A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

  “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” the man asked from above his repulsive tie, in what sounded like a kind, empathetic voice. He was trying to trick me. I started to wonder, though, what exactly they were charging me with. I hadn’t actually hurt The Villain; I’d just made the effort. Surely attempted murder wasn’t as serious as actually killing someone.

  “About what?” I said, probably with some defiance. I wanted him to know he wasn’t going to get the better of me. I was sure he thought I was some poor, uneducated foreigner he could manipulate and frighten. I knew enough about the law. I knew if I told the police I’d planned to kill someone, they could charge me with attempted murder. But they didn’t know anything. There was no mens rea. They didn’t have the death penalty in this state, so they couldn’t scare me with that either. I was two steps ahead of them.

  “About this.” He took a computer printout from a folder and placed it on the table in front of me. It was The Villain as he stood in front of the court building; something lay crumpled at his feet. I looked closely at it, slowly realizing it was a person. Shock and terror were almost certainly evident on my face. “I’m guessing,” he continued, “that this was not the man you meant to kill. If I were a betting man, I’d bet you were aiming for this one.” He pointed to The Villain, tapping the face with a finger.

  “He’s the one who killed your school friend, yes?” he went on, averting his eyes purposefully. “And your mother.” My eyes snapped to attention. My God! I had to admit that the American police were surpassing my expectations.

  The man in the hideous tie had rattled me, despite my steely demeanor. I had an overwhelming urge to explain myself. What I’d done wasn’t so horrible; it wasn’t even that unusual. He leaned forward in his chair, then folded his arms and waited to hear what I would say next. He clearly thought he was going to make me admit to things. His overzealous gesture reminded me that he was not my confidant; he was not on my side. I folded my arms as he did, and told him to get me a lawyer.

  He sighed the way Mother used to sigh when she simply couldn’t argue any more. He wanted me to think he was losing his patience. He would not fool me.

  “It might be awhile before we can get you a public defender out here,” he said, looking away. He seemed like a good man. Good men cannot look you in the eye when they’re lying. Thomas taught me that. “You want anything in the meantime?”

  “I’d like a bottle of water, and I’d like to call my grandmother.” He exited, leaving me to wait again.

  A long while later, a woman in a blue uniform brought me a tiny paper cone filled with water. I asked her where it came from, and she motioned toward one of those office water coolers. It was warm, but I was thirsty. I emptied the paper cone and asked for a bit more. What they’d given me was barely a sip. Surely they could spare me a few ounces of water. She said she’d see what she could do, sounding thoroughly put out. Another tired psychological game.

  Eventually, they led me to a rotary-dial phone and said I could make one call. Only then did it occur to me that I had no idea what Grandmother’s phone number was. I’d always called her on my cell phone. I’d just select her name from the address book and push the call button. I’d only dialed the number once … a year or so ago when I entered it into the phone. My breath quickened; I was starting to panic. This was ridiculous. There was nothing to do but go back to that room and wait.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  (Mikey)

  The Good Life

  I wasn’t really hurt when they took me to the hospital and got me checked out. I was able to keep myself from crying, but it was hard. My own little Chandra was all grown up and trying to do murder against me. It was too horrible to think about. How could she ever hate me so much? I was a damn good father to her. So ungrateful she was, like her mother.

  The emergency doctor said I was fine. Instead of making me go back to the jail, my lawyer convinced them to let me stay in the state hospital while I was waiting to see about the trial. She also got me a couple of what they called talking doctors. They would only do that if they thought I was crazy. The best thing to do, I decided, would be to go ahead and let them think that. It was another genius plan of mine. My genius plans have never failed me.

  I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. If they said I was too crazy to have to go to prison, they’d let me go to a hospital. Comfortable beds and yummy food, plenty of nice people to talk to, I bet. You’d get to walk around in your bathrobe all day and they’d take care of everything you needed. No job, no worrying about money. The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. All I had to do was pull off faking like I was crazy. How hard could that be? It was a good plan, and there’d be no treacherous women around to spoil it for me.

  “Hello, Mike,” the talking doctor said. I paid close attention; it was important that he get the right ... what’s the word? Impression? It was important that I give him the right impression of me. “May I call you Mike?” He was being super polite.

  Already I had a dilemma. The normal thing to do was to say yeah, that it was okay to call me by my first name. But that’s what a sane person would do. I was supposed to be the opposite of sane. I took a deep breath.

  “I prefer that you call me King Mike, Ruler of Michigan.” I told him this in my haughtiest voice. Surely he would think I was nuts if I said I was ruler of Michigan. Why would anybody want to rule a crappy state like Michigan in the first place? Exactly. So far, so good.

  “Very well, King Mike.” He was totally falling for it. “Do you mind if I record our conversation today?”

  “Nope,” I said, looking right at him. Only a crazy person would let someone record their private talking doctor sessions, right? All that stuff is totally personal. No one in their right mind would let it be recorded, so I went ahead and told him it was okay.

  “Good,” he said, pressing the orange button on the tiny recorder in front of us. I didn’t see any tapes or anything, just a little box that looked like a speaker. Maybe he was trying to trick me, and he wasn’t recording us at all. These kinds of people lie all the time; that’s how they get you. The government or whoever was probably listening in.

  “Why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about your family, King Mike?” I almost laughed. King Mike. As to the question, though, I didn’t know what to say. Dami had left me and taken my kids away. She was a treacherous foreigner who didn’t appreciate a damn thing I did for her or those kids. I couldn’t tell that to a doctor. He’d think I had rage against women, which would look bad, but not crazy.

  “She was a wonderful woman,” I told him, making sure I sounded totally whipped. “I loved her very much, even after she left me.” See there? No man in his right mind would talk nicely about his woman after she left him. This doc would totally think I was off my rocker.

  “Well, Your Majesty,” he said. I think he was making fun of me. “I was thinking more about your own parents. What kind of relationship did you have with them?” He was trying to trick me again. That was all these people ever did. If I wasn’t careful, this guy could get me to tell him anything. Then he’d know about everything, even that time I almost had sex with my sister and she punched me in the face.

  “We got along good,” I told him. “I had a good mama, a good dad. My sister was kind of … messed up. She ran away when I was little and I never saw her again.”

  “Oh?” The doctor said it like he was really interested. What’s so interesting about my sister running away from home? “How did you feel about that?” These kinds of doctors always asked you how you felt about stuff, as if that were relevant to how crazy a person was.

  “I felt okay about it. She was pretty mean to me.” I waited for the doctor to talk again. He didn’t, not for a long time. I started to lose patience with him. “She beat me up a couple of times.” The more I thought about Jeanette, the more unfair it all sounded. “She was always telling me what to do. She cooked all my meals and told me when I could go out
side to play, and even when to go to bed. So bossy.”

  “So that made you angry? Your sister bossing you around?” Obviously this doctor guy was hell-bent on making me look full of rage. Crazy or no, I was not going to give him the satisfaction.

  “Not really.” It was a lie, but he’d never know the difference. This guy’d never even met me before. How could he know anything?

  “Yet you still felt okay about her leaving you?” Leaving me? He was making it sound like Jeanette was my girlfriend or something. Dami was the one who left me. Dami was the one who’d deserved whatever she got.

  “She didn’t leave ME; she left our parents.” I wanted to make that very clear to him.

  “Why do you think she did that?”

  “How should I know?” I was blowing this, blowing it. I was supposed to be sounding crazy, but somehow I ended up sounding just like my regular self. Stupid Jeanette was ruining my genius plan! Ran away years and years ago but still she was messing shit up for me.

  “If you had to take a guess …” This guy probably wasn’t even a real doctor. He didn’t have a white coat, or any of those certificates all over his walls how doctors have. What kind of doctor wanted you to take a guess about anything? They should want facts. Only facts determine the truth.

  “Mama said she was a heathen harlot who went off to the city to be sinful and lascivious.”

  “Is that what you think?” he asked, not even thinking about it.

  “Why would Mama say it if it wasn’t true?” I hadn’t thought about my sister in years. I didn’t even know if she was still alive. Funny that I should know so little about someone I grew up with. It was also funny that this guy was asking more questions about my sister than he was about me. He couldn’t even stay on topic, and he was in charge of deciding whether or not I was crazy. Figures. That’s why Mama says everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t really know why they say that. Why a handbasket?

  A few days after that doctor, my lawyer came to see me again. She had a bunch of papers for me to sign. Apparently, if I agreed to have some surgery they wanted me to have, they’d let me stay at the state hospital until I got better. It was a huge load off my mind. All I had to do was stay in the hospital and get surgery. They said it would only take an hour, maybe less! One hour of surgery and I’d get out of going to prison. I knew it was a genius plan, faking crazy. If they knew how sane I really was, they’d want me to go to the worst prison they could find. That’s how mean they were.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  (Fran)

  Crystal Clear Hindsight

  I woke very early the morning I had to go to court. First things first: a cigarette. I was annoyed as all hell to have to be doing this, after all this time. Taking a whole day off work to drive out of state, only to rehash things about a man I’d like to forget I ever knew? I certainly wasn’t doing this because the police asked me to. They didn’t really ask, anyway, just showed up at my café with signed papers and told me I had no choice. A material witness order they called it.

  Mike hadn’t just murdered that girl from the café. He’d taken many lives, maybe eight or ten. They still weren’t sure. They think he actually fed a woman to animals at the zoo. It was horrible, just horrible. I could only imagine what he did to his poor ex-wife. He’d had the audacity to feign sadness about it in front of Jorge and me. He must be one of those … sociopaths, I think they’re called. Or psychopaths? I forget which is which, but he’s probably more than one, knowing him.

  For the longest time they’d said there wouldn’t be a trial. They said Mike was “mentally unfit” and that he’d get treatment. There was no treating his victims, of course. It looked like he’d never answer for what he’d done. His mother, she was crazy too, by all accounts. She was all over the news. Just wanted to stop him getting the death penalty, I suppose. That rest stop where they found him and that poor girl? It was just over the Michigan – Indiana border. You commit murder in the state of Indiana, the state of Indiana can murder you right back.

  After almost two years, the news said Mike was cured of his craziness. They took a tumor out of his head the size of a golf ball. Really. Then the doctors had pronounced him sane. I didn’t see how he could be sane, given what he’d done to those girls. Apparently, they had him doped up with medication. He was finally going to trial for what he’d done. As much as I hoped he’d get what was coming to him, I wanted no further part in it. Why couldn’t they just do this without me?

  There was another material witness due to testify. We weren’t supposed to discuss Mike or the case at hand, but I did want to at least say hello to whoever it was. It felt like we were in this together, even though I had no idea who the other witness might be.

  Imagine how I felt when they introduced me to a girl who was no more than sixteen. A fresh-faced young lady, wearing a happy smile despite the reason for her presence there. After a minute of staring, I recognized her. She’d been on the news. The girl who got away. Her name was … Kelly? Carrie? I couldn’t quite—

  “Casey!” She said it cheerfully, like we were meeting at a party. Maybe she was just happy to be alive. I guess I’d be feeling grateful if I’d narrowly escaped what those other girls had been through. They say Mike picked her up and made her go to his house, but she’d gotten away somehow. Freakishly lucky for her. She probably had no idea at the time that she’d escaped from a truly sick person. Feeding someone to bears and lions? It was obscene. The utter horror of such a thing, it made me sick.

  “Hello, Casey.” She held out her hand and I shook it, only then becoming aware of how badly my own hand was shaking. “Are you nervous?” I asked her.

  “A little,” she said, looking at the floor. “But it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?” Her eyes met mine and a defiant look flashed across them.

  “I guess so …” I told her, shame bubbling to the surface. This young girl was far braver than I. She went on to tell me about how her foster parents told her she didn’t have to testify at all. I didn’t want to ask what had happened to her real parents.

  The trial itself lasted seven weeks. I was on the witness stand for five whole days. The prosecutor was a short, dumpy man who looked sort of like a troll. He was theatrical and loud; I don’t think the jury liked him very much. I certainly didn’t. He came off snotty and abrasive.

  After three days of talking to the prosecutor, Mike’s lawyer stood up and walked toward me. This woman was thickset and plain. I couldn’t imagine why any woman would want to defend a monster like Mike Goretti. I’ve heard that some lawyers defend people they know are guilty just to prove how good they are. It’s despicable.

  The defense lawyer stood up, buttoning the jacket of her conservative, grey skirt suit. She darted toward me, overtly aggressive.

  “So … you hired my client to wait tables and were concerned when he spoke to your customers?” she asked, rebutting an earlier statement of mine. I took a deep breath and explained that he hadn’t been a waiter; he was a busboy, then a dishwasher. I looked toward the jury and told them I only became concerned when he seemed interested in one particular group of girls. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close.

  “I see. You were worried he might do something terrible to them?”

  “Not really; I wasn’t sure what he’d do. He was kind of a strange person.” As soon as I said that, I wished I hadn’t.

  “Really? So strange that you alerted the authorities, saying he was a threat to your customers?” I nodded. She was affirming that I’d done the right thing. These people and their trickery. “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear that?”

  “Yes. I called the police,” I told her, wondering what she was up to.

  “So the police knew there was a dangerous man in the area focusing on young women and girls?” I didn’t answer.

  “Objection, as to what the police knew. This witness has no knowledge of—” The judge sustained the objection before the prosecutor even finished speaking.

  “
You did inform the police that you had grave concerns about my client?” I told her I had, and that we didn’t want him coming into the café any more. For the first time, I actually looked over at Mike. I’d been doing so well at averting my eyes, purposefully staring at the jury, the floor, anywhere but at him. He winced when I spoke, then looked up at me with big, wounded eyes that blamed me for his every trouble. Me. As if somehow I were to blame for his predicament.

  An enormous sense of relief accompanied the end of my testimony, and indeed, the end of my involvement in this ordeal. It didn’t relieve my guilt. I’d been sure it would.

  I could have spoken up sooner, cared a bit more, paid more attention. What could I do about it now? Nothing. All that was left was to go back to my café, serve coffee and pie, and pretend I wasn’t at least partly responsible for the snuffing out of a beautiful girl who’d never get the chance to be a woman.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  (Mikey)

  Treachery Rears its Womanly Head

  I wanted to die. I didn’t deserve this, not remotely. I had to sit there being quiet, wearing that stupid suit, listening as people I thought were my friends turned against me. It was the worst kind of treachery. What did I ever do to Fran to make her hate me so goddamn much? I was a good employee for her, showed up on time and did my job well. She had no complaints. I missed work for a day or two when my own wife died—and what did she do? She fired me and gave away my job to some goddamn wetback—and suddenly I was the bad guy? It figured. They were everywhere now, those people. She came all the way here just to tell the world that I talked to women where I worked. Who didn’t do that? It didn’t prove anything.