Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

Tad took a deep breath and let it out, and, made a little mushroom cloud that floated off and broke apart.

“How does this work?” Tad said. “This vision business. You’ve told me about how you got to get some kind of noise out of things. But I don’t know that I really get it. Not totally.”

“Have to find the sound,” Harry said. “Kayla’s dad died, and it was violent, most likely he raised a ruckus. That leaves an imprint, and I’m the conduit. Show me the door where he was hanged, Kayla.”

Kayla took his hand. He liked that part. She pulled him into the darkness and flashed the light on a door. It was open and led into a small office that had a glass front. The glass was cracked.

They didn’t go inside.

“Here’s another thing,” Kayla said, letting go of his hand. “Look down low on the door.”

Harry looked. It had dents in the wood.

“That’s where he was kicking his heels,” she said. Then she swallowed big, adding, “Shit.”

“Kayla,” Harry said, “I do this, tell you what happened, it might not be what you want.”

“I know.”

“Kid,” Tad said, “you sure you want to do this? You nearly shit your pants just worrying about running your car into potholes where there might have been an airbag went off.”

“I’m not as bad as I used to be.”

“Yeah, but this is the big time here.”

“Just want the two of you to watch me, make sure I’m okay.”

“You got it, kid.”

“What I’m gonna do, is I’m gonna pull this door back, slam it, see that does anything. It does, I’ll be gone. Just make sure I don’t hurt myself. I might not be able to stand up. Sometimes it’s like getting hit by a train full of emotions. Runs me over, drags me down the track. After a minute, Tad, pick up something, start beating around the parts table in different places, smack the walls—there’s a rubber hose, a fan belt on the table. Use one of those.”

“Hit stuff?” Tad asked, as Kayla played the light on the table.

“Yeah.”

Tad found a rubber hose, slapped it gently in his palm. “I’m ready, kid.”

“Good. Kayla, you keep the light on me. Make sure I’m all right. Gets too much, you two pick me up and carry me out of here. Farther away I am from the event, quicker I’ll get over it. Understood?”

“Got you,” Kayla said.

“Just start whacking shit?” Tad asked again.

“Yeah.”

“This reminds me of that time in the honky-tonk,” Kayla said. “Looking for ghosts.”

“Thing that was different then, I didn’t really think we’d find one…. I need to concentrate a moment.”

Kayla squeezed Harry’s hand, let it go.

The sounds always surrounded him, ready to swoop in and take hold and twist him into a knot, but he told himself what he had been telling himself over and over with mixed results for some time. He found he could keep the sounds pretty much at bay. At least they didn’t leap at him pantherlike anymore if he disturbed one of those imbedded rumbles. They reverberated gently, and the images they held fluttered at the corners of his mind like vampire bats in the shadowy edges of a poorly lit tunnel. He could feel them and almost see them in the creaking sounds that the wind made in the old building, in the shifting of the aluminum siding.

There was something here, all right.

Waiting.

Harry took hold of the door, moved it gently at first to make sure there was play. It moved creaky on its hinges, but it moved. He swung it back and forth a few more times, then pulled it forward quick, slammed it toward the wall—

—sound vaulted out of it and with it came all the colors of the world, and then some, and they felt wet and heavy and they jetted into his head and made it swell until it exploded with—

Darkness flapped through his skull, dragging damp wings.

Thud, thud, thud .

A man formed out of the darkness and hung from the door Harry had slammed. It was Kayla’s father, dangling there in bra and fishnet stockings, pink panties with lace, his heels beating a tattoo against the door, his tongue, thick and dark, thrashing like a snake tongue tasting air. The wire around his neck bit deep into his flesh. His hands were tied. So were his ankles. He kept kicking back with his legs, striking the door hard with his heels.

The dark tunnel view broke down, widened.

Another man stood to the side of the door, his head tossed back as he observed. He had on a thick coat and hat. White puffs of cold came out of his mouth in what seemed like slow motion, looked like wads of cotton being pulled skyward on an invisible string.

As the man hung there, another man stood in the shadows, by the worktable that contained the parts. He was in darkness, his face not clear.

The man in the hat slowly took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and put it in his mouth. He produced a lighter from another pocket, lit the cigarette, and there was a snap as the sound of the lighter came alive. Harry could hear Jones’s heels beating big-time; he could even hear the hatted man let out his breath as he released his first drag of smoke. And this time, Harry clearly saw his face.

It wasn’t anyone he recognized.

Slap .

Slap .

Slap .

Harry couldn’t figure where it all came from, the slapping sounds, and the slaps kept coming, the sound slightly different after the first three, as if something different had been struck.

And then it came to him.

Tad.

With the hose.

And the vision wadded up into a black ball and went away, and Harry was facing the office now, and he saw Tad bring the hose up, strike the side of the office, just under the glass front—

Slap .

—the redheaded guy he’d seen before, one in the shelter, it was him, and he was being thrown against the glass by the hatted man, the back of his skull hitting it, cracking it, spiderwebbing it, and he was twisting free of the hatted man’s grasp—

Slap .

—a pocketknife flashing open in the redhead’s hand, cutting at the hatted man’s face. A little dark line of blood spat out of the hatted man’s cheek, hit the glass in beads. The redhead broke free, darted—

—all of it wadded up again, and—

Slap .

Slap .

—leaping images, some of them ghostly and overlapping, not entirely discernible.

The redhead hit the back door with his hands and it flew open. A rectangle of silver light burst into the garage and the redhead ran into it, out the back, up the hill and—

—faded.

His last vision was of the hatted man grabbing at a phone in the office, popping his own knife out of his pocket with a flick, cutting at the phone wire…and then—

Nausea, pain, a twisting of emotions, a crumpling of darkness, a flash of light and the most horrible sensations he had ever experienced, then he was rushing along some bat-ass dark corridor, things reaching out to touch him. He saw light at the end of it all. The light was not very bright, and it was punctuated by little silver dots, and after a moment Harry realized he was lying on his back at the rear of the garage looking up at the stars, gasping in cold air, and then the moon—

—no, Tad’s face dropped down over him, and Tad said, “Kid, you went someplace fucked-up, real quick and real bad. You stopped breathing. Kayla gave you mouth-to-mouth. Just consider, it could have been me, and I need a breath mint.”

Thank goodness for small favors, Harry thought. Then he realized that he was not lying on the ground, but on Kayla. She had his head in her lap. He had been here before. Years before. He liked it then and he liked it now.

She bent forward to look down at him. A tear fell from her eye and landed on his forehead. It felt good and warm out there in the cold air.