“You made the dead bodies.”
“No. It wasn’t me. It was never me. I never brought those things to life. It was Jude. From the moment we met she had a chain around my neck like I was a trained animal. It was all to get me to that night.”
“You killed them, Rick. You used the scythe and you killed them.”
“I was only twelve, man. You really think I could have done that? It was her. I swear it was. That’s why I wanted you to come, because I can prove it to you.”
He fumbled to get the top off the shoe box and when it was more of an effort than he had the patience for, he turned the box over and dumped its contents onto the table. It was a pile of newspaper clippings, some old enough that they had begun to yellow around the edges.
“Look at this. It’s right here somewhere.” He rummaged frantically through the pile, his face twisted into an expression of pure mania, his hands shaking, until he came up with what he had been looking for. “Yeah. Here it is. Look at this. You remember this photo?”
He flattened out the newspaper clipping in front of me. It was from the Record Searchlight. The day after the Halloween tragedy. The caption read: Rick Freeman escorted out of the County Courthouse by police. In the photograph, he was at the top of the steps, wearing handcuffs and a bulletproof vest, his eyes staring out in a lifeless, vacant gaze. I remember my mother looking at that photo and remarking how frightened she thought Rick looked. But I never saw any fear in that expression. I never saw anything in it.
“Look. Look right there,” he said, pointing into the crowd of spectators in the background. “See her? That’s her. That’s Jude.”
The police had never been able to verify the existence of a Jude Fairclough. No one was registered under that name at the school. And none of the other kids could recall anyone with that name. In the end, they had concluded that she simply did not exist.
“Now, look at this one.” Rick flattened out another clipping in front of me, using both hands like an iron, and then pointed to a similar crowd of spectators in another photo. “You see her? Right there? Next to the column?”
The caption read: Sheriff’s deputies escort young suspect out of court building. The article was from the Dispatch. It had been written two years after my brother had been arrested. The “young suspect” in the photo was not Rick. It was some kid I had never seen before.
“That’s Jude.”
It might have been.
And it might not have been.
It was an old grainy clipping, and I couldn’t be sure one way or the other.
“And here,” Rick said, ironing out another article. “Look at this one. Right here, in front of the fence. There she is again.”
This was from the Herald. The photo was of a group of students gathered around a chain link fence where they had apparently built a memorial of flowers and cards in honor of the victims after a high school student had opened up fire in the school parking lot. The girl in front, the one Rick had pointed out, looked slightly older here, maybe sixteen. I glanced at the date. The article was from November 2, 1981, six years after what Rick had done.
“It goes on and on,” he said, adding more clippings to the pile. “Every couple of years. Always right around Halloween. Always somewhere new.”
I sifted through them randomly, looking at the photos, studying the faces of the girls. “You can’t tell anything from these.”
“It’s her.”
“If that’s true, then why is she always the same age? You’ve got stories here spanning twenty years.”
“That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? That’s what it’s all about. That’s why she does it. To stay young.”
I stared at him a moment, a little dumbfounded I suppose, though I probably shouldn’t have been. I had expected something like this. Rick had never made an effort to own up to what he had done. He had always been long on excuses and short on responsibility. “This is crazy. I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“She’s here,” Rick said. “In Weed.”
“Oh, Christ. You’re kidding.”
“That’s why I wanted you to come up, man. So I could show you in person.”
I glanced down at the photos again, not even sure what words would work under these circumstances. I guess there was a part of me, some sense of family left over from when we were children, that wanted to believe in him. It was not the only struggle going on in my mind at that moment, however. I also wanted to prove him wrong, to show him once and for all that there wasn’t any Jude Fairclough, that there never had been, and to force him to finally own up to what he had done.
“She’s in every one of them,” Rick said as I sifted through the clippings. He had calmed down some, though I had the sense that he was never really at peace, even when he was sleeping.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
11.
I’ll regret those words the rest of my life.
Rick was convinced that Jude was going to make an appearance at the elementary school dance, less than seven hours away. Just as he was convinced that she had been making similar appearances under similar circumstances over the past twenty-odd years. I wasn’t going to change his mind.
He sat across the table from me, exhausted from his own agitation, and slowly gathered up the clippings. “I want you to see, that’s all. Just come to the school with me. Let me prove it to you. She’ll be there, Bryan. She’ll be there and so will those things she creates.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“You tell me. What do you want?”
“First, you take responsibility for what happened that night.”
“You got it.”
“Then you get yourself some help.”
“I’m not crazy, man.”
“That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”
12.
The next seven hours went like a wait at the dentist’s office. We got a bite to eat at McDonald’s, and returned to the motel room. Rick brought out a deck of cards and we played cribbage for awhile, the same as we had when we were kids. For an hour or so, the gulf between us was put aside. Things seemed to settle into an air of ... routine I guess you might call it.
After the third game Rick came down with a headache. He slept for a few hours. I watched the sun go down and felt the temperature drop. The storm coming over the mountains from this morning finally settled over the valley.
It started to rain.
I stared out the window, watching puddles take form in the parking lot, and thought about Traci and the kids and how nice it was going to be to get back home again.
13.
We arrived at the school a few minutes past eight.
Rick had been quiet and withdrawn since his nap, saying something about his headache not getting any better. He didn’t look well, and I found myself watching him a little closer. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but his sudden sullenness had me worried.
“It’s over this way,” he said as we climbed out of the car.
“Hey, are you okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah, fine. Why?”
“You’ve been awfully quiet.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
The gym was really an all-purpose room that doubled for the cafeteria and served as the gathering area for school assemblies. There was a teacher at the main entrance, a short burly man with a queer little bald spot that made it appear as if he had purposely shaved his head in that area and that area alone. Rick stopped and talked to him long enough to convince him that I was some kid’s uncle and we were making sure the kid had shown up like he had said he would be. The man seemed to take it all in stride. No big deal. People come and go all the time. Go on in and make yourselves comfortable.
It was dark inside, the lights kept dim, except for a string of red, blue and green bulbs outlining the stage at the far end. The music was blaring, so loud it took a moment before I recognized Wonderwall by Oasis. Rick motioned toward the other s
ide of the room and I followed him around the outer edge. He stopped under a basketball hoop, then scanned the crowd.
“See it?”
“What?”
“Right there.” He pointed toward the refreshment table. “In the corner, behind the kids. The thing in the robe. It’s still taking form.”
I don’t know to this day what I was expecting to see. Probably nothing at all. And I can’t say for certain one way or the other that anything was there. But I thought I caught a glimpse of something, one of those out-of-the-side-of-your eye things. It stood head-and-shoulders above a group of nearby kids, clothed in a robe, a gaunt, drawn face staring out through two bright-red orbs. The robe was open in front, and I thought I could see ribs and a breastbone.
It was a glimpse, though. Nothing more.
A second. Maybe less.
And then it was gone.
“And over there,” Rick said, pointing across the dance floor.
There was a folding table against the far wall. On top of the table, on display, were a number of carved pumpkins, each with the light of a candle flickering through the openings. Next to the table, stood two kids, one dressed in a leather-jacket with his hair combed back, the other wearing the fangs and white face of a vampire. There was something else there, too. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, only that it had a vague shimmer about it, like an aura. And a foreboding sense of doom. I remember feeling the weight of that doom settle heavily on my shoulders for a brief moment. Then it was gone.
“We don’t have much time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It won’t be long before they take full form.”
The music wound down. For an eerie moment a hush fell over the room and everything seemed to grind to a standstill. I caught another vague shimmer of something lurking in the shadows near the trash cans. It looked something like a baboon, with an elongated snout and teeth too large for its face. Then it was gone and the music came up again, this time with Alanis Morisette singing Isn’t It Ironic.
I turned to Rick to say something, but he had already worked his way down the room ahead of me. I could see him overlooking the crowd, searching the faces, his eyes as wide and as white as I had ever seen them.
Finally, he stopped, looked back at me, then motioned toward a little girl, sitting in a chair near the stage. “It’s her,” he mouthed. “It’s Jude.”
She was such a tiny thing. Dressed in white, with papier-mâché wings, and a silver-glitter wand in her lap. She reminded me of my daughter Peg, and I found myself wondering what I was doing here instead of being at home, escorting the kids around the neighborhood with their little pillow cases in tow. There are only so many Halloweens before kids no longer want to be seen with their parents, and I had wasted this one.
I looked to Rick, who had started across the room in the direction of the girl. Those white eyes of his flashed again inside my thoughts, and suddenly, for the first time, I realized what he’d had in mind all along. He hadn’t brought me here just to see Jude. He had brought me here to see Jude die.
I can’t you tell you how I knew this. Only that it was one of those things that instantly seemed self-evident. Like when you realize a half-second too late that you aren’t going to make a yellow light.
Rick started his way through the crowd, in no apparent hurry, never taking his eyes off the girl. I moved with him at a different angle, step for step. It was the only angle I had, and it quickly became evident that it wasn’t going to be enough to get me there first. He had the line on me and he had the jump. All I could do was hope to get there before it was too late.
But if that’s what I was thinking, then I was fooling myself.
Maybe half-a-second more ...
Maybe then ...
Just before he arrived at the girl, Rick pulled a knife from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was the same knife Uncle Chet had given him when Rick had been a boy. The Generation IV. He kept it low, at his side, but the colored lights reflected dully off the matte-silver finish, and I saw it clearly. I saw it and I realized my brother was playing out the same fantasy he had played twenty years ago, or something as near to that fantasy as he could construct in his mind.
He pounced on the girl, knocking over the chair and sending her sliding across the floor on her back.
No one around them seemed to notice at first. It was as if the two of them were ghosts, playing out one final death scene for the benefit of no one but themselves.
Rick leaned over her, pausing momentarily to study her face. Later, he would say that he had stopped to look into her soul, to make certain she was really Jude. Then he raised the knife above his head.
Someone screamed.
I fought through the last hurdle of kids.
The girl, whose name I would later learn was Kimberly Hall, looked past my brother and stared directly at me. Her eyes were light blue, the color nearly drowning in its own white terror. Her mouth opened wide, but the scream inside her never made its escape.
Rick plunged the knife into her chest, nearly all the way up the shank.
The girl took in a depth breath that slowly gurgled out again. A trickle of blood ran out of her mouth, down the side of her chin. She stared toward the ceiling, her eyes instantly glassy, her mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for air.
I pulled Rick off and looked down at her, thinking of Peg, thinking of everything that had brought me here, to this moment and place, and the thousand things I might have done to prevent it.
She closed her eyes.
“Just watch,” Rick said.
“Shut up! You hear me? Just shut your goddamn mouth, Rick!”
“Watch.”
There was nothing else I could do but watch. I had never seen a person die before, and in all honesty, I hope I never do again. I watched her eyes close, and I watched a subtle change ripple through her features like a wave. It reminded me of the shimmering I had seen earlier. Only this time I thought I caught a glimpse of something more. I thought I caught a glimpse of a hundred-year-old woman, deep black sockets where her eyes should have been, loose, weathered flesh, a mouth of rotting teeth...
It was there.
And then it was gone.
And she was dead.
Kimberly Hall was dead.
14.
That was twelve years ago.
Rick was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He’s run his course of appeals. Tomorrow he’s scheduled for execution in the electric chair, which, I suppose, is what stirred this all up again.
He never stopped writing, though I admit I stopped opening his letters years ago. I couldn’t endure the pain any longer. They all read alike.
There are nights when I still can’t close my eyes without seeing her face staring up at me. I don’t know if what I saw at the moment of her death was real or not. I guess I’ll never know. Traci tells me it’s something I use to protect myself from my guilt, and I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any. But I pray she’s wrong. I pray it really was Jude Fairclough who died that night. Because, as Rick said in one of his letters: some roads in life don’t allow you to turn back.
About The Author
David B. Silva has written seven novels, his most recent, All The Lonely People. His short fiction has since appeared in The Year's Best Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and The Best American Mystery Stories. In 1991, he won a Bram Stoker Award for his short story, "The Calling." His first collection, Through Shattered Glass, was published by Gauntlet Press in 2001. In 2009, Dark Regions published his second collection, In The Shadows of Kingston Mills.
Other Books by David B. Silva
All The Lonely People
Chase Hanford owns and runs The Last Stop, a little bar with sawdust on the floor and pine paneling on the walls. It, like the jukebox next to the front door, didn't get much play, but it had its regulars. Until one night, when a stranger appears with a peculiar rosewood box. A box that possesses a stran
ge symbol: a circle within a circle inside a crescent. The stranger calls it a spirit box. Something Native Americans once used to trap the souls of their enemies within. As the bar regulars become curious, the stranger opens the box. And unleashes a hell like no other. Chase Hanford awakes from the aftermath, soon realizing bits and pieces of his life are being taken away. Fallen to mental lapses and witnessing strange occurrences, he fights to save his life, his soul and his sanity...
David B. Silva's All The Lonely People is a page-turning exercise in thriller writing." - CNN.com
Through Shattered Glass
Through Shattered Glass, David B. Silva's first short story collection, takes readers on an imaginative journey through the lives of seventeen ordinary people struggling with extraordinary events in their lives.
The Calling: an adult son cares for his mother, who is dying from cancer, over the final few months of her life. As the cancer grows stronger it permeates their relationship, every event inside the house, and eventually leads to a powerful, unexpected ending that seems almost inevitable.
Dry Whiskey: Something horrible happened last night. There's blood on the bumper of the old pickup, and Will's father thinks he might have hit something on the way home from the bar, but he isn't sure. When they hear that Joey Eagan was killed last night in a hit and run off Buzzard Roost Road, Will's old man vows to finally give up his heavy drinking. But drying out takes a toll of its own.
The Hollow: Michael Carpenter is a lonely twelve-year-old who lives in the quiet little town of Appleton where nothing worthwhile ever seems to happen. That is until today. Because today Michael made friends with something alive in the hollow of the old oak not far from home...
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