by Smith, Bryan
“That you did, brother. That you did. Goddamn, it’s good to see you again, man.”
They hugged awkwardly the way manly men do and then Greg took a seat next to him at the bar. As Luke settled back onto the stool he’d deserted a few moments ago, he beckoned Stu over with a raised finger. “A drink for my friend, whatever he wants. First round’s on me.”
Greg glanced at the bottle of Pabst and the whiskey glass already in front of Luke, raising an eyebrow as he said, “Looks like it ain’t technically the first round, at least for you.”
Luke shrugged and picked up the whiskey glass. “True enough, but I ain’t been at it that long yet. Got a ways to go before achieving maximum inebriation status.”
“And is that your actual goal tonight? To get obliterated?” He glanced at Stu, briefly making eye contact. “I’ll have a double bourbon, no ice.”
Stu grabbed a fresh glass from under the bar and reached for a bottle.
Luke sipped whiskey and nodded. “Obliteration is definitely the goal.”
The smile that had been in place since shortly after recognizing Greg slipped some as it hit him how true this was in more ways than one. But that was a thought he kept to himself. He couldn’t very well tell his old friend he meant to kill himself mere moments after seeing him again for the first time in years.
And he realized something else as he and his friend drank together and laughed about old times. Setting aside everything else, the real reason suicide had become such an alluring notion boiled down to the utter emptiness of his existence. He had nothing and no one in his life that mattered. His family was gone, except for some distant relations he scarcely knew. The close friendships he’d formed with a handful of special people here in his hometown had ended in the years following his departure. Some of those friends, Greg included, initially made an effort to keep in touch, but his total failure to respond to their letters and phone calls eventually put an end to that. He became a man without social connections of any kind, an isolated hermit with nothing to live for.
But maybe that wasn’t really the case. Maybe those old friendships weren’t actually dead. They might just be in a dormant state. He’d figured all the old crew no longer wanted anything to do with him after the years he’d spent ignoring them, but perhaps this had been a false impression. Maybe, like Greg, the rest of them would welcome him back without recrimination if given a chance.
It would be nice to believe so, anyway. In his infrequent moments of true self-aware clarity, he understood there was a part of his psyche wired to self-destruct. In these same moments, he would also realize this was a direct and understandable result of the horrendous trauma he’d endured on this night ten years ago. He was the only survivor of the Herzinger Family Massacre and he’d never stopped feeling guilty about that. The guilt ate away at him constantly and made it impossible to live a normal life. It drove him to punish himself in myriad ways. Deciding to kill himself was just the ultimate culmination of that.
But right now he didn’t much feel like propping that shotgun under his chin and pulling the trigger. At the moment, in fact, it was pretty much the last thing he wanted to do. It was astonishing how much better he felt. And all it took was this chance encounter with his old friend.
If it really was a chance encounter. A part of him felt sort of like an angel had been watching over his shoulder and had sent Greg to intervene. Luke had no religious convictions of any kind. He hadn’t really been a believer in the first place, but all the carnage he’d witnessed on that long ago Christmas Eve had convinced him there was no God. He was still pretty sure about that, but this thing with Greg had him wondering, he had to admit. Whatever the case, he was grateful it had happened.
The subject of Luke’s attire was avoided for the first half hour of their booze-soaked reunion. Luke was sure this was an act of deliberate discretion on Greg’s part, but the steadily rising level of alcohol in his system inevitably sent discretion flying out the window.
Greg drained off the last dregs of his third double bourbon and thumped the glass on the bar. After signaling Stu for yet another refill, he gave Luke a cockeyed look and said, “So what’s with the Santa suit? I guess you know how fucked up it is that you’re wearing that thing.”
Luke nodded. “I do, yeah.”
He picked up his half-empty bottle of Pabst and frowned at the label without drinking from it. Wishing to at least somewhat slow down the progression of intoxication in the wake of Greg’s arrival, he’d switched to strictly beer. Beer was good. Beer was always good. But he missed the sweet burn of the whiskey and consoled himself with the certainty that it would be reintroduced to his liquid diet before the end of the evening.
He sipped from the Pabst and stared longingly at the gleaming liquor bottles behind the bar.
Greg grunted. “Okay, then. Care to explain what the fucking deal is?”
Luke stared in silence at the bottles a moment longer, but now he wasn’t thinking about how much he desired what they contained. Instead, he was thinking again about how unlikely it was that Greg should show up here at Sal’s at this particular time, on this night of all nights.
It had to mean something.
Didn’t it?
Well, maybe it did, and maybe it didn’t mean a damn thing. Who the hell knew? Maybe Greg stopped in here every night. But Luke decided that didn’t matter. What mattered was he’d never expected to see anyone he actually cared about ever again. He’d expected to go to his demise tonight feeling as lonely and empty as ever. But that wasn’t happening. Whether it was actually divine intervention didn’t matter. It felt miraculous, anyway.
It did mean something, goddammit.
He felt a strange swelling in his chest as he came to a decision. “I’m wearing this goddamn thing because I was planning to go home tonight. Back to the old house on Crandall Hill.”
“On Haunted Hill,” Dave Wannamaker interjected. Dave was the man Luke had previously thought of as Fatso. The elderly man to his right was Virgil Alston. They’d formally introduced themselves shortly after Greg’s arrival. “That’s what the kids call it now.”
Luke grimaced. “Really?”
Dave nodded. “Yeah. Started a few years after…well, you know. After what happened.”
Some of the joviality had drained from Greg’s expression. His features twisted in a scowl tinged with concern. “Why in fuck would you want to go back to that place?” The scowl deepened as he shook his head. “Jesus Christ. That is messed the fuck up.”
Luke sighed. “I know.”
“Your asshole father was wearing a Santa suit when he went on his fucking rampage.”
Luke drained the last of the beer from the bottle. He thumped it down on the bar harder than necessary. The force of it caused the bottle to slip from his fingers and go rolling toward the other side of the bar. Luckily, Stu was there to grab it before it could fall to the floor and shatter.
“Sorry, man,” Luke said, wincing. “Bring me another, please.”
Stu’s brow creased. “Sure you need another?”
Luke nodded. “I ain’t hammered. Not by a longshot. Not yet. Just a little emotional.”
“I’ll bring you another, but I’ll cut you off if it happens again.”
“It won’t. I promise.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that.”
Stu fetched another bottle of Pabst, twisted off the cap, and set it on the bar in front of Luke, who picked it up and looked at Greg. “I don’t need any reminding about that night. I remember it all pretty fucking well, thank you.” He knocked back a slug of beer. “Too well, in fact. The suit is a symbol. I’m wearing it because it’s what my father wore that night. My plan tonight was to go up to that house on Haunted Hill and use my shotgun to finish the job that son of a bitch started ten years ago.”
Luke couldn’t believe he’d actually said it out loud, here in front of Greg and all these strangers. But he had. Blame the booze, blame the heat of the moment, or some combination o
f both. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the words were out there and he couldn’t take them back.
An awkward silence stretched out for maybe ten seconds.
Then Greg cleared his throat and said, “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You came back home ten years to the day after your insane father slaughtered your entire family to kill yourself at the same location.”
Luke sipped beer and nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
Another awkward silence of slightly shorter duration ensued.
Then Greg glanced at Stu. “Call the police. Seriously. A stated intent to self-harm warrants a lockup for the night at the very least.”
Stu drifted over to the wall-mounted phone behind the bar
He set his hand on the receiver.
Luke gave his head an emphatic shake. “Don’t do that. It’s not necessary. I’ve changed my mind.”
Greg looked at him. “And I’m supposed to just take your word for that?”
Luke sighed. “It’s the truth. Look, running into you tonight isn’t something I expected to happen. It got me to thinking…”
Luke spent a few minutes explaining all the half-formed notions of redemption that had been whirling through his booze-fuzzed brain for the last little while. By the time he finished, Greg looked somewhat placated if not entirely convinced. He and Stu exchanged a long look. After another moment, Stu shrugged and took his hand away from the receiver.
Greg fixed Luke with a stern expression. “Fuck whatever other plans you might have had. You’re staying at my place tonight. And I’m taking the goddamn shotgun from you. That’s non-negotiable. You hear me?”
Luke nodded. “I hear you.”
Yet another awkward silence descended for a few moments.
It ended when Virgil Alston said, “You might have had company if you’d gone up to Haunted Hill tonight, anyway.”
Luke frowned. “Company? Nobody’s living there. I know that.”
Greg shook his head. “That’s not what he means.”
Luke’s frown deepened as he turned on his stool to look at Greg directly. “So what does he mean?”
Greg began an explanation.
As Luke listened, he pushed the bottle of Pabst away and indicated for Stu to bring him a double whiskey. What he was hearing was too unsettling for anything other than the hard stuff. The double whiskey was gone by the time Greg was done giving him the lowdown.
He immediately called for another.
5.
Simone peeked through the open door into the shadow-cloaked foyer of the long-abandoned Herzinger place, feeling a little nervous as she stood on the threshold of entering the site of the most notorious crime in the town’s history.
Not that it had much competition in that area. Rayford was a quiet town for the most part, with a population several hundred souls below 10,000. There had been other murders, sure, even a few other explosions of violence resulting in multiple victims. But not one of those incidents approached the sheer horror of what had happened here ten years ago.
Most locals knew the story by heart.
The scope of it was almost incomprehensible. An extended family gathered for a Christmas celebration. Fifteen men, women, and children, not including Silas Herzinger, the patriarch of the family and architect of its demise. All but one of the Herzingers died that night, many of them butchered in their sleep, chopped to pieces with an axe. Others were awake, but only barely, thanks to the high level of Rohypnol circulating in their systems. Their holiday meals had been laced with the drug, ensuring they would be easy prey. Defensive wounds on their bodies suggested a few were just conscious enough to attempt fighting Silas off, but their efforts were doomed to failure. Only Luke Herzinger, then a young man in his middle twenties, escaped being dosed with the drug.
But even his survival had been a narrow thing. Asleep at the time of the massacre, the slaughter was nearly over by the time the screams of a female cousin from the room next to his stirred him to wakefulness. The cousin died and Silas came to his son’s room. Unbeknownst to Luke at the time, his mother and three siblings were already dead, as were numerous other relatives. He was wide awake when his father came into the room. The old man had donned the Santa suit he normally wore on Christmas Day for passing out presents to the young ones. It was covered in blood, as was his face.
Silas tried hard to kill his last surviving son, but Luke dodged the swinging blade of the axe several times before he was able to grab a table lamp and smash the heavy base of it over his father’s head. He then went off in search of help only to be struck dumb with horror at the carnage that greeted him in every room. It was so overwhelming he fled the house without calling 911. Instead he got in his car and drove at high speed all the way to the police station. He was a babbling, almost incoherent wreck, but at last the lawmen were able to get the gist of the situation. By the time they made it out to the house at the top of remote Crandall Hill, Silas was already dead by his own hands. He’d blown his head off with a shotgun. No one ever discovered why he’d done this horrible thing. He left no note. His finances were in good order. There was no evidence anyone had done him wrong in any way.
He just…snapped.
Somehow.
For unknown reasons.
“We going in or not?”
Simone jumped at the sound of Terry’s voice. She turned away from the door and saw him standing at the edge of the porch. Beyond the porch, the wind was still gusting hard and blowing the heavy snow about so fiercely it was impossible to see more than about ten feet in any direction. She again cursed Spence’s bullheaded stupidity. The possibility of being stranded here for the night was feeling more real all the time.
She folded her arms tight beneath her breasts and shivered. “Guess we’ve got no choice. It’s too fucking cold to stay out here. But I wish we had another flashlight. It’s creepy dark in there and I don’t see Spence or anyone else. They must be deeper in the house or upstairs.”
Terry still held the handles of the plastic grocery bag containing his beer in the fingers of his right hand. Smiling, he shifted the bag to his other hand and dug his phone out of his right hip pocket. He swiped at the screen a couple times and an instant later a beam of light projected from the back of the phone.
Simone frowned. She’d forgotten many smart phones were equipped with a flashlight function. The light the bulb at the back of the phone emitted wasn’t quite as powerful as the real thing, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. Her phone was in her purse, which she’d left in the SUV. She thought about going back for it, but another glance out at the near-whiteout conditions changed her mind. She’d just stay close to Terry.
She stepped aside and waved a hand at the open door. “Lead the way. Let me carry that beer for you.”
Terry handed the bag over and watched as Simone extracted a green bottle from the six-pack carton.
She smiled. “You don’t mind sharing, do you?”
Terry returned the smile. “Not with you.”
Of course not, Simone thought.
She knew full well Terry would never refuse her anything. The feeling of power this gave her might have made her feel bad, at least a little, under other circumstances, but right now she didn’t care.
Her hopelessly devoted nerd friend dug his keys out of another pocket and offered them to Simone. “Those aren’t twist-offs. You’ll need an opener.”
A cheap opener—the kind available from impulse-buy racks at virtually every convenience store across the nation—was attached to the key ring. She popped the cap off the bottle and let it fall to the snow-covered porch.
She passed the bottle to Terry. “That one’s yours.”
She opened another bottle for herself and shoved Terry’s keys in a pocket of her jacket. “For safekeeping.”
Still smiling, Terry took a slug of beer—a big one, to show how manly he was, no doubt—and entered the Herzinger house. He held his phone at shoulder-level as he moved deeper
into the foyer. Simone took a slug from her own bottle and followed him into the house.
The taste of the beer made her grimace. It was sharply bitter, the flavor too strong for a palate accustomed to the blander, gentler taste of cheap beer. She figured she would switch to Budweiser when they caught up to her asshole boyfriend and the others. Terry could keep his fancy suds.
Terry turned left a few feet deeper into the house, moving through a wide archway into what appeared to have been the living room. Simone saw a long couch and multiple recliners. The couch faced a TV stand, but the electronic equipment it had once housed was no longer present, probably removed long ago by either Luke Herzinger or thieves. She was amazed so much furniture was still present. She’d expected to find the place stripped bare, its contents either put in storage or hauled away to the dump. That would have made sense. No one had lived here for a decade And yet with just a few exceptions—like the missing TV and accompanying components—the inside of the house still looked much as it must have all those years ago.
Recognizing this was a bit unnerving. A series of empty rooms would have been far less creepy. The preserved state of the place heightened a growing sense of having entered a long-sealed mausoleum.
Standing in the approximate center of the living room, Terry turned in a slow circle and played the beam of light over the walls. Simone’s amazement grew as she saw several family pictures and a few art prints still hanging in their frames. Terry accompanied her as she approached the section of wall adorned with the most pictures. Her mouth fell open in astonishment as she stared at faded images of people that were familiar. She’d encountered many of these faces in the course of researching the Herzinger Family Massacre.
She reached out to lightly touch the face of one little girl. In the picture, the girl was standing with her father in an outdoor setting. The photo had been snapped on a bright day in a park somewhere. The little girl was wearing a yellow dress and had her arms wrapped tight around one of her father’s stout legs. The father was smiling and holding an even younger child in his arms.