Phantom Effect

by Michael Aronovitz

  And now this.

  I pitch into the sea of blackness for another bald moment, the flying Toyota, Chitty-Chitty fucking Bang-Bang, and I hit too soon, all shock and concussive whiplash. My knees fork out, my chin whacks the wheel, and my right middle finger jams into the dashboard.

  The Corolla is sliding nose down, and by the chock ’n’ gravel sounds it seems I’m on dirt, and it might go ass over teakettle, and I’ve lost a tooth. I’m trying my best not to swallow it, and my right hand is screaming bloody murder. When I whammed and jammed it I turned on the radio by accident, and it’s classic rock, Phil Collins who can feel it coming in the air tonight, and this can’t be my swansong because I always hated this soft motherfucker.

  The back end bumps down and I swerve, passenger side first in a sweeping arc that sends a shuddering wave of reverberation straight through to my tailbone. My forearms are in front of my face now as I picture sideswiping straight into a perpendicular steel I-beam bursting through the window and pinning my head to the door rim . . . barrel-rolling hard and heavy into a bulldozer with its bucket-spikes up . . . sailing off the wide edge of what turns out to be the real recess and tumbling into a hundred-foot quarry.

  I smash into something broadside, and the side of my head smacks the door glass hard enough to make it dimple and spiderweb.

  Phil Collins hits the break where he sings,

  “Well I remember.”

  The car rocks and settles. Through the crimped framework of the blown-out passenger window, I can see a dark curve of wet cement, and I know I’ve come to a stop on the long side of a massive section of concrete piping. For a second I try to recall whether the shape is concave or convex, and I wonder why on earth I give a fuck.

  I hawk up and spit out my tooth, glance down at my bleeding hand, and see the knuckle has come straight through the skin. I cradle it to my chest and simultaneously reach across myself to turn off the headlights and the radio, and everything shuts down to a thick hush. The rain has backed down to a drizzle and the pitter-patters along the roof are like distant white noise. The wind comes up and quickly drifts off. I’m about to turn back the key and from behind I hear a click, a snap, and a distinct metallic squawk, like hinges moving sluggishly in poorly oiled recesses.

  I look to the rearview and the trunk is coming open. I can see it moving upward, finally coming seated in the groove keeping it stationary in its raised position.

  The back end of the car bobs down and then elevates to a level slightly higher than a second before.

  And then, in the wet dirt back there, I hear a footstep.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Deseronto turned the car off and pushed up carefully, sliding the keys into his tight pocket, eyes glued to the rearview. Was it possible the cop had actually survived the assault back there in the breakdown lane? Deseronto had torn the man’s Adam’s apple straight from his throat. He had eaten it too, swallowed it whole right there on the roadside. He had told himself that it was a haphazard sort of attempt at concealing evidence that the officer had in fact died out there in the harsh glare of his own headlights, but he really believed it had instead been some old buried Lenape tradition, preserving a piece of the soul you’d just stolen or some such ghost-dance skin-walker bullshit. Because he’d done it instinctively. Because he’d enjoyed it.

  But was it in any way conceivable that the bastard could had lived through it? Deseronto had heard of people surviving all sorts of weird shit, gunshots to the head, vital organs crushed. A few months back some nurse at Children’s Hospital was on a late-night cable show describing how there was this ghetto kid who stabbed his seven-year-old cousin straight through the chest with a pair of sewing scissors, and when the blood-spattered victim was wheeled through the emergency room fully conscious and telling bad jokes no less, the handles were still pumping up and back with the beat of his heart. Deseronto even read in a construction newspaper last year about some guy fucking around on the jobsite, sticking what he thought was an empty nail gun up to his buddy’s head and pulling the trigger so the piston would ding him. The victim had laughed about it, worked the rest of his shift, and only complained of a nagging headache when he couldn’t fall asleep later that night. The eventual X-ray showed a two-inch finishing nail stuck straight through the middle of his brain. But could a man survive having his voice box torn out? He’d seemed dead as all shit back there on 476, that was for sure.

  Deseronto looked at his mangled hand and noticed that the protruding knuckle bone had splintered. It could make for a weapon, one deadly punch to the forehead. Or maybe he could blind him. He made a fist and winced, the grimace turning to a tight grin. The fucker out there couldn’t walk. He’d broken the guy’s knee straight through, so who had it worse?

  Something clunked back there and the car rocked slightly.

  Enough. Deseronto opened the door. The hinges squawked. Broken chinks of glass from where his head had made contact with the driver’s side window speckled along his thigh and tick-tacked into the groove between the seat and the rim. Rain feathered down, making sweeping dimples in the puddles, and Deseronto grabbed out onto the roof to pull himself up. The wind came on in a steely spray, and suddenly his dead mama in her ventilator mask spread across the breadth of his imagination, looking down at him with that one reddened, accusing eye as if to remind her son of how stupid he’d been leaving so many signposts and tokens exposed out in the great wide-open along the roadway above him, scuffs in the asphalt, the empty cruiser, the passing trucker.

  Deseronto felt his jaw bunch up and set his feet in the mud. Time and place. What was going on here was immediate. Besides, Mama had no place in the world of his hunting, especially to remind him of the dark obligations she would otherwise condemn. And the fact that Deseronto was using her image against his own conscious will to punish himself for his blond moments in the first place was another battle for another day altogether.

  His sneakers squelched as he walked slowly along the side of the car, the fingers of his left hand splayed out and running along the windows and frame almost in a subconscious attempt to keep himself grounded. At the periphery of his vision he saw piles of U Channel, most probably scrap, and the blur of a stationary wet saw. There was something covered with a tarp, an air compressor poking out from under a flap of canvas on a pile of block, the back side of a Bobcat utility vehicle, but nothing good and useful like a clawhammer or pipe wrench. Suddenly he pictured the new bag of El Sabroso Hot and Spicy Pork Rinds he’d left in the glove box, and he promised himself that he was going to wolf down the whole bag right here and now in celebration of finally wasting this fucker even though it had become ritual to gorge himself only after he had parked safely at the edge of the woods at the tail end of a kill-night, chilling there in the dark, thinking about digging the holes and scattering the body parts.

  At the rear of the vehicle one of the officer’s tactical boots suddenly kicked up and over the rim of the trunk. Then it froze there, toe pointed up. Deseronto jumped back a step as he came around the corner with his fists bunched and saw the dead officer draped across the short open space, trooper’s hat down across most of his face on an angle, shirt pulled up bikini-like above that wide full-moon belly, poncho spread behind him like Batman.

  The bastard started moving, rippling slightly as if bobbing in the ebb and flow of gentle ocean waves, and from beneath him came a watery scream.

  It wasn’t the cop who was still alive. It was the girl underneath him.

  Deseronto’s eyes widened. This was impossible. He had brought Marissa Madison’s corpse to the tool place after hours and cut her into the usual seventeen pieces, careful of course to clean the mini cordless circular saw’s shoe on both sides and squeegee the waste down the floor drain after pressure-washing the concrete with that special solvent they used in military labs and zoo animal cages. He’d been patient and meticulous in cleaning and rinsing all the hand tools he’d used for the trim and detailing in the industrial tubs over b
y the slab saws and rental compressors, and he’d worked extra hard getting the clumps out of the mouth of the Sawzall, as he’d had that careless moment when her hair caught, snapping her face down and skidding the blade up her cheek.

  But “impossible” had just been redefined, and Deseronto was a bitter realist when it came to saving his own skin. Even though the idea of “ghosts” usually brought up silly images of hobgoblin anorexics with “scarecrow-face” doing nothing but clanking chains and rattling the rain gutters, Deseronto had never doubted the possibility that dark magic snaked its way through our world. He only wished there had been some sort of warning here so he’d had a chance to bone up on the “rules” or whatever.

  He ran back toward a Porta-Potty and then veered off due west where they were preparing for the demolition of an old Motel 6, signage already stripped off the marquis billboard leaving a ghost pattern. The main building was covered by sections of canvas and dark tarpaulin with accordion-ribbed trash tubes coming down off the roof, wrecking ball hanging from the arm of a crane poised in the background like some dark praying mantis. Deeper in to the left at the back of the quarry there was a labyrinth of construction trailers, storage containers, dozers, and dump trucks, all interwoven by barbed-wire security fencing. Beyond that was the dark structure being erected down by the thoroughfare, its I-beams rising high into the night with the rain blowing through all the massive cross-sections. Deseronto was pretty sure he had read in the paper that it was to be a community medical center, and he made a beeline for it. So he’d have to jump a fence or two to get over there, rip his pants maybe, cut his fingers a bit. Once he had passed through the construction domain under the thick steel foundation posts he could make it to the by-street. He had seen that BP there on the far corner up the rise when he’d come down the exit ramp, and a gas station meant cars in the lot to be worked on, tools, spare tires, hope, no matter what was coming for him from the depths of his bloody, rain-flooded trunk.

  He burst off toward the first section of gating down a mild slope and across what seemed a loading area surrounded by forklifts, pallet towers, and piles of wood scrap. There were long divots cut into the mud by heavy tires and twin dozer treads, and the running got tricky especially twenty feet or so from the chain link that barricaded off a row of equipment sheds. He almost had to tiptoe through it as the ground levels changed, and that took away the “run and pounce” he had planned for the fencing right next to the dented reflective sign that said “Hard Hat Area.” Not that it would have saved him all that much time and space as opposed to scaling it from the bottom, but he had a feeling that every millisecond and millimeter counted. Was she right behind him? He didn’t look. He couldn’t afford to let her get close while checking to see if she’d gotten too close, and he almost laughed at the irony of running away from such a pretty little young thing no matter what particular incarnation was pursuing him here.

  He had originally spotted her from his Toyota making that crowded multi-lane turn into the King of Prussia Mall, and it was the hair and cheekbones that did it for him, as always. With the multitudes of store cameras internal and external, you couldn’t go around “casing a joint,” following one of your marks up an aisle or out to the lot. So Deseronto made quick study of all his victims on the open roadway, as they pulled up alongside him or drove past in their vehicles, portraits in the windows. The illusion of safety people took for granted in their cars was a modern, built-in cultural thing. It was impolite to look at your neighbors as you rushed by in the passing lane, as you rode neck and neck on the parkway, as you waited at a red light together, and so it was rare, very rare, that anyone caught Deseronto looking. And he only needed a glance for the hot ones.

  Then he followed them home. Parked up the street. Moved the car when he had to and memorized their schedules. The toolhouse had him on part-time hours, and even though he stood to miss patches of his given target’s routine, he was off enough days to get a good sampling. He learned their work hours, their favorite coffee stops and car washes and delicatessens, their preference for pets, and their physical conditioning routines, whether that meant jogging the neighborhood or lifting in the gym. By the time Deseronto went on a kill-night, he was more intimate with his given victims than most of their roommates or lovers, he supposed. He didn’t know if she had morning breath, or if she took oatmeal bubble baths, or if she preferred to masturbate on her tummy or arched up on her shoulder blades, but he did know how often she took out her recyclables and whether or not she wore rubber gloves when she did it. He knew if she got a morning paper and if she had pizza or Chinese delivered once a week. And if he had a good angle and a bit of luck with the border foliage, he watched her grill out back in the summer and then drink wine while swinging gently in a hammock, he watched her sit on a lawn chair listening to Pandora with oil glistening on her stomach and then don a floppy hat and a sundress so she could be the quaint little picture reading a book under a tree. He knew when she woke up in the morning, what time at night she shut off the lights, and best of all, the places she went in her vehicle. Work, the Crate and Barrel, the spa, a weekly book club, her go-to gas station, the produce stand where she bought fresh corn and strawberries, her best friend’s place, her second best friend’s place, the domicile of a lover, the domicile of a secret female lover, and speaking of which, the places she frequented for the sake of satisfying some secret guilty pleasure.

  That’s when he had her.

  For secret guilty pleasures were meant to go unseen, and there was nothing more gratifying for Deseronto than his hummingbirds designing the very borders of their own doom through personal patterns of stealth. They did the dirty work for him. He was just the finishing tool.

  The fencing rose before him high into the night, and at the top was the V-section looped and threaded with razor coils. It was going to be messy. Deseronto reached up for a good grip and looked down to where he was going to press the sole of his right foot, knowing he couldn’t stick in a toe like some kid, not with his big-ass shit-kickers. Maybe it would have been better to rush the barrier and try to bend and crimp it down like a fucking potato chip with his sheer body mass. But it was too late to be thinking outside the box now when he was committed here at the base.

  He grabbed up for the fence, but his fingers closed on wet air.

  The ground beneath his feet blurred, as if it were some ride at the county fair that had just kicked in its hydraulics. Deseronto almost windmilled in place there, the illusion so powerful, the simulated movement from right to left beneath him so violent he was tricked into thinking his balance point was fucked. Then it stopped, and there was actually a “gung” noise and recoil wobble as if some Big Wheel had been brought to a halt and it was quivering for a moment there on the loading springs.

  Deseronto fell forward, as that was where his weight had been headed, and there was no fence, no hard hat sign, no pathway beyond that snaked between the storage sheds, only the dark haunt of a wrecking ball rising behind layered furls of tarpaulin, and a Motel 6 sign with faded imaging shadowed into the billboard marquis.

  He belly-flopped hard into a long puddle and imagined that the gush and plume looked glorious, like a burst of fireworks. Of course it did. He was caught in some artsy independent filmmaker’s dark symbolic nightmare about a “bad guy” trapped in a loop, caught between the Motel 6 and the monster in the trunk. He pushed to all fours, sucking wind, hair plastered to his neck on one side. Belly-flops hurt, especially when there was only about six inches of dive-cushion, and he wasn’t about to run off to the left and down the short hill again. Fool me once . . .

  There was a noise, and Deseronto looked back over his shoulder.

  Marissa Madison was crawling out of the trunk.

  She had already evicted the dead cop, a rumple and twist in the mud, and she was pulling up now, fingers curled around the edge of the lid, the other on the bottom lip, head bent with exertion, long hair hanging in front of her face like a sodden veil. There were hash mark
s where the body parts had been put back together, and some of them were affixed backward, insectile, sewn with what looked like the fishing line he’d kept in there on a wooden spool, the rough stitching cut off in stingers and barbs. The shoulders flexed and the joints angled in, the spider poised to emerge from the sack.

  Deseronto pushed to his feet and turned toward the motel. Behind him there was wet suction and a distinct splat in the mud. He wasn’t about to wait to see if she was going to scamper at him on all fours and mount him. Who knew what other goodies she’d found in the trunk that she could morph into the little Frankenstein skit she had going? Maybe she had ingested that old tube of tile caulking so she could eject it out of her newly formed spinneret lodged at the base of her bloated and spotted underside. Maybe she’d found that tire iron, jammed it up into her face, and made a snake’s-fang sharp enough to bite through the straitjacket grave bag she wanted to wrap him in.

  Derseronto sprinted toward the entrance rotary past the marquis. He kicked up dirty splashes and half expected the divine psycho-carnival intervention again, only this time instead of a gargantuan “Wheel of Fortune,” it would be one of those moving George Jetson power walkways thrust into a sudden and violent reverse. The ground beneath him retained its form, however, and he slowed when he reached the carport plaza, its rectangular roof section removed from the two driveway pillars. The walkway beyond was blocked by two huge dumpsters, three massive skid steer loaders, and a series of Rubbermaid trash carts lined up under a wide corrugated roofing sheet nailed to a series of splintered framing supports.