I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t broken any law, really. I hadn’t busted into the Doc’s house. We had been let inside by a man with a gun.
What was the deal?
What was the fat man, Fat Boy, the other called him, doing there?
Who had screamed?
What in the hell had happened to Doc’s schedule?
And the others, Sharon, the Disaster Club, what was to become of them?
No answers came to me. I lay there and felt the water that had splashed on my legs turn cold. Where I had banged the stone seat with my shin ached like hell. I felt like a coward, running like that, but what else could I do? I figured what Fat Boy had in mind was going to be unpleasant, and had I hesitated one moment longer, I felt certain I would have found out how unpleasant. There wouldn’t have been any getting away.
Finally, couple hours later is my guess, I got my nerve up. I went along the bank where the creek travels through the heart of the University, under the bridge and along these deep concrete channels the city put in for flood control. I came out on the other side of the University and started walking home. I guess I had been down there on the creek bank for a couple of hours, maybe longer, scared, not knowing what to do. I figured now the thing to do was get home and call the cops.
I wasn’t very far from my place by then, and I started walking home. You haven’t seen this place, Uncle Hank, but it’s not the Ritz. It’s over by the University and I moved there when I started school. It’s down in the one area over there hasn’t been upgraded. There’s about six streets with rows of ramshackle, slumlord houses on either side, and one of those dumps is mine. There’s one street light at either end of the street, so unless you’re under one of those lights, or you have a porch light on, way all those oaks and elms along there droop, you won’t see much.
I got to my street and started down it. Dogs ba Sn iyou’re rked at me along the way, and a goddamn bat swooped down on my hair and scared the hell out of me. Time I got to my walk, I was a bundle of raw nerves. Everywhere I looked, I thought I saw Fat Boy or Cobra Man. My empty carport was full of shadows and all of them looked like people with guns.
But there wasn’t anyone. I got my key from under the steps and unlocked the door and slipped inside, still trying to figure what to do next, and it was while I was figuring that the smell hit me. The stink of Cobra Man. I tried to back out of there, but I went back too fast and slipped and fell. I tried to get up and my hand went into something wet. I lifted it to look, saw what I had slipped in.
Blood.
Then, between my bloody fingers, very close to me, I saw a face, eyes poking out of its head like a couple of golf balls with pupils painted on them. A tongue hung way out of its mouth and the teeth were clamped through it. I jerked my hand out of the way for a better look.
It was Dave.
I jumped up and skidded and fell back against the wall and stood there looking at Dave, smelling the blood on me and the sour stink of Cobra Man. I wanted to turn and dart outside, but I didn’t. All the noise I’d made, slipping and falling, it came to me that if Cobra Man or Fat Boy were in the house, they’d have been all over me. And with the front door open, the air had cleared out some of the stink. With that diluted, I felt stronger. I began to believe I was the only living thing in the house.
I slipped into the kitchen for a better look at Dave. He was lying on his stomach and he wasn’t wearing any pants. I could see the tip of an Old Hickory butcher knife hilt sticking out of his ass. He’d been sodomized with it. That’s where all the blood had come from. The knife belonged to me.
There was a coat hanger twisted around his neck so tight most of it wasn’t visible. One of his legs was cocked at the knee, the foot pointing at the ceiling. The other was stretched out on the floor, straight and stiff.
I had a feeling with all his talk about fear and dying, this hadn’t been what Dave had in mind. I think he expected something a little more noble; something not smelling of blood and shit.
Trembling, I went over to the open knife drawer and got another Old Hickory knife, eased around and looked in the living room.
Everything appeared okay, but it was dark enough in there to make me uncertain. I let my eyes adjust until I felt secure no one was hiding and waiting for me. Not that there were many places anyone could hide, small as the room was, and the only major pieces of furniture were a stuffed chair, a television set, and a couch with its back pushed flush against the wall.
I went in and looked around and didn’t see anybody, which of course is what I was pretty assured of, or I wouldn’t have gone in there.
The back door that led out of the living room and onto the little back porch was wide open and there was only the screen door between the room and the night. That door wasn’t much when it was locked. You leaned into it and picked up some, the latch would pop and you could come in. It was a strange time to worry about it, but I remember thinking to myself, after tonight I was going to get some kind of deadbolt and s Seadsn’ome latches for the windows.
I went over for a look through the screen door. The moonlight was falling over the tiny overgrown lawn and there was a dark-haired tomcat sitting on the wooden fence that bordered my yard and the neighbor’s, sitting there with one leg lifted, licking his balls.
I gingerly opened the screen door and went onto the back porch, jumping a little as the boards squeaked beneath my feet and the cat leapt with a surprised yowl into my neighbor’s yard. A dog barked. The cat hissed, and then the dog barked several times, moving away, pursuing the cat, I presumed. Finally, there was only the sound of crickets in the grass.
I went out and stood in the yard and sucked in some of the night air. It was so cold and clean it almost made me drunk. My wet pants legs felt cold as ice.
I went back in the house and noticed for the first time that there was a thin sliver of light slipping out from under my bedroom door and out of a needle thin crack where the door was pushed slightly open. I had concentrated on that open back door so hard, I hadn’t noticed it.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I squeezed the handle of the butcher knife so hard I felt it ridge into the palm of my hand, but I couldn’t let go. I kept squeezing, causing a slight cramp to run up my wrist and forearm.
Guess I felt like I had been such a coward before, I wanted to prove myself. Or to be more truthful, fearful as I felt, I didn’t believe anyone was in the house. It seemed obvious to me they had come in by springing the back door, and had brought Dave inside and killed him in the kitchen, which gave me an idea about what I’d find in the bedroom.
I touched the bedroom door and eased it open, stood in the doorway looking at an image in the corner of my dresser mirror. The image of a naked body standing very still. Or I thought it was standing. Another look showed it was hanging from a chinning bar I kept mounted between the frame of my doorless closet. It was a woman.
Her legs weren’t touching the floor. They seemed to be cut off at the knee.
I took in a breath and caught the fading odor of Cobra Man and another odor I didn’t like. I went in, looking in the direction of the reflection.
It was Carrie. Her legs had been pulled up and tied behind her and there was a coat hanger twisted around her neck and there were great strips of hair missing from her bloody scalp. The hair had been ripped out, and the tool for the ripping, a pair of pliers from my kitchen drawer, lay on the floor beneath her. Coat hangers had been taken out of the closet, straightened and inserted into her mouth at the edges of a cloth gag, and into her ears, nostrils, the corners of her eyes, her ass and vagina. Her face was spattered with blood. Her legs were coated with shit.