by Kris Ashton
“Um, you fell down a ravine, remember?”
Sharna nodded, as if he had done nothing more than remind her of a friend’s impending birthday. He sat next to her and put an arm across her shoulders. She felt hot to the touch, but did not appear flushed or sweaty. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s all everyone’s been doing for the past couple of days. Guy seems to think it’s some sort of flu that’s spread through the house. Del and I are the only ones who haven’t caught whatever it is.”
All of a sudden Sharna got up and stood facing him, her chest pushed out. “Make love to me,” she said.
Derek blinked in surprise and then creases appeared in his brow. “Sharna, are you sure you’re up to it? I think you might be suffering some sort of mild concussion, and even if you’re feeling better now you—”
Sharna lifted up the hem of her dress, tucked her fingers into her underwear and bent at the hips, guiding her simple cotton panties down to her ankles. She stepped out of them, two petite steps, like a child marching on the spot. Then she lifted her dress up to her waist and thrust her groin towards Derek’s face.
He let out an involuntary cry of disgust and recoiled back onto the bed. The beautiful lips he knew with their dusting of light brown hair had swollen into a perverted ogre’s kiss, the labia inflamed and blue with bruising. Yet amid the carnage he could see the engorged red bump of her clitoris and the moist dilation of her vulva. As sickening and abhorrent as the idea might be, Sharna was ready for action.
“Make love to me.”
“Jesus Christ, Sharna, no!” he scrabbled sideways and hopped off the end of the bed, worried Sharna might throw herself at him and do herself more injury. “We’re going to sleep now and first thing tomorrow I’m canceling breakfast with your dad and taking you to see Dr Pratt. You’re not well.”
She came at him again, arms outstretched and mouth slightly parted, a manifestation of lust and desire…yet none of it touched her eyes. A shiver ran up Derek’s shoulder blades. Could a person be delirious and have uncontrollable erotic urges?
He grabbed her by the shoulders, as firmly as he dared, and bellowed into her face: “I’m not interested, Sharna! You’re sick. You’re not well.”
Her torch flames of lust flickered and began to wane. Her whole person slumped in his hands and all at once she only looked tired again, the same ragged girl who had collapsed onto the porch steps that afternoon. “Sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right, it’s not your fault,” Derek said, feeling bad that he’d yelled at her. “Come on, we’ll get you to bed now. I’m tired as well. Let’s just get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow I’ll drag every damned one of us down to Dr Pratt’s if I have to. I’ll find out what ails us.”
He expected Sharna to smile, but she merely nodded as he steered her to her side of the bed. Her eyelids appeared leaden. As she pulled listlessly at the covers and clambered in, he wondered if her burst of sexual energy had set back her recovery. He pulled the duvet up beneath her chin and then switched off the light. He joined her in bed and listened to her consistent breaths, his own soreness and fatigue forgotten. She was asleep already, God help him. No healthy person nodded off that fast when they had spent half the day at rest. He did not relish the thought of calling Sheriff Grayson the next day. His suspicions would surely be aroused, but there was nothing else for it.
Derek had no sense of dropping off into sleep. His slumber was deep but fitful; he woke once to what he thought were scuffling footsteps in the hall, but he listened and heard nothing more, and decided he must have dreamed them.
Friday, August 7, 1969
The instant he awoke, Derek knew something was wrong. The roof had not caved in, no one had splashed blood across the walls, and yet some latent instinct could sense it the way a dog could sense an approaching storm. The commune did not sound right, for one thing. A house with eight occupants was a bit like New York—it never really slept. Even in the early hours of the morning, someone was always getting up to go to the bathroom or to pour themselves a glass of water. These weren’t even the early hours of the morning, and yet he heard nothing but the twitter of birds and the swish of a breeze in the treetops. No bustle of kitchenware and breakfast preparation, no chatter among early risers, not even a grumbled daytime greeting from the night owls. It could have been a holiday house abandoned during the frozen winter months, or an office closed down for the Christmas holiday.
Sharna no longer shared his bed, either. Her pillow still held an indentation of her head, and at the bottom of this cotton gully was the leaf that had been entangled in her hair. In itself it was unremarkable, one of uncountable leaves dropped in the course of a year, and yet set alone against the pillow’s stark whiteness it made Derek think of a suicide note.
You’re tripping out and there’s not a mushroom in sight, his rational mind surmised. Sharna’s just gone to the bathroom and you’re ready to flip your wig.
Those words made perfect sense—and yet that deeper, primordial part of his brain, where the cells were only one step evolved from nerve endings, refused to listen. They didn’t think or wonder or contemplate, they knew.
Sharna had left the bedroom door open. Derek crept up to it and poked his head out into the hall with master thief’s caution, as if he expected an ax to arc down towards his neck. The hallway was bare and, he noticed, the rest of the bedroom doors were now open. He checked each room, just to make sure, but all were empty.
Where did a group of people with the flu (and one with a possible concussion) go? He commenced a slow-footed inspection of the house, beginning with the kitchen, moving into the lounge room and then heading out to the bathroom and laundry at the rear. Not a soul. Everything was in its place, but no one was around to use it. He felt like he had boarded a land-locked version of the Mary Celeste.
“Hello?” he called out. Those primeval brain cells thought calling out might be a bad idea, but Derek didn’t care; he was in a waking nightmare, one that a single voice could banish. “Where is everybody?”
Nothing. No response.
What if Milton had instigated some crazy mass suicide with a side helping of murder? Three days earlier the idea would have seemed preposterous, but so much had happened in those seventy-two hours. So much strange behavior. Was it so hard to believe Milton’s cracked mind had finally shattered beneath the weight of his jealousy and discontent? No, it wasn’t hard to believe. Not at all.
Derek went out onto the porch and looked around. The morning went on like it always did, the overnight frost melting to dew, birds flitting from tree to tree in search of breakfast. As Derek crossed the yard, faults started to appear in the veneer of reality. Del and Daisy, who still worked on farm time, usually got up early and started the fire to see out the chilly morning hours. But today no smoke issued from the chimney. And Derek, also a child of dawn, would normally be at his chopping block replenishing their supply of firewood. Instead he found himself creeping towards it, gooseflesh rising on his arms and back.
They stood together like penguins huddling together for warmth. Only that wasn’t right; there was no warmth in this convocation, it better reminded Derek of a cluster of bees exchanging information. Everyone except Del wore clothes; she stood blank naked on the edge of the huddle, finger-shaped bruises on her wrists and ankles and a single drop of blood dried on the inside of her thigh. She saw him first and turned away from the group, a beastly hunger adulterating her pretty face.
“Make love to me,” she said.
Now the others turned to look at him, first the girls—Daisy, Jenna, Sharna—and then the men, Gary, Milton and Guy. Only ‘girls’ and ‘men’ no longer seemed apt descriptions for the things that observed him. In pairs of one or two the perversion of their eyes had been indefinable, but now, with all fourteen of those dead orbs directed at him, he could see they were as alien as a fly’s eyes.
“Make love to me,” Del said again.
“Make love to me,” Sharna
echoed.
“Make love to me.”
“Make love to me.”
They advanced on him, a bevy of glassy-eyed zombies driven by some unfathomable sex-lust. They looked ripe to the point of rottenness and Derek did not know what horrified him more: the complete absence of independent consciousness on their faces or that on some primal level he wanted to comply with their monotonous, one-track wishes.
He took a trembling backward step. “Get the hell away from me,” he growled.
The girls—the females—ceased their approach and regarded him with a skink-like tilting of their heads. Guy—one of the males—walked forward and stood beside Jenna.
“Reproduce,” he said.
Jenna obediently pulled down her pants and stood there naked from the waist down. The morning air was still chilly enough to convert breath to steam, and the diminutive clouds emerging from Jenna’s mouth became greater and more frequent. She spread her legs wider, as though she were about to begin a light session of yoga.
What happened next made Derek clap a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream. The noise wouldn’t matter; he was the only one around to hear it. But he didn’t want to hear it.
The thing that had once been Guy bent down and picked up the silver object on the grass between Jenna’s feet. He held it out on his palm, as if it were a pet rock, and looked in Derek’s direction, seeing with those unseeing eyes.
“Reproduce,” Guy said.
Being a man of considerable intelligence, Derek fled.
Bert didn’t much want to be happy, but as he guided his cruiser around the gentle bends of Main Street’s east end, his mouth kept betraying him. Now and then it would break into a smile and sometimes it might purse out and start whistling a tune.
God, who was he kidding? He was as happy as he’d ever been since Dana passed away. He had come to terms with rather than accepted Sharna’s residence at the feminist retreat (a trick of inner diplomacy he supposed all adults had to perform if they didn’t want their grown-up kids to hate their guts), and while her lies had come as a shock, he had come to prefer the present situation. For one thing she had not left town—was living, in fact, only a few miles from the front door of the house in which she had grown up. For another thing, although Bert was not naïve enough to believe he would see the commune as it truly was without his presence, if Brolin was happy to invite the law onto his property with only a couple of days’ notice, any illegalities that went on there could only be minor. God knew, some of Dana’s stories from her teen years had nearly turned his hair white, and when he looked back at the lunatic motorcycle races he and his friends had conducted along rutted dirt roads (no helmets, either) he could only wonder that all his limbs were still intact. Part of becoming a parent seemed to be forgetting one’s own less-than-seemly past and imagining one’s own children were the first generation of delinquents.
Gliding on such contemplation, Bert steered the cruiser lazily around the sharpest bend of Main Street, known for reasons lost as Danson’s Corner. It often claimed drunk or weary motorists, lulled into carelessness by the stretch of straight road that led all the way back to the i70. As Bert came into the first part of this straight, he saw a barefooted girl walking along the shoulder. He might have stopped anyway, just to make sure nothing was the matter, but when he recognized his own daughter he stamped on the brake, all professional and high-speed driving instruction forgotten. The cruiser wailed to a stop about forty feet past Sharna’s dawdling form, the wind catching the tire smoke and hurling it at Utah.
Bert switched on his flashers, got out and started down Main Street at a harried march. Sharna had turned around and now watched him come closer…but it was almost as though she didn’t recognize him.
“Sharna, what are you doing out here? Are you okay?”
She did not respond, but only angled her head as if trying to remember who he was. Bert’s heart started to pound, the way it sometimes did if he drank one cup of coffee too many. Droplets of sweat sprung up beneath his armpits. As he got closer he saw the sharp blue eyes he had always loved were gone, diminished in a haze…no doubt a drug haze. They reminded him of mongoloid eyes.
“Christ, Sharna, what have they done to you? What have you done to yourself?”
Sharna appeared to hear him for the first time and looked straight at him…although their eyes did not properly meet.
“Make love to me,” Bert’s daughter said.
Bert stopped short, as if an invisible Ali had jabbed him in the breadbasket. He couldn’t have heard right. “Did you say…”
“Make love to me,” Sharna confirmed.
Bert turned his head away and leaned over, certain he was about to puke. What drug had they given her, what possible narcotic could she take that would…
Her hand, dry and hot, fell onto his prone neck.
“Make…” She stopped. “Defective.”
Bert managed to compose himself and stood erect. “Sharna, you’re not making sense. What the hell have you taken?”
“Time to go,” she said.
“Time to go where?”
She turned away and made as if to continue into town. Bert caught her by the shoulder. “Oh, no you don’t. I’ve put up with this long enough, Sharna. I’m not going to sit back and watch you broil your brain with that band of dropkicks. You’re coming home with me.”
“Time to go,” Sharna said irritably, trying to shrug off his hand.
“No nonsense,” Bert said, using his cop’s voice. “You’re coming home with me and that’s final.”
Sharna swung back. “Time to go!” she shrieked.
“Okay, that’s it,” Bert said, “if you’re going to behave like a child I’m going to treat you like one.” He snatched her up and put her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Sharna shrieked and snarled, her nails clawing at the small of his back and untucking his shirt.
Ignoring the flares of pain, he opened the cruiser’s back door and tossed her in like a sack of wheat. He slammed the door shut and stepped back panting. He had just put his daughter in a place only ever occupied by belligerent drunks and one or two hardened criminals. Bert expected her to slap her hands against the window (she couldn’t get out—the door had no interior handle) but her incarceration seemed to have sedated her. She stopped moving altogether and sat facing forward, her eyes locked on the headrest she could presumably make out through the sturdy wire mesh.
Her changeable mood directed Bert closer to a suspicion of drug abuse. He looked in the direction of the commune, infused with a desperate need to drag one Derek Brolin out by his long faggot hair and kick him until he heard ribs snap. But love and concern for his daughter packed down his anger, and with a final baleful look northeast, Bert walked around to the driver’s side and got in.
“This is for your own good, Sharna,” he said as they started back towards the town center. “I don’t know what the hell you’re on, but it’s changed you.”
His daughter remained perfectly quiet. Bert had to check his rear-view mirror to know she was even there. The mesh obstructed a proper view of her face, and Bert was glad.
“I’m disappointed in you, Sharna. Let me make that clear. You’re so much better than this. You’re a smart girl, smarter than I ever was, but what you’ve done to yourself is dumb. Hanging around with those freaks might seem exciting and rebellious now, but when you’re a thirty-year-old unmarried mother lying in the gutter with a syringe hanging out of your arm, it’s not going to seem so wonderful. Believe me, I’ve seen it.”
Actually, this last was a lie—he had only ever heard stories from other cops. Real or otherwise, Bert could not tell if his advice had gotten through to her. She seemed content to gaze at nothing—or whatever the goddamned drugs were televising for her. Bert ended his sermon and focused his thoughts on other matters, such as how long it might take for word to spread that Sheriff Grayson’s daughter had become a junkie. Would that tasty tidbit end up in Hank Woods’ magazine article? Bert grimac
ed inwardly as he put himself in a journalist’s shoes. Of course it would. The local sheriff’s daughter is shacked up with the local hippie leader, and for six months her gullible father is none the wiser. Hell, that could even be the story.
Bert was still pondering the ominous possibilities when he pulled into his driveway. But his mind soon shifted to the present as he saw old Frank Hoskins across the road watering his front lawn. Frank tended to his own lawn and other people’s business with equal care, and a scene between Sheriff Grayson and his daughter would be some fertile compost to spread around at the next senior citizens meeting. Bert remained in his seat a while, hoping Frank might almost be done, but his neighbor showed no intention of reeling up his hose.
Bert opened the back door cautiously, but rather than trying to leap out of the car like a cat escaping a carrier cage, Sharna stepped out placidly, showing no intent to flee. He guided her up the walkway to the front door and she observed nothing in particular as he unlocked the deadbolt. He wondered if, in her own drugged-out way, she realized he was looking out for her.
They went to the kitchen. “Take a seat,” he said.
Sharna did as he asked and Bert pulled up a chair himself.
“I’m sure you’re mighty angry at me right now, and I guess I can understand that. But you were leading a lifestyle that could only end one way. You might be fine for six months or a year, or even two years, but eventually drug use only leads to one of two places—jail or a coffin. I don’t want to see my only daughter dead or in prison. Don’t you think that’s reasonable?”
Sharna did not look at him, but she nodded.
“I want you to stay here with me for a while. It might not be ‘cool’ or whatever, but it’s what’s best for you at the moment. If you get yourself clean, I think you’ll see that. You don’t much hear about it in church, but ask any policeman and he’ll tell you—drugs are the Devil’s invention. They make you forget who you are and what’s important. They make you less than a person. You need to stay here so you can remember who you are. And who you are is an intelligent girl with a bright future in front of you. If you don’t mess it up. Does that make sense?”