An impulse buy, that’s all it was. Rule number one in the almost-antique-or-at-least-collectible business is to follow your brains, not your gut (that gets you into trouble), but rule number two is to at least give it the occasional consult.
Old lady Crane had gone off to heaven, leaving behind grieving children, confused lawyers, and finally one hell of a garage sale.
And I got first dibs. Woke up bright and early, and brought the whole truck with me as I swept from table to table to table.
Books. Sure.
Knick knacks. Why not.
A whole tea set, almost matched. Definitely.
And then I was eye to mouth with something and reeled back, snorting.
“Shoo!”
The cat blinked at me, sneezed twice, and dropped away to find a better napping spot.
The mouth stayed behind. Good lord, what was this thing doing in here?
“Oh god, she kept that thing,” groaned Teddy Crane. Sweat was beading on his receding hairline; casualties of an unseasonably warm autumn morning.
“You familiar?”
“How could I not be? The kids loved it, but that was years ago. Amazed it isn’t a rat’s-nest by now.”
I looked at it.
Where in the hell’s name had old Linda Crane picked up a ten—foot T. rex statue?
Well, I mean, beyond the obvious answer of ‘pre-80s’. The posture was all wrong: bolt-upright, tail-dragging, pot-bellied. And it had been no expert work even by the standards of the day – the jaw was loose; the legs were too fat and too scrawny all at once; the feet were lumpen clubs that looked like they’d been planted drumstick-side-down. .
“You want it?”
I looked at it again. Even the eyes were amateurish; no eyeballs here, just smeared paint over empty sockets: a swatch of yellow and a quick swipe of slit-pupiled black. A teenager would’ve done a better job.
“Sure,” I said. “Why the hell not. It’s a lot more noticeable than the sign.”
I got enough rubbernecking on the highway just carting the thing back, which told me my gut had given me a proper nod for once. Not bad for a Thursday.
Finding the proper place for it was a bit harder. Right beside the sandwich board overshadowed it a bit; the parking lot was for customers not statuary; and the roof… well. Even if I had the time and energy to do that, there was no way I’d be comfortable with the amount of guywires needed to keep it happy in a fall gale. To say nothing of the fun it could offer if it filled with ice in the winter – I’d already had to deal with the roof once this decade, thank you.
But well. There was the old hitching post I’d kept around, wasn’t there? And I had some theatrically raggedy old ropes that weren’t much use, and that was how it ended up. Just outside the door, mouth open, tied neatly in place. Looking for all the world like it wanted to take a drink of water out of the flowerbed trough.
And still visible from the road!
Esther Alder’s Antiques and Collectibles. Now sponsored by ‘70s paleontological paraphernalia. You never know what a lucky break looks like until it happens, do you?
*
The kids loved it.
The adults were bemused by it.
The teenagers didn’t care about it but teenagers didn’t care about anything and didn’t have any money so who cared what the hell they thought? Besides other teenagers.
The important thing was that it brought eyes, and eyes were usually attached to wallets, and sometimes those wallets were agreeable to being lightened by taking something off my hands – a stack of dusty old comics; a tattered paperback about rippling thews and so on; a hideous lamp; a tuckered-out table.
More money, less junk. A win-win, but hey if other people were crazy who was I to tell them?
About the only person that wasn’t happy was the dog. Senile old bitch walked around like she’d had a tazer up her far end for a week, the shock of something new was that crippling to her. No amount of pissing on it seemed to satisfy her hostility, and every morning I got to wake up to a morning solo aria as the idiot remembered that the ugly thing still existed.
“Shut up,” I informed her, hiding under the biggest pillow. “Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.”
It never worked.
*
“That’s not a real dinosaur.”
I frowned at the kid as her dad fussed with his wallet. “Looks real to me.”
“They don’t look like that. It’s fake.”
“’Course it’s fake. Real dinosaurs are dead.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yeah. You know Jurassic Park was fiction, right?”
The kid rolled her eyes in the deeply obnoxious way that only someone who knew they couldn’t be punched would use. “Birds are dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs are alive.”
“Yeah, but they’re boring.”
The kid’s eyes narrowed, but around then the dad grunted in triumph and the purchasing of an old anvil saved me from more lecturing.
Little smart-ass. What did kids know anyways? As if it being real was the point.
That weekend the dog went missing. Well, less money on kibble, and she was a bit past the best-by date anyhow. And whatever coyote, wolf, or cougar that had surprised her had saved me the effort of digging a pit out back, too.
Amazing the sort of luck the world can go out of its way to hand to you.
*
“I don’t like it,” said the register monkey. She was fidgeting at the till again; damned kid couldn’t sit still. With that sort of instinct you’d think she’d be better at making change, but no.
I sighed. “Well, too bad. It brings people in, you don’t. Just thank your lucky stars or whatever that you aren’t competing for the same job.”
“It’s creepy. Its eyes like, almost follow you. Around. You know?”
“No, I don’t, and also: no, they can’t. They’re little splotchy smears in empty pits, that’s impossible.”
“Whatever. It’s creepy. And it’s not even a real dinosaur. Real dinosaurs have feathers.”
“No they don’t.”
“Yeah they do. They found them out in China or something.”
I restrained the urge to reach out and flick the register monkey directly in her nose – you never knew what part of the province’s labour laws she’d memorized – and contented myself with rolling my eyes. “Whatever. It’s not about the scientific accuracy. And if you care about that sort of thing, we’ve got five tons of paperbacks from the ‘50s in the showroom you can annotate that think that Pluto’s a planet, cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, plate tectonics doesn’t exist, Venus is a jungle, and man-with-a-penis is the center of the universe.”
“Really?”
“No, you dumbass. It’d spoil the resale value.”
The register monkey flaked out on me that very night. I came in the next morning; the whole building was shut down about as competently as she ever did it – the lights were on, the register was short five bucks, the doors were (mostly) locked – but her rickety car was still in the side lot and she didn’t show up for work again.
I sold the car. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
*
“Where the hell did THAT come from?” asked Brian.
“Old lady Crane.”
“Where’d she get it?”
“Didn’t ask, she wasn’t in much shape to answer.”
“Fair, fair.” He squinted out the window at it through those ancient Harry Potter glasses of his, little eyeballs lost in giant lenses. “Gad that thing’s been beaten with an ugly stick. When was it made, the ‘40s?”
“Could be the ‘40s, could be the ‘50s, could be the ‘60s, could’ve been six months ago. It’s a sign, not a statement.”
“Every sign’s a statement,” he said peevishly. “This one says ‘help me help me my knowledge of biology is fifty years out of date.’ Might as well put up a big sign saying ‘COLDS ARE CURED BY CHICKEN SOUP’ or ‘ACADEMIC STUDY INDUCES HYSTERIA IN WOMEN’ or something.”
“Little bit of a difference there, Brian. For one thing, nobody cares.”
“I care.”
“Nobody worth mentioning.”
He punched me in the shoulder, I grabbed his skull and noogied it, we drank six more beers and I kicked him out to do shutdown.
When I came outside he was gone, already left to walk home by himself in the dark. The kind of advanced thinking you only got from Brian after six more beers, and it must’ve done him iller than usual because nobody ever saw him again.
Was it the creek? Did he cut through the woods and fall in a ravine? Some careless idiot with a car who removed the evidence? Something else?
Shit. What a miserable autumn.
*
November.
God, it was such a November out there. If it had been October the weather would have been merely outrageous; as it was it was just damned depressing. There was an inevitability in the clouds; the comfortable gloom and despair of someone that knew they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
And it was pissing down like a drunk with six catheters.
If I’d known this was going to happen – if the weather report had done its fucking job – I wouldn’t have even opened today. Lost the whole afternoon and now I’d have to stay overnight; the highway was a river right now and my car was short a few paddles.
Not the first overnighter I’d pulled, but it was never fun. The smell fermented in the night, the creaking intensified, the mice ran across your feet, and that was all WITHOUT the pleasure of whatever the hell was going on outside. Maybe it was seven catheters.
I looked at the yard. The rain wasn’t falling; it was pounding. The parking lot looked as if someone was hurling shrapnel down on it and the few puddles deep enough to exist were exploding like raccoons on a highway.
Well, if I hadn’t had potholes before, I did now. Resurfacing time again, yay. A good end to a good summer, and that’s if I could get it in before the frosts started. I didn’t like the idea of trying to rope Hugh into winter work. Miserable bastard complained in a light breeze; a snowstorm would have him whining hard enough to break my windows, and THAT was just straight-up unaffordable.
I looked at the yard. Lightning took snapshots of it for me, carving familiar garbage into unfamiliar and ugly shapes with shadow chisels.
Too much garbage. A shameful thing to say for an antique shop, but it was true. Maybe I’d overreached? No, no. There’d been enough space, there’d been enough time. The customers, they’d failed me. Driven by fickle fancy and the weather, but I repeated myself. Some years you win, some years you lose.
I looked at the yard. Something wasn’t quite right.
Had the wind taken something? I’d chained down the sandwich board years ago after one too many pranks led to one too many replacements, but maybe it’d rusted up or come loose or something. It was hard to see, but maybe if I squinted.
The doorbell rang.
*
My life wasn’t very big, and I knew that, and maybe I wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent happy with it, but I was used to it and the way that I knew every inch of its happenings. I could wake up and from dawn to dusk spend no more thought on anything than someone would on breathing.
So there was absolutely no need for me to stop and think and run down the entire list of everyone who might ever have a reason to ring the doorbell.
Delivery not in this rain; Liz she moved down to Mexico last year; Aunt Edith was in the hospital after that fall; who who who who who.
Ding-dong.
Twice.
Nobody would ring it twice.
I thought about that, or tried to avoid thinking about it. So I looked out the window in-between squalls and….well.
The yard wasn’t quite right.
Everything was there. The gravel parking lot, the ancient old giant sandwich board, the big weather-beaten (bashed after this) flower trough, the hitching post.
There wasn’t anything at the hitching post.
Well.
Well.
Well.
Obviously some kids had made off with it. That was what had happened.
Something crunched against the side of the building.
Tree branch coming down, of course. I hadn’t trimmed well enough around the lot this year.
I was standing very still, but that was just because my explanations weren’t convincing me, which my forebrain told me was completely normal. It was a dark and stormy night and I was nervous, that’s all. Tomorrow morning it would be different. Nothing was frightening in the daylight.
My hindbrain was screaming that maybe that was because things that wanted to eat me liked the dark.
I kept standing very still, and I wondered if this was how nervous breakdowns started. My uncle Bill had been steady as a rock until one day Edith asked him to pass the pepper and he just laid down and started crying. Maybe it ran in the family.
The back door creaked open and I was upstairs in the attic storage.
I couldn’t explain either of those events. I had no idea who was at the back door. I had no idea how I’d gone through two doors and to the top of a rickety, creaky staircase in-between breaths.
I had no idea why my chest was hurting from the inside like there was a little man in there with a mallet, and I had no idea why I knew, just knew, from my marrow-on-out, that I needed to be quiet.
Something was scraping along the floor downstairs, slow and unsteady, moving with jerking and uneven footsteps.
I knew what it was even before I looked. I knew it wouldn’t help if I looked. I knew that any movement right now was a terrible idea.
I leaned down and looked between the floorboards anyways, because the alternative was leaving it to my imagination.
Damnit, I should have trusted my imagination more.
*
The way it moved was the worst thing I’d ever seen. In clumsy jerks and thuds, like a cross between cheap old stop-motion and a cheap old children’s toy. Something cast out of a cheap mould in cheap plastic, disposable and born decaying. Its mouth opened and closed in a parody of breathing, its little arms twitched against its chest with something more than the vibrations of its walk.
Its walk. Gods, its walk. Each foot swayed and meandered in the air, like a drunk man descending a staircase in the dark. And no wonder; its head remained firmly erect, eyes forward, blank little smeared-yellow eyesockets staring dead ahead as it groped its way along.
Forward. Down the hall. To the front windows. Where I’d been standing.
Every single hair on my body was standing erect and my clothing felt like it was made of needles. I felt the suicidal urge to giggle.
Somehow, some delusional thing at the back of my head that kept pretending it was my common sense was yammering at me, telling me that this was crazy. Its claws were chipped and blunted little plastic pegs; its teeth were a single jagged mass with vague serrations carved into them; the whole shebang couldn’t weigh much more than two of me and it was top-heavy; it was nonsense to be afraid of it.
That same idiotic response had also tried to tell me that none of this was going to happen, so I decided on the most fundamental of levels that I was going to entirely ignore my head and would listen to my gut now.
My gut put my knee in the wrong place on the wrong floorboard and I went through the ceiling in a hail of timber dust and exploding joists.
*
I must’ve blacked out for a second – not the lost seconds of my trip to the attic storage, a genuine loss of consciousness – but when I woke up I couldn’t breathe. I flailed my arms and legs a little and fell over and could breathe again and realized that I had been wrapped around the toilet.
And that the footsteps had stopped by the register.
Oh no, there they went again. Getting closer this time.
It was going to get me, it was going to get me just like it got Brian and the register monkey and the dog and damnit, this made no SENSE It wasn’t even a real dinosaur.
Not that I’d be any better off if it was a real dinosaur. Hell, it’d probably have its shit together better and I’d be dead by now. This thing was such a lumbering oaf it was amazing it could
Hmm.
I let my brain chase that inspiration while my gut hauled my entire body together starting with the legs, and I made it out of the bathroom just ahead of the thing. Something lurched behind me and I heard plastic scrape against hair.
Run run run. Where? Somewhere that isn’t here!
Through the show-room vaulting tables chairs knocking over a jam-packed shelf of garbage all to get faster to get to the back door. It was creaking open softly, back and forth. The wind was fast, but it was sturdy and heavy and the handle had been mangled and was dangling there by a little twist of torn metal.
It wasn’t fair. It was cheap. It was so cheap and so incompetent and it was going to kill me.
I let that outrage seep into my muscles, let it burn inside, let it take me out into the pouring rain and around the side of the parking lot – past my car; my keys were in my coat, fat lot of use now – and out onto the wide mud flats of the parking lot, where I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder.
There it was, big as daylight and twice as horrifying in the dark, all its imperfections slickly stroked away by the rainfall and the gloom and the gale. I couldn’t even see the fakeness of its teeth.
It was stupid. I was going to die. I was going to die in the dumbest possible way to the dumbest possible thing unless it really WAS the dumbest possible thing and then maybe I had a chance and maybe I could do it if I ran just a little farther, just a little faster.
Thud, thud, thump, shuffle, splash.
I reached the hitching post, I spun again, and this time I saw what I’d hoped – a cant, a list, a lopsided lean, a foot embedded in a pothole that was more of a pit – and I was so filled with hope and prayer that I almost forgot to throw the hitching rope at it.
It’d been years since I played cowboy, but I was pretty proud of my aim, and it wasn’t as if it was a small target. Over its head, around that thick lizard neck, yanked tight-slick-fast in the rain, rope screaming over rough, wet plastic, and then I yanked.
If it’d been on flat ground, it might not have worked.
If it’d been on dry ground, it might not have worked.
If I’d been just a hair less panicked and desperate and furious at the idiocy of this entire problem, it definitely wouldn’t have worked.
But as it was I was so damned scared and angry I yanked the thing over on its rough-cast snout, and the splash it kicked up soaked me to the core with triumph.
Three times I spun in a circle, laughing in the rain. Three times I yelled up at the storm, not even using syllables. And three times I kicked that stupid, writhing, twitching mess as it mired itself in the liquid gravel, tiny useless arms thrashing and rigid legs hopelessly unable to bend.
It made an upturned turtle look like an Olympic gymnast.
Still, I tied a few more ropes, just to be safe. Then I went inside and got more and tied them too.
Then I got the handsaw. Chainsaw’d be nicer, but it was a bit wet for that, so I’d just take off the feet. I had to leave something to do in the morning anyways.
Not that I knew tomorrow’s weather report. But hell, you never know what a lucky break’ll look like, do you?