by Jo Treggiari
“Man, I’ve never been so fucked up,” he said. The sedatives blurred his eyes and thickened his tongue. “I don’t remember how I got here. Ha ha.”
He didn’t even notice when I took the knife out. It wasn’t until I held it before his eyes, letting the lamplight glint on the wicked edge I’d made, that he’d focused. And then that was all he saw. I watched his pupils swell like ink spots, and I told him exactly what I was going to do to him. The honor of it. To be the first under the knife; to become a beautiful picture. He looked at me with confusion, the words taking forever to seep into his brain. And when they did, he was too scared to scream and he was too drugged to run.
But then I heard a noise outside, a vehicle, engine cutting out, slamming door, footsteps. I panicked. I’d already botched killing Ari and now I was in danger of being discovered before I had accomplished everything I needed to. I slipped the knife back into the sheath; it was for fine work that would take many hours. This was just manual labor. My hands were around his neck before he could make another sound. I squeezed with all my strength, thumbs against his windpipe and my face close to his, pressing against his chest with the whole weight of my body. Still, it took longer than I expected. At least three minutes before he made a curious noise, like a hiccup, and his head fell forward.
My hope is that Lynn and Ari will fight much harder.
The weather has changed abruptly. There is a sharp bite in the air. When I went out early this morning to look at the creek, the wind whistled across the fields and numbed my fingers. Even now I can feel them tingle at the tips, and holding the paintbrush is difficult. The creek is swollen. Hidden rain-filled mountain springs have fed it and caused it to burst from its banks. Dead leaves, blackened and slimy, slide underfoot, and the soil smells musty like old coffee. I spend a long time looking at the water, the froth and swirl, the dark depths, the early-morning ice riming the rocks. A tree has fallen, loosened from the earth’s grip by the currents. Roots snarled and tangled like a witch’s hair.
I think of the deer’s submerged carcass, the way the hide loosened and sloughed away, the rolled eye like a slice of hardboiled egg, held captive there in the bright, pure water. I wonder if ice will creep across its surface like a window cracking. Like a silver spider’s web.
I imagine my girls trapped under the ice, gray lips, eyes transformed into clouded jewels, skin frosted and pale as marble, and their hair, spread out like seaweed, limned in light.
Back at home, still winded by my escape from the school, I lie down on the floor and press my face to the side of the chest. I can hear her quick breathing. For a moment I match my breathing to hers and see her eyes widen as she hears it. “Ari is coming,” I tell her. I admit that Ari surprised me with her fire alarm trick. It showed initiative. Although there is barely any room in the box, Lynn turns away and hides her face. Sobs rack her body. It is all coming together.
The third wall confounded me, but eventually I painted it white with blue shadows like a snowdrift. I couldn’t see the color of the paint but I had the man at the hardware store write the shades on the lids. He assured me it was subdued. “November Sky it’s called,” he said. I will display the dead girls against it, half reclining, backs bolstered by the wall, heads together, fingers clasped. I’ve decided to suffocate them long enough for a temporary loss of consciousness followed by drowning in the glacial stream, and then I will bleed them out and remove their fierce hearts. Their blanched faces will blend into the whiteness, exquisite china dolls, their eyes replaced by chips of ice like in the Snow Queen story. If I kiss them, will my lips stick to theirs? Will I leave a layer of skin behind, taste salty blood?
I check on Lynn again. She is unmoving, but slowly she exhales. Her hair is lank and there is a sour smell coming from the wooden chest. She has peed on herself again.
“Lynn,” I breathe. “You beautiful creature.” She begins to cry—jagged, heaving sobs.
“I’m going to eat you up.”
And then she begins to scream.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Ari consulted the map she’d printed out from her computer and took exit 20 onto Tanner’s Way. It was roughly twenty-five miles from her doorstep to this bumpy one-lane country road. She met no vehicles coming the other direction. Up ahead a few hundred yards she could see the intersection that must be Kissing Bridge. No bridge in sight, nor could she imagine anyone kissing in a place like this. Although there were fields on either side, they were brown and dead-looking and it seemed too quiet. Hardly the spot for romance. Just past the crossroads, a gravel road, little more than a driveway, wound up the long slope, and perched at the very top she saw a two-story house. She rolled down the window. Unseen in the cloud cover, a single bird sang. The air carried an eerie stillness. She thought of the photos she’d seen of John Wayne Gacy’s home. They’d torn it down after Gacy was caught, but it had been a little bungalow built out of different-colored bricks with big picture windows and cheery shrubbery. It looked like a house a typical family would live in, but they’d found twenty-eight bodies buried in the backyard.
Was that where she was heading? A house of death?
Lynn was somewhere inside. Ari watched the sun hover at the edge of the tree line and turned her collar up against the sudden chill. It might be safer to hold off until dark, but she couldn’t bring herself to wait any longer. He was dictating everything; she’d make what decisions she could. She closed the window, tucked the keys into her hip pocket and picked up the large screwdriver from the passenger seat. It wasn’t much of a weapon but it was something. For a second she found herself in agreement with the National Rifle Association—every citizen should be able to carry a gun.
“Just stab him with the sharp end, Ari,” she muttered, feeling an insane urge to giggle. What was up with her lately? She remembered Lynn telling her about gallows humor. The oh-so-funny side of murder and death. At any second she could collapse into tears or laughter.
She’d left a note for her parents, telling them exactly where she was going, what time she left, and everything she suspected: there was a psychopath living in Dempsey Hollow; he or she had slaughtered those animals and tried to kill her; and now they had Lynn. Carefully she wrote four names on the piece of paper: Jesse Caldwell, Stroud Bellows, Jack Rourke and, after a moment’s consideration, Dr. McNamara. She was doubtful about the teacher, but at this point everyone looked like a psycho.
Halfway up the driveway she paused and scrutinized her shaking hands. Her heart was leaping in her chest and she felt unnaturally cold. This was fear. This was basic primeval instinct. She’d gone over everything that had happened in the last couple of days, everything that her brain let her remember, hoping for some clue to this killer’s identity, but there was nothing, just a black silhouette and the gloves, and a voice that sounded like death calling for her. If she knew who it was then she could—what? Figure out her assault plan? She had no plan. It didn’t matter if it was Jesse or Jack or Stroud or McNamara; they were all bigger and stronger than her, and all she had was a screwdriver and some serious rage. It would have to be enough. She tightened her fist around the handle and forced her feet to continue up the road, hoping the cavalry would arrive at the last second.
The curtains were drawn, the windows looking out at her like furtive eyes. The yellow hue was off, the sickly shade of a rubber chicken. She stood on the path for a couple of minutes, steeling herself. Taking a deep breath, she walked up to the front door and paused with her hand inches from the wood. Knocking just seemed wrong. Hello, I’ve come to be killed. How are you? She twisted the knob. Locked, solid. Fuck! She looked through the glass. A hallway with a couple of doors leading off it, a staircase. Please God, let there not be a basement!
No curtain fluttered. She didn’t have the sense of eyes on her. She’d ramped herself up on adrenaline and now—nothing. Too quiet. If she hadn’t received that message, she’d have thought the house was a summer place, or on the market to be sold. Uninhabited. But someone h
ad raked the leaves from the browning grass and mowed in the recent past. It was well-tended. She walked around the back, ears pricked, nerves hopping. Curtains shielded the back windows of the house too. There was a garage with small grimy windows. Someone had nailed a dead crow to the wall. It was an old farmer’s trick she knew. A way of warning away other crows. She tried to peer through the dust-covered windows. She moistened a finger and cleared a patch. A car was parked inside. A blue Audi. All of a sudden her heart was pounding like a jackhammer. It was Stroud’s car.
She ran up the steps leading to a screened back door and grasped the knob. It was bolted as well but the glass was up a few inches and nothing but a rectangle of screen barred her way. She stabbed at it with the screwdriver, ripping it loose with her fingers, and reached in to unlock the latch. The wooden door behind it was not bolted from the inside and yielded easily to her hand. The click seemed unnaturally loud but no one came at her, no one shouted. The house appeared to be empty. Should she creep in like a mouse or storm in like the army? She settled for something in between—balanced on the balls of her feet, screwdriver at the ready, prepared to ward off any surprise attack. Her mouth was dry, and she could feel the sweat soaking her T-shirt, though her skin still felt clammy.
The house was cold. Refrigerator cold. She was surprised not to be able to see her breath as she exhaled. From somewhere she heard pipes clanking. An uneven rhythm that seemed to keep time with the uneasy lurch of her heart. Kitchen, cupboards, a small table and chair. The décor, if you could call it that, was minimal, like something out of a LIFE magazine from back in the seventies. An electric clock that hummed rather than ticked; a black telephone mounted on the wall. She picked it up and got a dial tone. Working phone. She filed the information away, continued down the narrow hallway.
Floral wallpaper and a diseased shade of yellow paint, the same as that on the outside, covered the walls. Some sections were sun-faded and some were water-stained, but it hardly looked like the scene of a murder. There were no photos though. She did a slow sweep. No personal touches. Nothing that indicated who lived there.
She paused by the refrigerator. Should she open it? She remembered Dahmer and his cannibalism and pulled the door open. Slowly she looked through her eyelashes. A box of baking soda, a small Tupperware container too compact to contain a head. She felt her pulse calm a little. She opened the container anyway. A couple of shriveled potato wedges; no severed fingers. She let her breath out and hunched her shoulders a couple of times to loosen them up.
Slow and easy, Ari.
Now she was by the front door. Stairs to the upper floor to her right. She switched the bolt to open just in case she had to run out this way and glanced quickly outside. She could hear an airplane buzz far overhead, but inside it was deathly still except for the pounding of her blood in her ears.
No creaks of the floor to indicate that someone lurked upstairs. Dust hung in the air and there was a tangy smell that tickled her nostrils. Fresh paint. She turned toward an open doorway, holding up the screwdriver, and stumbled backward in shock.
Red exploded from the walls, paint in thick strands and globs that looked like it had been applied with a trowel. Ari entered the room feeling as if she were going into a cave. A cave made of skin and meat. At first it all looked so random, but as she turned around, she started noticing details. Some areas were painted more densely, like bloody strips of hide, cross-hatched with a sharp implement; others were barely skimmed with color, and it wasn’t just deep crimson but other shades closer to brown, orange and purple, which gave it depth and an almost three-dimensional quality. It was vivid, frenetic with energy and a roiling movement like a stormy sea, but the colors were all wrong. It made her heart leap crazily in her chest. It made nausea rise as if she’d stumbled upon the scene of a terrible accident. She suddenly thought of liver. Something her mother brought home about once a year when she started worrying about iron deficiency in teen girls. The last time, Ari had flatly refused to eat it. There was a slimy, shiny aspect to this paint, and a thick, warm smell that reminded her of raw chicken. Organic.
In contrast, one of the three walls was painted cool white and blue, and washed in gray like moonlight on a frozen lake. Cut into it were spiraling lines that reminded her of a maze. She put her hand out and touched her fingertips to the wall. It was still wet. She reached out to the nearest red wall. Dry. And now she saw the faces, tumbled amongst the swathes of color—screaming, distorted faces, like some depiction of hell. She backed up and stumbled against a large cedar chest. The lid was open, a mildewed blanket crumpled in the bottom, an empty bottle of water. And she smelled the sharpness of urine, an odor that catapulted her instantly back to the bottom of the well. A plastic crate sat upended next to the chest, holding a row of books. They were leather-bound, old and worn, their titles stamped in gold. Grimm’s Fairy Tales; The Crimson Fairy Book; Myths and Legends of Old Britain. Next to them was a bulky journal. She picked it up, leafed it open. The sketches leapt at her, finely drawn, meticulously detailed, scenes of torture and death. They were exquisite and horrifying. Compelling enough to keep her looking. A dozen pages were all of Lynn—in profile, captured in a hundred life moments, almost jumping off the paper, then body broken, chest cavity split, and pieced together like a ruined porcelain doll. Her heart, her heart is missing, Ari’s thoughts screamed. The last two pages were sketches of herself, curiously specific, even down to the mole by her right ear, a thin, frayed ribbon tied around her throat. She looked closer—not a ribbon but a knife slash from ear to ear—and let the book fall.
“Lynn,” she yelled, no longer caring about furtiveness. She whirled from the room and ran up the stairs, a bedroom empty but for dust bunnies wafting in the corners, a tiny bathroom with a stained sink and dingy toilet. Another bedroom. She stopped so quickly that her feet skidded against the worn floorboards and she had to grab the doorframe to steady herself.
This one was not empty. Her blood thundered in her ears. She smelled something sweet and rank like spoiled milk. A threadbare armchair faced the window. Beyond the high back she could see brown stubbly fields stretching to the horizon. They reminded her of the field she had walked across from the well. She remembered the razor grasses slicing the bottoms of her feet. There was a large hook mounted on the sill, a length of rope coiled beside it. She could clearly see a shirt-sleeved arm and the hump of a shoulder covered in a blanket. Slowly, balanced on the balls of her toes, she made a wide circle around the chair, barely breathing as more and more of the occupant came into view. Please let it not be Lynn, she prayed.
The cloying smell grew stronger.
She saw the hummock of a body, patchwork blanket pulled up high, covering everything but a hand, limp as a fish, and the curve of a pale cheekbone, like a sliver of the moon. It felt like déjà-vu.
Stroud.
She backed away, tripping as her foot snarled in the blanket. The cover slipped and she saw the red marks around his neck, the vivid bruising in the shape of fingers. She recalled how carefully he’d been tucked in at the cabin. As if he were a small, loved child. He was dead and had been for some time. There was no mistaking it. His lips were tinged blue and his eyes were open and staring at nothing, the skin around them starting to slough away.
A whimper escaped from her lips. She wondered at the strength it had taken to overpower him, kill him, to get him up to this room. Her eyes went again to the window and the rope.
She pounded down the stairs and out the front door into the yard, where she stood panting and looking in every direction. “Lynn!”
The road, her dad’s red car, and then nothing but golden pastureland, wind-burned, rolling into dips and hollows, slashed with shadows that crept and crawled.
She looked toward a line of crooked trees, bent with age and pitched forward, their branches scraping against the ground. Parked underneath, partially concealed, was a grimy brown car. She’d seen it before, leapt out of its path as Jesse Caldwell drove it too fast, horn bl
aring, into the school parking lot.
She set her teeth in a snarl and re-tightened her grip on the screwdriver.
Jesse Caldwell. She would kill him.
Heart beating wildly, Ari caught the gleam of something among the dry stalks of grass and bent to pick it up. Lynn’s tiger’s-eye bracelet. Moaning, she slipped it onto her wrist next to the one she wore. Perhaps Lynn had dropped the bracelet on purpose as a clue, believing Ari would search for her.
“I am coming, Lynn. I’m here,” Ari said, staring in every direction. But which way?
The scrubland dipped just ahead and she could hear the splash of rushing water. She headed toward the sound. A hundred yards on, the muddy ground fell away along a deep-carved river. More gnarled trees bent to the water’s surface, trailing their knotted limbs and obstructing her view.
She stopped and listened hard. Water foamed and roared. The mat of leaves was thick, it was impossible to walk without making crunching noises, but she tried her best to be silent. Birds twittered and rustled in the undergrowth and pecked along the ground. She saw a shallow trench running through it, like a track made by someone who was not picking up their feet. It led toward a thicker growth of trees overhanging the stream. She could imagine Lynn stumbling along it, weak and dizzy. Or being dragged, perhaps. Where was Jesse? Was he watching? Waiting for his chance?
She crept closer, caught a flash of something white on the shore. A bird? A tangle of bedsheets? A person? Lynn? She ran toward the bank.
And then the breath rushed out of her as she was tackled from behind. The screwdriver went flying. She fought back furiously, throwing wild, awkward punches. Hot breath against her neck, her face shoved into the mush of leaves, something bony against her spine, a hand smashing against her lips. She managed to twist her body around so she was on her back; she brought her legs up to her chest and shoved away with all her strength. Jesse’s face, red and sweaty, contorted, loomed above her. He opened his mouth and she launched a flurry of sharp-nailed blows at his eyes. He pulled back a little and the weight across her chest lessened, but he still held her trapped beneath him.