Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

  It crossed her mind then that there must be a hole in the fence somewhere. After four years, maybe several good-sized crawl holes. And she’d gone to all that trouble, breaking in through the gates ...

  Her heart was calming down and she wasn’t breathing so hard. Taryn looked up at the screen and imagined Stallone bare to his waist, gazing down on her, the eyes of a man who knows he has what it takes, choice pectorals gleaming with sweat, God: where was Sly now that she needed him? Funny how after a big enough scare you could start feeling horny, just like that, and she mildly regretted that she and Nealy hadn’t had the chance to get it on before Gaynell showed up. Never had any use for Gaynell, Taryn reflected. Nobody else in the family did either, really: “the bitch from Grinder’s Switch,” they called her, poking fun at her backcountry origins.

  Taryn was still gazing at the movie screen when a sudden sharp yelp caused her to jump a foot. She looked around but couldn’t locate the cur dog in the darkness beyond the projection booth. The door was still partly open; had he gone back inside? Then what was it made him yelp that way?

  Silence, now; a silence she didn’t particularly care for.

  Taryn shuddered, crossing her arms, fingers digging into her forearms. From a long way off she heard the diesel horn of a train near the Carverstown yard of the Chessie Railroad. She needed to pee. But she felt embarrassed, for no good reason. It was just an unnerving thing to do, as if she could picture herself squatting and then suddenly the whole drive-in would be filled with cars, like the old days, headlights focused on her and everybody laughing, There’s Taryn with her pants down! She could even hear Stallone chuckling, huh-huh, up there on the—

  Blank, empty theatre screen.

  What an imagination! No bout a’ doubt it, she was purely wasting her time with counter jobs. Ought to be out there in Hollywood right now, giving them the benefit of her good looks and talent.

  Make up a movie, just to pass the time. Go ahead. What kind of movie would you like to be in, Miss Melwood honey?

  Well, let me see. There’s this champion stock car driver, only he’s no good anymore after a bad wreck, lost his confidence or whatever. And, uh, then there’s this rich girl, that’s me, she’s got so much money, but her life doesn’t have any meaning. Uh, the stock car driver, who looks a lot like Bill Elliott, is down on his luck, and she needs a chauffeur, or maybe a bodyguard, because there’s this real crazy guy who’s been calling her up on the phone—

  “Don’t move. If you turn around I’ll kill you.”

  The jolt of fear at the nape of Taryn’s neck was powerful enough to pop her mouth open. She hadn’t heard a sound. But he’d sneaked up so close behind her she could smell him—and his odor was instantly, powerfully familiar.

  “Oh, come on!” she said, exasperated. “It’s me! Don’t give me a hard time, because I’ve already had—”

  As she started to look around, a blow to the back of her head staggered her.

  “Shit!”

  “I said not to do that! Now, sit down. First we will have the Light. Then we will have the Truth.”

  “You really hurt—”

  “Sit cross-legged, with your hands on top of your head. Do it now!”

  He seized her by the back of the neck; a strong thumb pressed against her carotid artery. Taryn couldn’t speak. Her knees locked and there was a surge of blackness to her brain.

  Sensing she was going to faint, he eased the pressure on her throat.

  Taryn took a shuddering breath which broke as a sob. She sank slowly to her knees on the hard Georgia clay, then sat down as he had dictated. Because his tone of voice allowed no alternatives.

  “Hands on top of your head!”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” He was acting big-time bad drunk; but, no, be hated liquor, he had never taken a drink that she knew of.

  “First the Light.”

  Taryn moaned.

  “I haven’t done anything! I ran out of gas. You saw my car—I know it’s not my car, but I didn’t actually steal it, I can explain—”

  The beam of a powerful flashlight illuminated her. She gasped and bit down on her lip. She began to tremble so violently her teeth cut the underlip and blood trickled down her chin.

  “Don’t hurt me—love of God, please—”

  “Are you a whore?”

  “No. Yes! I don’t know, just don’t hurt meeee!”

  He walked around her; then the beam of the flashlight was full in her face. Taryn shut her eyes tightly. Her bitten lip smarted.

  “You’re bleeding. But it was Jesus who bled for you.” Why, why, was he carrying on like this? “Oh ... yes. Sure, I know that.”

  She heard something. A zipper. The sound chilled her. “You need a lesson. You’ve needed one all your life. Isn’t that true?”

  “I don’t know! Listen, don’t make me do it! I won’t tell nobody about this, I never told before. I never did! I just want to go home!”

  “Open your eyes.”

  “It’s too bright!”

  He lowered the beam of the flashlight. Taryn blinked her tearing eyes. He was standing three feet away. His pants were open.

  “Is it beautiful?” he asked softly.

  “Uh-huh,” she gulped.

  “Isn’t it the most beautiful one you’ve ever seen?”

  “Is that—all you want?” Her eyes took in the flashy hunting knife in his right hand and saw that it was slicked with blood already. Dog blood? If he’d kill a poor homeless dog—she flinched, gagging on fear, the taste of her own blood. Her lower lip was swollen, it felt as sore and vulnerable as the naked breasts beneath her blouse. “If we—if I—do it—then you won’t hurt me?”

  “How do you know what I want you to do?” he said harshly.

  Taryn guiltily lowered her head. The clay between her legs was soaked. She smelled the pee. But at least the odor was so strong she didn’t have to smell him. Her trembling lessened. The shock of what was happening to her began to have a numbing effect.

  “You can stand up now,” he said in a disinterested tone of voice.

  So that was all there was to it—he’d come already, from he pleasure and excitement of seeing her wet herself, from he aphrodisiac of animal terror that still racked her. She dared to raise her eyes, and was disappointed. No, he hadn’t come, he couldn’t even sustain a weak erection. So of course he wasn’t going to let her go, not yet.

  “Taryn, I want you to stand up.”

  “Okay.” Anything to appease him. No telling why he’d ;one crazy like this, but it didn’t matter, living mattered; somehow—she couldn’t think straight, but the impulse was sound—she had to get away. Yet she could barely stay on her feet. She had a cramp, couldn’t stand up straight. Worst if all, she was soaking wet.

  “Take everything off,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” Taryn groaned.

  “You have seen the Light, and you know the Truth. Now it’s time for the Punishment.”

  “Why do you keep talking like that!!”

  “TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES!” he shouted, and made a quick, darting move with the knife that ended only two inches from her breasts.

  “I’m going to! But you won’t—you couldn’t—please don’t cut me! I’ll do anything you want me to do so long as you don’t cuh-cuh—”

  She tried to unbutton her blouse. It was no use, her fingers functioned only as blunt hooks to rip and tear the material. His light drifted up from the ground to center on her navel and breasts. He looked at her for a long time while she hung her head, breathing through her mouth, trying not to be sick and add to his obsessive enjoyment of her humiliation.

  “The rest,” he said finally.

  “I never thought you c-c-could do a thing like this t-to me.”

  “God speaks to me, and I obey him.”

  “You don’t even go regular to—”

  “Filthy, lying harlot! Strip yourself naked and bow to the will of the Lord God Almighty!”

  She looked up tearfully but
could not see his face. No matter; she knew it too well already. He who now named himself God. Past him the oblong theatre screen was bisected by the flight of an owl. Taryn took off her skirt and her lime-green panties and stood with her hands clenched over her breasts, hiccuping. The heat in her breast was turning to anger. With his free hand he was playing with himself. And that roused hatred—she hated him, and all the men like him in this world: liars, drunks, perverts, betrayers. The pitiful weak men who swaggered as they pretended to be strong, and just, and true.

  “Why don’t you suck that thing yourself?” Taryn said wrathfully. “Because I’m sure as shit not about to.”

  He dropped his penis and made a fist. Taryn fell back a step, staring at the upright blade of the knife in his other hand.

  “Run,” he commanded, and she took to her heels, with no direction in mind.

  The sudden freedom, the invitation to flight, was exhilarating. Weaving in and out among the iron posts, she ran faster than she had ever dreamed she could go. The night air seared her lungs. But he would follow; she knew that. It was part of the torment he’d made up his mind to visit upon her, a little part of the revenge on all the young girls he lusted after and was no good for.

  As she ran Taryn had a glimpse of something that gave her hope and a desperate sense of renewal, the will to defeat him. He was going to spend the rest of his life in jail for this night!

  The fence at the front of the drive-in on either side of the big screen was seven feet high. Taryn stood five-four; she knew she couldn’t reach the top of the fence without climbing on something. But there it was, in the darkness, parked against the wall. A two-wheel trailer with a sign mounted on it, a portable marquee the *Star-Light’s* owner had driven around town behind his station wagon to advertise the weekend double features: his last futile attempt to stay in business after the eight-screen theatre complex opened at the new mall.

  Now Taryn chanced a look back and saw the beam of the flashlight slashing up and down through the dark as he jogged after her, confident she would succeed only in running herself into the ground. Taryn cut sharply to her left and raced toward the trailer. She mounted a soft rotting tire and pulled herself to the narrow tilted top of the marquee. As she stood on her toes reaching for a handhold on the fence the blinding beam of his flashlight isolated her.

  She had one leg up and was pulling herself over when something like a piece of pipe or a club struck her hard in the ribs. She didn’t fall, but the pain was so bad she couldn’t summon the strength to push herself the rest of the way over. Then he was there: a hand clamped on her dangling foot and he jerked her down from the wall. Taryn screamed in pain when she hit the ground; a boot with a thick tread stepped on her throat. The light was full in her eyes again.

  “You’ve had your chance to run,” he said. “Now crawl for me.”

  When she didn’t move immediately, he kicked her.

  Taryn bucked and groveled, sobbing for breath.

  He kicked her again, in the buttocks this time, once, twice—she began to crawl, pulling herself away from the marquee trailer, from his heavy boots. He followed slowly, kicking her from time to time, muttering under his breath. Then he went down on one knee in front of her and seized her by the hair, yanked her head up until her throat was taut.

  She could see nothing but the bright light in her eyes.

  “You’re all dirty,” he complained. “Time for you to wash in the blood.”

  Then Taryn saw the flash of the knife in his right hand, felt the sharp blade slicing through the skin of her hairline. Blood gushed down her face, blinding her.

  She got up so slowly that at times she appeared static, posing grievously. Both hands were cupped to her forehead, filling up with blood as she tried to stanch the heavy flow from the cut that had half-scalped her. He had rocked back on his knees and was praying. Taryn stumbled away from him, crying, barely able to see where she was going. She fell twice, muddying herself in the red dirt, her own blood. After a few minutes she no longer heard him praying. It was her own voice she heard now.

  “I don’t want to die want to die want—”

  On her knees again, the pitted theatre screen looming over her, wide as the sky, empty as a desert.

  What kind of movie would you like to be in?

  She was oblivious to him shuffling up behind her; she ignored the clutch of one hand on her shoulder because she was engrossed, now, in what she saw on the screen, the images of her life flashing by until the downward chop of his knife to the nape of her neck stopped the show with one last brilliant pulse of light that became a luminous river stretching on and on before her, forever.

  • 3 •

  Point of Fatality

  He awoke at dawn with a headache, muscles cramping in his calves and wrists. He had the familiar sense of undefined anxiety that told him there had been an Occurrence.

  Hieronymus “Hero” Flynn attended to his discomfort by concentrating on the rays of the unseen sun, the God Belus whom he worshiped, keystar of the Sabian religion. He had far to journey before he became a master; but his will was strong. He had made good progress in the treatment of his affliction during his three weeks’ sojourn in this cosmically significant point of the Western Hemisphere, not far from a place called Carverstown, in Georgia.

  By the time his body was more in concert with the human soul and his breathing had slowed to a just-perceptible six breaths a minute, the sky had lightened. He rose from his sleeping bag and hung it over a low branch to air it out while he walked down the path to the public area of Shoulderblade State Park. He had been living in the park since shortly after his arrival in the U.S., following long stays in Bolivia and the Yucatan.

  The man-made lake was down several feet after a prolonged summer drought. This time of morning there were only a few solitary fishermen in the coves. A pale gold streak of daylight shone across the main body of water, and the concrete face of the dam three-quarters of a mile away was a soft rose shade.

  Hero used the public toilet and rinsed his mouth, wincing at the sting from a bitten tongue, a typical consequence, along with a brutal headache, of the Occurrences. When he came out of the building the early, airy virginal odor of pines and other growing things had been diluted by the smoke from a breakfast cook fire, bacon frying. All was serene beside the lake except for the discordant yammer of a television turned too loud in one of the caravans parked in the area reserved for them.

  As he did every morning, Hero took the path uphill through the pines to the Indian burial mounds, grass-covered hillocks approximately twenty-five feet high and scattered irregularly over a few acres. The site was several thousand years old but had never been more alive, cosmically speaking, due to certain conjunctions of benefic lights and planets and the energy these conjunctions discharged upon this particular plot of ground. It had been foretold by a Mayan priest he had discovered on the Belize-Honduran border that this site would be of vital concern to Hero if he desired to correct himself in this lifetime, to once and for all be free of the physical encumbrance that had persisted from a past life misspent in Babylon, some 3,500 years ago.

  But today he found it difficult, perhaps because of the most recent Occurrence, to align himself properly with emanations from the unexcavated burial site, so rich in harmonics which enhanced his own earthly vibrations. He was saturated with the knowledge of another’s death.

  After twenty futile minutes of effort at concordance, uneasy from the sensation that he was urgently required elsewhere, Hero rose and returned to his modest camp. There he was instantly sensitive to the fact that something or someone had been prowling about—no, not an animal. He discovered no footprints to conclude that it had been a man, and as far as he could tell, his belongings had not been disturbed; yet a spoor remained in the air ... he sniffed gently, downwind, nostrils vaguely offended by the lingering odor of smoke.

  Tobacco, not wood smoke. It might have been one of the caravaners, passing through on a morning stroll, enjoying h
is pipe. Hero’s fellow campers were, for the most part, a congenial lot. He did not, however, like the vibrations he was receiving here, where serenity had been the rule. Perhaps they were some of his own unquiet vibrations, left over from the nocturnal Occurrence.

  But as he stood there motionlessly, absorbing all that the clear, ethereal morning had to describe, he began subtly to tremble, a quaking of anguish, reaction to an intuition of threat. In the jungles he had developed an ability to sense, even at a distance, where a jaguar had dragged its leftover kill through the undergrowth to lodge it in a tree for safekeeping until mealtime came around again. He was preternaturally attuned to violent disturbances of nature, down to the most insignificant clash of warrior ants from different nests. Crossing Chickamauga in the northern part of Georgia, he had suffered excruciating mental pain on that Civil War battlefield, smelled the powder and the blood as if it had happened yesterday and not more than a century ago.

  He was suffering now, but still he had no idea why. It was some beastly imprint left in the delicate harmonic fabric he had woven in his temporary sanctuary, unwelcome knowledge of a feast or ritual of blood.

  Hero shuddered. What did it have to do with him? Now he must move, find an undisturbed place where he might continue his meditations until, four days from now, heavenly configurations involving the burial mounds reached a climax.

  When he opened his backpack to replace toothbrush, soap, and hand towel, there was a sudden flare just outside the angle of his vision. Startled, Hero looked up and froze, his hands clenching involuntarily. Fifteen feet away, stretched between the slender trunks of two young pines, he saw a giant, radiant web that he was sure had not been there earlier. The web was roughly in the shape of a wheel and divided into twelve sections, like the twelve houses of the zodiac. And on the wheel, positioned in the Eighth House, the astrological house of death, was a stellium of spiders that glittered like jewels in the sun’s rays. He recognized the astral symbols by their colors: the great red god Mars, ruler of the Eighth House, was square to Saturn on the Ascendant. The white binary Algol, most malefic of stars, was aligned with the Dragon’s Tail and combust the sun. There were afflictions everywhere he looked: but nothing disturbed him more than the Arabic Point of Fatality, which by his calculations was exactly in opposition to the Lord of the Fourth House—the end of things.