BACK   

= THE FIREMEN'S DANCE =

Dark Fantasy

by John Argo

6.

Another fog bank rolled past. Roger slowed way down, wiping the windows with his knuckles, while Maureen wiped with a hankie. For two or three minutes, the car was at a dead stop as visibility was reduced to nothing, and drizzle hissed on the car's metal roof. When the fog passed, the young couple were gone.

No, they were walking up a grassy hill. They held hands again, but she appeared angry, pulling him along. "Drunk," Roger muttered. He'd been a cop for years.

The young man kept pulling at her as if to reason with her.

"Roger, do something. They're having a silly argument, and they'll die of pneumonia out on a night like this, she without even a decent wrap."

"All right." Roger got out, raising his lapels against the chill. Another fog float came, and he walked headfirst into it. But it did not butt heads with him — it flew silently past, like a boat in a fast stream on a river, leaving only damp cold kisses on his face. He stumbled up the embankment and was about to call their names.

Cold knives went through him as he heard a woman's voice burst forth in a shrill scream that modulated into a long wail of rage and denial, then into a groan of grief that dragged out, loudly, more like the growl of an animal than anything human.

Then silence.

Roger thought he heard a few words spoken in a calm male voice. But it might have been a whisper of the faint wind. Roger broke into a run to see if he could help.

Heart pounding, feeling utterly defenseless without the gun of his 30 years' police service, he neared the top of the hill. Don't even have a flashlight, dammit.

There was nobody on the other side of the hill, where he'd expected to find a young couple in trouble.

From the top of the hill, the view took his breath away. He stared out over the grassy plain of a cemetery — several acres of monuments, statues, columns, damp gardens, and tombstones. Something — a clingy something, a hint of her perfume, the echo of her voice, the strength and life in her handsome limbs — made him walk numbly down into the city of the dead, where the fog moved in ghostly masses, and a damp moonlight winked in shades of cloudy glass, and droplets fell one by one from soaked branches. Black rivulets of tears ran down the cheeks of granite cherubs. He moved among the strange little temples and statues until he came to a mausoleum of shining dark brown marble, a little taller than he, and about ten feet around. It was built like a miniature house, with a cross on top and two large flower basins. The imitation windows were barred with thick wrought iron, and a peek inside revealed a darkness deeper than that of night. Cold eked out of there, enough to chill his bones in a second.

Walking around the front of the tomb, he could see, under an overhang, the letters embedded, stainless steel into marble: "Duncaster— Perry and Jane— Together Eternally." Trapped under thick glass were a couple of photographs — the young couple smiling at their wedding, a distant shot of their car wreck with firemen desperately working to free them, the funeral attended by half the town, a glamor shot of Jane, with Perry proudly looking on.

On a steel sconce was draped Maureen's scarf. Someone had torn it to shreds in a fit of pain and rage. Someone else had neatly and lovingly folded the pieces together and patiently hung them where they would stay clean and dry.

Other shreds hung from the letters. And all around the bottom of the base were objects, some so rusted or rotted they were barely distinguishable from the drifted muck on the marble: a key, a rotted leather key case, a penny, a broken pen, a credit card faded from exposure, a rusty paper clip…

TOP  |  MAIN

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.