“What did she say?” Renee asks. “Where’s Wylie?”
“Both of you stay in the house.” I go back to the front door, but this time I step outside and close it behind me.
Most of them have passed by now, but I can still hear them, voices and footsteps fading to my left. I cross the down-sloping lawn to the sidewalk and watch them. I can’t tell how many there are, but six…no, eight of them are carrying torches.
What do they intend to do, anyway? Drag Teklenburg out of the house and lynch him in the front yard? Thanks to them, maybe he will be out of the house when it goes up in flames.
Across the street, Nadine stands at the window, trying to see down the street from an impossible angle. She turns and hurries away, probably to go to another window.
Up and down the street, dogs are barking. The air is still and warm, and carries the lingering aromas of cut grass and outdoor cooking. It is a perfectly normal late-summer evening. Except for the angry voices and the jewels of fire bobbing through the night, all the way to the end of the street.
Wylie’s voice rises above the others just before they reach Teklenburg’s house. I cannot understand his words, but the neighborhood mob has come to a stop. Whatever he is saying, they are listening to it.
But they do not listen long. Another male voice shouts in protest. Then another. Some of the torches move forward, then the whole crowd. More shouting. A gun fires and my feet leave the sidewalk for an instant.
“What’s happening?” Renee calls from the porch.
“Stay inside,” I say.
“Who’s shooting?”
Someone is running up the street, away from the mob.
“I don’t know. Go inside!”
I recognize the shadowy shape and step off the sidewalk, hurry down the road to meet him. “What the hell is going on?”
“Cat’s outta the bag,” Wylie says, winded. “Who’d you tell?”
“Renee. And she told her damned mother.”
“Yeah, you gotta love women. If their mouths worked as much in bed as they do the rest of the time, we’d be happy men, huh?”
Glass shatters at the end of the road, followed by pounding, pounding. The shouting crescendos as more glass breaks.
“What should we do?” I ask. My voice wavers and my heart beats in my throat.
“Well, I did all I could. I couldn’t stop ‘em.”
“Who fired the gun?”
“Oh, that pompous ass Gary Elliott. Fired it in the air. I was hopin’ it’d come back down and land right in his brain.”
I can only see three…no, four torches now. Where are the other four? I turn to Wylie. “What do we do, dammit? They’re going to kill him!”
Wylie laughs. “You’re funny. Well, I’ll go inside and call the station, tell ‘em I did what I could. Have ‘em send a coupla cars down. An ambulance and a fire truck.”
“A fire truck?”
“Yeah, I really oughtta make that call right away, but I’d hate to miss it. It should be any—”
A heavy whump sounded from Teklenburg’s house. Window panes blew out with a sudden clapping sound and flames belched from a few of the windows. It’s impossible to tell where the fire started because suddenly it is everywhere, glowing in all the windows. But I can’t hear it burning. Not above the screaming. Men and women screaming as they run from the fire, taking the flames with them, staggering, falling. Burning figures—I don’t know how many—scatter and fall and scream.
Wylie chuckles, slaps me on the back. I turn to him, and he’s grinning, watching the fire. “Yeah, that was something. Well, I gotta go make that call. You better run inside like you’re in a hurry, too. Case somebody’s watching us.” He took off at a jog, disappeared up his driveway.
I realize I’m standing in the middle of the street. Wylie was right—if somebody’s watching, they’re going to remember me. I turn and hurry back up the lawn, into the house.
As I go inside, the screams fade to nothing behind me. But I can still hear them in my head. I rush to the bathroom, feeling sick.
6.
Three people were killed in the fire—Gary Elliott, his seventeen year old son David, and Chick Teklenburg—and nine were injured, five of them seriously. Fire trucks arrived, but by the time they were done, the house was nothing more than a black skeleton.
Although there was nothing left in the remains of the house to incriminate Teklenburg, police were told about the website. Wylie told his buddies on the force that he knew nothing about Teklenburg’s activities until that evening, when people started talking. He helped question everyone on the street, including myself and Renee, which was a lot less stressful than being questioned by an unfamiliar officer in uniform.
The website remained on the Internet, and police confirmed the story. Somehow, Janet Smidden’s name never came up, so police never questioned her to learn that she heard about what Chick Teklenburg was doing from Enid Plummer, which would have led them to contact Enid and learn that she’d heard about it from her daughter.
As Wylie predicted, everything went smoothly. No evidence of arson was found—Ricky was as good as Wylie said he was—and it was assumed the fire was started by the torches carried by those who had burst into the house.
But you’ve probably heard about it all by now. It was in the news for weeks.
Renee handled it all very well. Melinda, on the other hand, became silent and brooding for weeks afterward. We have decided to send her to a private school, and are looking around to find the one that’s strictest with its students. We’ve been talking about taking her to a psychologist as well, maybe a psychiatrist. Her behavior has only gotten worse since the fire. We discovered she’s been crawling out of her bedroom window at night, going out with friends and getting drunk, stoned. She becomes more unfamiliar every day. I have little hope that counseling will help, but I’ve put up an optimistic front for Renee.
I don’t talk about what happened, not with Renee or Wylie. As far as they know, I’m fine. But it eats at me inside. Probably always will.
Betty Elliott and her two remaining children—both girls, one eleven, one fifteen—moved out of their house on Gyldcrest almost immediately and went to live near Betty’s mother in Mt. Shasta City. The FOR SALE sign stood in front of the house for more than three months. Just a few days ago, two men began moving in. I met them the first day, Sidney and Leo…I don’t remember their last names. Nice guys, both of them in their late fifties. Sidney is an artist, and Leo is a retired florist. They moved up here from San Francisco, tired of city life, looking for a place to relax with their four cats.
What remained of Teklenburg’s house was leveled, the lot put up for sale, although I don’t know by whom, and do not care to find out. A new house will be built there eventually, and someone else will move in. I have no intention of getting to know the new residents. But even then, with a new house standing at the end of the street, the black and broken bones of the previous one long gone, the fire’s scars will remain on the street. In the pink and twisted flesh of those burned by it.
* * *
“What the hell you doin’ out here in this cold, tryin’ to catch pneumonia?” Wylie asks as he comes up the steps and through the screen door of our screened-in back porch.
I am sitting on one of the two chairs on the porch, beside a small table. The lamp on the table casts its glow on the John Irving novel I’m reading. “It’s not that cold,” I say. “And this is a warm sweater.”
Renee and I have turned down the last few invitations to cross the street to eat or drink. Renee would have gone, but I didn’t want to. It would be just like Wylie to joke about what happened. A lot. I knew I couldn’t take that. I thought Wylie would get the hint, but no, I doubt it ever occurred to him I didn’t want to see him.
“What you been up to, Clark? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Busy with classes.”
He’s wearing a fat down jacket and removes a Heineken from each pocket, grinning. Hands
me one, sits in the other chair as he twists the cap off.
“Are you sure?” He takes a sip. “Look, Clark, if I’ve done something to offend you, I want you to let me know, okay? I’d do the same for you. I don’t believe in holding things in, y’know?”
I’m surprised, but keep it to myself. I’m not sure what to say for a moment. Then: “No, Clark, you haven’t done anything to offend me.”
“Anything wrong?”
I slip my bookmark into the book, close it. “It’s just…well, I don’t want to talk about…about what happened.”
“What happened when?”
“You know what I mean.”
He leans forward in the chair. “Clark, I’ve already forgotten it. It’s over with, a done deal. You oughtta do the same.”
I am tremendously relieved to hear Wylie say that. But it’s not something I could ever forget.
“You meet the new neighbors yet?” he asks.
“Yes. Have you?”
“Yeah, I met ‘em. Didn’t think I’d ever see it. This town’s gone right down the shitter.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve lived in this town all my life, and it’s always been a good family town, a good place to raise kids. But in the last ten or fifteen years, with all them people moving up from the Gay Bay, I just can’t say that about Redding anymore.”
I sipped my beer and closed my eyes so Wylie would not see them roll.
“It’s one thing to see ‘em swishin’ around in the mall, or in restaurants,” he went on. “But I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit by and watch ‘em move in on Gyldcrest. Hell, first our girls were being preyed on, now it’s our boys who’re at risk.”
The beer did not sit well in my stomach because suddenly I had a sense of where Wylie was going.
“We’re just gonna have to do somethin’ about it, Clark. And the sooner, the better. You don’t wanna let them fags get too settled.”
Suddenly, I am very cold. But from the inside out.
“I’m not sure how we’ll handle it yet,” he says, “but I’m gonna think hard about it. I wish you’d do the same, Clark.” He chuckled. “You’re a college professor, you’re probably a hell of a lot better at thinkin’ than I am. I think it’s way too soon for another fire, so Ricky’s useless. Maybe we could—”
“Wylie, I-I’m hoping you’re joking. You… you are joking, right?”
“Joking? Shit, no Clark, I’m as serious as a heart attack. Just because we don’t have any boys doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about the rest of the neighborhood.”
I squint at him as if he’s far away, shake my head. “What… what the hell are you talking about?”
“Boys! Little boys!” He stands, a little angry all of a sudden. Sips his beer as he walks the length of the porch, then comes back, saying, “You know how them fags are. The older they get, the younger they hunt. Those two’ll be goin’ after the tender meat we got here on Gyldcrest. And we’re not gonna let that happen.”
My mouth hangs open as if I’ve had a stroke. I can’t remember ever being this afraid in my own home. On the back porch, anyway. He means everything he’s saying, and that angry edge to his voice said he was willing to prove it.
“Wylie… Wylie…” My tongue feels thick. “I…I can’t, Wylie. I can’t.”
Towering over me, he looks down at me the way he might look at a cockroach before he stomps on it with the heel of his boot. “Can’t? You can’t what?”
“I can’t do it again. I just can’t. Look, we’re friends, right, Wylie?”
He nods slowly, still glaring. “That’s what I’ve always thought, yeah.”
“Well, if you’re really my friend… I know you won’t ask me to do something that I… that I just can’t do.”
His face relaxes when he laughs. He hunkers down in front of me, smiling. “Hell, no, I’d never ask you to do something like that, Clark. I’m not askin’ you now.” He lowers his voice, almost to a whisper. “I’m tellin’ you. I don’t think you realize how easy it’d be for me to put you behind bars for a long time, Clark. That fire? Those deaths? All them people walkin’ around lookin’ like dog vomit on two feet? I could pin all that on you and make it stick. I’m a cop, remember? I work the law from the inside. I can get you out of a jam…or put you into one.” Still smiling, his voice becomes little more than a breath. “And just in case that don’t work—it would, don’t worry, it would—but just in case, I can always come into your house in the middle of the night, tie you up, and make you watch while I fuck your wife and daughter. Then I’ll kill ‘em, and make you watch me fuck their corpses. By the time I get around to killing you, you’ll thank me for doin’ it.”
Wylie stands so suddenly that I gasp in surprise.
“But that ain’t gonna happen,” he says. “Because, like you said, we’re friends. And we’re gonna do the right thing. And the right thing is getting ridda them cocksuckers.” He takes a swig of beer, then turns and goes back to the porch’s doorway. “I gotta get home. Hey, tell you what. Why don’t you come over tomorrow night for dinner? Deeny’s gonna fix a big stir fry, and there’s always way too much. Bring Melinda and the girls can run off shopping after dinner. That’s all they ever wanna do, is shop.”
My mouth still hangs open as I watch him go down the steps.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Clark,” he says. Then he disappears into the darkness that presses close against the screened-in porch.
Hearts in Reverse
by Usman T. Malik
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. He is a graduate of Clarion West. Look for his stories published or forthcoming in Black Static, Strange Horizons, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places or visit him at www.usmanmalik.org
The Diary of Sara Tilling
June 1st, ‘84 AA.
It was Easter and the Easter Bunny never came. I got mad, and then Daddy got mad at me when I said to go hunt the bunny down.
He looks at me all strange.
“What, Daddy?” I say.
He says nothing, just looks at me. There are circles under his eyes, deep as mud holes.
I start getting worried. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Mama said the same thing the other day. Said to shoot all fairy creatures down if they come live next door.” I cross my arms. “What good is an Easter Bunny if he can’t do what he supposed to do?”
“You’d kill a bunny ‘cause it didn’t bring you gifts? Where’s your heart, child?” His voice is deep and rumbly, like my belly is sometimes when I get hungry. Is Daddy mad at me, or hungry?
Daddy looks at the sky. At the rug-shaped redness in the middle of it, where the boys whisper the demons came from. “Times. What times—” Daddy says and stops. He sighs and his eyelids go all pink and moist like he was biting onions or peppers.
“Believe it or not, Sara, there was a blue sky once,” he says. “We messed it up.”
“No, we didn’t. Mommy says it’s all God’s fault. He did it.”
“God had nothing to do with it. God didn’t scorch the—” Daddy stops. His eyes are angry.
Already I’m regretting what I said. “Daddy, I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad.” I want to run to him and hug his legs, but I’m afraid he’ll shove me away.
I couldn’t take my Daddy shoving me away.
“Once,” Daddy says, “people believed in God. They believed in goodness and love and being neighborly—no matter who their neighbor was. Not like your Mama . . . .” He stops and looks at me. “I’m not mad,” he says, quiet now so I can hear my heart beating in my ears. “I just love you too much to raise you wrong.”
He reaches out and messes up my hair.
“Hey,” I say, but I’m happy now that he’s happy, and I let him.
“Just remember, baby,” Daddy lifts a yellow pollen puff from my head and blows it away, “they’re as scared as we are.”
I wan
na ask him how they got here, why they came if they’re so scared, but Daddy’s walking to his rocker and his pipe’s coming out his pocket, so I say nothing.
The rug-like red hole in the sky winks at me.
* * * * *
Johnny came to her in the middle of the night.
“Mama, my nose won’t stop running.”
Sara yawned and stretched her arms to wake herself up. The March issue of the Journal of Herpetology had just arrived and she’d been reading it way past her bedtime. Now she got up, blew Johnny’s nose, and checked his temperature.
Normal.
Probably picked up a virus from one of the demon children, probably one of those little fucking werewolves. She’d seen two of them at the daycare. God, she hated those filthy beasts with their matted hair and sharp teeth; she was always afraid they’d nick Johnny during playtime and she’d have to get him tetanus shots or something.
Johnny coughed.
Sara poured a tablespoonful of anti-allergy and anti-tussive, gave him the meds, and sent him back to bed.
By the next morning, his sinuses were dripping blood.
Two days later, after the terrifying, nightmarish ER visit, they were at his pediatrician’s. Johnny’s face was still splotched, but at least he wasn’t purple or gasping from the airway spasm anymore.
Johnny’s pediatrician scratched his nose. “Isn’t this the sixth time in the last few months he’s had this happen?”
Yes, Dr. Useless, Sara wanted to scream. Instead she nodded, feeling a mother’s ceaseless fear turn inside her.
Dr. Useless rubbed his nose again. A pimple on it popped and leaked pus. He wiped it with the back of his hand absently.
“We better get him to ENT,” he said.
And that was how they discovered Johnny’s disease.
* * * * *
The Diary of Sara Tilling,
May 2nd, ‘89 AA.
Father said he was going to Church, and Mother got mad. She called him a book-thumping asshole. She said, “What kind of God—”
Father went down the steps, his wide-brim hat secreting his eyes. I still remember that check-blue shirttail, all mussed up, curling in his butt crack, and how the fucking steps creaked with his fucking weight.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 14
