by Doug Johnson
“Bingo.”
Lazarus flipped the binder pages with his foot, horror mounting with each subsequent turn. Random words and dates were highlighted. Crudely drawn diagrams created senseless data.
The real zinger was the familiar name that kept popping up with alarming frequency throughout. His own.
He turned a page and recoiled at what he saw. A photograph of himself, at the height of his fame in the early two-thousands. His eyes had been blacked out with ink, his face bore the pockmark jabs of repeated attacks with a sharp object, and a single word had been scrawled across his chest, the letters traced over again and again until they had scored through the page like stencils…
“KILLER.”
Lazarus slumped back in his chair. “Oh, dear Lord.”
His sweat had turned cold. He was shivering. And a cold realization washed over him like an arctic wind.
He had absolutely no fucking idea what to do.
The door slammed open and Lazarus nearly shouted out in shock. He sat frozen as Kitty dragged both him and the chair back to their original spot. It wasn’t graceful, but she did it.
“I see you’ve been doing your homework. Good boy.” She patted him on the head as she walked away.
He thrust his foot out and kicked the book, sending it sliding across the floor toward her.
“What is this?”
Ignoring the question, she sauntered back out of the room, returning a moment later with a bundle wrapped in cloth. There was a loud, metallic clatter as she heaved it onto the table.
“What’s the deal with this basement, anyway? These rooms are crazy!”
“Upstairs, Downstairs.”
“Huh?”
“The servants lived below, the people of the manor, above.”
“That explains the creepy-ass kitchen down here.”
She perched herself on the chair opposite Lazarus.
“I mean, really. It’s like a maze down here or something.”
Lazarus motioned to the binder. “I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what your book has to do with me.”
Kitty opened to the first page. A photograph of a pretty brunette smiled back.
“Lisa Connors,” she said expectantly. She watched Lazarus for a reaction. He gave none.
“Okay,” he offered back.
She frowned and turned the page. “Jennie Tolliver.”
“Sorry, I don’t know what you want me to say.
Kitty slammed the next page over. This time, a raven-hared beauty. “Susan Miles.”
Lazarus shrugged. “Sorry.”
She leaped from the chair and stung his face with a brutal slap.
“Don’t play dumb!” she screeched, shoving the page at him. “Susan Miles, last seen walking down I-35 outside of Dallas after a fight with her boyfriend.” She turned the page back.
“Jennie Tolliver. Snuck out of her house one night and no one saw her again.”
Kitty continued, certain something would draw the response she clearly expected. Another page, another girl.
“Lisa Connors. Told her friends that she was going to run away and travel the world.”
Sounds like someone else we know, thought Lazarus, but he bit his tongue. Kitty turned to one of the bizarre diagrams. A nonsensical flowchart. An attempt to impose logic onto the random.
“What’s the common thread, Lazarus?” What links these girls?”
“I don’t know,” he said flatly.
“The were all Black Ryder fans. And your band was playing in every city the night of their disappearance.”
“That makes no sense!” he exploded.
Kitty flipped through the book. “You don’t recognize any of these girls?”
“No!”
She turned to one of the final pages and lingered there. The same look of detachment washed over her face again, and Lazarus sat staring at it with dread roiling in the pit of his stomach.
“What about her?” she asked, rotating the book to show him. A school photo had been pasted in. This face was sad. No… angry. The girl glared at the camera with a surly expression that did, in fact, spark a memory for Lazarus. It reminded him of the embroidery on Kitty’s skull bag. Fuck the world.
“Sorry,” he said. It was maddeningly toneless.
“I know for a fact she got backstage. You know her!”
“I don’t.”
She sprung from the chair, face clouded with confusion. Her feet shuffled restlessly, spinning an inkless spirograph on the stone floor with her Doc Martens. He could see it so clearly now, the gears and rotors of her mind turning endless roulettes around the same singularity of focus. He imagined her thoughts as the parabolas of some planetary orbit, incapable of breaking free from the gravitational pull of her conviction, merely able to swing fleetingly and return to center, like the pendulum of some psychotic clock.
Then, she surprised him. The clouds dissipated and a brightness of clarity returned to her eyes. She looked at him, and for an instant there was a purity that shined through. It wasn’t Kitty looking at him, it was Kathleen Van Winkle, the innocent girl from the passport photo.
“Oh,” she said. It was humble and soft-spoken. “Okay.”
She tried to smile, but it was heavy with apologetic shame. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she gathered her things. She saw the knife on the table and picked it up.
Lazarus felt the gallop of his heart and braced himself as she approached. She thrust the knife forward and the blade began to saw at the ropes around his wrists. He stared at her, completely dumbfounded.
“I must have made a mistake. Just give me a couple minutes head start, okay?”
She did not cut all the way through the ropes, but left a thin tether on each. It would take some effort to break them, but for all intents and purposes, he was free.
Kitty set the knife back down on the table, and without turning back, picked up her book and walked out the door.
Lazarus waited. He listened until her footsteps faded into silence and the air was left with nothing but the muted rushing of the wind against the house above. He clenched his fists and pulled against the weakened ropes. His stronger, right arm snapped free first, then the left.
The pins and needles in his legs took a moment to shake out, but once they had, he walked to the table, picked up the knife and followed her path out the door.
Emerging from a winding, servants’ stairwell into the entrance hall on the main floor, Lazarus stood and listened. A soft hiss bled from the open parlor door, underscoring the stalwart ticking of the grandfather clock. His first instinct told him it was running water, but then he realized it was the stereo speakers. It must have been cranked to ear-splitting levels, but for now at least, the party was over.
He walked to the front door and opened it. The cool, damp air was a welcome sensation on his face. He framed himself in the doorway, scanning the courtyard and driveway as far as his eyes would allow in the dark. The knife handle was warm in his hand and he gave it a squeeze to reassure himself.
He sensed nothing as Kitty slipped silently from the parlor behind him and melted into the shadows. The familiar hiss of overdriven speakers was driving his pulse faster. It filled him with the inexplicable, almost carnal longing for the electric crackle and hum of a guitar cable jacking into the raw power of a wall of amplifiers.
“Where are you, you little bitch?”
She drove the stun gun between his shoulder blades and sent five million volts through him for the second time that day. He crumpled to the threshold and spilled onto his back. Kitty snickered. Not because the stun gun had rendered him unconscious again, but because Lazarus Walker had an erection.
“I’m right here, baby.”
CHAPTER 7
Screaming Black Ryder fans surge against security guards.
Lazarus strides past the girl in black.
Her presence draws his eyes like the pull of gravity.
She raises her head. The dark hair falls away from her face.
<
br /> She is everyone to him. She is no one.
He struggles to remember the face, but the other girls are laughing.
He knows her, but the laughing…
She is…
The laughing…
CHAPTER 8
He was not dead and he was not asleep. He was somewhere in between. The darkness and the light pulled at him like a wishbone. He was the buoy again, hostage to the chaotic pitch of the surf.
The laughing…
It filled his ears, layer upon layer of it. It ricocheted in his head like bullets in a box.
A tingle of nerves quivered through the muscles of his back and exploded into shockwaves of excruciating spasm. It ripped him from his death-sleep and hurled him headfirst into the light. By the time it finally passed, Lazarus was lucid enough to take stock of his condition.
Constricted breathing. Paresthesia. Uncontrollable convulsions. Blurred vision. Fingers clenched like talons.
Great, nothing to worry about.
He squinted. He could make out the vague shape and features of her face. What he saw bore less resemblance to the girl than it did the skull on her duffel.
Kitty found it all quite hysterical. Watching him claw his way back to consciousness had quickly become her favorite pastime. The laughing ceased.
“Really?”
It was basted with a nice, thick shellac of sarcasm.
Lazarus forced his hands to unclench. They throbbed with an arthritic ache. Not surprisingly, the ropes were back.
Kitty assumed a “little girl” voice. “Oops, sorry. I’ll just go.”
Her face tightened to a sneer. “Please. Your day of atonement is at hand.”
His vision cleared, and Lazarus fixed his glare on her stonily.
“What did I do, Kitty? Enlighten me.”
“The last time my sister went to a Black Ryder concert, she never came home.”
Opening the binder, she showed him the last picture. The surly girl.
“The cops said she ran away.”
She pulled the stun gun back out and wagged it in his face. A single blue spark arced between the electrodes and Lazarus jerked backward reflexively.
Kitty smiled. “I think she’s dead.” She leaned close to Lazarus, their lips almost touching.
“And you think I had something to do with it?” he asked.
“I think you had everything to do with it.”
Lazarus shook his head.
“I don’t remember your sister. I’m sorry.”
“Her name was Lacey Van Winkle.”
“There were loads of girls in loads of cities. You can’t expect me to remember them all.”
Kitty grabbed him by the hair and twisted hard. Lazarus cried out in pain.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.” She released her grip. “I think I need something else to jog your memory.”
She slunk around the chair, fingernails raking along his shoulders and leaving long scratches on his skin. Her face suddenly lit up.
“Oh! I almost forgot!”
She practically skipped over to the table.
“I found some things to play with in the kitchen.”
Lazarus felt his stomach churn as he watched her unroll the bundle of cutlery.
“They’ll catch you.”
“Who?”
“The police. You must have left a trail.”
Kitty held up the lamb splitter. Lazarus looked away.
“Oh, I’m not that stupid. I’ve been planning this for years.”
She considered the cleaver, then Lazarus. “No, not quite right.”
Lazarus exhaled as she set it aside. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.
“See, my parents were total shits. Drunk assholes that only cared about themselves.”
She picked up a long, slender metal skewer. Its tip was the fine, sharp point of a dart.
“This might work.”
The skewer whipped through the air as she turned and brandished it, as if it were nothing but a child’s toy and she had no intention of inserting it into his body.
“My sister took care of me. When my parents went on really bad benders, we’d lock ourselves in our room and listen to your CDs over and over.” Kitty’s demeanor turned wistful. “She was the best sister ever.”
Lazarus felt along the underside of the chair arm with his fingers and discovered the point of a short nail sticking up.
“You’ll get caught,” he said. “Someone will have seen you.”
Kitty snapped out of her reverie. “No, they saw Kathleen, a sweet, pretty, preppy girl.”
Lazarus began to work the rope against the tip of the nail.
“You’ll have left a trail. You probably told someone in town where you were headed.”
“I told them I was going to Granger. There’s no way they’d think I’d be here.”
Lazarus scoffed. “Granger?”
“There’s a lovely medieval church there. Kathleen was going to do some rubbings.”
Lazarus didn’t particularly care for the way she’d begun referring to herself as two distinct people. The nail was proving ineffective. He shifted in the chair.
“There’ll be a paper trail… a bus ticket or a taxi receipt.”
“I walked.”
Feigning discomfort, he stretched against the ropes hoping to find a weakness in them.
“You must have told a friend.”
“Nope,” Kitty shot back.
“Surely.”
“You know the saying, ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead?’”
That didn’t particularly sit well with Lazarus either, but he nodded just the same. What he needed to do now was buy some time and he knew it.
“I’m a firm believer,” Kitty continued. “See, after Lacey disappeared, it was obvious to me—”
“She ran away?”
Kitty shoved the skewer in his face. The tip hovered millimeters from his eye.
“She didn’t run away!”
Lazarus twisted his head to the side trying to avoid the sharp point. It would pierce his eyeball like a grape tomato on a kabob. He almost wished she’d go back to threatening his balls.
He could feel her coarse respiration on his neck like garnet paper. This rage was real. Even if all the rest was some kind of bullshit act, this anger… this wrath… it was no game.
Kitty calmed. The skewer drew away from his face and she circled him.
“Stop trying to confuse me.”
Like hell I will.
She rubbed her forehead. Why? What did her body language mean? He had to start picking up on those signs. Was she actually confused? Was she just playing the part? Was it a sign of deep thought? Massaging her fucking brain to get it working? Was she getting a goddamn headache? What??
“I knew when she didn’t come home that something had happened.”
“Why didn’t you tell your parents?”
“I did! And the police! They didn’t believe me.”
She tapped the skewer against her open palm like Patton’s riding crop.
“And that’s when you decided I was to blame?”
“I didn’t decide anything! It was obvious.”
Lazarus felt the point of the skewer against his neck.
“She’d never leave me there,” she continued. “She would have come back for me.”
Lazarus shifted in the chair, and when he did, the knot that bound his left hand picked up the tiniest bit of slack.
Kitty eyed him with suspicion. “What are you doing?”
“The ropes. They hurt.”
She furrowed her brow. “Good.”
Lazarus repositioned again. He could feel her eyes on him still.
“Perhaps if you told me more about…”
Kitty’s eyes narrowed. “Lacey.”
Keep her angry. Angry is better than suspicious. Angry is stupid. Angry is careless.
“Right. Perhaps it’ll jog my memory.”
She nonchalantl
y rolled up one of his shirt sleeves.
“She told me about the time she got backstage. She wanted to meet you but you were with another girl.”
The dart tip of the skewer dragged the shape of an “L” over his bicep, scoring two thin beads of blood.
“She tried to get your attention but you didn’t notice her.”
“See? I told you I didn’t know her!” Lazarus surged forward for dramatic emphasis, camouflaging the fact that he was simply stretching more slack in the knot.
Kitty jabbed savagely into his arm. “The first time she went backstage! That was the first time!”
He cringed, trying to pull away from the skewer. Blood ran down his arm in a rivulet.
“She looked like me in my passport picture. Pretty. Sweet.”
An expression of utter boredom washed over her face. She wiped the skewer off on his shirt, leaving a vibrant stripe of blood across the shoulder.
“She saw the kind of girl you liked. Dark. Mysterious.”
Damaged.
Kitty turned and wandered languorously toward the table. Lazarus seized his window of opportunity and flexed against the ropes. This time, the knots gave way.
“She changed for you.”
She smiled and picked up the tarnished lamb splitter. The cleaver bore an unsettling resemblance to a shark, its torpedo blade forming the head, the hole in the meat of its steel, the eye.
“And once Lacey put her mind to something… that was it.”
She slunk back over to Lazarus.
“We’re a lot alike that way.”
Lazarus was no longer certain exactly who the “we” was that she was referring to. Somehow it seemed there were now several more people in the room than just the two of them.
Things were getting very crowded, indeed.
It had never really occurred to him why the longcase grandfather clock in the parlor always succeeded in startling anyone within earshot. There were, in fact, two reasons.
Firstly, the precursory Westminster quarters had been disabled. The familiar, soothing four to sixteen note melodies that marked each fifteen minutes as they passed had been deemed too bothersome to the manor’s previous occupants, and Lazarus would most likely have come to the same conclusion within hours of taking up residence himself. The clock was now limited to the abrupt, full hour “Big Ben” chimes, which somehow could never be anticipated, despite the fact that they adhered to the most perpetually rigid schedule ever devised.