by Gene Lazuta
Over the bed was a broken window and its glass sparkled madly as Norris felt his body being lifted from the floor. He struggled, kicked, and shouted, but there were too many arms, too many men, pulling and hustling him out, away from the light, away from the blood, away from Woodie’s face, which was the last thing he’d seen, on the floor, under the splintered wood of a broken dresser drawer. The head was on its side, the face torn into unrecognizable pulp, one eye open, and one eye gouged out…
One eye…
Sees what I see!
Norris felt a terrible fist form under his ribs as his heart seized itself into a knot.
And one eye…
Sees what Dad missed!
Snow was falling…and so was he.
There was an awful crack when his knees hit the pavement. He heaved once, and then again as he hung his head and gurgled, spit, and then growled…no words…and he didn’t know why he did it. But he growled…and it felt good.
It felt better than good.
It felt right!
The sound came from deep inside his chest, and swelled in a rumbling surge that made the whole of his throat vibrate. He did it once, on his hands and knees, there in the slush and snow and steaming vomit. He growled once, whipped his head up, and leveled his hot, red eyes on Cooper’s face, and then he growled again, with his teeth exposed and his fists clenched.
“Goddaaaaamn you!”
The sound came, dripping with threat.
Cooper, stretched tall by perspective and silhouetted by the light from inside the motel room, nodded gravely—as if some secret suspicion of his had been confirmed.
Then he said, “Clean him up.”
16.
From a window at the other end of the motel, Ernie Cray, the Lexington’s owner, watched Robert Norris vomit, and laughed.
“So the big shot brother’s a wimp,” he muttered, less than sympathetically, craning his neck as Norris was dragged behind the ambulance. ‘What an asshole.”
Ernie was standing in his kitchen, bathing his wounded hand under a stream of cold water, and looking out the window over the sink.
He was feeling surly and mean.
The cut itself wasn’t bad; what bothered him was the he couldn’t remember how he had gotten it. All he knew for sure was the his injury had something to do with Woodie—that’s how he had signed the register book, Woodie Norris, big block letters—and, by extension, with his park ranger brother. Together, these two had dragged something strange into Ernie’s life; something so peculiar that it hung like a smell and affected his mind.
“I knew I shoulda sent that creepy son of a bitch packing,” he added, glancing down and examining his wound.
It started at the crown of his right hand’s middle knuckle and zigzagged its way back to the bump on his wrist that was the end of his ulna. At the knuckle, it was a craggy, raw-looking tear, but after about an inch, it branched out into little, neat slices that filled with blood as soon as he moved his hand out from under the water.
It hurt like hell.
And God…the blood!
It was all over the place—dribbled over the countertop, the faucet fixtures, the floor—and no matter how long he kept the hand under the water, there still seemed to be more coming.
“Dumbass,” he mumbled, turning on the light over the sink.
Suddenly a pallid white puddle fell on his face, transforming the window into a black mirror. Shadowy forms moved within his floating reflection, punching it through with stabbing flashlight beams, and silently blowing chunks of his head away with red and blue bursts of police car emergency bubbles.
“Shouldn’t have given him a key,” the eerie, insubstantial man, clad in an unbuttoned, red and black, lumberjack-style flannel shirt said from his place inside the window pane.
I shoulda told him that we was full up,” Ernie agreed.
The reflected man’s expression was dour. His eyes were deep-set and dark, his head shone bald on the top, its sides overgrown with bushy white hair that prickled as if it were electronically charged.
“I shoulda known. I felt it soon’s I saw him. But it was snowin’ so bad…and, shit, I don’t know…”
His reflection shrugged.
“Too late now.”
* * *
What Ernie had felt when he got up to see, “Who the hell’s banging on the door at twelve-thirty in the goddamn morning when the sign ain’t even on?” was a strange sensation of vertigo that seemingly had as its object the spaces beyond the walls of the room he occupied. He didn’t know how to put it any better than that, and he was sleepy anyway.
As he got out of bed, a funny, head rush overcame him, making him lurch. Putting his hand on a dresser to steady himself, he suddenly knew—just knew—that the motel wasn’t where it had been when he had gone to sleep. Things had changed. Maybe he was still groggy, but he sensed that an alteration had taken place, a twisting of things that directly involved him. Such sudden knowledge was irrational, of course, but its impact was so powerful that it made him pause and hold his breath. In that silent, intimate moment, he was sure that he could feel the building floating—the whole goddamn thing, floating—in some dreamy space that was as dark and cold as all creation.
His wife didn’t stir, even when the pounding started again. She never did: selective hearing. She just went right on snoring, the hulk, a crocheted bedspread tangled over the four blankets that she insisted she needed to stay warm.
“She nests like a bear,” Ernie complained, his voice shattering the moment as he pulled on his slippers and growled, “I’m coming. Jesus Christ!”
But when he snapped on the hallway light, it hit him again: a twinge; a real, physical flutter in his chest that made his heart skip.
There was something…serious going on here tonight. Something, really…Lord, it sounded crazy…but there was something big outside.
And whatever it was, it was knocking on his door.
When finally he did open that door, after glancing over to see that his shotgun was still leaning against the wall, Ernie half-expected to see the President—or the Queen of England, or some other personage of remarkable distinction—standing in the harsh gleam of his porch light. But instead he found a man…a thin, long-haired man, shuffling his feet in the cold and holding one hand over his eyes in a salute intended to keep the blowing snow from frosting his lashes.
“Got a room?” he asked, and his voice was strained, nervous, and…was it vaguely desperate?
Against his better judgment, Ernie gave the man a key, briefly perfunctorily explaining the house rules, and collecting his twenty dollars, which the kid handed over with trembling fingers.
He’s on the run, Ernie thought. He’d been in the motel business long enough to know trouble when he saw it. The thin timbre of the kid’s voice, the way he wouldn’t look Ernie in the eye, and the skittish, almost flighty way he moved—he was running all right. But from whom?
Cops?
Jealous husband?
Drug dealers?
When the kid went back to his car, Ernie watched him through the window and saw that there was another person sitting in the passenger’s seat. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—and nowadays it didn’t really seem to matter—but he would have bet woman.
Jealous husband, he decided…or angry father…letting the drapes close and turning from the window as he felt that dreadful sensation of unease move—like a patch of fog or a cold draft—following the young man away from the office and down to the south side of the motel. Whoever he was, the kid exuded a…a vibration, an aura that irritated Ernie’s skin, making it feel itchy, like there was wool in his arms and cotton in his mouth. It made him feel like squirming, pointlessly, like kids do when you show them a worm. And it made him thirsty.
So he got himself a shot of moonshine and went back to bed. He intended to sleep, but the sight of his wife…just lying there—good-for-nothing, son-of-a-bitching…
When the beating was over, hi
s hands were bloody, and his wife was crying. He stared at her for a moment, feeling a physical wash of relief ebbing the frustration in his guts, and heard a great crash of shattering glass outside. Without even thinking—and in a weird display of detachment that focused his attention on events outside this little cell of space he thought of as his own, impenetrable fortress against the laws and logic of the world—Ernie went to his kitchen and called the sheriff.
* * *
That wormy, itchy feeling was worse than ever now, and Robert Norris was its source. He, like his brother, made Ernie’s skin crawl.
“Fucker,” he said, returning his attention to the sink and rubbing his hand over his wound to clear away some of the blood so that he could see if he needed stitches.
So much blood for such a little cut.
Just a little cut.
And then Ernie Cray noticed something that made his eyes grow wide and his heart go cold. Grabbing his wrist and lifting his bleeding hand closer to his face, he stared at it, transfixed and confused, as a police car slid past his window, its light revolving.
“Cops,” he hissed, his reflection’s eyes twinkling red as it mimicked him in the glass. “Right outside! There’s an ambulance, right outside!”
With an inarticulate cry, he lunged for the door…
And locked it.
Leaning his back to the wood, he studied the wound again, watching as his skin seemed to swell, right before his eyes, as if his hand were suddenly full of some thick, lumpy liquid. Wiping the blood away, roughly, he began probing at the cut’s ragged edges with his fingertips, ignoring the pain as the room around him disappeared.
Finally, he pushed the bloody slice open and stroked it, carefully moving streaks of red until the things he’d seen were laid out: moist, dark, and fine.
Hairs.
Ernie grinned.
There were hairs protruding from inside his hand: long, black hairs, growing on the underside of his skin.
No wonder there was so much blood, splashed, from the bedroom—where his wife still reclined—to the sink, where he had just been standing, washing his hairy, bloody hands.
No wonder there was so much blood.
Blinking, he whispered, “There should probably be more.”
And then Ernie Cray checked the lock on his front door, lifted his shotgun from its place in the corner, and headed back to his bedroom.
17.
After he had been “cleaned up,” a process during which he stood mute, implacable, and zoned, Robert Norris was placed on a bed that was identical to the one upon which his brother’s body had been found, in a room three doors down from the murder scene. There, he remained for what could have been an hour—maybe more, maybe less; he couldn’t tell, and he really didn’t care—trembling violently and trying to summon from somewhere inside himself a sliver of steel, or a single, cold slice of nerve, that would make the awful gagging sensation in his chest go away. He felt battered and weak. He was repulsed at his own frailty and ashamed of the sweat on his palms. He was Woodie’s big brother—and he wanted to do…
Something…
Anything.
But what?
Woodie was dead.
Terribly, obscenely, irreversibly…
Dead.
And vaguely, Norris felt that somehow it was all his fault.
Trying to trace the logic of such a conclusion was pointless, he knew. But his conviction was unshakable. Somehow, Woodie had died because of him. He’d been doing something that had to do with the dreams that had plagued both their lives. He’d said so in his letter. Those dreams were the same ones that had terrified Norris’ father and had, years later, fascinated the psychologist his mother had ended up marrying.
* * *
The first time the young Robert Norris ever saw Dr. Datch, his soon-to-be stepfather (who to this day insisted that Norris call him “Daddy-O”), was in the hospital room where Woodie was lying after the car accident that had killed their dad. A lot of people he knew—his mother, grandparents, and even a couple of crotchety old aunts—were all standing in a circle around the bed. There was also a bunch of people he didn’t recognize, all dressed in white, sprinkled through the group. And among them was a man with longish brown hair, glasses, and a soft belly, standing with his hand on his mother’s shoulder.
“Where’s Daddy?” Woodie asked, weakly.
And they told him Daddy was dead.
“That’s not true,” Woodie said, making his mother cry.
“You were right,” the man with the glasses said to her with a frown. “He’s pretty banged up.”
“What happened?” a lady in a white smock asked. “Can you tell us why you were out so late?”
Woodie replied that he couldn’t.
And Dr. Datch then proceeded to explain to everyone present how normal it was for a person to block traumatic events from memory. It was his contention that buried memories often found their way into the shadowy corridors of a man’s soul, where they wandered for years, being twisted by darkness and neglect until they reemerged years later as a full-blown neurosis. To prevent that from happening to Woodie—and with his mother’s approval—he proposed initiating a series of therapy sessions with both boys involving hypnosis. Those sessions ended up lasting for the whole year before he married the boys’ mother and for all the years leading up to the day that Bobby Norris finally got away, by going to college. During those years, Dr. Datch lost interest in Woodie, but he kept coming back to Bobby, and their sessions often lasted well into the long hours of the night. The doctor kept everything Norris said while “under” in a big, black binder that he guarded like a secret.
Growing up with the knowledge that there was a part of his brain that was hidden from him—like a waterproof space inside a ship that no one could open—Robert Norris felt strangely compelled to be by himself. Thus, he was drawn to the woods—these very woods—the anonymity of the Killibrook Valley. When he was alone among the trees he could forget his stepfather’s black book. He could remove himself from the sidelong glances his parents both seemed to be perpetually sneaking his way. And, most of all, he could forget the dreams…
Which were another thing his stepfather seemed to be interested in.
Many nights, Norris would wake up with a start, clawing his way back from the midst of some wretched, awful nighttime vision, only to find Daddy-O sitting on a chair beside his bed, writing in that imposing black volume.
“What’s in that book?” he asked him once.
“You,” came his reply.
“No, I’m not,” the boy insisted. “No one has me locked in any book.”
As he got older, he went even deeper into the woods each day, until finally he decided that it was time to stay there and never come back. He went to college, far away, leaving his mother and Daddy-O behind.
They still lived down there, in Mist County, just south of Harpersville. He wondered how long it would be before they learned of Woodie’s death. Thinking of his mother, he allowed himself to mentally drift back to the modest brick bungalow surrounded by a rolling lawn in which he had been raised. The Killibrook Valley State Park started like a barricade at the ridge about a hundred yards from his bedroom window, and as a child he had stared for hours at the brooding line of oak, ash, and evergreen, yearning for the embrace of its shadowy depths so deeply that he was often impervious to the fall of night. In the morning, he’d awaken with the forest still in his eyes.
* * *
“One of my eyes sees what I see,” Woodie’s letter had said, and Norris thoughtlessly slid his hand under his jacket pocket and found the small, hard thing he’d picked up in the room where Woodie’s body lay. It had been on the floor, and he’d seen it after he’d slipped on Woodie’s blood. “And the other sees what Dad missed.”
He lifted the object to the light, and a deep, smoke-grey sparkle, intricate and real, danced near a shiny black dot. He didn’t have the slightest ideas of what had possessed him to pick it up in the
first place. But when he saw it, his only thought was to hide it from the men around Woodie’s corpse. When he fell, he splashed one hand down atop it. He held it in his fist as they dragged him out of the room. And he stuffed it into his jacket when they hustled him down to “clean him up” as Cooper had ordered.
Now it was his alone.
And he didn’t know why he wanted it, or what he was going to do with it.
He moved his hand, and the light sparkled from grey to a clear milky white.
Eyes…
They were so significant in his life—the one truly constant image in the symbology of his persistent dreamscape. Vivid pictures of them, hovering overhead, staring into his soul, and filling the sky, had come to him almost every night for as long as he could remember. There was so much expression embodied in the eye, so much knowledge filtered through its lens. So much of a man’s mind could be seen reflected in the eye. And so much information could be read there…
But the one he held, Woodie’s glass eye, simply stared at him: silent, cold, and impassive.
Woodie had worn one since the accident that had killed their dad. Some arteries were ruptured when his head hit the windshield. There was an infection, and soon there wasn’t an eye they could save anymore. Few people could tell that the eye was artificial, unless they really looked, which not many ever did.
But Norris knew.
He’d held Woodie in his arms as the boy cried in his hospital bed, half his face covered with bandages, and his good eye squeezed tightly shut. He had held his brother as he cried and cried. They’d just brought the eye in for him to see. The first of many he’d have over his growing years. They thought it would make him happy.