The only other person in the place was a young guy with unkempt red hair and a greasy beard and a ratty fatigue jacket. He could have been a junkie, or even one of those Juilliard music pricks. But he wasn’t.

He was Death.

I don’t know how I knew, but I just did.

I tried not to stare. I stole glances at him as slyly as I could, and whenever I turned his way he was just reading a newspaper and giggling quietly to himself. Amusement? Self-satisfaction? I couldn’t tell, but it gave me the creeps either way.

At length he got up and walked to the door, and I felt not a little relief. But before leaving, he paused and said, “Do you want to know?”

“Excuse me?” was all I could say, and I choked it into my coffee cup as I was too frozen with sudden terror to turn around.

“Do you want to know when I’m coming back for you?”

I heard the word “yes” come out of my mouth, and I turned to look at him.

Death looked at me with his surprisingly green eyes, and smiled, almost kindly.

“It’s right there in front of you,” he said with a nod towards the counter.

I swiveled back towards my cup and saw the check for my breakfast. Coffee, buck ninety-five. The bell on the door rang as Death disappeared onto the snowy Manhattan streets. Eggs and toast, six dollars and twenty cents. Bacon, two seventy-five. Tax.

That bastard. It was there in the numbers somewhere. He was taunting me. To have the date of one’s own demise right in front of you in a handful of digits and still not know the answer for certain is agonizingly worse than not knowing at all.

I paid the bill and left the diner and that’s where the dream ended.

But I’ll now always wonder, every time I leave a tip at a restaurant, if I’m not arbitrarily choosing my own fate.

His eyes open wide with a sinister gleam,
he plotted and planned out his murderous scheme.

He’d gut with a knife and strike down with a spell.
He’d kill them and mince up the corpses so well.

He’d poison his mother, impale his old dad,
and garrote his brother, the poor little lad.

He’d chop up his sister and granmummy too,
their soft meaty bits to be served up like stew.

But then Silas paused, reconsidered his plan.
“Too messy to butcher the whole ghastly clan.

I can’t off them all, that is far too much gore.
Perhaps I’ll just start with the bully next door…”

He was offered branch management positions time and time again, but he preferred to stay in his position as a teller. Eight hours a day, five days a week. No politics, no overtime, no drama. Just a good salary and a decent benefits plan.

He knew pretty much every regular customer who came into his small suburban branch, so it was easy for him to spot the out-of-place young man in a thick cotton sweatshirt with the hood up on this particular Tuesday in late July.

Tom watched the stranger fiddle around with deposit slips at the side table in the lobby, then called out, “May I help you?” in his Friendliest Teller Voice.

The young man walked directly to Tom’s window, then nervously slid a slip of paper across the counter.

“Little hot today, isn’t it?” Tom asked without looking at the slip.

“What?”

“I said it’s a little hot today. Probably a little too hot to be wearing that hood, don’t you think?”

The stranger scowled and pushed the slip of paper towards Tom and tapped on it.

Tom lifted the slip and giggled, then read it out loud: “This is a stick-up.” He laughed again. “Oh, that’s adorable.”

“Look, I’m robbing you,” said the flustered stranger.

“Yes, I understand that. But who says ’stick-up’? Are you supposed to be Steve McQueen in The Getaway or something?”

“The what?”

“The Getaway,” Tom said with his Polite Teller’s Smile, as the stranger just stared at him. Tom rolled his eyes. “You know, heist movie, 1972. A classic. You have seen it, haven’t you?”

“Well no, but I—”

“Of course not. Clearly you’re not familiar with the heist movie oeuvre,” Tom said with a shake of his head, “otherwise you wouldn’t be making so many mistakes.”

“Mistakes?” the stranger sputtered.

“Mistake number one, you came in here on the busiest day of the month. It’s the first tuesday, which means that people will be coming in to deposit their unemployment checks. The lobby is already starting to fill up. So there will be more witnesses.”

The stranger became agitated. “Look, pal, I’ll blow your fucking head off,” he said, pointing something through his right hoodie pocket towards Tom in as menacing a fashion as he could manage.

“Mistake number two, you’re pushing your finger too far out through your pocket. Now I can clearly see that it’s just your finger, and not a gun.”

“It is a gun!”

“No it’s not, it’s your index finger. I can clearly see it. If you’re going to mimic a weapon, just push your finger out enough so that there is a slight bulge, not a pointy thing. That way no one can be certain if it’s a muzzle or not.”

“Maybe it’s a knife!” the stranger barked, loudly enough to turn a couple of heads in the lobby.

“It’s not a knife, either. You’re desperate. Perhaps even stupid,” Tom said, maintaining his Polite Teller’s Smile, “but no one robs a bank with a knife. It’s too personal. Too messy. Knives are used in crimes of passion and immediacy, not planned heists.”

The would-be robber simply stood there, sweating profusely, his face flashing between anger and utter incomprehension. Finally he pulled the hood back from his wet, greasy hair, unzipped his hoodie in a huff, and leaned in towards Tom. “Okay, fine. What else?”

“Look up over your left shoulder,” Tom said.

The sweaty thief did so, and found himself staring into a large dome-covered camera.

“Mistake number three. That’s a high-resolution surveillance camera. It just captured your face at sixty frames per second. And the facial recognition software this bank uses is from Inimitech, the same outfit that designed a similar program for the FBI. A cotton hood and a day’s worth of scruff aren’t going to be enough to disguise you.”

“Dammit.”

“Mistake number four involves the fact that your fingerprints are all over this place because you’re not wearing gloves, and I’m not going to even mention the fact that you’re wearing a shirt bearing the name of the place where you likely work. Do you have a car waiting outside? I bet you probably parked your own car right in a front space. My god, boy, do you have any sort of plan at all?”

“Okay, okay, I get it, Jesus, lay off already.”

The stranger’s expression turned from frustration to defeat to sheer panic in an instant.

“Alright, look,” Tom said, “I’m going to let you out of this, and no one has to know.”

The stranger nearly gasped in disbelief as Tom glanced at his watch.

“My lunch break is in five minutes, and I’m starving, so here’s how we’re going to wrap this up,” he said, grabbing a slip of paper and a pen. He scribbled on the paper for a few seconds, and then slid it across to the failure of a robber.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a list of classic heist movies. You are going to rent every damned one of them, and watch them in their entirety, in the order listed there.”

Tom reached into his pocket as the stranger perused the list.

“My car is the blue Civic in the back of the parking lot,” Tom said, handing his keys to the stranger.

“What?”

“My car. You’re going to take it down the street and have it washed and waxed on your own dime. And I don’t mean the do-it-yourself place on Madison. I want you to take it to Buggy Bubbles and get the Max Wash with the tire shine and the clearcoat protectant.”

“Are you serious? Man, that wash is like twenty bucks!”

“Given the choice between twenty dollars and twenty years for attempted armed robbery with a deadly finger, I think you’ll find you’re getting the better deal.”

“Fine, dude. Whatever,” he said, shoulders slumped.

“Great! On your way, then. I want that Honda back in the parking lot and shining like a diamond by the time I finish my Hot Pocket. And after watching that list of films, I do hope that if you are still interested in knocking off a bank, that next time you try the Harwick Savings and Loan down on 13th Street. The staff is fairly dim and their camera equipment was installed in the Carter Administration. They also launder money for the DiPaolo crime family, so no one is going to search particularly hard for the thief, provided he only takes a few thousand dollars.”

“Uh. Okay. Um… thanks?”

The defeated young man turned away and made a hasty retreat through the door, with Tom calling, “Have a nice day!” in his Friendliest Teller Voice.

Tom Ferris loved his job.

The dream always starts the same way. The sound of footsteps in the snow. Silence. Then singing. Sweet, perfect tones from a young voice that will never age.

Then the question comes. “Was it you?”

Sometimes it’s accusatory. Other times it’s pleading, forlorn. But it’s always the same question.

“Was it you, sarge?”

And that’s when I wake from the dream, trembling and disoriented. Are they even dreams? I don’t know. A few times I’ve seen him standing there, looking at me, even after I wake. Once in a while I can even smell the forest for minutes afterward; the scorched evergreens, the smoke. The death.

* * *

I was staring out of the small window at the snow-covered tarmac when a youngish man dropped himself into the seat next to me and began pulling tablets and pens from a nylon sack with “NEW YORK TIMES” embroidered on it. He looked a bit too casual and rough around the edges to be a businessman. I pegged him for a writer.

“Hopefully it will be warmer in Charlotte,” he said without looking up from his rustlings.

“I’m only connecting there,” I said.

“Oh yeah? Where are you off to?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Family there? Grandkids?”

“Nope,” I said. “Just an old war buddy.”

That’s more words than I usually exchange with strangers these days, but it seemed to get the young man’s attention. He shifted in his seat towards me.

“No kidding. Where did you serve?”

Maybe it was the after-effects of the previous night’s dream, and the resulting lack of sleep. It also could have been the whiskey and ginger I drank once I boarded the plane, the liquids doing their little fluid dance in my empty stomach. Whatever it was, my guard was down, and I uncharacteristically let myself get involved in the small-talk.

“I didn’t serve with him for long. He and another buddy of mine spent some time together in France and Belgium in the winter of ’44. Just four guys in a foxhole.”

“But you just said you had two buddies there.”

“Did I? Yeah. Well. Didn’t know the other fella all that long. You sure do ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m a writer. I ask questions. That’s what I do.”

I smiled and nodded towards his bag. “That’s alright. I figured as much.”

“So you would have been in the Battle of the Bulge, then,” he said more as a statement than a question. “Man, that must have been pretty exciting.”

I chuckled. “Exciting? Not where I was. Mitchell and Lanny—my buddies—and I were along a quiet part of the Ardennes Forest. We sat in freezing foxholes for days on end, with light German infantry no more than two hundred yards away through the dense woods.”

By this time the young man had pulled out a notebook and a chewed-up pen and was scribbling furiously.

“So you just sat there?”

“Pretty much, that’s all we did. Once in a while there would be a firefight during the daytime, and we’d get shelled fairly often. That was hell. And sometimes at night we would exchange a few shots.”

“Wow,” he said, still scribbling.

“I was a company sergeant, so my job was mostly just taking in all the replacements and getting them ready to go up into the real action.”

“Replacements?”

“Yeah, the new kids. The green ones. Boys right from basic training. They always got to us loaded with equipment they didn’t need, so we’d strip them down to the basics and tell them what they really needed to know. We’d take their extra pouches and packs, their shovels, parts of their mess kits, their overcoats—”

“Wait, you took their coats away? In wintertime?”

“We only took their overcoats away. They still had field jackets and sweaters. Look, none of us who’d been on the line had overcoats,” I said, emphasizing my point with a finger. “The paratroops didn’t have overcoats. The only people who had long coats were the Germans. If you wore a long coat, you had a pretty good chance of getting yourself shot at.”

The writer fellow made special note of this.

“A lot of those stupid kids, though, kept them anyway. Stored them in their sacks and used them as blankets.”

“Did some men wear them anyway?”

“Hell no!” I said. “I’d read any of my boys the riot act if I ever saw them wearing the damn things.”

I paused.

“There was this one kid, though,” I said quietly. “Skinny kid from Texas. Always cold and shaking like a leaf. He just loved his coat and wouldn’t give the thing up. Wrapped himself in it every night. He was the fourth one in the hole with Lanny and Mitchell and me.”

“What was his name?”

“Don’t remember his name. We just called him Pitchpipe. He wasn’t much of a soldier, but he was a happy kid, and boy could he sing. He’d sing all day long. On patrol, at mess time. Beautiful songs. He kept a smile on a lot of tired faces for the few days he was with us.”

The writer put his pen down. “Is that who you’re going to see?”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to see Lanny.”

“And what became of Mitchell?” he asked, picking up his pen once again.

“Dead. Killed himself in the early seventies. He suffered from horrible nightmares and paranoia for most of his life.”

“And this Pitchpipe kid?”

I quickly changed the subject to some other silly war story, and before long, we were on the ground in Charlotte.

“Look, Mister…”

“Just call me Ben,” I said, extending my hand.

“Okay, Ben. Do you mind if I get in touch with you? I think I have the makings of a great story here and I’d love to talk some more about it.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “Give me your address and when the time comes, I’ll tell you everything about that winter in the forest. Everything. You may not even believe it, but it’ll be the truth.”

The writer fellow pulled out a business card and wrote his home address on the back.

* * *

I stepped into the cold VA hospital room and lowered myself into the chair next to the bed where Lanny was sleeping. I grabbed the remote off of the tray table and turned down the droning voice of a CNN talking head on the TV.

Lanny stirred.

“Hey there,” I said, trying to smile. He didn’t look good at all, and I knew it would likely be the last time I’d ever talk to him.

“Pitchpipe,” Lanny squeaked. “Pitchpipe sang to me last night, Ben.”

“That’s just the morphine drip. Vivid dreams.”

“No. No, he was here. He sat right there in that chair and he sang to me.”

“Lanny, he’s been dead for 65 years.”

“Jesus, has it really been that long?”

“Feels like a thousand.”

Lanny chuckled, then coughed. He took a deep breath through the oxygen feed in his nose and turned his yellow eyes to me.

“Did we really do that to him? I mean, I know what we did. But the dreams. They feel so real.”

I looked down into my folded hands. “I don’t know. We were just kids then, really.”

“Kids forget their nightmares. You and I have never forgotten.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

“Does he still sing to you?” Lanny asked. I was still looking away but I could feel his gaze fixed on me. “Does Pitchpipe still sing to you in the night? I bet he does.”

My throat tightened. I’d come to say goodbye to my dying friend, not be reminded of shared tragedy and years of sleepless nights. Though I suppose I knew in my heart that it would come up in what was essentially a deathbed conversation.

“How about some morphine?” I asked, and pushed the button on the pump without waiting for a response. Lanny’s eyes began to flutter and his pursed lips relaxed.

“You won’t tell anyone after I’m gone, will you Ben? We promised. We swore we’d never tell anyone.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” I lied.

“Good,” Lanny said weakly as he began drifting back into his narcotic haze.

I didn’t know how else to say goodbye without actually saying goodbye. I just patted him on the leg. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” I said, and left the room.

I got no more than ten steps down the hallway when I heard singing from Lanny’s room.

“Who knows if we shall meet again,” Lanny sang, weakly. “But when the morning chimes ring sweet again, I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places…”

I shuddered, and quickened my pace towards the exit.

* * *

The following morning I got a phone call at my hotel. Lanny had passed during the night.

In a way, I was happy for him. No more pain. And no more dreams. He was lucky in that sense.

I found myself hoping that there would be no more dreams. Two of the three of us were gone, now. And God only knows how many more years I’ll be around. Once Mitchell died, the dreams continued for me and for Lanny. All we could think of was that Mitchell didn’t do it. It must have been either Lanny or me. And now that Lanny was dead, maybe I’d be off the hook.

Maybe.

It didn’t matter now, I thought to myself. Maybe talking about it after all these years would do something. It had felt almost comforting to tell part of the story on the plane. Telling the rest of the story would not be anything resembling penance, that was for sure. But I wrote the letter anyway. I spent the entire day writing out the events of that December night, and mailed it off to the young writer.

I went to sleep comfortably, hoping that it was finally all behind me.

* * *

I had the dream again that night.

It was different than all of the other nights, though. Vivid. Like I was reliving the memory.

Mitchell and I were curled up together in the deep foxhole to keep our body heat while Lanny stayed awake as sentry. There were some breaks in the snow-clouds that night, casting a ghostly sort of blue glow over the complete whiteness of the forest.

Lanny kicked me while raising his carbine and pointing it out into the treeline. I grabbed my rifle as well and pulled Mitchell up with me. A shadowed figure in a long coat approached our hole from maybe fifty yards away.

I don’t know who fired first. We were all exhausted and twitchy. But one shot rang out, and then another. In the span of a few seconds, all three of us had fired at the figure, who had since fallen to the ground.

We must have inadvertently started a firefight, because shots started coming at us from the German line. Other men in the holes near us returned fire into the darkness.

Before long, a few shells burst overhead, splintering the trees and lighting up the forest like daylight before raining snow and burned wood shards onto us from above.

And then it was over. The shots ended, and the dark forest returned to quiet.

“Pitchpipe,” said Mitchell. “Where is he, sarge?”

I realized he hadn’t been in the hole with us the entire time. Lanny leapt from the hole and ran out into the snow.

“Lanny, what are you doing?” I called after him, as quietly as I could. But I knew exactly what he was doing. And it froze me to the core.

Lanny came back to the hole, dragging a body with him. Pitchpipe was glassy-eyed and white, wheezing through his own blood in his nose and mouth. The front of his long overcoat was soaked in red.

“Jesus, kid,” Lanny said in a crying panic. “I thought you were a kraut.”

“Just…,” Pitchpipe squeaked, “went… to take… a leak.”

“MEDIC!” I shouted down the line. “We need a medic down here!”

“You’ll be ok,” Lanny kept saying. “You’ll be ok. I didn’t see you leave the hole, kid. I must have fallen asleep. You’ll be ok.”

I knew there was no way he would last more than another couple of minutes. “I told you not to wear than damn overcoat, private,” I said to him with a forced smile, in a poor attempt at some modicum of comfort for the dying boy.

Pitchpipe’s wheezing became more shallow, and his eyes searched ours. He couldn’t speak any longer, but I think we all knew what he was trying to ask: Why?

A company medic finally ducked his way to our hole, but by that time Pitchpipe had slipped away.

“Looks like they got him pretty good,” he said, coldly. “I’ll get him tagged and sent to the rear.” He waved in another medic with a stretcher, and just like that, they were gone.

We were in shock.

I had no words. Lanny just kept muttering to himself. And Mitchell was huddled at the bottom of the hole.

“We killed him,” he said at length. “We killed that poor fucking kid.”

“Maybe we didn’t,” I said. “The Germans opened fire too.”

“Mitchell’s right. We did kill him. He was coming towards us and he was shot through the front.”

“It was an accident,” I said.

“Which one of us hit him, do you think?” Lanny asked.

“Does it matter?” said Mitchell. “He’s dead. Doesn’t matter whose bullet it was. We all killed him.”

By the time dawn arrived, we’d decided we’d keep it to ourselves. We didn’t have much of a choice, really. The kid deserved to die as a hero killed in action, not the victim of a reckless accident; a thought that we would use to assuage our collective guilt for a long time to come.

And then the dream was seemingly over.

I woke in my hotel room in the middle of the night. For the first time, I didn’t wake in a panic or a sweat. I merely felt the hollow, crushing weight of that night.

Then I heard the voice.

“Hey sarge,” it said, breezily.

I looked in the direction of the voice. Through the darkness I could make out a thin figure in a long coat.

He began singing.

“And when the night is new, I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you…”

He finished the song.

Silence.

“Was it you, sarge?”

The curtain went up.

And despite his ignominious performance during dress rehearsal the night before, Gareth took a deep breath and prepared to deliver the best triangle solo in the history of the Huey Long Middle School 9th Grade Concert Band.

Thanks so much for coming over to kitty-sit this weekend while I’m at the MS Office seminar. I can’t believe my company paid for me to go to Providence for an overnight trip and a whole Saturday of training! I’m very excited – I just know there is so much more Excel can do. Have you seen those crazy 3-D charts that Terry from Accounts Receivable puts in his reports?? I want to learn how to do that!!

Anyway, you’ll soon see that Buster is a hungry little guy (just like his mommy! There is an Applebee’s right next to the hotel where I’m staying and I am going to eat the biggest burger they have! It’s like the Cathy cartoon on my fridge!! LOL!), so make sure his bowl is topped off with dry food all the time. Also, you can give him treats, but make sure they are the tartar control snacks in the blue pouch, because the seafood ones in the pink pouch upset his tummy and I don’t want you to have to clean up kitty-barf!

I think his litterbox will be fine until I get home, but if you get the gumption to scoop it out, it is in the basement under the stairs. If you go down there, please ignore any sounds you might hear coming from the storage room, no matter what.

Also, and this is really important, make sure you do NOT step into the chalk circle in the middle of the floor. IF YOU DO STEP INTO IT, DO NOT STEP OUT. FOR YOU MUST PUT DOWN THAT WHICH YOU HAVE SUMMONED. Y’AI ‘NG’NGAH! YOG-SOTHOTH! H’EE – L’GEB F’AI THRODOG UAAAH! Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. YOG-SOTHOTH!

Oh, and there are a couple of strawberry Activia yogurts left in the fridge – go ahead and eat them if you want!

See you Sunday. Buster and I thank you!

Pamela

Mom told me that Washington Irving was a writer and then I learned about him last year in the fifth grade so I guess that’s OK but it’s funny because I don’t like to write. I like to do math, though. Well I did, until my teacher started making me show my work and I don’t like to show my work and so my grades got bad this year.

Mom got really mad though because she looked at all my homework and told me the answers were right and that my teacher shouldn’t fail me if I got the answers right even though I didn’t show all the steps I was supposed to show. So she went to the school and got me signed up for the gifted program, and it is pretty neat, because I get to be in a different classroom and the other kids are fun and I have a new math teacher.

Every day we get to spend a whole hour doing whatever kind of work we want and my new math teacher came over and asked me about the paper with all the numbers on it in my Trapper Keeper. It was the plain blue one that I keep my own junk in, not the Batman one that has my school papers in it. Anyway I told him that one night I was up late because mom let me stay up, and I was watching TV and then I found one channel that was all black but there was a song on a piano. It sounded really neat so I started writing it down. He asked what I meant by write it down so I told him that music sounds like numbers to me and I wrote down the numbers that the piano song was playing. He asked if he could borrow the paper and I said it was OK but to give it back when he’s done with it because I wanted to use the back side for other stuff.

I haven’t been back to school in a long time though because after my math teacher took my paper, the angry guys came to my house. They yelled at mom and went through all our stuff and mom cried and they kept shouting about codes and secrets and how I knew them and I don’t even know the Fibanachy or Fibowhatever guy they were talking about.

Then another guy came in and he was an army guy but he was really nice and he reminded me of grandpa because he smelled good and he smiled a lot. He talked to my mom for a long time and she stopped crying and then told me I needed to go with the man but just for a couple of days and then I could come home and go back to school.

I don’t know how far we drove but it felt like a whole day and I couldn’t see anything out the windows of the van but they let me bring my Nintendo with me so that made it OK.

I have a nice room here and they let me eat pizza and stuff, and the bed is a lot bigger than the one I have at home but it’s been longer than a couple of days. I sort of want to go home but I’m afraid to ask and the people are nice to me. The army guy comes to my room in the morning and plays different kinds of music to me and asks me to write down what I hear, so I write it all down in the numbers but it makes my hand hurt to write so much.

Before dinner the army guy takes me to see a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t do anything but ask me questions. He gives me math problems to do and I do them and he asks why I don’t show the work and I tell him every time that I can’t. He asks why and I tell him that I just know the answers, that’s all. He asks other silly questions about how I sleep and if I hear voices and have bad dreams. I don’t know why, because the doctor mom always takes me to just wants to look in my ears and puts that cold thing on my chest and tells me to breathe so I don’t know why the other doctor asks so many questions.

The army guy just brought me a cheeseburger and a Pepsi and it smells really good and I’m hungry, but my mom makes good cheeseburgers too. He told me tomorrow I’m getting a cat scanner or something. I don’t know what that is, but it reminded me of my cat, and I just want to go home to see her. I’m tired of writing down all the numbers.

We all have.

Probably when you were ten, eleven.

You wake up in the night, for no reason. You’re not scared, but something feels, just… wrong.

And then you notice him.

He’s standing at the foot of your bed.

First you see just the shape. You want to scream out, but you can’t. Your arms won’t move and your legs won’t move and your mouth dries up and nothing comes out.

Then you see his face. And he’s just standing there, grinning at you. It’s the widest, most malevolent grin you’ve ever seen and all you can do is lie there and panic while he stares at you and grins.

Eventually you fall asleep again, and you never remember the “dream”. But something sticks with you. Something about his face. Something that haunts and disturbs you when you don’t expect it.

Because deep down, you know he’s coming back. That shadowy grinning man is coming back to visit you again.

Sleep tight.