He also thought how great the barn would look with flames licking out of its loft windows and angry red sparks spiraling skyward beneath a heavy belly of smoke.
Yes-sir-ee bob-cat! he thought, feeling a tingling in his groin, the same tingling he felt whenever he contemplated torching a building. His hands began to tremble with excitement at the thought as the funny tingling spread up into his belly. Hell! It felt better, by far, than what he had felt the few times he had played with himself and the sticky white stuff had shot out of him. That felt good, too, but it didn’t come close to what he knew he’d feel if, once those men left for the night, he went back there and checked to see if there was enough hay in the loft, maybe even some gasoline! to get things really going.
“Look, Hock. If it’s something to drink you want, you can head to town and score a six-pack. If it’s the damned barn you’re so psyched up about, I found another one while I was slugging my way through the woods after the cop nabbed me. This one definitely ain’t being used. It was all overgrown with trees around it. Actually, we could have made our camp there for the night if I’d gotten back sooner.”
“Another barn?” Hocker said.
“Umm. On the other side of town. Do you want to try to make it there tonight?”
Hocker shook his head, still keeping his eyes fixed on the men in the barn. The well-dressed man had finished dispensing the liquid, and it nearly broke Hocker’s heart to see him grab the edge of the kettle and overturn it, spilling the remainder of the dark liquid onto the ground.
“Naw,” he said, his voice rasping. “We can camp like I said, in the woods behind that abandoned farm house. If no one shows up, we’ll check it out in the morning. Maybe we can play house there for a few days.”
“Sounds like fun,” Tasha said, convinced that Hocker wouldn’t catch her sarcasm.
“But before we bug out of this town,” he said, “you have to show me where that other old barn is, okay?” He smiled widely as he pictured the black skeleton of the barn burning as raging tongues of orange flame roared into the night sky.
VIII
The first Tasha knew there was any trouble was when a booted foot slammed into her side, jolting her out of a deep sleep.
Cops! she thought as she doubled up in pain, not knowing whether to hide deep in her sleeping bag or scramble to her feet and fight like hell. As she rolled over, she opened her mouth to scream and got nothing for her effort but a mouthful of dry leaves, dirt, and pine needles.
“Hock!” she sputtered, but the cry was lost as she spit to clean out her mouth.
The small campfire they had built before going to sleep had burned down to orange coals, but the moon, now high in the trees, shed enough light to see by. She wasn’t sure if Hocker was still tangled in his sleeping bag or if he was one of the four figures she could see silhouetted against the sky. When one of the figures swung wildly at another, though, she had her answer.
Bitter panic rose from her stomach to her throat, choking her as she beat aside the sleeping bag. One of the silhouettes loomed over her, as tall as a tower, threatening to crash down on her. The foot came out of nowhere, catching her on the underside of the ribs. She doubled up in pain just as a crushing weight fell down on her.
Her screams caught in her chest, and the only sound that came from her mouth was a strangled grunt as she clawed desperately at the face pressing down on her. By simple luck, her finger wrapped around the man’s throat, and she held him back long enough to see his face, lined in harsh relief by the moonlight. The memory of that leering, grinning face, more skull-like than living flesh, etched itself like acid into her brain. Wide, staring eyes, swirling whirlpools of black thicker than the night, gazed deeply into her eyes, ripping like a wild animal into her soul. A sickly, sour breath washed over her face like a spray of vomit.
With a strength charged by adrenalin, she loosened the grip with one hand and raked her fingernails across those eyes. The effect, even in her panic, was stunning; the man seemed barely to notice! His dead weight still pressed her down, crushing the breath out of her! The face loomed closer, and when the man opened his mouth and viciously chomped his teeth several times, drawing closer to her face, Tasha was positive she would spin backward into unconsciousness, a faint from which she would never awaken.
But then, just as suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a flash of light close to her ear. The weight of the man lifted off her. She looked up, horrified, to see that the man’s entire head was blown away from his shoulders. His headless corpse lurched up, staggering once in the pale moonlight, and then crumpled to the ground, where it twitched spasmodically before lying still.
A whining buzz filled her ears as she looked, horrified, at the dead man. Jesus Christ! Where did you get a gun? she wanted to yell to Hocker, but he had already turned to face the two other attackers. Tasha extricated herself from the sleeping bag and groped about on the forest floor, seeking something she could use to protect herself. She found a wrist-thick branch and, giving it a testing heft, stood up to help Hocker.
Hocker was circling the small clearing where they had camped. The gun waved menacingly in his hand, glinting in the moonlight.
“Come on, you fuckin’ scumbags,” he growled. “Come on! You want it? I’ll give it to you!”
The whole situation didn’t make sense, but what happened next made the least sense of all. In any conflict, Tasha would have bet good money that, even two men, faced with a gun, would back down. Maybe because they knew one of their group was already dead, they wanted revenge. Maybe they were escaped convicts, desperate men on the run with nothing to lose. (Like us, Tasha thought.) Whatever it was, first one man then the other coiled back. Then, with gut-deep grunts, they launched themselves at Hocker.
The gun blasted twice. Tasha barely registered seeing one of the two go down, but even on the ground, he clawed at the mulchy soil to propel himself forward. His feet scrambled wildly on the ground, like he was trying to burrow into the soil. The other man slammed into Hocker like a runaway bull, pushing him back in a flurry of arms and legs into the brush. The sound of them thrashing in the woods filled the night.
Tasha moved forward, thinking she might be able to help, but as she stepped over the fallen man, she felt a clamp-like hand wrap around her ankle. She squealed and instinctively raised the stick up high and brought it down hard on the man’s head. Once, twice, three times! She pounded as hard as she could. Each blow made a sickening hollow thump that made her believe she was beating on a pumpkin instead of a real person’s head. She had a fleeting image of the man’s head splitting open, and what spilled out was not brains, but rotten pumpkin fiber.
Worst of all, though, was when she vividly imagined the man’s face and those eyes glaring up at her.
They were dead man’s eyes! The image terrified her; and charged her with even more frantic energy. Again and again, she slammed the stick down where she knew that face was. She wanted to smash the skull until it was pulp; she wanted to knock that black, hypnotic gaze out of his eyes. She didn’t stop hitting even after the grip had loosened on her leg and let go. Tears blurred the silvery-lit clearing as she slammed, and slammed, and slammed!
What brought her back to reality was the sound of gunfire, muffled in the distance. She looked over to the bushes where Hocker and the other man had disappeared, but now, except for a faint rustling, all was quiet. Silence settled back down on the night like a heavy blanket. Even the wind seemed to have stopped. Moonlight washed the clearing with dull silvery light.
“Hocker?” she called out feebly. The sound of her voice, twisted and strained, intruded unnaturally on the night. Again, she heard a rustling of leaves, and the only thought that filled her now was: Hocker’s dead! Now that guy’s coming for me!
Her grip on the stick tightened until the palms of her hands hurt, but she waited in the clearing, figuring either Hocker would come out of the brush, or that man.
This is it! she thought as tears flooded her eyes, makin
g it almost impossible to see. I’m gonna die!
If the man had killed Hocker and now had the gun, she could expect at any second to see a bright flash of light and feel a bullet rip out her chest. She waited, her legs trembling, her stomach filled with ice. Waited, now, for the end.
“For Christ’s fuckin’ sake, will you come over here and help me?”
It was Hocker’s voice, calling to her from the dark woods. Never before in her life had she been so relieved to hear his throaty growl. As soon as she tried one step forward, though, her legs gave out beneath her, and she crumpled to the ground. When she awoke, the sun was cutting through the morning mist in the trees, and Hocker was crouched by a small campfire, heating up a can of baked beans.
Tasha looked at him through slitted eyes. When the horrors of the night rushed back to her, she jolted into a sitting position. The night’s events had the gauzy overcast of a dream, but as soon as she moved, the knife-like pain under her ribs convinced her it had been real.
“What the…?”
“Don’t worry,” Hocker said, smiling as he stirred the beans with his spoon. “Everything’s taken care of.”
“What do you mean?” she said, although it was difficult, practically impossible to speak. She was positive she had screamed several layers from inside her throat, and just taking a tiny breath hurt like hell!
“Over there, pretty well hidden,” Hocker said, nodding to one side. Through the screen of brush, she could see three rectangles of fresh-turned earth.
“All three were dead?” Tasha asked. Her body was wracked by a wave of shivers that felt like they would never stop.
“They are now, for sure,” Hocker said. He raised up a wad of mucous and spit in the direction of the three new graves. “I don’t want to sound superstitious or anything,” he added. He tested the beans with his finger and licked his fingertip clean. “But just to make sure they stay dead, I cut off their heads before I buried ’em. Pretty wild, huh?”
Chapter Five
“Funeral Time”
I
“I’m surprised she even remembered me,” Donna said as she and Dale left Mrs. Appleby’s and walked out to her car, parked down by the curb. “She must have had hundreds of students over the years, and she really did remember me.”
Dale chuckled and shook his head, “Well, you must admit, that little ‘accident’ you had would have been pretty memorable. What a riot!”
“I didn’t think it was very funny back then,” Donna said. Her face turned several shades of red, remembering what had happened to her when she was a fourth-grader in Mrs. Appleby’s class. She hadn’t even remembered the name of the boy responsible, but Mrs. Appleby did: it had been Tommy Anderson.
One day, as a practical joke, Tommy had secretly taken the hem of Donna’s dress, (she remembered the dress vividly; it had had a yellow and white check design, and a tiny black poodle sewn on the left shoulder puff) and tied it in several knots around the back support bar of her chair. Apparently he had tied it a little too good. When Mrs. Appleby called on Donna to do a multiplication problem at the blackboard, she stood up. With a sudden, sharp hiss, the whole bottom half of her dress ripped away, and she was left standing in the middle of the room with her skinny legs sticking out from her frilly underpants.
“I think that was Tommy’s way of trying to get me to pay attention to him,” Donna said, still embarrassed. “But it didn’t work. I never even remembered his name until today.”
“Well, something like that would make an impression on a teacher,” Dale said.
When they got to the car, Dale opened the driver’s door for Donna before he got in. They decided to take a drive into Houlton that morning, before the funeral, so Donna could buy an appropriately dark dress. That was what started Mrs. Appleby reminiscing about the famous “yellow and white check dress” story.
School started in mid-August earlier than the southern part of Maine, but let out during the several weeks of harvest. Angie decided to stay at the house and hang out with Lisa. Dale thought he detected a slight jealousy now that Donna had wedged herself between them so fast. If that was the case, however, he felt he’d have no problem reassuring her that this was “nothing serious.” He smiled to himself, though, as Donna started up the car and pulled away from the curb. It was significant, he thought, that this was the first time since Natalie died, that there was even a question of any relationship with a woman becoming serious.
When they passed Brooklawn Cemetery, they exchanged nervous glances, not having to voice their thoughts about what had happened in the cemetery last night. Dale was still haunted by the thought that it had not been a trash can or a floral arrangement he had hit as he backed around out of there. What if the man they had seen had had a buddy out there with him? Maybe a couple of old friends had gone out to the cemetery, as he and Donna did to enjoy the peace and quiet and the view of the town, as they shared a bottle of Ripple. And what if Dale had run the man down? What if he was up there, right now, dead in the road, waiting to be discovered? Maybe to be discovered by the cemetery workers who were coming to work today to bury Larry?
He tried to push those and other thoughts away as Donna drove by the first cemetery gate without a backward glance.
If that’s what happened, he thought bitterly, then, that’s what happened. He’d have to turn himself in!
When he saw a second gateway to the cemetery up ahead, he tapped Donna on the arm and pointed to the black, wrought-iron entrance.
“Just zip in there for a minute, will you?” he asked, hoping the tension wasn’t noticeable in his voice.
Donna forced a smile despite the memory of that man’s face looming in front of them out of the darkness. “Want to see if our buddy’s still up there?” she asked.
Dale nodded. “Just checking.”
Donna slowed and took the turn. Once inside the cemetery, they followed the twisting, twin-rutted dirt road to where they had parked the night before. Donna put the car into park and waited behind the wheel while Dale got out and carefully inspected the ground. His first sensation was of relief; there was no corpse in the road. If there had been one, wouldn’t there be police lines and cruisers all over the place?
The criminal always comes back to the scene of the crime, his mind whispered softly.
After his initial relief at not finding a dead man there, Dale took a few seconds to look around for any sign of the man they had seen. The ground all around was well-trimmed and there were, as far as he could tell, no signs of anyone having been there. There were no footprints, no empty Ripple bottles leaning against the tombstones: nothing. Not even a trace of what had happened last night.
“Satisfied?” Donna called through her open window.
Dale nodded as he circled the area one last time, making a wide swing that included the road where he thought he had seen something. An icy tingle ran through him when he saw a small dark splotch in the middle of the dirt road.
Could it be blood? he wondered. Maybe the guy they saw hauled his friend’s body away himself, leaving nothing behind but a small puddle of his dead friend’s blood!
Dale shook his head and knelt, slowly extending his fingers to touch the dark, damp spot. It made his hands sticky, but the more he looked at it, the more he became convinced it was oil or something else… It was certainly not blood!
“Yeah,” he said, standing up and wiping his fingers on his pants leg as he walked back to the car. “I guess there’s nothing here.”
He got in but couldn’t resist taking one last glance over his shoulder as they pulled away. The events of last night took on a strange, unreal cast, like a dream, only partially, but vividly remembered.
“Oh, damn, you know what?” Donna said as she pulled to a stop at the cemetery exit. “I think I left my other keys behind.” She slammed the car into park and picked up her pocketbook. After a minute of frantically pawing through the contents, she let out a sharp breath that angled up over her face, making the hair on her fo
rehead bounce.
“A problem?” Dale asked.
“The keys to my folks’ house,” she said, grimacing as she continued her futile search. “I went out to the house yesterday, and I must’ve left the keys there. They’re probably right there in the door.”
“Is it far from here?” Dale asked. He knew they wouldn’t be back from Houlton in time for the funeral service unless they left now. His detour to the cemetery had eaten up enough time as it was.
Donna looked at him, a shadow of worry wrinkling her brow. “It’s not far,” she said, “and I really should check to see if they’re there. I wouldn’t want anyone getting in there.”
Dale shrugged. “We won’t make it to Houlton in time if we take much longer.”
Donna shook her head, angry at herself for being so thoughtless. It wasn’t like her to be so absentminded, but when she remembered the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions that had flooded her yesterday at the house, she wasn’t all that surprised that she had left the keys. She would consider herself lucky if that was the worst that happened.
“I suppose I can wear something I brought with me,” she said, scratching her cheek. “That will cut a lot of the hurry out of the day. We can take our time not rush-rush-rush.”
“That’s one thing I like about this town,” Dale said. “The whole feeling that life is somehow unnatural if it goes at a very fast pace.”
Donna smiled in agreement. “That’s why I wanted to get out of here so much when I graduated. I wanted to live in Boston or New York City or someplace, and get away from the really small minds around here. It’s only now after I’ve lived that kind of life”—and seen what it can do to a person! she added in her mind—”that I can sort of appreciate it.”
“Let’s go out to the house, then,” Dale said decisively. “You can give me a guided tour down memory lane.” He paused, then added, “Maybe I can dig out a few more embarrassing stories about you.”
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