“What are you talking about?”
“How come you didn’t tell the police about the carnation?” Bookworm asked.
“I don’t see—”
“Exactly. You don’t see. Love really is blind.”
“But, what does that have to do with Monique’s murder? Or us, for that matter?”
“You’re going to have to trust me, Beth.” The knife was hot and hard in my hand.
Look into her eyes, Richard. See the light. See the love shining so stupidly. All this can be yours, my gift to a faithful servant. Let me into your heart forever and ever amen and you can have all of this and nothing.
“Can you trust me?” I whispered.
She swallowed hard and nodded.
“Then come with me for a ride,” I said.
She squinted. “What about my things? We need to get them moved to your place.”
“There will be time for that later.” I think it was my first lie to her. But damned if I’m going to read back through the entire book just to make sure.
Questions squirmed in her eyes. In that frozen slice of Now, I saw into the bright warm soul that the Insider wanted to consume. Her essence burned like fire, a conflagration that could melt glaciers and torch treetops and singe clouds and roast the gods in their lukewarm heavens like so many scratch biscuits.
Her eyes were windows and doors, opening onto the rooms of her life. Here a terror, there a wish, upstairs some faith. A little girl tucked away in the basement. Closets full of old dreams. A mansion of memories that made her a human being.
While all I had was a bare Bone House.
In that instant, I saw a vision of a possible future. Us under starry skies, our laughter filling a soft forest as we danced on a carpet of leaves. Two souls melting and melding, fused by the white heat of love, lit by the love that was poison to that which propagated darkness. An alliance more binding than those formed by headmates and inner voices, a union more powerful than the grip of an invading psychic overlord. A house built of hope instead of bone.
Perhaps, in some unwritten romance novel, that true and abiding love did flourish. But we were trapped in my ghostwritten autobiography, Poor Richard’s Almanack, where pain and fear were constants, where awareness brought nothing but madness, where all were strangers and none could know another. A story where the only eternal life was found in the miserable heart of the soul-eating Insider, where the believers in mercy and goodness cowered before the boots of dark gods. A fabulist’s construct where love meant having to say you were sorry.
The Insider had taken everything. I couldn’t love, because love was made of tomorrows, not painful yesterdays. Love was laid on a foundation of hope, and hope was only a snowflake on the palm, a pretty bit of flash that was gone before the hand could close around it. Love was fueled by faith, and faith was as flimsy as a gossamer umbrella before a black avalanche.
I had lost.
I stood looking into the eyes of another person who I would never be allowed to know or love.
I had lost. I was lost.
But maybe Beth could be saved.
I opened the door.
“Good things are worth waiting for,” said the Insider. “But bad things want it right now.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Where are we going?” Beth asked after we got in the Subaru.
I started the car. I could feel them fighting, rising, breaking free inside my head. The walls were caving in, the Bone House shaking on its foundation.
And leading them all was the Insider, calling them out like the Pied Piper lulling rats from filthy dark nests.
“Going?” I echoed. “I thought we’d just drive around in the snow for awhile. Maybe go hiking in the woods.”
“It must be about fifteen degrees outside. Are you crazy?”
“Crazy? No. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sane,” the Insider said to her. It gave her a look, and I could feel my lips turning up into a crooked sneer. I could feel my eyes heating up, as if they were glaring lethal rays. I could feel the warmth of the Insider’s hate flaming my chest.
I struggled, winced, and tried to beat the Insider down, to flush it back into the darkness.
“You can’t win, Richard. You still don’t know what you’re dealing with, do you?”
“Richard?” Beth’s eyes were as round as silver dollars and she pressed against the passenger-side door. She must have seen the Insider lurking in my pupils.
“It’s time, Richard. You think I didn’t know about Bookworm, plotting and scheming all this time while he pretended to be asleep? You think I don’t know what the Little People are up to?”
“The little people?” Beth echoed, shaking her lovely hair. I wished I could reach and stroke it, to reassure her. But I didn’t think the Insider would ever give my arm back.
I flickered in and out as fire and ice pierced my lungs, needles probed my brain, and broken glass passed through my intestines.
The Insider chuckled. He was a lousy driver. He could guide a meat missile to the heart of a target, but he couldn’t operate a motor vehicle worth a damn. “And just to make things interesting, guess who’s coming around the corner in twenty seconds?”
“Who?” Beth said. “Why are you yelling?”
“Detective Randolph Frye. You see, love and justice are both blind. Until I decide otherwise.”
“That detective? The one who questioned me about Monique’s murder?” Beth asked. She had a hand on the door handle, and I was trying to nod at her to run, run, run and never look back, run until she found a corner of the Earth that was beyond the reach of the Insider. But my head was a Styrofoam block fit for nothing but a wig.
“We don’t mind getting caught,” Bookworm said.
“Richard, your voice changed,” Beth said. “And your eyes... what’s going on? Are you on drugs or something?”
She laid a hand on my arm, their arm, its arm. I felt the distant tingle of her touch, but I was too far gone to return the touch. Why didn’t she run?
“Richard doesn’t need drugs, Angel Baby. He’s got me, the best drug you’ve never seen. And look, here comes our old friend now.”
An aqua Crown Victoria cut around the corner at the end of the block, sliding sideways in the six inches of snow that had fallen.
“Let him come,” Bookworm said. “If we’re caught, that means you’ll be locked up for a while, that’s all.”
Locked up? I’m the gatekeeper, Bookworm. I decide which doors are open and which are closed. I make the rules here. But you don’t want me to be arrested. All that will do is force me to leave. Who will get the pleasure of being my new host? Will it be Richard’s mother, or...
It ran my fingers down Beth’s soft cheek. Then it gripped her chin hard enough to leave red marks. The Insider twisted her head to face me, measuring the light of her love, the juiciness of her fear, the depth of her guilt.
Oh, yes, and baby makes three.
Maybe I’ll just go straight for the little guy, saddle him up for a good long piggyback ride, make him just like his father.
After all, it would be a shame if the Coldiron Curse died now that there’s potential for a sequel?
That was when they rose, when they all poured out, swarming like pissants over a black beetle. The Little People came out of their rooms, but this time, instead of fighting to see who got to wear the Richard-puppet, they were fighting to suffocate the Insider.
Extreme home makeover with a wrecking ball.
“Rock and roll in a doughnut hole,” Little Hitler said, throwing out his battle cry. I was a satellite orbiting the collapsed star of my own psyche.
Too many things were happening, too much sensory input flooded my brain, too many people were happening. I felt them all, Bookworm, Little Hitler, Loverboy, and Mister Milktoast, wrapping their energy around the Insider, enveloping it in a pocket of confused mist. An ensemble cast upstaging the prima dona and stealing the show.
I was dimly aware of Beth pulling on the
door handle and beating on the window. The Insider wouldn’t let her escape, not when the party was just getting started.
I concentrated and tried to throw off the jagged shackles and razor chains and frozen ropes with which the Insider had bound me. I broke free and fluttered to the surface of my own mind, Houdini in a rabbit’s hat. I threw the Subaru in gear, popped the clutch, and the wheels spun on the ice. The car caught traction just as the Crown Victoria pulled alongside.
I glanced over and saw Frye’s thin startled face, the lit tip of a cigarette jabbed between his clenched teeth. Recognition flashed across the beads of his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized what he was doing in that part of town. As if he had connected the dots between Shelley Birdsong and Monique Rivers and formed a picture of Richard Coldiron. His mouth opened in surprise and the cigarette tumbled down his necktie.
Then I was gone, heading down the snowy street in four-wheel drive. The Insider was busy fighting off the Little People, but it had a little extra for me. It turned corkscrews in my brain, shaved pieces of my arteries away, peeled the hot copper wires of my nerves. It raped me with its brass talons. But the pain was welcome. The pain was good. It meant that I was still alive.
That I still had feelings.
“It’s okay now, Beth,” I said, panting from exertion. “We’re going to make it.”
She was as pale as the snow. She gripped the dashboard as I turned the corner and hit fourth gear. In the rearview mirror, Frye’s car was making a U-turn. The front-wheel-drive cruiser wasn’t made for icy roads, and it slipped and spun on the bed of snow. The front end hopped up as Frye drove onto the submerged curb. I turned the next corner and angled off to the main strip.
I didn’t want Frye to catch me before the psychic battle was over. That would wipe out the element of surprise and give the advantage back to the Insider. Because I had no doubt that the Insider could use and manipulate Frye, just as it was trying to manipulate Beth. Just as it had always manipulated everyone in my life.
“What’s going on, Richard?” Beth gripped the dashboard with both hands as the Subaru hit a slick fifty.
I winced as the Insider belched its acid. It was struggling with the Little People, startled, used to one-on-one combat but not gang warfare. How long had they been planning this? And why were they on my side?
“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “I owe you that much.”
There were only a couple of other cars on the slick highway, a big green boat of a Chevy and another Subaru. I passed them and got behind a yellow Highway Department truck. Rock salt and bits of gravel bounced up from the road bed and peppered the windshield. I saw the Crown Victoria small in the mirror, losing ground but still giving chase. Its blue lights pulsed off the silent buildings that lined both sides of the road.
“Where are we going?” Beth asked again.
“Just going,” I said. I must have looked as mad as I felt, because sweat popped out on my forehead. My eyes bulged in their sockets. My hands were white on the steering wheel. But the real tension was inside, where an ancient, invisible battle was being waged, perhaps one as old as Eve and the serpent, Abel and Cain, God and the nothingstuff He had whipped together to create heavens and Earth.
The Insider said he’d nearly been sucked by Virginia into that gray land of death. So it was beatable, mortal. What had the Insider said? Something about selflessness and purity? Sounded like a maguffin, a clue planted for convenient misuse later on, the lazy out for a hack thriller writer. But I could worry about that in the second draft. Right now, I had to leave Frye behind.
I swerved around the salt truck just as we reached the Paper Paradise. Behind the big windows, the squares of books were arranged behind like a monument to human thought and emotion. There were so many titles Bookworm would never get a chance to read, dead leaves, unwitting classics. So many imaginary friends never met. I said a silent “So long” to all those overlooked chapters and turned the page toward the climax.
I was sluicing along at sixty miles an hour, as fast as I dared on the slick pavement. The snow fell heavily and the sky was almost black. It was as if the Insider was extending itself out over the entire world, trying to enfold and swallow everything, not just the Little People that were pecking at its shadow like crows at roadkill.
“Richard. Slow down. That policeman...you have to tell me.”
Now that it was confession time, I didn’t feel the surge of emotion actors expressed in their crime dramas. Perhaps my writer wasn’t as skilled. Or my show had been canceled in mid-season. The words came out beaten, worn, years weary. “Remember Shelley Birdsong?”
“That girl who went missing?”
“That was me.”
“You, what? She turned up in Los Angeles, reading scripts for a studio. Didn’t you hear?”
My foot reached for the brake but at the finish line you’re compelled to accelerate.
“She was in my basement. I had her tights.”
“Richard, it doesn’t matter who you were with before. I wasn’t a virgin, either, remember?”
I was angry, and this time, it was my anger, not some maudlin bit of melodrama shunted into my life in the interest of plot development. Plus, she’d forgotten that I had lied and told her I was a virgin. “The carnation. Jack the Ripper. It was me, Beth.”
“I don’t understand.”
Of course not. What kind of drugged fog had the Insider put in her head? What kind of sweet insane lullabies was it whispering even now, what siren’s song of decadent rapture? What rule would it break next to cheat the ending?
I swerved off the main highway onto Tater Knob Road. There were no tracks in the smooth white roadbed. The Subaru cut through the virgin snow and I saw Frye’s headlights behind me. He had gained some ground on me back at the interstate.
“I killed Monique, Beth,” I said.
“You couldn’t have.”
“That couldn’t have been Richard.” So the Insider had fought free. But he was weak and wounded. “Nothing’s ever his fault.”
“Richard? Honey?”
“Sooner or later, all we serial killers end up referring to ourselves in third person. It’s a genre convention.”
“Stop it. You’re freaking me out.”
“And it wants me to kill you, too.”
Beth was whiter than ice, her lips parted, her mouth round and black with horror.
We passed a barn that was huddled under the weight of snow. Its open door was a like a black, leering eye. “Glaring balefully,” Mister Milktoast punned from some distant hallway.
I glanced in the rear-view and saw that the Crown Victoria had slid sideways into a ditch. One front wheel was spinning uselessly a foot off the ground. At least Frye would be safe from the Insider’s knife.
“But I won’t let it kill you,” I said to Beth.
“We won’t let it kill you,” Bookworm said.
“There. Your voice just changed again. And what’s all this about killing? You’re freaking me out.”
“It wants to eat the light,” I said. “There’s a psychic spirit in my head that’s millions of years old—”
The Insider cut in like an Alpha male at a beta test for one-liners at closing time. “—and I’m going to fuck you with a knife. I’m going to make you love me, then I’m going to let Richard see his little progeny. I’m going to make Richard hate you, you human bitch.”
Beth wailed, shuddering, sobbing, pounding the window. “That drummer killed Monique. Jimmy whatever. They arrested him three days ago. Have you been drinking? Stop the car.”
I faded in and out, a television set with bad reception. I didn’t want to sleep, not yet. I didn’t want the Insider to walk or float or swap skins. Not yet, not yet.
I drove along a ridge, and below me the land sloped away, white and steep. A few gnarled apple trees cowered like witches two hundred feet down. One turn of the wheel. Maybe Virginia knew something I didn’t.
“Not a chance, Richard,” the Insider said
.
And it was too late, we were on a level stretch of land now that I recognized even in the storm. It was Arlie’s farm. His warped log cabin looked down on the road from the side of the hill. The road was giving out. The Subaru leapfrogged into a frozen meadow and stalled.
“Now, you pretty little can of potted meat. Tell Richard you love him, so we can get this over with.”
I dug in my pocket for the knife. The blade sliced my index finger, but the pain was borrowed and distant. Not my pain. My pain was deeper, darker, more hellish. Because I wasn’t sure where the Insider ended and I began.
I grabbed Beth by the hair and twisted her face toward me. “Look at me!”
The knife curved inches from her nose.
She saw the Insider in my eyes. Realization crossed her face and fear tightened her jaw. The Insider had taken away the veil, dropped the rubber mask, rubbed off the ham fat and come out for a bow. She saw me as I was, a haunted murderer. A murderer who had planted a child in her womb. A murderer who wanted to dig it back up.
Love was no longer blind. She saw the real Richard Allen Coldiron. Her sperm donor, her lover, her captor, her killer.
The moment was frozen, an ice sculpture of time:
Stands of silver birch and naked oak watching from the hills.
The sunless sky pressing down like a great gray mitten, closing and suffocating.
White flakes pirouetting in the wind like ashes of long-dead volcanic fires.
My hand tangled in Beth’s amber hair, so soft beneath my cruel grip.
Her heart-shaped face, radiating the light of beauty. Twin eyebrows furrowed into gull’s wings. Underneath the eyebrows, two sea-green eyes, pools, lakes, cosmic oceans, spreading out calm and eternal.
And the eyes saw into mine, saw through the Insider, looked into the mirror-caves of my soul.
We both saw the light.
“She doesn’t love us,” Bookworm said.
Beth gulped, ready to say anything to save her life. “Yes, I do, Richard. Please don’t hurt me.”
“She does,” the Insider taunted. “And you know what happens to the ones who love you? Now get this over with. It’s a long walk home to Mother.”
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 90