It was all that uppity one’s fault, the chief of police’s daughter. She was such a goody-goody, and Ricky hated that. All day she had been judging him, thinking she was better than him, better than everyone. That alone had been bad enough.
But what had really done it, what had really put the pin in the party pig, had been what had happened outside the liquor store. That had killed the mood… and, in the process, his chances of getting laid. That numb cunt. Who did she think she was? He couldn’t believe she’d screamed at him that way, and in public. What had she called him? A psycho? What the hell did that even mean? He was only goofing around. He wasn’t actually going to run anyone over; he had only wanted to get a laugh. It was funny, wasn’t it?
The icy internal voice, sharp and rusty like an old, trusty straight razor, spoke in his head: But you did want to hit them. You wanted to feel their bones crunch under your tires, hear their screams mix with the sound of the engine, then be overrun by it. Hear their love die. That’s good. That’s very good, Ricky. You didn’t kill them, but you could’ve. It was your decision. You are the judge of who lives and who dies.
The dark thing was in his head again. He was thinking about taking life. Killing. It’d been on his mind a lot lately, but he’d been trying not to look at it. Sometimes he took a peek, though. For a while—since the first one—he’d had the beast on a leash pretty well. But like most wild things, it wouldn’t stay caged forever. And like most wild things, sometimes it escaped and fed.
He had killed before. Only once. Well only one human, anyway. There had been dozens of animals. The stray cats and dogs. Birds and squirrels he plucked off the tree with his pellet gun behind his house. And of course, the experiments he did out in the woods in that old pump shed.
The girl was six years ago, three weeks after his twelfth birthday. And to say he hadn’t been planning to kill her might’ve been inaccurate. He hadn’t planned to any more than a wolf plans to kill a rabbit, but if one crosses its path, nature takes over. Nature always took over. So, no, Ricky hadn’t planned to, but he had felt that it would happen in an undefinable way. The feeling was not something he quite understood. It was just there, like a black hunk of lead in his chest. Always heavy. Always there.
The day he became a murderer, Ricky had been down at Silver Bridge, burning ants with a magnifying glass he had stolen from Tedford’s Hardware. It was a hot Saturday afternoon. He had spied a real busy colony of carpenter ants and was going to town on them, frying the little buggers as fast as he could catch them. Usually he had to stun them first with a firm press of his thumb to get them to stay still long enough for him to bring the white dot of death into focus over their little black bodies and set them alight. They would start to smoke almost immediately. He had liked the smell. It had been sweet but a little bitter, too.
He was midway through what must’ve been his twentieth execution when a shadow fell over him and darkened the anthill.
He looked up, squinting. “Hey, what gives? Move it. You’re in my light.”
He couldn’t see who it was at first. His eyes were throwing spots from staring at the focused light of the magnifying glass. He could only make out a small silhouette standing in front of him.
“Whatcha doing?” a girl’s voice asked. There was something unsettlingly tough in the girl’s tone. The silhouette squatted down.
Ricky shielded his eyes to get a better look. He recognized the girl, had seen her around town on occasion, but he didn’t know who she was. She had dark shoulder-length hair that was done into ponytails. Around her neck was a thin silver chain with a small letter M hanging from it. She was wearing denim overalls and, underneath, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up past the elbows. The shirt was dingy with dirt. She was dingy with dirt.
“I’m makin em pay, that’s what.” He blinked hard, trying to clear away the spots floating across his vision.
“Makin em pay?” the girl asked, confused. “For what?”
“I don’t know,” Ricky said. “Them being there and me being here, I guess. That’s good enough, isn’t it?”
“Oh,” the girl said, and picked up a small twig beside her and started flicking through the charred remains of the insects.
Ricky could tell she didn’t understand. No one understood.
“Can I try one?” she asked.
“No, get lost,” he said, feeling like his world was being invaded. He liked to do this kind of thing alone because the sensation it drummed up in him was one that made him feel a little funny in places that made him uncomfortable. “This isn’t for little bitch brats, now beat it… or else.”
The girl dropped the stick on the anthill and stood abruptly, hands on her hips. “Hey! You shouldn’t talk like that, or I’ll tell on you.”
Ricky regarded her. She must’ve been a year or two younger than him.
He stood. “Now wait a second. I didn’t mean it.” He reached out, grabbing the girl’s arm. Hard. It was thin, and he knew he could snap it if he wanted. And he did want to.
“Ow, you’re hurting me, let go!” the girl yelled, flapping her arm up and down like a wet rope as she tried to pull away.
Ricky let go, grinning. “Relax, would ya? You wanna try one? I take back what I said. Here.” He held out the magnifying glass to the girl. She was rubbing her arm, looking at him untrustingly. “I’m serious. Take it.” He wiggled the lens like a piece of bait, which, of course, it was.
After a moment, the girl’s face warmed, and her forehead ironed out, the toughness returning. “Let me see it,” she said, and took it.
She squatted back down to where the ants were hustling and bustling around their flattened anthill.
“The trick is, you gotta stun em first,” Ricky said, watching the girl. His stomach was fluttering with excitement. “Find one, then press your finger down on it. That makes it easier to keep em from moving.”
“Uh-huh, I can do it,” the girl said dismissively. She was already fixated on the anthill, trying unsuccessfully to chase the insects around with a poorly focused point of light.
Ricky stood over her, continuing to watch. She looked so small. So weak. So his.
Them being there and me being here, he thought. And following that came the first time he ever heard the sharp, cold internal voice that sounded a little like his own, but also different: She threatened you, Ricky. She’s gonna tell everyone you hit a girl and were down here killing ants all alone and playing with your little wee-wee. She’ll tell everyone your secret. She’ll tell everyone what you are, and then they’ll know. And we can’t have that. No we cannot.
The voice should’ve startled him, but it didn’t. It was like receiving a phone call from an old friend he’d been waiting to hear from for a very long time. He didn’t know what was about to happen. But some part of him inside—the dark thing—was pulling the strings now, moving for him. And it felt good.
His eyes scanned the ground. He spotted what he needed sitting beside the metal drainpipe behind him.
“I can’t get them to stop running away,” the girl said, frustrated. Her eyes were glued on the ants, her tongue peeking out from the corner of her mouth in a show of determined concentration.
“Keep tryin. You’ll get one,” Ricky said.
He took a slow step backward, dropping down silently and picking up the rock. It was jagged, about the size of a baseball. It fit in his hand perfectly, as if he were meant to hold it.
Then he was standing over her, rock in his hand, watching the girl timidly try to catch the scurrying insects. She was too slow. And he could tell, as tough as she tried to act, she was too scared to touch them. He doubted she would even be able to figure out how to work the magnifying glass properly, if she did catch one.
He looked around. The street was empty. Not a house for a quarter mile in either direction. No kids riding up to take a jump off the bridge and into the Gilchrist River. He spotted the girl’s bike. It was leaning up against a tree at the end of the little parking shoulder
. She must’ve ridden there alone.
The dark thing showed him what to do. Showed him how good it would feel. So he did it, never thinking twice. The wild thing inside sank its teeth in and tasted human flesh for the first time.
Ricky brought the rock down as hard as he could on the back of the girl’s head. The solid clunk! sounded like a small, hard pumpkin crunching. A high squeal popped out of the girl’s mouth but was abruptly cut off as her face landed in the anthill. The insects started to crawl into her hair as she lay there motionless, eyes open and staring. They looked just like his mother’s had when she’d been at the bottom of the stairs after her accident.
Ricky stood over the girl for a moment, the rock still in his hand, watching the blood ooze out of her and mix darkly in the dirt, the ants avoiding the growing spill. He looked down and saw his pants sticking out in the crotch. It felt good. The dark thing inside hadn’t lied to him. It told the truth.
A part of him wanted to drop his pants and do what he’d recently discovered he could do to himself when his penis went stiff that way, but a more instinctive, self-preserving part of him kicked in. He needed to hide the body and get the hell out of there before someone came and saw him standing over a dead girl.
He went to the river’s edge, cocked his arm back, and tossed the rock as far as he could. It splashed into the river fifty feet out.
He went back to the girl, nudging her thigh with his foot. Her body moved limply. “Hey… hey, you… you awake?” He kicked her a few more times with the scuffed toe of his ratty Chuck Taylors.
She didn’t answer.
He bent down, yanked off her silver necklace, and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he picked up the magnifying glass. The handle was covered in the girl’s blood, which he could smell. He threw that in the river, too. It flew through the air like a boomerang, curving on its downward descent, and landed a little farther out than the rock had.
Next, he had to make a decision about the body. There seemed to be two obvious choices: hide her or roll her into the water and let the current take her down the river. His initial gut instinct had been to stuff her in the drainpipe and cover her with brush, but the dark thing had advised against that. The dark thing showed him the way—the river. It might look like an accident that way. Hidden in a drainpipe would rule out any doubt of what had happened. If he dropped her in the water and left her bike leaning against the tree, it might look like she’d come out to the bridge and perhaps fallen over the edge while playing. Probably hit her head on a rock.
He grabbed the girl by the ankles and dragged her to the water’s edge. She was heavier than he’d expected. He rolled her into the river and, with a long branch, pushed her body far enough out to let the current do its job. He stood and watched with black fascination as she disappeared under the bridge. He thought she looked very much like a piece of river trash and nothing more. After a minute or so, he lost sight of her.
Ricky turned and kicked loose, dry dirt over the blood on the ground until it was no longer visible. Then he left and went downtown to enjoy a hot dog and a root beer float at Woolworth’s.
Three days later, the body of eight-year-old Madison Feller was found caught in a fish ladder over in Sawyer Falls. At the coroner’s inquest, her death was ruled an accident.
8
Ricky looked around his father’s garage. His beady, weasel eyes blinked slowly as he turned away from the memory of the Feller girl, trying to quell his rousing friend. He didn’t feel like feeding it tonight. But it was too late. He had thought about it too much, and now the dark thing was taking hold of him. And it was hungry. Usually he could sense when it was going to wake up from its hibernation. He could feel it much in the same way he could feel the air sharpen and become charged with dangerous energy as a powerful summer thunderstorm approached. But not this time.
This time, it had hit him without warning. He wondered if, perhaps, that had been Grace Delancey’s fault, too. Had she rattled the wild thing’s cage? Undone the latch and allowed it to escape? Maybe she’d known about his dark thing and wanted to see it. Maybe she hadn’t even been yelling at him outside Duddy’s Liquors; she’d been yelling at it, trying to coax it out into the light. It had been the dark thing’s idea to scare the old couple on the side of the road, after all.
Well, if that bitch wanted to see his shadowy friend, he would show her. Then she would really have something to scream about. His temples started to thud with red anger. He wanted to hurt Grace Delancey more than he had ever wanted to hurt anything before.
The voice spoke from the shadows of his mind: We’ll take care of her, show her she isn’t any better than anyone, Ricky. Not tonight, though.
“Okay,” Ricky said flatly to the empty garage.
There was nothing he could do about Grace at the moment. She was, after all, the police chief’s daughter. That would take more consulting with his dark thing to make sure he got it right. But it was still hungry. Tonight, he would have to feed his dark friend some other way. A temporary fix.
He squinted and rubbed his temples. “How?”
I’ll show you.
At first he didn’t know what he was going to do. Then he did. The idea came to him prepackaged, as if he had been thinking about it forever and already had all the details worked out. Sometimes things happened that way, he thought. You don’t know something at all, and then you know it completely. Like how he hadn’t known what he was going to do to Madison Feller six years ago, and then he had known exactly what he would do to her.
Ricky grabbed the chain off the ground and put it in an old milk crate. The chain was a good length and a heavy gauge. It was fitted with clevis slip hooks at both ends. His father’s shop was full of towing equipment like that, so he would never notice anything missing.
Hanging on the beam beside Ricky were two chain binders. He would need those, as well. He put them in the crate with the chain. Then he left the garage and put everything in the backseat of his car. He got in, fired up the engine, and drove away from Osterman Auto and Towing. Turning right at the intersection, he headed in the direction of Waldingfield Road.
Ten minutes later, he was driving the same dusty road he had sped down earlier that evening, when the night ahead had still held the promise of a good time. Before the police chief’s daughter had spoiled everything.
Oh well. This would be a good time, too.
A half mile before the access road that led down to the back side of Big Bath, Ricky stopped. He sat there on the side of the road for a moment, looking at the backs of his hands, listening to the engine rumble. He had never noticed how capable his hands looked before. They could do anything they wanted if he had the will. And he did indeed have the will. Now more than ever.
Hurry, before anyone sees you parked here, the voice said. If someone drives by and spots your car, then we’re shit out of luck, Ricky. This doesn’t work with witnesses.
Ricky stepped out. He grabbed the chain and the binders from the backseat. The chain, he draped over his shoulder, leaving one end to drag in the dirt behind him as he walked to the large oak tree a few feet off the road. He carried the binders, one in each hand, walking stolidly, a vessel with a hardcoded purpose. When he reached the tree, he let everything clatter to the ground with a loud but satisfying sound. The sound of important work.
He picked up one end of the chain and completed a full loop around the base of the tree about a foot and a half off the ground before attaching it to itself with the clevis hook. He took the chain in both hands and yanked it to make sure the hook had a good bite. Then he began walking the chain across the road to the other side. He found another tree a few feet off the road. It grew at the edge of the embankment, which dropped nearly ten feet. He did the same as he had done around the oak.
Heavy under its own weight, the chain sagged across the road. It was stretched at an angle: the second tree he had anchored to wasn’t directly across from the first. Having the chain at an angle would work better, though. The
dark thing confirmed it.
He went back to the oak and grabbed one of the binders off the ground. He slid the hooks onto the chain and laced his fingers over the steel lever arm. He leaned back, dug his heels into the dirt, and pulled down with all his weight, snapping the arm in place against the chain and tightening it stiff.
Ricky picked up the other binder and banged it against the taut chain, testing the tension. It moved slightly, but slightly was too much. He carried the second binder to the other side of the road and repeated the process, until the length stretching between the two trees held so much tension that it could’ve been a solid piece of steel.
He went out onto the road and stood at the chain, admiring his work. It came up to just above his knees. He lifted his leg and rested his foot on it, shifting his weight forward. It didn’t budge.
Ricky lit a cigarette on the way back to his car. He started it, did a U-turn in the middle of the road, then drove slowly up Waldingfield until he spotted a trailhead where he could pull his car in and hide it.
He shut off the engine, got out, and found a few fallen branches to lean against the back of his car. Then he walked the four hundred or so yards back through the woods until he found a good vantage point to watch the action.
Waldingfield wasn’t a busy road by any means, but on a Saturday night, people returning home from a night out in another town used it as a shortcut from Route 2 to downtown Gilchrist. Ricky did it all the time. Mostly, only locals knew about it. A random person driving down the highway wouldn’t even see the road entrance if they didn’t know to look for it.
Ricky was hoping it would be someone from Gilchrist who came along, maybe even someone he knew well. It would be more satisfying that way. He would be able to see the aftereffect it had, the same way he had heard all about how heartbroken everyone was when Madison Feller turned up dead in the river. His favorite part had been how the girl’s father had fallen apart. How he had insisted her death wasn’t an accident and hung those silly fliers on all the telephone poles around town. How no one had believed him. How everyone had said he was just a drunken lunatic. Then—the cherry on top—how the guy’s wife had split on him and left town.
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