“I don’t understand,” she said.
The woman – goat eyes fixed on Lori – took half a step forward. The smell of her body odor became more intense, and Lori wrinkled her nose and half turned her head in a vain attempt to mitigate the stench’s effect.
“Confess and atone – or suffer.”
The woman’s voice was sandpaper-rough, and her breath had a strangely fruity smell. Lori wondered if she were ill.
The woman leaned her face closer to Lori, and although it wasn’t, couldn’t be possible, her rectangular pupils rotated in opposite directions. Startled, Lori stepped backward quickly, colliding with the spices on the shelves and knocking a number of them to the floor. She lost her grip on her shopping basket, and it fell to the floor as well, tipping over as it landed, the ingredients for her dinner spilling forth. Her purse slipped off her shoulder and slid down to her forearm, but she managed to keep it from falling.
The woman stared at her a moment longer, but made no further effort to come closer. Then, without saying anything more, she turned and started walking down the aisle, away from Lori. She walked with slow, shuffling steps, and it seemed to take a long time before she reached the end of the aisle, turned, and was lost to sight.
Lori hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until her lungs began to ache. She inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it. The combined smells of the woman’s strong body odor and her strange fruity breath still suffused the air. She wanted to get out of there, and she was tempted to leave her groceries where they’d fallen, haul ass out to the parking lot, jump in her Honda Civic, drive off at full speed, and never come back. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t have been much of a physical therapist if she didn’t know how to keep going when the going got tough – or in this case, bizarre.
She slid her purse back up to her shoulder, then knelt down and began picking up items and putting them back into the plastic shopping basket. She breathed shallowly to minimize the impact of the woman’s stink, and she tried not to think about those goat eyes and how they had appeared to rotate in their sockets. No, it hadn’t been the eyes themselves that moved. Only the pupils had rotated. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, but she did. Still, did it matter? Either way was equally fucked up.
Once she’d retrieved her meager supply of groceries, she picked up the spices she’d knocked down and put them back in their proper places on the shelves. Feeling better now that she’d restored at least a small bit of order to the world, she picked up the shopping basket and headed toward the self-checkout. She still didn’t have any garlic powder, but it didn’t matter anymore. She intended to buy the groceries, but right now the notion of making food – let alone eating it – nauseated her. All she wanted to do was go home, put her groceries away, and take a long hot shower, using copious amounts of body wash to cleanse the woman’s stink from her skin and hair. She’d toss her uniform into the wash as well. And if she couldn’t get the stench out of the fabric, she’d throw the uniform away. She had others.
Look forward, push onward.
She told her patients this, but it was something of a personal mantra for her as well. It had gotten her through a lot in her life, and it would get her through an encounter with a crazy woman in FoodSaver. But despite her determination to put the incident behind her, she heard the woman’s rough voice speak once more in her mind.
Confess and atone – or suffer.
* * *
Lori left the store, carrying her groceries in a single plastic bag that dangled from her left hand. A pleasant breeze caressed her body, and the sky was a bright, clear blue. Small trees had been placed throughout the parking lot, and while most of their leaves were still green, some had begun to change color. A few dry ones had fallen, and they made soft skittering sounds like small insects as the wind blew them across the asphalt. The scene wasn’t perfect, of course. It was the tail end of the evening rush hour, and while downtown Oakmont, Ohio, was hardly a busy metropolitan hub, the traffic flowing past FoodSaver was steady, and the air held the faint tang of exhaust fumes.
It would smell worse if the wind wasn’t blowing, she thought, and she reminded herself to be thankful for small graces. Not that she was religious. Her parents were more or less devout Lutherans, but both she and her sister had stopped going to church years ago. She still considered herself spiritual, though, in a loosey-goosey nondenominational way. Besides, it never hurt to appreciate the good things in life, even the small ones.
The lot was full for a Tuesday night, and she’d had to park farther away from the store’s entrance than she usually did. That was okay, though. She had an app on her phone that recorded the number of steps she took in a day and how many calories she burned by walking. So as far as she was concerned, the more she walked, the better. Her car was parked close to the street, next to a tall lamppost. She always tried to park next to one, day or night. She could more easily find her car that way, and at night the illumination was a good security measure. She headed straight for her Civic, feeling better with every step she put between herself, the grocery, and the goat-eyed woman. Maybe by the time she got home, her appetite would’ve returned.
As she passed a pair of SUVs parked next to each other, a flash of movement caught her eye. Without thinking, she turned to look in that direction, and she saw…something. It moved too fast for her to get a good look at it, but she had the impression of a tall person with thin arms and legs, dressed entirely in black. But whoever it was slipped in front of the vehicles with silent, liquid grace, blocking her view. It happened so fast that she wasn’t certain she’d seen anything at all. It had probably been her imagination, she decided. She’d been creeped out by the goat-eyed woman, and now she was seeing sinister shadows flitting around the parking lot.
She frowned. That was odd. Why did she think it was sinister? The way it moved? Or…. An image came to her then of the dark figure she’d glimpsed. Originally, she’d thought she’d seen a person dressed in black: black long-sleeved pullover, black pants, black shoes…. But now she realized that the figure – she was having an increasingly hard time thinking of it as a person – had been black all over. The hands had been black, and so had the head. It was as if the figure had been garbed in a black skin-tight outfit that completely covered its body, making it look like a living shadow.
It was a ridiculous thought, but she walked faster, and although she felt an itch between her shoulder blades, as if someone was watching her, she didn’t turn around to look, too afraid of what she might see.
* * *
Neal Goodman was tired.
He’d started working at seven this morning, and – with the exception of the half hour he’d taken for lunch – he’d worked straight through until five. To someone looking in from the outside, the work of a dentist hardly seemed strenuous, and it wasn’t as if he spent his days digging ditches or anything. But bending over to peer into patients’ mouths and holding your arms up while working on their teeth hour after hour took a physical toll. His lower back ached, and the base of his neck was so sore that it hurt to turn his head in either direction. The joints in his hands throbbed thanks to his arthritis, and it was all he could do to maintain his grip on the steering wheel of his Volvo. When he got home, he’d have to do his best to hide his discomfort from Rosie. If his wife saw how badly he was hurting, she’d start nagging him about retiring again. He would turn seventy this January, and while he liked working – even if it was getting harder on his body as time passed – Rosie was beginning to wear him down.
You’ve been a dentist for almost forty years. You’ve had your own practice – a very successful one – for thirty of those years. You’ve earned a rest, and you should take it before you’re too old to enjoy it.
It was this last part of her argument that was the most effective. Aside from some aches and pains, he was in good health for a man of sixty-nine. But how long would his health hold up? How much time did he have left before his life ended? He wasn’t by nature a morbid man, but he was a realist. With luck, he’d live another decade, but more than that? Maybe not. And even if he did live into his eighties, would he still be strong and healthy enough both physically and mentally to keep enjoying his life, or would he end up parked in some assisted-living facility, marking time until his old body finally had the good sense to give up the ghost? The latter outcome seemed more likely.
Maybe he should make an appointment to talk with his financial advisor to see if it was feasible for him to retire at the end of the fiscal year. If nothing else, it would make Rosie happy and keep her off his back, at least for a little while.
That decided, he started thinking about what he might do with his newfound leisure time. Go on a cruise, maybe. Rosie had always wanted to take a cruise to Alaska. He had no idea why the notion appealed to her so. She hated winter. Maybe he could talk her into going someplace warmer, like the Caribbean. He’d seen commercials for Caribbean cruises on TV, and they’d always looked—
His train of thought broke as he realized he was approaching FoodSaver. He remembered that Rosie had asked him to stop there on his way home and pick up…something. He hadn’t written it down because it was such a normal thing to pick up – like milk or bread – that he figured he wouldn’t forget it. But of course he had. He could stop anyway, go inside, and hope that being in the store would jog his memory. Or he could pass FoodSaver by, continue on home, and when Rosie asked if he’d gotten what she’d asked for, he could say he’d been too tired to stop. She might feel sorry for him then and let him off the hook. Calling her and asking her to remind him what he was supposed to get wasn’t an option. She worried about him enough as it was. He didn’t want her to think he was starting to show signs of dementia. Passing by FoodSaver because he was too tired to stop was one thing. But forgetting the single ordinary item she’d asked him to pick up? She’d take that as an early symptom of Alzheimer’s. Best just to go on home.
He’d eased up on the gas while debating with himself, but now that he’d made his decision, he increased pressure on the accelerator and his car began to pick up speed. He saw something out of the corner of his eye then, and he reflexively turned to see what it was.
A woman, wearing jeans and a pale-blue sweatshirt, stood at the entrance to FoodSaver’s parking lot. At first, he thought she was waiting on someone to pick her up – a bus or an Uber – but then, for reasons he wasn’t quite clear on, he understood that she’d been waiting for him. He locked eyes with her, and for an instant, it was as if time came to a screeching halt. The woman was at least a dozen yards from him, but he saw her as if in close-up, every detail clear and vivid – especially her oddly shaped pupils. Her face was impassive, but there was something about her that spoke of grim purpose. And then, as quickly as time had slowed, it returned to normal speed.
He took his gaze off her, looked forward, and was startled to see a man standing on the road directly in his path. No, not a man. A shadowy thing shaped like a man. It had a head, torso, arms, and legs but otherwise was completely featureless: a silhouette come to life. It was tall, limbs long and lean, and it made him think of the way a person’s reflection could be stretched in the warped glass of a funhouse mirror. Neal didn’t have time to brake or swerve. All he could do was tighten his grip on the steering wheel and grit his teeth. He wanted to close his eyes – wanted to do this very much – but they remained open as he struck the dark figure.
Except he didn’t.
There was no sudden jolt, no horrible meaty thump of his Volvo hitting whatever it was. He saw a flash of darkness rushing toward him, felt a blast of cold course over and through his body, and then he was past the shadow thing. He looked at his rearview mirror and saw the creature – whatever it was – standing on the street behind him, seemingly unharmed.
He passed through me, Neal thought. Or I passed through him.
The cold he’d felt…. That had been the instant his body had come into contact with the shadow’s substance. Somehow the thing was insubstantial enough to pass through glass and metal but still solid enough to affect him as it moved through him. He wondered how—
Pain slammed into his chest with sledgehammer force. His left arm stiffened and went numb, and his left hand slipped off the steering wheel. He couldn’t breathe, and his vision narrowed to tiny pinpoints of light surrounded by darkness. Without realizing he was doing so, he pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and his right hand – which had a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel – turned hard to the left. His Volvo swerved into oncoming traffic, and the driver of a white pickup gave an angry blast of the vehicle’s horn as Neal cut in front of it. Neal missed colliding with the pickup by less than a foot, and his Volvo bounced over the curb, went over the sidewalk, and roared into FoodSaver’s parking lot, continuing to pick up speed as it went.
Neal was in agony, teeth gritted, lower lip caught between them, flesh bitten, blood pouring out of his mouth. But a part of him was detached from the pain, was merely observing what was happening, not scared so much as confused. He’d had a checkup less than a month ago, and the doctor had said he was in good shape for a man of his age, and she’d said his heart sounded strong and healthy. But if what the doctor had told him was true, how could this be happening? It took more than a few weeks to develop heart disease, didn’t it?
He saw another woman, this one wearing a blue uniform top and carrying a small bag of groceries. He was heading straight for her, and she turned to look at him, her expression one of terrified disbelief.
Toilet paper, he thought. I’m supposed to get toilet paper.
* * *
Lori was two-thirds of the way to her car when the sounds of a blaring car horn and screeching tires caught her attention. She looked toward the street, expecting to see an accident take place, most likely involving someone who was about to discover why it wasn’t advisable to ride another driver’s ass during rush hour. But instead of witnessing one vehicle rear- end another, she saw a Volvo swerve into FoodSaver’s parking lot and come barreling toward her, engine racing.
