“But Laurent is dead,” I reminded her. “You and David both insist he’s—”
“He was murdered.”
“But if a body was never found there’s only one way you could know that.”
She nodded.
“If he’s really dead then how can he be here with us tonight?” A sudden burst of nervous, joyless laughter escaped me. “You expect me to believe he’s some sort of—what—ghost?”
“Baby, I know this is hard for you but you have to accept it. You have to let this go. You have to let me go.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Evil is real, Will. Sometimes you can touch it.”
I walked away, came back then walked away again. It felt like I was literally about to come out of my skin. “This is madness. What is going on? I—OK—get your things, we—we’re leaving. Right now, tonight.”
“I can’t. You know that.”
I stood there shaking with anger and confusion, trying my best to figure out exactly who was standing there with me. The longer the night went the less recognizable my wife became. “Then I’m calling the police. The bastard is out there somewhere, and I want him off this property.”
This time it was Betty who laughed, a pathetic, helpless little laugh. “The police? Will, for God’s sake, do you really think the police can help? Don’t you understand what Davey was telling you, what I’m telling you?”
“Whoever was sitting in that chair is a man and nothing more. He—his truck—it broke down and was towed away. Was that all an illusion too?”
“In a way,” she whispered. “Like a dream, a bad dream. We need to have them sometimes. They help us see what we need to see, the things we need to know.”
Rain sprayed the windows, tapping the panes and summoning us out into the storm. I looked to the window over the sink. The light was on again.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll handle this sonofabitch myself.”
Betty nodded sadly. “I wish there was some other way. But there isn’t.”
My wife reached out and took my hand in hers. Slowly, she led me back out the front door and into the rain. Together, we walked around the side of the house to the backyard. The outside light was still on, and at the very edge of its reach the dark forest stood silent and swaying in the storm. The rain pelted us with such force it was painful on contact, but neither of us cared. We’d become transparent. We were the ghosts now, transported to another rainy night so very long ago. Yet we were alive. The pain told me so.
I held Betty’s hand tight and followed her gaze as she turned and looked back up at the house behind us to the second floor where her bedroom was.
And I saw. God help me. I saw.
The children. Betty. Davey Hamilton. Sharon Lodge. Two others. A boy. A girl. Five in all, they stand in the dimly lit bedroom. A lone candle burns on the nightstand, the flame flickering, bending arcs of light along the shadowy walls and ceiling. The children surround the bed. Bob Laurent lies there before them, his face painted stark white, his eyes ringed in black. On the floor next to the bed are a shattered mug and a puddle of coffee, lying right where he dropped them when the sedative took hold and he lost consciousness.
The children. Knowing what they must do. What they have agreed to do and planned out right down to the very last detail. From the tranquilizers stolen from Sharon’s grandmother, to the rope bought at the local hardware store, to the hunting knife Davey’s father will not notice is gone and will be back in place before he next uses it. Everything has been planned and agreed to well in advance. And it has all led to this night. This rainy day which slowly became a rainy night. The last day, and the last night any of them will have to endure these things, because on this night Bob Laurent will die. They will see to it. No one would believe such a nice man could possibly be responsible for the horrors he has perpetrated against them. No one needs to know what these children have been put through. They know, and that is enough. They will end it. They have decided. Not one or two, but all five of them, together. Together, they will end this. Together, they will forever carry the scars of what he has done to them, and together they will forever carry the burden of what they are about to do. They will not tell, just as Bob Laurent has always warned them not to do. They have become very good at not telling, at pretending things never really happened. He has taught them well.
Now, they will teach him.
Davey goes first. Holding the enormous knife in both hands, he raises it up close to his chin as his eyes brim with tears, his face pale and ghoulish in the candlelight, and then slams the blade down into Laurent’s chest. It sinks in deep then snags on bone, turning the teenage boy’s wrists. No one says a word. No one looks away. Even when the body convulses and Laurent’s breath catches in his throat and he makes an odd wheezing, gurgling sound. Everyone cries. Quietly. Rain spatters the windows as Davey, choking back the bile, pulls the knife free and hands it to Sharon. She takes it with trembling hands, her face a twisted grimace of rage, then stabs him once, then again, deeper the second time, the blade making a sickening ripping sound. As she pulls it free of him, ribbons of blood fly from Laurent’s body. He is still alive, but dying quickly.
The blade is passed to the others and they strike just as they promised they would, plunging the knife deep into the body before finally passing the bloody blade to Betty.
Hands trembling and tears smearing her face, she looks to the others then down at the body. Bob Laurent is dead.
“Do it,” Sharon says, a wicked smile curling her bloody lips. “Do it, Betty, do it! Do it!”
Betty shakes her head no, the madness rising, becoming one with the terror and shame.
“You promised,” the other girl says. “We all promised.”
Davey touches her wrist, strokes it with tenderness. “It’s OK,” he tells her. “Do it. It’s almost over but it can’t end until we all do it.”
Betty hugs herself and backs away. “He’s already dead, there’s no point,” she says, her voice trembling.
“Finish it,” Davey says.
Finally, tears streaming her face, she does.
The rope comes next. They bind his hands and feet with it and then fasten the second length around his neck. When the knots are secure, they roll and wrap the body in a sheet. Dark blood quickly stains it, seeping through.
Together, they carry the body out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the house and out into the night.
They cross the backyard, through the heavy rain, and move into the forest behind the house. Nearly a mile in, they come to an old stone well that has been abandoned and unused for nearly a century, forgotten and overgrown deep in the woods. As planned, they have already loosened the stones and prepared the well for their purposes.
Drenched in rain and blood, the children remove the stones one by one until the opening is large enough to accommodate the body. Together, they drop and roll it into the well.
The body plummets, lands with a dull thud far below.
Together, in the rain, they replace the stones.
Together, they hug and cry and promise each other everything will be all right, that none of this ever truly happened. And even if it did, it’s over now. Bob Laurent is dead and buried and he won’t be coming back. He can’t hurt any of them ever again.
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back; let the raindrops tickle my face.
Most of my tears washed away, but just like the rain and all the horrors hiding within it, they kept coming. And as Betty’s hand slowly slipped free of mine, I turned and saw the others standing behind us in the yard.
Through sheets of rain, there they were, children no more.
And in David Hamilton’s hand, a knife, held down by his leg.
Betty left me, joined the others, and together they watched the woods behind me. Waiting…
My mind shattering, I slowly stole a look back over my shoulder.
Through the rain and darkness at the edge of the forest came an u
nnaturally white face. Striking blue eyes ringed in black opened wide in demonic delight as he glided between the trees, dancing like some sort of depraved marionette, his movements jerky and bizarre, arms up above his head and spindly legs prancing.
Without taking my eyes from him, I stumbled back across the yard until I also saw the others in my peripheral vision. The rain grew worse, falling in heavy diagonal sheets, but he was there, dancing, and when I looked at Betty and the others, what he’d done to them—all that unimaginable pain and horror—it was there too, branded on their faces like the mark it was. His mark. A mark of evil.
I stood in the rain, drenched and cold and unable to move as the creature danced deeper into the yard. And then he stopped, leaned forward, and with a wicked grin of a smile, pointed at me with a bony finger, the nail long and curved like a talon.
Slowly, very slowly, the finger curled back, summoning me. Once. Twice.
David handed Betty the knife. Once at my side, she held it out for me.
I took it, holding it tight with both hands, and stepped forward. Soaked and shivering, I looked back at my wife. She nodded, her lipstick running over and dripping from her chin like blood.
I reached out as if to touch her, but she was several feet away. In that moment I wanted nothing more than to put my arms around her and take her away from this awful place, but I knew that was not possible.
This was my battle now, my demon to slay.
“Betty,” I said, my voice a croak of a whisper beneath the rain, and then I turned and charged at him.
It opened its arm as if in welcome, head thrown back and mouth open to drink in the rain, the blood and the madness.
I crashed into him and together we fell. He vanished beneath me, and then I was hitting him with my fists, pounding him down deeper into the muddy earth. The thing writhed about and scrambled for purchase, struggling back up to its hands and knees, swiping at me with its claws. Flailing about, it smiled. It was happy. It was enjoying the violence, absorbing it. This was what it needed. But it was weak. Time had left it weak.
As it began to rise to its feet, I attacked again, this time with savagery I never would’ve believed myself capable of, slashing its throat with the blade then swinging it back around and burying it deep in the thing’s gut.
Crimson sprayed from its throat wound and gushed from the jagged hole in its abdomen, but it kept rising, smiling demonically, eyes locked on me with something like love. But this wasn’t love. This was sinister, twisted and evil.
Suddenly the others attacked, pulling it back to the ground and swarming on it like a pack of ravenous wolves. Betty ripped the knife from my hand and straddled Laurent. Raising the knife high above her head, she thrust it down again and again in a spray of blood and gore and endless rain.
It all seemed to happen so fast, and then they were drifting away, wandering off through the storm in separate directions, each covered in blood and entrails. Finally, Betty walked away too, leaving the body behind in the mud. She never looked at me, just turned her back on the fallen creature and stared at the ground as if she might find answers there.
Bob Laurent lay naked and broken in the rain, his clothes torn away, his body mangled. They’d ripped pieces of him away with their hands and teeth, nearly devouring him in their viciousness.
I realized then that the back light had been on the entire time. I looked back at the house. Light filled the kitchen window as well.
Someone stood there watching, peering out at the storm.
I felt my knees give out as I sank down and splashed into a puddle.
After a moment David and the others all came together again, wandering back into the light. The rain had washed away the gore, but none of us were clean. We could never be clean again.
I watched as David took the knife from Betty’s hands. He leaned in, kissed her gently on the forehead then turned and walked away with the others.
As darkness swallowed them, Betty moved over to me—her face blank, her hair matted down and her clothes plastered to her body—put her arms around my shoulders and gently pulled me close. I fell into her, still on my knees. Her arms tightened around me and she dropped down to her knees as well.
We held each other awhile. There, in the rain.
When I opened my eyes I looked behind her, over her shoulder.
Laurent was gone.
Maybe he’d never really been there at all. Or maybe he’d been there all along. Real as the night, the rain, the blood coursing through my veins and the nightmares that refused to let me go.
7
All the stones have been put back in place. From below, submerged beneath the mud and rainwater, with dead eyes he sees, watches…listens…waits…rots. Scarred bones and fading bad dreams, nothing more…
Yet he haunts me still. Haunts us. As all good demons should.
I remember standing at a local junkyard behind Sully’s Repair Shop. After a drawn out, somewhat confrontational conversation with the owner, he’d led me out to the bevy of dead and abandoned cars that had been towed and left there over the years, some dating back decades. One such vehicle was a truck that had once belonged to Bob Laurent. It had been found on a stretch of state highway a few miles outside town, parked in the breakdown lane as if he’d pulled over, shut off the engine and simply walked away. The truck had sat rotting and unclaimed ever since. As I looked at the rusted and rotted corpse that had once been Laurent’s pickup, I told myself it didn’t matter what was possible and what wasn’t. The past was real. The evil within Laurent was real. I was real. My wife was real. Our pain was real.
Between the screams, the tears, the blood and violence, the lies and wounds, scars and those moments when I’d have sworn I’d come awake with my hands around Laurent’s throat, gleefully choking the life from him, I dreamed of Betty sitting beneath a beautiful old oak tree, a noose hanging ominously from a branch above her, her clothes stained with Laurent’s blood. And the faster I ran through the woods to her, to stop her from what she felt she needed to do to stop the things that had haunted her since childhood, the farther away she seemed to get. And when I could run no more, I knew I’d never catch her in time.
The wolf, he was there too.
But on this night of ghosts and memories, of tall tales and love stories, horrific demons in whiteface and a rain that crashed the Earth with ferocious anger, my nightmares parted and for just a moment there was peace.
No. Not peace.
Understanding…anger…pain…regret…loss…and yearning that will never leave me. But not peace. Not quite.
I closed my eyes and tried my best to remember the good. The joy.
And all I could see was Betty. My love. Forever. For always.
Why, baby? Why didn’t you wait for me? Why didn’t you tell me?
It’s all right now. It’s all right. The rain, it’s stopped. Do you see?
Listen. Can you hear the quiet? Can you feel me there with you?
There’s no one dancing beyond that dark and blurry window.
Not anymore. Not ever again.
It’s only me now. Only me.
* * *
Even when the night began to die and a faint rumor of light burned through the misty fog in the distance above the trees, we remained in the backyard, on our knees and holding each other tight. The rain had stopped for a few hours but began to pick up again, falling heavily in twisted veils that curled and sprayed down on us. It was a warmer rain now, but just as telling. I ran a hand across Betty’s face, cupped her cheek and lifted her chin from my shoulder so I could look into her eyes. She blurred through the rain, perhaps my tears.
“I’m sorry,” she promised, but her eyes had grown sluggish and distant, and that effortless smile I’d always found so endearing, the one that curled just the corner of her mouth, now seemed forced and weary. “Do you believe me?”
I nodded and we kissed. It was a desperate kiss full of passion and fear, longing and the knowledge that it would be the last kiss w
e’d ever know.
There might be others, but not like this. Not here. Not now.
Even as the rain crashed down on us and washed her away from me, I told her she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, the only woman I’d ever loved and everything in the world to me.
I held on tight, wanting—needing—to keep her there with me, but she was already gone, already lost to the rain and mud.
In my arms I held nothing but old clothes. Her clothes from so very long ago I’d found beneath the floorboards of her bedroom closet along with those horrible photographs.
I bowed my head and cried like I never had before.
Eventually, I struggled to my feet. Somehow, my legs carried me as I stumbled across the yard. Fumbling keys from my pocket, I stopped at the stone walkway and took one look back at the old house. It sat silently in the storm, offering nothing more. It had told me its secrets, showed me its ghosts and now it too had fallen asleep.
It was time to go, there was nothing left here. It was all dead now, the good and bad and everything in between.
But before I could turn away, just for a moment I saw Betty as I’d seen her years before. Young and happy and vibrant and in love with me, hurrying out the door to see me, her hair flying in the breeze.
The Rain Dancers Page 8
