LLOYD, PAUL R.
Authors: Hags
By
Paul R. Lloyd
Copyright
© 2012 Paul R. Lloyd. All rights reserved.
Published 2012 by
Paul R. Lloyd Books
P.O. Box 638
Warrenville,
IL 60555
No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the express, written permission of the author.
For Heather and Joseph. And Jeremy and
Westley. And Kim.
Thanks to all who contributed to this
effort including Joe Barder, Karen T. Smith, Jeremy Majewski, Annie Park, Bill
and Susan Price, Roger Tilber, Malcolm Chester, Eric Michalsen, Maryellen
Manley Young, Doris Lucas, and Joseph Lloyd.
Thanks for
downloading my book.
Please review it
on Amazon after reading it to share your thoughts with other readers.
THE REAL
NAPERVILLE AND OTHER LOCATIONS IN HAGS
From the mattress on the floor of
the back bedroom of his antique Victorian fixer-upper, Micah Probert heard a
far off scream. An equally distant clang of heavy metal followed. Then two
muffled voices, a male and a female. The sound of feet scampering followed by a
loud buzz made Micah picture a prehistoric dragonfly. Then came the silence.
Micah dragged his six-foot bulk to
an upright position and maneuvered stoop-shouldered around the stacks of book boxes
cluttered about the bedroom. The ancient pine floor boards creaked under his
weight as he made his way to the window. He absorbed the aroma of damp, clean
night air after a storm.
Darkness prevented Micah from
seeing into the small backyard of his downtown Naperville, Illinois, property.
A series of streetlights illuminated the parking lot behind his yard. The light
changed colors as it filtered through the raindrops on the window panes.
At the far end of the lot, he made
out the dumpsters, five in a row, bathed in the harsh glow of a streetlight.
One had its lid ajar. All were wet with rain.
Micah wasn’t sure if he imagined
the hand, wrist and arm sticking out from under the metal top of one dumpster.
The police will accuse me. No,
they won’t have any evidence. Still, if I report it, they’ll accuse me. No,
they’ll suspect me if I don’t report it. Dead either way. So’s the person in
the dumpster. It could be a dummy, part of a college prank. The person may
still be alive. And maybe I’ll drive myself crazy with hallucinations.
A black cat stepped out from under
the dumpster and called out in a loud, lispy meowr with a big, toothy grin.
Cats can’t smile, can they? And
why does that one meow with a lisp?
Micah ran down the steps, tripped
over a stack of three large clothing boxes in the entranceway, and made his way
into the kitchen where he knocked over a chair. He noticed a wispy mist with a
barely-there woman in the center dressed like a pioneer. She sat across the
table from Micah, devouring an equally wispy bloody chunk of raw leg of lamb.
After a quick little half scream, he stared for few seconds more before opening
the back door.
Cold, wet grass tickled his bare
feet as he ran to the end of the yard. In the darkness he couldn’t find a gate.
Feeling with his hands, he realized he had purchased a home with a fenced in
yard and no gate.
Can’t jump over in my bare feet
and underwear. Break an ankle. Scratch my legs. Slip and do much worse. Not
using the family jewels for anything anyway. Still the pain would be
insufferable.
Micah turned the lights on in the
kitchen where the apparition continued chewing her raw meat. He screamed. After
a frozen moment, he ran to the downstairs hallway where he threw the light
switches on for the downstairs entrance area and the upstairs hall. He also
turned on the light in his back bedroom.
He slipped on a pair of faded blue
jeans and sneakers without the socks. He checked the time on his cell phone.
Two-thirty-eight. He ran back downstairs, out the front door, around to the
alley and the parking lot.
At the dumpster with the damaged
lid, he touched the wrist of the arm hanging out. It was cold, feminine, and
petite. He hesitated before taking the cell phone out of his pocket. Not
certain his Arizona phone number would connect to a local nine-one-one line, he
punched four-one-one and asked the operator for the police.
If I phone, they’ll respect that
I called. Like that means anything in DuPage County. At least, I’m not
hallucinating.
In less than a minute, a police car
pulled up close to the dumpster with its lights flashing. A uniformed officer
stepped out of the car and shined a flashlight into Micah’s face. The sudden
brightness flooded Micah with a litany of bad memories.
“You the one who called?” The
officer kept the light in Micah’s face.
Micah raised his hand to shade his
eyes. “Yeah. See?” He pointed to the dumpster with his finger about two inches
from the girl’s dead hand.
The officer touched the girl’s
wrist.
“I… I… couldn’t find a pulse.”
Micah backed away to make more room for the officer.
“You touched her?”
“To check for a pulse.”
The officer opened the lid. Micah
hit the ground butt first and hard. The intense pain shooting through his
posterior kept him from passing out.
The officer shined his light down
on Micah. “You okay?”
“Didn’t expect that.” Micah swiped
at the puddle soaking his bottom. He stood up.
“Sorry. I wasn’t either. Guess you
didn’t find a pulse.” The officer punched a button on his communicator and
spoke to his dispatch in the language of authority.
Micah leaned down to pet a black
cat snuggled against him. The cat smelled of damp fur and blood.
Micah waited.
He backed away a distance to avoid the police chatter, but he couldn’t escape
the hideous noise. Nor could he explain the huge puddle of blood flowing like a
river from under the dumpster with red cat paw prints leading away from it.
***
In the half awake time before
rising when images, dreams and half dreams ascend from the darkness of the soul
and imprint themselves on the memory for the rest of the day, Micah Probert observed
the faerie in a mountain meadow. The creature wore blue jeans and a red shirt
tucked into his waistband as he flitted about from golden daffodils to blue
forget-me-nots like a bee shopping for nectar. Gossamer wings buzzed like a
dragonfly until, as sometimes happens in half dreams, the creature turned to
face the camera of Micah’s mind. It flew in for a close-up and grinned with a
Mediterranean face outlined with short black hair.
Micah jumped which caused him to
smack his hand hard against the side of a stack of book boxes by his mattress.
He pushed the boxes aside and
blinked against the sunlight as it glared through the soiled glass of the back
bedroom window. Micah found his knees staring him in the face when he plopped
his feet on the floor. He reached over to pet the black cat asleep among his
blankets and sheets. “How’d you get in here?”
A humming noise came from outside. Micah
weaved a path through the jungle of boxes to the window. He leaned his hands on
the wide wooden sill coated with faded, peeling white paint and considered how
potted plants would go nicely on the windowsill.
The droning came from above and to
the right, so Micah turned in that direction in time to see a man in blue jeans.
He was bare from the waist up, but had a red shirt tucked into his waistband.
He wore a pair of brown work boots like a construction worker prepared for a
job in the mud. The man hovered about fifty feet above the parking lot behind
Micah’s tiny backyard near the row of green dumpsters. Yellow police tape surrounded
one of the dumpsters. The police had completed their work and hauled the body
away.
The winged man landed by a large
puddle in the parking lot. He folded a set of four long, narrow gossamer wings against
his back. The wings faded into a filigree pattern of blood vessels woven over
the man’s skin like a tattoo. He undid his shirt from his waist and ambled
around the corner of the house out of sight. Micah craned his neck sideways to
track the winged man’s movement. Above, a strong breeze moved the cloud cover
off to the east.
Micah shook his head to clear it. “Hallucination?
What do you think, cat?”
The feline sprawled with its paws
stretched out and its mouth open in a yawn. “Meowr.”
“Yes, sir. You make a good point. And
I agree. Caffeine is the best way to figure out how you got in here. By the
way, have you always had that lisp?”
The cat
stretched, yawned and smiled.
***
Micah wound his way
stoop-shouldered around the boxes back to the unkempt mattress. A loud thump
caught his attention so he meandered around the boxes again to the window. Red liquid
smeared a six-inch-square chunk of the wet pane. “That wasn’t there before.”
Micah attempted to raise the window
so he could check out the stain on the outside of the glass, but it wouldn’t
budge. “Painted shut, cat. Or else the wood is swollen from the rain.”
He flapped his bare feet downstairs
to the kitchen where he poured milk into a small white porcelain bowl and
filled the other bowl, a little red plastic one, with fresh water.
“Now where did I pack the coffee?” Neither
the Delonghi coffeemaker nor the Jamaican Blue Mountain turned up in any of the
boxes marked “kitchen.”
He rubbed the cat on the head. “One
of us needs to check the coffee shop down the street. I know, you’re wondering
how I knew about it, what with me new in town and all, but cat, you have to
know coffee lovers notice coffee shops, especially the indies.”
A wispy woman dressed in a pioneer
costume strolled into the room. She stared at Micah as though she was about to
speak. She turned up her nose and retreated down the hall and around the
corner. Micah chased her, but by the time he arrived at the stairs, she had
vanished.
“What do you think, cat? Haunted
house?”
“Meowr.”
“Yes, sir. I agree. She gives me
the heebie-jeebies. She could at least take her bonnet off inside. So cat, did
you see where I left my wallet?”
Micah Probert guessed the woman to
be about forty. He liked her face, but in a déjà vu moment, she reminded him of
something he couldn’t quite grasp. His stomach growled against the aroma of
rich coffee buffeted by the sweet smells of scones and muffins under the
counter.
The heavyset woman’s puffy face
turned bright red against her medium-length blond hair. “Get out! How dare
you.”
Micah’s smile faded as he opened
his mouth in wonder and his head slanted to the side in a glint of recognition.
He backed away from the counter. “No.”
Bob’s Coffee Emporium exuded
darkness from the aged mahogany framework of the display case to the faded oak
wainscoting and forest green upper walls. A painted tin ceiling dotted with
fans and soft lights added to the appearance of antiquity in the store. The plate
glass front door and storefront windows provided soft light from a northern
exposure.
