Beautiful.
Freedom.
Freedom never tasted so bitter, so preposterous.
The backyard was humongous and wide-open, with no visual escape routes. Rather than staring out at a small cyclone fence as they had both hoped, they peered out at a massive stone-like wall (much larger than the one surrounding the front yard). It reminded Eric of a prison wall surrounding the courtyard—Alcatraz, maybe, even though he had never seen it in person, but he had seen many portrayals of it in movies. Replacing the razor-sharp barbed wire on top of Alcatraz’s wall was a thick layer of overlapping brush, weeds, and most difficult, briar brambles. It might as well be barbed wire, Eric thought. Either way, it didn’t matter. Whether it was barbed wire, brush, or simply nothing at all atop it, the fence was just too high, and they both knew it.
They walked to the edge of the porch but neither wanted to venture out into the yard itself just yet. No gates. No openings. No weak spots. No drops in the height of the fence. No spots that appeared free from briars. No ladder. No step stool. Nothing substantial that might aid them. No silver lining. No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
“You’re never going to get out this way,” a stranger’s voice (a man’s voice) advised. “Why do you think the door was unlocked?”
CHAPTER 22
Eric and John both turned simultaneously, shocked. There was no doubt present in either one of their minds as to whom that voice belonged; call it intuition, a hunch, or just a wild guess, but whatever you choose to call it, it was right.
Sitting in a rainbow-colored, cloth, folding lawn chair was a man (late twenties, maybe early thirties). He was skinny, not quite to the point of bulimic or anorexic but a hint of malnourishment definitely applied. Poking out from beneath the lining of his dark blue NAPA ball cap sat a froth of red, curly hair. His clothes were tattered and torn, age-ridden, and nearly too small (hand-me-downs or secondhand no doubt).
In his right hand rested a long, black-handled, stainless steel butcher knife. It had to be the missing knife from the display in the kitchen. The same knife that had been overlooked by forensics after being used to murder the entire Cahill family, his—the man in the lawn chair—family.
“Raymond?” John uttered hoarsely. It was a mistake, a reflex, but oh well. What could it possibly hurt to speak his name now? He was here now. Their location was no longer concealed but compromised.
“Smart boy,” Raymond announced in a raspy, surly tone; the blade’s tip is dug at least an eighth of an inch into the hard plastic armrest of the lawn chair. Raymond used two of his fingers to spin the handle around and around, twirling the entire knife; it drove deeper into the plastic like a drill bit chewing through wood, kicking out small, curly strips of plastic here and there. The blade glistened under the crescent moonlight. “Well, I guess smart would be a bit of an overstatement considering y’all are here.” He lifted the bill of the NAPA cap up with the tip of his finger, looking to the boys for the first time, sizing them up. And even though he, Raymond, was considerably small for his age, the boys were smaller. “And why are you two here? I can’t figure that much out.”
John almost answered. He was about to tell everything when Eric grabbed his arm and gave it a squeeze. John looked cautiously to Eric, not wanting to take his eyes off Raymond but need to if he wanted to see what was up with Eric. Eric merely gave a brisk shake of his head methodically while loosening his grip. John understood (to a certain extent) and refrained from answering.
Raymond sat quietly, peering at them with beady, inconsistent eyes, the eyes of a lunatic. He waited patiently for an answer, like a predator stalking its prey, not moving or making a sound, but those eyes...those damn eyes expressed all that he needed. He gave them ample time to respond, and when neither one did, he rose to his feet. In one swift motion, he jerked the butcher knife out of the armrest and flipped it upwards until it was aiming at the boys.
Raymond Cahill was no longer just simply a stranger in a lawn chair holding a butcher knife but a homicidal maniac wielding a knife.
He made a step towards the boys refusing to let those goddamn eyes let up, and the boys begin to backpedal.
“Let’s try this again,” Raymond demanded with a maniacal smile conquering his face; a smile to match the tone. “I ask you boys a question...one of y’all answer me. That’s how it generally works.” He laughed, heinously. “You boys are dumber than I thought.”
The insults hurt, but Eric and John were helpless. They both knew better than to protest. If they could avoid doing or saying anything that might provoke Raymond, then this conversation may continue. As long as this conversation droned on, they maintained a chance of survival, albeit it a small one. If Raymond continued to talk, the boys could conspire.
Maybe there was a silver lining after all.
“What do you want from us?” Eric barked. It was no longer the shaky, concerned Eric, but the one that had almost let John fall down the stairs before beating on the front door and nearly tripping the alarm.
This might be good.
Raymond laughed. A tinge of something—perhaps nervousness—shone through the laughter. “That’s not how it works. Y’all invaded my space, tore up my shit. I ask the questions here; you two answer them.”
Unknowingly to both boys until the second it actually happened, John reached up cautiously and once again entwined his arm with Eric’s: the prom courts from hell.
“You have us trapped here. The least you can do is tell us what you want.” This new daring Eric refused to back down. It was sort of, in a way, invigorating.
“We’ll give you whatever you want,” John chimed in. He was terrified. “Anything you want...and...we won’t tell. We—”
Raymond glanced menacingly to John’s direction, and John shut up with no further convincing. He snapped his gaze back to Eric, not wanting to let this boy out of his sight for too long. This boy perturbed Raymond. “The least I can do is keep you alive,” he said. “You or your girlfriend over there means nothing to me, and I could care less about your word or your bribes.” He glances back to John, who instantly shied away, and then back to Eric. “For starters, you both know my name. What are yours?” He stared at Eric, resembling a gunslinger in immense concentration waiting to draw. He was normally great at reading people, but not today. He could not get an accurate read on this boy, and it was eating him up.
Eric could sense it somehow; he rather enjoyed this feeling. He wanted to smile but could not. No provocation, he thought. And he supposed he may have already provoked this man, but smiling may tip Raymond over the edge.
Finally, the awkward silence ended.
“I’m J-J-John,” he stuttered.
Raymond looked quickly and hesitantly to John and flashed him an almost surreal grin, before placing his attention back on his real foe.
“I’m Fred,” Eric boasted proudly. Although it was indeed a lie, Eric didn’t necessarily view it that way; a partial untruth, maybe, but not a lie.
In this moment, he felt nothing like himself, like the Eric Richardson of yore. He was not himself. He was the new and improved Eric. For all intents and purposes, he wasn’t Eric anymore...but Fred. He would have simply said John because that was who he felt like (John McLain), but two friends, visually the same age, showing up here together with the same name—no matter how common of a name John actually was—felt far too ironic and coincidental to work. Fred was the first thing to pop into his mind and he went with it. Spontaneity. What a beautiful thing.
*****
Raymond let out a nearly silent giggle…a sarcastic, mocking, I-know-something-you-don’t-know giggle. He spoke clearly, enunciating each word with perfection. “Lie to me again, Eric,” he ran his index finger down the edge of the butcher knife’s blade, testing the sharpness, “and one of the last things you will ever see on this Earth is,” he raised the tip of the blade steadily until it once more pointed at Eric and turned it on John, “your best friend will die a slow and painful and agonizi
ng death right in front of you, and you won’t be able to do anything about it.”
“No. Please,” John begged. “Please. I haven’t even—”
Raymond lunged forward; the tip of the butcher knife still aimed at John, pointing directly at his throat, and—
*****
John tumbled backwards; much like he would have done upstairs had Eric not come to his own senses and rescued him. Only this fall wasn’t an entire story; it was merely off the porch. It was not necessarily life threatening, but it hurt all the same.
From the corner of his eye, he could see that Eric never flinched. He didn’t appear to be the slightest bit afraid for some ungodly reason, and John could not for the life of him understand why.
And even though he fell and was well out of harm’s way for the time being (he, of course, had no way of knowing this), he watched as his meaningless life passed perilously through his mind as he supposed the blade was still moving in.
Eric still refused to move. He never blinked. John could only deduce that Eric had frozen up just as he, himself, had done at Riverton all those years ago.
Eric stared, bewildered, as the situation unraveled. No longer Fred or John McLain, just plain ole Eric Richardson. He knows my name, Eric thought repeatedly. He knows everything.
The element of surprise was gone, ran away and hid right beside any hope they previously had of getting out of here alive. Fred had ran away and hid as well. Only Eric and John left, and he supposed that was best this way.
On the bright side, John had fallen down, and Raymond’s homicidal outburst seemed to have subsided for now. Raymond, however, continued to hover above John, but his focus found its way back on Eric.
Eric took this as an opportunity to reinitiate the conversation. “How did you know," he finally muttered, his voice dry and cracking to the point of where he barely recognized it, “m-m-my name?”
Raymond laughed a persevering cackle. “C’mon, E,” he said. “That’s what your friend over here calls you, isn’t it? E?” Eric swallowed the lump forming in his throat and felt a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead and across his brows. “Anyways, I know my little sister warned you.”
Eric cringed, the sweat now forcing a shiver to dance down his spine. He found himself speechless and not because of fear, although he was scared out of his wits, but rather due to the fact that he simply just needed more time. He did not want to throw Isabella under the bus, so he needed a lie, no matter how dangerous it may prove to be if he was caught again.
“Sweet, little Isabella,” Raymond gushed in his most sarcastically sincere tone. “She was always a royal pain in my ass. Always snitching and tattling on me. But what can I expect? She never had the chance to grow up...did she?” He said the latter with a benign smile stretched across his face.
“I don’t know—”
“No...No...No, Eric,” Raymond interrupted. “I’m going to cut you off right there because we’re having fun, aren’t we?” There was no response from Eric just as Raymond had suspected. “I warned you what would happen if you lied to me again, so I’m stopping you because we’re having fun, aren’t we?”
Eric stared back with impatience dominating every physical feature. John was still on the ground, lying flat on his back, like a wounded dog in the middle of a busy intersection waiting for the next unsuspecting driver piloting the vehicle that would put him out of his misery.
“Yes,” Eric finally said. It took a lot out of him, but he had to say it. “I saw her. She warned me.”
“Well, congratulations, Eric,” Raymond said convincingly. “You saw your first ghost.” He twirled the butcher knife round and round again; the blade now pointed straight down towards the ground. “Let me guess: ‘I’m different’,” he continued, mocking Isabella. “‘Not quite a ghost; not quite human.’ Something to that effect, huh?”
Eric supposed it was rhetorical since he had no time to answer. He probably would not have answered even if he had had the time to do so.
“‘He can control us.’ Blah blah blah. I’ve heard it all before.”
Eric looked on in horror, a bit shocked as well.
Raymond laughed again. “Don’t tell me.” He began again, but the laughter was just too much. He could not control it and found it extremely difficult to talk through it. “Wait.” He held the tip of the butcher knife straight up in the air, as someone may hold up his or her index finger to implicate wait or hold on. “You thought you were the only one she’s helped. Man, that’s rich.”
Eric squinted his eyes; his anger grew to unreal proportions. His fists clinched and reopened rapidly at his sides. His breathing grew heavier. He despised teases and taunts.
John thought it best to continue lying here. If he struggled to his feet at this point, it might break Raymond’s concentration. If Raymond deemed his sudden movement threatening, then who knew what might come next?
He knew; John Parker not only knew but forbid it to happen. If he could continue to lay here unnoticed, he could think; thinking was always good despite the little saying his father loved to throw up in people’s faces any chance he got: you think long, you think wrong. No happy, mind-altering, situation-diverting thoughts this time. No.
Instead, he stayed primarily focused on their main objective this time: “ESCAPE!” It flashed abruptly through his mind, big black letters thrown off in a blob of hallucinogenic green like the facing of an alarm, much like the ACTIVATED had flashed on the Cahill alarm system. John dozed in and out of Raymond and Eric’s conversation, not paying too much attention to any of it. He heard the vague threat Raymond submitted and let it blow through one ear and out the other.
You stop to kill me, and Eric runs, John thought. He’s much faster than me. You’d be better off handling him first. Not that he wanted anything to happen to Eric, or himself for that matter, but it was the truth. Eric was the one to worry about, not himself, not little John Parker who had nearly been swallowed up by the thirteen-footer that day at Riverton; not the little John Parker who froze up in the face of danger. No, not him.
He could sense that Raymond already somehow knew this by the way he stared at Eric; only taking his eyes off him long enough to cast hollow threats (both verbally and with his eyes) at John. John had not understood much on this night, but he was starting to see things a little more clearly now. What he understood now was simple (as bleak and pervious as it may sound, it was simple): their safety no longer depended on the two of them, but Eric alone. John was merely a pawn on the chessboard of life, the most insignificant piece on the entire board.
Eric was smarter, faster, and much more courageous, and always had been. John was no longer a wounded dog; he had graduated to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Better yet, he was a possum playing dead. As long as the conversation continued on, John could continue playing possum. He needed more time to go over the remnants and figure out how he could divert Raymond away long enough for Eric to escape, so playing dead was of vital importance.
Keep him talking, E.
Despite his benevolent intentions, Eric listened on. No provocation, he kept thinking over and over again.
“You’re not the first,” Raymond said shrewdly. “You’re not the first ones here. Hell, you’re not even the first one she’s talked to. And I personally guarantee—no—I promise you that you won’t be the last either, Eric.”
Eric didn’t speak this time. Instead, he stared daintily at the twirling blade and sensed his time may be ending. He needed to conserve whatever energy he could because he refused to go down without a fight.
John sensed the tension mounting. He was getting quite good at sensing. The time for him to make his move rapidly approached. He focused in more on the dwindling conversation, waiting, anticipating the right time.
His mind shouted: Now. Now. Now. Go. Go. Go!
But he ignored it.
He heard the despair in the threatening promise cast by Raymond. Both were quiet now, and he could not determine whether that was good
or bad.
Now. Go.
But not just yet.
*****
“You sound very sure of yourself, Raymond,” Eric said, a certain zeal now returning.
Raymond tried laughing it off, but a facade of nervousness set in, and he fell short of coming off as tough and unbreakable this time.
“So you’ve killed before?” Eric said. “Okay. But you’ve always had one thing before that you’re lacking now.”
“Oh yeah. And what is that?”
“Surprise,” Eric mumbled.
“Surprise?”
“Guess you’re dumber than what we thought.”
John could not help but snicker, and luckily, Raymond ignored it. Eric ignored it as well, never removing his eyes from the man standing in front of him. He watched carefully as Raymond tightened his grip around the black handle.
“The element of surprise, Raymond,” Eric said boastfully. “You’ve lost it.”
Raymond licked his lips, seeming to savior the fluid sweat. But when Eric looked closer, he realized it wasn’t sweat at all, but rather blood. A small stream of blood trickled down from Raymond’s nose and clung in his sickly mustache. “Oh really?” he murmured, licking again. He was like a rabid pit bull with its first taste for blood.
“Yeah,” Eric spit back.
“You know what? You’re right. I shouldn’t have let you live this long, but...” he spun the knife one final time before pointing it directly at Eric “...but...” he licked up another sticky slop of blood from his thin mustache “...how’s this for surprise?” he shouted, lunging forward with the knife beaming down at Eric’s beating heart and—
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