When Skylar’s eyes filled and she tried to stifle her sobs, Marty understood the truth of her childhood and he pitied her.
“That’s enough, Cerulean. You’ve made your point. She and I are even now.”
“I’ll say when the score is even.” Cerulean’s watery eyes were black with evil. He gripped Skylar’s arms and moved them like a puppet and spoke as if he were her. “Because I’m so screwed up inside, I can’t go on anymore.”
“Please stop, you’re hurting me,” she pleaded. Tears and mascara ran down her cheeks.
Cerulean made her hand pick up the razorblade that she’d been using to make white lines out of her coke. “The world is a cruel place and I’m going to say goodbye now. I won’t even leave a note ’cause no one will care if I’m gone.” With his hands over hers, he made her slice her wrists, up the veins. She struggled some but Cerulean easily overpowered her.
Her blood ran like water, spreading over the white tile floor.
“What have you done?” Marty’s voice sounded high and panicky. Skylar grew weak in his arms. “Stay with me, Skylar.” He held her from behind, trying to keep her soul inside her body. But there was too much blood leaking from her open veins. She died in his arms.“No…” Marty cried.
Then he felt her ghost pass through him. It was lighter than the others, translucent and shimmering white. Skylar looked at him with saddened eyes as she floated upward, through the ceiling, until she was gone.
Chapter 20
Lightning flashed in the storm as Marty drove back across the river bridge, leaving town. Lake water brimmed at his eyes, streamed tears down his cheeks. With Skylar, he had murdered an innocent girl. Her sins against him had not been harsh enough to warrant death.
He was nothing more than a monster, like his father.
An unlovable beast.
Marty sped past the Razor’s Edge and turned down a country road that led into a neighborhood of low-income apartments. A dog stood in the street, barking at him as his car raced past. He parked in the gravel lot of his apartment complex. As he got out of his car, a neighbor’s grungy mutt growled at him, threatening to attack.
Marty roared back and the dog turned tail, barking as it ran and hid beneath a car.
The efficiency apartment was barely furnished―a secondhand couch, coffee table, a wall-length bookshelf full of well-read paperbacks and his large vinyl collection, a dresser and mirror, a mattress on the floor with sheets and blanket tucked neatly under a single pillow. On the walls hung posters of classic cars and bands from the Sixties and Seventies: The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and his all-time favorite, The Doors. The room had a tiny kitchenette with a fridge and ancient stove. Marty had always wanted to live in a house with a big kitchen and lots of rooms. A study with a view of a garden or the woods. But for a man who had dropped out of high school and worked for minimum wage, this apartment was the best he could afford.
He threw his hat and keys on a card table and searched his collection of old records. He pulled out The Doors’ debut album, an original copy released in 1967, and placed the record on the turntable. He set the needle on track 11, and the 12-minute version of “The End” filled the apartment with its melancholy strains. When Jim Morrison crooned his poetic lyrics, Marty felt the waters ripple inside him. “The End” had been written as a good-bye song to a girl. But it was so much deeper than that. It was about a son loving his mother and wanting to kill his father. Morrison sang about Marty’s life.
Marty mouthed the haunting chorus as he took off his boots and coveralls. Then he went to the mirror and took a hard look at the thing he’d become.
The darkness inside stared back.
“I won’t kill anymore,” Marty said.
“We’re not done yet,” said Cerulean. “We need to hunt down all the bullies from your foster homes, Mr. and Mrs. Crowley―”
“I don’t care. I just want to die.”
His reflection smiled. “You’re already dead, my friend.”
“You’re not my friend anymore, Cerulean. You tried to kill Jennifer.”
“She never loved you. She would only have hurt you like all the others.”
“You’re the one who keeps everyone away. I hate you!” Marty punched the mirror, shattering it. “Get out of me!” He took a shard of broken glass and sliced open his paper wrists. Lake water leaked out. There was no pain, just the release of his emotions spilling onto the floor. He punctured more holes in his chest and belly, his thighs. More water shot out in arcs.
“You need me, Marty. I’m the one who took care of you after your mother died. I protected you from the bullies and child molesters. I kept you safe.”
Marty didn’t want to hear it. He was done with this existence. He peeled off the poems, starting with his legs. His body began to collapse as the water flowed out. The wood floor was covered in puddles and damp pages. Soon, he was nothing but a head, torso and single arm. All the water had leaked out of him, but something unseen still held his upper body together.
On the floor the wet papers started to move, reconnecting, forming into legs and feet. Other papers molded into a severed arm. When the reconstruction was complete, the phantom limbs inched across the floor towards Marty’s upper torso and reattached themselves. He cut off a leg again and pushed it away, but it returned, slipping back into place.
The poems would not let his spirit go.
He stood and looked at himself in the broken mirror. He looked the same as before, only now he was hollow. A ghost damned to reside inside this husk.
The essence of his old friend, the lake, remained on the floor. The dark water pooled together and then began to rise, shaping into a watery version of a human body. At the head formed Cerulean’s face. “Marty, don’t be angry with me. I was only looking out for you.”
He reached out with a liquid hand, but Marty backed away, holding out the shard of glass. “Stay away from me.”
“You need me.”
“Just go, get out of my house!”
“As you wish. You know where to find me when you need me.”
“I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Very well.” Cerulean made splashing sounds as he crossed the room. He stopped in the open doorway. Lightning flashed and rain streamed down behind him in silver cords. “Without me, you’ll no longer be protected. They’ll be coming for you.”
Cerulean stepped outside and merged with the rain.
Chapter 21
The next couple days were gray and overcast, with a constant drizzle that wouldn’t let up. It was a busy week for the police and media. Marty watched on the news as the sheriff’s department investigated several bizarre murders at the lake where a fisherman had discovered the bodies. The lake must have been hanging on to Marty’s body as a keepsake, because it hadn’t surfaced yet.
At St. Germaine College, the Riverdale police were investigating Lyle Dinkman’s and Skylar Herron’s deaths. Because Skylar was a senator’s daughter, the media circus had come to town. The story ran by the hour on CNN and Fox News with panels of experts discussing what could have possibly gone wrong. In an exclusive interview, a teary-eyed Senator Herron couldn’t explain why his baby girl would take her life.
Everyone who worked for the college was a suspect. The killer had left no fingerprints, of course, no DNA to link the deaths to Marty, but he would be on their list of suspects.
By not showing up for work yesterday, he’d made himself a person of interest. It wouldn’t be long before the police came knocking at his door. He had no idea what would happen if they arrested him. He looked like the Invisible Man now―the bandaged version with hollow eye pits. If they peeled him apart, they’d find nothing there. Would they put a ghost on trial? It would be a farce if they tried to convict him. I plead insanity, Your Honor, I was dead at the time. My dark side murdered them. Marty laughed thinking of the absurdity of his situation. He wasn’t afraid of going to prison. No cell would hold him. In the past couple of days
, he’d learned his body could detach and reassemble itself, slip through cracks if he needed to. But if the cops captured him, they would confiscate his car, which he still needed to get around. Maybe some ghosts could fly, but trapped in this body, all he could do was walk from place to place. Purgatory would really suck without a set of wheels.
Jennifer had texted him a few times and left voice messages that she was worried about him, but Marty didn’t respond. He was afraid if he got in touch with her, he’d put her in danger. His father’s inner voice had tried to make him kill her once. Could he do it again? Marty hoped that banishing his demon from this body meant that only Marty controlled his actions now.
He felt cooped up in his apartment. He had to get out of here, do something. He had this sense that time was running out. That his limbo state was coming to an end.
They’ll be coming for you, Cerulean had warned. Whether he was running from the police or the soul snatchers, Marty had to stay on the move. He pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a black T-shirt. He couldn’t help feeling that he still had a purpose to fulfill. Otherwise, he would have transcended or descended already.
He looked up at the ceiling. “Why am I still here, God?”
Just then his mind filled with images that had long been buried deep. He walked to his dresser and picked up a framed portrait of his mother. She smiled back at him, forever frozen with the kind expression that portrayed her nature. Witnessing her murder had been the beginning of Marty’s madness. He never understood what drove his father crazy enough to kill her and half a dozen college girls. That period of Marty’s life was nothing but blurry memories. He now felt divinely compelled to go to the one place where his family’s darkest secrets were entombed.
Part Four
Where Dark Artists Meet
Chapter 22
Houses old and filthy
Pets of sicker breeds
Daddy is a nice man
He just has many needs
The old neighborhood on the poor side of town was a clutter of clapboard houses built back in the Thirties, when Riverdale had been a promising gold-mining town. The mines had long since been abandoned and sealed off, but the economic fallout still blighted this neighborhood. Broken-down cars littered unkempt yards. The houses were spaced apart with thatches of trees separating their miserable lots. Marty remembered riding his bicycle along these streets, going on adventures with some of the other kids. He didn’t know he was living in poverty at the time. Everyone in his little world was dirt poor.
He had been mostly a happy kid, those first magical nine years, all because his mother had loved him dearly and opened his mind to his imagination. She taught him how to see what wasn’t there, how to go in search of imaginary kingdoms, trees with hidden doorways, and secret gardens where wizards and fairy folk lived. His father had seemed a nice man in the beginning. At least that’s how Marty remembered it. A hard-working carpenter, he took Marty to sites with him sometimes, taught him how to use a hammer and nails, saw lumber, clean up a construction site. Guy stuff. But when his father lost his job, Vernon Weaver’s demeanor darkened. He drank heavily, a twelve-pack a night, and he distanced himself from his wife and son. Marty’s parents fought often about money. His mother worried how they were going to pay the bills, keep the house. And then on a hot and muggy summer day, The Bad Thing happened.
At the sight of his childhood home, Marty felt a sudden rush of terror. Set back from the road, half-hidden by trees and tall grass, the white dilapidated house looked abandoned. All the doors and windows had been boarded over. He drove down the gravel driveway and parked beneath the detached carport and walked around back. Weeds and bunchgrass had overtaken the backyard, which backed up to a creek. The one-story house was smaller than he remembered it. A box with two bedrooms, a den and a kitchen.
Marty resisted going back inside. But some divine purpose had brought him here, and it was that conviction that fueled him with the courage to approach the house. White paint was flaking off the clapboards. Using a crowbar, he pulled off the boards that had been nailed over the back door. The door’s window was already busted, so he reached in and turned the lock.
As the door swung inward on squeaky hinges, he suddenly felt like that terrified nine-year-old boy, afraid to go inside his own home. In his mind, he heard Mommy and Daddy fighting, their raised voices and the sounds of plates shattering against the wall. His mother telling his father that she couldn’t do everything herself, and that he needed to go out and find a job. “Everything I earn, you blow it all away,” she had scolded. “You’re destroying us, Vernon.”
Then came the slaps and curses as Vernon retaliated the only way he knew how. When he got drunk and short-tempered, he’d take out his frustrations on Marty, as well.
Even though years separated Marty from that time, it still took him several minutes to cross the threshold and step inside. His boots crunched over brittle linoleum as he entered through the breakfast area. Sunlight pierced through the slats covering the windows, offering enough visibility to see in the gray gloom. Straight ahead was the kitchen, to his right the den. The dusty house was empty of furniture, the walls bare, but in his mind’s eye he saw the place just the way his mother had decorated it, with framed posters of Monet’s water lily ponds and van Gogh’s starry nights, furniture with soft cushions, and bookshelves filled with books and colorful vases. The only items that his father had contributed were a widescreen TV and several taxidermied deer heads mounted over the fireplace and on the walls, staring down with glass eyes.
Exploring the den area, Marty found an area on the floor littered with beer cans, cigarette butts and a couple faded Playboy magazines. All of it covered in thick layers of dust. Some neighborhood kids must have once used this house as a hangout.
Seeing the beer cans conjured up a memory of crumpled Coors cans on the coffee table and carpet. His father had sunken into the couch cushions and was watching the evening news. He had a solid, muscular body from working construction, along with a slight beer gut. He had a thick brown beard and wore glasses with dark shades that shielded his eyes.
On this night, Marty and his mother sat at the breakfast table putting together a puzzle. The right side of his mother’s face was red and swollen after she’d tested her husband’s patience. She somehow managed not to cry as she helped Marty search for puzzle pieces that would eventually look like an enchanted forest with waterfalls.
“You okay, Mom?”
“Shhh…work the puzzle, sweetie,” she whispered and then took a shaky draw on her cigarette. At thirty, his mother was a pretty woman with kind eyes and girlish freckles. But that night she had a bruise coming up beneath her right eye and a cut along her jawline that should have been treated by a doctor. Instead she and Marty did their best to be quiet while Daddy watched TV.
A picture of a missing girl flashed on the big screen. The news lady said, “Lisa Marie Schrader marks the sixth teenage girl in the Blue Mountains counties who has mysteriously vanished in the past few weeks. Five of them were college girls. The only high school girl, Natalie Linbaucher, ran away from home two weeks ago. Police aren’t sure her disappearance is related, but they’re not ruling out that she might be part of the serial abductions. Our hearts and prayers go out to the latest missing girl Lisa Marie, who attends our very own St. Germaine College and hopes to one day be a school teacher. One student says she witnessed Lisa Marie leaving the campus Laundromat in the company of a bearded man. If you have any information concerning him or the whereabouts of these six girls, please call this hotline.” Six pictures appeared on the screen along with a number.
Marty’s father crumpled another beer can, tossed it onto the coffee table and then stood. Marty’s mother shrank in her seat as his father walked by and crossed through the kitchen. “I’ll be downstairs. Don’t disturb me.” Then, like he did every night, he locked the basement from the other side and his boots echoed down into his private chamber beneath the house.
“Why d
on’t you leave him?” Marty whispered.
“One day,” was always her response.
Now fully grown, Marty ventured into the kitchen. He walked slowly towards the basement door. When he was nine that door had always remained locked. It led down to the forbidden place. Many nights he and his mother could hear his father operating tools down there, hammering and drilling, and cutting things with an electric saw.
Now, in the ruined shell of a home, the door hung partially ajar. Marty pulled it open. Its creaking hinges echoed in the hollow darkness that it concealed. He turned on a flashlight that he’d brought. Beyond the door, a set of dusty stairs led halfway down and then stopped. The bottom half of the staircase had fallen away. The stairs looked as if they led into a bottomless black abyss.
Darkness Rising: A Novella of Extreme Horror and Suspense Page 9