Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  ««—»»

  Couldn’t hurt to check, he told himself as he drove. He tried to make excuses for driving over there, because he had calmed down a little and felt stupid. That dream with Paul in it had still been on his mind, and he had simply misinterpreted a sound. Still, couldn’t hurt to park outside Heidi’s house for a few minutes and look at its lit windows and listen for normal sounds from within.

  Quickly, before he had left, he had hidden his.22 rifle back in the broom closet and his .22 pistol and the .357 under clothes in a drawer in the bedroom he was using while painting the black room. Having used so much ammo on the matador, today he had also picked up some more ammo. He had bought some .12 gauge shells for his single shot shotgun, too. He had never fired it before and he wanted to start. Especially since Kelley. It had a shell already in it and Ray had slid it under the sofa.

  No one would find his guns readily if they broke in. Also, whether he found himself surprised someday in his kitchen, bedroom or parlor, he would have death at his disposal.

  It was a long ride, about a half hour or more, to Heidi’s house anyway, complicated by the fact he had only been there once and she had driven him. Luckily he remembered her street’s name. By the time he reached her street, nearly fifty minutes since he had left home, FantasyIsland was half over.

  Ray recognized the house ahead on his left. The lights were on, Heidi’s car was parked in the drive but none others. Ray slowed to a crawl, still questioning his actions, and decided to follow through by parking directly across the street.

  He sat and watched the yellow windows in the black house. No one passed by in them, but blue TV light flickered on the curtains in the parlor. Ray looked again to the driveway. Heidi’s car. None others. He remembered the night the rest of her family had been conveniently gone, leaving them to spend the night together. Ray took in a long breath, and then pulled the .38 out of his blue windbreaker’s pocket.

  Ray placed the .38 on the passenger’s seat and covered it with a folded newspaper, left his car and locked it. He crossed the street.

  Up the walk. Part of him shrilly pleaded for him to turn and run but he mounted the front step. Ray poked the door buzzer. He heard it ring inside. He was nearly swooning, drunken—though the Schnapps had since worn off.

  No one answered. He rang again. Waited. Knocked loudly.

  “For God’s sakes,” he sighed. Knocked—nothing.

  Ray stepped down, moved around the side of the house into the backyard. He climbed the few steps to the small patio that gave into the kitchen through a glass sliding door. He hesitated. The kitchen could be clearly seen beyond, and part of the livingroom with blue light moving on the walls.

  Ray rapped on the glass. He waited and no one came. The TV

  couldn’t be turned up too loud—he couldn’t even bear it. All he heard was a fizzing sound he didn’t recognize. Perhaps Heidi was asleep, so he rapped more loudly.

  Glancing down at his feet, Ray sighed. He should leave, leave while he still had a chance. What good would this do? She didn’t want him. He was already past history for her—yesterday’s paper. Yesterday’s toilet paper.

  Ray was lifting his head to knock again, maybe for the last time, when his eyes flicked back to his shoes. He moved one of them a little.

  He had been standing on a few dark splotches like paint dripped from a height.

  His head jerked back. He gaped above him.

  Above him, above the back door, someone had painted an inverted five-pointed star inside a circle with some red liquid.

  “Oh my God!” Ray hissed to himself.

  A few involuntary steps backward, and he snapped his eyes back down to the glass door. Placid, unoccupied kitchen beyond. Lighted rooms, but no activity. Ray moved forward and tried sliding the door but found it locked.

  He ran out front again, tugged at the front door. Locked. Ray stared at the knob, then compulsively wiped it free of prints with his shirttail. If something bad had happened he didn’t want to be wrongly implicated.

  Darting across to his car, he retrieved the .38 and jammed it in his pocket, then rushed back. Around to the backyard, up the patio steps.

  There was lots of yard and the neighboring houses didn’t crowd, so Ray felt safe in freeing his gun and using it to rap on the glass.

  “Heidi!” he said. “Heidi!” A glance above.

  The dark pentagram stood out even in the dark of night.

  His heart was at a crazed gallop, pumping too much blood into his brain, drowning him. Ray looked around him, spotted a heap of gardening tools in the grass against the house, jumped down and seized a trowel. He pulled off his windbreaker, bundled it around his right hand and gripped the trowel, again ascended to the patio. A glance off toward the neighbors.

  He hoped Fantasy Island was interesting tonight.

  It was such an inconceivably destructive thing to do that he hesitated, tempted to change his mind and break a smaller window and crawl through—or even to drive off and call the police. Let them break in. But what if Heidi’s life depended on quickness? What if he had a chance of protecting her but ran away instead?

  Ray drove the trowel blade-first against the glass as if lunging a knife into a man’s stomach. A screeching-grinding noise; the trowel skidded and the glass door rattled but didn’t shatter.

  Ray realized that instead of simply breaking a hole big enough for him to reach in and unlock the door, if he did succeed in smashing the glass the whole thing would fall away in huge chunks. Fuck it—if that were going to happen anyway who needed the trowel? He tossed it away and picked up a large stone that had a hand-painted seascape on it and the words CAPE COD in red, wound up almost like a shot-putter and flung the heavy decoration straight at the center of the glass. That worked on the first try—there was a far too loud crystalline explosion and big hunks like sheets of ice dropped down and sub-divided at Ray’s feet.

  His arm still wrapped, he reached in and fumbled, unlocked the door.

  To hell with prints—his selfish concern could cost Heidi her life. Ray slid the door open and entered the house, overlapping shards of glass grinding and squealing and crunching under his shoes.

  No one in the kitchen definitely, no signs of disturbance. Ray plunged into the livingroom.

  The fizzing he had heard was very loud now—it was the TV, turned to some channel that had no station. Ray saw it was “8,” with the snowy static up to a high volume. This fizzing/crackling emptiness was what had danced blue light on the curtains and walls.

  No one in here, either. Ray strode across the room and shut off the TV

  with his left hand; in his right fist he clung to the five shot .38.

  The house was now quiet; too quiet. So much so that Ray could hear a clock ticking and the hum of the refrigerator off in the kitchen.

  He swallowed saliva and resumed his search of the house. When he had searched his own house, attic and, all after Kelly’s sacrifice he had been too furious to be afraid—but even in this well-lighted, more modern, less isolated house he felt a chilly terror almost like panic, almost enough to make him run the hell out of there. Almost.

  Dining room empty, undisturbed. No signs of struggle. Nothing unusual. On down the hall to the bedrooms. Ray poked his nose and gun into the brother’s bedroom first, saving Heidi’s. No brother, no Heidi. He entered and nudged a closet door open. Ray wondered why this room would be lit, since Heidi’s car was the only one here.

  What if the boy and Heidi had stayed home—maybe the sister, too, and only the mother was out? Or what if Heidi had gone with them and left her car, and no one was home, and he had broken in for nothing?

  Perhaps all the lights and the TV had been left on to dissuade burglars.

  So who had answered the phone? Who had painted the pentagram?

  And where was Heidi’s dog?

  The bathroom was lit and empty—no wide-eyed, grinning possessed fiend hiding behind the shower curtain. Ray glanced at his reflection.

&n
bsp; Who would paint the pentagram on Heidi’s house and his house? Who suspected the connection between them? Someone at work? Ray remembered, for some reason, the time someone had broken into work just to set fire to a box of scrap leather on a table next to his cutting machine.

  Someone crazy?

  Out in the hall again, Ray faced Heidi’s room, its door half open, his gun poised at waist level.

  The lights were on in there. No sounds…

  Ray eased the door open fully, slowly, with his toe. Breath whistling through his nostrils, mouth clamped tight.

  Two empty beds, no longer pushed together to make one.

  The sister’s looked taut as an army cot, but there was a dent in Heidi’s pillow and the blanket was rumpled, partly turned aside.

  Heart rate escalating further, if that were possible, Ray peeked into the closet, prodded his gun into hanging clothes, half expecting a skeletal white hand to shoot out and seize his wrist.

  Ray left Heidi’s bedroom to seek out her mother’s.

  Lights on, bed taut as a drum and pillow rigidly undented.

  Now what? Call the police?

  Wait—the basement. He’d seen a door in the hall, just outside the kitchen, which he assumed led down there.

  When Ray cracked the door he saw light down there. Silently he swung the door fully open. Hesitated…then began to descend with soft guerilla steps. He felt vulnerable as his legs came within view of whoever might be down there.

  A billiard table waited down here for him, the green too bright in the center from a low light but shading darker toward the pockets. A bookshelf stuffed with paperbacks behind glass cabinet doors. Behind the stairs was a second half of the cellar partly divisioned, and it wasn’t lit, and Ray smelled clothing detergent from that direction. Wash room. His alert eyes scanned further but his body stayed rooted. Away from the pool table, some stone steps led up to a slanting metal bulkhead hatch that obviously gave access to the backyard. Ray now remembered having seen it from the outside—but he didn’t remember noticing that the hatch was cracked a few inches open, with a cool night breeze sifting in.

  He moved quickly toward it, passing the opening into the dark wash room, which was also where the furnace was, without really looking deeply in there yet. If he had, he would have seen Heidi staring back out at him from the gloom.

  Ray mounted the stone steps and raised the hatch fully on its rusted, squeaky hinges. Peered out as if from inside a tank, then stepped out into the yard again. Stood scanning around him. Here he was full circle…as he looked toward the obliterated patio door. What if Heidi were out with her mom and safe and he had committed vandalism and breaking and entering for nothing?

  But the pentagram was still there, only slightly visible from here, over the smashed glass door.

  Ray turned and ducked back down into the playroom section of the basement. At the foot of the stone steps he swivelled to face the darkened wash room.

  Darkened. It was the only room in the house not lit.

  He stepped forward.

  He saw her before he had even stepped through the threshold.

  Ray made an exclamation of fear that might have been funny if he were a character in a comedy movie sitting on a tack. The short burst of incoherent gasping-babbling that followed as he stumbled backward might have been funny, too. Ray had to spin away from the vision and grab the edge of the pool table. “Oh God, oh God,” he moaned. Chilly wave after wave ran up his neck into his cheeks and scalp.

  Stay alert! his mind shrieked.

  He hadn’t looked throughout the wash area—what if the person who had done this were still here?

  Dazedly, Ray turned and gazed back into the murk. Stepped away from the anchored security of the billiard table and felt floaty as he neared the room. She was still there. This time Ray crept fully inside the sepulcher.

  “Jesus. Oh Heidi,” whispered Ray tremulously—for all his terror, some pity oozing through. After all, he was only scared. Heidi was dead.

  He felt he should cry. A person he loved, or thought he loved, was dead..

  He couldn’t cry. For one, the vision was too fascinating to his horrified curiosity. Heidi was naked except for panties and her ankles were lashed to an overhead pipe and her eyes were open and there were the kind of deep cuts, not mere scratch slits, that open like vaginas, and there was blood still wet and catching sparkly highlights from the other room.

  Her mouth was a little open and her hair hung down, her arms flopped in nail-less crucifixion.

  Ray glanced around, established that there was no one lurking about behind the furnace or boxes of Christmas decorations. Christmas decorations. Ray’s eyes returned to the body he had made love to, and now that he had assured himself the killers were gone, their work finished, he started to cry. It was safe to cry. He sobbed loudly as if in self-pity, a child with a dead mother, alone in the world. Christmas decorations. Where were her glasses? Her flawless Renoir skin. She was sweet, shy, afraid…she didn’t deserve this, didn’t deserve this…

  Ray squatted by her, vision blurred—mercifully—and groped for her stiffening, cooling hand, mottled with the blood settling in it. He bent and kissed the hand, which wore her engagement ring, with a sob of the utmost despair. She didn’t deserve this…he wished he could trade places with her.

  Breathing raspily through gritted teeth, Ray straightened and wiped his left hand across his eyes. He couldn’t, wouldn’t leave her like this, strung up like a side of beef. Like a sacrifice to some decadent demon even now watching this human’s pain and laughing at him. Ray turned from her to go upstairs and find a knife.

  In the kitchen he pulled open a drawer, sniffling, selected a butcher knife. As he shut the drawer he noticed several spots of red on the tiles a few inches from his feet, like those on the patio. They were under the cabinets below the sink. Ray remembered the light on in Heidi’s brother’s room…

  The .38 in hand, for no other reason than moral support, Ray stooped cautiously and opened the cupboard.

  Kelly tumbled halfway out rigidly at his feet. Ray jumped back and screamed.

  ««—»»

  Ray embraced Heidi around the legs while he sliced at the rope, so as to let her down rather than let her thump. He did it in a dream-state, not looking at her, forcing out his fear of her blood on him. The rope gave and her weight shifted to his arms. He lowered her legs to the cold, dirty floor, took her under the arms now (a little scratchy from stubble) and dragged her onto a blanket from the wash. Ray dragged the blanket out into the light of the playroom, and there he covered Heidi’s savaged nakedness with another blanket. He didn’t cover her face and he knelt by her side.

  Her face was discolored—that interior bloodying more scary than the outer blood that snaked across her neck, into her ear and hair. Ray sniffled, gasped raggedly, batted his lashes at tears and stroked Heidi’s cheek lightly one last time before covering her face. He couldn’t bear the pain he thought he saw in her clouded eyes. The pain of a person cheated of life, cheated of all her dreams.

  He rose. He went up the stone steps into the open night air.

  Too many prints—if they blamed him how could he prove he didn’t do it? Even if he wiped the prints, how could he get rid of the pentagram like the one the police had found at his home? And Kelly was inside, and he didn’t have enough nerve left to go back in and get her. At least Heidi was still soft…Kelly had toppled out like a gnarled piece of driftwood.

  He couldn’t touch that.

  He would have to go to the police now and tell them the truth.

  So Ray crossed the street to his car, let himself in and drove off.

  ««—»»

  The sniffling wound down to irregular little hitches like hiccups.

  Ray’s red eyes grew intent on the road. Not much traffic for a late summer Saturday night, but it was late— Fantasy Island over.

  There was a point where the road ahead offered him a choice: to drive left and head into the center of town
where the police station would doubtlessly be found, or to take a right branch in the direction of his town.

  Ray slowed, the fork growing, and when he could no longer avoid a choice any longer and a car came pressing up from behind he turned right.

  The car of kids behind laid on the horn and yelled. The horn and yells vanished off down the left side of the fork as if their car plummeted into an abyss. Or was he plummeting from them?

  Ray didn’t understand his choice much except for two things. He had a strange intuition. And he was mad. Furiously, explosively mad. His intuition suggested that he might be able to use his fury. It was pent-up, chained-to-a-wall-for-a-hundred-years fury, and he could unleash it on the proper enemy. Get revenge…

  No more hiccup-hitches. His eyes narrowed, hardened, burned painfully with their determined blaze. The segmented white strips in the road plunged one after another after another into his rushing car like tracer bullets, each one pumping his adrenalin further.

  He knew they’d be there, whoever they were…waiting for him. It was him they really wanted.

  196

  Chapter

  8

  Itwas nine o’clock. One hour until Westman Freight arrived for their two skids of taped boxes. Three short—infinite—hours ’til punch-out.

  Paul, Abby, Maureen and Jean had left the cafeteria after Paul brought the sandwich carousel full circle in search of more human fragments, but there were just the two mismatched hands. Hungry as they were, no one bought so much as a pack of gum. They had timidly ventured out of the cafeteria in a cluster and approached the far wall of the shipping room, blanketed in black foam hardening from air contact.

  By nine the foam had quit flowing and had hardened and cooled. Paul poked it with his Buck knife but warned the others not to touch it with their skin. Jean and Maureen sat at the two old desks in Ted’s tiny office, while Abby and Paul stood. They were waiting, and Paul accepted the burden of their expectations in his command.

  Paul wasn’t content with waiting. Somberly he announced, “Let’s make some weapons.”