Night Chill

by Jeff Gunhus

  Jack turned and sprinted back through the hall. He took the stairs three at a time.

  “SARAH! BECKY!”

  The girl’s rooms were at the end, one next to the other. Becky’s room was first. He flung the door open.

  A little voice came out of the dark, “Da-Daddy?”

  Jack flipped on the light switch. The room’s bright primary color scheme jumped out at him. Clown faces painted on the walls stared at him with dead expressions. Meant as happy decorations, they were sinister now, their mouths bent into strange sarcastic smiles, eyes too narrow and intense. Jack half-expected one of them to peel itself off the wall and race him to Becky’s bed.

  Becky clutched a pillow to her chest and looking up at him with wide eyes. “You O.K.?” Becky nodded. “All right. Stay right here. Stay in bed. I’m going to check on your sister.”

  Jack locked the bedroom door with himself inside. The girls’ rooms were connected by a shared bathroom. He decided to go through the bathroom instead of going back into the hallway. For all he knew, the intruder could be out in the hall right now, right behind the door he just locked.

  He clambered across the room, toys skittering across the floor as he kicked them out of the way. The bathroom nightlight was enough to see by. He ran through the room and threw open the door. Even before he could reach the light switch, he knew something was wrong. The room was freezing cold. Like walking into a meat locker.

  He flipped the switch. Sarah’s room was a calm pink, a princess motif she picked out herself. Her bedclothes were frilly, white and pink. Under the pink blanket lay his baby girl, shivering in the cold, blue lips pressed tight against chattering teeth. Her window was wide open. Jack looked around the room. Nothing else seemed out of place. He ran to his little girl and put his warm hands against her cheeks.

  “Sarah. Are you all right sweetie?” She didn’t answer. “C’mon. Let’s get you out of here.” He pushed back the covers and picked her up in his arms. With his one free hand, he grabbed the baseball bat. Together, they went back through the bathroom to get Becky.

  The door to Becky’s room was open.

  Becky was gone.

  Jack lunged into the hallway. Nothing there. Still clinging on to Sarah, he rushed down the hall. “Becky! BECKY!” he shouted. “Lauren! I need your help. Where’s Becky?”

  He ran into the master suite but stopped as soon as he was through the door. Lauren was asleep in their bed with Becky nestled against her. It didn’t seem possible. How could they be sleeping as if nothing was going on?

  Sarah slipped from his grasp as he lowered her to the floor. Too scared to complain, she curled up against the wall, shivering.

  The still figures of his wife and daughter huddled on the far side of the bed, both facing away from him.

  On the side of the mattress closest to him, a large lump twitched violently under the covers. With each spasm, the shape crept closer to Lauren and Becky.

  With a cry, Jack leapt across the room and tore back the sheets.

  There, under the covers, was Buddy, or what was left of him.

  The dog’s rear legs were mangled and useless, almost impossible to recognize as part of his body. A gashing wound was open across his side, deep enough to expose bits of bone. The blankets were drenched with blood. The dog’s head hung at a strange angle, the jaw shifted ninety degrees to the side.

  Buddy turned toward his master, a single wild eye able to function. A gurgling noise came from the dog’s throat as he tried to whine for help.

  Jack’s eyes moved over to Lauren and his little girl. Everything was in slow motion. A strobe-light world of sequential snapshots.

  He walked around to the other side of the bed so he could see their faces. They stared back at him, wide eyed, mouths open.

  Jack dropped to his knees and covered his mouth to block his screaming. The bodies were covered with black, oozing sores. Every one ringed by purple flesh. Dead. His baby. His wife. Dead.

  There was movement on the other side of the bodies. Buddy was still alive.

  Got to put the poor animal out of its misery.

  Jack stood, nodding at the thought. His body was numb, feeling as dead as the corpses on the bed in front of him. He crossed back to the other side of the bed, back to the bleeding, whining lump that twitched on the bed. He raised the bat over his head.

  Got to put the poor animal out of its misery.

  The thought sounded strange to him. The voice was wrong.

  The dog is suffering. You have to do it. End its suffering. Then the same for Lauren and Becky. Just in case they were in pain too. You have to end their suffering.

  It wasn’t his voice, but it didn’t matter. The voice was right. He had to put the dog out of its misery. Then take care of Lauren and Becky. Bury their poor bodies. It was all clear to him. He knew what he had to do. Then, afterward, after he’d done it all, he’d get Sarah out of there. Take her far away.

  Yes, take Sarah away. You know where.

  Jack twisted his hands on the bat to get a better grip, flexed his arms to prepare for the downward swing.

  Then a different voice roared up from deep within his mind.

  “Stop, Jack! Don’t listen to him. Wake up!”

  Jack rocked back at the sound. He fought to make sense of it all. No, he knew what he had to do. He took a step forward, the bat poised to strike.

  “Daddy, no!”

  “Jack. JACK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  He froze. The voices. It was Lauren and Becky. Not dead, but alive. It didn’t make sense. He’d seen their bodies. How was it possible?

  The bedroom lights flashed on. Lauren sat upright in bed. Becky was beside her, pressed up against her mom for protection. Jack looked down on the bed where he had aimed the bat. Buddy was there. Rolled over on his back in submission. There was no injury. There was no blood.

  Jack dropped the bat on the floor and staggered away from the bed. He collapsed on the floor and sat with his back against the wall.

  The voice rose up in his mind, like a wave crashing over him, pounding at him. It was in his head, it was everywhere, shouting at him, laughing at him. Jack recognized the voice.

  Nate Huckley.

  The words came across as clear as if Huckley was crouched next to him, whispering in his ear.

  I’ll be back for you, Jack. You can count on it.

  Then the crash and roar of the wave disappeared and the voice was gone. The only sounds left were Becky crying and Lauren’s voice saying that everything was all right. Jack heard the voice like it was coming from an echo-chamber. “Daddy’s O.K. now. Daddy’s O.K.”

  Jack turned to look at Sarah, still crouched against the wall on the opposite side of the room from him. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He stared and tried to force a reassuring smile. Sarah leaned forward and whispered just loud enough for him to hear, “That voice. It was the bad man again, wasn’t it?”

  Jack crawled over to his little girl and wrapped his arms around her. It was her next words that sent shivers through his body.

  “Is he really going to come back like he said, Daddy? Is he really?”

  Jack squeezed his eyes shut. It was too much. He didn’t understand what was going on. He just wanted it all to stop. As he sat there and rocked Sarah in his arms the same thought ran over and over in his mind, like an old scratched 45 record stuck on the same lyric, “What if I hadn’t snapped out of it? What would I have done next?”

  One look at Lauren and Jack knew he wasn’t the only one trying to deal with that thought.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The party was tomorrow night. Cathy Moran couldn’t think of anything worse than if she couldn’t go. Well maybe. If she went and somehow everyone saw the dark spots covering her chest and shoulders it would be catastrophically uncool.

  She could go and just wear a turtleneck. It was cold enough. But if she went she risked an even worse scenario. Bobby Mazingo might be there. Then, if Bobby did try something, which
Cathy hoped he would, she would have to say no. While this turn of events would make her dad the happiest man in Prescott City, ‘no’ was not the word Cathy wanted to use. And she felt pretty certain that if it came to that then she could kiss Bobby Mazingo goodbye, and not in the sense she was hoping to.

  Cathy stood in front of her bathroom mirror and tenderly rubbed the discolored skin, probing with her fingers for any sore spots. That was the strangest thing about it, nothing hurt. The whole area around her breasts, neck and shoulders looked like she’d been used as a punching bag. The skin between these freakish oversized pox marks was a dead gray, flaking with dry skin. Like freezer burn on meat. The unexpected thought made a chill pass through Cathy’s body.

  She opened the cabinet under the sink. Neat piles of fresh towels filled the space, folded to exacting Martha Stewart standards. At least her dad’s new trophy wife was a good housekeeper, although Cathy would never give her that compliment to her face. Barbara, or Barbie as Cathy preferred to call her, was a regular Martha friggin’ Stewart. But with a great rack, courtesy of the best boob surgeon her dad could find.

  The day of the wedding set the tone for the relationship with her new mom. The ceremony was an hour late getting started since the maid-of-honor, a position grudging offered to Cathy to begin with, showed up an hour late with a surprise for everyone. Little sixteen-year old Cathy Moran staggered down the aisle drunk as a factory worker on payday, waving happily at the assembled guests with a silly grin pasted on her face. Adding to the spectacle, her dad got to see her new jewelry for the first time as she drew nearer. A thick band of silver hung from her nose, still swollen from the piercing only hours before.

  The more witty guests would later comment at the reception that the wedding was a success as it had ensured job security for the groom. His daughter alone could keep Scott Moran’s psychology practice going for years.

  Cathy pushed aside the towels. Way in the back, behind the bottle of Scope and Liquid Plummer, was a small ceramic jar with a cork lid. She pulled this out. The jar felt cool in her hands. She pried open the tight fitting lid. Inside was a Zip-loc baggy. And inside that was exactly what the doctor ordered. Bud directly from Humbolt County in Northern California, or so Nikki Tomlinson had promised when she’d sold it to her. Whether Nikki was telling the truth or whether she was full of shit, it was the best weed Cathy had ever smoked. And in the last year she had become somewhat of a connoisseur.

  She tipped the jar over and felt the small pipe tumble into her hand. Normally she would have stuffed the pipe and the baggy in her pocket, snuck into the forest behind her house before she lit up. But she didn’t feel like it. The dark splotches had her freaked out and she needed a hit. Her therapist, a friend of her dad’s who had been at the wedding, had explained that her behavior showed that she wanted to be caught by her father, that it was acting out, a cry for attention.

  Cathy thought it was bullshit.

  Anyway, she wasn’t worried about getting caught by her father anymore. What was the worst he could do? Hate her? Well, that was already pretty much the case anyway, so she figured she had nothing to lose. Besides, even the doctor treating her disease had said it would be all right to smoke if the nausea from the medicine got too bad. She didn’t think her father knew about the medical O.K. and that was fine by her. The less he knew the better.

  She plucked a few buds from the baggy, breaking them up just a little by rubbing her fingers together, and packed them into the pipe. Using the lighter from the jar, she lit the pipe and sucked back the acrid smoke, holding her breath to let the pot do its magic. Soon her brain mercifully floated away and the stress dripped like wax off a candle. She looked in the mirror. The purple marks still registered in her mind as a bad thing, potentially a really bad thing, but the pot took the edge off. She knew what she had to do, what she should have done when she first noticed the marks.

  Reluctantly, she packed the pipe away, sprayed half a can of Lysol into the air to cover her tracks. As she dripped Visine into her glazed eyes she made the decision to wait until after school to make the phone call. Better to do it outside the house. The last thing she wanted was for her dad to hear her on the phone and freak out like he always did. Some day he’d treat her with the respect she deserved. Until then she would sneak around behind his back.

  Well, unless it turned out it was really serious, then she’d tell him. Asshole or not, he was still her dad.

  Cathy grabbed her backpack from her room and headed downstairs. She just hoped she’d be able to see her doctor after school and get back home before anyone noticed. Since no one in the house seemed to care about her, the chances for success looked pretty good.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Dr. Stanley Mansfield removed his glasses and dug a thumb into the corner of each eye. He pressed hard, trying to relieve the sinus headache that had gathered momentum since he woke up that morning. Even his hair seemed to hurt. He knew he wasn’t ill. Just a bad case of nerves and stress. Maybe it was time to take a vacation. Get away and do a little fly fishing. He smiled at the ridiculous notion. It had been years since he had taken a break from his work. Then again, he thought, maybe that was why he found himself stuck.

  The phone rang and killed all ideas about vacations and mountain trout. He considered ignoring it but the shrill ring was too much for his headache.

  “Hi Stanley. It’s Lauren.”

  Dr. Mansfield leaned back in his chair, “Lauren. How are you? How are Jack and the girls?”

  “As well as can be expected, I guess.” Lauren’s voice tightened. He could tell she was trying to hold back her emotions but they were getting the better of her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Still a little shaken up over everything,” Lauren replied after a long pause, her voice trembling.

  “Take some time off. I’ll cover any cases you have here. Take time to be with your family.”

  “I’ll probably take you up on that. I might take the kids for a trip. Get their minds off things a little, you know?”

  Take the kids. He noticed she didn’t mention Jack. “Sure. Whatever you need, you know that.” There was no answer. “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. I’m sorry. You see, I…”

  “Go on. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  “I need a psych referral. Someone good.”

  “For the kids?”

  “It’s not for the kids. It’s for Jack. This whole thing has really shaken him up. He’s had some hallucinations.”

  Dr. Mansfield chose his words carefully. “I heard about his…uh…episode in Nate Huckley’s room. You know it’s normal for someone who’s been in a crash like this to have short term psychological effects. Post traumatic stress often occurs when the subject endures the kinds of event Jack went through. Especially when there are children involved.”

  “I know all that,” she snapped. “But it’s just a little harder when it’s your husband and not some textbook study.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry,” he said.

  Lauren sighed, “No, I’m sorry. I’m on edge. Jack doesn’t know I’m calling you and I’m not looking forward to the battle to get him into see someone. Do you know anyone good?”

  “Yes, actually there is someone right there in Prescott City. I’ve known him a long time. He’s good and you can trust him. I’ll email you his information.”

  “Thanks. Is there any way you could pull some strings and get him in today?”

  “If you think it’s necessary, of course I’ll ask.”

  “Please. I’d appreciate it.”

  “I don’t want to intrude, but are you in any danger?

  “No. Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “These hallucinations haven’t led to violent behavior, have they?”

  “No. Of course not.” Lauren shot back a little too quickly. She seemed to realize it, too, and paused to collect herself before continuing. “Look, thanks for the help. And I appreciate the of
fer for some time off. I’m going to stop in later today to check in on Felicia Rodriguez and then I’ll probably leave tomorrow for a few days, maybe a week.”

  “God, I thought someone called you.”

  “Called me about what?”

  “Felicia Rodriguez suffered a massive coronary yesterday afternoon.”

  “Damn, why didn’t someone call me? What’s her condition?”

  Dr. Mansfield cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Lauren. She died.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The room didn’t look like a typical therapist’s room. Jack based this evaluation not on any personal experience, but from scenes in countless movies and T.V. shows. They always showed puffy leather chairs, cheap wood paneling and the obligatory couch where pathetic people stretched out while they spewed their problems to a paid stranger.

  There was no couch in this room, though. Besides the executive leather chair behind a sprawling antique desk, the only furniture was a pair of sturdy wooden chairs, with thick armrests, facing each other in front of a fireplace. One personal photo sat on the fireplace mantle: a picture of a teenage girl standing next to a horse. Jack stared at the photo as he sat in one of the wooden chairs waiting for the therapist to show up. Unlike the rest of the room, the photo at least had a warm feeling to it. The girl faced the camera with an ear-to-ear smile, one hand holding the reins, the other patting the horse’s forehead. Staring at the picture relaxed him a little. And that was exactly what he needed to do. Unwind the tension. Slow things down. Get a grip.

  Lauren had been diplomatic in her approach to get him to this session. When he’d agreed without a fight to see the therapist, her surprise hadn’t been lost on him. It was the fear in her voice that did it. And his own fear too. He still couldn’t piece together what had happened last night. All he knew was he had ended up with a baseball bat in his hand and had come out of his trance, or whatever the hell it was, just in time to stay off the evening news as a serial murderer. So when Lauren explained that Stanley Mansfield had arranged an appointment with a shrink for him, he had agreed right away. He also agreed that Lauren should take the kids down to their friends’ house in Baltimore. Just for a while. Just until he was sure he wasn’t going crazy.