“I’ll be glad to tell you,” the stranger said, and then he held out his hand and Gregg looked at it for a moment, his mind a blank at first. Then he took the stranger’s hand and, with his help, rose to his feet.
THEY SAT IN Gregg’s blazer with the engine running for a while so they could get some heat. Gregg had begun to shiver the minute they climbed into the cab and once he got the engine cranked, the longhaired man flipped on the heater. “Supposed to be in the high teens tonight,” he said, rubbing his leather-gloved hands together. “I’m surprised you didn’t feel it before.”
“So am I,” Gregg said, hugging himself. His mind still refused to believe that Elizabeth was gone.
“My name’s Don Grant,” the man said. “And...what I have to tell you may sound...well, shit, it sounds like something out of an X-Files episode or a Stephen King novel. But it all relates to Diana and how she ensnared Ronnie Baker so quickly.”
“Ensnared,” Gregg muttered, shivering, slowly warming up. “You got that right.”
Don looked at him. “She moved in quick, didn’t she? You’ve known Ronnie how long? Ten years, maybe more? He never fell for a woman this fast before, has he?”
Gregg shook his head. “He used to run around with a lot of different women. Then Cindy came along and...well, he settled down a little bit. They had Mary, they got themselves a nice little townhouse, and then she started fooling around with somebody.”
“Gary Swanson?”
“Yeah.” Gregg felt tense. “How do you know all this? I mean...”
Don held up a hand to stop him. “It’s a long story so I suppose I should start at the beginning. All I ask of you is one thing. Keep an open mind to what you are about to hear. Okay?”
Gregg nodded, his heart thudding in his ribcage. He didn’t think it would be tough to do that. With everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, he didn’t think it would be difficult at all.
WHEN DON GRANT began telling his story, it sounded to Gregg like the typical case of adultery.
Married professional couple lives in Los Angeles. They are married to their careers, are active in their church, but their love life begins to fizzle. Don didn’t realize it was happening until he began to suspect his wife, Lisa, was having an affair. “I don’t know why I started having suspicions,” he said. “We were devoted to each other. We were very active in our church. We were very Christian. The thought of having an extra-marital affair certainly never crossed my mind, and in the beginning of our relationship, Lisa and I made vows that we would be together forever. Then things just got hectic...you know...jobs, both of us trying to finish our degrees. We were so busy that it was hard just to arrange a quiet evening to have dinner together. We became strangers in our own house, and I kept trying to mend things, but every time I tried, she had something come up in her schedule, or every time she tried to get something going, I had something come up. We never put a stop to what was going on in our lives. It wasn’t until I...well, I guess you could say I wizened up...it wasn’t until that happened when I realized Lisa was having an affair.”
For the first few months it was merely suspicions. Don tried talking to Lisa, tried getting her to cut back on her hours at school and work, but she refused. When his suspicions became stronger he started snooping around in her belongings while she was absent from the apartment, or through her purse when she was in the shower or asleep. That was when he found the sheet of paper with Lisa’s lover’s name and phone number written on it.
“I knew it wasn’t the name and address of a colleague,” Don said. “It was like some lightning bolt of knowledge zapped me and said that’s the guy that’s fucking your wife. I just knew. And I was enraged.”
He tried asking Lisa who the man was—Bruce Miller was his name. Lisa said he was a friend from work. “But the way she said it, the way she said he was just a ‘friend’ told me there was something more going on between them than mere friendship. She didn’t even try to evade anything or change the subject. It was like she didn’t care.”
Don started following Lisa and that’s when his suspicions were confirmed. “I followed her one night after work. She was supposed to have a class at Long Beach State, but she went to his apartment instead. I watched her go up to the complex and I sat in my car the rest of the evening, just watching the apartment complex and crying my heart out because by then I really knew. And knowing that she was betraying me, cheating on me so blatantly, tore me up.”
He confronted his wife the following morning with evidence of her infidelity. “I told her I’d followed her and asked her where she had gone the night before. She said it was none of my business. As if she were daring me to ask her again, but at the same time rubbing it in my face, you know? Like, ‘yeah, I’m fucking around but so what? What are you going to do about it?’”
Lisa continued to deny she was having an affair, but at the same time she toyed with Don. It was as if she felt no shame in cheating on her husband, that she was glad he knew, but wasn’t going to do anything to stop the relationship or hide it from him any longer. Gregg listened, wondering how this related to Diana and Ronnie and what had happened today. Why the hell should he care that Don’s wife had fucked around on him? The more Don relayed the story, the more Gregg wondered where this was leading.
“After awhile she began taunting me with it,” Don continued. He was looking out the windshield of the Blazer at the High Suites Bed and Breakfast in front of them. “It was like she knew that this was tearing me apart emotionally. I tried everything to keep us together. I asked for advice from my pastor, which didn’t help. I asked her to go to marriage counseling but she refused. I went into therapy myself just so I could talk to somebody about this because I couldn’t talk to my friends, couldn’t talk to my family. I’d have felt ashamed to do that at the time; I didn’t want anybody to know we were having trouble. I felt embarrassed. So I went to a professional therapist. I needed to come to some kind of...some kind of grip with what was happening.”
In the meantime, Lisa became more obsessed with her new lover. She quit school and began cutting down on her work hours, but the time she gained they could have spent with each other—by this time Don had quit school as well—was spent with her new lover instead. She began seeing the man openly now, no longer seeming to care she was committing adultery or that her husband was being tortured emotionally as he saw her carrying on with another man.
And the more Don was hurt, the more he became enraged.
“I began to get obsessed with Lisa,” he said, glancing quickly at Gregg. “I was never the kind of man to become obsessed with a woman. I was never a violent person. Never! But the more I thought about her, the more I imagined her with this other guy doing the things we used to do together. Her opening up to him emotionally and sexually. I began to imagine him exploring every inch of her body, doing things even Lisa and I had never done before. Then I imagined her liking it and...it just sent me into a rage!”
It was then when he began to think about killing his wife.
“The guy was actually calling her at our apartment now,” Don continued. “Sometimes I’d answer the phone and he wouldn’t even hang up. Bastard was bold. He’d come right out and ask for Lisa and I don’t know what it was that made me do it, but I’d hand the phone over to her like I was some puppet on a marionette’s strings. It was like he was controlling me, laughing at me while I screamed from inside in rage and anger over what he was doing to me...to us. And then Lisa would get on the phone and get all giggly and...sexy-talking the way she used to do with me when we were dating. And she’d do this right in front me! With me in the goddamned apartment! During the last week or so of our marriage he’d come to the apartment while I was there!”
That had proven to be the last straw. Don had spent the last month of their marriage in emotional turmoil, entertaining fantasies of killing his wife and her lover, and while he was secretly appalled by it, another part of him kept urging himself to do it. Don burie
d his face in his hands, his long hair framing his shoulders as he spoke. “These thoughts I were having were just killing me. I mean...I was a good man. I’m still a good man. I’m a Christian, I believe in God and Jesus Christ. Lisa and I were both believers, were both very active in the church. We didn’t think anything could penetrate our faith and our lives, that God would protect us. And then...” His voice quavered slightly. “...then this happens and suddenly I’m thinking things I’ve never thought before, never thought I’d have the desire to feel and they scared me! But they also spoke to me so strongly, they were so persuasive that I couldn’t resist their beckoning. The more I let those voices in, the more I began to entertain what they were telling me. And before I knew it I had convinced myself that the only way to put an end to the whole mess was to confront them, just follow Lisa to Bruce’s apartment, force my way in and kill them. But I’d kill him first. I’d let her watch me shoot her lover because I wanted to see the look on her face when I did it. Then I was going to kill her.”
So he bought a small caliber pistol at a gun shop in Hawthorne. He was in a fog when he did it, picking the weapon out hurriedly, not caring what he bought, just so long as he had a gun. The mandatory three-day waiting period he had to endure before picking up the handgun didn’t change his mind. Then after he picked the weapon up, he simmered for two days. During that time he quit his job suddenly, withdrew what little money he had in his personal savings account, as well as all the money in their joint checking account. “Then I followed her to Bruce’s house one morning,” he said, looking back up into Gregg’s face. “And I did it. I watched her walk into the complex and I waited for a few minutes, then I got out and followed her. I got his apartment number from the mailboxes outside, went through the courtyard to his apartment and knocked on the door. He answered the door wearing a pair of slacks and his shirt was unbuttoned and I...I shot him in the chest and he fell back into the apartment.” Don swallowed and Gregg listened closer to the story, riveted now. “I shot him a few more times and then I went into the apartment and Lisa started screaming for Bruce, and the sound of her voice just ripped my heart out. She sounded like the love of her life had just been wrenched away from her, and hearing that...well, part of me got a thrill out of hurting her like that. That kind of fueled me, kept me going, and I turned to her and yelled something, I don’t remember what, and then when I turned back to plug another couple shells in Bruce I saw that he was laughing at me! And he was starting to get up.”
Gregg felt all the spit in his mouth run dry. “He stood up? You mean...”
Don nodded. His eyes looked haunted. “Yeah. He was still shot, but he was getting up. I could see the blood staining the front of his shirt. In fact, his shirt had been unbuttoned and I could see the wound in the center of his chest. I’d shot him at close range but the fucker was laughing at me. And then as I stood there in shock, the wound started to heal and he started to change.”
Mary’s words danced in Gregg’s head. I saw it change, and there were different shapes in it and some of the shapes were faces, Diana’s face and Lily and Rick’s face and
And then it was a shriveled demonic-looking thing that had no sex and was as old as time. And it was laughing at Don. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the look of surprise and joy that had come over Lisa’s face at seeing her lover wasn’t hurt. And then she had rushed forward and embraced it, hugging it, seemingly not even aware of the monstrosity she was embracing.
Then she’d kissed it square on the lips. Don had been frozen in shock and fear and a sense of sickness as their tongues danced, hers healthy and vibrant, Bruce’s gray and diseased looking, probing her mouth, tasting her, sucking her in.
“I lost it then,” Don continued. “I fucking lost it and bolted out of the apartment. I don’t even remember making it to the car. The next thing I remember, I’m tearing down Redondo Beach Boulevard doing eighty and I got myself under control and got back to the speed limit. I was entering Gardena, so I pulled off into a cul-de-sac and parked the car and then I got the shakes so bad I felt like I was going to pass out. I didn’t even think about the possibility of the cops chasing me or anything. Didn’t even think somebody had called the police. I just lost it. All I could think about was Lisa kissing that...that thing that had been Bruce and she didn’t care! It was like...she knew, but she didn’t see it, you know? It was like he had fooled her, he had ensnared her and trapped her, and she knew what she was doing was wrong, knew he was so bad for her but she didn’t care anymore because she was addicted to him, the way junkies knows heroin is bad but they do it anyway because they can’t help it; their bodies scream for the relief it gives them. That’s the way it was with Lisa. And I knew right then that it was not only over, she was dead. This thing had gotten her, sucked the life out of her, reduced her to this junkie addicted to the physical pleasures it gave her and it fed off not only her need, but the emotion that came from the repercussions of our relationship. All the anger, hurt and resentment I felt when I found out about the affair...it knew this would happen and it had played Lisa right along, knowing it was going to get this out of me because it wanted that too. And...and it fed off it!”
Gregg saw the parallel with Don’s story and with what had happened with his brother-in-law immediately. “Did your wife get...did she get sickly-looking?”
“Yeah, she did,” Don said, and he reached out and gripped Gregg’s arm. His eyes were wild and scared looking. “She'd started losing weight, lost interest in eating. She was nowhere as bad as Ronnie, though.”
“You saw how Ronnie got?”
Don nodded. He released Gregg’s arm and slumped back in his seat. “I didn’t even think about it till later,” he said. “Until after I left. And when I came across the others, when I did my research into it and read about others that had been affected, it was only then I thought back to Lisa and what it was doing to her.”
“What is it?” Gregg asked, both horrified and enthralled now. “Is it...some kind of vampire?”
Don straightened up and held his left hand up to Gregg, palm outward, finger raised. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let me finish. I promise I’ll answer all your questions, just...let me finish.”
Gregg nodded, settling back in his seat. He took a quick glance at the room he had booked for himself and the kids tonight and saw the two round silhouettes in the window again.
“After I calmed down I checked into a cheap motel in Torrance. I was afraid to go over to the apartment, but I finally got the courage and drove by about an hour or so later. There were no cops around.” He looked at Gregg. “It was like it had never happened. I had shot a man multiple times in the middle of the morning and there were no cops, no nothing! Part of me actually wished the place was swarming with cops when I drove by, but there wasn’t. That’s when I knew my mind hadn’t been playing tricks on me, and I suppose that’s when I really knew Lisa was gone.” Don took a deep breath, as if composing himself for what was to come, then let it out in a whoosh. “So I spent the next few weeks watching them.
“I had quit my job of course, but I had some money to live off of from our checking accounts,” Don continued. “I hoped the cops would find me, that Lisa would call them to complain I had stolen the money out of our checking account, but that never happened. So I started following them around. Bruce was still Bruce. That thing that I saw him turn into...I didn’t see that. But every time I saw him I knew what I was really looking at now. I wasn’t looking at a man, I was looking at an indescribable thing I had no name for. It also seemed to recognize when I was around. I always kept the car parked half a block from the apartment, far enough away so nobody would notice, but every time they came out of the building, Bruce would actually look up the street toward where I was parked and...it almost seemed like our eyes locked. Like he knew I was there and knew right where to find me. I’d look away, bend down over the dashboard to hide, but I always knew it was too late. He knew I was there, but he never did any
thing, he never nodded or gestured toward me. But he knew...he knew.”
“What about Lisa?” Gregg asked.
“Lisa didn’t recognize me,” Don replied. “She looked lost, glassy-eyed, like an addict. And she was an addict, in a way. She was addicted to Bruce, to this thing. And when I saw her that first time after bursting into that room...it must have been two, maybe three days later...she’d gone downhill fast. It looked like she’d lost twenty pounds, her clothes barely fit her and she clung to Bruce like some street corner hooker hanging onto a pimp. And...I gotta tell you, Gregg, when I saw her that first time I couldn’t control myself. I fucking broke down in the car and wept like a baby.”
Gregg’s mind went back to Cindy Baker’s wake and how horrible Ronnie had looked that day...and how vibrant and alive Diana and her kids had become.
“I knew I couldn’t help her,” Don continued, looking out the windshield. “I knew there was nothing I could do. I tried calling her parents one night to see if they could do something, but her mother’s got problems of her own and her dad well, shit, her dad’s an asshole. Always fucking working, so I couldn’t count on them. I knew I would hate myself if I didn’t try to do something one last time, so one day I followed them to the Del Amo Mall. I knew Bruce could sense I was following them, but I didn’t care. He never looked back, never gave any indication he was aware I was following them, but he didn’t have to. The only way I can explain it was I felt that he knew I was there. But I was still as discreet as possible.
“I followed them around for an hour. At one point, Lisa split up from him and went to the bathroom. Bruce actually helped her to the door that led down the service hall to the restrooms and I thought he was going to wait outside for her, but instead he darted into a clothing store a few doors down. I was around the corner from the mall, near the south food court, and I looked down the mall to where Bruce had gone but I couldn’t find him. I saw an opportunity to do something, so I hurried over to the restrooms. They were at the end of a long service hallway that served several of the businesses. Bruce had escorted Lisa right to the door of the hallway, had waited till she had gone into the ladies room, then left. This was my chance.
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