The Axeman Cometh

by John Farris

  The bedroom directly above the kitchen is Allen Ray's. He is ordinarily a sound sleeper, and has been known to go on snoozing peacefully after being pulled, bedcovers and all, to the floor. Tonight he had sex (twice) with Sondra, which relaxed him greatly. But the clatter and thumping in the kitchen is sufficient to cause a vibration, as if the house has been jolted by an earthquake. The sleepers in the front of the house are not aware of the momentary disturbance, but Allen Ray, roused from a dream of foggy dirt tracks, bugs as big as flying mice around the light poles and battered cars in a slewing, fender-to-fender finish, sits up befuddled, wondering what he heard or if he heard it. The luminous hands of the big alarm clock on his dresser tell him that there is still more than an hour to go before dawn.

  Allen Ray sinks back in a daze, limbs heavy, and he would be almost instantly asleep again except for a couple of physical distractions. His mouth is still very dry from French kissing, his tongue sore where Sondra, in her excitement, bit it. He is momentarily suspended between the urge to plunge back into sleep and a craving for a cold quart of milk. Once he begins to actively think about the milk the prospect of sleep recedes. Allen Ray sits up again, stretching. Four-thirteen a.m. He is naked except for the pair of clean boxer shorts he pulled on after taking his shower. He stands up, takes a couple of steps toward the door, stumbles over the wet towel he dropped on the floor earlier, kicks it aside and goes out to the hall.

  The shortest distance to the kitchen is by the back stairs, which, for some reason, the family members seldom trouble to use. For one thing, no matter how many times Allen Ray and Dab have worked on it, the door on the first floor doesn't open easily. It is necessary to apply upper pressure on the knob with one hand, then push with the other about three-quarters of the way down on the right side. Easier just to go the long way around, particularly if you're carrying a load. But Allen Ray is intent on getting back to bed quickly. He takes the back stairs and goes through the routine of springing the stubborn door open, which on this occasion works like a charm. He is two steps into the kitchen on his way to the refrigerator when he becomes aware that the pantry door is standing open, a chair is overturned, there is a sharp odor of vinegar in the air from a broken cruet on the kitchen table. And someone is lying on the floor on the other side of the table.

  Allen Ray, sharp-eyed, heart leaping high in his throat, identifies him immediately: Uncle Gilmore, who was slugging down the Jack Daniel's all evening. Now he's lying there passed out, or worse. Because he's so still. Allen Ray can't swallow the lump of his heart—his chest has constricted, there's no room for it. His face feels cold, the back of his neck tingles.

  Better get Dab. But if Uncle Gilmore is only sleeping, not unconscious, then—

  He circles the table, staring at the upturned face. Oh-oh.

  Gilmore's eyes are open. His mouth is open too, the lips dark, and there's a dark stain down his shirt front, as if he's spilled whiskey or vomited all over himself. But Allen Ray should be able to smell it if it's whiskey puke; no, what it looks like—

  Allen Ray turns, lunging at the refrigerator. Knocks a lot of the little magnets off along with Ernestine's penciled reminders to herself and other family members as he snatches open the door and looks back at Uncle Gilmore.

  God dog it is blood! Gilmore's drenched in it. Blood is welling from some sort of large hole or gash right down the middle of his chest. Perhaps as recently as a minute ago the split heart was spurting, because in the light from the refrigerator there are stipplings everywhere: on kitchen cabinets, the linoleum floor . . . the ceiling drips.

  Allen Ray is only nineteen, but he has courage; it is something he has always taken for granted. The ability to act coolly in a crisis. He has proved himself in football, in fistfights, in racing. Unfortunately there is no precedent for the horror he now faces: a newly dead man, probably murdered (although this dangerous factor has not yet registered in his stunned mind), in the most familiar of surroundings. He is enveloped in a billowing mist from the refrigerator, yet colder than anything on ice. Sickened, too. He knows he must do something, get help. His most powerful impulse is childlike, inevitable—to run away. He stiffens and resists the impulse, fights it while the time for decision-making ticks away and the Axeman cometh.

  Four-fifteen a.m.

  In her bed at the front of the house, Shannon wakes up as Chap, made uneasy in his dreams, convulsively tightens an arm around her. True to his style, he has pushed her nearly to the edge of the bed by the windows. The sheets are in a tangle. She pushes him back to somewhere around the middle of the bed. On his back, the mildly asthmatic Chap begins to snore.

  Shannon fussily straightens out the covers, then presses a pillow around her head so she won't hear him. Glass shatters in the back door of the kitchen, but she doesn't hear, that, either. Nor the liquid coughing sounds that Alien Ray, with his throat sliced open, makes as he tries to pull his arm free of the glass shards and attempt a last desperate run for his life.

  Four-eighteen a.m.

  Chap snores, one foot thrashing.

  Shannon dreams.

  In the other bedroom at the front of the house, Dab with his cigar breath burbles, not unpleasantly, in his slumbers on his side of the bed. Ernestine, on her stomach, a hand trailing nearly to the floor, is soundly in the grip of her favorite tranquillizer, a heavy shot of vodka—two shots tonight, one shortly after retiring to their room, another an hour later when she realized, what with the ache in her prematurely old knees, that she wasn't going to be able to sleep without another friendly infusion.

  Dab has known about the vodka, which Ernestine keeps in a hatbox on the back of the closet shelf, for a long time. Worries about it, but doesn't say anything.

  Four-nineteen a.m.

  A creaking on the back stairs that no one hears.

  The Axeman Cometh.

  "Carnes!"

  It's him again. Papa. Old Hummingbuffer. Don tries to ignore his presence—wherever he may be. The rain won't quit and the city, at least this part of the city south of Twenty-Fourth Street, is in blackout. There is traffic on Sixth Avenue, proceeding very slowly through intersections, headlights of taxis and buses. But there are only occasional vehicles on the cross streets, Eighteenth and Nineteenth, that bracket what had been, in more gracious times for the neighborhood, the Woodrow & Lavont department store. Elegance is apparent in every line of the architecturally significant building, despite recent abuses. Since he arrived, walking and sometimes running all the way down from Thirty-Second Street, Don has worked his way around three sides of the building looking for a way in. All of the metal doors he has located require one or more keys for entry. Accessible windows are blocked by wire grills bolted to stone. The former store's large, street-level display windows deep within the facade and facing Sixth are boarded up, plastered over with several years' worth of handbills. Where double revolving doors once admitted women with parasols and men in derbies and spats, the entrance is now through a plywood tunnel blocked by an iron gate. No watchman is on duty; at least he hasn't been able to raise anyone by repeatedly rattling the gate, banging on side doors. Calling until he is afraid his throat is about to give out.

  The temperature is still dropping; Don's thoroughly soaked and shivering, and he's always been susceptible to bad colds at any sudden change in the weather. Already he's woozy, beginning to feel feverish. At least it's dry under the façade, which is supported by thirty-foot bronze columns on granite bases as high as his head. But what is he supposed to do now?

  "Don't overlook the obvious," Papa says, closer but still somewhere behind him.

  Don sneezes into a damp handkerchief, sniffs forlornly, looks around as the headlights of a passing bus illuminate one of the fluted pillars, the size of a young redwood tree, and the wise old hunter standing at the base, buttoned up to his whiskers in foul weather gear, cozy and at home in the elements.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Fornicating rain's coming down hard. Plenty of homeless in this
burg. Where do they all go to get in out of the rain, get warm, grab a night's sleep?"

  "Subway."

  "Use your canoodle. What did Miss Petra say about this building when you talked to her?"

  "She said—oh, I get you. She said there were some unfinished floors, and she thought probably some derelicts, or maybe drug addicts, are holed up on those floors. But I haven't seen—"

  "Haven't seen any rummies under this façade, even though it's decent shelter. None of their usual trash, either. Rummies leave their bottles where they empty them. They piss where they've a mind to. Piss on stone, it soaks in, stink rises whenever it rains. Ought to smell like a cageful of cotsies under here, but there's no rummy spoor. What does that tell you?"

  "I . . . I don't know."

  "I walked away from a plane crash with spinal fluid leaking out of my ears, and I could still do a better job with what brains I had left than you're doing tonight."

  "Thangs a lod," Don says resentfully, and blows his nose again. Too hard. His ears block. He looks helplessly at the plywood runway, the padlocked gates, and thinks of rummies.

  "If there're any inside, then . . . they must have a way in I didn't think of."

  "While you were busy trying to kick down locked steel doors."

  "Maybe—an alley—"

  "The only alley in Manhattan is Shubert Alley. They didn't tunnel up from below the street, either."

  "I'll . . . have another look around." Papa lays a finger against his nose. "Follow this," he suggests.

  "What?"

  "Rummy spoor."

  "I can't smell a thing."

  "Maybe I'd better go with you this time. Tracked a lioness in heat through the rain in the Serengeti. Her spoor was like attar of roses, compared to a rummy's."

  "Don't you talk to bears, too?"

  "When I happen to run into one. We'd better move quickly now. Your beauty is weakening, and he's stronger. He'll know I'm around. He'll know how to get rid of me, too."

  "I don't know why I believe any of this."

  "Because you believe in the Axeman. She's made a believer of you, all the years you've known her."

  "If only I'd married Shannon. I should never have let her get away with jilting—"

  "She was trying to protect you."

  "But he must have died! They found his blood in the house. And after Kansas, there was never a sign of him."

  "He's been living in the one place that's safe for him," Papa says.

  They are on Eighteenth Street, walking east, toward the rear of the large building. A cab, off duty, hisses toward them, throwing up a wave Don can't avoid. Turning, he sees no one, although Papa has been right behind him. After the cab passes he looks up and is startled to find the author twenty feet down the sidewalk revealed in the counterglow in gleaming—rainwear, moon-shaped—face pressed close to a wall thickly papered with dilapidated one-sheets promoting opera, ballet, a reunion at Town Hall of folk artists from the sixties.

  "Nope," he says, stepping away from the wall as Don jogs soddenly up to him, his expensive shoes full of water. "No rummy spoor here. But we'll find them."

  Don sneezes.

  "Enjoying the hunt?" Papa asks sardonically.

  "I'm an indoor person."

  "You haven't had the tight exposure. More than once Blixen and I drove a hundred miles in a day and were never out of sight of the herds. Tommies, kudu, Grant's gazelle. They go to the rains, which were falling always just out of reach, to the north, to the west. The five senses of man are not enough to appreciate this beauty, a million antelope but space for a million more, or ten million. The lions followed the herds, and we followed the lions. Leopard too. The most difficult of all to kill, if you kill fairly and not by blinding them with lights where they come to feed or drink. They are truly cunning and dangerous because they hunt often in the dark and they themselves are darkness, except for the eyes, which are the true yellow color of a freshly cut key lime."

  Don says crossly, "I don't know what that has to do with—"

  "It has everything to do with becoming a hunter, which is now more than your obligation; you and your beauty may survive only if you hunt carefully and well. But Axeman is the quickest of quarry, and no one has hunted him successfully before. Tell me all you know about him."

  "There's not much to tell. If it was the same man, then—he may have killed as many as twenty-five people over a two-year period in four Midwestern states. I did some research after I knew I was in love with Shannon. I took time off and went out there, talked to the police and read all the accounts of the murders I could find. The Cobb family in Briarwood, Missouri. The Hanyards in Crestview, Iowa. The De La Warrs in Hendricks, Nebraska. And Shannon's family. September 1962 to June of 1964. There are similarities in each case. Five members in each family, although in Briarwood an au pair girl was also a victim. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old daughter in each household. Blonde. He chose families that had only a few or no pets, except for the De La Warrs, who raised golden retrievers. But they were in a kennel away from the house. From the variety and type of wounds the FBI concluded he used the same weapon over and over, an ax with a curved blade or blades that he kept razor-sharp. He left an old whetstone in the Cobb house that couldn't be traced. There was a partial footprint in new carpeting at the Hanyards'. From that the experts concluded he wore bowling shoes, was about six-one and weighed between one-hundred-seventy and one-hundred-eighty pounds. They were also able to tell he was right-handed. Scores of relatives of the four families were questioned, but no links between any of the victims could be established. Apparently they were chosen at random. The Axeman left the same message, scrawled in blood on a variety of surfaces with paint brushes he found: 'I like to chop.'

  "He, ah, apparently had no bias toward any particular part of the anatomy. He often dismembered victims after they were dead. He did not sexually molest males or females, not in a conventional or detectable manner. He liked to string the bodies up, usually in the cellars, by hammering cement nails into the walls. He used wire, clothesline, fishing line. A flute belonging to Timmie Cobb, one of three girls in the Briarwood case, was found next to her severed head. She'd been a flautist in her school band. He left no fingerprints; at least no prints recurred in the four houses he visited. There . . . isn't much else. Shannon survived. Untouched, by the merest stroke of good luck; or, perhaps, it had nothing to do with luck. The boy died before he could speak, so the police never knew what part he may have played in her escape. It's possible he knew the Axeman, although they later ruled out the possibility he may have been an accomplice. Unmatched blood samples were found on his knife in the Hill house. The Axeman, who obviously was injured, got away, only to die in some place where his remains are undiscovered. But that's speculation, based on the fact that the murders stopped; his modus operandi was not repeated after the massacre in Emerson."

  "And what has your beauty had to say about her experiences with Axeman?"

  "Whatever she knows, she's stuck it away in a place with a lot of cobwebs. Shan managed to survive, mentally and emotionally, for four years after the massacre by literally denying her own identity, inventing a different background for herself. Her case has been exhaustively written up in psychiatric journals. She created, in comic-strip format—there are thousands of panels—another family of which she was a member, a fictitious but wholly safe environment in which to live. The Tafts of Roseboro, Kansas. The team that treated her at the psychiatric clinic found her artistic imagination very helpful in affecting a reintegration of her shattered personality. When she no longer needed 'Suzy Taft,' Shannon wrote her out of the strip, so to speak. Just as the other Tafts—mother, father, 'Suzy's' two brothers—died, nonviolently, and were buried as she came to grips with what really happened to her family."

  "Axeman was never in the strip. But she's used the same means to try to get rid of him."

  "Yes. She certainly tried. But she couldn't draw him. It was frustrating for her. 'If I could get him right,' S
han told me, 'he'll disappear forever.' But who knows if she ever saw his face? He struck in the dead of night, when they—the families—were most vulnerable. Oh, God. Some of her efforts were—disgusting, horrifying. Inhuman. The closer we came to our wedding day, the more compelled she was to draw. She was making a—a terrible effort to purge him, to be free and happy. I felt so sorry. There was nothing I could do to help her."

  "I believe she has never wanted to see, to draw him truly. Because the consequences were bound to be the reverse of what she hoped she would achieve. Your beauty's creative imagination is a force beyond her control. Her pain is deep. Axeman's evil is an image of that pain, which he gave to her. Now Axeman has trapped her, in circumstances she has always feared. He is exhausting her in order to seduce her. He has the means. Her only defense is to draw—anything, everything that comes to mind but him."

  "She drew you, didn't she? She imagines, it's real, like that. I had a little taste of what she can do, once, just a taste, and I—put it out of my mind and got damned good and shit-faced in a hurry, because what was the alternative? Believing the unbelievable? Damn it, I have no imagination myself, I never have nightmares, for Christ's sake I—"