“Oh, I dunno, seems like you could get up under there if you knew what you were doin’,” said his buddy.
“Well, whatever. ’Course, it’s s’posed to be just a rumor, but you know, that’s what they always say when they don’t want to admit stuff, the police and all.”
“What does he do with their hearts and their titties?” said Heather.
“Eats ’em,” said Deere cap, grinning.
Heather shrieked. “He does not! Does he?”
“Them titties, that’s some good eatin’!” His mouth hung open as he chortled. Roni cringed, watching.
“How do you know? You had some of ’em?” said Heather, posed with hands on hips.
“Naw, I’m just doggin’ ya.”
“Oh, don’t you start!” said Heather, slapping playfully at him. “You’ll about scare me into a conniption. He cuts their hearts out and their titties off! Goodness gracious,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Jesus Lord!”
Jesus indeed, thought Roni. Hearts and breasts. She hadn’t heard that one. Probably wasn’t true. Sounded like scenes from one of the stupid movies at the marathon.
But the whole thing was creepy enough, all right. There’d already been four girls killed over the last few months, and the local media had generated a lot of interest in the case. Even Jaime Tales seemed to become somewhat alert to hear the subject come up, sitting up in his seat and looking from face to face as the barflies spoke.
If this were true about the Slasher cutting hearts out, Roni thought it would probably make the national news before long. Well, that should put the old town on the map. And here she was, probably going to have to walk home, thanks to her shithead hubby. Sweet.
Heather, standing on the chair and swaying, reached up, clunked the TV’s knob and stopped at a channel with soundtrack music going that indicated a moment of high drama. On the screen, a leggy girl in cutoffs ran through a night-lit field of gravestones, a terrified look on her face, her long blonde hair streaming behind her. In pursuit came a chubby overalled man brandishing a pitchfork, laughing maniacally, a split-faced grin on his hog-ugly face. The girl suddenly fell forward into what turned out to be an open grave. The camera closed in on her. Looking around, she found herself lying on a decayed corpse in a suit and tie, its mottled skull-like face bearing a grin like that of her pursuer. As she screamed, rolling over and thrashing wildly so her blouse tore open, revealing large breasts in a low-cut bra, the corpse’s arms wrapped around her in a seeming embrace. A knot of worms emerged from his empty eye sockets and squirmed apart across his face unto hers, as her own eyes rolled madly.
Heather gave a yelp, turning up the volume.
“Is that the news? Looks like a movie,” said one of the geeks.
The man in overalls looked down on the girl, grinning with delight, and seemed about to hurl the pitchfork into the grave when a spotlight fell upon him, accompanied by a high-pitched whirring-and-beeping sound. His expression went blank, and he dropped the pitchfork at his feet just as he began to levitate straight upward into the beam.
“Where’s he goin’?” said Deere Cap.
“It’s just a movie. That’s Chiller,” said a geek.
“I was gonna say.” Deere Cap lifted his glass, downed his beer.
“Oh,” said Heather. She sounded disappointed.
In confirmation, the screen went black and the words “Chiller Theatre” rose up in spookily wavering letters. An unseen announcer said, “All right, good groovers, we’re watching Scream of the Ghoul, also known as 7 Masks of the Faceless Ripper, 1972, starring Robert Castle, Dominique Saban and Adriana Tori. Don’t know those players, but definitely an interesting flick. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back after these important messages.” A too-familiar replacement window commercial began.
Great, thought Roni, 7 Masks is one of the movies we’re showing at the marathon. Unlike all these dipshits around here, including her husband, she had no use for this kind of crap, but she recalled the title from the bill.
Fred stepped back into the room, wiping his hands on a towel. “What you doin’ with my TV? Put Dr. Landfrey back on there.”
“Omigod, Fred, did you hear about how those girls the Westside Strangler kilt got their—”
“Yes, I heard you. Quit takin’ the Lord’s name in vain.”
Heather sighed, climbed up again and turned the knob. The screen showed an elderly bespectacled man in a suit and tie, white hair in nearly a pompadour, seated and with his hands clasped together, wearing a fixed smile that puffed his cheeks up like dinner buns. He was, of course, Dr. Trumpeter Landfrey, a popular evangelist with his own cable TV network. His show was apparently on all day, seemed like whenever you were changing channels on TV, he’d be on.
“There he is,” said Heather, moping, leaning on the bar, cheek on fist. The customers shrugged and looked away from the TV while Fred moved the chair back to its proper spot, sat down and leaned back, folding his arms and giving the good doctor his full attention.
“Friends,” said Dr. Landfrey, speaking in a deep, dramatic voice that seemed it should have been coming out of a wholly different face, “we hear a great deal these days about the ghastly crime of rape, the unspeakably vile, violent violation of our young women…”
“He’s talkin’ about it too,” said Deere Cap.
“Police tell us that statistics show the number of these outrages reported in our fair country is ever on the rise, year after year. The so-called feminist organizations allege that even more such crimes, a huge number, go unreported every year, so the claim is made that this problem is greatly worse than our rightful authorities tell us.
“These feminist groups place the blame for the worsening problem on pornography, which indeed overstimulates weak and immoral men. But the feminists say it also encourages all men—every man in the world, these angry Marxist-influenced ladies allege—to see man’s traditional helpmate, the woman—every woman—as what they call a sex object. That is, not a person but only a thing to serve as a vessel for lustful contemplation and all that may follow in man’s blighted and benighted course.” Landfrey hunched down and pressed his lips into a thin, abbreviated line.
“Pornography, we Christians know well, is a heinous menace to the moral fabric of our society.” He leaned in closer, folded his hands, shaking his head. “But friends, doesn’t good old-fashioned common sense tell us there’s a close connection between the repulsive and inescapable presence of pornography in our supposedly enlightened secular world, and the plain fact that so many of our young females today choose to dress in the manner of what in our forefathers’ time were termed common harlots, and further, to conduct themselves as if…”
“Naw, I guess he’s off on something else,” said Deere Cap.
“… for as the Bible teaches in the Book of Proverbs, a loose woman does not take heed to the path of life, her ways wander, and she does not know it, as her feet go down to death…”
As the old coot rattled on, he was replaced on the screen by images of angular young fashion models sashaying down runways in strange skimpy outfits. The distant wail of a police siren rose in the background as the scene shifted to grainy images of a young woman lying face-up on the ground, apparently by the side of a road, her clothing disarranged and a superimposed black rectangle covering her eyes.
That’s right, cocksucker, thought Roni. First make all women out to be objects, tell them they’re worthless if they’re not, then blame them for getting raped and murdered because of how they dress. Fucker. Typical. Her rising fury made the evil old bastard’s further words an aural fog as she stabbed out another half-smoked cigarette.
Fred and the John Deere guy were both nodding in syncopation to Landfrey’s sage words. Fucking redneck morons.