There were more protestors in front of the entrance. One carried a sign that said “The Lord is Not Mocked,” and another’s said “Satan Walks Among Us.” “Satan Walks Among Us,” that sounded like one of Hobie’s movie titles.
Outside the main entrance was a line of four scarecrow-like dummies with hoods over their heads and arms tied behind their backs, being hanged. It looked like the old photos of the outdoor gallows Abraham Lincoln’s assassination conspirators were executed from. Hobie had done it himself and was real proud of it. She thought it was hideous and sick, but then, the whole marathon was. But that stuff had also been there yesterday, unlike the mural.
She went into the side entrance, apparently unnoticed by the reporters and the crowd. Once inside, she could hear something scraping across the floor in the next section, the foyer of the theater. Stepping over, she saw Hobie, in striped pajamas, doggedly dragging what looked like a water cooler across the floor. The cooler was full of not water, but some pinkish liquid, and it looked like something else was floating in it. Getting closer, she saw it was a babydoll head.
“Hobie, what in the fuck are you doing now?”
He turned. “Oh, there you are at last! Good morning! I’m just elaborating the Chamber of Horrors theme,” he said, grinning. “I’ve been up all night working on it. Could you go up to my office and fix some coffee? I am totally dead.”
“What are you doing with those things?”
“Oh, just setting them up. It’s all part of the backdrop. The mise-en-scène, you could say. I’ve been planning it for some time. It’s going to be quite a production, as you’ll see.”
Mise-en-scène. Christ, he wants to pretend he’s making a movie, thought Roni. With no cameras, yet. What a pathetic wanker. But Shannon and all his friends were like that, one way or another.
CHAPTER 16
JAIME AT THE DONUT HOLE
At the Donut Hole, a tiny donut and coffee restaurant he frequented, Jaime sat before his cup of coffee, stirring in his fourth packet of sugar with a plastic spoon, the emptied sugar packets all scattered on the counter before him, ignoring the scowl from the waitress as she served him his apple fritter on a chipped plate. The fritters they offered were big and cheap.
The TV was going, but Jaime usually didn’t pay too much attention and might not have noticed what was being reported at all if a couple of other customers, a trio of old codgers who spoke in the kind of loud voices common to people who can’t hear well themselves, hadn’t started talking about it in a way that caught his attention.
“Another one? When did this happen?”
“This one was from last year. Chinese girl.”
“Looks like she had red hair. That’s not normal for them.”
“That shows that she’s some wild-ass so-and-so type of girl, anyway. Them Chinese people, they usually don’t go for that kind of thing.”
“She ain’t Chinese anyway, she’s Korean. I heard her parents got money.”
Jaime looked up at the TV, eyes wide, pasty sugar sliding down his chin from his open mouth. Chinese? Red hair? His hands began to tremble.
On the TV screen were two photos placed side by side. One that might have come from a high-school yearbook, showing a smiling and pretty girl, her hair black and short. A photo beside it was clearly from later. In it, she was scowling at the camera, had some kind of chain pinned to the side of her lip, and her hair was bright red. A woman reporter was speaking:
“Ms. Cha was last seen on November 20th at the Trocadero Restaurant in the Bennington District. Accounts from witnesses conflict, but some say she was seen leaving the club with a tall slender man with long dark hair and tattoos…”
“Where’d they find her?”
“They ain’t found her yet. Her parents think she might have been the first victim.”
The first victim. That meant Todd Dewolf was the Westside Slasher! He gulped his coffee, burning his mouth, and hurried out.
CHAPTER 17
DEWEY AND SHANNON AT THE LIMBO
Dewey was at the Limbo, waiting for Shannon to show up, sitting by the window. He was about an hour late, and Dewey was irritated but not surprised. It still pissed him off about that girl yesterday. It wasn’t that he wanted to take her himself. He didn’t think that would be safe and didn’t have a place to put her anyway, with his grandma around.
It wasn’t that the incident with the Asian girl in the woods bothered him that much, though he didn’t really have an explanation for what had happened to her. They surely would have heard if she’d been found dead anywhere near there, so somebody probably did pick her up. Maybe she hadn’t been totally naked, like, she might have had some other little bathing suit or something in her purse that she got out and put on. Or whatever. It still bugged him Shannon would give this new girl to Todd just because he’s such a mess these days. To Dewey, Todd had been messed up even before the thing with the Asian chick. He’d sat in the car when Todd took her inside, and she hadn’t said goodbye or looked at him when she left, so he supposed she didn’t like him anyway. But there’d never been that many girls who did.
Then there was this whole thing about getting Todd to make worm and dealing it. He was sorry now he’d ever mentioned that magazine article about it to Shannon.
Dewey was drinking his third beer and thinking this was the last one. There were only a few customers around, two guys playing Ms. Pac-Man. Heather wasn’t in yet, and Fred had that damned Dr. Landfrey on again. Dewey usually tuned this kind of thing out, but this particular talk caught his attention.
“… because, friends, the gravest danger, among all the grave dangers, that our country faces today is the homosexual agenda. For you see, homosexuality is not inborn, but is spread by recruitment. It is a thing that a normal person finds loathsome and disgusting, until the key is turned to unlock the sinfulness within. It is a matter of inversion, of going inward, into oneself all alone, which is why self-abuse, according to those who study the workings of the mind, itself leads to homosexuality. As the great Rev. Jonathan Edwards said in 1742, ‘ . . . there is laid in the very nature of carnal man a foundation for the torments of Hell.’ And indeed, it is in man that the sin of homosexuality is most foul. For y’see, there is a part of man which, woken up, will become his master. It is a thing laid up deep inside the most intimate part of any normal man, that when abused, becomes like the reproductive parts of a woman. Left alone, it is fine. But once it has been stimulated, and stimulated repeatedly, it will demand more and more unnatural stimulation. It will literally become like a shrewish woman, nagging and whining until it becomes the master to the man, remolding his entire personality into a twisted abomination that amplifies all the worst qualities of woman. And in keeping, there is a part of woman, a tiny thing, that is in some sense like the reproductive part of man, that if awoken…”