Bleed

by Ed Kurtz

  Klein nodded. Forsyth twisted his mouth up to one side and sighed.

  Withdrawing a slightly bent card from his shirt pocket, Forsyth faked a smile and handed it over to Walt, who accepted it.

  “If you think of anything, anything at all…”

  “I’ll call you straight away,” Walt interrupted, flicking the card with his thumb.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. Blackmore.”

  The policemen each nodded to him and commenced their way back to the patrol car parked in Walt’s driveway.

  “You bet. And hey—”

  Klein and Forsyth paused, turned to look back up at Walt.

  “Stay warm out there, officers. Looks like snow.”

  Smiles all around.

  Walt shut the front door gently, locked it, and leaned against it. He thought for a moment he was going to cry.

  Instead, he laughed.

  48

  Friday was a snow day.

  The air warmed slightly in the night, allowing the perfect conditions for the flakes to start falling. By sunrise, the ground was covered in a blinding white blanket of snow.

  Walt grimaced when he saw it through his bedroom window. He wondered what it meant for the pit.

  ***

  Alice perked up when she realized that the brilliant light blasting the sheer curtains of her window was due to snow. She wasted no time flinging herself at the CD player beside her bed and switching it to the AM band. The voice on the first clear station she found droned on about the state of the economy, the president’s lack of moral fortitude, and the invisible connection that lied therein.

  “Come on, damnit…”

  The next station played dozy Samba music.

  “Come on.” She kept searching.

  Finally, at the end of the band, she hit upon a news station that promised to repeat a list of school closures momentarily.

  And, when they did, hers was among those closed for the day.

  “YES!” she cried.

  “Shut the fuck up in there!” her stepfather bellowed from the next room. “Try’na fuckin’ sleep in here!”

  Alice’s heart thrummed. Her joy rapidly melted into a lukewarm puddle of disenchantment.

  School would have been better than this. Maybe Jarod and Clem would still be skipping. Hell, maybe they were dead. That would be something.

  Most of all, she would have been afforded the opportunity to see Mr. Blackmore afresh in the new light of his leering, lusty gaze in the parking lot the other day. Had it been a week already? She reviewed other glances since, other gestures and expressions, and wondered how much she was reading into them for the sake of hoping they communicated as much as that first ogling stare. Alice’s chest tightened at the mental inventory, but she cut off the feed before her imagination had a chance to run wild. But now she wouldn’t see him again until Monday, three days away.

  It might as well have been three weeks.

  Or three months.

  Alice sighed. She wondered about how rapidly she’d developed this infatuation. She wondered how mad her stepdad would be if she took the car for non-school-related purposes. And so she wondered what ever happened to her winter snow boots, because it was going to be a long, wet walk to the bus stop.

  ***

  The morning light shaft to which she’d grown so accustomed was grayish and foreboding. When she actually slept, Sarah always woke up just to see it leaking through the cracks above her. There was nothing else to look forward to. Not anymore. But this one, infinitesimal thing was just barely enough to give her a shred of pleasure. The mere fact that there was anything even remotely enjoyable left to her kept total despair at bay.

  Today, however, it was colorless and dull. The freezing cold breeze swept the snow into the attic. It built up gradually into a white bank on the beams underneath the air vent slats, accumulating only a little more quickly than it melted.

  Sarah couldn’t help but wonder if she would live to see another warm day. Or, if she did, whether or not she would still be chained up in her lunatic brother’s attic. Whichever the case, freedom seemed remote to her mind. A wild fantasy, on par with the sort of unicorns-and-rainbows daydreams she entertained as a girl. She would walk away from this charnel house around the same time winged kittens swarmed the sky and blotted out the sun.

  Wrapping her bare arms around herself, she shivered. Although she recognized that being this cold was far better than sharing the attic with that horrendous monster her brother called Gwyn, she still considered the possibility of asking after warmer clothes. He’d brought her the mattress, and he’d brought her food (such as it was). A damn jacket shouldn’t be such a big deal.

  Until that eventuality, she rose to her feet and began to move and stretch. She bent at the waist, touched her toes, and twisted back and forth. It kept her loose and warmed the blood in her veins. In lieu of something to read or a television, it was also just about the only thing she could do. So on she went, craning her neck from side to side, stretching her triceps and shoulders and waist.

  When she decided to move on to her middle back and twisted her torso as far as the muscles would allow, Sarah screamed. She lost her balance and crashed down to the mattress.

  She had forgotten all about the mutilated head that thing left. It still sat there, resting on its side. Its dark, empty sockets weirdly stared at her. A few inches of spinal cord jutted from its butchered, severed neck. The face—the one Gwyn had pried away from the skull and worn like a mask—was gone. Sarah swallowed hard at the thought that the creature probably ate it.

  Maneuvering herself on the mattress until the weak winter light was on her face, she closed her eyes and tried to think of something else. She thought of Mitch, but he never made her feel any better when she was at home and in no danger of being killed and eaten by a creature that couldn’t possibly exist. My God, did he even call the goddamned police, the idiot? Or is he just glad I’m not around to bother him anymore?

  She thought of her house, but at this point she really couldn’t care less if she ever saw it again. She thought too of her mother, her and Walt’s mother, the reason she was out there in the first place. Jesus, has he gotten to her too? All she wanted was to live. That, and to get as far away from there as possible.

  So instead she squeezed her eyes and thought about killing Walt. The monster, too. Prying their throats apart with a serrated bread knife and chortling as their lives spurted out of their necks.

  She continued along these lines for a while, slaughtering her brother and his beast over and over again in a multitude of increasingly grisly ways. Eventually, she permitted the bloody reverie to lull her to sleep. And in her dreams, Sarah killed them some more.

  ***

  Nora lit another cigarette and glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Not long ago, this would have been about the time she’d be getting ready to open the store. She would be shuffling hangers in the closet, looking for the best top to compliment whatever skirt or slacks she’d already chosen. More often than not, she’d also find herself mindlessly whistling whichever song had been playing in her head when she woke up. Something 80s, most likely. Brit pop type stuff. I’ll stop the world and melt with you…

  Hmm, hmm, hmm hmmmm.

  Not today or any other day since Amanda’s disappearance. Today she remained in bed, the sheets bunched up at her feet despite the nasty cold weather. Her cigarette slowly burned down; she only took occasional drags from it. When an inch of gray ash broke away and burst into a dark smudge on the bed, she ignored it. The smudge was surrounded by small, circular burn holes anyway.

  Nora stabbed the smoke out in the moldy coffee cup beside the clock—IN THE READS: GET YOUR READ ON!—and lay back down on the dirty bed. She hadn’t bothered to wash the sheets for months, and she didn’t care. She didn’t care about that, or the dishes, or the pile of mail gathering beneath the mail slot in her front door. Nora doubted she could muster much concern if the place caught fire. She’d probably ju
st lay there and burn.

  She’d done everything she could. She didn’t blame herself for any of that. There were interviews with the police, long nights combing the few crisscrossing streets that constituted “downtown,” and even the hundred and fifty photocopied Have You Seen Me? posters she stapled to practically every sky-reaching signpost and utility pole in town. Nora broke into Amanda’s place, spent the night and drenched her missing friend’s pillowcases with her tears. She spent hours at a time on the horn with Amanda’s widowed mom, a woman she’d never met face-to-face but in whom she now found a close ally against the forces of desperation and despair. Nora even wasted weeks trying like hell to track down Amanda’s weird, elusive boyfriend, the ever-mysterious Walt.

  There couldn’t have been anyone else in the world with a best friend whose three-year boyfriend remained such an elusive mystery. Only Nora. There were times when Nora was ninety-nine percent certain that Walt didn’t actually exist, that he was either a psychotic delusion or the subject of an elaborate joke that never reached its punchline. But Amanda was neither crazy nor cruel, so neither rang true enough to seriously consider. She said the man was just shockingly insular and insecure about meeting new people, especially women. It wasn’t just Nora, but practically every other soul in Amanda’s life as well. It was one of the sundry eccentricities old Walt displayed that endeared him to her. He was crazy, but good crazy. Unique.

  Nora thought maybe he was deformed or something. Then Amanda pinned a photo of them, of her and her beau, on the bulletin board in the shop’s office. Walt was not deformed at all. In fact, he was peculiarly handsome. Sort of roguish in the way his brow angled down to the bridge of his nose, even though he was grinning from one ear to the other.

  Cameras don’t record images of hoaxes and illusions. Walt was real. Just exceptionally strange. Strange enough to have done something awful to Amanda, perhaps? Nora had to know.

  What was surprising was the total absence of anything that contained the intangible man’s full name in Amanda’s apartment. To Nora, that seemed impossible. How could a woman date a guy for three whole years and not have a single letter, sticky note or receipt with his name on it?

  What was the fucking deal with this guy?

  Giving up was the last thing Nora wanted to do, but she’d hit a brick wall. That was back in November. Since then, she’d been laying around, sucking down cigarettes and subsisting on Chinese delivery and canned beer. She locked up the shop at closing time two and half weeks earlier and never went back. Without Amanda, there wasn’t any point. She hadn’t left her apartment in that same time. How long before one is officially classified as a shut-in?

  She dozed for an hour or so more before finally summoning the strength and courage to rise from the bed. She made a quick survey of her surroundings, all of it dingy and dirty and cluttered beyond belief.

  Enough was enough.

  With a curled upper lip and a grunting sigh, she threw on some dirty clothes and went hunting for her car keys.

  49

  Despite the relative safety of her boots, Alice treaded warily through the wet snow, careful not to step off into the ditch where all the muddy slush accumulated. The boots only reached mid-calf, and the cold, filthy morass below would undoubtedly splash up and into them. Years ago, when she was little, her mother would collect the plastic bags the newspaper came in throughout the year. Then, when it snowed it winter-time, she’d wrap Alice’s little feet in the bags and secure them at the knees with rubber bands. She never got slushed that way. Didn’t have to take a hot bath before coming back into the house for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, if she didn’t want to.

  Harold didn’t know how to make grilled cheese and tomato soup. Even if he did, he wouldn’t. Alice was left to fend for herself. But it had been that way for almost half her life now. Gradually, she was getting used to it.

  The snow beneath her feet crunched in some places and squished in others. Grackles screeched above her, cawing at one another among the bare treetops. As a kid she would have deemed the landscape around her a winter wonderland. Now it just looked dreary and dead and utterly hopeless, as if spring would never come again.

  She trudged on. Eventually she reached the corner where the gravel road on which she lived ended. It formed a T with the oily macadam street that met Highway 5 at the bottom of the hill. At that intersection was the bus stop, although no one would know to look at it. There was no bench or sign or shelter from the threat of rain and sleet. Just another muddy street corner. When Alice got there, she breathed a cloud of warm steam on her ruddy hands and waited.

  She waited for the better part of an hour without ever seeing proof of life on Earth apart from herself, a few scattered birds and a mongrel dog snuffling in the woods on the other side of the road. She popped her comp book out of her bookbag and got to sketching on the page facing the dragon. In just twenty minutes of drawing while standing in the cold, she had the beginnings of a recognizable portrait. Alice pouted at it. Then she scrawled a quotation beneath the floating head—

  Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears

  For they are the rain upon the blinding dust of earth

  —and returned the comp book to her bag.

  She didn’t know the bus schedule, but she was surprised one had not come along by then. Hunching her shoulders and rubbing her hands together, she considered her options. She could go back home, spend the day getting hounded by Howard, but she would rather stand in the cold all day than that. Otherwise, she could wait some more in hope that a bus might come along, or keep walking in the general direction of town.

  With a jerking shiver, she set off down the shoulder of Highway 5.

  ***

  With no particular destination in mind, Nora just drove. The weather had all but swept the streets clear of competing traffic, affording her a leisurely path to wherever she wanted to go. At first she just wound around the outskirts of town, paying more attention to the classic rock station on her radio than the road in front of her. Before she knew it, her internal autopilot had taken her away from town, speeding west down the interstate. She snapped back to reality then, keeping an eye out for the next exit. She didn’t want to end up across the state line and then have to drive all the way back home.

  She pulled off onto the exit for Highway 5. She knew she could take its winding trajectory back to town; it only took three times longer than the interstate. But it was scenic, she supposed, although more so in the full bloom of late spring than now, when the forest hunched dead and low beneath the crushing weight of winter.

  The world grew darker the instant she took the wooded road. She slowed to accommodate the long neglected pavement. Occasionally she glanced around the interior of the car, looking for color to counteract the outside palate of gray and black. This was a dead time, and with no one else in view—either on the road or anywhere near it—Nora felt like the last woman on a doomed planet. The bright red scarf coiled up on the passenger seat was a warm and welcome sight. At one point, she even smiled at it as though it was an old friend or a treasured child. It was then that the tires skidded and Nora’s car went into a spin.

  Her breath froze in her windpipe and the spin on the ice patch seemed like it was occurring in slow motion. She simply stared forward, through the windshield at the southbound road, the trees, the northbound road, and the trees on the other side. Over and over again, until at last she skidded off Highway 5 and the car slumped into a snowy ditch. The halt was abrupt and she pitched forward, saved from bashing her face against the steering wheel by her seatbelt. When her head stopped trying to spin in time with the car, she let out the breath and muttered, “Shit.”

  ***

  Alice heard a rush of air and the dull whumph that eclipsed into silence. It began and ended in the span of a few seconds. She stopped walking and peered down the hazy road, but she couldn’t see anything. The sound must have been deceptive, sounding closer than it actually was. Probably it carri
ed down the corridor that cut through the dense forest, like a gunshot. She continued on.

  Around the bend and further down the slope of the road, she finally saw the steam sputtering out of the car’s exhaust pipe. Most of the car itself was shrouded in the snow bank it crashed into. Alice knew from experience that the bank concealed a deep reservoir of muddy slush. She wondered if the driver was still in the car, and whether or not they were all right.

  As she drew nearer, the passenger side door cracked open a few inches, lingered there, and then slammed shut. A minute later, it cracked open again, only this time someone started to work their way out from inside the car. It was a woman. She looked frazzled, but otherwise uninjured. Alice maintained her languid pace and arrived in front of the car in the amount of time it took the woman to stumble back onto the road.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  ***

  Puzzled, Nora spun around to identify the source of the voice. She moved too quickly. Disoriented by the accident and the blurry gray haze that enveloped her, she lost her footing on the slick road and fell crashing on her ass. Heavy footsteps clopped wetly toward her and before she knew what was going on, someone was helping her back up to her feet.

  She was just a kid, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. Her pudgy face was expressionless but kind, her ruddy complexion framed by a black bob that curled in toward her round chin.

  Alice?

  “Nora? Jesus! You got a concussion or anything?” Nora just stared. “Nora! Do you need an ambulance?”

  ***

  She felt idiotic the moment she heard the words come out her mouth. How the hell was she going to get an ambulance out there? The car looked pretty well screwed and it wasn’t as if Alice had a magic phone in her pocket. But if Nora did need medical help, something was going to have to be done.

  Eventually, Nora’s eyes cleared and she looked down at Alice.

  “No,” she said weakly. “No, I think I’m fine. Just a little…shaken.”