by Ray Garton
Robby watched her run the stop sign at the intersection and take a squealing left turn. He bent to give Jessie a reassuring pat, but the dog scrambled away with a yelp, trotting down the street. Robby stood on the sidewalk, numbed by what had just happened.
Winona Garry was one of the most easy-going even-tempered persons he'd ever known. Robby couldn't believe she'd nearly run over him and her own dog.
He stared at the Garry house for a moment. It looked dead. Empty. Apparently Dylan was still sick. He was usually out by now, heading for the bus stop with Robby.
Still sick, Robby thought. Like everybody else.
Moving slowly, trembling from his exertion, Robby picked up his books from the wet pavement, tried to dry them off with his jacket sleeve, then started toward the bus stop again, so disturbed that he was mumbling to himself, trying to sort out what had just happened. He noticed that the Crane's mailbox, like his own, was stuffed with days of mail. Robby stopped to peek into the box at the soggy stack.
There were three plastic wrapped newspapers in the driveway. One of them was beneath the left rear tire of Al's Mazda.
Not a whole lot of interest in the mail or the paper these days, Robby thought.
The LaBianco's weren't interested in theirs, either. And coming from inside their small house, Robby could hear Mr. LaBianco's normally quiet voice raising to an angry roar.
Sheri MacNeil's porch light was still on and all her curtains were closed. She was usually at her kitchen window by now, waving at passing children as she made breakfast and watched Good Morning America on the small television on her kitchen table.
But when he stopped again and looked around, Robby realized there were no children passing her house. There were a few standing at the intersection, waiting for the bus, but not half as many as usual. And they were so quiet.
He walked on slowly, facing front, but looking out the corners of his eyes at the strange sights that only a longtime resident of the neighborhood would notice – more mailboxes stuffed with neglected mail, more ignored newspapers scattered on lawns and driveways, a small jagged hole in the front window of the Petrie house, no loud rock music coming from Donald Gundy's bedroom window as he got ready for school.
Robby walked to the intersection and stood behind the Crane twins and two other children. The twins were talking softly between themselves; the other two were silent.
"I thought you were sick," Robby said.
"We are," Dana said, facing the street and sounding cranky.
"Sorta." Tara's voice was gentler, almost a whisper. "But we're better."
"Shouldn't you stay home until you're well?"
Tara said, "Mom wants us out of the house for the day. She's… in a bad mood."
"So's Dad," Dana snapped.
Robby hesitated, not wanting to sound nosy, then asked, "How come?"
"I think they're sick, too," Tara said. "But mostly, I think they're fighting."
He wanted to ask why, but the bus rumbled off of Victor Avenue and slowed to a stop at the curb and the children climbed aboard.
Robby stood alone on the corner hugging his books -
– The flu? Is that what you've got? -
– feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the weather -
– Yeah, that's what we thought it was. But I know better now -
– and listening to the sound of his own bus in the distance -
– Because I don't think the flu would make my wife take a chainsaw to her son. Or to me -
– as it neared the corner. It would stop, the doors would hiss open, and the driver would wait for Robby to get on, then it would take him to school, where he would be expected to forget the deeply disturbing feeling of wrongness that he felt now, and concentrate, for six hours, on teachers and books. He spun around and hopped over the small shrubs that ran along the front of the Holcombs' yard, then ducked behind the fence that faced Mistletoe until the bus came. It slowed at the abandoned corner, then picked up speed and rolled on down the lane.
Robby left the Holcombs' yard and started down Mistletoe. Although he wasn’t going to school that day, he couldn't go back home, either. There was something else he had to do.
* * * *
When the telephone rang Ronald Prosky was lying in bed in his room at the Motel 6 on Hilltop Drive, thinking about sleep.
That was about the best he could do these days – think about sleep. For nearly a year after the loss of his wife and son, there had been no nightmares. In spite of his grief, he had other things to think about, like the surgical reconstruction of his face (for all the good it had done) and adjusting to his prosthetic arm. Then, after his life settled down a bit, Marie and Gordon had come back to haunt his sleep. Each time he drifted off, he saw them naked in bed together… and then he saw them bloody and dead. He heard his son's screams and smelled the gasoline vapors from the buzzing chainsaw, felt his own warm blood on his face and tasted it in his mouth and he saw his right arm lying on the bedroom floor. And worst of all, he saw her, again and again.
Now he couldn't even fall asleep long enough to have a nightmare. He was afraid to sleep, not because he would relive his family's death, but because he knew she was near.
She was working differently now. The people who lived on Deerfield had changed in a matter of days. It usually took months before the changes in her victims became visible, then a couple of months after that before they became violent. In less than a week, the Pritchard boy had taken on the gaunt, pale look that usually overcame one of her victims after three months or so of seductive teasing and careful priming.
She was working much faster now, as if driven by something to finish here in Redding and move onto the next neighborhood… or apartment building… or mobile home complex… anyplace where families lived in reasonable contentment and safety.
It could begin at any moment, the torture and killing, and there was nothing Prosky could do to stop her. Unless -
The phone rang.
Prosky sat up on the bed, hoping it was the Pritchard boy; that he'd decided, for whatever reason, to help Prosky.
"Hello."
"Um… hi. It's me. The guy you talked to yesterday? At school? My name's Robby."
Prosky shot to his feet and a broad smile of relief twisted the scarred flesh of his cheek. "Yes, Robby?"
"I… I'm scared." His voice broke and dropped to a whisper. "I'm really scared and I think I need help."
Chapter 14
The Stranger's Story
The man picked Robby up at the Shell station on the corner of Mistletoe and Hilltop. He said his name was Ronald Prosky and although Robby tried to conceal his nervousness – actually, it was more like fear – and to avoid looking at Ron's face, he knew it was obvious because Prosky tried immediately to put Robby at ease.
They went to the International House of Pancakes just a couple of blocks away and got a booth in the back, where they each had a cup of coffee.
"Please don't be nervous, Robby," Prosky said quietly. "I know that my appearance is off – putting and I'm a stranger to you, but if we can just talk a while, I think you'll feel better. "
Robby fidgeted, wondering if he'd made a mistake – maybe this guy was just a streetwalking lunatic who ate out of trash bins and lived in his clothes.
"Okay," Robby said hesitantly, "so what do you want to talk about?"
"Your new neighbor."
"What about her? I mean, yesterday, you seemed to think you knew everything about her, so what do you want me to tell you?"
"What has she done?"
"She hasn't done anything."
Prosky stared into his coffee for a moment, then took a deep breath. "Okay. Maybe it'll be easier if I tell you what I know about her. Then you can talk." He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Five years ago, I was a reasonably successful investigative journalist. I had a wife and a sixteen-year-old son. We lived in a suburb of Chicago, a nice friendly neighborhood. A lot like your neighborhood, Robby. Then L
ily moved in. At least, that's the name she was using then." He took a long sip of coffee before continuing. "She was a beautiful woman. Very nice. Friendly. Generous. It was the kind of neighborhood that welcomed new neighbors, so everyone started to get to know her. I really got to know her.
“My wife and I had been married for nearly nineteen years by then. It wasn't a bad marriage, but… well… " He looked away from Robby and winced, as if someone had stuck him with a needle. "I guess I'd gotten… bored. And I didn't even know it at the time. At least, not until Lily let me know that I was -" he cleared his throat abruptly, " – welcome in, uh, her bed any time. She was… god, she was gorgeous. Women like that do not proposition men like me every day. So I took her up on it. She assured me it would be discreet and just between us.
"So, I was having an affair. And what an affair it was. I mean, she was the kind of lover men only dream of having. But as the months passed, something happened. I began to change. I noticed I wasn't as coordinated as usual, I wasn't as strong. I was always tired, couldn't get enough sleep. And when I did sleep, I had these dreams. Incredibly vivid. I dreamed that Lily came to my room and we made love on the bedroom floor or on the bed beside Marie while she slept, and she never woke, no matter how noisy we got. I didn't think much of it, until it got worse – the fatigue and the dreams – and then I woke one night and she was there. On top of me. In my bed. It wasn't a dream, she was really there, and I didn't know how she got in. I didn't know how she got out, either, because I lost consciousness at the end. I always did with her. I asked later, but of course she wouldn't tell me."
The inside of Robby's mouth had turned to soggy felt and he gulped his ice water down quickly, then sucked on some crushed ice. The glass clattered against the tabletop when he set it down because his hand was trembling. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear any more.
"Then I noticed something,” Prosky continued. “It had been happening gradually, right in front of me, I just hadn't noticed. I wasn't the only one not feeling well. My son and wife were tired all the time, pale and sickly. They didn't talk much. None of us did. And if we did, it was bad, you know, we… we fought, said hurtful things to each other. That just wasn't like us. Things had changed, and they were changing still.
"I tried not to see Lily much anymore, but she would come to me. One night, I decided to stay up, find out how she got in, so I drank a bucket or so of coffee and took some little white pills. It was still tough staying awake. I felt so… drained all the time. I sat in the living room, in the dark, waiting. When I heard a noise outside, I looked out the window and saw my son climbing down a tree outside his second-story bedroom window. He walked over to Lily's house. I realized that I wasn't the only one being neighborly.
“The next day, I had a private talk with him, told him I knew, and that it had to stop. Some father, huh? It's okay for me to fuck her, son, as long as your mom doesn't find out, but you can't. Anyway, when I told him to stop, I saw such… hatred in his eyes. Hatred like I'd never seen in anyone, and he was my own son. And he said – no, no, he spat – 'Why? Are you fucking her too?' I told him to stop, he said he'd stop when he was ready. So, the next day I hired someone to cut down the tree in front of his window and had a new lock put on his bedroom door, one that could be locked from the outside. See what I mean when I say I changed? I was jealous of my own son, so I locked him up. Like a prisoner. Marie wanted to know what was going on, so I told her. She went to his room. They talked. That's what she said, anyway. They talked -" He chuckled icily. " – for nearly three hours.
"All of this began to affect my work. My editor – whose position I was supposed to take over later that year, because he was leaving – noticed a drop in my quality, said I was irritable and preoccupied, and suspected I was drinking or doing drugs. I told him I'd take care of it, problems at home, all that shit. But I couldn't, I just couldn't. Not long after that, he informed me I wouldn't be promoted. The position was going to someone else. Someone… more responsible. More reliable.
"That very day, I went home and found my son and wife in bed together. Fucking. Everything exploded. We hated one another. I don't know how we stayed in the same house. It was like… drinking. I had developed a bad drinking problem in college, see, so I know what it's like. You're not yourself, you don't even know yourself. The bottle does something to you, makes you do and say and think things you wouldn't even consider under normal circumstances. That's the way I was then, I hated them for what they'd done. And they kept doing it. I hated them so much I didn't stop to think why they'd done it or what was happening to us. Instead, I decided to go on seeing Lily, to see her even more. Fuck 'em, I figured.
"About that time, the man down the street killed his family and himself. A couple of weeks later, a woman at the other end of the street ran over her own son with her car. Not accidentally. And somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that everyone in the neighborhood – or nearly everyone – looked sick, weak, like they had the flu, which is what everybody said they had. Except the flu goes away. This didn't. It got worse. After a while, some of them even stopped bathing. They wore dirty clothes. I remember seeing Mrs. Denny – about fifty, normally a real cow – walking naked out to her mailbox, scratching her crotch and hacking, and I realized she'd lost about sixty, maybe seventy pounds. She looked like a corpse.
“And again, I realized – almost subconsciously – that something was wrong. It was like a little voice inside me that couldn't get above a whisper, trying to tell me that I had to do something because things were going really bad. But I didn't listen to it, because there was another voice, a louder one, talking over it, telling me that my wife was a cunt and my son was a spoiled little shit and the only person I had to think about was myself and what made me happy, and what made me happy was fucking Lily. So I kept it up while everything crumbled down around me.”
Prosky stopped, tugged at his collar as if he were choking, and stared silently out the window for a moment. "I haven't talked about this in a while," he whispered. "It's… hard."
Robby didn't know what to say. He couldn't feel pity for the man because he was too busy fearing for himself… for his family.
"My wife and son fought," he continued with a broken voice. "Like lovers. More passionately than she ever fought with me. And other times, I could hear them somewhere in the house. Moaning obscenities to one another. I got fired. I didn't know what to do. My wife didn't work and I was afraid of how she would react if I told her. So I got drunk. First time in years. I went on a real skull-grinder, spent my last dime at the nearest bar and walked home – staggered, really – talking to myself like some wino, even singing, for Christ's sake. But after I turned onto my street, I saw something that sobered me up. Fast.
"At first, it looked like smoke and I thought something was burning, because it was the middle of summer and I knew no one was using their fireplace. But it wasn't smoke. Smoke drifts. This was moving. It was white as a summer cloud and… liquidy. And… maybe it was because it was floating by a streetlight, I'm not sure, but… it seemed to glow. Just a little. It moved through a tree in front of Lily's house and over the street, formless, but moving with purpose. And it went straight to my house. I stood there with my mouth hanging open and watched it hover outside my bedroom window. The curtains were drawn, but the window was half open. Then, like milk being sucked through a straw, it flowed into the window and was gone.
"Whatever it was, it was in my house! I practically forgot I was drunk, ran down the street, let myself in and went upstairs. Halfway up the stairs something hit me, I don't know, something like… a drug. Yes, it was like I'd been drugged. My feet weighed a ton and I could hardly keep my eyes open. It wasn't the booze, I was pretty sure at the time – and I'm certain it wasn't, now. It was an effort, but I made it down the hall, fighting to remain conscious. I fell into the room and… and I… I saw… " He shook his head. "She was there. Naked. Pulling the bedcovers back as Marie sat up reaching for her. When Lily turned to me, my knees
gave out and I fell as she slapped her hand to Marie's forehead. Marie dropped back like a rock, unconscious, and I was losing it, too, just on the edge, but fighting, scared shitless. Then there was this… this rush, like all the air in the room was being sucked to the center of it, and she was gone. Replaced by this-this-this writhing cloud that blew back out the window. Then I passed out.
"I woke up a few hours later, I think. Went to bed. Marie never mentioned it the next day, but she didn't talk to me anyway. I tried to tell myself it was the booze, or a dream, but I couldn't deny it anymore. Something horrible was happening. Something horrible was wrong with Lily. But what? I didn't know what to do, where to start. Then I remembered something.
"She had this sculpture. Black onyx. It was -"
"Lilith," Robby interrupted, surprising himself.
Prosky nodded slowly. "That's the one. I'm not sure what made me think of it at the time. I guess what I'd seen the night before shook me up. I started thinking more clearly – I started thinking, period – and I remembered the first time I went to her house. I'd never heard of Lilith, didn't know who she was, and when I admired the sculpture she told me the story of Lilith. What I remembered was the way she told me the story; so passionately, lovingly, and all the while sort of watching me out of the corner of her eye, as if she were waiting for some reaction, some specific response."
"She did the same thing with me," Robby said.
"And what did you think?"
"Well… " Robby shrugged. "I guess I wondered why she was making such a big deal out of the story. You know, being so dramatic about it. I wondered if maybe it, you know, meant something."