Good Times Bad Times Read online

  Glynn Mars, a forty-three year old Slavic-looking man, was hurrying down the crosswalk on Rose Street, a newspaper in one hand, the other hand in his sweater pocket. His crew cut looked corny on his pudgy face. And the way he’d move about was funny, too. The result of some muscle imbalance in his legs, giving the impression that one was shorter than the other.

  So here was Glynn now, weaving past the corner bookstore near where the golden ball was abiding. The newspaper he held was swinging left and right, below his waistline, like a pendulum. I cast an eye over the thick-lettered headline, and there was this small section on the paper that read: The Bludgeoner – A Five-Year Hiatus.

  And then the story:

  Tonight will mark the fifth consecutive year free of any heinous blood-curdling slaughters attributed to the infamous serial killer, billed as: the Bludgeoner. To this day, his whereabouts and identity remain a mystery, let alone his motives behind the string of gruesome killings that spanned almost three decades.

  In the course of the long-drawn-out investigation, the victim’s families have several times expressed their anger towards the crime unit and its incapacity to nab the individual responsible for their loved ones’ brutal deaths. Now, it would seem any chance of apprehending the scourge is slim to none, since there hasn’t been a major breakthrough in a long time. And after five years of inactivity, one has to wonder whether the Bludgeoner hung his bludgeon up for good, or simply took multiple gap years. All we can hope for is that justice be served, one way or the other, for the sake of the grieving families who deserve some kind of closure…

  I stopped reading because in his passing, Glynn casually dropped his eyes on the golden ball, just like one spots a silver coin on a blacktop.

  At first, he was puzzled. The small object was bouncing the blinding light of noonday in his direction. Such a beautiful luminance. And yet people were passing by it, like a marching torrent of anonymous faces, completely oblivious to that piece of sun that lay at their heel.

  Without hesitation, Glynn Mars sidled up to it and reached down. When his pudgy fingers enfolded the golden ball, for no concrete reason at all, he felt as if a sea of good fortune had closed in upon him. Riding the wave of that sea of good fortune, he jumped in the first available cab he could find.

  “Government Center,” he said to the driver. “And please, I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Roger that,” the cabbie said.

  The taxicab took off. On the backseat, Glynn Mars was contemplating the golden ball, holding it between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes raking its glossy surface with daze and elation. Then he hefted it in his hand. It was quite heavy for its small size. He then brought the ball near his ear and shook it vigorously. Maybe there was an inner layer of something in it. A hollow nest perhaps. And Glynn caught himself fantasizing about one of those large Faberge eggs. But the golden ball seemed not to house a smaller item inside.

  His cell phone suddenly tolled. He had to pat himself down to locate it. When he finally did, he quickly pressed the “call” button because the ringing had gone on for nearly a minute.

  “Hey, what’s up?” He listened. “No, no… I’m on my way to the hearing right now… Yeah… I should be there in fifteen minutes…” He glanced at his watch. “I know, I know… last thing I want is for her to get custody of my kids and take them God knows where with that hillbilly stud of hers… I don’t care what she’s been doing or who she’s been doing it with, those are my children we’re talking about… They need their father… They need their ––whose side are you on, anyway? ... Well, we’ll see how the proceedings go today…” He began to idly fiddle with the golden ball in his fingers. “Hmm… listen, I found something quite remarkable… I don’t know –– I mean, I’m not sure. It looks like something I saw a long time ago… perhaps on an old cave painting at a dig site… But I don’t know which though – Okay, I’ll bring it over tonight. We can crosscheck it with the compiled data of the university catalog. Maybe start with the Peruvian tomb we excavated a while back…”

  Again, Glynn let his eyes roam over the golden relic he thought the ball was and –– immediately leapt back in his seat as if dodging a strike.

  “Good Lord!”

  The driver looked at him through the rearview mirror. “Is everything all right back there, sir?”

  He had an impassive voice that suited his impassive face.

  Glynn met the eyes of the driver. He was gaping, but soon recovered his voice after a brief moment.

  “Yeah… everything’s okay.”

  But everything was not okay. The person on the other end of the cell phone, a middle-aged man, was gushing out his concern into the cabin. You could hear the frizzle in his voice.

  “Hello?… Are you still there? ... Glynn?… Hello?…”

  “I’m still here…” Glynn finally said, bringing the cell phone to his ear. His forehead that was all tidy a minute ago, was now beaded with sweat.

  His reflection… There was something wrong with his reflection when he saw it on the golden ball the second time around. He looked again, afraid of what he thought he’d seen. His mouth opened in shock… There was no mistake. On the golden surface, Glynn Mars could view every feature of his face save for his eyes. They were literally absent, gone, completely erased from his facial ensemble. An expanse of skin covered the sockets to make up for the loss. And it looked inhuman.

  “What the devil is this thing?” Glynn muttered under his breath, holding the golden ball out at a safe distance from his face. The eyeless version of himself was kind of freaking him out.

  Now he was ruminating mentally: when he first looked into the mysterious ball, his reflection was distorted indeed, but it was whole. No feature was missing. He could bet his arm on that – or could he? Now, he wasn’t sure.

  “It must be an optical trick,” he reasoned with himself. “That’s the only explanation.”

  “…Glynn… Are you listening?”

  The other speaker had been blaring in Glynn’s ear the whole time. And from the fuss he was making, you could tell he was getting all mussed about Glynn not talking back.

  Glynn snapped out of his numbness to end their conversation.

  “I’m sorry… yeah, I know… Listen, I’m gonna have to call you back!”

  Glynn hung up, and his mind reverted to the ball he now flatly refused to even cast an eye on.

  In a ham-fisted way, he shoved the golden ball in his sweater pocket. That’s when the cab abruptly came to a bumpy stop. Glynn almost went ass-over-teacups through the cabin and cursed angrily through his teeth. The driver explained that one of the front tires had just popped, and that he’d try to switch it out real fast.

  “How long?” Glynn asked, looking at his watch.

  “Ten minutes tops.” the cabbie replied.

  Glynn climbed out of the sidelined car with a little aggravation. He came over to the driver who was already popping the trunk open. Glynn handed him a few bucks.

  “Here ––” he said. “I don’t have ten minutes.”

  The cabbie took the fare and started apologizing for the layover. But Glynn didn’t hang around to hear it all. He had already flagged another taxi down and was boarding it, much to the dismay of the stranded cabbie…

  Exactly seven minutes later, the cabbie was kicking the spare tire on. He received a call from dispatch, sending him off to the city park for a pick-up. Halfway out to his destination, while paddling through the usual stop-and-go traffic on the freeway, he noticed something on the footwell, partially exposed from the underside of his seat –– the golden ball.

  The cabbie had seen it in the hands of the previous passenger. As it happened, when – due to the tire burst – the car had wobbled out of control before stopping short. Glynn had almost fallen off his seat in the resulting concussion, causing the ball to slip out of his shallow sweater pocket. And so the ball had come down onto the backseat footwell, and rolled its way across to the footwell of the driv
er’s seat.

  Glynn Mars didn’t know it, but he had joined the few people who’d come across the golden ball and lived another second to ponder on their experience with it.

  With one eye on the road, and because the traffic was unmoving, the cabbie bent to retrieve the ball. His reach was restrained however. So he unbelted himself and groped under the seat, until his fingers brushed against a sleek, spherical curve…

  As if ten thousand watts of electricity had surged through his body, the cabbie’s head, in a brutal reaction, snapped backwards onto the headrest and then banged sideways, webbing the door’s window. Blood came spilling out on it. Finally, the cabbie slumped over the wheel. And the long blast that resounded from the wedged horn, was a fair substitute to the howl of pain his own voice would’ve produced if he hadn’t died on the spot.

  Meanwhile, the golden ball had instantly vanished from the taxi. It reappeared a second later, like magic, somewhere on the green fields of the city park, not far from the spot where the Greaves had settled themselves to picnic…

  Chapter VII

  GRECO AND SUZY’S INTIMATE MOMENT:

  TWO LOVEBIRDS IN A COMPLEX NEST