought, in any sense? No, not want, not her, but—in these past nine weeks I haven’t seemed to exist anymore, without her paying attention, any sort of attention, to me. These days I’m hardly more than an imaginary friend of Amber’s next door, a frail conceit soon to be outgrown, even by her.