Miles stopped. Something was wrong. Was it the effectiveness of his voice, or the fact that he wasn’t having as much fun as before? He’d been hearing a slight, rhythmic sound, but hadn’t paid much attention to it, a steady thump, muffled somewhat because of the rain and because he was inside. The more he spoke into the mic, the more he realized he could only hear his voice from the switchboard now. It was no longer echoing out over the town like it had been before.
His heart skipped a beat, not with fear but anxiousness.
Boone had made it to the police station, and he’d taken the speakers out.
In the time he’d been waiting for him, Miles had ‘done himself up.’ He’d gone outside and grabbed Remy, dragging him inside. He’d gotten Reba and dragged her in as well, positioning the both of them, along with Wally and Carrie, in a sort of welcoming committee against the wall. He’d made a sign that read, “Welcome Home, Frankie!” All four of them stared into the grim silence of death.
Reba was in her bra and panties. He’d taken off his uniform and put on her blue pancake dress, tearing the sleeves and ripping the waist to make it fit better. He was much taller than Reba, and the dress hung on his rangy body like a torn, worn out dishrag covered in blood.
He’d gotten Reba’s purse, her makeup bag and spent a half hour in the bathroom putting on facial powder, eyeliner, and lipstick. He was no expert, but in his drunkenness, his hair in disarray, the makeup on, he looked more clownish and demented than sultry. He put the gun-belt back on, and now he looked like a transvestite gunslinger in clown makeup.
He’d looked at himself in the mirror, grew aroused thinking about Boone, the dress fabric against his skin, and masturbated.
Now, he was at the switchboard, anxiously awaiting Boone, trying to recreate the scene at the hospital.
He thought it would make Boone proud.
~
The parking lot was a no man’s land. The water was rising against the door of the police station. Remy’s body had drifted away. The car, the giant black beetle was being taken farther south down the turnpike because of the water.
The television above the police station was the worst one yet, the loudest, biggest and most unnerving, like a slow, rotating spaceship, showing the most disturbing scenes Boone had ever seen.
~
It seemed only several hours ago he’d been at Boone’s house, but it must be close to five or six o’clock in the morning by now. Not long after that, he’d watched Boone in the parking lot killing Remy, then chasing Marci. That seemed like a lifetime ago.
Miles had found a radio and turned it on to the oldie’s station, dancing through the police station, the whiskey bottle in his hand, singing to, “Then He Kissed Me,” by the Crystals. Then he sang to “You Really Got a Hold On Me,” and then another one of his favorites, like Jesse Gabol, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” by The Shirelles. Miles sang with all his heart, dreaming about Boone. He imagined himself in Boone’s arms, those big, giant, massive, murderous arms, experiencing what he’d been dreaming about since he was nine years old.
~
When he pulled the door wide, axe in hand, Boone wasn’t sure what he was looking at, let alone what it was supposed to mean. There were several bodies with their faces painted like clowns sitting up against the left wall. Some were vaguely familiar, some were not. He’d silenced them once already, but their mouths were moving again, like in the house before with the old woman. He couldn’t hear any words, but the static was growing. The reception was bad. It was turning into white noise again.
He did not understand the sign any more than he understood what they were supposed to be doing.
“Frankie?”
Boone looked. Again, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. It was a stranger, but it was not a stranger. It sounded familiar, but it sounded wrong. It was the corpse of his dead mother, but it was the face of a clown. She was not as tall as this creature, though it was wearing a dress. It had makeup on, but it was not treating him like a devil child. Instead, there was a starry look of devotion in its eyes. If this was his tormentor, then it deserved it die. This was the voice that had been calling him, mocking him, pretending to be his mother and lying.
She’d wanted to come back, and she’d managed to do so in her own way. He knew she was in there, behind the clown make-up and the pancake dress, trying to get the best of him, tormenting him from beyond the grave, from the depths of the Miramac. It wasn’t his mother, but he could see his mother in there.
“Frankie?”
Her body was still in the river. He knew that. The memory came back through the voices of the people against the wall. They were calling him devil child, like the others, like his mother years ago.
She’d dragged him to the river. She’d been a small woman, but she’d been strong. He could smell the sweat on her hands as she pulled him through the brush.
“Frankie?” the woman thing said.
But it wasn’t a woman-thing. It was a man-thing. He knew that, too. He’d seen him earlier. He recognized him through the clown makeup. The eyes were pleading, adoring, nothing like his mother at all. This thing had crawled from the pages of a smutty magazine, of soiled pasts, and dark comic books.
But he thought he could see his mother in there, if only for a second: dead, decaying, rotting in the river, only a skeleton now, her worm-ridden mouth trying to speak, a dead thing in a gingham dress.
He was hallucinating again, right here in the police station, reliving the past.
“FUCKING LUNATIC CHILD!” she’d screamed, dragging him by the hand, out of the house, and down through the trees. It had been raining then, too. The rain had been helping him his whole life, a comforter, a boon.
She dragged him all the way to the banks of the river, where the water was deep and swift. He’d gone willingly, as though knowing what was going to happen.
She kept screaming into his face: “LUNATIC CHILD! DEVIL CHILD!”
His expression never changed. He was intent. She fought, grabbed him by his arms, and tried to throw him into the river. She didn’t think he could swim, but he could. He had been down here before, plenty of times. The water had been speaking to him, telling Boone he had to teach himself how to swim. He came down here often, took off his clothes, and swam in the shallow areas. She didn’t know about any of that.
She slipped on the muddy bank. Her fingers let go of his arms. He maneuvered in such a way that Boone got a better hold of her instead of vice versa, and he pushed her.
She slipped and fell backwards into the water, making a big splash. The current did not take her right away. She grabbed a handful of brush by the bank, staying afloat and swam toward him, calling his name: “Frankie! Frankie! Help me!”
He reached out. She tried to take his hand. She looked desperate, fighting for her life one moment, then leering and smiling the next, as if she had him right where she wanted.
He waited until she was close enough. She pleaded for him to save her, but he screamed into her face:
“DEVIL MOTHER! LUNATIC MOTHER!”
He screamed as loud as his lungs would let him, releasing all the years of torment she put him through.
She clawed at his arm, but he was too strong. He put his hand on her head and pushed her under.
Her arms flailed, hands reaching out, grasping empty air. She stopped struggling, but he wanted to make sure . . . he wanted to make sure she was dead.
When she finally was, he stood up and watched her float away facedown in the Miramac.
Chapter 14
“I did it for us, Frankie. So we could be together. I thought you’d like it because it’s the way you left the hospital. But you don’t like the word ‘hospital,’ do you? You like ‘asylum.’ Or ‘sanitarium.’ I know that about you. I’m connected. And it’s a good thing. I understand you, Frankie. I really do. I understand everything you went through, and I know I can make everything right for you. You know all about that, I bet. Don’t you? I bet you do. I bet you do.�
��
The sun would be coming up. It had been a long night. The rain was still pouring, and it was coming inside the police station now.
The lights flickered, and then went out completely, plunging both Boone and Miles in darkness.
The radio quit. “Will You Still Love Me,” sounding off like a dead jukebox. The police station, the power within, the steady hum turned dead quiet. All Miles could hear was the rain outside, the occasional rumble of thunder. The water was getting everywhere. But there was still a gloom, enough to see the big, burly shadow of Boone standing in front of him, holding the axe.
“I painted my face,” he said.
Boone just looked at him.
“Frankie, can you try to understand where I’m coming from? I’ve been with you for as long as I can remember, you know? I was with you at the table years ago when my parents hated you and called you a monster. But I never thought you were a monster. I understood. Frankie Boone, a dream come true, everything any woman could ever want. Do you realize that? Do you realize what you arouse in people? When the kids in school sang those songs, I knew I wanted to be close to you. But, really . . . like tonight, when you saw me earlier, I wanted you then. That’s all. I wanted you to understand someone could love you for who you are. There are people who worship you, Frankie. For twenty years, that’s all anybody in this town has ever talked about. They sing song about you. There’s poetry written on bathroom walls in the elementary school. ‘Boone, Boone, a troubled young man . . .’” Miles sang.
But Boone just looked at him. Like his mother that day in the Miramac, his expression did not change. He could not hear what Miles was saying, and because of it, something occurred to Miles that completely shattered his heart, something he’d never contemplated.
Boone couldn’t care. Not for anything Miles thought or did. Not for anything Miles felt. It simply wasn’t how the man was made.
He’d hoped, sure, out of naïveté, but did he really believe Boone would want to be part of the world he was trying to create for them?
Miles realized how far away he was from Boone, a distance he could not possibly reach. Frankie might as well be on another planet; he could see that by the expression on the man’s face, the look in his eyes. There was something going on in there he would never be a part of. He could not see what Frankie Boone saw, understand the force driving him. He saw and heard things on a level Miles could only dream about. It had been naïve to think he could ever be a part of him. That was simply wishful thinking. That was why people worshipped him, sang songs about him, and wrote his name on bathroom walls.
It came from the clouds and the rain . . . from the silence.
It came from the axe.
Everything he’d done up until now, the love he’d had, the scrapbook . . . all in vain.
He was simply no match for Boone.
Miles hung his head. Tears poured down his cheeks. His shoulders hitched.
But he was still the last one standing, and that must mean something. Out of everyone who lived in the Grove, he was the last one alive. It was just he and Boone, the dead wedding ensemble, and the pouring rain.
Maybe that counted for something. Maybe it counted for nothing. He’d fallen short.
But maybe dying by the hand of Boone, in the name of Boone, was worth living for.
Miles looked up.
In those final moments, something else occurred to him . . . a name, a face, and it was this girl he wanted to remove, her place he wanted to be more than anything. He wanted to stand where she was standing. That was his road. It had come to him while sitting in the patrol car earlier, flat out jealousy, nothing more, a petty emotion after all the years of love and obsession.
It was his last gasp, and Miles tried to use it to his advantage, the union he’d wanted so desperately to thread himself into, but knew in his heart he could never have.
He looked Boone directly in the eye.
“My name is Isabelle,” he said.
~
It was a petty tormentor, pretending to be his mother, a petty tormentor like the faces in the window of the asylum, begging to be released. Only his hands could do it. Only his hands knew.
When it spoke her name, all Boone heard was blasphemy because it could never be what it claimed to be, and that was unacceptable. It had lied, plain and simple.
He brought the axe up. So, it wanted to die. That was okay. It wanted to die by his hand, and when the thing opened its moth wide and screamed, it was the last one Boone ever heard in his life.
He swung, decapitating the thing in front of him. The body collapsed, crumpling to the floor. The head hit the wall and fell to the ground.
Boone looked at it for only second before turning and exiting the police station.
~
Outside, the water was high in the lower regions of Shepherd’s Grove. It was moving steadily through the downtown area now. Boone stood in roughly knee-deep water. He trudged through, across the parking lot and toward the Junction 21 Turnpike. The large black beetle on its back, with the sluggish current, was moving south down the highway and being carried away.
The sun was rising behind the storm clouds in the east.
Across the highway was the guardrail, which ended a little ways to his left. The land dipped to farmlands and neighborhoods below the downtown area. He could see the tops of houses, the church, and the sanitarium. Water spilled over the edge of the highway and into the lower regions of the Grove, making a slight waterfall before splashing into what was now the Miramac Lake.
Boone walked to where the guardrail ended. He wanted to savor the sight of the Grove buried in water.
But he misjudged the drop-off, and the land gave way under his feet. He fell all the way to the water, making a huge splash.
He broke the surface, swimming as best as he could with one hand, never letting go of the axe. He dogpaddled, gulped water, but kept afloat.
There were structures of houses to the west, and he swam in that direction. Fallen trees, huge branches filled the Miramac. The sluggish current pulled him along.
The nearest rooftop was a random farmhouse, the same one he remembered hearing the sheep bleating from earlier. The tops of the windows were still visible along the side.
Once he was close enough, he grabbed the rain gutter, but because of his weight, part of it ripped away from the eave. He positioned himself and got a better grip, pulling himself up, and set the axe onto the sloping roof. He lifted his entire bulk onto the shingles, then crawled up closer to the top. He was four feet above the waterline now.
The house was like a lone island in the middle of a vast, muddy brown ocean. The rain continued to pour, and the sky was getting lighter.
He set the axe beside him and took a deep breath.
Boone leaned back and closed his eyes.
Chapter 15
Peter Capstone had taken Stephen and Veronica to some random house, hoping to find someone to take care of them. He’d had no such luck. Most of the town had been deserted. He’d also walked into several houses and found the people there had been murdered.
The man had made quite a trek in one single night.
Stephen and Veronica had been crying and sniffling the entire way. They’d been screaming when they saw the people being murdered in the church. They’d been crying because their parents were dead. They were now cold and hungry. Peter had found some food and some heavier rain gear for them to wear, which helped considerably.
They’d traveled east, toward downtown. They needed to get to higher ground, away from the real flooding. That was fine. But Peter couldn’t take care of them by himself.
He’d found a random house for them to stay in and said he would be back. They were on the second floor because the house was already under a foot of water.
Peter did not plan on coming back. He would tell someone about the kids when the storm cleared. There would be a phone line open eventually, or a cellphone he could use.
“Where are you going?”
Stephen asked.
“To get some help.”
“We don’t want you to leave us,” Veronica said, her tear-stained face red and gaunt. It had been a long night for all of them.
“How are you going to make it through the water?” Stephen asked.
There had been a boat in one of the driveways along the block. Peter had found a life-vest in it, and he had it on now.
“Don’t worry. It’s deep enough to wade through and there’s hardly any current up here. Plus I have the vest. But we can’t stay here. Someone has to get help. Someone has to take care of you. I’m going to go down to the police station and see if anyone’s there.”
“I’m scared,” Stephen said, frowning, and started to cry.
“I know,” Peter said. “I am, too. But you have to take care of each other. There’s plenty of food here, and there’s no one around. It’s safe. Just stay upstairs for now.”
“I don’t want you to go!” Stephen cried.
Peter sighed. “Come on. You have to be strong. Your momma and dad would want you to stay strong for each other, okay?”
“Who did that?” Veronica asked, out of the blue.
“What?” Peter said.
“All that killing? Who was it?”
“It was Boone.”
“Who is Boone?”
“He’s a man that killed his mother when he was ten years old. He’s been in the hospital. He must’ve gotten out.”
“I’m scared,” Stephen said.
“I know you’re scared, but I’ll be back, okay?”
They calmed down after some more reassuring, and Peter finally walked downstairs into the water that was already in the house. He looked up the staircase at them and nodded. He didn’t like doing it, but it was the only thing he could think of.
He left the house, wading through water up to his waist. He managed fairly well and found a large sturdy branch to brace himself as he walked along. In the downtown area, there wasn’t much of a current so much as a wide, deep pool. The sun was coming up, and the sky was getting lighter.
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