It wasn’t about him. Over and over the images played in his mind. Limbs contorted. Bodies in impossible positions, angles all wrong. Billie Holiday crooning in the background. All aimed at Brandt. He played. He slid into the progression, eyes clamped tightly shut, and fingers flowing liquid hot over the strings. He played and he thought of his childhood. He thought of days in bright sunlight, happy days of fun and carefree hours where nothing mattered but the moment.
“He kept us prisoner.”
The voices spoke in unison, crazy harmonic clarity.
“He kept us, bound and naked. For a long time. He made us beg to be touched. . . .”
Brandt shook his head and bore down on the strings. “No,” he whispered.
“Yes,” the voices continued. “He came to us, and he touched us, but only a little, and then he left. Again and again. Alone. When we heard him, we needed—him.”
“No,” Brandt repeated, louder. He let his fingers fly, releasing them to the song, and he turned away. He didn’t want something prodding him to open his eyes and look. He didn’t want to be distracted again. Nothing mattered but the connection. He felt the pain. He felt the struggles for individuality, the fight for freedom. He felt chaffed wrists and dry throats. He felt the shame of need. He felt desperation and he felt the slicing, heated cut of the blade.
They’d been awake—bound and helpless—when he’d cut them. Brandt felt himself drawn in. He clamped his eyes tightly shut, but the images surfaced, ignoring him. The woman was spread out on the bed. Her ankles and wrists were bound. Brandt stood over her, watching through eyes he couldn’t escape. She wasn’t struggling. All the fight was gone from those helplessly tied limbs. Her eyes were blindfolded, and her head turned to one side, as though she were listening carefully.
“Please?” she said softly. “Please touch me. Let me know you are there. Please?”
Brandt shied away; the body he inhabited reached out. Touched. Teased and pulled back. She trembled, arching from the bed. Tears soaked the blindfold at the corners of her eyes.
“Please,” she whispered. “Oh God, please, don’t go. Don’t leave me this way. Please?”
Brandt’s pulse raced. She was so helpless. So in need of the touch she craved. So warped in that need and he couldn’t draw away.
“No,” he whispered a third time. Before he could work to draw back, to cut it all off and play, a flurry of notes cut through his trance.
Shaver. Brandt mouthed the word, but didn’t speak. He knew what he heard, and who he heard. That was enough. He was not alone, and very suddenly, the presence that held his gaze released him. Brandt threw every ounce of his concentration to his fingers. He ground the chords from the strings, laying them out like a fine mesh for Shaver to dance his own notes across. Shaver played as if the entire struggle was beyond him. He played as if there was no fucking way Brandt would ever fail to lay that groundwork, as if the rhythm were already set in the firmament of the heavens, and all he had to do was take that plunge, drive his own notes out over that safety net of perfection and watch them fall into place.
Brandt gritted his teeth, opened his eyes, and played. The others were there. No women, bound to dark beds. No crying, tearful begging. No arched flesh too tempting, so forbidden. Just Synthia slipping in close beside him, Dexter pacing around them all, Liz kneeling with her fingers working, kneading the soft earth at their feet, and Shaver. Shaver’s eyes were closed now. No way to tell what he saw, or what he felt—no way to ignore the sound. It was sublime. It drew them all closer, binding them in spirals of sound and drowning out the mocking laughter that had filled the clearing.
Brandt felt the pain uncoiling. He still heard the voices in the recesses of his mind, chiming up as one voice, over and over. The images had faded. He saw only the death. He knew only the pain, and he let it slide through him, hot butter rolling off the edges of the blade that had carved and killed and left them to rot. One by one, their voices rolled free as well. One a little more high-pitched. Another, the patterns of the words shifting. Brandt could no longer make out what they were saying, only random words filtered through.
One thing he did see. The images, as they peeled, one from the other, were eerily similar. The killer had taken them all for a reason. A single reason. They all were the same. They looked the same. He saw them as the same woman. One after another, whirling away, freed by the notes that were reaching a crescendo and shimmering back down like warm rain.
And then there was one. The girl they’d followed in the first place. The catalyst. She gazed at Brandt as the notes trailed away, first in anger, then in puzzlement. Finally, she dropped her eyes, and the clearing grew silent. Everything shimmered, the cohesion of the “vision” slipping away. Still, she stood, and she watched.
“He will not be pleased,” she said at last. The words were so soft, a whisper like wind through the trees overhead. “He will come for you.”
“I am going to him,” Brandt replied without thought. “There is no hiding.” He stood for a moment in silence, then added. “The one who sent you to me is not the one who . . .” Brandt’s eyes flickered to where the women’s corpses still sprawled on the carpet of dead leaves and soft grass. “Not the one who did this.”
“No,” she said. Her own gaze trailed after his. “No, he is not. He is much darker. This . . .” her hand swept out in a slow arc, gesturing to the carnage, the girls piled high and cold and gone, “this is my brother’s work.”
Warring emotions flickered across the surface of her eyes. She couldn’t quite meet Brandt’s gaze now.
“He wanted me. I used to sit on the end of his bed, when we were alive. When we were young. I used to slip in, in the middle of the night when Ma and Dad were asleep, pull my nightgown over my head and sit on the end of his bed.
“It was fun. He used to do things for me. Anything I asked, if I let him touch me. Used to beg to touch me. I had to tell him to be quiet, to lay still. Told him if he was my good little boy, I’d let him touch more, but I never did. I liked it too much, the touching. I was afraid if I let him touch me more, I’d like it more, and I wouldn’t be able to control him. I was right, in the end.
“I didn’t control him. He caught me one night slipping out my window to go out with some friends. I never made it past the edge of the yard before he had me. Didn’t know he could hit so hard. He got me in the back of the head. I was down, half-conscious, and he had me tied, gagged, and was dragging me into the woods. These woods. He was only sixteen, but he was very thorough. He even brought my nightshirt.
“He tied me out there that night. He took my clothes, made me dress in the nightshirt, and tied me to a tree. He left me there.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. Synthia. Brandt felt her reacting, and he turned to her, silencing her with a glance. His fingers were pressed tightly to the strings of his guitar, painfully. He listened, and the girl continued.
“He came back the next night. He touched me, but only once . . . very softly. Lingering. He didn’t speak at all. He gave me a piece of bread, and some water . . . and left again.
“It was the third night I begged. I couldn’t help it. He was going to go again, to leave me there. I begged him not to. I begged him to touch me, and he did. Again, and again, and I was so relieved. I was so sore, and so tired. Then, when he had his fill of it, he killed me. I remember when father gave him that knife.”
The images were flickering now, strobing like an old movie nearing the end of the reel. Flecks of what Brandt saw, and heard, shivered away from him.
“It is over now,” he said softly.
“No,” she answered, as she slipped away. “It is over for me—for them,” her arm waved across the clearing. “He is not dead.”
They stood alone, in the alley. No trees. No bodies. Only the softest trickle of moonlight seeped between the walls of the buildings that walled them in. Brandt saw it flicker off the strings of Shaver’s guitar, felt Synthia leaning in even closer. He closed his eyes again.
In the distance, very faintly, he could still hear Billie Holiday.
“What the hell was that?” Dexter asked at last. “Jesus.”
“I think that is just what it was,” Brandt said, shaking his head from side to side to clear the cobwebs. “Or very close to it. Hell. Never thought I’d be the one to help people avoid it.”
“Did you hear her?” Liz asked. She was kneeling still, on the concrete floor of the alley. Between her legs, something rested on the ground.
Brandt nodded in answer, turning and leaning down to place his guitar back in the case. The aching need to play was stilled, but he couldn’t keep himself from staring over at Liz, wondering what it was she had. He remembered her fingers, working the soil, remembered that she’d been working as the girl had talked.
He snapped the case closed and lifted it, turning and stepping closer to her.
As the object came into focus, he frowned. It was a cross. The cross-arms were formed of sticks, bits of wood, bound by an old length of string. It wasn’t the cross that caught his eye. Bound to it, warped and twisted, was what might have been a body. It was a third stick, twisted and knotted, broken to a length that fit on the cross neatly. The shape was that of a body, bent double by pain, helpless to ward off that anguish.
There was a bit of the girls they’d seen in the image. There was a bit of the man who’d bound them, and the sister who’d brought it on them all. There was the Christ, something Brandt could see, and yet, that meant so little to him. Too much.
He staggered back, turning away. More images assaulted him: trees, mountains, fiery, hungry eyes that he recognized only too well.
“Fuck,” he whispered. He felt Synthia wrapping her arms around him, holding him, once again, from a fall.
Liz rose quickly, gathering the small “sculpture” up as she did. She seemed embarrassed, somehow, to be on the ground, and upset by Brandt’s reaction.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dexter said. “We have a mountain to climb, and music to make.”
Brandt shivered once, hard, nearly slipping from Synthia’s grip, then nodded and stood up straight. “There isn’t much time,” he said softly.
They walked from the alley and into the brilliant moonlight bathing the street beyond, each lost in their own thoughts. For the moment, the music had silenced.
Fourteen
The five of them, their instruments, what bags and clothes they figured they could get by on, and a massive stack of beat-up cassette tapes bounced down the freeway, just outside San Valencez. The van wasn’t really designed for the comfort of five, but with some creative packing, they’d managed to make it bearable. Dexter was firmly planted behind the wheel, a twenty-ounce black coffee steaming beside him and his fingers tapping rhythms on the steering wheel. They’d known he would never make it through the trip sane if they didn’t give him something to occupy himself with. Road maps and traffic patterns seemed the perfect answer.
Beside him, Shaver rode shotgun. He had his guitar in his lap, and Synthia’s pig-nose amp, turned low and wailing like a tiny Marshall stack on the console between the seats. He ran through progressions randomly, piecing them together and watching the pattern of Dexter’s fingers tapping on the wheel.
Liz had turned, facing the back, and made a backrest of that console. Beside her on the floor were her pads, and a freshly sharpened pack of pencils. She’d been sketching the others to pass the time. Just that moment, she was resting, her head leaning against where Shaver’s elbow rested, her eyes closed, listening to the music. The top pad held a sketch of both Brandt and Synthia, but not your average photo-realism. Brand held his guitar, facing some unknown menace just to one side. Synthia was wrapped around him, literally, like some giant, dark serpent. She rose to blonde hair that peaked in the shape of a fender bass, her arms, elongated, curled around Brandt’s chest.
It was an eerie caricature, quickly drawn with deep, powerful strokes. The most striking thing about it was a small reflection in Brandt’s eye. You could only make it out if you concentrated, and yet it was impossible to miss. Shaver had stared at it for a long time without speaking, pulling it closer, shoving it out to arm’s length, squinting.
“What is it?” he’d asked at last, handing the pad back. Liz had stared at it, an odd expression on her face.
“I’m not sure,” she answered. “Don’t even remember drawing it.” She took the pad back, turning it sideways, then upside down. Then she’d passed it back to Brandt and Synthia, who were curled on the ample back seat in the space left beside Dexter’s drum kit.
Brandt took it and held it for them both. Synthia was sprawled sideways, her head curled into the crook of his shoulder. Nothing was said for a long time. Brandt stared at the image of himself carefully, and he felt Synthia pressing back more tightly against him as she studied the sketch of herself, and Brandt’s careful reaction to it.
“It looks as if I’m smothering you,” she’d said.
“No,” Brandt’s answer had been contemplative and certain. “It is a metaphor, I think, of the music. You are weaving yourself in and around me, but here,” he pointed to the base of the image in the drawing, “is the support. It is you, strong coils holding me up as I play. See the way your hair is the neck of your bass?”
Brandt had turned to Liz then, handing back the picture and smiling. “I’d like to see how the rest of the band would fit into that, if you get the notion.”
Liz had smiled, her secret shared and understood, nodding in silence and moving closer to Shaver, who turned then, leaning back to catch Brandt’s gaze.
“But what is that thing reflected in the eye?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Brandt answered with a quick shrug. “That,” he added thoughtfully, “is the key to the pattern.”
There hadn’t been much conversation since that initial burst. Shaver played, the others listened, Dexter wove the old van in and out of the moderately heavy outbound traffic. They left San Valencez behind quickly, and turned toward the mountains, barely visible in the distance. No one spoke, and Liz refused to rise high enough from the floor to see the mountains at all. They had at least a day’s journey ahead of them, and the consensus was that they’d stop early on, not push themselves, find a room or two somewhere and crash hard. No telling what they were about to face off with on that mountain, so why be exhausted when they found out?
Dexter drove on through the growing darkness as if he could go forever. The coffee was drained, then filled from the Thermos he and Shaver shared. When the Thermos was nearly empty, they had traveled a few hours, a couple of hundred miles, and had begun to take note of the glowing signs and offerings of food, lodging, and relaxation that lined the sides of the road.
“Man,” Shaver said, “the rooms get cheaper the closer we get to this place. When we left the city, every sign was saying at least $39.99 a night. Now we’re down to $19.99, and the offer of ‘adult entertainment’ and ‘special’ rooms with vibrating beds. What planet are we traveling to?”
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Liz cut in. “You wait until we’re close enough for the signs Reverend Forbes paid for to start showing up. You’ll think you’re driving into some sort of snake-handling circus. He was not shy about spreading ‘the word of the Lord’ far and wide. He was also not shy about what sort of folks would be welcome in Friendly, California. You’ll see.”
They chose an exit that proclaimed “Home Cooking, Just Like Ma Used to Fix,” and double rooms for $19.99 a night with free HBO. Dexter swerved gently onto the ramp and rolled down to the single traffic light swinging at the end. He turned right, following the signs. To the left there was a dimly lit gas station, and a convenience store, stark against the deep black of the night.
As they started down the road, the glow of a small town lit the skyline. The signs were closely placed, one after the other, proclaiming all the worldly delights of South Haven, California. They rounded a bend in the road, and the signs began to show life. Color, neon
lit and blinking:
BEER
LIQUOR
SOUTH HAVEN MOTOR-LODGE
“That must be the place, “ Dexter grunted, signaling the turn to no one, as they were alone on the road, and wheeling the van into the gravel parking lot. The “Vacancy” sign was lit, half of the “V” broken, and the sign hissing and spitting into the utter silence that fell as Dexter killed the engine.
The office sported a patched screen door with a big “OPEN” sign dangling from wire in its center.
There was a dim light from somewhere deep in the interior, but no other signs of life.
“Jesus,” Shaver said, “it’s only ten o’clock.”
Dexter popped open his door and slid out onto the gravel. Shaver did the same, and the two advanced on the old wood-framed door slowly.
There was a bell “For Service” to the right of it, and Dexter punched it without hesitation. A high-pitched buzz sounded, like a bug-zapper at the dinner table, and a light flashed on in the back, brighter than before.
Muffled footsteps, the heavy scent of a cigar, burning past its prime, and the latch on the inside of the door was being unfastened.
The woman was old. No way of telling how old. All distinguishing features had been erased by time, total disregard for health, and the worst fashion-police disaster Shaver had seen since his Aunt Mable had come to “visit” when he was a child.
“Um,” Shaver said at last, feeling that ancient, withered gaze sliding up and down him in distaste, distrust, and what bordered on anger. “Do you have three rooms?”
The woman blinked at him, inhaling and drawing enough air through the cigar butt to bring the embers at the tip to glowing life.
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