by Harvey Click
“I don’t know why,” Kathy said quietly. “How could I?”
“Will you help me find out?”
“I’ll try,” she said even more quietly, knowing she didn’t want to.
“There must be some clues in this,” he said, grabbing a ring-binder notebook from the mantle. “It’s one of her journals. She started keeping journals in her last couple years as she grew more…mysterious, shall we say? This was her final notebook. She made her last entry the day before the incident.”
He turned to a page and read: “ ‘The Griever has told me again and again what I must do. Tomorrow morning he shall have his payment.’ ”
“The Griever?” Kathy asked.
“Yes. She mentions him often in the journals. I say him only because that’s the pronoun she uses.”
“Does she ever say who he was? Or what?”
“No.”
He leafed through the notebook and read a passage out loud: “ ‘Again today the Griever spoke in parable. A farmer was required to pay his landlord three-tenths of his harvest each year. Wishing to purchase the plot of land he and his family had cultivated for generations, he offered the landlord seven-tenths of his harvest for a period of ten years, but the landlord said that would not be adequate. The farmer asked, if ten years was not long enough, then for how many years must he pay seven tithes, and the landlord’s reply was forever. The farmer said, but if I give you a single grain more than seven tithes my family will starve, so what can I do? The landlord said, you wish to purchase an eternal right to my land, and yet the payment you offer is perishable. Even in my best granary the wheat will eventually be consumed by worms and rot. Verily, if you wish to purchase that which is eternal, you must pay with currency that is likewise eternal.’ ”
“It sounds like something out of the Bible,” Kathy said.
“So it does, but my mother wasn’t known to be religious, and there’s no copy of the Bible in this house. Is the Griever God or the devil or neither of the above?”
“Probably just a figment of her imagination.”
“Maybe so, but where did the figment come from? What planted the seed?”
Kathy poured another glass of wine and stared at it. It occurred to her that all of this—the noose, the journal, his story—might be an elaborate hoax intended as a strange sort of teaching tool. The newspaper looked real enough, but there was no proof the family was in any way related to Derrick or that his name had ever been Matthew Bradly. Unfortunately this thought didn’t give her any comfort because she believed only a psychotic would contrive such a macabre hoax and pretend his own mother had been a murderer.
Derrick was leafing through the notebook again. “In the last two years of her life, as the change came over her,” he said, “she would sit for hours at her writing desk upstairs, scribbling in her journal. Her writing is tiny and crabbed, very hard to decipher, maybe on purpose. But I’ve learned to read it as easily as typescript, and I’ve studied every word in every notebook countless times.
“I write all my stories upstairs at my mother’s desk. I scrawl them out in longhand on narrow-lined paper in ring-binder notebooks, the same kind she used for her secretive musings. Only here, in this house, in complete privacy, in utter secrecy, can I roam freely in the darkest closets of my mind, descend to the deep filthy cellar where the most poisonous mildew thrives. The dried blood on the rug is my muse; the hook in the ceiling is my higher calling.
“My handwriting is as tiny as my mother’s and maybe even less legible—hermetic ciphers that even a cabalist probably couldn’t decode if he found one of my notebooks. Later, when I’m back in town, I type only the most innocent and innocuous passages into my computer, and those are the stories you’ve read. The majority of my writings stay hidden in my notebooks, where even the devil can’t read them.”
“Why?” Kathy asked.
“Because most of my writing isn’t fit for public consumption. Even jaded horror fans would find it appalling. It would be judged insane, criminally insane.”
He stopped speaking, but the two words remained stuck in her head: criminally insane.
“I want you to drive me home,” she said. “I don’t want to stay here any longer.”
He smiled faintly, maybe sadly. “I’m disappointed,” he said. “I thought I’d seen a special spark in you, a kind of depth most people lack. I even fancied I saw a hint of it in your stories, just barely visible beneath the banalities and clichés, but obviously I was mistaken. You’re just like the others. Vapid, no more depth than a TV screen.”
He was standing in front of the fireplace, the butcher knife within easy reach. His wineglass still sat on the coffee table, and she noticed it was full. It didn’t look as if he’d drunk a single drop, even during their toast, and she wondered about the odd metallic taste of the burgundy. Maybe the last time he was here he’d uncorked the bottle and slipped something in it and then replaced the cork.
She set her glass unfinished on the coffee table and stood up, feeling strangely weak and dizzy.
“I’m disappointed too,” she said. She was tempted to add, “I didn’t know you were a fucking lunatic,” but thought better of it, not wanting to agitate him. “Just take me home,” she said.
“Fine. I’m wasting my time with you anyway. Nobody could teach you how to be a horror writer.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve decided I don’t want to write horror. The world has too much of it already. Just take me home, please.”
“You promised you’d help me understand why my mother did this.”
“I’m not a psychiatrist.”
He darted toward her swift as a panther and grasped her wrists. She tried to pull away, but he was strong and she felt weak and dizzy. He smiled while she struggled feebly, but his smile didn’t say whether this was a lover’s game or a killer’s.
“But you can try to understand,” he said. “Before you leave, I want you to meet my mother.”
“Your mother’s dead.”
“It’s no wonder you can’t write horror stories,” he said. “Your mind is too literal and linear. Is the past ever dead?”
She tried to knee him in the groin but lost her balance and nearly fell. He slipped behind her, holding her wrists so she couldn’t hit him, and pulled her body tightly against his. She felt his hot breath against her neck and his erection pressing against her hips.
“You asshole,” she said. “You put some kind of drug in my wine.”
“Did I? An hour ago you thought of me as your lover and mentor, and just a few minutes ago you promised to help me. Now you think I’m a madman who drugged your wine. Isn’t it a bit frightening how little we really know people?”
“You fucking jerk,” she said. “What is it, some kind of date-rape drug?”
He walked her out of the room and down the hall toward the kitchen. When she tried to resist, he locked his arms around her ribs from behind, lifted her feet off the floor, and carried her. She felt limp and helpless like a ragdoll but fully awake.
In the kitchen he set her down facing a door and held her with one arm so he could use the other to open it. She smelled mildew and dimly saw a bare wooden stairs leading down into darkness. Now even more terrified, she struggled so hard she was panting, but with no effect.
“Nobody’s locking me in some damn basement,” she yelled.
“No, nobody is. Look at the door. Do you see a lock?”
She didn’t.
Derrick reached in to switch on a light and said, “I’m not going to lock you up or hurt you. I want your help. I want you to help me understand a particular Saturday morning. In her last two years Mother spent long hours sitting in this basement. Let’s go down and see if we can find her still sitting there.”
Kathy screamed and thrashed, and he clasped her so tightly she could scarcely breathe.
“I regret having to use force, but you give me no choice,” he said. “These stairs are steep, and if I need to keep wrestling with you lik
e this we’re likely to fall. So go on down by yourself and I’ll follow.”
He let go of her and placed his hands against the doorframe so there was no place she could go except down. Her legs were unsteady, and she grasped the bannister tightly as she climbed down the steps with him close behind her. Cobwebs clung to her face as she descended, and when she reached the floor she saw a fat gray rat scurry into the shadows.
It was a large basement, its stone walls black with grime and its concrete floor riven with cracks. At the far end the door of a coal bin hung open, and she could dimly make out a modern furnace that looked incongruous in the ancient gloom. Whiskey kegs shrouded with cobwebs rested on their sides on a stone ledge against one wall, and along another wall were racks of wine bottles and a potato bin filled with old toys peeping out through the wooden slats—a clownish jack in the box, a green tricycle, a silver robot, and filthy dolls with blank staring eyes.
Near the center of the floor was a circular stone wall about three feet high and maybe five feet wide. She went to it and saw a round well with black water barely visible several feet below. She smelled it more clearly than she saw it, a stench of death and sewage.
“In the nineteenth century it wasn’t unusual to build a house over a well,” Derrick said. “There are obvious advantages, especially in the winter. The disadvantage is they can become contaminated if the basement floods. I regret to say this one is badly tainted. It’s not fit for drinking, but my father used to pump water out of it for the garden.”
He placed his hand on the back of a wooden chair beside the well. “My mother used to sit down here for many hours nearly every day, staring into the well. I wouldn’t be surprised if she sometimes drank from its poisoned water. Did it affect her mind?”
“Why didn’t your father take her to a doctor?”
“Oh, she never stayed down here when he was home. She always acted more normal while he was around. Quiet and distant, but not mentally ill. My father wasn’t much attuned to feelings and moods and that sort of thing. To him she just seemed mopey. ‘Still moping, Maureen?’ he’d say when he got home from work. ‘When are you going to buck up?’ ”
Kathy was dizzy and wanted to sit down. She touched the seat of the old wooden chair, expecting it to be grimy, but it wasn’t.
“The chair’s quite clean,” Derrick said. “I sit down here for a while whenever I’m back. You might call this my meditation temple. Please sit down, make yourself at home.”
Kathy sat and rubbed her eyes, feeling so weak she could barely hold her head up.
“I believe this is where she met the Griever,” Derrick said. “Many afternoons I’d open the basement door a crack and listen to her speaking quietly to someone down here, so quietly I couldn’t make out her words. One time, and one time only, I came down and asked if she was all right, but she didn’t seem to notice me. Her eyes were as blank as the eyes of a mannequin, and when her lips moved I couldn’t make out the words though I was standing right beside her.
“And then something terrifying happened. I sensed a presence, something malignant, sinister, baneful, evil, pestilential, vile, pernicious, noxious, malefic—there aren’t adjectives potent enough to describe it. I tore up the steps as fast as I could, slammed the door behind me, and raced outside into the sunlight.”
“But you still come down here?”
“Yes, now that I’m old enough to face my fears. I want to unravel the mystery. I want to meet the Griever, but he refuses to visit me.”
“Griever, Mourner, they mean the same thing,” Kathy said. “You took your penname from the figment or demon or whatever it was that drove your mother mad.”
“Ah. Did I? And what do you suppose a psychiatrist would say about that?”
“I wonder,” she said.
There was a long silence. Her limbs felt heavy and numb from whatever drug he’d put in the wine, and she shut her eyes and maybe dreamed for a moment. When she opened them again the ceiling light was out and the basement was perfectly black.
“Derrick?” she said.
She looked behind her shoulder and saw no light where the door to the kitchen should be. But then the kitchen light hadn’t been on, so maybe there wouldn’t be. Maybe he’d crept upstairs and shut the door, or maybe he was still standing behind her in the dark. Maybe he was waiting for her to solve his mystery, or maybe he was waiting to slash her throat.
She was terrified but felt too weak to stand. Her legs were like stones, and though she wanted to rub her temples her hands lay heavily in her lap, unwilling to move.
She shut her eyes again and maybe slept for a while in the chair. When she opened them a dimly glowing green fog was rising out of the well. It swirled and pulsated as it swelled over the rim, poured down the sides of the stone wall, and drifted slowly along the floor, filling the basement and vaguely illuminating it.
Except it was no longer a basement. It appeared to be a stone cavern, large and irregularly shaped, with smaller cavities and tunnels leading away into deeper darkness. The stone walls seemed to be squirming in the green phosphorescence—but no, the walls weren’t moving, creatures were moving upon them, grotesque lizards and what looked like huge worms or centipedes slithering up and down through the crannies and crevices.
She looked back at the well and saw a long, grieving face peering at her above the circular stone wall. The creature’s hands were clutching the rim, and as its breath parted the green fog she glimpsed its bony white shoulders and the upper half of its emaciated torso.
She couldn’t move. Her body felt like a statue sitting heavily on the wooden chair. The thing regarded her silently with dark fishlike eyes. White and hairless, the face looked human except it was unnaturally long and narrow, as if it had been stretched. Its thin black lips were turned down in a tragic frown.
It sighed and said, “So he has brought you to me at last.”
***
Derrick watched her as she entered the family room, but he didn’t speak or move. He was sitting in his own chair, the one with no bloodstain beneath it.
Where Kathy had felt heavy as a stone before, now she felt light as air, as if she were gliding rather than walking toward the fireplace. This was a solemn moment, and she knew she must not move too quickly or too slowly, but rather with the calm and deliberate movements of a priest.
She took the butcher knife from the mantle, stood behind Derrick’s chair, and slid the blade across his throat. It was sharp and cut nearly to the spine.
The knife was a sacred object, not something to be dropped carelessly to the floor, so she returned it to its place on the mantle. Derrick was slumped sideways in his chair, his legs still kicking, blood still spurting from his throat, and his eyes still open as she set upright the chair that his mother had kicked over eighteen years ago beneath the noose.
Derrick still seemed to be watching her as she climbed onto the chair and placed the noose around her neck.
Doctor Good
At three a.m. there were still two cars parked in the lot behind the bar. Jack knew one of them belonged to Buena, who had tended bar tonight, and the other probably belonged to a waiter. The bar had closed half an hour ago, and he thought they should be just about finished by now with whatever cleaning they needed to do.
Jack was sitting on a cinder block in the shadows beside the dumpster in the adjacent parking lot. It belonged to a Chinese restaurant, which had closed hours earlier, and nobody was roaming around at this hour. If anybody saw him, he’d look like just another drunken street bum, his coat collar turned up so his face was mostly hidden, but nevertheless he didn’t want to be seen. He’d been sitting there for fifteen minutes, and he hoped Buena would come out soon.
The back door of the bar opened, and a skinny young man emerged, walked to his car, and drove away. A few minutes later the door opened again, and this time Buena stepped out. Jack slipped silently out of his hiding place while she was locking the steel back door. He moved toward her with a quick, quiet stride
while she was walking to her car, and she didn’t notice him until he was just a few feet away.
She turned to look at him, and he slipped the blade of his knife through her fleece jacket and deep into her abdomen. As she bent forward to clutch her belly, he slid the sharp blade across her throat, slicing it open.
She fell face forward and lay twitching on the asphalt. He stooped down just long enough to wipe the blade clean on her jacket, then hurried down the alley to the side street where his car was parked, scanning windows and shadows to make sure there were no witnesses. He didn’t see any.
He drove to his apartment, took two aspirins, and went to bed.
***
The next morning Jack awoke with his usual headache. He always kept a bottle of aspirin on the stand beside his bed, and he swallowed two of them without water and stayed in bed for a few minutes until the headache went away. He vaguely remembered a disturbing dream, but whenever he caught onto a detail it would flutter away. A dumpster, shadows, two parked cars, a woman stepping out of the back door of a building…and then something unpleasant that he couldn’t remember.
He stayed in his apartment all day hunched over his drawing table. He was a freelance illustrator. Magazines, catalogs and websites would email photos to him, mostly of sleek models wearing expensive clothes, and he would convert them into drawings more eye-catching and elegant than the photos. He was good at his work and had no trouble paying his bills.
As a sideline he’d begun creating book covers for indie writers. He’d paint or draw the illustration at his drawing table, then send a photo of it to his computer so he could manipulate the image and add the title and author’s name. Today he was working on the cover for a horror novel, and for some reason his illustration of a dark figure crouched over a body was making him feel uneasy. His headache came back, and he took some more aspirin.
Before noon he set the book cover aside unfinished and spent the rest of the day working on some drawings for clothing ads. After dinner he watched television and drank a bottle of Chardonnay.