From the darkness of the hallway she could make out a vague shape moving stealthily in her direction, see eyes shining in the gloom like strobes. As it got closer she could see it was a woman. Lisa could hear her breathing, raspy and hollow like wind through bellows.
“Who…” Lisa started to say right before her throat seized up.
No, not her mother.
A stranger.
Some strange woman dressed in a business suit of all things, barefoot, her hands held out before her, the fingers trembling and slicked red with blood.
Lisa, a wave of raw fear washing through her, set down her guitar case, dropped her purse. She backed up slowly as the woman advanced, her face twisted up in an insane grimace that was more like the death rictus of a corpse than an actual smile.
Lisa kept backing up.
She reached down and took a poker from the brass sheath of fireplace tools.
“Listen,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you can’t be here.”
The woman’s lips pulled away from her teeth. Foamy drool slid from the corners of her flaking lips. “What I want,” she hissed in awful congested voice like a backed-up drainpipe, “is you, is you, is youuuuu…”
Long before Lisa even had a chance to be locked-up with horror, before her nerve endings had a chance to seize-up with raw fear, the woman came at her. She didn’t move like a human being, but with a perverse see-sawing motion.
A predator sneaking up on its prey.
Lisa stood her ground and swung the poker.
It caught the crazy woman in the head, snapped her skull around and took her body with it. She landed bonelessly in Lisa’s mother’s chair. She struck the arm and tipped over with it. But her face came up immediately, eyes still burning, her forehead gashed open just below the hairline, blood running over her pale face in rivulets.
The fact that she could be knocked down, could be made to bleed, heartened Lisa.
She advanced on her and as she came up again, growling, Lisa brought the poker down.
But the woman was ready.
As the hook of the poker sunk into her shoulder—if she felt any pain there was no indication of it—she took hold of Lisa’s wrists, flung her sideways with a near-psychotic strength.
Lisa hit the hardwood floor and conked her head.
But she still had the poker.
As the madwoman came on again, Lisa rose to meet her, jabbing the pointed end of the poker into her belly. The woman howled with a bestial roar, stumbled back. The poker was stuck in her belly. She gripped it and pulled it out, about three inches of tempered steel that was glistening red and dripping. She flung it away.
But by then Lisa was on her feet.
She dove past the crazy woman to the fireplace, grabbed a two-foot birch log and when the woman rushed her yet again, she brought it down on her head with everything she had, screaming as she did so.
The woman shuddered, her eyes rolled shut, and she collapsed like she was made of Popsicle sticks. She lay on the floor, bleeding, but not dead. Unconscious and twitching, vile foam dribbling from her askew mouth. A pencil-thin line of it oozed from her left nostril.
Lisa stood there with the log in her hand.
Her body felt heavy, slack, and useless. She had a sudden need to vomit, to cry, to start shouting. But she did nothing but stand there. After a time, she dragged herself into the kitchen.
She didn’t find her parents there, either.
But she did find a lot of blood.
4
“What would really speed things along here,” Nancy Eklind said to her husband, “would be for you to just admit I’m right.”
Ben had a nasty urge to wrap his hands around her throat. Not that he was going to, mind you, he just had a nasty urge to. So he compromised: he said nothing. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and studied the dark road ahead, the minivan’s headlights splashing across it. Safer that way.
“What?” Nancy said.
He kept staring forward. “You say something?”
“I believe I said what,” she told him. “I said what in reference to my comment about you admitting I was right.”
He nodded, wouldn’t go there.
He looked in the rearview.
He could see Nancy’s brother Sam sitting in the back, looking everywhere but at what was going on in the front seat. Poor guy. Sixty days courtesy of the county and his first night out he gets a belly full of this. Dinner and a little gambling at the Chippewa casino, they’d told him. A few drinks. Help you relax.
Ben decided he looked anything but relaxed.
She’s your sister, buddy, he thought acidly, at least I’m only related to her by marriage.
Nancy snorted. “You know, Ben, maybe you’re not involved in this conversation. Maybe I’m having it all by myself. Would you like me to bring you up to speed on what we’re discussing?”
“No, Nancy.”
“All right, then. Feel free to jump in anytime.”
He mumbled something.
“Sorry? Couldn’t quite make that out. Jump in a little louder.”
He wanted to jump with both feet in her fucking face. “I said, no.” He scratched his beard.
“See?” Nancy turned and looked at her brother cowering in the backseat. “See what it’s like, Sam? It’s like this all the time. He can’t discuss anything. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s the least bit sensitive, just forget about it.”
Ben sighed, slowed the van, made a left onto a country road. “Let’s change the subject, okay? I think you’ve beaten this to death for one night.”
“Oh really?” Nancy folded her arms across her sizeable bosom, cocked her head, considered it. “No, I don’t think we’re done here. Nope, don’t think so.”
“Hasn’t it gone far enough? Change the record already.”
“You know what, Ben? If you would just discuss things with me, spit out what’s on your mind, we wouldn’t have these problems. But, no, talking with you is like pulling teeth.”
Ben sighed again, thinking that for the past five years since he’d slid that noose… er, that ring on his finger, he’d been doing a lot of sighing. “We’ll discuss this later, okay? We’re making Sam uncomfortable.”
Nancy turned around again. “Are we making you uncomfortable, Sam?”
He kept staring out the window. “Listen, I just wanna go home. I’m tired. I want to hit the sack. A real bed, not a county mat. Jesus.”
Nancy snorted at him, too. “All I’m saying to you, Ben, is that for a man your age, you’re not very responsible. Being eighteen is great, when you’re eighteen. But you’re thirty-five, dear, time to put away the fantasies and what-ifs, live life like a great big man.”
“I think you’re being really impatient,” he told her, trying to sound calm, in control, very rational, so Sam would think she was the crazy, belligerent one and not him. “Every business loses money the first year or so. Ask anyone.”
She kept nodding her head. “Well that’s fine. Problem being it’s my money you’re losing. These past five years, Ben, it’s been one crazy scheme after another. First the trapping business. Lots of money in beaver and raccoon fur, you said. So I put up the money like an idiot. That fell apart. I should’ve known better—people don’t wear real fur anymore. Then the extermination business. Okay, that sounded reasonable. So I put up the money for your licensing, your equipment. What happened? Big fat nothing. All that stuff is out in the garage collecting dust. Then the house painting scheme. Never mind that there were more painters in town than hairs on a dog’s ass. That fell through.” She slapped her knee, laughed without humor. “And now, ah yes, your latest business, striping parking lots. Parking lots have to have those yellow lines, honey, and somebody’s gotta put ’em down. There went my entire tax refund, right down the old drain. And why? Because all those jobs are contracted out, but you didn’t look into that. Oh well.”