by James Newman
I can only hope, for the sake of Harrison County, that Detectives Paul Hembry and Erik Norton are perceptive enough to realize this as well.
Before it is too late.
Before another Rebecca Lanning is “discovered” on Poinsettia Lane.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When I was a kid, my favorite uncle used to have this saying. Around a mouthful of chewing tobacco, while he stared out his living room window and watched a particularly nasty storm pummel his twelve-and-a-half acres of Appalachian farmland, he would swear it was “raining to beat the Devil.”
Uncle Fred’s old adage never failed to make me laugh, even as it filled my impressionable young brain with a plethora of cloven-hoofed nightmare images.
Now, on a Saturday evening four days after the good people of Poinsettia Lane destroyed my Explorer, I doubt there had ever been a more apt description for the drenched gray world outside my window.
Indeed, it was “raining to beat the Devil”… on the day my best friend died.
***
“Dad?” Samantha called out to me from the kitchen, where I hoped she wasn’t making too much of a mess as she fixed herself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for an afternoon snack.
I hit control-S on my keyboard, quick-saving the last page I had written on A Feast of Souls, before replying, “What is it, baby?”
“Can I watch The Fly?”
“Which one?”
“The one Grandpa Nickolas got you for your birthday. That guy from Jurassic Park’s in it? And the mom from Stuart Little?”
“Sounds like you’ve already seen it a couple times, sweet-pea.”
“Can I?”
“Better not. Your mother would squash me like a fly if she knew I let you watch gooey stuff like that.”
“What about the old one? Do you have it on DVD?”
I grinned from ear to ear in spite of myself, shook my head. Samantha certainly was her father’s daughter, no doubt about it. I couldn’t have been more proud.
“It’s in there somewhere, Sam. You’ll just have to look for it.”
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll just watch cartoons.”
“Okay, hon. Just keep the volume down, will you? I’m trying to work in here.”
Outside, a vicious summer storm batted against the house like some malevolent creature trying to get inside. Wormy gray raindrops wriggled their way down my office window, obscuring the world beyond. Thunder rumbled and boomed like a celestial battle being waged in the clouds above Poinsettia Lane. But I didn’t mind. The sounds of a storm were always perfect background noise for creating tales within my chosen genre. I loved every second of it.
“Dad?”
I frowned, stopped typing in the middle of a sentence. Tried not to sound too agitated.
“What do you need, short-stuff?”
“Can I have a Dr Pepper?”
“It’ll rot your teeth.”
“Please?”
“Go ahead. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I returned to my work, but finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t going well at all. I’d had a hell of a time trying to concentrate anyway the last couple days, after that infuriating editorial in the Weekly Independent.
Screw it. I decided I would finish the chapter in progress, then it might be best to just wrap things up and go spend some time with Sam.
I didn’t even get that far, however. About five minutes later, I heard my daughter’s footsteps pattering down the hallway. She burst into my office at the exact moment a bright white flash of lightning lit up the room.
The lights flickered. We both flinched.
“Dad?” Sam said. She was breathing heavily, as if she had just run a few laps around the block. “I think you’d better come here. Quick.”
I swiveled around in my chair to face her. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“I think there’s something wrong with Norman.”
At first, I thought I had misunderstood her. A vicious crack of thunder—like the sound of our house suddenly splitting in half—nearly drowned out her small, frightened voice.
“What?”
“Norman,” she said. “He sounds funny. Not funny ha-ha, I mean. Funny like… weird. I peeked outside to make sure he’s staying warm in his doghouse, and… he’s making some really weird noises. Like he’s hurting.”
I stood. “What are you talking abou—”
“Listen. Can’t you hear him?”
I listened.
And I did hear him.
A low, keening whine from the backyard. It was faint beneath the roar of the storm. But it was there. The unmistakable sound of a living thing in great distress… or pain…
“That’s Norman?” I gasped. “My God—”
I ran for the rear of the house, my heart fluttering like a wounded bird in my chest. Sam followed closely behind me.
When I opened the back door, the storm ripped it from my grasp. The door banged against the house’s vinyl siding.
Thunder chuckled cruelly in the bruise-colored sky overhead.
At first, I could barely see Norman in the far corner of the yard. Sheets of pounding rain blurred the world before me. Miniature cascades of dirty run-off streamed from the roof of the retriever’s Bates Manor doghouse like thick gray curtains shielding him from sight. Only his glistening wet snout was visible, protruding from the doorway.
Norman’s agonized yowl had ceased for now, but in its place sick gagging noises reverberated about my property. The sound of violent retching. As if my dog were coughing up something lodged in his throat.
“Norman?” I called out to him, splashing through the pond that had been my backyard. “What’s wrong, boy?”
Behind me, Sam echoed my frantic cry. I glanced back at her as I approached Norman’s doghouse. Her long blonde hair was already plastered to her neck and shoulders. The rain trickled down her cheeks, dripped from her dimpled chin.
“Samantha, stay back,” I said. “I don’t want you to come any closer, okay?”
I knelt before the doghouse then, and beckoned to my best friend as the storm stung at the nape of my neck like a thousand angry bees trying to drive me back inside. “Norman? Norman, come here, boy…”
More awful gagging sounds. Like a beast fighting to breathe through a mouthful of razor blades.
“Come on, boy. Come on. It’s okay…”
Lightning lit up the world, brighter than the sunniest summer afternoon. A few seconds later, thunder boomed directly overhead, vibrating the ground beneath my feet.
My scalp tingled. The hair on my arms stood up. The storm’s electric fury seemed to hum inside of me, deep within my bones. I felt like a guitar string stretched taut, ready to snap any second.
“Norman,” I called again.
This time a long, rattling sigh resonated from the doghouse. Followed by a moist popping noise. Like something… giving way. Rupturing. The sound of spoiled fruit being stepped on and smeared across wet pavement.
I smelled sickness.
I covered my mouth and nose with one hand, held the other toward the crumpled black shape in the darkness of the doghouse.
“Norman, get out here,” I said, my voice cracking even as I tried to sound firm with him. “N-Now…”
Finally, beneath the storm’s incessant roar, I heard his collar jangle. A thump against the wooden walls of his home. A soft rustle of fur as he shifted inside there.
“That a boy. Come on. It’s okay…”
At last, Norman emerged through the doorway. The rain batted at his floppy golden ears, tattooing dime-sized indentions in his fur.
He took two steps toward me, his head hung low as if he had done something wrong, before his quivering legs betrayed him. With a hoarse wheeze, he collapsed into my arms.
“Oh, my God,” I wept, as I stared down at him. “Norman…?”
The retriever was shaking all over. His sides hitched in and out every few seconds. He peered up at me with eyes that were milky and rimmed
with mucus. Thick yellowish foam bubbled from his mouth and nostrils, oozed down his muzzle and onto my wrists.
His tongue lolled out of one side of his mouth. It was an odd grayish-green color streaked with bright red blood.
Spasms wracked his body. From somewhere deep in his throat came a sound that was all at once a delirious growl, a terrified whimper, and a desperate sigh.
He gagged again.
And then he vomited into the mud at my feet.
Right away, I noticed the stuff he expelled from his stomach was bright, bright green. There was an odd chemical smell to it.
“No,” I cried. “God, no…”
Norman laid one limp paw upon my thigh, whined up at me as if pleading with his master to end his suffering.
He threw up again. All over my hands, this time. In my lap.
“This isn’t happening,” I wept, as I held my best friend’s twitching wet head in my hands. “It can’t be. Oh, n-no. No… Norman…”
I knew what was wrong with him. As much as I wished to deny it, I could not…
When I was eight or nine years old, I had a best friend whose dog was murdered by a mean old geezer down the block. The son of a bitch had used rat poison to do the evil deed, and my buddy’s beloved Jack Russell terrier, Jo-Jo, had displayed the exact symptoms my Norman was exhibiting now…
I remembered Jo-Jo’s vomit had been this same bright emerald hue.
I remembered how he had died in my best friend’s arms.
For those next few terrible seconds, I stared at Norman’s upturned food bowl several feet away. Something that had once been so innocent now seemed sinister, deadly. Like a gore-streaked machete or a smoking machine gun lying in the middle of my yard.
“Samantha!” I shouted. As I called for her, I buried my face in Norman’s sopping-wet fur, started rocking back and forth while the retriever convulsed in my embrace and I silently swore I would never let him go. “Samantha!”
“Daddy?” Sam cried. “Please tell me what’s going on. What’s wrong with Norman?”
“Call 911. Now.”
“D-Dad—”
“No, wait. Sam, wait.”
I held up one trembling hand. Trying to think. Trying to make sense of all this. Everything was happening too fast.
“Forget the police. Screw the police. They’re no good. Fucking worthless.” I turned to Sam, pushed my rain-soaked hair out of my eyes, and yelled to be heard above the storm, “I want you to go inside and find my address book. It’s in the top drawer of my computer desk. Look up Dr. Westerberg’s number. Hurry.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Westerberg. Norman’s vet. I need you to call him, sweetie. Tell him it’s an emergency. Can you do that?”
“I… yeah… s-sure. But… Daddy, please tell me what’s wrong with Norman!”
“Just do it, Sam. Do it now.”
“I’m scared.”
“Go, baby! Everything’s gonna be okay,” I lied.
She hurried inside, sobbing as she went. The door slammed shut behind her.
In my arms, Norman began to shudder more violently than ever. His head fell to one side, and more vomit rolled off of his slack gray tongue in wormy green rivulets. For the first time, I noticed that he appeared larger than usual. His belly was bloated to twice its normal size, as if the poison inside of him were some alien creature incubating within his guts.
“Oh, God,” I wept. “My dog. Norman! How could they…”
Norman convulsed in my embrace. He chuffed once, weakly. I squeezed him tighter to me, and his front legs kicked as if he were desperately trying to flee from his agony. He caught me in the crotch, hard, but I barely even noticed.
I felt dizzy, feared I might pass out face-down in the mud beside his traitorous food bowl as my senses were bombarded by the ozone scent of the storm, the musky odor of wet animal, and the sickly-sweet stench of impending death.
“God damn you!” I screamed, glaring up at the heavens as needles of frigid rain struck me in the face and stabbed into my Adam’s apple. “God damn you all!”
More flashes of angry lightning exploded all around me, as if the roiling black sky refused to allow me the last word. The storm gurgled and burped through the gutters over my shoulder, batted against the walls of my privacy fence in an unending basso drone.
And then, as I knelt there bawling like a baby, feeling so helpless and crippled with guilt, wondering what I could have done to prevent this… my best friend died in my arms.
His eyes filled with rain, but did not blink it away. They grew fixed, stared right through me.
I heard him lose control of his bowels.
His body went limp. His tail flopped once, as if with great effort, before lying still on the muddy ground in a shape like a crooked question mark.
The last thing poor Norman did before he left this world… was lick my right hand. Twice.
As if to say, Goodbye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I was thinking maybe Samantha shouldn’t come back over there until all of this is resolved,” Karen said. “Don’t you agree?”
We weren’t arguing. I knew she was right. But that didn’t make the conversation any easier.
“I mean… what if they decide to take it out on her, Andy? At this point, I wouldn’t put it past them. What if they hurt Sam?”
The phone line crackled and popped between us like the whispers of disembodied spirits eavesdropping on our conversation.
“Andy? Are you still there?”
“Just tell me that’s the only reason, Karen,” I said. “Tell me… tell me it’s because you’re worried about Sam, and promise me… promise me… that you don’t think there’s any truth to what my neighbors are saying…”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my ex-wife replied. “I know you, Andy. Jesus. We’ve had our… problems… but I could never think anything like that. Ever.”
“Norman never hurt anybody,” I said.
“I know. He was a good dog.”
“I hope they burn in Hell for what they’ve done.”
“This is all gonna blow over,” Karen assured me. “Soon. It has to. The police will catch the killer in a few days, and these people will realize they’re gravely mistak—”
“That won’t bring Norman back,” I said, my voice cracking.
Karen sniffled softly on the other end of the line. “No. It won’t.”
“I’ve asked myself a million times if there’s anything I could have done differently,” I said. “If there might have been some way to save him, if I’d only found him sooner.”
“Andy, you can’t blame yourself. It’s not—”
“I caught them in the act the night they vandalized the Explorer. How in the hell did I not hear them in the middle of the fucking afternoon, when they were sneaking through the gate, slipping rat poison into his food bowl?”
“You know how friendly he was,” Karen said. “He probably never even barked once, if he knew the people who did this.”
“Oh, he knew them,” I said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
“I’m sorry, Andy. I’m so sorry. I know how much you loved that dog.”
A nervous twitch seized my body, and I nearly dropped the phone. I felt as if I had finally fallen off the precipice into insanity. And now there was no turning back.
“I hope you filed a police report,” Karen said.
“That’s not going to do any fucking good.”
“You should, Andy! At least then you’ll—”
“It’s the media’s fault,” I interrupted her. “You know that, don’t you? It’s all their fault. The newspaper. And the TV. They’re just as fucking guilty as the people who live on this street. They’ve convinced my neighbors that I’m something I’m not. And there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about it.”
“What about libel? Maybe you could—”
“It’s not libel,” I said. “Everything they’ve printed about my books, my criminal record—it’s all true.
So far, they haven’t lied about anything! You can’t sue if they’re reporting facts.”
“But the things they’re insinuating! I usually agree with his editorials, but did you see what that Jeremy Webster guy said in the last Indepe–”
“Insinuation isn’t grounds for a lawsuit either,” I said.
“What if… do you think it would help if you talked to them?”
“The press?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“But if they finally heard your side of the story, then they might—”
“I’m not going to let them twist my words, take them out of context. Because I know that’s what they’d do. It would only make things worse.”
Karen sighed, but did not reply. She knew I was right.
“The same goes for you,” I told her. “If they call you, wanting to ask questions about me, don’t tell the bastards anything.”
“I won’t.”
“Just say ‘no comment.’”
“I promise.”
“Thank you, Karen.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Andy. I’ll do whatever you think is best.”
“How is Sam handling this, by the way?” I said.
“Not well. She loved Norman too, you know.”
I quickly wiped away a tear that tickled its way down my cheek and caught in my five o’clock shadow.
Neither of us spoke for a long, awkward minute or two.
“Karen?” I said then.
“Hmm?”
“Do you remember that weekend we spent in the mountains? At Keene’s cabin?”
“Of course,” she replied, a wistful tone in her voice. “How could I forget?”
“I keep thinking about that weekend,” I said. “Of all the memories I have of poor Norman, I can’t get out of my mind what he did the last night we were up there…”
Norman had been a member of our family for a little less than a year on the evening in question. One late-summer afternoon, on a whim, we had decided to pack our things and embark on an unplanned vacation up in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Ever since I had known him, a fellow horror writer and good friend of mine had offered to let us use his summer cabin there; after damn near succumbing to mental burnout following a long period of penning two novels simultaneously, I finally accepted his invitation. We had taken Sam with us, of course, and Norman too, and as long as I live I shall never forget the night Karen and I sneaked out of the cabin like two horny, giggling teenagers. A few minutes after Samantha drifted off to sleep, we crept naked into the darkest part of the woods, where we spread out an old blanket on a carpet of pine needles, lit up a fat joint for the first time since our honeymoon, and proceeded to make the kind of passionate love usually reserved for young people naïvely innocent to the pitfalls of married life, fools who believe with all their hearts that nothing will ever tear them apart.
