I sent another kick at his crotch, hoping for the satisfying crunch and pop of his testicles against my foot. But my kick was stopped in midair by one pale hand, and he lifted and threw and I was flying backwards, doing an impression of a novice tumbler, first looking up, then down, the house around me right side up, then upside down, whirling and twirling like I was caught in a whirlwind. My face met the floor and all motion stopped, the world seemed to pause, and then blackness seeped in like a fluttering blanket settling atop me.
* * *
When next I opened my eyes I found myself in a chair at the dining table next to my parents. My sister and Jim were also in chairs across the table from us. We could have been sitting down for dinner if not for the fact that we were all bound to the furniture we sat on.
The fishing line bit cruelly into my wrists and ankles, and when I tried to wriggle them I felt a numbness and tingling like the pins and needles when a limb has fallen asleep. Through the slim partings in the curtains at the windows, it seemed all the darkness wasn’t just from the lack of lighting in here. Afternoon had passed and evening had settled in.
The clock on the wall above the television read nine o’clock.
I’d been out for awhile.
Looking around the table, first at my parents then at my sister and friend, I saw they were all conscious or close to it. Panicked eyes looked back at me, and I guessed I probably looked much the same to them. I wanted to say something to them, but jammed deep into my mouth was a cloth of some sort, tasting of old food and carrying with it the faint smells of long ago meals.
I didn’t see Tara anywhere.
She wasn’t at the table with us, and from my mostly unobstructed view of the kitchen and living room, she wasn’t in those rooms either. Unless she was lying on the floor, unconscious or dead, out of sight behind the sofa.
I remembered where she’d hit the foyer closet door. Where she’d fallen to the ground. That spot was visible from where I sat, and she wasn’t there.
I also thought of Bandit upstairs somewhere, injured, maybe worse, and I renewed my struggles against the fishing line. The numbness initially allowed my fingers and toes to only move in brief and spastic wiggles. Across from me, Jim shook his head and the message was clear: we’ve all tried, there’s no use. But slowly feeling returned to my arms and legs and I was able to pull harder against the fishing line. My chair rocked with my struggles, tilting from side to side and nudged against my parents to either side of me.
Dad moaned, and I looked at him and the expression on his face matched that of Jim’s. I wasn’t trying anything the rest of them hadn’t, and I was wasting my time and energy.
Disconsolate, I ceased my rocking.
Instead, I nodded at each of them, then nodded at an empty space beside Jim and Sarah. My meaning was clear as well: Where’s Tara?
I looked at my mom first, then Dad.
The sorrow and fear on their faces was plain and raw.
I looked across the table at Jim and my sister. They both looked away, unwilling to meet my eyes.
I turned back to Dad, panic again rising to the forefront, and I tensed, ready to begin pulling anew at the fishing wire around my hands and feet.
Where is she? I tried to send wordlessly to him. I was breathing hard against the balled-up cloth in my mouth, so that I was making a frantic Darth Vader sort of breathing sound. Dad nodded and I followed the direction of his gesture to the stairs, and I looked back at him and he nodded again towards the stairs.
Upstairs.
Tara was up there somewhere with the Collector.
I remembered Lookout Mountain and Tara standing at the edge with the gun where the Collector and Mr. Templeton had fallen over. The gun in her hand, smoking at the muzzle.
She had shot the Collector at least twice, she told us later.
We had thought, or hoped, that he had died that night. I remembered the police telling me that he had probably stumbled a little ways, then fallen, unconscious, and probably dragged away by animals. That story had been so appealing after the horror preceding it, I think we all just accepted it with a tired, resigned hope.
But he wasn’t dead.
And now he’d come back to collect. Sometimes he collected things that were owed. Sometimes he collected for himself. This is the night, I remembered him saying, his dark and insane poetry. These are the times.
He was upstairs with Tara, and he was collecting.
2.
He came down sometime later, seeming to float down the stairs as he had done the first time. In the dark he seemed like a part of the night, a piece of it separated from the rest, a disengaged probe of shadow and substance. He crossed the living room to the dining table, his hands in his pockets like a leisurely stroller through the park. I thought of the first time I’d seen him walking down our street from my bedroom window, and thinking that maybe if I threw the window up I’d hear him whistling some lackadaisical tune. Maybe something like the Andy Griffith theme.
There in our home, walking towards us, he was whistling, but it wasn’t anything as upbeat as a 60s television theme. It had sharp and abrupt fits and starts, like a song he was making up as he went along.
Strolling and whistling, relaxed and calm.
Collecting must be meditative and stress relieving in some way, I remember thinking, and wondered what that meant for Tara.
I shook my head and groaned loudly against the gag in my mouth as the Collector came up alongside the table. He stopped whistling and looked at everyone in turn. Even from this close his face was only a smudge of whiteness beneath the low hanging brim of his black fedora. Then he was looking at me. How I knew this since I couldn’t even make out his eyes, I don’t know. But he was looking at me, and I think that perhaps he was smiling.
He pulled up a chair to the free space at the table beside Jim and Sarah, directly across from me. Sitting, the length of his coat draped the chair like a cover and rustled with leathery whispers as it settled.
“There is a price that must be paid for every action,” the Collector said, leaning towards me ever so slightly over the table. “In this life there is a balance to all things.”
I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, but I didn’t look away from him. I couldn’t. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t allow it anyway.
“Last time we met,” the Collector continued, “you and your friends impeded me from my collection. As a matter of fact, in a lesson of irony, you collected from me instead of the other way around.”
He removed his right hand from his coat pocket and raised it to his collar. In the dimness of the dining room I was still able to discern that the hand was wet and gleamed with its wetness. A deep scarlet in the darkened room, I didn’t want to think about what that redness on his hand meant. The bloodied hand went to the collar of his black coat and pulled it down and over his shoulder. Baring flesh whiter than my ass cheeks, so pale as to almost be translucent, I saw a puckered scar still partially scabbed over, just under his collarbone. He covered the white flesh again, pulling up the collar of the coat so it was only his face and hands that broke the pattern of blackness about him.
His wet hand went back into his coat pocket.
“You collected from me,” he said, me only half listening at first, still thinking about that patch of pale flesh like marble, “and so I collected in turn.”
This last brought my attention back from the shock of the glimpse of his pallid skin, and I was again enthralled by the words he spoke. He had collected in turn, and I was about to learn what that meant.
“I have a gift for you,” he said and looked down to indicate his hands in his coat pockets. “I will allow you to choose.”
I bit down on the cloth in my mouth. I was shaking, looking from either side of him, down below the table where his hands were out of sight, in his pockets, holding my possible “gifts.” I didn’t want to choose, didn’t want to play his games.
But I knew I had no choice.
If I refused, who knew who he would collect from next: my mom or dad; Sarah or Jim; or even me. I’d felt the touch of his knife before; felt it draw my blood. I didn’t want to ever feel that again.
I nodded towards his right hand. The one I’d already seen. The one with the blood coating it like paint.
The Collector nodded.
“Excellent choice.” Withdrawing his hand again from the coat, he cupped something in his palm, looking down on it like a jeweler considering a gem. I couldn’t see it yet from my perspective, but Jim, right next to the Collector, did, and his eyes widened even more, so wide I thought they might roll out of his head and onto the table like spilled marbles. The Collector looked up from his cupped hand to me, then stretched his arm out across the table, showing me what he held. “Here is some of what I have collected thus far.”
Lying in his palm in a circle of blood was an ear.
Not a human ear, though.
The triangular, fur-covered ear of a German shepherd dog.
I screamed behind the gag. I bolted forward against the fishing wire that held me to the chair. My midsection collided with the edge of the table as I tried to get to the Collector across from me. The collision knocked me backwards. The chair rocked back on its legs. I didn’t try to stand again, but I kept screaming, the breath of it pushing against the gag.
“You wish to speak?” the Collector asked calmly. As if he held nothing remarkable in his bloodied hand.
I nodded, still huffing behind the cloth stuffed in my mouth.
“I’d like to hear what you have to say.”
He leaned forward, stretching his right arm across the length of the table. He reached for my face, my mouth, the blood-soaked hand beneath my nose so that I could smell it, the rawness of it, and two fingers darted between my lips and I could taste it, the coppery and salty taste of my dog’s blood. These bloody probes sought the gag, snatched it, and yanked it out of my mouth. I tried to bite him at the last moment, missed, and my teeth clacked together painfully.
“You fucker! What’d you do to my dog? I’ll kill you! What’d you do you fucker!”
I thought the force of my words must blow him back like a gale force wind, but he merely sat there across from me. Watching from the shadows of himself as I spewed my venom, trying to burn him with it, to engulf and destroy him with it.
I kept at it until he reached across the table and slapped me hard. The blow was staggering, sent my chair again rocking so that for a moment I thought I’d spill backwards.
“I am the Collector. I collect what is owed, and sometimes I collect for myself.”
He may have been ready to say more, or he may have said all that he wanted to me. I’d never know. His left hand came out of the coat too, and it was holding the long bowie knife. The point of it pointed in my direction.
Then the front door flew inward with a crash, splinters of it rattling to the ground. The Collector turned away from me at the disturbance. I craned to look past him.
Brock was in the doorway, moving in, pistol in hand.
Silver-haired Vincent Perrelli was close behind, his gun at the ready as well.
The two men took in the scene quickly. They saw us at the table, the moonlight outside casting us in its glow. They saw the Collector, moving towards them across the room, knife in hand.
“You failed,” Mr. Perrelli said to the dark figure gliding his way. “Our contract is nullified.”
Who fired first, I don’t know, but one moment there was a silence after Mr. Perrelli’s pronouncement, like a dramatic pause onstage, and then both he and Brock were shooting, the pistols spitting fire like tiny rocket engines. The Collector danced a spastic dance like a broken marionette dangled by a drunken puppeteer. His knife was jerked out of his hands and flew past my head. It hit the wall and clattered somewhere behind me.
The Collector fell to the ground in a black mass.
The guns fell silent with empty magazines.
I looked at my dad. He looked at me, nodded.
We both rocked backwards and sent ourselves in our chairs falling. The collision of my back on the dining room floor was hard and painful. I tried to hold my breath and steel myself, and still most of the wind was knocked out of me. My hands tied to the back of the chair were smashed and throbbed under the weight of me.
But I gritted my teeth, looked to either side from my new horizontal perspective. I saw my dad, also dazed by the fall. He saw me. We both saw the knife between us.
We both scooted awkwardly towards it.
Footsteps coming across the floor marched in our direction.
I lifted my head, stared down the length of my body, between my legs and under the table. Saw two pairs of black slacks and shiny black loafers coming our way.
“Hurry, Dad!”
I felt my fingers brush the knife.
My dad’s grasped it first and pulled it away.
The black panted legs planted themselves in front of me, above us, and the bodies they were attached to, Mr. Perrelli and Brock, towered high. Perrelli smiled down at me as he ejected the spent magazine, pulled out a spare from his jacket pocket.
“Well, well,” Perrelli said. “Lucky we came early. Looks like the party was starting without us.”
He fit the new magazine into the pistol. Aimed it at me.
Brock likewise reloaded and pointed his pistol at Dad.
Mom was crying behind her gag, still upright in her chair. Looking from Perrelli to me and Dad on the floor, her eyes flitted frantically, trying to see everything at the same time.
“I think you need to tell us where the money is,” Mr. Perrelli said.
“It’s not midnight,” I said stupidly, unable to think of anything else to say, thinking only of the unfairness of it all. I stared up into the muzzle of that gun and there was nothing else to say.
There was no money, this man would never believe that, and I was dead. That was the short and sweet of it, that was the ending to my short life, and there was nothing to be done about it.
“The money, Joey,” he repeated.
And since I was dead anyway, I decided I might as well go out with style.
“Have Brock bend over,” I said. “You’ll find it with your dick up his ass.”
Mr. Perrelli’s smile faltered and that made me smile, and me smiling made his smile fade completely, and that made me laugh.
“We burnt the money, dickhead,” I said. “A bunch of kids burnt ten million dollars, you stupid tool.”
Vincent Perrelli shook his head like this was disappointing news, and he extended his arm and the pistol was there, mere inches away. His finger curled around the trigger.
“How unfortunate that our business had to end this way,” he said.
An explosion; a small thunder. I waited for the feel of the bullet shattering my face. Then I realized that it should have happened before that thought was even complete.
More gunfire, and I was still alive.
Mr. Perrelli dropped to the ground beside me, rolled away, taking cover behind the table. I saw him holding his left arm. Saw the moonlight glitter and reflect off the blood there.
I looked in the other direction, towards Dad. Saw him fumbling for the knife again, grasping it, trying to turn the blade towards the fishing wire at his wrists.
Brock had darted into the kitchen, putting a wall between him and whoever had opened fire. I thought of Tara, upstairs, and maybe she’d found one of Dad’s guns, had come down charging to the rescue.
I looked down the length of my body again, saw the table and my mom and sister and Jim still sitting there, prominently in the line of crossfire. Under the table and across the room towards the front door, I saw the lower half of someone in the doorway.
A guy, not a girl. Not Tara.
I saw the hem of a brown suede jacket.
On the floor near me, Mr. Perrelli stood and fired. The guy at the front door dropped to the ground, rolled behind the sofa. I saw his face as he rolled and scrambled for cover.
The greasy hair, the crooked smile like everything was a game.
Mr. Smirk. Dillon Glover.
“You killed my dad, shithead!” he called from behind his cover.
Even in the midst of this chaos, I wondered why a kid like him would give a shit about his asshole of a dad dying. Then I remembered Fat Bobby, and how he’d moped about for days following the death of his dad atop Lookout Mountain. How he’d had us drive to the funeral so he could say his goodbyes.
Maybe, regardless of who brings us into this world, there’s still something owed. A loyalty or devotion beyond sense and reason.
Dillon jumped up from behind the sofa, took sloppy aim at Mr. Perrelli, pulled the trigger. Vincent Perrelli dropped behind the table again. Splinters of wood spit into the air and rained down on me, and I turned my head.
Looking towards the kitchen I saw Brock leaning against the wall, tensing, and darting out. Dillon saw him, swung his gun towards the tombstone-headed man, fired. Brock fired also.
Both of them went down. Neither got up.
In the sudden silence I could hear the breathing of many people. A chorus of breathing. A choir of fear and expectation.
Mr. Perrelli stood, favoring his injured arm. He turned this way and that, almost as if hypnotized, surveying the scene around him.
“Well,” he said, “that was unexpected.”
Dad leapt to his feet beside me, hopped over me, charged Mr. Perrelli, buried the bowie knife into the older man’s stomach. Wrenching his gun hand down and to the side so that the reflexive pulls of Perrelli’s trigger finger fired the rounds harmlessly into the floor, Dad’s momentum carried them into the far wall.
The impact shook the house and framed pictures swung on the wall as if by poltergeist hands. Dad twisted and thrust with the knife, skewering Perrelli and lifting the man almost off the ground, so that he slid up the wall a bit. Blood oozed from his stomach, and Mr. Perrelli spit some of it up like scarlet vomit. It rolled down his lips and chin in trickles. His eyes widened. He scowled and looked down on my dad.
“This … isn’t supposed … to happen …” he rasped, the words punctuated by liquid pops as blood bubbles burst from between his lips. “This … isn’t right …”
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 26
