He’d never gotten the hang of the office’s phone system, so he called out to Amy and asked her to give his dad a call and patch him through. A few moments later, she knocked on the doorframe and poked her head in. ‘‘I’m sorry. He’s unavailable.’’
‘‘Who’d you get? Tyler? Janeane?’’
She shook her head. ‘‘He hasn’t checked in today. No one knows where he is.’’
Victor thought of the e-mail. In the back of his mind was the vague thought that his dad might be in trouble, that there might be something wrong, but he dismissed that possibility almost immediately. There was nothing Tom Lowry couldn’t talk or buy his way out of, and if there’d been any sort of medical emergency, he would have instantly found his way to the finest room in the finest hospital.
Maybe he was having an affair.
The idea made Victor smile. He couldn’t imagine his straitlaced old man doing any such thing. Hell, he couldn’t even imagine him with his mom.
‘‘Well, try again later,’’ he said. ‘‘I need to talk to him about something.’’
Amy nodded. ‘‘Okay.’’
But there was still no sign of his father at lunchtime when he left. He grabbed a couple of hotdogs from his favorite Farmers’ Market stand and then went to Amoeba to look for new music. Hooking up with a few friends, he spent the rest of the afternoon just chilling, and forgot all about his dad.
There was a concert he wanted to see that night at the Wiltern—a retro pairing of Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren, with the opening act Ethel to attract scenesters—and he scored some scalped tickets outside the venue after picking up Sharline at her apartment. They’d parted on bad terms last week after a very public fight at the SkyBar, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it—either that or she was so desperate to partake of some nightlife that she was willing to completely tamp down her true feelings—and when they had a couple of drinks at the bar across the street before going into the theater, everything seemed fine.
The concert itself was amazing, the performers exhibiting a virtuosity and breadth of styles that made him nostalgic for the eclecticism of the 1970s.
Not that he’d actually been around then.
Victor wished he had been born twenty years earlier, that he’d been a teenager or young adult in the seven-ties. He’d missed completely the artistic ambition of that decade, experiencing it only thirdhand, but he still found it compelling enough that he actively sought out music and movies from that period. As critics never seemed to tire of pointing out, even all these years later, there’d been overreaching, but Victor found that vastly preferable to the complacent mediocrity with which he’d grown up. Francis Ford Coppola, not content with his Godfather success, had striven for even greater heights with the vastly more ambitious Apocalypse Now. Woody Allen built upon Annie Hall with Manhattan and then the truly daring Stardust Memories. Rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Renaissance incorporated symphonic textures in their music and toured with their own orchestras. Even hard rockers like KISS put out simultaneously released solo albums in which they followed their own muses.
What had happened to those sorts of aspirations? Why was everyone now content just to coast within the easy parameters of their abilities?
Why was he?
This always happened when he attended concerts he really enjoyed. He always ended up thinking about the unbridgeable gap between perfection and reality, between the way things ought to be and the way they really were.
He forced himself to clear his mind and concentrate only on the music.
Afterward, he took Sharline back to her apartment and did her quick and hard on the floor of the living room, finishing in her ass though he knew she didn’t like it that way. ‘‘You bastard!’’ she yelled, slapping him as she pulled away and headed to the bathroom, one hand cupped between her legs. He smiled. It helped him get off, doing things to women they didn’t like, and he supposed if he had a shrink that was one of the things they’d have to talk about. He felt good, happy, and he pulled up his pants, shouted good-bye and left before she came out, not really wanting to see her right now, not sure if he ever wanted to see her again.
It was late, after midnight. Beverly Hills was a city that went to bed early, where the sidewalks were rolled up by eight and whatever happened after dark happened behind tall walls and security gates, and he sped up the winding road toward home, the only car on the street. To his surprise, the gates to his family’s house were wide open. He slowed down, in case one of his parents was on the way out, but the short drive was empty and both the Mercedes and the Jaguar were parked in front of the garage in their usual spots. Seemingly all the lights in the house were on because the windows were blazing. None of the shades or curtains had been drawn.
That was odd.
Victor pushed the button on his dashboard to close the gate and pulled to a stop next to the fountain.
The door to the house was open.
He cut the engine and got out of the car, looking around the upper drive, trying to see through the first-floor windows. He approached the entryway of the house and started up the porch steps, stopping at the top. He should have dialed 911 immediately, but he didn’t want to look like a complete candyass in front of the police if it turned out to be nothing, so he poked his head in the foyer. ‘‘Dad?’’ he called.
‘‘Back here, Vic!’’
Alarm bells were going off in his head. The joyous, almost singsongy voice was nothing like his father’s usual rumbling stentorian tones, and he could not recall the old man ever calling him ‘‘Vic.’’
He thought of this morning’s e-mail. The streaming video.
Suddenly, he realized where he’d seen the dog before. And the bedroom. And the garage. It had been years since he’d seen them, but they belonged to the Jensons, their next-door neighbors.
This is where it begins.
‘‘Vic!’’
It was a game. It had to be. Or a trick. ‘‘What?’’ he called out.
‘‘Come here!’’
Call 911, his brain was telling him. Dial 911.
He walked through the foyer, through the living room, through the drawing room, down the east hall. All of the lights were on, and that was a red flag right there. His mom was a freak about conserving energy, and unless there were guests, she never left lights on in an empty room. Especially now, in the middle of the night, when both of his parents were usually fast asleep.
Victor realized for the first time that the house was silent. With all of the lights on, Lizzie and Jonnie, his mom’s two Pomeranians, should be yapping up a storm.
Maybe his mom had left and taken them with her.
No. The Mercedes was still in the driveway.
‘‘Vic!’’
His dad was in the music room, and Victor made his way down the hallway toward the door. He slowed as he approached, not wanting to go right in, thinking he should check it out first, just in case.
Wise move.
The room looked like an abattoir. Blood was splattered over furniture, floor, wall, even the ceiling, in random bursts that reminded him of the paintings in an art exhibition his parents had dragged him to when he was ten. The Pomeranians had been slaughtered and gutted, their entrails flattened and ground into the once-white rug, their little heads smashed open, pieces of their furry bodies strewn about the room. His mom, or what was left of her, was lying on the piano bench, her eviscerated form draped over the seat like an empty rag doll. Her face had been peeled away and placed on a potted palm.
This is where it begins.
There were other bodies in the room as well, but he had no idea who they were or who they could be. Too many hands and feet littered the crimson carpet. The butchery had obviously been going on for some time, probably all day, and Victor stared in horror at the extent of the carnage. This was so far beyond anything he had seen in even the goriest slasher movie that his brain felt numb and heavy and slow, overloaded by the sight. The smell was overpowerin
g, a terrible noxious stench unlike anything he had ever encountered before. The only reason he wasn’t throwing up all over his shoes was because the numbness had engulfed all of his senses.
But that wasn’t the worst thing.
No, the worst thing was in the far corner of the room.
His dad.
Victor stared at his father. The old man was naked, his bare chest streaked with smears of blood, handprints visible in the thick crimson patina that covered his hairy skin, his arms so drenched with gore that they appeared to be skinned. Machete in hand, grinning crazily, his dad bounced from foot to bloody foot, his arousal evident in the large erection that bobbed with each jounce.
Only . . .
Only something was wrong. Very wrong. Victor’s eyes were drawn to his father’s midsection where, beneath the red wetness, the skin of his stomach looked white and slimy and wormlike. On the sides of his abdomen grew thick, coarse hair, and beneath the overlarge penis, where testicles should have been, was a rounded bony protrusion, like a rhino’s horn with the point softened. He tried to remember whether or not he had ever seen his dad naked before. Surely he would have remembered something this unusual, something this extreme—unless it was new, unless it was the result of some bizarre disease or a plastic surgery effort that had gone horribly awry.
No. He knew even as he thought it that that was not the case. This was who his dad was. His father was hideously malformed and had no doubt been born this way. Victor glanced automatically at his mother’s limp, empty body. She’d known all along that her husband was like this.
How could she have brought a child into the world, knowing it might inherit its father’s genes?
Thank God he took after her.
His dad was still bouncing from foot to foot, but he was moving forward as well, approaching Victor with the machete extended and an excited gleam in his eye. ‘‘Hi, Vic,’’ he said in that singsongy voice. ‘‘Hi, Vic.’’
Whether or not his father had always been deformed, he had not been psychotic. This was something new, and Victor backed up, slowly reaching for his cell phone, not wanting to make any sudden moves. He wondered where the craziness had come from, whether it had been gradually building or had arrived full-blown. He didn’t recall any unusual behavior over the past few days. Glancing down for a moment at the keypad of the phone, he heard the wet slap of feet, saw a blur of red in his peripheral vision.
‘‘Hi, Vic.’’
His father was standing right in front of him, grinning, machete raised.
Victor tried to run.
And then his dad was upon him.
Tom Lowry didn’t want to leave his lair, but when the night passed and then the day and then another night and another day with no one coming to visit him, no new victims arriving, he decided to venture out of the room and out of the house.
The result was liberating.
He found a sparrow on the lawn, crushed it in his fingers, feeling the guts ooze between his knuckles. Then he ran through the overgrown bushes on the edge of the property, blade in hand, hopping the fence that led to the Akkads’ lot next door, snaking along the perimeter of their property and sneaking into the next yard down the hill. A guard dog came after him, and he cut off the animal’s head with one swipe, reveling in the blood as it gushed from the gaping wound. Before anyone could come out to investigate, he was gone, onto the next property, where he drank water from a birdbath and ate half a dozen mosquitoes. Branches slashed his buttocks, thorns scraped his erection, but he continued down the hill, house to house to house. In this way, he made it onto Sunset, slinking silently through the shadows, moving purposefully toward the lights of the strip.
And other people.
He was hacking up a girl in a Hamburger Hamlet parking lot when the police finally took him down.
Two
It had been nearly a decade since Brian Howells had been home, and what surprised him most as he headed up the Central Valley was that it had not grown the way Southern California had. If anything, the Valley seemed to have shrunk. There weren’t miles of pink- and peach-colored Spanish-style tract homes and condos; there were no new golf courses or open-air malls. There were only dirty oleanders and eucalyptus trees lining a deteriorating too-narrow highway, and periodic clusters of old restaurants, trailer courts and industrial agriculture buildings that had been in use the last time he’d passed through here but were now abandoned. It was as if the already sparse population had constricted even further as ranching families went bankrupt and younger generations moved to the cities in the South.
Brian didn’t care. There was something comforting about being in a place that was real, that wasn’t always in the process of reinventing itself and expanding. He felt curiously reassured by the dying, dusty farm towns, and he was glad that he’d decided to make this trip home.
He drove past a peeling billboard advertising a local Ford dealership. He’d been living in Orange County ever since graduating from college, and though his mom had come down a few times to visit him, and they’d all spent holidays at his sister, Jillian’s, house in San Diego, he had not been back to Bakersfield since winning the scholarship and leaving home the summer after high school. Part of it was logistics. Although he’d had two days off work each week, they’d rarely been consecutive, and even then he’d usually been on call. Not to mention the fact that he’d never trusted his crappy car enough to drive it out of Southern California. But now, after three years at the Register and two prestigious journalism awards, he’d been hired by the Los Angeles Times. There was a one-week gap between his last day at the Register and his first day at the Times, and he’d decided on the spur of the moment to rent a car, visit his mom and spend a few days with her. When he called his sister and told her, she’d offered to bring her family up as well, but he let her know politely that he wanted to do this alone. He needed to spend a little quality time with his mother.
Because the truth was, it hadn’t been merely practical considerations that had kept him away from Bakersfield. That rationalization was legit as far as it went, and it made him feel better to think those were the only reasons, but in actuality he was the one who’d always insisted that they hold their get-togethers at Jillian’s house, he was the one who’d invited his mom to come down and visit him whenever she tried to entice him back home, and he was the one who made his mother’s few brief stays so physically uncomfortable that she couldn’t wait to leave.
Was it his mom he’d been avoiding? His hometown? Or both? He wasn’t sure. But he was determined to find out and to confront the problem head-on.
Bakersfield, as usual, was encased in smog, the series of concrete overpasses that bridged the sunken highway blurred by a haze of white. Bakersfield has two seasons, his sister liked to joke, smog and fog. There was more than a little truth to that, and as he pulled up the off-ramp and turned right, his eyes began to water, and he cranked up the air-conditioning.
His mom still lived in the old house. What used to be the field on the corner was now a vacant lot, and old man Murphy’s chicken ranch across the street was gone, replaced with a cul-de-sac of unsold spec homes. Back in Southern California (or SoCal, as he was going to have to start calling it now that he was a Times staffer), his Bakersfield roots seemed cool. The town’s connection to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, both perennially hip among people who didn’t actually listen to country music, gave him cultural cache. But in truth, the town was a dumpy lower-middle class community with gang graffiti spray painted on the sides of stucco houses and weedy yards enclosed by cinderblock fences. Downtown was a jumble of indistinguishable businesses interspersed with grimy gas stations and fast-food joints. He remembered now why he’d been so anxious to leave.
Still, it was nice to see his mom again, and over lemonade in the living room he caught her up on the details of events that he’d only outlined over the phone. Friends of hers who’d known him as a child dropped by, obviously invited by his mother and just as obviously warned to make
sure their visits seemed casual and completely spontaneous. He didn’t mind. It helped to have a buffer between him and his mom. He needed time to work up to the discussions he knew they had to have.
At night, after taking his mother out to dinner (she’d insisted on Denny’s because she liked their chicken-fried steak, even though he’d tried his damnedest to get her to go to Souplantation or someplace even moderately healthy), they drove home the back way, past the Baptist church she used to drag him to when he was young. Like everything else in town, the chapel looked shabby, as though it hadn’t been painted or fixed up in years, and Brian found that depressing. He’d never liked church— particularly that church, where his ever-changing teenage hairstyles had been the object of ridicule and scorn from the tight-assed pastor—but, still, the sorry state of the building left him feeling melancholy. He wondered if his mom continued to attend services there. He didn’t want to bring up the subject, because he knew it would lead to a lecture and an argument, but as they turned left beyond the edge of the church parking lot, his mom said, ‘‘Reverend Charles asked about you the other day.’’
‘‘Really?’’ he said noncommittally.
‘‘He knows you’re a writer and thought you might help us out with our letter-writing campaign. The school board refused to allow science teachers in the district to talk about creationism or intelligent design. We’re trying to get that changed.’’
‘‘Mom . . .’’
‘‘Don’t worry. I told him you wouldn’t be interested.’’
‘‘Okay, then.’’
‘‘But it is important.’’
‘‘Yeah, you’re right. They should be teaching religion at school and leave that controversial stuff like science for parents to teach their kids at home.’’
‘‘Don’t you start blasphemin’ with me.’’
He sighed. ‘‘I’m not, Mom.’’
‘‘I didn’t raise you to—’’
‘‘Let’s just drop it, okay? I’m sorry.’’
The Vanishing Page 2