Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die

by Charles Runyon

  “I’m not into necrophilia, Sheriff.”

  “Necro …?”

  “Necrophilia. Love of death—as you probably already knew.”

  “Yeah, well—” He smiled faintly as he slid the photos into the envelope. “We dug these dead bodies up in the woods, about a quarter mile downstream from Bollinger’s cabin.”

  For a few seconds her mind was a jumble, jangled chaos of separate thoughts, each canceling out the other. The sheriff was looking at her, waiting. She wanted more than anything else to walk away from him and all the problems he represented.

  “The paper mentioned only one body. Found somewhere in the national forest, as I recall.”

  The sheriff nodded as he rewound the string. “I gotta make these reports, you know, so people can read the papers and say, my-my, ain’t it awful? But I don’t hafta make it easy for ‘em. What I put down was ‘Unidentified human remains.’ If I’d mentioned two female bodies, I’d have had my phone tied up by women wanting me to come look under their beds.”

  She looked up at him for a minute. “I don’t think I’d want your job, sheriff.”

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t want yours, either.”

  “Good. Then we won’t trade jobs. At least we agree on that.”

  “Right. Now about Bollinger.”

  “You still won’t get him until a week from Monday. Maybe not even then.”

  He closed his eyes and inhaled through clenched teeth. “Look—can you take a ride with me?”

  “I have several appointments—” She glanced over her shoulder and saw Thelma looking out of her second-floor office window. “Anyway, if you just want to show me where two bodies were dug up—”

  “Two bodies was day before yesterday.” He spread his lips in a grin. “We got us a mass murder on our hands.”

  The blacktop wound among forested hills. House trailers stood on cinder blocks in hacked-out clearings. Asphalt-shingled shacks peered out from behind junked cars. The newer homes had landscaped grounds with new grass spearing up through purple-red soil. The mailboxes carried names like Whispering Pines, Rolling Acres, Coon Creek Manor.

  After several miles they passed no more houses, only trees ranked like silent armies on each side of the road. The sheriff swung down a rutted gravel track and stopped at a wooden barrier painted with orange-and-black diagonals. The trail beyond showed signs of heavy traffic; the weeds were shredded, rainbows of crank-case oil shimmered in water-filled ruts. The sheriff moved the barrier and drove on. Spiky branches screeched along the windows. The car slewed sideways across a deep gully, then scraped across a rubber-scarred outcrop of granite.

  Elizabeth felt stifled, hot. Her skirt kept bunching up around her hips. Her nose caught the lush ferment of rotting crab apples, the sharp fragrance of sumac—and another odor which awakened a sharp sense of dread.

  She saw the cabin from the top of the ridge: low gabled roof of moss-backed shingles, stone walls rising from a hump of land formed where two ravines met in a narrow V. Two stone arches met at the point of land, divided by a pagodalike pavillion with a roof of rust-red tile. Beyond lay a dam, now cut by a steep-sided trench. A scummy green soup stood in the center of the bowl. Slopes of cracked dried mud rose to a border of sickly yellow weeds. The stone arches spanned cataracts of dry rocks covered with flaking gray powder …

  As she got out of the car, a yellow bulldozer nosed up out of the ravine behind the dam, snorting clots of black vapor which dispersed slowly in the airless clearing. The sheriff pulled off his hat and waved; the human figure directed his clanking monster up the slope and stopped twenty feet away. He killed the engine with a thrust of his arm and climbed stiffly out of the seat. He was a tall man in baggy overalls and a stained gray shirt. He nodded to Liza, then turned and spat out a glob of brown substance, wiping his mouth on a dusty bandanna.

  “How many you found, Wayne?” asked the sheriff.

  “Well … two so far. I just dug down to the original fill. They’re doin’ the rest with shovels and trowels.” He turned to Elizabeth. “He already had this little bitty dirt fill across the creek, see? I told him you gotta scrape off the topsoil, otherwise your pond’ll seep, but he didn’t seem to care about that. That’s how I knowed exactly where they was. Soon’s I read in the paper that they’d found a body, I started havin’ this queer feelin’. Wasn’t till I talked to my cousin who’s a special deputy that it finally hit me—”

  The sheriff interrupted. “Wanta go see, Miz Bodac?”

  Wanting isn’t the word, she thought as she walked down the slope. She had to push her feet ahead of her, yet she felt compelled to view the horror which lay beyond the embankment. She could hear the clank and tinkle of shovels, the muffled voices of the men: “Gonna buy me a pig, by God, can’t afford them groc’ry prices.”

  “How ya gonna feed the pig, Grover?”

  “Turn the som-bitch loose in the woods, let him root hog or die—hey, here’s somethin!”

  “A hunk of chert?”

  “No, by God, it’s a skull. Hey! You men with trowels! Over here!”

  An incredibly foul stench pinched her nostrils as she reached the top of the dam. One of the diggers had propped a transister radio in the loose dirt above the cut: “It all seems wrong somehow … that you’re nobody’s sweetheart now …”

  The song became an obscene joke as she looked down into the trench and watched the dirt being dug away from the greasy, discolored flesh. A body-bag of black, shiny plastic was thrown down; the men grunted and swore in the narrow fly-blown trench. She heard a slushy pop-crack as an arm came off at the shoulder. The empty socket was a writhing mass of white worms.

  Gagging, she whirled away and stumbled out of the clearing. She pressed her forehead against a tree and felt her breakfast come up: orange juice, poached eggs and coffee gushed out and left her sweating and dizzy. She groped for her handkerchief, found none, and started to use the inside of her sleeve. Something touched her shoulder. She jumped, turned to see the sheriff holding out a red checkered bandanna. “There’s running water inside, if you want to wash your face.”

  The little cabin was musty and humid. She followed the trail of dried mud across the wooden floor, parted a matchstick drapery, and stepped inside the bathroom. Only the faucets, fixtures and lights had been manufactured. The sink, sunken tub and commode were hand-moulded cement, with primary colors of yellow, red and blue folded into swirling rainbow galaxies.

  She bent over the stool and stared at the yellow scum until she realized that her stomach had no more to give. She turned on the faucet and wet the bandanna, ran the cool cloth over her burning cheeks. A broad antique-framed mirror stood behind her, reflecting her image in the medicine-cabinet mirror. She seemed to be standing in a vast open space, surrounded by ashen-faced women. All bore a faint resemblance to herself.

  Wasn’t the dream enough?

  She remembered the sudden slash, agony of cold fire, a feeling as if a silk thread had been drawn across her throat. The blood had welled up in ruby droplets, trickled down her neck, splashed warm across her breasts. In the dream she had worn a shawl, a pair of jeans, a heavy plaid shirt. It wasn’t herself who had been murdered—yet it was a very personal death she had felt …

  She looked in the mirror and reminded herself that the dream had been no more than a common death fantasy. She drew her fingers across her throat and saw the satin smoothness where the skin pulled tight. Yet the terrible memory hung on, of lying there and feeling the blood drain out, knowing with absolute certainty that she was dying, putting her hand over her throat to stop the arterial gush, but realizing there was no way to restore the channel which carried the blood to her brain. The worst part of it had been realizing she would never know who had killed her. She had felt the life of her brain dwindle slowly, like city lights in the wee morning hours …

  Ah. With decisive twists she wrung out the bandanna, flipped it a couple of times, and walked out through the drapery. The sheriff stood looking at a mural
which covered the wall opposite the fireplace. A gigantic demon with skull face and wild, red-rimmed eyes waved his six arms against a background of billowing purple fire. Tiny humanoid creatures writhed in the skeletal hands; many had their heads and limbs bitten off. A pair of shapely feminine legs hung from one corner of the monster’s mouth.

  “You know what that is?” asked the sheriff.

  “Some kind of Tantric symbol, I think.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well … death devours all, I suppose.”

  “He worshipped that, you know.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  He held out a small red-clay Buddha. She bent over and sniffed the fragrance of sandalwool. “Burning incense doesn’t mean worship. Not now—if it ever did.”

  “Okay.” The sheriff chuckled, a sound like rattling gravel. ‘Take a look at that figure on the left, the one he’s got gripped in his fist.”

  She stepped forward and saw that the girl’s face was clearly defined in acrylic enamel. For a second she thought she was seeing herself, but then realized the nose was broader than hers, the cheeks rounder. The eyes were closed, the mouth gaped wide in agony—or was it ecstasy?

  “Now look at this.”

  He held out a Polaroid photo. She saw a redhaired girl sitting on the railing of the bridge with one knee drawn up. She was nude, and a little too heavy in the hips and thighs to photograph well in that state. The mouth was spread in a smile of happiness—but worry-lines filled the space between the arching eyebrows. She resembled the girl in the ogre’s hand.

  “Does it prove anything?” she asked.

  The sheriff shrugged and tucked the photo back into an envelope. “It will, if certain dental records match up. Not many killers make it this easy.”

  “Aren’t you making a lot out of circumstantial evidence?”

  “I just gather it, I don’t label it.”

  “I mean—maybe it wasn’t murder at all.”

  He looked down at her, his eyes squinted with amusement. “Yeah, maybe they all crawled under that pile of dirt and died of natural causes.”

  She felt her cheeks grow hot. “I just meant that people do die, in many ways besides murder, under circumstances where there might be some reason to hide the body. Overdoses of drugs, bungled abortions … you couldn’t be sure until you found the exact cause of death, and those bodies are badly deteriorated.”

  “Yeah, most of ‘em were too rotten. We got a good result on one, though. The scarf kinda protected the wound.”

  “The wound?”

  “Yeah. Her throat was cut.”

  —Going up the slope behind the cabin, into the dappled shade where the forest began. The sheriff had wanted to talk to the men before he left, and she hadn’t wanted to wait in the car, or in the cabin.

  She gasped when she saw the grave. The weathered sandstone slab looked as if it had stood there for centuries, but the chisel marks were new, not yet darkened by time and rain. She read the inscription.

  A DOG

  He lived and he died

  Just like everyone else.

  Six

  “What did you do to those girls, Dan?”

  “What girls?”

  “The ones who visited you at the cabin.”

  “Whaddaya mean, what did I do to them? Nothing. Nothing they didn’t want to happen, anyway.”

  “I was thinking about the dog. You got the feeling he was hanging you up, so you carried him off—twice. Why?”

  “I didn’t like his habits. He was a meat eater.”

  “And the girls, what were they?”

  He laughed. “I guess they were too—in a different sense.”

  She lit a cigarette and leaned back in the secretarial chair, turning her face toward the window. He saw the faint pink flush of a new sunburn on her forehead; her eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. She’d worn a dress for the first time, and her nylon-sheathed legs stretched under the table. Is this for me? Don’t ask—he told himself. Just enjoy the effect. Her voice no longer echoes the dead metronome beat of the institution. It bounces, jumps, sparkles with the electricity of life. Maybe she is beginning to divorce herself from the machine …

  Abruptly she swung around to face him. “Look—when you dropped acid with those girls, were there times when you lost touch with reality?”

  “Well, there were times when I wasn’t sure which reality was mine.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “We’d pick up each other’s visions, ways of looking at things.”

  “You mean—like this cigarette—you’d each see something different?”

  “We’d see it in a different way … like Christina was always seeing things in shifting, writhing shapes, and mine were hard and angular. That’s when I knew I was into her head, everything would start writhing … hurting. Chris was in a lot of pain.”

  “Why?”

  “She’d always loved her parents and followed their advice, and here she was twenty-five years old and nothing they said had worked out. It was a major crisis.”

  “But she solved it?”

  “She thought she had it solved when she left.”

  “Do you remember the last time you saw her?”

  “Sure. I started to walk up the trail with her to the highway, she was planning to catch a ride. About … oh, a hundred yards from the cabin she said she wanted to say goodbye there. I think she’d suddenly gotten the feeling she might never come back.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because of the way she said it. She wanted to remember me in that context, with the cabin and the forest in the background. Like this would be an encapsulated part of her existence, she could box it up and keep it in her memory, so it wouldn’t affect the rest of her life. I think she had the feeling she couldn’t get loose from … whatever she was hung up with.”

  “Then … tell me what you did.”

  “Kissed her, then turned and walked back to the cabin. We just walked away from each other.”

  “You didn’t see her again?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do with her child?”

  “She didn’t have a child.”

  “You said she gave birth to a baby in the woods.”

  “Oh, but it never lived—”

  “What did you do with the corpse?”

  “We buried it in the dam. Actually it was a grave. The dam was a later idea.”

  “What gave you the idea?”

  “I wanted a place to swim.”

  A look of pain crossed her face. She lowered her eyes, and rolled the pencil between her palms. A muscle jumped in her jaw. On a sudden impulse, he reached out and touched the satiny skin below her ear. She jumped, her eyes shooting fire:

  “Don’t DO that!”

  He leaned back, his nose smarting. “You want to pry into my mind, right—but you don’t want me to even get a peek into yours. You want to hide behind your goddam institutional curtain and watch me balling all these chicks, and you don’t want one cubic centimeter of your own skin to be touched. You know what you are? A voyeur, and not a damn bit more.”

  “I’ve got to go, Dan.”

  She started stuffing papers into her folder. Dan got up and turned off the machine, started coiling the black cord around the mike. He felt a hard hot lump in his throat. They seemed to be lovers who had just had an argument, and were parting because neither wanted to say they were sorry.

  She tucked the folder under her arm and looked up at him, level-eyed and grim. “I want you to think, Dan. Remember. The girls, the situation … remember the conditions under which they left. Believe me, it’s going to be very important.”

  “Important, you mean at the staffing?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. “At the Staffing, and to yourself. Consider the possibility that you just might be—excuse the expression—mentally ill.”

  “Ah. I’m supposed to believe in mental illness, right? That’s one of the conditions fo
r getting out of here.”

  She turned at the door leaned against the wall. “Don’t you believe in mental illness?”

  “No, I think it’s an illusion. I’m not sure how you do it but it’s damn good. I’ve been trying to find the seam, you know? That place where you spliced this little illusion into the big one.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’ll cut it back and splice myself in at the right place.”

  “The right place. You mean where you slipped off the track?”

  “Yeah, I think it was Vera Cruz, during that acid trip with Jo Anne. That’s the part that got zzzzzt! burned out between the electrodes. No, wait. If this is an illusion, then I’m still lying in that shack while Jo Anne whimpers on the pallet. Her voice kind of rode the edge between laughing and crying, I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. She lay there a couple of hours until I smelled urine and I saw that she’d pissed her pants. That’s because I told her to let go of everything … no wait, if the drop-out really happened then, I’d have no memory of the event to be destroyed by shock treatment, would I?”

  “Dan—you lost me on the far turn.”

  “Yeah. It goes round and round. It’s even possible that I’m still lying in the bush at Pleiku, and the bullet severed my spine instead of just punching out a piece of neck muscle. In that case I can be thankful because I’ve had a lot of good times handed to me free of charge. Maybe that’s why this seems like such a long drawn-out process, this gray eternity stretching on and on … because it’s death, really. Do you ever get the feeling you’re dead?”

  “I never felt it in those terms, no.”

  “What terms?”

  “I suppose I would describe it as utter boredom, when the future looks as bleak as a moon landscape.”

  “That sounds real as hell. What do you do about it?”

  “I sit and wait for it to go away.”

  “What if it just hung on and on?”

  “Then I think I would seek expert assistance.” Her cheeks dimpled in a faint smile as she opened the door and stepped through it sideways. “See you tomorrow, Dan. Think about what I said.”