“What have you got there?” Tony asked as much to break the spell.
He looked at Tony with bewilderment, unsure if what he had seen was real or staged. “Wha—? Yeah, sorry. I just found these in one of the containers. They were sitting on the top.” He moved quickly, handing over the papers to Hunt. Then he took a step back and waited.
An instamatic photograph was clipped to each one of the pages—photocopies of personal details from the dental clinic—three faces in total. Hunt looked over each one, then returned to the first.
It was obvious why the young officer considered these important. The first page stood out among the rest. Drawn on top with thick red marker was a smiley face. It took up the circumference of the page, a round circle for the head, two dots for the eyes, no nose, and a half circle depicted the smiley mouth. Two red tears were drawn on the right side. The smiley face was crying with laughter.
A mark of intent.
“Good job, son,” Hunt said. “See what else you can find.”
The young officer attempted a smile that didn’t quite come off. He still looked puzzled or shocked by what he’d seen as he went back in the direction of the workshop to continue his search.
Hunt detached the photo, passed it to Tony and held up the page to show him the smiley, crying face. “Look familiar to you?”
Tony glanced at the page and studied the photo, but not for long. Something was screaming at him from inside his head. “Helen Dooley—the girl looks just like her.”
“Not what it says here,” Hunt said, “Sardis Dirkan, there’s an address. Delmane, Large Hill. You know where that is?”
A swell of anxiousness thumped Tony in the chest, telling him to get a move on. “Large Hill, that’s up in the Farnham Mountains. I used to go camping with the Scouts up around there. It’s past the Merry Tillmen, Pebblebrook way,” Tony answered.
“I know the pub,” Hunt said, “We’ll take my car.”
Tony looked around to make sure no one was in ear shot. “What about backup?”
“No. All used up, and it’s still a long shot. I’m not calling for anyone else unless we’re sure we’ve got him. For now, you’re it. You’re up for this?”
Tony looked at his watch. “If he is there, he’s got one hell of a head start. Let’s go.”
Hunt handed over his keys to Tony. “You can drive.”
Tony watched Marcus from the other side of the car put his hand to his mouth as he stooped to get in the passenger seat. He swiped up a small bottle of water from the passenger seat, opened it, took a drink, and swallowed by the time Tony sat in the driver seat. More pills. The attention he now gave to his gun compounded Tony’s unease; this wasn’t good. Hunt was checking it for bullets. His eyes rushed to every chamber, consumed by thought, reciting a set of plans in his head with military purpose, a man on a mission.
Pulling away from the Masterson House of Horror, Tony could have done with a pill.
Just the one.
53:
“New tricks.”
It was another out-of-body experience, a death to wake up to, sometimes more than one. It started the same, asleep in bed with an inexplicable determination to grow lighter until the next intake of breath lifted her out of herself. Training was required until floating became second nature. She felt safe for her other self, lying motionless in the bed. And then that amazing sense of freedom in the dark, standing buoyant in front of the cottage, arms outstretched in a saintly pose, ready for the rush.
She looked to the stars and effortlessly rose into the darkness as high as she’d dare, not yet trusting the happening, conscious of the world below. She continued to rise. Fear of height faded. And just when it felt right to curl into a swan dive and glide back down to earth, she started to dither, tumble, and fall. The world below rushed up to greet her at a hundred miles an hour. She felt the whooshing air suffocate her nose and mouth, and tears blur her vision to blindness. Her body felt weighty and compressed toward the night sky, as if the G-force of gravity had turned upside down and she was falling back into space. And when she expected to smash the ground as hard as to disintegrate into the earth, everything became dark, and still, and quiet. Like death.
She was back within him, within her host. It was dark, dark as it gets. She couldn’t see, and felt groggy and dizzy and disorientated. He was up to something: New tricks.
She could sense an imbalance in his stride, carrying a weight out in front of him. His back arched to compensate what he cradled in his arms. She could feel it, the dead weight, and a scent of its aura, familiar—a body, dead or alive she didn’t know. He grunted when he bent over and set it down. It reverberated through her hollow self. He was moving again, empty-handed, quiet about a house, and into another room. She began to see little bits, like looking through a prism of water refracting a small amount of available light, enough to see blurry, dark shapes. It was unusual because he moved without trouble. The visual impairment was only affecting her, it seemed. It was difficult to identify exactly where he was now but she guessed it to be a bedroom, judging by the large dark shape in front and his unwillingness to move forward.
He was standing over the bed looking down on the occupant, contemplating his next move, most likely. He made a sound, spoke a word. Sardis heard it as “Mother.” It sounded odd (Mu-there); the spooky tone confused her. There was a stir in the bed and he spoke again, louder but still a whisper. The oddness was in his voice, unlike his own, mimicking that of a girl, overstating every syllable, “Mu-there, Mu-there, way-key, way-key.” The occupant was working to rouse. She could see the blurry baffled shape sit up.
“Sardis? Is that you? What’s the matter? What are you doing standing there in the dark?”
Then a scream and Sardis screamed, too, quietly inside of him. The prism of darkness moved to crooked yellow shapes in the light when Suzanne was hauled from the bed like a cave woman, dragged through to the living room into the kitchen, kicking and screaming, grappling for his fists to prevent the roots being pulled from her head. The screaming did no good, there was no one for miles to hear or help. Sardis was bawling, afraid for what was happening to her mum, for what would happen next.
The tears she cried on the inside restored her inner sight to satisfactory. She could see herself, no longer safe in her bed, but slumped in the living room chair in only her white string singlet and red tartan cotton shorts, where he’d left her so as to be in full view of Suzanne, the tears seeping between sleeping lids.
Suzanne was strapped to one of the long-backed wooden chairs with her ankles bound to the legs with duct tape. The tea towel that hung over the back did nothing to aid her comfort. He had cable ties in his bag of tricks but decided not to use them. The tape was doing a fine job belting her still, important for purpose.
Sardis’ inner self was so close to her mum that she felt she was lending him a hand, helpless to stop him. She knew she needed to disengage if she was to have any chance of saving her mum and herself but she had no idea how to break the connection, sheer will wasn’t working. Her mother’s fear compounded her own; she was sickly afraid.
He was dressed up as something else she hadn’t seen but for a blue flowery frock and the long fair hair that ran over his shoulders, similar to her own. Suzanne had seen him clearly in the light. After he bound her ankles he took a moment to hold her face with a large hand and have her stare back at him, inches to his face. The sight of him replaced her screams with quiet, trembling trepidation. He was so close he could have licked her wet cheek if he wished. She could see the fear speckle on her mum’s cheeks, merge and ooze like muddy grey tears on the skin.
“That’s better, Mu-there,” he said again in that synthetic girly voice. “Don’t force me to rip that pretty nightdress from you and stuff it in your mouth. I don’t want to have to do that. I want us to be able to talk, show you a few things. Say ‘
I understand, Sardis.’ Say it.”
“I-I . . . uh-un-der-sta-and.”
He slapped her full across the face. “‘Sardis.’ Say it.”
“Si-ar-dis.”
“Better. Don’t be looking over at her ’til I tell you; she can’t help you. I’ve given her a little something to keep her quiet. I’m the only daughter you’ve got, so pay attention to me, Mu-there. We’ll get to that imposter shortly.”
Sardis caught another glimpse of herself when he stood from the legs of the chair, before he brought his attention to the Doc Holliday bag on the kitchen table, open wide like a hungry mouth. Dribble ran from her mouth down her chin, dead to the world. She knew then she had been drugged. It explained the suffocation, the compression across her nose and mouth, the dizziness and disorientation, the fall from the sky. She wanted to escape him, wake when his back was turned and pounce with her nails and teeth bared, rip into him like a wild beast as he had done to so many others, gouge out his eyeballs and rip his balls to shredded meat.
The grogginess was waning but the fear remained. Even if she could get back to herself there wasn’t much she could do, considering the state of her. Lift a sharp nail, perhaps, and motion it toward him. That should stop him, NOT. Panic set on top of fear. For now, all she could do was cry and pray inside of him.
He was looking into his Doc Holliday bag, taking things out and putting them on the table, unusual things. No knife. Maybe he thought he didn’t need one for these two suckers. He patted a two-kilo bag of brown sugar and rubbed down the foil of two half pounds of butter like they were his pets. Then he went back into his bag and pulled out a bunch of syringes, the needles capped in place, held together by a rubber band, more than he could have held in one hand alone.
“I’ve plenty more of these, another two bundles.” He giggled in tee-hee fashion, then reverted to his normal voice. It was just as disturbing as his girly one. “She doesn’t like needles very much. She wouldn’t let me use the anaesthetic when I filed down her teeth. I had to be particularly careful not to file to deep—do you know how painful that would have been if I’d nicked through? I could have offered gas but she never asked. It was challenging, brave girl. She must really fear needles to warrant taking such a risk. And that got me thinking. What flavour would she be? How I imagine her to taste in my mouth?” He went back to his girly voice. “I’ve got a little preview for you, Mu-there, see what you think. I hope you’ll be proud of me.”
He pulled four of the syringes from the bundle. Suzanne watched him walk to Sardis, pull a cap from a needle and discard it to the floor. She pleaded for him to stop with her snivelling and a sobbing blubber mouth. Sardis was doing the same at the core of him, but to no avail. Her aura, that energy she needed to do something was missing. The anticipation of the needle produced an anxious fear. Even if the energy was there she didn’t think she could use it. The needle was too close. The outcome could stab her anywhere, do more damage. She watched what he did as he did it. It wasn’t possible to shut eyes that didn’t belong to her. All she could do was brace for the agony.
“Shush, Mu-there, I need concentration,” he said, kneeling down by Sardis’ side, and speaking like a chirpy little girl. “This could go terribly wrong. And we don’t want that. You won’t see it by her reaction, but she will feel it. I love that.” He stuck the needle to her thigh and pulled back the plunger.
She felt nothing. Not from where she was. Maybe her other self felt something but it didn’t show on her shut down face.
The syringe filled with dark blood. He made no effort to remove it, let it hang loosely from the skin, and then flicked the cylinder lightly with one finger. It jarred forward and back and stayed put. “One,” is all he said.
He did the same with another two. The second hung from the arm, the third to the belly. The fourth, he put to her cheek, drew blood, removed, recapped, and detached the needle.
“Mu-there, can you guess what flavour she is?” He tilted his head to the ceiling, brought the syringe up and squirted her blood into his mouth. He made a supping sound, gargled, swallowed, and then said, “Scrumdiddlyumptious.” He turned to Suzanne. “That’s not the answer, by the way. That’s just how she tastes. I’m going to leave those there for now, do the rest later.” He stood up. “Now, Mu-there, back to you.”
He stroked Suzanne’s head as he passed back to the Doc Holliday bag. “You’re behaving ever-so-well, Mu-there. You’re shaking, no need for that”—he pulled the bag to him—“not yet.”
“Wha-why are you doing this?”
His hand was in the bag rummaging, “Bonding Mu-there, we’re bonding. Isn’t that what we call it? But we’re doing it my way. Here, this is the one, let me show you.”
Sardis recognised the lollipop. It was unfamiliar to Suzanne, like a wooden rocket. He covered part of the shaft with his hand, “What flavour does it say?”
Suzanne looked at it then up at him. “Orange,” she said.
“Very good, Mu-there, but that’s not it, now picture lots of them, all over her face, hands, legs, arms, back, front, even the naughty bits, everywhere, sucking the blood from her. . . .” He moved his hand and kept the shaft of the lollipop stick in front of her. “So now you get it.”
Suzanne shook her head, letting go of a new wave of tears.
“Of course you do. They’ll get it, too. They share my sense of humour. I think they secretly look forward to it. It’s genius.”
Stencilled across the shaft was BLOOD SORANGE
“But first we have to get you sorted. Yours is, well, let’s say, less imaginative, but still good. Here, let me show you yours. I don’t normally do two. No need to guess but I’ll let you guess what happens after. It’s an easy one.” He put the lollipop on the table with a clonk and picked the second from the bag, the exact same size and shape and showed it to her. Stencilled across the shaft was TOFFEE POP
He ignored her frightened uncertainty. “Now we just need to find a big pot and get cooking.”
Sardis wanted to be with her mum. She couldn’t see her when her host was rummaging for the pot and figuring out how to work the stove. But she could hear her repeatedly saying, “Please don’t.” And when he went back to the table to lift the two kilos of brown sugar and two half-pounds of butter, she’d looked at him and say, “Please, please, we’re not going to say anything to anybody. Please, let us go,” which afforded her another slap across her sodden face and a final warning in his man’s voice to, “Shut the fuck up.”
It was eating Sardis up the way she looked with red, streaming eyes. Snot hung from her nostrils. Snot always seeps when people are terrified. But it was her aura that really affected Sardis. It was like thick grey toffee.
If Suzanne believed what Sardis had told her, then she was pleading directly to her as well as him: It was she who took the pot from the bottom cupboard, placed it on the hob, and cranked the gas cooker to full. She who gathered the ingredients to make the caramel, and she who slapped her mum so hard across the face that she did indeed “shut the fuck up.” And it was her with a wooden spoon in hand, waiting for the sugar and butter to melt.
The butter was half the size spreading across the sugar, dissolving in a light golden froth. She had a good idea what he (or was it her) was going to do when the mixture turned toffee brown and bubbled like liquid glass.
TOFFEE POP
A new level of helpless fear enveloped her when her guardian mum and grandma appeared and everything else disappeared. Their eyes looked sullen, almost disapproving, and not helpful to her cause. In unison their eyes turned down and held steady to reveal all of themselves: grandma’s sliced arms, blood dripping to the ground from all her fingers; her mum’s carved, petite, red-soaked frame with bound and crushed wrists, and her host below, a hairy mane tugging between dangled legs. And boom!, boom!, boom!, in three swift stages she was looking into his bl
oody, wolf-like face. Then it all disappeared.
It was brief and upsetting, but a necessary visit: In her current state, her mind wasn’t working. Fear and panic did no good, sucking out her energy, reducing it to uselessness. These were emotions she couldn’t handle (nor should she want to); she needed new ones. They knew that. The brief unsettling visit was a reminder. With the woman and the lime green ribbon it was different. Those were of sorrow and remorse, tangible feelings drawn in from the outside which produced pity and a need to help, to deliver solace. That’s where the energy to act had come from.
The grogginess was gone, the panic too, and the fear, mostly. What replaced it was a hatred and a rage never before experienced, for everything he had done and everything he was about to do. It was an emotion searing into a concentrate of burning lemon-yellow sun, which brought with it a new sensation all of its own: strange, as if she were seeping into every part of his being. Almost becoming him, wearing him like a zip-up costume in which the hate and rage matched his. She knew where he was coming from, how he could do the things he did, but not how he got there. She could feel the charge and the change within, and knew she had the capability to do just about anything. Anything he could ever do, even surpass him, not give it a second thought if she felt it justified. She could be just like him. It was a scary thought not dwelt on, the hate too great. She hadn’t seen her other self in a while and wondered if there had been a change.
The sugar crystal was breaking down in the melted butter. With the handle in one hand and the wooden spoon in the other, he pushed the molten mix about the pot, taking care to get the consistency right for his purpose. Suzanne whimpered against the smell of thickening toffee. Sardis saw his hands change colour, darken along with the toffee and proceed to spoil to black.
The Ice Scream Man Page 41