SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  “You are exactly like me,” he said in a high old-womanish voice.

  This change made her stop and consider him. “Who are you? What kind of lunatic are you?”

  His voice changed again to the one he had used on the phone, the one with the light British accent. “I'm no one and everyone. My name is Son, progeny of Mother and a father I never knew.”

  “If you think I'm going to feel sorry for you, forget it. I don't give a goddamn about your life. I don't care what your name is. You're Frank, you're Son, you can hide behind a million names, a million faces, but I know you. You tried to kill Mitch. You'd kill me if I let you.”

  Now his voice changed again and it was one of a child, a lonely sad little child. “I can mimic anyone, isn't that something?” he said. “I'm very gifted. I have great talent.”

  For a long moment she was afraid. She couldn't kill a child. She could not pull the trigger on a small helpless baby. Then she knew it was a trick. And she hated him even more for trying to confuse her. “You're a sick, twisted, heartless bastard. I might be sick. I might be twisted. But I'm not like you, nothing like you. I didn't kill anyone who was innocent.”

  She stepped closer and his hands came down to reach out for her as if to take her gently into the circle of his arms.

  She squeezed the trigger of the gun in her fist and the sound of the shot reverberated from the catwalk overhead, it echoed through the hallways and the floors and the dome of green glass that graced the center section of the mansion.

  Son stood in place, the flashlight full in his face. He had a look of utter shock and disbelief in his eyes. She squeezed the trigger again. A second shot rang out loud as a sonic boom and Son slumped now to the floor, falling to his knees, his face still turned up to her.

  She pulled the trigger again and again, but the hammer clicked against empty cylinders. She did not stop pulling the trigger until Son fell forward, grasping her knees before sliding to the marble floor.

  She stepped back, dropped the gun beside him.

  There was nothing left in this world that she had to do. She had committed all the wrongs and suffered all the wrongs she could stand for one lifetime.

  There was still the motor boat, tied to the pier. It would take her away from the dead man at her feet, away from making any excuses for her actions, away from Mitch who had loved her and who ultimately had been betrayed by that love.

  Forty-One

  In the far distance on the shore she saw lights swarming the Shoreville mansion. As she watched, mesmerized by the twinkling, the house windows glowed, one by one, until all the floors blazed like a fiery multi-faceted diamond.

  She felt nothing, but a small regret that she could not have said goodbye to Charlene. She knew Mitch would look after her and keep her safe, but she would have liked to tell her how much she'd meant to her, how much her friendship had been valued. How much she had truly loved her.

  The waves in the bay were gentle swells that came from out of the open sea. The small outboard motor hummed, pushing the boat away from land, from the lights, the dark and jumbled past.

  She looked to the sky for signal of morning. It seemed she had lived for days in the mansion, hiding, searching, alternately afraid and fearsome. It had been but hours. The sky to the east changed from unpolished silver to pearl gray as she watched it. By the time the sun rose, she would be deep into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after, the motor would run out of gas. She'd drift, carried by ocean current, past the shipping lanes, and into the vast open empty sea.

  There, when she had worked up her nerve, she would slip over the side of the boat and let the sea take her down. She knew by then the Coastguard would have been called to either capture or rescue her, but all they'd find was the empty vessel floating aimlessly over the waves.

  She settled back against the ribs of the boat and guided the handle of the motor so that her course would not be altered.

  The wake trailed behind her, picked at by flashing divers, seagulls hunting breakfast. She saw a sleek gray dolphin leaping. It came alongside for a time, pacing the boat, accompanying her to sea.

  When the sun was just over the horizon, she had cleared Galveston Island and was leaving it too behind. She saw a shrimp boat ahead of her, but too far for the men on board to notice, and she trailed it. Far to the right was a freighter that looked as small as a toy boat in a bathtub. Isolated, it steamed toward a foreign destination.

  When the sun had fully moved up the eastern horizon and she could no longer see the Seabrook or Galveston shorelines, when there was no land at all in sight and deep cobalt waters surrounded her. When the shrimp boat and freighter were lost in dawn mist in another part of the Gulf, she waited for the little motor to splutter and die. It obliged her minutes afterward while she spent her last moments immersed in pleasant reverie of her time with Mitch, loving him as she had loved no other man, even Scott.

  When she came to herself and realized the motor was dead and that the bow of the boat was turning, drifting on its own, she looked once at the sun, once at the shadows racing across the water. Shadows fell from fat, blue-bottomed clouds hanging low overhead. She crawled to the side, and lowered herself into the cold, rippling body of blue, hoping, hoping sincerely, that God lived, and that He safely held the souls of all little children in the palm of His hand.

  Even her.

  THE END

  INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO

  BY

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright 2011 Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved

  Published first in PSYCHOS by Robert Bloch, re-published in DARK MATTER by Billie Sue Mosiman (available in hardcover from John Betancourt)

  ***

  The place was Alabama, a hundred miles north of Mobile, the village named after Paul, one of the apostles. It was 1965 and the young people hadn't deserted yet to make their marks on the world. More than three hundred souls inhabited the surrounding small farms and homesteads. In Paul stood two country stores, one with two gas pumps selling overpriced fuel, an ancient one-room unpainted house that served as the U. S. Post Office, and two churches, the Pentecostal Holiness and the more sedate Baptist.

  Hank Borden lived two miles down one of the many dirt roads leading from the main blacktop that wove through Paul. He was going to be eighty-one in a few days. He had never lived anywhere but in the old gray plank house on ten acres of thick second-growth pine. He had never been married and his family was all dead, parents and five siblings.

  He spent most of his days sitting in a rocker on the tin-roofed porch that aproned the front of the house. He had many thoughts, some of them damnably confusing, and nothing but time to think them.

  He knew the girl was coming. She had interviewed nearly all of Paul's elderly over the past six months, and she would not bypass him. They said she was putting together a book of the interviews, an oral record of the area that covered the years between the Depression and present times. She had arrangements, they said, for the publication, and was being paid a handsome sum of money for an advance against royalties. Imagine a writer coming out of this place, this backward evil place, he thought, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the bare yard.

  Well, he had many things to tell her. Things no one else knew. It was time he let the truth out. He once thought he would never tell. Had he before now the local sheriff would have come with his deputy and taken him away in handcuffs. But he was dying. He wanted to tell it now. He felt compelled to share it with someone.

  He had already suffered two strokes, coming back from them without the aid of doctor or hospital. He still couldn't straighten out his right hand--it was deformed into a clawed thing, gnarled fingers pulled in toward the wrist--but he had learned to manage. What couldn't he do with just one capable hand? Nothing that mattered anymore. And his speech was slow and halting now; he had to take his time formulating thoughts into words, but he rarely spoke to people so that did not significantly hamper him. He could speak well enough to communicate with the
girl.

  He watched the road and waited.

  She would be along shortly.

  ***

  On a sultry summer day with the air as dense as a chain mail suit, she drove into his yard and stepped out of a mint green Ford Galaxy with dented and rusted fenders. He sat in the wooden rocker on the porch waiting, not even bothering to offer a greeting or a wave. His heart was fluttering so in his chest, he hoped not to keel over before he could tell his life story. He scowled through the blinding sunshine blinking from the chrome on her car. When she stepped from the vehicle he was not surprised to see she was a pretty thing. She was the granddaughter of a woman he had always thought handsome, even as she aged. This one, this girl, looked a lot like her mama, too, having inherited a petite build and dark brown shiny hair and eyes so dark the irises appeared black. He was glad to see she was small. He had never cared much for heavy women.

  His expression softened as she came toward the steps and the dappled shadows of a mimosa near the porch threw her into shade. He could not smile, not knowing what he was abut to disclose, but he did say in a civil tone, "Hello, there, young lady. They said you were coming."

  "Hi, Mr. Borden. How are you doing today? I guess my mission has preceded me. You know about my book?"

  He gestured with his good hand that she take the second rocker next to him. When she was comfortably seated he said, "Everyone knows. You can't go into Potts' store without someone bringing it up. You're a regular sensation around Paul. Who would have thought we'd produce a talented girl like you?"

  She smiled and brushed back a wisp of bangs from her forehead. "I love this place," she said. "That's why I wanted to tape all the stories about it so it could be preserved in print. Do you mind if I turn on my tape recorder while we talk?"

  "Go ahead, won't bother me any."

  She pressed a button on a recording machine that was about the size of a hardback book.

  "Now," she said. "You know what I'm after, right? I want you to just talk to me as if we were having an afternoon chat about your past. We can talk like friends, you don’t have to worry about how it sounds or anything. I'll be transcribing the tapes and typing them up in your own words. I have a release form here that I'd like you to sign, if you don't mind. It's just a formality the publisher asked me to have contributors put their John Hancock on." She pawed through a fat leather shoulder bag and brought out a sheet written in small print and handed it over with a ballpoint pen.

  He held the paper on his knees with his damaged right hand and painstakingly signed his name with his left. It looked like hen-scratchings on dry ground, but he knew that was of no consequence.

  "You don't want to read it?" she asked.

  He gave her a bemused look. "Nah, that's okay. I cant read much without my glasses anyway."

  "I can read it to you…"

  "Not necessary. Now where should I start?" The fluttering was back in his chest. It was going to be difficult, the most troublesome event in his life to confess to his crimes. Especially to this unsuspecting and innocent young woman. How did you make horror and depravity come out sounding like anything other than it was? He was not going to offer excuse. He had long ago realized there was no excuse under heaven for his sins.

  She folded the paper and put it and the pen in her purse again. "Anywhere you'd like," she said. "When you were a boy? Or when you were grown and living through the Depression, that might even be better."

  "Well, it started when I was just a boy. I had turned just thirteen…"

  "The Depression started then? But…"

  "No," he said. "I'm not going to tell you a story like you've gotten from the other old people around here. My story isn't about surviving the Depression or what it meant to go from horse and buggies to cars or from slaughtering our own animals to buying store-wrapped meat. I have an entirely different tale to tell you."

  She gave him a perplexed stare, but her attention was rapt, open to whatever he wished to tell her. "Well, go on, then. Whatever you want to say is all right with me. What started when you were thirteen?"

  "Murder." He must get that out into the open before he lost his courage. There was no point in wasting this young woman's time.

  The girl was visibly shaken. Her eyes widened perceptively and she swallowed and blinked.

  "I'm afraid this won't be pleasant for you," he said.

  "Murder?" Her voice was small and shocked. A fly landed on her cheek and she shook her head to make it leave.

  "That's when it started. My first kill. I'd like to tell you how it happened…"

  Then the fluttering of unease in his heart settled and he stared out across the yard and across the dirt road to the deep green forest beyond. This was hard, but he could do it. He had done many arduous things n his life.

  He told her how he came to have an abiding hatred for the man who ran the sugarcane mill. The mill took in the cane from farmers in the country and put it through a press to get the succulent juice squeezed into a great vat where it was made into syrup and canned and shipped throughout the state. Hank's father grew a few acres of cane and Hank was the one who took it by the wagon-load to the mill and sold it.

  "His name was Rufus, the mill man," he said. "A more cruel individual you might never want to meet. He not only called me names, but he would reach out and slap me when I didn't unload the cane lengths quickly enough to suit him. My ears would ring half a day afterward. I've always suspected I don't hear so well because of that.

  "The thought of revenge haunted me day and night. It was like a tumor growing down in my gut. I didn't tell my Daddy Rufus treated me so awful. Daddy needed the money from the cane, he'd just have told me I must be slow and quarrelsome and that Rufus had every right to slap me around for it.

  "I'd lie in bed at night and ponder how to do away with Rufus. I planned it all very carefully, every detail, and then when my chance came up, and there were no witnesses present, I rushed Rufus on the cat-walk that ran around the perimeter of the huge syrup vat, and I knocked him into it.

  "Oh, did he scream and curse me! Then he grew frightened because there was no way out of the vat, no ladders along the curving slick inside of it. It was at least six or eight feet to the top from the level of syrup where he slapped around, fierce and furious. He was going to drown in all that sweetness when he tired of dog-paddling and keeping his head up. When the thought got through to him, he began to beg me to throw him a rope.

  "I just stood on the cat-walk and grinned. It took some time, but Rufus started losing strength and began going under. His hair was slicked down on his scalp and syrup had glued his eyelashes into clumps. He kept licking his lips and coughing. He flailed a while. He even cried.

  "But when I left for home, my cane unloaded and paid for, Rufus was drowned, his lungs full of sugarcane syrup. They found him the next day and thought it an accident. All I remember is feeling triumphant. It was a great victory, that first murder. I had rid myself of a burden that made me feel lighter and happier than I had ever been. It is exhilarating to kill, you know? There is absolutely no other adventure like it."

  The girl sucked in her breath and he glanced at her.

  "Do you think I care if you tell people this?" he asked. "You can go straight to the sheriff when you leave here if you want, that won't bother me. But first you might want to hear the rest."

  She nodded, her lips pressed together in a tight line. She disapproved vehemently. So be it. He had not expected otherwise.

  "After that, it was much easier," he said, continuing. "Anyone who crossed me or caused me pain, I found a way to send to the grave. I made them look like accidents and no one questioned the deaths. There's an advantage to living in the country and that is one of them. People don't expect violence and the law doesn't look for an explanation." He paused before he said the rest. It was bad enough he admitted killing for revenge. Now came the part he hardly understood himself. He wondered if he could explain it so that it made any sense at all. He had contemplated these ev
ents for decades now and he was still confounded.

  "There were maybe six or seven murders like that, where someone did me wrong and paid for it. I had a high sense of justice--too refined some might say--and there were just too many folks around here who treated me without respect. Then…"

  He stayed silent so long, remembering, that she cleared her throat and that prompted him.