And that’s when the door to the house busts open.
Because I have left the phone off the hook.
Because Juney has been worried. But pleased too. Pleased about me pouring all the booze down the drain. And she don’t want me to fall off the wagon. Not this time. Because this is my last chance. I know that. I know I can only break her heart so many times. And Carl knows that too. Carl knows how close Juney is to the edge. How close to breaking she is with that shit-drunk husband of hers.
None of this is a mystery novel. None of this takes much guesswork.
So he hears the noises coming from the bedroom. He knows what those noises mean. And he knows Juney’s still on shift at the Dunkin’ Donuts.
And, best of all, he knows where the Colt is.
CARL’S GOT A sour smell to him. Like sweat mixed with old bacon. I can smell him.
There’s a hot breeze that’s tugging at my hair.
I can feel the muzzle of the Colt pressing into my back.
“Turn around slowly,” he says.
I am struck because I have heard this line so many times. I want to ask him, “Is this a stick up?” I want him to say, “Reach for the sky, pardner!”
I can’t help it. I let out a snort, and he hears it. When I turn – slowly! – his face is running from stunned to hurt to angry.
“I can explain,” I told him, but now that we’re face to face I know I can’t. What do I say? What part of this can I tell that would make sense? Carl is not a smart man. Carl is not a forgiving man. Carl will not buy whatever line of bullshit I want to sell him.
I open my mouth. I close it again. He leans in closer. His teeth are pressed tightly together, the little nubs of them rubbing together. He is angry, but I think he is also curious about what I will say. A dull curiosity. The same look he gives the flies as they bumble around the inside of the jar. How long will this one last?
When my mouth opens the second time, I am just as curious about what will come out.
Because a drunk will say anything to get a drink. And a cheat? A cheat always has a happy tune to whistle.
“I can explain...” And I surprise myself. “No. I can’t. I love her,” I say. “I love Juney.”
“I know,” he says and his mouth twists. There is something that goes across his face – and if I stared hard enough I could catch exactly what it is – but I’m not looking that hard. I don’t what to know.
Because by then I am moving. Because, then, I think, he has moved in close enough. There is just enough room. If I am just fast enough I can–
And then there is a noise like a thunderclap.
IT IS LATE when I find myself back in the house. I don’t know what time. Close to dawn because Juney has just got in. Her hair is mussed. Silvery-grey strands coming undone from her neat bun. Her Dunkin’ Donuts uniform is creased a little. She somehow looks pretty. Worn, but pretty.
My lady of Half ’n’ Half. My lady of How Do You Take It?
“Smiley,” she says. “Did you just get in?”
I allow that I did.
“And are you sober?” she asks.
“Yeah, Junebug,” I tell her. “Sober as a priest.”
And it’s the truth.
“Good,” she says. And then: “You look good.”
She’s dead on her feet. I can see her swaying a little, her hands on the kitchen table, keeping her steady. But she’s smiling and that makes me happy. I’m glad for that.
“Come to bed,” I tell her, and take her in my arms. I can feel her weight sagging into me.
“S’cold,” she says, but I don’t say anything. Somewhere off Route 66 my body is waiting for the sun to scorch it crisp and black. Somewhere Carl is washing the blood out of his shirt. He is careful. Gentle, even. But there is a part of me that is here. Maybe the better part of me.
I take Juney to our bedroom. I help her peel off the uniform. I kiss her gently on the forehead where she still tastes like icing sugar and cinnamon.
I want to tell her about Carl. About how she must be careful around him. How there’s bad news coming for her. I want to tell her so bad it’s burning up like bad liquor in my gut, but somehow I can’t. Maybe it’s cowardice. Maybe it’s just that I can’t stand the thought of that forehead of hers creasing, that same old fight we spent twenty years on, same as every other fight.
Maybe I shoulda. Maybe.
The thing is, the dead can’t see the future any better than the living. They have to drive down that same road. One mile at a time.
And this is just a pit stop for me. Maybe. A way station. I can’t stay.
I don’t want to.
There is something growing in me. Something cold. Something heavy and black as tar. Is this death? Or is this something else?
And it is cold. And she is warm. I lay down next to her. I do not want to touch her. I can’t help wanting to touch her.
“G’night, Smiley,” she says.
“G’night, Junebug,” I say.
THE WIDOW
RIO YOUERS
Rio has already made his mark on the horror genre with his moving and dark novella Westlake Soul (ChiZine Publications, 2012) and continues to make an impression with a slew of incisive short stories. What follows is Youers at his best, displaying his horrific sensibility with a gift for characterization that makes ‘The Widow’ a compelling read.
“WHAT ARE YOU doing?”
“I’m stopping you.”
The man drew whistling breaths and his chest strained against the rope that bound him. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth. Harsh light washed him, emphasizing every bruise and abrasion. Had she thought him immortal... supernatural? Here he was now, weak and bleeding all over her floor. His ancient skin could break, after all.
“Stopping me?” He blinked and shook his head. “From what, exactly?”
She stepped towards him, throwing her shadow like a blanket. A large woman. Not fat, but solid. Her thick arms were packed with toil and angst. She had a prominent brow and square shoulders. Very little could be described as feminine. Not her military surplus jacket, nor her scuffed leather boots. Only her fingernails, perhaps, painted – incongruously – bubblegum pink.
“By my count, you have killed a total of fifty-three people.” Cloud-coloured eyes peered through unkempt hair. “Fourteen of them were children. I can only go back to when records began, of course, so the actual number may well be greater.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“And now it ends.”
“This is madness.” He fought the rope again, twisting his upper body; it chewed into his arms and chest. No give. He pushed against the wooden post he’d been bound to. It creaked, but didn’t budge. More blood leaked from his nose.
There was a workbench against the back wall, strewn with tools. Various wrenches and screwdrivers. A handsaw. A nail gun. A claw hammer. She turned and walked towards it, her heavy boots kicking up dust.
“Timothy Peel,” she said.
“What? What?”
“One of the men you killed... Timothy Peel.” Her hand moved from the handsaw to the nail gun. Back to the handsaw. “He was my husband.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear I don’t.”
“We’d only been married eleven months.” She selected the nail gun. Cordless, 15-gauge, loaded with two-inch finish nails. Her fingers curled around the handle. “I loved him very much. He was my... my balance.”
No one would hear him scream. Not here, in the basement of her house, fifty yards from the road, and a quarter of a mile from her nearest neighbour. And scream he did, looking at the nail gun in her hand. A shrill and desperate effort. Eyes wide. Body jerking. His throat turned dark with the strain, like a bruise.
She let him expend both voice and energy, until he was left rasping and drooling. Tears soaked his shirt. His upper body sagged against the rope. He’d been tied in a sitting position. His legs were splayed. She kicked them closer together, then straddled them. Th
e muscles in his calves tensed, but he couldn’t move. Another weak sound, and he looked at her with shattered eyes.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” he said.
“Seventh of April, 2009. Almost four years ago. To the day.” She pressed the nail gun’s nose piece against his left kneecap and he squirmed and struggled, but was held tight. “Timothy wasn’t just an accomplished driver, he was a careful driver. Yet, mysteriously, he flipped his car one morning on his way to work. Conditions were perfect. No wind. No rain. Good visibility. He died while emergency services worked to cut him from the wreckage.”
“A car accident.” The man’s voice was cracked. His eyes pleading: blue and large and wet. “He died on the road.”
The widow smiled. She looped her index finger around the trigger and fired three nails into the cartilage below his kneecap.
He found the energy to scream again.
“But, mister,” she said. “You are the road.”
THERE HAD LONG been concerns about Faye Peel née Lester’s mental stability, but when she decided to have a house built on Thornbury Road – less than one hundred yards from where Timothy was killed, in fact – her friends and family deduced that she had finally come unhinged. Not irrevocably so, but sufficient to warrant professional intervention.
Her father was a worrisome rabbit of a man with fleet gestures and small eyes. He rarely finished a sentence.
“Your mother and I feel that...” He proffered a sheet of paper, upon which had been printed the particulars of one Dr. Matthew Claridge, MA, MBBS, MRCPsych. His logo was a smiling flower.
“A psychiatrist?”
“We’re worried about you, Faye.”
“Indeed.” She placed the sheet of paper facedown on the kitchen table. Her mother busied herself cooking, humming something, as if she didn’t have one ear – or both – on the conversation.
“It’s just that, since Timothy...” Her father made half a move to take her hand, but drew back. His mouth twitched. “And all that nonsense about... and now this, with the house...”
“Thank you for your concern.” Faye smiled, and it was she who reached across to take his hand. It felt small, somehow, and she noted how it trembled. “I’m fine, though. I feel stronger and more focused than I have in years.”
“But the house... do you really...? Oh, Faye, it’s just so close.”
She squeezed his fingers gently. Her smile was sure. Her voice confident.
“I have my reasons.”
And she did; the ‘nonsense’ to which her father referred was her erstwhile assertion that Timothy’s death had not been an accident, and her subsequent vow to find the man responsible. These claims were met with sympathy, a great deal of love, but very little understanding. Faye eventually let it slide – even professed a misjudgement, for her parents’ sake – although she secretly, passionately, pursued her suspicion.
It began shortly after Timothy’s death. The first two months had been an emotional blur. She recalled only damp and grey patches, like fragments of cloud snatched from the sky. The funeral was dreamlike. Red flowers. So many red flowers. Timothy’s brother playing ‘Let It Be’ on a guitar the same colour as his coffin. As many hands as there were flowers, all offered in support. The world revolved too slowly, and with a grinding sound that kept her awake at night. She imagined its ancient machinery full of pain, coughing black smoke, and God crippled by the weight of His dead.
This lassitude fractured, finally, when Faye opened the bathroom cabinet one morning and saw Timothy’s aftershave on the shelf. She’d been with him when he bought it, neither of them knowing that he wouldn’t live long enough to finish the bottle. It occurred to her – and it was like a hand gently leading her through the rain – that she would never again smell that aftershave on his skin, or the vague trace of it on his shirt collar when doing the laundry. She took the bottle off the shelf, unscrewed the cap, and lifted it to her nose. Her tears were copious, but not without healing. As she wiped the last of them from her face, she felt something give way inside her – an internal landslide that left her partly hollow, but with enough space to exist. She poured the aftershave down the sink and disposed of the bottle. She whirled, then, through the house, not removing Timothy, but clearing those possessions too replete with memories. His reading glasses. His favourite cardigan, threadbare and wonderful. The giant bar of Dairy Milk he’d been nibbling on since Christmas. In the end, a chestful of items that had no place in her half-formed life. And even though she still slept at night with her arm thrown across Timothy’s side of the bed, it felt like a huge step in the right direction.
Another step was to visit the site of the accident. Thornbury Road was a seven-mile pencil-line on the countryside, linking the A4301 at Abbotsea to the Paisley Wood roundabout. It often provided a beautiful drive, with raised banks of daffodils in the spring, and clutches of woodland that flared with oranges and reds come autumn. Strings of mist clung to the farmland at dawn, made pink by the climbing sun, and wildlife revelled in the fields that rolled southward, where, on clear days, the English Channel could be seen skimming the horizon. Despite its charm, though, it had, understandably, become a sombre route for Faye. The shadows seemed suddenly denser. The dawn mists obscured secret things. Broken things. It was here – a stone’s throw from where Timothy had died – that she first saw the sideways man.
He had a condition, she thought. Scoliosis, or perhaps spina bifida. His back was skewed and his head kinked to one side, always looking over his right shoulder. Uneven hips caused him to drag rather than walk, having to correct his direction every several steps. His face, too, sloped to the right, as if sympathizing with his body.
Faye had parked in a lay-by only a short distance away. She looked at the man through the windscreen. He had no purpose, apparently; he circled towards and then away from where Timothy died. Lank black hair covered his eyes.
She surmised his challenges went beyond the physical. The poor man was lost, obviously, and confused. Thinking she could help, she stepped out of her car and onto the road. He looked up, alerted. A breeze blew back his hair and his eyes glimmered. They were notable not in their colour or shape, but in the way they regarded her. She felt suddenly naked, both body and soul laid bare. It was as if he touched – probed – her with those eyes, and examined her history. Every smile. Every tear. Every hope and sadness exposed. Faye shivered. She crossed her arms over her bosom and took a step back.
She was about to get back into her car – return another day – when the man dragged himself sideways, onto the bank, and behind a cluster of evergreens. She saw his jacket sway between their narrow trunks, then he was gone. Faye staggered into the middle of the road and waited for him to emerge one way or the other, or to see him shuffling sideways across the field beyond the point where he had disappeared. She adjusted her position and peered through the branches.
Nothing.
“Hello.”
Gone.
She shivered again, composed herself. Several deep breaths, focusing on Timothy and the reason she’d come here. She walked to the site of his death. Planted both feet firmly upon it. She thought she’d experience... something. A chill. A vision. A memory. There was nothing. The road felt the same here as anywhere else – as any other road. The broken glass had been swept away. The blood, too. As far as this unspectacular patch of Thornbury Road was concerned, it was as if Timothy Peel had never existed at all.
She cried again, deeply, and with a great pain in her chest. She got into her car and drove away. Too fast. Moving forward, or so she hoped. What else was there to do?
THE NEXT SIX months were better. The pain never went away, but she could fold her hands around it. Contain it. She went out with her friends and smiled more often. She even regained the weight she’d lost after Timothy died. Her parents remarked on how well she was doing, and how proud they were. One morning in December, Faye awoke with her left arm curled beneath her pillow, rather than clutching Timothy’s side
of the bed. She gasped – feeling both delighted and guilty – and sat up quickly. Early sunlight seeped through a crack in the curtains.
That very day, a family of four was killed on Thornbury Road. Faye saw the wreckage of their Vauxhall Astra on the six o’clock news. Folded in the middle like paper. Roof pried away to get the bodies out. She saw the pulsing lights of the emergency services. She saw the POLICE ACCIDENT signs and solemn-faced officers at the scene. And she saw the sideways man, standing in the background like a large, stooped vulture.
From that moment, everything started to unravel.
SOMETHING THE REPORTER said picked at Faye’s mind and wouldn’t let go – that Thornbury Road had claimed eleven lives in the last ten years. An interesting choice of words that gave the seven-mile stretch of asphalt a certain character. She imagined it breathing, elongated lungs pounding beneath its surface, occasionally whipping snake-like to send some luckless vehicle spinning out of control.
Ridiculous, but it picked at her. Then it gnawed at her. Then it started to tear. She lay awake, night after night, grinding her teeth and imagining the road moving slickly beneath the stars. She often drove out there, stopping her car every two or three hundred yards, on hands and knees with her ear pressed to its gritty skin ...
No heartbeat. No movement. No life.
She researched the road. More particularly, its nature. She was intrigued to find out just how many lives it had claimed over the years. She spent what amounted to months at the library and on her home computer, scrolling through links and news stories. Tracking deaths within the last forty years was easy enough. Most of them got front-page coverage in the Abbotsea Echo. Beyond 1965, though, it became more difficult. The library’s files were incomplete, and search engines provided only the more notable stories. She persevered, though, following every thread, however tenuous. Sometimes she worked through the night, with her eyes stinging and her worn body slouched across the desk. When she wasn’t digging for information, she was cruising Thornbury Road, daring – almost willing – it to come to life.
End of the Road Page 13
