by Doug Johnson
Behind and above her loomed the Queen Anne cabinet. He hoped that in her frenzy Kitty had forgotten about the stun gun, but it was a moot point anyway; Lazarus would get it and drop her like a house of cards.
With a burst of power, he threw her off and sent her skidding across the limestone floor. She rolled to a stop and just as quickly scampered back to her feet. By the time she was up, Lazarus was already off the floor himself and fishing around the top of the cabinet for the stun gun. At first he couldn’t find it, but then his fingers grazed the metal case. It was wedged between the cabinet and the wall.
He stretched, standing on his tiptoes in a frantic bid to reach it. He nearly had it, but Kitty lunged at him, leaping onto his back and yanking his hair again. His head snapped back and he howled in pain. It was a note-for-note repeat performance of his earlier attempt to grab the stun gun and Lazarus was infuriated by the déjà vu.
Throwing himself backward, he slammed Kitty into the wall. She grunted but held on tight. It felt to Lazarus as if she was close to pulling his hair out by the roots. He was right. It made an awful, tearing sound as she clenched tighter and blood began to trickle over his burning scalp. His teeth clenched in a horrible masklike grin, eyes watering as he reeled through the hall with Kitty on his back and her full weight hanging from his hair in a sustained effort to separate it from his head.
Lazarus staggered into the parlor, scanning for anything even remotely resembling a weapon. His eyes honed in on the brick fireplace. He lurched toward it but Kitty sunk her teeth into the muscle of his right shoulder and he cried out in anguish. He spun a one-eighty and threw himself backward, slamming his jockey into the stone mantle. It smashed into her shoulders and her grip faltered momentarily.
He had his window. Lazarus flung himself back again and slammed her into the mantle to buck her off. The air emptied from her lungs and he felt its heat on the back of his neck. He could feel her resolve draining away and it fueled him on. Coiling himself, he sprung back and rammed a third time. She finally lost her grip and slumped to the floor like dead weight, a tangle of buckles, ruffles and fishnet.
Where she’d bitten him, a ruby circle bloomed on his shirt like the blurred ring of a wine glass. Lazarus stumbled back, winded but relishing the sight of Kitty writhing in pain and fighting to regain her breath, gasp by leaden gasp. He steadied himself against the arm of the sofa and his hand brushed the same lumpy pillow with the gold border piping he’d placed there earlier. He looked down at it. Yes, that would do very nicely. She’d called him a killer, hadn’t she? If Kitty gave him any more shit, he’d have no trouble shoving it over her pretty face and snuffing her lights out with it. No noise, no mess, and best of all, no fucking electricity.
He picked up the pillow, and when he turned back toward her, Kitty was up on one knee holding a double-hooked, black iron fireplace poker in her hands. It looked like a goddamned harpoon. The crazed look in her eyes spoke volumes, and Lazarus suddenly began to question the wisdom of bringing a pillow to a death match.
CHAPTER 12
Dylan’s Fiat rounded the circular driveway for the second time that night and parked a respectful distance from the house. He cut the engine and stepped out onto the pea gravel. The front door was standing wide open and both he and Sian just stared at it for a good ten seconds. It was one of those things that really shouldn’t have been eerie but was.
“Forget it,” Sian said. “Let’s just go.”
Dylan paused as if considering the suggestion. It wasn’t an option. They were here now. Best to just get on with it. “Nah. I’ll just slip in. He won’t even hear me.”
Lazarus attacked, lunging at Kitty with all the resolve he could summon. She countered with a nimble roll to her left that sent him crashing to the floor. His back was to her and he spun around, barely raising the pillow over his face in time to block the swishing fire poker. It swatted the pillow, goring it open with its harpooned barbs and sending puffs of wadding billowing up into the air between them.
The grandfather clock boomed the eleven o’clock hour and somehow it seemed even louder to Lazarus with his head hovering inches above the parquet floor.
Kitty swung again but Lazarus was able to roll himself this time. The poker struck the fireplace with a resounding clang, kicking off sparks and knocking several bricks loose for good measure. Lazarus reached over and snatched a long-handled fireplace broom. He brandished it, but the visual impact was limp to say the least.
Christ, what was he going to do? Sweep her out the front door?
She stood above him as he lay on his back, a twisted smile playing on her lips.
“Bye-bye, baby.”
She raised the poker over her head and brought it whistling down through the air at his face. Lazarus managed to block the blow with his broom but the heavy iron poker cracked it in half like a candy cane.
Kitty was livid. She swung the poker back over her shoulder with such force it slammed into the grandfather clock behind her and smashed apart the horns of its split finial. The whole case rocked on its base and a shockwave of dust engulfed it. She attacked again, but Lazarus was ready. Still clutching the two halves of the fireplace broom in his hands, he spun to his right and the poker hook chopped into the wood floor, sending parquet chips flying.
He chucked the fragments at her and one grazed her cheek. She seethed with boiling rage and arced the poker straight back one more time like a pendulum. It connected with the clock again, punching through the glass door covering the face and raining down shards of it behind her. The hook caught in the moon dial and the whole bloody thing came crashing down.
It toppled like a great, creaking tree and exploded with a cacophonous blast. It was a dissonant symphony of tuned brass, shattered gears and splintering English hardwood. In an instant, a priceless piece of extraordinary old world craftsmanship was obliterated.
But its insignificance was staggering.
There are moments in life where what we know and what we believe come crashing together with such cataclysmic force that we just have to shut up and watch. It feels so final that we think the world might as well just end right then and there because there’s simply nothing else left to say.
For Kathleen Van Winkle, this was one of those moments.
When the grandfather clock split open on the parlor floor, a battered tin box tucked inside the case had been knocked loose and came tumbling out, fluttering its contents over the parquet like a fan of playing cards on a blackjack table.
Kitty turned around, unable to do anything but stare at the open box in disbelief. Her eyes were reading the signs but her brain was a dozen car-lengths back. It was too much to absorb all at once. You don’t find a four-leaf clover by looking at a field. You find it by looking at a clover. Then another. And another.
Her stomach rolled as her focus locked onto something familiar. It was lovely and awful and heartbreaking all at once. It was a face. One that she knew better even than she knew her own. It was the face of a raven-haired beauty named Susan Miles. Her Texas driver’s license now sat on Lazarus Walker’s parlor floor, five thousand miles from the last place she’d been seen alive. There was a long moment of disconnect before Kitty realized she was looking at the keepsakes of a killer. Her eyes sought out more clovers. More driver’s licenses, then passports, student and resident identification cards. There was such tragic beauty in each face that Kitty could barely breathe. At long last she was speechless. She just shut up and watched.
Lazarus stood up behind her and brushed himself off. “Thank you,” he chuckled.
Kitty spun with the fireplace poker clutched in her hands.
“For what?”
“That’s the most fun I’ve had in years.”
She thrust the poker out at him, but he dodged easily. His clumsiness seemed to have vanished.
“I try so hard to fight it. I do.”
He took a step toward her. She took a step back, Doc Martens crunching through glass.
“You sick
fucker, I knew it!”
“I hid myself away. Locked the gate. Put up signs, but you always come.”
Kitty roared with pure, barbaric rage and charged. Lazarus sidestepped, and in one easy, fluid motion plucked the fire iron from her hands and twirled it like a baton.
“I throw you out, threaten to phone the police, but you always come back.”
She stumbled around the room in confusion. If Kitty hadn’t known before that she’d swum too far from shore, she damn well knew it now. She snatched the useless phone off the table and threw it at him. He ducked and it shattered against the wall.
“I give you chance after chance but it always ends the same.”
Kitty mustered the courage to charge again. She was nothing if not intrepid. It was a valiant gesture, but Lazarus popped her neatly on the nose and she went down instantly. Her face went numb and the smell of blood filled her nostrils. Lightheaded and exhausted, she sat there in the glass, quickly zeroing in on the likelihood that her passport was going to end up in that tin box tonight, too.
Then she saw him.
He stood in the doorway watching them as if the scene was common as you please.
“Call the police, Dylan. He attacked me!”
Dylan looked at the fireplace poker Lazarus held.
“She’s crazy,” Lazarus countered. “Don’t listen to her, mate.”
Dylan didn’t answer either of them. They watched incredulously as he strolled over to the couch and began fishing around the cushions instead. When he found his Zippo, he plopped down and lit a cigarette.
“Don’t just sit there,” Kitty pleaded. “Help me!”
Sian slipped into the room and took in the whole surreal scene. She glared at Lazarus in disbelief.
“Wot? Ain’t you done her yet?” she asked.
“For the love of God!” Dylan barked. “Shut up, woman!”
Lazarus wrung his grip on the poker. “Sorry?”
Dylan rubbed his face. “You’re not sticking to your routine, mate.” The tone seemed to imply this was the most tedious conversation that he’d ever endured.
Lazarus and Kitty shared a look that conveyed their mutual confusion.
“You’re usually on clean-up by now,” Dylan said.
Kitty was the first to get a handle on what was going on. Lazarus had just hit terminal velocity without a chute.
“You are so fucked,” she said with a smile of vindication.
Dylan looked at Sian. “Hand me a rag, Love.”
Sian dug a plastic zipper bag from her purse and pulled a folded cloth from it. She walked toward Lazarus.
“Who’s laughing now, dick?” Kitty taunted.
“Don’t know what you’re so pleased about,” Sian said to her. She clapped the rag over Kitty’s mouth and nose then pinched her in a headlock. Kitty struggled briefly, but within seconds she fell limp in Sian’s arms.
What in thunder, thought Lazarus. He had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on except that his handbasket had just been loaded up onto the bullet train for hell. This definitely qualified as a bustle in the hedgerow. He bolted for the door.
“Stop him!” Dylan yelled at Sian. She launched like a sprinter off the blocks, but tripped over Kitty on her very first step and flopped to the floor. Dylan leaped off the couch and raced to catch up.
Lazarus reached the front door and grabbed the handle, but someone had locked it up drum tight from crossbolt to deadlatch. Dylan grabbed him from behind and muscled him into a chokehold with one beefy arm. With his free hand he tried to push another rag into his face, but Lazarus countered with a hard elbow to the ribs. Dylan doubled over and dropped the rag, groaning and retching as Lazarus shoved him off.
Sian swooped in to snatch up the rag and shoved it right back in his face. Winded and more than a little freaked out, Lazarus did precisely what one does not want to do when negotiating a cloth soaked in homemade chloroform. He took a great gasping breath and his lungs filled with an icy vapor full of wrong. He had time to formulate a thought that the smell was astringent and syrupy sweet. Then his limbs went numb and Lazarus took his third trip of the night to involuntary dreamland.
CHAPTER 13
Timing was everything. So much of life was chance. Coincidence. One random event after another and somehow in the end it was all supposed to add up to a life. Lazarus thought it was a big, sweaty bag of bollocks.
Life wasn’t a weather balloon. Sure, you could just sit back and let the jetstream steer you wherever it damn well pleased, but that was far too random for his tastes. How could there be any pleasure reaped from a life without control? And really, once you’ve filled stadiums, where do you go from there?
The human spark was so damned fragile. Life, was fragile. People, were fragile. He’d recently seen a news piece, a follow-up on the aftermath of a Japanese tsunami. It seemed debris had begun beaching itself along the coastlines of Canada and the States, the rocky shores of Vancouver, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. The seas were constantly teeming with flotsam and jetsam, but the ocean is the mother-of-all haystacks, to be sure. Anyway, the navel-gazers were creaming themselves about one piece of trash in particular. A light bulb.
It seemed a single, unbroken Japanese light bulb had washed up somewhere on the Alaskan panhandle and was being hailed as a symbol of the unbroken human spirit. The fragile thing should have been smashed a thousand times over and become one with the sand, but somehow, and it was the bloody miracle of all miracles, it had managed to float merrily across five thousand miles of the open Pacific unscathed. Life was but a dream.
But really, what was the point? It wasn’t life. In life, the glass breaks. It breaks because someone is usually there to smash it to bits, and Lazarus thought things were far more interesting that way. After all, why make life so fragile if it wasn’t so beautiful to watch it come apart?
And here was the kicker. Some plonker had the bright idea that they would screw the bloody thing into a lamp and make a big production out of lighting it up. The indomitable human spirit! They just couldn’t leave well enough alone. One miracle hadn’t been enough. Everybody wanted two. Well, of course the damn thing didn’t light. Light bulbs aren’t designed to brave the high seas. They’re designed to work just long enough so that you won’t be cheesed off when they die.
Like people.
Everything is finite. Yes, even the ocean is finite. It’s a great, big bastard but it’s finite. Life? Most definitely finite. No different from an apple in the orchard. A blossom appears, and from that blossom an apple grows. It grows until it reaches a peak, a zenith of perfection… its destiny. That’s it. There’s nothing random about it. There is nowhere else for it to go. It is ripe. And if the timing is right, someone will be there to pluck it from the tree and swim in its fleeting beauty. If the timing is wrong, it will fall to the ground to shrivel and rot. Should human beings not also be allowed the dignity to be enjoyed at the peak of ripeness?
Lazarus thought that they should.
“He’s waking up.”
The tug-of-war between the darkness and the light waged on. He felt as if he was being suspended at the base of his skull by handscrews. The throbbing was excruciating. Lazarus was the light bulb on the high seas now, bobbing through the froth and blackness. His eyes burned, the sting of seawater and blinding sunlight. Then back into the airless, lightless void, submerged like one of Salem’s witches in a dunking pond. The good news was that Lazarus was reasonably certain he would float.
He was in a chair again. Kitty sat facing him. She was still a blur, but he knew her now. He could have picked her out of a crowd from a hundred yards. She was tied up now too, and there was a raging fire behind her eyes that Lazarus saw immediately when his own began to clear. It was the same wild energy that had fueled all of his exploits. It was the crimson flush. Their eyes met and in an instant a silent pact was made.
Sian paced. Dylan stood quietly in a corner smoking. They were back in the basement again. The smashed table rema
ined but there was no sign of the knife roll Kitty had brought from the kitchen. Lazarus half expected to see The Gimp from Pulp Fiction hobble into the room, but decided the humor might not be appreciated by the rest of the club and kept it to himself.
“What the hell are you doing, Dylan?” Sian asked.
“Shut up and let me think.”
“Just phone the filth and get the reward, already.”
“I said, let me think!”
Dylan flicked his lit cigarette at Lazarus. It bounced off his chest without a flinch from Lazarus. He didn’t take his eyes off Kitty, nor she him.
“You really think you’re something, don’t you?” Dylan asked.
Sian stopped pacing. “Dylan—”
“Think you’re so smart with your shitty band and shitty house, playing Lord of the Manor while I toil in the dirt and dust.”
Lazarus finally shifted his gaze to Dylan.
“I can see how most folks wouldn’t figure it out though,” Dylan continued.
“Figure out what?” Lazarus asked calmly.
“Don’t play fucking dumb with me. I’ve been watching you for quite a while now.”
Kitty laughed at just how pathetic it sounded.
“Donna Riley goes missing down London… you buy a tree. Sally James goes missing in Manchester… you buy a tree.”
“Stop it,” Sian said. “Just phone the police. Be done with it.”
Dylan ignored her. “I’ll admit, I didn’t really start paying attention until Annie Mays.” He walked over to Lazarus and got right in his face. “Always wore a Black Ryder t-shirt in her pictures.”