Blood Music

by Jessie Prichard Hunter

  They stopped then, just inside the safety of the trees, branches like arms surrounding them. They did not move, and they did not breathe. Ariadne heard a hysterical little intake of breath next to her ear, and Dante’s sweaty fingers squeezed her own.

  Her breath was ragged and loud in her ears, a thunder in her head. But the vague shapes at the bases of the farthest trees had not moved. Dante squeezed her hand again and they disappeared into the forest, a shadow and a shadow’s shadow.

  Far behind, the violins took up a plaintive strain and played it to the sky. Ariadne’s footsteps were louder than the music. Dante ran his hand up inside her blouse as they walked, his fingers were hot and her skin was cool. They were laughing; they could dare now to make noise.

  The web of darkness in front of Ariadne’s eyes was dissolving into moonlight and branches. Dante’s hands were all over her as they walked. There was a dirt trail and, past picnic tables looming like crouching animals, a little path up a steep incline. At the top Dante stopped to bury his head in Ariadne’s hair; she arched her neck and looked up: the full moon smiled back at her. It was light enough, when they moved again, to see a small toad hop up and away, to catch moonlight reflected from the leaves at the corner of her eye. Anticipation of pleasure built between her legs, along the soft down of her arm. Ivy brushed her naked ankles, year-old leaves crunched under her feet, something white shone on the path ahead.

  “Dant—” But his whiplashed arm struck her back; a sapling branch struck her cheek. Dante moved ahead, but before his shadow obscured it Ariadne saw: a white calf, a forlorn foot, dark shorts, an obscene expanse of back, blond hair. One arm stretched out above the head, one supplicant hand. The fingers were stained dark. The moonlit dirt under the head and neck was dark. The clotted moonlight could not reflect on that dark puddle. One staring eye, one reaching hand, one forlorn naked foot. When Ariadne started screaming the policemen at the edge of the forest at first mistook the sound for violins.

  He had wanted to shout his exultation to the moon, to throw back his head and release the animal roar within. He had stood above her bloody body, blood feeding the earth beneath her neck, the little ants already gathering, surely, to wet their feet in the good sticky nourishing flow. He had stood above her, spent, and as always he was grateful. He could hear the orchestra tuning up an eternity away. His breath was too fast and his hands were sticky. He focused his attention on the discordant, exploratory sounds, catgut and the slow sweep of an arm, air forced upward in a sweet exhalation. Until this moment he had been listening to his own music.

  He would have to leave her. She had been given to him, and he had loved her, and now he would leave her to the ants and the forensic experts. Her stillness moved him, caught his groin, but he could not risk having her again. He had to be back before the Schubert began.

  He walked softly through the woods, within sight of the lights of the road and the silent dark presence of the police, until he came to the tennis courts. There was a couple playing a desultory game, with twice-bounced balls and laughter. The policeman stationed there was watching the game: when he materialized on a rise above the courts he was not noticed; he was invisible. Walking across the empty parking lot to the van he was invisible; he took off his bloody uniform and changed into an identical one and stepped out onto warm asphalt, invisible. He washed some of the blood off in the van, with washcloths in a bucket half full of water, and he washed his hands again and slicked back his hair with water at a fountain near the tennis courts. The couple was still playing. A policeman regarded him suspiciously. He smiled and nodded reassuringly and the blind man was reassured.

  Zelly opened her eyes. The Schubert was beginning. The baby had fallen asleep again where she lay on the blanket, with Zelly’s hand on her back. Zelly had fallen asleep herself, the crowd’s seashell murmur around her, the air like a blanket, the stars above her as she lay with one hand on her daughter’s back.

  The bottle of wine on the blanket next to hers was almost empty now; two teenagers lay back looking at the sky, two others were engaged in heated discussion. The old couple on the other side were holding hands. The boys in back of her were quiet: they were not looking for killers anymore. Mary’s tiny hands twitched in her sleep.

  Zelly looked over toward the ice cream truck; the Schubert had started. A liquid, longing fragment of a melody, a prayer to the sky. There was some movement behind the stage, some change of shift of the police guarding the woods, perhaps: a growing knot of blue. She watched as a rivulet of people drained off the crowd, like a rain stream caught in a seam in the sidewalk; it flowed down and around the corner of the stage, toward the woods. Zelly began to sit up to see better when out of the corner of her eye she saw her husband coming toward her smiling through the crowd, in his upheld hands an ice cream sandwich and a Calippo bar.

  36

  There was something—in her dream it had been an insistent image, like a drumbeat. Imperative to remember it. Imperative. Something about that word: imperative. The high, keening cry cut through the image like a blade through cobwebs; the word and the image and the silent undercurrent like a drumbeat, or a heartbeat, were dissolved like cobwebs. The baby was crying. It had been on the shoe and the baby was crying. Zelly got out of bed and went to her with nothing in her mind at all. Two thirty-five. The cries weren’t loud; Pat slept. Zelly’s breasts were full and sore; she thought she had been dreaming something unpleasant on account of her sore breasts. There was milk on the mattress again, soaked through the sheet. Zelly brought the baby into bed and lay her on a towel on the damp sheet. There had been something sticky in her dream, something on her shoe.

  There is no tiredness like the tiredness a mother feels at two o’clock in the morning. It obliterates linear thinking; all her actions are the actions of an automaton: the crooning words, the gentle touch without thought, a ritual undertaken without even resignation. Whatever the mother has been dreaming will continue to possess her consciousness while she suckles her baby; rain will fall in her mind or she will walk down empty streets.

  Zelly lay on her side and looked out the window at the dead light of the street lamp while the baby drank with small, excited snuffling noises. Sometimes there were people up at this hour, spillover from the two bars, one catty-corner across the street and one down the street about a half block.

  Mary quieted a little, her tiny breath slowed: milk. Try not to fall asleep, have to put the baby back in the crib. The little mouth was only a faint pull, the little heart beat next to her own. His shoes had had blood on them. Zelly snapped awake; the street lamp shone like the last street lamp on a deserted Earth. The baby breathed easily in sleep. Ought to put her back in her crib. In her dream his shoes had had blood on them. The shoes in the closet or the shoes he had been wearing Friday night? He had several pairs, black and identical, which stood lined up in the hall closet. Blood on the toes, blood down along the side of the right foot where she could see it on the brake pedal.

  Zelly hadn’t looked at his shoes at all at the concert Friday night. Mary had started crying as the rumor spread, and Zelly couldn’t pretend to be calm either. The agitated murmur of the crowd overcame the Schubert, which although it did not stop seemed to halt and die away. Blue poured in from everywhere, and cordon ropes appeared, and the eager crowd began to swarm toward the woods behind and to the right of the stage. Pat sat, his face rapt toward the musicians, his eyes closed and his ears oblivious to rumor. Zelly craned her neck and almost followed the crowd, but Mary on her lap held her back. Legs and feet flowed around them, to the right and behind the stage. The whispers became louder and more shrill. Zelly was anxious for the baby but she felt a nauseating visceral thrill: there had been a killing. Ted Bundy, the superstar of serial killers, had once taken two young women out of a crowded park in Washington State in one day, one after the other, in broad daylight, in a ruse involving a papier-mâché cast and a trailer and a mythical boat, but there had been no police, however shorthanded, to protect that weeken
d crowd. What evil hand of coincidence had prevailed this night? It could not have happened, but it did. Even Pat was moved to suggest they at least shift their blanket out of the way.

  Zelly would have gone with the curious if she’d been alone. Not to see—someday in a book about the killer there would be a black-and-white picture of the naked back, the matted blond hair. There would be a caption: “Forensic experts examine the remains of—” She wouldn’t have a name until the morning papers. But she rippled through the crowd like a dirty joke, titillating and embarrassing. Some of the women in the crowd were crying, it was true—the same women who had earlier laughed and tossed their hair and taken it as a compliment to be offered up as appropriate for sacrifice.

  The face on the fliers looked out, implacable. Zelly had looked at Pat’s profile against the night sky and known why the boys behind them thought he looked like the killer. Suddenly she had to get out of there: knifed—naked—found by a girl and her boyfriend after they’d sneaked through the police line for a little fun in the woods. The girl was reportedly hysterical; the ambulance that came screaming over the grass at the edge of the woods was for her. The second came quietly and slow, because the dead don’t mind waiting.

  Pat had been gone all during intermission, even until the Schubert had begun playing. But he had brought back ice cream. He couldn’t have had time: men do not rape and murder and buy ice cream sandwiches to bring back to their babies.

  In her mind Zelly had kept seeing the hands lifting the body, the sudden insect scurry and the mulch dropping off in little clumps. They would not have moved the body yet, and she wanted to leave before they did. And in the car—the baby’s cries a counterpoint to the real and imagined ceaseless murmur of conversation around them in the other cars in the parking lot—or in the closet, the foot pressing down on the brake too sharply, making the van lurch: in her dream Zelly had looked down at his foot on the pedal and there was something on his shoe. There was something like a drumbeat, a heartbeat, but it was becoming fainter and there was something about a boat, an old woman who lived in a boat, she was trying to wash something off the side of the boat, it was creeping in a dark stain up the side of the boat and Zelly was asleep.

  37

  He was proud; he was so proud. WHEN I LEFT HER SHE WAS RADIANT WITH MOONLIGHT. DID YOU TASTE HER BLOOD? There were newspapers spread out around him on the floor of the van; there was a bucket of bloody water. It was Sunday morning, June twenty-first. He needed a T. “Frightened.” WERE THE CHILDREN FRIGHTENED AFTER THEY FOUND HER? The papers would leave out this detail. The bite mark would measure one and three quarter inches. There would be found at the scene various dark brown hairs, both from the head and from the pubic area; there would be footprints, size ten and a half. Probably a tall man. Footprints in big strides led west away from the body, but only a few feet away they mingled with footprints left by Dante and Ariadne, by the police who came when Ariadne screamed, prints from the homicide detectives from the 107th Precinct, from the ambulance attendants. A crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes would be found—impossible to know if that had belonged to the killer—and gray fibers that would be analyzed and categorized as the type used in the kind of rug commonly found in automobiles. There would be blue fibers of the type commonly found in workmen’s uniforms—it was all detritus.

  KELLY WAS HAPPY TO GO WITH ME, TO BE MINE FOR INTERMISSION.

  Her name had been Kelly Dearlove; she had arrived at the concert with her husband and sister-in-law. By a fortunate coincidence she had been one of the young blond women interviewed on-camera for network television news. All three channels played a seemingly endless loop of Kelly’s smiling face: “Of course I’m not afraid, I have my husband with me.”

  Kelly had gone to buy ice cream, and she didn’t come back. No one had seen her near the ice cream truck; after she got ten feet from her husband and sister-in-law (who would have gone with her had she not felt sleepy and chosen instead to doze on the blanket) no one saw her at all. She had been eaten by the crowd and spit up half-naked on her face in the dirt.

  So little was known, two days after the concert. Brown hair, crepe-soled shoes, workman’s uniform. An ordinary hunting knife, which could have been purchased at one of any number of sporting goods stores. The man was said to be six foot two to six foot four. There was the poster. There was the FBI personality file, printed in the Sunday papers: a loner, probably unable to hold a job; unlikely to have any close familial ties; physically, and probably sexually, abused as a child; may have had abnormally close ties with his mother as a child; may have lost one or both parents in childhood; above-average intelligence; may be a collector of some sort, possibly of stamps or baseball cards; drives a dark van, probably of recent make; unable to form or sustain a relationship with a woman; probably a blue-collar worker, good with his hands—a carpenter, a construction worker; high school education; does not have a true or deep-seated love of classical music; has contempt for authority, probably stemming from childhood; may believe he has musical talent, may in fact at one time have been a member of a rock and roll band.

  The police and the media and the FBI were building a mighty edifice, one which would stand shining and unshaken for many years to come. The edifice built around the actions of Jack the Ripper, for example, has stood for a hundred years, and sneaking Jack, with his poor draggled backstreet London prostitutes, has been forever buried under a more glamorous Jack, product of movies and articles and books and Hollywood, a society Jack, a Jack who can even claim royal pretensions.

  Kelly Dearlove was lucky to be numbered among the onetime loves of the Symphony Slasher. (How he liked that name!) Lucky to be suspended forever in youthful extremis, never to grow old, never, in a sense, to die. Her lovely face (which had in mundane reality been somewhat heavy of jaw and brow) would eternally stare out of books and old newspaper clippings, and actresses would comb her life for clues as to how to portray her going toward the ice cream truck—eager, like a child? Or aimless, watching the crowd, unaware that her life was about to end in pain and terror? He killed them once, for his own untranslatable purposes, and then society would continue to kill them, over and over, for pleasure and instruction.

  He was tired. Two in two days. The first one had already faded, even in his own memory—he felt sorry for her. That had been an impulse, a prank, sort of like a bachelor party the day before the wedding. Her picture would always appear next to Kelly’s but it was an unglamorous death. Ten thousand people, after all, had seen Kelly die. Only he had seen Leanore die. But their blood was mingled in the dented pail.

  He needed an L. “Love.”

  What if a witness were found? But there would be none. A dark figure, tall, carrying something bulky—who would not have alerted the police at the time they saw it? For he took his own risks, too, and was aware of his own death competing with him, as it were, for the prize of a death, each time—and each time he gave it theirs instead. His own tribulations were of course of no interest to the press. He was tired. His arms hurt. The first one—Leanore—had fought hard. Baseball cards! He snipped out the B. She’d practically put his eye out but the next day it wasn’t even red. Unusually close to his mother, he didn’t remember anything like that. It’s remarkable how easy it is to get a person to talk to you, if that person is in what she believes to be a safe place. When there is no safe place.

  TRUE RAGE SEEPS THROUGH DOORS AND WINDOWS AND BLUE POLICE LIKE WATER OR FIRE.

  That would be good. How easy it is to get a person to take a few steps out of her way, if you are gentle—and have you seen a little boy? About so high. Brown hair. With just the barest level of urgency in your voice. (A rock band!) Over that way, toward the road? I just turned my head for a moment—oh, would you? Thank you. An O. So easy. And she will go in the general direction you are going, wanting to help find the child but needing also to keep you in sight in case she does find the child. Asking his name but you are so intent, in your completely understandable distress, that you do no
t answer, and she follows; you are calling something, softly, she assumes it is your child’s name, and then you pause, at a particularly dark spot—you and she have gone rather far from the ice cream truck, which is all the way over to the left, now, and are standing across the narrow road from the shadow of the woods. And she comes up to you—this nice, normal father (the boy is just four, tall for his age, with dark brown hair)—and she stands next to you, panting a little because you have been moving fast, with fatherly concern scanning the crowd and moving toward the periphery of the dark woods. Does she notice all of a sudden that there are no people right here? That out of all the crowded park there are no people standing or sitting just here, where the woods loom dark across the road? And the police are just dark blobs to the right and to the left. And you move toward her as she steps back—but she is not going to be impolite, you have after all just lost your son. So she does not move fast enough, and a man with very strong arms who has done this before can cut the breath from the windpipe in a second, can cut off a scream in the throat in a second.

  A D. “Blood.” While he was running across the road with her limp body he got hard, instantly, because that was the only moment when he was really naked—not back when he first saw her, not when he spoke, not when she followed him all unsuspecting, because nobody saw any of that—but when he was in the road he was naked, even if the police were woefully understaffed (which of course he knew from reading the newspapers), even if the police were spaced only one every forty yards one of them might have seen him, she was so light, though, and he had a hard-on by the time he got across the road.