Little boys go missing.
All the kids had been buzzing with it since school began—the story about the boy who was found all cut up at the graveyard near this house.
Little boys die sometimes.
Please, Mama, I won’t do this again. I won’t wander. I’ll come home right after school. I’ll say my prayers. I’ll wash my hands and face. I won’t wander ever again. Kazi thought the prayer out, hoping his mother or God or someone would hear him.
“Who am I?” the man said. “My boy, my little foreign spy, I am Mr. Speederman, but most of my friends call me Mr. Snider, and I want you to do that, too. K-Z. Or you can call me Dadko. That’s my first name. You know Dadko? I bet you do, K-Z. I bet you know about how people burn the straw man and straw woman at harvest time. I hate that. It’s so silly and pagan, and pagan things are devil things and devil things are atheist things. But call me Dadko. Or Mr. Spider.”
“I have to go home. Now,” Kazi said.
“Oh poor little Czechie got to go see the babushka who can make his peed little panties all right,” Mr. Spider said. “And meanwhile, my wife is up there in pain and doubled over and all you think about is yourself, K-Z Slovak. I don’t like that one bit. Not one bit. Mind your betters, you hear me? Jsou lide, kte n’ neve’ ri—je pozde litouat.”
Kazi understood this Czech phrase too well:
There are people who do not believe—it is too late to lament.
He didn’t know why Mr. Spider was saying this, but it was getting to the point where Kazi knew he had to either run or accept that Mr. Spider might never let go of his wrist and might, in fact, kill him. There are bad men in the world.
“I have to go,” Kazi said. “Mr. Spider.”
“Well, I understand you do, Kazi. Have I been scaring you? Lord knows, I don’t mean to frighten you, you sweet little kind kid of a kid. Gah, don’t listen to me. I’m an old man. I am. I’m older than I look. I look fifty. But I’m really fifty-seven. Fifty-seven is old, K-Z. And I guess I’m a little senile already. You know senile? It’s when all the old farts start to lose it. I was just havin’ you on, kid, really. Having fun. Sure, nobody gets my sense of humor,” Mr. Spider said, but this time, he tightened his grip on Kazi’s wrist and brought his other hand up behind the boy’s neck. It felt icy as it touched him, and if Kazi had any pee left in him, he was fairly sure it would have leaked out right then.
Why isn’t my mother here? he thought. Why can’t she protect me?
“Come on, it’s okay. Lighten up, kid. I just need you to crawl up on this window sill. I’ll be below you to catch you. You won’t fall, but I mean if you did.” Mr. Spider prattled on as he tugged and pushed at Kazi, and eventually they got up on the big front porch of the house. He said, “See, if I lift you up, you can reach that little balcony kind of thingy over there and you can just scramble up like a monkey and get to the window sill and slip in there—see how it’s open a bit? And then you just run downstairs and unlock the door for me.”
“Why can’t Mrs. Fly come to open the door?”
“Gah, she’s in pain, K-Z, now will you do it or not? I mean, you’re free to go. You are free as a cub ci syn—I promise. Oh Lord, I upset you. I’m sorry, dear boy. Dear one. You, who have always been so good to me,” Mr. Spider said, and then with one swift swooping motion, he hefted Kazi up on his shoulders. Mr. Spider was taller than he’d seemed, and Kazi felt as if it would be a long fall to the ground. “What you do is you just stand up, use my shoulders, see, stand up, and then when you stand, you can just reach the balcony. See? It’s not much of a balcony, but it’s enough for you to stand on, and if you go on tippy-toes you can get to that window ledge. I know you can do it.”
Kazi didn’t want to do anything to help Mr. Spider, but he was a little scared and a little afraid to do anything to upset Mr. Spider. If I just do it, he’ll let me go. He’s crazy but he hasn’t hurt me. He’s just crazy. He’s like one of the teachers at school—they’re kind of mean, but maybe they don’t know how mean they sound. Maybe that’s all. Maybe.
CHAPTER TEN
1
“Two Guinness,” Bish said, sliding onto a barstool at the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille.
“Just one,” Luke said. “I’ll have a boilermaker.”
“Jeez, that sounds 1930s. Like Nick and Nora Charles.”
“It is. I just like ‘em.”
“Alcoholism runs in your family.”
“It better not run too fast or I’ll never catch up.”
The bartender, who was named Pete, leaned over and said, “We’re out.”
“Out?” Bish asked.
“Out of everything you want.”
Bish and Luke glanced at each other; one shrugged, the other smirked; and then Luke said, “Out of beer?”
He looked at the bartender’s face—hadn’t seen him before in town. Looked sort of like several people in the village, most of whom were probably related. He had that inbred kind of chin—recessive and with a bit of an overhang of skin beneath it. His eyes were bloodshot and squinty, and the curl of his lip went down instead of up.
“We got nothing you want,” the bartender said. “Couple-a-queers.”
For a second or two, it was as if time froze, and Luke Smithson felt a little shiver of something inside. Not like a memory or anything, more like a nightmare that he might’ve once had. But even then, he wasn’t sure of it.
Couple-a-queers.
The frozen moment broke into bits, and he looked at Bish.
“What the fuck,” Luke said, laughing, and making an I don’t fucking believe this face.
“Should I tell him?” Bish said, jokingly putting his hand on Luke’s scalp and combing his fingers through his hair. But Luke pulled away. He didn’t like that kind of joke. Didn’t like it at all.
Luke felt his face flush; he felt as if he were peeing all over his own body. It was a strange heat inside him, and it felt closer to humiliation than he’d ever want to come.
He hated homophobes. He’d seen what his aunt had to put up with in her lifetime. Never liked it as a kid, didn’t like it now.
“Neither one of us is gay. And what the hell does that mean, anyway?” Luke said, standing up too fast from his stool, nearly toppling it over behind him. “What the hell does that mean, anyway, bubba?”
Bubba was the best word he could come up with on short notice.
“Two pretty gayboys,” Pete said, looking Luke in the eye. “We don’t serve your kind.”
“What century are we in?” Luke asked. He glanced at the couple at the end of the bar. “What century is this? This the nineteenth century? Eighteenth?” He laughed, but something in the sound of his own voice sounded hollow. “What the hell? Bish, is this guy for real?”
“Wait, Pete,” Bish said, looking from Luke to the bartender. Bish grinned, shaking his head. He could not quite believe this. “This is a joke, right? It’s gone far enough. Come on. Come on.”
“I saw you two kissing and ... fondling,” Pete said, his face wrinkling with disgust. He stepped back from the bar. “I saw you with your ass in the air so your boyfriend here could poke you, gayboy.”
“Pete?” Bish asked. “This is not funny. Not funny one bit.”
“Funny as hell, gayboy.” Pete shouted to the two other patrons at the end of the bar. “We saw ‘em, didn’t we?”
A guy and his girl sat sipping from highball glasses, and playing a video game on the bar counter. The guy looked over. “Yeah. Sure. Yeah.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘yeah’?” Luke said. He felt as if he were burning up inside. It was insane and nasty— this kind of joke. To pick two people out and make a stupid comment. A stupid homophobic comment. Only ignorant morons did that. Backwater trash creeps who all should be shot for their ignorance.
“I mean, hell yeah,” the guy said. He looked at his girl, then back to Pete. “Those two? Yeah. In love like two girlfriends.” He grinned, and started chuckling; his girlfriend tried to shush him, but she
had a big sloppy smile on her face, too.
Luke had a feeling he hadn’t had since he’d been a kid—that somehow, his mind wasn’t smart enough to untangle the confusion in his brain. He began recalling some memory—a time when he was in his teens. A time where he had heard somebody say something mean about someone else, but it was as if his brain were blocked, and all he felt from this gasp of memory was confusion and shame.
And now, this was too weird.
Even for Watch Point, this was weird. It wasn’t that much of a backwater. Nobody gay-bashed in Watch Point, not just a drive up from Manhattan. Not with the commuter train that ran through town. Not with two gay guys running the main bookstore in town. Watch Point had even tried to get gay marriage recognized. Despite a handful of ultra-backwards, it was a pretty liberal place, he thought. Cynthia and Danni lived here together for years. We’re just a couple of hours out of Manhattan. We’re not in some redneck boondock. Maybe he’d heard about some gay bashing once or twice, but usually it was the other towns in the Valley that had hate crimes and open-handed bigotry. Watch Point wasn’t that bad, not these days. How could it be?
But this was something else.
And it made no sense.
None at all.
“Shame on you.” The words entered his mind as if someone had spoken them. A taunting teenager in his brain. “Shame on you.”
He tried to figure out every angle—was this a sick joke? Was it some setup Bish had made?
Bish.
Luke had a memory from high school about Bish.
He wasn’t sure what it was.
Bish’s anger at him. Inexplicable.
But that wasn’t it. It couldn’t be a big jokey setup because Bish would know how insensitive it was given Luke’s aunt. Bish had always been cool with Danni and her girlfriend. Even when Luke had had some trouble with it... I mean, it was hard for me to accept her being gay, he thought. But I was a kid. I did’t know any better.
But this nastiness in the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille—this was something else. This stank of something awful that Luke didn’t think happened in the world.
He liked girls. This was a nasty joke. He was in love with one particular of the female species and he had no intention of ever going gay.
Gary’s bad.
The thought had never come to him before.
In his mind. A voice. It wasn’t even his voice. It was just a voice.
You hate queers, the voice said. You like girls who are pretty and who like you to look at them because they have all the right parts. Tits and pussy and all the in-between. You’re healthy and well-adjusted and any dark secrets you have are the kind nobody ever finds out about because you write them in your diary. Men often write in diaries. It’s a manly pursuit.
Just because your aunt was a homo doesn’t mean you can’t hate all of ‘em.
Hate the sinner, love the sin.
And nobody but nobody calls you a gayboy.
Nobody does it and lives.
Something was wrong, and it wasn’t just this sick stupid joke that had gone on two minutes too long.
Luke felt as if his brain would not shut down with this voice. It kept going and going inside him, all the while he was pissed off at the bartender. Sometimes his brain did that late at night, just kept going and going, and that’s what got him to start writing in a diary in the first place—the nights of no sleep, of wandering, of worrying and fretting and imagining and writing in the diary.
He had assumed it was a healthy outlet, but he now wondered if he hadn’t been kidding himself.
The diary stops you from doing the things you want to do, the voice said. You write in it so you don’t have to live. So you don’t have to do what needs to be done. You sublimate, my boy. You sublimate when you really want to lash out. You hide it in your diary when you really want to unzip it, take it out and swing it around.
Luke said, “Okay, let’s go, Bish. Something’s fucked up here, but I’m not putting good money down in a place that would ever treat anyone like...”
“Oh you nanthy boy,” Pete said, and to accompany his lisp he added a limp wrist and a hand on his hips. He began walking to the left and right, swinging his hips too much. “You got your feelingth hurt by the big bad heterothexthual. Why don’t we jutht run off and play rimjob poker? Or we could thucky thucky. You like that, pretty boy?”
“Okay, enough, Pete,” Bish said. “What the hell are you doing? What the hell is this about? It’s not even funny. It’s nasty. It’s stupid. What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
“You wanna know?” Pete said, dropping the absurd nasty act. “You wanna know? You wanna know, gayboy?”
“I think the gayboys wanna know,” the guy at the end of the bar said.
“Yeah, I wanna know!” Bish shouted.
Luke noticed that Bish’s face was a bright red hue. He had never seen Bish this upset.
“I want to know what this nasty stupid joke is about and why it’s so important to you to keep it going. I want to know why you’re willing to stand there and be a goddamn homophobe and ... shit, we’re not even gay, so I don’t even know why you’re doing this. I want to know, you damn well better believe I want to know!”
“Okay,” Pete said. “Look at this.”
The guy with the girl at the end of the bar said, “I saw you two lovebirds going at it. It was... it was...” They both started snickering and then tried to hush each other.
The girl, a frowzy blond with a big rack, said, “It was disgusting. Unnatural. Unspeakable. And it looked like you were tearing that poor dude up. I mean, I can’t take it in the backdoor, if you know what I’m sayin’. I like my action all normal and front door.”
“Yeah, go in the front door,” the bartender said. “Clean plumbing.”
“We’re moral people,” her boyfriend said, and then chuckled to himself as if remembering a particularly funny joke. “But you. Well, shame on you. Shame on you.”
Luke felt an icy finger along his spine when the guy said it.
Shame on you.
Bish glanced over at Luke, who had backed away from the bar, but met Bish’s glance. What the hell? Seemed to be the expression on both of their faces.
In Luke’s mind, the voice said, Oh, the sights you will see. The passion, the drama, the bittersweet love.
“Want to know what this is about?” Pete asked again, and he reached beneath the bar and pulled out a DVD. “Your kind disgusts me. You disgust anybody who’s decent.” He popped the DVD in the player that fed into the bar’s video system.
On three TV sets—one over the bar, one back near the pinball machine, and one just over the front door of the bar—a porn scene came up, only, as Luke looked at it, he saw his own face—and it was not where it should’ve been.
It was buried between Bish’s thighs.
“Oh my God, that’s so gross,” the blonde cried out. “That’s like so gross. How can you do that shit?” She slapped the bar and started giggling into her “oh my God’s.”
“Wait for the part with the butt,” her guy said, giving Luke a sly wink. “Naughty boys, you two.”
“That’s not me,” Bish said, his voice raising an octave as if he suddenly were a little boy again. “That’s not us. Who the hell made this thing?”
Luke reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew his cell phone. “Let’s call the police. Something’s too fucked up here.”
“Cops?” Bish asked. “What the hell are they gonna do?”
“Give me another solution. It’s either that or beat the crap out of everybody here. Bish? Bish?”
But when he looked over at Bish, his friend had become transfixed as he watched the images of the two men making love on the video. It was as if Bish could not take his eyes off of it.
Luke looked at the bartender—he too watched the video as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, and only the blonde in the back kept shouting “Nast-ee! Oh, Jesus on a stick, who would do that to a man? Oh! Damn!
That’s gotta hurt. It’s just gotta.” She turned toward Luke, pointing her finger at him, laughing. “Oh my God, you got a little one, too. You got a teeny-tiny.”
“What the fuck,” Luke whispered under his breath. He felt a mix of confusion and a kind of fear he hadn’t felt since he’d been a kid—the fear that brought shame with it. But that’s fucked, he thought. That’s completely messed up.
He flipped opened his cell phone, tapped in for the operator, got connected to the Watch Point police department and could not believe that the phone just rang and rang on the other end with no one picking up.
He looked up at the TV screen.
“Turn that off!” he shouted, but the others were watching the show—and when Luke looked up, he had just turned Bish over on his stomach and had begun licking down his back, all the way to the mounds of his buttocks.
Oh, the voice in his head whispered. The things I will show you.
Luke tapped off the phone on the eightieth ring to the local cops, and instead tapped in 911.
This time, after several rings, someone picked up.
“Hi. Look, I need some cops out here. There’s something screwy.” He gave the address of the bar.
“I know that place,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “I drink there sometimes. What’s this about?”
“It’s about something too strange to say over the phone. Maybe it’s fraud. Or gay bashing.”
“Wait—you’re gay?” the woman asked.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, ‘cause usually they sound a certain way. Funny like.”
Luke could not believe her response. “Can we get a cop out here?”
“You might want to take a few deep breaths.”
“What?”
“Calm down a little. Just take it slow and easy. Relax. Don’t fight it. If you relax, you can take all of it.”
Luke drew the phone back and stared at it, feeling disassociated from it. Then he put it back up to his ear. “I’m not sure what’s going on.”
“You know, when I’m not sure what’s going on,” the woman said, “the last thing I do is pick up the phone and dial 911. This is for serious emergencies only.”
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 14