Steve waited.
The knife came down. Perry smiled, looking drunk or drugged or even a little chagrined as he shuffled away. He’d just jumped another notch on his peer group’s Dipshit Scale.
“Eddie’s one slick sonofabitch, that’s for sure,” Masey said.
“And Dempsey’s one stupid one,” Steve replied, remembering the laugh that had accompanied the knife’s bloodless slide back into its sheath. Nobody home, one night-light in the basement. Mortimer Snerd cum Henry Lee Lucas.
And all of that for one harmless bit of flirting that wasn’t even leading anywhere. Sitting on the stairs, three weeks ago, at Deke’s house. Playing with her hair a little, kneading the tequila-loose flesh of her shoulders, making only the fuzziest come-ons in naughty-joke form . . . no big deal, right?
Wrong-o, buster. Not if your name was Perry “Psycho” Dempsey, the I-Was-a-Teenage-Norman Bates of Diamond Bar, California. Then it didn’t even matter that the girl whose honor you were defending couldn’t stand to be around you; it was just full speed ahead, point-first, through the shower curtain . . .
“Well, fuck it,” John Masey said, clapping a hand on Steve’s shoulder. Steve jolted back to the present. “I’m gonna grab me a brewsky and hit the Jacuzzi.”
“Sounds good.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
They slapped skin in the high-five way that had replaced power grips as the funny handshake of its age, and Masey headed for the bar.
Well, that was certainly meaningful, Steve told himself. The loving couple was long gone from view. Perry was probably still wandering around in the coliseum parking lot, waving his knife at the shadows. Unless Mommy and Daddy found him first, that is. If that happened, he’d probably be crucified.
Steve turned to the picture window, looked out. A slate path wound through the center of the backyard. He could see the sauna, the Japanese rock garden, the Jaccuzi and the swimming pool beyond. Again: Dr. Wyler was not lacking in style. It looked like there were some naked young people by the pool. That seemed like his best bet.
It was one o’clock. The night was young.
And getting older by the minute.
* * *
Mary Hatch was the first one to spot the bone-white Cadillac tooling up Ranchero Drive.
She was, at fifteen, tall for her age, and just beginning to fill out. Her breasts would probably never be large, but they were bound to get bigger than the thimbles she sported now. Her hips, on the other hand, seemed motherhood bound: high and wide enough to squeeze out a nine-pounder without even breaking a sweat. Breeder’s hips, her mother called ‘em and they ran in the maternal gene pool along with her height and her hair and her green-eyed nearsightedness. Breeder’s hips. Thanks, Mom. Looked like shit in a bikini.
But her legs, ahhh . . . Said legs were long and lean, like her upper half; and even though she thought her features too angular and her behind way too wide, she still got hit on enough to be convinced that she was attractive.
Mary Hatch was in the bushes, attempting a technique few women ever truly master: How to Pee Standing Up. She was not enjoying a tremendous amount of success when the Caddy careened into view.
She heard it first, actually; her eyesight was not so terrific, her glasses were down by the side of the pool, and best of all, she was tripping her brains out. But Ranchero was the only well-lit street on the hill; she just followed the distant rumbling until the tiny white blur near the bottom caught her attention.
This part of Diamond Bar tended to be quiet at night, Mary knew. She’d lived three doors up the hill from the Wylers’ for the past seven years. Most of the neighbors rolled up their driveways by eleven, all the rest by twelve. That was certainly one reason why she found herself squinting at it.
The rest was somewhat more difficult to peg. But its effect was far more resonant.
The car made her nervous.
Mary glanced back over at the pool, her urinary scribbling forsaken. She couldn’t make out any of the naked shapes . . . they were, to her, as formless and fuzzy as cloud formations . . . but seeing them popped an unnerving gestalt impression, full-blown, into her drug-enhanced imagination.
Big shape. Little shapes.
Water. Danger.
Shark. The word went off like a thirty-foot Great Gong inside her head. Shark. She closed her eyes, and the pictures became instantly clearer: pictures of rending flesh and screaming, of dark dark water boiling in the heat of extinguishing life. She watched the pictures for two full seconds. That was more than enough.
She was no longer nervous.
She was scared.
Goose bumps were crawling over most of her all-too naked self. She felt a sudden, strong desire to be tucked, safe and warm, in her own little bed. Undressed, so close to the water, she felt more than vulnerable: she felt like a worm on a hook.
And the car was coming closer.
The last few drops of pee speckled her inner calves and thighs; she’d stopped paying attention. Great, said a voice in her mind. Now you’re pissing yourself. Her irritation was vague, overwhelmed by mounting panic. She was thinking about her clothes, her glasses, and her friends. She was thinking about how far away they seemed, how hard to assemble and escape with. . . .
No, she told herself abruptly, sternly. This is stupid. You’re on drugs. How do you spell paranoia? LSD, and C-O-C-A-I-N-E. It was the voice of Reason.
It was not at all convincing.
And the car was coming closer.
Mary sidestepped the moisture she’d laid and crept to the edge of the yard. There the hedges were highest, effectively slicing the Wylers off from the Cronenbergs next door. It hadn’t been in the scheme of things to surround the place with redwood fence: it would have screwed with the topography, cut off the view down the hill. With territorial rights still a high priority, Dr. Wyler had taken the alternate logical step of surrounding the hedges with an all-but-invisible electric fence, which he sometimes boosted to a genuinely dangerous and highly illegal voltage. She’d seen the effects of it four years ago, when Cyndi’s dog Astro had taken a flying, Frisbee-chasing leap into the wire and the Hereafter. Not pretty. She steered clear of it, grabbing safe hedge branches like periscope handles.
Watching the car.
Coming closer.
And closer.
Until details of the vehicle came obliquely into focus: big, white, convertible, with a slew of dark figures jutting up from the seats. She saw these things, as best she could, in the moments before the car reached the Wyler driveway.
Then she glanced at her clothes, her glasses, her friends.
And waited where she was.
In the hedges.
Naked.
Alone.
The bedroom was engaged in a carousel spin, lurching in slow motion through a sea of Cuervo Gold. Cyndi closed her eyes to blot it out, but the darkness was even worse. She was the axis at the center of this merry-go-round, and she wanted very badly to get off.
But she couldn’t, because Eddie was holding her down, pinning her body to the designer Cannon sheets of her parents’ king-size bed. He was three years older, four inches taller, and the almost fifty pounds he had on her was mostly muscle. He was also not nearly as drunk as she was; chances were good that the room wasn’t spinning for him.
These were fairly decisive advantages. He had parlayed them into the removal of her oversized black pig-suede shirt, the hiking of her bright yellow sleeveless T-shirt past her nipples, and the unbuttoning of her peg-leg paisley pants. These were now attempting to slide off her hips, through no effort of her own.
She was starting to figure out, though dimly, that maybe Eddie wasn’t the greatest dude in the world, and that he might not have her best interests at heart. He was gorgeous, yes, and most of her friends would gladly lube on command for his attention. But that didn’t change the fact that he looked like he was about to ride her, and no mention of contraception had been made.
This wasn’t her first time. That w
asn’t the point.
She was starting to reconsider.
Cyndi looked up. In the dim and swimming light, it was extremely hard to see his face. The fact that he had twelve of them, doing a Ferris wheel spin around her vision’s periphery, didn’t help. She could see the outline of his spiky black hair, the faint gleam off his wraparound shades, the even fainter gleam of his carnivorous grin. Somehow, it failed to reassure her.
“Eddie,” she said. The word came out muffled, tongue-tied by tequila. He ignored it. His attention was on the pants he slid down past her ass, en route to her ankles. His fingers left trails of murky sensation that tingled her naked thighs. Arousal and trepidation mingled: a single schizophrenic, slowly spinning in the fog.
“Eddie.” Louder. Still no clearer. Still no good. She started to struggle. He held her.
“Cut it out,” he said.
“Eddie, stop.”
“Jesus, Cyndi.” Less than amused. “Come on. The Mighty Godzilla is waiting for you.”
He was on his knees now, sliding up to straddle her almost-naked hips. His fingers went up to the center of his chest, where the zipper to his black jumpsuit began. Over the thudding of the music from below, she heard the gentle ungnashing of metal teeth. “No,” she said.
“Yes.” The zipper was down to his navel.
“No,” she repeated, but it was closer to a whisper. The head of the thing that he called Godzilla had come up for air. It stared at her, cyclopean. The rest followed shortly. There were twelve of it, doing that Ferris wheel spin: a whirling penis bouquet, less than a foot from her mouth.
“Your tongue,” he said, “is Tokyo. And the monster is coming.”
He aimed and leaned forward.
A screeching of brakes erupted directly outside the window. It might as well have driven a nail into her ass. She was a foot in the air by the time the raucous howling reached her ears. So was Eddie. They let out matching howls of their own. Her forehead, not her tongue, had met the Mighty Godzilla. He fell over backwards. She fell on her back.
“Ow! Ow! Shit!” Eddie yelled, cupping the monster’s damaged luggage. She considered saying she was sorry, then decided that she wasn’t. All that screeching and leaping about had whipped her adrenaline up to a fine fever pitch. The world and her body were still out of control, but her mind cleaved through the murk like a hatchet.
The window was open; its beige curtains danced in the breeze like suntanned ghosts on a midnight beach. She crawled across the matching sheets to the windowsill, reached the foot and a half across empty space without falling over, caught the sill, hoisted up, and peered over the side.
She didn’t recognize the bone-white Cadillac idling out-side her front door. Nor, at first, were any of its six passengers familiar: they could have been any of the thirty thousand Scream freaks who’d hit the concert tonight dressed to kill. They could, in fact, have been Eddie.
But they weren’t, because Eddie was right behind her, still moaning and holding his nuts. Cyndi struggled with her vision, trying to make the many boil back to one, trying hard to focus. It wasn’t easy. The tequila had not gone away.
The words Who are you people? were halfway out her throat when she realized suddenly that maybe she didn’t want to know, not really, not ever.
But by then, of course, it was far too late.
“HEY, CYNDI! HOO, BABY! TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT!” The shadow who screamed it was in the backseat, his sunglasses pointed straight up at her face. He looked and sounded vaguely familiar; but the voice had a nasty rasping quality that was utterly unfamiliar, and the face refused to come clear.
“What do you want?” she hollered down.
“I WANT YOU, BABY! I WANT YOUR ASS!! EEYAAOW!” They all echoed the sentiment. They got out of the car, knives flashing in the moonlight.
That was when she dimly realized that maybe they weren’t kidding.
That was when the real party started.
He had no eyes. He didn’t need them anymore. They were just two moist relics of his past: always filled up with the bullshit reflections that everybody’d always shined down on him. The wimp. The psycho. The darling baby boy. His holier-than-thou folks’d have him on restriction for the next twenty years if they’d found out that he’d snuck out to hit a Scream concert, and that was all but guaranteed since his so-called fucking friends dumped him there.
He’d caught a glimpse of them, all right. Piling into Eddie’s car and laughing, while he fought his way through the riotous, exiting masses. They’d driven off on purpose, laughing. Even Cyndi.
Laughing.
And he’d stood out in the bedlam of overamped kids and cops clashing and bashing it out in the parking lot and fucking cried, for Chrissakes. Just cried, from rage and frustration and the wrath of things beyond his control. Weeping like a little lost lamb.
And that was when the others found him.
It was as if they’d been waiting there all along. Just waiting for him to reach his moment of maximum desperation. He’d stood in the parking lot on the ragged edge of fifteen-year-old doom and watched as the bone-white Caddy slid up. He watched as the door opened, and the long cool hand reached out to take him. . . .
They gave him a ride, but that wasn’t all. Not by a long shot. They took a little, yes; but they gave back much, much more. In the backseat, with one cold white hand reaching down to unzip the front of his jeans and another moving up to place sharp white nails on his fluttering lids, they gave. A little bit of pain. A great deal of pleasure.
And the promise of so much more to come . . .
He reached up underneath his shades and touched the still-moist rims of flesh where his baby blues had been. So what if they were history? Fuck ‘em. The pain had gone with them, and the loneliness, and that was all very nice. In its place was a new sense of mysterious purpose, a knowledge that everything was indeed running like clockwork, and now he was another happy cog in the Master Plan. Tick tick tick tick.
And as his new friends, his true friends, piled out onto the lawn all around him, he felt a joy and communion and a power the likes of which his short life had never known. He would have what he wanted, both now and forever.
And now was a fine place to start.
Steve was midway into a double gainer—feet over head, spinning backward in midair, the diving board still thrumming behind him—when they came around the side of the house. He caught a microglimpse of shadows under the porch light, moving fast, before the aqua-green underlit water came up to embrace him. It blew his concentration at a critical instant. There wasn’t even time to curse.
He hit the water awkwardly, bubbling his frustration. A thin, chlorinated jet rocketed up his nose. He choked and made mad thrashing movements toward the surface. The chlorine-taint burned like a son of a bitch; the pain shifted him into Automatic Panic.
His head broke back up to the air. He coughed, treading water, edging blindly toward the side of the pool. There were noises that confused him. He opened his eyes, but they stung and they couldn’t see shit, so he closed them again, putting up with the confusion until the coughing stopped and his hands latched hold of the poolside’s cold concrete rib.
And a cold hand latched hold of his hair.
Steve’s eyes came open easily then, despite the burning Weariness. The first thing he saw was John Masey, tumbling backward into the pool. Were it not for the blood shooting out of his mouth, he might have been just horsing around.
But the pool was full of screaming people; and when Masey bobbed back up to the surface, he just kept right on bobbing. Steve took a second to digest that before he pivoted on the end of the wrist that held him, turning to see himself darkly reflected in the wafer-thin plastic curve of Perry Dempsey’s shades.
Perry was smiling. Steve’s reflection was not. Something sharp and shiny and all-too-familiar waved slowly back and forth in the space between their faces.
“Hey, Perry. . .” Steve began. He could feel his flesh goose-bumping. It had nothing to do w
ith the water.
The knife got closer. Perry’s smile got broader. His grip on Steve’s scalp stayed just the same.
“You’ll never make fun of me again, dipshit. Whaddaya think about that?”
The words I don’t think that would be a very good idea flitted vindictively across Steve’s mind, somewhat worse than déjà vu. The point of the knife was getting closer to his throat. Somehow he didn’t believe that it was going to stop at the skin this time. He tugged to the left. Perry’s grip held.
A shrill, piglike squeal in the same direction made Steve stare wildly out the corners of his eyes. A Screamer he’d never seen before had Betsy Waverly dangling inches above the water. He also had a knife. He was using it to remove Betsy’s face. A few more bodies were floating beneath her feet.
This time, when Steve yanked, it was with all the strength in his possession. A handful of long dark locks came loose: the price of freedom. He let out a little triumphant yell as he pushed himself backward, away from the wall.
There was a brilliant flash of silver and aqua-green, brilliantly underlit by the pool. Steve watched it disappear under his chin, felt the snick and tug of it. The pain came a split second later, hot on the heels of the cold steel slice that neatly bisected his Adam’s apple.
Then he was up to his nose in the water again, the water that met his new aperture and didn’t know which way to go with it. Blood and water shot down to his lungs and spritzed back up his nose, intermingled in the sputtering gash. He tried to scream, got bubbling red and green.
Perry was laughing. Steve wished to God that he couldn’t hear it. God didn’t appear to be listening. It was the sound that he carried with him as he sank, the sound that greeted him as he surfaced.
And sank. And surfaced. And sank.
And sank.
And sank.
Eddie was pissed when he came down the stairs. His halls hurt, his poontang strategies were blown, and now Perry and a bunch of assholes had crashed the party. The only good news was that it gave him an excuse to hit something. Like a Dempsey, for instance.
The Scream Page 2
