Dancer's Rain

by Doug Sutherland

  She got up, still groggy, and went into the kitchen. The counters were still clean, other than a jar of instant decaffeinated coffee and the cup she’d abandoned when she’d decided on a glass of wine instead.

  It was a small house with a strange layout—the stairs went up off the kitchen, not the front hallway—and Adrienne went up to check her daughter’s room. The door was closed and she eased it open. The only light in the room came from the streetlight outside. Other than a tangle of unmade bedclothes the bed was empty. The curtains were wide open—Emily had a habit of leaving them that way, whether she was in there or not, a habit Adrienne had been remonstrating with her about since her early teens—and she automatically went to the window to pull them closed.

  Adrienne looked out at the street. An old blue car—she knew nothing about cars, but knew she hadn’t seen this one before—sat directly in front of her house. It was wreathed in thick smoke from the exhaust, its windows heavily fogged. She stood at the window, indecisive. Emily had left early in the evening, tossing off a hurried good-bye and, as far as Adrienne knew, leaving to help a friend with some homework.

  Sure. Adrienne yanked the curtains closed and headed downstairs.

  The grass was damp and cold on her bare feet as she marched across the lawn. At the last moment she hesitated. Maybe the car had nothing to do with Emily. She looked up and down the street. The neighboring houses were mostly dark, the house directly across the street completely so. She looked at the car again. This close she could see indistinct shadows moving on the other side of the glass. She made up her mind, moving closer and rapping sharply on the passenger side window. She heard a muffled curse from inside—Emily’s voice—and the shadows resolved themselves into frantic motion. She yanked the door open.

  Emily was trying to get her blouse buttoned. Adrienne grasped her arm and hauled her out of the car, practically tossing her toward the lawn. Then she leaned back into the car—and recoiled. She’d expected to see a cowering teenager, maybe one of Emily’s classmates, but instead she was looking at a young man who looked in his early twenties with long hair and exaggerated sideburns. His shirt was unbuttoned and he was tugging at his belt.

  “Get the hell out of here!” she screamed, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Fuck off,” he reached for the door handle. Alarmed at the sudden movement, she pulled back. He laughed and reached across the seat to slam the door shut, then gunned the engine and pulled out, the tires shrieking in protest. She could see a light come on across the street. Wonderful. The low rent follies. She turned on Emily.

  “You get inside, young lady,” she said, trying hard to keep her voice down.

  “I hate you!”

  “Inside—now!”

  Adrienne spun her around and shoved her toward the house. Emily stumbled ahead, and for a moment Adrienne thought she was going to break into a run, take off down the street. She hurried to catch up, grabbing her arm again. Emily yanked her arm free, and Adrienne suddenly realized that her daughter was stronger than she was—she just didn’t know it yet. She stayed very close, herding her into the house. As soon as she got to the doorway Emily ran into the kitchen and then up the stairs into her bedroom. Adrienne heard the door slam. She stood in the kitchen, furious, wanting to follow her daughter and have it out, but finally realizing they were both too angry for a confrontation to go anywhere but downhill. She’d gotten her out of the car and into the house. That was enough, for now.

  She remembered the front door was still open and went back to close it, seeing the silhouette of one of the neighbors still at the window across the street. She stood in the open doorway, staring pointedly back, but the silhouette stayed where it was. For an irrational moment she thought of going over there, telling them to mind their own damn business, but decided against it. The neighborhood already had enough gossip material for one night.

  Adrienne glared across the street and made a point of closing the front door slowly and quietly. When she turned back inside Emily was standing there staring at her. She was trembling with rage.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again,” she hissed. Adrienne stared back, speechless.

  “I’m your mother, “ she said finally, trying to keep her tone reasonable but realizing suddenly that an outside observer would have seen two mirror images facing each other, the same erect postures, the barely contained, trembling fury, the same icy veneer. I have seen the enemy, she thought, and they is us. She remembered showdowns with her own mother—never realizing at the time that she had been confronting herself years later.

  “I’m eighteen fucking years old! I can do what I want!”

  “Look, I know this move has been very hard for you—”

  “No shit.”

  “Emily, you have to talk to me. Don’t take it out on me by, by ...” she could hardly find words for it, “by doing what you were doing just now. You’re a beautiful young girl. You’re cheapening yourself—” she stopped suddenly, not believing she’d just said that.

  Emily laughed, not believing it either.

  “You’re kidding, right? What about you, Mom? You ever ‘cheapen’ yourself? After you got rid of Dad?”

  “I didn’t ‘get rid’ of him...he left.”

  “You mean you drove him out.”

  “Your father left, Emily. I know it took two of us to get to that point, but he left on his own.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  “I’m not going to stand here and debate it with you. Especially since all you’re doing is trying to change the subject.”

  “Whatever you say, Mom,” she drew out the last word, insolent, then glared at Adrienne, challenging her for a response. Adrienne started to say something, then stopped. This could go on all night. She decided to let her daughter have the parting shot. Emily looked almost disappointed and finally whirled around and went back upstairs. Adrienne stayed where she was. Her pulse was pounding and she could feel the dull beginnings of a headache.

  She knew that in spite of school in the morning her body would fight sleep for at least an hour. She sighed, gathering up the old blanket that draped the back of the couch and taking it over to the overstuffed chair that gave her a clear view of the stairs.

  11

  It was the first one they’d ever found. He put down the thin weekly newspaper, filled for the most part with parochial drivel about charity drives and local sports heroes.

  And news of what he’d done.

  There wasn’t much detail, which didn’t surprise him. Even taking into account his sloppiness that night, he was good at this. In spite of his carelessness it didn’t sound as if he’d left them much to work with. There was a simple boilerplate quote from Frank Stallings that said, basically, nothing.

  Still, the fact that she’d been found at all signified a serious lapse on his part. Not necessarily his fault, but ultimately it was his responsibility. For a moment he tried to absolve himself—the girl they’d found might not even be one of his. People—especially young girls—went missing all the time—although the odds against two of his kind operating at the same time in a place this small were astronomical. Ultimately the effect would be the same, and not good. It would draw attention where before little awareness had existed.

  He scolded himself. After he’d done it, out on that road, he’d seen a couple of bouncing, indistinct lights far off in the bordering woods—probably just someone jacking deer, he’d thought at the time, but potential witnesses nonetheless. The lights were moving as if they were in someone’s hands, at least two of them—and uncharacteristically he’d panicked, cutting short his work and putting the girl in the water.

  Because of that he hadn’t gotten all he could have out of the experience. He thought of it as a waste of his time.

  He felt cheated, unsatisfied.

  He’d always known the van was a weak link. No matter how hard he’d try to clean it some physical evidence, some vestige of hair or fiber, would remain. He watched CSI like everyb
ody else, and while he knew Frank Stallings’ little police force had neither the resources or the expertise possessed by the fascist manifestos that played on television, he didn’t want to tempt fate. If something was worth doing it was worth doing well.

  He liked what he did, and he had no intention of stopping. Or being stopped.

  He’d known very young that something was wrong—not wrong in his eyes but in the eyes of his parents, the people at school. What seemed natural to him was definitely not that way to the people around him. To know the difference he had to go entirely on their reactions to what he did. It had taken him a long time to even become aware of just how unique he was and that other people had an awareness of that, even if they didn’t say or do anything to him that indicated otherwise. He was in his own world, one in which he could see out—when he chose to look—but that others couldn’t look into. When he got a bit older he became more conscious of nuance in the way others reacted to him and found that he was even more different than he thought. He would have preferred invisibility, and he didn’t react well when teachers and his peers showed by their reactions to him that he wasn’t invisible at all, that anything he did that was true to his own nature just made him stand out more.

  He learned the hard way that defiance didn’t do any good. Defiance got you punishment, got you earnest interviews with strangers who sat in judgment on you behind masks of feigned concern. Defiance meant you became constrained by others, and watched.

  Hate was something else entirely. You could harbor hatred inside you and control its outward manifestations, keep it from others, no matter how intense it was. He’d found a way to do that over the years—that what he thought would make people leave him alone invited closer scrutiny instead. It was better to look so inconsequential that they looked right through him.

  The new strategy bought him some space. The only alternative was to give in to the hate, display it, and then he knew something bad would happen, something with negative consequences for him.

  When he was a kid, maybe sixteen or so, he’d gotten into a row with some men who worked at a service station. That was back when he was still learning how to pass as ‘normal’, part of the background noise. Had a girlfriend and everything. She was what had set it off.

  She was a good-looking girl and they noticed—this was back in the old days, back when grown men of a certain class still yelled suggestively at women or even young girls, and as jealous as he was he’d called them on it. All of them. He wasn’t big then, and he’d finally backed down when he realized they weren’t going to and it was going to end badly.

  So he went back later that day, with the station still open, and fired a couple of rocks through the plate glass window that fronted the station. Then he took off. Even though he had no idea who the men were, they apparently knew who he was, or found out. The cops were on him within hours—didn’t matter about the circumstances that led up to what he’d done, which at the end of the day was just vandalism anyway. The cops came after him, not the men in the station who had provoked him by yelling to the girl that, basically, they wanted to take her inside the station, splay her across a work bench, and fuck her. None of that mattered here. What mattered was the broken window, the private property valued above all else by the descendants of the tight-assed Scotch—Irish immigrants who had first settled the place.

  That’s when the real hatred grew, intensified—hatred for the men, the town, the cops, everybody, everything. At first he didn’t realize how intense it was, but finally it slowly, inexorably accelerated to the point where it was always there, a hard dark undercurrent that he had to consciously fight down, try to mask so he could have his life to himself.

  Not long after the incident the gas station burned to the ground. He wasn’t anywhere near it, and amazingly enough the cops didn’t think he was either. But he was glad it happened, and secretly he hoped maybe his hatred had something to do with it, that maybe there was a tangible force behind it after all.

  That had been a long time ago, and it taught him that maybe this intensity wasn’t something to be denied or ashamed of, that it could have a purpose, give him a way of fighting back against a world he saw as full of antagonists, as enemies. He could take revenge after all, but if he wanted to survive he had to have more than one life. His real one, his true nature, was too ugly and dangerous. Sooner or later it would betray him. He needed another one. One for the world outside, one for him.

  He became adept at telling people what they wanted to hear, and even more adept at masking his needs and wants behind a bland façade. He learned that most adults weren’t very intelligent, falsely reassured by things they hung on their walls and by the uniforms they wore. He also learned that he was very, very smart.

  And he learned to hide it, all of it.

  After the story in the paper he waited for them to come, the way he always did. In some ways he liked this time more than any other. The suspense, the bubbling wellspring of dread that would rise slowly and hover just underneath the surface until finally—after nobody came—it would just subside. No one had ever come before, but this time he’d thought it would be different. This time one of them had been found.

  He’d done this close to home, been sloppy about it, hadn’t done it well. It had been recorded in that pathetic excuse for a newspaper, perhaps spurred some suspicion, and that made his jeopardy more immediate.

  Still no one came.

  That was a source of relief to him. He had never, never once, wanted to get caught. There was a lot of literature on the subject and he’d read some of it, and more often than not it seemed like the people who did this kind of thing wanted to get caught. So the authors said. But none of the authors were...practitioners. They were ‘experts’, but experts from the other side, the ones on the outside looking in. Guessing at the unguessable. And maybe in the cases they were aware of the people involved had wanted to get caught, or more likely were just stupid. Or wanted to be celebrities. No question that could happen. You could literally become a world famous serial killer, become like ‘Charlie’ Manson. It was almost a profession now, a career choice.

  He didn’t want to be famous. He wanted to keep doing what he did, undetected and unmolested. There were probably others like him, others who liked the work, others who would never be caught because they were smart or lucky or just because their pool of victims was so far under the radar that the bloody, eviscerated dots would never be connected. That was his method, too, and so far it had worked. As far as the outside world was concerned the people he removed from it had hardly been there in the first place.

  You just got better at it with practice, like anything else. You became more experienced, even skillful, and like anyone who wanted to get better in their chosen field, you introduced variations, refinements. Little things that you’d never think of—not until you’d actually done it before. The devil was in the details.

  The only trouble with that level of experience was that too much of it took the edge off, took away the novelty, the excitement. The last two or three had had a sameness about them. He was smart enough to know that this feeling of ennui could be his undoing—he could get careless, as he had with the girl in the water. There were only so many variations, and he was afraid of the day when he would exhaust them all.

  He knew the traps. Other than the craving for notoriety that a lot of his...colleagues seemed to share, sooner or later most of them inevitably followed a pattern of some kind. He supposed that could happen to him too. After all, he was only human.

  It would test his patience, but all he could do now was stay where he was, in plain sight, and wait it out, go back into the somnolent routine that was the hallmark of this place. A sudden move and he’d attract attention, interest.

  There was a downside, of course. He’d have to stay low, retreat into his other life as the person people had come to know and not necessarily like or respect but at least tolerate. That would be the price for his momentary lack of discipline. It would
be his penance.

  Then he saw the girl and it changed everything.

  The encounter was prosaic enough. During the few days that had passed since the article had appeared in the paper he’d been making a deliberate effort to stay clear of any encounters at all, let alone any that involved young women. But he didn’t live in a vacuum, and in spite of all his earnest intentions there was nothing he could do when they crossed paths, even if it was only at a distance.

  He was doing nothing more threatening or premeditated than crossing the street when he looked up and—there she was. Tawny cinnamon colored hair, a thin t-shirt that accentuated her breasts and her flat stomach, faded, artfully ripped jeans molded to long slender legs...she was walking alone, eyes straight ahead in the manner of attractive women and girls who had grown up in places bigger than this one, and it was all he could do not to stop in the middle of the street, impeding what little traffic there was, and just stare at her. She had...presence, that was the word, walking down the street as if she owned it, beautiful and young and entitled, as if everyone else were simply extras in the movie she was starring in.

  It took only seconds for her to sail on by, leaving all those hapless, hopelessly ordinary people in her wake. People like himself—he looked around suddenly, wondering if all these friends, neighbors, and fellow townspeople of his had noticed his reaction to her. Then he realized that his reaction had been their own. It was like her slipstream had sucked all the air from the space around all of them and only now were people shaking off the effects, wrenching themselves away from all the little ugly and envious fantasies her passage had created. Nobody had noticed him pause briefly, transfixed, in the middle of the street or seen him stare at her.