Shards Read online



  Shards

  By Patrick C. Greene

 

  Copyright 2012. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Originally published online by SFZine.org (2008)

 

  Table of Contents

  Shards

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Other Books by Patrick C. Greene

 

  “Well, shit.”

  With a huff of exasperation, Shelley Frakes slammed the door of her Ford Explorer, the gift she had given herself in advance for the excellent closing record she was sure she would score last year.

  The gray ranch house–her current special project-had been on the market for just over a month. Fairly secluded at the end of a winding elm-lined drive, the property would command a healthy price.

  With three potential buyers coming tomorrow, she didn't need this headache.

  Shelley stared at the shattered window for several minutes, deciding whether or not to call one of the men from the office, or perhaps the police. Even the savviest vandal would not have had time to discover an empty home this far from town. With a sigh, Shelley drew her cell phone and speed-dialed the office.

  "Red Star Realty, this is Doug."

  Shelley would have preferred Roger or Kyle, but this late in the day that was asking too much. "Hi Doug."

  "Shelley? What's up?"

  "I stopped by Hartford Road, for a last minute check. Somebody took out a window."

  "Really? It's broken? Is everything else okay?"

  "I don't know. I haven't been in yet."

  Shelley made an effort to be nicer than usual to Doug.

  "I was actually hoping I could get somebody to come down here and help me check it out."

  "Well, I'm the only one here right now, Shell. And I'm expecting a client in about ten minutes."

  "Can you come out after that? I really don't like this."

  "C'mon, Shelley. That's way out of my way."

  "Don't make me beg, Doug."

  "Hm. Maybe I'd like that."

  "Yeah. Forget it."

  Shelley clicked off, and blew a strand of auburn hair out of her face. She appraised her reflection in the passenger side window and wondered if she was dressing too suggestively, or wearing too much makeup; sending the wrong message.

  She dug the front door key, and her fashionably-miniature mace canister, out of her purse.

  A quick check of the first floor and the upstairs brought a sense of relief.

  Other than the glass puzzle-pieces under the window, the house seemed in order. There was no other damage whatsoever. Just a hit and run, likely.

  Shelley brushed the mess with her shoe. In the waning spring daylight, the shards were more sound than sight. Though it wasn't possible to have the pane replaced before her morning appointment, she could at least tidy up, and hopefully come up with a white lie for the potential buyers.

  Shelley walked to the kitchen, thankful she was in the habit of leaving a broom and dustpan in her sale properties. The sound of her shoes padding across the plush powder-blue carpet was pleasing. She would work this into her presentation.

  In the kitchen/dining room, Shelley went to the freshly painted broom closet, and stopped upon seeing the basement door.

  It stood ajar about three inches.

  Shelley always kept all doors closed to add to the drama of separately presenting each room. Since the basement was completely underground and featured no windows, she had intended to underplay that section of the house. She hoped it hadn't been vandalized as well.

  She went to the door and pushed it open, staring into the subterranean murk, listening. Flipping the switch, she cursed herself for forgetting the power had been disconnected. She stepped back into the kitchen's half-light and redialed the office, now willing to go along with Doug's silly game. The answering machine clicked on.

  "Doug, are you still there?"

  She waited nearly a minute for him to pick up.

  "If you're there and you get this, please call me on my cell phone. Thanks."

  With this, Shelley took out the mini mag-light she kept in her purse, and considered a moment whether to leave now, and be here early with the police.

  Her first appointment came at 7 a.m. It wouldn't do to have them see the police conducting a break-in investigation in their prospective home. Shelley drew her mace canister again, holding it high as she shined the mag-light low.

  All those optimistic advances-the Explorer, the spa vacation, the tummy tuck, well, those were coming due. Past due, actually.

  “Suck it up, Shel…” she muttered.

  The beam revealed nothing more than open wooden steps leading to a clean concrete floor.

  "Yoo-hoo!" Shelley called.

  Yoo-hoo? She must have been more nervous than she thought. She took the first step, straining to see more than the thin beam would reveal. Two more steps and she stopped to listen again. The cool of the room wrapped itself around her, as the concrete walls reflected only the sound of her breathing. She took four more steps, until her feet nearly disappeared into darkness.

  Shelley took one more step, her last.

  There was sudden coldness at the back of her knee. The dusty stairs spun and rose toward her, crashing against her shins, her knees, her jaw. Her mace canister clattered, then rolled several yards away.

  When the motion stopped, the vertigo continued, compounded by the darkness. Shelley became aware that the door was far away and above her, and that she was not moving her limbs well at all. She instinctively reached down to her leg to determine what had caused that strange feeling, but it couldn't have been her leg that she found, because the thick, ropy tendon there was cleanly severed and very wet, and she remembered that her own knee was not like that at all.

  Nonetheless, it responded to her probing by sending flashing pain responses to her brain.

  Something shuffled in the dark behind the stairs, issuing a childish snicker. It was coming around and toward her, blocking out what was left of the afternoon light. Inner darkness meshed with the outer, as Shelley’s mind sought refuge from her body’s pain and terror.

  Shelley awoke in increments. First, the throbbing in her leg became a pulsing, almost chant-like hum in her head, drawing her out of a dream of a house showing in which mute clients seemed to share a secret psychic joke about her.

  Her sense of sight was next. Wisps of smoke trailed into the sunless sky past the blooming branches of an elm. Then came the stench; a combination of body odor and wood smoke.

  The pulsing sound faded, replaced by crackling wood and a breathless, excited whispering.

  She was lying on a chaise lounge she had bought to dress up the back yard. Still too groggy to rise, she turned her head to the side. She saw the back screen door from the kitchen hanging open, about eight feet away. Dirty finger-smears spoiled the stark whiteness of the brand-new door, whose installation she had overseen herself.

  She tried to gasp at the impropriety, but was too weak even for that. Now she remembered the basement, the vicious slicing at her knee, the snickering…

  She slowly rolled her head to the other side, hoping to spot her assailant before he could see she had come around.

  There he squatted, twelve or so feet away, tending a fire he had built in the middle of the well-manicured lawn. His scrawny back, clothed in a ripped denim jacket, was turned, and
he was deep in sibilant conversation with himself. She had a chance.

  Shelley gathered a slow, quiet breath and made a plan. With the knee tendon severed, her throbbing right leg would be mostly useless. She would have to roll off the lounger, plant her left foot and lunge hard, ignoring the pain. Once she snagged the door, she could haul herself in and lock it. The psychotic vagrant may have broken out a window and unlocked it, but he couldn’t break down the reinforced solid white pine doors, no matter how crazy-strong. Then she could call 911, and pray...

  She looked toward the smelly vagrant again. He was mesmerized by the sparks rising from the fire, waving a stick among them and chuckling with childish delight. Yep. His elevator was a good long way from the top. Should she have been encouraged or terrified?

  The evening was falling quickly, and despite the advantage it offered, Shelley did not relish the possibility of playing cat-and-mouse with an unhinged vagrant in a pitch-black house. And she was still so weak.

  Shelley turned her head toward the door, yearning for it, while the tortured whispering continued to her right. Shelley gave herself to the count of three. On the silent ‘two’, she tricked herself and rolled with the agility of a panther, bracing for the pain that would inevitably shoot upward like a lance when her right foot hit the ground.

  But it all went wrong.

  The right foot didn’t hit the ground, because it wasn’t there anymore. Pain and shock jarred Shelley, as the stump of her right knee slammed into the ground and sent Shelley pitching forward for the second time, far short of the doorway to safety. She cried out with a shriek that sounded too loud to have come from her.

  Looking down at the leg she had just walked on not an hour ago, the leg that was now missing below the knee, Shelley shrieked again.

  Her assailant appeared above her, staring down with concern that was somehow both genuine and mocking. His crystal-blue eyes were rimmed with red from the fire, his scraggly, graying beard was specked with little bits of glistening food. Shelley recoiled from his rancid breath as he leaned ever closer.

  The stinking man snickered again, his initial caring instinct vanishing into his madness. “Didn’t know it was gone. You didn’t, didja? Did not,” he muttered, spitting a fleck of meat onto her cheek.

  He grabbed her up, trying to be gentle. But Shelley’s spasms of shock and disgust and pain forced him to get rough. He dragged her over to the chaise lounge and unceremoniously dumped her across it face down.

  “I wish you brung some food. You should, you got money.”

  Shelley raised her spinning, dizzy head. The stinking man stood by his fire, working a crude spit he had constructed.

  “It’s getting’ hot out. You won’t keep long dead, so I got to keep you alive.”

  With a shard of the glass from the broken window, he sawed off a piece from the smoking body skewered on the spit. Her eyes confirmed what she had no intention of considering: it was her lower leg, crispy and brown. Several sizable chunks already cut away.

  “It’s a bit tough, but it’ll go down.”

  The stinking man shuffled toward her, the piece of leg meat hanging from his filthy fingers.

  Shelley’s mind erased itself, save for the fear that the house would probably not sell for a very long time.

  ###

 

  About the Author

  Some dark serendipity plopped a young Patrick C. Greene in front of a series of ever stranger films-and experiences-in his formative years, leading to a unique viewpoint. His odd interests have led to pursuits in film acting, paranormal investigation, martial arts, quantum physics, bizarre folklore and eastern philosophy. These elements flavor his screenplays and fiction works, often leading to strange and unexpected detours designed to keep viewers and readers on their toes.

  Literary influences range from Poe to Clive Barker to John Keel to a certain best selling Bangorian. Suspense, irony, and outrageously surreal circumstances test the characters who populate his work, taking them and the reader on a grandly bizarre journey into the furthest realms of darkness. The uneasy notion that reality itself is not only relative but indeed elastic- is the hallmark of Greene’s writing.

  Living in the rural periphery of Asheville North Carolina with his wife, youngest son Gavin and an ever-growing army of cats, Greene still trains in martial arts when he’s not giving birth to demons via his pen and keyboard.

 

  Connect with the Author

  www.patrickcgreene.com

  Patrick on facebook

  Other Books by Patrick C. Greene

  Novel

  Progeny

  Short Tales

  Bill’s Becoming

  Finder’s Keepers

  Into the Small Hours

  Words That Start with the Letter D