Please Don't Go (35 page)

“
Dollar seventy-five,” he repeated, much to Jackie’s chagrin.

She pretended to look for her other dollar, deciding that a delay in finding the proper monetary funds may help to loosen his rigid senses. Out of the corner of her eye, she surreptitiously watched him, unblinking like a statue. “Goddamit,” she muttered just loud enough for him to hear.

“
Dollar seventy-five.”

Jackie groaned, conceding herself to stopping at the next exit where she would hunt down an ATM machine. It would further delay her trip, but she needed cash
anyway
. Perhaps she would even indulge in something for lunch. Jackie retrieved the second dollar bill from her purse, offering it forth to the toll booth attendant with a slight sneer. He hadn’t made the transaction easy on her, that was for sure. He wasn’t getting her usual obligatory thank you (thank you for
what?
) that she regularly delivered to public servants of any sort. “Two dollars,” she stated, effectually saying
you better give me my proper change, asshole
.

He handed the quarter over. When her hand reached his, her wrist became suddenly ensnared in his grip, twisting the taut skin like an Indian sunburn. Jackie tried to pull her hand back from him, but found that he was more powerful than he looked. His wide grin had transformed, his eyeballs pale white, not a trace of retina in them. “Where you travelin’, sweetie pie?” he asked. Jackie looked from side to side, wondering if anybody was witnessing this abusive behavior. She dared not to scream, for his gaze told her that terrible repercussions were involved with such an action. “You drivin’ all by your lonesome, I see.”

“
Let me go, you son of a bitch,” she insisted.

“
When you tell me where you’re travelin’ to.”

“
None of your business, creep,” she shot back with a touch of wetness blossoming at the corners of her eyes. Her hand had started to go numb, and she wanted the nasty man to leave her be. “None of your fucking business,” she repeated, trying to inject bravery into her voice, and failing miserably.

“
I don’t care where you’re travelin’, as long as you know that you’ll return home to him... with
that thing
.”

The toll worker released her hand, leaving behind the solitary quarter in her palm, looking her up and down with his ivory eyeballs. The clouds in his diseased eyes dissipated and he leaned back into his booth. “Thank you. Have a nice day!” he said to Jackie, his temporary madness now vacant from his ruddy face.

“
Thank you,” Jackie replied, unsure of what had just happened to her.

That thing.

Jackie held her breath.

12.

Zephyr pulled one book after another from the shelf, thinking back to Rattup’s hammy hints.

You’ll find the answer among my books.

The book collection in the den was the only one that was known to Zephyr in the house. It seemed certain that there were other stashes of literary pieces (beneath beds, in boxes), but he had yet to uncover them. If there was a further collection, it would have been in the basement. He had not yet dared to traverse those stairs, especially since Karen had been brought down into the house’s belly. Zephyr tried not to ruminate on her outcome for too long. Though he was curious to see what had become of her, in a devious part of his cockles, a majority of his instincts leaned toward him never entering that bloody sanctuary, not without just cause.

A traditional riddle normally stated the obvious then eased the riddlee into the less obvious. Given that, Zephyr assured himself that the trickery lay in the second and third sentences of the wordage. Without a doubt, there was a hitch built into those words, or maybe even a sneering red herring. Rattup was not one to make his words as simple as they first appeared, for he was a writer, and completely full of himself, at that.

Don’t look too high, don’t look too low. Use your eyes and find the pages I’ve dog-eared.

Zephyr focused on the middle shelves, neither too high nor too low on the vertical axis, and perused the titles as he had done on his initial visit with Rattup, in those times when he still looked upon the man with grace and comfort. Pulling from the shelves one book after another, he looked to the titles for clues, and then to skimming the pages between, surveying the top edge of the books for a dog-eared inhabitant. With each bound possibility that he took away from his list of suspects, he plopped them to the floor in an amassing pile of exhausted soldiers around his feet. He expected
her
to question this at any moment, but she said not a word. Perhaps she was relishing in his struggle.

Dickens and Hemingway and King and Morrison and Kipling and even The Bible.

He kicked away the pile as he found himself at the end of the middle shelves, still without a plausible answer to the riddle. He started in on the top shelves, moving his way in a methodical motion around the perimeter of the room, deepening the pool of hardcover and softcover tomes at his ankles. It would take him hours to put them all back in place, but time was something that he now had an abundance of. “I’m making a fucking mess, aren’t I?” he called out over his shoulder as he dropped several volumes of Baum’s
Wizard of Oz
series over his shoulder. Rattup would have never stood for such disrespect to his books, but he doubted that the strangling-squawking specter of disdain gave a damn either way.

“
A bloody mess,” he stated again, waiting for that cold, deadly grip to snap around his neck.

She was away from him. Away from the house. And still, he dared not to attempt escape. This was, he concluded to himself with a pang of remorse, the prime indicator that she had broken him for sure. His demeanor saddened at the thought and he slowed his examination of the literature. He threw a Vonnegut (
Breakfast of Champions)
to the ground, and then hurled a Nathaniel Hawthorne (
The Scarlet Letter)
against the wall, which he did on the surface because he loathed the book, but deep inside of him, he committed the shameful attack because of a sapping of hope. He tried night and day to fight that lost sense of purpose by not thinking of it, but it didn’t work.

Hubbard and Sagan and Fitzgerald and Angelou and authors big and small languished on the ground about him, calling to his senses to be read one more time before their day was through. He listened not to them, avoiding their rampant stares and fitful protests to the treatment he was bestowing upon them. They were all his children, trampled beneath his feet. “I’ll put you back where you belong. In due time,” he told the books, chuckling at the imaginary symphony of literary whining that he heard inside of his mind.

He dropped the last book from the bottom of the last shelf. There was nothing left. Had he missed one? Would it even be worth his time to go back through the collection, one book at a time, and examine once again that which he had already accounted for? He stared at the books about him, glaring at them and destroying their very fibers with his hateful gaze. They had given him nothing, but asked for everything.

“
You’re a worthless fop, young chap,” proclaimed Charles Dickens.

Feeling bested in the insult parade, next came Norman Mailer, “You’ll never leave this place. Can’t you see that it’s got teeth on you? Can’t you see the chewed up fodder you’ve become? Give it up, while you’re still young.”

He kicked at Norman with his foot, sending
An American Dream
across the room, bopping against the wall in a plume of dust. The book had presumably not been opened in ten or more years. And
this
was the abusive treatment it received after that extended stint.

Tolstoy defended Mailer, “You treat us like ghouls, and we’re your only comrades in here. We’re all prisoners in this place, and if you attack one... then you attack us all.” It came off as a threat and Zephyr did not appreciate the sentiment.

They were staging a revolt against him. Zephyr leaned down and spat in Tolstoy’s face, as nothing more than a warning shot to the rest of them. Was he losing his mind? Was this the first in a long series of downward spirals that would lead him into rock bottom, to a place that he spent his waking hours arguing with dead (and even some living) authors? Surely, there was a better way to spend his time in prison, though he could not think of one.

He fell to his knees, defeated. As he gripped his hands around Tolstoy’s words, wringing the firm fat binding in his hands, intent on destroying the book, he looked past the mess of books around him. Propping the bottom of the westernmost shelf was one final book. It held the entire shelf upright as a peg leg would. All the other shelves were either wall mounted or firmly rooted with sturdy wood blocks. This one particular shelf, though, had not been able to withstand the forces of gravity on its own. One of the blocks on the bottom had been quite effectively replaced by a crimson hard-covered book.

Zephyr pushed another story of equal thickness next to it, to act as a replacement when he withdrew the makeshift leg. He shimmied the final book of the collection from its home, laughing to himself as he read the cover. The bastard Rattup had tricks still up his sleeve, always skirting around the obvious and peppering Zephyr’s mind with spicy madness.

Not Too High and Not Too Low: Tales of Love and Addiction
by a writer named Gareth Hamilton. Published by The Dog Ear Press.

***

He opened the solitary dog-eared page of the book, and in that spot he found a new clue. The note read: “Mister Zipper—now that you’ve undoubtedly toppled every book in my collection on to the floor in some breed of rampant frustration (you should control those dizzying urges), you’ll have to track down a very specific book in those piles, that which you have already touched.” Zephyr looked to the books all around him, estimating more than two thousand in total that he had dismantled in the past hour. The note continued: “Find the book called
Demons of the Modern World
by Franz Gersten. The page you want is seventy-three. Start there, and only read when you think she’s not listening into your radio waves. She hates the truth. Good luck! Hugs and kisses, Charles Rattup.”

The man was so full of lies that Zephyr did not find himself being swayed in either direction, but considered the words with the childish sense of
I’ll play along
.

Zephyr glowered at the books that engrossed his very existence in every cardinal direction. He could recall seeing that particular book, but its location was unknown. He sighed and started shuffling through them once again, agitated at the head games that Rattup continued to play with him, even in his absence. He returned to the image of the physical harm that he would bring down upon Rattup when he had his hands around his feeble throat. Though that day would never come, Zephyr treasured the possibility.

***

Forty-five minutes later, with only a small pile of books remaining, Zephyr could feel sweat trickling down his neck and chest. It felt as though the room temperature had been driven upwards by twenty or thirty degrees, yet there was no roaring fire to be found. The temperature outside was pushing seventy, which was unexpected for late April. By this point, the girls at the university would be starting to strip away layers of clothes in their daily motions and Zephyr had not been one to complain. This thought bounced around his mind and led to a bigger epiphany of dread... what would his professors think of him? Would they think he flunked out after several consecutive absences? Had Jackie or his mother contacted them to explain the situation? For that matter, where the fuck were those two? Why hadn’t Jackie even attempted to find him? To say that she was losing points with him was a gross understatement. Her negligence in his time of need indicated a deeper loss to their relationship than he could put into words. For the first time since he had met her, the word association of “Jackie” and “bitch” danced around each other with a casual rumba.

Zephyr shook his head, beads of sweat landing on the book that he now held in his hands,
Demons of the Modern World.
With a deep sigh of relief, he leaned back on his aching knees and maneuvered into a sitting position on the floor, the books surrounding him, which had been taunting his senses with faint whispers. Norman Mailer and Charles Dickens had been most gracious in excusing themselves, perhaps retiring to their late afternoon tea.

He took account of the aura around him and determined that
she
was still away from the house for the time being, doing whatever it was that demon bitches do. He read from page seventy-three as the villainous Charles Rattup had advised him to:

In some medieval legends, a
succubus
(from the Latin verb succubare, which means “to lie under”) is a female demon that hunts men, especially monks and men of the cloth, in their dreams. Their intentions, often times, are to seduce them and engage them in sexual intercourse. This legend was first used to explain the phenomena of wet dreams and sleep paralysis (a term used to describe a disorder where awareness is maintained though the body becomes paralyzed when entering the REM state of sleep- also known as
hypnogogic paralysis
). A hearty guilt surrounded the sunken sexual desires of men upon a lifelong religious pilgrimage, and so these terms were used to describe their uncontrollable fixations and dream-world imaginations. Though some supported this more psychological theory as to the succubus’ existence, others came out in protest to this, particularly in the Catholic faith. They, like throughout history, held firm to the presence of demons in every aspect of life, that there was an eternal battle between good and evil, that they were, and still
are
, the front-line warriors in.