Strangers

by Mort Castle

Shit, if you wanted to find Wonderful Wifey’s “old self,” you could start looking somewhere past the rings of Saturn. Tack a sign on her forehead: CLOSED FOR THE DURATION.

  “Yes, I should call the children,” Beth said. Her voice was throaty and autistically flat. She rose like a marionette manipulated by a spastic puppeteer. She shuffled to the telephone on the kitchen counter. There was a slipper on her right foot; her left was bare.

  Beth picked up the phone. She said, “The children… Where did they go?”

  He told her.

  She said, “I forget the number.”

  “Well,” Michael said, “try to recall it. Let’s see you think as hard as you can.”

  Beth gripped the receiver with both hands. She closed her eyes after a few seconds opened them and said with a defeated shrug, “I really can’t.”

  “That’s all right, honey,” Michael grinned. “You gave it your best shot. Hell, you get ten points for trying.” He gave her the number, one digit at a time and, her face tense with concentration, she pushed each button in turn.

  “Hello? Hello, Laura. This is Beth… I’m all right. Yes. I want to talk to… I want to talk to Marcy and Kim.”

  Michael decided she really didn’t have all that much—to say to the girls. A couple of “yesses,” a single “no.” “Oh, I want to see you soon,” and “I love you” and that was damned near Beth’s conversation with the kids, verbatim. He imagined it probably used up what remained of her vocabulary.

  “All right,” Beth said, “I’ll put him on.”

  She stiffly held out the telephone toward him. Sure, he was the “perfect pop” so the kids wanted a word with him. That is, Kim was going to remind him that she had her heart set on roller-skates for Christmas and her own Atari, and what about a dog? And Marcy was going on, “Oh, Daddy, I miss you” to him.

  He took the telephone. “Hello?”

  “Michael?”

  “Yes, Jan,” Michael said. Surprise, surprise—another Jan and Vern bit of business that didn’t include him? Aw, c’mon, pallys, he knew the secret handshake and everything!

  “Laura asked me to drop over here, didn’t you, Laura?”

  So Laura was within earshot. That meant Jan would be watching what he said.

  “Laura suggested I have a chat with Marcy and Kim, to explain about Beth,” Jan continued. His voice was professional, a blend of Leo Buscaglia and Mr. Rogers. “It could help make their adjustment to the situation somewhat easier. But you’re their father and I didn’t want to do that until I’d spoken to you about it.

  Beside him, Beth stood like a droopy mannequin. He pointed to the table. Sit! She obeyed the unspoken command.

  “By all means,” Michael said. “Anything we can do to help those terrific kids get used to their new, improved, whacked-out mom is okay with me. You have a heart to heart talk with them, Jan.”

  “I will,” Jan Pretre said. “They’re bright. I’m sure they’ll understand. And how is Beth?”

  At the table, Beth was staring at the refrigerator.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Michael said. “Not more than five minutes ago, we were discussing the Theory of Relativity. See, she figured out a few mistakes Einstein had in there and she’s got them corrected. She’s worried about what she should wear when she’s awarded the goddamned Nobel Prize.”

  “Michael”—Jan paused, then said seriously—“keep a close eye on her.”

  Another warning from Jan Pretre? Orders from headquarters: No more goofs, Michael. Mind those p’s and q’s. Do not fuck up.

  “I’m doing exactly that, Jan,” Michael said. “No problem. It’s about as interesting as watching a frozen dinner thaw.”

  “Very well then, Michael,” Jan Pretre said. “I’ll be in touch soon”—this time, a second’s pause—“very soon. Goodbye.”

  Michael put down the telephone. Oh yeah, say it twice and you’re right both times—he was ready for “very soon.”

  “Beth!”

  Her head turned with the slow movement of a windup toy. He could nearly hear the gears grinding.

  “Hey, hey, hey!” He clapped his hands. “It’s about lunch time, Bethy babes. And what’s the happy homemaker have on today’s menu? Something plenty yum-yum, I’ll bet!”

  “You want me to fix lunch,” Beth said.

  “Whoo! You got it! Let’s hear it for the lady with one shoe off and one shoe on!”

  “I can’t, Michael.”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s negative thinking, sweetie-pie, and negative thinking is exactly what we don’t need in the Louden household. You remember you’re an American, and American ends in ‘I can. He smiled and savored the threat of it. “Now you get off your ass and let’s hear those pots banging!”

  Beth did not move.

  “Get up, goddamnit!”

  She rose. He crooked a finger, summoning her. “Beth,” he said sternly, “here’s how it works. See, I go to work every day, and I bring home the bacon, yessireebob! That’s my job because I’m the husband. Now your job is to be the wife and to fry up—that bacon for the family. I said your job, goddamnit, and that means you have got to do it. Are you starting to get the message? You knock off this walking corpse bullshit. You don’t, it’s right back to the nuthouse so they can plug your head into the electrical outlet a few more times. This time around, you’ll be tuning in short-wave radio on your molars. Is that what you want?”

  “Michael,” Beth said, “why do you hate me?”

  The anger was sudden and total. It seared his flesh from within. This nothing, the nothing who’d someday sensed the truth of his Stranger-self, who’d even tried to deceive him with her ‘housewife on a horny holiday affair,’ now dared to ask him why he was…what he was!

  His hand flew up to grab her throat but he caught himself. He slapped her.

  “No questions! None! Not another goddamned word! Now”—he took a deep breath, held it until he was certain he’d regained control—“it’s lunchtime.” The lines of his fingers flared red from her ear to her mouth.

  He pushed her toward the refrigerator. “Beth no cook, Beth no eat.” That wasn’t much of a threat, he realized as soon as he’d said it. Beth’s appetite had gone on a journey with her mind. The only thing she regularly consumed was her pills, and she would keep doing that if he had to ram them down her throat with his foot.

  But he was determined she would prepare a meal, and right the hell now! “Something light. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Yeah, that would be nice.”

  The task had to be broken down into each of its—separate steps: butter the bread. Slice the cheese. Take out the frying pan… Arms folded, he was the overseer to an automaton. He wasn’t certain if he were gratified or furious in the role.

  With the sandwiches grilling (he made sure the fire wasn’t too high) he told Beth to pay attention, to turn them over in a minute, and he left to go to the bathroom.

  When he got back to the kitchen, the sandwiches were carbonized blocks of dough oozing yellow goo, black smoke rising, and Beth was gone.

  Her single slipper had come off, so she walked barefoot through the half inch of powdery snow that had fallen in the early hours of the morning. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, the sky dismally overcast, the wind fiercely gusting from the north.

  The sun shone on her face. It was the golden, world-embracing light one knows only in childhood, the rarified glow that has a clean scent, its warm memory surfacing later in dreams of contentment and color.

  She moved down the driveway. The wind blew her hair, flapped the hem of her housecoat against her calves. Around her ankles were miniature whirlwinds of snow.

  It was good to feel the grass beneath her bare feet. The grass was an emerald-green; she could feel it quivering with life, the steady life-pulse of the earth. She heard wind-chimes, delicate “tings” of sound and a distant, smoke-like flute.

  She walked to the side of the garage.

  She was going to her garden.
<
br />   no fear

  no wicked secrets

  no death

  no death

  no death

  She stood in the center of the desolate snow covered plot that had been her spring and summer time pride.

  The beauty that surrounded her was such a sweet pinch in her chest that her eyes stung with tears. She was in an endless ocean of flowers. Gladiola were a riot of flaming reds, shimmering purples, the cushion mums blazing bronze and pink, and the lilies, the lilies—the “imperial silver”, as formal as a Chinese empress, the trumpet lilies, all golden and blasting a silent fanfare to the heavens, and the “pink perfection”—yes, perfect, oh, perfect! The profusion of color, colors that had not been named because they could not be described. The garden promised infinity and eternity…

  no death

  not death

  “Beth! Beth…There you are!”

  Suddenly, there was something wrong here in her garden. Weeds sprouted, instantaneous and horrid, bursting from black soil to entwine about the flowers, to choke their life-loveliness. The weeds were tendrilled malignancies. They attacked her! They wound about her ankles, trying to bring her down…

  “Beth!”

  No!

  no death!!!

  She had to fight the weeds. She needed weapons. The weeds lashed her calves, wrapped around her feet. She jerked free of them.

  Beth went to the side door of the garage. It was unlocked. She walked inside, cold light from the doorway trailing her as the stepped past the rear end of the LTD and Chevette Scooter.

  There were her garden tools in a box on the workbench: a three-pronged weeder, a trowel, a cultivator, a ratchet pruner…They were too small. She needed a more powerful weapon. There in the corner were the lawn’ tools, a rake, an edger, a shovel—a shovel! She could uproot the weeds, dozens at a time…

  Kill the weeds!

  The pegboard over the workbench caught her eye. Something was missing. Something was not where it belonged. There was an empty hook.

  She tried to remember what it was that had hung there, that was meant to be there. She could not, but she knew that something was gone and that left her with a sense of loss. It—oh, whatever it was—was gone and everything was gone, gone or vanishing, vanishing…

  Her strength drained away. Futility overwhelmed her.

  “Okay,” Michael said. He stood at the garage door. “Come here.”

  Walking to him, she struck her shin on the Ford’s back bumper. “Just what do you think you’re doing, going outside like that in this weather?” Michael said. “If any of the neighbors saw you, they’d—think you were crazy!” He smiled, “Hey, you wouldn’t want them to think that, would you?”

  Beth said, “I went to the garden.”

  “Your garden?” Michael cocked his head. “Your garden?” He held out a hand. “Okay, let’s both of us pay a visit to your garden!”

  He dragged her from the garage. Then with a backhanded wave, he said, “And here you have it. Really something, isn’t it?”

  She no longer saw the weeds. She no longer saw her flowers.

  “Bethy’s garden has gone beddy-bye for the winter. Everything’s dead, kiddo. Crapped out. El Zero Ultimato.”

  “No,” Beth said.

  no…

  death…

  “…No.”

  “Yep, and that’s all she wrote.”

  “Michael,” she said, “I’m very cold. Can we go back to the house?”

  “Congratulations,” Michael said. “You just had a real idea.” Arm around her, he took her inside.

  Michael was grinning; he couldn’t stop grinning. “Look what we’ve got here!” He snatched one of the ruined sandwiches from the frying pan. It was still warm and scratchy to the touch.

  As he advanced on her, he felt a dizzying euphoria. It was not the sublime sensation that was his when he killed, but the feeling that preceded that moment, that time when his power was at its peak and his victim was utterly powerless.

  “Children in Europe and China are starving and you burn our fucking sandwiches!”

  Head hanging, Beth looked at him through lashes. Shit, he saw nothing in her eyes! He doubted she had any more idea of what he was yelling about than if he were shouting in Arabic!

  All right then, all right and all right! He’d meet her submissive challenge. Beth was going to fucking hurt, and she would feel that hurting and beg him to make it stop.

  And then he would kill her!

  Not yet, no, and not now—but soon!

  He calmed himself, relaxing but not letting the glowing energy inside him dissipate altogether, just some fun and games right now, a pinch and a poke and a twist…

  But soon…

  Winter was a dying time for the nothing people. And winter was the killing time, a time to truly live and kill and kill and kill…for the Strangers! He believed that the way a priest trusted in the surety of kingdom of God.

  That was Jan Pretre’s promise.

  With his left hand, he seized the back of Beth’s neck. She didn’t struggle. Slowly, he scraped the black sandwich back and forth across her mouth, then her cheeks. It sounded like a worn-out razor blade on a two-day growth of unlathered whiskers. He said, “That doesn’t taste very good, does it? It’s too well done.”

  She was rigid and quivering, eyes squeezing shut. He dropped the sandwich on the floor. Her face looked sun-burned, dotted with tiny specks of black.

  He paced in front of her like a drill sergeant chewing out a slouch of a recruit. “You were bad to burn the food, Beth,” he said. “Bad girl! That’s why I had to punish you. And now I have to punish you for running away from home.”

  Pivoting, he swung, arm at waist level. He didn’t put all his force into the blow, but there was power and speed behind the fist that slammed into her stomach.

  Beth clasped her arms over her belly and doubled over, whuffing for air and then wretching with a dry, hacking noise. Okay! he thought. That got through to her! One in the old labonza!

  “Don’t throw up, Beth,” he warned. “You throw up, I’ll wipe your face in it.”

  He yanked the hair at the top of her head and forced her to stand erect, jerking her up on tip-toe. With a tone of “reasonable explanation,” he said. “You had to be punished, Beth, because you were a bad girl. I’m sure you understand that.”

  He cranked her head up and down in a “Yes” gesture.

  “So now you’ve had your punishment and I can forgive you, but first, and this is the catch, baby, you have to tell me you’re sorry for being such a bad girl.”

  Her eyes were huge and glazed, the whites shot through with streaks of red. Her mouth was open, tongue stabbing between her teeth as she panted. She did not answer.

  “Say ‘I am sorry,’ bitch,” he ordered, punctuating each word by jerking her head.

  Her taut throat worked. In a dry, whispered scream, she said it.

  “That’s better,” Michael said. He turned her hair loose. He thought she might collapse but she remained on her feet. “You know,” he said, “I hate these little arguments we get into, Beth. I don’t like to get upset with you, sweetheart. I love you so very much.”

  Then, grinning—Smile at the birdbrain—he said, “And I know you love me, too. Tell me, snookums. Let me hear you say, ‘I love you.’”

  He was—ready for a spark of defiance to snap at him. He hoped for it, for the chance to extinguish it.

  Sounding like a tape on a telephone answering machine with worn-down batteries, Beth said, “I…love you.”

  All right, pack up the pieces of that game and break out a new board and cards and dice! Fun, fun, fun!

  “Aw, that’s great to hear. That’s wonderful! Shit, hearing those magic words gets me right where I live.” He tipped his head to the side. “You’ve got me all romantic, you irresistible sex goddess you!”

  He gripped her nose between his first and second fingers, a “Three Stooges” come-along. “We’re going to make love, cud
dles.”

  The peeping “ooh” she whimpered every step of the way pleased him immensely. In the living room, he drew the picture window’s drapes. “Don’t want to give the neighbors a cheap thrill,” he said.

  “Now let’s get into the holiday mood!” He plugged in the lights of the aluminum Christmas tree in the corner. An artificial tree… He’d never yielded to Beth’s wanting the genuine article. He too much liked the secret irony: an artificial tree for his artificial celebration of the holiday. Beneath the tree were decoratively wrapped gifts.

  Of course! Michael Louden, father, and Michael Louden, husband, wouldn’t neglect any of the members of his dear family. He was one generous guy!

  “Now, Beth,” he said,—1 know you’re itching for it. After all, you haven’t had it for a long time”—Not since that Kevin asshole gave it to you. And wasn’t he the “last of the red hot lovers?”—“but I’m no blue-collared redneck who doesn’t give a shit about his lady’s pleasure. We’ve got to have some foreplay!

  With both hands, he grabbed the collar of her housecoat and ‘ripped her clothing off her.

  “So much for foreplay,” he said. He threw her on the couch and with the heel of his hand on her forehead, shoved her down on her back. He unbuckled his belt, opened his button and fly, and pushed his slacks and shorts down to his calves.

  He stroked himself quickly, then dropped upon her. He forced himself into her, thrusting hard, making sure every lunge hurt. “Let’s get some action going,” he demanded. “Necrophilia isn’t my speed.”

  Beth gasped each time he drove his hips down. That was the only sound she made. Her movements were not his own, merely her body’s involuntary mirroring of his actions.

  He hit his climax, hit it as hard as he could, and stiff-armed, frozen above her, clenched his teeth and then slowly exhaled.

  He got off her, pulling up his clothing. “Well, was it good for you, honey?” he said.

  Beth’s eyes did not shift toward him; she looked at the ceiling. Only the rise and fall of her breasts showed that she lived.

  “I mean, did you feel the earth move? Did you have the ‘Big 0’?”

  Beth said nothing, did nothing.

  Michael walked to the Christmas tree, stopped, and picked up the small package marked “Beth.” “You know, after a wonderful moment like that, I can’t help myself. I just have to give you an early Christmas gift.”