Something Wicked Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Read online

  “My agency cares. That’s why they sent me to follow up.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, and I must point out that it’s getting quite late.”

  “Six o’clock isn’t late, Miss Smith.”

  “It is when you start your day at four o’clock and work till five.” Emily hoped the man would leave. Once he did, she would pack and go as she always did. Within hours, it would be like she had never lived in the apartment. She would miss the couch, though.

  “My apologies, but this won’t take much longer, Miss Smith.” Thompson reached into his briefcase and took out another 8x10. “I was serious when I said you were photogenic.” He laid the photograph on top of the picture of the dead man. “See? This is you.” He tapped the photograph.

  The picture showed a small group standing in front of a burning apartment building in San Francisco. The Victorian windows were quite distinctive.

  Also quite distinctive, Emily stood in the group. Only one other adult, a woman, was there. The other seven people were all children. The children hung onto the two women fearfully.

  “My agency trains its employees to look for stories like this, Miss Smith. Did you know that?”

  Emily did know that, and she grew very afraid. She also noticed that Thompson’s hand wasn’t very far from his pistol now. She knew he would have no hesitation about shooting her, but that wasn’t what scared her the most. The thing that truly frightened her was what Thompson’s agency did with someone like her. In their view of the world, people like her were for them or against them. Neutrality didn’t exist.

  “On the surface, this is one of those stories news people throw out there to make everybody feel good. A young woman – you, for instance – goes into a burning building and alerts a woman running a home daycare of the danger.” Thompson paused. “It’s a good story, don’t you think?”

  Emily remained silent. There was nothing she could say and she knew it. She was sitting quietly in a trap and waiting for Agent Thompson to close it. More than anything, she hated feeling trapped.

  “The television news people thought it was a good story. They ran it and the print media picked it up. But do you know what everyone seemed to forget?”

  Refusing to be baited, Emily didn’t answer.

  “The daycare owner? Mrs. Abigail Schwartz? She told everyone that this young woman, who was identified as Miss Jane Jones, entered the building before the water heater blew up and told her the children were in danger. What do you think of that?”

  “I would say that everyone in that picture was lucky that young woman – whomever she may be – was passing by in time to warn them, Agent Thompson.”

  “But how did she know? How did she know that water heater was going to blow?”

  Emily didn’t answer.

  “We could go with the obvious possibility. That she did something to the water heater that made it blow up.”

  Silently, Emily screamed. When she’d been a child and given warnings to other people, they had accused her of causing “accidents” just so she could claim credit for trying to help. Those incidents and the accusations had made her childhood miserable. Later, when people began to believe she could see things, they grew afraid of her, all of them wanting to know the answer to the one question most were afraid to ask.

  “If she did that – ” Thompson stopped himself. “If you did that, Miss Smith, my agency wouldn’t be interested in you at all. But we don’t think you did that. We believe that you somehow sensed that water heater was going to blow up and you got there just in time to keep those children from being killed. I think that was a very brave and wonderful thing.”

  Emily sat in the quiet of the apartment that had been her home but now no longer was. She wanted to weep, but she knew it wasn’t worth the effort. She just wanted to be able to get out of the apartment alive now. Alive and free.

  “My agency, Miss Smith, seeks out people with gifts like yours. We pay them to work for us, to see little bits of the future and help us tilt the odds in favor of this country.” Thompson looked at her with bright interest. “You do love this country, don’t you, Miss Smith?”

  “Yes, I do.” Emily knew her voice shook with sorrow and pain and frustration. “But I do not like your agency at all. I’ve seen what they do to people who have these gifts you’re talking about. They imprison them. They put them in compounds and make them work at seeing things until they die. Or until they kill themselves because the things they see are horrible and they just won’t stop coming.”

  Thompson dropped his hand onto the butt of his pistol.

  “It’s one thing, Agent Thompson, to flash on something horrible, to see it unexpectedly and then try to do something to stop it, but it’s another to sit and gaze out into the world at all the atrocities that take place everywhere at all times. Do you know what it’s like to get a vision of a small child perishing in a fire?”

  Thompson said nothing.

  “If you can go to that child, save him or her, the horror isn’t the same. It’s not real any more. But suppose you can’t save the child? Because you don’t know where he or she is, or no one believes you and they don’t do anything to save him or her? Can you even contemplate how horrible that is?” Emily knew her Southern accent was in her words now, but she didn’t care. “I don’t have a television because I don’t want to see people I know bad things are going to happen to. I don’t read newspapers or magazines for the same reason. If I’m not careful, my life is one nightmare after another. Did you know that?”

  With one hand on his pistol, Thompson pulled a pair of handcuffs from behind his back. “I’m going to need you to come with me.”

  Emily ignored him, no longer able to hold back her anger. “You see, you don’t know what it’s like. But I’m going to show you. In less than a minute, Mrs. Ferguson from down the hall is going to knock on my door and ask for a cup of sugar and two eggs because there was a traffic accident today and she didn’t get to stop at the store. You’re going to get a text message on your phone from your superior telling you that Agent McReady had had inoperable cancer, which is what I told him the day he tried to arrest me. And out in the street a car is going to lose control because the brakes fail and it’s going to run into the building.” She took a breath. “And that’s only a taste of what I go through every day.”

  Thompson stood up with his gun drawn and a hard look on his face. “You’re coming with me. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

  Someone knocked on the door. “Mary? It’s Tanya Ferguson. From down the hall? Mary?”

  “If I don’t answer the door, she’ll call the police.”

  Thompson waved the pistol. “Answer the door. If you try to run, I’ll take you down and cuff you. I won’t be gentle.”

  Emily got up and went to the door.

  Mrs. Ferguson was in her forties and always stressed. Her red hair teased and sprawling now, she looked flustered. “I hate to do this, but could I borrow a cup of sugar and two eggs? I was going to stop on my way home, but there was a traffic accident near the store today and I thought maybe I had enough for dinner tonight.”

  “Of course. Let me get them for you.”

  Mrs. Ferguson stepped into the living room and nodded pleasantly to Agent Thompson. “How are you?”

  “Fine. Thank you.” Thompson stood with the pistol and handcuffs behind his back. He smiled confidently, certain he was in control of everything. Emily lived on the fourth floor and he had every reason to feel confident she couldn’t escape.

  Emily returned with the sugar and the eggs and told Mrs. Ferguson she was welcome when the woman thanked her for them. Then she closed the door and faced Thompson.

  His cell phone buzzed for attention. Slowly, he pocketed the handcuffs and reached for his phone. Emily thought it was quite telling that he’d decided to keep the gun instead of a means to restrain her.

  He looked at his phone, then looked at her. “McReady had a brain tumor. It was inoperable. He was
a walking time bomb.”

  “He would have died Tuesday if he hadn’t stepped in front of that produce truck. All he would have managed to do by going to the doctor was confirm the news and run up a huge medical bill to leave his wife and kids.” Emily shrugged. “You see, sometimes the future can be altered. Just like that day when I warned Mrs. Schwartz about the water heater that was about to explode. But it doesn’t always change. That’s when I truly hate seeing things.”

  A loud crash sounded outside. Horns started honking and people started yelling.

  “Constance Gillicutty, age thirty-two, just lost control of her vehicle while talking on the phone to her cheating boyfriend.” Emily smiled sadly. “Of course, Constance – Connie to her friends – doesn’t know for a fact that Eduardo is cheating on her. But I do. And I know that he’s cheating on her with her best friend.”

  Thompson stood there.

  “Now you’re going to let me walk out of here and tell your bosses at the Agency that you just missed me. They’ll think it was because I saw you coming before you got here.” Emily smiled a little at that. Having the agency think she could do that, on a regular basis, might convince them to give up chasing her. That would be nice. It was frustrating that she didn’t know that, but no one knew everything. Not even her. Like now, she didn’t know how this confrontation was going to turn out.

  “I’m not going to do that.” Thompson took the cuffs back out of his pocket.

  “Agent Thompson, your real name is Michael Bowers. You grew up in Dallas, Texas. You’re twenty-eight years old, engaged, and are the second son of four boys. Your father is a welder. Your mother is a schoolteacher. Third grade, with a reading specialization.” Emily paused. “And you’re going to die in the month of August.”

  The man paled slightly at that.

  “If you don’t let me go, I’m going to tell you what year you’re going to die, and you can live with that hanging over your head until it happens.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Do you want to go down and ask Connie for her driver’s license to find out? She doesn’t actually have one. She has her sister Carman’s. But she has a library card in her name. That should be enough proof for you, I think.”

  “You said the future can be changed. I don’t have to die in August.”

  “If you know how to stop an accident, true. But what if it’s a medical issue? Like with Agent McReady? Do you really want to know the time of your

  death?”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “If you take me in to your agency, I won’t have a life anymore. I’ll be a prisoner. I’ve already given up my family because of the way I am, and I can’t ever let anyone close to me because I know how that person’s life will work out. Do you know how horrible that is? To know so much and to be so alone?” Emily shook her head because she knew he had no clue. “Still, it’s better to know it and be alone than to be locked up somewhere in a government institution. I’ll take what I can get. I’ve already learned that life isn’t always very kind.”

  A police siren sounded out in the street.

  “So what will it be, Agent Thompson?”

  His left eye spasmed. “You could still be lying. You said yourself that you don’t know everything.”

  “You’re going to die on August 24th at 10:38 a.m.” Emily paused. “Do you really want to know the year?”

  Thompson lowered his pistol, closed his eyes, and leaned back against the wall. “Get out of here.” He took a breath, then turned, got the pictures and the briefcase, and left her home.

  Emily went straight to her closet and got her traveling bag, the suitcase she always kept packed so she could leave at a moment’s notice. She took out the letter she’d already prepared to leave for the building super explaining that she had a family emergency and had to leave, to please keep the deposit, and thanking him for all his kindness.

  She locked her door behind her for the last time and breathed a little easier when she saw that Thompson really was gone. She hadn’t seen his future, any of it, but the man hadn’t known that. Still, she felt bad for him because she had taken away every August 24th for the rest of his life, and at 10:38 on each of those days he was going to feel – literally – like he was going to die.

  That was better than losing her own life, though.

  Before she left for the bus station, she walked down three doors and knocked.

  Debbie Gruner answered, looking frazzled. She was in her late thirties, a mom with two pre-teens, who for three years had been taking care of her invalid husband who’d had a stroke and become paralyzed from the waist down and on one side. She had peroxide blond hair and a good figure that she liked to flaunt. None of them deserved to have the hard lives they were having. It was just how the world worked.

  “You need to stay home tomorrow night, Mrs. Gruner.” Emily spoke politely.

  The woman turned angry at once. “Who are you to be telling me what to do?”

  Emily didn’t let the woman’s anger touch her. “Your husband needs you tomorrow. Your boyfriend can wait.”

  Mrs. Gruner stepped out of the apartment and pulled the door shut behind her. The sound of her children’s voices and Spongebob Squarepants became muted. “Don’t come down here and start something with me. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Tomorrow night your husband is going to have another stroke. If you’re here, you can call 911 in time to save him. If you’re not, your two boys won’t know what to do and they’ll watch their father die while you’re out with your lover.” Emily had planned to be there in time to help. That wasn’t possible now.

  Mrs. Gruner stared at her. “Are you some kind of crazy woman? Get the hell out of my face!”

  Emily turned and went. She didn’t know how tomorrow night would turn out, but she’d done everything she could do. That was how it was sometimes.

  When she got a quiet life back, without anyone interfering with her, and with hard work to keep her focused on things her hands did, she’d see very little. She hoped to find that again soon.

  BILLY BOGROLL

  BY DAVID MCCOOL

  A couple of months ago - I’m talking mid-June, right smack in that heat wave - I took a walk into the town centre to kill some time on what was likely the hottest day of the year. Had I stayed at home I’d have risked dozing off in front of the TV, and, at my age, my sleep pattern doesn’t need much more than a five-second, head-jerking snooze for it to be thrown right out of sync. Working in the garden wasn’t an option, either. I’d have been sizzled good, even with factor 50 and a straw hat on my side.

  No, on a day like that the only sensible thing one can do in the city is take advantage of the air conditioning in the shops. So that’s what I did.

  It was around 4PM, on the small square that you get to if you walk down either Wood Street or Church Street, that I decided the sun was just about bearable enough for me to sit in. I found a spot on the row of benches facing the mouth of Wood Street. Those benches - which, if you ask me, have to be the most poorly-set benches in the whole of town, owing to them only getting sunlight between the hours of about 7AM – 10AM - were perfectly placed for a day like that. Cool shade was the highest commodity, and if the retailers could have, they’d have packaged it up and sold it back to us in an instant. More importantly, for what I want to tell you, if you sit on the benches in front of the old Army surplus store (exactly where I was sat that day), you have an ideal view of the stairs leading down to the public toilets on Wood Street.

  Not so far from where I was sat, a young father and his son – I’d put their ages at about 30 and about 10 – were stood together eating ice cream. The thing that drew my attention to this pair, rather than any of the other people around the square at that time, was that the boy was jigging about as if he had tourettes of the legs. After a few minutes, his dad signalled to the public toilets, then to a shop somewhere across the other side of the square. The father went his way, and the boy his. Kind of
.

  He stuttered and jerked in the direction of the toilets, but, given his current need, he certainly wasn’t in the hurry you would expect him to be. He would move along a little, stop, turn around (I assumed to check that he was still in shouting distance of the crowd), then repeat.

  Eventually he reached the top of the stairs, pausing just shy of the first step. He looked back to where he’d came from, then back down the concrete stairs. Then, just as his hand reached out to hold the railing, he stood stiff and pissed his pants.

  It was his father’s fault, too. He should have known better. He should have remembered that those toilets were Billy Bogroll’s.

  Back in the late ‘60s, when I would have been around 25, a seven-year-old girl called Imogen Rogers got herself in the news when she disappeared from the front garden of her family home on the outskirts of the city centre. No trace of her was found. Rumours began to circulate that the person responsible for her disappearance was the toilet attendant from Wood Street. Alan Hostick was his name. He was questioned by police, but nothing came of it.

  Then, in the 1970s, 15 children under the age of ten went missing in and around this city. None to be seen again. Some of them made the papers, some of them didn’t. Some of them had posters around the town, some of them didn’t. Although never officially stated, the finger of blame constantly pointed towards Hostick, who by then had been given the nickname ‘Billy Bogroll’. He must have been arrested a dozen times, but was never formally charged. People said he was a legal genius, and he got off because of loopholes. There’s always a loophole.

  They say that the piping system there, from the urinals and cubicles, joins together underground to form one large pipe about a metre in diameter. Along this pipe there are a series of chambers which act as a kind of filtering system for things which get thrown down the toilet that shouldn’t. These chambers are meant to catch sanitary towels, nappies, condoms, needles and anything else that might get flushed down a public lavatory. The story goes that the chambers beneath the toilets on Wood Street are the final resting place of many a missing child. The acid content of urine and bleach that washes through the pipes daily, also washes over the dead children in there, they say, rinsing them away layer by layer. If anybody was to look down there, maybe they’d find a couple of scraps of gristle where a child used to be, or a browning rag that once upon a time was a pink summer dress. So they say.