Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (19 page)

Feeling relaxed and
satisfied with this day’s accomplishments, Jonah walked out the
front door. He strolled down the sidewalk and into the parking lot.
That was where he heard the massive dog growl.

Jonah turned on time to see
the St. Bernard take its last few steps toward him. It stopped a
couple of feet away and growled again. Anticipating it biting him,
Jonah could feel a slight tingle in his neck, where it stared. The
dog’s mouth looked big enough to engulf half of Jonah’s arm, and
its intense look told him not to move. The St. Bernard crept closer
and sniffed the middle of Jonah’s body. It growled, then
whined.

Jonah thought of kicking
the beast and making a run for it. But the thought was weak, not
enough to challenge his panicked feeling. The thought occurred of
how terrible of a thing this was, to come and ruin his triumphant
day. Had he conquered his own wickedness, only to have his dick
bitten off by a dog? But none of these thoughts really mattered.
The most important thing seemed to be the begging in his
mind.

Please! Just let me get
through this!

After
holding its ground for a little while longer, the St. Bernard moved
away. First, it backed up slowly. Then it turned its long frame
toward him. It growled one last time. Though he knew it was absurd,
Jonah thought the gesture was meant to say, “
This isn’t over.
”

The dog ran off into the
night.

#

When Jonah got inside his
apartment, he began to check. But these weren’t the old OCD checks.
No, these checks were reasonable. He’d had bugs in his house and
bugs on his body. So now, he was checking for bugs.

The animals? Was there a
rational explanation for the animals, the dog that had confronted
him, the wolf that had attacked the stripper? The rest, the dreams
and the urges, could be explained by the massive changes in his
personal psychology. But the animals?

Jonah could see only two
explanations. Either he had gone so mad that he was living in a
completely psychotic dream world, or he was dealing with the
paranormal. Though the former seemed like the most rational
explanation, the latter seemed more accurate. Jonah didn’t feel
crazy.

As he looked around, Jonah
heard the urges. But they were easy to resist now.

When he was satisfied that
his house was bug free, Jonah got some shipping tape out of the
closet in his spare bedroom. He used that to tape the window in his
bedroom. Finished, he said out loud, “Lets see ya break through
there, birdies.”

Jonah used the same tape to
tape around the crevices of his bedroom door. Then he taped over
the vent, not satisfied just to shut it.

“No bugs tonight.”

Jonah turned his fan on
high to drown out any noise that might disturb his dreams. Then he
went to bed. He dreamt.

#

He pulls onto Chestnut
Street in Perryton, Oklahoma. He drives less than a block before he
turns into the parking lot of somebody else’s clinic. But, somehow,
that clinic feels like his own.

With that, it fades. He’s
lifted up into a blur and set down. The blur clears, and he’s in
his office in Stanton. Only there’s a cushioned table in his office
where a desk should be. It’s the kind of table a physician would
use, complete with the metal stirrups used in a vaginal
exam.

The scene fades for a few
seconds, then returns. Only now, it’s not his office at all. It’s
mostly white, sterile. There are medical charts on the wall. The
table and stirrups remain, but they are now in the center of the
room.

There is the blur, and when
the scene returns, there is a woman on the examination table. She’s
on her back. She has dark hair but light skin. She looks like she
is in her early twenties. Her breasts are small but perky. She’s
completely naked and her legs are spread.

He is naked from the waist
down. But this body, though he is in it and can feel it, is not
his. He doesn’t care. He moves to the examination table, between
the woman's legs. He pushes inside and begins to pump. He has the
strange thought that this is the measure he is giving to the woman.
It’s the measure from his dissertation. It’s impulsivity. It’s
making her better, somehow.

How would a measure make
somebody better?

The scene fades and comes
back. It’s a new woman now. Her hair is red, her back is slender,
but that’s about the extent of what he can see about her, because
he’s pumping her, giving her the measure, no, giving her the
medicine she needs, from behind.

The scene fades, then comes
back. This time he’s up on the table and on top of the next woman.
She’s blonde, and she’s young, maybe not quite eighteen. But that’s
fine, because she needs this. But it's not a measure as he had
thought. It’s just medicine. The medicine is
impulsivity.

It fades,
then comes back. The next woman is also young, and she’s familiar.
He shouldn’t be giving it to her. It’s taboo.
Who is she?
he wonders as he’s
fucking her missionary. He looks closer into her eyes, at her
expression. She’s the mother of his son, who will be called Jonah.
No. She is his mother. He is Jonah. Jonah awakes.

#

Jonah lay in bed. Ashamed.
All he could do for a little while was try to forget what he had
just experienced. Then, after about an hour of lying awake, Jonah
got out of bed. He had a premonition. He had to know.

He stripped the tape from
his bedroom window, and there they were, sitting in the moonlight,
looking up at him. There was the orange-stripped cat, the St.
Bernard, and in the middle, a wolf.

“Fuck you!” Jonah said.

He went back to bed. He did
not dream again that night.

#

Steph did not show up for
work on Tuesday, but there was a message on the answering machine
saying she would try to be in tomorrow. Jonah was glad she wouldn’t
be there. He needed the privacy. Now all he needed was a break in
the clients.

The urges were not there at
all. It was as if they had given up. After whipping through his
first three clients, Jonah got the break he needed. His 11AM client
called and cancelled. Jonah shut the door and used the phone in his
office. He took a piece of paper from his pocket and dialed the
number.

After two rings, his
mother’s voice came on the line. “Hello.”

“Mom. It’s
Jonah.”

There were a few seconds
before she spoke again. “Hi, Son,” she said, her voice hesitant.
“How are you?”

Jonah lied. “I’m fine. How
are you?”

Again, there was a pause.
As it always was in his adult years, when Jonah had only
corresponded with his mother by phone, Jonah felt both anger and
awkwardness talking to her now.

“I’m getting better, son.
I’m getting my life back together.”

I’m
getting my life back together.
It was the
same line he had heard over and over again. He was fairly certain
she’d said it in the last ten conversations they’d
had.

“That’s good,” Jonah said,
trying not to upset her. She had something he wanted. He’d asked
for something similar before, on a few occasions, and not gotten
it. It had been years since he’d asked her, not wanting her
predictable reaction, but now he had to try again. “Mom, I have to
ask you something.”

“Okay,” she responded, a croak in her
voice.

Jonah took a deep breath,
part of him really not wanting to ask, but knowing he had to resist
that part. “I want you to tell me where I came from.”

He could hear her crying on
the other side of the line. Then, in a frantic voice, she said,
“Don’t do this to me! I’m just starting to get better!
I—”

“Is it a place called Perryton,
Oklahoma?”

There was silence on the
other side of the line. After a few seconds, Jonah said, “That’s
it, isn’t it? Is that where our family is?”

“No!” she screamed. “Who
told you that? Why are you doing this to me? You ruined my life
once already!”

“Tell me what that means!”
Jonah snapped. “Why did you always tell me that? All I ever did was
be born.”

“No! I won’t let you
ruin—”

“It was my father, wasn’t
it? He did something, didn’t he?”

There was silence on the other side of
the line for a few seconds, then his mother hung up on
him.

#

Around 3:50 PM, Jonah sat
behind his desk in his office. He was disappointed and confused,
but still intrigued. His three o’clock had been a cancellation,
leaving him with time to research. He had used the computer in
Steph’s office to search the Internet.

Perryton was a town of
about 24,000 in western Oklahoma. He had searched the white pages
and found one listing for Singer. An old woman had answered the
phone and denied that she even knew Martha Singer, Jonah’s mother.
By the bluntness of her voice, Jonah suspected she was lying. The
old woman wouldn’t give him the names of other Singers, and, as his
mother had done, the lady hung up on him.

Jonah’s mind had been calm,
too calm. It didn’t seem likely that the urges would have given up
completely. Not yet.

Jonah heard the front door
open a few minutes before four. He went to meet his client. It was
a young man out in the lobby, probably early twenties. His clothes
were rugged and his face stubbled. His hair was overgrown and
messy, but he had an intense look on his face that probably made up
for his lack of luster in other areas.

“Hi. I’m Dr. Singer,” Jonah
said.

The kid nodded but didn’t
say anything.

“Okay, if you’d like to
come on back, we can get started,” Jonah said, almost robotically,
more into what was happening elsewhere in his life than into this
young man. Jonah walked back to his office, and the kid followed.
They both sat down. Jonah pushed a form across the desk. That was
when the kid started laughing frantically.

Jonah looked up at the kid, who was
leaning way back in his chair, the look on his face a mixture of
astonishment and fear.

“There’s something in there with it,
man!” the kid shouted.

“What?” Jonah asked.

“Shit! There’s something
with it! I’ve never heard that before!”

Jonah realized this kid
might be like the two clients he’d seen before, the one that had
left and the one that had attacked him. Before Jonah could say
anything, the kid said, “It don’t like the other thing with it.
This other thing’s trying to tell you something.” The kid got
up.

“Wait!” Jonah said. “Don’t
leave! I want—”

“It’s welling up. I’m
getting out of here.”

Jonah got up, as the kid
moved toward the office door. “Wait!” Jonah shouted.

But the kid didn’t stop.
Jonah heard him shout one last thing from the lobby.

“It’s gonna kill you, man!”

Jonah ran out of his office
and out the front door. He went to the parking lot, but the kid was
nowhere to be seen.

#

There were no urges the
rest of that night. In fact, his mind seemed to be as he wanted it.
Jonah was fast, the fastest he’d been yet. But there was the
puzzle. He felt nothing wicked, not even a tinge. It was as if what
had made him wicked before was no more. But the client had said it
was welling up. He had said it would kill Jonah. What was
it?

Jonah searched the kid’s
chart, hoping something in there would give him some kind of clue,
at least point him in a direction to search further. All the chart
contained was a previous SSI report done by another psychologist.
The psychologist had diagnosed him with Bipolar Disorder. That made
sense. The previous two clients that seemed somehow connected to
all this had similar diagnoses, diagnoses involving psychosis,
delusional type thinking, possible hallucinations. But what did
this connection mean? What did it give him to go with? Jonah had no
idea.

Logically, Jonah thought he
should be careful going home. The St. Bernard could be back. So
could the other animals that seemed to stalk him. And according to
the client, there was something that wanted to kill him.

But there was something
beyond logic that Jonah could sense now. He couldn’t put his finger
on it, but there was something there, something different, and it
was telling him that nothing was waiting for him. It was right.
Jonah made it to his car, to his apartment, and inside, without an
event. Inside, he quickly prepared for bed. He taped the room as he
had done the night before. He turned on the fan.

Lying in bed, Jonah said
out loud, “Help me understand.” He didn’t know what he made the
request to or if he made it to anything at all, anything that would
listen, but he went to sleep, hoping an answer would
come.

#

He’s in the office, the
examination table in the center of the room. In the corner of the
room, his mother, no, the mother of his child, is getting
dressed.