FIFTY-NINE
Jason and Cory had gone up to the abandoned house earlier while I napped, after they had changed the end details on the plan we had set up. While they were up there, they took the latch and padlock off and then took a Phillips screwdriver, unscrewed the door handle and switched the inside knob with the outside knob so the thumb turn that locked the door was on the outside and the key hole was on the inside. Now there was no getting out unless someone unlocked it from out front. That part of the plan I had known about.
The part I didn’t know about was while they were up there they had taken a bunch of the trash that littered the outside of the house and field and had tossed it everywhere within. Cardboard boxes were scattered along the walls. Old mattresses and couch cushions had been pushed inside. Wooden pallets, old desks, dead branches and all the paper they could gather was strewn about making the place seem over crowded with rubbish.
And as I sat there, huddled in the dark with Frisbee, the Sesame Street Killer no more than twenty feet away, screaming from the pain of her burst eyeball, I noticed something that I hadn’t right away; the smell.
That was something else that they hadn’t told me they were going to do. Something they had planned later, when I wasn’t around. After they had come up and switched the doorknob around and filled the place up with trash, they had taken Cory’s metal gas can and dumped the last half of it inside on the couches and mattresses, letting them soak up the fuel like giant sponges.
The fumes brought tears to my eyes and Frisbee whined once. We listened to Emily Manning moan and cry. I was crying myself-although silently-wondering how I was going to get out of this situation. There was only pure black all around and I felt as though I was back in my Dark Dream, waiting for the bubbles. With the windows being boarded over and the door shut tight in its frame no light could penetrate the house, not that there was any outside, considering the time of the morning.
I held onto the bandana around Frisbee’s neck for comfort. I could feel him looking in Emily’s direction, but he made no sound. He was there, watching her and watching over me, keeping me safe and I had a feeling that he would probably give his life for me if it came down to it.
I wondered if he could see in the dark, like a cat could, and thought about those golden eyes and the way they had lit up like there was a fire in his skull when we had been in this house last, when I had had Jacob’s Zippo with me.
“God hates me,” Emily moaned, soft and without feeling. At first I wasn’t even sure she had said it but a moment later she repeated her words only this time with venom. “God hates me. And I hate him.”
I had no idea if she was trying to communicate with me or if she was just talking to herself, but it scared the crap out of me and I kept quiet… for the moment. Frisbee was there and I knew he wouldn’t let her get to me without a fight. I pictured her slumped against the wall in the foyer by the front door where she had tackled me, worn out and in pain, head hanging to her chest.
“I always tried to protect her but it was never good enough for him. He told me that was what I needed to do. But it was never good enough.”
I kept quite and still. So did Frisbee. I could hear the guys outside calling my name, asking if I was alright. They knew I should have gone right through the front door and into the garage and out the vent hole. Instead, I had lost the flashlight and my sense of direction and didn’t even know which way the garage was.
“It wasn’t even supposed to be this way. It never was. We were supposed to be a happy family just like in a fairy tail. Just like those families on TV. But then she came along and mucked it all up. Damn retarded, dummy.” She paused a moment and sniffed and surprised me when she said, “What’s your name?”
My heart began thumping at an irregular beat as a reserve of adrenaline flooded my system. Was she talking to me or to herself still? Or had she been talking to me all along?
I didn’t want to answer her, didn’t want to give my position away and have her jump me in the dark and I could only pray that Frisbee would keep her at bay if that happened.
“Boy, I know you’re there. I can’t see you but I can hear your heart beating through your chest,” she said, gasping as she talked. “I can feel your dog staring at me too. I’m not going to hurt you. I have no more fight in me. The back of my head’s leaking from were your mutt bit me. I think I broke my hand when I went through that gate and I can’t even feel my foot any more, thank you very much for the tetanus. I don’t know if you saw or not but your little long haired friend shot my eye out and now I’m half blind. I can barley move. I’m done.” She sobbed on the last sentence.
I stroked Frisbee’s back and found the courage to say, “Ricky,” though it came out as a squeak, caught in my throat, and I had to repeat it.
She began to moan again and I could tell she was still in the same place she’d been only moments before. She wasn’t trying to trick me, wasn’t trying to get me to betray my location.
“Oh, Ricky, how did I end up like this?” she asked.
At the time I thought she was asking how she ended up in so much pain in an abandoned house with an eight year old and a stray dog. If she didn’t know that then she really was crazy. The thought almost made me laugh, but then I realized that she was asking how she ended up this way in life.
My face grew hot as I thought of the children that she had murdered and the families that she had torn apart, all the moms that were crying themselves to sleep every night knowing their daughters were no longer sleeping in the room next to them, all the fathers that would probably turn their backs on those same moms in confusion and anger and frustration; and in shame. I heard somewhere that more than half of all marriages don’t survive after the loss of a child.
She had no right to do what she did.
“You killed those girls,” I told her with a whine. “You made their mothers cry. Why would you do that?”
“How do you know what I did?” she asked me. “You’re just a kid yourself. You don’t know shit about shit.”
It was Donald that had told me not who she was but what she had done; her crimes.
“Amy,” I said. “Melissa. Kelly.” I stopped and hoped, for my brother’s sake, that she wouldn’t recognize the next name. “Amber.”
She chuckled and then gasped in pain but finally said, “You do your homework, Ricky. Are you and your friends the Hardy Boys or something? You know my name don’t you?”
“I know the newspaper calls you the Sesame Street Killer,” I said. “But your real name is Emily Manning.”
“I’m the Cleanser and that’s that. They only call me the Sesame Street Killer because I leave a present with the girls. A little memento so He knows I’ve been there. The police knew it was me that killed them girls because of the gifts; the dirty girls.”
“But why?” I asked.
She was quite a while as though thinking, then said, “Why am I the Cleanser or why did I leave them things with the girls?” she asked back. It wasn’t what I had meant but she answered her own questions anyway. “I am the Cleanser because of Jamie, because of what she is: a no brained dummy. You know she can’t even wipe her own butt when she shits? I have taken care of her for so long, given so much of my time to her and the only thing I ever got in return was a husband that bad mouths me and hits on me with his fists, calls me stupid.
“I prayed the whole time I was pregnant with that girl. I prayed to God that he would send me a sweet little, angel, a sweet little pearl. Someone I could sit with and comb her hair and buy cute dresses for and take to church on Sundays. Someone-that when she was old enough-we could talk about boys and going on dates and to the prom. But no, God just turned his back on me and sent me that deformed grain of sand that never turned into nothing, that needs to be dressed and bathed and fed for the rest of her life. I prayed and prayed and prayed and that’s what I got. And that’s why I cleanse.”
I wondered, even at that age, if she was aware that pearls aren’t just born, that the oysters t
hey grow in spend lots of time and lots of patience creating that beautiful gem.
“Why should other parents have it so easy? These cute little girls that they taunt in front of me. Damn show offs. But I taught them all their lessons. I showed them what they all had to be thankful for. I showed them what it is like to know pain and suffering and cruelty and anguish and they will never be the same again. I made them just like me.
“As for the presents I left. They weren’t meant for the police. They were a gift. To God.”
It struck me as odd that she’d think this way. I always knew that God’s gift to us was life and our gift back was our love and our faith, not something that could be bought at a Toys R Us.
“Why did you leave those things for God?” I asked in a shaky voice. “What good did it do?”
“Ricky,” she said, no longer weeping but sounding stronger as if talking were helping her heal, “Have you ever laughed in God’s face?”
The question left me stunned and at first I didn’t even know how to answer. Who would want to laugh in God’s face? Was it even possible?
“No,” I said finally.
“Well,” she chuckled, “I have. Every time I left one of those mementos with the girls. Every time I sent a girl back home, to Him, I laughed in his face. An eye for an eye. It says so in His book.” She then erupted into laughter, but, slowly, it faded and turned back into sobbing.
And there it was. It was simple, stupid, cruel and evil all rolled into one.
She was pissed at God.
And so she had taken the lives of innocent children to spite Him, to pay Him back for what she considered His cruelty to her; the birth of a daughter with Down’s syndrome.
I heard her move then. I wasn’t sure if she was adjusting herself or getting up, but either way, my nerves bunched and my muscles flexed in expectation of an attack. I felt Frisbee do the same but no attack came. Steve was yelling my name from outside. It sounded as if he were yelling into the garage via the vent hole. I wanted to answer but was petrified to call out in the darkness.
Emily said, “You want to know something? This is my house.”
I wasn’t sure if I had heard her right because my head began to spin, not from the gas fumes-although the fumes were helping-but because if what she had just said was the truth than I was almost certain that we were in the same place that those little girls had spent their last minutes on earth. I thought of the chair in the back bedroom. The lantern. The bloodstain on the floor.
“That’s right,” she continued. “I own this house. I got it when my first husband passed away. Well, he didn’t really pass away, I guess. He killed himself, in the back bedroom. Tied a rope to one of the rafters in the closet and jumped off a chair. While he was hanging himself, I was outside hanging laundry. I came in and found him with a note pinned to the uniform he was wearing. All it said was, ‘Can’t do it anymore, sorry.’ He was a fireman at the station up the street from here and when I called the authorities it was his partners that ended up cutting him down. I think he had seen too much death from his time in the department. There were too many people he couldn’t help and I think that always hurt him. He was sad and depressed all the time.”
Obviously he couldn’t help Emily either. I wondered if she had been just as crazy when she was with her first husband as she was with George Manning. Or maybe that was when she started going a little nutty, finding her first husband’s body and with the physical and verbal abuse she got from George, she just finally snapped.
“After I met and married George and moved into the house on Cottonwood, kids started breaking into this one and so the city made me board it up and put a padlock on the door. Now it isn’t worth a shit so it just sits here. And now it’s my Shelter.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked her. Didn’t she know I would relate all this to the police when I got out of there? If I got out of there.
After more than a minute of silence, she said, “Because, like I said, I’m done. God laughed in my face once and I paid him back a tenfold. Well maybe not a tenfold but… That little girl tonight was going to be my last one, I think. Then you two interrupted me and spoiled everything. But that’s okay, because I’m done.”
“That little girl is Jackie Hanel and she never did anything to you,” I spat. “You had no right.”
Emily Manning moaned a bit and said, “Didn’t she? I saw the whole lot of you the other day making fun of Jamie. Your dog was even trying to bite her. I saw the whole thing. I was going to kill her or maybe the other girl that was with you.” She meant Cory’s sister, Christy. “Just for teasing her.”
“We told your husband that day,” I tried to explain; “we weren’t teasing her. She was just petting Frisbee. That’s all.”
“Frisbee? Is that what you call that mutt?” she asked.
Frisbee gave a low growl as I said, “Yeah.”
“Well I saw what I saw. She was crying when she came inside. I know you guys must have done something to her.”
“Maybe she was crying because you took her inside” I explained. “Maybe she just wanted to play with Frisbee. He wouldn’t bite anyone.”
“He bit me!” she yelled.
That was true. And he had bitten Mike Wood. But it was only to protect us.
“He bit you because he knows who you are,” I told her. “And he knows what you did.”
“He’s just a dog. He couldn’t know that.”
I explained: “Last night, I was sleeping. I heard him bark and he woke me up. When I went outside to check on him, I saw you. You were across the street looking in Jackie’s bedroom window. He knew who you were and since he knew, I knew.” I chose not to tell her the part about Donald because I knew she’d think that I was the crazy one if I did.
She laughed, a low guttural chuckle. “So that’s how you knew? Your dog? He must be real special.”
I could hear her moving around more now as though her boots were scraping the hard wood floor. And then there came a metallic tapping and I thought of her screwdriver. I hadn’t forgotten she had a weapon.
Jason yelled my name through the vent as Steve had done before and finally I shouted back.
“I’m okay, Jason,” I said.
“Is she in there with you?” he asked, frightened. Steve would have told Jason and Cory the identity of the killer by this time.
I waited a moment, listening for her movements and when no more came I replied, “Yeah, she’s here.”
“Well can you get out?” he asked.
Now I went completely silent and still again. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face and didn’t know which way was which and it was Emily that responded to his question.
“Your friend’s stuck in here just like me,” she yelled. “I know you probably got me locked in here somehow. If you were able to get the padlock off then I’m sure you locked it back up once we were inside. I’ll tell you what. If you open the door up, then I let Ricky go. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to kill him.”
The words shocked me. I thought she had told me that she was done with killing. But I guess you can’t ever trust a person who will commit the crimes she did. She was evil and evil lies.
“Don’t listen to her,” I told Jason. “If you open the door back up she’ll kill us all. Go call the police. Frisbee will keep me safe.”
I didn’t want to stay in that house any longer than I had to-hell I didn’t want to be there in the first place, let alone with a serial killer. But if it meant keeping my brother and my friends from harm, I’d do it.
Emily Manning began laughing now. The pain from her injuries seemed to have left her and when she spoke I could tell that she’d moved away from the foyer and had closed in on Frisbee and me.
“Oh, Ricky. I have nothing left. When this is over, I will lose my family-like I give a shit. I will lose my homes-this one and the one with George and Jamie-again like I give a shit. I will spend the rest of my life either in jail or a loony-bin and that just
can’t happen. So I figure the only thing I can do now is end my own life. And since I doubt God will let me into Heaven the least I can do is send him one more gift, laugh in his face one last time.”
Just then I saw light out of the corner of my eye. Then it grew brighter in the room where we were. I had been kneeling next to the half open door that led into the garage and Steve was now shining the flashlight into the vent. It lit up the entire garage and half the living room we were in. Frisbee began to growl.
Emily Manning was standing in front of us. Her face was a ragged mess, her eyeball fat and swollen. She was favoring her injured foot by keeping it off the ground. She held the screwdriver above her head and was just bringing it down upon us, when, in a blur, Frisbee was on her, lunging at her throat.
As I bolted for the garage I heard her screaming-or trying to at least-then it was cut off. I wasn’t sure then if Frisbee had ripped her throat out or if he had just done enough to give me time to escape. I looked back but couldn’t see either of them as I ran for the vent. Steve was there lighting up the whole garage and everything seemed to waver in the fumes of the gas. They had dumped plenty of fuel in there as well.
I stuck my head through the hole and Steve and Jason began to pull me through, scraping up my legs even more than they had been from the fall in the driveway. In a matter of seconds I was out and on the side of the house, relieved to be away from that mad woman.
“Where’s Frisbee?” Steve asked, anxious.
I caught my breath and tried to explain, but only started coughing and crying. Jason was there, squatting next to me, telling me that I was okay. Cory was off to the side, throwing bottles full of liquid on to the house. One after another, they crashed on the roof and on the stucco and against the plywood covering the windows.
After a few moments, when my sobs had dwindled, I asked, “What’s he doing? Why’s Cory doing that?” I turned to him then and said, “Cory, knock it off. Come help us get Frisbee.” But just as I said it, Frisbee squirmed his way out of the vent hole and was free too.
“Good boy, Frisbee,” Steve said, petting him. “Alright you guys, get back.”
I looked around, not fully understanding what was going on. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Jason and Cory ran back into the field about twenty yards, getting clear of the property.
“Steve,” I said, “What are you doing? Come on. We need to go. We need to go call the police now.”
Steve turned to me then, his eyes looked a bit ashamed, and reached into his pocket, Frisbee barked.
“There’s been a change of plans, Ricky,” he said and brought out something that looked like a pack of Lifesavers. It was pink and had a gray string hanging from the middle.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “We need to leave. Come on.”
“Not yet,” he said. “Not until she’s taken care of. Not until she pays for what she did.”
“What is that?” I began, but when I saw him flick open Jacob’s silver Zippo and spin the wheel into life I knew that it wasn’t Lifesavers he was holding, it was the flower he had found the day after the firework show on our street.
Then it hit me: the gas inside, all the trash.
“Steve, no, you can’t,” I said.
But he did. He stuck the flame to the gray fuse and once it caught and sparkled, he threw it through the vent into the garage. Quickly he snapped the lighter shut and wiped off the metal casing with his shirt and dropped it at our feet. I didn’t know then why he had done that but I found out later. And in the next second, I reached into my own pocket and removed the shoelace. I didn’t need it and I sure didn’t want it. I dropped it too.
Steve, Frisbee and I began running into the field toward Jason and Cory. It was about three seconds later that the garage exploded. It didn’t come apart but the walls went all wobbly and they ended up leaning funny like a drunk.
The bottles that Cory had thrown at the house were filled with gasoline and the whole structure began to crackle and smoke. And then we heard her inside, Emily Manning screaming like a demon from Hell. Combined with the lightening and thunder it seemed as though judgment day was upon us and it was as if the story about the abandoned house, and the screaming ghost inside, had become real.
The five of us high tailed it down Magnolia and by the time we got to the dirt path in Dead Grove the whole house was an inferno.
When we got back to the now broken gate at the entrance to the alley, we heard the sirens.
When we got back to the tent in Cory’s backyard Steve realized he had left his BB gun behind.
And when we sat back down on our sleeping bags, Cory said, “You think she’s dead yet?”
Frisbee Page 67
