No Place Like Home

by April Hill

  "Stop crying for him!" Anson shrieked. "It was wrong for him to try to come back. You liked me, best! From the beginning. You know that! I always knew it. I explained to you that you must wait until you grew up, and that we would be married, and you promised to wait for me, but you didn’t wait! You lied to me, Karen!”

  Gee, Anson, I made a lot of promises back then. I was seven, for God’s sake! Get a grip! I promised Kenny Rothwell I’d give him back his Batmobile, too! And you don’t see him here, do you, dressed up like some big damned black cockroach in my mother’s ratty old fur coat and scaring the shit out of people?

  “After that, others came—and went. You knew many of them, of course. Would you like to see?"

  Thanks. Anson, but I’ll pass.

  "The next one was the easiest, and very fast. He died while I was hurting him. Right in the middle of it! Can you imagine how that upset me? I had his mouth taped with duct tape, of course, and his eyes went big when I started to do the Thing to him. I suppose it does hurt very badly. And then, he just died! Just like that! Isn’t that interesting?"

  Fascinating!

  "But Billy, that sly boy! He moved away before I could hurt him. My first real failure, I’m afraid. But it was getting so hard, you know, to find a place, so I just moved back here. By then, your slut of a mother was renting our lovely little house to all sorts of awful people, so I made them go away. If they didn’t go, I hurt them. When they weren’t here, I had privacy, and time, and I built my lovely Homeplace, right here where I had belonged all the time, so I could wait for you. It’s cozy here, isn’t it?"

  I didn’t really think it was cozy, but I nodded anyway. I was getting sick, and as if he knew it, Anson discontinued his monologue. I could guess most of the rest, if I put my mind to it, but I didn’t particularly want to.

  "You’re not feeling well are you, Karen?" he asked. I nodded.

  "Would you like me to loosen your gag? I will, but only if you promise not to shout. There’s no one here, or anywhere near, but if you yell, I’ll have to hurt you, and put the gag right back in. I may have to punish you, as well, and you won’t like that. Do you promise to be quiet?"

  I nodded again, and he removed the tape from my mouth, along with a fair amount of skin. Still, it felt wonderful to take a deep breath and to ask him the one question I wanted to. The one that had been bothering me.

  "What happened to Dwight, Anson?"

  Anson sighed, and looked suddenly very sad in the dim light.

  "The Whore liked Dwight. She was going to marry him, and move into my house. He said my house was ugly! He wanted to "fix" it! Can you believe that? He wanted to do things to it, and then he would have found my Homeplace. So I wrote things about him. Bad things, and he went away, and that hurt the Whore, even more. Didn’t it!"

  Yes, you stinking sonofabitch, it hurt her.

  Until that moment, I had never in my life actually wanted to kill anyone. Anson must have picked up what I was thinking, because suddenly, he seemed to be asking for my understanding—maybe even my approval.

  "I tell you these things so you’ll know why I’ve had to do so many Bad Things, Karen. Do you see, now, why I had to do those Bad Things?"

  I nodded, again. Who wouldn’t empathize with a sensitive guy like this?

  He waved his hand around airily. "I keep most of them here, of course. I think of them as the Kept Ones. I have no car, you know, and it’s so difficult to get around Los Angeles without a car. You know that, don’t you? I was going to buy you a car, someday, Karen. Really, I was. That Larry person had a car, and that Dooley animal, and another man from that filthy bar...a long time ago. I hired him to help me with one project I couldn’t do by myself, but he didn’t work out, I’m afraid. I can’t keep the cars, of course, but now and then I take one from one of our neighbor’s clients. The one in the green house? They’re very bad people, in that house, you know." His thick lenses glinted in the dim light, and behind the lenses, the sunken eyes looked dead and small, like a shark’s eyes.

  I began to cry. "You killed Demetrius!"

  He seemed confused. "The Very Big Man? Or the other one—the one who you allow to fuck you? No matter. I killed them both, you see. First the Big One, and then the other one— your lover! Would you like me to describe how I ..."

  I screamed, then, and passed out.

  * * *

  The rest of the story I really don’t know much about, except what I’ve been told. It’s not pretty, but it’s not too long, either.

  I woke up again after a few moments, probably, but everything was black, and Anson was gone. I was still tied, facing the wall again, and I couldn’t stop sobbing. I cried until I could barely breathe anymore, and then stared at the wall for a while until a new wave of grief and horror swept over me and I began to weep again. Suddenly, I felt rather than saw Anson crouching near me once more, and I struggled to rip the bindings from my hands. I kicked at him, and he leaped aside, like some kind of hideous, feral animal. Then he hit me in the face, very hard, with something heavy.

  "Don't do that!" he screamed. "Don’t force me to hurt you! I love you!" I kicked again, and felt my bare feet connect with some unknown part of his body with a dull thud—maybe a knee. I didn’t care what he did to me, now. It was too late. Hank was dead, and I didn’t care.

  "That was bad!" Anson was shrieking, now, his voice getting shriller. "Very, very bad!"

  God! I thought, What I wouldn’t give right now for a nosy neighbor or two.

  Anson screamed again. "You’re bad! Ungrateful, and very, very bad! Like your whore of a mother." A second later, I felt the cold touch on my throat of what I knew was a butcher knife—appropriately named. I’d never really thought about it before. God! What a thing to call a kitchen utensil!

  With every ounce of energy I had left, I managed to roll over, and drawing my knees up, I kicked again, aiming wild, but determined to go out in a blaze of something, if not glory. The knife slid across my throat, and something wet began to flow down my chest. I kicked again, and heard him make a sound like he’d had the air knocked out of him. Too good to be true, I figured, but I repeated the move, just in case, and then heard him grunt again, and then fall backward. I squirmed away from where I thought he was, moving rapidly down the tunnel like an insane inchworm, with no idea at all where I was going, but not caring a whole lot, either. Behind me, I could hear Anson making a kind of high-pitched keening, and my female instincts told me I’d landed a pretty good kick in his balls. I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting away, of course, and I was still sobbing so hard I could barely breathe, but somewhere in me, I had decided to survive this son of a bitch, whatever the odds.

  There’s always a moment in all those old Hollywood westerns when a handsome young corporal is seen tooting a bugle call, announcing the arrival of the cavalry, riding in to rescue the a band of brave but outnumbered settlers just moments before they’re massacred to the last Christian soul by a howling horde of bloodthirsty, politically incorrect Native Americans who are for some reason always badly overweight. Well, that didn’t happen, here. What I did hear was the most beautiful sound in the world, like the heavenly voices of angels—Hank, my own, not-dead-after-all hero, shouting my name, and his voice sounding very strong for a dead guy.

  I screamed back, and kept screaming, but right behind me, a scuffling sound told me that Anson was coming after me a lot faster than I was crawling. A second later, my head hit something solid, and he leapt on top of me, smelling like a corpse and shrieking like a banshee. Another second later, and something that looked amazingly like the wrought iron legs of my coffee table came crashing through the wall above my head, burying Anson and me in an avalanche of broken plaster and wallboard. Jesus! Was Mom ever going to be pissed!

  Anson scrambled off me and scuttled away on his hands and knees, looking like some grotesque insect, and a moment after that, an arm reached in and grabbed me, yanking me on my naked stomach through a gaping hole in the crumbling wall of
my living room. Then, through a pall of choking dust, I could actually see the living room, looking as neat as a pin except for the half-ton of broken plaster and the cloud of white powder that was settling on everything in sight. I was in really big trouble with my landlord, and with her homeowner’s insurance.

  Hank pulled me halfway to my feet, then shoved me backward onto the couch just as Anson reappeared, almost magically, at the door to the kitchen. I screamed. (I was getting very good at screaming by now) and Hank fired what sounded like two shots. I screamed (again), trying to be as helpful as possible, and rolled off the couch like a big caterpillar, hitting the floor on my rear end with an unattractive thud. Hank turned around and grabbed me again, by my hair, this time, and started for the front door, I suppose. I couldn’t see much, to tell the truth, from my worm-like, facedown position. I heard an absolutely blood-curdling scream, (this one NOT from me), and Anson reappeared, squatting in the fake fireplace. He was holding a red metal can. Hank dropped me and gave my rear end a painful shove with his foot, which rolled me halfway into the hallway. I heard two more shots, a split-second before Anson threw the can’s contents across the room at us, along with what looked like a matchbook.

  The room exploded in flames, and Hank dove for the front door, giving my back one final, tremendous shove. I rolled out the door and down the front step, thumping to the bottom of the stoop and yelling like crazy from the pain of each bounce. I heard another shot, and squirmed around to look back, just in time to see the doorway disappear in a firestorm. Hank was nowhere in sight.

  Suddenly, there was a crash of breaking glass, and through the high front window, I saw hands grapping at the rim, and the face of what might have been a man in a thick black coat, but the coat was in flames, and the face seemed to be melting. Somewhere, police sirens were shrieking in the night, and a stream of flashing lights was coming up the hill.

  Hank stumbled out the garage door, and collapsed on the white rock, near the cow skull. I started to cry again—this time from happiness.

  * * *

  Hank spent ten days in the hospital while the worst of his burns healed. The doctors told me he’ll have a few smallish scars on his upper arm and on his right shoulder, but his smile is as adorable as ever, and I’m never going to get tired of looking at it, even if I live to be two hundred years old. My injuries consisted of a few bruises and scrapes on my battered behind, and a shallow knife cut across the base of my throat, which left no visible scars, so my movie career is safe.

  Demetrius didn’t die, because Hank woke up, missed me, and found him in time to call an ambulance. Hank was already on his way to the White Rancho by the time the arriving cops found the incendiary device Anson had planted under our bed. You have to hand it to Anson. The guy had a slew of talents. His rat hole was crammed with books on survival, assassination techniques, and other helpful household manuals gleaned from the internet.

  After the fire department had finished, the cops sifted through the charred remains of Anson’s labyrinth of tunnels and found that he had pretty much moved every wall in the house, allowing himself a complicated network of crawl spaces almost two foot wide throughout the entire house. (I was, of course, absolutely right about the windows looking out of line, and I’ve reminded Hank of this fact at least fourteen times a day since the whole nightmare ended.) He says that as soon as his arm is healed, he’s going to make me pay dearly for the number of times I’ve said "I told you so."

  In between murdering or scaring off tenants, Anson had been a very busy boy. He'd carved out a lot of "peep" holes around the house, and built some really well-disguised entrance holes inside the kitchen cabinets, in back of my "broken" dishwasher, and even one that led outside through the back of the fake fireplace. Who would have guess that Anson would turn out to be a better carpenter than anyone had given him credit for?

  They found several bodies, of course, or sections of them, anyway. Some of Larry, most of Dooley Fred, and a couple of tenants for whom Mom spent a lot of time looking, trying to collect on broken leases. There were a lot of random body parts, too, carefully preserved in sand and quicklime and stored in the big recycling containers I’d seen. The CSI guys think that Anson wasn’t so much collecting souvenirs, as much as simply storing "things" because he didn’t have a car. I guess that makes him a little less monstrous. I know all about that. L.A. can be hell without a car.

  A week later, I discovered that Hank had a couple of recycling containers of the same make and color on his back porch in Malibu. Same price, and also from WalMart. We threw them away, but the trash guys wouldn’t take them. Something about the recycling rules.

  The whole thing cleared up a few little mini-mysteries for me, like who was cleaning the house and leaving money around, for me. I’d been giving Mom the credit, and then Hank, and all the time, it was poor old Anson, trying to get on my good side, and I never even knew it. I just thought I was drinking too much. Kind of sad, in a creepy sort of way, right?

  There’s a lot we’ll never find out about what happened, and I have about a million unanswered questions of my own, like what happened to Anson to turn him into what he was. Hank says we’ll probably never know that, and I guess he’s right.

  Mom got through everything pretty well, which surprised everyone. I think that finally knowing that Dad hadn’t really abandoned us helped a little, but who knows? Maybe she was just happy to be rid of an ugly, unrentable house and collect on the insurance. I wrote to Dwight’s wife, trying to explain everything. I hope it helped, but she never wrote back to me, so I'll have to add that to the unresolved question list.

  A week after the house burned, I decided to sneak up there and poke around for mementos, before they razed the place. I got caught, naturally, because Hank apparently knows every damned cop in Los Angeles and every one of them seems to be on his private payroll as a spy. Anyway, I'd barely begun my search before some rat in blue called him and spilled the beans.

  I was dragged away in police custody, and when I arrived home, Hank was already there, looking like he was about to spit nails. He even had my hairbrush at the ready, for my police escort to plainly see. Humiliating, to say the least. I know I saw a couple of grins as they handed me over. They were barely out the door, or maybe even listening at the damned door, when he deposited me across the arm of the couch, yanked down my pants and commenced scalding my bare ass. By the time he finished, I was wailing my head off and promising in between howls to give up sleuthing for the rest of my life. The good news was that he didn’t think to search me first, so he didn’t find my mementos. (Anson’s glasses and Isabelle’s head.) Dumb souvenirs, I guess, but mine.

  Dumber than I thought, and not even mine to keep, as it turned out. Three days later, when I showed the articles to him, glowing with genuine pride about my clever detective work, Hank rewarded my investigative skills by removing his belt, dumping me across the end of our lovely new king-sized bed and welting my bare and already well-scorched behind so thoroughly I will doubtlessly remember it in excellent detail well into our fiftieth year of marriage. Cops can be funny, sometimes. Mine seemed to think that taking a few measly little souvenirs was stealing evidence and obstructing justice. We made up rather nicely that very evening, however, in the same bed.

  Hank and I got married late that summer, after the investigation was finally closed. On our wedding night, he asked for my solemn promise that none of our potential offspring would ever play with dolls of any description whatsoever. Due to a small oversight on my part, however, possibly brought about by excess stress and my famously bad math skills, it appeared that the patter of little feet was going to become an issue sooner than expected. A few weeks later, we learned that Ringo was going to have a little sister. Hank was as happy as a clam about the whole pregnancy thing, but then, he wasn’t spending quite as much time with his head in a toilet as I was.

  After Mom collected the house insurance, she dumped poor Leo for a new guy she found at a place Mona found called "Oldies
But Hotties." I kind of liked Leo, and I was sorry to see him go into Mom's "ex-box," but Mom explained that poor Leo "just couldn't get it up" often enough to keep her happy. I think she’s been hanging around Mona too much. Mom swears that number seven (?) is forty-nine, but he looks a hell of a lot younger than that to me. She must be doing something right. I’m going to ask her for the name that night cream she sleeps in.

  After life cooled down a bit, I was stuck at home, bored, and looking more like the Goodyear blimp every day. To relieve the tedium, I started working on a screenplay about everything that happened up at the Watercolor Rancho, (leaving out my rather frequent spankings, of course.) I gave it the working title of "No Place Like Home." Original, huh? Anyway, my agent liked it well enough to show it to a friend he knows at Miramax, and guess what? Lightning struck! They took an option on the script. For real money! Hank and I put the advance down on a little beach place in Santa Barbara that the real estate guy called a "fixer upper." The house is about the size of a decent walk-in closet anywhere else in the world, and after it’s "fixed up," it’s going to end up costing us more than the Palace at Versailles.