Big Wheel

The moon glared at Casey.

He turned over in bed to stare at the wall, the phone receiver quiet in his hand. The wall clock was perfectly balanced at 3:45 a.m.

He closed his eyes.

A minute later, he opened them.

"Nuts," Casey muttered. He struggled out of bed and walked to the window. Identical houses lined the street, disdained in the moon’s pale glow.

A dog barked, out of sight. Another answered in the distance.

Casey stared at a Big Wheel between the sidewalk and the curb, a few houses up. It lay on its side in a pool of moonshadow, red and blue bleached by night. Nostalgia bit into Casey’s stomach. He’d had something like it years ago. Twelve years old, rolling down the middle of the street in his pirate shirt. It hadn’t been a Big Wheel, though. It had been something different; a Blue – no, Green. Green Machine. Stopping traffic in the subdivision. Rolling on his Green Machine.

Roddy’s tricycle flashed to mind, the handlebars bent together to touch, the front wheel forming a ‘u’ on the shimmering pavement.

Casey turned from the window and padded into the kitchen, his feet thwacking on the tile.

Mindlessly, he began plucking dishes from the drying rack and putting them away. He took a glass and held it under the faucet, turned the tap, and waited. There was a banging deep underground, a rattling that traveled up through the pipes and finally manifested in a burp of water, sloshing into the glass.

Casey held it up to the kitchen window. The water was cloudy; rusty or calcified. He shrugged and drank.

The phone rang again. Casey dropped the glass, and it exploded on the floor, shards of glass skittering across the floor as the water spread. Casey’s nails bit into his palms. Call trace had been pointless, all pay phones.

Ring. Casey walked to the phone on the wall and touched the receiver.

Ring. It was hard, not answering the phone; an itch.

"Screw you," Casey muttered at the phone. "Screw you, screw you, screw you."

Ring.

Maybe it was an emergency.

Maybe he was dead.

Maybe the hospital was calling to tell him he had died and he should stop by so they could get him properly squared away.

Ring.

Casey shook his head viciously. He needed sleep. He padded back to the bedroom, shattered glass forgotten.

Ring.

The bedroom phone was more polite; a gentle, insistent chime. It tickled the edges of Casey's hearing. Casey laid down on the bed.

Ring.

The moon kept staring.

Ring.

Casey looked at the clock. 4:00.

Ring. So very polite.

He picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

A child’s voice, barely more than a baby, sing-song and querulous. "Roddy?"

"No," Casey said.

"I want Roddy." The tiny voice was insistent. "Roddy."

"This isn’t funny," Casey said, looking at the window. The moon was a mad pale eye. Casey stepped out of bed and across the room, holding the receiver high to keep the cord from tangling.

"Roddy. I want to play with Roddy."

"You’re sick," Casey said. He sounded tired and angry – pathetic. Unthreatening. "This is sick. What’s wrong with you?"

He reached for the curtain rings, cradling the phone between his head and shoulder, and as he touched the cloth, he looked outside.

"Roddy," the little voice said on the phone as Casey dropped it.

The Big Wheel was gone.

Casey looked up and down the street. The Big Wheel was nowhere in sight. He hauled the curtains shut. A hook tore free, clattering on the curtain rod.

"I want Roddy," the voice came again from the phone, on the floor close to the bed, pulled back by the cord.

"Stop it," Casey said to the phone. He picked it up and held it in front of his face. "Stop it."

"I…want…to….play…with…RODDY." the voice said.

"Roddy’s dead," Casey said, hanging up the phone.

There was a squeak outside Casey’s window; brief, high-pitched. Subsidence? A night animal? It was shrill and nostalgic. Casey knew it. It was the squeak of an ungreased pedal shaft on hard plastic, the soundtrack of childhood summers.

Stoppin’ traffic in his Green Machine.

The phone rang.

Casey ran to his window and threw open the curtains. In the forming dew, he saw tracks on his lawn, moving up to the front of his house. Three-wheeled tracks, two small on either side and a big one in the middle.

Ring.

Casey walked to the wall and pulled the phone cord out of the jack.

The kitchen phone rang. Casey ran across the house.

Ring.

As a sliver of glass punched into his foot, and Casey screamed as he fell to the floor.

Ring.

He pulled the kitchen phone from the wall.

Ring. The living room.

He crawled, looking back at a dark trail as his blood stained the living room rug. He felt his way past the coffee table, over to the phone, guided by its warble and flashing red light.

Ring.

Casey found the phone and carefully tugged the connection from the phone box. He sat there in the silence, in the dark. He touched his foot, and held his fingers to the pale light from outside; wet with blood.

The squeak of a Big Wheel sounded outside the living room window, travelling stealthily on a circuit around the house.

Maybe he was dead. Maybe hospital attendants were circling the house on Big Wheels, waiting for him to come out so they could take him to the morgue.

"I’m not dead," he whispered in the darkness. "Roddy’s dead. Not me. Not me."

The bedroom phone rang.

Then the kitchen phone.

Then the living room phone.

As soon as one faded another began, the sound whirling around the house like a dead child on a Big Wheel, pedaling furiously, flecks of blood on his lips and hate in his empty eyes. Casey clutched his head and moaned, bending in two.

"Go away," he whispered. "Not my fault. Go away. It wasn’t my fault."

Over the phones, there was another noise. A thump, soft against the front door. The ringing continued to race around the house, leaping from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room, where Casey was curled on the floor, staring at the door, listening to a thump.

And a squeak, barely audible, as the child outside backed the Big Wheel up to bang into the door again. And again.

Casey snatched the phone off the hook. The ringing stopped.

"It was an accident," he said into the dead receiver. "The gear slipped. I didn’t mean to."

There was no answer. No dial tone. Casey dropped the phone, let it hang away from its base. Slowly, deliberately, he got up, feeling the glass grind deeper into his foot.

The thump came again at the door. And the squeak, audible in the darkness. Thump.

Casey shuffled forward, a blood trail behind him. The front door was bordered by thick beveled glass, making the outside semi-visible. A red and blue haze backed up and pedaled towards the door again. Squeak-thump.

"Please no," Casey said, through the door.

"Casey," said a clear child voice outside.

"Please," Casey said. "I’m sorry. Please."

Squeak-thump.

"It should have been me," Casey said.

Squeak-thump.

Casey opened the front door and looked down.

"Hello," he said to Roddy, sitting on the Big Wheel, his skin pale and greasy and streaked with dirt, his mouth open a little. Through pale lips, Casey could see that his teeth had been filed to points. They’ll all fall out, Casey thought abstractly. They’re just baby teeth.

Roddy smiled with his baby shark mouth. He got off the Big Wheel and took a few stumbling steps towards Casey, falling as he reached him. Casey thought Roddy had stumbled until he felt the cold grey tongue rough against his foot; lapping up the blood pooling on the stoop.

"I’m hungry," Roddy said.

Casey picked the little boy up and squeezed him against his chest. "Of course you are," he said. Roddy’s fingers drummed excitedly against the back of his neck. Casey stepped back into the house, holding the cold little body tight against his.

"Of course you are."