“Hello,” Neil said. “Alison? This is Neil Hurly. How are you doing? That’s great. I’m doing fine, thanks. The reason I called—I was wondering if you would like to go to a movie with me this Friday? Oh, you’re busy. That’s OK. How about Saturday? You’re busy then, too? That’s OK. How about next weekend? Oh, I see. Yeah, I know how that is. Well, I just thought I’d give you a call. Goodbye, Alison.”
“Wait a second!” Tony yelled as Neil started to put down the phone. He strode across the room and snapped the receiver out of Neil’s hand. “Let me talk to her.” Tony raised the phone to his ear and mouth. “Hello, Alison? This is Tony. Would you like to go out to the movies this Friday? You would? That’s great. When should I pick you up?” Alison gave him a time, and he hung up. He turned back to Neil. “See, that’s the way to do it, buddy. You just be me, and everything goes perfectly.”
But Neil wasn’t listening. He’d already stood and begun to walk out the door. But he turned at the last moment and sadly shook his head at Tony. Tony wasn’t sure what he had done wrong, other than steal his best friend’s girl.
Then Tony was back in the metal room—in the box.
Alison was standing before him. She had a silver knife in her hand.
It was murderously hot inside the box.
“Tony,” Alison said sweetly. “You’ve really opened my heart to what love is all about.” Then she raised the knife and tried to stab him in the chest. But he was ready for her tricks. Brenda’s witch had taught him well. He dodged to the side and managed to trip Alison. She fell forward and landed on her own knife. She rolled over on her back, and he saw that the blade stuck straight up out of the center of her chest. There was blood everywhere, especially in her hair. It gave her black curls a special maroon color. She smiled up at him, and blood gurgled out the sides of her mouth.
“Fooled you, didn’t I?” she said, and her voice was different from Alison’s. He realized it was Sasha who was lying on the floor in front of him. He watched in amazement as she yanked the knife out of her chest and tossed it aside. She reached up, and he helped her to her feet. She brushed her hands off on her black pants, but the blood didn’t go away.
“I thought you were Alison,” he said, confused.
“They always think that,” Sasha said. She took his hand again. “Come. It’s time. We have to go.”
He took her hand reluctantly. This last murder had not felt so good as the first. He could have sworn it had been Alison in the room with him.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
She smiled. “They always ask that.”
“Who are they?” he asked.
She laughed. “You are they. We are they. It makes no difference where we’re going.” She leaned over and whispered in his ear. “Soon you’ll be in the box.”
“But I thought this was the box,” he said. It felt hot enough to be the box.
She giggled. She couldn’t stop giggling. The sound of it began to make him feel sick. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “This place is only to warm you up. You have no idea what the box is like.”
Then she took his hand and led him away—to the other side of the wall. And soon the screams he heard were his own, and they never stopped.
· · ·
Tony awoke and stared at his own ceiling. He turned over in bed and saw Sasha curled up in a ball beside him. She slept like a cat, he thought. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and sat up. His mouth was dry, and he had a headache. He must be getting sick. His entire body was soaked with sweat.
He stood and walked to the window and looked out at the deserted nighttime street. It looked like an alien planet. He didn’t even feel he belonged in his own body. He hurt all over. He had gone to bed early only to awake at midnight and find Sasha standing over him. Before he could speak she had pressed her finger to his lips and whispered in his ear that she wanted his love. She had slipped into the bed beside him, and they had done the nasty deed, and it had been nasty. He had never experienced such passion with Alison, but it had taken its toll. He had passed out almost immediately afterward. Once more Sasha had refused to undress completely. She had kept her black blouse on. Indeed, she still had it on. It was the only thing.
Studying her sound asleep on his bed, Tony felt a sudden digestive spasm. The contents of his stomach welled up in his throat. He barely made it to his bathroom. He vomited up everything he had eaten for dinner and then some. He was catching his breath when Sasha came and knelt by his side. She leaned over and kissed him hard on the lips, vomit breath and all. She patted him on the back.
“Is my darling not feeling well?” she asked.
“I had a nightmare,” he mumbled. It was just coming back to him. “I think it made me sick.”
“What was it about?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She grinned. Even in the unlit bathroom her green eyes glittered. He was reminded of the dead man in the desert. Of course, his green eyes had been flat as the ground he had been lying on.
“But I want you to talk about it,” she said. “You will talk about it.”
He smiled with her, although he felt far from smiling. “I have no choice in the matter?” he asked.
She continued to stare at him. Another wave of nausea swept through his body. “No,” she said.
It was one little word. No. He had heard it a million times in his lifetime. But he had never heard it spoken the way she had just said it. There was a power in her voice that pushed a button deep inside him, one he didn’t know he’d had. Maybe he hadn’t had it until she’d come over that night. Their lovemaking had been passionate, but he couldn’t say he’d enjoyed it. One of the reasons he felt sore was that she had scratched his back so badly in the throes of love.
Like a cat.
Her green eyes, green even in the dark, continued to hold him.
He told her about his nightmare. He remembered it all.
When he was done, she seemed happy. She patted him on the back again. Then she said something that shocked him to the core.
“Did I tell you I met Neil?” she said.
“What? No. When?”
“I met him in the desert where you buried the man. He had brought flowers to put on the man’s grave. It was two months after you killed the man with your car, Tony.”
“It wasn’t my car,” Tony said.
Sasha smiled. “But you were driving. You were responsible. Neil told me the whole story. I made him. He sounded so sad. I wanted to do something for him.” She leaned closer. “Do you know what I did for him?”
Tony could not imagine. Everything she said blew his mind, which was already pretty well blown. “No,” he said.
She moistened her lips with her tongue. Once more he smelled her smell. It wasn’t really a hospital odor at all. He had just thought that because she had told him it was. But he was beginning to understand she didn’t always tell him the truth. For some reason he was reminded of biology class in high school.
“I kissed him,” she said.
His stomach rumbled. “Why?”
“I kissed him to make him feel better. I kissed his head. I kissed his knee. Do you remember he had a sore knee?”
“Yeah. He had a bone tumor in his leg. He ended up with a brain tumor. That’s what killed him.” Of course, Neil had not had these tumors two months after the incident in the desert. He had only developed them later.
“He was in a lot of pain,” Sasha said sympathetically. “I made him feel better. He needed a friend. He felt awful about what you had done to the man. I talked to him regularly about it.” She chuckled. “I talked to him even when he didn’t know I was talking to him.”
“But this thing got in my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it. I don’t know where it came from. It was like a voice. . . . ”
“Did you know about the chain letters?” Tony asked, shocked.
“I know many secrets.” Sasha sat back on her heels. “I kissed Neil, and now I’ve kissed
you. But I’ve done more for you than give you a kiss, and now you’ll do more for me than even Neil did.” She cocked her head to the side. “I believe we have a visitor.”
He could hear nothing. “What are you talking about? What did Neil do?”
“Shh,” she said. “Listen. There it is. Someone’s here.”
She was right. Someone was knocking softly on the front door. He stood and grabbed his robe and hurried downstairs. Sasha didn’t follow him. He opened the door, half expecting to find Alison. But it was Joan. She carried a brown paper sack in her right hand.
“Hi,” she said flatly. “I have something for you.” She thrust out the bag. “Take it. Do what you want with it. I’m sorry I’m late with it. I had to—go somewhere first before I could bring it over.”
He took the bag reluctantly. “What’s going on here?”
Joan spoke like a robot. “Brenda brought me her chain letter. She did what she was told to do. I’m doing what I was told to do.”
“Who told you?” Tony asked.
“There was a note in my mailbox. One for me, one for you. Yours is in the bag, with the gun.”
“What gun? What do I need a gun for?”
“It’s my father’s. Read the Caretaker’s note. You’re going to need everything I gave you.”
Sasha suddenly appeared at Tony’s side. Joan’s eyes widened when she saw her, and she took a step back. Sasha grinned a mouth full of teeth.
“Is it loaded, Joany?” Sasha asked.
Joan swallowed. “I know you,” she said.
“You’re going to know me better,” Sasha said. “You’ve done what you were supposed to do.”
Joan trembled. She stammered. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
Sasha laughed. “You just keep telling yourself that. Get out of here, worm. I’ll come for you later.” Sasha shut the door in her face. She turned to Tony. “Open the bag.”
Tony searched inside the bag. If he hadn’t just thrown up, he would have done so then. Joan had brought her dad’s gun, all right. It could even have been loaded—he hadn’t checked. Joan had brought it over with the trigger pulled back.
With a bloody severed finger.
“Brenda,” Tony breathed. The gun fell from his hand onto the floor. It was fortunate it didn’t go off. The finger bounced loose. Sasha reached down and retrieved them both. She pocketed the finger and flipped open the revolver chamber. It was fully loaded.
“It’s hers,” Sasha cackled. “Oh, Tony, we are going to have fun tonight. Hurry, read your small service. I’m going to help you perform it.”
Tony reached into the bag again and withdrew a crumpled purple paper. He read in the shaft of white moonlight that shone through the window beside the front door. He didn’t have to decode it.
Blow Alison’s brains out.
He dropped the note in horror. “I can’t do that.”
Sasha was amused. “Why not? Do you know what your dear Alison is doing right now? She’s on her way with her new boyfriend to dig up Neil’s body. She’s going to turn it over to the police. She’s going to put you in jail, Tony.”
Tony put his hands to his ears. “Stop it! She wouldn’t do that to me!”
“She’s doing it as we speak.” Sasha pulled his hands down and placed the revolver back in his palm. “You’re going to have to kill her. If you don’t kill her, she’ll destroy you.”
“But Ali—”
“Is a whore,” Sasha said, sweeping in closer so that she was practically whispering in his ear. But the funny thing—he wasn’t sure if she was speaking at all. It seemed as if her thoughts were simply inside his head. That they were the same as his thoughts. Yes, that was the way of it.
“She’s a whore, and she’s spent the night screwing her new boyfriend and laughing about what an asshole you are. Now she’s digging up Neil’s body so that she can put you in jail so that she can screw anybody she wants while you rot away.”
“Is this true?” Tony whispered, standing frozen in shock. This new voice was a revelation to him. It knew so many secret things. It had been there for months, he suddenly realized. Ever since Neil had died. It was funny how long it had taken for him to hear it clearly.
Sasha kissed his ear, briefly sticking her tongue inside, and said, “It’s all true, my love.”
“I would have to see it for myself,” he heard himself say.
“You will see it. I promise you. We will go there now.”
“You will see your whore digging in the mud, and you will take the gun and put a hole in her brain and bury her in the mud, and then you will be my love. We will make love on her grave, and it will be like heaven.”
He turned his head toward her and felt her tongue slide over the side of his face. Her eyes stared at him only inches away—twin mirrors hung in a featureless box. Her smell was overpowering—the stink of the morgue.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“The Caretaker. The one who takes care of you.”
Sasha smiled. Her mouth did. But her eyes didn’t change. They never did. They just watched. She was the Observer, the Recorder. She was also the Punisher. He had to listen closely. The time had come for his punishment. She brushed her hand through his hair. “I’m your greatest admirer,” she said.
Chapter Sixteen
Alison found the spot without having to search. Even with the passage of time and the dark, there were still visible signs: tire tracks on the road that the winter’s worst had failed to obliterate, scraped rubber on the asphalt that would probably be there at the turn of the century. But had there been no evidence, she would still have recognized the place where Tony had lost control of the car. For her, as well as for Tony, it was haunted, and her ghost, as well as the man’s, often walked there at night. Alison and Eric parked their car, grabbed their shovels, and climbed outside.
“How far off the road did you bury him?” Eric asked. They wouldn’t need flashlights. The moon shone in the sky like a cold sun.
“Fifty paces, straight out,” Alison said. “Come on.”
“What are we expecting to find?” Eric asked, following beside her as they strode through the sticky tumbleweeds. Alison remembered the night it all began—the howling wind, the dust in their eyes. That night the area was bathed in serenity—but it was as false a peace as that achieved by suicide. They had given themselves a death sentence that night a year ago when they had tried to pretend to the world they hadn’t killed anybody. The irony of it all was that they hadn’t. The man had already been dead. If only they had known!
“An empty grave,” Alison said.
“But if we don’t find anything, how can we be sure we weren’t digging in the wrong spot?” Eric asked.
“I’ll know.”
“But what will the empty grave prove?” he persisted.
Alison stopped. “I tell you I met Neil up in the mountains.”
“But you said he had terminal cancer. Even if Tony lied about him dying, he would have died shortly after.”
“He’s alive,” she said. “He died and he came back.”
“Alison, people don’t come back to life. It’s just fantasy.”
She raised her eyes to the big round moon. She thought of the enchanting love of the stranger. She remembered the knives that had stabbed outward from the girl’s eyes.
“Maybe they come back as something other than people,” she said.
A minute later they entered a small clearing in the field of tumbleweeds and cacti. The latter stood around them like frozen sentinels. They had counted fifty paces, and here the soil was grossly uneven. It should have been. Tony had buried Neil only two months earlier.
“This is the spot,” she said. “Neil’s body should be right beneath us.”
“I have to tell you I’m not looking forward to this,” Eric said.
“It doesn’t matter. You’re already in this too deep.” She pulled off her coat. The evening was cool, but she knew that soon she’d be sweating. “Let’s get to work.”
They had bought their shovels at an all-night grocery store and were lucky that the place had any shovels at all. But the quality of the shovels matched the quality of drugstore jewelry. A couple of feet into the ground and the wooden handles were coming loose from the metal spades. Eric muttered something about coming back later with better equipment, but Alison tossed a shovelful on his pants. Keep digging, brother.
The soil was a mixture of dirt and sand. It was not tightly packed—another sign that they had found the right spot. Working together they were down to five and a half feet in a hurry. Eric raised his shovel for another deep plunge. Despite his complaints, he was a hard worker, stronger than he looked. His spade stabbed into the earth, and it made a squishing sound.
As if it had plunged into something that had once been alive.
“Oh, Christ,” he muttered. He was afraid to pull the shovel back out. He looked over at Alison, who had suddenly frozen in the moonlight at the sick sound. The two of them were standing head deep in the grave.
Neil’s body is still here. He didn’t rise from the dead.
Was she wrong about Jane Clemens as well?
An arm swung out of the night above them.
It struck Eric hard across the head, and he crumpled at Alison’s feet.
She screamed, then all at once her scream choked in her throat.
Tony Hunt, her dearest love, accompanied by Jane Clemens, witch from hell, appeared above her at the edge of the grave. Tony was carrying a baseball bat, and a black revolver stuck out of his belt. He peered down at her with eyes cold as Arctic frost. The girl beside him giggled.
“We won’t have to do any digging,” she said. “We’ll just cover her over. Both of them.” She turned to Tony. “Do you believe me now?”
“It’s true,” he said softly, his voice void of any inflection.
The girl raised her arms above her head, stretching. “Kill her now, Tony. It’ll give us that much longer to roll in the mud above her corpse.”
Tony dropped the bat and pulled the revolver out of his belt.
“Wait!” Alison cried. “Tony, listen to me. This girl has lied to you. She’s not who she says she is.”
Chain Letter Page 31