Tomorrow I Will Kill Again

by Matthew Allred

  In the midst of this weird indulgence, another instinct fought for his attention: his survival instinct. He made a mental list of weapons within reach, and couldn’t think of much. Even his electric toothbrush (the most promising item he could think of nearby) was too far away to grab. He patted the pockets of his bathrobe, and he felt the weight of the bayonetted-rifle letter opener. He couldn’t remember grabbing it after putting it back in the drawer, but he must have. Paul’s brain was in overdrive, and all these thoughts took place in a matter of three or four seconds. However, one thing he would have realized had he more presence of mind, was the way the huge man in front of him seemed content to stand as he was, sort of crouched over him, offering himself. It was as if Deeny were giving Paul time to consider his options and how he might proceed.

  With the intruder so close to his face, crouched over him like that, Paul thought he could do some serious damage. He wasn’t about to waste the chance. His fingers tightened around the butt of the tiny rifle-shape and slammed the point of the short blade into the man’s face. “Arrgh!” he said as he did so, a war cry that sounded like a madman’s to his own ears.

  Paul had never so much as punched a person before and was not prepared for the implosion of bone and tendons he then felt. It was as if the face wasn’t really a face at all, just a fleshy, hollowed-out copy of one. He saw blood, both red and black, splatter across his hand and arm as they went inside the thing’s head. The anti-light mercifully masked the most graphic details of the violence.

  He assumed the howl coming from Deeny was a cry of pain, but then he deciphered it for what it was: laughter. A great load of blood poured out of the growing wound. The massive, fat head began to collapse in on itself from the top down, mixing with the dark fog. The laughter lost clarity and turned into a bubbling gush of sickening noises. Before the rest of the body deflated and melted, seemingly into the tile floor or into the dark, Paul could make out one phrase plainly.

  Deeny said, “I am undone!” as he laughed.

  5

  Jen had a pleasant morning. There was a stack of papers waiting for her, and a hundred phone calls to make—one of those to the intrepid fountain of familial updates, Dorma—but Jen really didn’t mind. Her door was closed, and before digging into the work for the day, she opened the drawer containing her talking-to mirror.

  “Hi, honey,” she said to her face, “you look good.” And she really did. She didn’t just look and feel like a businesswoman putting on her poker face. Today, she looked and felt like a woman woman. “The best kind of woman,” she said.

  “Last night you made love to a man you love and who loves you and didn’t it feel wonderful?”

  “Yes. Oh yes. In more ways than one. Maybe this was all just Paul’s midlife crisis, a few years early. Maybe now it’s done.”

  “Maybe,” she whispered, no longer looking in the mirror, slowly closing the drawer. “I can hope, right?”

  The phone rang and she answered it.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hey, is this Jennifer Kenner?” She didn’t recognize the voice. She didn’t like it when people used her full name like that. It sounded like they should just keep going: Jennifer Kennifer. Upon getting married she had become Jen once and for all.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “This is Tyson Hills. You probably don’t remember me. Actually, we’ve only ever spoken on the phone.” The voice sounded young, energetic, fun even. But she could tell somehow he was at least her age, maybe a bit older. “I know your husband.”

  “Okay,” she said, not sure how to ask Why are you calling me, then? without sounding rude.

  “Paul?” he offered, as she might need clarification on which of her husbands he meant. After a beat, he seemed to get that the burden of understanding was on his side of the line. “I helped Paul with researching Manpower.”

  “Oh, um, yes. I don’t actually remember talking to you, but I remember Paul telling me your name and what you did. He said you were quite helpful. What can I do for you, Mr. Hills?”

  “I didn’t realize you guys had moved out to Utah.”

  “We did. About four months ago.”

  “I must have an old number and an old email for your husband. I can’t seem to reach him.” He laughed, and it was a good laugh. Jen had a hard time reading this guy—she really couldn’t tell if he was dense, stupid, down-to-earth, goofy, or what. It set her off a bit.

  “That may be,” she said. “I’m sure he’d like to talk to you. What I mean is, I’m sure he’s not avoiding you.”

  He said, “Yeah,” but he didn’t sound convinced.

  “I can get you his number or email. It’s no big secret or anything,” she said, trying to dispel the sense of conspiracy that was building. She felt somewhat nauseas, as if she were trying to look at something that was too big to see.

  He said, “This is going to sound strange...”

  This is already strange, Jen thought.

  “…but I’d like to ask you if you are a religious person.”

  Jen didn’t know what she had been expecting him to say, but it wasn’t that. The subject of God was one she hadn’t thought about in a long, long time.

  “I am,” he said. “I really am. I’m a Mormon.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re Christian, you know,” he said. “I mean, you probably know that, but some people don’t. It’s so weird the ideas people get about the Church, as if we lived in some other weird country or something. They don’t get that we’re just people, you know? Like anybody.”

  “Sure,” she said. She glanced out the blinds and saw three birds lighting on a bronze statue of a man in a suit. She realized she’d looked at that statue dozens of times, but she had no idea who it was meant to immortalize.

  “I tried to convince Paul to join the LDS church,” he said as if she had asked him to. “It’s actually called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but that’s kind of long.” She had an idea that this wasn’t the way Tyson Hills normally sounded—disjointed and uncertain. She couldn’t imagine the man on the phone, the way he was now, being much use to Paul in his research. “Just sometimes you get these feelings and you can’t ignore them.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, curious despite the strangeness of the call. Intrigued when she should have been annoyed or frightened.

  “Ha ha, the word we use a lot is promptings,” he said, as if it explained anything. “When you get a feeling that you should do something—a spiritual feeling, you understand—we believe it comes from the Holy Ghost, and we call it a prompting. Like, once I was on the freeway and I felt like I should pull over. It was weird, you know, and not really very safe. But I knew it was the Holy Ghost telling me to do it, and I obeyed right away. I didn’t know why I was doing it, but I pulled over, and cars were just screaming past me, you know? Somebody even honked.”

  Jen watched as all three birds, one at time, flew off the statue.

  “I just sat in there, idling on the side of the road,” he said. “Not even really a decent shoulder or anything, thinking to myself, Why did you just do that? That was so stupid. Now you have to figure out how to get back on the road, and that’s going to be a nightmare. You didn’t have a prompting or anything, you just had a stray thought, and then, BOOM right in front of me, maybe eighty yards down the road, this semi just goes off course, you know? I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like it was on tracks and then it went off them. It flips over to its side, and this car gets crushed right away and cars are running into it, and they starting pilling up behind it.” He sounded overly-excited. “Easily the worst wreck I’ve ever seen, and here I am, totally safe, hanging out in the shoulder, perfectly fine. I started praying for everybody in the wreck, that they’d be okay or at least die painlessly, and I’m saying, ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ because for some reason God decided to warn me. To save me. Six people died in that crash, and probably over a dozen had to take their cars into the shop. But not
me. I only had to wait there for twenty minutes, and then the road was cleared enough that I could get though.” He sighed a bit, now sounding confused as well. “That’s what we mean when we talk about ‘getting a prompting.’ I think it’s kind of a stupid word for something so spiritual and vital, but we have to call it something, you see?”

  “I understand,” she said, still processing the specifics of his wreck story, trying to see how it related to her and Paul.

  “Well, Mrs. Kenner, I got another prompting this morning, right after I found out through the grapevine that you and your husband had moved to Utah. It was stronger than the one that saved my life. You hear that? Stronger than the one that saved my life,” he said, losing the Utah affectation to his voice, and for a moment sounding more like a hard-steel Easterner.

  “I hear you,” she said. She didn’t know what to make of it, she didn’t know if she put even the slightest bit of faith in his little explanation of a prompting, but she felt certain that it meant a great deal to him. He, at least, was convinced that whatever this prompting was, it mattered. “What was your… your prompting?”

  “I can’t really afford it, but I’ll get the money somewhere,” he said. “You have to let me buy your house.” And then, incredibly, he added, “I’m going to burn it to the ground.”

  6

  Paul rested his back on the bathroom door and watched as the black sort-of fog faded into the nothingness it had come from. The stark November light shone brightly through the half-circle window, revealing nothing. The body, if there had even been one, was gone.

  If there had even been one? Paul thought, You cannot deny this now. He remembered the feeling of the face crumpling beneath his attack. This is not some dream or hallucination. This is really happening and you have a choice to make.

  It was true. He did have a choice to make, as crazy as it sounded.

  Paul had always been able to reduce complex situations into options. He could see only a few here: He could continue to fight Deeny’s influence, or he could give in and let the man (man?) do with him whatever it was he wanted to. Even at this early stage in their relationship, Paul had an idea of what Deeny was trying to lead him to. In the book Deeny only ever did three things: he killed, he prepared to kill, or he reflected on having killed. There was, Paul supposed, one other option, which was actually simply a rejection of choice—suicide.

  Paul was paralyzed physically and mentally, unable to choose or consider choices. Deeny had tricked him, and he thought he knew why. Paul hadn’t put the letter opener in his pocket; at least, if he had, he had been made to or compelled to. Deeny had asked him if he had ever killed anyone and, of course, he hadn’t. But now he had. Even if it was some kind of monster, some kind of non-human. Even though he was certain Deeny would be coming back, he had killed the body that had housed him. Not murder, no, he wouldn’t call what he had done murder, but it was killing.

  Already he could feel a distant, empty part of himself filling up. Absent-mindedly, he began thumping the back of his head on the door he rested against. He did it hard—hard enough to hurt. He could not deny that he’d enjoyed slamming the letter-opener into that giant face in some way; as terrified, as confused as he had been, killing the thing had been gratifying. It was a pleasure to burn, he thought, remembering the “firemen” from Bradbury’s tale. That’s what it felt like, like it was Paul’s job. He felt as if he had been made, in some capacity, to kill.

  He stood up and returned to his office. The Civil War era photographs that served as his screensaver marched across the monitor, and Paul sank back into his chair, met by the familiar hiss of air the leather chair always let out.

  He was horrified by the realization that it was now much more likely that he would give in to Deeny’s pulling at him. He could have that feeling, that rush of taking a life, over and over and over if he joined with this force. He didn’t understand what Deeny was, where he had come from, or how the specifics would pan out, but the story he’d been writing in the woods had given Paul a pretty good idea of Deeny wanted to become, what he hoped Paul would help him become: a killing machine, simple as that.

  And the temptation to kill was far greater than Paul was prepared for; he lurched forward in his seat and began coughing for no other reason than to allow his body to react in some way. It was a powerful, commanding urge not unlike the unexpected blasts of hormonal lust he’d felt sometimes as a young man, when the need for sex would become instantly overwhelming. But this wasn’t sex calling to him. It was death. He had never been violent or hateful, but he enjoyed writing the violent descriptions in his books. He felt it helped people understand the carnage of war and the sacrifices that were made, often in vain, by soldiers and civilians alike—and in the Civil War especially that line was sometimes hard to draw. But perhaps there had always been another part of it he had liked, a part he’d never really thought of: the vicarious thrill of taking away a life.

  Controlling a life. Isn’t that what Jen wanted to do to? Have a child; bring a life into the world? He thought, is taking a life really so different than making one? The thought made him sick and he closed his eyes, wishing he could just sink into the chair, then through the floor, into the kitchen beneath him, into the ground, and sink and sink and sink.

  He saved the Word file and closed it. There would be no more writing that day.

  7

  Idiots, Clancy Miller thought from his den, staring again out the window at the huge, ugly home at the end of Twin Nest Lane. From this distance it looked like a toy, a dollhouse. He held his bony, spotted hand in front of his eye and imagined crushing the house between his finger and thumb.

  The retired mink farmer lived alone. He didn’t have a lot to do with his time aside from hate and fear the large home he could see from the window. Miller knew about the place, sure. In a very real sense that patch of trees had shaped his whole adult life. Isn’t that why he’d moved to Peoa in that first place, decades ago? Isn’t that why he’d bought this house, so he could keep an eye on it anytime, day or night? Heck, he wouldn’t have become a mink farmer if he hadn’t come here, and he wouldn’t have come here if not for that patch of trees. The killer thing, the thing that bothered Clancy more than anything, was that everyone in Peoa seemed to know there was something wrong with that little ‘forest.’ How many children had been lost there, in that tiny, evil place, never seen again? Their names and faces shown still in his memory; Laney Scott, Brianne Thompson, Mikey Barrus, Trevor Brown, each one lost somewhere along that river, by those trees. And what about… no. Not right now. He wasn’t going to dig up those memories right now.

  And the list of those dead children would be longer, too, if Miller hadn’t turned a few away, even resorting to scaring them with profanity (the kinds of words Miller never used normally) if need be.

  Miller shuffled into the familiar, cluttered kitchen to make a cup of Postum, a coffee substitute. The price had gone up considerably in the last few years, but it was his only indulgence. Of course he thought about Mary again, but he didn’t have the energy for her. He clicked on the radio (permanently set to NPR) while the water heated in the kettle, but he didn’t really listen. For whatever reason, his unease about Kenner living in that tree patch was worse than usual. He could seem to think of little else. Some choppy professional voice on the radio said something about the Gaza Strip, and Miller had the feeling that whatever it wasn’t he didn’t really want to know. Just more bad news.

  Hadn’t he told Donald Harmon not to sell that little patch of land to those idiots? Oh yes, he had. He’d walked right up the front steps of what used to be the biggest house in town and banged on the door. Donald had opened it looking hung-over. Probably had been.

  “Miller, you’re all worried over nothing,” Donald had said, running his hand through his ink-black hair, “Yeah, our little town has had a run of bad luck—”

  “A run of bad luck?” Miller had interrupted those six months ago, when he’d first gotten wind that Harmon
was planning to selling the property beyond Miller’s home. “Four children in twenty years? You know there’s something out there, something wrong with those trees. Why don’t you just burn them down?”

  Miller was sure Donald had considered it many times, but Donald said nothing of that then. Miller could see in Donald’s face that he was uncomfortable with the topic. Well, goody for him.

  Miller said, “Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I mean. You’ve felt it. We’ve all felt it. Don’t let them have that land. It’s not fit to live on.”

  Donald wouldn’t look into Miller’s eyes; he adjusted his pants around his considerable waist and pretended the sun was in his eyes. A breeze whipped past them, trying to steal Donald’s words. He said, “You don’t know what they’re paying me. It’s not an offer a man like me can turn down lightly.”

  Miller knew what he meant when he said a man like me—a sex-crazed teenager in a fifty-five year old body. He was the kind of man who had to pay for all the fancy dresses, restaurants, and jewelry that kept Donald with a steady supply of pretty young ladies. He hadn’t had an actual job in twenty years. He lived off selling and renting all the land his pappy had left him. Miller had given him credit for leaving the patch of woods alone, despite its worth, for decades, not knowing how hard Donald had tried over the years to sell it.

  “Look, Miller,” Donald said, almost pleading, “I told them about the kids. Well, Mr. Kenner, anyway. He said it was unfortunate and we left it at that. They want to live there, that’s their choice, right?”