by John L. Monk
I pulled off the road and watched Gerald drive up to the house. There were eight other cars parked there. He got out. The lights on his car flashed once when he locked it, then he approached the house. Up the stairs onto a porch, now, where he pulled open the storm door and knocked.
I slipped out of the minivan for a clearer look.
The inner door opened and Gerald shook someone’s hand. The contrast of white on shadow hid whoever was there. A snatch of conversation carried across the field, but the words escaped me. Shouting between the two of them, then Gerald threw up his hands and headed back to his car. Just as he reached for the door a man with white hair came out, waving for him to stop. Gerald turned around. The white-haired man approached him and the two began talking again.
Something in the house caught my eye. In the doorway, standing in silhouette yet somehow discernible, was a small girl with dark hair. Though she was too far away for Fred’s seventy-year-old eyes to tell, I somehow knew she was watching me.
My gaze was pulled away by Gerald and the man walking together back to the house. Whatever they’d disagreed about must have been resolved. When I looked back to the door, the girl was gone.
The two men went inside and the door shut behind them.
I stood there leaning against the minivan, watching the house and worrying about the girl. I waited five minutes, twisting in indecision, growing more worried. No one else came out of the house, and there were no new arrivals.
I sat behind the wheel, inserted the key, and then took it back out. If I drove up and they heard me, they’d be ready and I’d be just one person.
I got out, walked to the entrance, and turned up the long driveway. I made sure to keep close to the fence, trusting the lengthening shadows to hide me. With every step, whatever semblance the house had to a sailing ship evaporated. Now it seemed more like a toadstool—looming and sickly and poisoning the world.
Fred’s heart thudded heavily in his chest, and I took deeper breaths.
“Just a little more,” I said.
As I struggled ahead, the air grew heavier, weighing me down even more than all the excess flab I was carrying. My steps felt too short for the distance I had to travel, and the house seemed impossibly far away now.
Halfway to the house, I felt a brief moment of panic when I thought I’d left the gun in the minivan. I took five steps to go back before realizing it was clutched in my hand all along. I lifted it up and stared at it, just to be sure … of something … before lowering it and turning around again.
I tried to continue … and then realized I was sitting in the middle of the gravel drive, less than thirty feet from the house. But I’d dropped the gun … I needed the gun. Where was it? Breathing was difficult, like being squished under an enormous invisible bubble pressing me from all sides.
My chest tightened painfully and I saw little sparks of light, like fireflies. More colorful, less cheerful. The door of the toadstool opened again, and the little girl from before was standing there looking at me. I could see her clearly now, so beautiful, her face a mask of concern mixed with resolve—too much of either for a girl so young.
While I lay like a cow pie in the middle of the road, the pressure on my chest began to lighten. I dragged in several ragged lungfuls of air, and with each draw my oxygen-starved brain recovered. Soon my vision cleared and the burning in my chest cooled to a distant smoldering.
My hand hurt. Looking at it, I found I was squeezing the gun in a white-knuckled grip.
When I searched for the girl, she was gone. But the door was open.
The way was clear.
Chapter Twenty-Two
On entering the house, I was hit by the syrupy smell of cheap perfume mingled with marijuana. The second thing I noticed was a young boy, naked, sprawled on the floor watching TV. Maybe nine years old, he didn’t look up when I came in. He was too focused on the frenetic motion of cartoon characters. I didn’t see the girl anywhere, or Gerald, or the man with the white hair.
Thumping music carried down from upstairs, not terribly loud or I would have heard it from outside.
A powder room was to my left and a flight of stairs just beyond that, also on the left. The room with the television stretched right, out of my field of vision. I stepped around the boy, turned the corner, and found myself in the dining room. The table was loaded with sandwiches, deviled eggs, cookies, chips, meat and vegetable platters, sodas, and bottles of hard liquor.
There was another child, sitting at the dining table in her pajamas holding a Barbie. Not the girl I’d seen twice now. This girl was about five or six and looked Hispanic. She didn’t react to my presence in any way. She stared ahead with drugged, lidded eyes.
In the middle of the table, next to the deviled eggs, was a candy bowl filled with little white pills. I leaned over and picked it up. Each pill was smooth and free of branding. I moved to put the bowl back, then thought better of it and set it out of the girl’s reach. She didn’t appear to notice.
I saw a cordless phone up on the wall where the dining room turned into a kitchen. I walked over, picked it up, and dialed 911.
A lady came on asking me what my emergency was.
“Hurry,” I said, and set the phone down facing out to the room.
From somewhere upstairs came the voice of a man asking a question I didn’t catch.
“…still downstairs,” another man said.
A slender steak knife was on the table near the folded cold cuts. Though I had a gun, I grabbed it anyway.
Leaving the little girl, I stepped around the boy on the floor and over to the powder room near the entrance and hid inside—barely avoiding a face-to-face with a burly black guy who clumped down the stairs and walked into the living room wearing…
What the hell?
The guy was wearing a spandex cow outfit. It hugged his body tightly, with black and white shapes everywhere. Though it seemed almost like camouflage, the effect accentuated his muscles. He shifted my way to stand over the boy, and the tight spandex revealed way more than anyone needed to see. If that wasn’t bizarre enough, he stretched his arms out wide and flexed like a bodybuilder, his gaze sweeping over his arms and body in a lurid display of self-infatuation.
“Come on,” he said to the boy, his voice husky and deep. “I got plans for you, little friend.”
Time seemed to slow down for me, not unlike the attack outside, but with an important difference. Where before I’d been nearly undone by Fred’s flagging health, now I shook with white-hot rage.
The man bent down, reaching for the boy. When I came up behind him, he turned toward me, his eyes widening in surprise. The knife flashed hard and fast, like a sword, slicing deep through his neck in a geyser of oxygen-rich spray. I kicked him before he could fall on the child, who kept watching the television as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered.
From behind me, near the stairs, came a startled sound and a scrabbling of feet.
I turned around and shot the white-haired man in the face, splattering the yellow wallpaper behind him with blood and brains and chunks of his white-haired skull.
Upstairs, over the sound of thumping music, someone shouted in fear.
When I looked up the stairs, she was there—the brown-haired girl. I’d seen her face before. Her eyes were blue like the sky from another age, back when the world was new.
“Wait!” I shouted.
She turned and walked away.
Gun in one hand, knife in the other, I climbed the stairs. With every step I felt a growing and overwhelming hatred—a need to destroy. When I got to the top, the world turned funhouse strange, and for a while I became lost to myself…
* * *
Dan Jenkins stands in the middle of a short hallway that veers off to the right. Along its length are four doors, two per side. The music is loud and there are three adults visible, all men. Two are peeking out of the various rooms, and one stands in the middle wearing a green bathrobe and nothing else. Dan recogniz
es him—His Honor, judge Mark Simmons, the same judge who’d let Gerald Ross go and later went to jail himself—falling now after Dan’s bullets catch him high in the chest. Judged.
Down the hall, the two faces duck back into the rooms.
Dan looks in the room to his right and sees a man lying on the bed with two children clutched in his arms like pillows. Dan takes careful aim, shoots him through his screaming mouth, and turns back to the hall.
A man rushes to get past him, fleeing to the safety of the stairs, but Dan catches him in the stomach with the steak knife. Mustering Fred’s thick meaty strength, backed by adrenaline, he lifts the man onto his toes, splitting him navel to sternum. Dan pulls the knife out and kicks him down the stairs, where he stumbles, falls, and doesn’t get back up.
Heedlessly, Dan enters the room the man came from. He blinks away tears for the children who stare back listlessly, too drugged to care. He backs out, takes a breath, and moves to the next room. Again two men on a bed, again clutching children as human shields. Dan strides up to one of them. The man foolishly lets go of the girl he holds to cover his head, and Dan shoots him in the chest. The other man gets up to run and Dan guns him down from behind.
The final room is empty of adults. The children don’t cry or seem to notice him. Like the child in the dining room, and the ones in the room near the stairs, they appear drugged.
The bend ahead leads to a closed door. Dan kicks it open. A bathroom. The shower curtain is closed. When Dan pulls it wide, he finds Gerald Ross lying naked in the empty tub staring at him in terror.
Dan points his gun, pulls the trigger, and nothing happens. He looks at the gun, confused, and Gerald leaps at him. The ferocity of the attack drives Dan back, knocking him over. Gerald falls on top of him, punching and scratching savagely, eyes wild, his teeth pulled back in a triumphant snarl. For a while. In time, the frenzy slows and he rolls off, shuddering and gasping.
Dan uses his knees to nudge himself away. The knife is sticking out of Gerald’s stomach.
Gerald lies on the ground shaking and coughing.
Dan jacks the spare magazine into the pistol and chambers the next round. He could have shot him in the head and killed him quickly, but he misses and hits him in the stomach. A cruel way to die. Dan shoots again, missing the head again, and hits him three more times with shots to both knees and then the crotch. The screaming is almost satisfying, but it ends too soon.
With Gerald dead and no more adults left to shoot in the stomach, Dan steps into the hallway…
* * *
It was the stinging chest pains and the wheezing and rattling of my breath that brought me out of my rage.
Ignoring the pain, I struggled from room to room checking on the kids. None of them were crying, just staring, and all seemed physically unharmed. One of the things about the Great Whomever: he’s always had good timing.
I shook my head, disgusted and used up.
The music was thumping like a heartbeat I hadn’t killed yet, and the smell of marijuana and perfume warred with the gun smoke, cooling guts, and human waste, such that every breath was a desecration. Pain flared hotly in my chest, and the ground came rushing up.
When I came to, it was to the sound of sirens from outside. Gunshots over a 911 call, works every time.
I tried to raise the gun to my head but my arm wouldn’t move—it was numb all the way down, and my chest felt like someone was stabbing it repeatedly with broken glass.
Someone was there now, looking down at me. The girl from before.
Outside, when I’d seen her in the doorway, she’d been too far away to get a good look at. Later, at the top of the stairs, I’d had other concerns. Now that I was dying, I recognized her. I’d seen her before. I’d been dying one of many heart attacks in that Scheherazade smokestack of death and she’d been there for one of them, looking down at me like she was now. Exactly as she was now.
Like before, the girl touched my face. Then she leaned down and whispered, “It’s okay.”
Moments later, it was.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I had to assume Cliff was safely rescued. Of all the things that had happened, none of them were more troubling to me than the idea I’d contributed to the death of a more or less innocent dirtbag. Not even a dirtbag really, just a jerk.
The girl at the house was a mystery. Of all the children I’d seen, she was the only one who hadn’t seemed drugged. Also, she’d been dressed. And when I walked the hall looking from room to room, she hadn’t been in any of them.
Which was fine.
It’s like I always say: sometimes when you come back from the dead through mysterious portals for no good reason and you do it going on sixteen years, and when a strange child guides you into a house so you can kill a bunch of awful people, and then that child disappears as if by magic … you roll with it.
Stuff like that had happened before, most recently with a disappearing camera during my brief ride as Peter—not there one minute and suddenly there after I’d killed Erika, the amoral fiancée of a lottery winner named Nate. Before that, she’d pointed a gun right at my head and fired. And though her aim had seemed perfect, she’d missed.
Magic bullets and spooky cameras. Smokestacks of deaths and disappearing girls. It was enough to drive me crazy. But in the Great Wherever, even that comfort was denied to me. So what did I do?
I rolled with that too. Having seen too much, I no longer cared and just wanted it over with.
I’m ready now, I willed into the nether. I’m ready to move on. I’m sorry for my sins, is that what you want to hear? It’s even true—you know it is. No more, I’m done.
But as had happened every time before when I’d tried to communicate, no voice spoke back to me. I did not move on.
Ages, it seemed, passed for me in the Great Wherever. Far longer than I remembered it lasting before. And though it was boring in a general sense, it was never tiring. I wasn’t standing in an empty room somewhere, aching and weary and wishing for sleep. I was living consciousness and nothing more. I existed, I remembered, I imagined.
* * *
Virtual years after Fred and Gerald and blued-eyed mysteries, I was thinking about that time I used to steal from supermarkets.
When I was twelve years old, when kids were expected to play outside and video games weren’t remotely as fun as the commercials on TV made them out to be, I’d walk the quarter mile to the local shopping center and steal candy.
To this day, it remains one of the few things in life I was ever an expert at. I had the system down perfectly. I’d stroll into McCrory’s, a chain of five and dime stores that isn’t around anymore, then go to the section with the books and magazines and browse—all while keeping tabs on the checkout area where the sales clerks were. When things got busy, I’d pop over to the candy aisle and steal something big and unusual—like the giant candy bars with the fruits and nuts in them, or the Chunkys, or the enormous Snickers bars Mom always refused to buy me with her hard-earned money. Then I’d grab a cheap piece of chewing gum and stand in line. If nobody paid attention to me in line … well, maybe I wouldn’t buy that gum. Maybe I’d rethink my choice and put it back. Then I’d waltz out of there, chin up, spurning the meager choices offered at McCrory’s. I’d spend my money elsewhere, thank you very much.
I had a rule of never stealing two things from the same place on the same day. But I couldn’t steal candy from the shoe store or the ice cream shop or the picture framing shop. Emboldened by my success, I’d head four shops down to my next score: the supermarket.
Safeway was a little more difficult to steal from. They had food stockers in the aisles and adults everywhere doing serious grocery shopping, and not browsing for cheap junk to make them happy. If that wasn’t bad enough, the candy aisle shared floor space with the chips and cookies and other snacks—in the middle of the store, with the highest visibility. Only the very best candy thieves dared steal from Safeway.
My method was to pick up the
candy like I was buying it, browse around until I knew nobody was watching me, and then pocket it. Then I’d visit the public restroom behind the produce section. Adjacent to the restroom was a storage room with employee lockers. It had an access door in the wall to get at the pipes. Provided the locker area was empty, I’d place the candy on the inside lip right above the access hole. Then, with the goods safely stashed, I’d waltz out of the store, chin up, spurning the meager choices offered at Safeway. I’d spend my money elsewhere, thank you very much.
The next day, after the heat had died down, I’d return and claim my prize with no one the wiser.
Things went fine until, one day, the manager of Safeway came to my elementary school and lectured everyone about criminals and how bad stealing was, and how if we stole then that made us criminals in the eyes of the law.
“Everyone who steals gets caught,” he told us, and went on to say how nobody escapes justice forever, and that our crimes would come back on us if we strayed from the honest path. He added that jails were full of hardened criminals who’d launched their lives of crime by stealing candy. And because he was an adult and not a teacher, I actually believed him.
From that day on, I never stole candy again. Not because I was afraid of getting in trouble. Getting in trouble was annoying and loud, but ultimately survivable. The reason I quit stealing candy was pride: I wanted to be the only candy thief who’d never gotten caught.
And as far as anyone knows, I am.
Sometime after my memories of McCrory’s and Safeway and candy thieving, while leafing through the past for something fresh to think about, a portal opened in the nether. Enough time had passed since that bummer of a ride in Connecticut, and I was curious as to what was on the other side.