by Sandy DeLuca
* * *
I watch as Bobby shovels dirt, his eyes fastened on the shallow grave he’s digging. There have been so many graves, so many bodies covered with burlap tarps. Sometimes I hear them pleading for their lives. Sometimes I think I’m the one who is crying for help in the dark.
The radio is on in Bobby’s van. A commentator speaks about a missing girl, last seen in Boston. Her name is Sally Brent. She’s a tall blonde with freckles. She wore a New England Patriots sweatshirt, jeans and white sneakers when last seen.
Bobby tosses one of the bodies into the grave. The burlap falls away, revealing a blonde girl; blood soaks her hair and smears her face. A tattered New England Patriots sweat shirt hangs from her torso—or what’s left of it.
I turn, move in between two towering oaks, and I weep because I didn’t have the power to save her, and I need to gather the power to save myself.
* * *
School got cancelled the following day. The roads were devoid of traffic except for an occasional snowplow. Eddie didn’t go to work—or wherever he went during the day. He spent most of the morning shoveling the drive and walk. Mary Beth stayed in their bedroom, door locked, humming something low and incomprehensible. I imagined she held the wooden box and rocked back and forth on the bed, like she always did when she got upset—when Eddie left her side, asking him, “What do you do with them? Do you tell them they’re going die, or do you kill them without warning?”
I peeked out my window, watching Eddie as he shoveled; an ordinary man, with doughy hands and a stout body—like somebody’s father or uncle—a man a kid could trust. I didn’t want to believe the horror Jane showed me, or remember teenage faces as Eddie bound their hands, smiled slowly when blood began to trickle on his basement floor.
I had to leave Mary Beth and Eddie. I wanted to be like other girls, and live in a normal world. I thought Bobby could take me away, give me a good life, but I didn’t realize his iniquity.
On that day I slept a while, as a chill crept into my room, and the wind beat branches against my window. It was early afternoon when I opened my eyes. I needed to walk, to think about what I’d done with Bobby. Maybe he’d be standing in a storefront, waiting for me.
I dressed in high boots, a long coat with a hood and wrapped a scarf around my neck. The streets were plowed, but the walks were still deep with snow. The temperature had dropped below zero, turning snow to ice, glazing trees with crystal icicles and causing me to slip if I wasn’t careful. The chill seeped into my bones, made my face numb and my hands tingle.
Eddie watched as I slid a bit on the walk, and then I caught my balance. I gave him a quick wave. His eyes narrowed, and he yelled something about getting back before dinner. I nodded, and then I moved toward Tandaro’s Pizza. I smelled breads and Italian food and the windows were steamy.
A few customers huddled at tables, bundled in winter clothes, lips moving and eyes staring straight ahead. Something was off, as though those people existed in a dream world, their faces milk white and eyes without emotion.
Wasn’t the building boarded up the day before, its sign dangling from a broken chain, windows spray-painted with graffiti? I had to be mistaken. The structures in Barlow Falls all looked the same.
“Bobby?” I called to the barren landscape, knowing he was part of loneliness, the pain, the fabric of what I’d become. For a moment I wondered if I truly walked among the dead—and if I’d become one of them.
“Bobby?” I called again in vain, because the name haunted me, because I still smelled his scent and felt the heat from his kisses, and the soreness between my legs.
This couldn’t be happening to me again. What was wrong with me? I thought he loved me, and could save me from Mary Beth and Eddie.
A voice sounded from inside the restaurant, “I can save you.”
At that moment the sound of flapping wings sounded and a dark shape stretched across the sky. A streetlight flickered, and then dimmed. Brakes screeched, and the school bus slowly moved down the street. Bobby waved. Something dripped from the window, thick and red; and I swore I heard Mary screaming in the back.
Bobby stopped and the door opened. Smells of copper and something rotten assaulted me. “Hop in. I’m taking them all where they belong. Care to tag along?” His eyes were warm, inviting, so I stepped inside, wanting him again, loving him. “This won’t be our last bus ride. Years from now we’ll come back and do it again.”
His words were strange, haunting, and he smiled at me, tough, brilliant and deadly.
I climbed onto the bus, brushed by him, feeling excitement, wanting to be with him again in the back of that old Ford van.
He whispered, “It can be like that forever.”
I took comfort in those words, and feared them, too, as I moved farther into the bus. All the seats were filled, except for the back seat against the rear window. Somebody tripped me as I made my way down the aisle. Someone else spit. I wiped phlegm from my face and sat down. Mary squeezed beside me. She smiled, and then waved her knife back and forth.
“What do you want?”
Mary didn’t answer, just ran the blade across her neck. Bobby watched in the rearview mirror, nodding, pulling the bus onto the snow-streaked highway, driving toward the flames of Hell.
I awoke when my mother screamed my name, and Eddie’s low voice seemingly tried to comfort her. Didn’t he realize he could not tame Mary Beth’s demons? Didn’t he know they’d destroy him, too—despite what he was capable of?
12
They thought I was asleep, but I peered at them from behind the hallway door. Eddie sat in the living room with Mary Beth. He spoke slowly, carefully to my mother. “It’ll be alright.”
She shook her head, sobbing, hands trembling. Her voice was weak, “I keep seeing her face—so white—and with blood all over her clothes. Tell me what happened again. I keep forgetting.”
Eddie patted Mary Beth’s hand. “The meds make you forget.”
“Tell me,” she whispered.
He nodded. “The police found her in an empty bus parked in the school lot. She slashed her wrists, but didn’t cut deep enough to lose a lot of blood. She’ll be admitted to the psych unit at County Hospital on Friday. They gave her strong meds, and a day or two at home won’t matter.” He paused. “The knife—I noticed it was missing from the kitchen, but figured I misplaced it. Things disappear, and then turn up—happens all the time.
“I looked through her school things, notebooks and the like, hoping I could find a clue—a reason why she’d do this to herself.” He gazed at snow drifting past the window. “Found some notes about a guy named Bobby Tandaro. His family used to own the pizza place down the street. It’s been closed for years, boarded up like lots of places around here. She claims they had a thing. Impossible.
“She wrote about Mary Sacks, Pamela Reardon, Jimmy Russo and Carmine DelFino. I found clippings stashed in one of her notebooks, things I’d saved. All those kids are dead—buried.” He sighed. “She collects books, about people like Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate—stacks of them, with highlighted pages.”
My mother sobbed. “She’s lost her mind, making up things in her head, believing Jane comes to her, shows her things. She writes it all down—in her notebook. I can’t believe what she thinks I’ve done—what we’ve done.”
Eddie paused before he spoke. “She must have found the clippings in the basement. I had them with my photo albums from the army. I knew the parents, saw those kids grow up.”
“What’s all this got to do with what she did?” My mother’s voice was strained.
Eddie went on. “All those kids were murdered, buried over in South County. Tandaro was suspected, but he disappeared. Cops have been looking for him for a while. Everything was documented in the papers.”
Why was Eddie lying and blaming Bobby? I knew the truth about what happened to those kids and why Eddie kept the articles. There were other articles about how somebody cut Eddie’s throat while he sat in his fav
orite living room chair. He was killed while reading the evening paper; Mary Beth’s body at his feet.
Barlow Falls is a town of the dead, a holding place for dark souls. I needed to get out of there—away from ghosts trapped in perpetual purgatory. I went to my room, dressed quickly, putting on warm clothes. I combed my hair and tied a scarf around my neck. I opened my bedroom window, climbed onto the porch and made my way into the yard. I clutched a knife in my hand. Blood dripped from it, onto white snow. I dropped it, looked back at the house and moved into the dark.
Bobby’s van came barreling down the road, headlights flashing. He was coming to get me and we had so much living to do.
13
On that night Bobby parked on a hill overlooking my old house. The cops broke down the door, and lights burned bright when we saw them moving around inside the old bungalow. They carried out my mother’s wooden box, wrapped in plastic and they sprayed luminal in all the rooms, on the walls and floors, marking places where blood had spattered, and then washed away.
They loaded body bags into the morgue van and put yellow tape around the house.
“You’ve been through a lot, lived with bad stuff all your life. It’s over now. You’re with me,” Bobby told me as he put the van in drive, moved onto the street and then onto the highway. Cigarette smoke filled the van, and on the radio Jim Morrison sang The End.
The highway was dark, lonely and unlit. A hitchhiker became visible about a hundred yards away when Bobby flicked on his high beams. Her face pale in the light, long dark hair wild, thumb pointed towards the road ahead, a shabby bag across her shoulder.
Beyond another pair of headlights moved towards her. In time a red corvette became visible in smoky darkness, speeding, flying with the furious wind and flurrying snow, hitting the girl, sending her lurching forward, tumbling beneath stars and ancient constellations, blood splattering on Bobby’s windshield, and then she lay broken, dead and alone across black tar.
The corvette continued its flight into the dark, without mercy; without hesitation and I knew its driver would dream every night of what he’d done. He’d go back to the place where the woman died; and one day he’d go to the police, begging to be set free from the guilt.
I cried out, shaking, telling myself I could have been that girl as I walked alone in early morning hours, meeting that driver, filled with wine and hell.
Bobby told me to stay put, and I watched him kneel, cradle the girl in his arms, carry her body, snow and sleet clinging to it, into the van. He licked his fingers, offered them to me, and then he offered me her flesh; coppery and rich burning our tongues, giving us the power to move to the edge of life and death.
* * *
We drove until early morning, my bones aching because my restless mind was filled with dreams of others taken on the side of the road, in darkened bars and hotel rooms, their screams filling my ears and their blood staining my fingers.
We pulled into a town called Mercury, somewhere up north. I’m not sure if it was Maine or Vermont, but it was colder and the snow deeper than the Southern New England city we’d come from.
The boarding house we stayed at smelled of dampness and rot. The room we rented hadn’t been cleaned in a while, stained and smudged with sex, dope and a thousand other vices; and I knew people died there because their ghosts clawed at the faded wallpaper and paced the dusty floor.
Bobby made love to me on dirty sheets, and specters came to our side, screaming to be released from Hell; a man who’d driven his car off the side of the road because work was more important than sleep, a woman who slashed her wrists in a rest area off Interstate 95, and a couple who picked up a stranger on the Mass Turnpike—victims of a stranger’s blade, left dead and bloodied in their car.
“Why?” I asked when Bobby’s semen ran down my thighs, when he cried out.
He lay on his back, thought for a moment, and then told me softly. “It’s the law of the Universe. People die. Some go easy, some don’t.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m part of you now.”
I realized then that I accompanied a madman, a killer—someone like Mary Beth—and I realized he was what I’d dreamed of all my life.
14
“Time to move on, Darcy,” Bobby waves to me. Something’s off and he looks different, softer, calmer, dressed in white, his hair combed to the side.
I know what happened now. I know secrets. “You killed Eddie and Mary Beth so I would go with you. You knew I was afraid—that I’d do anything to survive—”
“It wasn’t me. Think again. Try to remember.”
I remember holding the knife, pressing it to flesh, feeling warm blood splash on my face and hands. “No,” I tell him as he takes me out of the house, leads me toward the van.
“I lived there longer than I meant to. Mary Beth’s hold on me was strong, making me stay even after she died; like she still ran my life from beyond the grave,” I tell Bobby, feeling tired, knowing if we don’t leave Barlow Falls soon we never will.
The girl’s body is limp, dead in the back seat, pieces of her scattered on the floor. “I thought we buried her. What was her name?” I ask him.
He hands me the keys, “Come on, Darcy.”
I slide into the seat, fasten my belt, and then look over. Bobby hasn’t bothered to fasten his. I look to the floor, gaze at books scattered there; tales about twisted love, Fugate and Starkweather, Fred and Rosemary West, Bonnie and Clyde, Hindley and Brady. I’ve memorized their crimes and their love.
“I want to be like you,” I whisper.
There’s a row of thick oaks up ahead, branches swaying in the wind. I don’t care anymore. If I die, then it’ll be over and I’ll become one of the specters of Barlow Falls, so I press down on the gas and speed towards the oaks.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bobby asks; cigarette butt slipping from his lips, sliding down his chest, and orange and gray ashes crumble on black leather.
I see patterns on bark, crystal ice on dead leaves, and then an explosion as the car strikes a tree. Now it’s too late because Bobby’s lying on the hood, glass in his hair—arms flaying, lips moving, broken like my sister’s doll.
He looks at me with bloody eyes and whispers “Help.”
I press my hand to my forehead, blood streaks my fingers, but I’m alive, so I open the door, and I walk away from Bobby, leaving him to die in Barlow Falls…once again. It seems my story ends differently each time.
It’s about two miles to the city’s border. I’ve got some money in my bag. I’ll make a new life, but I know it’s all in vain as I look to the lonely road ahead. I fall to my knees—and someone calls my name. If I hide here in darkness he won’t see me—he can’t hurt me, but the voice calls out again, lilting, hypnotic.
“Darcy, it’s time.”
I open my eyes, take in semi-darkness. I see a man leaning against a wall, something gleams in his hand. He’s smiling, and his arms reach out for me. “Time to sleep, Darcy,” he tells me, and I go to him, because he has the power to take away the pain—to take me where I must go. I smell rubbing alcohol and disinfectant, and I see others standing in shadow, concern on their faces.
I know this place. It’s where I come when I drift away from Bobby, when each chapter on the road with him ends—before I imagine a new one, away from this stark room and simple cot where I sleep. Long ago Mary Beth and Eddie brought me here, hoping the doctors could save me.
An orderly helps me onto white sheets, covers me, and then flicks off a light. I feel a needle prick me, and then wet cotton against my flesh, knowing tomorrow a new bruise will be there. I want that orderly to be someone else, a fierce and brutal dream man I love, and I say to him, “Bobby? You’re not dead.”
He smiles sadly, “Not for a while…I hope.”
He pats my hand and touches my forehead. “Sweet dreams, Darcy,” he whispers, and his footsteps pound on tile as he moves away, and then closes a door behind him.
I reach beneath my p
illow; find comfort in the books stashed beneath it; stories of love, dark and dangerous.
I close my eyes again, imagining my own story, told every night, by my lover’s side in the darkest corners of my mind. My heart aches for love unrequited, for something found in drug induced visions, in dreams that keep me from death. I go there with a blood thirst in my heart, without fear. It’s all in my head, but it’s my reality and where I reside in my city of the dead.
About The Author
Sandy DeLuca has five novels to her credit: Settling In Nazareth, Descent, Manhattan Grimoire, From Ashes, and Messages From The Dead (forthcoming 2013). Two of her novellas, Darkness Conjured and Into The Red were released in 2011 . A poetry/art collection, called Mad Hattery (with Marge Simon), was also released in 2011. Her poetry chapbook, Burial Plot In Sagittarius, was nominated for the Bram Stoker award in 2001. She is also the author of a poetry/short story collection called Paths Of Destiny. In addition, she has been a painter for over twenty years. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, hair salons, book stores and online venues. She has also done covers for various small press venues. Please visit her at: SandyDeLuca.com.
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