Tomorrow I Will Kill Again

by Matthew Allred

  “I read one of his books,” Sean said, folding his own tie back and forth on his belly as he leaned on her desk. “It was very good. Is that what got you interested in him in the first place?”

  This would be so much easier if she wasn’t crying. She’d already told Sean the reason she stayed late so often was—as he had inferred—that she no longer felt comfortable or even welcome at home.

  “No,” she said, wiping another rogue tear from her eye. “He hadn’t written as much as a short story when we met at the University of Chicago when I was nineteen. He was studying business. About a year after we met through a friend of mine, things got really serious between us, and without even realizing it we were headed for marriage. I remember when he read his first Civil War book, The Killer Angels. He read it in two days, even though he was swamped with classes. It was a gift from his uncle, just something to read to pass some time, but it changed him.” She found a pencil on the desk, and rolled it nervously back and forth, liking the faint click-click-click it made as she did. “After that, he read every Civil War book he could get his hands on. It’s funny, actually, the day he proposed was also the day he told me he wasn’t going into business after all. The two things went hand-in-hand; basically it was, ‘Will you marry me if I spend the rest of my life trying to write books like these?’ I wasn’t surprised. I knew before he did that he was going to write these books. I saw the look on his face as he read them. They were like revelations to him.”

  Sean pushed himself off the desk and sat in the rarely used plastic chair facing her. “Obviously it was a good career change. I understand you’re both doing quite well now.” Jen mentally brushed off the annoyance she felt at him mentioning their wealth. Again, he swept his hair back with a model’s vanity. “So what’s the problem? I mean, why would you rather be here in Salt Lake working than home in your beautiful mansion with you brilliant husband? What is it, exactly,” he leaned in, hands on his knees, “that makes you so uncomfortable about home?”

  Jen hesitated. Just how much was she going to tell him? Well, she’d gone this far.

  She said, “Honestly, Sean, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I don’t think he wants to have kids.”

  “And you do?”

  Embarrassed, she said, “More than anything.”

  “Well, then, that is a problem.”

  “But it’s not just that, it’s this whole move. I didn’t want to come here. He talked me into it, and I still don’t know why he wanted to come.”

  Sean said, “You don’t like it here?”

  “You know, Sean, I really don’t.” She said, realizing how true it was as she spoke it. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “What if he said you could have children?”

  “Then I think I could take it.”

  He leaned over the desk even more. His piney cologne drifted to her. He said, “You have to tell him.” He seemed to her not quite sincere, as if what he actually wanted was the opposite of what he was saying. “Don’t let him do this to you. And if he won’t give you what you want, someone else will.”

  She wondered at the implications of this and shuddered minutely. Sean was an okay guy to talk to, she supposed, but if he was suggesting himself, he was way off-base. She ran the last few minutes of her life through her head, and suddenly felt soiled. “Well,” she said, “Thanks for talking with me Sean. I should get going.”

  He said, “Yes,” his eyes on her like a waiting child, “you should.” His voice was hollow, drained of power. Despite the bright florescent lights in her office, the room seemed dim now, like Sean was sucking brightness out of the room.

  6

  Driving home, she decided not to think about Sean anymore. Instead, her thoughts turned to Utah and just what it was that made her not want to be here. She often thought of the first time she flew into Salt Lake International from Chicago. The airport is located—quite unfortunately—very near the Great Salt Lake, which is “great” only in the sense that it is large. The first impression she had of Utah was a lasting one, a dead wasteland moonscape stretching out over an improbable distance. She knew, of course, that many people felt the state was one of unique beauty, but flying in, it looked like nothing but a flat expanse of gray and white cradled by brown mountains on either side. She had thought, There are no trees in this place. Of course, there were trees, some of the more suburban streets were packed with them, but compared to what she was used to in the Mideast, Utah looked like a desert. She later learned that nothing larger than brine shrimp lived in the water that was four times saltier than the ocean and that much of Utah was, technically, a desert.

  Paul loved the drive from Salt Lake to Peoa, but Jen couldn’t stand it. It was mile after mile of sagebrush and scant plant life. The ground was brown in Illinois, too, but at least there it was covered by green growth of one kind or another. Finding even these thoughts exhausting after her long day, Jen eventually decided to think of nothing, and drove the rest of the way on autopilot.

  7

  Cards was outside. Having dog fun among the trees. It was dark.

  Inside house man and food were waiting but there was smell she had to follow. She sniffed it. It was old and meaty. She sniffed. Old. Meaty. Dark. She ran between two trees and then past another. Then smell was tricky. In front of her leading her but then behind her then beneath her then gone then in front of her. She sniffed and found it was more than old and more than meaty. It wasn’t a dog or a person or food or anything like that. It was a round smell. An old meaty round big smell. Very big. She sniffed and saw a bubbling up in the ground of leaves and dirt and she felt-smelled the thing beneath it. The old big round meat of thing. The bubbling up subsided and she felt hungry and went inside and ate dog food in the kitchen.

  8

  Seven months after they’d been married, back when they had first moved to Armour Square, Jen was working as a glorified secretary at a law firm—Paul could never remember what her actual title was, just some string of letters—and Paul was working on his first book, Vicksburg. Jen knew he enjoyed the work, but also that he felt bad about not bringing in any money. She knew, somehow, it would all work out. She’d believed in his writing, even though he was so afraid he’d fail. The night he finished the final draft, she came home to find him in unusually good spirits.

  “I might actually be able to do this,” he’d said, looking almost star struck.

  “I know,” she said, joining him on their horrid thrift store behemoth of a couch, pouring two glasses of sparkling wine. “I’m proud of you.”

  “I mean it,” he said, as much to himself as to her. He sounded like a scientist who’d just made his first breakthrough discovery, too shy to really bring the outcome into the light, afraid he would find it was just an illusion, a false positive. He picked his glass up from their battered coffee table but didn’t drink. “This thing might be pretty good.” The finished manuscript lay flat on the table in front of them, looking as clean and white as a sacred building.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him.

  Their lips stayed together for a long time, and before she even had a chance to set her glass down he was pulling her button-up shirt out of her pants, popping two of the buttons off. Even though it was a work shirt, she didn’t care. He’d been so oppressed by self-doubt lately that she was too thrilled by his happiness to worry about a shirt. He pushed her bra up with his free hand, freeing one of her smallish, pretty breasts, and she laughed.

  “Let me take it off!” she said. “You’re going to break it.”

  He kissed her naval and said, “So what?” He accidentally knocked the glass from her hand, and it fell to the table, cracking down one side and spraying wine everywhere but the manuscript.

  Locking lips, they’d undressed themselves and each other in a youthful flurry of movement all while finding their way to the floor. That was the only night of their marriage they hadn’t used protection, and each
of them had been secretly hoping Jen would get pregnant, even though they felt they couldn’t afford it.

  9

  When he heard the Taurus pulling up the drive, Paul walked downstairs. After a serious battle of egos and options, he had come to the conclusion that he was, indeed, losing his mind. He knew it needed to be dealt with before someone really got hurt. He worked his way down the steps in the shadowy light emanating from his office. Aside from the front porch light, and a little plug-in safety light in the kitchen, everything was dark.

  He expected Jen to come in as she usually did these days: exhausted and unhappy. He wished he had good news for her. He wished he had something wonderful to tell her. Instead he was going to shatter her. He was going to tell her about the car salesman, the police officer, the muddy river—all the things that had to be hallucinations. Quite seriously, he wondered if she would leave him. A part of him tried to promise that in some ways this would probably be a good thing, that she would be happy to have a problem they could work on together, something like that. He wanted to believe it, but he felt a black certainty that telling her the truth might mean the end for them.

  He stood in the living room, waiting for her to come in, thinking, Are things really this bad? They are, aren’t they? In less than a minute I’m going to tell my wife that I am losing my mind. He didn’t think about what that would mean for the future. He knew if he did, if he really thought about the hospitals and psychological evaluations that were to come, he may not have been able to say what he needed to say.

  She came in, and he was struck by her beauty; not that she was some Hollywood starlet (nor did he wish her to be), but simply that she was lovely. He did not notice her this way often enough. He thought of how things had been back in Armour Square, early on, before they’d started fighting. How much passion they’d shared. The light from the porch swung with the door, painting her face briefly white. Then she closed it and it was dark. Her low heels clacked three times as she came further into the room.

  He faltered. He knew if he didn’t say something now he might never be able to.

  He gripped the handrail halfway down the flight of stairs and said, “Honey, I might be losing my mind. I may need professional help.”

  Jen’s only response was a wicked grin. She didn’t move; she simply stood in the dark entry way. “Did you hear me?” He said, more loudly than he intended, “I think I’m losing my mind. You may not be safe with me!”

  She stepped into the living room and switched on the small, Tiffany-style lamp they kept on the end table. The lamp’s varied, deep colors muted the little light it put off. She took a step closer to him but then stopped abruptly. He rested his weight on the foot farthest from her, up one step from the other.

  She said, “Paul, let’s go upstairs.” She was looking right at him, her eyes flicking back and forth from one side of his face to the other. He could barely see her pupils in the dimness. “I’d like to see how you’ll perform.” She licked her lips. “Tonight is a very special night.”

  “What are you talking about?” He said, pleading, “Are you even listening to me? There is something seriously wrong with me!”

  She bit her lower lip and her smile disappeared for a moment. She said, “I get it. That’s why you’ve been ignoring me lately. You can’t get it up anymore, can you? How sad. Sad for us both.”

  Paul looked into her cold, devilish eyes and said, “You aren’t her, are you? You’re another one of them.” He couldn’t help but be dismayed by how textbook crazy that sounded.

  She laughed, deep and throaty, and though it was Jen’s voice, it was not her laugh.

  She said, “Oh, I’m her. At least, this is her body. You used to love this body, being with it, but now you won’t. Why?”

  He said, “Please give her back to me. Please leave me alone.”

  She said, “He won’t,” and sounded reluctantly resigned, a tiny fraction of humanity could be heard. “He can’t leave you alone, Writer, not after what you did in the forest. He couldn’t turn away from a mind like yours even if he wanted to.” She stepped closer. “All those books, those descriptions and stories and characters living in your head, it’s given you power. More than you could understand or ever make use of, but Deeny knows how to use it.” She began to ascend the large staircase, using each little packet of words to take another step. “Deeny is a man who knows what he wants and how to get it.” Step. “A man armed with that knowledge is not easily stopped.” Step. “You, on the other hand, do not know what you want.” Step. She was only a few stairs below him now. “You have achieved great fame and recognition in your field, but it doesn’t fill you.” Step. “You have a lot of money and a little bit of love, but they do not satisfy you.” Step. She was just below him now; one more stair would bring her face directly to his lower chest. “Your needs are something else Deeny can use.” Now she wasn’t moving, just staring him down from below. Her eyes no longer shifted from side to side.

  Then she said something that burned Paul’s brain to hear. She said, “Hunger and blood have always been two sides of the same coin.” It was a line from his most recent book, Confederate Dead. Captain Jeffs, a character who had appeared in three of Pauls’ books so far, had said it while explaining to a fresh-faced teenage soldier what war’s two great powers were, the two things it did better than anything else: kill and consume. Hunger and blood.

  With so little light, Paul could not clearly see the room, he could barely see his wife’s body. But he saw the thing inside her clearly. Not a ghost or a monster, but not really a person. It was like a blank copy of a person, superimposed inside her. He said, “Are you Deeny?”

  “No,” Jen’s mouth said. “I am just an unborn. A nothing person.”

  Then Paul said, as if the thing would help him, “What can I do to stop this?”

  The wife-thing laughed again, playful now. She took the final step and joined him awkwardly on his stair. She slipped her arms around him and leaned her face in to whisper in his ear. He wanted to push her away, but he had a feeling if she went tumbling down the stairs now it would be Jen paying for it. She said, “Nothing. You are slowing him, Writer. You are fighting.” She squeezed him affectionately around his midsection. “Can’t you feel that? The constant pull on you? But you resist. You think you can withstand him, but you can’t. He will have your beautiful mind, and with it he will be more than he has ever been. And, here’s the best part, you will become more than you could ever have dreamed.”

  Not knowing why he bothered to speak, but feeling like he must explain, Paul said, “I’m happy with my life. I don’t need whatever it is this Deeny is offering.”

  “You are lying. I have to leave soon. One more chance to cheat on your wife with her body? Us nobodies know what we’re doing.”

  Paul said nothing.

  “Your choice,” it said, “for now.”

  The thing let him go, and walked back to the entryway, exactly as if Jen had just walked in. “Showtime,” it said. Then it disappeared from her body, and without so much as a confused shake of the head, Jen walked further in the room and flipped on the bright bank of lights in the living room, hanging over their imposing fireplace.

  She looked up at him, clearly exhausted, and said, “Why are you standing here in the dark?”

  Paul said nothing. She sighed in the way that meant, Sometimes I don’t even know who you are, and made her way into the kitchen to fix a dinner Paul probably should have made already.

  And Paul wanted to follow her. He wanted to hold her and kiss every inch of her face. He wanted to take her upstairs and tell her they could start a family, that he would give her a child. He wanted to beg her to never leave him and to tell him they would always be together. He wanted her to pet his head and make him curl up next to her somewhere warm.

  Instead, he went to the upstairs bathroom and brushed his teeth. Then he went to bed. Just before dropping off into a troubled sleep, some thought flitted at the edge of his mind. No. Not a t
hought…an image. It wasn’t clear, but it felt good and bad all at once. Like the best thing in the universe had been coupled with the worst: Something red. Something wet and heavy. What it had to do with anything, Paul didn’t know, and he was too exhausted to care.

  10

  In the morning, he lay in their huge, empty bed for hours, debating. He kicked around his scant options and picked up his phone a number of times. Each time he simply set it back down. There was no one he could call, no one he could tell. His eyes rested on the walls of his room, irregular boxes of light from the windows stretched dramatically across the textured maroon paint. Why had he built this house? It seemed suddenly strange to him, as if the decision had been made without his approval. He thought of when he’d first graduated high school in Illinois. He’d had a plan then. Business degree. Find some company that paid well and took care of its employees. Make money. Have a family. Fish and bowl. Maybe even take some private flying lessons. He wanted to move to the coast. The east coast. New York or maybe DC. Certainly he would never have thought he’d move west, unless it was California or something. And Utah? He thought, Do I really know what I’m doing here? He twisted in their huge comforter, not feeling particularly comforted. Now he didn’t have a plan, did he? He’d chosen the shiftless life of an artist, even if he was successful. There was no fire under him. He had to motivate himself if he was going to get another book done. And now he was… distracted. I think you mean absolutely insane, said some quiet, certain voice inside him.

  He picked up his phone again, ready to dial the first number that popped into his head, but then the forest started whispering promises about a book that could be written, a book that would fill him in a way his others had not, in a way his home and car had not, in a way his plans and lack of plans had not.