I Hear They Burn for Murder

by J L Aarne

  He was still high when he returned to the motel and was actually pleased when he went into their room and saw Steve there stripping his bed. He looked up and saw Jack, noted his glassy eyes and went back to what he’d been doing without a word.

  “You feel better?” Jack asked.

  Steve smiled, picked up the soiled bedding and stuffed it into a laundry bag. “I do, yeah. You? You’re looking…”

  “High,” Jack supplied. “Yeah.”

  Phineas stood behind Steve lewdly mimicking a blowjob with his hand and tongue pressing his cheek. Jack tried to ignore him.

  Steve walked by Jack and patted him on the shoulder. “You did good tonight, Jack.”

  Jack didn’t want to be, but he was pleased. He dropped his eyes and said, “Thanks.”

  “Go on to bed,” Steve said. He walked to the door and opened it, jangling a handful of quarters in one hand. “Got to take care of this.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Goodnight, Steve.”

  Steve smiled again and nodded. Then he was gone and Jack was alone.

  He took his shoes off and crawled up the bed to sit with his back to the wall. He still felt good. Until he looked across the bed and Phineas was there sitting on the foot of it watching him, smiling his weird, taunting smile with his cracked makeup and his yellow baby teeth. Jack sighed and stared back at him, resigned to his company.

  “I hate you,” he told the clown.

  Phineas’s smile widened. I know.

  Jack had first seen the clown when he was about ten. He remembered because it had started after the first time one of his mother’s boyfriends raped him when she was at work. That was when they still lived in the apartment in Louisiana, before Kate hooked up with the rich guy from Texas and they moved away. It had been a weekend and Jack was watching cartoons in the living room while he ate a bowl of Trix cereal. His older brother, Shane was gone at a friend’s house for the day. The boyfriend’s name had been Hal and Jack had liked him before that.

  Phineas showed up after. At first, Jack liked it. He had an imaginary friend and though he didn’t talk, he took Jack places and sometimes made him animal balloons. He took him away when he was alone with Hal and Hal would start trying to lick and kiss his mouth and touch him places he shouldn’t and tell Jack what a beautiful boy he was. And no one else could see Phineas, so it was like the best secret ever. Because even if he talked about it, it was like a secret; no one believed him. It was a better secret to have than the secrets Hal made him keep.

  Shane couldn’t see Phineas though and Jack had always felt bad about that because sometimes Shane got in the way. Sometimes Shane took his place.

  Jack named the clown Phineas after a name he read once on a wall somewhere. It wasn’t like Phineas wuz here ‘02 in paint on a wall though. The wall had been a place in an old cemetery; a map of the dead and buried. He’d seen the name on the gravestone of a baby that was born the same day it died sometime back in 1898. It only occurred to Jack years later, after he had stopped finding any joy in his new “friend,” how really morbid that was.

  Those were the places that Phineas took him. Places that Jack could never have gone without him. Phineas liked old swamps teeming with mosquitoes, the water squirming with a thousand kinds of unclassified vermin, with air that smelled like half rotted banana peels and trees that looked like if they came alive they would talk to you in hissing whispers as they slowly impaled you on their jagged branches. He liked old graveyards lost far out in the trees where the stones were crumbling from hundreds of years of moisture and the moss that had grown into the cracks in the alabaster over the years, where the dates on said stones were so long ago that the place had been forgotten and the hills where the dead had been buried were no longer hills, but almost deep enough to be called trenches because they had started to cave inward like the pits of rotting teeth. He liked crowded alleys behind whorehouses, their gutters lined with the limp membranes of used condoms and the broken shine of used, infected, poisonous needles. He liked the smell of Bourbon Street after dark—and even better at high noon when the stench of whiskey, urine, vomit and shit were cooked in the sun.

  Phineas liked the shifty way men and women both looked at young Jack. He liked to watch.

  Phineas really liked Steve. He thought Steve was a grand old time. He loved the way Jack loved him and how it tortured him. He even liked Steve’s little kindnesses to Jack because he knew, as Jack did, that they were like scraps and biscuits being tossed to a favored dog. Steve liked Jack, maybe even cared about him, but to Steve’s twisted mind, Jack was like a pet. He was a useful possession.

  Jack knew it. Still, he stayed because he loved Steve no matter what Steve felt. He told himself that Steve didn’t have to love him back, that he knew that wasn’t how it worked, but he wished it was different. He had never liked stories and poems and songs about unrequited, one-sided love. And he did wonder at how really screwed up he had to be for a man like Steve Walker to be the one for him. At how crazy it was to be jealous of all the corpses.

  Jack still believed that it had been Phineas’s idea to run away when he was sixteen. It had been Phineas who gave him the idea to sell himself the first time. Not bad ideas in themselves. The rich Texan had wanted the same thing from Jack that Hal and a couple of other boyfriends of his mother’s who came after Hal had wanted from Jack and his mother didn’t get tired of the man and leave him. She’d stayed. Then at sixteen, Jack was on the streets and he had to eat and he had to get out of the rain, but he had nothing. Except even when he had nothing, he still had himself and there was always someone willing to buy. It had saved him, but it had also shaped him into the wreck of a man that he was now and he suspected that Phineas had known it would from the start.

  Phineas had been there in the alleys when Jack went down on his knees for money the first time. He had been there when Kate’s men were fucking him over the arm of the sofa while the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battled evil-doers. He was there the first time Jack popped a needle into a vein and the first time he went a little nuts because he couldn’t find one and had to stick it between his fingers. He stood by and grinned when Jack met Steve.

  The clown had appeared as salvation, but he had loved every minute that had twisted and broken him.

  Steve had been all Jack’s doing though. He didn’t blame Phineas for that. That was all him.

  “Go away,” Jack said.

  Phineas stuck his tongue out at Jack, but he got up and walked out of his line of sight.

  Jack closed his eyes and dozed. In the room behind the wall where he was propped a woman started screaming at someone named Jamal. Whoever Jamal was, Jamal don’t be nothing but a fucking nigger, according to the woman, who sounded like she was also black. Jamal called her a cunt. She threatened to cut his dick off and club him with it.

  Jack and Steve were going to have to move on to someplace else soon. They had been living at the Last Chance Motel for a month, but they never could stay anywhere long, even if they had wanted to. If Steve settled down, Steve might get caught. The thing about keeping Jack around was, he was useful and helpful in catching the girls, but Jack more than Steve was likely to be remembered. Even now, with ten years of prostitution and eight years of moderate to serious heroin addiction under his belt, Jack was striking. He did not have a forgettable face.

  He was asleep when Steve returned from the Laundromat with his newly washed bedding. In the middle of the night, Jack woke up thirsty and rolled over to see Steve sitting on his own bed smoking a cigarette while he watched Jack. The curtains were closed, but a slat of light fell between the curtains and the window and illuminated one side of Steve’s face, turned his faded denim blue eyes electric.

  Jack sat up. “Steve?”

  “Yeah, Jack?”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Sitting here. What’s it look like?”

  “Okay.”

  A little disturbed by it, Jack got up and went into the bathroom to drink some wate
r and pee. Sometimes Steve kind of tuned out like that, so maybe he hadn’t been watching Jack sleep after all, that was just the way he was facing. After he had a girl, he thought about it and played it over in his mind for a few days. Until he got the itch again and needed another one.

  It bothered Jack more to think that had been what Steve was doing than that Steve had been staring at him while he was sleeping and thinking about something else. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

  “You go fuck that Zane asshole for dope again?”

  Jack paused on his way out of the bathroom and rolled that over in his mind. Steve wasn’t jealous, he just disapproved. He was possessive and if he didn’t like Jack whoring, that was probably the only reason why.

  “No,” Jack said, walking back into the room. Then because sometimes he resented Steve a lot more than he would admit, he added, “I fucked someone else for money and bought drugs. I was tired. Zane took a suck job.”

  Steve stared at him without expression. In the dark it was hard to tell, but Jack had known him a while, he recognized the way the shadows fell on his face to mean it was blank. Then he turned his head and looked away from him at the wall; disgusted and dismissive.

  You can’t get it up for no one but dead girls, Steve. Who the hell are you to judge me? Jack thought with a rare spark of anger at him. He almost said it. Then he sighed and climbed back into bed without saying anything.

  He lay there staring up at the ceiling, listening to the rattling A/C, watching the pale blue of Steve’s cigarette smoke curl in the dark above him. After a while he said, “You always knew what I was.”

  Steve grunted in a way that conveyed both acknowledgement and irritation.

  “We need the money.”

  “Don’t do any good if you’re shooting the shit up your fucking arm,” Steve said. “You ain’t doing that ‘cause we need the money.”

  Jack shrugged. It didn’t bother him, he’d been a whore a long time. It was what it was.

  “You gonna go and get yourself killed by some sick fuck closet case faggot one of these nights, Jack, and where’s that leave me?” Steve asked. “You ever think about that?”

  “I guess not,” Jack said. It wasn’t an apology though. “Guess I always figured you’d be fine. We both know you don’t need me around, Steve.”

  Jack could feel Steve’s eyes on him again, but he didn’t take his gaze from the shadows of the ceiling to look at him. Eventually Steve made another of those dismissive sounds in his throat and stamped his cigarette out in the heavy marble ashtray on the nightstand between their beds.

  Jack closed his eyes and was soon asleep again.

  He dreamed about Shane. He dreamed about being little again and Hal taking his clothes off. He dreamed about Shane walking in and how he had flown at Hal with a plastic hockey stick like it was a sword, trying to defend Jack, his baby brother. He’d always defended Jack. He dreamed about sitting huddled over his knees and crying in the corner by the laundry hamper while Hal raped Shane and made him scream instead. Phineas was there across the room watching it all, his little teeth like pearls, his eyes like foxfire.

  Jack’s real shame about hearing and seeing his fifteen year old brother naked and crying and sweaty while Hal tore into him was that he’d been glad; glad that it wasn’t him for once.

  To purchase a copy and continue reading:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FP1ALBG

  About the Author

  J.L. Aarne currently lives in the Northwest United States. Aarne studied English at the University of New Orleans, but like so many people these days, could not afford to finish. Someday, perhaps. J.L. Aarne currently lives in the Northwest United States. Aarne studied English at the University of New Orleans, but like so many people these days, could not afford to finish. Someday, perhaps. This book and others by J.L. Aarne are also available in paperback.

  Aarne blogs from time to time at http://jlaarne.tumblr.com/

  J.L. Aarne can be reached by email at jlaarne [@] outlook [dot] com

  Other Books

  The Man in the Long Black Coat

  Dale Bruyer and James Sandover were huntsmen: monster hunting heirs to a secret legacy, self-appointed defenders of mankind, students of magic, warriors and—in James’s case—occasional chess opponent of the Devil himself. Until James died and left Dale all alone on a self-destructive path through alcoholism to an early grave.

  Then one stormy night, the giant tree that had marked James’s grave uproots and Dale finds footprints walking away from the hole beneath it. A killer begins ritualistically murdering young women in the small town of Solagrove, Louisiana where he lives, and though the man in the long black coat sounds a lot like James, it can’t be James. James is dead; there is absolutely no question about it.

  Dale is reluctantly dragged into the investigation by his neighbor, the mother of the first victim. He’s not so sure the killings are really his sort of thing, but there’s something very familiar about it all anyway and someone has to stop it. Though why does it have to be him?

  In the midst of all this chaos, he suddenly finds himself with a house full: a werewolf in the kitchen, a god crashing on his sofa and a punk rock fallen angel riding shotgun.

  To read a sample or purchase a copy: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LOYM78O

  ***

  Love Song for a Vampire

  Dale Bruyer kills bad things that go bump in the night, or at least he used to. Now he owns a bar in small town Louisiana and granted, it has become a hang-out for the same creatures he used to track down, but they tip in gold and diamonds, so he can't really complain. He's retired (sort of) and out of the game until a friend starts him a blog without his permission and brings him a new case: vampires in New Orleans.

  He's skeptical at first, but he discovers vampire blood making the rounds on the street as the newest cheap thrill and comes face to face with a monster from legend, and it's not so unbelievable anymore. Except things aren't always what they seem, especially in Dale's world, and it's up to him to figure out what's actually happening and ultimately decide which side he's really on.

  To read a sample or purchase a copy: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00T100SMU

  ***

  Mercy

  A kid commits suicide as a direct result of bullying once every half-hour. This is something that Mercy Hartwell knows, but it doesn’t impact her life until her brother, Corey nearly becomes a statistic.

  On a Monday morning in small town Iowa, a harmless school assembly about bullying takes an unexpected turn and becomes a hostage situation. With a captive audience and a small arsenal, Mercy and her friends conduct a trial with themselves as judges, jury and executioners. They’re willing to risk everything for their one chance at vengeance. In their courtroom, anyone can accuse anyone of anything as long as they’re willing to tell their horrible story in front of the class.

  The only verdict is guilty.

  The only punishment is death.

  Those who survive will have a whole new reason to hate Mondays.

  To read a sample or purchase a copy: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OI76FMI

  ***

  The Destiny Machine

  In a world cured of death, Aarom is an outlaw.

  The world should have ended twenty years ago. Without the invention of the Destiny Machine, it would have and in a lot of ways it’s a blessing. No one goes hungry now, murder is a thing of the past and life is beautiful and peaceful. In other ways, for some people, it’s a lie and a curse that they can’t bear to live with. They sense the wrongness of their existence, but now they inhabit a world where it’s almost impossible to die.

  You can’t even kill yourself anymore.

  Aarom is a prophet, a member of a rare group of people who would have survived the Armageddon that the Destiny Machine derailed. He has the power to see behind the curtain. He can give to people the deaths they have been denied. Their true destiny.

  In his personal life, he's at a crossroad, torn between
letting go of a past that made him and Jonathan, who he’s secretly loved for most of his life. Jonathan isn’t a prophet, he’s a happy, normal member of society, but he looks forward to the rare times when he sees Aarom and sadly waits for the day when he will stop visiting. Aarom ultimately has to make a choice to either be brave and honest with Jonathan or walk away completely. It’s a real life and death decision.

  To read a sample/purchase a copy: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V3ZGHZ8/