“Todd?” called Clare, her voice rising as she stretched the word. She headed off down a hallway, and after a moment of indecision, Jaime hurried along behind.
They stepped into a bedroom in the back. It was even more of a mess than the living room. The bedclothes were in disarray, and a drawer in the dresser was pulled out and its contents spilled. They moved closer to the bed, there was a red blotch on the pillow, a blood stain. Clare stepped into the bathroom. It was through this bathroom window where Jaime had watched the girl showering until she’d noticed him and screamed. He was thinking about that scream, which had made him run away, when another, more piercing scream came from inside the bathroom, so loud and sustained it seemed as if it might shatter that window and all the windows in the house.
Terrified, he ran up to the door to see. There was much more blood, splattered across the walls and mirror and dripping from the sink. Someone lay twisted up in the center of the floor, gooey red smears all over and under them and everywhere. Clare, still screaming, turned and elbowed Jaime out of her way as she exited the room. As she did, he briefly saw an object in her hands that, for a moment, he thought was part of a large doll. Outside the room, her screams collapsed into heaving sobs.
He stared at the person on the floor. It didn’t have a head. Its neck was a band of skin raggedly torn at the rim. The neck contained gnarled red meat surrounding a lumpy whitish stick in its center. Bone. It protruded a little above the meat. A blood-streaked axe leaned against a side wall.
He hurried out, his stomach churning, fell to his knees and nearly onto his face, his insides pulsing as vomit raged out of his mouth and spilled onto his legs. Looking up moments later, he saw Clare, quiet now, sitting at the edge of the bed, holding Todd’s gruesome severed head right before her face, looking straight at it and, rather calmly, talking to it.
“You wouldn’t ever listen to me, would you? You were so stable and smart and I was supposed to be crazy, wasn’t I? There weren’t any Gnoomes or Qwiffs. It was ridiculous. Well, look who was right and who was wrong.”
Clare didn’t glance at Jaime and seemed to have forgotten he was there. She didn’t even turn to look as he stumbled to his feet, ran from the room and out the front door.
CHAPTER 34
RONI AND THE GIRL SCOUTS
Roni was at home, having run all the way there from the theater. Once inside, she fell into an armchair, hyperventilating for some minutes. Her breath having settled down, she stared at the wall, whimpered for a while, then got one of Shannon’s Mexican beers out of the refrigerator. There were three, and she drank the first two rather quickly, and was now nursing the third.
She wondered where Shannon was. Probably still looking for his stupid car. Which wasn’t even his. If he came home, he’d be pissed she drank his beers. But who cared. God, here she was thinking about her fucked-up marriage when Hobie was dead and the whole fucking town had gone insane. She felt kind of like she was ’luded out, like in the old days. Only worse. It wasn’t the beer. It was like being a head on a post. Numb. Like Thorazine was supposed to be, or what she’d heard of it.
“People react in different ways to the revelation that nothing means anything because everyone will eventually die and then nothing will matter,” Hobie had said. Maybe so. Maybe she should turn on the TV and look at that instead of at the wall. Not that it was all that different. It just moved around more and had people in it.
She thought of Hobie going out the window, the smile on his face, and started to sob, though she did not feel sad, exactly. It all seemed so faraway, as though it had happened years before. Still, the fact she had some sort of emotional response reassured her somewhat, though she only sobbed a couple of times and then became utterly numb again. Maybe she was in shock. That was probably it.
Oh yeah, was going to turn on the TV. She saw the remote on the end table, stared at it for a minute or so. Okay, TV. She picked up the remote and pressed the button, and it came on to a home shopping network channel. Good grief, had she been watching this?
She went through the channels until she found a news report, caught in midstream, the Mirror showing on the screen, with emergency vehicles on the sidewalk in front of the place, lights flashing, and much yelling and crying going on, though the people standing around and crowded by the vehicles all looked lethargic, empty-eyed. The way she felt, more or less.
The girl reporter on the screen, however, speaking into a microphone outside the theater, sounded frantic.
“—died immediately, according to reports, when he leaped from a window to avoid arrest. Police confiscated the dispensers of the strange pink liquid thought to contain a dangerous recreational drug that has apparently sparked the melee—”
On impulse, Roni changed the channel. “Let’s see what else is on,” she said aloud, then laughed. Why was she laughing?
Switching through the channels again, she stopped at the image of that old bastard evangelist guy, Dr Trumpet something, holding forth as always. Did this fucker ever shut up? Or go home?
“—because atheism is Satan’s most useful tool of all. What do people have to fear in a world where death is the end of everything, where no reward or punishment can take place? What to fear but death itself, even as they know they’ll not even feel regret once it’s come to them. For the atheist, and for their lord Satan, each death is the end of the world. The paradox, my friends, is that the escape from judgment is at once the most fearful fate conceivable and a license to commit any crime one might believe they can get away with in pursuit of profit or sensation. And what if this nihilism of ultimate oblivion is brought to its ultimate conclusion: why even fret over earthly punishments, if only a void awaits?”
“To keep from going into that void for as long as possible, dumbass, I would think,” said Roni to the TV. She hit the off button, stared at the blank screen. But funny thing, it wasn’t entirely blank. She could see her own image in it, vaguely.
She got out of the armchair and crawled across the floor to peer closely at her dim reflection in the screen. Were those shadows or her mark, expanded more than ever? It looked as though almost half her face was black. In fact, the mark seemed to spread even as she held very still and studied her dark reflection. She began again to sob, then, surprising herself, to shriek. She put her hands over her mouth to stop herself. The sound continued. It wasn’t her after all.
There were sirens, coming nearer, down the street outside. They became very loud and then shut off abruptly, close by. She tensed. Police.
She heard someone outside. There was a knock at the door. “Who is it?” she called out.
“Girl Scouts!” came mingled, high-pitched voices. Little girls.
She laughed again, went to the door and opened it. Three girls in uniforms, berets and sashes, with a woman, someone’s mom, all smiling for a beat or two. One began, “Hello, would you like to—” when all their eyes froze upon her face. The scouts looked amazed and horrified. The mom, instead, looked surprised, embarrassed, pitying. “I’m sorry to bother you, we’re just, we’re selling Girl Scout cookies, and—”
“No thanks,” said Roni, slamming the door. No, she would not look in the fucking mirror, or even at the TV. She sat back in the armchair with her hands over her eyes, envisioning Hobie’s burst-open corpse staring at her, enduring the image.
CHAPTER 35
CLARE ARGUES WITH TODD’S HEAD AND PICKS UP A HITCHHIKER
Clare carried Todd’s head out to the car, which was parked in front of the house. She opened the front side door and put the head on the seat, and went around to get in the driver’s side. She turned the key, which Jaime had left in the ignition, and the motor started.