Inside Information

Chapter One

Christmas is in full bloom and the fragrance intoxicates everyone.
Kids scurry through aisles and dodge traffic, side by side with the
well-heeled and those without souls. Beggars' smiles widen in
expectation, while visions of It's a Wonderful Life dance in their
heads. The homeless peer longingly through shop windows quietly singing
Christmas carols and making wish lists.
The man is barely noticed as he penetrates the glistening, white
shroud covering the town square. Size-ten feet in size-eleven boots,
leave craggy craters in their wake. The collar of his pea coat is
turned up against the blow, and a dark blue wool hat protects his head
and ears.
As he walks, he tries to keep his head down, but as he nears the
border between his world and the Main Street sidewalk, he has to raise
his eyes to avoid being caught in the holiday Tango. He is past simple
fatigue, and his pale gray eyes, surveying the chaos from behind
red-rimmed lids, would tell the story to anyone who wanted to hear, but
they had all stopped listening a long time ago. As he moves among the
sea of faces and holiday lights, scenes start to blink in and out,
renegade sparks of thought given a voice.
Blink.
His chapped hands shoot out of his pockets to cover his ears, and his
elbows invade the space of a woman wearing a red turban, and dangling
gold earrings. She sidesteps, giving him a wary, slightly disgusted
look, and he moves off the sidewalk in the opposite direction, deftly
disengaging himself from the dance, looking for a place to hide. There,
he thinks, behind the church, under the basement eves. He runs, then
squats, rips off his hat, and clamps his hands over his ears with a
loud thwack, squeezing his eyes shut.
"No, " he mutters, as he rocks, trying to calm himself.
"Danny." A breathy whisper, not his own, but familiar. "You can't get
rid of us. We won't leave until we're ready."
His fingers grip his ears, as if to tear them off.
"What are you talking about, who are you?" he growls softly.
"We need you to help us Danny. Help us!"
Elastic, dripping faces and melting mouths shout the echoing edict, and
a low mewling litany of denouncement explodes from his thick scabbed
lips as he tries to think the voice away, but the game will commence,
with or without his consent.
Blink.

Chapter 2

"Did you see that man?" Jo asked Gert, as they sat on the enclosed
porch of Gert's General Store.
"I've seen it all." Gert replied. "Right here in Redfield."
Jo shifted onto a fresh cheek, getting ready for the story. There was
always a story when Gert answered like that.
"There was never a whiff of trouble here. Marty Vernon used to be the
sheriff; and he wouldn't let any trouble into Redfield. If you look
across the street, there, directly across, you can see his office. See
the sheriff's sign blowing in the breeze? Well, that's where he used to
be. And I suppose he'd have been there till his dying day if it hadn't
been for the trouble that slipped into town behind his back. In the
end, he came to think it was his fault. It weren't a course, but he was
in a personal predicament then, and such heartaches color your feelings
about everything." Gert sighed, and gravity appeared to settle around
her face.
Jo thought Gert looked like an old bulldog when she was overcome by a
story. It wasn't an unkind thought, just an observation.
"Gert.
"Hm?"
"Did you see that man?"
"What man?"
"Before you started telling me the story, I asked you if you saw the
man over by the church. He looked homeless."
"Your point?"
"Gert, please, where is your Christmas spirit?"
"In the store, want some?"
Gert hoisted her body out of the rocking chair, which clung to her
rear end before rocking silently back into place.
"Chardonnay," Jo said.
"Do tell. How about two fingers of Jack Daniels instead?" Gert called
over her shoulder, disappearing into the store.
"Oh boy." Jo said under her breath.
The holidays always put Gert in the mood to tell stories. Sometimes
they made the hairs on the back of Jo's neck stand up, and she would
pretend to have a headache and go off to bed to avoid feeling the chill
that started in her heart mid-story, and then settled into her bones.
Gert's tone of voice brought the cold. She knew she hadn't heard all
Gert had to tell, and knew she would hear it someday, like it or not,
but she wasn't sure she wanted to hear it now. She had a feeling she
wouldn't like the end. Jo had never been fond of listening to ghost
stories around the campfire when she was a little girl, and as an
adult, she never believed in what couldn't be seen, except for God.
Now, she thanked Him for keeping her mind in good working order. She
thought that if she were the least bit weak in that department she
could start believing Gert's stories, and if she did, she would
probably wide up in a home for the very nervous. Her mother had.
Gert came out with two full shots of Jack and handed one to Jo. A
breeze set Gert's chair to rocking, as if anticipating the return of
its occupant.
"Thank you, Gert. Cheers." Jo tapped her glass against Gert's.
"Cheer is not what I've been talking about, Jo. If you'd ever let me
finish, you'd understand that." As she spoke, Gert lowered herself into
the rocker.
"You know, people don't believe that things come back to haunt them,
but they can, and they do. I've heard it called Karma by the young
folks and God's revenge by the older ones. I don't believe God has
anything to do with it. I know what goes around comes around. I guess
that lines me up on the side of Karma, don't it?"
Jo supposed it did, but she wasn't sure what Karma was, even with
Gert's explanation. Jo chose to nod and smile politely. That was all
Gert needed, all any of us need, Jo supposed, when you reach the point
in life when everything happened yesterday. Jo felt she was at that
point, but she didn't have many stories to tell, and she'd never been
much of a talker anyway.
Jo had come to Redfield from Loden after her husband, Al, died. The
late Allen Andrew Sutton had left his grieving wife with more debt than
net, and since housing could be found cheaper in Redfield, she had
packed the old Chevy wagon with her most precious belongings and
skipped town, not leaving a forwarding address. She settled into a
one-room efficiency at the EZ Rest Motor Lodge. It was the only motel
with efficiencies in Redfield. The peeling brown paint and goat-clipped
front lawn had put her off at first. But she had liked the sliding
glass doors that lead out to a small paved patio in the rear of the
building. She had taken the room paying six months in advance. Her
mementos: pictures of her long dead parents and her son Michael, who
died at age two months; a picture of her and Al on their wedding day;
her grandma's quilt; and her mother's satin pillow. These items were
put in their places immediately. She moved the kitchen table in front
of the sliders, and when she sat there, with the sun shining in on late
afternoons, she would admire the goat's contribution to the green
lawn.
Jo had been sixty-eight then. She had the beginnings of arthritis and
a little shortness of breath to remind her of her age. The
fifteen-minute walk into town to pick up supplies at the general store
had been an easy stroll, but by the time she met her seventieth
birthday, she was relying on the good will of a neighbor's boy to run
errands for her. The arthritis had gotten much worse. She hadn't quit
smoking, and her lungs were beginning to protest in earnest.
Jo and Gert became friends over cups of coffee when she would go to
Gert's store for supplies. Eventually, Gert invited Jo to take a
bedroom in her apartment over the store. Gert was lonely, and she knew
Jo shouldn't be alone. Jo had hesitated, feeling Death's hot breath in
the air, and fearing a loss of independence, worrying that her
friendship with Gert might suffer if they shared a life together seven
days a week. They were different in a lot of ways, but in the end, she
had agreed and made the necessary adjustments to ensure that peace
would prevail in the new living arrangement.
The biggest adjustment was honing her ability to sit for hours and
listen, without asking questions. And she sat now, wrapped in a blanket
on the front porch, getting ready to have her abilities tested
again.
After much practice, she found she could sometimes redirect Gert's
stories by showing an interest in a particular subject. She knocked
back the whisky like a veteran barfly, stifling the gag that threatened
to reverse the hot liquids' decent. Gert always found this amusing, and
it put her in the right frame of mind for Jo's re-direction.
Sometimes.
"Gert, tell me more about Marty Vernon," Jo asked. "I want to know
what happened to him." Her body was twisting and curling under the
blanket as she tried to find a comfortable position that wouldn't cut
off the circulation to her legs.
"Okay, but you need to just listen. Even when it seems I'm just an old
lady taking all the dirt roads when I could just as easily jump on the
highway. Can you do that?" Gert asked, slowly sipping the warm nectar
that greased her mind's wheels.
"I can do that," Jo replied. "I'm just trying to get comfortable. I
know it's going to be a long night. The left foot will go numb in about
fifteen minutes, then the right?"
"Alright, alright. Stop complaining. Let me think of where to
begin."
While Gert thought, Jo looked out at the Christmas lights and wondered
about the man she had seen. Something tickled her consciousness, but
she ignored it, pulling the blanket tighter around her.

Chapter 3

The sound of crunching snow echoed off the outer walls of the church
to his left, and the funeral home to his right. There he was between
God and death searching for sanctuary. His thoughts bounced back
through his mind off the clouds, and ping-ponged on a geometrical track
that crossed lines and brought down poles causing a power failure to
ripple across his inner landscape.
"We're with you. Can you hear us?"
"You're not real," Danny thought, moving again. His thoughts bumped
into the other's words like Hydrogen atoms sailing through outer space,
touching, but never making a connection. His mind was searching through
a thick atmosphere of corruption, trying to anchor itself in the ether.
He stopped, fell to his knees, his hands clamped to his ears to keep
the thoughts out. He tried not to think, but it was an exercise in
futility.
"Help us or we'll keep you alive and stay with you forever."
The words spun his world until he lay flat on his back, arms
outstretched as if to make a snow angel. He looked up at clouds which
seemed to drip blood and felt the cold snow ooze around his body. His
muscles twitched and his skin prickled.
"Get out of me. Get off of me. Oh Christ, leave me alone."
He lifted his shaky hand to crush the voices only to find his body
transparent. His hand seemed to pass through his leg like his thoughts
were passing through the thin veil of time. He got up on his hands and
knees again, and scuttled like a bug escaping a spider.
Blink
He has a visceral knowledge that he is on the ground. He knows he is
behind the church, but has no awareness of having moved to get there.
He knows it is the church because you can smell death, and he doesn't.
His stomach roiled with anxiety, and he sweat as if he were lying on a
sandy beach at high noon. Some of the wet beads crystallized at first
contact with the frigid air and made his skin shine like a dime-store
moonstone.
Whispers?help ?shhh?listen to us?help us?called to him and begged him.
He curled into a protective ball, and retreated behind a memory. He can
see their shadows approaching. Fun house mirror mouths with jaws
working.
"We'll always find you. You know we will. You can't hide from
us."
He retreated farther into the inky recesses of his mind, to the time
when he was nine, and began to feel free, soothed by the feeling of
cool lake water on hot skin after a game of tag. Free of the ones he
does not know yet. Wiry arms and legs glided him across the water in a
hypnotizing rhythm, and his mind began to settle.
"Build your strength?you're going to need it."
The voice of the others bubbled up from the lakes' depths threatening
to bring something else along with it. Danny's memory began to deflate
like a rubber raft stuck with the point of a hidden rock. He turned and
headed for shore kicking and flailing his arms. He clawed at the water
swallowing the lake in frenzied gulps.
Blink.
Suddenly he feels himself running, sniffing the air like a dog. His
bare feet pound down a dirt road that stretches into the distance
beyond black mountains that cast a dingy shadow over the landscape. The
bitter air assaults his nose, and leaves a slimy feeling on his skin.
It is as if he is running through a thick cloud of human exhaust.
Saliva drips from his lolling tongue and the hairs on the back of his
neck bristle.

"No, no, no. Nooooooooooo," he screamed into the black. A useless,
pitiful scream.