Friday the 13th 3

by Simon Hawke

  Chris shook her head. “Nothing.” She looked around, took a deep breath, and exhaled heavily. “Chris . . .” she said, admonishing herself.

  She had only just arrived and already she was getting paranoid. This wasn’t a good sign. First she gave Rick a hard time about greeting her with a kiss and almost giving her a heart attack, as if it were his fault about what happened, and now this. She was feeling jumpy about an open door, as if someone had crept into the van when nobody was looking and was waiting to leap out at her. She had to get things back under control. She couldn’t go through life overreacting to every little thing. She reached into the van for a bag and jumped back with a small cry as a hand closed around her wrist.

  “That’s my bag”

  “Shelly!” she said, not so much angry with him for startling her as angry with herself for being so jumpy. “What are you doing in there? Why aren’t you down at the lake with everybody else?”

  “Oh, they said they were going skinny-dipping,” he said with a self-deprecating grimace, “and I’m not skinny enough.”

  He couldn’t even bring himself to take his shirt off in public. Back in high school, the locker room during gym class had always been horribly traumatic for him. He hated it when guys came up to him and grabbed his flabby pecs, saying things like, “Hey, come on, honey, let me cop a feel,” or “Hey, Shelly, what cup size do you take?” They thought it was extremely funny, but it hurt. It hurt incredibly and filled him with such overwhelming self-loathing that he promptly went out to a pizza joint and pigged out on a large deep-dish pie with the works and a pitcher of soda. There was no escape.

  He watched Chris as she walked back to the house with Rick and sighed. It looked like everybody had somebody. Everybody except him. Debbie and Andy were coming back up from the lake, arm in arm, and Chuck and Chili were off somewhere getting stoned together. There was Vera, “his date,” though she acted as if he didn’t even exist. He wondered, longingly, what it would be like to have someone like Vera. Yeah, sure, he thought, fat chance. And fat was the word, all right.

  Chris opened the door and stood aside for Debbie as she came in from the balcony corridor. “This was my bedroom,” she said. “It’s yours for the weekend.”

  “Great,” said Debbie, looking around at the homey little room. She raised her eyebrows in puzzlement and turned around, her gaze sweeping the room. “Chris, I don’t mean to be picky or anything, but where’s the bed?”

  Chris had gone to the window to pull aside the drape. The window looked down at the barn, and she noticed the barn door slowly swinging shut. She wondered who had gone inside there. Probably Rick, she thought, and turned back from the window.

  “Chris?” said Debbie.

  “Oh, it’s right here,” Chris said, turning around and opening a small, swinging partition to reveal a net hammock slung up on a hook.

  “What’s this?” said Debbie, looking at her to see if she was joking.

  “It’s your bed,” said Chris, with a straight face.

  “A hammock?”

  “You might like it,” Chris said with a grin, imaging her and Andy in it together as she went out the door.

  Debbie shrugged gamely. “Why not?” she said, lifting off one end to stretch the hammock out to the opposite hook. It couldn’t be any worse than the backseat of a car.

  Andy came staggering in, weighed down by their bags and his guitar. He looked around the room. “Where’s the bed?” he said, puzzled.

  Debbie held up one end of the hammock, with a grin.

  “All right!” called Chris, hooking the hoist to the hay bale and stepping back.

  Rick, standing shirtless up in the hayloft, grunted and hoisted the bale up, swinging it inside through the large square window of the loft. He pulled the bale in, unhooked it, took a deep breath, and sent the hoist back down.

  “Chris, I don’t understand why you guys have so much hay,” he called down to her. “You don’t have any horses. You never did.”

  Chris hooked another hay bale to the hoist and gave the rope a tug to signal him. “It was my father’s idea,” she shouted to him. “Every year, he makes plans to buy a horse. And every year, he buys all this hay and no horse. You figure it out.”

  She didn’t explain that her father had actually almost bought the horse this year, but at the last minute her mother had decided that she couldn’t bear to come back here again when the awful thing had happened to her daughter. And her father had never gotten around to buying the horse or canceling the hay order or any of a dozen other things that he had meant to take care of. Everything was just sort of hanging in limbo. Waiting. Just as her parents were waiting tensely at home right now, wondering how she was doing, feeling helpess and frustrated because she had refused to let them come with her and they hadn’t been able to stop her from going without them. They had been astonished that she had wanted to come back here after what had happened.

  Well, she hadn’t wanted to come, but she had no choice. And having her friends with her for the weekend, knowing she could depend on them for support, was incredibly important. Somehow, she had to come to terms with what had happened here and learn to live with it. She couldn’t very well expect her parents to do it until she could.

  “You realize, of course,” Rick called down to her from the loft, suddenly breaking in on her thoughts, “I gave up an opportunity to spend the weekend with Mary Jo Conrad for this.”

  He gave a heave on the rope.

  “You mean you actually gave up a chance to be with the Mary Jo Conrad for little ole me?” Chris called up to him, playing along.

  “That’s right,” he said, pulling up the next bale and swinging it inside the loft.

  “Boy, are you dumb!” said Chris.

  “Okay, Chris,” Rick said, sending down the hoist again. “I realize I’m just a country boy and my feelings don’t really matter, but this is the sweat of a worker, not a lover.”

  He gave a sharp pull on the rope and grunted. This was a heavy one.

  “Now, I believe there’s a time and place for everything,” he called down to her, straining as he pulled the rope. “And now’s the time and now’s the place, if you know what I mean.”

  This hay bale seemed unusually heavy. He gritted his teeth and pulled hard, feeling the muscles bunching in his arms and shoulders. He wasn’t that out of shape, was he?

  “So what I think we should do is,” he grunted “set aside three hours a day to fulfill our needs. One hour in the morning,” he gave another heave “and two at night. If you agree . . .”

  What the hell, he thought, straining on the rope, this hay bale seemed to weight a ton!

  Chris suddently rose up level with him. “Were you talking to me?” she said, standing with her foot in the hoist, hanging on to the rope and giggling.

  With a wry smile, Rick let go of the rope and with a yelp, Chris plummeted to the ground as the rope ran out through the block. As she hit, landing in a pile of hay and rolling, a frenzied scream came from the direction of the house.

  She got up quickly and ran back toward the house. Rick climbed down from the loft and followed close behind her.

  She ran up the porch steps and burst though the front door, looking all around her. There was no sign of anyone.

  “Is anyone here?” she called out loudly, badly frightened by the scream.

  Rick came bursting in behind her, buttoning up his shirt. “What’s going on?” he said, looking around.

  “I don’t know,” she replied tensely. “You check down here. I’ll check the upstairs.”

  She ran up the spiral staircase to the second floor balcony, stopped at the door to Andy and Debbie’s room, and looked inside. There was no one there. No one was screaming anymore. That frightened her almost as much as the scream itself had. She bit her lower lip and continued down the corridor. She stopped at the closed door of Shelly’s room.

  “Is anybody there?” she called through the door.

  There was no answer.

/>   She tried the door. It was stuck. She gave it a kick and it flew open to slam against the wall inside the room.

  “Shelly?”

  There wasn’t anyone inside, but the door to the antique armoire was slightly ajar. She apprached it, pulled the door open, and screamed as Shelly’s body slumped against the side of the armoire, blood glistening around a hatchet embedded in his forehead. He slid down the inside of the armoire and fell out onto the floor, his glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.

  Chris recoiled from the sight and her hands came up to the sides of her face as she screamed hysterically. She felt Rick’s hands on her shoulders, turning her away.

  “Don’t look at him!” said Rick, pulling her away. “Let’s just get the hell out of here!”

  Andy, Debbie, and Vera rushed into the room behind them.

  “We heard screaming,” said Vera.

  “What’s going on?” said Debbie, and then she noticed Shelly lying on the floor. “Oh, my God!”

  Andy alone seemed unaffected. He made a face and bent down over Shelly, reaching toward him.

  “Don’t move him!” Rick cautioned.

  “Don’t touch him!” Debbie said.

  Andy placed his hands on Shelly’s stomach and started tickling him. Suddenly the “corpse” started giggling uncontrollably.

  “You creep!” said Andy, giving him a shot.

  Shelly sat up, laughing, and removed the one-piece fake-embedded-hatchet-and-bleeding-latex-wound from his scalp. “I guess I fooled you, huh?” he said.

  “Jerk!” Chris shouted. She started to pummel him furiously and Shelly covered himself up, recoiling from her anger. Rick pulled her off.

  “Chris, leave him alone,” said Andy disgustedly. “He doesn’t know any better.”

  “It’s a joke,” said Shelly, chagrined that they were taking it that way. “It was just a joke! I didn’t mean to”

  “You never mean to,” Andy said.

  Vera glanced at him with disdain. Christ, she thought, why do these things happen to me? I’m never going to let anybody fix me up with a blind date again! What a pitiful nerd!

  “Oh, I gotta get out of here,” she said, with exasperation. She turned to Rick. “I’m going to the store. Can I use your car?”

  “Sure,” said Rick, throwing her the keys and shaking his head as he looked at Shelly.

  “Thanks,” said Vera, turning and leaving with a disgusted look at Shelly.

  “Asshole!” Chili said contemptuously, turning and shaking her head as she went out the door.

  Feeling awful, Shelly sat on the floot, wiping the fake blood off his face and forehead with a handkerchief. It hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned at all. He had wanted to impress them all with his creativity and his acting ability, but the joke had backfired, and instead, they all thought less of him than ever.

  I wish I could die, he thought.

  Chapter Three

  Vera ran down the porch steps, climbed into Rick’s white VW bug, and started the engine. It caught with a cough and sputter and settled into a steady, chugging idle. She shifted into first and started to pull away when Shelly came running out of the house, waving at her.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” he yelled, waving his arms and running toward the car. “Let me go with you! I gotta get outta here, too!”

  Jeez, that’s all I need, she thought, letting out the clutch and accelerating past him, kicking up the dust as she spun around and headed for the bridge. Then she made the mistake of glancing up in the rearview mirror.

  He looked so forlorn and pathetic standing there, gazing after her, that she simply couldn’t help herself. Against her better judgement, she stopped the car, sighed, and opened the passenger door.

  Elated, Shelly came running. I just know I’m going to regret this, she thought as he got in, beaming. She shook her head in resignation, cursing herself for being softhearted and drove off across the bridge.

  “Chris! Chris, wait up!” yelled Debbie, running down the trail after her.

  Chris stopped and waited for her to catch up before resuming her walk down to the lake.

  “What’s wrong?” said Debbie.

  “Oh, it’s that creep, Shelly,” Chris said angrily, picking up a branch and tossing it into the bushes, as if she were throwing it at him. “What a sick sense of humor.”

  “Oh, that’s just his way of getting attention,” Debbie said. “He doesn’t know about what happened.”

  Chris sighed with exasperation. “Oh, I know it, Deb. But from the minute we got here, I’ve been seeing things and hearing things . . .” She shook her head. “It’s probably just my imagination. I shouldn’t have come back here so soon.”

  “Don’t let it get to you,” said Debbie, trying to reassure her. “Relax. Enjoy the weekend. Nothing’s going to happen when we’re all here together.” She quickly tried to change the subject. “Hey, how are things going with Rick?”

  “Okay,” said Chris, in a resigned tone. “But he just doesn’t understand.” It was clear from her tone that she didn’t really want to go into it.

  Debbie wished that there was something she could do to make her friend feel better, to make her forget what happened, but there were some things a person simply couldn’t forget. Things like what had happened to Chris last summer.

  Debbie and Chris were best friends since childhood, and they had talked about it, just as Debbie had talked with Chris when she had found out that she was pregnant and had some very serious decisions to make. But what had happened that summer was the sort of thing about which Debbie couldn’t really give Chris any advice. Because she didn’t really know what happened. Not even Chris knew, not completely. Perhaps that was just as well, Debbie thought. On the other hand, not knowing could be even worse.

  There was a dark secret buried deep in Chris’s mind and there was no way of telling if she would ever be able to unearth it. Not even analysis had helped. A psychiatrist had tried to hypnotize her and cause her to regress, but she had subconsciously resisted him, refusing to go under. Chris wanted to remember, because not knowing frightened her; Debbie thought maybe there were some things that people were better off not knowing.

  Chris only remembered part of what had happened to her last summer and that had been frightening enough. The rest was a complete blank. A gap that Chris felt she desperately needed to fill. But Debbie was afraid for her. After all, when the mind blocked out something so completely, there was usually a reason for it. It was self-defense.

  Debbie bit her lower lip as they walked down by the lake. Chris had become silent, staring off across the water. Debbie knew that Chris was afraid of what would happen if she could never remember that missing part of her life.

  But Debbie was afraid of what would happen if she did.

  The cashier at the crossroads convenience store rang up the total as a local high school girl bagged their purchases of several six-packs of beer, a couple of six-packs of soda, assorted bags of chips, cookies, and a mess of candy bars, cupcakes, and doughnuts Shelly had grabbed for himself.

  Vera guessed that he had used restraint because of her. Otherwise, he probably would have loaded up on two or three times as much junk food. She figured that he probably had some emergency supplies stashed away in that makeup kit of his. It was certainly big enough. She didn’t even want to think about what sort of gruesome things could be inside there if that hatchet-in the-head trick was a typical example. Boy, she thought, Shelly was really strange.

  “That’ll be eighteen-fifty,” the cashier said. “And we don’t accept no food stamps.”

  Vera sneered at the thinly veiled racism. She thought, you wouldn’t say that to an Anglo, would you, bitch? And then her face fell as she realized that she had left her wallet in her purse, which was still back at the house.

  “Shelly?” she called.

  He quickly put the skin mag he was leafing through back into the rack and turned around guiltily, blushing like a little boy caught doing something wrong.

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nbsp; “I need some money,” Vera said, feeling awkward that she had to ask him.

  Shelly quickly dug into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out his cordura wallet and tossed it at her. Vera reached out to catch it, but it struck the side of her hand and fell to the floor. As she bent down to pick it up, a black leather high-heeled boot with ankle straps suddenly came down on top of it.

  She looked up to see a hard-looking young black woman in skintight, black, studded motorcycle leathers standing over her. She wore a dark purple headband and lots of turquoise and silver jewelry. She backed Vera away with a hard glance, bent down, and picked up Shelly’s wallet.

  “Excuse me,” Shelly said, moving towards her with his hands held out, “but I believe that’s my wallet.”

  Before he could take more than three steps, Shelly was grabbed by the arms from either side and yanked up on his tiptoes. He gulped and smiled nervously at the two bikers who held him. Both wore leather vests and patches on them of large black widow spiders on the backs. One of the bikers was black, with a shaved head, a gold earring, a heavy chromed steel lock-up chain hung around his neck, and a neat little goatee that made him look satanic. The other one was white, sort of punky-looking, with short, spiky hair, shades, an earring, and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  “Make a wish,” the black guy said, grinning at the white biker as they held Shelly by the arms.

  “Uh . . . could I buy you two a beer or something?” Shelly said, badly frightened but desperately trying not to show it.

  The woman started going through his wallet.

  “I’ll take that now,” said Vera, reaching out for it.

  The black woman smiled and arched her eyebrows as she held up a condom in a foil packet she had found inside the wallet. “Is this your rubber?” she said.

  Shelly groaned with humiliation.

  Vera grabbed for the wallet, but the black woman was quick to react, pulling it back out of her reach. “Didn’t your mamma teach you manners?” she said. “If you want something, you ask Nice!”

  Vera set her jaw, gritting her teeth.