A Party to Murder

by John Inman

  As they passed the dining room, he saw that the darkness inside had grown since the last time they were there. Clearly, the fire was almost out, and without more firewood, it was apt to stay that way unless they started breaking up furniture. A clap of thunder made Jamie cringe and edge closer to Derek’s back. Derek reached around behind him and patted Jamie’s hand. He made little shushing noises to ease Jamie’s fear. It didn’t work, but Jamie loved him for it anyway.

  Warily, at turtle speed, they crept up the long staircase, their eyes never leaving the black hole of shadow awaiting them at the top. The wailing storm outside covered the few bumps and scrapes of their footsteps as they climbed. At least Jamie hoped it did.

  “Remember what Tommy said?” Jamie asked in a squeaky voice. He didn’t like that he sounded so scared, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was terrified.

  “What’s that?” Derek softly asked. “What did he say?”

  “He said Banyon had a gun.”

  “I remember.” There was a beat of silence before Derek answered further. “I also remember Jamie said they fought in the bedroom after Banyon pulled the gun. When Tommy told us about their chase through the woods, he never mentioned the gun again.”

  “And…?”

  Derek stopped and turned, gazing down at Jamie on the step below. “And I was hoping the gun might still be in their room.”

  Jamie swallowed again. It felt like he had a rolled-up pair of socks stuck in his throat. “You think it’s really there?”

  Derek shrugged, a wicked grin lighting his face in a sudden flash of far-off lightning. “It’s worth a look.”

  Jamie couldn’t resist. He laid his hand flat to the furry expanse of hair that circled Derek’s belly button, wishing he had time to poke his tongue in there too. Derek gave a little jump at his touch, probably because his hand was cold.

  “If it’s still there,” Jamie said, “I’ll let you keep the gun. I’ve never shot one in my life.”

  Derek’s grin faded. “Actually neither have I.”

  Jamie groaned. “Great.”

  They turned, and with his fingers now brushing Derek’s ass again, they proceed up the stairs.

  The scattered lightning strikes were coming fewer and further between, as if the storm might be moving away. The hallway on the second floor was as dark and cold as a cave. They felt their way along the wall to the door of their room and, moving as quietly as they could, twisted the knob and slipped inside.

  Derek didn’t bother with a shirt. He simply grabbed his coat off the back of a chair and slipped it around his naked back. Jamie grabbed his own coat and pulled it on as well. He gazed longingly at the bed, wishing he had a naked Derek there, nestled under the covers, wrapped tightly in his arms. He spotted Derek watching him as if he knew exactly what he was thinking.

  Jamie offered a guilty smile, and Derek answered it with one of his own. He stepped close and laid a kiss to Jamie’s mouth, but before Jamie could get serious and add some tongue to the kiss, Derek stepped away and tugged him toward the door.

  “Let’s check out their room,” he whispered.

  “Whose room?”

  “Tommy and Banyon’s.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Stay close,” Derek admonished.

  “Well, duh,” Jamie muttered, wondering if Derek could hear his eyeballs rolling up into his skull.

  Back out in the hall, they listened for a moment to make sure they were alone. Hearing nothing, they moved deeper through the shadows to the rooms at the back of the hall. Jamie started shaking when they passed Cleeta-Gayle’s room, remembering what lay there behind the door. Derek must have felt his tremor.

  “It’s okay, Jamie. Just keep moving. Stay with me.”

  So Jamie did. The rumble of thunder and the scattered flashes of lightning, carried on the wings of the storm, followed them deeper along the hall. Sometimes the lightning showed them the way. Other times it left them breathless and shivering in the dark.

  “Here,” Derek whispered, and feeling along the wall, Jamie touched the molding of the door leading to Banyon and Tommy’s room. The door was ajar.

  Praying to God the room was empty, Jamie followed Derek as they ducked inside and quietly latched the door behind them.

  “There’s a candle in my pocket,” Derek whispered. A second later, a match flared as Derek lit the wick. Soft golden light fanned out across the room.

  Jamie looked around. The room was remarkably similar to their own. An unmade bed, mussed by sex. A night table on either side. Dusty curtains framing the two windows. A door off to the side led into the bathroom. A huge chifforobe, with drawers on one side and a door on the other that would open up to afford hanging space for clothing, stood in the corner like a looming giant waiting to lunge.

  Taking the candle with him, Derek stepped away and peered into the bathroom. Jamie moved straight to the bed and began ruffling through the bedclothes, hoping to find the gun. It wasn’t there. He bent and peeked under the bed.

  “Light!” he hissed, and Derek came quickly to his side, thrusting the candle under the bed so Jamie could see. There was nothing there but a lot of dust balls and a used condom.

  “Yuk,” they said in unison.

  Standing, they dusted themselves off. While Derek quietly drew open the drawers on the right side of the chifforobe, Jamie swung open the closet-sized door on the left.

  The eyes that peered back at him startled him so that he cried out and stumbled backward. Tripping, he landed flat on the bed, his mouth wide with terror, his pick falling from his hand and clattering across the floor.

  Derek gawked at him, then turned his attention to where Jamie had most recently been looking. Inside the chifforobe. And there, with his head squeezed in among the empty hangers, sat Oliver Banyon, barely visible in the shadows, his arms and legs folded tight in the confined space. His throat had been cut like Cleeta-Gayle’s. His eyes were open like hers had been as well. The bloody handle of a knife still protruded from the awful wound in his throat.

  “No,” Derek muttered, almost dropping the candle. “It can’t be.”

  To Jamie’s horror, Derek reached out and pressed a fingertip to the hardening lava flow of blood that had spilled down Banyon’s chest and puddled in his lap. When Derek pulled his hand away, his fingertip was clean.

  “The blood is coagulated,” he said.

  Jamie blinked. “What does that mean?”

  Derek turned to study his face. “Don’t you understand? It means Banyon was killed hours ago.”

  Jamie’s eyes narrowed. He was still confused. When Derek stared at the corpse again, Jamie stared at it too. He let the candlelight illuminate Banyon’s still body, and this time he tried not to look away. He struggled desperately to understand what Derek was attempting to explain. He thought back through everything that had happened, trying to trace a chronological order of the events that had brought him and Derek to this very moment.

  Then it hit him. Jamie finally understood. “His clothes are dry.”

  “Yes,” Derek said. “And so is the blood. Like I said, he’s been dead for hours.”

  “But Tommy said—”

  “I know what Tommy said.”

  Jamie tried to remember Tommy’s story. Every word of it. The truth finally dawned on him like a rising sun creeping over the edge of a hill.

  “He lied,” Jamie said. “Banyon never chased him through the woods, did he?”

  “No,” Derek said, extending the candle to study the body again. The hard, clotted blood, the dry clothing. “He couldn’t have. Banyon was dead by then. He must have been right here where we see him now. Everything Tommy told us was a lie. He made it all up.”

  Jamie remembered something else. “It’s also why he didn’t want us to come up to his room after he came in out of the rain. It wasn’t because he didn’t want us rummaging through his things. It was because he didn’t want us to find the body.”

  Their eyes met before they both
turned back to the corpse.

  Something about the boyish clump of hair hanging over Banyon’s still forehead sent a spasm of sorrow shooting through Jamie that almost ripped his breath away.

  Before he could speak, a footfall shuffled over the hardwood floor behind them. A floorboard creaked. Jamie jumped, and Derek whirled around so quickly the candle went out. Darkness fell like a hammer. A heartbeat later, a blaze of excruciating light, as sharp as glass, poured over them both. Just as quickly, the light was replaced by an exploding flash of pain at the side of Jamie’s head. With considerable surprise, he watched the floor fly up to meet him. When it struck, a different kind of darkness enveloped him. Before his brain shut down completely, he heard a wail of fury tear from Derek’s throat.

  Jamie raised his head and tried to shake away the pain, but he couldn’t move. His strength seemed to have evaporated with the light. Derek’s horrified face swam away from him in the encroaching gloom.

  Somewhere in the darkness, somewhere close at hand, Jamie heard the sound of flesh striking flesh. Then he heard a duller sound, like the thudding of wood clubbing bone. Derek cried out in agony, but his cry was quickly cut off. A moment later, the floor under Jamie shook as Derek’s body struck the floor beside him.

  Then came a most horrible silence.

  A voiceless scream of loss rang out, the sound alive only inside Jamie’s head. With a deep, eternal sadness, Jamie bowed before the closing darkness. His cheek landed hard against the cold wood floor, and with a last jarring burst of pain, he knew no more.

  Chapter Fifteen

  JAMIE AWOKE in darkness to the sound of quiet laughter. The moment consciousness hit him, his thoughts started spinning around inside his head, rattling senselessly, tumbling over each other. His mind was a thrumming hive of questions, impressions, and hazy, confused snippets, none of which made any sense at all.

  What the hell happened? Where the hell am I?

  In response to a sticky warmth on his neck, he reached with trembling fingers and found a thick smear of blood. He knew full well what it was by the viscous heat of it on his skin.

  Cold wood lay beneath him, and he knew he was on the floor somewhere inside the house. But in which room? The air smelled musky and rank, like a long-unused animal lair. Over his head, the storm sounded closer. Inches away. It felt like he could reach out and touch the wind and the rain. Like he could grab a handful of cold, stormy air as it whipped past, stirring the cobwebs in the eaves. From the corner of his eye, he saw the shape of a tricycle parked against the wall.

  The attic! He was in the attic. Where the playroom had been. Where the old, unused toys were stored. Where the implements of a forgotten child’s life had been left to molder and gather dust. Unremembered. Unmourned. Where rats, perhaps, or squirrels had built nests inside the walls. All gone now but for the pestilent, musky reek they left behind.

  Jamie’s tongue found a gap in his gumline that shouldn’t have been there. One of his lower front teeth was broken. As soon as his mind began to clear, he could taste the blood. Tiny shards of tooth enamel dusted his tongue. He tried to spit them out, but his mouth didn’t seem to be working properly. That was because his lips were split and swollen, he suddenly realized. Probably from the blow that cracked the tooth, although he didn’t remember it. A switch clicked, and a bright spear of light stabbed into his eyes. He gasped and tried to turn away. When he moved, an overriding ache touched him in places he didn’t know he had. Everything hurt. His head thumped. Bones creaked. A sharp arrow of agony pierced his hand, and he looked down, squinting against the light, to see that one of his fingers was bent in a way that it never should have been bent. It was the index finger on his left hand. It was clearly broken, and peering closer, he saw that not only was the bone shattered between the first and second knuckle, but the fingernail had been torn away. That was where most of the pain came from.

  Jamie bit back a sob, staring at it. Then he sensed a human presence close to him in the room.

  It took every ounce of concentration he possessed to gather up the strength to speak, and when he did, his voice sounded alien to his ears. Like the choked plaint of a trapped animal, barely alive, desperate, hopeless. Even the simple act of forming words on his tongue caused him to shrink into himself in pain.

  “Derek?” he wept softly. “Are you there?”

  When no answer came, he squinted past the light, trying to see around it. The bright bulb was so close he could feel the heat of it on his face. It must have been a gazillion fucking watts.

  He remembered the quiet laughter he had woken to. Somewhere past the glare of that damnable light, aimed directly at his aching eyes, he caught the merest susurration of sound. The smallest noise in the world, it seemed. And easily recognizable. It was the inhalation of a single human breath. It wasn’t his, he knew, and he was pretty sure it didn’t belong to Derek either. He didn’t know how he could possibly know that, but he did.

  The sudden pain in his throat that came with the utterance of words caused a spate of tears to well in his eyes. He tasted grit from his broken tooth again. Wouldn’t his dentist be thrilled! What did crowns go for these days? Fifteen hundred bucks? Of course, if he didn’t get out of this alive, he supposed he wouldn’t have to worry about it.

  “Move the light,” he rasped. “Please. Where’s Derek? What have you done with him?”

  “I’m not sure,” came a voice from behind the light. “The last time I saw him, he was sprawled out like a dead thing. Bleeding like a stuck pig, I think they call it. Head wounds are so messy.”

  Jamie cried, “No!” and the split in his lip tore farther. The pain of it caused him to cry out again, and that wail of misery caused his tender mouth to split even more. He bit down on his tongue to keep from bellowing yet again.

  His voice was stronger now, but still every syllable tore at his throat. “Help him,” he sobbed. “Don’t let him die.” And after a pause, he added, “Please, Tommy. Don’t take Derek from me.”

  The same chuckle he had woken to came again—a carefree little chortle that brought a rising surge of fury crashing through him.

  “So you figured it out,” Tommy Stevens said, his voice still chipper, like he was having a spot of tea and conversing about the weather.

  “Y-yes,” Jamie said, biting back his anger. “We found Banyon’s body. It was you who killed him. It had to be. Just like you killed the others.”

  The chuckle died, lost in the cries of the storm overhead. “Hmm. Do I detect a rebuke?”

  Not waiting for an answer, Tommy commenced humming an atonal little tune. He sounded like someone passing the time, casually waiting for something interesting to happen.

  Jamie licked his lips and tasted blood. The first spasms of pain from his shattered tooth began to sharpen itself on his senses. It dug through his head like the blade of a knife scraping across a whetstone. His broken finger ached, the empty nail bed burning like fire. His other injuries—a few bruises and contusions—were minor compared to the tooth and the finger. And even those two miseries were as nothing compared to the hatred that swelled inside his heart and head.

  “Help Derek,” he screamed. “Don’t let him die! Where is he? Let me go to him!”

  The light rolled away from in front of him. The absence of glare gave Jamie strength. He tried to sit up. And as he pulled his legs beneath him and pushed himself to a sitting position, the pick he had carried earlier came down in a flash of steel and wood and embedded itself in the floor inches away from his left knee. Shattered wood chips flew, stinging across the skin of his hand. The echo of the blow made Jamie fall backward, raising his arms to shield his face.

  Tommy laughed out loud. “You’re a jumpy little faggot.”

  And with that simple insult, Jamie’s courage and fury flared yet again. “Fuck you,” he spat. “Why are you doing this? Why did you kill all these innocent people? Why did you hurt Derek?”

  Jamie could see now. With the flashlight no longer aimed directly i
nto his eyes, he realized he had been correct earlier. They were in the attic, where all the old toys were stored. The flashlight had rolled to a stop at the base of the wall. It illuminated nothing now but the dusty old baseboard inside this room that hadn’t been used in years. But in the flashlight’s ambient glow Jamie could now see the features of the room. He could see, in fact, everything. Toys, furniture, the lot.

  Including Tommy Stevens, the little prick, standing in front of him, glaring down. Tommy’s hair was sopping wet and plastered to his forehead. He was shivering, either with cold or hatred, or maybe a little of both. Insanity seemed to be writhing around behind his eyeballs too, and that scared Jamie more than anything else.

  Tommy’s face was so filled with hate it almost stripped Jamie’s breath away. Awkwardly, Jamie murmured through his injuries, through his swollen, damaged mouth. “Why, Tommy? Why did you do it? This has to be a mistake. Derek and I don’t know you. We don’t know any of these people! What did we ever do to you? What did we ever do to anybody inside this house?”

  Tommy’s hands clenched at his sides. As quick as a snake, Tommy reached down and grabbed a fistful of Jamie’s hair. With his head wrenched back, Jamie cried out again. He stared upward to see Tommy glaring down at him with such icy disgust that Jamie cringed before it. A flash of lightning strobed through the attic window, and in the explosive play of shadow and light, Tommy’s young features were momentarily transformed into the face of a demon. Deadly. Mad. His mouth, tight and thin, smiled down at Jamie with such malevolence, Jamie could feel the fury of it digging into his skin like needles.

  Again, Jamie rasped, “Why? What did we do to you?”

  “Nothing,” Tommy snarled, the two simple syllables writhing through the air like snakes spilling from a hole. “Don’t you understand that yet? I’m not the reason you’re here. I’m not the one you hurt. It’s someone else you have to answer for. Not me. I’m just here to exact revenge.” Leaning closer, he chortled again. “Yes. That’s me. I’m the taxman. Collecting the debts.”