The Bleeding Season

by Greg F. Gifune

  The bed, moving and shaking, the headboard slapping the wall and the box spring wailing in rhythmic squeals as shadowy fingers cast from candlelight skipped along the ceiling. And sounds—words—no, prayers, but alien and backward, twisted and mocking.

  Linda’s eyes, her body nude, slick with sweat and lunging forward then back with each thrust, her head hitting the headboard and her voice still deep and urgent even after her dark prayers had been recited. Good…good…good boy.

  I shut my eyes but vision remained, refused to let go.

  It is night and that makes no sense, because it is not night, not really. Neither was it night then—but here, in this dream place, it is night. I am lying on the floor watching TV, and she is sitting behind me on the couch. She calls me, gets my attention, asks me to come and sit next to her. I do, though hesitantly, unsure of her motives, and my own. Such motives and feelings are still new to me. I am still trying to decipher many of them, to identify them for what they are and why I have them, but I sit beside her anyway.

  She turns her back to me, looks over her shoulder and smiles, tossing her hair. She looks like a model in one of those makeup commercials on TV; like a movie star. I’m afraid and angry with myself for feeling so nervous—I should be a man even though I’m not yet a man—I shouldn’t be afraid of a woman, a barely dressed beautiful woman who is my friend, who likes me and wants me to like her. Only a few short months before Bernard and I were huddled in the woods giggling over his secret pornography stash, unaware that such childish things were mere tips of the flames inching closer and closer to us even then.

  Lust and fear are one as she raises her hands to her breasts and cups them.

  She asks me to please unhook her bikini top. I laugh. This can’t be happening, but it is. She’s serious; she means it. Don’t worry, she says, I want you to.

  While she continues to encourage me, I struggle with the plastic hook, my hands shaking.

  When it finally comes free I feel a rush of excitement along with nervousness in my stomach. My face is so warm I know it must be flushed bright red. I worry that I look idiotic even as I stir beneath my shorts, feel it press angrily against my thigh.

  She holds her top in place now, her hands the only thing preventing it from falling to reveal that which lies beneath, that which I have seen only in quick flashes and glimpses.

  She is the most frightening and beautiful woman I have ever seen. So many times in recent months I have wondered if this would happen, and now that it is I’m unsure of what to do. The confident and skilled lover I am in my teenage fantasies is in reality an awkward and frightened fool—and besides, this is different, this is—I hate myself for being so weak and childlike. I smile, knowing this is wrong but gazing at her tanned skin just the same, a smooth bronze, soft and warm. She knows I’m looking.

  Her hands fall to her lap and the top follows, fluttering to her knees, the strings dangling across her shins. Her bare toes, painted light pink, wiggle into the carpet and she turns at the waist so that we face each other. She slides one hand between her legs, rubs at the front panel of her bikini bottoms, and with the other reaches out and touches my face, strokes it gently with her fingers. Her hand slowly pulls my face toward her, toward her chest, and I go, I allow her to draw me there and to push my mouth against her. Her brown nipple brushes my bottom lip, shrivels, tightens and hardens. She moans quietly, her breath escaping in a series of murmurs.

  I suckle, my mouth working, pulling, my teeth nipping as she forces me closer, crushing my face into her until I think I might suffocate. All I can smell is her skin and tanning lotion mixed with perspiration and perfumed deodorant.

  Why I think of God then, I don’t know. I think about my father too, wonder if he can see me, can see what I’m doing from wherever he is. I envision my mother next, sitting at the kitchen table like she so often does, sipping a drink.

  I can’t breathe—I can no longer breathe.

  Her skins seeps sweat, and I slip against the pressure. Her belly is flat and firm—but still soft—and the perspiration forms a puddle in her sunken navel. With a loud popping sound her nipple pulls free of my mouth, and I fall forward, against her, my face sliding along the damp skin between her breasts. She pushes me back—gently—then takes my hands and places them on her. I knead her breasts, squeeze them harder when she arches her back and moans again. They feel almost exactly as I imagined they would. I manipulate them with my fingers, watching her for a sign that this is what I’m supposed to do next.

  It’s OK to be frightened, she tells me. It’s OK.

  Then she is suddenly on her feet, her back to me again as she hitches her bikini bottoms with her thumbs and peels them down, revealing the two sculpted halves of her ass, milky and white against her otherwise tanned skin. Even her breasts are not this pale in comparison. As she steps out of the pants and drops them to the floor she smiles at me. I watch her buttocks bounce a bit, and she backs into me so that they’re against my face like two small pillows. She reaches around and again takes my hand, this time wrapping it around the front of her, pushing my fingers between her legs. She’s so wet and sticky I wonder if there’s something wrong, if it’s supposed to feel like that, but she pushes me deeper, still standing and grinding against my hand now.

  I try to pull away. I want to stop and I’m angry with myself for being such a baby but I don’t know what to do or how to express what’s happening inside me. I want—I have to stop, I tell her, and it sounds stupid and immature but I just want to stop. I want to run out of there and forget this, I’m not ready, and she’s not the one I should be doing this with. I—I want to stop, I say again, shuddering as a wetness of my own explodes into my shorts.

  Mortified, I wiggle away from her and collapse to the floor. I’m dizzy and embarrassed and when I look up at her she is so naked, right there in front of me—I’ve never seen anyone so naked—and this is wrong it’s all wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

  She kneels next to me on the floor, takes me in her arms and tells me to do as she says and everything will be all right. Trust me, she says. Trust me.

  I don’t want to do this.

  It doesn’t matter.

  Darkness closes in and she swallows every bit of me, devouring scraps I can never regain, pieces of me I can never rebuild.

  Wandering through the house now in this new darkness, I stumble about, hands reaching for the walls, hoping they might guide me or give me some bearing. None of the light switches work and I can’t find any of the windows—where are the windows?

  And then I am back in the same living room, and she is there on the couch, smiling at me. Her breasts are bloody, the nipples ringed in crimson and dripping. The sight sickens me, but she wanted me to; demanded that I hurt her like that with my teeth, and so I can taste her too—on my lips—her blood, her life, her soul. All that is inside her is now inside of me, and I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

  She reaches out, walks her fingers up my leg like a spider and grabs hold of me. It’s OK, she says, no one will know unless you tell. She drops to her knees; whispering her demented prayers again and smiling at me like a mannequin—hollow beyond her exteriors, void of anything real.

  I am inside her again, this time between her legs.

  She is warm, wet, empty and soulless.

  I can feel blood running through my veins; can hear my heart pumping it.

  Something from deep inside her crawls into me, slips beneath my skin, slithers through me like a garden snake, its tiny head and scaled skin slinking up the back of my throat, gagging me as its tongue flicks at the roof of my mouth.

  More echoes from the past taunt the present. Someone calls out to the angels, calls them by name. Someone screams in agony.

  I’m certain it’s me.

  When those memories part like dark curtains, I again find myself at the top of the stairs peering into Linda’s bedroom, listening to the sounds and watching all that is happening to her there. Her eyes meet mine, though briefly. She
knows what I have seen, knows by the grimace on my face that I am terrified and repelled, but she is neither.

  She is pleased.

  Good…good…good boy, she whispers, though not to me.

  I back away and move as quietly as I can down the staircase, my heart racing. I can see the door, am moving toward it, but it seems impossibly far away—painted on a distant backdrop—a light at the end of a tunnel I can never reach.

  And then it’s quiet, gone from me, buried so deep that maybe it was never there at all.

  It wasn’t until I came awake that I realized I had either fallen asleep or passed out.

  My first thought was that I’d been sealed into a tomb of some sort, because the darkness I opened my eyes to was no longer dreamlike. This was real. The flooring beneath me was cool and damp, and at the farthest reaches of my peripheral vision I could make out only slivers of faint light. Visions of being deep in a grave, of having been buried alive flashed through my mind, and I tried to move as I came awake, gasping and lurching into a sitting position all at once.

  What I intended as a screech strangled the base of my throat and came out as a gagging cough instead, and I scrambled around, flailing, slipping on the cement beneath me while trying to gain my bearings.

  As the haze cleared and my eyes gradually adjusted to the near dark, I saw that I had somehow ended up in the basement of the house. The light was from a series of squat windows positioned along the foundation. The stale smell was worse down here, but despite the heat wave it was relatively cool.

  I leaned against the brick wall and ran a hand through my hair. How the hell had I ended up here? I had no memory whatsoever of having left the upstairs. Slowly, I sank back down into a squat and tried to collect myself.

  Across from me was an area that had once housed a washing machine and dryer. A bit further down the wall was the bulkhead, the doors intact but rotted and splintered in places. I followed the light to one of the windows and on tiptoes, saw the backyard from ground level. There was still daylight but it was burning fast.

  Night was on its way.

  Behind me was a wooden staircase that led back upstairs. I remembered that on the other side of the door at the top of those stairs was a small pantry off of the kitchen. In my state of sleepwalking, hallucinating or whatever was happening to me, I must have wandered back downstairs, through the kitchen and down these stairs to the basement. “But why?” I asked the walls, the darkness. “Why here? Why here, Bernard?”

  Something told me to look back over my shoulder to the section of cellar I had awakened in. Empty space. Brick walls and a cement floor. Nothing.

  I walked back across the cellar, glancing at the array of thick cob and spider webs lining the rafters overhead. At the spot where I had awakened, I looked more closely at the rafters, at the wall, and finally the floor. I had either subconsciously put myself here or had been placed here by some external force for a reason, so I crouched down and searched the area for clues or some sign that might explain why.

  On hands and knees I swept my hands along the floor. It was damp and a bit grainy from small particles of sand and dirt but I found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Until my hand came across a small pile of dirt where the floor met the wall.

  I looked closer, and though the light was sparse I managed to see that it was a small mound of some substance, though not dirt. I grabbed a handful and let it slide back to the floor between my fingers. It was gray in color and had a granular feel. Cement.

  Cement from an interior wall that had been constructed to separate the washing machine and dryer from the rest of the basement.

  Tracing the short jog of brick wall with my finger, I followed a logical path upward to a point where the debris had more than likely originated. The first few rows of bricks were intact, so I followed the narrow avenues of cement between them with a fingertip, running my hand along as if following a maze, and eventually hit a soft spot a bit higher up the wall.

  On my knees, I looked at the brick more closely, and saw a small divot. I pushed my finger against it and it gave way, widened and grew as more loose granules fell to the floor and joined the little pile below. I continued working the area with my finger, pushing and scraping until enough had given way for me to get two fingers into the crevice. The brick began to loosen rather easily, and I realized then that it had been fitted back into this section of the wall and made to look intact when in fact it was anything but. I grabbed the face of the brick and wiggled it, and with minimal effort pulled it free of the wall with an eerie scraping sound.

  Dust motes flew about from the now open segment of wall like tiny escaping entities.

  I placed the brick on the floor and peered into the hole I had created, but I couldn’t see a thing, so I tried one of the bricks next to it. To my surprise, it too gave way with little effort, and suddenly, the one beneath it fell out as well.

  An odd clicking sound emanated from behind the bricks, like dice or dominos clacking one against another, and I moved back a bit while still trying to gain a better view of what was happening.

  Something emerged, sliding from the opening like the granules before it, but these objects were bigger and shaped in various patterns, and rushed from the open wall like they had been piled and hastily hidden away behind it.

  It was the bright white color that gave them away.

  I backed away, watched the growing pile of bones accumulate as they continued to pour from the ruptured wall. Little skulls and legs and spines and teeth and pelvises tumbling one atop another, cleaned and so white they appeared bleached, the remains of countless small animals that had been systematically killed, skinned and dismembered, their remains sealed off behind this wall.

  Bile gurgled in the back of my throat.

  The skeletons just kept coming, spilling onto the floor until the mountain of bones was complete.

  I choked back the horror and realized I was seeing Bernard’s early work, those things he had killed before human prey became the preferred method of achieving whatever sick and demonic triumphs he had hoped to attain.

  Our mutual love of animals had been a common point between Bernard and me.

  More fucking lies.

  The fact that he had left the brick loose in the wall could only mean that from time to time he had returned to this portion of the cellar to view his little trophies from the past. He had come here and pulled that brick free and watched the bones fall as I had, then—what? What did he do down here? Plunge his hands into them like a pirate rummaging a treasure chest? Relive the moments when he first killed these poor creatures? Compared them to his slaughter of human beings? Was there any difference, or was it all just death, ugly, violent and unnecessary death, killing just to kill?

  Regardless, it had begun the same for Bernard as it had ended, in a cellar, alone in the dark with his deeds and demons.

  I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, but crouched down and made myself study the bones instead. They were glossy and white. The sonofabitch had cleaned and polished each one.

  I took a closer look at the opening in the wall and noticed something protruding from it. A piece of lightweight metal, the corner of a larger piece, was clearly visible. I reached in and pulled it out from under what I thought were the few bones that hadn’t yet fallen out. But the items lying across the metal sheet were not bones. It was jewelry.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I whispered.

  Several women’s watches, rings, necklaces and earrings rained across the pile of bones. None of them looked to have any significant value, and one was even a medical alert bracelet. But they were scraps, belongings of human beings who were surely as dead and gone as the animals who had once inhabited those bones.

  And Bernard had killed every last fucking one of them.

  The bile was back. A shiver grabbed me by the neck and throttled me a moment, so I turned my attention to the piece of metal I had pulled free. To my surprise it was fairly large, at least two fe
et in height and perhaps one foot in width. The corners were worn with age and the entire thing was caked with dirt, but overall it was in relatively decent condition, and most of the colors were still distinguishable. The cartoon face of a man smiled at me, waving a hand as if we were old friends. I wiped at the dirt caked across it with my thumb and more shapes beneath began to form. Letters. I stood up and moved closer to one of the windows, holding it up to the slowly dying light.

  It looked like something out of the 1950s. It was a poster of sorts, with an illustration of a man waving, complete with pompadour, big bright smile and a jumpsuit reminiscent of factory workers at that time. Across the top of the poster were the words: Employees! Please be sure to wash your hands! Each corner of the discolored and aged metal had a hole where it had been fixed to a wall, and along the bottom, in small but still legible print it read: Buchanan Textile Corporation.

  Another evil souvenir, a clue, an inside joke—what? Had he laughed when he tore it from the wall? Had there been a dead body within reach?

  Buchanan Textile was one of the old mills that had once operated in Potter’s Cove years before. For decades now, like the string of other dinosaurs that had once constituted the town’s industrial area, it was an old, immense, condemned and forgotten husk of a building on the edge of town.

  Now I knew where he killed them, where he bled them.

  I dropped the poster, left it there with the bones and jewelry of the dead, with the memories and nightmares and secrets, and slowly made my way back across the cellar, up the stairs and out of the house.

  As I slipped through the side yard gate, I froze.

  Rick was across the street, watching me.

  CHAPTER 29

  His Jeep Cherokee was parked in front of my car. Rick was leaned against it, arms folded. I crossed the street, approached him. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was gonna ask you the same thing,” he said.

  “You tailing me?”