Okay, this isn’t really flash fiction, but this is a story I wrote for a submission call earlier this year and I didn’t make the cut. So, hit me with your feedback! The good, the bad, and the ugly. Don’t worry, I can handle it!
“The Ferryman”
S.C. Jensen
2968 words
Genre: Paranormal
Waves chopped up the surface of Wailing Lake like teeth. A gibbous moon, ruddy from the harvest, hung low over the water. It cast a shadow there, a gaping black maw. Alma imagined the waves spilling from its centre, tiny and hungry, swelling as they rushed at the shore where they fell upon the rocks in a frenzy. The lake gnashed at her; spittle sprayed her face. But Alma stood just out of reach.
“Maybe next time, old girl.” Alma sucked a lungful of crisp autumn air through her cigarette and flicked the butt into the water. “Break time is over.”
Alma scrambled back up the narrow path through the pines to the parking lot. She opened her car door and the CB radio crackled.
She had known it would.
Alma floated through life on an invisible string that seemed to tug her where she needed to be. Lately, the line had sunk itself deep in the middle of Wailing Lake. She woke, like a somnambulist, upon its shore, toes flirting with the waves; she never remembered how she got there. Her mother—a great lover of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo—had called her a Wayfinder. Alma felt more like a Stumbler, yanked from place to place with no idea where she was going or why she was going there.
She never missed a call from dispatch, though.
The radio crackled again and she grabbed the handset. “Got a fare for me, Ralphie?”
“Alma, Queen of the Night, I knew you’d come through for me.” Ralph’s voice broke over the patchy connection. “Taking a smoke break by the lake?”
“You’re a magician.” Alma pulled out of the rest area and onto the gravel service road that would take her back to the highway. “How’d you guess?”
“The connection is shit. And you’re the only one crazy enough to be out in the sticks on the graveyard shift.”
“What can I say? It’s my favourite haunt.”
“That place is haunted. You wouldn’t catch me out there for a picnic.”
Alma let instinct guide her as she turned onto the pavement. She headed, with mild surprise, not toward town but up into the pass. “Gimme that fare, Ralphie.”
“You’re most of the way there, already. Foothills Inn.”
That was fifty clicks out of the normal service range for Ferryman Taxi. “That faux-chalet thing at Eagle Peak?”
“Don’t forget to nail him with the mileage surcharge.”
Alma cracked the window and lit another cigarette. “Of course, Ralphie. Everyone’s gotta pay the Ferryman.”
“See, you get it.” Ralph laughed. She pictured his face crinkling up, the way it did. She pictured the patterns that would etch his skin when he was an old man. If he made it that far. “That’s why I love you.”
“You love me because I take the shifts no one else wants.”
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t true, my Queen of the Night.”
“You don’t want me for your Queen.” She took a deep drag and smiled. “I’d take years off your life.”
“Doesn’t stop you from smoking.”
Alma hung up the handset. She liked Ralph, but a vague sense of unease disturbed the warm-and-fuzzies. Maybe she was ready to try again? She felt like she was. But what if she was wrong? What if Ralph ended up like her last—
No sense dwelling on it. If experience had taught Alma anything it was that dwelling on the past was like dragging an anchor behind you. You never got where you were going to and, worst of all, you could never get back.
Alma turned up the radio and punched the old taxi into a higher gear. She let the hum of the engine pull her away from her thoughts, back into herself. The fare was unusual but that didn’t matter. There was nothing Alma loved better than knowing where she was going.
###
It was different when she was a kid. Back then, Alma had a knack for being where she wanted to be. She’d show up right before her mom’s cookies came out of the oven, or when a pick-up Frisbee game needed one more player, or when the fireworks were about to start. Things happened when Alma was around. Even the other kids noticed it. In school, her nickname was Lucky.
Everyone wanted to be her friend.
Alma had luck, it was true. But there was good luck and bad luck. As she got older, she realized that Fate didn’t discriminate.
Alma imagined great balances, like the Scales of Justice, weighing and measuring her fortune. If everyone was to come out neutral in the end, Alma used up her good luck before puberty.
Maybe luck had nothing to do with balance. Maybe Alma always got what she needed. Maybe as you got older what you want and what you need is worlds apart. Either way, things took a definite downturn after her first cycle. That was the day her mother openly acknowledged her gift.
“You’re a Wayfinder, Alma.”
“What am I supposed to find my way to?” Abdominal cramps and fear consumed every drop of patience she might have had. “The tampon aisle?”
“I don’t know.” Her mother seemed to absorb all the patience Alma was losing, the maternal sponge. “We won’t know until you are claimed.”
“This is not the time for the sex talk, mom. Really.”
“No matter what, you will find your way, Alma.” Her mother stroked her hair and, for once, the gesture didn’t irritate her. The warmth of her mother’s touch reach from her roots all the way through her body, like electricity. “But we don’t know what your way is. Now that you are a woman, things will change.”
“I used to be lucky,” Alma said. “Now I feel like I’ve been cursed.”
Her mother’s fingers massaged her scalp, releasing some pent-up energy she didn’t know was stored there. Jolts of it shot through her limbs, making her feel more alive. And more afraid.
Her mother said, “Sometimes luck is a curse.”
###
Alma flew up the highway toward the pass. The taxi soared silently up the ever-increasing grade, wraithlike. The humming engine and thrumming tires lulled her into a meditative state. The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” came on the oldies station and Alma cranked her radio. The time it took to get to the Eagle Peak turn off evaporated into Ray Manzarek’s eerie keyboarding.
There’s a killer on the road.
The tiny hairs at the back of her neck stood and reached up as if the air really were charged with electricity from a storm. The ones on her forearms ached against the heavy sleeves of her leather jacket. Even the stubble on her shins pulled away from her skin. Alma shivered.
His brain is squirming like a toad.
She knew the killer wasn’t human. The killer was Death; stalking every one of them until the time was right. Stalking Alma in particular, it seemed. Or at least the ones she loved. Her mother had been right. Things had changed that day. Ever since her first cycle, Alma became a magnet for sickness and disaster. Death.
Girl, you’ve gotta love your man.
Hadn’t she?
It wasn’t enough.
Girl, you’ve gotta love your man.
Alma turned off onto the service road just before the summit. The gravel ground beneath her tires and the headlights cast a strange white glow upon the unlit surface. She slowed, expecting that the road wouldn’t be well maintained in the off season. But the gravel, illuminated by her moonlight-white high beams, stretched smoothly into the darkness beyond. A figure materialized on the side of the road.
Take him by the hand.
Alma slowed as she passed him. Pedestrians weren’t unusual this close to the flats. Still, she stared as she crept past. The man was thin, his shadowed face gaunt and drawn. He walked slowly, like he had nowhere in particular to go. Alma wondered which way he would turn when he reached the highway.
Make him understand.
The taxi coasted past the guy and up toward the Foothills Inn. She wanted to stop and ask if he was okay. The fullness of autumn wasn’t yet upon them but the air had a bite to it. Alma tried to catch a glimpse of him in her rear-view mirror but the darkness had swallowed him whole.
The man would be cold tonight.
A chalet style building loomed above her at the peak, a gothic ski-bunny haven. Huge peaked windows stared down on her, black but for the reflection of her headlights dancing against their panes. The place was hollow. Empty. She sensed it long before she pulled up to the deserted valet station, before she knocked on the darkened glass of the entrance.
“Closed for the season,” a small sign inside the window proclaimed.
Obviously, Alma thought. But who had called Ralph for pick up? She slammed the car door and lit another cigarette.
The hitchhiker.
The world on you depends.
No, he wasn’t a hitchhiker, thumb out for any ride. That had been her fare wandering toward the highway. Why hadn’t she stopped? So much for knowing where she was going. Alma cursed herself and peeled out of the parking lot, back toward her fare. Hopefully he wouldn’t be too pissed off that she’d missed him the first time.
Our life will never end.
When Alma’s headlights found the man this time he stood still, waiting. She rolled up next to him, and he climbed into the back seat.
“Sorry about that, buddy.”
He said nothing. Alma met the man’s eyes in the mirror. His skin was thin and sallow; his eyes as black and empty as the windows of the Inn. “Where do you need to go?”
He didn’t even blink.
Gotta love your man.
Alma put the taxi back into gear and rolled down the service road. She knew where to take him.
###
It didn’t take the kids long to stop calling her Lucky. Alma’s thirteenth year was a turning point in her young life. Over the next five years, friends, once drawn to Alma like flies to honey, now dropped like them. Everyone that Alma loved was torn from her, ruthlessly. She went from always being in the right place at the right time, to being a harbinger of doom.
It wasn’t that Alma was ever the cause of Death. Yet she was always there when tragedy struck. She called the ambulance when Peter—her best friend since kindergarten—had an asthma attack at summer camp when they were fourteen. Six months after that, her cousin Lilijana took a line drive to the face pitching fast ball and died before help could arrive. The doctors said it was a freak accident, no one’s fault. Alma never believed it; if she hadn’t been there, she knew, Lily would have lived. The year after that, Alma’s friend Paula was badly injured in a house fire. Alma visited the hospital moments before Paula succumbed to the infection that weakened her burn-ravaged body; even Paula’s mother said it was as if the girl had been waiting for Alma to say goodbye.
Alma tried not to visit the hospital after that. No one blamed her, but Alma knew something wasn’t right.
Still, even when she tried to stay away, sometimes she opened her eyes and she was standing before someone who was hurt or sick, not knowing how she got there, but knowing that if she was there it was to say goodbye. Just like she now found herself standing on the shores of Wailing Lake, staring at the churning waters, as if there was something she was forgetting to do.
Her mother was the last one before Alma ran away.
Cancer. Alma knew her mother was sick. Alma knew she was dying. But she thought if she just stayed away from the hospital, somehow, her mother would keep living.
She couldn’t, though.
Alma couldn’t stay away and her mother couldn’t keep living.
“I knew you would come.”
“Please don’t leave me, Mama.” Alma cried into her mother’s hand knowing that she was, somehow, killing her. “I need you.”
“You don’t need me,” her mother had said. “You have been claimed.”
###
Into this house we’re born.
The song had ended ages ago but the lyrics still rang in Alma’s head. She accelerated through the curves that led out of the pass and back toward the flats. The almost-full-moon hung higher now. It had lost the bloody sheen of early evening but still looked hungry.
Is this what I am? Alma thought.
The man in the back seat stared straight ahead. He knew where he was going. Alma knew, too. The familiar tug in her guts told her where to go, even without his direction. His glassy black stare was focussed somewhere far beyond what Alma could see.
Far beyond what she would ever see, if she was right.
Into this world we’re thrown.
“You have been claimed,” her mother said. Only now did she believe it. Only now did Alma understand.
###
When she was eighteen, Alma ran. She thought if she could get far enough away, her path would change. There was no one left to hold her to her home. Everyone she loved was dead.
But she hadn’t run far enough.
The same pattern started again. Everywhere Alma went, went Death.
She cut herself off. She isolated herself from people, just the bare minimum social contact to get through life. That’s when Alma had taken to the night shift, though back then it was restocking shelves at a tech warehouse. Still, she couldn’t get away.
Still, she found Jared.
Jared, the tortured scholar, had too many lifetimes living inside him. Too many souls. They fought and he was miserable. He was magnetic. Alma was drawn to him, helplessly. She woke on his shores, blinking, wondering how it had happened. For a little while, they were there, together.
She loved him.
And then she killed him.
###
Riders on the storm.
Alma pulled back into the Wailing Lake rest area, and this time she wasn’t even surprised. This was where the man needed to be. This was where she would always end up. It only made sense.
The man opened the back door of her cab and closed it resolutely. He didn’t pay her. Alma had expected that. She knew Ralph would be pissed; missing the fare and the mileage surcharge. But this was not a normal fare.
The man lingered outside her window.
Alma cranked it down and lit a cigarette. His dead eyes stared through her. But he looked like he wanted to say something. His eyes sat like dull black stones in his sockets. His cheeks sunk deeper into his skull.
“Go on, then.” Alma sucked on the filter, relished the burn in her lungs. “This is the place, isn’t it?”
The man’s lips, thin and colourless, parted. But instead of words, something else fell out. Alma caught it. A thick gold coin landed in her open palm.
Riders on the storm.
###
The night shift hadn’t saved her. Alma might be Queen of the Night at Ferryman Taxi, but she felt like Queen of Nothing. She walked through her life with blinders, hoping no one would notice her. Hoping she would notice no one.
Now there was Ralph.
Before that, Jared.
You’ve gotta love your man.
The last time she had seen Jared it was at his apartment. He hadn’t called but she wanted to see him. When she opened the front door she knew why.
The Doors played on living room stereo. Water ran at the back of the apartment.
Alma opened the door to the bathroom. Pink tinged water overflowed the bathtub and lapped at her feet. Jared lay, wrists up, in the tepid pool. One arm was cut through, wrist to elbow. The other had a jagged gash near the palm but the wound had dissolved.
Unfinished.
“Help me,” Jared had said.
Alma grabbed her phone and dialed. But Jared said, “No!”
She stared at him, naked and vulnerable in the tub. His genitals floated on the surface of the water like a strange flower, a grotesque imitation of life. He said, “Help me.”
Alma helped him. She picked up the razorblade left by Jared’s weakened hand and dragged it through the vein. She guided him from this world into the next.
That was what she was supposed to do, right?
You’ve gotta love your man.
When the ambulance arrived there was nothing they could do for Jared.
Alma ran again.
###
Alma held the coin in her hand and watched the man disappear into the darkness of the trailhead. She closed the taxi door and followed.
At the shore the man hesitated. He let the waves of Wailing Lake kiss his toes. Then, slowly, he stepped into her waters. The man walked forward, deeper and deeper into her, until she lapped at his ribs, his shoulders, his throat.
Then he stopped and looked back at Alma. Those black eyes told her everything she needed to know. He walked into the waves like a thing that belonged. Alma felt peace descended upon her in the first time for years.
###
Alma sat in the driver’s seat of the Ferryman Taxi, waiting for the next call. She sucked on a cigarette and tried not to think too much about the man in the lake.
“Queen of the Night.” Ralph’s voice crackled through the speaker. “I have a pick-up for you.”
“Just as long as it isn’t you, Ralphie,” she said. Alma flicked the butt of her cigarette toward the waters of Wailing Lake. She knew where Ralph was going to send her.
There was nothing Alma loved more than knowing where she was going.
