Tar: An apocalyptic horror novella (18 page)

E
ddie Merrick couldn’t shake
the feeling. Like something was about to happen. Something bad. The sensation was so strong, so
intense
, it felt like a presence occupied actual space on the seat beside him.

He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have heisted the car on a Friday night. And on Halloween. Way too many people out and about. But he hadn’t been able to resist the shiny new 1940 Ford Coupe sitting in the parking lot of Murphy’s Bar with the keys dangling in the ignition like an invitation. He swore this was the last time. One more good score and he'd get out of this town, go somewhere with a lot of trees. Get an honest job. Now, sitting behind the wheel of the car, he couldn’t wait to get rid of it. He estimated pulling into Paulie’s Garage in fifteen minutes, give or take. Another ten minutes and he’d be handing the keys to this bucket over to Paulie himself. As he hung a left onto Jersey Avenue Eddie felt a crawling sensation in his testicles and along his spine. Like someone was watching him.

You’re just antsy. You think because it's your last time, you’re gonna get pinched. Stop being so superstitious.

He switched on the car radio and got the news. A man’s nasally, urgent voice said that the president promised not to send “our boys” into the war. Eddie didn’t believe it. If Roosevelt planned on keeping the U.S. out of it, then why had he enacted the draft? The Jerrys wouldn’t be happy until they took over the whole damn world. Eddie had seen Hitler a few times on the newsreels. A man that relentless wouldn’t stop until you
stopped
him. Looking for a way out of his dead end life, Eddie had tried to join the Army four years ago, on his eighteenth birthday. They turned him down flat because of his bum leg. When he was thirteen, Eddie’s old man beat him unconscious with a baseball bat for bringing home a bad report card. Eddie had never hated the drunken bastard more than he did the day he left the recruiter’s office with that rejection slip in his hand.

Eddie soon tired of the news. He fiddled with the radio until he came across a station playing his favorite song, Glenn Miller’s “In The Mood.” He took it as a good omen, and hummed along with the tune. He turned right onto Mercer Street and gunned the engine.

There was a flash of bright red through the windshield. He mashed his foot down on the brake pedal—a second too late. There was a sickening thump as the car collided with whatever had crossed its path. The Ford screeched to a halt, and Eddie stared out past the gleaming black hood, his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel in a death grip, cold sweat prickling his skin. Someone screamed and Eddie’s head snapped around. At the curb stood a girl and a boy, dressed respectively as a witch and a pirate. From the witch’s right hand dangled a plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket. In her left hand she gripped a broom. The pirate carried his booty in a white paper bag with a picture of a skull and crossbones on the side. A black eyepatch covered one eye while the other eye gazed in shock at the red clump in the middle of the street.

The radio was still blasting “In The Mood.” Eddie reached out with trembling fingers and switched it off. The sudden silence was deafening. He got out of the car and, his heart thudding in his chest, limped toward the red bundle.

It was a little girl. Dressed like Red Riding Hood. She lay on her back a good thirty feet beyond the car’s grill, awash in the headlamps like an actress playing a death scene on a stage. And dead she was; if the enormous amount of blood pooling around her head didn’t tell you the story, her open and vacant eyes sure as hell did. She had landed in such a way that the back of her skull had cracked open like a raw egg. An insane and unbidden thought arose in Eddie’s mind: You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. He felt his gorge rise.

“Margaret?” said the witch in a tiny voice. She was twelve or thirteen. “Get up, Margaret.”

The boy who was much younger, rolled an accusing blue eye toward Eddie. “You ran over our sister. You’re a bad man.” Then a single tear welled up in that eye and spilled down his cheek.

Eddie thought, this can’t be happening. But he looked down at the dead girl’s face, at the empty eyes staring up into the night sky, and knew it was. Panic wrapped its icy fingers around him. Without thinking, he made the sign of the cross, a buried ritual from his childhood.

Margaret had been toting a jack-o’-lantern bucket, like her big sister. It had rolled away against the far curb like a severed head, spilling its contents all over the street the same way Margaret’s head had spilled its own.

The witch screamed again. Eddie looked up. Other trick-or-treaters had gathered. Faces were appearing at windows in some of the nearby houses. The commotion had drawn a few people out onto their porches. For one insane moment, it occurred to Eddie to explain to the onlookers what had happened here.
She came out of nowhere, folks, I swear. I was just minding my business, out for a little spin on a Friday night and listening to Glenn Miller on the radio, when she stepped right out in front of me. And I haven’t had a drop to drink, either. Sober as the Pope on Sunday morning. Oh, the car? Well, it’s like this….

Two guys hurried across their lawns toward the street. The witch-girl was still screaming, a terrible piercing cry that set Eddie’s teeth on edge and blended with another, similar sound: the distant approach of police sirens.

Eddie took off. Didn’t know in what direction, and didn’t care. As long as it was
away
. He hopped fences and shambled across backyards, leaving in his wake barking dogs, trampled flowers, and dented garbage cans. He lurched through side streets, between houses, and down dark alleys. Hid behind trees or parked cars whenever he saw headlamps coming toward him. When he entered an alley at one point Eddie observed a flow of people streaming past at the other end of it. He decided getting lost in a crowd would be his best bet for escape. Slowing his pace, Eddie attempted to pull himself together as he approached the alley’s exit. He entered the street and shuffled along the sidewalk, trying to blend in with the crowd.

He was on Newark Avenue. First chance he got he’d grab a cab and take it across the river into New York. Then he'd lay low for a while until he could figure something out. He didn’t hold out much hope though; his prints were all over the Coupe. And a couple of those folks would be able to pick him out of a lineup, no sweat.

There were a lot of costumed people on the street, adult partygoers celebrating the holiday and the weekend ahead. He passed Frankenstein’s monster and his bride, and as he eyeballed them, Eddie bumped into Superman.

“Watch it, Mac,” the man of steel warned, and then stuck a fat cigar in his pie hole.

Eddie saw a cowboy with his arm around an Indian squaw, and a spaceman wearing a silver suit and what looked like a large fishbowl over his head. The whole atmosphere lent a sense of unreality to an already bizarre situation.

The marquee of the Palace Theater loomed up ahead. As Eddie drew near he became confused. He had passed the Palace only an hour ago, on his way (unbeknownst to him at the time) to steal the Ford. The theater had been showing the new movie by Charlie Chaplain,
The Great Dictator
. Eddie remembered because he had made a note he wanted to see it over the weekend. Now the marquee read
The Conjuring 2
. Eddie frowned. He had never heard of
The Conjuring
1, much less its sequel. Had the Chaplain movie been damaged?

These thoughts were purely sensory, fleeting, there one minute and gone the next. Deeper down, Eddie’s mind shouted out the absolute certainty that the cops were hunting for him at that exact moment. And the real possibility that they were closing in on him.

A city bus lumbered by on its way to the bus stop half a block down the street. On its side was an advertisement. Eddie had seen nothing like it before, and he gaped at it. It was showy, splashed with bright purples and yellows that made his head hurt. The ad featured two palookas grinning like monkeys. Screaming in bright red letters a foot and a half tall was the message MORNING DRIVE-TIME WITH PHIL AND THE ROOSTER! And under that, only a fraction less gaudy: 105.1 The Kick—Jersey City’s #1 Rock-and-roll radio!

Eddie didn’t know what to think, except What the hell is rock-and-roll? As he approached its stop, Eddie watched the bus pull to the curb and spill its passengers onto the sidewalk. They all went their separate ways, and there was nothing remarkable about any of them, but one. She moved along the sidewalk in his direction, lighting a cigarette as she came. Tattered denim shorts barely covered her midsection and ripped black stockings ran down her long legs to a pair of scuffed army boots. The arms of a flannel shirt were cinched around her waist. She wore a black t-shirt, the name RAMONES emblazoned in white across her jiggling breasts. Her blonde hair was longish on one side, buzzed to a bristle on the other, and her face and ears flashed with so many metal rings and thingamabobs she looked like a human pincushion. Eddie found himself appalled and aroused at the same time.

As she passed, the girl sneered at him. “Fuck you lookin’ at?” she demanded. Eddie turned to watch her stalk away, and she shot over her shoulder, “Take a goddamn picture, why don’tcha? Asshole.”

Eddie looked around. No one else was paying the slightest attention to the spectacle. He didn’t understand. How could people not notice her? What the hell was going on? He realized his mouth was hanging open and snapped it shut.

Then it occurred to him that the girl’s outlandish getup must have been a Halloween costume. She was headed to a party. Sure, that had to be it. Still, he’d seen nothing like her before. Also, Eddie had never heard a woman talk like that, and he’d spent time with some pretty crazy dames. Bewildered, he turned and continued on his way.

And damned if he didn’t feel eyes on him again. He tried to ignore it; if he lost his head, he’d never get out of this in one piece.

As he passed the bus stop, he noticed a newsboy hawking his wares there in the middle of the busy sidewalk. The kid clasped a few papers in one hand while waving a single copy in the air with the other.

“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” the boy announced to anyone who would listen. “Italian troops invade Greece! Greeks launch strong counter-offensive!”

Eddie scanned the street for a cab. No luck.

The newsie shouted. “Forty-seven German aircraft shot down above England!”

A guy in a gray suit stopped for a paper. He flipped the boy a nickel, and there was a brief flash of silver before the kid snatched it out of the air.

Nothing Eddie could do. He’d just have to hoof it for now. At least every step he took was taking him farther away from Mercer Street, and the dead girl.

Margaret,
his mind spoke up.
If you’re gonna run a little girl down, you should have the decency to remember her name.

Yeah, well, he argued, it’s not like I meant to do it. So why turn myself in now? Me going to the big house isn’t gonna bring her back.

He remembered the little pirate calling him a bad man. But he wasn’t. Sure, he was no saint. He’d pulled a few jobs in his time. But he never bumped anybody off.

Until now
.

I didn’t do it on
purpose
, goddamn it, he countered.

The newsboy yelled, “Airliners bring down twin towers in New York City in terrorist attack!”

Eddie halted and cast a side-long glance at the kid. What the hell was he talking about? Had the Krauts attacked the city? What twin towers?

Then the boy cried, “Petty thief, Eddie Merrick, wanted for the hit-and-run murder of Margaret May Dowling!”

Eddie felt his heart lurch painfully in his chest. Now the newsie looked straight at him. Holding the stack of newspapers straight out in front of him like a billboard, the kid flashed a sinister grin and tipped Eddie a wink. Eddie couldn’t breathe. He was pictured on the front page next to the girl. Eddie’s picture was a mug shot from two years ago, a bit he did for a burglary rap. Margaret’s image was from tonight. It showed her splayed out on the street, broken and bloody, her eyes staring at nothing. The angle of the shot was from Eddie’s perspective as he had stood looking down at her. As if he’d taken the picture.

A moan rose from deep in his throat as Eddie backed away from the newsboy. He stumbled at the curb and nearly toppled into the path of an oncoming car. Regained his balance at the last second, but overcompensated, and pitched forward onto his hands and knees. But he was up again in an instant, reeling down the street, thinking that this was it, this was what it felt like to flip your wig. But another part of him—the Eddie Fucking Merrick part—fought to silence his gibbering mind. There’s a reasonable explanation. I’m just paranoid, that’s all. I’m tense and my mind’s playing tricks on me.

But he needed to get the hell out of this town
right now
. He searched the street again for a cab, but several outlandish-looking cars in the midst of the regular traffic drove him to distraction.

What is this?

He didn’t have too long to dwell on the question, though, because from the corner of his eye, Eddie swore he saw someone in a red hood and cape across the street a little farther down. Just as he focused on them, however, they disappeared down an alley. Eddie limp-skipped along his side of the street until he drew even with the alley’s entrance, and saw it was not an alley at all, just a brick wall set back between two buildings. There was nowhere the owner of the red hood could have disappeared
to
.

You’re off your rocker.

Shut up, he told himself.

He craned his neck looking for a cab, but saw none. Where the hell were they? They should be out in droves tonight. There must be a million Halloween bashes. He cursed under his breath and turned to go—and ran smack into Snow White carrying an assortment of liquor bottles in a paper bag. The bag tipped and threatened to dump its contents, and she and Eddie did an awkward dance together there on the sidewalk under the streetlights, trying to prevent disaster. After a moment during which things might have gone either way, fortune won out.