by Michael West
Deidra bent down, cradled her mother in her arms, and was warmed by a free-flowing river of blood. “Somebody help me!”
Robby ran to her. He felt for a pulse and found something weak that barely passed for one. He knelt down, dug his knee into the puffy face of a Cabbage Patch doll. It smelled of baby powder.
“Don’t let her die,” Deidra moaned. “Please, not my ... not my mommy.”
“Shove some of these dolls under her head to elevate it,” Robby instructed. “But be gentle, we don’t want to hurt her more.”
Deidra nodded, did as she was told.
Robby opened Gwen Perkins’ button-up sweater, exposed her lacy bra, and administered CPR. He looked to Paul and Nancy. “Paul, take off your shirt and wad it against her head. Be gentle. She’s gonna have a skull fracture. Nancy, go downstairs and see if the 911 operator is still on the line. If she is, tell her to send an ambulance.”
“I can’t go down there,” Nancy said.
“Go!”
She shook her head, whipping it from side to side.
“I’ll go,” Paul said, handing his shirt to Deidra. There was no way he could get to Mrs. Perkins’ wound with her in the way, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask her to leave her mother’s side. He took a step toward the door, then saw the walls of the room bathed in alternating red and blue light.
“Freeze!”
Everyone but Robby and Deidra spun in the direction of the order, saw Sheriff Carter in the doorway, the pistol in his hands pointed right at them. A moment later, a second figure appeared with a second pistol, and Mick looked down at the bat in his own hands.
“Drop it!” Deputy Oates commanded.
Mick let go of the bloodied club and it hit the carpet with a heavy thud. He raised his scarlet hands toward the ceiling in surrender, and the deputy wrenched them back behind his back and handcuffed them together.
“Let me see everyone else’s hands,” Carter barked.
Nancy and Paul did as they were told.
“You’re gonna have to shoot me if you want to see my hands, Sheriff,” Robby told him, breathing hard between chest compressions. “I’m not losing another one tonight.”
Carter didn’t shoot. Instead, he radioed for an ambulance. Five minutes later, one arrived and Deidra accompanied her mother out the front door.
Paul watched her leave, then reached over to Robby and placed a hand on his shoulder in a gesture of thanks. “Will she live?”
Robby said nothing; instead, for the first time Paul could remember, he saw his friend cry.
Deputy Oates walked Mick down to a cruiser, and Sheriff Carter moved to the three remaining teens. Paul tried to glean some insight into their situation from the lawman’s sullen eyes and leathery face, but got nothing. Carter’s stare lingered on Robby for a moment, however, and Paul guessed that they knew each other. Finally, the sheriff told them, “I’ll need you all to come to the station.”
Twenty-Two
“Let’s go over this again,” Carter said.
Paul held his face in his hands, stared at the green cinderblock walls. He didn’t know if they were painted green, or if they just reflected the painfully bright light of the fluorescent fixture overhead. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that there were three other interrogation rooms just like this one down the hall and at this very moment Deputy Oates, the Assistant District Attorney, and God only knew who else were talking to Nancy, Robby, and Mick. What mattered was that the State Police had been called. What mattered was that Deidra was on the way to the hospital, her mother dead or dying, and he couldn’t be with her. As the sheriff went on and on with one question after another, Paul wondered if he would ever be with her again.
“Sheriff, I’ve told you everything. You’ve got the videotape. What more can I add to that?”
“Just makin’ sure all my ducks are in a row. You found Dale Brightman murdered, fuckin’ crucified – you’ll pardon my French.”
“I hear worse in the halls at school.”
This brought half a smile to the sheriff’s face. Just half a smile. “I don’t doubt that. So tell me what happened next?”
***
“I told them not to take him down,” Robby said. “But Danny wouldn’t listen.”
Deputy Oates nodded, then held up his Styrofoam cup. “You want some water or anything?”
Robby shook his head. He wanted to know what was happening with the others, then he wanted to go home, bolt his window, lock his door, and try to go to sleep. But he knew it didn’t matter what he wanted. He also knew sleep would come to him slowly tonight, if it came at all.
Oates took a drink. “Now, Mick Slatton. He wasn’t with you at this point?”
“No. He was back with the girls.”
“And Danny,” Oates directed. “He went to find his knife?”
Robby nodded. “Right.”
“But it was gone.”
“Right.”
Oates took another sip of water, wiped his lips on his uniform sleeve. “Did he have any idea when it went missing?”
“No,” Robby said impatiently. “I mean, he thought he still had it. Why else would he want to show us?”
***
“But you stole that knife, didn’t you?” Assistant District Attorney Goldman asked as he pulled the empty chair away from the table and sat down. His eyes never wavered from Mick Slatton’s blubbering face.
“It was just part of the game.” Mick wiped away the tears with one cuffed hand, dragging the other up to his face as well.
Goldman checked his notes. “This ... Wide Game? Yes. Was killing Danny also part of the game?”
“No! It was an accident. He was one of my best friends. Look, I told you before, I thought he was –”
“You thought he was Josh Williamson?”
“Skip.”
“Skip. Of course. And Dale Brightman? Did you think he was Skip too?”
Mick looked at Goldman with red, bewildered eyes and shook his head back and forth.
“And who did you think he was?”
“I didn’t even see –”
“What about Gwen Perkins?”
Gwen ...? The confusion in Mick’s face thawed to reveal horrified concern. Deidra’s mother. Oh, Jesus. “How is she?” he asked.
“I’m told she’s critical.” Goldman showed Mick an odd, baffled expression. “Tell me, when you swung that bat, did you think she was Skip too?”
Mick’s voice was almost too soft to be heard. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I thought.”
“But I’m supposed to believe that Sheriff Carter and Deputy Oates told you there was an order to ...” Goldman checked his notes again. “To ‘shoot Skip Williamson on sight’?”
“That’s what they told me,” Mick insisted.
“Mr. Slatton, what would you say if I then told you Sheriff Carter and Deputy Oates saw you for the first time this evening when they arrived at the Perkins’ home?”
“That’s not ... I saw them.”
“Just like you saw Skip Williamson when you killed Danny Fields.”
“It was an accident,” Mick contended once more, his voice growing even more pale.
“An accident.”
“Yes.”
“These were all just accidents.”
“Yes.”
“But when you finally got around to killing Williamson, that murder was on purpose, right?”
Mick lowered his head, saw the handcuffs gleam in the overhead light. “I’d really like to call my mother now. I get one phone call, don’t I?”
Goldman nodded. “Yes, Mick, one call.” He leaned across the table, his eyes focused, his face stern. “But first, let’s talk about Cindi Hawkins.”
***
“Cindi?” Nancy asked with nervous alarm.
“Yes.” Deputy Alison Landau, the first woman ever to serve the Harmony Police Department, spoke in a soft and caring tone. Nancy was too unstrung to wonder if it was sincere. “Cindi Haw
kins. You found her body?”
“Yeah. It was dark. At first I ... do I have to talk about this?”
Landau folded her hands on the table, looked at them a moment, then lifted her eyes to Nancy. “It would really help us find who did this.”
Well, her mind began, that would be me.
Then she heard the other voice again, like a stranger whispering to her brain, “Mick killed Danny.”
The thought of never seeing Danny again brought new tears.
Deputy Landau reached for the box of tissues on her side of the table and handed one to Nancy. “Do you need some water?”
“No.” Nancy wiped away the grief. “Danny’s ... he’s really dead, isn’t he? Mick ... killed him.”
Landau nodded, placed her hand on Nancy’s for comfort. “I know this is hard for you. If you want a few minutes alone, I can –”
“There was this rock,” Nancy blurted out.
“A rock?”
“Yeah.” Nancy felt her lips quiver as she spoke. She saw Cindi smile at her as they walked the school halls, the image burned away in a flash of light, replaced by the smashed face of a horrid dead thing, but this face too was smiling. Nancy’s hands flew to her eyes and she began to shake. She stood bolt upright, fell back against the green cinderblock wall.
“What is it?” Deputy Landau rose from her chair. “What did you see?”
Nancy opened her mouth, ready to confess to everything – stealing the Whitesnake cassette, murdering Cindi, lying about Skip ...
The choir was back. “And they believed what you said about him, didn’t they?”
Yes. Everyone had believed her.
“Nancy?”
Her face jerked toward the voice, saw Landau’s troubled stare.
“What happened out there?”
Nancy shook her head. How could she hope to make this woman understand what she herself could not grasp? How could she have done it? How could she have been so ... so evil?
“You’re not evil, Nancy,” the voices sang to her inner ear. “You were tricked.”
That’s right, Nancy found herself thinking, remembering what Skip had said about her being possessed. It made perfect sense. Some controlling force in the mist had made her see things, had forced her to do things she wouldn’t normally do. She swallowed, the thought calmed her, stifled the guilty pain that screamed in her gut. Yeah, that’s what happened. They made me do it, didn’t they? They made me.
“You’re a promising young lady,” the choir observed. “Why have your life taken away from you over something that wasn’t even your fault?”
But the police would find out she did it sooner or later. If she waited, it would be –
“They’ll never find out,” the whisper promised. “Mick’s the real killer here. He’s the one who killed Dale Brightman. He’s the one who took Danny from you. And he killed Skip and Deidra’s mother, too. You saw those, didn’t you? They’re ready to lock him up and throw away the key. What’s one more?”
“What happened?” Deputy Landau begged again.
Nancy’s lips parted, began with the truth, “I saw Cindi on the ground ...”
“Why waste your whole life over this?”
“Her head was ...”
“Just tell them it was Mick,” the choir coaxed. “What’s one more?”
“I ... someone had ...”
“Tell them.”
Deputy Landau put a hand on her shoulder, tried to comfort her as she probed. “Who was it, Nancy? Who did this to your friend?”
“It was Mick Slatton.” Nancy wept, then, over and over again she lied, “He killed her.”
“It’s all right.” Deputy Landau hugged her. “You’re safe now. He won’t hurt you or anybody else ever again, I promise.”
With vision made blurry by tears, Nancy thought she saw motion in the shadows of the interrogation room. She held the woman tighter and closed her eyes, wondering if she would ever be truly safe again.
***
The steel door to the holding cell slid along its track, closed with a loud clank that echoed down the hall. Mick looked around his new environment, saw a metal bunk covered in a sheet and tan blanket. There were little balls of lint all over the cover, and the sheet looked as if it had been stained by something and could never be washed completely clean. At that, Mick’s eyes unconsciously traveled to his own hands; he rubbed his newly freed wrists, tried to iron out the handcuff grooves.
“You sure you don’t wanna call your folks?” Deputy Oates asked from the opposite side of the metal bars.
Mick shook his head. “The sheriff, he said he would tell them I’m ...”
And the words suddenly escaped him.
Oates nodded. “All right then.” He started to walk away, then pointed to the olive-colored door at the end of the hall. “I’ll be right out there if you change your mind. Why don’t you get some sleep? I gotta turn the light out anyway.”
Mick nodded, distracted.
The deputy turned and walked out the door, flicking the light switch off as promised. A square of moonglow covered the cell floor, dissected into diamonds of light by the wire mesh embedded in the glass. Mick backed up to his bunk, sat down on the mattress, and the chaos of thoughts froze solid in his brain.
The darkness shifted, and Mick heard a rustling, whispering sound.
Instinctively, he pulled his feet up off the floor. There was something in the cell with him, some awful thing from the cornfield that had just been itching for this opportunity. Mick was alone, defenseless.
Oh God, he thought, shaking. What am I gonna do?
A whisper seeped into his ear, “God can’t help you now.”
He thought of the silhouette that had spoken with Danny’s voice, warning him this would be his fate. Now it was in here with him, and, if he should fall asleep, it would shuffle out of the shadows and avenge itself, wrap its rotting hands around his throat and choke the life out of him. Worse yet, for an instant, Mick actually thought he would let it.
“Who’s there?”
“Good thing you did this now,” the voice said, and Mick realized he was hearing it in his mind. “Next month, you’d have been eighteen and they’d be warming up ‘Old Sparky’ for your ass right now.”
Mick’s eyes snapped shut and he began to moan. I really have gone crazy.
“Now, you’ll just get life.”
“No,” he whispered through puckered lips, his tear-soaked cheeks glittering in the moonlight. He forced himself to open his eyes, to look into the darkened corner of the cell, to make certain he was alone. He wondered what would happen if he walked across the space into the shadows? What was really waiting for him there?
“A hundred Skip Williamsons waiting for you in prison, Mick. They’ll never let you rest. They’ll beat you. They’ll rape you. No Graduation Day to save you. With a life sentence, this is one monster you won’t be able to escape. And no Danny to help. You made sure of that, didn’t you?”
This is the voice of my conscience, Mick thought, terrified that he might hear it for the rest of his natural life. Mick shook his head violently, then ran for the bars and squeezed his face between them. The truth in what the voice had said became painfully clear. There was no way out of this situation, just as there was no way out of this cell. No way at all.
“There is one way out,” the voice he thought was his conscience told him. Actually, he’d come to notice that it wasn’t a single voice but a whole medley of them, some high, some low, all speaking the same words at the same time. “You could kill yourself.”
He turned around, pressed his back flat against the bars, his eyes peered into the shadows, searched for the outline of something hideous. If he killed himself, the thing in the corner wouldn’t get him. If he killed himself, the new beast of prison would not devour him; these new, as yet unseen bullies would not attack him. But, even if he wanted to do what the voice suggested, there was nothing here in the cell to –
“You could make a noose w
ith the bed sheet, hang yourself. You don’t have to suffer.”
Let your conscience be your guide.
Mick moved slowly away from the bars, but his eyes never left the dark corner of the cage. Did he hear breathing over there? He was almost certain he did. He grabbed hold of the sheet and tugged it off the mattress. This was something he’d seen in movies. He knew it could be done. His only question was, could he do it?
“You can do it,” the whispers assured him.
Mick twisted the sheet into a tight coil, his eyes playing Pong between the work of his sweaty hands and the dark corner where something stood watching, breathing. He then wrapped it around his neck and tied a tight knot, one that would not give under his weight. He moved his feet to the bars, climbed the wall as if it were a piece of playground equipment. Mick looped the sheet around the highest crossbar so that, when he jumped, his feet wouldn’t strike the floor, and then he stopped. What if something went wrong? What if he ended up in a coma, or as a quadriplegic?
“Do it,” the whispers urged.
He stood on the bars in contemplation. At least in a coma, the bullies could not harm him, and, worst-case scenario, if he were paralyzed, they’d have to put him in a special prison, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t stick vegetables in with the other inmates. Either way, it was better than the alternative.
“End it.”
He turned to face the darkened corner of the cell. He had to escape.
“I’m sorry,” Mick mumbled.
“Do it!” the voice said, now insistent, almost panicky.
Mick closed his eyes and stepped off the bars. The makeshift noose grabbed his neck hard, stopped his fall, and his eyes sprang open in sudden alarm. He felt the horrible pressure at his throat, felt it push in on his windpipe, suffocating him.
The darkness in the corner of the cell was on the move; it oozed across the concrete floor like scummy oil headed for a drain. Mick had the sensation of something fluttering above his head, a trapped bat or ... or a crow. He was aware of hands at his chest, could feel icy fingers clasp his heart.
“Thank you,” the many voices made one told his drowsy mind, and then they laughed.
