by Ronald Malfi
The chamber was filled with dolls.
They surrounded me, hives of them, assembled in heaps and dangling from wires and strings from the rafters. They were propped in corners, in pyramidal wedges of cloth and plastic and rubber. Dusty marble eyes stared at me from every corner of the room.
All of them—lashed together with wire.
The centerpiece of this nightmare was another mannequin—or, rather, an amalgamation of mannequin parts, assembled in such a fashion so that the thing was spiderlike, a confluence of arms and legs branching from a central torso held in place by tight bands of electrical wire. In each molded plastic hand it clutched a doll, like something about to feast. Its head was featureless, twisted funny on the blunt stalk of its neck. The thing wore a shawl of cobwebs, thick as a death shroud.
It stood in the center of the room in all its hideous, multi-limbed glory. The dolls all faced it, as if in worship. Painted in spidery red letters on the floor, spiraling in a never-ending gyre around the godlike mannequin:
Gas Head will make you dead
I staggered backward, unable to pull my gaze from the monstrosity. Your voice resonated in my head: There’s a man made up of poison gas who lives in an abandoned castle. He’ll get inside your skull and drive you mad.
My back thumped against a spongy wall of dolls, and I spun around in time to see one of them begin to twist and undulate and come alive. I trained the beam of light on it, my hand shaking. The doll bulged outward from the others, one molded rubber arm shifting in a slow-motion salutation. I watched its head tip backward, straining the stitching at its neck, and could hear its movement, somehow even more terrible than actually watching it move. It was tied to a support beam that was covered with countless other dolls, except this one was alive, was—
Something dark and sleek poked through a tear in the doll’s body. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to pull the flashlight’s beam away but I was powerless to move. I stared as the thing squirmed its way free of the doll’s body and dropped audibly to the cement floor.
It was a rat roughly the size of a small dog. I watched it sniff the air then scurry along the baseboard toward a deeper part of the room.
I should have felt relief, but the movement of the doll and the appearance of the rat had only served to heighten my senses. There was something else in here with me, an indistinct shifting of reality that conspired to resolve itself as an actual thing. It was the chamber itself, its walls closing in on me, those dusty dolls’ eyes drawing closer, closer. Something in here… something…
—There is madness here, other-Aaron whispered ghostlike in my head.
“Then let’s get the fuck out,” I responded, and fled from that terrible place.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
There was a police car parked in the Whitneys’ driveway when I arrived at five-thirty. I parked the Sube across the street and was about to get out when my cell phone vibrated. The hairs on the back of my neck periscoped, and I worried it might be Peter Sloane again. But it was Denise Lenchantin’s name and number on the display. Relief washed through me.
“Is this him? Is this the guy?” she blurted before I could utter a hello.
“Do you recognize him from those photos?” I asked her.
“No. I told you, it was too dark and I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Not even a sense of him from those photos? Nothing?”
A pause. “I mean, it could be. It could also be a million other guys. I just don’t know.”
I leaned my head back against the headrest, rubbed at my eyes.
“This article says this guy is a retired cop,” she said. “So he wasn’t just pretending that night, was he?”
“I don’t know,” I said into the phone. “I don’t know anymore.”
“What should I do, Aaron?”
“Just be careful,” I told her. “Keep one eye looking over your shoulder at all times.”
“Now you’re scaring me.”
I thought of that terrible monstrosity comprised of mannequin limbs back at the abandoned refinery, the profusion of dolls climbing the walls, and a shiver rippled through my body. Yet Denise Lenchantin was still alive; Peter Sloane hadn’t crept up on her in the night and choked the life out of her. Not yet, anyway.
“Aaron?” she said, and I realized I hadn’t spoken in a while.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know if this is the guy or not. Just please be careful, okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. You too.”
I promised I would be, then disconnected the call. My hands were shaking, and I took several minutes to regain my composure before climbing out of the car.
The rain had stopped for now, but the evening sky was a tumult of aggressive-looking thunderheads swirling in a soupy miasma above the treetops. I climbed the porch steps of the Whitney house, a bottle of Apothic Red in my hands, which I’d purchased from a liquor store in town.
A baby-faced man with a buzz cut answered the door. I held out my hand to shake his, but he snatched up my wrist and tugged me across the threshold. Before I knew what he was doing, he had gathered me in a tight embrace that drove the bottle of wine into my sternum.
When our hug was over, he held me at arm’s length. “Hey, man, I’m so sorry. Tara told me about Allison. I can’t believe it.”
“Thank you,” I mustered.
“I’m Eric.”
“Aaron.”
“Come on in.”
I followed him down the hall to the kitchen. Burgers were sizzling in a pan on the stove, and Tara was at the counter slicing tomatoes. She smiled when she looked up and saw me. “I hope you like Spamburgers,” she said.
“She’s joking,” Eric said.
“Whatever it is, it smells delicious.” I set the bottle of wine on the counter. “This was really very nice of you both.”
“Hell, we loved Allison, man,” Eric said. He went to the fridge, took out two cans of Bud, and handed me one.
“The police car outside,” I said. “You’re a cop?”
“Five years now,” Eric said. He clinked his beer can against my own then took a slug.
“Still can’t believe I married a fucking cop,” Tara said.
“Kiss it, babe,” Eric said.
Tara stuck out her tongue at her husband, then redirected her gaze to the bottle of wine I’d brought.
“Tell me where the glasses are and I’ll pour you some,” I told her.
“Hell no,” Eric interjected. “She made a deal with me. No drinking.”
“I’m pregnant,” Tara said, as if apologizing for something. She placed a hand against her belly, which was still washboard flat.
“No alcohol, no cigarettes,” Eric said, ticking each item off on his fingers.
“No sushi, no lunch meats,” Tara added, frowning.
“That was the deal. And she’s stuck to it, man. Impressed the hell out of me.”
Tara met my gaze. We’d smoked cigarettes that afternoon, after meeting with Lynn Thompson.
—Secrets abound, whispered other-Aaron.
“Well, congratulations to you both,” I said, and raised my glass in celebration.
2
We ate dinner on a small screened-in porch at the back of the house. It was chilly but the constant movement of wind felt good and made me feel alive.
Tara and Eric talked for a time about growing up in Woodvine. These stories inevitably coincided with stories about you and your sister, but to my surprise, I did not become maudlin or uncomfortable in hearing them; they were nice stories, and while they made me miss you more, they also comforted me in some strange fashion. I guess it was nice to hear that there were good things in your childhood, too.
What was clear was that neither Tara nor Eric had any real love for the town. They recognized it as a dead end, a remote and struggling landscape on the fringe of society.
“Why not move?” I asked them.
“Shit,” Eric said. “Where would we go? You ne
ed money to pick up and move someplace. Her folks, they had two mortgages on this dump.”
“We’ve really started thinking things through now that we’re gonna have this baby,” Tara said. “Started saving some money, too. I got my real estate license last fall. Remember I told you I’m the listing agent for Lynn Thompson’s place across the street?”
“No one’s buying a burned-out fuckin’ house, hon,” Eric said.
“It’s not the house, you dummy, it’s the land. Someone buys that, they can build ten houses on it.”
“Is that right?” Eric said, nodding appreciably. Throughout the course of dinner he’d gone through a case of beer, and had only recently opened the bottle of wine I had brought; he was on his second glass of that now.
“Anyway,” Tara said, “I don’t want to raise a kid out here.”
“She’s been having nightmares,” Eric said. He looked at his wife, compassion on his soft, round, alcohol-reddened face. He looked more like a drunken cherub than a police officer.
“Doc says it’s normal with pregnancy,” Tara amended. “Crazy dreams.”
“Monsters coming to steal away the baby,” Eric said, clawing at the air between him and his wife.
“Really,” I said.
“It’s all perfectly normal,” said Tara.
“Speaking of nightmares, I went out to that old refinery this afternoon. I went inside the place.”
To my surprise, Eric laughed. In a sort of singsong voice, like someone reciting a nursery rhyme, he said, “Gas Head will make you dead.”
“Oh, stop it!” Tara said, and slapped him on the shoulder.
“Yeah, Gas Head. What the hell is going on out there?” I asked. “It looked like some weird goddamn shrine or something.”
“Well, it sort of is, I guess,” Eric said.
“It is not,” Tara countered.
“Then what would you call it?”
“What is it?” I said. “Who put all those dolls out there?”
“Kids,” Tara said.
“From town,” Eric added.
“Kids from town are going up into that place?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it.
“Well, not so much anymore. But back when we were kids, you bet. I went in there a bunch of times myself.”
“To smoke weed,” Tara whispered around cupped hands. She tipped me a wink.
“I never smoked weed, T.”
“Liar.” To me, Tara said, “He thinks ’cause he’s the law now he can’t say he’s ever done anything illegal.”
“I never smoked any fuckin’ weed, T,” Eric insisted.
Tara shrugged her shoulders. “Suit yourself, bub.” She mimed toking a joint.
“So wait,” I said. “Hold on. Why were kids going up to that place? Those dolls look like they’re some sort of… I don’t know…”
“Sacrifice,” Tara said, her eyes going wide.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
“It’s Gas Head, man,” said Eric.
“It’s bullshit,” Tara countered, yawning. “Eric’s just being a dick.”
“No, tell me,” I insisted. “What is it supposed to be?”
“It’s just a stupid urban legend,” Eric said. “Every town’s got a boogeyman, right?”
“That’s how our parents kept us from hanging out on the refinery grounds when we were kids, after the place closed up,” Tara said. “Go there and Gas Head will poison your head, ruin your mind, and eat you from the inside out.”
“His body made of smoke! His eyes like pools of oil!” Eric crooned.
Tara said, “It’s just like how Godzilla was made from radiation or nuclear fallout or whatever? Well, Gas Head comes from the old gas fires of the refinery.”
“No, Dumbo,” said Eric. “He doesn’t come from the fires, he is the fires. Or what remained of the fires after the place shut down.”
“He’s the smoke, not the fires, jerk,” Tara corrected. “And quit calling me Dumbo.”
“Anyway,” said Eric, “it sort of had the opposite effect. You tell a kid not to do something, what do they do? They do exactly that. Place became a hangout for a while. We used to go and drink beer—”
“And smoke pot,” Tara said, wrinkling her nose playfully at her husband.
Eric ignored the comment. “Seriously, though,” he said, setting his wineglass on the table and sitting forward in his chair. He appeared to sober up. “Bunch of people got sick because of that place back when our folks worked there. We were just babies, man, so we don’t really remember nothing, but we all know the stories.”
“Sick how?” I asked.
“In the head,” Tara said.
“Brain cancer?”
“Crazy cancer,” Eric said. “Bunch of suicides, stuff like that. They shut the plant down for a while, but came back and said there was nothing wrong with it. Unrelated events.”
“Which was bullshit,” said Tara. “Unrelated, my ass.”
“Anyway, it didn’t last long. AstroOil, the parent company, they were facing some lawsuits, too, I think. They shut the place down for good a year or so after that.”
“How many people killed themselves?” I asked.
“I think around a dozen,” Eric said, looking at Tara for confirmation.
“Could be more,” Tara said. “Can’t really remember.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s a high number of people to commit suicide all in the same workplace.”
“No, no, man,” Eric said, waving a hand at me. “You misunderstood. They weren’t working at the refinery. These were people here in town.”
“What?” I said.
“There were others who had to leave town, too,” Tara said. “They were all out of sorts, you know? I don’t know. Getting paranoid. Needed to clear their heads.”
“That’s when people first started talking about Gas Head,” Eric said. “It started out as the term people used for the poor bastards who killed themselves, like it was some disease or something—‘They got a bad case of gas head,’ shit like that. But then later, as things went back to normal—”
“Normal as it gets around here,” Tara added.
“—and the refinery closed up for good, people just started talking about it like it was some kind of monster or something. Like, an actual thing. Gas Head. He’ll make you dead. Watch out, and keep outta that old building. It’s all just some local superstition.”
“My mom used to say that if I didn’t finish my vegetables, Gas Head would seep through my bedroom window at night and poison my head. For years I imagined this creepy white cloud of smoke coming into my bedroom while I slept and blowing up my nostrils, filling my head with smog. Scared the shit out of me.”
“But you ate your vegetables,” Eric said.
“Anyway, kids started to bring dolls up there like some sort of offering to Gas Head,” Tara said. “Like Eric said—a superstition, you know? You offer up a decoy to appease Gas Head, and Gas Head would leave you alone. That sort of thing went on for years, but it really ramped up after Carol was killed. And I’m not just talking about little kids believing in this stuff, either—I brought a doll up there myself and I was in high school at the time. At first they were just tossed at the doorstep of the place. But over time, people started going inside, setting them up in that room.”
“And all those mannequins?” Eric said. “Some high-school kids hauled ’em up there, set the whole place up. It became like a goddamn Gas Head shrine.”
“But no one goes up there anymore,” Tara said. “And Allison, she never went. She didn’t believe in it. She hung her doll from a cross on the road, near the river where Carol’s body was found. As if in defiance of the whole Gas Head thing.”
“I saw the cross on the drive in,” I said.
“That doll hung there until Allison left town,” Tara said. “She took that doll with her.”
I opened my mouth to say that I knew this, that I’d found the doll in your hope chest and had it in my possession, but dec
ided against it at the last moment. It just seemed too personal to share.
“Fifteen years later, and Carol’s murder is still unsolved.” I was looking at Eric as I said this. “Is anyone in the police department actively working this case?”
“With no new evidence, there’s nothing more to go on than there was back when it happened,” Eric said. “You ask me, it was their mom’s boyfriend, what’s-his-name.”
“James de Campo,” I said.
Eric snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Bingo.”
“What makes you so sure it was him?”
“Look, I didn’t really know the guy back then, except maybe I’d see him in the halls at school. He was the head janitor at Elk Head. But I’ve also heard stories about him from her.” He jerked a thumb at his wife. “Tara watched the shit play out live from right here across the street. Fucking guy was apparently a drunk who got a little too handsy with Lynn Thompson and her girls. Cops were always at their place.”
“That doesn’t make him a murderer,” Tara said.
“Listen,” Eric said. “You do this job long enough, you realize that the simplest, most logical answer is usually the right one. Besides, I’ve seen the file. He was the only suspect back then. His alibi was shit and he’d gotten into a fight with Carol just before she stormed out of the house. Then he disappeared for a few hours, claiming to get drunk by himself somewhere.”
“Did you know the police detective who was working the investigation back then?” I asked him. “A man named Peter Sloane?”
“Only from the file. I was in high school back in 2004 and didn’t much hang out with cops.”
“Sloane left the department back in 2006, two years after Carol’s murder. Would the department have a record of why he left?”
“Depends on the circumstances. You trying to track this guy Sloane down or something? He wouldn’t be able to tell you anything that you can’t already find online about the case.”
I felt uncomfortable mentioning the yearbook connection you had uncovered, and how Sloane’s photo was in it, to these people. Anyway, I wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that Sloane was the killer. It was only one photo in a book of hundreds.