David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

These were not new questions that Rueben grappled with and, in fact, were rhetorical in nature: a mantra of dissatisfaction, unease, and frustration that was recited nightly on his long way home from the police department where he was employed. Rueben already knew the answers to the why and when of his questions; the agony lay in the what-to-do.

He was a good, even exceptionally good, dispatcher — an important, if unglamorous, profession; the first voice that the frightened, desperate, and irate heard when they dialed for help. When he’d had a few too many at the annual Christmas party, he was often heard to remark proudly, if a little resentfully, that without him (meaning all dispatchers, presumably) help would never arrive. There were few desperate situations that his disembodied voice had not been a party to, and yet, unlike the officers that he sent to the scene, he had never experienced the actual blood, vomit, and tears of unruly life, and in truth, he was glad.

Rueben contemplated the idea (for at least the hundredth time) of asking one of these officers to pay his neighbor a visit and, as always, dismissed the thought. The officers would see it for what it really was: a strong-arm demonstration, shady and gangsterlike, and would refuse. Worse, they would view him with contempt for not being man enough to do his own dirty work. Rueben squirmed at the thought as a sudden gust of wind shoved his car toward the center line.

An oncoming pair of headlights appeared suddenly from around a curve and began to flash high beams in an angry warning. Rueben twisted the wheel to the right, startled from his reverie by an accompanying blast from the other driver’s horn as the car flew by without slowing. Gravel played a metallic tattoo on the undercarriage of his ancient Ford as it rode onto the shoulder at too high a speed. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered, twisting the wheel yet again and resuming the roadway. “Concentrate... concentrate.”

The nightscape seemed to reflect his turmoil — wherever his headlights fell, movement and shadow grappled and receded. A small white branch shot out of the darkness and skittered across the windshield like a ghost crab; Rueben slowed the car.

Somewhere far ahead, just beyond the reaches of a lone street lamp, there was movement. At least, Rueben thought he saw movement, though he could see nothing now. Yet, there was something that had drawn his attention. Even now, like a ripple in a pond or a disturbance of the mist, there was the suggestion of something. Rueben strained his eyes in the gloom. Yes, there it was again, on his side of the street! Linear and purposeful... nothing out of nature, certainly, and moving right towards him. Rueben felt a drop of perspiration form beneath his heavy, long-out-of-fashion moustache. “What on earth,” he breathed uneasily. Car and phantom closed on one another.

A figure began to form at the murky outer fringes of the head-lamps: improbably tall and wobbly, a shifting dark kaleidoscope of flapping wings, limbs, and even tentacles, rushing headlong towards the car.

Then it arrived full-blown in the glare of the headlights: face, a rigid, unshaven mask of discomfort; eyes, squinted nearly shut behind dirty taped glasses that returned the car lamps’ brilliance in miniature. The tattered old army overcoat that the man wore waved and flapped about him as he pumped along on the spindly, rusty bike, and his filthy scarf and hair whipped this way and that in the wild wind. He glared at Rueben through the windshield, though it was impossible that he could see in. Rueben feared that he might intentionally collide with the car; he followed the white shoulder line so closely. He rode as if to challenge the oncoming driver.

“You idiot!” Rueben screamed as he swerved to the left at the last moment and the apparition was swallowed up by the night. “You idiot,” he repeated more softly, chancing a backwards glance and half expecting to see the hated cyclist following. He wiped each palm on his trouser legs as more beads of sweat popped out on his upper lip (the real reason he had never shaved the unfashionable face hair).

Him, Rueben fumed, unknowingly picking up speed. Was there no getting away from that demented lowlife? How had he ended up with such a neighbor? And to pop up just when he was thinking about him. What were the odds — out here; in the middle of the night?

It wasn’t always so bad, he mused, steadily picking up speed as he narrowed down to the last few miles. No, it wasn’t that bad before Curt died. Uncomfortable, yes. But now... intolerable.

If Rueben had been less distracted by his train of thought, he might have been forewarned by the events of his drive: the wind, the branch, the other car, even his hated neighbor — the wildness of the night seemed determined to drive all before it. Yet Rueben remained impervious, wrapped in his downward-spiraling thoughts, even as his foot grew ever heavier on the accelerator. The first deer had actually bounded in front of his car and vanished into the darkness of the other side of the road before his brain could signal his foot to brake. The fawn that followed was not so fortunate.

In the split second that it took for Rueben to react, he saw, or more accurately, perceived in a flash of tan and white and just the suggestion of a large, moist eye, the smaller animal attempt to make the same crossing as its mother. The sickening thud that followed was simultaneous with the scream of his tires attempting to grip the asphalt. The deerling was flung back in the direction from which it had sprung.

Rueben managed to stop the car on the shoulder of the road some fifty yards away and clambered out into a haze of burnt, stinking rubber that, incredibly, hung in the air like a fog. It was as if the hideous impact had silenced the very wind and the night world now watched with held breath. By the light of his remaining headlamp, Rueben examined the damage as best he could. Besides the lamp, he could see that the grille was smashed, and with a frisson of horror, that several tufts of fur were caught in it, but as no fluid appeared to be seeping from the car and the engine was apparently unaffected, he had only the tire to be concerned with. A long streak of blood led him to the wheel well. Cautiously, so as not to smear himself, he felt about until he was satisfied that the tire was not damaged or impeded by the crumpled quarter panel. Rueben stood and carefully inspected his palms, but saw only road dirt.

He stumbled along the roadside in the direction from which he had come, scanning this way and that for the injured animal, as small stones skittered from beneath his shoes. He prayed that it was not still alive and suffering, as he had no idea what to do in such a case and doubted that he had the nerve to put it out of its misery, if he did.

No nerve was required, however. Rueben found the small, broken body at the wood line, and even by the phosphorescent moon-light, it was obviously dead. He stared down at it from the edge of the lonely road and was struck with the enormity and finality of death, as evidenced by this tiny, frail, yet once vibrant creature. It already had the deflated look of the absence of life, and even the large, bright eye that he had glimpsed the second before collision was filmed and sticky-looking.

“You were goin’ too fast.”

Rueben uttered a small cry and took several steps backwards, almost losing his balance.

“Way too fast,” the phlegm-choked voice challenged again from the darkness.

Rueben’s dilated pupils were now able to make out the dim figure that stood like a statue in the greater darkness of a nearby oak. He could just discern the bicycle that the figure leaned on and that had brought him noiselessly to the scene. With a fresh outbreak of sweating on his upper lip and a slightly sick feeling in his stomach, Rueben acknowledged what he already knew — that his hated neighbor was now a witness to his crime against nature.