Dead Echo

  *

  Jester sat in the dark and polished the gun. He stared at it, pausing in the middle of his frantic rubbing to hold it to the light and just watch. When he did this his mind ran even faster. Many times since that night almost a week ago he’d thought he heard light footsteps racing about in the backyard, deep breathing from just around a doorway, feather touches of malice playing along his spine. And every time he thought of these things he polished faster. Rubbing, rubbing, trying to find some avenue of escape. But he knew it wasn’t to be. He’d known it the second he came to and found Old Shake scattered out around him. Whatever it was had torn the dog to bits; even its skull had been in two pieces, the bottom jaw hanging from a low-lying branch almost twenty feet away from the rest of it. And even while he polished he knew the endeavor was most probably useless, that what he had couldn’t be dealt with by bullets. He knew that as gospel like a great sinking in his heart.

  He heard a noise and jerked the gun into firing position. The refrigerator continued to hum and he chided himself for the hundredth time. He was like a mouse, frightened of every creak, every shift in shadows. He knew this could not continue. He’d missed more days of work the past three weeks than he’d missed the previous five years; it wouldn’t take long until people started talking. Hell, even now he was hobbling around at work. The .22 bullet had punched clean through his foot, splitting the difference between his big toe and the one next to it, and with his foot wrapped up to his calf he’d told his coworkers he’d stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle. Thank God the rural route didn’t require him to get out of the truck much if he didn’t feel like it. Regardless, he could already feel them looking now. A fucking mailman on crutches just wouldn’t do for long and he lived in dread that asshole Thompson would send him to a doctor to have the “ankle” looked at. So bullet through the foot or not, he’d sucked it up and tried to act like it wasn’t that bad. He’d been working there too long to go and fuck everything up now. And sitting at the table, polishing the fucking shine off his gun, he just wanted everything to be back like it had been.

  And with this he stopped polishing.

  Let’s face it, he thought. Here he was, a single guy, save for a couple of dogs (as far as they knew, he reminded himself) living out in the middle of the fucking woods. The job didn’t require him to spend a lot of time socializing and everyone knew by now the hazards of solitary work. Yeah, they knew it well; the postal system had practically spawned its own unique breed of psychopath in the last couple of decades. So he had to be careful.

  Yeah, you’ll be careful fine, when you’re fucking dead, the voice stated in his inner ear. You’ll be pushing up daisies just like Old Shake in no time at all. He looked at his hand. It was shiny with gun oil and the nails were grimed. He was waiting for them to shake but they wouldn’t; it was deep down inside where he shook and no amount of polishing whatsoever was going to stop that. There was really nothing he could do, when you got right down to the bone of it, nothing at all, except find some way of talking face to face with the lady who lived alone at 9535 Samane.