Excerpt: Death on the Trinity

I’m walking down a dark empty street, a wide industrial area with warehouses, disreputable offices, and auto body shops on either side. It’s dark and I’m heading towards the far end of the street where the city runs out and the river bottom begins. Something rustles in the garbage off to my left and I feel a chill run up the back of my neck. I’m not sure exactly where I am or how I’ve gotten here. Fear grips the pit of my stomach and my heartbeat speeds up, but I keep walking, down into the deeper shadows at the end of the street, towards the old, giant, gleaming blue car that hulks there, waiting for me.

As I approach it, everything seems inevitable now, almost foreordained. The sense of foreboding intensifies. I walk up to the car. My steps slow. The car is electric blue, with fins and deco accents, straight out of the 1950s, and the driver’s window is rolled down. There is someone sitting in the driver’s seat. Sitting very still.

I look. It’s a man, an older white male, hair graying around his temples, a soft pudge of good living around his middle, dressed in an elegant tuxedo, cufflinks gleaming at his wrists, shirt crisp and white and immaculate. Except for the spill of blood down the front from the bullet holes in his chest. Worms of fear crawl down the back of my spine.

He turns his head to look at me. His eye sockets are empty, terrible dark yawning pits in his stark white face. A small rivulet of blood slowly crawls down his cheek from his right eye. He smiles, a malicious smile, and opens his mouth.

"Sojourner.”

His sour breath washes over me. Oh God how I want to run.

“Sojourner is getting unreliable.”

Then his dead hand scrabbles around on the armrest. He finds the lever and the door starts to swing open. I try to back away but I can’t move. He swings his legs out awkwardly and stands, stiffly, as if his cold flesh is difficult to move. Every hair on the nape of my neck is standing up but I am rooted to the spot as he takes a step towards me. He leans in and the smell washes over me: mold, putrefied meat, dead rats rotting behind walls. He opens his mouth again and his teeth squirm like white maggots.

He shouts: “Sojourner is getting unreliable! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Then he reaches out and grabs my wrist in his cold hand.

I struggle vainly to move. I take a deep breath and suddenly my eyes pop open and I sit bolt upright in bed, at home, alone, covered in sour sweat, my heart thundering like a racehorse in my chest, the voice of the dead man still ringing in my ears.