A Fatal Four-Pack

by P. B. Ryan

“Are you sure you won’t have some lunch?” Brenda asked as she approached.

  I shook my head, trying to pull loose the tape on the top of a box of underwear. Her fingernails were longer than mine and she easily worked one underneath, pulling the tape off. I opened the top, looked inside, and closed it again.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Restacking the boxes would be a big help. A lot of this should go right into the garage. The kitchen stuff—things like that. Maybe Rich can help us with those.”

  She reached for another carton and started working on the tape. “I think we have some box cutters in the kitchen junk drawer.”

  “Don’t bother with that. It goes outside.”

  Brenda examined the unmarked sides of the box.

  “It’s the silverware,” I explained.

  She shook the box and was rewarded with the faint clink of knives, forks, and spoons. “How did you know?”

  I shrugged, distracted, and attacked the tape on a box from the next stack. It came off, the top lifted—good, my bathroom stuff. The disposable razor from the hospital nearly cost me a pint of blood each morning.

  Despite her size, Brenda had the strength of a longshoreman. She opened a box filled with towels. Wrapped among them were several framed photos, slightly bent and scratched, the glass missing, presumably smashed. One of them bore a trace of orange paint—Shelley, in happier times. I hadn’t seen the photos in two years. Why had I held onto so many of my dead wife’s possessions—still unable to part with them?

  Brenda and I didn’t talk much during the sorting ordeal. She’d hold up an item and I’d give her a yea or a nay. It wasn’t long before the nay pile stretched three times higher than the yea pile. Luckily the garbage men would be around the next day.

  Later, feeling weak and sick, I watched Brenda make my bed before she retreated. Napping on my own comfortable mattress gave me my first taste of security since the mugging.

  When Brenda woke me for dinner, I staggered from my room like a drunk. Red wine accompanied the entree—corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked, stifling a yawn.

  “St. Patrick’s Day. Besides, it beats burgers any day,” Brenda said, placing a huge helping on my plate. “I bought Irish soda bread to go with it. Dig in.”

  She served Richard and herself and they started eating. I poked at the cabbage with my fork.

  Richard swallowed. “Is something wrong?”

  “The night I got mugged, I’d been with friends at a pub.” I pushed a chunk of potato around. “Nobody came to the hospital. Nobody called.”

  They stopped in mid-bite, glancing at each other. “Maybe they didn’t know.” Brenda reached over, clasped my hand. “You’ll make new friends, hon.”

  I couldn’t muster a reply.

  They spent the rest of the evening cooking up plans to paint my room, trying to cheer me. I should have felt flattered, but the attention only depressed me. I wanted to be left alone.

  By the time I said good-night, they looked more exhausted than I felt.

  Darkness shrouded the cold, dank room, the atmosphere charged with dread. Fatigue weighed me down so I could hardly stand. Something nudged me from the side. I turned, hands outstretched to stop its gentle swaying motion. My fingers probed the softness, tried to curl into the lingering warmth, but the hairs were too short.

  Hairs?

  I fumbled in the darkness until encountering a sticky warmth—blood? Its sickly sweetness turned my stomach. Startled, I backed away until I could make out the still form in the shadowy room. A ten-point buck, dressed out—its genitals and internal organs discarded—and hanging to bleed. Its lifeless, glassy eyes bored into my own.

  The back of my throat closed. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, as a wave of horror and triumph engulfed me, obliterating all rationality and what was left of my sense of self.

  I awoke, nausea nearly choking me, stumbled to the bathroom and vomited. I sat, heaving, my head threatening to explode. Spent, I collapsed onto the cold linoleum. This had been no dream. This time I had stood alongside the dead buck, felt and smelled its death tang.

  I couldn’t stop trembling. I couldn’t tell Richard something was terribly wrong. Not yet. Not when I had no understanding of what was happening to me.

  o0o

  Friday morning the three of us drove to one of those big franchise hardware stores to choose paint and buy brushes and drop cloths.

  It felt good to be out among normal people, people who weren’t sick—who hadn’t had their brains bruised. There seemed to be a lot of them out and about. Retired men, women with small children, young adults choosing wallpaper, paint, vacuum cleaners.... Didn’t any of these people work?

  While Richard and Brenda debated the merits of natural versus synthetic paintbrush bristles, I strolled down aisles filled with build-it-yourself furniture, nails, screws, garden tools, ceramic tiles, and everything in between, until I landed in front of the rope and chain display. Synthetic and natural fibers came in various lengths and widths, prepackaged or ready to cut on large spools.

  I crouched by a spool of Manila rope, half-inch width, by twelve hundred feet. The hemp felt splintery between my fingers. So ... familiar. When I pressed it to my nose, the image of an old, dank, wooden shed or garage filled my mind.

  In my dream the hanging deer had swung in a gentle, easy arc, but the light had come from a different angle....

  I turned the rope over and over in my hand.

  “Can I help you, sir?” asked an acne-scarred young man.

  I dropped the rope and straightened. “No. Just looking, thanks.”

  As he walked away, I turned my attention back to the spool. The rope meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  “Oh, there you are!” Brenda said, coming up behind me. “Which one of these color chips do you like best?”

  We started painting after lunch, though my broken arm kept me from doing much. After several hours of bad jokes and insults, the room looked better. Though Richard and Brenda said they couldn’t smell paint fumes, I could—and it aggravated my headache, so that night I ended up sleeping on the living room couch.

  My mind stayed on a circular track. What the hell was happening inside my head? The dreams and hallucinations were too real.

  Then it came to me. A brain tumor. Caused by the severe blow to my skull.

  What else could it be?

  I stole into Richard’s study, flipped through his medical texts until I found the symptoms. Yes, I suffered from drowsiness, lethargy, personality changes, impaired mental faculties.

  I was going to die.

  Awake half the night with worry, I wondered if I should draw up a will ... then I remembered I had nothing of value to leave to anyone.

  Richard and Brenda slept late the next morning. Brenda later told me it was a Saturday tradition for them to have a huge breakfast and skip lunch. Richard and I sat at the kitchen table while she made toast, then chopped vegetables and grated cheese for omelets. I waited for a conversational opening, but Richard buried his nose in the newspaper.

  “Uh, Rich. I—I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  He barely looked up from the sports section. “You’re in a new place. Give yourself a few days.” He continued reading an article on the Buffalo Sabres, absently grabbing a slice of toast from his plate.

  “No ... I mean, not since the mugging.”

  Richard looked up again, swallowing. “I can’t prescribe something to help you sleep. I won’t.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What could make a person not sleep?”

  He shrugged. “Anything weighing on your mind.”

  “Could someone with this kind of brain injury get a ... a tumor?”

  He folded the newspaper, setting it aside. “First of all, it would take months before you’d even notice symptoms. I looked at your x-rays and believe me, I called in the best for consultation. It’s my professional opinion
that you’re going to be just fine. What you need now is rest, and time to recover.”

  I took a deep breath. Richard was a good doctor. But....

  “Then I don’t understand it, because I don’t feel the same any more. I’m ... different.”

  “Of course you are; you suffered a trauma—” Brenda piped in.

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t mean the mugging. I mean I’m different.”

  Hadn’t Richard said the same thing?

  He pushed the paper aside, his eyes narrowing. “How?”

  “I’ve been having these weird dreams.”

  Brenda looked up from her cutting board, but said nothing.

  “The nightmare you mentioned in the hospital?” Richard asked.

  “Yeah, that’s when it started. I keep dreaming about a deer.”

  “A deer?” he repeated.

  I forced myself to continue. “It’s a bow kill, and it’s hanging in a garage to bleed. But there’re all these weird emotions tied to it: like triumph, and horror. Every time I dream about it, the emotions get stronger. One time it’ll be a perverse sense of satisfaction, and then it’ll be absolute terror.”

  Richard frowned. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but it could just be a reaction to being mugged. You were a victim, like the deer. You could’ve died.”

  “But that’s not the worst of it. It’s not just a dream any more. I’ve been having—” God. No going back once I said the word: “Hallucinations. When I’m wide awake.”

  Richard’s stare went right through me.

  “I might see it, feel it, smell it,” I continued. “I live it. This thing—this deer—is hanging. In a garage. It’s slit from stem to stern. And its eyes—”

  I closed my own, remembering that nauseating, oppressive dread. “They’re open and they’re glassy and they’re just so ... dead. And whoever killed the buck feels tremendous triumph.”

  Richard’s eyes were wide. There was definitely no turning back now.

  “I hear these words, over and over: ‘You prick, you goddamn prick,’ and....” I let the words trail off.

  “My God,” Brenda muttered, dropping her paring knife into the sink.

  Richard squirmed. Maybe the thought of a brain tumor wasn’t so farfetched after all. “I don’t have any pull at UB Med Center, but I have a few friends here in town I can call. If it’ll make you feel better, we could—”

  “No!” Brenda cried, diving for the newspaper. She thumbed through the thick pile, searching. “Didn’t you see the headline? Weren’t you listening to the news?” she said, her eyes wild. She spread the front page of The Buffalo News out across the kitchen table before us. The banner screamed: Businessman Found Dead in Bizarre Ritual Killing.

  “What about it?” Richard asked.

  “I heard it on the radio earlier. This guy was found in his own garage—eviscerated, hanging like a deer to bleed!”

  Anxiety churned my gut.

  “They’ve got no clues—nothing to go on,” she said.

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “Don’t you think it’s the least bit unusual that Jeffy has a dream—?”

  “Don’t start with that psychic stuff again,” Richard warned her. “He just said it was a deer.”

  I wasn’t listening.

  Psychic?

  Pure, blind panic hit me.

  I wanted to puke.

  The image was back.

  I rested my head in my good hand, covering my eyes.

  A man, a hemp rope cutting into his throat, swayed as though in a gentle breeze, his neck was twisted at an odd angle. Heavyset, about fifty-five or sixty, and naked. Rolls of fat hung like melted wax around his middle.

  The rustle of paper stopped. “Jeffy?” Brenda pointed to a coarse-screened, head-and-shoulders photo of a man dressed in a business suit.

  “That’s him!”

  “Who?” Richard asked.

  “The man I saw hanging.”

  “You said it was a deer.”

  “No, I just saw him!”

  “You had a vision, just now?” Brenda asked, excited.

  I nodded. A vision. Much more acceptable than the product of a tumor, a nightmare, or a hallucination.

  Brenda settled the paper on the table between us and started reading aloud. “Local businessman Matthew J. Sumner was found hanged Friday in his garage. The grisly scene....”

  My fears about tumors instantly vanished. The murder took place somewhere else. In a field. I knew it had. I’d seen it. The deer must have represented this guy. My mind had given me a vision of something I could understand.

  How the hell did it do that?

  Why the hell did it do that?

  And why had it started more than a week before the murder took place—when I was in a city more than four hundred miles away?

  I skimmed through the story, desperate to find out the facts. But the police were giving out few details.

  According to the ME, the Bison Bank vice president had been slain sometime late Thursday afternoon or early evening. Sumner was found hanging from a rafter in his own garage; his Cadillac Seville was missing. He’d been killed somewhere else, as evidenced by the marks on the body and lack of blood at the scene. His wife found him late Friday afternoon. She’d been visiting friends in Palm Beach the previous week. Funeral services were to be announced later.

  I looked up. Richard’s grim gaze remained fixed on me.

  “This explains everything!”

  “Calm down,” he said.

  “But I’ve got to do something about this.”

  “What?” He exploded from his chair to pace the floor. “What do you think you could possibly do?”

  “I ... don’t know. But don’t you see, it means I’m not crazy. I’m not—”

  It didn’t mean I wasn’t crazy. I sounded crazy even to myself. Smoothing the newsprint, I stared at the photo of the dead man. He looked familiar.

  Richard took his seat, his right hand methodically massaging his clenched left fist. “Jeff,” he began, his tone reasonable—his physician’s voice. “A head injury like yours can cause all kinds of problems. Make you believe all kinds of things.”

  “You mean I can’t trust what I think? What I know?”

  “It’s something you should consider.”

  I continued to stare at the news story, read it over and over again, my conviction growing deeper with each new reading.

  The tension in that kitchen was nearly unbearable. Finally Richard headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Brenda asked.

  “For a walk, before I say something we’ll all regret.”

  Brenda watched him go and looked after him for a long moment. Then she took out the plastic wrap and started putting away the chopped vegetables.

  “You believe me, don’t you, Brenda?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “What the hell is wrong with him? Does he think I want to know this stuff?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “He’s my brother—not my keeper.”

  “I think he’s trying to be your friend.” She sat down across the table from me and reached for my hand. “He’s worried about you. He’ll tell me I’m encouraging you in a fantasy.”

  “It’s not a fantasy.”

  I looked down at the damnably familiar, yet unfamiliar, face of the murder victim. I considered asking her to help me, but what could she do? And I couldn’t put her in a position where she’d have to choose sides.

  And what if Richard was right? Was my willingness to accept the possibility of possessing psychic abilities proof that my thinking was skewed?

  At that moment, I didn’t know what to believe.

  When Richard returned an hour later, his cheeks pink from the cold, Brenda and I sat at the kitchen table, listening to the radio’s hourly newscast.

  “Any new developments?” he asked.

  I shook my head, wanting nothing more than to escape his scrutiny, yet defiant enough
to stay. Ignoring us, he poured himself a cup of coffee, then disappeared into another part of the house.

  The day dragged.

  I sat on the sheet-shrouded couch and tuned in to Buffalo’s all-news TV station, obsessed with finding out more details on the murder, yet little was forthcoming.

  Richard kept circling back to the living room, watching me. Did he think he’d made a mistake bringing me home to Buffalo instead of committing me to a mental institution?

  It was almost four when, despite the strain between us, Richard suggested we take a walk and I accepted. I needed to think, plan. Walking would also help me rebuild my strength, something I’d need if I was going to be involved in this thing—this investigation. As far as I was concerned, it was a done deal. Now, how now the hell was I going to do it?

  We started out at a leisurely pace, heading south. The trees were stark silhouettes against the white, late afternoon sky. Despite its proximity to Main Street, the neighborhood was quiet. It was hard to believe the student ghetto around the University’s South Campus was only a mile or so away.

  Eventually Richard broke the silence.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  Not the question I’d expected. “So far, so good.”

  “You’ve only been out of the hospital for three days. You need time to heal.”

  I met his hard blue eyes. “I’m okay, Rich.”

  He paused, his gaze piercing me. “No, you’re not. You’ve had a serious injury. I don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

  The set of his mouth gave away the depth of his concern. He exhaled a puff of breath. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

  We didn’t talk about the murder any more that day.

  I hit the rack early but ended up staring at the ceiling for hours. The visions had stopped, replaced by unanswerable questions that circled around my head, keeping me from sleep. The biggest one was: why?

  Why was this happening to me?

  Chapter 5

  The sun hadn’t come up yet, but I’d already showered and dressed by the time the Sunday morning paper was delivered. I spread it across the kitchen table, grateful to study it in solitude. As I’d hoped, the top story was still the Sumner killing. Sumner was survived by his wife, Claudia, and three grown children, Rob, Diane, and Michael. There’d be no public viewing. Private interment would take place Monday morning.