Tomorrow I Will Kill Again

by Matthew Allred

  Tattoo man left, and the shorter guy loomed over her. In the darkness of the room his hand slipped down into her broken bra, and pinched her nipple, hard. “Mmmm…” he said. Then he reached into the front and then the back of her denim shorts, exploring her for pleasure.

  “Not bad, girl,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come back in the morning when you’re feeling better. Would you like that?”

  But now all the girl could do was cry, because she remembered her little one whose head had just been crushed in the other room where the music and lights were. Even though he’d looked okay when she’d last seen him, she realized now he must have been killed. She smacked her forehead on the hard, rough edge of the couch a number of times saying, “No! No! Oh my poor baby boy! My poor baby.”

  The door closed and she was alone in the dark room, wondering why her baby had been taken from her.

  14

  Jen stood at the bedroom window and watched Paul type in his trees. She’d come home early after learning the man she needed to speak to about the conference before proceeding was out sick. She didn’t know if Paul even realized she’d driven up or come inside, though he must have heard the car. She couldn’t make him out well, even though she had a more or less straight-shot view of him through two of the larger trees. Some shadow was resting over him, but she couldn’t see its source.

  Cards came up to her, cocking her head in a puppyish way. Jen crouched to scratch the poodle’s ears. “Who’s my little girl, huh?”

  Jen hadn’t interrupted him by announcing her presence because he seemed so intent on his work. Obviously, he had finally, finally, started Scott’s Anaconda, the book he’d been researching and planning for almost a year, in earnest. When he’d first explained the idea to her it had sounded like it might be his best yet, a remarkable novel that led the reader to the very heart of what it was to be a soldier or commander in the war Paul loved and hated so much.

  Good for him, she thought, knowing what it must mean to him to really be working again. But why is he outside? She left the bedroom and moved contemplatively down the hall toward his office. She stood at the doorway of the custom-made room, and wondered if the office had somehow had something to do with his apparent writer’s block.

  “Well,” she said, “whatever works, right?”

  She walked back to the bedroom, unbuttoning her blazer and kicking her shoes off in the general direction of the closet where they were supposed to end up. She changed into her cotton pajamas even though it was only four in the afternoon.

  Being married to a man like Paul was stranger than she thought most people could really appreciate. She had often thought how bizarre, how anti-pragmatic, it was that their financial livelihood in many ways depended upon his ability to engage and utilize his imagination. Athletes and blue-collar workers relied on heath of their bodies. Most jobs to some extent relied on the regular processes of the mind. But not a writer. A writer was like a composer, an artist, a poet. A writer like Paul—whose readers expected more than a rehashing of the same old themes and ideas that have been visited and revisited millions of times—relied on his ability to dream.

  Jen heard him laugh and keep laughing, though the sound was reduced by the distance and the window pane. She shuffled over to the window, feeling sleepy and a little dreamy herself. The shadow around him had thickened. She couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the faraway laughter lighting off the trees toward the house.

  Never, in the years she’d spent observing him write, had he ever stopped typing to laugh.

  But, no, this was even stranger than stopping to laugh. Jen squinted, trying to make out whether she actually saw what she thought she saw. He was laughing, all right, but that hadn’t stopped him from working. He was still typing, that much she could see. Something about watching him like that, laughing and writing, and doing both with great ferocity, made her wish she wasn’t alone in the house.

  Then Sean called with some banal question about work. The conversation lasted less than three minutes, but when it was over Jen was thinking about what they might have for dinner, and Paul’s behavior was pushed to the back of her thoughts.

  And anyway, he was coming in the front door now, presumably ready for supper.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NEXT DAY, PAUL AND DEENY SAT where the trees ended and the riverbank began. Deeny’s darkness drifted in the river where it mixed the water and sunshine into a strange soup. Paul sat on a large rock in a pair of slacks and a button-up shirt.

  Deeny said, “The dream I told you about… it is perfect, Writer. To kill is sublime.”

  “Oh, I know,” Paul said, his lips teetering between lifelessness and mirth. “The man must be killed. He must. I remember the dream, too. That was the night you first came to me, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I knew, even back then, how important that dream was. It shook me. It woke me up.” Paul picked up a stone about the size of a television remote that had been half submerged in the water. “But what I want to know is what woke you?”

  Deeny moved closer to Paul, his darkness increased around them. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”

  Deeny ripped one softly. “I believe so.”

  “Why me? There are other writers closer to you, at least a few as successful as me. Why reach out all the way to Chicago?”

  “What an absurd question.”

  “Is it?” Paul sounded like a man on the edge of sleep. “Why?”

  “You are here because you want to be. Others feel the pull, but few respond.”

  “You mean there have been others, though? Others like me? That have woken you with their… their own lusts?”

  Deeny stilled. He said nothing, and then, “No one is like you, Writer.”

  Paul threw the stone into the middle of the stream and watched the ever-darkening water swallow it. “You are my friend, aren’t you?”

  Deeny replied without hesitation: “Yes.”

  “Then no hedging. Answer the question.”

  Deeny stared at the water, his black eyes shining in his mist like polished obsidian. “I believe all writers—the ones who write fiction—feel the pull of this place or places like it.”

  Paul had slipped his shoes and socks off when they’d arrived. Now he lifted one of his feet off a flat rock he had warmed and dipped his toes in the freezing water. The motion sent shockwaves up and down his back. He closed his eyes and said, “Places like it? There are other places like this?”

  Deeny laughed, sounding almost embarrassed. “I do not know. I do not care.”

  Paul looked at his friend and smiled in an ‘oh you’ sort of way. “So other people have been called here, by you? Even if they weren’t quite ‘like me?’ ”

  “Not really. As long as I have been here—”

  “And how long is that, exactly?”

  Deeny belched and set his face in a pout. Since Paul had first thought about Deeny’s clothing the day he’d tried to chop down the tree, he’d been paying attention to them. His outfits never quite seemed the same, and today he was in red and black overalls. To Paul he looked like a man-child farmer, emphasis on the child. “I do not know when, exactly. I was in Rockport, once.”

  “Where is that? This river is called Rockport. Does it have anything to do with that?”

  Deeny said, “I do not know. Again I will tell you: I do not really care. All I know is—Rockport. A long time ago. Why does it matter? If you ask me any more about that, I will leave. I am interested in now. In our plans. In our future. Not that past, whatever it may be. As I was saying, as long as I can remember there has only been one writer who physically came here besides you. I gather that he was not as talented as you, or as powerful.”

  “You ‘gather?’ Didn’t he wake you up, too?”

  “No. Not like you did. I remember him as you might remember a dream. I think his name was Robert, but I do not know. It’s really too bad he
did not have your power; he was much more anxious to kill.”

  As a man might turn in shame from his wife upon hearing an accusation of weakness, an accusation the man himself has made in private for years, Paul turned from Deeny. Seeing this, Deeny took one of Paul’s hands in both of his massive ones, completely engulfing it. “I am sorry,” he said.“I did not mean anything by that. It is just as well that he was inadequate. I do not know much about him, but he could not have been like you. I mean it when I say there is no one like you. It is the truth. You are the one with the power to begin my reign, our reign. You will be strong enough.”

  “I find it hard to believe that I am the most bloodthirsty writer in America, on Earth, however far your reach goes. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  “Ha ha!” Deeny laughed. “I have thought the same thing myself. Perhaps there is another factor, one we do not understand. In any case, it is happening, and that is what truly matters.”

  “What is happening, exactly?”

  “Do not worry about all that. Let us focus on this next step. This vision.”

  “This murder.”

  “Yes. Learn to love the word, not to shy away from it. It is not disgusting, Writer. It is destiny.”

  For a long time Paul looked at his submerged foot. He wasn’t sure when it had gone from toes underwater to the whole thing. It was almost completely numb now. He wasn’t sure he’d feel a needle prick in it right now. He moved his foot back to the stone and watched droplets of water run off it. The slightest breeze came and froze it all over again.

  Eventually he said, quietly, “Why did the other writer fail?”

  “I do not know. I was asleep.”

  “Who was he? What was his last name?”

  “I do not know that either.”

  Another pause.

  Paul waved his foot, hoping to help it dry. He said, “What if I fail?”

  Deeny smiled. Paul wasn’t sure how big Deeny’s head was, and he sometimes wondered if its size changed from time to time, but right now he would guess his smile spanned about as long as a machete blade. Deeny said, “I have a feeling that at this point, it is extremely unlikely that you would fail. What is the phrase in your mind now… oh… yes… I believe we have reached ‘terminal velocity.’ I am not sure we could fail now even if we wanted to, but no sense tempting fate.”

  “Sure.”

  Deeny placed his massive palms on either side of Paul’s neck, weighting down his shoulders. “I am proud of you.”

  Paul felt like crying again, as he’d been doing so often lately. He was so weak. Deeny suffered him with such patience.

  2

  Clancy wanted to scream to Mary, force her to turn around as he saw her appear, back from the trees. But he knew if she were to have any chance of surviving her insane attempt to rescue him, he couldn’t give away her location. She crept behind Robert as he readied his tire iron for another blow—perhaps the final blow—to the top of Clancy’s head, but the ground covering of leaves and twigs made silence impossible.

  With his eyes still intensely fixed on Clancy’s head, he said, “If you take a step closer, or if you run away, he’s dead. You take one step from where you are now, I’m spilling his smarts all over the cushion of his precious car, with this—” He hefted the tool for her benefit.

  “Mary!” Clancy said, a splitting pain responding to his words, “He’s going to kill me anyway! No matter what! I know he is. You need to run. I’m already dead.”

  “Please be quiet, Clancy,” Robert said, tapping him painfully on the crown.

  “Stop! You’re hurting him!” Mary called out,

  “I’ll do a lot more than that if you don’t calm down, fella.”

  “Let her go, Rob,” Clancy said.

  Robert laughed and crouched down, so his face was only inches from Clancy’s, but inverted. “Let her go rob what? A bank?” He rolled his eyes dramatically. “Sorry. That’s not very funny.” Despite his joke, he now looked quite sad; a terrible change in temperament affected him briefly, and he said, randomly so far as Clancy could tell, “I just want to be useful.”

  With his attacker so close, Clancy decided there was no better opportunity. He reached up and grabbed Robert as firmly as possible between his hands and smashed Robert’s face, nose first, into his own forehead, turning his own stabbing pain into a bona fide explosion.

  “You rat!” Robert yelled, reeling from the car, blood streaming from his broken nose. But not just blood—bright green light… dripped from his nose and mouth as well. Clancy realized there, with horrid logical certainty, that they were dealing with something more than a young man who’d lost his mind.

  There were evil forces at work, and Clancy could feel them.

  Mary was on him faster than Clancy had thought possible. She tried to yank the iron from his hand, and succeeded in twisting the arm holding it painfully behind his back. Clancy tried to pull his legs up in order to get out of the car, but the intense pain of his shattered shinbone made him cry in agony. He knew if he pushed it any more he’d pass out from the pain.

  “Hey there, fella!” Robert said to Mary, sounding more jumbled than angry. “That’s mine.” He turned his body in a dance-like circle and regained his point of leverage, snapping the iron across Mary’s arm in the process.

  “Auuagh!” she yelled, stepping back. Her arm didn’t appear broken, but she’d lost the advantage. “I’m sorry, Clance!”

  Meanwhile, Clancy fought a blackness at the edges of his vision that threatened to drag him into a dreamless, dark sleep. “I love you,” he said, knowing that if he didn’t say that at least, he’d never be able to live with himself if he survived but Mary didn’t.

  What happened next would prove to be the stuff of both dreams and nightmares for Clancy Miller for the next six decades. He hadn’t understood it then, and later—when he had seen the importance of what Mary did—he still could not figure how she had known to do it. Though his faith had been mild throughout his young life, Mary’s final bizarre act of bravery had solidified in him the need, the absolute necessity, of relying on the Spirit and not our own human minds, for somehow she had known to do one thing that could have made a difference. And if God had not told her, Clancy didn’t know who could have.

  “I love you, too, Clancy,” Mary said.

  Clancy and Robert both watched in stunned silence as she reached down and picked up a long, flat rock, and—with more power and ferocity than either man thought feasible—plunged it into her neck. A tremendous stream of crimson spewed forth, and her body crumpled to the ground.

  Even though Clancy saw the act with his own eyes, he had trouble believing it had happened. Not only because he did not want her to die, but also because he wasn’t sure anyone was strong enough to kill themselves, apparently instantly, in the manner Mary had. Years later, replaying the incident in his mind, Clancy would wonder if what Mary had done was even possible in the typical sense of the word.

  Robert dropped to his knees in disbelief. The tire iron dropped to one side, balancing for a moment like a tall man, and then thumped down into a gathering of leaves. Clancy couldn’t see his face clearly, but his side view suggested that Robert’s jaw was hanging wide open.

  “No,” Robert whispered.

  Clancy couldn’t process what had just happened. His mind rejected it, utterly. He felt no pain, no guilt, no sorrow, no anger.

  In fact, he felt only one thing: tired.

  †

  When he woke he saw no sign of Robert. The stars twinkled. His head and right leg were raging, protesting the pain viciously. The slightest movement from any part of his body sent shockwaves of electric fire through his whole system. Slowly, so slowly an onlooker might not even notice, he looked up, which—since he was on his back—led his gaze to the ground.

  Mary was dead. Blood all around her. The body didn’t even look like a girl, just a crumpled mess of stained clothing.

  It was true then. She was dead. He found hi
s mind turned like a planet away from the thought. He’d deal with that later. Never sounded good.

  Despite the pain, he sat up. Everything was tilting around him and he threw up, white and brown, on the Belvedere’s dashboard.

  “Cripes,” he said quietly, not really hearing himself.

  Five minutes of crawling later, he’d made it about thirty feet from the car. He was on the gravel now. It was cold and hurt his hands and knees.

  He heard footsteps, but didn’t even think to turn.

  “It’s over now,” Robert said. “I think I needed two.”

  Clancy simply kept crawling. He couldn’t see Robert, but the crunch of his feet in the pebbles suggested he was close. He took one short step for four or five of Clancy’s great gasping clawings forward.

  “Sorry,” Robert said. “I’m really sorry. This was for nothing because of her. But I can’t really blame her. I’m going back to the trees now, Clancy, and you’ll never see me again. If you’re lucky.”

  Robert seemed to consider his own words for a while; Clancy crawled in anguish closer, minutely, to the main road. Then Robert said, “You can never come here again. I’m not sure why.” He laughed. “There’s so much we don’t understand, isn’t there? This is just a crazy old planet. My nerves’re shot completely. The weird thing is, I ruined it, I failed… but I don’t even really care.” Clancy heard the snap of a match, and soon he smelled the faint tobacco smoke. “I kind of feel like all this… all this craziness… was just a dry run. And maybe that’s okay.”

  And then, inexplicably: “I’m not really cut out for this writer stuff.”

  Clancy kept on clawing, clawing at the gravel, and clawing at his mental picture of Mary. He couldn’t accept what had happened to her yet; if he did, he’d never make it back to the road.

  Three minutes later, after following Clancy’s slow movements for a time, Robert said, “Well, I guess I’ll head back. Good luck, okay? And I’m really sorry about everything.”