Blood in the Mirror: Haunted Collection Series Book 3

203 pages

Chapter 10: Borrowing a Pen

Bob flicked on the light, ran the vacuum around the edge of a filing cabinet and felt a tickle on the back of his neck.

It was an old sensation, one that had sprouted up in prison. The feeling was of being watched; as though someone who meant to do him harm was close by, waiting to drive a knife into his chest.

Bob straightened up casually and turned around, eyes roaming over the office, searching the small shadows for someone he hadn’t seen upon entering.

No one was there.

His eyes stopped, then drifted back toward a shelf. On a small display was a golden pen.

It was beautiful.

Bob turned off the vacuum, feeling as though the noise of the machine was upsetting the pen.

Leaving the vacuum by the filing cabinet, he crossed the room to the pen and looked at it. It was stunning; a work of art with long, thin lines etched into the casing. Licking his lips, he lifted his hand, reached for the pen, hesitated, then lifted it up.

The metal was cold beneath his fingers, but a thrill of excitement raced through him as he held it.

I should write something, Bob thought, turning to the desk. He hadn’t written anything since high school, and even then, he had only done so while being punished in detention.

Without thinking, he pulled the chair out from the desk, sat down, and found a yellow notepad. He dragged the pad to him, leaned over it and gently turned the pen’s lower half. The writing point appeared and he smiled, a soft, almost bitter scent rising up from the metal.

Bob started to write, the pen gliding across the paper and leaving a trail of words behind it. The penmanship was magnificent, and nothing like Bob had ever written before. Sentences, long and perfectly crafted, flowed, and they made up his thoughts. His memories. He knew it, even though he had forgotten it.

For several minutes, he wrote in a daze, not quite sure what he was writing. When he finished, his hand and forearm ached dully. Bob had covered the entire page and part of another. His mind thrummed, and he held the pen loosely in one hand as he flipped back to the first page. He settled back into the chair, picked up the notebook, and read what he had written down.

I remember when I was eighteen years old. I had just gotten my license, and my father had allowed me to take out his 1958 Ford pick-up to take Kathryn Moltke on a date.

Bob chuckled, nodding. Damn, he thought, I’d forgotten all about that.

Still grinning, he read on, curious to see what else the pen had inspired him to remember.

Kathryn and I got a little too tipsy that night. She had stolen some Kentucky bourbon from her parents and hadn’t been able to say yes or no when I was ready for her.

Bob’s grin vanished and his stomach twisted. He wanted to argue with himself that what he had written wasn’t true, but he knew it was. His mouth went dry, and he continued to read on.

I helped her up to her house, put her on the porch in the swing, and left her there to sober up on her own. I took the long way home, cut through Colchester and Cambridge, down through Putnam and over through Dell. It was late. Almost two in the morning. There had been a fellow out hitchhiking.

Bob shuddered and shook his head, trying to take his eyes away from the words, but he couldn’t. He was locked onto them as if someone kept his eyelids pried open and his head straight.

The words marched on across the page.

I don’t know if he was drunk or sober, but I know I was drunk when I hit him, and I hit him hard. His body flew out into the middle of the road. I remember his sneakers, dark blue Adidas, on their sides at the street’s shoulder. The man wasn’t dead. He tried to get up, to his feet. I remember how white his socks were, how his right leg was bent wrong and how the left just wouldn’t hold his weight.

He kept falling down, and I sat there, watching, the big old V8 engine of that Ford rumbling and thrumming. Then I dropped the truck into low, eased forward, and hit him again. I backed up, and he tried to get up. Three more times I hit him. On the fourth time, he didn’t move. That’s when I backed up a good fifty feet, did a brake-stand and raced out over him.

I spent an hour at the high school gym, where the fire hydrant had a wrench attached to it for washing down the school buses. That hydrant blasted bits of skin and fabric, blood and bone right off the truck. I was even able to pull out a dent in the fender.

My father was happy that I had washed the truck.

And so was I.

Signed,

Bob Gilmore

Bob looked at the confession he had written and knew it was all true. Every word of it. He had buried it in his heart, long ago.

But there it was.

Shivering, he reached forward to tear the pages free from the notebook, but cold hands gripped his wrists.

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