Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (43 page)

Samuel looked up and noticed a steel
decanter hanging from an iron hook just above the stove. It spouted a line of
steam into the room, and he cocked his head sideways, trying to remember if it
had been there a moment ago. When the heady aroma of coffee beans filled the room,
he no longer cared. He stood and grabbed a stein from the small table, pouring
the dark coffee from the decanter and watching it form a black center
within the silver mug. He brought it to his lips and let the bitter tang flood
his mouth. When he was convinced it would not scald his tongue and ruin the
taste, Samuel drew the coffee into his mouth and let it warm his chest like a
shot of whiskey.

The window remained unchanged. Samuel
cupped both hands around the stein to help insulate the beverage and keep it
hot as he walked over, expecting to see a brilliant sunrise creeping over the
trees like the ones in the movies. But the window remained an opaque, dark hole
in the wall. Samuel could almost feel the ominous cloud flowing to the east,
toward him, devouring the rest of this broken world in its path.

He frowned and set the stein on the table
before looking at it and picking it up again, draining the remnants of the
coffee before setting it back down. He noticed the fire did not seem as bright
or as warm as when he fell asleep the night before. Had it been the night
before? How long had he slept? Before Samuel could consider the answers, he saw
it on the floor and it almost stopped his heart.

Chapter 8

It was impossible. Even in a place where
the clouds ate reality and the dead spoke, this was impossible. He blinked,
rubbed his eyes and blinked again. It remained.

Samuel crouched down to take a closer
look, resisting the urge to pick it up, as if it might shock him or something
worse. He closed his eyes, counted to five and opened them. It remained.

He remembered the mother-of-pearl inlay
on the narrow handle. He could smell the oil his dad used to protect the blade
and keep rust from forming where fingers touched it. He saw the thin, black indentations
used for drawing the blades out with the edge of a fingernail. He grasped the
pocketknife in his palm and squeezed until he was sure it was real. Memories of
that day rushed in.

“For three hits?”

“That’s right.”

“I can do that. We play Penn Hills
next week.”

“No. Not in the season. In one game.”

Samuel looked at his dad and shook his
head back and forth. “Not even Tommy Malone gets three hits in one game.”

“Then you’ll have to be better than
Tommy if you want the pocketknife.”

Samuel shrugged. He pushed the ball
cap back on his head and whistled. He checked the little league schedule on the
fridge, and ran his finger down the list of under-ten league games until it
stopped on April 14, 1979.

“Alpine Village. On my birthday.
That’s the one.”

His dad raised his eyebrows and
nodded.

“Danny Cranston plays for Alpine
Village. Word has it the kid has a mean curveball.”

“C’mon, Dad,” Samuel said with a
smirk. “He’s a lefty. I’ll see that pitch coming from a mile away. I’m behind
on the fastballs, but if he throws that curve, I can pull it to left field.
That corner is shallow at Hawkeye Park.”

Samuel’s dad squinted at the schedule.

“Didn’t notice that. Looks like you
play those guys at home.”

Samuel nodded and crossed his arms.

“I think you should tell Mom now. I’m
getting that knife.”

Samuel kept his eyes closed and his hands
wrapped around the pocketknife. He felt the memory lurch ahead.

“Let’s go, batter,” the umpire said,
standing behind the catcher.

Samuel winked at Tony, the catcher who
was crouched low and raising his mitt into the strike zone.

“You ain’t hittin’ Danny’s curve,”
Tony said.

“Watch me,” Samuel said.

The umpire dropped into position.
Samuel placed his left foot inside the batter’s box and dug the toes on his
right cleat into the dirt. He drew the bat back behind his ear, just like his
dad drilled into his head during all of those trips to the batter’s cages.
Samuel noted the runners on second and third and heard the moms cheering. He
did his best to block it out and stared hard at Danny Cranston perched on the
mound.

The first pitch came faster than
Samuel expected. It blew past his nose and dropped into Tony’s mitt with a
snap, followed by the umpire’s declaration of a strike.

Samuel stepped out of the box and
closed his eyes. He thought about his other at-bats. This was his fourth time
at the plate and probably his last chance at that third hit of the game. Two
singles. Fine. Those were still hits, even if they didn’t count as RBIs. A
third single was still a hit, too.

He moved through the circular practice
swing that batters individualize over the course of their baseball careers.
Samuel drew the back bat again, and again, Danny brought the heat.

“Strike two.”

Tony snickered from behind his
catcher’s mask and shook his head at Samuel.

“You’re chasin’ the count now, Sammy.
You know he’s coming with his curve. Might as well strike out right now.”

Samuel ignored the comment and moved
back into the batter’s box. He had Danny Cranston in the palm of his hand.

He could tell from Danny’s side-arm
pitch that the ball was coming from the outside in. Samuel saw the ball rotate
in slow motion, the red laces spinning overtop of the white rawhide. As it came
closer, Samuel gripped the bat. He brought it a tad higher over his shoulder
and then started the swing forward.

The contact felt so good it almost
made Samuel cry. The baseball shot from the meat of the bat with a satisfying
thud
.

Samuel’s eyes drifted up to follow the
ball into the summer sky of 1979. He knew he should have been running, but it didn’t
matter. This swing was a textbook left-field pull, and he knew the ball
was headed to the fence, probably over it. Samuel took a stride toward first
and dropped the bat into the dirt. He smiled as the ball became a white dot
doing its best to escape the atmosphere. The noise of the moment froze into
silence, and Samuel imagined the ball whistling through the air like a space
rocket.

But then it started to drop. That
space-bound projectile lost its booster fuel and turned back toward the green
outfield at Hawkeye Park. Samuel pushed his walk into a slight jog around first
base. The coach was screaming at him to run, but Samuel could not hear him. He
jogged toward second base, watching as the left fielder ran to the fence
underneath the baseball. The outfielder stopped and raised his mitt over his
head. Samuel saw the glove eat the ball a split-second before it cracked the
leather and snapped him back into real time.

“Out.”

Before he made it to the second-base
bag, Samuel was sobbing. He felt the demeaning glare of every player on the
field, every kid on the bench, and every parent watching from just beyond the
foul lines. When he reached the bench, he could not even look at his dad.
Samuel’s chest hitched and heaved as he ended the afternoon going 2-4, and
coming up one fly ball shy of a homerun and a third hit in the game.

Samuel shifted again, sweat building in
his palm as he held the artifact from his youth. Those feelings from so long
ago had returned.

“I know, but it was really close. I
think it was the only fly ball that kid caught all season.”

Samuel looked out the window at the
suburban world fluttering by at thirty-five miles per hour. He pulled his
bottom lip into his mouth with his front teeth.

“So where we goin’, Dad?”

Samuel’s father looked up at his son
through the rearview mirror of the 1976 El Camino.

“Ralph’s Army Surplus. I need some
things for deer season,” he said with a smirk.

“It’s April.”

His dad pulled the car into the tight
space at the side of the red-brick store. When they entered, Samuel’s dad
turned right toward the lit glass display case, and Samuel had his hunch
confirmed.

“Heya, Billy,” his dad said.

“Yo. Wutch yins lookin’ for?” Billy
asked.

“A pocketknife. Something that’ll fit
a boy, something he can use to protect himself.”

Samuel’s dad looked down at his son
with a wink.

“We’s got exactly what you need right
over here.”

Billy the clerk waved toward the left
end of the glass case, and before he could even begin the sales pitch, Samuel
saw it. The knife had both blades extended, fanned out like fingers on a
hand. The mother-of-pearl on the handle met the polished silver tips. It was
not more than three inches in length, but it was the perfect size for a young
man.

“Can I see that one, Dad?” Samuel
asked.

Billy stooped and pulled a ring of
keys from his belt. Several
clicks
and
pops
later, the back of the display case slid to the right.
His disembodied hand reached in and took the knife off the red velour covering
the shelf. He stood and closed both blades, then handed it to Samuel’s dad.

“That model is called ‘the Scout,’ and
it’s the last one left. Heard they ain’t got no more left in all of Western PA,
they been sellin’ so good.”

“How much, Billy?”

The clerk looked to the ceiling and
rubbed a hand across the stubble on his chin, producing a rat-like scratch.

“Listed for fifteen ninety-nine, but I
can prolly get it to you for eleven.”

Samuel’s dad reached into his back
pocket and removed his wallet. The cracked, brown leather was wrapped around a
bulging mass of scrap paper and business cards. He opened it with both hands
and used his forefinger to separate the tops of several bills.

“Son?”

Samuel had not stopped staring at the
knife since the moment he saw it on display. All of the kids at St.
Bernadette’s school had one, except him. They would circle up at recess and
pull them out, far away from the eagle-eye vision of the nuns. Sometimes, a boy
would unravel a lint-covered, wilting photograph cut from his father’s issue of
Playboy
, and sometimes another
would reveal the crumbled remains of a cigarette filched from his mom’s soft
pack of Marlboro Reds. But most of the time, it was knives.

St. Bernadette’s and the surrounding
public school districts all closed the Monday after Thanksgiving for the first
day of deer season. They kept the façade, the idea that most of the male
students would go hunting with their fathers that day. But everyone knew
the teachers went, too. The pocketknife was the first indication of readiness.
Even though Samuel and his chums would not be ready to take the hunter’s safety
course for another few years, the pocketknife served as public notice that they
would.

“Samuel,” his father said, this time
with more force.

“Yeah, Dad. That would be awesome.
Really cool.”

His father nodded at the clerk.

“Lemme box that for ya.”

“Can I just put it in my pocket, Dad?”

Samuel felt his father’s hand ruffle
his hair and then move to the middle of his back, where it guided him out of
the store. Samuel did not even notice the transaction, the receipt or
the small talk between Billy and his father. He gripped the knife in his palm
and for the first time, he felt like a man.

Photographs rolled through Samuel’s head
– a slideshow of his life. Each one brought a remembrance of the Scout
pocketknife and how it had become part of him. Samuel always kept it in his
front right pocket, where it clattered together with loose change.
Through his early teen years, Samuel kept the knife clean and polished. He
maintained the blade and would buff the mother-of-pearl inlay. He remembered
losing the knife several times, the last time in college after a night of heavy
drinking. He had to scour the basement of a frat house the morning after, in a
haze of hangover, stale beer and the occasional used condom. He found it
next to the toilet. He rinsed it off in the sink and placed the Scout back in
his pocket, where it belonged. The images shot across his mind, some lingering
longer than others, until the procession slowed and finally stopped on one. A
picture of Samuel in the funeral home, kneeling in front of his father’s
coffin.

Samuel looked down at his father’s
still face.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and
turned to see his mother. She held a tissue in both hands, having given up
trying to keep her makeup in check. She opened her mouth, but no words
came. She shook her head instead and gave Samuel a quick rub on the
shoulder before turning to greet another distant relative in town for the
funeral.