Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1

by Scott Nicholson

  “I left early. I wasn’t feeling well. I drank a beer and it made me sick. My dog ate my homework. I had a flat tire. My grandmother died.”

  Beth nodded and looked down at the warped pine boards of the floor. She spoke, her voice as hollow as if she were talking inside a coffin. “After I couldn’t find you, I hung around until just after midnight, when there was nobody left but sloppy drunks and the costume freaks. I partied some with the band. Then I got home, I don’t know, I told the police it was one o’clock, but it was probably more like two-thirty. And I went straight to sleep. Passed out, to be honest. I didn’t even see Monique.

  “I got up yesterday and did a little studying. I noticed Monique’s door was open just a crack. And she’s usually an early riser, you know how energetic she is...” A sob caught in her throat as she tensed to change tense. “...was, I mean.”

  I patted her knee. Loverboy let my hand linger for a moment. Mister Milktoast wanted to know which story she’d told the cops, which lie we’d use. Bookworm assured him that just because the Bone House was a den of prevarication didn’t mean the outer world had a foundation of fabrication. Whatever that meant.

  The screen door squeaked and Xandria stepped out. She carried a cup of herbal tea. Steam wisped around her dark face. Her eyes were cold and faraway, artist’s eyes that saw too well. She put the tea in Beth’s hands and reached a protective arm around her shoulder. I smelled raspberry and lemon and uncomfortable silence.

  I stood up and nodded to Xandria. Beth looked up at her with a grateful expression. “I was just telling Richard...”

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Xandria answered.

  “I know, but...Richard understands.”

  You damn straight, bitch. Been there, done that. If anybody knows how to deal with personal tragedy, it’s Richard Fucking Coldiron, ma’am.

  Xandria glared at me for a moment as Little Hitler smirked inside my pupils.

  “Fine. But if you need anything, you just holler,” she said. She tugged at the strap of her coveralls and went inside. I sat in the chair next to Beth’s.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, just rocked gently and sipped her tea. She looked out across the town below. She continued, softly, her words as light as the wind that was stirring the leaves across the broken sidewalk.

  “I called out her name. I figured she’d probably gotten up early or something, maybe went out for a walk. So I put on a CD and read a little bit. Later, when I walked past the hall, I saw something on the floor in her room, something pale.”

  She looked up at the top of the oak tree, staring as if watching the memory on a movie screen. Her fingers gripped the metal chair arm. Mister Milktoast cupped his palm over her closest hand.

  “If it hurts to talk about...,” he said.

  ...then talk about it, bitch. Because I need your fucking pain. I need you to whimper and leak your pathetic little human juices of sorrow. I need you to make Richard feel the guilt. Give me some emotional content the reader can identify with.

  She pushed away, sensing my mood change. “No, Richard, I’m dealing,” she said. “We were roommates for four years. You get really close to somebody after four years.”

  NOW you pretend to care. NOW you act like you give a goddamn about anybody but yourself. But tell me more. I’m just BEGINNING to rub Richard’s face in his own shit.

  “What did you see on the floor, Beth?” I had to know. It had to hear her say it.

  Her voice was flat, disbelieving. “I...went to the door and peeked at the thing on the floor. It was a white carnation.”

  “A carnation?”

  “Yes. Like the one...”

  “Like the one I was wearing with my costume. The one you gave me.”

  She nodded. “I was confused, Richard. I thought you might have dropped it when you came over earlier. I pushed open the door to pick it up, and then I...I saw...”

  And don’t you ever forget it. Slut.

  “You saw her,” Little Hitler said, his glee moderated by Bookworm’s anxiety over this potential piece of evidence.

  Beth broke down, wept dry tears and dropped her head. Loverboy reached out and cupped her chin. The gushing of emotions aroused him, custard in a cruller. There are certain times when erections are incredibly inconvenient—weddings and funerals among them. When you comfort a broken woman, an intimacy develops that healthy and sane men channel in an unselfish, platonic manner. Maybe that’s why Alpha male psychos get all the pussy while sensitive guys beat off to frilly fantasies of romance.

  Beth recovered and sipped her tea.

  “I loved her,” Beth said. “You know I don’t like to use that L word. But she was like a sister to me.”

  “I do understand,” Loverboy said. “I’ve lost loved ones to violence myself.”

  Beth’s head jerked toward me. “You?”

  “My father,” Little Hitler said with too much pride. “He was beating my mother, you know how people do when they think they’re in love. She must have snapped or something. She. . .”

  Mister Milktoast somehow summoned some crocodile tears. Little Hitler was bursting with mirth in the back of my brain. Beth slid to the edge of her chair and put her other hand over Loverboy’s.

  “. . .she went into the kitchen and got a knife. Stabbed him seventeen times as I watched. I was fourteen.”

  Beth’s mouth opened in a silent O. “Richard, I didn’t know...”

  If only I could have fought to the surface, reclaimed my body for one miserable heartbeat, I might have kept her from digging into the past. But the wound was gaping, the blood was flowing now, and she was drinking. She had broken me. She had won.

  No, Richard. I’VE won. It was always me.

  “I’m sorry, Richard. Don’t cry,” she said, barely able to disguise the pleasure in her voice.

  Loverboy let a long tear trickle down his cheek. He was laughing on the inside. Most of them were.

  “Tell me, Beth. Is insanity contagious?” Little Hitler said. “Because sometimes I wonder...that carnation...”

  “What? No, you must have dropped it at the party. And Monique must have picked it up, that’s all.”

  Didn’t she see? Or was the Insider preventing her from seeing?

  Of course I am, Richard. The party’s just getting started. I’m going to waltz your mannequin across the dance floor of hell like the puppet hand of hot peppers is up your ass.

  Bookworm whispered something about the Insider needing some help with its metaphors, but nobody was listening.

  “Did you tell the police about the carnation?” Mister Milktoast asked.

  “Why should I?”

  Of course she didn’t, for the same reason that the police hadn’t contacted me. It should have been a simple matter for Frye to connect Shelley and Monique and come up with a common denominator. The pieces weren’t in place yet, the plot threads hadn’t been woven into a tight enough fabric. The Insider needed a few more chapters.

  Beth took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red and shiny, but buried inside her pupils was a spark, a strange light, a distant hope of dawn.

  “Let’s not talk about Monique anymore,” she said. “I want to talk about you. Your poor father. That must have really torn you up.”

  I wanted to tell her that the world couldn’t build such miseries as ours, that gods couldn’t create such madness, that people couldn’t be this cruel and shallow and heartless. But I was vulnerable. After so much rejection, here was someone who pretended to care, who wanted to hear my story.

  “I’d better begin at the beginning,” I said.

  THIS CHAPTER DOESN’T HAVE A NUMBER, EITHER

  What a clever bastard.

  You know Richard is guilty. You will never let him forget.

  And you eat our pain. You carve up our psyche the way you did Shelley and Monique, then feed Richard the pieces of the memory. You force his mouth open. He eats his own sins until he vomits, then he eats his own vomit.
Is that your trap?

  Because the more Richard hates himself, the stronger you are. The more we despise you, the more we serve you. The greater our pain, the greater your hunger.

  You have tasted. And now you want more. But not Beth. You’ll never have her.

  I love her, however I can and whatever that means.

  Did you come with Little Hitler? Or are you Little Hitler, a mask over a mask?

  Did you raise the blade against Father? Or were you Father? Was that your opening gambit, your narrative hook, the crack through which you slid into Richard’s mind? Or did you come later, like a grave robber to freshly turned dirt?

  You say you came to him through Virginia.

  Oh, I felt that twitch. You know where it bleeds. But I know where you feed. And I’m starting to figure you out.

  And understand one thing, you sorry son of a bitch.

  You can make Richard loathe himself. You can shove his face in the past. You can make him kill. You can make him hate.

  But you can’t make me not love.

  Because love is hope, and love is poison to you.

  You are what you eat.

  You are what we feed you.

  Bon fucking appetit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  November crawled away on its belly, wriggled like a cold snake into a cave. Winter sent its icy fingers into the granite mountains, clutching and squeezing. The brittle trees froze, either dead or sleeping and dreaming of green. The daytime sky shivered in its blue blanket and the nights were as black as the bottom of my heart.

  The police had no leads in Monique’s murder. Mister Milktoast followed the media coverage with great interest. My fingerprints must have been all over the crime scene. I didn’t doubt that the Insider could extend its reach to the lab technicians. And Frye surely would have solved the case by now if not for infernal intervention.

  The rejection slips rolled in, except now they were no longer addressed to me. They began, “Dear Mr. Zweicker, we regret to inform you...”

  Even more disturbing than the name change was that my cleverly original title, “As I Die Lying,” had been altered, first to “The Dying Light,” and then simply “The Insider.” Because the agents never returned my manuscript, I never knew which work they were considering, nor did I have a clue how to improve it.

  Bookworm wept in his upstairs room of the Bone House. He alone could describe what was happening, but he stuck to penning illegible entries in his diary, leaving me alone to stare at the typewriter.

  Little Hitler was jubilant. This was his deepest perversion brought to full, red, screaming life. This was nightmare made reality, murder made holy, hellhounds unchained. He savored the giblets of memory, and the best was yet to come.

  Mister Milktoast was wary but content. As the protector, he thought his job accomplished because I was safely tucked away in the Bone House. He spent his time preening around in Beth’s brown hat and Shelley’s stockings.

  Loverboy had no complaints. He was banging Beth almost every night, inventing new sex manuals, kama sutra as postmodern surrealism or maybe one of those endless fantasy fiction series where the author’s publisher keeps squirting sour milk from the cash cow long after the author is dead. Except sex is better.

  Beth had moved back into her apartment, though she refused to rent out Monique’s room and had to stretch her budget to cover the bills by herself. She dropped Ted and her other satellite lovers, her native nymphomania having met its match.

  On one horribly memorable night, Loverboy coaxed her into Monique’s room. Monique’s parents had cleared out her paintings and clothes and books, the only pieces left of their daughter now that the other pieces had been laid into the ground. The room was bare except for the desk, the chipped bedside table, and the unmade bed.

  There was a large brown stain on the mattress even though it had been turned over after the investigation. The stain was like a Rorschach test where crazy people are supposed to see a splatter pattern of spilled blood but normal people see Schrödinger’s profile or New Zealand or the coffee splotch on the manuscript they are revising.

  Little Hitler sat with Beth on the bed and made her talk about Monique, how lovely she was, how vivacious, how much she meant to Beth. Then he steered the conversation back to my past, or at least the new spin on the story of Father’s death. History is always written by the winners in the blood of the losers.

  The Insider twisted its trident in my guts as Beth tried to comfort Little Hitler. Of course, it ended with Loverboy between her legs on the same mattress where her roommate had been mutilated. The Insider howled with glee. Loverboy simply howled, not caring whether she was faking or not.

  I went through the motions at the Paper Paradise. We were busy because of the coming Christmas season, and Bookworm stayed dutifully occupied with stocking and reorders. Miss Billingsly commented on my absentmindedness. I wanted to tell her that my mind wasn’t absent, it was painfully present, sharper than ever, sharper than Mister Milktoast’s wit and the Insider’s knives. But Bookworm only nodded and smiled at her, mumbled something about the hectic schedule, and got back to work. Arlie spun his conspiracy theories and Little Hitler egged him on. Brittany teased me about Beth, and Loverboy cornered her in the storeroom once in a while to flirt with her, even while Beth’s feminine scent bathed his chin.

  Beth drew closer and closer, quick to share herself now that she thought I had opened up to her. Alpha male psychos got all the pussy but sensitive guys got to do the laundry and wash dishes. We settled into a routine. Waking in each other’s arms, then off to work and school, meeting for lunch at my house, evenings at Beth’s apartment, Loverboy’s bakery cooking around the clock. Weekend afternoons at the park, bundled in our coats because the grass was crisp and we could see our breath. Sometimes stopping by a gallery or driving out of town for a show or hiking the muddy mountain trails.

  It was all so easy, so natural, almost too natural. I didn’t think people could change, but Beth had. She was relaxed around me, telling me she loved me, always planning mutual activities. We swapped spare door keys. She spent most of the days at my place, even when I wasn’t there, but she never rang the doorbell of the Bone House.

  I came to know Beth better than I knew myself. Our relationship was everything I had ever wanted back in my old, human life. She was becoming part of me, but that was the most frightening thing of all. I already had too many parts.

  I saw Alexandria downtown once, and she told me she’d never seen Beth so happy. She said she was unsure of me at first, but I had earned her “stamp of approval.” Maybe Alexandria was Beth’s version of Mister Milktoast, a distant protector who saw only what she chose to see. Or what she was allowed to see.

  Beth kept busy with her schoolwork, focusing on the future instead of the past. Bit by bit, Little Hitler unfolded a false biography of my life. He told her about Virginia, how she had broken my heart after saying she loved me. He told her Father was a sweet, loving man who occasionally lost his temper but would have moved the moon if I had asked. In my new life history, he became the saint and Mother the sinner. According to Little Hitler, Father wore Hush Puppies.

  On the day of the first light snow, in late November, Beth whispered that she had something to give me. We were sitting on the couch at her apartment, watching a rerun of “The X-Files.” I looked out the window as she slipped into her room. It was one of those merciful moments when the Insider was letting me out, letting me live so that I could fully appreciate what it was taking away. Just an ordinary day in the life of a possessed serial killer. An early darkness had fallen with the snow, crept down a flake at a time until the world outside was black and white.

  Beth returned to the living room with one hand behind her back. She snuggled into my shoulder and I put my face into her hair that always smelled of April or Dawn, one of those time names for women, or maybe Virginia or Dakota, one of those place names, or maybe Hope Hill, a character invented for this book who was actually a r
eal girl I’d sat behind in the sixth grade and secretly loved. I nuzzled Beth’s neck, but stopped when I felt Loverboy stirring. Those damned inconvenient erections, always popping up when least expected.

  “What’s the big surprise?” I asked.

  “I’ve got lots of surprises,” she said. “This is only the latest one.”

  “As long as it’s not about babymakers,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “What?”

  “Inside joke,” I said.

  She tapped my temple softly. “You’re supposed to let me in there.”

  Oh, you’ll get your chance. You’re going to be in there soon. Soon and forever, right, Richard?

  “Hey, honey, what about your big secret? Don’t keep me waiting.”

  “Good things are worth waiting for.” She’d worn the line down to a nub, like the eraser on a dyslexic’s pencil. Or licnep.

  “How do I know it’s a good thing?”

  She rubbed her chest against mine. “Isn’t it always a good thing?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  Her lips found mine, quickly, surely, with the ease of experience. She tilted her head back and looked at me through those mysterious half-closed eyes. Her green irises sparkled between dark lashes.

  “I have to ask you something first,” she said.

  “Uh-oh. That can’t be good.”

  “It’s nothing bad. And you can always say ‘no.’”

  “Uh-oh reprise.”

  “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “I bet if I say no, I won’t get the surprise.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can read you like a book.”

  Better than a book. I can turn the pages. I can rewrite the story. I can change the ending.

  “Okay, Richard. I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them since...”