For Mature Readers Only

# 1
December '06

Strange Tales Presents

THE HAUNT OF HORROR
featuring Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider '57
Part 1 of 6

Written by Mike McGee

Science said seven miles a second was escape velocity: The speed at which a rocket had to travel to escape the shackles of the earth. The Black Shadow's top speed of one-twenty-five MPH didn't even come close - but it sure felt like it did.

The sleek black bike took the rural roads like some wet dream of hot-buttered cheerleader penetration. Johnny Ackerman cackled at the thought, licked his lips, then lit up with a vulpine grin, marveling over his own mastery of the machine. He only had her pushed up to eighty-five, but still. Years later, sitting in a packed movie house in San Francisco one stuffy night when even a flick with a weird-assed title that he'd never heard of would do so long as there was air-conditioning, he would see Slim Pickens straddling the A-bomb in Dr. Strangelove, hooting and hollering his manic glee as the warhead plummeted down the heavens, and this moment - tearing through the wooded outskirts of Sunset Falls, Ohio - would come back to him in a flash.

But none of the rest of it. Those memories didn't need to be recalled. For they were with him always, every hour of every day, for the rest of his life.

It started with the sirens.

"Sonofabitch," Johnny said to himself, his voice lost underneath the roar of the V-Twin engine. He glanced quick at his mirror, knowing full well what he would see: Howard. Howard fucking Jourgensen. Who else? The beat-up old cruiser, the same one it had been since '48, tore around a corner that was already a good quarter-mile behind Johnny and came bearing down on him, red-and-blues whirling and flashing. Coyote Bob kept the cruiser in good shape - gratis, as the police department didn't have a dime - but it didn't have a hope in hell of catching up to the Shadow, and Howard had to know it.

He did know it, of course. But he also knew that Johnny had to come off of that bike sometime, and when he did, the sheriff would be right there waiting. It wasn't like he had anything better to do.

Johnny eased the speedometer up another fifteen miles, whipped around a sharp left, and made a neat circle around a few miles of pine trees before he hit a second left that after a moment brought him right up alongside of Howard. Johnny looked in the window of the cruiser and smiled. Howard didn't smile back.

The fat, brown-mustached cop with the perpetually dour look on his hound dog face just cocked a big, callused thumb in the direction of the roadside. Johnny gave with an exaggerated shrug n' sigh, then pulled over and braked. He slammed down the kickstand, but left the motor running. After what seemed like an eternity, Howard brought the cruiser to a halt, got out, and waddled on over to him.

"You're killing your mother," Howard told him.

"You're the one's killing her, if it's anything like how I picture it. I hope at least she has the good sense to get on top of you instead of the other way around."

Howard stiffened, then nodded and lit up a Lucky Strike. "You're a real bastard, John."

"My folks were married. My mother was married, and not to you. She still isn't. I bet you think a lot on why that is."

"Not really."

"Me neither. I get one of those smokes?"

"A goddamn greaser," Howard said. "It breaks her heart. I hope you know that, and I hope it makes you happy. You think you're ‘boss,' but all I see is a punk who wants to be that Elvis, with your leather jacket and your scooter and your hair full of monkey spunk. A boy old enough to be a man who wants to grow up and be some damned hillbilly who looks like a faggot and sings like a nigger."

"They're called colored," Johnny said. "Black even. I hear some of them are very athletic, so I'd address them with a bit more respect if I was a fat fuck like you."

"I'm not addressing them," Howard said. "I'm addressing you."

"You don't see a nigger when you look at me?"

The words hung between them.

"You need to not be speeding through these woods," Howard said. "That's why I pulled you over, to tell you that."

"You didn't pull me over. I pulled myself over."

"Well, either way, don't do it. It's bad enough you're out here making a jackass of yourself, but your mother would never forgive me if I had to put you in the lock-up."

Johnny laughed, short and bitter. "Make you go back to picking up prosties at the roadhouse, you mean. The jailhouse maybe wouldn't be so bad. I could use a few regular meals and some fresh ink."

"I'm glad you feel that way, son," Howard said. "Because you never know."

"One man in life had the right to call me that, Sheriff." Johnny's steel-gray eyes grew cold. They looked the policeman up and down...and then the young man's upper lip curled back in disgust. "And you ain't him. For damn sure."

"Things change, John," Howard said quietly. "Sometimes it's hard to accept the new things because you're still so in love with the old, but that's just how it is. You have to move on."

"I guess you do," Johnny said. He revved the bike. "I don't. Are we about done here?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I suppose we are. Mind what I told you."

"I'll mind it," Johnny said. He popped the kickstand with his booted foot. "You mind that you found me in a good mood. Mind you don't try to give me a man-to-man some day I'm in a bad one."

He slashed an arc in the dirt road with his leading tire, put Howard at his back and peeled out. Halfway up the trail, Johnny looked in the mirror and saw the sheriff still standing there, watching him go, impassive.

"Sonofabitch," Johnny said to himself.

Something watched Johnny as well.

Patience was paying off. It always did. The Other remembered an older man, his form sprawled on the midnight blacktop, blood and brains spilling from his shattered head to spread around him like a halo of gore. The Other had suspended time, made the space between the dying man's last breath and his death rattle last an age, and in that elongated split-second the Other had offered him a choice. Men and women like this one, suffused with nobility and a powerful code of right and wrong, always made the best hosts...for all the same reasons that they were always the hardest to convince. The Other wanted this one so badly he could taste it.

But the man resisted, and the Other finally realized that forever itself would not be enough time to change his mind. The Other released his hold over time and death rushed in to suck the wounded man under. The Spirit would not ride that night...but the Other always planned ahead.

In the moment he had first proposed his bargain to the dying man, the Other had seen into his soul: Faced with the notion of a return to life at the cost of Hell, only one thing had given him pause before delivering an unequivocal no. The Other saw a face in the dying man's mind's eye, a boy, his features so similar to that of the dying man that he would almost certainly mature into his doppelganger. With one difference - there was a fire of rage in the boy's eyes, even then; one that would surely bloom into an inferno with the death of his father. The boy was too young to be of any use to the Other yet, but there would come a night....

That night was here.

The night of Saturday, October 4, 1957.

Dusk.

Johnny stood over his father's headstone, staring through dark glasses he'd donned to shade his eyes from the red glare of the setting sun. The cemetery lie on the very edge of town, and was well-tended; at this time of year, the explosion of red and brown and orange parchment-texture leaves high in the branches of the trees and scattered all over the grounds conspired to make it the most lovely spot in Sunset Falls. Invariably, Johnny was the only person there to appreciate it, which suited him just fine. Tonight, as was the case every night, he was alone.

Which was why it scared the hell out of him when a voice said, "Hello."

Johnny jumped and bristled. It took him less than a second to shake it off. The presence of another person when he'd been sure no one else was around was what unnerved him; the voice itself was small, soft, feminine. Looking to his left and down, the figure he found there - squatting on the leafy earth, her back to a tombstone - matched it perfectly. The petite, winsome platinum blonde in the white taffeta dress looked at him with a sweet smile and closed her book.

Johnny stared.

"Hi," she said.

He continued to stare. Then, "How in the world did you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Ma'am, I try not to curse in front of a lady, but I swear to God that you were not there a minute ago."

"Sure I was," she said. "I was sitting right here, reading my book." She flashed him the cover: The Golden Apples of the Sun, by Ray Bradbury. "See?"

He softened. "Well, I guess I can't take offense at a sneaky lady if she's got classy taste in literature."

The girl beamed. "You like him? I used to read his stories in magazines. I got lucky and found this one that someone left laying around. Some of these are scary, but I must have read all the stories in here a million times now."

Johnny reached toward the book. "Do you mind if I..."

The girl instinctively clutched the book to her chest, protecting it as a desperate mother might an infant. Johnny caught a flash of fear in her eyes that was heartbreaking, unmanning, and he pulled his hand back as if burned. "I...I, I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean to...."

Blushing, the girl laughed nervously, embarrassed. "No, I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me just now. That was stupid, I know. It's just...it's my only book, and I...well, of course you can see it, but...you will give it back, won't you?"

"No," Johnny said. "I mean, yeah. Yes, I would give it back, but you, uh, you just hold on to that there, I've been meaning to go to the bookstore anyhow. Uh..."

Suddenly, he wanted very much to get away from this girl before whatever the hell was wrong with her wound up rubbing off on him. But he could tell that she sensed this in him, and she seemed like a good enough person, if weird. And...well. Those eyes, big and brown and childlike, those were eyes you could drown in. It wouldn't do to be rude to such a woman.

"Yes?" she said.

"I was going to say, it's going on toward seven o'clock, and if I know my boss, he won't eat until I feed him. I need to motorvate on back to the ranch, but if you'd like to come along, I'm sure he wouldn't mind the company of a pretty young lady like yourself."

She smiled shyly. "I'm not so young."

"You're no older than me, and everybody calls me kid. You look like you could be younger, even."

"You flatter me," she said. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one next month."

"You flatter me," she said, and averted her eyes.

Johnny knew the answer already...and, knowing it, he was surprised to find just how disappointed he was. But he went on, "Age notwithstanding, the offer's there. It'll be a bumpy ride on the back of the Shadow, but...."

"No," she said, still not looking up. Her bashfulness wouldn't allow her to look up again until he'd left, but the roses in her cheeks and that slight smile playing over her features made her pleasure clear enough, and Johnny supposed that would have to do. "No, I couldn't. But thank you for the invitation."

"Yeah...you're welcome. Maybe some other time."

"Maybe so." Her tone was not encouraging, but somehow he didn't take it personally. Shy people deny themselves human contact, and Johnny got the feeling this was her problem...one of many, no doubt.

"Yeah." He cleared his throat. "So, uh...say. Suppose you tell me your name, so if I see you again, I don't have to shout ‘hey, you' across a crowded graveyard."

The setting sun cast lengthening tombstone shadows over the cemetery. One of them obscured the girl almost entirely now. Johnny saw nothing but a flicker of ivory as her mouth opened to say, "Christina."

"Christina," he repeated. "That's beautiful. Mine's just John. Kinda dull, that's why I go with Johnny. Johnny Ackerman."

"John is a good name," Christina said. "A strong name. It suits you." Her arm lifted from the shadows to point a finger at the headstone Johnny stood before. "Was he some relation to you? Benjamin Ackerman?"

"My dad."

"I'm sorry he's gone."

"It was a long time ago."

"Yes," she said, and there was great sadness in it. "You're a gentleman, John. Benjamin would have been proud of you."

A chill went through him.

"I better go," he said.

"I understand," Christina said. "Thank you for visiting with me."

"It was hip," he said lamely, then before he knew it he was back at the path that led through the cemetery, starting the bike before he was even completely on top of it, and back on the road that led to the garage before he could think to breathe.

"Sputnik," Coyote Bob said, spitting the word out like a wad of thick phlegm. "Sounds like a new kind of soda pop. Jesus, it's all over now. I don't know what the hell we're gonna do, Johnny, and that's the truth."

Johnny stood there and looked at him like he was the first trooper to set foot off a scout ship from Mars. Coyote Bob's way of saying hello was often to launch into a discourse on some obscure subject like you knew exactly what he was talking about. The fact that this was usually not the case didn't appear to bother either one of them. After the cemetery, Johnny took comfort merely in the old man's presence, and this time he wanted the lowdown just so he could listen to him.

"What's that?" Johnny asked.

"What's that?" Coyote Bob thundered. "You got bugs in your ears from spending the afternoon riding around on that machine of yours, or else you'd know - there's been nothing else on the radio all day." Right now, the radio was playing "That'll Be the Day," but this evident contradiction eluded him. "Sputnik. The damn Russians have some kind of death satellite up there, watching us, listening to us, maybe getting ready to shoot beams at us for all anybody knows, and if this isn't the beginning of the end, I don't know what is. They call it Sputnik. Damn stupid-sounding thing, but it's sinister. I'm just glad I'll be dead before those bastards can take over the planet. I feel sorry for you, though, you poor little sonofabitch."

"Sincerely?" Johnny asked, floored. "They put a space ship up there?"

The big, black-bearded, tattooed old man struck a wooden match on the underside of the counter (cluttered with all-too-flammable oily rags and greasy auto parts), and applied the flame to the tip of a stubbed-out cigar. He sucked on the wet end and blew out a thin cloud of stale-but-fragrant smoke. "Hell of a thing," he mused. "You'd have to slave in their mines for a month to earn one of these, and then they wouldn't even be able to grow the tobacco right. Me, I buy five of these for a quarter dollar, and it's the best-tasting smoke on earth. Hope you appreciate what you've got here in America, Johnny, I honestly do."

"Those cigars come from Cuba," Johnny said.

"You see? It's already starting."

Johnny thought that Coyote Bob loved America a lot more than America loved him back, but it was an opinion he kept to himself. The old man would proudly tell anyone that he'd lost a chunk of his right nut in World War I, his half-testicle a sacrifice to God and country. And American flags of various sizes, ranging from the little one on a six-inch stick that stuck up out of the pencil mug on the counter to one roughly the same dimensions as an opened parachute that flapped around on a pole outside the garage, dotted the premises. There were at least a dozen of them, all told, and they weren't remarked upon half as much by Bob's customers as the girlie motorcycle calendars. The old man's medal and certificate of honorable discharge from the armed forces were set in a frame right next to a bikini-clad girl fresh out of high school who draped herself over a Harley; maybe one person in fifty ever said a word about Bob's mementos of honor, but the girl's breasts were almost eradicated underneath the fingerprint smudges. (It was, Johnny reflected, about time to flip that page over to October.)

Maybe that stray German sniper rifle shell had done more damage to Bob's gonads than he was willing to let on, but whatever the case may have been, his marriage of twenty-two years had been childless. Since his wife's death from heart failure in '53, the old vet had been alone in the world. Louise had loved him, and loved his stories, and he told them all to her again and again (careful, as he would later inform Johnny, to omit those aspects of his wartime experience that involved the use of his then fully-intact equipment). So now, in her absence, in the absence of a son of his own, Bob told them to Johnny. Who always listened.

Coyote Bob had taken Johnny in at eighteen, right around this time in 1954. Johnny had one hell of a bike, a '52 Series C Vincent Black Shadow...a British bike, yeah, but an amazing machine nonetheless. The kid had made himself over into a solid motorcycle mechanic doing maintenance on the Shadow; he'd still had a lot to learn about working on bikes, and he knew absolutely nothing about cars, but Bob saw his potential and knew he could use another pair of hands. And that would have been the extent of their relationship if Bob hadn't woken one night a few weeks later, a week before Christmas, and found the kid sleeping in the garage. It was then that he learned Johnny had no home to go back to, a thing the kid had just been too proud to mention. The whole conversation lasted about three minutes, and at the end of it Bob cleared a few boxes out of a storage room, brought in a cot and some blankets, went back to bed, and woke the next morning to realize that he now had a boarder.

Of course, it was deeper than that, or anyhow it was after a while. Neither let many people into his world, and it was something just to be accepted. He would never say it out loud, but Johnny figured he didn't care for another living human as much as he did Coyote Bob. The old man could never be a father to him. But it was damn nice to have a granddad.

"I'm guessing," Johnny said, "that you've been so preoccupied with the coming Russian takeover of the world that you haven't eaten a damn thing since I went and got us breakfast today."

Coyote Bob's brow furrowed. "Really? What time was that?"

"I don't know, eight, nine o'clock this morning."

"No kidding," Coyote Bob said. "Well now, that does make sense. I thought I was dying. I didn't wanna say anything, because I thought it might upset you."

"Nah, I'm pretty resilient."

"You don't care. You just want the shop for yourself anyway, you ungrateful fuck."

"To think that one fine day all this grease-coated splendor would be mine," Johnny said. "You better go get your own dinner, I'm tempted to poison you."

Coyote Bob barked out laughter. He reached into his jeans pocket and produced three moist, crinkled singles. "I die harder than Rasputin. That's probably good, since it's his relations I'm gonna have to pick off from the roof of the garage when they hit Sunset Falls."

Johnny took the cash. "Want the usual?"

"Yep. Don't bother with the drinks, I'll burn some coffee while you're out. Two bacon burgers and a mess of fries. And make sure they put some ketchup on those fries, and don't let them be stingy about it, either. I want those sonsofbitches smothered."

The Other watched Johnny Ackerman leave the garage, watched him stride through the dirt lot outside it and over to the Black Shadow. Johnny slung a set of black leather saddlebags over the bike and hopped on in a single, fluid motion. Such grace, the Other thought, and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. The biker's instincts were better than he even knew - at the gesture, Johnny's eyes narrowed, his head whipped from right to left and back again. He senses me, the Other thought. He knows I'm here. But Johnny saw nothing. He shrugged it off, turned the key in the ignition, and rode off into the cool autumn night.

Sunset Falls was a little town in those days; it isn't even there today. A few thousand souls called its streets home in 1957, and on a Saturday night, the majority of them were indoors, reading or watching television. This wasn't true for all of them, and Johnny was well aware of that - the kind of life he'd had, he knew that the faces people presented in their daily affairs were often not the ones they wore at home. But it was nice to pretend, riding down those streets, streets with names like Birch and Willow and Oleander, that behind each of those well-lit doors one would find the perfect, smiling nuclear family, Mom and Dad and Biff and Sis, maybe a nice golden-haired labrador to round out the picture. He liked to imagine that. It was easier to do when he couldn't actually see any people.

There were a few to be found in what could with some irony have been called Sunset Falls' business district, which consisted mostly of a few small offices and a couple of restaurants. Outside the Rialto, the local movie theater, some high school kids standing in line for tickets saw the Shadow coming and hollered their approval. The marquee shouted the presence of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, which didn't sound altogether that thrilling to him, and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF!, which did. He'd be back.

But for now, his mission was clear. The red-blue-green neon that snaked all over the front of Betty's Grill blazed through the darkness, calling to him like...well, sort of like how that foghorn called to the dinosaur one overcast night in that one Ray Bradbury story, an association which he found vaguely troubling for some reason, so he pushed it out of his mind and pulled into the parking lot.

"Party Doll" blared out of the speakers that carried WIXY 1260 to the diner's outdoor patrons. With a clash of skates over tarmac, Mallory Coscarelli was at the shoulder of the stopped bike before Johnny could so much as get on his own two feet. Mallory was a sexy little number, Italian dad, Mexican mom, all full lips and fire-engine red hair and that unbelievable Catholic school girl skirt all the girls at Betty's had to wear, but it didn't look the same on anybody as it did on her.

"Mallory," Johnny said, tipping an imaginary hat.

"Master Ackerman," Mallory said, though she was at least a year his junior. "Can I help you, sir?"

"Came to pick up an order."

"I see," Mallory said. "And did you have a car, sir?"

"No, ma'am, I believe this is what is referred to in most circles as a motorcycle."

"I see," she said. "Then I'm afraid I can't help you, being a carhop and all."

"You don't have a bikehop?"

"She's only here Thursday nights. You get to go inside and place your order with the rest of the pedestrian riff-raff. Sorry!" And with that, she turned on her heel and sped back in the direction of the diner.

Johnny climbed off the bike. "Wait a minute," he called out. "You don't have any other customers. You can't make an exception?"

She spun 180 degrees and stopped on a dime, facing him. "Rules are rules."

"Suppose I offered to take you out some time."

"That would be mighty big of you. And what, pray tell, would we do?"

"Go to the movies. I like the sound of this werewolf picture."

"Sure you wouldn't rather go see The Incredible Shrinking Man ?"

"I'm gonna go in and get my dinner now."

"I'm gonna stay out here and tend to the masses."

"Fair enough."

He marched past her and into the diner, little bells tinkling overhead to herald his entrance.

And had to suppress a sigh when he saw who was working behind the counter: Gladys. It wasn't the same kind of sigh he had to suppress whenever he chanced a glance at Mallory. Gladys was what polite folks liked to call "touched." Johnny thought she was about his age, but it was impossible to tell: Huge, bovine, her eyes innocent but evincing that same thousand-yard stare you usually only saw in some of the guys after they'd come home from Korea. It wasn't fair to say she had the mind of a child; in truth, she didn't seem to have much of a mind at all. The diner had taken Gladys on, Johnny supposed, out of pity, and then stuck her in the place where they figured she could do the least damage. Running the register, taking down orders, Gladys couldn't do too much harm...except to your nerves.

"Hi, Ben," Gladys said.

"Ben was my dad, Gladys," Johnny said. "I'm Johnny."

"Oh."

"It's all right, not everybody's so good with names. Now I wanted to get...."

"Where's Ben?" Gladys asked. "I liked Ben. I haven't seen Ben in a very long time. Where did he go?"

Oh, Jesus, Johnny thought.

"He died," Johnny said, losing patience. "It was about eight years ago. He's dead, okay? Please, Gladys, I just wanted to get - "

"Noooooooo!" Gladys wailed, and huge tears swelled in her enormous cow's eyes. "No, not Ben! It can't be!" The retarded girl bawled, and just as Johnny thought that she would sink into screaming hysteria, a surprisingly small-fingered but grotesquely fat hand shot out from behind the counter to grip the lapel of Johnny's leather jacket and yank him to her with violent force. She lifted her head to look at him, and he saw that her features, red and tear-streaked, had taken on a gravely serious cast, and she hissed, "It can't be."

Johnny goggled at her, baffled and spooked all at the same time. "It...it is. I'm sorry."

Gladys' lower lip began to quiver. "But... no. I need him, Johnny. I need him now. I need him, and...I saw him. I saw him just tonight, coming to work, with the pretty girl. I go there to look at her, I don't think she sees me, but I see her by the gravestones. She's so pretty. I love her. And Ben can't be dead, because I saw him there with her by the stones, and...and...oh, Ben.... "

Gladys began to weep, her sobs horrible and broken-sounding, and she buried her face in the soft leather of Johnny's jacket. The grip she had on his lapel tightened, and although the girl was unknowingly starting to strangle him, Johnny put a hand on the back of her head and gently patted her sprayed-hard mousy brown hair in an awkward gesture of reassurance. From outside, Johnny heard the growl of many engines, and, still absently consoling Gladys, he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Mallory burst in.

A tenth of a second later, he spotted the half-dozen cycles through the picture window at her back - all heading up the parking lot, and looming closer.

"I have no idea what you guys are doing," Mallory said breathlessly, "but I have a really bad feeling about this."

"Shit," Johnny said. "Same here."

The guys on the bikes were the size of grizzly bears to a man, muscular Vikings in black leather, adorned with swastikas, wrapped in chains. Despite the cold blood that flooded his heart at the sight of the bikers, Johnny couldn't help but admire their machines in an abstract sense - majestic Harley hogs, all a decade old or more, but aside from the dirt and mud of the road, in flawless shape.

From the back room, Kevin, the wiry black guy who washed dishes, and Matt, the brick shithouse ex-Navy who'd learned to cook for a hundred in the Service, ran out to scope the source of the commotion. There's a look people get when reality is ten times worse than what they'd imagined, and both men wore it.

"Shit," Kevin breathed.

"That's what I just said," Johnny said.

"You were right," Kevin said.

The legion of bikers stopped just short of plowing through the picture window. Climbing off of their machines, Johnny could see that his original count had been wrong: There were six bikes, but seven bikers. One of them rode shotgun behind the most mountainous of them all, so big that his passenger was invisible until the pilot stepped off his bike. Like a pack of feral dogs, the bikers had clearly chosen the most vicious to lead them - or, more likely, he had chosen himself. The red-bearded alpha male took long strides toward the diner's door, and the rest followed with him.

Gladys looked up from her nestling place in Johnny's jacket and beseeched him, "Please, Ben. Please. You have to stop them. Keep me safe. Don't let them hurt us."

Redbeard kicked open the door, spraying shattered glass all over the floor of the diner.

Kevin and Matt were still behind the counter. Gladys was back there, too, hanging on to Johnny for dear life. And Mallory had glided back there on her skates; if any of them could have fled and made it, it was her, but she'd stayed, either out of a sense of loyalty to her friends...or a feeling that there could be no escape.

The only one on the other side of the counter now was Johnny. He felt Gladys' hand loosen its hold on him, freeing him to move a little. She knew what they all knew: That somehow this was on him. Just him.

Redbeard stopped before him, looking down about a half a foot to stare Johnny right in the eye. Johnny couldn't look back - in defiance of the dark of night, the other man was staring through a dusty pair of smoke-colored Foster Grants. They all wore them.

For a long moment, no one breathed.

Then Redbeard took a drag from his Camel, exhaled smoke, and rasped, "That bike out there. Is that yours?"

"It is," Johnny said.

"Not no more," Redbeard said. "See, my compadre here, he's got no bike to ride on. It's a sad fucking state of affairs is what that is. So your bike...is now his bike."

The four figures behind the counter tensed.

"I'm afraid," Johnny said, "that is not the case."

Matt muttered, "Jesus, John, give him the fucking bike."

"His name isn't John," Gladys said. "It's Ben. And Ben's going to save all of us, you'll see...."

Mallory whispered, "Gladys, sweetie, be quiet - "

To the bikers: "You'll see!"

And then Gladys' face vanished into a mist of blood.

Johnny never even heard the shot, just a sudden and intense ringing in his ears followed by the strangely clear and slow pattering of what at first seemed like scattered raindrops. Then, in the same moment that sound rushed back into his set of senses, time hyper-accelerated from zero to sixty and the fine rain of blood that splashed his jacket became a deluge of gore that washed over him in a hot, scarlet tidal wave. He felt the tug of Gladys' hand at his lapel for only a second - and then she had released him utterly, crashing to the floor behind the counter like a shot from a cannon, the front of her head blown away and spewing her sad addled brains all over the wall.

The guy who rode behind Redbeard lowered his sawed-off shotgun and nodded grimly.

"The keys," Redbeard said.

Johnny's face was a terrified mask of blood...and then he sneered.

"Fuck you."

"Yeah," Redbeard said. "Maybe that's what I'll do to your momma, right before I kill her. Her and that cocksucker cop she's shacked up with."

Johnny's eyes went wide. "What? Who are you...how...?"

"Oh, I know you, Johnny," Redbeard said. "And I can take those damn keys off a dead man just as easy as a living one. I was never gonna let you walk out of here breathing either way. I've been waiting to do this for a long time."

The biker pulled a revolver out of the waistband of his black jeans. He turned back the safety in the same motion that brought the barrel to rest an inch away from the spot directly between Johnny Ackerman's eyes. Johnny saw white light, and then nothing.

END OF PART ONE

For Mature Readers Only

# 1
December '06

Strange Tales Presents

THE HAUNT OF HORROR

"The Mirror Story"

Written by Josh Reynolds

The concept of the mirror has always been a question of sorts for me. I have always felt that they are a useless symbol of mankind's vanity. Why use them?

To see, yes? To comb your hair, check for imperfections, check for those minor niggling flaws that render you unable to congregate with the vast expanse of the human beast. In effect, those sinister panes of polished glass show us those things which no sane human would want to see; they destroy our carefully formed illusions and masks...or else, they aid us in forming the dangerous, blinding illusions that can kill us if we are not careful. Take for example the bulimic or the plastic surgery junkie. If not for the mirror, they would perhaps not be the pathetic things they are now. Or maybe they would.

Some mystics even believe that the mirror is a window to the soul...that your reflection is your soul in all its glory and hideousness.

I hope not.

Otherwise I am surely damned.

Let me tell you a story. It begins, innocently enough, with this fascination with mirrors I have. This loathing. It began with my grandmother's mirror. A large type, the kind used to examine every part of your form in all its twists and folds.

She would stand me in front of it. And then she would tell me what she saw. It was one of her favorite activities. A lesser child would have broken, or perhaps bent, becoming twisted and as hateful as their victimizer. Perhaps even dangerous. Isn't that how Dahmer started out? But not me. If I was bent, it was only a little. And catharsis came quickly in any event.

When I turned thirteen she died, and I stood over her casket and told her then what I saw. I have never enjoyed anything more.

But, irregardless of such little joys, she left the mirror to me. From beyond the grave and all that rot. A last parting shot from a virulent old hag determined to destroy whatever hope I had for a normal outlook on life.

Luckily, for all that she destroyed my personality, what was left was iron, cold and unfeeling. So I merely looked upon the gift of the mirror as one of life's tasteless little ironies and had my family put it away, wrapped in an oily tarp in a dusty attic and thought no more of it. I kept no mirrors in my home after I moved out. Out of sight, out of mind. That is, until I decided to hold a garage sale.

I crawled into my parent's attic, bruising my shins and wrists on the protruding junk and bric-a-brac and filling the dusty air with curses. I was in need of extra cash to give some breathing room on a few of my more gnawing debts and a garage sale was the only legal method I had for getting the cash beyond selling portions of my biology-something I am not a big fan of. I thought briefly of knocking over a liquor store, but I'm allergic to pantyhose and police officers with guns, so that left the garage sale. As I kicked and shoved boxes of antique junk through the attic trapdoor, I backed into the hulking shroud of grandmother's mirror.

It had been several years since I had had it lugged up there and buried, but as I idly pulled the tarp back, I saw it had lost none of its luster. Hateful thing.

My reflection looked back at me through the glass, bound in shadow and almost indiscernible from the darkness of the attic. When I grinned, it grinned. I waved, it waved. I decided then and there to sell it. Such an antique would be worth a lot to some bumbling idiot and I could be rid of a vile memory and gain several hundred dollars all in one swoop. How could I lose?

I'll tell you how.

No one bought the damn thing. It sat in the wet grass on my front lawn like a garden gnome afflicted with gigantism, it's wooden frame redolent with garish carvings and termite holes. Staring at me. Me. Every time I turned, my reflection was there, staring.

And not one of my customers gave it a second look. At the end of the day, I had just enough to cover my debts and a revitalized sense of self loathing courtesy of grandmother's mirror. I thought briefly of tossing it, but pride wouldn't let me.

She wouldn't beat me. Not now that I was grown and she was dead and rotting. She would get no post mortem delight in whatever comfy corner of hell she squatted in that I still feared her mirror.

So I brought it in to my home and sat it in my bedroom.

Initially, it took a few days to stop jumping every time I saw it. It was a constant finger in the scar tissue prevalent in my psyche, poking, prodding, tearing. But I got used to it. Eventually, it became just a mirror...just a polished section of geometrically cut and squared New England glass. On a visceral level, I still despised the whole concept of the mirror, with the clear view it gave me of my imperfect features, my narrow face and dark eyes...a fox's face, my grandmother always said...but I came to accept it. Accept it's usefulness. I was no longer a vampire, smashing every mirror I came across. I had at last made peace of sorts with my phobia and loathing.

And then, I saw the woman.

It was early one morning. I rolled out of bed, just as light began to flood the horizon, and snatched a pair of jeans from the floor. As I stood and zipped up the pants, I caught sight of the mirror out of the corner of my eye. Or, rather, I caught sight of the woman reflected in the mirror. She was laying in my bed, curled up next to the empty space where I had been laying. She was beautiful, moreso than I was used to bringing to my bed in recent months. I yelped and swung to look at my bed... only to find it empty! I flung my gaze back up to the mirror, meeting my reflection's eyes, and beyond my own features in the glass, there was nothing. Nothing more or less than my own bed and the room around it.

I shook my head and grinned at my reflection. Wishful thinking. I forgot about as the vagaries of the day came to bear on me later.

Two nights later, I saw her again, this time as I was getting in bed. As I pulled back the covers, I glanced at my reflection, a habit of all owners of such large mirrors. And there she was! In my bed, under the covers, staring at my back, her mouth moving, but no sound emanating. I shrieked and fell out of bed, stumbling back against the wall, gawping at my empty bed.

I stood, trembling and met my reflection's eyes. Was I going insane? No. Stress. It was stress. And I went to sleep, discomfort forgotten.

A bit of undigested beef. Wasn't that how Scrooge described it?

Stress was no longer a comforting explanation after my fifth sighting of the redhead in the mirror. This time, at midday, as I came home early from work and tossed my wallet on my bureau, I saw her standing, folding clothes on my bed, but once more, only as a reflection in the mirror! As my reflection entered the mirror, she turned and jumped happily into his...my arms. I stumbled back in sympathy with my double, though no weight came upon me. I could only gape as they kissed, and talked silently to one another. Some part of my brain felt like an intruder. It grew in strength as they began to undress in haste. I backed out of the room, away from the mirror, and got a beer out of my refrigerator. And then another.

After four or five, just enough to calm my shocked senses back into a semblance of working order I got up the liquid courage to stalk back to my room and the mirror.

The woman was dead.

Blood coated the room...or at least the reflection of the room. And my reflection himself. He sat calmly beside her corpse, stroking her face tenderly. He looked up as I entered, and mimicked my reactions, just like a good little reflection. Albeit naked and bloodily. And as I stared into my own eyes, I...he winked. Just ever so slightly, just enough so I couldn't tell whether my own eye had been the cause of the movement or not.

I fainted, falling heavily backwards across the bed.

When I awoke, it was several hours later and the room in the mirror was once more a pristine duplicate of my own. And my reflection was lying across his bed, just as I was mine. Nothing out of the ordinary, to suggest what I had seen.

But I had seen it...hadn't I?

Over the following months, I saw more women. White, Black, Hispanic, all types, all races, all beautiful, just like the first. And when I wasn't watching, they all died at the hands of my reflection.

I like to think there was nothing I could have done for them.

And through it all, my reflection taunted me. Every time I entered my room, he was there, a normal reflection in a normal mirror. He parroted my action so well I almost began to doubt my own sanity once or twice. Though his mask slipped occasionally. Winks. Laughter, silent and mocking, like a child making faces in front of a mirror. He knew. Just as I did. Bastard.

Once or twice, I almost got rid of the mirror. But then I thought, what would happen then? My reflection killed when I wasn't around...would it continue? Or would the darkness of the attic stop it? Had he been killing all that time, all those years in the attic?

Could I shatter it? Would that end it?

No.

I knew only one way to end it.

But could it be done? Was I right?

So I began to covertly study my reflection. I sat one entire Sunday in that bedroom, staring at myself in the mirror, striving against sleep. And he sat there as well, the same look of consternation on our twin features.

I tried this tactic several more times until I was satisfied. I was right. My reflection could do nothing while I was there, while I watched. But if I slept, if I left, then he would be free.

Free to kill.

Why, I wondered as I planned what I was going to do. Why did he kill? In that little mirror world, why did I kill? That line of questioning opened other doors of inquiry even more disturbing if that was possible. Like, who was he killing? Other reflections? Or was I the reflection? And he the real man? Which of us had actually suffered at my grandmother's hands...me or him? Both?

I recall once catching an episode of an old sci-fi TV show when I was younger. It dealt with a astronaut leaving earth and returning later through a cosmic storm, whatever that was. When he lands, he realizes everything is subtly different about his world. By the end, he discovers he is, in fact, on an alternate world, parallel to his own, but different slightly.

I didn't recall ever traveling through a cosmic storm in recent months, but a parallel world sounded as good an explanation as any. Or perhaps, what I was seeing was my soul. Even more disturbing.

Maybe my grandmother had won after all.

No. It wasn't over yet.

I quit work that afternoon. I told my family I was going on a trip, and not to call or come looking for me. And then I pulled all of my money out the bank and used a good portion of it to buy a cabin in the woods back, far and away from civilization. I took enough food for a few days, two at most and I bought a bucket for my toilet.

After I set up at the cabin, barren but for a single chair, my food and my bucket, I brought in the mirror. I had covered it in a tarp, the same one from the attic, and as I pulled it off, I fancied I saw a slightly startled expression on my reflection's features. I locked the door, and sat in my chair, my eyes locked on his. And I slowly pulled the bottle of pills out of my shirt pocket. Stimulants.

I downed enough to stay awake for days.

And I did.

And I still am, even as I write these words. So is he, though it appears unwillingly. I have noticed as the hours pass that we are not so similar, nor so tightly bound as I thought.

For instance, he is screaming at me.

And I, I am merely smiling.

I was right.

He cannot leave. He cannot move his body unless I do, while I watch him. Why this is so, I do not know. Nor do I care. He is mine.

His face contorts as I mouth those words... you are mine...and he struggles, though weaker than before. I can tell. Hunger you see. We are both starving...the food ran out two days ago.

I wonder, if I die...will he?

As a reflection, can he die?

Is he a reflection trapped by a man?

Or am I a reflection who has trapped a man?

It does not matter.

Irregardless, we will die. Eh?

What is this?

He is standing...or trying. I feel my limbs trembling with his effort. My own reflection, forcing me to parrot his actions! He is trying to reach the mirror...to smash it!

Fool.

But...if it were to be smashed, who would cease to exist, whose world would shatter like shards of that demon glass?

Mine? His?

I must stop writing, I must drop this pen. My...his fists are limply falling towards the glass...we are not the same.

He fears the slow death. Fine then. Smash the mirror you murdering bastard!

We will see whose world shatters firs-

THE END