Kent just shrugged. His once glossy black hair was now grey, but he had the same big jug-handle ears and friendly grin. He restored old cars. If that sounds like he was a grease monkey messing around in his garage on Saturday afternoons, let me clarify things: he sold his cars to collectors like Jay Leno.
I was biting back the urge to say it was me, just for the hell of it, when our waitress came to the table. She was probably all of twenty years old, and for a moment as I looked at her, I felt my age like a great weight on my bones.
She set a folded card on the table, gestured to a faux-antique clock on one wall and said, “I was told to give this to you at 10:00 p.m.”
I opened the card.
Inside, there were two small photos that looked as if they had been cut from an old grade-school yearbook and glued in place. The photos showed the smiling faces of the two members of our Group of Seven who were no longer with us, Keith and Lorne. Written on the card in a childish scrawl was a message:
Meet me at the Playhouse, at midnight.
The Maitland Playhouse had been Kitchissippi’s only movie theater. It had been boarded up in 1979 after being overrun by rats that had proved damned near invincible.
The message was signed Perseus Jones.
I passed the card to Kent. He read it and passed it on. No one said a thing as the card circled the table.
When it came back to me, Kent pointed at the card. “Anyone notice the word midnight?”
“Somebody scratched out the letter i,” Eddie said. “Both of them.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Mark said.
“Aubrey,” Darren whispered.
I sat back from the table, remembering what happened the last time we had all been together.
People in Kitchissippi said the trouble with Aubrey started when he killed a cat. I believe it started a few weeks before that, when Aubrey lost his eyes.
-6-
Aubrey had left school for good at the end of November in 1976. He underwent surgery at a hospital down in Ottawa two weeks later, and had his recovery over the winter break.
I believe Kent and I are the only two people Aubrey reached out to after his surgery. It was Aubrey’s mother who had invited us to drop by on the day after New Year’s Day. I can only imagine how excruciating the lead-up to those phone calls could have been for Aubrey, with Mrs. Debrunner asking her son if he would like to invite any friends over, and Aubrey trying to come up with the names of one or two kids who might actually show up, not blow him off and use the request as fuel for more cruel taunts, all the while lost in a darkness that was newfound and forevermore.
In the end, Kent and I agreed to visit Aubrey, but not because of pressure from our parents. My mom and dad didn’t know the Debrunner family, but they were sympathetic to their grim situation as the parents whose poor little boy had “lost his eyes,” as if they had fallen out of a hole in his pocket. No, we ultimately decided to see him out of morbid curiosity because we were kids.
At the urging of the others, Kent and I went to Aubrey’s house on Sunday, the day after the Group of Seven attended a New Year’s Day matinee at the Maitland. It was a typical double bill of older flicks, which in this case were The Devil’s Rain and Race with the Devil. I don’t think Pete Maitland ever showed a first-run feature in his theater. He was too cheap for that. The stupid bastard turned down a chance to screen Star Wars and make a mint at his concession stand.
It was between a chapter of a pretty decent Republic serial called The Purple Monster Strikes and the first feature when I mentioned that Aubrey's mom had called to ask if I would could come over and visit him. Instead of ragging on Aubrey as a loser, we sat silently watching the spastic antics of a cartoon bag of popcorn that exhorted us with disturbing desperation to visit the snack bar, until Kent spoke up and said his mother had received the same call.
Eddie, Mark, Darren, Keith and Lorne insisted we had to go. We had to find out exactly what had happened to Aubrey and then report back.
So we went.
-7-
“Do you think this is a good idea, Johnny?”
I tried to focus on Kent’s question and not let irritation distract me. I hadn’t been called Johnny since I left Kitchissippi, and I wasn’t too keen on hearing the name again.
“Sure, why not?” That was bullshit. I was scared, but I was also compelled to go back to my old hometown and find out exactly who was screwing with us.
We were heading down Highway 13 in the minivan Darren had driven up from Toronto. Eddie was driving now; he was the only one of us who hadn’t had any drinks with dinner.
It was a warm night and the windows were rolled down, the air heavy with the humidity that was the scourge of Ottawa Valley summer. Darren’s satellite radio was tuned to an oldies station, the volume turned low. Bachman Turner Overdrive whispered to me from the past, telling me that I ain't seen nothing yet. As we turned off the old highway onto Laplante Road I heard the unmistakable call of a loon out on the flat black expanse of Lake Kewasowock. Miramichi was behind us. The ruins of Kitchissippi lay ahead.
“Sounds like some practical joke,” Mark said. He was half-cut on Canadian Club whiskey and looked meaner than ever.
A moth hit the windshield with a soft thud and left a palm-sized greenish smear on the glass. Darren jumped. He looked scared, and I wondered why he had come along.
“Jesus fuck,” Eddie whispered, turning on the wipers. “I forgot how big the bugs were out here.”
We drove on without speaking. The minivan turned onto Laurier Street, and then we were in the dark and haunted belly of Kitchissippi.
“We’re back in the Kitch’,” Mark said. “And ain’t it a bitch.”
Eddie took a left, and another left and then we pulled up in front of the Maitland Playhouse.
As kids we’d all had some grand times in that old movie house. The movies had been my only escape from this town until my family moved away. Seeing that it had become a boarded-up, graffiti-tagged ruin broke my heart.
“What a mess,” Darren said.
“What a drag,” I said.
Kent nodded. “I know, eh?”
There were sheets of plywood across the entrance. The glass was broken out of the ticket booth, and more plywood sealed the booth off from the rest of the building. Someone had used chalk to draw a crude pair of eyeglasses on one sheet, head-high. Centered in each of the chalk lenses was a knothole. Written over the knotholes, in an oddly-canted hand, was a challenge:
Are you brave enough to look inside?
Or will you run away and hide?
Still drunk, Mark nearly fell out of the minivan, read the words on the wall and said, “Fuck that shit.” He unzipped his fly and began pissing on the side of the ticket booth.
Eddie stepped past him and stood close to the plywood wall. He peered through the knotholes and then screamed in pain as someone rammed the long steel tines of a two-pronged hayfork through his eyes and out the back of his skull.
-8-
I rang the Debrunner’s doorbell on that chilly day in January. Kent was taller than I so he reached up and used the brass door knocker.
“Before we got here, I was hoping this would be kind of weird,” he said. “Now I hope it’s not.”
Aubrey’s mom opened the front door, and for a moment I thought she was getting ready for a role in a play as her face was powdered almost white, her lipstick was such a dark red it was almost black and her eyelashes looked like the legs of June bugs. It took me a moment to realize that, aside from eyes that appeared red and tired from crying, this was probably how she looked every day.
Aubrey’s dad stood behind her like a supporting player in a bad sitcom. He was wearing a sweater-vest, and he had a pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip. He didn’t say a word.
“Oh come in, come in,” Aubrey’s mom said, letting out a forced laugh. Her hair was as white-blonde as Aubrey’s, piled high on her head like ice cream on a Dairy Queen cone. She was holding a can o
f Glade air freshener.
The furniture in the living room was covered in protective plastic and everything was perfect, as if from a magazine. What little I could see of the kitchen was spotless, not a pot or dish or drinking glass in sight. The house didn’t look like anyone really lived there. It looked preserved.
Kent and I took off our gloves, coats, toques and snow boots, and then padded up a flight of stairs with Mrs. Debrunner saying, “Knock on the first door, yes, that one right there.”
We knocked on the door, and a voice from inside told us to come in.
It was a gray day, the lights were off and the blinds were drawn over the only window, leaving the room almost dark. I could see a shape sitting on what I assumed was the bed.
There was a smell in the bedroom that was both sweet and awful. Mrs. Debrunner’s air freshener and something else.
“Hi, Aubrey,” I said.
“Hi!” he replied, excited that we were there. His enthusiasm made me feel terrible because I couldn’t wait to leave.
“Can I turn on a light?” Kent asked.
“What?” Aubrey sounded genuinely confused, and then he let out a morbid, jaded chuckle that frightened me. It was a sound no child should ever make. “Yeah, go ahead. You know dads, always turning off lights and turning down the heat and telling you to put on—”
“A sweater,” Kent and I said at the same time. All three of us laughed.
I was thinking that things were going to be okay after all. Until the light came on and I saw that slender, pale boy stand and take a step toward us, his eyelids as flat as the blanket on his empty bed.
“I’m really glad you guys are here,” Aubrey said.
Kent pointed, and I saw that Aubrey was wearing one gray sock and one green sock.
“No problem,” I said.
Aubrey came closer and Kent and I stepped to either side, as if the cancer that took Aubrey’s eyes was somehow contagious. He closed his bedroom door and then turned back, walking across the room with one hand outstretched until he reached his bed, where he sat down again.
“So, how’s it hanging?”
Kent winced dramatically when I said this, and I felt like an arsehole, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Aubrey shrugged. “Okay, I guess, at least that’s what my doctor says. It hurt, at first.” He touched one of his lax eyelids, making a wet sound like parting lips. I nearly bolted from the room, wailing in revulsion when I glimpsed an empty red hollow beneath that eyelid. “But now I’m just bored.”
Kent and I stood by the door in silence, breathing in that faint, horrible smell. He confirmed later that we were thinking the same things. We couldn’t talk about TV, or movies, or comic books, or about anything we’ve seen. When you’re twelve years old, those restrictions don’t leave a whole hell of a lot else to talk about.
I looked around the room, desperately trying to think of something to say, and that’s when I noticed the jar atop a dresser near me. It was made of heavy glass that had a slight blue hue and was sealed with a glass stopper. There was liquid inside. Floating in the liquid were what appeared to be two rotten pieces of meat the size of dice.
Kent had noticed the jar too, and I heard him whisper, “What is that?”
Aubrey perked up at this, his pallor and collapsed eyelids making him look like a corpse.
“You’ve seen the apothecary jar, and my eyes,” he said. “My optic nerves were removed and my eyes were precancerous, so it all had to go, but I kept hoping that maybe I could get them to work again. That’s why I asked the doctor if I could keep them.” He shook his head. “After I got home from the hospital I put my eyes back in, and they didn’t work. But I found something that did.”
Aubrey got down on his knees and groped blindly under his bed until he found what he was looking for: a shoebox. He kneeled and set the box in front of him so we could see it. He lifted the lid and Kent retched.
I felt like I was going to vomit and fought it down. Inside the box was a dead cat, a young tabby with a broken neck. It was the source of the horrible sweet-putrid smell in Aubrey’s room.
The cat’s eyes had been removed from its head and now lay between the creature’s paws, the sclera as white as ivory and the emerald green iris now as cloudy as jade.
Aubrey took one eye out of the box and then the other, lifting his eyelids and gently placing the cat’s eyes in his own sockets.
Those green eyes gleamed.
And then they moved.
Aubrey smiled and said, “Now I can see you.”
Kent and I screamed. We ran out of Aubrey’s room and down the stairs, pushing past Mr. Debrunner, with his pencil mustache and shroud of silence, and Mrs. Debrunner, who was grinning like an imbecile and spraying air freshener. We pulled on our boots and ran out into the cold, carrying our coats and gloves.
Following us down the frozen street like a gust of winter wind at our backs was Aubrey’s voice as he cried out in heartbreak and rage, “Come back!”
-9-
Eddie hit the ground like a steer brained by a butcher’s mallet, the heels of his shoes hammering the sidewalk as blood poured out of his eye sockets.
Mark went berserk. He ran full-tilt into the plywood wall and smashed through. He grinned at us, apparently unaware he was bleeding from cuts on his nose and chin.
Darren followed. His fear-bleached face was as pale as a winter moon.
Kent and I entered the dark theater lobby cautiously, seeing Mark, and then Darren, turn down a hall that lead to the bathrooms.
The lights came on, painfully bright, and I heard Kent gasp as if a bucket of cold water had been splashed in his face.
In the center of the lobby, hanging from a rope around its neck like a condemned man, was a pig. Its eyes were missing.
I stepped over the hayfork lying on the dusty lobby carpet. The blood-slick steel tines jutting upward like horns had been bent close so they would fit through the knotholes in the plywood wall.
Kent saw the hayfork and said, “Oh Je—”
Mark and Darren cried out, their voices muffled and far away.
-10-
Two of my friends were murdered in the winter of 1977. Keith was found by the side of Donaldson Road on January 30th, his body twisted as if it had been tossed away like so much trash. Lorne was found on the 12th of February near the densely wooded area known as Borthwick Stand.
The Group of Seven was no more.
The Miramichi Ledger said Keith and Lorne had wounds that indicated, “the presence of scavengers.”
They had bled to death and parts of their bodies had been chewed away. Their eyes were missing.
Written in the snow in their own blood were the words LET’S BE FRIENDS.
Rumors ran rampant among the citizens of Kitchissippi. Adults suggested it was a serial killer or a psychotic sex pervert, and teenagers said it was the Unicorn Man, a local legend used to scare little kids.
My friends and I were convinced it was Aubrey because he was taken away a few weeks later.
That spring my family learned my dad had been posted to Chilliwack. We eventually packed everything we owned into boxes and moved out of Kitchissippi on April 12th, and for that I was grateful.
The week before I left town, a white station wagon pulled up in front of Aubrey’s house, and that skinny, blind, lonely boy had been dragged into the street by two men in crisp white shirts and pants. He was crying aloud that he wanted to stay with his mother and father, that he wanted to stay in his own home, that he didn’t want to go to a hospital.
Aubrey was bound in a straitjacket, looking like something out of an old movie. His pale blond hair was sticking up in tufts, spit flying from his mouth as he raved at everyone watching. And most horrible of all his eyes were open, the lids raised over their empty sockets.
The last thing Aubrey said, the last thing he swore before he was locked in the station wagon and sent away, was, “I’m coming back!”
There was so much I didn
't see back then, which is ironic.
I didn’t see Aubrey kill my friends. I didn't even see him kill the cat in the shoebox. It could have been road kill for all I knew. But I believed he took those lives, believed it with all my heart.
I believed that losing his eyes left Aubrey standing on the edge of sanity, and losing his friends, having Kent and me turn away from him when he showed us his stolen cat's eyes in a desperate attempt to be normal again, pushed him over the edge. That’s why I was so relieved when my family moved as far away from Kitchissippi as we could get.
-11-
Kent and I ran down the hall, passing the doors to the bathrooms and pausing at the head of the stairs leading down to the basement.
We heard another cry of pain and continued down the stairs, part of me wondering who had turned the power back on since there were lights on everywhere, and part of me wanting to simply cut and run.
At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway as long as the theater's lot and many closed doors.
A door at the far end of the hall creaked open a few inches. I went down the hall and through the open doorway, Kent following in my wake.
Inside the room, Mark and Darren were lying side by side on the floor. Both men were dead. Their throats had been crudely torn open and their eye sockets were red holes. Their blood on my hands was still warm.
Written on the wall in broad strokes of blood was LET’S BE FRIENDS!
Movement at the other end of the room caught my eye.
It was the shape of a man, little more than a silhouette against a wash of fluorescent light. He was tall and lean, his thinning hair long and unkempt. He held something over his open mouth, like a debauched Roman being fed peeled grapes. It was a human eye hanging by a string of tissue. He dropped it into his mouth and began to chew.
He sidestepped gracefully as Kent ran at him, spitting obscenities. The moment Kent was on the other side of the door it was slammed shut, and I heard him scream.
Peel Back the Skin Page 15
