zine
car
HOME  ABOUT  FICTION  POETRY  ART  SUBMIT  NEWS  MORBID  ZINES  ODDITIES  BEWARE  CONTACT  GRAVE  FRIGHTS  STEPHEN.JONES  BOOKS  FILMS  TIPS
Gregory E. Lucas

The November Featured Writer is Gregory E. Lucas

You can email Gregory at: GLucas7797@comcast.net

Greg Lucas

REFORMING CHIMERAS
by Gregory E. Lucas

Frank’s cell phone blasted the Mexican Hat Dance and woke him from the same creepy dream that’d terrorized him countless nights, the one in which he hid behind the living room sofa of his childhood home in Lansdale Pennsylvania, stifling a scream while an ape-like creature, or sometimes a man in army fatigues and a rifle, searched for him in the dark room. 

The search never ended; it continued from one recurrence of the nightmare to the next, no matter how many days, weeks, months or even years passed between recurrences of the nightmare, and the interminable terror in every episode kept him on the verge of shrieking. 

Moonlight seeped through the slits in the blind and cast an eerie hue on the musty furniture of the shabby motel room while the phone continued to blast. He felt too exhausted to answer it. The digital clock flashed two-forty-seven in demonic red, and if she—he knew it was his wife, Maggie, drunk on booze or crazed by her mood swings—didn’t get him to answer on the first try, she’d persist until he’d pick up, so he saw no sense in delaying the inevitable conversation. 

His heart still thumped wildly from the nightmare and the startling blare of the phone. He sat up at the side of the bed and pulled the phone out of his duffel bag. “Maggie, do you know what the hell time it is?” 

“Dad, is that you?”

Frank couldn’t speak. He studied dust particles doused by moonbeams spiraling in the center of the room. 

“Ricky, what’s the matter?” Frank said.

“Aren’t you coming home? It’s really late.”

“You should be asleep.”

“You sound different.”

“I don’t sound any different,” Frank said, but he could hear the strange timber of his voice.
Probably a drink of water is all I need, he thought. He convinced himself that it wasn’t his fraught nerves that changed his voice. He blamed the dust and the mustiness for drying his throat and stuffing up his sinuses. 

“When are you—?”

“It’s temporary, you and me living apart. I’ll fix that as soon as—”

“He came back.”

“Who? What do you mean?”

“That strange man, the one in that dented car we saw at my school. I think he’s out there, near the house.”

A cold draft sent goose bumps up his arms and across Frank’s bare chest. Pulling the bed sheets around him failed to help. “I don’t believe any of this.” He waited for Ricky to respond and paced from one end of the bed to the other, unsteady on his feet. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

“Someone keeps driving by. It’s him,” Ricky insisted. “I know the way that car sounds. I don’t need to see it to know it’s his car.”

“You’re just saying that to get me to come home. Where’s your mom?”

“She’s okay.”

“I didn’t ask how she is. Where is she? She asleep? Wake her up.”

He heard the phone being put down on the kitchen counter. Weird faces appeared and disappeared in the floating dust lit by the moonbeams. He searched the duffel bag for a shirt, but before he could find one, Maggie got on the phone and said, “I heard him talking. I came in and found him on the phone to you.”

“I’m not coming back. I got all my stuff,” Frank said.

He prepared himself for scalding remarks aimed to make him feel guilty for his sly way of leaving her; he also expected a fit of teary pleas for him to come back, but he didn’t expect her subdued reaction. “I expected you’d leave me. It didn’t surprise me when I came home and saw you’d taken away all that’s yours.”

Ricky must’ve come nearer to the phone again; he interrupted his mother, and Frank could hear him in the background. “Hear that? Him again.”

“This all started today.” Her voice deepened; it changed to a poor imitation of his voice. “You know, soon as you got all your stuff.”

He felt relieved that she’d dropped her sober tone; he’d learned how to deal with her flinging accusations at him and then behaving with greater unreasonableness. “You’re saying it’s my fault he imagines this guy, that car?”

“He had me in a stir at work. He called, kept telling me about some weird guy he says you two saw when you got him at school today.”

“Yeah, a guy who drove a beat-up old car. So?” Frank said.

“Ricky kept saying that the guy drove by, and then when I got home—”

“Don’t fall for it. You know what he’s trying to do.”

“I felt terrified. Ricky told me on the phone, when I was busy at the gallery. He kept saying that the guy was watching him. So I went home.”

“It’s too late to talk.”

She ignored him. “Ricky gave me this.”

“This? Like I’m in the same room as you and can see.” He didn’t want to delay getting back to sleep, but he said, “What’d he give you?”

“A newspaper from about two weeks ago. He found it by our front door, open to the story about this horror-movie-like murder in a New Castle, Delaware park. Ricky says the strange guy put it on our stoop.”

“The article about the girl and the mother who got killed on the beach?”

“That’s the story.”

“I don’t remember the whole story,” Frank said.  He lay back down on the bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. He rested his head on the pillow. The dust cloud still swirled, creating a multitude of freakish images. Hollow-eyed goblins and other gruesome skeletal faces peeped out of hoods. He stretched his legs on the bed—a failed attempt to relax.

“Think that Ricky would make that up?” Maggie asked.

“Kids like scary stuff. I guess that probably a kid gave Ricky the newspaper, maybe at school, and he kept it.”

Red zeroes flashed on the clock—the stalker’s eyes. The temperature in the room sky rocketed. His heart knocked against his chest like a caged wild animal determined to bust free. He wiped sweat off his forehead, but shivered, too. 

“Let’s say that weirdo—let’s say he’s stalking Ricky,” Frank said. “And he killed those people in New Castle. He left the article about his murders on our door step to what, say that Ricky’s next? That’s too damn creepy for me to believe.”

“Here, talk to your son.”

The boy got back on the phone. “I’m scared.”

“Cut this crap out. You’re going too damn far, making up stuff like that. You’re worrying your mother.”
“I’m not making it up.”

He heard Maggie’s voice: “Give me the damn phone back.” Commotion, clatter.

“See what you’ve done to our son?” Maggie said. “You’ve got him making-up the wildest shit to get you back home. Is she really worth it?”

“You never fail to put it all back on me.”

“Go to hell.”

“You, too.”

He hung up on her. His heart thumped while his thoughts raced. What’s the matter with that kid, spooking the hell out of people? Weirdoes lurk everywhere, and that guy in the old car at the school today was nothing more than another harmless freak.  

He closed his eyes and told himself to pretend that the phone call never happened. In his imagination, the ashen moon cast the only light on Hollering Hill Road and other lonesome roads near his son. A sedan cruised by his home, the dent in the passenger side door glinting with sinister harshness, like the eyes of the driver who slowed down to almost an idle.  

Knock it off, Frank said to himself. Don’t let the kid spook you with his fibs

He rolled onto his left side. Bumps in the saggy mattress conjured memories of the bumps on the road where he imagined the fiend parking, turning the car’s lights off, and then scrutinizing his home. He imagined him chugging Jack Daniels, edgy, tapping the bottle of booze, barely able to contain his homicidal cravings for Ricky.

He rolled onto his right side. Bumps in the mattress provoked him to open his eyes. He scrutinized the weird images gathered in the swirling dust in the middle of the room. As much as he wished to keep his eyes shut and avoid their terror, a mysterious will stronger than his own compelled him to put off sleep and stare at the ghastly shapes. Figments of his recurring nightmare meshed with the dust-swirled facial profiles of the killer, facial profiles that fluctuated from tiny, barely discernible copies of the face he’d viewed at the school to enlargements of it that dominated the center of the room.    

Until now, fear seldom tormented him except during his recurring nightmares, from which he often awoke shrieking. He lay totally awake and couldn’t flee the terror and escape a sense of impending doom by opening his eyes and emitting shrill cries into the darkness.

He flung covers aside and walked toward the epicenter of the appalling images. He swung his hands through the dust cloud, scattering the grotesque faces. Right after he stopped, the dust gathered and formed ghouls as horrid as the others.
He visualized in those dusty swirls the soldier, or the ferocious ape-like intruder in the dream, storming the house while his father remained away. And he pictured himself, a scared little boy who wanted his father there to protect him.

The dust reshaped the specks into an ever changing collection of images. Distant memories surfaced and took on new meanings. His thoughts rambled: that was no intruder in his nightmares, was it? 

In fact, that powerful figure lurking in his nightmares was his father, violent in his drunkenness, back from a stint with the army reserves that’d kept him away from home a few days. The boy in the dreams hid from him because that’s what he’d wished he could do every time his father yelled cusses in his drunken stupors, calling out threats to everyone, even in his drunken sleep.

Frank shook his head. He asked himself, It makes no sense, does it, to both want someone there to protect you and to also feel afraid of that same person some of the time? 

But that was exactly the way it’d been, he realized. And Ricky feels the same about me as I did about my own father.

Frank imagined the boy lying awake at the house on Hollering Hill Road. He imagined him afraid, feeling abandoned by his father, wishing that his father would come home to protect him and make things feel normal. 

And if he returned, what was likely to result? Not a drunken rampage, not the drunken craziness that an alcoholic father and drug addicted mother had made prevalent in Frank’s childhood, but something as bad: the vicious accusations and loud insults that’d become common between Maggie and him. Ricky hoped he’d return, Frank knew, but Ricky feared him too, like he had feared his own father, because he brought to the house dreadful arguments and chaotic conditions. 

He left the bed and twisted the thin rod on the side of the blinds. The room darkened and the cloud of dust with its accompanying horrors vanished. 

He lay down, folded his hands on his chest. He found a comfortable position on the bed, flat on his back. His eyes stayed closed as he teetered on the brink of falling to sleep. Suddenly his eyes sprung wide open. His body shuddered as a thought struck him with all the bang and crack of lightning striking the sea during a storm: What if Ricky’s story is true? 

He fended the question off every time it re-entered his mind. No, no, it’s the kid’s way of manipulating me, of controlling Maggie, too. She might fall for it, but not me, he kept telling himself as the faint twitter of birds seeped through the walls and the dawn’s light bled through the blinds into a room that he hurried to leave.

Frank went into the motel’s parking lot. When he threw his suitcase into the trunk of his car, he noticed the weird man from the school, driving slowly by in his old, beat-up car.

Greg Lucas lives in New Castle, Delaware where he makes his living as a tutor for a public school district. He’s had eleven short stories published in Yellow Mama, The New Press, Literary Fragments, and in several other literary magazines. He is also a poet. Blueline, a literary magazine dedicated to Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, has recently published one of his poems.