Try, Try Again

The Midnight Vault II

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation. Tonight’s offering is my contribution to the second edition of the “Twilight Zone”-inspired gathering, The Midnight Vault…

The old hospital room had high ceilings and close walls, like a twelve-foot-deep grave with peeling plaster. The grim atmosphere had no apparent effect on the visitors who had been taking shifts over the last several days to pack themselves in beside the bed, bribing the nurses to overlook their raucous presence. While the room’s occupant lay blind and deaf in his final catatonia, they waved infant great-grandchildren at his limp, gray form and regaled each other with stories of happier days. An observer could have been forgiven for assuming that any man so loved as old Mr. Frank Sylvester must have led a full and joyful life.

Mr. Frank Sylvester, a ninety-seven-year-old working man, widower, and patriarch, lies dying. They say that death’s approach has a way of focusing the mind. They also say that focusing on the wrong things can leave you in a world of hurt. Mr. Sylvester, or Sid Foster to those who knew him in his past life, has a choice to make—perhaps the ultimate choice. No one can make it for him. Only he can decide when to walk away.

“He would’ve passed for sure already if he knew we were making such a fuss,” one old lady commented to the intruder leaning past her to check his vitals. “Lived very quiet, Dad did. He never wanted any attention. Never talked about himself, or his folks, or anything. That’s what I call un-self-interested. Contented, like.”

“I don’t know if I would call Grandad contented,” a younger man said.

“Of course he was.” She gently patted her father’s cold, twisted hand with her own. “You didn’t have a regret in the world, did you, Dad?”

The old man stirred, and with some difficulty managed to pull his dry lips free of each other. “Shoulda knocked ’is lights out,” he muttered breathlessly. “Mary…my Mary.”

The gathered relatives all looked down in surprise. “Did he say something?” one asked.

“Who’s Mary?” said another.

The old lady’s wrinkles deepened. “Why, I don’t have the first idea.”

At the head of the bed, the nurse set the old man’s wrist down and coughed softly. “Clear the room, please,” she said.

When Mr. Frank Sylvester opened his eyes, he was no longer lying prone in a hospital bed, ninety-seven and eaten away by cancer and resentment. He was standing in the parking lot of a dive bar in the red-orange Nevada sunset, and his suntanned hands were strong and smooth. He was twenty-two. His name was still Sid Foster. He had not yet ruined his life.

“Ha!” Sid punched up at the air for joy and smiled an old man’s victorious smile on a young man’s face. “Another chance—I got another chance. It’ll be different this time, huh—just you watch.” His reflection in the car beside him pointed and grinned back at him, and it made him laugh. He knew where he was, and he knew what day it was, and what he had to do differently. After all, he’d been dreaming about this day for a lifetime. If The Man Upstairs was giving him a second chance, he wasn’t going to waste it. Sid just stopped to pat the hood of his beautiful car, the only nice one he’d ever owned. Frank had never had the money for things like that—but money was easy enough for Sid Foster to come by.

He was broke at the moment, of course. The trouble had all started there. A recent run of bad dice rolls meant that Sid now owed over a hundred dollars to “Thumbs” Peretti, whose outfit operated out of this dive, and he didn’t yet know how he was going to pay it. That was one thing he never had thought through.

The door of the bar opened and out stepped Mary, yellow-haired Mary, flashing a smile at him that made him forget all about the money, just like she had the first time around. She was his girl, still—think of that! And this time, he’d keep her. There would never be any Frank Sylvester scraping the bottom of the barrel in some godforsaken Texas cow town, and there would never be any Lillian Sylvester stout and snoring through her buck teeth. Yes, this time it would be different. He returned Mary’s smile and threw his arms open in welcome.

She kissed his cheek, and he offered to take her in and buy her a drink. “You and what dough, Sid?” she asked. “Thumbs says he’s just about ready to call in that debt.”

“You let me worry about that,” he said grandly as they stepped up onto the curb. She looked doubtful, but he was still smiling when his reflection in the building’s glass door was replaced by a rough, pinched face behind it. Thumbs Peretti pushed through the door and steered Sid back a few steps with a heavy, four-fingered hand on his arm.

Another man loomed behind him at a respectful distance, holding Mary out of the way. Gunmetal flashed beneath the palm of his hand.

“You got my money, Foster?” Thumbs growled.

A sly look past him to the girl. “I do not.”

“Wrong answer.” The hand tightened its grip.

Sid knew Thumbs pretty well, or so he’d always thought. The man had a temper, but Sid could generally talk him down. He’d called his bluff on that accursed day so long ago, and he called it again now. “Hey, now, what’s some loose change between friends, after all we’ve been through together?” he said. “Tell you what, how about we play for it? Double or nothing.”

The point of a knife poked through Sid’s shirt and pressed meaningfully against his skin. “Not today, ‘pal’. I’ve had it with you. You can either hand over my money, or you can tell my new lady friend back there that it’s been nice knowin’ her.”

The first time around, young and slick and afraid to die, Sid had folded right here—folded up like a piece of paper, and groveled like a worm—and Thumbs had let him go, ostensibly to raise the cash. But even if he could have come up with it in time, Sid knew what life would be like for him around here after a performance like that. He hadn’t thought twice before slinking into an empty boxcar and reemerging three states away as Frank Sylvester. He’d discovered too late that a dull, law-abiding life couldn’t erase his inner shame. He could still see that last look on Mary’s face, her pretty mouth sneering in disgust…

No. This time, it had to be different. He’d prove what he was made of, if it killed him—he’d lived once already, so what did he care?

He shoved Thumbs’ knife hand away, curled his fingers up against his palm, and punched him square between the beady little eyes.

Thumbs fell back a step, his red face taking on a purple hue, and then dropped. On the way down, his head cracked against a signpost and hit the cement with a final wet smack.

Sid stared, not having expected this outcome. But when Mary called his name, he looked up and saw her with the thug’s pistol, the business end pressing into his neck. It looked right in her hand, as if she’d just been waiting for a man of hers to try something like this. Yes. This was what should have happened. “Hurry up,” she said. “Grab what you can and let’s get out of here.”

He knelt in a daze and fumbled to turn out Thumbs’ pockets, and then the other man’s, while Mary hissed threats to keep him quiet; he hardly noticed what was in them beyond that most of it was cash. As he stepped back, the thug’s throat blew out with a shot. Mary was already at the door of his car. “Come on! You can drive, can’t you?” she shouted.

“Sure, yeah.” He was in the driver’s seat now, the engine noise drowning out any sound of a reaction from inside the bar. “Watch me.”

His shock melted back into glee as they sped into the desert with the sunset at their backs. So this was the other side of the coin, the ending he might have had—the ending he had earned! Sid drove through the night as Mary held a flashlight between her teeth and counted out the money. It was enough to hold them for a while, he thought. They’d go to Mexico. He’d reinvent himself again…this time as the man that he’d always known he could be. Visions of the good life, vice, and glory swam just above the horizon in the desert sun.

The mirage vanished before he was ready to let it go. They reached Juárez at daybreak, and Sid woke in the afternoon to find that Mary had left him with nothing but the lodging he had already paid for. The gun, the money, the car: all gone. Aimless and unable to reorient himself while sitting down, he slouched through the dusty streets alone, cursing that woman. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that she always had known how to attach herself to whichever fellow was on top. For all her faults, he supposed, Lillian Sylvester had at least been loyal.

Well, that had been another lifetime; he was a different man now than the one who’d laid low and shirked his destiny. This could still be the beginning of grand things for him.

He turned into an alley and felt the point of a knife again, just to the left of his spine. “Your money or your life, gringo,” someone said behind him.

Sid laughed nervously as he put his hands out, unprepared this time to fight back. “Pal, believe me, my life’s all I got.”

The only answer was the blade punching through the side of his body. His legs folded under him, and he fell onto the street.

He didn’t know how long he lay there. Rough hands pulled at his jacket and shoes, and then he was kicked aside and abandoned. Gradually, as the light of the setting sun crept across his face, the pain of the wound began to fade. He suddenly felt very old again, as though he had lived all the intervening years at once.

This time, would he get another chance? He knew what he had to do now. It would be different. This time, it really would be different.

An ill-defined face filled his vision, squinting down through the twilight into his. “Quite a tragedy, aren’t you?” it said.

Sid stared up at it blankly, mute, his limbs liquid and warm.

“I always wondered how it was they kept that old king pushing his boulder up that mountain, day after day…you know, between you and me, I don’t think anyone did keep him at it. I suspect that he really believed he could make it to the top, and that one of those days, he would.”

The dim light had contracted to a pinpoint.

“Something to think about, you know…for next time.”

When Sid Foster opened his eyes again, he was standing in the parking lot of a dive bar in the red-orange Nevada sunset, and his suntanned hands were strong and smooth.

He looked down and put his hand to the place he’d been stabbed. He pinched himself. He took a deep breath and then slowly let it out again.

It would be different this time.

Mary, his Mary, came out of the bar and leaned in to kiss his cheek, one hand on his arm and the other planted on the door panel of the only nice car he had ever owned. Glory days. “You all right, Sid?” she asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Just fine.” He reached down deep for a charming smile. “C’mon. I’ll buy you a drink.”

“You and what dough? Thumbs says he’s just about ready to call in that debt.”

“Baby, you let me worry about that,” he said.

She gave him that doubtful look again, and he just smiled at her knowingly. It would be different this time.

There was Thumbs through the door again, the thug muscling through behind him with his right hand already in his pocket. “You got my money, Foster?”

“I don’t,” Sid said, “but I will.”

As the other man was reaching for the knife, Sid pulled back his fist and hit him with everything he had, sending him into the signpost with blood leaking from his nose.

This time, it would work.

So much for Mr. Sylvester, it seems.

Many an ambitious man comes finally to a point at which his ambitions outstrip his limitations. Whether he can accept that he’s reached it is a question that may have stiff consequences, for himself as well as for others…consequences that reach even beyond the enclosing walls of the Midnight Vault.

---

Thank you for reading…for my regular readers, be sure to check out the other stories from this event. For my visitors, welcome again, and if you enjoyed your stay, feel free to stick around.

Dark speculative fiction fans may also enjoy “Battery Low”, a very short story I wrote about loss after the apocalypse.

Battery Low