by Kaden, John
The moment seemed to elongate, stretching itself out, playing through in slow-motion, Donna’s face darkening and darkening until it turned the color of a ripe plum.
When she lay mercifully silent and still, young Milty collapsed on the bed beside her, his eyes manic and bewildered. Milton looked into the desperate, deranged face of that young man, the man he had been forty years ago, and he felt nothing but raw contempt for himself.
This is it, he thought, my “Ah-ha!” moment.
His knees buckled and he slid to the ground, sobbing into his hands.
“For you, June,” he said, and his younger self spoke in synchrony with him, their voices intertwined. “I did it for you, June. I am so, so sorry…”
XII
When he lifted his tear-wet face from his hands, he startled at the scenery that surrounded him. Everything had changed completely. The lush courtyard was nothing but an abandoned lot full of overgrown weeds and vines. The bungalow that stood before him no longer appeared quaint and tidy — its walls were black with mold and webbed with ivy, covered with a funhouse array of weird graffiti. The front door had been knocked off its hinges years ago and now leaned crookedly against the inner wall.
Milton sat up, jolted by the sight of it.
Through the warped doorway, he could see into the dank interior of the bungalow. Garbage littered the floors — empty beer bottles, crumpled newspapers, discarded cans of spray paint. The whole place looked like it had become a den for hoodlums and homeless people.
No wonder the cab driver had been skittish about dropping him off out here. Strange destination for a man your age…
Yes, Milton thought, it certainly is.
He steadied himself to his feet, delirious from the rush of images that kept flooding into his head, and stepped toward the cock-eyed front door. A dour, musty odor punched him in the nostrils right as he reached the threshold. Broken pieces of furniture and a cemetery of tiny bird bones lay scattered across the sagging plywood floor.
He stepped inside, kicking empty food containers out of his way as he staggered through the moonlit wreckage. This is where I did it… killed her… this is where I killed Donna… her name was Donna… Donna Lockwood… Donna Donna DONNA! The memories were living things now, slithering inside his veins, swimming through his consciousness of their own free will, and he knew, at that moment, that whatever else the blight of dementia might steal from him in the coming years, this memory would always remain. It wasn’t going anywhere ever again. It was more vivid than any scrapbook memory or retold story could ever be. It was alive in his mind… and it wasn’t finished just yet.
The bathroom doorway stood up ahead, dark and tilting, framed only by rotted wood beams and a few scraps of drywall. Milton approached it with a drawn look on his face.
Inside, it was a fetid mess.
He stared into the cracked, rusted bathtub, wincing as the worst of the memories settled themselves in his mind like so many lock pins clicking into place. His gorge started to rise and he fought back the urge to throw up. This… this is where…
Yes.
It was all coming back to him now.
Because young Milty had to get the body out of here without anybody catching him in the act. She wouldn’t fit into the suitcase, and he couldn’t just carry her out the door and through the courtyard — no, that wouldn’t do. Someone might see. So he’d gotten something from the trunk of his car, hadn’t he? Something from his industrial kitchen supplies sales case, in fact. Something very sharp.
In the gloom of the decayed bathroom, a shadow moved; angular and misshapen, limned by reflected moonlight.
Donna.
Her ruined body stepped forward through the darkness. There were jagged crimson slashes across her neck, her shoulders, and the tops of her thighs — all the places where Milty had gone to work on her, dismantling her, cutting her body down to a manageable enough size to fit her inside the suitcase and chuck her into the gator-infested waters of the Loxahatchee River.
She lumbered forward like a ragdoll whose pieces were barely stitched together. Her dead eyes opened, milk-white, and in a wretched, swamp-clogged voice she said, “I told her, Milty. I told her everything!”
Milton screamed and drew back into the bedroom, terrified of her, of this monster he had created with his own murderous hands. He banged his knee on an overturned dresser and stumbled into the wall, then righted himself and careened headlong toward the doorway.
He collapsed onto the ground outside, pain sprouting from every joint in his body, and backpedaled away from the decrepit bungalow. The weight of exhaustion slowed his escape and he had to stop and catch his breath, his chest rattling like a lawnmower engine that wouldn’t start up.
He brought his arms up to shield his face, wincing and cringing, expecting to see the specter of Donna come tearing through the doorway and maul him to pieces.
Seconds passed and nothing happened.
Everything remained silent, except for the slight rasping of leaves in the surrounding trees.
Milton slowly lowered his arms.
There was no sign of anything inside, no motion whatsoever, and a cold sort of relief washed over him. Seeing things, he thought. Donna wasn’t just gone, he realized — she had never been there at all. She had been nothing more than a fevered hallucination produced by a guilt-ridden mind; the twisted manifestation of a forty-year-old repressed memory, just like everything else had been.
He exhaled a deep, uneasy sigh and looked up at the bungalow. An utter shambles. It looked like it had been boarded up for decades and left to rot out here in the sticks. His eyes grazed over the collage of graffiti, an odd mix-match of gang symbols and lovers’ initials, and came to rest on one tag that had been written over the top of it all, directly above the crooked doorway. It was fresh, the red spray paint still glistening in the moonlight…
I KiLLed DonNa LocKwoOD
This wasn’t June’s handwriting. It was his own. He brought his hand up to his face and saw his fingertips coated in red. “Dear God,” he said, looking from his fingertips to the graffiti and back again. My own hand, he thought. On the ground, he saw the rusty spray can he must’ve used, probably discarded months ago by some local teenager.
The courtyard went still around him and he sat back in the wet grass, replaying the events over again in his mind, with a new clarity that had been missing for four long decades. While the shock and horror of what he had done was all very hard to absorb, there was one aspect that still made no logical sense whatsoever. One puzzle piece that didn’t quite seem to fit. He thought of the countless hours he had spent holding the cigar box, delicately picking up each trinket, turning them in his hands, feeling the power they possessed inside of them. It made no sense, because it was all clear now, that horrible night, and he remembered it through to the very end: When he had disposed of Donna Lockwood’s body, he had also burned all of her possessions, and he now vividly remembered watching that goddamned cigar box go up in flames, burning until there was nothing left of it but ashes and embers.
“Sweet life…” he said, his voice barely a scrape.
He looked up to the sky, at the moon hanging above the silhouetted palm trees. It must have been at least five hours since the taxi had dropped him off. Five hours of hallucinations and “missing” time. It was all too much to comprehend. He was tired. His bones hurt. Whatever retribution needed facing, and he was sure there was a lot of it, he vowed to face it tomorrow. Right now, he only wanted to go home.
He let out a groan and tried to stand up, but his shaky legs gave out immediately and he plopped right back down in the weeds. I might have to spend the night out here after all, he thought, and that gave him a morbid shiver.
He leaned forward and wiped the tears out of his eyes, his heartbeat steadily decelerating, his adrenaline coasting back to neutral, and that’s when he felt the warm, silky hands slide up his spine and linger at the nape of his neck. He would have known that touch anywhere. She had
been dead for five years but he still remembered those smooth hands and that soft caress.
“June…” he said.
He felt her hands close around his throat, ever so gently, and her lips tickled his ear as she whispered, “Hello, Milty.”
About the Author
John Kaden is the author of Blood Séance and Alexandria, with more stories on the way. He is a die-hard fan of horror, thrillers, and apocalyptic fiction. He lives in Southern California.
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JohnKaden.com
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Also by John Kaden
BLOOD SEANCE
A Haunted House Novel
ALEXANDRIA
An Apocalyptic Adventure