by Jacob Stone
When he rang the doorbell, Nancy’s older sister answered. She didn’t like Henry, always looked at him as if he were some sort of strange insect, and this time it was worse than any of those other times. But she still consented to yell for her sister that her oddball friend was at the door. “You better come down before he starts blubbering!”
When Nancy came to the door and saw Henry, she quickly stepped outside to join him and closed the door behind her.
“I’m so sorry, Henry.”
He bit his bottom lip as he struggled to fight back tears.
“She didn’t like you the way you wanted her to.”
Nancy didn’t say this as a question but as a statement of fact. Still, Henry nodded.
“Let’s walk to Super Comics. It will cheer you up.”
Henry still didn’t trust himself to speak, and they set off on foot together to the comic-book store two miles away. After walking half a mile, Henry told Nancy that it was stupid that he was ever interested in Aisley.
“Those blue lips and black eye shadow make her look like a corpse,” he said. “She’s not anywhere near as pretty as you.”
Nancy didn’t say anything as Henry took her hand. They walked quietly for another block, then Henry said that they should date. “There’s nobody I like better than you.”
Nancy pulled her hand free. “Stop it.”
“No, I mean it. You should be my girlfriend.”
“I said stop it.”
Her voice sounded different from what Henry had ever heard from her. As if she were talking to a stranger that she didn’t particularly like.
“Do you have any idea how insulting this is?” she asked in that same cold, distant voice. “Goth girl rejects you so you come running to me as a consolation prize? We’re friends for three years, and this is the first time you express interest in dating me!”
Henry couldn’t think of what to say. A slow horror filled him as he realized he was on the verge of losing Nancy from his life.
“Why’d you even come to me that day in the cafeteria and ask if you could sit with me?”
He wanted to cut out his tongue as he half heard himself tell her that it was because Mr. Shapiro told him he should. At first Nancy stared at him dumbfounded. When she turned and walked away from him, he knew she would never speak to him again.
At first Henry felt too weak to move, as if his muscles had melted into goo. As if he’d been completely hollowed out and left barely as a husk. It wasn’t until a half hour later that he was able to start trudging off toward his home, and it was then that he passed by the kid he had saved from humiliation weeks earlier, Gary Fleishman. Fleishman was on a bike, and he stopped to say hi to Henry.
“I never got a chance to thank you for saving me like you did. Standing up to those football jocks was amazing,” Fleishman said.
Henry stared at him dumbly, not recognizing him or making sense of what this scrawny kid was saying. All at once hurt and pain and rage flared up inside of him, and he bellowed out a yell and started chasing after Fleishman, who had dropped his bike and was running as fast as he could to get away. As if he were running for his life. Which he was.
Henry never would’ve been able to articulate why at that moment he wanted so badly to beat Fleishman’s face into a bloody pulp, but that’s what he wanted to do, and he blindly chased after Fleishman for two blocks before Fleishman fell to the sidewalk skinning his knee bloody and crying out in fear. Henry, huffing and puffing, rolled Fleishman onto his back, then plopped down on his chest and brought his fist back ready to crush Fleishman’s head as it were a grape. But a force stopped him from following through with his punch.
“What the hell are you doing, kid?”
Bewildered, Henry looked up to see that a man had grabbed his arm and was keeping him from hitting Fleishman. He broke free and ran off. The man who had kept him from killing Gary Fleishman made no effort to stop him, and Henry kept running, his chest aching as if it was going to break apart. It was only later that he realized that somewhere along the way he had lost his Shrieker comic books.
When Henry got home, he locked himself in his room and started a new comic book. This one had an anti-hero who killed his first victim (a scrawny kid who looked a lot like Gary Fleishman) using a sledgehammer to smash the skull into a gory pulp of blood, hair, brain matter and bone fragments. Henry decided to switch things up after that and have his anti-hero instead use a hammer and chisel to break open the skulls of those deserving his wrath, and once the skulls were broken apart, the anti-hero dug out the brains with the claw end of the hammer. His next two victims strongly resembled Aisley Martin and Nancy Bower.
Chapter Twenty-two
Los Angeles, the present
“Welcome, Howard.”
“Hiya, Madame Asteria.”
The young full-figured blonde fortune-teller offered Henry a warm smile and her right paw, which he took. Henry smiled right back just as warmly, hiding his disappointment over her not being as young as he had thought. From her website and the pictures he took of her outside this strip-mall storefront, she had looked like what he imagined a twenty-three year-old version of Nancy Bower to look like, but up close he could see the crow’s feet creeping out from the corner of her eyes and the razor-thin lines pruning the skin above her upper lip. She was in her late thirties, easy, maybe even forty. He was just going to have to pretend she was twenty-three.
Of course, those photos making her look so much younger weren’t the only fraudulent thing on her website. Her real name wasn’t Asteria, Madame or otherwise. Three weeks ago he’d followed her from her psychic storefront to her apartment building in North Los Angeles, and found that her real name was Lois Grabenstein, which, to put it mildly, was not nearly as exotic a moniker as the way she advertised herself. Out of curiosity he searched on Google for the meaning of Asteria and found that it was the name of the Greek goddess of the stars, so at least she’d made a reasonable choice for her “psychic” name.
After letting Henry in, she had locked the front door and flipped the sign to busy, so he could’ve bopped her on the head when she turned around to lead him to the two satin-covered easy chairs sitting in the middle of the small room. Although the iron pipe was in the backpack that he carried (since killing Hawes and Susan, he’d changed into more casual clothes and moved everything he needed from the briefcase to his backpack), his fist would’ve worked fine. But he didn’t do that. He was curious about what a psychic reading would entail. Maybe he was also a little frazzled after his impromptu and rushed killing of Susan, and he wouldn’t mind sitting in a comfortable chair for a few minutes to catch his breath, so to speak. Besides, he’d booked an hour with Madame Asteria, so why be in a hurry? He plopped himself onto the chair the psychic invited him to take with a sweep of her palm, and she lowered herself more daintily onto the matching chair facing him.
“Your name isn’t Howard,” she said.
He almost told her that her name wasn’t Asteria, but he held his tongue and maintained his pleasant smile.
“It’s similar to Howard, though,” she said. Her forehead wrinkled, and her eyes squinted to show that she was concentrating in her efforts to divine his real name. “Herman? No, not Herman. Herbert. No, that’s not it either. Henry, yes, that’s it. Henry. That’s your name.”
She gave him a way-too-pleased-with-herself smile. A parlor trick, Henry thought. When she had called him Howard at the door he must’ve given her an unconscious signal that that wasn’t his real name, and then when she rattled off those other names she was able to read his expression to know when she had it figured out. Not someone he’d ever want to play poker with, that was for sure!
“Very good,” Henry said. “I guess you really are psychic, huh?”
“I have a gift, Henry. I sense your skepticism, but what I do is very real. Before we proceed any further, we should take care of my fee.”
Earlier Henry hadn’t yet decided whether to kill her right off or to play along
for a while, so he had counted out the three hundred dollars that she charged for an hour-long psychic reading. He dug into his pocket for the money and handed her a wad of bills comprised of tens and twenties. She gave it a cursory look before placing it somewhere under the flowing pink robe she wore. He’d have to get the money back later so he wouldn’t be leaving any fingerprints.
“Where’s the crystal ball?” Henry asked.
She knew he was cracking wise, but she explained anyway that no psychic she knew of used crystal balls. “In my case I read auras,” she said. “I’ll also be aligning myself with your energy, and later during the reading I’ll be asking to hold your hands. Now Henry, why don’t you tell me why you wanted to see me?”
“As you said, I’m a skeptic. I’d rather you tell me my reason.”
Her plump lips narrowed into a thin smile. “Very well.” She took in a deep breath through her nose, and brought her hands parallel to her mouth so that her middle fingers touched. As she exhaled, also through her nose, she pushed her hands down.
“A cleansing breath,” she explained, then for an uncomfortably long moment she stared at Henry in this weird way where her eyes seemingly became translucent. Henry wondered how she did that, and it made his skin crawl the way she looked at him. He strongly considered grabbing her and getting this latest Skull Cracker killing over with, but he stayed seated. In a perverse way, he was too curious about what she was going to say.
“You recently suffered a loss,” she said at last. “A wife? No, not a wife. A girlfriend.”
She was up to more of her parlor tricks, making wild guesses, and then reading his expression to see if she had guessed right. “Not a girlfriend,” he said. “I’m married.”
“A friend then.”
He opened his mouth, but closed it without commenting whether she was right or wrong.
“A woman friend. She died after a long illness.”
Before Henry could stop himself, he shook his head. If she wanted to think illness, he should’ve just let her think that.
“No? I had an impression of this woman being very skinny. In an unhealthy way. I thought illness, but now I see it more clearly. She died violently.”
“In an accident,” Henry said.
She looked like she was about to correct him, but she caught herself, just as Henry had done earlier. “You were with her when she died,” she said. “I can sense her death heavily within your aura.”
“I wasn’t there,” he insisted.
Again she looked like she wanted to argue with him, but instead swallowed back whatever she was going to say and offered him a sympathetic smile. “Nonetheless, her death is weighing heavily on you.”
This had not only gone on too long, but was getting uncomfortable. Henry had no doubt that she was really just adept at reading his cues, kind of like a mind-reading act he’d seen on TV, but he didn’t much care for it. With one quick lunge, he could grab her by the throat and throttle her until she passed out, and then once he had her trussed up, he could use the chisel and hammer to wake her up. But something wasn’t right with the setup. He wasn’t sure what it was, but something felt off to him.
“That may all be true, but that wasn’t why I wanted to see you.”
She did another of her cleansing breaths, and then did that cringe-worthy trick again making her eyes become translucent like a snake’s. He wondered how the heck she did that. It didn’t last long, though. Only a second or two, and then she was nodding to herself.
“You’re here because of your wife,” she said.
“What?”
“The impression I received of your wife was overpowering. She was hurt badly in an accident.”
“That was five years ago,” Henry murmured without fully realizing he had done so. He wondered how she knew about his wife. Could she have researched him like he had done with her? But how? She didn’t know his name, at least not his full name anyway. He had used a pay phone in Santa Monica when he scheduled the appointment. Then Henry remembered that he had mentioned his wife earlier. He must’ve subconsciously given her a visual clue then about what happened to Sheila. This Madame Asteria was one clever lady, he had to give her that.
“Your wife is in a great deal of distress. She sent you to me. Please hand me the items of hers that you brought and I’ll sense the impressions I can from them.”
She was referring to the backpack Henry had left by his chair. “There’s nothing of hers in there. This is such a sketchy neighborhood, I didn’t want to leave anything of value in my car.”
He didn’t know why he bothered giving her an explanation. He should just clobber her and get the killing over with, but something wasn’t right about this. He wasn’t sure what it was, but a whisper in his head was telling him that something funny was going on here.
She got up from her chair and kneeled beside him, smiling as she held out her hands so she could take told of his. It struck him like a thunderclap what his whisper had been trying to tell him. He understood it then as clear as day.
“You’re filming this,” he said.
It hadn’t been anything overtly obvious. Subtle glances toward a mirror on the wall. A few other slight mannerisms that could’ve easily gone unnoticed. With the way her eyes momentarily shifted from his, he knew he was right. For a second she was going to try arguing that she didn’t know what he was talking about, but as her eyes shifted back to meet his she must’ve realized it would be pointless. Without saying another word, she got back on her feet, walked over to the wall opposite to where she’d been sitting, and knocked on it. A moment later, the wall opened up exposing a hidden door that led to a hidden room, and a hipster type in his thirties walked out of it.
“I’m Devlin Pavlovich,” the hipster said introducing himself to Henry and handing him a business card. “Executive producer of Real Los Angeles Psychics, which will be airing next fall.”
At first Henry was too stunned to speak. A shudder ran through him as he realized how close he had come to attacking Madame Asteria in front of an audience. It was even possible with this being reality TV they might’ve stayed hidden and recorded the complete Skull Cracker killing. As the initial shock wore off, Henry wondered whether there was anyone else there other than this hipster and Madame Asteria. Because if that’s all there was, he should be able to knock out the hipster and grab the psychic before she realized what was happening, and still go through with the killing.
Pavlovich mistook Henry’s contemplative silence for outrage over having his privacy violated. Showing a guilty smirk, he said, “I apologize if you’re feeling duped right now. I assure you that was not our intent.”
Henry made up his mind after hearing scuffling noises coming from the hidden room, probably from a cameraman. The psychic and this skinny hipster with his wire-rimmed glasses and goatee he could handle. More than that, forget it.
“Really, huh? You had me fooled,” Henry said.
Pavlovich showed more of his guilty smirk. “We’re worried that if subjects know they’re being recorded it will interfere with their psychic energy. When your session was over we would’ve introduced ourselves and asked you to sign a release form. Everything else was completely on the level.”
Henry ignored him and asked Madame Asteria for his money back. She shrugged, and without any argument dug the wad of bills out from under her robe and handed it to him.
“My reading was sincere,” she said. “Your wife is in danger.”
Henry grabbed his backpack and got up to leave. His legs were rubbery as he trudged to the door. Another shudder chilled him as he fully appreciated the disaster that he had narrowly avoided.
Pavlovich followed him to the door. “Can I leave you the release form and have you consider letting us use your session? There’s some good stuff there.”
Henry pointed a thumb at Madame Asteria. “She’s the psychic. Ask her what I’m going to say.”
Henry had the door unlocked and was walking through it when Pavlovich asked
him how he knew that there was a production crew recording him.
“I guess I must be psychic too,” Henry told him.
Chapter Twenty-three
The detective who discovered Gail Hawes’s body knew Morris from when he was on the force, and he met Morris and Stonehedge outside of Hawes’s apartment.
“It’s already a madhouse in there,” he told Morris. “Forensics, crime scene, ME, and an FBI profiler are all present.”
“How’d you find her?”
“A friend of hers called the station. The victim had written something on Facebook about running into someone’s secret lover, and because of that she was going to be late for a lunch meeting, and then minutes later whatever she wrote was removed. According to her friend, it would be out of character for the victim, Gail Hawes, to remove anything she wrote on Facebook. When pigs sprout wings was how likely her friend put it. When she tried calling Ms. Hawes and got no answer, she called the station convinced something must’ve happened to her. Since we were on alert for possible female victims in their forties, I checked it out as soon as the call came in.”
“What time was this status update written?”
The detective frowned at the question. “Status update? Is that what they call it? I wouldn’t know. Facebook is Greek to me.” The detective consulted a notepad. “The call came in at twelve fifty-five. I’m not sure when she first saw the victim’s message.”
Morris’s mind buzzed as he thought about what this meant. This latest victim had seen SCK with someone she knew. Not only that, SCK was this mystery person’s secret lover. They now had a concrete connection to SCK. If they found this person, they would have SCK.
“I need to talk to the friend who called this in.”
“She was brought to the Hollywood station on Wilcox.”
Morris called the station and soon had Hawes’s friend on the phone. The woman sounded distraught as Morris questioned her about the exact time that she saw Hawes’s status update. “This is so awful,” she said. “Gail lived on Facebook. Everything she did, she posted. And it was such a strange message about running into a friend’s secret lover, kind of a teaser, you know.”