This is a part of the short story The Deck Chair Arranger by Neil Coghlan, if you like this ebook you can get a copy by clicking here GET THE FULL EBOOK HERE
If you have any sugestion please let a comment and if you like this, please share this page with your friends. Remember check our LIBRARY to find more horror ebooks, have fun.
REDEMPTION SONG
by Kevin Wallis
The pull of the park was strong tonight. Perry considered fighting it,
telling that smelly old playground to just let him be, but his feet were
already shuffling across the road and through the squeaky iron entrance gate.
“Dang gate,” he mumbled. “Oughta close and stay closed, up to me.” Toothpick-thin
crystals of ice jingled from the fringes of his scraggly beard as he talked. He
tugged his woolen cap down to his eyes and pulled his three coats closed. The
string he used in place of buttons was about frayed through, but he managed to
keep most of December’s bite at bay. The stink of unwashed skin, however, crept
out like the breath of the dying.
Perry reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper,
habit guiding his thickly mittened hands more than feel. He didn’t look at it
though. Keep lost things lost, Old Man Gristle said, and Perry believed him. He
never looked at it. The paper just hitchhiked around town with him, begged and
washed windshields with him from the safety of the coats, or occasionally a
knapsack unless he ran out of tape to fix the flimsy parts.
Most of the townsfolk loved the park, especially on a night like this;
he and Old Man Gristle always heard people talking about it as they walked
under the bridge, on their way to wherever fancy people go. Icicles hung from
the venerable oaks, casting prisms of white and gold as they reflected the
moonlight. The usually dull orange of the streetlamps’ lights bounced off the
ice on slides and swings, reminding Perry of playgrounds he’d seen in the
catalog pages of his bedsheets.
Perry didn’t see beauty, however. The night’s frost and glow merely
awakened something inside him, something growling and frightened. Yet here he
was again, covering the same tracks as last night, listening to the same
creaky, windblown swings as the night before that. The same trees as last week,
the same dang park as last year. Every night, identical—the pull, the fight,
the defeat. And Life Before the Bridge whispering indecipherable secrets into
his head.
Well, that life was gone. He remembered none of it, wanted none of it. He
wasn’t the brightest apple in the barrel, but he knew that he didn’t magically
appear under the bridge one day. He understood that he must’ve lived a life
before sleeping with the rats and listening to Old Man Gristle’s God-awful
snoring all dang night. But a squirrelly, slimy feeling in his chest told him
not to question, that he’d forgotten for a reason.
No, all he wanted now was some food. Maybe he’d find some unspoiled
berries along the bushes against the rear fence. Or maybe a. . .
He saw her under the largest oak at the back of the park, propped
against the trunk like a sleeping statue, and Perry knew one thing with
certainty—she was dead. He didn’t know how he knew this. Maybe it was her
stillness, maybe her color, all pale and spotty, like Gristle’s hands when his
diabetes got ornery.
Just leave, Perry, he thought. You plus dead woman equals bad news. But
his feet betrayed him once more. He was already halfway to her, stumbling and
cursing across the slick grass.
Well, maybe she has a purse, some Tic-Tacs or something.
He stopped before the dead woman and smothered a yelp into his beard. She
was dead, alright, deader ‘n disco, but. . .what? You’ve never seen this chick
before.
Winter had settled into her thin hair, creating a shining white wig like
those men he remembered seeing in history texts about the olden times. Her eyes
were closed; her mouth, blue and peeling. Her jogging suit spoke of name-brand
knock-offs. Death had colored her face with a pallid canvas, but blackened
spots of frostbite—or was that decay?—dotted her face and exposed hands.
Perry knew he drank too much, probably had something seriously
off-kilter in his coconut with all of these late night jaunts to the park, but
he knew for danged sure this woman wasn’t sitting under this tree last night.
Ah, screw the pooch. He reached forward, already tasting the granola
protein bar she surely had tucked into her jacket, and the dead woman opened
her eyes.
Orbs of sunlight-on-glass yellow sliced through the darkness like a pair
of monstrous fireflies. Perry jerked back his hand and stood upright, a guilty
child caught in his crime. He squinted
against the dead woman’s gaze.
Notdeadnotdeadnotdead, he thought.
He opened his mouth, hoping to ask her if she was still in fact
deceased, but the woman beat him to it. Her jaws creaked open. No blast of
frosted breath exited her gaping mouth, but what did come out froze Perry deeper
than the glacial wind.
Down in da meadow in a wittle bitty poo,
Fam fee wittle fishies and a mama fishie too
Her voice was golden, the song a stark contrast to the grayness of her
corpse. The words pried and invaded, each syllable a childish finger reaching
into Perry’s secret corners and coaxing forth the past.
“Not your business!” he shouted, but only to keep from crying.
A creaking behind him, and Perry spun around. The middle of three swings
glided into the air, as high as Perry’s cap, hesitated for the briefest of
moments, then flew backwards in a gleeful arc. Forward again, back, over and
over and. . .
“Fim,” said da mama fishie, “fim if you can!”
And dey fam and dey fam all over da dam.
The ebony sky faded to the glorious blue of a clear afternoon, and he
was there, watching her swing. Her cherry-red pigtails flew back as she shot
forward. A light rain fell, the type of spring shower that falls from unseen
clouds and leaves rainbows for the children. She giggled as she sang their
favorite rainy-day song, and the joy in her laughter held even the birds in
silent awe.
Perry tried to gasp, to shout or sob or moan, but his body failed to
respond, as if delegating all its strength to the chaos in his head.
In two hours, I’ll be sunburned and she’ll be dead. Got any cutesy
sayings for that, Gristle?
He bathed in her splendor, all thoughts of food and bridges and corpses
gone. Memories blistered his mind even as the sun darkened his skin.
He could time the seizure to the second. Three. . .two. . .the end of
his world.
The girl stopped the swing and looked at Perry. Her
hands stole to her paling face. Perry tried to close his eyes, to turn away
from the evil of that moment, but he languished in the slow-motion sludge of a
nightmare.
This is the end of a part of this short story The Deck Chair Arranger by Neil Coghlan, if you like this ebook you can get a copy by clicking here GET THE FULL EBOOK HERE
If you have any sugestion please let a comment and if you like this, please share this page with your friends. Remember check our LIBRARY to find more horror ebooks, Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment