A Long December

by Richard Chizmar

  THREE

  I was sitting in my car smoking a cigarette when the madness began.

  It was just a short time later—sometime before ten—and I was parked off to the side of the road, halfway up Carson’s Ridge, which overlooks the back of the old post office property. The place had been closed down for a number of years, but the town’s braintrust had yet to figure out what to do with the large plot of land. The matter was quickly becoming a front-page item in our little weekly newspaper. There were two schools of thought: tear it down and build a mini-mall or convert it into a clubhouse and surround it with a couple of fancy swimming pools and an outdoor picnic area. Neither idea did much for me. We already had two shopping plazas, and what we needed a planned picnic area when we lived right smack in the middle of the North Carolina hills was a mystery to me. A better question, if you asked me (and no one ever did), was who the heck built a post office three miles out of town in the first place?

  The ridge was one of my all-time favorite spots. I usually went there when I was feeling old and sappy and nostalgic. I’d park among the trees and think about the great Friday night bonfires we used to have deep in the woods after high school football games and all the sweaty nights that Janice had sent me home with a hard-on in my jeans, having let me touch her breasts, but never quite reciprocating with her own fingers.

  I hadn’t been a big sports star in high school—second string on the soccer team was the best I could muster—but my older brother, John, had lettered in three sports and made All-County in two, so I was automatically invited to most of the parties and was generally deemed okay to be seen talking to.

  Those school years seemed so long ago now, and I looked back on them often (probably too often) and fondly (thanks, mainly, to Janice). And I remembered them as a time of such innocence. Compared to today, anyway. Sure, there had been some drugs—pot, mostly—and plenty of alcohol and more than a few drunken brawls. And, yes, there had even been a handful of sex scandals, like the time Tracy Anderson got caught sleeping with her boyfriend and Tammy Wright’s boyfriend both on the same weekend. But it was nothing like today. Nothing like the big cities. No crack cocaine, no guns, no fourteen-year-old mothers. Things had changed so much, so fast.

  So there I was, smoking my cigarette and listening to The Doors on the radio, feeling every inch the crusty old high school English teacher when the red Mustang glided into the back lot using only its parking lights. At first, I thought it was just a couple of kids, sneaking back there to neck or maybe planning to do a little something more. But then when the Phantom of the Opera staggered out of the car—and I didn’t care if it was almost Halloween—I knew something weird was going down.

  Even from a distance, it wasn’t a pretty sight. As soon as the car jerked to a complete stop, the guy in the costume was out the door and down on his knees. Throwing up.

  I shook my head and laughed. The guy was royally plastered.

  The Phantom stayed on his knees for record time and each time he dipped his head and convulsed I felt a little sorrier for him. He looked like a dog that’d gotten into a bad bowl of chili. Still, I had to admit it was pretty damn funny; the Phantom of the Opera down there puking in the parking lot, mask still in place, black cape flapping wildly in the wind. It was a grand performance.

  After awhile he got to his feet and looked around self-consciously. He took a few wobbly steps, then stopped and stood very still. I figured the parking lot was probably doing cartwheels in front of him. Either that or the dead leaves swirling across the lot had suddenly taken on the appearance of a hungry swarm of giant, brown rats. Depended on how much he’d had to drink, I supposed.

  I started to feel a little guilty for spying on the poor guy, but he obviously didn’t see me parked snug against the treeline.

  He obviously didn’t see me because of what he did next.

  He took a quick swipe at his chin with his shirt sleeve and slowly walked to the back of the sports car and popped the trunk. The trunk lid sprung open, momentarily blocking my view, then quickly closed again.

  When the Phantom walked back into sight again, he was carrying a woman.

  A very dead woman.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, pressing forward against the steering wheel, squinting for a clearer view. Suddenly, my heartbeat was very loud in the car.

  The Phantom headed for the treeline, the body cradled in his arms.

  I was parked a good fifty yards away and it was pretty dark, what with only a handful of lights still working in the lot, but I had a bird’s-eye view and I knew right away that it was a body. Fairly petite. Long blond hair fanned out toward the ground. Slender white legs hanging limp from beneath some type of skirt or dress.

  Suddenly, the Phantom stopped walking. He leaned over to the side a little and shrugged his shoulders, adjusting his grip the way a shopper might do to get a better hold of a particularly bulky bag of groceries. Seemingly content, he glanced over his shoulder once more, and then continued toward the trees.

  It was like watching television. Maybe it was the fact that I was staring through a windshield and the picture before me was perfectly framed. Or maybe it was because suddenly everything seemed to move in dream-like slow motion. All I can tell you is that for those first few seconds after I saw that body, it didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real. I might as well have been kicked back in my basement watching NYPD Blue with a bowl of pretzels in my lap.

  Amidst all of this, my fingers started burning, and I remembered my cigarette. I stubbed out what was left of it in the ashtray and clicked off the radio. When I looked up again, the Phantom had disappeared into the woods.

  And it hit me then. What I had seen.

  I sat there feeling scared and numb and excited all at the same time, fully understanding for the first time what it was that I was witnessing. I sat there and didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

  He surprised me by returning so quickly—five minutes at the most—a time when, for some strange reason, the idea of leaving the scene never crossed my mind. At first there was only the night and the whipping wind. Then, a subtle shifting of shadows at the wood’s edge. Finally, the Phantom appeared like a ghoul from a nightmare.

  Empty-handed.

  He hurried back inside the car, his stride more confident now. This time even the parking lights stayed off. And then he was gone, and there was only the wind and the darkness and the silver shine of moonlight.

  I looked at the glowing red numbers on the dash. They read: 10:03.

  FOUR

  I found her maybe a hundred yards in. Buried beneath a tangle of dead tree limbs and a lumpy pile of wet leaves.

  The Phantom had done a crummy job. If I could find her in the middle of the night with only a flashlight, trust me, anyone could.

  I lifted a couple of the larger branches off of her and pushed them aside, careful not to make contact. And then I simply stood there in the darkness, staring. Just staring.

  Dim flecks of moonlight filtered down through the trees, pleasing only the shadows. The wind lashed at the back of my neck, seeming to focus there, and the cold sting of the metal flashlight tickled my palm. It all seemed very real now.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the body.

  I’d been wrong earlier. She wasn’t a woman at all. She was just a teenager. A girl.

  And I knew her.

  A part of me wanted to gather her up into my arms, brush the dirt and leaves from her hair, take her far away from this place. But take her where? Another part of me wanted to flee as fast as my legs would carry me—back up the ridge to the car, straight home and upstairs to bed. Back to where my family waited, where it was safe and warm and the wind couldn’t find me.

  I knew I was close to panic then; very, very close to losing whatever foolish courage still lingered within me. I could feel it building inside me like a scream. My mind, as if feeding the madness, turned traitor: I looked at the girl’s dress, filthy and torn, and thought how
amazingly pretty it would look on Janice. How it would be just perfect for our Sunday afternoon picnics at the creek. I looked at the girl’s face, at the dark, angry hole centered in her forehead. I found myself wondering if my tiny daughter might grow up to look anything like her; if she would wear her hair in a similar cut, if she would dress anything at all like the girl. And then I thought of Josh and wondered, if he’d been a dozen years older, if this girl would have been to his liking; if perhaps they would have even dated, maybe gone to Homecoming or the prom.

  These were the thoughts of a crazy man. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop them from rushing over me. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by madness. Drowning in it.

  A gust of wind rattled the dark trees high above me.

  I felt the scream coming…

  I dropped the flashlight and ran.

  FIVE

  I drove across town with the windows wide open. It was chilly, but I needed the fresh air to breathe. Besides, my stomach was still doing jumping jacks and puking was definitely not yet out of the question. I figured better safe than sorry.

  I drove slowly, with no clear direction, but somewhere in the back of my head I knew where I would eventually end up. It was just a matter of time.

  As I passed through the neighborhood, I noticed that most every house on most every street had some type of Halloween display or decoration.

  Glowing pumpkins rested on porch railings, smiling their jack-o-

  lantern smiles, slanted orange eyes winking at me in the wind. Mummies and ghosts and witches and goblins guarded shadow-webbed front yards, daring me to stop the car and trespass. Corpse-shaped mounds of leaves protruded from in front of countless homemade tombstones, silent remembrances of the dead and buried.

  I thought of my own narrow strip of front yard—adorned with a glow-in-the-dark graveyard and a fishing line-suspended Grim Reaper—and I grimaced. Josh and I had had a blast setting the whole thing up two weeks ago, but it didn’t seem very funny anymore. In fact, none of the houses looked like very much fun at all.

  In less than twenty-four hours, Sparta—and towns just like it all over the country—would be celebrating Halloween. There’d be trick-or-treaters and costume parties, candy apples and haunted houses…

  But that was tomorrow.

  Tonight was Devil’s Night.

  A night for mischief, as my father used to say. Yes siree, he’d whisper, his eyebrows lowering, Halloween may be a night for make-believe ghosts and goblins, but you’d better be sure to turn on all the lights and lock your doors on Devil’s Night. Because that’s when the real monsters lurk…

  And then my mother would hush my father with a swat of her hand and all us kids would giggle and we’d finish our dinners with smiles on our faces and nervous, thumping hearts in our chests.

  A night for mischief…

  Her name was Amanda Hathaway. The girl in the woods.

  She was sixteen years old and a student of mine. One of my favorites. Not just from this year’s class, but one of my all-time favorites.

  She worked part-time over at the ice cream shop in the mall, and whenever Janice or I came in with Josh, she would always sneak him an extra scoop of chocolate and make him feel co-conspirator with a sshing finger to her lips and a wink of her eye. Josh loved it.

  Amanda was in my last period English class. This was her first year at Sparta High, and the semester was barely two months old, but she’d already proved herself a model student. Not straight A’s across the board, mind you, but certainly honor roll with more A’s than B’s.

  But it wasn’t her grades that made her my favorite. There were several other classmates, in fact, who regularly earned higher marks.

  No, it was more than that—Amanda Hathaway was simply special. In a time when many teenage girls were openly disrespectful or arrogant or flirtatious, she was a teacher’s dream. Extremely well-mannered and on the quiet side, she was much more serious-minded than most of the other students. I sensed it the very first week of classes: she gave you her full attention because she wanted to learn, not because she had to.

  Yet at the same time, Amanda was popular with her classmates. She was quiet, but not invisible. Polite and smart, but not a geek. Pretty and well-liked, but not a snob. It was a precarious balance for a sixteen-year-old, but she carried it off in spades.

  I guess that’s what I liked the most about Amanda Hathaway: here was a very decent and beautiful young girl who could have moved among the school’s elite, but instead she chose her own path. She traveled in a circle of one.

  It was a rare thing to see nowadays, and I admired the hell out of her for it.

  We often talked after class, usually after the other students had left, and she would tell me in that quiet, little excited voice of hers about a particular book she was reading or a short story or poem she was working on. Sometimes she would even let me read one.

  That was another thing I liked about Amanda—she really trusted me. Besides her parents, I was the only one who knew about her “little secret” (as she often called it): more than anything else Amanda Hathaway wanted to one day become a writer.

  When I pulled into the high school parking lot, I discovered that I was still gripping a quarter in my sweat-slicked hand. I stared at it for a moment and tossed it back into the ashtray.

  Before tonight I had never dialed 911, so I hadn’t known that it was a toll-free call. Of course, I should’ve guessed it—who had the time to make change during an emergency?—but I wasn’t thinking straight at the time.

  Looking back, I guess I was never really thinking straight. If I had been, I never would have gone looking for the body in the first place. I never would have hung up the telephone as soon as the emergency operator answered. And I sure as hell never would’ve gotten back into my car and zig-zagged my way across town to a high school Halloween dance.

  No, I wasn’t thinking straight at all.

  SIX

  I found the red Mustang in the side parking lot. I placed both my hands palm-down on the hood. Still warm. I cupped my hands together and took a quick look inside. Nothing much. A balled-up sweater or sweatshirt on the front seat. A Diet Coke can on the floor. Some cassette tapes.

  I walked around to the back of the car and studied the trunk. No blood. No ripped clothing. Nothing.

  I took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. And headed for the school.

  It had dawned on me just a split second before the 911 operator had answered—I had seen the car before. The red Mustang. I couldn’t remember where, I couldn’t remember when, but I had seen it. I was suddenly sure of it.

  So, I’d hung up the telephone and walked quickly across the Safeway parking lot and started driving. A few miles later I was pretty sure of one more thing: the Mustang belonged to a student. Present student or former student, I wasn’t sure. I’d tried to picture the Phantom in my mind—could he have been just a boy? Again, I couldn’t be sure.

  Then, I had remembered the Halloween dance—the costume dance—and I’d made my way toward the high school, not really expecting to find anything and not knowing what I’d do even if I did find something.

  And all the while this was happening, the sane half of my brain—the part that balanced checkbooks and went grocery shopping and taught English class and changed diapers—screamed out at me in a shrill, panic-stricken voice: What the hell are you doing? What are you thinking? Why haven’t you called the police?

  But there had been no answers.

  Only silence.

  I checked my watch. It was almost eleven and the dance was in full swing.

  The high school lobby and cafeteria (where the actual dancing was taking place) were decorated in traditional October fashion: bright orange and black streamers draped the walls and ceilings. Dozens of cardboard Halloween displays—black cats and pumpkins, mostly—covered walls and glass windows and display cases. And, of course, several menacing-looking scarecrows had been placed at various spots throughout the rooms.
It was all very innocent and fun.

  As I walked in, I smiled and nodded at Valerie Gallagher, a science teacher (and our faculty gossip) who was selling tickets just inside the door. She smiled back—a sleepy little grin that told me she’d already had her usual couple of sips back in the teacher’s lounge—and I was grateful that she didn’t stop me to chat.

  But then, halfway across the lobby, Dan Sellard cut me off. He was a freshman-year English teacher and one of my Thursday night poker buddies. I had no choice but to stop.

  “Hey, thought you weren’t going to make it tonight?” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders and thought fast. “I, uh…was out for a bite and thought I’d drop in.”

  He laughed and arched his eyebrows disapprovingly. “Let me guess—large cheesesteak and fries from Frank’s?”

  “Right on both accounts,” I said, faking a smile. “Anything going on here?”

  “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Same old thing. But hey, you hear about Thompkins leaving after this semester?”

  Jeremy Thompkins was Sparta High’s vice-principal. Like myself, he’d lived in Sparta his entire life. “Leaving where?” I asked. At the moment, I didn’t really care what the answer was, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the conversation.

  And then, thankfully, I didn’t need to.

  Before Dan could answer, a chorus of loud voices rang out behind us. A shoving match had erupted in front of the girls’ bathroom. A boy with a gorilla neck and a letterman’s jacket had a smaller kid by the shirt collar. And he was starting to twist.