by Newman,James
Gasped.
Suddenly lost my smile.
Burner wasn’t there.
“I…I—” I could only stammer uncontrollably as I walked all the way around the tree. Then again. Then a third time. I knew this was the right tree. It had to be. Just in case, though, my eyes flitted nervously about the immediate area. Searching…searching…
My bicycle was not there.
“Oh, God…p-p-please, n-no,” I stammered.
Only a slight disturbance in the soft black mud and dead leaves at the base of the tree proved Burner had ever been there at all.
Someone had picked him up, carried him off.
The night seemed to close in on me. I could hear the blood rushing through my head. My feet felt heavy, my brain weightless and fuzzy…
I took off then, running for home as fast as my weak, trembling legs would carry me. Otherwise, I knew I would faint right there on the cold forest floor. Vulnerable and alone.
Somewhere to my left an owl mocked my fear as I ran. A screech owl. The sound it made was not unlike Cassie Rourke’s wail of terror just before Sheriff Baker killed her in my Old Shack.
Salty sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes despite the chill rain falling upon me.
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. I wanted to knock out my own teeth for being so damned irresponsible. I might as well have signed my name in the dirt at the foot of the Old Shack’s doorway so Sheriff Baker would know exactly where to find me. I should have pinned a note to that tree, giving him and his son my home phone number and street address.
What the hell was I supposed to do now?
At last I burst from the Snake River Woods, but then amidst my disorienting fear I realized I had exited the forest a block or so down from my own house.
The streetlights resembled the eyes of demons watching my every move. Midnight had never seemed so menacing. The distance to my house never seemed so long.
A car passed me on Old Fort Road when I came within just a few hundred feet from home. A big blue Dodge Charger, all sleek and mean and shark-like in the night. Its windows were down. The Doobie Brothers were singing “Jesus Is Just Alright” on the radio.
Someone laughed inside there. A girl, it sounded like.
Off to my right, a leftover Gala streamer scuttled down the cold gray sidewalk like a brightly colored snake stalking the night.
I shuddered.
I was still trembling all over a few minutes later, when I finally sneaked back through my bedroom window and slid into a bed that seemed so lumpy and uncomfortable.
I wondered if I would ever sleep again.
Later, as I lay in the darkness not daring to close my eyes, I heard the high-pitched warble of a police siren peaking and fading somewhere across town. I wondered if it was him. Out there doing his thing, roaming my town under the guise of upholding the law. I wondered if Burner was imprisoned even now in the trunk of his patrol car, if the murderous bastard cruised the streets of Midnight in search of the child to whom that bright blue Schwinn belonged…
What next?
I couldn’t stop shaking. I pulled the covers over my head and curled into a fetal position.
I wondered how long I had left to live. And what it would feel like to die.
CHAPTER NINE
During the days following Dan’s departure (not to mention the abduction of my beloved bicycle), I struggled with indecision. With guilt. With trying to determine how—if—I should do the right thing. My every waking hour, it seemed, I saw the dead girl beckoning to me from beyond the grave. Everywhere I turned, something lurked to remind me of the injustice of it all—whether it was the follow-up articles each morning in the Midnight Sun covering the investigation into the murder of Cassandra Belle Rourke, or just seeing Sheriff Burt Baker cruising down Main Street in his patrol car without a care in the world despite the vile things he had done in my Old Shack.
The nightmares continued, too. Once I dreamed I was stuck down in the Well. Faces swam out of the black, taunting me. Skeletal hands tore at my clothes. Cassie Belle Rourke’s pale visage leered at me, weeping “why, Kyle, why?” beneath the distorted echo-strains of “Hotel California” as performed by the Gerald R. Stokely High School Band. Baker’s scowling face insisted we had to clean everything up till there wasn’t even a pussy hair left. Henry Baker tried to convince me, as his hands twitched spastically and his head jerked up and down every few seconds, that he thought all along she was dead, she hadn’t been moving so what else was he supposed to think? Dan was there, cocking an eyebrow at me, ordering me to “do the right thing.” Of course Mom showed up once or twice as well, drunkenly scolding me for going out to that “nasty old cabin” in the first place. I was grounded from ever having a decent night’s sleep again, said my wild-eyed dream mother, and I believed every word she said.
I knew I had to do something. Soon.
It was up to me. Only me.
Yet I was so afraid. I heard suspicious noises outside my bedroom every night. On those rare occasions when I left my house during the next few days, I studied my fellow townsfolk with weary scrutiny and paranoid distrust. Every time I heard the crunch of gravel beneath tires in our driveway I would tremble uncontrollably, knowing the end had come for me, only to discover that the car pulling into our property was merely some lost driver turning around on our dead-end street and not the murderous law-enforcement officer who haunted my nightmares.
Simply put, I was a nervous wreck. I could not ignore the fact that someone—the sheriff? his son?—had found Burner after I foolishly left him behind. When the nightmares were over and the light of day bled through my bedroom windows to push back the shadows and chase away my nightmares, I knew were no such things as ghosts. I knew no tortured soul beseeched me from beyond the grave to avenge its untimely death. Yet there did exist a very real terror, living in Midnight. Someone was out there—waiting, watching, aware of the fact that I knew the Bakers’ dirty secret—and that someone was a creature of flesh and blood.
He had Burner.
He knew where to find me, anytime he wanted.
Everything I had been taught about policemen, the trust we place in them and how it is their undying duty to shelter us from harm…had all been a terrible lie. The man who had sworn to protect and serve my county—my world, as far as I was concerned at the ripe old age of twelve—had spit in the face of every person who had voted for him, who looked up to him, who counted on him to take care of us all and keep the bad guys behind bars where they belong. My belief system regarding good and evil, crime and punishment, the role of the law and those who enforce it, had been irrevocably shattered. Not to mention my budding outlook on the way things work when you grow up. My faith in adults in general. Since the night I witnessed Sheriff Burt Baker’s heinous crime, I no longer respected my elders as I had been taught to do since a very young age. I could not trust them. I feared them.
I knew I did not ever want to be one of them.
I felt betrayed. So alone.
Yet at the same time I felt like the traitor.
Guilt filled my soul like acid burning me up from the inside out as I waited, doing nothing, but I asked myself time and again what could I do?
I was a child with few friends and even fewer relatives to whom I could turn. Most folks in town knew of my mother’s little “problem.” I saw the holier-than-thou expressions on the faces of my neighbors, could not ignore the way they looked down their noses at my family as if we were just a step above poor white trash. Sure, Dan had been a local basketball hero, everyone knew and loved my big brother, but I doubt more than a handful of Midnight’s citizens even knew my name. Long past were the days when folks greeted me with patronizing sympathy in their eyes, as they had shortly after Dad died in Vietnam. Most of the townsfolk probably recognized me as nothing more than “the son of that alcoholic lady” where they had once so valiantly insisted we shouldn’t hesitate to call “if we ever needed anything.”
I did briefly consider taking my story to Father McKinney, at the First Lutheran Church of Midnight over on Craig Street. My family had worshipped there occasionally when I was four or five. Perhaps he could set my mind at ease. Problem was, Father McKinney was somewhere in the vicinity of eighty years old, and I’d heard he was going senile. He would recall very little of what I told him. I feared he might get my story all mixed up, and subsequently Dr. Brent Barker, Midnight’s resident veterinarian, would be arrested for cold-blooded murder.
Dan had been right. My only option was to go to Deputy Linder. Not only was he one of the nicest men in town (memories of visits from Deputy Mike to check on our family after Dad passed away filled my mind as I conjured my plan of action), he was second-in-command to Sheriff Baker himself. He would know what to do. He would take my statement, investigate my accusations, and Cassie Rourke’s murder would be avenged.
Yet I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I wanted to do it, knew I needed to do it, but I couldn’t.
Just another day or two, that’s all, I kept telling myself. Just a few more days and I’ll go…
Who could I trust? Who should I fear? The questions plagued me night and day. And kept me from doing the right thing.
My big brother was the only person in whom I could confide, at this point. The only soul I knew I could trust unconditionally.
And he was gone.
So I waited.
AUGUST 7
CHAPTER TEN
Two nights after Sheriff Baker killed her in the Snake River Woods, the dead girl was on television.
“Taken Too Soon: Portrait of a Midnight Angel,” the show was called. It came on just after the Channel 5 Six o’ Clock News, and lasted just under twenty minutes.
They sure hadn’t wasted any time in throwing it all together, I remember thinking. In theory, it sounds like a respectable thing to do, that “Exclusive Report, In Memoriam,” but ultimately the show ranked just a step above tabloid sensationalism. A desperate grasp for small-town ratings disguised as sugar-sweet sentimentality. Not to mention the long string of “sponsors” who received free advertising and priceless P.R. potential by lending their names to the list of companies the program had been “brought to you by” (Futch Bros. Dairy, Wilkinson Auto, and Bradley Heating & Air Conditioning were just a few).
The program began with a choppily-edited look at Cassandra Belle Rourke’s short life beginning with a montage of still-shots from her childhood set to a song that sounded just enough unlike Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” to avoid accusations of copyright infringement. Following that were interviews with the decedent’s friends and classmates at Gerald R. Stokely High School. Several misty-eyed teachers discussed the kinds of grades Cassie Rourke had made (“mostly B’s and C’s, but she always tried so hard, which made Cassie anything but average”). So many “best friends” came out of the woodwork for the show to declare how terribly they would miss Cassie Rourke I couldn’t help but wonder if it were possible for someone to be so universally adored. The dead girl’s parents were interviewed as well, and through everything else they were the ones with whom I truly sympathized. Their emotions were real. Too real. A mother who couldn’t stop shaking, whose features were red and swollen from days of constant crying. A little brother, who proudly displayed for the camera the ugliest teddy bear I had ever seen, boasting that his big sister had given it to him “just before she went to Heaven.” Cassie Rourke’s father spoke briefly, but I do not remember what he said. Here stood a man who was not so much in mourning as drooling at the prospect of revenge. As crude as such a thing may sound on my part, considering everything Mr. Clinton Rourke had been through, there was something about that burly, balding man with his thick Southern accent and his crooked, too-sharp teeth that I did not trust. Beneath his stunned, watery gaze, there seemed to lurk something mean. Something gruffer and more cruelly vindictive than grief-stricken.
Finally, I could watch no more. I left the room about the time Sheriff Baker’s fat, ugly face filled the screen. He vowed to catch “the animal who could do something like this to one of Midnight’s innocents,” claimed he would “spare no expense” in hunting down the culprit and punishing him to the fullest extent of the law. It was his “personal duty.”
The whole thing sickened me. I could watch no more.
Just before I turned my back on the television to head for my bedroom, Mom started sobbing, blabbering about how god-awful she would feel if she ever lost Danny or me. I could barely understand her, though, through her river of tears and snot.
Even after I slammed my bedroom door and turned on my radio to drown out the sound of it all, I could still hear Mom in there. Making comments every few minutes over the sound of the TV as if providing her own compulsory two cents to Cassandra Belle Rourke’s short legacy. Honking crudely into her Kleenex like something from the wilds of Africa trumpeting its grief into the night.
I shook my head, rolled my eyes. Grimaced and barely refrained from throwing my radio across the room when Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ In the Years” segued into the opening chords of “Hotel California.”
For a while I tried reading a Batman comic Dan had bought me a couple weeks before (Issue #258: “Threat of the Two-Headed Coin!”), but before long I gave it up. The evil scarred half of Batman’s nemesis, Two-Face, reminded me too much of Sheriff Burt Baker’s ugly, pitted features.
I decided to lie there for a while and listen to the midnight rain. Perhaps it would lull me to sleep.
I was wrong.
I covered my head with my pillow, curled up in a fetal position upon my bed, and lay like that for at least an hour.
Dark questions plagued my mind. I tried to ignore them, because I knew the answers were moot.
A girl had died. An innocent had been murdered.
Yet the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to scream out to Cassandra Belle Rourke, wherever she might be…
You seemed like such a good girl…what were you doing out there in the Snake River Woods with Henry Baker in the first place?
AUGUST 8
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I used to love horror movies. The nights I rode with Dan to the Lansdale Royal Drive-In on Forster Boulevard to partake of such breathtaking B-movie fare as The Bat People, Beware the Blob, and The Incredible Melting Man were some of the best times of my life. Nothing compared to those hot summer nights spent hanging out with my brother in his pick-up, dwarfed by the flickering horrors upon that massive drive-in screen as we chowed down on a bucket of popcorn almost as tall as me. More often than not the soundtracks to the many movies Dan and I watched at the Lansdale were distorted through the drive-in’s tinny speakers—bulky gray things resembling battered robot heads that never wanted to hang quite right on the windows of Dan’s Ford and always seemed to short out several times during the movie—but none of that mattered to me. I loved every gloriously tacky second of it.
What incredible, magical times those were. The Lansdale Royal Drive-In, when I was a kid, might have been Heaven on Earth…
Yet things change. People change. If monuments that have stood for centuries can eventually erode and crumble, then humans must be the most fragile, malleable creatures ever to exist. We try to believe otherwise, but we are at the mercy of our merciless environs.
My point?
Literally overnight, my love for horror movies ceased as if it had never been at all.
After what had happened out at my Secret Place, I was perhaps the only twelve-year-old boy in America no longer infatuated with celluloid monsters and madmen and things that go bump in the night. Three days after the Gala I ripped down from my closet door that oversized poster of Lon Chaney, Jr. stalking the night as The Wolf Man, not stopping to think for a second about how desperately I had pleaded with Mom to buy it for me for my tenth birthday. I retired my old dog-eared copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland to the space beneath my bed, never to open them again. I had seen enough death, enough suffering during the ten minutes or so I had
stared through that filthy, fly-specked window of my Old Shack, I decided that I no longer wanted to see the same things simulated in magazines or pictures or upon the Lansdale’s weathered screen. Though I knew by the age of seven or eight that such visions were nothing more than Hollywood special effects, harmless concoctions of latex and corn syrup and fake blood, I never again wanted to perceive even a cheesy facsimile of man’s inhumanity to man.
During the second week of August 1977, the Lansdale Royal Drive-In began hosting a Terrifying Trio of Fearsome Flicks For the Luridly Low Price of One Dollar. Three movies for a dollar was unheard-of even in those days, and any other time I would not have missed such a momentous event for the world. Even without Dan around to smuggle me through the theater’s gates, I would have gladly sacrificed all comprehension of the films’ already illogical plots to view the marathon from atop the old water tower on Cardinal Street. I had done so once or twice before, and it was the next best thing to being parked right there beneath the big screen as long as I brought along a blanket and a thermos full of hot cocoa to push away the night’s chill.
The movies on tap that week were The Hills Have Eyes (a brand new film I should have been dying to see, as the trailers on TV appeared oh-so-deliciously terrifying), Day of the Animals, and The Creeping Flesh. These were the sort of trashy, low-budget flicks I would have insisted were the greatest ever made, no matter what the critics believed, and I’m sure Dan would have agreed.
As I said, though, things had changed. I had changed.
The Lansdale Royal Drive-In hosted their horror-movie festival, with those Three Fearsome Flicks For the Luridly Low Price of One Dollar, but the whole thing passed for me. A sappy romantic comedy might as well have graced the screen that week, or some yawn-inducing documentary about the mating habits of salmon. Much to my mother’s surprise I never even considered attending the Lansdale’s latest monster-fest (“I’m so proud of you, Kyle, that you’ve finally outgrown such silliness,” Mom said at some point, but I pretended I didn’t hear her), and soon The Hills Have Eyes and Day of the Animals and The Creeping Flesh were replaced with two new movies advertised on that grand billboard looking out over Forster Boulevard.