by Gene Lazuta
VALLEY
THREE
15.
Do you still have nightmares? the letter read.
And…
Remember how Dad used to study your face when you’d scream in the night? Like he was looking for something, in the glare when he’d turn on the light. Remember how he’d bend over the bed with those big, dead eyes?
Robert Norris, Jr., nodded, remembering the letter, and trying to keep his attention on the ever-shifting, headlight-bright tunnel through which he was guiding his big blue Bronco. The trees overhanging the road were heavy with fresh snow, their tangled branches drooping so low as to scrape the truck’s roof as it crept through the featureless, country-dark indigenous to the Killibrook Valley.
When winter came, this land died, he thought, with a frown—and everyone and everything that lived on it died as well. Or at least that’s how it seemed. Snow came in twenty-foot drifts that clogged roads and froze so solid that it often didn’t melt until May. Inevitably, spring revealed the carcasses of hapless animals, probably months old, all twisted legs, matted hair, and bucktoothed, death-mask grins. Occasionally strange men were even found in those drifts; never locals…locals had more sense than to drown in snow. It was always some outsider: stiff as a board, one hand sticking up from a dirty mound of ice, nameless, no ID. The cops would just have to chip him out and bury him again, once the ground unfroze.
Norris had been in voluntary exile from this sad parcel of Ohio for ten years—a refugee from a bad land and home. He’d made a solemn oath, both to himself and to the Valley that they would never lay eyes on one another again.
And he’d meant it—from his heart.
But tonight he was back, responding to a summons of such urgency that it had rendered his pledge mute.
It was into the residue of your dream that he’d thrust his face, the letter continued. So close that you could smell the fear rising off his skin like heat. And he’d say, ‘Did you wake up before or after?’ And you’d answer, ‘Before,’ just so he’d go away.
Do you remember his eyes, Bob? Do you remember how his eyes made you tell him that you’d woken yourself up before it happened, whether you had or not? That you hadn’t seen the blood in your dream?
Well, I’ve got Dad’s eyes now, Bob…or at least I’ve got one of them.
Robert Norris…Junior…still had nightmares.
And at three-thirty in the morning, the telephone had rung him from one, right into the middle of another.
* * *
In his dream…
The woman wanted to cry, but she didn’t dare because the sound would draw him back. He enjoyed watching her cry, and he liked to see her suffer.
She was lying in a small, cramped room with whitewashed walls and a big, flowered easy chair in one corner. Her nightgown was torn. A silver moon hung motionlessly in the sky outside. And thin, milky light bled through the parted drapes, forming an elongated pattern of glowing windowpane rectangles and shadowy crosses on the floor. There were four thick blankets covering her trembling body, and water was running in the kitchen.
He was out there, and every time he cursed, she cringed.
How it had started this time she wasn’t sure. She’d gone to bed early, as much to get away from her husband as anything else, leaving him alone in his chair where he was looking out the window at the snow falling in the parking lot, a half-empty mayonnaise jar of liquor on his lap. He was in one of his moods again…one of his quiet, sullen tempers when he didn’t talk, or even look at her. She put on her nightgown, climbed under the covers, and huddled herself into a ball, dreaming, as she did every night, of the day she’d wake up to find him dead next to her, his face bruised black from the heart attack that would end her misery.
Sometime after eleven he got into bed, wearing, she saw when she caught sight of his silhouette against the glowing window, his tattered flannel shirt, and nothing else. He lay next to her, breathing roughly and tossing drunkenly until the doorbell rang. Then he went away, spoke to someone a moment, and came back angry.
Maybe it was because a customer had come so late. Or maybe it was just because he was awake. But his quiet mood had fled before a rush of unfocused rage he seemed to always carry with him. Ripping off the blankets, he roared something about how the way she slept made him crazy, dragged her out of bed, and punched her with his fist, five times, ten. Then he went back out to the kitchen to wash his hands, leaving her to cower, first on the floor and then on the bed, sitting up with her back against the headboard, crying noiselessly to herself and waiting for the sun to come up and save her. He’d be up all night now, she knew. That was his pattern: drink, try to sleep, beat her, then drink alone in the living room until he fell asleep on the couch at sunrise. He’d stay on the couch all day, and she’d sneak out to clean the rooms and do the work that kept the motel going.
She didn’t know why she stayed with him. Probably because at the age of sixty, with no living relatives, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She’d sped her day working, avoiding her own home, until dinnertime brought her back to cook his food. He’d eat, start drinking again, and the whole lurid scene would play itself out in the night, as it had since their third year of marriage.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
Maybe he would just go to sleep.
And that was probably the worst part: the not knowing.
Sometimes she thought she could stand it better if she’d just know!
God, she hated him! She hated him, feared him, and for the life of her, couldn’t remember a time when things had been any other way.
The water ran in the kitchen sink for an incredibly long time. And, through the window, red lights flashed. People were moving around outside, and once or twice, the crackle of police radios buzzed faintly through the thin walls. Wiping tears from her cheeks, she glanced up and thought about asking him what was happening in the parking lot. But she didn’t move. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any of her business, and he’d probably hit her again for asking.
So she just sat here, wrapped in her blankets, listening to him wash his hands and talk to himself—he’d been doing that for the last week or so, and it worried her. He’d ask questions out loud and then answer them, grunting or laughing as if someone were in the room with him until his conversation turned ugly and he’d get himself worked up for another beating.
“Not again!” she whispered, terrified.
The water stopped and she heard a low, tense tone of voice mumbling in the next room. He was moving again and a tiny groan of despair escaped her swollen lips.
And then the door burst open and he was there.
Outside, the first tint of morning softened the darkness, and in the room’s gentle light she saw him, leaning with his back to the door, his scrawny, hairy legs bowed beneath his hanging shirt and his heaving chest. His eyes were wild, glazed, and aglow with a hideous light of fury so intense that she clenched her fists at her sides and tired her best not to grimace. Remaining perfectly still, she watched him through eyes almost shut, hoping that he’d think that she was asleep and leave her alone.
“More!” he whispered.
And she noticed for the first time that, in the darkness behind his left leg, he was dangling his shotgun.
She gasped, choking the sound by biting her tongue.
“There should be more!” he said.
And then he left the room.
She sighed, and felt the tears come.
He was gone for nearly an hour, and when he came back, the sun was up.
Still, she didn’t dare move.
Closing the door gently, he paused before turning and displaying a leer so genuinely insane that it made her bolt straight up in bed and cry, “Ernie, no! What did I do? Oh, Ernie…please! No!”
He swung the shotgun up so that it pointed at the ceiling, and ran his hand along its barrel, smearing a glob of Vaseline over the blue-black rod. Up and down his hand moved, obscenely oiling the steel as he stepped toward where she
pumped her feet on the sheets and pressed herself hopelessly into the headboard, screaming,“Help! Oh God…HELP ME!”
“It’s down deep inside and we’ll bring it out,” he growled, advancing toward the bed and cocking the gun.
The woman opened her mouth.
The gun came forward…
* * *
And Norris screamed in his bed. Twisting madly, he tore himself up and swung his eyes furiously around the room. He was holding something black against his head, and in his ear a voice said, “Bob?” Clattering around on the nightstand, with ebbing visions of what the woman had seen, he searched for the light switch and listened as the voice in the black telephone receiver said, “Bob, it’s Woodie. You better come down.”
Pause.
“Bob?”
“I’m here,” Norris said, squinting at the clock and gasping as sweat rolled down between his eyes.
Three-thirty.
“Bob?”
“I’m here”
“Woodie’s had an accident.”
“Woodie? Who is this?”
“Jesus, Bob!”
“Mike?”
“You better come down. I’ll tell you where. But you better come ‘cause, man, it’s bad. It’s really bad.”
Bad?
Mike Cooper never talked like that. He was a very special kind of cop; he was a friend; and he was emotionally flat—or at least that’s what he wanted everyone to think. “If you let yourself get all wired up over the shit I see every day,” he’d once told Norris over drinks in a bar near the county morgue, “you’d spend all your time going, ‘How could anybody do something like that?’—which is just what these creeps want—and you wouldn’t be any good to anybody…not the victim, the department, or yourself.”
So as a direct result of his unshakable desire to be “good,” he kept his voice even, his tone soft, and his word choice confined to “interesting,” “suspicious,” and, in extreme cases, “regrettable.”
At least he had until this morning.
Something “bad” had happened to Woodie, Robert Norris’ younger brother, and the author of the letter he had received on Monday.
Dear Bob, it read. I’m sending you this because it’s too risky for me to try to see you face-to-face.
That was Woodie, all right: Mr. Dramatic., Norris thought as he carefully slid his car off the road and onto the bouncing gravel of the Lexington Motel’s parking lot.
His dream was all but gone. By a familiar act of mental discipline he’d banished it from memory. He’d been having nightmares for so long that he had learned to just shake them off and to file them away. They came and went like mist, and since there was nothing he could do to stop them—no therapy, drugs or magic—he had, in his stoic, almost painfully practical way, taught himself restraint. They came, he screamed, and they disappeared: coexistence in the same body…an uncomfortable compromise.
The motel was an L-shaped building, one floor, studded with yellow light bulbs that made it shimmer a sickeningly familiar green. It had an office at one end, and rental units running window/door, window/door, around the back. Just about every window was dark, except for one at the south end, which glowed a cheap, feeble amber. That unit’s door stood open in the cold, and amid the oddly staggered cluster of cars and pickup trucks parked nearby was a Harpersville Sheriff’s Department cruiser.
There was an ambulance backed up close to the door, but it was dark inside and one of its uniformed attendants was leaning up against its great, flat side, smoking a cigarette.
Silhouettes moved back and forth across the amber window.
Norris felt as if his car were rolling toward the light completely of its own volition, carrying him somewhere he sincerely didn’t want to be.
The letter was the first time Norris had heard from his brother since the cemetery episode. (Woodie—who had been very drunk at the time—had been arrested the previous Halloween for trespassing in a graveyard. The police report stated that he had given “Waiting for the Great Pumpkin” as his reason for being on the premises after midnight.)
After rambling around for a while about the Norris family history, which had been Woodie’s obsession for the past few years, the letter finally settled into its most disturbing, and, yes, Norris thought, pushing the gearshift forward and turning off the car, its craziest part…
The part about death.
It said:
Listen: I know how you are, Bob. You won’t believe me. Just because it’s me, you won’t believe. But you’ve got to hear anyway. One of my eyes sees what I see. And the other sees what Dad missed. Understand? When I die, will you understand?
A uniformed policeman stuck his head out of the open motel room and then pulled it back. As Norris climbed from his car, a figure emerged and made its way over, so that, just as he slammed the door, a pair of strong hands touched his chest and Detective Mike Cooper’s earnest face—outlined by the light behind his head and fuzzed by a cloud of frozen breath—thrust itself boldly toward his.
“Mr. Norris,” Cooper said, gripping Norris’ coat and pulling him sideways, away from the ambulance. “Thank you for coming.”
Norris shuffled his feet and lifted one hand. But before he could speak, Cooper had hustled him past the ambulance to a spot between two sheriff’s cruisers that was dark, and, he suddenly realized, out of the smoking paramedic’s hearing.
“Real quick, Bob,” Cooper said. “I didn’t want to do this, but it’s gotten out of hand, so listen.
“Woodie’s been mauled. I mean it, Bob. Mauled…and bad. You’re not supposed to be here. No civilians at the C.S., period, department rule, no exceptions. But it’s Woodie, for Christ’s sake! So we’ll say that you’re consulting; you’re a CCMP animal behavior specialist. Okay? Can you handle that?”
“But, Mike,” Norris sputtered as Cooper dragged him around the cars and toward the open motel room door from which three men had so recently appeared.
His mind was working with the words Cooper had used: mauled, C.S.—crime scene—animal behavior.
Animal?
Mauled?
“My God,” his lips mimed silently as Cooper introduced him as a representative of the Cuyahoga County MetroPark System’s Criminal Consultation Division.
I’m a fucking park ranger! Norris protested in his mind as, over a fat man’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of the room’s interior. There was something dark splashed on the walls in there.
“Mr. Norris,” the fat man said, sweeping his hand before him. “Right this way, sir.”
As a member of the Park Services Division—stationed in Berea, south of Cleveland—Norris was familiar with the animals that populated Ohio’s wilder areas. He’d seen foxes, raccoons, and opossums; even a wildcat or two. He’d seen groundhogs, badgers, beavers, dear, the odd coyote, and even a bear, once—way down south where sighting one was about as common as spotting Elvis in the mall. But he’d never seen a lion, tiger, or wolf running free at the fringes of civilization’s backyard, and these were the beasts that immediately leapt into his mind as he stepped, full face ahead, into the room where his baby brother had met his sudden and horrible…demise.
“Oh, God,” he whispered as his knees went rubbery.
“Keep it together,” Cooper’s strong voice said close behind. “And then tell us about it.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Norris said, louder this time, feeling his head swim and seeing the room in tight little flashes of detail that were interspersed with long moments of blurred, tear-filled confusion.
“You…” he said, turning and feeling bile burn the back of this throat. “You…you left him here?”
Then his mouth fell open.
Cooper, the fat man, three guys in grey uniforms, and two in blue coveralls were standing, blocking his way to the door. There were bright lights on tall aluminum poles, and there were cameras. There were faces, intense, careful faces, studying him, watching him, aiming the collective weight of their expectant gaze at him as he swallo
wed back the urge to vomit and searched out Cooper’s familiar features.
“You set me up!” he moaned, bewildered.
Flashbulbs popped, dazzling his eyes and making him throw his hands over his face.
“Bob…?” Cooper’s voice asked.
“Somebody grab him!” another man announced.
Norris stumbled away from the group and into the middle of the room, which was so small that its one, single bed, tiny four-drawer dresser, and TV-try nightstand—broken and scattered as if by an explosion—made it feel cramped. He half turned, rolled his eyes, and groaned, waving his arms and reeling back to shake his head as he barked, “You fucker!”
More flashbulbs popped.
Cooper touched him.
Norris pushed him away, slipping on the blood-soaked carpet in the process so that the next thing he knew, he was on the bed.
“Goddamn it! He’ll fuck it all up!”
“Jesus, Mike!”
Hands were coming at him again as Norris rolled, and slid to his knees at the bedside—like a child saying his prayers.
On the mattress before him…right before him…inches from his face…was part of what was left of Woodie…real name, William.
(He called himself Woodie because he said two brothers named William and Robert—Billy and Bobby—sounded like Norman Rockwell’s version of the American family. And Woodie always wanted to be different.
“Christ!” Norris gagged, and then his stomach locked up. Something—not someone, even in his shock he knew, instinctively, that it wasn’t a human being who had done this, but something—had torn Woodie apart.
If it was Woodie.
Which was hard to tell.
What was on the bed resembled an insect more than it did a human being. A good portion of a man’s rib cage—complete with red muscle and white cartilage—was half propped against a soggy pillow. Jutting from the end of the basketlike arrangement was a shattered length of spinal vertebrae that ended in a lump of meat that was part of a leg, to the knee. The sheets were puddled with blood, and across the floor, walls, and even the ceiling, great splashes of red dripped and congealed. The arms, head, and other leg of the body had been torn off, leaving little strings of skin hanging from the gaping, pulpy ruins of neck, shoulder, and groin. And huge, crescent-shaped chunks of flesh had been bitten from the corpse, leaving jagged, deep gouges that roughly matched those that had been bitten into the walls.