Through Shattered Glass

by David B. Silva

  Rick hadn’t mentioned anything about staying at a motel. I had assumed the number he gave me was an apartment number. But I probably should have known better. I don’t think he ever stayed longer than a month or two in any one place.

  I pulled into one of a long line of empty spaces, turned off the engine and sat for a moment, staring at the door to room 118. It was morning now. A bank of angry-looking rain clouds was rolling in over the mountains to the west. The temperature had dropped a bit.

  I don’t know exactly how long I sat there, but eventually, Rick pulled back the curtains and peered out through the motel window at me. He looked like a stranger I guess you could say. His hair was shoulder-length, stringy, gray over the ears. He held a pack of cigarettes in one hand, along with a lighter, and an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

  He waved me in.

  It was a long walk from the car to that motel door. I hadn’t told Traci this, but I had come here because I wanted to put an end to the letters and the calls, and I knew the only way that was ever going to happen was if I looked my brother in the eye and told him in no uncertain terms that our relationship was over. We had been brothers once, but that had been a long time ago. Maybe not in Rick’s mind, but in my mind, it was a dead relationship.

  He opened the door before I got there. “Oh, man, you came. I knew you would. I knew it.”

  Rick didn’t look any better up close than he had at the window. It had been three or four days since he had shaven, and his beard, unlike the gray in his hair, was as black as ever. He lit the cigarette in his mouth, blew out the match and tossed it at the ash tray on the table next to the window.

  “Come in, man. Sit down. I know it ain’t the best place in the world, but I cleaned it up for you.”

  I sat in the nearest chair.

  “Let me get a shirt on, okay?”

  The first thing I noticed, besides the fact that he had, indeed, cleaned up the room, was how thin Rick had become. He was a couple of years younger than me, almost thirty-eight, and he had always been on the slight side, but he looked haggard, as if he had been living on the streets a good part of the past twenty-or-so years. I also noticed the tattoo. It was on his right arm, up near the shoulder. The Grim Reaper, holding his scythe in one hand and flipping off the world with the other.

  “Look,” he said, reappearing with a shirt. “I know you think I’m a nut case. And I don’t blame you. But what happened that night ... it’s not what you think.”

  “What did happen?”

  He had opened the bottom drawer of the dresser and was digging through it, looking for something, when he stopped and gave me a crooked glance. There was the oddest expression on his face. For a moment, I thought he might break down and cry, but he didn’t. He nodded slightly instead. “You know, that’s the first time you’ve ever asked me that question.”

  “Is it?”

  He nodded again, more visibly this time, then pulled an old shoe box out of the drawer and sat in a chair across the table from me. He placed the box on the table between us. “You really want to know?”

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “It was like a dream, Bryan.” He gazed through the window. A middle-aged woman, her husband and two kids, were hauling luggage out to their Datsun. Shadows moved across the parking lot as a cloud blocked the sun and swallowed them up as if they were only shadows themselves. “I mean sometimes I think back to that night and it’s like it happened to someone else. It’s like a scene out of movie, something I saw as a kid that belongs to me now.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

  Rick took a long draw on his cigarette. “Jude was there, you know. At the party? Go on, she kept saying. Do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “You’ve got to understand, Bryan. It was Halloween. That was the whole point. I just thought it would be a big laugh. That’s all.” He took another long draw on his cigarette, and stuffed it out in the ash tray. “But she wouldn’t let up. Go on, have a little fun, she said. We had talked about it for days, and I won’t deny it sounded like fun. Fact is ... once it got going, for awhile at least, it was fun.”

  “Rick,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “You’re stalling.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, looked at them, then tossed them aside. “They were everywhere that night. It was like snapping your fingers. I didn’t even have to close my eyes. An image would come into my head and there it was, alive and kicking, right in front of me. Just like that. I can’t remember them all, there were so many. I remember the scarecrow. He had this dirty straw face with these two empty eye sockets, nothing else, and he was carrying this scythe with an old rusty blade that looked like it had been out in the rain for years. I remember that. And I remember this huge griffin or gargoyle or some such thing, I don’t know exactly what the hell it was. Its wing span was like ... just incredible.”

  Rick stared off into his memories, his voice just above a whisper and fighting through a tremor. “There were others. This guy that was nothing but bones and a little hanging flesh. He had these perfect teeth. All I remember about them is how they kept chattering, like he was trying to say something. God, there were so many others. Snap! Just like that they were everywhere.”

  I looked at my brother, who seemed a thousand miles away, and felt an odd mix of loathing and sadness. It had been more than twenty years and Rick was still entwined in his own self-denial. I remembered the scarecrow, too. Or at least the story of the scarecrow. The part Rick always seemed to forget, though, was that he had been the one who had taken the scythe to the party. I still don’t know where he had gotten it from, but for weeks afterward the newspapers reported that he had wrapped it tin foil to make it look like a harmless prop.

  “At first it was kind of funny, you know. Watching the kids freak. Half of them were out the door before anything happened. And the other half were heading out right behind them. I didn’t think anyone was going to get hurt. I mean, that never even crossed my mind. It was just supposed to be a prank.”

  Rick glanced at me, as if he were checking to see how much of this I was going to believe, then his dark-eyed stare returned to the window. “I don’t know exactly when things started to go wrong. I guess I didn’t realize anything was wrong until I heard the screaming and saw one of the kids fall. I think it was Manny Bunkin who went down first. The griffin swooped down on him from behind. It just seemed to fly past him, as innocent as that. Then Manny’s head kind of fell off to one side of his shoulders and he collapsed. It was crazy after that. I mean you couldn’t make any sense out of what was going on.”

  “Thirteen kids were dying,” I said tightly.

  My brother fell silent.

  “Thirteen of them, Rick.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I haven’t had nightmares about it every night since it happened? I was there, man. I saw the blood. I saw the dead bodies.”

  “You made the dead bodies.”

  “No. It wasn’t me. It was never me. I never brought those things to life. It was Jude. From the moment we met she had a chain around my neck like I was a trained animal. It was all to get me to that night.”

  “You killed them, Rick. You used the scythe and you killed them.”

  “I was only twelve, man. You really think I could have done that? It was her. I swear it was. That’s why I wanted you to come, because I can prove it to you.”

  He fumbled to get the top off the shoe box and when it was more of an effort than he had the patience for, he turned the box over and dumped its contents onto the table. It was a pile of newspaper clippings, some old enough that they had begun to yellow around the edges.

  “Look at this. It’s right here somewhere.” He rummaged frantically through the pile, his face twisted into an expression of pure mania, his hands shaking, until he came up with what he had been looking for. “Yeah. Here it is. Look at this. You remember this photo
?”

  He flattened out the newspaper clipping in front of me. It was from the Record Searchlight. The day after the Halloween tragedy. The caption read: Rick Freeman escorted out of the County Courthouse by police. In the photograph, he was at the top of the steps, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof vest, his eyes staring out in a lifeless, vacant gaze. I remember my mother looking at that photo and remarking how frightened she thought Rick looked. But I never saw any fear in that expression. I never saw anything in it.

  “Look. Look right there,” he said, pointing into the crowd of spectators in the background. “See her? That’s her. That’s Jude.”

  The police had never been able to verify the existence of a Jude Fairclough. No one was registered under that name at the school. And none of the other kids could recall anyone with that name. In the end, they had concluded that she simply did not exist.

  “Now, look at this one.” Rick flattened out another clipping in front of me, using both hands like an iron, and then pointed to a similar crowd of spectators in another photo. “You see her? Right there? Next to the column?”

  The caption read: Sheriff’s deputies escort young suspect out of court building. The article was from the Dispatch. It had been written two years after my brother had been arrested. The “young suspect” in the photo was not Rick. It was some kid I had never seen before.

  “That’s Jude.”

  It might have been.

  And it might not have been.

  It was an old grainy clipping, and I couldn’t be sure one way or the other.

  “And here,” Rick said, ironing out another article. “Look at this one. Right here, in front of the fence. There she is again.”

  This was from the Herald. The photo was of a group of students gathered around a chain link fence where they had apparently built a memorial of flowers and cards in honor of the victims after a high school student had opened up fire in the school parking lot. The girl in front, the one Rick had pointed out, looked slightly older here, maybe sixteen. I glanced at the date. The article was from November 2, 1981, six years after what Rick had done.

  “It goes on and on,” he said, adding more clippings to the pile. “Every couple of years. Always right around Halloween. Always somewhere new.”

  I sifted through them randomly, looking at the photos, studying the faces of the girls. “You can’t tell anything from these.”

  “It’s her.”

  “If that’s true, then why is she always the same age? You’ve got stories here spanning twenty years.”

  “That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? That’s what it’s all about. That’s why she does it. To stay young.”

  I stared at him a moment, a little dumbfounded I suppose, though I probably shouldn’t have been. I had expected something like this. Rick had never made an effort to own up to what he had done. He had always been long on excuses and short on responsibility. “This is crazy. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”

  “She’s here,” Rick said. “In Weed.”

  “Oh, Christ. You’re kidding.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to come up, man. So I could show you in person.”

  I glanced down at the photos again, not even sure what words would work under these circumstances. I guess there was a part of me, some sense of family left over from when we were children, that wanted to believe in him. It was not the only struggle going on in my mind at that moment, however. I also wanted to prove him wrong, to show him once and for all that there wasn’t any Jude Fairclough, that there never had been, and to force him to finally own up to what he had done.

  “She’s in every one of them,” Rick said as I sifted through the clippings. He had calmed down some, though I had the sense that he was never really at peace, even when he was sleeping.

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  11.

  I’ll regret those words the rest of my life.

  Rick was convinced that Jude was going to make an appearance at the elementary school dance, less than seven hours away. Just as he was convinced that she had been making similar appearances under similar circumstances over the past twenty-odd years. I wasn’t going to change his mind.

  He sat across the table from me, exhausted from his own agitation, and slowly gathered up the clippings. “I want you to see, that’s all. Just come to the school with me. Let me prove it to you. She’ll be there, Bryan. She’ll be there and so will those things she creates.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “You tell me. What do you want?”

  “First, you take responsibility for what happened that night.”

  “You got it.”

  “Then you get yourself some help.”

  “I’m not crazy, man.”

  “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  12.

  The next seven hours went like a wait at the dentist’s office. We got a bite to eat at McDonald’s, and returned to the motel room. Rick brought out a deck of cards and we played cribbage for awhile, the same as we had when we were kids. For an hour or so, the gulf between us was put aside. Things seemed to settle into an air of ... routine I guess you might call it.

  After the third game Rick came down with a headache. He slept for a few hours. I watched the sun go down and felt the temperature drop. The storm coming over the mountains from this morning finally settled over the valley.

  It started to rain.

  I stared out the window, watching puddles take form in the parking lot, and thought about Traci and the kids and how nice it was going to be to get back home again.

  13.

  We arrived at the school a few minutes past eight.

  Rick had been quiet and withdrawn since his nap, saying something about his headache not getting any better. He didn’t look well, and I found myself watching him a little closer. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but his sudden sullenness had me worried.

  “It’s over this way,” he said as we climbed out of the car.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, fine. Why?”

  “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  The gym was really an all-purpose room that doubled for the cafeteria and served as the gathering area for school assemblies. There was a teacher at the main entrance, a short burly man with a queer little bald spot that made it appear as if he had purposely shaved his head in that area and that area alone. Rick stopped and talked to him long enough to convince him that I was some kid’s uncle and we were making sure the kid had shown up like he had said he would be. The man seemed to take it all in stride. No big deal. People come and go all the time. Go on in and make yourselves comfortable.

  It was dark inside, the lights kept dim, except for a string of red, blue and green bulbs outlining the stage at the far end. The music was blaring, so loud it took a moment before I recognized Wonderwall by Oasis. Rick motioned toward the other side of the room and I followed him around the outer edge. He stopped under a basketball hoop, then scanned the crowd.

  “See it?”

  “What?”

  “Right there.” He pointed toward the refreshment table. “In the corner, behind the kids. The thing in the robe. It’s still taking form.”

  I don’t know to this day what I was expecting to see. Probably nothing at all. And I can’t say for certain one way or the other that anything was there. But I thought I caught a glimpse of something, one of those out-of-the-side-of-your eye things. It stood head-and-shoulders above a group of nearby kids, clothed in a robe, a gaunt, drawn face staring out through two bright-red orbs. The robe was open in front, and I thought I could see ribs and a breastbone.

  It was a glimpse, though. Nothing more.

  A second. Maybe less.

  And then it was gone.

  “And over there,” Rick said, pointing across the dance floor.

  There was a folding table against the far wall. On top of
the table, on display, were a number of carved pumpkins, each with the light of a candle flickering through the openings. Next to the table, stood two kids, one dressed in a leather-jacket with his hair combed back, the other wearing the fangs and white face of a vampire. There was something else there, too. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, only that it had a vague shimmer about it, like an aura. And a foreboding sense of doom. I remember feeling the weight of that doom settle heavily on my shoulders for a brief moment. Then it was gone.

  “We don’t have much time.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It won’t be long before they take full form.”

  The music wound down. For an eerie moment a hush fell over the room and everything seemed to grind to a standstill. I caught another vague shimmer of something lurking in the shadows near the trash cans. It looked something like a baboon, with an elongated snout and teeth too large for its face. Then it was gone and the music came up again, this time with Alanis Morisette singing Isn’t It Ironic.

  I turned to Rick to say something, but he had already worked his way down the room ahead of me. I could see him overlooking the crowd, searching the faces, his eyes as wide and as white as I had ever seen them.

  Finally, he stopped, looked back at me, then motioned toward a little girl, sitting in a chair near the stage. “It’s her,” he mouthed. “It’s Jude.”

  She was such a tiny thing. Dressed in white, with papier-mâché wings, and a silver-glitter wand in her lap. She reminded me of my daughter Peg, and I found myself wondering what I was doing here instead of being at home, escorting the kids around the neighborhood with their little pillow cases in tow. There are only so many Halloweens before kids no longer want to be seen with their parents, and I had wasted this one.

  I looked to Rick, who had started across the room in the direction of the girl. Those white eyes of his flashed again inside my thoughts, and suddenly, for the first time, I realized what he’d had in mind all along. He hadn’t brought me here just to see Jude. He had brought me here to see Jude die.