by Ed Gorman
His hands and eyes pleaded for mercy.
Laumer kept after him until the little queer disappeared into the night like a slithering nocturnal animal.
There should be a concentration camp for slime like Jake, Laumer thought.
Laumer hated fairies, used to beat them up during his years in the service.
He remembered, especially, one incident when he’d seen two queer-style hairdressers coming down the streets in the town near where he’d pulled boot camp.
One of the fags had said something to Laumer—made a remark about Laumer’s macho stride—and Laumer had become enraged.
Blindly.
He had pursued the queers—who had the good sense to be terrified—down a misty alley, caught both, and begun working them over with the skill and pleasure he had learned in training.
Then the fag who’d wised off had made another mistake—he’d mocked him again about his masculinity—and Laumer had reached in hard, with his thumb, ripped out one of the fairy’s eyeballs.
Now, looking at Jake, he felt the same disgust he had felt years before in the alley, when the queer had suggested that there was something wrong with Laumer.
But he had no more time tonight to devote to thinking about scum.
Now it was time to go to the cabin.
To implement his plan.
Images of charred flesh, hellish screaming filled his mind.
It was time.
Jake cut himself several times as he tumbled down the dark hill trying to escape Laumer.
All he’d been doing was looking at the Foster meat plant....
Cruelty of this kind confused Jake.
He continued to tumble ...
... rocks cutting at his body ...
... long grasses lashing him....
Finally, exhausted and terrified, he stopped rolling at the bottom of the hill.
He knew better than to move.
At moments like these he had to become an animal, imitate the way animals hid from humans.
He lay in the long grasses at the bottom of the hill, staring up at the night....
Sometimes he wondered about the stars ... who had created them really ... some said God; others said there was no God....
Then, for no reason ... though maybe it had been thinking about God that had inspired it ... he thought of the bloody butcher’s apron.
The image had not left him all day.
And whenever he thought about it, a dull throbbing started behind his eyes.
Sometimes Jake had terrible headaches.
A sound startled him.
He rolled over on his back, half-expecting to see Laumer standing over him.
His heart started pounding.
But the noise had been caused by a dog roaming through the long grasses.
The dog stood still a moment watching Jake, then moved on, tail switching.
Jake felt his whole body sag with relief.
Laumer was a frightening man, one who’d always taken pleasure in hurting people in front of Jake....
... now Laumer had upped the ante, becoming physically violent with Jake as well....
No, cruelty of that kind made no sense to Jake. Why couldn’t people just let other people be?
Why did they always have to take pleasure in the pain of weaker souls?
... the image of the bloody butcher’s apron floated back into Jake’s mind....
He had brought it home, not sure why, as if staring at it would reveal its significance to him.
Maybe, because he’d found it at the Foster mansion, maybe Ruth Foster or Minerva knew something about it?
But what would they know about a bloody butcher’s apron?
And if Jake raised the subject, maybe they would get mad at him. And then where would he be if they fired him? Then he would be about as well off as Richard ... depending on others for his food and shelter.
No, Jake would not raise the subject.
The throbbing behind the eyes again.
He slapped his hands over his face in an effort to stop the pain.
It did no good.
He rolled around in the grass.
A sweet breeze loaded with spring flowers and the night air comforted him, finally.
Eventually, the pain subsiding, he took his hands from his face and looked up at the starry sky again.
He did not want to think of the bloody butcher’s apron.
Not for now, anyway.
Not when it gave him such a headache.
He stood up.
Still ... something compelled him to consider the apron.
To solve its mystery.
Searching the hillside carefully for any sight of Laumer, Jake set off.
He felt lonely and afraid.
4
The Valium had not helped.
Minerva sat in front of the small black and white TV set she kept in her room, staring at a rerun of Columbo on cable and trying to calm herself with hot tea.
She kept waiting for the drug to kick in, to give her some peace.
Apparently, it was not going to work.
What had upset Minerva was the argument she’d had with Ruth Foster late this afternoon.
Never before had Ruth pulled rank like that and forbidden her to do something.
But it wasn’t Minerva’s ego that was hurt.
She was concerned for her friend Ruth.
Standing in the doorway, fairly screaming everything she had to say, Ruth had looked slightly crazed, the way people do sometimes when they cross the line between sanity and insanity.
What Minerva was trying to figure out was—what had caused Ruth to react this way?
There was only one possible answer, of course.
All these years Ruth had tried to pretend that there was nothing peculiar going on down there ... that at night all they’d hear—the moaning noises—was an animal trapped below....
Minerva had always known better.
Now she had a kind of proof that her suspicions were indeed correct.
She thought of last night, of getting knocked out by somebody or something as she stood by the basement door.
She thought of this afternoon, somebody or something slamming the door in the cubicle.
Then she thought of what looked to be the outline of a trapdoor in the cubicle.
And finally there was Ruth’s behavior this afternoon. So twisted-up. Almost hysterical.
Calm, collected Ruth.
Almost hysterical.
Minerva closed her eyes and put her head back against the chair.
The events of the last hours had conspired to unhinge her.
Here she thought she’d had her life, the years remaining, all planned out.
She would reside in the big mansion and serve Ruth until Ruth’s death. Whenever that came—and Ruth was healthy enough to live a long life—she knew that Ruth would provide for her in her will.
Then Minerva would travel.
Perhaps she would go back to New Orleans, the place where she’d met the white man so many years ago. Or perhaps she would go to France. There was French blood on both sides of her family.
Wherever she went, she would spend her last years in modest comfort and dignity, the two things she’d asked from life. Nothing more.
But now she wondered ... after last night ... after this afternoon in the basement ...
She opened her eyes, watched a few minutes of Columbo. It was one of his cases that was so complex she had no hope of following it. She got up and walked across to the set and started twisting the dial until she found something she liked. A forties movie with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard.
Now, there were some real movie stars, not like the snips you saw today with their sex and their drugs and their preening egos.
Minerva watched ten minutes of the movie, delighted with the company, when she heard the noise from below.
Glass shattering.
She froze. Her mind raced with thoughts of burglars.
You read about them all the time. And what they did to their victims, such as two older women isolated in a big house.
Minerva’s fingers dug into the chair.
She listened intently.
For now all she heard was the wind soughing in the trees.
And Ray Milland saying tender things to Paulette Goddard, who was in his arms for a kiss.
At the next sound of breaking glass, Minerva’s fingers dug even deeper.
All she could think of was that Ruth was probably downstairs.
This was the time of night when she always sat in the room she referred to as “the parlor” and looked through her family photograph album.
Ruth ... alone ... downstairs ... glass breaking.
Burglar.
Minerva was up out of her chair, moving so quickly that she knocked the tea from her lap.
Her skirt was soaked with hot liquid.
Forgetting about the tea, Minerva raced to the door, in a hurry now to get downstairs and see that her friend Ruth was all right.
Now she regretted their argument of this afternoon ... it had been so silly and stupid....
She would not want her last memory of Ruth—just in case something was happening down there—to be one of arguing.
Minerva put her hand out to the knob.
The door would not budge.
Thinking wildly that the door was only stuck—sometimes moisture swelled up the jambs—she tugged inwardly again.
The door would not yield.
Minerva was locked in.
5
There was no mistaking what it was.
A rat.
Deirdre had lost any sense of time, so she had no idea how long the rat had been trying to get at her.
Hanging suspended, the only thing Deirdre could do was raise her feet from the ground so the rat could not tear into them with its sharp, filthy teeth.
The trouble was, how long could Deirdre hold up her legs?
Already they ached beyond belief.
Already they wanted to lower of their own volition.
Already ...
Hearing the rat chittering again, Deirdre raised her legs as high as she could.
Then she heard and felt the rope begin to pull apart.
In her desperation, she had to laugh at this. All the forces in the cosmos seemed to be conspiring against her, the way they did in the Stephen Crane short stories that Mr. Arbogast taught them in tenth-grade English....
The thought of Mr. Arbogast brought back the real horror of her situation.
The dislocation.
Bad enough that she’d been cut up last night—just enough to bleed, not enough to be wounded seriously, as if the point of it were torture and not death—but missing her father and mother and her friends back at school, that was the worst part.
The ache in her soul.
The noise the rat made brought her back to the terrible reality.
Her feet had dropped again, and this time the rat had gotten hold of one of her toes.
He shredded parts of it instantly.
Deirdre screamed, searing pain shooting up her leg.
All she could think of was a single word.
Rabies.
In her mind, rats and rabies were synonymous.
She jerked her feet up off the floor.
Somewhere at the opposite end of the room the door opened.
What surprised Deirdre was the smell.
Pleasant.
Sweet.
Perfume.
Her visitor was a woman!
“Scat!” the woman said.
Deirdre heard the rat screech as it was driven away.
Oh, how she wished she could see.
Before, her visitor had been a man. She was sure of it.
Now a woman was here.
Who was she?
What did she want?
A silence filled the room.
Deirdre had a sense she was being watched.
Studied somehow.
“I can’t help you right now.”
It was the first human voice Deirdre had heard in hours.
A warm, intelligent voice.
Deirdre struggled to speak with a dry throat. “Please,” she said, “you’ve got to help me.”
“I can’t. Not right now.”
This time the woman sounded almost stern.
“When?”
“Later tonight.”
“Where am I?”
“In good time.”
“Please. Just tell me who you are.”
“In good time, as I said.”
“But—”
“Hush now,” the woman said. “The rat is gone. I killed him. You have nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe I need to see a doctor.”
“You’ll live.”
“How is my father?”
“Your father?” the woman sounded surprised.
“Yes, I was with him when I was taken from the car. ”
“I don’t know, child. I can’t help you with questions about your father.”
“Please,” Deirdre said again.
“I will be back. Later.”
“Please,” Deirdre said.
But the woman was silent.
Then she left.
The woman’s visit had a curious effect on Deirdre. Instead of feeling safer, with some hope that she would be let go eventually, she now felt as if she were involved in some insane kind of scheme that could end only one way.
Every day you read about it.
Young girls dragged off and butchered.
Deirdre now knew she was in the clutches of people so strange and menacing that her sixteen-year-old mind could not possibly comprehend them.
All that remained of the woman was the lingering smell of her perfume.
That and the slightly mad tone of her voice.
As for what her visit had meant, Deirdre had no idea.
All she knew for sure was that she was never going to get out of this damp, musty room alive.
6
He spent a lot of his time talking to Bruce Lee, Bobby Coughlin did.
Directly to Bruce Lee.
It was like he had Bruce’s phone number or something.
How it worked was this.
Above Bobby’s bed at home was this huge picture of Bruce, looking fiercer than he ever had in his brief time on the planet.
And each morning, after rolling out of bed, Bobby Coughlin stood in his ragged underwear and aped his man.
Struck the same pose.
Put the same ferocious expression on his face. And served the same kind of warning on the world that Bruce Lee had.
Only now Bobby Coughlin was doing it in the evening—striking the pose, serving the warning.
Specifically, he was sending out dire emanations to Dave Evans, warning him that after today’s embarrassment—Angle shrieking at Bobby in the hall, Dave not defending Bobby—that things were going to get very bad for Dave.
Very bad.
Just now, Bobby heard Bruce Lee’s voice in his head.
“Do not be afraid, little one. You are becoming a master of yourself and thus a master of other men, as well.”
Bobby, wearing the same gym shorts he’d worn back at the health spa, smiled.
Then did a quick karate kick (actually he didn’t know if it was karate or judo or what; never having studied either one of them, all he knew was that the kick was, whatever its origins, a pisser) and knocked himself off his feet.
He landed on the bed.
But instead of pretending he’d screwed up, he’d told himself that, in a real fight, he would have killed the other guy (whose name could very well be Dave Evans) before falling down.
No doubt about it.
With Bruce Lee’s help (just yesterday, Bruce had said, “Bobby, someday you won’t need acne cream and your biceps will be full and girls will offer to give you endless hours of pleasure”) Bobby was going to stake a claim on manhood the way the U.S. M
arines had staked a claim in Grenada.
He turned and looked at the Bruce Lee picture the way he used to look at the Stations of the Cross in church.
With reverence.
Awe.
Communion.
He was just setting himself in the proper position again—the Killer Position as he thought of it—when he heard the door creak open behind him.
Before he could break the position—because he knew who had just walked in, who was about to embarrass him—he heard a girl’s voice say, “You’re such a nerd it’s incredible.”
There he was, skinny Bobby Coughlin, one hundred and twenty-six pounds in his gym shorts, a face full of pimples, a heart full of fear, and there stood his twelve-year-old sister Annie, making fun of him.
“You’re really scary, Bobby.”
“I thought Mom told you to knock.”
“No, she told you to knock, remember, you’re the one who’s walking in the bathroom when I’m in there. You just want to see my boobs.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“That’s just because you can’t get any girls your own age.”
Annie was mad at him because instead of MTV, he’d insisted they watch a Kung-Fu movie on cable. She could be merciless when you crossed her. Like now.
“You pretending you’re Bruce Lee?” she asked, raising her eyes to the poster. She was four-feet-ten, weighed maybe eighty pounds, and was pretty in the snub-nosed way of all the Coughlin women. She was also about as compassionate as a hungry shark.
“If you want to know,” Bobby said, deciding to really bait her, “I talk to Bruce Lee.”
“Isn’t he dead?”
“Not really.”
“Boy, that’s a good one. ‘Not really’.” She put her hands on her hips, spoiling for this argument as much as Bobby was. “He’s either dead or he’s not.”
“He speaks to me.”
She smirked. ‘“From beyond the veil’, like Leonard Nimoy says on In Search Of.”
“That’s not on anymore.”
“A lot you know. It’s on cable now.”
“Oh.”
“And you definitely do not talk to Bruce Lee.”
“Yeah, well I do, and he told me some very confidential things about you.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you do when you’re watching MTV alone. ”
His sister’s pretty face crimsoned instantly. Boy, had he struck some kind of nerve.
