The Dark Game

by Jonathan Janz

  Late-night walks along the ocean, making love on the shore or in her big cozy bed. She never wrote her novel, nor did the infatuation last long. Not for him anyway. But before she went away in August, his fall term not beginning until early September so he could at least enjoy the last few weeks of break without her constant presence, she informed him she was ‘with child’, saying it exactly like that.

  Tommy scowling, asked her what she was going to do about it. She’d looked at him sadly and said, I’m going to name him Thomas, and it had taken all he had not to puke. Won’t you go with us? she’d asked. You can write during the evenings and watch Thomas during the day while I teach.

  And Tommy had laughed at her, laughed so fucking hard that tears had streamed from his eyes. He refrained from slamming the door in her face, but she saw how it was, just looked at him with her sad doe’s eyes, and wished him well, which was the worst part of it, the part that returned to him now.

  This was the tree in front of Tammi’s vacation house, the place she’d rented in order to write her novel, the place she’d been impregnated. The child would now be…what? Seven years old? Almost eight?

  Hard to believe.

  Almost as hard to believe as the sight that awaited him on the other side of the oak tree.

  The creek. The exact creek that serpentined around the countryside near his hometown. His heartbeat whamming in his chest, he halted before he tumbled down a ridge, certain he would find Suzy Powlen awaiting him on the shore below, the mentally challenged girl, pimple-backed and drooling.

  He was ready to bolt in the other direction the moment he glimpsed Suzy or any other spooky shit, but peering through the dappled leaves that swayed gently over the creek bank, he saw nothing but wet stones, gritty black sand, and gently lapping water, dark and soothing as dreams.

  Tommy was sweating like crazy, his clothes pasted to him, so he peeled off his tank top, chucked it onto the path. He wasn’t listening for it, so when he heard it, it caught him off guard.

  The laughter.

  Tommy walked along the gritty sand and breathed in the river smells. He heard the laugh again, and though it was faint, he thought he’d pinpointed it now, from just around the rock wall to his right, the bank very steep there.

  Finally, the shore broadened, the bank becoming a sandy beach, gorgeous, and mottled with sunlight. Tommy smiled, taking it in. He couldn’t believe his luck. He couldn’t believe—

  A sloshing sound to his right.

  He turned that way and beheld the blue-black object in the water. A small boulder, poking through the surface. Tommy frowned, stepped from the thick sand to the stone-littered verge. Saw the object was rising, discerned a paleness, someone’s forehead, and before he could comprehend what he was seeing, there was a face, shut lids and…

  …it was Tammi, her face as it had been that summer long ago, the neck, the breasts, the nude body rising out of the water.

  Her belly distended in pregnancy.

  He took a step backward, unwilling to believe it. How had she found him here?

  Tommy retreated, and though the sight of her pregnant belly shocked him, his eyes shifted to her flanks, where another pair of heads began to breach the surface. The first head rose, a blond one. His former girlfriend Megan, nude, strode out of the water, a shaft of sunlight passing over her closed lids and her large breasts. Under that, the enlarged stomach, the belly button pushed outward like a grotesque flesh dome.

  On Tammi’s other side he spied Lexi, the girl he’d boned by the river, and Lexi hadn’t aged a day. Except she must have aged about nine months from the time he impregnated her, her gut was so swollen. His eyes tracked lower, and he gagged when he saw the tiny foot dangling from her vagina. Her labia spread wider, and he glimpsed the child’s lower half, another leg, a tiny penis, and it was too much. He moaned, reeled backward, and discovered two more heads emerging from the water.

  One of them was Suzy Powlen’s.

  Like the other women’s, Sloppy Suzy’s eyes were closed. But her belly was enormous. Tommy sank to the sand, but he couldn’t look away. The women’s eyes were opening, the naked, pregnant women, and their eyes were stark white, their mouths stretching in leers, their teeth blackened and mud-caked, and grime was squeezing from between their teeth.

  Tommy marshaled the strength to crawl away from the creek, but he heard laughter. He realized there were several children on the beach, five or six of them. The children were perhaps kindergarten age, they were naked and staring at him, and somehow this was worse than anything else, worse even than the mothers, because the eyes of these children were normal, they were his eyes, because they were his children. Little boys and girls, their arms out, their feet padding toward him.

  Tommy screamed at the sky, wailed, and the kids were surrounding him, and Tommy screamed, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” but his words died in a choking rattle. The children forced him backward to the sand, they held him down, preparing him, and he looked up, saw the white-eyed mothers, and squealed in horror, because their babies had plopped to the sand, were crawling sightlessly toward him, their tiny teeth like razors. The mothers leered at him, supervising the kill, the afterbirth trailing from the hideous newborns, which reached Tommy and began tearing at his flesh.

  Chapter Six

  From the Diary of Sherilyn Jackson:

  My partner Alicia has been pestering me to keep a diary. I argue that a record of my life would be worthless. Who reads that shit anyway? Biographies are always of presidents or rock stars. Who the hell am I?

  But since we have to start somewhere, let’s begin with this:

  It sucks to be poor.

  Oh, my family wasn’t so poor that my brothers and sisters and I sat around in a dusty dooryard like you see in all the pictures. But we definitely qualified for food stamps and plenty of disdain from the folks in town. Then our daddy got gangrene because of poor circulation, which was brought on by diabetes, which was caused by a shitty diet because he couldn’t afford a better one. At any rate, it all comes down to money, doesn’t it?

  I just re-read this and want to slap myself. It sounds so goddamned lachrymose. I just wanted to get it out there that money has always been an issue for me and as a result, I’ll admit it, I started looking for a man to marry when I came of age. My number one criterion, even before a good sense of humor and a smile that made me moist down below, was the dude had to have money. The more the better. Because by the time I was seventeen I was seriously tired of wearing hand-me-downs from my older sisters. I’m talking about clothes that had been cycled, recycled, and finally flung at me, holes in knees, busted zippers, faded colors. Even streak marks in panties. And when you’re forced to wear your sister’s shit-stained underwear, you really start to crave something better.

  That something better was David Zendejas.

  Let’s get the name out of the way first. It sounds Hispanic, and somewhere along the line one of David’s relatives might have lived in Mexico. I don’t know. What I know is he looks black, and my mom lit up whenever he called on me. Daddy by that time had lost both legs and spent a couple years stinking up the back bedroom and finally died looking nothing like the strong cheerful man who used to toss me up in the air when I was a little girl.

  Sad. And unfortunate. I think if Daddy had been healthy when Zendie began sniffing around, he would’ve seen right through him and either kicked his smiling ass or at least sent him away.

  No one sent him away, least of all my mother. Zendie would bring her flowers (not me, mind you, her) and smile his brilliant smile, and his hugeness and good looks and deep voice would charm the shit out of my mom. He could’ve fucked me right on the front porch if he’d wanted to. Hell, Mom would’ve pulled up a chair and complimented him on his technique.

  But like I said, I was only seventeen, and if seventeen sounds old enough to you, please note that Zendie was already twenty-eig
ht and the father of three illegitimate children (from three different women).

  I look back and wonder why he chose me. He was already head pastor at a Tuscaloosa church and had a score of attractive young women to choose from. He bedded half of them after we got hitched, and when we’d been married two years he got an offer from a slightly larger church, and he took it, but that one didn’t have as many sets of pert breasts and tight asses, so in short order we moved to another church, and for eighteen months we were happy. I was happy because he was finally talking about having a baby. I was still a kid, barely over twenty, but my sisters were having babies, and every lady in the congregation seemed to have a child on each teat and I caught the fever and began to assert myself, which was probably why he put an end to that talk pronto (one of his favorite words) by garnishing my allowance and using the hard flat palm of his hand.

  Allowance was what he called it, but it was really my spending money. I used to be ashamed of this, but I’ve realized over time that everyone is an asshole sometimes.

  So I was being an asshole and letting the money go to my head. It wasn’t much money in the vast scheme of things but it was more than I’d ever had in my life. I became a fixture at the outlet malls and started buying organic food even though I didn’t give a shit that it was healthier. I just liked the sound of it. So maybe to support his wife’s organic carrot addiction, Zendie took an offer to shepherd a flock of eight thousand parishioners in one of the biggest Baptist churches in Tuscaloosa.

  Now why, when his congregation had never been larger and his pickings more plentiful, Zendie had to prey on a married woman – the wife of the youth pastor, for fuck’s sakes – I’ll never know. (Oh, Zendie never stopped cheating. If it was pretty and willing he’d hump it. Only once if the girl just lay back and let him rut out his passion, multiple times if the girl wanted to get more adventurous. Of course, he never wanted me to be adventurous. If I ever made a comment he judged too lewd he’d show me his hard flat palm. So forget any adventures in the bedroom for Sherilyn Jackson, who was then called Sherilyn Zendejas, whose initials were SIZ, for Sherilyn Irene Zendejas, which always sounded to me like some sexually transmitted disease or maybe some syndrome infants got in the hospital, but anyway.…)

  Zendie got caught with his pants down. Literally. And I abhor tired clichés and the adverb literally but both descriptions fit. My husband was banging the youth pastor’s wife in the church toddler playroom, the young woman draped over one of those Fisher-Price kitchen sets, her bare ass in the air and my husband ramming her from behind like he was punishing her for burning an imaginary cake.

  Unlike other administrators, the ones in the First Baptist Church of Tuscaloosa weren’t willing to overlook my husband’s habit of sticking his dong in every willing lady he encountered, and he was promptly sacked. I was pissed about my allowance being cut in half (a result of my husband’s firing and subsequent return to his previous church, which apparently took no umbrage to Zendie’s never-ending search for sexual gratification), and I wanted a child. Zendie argued it was a bad idea to conceive when we had less money coming in. I pointed out that he’d by that time fathered four illegitimate children and didn’t seem to mind sending payments to them, so why would he demur to impregnate his own wife?

  I’d seen people choked in movies. But let me tell you, feeling those big viselike fingers on your throat and looking into those bulging mad eyes is some seriously scary shit. You think to yourself, Whoa, this is real. And then, Damn, this really hurts. Then, Holy shit, I just might die here. And finally, Son of a bitch, I am dying here.

  Okay, it’s time for me to work on my novel. I aim to win this contest.

  And not for the reasons you think.

  I said I was writing this diary because of Alicia’s pestering, and Alicia, if you ever read this, that’s true. You do deserve some of the credit.

  But here’s the thing (and if this is me being an asshole again, so be it):

  I’m afraid of Roderick Wells.

  I’ve tried not to let it show, but there it is. I’m afraid of him. If anything happens, I want there to be a record of what occurred here. Wherever here is.

  Which reminds me of one more thing. The strangling. Or near-strangling. The first of many.

  I lay on the kitchen floor and wheezed into the tile and dirty grout. I thought about my twenties and thirties going by without having a baby. I thought of growing older while Zendie kept preying on the same young sluts who fell for his charm and his looks (which only seemed to be growing better). I cried thinking about it and began to feel hopeless.

  And angry.

  It was when I was being strangled that I first entertained the notion of killing my husband.

  Chapter Seven

  Blocked, frustrated, Lucy climbed the staircase, but rather than stopping at the chapel she continued down the third-floor corridor. She was halfway down the hallway when she paused, one door in particular calling to her, and for no reason at all she thought of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, and where she’d been forbidden to go. The West Wing?

  With a delicious tremor, Lucy reached out, twisted the knob. Nudged the door inward and stepped inside.

  She stood openmouthed at the ballroom unspooling before her. It was breathtaking. Perhaps sixty by eighty feet, the ceiling domed and hung with numerous chandeliers, a mammoth one in the center of the dance floor, which was comprised of black-and-white tile and wreathed with circular tables, and all thoughts of Beauty and the Beast scattered, replaced now by thoughts of The Great Gatsby, a grander time. Lucy strode onto the dance floor and imagined the tables peopled by women in flowing gowns, their men shiny-haired and black-tuxed, everyone smoking, every face full of knowing good humor, watching her. Feeling slightly foolish, Lucy executed a pirouette, stumbled a little, dancing never really being her thing.

  She regained her balance, heaved a sigh, and beamed at her surroundings. Though it was gloomy in here, there were skylights that threw enough illumination for her to see. If she were to turn on the chandeliers, she’d feel exposed, ostentatious. As though she believed she deserved this sort of grandeur. And…

  …and did she hear the faintest musical notes sounding from the recesses of the ballroom? As if some elegant orchestra were tucked in the shadows, urging her to dance?

  No, she realized, not to dance – to write.

  Oh my God, she thought, aware of the thrum in her head. At first she didn’t credit the vibration for what it was, but now she realized…yes, this was the vibration she’d experienced before writing The Girl Who Died, all those years ago. It had felt like this, a psychic thrum, a spiritual thrill. She was starting to see the figures materialize from the darkness, to hear the music from the orchestra. She could almost identify the tune. Then the voice spoke from behind her, making her shriek, flail her hands, and she whirled and stared at the figure seated beside the door, her heart jackhammering.

  “Aren’t you going to answer my question?” the figure asked.

  She knew who it was, and the knowledge did nothing to soothe her jangling nerves. Wilson, Wells’s handyman, was watching her, waiting for a response. Worse, he was amused. She knew this as surely as she knew she was in trouble. No one had any idea she was up here.

  No one but Wilson.

  She knew it would come out unconvincingly, but she drew herself up anyway. “You always sit in shadowy rooms waiting to scare the hell out of people?”

  “I was here first.”

  “I would have seen you.”

  “Seeing isn’t your specialty. Nor, evidently, is overcoming your demons.”

  Lucy frowned. Though it was gloomy near the door, she couldn’t help but notice the way his hair gleamed. Slicked back. And what was he wearing?

  A tuxedo.

  Lucy’s chest tightened.

  She fought it off, said, “I’m gathering details for my novel.”

 
“Am I supposed to report that to Mr. Wells? Make you sound dutiful?” His drawl was affected, honey-sweet. Overlaid with a scornfulness so thick she couldn’t help but think of Fred Morehouse.

  “I don’t care what you do,” she said.

  Her feet itched for the door, which was open, thank God. But escaping not only required moving within arm’s reach of Wilson, it was a bald admission that he was scaring her.

  “You and one other are the stragglers,” Wilson commented. “And I suspect he’ll be writing by night’s end.” A nod. “That leaves you.”

  Her voice came out shaky. “I’m going downstairs.”

  “And leave this place?” Wilson asked. “You gonna tell me you weren’t imagining what it’d be like to own this ballroom? To throw fancy galas here?”

  “I’m not a fan of crowds.”

  “There’s another spot you should see.”

  She hated the way he’d invited the obvious question, also a Fred Morehouse tactic. She refused to play along. “I wish I could say I’ve enjoyed talking to you—”

  “A farmhouse. There’s an upstairs room that’d be particularly fascinating to you.”

  She moved toward the door. “I’m not interested.”

  Wilson sat sideways in his chair, half-blocking the doorway. “Isn’t it funny how we’re shaped by our experiences? How things just…dog us, no matter how we try to run?”

  “Look, Wilson.…” She stopped when she saw him chuckling.

  “Wilson?” he said, passed a hand over his mouth. “No Mister, huh? Just Wilson?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “‘Get me my dinner, Wilson!’” he called, his voice deepening in mock authority. “‘Carry my bags for me, Wilson!’”