THE DEAD WALL
by David Byron

I got a kick out of it, you know? No one ever caught on to me, no one that mattered anyway, and I was making a hell of a living. I performed a live stage show of “talking to the dead,” using a form of slight-of-mind called cold reading. Some of those poor bastards actually believed they were talking to their dead grandfather, aunt, puppy, whatever, and that’s okay. They seemed happy enough to unbend their wallets until everyone was prancing in daffodils.

So this girl raised her hand during my stage show. She was a cute brunette with three short lengths of beaded braids on the left side of her head and a killer body. She learned of my “supernatural abilities” from the television commercials I always ran before arriving in each town. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, but these were the fruits of being a celebrity. I was cruising the profiteering bandwagon. Women usually threw themselves at me like I was a rock star or something. I’d lost count of how many I had over the last couple of years.

Naturally, she wanted to talk to her deceased brother. While I was letting her ask her questions in front of the audience, my assistants ran her credit card information obtained from her entrance ticket through the online billing we had set up, only to find the funeral parlor had recently billed her for an extremely exorbitant burial. Quickly checking the computer obituaries, my assistants deduced her brother had committed suicide. Of course this information was secretly handed to me. It had all been done while she was still talking.

When it was my turn to speak to her in front of the audience, my well-oiled lines for this kind of thing soothed her pleas for details of why he killed himself. The brother “spoke to her through me.” I assured the brunette that her brother was in a joyous place, surrounded by loved ones, and he was at peace with happy memories of her. She seemed to feel a sense of closure.
Yeah. And all good dogs go to Heaven.

Afterwards, I had her backstage for a private reading. Hey, if the mortuary business can take advantage of her grief, why couldn’t I? And just when our make-out session was reaching critical mass, she pulls out a condom. Why do they always have those damned buckskins in their purse? So I told her we’re not going to do it if I have to wear that party favor. She hesitantly put it back into her purse. It was amazing what a little fame could do.

*******

So next, I was heading to a gig on Texas Highway 37. Out of nowhere, the engine of my truck started making this damn clanging sound like a monkey wrench in a Laundromat dryer. I just dropped a sultan’s salary on this rig.
I needed to get off the road, so I took the next exit where a bent and warped sign announced the hidden town of Finnigan. It didn’t say that Finnigan was still seven more miles off the highway. By the time I made it into town, the wind was picking up and I was stuck while the local mechanic, “Goober,” looked at my ride. Only in Texas.

I shielded my face from the blowing sand and saw the sheltered relief of a bar named Gary’s across the dirt-paved road. I walked into the place and immediately noticed that inside, it was deceptively large and went all the way back to unseen depths. I had been feeling a little nauseated lately, like I had the flu or something, so I figured I should get something to eat to settle my stomach.

About a dozen good-old-boys were sitting in cheap, rotting upholstery listening to outdated country music. They tended to their interests, ranging from cards to dominos to two tired pool tables and the liquor bar. A wall of plaques with photographs dangling, taped to them, ran from the  front to the far end of the building. Back there, the light bulbs were unlit, leaving the long wall fading down into darkness.

Avoiding a broken stool, I sat down on another. At the other end of the bar was a girlish form in a mocha tan sundress billowing with white flower patterns. Her back was to me and slight movements reflected a shivering luster off her satin black hair. She was transfixed to a TV wedged above the bar.

I had to see her face. Noticing her empty drink, I asked, “Can I buy you a refill?” raising an eyebrow at her silly little flexi-straw.

She turned and flashed a youthful smile. “Hi. You surprised me.”

My surprise far outweighed hers. Her crystal, Caribbean-blue eyes were offset by lavish thick hair and her good looks staggered me to the core. She was a diamond in the dirt in this drunken hut.

“I think I might get in trouble for buying a drink for an underage cutie,” I said, observing that she was definitely a minor.

She blushed beautifully and took a stool closer to me. “S’ok, I’m over eighteen; nobody cares that I’m here. . . I’m just drinking pop.” She glanced across the room. “That’s Dale, the Chief of Police, over there.” She tilted her head toward a chubby, uniformed man absorbed in a game of dominos.

I motioned to the bartender, pointed to her drink, and then turned my attention back to the pretty girl. “So this is the local hot-spot.”

“Hot-spot? More like a lukewarm stain,” she said.

I smiled and offered my hand. “I’m Ricky. Ricky Peterson.”

She took it with cool softness. “I know who you are. I seen your TV commercials.”

She pronounced it “Tie-Vie” but that’s the way they talked around here. I couldn’t help but notice that she would make a perfect mark for a psychic reading, and she was also just old enough for some “quality time” with me.

“You look thinner in person,” she said.

Truth be told, in the last six months I had been dropping pounds like loose change, but I figured I’d gain it back after the stress of the tour was done.

“What’s your name, farm girl?”

“Amie,” she said smiling.

“Is your Dad around here, Amie?”

“Used to before he died. Now he’s over there.” She didn’t look up or down but glanced over my shoulder with a sour expression to the wall covered with plaques.

I turned to look at the wall. It showed a variety of small brass memorials, like plaques. There were peoples’ names with a year inscribed on each one of the plaques. “What is that, anyway?”

“The Dead Wall,” a baritone voice said from behind me.

I turned to see a tall, lean man standing behind Amie. The tall man was holding a pool cue, straight up by his side, like a castle guard’s pike. He was dressed in complete Old Western-style attire, all black except for silver filigree around the edges. He had an Adam’s apple sticking out like an internal elbow.

“The Dead Wall? Are you saying that’s where the dead are? But I had you all pegged for Christians,” I chided. “Heaven and Hell and all, you know.”

“Sometimes Hell won’t have ‘em,” said the cowboy, spitting into a spittoon with uncanny accuracy.

Amie snickered and said, “Besides I ain’t got a post card or phone call from Heaven yet.” She jerked her thumb up at the plaques. “Up there, well, that’s something different.”

I turned around and saw a plaque with red and blue borders in the sloppy motif of a toddler. The pictures of four young children and a teenage girl adorned its edges. The inscription was simply Jim Somer, and dated this year.

“That Jim Somer fellow must’ve been a father or a teacher of some kind,” I said as I reached out to touch the memorial. “You have to admire people like him because—”

But I stopped speaking, because when I touch the plaque of Jim Somer, something unusual happened. My hand went into the brass, breaking the skin of the metal like it was perpendicular liquid. Something else happened, and it was happening to my mind. I was becoming someone else.

       
Animals. That’s all they are. Yeah, they’re the future of the world and all that other crap, but to me they’re just problems.

I’m so angry, so goddamn angry.

I’m in a miserable cracker-box home way out of town with a wife who insists on taking in foster children.

We need the money we get for them. I can’t think of a better solution ‘cuz I can’t find a job in this miserable slum town so I shut up and sit in the smell of dirty laundry and cat piss, enduring the situation. Always squalling, bawling and needing. Damn kids are like pigeons. Disease infested vermin swimming in bacteria, that’s what they are.

There are five. My two slack-eyed imbeciles, those two are my own, but they’re both just booger factories whose names I can never remember; and then there’re the two foster kids, miserable shits.

Then there’s Courtney.

She started it all! Most of my misery is her fault.

Courtney. Another foster kid. So fresh and nubile. Fifteen years old and she don’t have a clue how sexy she is. The way she talks, the way she moves, the lines of her body, all a cry for a walk on the wild side. But when I come into her room at night, she pushes me away. Why doesn’t she want me? And now my wife is getting suspicious.

So this has been a long time in the thinking and more than a few beers and I’m gonna douse the house with gasoline. I’m gonna listen to the shrieks until they stop before I put the barrel of my shotgun into my own mouth. That’ll serve Courtney right for rejecting me, serve my wife right too for trying to be a do-gooder in this no-good world, and get rid of the other miserable wretches as well. I’m going down, and I’m taking them all with me.

I pulled back my arm and blinked, horrified. I looked around, baffled. I was still at that bar. The bar in Finnigan, Texas. I’ve never been in anyone’s house with anyone’s wife or foster children. What the hell?

“Ol’ Ricky’s back with us again,” boomed the cowboy, chalking his pool stick in front of himself. He made a mocking face. “Hey Ricky, did you have a ghostly experience?”

Dizzy and out of phase in plain sight and covered with the poison film of Jim Somer’s insanity, I stumbled to the nearest stool and accidentally put my head down on the bar in the middle of an ashtray. I raised, spitting, and batting the butts off my face.

Jim Somer. Something was important about that name. Jim Somer.
I shook my head, and then remembered: the girl with the three short beaded braids on the left side of her head. The brunette I had seduced after one of my shows.

Jim Somer had been her brother.

We were a hundred miles from nowhere, and two hundred miles from that show where I had been intimate with Jim Somer’s sister. This didn’t make sense. I pointed to the memorial and asked, “How did you get a plaque for this guy? Did he live around here?”

Amie shrugged. Somehow she didn’t look eighteen any more, she looked older. “New ones appear all the time,” she said, “and when new ones arrive, the rest just move towards the end of the room. That way, there’s always room for new ones, and the old ones don’t ever leave, they just move on down the line.”

She pointed to the blackness swallowing the far end of the lengthy room. “The plaques come by themselves. We don’t ask questions and we sure as hell don’t touch ‘em like you did.”

The cowboy said, “She has a name, you know. Do you even remember?”

“Who?” I looked at him, then back to Amie.  How had I thought she was so young? She was definitely on the dark side of thirty.

“. . . her name,” the cowboy was saying. “The girl with the braids. You know, the brunette from your show. You spent last night with her.”

“The girl’s name is Twila Somer,” Amie said, her hair more pewter-grey than sable. She was aging before my eyes; how could that be?

“She works for a place called Rozer Pharmaceuticals,” the cowboy said. “I guess she’s some kind of undiscovered genius. In five years, she was going to find a cure for AIDS. Well, she would have, anyway, if you hadn’t killed her.”

“What are you talking about?” I was getting furious at the insanity around me. “I just slept with her, I didn’t kill her!”

As I spoke, I watched Amie age into her forties, sixties, then eighties. Her skin cracked and I saw one of her fingernails fall into her drink. The cowboy by her side, who seemed fine a minute ago, now wore the sagging skin of a dying Basset hound.

“You have AIDS, Ricky Peterson,” Amie rasped. “Why do you think you’ve been so ill lately?” She grinned at me, a tooth falling out of her wilting face and rattling onto the bar. Her eyes, dancing in the light of youth not an hour before, were now milky and blind. “In fact, you’ve killed dozens. For the last two years, during the most sexual time of your life, you have been spreading this disease through your disdain of others.”

A jolt of 200 proof panic hit me and my wise-guy image was gone. I bolted from my bar stool. Running to the door, I fumbled for the exit. Realizing it had changed to a realistic mural on a solid cement wall, I slumped in disbelief.

I turned back to face the bar and saw nothing but a skeleton, yet Amie’s dead skull still spoke, her teeth clacking against one another. “And those dozens you killed will kill others, unaware of their condition. The numbers will keep doubling as they infect more innocents. All because you were selfish and didn’t view others as human beings. You never recognized that other people have feelings too. Other people matter.”

I looked to the bartender for help, but he was now just a heap of a darkly webbed substance. Frantically searching the room, I saw an emaciated woman eating the guts out of the reclining Officer Dale who was unbothered by it as he pondered his next dominos move.

The cowboy stood aside as the meat of his body dropped away, splattering onto the floor in slimy chunks. Now a near-skeletal form, he said, “Time for his walk, Amie.”

He snatched my arm above my elbow. I tried to scream at his cold, wet touch but could only expel a squeaky chirp. Amie’s skeleton quickly moved forward. I tried to kick at them both, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to aim right.

Amie grabbed my other arm. They dragged me toward the far end of the room, towards an inky howling nothingness. Loose paper flew into the suction of the icy void. I screeched and bawled until my face was a sheet of bubbling snot. The corpses in the bar joined together in clattering laughter.

They pulled me towards the Dead Wall, pausing briefly to point out something on the wall to me.

A plaque inscribed with my name, Ricky Peterson, was etched with today’s date. Attached to it was a photograph of Twila Somer, smiling with life’s promise.

David Byron is the founder/CEO of NVF Magazine, an online publication that promotes indie filmmakers, fiction writers, actors, actresses, FX artists, graphic artists, and musicians. He is the author of five non-fiction books, including The Queens of Scream, Film Prodigies & Legends, Cinemassacres, Hot & Horrifying: The First Ladies of Horror, and The Indie Filmmakers Handbook.
His other credits now include fiction writer, poet, screenwriter, producer, and editor. His short stories Electrocuting The Clowns and The First Cut Is The Deepest were both nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in 2008. His involvement in helping unknown writers has helped some of them go on to success within the horror genre.

He lives in Indiana with his cats, Toby and Buckwheat, who are both a constant inspiration for another story or film.