I tried calling Fitz next, but I got his machine. I left a message for him to call me back. I even tried the prison, but I couldn’t get through. Frustrated, I hung up my cell and flung it on the blankets, then tried to turn over and go to sleep. I thought of the wine I’d left on the counter. I thought of my brothers and Frankie. So much death. So much blood.
What was the good of surviving if what you had left were nightmares and night sweats, wine hazes and hangovers? What was the use of living day to day simply to fear screaming in the night?
My therapist didn’t like those kinds of thoughts, but she wasn’t there with me. I was alone. Alone, because I had survived.
Alone, unless she was wrong about Culmer.
* * * * *
I cried hard after Frankie. It wasn’t just for him, though, and a part of me feels guilty about that. It was also because Culmer had said he’d also killed his mother, and it really hit me then, what Culmer was. We weren’t dealing with some distraught man who could be talked off the ledge, so to speak. A man who could kill his mother had come to murder with a purpose, and I doubted anyone would dissuade him from it. If you could kill the woman who gave birth to you, then really, who were a bunch of strangers who never gave a damn about you anyway? Would it matter that they had mothers? Fathers? Family who loved them? I doubted it. Culmer didn’t have that, so why should it sway him that others had, and probably took for granted, what he never did?
After Frankie, the strain became noticeable on Culmer’s face. I could see then how sunken and purpled his eye sockets looked, how dry his lips were. His nails were jagged, bitten down below his fingertips. He had bruises on his arms.
Culmer was reaching his own confetti point when he turned on Lorelei Creighton.
I was friendly with Lorelei, at least in class. We shared notes, stories about weekend trips to the bar, even superficial dating fiascos and successes. She was curvy, with smooth skin that reminded me of dark suede, with tight copper-colored braids and small, smart glasses. She spoke in such a way that it was obvious she expected people to listen, with the faintest hint of southern accent. Lorelei was her mama’s daughter, and proud of it. I don’t remember the name of the guy she was seeing, only that her eyes gleamed with pride when she told me he was the first in his family to attend graduate school, for law. She was more infatuated with him than she ever admitted, but I think—I really believe, maybe because it makes me sleep better to do so—that he was the last thing she thought of before she died.
After Marshall’s death, Lorelei had taken up a slow, steady mumbling that was part prayer, part denial of the events unfolding around her. By the time Frankie had lost a good chunk of his head, she had quieted, and simply moved her lips to the rhythm of her own internal rituals. She had been reduced from vibrancy and sass to a shivering, tear-streaked figure trying to melt into the wall itself. She kept her head down when Culmer looked her way. So far as I can remember, Lorelei hadn’t done anything to directly capture his attention; rather, she’d gone to lengths to become the no one that we had always wanted Culmer to be.
I don’t know why Culmer shot her. At that point, I think he meant to kill a number of people, and just about anyone could have filled the quota. Or maybe I’m wrong—maybe Lorelei was just the type of woman who had openly and directly rejected him again and again his whole life. There was a passing bodily resemblance to the pictures I’ve seen of his mother, who also had curves and glasses. His mother, who had ultimately rejected him first, throwing him over for painkillers.
Whatever his reasoning, he actually grimaced when he pulled the trigger. He blasted open her shoulder and when she screamed, he flinched, cursing to himself. He climbed over Frankie’s body to shoot her again. I can remember the terror in her eyes, like she wanted to beg him to stop, but she kept praying. The second bullet, this time from the handgun, caught her in her throat, just below her chin—like he wanted to silence her and until the life and warmth went out in her eyes, those lips kept praying, silent and fervent. I believe it was when they had stopped moving that I resigned myself to death.
* * * * *
The day before the anniversary, I busied myself with projects that I could become lost in. I cleaned the house and did some gardening until it got dark, and read books back to back until my legs went numb from sitting so long. I ate very little; I wasn’t hungry. And it was right around dusk that I heard the screaming. It was faint at first—so faint that I mistook it for an alarm somewhere in the distance, or the bleating of some farm animal.
It didn’t go away, though, and after a time, I thought with some annoyance that it was bordering on animal cruelty not to attend to whatever was wailing like that.
I noticed just after sunset that it had gotten louder, but I managed to avoid looking out the window to the back yard until those screams took shape as words.
Those words were numbers.
Ichi, ni, san, shi....
I opened the shutters. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. There was nothing out there but the growing dark.
Wait...there was blood. I could see it splattered on the vegetables in the garden. It coagulated into footsteps along the stone path that headed straight for the back door. The screaming was getting louder, but I could see no mouth, no throat to make such awful sounds. The bloody footsteps, I saw, stopped just ten feet or so from the back door.
Go, roku, shichi, hachi....
I closed my eyes. Hallucinations, I told myself. PTSD. I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t.
The screaming continued, a wail of anguish forced to count, a voice in the wind that would not be ignored.
Kyu....
* * * * *
The ninth was an Asian girl, slight of frame with a soft, musical voice. Her face was bright and friendly and in a delicate and earnest way, absolutely beautiful. Sometimes she wore those glasses that are so thin they’re hard to see at all from some angles, and they made her look vaguely classical, a picture of some ideal rather than a real person. We’d gone off-topic once in class, segueing from a discussion about Victorian obstacles to love to annoying things that significant others did. She told the class once that her boyfriend, on the occasional less amusing attempts at wit, would sometimes call her “Okiku.” She said this with some darkening of the cheeks. When asked what that meant, she simply said, “That I am relentless.” There was more to it there—it was in the recesses of her expression—but we didn’t push and she didn’t elaborate. I think Culmer once had a crush on her, before he developed his obsession with me.
She cried tears as silent as Lorelei’s prayers had been, but she didn’t scream. She simply closed her eyes, the last of her crystal tears rolling over her soft, pale cheeks. Culmer shot her in the heart, close range, and the blast knocked her back a little, spraying the wall behind her with blood and pink tissue. It seemed to me like she took a long time to collapse, like some part of her held up in defiance to Culmer. I don’t know how such a thing could be possible, but it was.
Culmer turned to me. I could tell from his expression and the set of his mouth that he had many things he wanted to say to me before he killed me.
It was then that a bang as loud as any of Culmer’s rifle shots, followed by another and another and finally, the cracking and opening of the door, smeared the rest of the night in a blur of blue and black uniforms and shouting, of flashing red-blue lights, of firm hands spiriting me from school to campus to ambulance to hospital.
Ironically, the memory of my rescue at the hands of two S.W.A.T. team members is vague. I suppose my mind had shut off hyperawareness at that point and was content to sink into a blissful kind of half-sleep. I remember tall, handsome men with guns sort of like Culmer’s. They were shouting commands to him. I remember him dropping his rifle and then his handgun and raising his hands to his head. He knelt, then lay on his stomach on the tiled floor, right in the mingled blood of the bodies around him. The men rushed him and cuffed him. I remember the few surviving classmates fleeing in the direction
indicated by a third S.W.A.T. team member. Another, an efficiently attractive woman with tied back dark hair, took my shoulders and pulled me from Dr. Winston’s desk chair, steering me past the blood and the bodies and the prone form of Culmer glaring up at me with that mixed expression of love and hate....
Culmer had killed nine people. Nine. He had only managed to say one of his many things before the officers burst through the door.
“Gina,” he told me, “I will never forget you, either.”
* * * * *
He chose nine other people to die beside me: seven shivering, whimpering college students hanging in until the end of the semester, taking a night class to fulfill English credit requirements, seven other students who were confused, terrified, a collective scent of sweat and metallic fear rising from them like the night mists, and a teacher simply looking to pass on his love and knowledge of literature to young minds made eight. And Culmer’s mother – he had actually killed her first, police told me later. Killed her before he’d even left the house. They’d found her in her bedroom, face-down (with what was left of her face) in her own blood. I have imagined the scene many times: a spray of crimson across a white bedspread, a pool of thick blood spreading across a dark hardwood floor. I have often wondered what triggered Culmer to kill his mother. I’ve asked police, my therapist the experts I appeared on news talk shows with. They’d read his journals and pieced together the sequence of events from the crime scenes. They studied Culmer, interviewing him and taking careful notes of his answers and asking more questions. And all his own words, written or spoken, as well as all the evidence from both crime scenes, suggested there had been no triggering event, no fight, no sudden revelation of news that Culmer found upsetting. He was simply tired of being invisible to some, and relegated, forcefully if necessary, to invisibility by others.
He told a reporter once that he was a voice in the wind—there, even if no one could hear or was willing to listen.
He had focused on me to the point of obsession; I was not only sexually attractive to him, experts told me, but also symbolically attractive. I was the symbol of all things beautiful and good in the world, but an eye that wouldn’t see him and an ear that had willfully avoided listening to him.
Why had he chosen nine others to make his point? I’d asked the experts. Why not just me?
Because, according to Culmer’s own words, I needed to see him take down the winds that drowned him out, the dirt that blinded others’ eyes and buried him over and over again. Mostly, it was not enough to simply scream to me in the wind anymore—he needed to be heard and heard clearly, and so all other noise distractions also had to be symbolically removed. He wanted to make sure I’d listen this time.
We ask people like Culmer why they kill because we need to redefine and reparcel them. Culmer wouldn’t abide being a blur in the background, so the courts and newspapers and town talkers needed to rebrand him a monster. But Culmer never fit neatly into anyone’s files. We ask people like Culmer why they kill because we need to identify such horror as the behavior of the other. And they tell us sometimes that they don’t understand it themselves, or can’t adequately explain their internal logic. Sometimes, their reasoning is not so hard to understand, not so “other” at all. Either way, we will never find peace in the answers.
Their answers never absolve us of the fear that just maybe, it really is our fault.
Despite what my therapist and others said, I felt he had killed nine people because of me, and as the night overlapped onto the early morning of the tenth anniversary of those deaths, the screaming of numbers counting over and over, one through nine, ichi through kyu, wore beneath my skin and into my soul. The bottle of wine from the night before was gone, but it only served to amplify the screams beneath my skin and inside my head.
I had no guns in the house, naturally. No guns to make it stop. No way to count to ten.
The screaming crescendoed to howling, whipping around the house, the words coalescing into one long, loud, continuous shriek of inhuman love and hate. I covered my ears with my hands and began to scream myself.
The noise drowned out the first several rings of the phone. The next few broke through in between my own wails, and I slowly dropped my hands away. Was I imagining the phone ringing? No one called me here. How many times had it rung already? Nine?
I picked up the receiver and at once, the howling dropped to a dull roar confined to the night outside.
“Hello?”
“It’s Fitz.” The gravelly voice sounded very loud on the other end, like he was trying to communicate from the far side of a very long tunnel.
“Fitz...he’s out, isn’t he?”
“Out? Listen, sugar, are you sitting down?”
“He’s here, isn’t he? I knew it.” I felt the sick lump in my stomach drop. “Oh God, he’s here. How? How did he—? I saw him, and then I saw his lights, and then he was screaming, somehow screaming tonight outside my door, and—”
“Gina, you’re not making any sense. I need you to calm down and listen to me, okay?”
“Okay. Okay, this – this is about Culmer, though?”
“Yes.” His voice sounded funny, and with each thud of my heart, my chest flooded with a black panic, a sureness that he really had escaped, that he’d slipped through airport security and onto a plane, through Japanese customs, that he really had come to haunt the streets of Takeshi-muri, to kill me. To shout above the wind.
“He killed himself, Gina.”
A numbness settled in, a surprisingly emotionless weight that made my limbs feel funny. “What?”
“Stabbed himself in the neck with a rusty bed spring after dragging open the veins in his arms. Messy, but effective.”
“How? When?” The words stuck in the dryness of my throat.
“I just got the call from Mickey. I think he sneaked out of the fray of protocol just to call. Sounded like a cell phone in the men’s room. It couldn’t have been any more than half an hour ago.”
I looked out the window. It was just dawn here, which meant that for me, it was the next day. For him, it would still be the night before, but he’d known...somehow he’d known that where I was, it was already the dawn of the tenth anniversary.
“Oh my God.”
“It’s probably a lot to take in,” he said. It was the closest approximation to compassion that I’d ever heard Fitz reach.
“He’s dead? There in America, he’s dead? Over there?” I couldn’t quite shake that sureness that he was here, in Takeshi-muri, looking to cap off his perfect devotion to me. The screams...they’d gotten so loud just a bit ago, ten years of human confetti showering everything around me.
“There was a note.” In the pause that followed, I could hear Fitz breathing, even over the thin, anguished counting from outside...or was it inside? I felt like I was breathing it in as much as hearing it.
“Was there?” I managed finally.
“I thought you’d want to know. I think it was meant, I dunno, as closure, maybe. I think he wanted you to know.”
I fidgeted with the empty wine glass in my hand. “What did it say?”
Softly, he replied, “Ten.”
…Ju, a voice in my head echoed. Ten. The scream outside faded.
“Thanks, Fitz.”
“Take the day off. Get some sleep, sugar.”
I hung up the phone and went to the back window in a kind of half-daze.
I stood staring into the empty back yard. There was no blood, spattered or foot-printed or otherwise. There was only my garden, still shadowed beneath a pink and orange sky, and a small stone bench at the far boundary.
For the first time in ten years, I counted, out loud, in English. When I reached nine, I stopped. A light breeze gave my garden plants a gentle nudge.
Closure, Fitz had said.
There were markings on the stone path. Something had carved a number not too far from the back door.
“Ten,” I whispered. But it was done; the voice in the win
d had died, and nothing whispered back.
THE FLOODGATES OF WILLOWHILL
EARLY AUTUMN EVENINGS IN WILLOWHILL were traditionally made up of those moments where the pieces of the world all seemed to click into place, where the town’s sights and sounds and scents were enough to instantly evoke the warm safety and endless possibilities of youth. The world at that hour always seemed to be clearer, sharper, more real somehow. The late afternoon sun sank slowly, its gold gliding off cars and blinding window-eyes. The air carried the faint smell of apples in cider and pies. The general store would stay open an hour later in the evenings for another month more, that hour usually spent with the easy-going creak-rhythm of Mr. Larsson’s rocking chair runners against the faded honey-oak porch and the black cherry smoke of his pipe meandering up into the air.
It was an evening like that when the city man came to Willowhill. It was also an evening like that, darkening to purple and then to black, which brought the discovery of the strange growing things in the shadow-haunted Faulkesville woods on the edge of Mr. Becker’s farm. Some folks – those unused, perhaps, to skins much darker than the Irish/Swedish summer burn or to religions celebrated outside of sturdy, sensible, white-washed Protestant churches – equated the two somehow in their minds, blaming the latter on the former, at least at first. By the end, though, folks knew differently. Samantha certainly did.
Sam and Mr. Larsson and Mr. Jedsoe had been sitting and soaking up the last of the day’s warmth that particular evening, Sam with a mug of hot cider and the men each with pipes and two fingers of bourbon in small clear glasses, on the porch of Larsson’s General Store. They watched the city man’s form approach, gathering the silhouetting darkness to itself as twilight wore on around him. Seeming to feel the weight of their gazes on him, he looked up as he passed them, nodded politely, smiled at Sam, and continued on. Sam, who had been a ward of Mr. Larsson’s since her parents’ death when she was 12, followed the man’s retreating form with unabashed interest. He was gold-skinned like the sunset, black-eyed and black-haired like the night. It was as if the strange man was, and had always been, a part of the elements or of the moving shadows that danced away from the angles of the sun. She wondered what had brought him to Willowhill.
Night Movies Page 12