by Victor Allen
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Not many knew it, but Mama Ted had always cautioned Heebie not to get “beside himself”, as if a couple of bolts and washers had come loose and allowed some integral, working gizmo that made his mind whole to fall off and leave it limping along like a car with a misfiring cylinder. Still distressed by what had happened earlier in the day, Heebie had lingered in the cemetery, wanting to be among those that didn’t judge him or want to hurt him. He sat in his chair and watched Venus come up, brightening slowly into life as the sky darkened behind it. The night had cooled rapidly, quite welcome after the heat of the day.
He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for, only knew he would know it when it happened. And when it came, it was like a single note carried on the wind.
Heebie…
He looked to his left and right, seeing what could only be called spectral shadows standing darkly by the tombstones. Their forms were clearly human, but nebulous, with features hidden and strange. They surrounded him in dead silence like theater goers staring raptly at a stage, their occult eyes looking towards the horizon where only Venus glowed. Heebie turned his head to match their unblinking gaze.
There, unfolding on the purpled sky like a movie, a ghostly light show played out. Venus faded as the headlights of a car swept over the horizon, huge and blaring bright, canvassing the entire eastern sky in full PanoramaVision. Heebie could even hear the swishing of the car’s passage, like a whip of cold wind. The headlights picked out a lonely girl, maybe seventeen years old, stumbling along on some out-of-the-way back road. She was a young, waif-like thing with short hair who wore blue jeans and a tube top. When she turned to look at the car bearing down on her, Heebie could see the dullness of intoxication in her eyes- from drugs or booze, Heebie didn’t know- the red of her lipstick, the reflection of light from a nose piercing.
He watched, as if standing there, but some distance away, as the car pulled up alongside her, idling, with its brake lights shining too brightly into the night. There were three figures in the car, but it was too dark for Heebie to make out faces. Two of the figures seemed like average guys, but the third, the driver, the one that asked her if she wanted a ride, was a big, football player type.
Groggily accepting the ride, she clambered into the back seat of the car. Again, Heebie seemed to be there, but set apart, seemingly unable to affect events and not knowing if he was seeing something in real time, or in the past, or in the future. Oh, but his diminished brain hurt and he rubbed his palms against his temples.
The closeted darkness inside the car dimmed any details, but the guy in the back seat kept putting his arm around the girl, and she kept pushing him away. The car sped into the night, moving deeper into the wilds of the county.
Heebie felt the girl’s terror when the guy pulled a knife and told her to be still and quiet. The grudging light in the car reflected off the blade and onto the guy’s face and Heebie saw his eyes. They were the most like an animal’s eyes he had ever seen. There had been no human emotion in them and he felt the girl’s terror, even through her drunkenness, rise. She had tried to get out of the moving car, but the guy grabbed her, dragging her across the back seat with brutish, inhuman strength.
By now the car had approached a clearing on the side of the road, so deep into the woods that any cry for help would have yielded no rescue. The car pulled off and sat there, the lights and engine extinguished as the girl was dragged from the car and into the woods.
She opened her mouth to yell, but the guy with the knife clamped his hand across it. She bit down hard, tasting blood. Heebie heard a startled grunt of pain and winced just before he saw the dark flash of a fist crash into her face.
They were in the woods now, even darker than before. Heebie heard snuffling gasps and grunting, even imagined he could smell a mixture of beer and cigarettes.
He heard clothes being ripped, the sound of an arm breaking as the girl vainly struggled to defend herself. There were other, meaty thuds, as of fists hammering flesh.
Everything was mostly shadow, but enough moonlight filtered into the woods to glint off the icy steel of a blade as it was pressed against the soft flesh of her belly and Heebie heard a voice, just as cold, say, “Now, maybe you’ll do what we want.”
The rest was hazy, like a nightmare, but painfully obvious as the squalid scene played out.
When it was over, Heebie could see her, bleeding and broken, naked from the waist down, her tube top rucked up to just under her small, calorie-starved breasts, blood dripping off her bare belly, lying there like a terrified, hunted animal run to ground. The three figures finished with her, got back in their car, and drove away.
The film faded to purple, washing from the iris of the night like a closing eye, and Venus reappeared on the shield of sky. A full moon had risen, bloody orange, and it tinted the area around its domain with dark ocher as Heebie blubbered and cried in his chair like a ten year old.
He looked left and right, knowing his friends were looking at him, but unable to see their stony eyes. Then, again, that song of the wind.
You know what you have to do.
The shadowy forms washed out to nothingness, returning to their disturbed rest as Heebie passed the balance of the night in his chair, frightened and weeping.
