Dark Screams, Volume 4

by Dark Screams- Volume 4 (retail) (epub)

  She sat way over against the window in the shadows. I couldn’t see her very well, but I could sense her warm, full mouth and the gentling warmth between her legs. I wanted to hide in that warmth and never see sunshine again.

  “You were right, Spence. I took the money and I killed the kid.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Huh-uh. True. And I’ve done it before, too.”

  “Robbed places?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And killed guys?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “God, Spence, you think I’d make up something like this?”

  I absolutely didn’t know what to say.

  “He makes me do it.”

  “Who?”

  “My friend.”

  I thought of poor dead Michael Henning and the warning he’d given me.

  “How does he make you do it?”

  “He controls my mind.”

  I grinned. “Boy, you had me going there, Cindy. I mean, for a minute there I thought you were serious. You were robbin’ guys and killin’ guys and—”

  “You want to meet him?”

  “Your friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes. But I better warn you, when Michael met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really freaked him out.”

  “How come?”

  “You’ll see. Tomorrow night.”

  “Is this all bullshit, Cindy?”

  “None of it’s bullshit, Spence, and you know it. You’re just afraid to admit it’s true.”

  “If it’s true, I should go to the law.”

  “Then maybe that’s what you should do. Lord knows, I couldn’t stop you. Big strapping paratrooper like you.”

  “But why do you kill them?”

  “He makes me.” She leaned over to me, and now I could see her face in the faint streetlight, see that tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t want to do any of it, Spence. But he makes me.”

  “Nobody has that kind of control over somebody else.”

  “Nobody human.”

  “He’s not human?”

  She kissed me with that luxurious mouth of hers and I have to say that I went a little insane with my senses so full of her—the taste of her mouth, the scent of her skin, the soft warmth of her lips behind the denim covering her crotch…I went a little insane.

  “Tomorrow night, Spence,” she said.

  I wanted to say a lot more, of course, but she was gone, her door opening and the dome light coming on, night rushing in like a cold, black tide.

  Not human. Those were the two words I thought about all next day. Not human. And around three o’clock, just when the wholesale business was slowing down, I started thinking about two words of my own. Temporarily insane. Sure, why not? A girl who’d grown up without a mother, constantly being beaten by her father? A girl who secretly blamed herself for the death of her boyfriend, as I secretly suspected she did? That could cause her to lose her mind. It happened all the time.

  “You not hungry tonight?” my dad said over dinner.

  I saw them glance at each other, Mom and Dad. Whenever I did anything they found out of the ordinary, they’d exchange that same kind of glance. The Cindy glance, I called it.

  “One of the women at work got a box of birthday candy and she passed it around. Guess I ate too much of it.”

  Another Cindy glance. They knew that I wasn’t much for sweets and that I’d certainly never stuff myself with them. I decided that then would be a good time to tell them.

  “I’ll be moving out next week.”

  “Moving out?” Mom said, startled.

  I laughed. “Well, I’ll be twenty-four this year. Don’t you think it’s about time?”

  “Is—Cindy—moving in with you?” Dad asked. Sometimes they both had a hard time saying her name. Got downright tongue-tied. The way Christians do when they have to say the name Satan.

  I nodded to Jeff and Suzie. “These are very young, impressionable children. I don’t think we should discuss such matters in front of them.” I smiled at Suzie.

  “Who would have thought,” said fourteen-year-old Suzie, “my very own brother, shacking up?”

  Jeff laughed. Mom said, “That’ll be enough of that, young lady.”

  “Is she?” Dad said.

  I reached across the table and took their hands, the way we hold hands during grace on Thanksgiving and Christmas. “She’s not moving in with me. And I’m not going to start dealing crack out of my apartment. I’m just going to live there alone, the way any normal red-blooded twenty-four-year-old guy would.”

  I could tell they weren’t happy—I mean, even if Cindy wasn’t going to live there, she was obviously going to spend a lot of time there—but at least they let me change the subject. The rest of the meal we talked about some of the new cars I’d been looking at. Last month’s bonus at the lumberyard had been pretty darn good.

  Funny thing was, that night Cindy went two hours before even bringing up the subject of her friend. We drove to Cedar Rapids to Westdale Mall, where she bought some new clothes. Always before, I’d wondered where Cindy got the money for her seemingly endless supply of fashionable duds. After the robbery the other night, I no longer wondered.

  On the way back, radio real low with a Bob Seger tape, windows open to let the warm May breeze bring the scents of newly mown grass and hay into the car, she said, “You know where the old Parkinson cabin is?”

  “Sure. Up in the hills.”

  “That’s where he lives.”

  “Your friend?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want to go up there?”

  “Do you?”

  “I got to admit,” I said, “I’m kinda curious.”

  “Michael was afraid. He put it off for a real long time.” She leaned over and kissed me, making it hard to concentrate on my driving. Like I cared. What better way to die than with Cindy kissing me?

  “No,” I said, “I’m not afraid.” But I was.

  Little kids in our town believe that there are two long-haunted places. One is the old red brick school abandoned back in the fifties. The tale five different generations of boys and girls have told is that there was this really wicked principal, a warted crone who looked a lot like Miss Grundy in the Archie comics, who on two occasions took two different first-graders to the basement and beat them so badly that they died. Legend had it that she cracked the concrete floor, buried them beneath it, and then poured fresh concrete. Legend also had it that even today the spirits of those two little kids still haunt the old schoolhouse and that on certain nights, the ghost of the principal can be seen carrying a blood-dripping ax.

  The other legend concerns Parkinson’s cabin, a place built in the mid-1800s by a white man who planned to do a lot of business with the Meskwaki Indians. Except something went wrong. The local newspaper—and for the hell of it, I once spent a day in the library confirming the fact that an 1861 paper did run this story—noted that a huge meteor was spotted by many townspeople one night, and that it crashed to earth not far from Trapper Parkinson’s crude cabin. Odd thing was, nobody ever saw or talked to Parkinson after the meteor crash. Perfect soil for a legend to grow.

  It took us thirty-five minutes to reach the cabin from the road. Bramble and first-growth pine trees made the passage slow. But then we stood on a small hill, the moon big and round and blanched white, and looked down on this disintegrating lean-to of boards and tar paper, which a bunch of hoboes had added in the forties when they were trying to fix the place up, with not much luck. An ancient plow all blade-rusted and wood-rotted stood stuck in a stand of buffalo grass. A silver snake of moon-touched creek ran behind the cabin.

  And then Cindy said, “You see it over there? The well?”

  Sometime in the early part of this century, when the last of the Mormons were trekking
their way across the country to Utah, a straggling band stopped here long enough to help a young couple finish the well they’d started digging. The Mormons, being decent folks indeed, even built the people a pit made of native stone and a roof made of birch. And the well itself hadn’t been easy to dig. You started with a sharp-pointed auger, looking for water, and then you dug with a shovel when you found it. Sometimes you dug two hundred feet, sending up buckets of rock and dirt and shale for days before you were done. It was all tumbledown now, of course, but you could see in the remnants of the pit how impressive it must have been when it was new.

  We went over to the well. Cindy ducked beneath the shabby roof and peered straight down into the darkness. I dropped a rock down there. Echoes rose of its plopping through the surface. I shone my light down. This was what they call a dug well, about the only kind a fella could make back then. Most of the dug wells in this area went down into clay and shale about fifty feet.

  I shone my light down. Dirty black water was still spiderwebbed from the rock.

  “He probably doesn’t like the light.”

  I stood up, clipping off the light. “You going to get mad if I start laughing?”

  “You better not, Spence. This is real serious.”

  “Your friend lives down in the well?”

  “Uh-huh. In the water.”

  “Nobody could live below the water, Cindy.”

  “I told you last night. He’s not human.”

  “What is he, then?”

  “Some kind of space alien.”

  “I see.”

  “You better not laugh.”

  “Where’d he come from, this space alien?”

  “Where do you think, dopey? He was inside the meteor that crashed here that time. Parkinson’s meteor.”

  “And he stays down in the well?”

  “Right.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because if humans ever laid their eyes on him, they’d go insane. Right on the spot.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “He told me. Or, rather, It. It’s more of an It than a He, though It’s also sort of a He. It told me. But It’s also a He.”

  “So he just stays down there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Now, how the hell would I know that, Spence?”

  “And he tells you to do things?”

  “Uh-huh. Once he establishes telepathic contact with you.”

  “Telepathic. I see.”

  “Don’t be a prick and start laughing, Spence.”

  “How’d he make contact with you?”

  She shrugged. “One night I was real lonely—Michael went to some basketball game with his father—and I didn’t know where else to go, so I walked up to the park and then I wandered over here and before I knew it I saw the old cabin and I just kind of drifted down the hill and—He started talking to me. Inside my mind, I mean.”

  “Telepathically.”

  “Exactly, you smart-ass. Telepathically.”

  “Then you brought Michael up here?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And he started talking to Michael?”

  “Not right away. Michael and He, well, they didn’t like each other much. I always felt kinda sorry for Michael. I had such a good relationship with Him, but Michael—but at least Michael did what He told him.”

  “Which was?”

  “You remember when O’Banyon’s trailer burned that night?”

  My stomach tightened. Brice O’Banyon was a star baseball pitcher for Consolidated. He lived in a trailer with his folks. One night it burned down and the three of them died.

  “Michael did that?”

  “He didn’t want to. He put up a fight. He even told me he thought about going to the police. But you can imagine what the police would say when Michael told them that some kind of alien being was controlling his mind.”

  “He do anything else?”

  “Oh, yes. Lots of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “We drove up to Minnesota and robbed eleven convenience stores in two nights.”

  “God.”

  “Then in Chicago, we set two homeless people on fire. It was kind of weird, watching them all on fire and running down the street screaming for help. Michael shot both of them. In the back.”

  “While they were on fire?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I laughed. “Now I know it’s bullshit.”

  “It isn’t, Spence. You just want to think it is.”

  “But setting people on fire—”

  “I didn’t want to do it, Spence. I really didn’t. And neither did Michael. But we kept coming back up here to the well all the time and—”

  We didn’t talk for a while. We just listened to the dark soughing night and all the strange little creatures that hop and slither and sidle in the undergrowth. And the wind was trapped in the pines and not far away a windmill sang and then—

  She startled me, moving up against me, her hands in my hair, her tongue forcing my mouth open with a ferocity that was one part comic and one part scary—

  She pushed me up against the well and deftly got my fly open and fell to her knees and did me. I felt a whole lot of things just then, lust and fear and disbelief and then a kind of shock when I realized that this had been the one thing she’d said she’d never wanted to do, take anybody in her mouth that way, but she kept right on doing it till I spent my seed on the earth surrounding the well.

  Then she was in my arms again, her face buried in my neck and her hands gripping me so tight I felt pain—

  And then: “He’s talking to me, Spence. Couple minutes, He’ll be talking to you, too. You’ll be scared at first, hearing Him in your mind this way, but just hold me tight and everything will be all right. I promise.”

  But I was scared already because I knew now that what I was seeing was the undoing of Cindy Brasher. She probably felt a whole lot guiltier about Michael than she’d realized. And now her guilt was taking its toll. A friend of mine worked at the U of I hospital. He’d be able to help me get her in to see a shrink. I’d call him tonight, as soon as I dropped Cindy off.

  And then I heard it.

  I didn’t want to hear it, I pretended not to hear it, but I heard it. This voice, this oddly sexless voice inside my head, saying: You’re just what I’ve been looking for, Spence. You’re a lot tougher than Michael could ever have been.

  And then I saw Cindy’s face break into a little-girl smile, all radiance and joy, and she said, “He’s speaking to you, isn’t He?”

  I nodded.

  And I started to tear up and I didn’t even know why.

  Just standing there in the chill prairie night with this gal I was crazy in love with and this telepathic alien voice in my head—and my eyes just filled up with tears.

  Filled way up and started streaming down my cheeks.

  And then the alien voice started talking to me again, telling of Its plans, and then Cindy was saying, “We’re one now, Spence. You, me, and the thing in the well. One being. Do you know what I mean?”

  —

  I killed my first man two weeks later.

  One rainy night we drove over to Davenport and walked along the river and then started back to Cedar Rapids. Cindy was all snuggled up to me when, through the rain and steam on the windshield, I saw the hitchhiker. He was old and skinny and gray and might have been part Indian. He wore a soaked-through red windbreaker and jeans and this sweat-stained Stetson.

  The voice came to me so fast and so strong that I didn’t have any time to think about it at all.

  “Is He saying the same thing to you?” Cindy said, as the hitchhiker got bigger in the windshield.

  “Yeah.”

  “You going to do it?”

  I gulped. “Yeah.”

  We pulled over to him. He had a real ancient weary smile. And real bad brown teeth. He was going to get his ride.

  Cindy rolled down the window.<
br />
  “Evening, sir,” I said.

  He looked a mite surprised that we were going to talk to him rather than just let him hop in.

  He put his face in through the window, and that’s when I shot him. Twice in the forehead. Knocked him back maybe ten, twelve feet. And then he stumbled backward and disappeared into a ravine.

  “Wow,” Cindy said.

  “Man, I really did it, didn’t I?”

  “You sure did, Spence. You sure did.”

  That night we made love with a hunger that was almost painful, the way we hurled ourselves at each other in the darkness of my apartment.

  Thing was, I wanted to feel guilty. I wanted to feel that I’d just gone crazy and done something so reprehensible that I’d turn myself in and take my punishment. But I didn’t feel anything at all except this oneness with Cindy. She was right. Ever since the voice had been in my mind, I did feel this spiritual closeness to her. So there was no thought of turning myself in.

  Oh, no, the next night we went back to the well and He spoke to us again. Inside our minds. I had a strange thought that maybe what we heard was our own voices inside our respective heads—telling us to do things we’d ordinarily be afraid or unwilling to do. But the voice seemed so real—

  In the next week, there were six robberies, two arsons, and a beating. I had never been tough. Never. But one night Cindy and I strolled all fearless into this biker bar and had a couple beers and of course a couple of the bikers started making remarks about how good-looking Cindy was and what was she doing with a fag like me, things like that, so I picked the toughest one I could see, this really dramatic bastard who had a skull-and-bones tattoo on the left side of his forehead, and rings with tiny spikes sticking up. I gave him a bad concussion, two broken ribs and a nose he’d never quite be able to breathe out of again. I guess I got carried away. He was all the bullies who’d hurt and humiliated me growing up and in the Army. He was every single one of them in one body—even in the paratroopers, I was afraid of being beaten up. But now those fears were gone. Long gone.

  The lovemaking got more and more violent and more and more bedeviling. It was all I could think of. Here I was working a lumberyard front office, not a place that’s conducive to daydreaming, what with the front door constantly banging open and closed, open and closed, and the three phone lines always screaming—but all I could do was stare out the window with my secret hard-on in my pants and think about how good it would be that night with Cindy. My boss, Mr. Axminster, he even remarked on it, said I was acting moony as a high school kid. He didn’t say it in a very friendly way, either. There was no bonus in my check at the end of that month.