Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T.L. Hines writes "Noir Bizarre" stories, mixing mysteries with oddities in books such asThe Unseen, Waking Lazarus, and The Dead Whisper On. Waking Lazarus received Library Journal's "25 Best Genre Fiction Books of the Year" award.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Faces in the Fire

Thomas Nelson

Chapter One

The dead man's shoes spoke to Kurt long before he wore them.

He expected the shoes to say something, of course; Kurt had hundreds of articles of clothing from the dearly departed, a wardrobe of wearable ghosts that fueled his existence. It wasn't unusual, when browsing estate sales, to find a jacket whispering of adulterous affairs, a pair of slacks sobbing uncontrollably about financial ruin. While searching through the piles of belongings at these sales, Kurt heard the constant babble of past lies and past lives rising from the tables where the clothing lay neatly folded.

So he wasn't surprised to find shoes with something to say. But while most of the clothing spoke to him in words, in plaintive voices tinged with desperation, these shoes spoke a single, simple image: a catfish.

It started as a white dot on the horizon, floating in a vast expanse of orange. But the dot moved, coming closer and closer, until at last the dot took its fish form, its continual back-and-forth sweeps of the tail coming into focus. Finally, as the catfish filled the entire slate of his mind, Kurt absently set down the light-tan sweater he'd been holding and turned his attention to the shoes.

The sweater had been quiet. Or maybe it hadn't been. But if it said anything, its voice was drowned out by the image the shoes pushed his way.

A catfish. What did that mean?

The scene began to loop again, and Kurt moved to touch the shoes. When he did, the image in his mind became a bit more vibrant, a bit more dimensional.

"Good stuff, huh?"

Kurt swiveled his head in the direction of the voice, the catfish momentarily dissolving as his concentration broke. A short man stood next to him, riffling through the folded clothes of lot 159; a scruffy beard concealed most of his face.

"Sorry," Kurt said, trying to force a smile into his voice. "I didn't catch that."

The bearded guy picked up the tan sweater Kurt had just been holding, examined it a few moments, began refolding it. He finally looked at Kurt. "Good stuff here. Guy left lots of stuff."

"Oh," Kurt said, feeling as if his mind were in a slower gear than usual. "Yeah. Sure."

And even as he tried to sift through the rest of lot 159, an assortment of clothing left by a dead man to scavengers at an estate sale, one item continued to speak to him.

The shoes.

Sending him the flickering scenes of the catfish, swimming against the murky current of his mind.

thirty-nine. 39.

That evening, after paying just fifty dollars for the entire lot (the bearded guy, for all his talk about the quality of lot 159, didn't offer a single bid), Kurt unlocked the rolling doors of his workshop.

He'd already sealed all the clothing from lot 159-shoes, shirts, slacks-in a plastic storage container, and now he carried the container to another door on the back wall of his workshop. He paused to unlock this door as well, then pushed it open and flipped the light switch that illuminated a single overhead bulb.

Cold storage. That's what he called this room. It was the size of a single garage stall-had once been a garage stall, in fact-but it held no vehicles. Instead, giant storage bins just like the one that now held lot 159 filled the entire room, stacked floor to ceiling.

The room remained unheated because there was no reason to heat it. Quite the opposite, really, because cold-especially the frosty autumn and winter nights here in western Montana-fueled the fears, the ghosts, that spoke to him. The fears and ghosts that fed his work.

After all, not every piece of clothing was haunted by the ghost of the person who wore it. Far from it. Perhaps only one out of every twenty pieces had something to say. Putting the clothing in cold storage, keeping it in isolation, tended to amplify the voices caught inside the folds of denim or cotton or silk or wool.

Kurt paused at the door, glancing up at the noticeable flicker in the bulb overhead. It swung slightly on its bare, corroded cord, rocked by a gentle breeze that wasn't there.

From inside the plastic storage containers stacked around him, Kurt heard murmurs. Whispers. Chatters. Even a few screams. No more than a dozen distinct voices in all, out of the hundreds of articles of clothing neatly tucked away into this space. And even now, not amplified by cold storage or isolation, the shoes were projecting images of the catfish in his mind, a movie to accompany the cacophonous soundtrack of the voices.

He shuddered.

Kurt didn't want to confine ghosts of the dead in cold storage. He didn't want to hear them scream or suffer. He didn't want any of this.

And yet he knew this was what he had to do. It was his task, to listen to these ghosts of the present, because he could never hear the ghosts of his past-the past that stretched beyond truck driving school, beyond his therapy sessions with Todd almost eight years ago.

The invisible past that haunted him more than any of the ghosts ever could.

Fifteen 15.

Kurt sat, nervously tapping his foot against the floor as he waited to meet the therapist for the first time.

He'd graduate from the High Road Truck Driving School soon. Then he could apply to trucking firms all over the country, firms always searching for new drivers. He could go anywhere and start his career. Maybe eventually buy a rig of his own.

Eventually.

But right now, he was here because ... well, he'd let the therapist decide that. That's what therapists did, didn't they? They listened to your secrets, nodded their heads appreciatively, and told you what was wrong with you. End of story.

So that's why he was here. Not really for the end of the story but for the beginning of it. That was the Great Secret he was going to have to admit to the therapist, something he'd not mentioned to any of the other students at the driving school, something he'd not mentioned to any of the trucking firms trying to recruit him.

In fact, the only person who knew was Marcus, the one instructor who had become something of a friend. One night, after a few beers with Marcus, Kurt had blurted his secret confession. Slowly, hesitantly at first, but then in a torrent as Marcus listened.

After he'd finished his story, Marcus had taken the last swig of his draft, nodded, looked at him, and given him the names of two people. One a private detective and the other a therapist.

So he'd called the therapist. Later, he might be able to call the private detective. But not yet.

Kurt smiled, thinking of the incongruity of Marcus, a stereotypically big, beefy guy with a shaved head and a pointed Vandyke beard, telling him about a therapist. Swigging that last drink of beer? Yeah, Marcus looked natural doing that. But Marcus would look decidedly out of place sitting here, in this room, surrounded by soft flute music and burning incense, waiting to talk to a therapist about his past.

The way Kurt was waiting now.

The door at the back of the waiting room opened, and a pink-faced woman walked in. She stopped a moment, stared at Kurt intently, then moved quickly through the waiting room and to the door to the outside, her arms wrapped tightly against her.

"Mr. Marlowe?"

Kurt turned his attention back to...