Author’s Note- The following piece first appeared in “In Amelia We Do Not Trust”, published by Untreed Reads back in 2014. Originally, it had been submitted to several horror-themed magazines and websites for consideration, and initially cleared several hurdles at three different distributors; Fangoria, Dark Haven, and Evil Eye. However, shortly after these outlets expressed interest, Mr. Hartman of Untreed reached out and asked if I had a second collection of stories prepared for publication, and I answered that yes, I had a set almost ready to go. I am a big believer in loyalty to those who give me a chance; I passed up a guaranteed $500 payout from Dark Haven in order to keep all of the Amelia City material together with Untreed. Some would say that was a sucker’s move, especially given that this second anthology never earned me that much money in sales. But despite my love of Harlan Ellison and his ‘pay the damn writer’ approach, this is not always my approach.
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Ringing
Helen didn't want to think about what she was seeing for three reasons. Firstly, she had only been living in downtown Amelia for six weeks after living a lifetime in the suburb of East Perry, and had been hoping that her move would go smoothly. Secondly, she had never been a fan of surprises, and this ranked as number one in her lifetime.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the 20-year-old redhead was too big a fan of reality in general to want to see what stood in front of her. This is the last time I check out a weird sound around this city, she thought. Never again. She had been walking home from her job at Chez Francois, which to her was more than just another waitressing gig. The wealthy clientele who dined there tended to be generous tippers, and she usually covered her rent with two weeks' tips alone. About halfway home, she could hear an old-fashioned phone ringing nearby.
Assuming it was someone's cell phone set up with a retro ringtone, Helen followed the sound into a nearby alley which turned out to terminate in a switchback leading to another alley, unseen, to the right.
Helen didn't feel too leery about being in a dark alley at night in the big city. She had taken Ishinryu karate for five years and earned her first degree black belt, and had a can of pepper spray in her small brown leather purse. It was in her hand halfway down to the corner of the alley.
Now it dangled at her side in a loose grip as the ringing continued. Around that corner, twenty yards away, was a tableua that could be best summed up as acid-trip-strange. The alley stopped in a windowless brick wall.
Against that wall was a long conference table, upon which sat a squat black rotary phone, the source of the ringing. No wire or cord ran from it anywhere. A few feet away from the table and its mysterious phone stood a dairy cow with multi-hued hair covering it in patches of yellow, blue, orange, green and red. A pair of boneless appendages hung flopped down from its flanks, the little hooves curved outward. The reek of its feces on the alley floor stung her nostrils.
On the lefthand alley wall, also a brick building, a light shone over the back alley door of some business. The little pool of light illuminated the side of a dumpster. Perched on the dumpster's edge was a human skull with bat's wings and little bird feet, a single eye staring out of its left socket at her as it moved its jaw around and around, as if chewing something. Blood ran in a thin trickle from a crack over its empty right socket.
The cow opened its mouth and said in a stoner's drawl, "You gonna get that?" The phone continued to ring, and Helen stared up at the winged skull as it blinked its lone eye, a flap of eyelid squelching shut and open on it. She screamed and ran off back the way she had come, dropping the pepper spray in her hurry. She didn't stop running until she was inside of her apartment seven minutes later, the door latched, dead bolt thrown, and security chain hooked against the madness she had encountered.
Sleep was a long time coming that night.
When Helen woke up, her vision blurry, her nose plugged on the left side compliments of the cold she was getting over, her first thought was, I have seen the face of madness, and it looks out from inside a mirror. Sitting up, startled by her own capacity for the poetic at the outset of her day, she rubbed her eyes of sleep. Her studio apartment remained as it had the day before when she headed off to work, which is to say cluttered. Four hundred square feet isn't a terribly lot of space for anyone to live in, and it gets cluttered quickly.
The apartment had been ideal for her, though. Rent was only five hundred a month, and included her gas and electric service. Work was only a mile-and-a-half away, easily walked or biked (if she ever got down to Mike's Bikes on Tenth Street to purchase one), so she saved by needing no car. Half a mile in the direction opposite work was a small Jubilee grocery store.
In short, her apartment met her exact needs for price and location. A Murphy bed which clicked up into the wall, a shower stall in the bathroom inches from the toilet, and a two-burner stove unit with small oven suited her needs. The microwave, built into the underside of the cabinets next to and over the stove, was her main cooking device.
Helen Green didn't want for much. Between the job at the restaurant and a couple hundred dollars she earned each month writing for a fashion product review site online, she was able to squirrel away quite a good deal of money each month. She only wished her employers would offer her health insurance.
"Particularly since I'm going crazy," she muttered as she clipped the Murphy bed in place. Her encounter from the night before played through her head now, every detail sticking out in her mind's eye, taunting her. Helen's grandmother, Elizabeth Green, had spent the last fifteen years of her life in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Philadelphia. She had been a delusional schizophrenic, convinced that a creature she referred to only as 'a stranger' was trying to recruit her to spread demons and evil across the country. Helen knew from her own mother that her grandmother's erratic behavior had begun while still living in Amelia City, before she moved out east to 'escape the evil of this region'.
She wasn't entirely sure her grandmother had been crazy, not anymore. If she was, then the illness skipped a generation, because her own mother had been a rock of logic and reason.
Helen grabbed some clean clothes out of her cheap dresser, a five-drawer Wal-Mart special, and headed to the bathroom, grumbling to herself about madness and bloodlines. She sincerely hoped to write off the previous night's incident as nothing more than the product of an exhausted mind.
Showered and kicked awake with two cups of coffee, Helen decided it would be best to put some clothes on before noon. This was particularly important today, since she was going to make a video to go along with her written review for FashionForward.com. She'd been wearing several new pushup bras throughout the week from a new clothing company, as was her assignment, and today she would perform her final review.
She got into a comfortable light green sweater, a pair of boot cut jeans, and worked her curly red hair into its best look. A little foundation went on next, then a touch of blush, eyeliner and eyeshadow, and lip gloss. She gave herself a critical once-over in the bathroom mirror, grinned at her reflection with approval, and headed out to the main room.
Helen's laptop sat on the folding card table which served as both dining table and computer space. The webcam was plugged in, and she opened up her video program with a few clicks. As it came on, she saw on the screen the entire apartment behind her, including the lone sliding glass window in the wall.
The winged skull was perched outside of the window on the ledge. Helen shrieked, stumbling to one side and turning around, but when her eyes fell upon the window, they found nothing perched there. Breath coming in shortened gasps, she stole a glance at her computer screen, and saw nothing out of place.
She decided to grab a cup of coffee and a bagel to calm herself down before going on camera.
Helen sat in the padded folding chair and smiled at the camera, checking to make sure the three bras she had tested out were on the little end table next to her seat. She took a breath, let it out in a long, slow exhale, and clicked on the 'record' tab.
"Hello ladies, and any gentlemen who find their way here to FashionForward, I'm Helen Green. This week, I was asked to test out the newest products from Her Lines, a new up-and-coming clothing company based out of St. Louis." She reached over and grabbed the first of the bras, a padded yellow number that looked functional, if not very pretty. She held it up for view on screen. "The first is the Honey Bee push-up bra, and though it might not look all that terrific or sexy, it does exactly what it's supposed to. It's very comfortable, and provides plenty of lift and support. With the cups curved in and the springwire placement between the padding, it also pushes the breasts together no matter what you're doing, so that you can present firm, solid cleavage in whatever circumstances you're in!"
She set the first one aside and hit the 'stop'. Another sip of coffee, and then recording once again. She plucked up the second piece, a red number which was thinner and had a lacy edging. "Next is the Crimson Lady pushup, and where the Honey Bee shines, this one falls flat. Ladies, this number is underwire, and not comfortable at all. I felt this thing digging in before I even headed out of the house to go to work. It does the job of pushing up, but the cups are undersized and flimsy. Spillage will happen if you wear this, so a bad call from Her Lines."
She hit the 'stop' button, rifled through her pre-made video clips, and confirmed that she had one of a bra burning from the stock footage sets she'd downloaded the week before. After checking the video for editing capability, she returned to her webcam program and hit the 'record' tab.
"And finally, this," she said, holding up a heavier gray push-up, her favorite of the group, "is the Sultry Smoke, the last of the new push-up line from Her Lines. Using high fiber count weave and a flexible, insulated plastic wire instead of metal, the Sultry Smoke delivers the perfect balance of lift and push, yet is more breathable and softer than the Honey Bee. If you have to buy a new push-up, ladies, this is my highest recommendation. That's all for now from me, but don't let me be your final stop on FashionForward! Head on over to the articles tab and check out the latest from our other contributors and affiliates, and remember when you're shopping, ladies, if you're not having fun, you're not shopping at the right place!"
Helen clicked the 'stop' tab again and finished her coffee in a long pull. She didn't love doing the clothing pieces; being a woman of average size and proportions, she was barred from doing wear-and-reviews on anything below a size 14. Being her father's daughter and having a frame suited more to her martial arts training than to modeling, she would likely never get to do the most prominent clothing pieces.
That was why she loved doing makeup reviews, and she looked forward to finding out if she'd be getting to do one this week. She checked the time after compiling all of the elements of her video and starting the upload. She had only two hours until her shift, so she began getting ready for the walk and her regular work day.
Helen didn't notice that her window had been opened a crack between the second and third sections of her video. Later, when she took off, she slid it shut without a second's thought.
She would think about it later, though.
With an hour left to her shift, Helen asked her manager if she could nip outside for a few minutes, and he let her go without any problem. "Getting pretty slow out there anyhow," he said with a grimace. "Used to be this place would be packed until eleven at night."
She pushed through the back door in the kitchen, which led to a wide alley the restaurant shared with a daycare center. Helen held the door open for Ramone, one the cooks, to head back in as he pitched his cigarette. He stopped and gave her a surprised look. "You smoke?"
"No," she replied with a grin. She pulled out her cell phone, one of her few extravagances. "Want to check some stuff."
"Facebook?"
"Among other things." He chuckled and headed in, and she let the door drift shut. Right away Helen headed to FashionForward and checked her numbers; her new video had just over seven-thousand views, and fifty-three comments. It had been "Liked" and "Shared" on Facebook one-hundred and sixty-two times. "Huh, new record," she said, hopping up and down a little.
Looking through her comments, Helen heard a hollow metal 'clunk-clunk', and looked up. Standing twenty yards away, chewing what looked like a wet piece of cardboard, was the Technicolor cow. Ice ran through her veins as the ringing of an old-fashioned phone sounded somewhere nearby.
The cow dropped its cardboard and gave her an impossible, needle-toothed smile that split its face in a curve up to its ears. "You gonna get that," it asked in its dull, stoner's voice. Helen let out a sharp squeak and hurled herself back through the door into the kitchen.
She ran through the kitchen, then off down a corridor which passed the manager's office to the inside break room. There she sat in the far corner from the corridor, feet up on the edge of her seat, hugging her legs. She shivered and held herself there for ten long minutes, allowing her heart to go back to its normal pace.
Helen Green tried not to think about her grandmother's fate.
Helen stepped off of the bus at 9:06 the following morning at the Amelia Transit station in East Perry's business district. After she'd walked home the previous evening, keeping a near-jogging pace the whole way, she had called her mother to ask if she could come over the following day for a visit.
"Do you have the day off of work," her mother had asked muzzily, having already gone to bed.
"Yeah, mom. I just want to visit, talk to you about the city."
"Well, I'll call the office and take a personal day," her mother replied happily. "It'll be good to see you again." And now Helen saw her mother's puke green Mazda pulling up in front of the small bus station, smoke blowing out of the driver's side window. She waved as she pulled to a stop, and Helen climbed in, leaning across the seat to give her mother a long hug.
"Good to see you, mom," she said into her mother's hair.
"You too, honey." They pulled apart, and Helen was struck, as she often was, by how much her mother looked like Diane Keaton. Her own features took far more after her father.
"Why are you still driving this thing? I'd have upgraded by now. You can afford it."
"No need," her mother, Lindsey McCoy once again, said with a grin. "Your father's money is good, but I'm not about to go throwing it around senselessly." She pulled away from the curb into the sparse traffic, heading for home.
"Any word from him, besides another late check," Helen asked with a hint of disdain.
"Just last week, in fact. He says he'll sign off on the college fund and let you handle it by next month. Really, Helen, I wish you'd move back in with me. The house is too empty now."
"I told you before, mom, I can't be there anymore," Helen said, lowering her voice. "It was a struggle sticking around for three years as it was." They rode together in silence for a few minutes then, before Helen broke it by asking, "Have you seen Tina around at all?"
Tina Ellis, Helen's best friend since fourth grade. Helen had come home from soccer practice early one evening in her sophomore year to find her father having sex with Tina in her bed. Lindsey filed for a divorce, which went smoothly and quietly in exchange for her silence about the age of the woman her husband was having an affair with. She didn't tell the authorities, and just as important for Roger, she didn't tell his congregation at Amelia First Evangelical Church.
"I have, actually. She's working at the Target out on the north side of town. People talk, dear, and she has been courted by your father for the last year, very publicly. Greta Jenkins says she saw her car parked in his garage a number of times overnight. Scandalous, to be sure, but there's not a soul in this town will hear of it. Well, except those folks at St. Matthew's."
"Leave it to Catholics and Protestants to forget they're all Christians," Helen mused wryly. Her mother chuckled, taking the last turn leading to the home Helen had grown up in. The peaceful little Cape Cod looked much better than it had when Helen finished high school, and the front porch had been finished since she'd moved to the city. "They finally finished the porch," Helen commented, climbing out of the car.
"Hogwash," her mother replied. "Danny Polk and his son came over three weeks back and finished it in two days. That man is a godsend to this town." Helen let her mother guide her by the hand up into the house, depositing their purses by the front door and moving without pause to the kitchen. "Coffee, dear?"
"God yes," Helen said, sitting at the solid round oak kitchen table. She ran a hand lovingly over the scuffed surface of the table, remembering each scratch and scuff she'd been responsible for, which was most. "So, mom, what did you want to do today while I'm here?"
"I thought a little poker, maybe a movie or two, and a short trip to Polk's for my medication," her mother replied, setting the coffee to brew. The scent instantly transformed the soft, homey little kitchen into a comfy chill-zone, redolent with the heady aroma of rich imported beans. She took a heavy whiff before sitting down with her cigarettes and an ashtray. "Heavenly, isn't it?"
"Specialty blend?"
"Argentinian, fifteen dollars for a twelve-ounce pouch," Lindsey said with a smile. "Between the alimony and my commissions, I can more than afford it."
"Any interesting clients lately," Helen asked. She reached over to her mother's battered white microwave cart, opened a drawer, and took out a deck of playing cards.
"One, a young man from Ohio. I'm fairly certain I can work with him. His prose isn't bad, but he's a bit of a primadonna. He's gone through three editors already, and two of them sent me warnings through email. The problem is, he has potential."
Helen dealt the cards, her mother lighting a cigarette. "Mom, it's been a while since we talked about it, I've kind of forgotten. When did grandma start having her problems?" Her mother's hand hesitated by the ashtray, her eyes flat and shiny like a shellshocked soldier.
"Helen, are you having symptoms," she finally asked in a near-whisper.
"No, mom, but I kind of want to be prepared, know everything I can. Better to have an idea what I could be up against." Lindsey nodded, exhaled, and seemed to slouch a little in her chair.
"Well, you were only two when she first had a major incident, and she was forty-six. So, she would have been thirty-nine when your father and I first caught a hint that something might be very wrong with her." She got up then and fetched them both a cup of coffee, the sugar and creamer. Helen stirred hers after folding her first hand.
"Was it always about that what-do-you-call-it, a 'stranger'?"
"Almost from the very start, yes. The truly weird part was how she referred to him; 'the stranger named Molag', she said. I still have a couple of her diaries up in the attic."
"You held onto them?"
"Yes. In case," her mother said, taking a deep breath, "you ever started showing signs of the same trouble." The image of the Technicolor cow smiling its glistening, face-splitting smile reared up in Helen's mind. She shook it off with an effort, careful not to let her mother notice. "If you want, you can take them with you when I take you home tonight."
Helen tried to convince her mother that she could take the bus back home, but Lindsey argued that doing so would cut their visit short. In the end, Helen agreed to stay later and let her mother take her back to the city. Of the diaries, she said not a word.
It was eleven-twenty when Helen bade goodbye to her mother at the curb in front of her building and headed inside. In the front foyer where the mailboxes were, she noticed a new bit of graffiti gracing the wall. It was one she'd seen back in East Perry, at the scrapyard. It was a set of four hooked blue claws, with a single black line across their rounded tops. For some reason, this symbol always set her nerves on edge.
Ignoring the graffitti she grabbed her mail, then headed to the elevator a few yards away. Inside, she hit the 5 button, looking through her mail as she rode up.
Flipping through the envelopes, Helen felt a sudden jolt as the elevator hitched to a stop, the lights flickering. Her hands went out to the walls, her back pressed to the corner. The envelopes slipped from her hands, but Helen didn't bother looking down from where her eyes were locked on the ceiling panels.
Abruptly, an old-fashioned telephone ringing sounded from the roof of the elevator, echoing through the shaft. Helen screamed, sliding down to the floor, covering her ears with both hands, her elbows pressed together in front of her face. As she sat there and sobbed, she heard a dull voice call up from somewhere below the elevator, "You gonna get that?"
The elevator rocked once again, the lights flickered, and the ringing ceased as though it had never been. Eyes wide, hands trembling, Helen grabbed the spilled mail. When the elevator opened onto her floor, she made a mad dash for her apartment, her purse banging against her side with the weight of her grandmother's diaries.
It was two o'clock in the morning, but that didn't much matter to Helen. She was wired, too much so for sleep. The only thing she'd been able to do when she got into the apartment was change into pajamas and sit with a cup of tea at her table, surfing the web and watching George Carlin videos on Youtube to try and calm herself down.
Thinking about her visit with her mother helped somewhat as well. It had been a nice long day, the two of them speaking more candidly than they ever had. Her mother admitted early on that despite her fears at having Helen live all the way in the city, she felt more comfortable talking to her as an adult now that they didn't cohabitate.
Helen suspected that newfound comfort allowed her mom to admit that she was quietly dating the widower Danny Polk, who owned Polk's Pharmacy. A long-time family friend, Danny's wife Francine had died when Helen herself was just nine years old. She'd been an unassuming woman, friendly to everyone she met. One night she didn't come home from work at Ferrin Medical Clinic, a small clinic and ER on the town's west side. The following morning, a coworker found her dead in her car, butchered by an as-yet unknown assailant.
Danny had been raising his son Carl on his own since then. His sister Nora helped when she could, which was quite a lot at first, then less and less as Carl got older and could watch after himself.
Helen thought her mother and Mr. Polk were a good fit. Thinking about them dating was a far sight better than brooding over what had happened in her building's elevator. Every few minutes, despite her best efforts not to think about it, she replayed in her mind the otherworldly visions she'd had over the last few days.
The old rotary phone, the skull-bat, the Technicolor cow. She didn't want to believe she was going crazy, but if she were, she supposed she could be greatful that her hallucinations were consistent. Thinking that, she set up another video and went over to the little nightstand set up next to where her bed folded down out of the wall. Her purse sat open on it, two of her grandmother's diaries sticking up out of it.
Helen grabbed them both and looked at the covers of the old leatherbound books. They were solid black, with squared strings that wrapped around the book and slipped through a small eyegrot on the cover. She undid them both on the folding table and opened them to their inner front pages. One had a large '4' written on it, the other '3'. She let number four close, then sat down with number three open before her.
The third diary of her grandmother, Janice Holland, began on the back of the numbered page with a sketch of a pair of feline eyes. Below that, her grandmother had drawn another symbol using colored pencils- the four blue claws, joined along their rounded tops by a black line. Below this symbol she had written in her beautiful, feminine flowing script, 'Beware any time you see this mark, for it is the mark of the master of the strangers and the wraiths.'
Helen paused the George Carlin video and began to read.
Helen awoke with a start, twitching and groaning as pain shot along her neck. She had fallen asleep at the table, of all things. She checked her phone quickly, assuring herself that she had plenty of time before her shift at the restaurant.
Since she was already at the computer, she checked her email to see if FashionForward had sent her next assignment yet or not. Sure enough, an email from her editor sat in the inbox, titled 'Review Subject-Out of the Way'. Intrigued, she opened the email and read it.
There was a new nail polish being carried in a limited release by a small cosmetics startup called Glam Incorporated. Only one store in all of Amelia City would be carrying any of it, a shade called 'Concrete Jungle'. Her editor went on to tell her the store was a little Spencer's rip-off called The Dim Domain. Helen had never heard of the place, and neither had her editor, but the store had sent a promotional email hoping to get coverage for their store.
Helen wrote a short message back saying she'd find the place and the nail polish for review.
After setting up coffee so she could wake up, Helen stripped down and got into the shower, her thoughts lost in her grandmother's diary. The woman had constructed an elaborate fantasy world in her mind, one where an evil man who referred to himself as the stranger named Molag, was bent on setting loose wicked spirit creatures into the world. One type of creature was referred to as wraiths, and her grandmother said they were sometimes even more deadly and dangerous than the strangers.
According to Helen's grandmother, this Molag wanted to use her to spread this infestation around Amelia City and then beyond, west towards California and Washington. The evil spirits could travel only so far on their own without something her grandmother called a 'lodestone'. In exchange for her safety, Molag wanted her to carry several of these lodestones to the west, to spread the curse of Amelia City.
Helen ran shampoo through her curly hair, trying to figure out how someone could construct such an elaborate set of delusions in their own mind. Maybe, she thought, they start small. Maybe they start with something like winged skulls and evil talking cows patterned like a rainbow.
"No," she said aloud, sternly. "I am not going crazy." She rinsed out her hair, turned the water off, and stepped out, letting herself drip naked onto the rug set down to catch water. She grabbed her towel after a minute and started drying herself off. A small thud out in the main room drew her attention, and Helen wrapped the towel around herself as she grabbed the doorknob.
Thrusting the door open, Helen felt a breeze in the main room of the apartment. Looking right, she saw that her window stood open. "Fucking latch," she muttered. She strode to the window and pulled it shut, and saw that the latch was indeed in rough shape. She'd have to talk to the landlord about it.
Helen returned to her computer after dressing for work, and resumed her George Carlin videos. She would leave thoughts of her grandmother and mental illness alone for now.
She was on her fifth table in an hour, flying back and forth from the beverage station to the pick-up window to the register in a loop that had her feeling frantic but upbeat. Her tips, she figured, were going to be great.
Helen had come in two hours ahead of what was usually their dinner rush, but it was only ten minutes into her shift when the tables and booths began filling swiftly enough to force parties to wait in the front vestibule. When the first of her tables cleared out, she discovered a nice forty-five dollar tip beneath one of the plates.
Ten minutes later, her second table left an even fifty. Thus far, it had been a great first hour. The third table turned out to be worse than a dud, though. There had been a budding trend among the least pleasant part of the upper class lately that drove her a little nuts, and the couple at this third table had indulged in it. On the credit card receipt left on the table, the man of the pair had drawn an arrow on the 'Tip' line over to the back, where he'd written, 'Get a second job, maybe a real one'.
"Jerk-offs like that deserve to be shot into the sun," she muttered, bussing the table. Tables four and five both left her thirty dollars, bringing her to a hundred and fifty-five dollars in tips for her first hour of work.
After her second hour, when she was finally afforded a break by her manager, her total for the day was two-hundred and twenty-six dollars. When she slipped out the back, she felt like giving Ramone a hug. She could see from the sweat soaking his bandana and white cook's shirt, along with his deadened expression, though, that he likely wasn't feeling very celebratorial.
He looked over at Helen as she tapped away on her phone. "Been a hell of a shift for you already, eh?"
"Yeah, good tips though," she replied.
"Huh. Well, I'm about done with this," he said, puffing on his cigarette, "but I'm gonna stay out here with you until you head back in." Helen looked up at him, and saw Ramone standing near the edge of the dock with his hands clenched into fists. He looked nervous.
"Ramone? What's the matter?"
"I come out here a few minutes ago, there's some dude standin' out there about halfway to the street," he said, pointing vaguely down the little alley. "Can't see the guy's face, but he's got this really long coat and I can see he's pretty big. He's just standing there staring at me, then he turns around and just walks away."
"Jesus, what do you think he was doing here?"
"I don't know, but he creeped me out. This whole fuckin' city creeps me out, man. We got ghost stories back home, Dia De Muerto and all that, but those're just fairy tales. Amelia City, though? Man, this place is fuckin' cursed. Come on," he said, leading Helen back inside.
Helen waited another hour before slipping back out into the alley behind the restaurant alone. When she did, she carefully walked toward the street end of the alley, until she came across a small pocket notebook laying on the alley floor. Curious, she knelt down to see what was written there.
'Pick up the phone', it said. Helen ran back inside, refusing to take another break out back for the rest of her shift.
The following morning, as she climbed out of bed, Helen decided it might behoove her to take a walk in the daylight, get some fresh air. Sure, the city and her internal struggle with whatever madness was building within her mind terrified her in the dark of night. During the day, though, she believed she might be able to work through some questions and put herself at ease.
Donning a long blue skirt and plain white blouse, worn under a waist-length gray wool jacket, Helen headed down to the ground floor and then down the street towards the grocery store. She would stop in there on her way back home from, well, wherever her feet took her. She wanted to cook herself something fresh for lunch before heading to the restaurant for a short four-hour shift.
The balmy morning of Amelia City showed it for what it was to most residents and observers, a city architecturally stuck somewhere at the tail end of the industrial revolution. Helen thought it looked like the perfect setting for a noir film, one of those private detective murder mysteries that soared in the pulp magazines of the 20's, 30's and 40's.
Past the Jubilee, on the opposite side of Rawlings Street (upon which stood her own building), Helen saw an empty playground, the light, warm breeze blowing through, causing the swings to creak on their rusty chains.
Driven purely by impulse, she checked both ways and crossed the street to the playground. The swing set was closest to her, with a construct of splintery old wood nearby containing monkey bars and slides and rattling faux bridges. Rope ladders hung off of the sides, something she had always loved to climb as a child.
Helen walked around the side of the construct and halted abruptly. Sitting in one corner of the playground were three little plastic rocking animals on heavy gauge springs. Used mostly by little kids, these had been neglected for years, if the little horse and crab rockers were the sole standards of measure. But they weren't. Helen approached the third one cautiously.
The last rocking animal was a little cow, painted in various blobs of color. It's eyes were sleepy, dopey, but its smile was quite big. She crouched down next to the rocking cow, jaw set, the smell of rust heavy in her nostrils.
Helen spat on the side of the plastic cow's face. "Fuck you," she rasped. The cow's eye rolled up toward her, and the mouth closed in a tight-lipped line.
"No, fuck you," the dull stoner's voice droned, and the three rocking animals began hammering back and forth into the ground, the peel of children's laughter and squeals of excitement blasting Helen's ears. She turned to run, tripped over her own feet, and crawled until she could get to her feet, fleeing the little playground.
Her jaunt at an abrupt end, Helen didn't bother with the Jubilee stop, just heading for her building. She'd heat up her last Hot Pocket, head in to work, and confirm for herself that she had another two days off coming up. She needed the time, not only to try and relax, hopefully catch a break in her spiral into insanity, but to go to The Dim Domain so she could do her review assignment for FashionForward.
She tried to remember what her parents had told her about her grandmother when she was younger. They'd said that her symptoms came on slowly, becoming more noticable over time. And there was something else, something important, that she just wasn't remembering.
When she got home, sitting down with her Hot Pockets, she hopped online and did some research into the onset of early stage schizophrenia. During her research, she found what she had forgotten on a mental health website.
In the early stages of the psychosis, most schizophrenics experienced a stretch of three to seven days of intense hallucinations, which would then taper off completely and be gone for several weeks, sometimes months. The initial psychotic break could happen at any time, though for females, it usually occurred during their mid-to-late twenties or thirties. In males, the typical initial incident was in their teenage-to-early 20's range.
Helen changed into her work uniform, then headed to the bathroom to do her hair. She was surprised to see that she had tears slowly streaming down her cheeks. Given what she had been confronted with, recognizing that her sanity had begun slipping away from her, a few tears would be more than understandable.
Helen Green wiped away her tears and finished getting ready for work.
Helen was reading the newspaper back in the break room, taking a few minutes to get off of her feet. It had been a slow shift thus far, and with only two of four hours left, she didn't want to have sore feet and few tips by the time she left.
She'd only been sitting down for three or four minutes when Eric, the manager on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons, came in, looking troubled. "Helen?"
"Yeah?" She set the newspaper down.
"Have you seen Ramone?"
"No, not since I got in. Did you check out back? He might be grabbing a smoke."
"I checked out there first," Eric said, hands on his hips. "He's never just disappeared like this. If you see him, tell him to get his ass back in the kitchen. Bobby needs to go on his break."
Helen watched Eric slide back out of the break room. She knew full well where Ramone was; he'd told her he was going out to his car to have a little 'green time' about ten minutes before she came back to the break room. It wouldn't affect much of anything, because Ramone was a wizard in the kitchen, high or sober.
She turned her attention back to the paper on the table before her. The break room door opened again, and in strode Ramone, eyes bleary and bloodshot. "Yo, boss come lookin' for me?"
"Yeah, he says Bobby's gotta go on break soon. You may want to head back there." Ramone nodded, then stopped by the door and looked back at Helen. "What's up?"
"I think that guy from the other night is hanging around the parking lot," Ramone said quietly. "You got anybody can give you a ride home?"
"I'll be okay," Helen said with a bright smile. "Today's not the kind of day where someone would want to test me." Ramone nodded, then disappeared back into the restaurant.
Helen returned to the floor five minutes later. While she was taking the order of a family seated near the windows facing the parking lot, she noticed that it was already starting to get dark out. Peering outside, she caught side of a darkened man-like figure darting away from the lot.
Something that looked like a bat flew after the man, something with a body that was round and white, like a skull.
The sun had set twenty minutes before the end of her short shift, and Helen no longer felt so confident about walking home. Ramone had seen the strange man in the parking lot, possibly the same man that had been in the alley. If the two were one and the same, then she might not be crazy.
Reality itself may have simply decided to take a holiday.
Helen clocked out and grabbed Lana, one of the other waitresses, on her way out. Lana agreed to drop her off, and six minutes later she was stepping onto the elevator in her building.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened on her way up. Helen got into the apartment and got changed into loose sweatpants and a yellow camisole, pulled her bed down out of the wall, and settled in to watch her copy of "Down With Love" for the tenth time or so that year alone.
She had tucked her grandmother's diaries into the small coat closet by the front door before heading to work. There they remained, forgotten for the time being. And for an hour before she fell asleep to the movie, Helen forgot everything, all of her troubles and cares.
Skull-bats and Technicolor cows be damned.
"Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy but socially dead," Helen quipped as she stretched on her bed, waking up at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. She eyeballed the alarm clock like it had committed a crime against her, turned the television from her DVD player to regular cable, and flipped until she hit CNN.
Helen wasn't heavily into politics, but it beat early morning infomercials. She nipped into the small kitchen area, got coffee going and a blueberry muffin from the pantry cabinet, and returned to the bed.
Content to watch CNN until Morning Joe came on on MSNBC an hour later, Helen drank her coffee and thought about the trip she'd have to take today. Bringing the laptop over to the bed, she checked the bus schedules for the day. If she wanted to get to the city's north side, the earliest bus she could catch was at ten. The route was circuitous and would drop her off around noon.
Alternatively, she could take the subway to the Fuller Street station and walk three blocks west to The Dim Domain. The nearest station was a ten minute walk away, and the trains ran all the time. Helen decided this would be the better course to take.
Having a little spare time to kill, she popped her copy of "Mean Girls" into the DVD player and settled back onto the bed to watch. As the movie began, she quickly checked her video stats from FashionForward, pleased to see a spike in recent viewing activity.
Helen thought the day might go well after all.
"Karma is a lovely thing," she said to herself as she passed through the turnstile. The passenger ahead of her, a jowly grandfather-type, accidentally put too much change into the counter. He turned to her, smiled, and told her it was okay for a pretty girl to hop a ride on his dime.
Helen had been complimented by a passerby on her hair on her way down into the station only a couple of minutes before that, and now she stood on the platform waiting for the train. Someone standing nearby smelled faintly of lavendar, one of her favorite aromas.
The train arrived a few minutes ahead of schedule, and Helen managed to find a seat next to the woman with the lavendar perfume. All in all, a promising start to her trek. She took out her cell phone, booted up her Kindle program, and started reading Terry Pratchett's 'Hogfather'.
When the train pulled into the Fuller Street station almost forty minutes later, she locked her phone and collected her purse, pulling down her flat red skirt before stepping off of the train. She waited until she was up on the street again to pull out her phone and boot up her GPS application. It was a good day for walking, and plenty of other Amelians seemed to have the same idea. The sidewalks weren't packed, but a healthy concentration moved along around her.
Following the arrows on her phone, Helen arrived in front of The Dim Domain twenty-five minutes later. She could have moved quicker, but she kept a slow pace so she could window shop and just look around. She hadn't really taken the time since moving downtown to appreciate the size and scope of Amelia City and its bounty of offerings. Despite the aged architecture and urban legends that infested the area like a sore tooth, it really was a marvelous city.
The front of The Dim Domain featured two display windows with mannequins done up in modern goth attire, standing in front of black curtains to block of view of the inside of the store. These flanked the main door, which had a dark purple curtain serving the same function, but it fluttered a little from the door being open a crack.
When Helen entered, she got the impression that unlike Spencer's or Hot Topic, this store was devoted to hardcore goths instead of posers. Three clothes racks stood in the central space, and most of the selection was black, red or purple. On the left wall of the main shop were all manner of goth accessories and outfits, including a skimpy white dress of the sort Helen had referred to as 'Lolita Goth'.
To the right were display cases, the register, and seated behind that with a comic book open before her, a young woman with more metal in her face than Helen had in her kitchen. The woman's hair was shaven clean to the head on the near side of her head, colored an electric blue on the other. She wore a leather vest with several shiny pins, and kept her heavily shadowed eyes on her comic even as Helen approached.
There were armbands and rings galore in the display case, as well as chokers, handcuffs and a riding crop. Helen tried not to look at the little sign over some of the piercing studs declaring 'Clit and Cock Piercings Available' as she approached the clerk. She cleared her throat meaningfully, and the woman looked up from her comic book, a dull sheen in her eyes.
"Help you?"
"Ah, yes, I hope so. I understand you're carrying a new nail polish line here? From Glam Incorporated?"
"Oh, yeah, that. Back wall, in with the other makeup stuff." Helen thanked her and wove her way around several shelving units displaying everything from candles and books about vampires to leather bondage masks and ball gags. She had never assumed that goths necessarily went in for the whole BDSM thing as a whole, but she understood the business sense in lumping the two together for the curious customers who might pass through on a whim.
The back wall of the store consisted of keychains, small plushies and trinkets, almost exactly like a Hot Topic store. She located the small display shelves on which sat the new Glam Incorporated products, and knelt down, working her way through the selections on offer.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a tall, angular man in a long, wide black coat rush through a black door that Helen had seen coming back here, a door marked 'Employees Only'. The woman at the counter shouted, "Dude, what the hell?"
"Everything all right," Helen asked as the clerk stomped around the corner and made her way back. Her Night of the Living Dead shirt hung down over leather studded pants that matched her vest perfectly.
"Hell no. Wait here," she said, not even turning to look at Helen before shoving her way through the door, calling out, "Hey, dickhead!" The door clapped shut, and Helen heard muffled shouting. The clerk's shouts quickly became screams, and there came a clamour, as of a fight. Helen reached for her pepper spray, remembered that she'd lost it, and stood there for a moment as she weighed the risk of pitting her martial arts training against this unknown assailant.
Deciding the right thing to do was to try to help, she took out her phone, dialed 911, and set the phone on a shelf. The police would be able to pinpoint the phone if it was left on, even if she didn't stay on the line. She tucked her purse in among the plushies to hide it, braced herself with a breath, and shoved the bar on the door, stepping through.
The tableau before her threw her into paralysis. The back room of the store was a chamber hewn in uneven gray slabs of stone from floor to ceiling. Twelve feet away sat a long conference table, with an old black rotary phone on it. To the right of the table stood the Technicolor cow, sleepy eyes locked on her. To the left stood the clerk, wearing an impish grin. Next to her stood a shadowy figure in a long black coat, his features hidden in darkness except for glowing crimson eyes.
The shadow man plucked one of the pins off of the girl's vest, a metal relief of a skull with bat wings and a single eye. It threw the pin in the air, and with a flash of blue light, the shadow man disappeared, and the pin became the one-eyed skull-bat. It flapped its wings and hovered backward, perching on the clerk girl's shoulder.
The phone began to ring. The Technicolor cow, in its stoner's voice, said, "You gonna get that?" Helen, lower lip trembling, walked slowly forward, until she stood between the girl, whose eye sockets she now saw were empty and bleeding, and the cow, grinning its impossible grin. Turning her eyes down to the phone, she picked the receiver up off the base with a shaking hand.
She brought the receiver to her ear. "Hello?" The sound that whispered through into her ear, a mix of whispered voices and bestial snarls and snaps, would have been so much nonsense to anyone else.
For Helen, they were the sounds of sweet release.
Officer Dodge looked over at the raving woman on the gurney, thrashing back and forth in her restraints, spit and blood flying from her mouth. Shards of glass shone in the daylight from her face and hands.
Dodge looked down at the goth girl and shook his head. "Now, you say she came in and seemed normal, right?"
"Yeah, yeah. She asked about this new nail polish I just started carrying, then went back there and just sort of, I don't know, totally lost it. She left her phone out, and I don't have service hooked up here yet. Plus I left my phone in the car, so I just called you guys and hid behind the counter. I could hear her going apeshit in the back."
"We saw that ourselves. Now, miss, uh-"
"Bleufleur," she supplied with a smile framed by piercings. "It's French, means 'blue flower'."
"Right, Ms. Bluefleur, do you want to press charges?"
"Oh, no. That chick seems like she's already got enough problems of her own." The following day, authorities discovered the diaries of Helen's grandmother in her studio apartment, along with a third diary written by Helen herself in a composition notebook. The handwriting was jagged and sloppy, and filled sixteen pages with lunatic ravings about a rainbow-colored cow and flying skull, ringing rotary phones plugged into nothing, and a possessed playground.
Two weeks after being arrested for her psychotic break, Helen Green was transferred from the county lockup to the Humphry Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, where she would be committed until such time as she could be safely released back into the public.
Miss Bleufleur considered this as she read aloud a small article about Helen in the Amelia Journal. She smiled in her chair in the middle of the stone chamber, and looked to the Technicolor cow and skull-bat she'd read the piece to. None of them figured Helen would be getting out anytime soon.
-Fin
Lodestones, huh? The original magnets.
Knowing the U.S., I bet Miss Bleufleur gets her name mispronounced a lot.