I was so absorbed in the song that I didn’t hear my mother calling me until she was standing right beside me. Her shadowy figure seemed to appear out of nowhere. That combined with the sound of my name made me leap out of my seat. I fumbled the earphones off and stared at her with wide eyes.
She threw a hand over her mouth and tried not to laugh. “Your father called and he told us not to wait up for him. He’ll probably be home late.” She ruffled my hair. “It’s past ten, Paul. You have school tomorrow.”
I nodded and tossed the earphones back onto the desk. I must have looked as white as a sheet because Mom laid a hand on my shoulder. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I was just really into what I was reading. I guess I kinda zoned out there.”
Mom glanced at the computer suspiciously, perhaps thinking that she had caught me on a racy website, or worse yet, a serial killer one. She gave my shoulder one last squeeze, pecked me on the cheek, and told me goodnight.
“I enjoyed spending time with you tonight, Paul. The older you get, the less time I get with you.”
I gave her a nod and a half-hearted shrug. I responded, “Yeah.” It was the biggest insight I could manage at that point. My peace had been momentarily shattered, my heart rate just beginning to slow to normal.
She stopped in the doorway and stood with her back to me. After an apparent inner debate, she turned back to me one last time. “Pat would never tell you this, Paul, but she’s worried about Claudia, because she’s manic depressive like her father.”
I let go of the mouse in my hand. She had my full attention now. “Depressed? I’ve never seen her..,” then before I could finish my thought, I remembered the poem I’d caught her writing.
All alone I am.
“Of course you haven’t, Paul, because she’s on medication now,” my mother told me. “Pat tells me that it’s a cyclical thing. She was in almost a constant state of depression for three months before her doctor found the right balance of meds. She’s only recently turned a corner, but Pat’s worried with all the excitement about the disappearances that she might go to the other extreme.”
Now that I thought of it, Claudia did tend toward being obsessive, but of course, I’d chalked it up to her personality. This new revelation made me wonder if I wasn’t helping to contribute to this mania of hers.
“I just felt I needed to tell you that,” she concluded, lowering her head and shutting the door behind her.
After she left me alone, I copied the lyrics onto my word processing program and saved them for later. Claudia might be interested.
Damn, I thought. Maybe Mom’s right and I should just play all this down.
But then again, why should I treat her any different just because of this? It wasn’t like she was disabled or something. Perhaps her enthusiasm was simply the healthy interest of anyone who’s doing the one thing they enjoy most.
An image of her face in the cemetery crept into my head unbidden. The way the moonlight highlighted the peaks and valleys of her face like a sculpture. Again I felt a pain similar to the one I experienced earlier, that sensation that felt like hunger but wasn’t. It was confusing the hell out of me.
Enough!
I leapt into bed, determined to surrender to sleep and let nature ease the knots out of my conflicted mind. Unfortunately, my subconscious had other business to discuss with me first.
I stand on the porch, the blistering heat singeing my back. I turn to look over my shoulder and with that surreal sort of blind acceptance of dreams I take in the fact that my shoulders are broader, too muscular for a child of five. Holding up my hands, I see that I am no longer a child but seventeen again, but the pumpkin bucket remains faithfully in my right hand.
Just over the railing, the forest of dead trees that I had seen before is now an inferno too bright to look into directly. It devours the hillside like a starved carnivore, sucking up the air around me like a drowning man emerging suddenly from the depths. The loud pops and squeals coming from the forest sound disturbingly human.
The blazing forest calls to me in a voice like glass raked across concrete.
Paul!
I look down and with confusion see that the candy in the bucket has turned into a book with a black leather cover.
Then the scream. I turn back to the wall of the black house. Through the featureless wall, I hear her scream. It is Claudia!
Out of sheer instinct, I drop the bucket and throw myself at the blackened wood and immediately bounce off again. I hear the hiss and whine of a tree limb succumbing to the flames. I hear mocking laughter but ignore it, focusing instead on the sound behind the wall.
Claudia. Is someone hurting her?
I know that there is a way inside. It has opened for me once before when it attempted to make a snack of my ear. Ever-so-slowly, I turn my ear to the wall and draw millimeter by millimeter closer to the blackened face of the house. The boards of the house groan and part. From the slot between the two planks wafts the putrid odor of decay, spat at me like from the cancerous throat of a dying man.
“Paul.” The flames lick at my heels. I can see the smoke rising through the floorboards of the porch around the discarded pumpkin bucket and notice with wonder that the contents of the bucket glow with a glorious white light.
Then through the crack in the boards, I hear Claudia cry my name, loud and clear. “Paul help me!”
It was then that I awoke from the dream with a lung-rattling gasp of air. Clawing at empty space, I sat up, the blankets in my lap. Taking a look around and realizing that I was no longer in any mortal danger, I put my hands to my face and just listened to myself breathe. In-out. In-out. The feel of my hands on my face relaxed me and my heart rate began to recede, but parts of me--whole muscle-groups it seemed--were still shaking.
The clock on my nightstand read three-fifteen in the morning.
Opening my window, I leaned out and sucked the night air into my lungs.
Dear Lord! I’d never experienced a dream so intense.
I had an almost overpowering need to see Claudia just to know that she was safe; that nothing that I had just seen had come to pass in reality.
Ignoring all the warnings, I dialed the Wickes number and waited to hear one of two possible voices. If it was her mother, I would hang up. If nothing else, it would succeed in at least getting her up to check on her daughter.
On the other hand, if it was Claudia…
“Hello?” her sleepy voice answered.
I closed my eyes and realized that I had been holding my breath.
Before I could stop myself, I had dropped the phone back into its cradle.
My muscles stopped quivering. The ground beneath me felt solid again.
I fell back to sleep in record time.
Chapter 13 (Monday, October 12th)
Lunchtime arrived. It had been a particularly busy Monday. There was a quiz in English Lit and a unit exam in Algebra 2. The day was only half over and I was already mentally exhausted. And quite honestly, a little nervous. Why, I wasn’t sure. After all Claudia was the same person she was before I’d learned about this manic/depressive thing. Nothing had changed, but maybe my mother was right and this lunchtime serial killer thing wasn’t good for her.
Claudia was already waiting for me up in the bleachers.
“Did you get anything from your Dad?”
“No, he got home late last night and he was already gone when I left this morning.”
Claudia stopped crunching on her nourishing lunch of Cocoa Puffs cereal and gave me a look. “He’s going to them, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, Mom said they guilted him into it.”
“They must need him pretty bad.” Claudia pulled her leg up to fold it beneath her and her knee brushed mine. For some reason I jerked away as if I had been stung. She gave me a half-offended look.
“Sorry, I’m a little jumpy.”
“Something wrong?”
I considered telling her about the dream, but thought
twice when I considered the possibility that she might put two and two together and realize that I was the one who called last night. Not that she didn’t assume it already, though she hadn’t brought it up.
“Nothing.” I started into my sandwich so that I’d have an excuse not to say anything more.
“Whatever.” Claudia brought out her spiral bound notebook and turned to a dog-eared page. “Okay, next on the list is motive. There are five categories of motive. Visionary. Missionary. Hedonistic. Gain motivated. The last is the most common, Power and Control. Keep in mind, a serial killer can have more than one.”
I sighed heavily and shifted my position. She was already in profiler mode and we had been there less than two minutes now. If I was going to attempt to curtail this mania of hers, I had to stop enabling her somehow.
“Killings occur as a display of domination, sometimes used to compensate for some sort of trauma or abuse the killer may have suffered in childhood. Some killers reenact the same abuse they’ve experienced on others. Though rape might occur, the reasons behind it are more related to power and control than it is to sexual gratification.”
I gave a cough as an excuse to cut through her torrent of words. “For a change, do you think we could talk about something else?”
Claudia gave me a look of confusion. I had totally thrown her train of thought. She glanced down at the plastic baggy of cereal in her hand and shrugged. “Why?”
Thinking fast, I replied: “I don’t know. I’ve already had two tests today. My mind is mush. I can’t absorb any more information today.”
In addition to worrying about her health, something had occurred to me this morning over a bowl of hot oatmeal. If the unconscious mind is somehow utilized in your dreams, maybe I had been trying to tell myself something, telling myself to back off a little. Maybe all this serial killer stuff was just as unhealthy to me as it was to her. Even dangerous. If nothing else, all this talk of violent death and abnormal psychology was starting to affect my sleep and, truth be told, I didn’t find it quite as fascinating as I once had.
Was I really ever interested in all this or had it only been a means to something else? I glanced furtively at her out of the corner of my eye, my eye following the curve of her jaw line to her unpainted lips.
Chasing a handful of brown puffs down her throat with a swig of Coke, she glanced longingly at the notes jotted down in her notebook. “Fine, just let me tell you this one thing, then we can drop it,” she replied, her voice picking up speed in an effort to barrel through any road block I might have thrown in her way. “Gain motivated serial killers are those who commit murder for material gain. Y’know, like Mafia hit men or those who kill for information--a valuable commodity in and of itself. This category is pretty self-explanatory.”
I sighed and settled down to finish my lunch. Her lesson had its own momentum and I had to just wait for the conclusion, whether I wanted to or not.
“Hedonistic killers are the ones who are sensually aroused by their acts, but not always sexually. These guys get a certain element of enjoyment out of either the hunt for the victim or the killing or the torturing.”
Barely two bites into my sandwich, I was quite finished. I jammed the remainder back into the bag. She barely seemed to notice.
“Missionary killers are the ones who believe they are ridding the world of certain types which, for one reason or another, they find disagreeable. Might be religion-based or race-based. Jack the Ripper might have been profiled as a missionary killer because he killed prostitutes. The motive is non-sexual in nature. Though the victims are sometimes raped, it is not as much the main rationale of the killer as it is incidental to the act of the murder.”
I realized that if I was going to get her attention at this point, I had to take a more radical approach.
“Y’see, I’ve been having these nightmares lately.”
She glanced up at me.
“They’ve been getting more vivid.”
She shook the remainder of the can of Coke in her hand as if deciding whether or not she wanted it. I could hear the hissing of the carbonation within. It sounded like a tiny angry snake. “Is that why you called me last night?”
I glanced over at her but she continued to stare down at the can. There was no use in denying it. They had Caller ID. Besides deception wasn’t my style.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Why did you hang up?”
“I didn’t realize how stupid it was until I heard your voice,” I tried to explain. “It sorta woke me up. Hanging up was even worse than calling in the first place I guess. Hope I didn’t scare you.”
Claudia glanced up at me, a new, almost furtive, look in her eye. “Why did you call me?”
I shrugged. Sometimes the truth was subtle shades of gray. Admitting that I had a dream about her was bad enough (which, I’m sure at this point she’d already figured out), but explaining that the dream involved her screaming and trapped in some sort a house without windows or doors was bordering on lunacy.
“It’s just that… you’re… well I consider you a friend, y’know”
She was quiet. I was watching her face, but I still couldn’t read her yet.
“Sometimes I dream about him.” Her voice wavered in an effort to regain control over a sudden burst of emotion. “But he’s not old. He’s eighteen. He doesn’t seem to know he’s my father. Instead, he’s just some random stranger and he hangs out with this group that won’t have anything to do with me. I guess he’s too cool or something. I try and talk to him but he doesn’t even seem to know I exist. His eyes look right through me.”
I felt I should do something. In the movies, a different guy might’ve put his arm around her or taken his jacket off and tossed it over her shoulders, but as I sat there picturing how stupid that might have looked, the moment passed us by.
She rose and climbed up the steps of the bleachers, leaning over the railing at the top. I realized she was crying and the fact of it, the lack of control, seemed to disgust her.
After a few minutes, she returned wordlessly, retrieved her books, and started down the bleachers without another word. She needed to be alone, and for that reason, I didn’t go after her.
By the end of the day, it was on every student’s lip. Somehow the story had been leaked that a message had been found spray-painted on the interior of the dumpster where the body of sixteen year old Sadie Nayar had been found.
Sprayed in cursive script in red paint were the words “Sam Hain.”
The name rang no bells for me.
Wild speculation ran the gamut from a rumor that the state police had a suspect to there being a Satanic cult with the same name. Since I couldn’t find Claudia, I went to the least reactionary person that I knew.
“I looked the name up on the internet,” Don-Tom told me as we walked out to the parking lot after dismissal. “It’s either a rock group or the name the Celtic people call their Feast of the Dead.”
“What, like, a celebration?”
“Right, it’s a pagan ritual that was supplanted by the Christian practices of All Saint’s Day, on November 1st. The beginning of the Celtic winter season. In fact, one article I read says that the word Samhain literally means ‘November’ in Irish Gaelic.”
“November 1st? That’s my birthday.”
“Who the hell are you?”
Both of us turned to see Claudia rushing up behind us. Don-Tom turned and looked down at the little glowering girl in black and after a moment broke into a smile.
“Claudia this is Don-Tom. He was just telling me…”
“…about Samhain and just for the record, it’s pronounced Sow-In, not Sam-Hain. Let’s try and rise above the uninformed masses. I dread to hear those blithering bimbos reading this story off the teleprompter tonight during the evening news. Remind me to unplug my TV.” Claudia took me by the arm and pulled me forcibly away. I gave a wave over my shoulder to Don-Tom.
He raised his hand to me and veered off toward his truck, a
late nineties Dodge Ram, a hand-me-down from one of his older brothers. “I’ll catch you later, Paul. Nice to meet you, Claudia.”
Ignoring him completely, Claudia tossed my arm aside like I had been the one manhandling her. “What horseshit was that misinformed idiot trying to sell you?”
“Geez, Claudia, chill out, will you? Don-Tom’s all right.”
“Look you and I are the only people at this school with the slightest inkling of what’s going on here. I’ve been dealing with these freaking small-brained wonders since the first moment I heard about the message on the dumpster. Can we get out of here?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Forget everything he told you and I’ll see if I can straighten you out.”
“All he said was that it was a Celtic feast and that it corresponded to the Christian All Saint’s Day of November 1st .”
“Wrong,” she honked with all the serenity of a game show announcer. “It’s the eve of the Celtic New Year which begins on November 1st. Samhain is October 31st. Hallowmas, Samana, Samhuinn, All Hallow’s Eve, or just plain old Hallow evening, abbreviated to Hallowe’en.”
“Wow, I never realized,” I burst out.
“It was the celebration of loved ones who had departed for the spirit world. Costumes were worn to commemorate the event both by participants and those who wanted to avoid mischievous spirits by pretending to be someone else.”
I was staring at her like an imbecile now. “That’s where costumes came from!”
“Yeah, Paul. Try and focus, please,” she said in her least snide tone. “Offerings of food left for the deceased eventually gave way to the giving away of food to others either when the harvest didn’t produce the yield that was expected or when the holiday was merged with the Christian celebration on the day before All Saint’s Day.”
As I unlocked the passenger side door of my car for Claudia, I gave her a look of amazement. “How is it I never knew all this about my favorite holiday?”
“Well, you never had me.” She gave me an off-kilter smirk.
Swinging the door open for her, I gave her a bow and a sweep of my arm.
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