THE WAITING ROOM By T. M. Wright Writing as F. W. Armstrong

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2 THE WAITING ROOM By T. M. Wright Writing as F. W. Armstrong First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Copyright 2011 by T. M. Wright Cover Design by David Dodd Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione Cover image courtesy of: Emma Louise -

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4 NOVELS: STRANGE SEEDS BOUNDARIES THE CHANGING THE DEVOURING OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T. M. Wright: NON FICTION: THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS: A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY NARRATED BY DICK HILL

5 BUY DIRECT FROM CROSSROAD PRESS & SAVE Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a onetime 20% savings! We have a wide variety of ebook and Audiobook titles available. Find us at:

6 With love and thanks to my mom- MARIEANNE AUBIN

7 Acknowledgments For her much-needed letter of encouragement, my thanks to Stacy Horn. for his continued support, my thanks to Jeff Zaleski. And, as always, my gratitude to my editor, Harriet P. McDougal. And one person deserves acknowledgment merely for being the marvelous woman that she is Barbara Doherty.

8 Part One At the Edge

9 ONE My name is Sam Feary. I have a friend named Abner W. Cray. Sometimes people call him "Abner Doubleday," either because they think it's funny or because they're hard of hearing and they really believe that's what he's called. He hates it, though. Abner and I have known each other since we were kids in Bangor, Maine. I'm a year and a half older, probably fifty I.Q. points smarter, and I'm not nearly as clumsy as he is with women. Take that stupidity with his cousin Stacy, for instance, and the unholy mess he made of things with Phyllis Pellaprat, which, of course, he couldn't have helped when the love bug bites Abner, it bites him hard, right through the skin and into the blood. It happened more than once in Bangor, when we were in high school together. ~ * ~ I came to Manhattan, and I stayed here, because I like it. I like people all kinds of people. Everyone's interesting as far as I'm concerned, everyone's got some great story to tell, even if he's not aware of it. So I came to Manhattan, I got myself a job with a construction company, set myself up in a small apartment on Second Avenue, near 1lth Street, bought myself a pet boa constrictor which has since gone the way of the carrier pigeon met a woman named Leslie, whom I rapidly fell in love with, and started to live. I like living. I get a kick out of touching and tasting, out of going into an Italian deli---there's one not far from here and taking a giant whiff of whatever gritty aroma wafts my way. And I like to dance, though I'm the first to admit that I've got three left feet and fifteen big toes. And except for country western, I like music, too pop, rock, classical (if it's not too sleepy). If it's got a beat, I'll listen to it and enjoy it. There's very little in this world that I don't like, in fact. Except the New York Post, and the memory of Idi Amin and Joe Stalin and Richard Nixon (because he got me into so much damn trouble in Viet Nam), and commercials for Charmin toilet paper, and a lone fly buzzing me while I'm trying to eat, and two radios playing different stations at the same time, and the smell of peanut butter sandwiches mixed up with the smell of ironing. I had to grow up with that. In Bangor. I had to come home from school at lunchtime, because the school I went to had no lunch program, and invariably I'd get fed peanut butter sandwiches and milk while my mother finished up her morning's ironing. I didn't think much about it while it was happening. I think I may even have enjoyed it those two smells mixed up together. I started hating it later, in Nam, I think. I'm not sure why. Maybe I had a thing for my mother, I don't know. Maybe I had a thing for peanut butter sandwiches, or fresh ironing, I don't know. I'll probably never know, because what I've learned about myself over the years is this: There's a stranger living inside me, and sometimes he's a damned ignorant bastard. ~ * ~ I had no idea Abner was here, in Manhattan, when I got here. The last time I'd seen him, I was two days away from catching a Greyhound bus to Parris Island, in South Carolina, where some asshole D.I. was going to try and "mold" me into a

10 Marine. Abner was drooling over his cousin Stacy then; he was going on and on about her "incredible body," and I remember saying to him, "Christ, Abner, she's practically your sister, and here you are talking about putting it to her." "Putting it to her?" he asked. I didn't know then that Abner was a virgin. I thought that anyone older than fourteen had a constant hard-on and was lying in wait for whoever happened to back into it. "Put what to her, Sam?" "Your thing," I answered. "Your little ding-dong. You know put it to her, have sex with her." "With Stacy, Sam? Naw. She's too smart for that. She's smarter than I am, for sure." Abner was fifteen then, maybe sixteen. And it wasn't that he was homely, or smelly, or stupid. He was just plain scared of girls. Especially girls like Stacy. This was 1965, remember, a full ten or fifteen years before people finally figured out that, male or female, everyone likes to get it on. In 1965 all of us guys knew that only men liked to get it on, and that it was the full-time job of women either to prevent it or to grin and bear it. So there was Abner, fifteen or sixteen, horny, and scared. And there was Stacy, fifteen or sixteen, smart, stacked, and enticing, which, as far as poor Abner was concerned, added up to obscene intimidation. ~ * ~ Abner and I broke into a mausoleum once, when we were kids, shortly before I got called up and shipped away to Viet Nam. Breaking into the mausoleum was his bright idea right from the start. He said something about wanting "to see how the dead ticked," which, I told him, was just about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard anyone say. "The dead," I told him, "don't tick anymore, Abner." He shook his head, squinted, pursed his lips, tried to look befuddled. It's a pose he uses quite a lot, especially when he realizes that something incredibly stupid has just come stumbling from his mouth. Then he explained, "Well, I guess 'tick' isn't the right word, is it, Sam? But it really would be a neat thing to do. I mean... you could bring that cat skull you've got " "It's not a toy, Abner. That cat was my friend." "Sam, you dug her up, Jees you dug her up " What could I say? The cat was named Flora, and I really did love her, if only because the original Flora was a girl I'd taken to a couple of horror movies and had fallen hopelessly in love with because of the way she clutched at me in panic. Then she moved from Bangor to Oshkosh or Hoboken or some such place, and I was devastated. The cat itself was pretty much just a cat; she was nothing special (and it comes to me that my father once pointed out that Flora was a male, which, because the cat had long, thick black fur was not something that was easy to spot, and since he had a soft, feminine face, I assumed that he was a she). I said to Abner, "I dug her up only because we were close. If we do this thing, if we break into this mausoleum, Flora stays home. Okay?" He shrugged. But, at last, I did bring Flora's skull, if only so Abner wouldn't sulk. And I brought some candles, too, and a dozen Mallo Cups, because I had something like a