by Bryan Smith
She turned and stalked away from him, the screen door flapping shut behind her. Jake felt some of his old anger coming back. His mind treated him to an array of images from his past, beatings and other cruel punishments. Blood roared in his ears. He wanted to scream.
He counted to ten again and entered the house.
Jolene was pouring herself a glass of Wild Turkey, diluting it with a minimal splash of Coke from an almost empty two-liter bottle. She nodded at an empty glass on the table. “Want some firewater, son?”
Jake clenched his fists. His fingernails pierced his flesh. Jolene had introduced Jake to the wonderful world of alcohol on the occasion of his tenth birthday. Things were different on Planet McAllister. Here ten-year-olds were considered old enough to indulge in adult vices. Jake was given a carton of Kools and a six-pack of Bud when he reached that age. Five years later it was Mikey’s turn. Poor Mikey never had a chance at a real life. He was a good kid. Kindhearted. Maybe too sensitive. The poor bastard dived headfirst into the world’s biggest bottle of whiskey and never resurfaced.
Jake made himself relax. “Thanks, but no.” He looked around the dirty kitchen. “Where’s Trey?”
Jolene knocked back her drink and slammed the empty glass down. “Trey! Get out here, boy, your brother’s here!”
Trey ambled into the kitchen a moment later, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans and his gaze cast downward. Trey was a handsome golden boy with dark blue eyes and tousled, longish blond hair that made him look like a displaced California surfer dude.
But something was very wrong here.
Trey displayed none of the abundant confidence described by both his mother and Stu Walker. He seemed fidgety, uncomfortable in his own skin.
Jake was dismayed to see that his mother’s concerns were justified. He’d been so certain her worries about Trey were unfounded. He seemed dazed or drugged, and Jake immediately wondered whether the new girlfriend had gotten him hooked on something. Couldn’t be meth, the preferred poison of white trash youth. The kid didn’t have that jittery, tweaker thing going on, thank God. But maybe it was heroin. Did they have that out here in the sticks? He had no clue, and so he tried to rein in that line of thinking. Jumping to conclusions was a bad idea. He needed to get Trey out of here, take him somewhere where he’d feel able to talk more freely.
“Hey man, why don’t we go get a pizza or something. My treat. We’ve got some major catching up to do.”
Trey shrugged, but didn’t lift his gaze from the floor. “Sure. Whatever.”
“Boy, can’t you at least look your brother in the eye?” Jake cringed. His mother’s voice was like nails on a chalkboard when she was this hammered. “He came a long ways just to see you, boy, takin’ time out of his busy schedule. You owe him some respect.”
The rebuke seemed to have some effect. Trey lifted his head, forced his mouth to form an expression that vaguely resembled a smile, and finally looked Jake in the eye. The effort clearly required a great force of will. “Sorry, Jake. I’m just—”
Then the kid’s eyes widened and his face contorted with terror.
Jake frowned.
What the—
Something crashed against the sliding glass door behind him, making the door rattle in its frame. Jolene was shrieking as Jake spun around and gaped at the site of a blood-soaked naked fat man pressed against the glass. The sheer strangeness of what he was seeing kept Jake from processing the horrific tableau for a long, elastic moment. Time seemed to slow down, to grind down to an almost complete stop. Then things clicked back into place, the mental gears started meshing smoothly again, and he realized the man at the door was his stepfather.
Jolene dashed to the door, flung it open, and drove the heel of a palm into the center of Hal’s chest, causing the man to stumble backward several steps before landing on his back in the tall grass beyond the patio.
“What the fuck are you doing out here, you goddamn son of a bitch!” Jolene’s voice achieved a level of shrillness that surpassed even the worst screaming fits Jake remembered from his childhood. “Get off your motherfuckin’ ass and get back in the goddamn shed before I cut your nuts off!”
Jake followed his mother into the backyard. Maintaining a cautious distance from her, he moved in a slow semicircle to his left. His stomach twisted when he was able to get a better view of Hal. Jolene kicked at him, driving a foot into his flabby belly again and again. Hal managed to shift his weight and flop onto his side. He cast an anguished gaze up at Jake, and Jake was astonished to find himself feeling actual pity for his stepfather. A series of revelations snapped into place in rapid succession. Primary among them was the brutally evident fact that his mother was insane. Most of the man’s fingers were gone. He saw knobs of ugly, cauterized scar tissue just below the knuckles. His genitals were a bloody mess. One of his ears was gone. His whole body was covered with scabbed-over wounds, places where he’d been sliced with a knife or other sharp instrument.
Jake felt dizzy, sick with fear and revulsion, but he couldn’t allow himself to be overcome. He wanted to run screaming in the opposite direction, anywhere away from there, but he made himself cling to an unfortunate reality—he was the only person here remotely capable of handling this thing the right way.
He moved closer to Jolene, who was still kicking her husband. Jake stepped over Hal’s much-abused body, seized his mother from behind by the elbows, and twisted his head toward the house. “Trey! Call 911!”
Trey stood in the open doorway, his eyes wide and his jaw hanging slack.
Jolene flailed against him, trying to twist out of his tight grip. “Let go of me, you fuckin’ asshole! He had it comin’! Let me go or I’ll fuckin’ kill you!”
“Trey, your mom needs help.” Jake glanced at Hal. “And so does your dad. Call 911 now!”
Trey blinked. He nodded and retreated into the kitchen. Within moments, Jake dimly heard his brother’s voice as he talked to the 911 operator.
Jolene threw her head back and released a wail that chilled Jake’s blood.
On the ground, Hal cried.
Jake held his breath and prayed for the ground to remain solid beneath his feet for just a little while longer.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jordan was asleep on the sofa in her living room. Overwhelmed by exhaustion and anguish, she’d collapsed there moments after ejecting Bridget from her apartment. Her body twitched and her throat produced a series of mumbled words and moans. Noise from the apartment next door pushed through the wall of sleep, sounds of distress that complemented an already disturbing dream. The shrieks that came from Todd Monroe in the moments before his death changed the tenor of the dream. What had previously been just a disturbing bit of eroticism became a horror show, and Jordan’s moans of pleasure became frightened whimpers.
Jordan awoke with a scream. She sat up, gasping for breath, her heart racing, her mind awash in pornographic images. She put a hand to her chest, willing her heart to return to a calmer pace. Despite its awful ending, the dream had been powerfully erotic, and she felt a lingering arousal. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that Bridget Flanagan had played a starring role in the dream.
Jordan experienced a flare of self-disgust. But the erotic images were so vivid, so compelling, that the arousal refused to go away. Even now she could almost feel Bridget’s tongue on her clit. She toyed with the idea of masturbating, of indulging in a fantasy about Bridget. But the tide of self-loathing that rose up at this thought stifled the urge.
She sniffed. “I hate you sometimes, Jordan Harper.”
She was on the brink of a crying jag, the kind of pity party she had no tolerance for in others. What a dark day in her life this was. A brittle facade of strength had been smashed to bits. There was no way to put a positive spin on it. Her life was a mess. The rough road ahead of her, which she’d contemplated with such conviction before finding Bridget in her apartment, now seemed daunting.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and she made no e
ffort to wipe them away. Her distress made her oblivious to the new sounds emanating from Todd’s apartment. At first. Then she began to perceive something. A blunt, flat sound, like some sort of heavy object striking something repeatedly. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Thunk. Thunk. THUNK.
God, it simply wouldn’t end.
Jordan frowned.
She’d looked after Todd’s cat, a brown tabby named Willow, once while he was away for a week over the Christmas holiday season. She spent hours at a time there, watching his DVDs and poking through his stuff. She felt some guilt over the snooping, but told herself it was harmless. It made her feel a bit naughty, and she sometimes liked doing things she wasn’t supposed to do. She discovered no deep, dark secrets. Todd had no secret cache of naked kid pictures, no drug stash, no telltale hint of secret lunacy, no bomb-making materials, or Far Right pamphlets. About the worst you could say about Todd was that he was terminally geeky. The guy had a massive comics collection, and what Jordan imagined must be the world’s largest collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer memorabilia.
Jordan figured she knew Todd as well as you could know a person without actually being friends with them. And there was one thing of which she was absolutely certain—Todd was not the handyman type. The idea that he was over there hammering away at something struck her as unlikely.
The sound came again.
THUNK.
And again, louder.
THUNK!
Another dim sound from next door deepened her frown.
It was laughter. And it had a certain quality that made her uneasy. Then the sound came again, rising in pitch as the hammering continued.
Her stomach clenched.
It was female laughter.
For some reason she thought of Bridget. But that was ridiculous. And paranoid. The laughing girl could be anybody. But it troubled her nonetheless. Todd hadn’t had a girlfriend the entire time she’d known him. She rarely saw him in the company of females at all. But maybe his luck had changed. She hoped so. He’d always seemed so lonely. Hell, at least maybe somebody’s life had taken a turn for the better.
She thought of the sad state of her own life and darkness encroached. Fuck. She didn’t want to think about other people being happy. Not now. The sounds from Todd’s apartment taunted her, reminded her of a buoyancy of spirit she’d felt so often, even as recently as yesterday. She went to her bathroom and found a package of earplugs. Then she returned to the sofa and lay down for another nap.
This time her sleep was free of dreams, erotic or otherwise, and she slept for hours. When she awoke again, the day had progressed well into the afternoon. She pulled the foam earplugs from her ears and the first thing she heard was loud, thumping music from Todd’s apartment. This, too, was very unlike Todd. He was a considerate neighbor. On the rare occasions when the sound from his stereo bled into her apartment, the volume was too low to be a real nuisance. But this time the music was going full blast. She slammed a fist against her living room wall in protest. She sighed. The music was too loud. She’d have to go knock on his door if this continued much longer.
Her sense of unease returned. She put her ear to the wall and listened to the music. Weird. This wasn’t Todd’s sort of thing at all. He liked alt-pop stuff. Modest Mouse and Death Cab For Cutie. This stuff was club music, some kind of bland techno crap. Well, maybe he was going out of his way to please his female guest.
She smiled.
I hope you get laid, buddy.
God knows you deserve it for putting up with that crappy music.
Jordan put Todd’s mystery girlfriend out of her mind and got to her feet. She stretched and decided she would fill at least some of the remaining daylight hours by giving the apartment a thorough cleaning. She put on a Tori Amos CD to block the noxious club music. But it wasn’t very effective. The mellow Tori songs just couldn’t compete with the ultrapercussive bonehead beats coming from Todd’s apartment.
“Goddammit!”
She paused in the midst of polishing the coffee table and stared at the wall separating her apartment from Todd’s. The dance music was so loud it could have been coming from her own stereo. Tori’s ethereal voice was lost in the musical maelstrom. She tossed aside the cleaning rag, set down the can of Pledge, and got to her feet.
Enough of this.
She strode quickly to her front door, intent on marching over to Todd’s place to put an end to this crap. But she heard something from outside and paused at the door. She listened and recognized the sound as a clatter of footsteps coming up the staircase. Someone in heels. Jordan’s and Todd’s apartments were the only ones accessible via the second-story landing on this side of the building, so one of them was about to have a guest. Jordan looked through the peephole of her door and watched Angela Brooks move into view. Jordan’s eyes widened. Why was one of Bridget’s bitch friends coming to see her now?
Jordan felt sick.
When would Bridget quit playing her stupid little games?
Then Jordan frowned again.
Angela swept past the door to her apartment and disappeared from view. Seconds later she heard the brass knocker rapping against the door to Todd’s apartment. Then she heard the creak of the door opening, followed by the excited squeals of two very vapid females exchanging greetings. Now Jordan knew the identity of Todd’s female guest. Her initial instinct—the one she’d dismissed as paranoia—had been right all along.
Bridget fucking Flanagan.
That voice—so falsely sweet and lilting—was impossible to mistake. The revelation also explained the horrid music pounding out of Todd’s stereo.
It all came together for Jordan in a heartbeat. Bridget had created quite the ruckus upon getting the boot from Jordan, a disturbance which naturally brought Todd running. Jordan could too easily picture what happened next. In her mind, she saw Todd reeling at the sight of a gorgeous naked female outside his apartment. A hot blonde prettier even than the admittedly very fine Buffy Summers. In three-dimensional flesh and blood. He wouldn’t have been able to think properly, the poor bastard, and Bridget would have played him with the finesse of a master symphony musician manipulating her instrument. The bitch was likely assuaging her bruised ego by fucking with the guy’s head to an extreme degree.
The door to Todd’s apartment slammed shut.
Jordan stood there by the door for a long time. She didn’t like the idea of her sweet, geeky neighbor being used by those heartless girls. On the other hand, she didn’t much relish the idea of confronting Bridget again.
An inner voice taunted her: You fucking coward.
Jordan’s expression hardened. “No. I’m not.”
She looked at her door. Saw her hand gripping the knob, then turning it. Her conscience told her a visit to Todd’s place to set him straight on some things was the absolute right thing to do. But then she thought of the smirk on Bridget’s face this morning when the comforter fell away from her breasts. And she thought some about the way Bridget’s body had looked stretched out in the morning sunlight.
She closed her eyes against a fresh welling of tears. “Shit.”
She sighed.
Wiped away her tears.
And went back to her bathroom to find some sleeping pills.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After school let out, Kelsey hopped in his ancient Oldsmobile and headed for the Rockville Public Library, where he checked out an armful of books, most of them musty, old volumes, everything he could find on demonology and related occult subjects. Old Mrs. Cheever, the head librarian since roughly the dawn of time, clucked over his disturbing taste in literature.
Her always stern expression became even more severe than usual. “Such filth.” Her eyes narrowed and her nose wrinkled. She looked like she’d caught a whiff of something dead and rotting. “Why on earth are you reading this trash, young man?”
Kelsey was caught off guard by her nosiness and fumbled for something to say. “
Uh…I…dunno.”
Mrs. Cheever harrumphed. “What, exactly, is the allure of something like this?”
She held up a copy of a richly illustrated text entitled Succubi: An Illustrated Journey Through the World of Sexual Demons and Possession. The cover depicted a woman drawn in an exaggerated manner similar to the covers of old fantasy novels. Her feminine attributes were emphasized to a ridiculous degree, with wide, flaring hips, a narrow waist, and breasts like melons. She stood against a lurid landscape meant to represent some hideous layer of hell, with little demons and imps dancing in the background. Clad in a ragged animal skin loincloth and matching top, she stirred something primal within Kelsey.
He felt his face go hot with embarrassment. “I…don’t know.”
The librarian made that clucking sound in her throat again. “I suppose this kind of thing must appeal to boys your age. It’s shameful. God forbid you should enrich your minds with real literature.”
Kelsey seethed with rage. This wasn’t school. This was the public library. He didn’t need to be lectured by this snooty old bitch. His reading material was none of her damn business.
“Tell you what. I’ll borrow my sister’s Jane Austen books. That’s real literature, right?”
The librarian’s wary smile poorly masked a deep-rooted suspicion. This was a woman who clearly did not like young people. At all. “Well…yes. But—”
Kelsey grinned. “Good. I’ll enrich my ass with brilliant prose. And by that I mean I’ll wipe my shit-encrusted bumhole with the pages. And I’ll be thinking of you the whole time, Mrs. Cheever.”
The librarian shoved the stack of books across the counter. “These are due back in two weeks. Enjoy your drivel, you worthless delinquent.”
“Right. Have an excellent day.”
Kelsey scooped up the books and got the hell out of there.
Mrs. Cheever summoned young Bethany Haines to the front desk and retreated to her office for a break. She settled into the plush leather chair behind her desk, put the phone to her ear, and made a call.
