Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (2 page)

“Before we get started, I
have a . . .”

Jonah looked up and caught
a set of eyes that looked as if they might come out of the man’s
head. Tears came from those eyes and streamed down his face. His
mouth opened and closed a few times before words actually came out.
Then, with a high-pitched sob, the man uttered, “You . . . You . .
. You . . .”

No,
Jonah thought.
It’s not about me. It’s about you. And it’s only
about you for an hour. So let’s stop with the dramatic bullshit and
get on with this.

Of course, he couldn’t say
what he thought. The SSI evaluations didn’t require that he be
exceptionally warm. In fact, according to David, SSI frowned on
that. But he couldn’t be rude either.

“All right, sir,” Jonah
said in a quiet but stern voice. “I want you to take a few deep
breaths and try to calm down. You’re going to get through
this.”

The man didn’t seem to hear
him. “You . . . You . . .”

Jonah restrained a sigh,
thinking of how this was probably going to take the better part of
the hour if not more, and that would mean no time to grab a smoke
before the next client. That meant DTs while performing the next
eval. Or maybe he’d just have to sneak out anyway and be that much
more behind.

“You,” the man said.
“Youuuuuu!”

Jonah, not knowing what
else to do, pointed at the form and said, “This is our release of
information form. If I could just get you to sign here.”

The client was no longer
speaking. But he wasn’t looking where Jonah was pointing either. He
was looking around the desk in front of him. His eyes finally fixed
on the big Swingline stapler. He reached out and grabbed it. He
cocked back the hand that held the stapler.

Boom! Jonah was in a new
place. It had happened twice before. And, in memories, those times
came back to him now.

Age fifteen, Mom’s drunk
boyfriend coming at him. “What, boy! You want some too?”

Sophomore year at USC.
Rednecks catch him outside at night. “What’s up, Nigger-loving,
liberal bastard!”

He was suddenly calm. The
rest of the world had melted away. He was like someone else. “What
ya plannen on doen with that stapler, boss?”

The man shot to his feet.
“No! Make it stop! I don’t want what’s in you!”

Not sure why, Jonah got to his
feet.

The once slow-moving man darted out
the door.

Jonah walked out of the
office, but he didn’t move fast enough to see the man again.
Standing outside, he felt his usual self return. What did he do
now? The client was gone. Did he need to call SSI? Should he call
David? Should he do something immediately or try to calm himself
with a smoke first?

Jonah went back to the
office to get the pack of smokes from his bag. On his way behind
the desk, he stopped for a second and noticed the room. What had
just happened to him? He was not a brave man. He avoided
confrontations like the plague. But behind the desk was where he
had been. There had been no out behind him. The only way out would
have been through or around the man.

Backed
into a corner.
That had to be it. Just like
Mom’s boyfriend. Just like the rednecks.

Jonah got the Camels from
his bag. He took them outside. He put one in his mouth. It didn’t
feel right. Jonah laughed in exasperation. He had forced himself to
buy the filtered cigarettes, promising himself that he would smoke
them as they were this time.

But what if it didn’t satisfy him and
he just ended up smoking again?

“Fuck it,” Jonah said, then ripped the
filter off.

#

The last client walked out
that night at 9:15. It was supposed to be nine, but the fat woman
with fibomyalgia had wanted to vent, giving him way more
information than necessary for his report, and he was too tired to
dig out of his bag of psychological tricks that he would need to
stop her.

All had showed after the
initial walkout. So it had been more than twelve hours straight.
With the exception of the last, they had all been timely enough.
After each client, he’d managed to smoke, grab a cup of coffee, and
shove a couple of crackers in his mouth, before he had to start the
next one.

Now, sitting in the chair,
his body protested the day. His nerves were shot, too much caffeine
and nicotine firing on muscles and a brain that couldn’t do
anymore, resulting in a spinning headache and an electric, but
tired, body. His stomach, having only the peanut butter crackers in
it, was begging him to eat, but, at the same time, telling him it
was too nervous to hold food. Get up or stay sit? Eat or not eat?
It didn’t matter. He was going to be sick anyway.

Jonah knew the last thing
he needed was a cigarette, but that he didn’t need one didn’t
matter too much. Jonah got up and went outside.

#

Jonah supposed it would
have taken most people less than five minutes to get out of the
Meade Center once the last client was gone. Really, it should have
just been a matter of grabbing the files, hitting the lights, and
locking up. But, of course, for Jonah, there was the checking
factor. He had grabbed his files, hit the lights, locked the front
door, got in his car, got out of his car, went back in the
building, checked the lights, checked the doors, then went back to
his car. Afterward, he had almost gotten away, only to feel the
anxiety overwhelm him again. He got out and repeated the entire
sequence, promising himself this was it.

Again, sitting in his car,
he tried to fight it. He lost, but it was a loss with a compromise.
The next time he got out of his car, it was to check only the
outside doors of the building. He pressed down on each handle and
held for a five count.

Jonah felt satisfied when
he left the lot. Tonight, the compulsions had been extra, but that
wasn’t unusual when he was so tired and at the same time so keyed
up. He was a block away, before the image to the coffeepot entered
his head. He thought he had turned it off, but he wasn’t sure. That
is, he was only 99% sure, which, in the mind of an obsessive
compulsive, is only seen as not sure. He went another block and
turned the car around.

#

It was a little before ten
when Jonah pulled onto Stanton’s main road. Already, he was
dreading the days in front of him. Tuesday and Wednesday would be
similar to Monday, back to back clients until he was ill. That
would leave him with around thirty reports to call in. SSI had a
telephone dictation system, where he could call in and read his
reports to a machine. The reports would later be typed by a
transcriptionist, then mailed to him for proofreading and
signing.

David had told him the best
way to do it. “You spend forty to forty-five minutes on the
interview, then take about fifteen minutes to call in the report as
soon as the client leaves the room.”

Jonah was sure that worked
for David, but David didn’t need a cigarette between each client,
and he probably didn’t obsess over small details when he was with a
client. There was no way Jonah could read a report in fifteen
minutes. The dictation service had a rewind function. And Jonah
used it, making sure he had said what he thought he had said,
making sure he had been clear. He always had and always was, but it
didn’t matter; he still rewound, over and over again.

Jonah would finish the last report
sometime Sunday, just on time to go back Monday and start the
entire process over.

Just before the side road
to Jonah’s apartment complex, there was a Denny’s. Jonah thought of
what he had at home. There was some meat, but none thawed. He had
TV dinners, but that seemed too depressing after the day he’d had.
He pulled into the Denny’s parking lot.

#

The Monday night at Denny’s
was fairly slow. There was a vagrant-looking man in one booth,
having a cup of coffee. A couple of college-aged girls were sitting
in another booth, books spread out in front of them. Three booths
down from Jonah, a guy who looked a few years older than him sat
alone and stared at Jonah with obvious interest.

A mildly
attractive waitress with long blonde hair walked up and gave Jonah
a menu. He ordered an orange juice and a milk. She left, and he lit
up a cigarette, noticing how low the pack was getting. He would
have to stop at a quick shop on the way home. He knew it would be
more economical and save him time to buy the smokes in cartons, but
ten packs seemed like a big commitment, given the promise to
himself that he would quit someday.
Yeah
right.

The cigarette tasted bad
and burned his throat, which was now way overexposed to the
nonfiltered smoke, but he smoked it anyway. When he finally crushed
it out, the guy that had been staring at him walked up and sat on
the other side of the booth.

“Hey, brother, I’m Tate,”
the man said, sticking out his hand.

Jonah sized him up
immediately. Tate was Caucasian but dark. He had thinning black
hair, cut short, and intense hazel eyes. A yellow T-shirt with some
martial arts insignia and sleeves cut off revealed shoulders and
biceps that seemed too big for the rest of his upper torso, which
was taut but not thick.

Jonah took Tate’s hand and
felt a powerful handshake, almost jerking him forward. “Jonah,” he
said.

Tate laughed, fast and
high-pitched, intense and mocking. His laugh stopped abruptly, and
Tate’s face was suddenly practiced pleasant. “You don’t recognize
me, do you bro.”

Jonah studied Tate for a
few seconds. He thought this stranger looked familiar.

The waitress came over with
his drinks, breaking his concentration. Tate looked up at the
waitress and seemed to wait for her to look at him. When she did,
he raised his eyebrows and continued to stare until she looked
away, obviously uncomfortable. Tate let out another high-pitched
laugh as she walked away, then stopped abruptly again as he turned
back to Jonah.

Jonah wondered if his
incredible tiredness was affecting his perception, or could this
guy really be this weird.

“I see you around
everywhere I go,” Tate said. “And you never say hello.”

Jonah didn’t say anything
nor change his expression. He was just that tired.

In what, as their
friendship developed, Jonah would come to think of as “trademark
Tate,” Tate jerked his hands up and to his side as if to ask,
“What’s up?” He held an intense expression on his face for a few
seconds, then put his hands down and did the already trademark
high-pitched laugh. He said, “I’m just fucking with ya, bro. I live
three apartments down from you. I see you at the gym
too.”

Now memories came to Jonah.
He had seen Tate walking to his car. He had seen him on the
nautilus equipment at the gym.

“Tired, aren’t ya, bro,”
Tate said, bringing Jonah back to the table.

Jonah nodded.

“And I bet you’re pretty
dizzy. Your head aches. Your stomach is starving, but doing
flip-flops at the same time. Your mouth taste like a day old cup of
coffee with twenty cigarette butts floating in it.”

Jonah sat there, stunned at
Tate’s accuracy. Tate smiled at him for a couple of seconds, almost
taunting him. Then he said, “And now there’s this bitch in front of
you, fucking with your head.”

Jonah didn’t mean to nod.
But he was tired. And Tate was right.

The intense stare was back,
but only for another second, then Tate’s face and voice became
pleasant. He spoke as if he and Jonah were already long-time
friends. “All right, bro. I’ll stop fucking with ya and get back
another time.”

With that, Tate got up and
left.

#

In his first year of
graduate school, Jonah had done a paper on obsessive-compulsive
disorder. Most people with OCD fell under two broad categories:
washers and checkers. Jonah’s apartment was no dump, but it wasn’t
exceptionally neat or clean. There were still boxes he hadn’t
unpacked from the move stacked in the bedroom. There were dishes in
the sink from the day before. Jonah didn’t wash his hands one
hundred times a day. Jonah was not a washer. He was the epitome of
a checker.

So, when he got home that
night, he checked and rechecked his car, made sure it was centered
between the lines, lights off, doors locked, over and over again.
Inside, front door locked and quadruple checked, he felt as relaxed
as he would on this day, and that was just because he had reached
the point of exhaustion where he was too tired to worry very
much.

After undressing, Jonah
went straight to the bathroom and got in the tub. He lay there and
thought about the character he’d just met. The things Tate had
known were pretty amazing but not unbelievable. Tate wasn’t magic,
just perceptive. Being in psychology, Jonah had run into a few
other people like that, some fellow students, some professionals,
others clients. People had different levels of what they
noticed.

Once cleaned up, Jonah got
a big cup of water to keep beside his bed. He rarely drank from the
cup at night, but he couldn’t sleep a wink, unless it was there. He
was about to lie down, when he noticed the answering machine light
was blinking. Before he could get to it, what felt like a hundred
thoughts flashed through his head: It could have been someone at
USC telling him that something was wrong and he shouldn’t have
received his degree. It could have been a high official at SSI
telling him that he had been too rude to one of his clients and
that they were reporting him to the licensing board. It could have
been the police . . .