by Marc Laidlaw
Acid . . .
That’s the trouble. I’m full of acid. It’s dissolving me.
He could feel it burning through him, a fire in his brain and nerves. He was already crouched and in position—he had only to open his mouth and vomit a thin string of bile on the magazine. He couldn’t avoid seeing that trove of desecrated flesh as his guts seized and spasmed. Now stomach acids burned through those rips and tears. The tears he squeezed out were acid, too, etching trails down his cheeks.
The cave of weeds was engulfing him. He thrashed free of it, finding his feet, reclaiming the open night again, running. The barbed wire didn’t faze him. He slid between the strands without a scratch, only pausing to look down Shoreview Road toward the house they had burglarized earlier. When was that? How many people had he been since then, his mind running riot as he raced through the hills? Had everything happened on this one night? Wouldn’t it ever end?
Two police cars sat before the trespassed house, rack-lights spinning. When he saw them, his heart nearly stopped.
Worse, the metallic brown car was parked in front of Edgar’s house.
I sure hope you didn’t go home, Edgar.
He took a circuitous detour back to his home, staying out of the cops’ sight.
Only his mother’s VW sat in the carport. It must have been earlier than he thought, or Jack’s Volvo would have been there. He unlocked the door and let himself into the darkened house, wondering if a call to Edgar would tip off the police.
As he switched on the upstairs light, all thoughts of Edgar vanished.
It’s another hallucination, he told himself. I’m having a nightmare. I may never wake up.
The solid glass dining room table had been smashed into ten thousand pieces; lethal shards covered the yellow carpet and chairs, making a gleaming ruin. As he took a numb step forward, he discovered that the mirrored wall also was shattered, though a few pieces clung there still, returning his horrified stare.
He turned around slowly, afraid to see more. Deep gouges scarred the dark blue walls, in sweeping arcs as wide as a man’s reach. Dishes and crystal lay shattered on the floor; at the foot of the fridge was a clotted pool of sauces and jellies, swimming with the curved wet shards of broken jars. Raw hamburger, flank steaks and a whole chicken lay thawing on the linoleum. The oven door had nearly been wrenched from its hinges. He looked hesitantly into the living room and saw that the wood and glass shelves had been toppled. Albums were ripped from their sleeves and strewn about; the reel-to-reel was buried in festoons of tape. The white sofa and matching chairs were slashed open like members of a massacred family, plush foam and padding spilled everywhere.
He switched on the light for the lower landing before descending. Halfway down the stairs, he knew he shouldn’t go any further. What if the intruder was still inside? He should run for the cops right now, while they were in the neighborhood. On the other hand, they might smell the acid burning through him and instantly throw him in jail.
But could that be any worse than this?
More gouged lines ran above the stair railing. The door to the master bedroom was open. He could smell spilled perfume and powders. Clothes had been torn from the closet and shredded. The mattress, hauled from the bed, was covered with dirt and strewn with petals. His mother’s orchids were destroyed, pots overturned and broken. The thought of her grief at this scene made him burst into tears.
He shut off the light, unable to bear the vision, and went on weakly to his own room, expecting a scene of complete devastation as he opened the door. It would have been far more reassuring than what greeted him.
His room was almost untouched. Almost. A few books were off the shelves; then he remembered loaning them to Edgar. His desk seemed less cluttered, but at first glance he couldn’t tell what was missing.
He looked at the walls, wondering if by some mysterious power, the gorgeous painted moon had saved him.
It hadn’t. Not completely.
Beneath the moon, among the layered green hills, a foot above his pillow, the intruder had carved a hole. Three inches in diameter, roughly circular, it looked like a cave in one of the magic green hills—but a cave that could hold only horror.
He approached fearfully, because it had the look of a place in which something must be hiding.
Down in the dark hole, a rounded shape. It looked hard and metallic—not soft or wet or poisonous. Safe to touch. His first thought, ridiculous, was that it was an avocado. He put his hand in slowly, closed his fingers on the thing, and took it out.
He had only seen hand grenades in movies. This looked like one of those. Unreal.
Then he was walking down the stairs, scarcely seeing the slashed walls and shattered mirrors in Ryan’s room. Ryan’s back door opened onto the patio, where Jack had installed a redwood hot tub. Mike went down the stairs between the houses, out into the brush, and laid the grenade in the dirt beneath a sage bush, where he could find it again if he had to. Where it could explode without destroying the house.
Or what was left of it . . .
From here, he turned and looked up at his home. A strong wave of déjà vu washed through him.
It was the view he’d hallucinated earlier. In the bushes, looking up. He recalled a light coming on in his mother’s room, a shape behind the bamboo curtain, blinds closing. That room was dark now.
From outside, knowledge of what the house held felt unbearable. Everything looked peaceful and normal; he could almost imagine that nothing had changed.
But the worst had happened. One night not so long ago, his key had fallen into a monster’s hand. The monster had finally used it. What else was there to fear?
What else but . . . the monster’s return?
Thoughts of monsters were ridiculous, the dregs of a ludicrous hallucination. A man had done this, one with a face and a name. Who? Stoner had the grenades, but Sal’s brother Lupe had vanished with the key. Were they working together?
His brain felt raw and bloody. Nothing made sense.
Shouldn’t he confess now? Wasn’t this finally the time to admit to Jack and his mother exactly how he’d lost the key? What was he confessing, after all, except that he had gone into the house after dark, when he’d been warned not to. That was such a small transgression, his original mistake. Sure, things were more complicated now, but why keep piling lie upon lie? The whole clumsy edifice had to collapse eventually under its own ungainly weight.
For the moment, he felt locked into the pattern he had helped create. He was more concerned about fitting into that structure, enhancing its apparent reality, than with tearing it apart just now. Maybe there would be another time for the truth, a better time, later.
But not tonight. Not with cops around and acid percolating through his bones and Edgar in hiding . . .
No way. There had been a good chance for honesty before tonight, an option of confessing and getting the locks changed. But that was in a simpler, more innocent time. The amount of blame that would fall on him now, after this incident, was inconceivable.
It was almost a relief to realize that the police would finally be involved. Let them take care of it. He would stick to his story.
The only trouble was, when the cops came around they would see no windows broken, no doors forced. Then his mother would remember the lost key and the blame would fall on him anyway.
He had to keep things straight. They must seem to make sense, so that no one would look any deeper. The real secret of the key must remain hidden. He knew what had to be done, and how to do it.
Looking up at the house, his eyes went dry.
No use crying, boy, he told himself. You’re going to have to do it: cover up a monster’s tracks because they overlap with your own.
He walked back up to the patio. Since Jack had only recently finished building the redwood tub, tools were still scattered about. It didn’t take long to find the prybar Jack had used to wrestle the staves into position while he worked the metal straps around the tub.
/> Still want to cry? he asked himself.
Tears would get in the way with what he had to do, so he gave them a chance to finish up, get it over with.
Nothing came. He couldn’t feel a thing.
Back at the bottom of the house, he saw the strobe of lights across the canyon. One of the cars was driving away.
“Stick around,” he said softly, positioning the prybar in the track. “You can come over here in just a minute.”
Breaking into his own house was, in Edgar’s words, baby-simple.
19
Lupe ran through the sagebrush hills with a pack of shadows at his heels. The boys could have moved much faster, but they were patient with him, knowing that he carried a knapsack packed with cans and cartons, vegetables, eggs and bread, kidney beans and fruit cocktail—anything he had managed to stuff inside it. Delicacies, compared to the roots and nuts and cactus pears he’d been living on since finishing off the emergency cache he’d hidden away while living with Raymond.
It had been stupid of him to trash the house, a voice in his head said now. But that voice had been silent while he prowled, after passing through the door his key had opened.
You could have fed there again, he told himself. You could have taken a few things, only what you need for a few days, nothing they’d really notice, then struck again and again whenever supplies ran low.
Instead he’d gone wild. He couldn’t help it. He’d snapped, seeing everything so neat and perfect that it mocked him. It was a life he would never know, the nuclear family in a TV house with dishwasher, garbage disposal, washer and dryer—all the fixtures sparkling, of course. He had wanted to destroy it—had been forced to settle with making it merely uninhabitable. Let them live in filth; let them see how their lives could have been.
As he smashed the mirrors that covered walls in several rooms, he was amazed to see what he looked like. His hair was matted, crazy, full of stickers and straw. He must remember to steal a comb. He took his time, on a stroll of destruction. On the second level, he entered a room full of plants. Flowers grew everywhere, on the outer deck and inside, giving a perfume to the air. He stared enrapt at softly speckled hoods of orange and violet, yellow and brown frills, swaying on dark green stalks. The flowers caught his attention, but it was the roots that fascinated him. At the base of several plants, thrusting up from the soil, were nutlike clusters, small and ovoid, of pale brown and green. He grinned at the sight and snapped a couple from the soil of one pot, breaking off the stems attached to them. They were firm, resilient, cool in his palm. He rattled them together for a moment, then—an urge irresistible as that of destruction—thrust them deep into one of his trouser pockets.
Now, as he hurried through the hills, he rubbed his palm against his pants, feeling the oval lumps near his crotch, jiggling them slightly in the pocket’s pouch. He closed his hand around them and squeezed through the fabric. Tightened his grip, desperately dreaming of the agony and nausea he was supposed to feel.
But he felt nothing. He had trouble imagining—or remembering—what such pain might have been like. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the bulbs, and popped them into his mouth. He rolled them on his tongue. Saliva squirted, despite the bitter taste. The texture was all wrong, and they were too hard, poor surrogates. He gagged, fighting the reflex that almost made him swallow them. They might be poisonous. He spat them out. Not all vegetables were good.
But at least he had real food. And weapons. And shelter—grand shelter! He knew the hills and canyons thoroughly, from roaming them ceaselessly, day and night. He went to his cave only for the deepest and darkest of necessary sleeps. The rest of the time he moved stealthily, spying, storing information. Shuttling between Rim of the World and Shangri-La, avoiding the fire roads that linked them, taking more hidden paths. He had watched Raymond leave for Hawaii alone, keeping the house empty as a lure, a deliberate temptation. A trap, yes, devised by Sal. He had seen his brother in and around it, Sal and his boys, keeping watch in case Lupe returned. What Sal did not know was that he, too, was being watched. Sal’s watchers, however, had lost heart after the disappearance of their clumsy giant.
Lupe still wasn’t sure who had sent the big man. At first he’d thought the black van watching Sal’s house held police interested in the drug deals going on. But Lupe had found a driver’s license and Social Security card that both indicated he had killed a “William Stone.”
He had chuckled when he read that. Killed a Stone with a stone.
Thinking of which, he wondered again if he should have taken Stone’s strength, conducted an actual initiation. It had been an occasional regret ever since the killing. He was bigger and older than Lupe usually liked, but that might have been an advantage in the days ahead. He had looked very strong, despite the fact that his skull had cracked like an eggshell. All that power could have been Lupe’s . . .
But it hadn’t seemed right. Not only was he the wrong type, but the killing had been done without his special blade, in full sun. The glaring light, the heat and dust, had robbed the death of meaning.
More attractive to him was the growing appeal of the boy whose room he had entered tonight. He was already thinking of him—in the same way he thought of the Pump Jockey, the Junkie, and the Marine—as the Artist.
Imagine, an Artist for his collection.
Returning from the lower rooms of the house, he had noticed a door under the stairs, one he’d missed on the way down, in his frenzy.
He opened the door, found the light switch, and walked out into the hills . . .
It was cooler in there, with a breath of the night, as if he were stepping through a magic door into a dream. It was a room of green hills and soft, scented breezes. The full moon hung in a starless sky. Standing there with the rest of the house in shambles around him, he spread his arms and heard an owl hooting in the distance. Wilderness. Incredible hills. Squinting, he imagined roaming through the folds, down among the crevices the painter had left hidden. All it lacked, to make it perfect, was one decent cave.
The absence troubled him until he thought of how to remedy it.
With his knife in hand, cutting the hole, he had felt how right it was. Paradise. It was his cave he carved, he realized. The wall was a map of this very moment—or one a few nights from now, when the moon would be exactly as full and round as the one on the wall.
Backing away to put the cave into perspective, he saw a desk littered with pens and paper, crayons, brushes, paint. Tacked inside the closet walls above the desk were many sketches, some extremely violent, surprising in their starkness. A generous use of red for splattered blood. Dripping fangs, bloody swords and daggers, severed heads and arms. A man being drawn and quartered; scenes of torture. Lupe’s breath caught in his throat, arrested by recognition. It was as if whoever inhabited this room had looked into his mind, reached down into his nightmares, wrenched them out and thrown them quivering on the page; as if the artist had stood beside Lupe in all the caves since the First Cave, watching his eyes, hearing his heart, drinking it in and putting it on paper. Here.
He crumpled a sketch in his hands, then realized he was destroying it. With wracking guilt, he tried to flatten it on the desk. Then he backed away, feeling he had damaged something irreplaceable—some part of himself.
At the same time, a feeling of jealousy began to warm within him.
He had drawn once, long ago. It seemed so far in the past that he could hardly remember. Why had he done it? How had he known what to do? What was the point of it all?
And why—why had he stopped?
Unthinking, he picked up a pencil, then a pen, and then handfuls of them. He thrust them into his pack, among the cans and loaves of bread. He grabbed a drawing tablet and stuffed that in, too. Suddenly he wanted these things more than the food, wanted to remember and reclaim whatever he’d once had. He could hardly understand his excitement, which felt as if, finally, he was about to find fulfillment—release.
He tried not to feed his ho
pes, for they had always betrayed and disappointed him. It was impossible that he would ever change. Still, it was impossible not to want to hold on to the promise.
It was then he conceived the idea of collecting not only the art, but the Artist.
Family photographs stood on the desk. One snapshot in a lucite picture-cube showed two boys with their arms across each other’s shoulders. He studied their faces, thinking of what he’d seen in the house. The room downstairs belonged to one boy; there were soccer balls, baseball mitts, football helmets and posters everywhere. This other room, with its lovely scenic walls, might almost have belonged to a girl . . . might have, except for these sketches.
These were no girl’s visions, of razors and murder and decapitation, of muscular men with absurdly buxom women wrapped around their legs.
He noticed a pencil sketch pinned up in the closet. It was the shorter of the two brothers, the one with eyeglasses. Labeled “Self-Portrait,” it showed a boy with a dripping sword in one hand and his own severed, bespectacled head in the other. Both heads smiled grim identical smiles. He had used red pencil for blood, the only color in the picture—in most of these pictures.
That was him. The Artist.
It dawned on Lupe that this boy was the very one who had left him the key. The one who had invited him in. The one who knew his mind and thoughts as surely as if they shared the same dreams.