That is fucked up, said one of the men.
Cross needs to stop smoking crack before he goes to bed, said another. I couldn’t tell them apart; they all looked the same.
I’m telling you guys, Brandon went, it’s those damn powdered eggs. You eat those things and they mess you up all day.
Let’s go kick some ass.
Yeah, buddy.
And they headed off along the route that fighter pilots take to get from their locker room—do fighter pilots have a locker room, my loosening mind wondered, or do they just get dressed at their bunks—to the flight deck. Where they would climb into their steel birds and wait for the steam-powered slingshot to catapult them into the sky.
I thought about Brandon flying a plane. I hoped he found a way to do that tonight; the thought calmed me, made me feel good; so good, in fact, that when a less calming, less feel-good thought tried to surface, I was able to force it back down below the waterline. I never even knew what it was. Instead, I thought about Brandon, I thought about missile-laden fighter planes climbing towards the sun, and I fell asleep.
31.
“The Bald Man raping your wife again,” Dr. Koenig said. “This is beginning to sound familiar.”
I snorted. “Tell me about it.”
Southern Rifleman—the cover, anyway—had disintegrated into almost nothing. On my way back from court the other day, I had swung by Office Depot on
Church Street and picked up a clear plastic cover into which I inserted the magazine. There beneath the translucent plastic film, it looked like a museum artifact. “Have you discussed her coming to see me?”
“She doesn’t want to,” I said. “Guess you’re stuck with boring old me.”
I chuckled, but he didn’t. Instead, he pursed his lips and made another notation on his notepad. Patient uses humor to deflect unpleasant questions. Remember to check insurance coverage.
“What did she say about the dream this time?”
I told him. When I finished, he frowned at me.
“Did you tell her about the pool table?”
“Pardon?”
“You said, ‘you were getting raped again. All I could do was watch.’”
“Yeah.”
“When did you tell her it was happening in the basement? When did you ever say anything about the pool table?”
I blinked. For a moment, I couldn’t speak; my lips froze as my brain flipped through its Rolodex of memories until it found the card corresponding to the night before. I pulled it out. I read everything on it.
I hadn’t said anything about the pool table. Or the basement.
“I’ve had the dream a lot,” I said. “Not just last night. Like, a lot. So I’m pretty sure that even if I didn’t say my dream took place in the basement last night, I probably said it another time.”
“Because it does take place in the basement,” Dr. Koenig said.
“Yes. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep psychological meaning there.”
“Are you.”
I nodded. The one drawback about the plastic cover was that it made rolling the magazine into a tube more difficult. Static electricity made the plastic want to bind to itself and resist my rolling efforts. Maybe I could find a less clingy cover next time I went to the store.
“The basement is mine,” I said. “The rest of the house belongs to Allie, but the basement is my man-cave. Big TV, old furniture that doesn’t match, a custom bar and a pool table. Basketball posters. It’s mine. If you really want to hurt a man, plugging his wife’s a great way to do it. But it’s even better to bend her over his pool table and make him watch.”
“The man-cave is yours,” he noted. “And so is Allie.”
I looked at him. He looked back at me expressionlessly.
“That part of her is,” I said. “She’s never been with any other man. Just me.”
He wrote. I always felt a little defensive when he did that; he could have been writing something positive or something innocuous, but I always felt the scratching of pen on paper to be a criticism of whatever I’d just said.
“And I’ve never been with any other woman other than her,” I added. “We met when we were 18. We belong to each other in that way. That’s not a bad thing.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“I’m not some possessive psycho just because I like the fact that no other guy has ever had sex with my wife. I think it’s perfectly fine.”
“It is.”
“So what did you just write down?”
He looked up. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Because I feel like a lab rat in here. Like you’re making these observations, these judgments, about everything I say and you’re writing them down. So I’d like to know what you’re writing. I’d like to see your notes.”
“No.”
“You’d better keep an eye on your briefcase,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I will.”
“It’s all good. I probably don’t want to know what you really think of me, anyway.” I chuckled again and stood up to stretch. On my feet now, I couldn’t resist walking over to the big picture window and looking out at the stone bench in the courtyard. It hadn’t snowed yet—we might get some flurries at the end of January, maybe an inch or two before spring began yawning and stretching—but it looked cold out there anyway. The gray sky matched the bench. “You must think I’m something of a monster. On some level, at least.”
“Why would I think that?”
“I’m like that bench out there. Cold. Hard.”
“You’re a hard son of a bitch,” he said.
I nodded. I wasn’t looking at him, but I could feel him looking at me. “When I shot Pinnix and Ramseur, I didn’t give one cheek of a rat’s ass. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve never killed any people. I’ve only killed golems. Conjured from plain earth.”
He didn’t write that down. I was pretty sure he already had it in another pad. Instead of writing, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he’d rubbed all the sleep out of them, or whatever he wanted to get rid of, he left them closed. At first, it looked like he was thinking about something very deeply, a subject so difficult that his brain couldn’t process visual stimuli and this other concept at the same time. Then I began to suspect he was just tired and falling asleep.
“Doc?” I asked.
“The Bald Man,” he said.
“The Bald Man.”
His eyes opened and on went his glasses. He filled his narrow chest with a deep breath—a ki breath—and released it in a long, slow exhalation.
“I’d like to talk about the Bald Man,” he said, “in detail. If you don’t mind.”
I sat down on the couch. I reached down to that nasty coffee table and grabbed my plastic-encased Southern Rifleman. “Sure. Let’s talk.”
“In these dreams where he’s…assaulting Allie.”
An image: smooth skin, made for the touch of my hands only, rippling from the violent impact of his hips against the backs of her legs, her buttocks. That slapping sound.
My stomach knotted. I shuddered.
“Standing isn’t what I’d call it,” I muttered. “If all he does in my dreams from now on is stand, I’ll be a happy man.”
“But he’s behind her.”
“That’s how he likes it.”
Dr. Koenig stared at me.
“In my nightmares, I mean,” I said quickly. “She’s always turned around—I can’t ever see her face. He can’t see her face. Must be how he likes it, because that’s how he always does it.”
“You can’t see her face,” Dr. Koenig said. “But can you see his face?”
I swallowed and shook my head.
“No. In these dreams, I never see the…beginning. How Allie’s pants come off, how his come off. It’s always in the middle of things.”
He appeared to ponder this for several moments, and as he did, I pondered along with him. My mind wandered, and when it did, it wandered ba
ck to 1989 and an afternoon spent with Kate and Bobby. A palm reading from a cut-rate fortune teller who plied her trade in an old camper.
Don’t get married. Live alone always.
I spoke up.
“There’s a lot that bothers me about these dreams,” I said. “For obvious reasons.”
Dr. Koenig looked up.
I wet my lips with the tip of my tongue and pressed them together. I had to breathe through my nose when I did this, and so it didn’t last long. I felt a sinus infection coming on.
“But one thing that has occurred to me,” I continued, “is that there’s definitely something…supernatural about all this.”
If he agreed, he gave me no indication.
“These dreams,” I went on, “could be the product of an overstressed mind—Allie thinks it’s my brain training itself on what to do if something like that ever happens—but it could be something else, too. If we accept the postulate that this isn’t a memory…could it be a premonition?”
I leaned forward.
“Could the Bald Man be showing me what he’s working up to?”
32.
Dr. Koenig didn’t act very interested in my premonition idea. For the remainder of our session, he grilled me on what the Bald Man looked like and what he’d been wearing in my dream. Not much information, because he’d been naked from the waist down. And I saw only the back of his head.
My therapist didn’t think much of the idea, but I did. That evening, I called Bobby.
“That’s some crazy-ass shit,” he said, when I’d told him everything. “Hell, maybe you do need to keep seeing this shrink. Maybe he can get you on medication.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“A demon-man making people out of clay and sending them after you? And now you’re psychic?”
“Okay, maybe ‘premonition’ is a bad term. ‘Vision’ works better. Psychics have their own visions. These aren’t mine. They’re his.”
“He’s beaming them into your brain.”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said, “yes.”
“Make a hat out of aluminum foil,” he replied. “That can help.”
“Come on! I’m being serious here!”
“So am I. Kevin, man…”
He trailed off into a sigh.
“Listen to yourself, okay? Go home, get some sleep, and in the morning, go out on your porch and look at the sun and ask yourself if what you’re saying right now still makes a lick of sense. Demons, clay people, visions…it’s too much, man. I can’t dig that.
Papers and file folders lay scattered all over my desk. My law license, my sundry diplomas, hanging on my walls. Mail I hadn’t opened even though Kristin had brought it in shortly after lunch; a large manila envelope that looked like it probably contained interrogatories and document production requests—an invitation to more eyestrain and late nights. My office, my world. My reality.
I looked at my stack of mail. The manila envelope drew my eyes. The edges, I realized; the edges were too crisp. It didn’t look like it had made a run through the Burlington post office.
“Go home,” Bobby said. “You’ve been working too much. Go home, drink a beer. Drink three beers; hell, drink a case. Just get some sleep and get off this shit. And the next time you see this shrink, get a prescription. Okay?”
What had I thought? That he would agree with me? That he would say yes, Kevin, there’s a very evil man—a demon, actually—making dudes out of clay and sending them out to fuck with you. Let’s have a logical discussion about how to deal with that very real problem, because I think it’s completely plausible.
Right.
“Sure,” I said with a sigh as I reached for my mail.
“I’m hanging up now. Bye, man.”
“Bye.”
The connection broken, my phone returned to sleep. I laid it down on the desk and pulled the stack of mail closer to me. I went straight for the manila envelope.
No return address. The sender had addressed it to Kevin Swanson, Esquire, right here at the office. Our street address, not our post office box; it shouldn’t have arrived, because we had no mail receptacle at the building. But here it was.
I opened it. I removed its contents.
I dropped them.
“Motherfucker,” I whispered.
33.
Craig Montero didn’t answer his phone when I called him from the office, nor did he answer when I called from my cell. I had to wait until the next morning, when I corralled him in the parking lot at Carwood, Allison, with the manila envelope in one hand and my phone in the other.
“Hey, asshole,” I said. “I called you last night.”
“I saw it. I was busy.”
“Did you listen to any of your messages?”
“I had an Elon grad student in the shower with me. Do you think checking my voice mail was a priority last night? Single men have to work for their poontang, punk.”
I waved the envelope at him. “You need to see this.”
He reached for it, but I pulled it away.
“Not here. In your office. We need a computer.”
Fortunately, we’d both arrived early enough to where the staff remained sluggish, so nobody assaulted us with messages or questions or reminders or any of the little nuggets of pure joy that made mornings so much fun. We proceeded to Craig’s office and shut the door. I handed him the envelope as he lowered himself into his chair.
“I found this in my inbox last night.”
“Who’s it from?”
“That dickhead that called the radio station.”
He opened the flap and pulled out the sheaf of papers. “This is your Facebook page,” he said.
“Pieces of it,” I said.
“It’s all your photos.”
“Not all. Just the ones of Allie and Abby. Nobody else.”
He continued flipping, then returned to the beginning and flipped again.
“That’s a threat,” I said. “That motherfucker is threatening my family.”
He reached the last photo—Allie, Abby and I at Mellow Mushroom for Abby’s twelfth birthday dinner. He pointed to something typewritten on the bottom. “Did you see this? Says, ‘For a preview, go to www.doithard.com.’ Did you check that out?”
He spun around in his chair to face his computer and reached for the mouse.
“I did,” I said. “It’s a porn site. Bondage. S&M.”
He clicked the mouse and entered the website into the address bar. His computer took its time, as if it didn’t approve of where he had sent it and found the material highly distasteful. But then the pictures popped up.
“Whoa!”
“Yeah.”
“This is some sick shit!”
“He calls it a preview,” I said. I had folded my hands across my stomach, wanting to look calm, but I didn’t feel calm at all. “I didn’t sleep last night. I sat on the bottom step in my foyer with my AK-47 and waited for the son of a bitch to try to get in. Or send somebody after me.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“They don’t give a rat’s ass about little crap like this. And how are they going to find him? I give them dead bodies and they can’t even get them identified!”
“We need to report this,” Craig said. “This is a threat, Kevin. This guy’s basically saying he’s going to come over and…do this stuff.”
I covered my face with my hands and shook my head.
“How long has it been since you’ve gotten any sleep?” He asked me.
“Night before last,” I said. “I got a little then. A few hours in the past forty-eight. Kind of hard to get any meaningful shut-eye when you have to deal with things like this.”
“I’ll call my people with Burlington and the Sheriff’s Department. They’ll take care of this thing.”
Would they? I wanted to believe that, but I wondered how the criminal justice system would tackle a perpetrator who created his own accomplices out of dirt and twigs. A perp who made. I
wanted to tell Craig that I hadn’t called the police because this wasn’t a police issue anymore. It had escalated.
“You have court this morning?”
“Some pissant motions over in Civil.”
“I’ll continue them for you. Go home and go to bed. You need to sleep or you’re going to collapse.”
I dropped my hands from my face. The flesh beneath my eyes felt impossibly heavy right then, like my fingers were pulling all my features down towards my chin.
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“Sure,” he said.
“You still keep that gun in your desk?”
I swallowed.
“I think Allie might need it.”
34.
The Bald Man didn’t want Allie and Abby. I had thought that before, but the more I pondered it the more convinced I became of it. I spent most of my time away from home; if he wanted to rape and murder my family, going after them when I wasn’t around—which was most of the time—made the most sense. It required only a well-placed visit to my house at four in the afternoon, with Abby doing her homework and Allie doing...whatever Allie did with her time at four in the afternoon. They didn’t constitute hard targets.
But he hadn’t done that. He’d thrown four golems at me after Pinnix and Ramseur, but he hadn’t thrown anything at them. Because, ultimately, they didn’t really have anything to do with this. This all centered around me. He wanted to show me I wasn’t a hero, put me in my place. Show me that he stood above me, that he could do anything he wanted and the Hero of the Month couldn’t stop him. Show me that I was a bitch.
Hurting Allie and Abby would only serve his purposes with me there to watch. I saw this as clearly as I saw the restaurants and offices and shops of West Burlington flitting past my window as I made my way back to the interstate. He would hurt them, but only in front of me. And he would do it in such a way that I would later blame myself; there would be some aspect of the assault that I could have prevented but failed to do so. I understood this, and I also understood the next logical progression: remaining around me put both Allie and Abby in serious danger.
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