The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

DAVID by Sean Doolittle

David first saw him on the bus. Not the six-oh-five crosstown, that was just it. He’d gone straight to Nabob’s after work and had already come up with a table (fireside, of course, he would finally get the fireplace tonight of all nights) when Christina had called the restaurant, apologized a blue streak and scampered off to OR to clean up after the appendix-bomb that had gone off in some poor kid’s stomach twenty minutes earlier. Not having the spirit to engage in any real meaningful battle over a cab, David hopped aboard the seven-twenty, which was loading on the corner just as he left the restaurant.

The guy was one seat up and across the aisle. He glanced back once early on, then again, a light in his smoky gray eyes that David recognized as a particular kind of uncertainty. I know you, I think. Do I know you? A youngish guy, maybe a little younger than David himself. Late twenties. Dark hair and soft features, a day’s worth of stubble, and besides looking only vaguely like the guy David had seen on a Grape Nuts commercial, completely unfamiliar. When he looked back the third time, David decided to give him the nod—that polite and general one that covers those situations where eye contact has been made with a stranger and something seems like it should be done. Then he unfolded the evening edition he’d grabbed from the machine outside Nabob’s and turned to the comics.

The guy looked back again right around thirty-fourth and Warburton, started to stare.

By the mid-fifties, it was time for another decision. Look up? He toyed briefly with the idea of screaming “What?” into the guy’s face, decided ultimately to give social cues another chance and stay with the comics. Try to look really engrossed. See, man? I’m reading. I’m reading so hard that I don’t even notice you.

They pulled up to the stop, a six-block stroll from his apartment building, ten minutes later. The guy watched him all the way off the bus.

Ike’s was on the corner, and after getting off the bus David looked at his watch, saw that it wasn’t even eight, and decided to duck in for a beer. It turned out to be Karaoke Nite inside, as luck would have it. He downed a Heineken and made it out just as a middle-aged couple in matching sweaters began bellering “Unchained Melody,” staring drunkenly into each others’ eyes and holding the mike between them.

He was pressing the button at the crosswalk when a voice just behind him said, “Hi.” David turned and saw the Grape Nuts guy from the bus looking at him intently.

“Hi,” he said, and realized he was pushing the button repeatedly. He made himself stop.

The guy continued to watch him, saying nothing. David glanced at him again. He was wearing a sweater, fraying but bulky. Jeans. Sneakers. The night was cool enough that David could see vague tendrils of breath wisping from the corner of his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Do I know you?”

The guy kept looking at him, expression pleasant, deep gray eyes revealing nothing. Just interest. David looked back and then, with a mental slap to the forehead, thought, Christ. I’m being picked up, here. He almost smiled.

“I saw you on the bus.” The guy gave a small smile, as if in explanation.

David just nodded, slowly. The way you nod to someone telling you about the poltergeist in their laundry room. “I… yeah. I noticed that.”

The guy nodded back and they just stood there, nodding at each other, two people who don’t share the same language giving each other directions.

The light was what saved the moment. It turned, and David gave a final nod and started across the street. The guy came right along with him. When they hit the other curb and David turned right, heading up the walk in the direction of his apartment, the guy didn’t miss a stride.

David gave a sigh of exasperation and stopped dead in his tracks. “Look, can I help you with something?”

At last, the gray eyes filled with warmth. The guy took a step closer. “Kill me.”

David felt his eyes fly open like window shades and he almost tripped backing up. “What?”

The guy repeated what David had thought he’d heard. Soft and definite. “Kill me.”

David began walking away very quickly. He kept one eye over his shoulder as he did. The guy jumped to catch up.

“Get away from me, man.”

“You can do it.”

David walked on, increasing his pace. The guy, whose stride was shorter, had to work at it a little. But he kept up. They covered the next block, and David stopped again. He faced the guy and tried to make his voice calm and friendly.

“Look. I’m sure you are a very nice person, but I’m seriously warning you, here. Get. The hell. Away from me.”

The guy just blinked and kept staring with that maddeningly passive gaze. Well, I’d like to, really. But I can’t do that. How come? Because I’m a raving fucking psychotic, see?

David shook his head and started on again, and when the guy stuck with him for another block he said, “Don’t make me break your goddamn nose, okay? Just leave.”

The guy put a gentle hand on his shoulder. David shrugged it off like it was something with maggots.

“Don’t break my nose. Break my spine. Kill me. You can.” He locked his gaze on hard, and the next time he said it he was whispering. “Kill me.”

David heard sharp footsteps up the block, their echo clock-clocking in and out of the alleyway between Fritz’s and The Golden Carrot. Beat cop.

Thank you, God.

“Officer,” he shouted. “This man is bothering me.”

The cop turned, cocked his head, and began walking in their direction. David felt himself cringe.

Beautiful. How very damsel-in-distress of you, Dave.

The cop strolled up, eyebrow suspiciously arched. At him. That was when David noticed the guy had gone.

Again. Beautiful.

“What’s that?” The cop looked to his right, then his left, all around them. A heavyhanded little piece of sarcasm, David thought, if ever there was one.

“Nothing. Never mind. Thanks,” he said, and walked on quickly, feeling the cop watch him all the way to the next block before the hollow clock-clock started up again.

David caught himself looking back every second or two, realized he was watching his back for the Grape Nuts guy.

I’m sure somebody’ll kill you, sport, he thought, then prayed as he reached the front steps of his building at last that there would be aspirin. Weirdness gave him a headache.

There were no aspirins, as if he couldn’t have guessed that, but there was a single, lonely Heineken in the fridge, which he uncapped and took with him to the shower. He cranked the thing onto Nearly Unbearable, closed the door and let the place fill with steam, stood under the spray, setting the head on massage and letting it bombard his forehead, the back of his neck. He stayed until the water began cooling in incremental shades.

Worked, by God. And the beer hit the spot well enough that he decided to throw on jeans and a sweatshirt, hop down the block to Sammy’s for another six. Saturday tomorrow, and if he was forced to spend Friday night Christinaless, might as well assemble himself in front of the tube and buzz the evening happily away. He made it back in roughly eight minutes, had popcorn ready in ten, and plopped into the sofa group, with blankets and pillows, in twenty minutes flat.

He had three dead soldiers and nothing but unpopped kernels in the bowl when he heard a key snick into the doorknob. Letterman was just getting underway.

In a few moments, Christina dragged herself through the door and leaned back heavily against it. Her sandy hair was hanging into her eyes, and it looked like she could pack for a weekend in the bags under her eyes.

“You look like hell,” he said.

She smirked at him. “Your hair is thinning.”

“Poor baby.” He patted the cushion next to him, held open the blankets. She batted her eyes in something like relief and left her coat and purse in a pile by the door. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and let her snuggle in. He smelled her hair, kissed the back of her head. “How’s the kid.”

She yawned. “Still groggy, lucky for him. He’s gonna hurt.”

“How’re you?”

She craned her head around and kissed him. “Exhausted. Sorry about dinner.”

“No sweat whatever. Beer?”

She already had one open.

He squeezed her. “I’m glad you came, babe.”

Christina wiggled around to face him, wickedness dancing in her eyes. “I haven’t yet,” she said, kissing him again, “but I thought we could work on it.”

David bugged his eyes at her in mock amazement. “I,” he said, “am shocked at you. You kissed your mother with that mouth?”

And that was when he heard the bedroom door open and a small, sleep-drugged voice say, “David? Who are you talking to, hon?”

David almost launched Christina into the coffee table as he scrambled out of the pit and wheeled around, hitting their freshly popped beers and vaguely hearing them empty into the carpet in glugs. Then he heard Christina gasp.

Grape Nuts was ambling into the living room, hair mussed, eyes drowsy, scratching the side of his jaw and yawning. He was wearing David’s robe.

“I’m Roy,” he said, blinking as if to clear the sleep from his eyes and coming around the couch toward Christina. “I don’t think we’ve met. David?”

Christina’s lower jaw could not have drooped farther without dropping off into the carpet with a dull sort of thud.

What the fuck?

“How did you get in?” he roared. It was the first thing out of his mouth once he remembered how to make words.

The guy winked at him slyly as he sauntered over, patted him on the crotch before David knew what was happening. “I almost asked you the same question earlier, big guy.” He looked back at Christina playfully.

She was already heading for the door.

“Jesus, Christina, wait!”

She grabbed her things and opened the door.

“Christina, this isn’t…”

“Look, David…” she started, hands up, eyes wide and filled with something like horror, something like disgust. Then she was out. The door slammed.

David whirled on the guy, whose face had become passive once again.

“Kill me.”

David went for the phone and dialed the police. By the time he’d botched it twice and then managed the first three numbers without missing, Grape Nuts was coming out of the bedroom once more, dressed. He gave David a last, long look and then left, closing the door softly behind him.

David hung up the phone.

He spent the next half hour pacing laps around the living room. At one point he picked up one of the empty Heineken bottles and hurled it through the glass top of the coffee table. The sudden realization that he’d just turned a piece of his furniture into about a billion tiny shards of glass helped him get things together.

He picked up the phone again and called the police. Then he called Christina. The phone rang seventeen times before he heard the other end pick up and drop again.

It was almost one-thirty by the time the guys from the police department knocked on his door. He let them in—Officers Swanson and Bentley, hello, I’m David Conners—and he spent the next fifteen minutes recounting everything from the bus ride on. They did their cop thing and left, can’t really spare a surveillance unit at this stage but call us immediately if anything else transpires.

David knew that any attempts at sleep tonight would be a washout. So he made coffee, returned to the sofa pit, and waited for dawn.

Who in God’s earth was this guy?

He’s Roy. He wants you to kill him. Haven’t we been listening?

Why him, then? How about that. Why, out of all the poor dopes in this lunatic city, did this particular lunatic decide to single out him to make miserable?

David decided, as he sat in the stark glow of the television, sipping his coffee and watching the snow, that next time he saw the guy he’d ask.

When daylight at last began to seep carefully into the city, David showered again. He put away two last cups of French Roast, called for a cab, and was at Christina’s by eight.

She was almost packed. Going to her sister’s.

He nearly had to staple her down, but in the end, which was almost two hours later, he’d managed to convince her—at least enough to nix the trip to sister Susan’s—that no, he was not leading a double life, was not having an affair with a psychotic man named Roy, and you can goddamn well bet I called the police. Looked like an episode of Dragnet in my apartment until two-thirty this morning.

“My God, David,” she said, after he threw up his hands and collapsed, thoroughly wrung, into the loveseat. A silent minute passed, and when he lifted the heels of his hands away from his eyeballs Christina was sitting down beside him. She put a hand on his cheek. “I am so sorry.”

He hugged her.

“Are you okay? Has he… done anything?”

“I’m pissed. He hasn’t done anything but break into my home and wear my clothes and send you the other direction at warp factor eight.”

They broke the clinch, and when she looked up her eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry, David,” she said again, and then she shook her head like she couldn’t figure out what kind of ungodly sprite had gotten into it. “Not trusting you. I’m pathetic. Just pathetic.”

He told her, after they sat for a few moments, that he didn’t cook breakfast for pathetic people, and after they’d eaten she took him shopping.

All, it seemed, was right with the world once more.

They decided he would stay the rest of the weekend at her place. When they returned that evening, loaded with bags and exhausted and happy, she said that this time she would cook, shooed him out, and set about it while he ran back to the apartment for clothes, toothbrush, all the rest. A Frito Lay truck had somehow managed to jackknife in the middle of the intersection at Forty-fifth and Boswell. They got to his building in just under an hour. David would remember this, later.

When he opened his door and flipped on the lights, Roy was on the couch, waiting.

It was strange. David didn’t feel surprised.

He looked him dead on. The guy’s face was expressionless, eyes intent. “What do you want from me?” he said. He slipped his hands into his pockets and leaned against the door, as if to say I’m not budging until you come clean, mister. It struck him how ridiculous it really was. It was his apartment, for God’s sake. He decided to hell with it and arched his eyebrows. “Huh? What is it that you want.”

Roy folded his arms. “I’ve told you, David. I want you to kill me.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Roy.”

David just nodded and kicked off the door. “Yeah. Well, Roy, I’m not going to kill you, ’kay? If you want to die, there are plenty of other ways besides walking up to a stranger and saying ‘kill me.’ Hell, buy a gun. Jump off a building. Jump off a building in front of a bus, for all I care. Just get out of here and don’t come back.” He smiled at Roy sweetly. Whaddaya say, hmm?

Roy did not flinch. He didn’t smile or tic or anything. He just looked at him. “I’m asking you, David. You can do it, no matter what you think. Kill me.”

What was this? Some deranged philosophy major going around to people? Recognize the Dark Side, stare the Beast in the eye and make friends with it and all that happy horseshit?

“Get out.”

“If you want me gone, take the proper steps, David. I’ve told you. You know how to get rid of me.”

“I,” David said, “am not. For the last time. Going to kill you.” He went for the phone again. At least there was one thing besides death that made the guy leave.

“You will,” the guy said, just as the door closed. He tossed something onto the carpet before it did, which made a muffled chink as it landed.

David knew what it was before he even got there. He recognized the miniature tennis shoe.

Christina’s keyring. He felt his head go numb as he picked it up, saw the sole of the little sneaker smeared red, pieces of sandy hair stuck in it, the message suckerpunching him and leaving him trying to breath.

Stepped on her, bro. Kill me.

David remembered calling the police, vaguely remembered mentioning Swanson and Bentley, and he must’ve called a cab because one came to pick him up.

That was about all from the next several hours, except for the image of flashing red and running people, that the cops had gotten there before his cab and wouldn’t let him see.

David flew to his brother’s in Akron the next afternoon. The cops had found the cabbie in whose company he’d been when it all went down. There were also strands of hair in his robe and evidence that the lock to his door had been picked, verifying his claim of an intruder. The strands of hair were important in that they a) weren’t his and b) matched the ones beneath Christina’s fingernails.

After Christina, they took him seriously enough to send him to the airport in a squad car.

The cop waited with him until he boarded.

David threw a last look back as he ducked into the boarding tube. Back, far back beyond the cop and the people waiting in the gate lobby, he could see Roy, leaning up against the Arrivals/Departures kiosk with his hands in his pockets, watching him. His stubble was slightly darker now. He was wearing a long coat.

Then the line swept David along like a leaf in a stream.

It would be all over the national news broadcasts for most of the next week, riding out its life on the local stations for longer than that.

But then, when a guy pulls a Mini-14 and three loaded clips out of his coat in the middle of a busy airport, you’re gonna have news.

In Akron, David caught it all. CBS to CNN to People to Maury Povich.

Roy burned out two and almost all of the third of his 30 round clips before he fled the airport and screamed off toward the city in a late-model Ford Taurus, hitting downtown just as the sirens kicked in, weaving in and out of traffic, careening through the city with the cops in pursuit. He hit the pedestrians too slow to move, actually made a point of swerving to do the job on at least two occasions (said an unidentified bystander one night on Hard Copy). Window open, he plugged as many at random with an unlicensed Beretta 9mm before the 15 round clip gave out. He’d been too busy driving, it seemed, to pop in another.

They brought him down at Sixty-fifth and Gable. Nobody got more specific than that in terms of location, but David recognized his own address when he saw it.

The trail of bodies led almost to the front steps of his building.

David overheard, one evening, very late, his brother and his wife speaking in the den, tones hushed, voices strained. About calling somebody, Christ, Caroline, I don’t know but I’m worried about him.

When the thing became redundant at last, when they stopped coming up with new stuff (it took a bit, the late-night could milk a thing like this for weeks), David catalogued all the VHS tapes (there were seven) and watched them again.