The Avid Book Collector: iequalsalissa

Cover Art by Heidi ‘Azurylipfe’ Darras

If a painting in the home of your perfect man reflects your dreams of doom, do you run, or do you dare to embrace love?

While Lizetta lives a life of compassion, childhood bullying over a few extra pounds have caused this sparky woman to lose sight of the beauty of her soul. Jensen’s recent past is filled with substance abuse, shady morals, and loose women. A brutal wake up call forced him to find his way back to the gentle soul he once was; however, there are some whose futures depend on the return of the demon.

Souls can heal, but how long can they fight the forces that seek to destroy them? If one of those forces is the person who shattered your self-image, and she is determined to take down the one you love, could you still believe that everyone deserves a second chance?

Ambushed.

The moment I get home from work and step inside my apartment there is company on my tail—company with sweet breath that tickles my ear and reminds my body that it is male. “There you are. I missed you.” Usually when Laura does this, it’s a seductive whisper. Now she sounds like the Grim Reaper who has come to stake claim.

I sigh. “We've been through this already.”

I knew by the tone of the text she sent this morning that she’d soon pop in for a romp. It ain’t gonna happen, which is why I responded with a firm, “No, we are done.”

Laura strolls her way into my apartment as if I have rolled out the red carpet. Etta immediately comes to attention. Why can't I shove Laura out the door like an intelligent person would? There is a difference between being a gentleman and being a doormat. I don't mind becoming a bit of a wuss when it comes to Lizetta, but with this girl? No way.

“You mean the same game you and I have played for the last year? Every time you stop taking my calls it’s only to build the tension. I don’t mind you toying with me, but this go around lasting two months is pretty ridiculous.”

I never should have slept with her after I bailed out. The brain inside my dick that overrules my sanity needs to be lobotomized. It took forever for her to give me a break after that. It finally seemed to be working, too. The last time Laura called was the same day her brother, Larry, tried to get me to come back to the band, again. Coincidence? Probably not. A few hours later I reached my ninetieth day of sobriety. With the exception of the text I got when Lizetta and I were on our first date two weeks ago, I took the few weeks of quiet that followed as congratulations from God for making it. It’s been insanity ever since.

Hey, God. Thanks for nothing.

Laura also makes me bitchy as hell.

“It’s not a game, Laura.” I was always serious when I said no. It's just that she can be rather persuasive in changing my mind.

She leans back on the sofa with one boot resting on it. Combat boots? What happened to heels? Given what she had started experimenting with when I left, this is a bad sign. Her skirt exposes the fact that she's not wearing any underwear. I hate when she does that.

Actually, I wouldn't exactly call it hate.

Why does everything with this woman have to be so challenging? Can’t she just be normal?

No, with the hell she has been through I suppose this is normal enough. I can’t think about it, or I’ll want to help her. She turns my compassion around and makes me defenseless. She doesn’t want sobriety; she wants love. She wants someone to swoop her up in a grand gesture of devotion. I can’t give her that. I won’t risk my sobriety for her, no matter how much she is hurting my heart.

Etta snarls at Laura, reminding me that I’m not supposed to feel for the woman. The spitefulness Laura brings out in me nearly has me hoping that Etta’s raised ears and tail mean she will turn vicious. I don’t want Laura harmed, but she’s exasperating. My head feels like it is going to explode, so I rest it against the wall and point to the door. “Laura. Please.”

She slides down farther, thus sending her skirt up, just in case I missed the obvious. To ensure that her message is sent she tugs down her tank top. It’s not a display of modesty like it is with Lizetta, but more an act of exposure since the neckline stretches down past where her bra should be. Sweet Lord. She may not have any class, but memories of those boobs come rushing back. How I’d love to—

Man, I know Lizetta and I have only had a few dates, but even if Laura weren’t such a skank, I couldn’t go there. I'm just trying to do something right in my life. It seems to be working, because not long ago I would already have been down to business.

I toss my keys on the coffee table—despite knowing I should keep them at the ready to use as a weapon. I’m not getting my ass, or any other part of my body, near that sofa, so I squat beside her. Laura may have serious issues, but that doesn't mean she can't be reasonable and that I should not try to be decent to her.

“Look. That reply I sent was serious. We are done. Please respect that and wish me happiness, just like I wish you.”

She stands like she is going to leave. Instead, she tromps up to Etta and looks down on her. “Where did this come from?”

Scratch what I thought about being a decent human. I’ve always known that Laura is more of a bitch than I want to admit. She's proving me right. “That’s Etta. I adopted her.”

She stares straight at Etta and snickers. “You? You adopted a dog?”

“Why are you so surprised?” Etta, honey, if you rip her a new one, I promise not to think ill of you.

Enjoying San Francisco as a backdrop, the ghosts in Diane's 150-year old Victorian home augment the chorus in her head. With insomnia as their catalyst, these voices have become multifarious characters that haunt her well into the sun's crowning hours, refusing to let go until they have manipulated her into succumbing to their whims. Her experiences as an actress, business owner, artisan cake designer, software project manager, Internet radio disc jockey, vintage rock n' roll journalist/fan girl, and lover of dark and quirky personalities influence her idiosyncratic writing.

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Forbidden Flower Trailer

It's the Fall of 1994 in the small milltown of Belford, New York. The leaves are turning, the kids are going back to school, and the heat of Summer is giving way to a cool, misty season. It happens every Fall.

Only this Fall, people are disappearing into that mist. Some people are found torn apart, some people are found dead for no reason, and some people aren't found at all. Other people see strange things in the mist: ghosts and campfire stories.

There's something out there in that mist. Something old. Something that has slept for a long time, but has now woken up hungry. Maybe the people of Belford could resist it, but as the terrible Fall wears on, more and more of them start...changing. Acting bizarre and violent. In the end, only a small group of teenage defenders are left to make their stand.

It was late when Vicki finally left, and it was pretty dark. Clouds had covered the moon and stars, and it was foggy again.

Hm. Two nights in a row. Must be because it's getting so cold at night...but then, why is it doing that, either?

Valerie lived in a trailer a little ways out in the woods from Belford. Vicki lived right on the edge of town. It was roughly a fifteen-minute drive between their houses, on a narrow, winding, ill-maintained back road through the woods. Usually, that didn't bother Vicki a bit. Usually, she traveled that back road at approximately seventy miles per hour. Not tonight, though. Tonight, it was foggy enough to make the road a blank white wall no more than ten yards or so in front of her headlights. Trees were looming, massive shapes, turning the road into a dark corridor. Vicki drove well under the speed limit tonight.

Shit, I don't like this. Can't see signs and turns until you're almost to 'em...if I didn't know this road, I'd be having real trouble. She nervously checked her fuel gauge. Three-quarters full. Hate to break down tonight. That would really suck. Damn. What a night to be telling ghost stories.

That had been the last thing that she and Val had done before she had left: watch the flickering shadows that the fire pit cast into the woods and try to scare each other. It had started when Vicki had mentioned the story of “the Reaper,” and things had just gone from there. Two stories stuck with Vicki now. One she had told herself: the story of Old Man Harfield.

Supposedly, Luther Harfield had been a Baptist minister some time just before the turn of the century. One night, for no reason that anyone could discover, he had killed his entire family – his wife and four children – with an axe. He had been found the next day, sitting in a circle he had made with their bodies, just staring straight ahead. Horrified, the people of Belford – including much of his own congregation – had hauled him into the woods and lynched him.

Not long after, several campers were found hacked to bits with an axe. The murders continued for years, unsolved. There was no real pattern, but the killings happened more often around the time of year, and near the place, that Luther Harfield had been hanged. Finally, in the 1930's, a hobo who had been camping in the woods stumbled into town, a babbling wreck. Three of his friends had been killed by a man with an axe. He described the man, and the description fit Harfield exactly. The killings slowed down after that, but campers still disappeared occasionally, and every so often, someone would spot a man wandering the woods, carrying an axe.

Vicki had scared Val good with that one. She knew that Val would make sure all the doors on the trailer were locked after that one. Probably lock her window, too, the heat be damned. Might not go into the woods for days, even in the daytime. Vicki snickered a little at that.

But then she thought of the story that Val had told. Ordinarily, it wouldn't bother her at all, but after what had happened to Lila and Jeremy – shit, those stories were real! Besides, it was just the kind of night that made the imagination run wild. The fact that the story of the Roadster took place on the very road she was traveling made the whole matter that much worse.

It happened sometime in the Fifties, Val had said. The town thug at the time was a guy named Curtis Knowles. He'd fit the stereotype of the Greaser perfectly: greasy black hair, black leather jacket, customized car, switchblade, and all. One night, as he was driving home from a party in a clearing back in the woods that no longer existed, he had gone over the "Cop Drop" and died. The "Cop Drop" was a deceptively sharp turn in the road with a bank on one side that dropped twenty feet into a grove of trees. It had gotten its name because a police officer had, indeed, gone over that bank. He had survived. Curtis had not. The official line on his death had been that he was drunk and speeding, which he may have been, but it was whispered around Belford high school that one of the many people he had terrorized had been at the party and had cut his brake lines.

Soon after Curtis's death, the number of accidents at the Cop Drop, always high, increased dramatically. A few survivors reported that they had been driven off the road by Curtis's car – a huge black Fifties Ford with flames painted on its hood and sides. But there were very few survivors. Many were found in their cars at the bottom of the drop, their throats cut with a switchblade. Some people – even to this day – disappeared completely. They started off down the road, and somehow they just never made it to Belford. Others had been chased by Knowles's roadster from the Cop Drop to within sight of Belford – at which point it just vanished.

Vicki thought about that and shivered. Wish I could go faster without killing myself. I wanna get home.

Vicki was nearing the Cop Drop when she looked into her rearview mirror and nearly jumped out of her skin. Then she settled back down, trying to bring her breathing back to normal, and trying to make her heart stop pounding. It's just someone's headlights! She scolded herself. That's good news, you idiot! It means you're not alone on this stupid road. You're letting these stories get to you too much.

Then she looked at her rearview mirror, and she noticed two things that started her heart pounding again. The first was that the headlights were the wrong color. Rather than the usual bright, blinding yellow-white, they were a dead, blank gray.

The second was that they were much closer and approaching fast.

Oh, God.

The headlights disappeared below the rearview mirror's field of vision, and a solid thump rattled Vicki's car as the newcomer rammed her.

Vicki knew that, legally, she should not leave the scene of an accident. Common sense told her to stop and examine the damage. Common sense told her that what she thought was happening could not be. Something deeper than common sense told her to speed up.

Her foot began to press the pedal to the floor. The hum of her engine began to increase in pitch and volume. She dared a look in her mirror, and she felt an instant of relief as she saw the two gray circles fall a little bit back. Then the other car's engine roared, sending it lurching forward to slam into Vicki again. The jolt was harder this time, and Vicki was flung hard into her seatbelt, which slapped her right back into the cushions.

Hot fear rushed through Vicki's body, flushing her face. Her mouth, dry from her gasping breath, filled with the sour taste of fear. Her pulse pounded at her temples and throbbed in her ears, half-drowning the screaming engines. Her foot pressed harder, and the sound of her engine grew to a roar. The needle of her speedometer pressed toward seventy.

A yellow blur flashed past her on the right. She hadn't had time to read it, but she knew what it said. It was a sign that recommended a speed of 30 mph for the approaching turn.

Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. The Cop Drop. Oh, please, God.

She started to let up on the gas, hoping to actually try what they'd told her to do in Driver's Ed when she was entering a turn too fast: let up on the gas going into the turn, then use it again on the way through, hoping that it'll pull you through.

As she started to slow, her pursuer rammed her in the back again. Vicki's body whipcracked. She wasn't going to be allowed to do that.

Desperate, Vicki tried to get into the other lane, so she could take the turn on the inside, away from the Cop Drop itself.

Her pursuer wasn't going to allow that, either. Vicki saw a dark shape coming up on her left, cutting her off. The shape was black and shiny and massive compared to her 1984 Ford Taurus. It was also an old shape. Then she saw a streak of red starting just after those wrong-colored headlights.

The Roadster. This can't be happening.

The Roadster began to press toward her. Its front end bumped her rear.

I'm gonna die. Oh Jesus God I'm gonna die.

Suddenly, yellow-white light blazed in front of her. For the briefest of instants, Vicki thought that that light meant she was dead. Then she realized what it – they – were.

Headlights.

Coming the other way.

Vicki screamed. The newcomer was going to crash into the Roadster, the whole mass would crash into her...

The lights passed her by.

Nothing.

The lane beside her was empty.

Vicki took advantage of that, pulling into it, using her Driver's Ed technique as well as she could. She strained with all of her strength, trying to physically force her car onto a safe path.

Vicki flew around the corner and started to skid. The rear end of her car started to swing back out toward the Cop Drop.

Another of Vicki's Driver's Ed lessons came back to her: Turn into the skid.

She straightened her car and she didn't even pause before she took off down the road as fast as she dared, which was much faster than it had been before.

Only after she had righted her car did Vicki realize: They didn't crash. He wasn't in that lane.

She looked in her rearview mirror, expecting to see those gray headlights closing on her once more, but there was nothing. Just the darkness and the mist.

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Matthew Keville wrote his first short stories in first grade, when the books on the shelves didn't have the stories he wanted. The stories have been his constant friends since then, and they've carried him through some hard times. He grew up in a small town where you either leave at eighteen or live there forever. He elected to leave at eighteen. Now he lives in New York City where everyone is only working as a waiter or bus driver or stockbroker until they make it on Broadway. This makes him different and special, because he’s only working as a paralegal until he makes it as a writer.