Dark Screams, Volume 4

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

  I stopped by a few times to see my folks. They looked sad when they saw me, probably not a whole lot different from the way they’d look if I’d died in a car accident or something. A real sense of loss, their first and eldest torn away from them and made a stranger. I felt bad for them. I gave them long hugs and told them how much I loved them several times, but all they could do was say that I looked different somehow and was I feeling all right and did I ever think of going to old Doc Hemple for a physical?

  And of course I went back to the Parkinson cabin and the well. I say “I.” While most of the time I went with Cindy, sometimes I went alone. Figured that was all right now that I was with the program. I mean, I was one with Cindy and He, but I was also still myself.

  That’s why I was alone when I got the Mex down by the railroad tracks.

  He was maybe twenty, a hobo just off a freight, looking for shelter for the night.

  I’d been covering the tracks for the past hour, watching the lonesome stars roll down the lonesome sky, waiting for somebody just like him.

  The voice this time had suggested a knife. Said there was a great deal of difference in killing a man with a knife and killing a man with a gun. So I drove over to Walmart and got me the best hunting knife I could find. And here I was.

  I crouched beneath one of three boxcars sitting dead on the tracks. The Mex walked by, I let him get ten feet ahead of me, then I jumped him.

  Got him just under the chin with my forearm and then slashed the knife right across the throat. Man, did he bleed. I just let him sink to the gravel. Blood was everywhere. He was grasping his throat and gasping, dumb brown eyes frantic and looking everywhere. I saw why this was different. And it was real different. With guns, you were at one remove, impersonal. But this was real, real personal. I watched till I was sure he was dead, then I drove back to my apartment and took a shower.

  Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled up to Cindy’s place and she came out. In the dome light, I could see she was irritated.

  “I hope you plan to start by apologizing.”

  “I’m really sorry, Cindy.”

  “Almost two hours late.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Where were you?”

  So I told her.

  “You’ve been going up to the well alone?”

  Somehow I’d sensed that she wouldn’t like that. That’s why I hadn’t told her about it.

  “I don’t want you to do that anymore.”

  “Go to the well?”

  “Not by yourself, Spence.”

  “But why?”

  “Because—” She looked out the window for a while. Said nothing. Every few minutes, her drunken old man would peek out the living room window to see if we were still sitting at the curb.

  “Because why, Cindy?”

  She turned and looked at me. “Because He’s my friend.”

  “He’s my friend, too.”

  “Well, He wouldn’t be your friend—you wouldn’t even know anything about Him—if I hadn’t taken you up there.”

  Kind of a funny night, that one. We never really got over our initial mood. Even the lovemaking was off a little. Sometimes you can feel when a woman is losing interest in you. It isn’t anything they say or do; there’s just something in the air. Laurie had been like that when she’d dropped me back in high school. I’d gone weeks with this sense that she found me vaguely distasteful before she actually dumped me. I was getting the same sense with Cindy. I just prayed to God I was sensing things wrong.

  But the next night, things were pretty much back to normal. We drove to an Italian restaurant in Iowa City, a little place with candlelight and a chunky guy wandering around with a violin, a kind of make-up dinner. After that, we went straight back to my place and made up for all the great sex we’d missed out on the night previous. Or at least I did. But Cindy—there was a certain vagueness to her sentiments now. No passion in the I-love-you’s. No clinging to me after we made love.

  Just before I took her home, she said, “Promise me you’ll never go to the well again by yourself.”

  “God, I just don’t understand what you’re so upset about.”

  “Just promise me, Spence.”

  “All right. I promise.”

  She kissed me with a tenderness that rattled me, that made me think that we really were going to be as tight and true as we’d once been.

  The next two visits to the well, we went together. By now, I knew why she always wanted to go there. It was addictive, that voice in your head, the sense that you were an actor in some cosmic drama you couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I suppose religious people feel this way when they’re contemplating Jesus or Jehovah or Buddha. I needed my fix every few days, and so did Cindy.

  Following these two particular visits, we drove to Des Moines and found a darkened building we could climb to the top of. Kind of cold on the fourteenth floor. And it was late May. My knuckles were numb as I assembled the scope rifle. There was a motel and a bar a quarter-block away. Must be where the really well-fixed swingers hung out, because the cars ran to BMWs and Porsches. There was even a Maserati.

  Cindy crouched right next to me, rubbing my crotch as I sighted the gun. Gray-haired guy came out and started to climb into his Caddy. The dark city sprawled all around him, tattered clouds covering the moon.

  “Him?”

  “Huh-uh,” she said.

  A few minutes later a real drunk lady with a fur wrap came wobbling out.

  “Her?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  Then a couple real slick types. Probably in advertising.

  “Them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Both?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’ll be tricky.”

  “You can do it, Spence.”

  I had to hurry.

  Bam.

  Guy’s head exploded in big bloody chunks. Man, it was hard to believe that a bullet could—

  “Get him!” Cindy cried, as the other guy, stunned, looked up the roof we were firing from.

  Knocked him a good clean five yards backward. Picked him up. Hurled him onto the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car. Even had time to put another bullet in him before he rolled off the trunk and hit the pavement.

  And then she was all over me, lashing me and licking me with her tongue, and she kept grinding her crotch against the barrel of the gun and I kept saying, “Cindy, God, listen, we have to get out of here!”

  I just about had to drag her.

  She wanted to do it right there on the roof.

  She seemed crazy. I’d never seen her like this.

  She couldn’t calm down.

  We rolled out of Des Moines about ten minutes later. She had my hand between her legs and her head back and her eyes were all white and dazed-looking. She just kept rubbing against my hand. We must have gone twenty miles that way.

  Later, in bed, she said, “We’re good again, aren’t we, you and me?”

  “We sure are.”

  “I was scared for a few days there.”

  “So was I.”

  “I just wouldn’t want to live without you, Spence.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live without you, either.”

  Her craziness had gone. We made gentle love and then I took her home.

  And then the next day, despite all my promising, I took the afternoon off and went to the well. I wanted to see it in daylight, see if I could see anything I missed at night.

  But I couldn’t.

  I sat on the edge of the pit and watched squirrels and field mice dart in and out of the buffalo grass. And then for a while I watched a hawk ride the air currents and I thought again, as I had all my boyhood, of how fine and free it would be to be a hawk. There was Indian lore that said that hawks were actually spies from another dimension, and that had always intrigued me.

  And then the voice filled my head.

  I turned around real fast so I could look down the well and see if the water boiled or
bubbled when the voice spoke, but it didn’t. Just dirty brackish water. Still. Very still.

  But I wasn’t still. I was agitated. I said, No, that’s not right. I won’t do that. But the voice wouldn’t let go. I tried to walk away, but something stopped me. I tried to shut the voice out, but I couldn’t.

  I had to listen to His plan. His terrible, terrible plan.

  At dinner that night, a burger and fries with coupons at Hardee’s, Cindy said, “I called you after school this afternoon.”

  “Oh. I should’ve told you.”

  “You took off, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d you go?” She wasn’t real good at hiding her suspicions.

  “Iowa City.”

  “How come?”

  I shrugged. “Check out one of the bookstores.”

  “Which one?”

  “Prairie Lights.”

  “I guessed that was what you’d say.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I figured you’d lie and I figured it would have something to do with Iowa City, so I called some of the places you go. And one of the places I called was Prairie Lights. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “They’re closed down this week. Doing some kind of remodeling.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Bullshit yourself, Spence. You want to call them? Find out for yourself?”

  She leaned back on her side of the booth and crossed her arms over her chest. “You went to the well, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You fucker.”

  She started crying then, just like that, right there in the middle of Hardee’s, with all the moms and dads and kiddies watching us, some with great glee, some with embarrassment and a kind of pity.

  I put my head down. “I’m sorry, Cindy. I won’t ever do it again.”

  “Oh, right, Spence. You won’t ever do it again.”

  —

  Must have been two hours later before she uttered another syllable.

  We were lying in bed and she said, “I need to be honest with you, Spence.”

  “I was hoping we were done arguing. I said I wouldn’t ever go to the well again alone. And I mean it.”

  “The way you meant it last week?”

  “God, Cindy, I—”

  “I met somebody, Spence.”

  “What?”

  “A guy. College boy, actually.”

  “What’s that mean, you ‘met’ him?”

  “I met him. That’s what it means. Some girls and I went to Cedar Rapids a few days ago, to one of the malls. That’s where he works. One of the malls. Anyway, he called me and asked me if I’d go out with him.” Pause. “I told him yes, Spence.”

  “What the fuck are you doing to me, Cindy?”

  “I’m not doing anything to you, Spence. I’m just being a nice, normal eighteen-year-old girl who met a nice, normal young man who asked her out.”

  “We’re going to get married.”

  Pause. “I’m not sure about that now, Spence.” Pause. “I’m sorry.”

  I rolled off the bed, sat on the edge, face in my hands.

  She slid her arms around me, kissed me gently on the back. “Maybe I just need a little break, Spence. Maybe that’s all it is.”

  I took my face from my hands. “You’re punishing me, aren’t you, Cindy?”

  “Punishing you?”

  “For going to the well alone.”

  “God, Spence, that’s crazy. I don’t play games like that. I really don’t.”

  “We have to get married, Cindy.”

  She laughed. “Why, are you pregnant?”

  “The stuff we’ve done—”

  “We didn’t get caught, Spence. Nobody knows. We can just forget about it. Go on with our lives.”

  “Right. Just forget it. You know how many fucking people we’ve killed?”

  I lost it then, jumped up off the bed and stalked over to the bureau, and swept it clean with my arm. Brut and my graduation picture and my Army picture and Cindy’s picture all smashed against the wall and fell to the floor in a rain of jagged glass.

  The funny thing was, I wasn’t thinking of Cindy at all, I was thinking of Laurie, and how she’d dumped me back in high school, and how even now I sometimes felt a sudden sharp pain from the memories…pain as dangerous as the pieces of glass now scattered all over my floor.

  I turned to Cindy. “I’ll tell you something, Cindy. If you go out with this guy, I’ll kill you.”

  “God, that’s real nice and mature, Spence. Maybe that’s why I’ve lost interest in you. I thought that because you were older, you were an adult, but—”

  “Don’t try and talk around it, Cindy. You heard what I said.”

  She got up and started putting her clothes on. We hadn’t made love, but we’d seemed on the verge of it. Until she’d told me about this guy at the mall.

  “If you threaten me one more time, Spence, I’ll go to the police. I swear I will.”

  “Right.”

  “I will. You wait and see.”

  I grabbed her. Couldn’t control myself. Wanted to smash her face in, but settled for throwing her up against the wall and grabbing a bunch of her button-down blouse and holding her several inches off the floor.

  “I meant what I said, Cindy. I’ll kill you. And that’s a promise.”

  Three hours after she left, the rain started. I lay awake the rest of the night, listening to the shutters bang and the wind cry like lost children weeping. How could you hate what you loved so dearly?

  I tried not to think what the voice had told me the last time at the well, about killing Cindy. But that’s exactly what It had said. And that’s why I’d threatened Cindy tonight, I realized now. I was only doing the bidding of the voice, acting on Its suggestion.

  I had been shocked, I had resisted it—but I saw now that He could also see the future. He saw that Cindy would meet a stranger at the mall, just as He saw that Cindy would soon be ready to dump me. That’s why He’d suggested I kill her.

  I didn’t see or hear from Cindy for three days. Things were bad at work. I couldn’t concentrate. I sent a wrong shipment to the new co-op they’re building out on the edge of the old Galton Farm and my boss did something he’d never done before—started yelling at me right in front of customers. It was pretty embarrassing.

  Lonesome, I even thought of going to see my folks, but anything I said would just lead to I-told-you-so’s.

  I looked up a few buddies, too, but they were like strangers now. Oh, we went through some of the old routines, and made some plans for doing some autumn fishing up at Carter Lake, but I left the tavern that night feeling more isolated than ever.

  I wondered what Cindy was doing. I kept seeing her naked and mounting the mall guy the way she sometimes mounted me. I drove and drove and drove, prairie highways leading to more prairie highways, cows and horses restless in the starry rolling Iowa darkness. Sometimes I merged Cindy and Laurie into one; sometimes I wanted to cry but was unable to. How could you hate what you loved so dearly?

  Warm summer arrived like a gift a few days later. People out here always go a little crazy when summer comes. I think they get intoxicated by all the scents of the flowers and the trees and the sweet, sad songs of the birds. I do. Ordinarily, anyway. But this summer was different. I couldn’t appreciate any of it. It was as if I’d been entombed in my sorrow over Cindy leaving me. There was no room for anything but her.

  I saw them, then. Town square. About nine o’clock. Walking slowly past the Civil War memorial. Her arm through his. Same way we used to walk. He was handsome, of course. Cindy wouldn’t have to settle for anything less.

  I stumbled into an alley and was sick. Literally. Took the lid off a reeking garbage can and threw up.

  Then I went into a grocery store and bought a pint of Jim Beam and went back to the alley and thought about what I was going to do. How I was going to handle all this.

  I’m not much o
f a drinker. By the time I finished the pint, I was pretty foggy. I was also pretty sleepy. I leaned against the garbage can and slept.

  A country-western song woke me a few hours later. Some poor truck-drivin’ sumbitch had lost his honey. You know how country songs go. I got up all stiff and chilly and reoriented myself. I took a leak while never taking my eye from the quarter-moon so brilliant in the midnight sky. I felt homesick, but I also felt as if I had no home to go to. And never would.

  Twenty minutes later, I stood out in front of the police station. Town this size, the station is in the old courthouse. Neon sign above the westernmost entrance says: POLICE. There’s a lockup in the basement and a traffic court on the second floor. On the first floor is where the seven police officers work at various times of day and night.

  I was going to do it. I was going to walk right up those stairs, right inside that building, and tell whichever cop was on duty just what Cindy and I had been up to.

  “Hey, Spence.”

  Voice was familiar. I turned to see Donny Newton, whom I’d gone to high school with, walking up the street. He wore the dark uniform of the local gendarmes.

  “Hey, Donny. Since when did you become a cop?”

  “Took my test last year, then went to the police academy in Des Moines for three months and voilà, here I am. Doesn’t pay jack shit for the first couple years out; given all the layoffs we’ve been having, I’m lucky to have a steady paycheck.” Then he ceased being plain Donny Newton and became Officer Donny Newton. Auspicious. “So what’re you doing here?”

  Maybe Donny could make it easy for me. I’d known him a long time. Maybe he’d let me tell it all my way and not get all self-righteous about it.

  My mouth opened. My brain wrote three or four lines of dialogue for my tongue to speak, just to get things going. But somehow my tongue wouldn’t speak them.

  “Hey, you all right, man?”

  Then I just wanted to get out of there. Fast.