Shocker

by Randall Boyll

  He heard the sudden hollow thunder of someone battering fists or feet against a door upstairs. A woman began to scream. Wood crunched. The screams got louder.

  Jonathan frowned a dream frown. The lady currently exercising her voice sounded oddly familiar. He decided to go for the bait. “Mom?” he shouted. “Is that you, Mom?”

  She replied in a hurry. “Jonathan! Help us!”

  More wood crunched and snapped. The dream screaming rose to a ferociously unbearable pitch, the screaming, one might say, of someone being murdered.

  Dream, Jonathan. Just a dream.

  No, wait, wait. That screaming is just too real.

  Kick back and relax. Enjoy the show.

  But that’s my MOM up there screaming.

  Up to you, then. Let your own brain fake you out.

  Faked out or not, Jonathan sprinted across the room and onto the stairway. The smashing noises had stopped, but the screams just went on and on. He made it to the landing and hustled down the hallway, interested most of all to see how this particular dream would come out. Predictably, his foster mother Diane’s bedroom door had been smashed through in a shape roughly resembling a large man, and the screaming was entering a range that only dogs might hear. Jonathan stuck his head through the door and got an eyeful of what was happening inside.

  Diane was performing a hideous waltz in the bedroom with a huge man, a dance of death, keeping the overlarge butcher knife he had in his right fist away from her throat with the sheer strength of desperation. The room itself seemed hot and unbearable. The man’s exposed arms were a welterwork of tattoos, snakes, goblins, devil faces, obscenities scrawled in Gothic script. Behind these two macabre dancers, drawn into a fetal position on the floor at the head of the bed, was Sally, the newest addition to the family, eight years old and weeping the tears of a child terrified nearly to death.

  Diane’s wild eyes found Jonathan. Her face was a mask of insane terror. “Help us!” she shrieked. “Jonathan, for God’s sake, help us!”

  The killer twisted around to look at Jonathan. His face was the face of a maniac, a leering white monster shiny with the sweat of his murders and his insanity. His eyes drew down to black slots while his mouth curved up in a ghastly Cupid’s bow. Blood had splashed his face in vertical spurts.

  “What are you doing here, dipshit?” he demanded with a voice that seemed full of dirt and stone, a voice as old as time and as new as hot steel. “Well?”

  Jonathan swallowed. His throat was dry as sawdust. “Let her go,” he said, no longer knowing where dream ended and reality began. Maybe he had wandered onto this street, his head full of clots and a severed medulla oblongata, and maybe, just maybe, this all might be real. It seemed as solid as a fistful of rock. “Let her go now.”

  He was obliged in an instant. Diane was thrown to the floor with a squeal and a thump, and the dream killer

  dream killer? dream killer?

  advanced on Jonathan. For a moment a ghost of familiarity flitted through Jonathan’s mind, the sensation that he had met this man—animal—thing—once before.

  “You want to watch?” the big man said, breathing hard in Jonathan’s face. The smell of forgotten tombs and coffins slick with rot was carried on the cold outrush of his breath. He grinned.

  “Wanna watch? Be my guest!”

  He turned and lumbered back to Diane, Jonathan’s foster mother, Diane, who had by now thrown herself in front of Sally. He raised the knife to stab her in the face. She squealed and shrank back, one arm raised against the knife, her long hair pasted to the back of her neck with sweat, the trembling child behind her clutching her nightgown with both fists. They screamed in unison.

  Jonathan stepped through the crude hole in the door. Very realistic wood splinters crunched under his feet. He realized he still had his helmet in his hand, and just about now it seemed like the best weapon available.

  He launched himself at the man who had killed Bobby and broken his fingers, dream or no dream, hauling back with the helmet, ready to sacrifice it but not the woman who had raised him since age seven. The big man had raised the knife, his face distorted into creases of light and shadow and mindless hate, and then Jonathan was upon him, ready to batter him with his helmet or his life.

  Instead everything evaporated and Jonathan was falling into a cold and lightless hole.

  He shot upright in bed, gasping, pasted with sweat, his eyes bulging in fright. The echoes of Diane’s and Sally’s screams trickled away to nothing in his ears. There was a television at the foot of his bed, on the dresser in front of the corkboard, and his football trophies and ribbons were neatly arranged around the TV. His Barcalounger, a high school graduation gift from his foster father, Don, and his wife, Diane, was resting easily in its normal place, ready to relax him to sleep, if he needed it, with its back full of rollers and vibration. On the TV some sort of airplane was spinning out of control, howling that peculiar howl that airplanes make whenever they are about to crash and burn.

  He looked to the right and saw hard rain coursing down the windowpanes, saw a brief flash of lightning that carried no thunder. The TV airplane howled itself into a tidy belch of flame as it collided with earth. Jonathan looked left.

  Alison was in the high-back wicker chair beside him. She looked up, focused on him, then let her eyes fall shut. Then they burst open again. She leaned out of the chair and went to the television.

  “Sorry if the noise bothered you, Jon.” She looked him over, obviously anxious. “You’re sweating like a hog. Bad dream, or does your head hurt?”

  Jonathan fell back onto the pillow, weak with relief. No blood, no murder, no house full of the swampy smell of spilled blood. That was alright, but he felt disoriented and lost. He turned his eyes to Alison, putting his memory back together chunk by chunk. Football. Coach. Rhino. Goalpost. Stars. Pizza.

  He let out a long, whistling sigh, then said, “Thank God.”

  Alison smiled uncertainly. “For what?”

  “My family. Foster family. I dreamed that—”

  She looked at him hopefully. In her eyes he could see doubts of sanity and worry about further complications. He tried his best to put on a smile, but it was a grimace and nothing more. “Why’d you stay?” he asked.

  She sat on the side of the bed, clearly embarrassed, her reddening face scarcely visible in the dimness of the bedroom. “I, uh, I thought maybe I’d stay until you, uh, well, until you—”

  “Lived or died?”

  Now she sighed. “I guess that’s it, yeah.”

  He took her hand (soft, fragrant—Jesus Christ, why did she go to so much trouble for one lousy football hero?) and squeezed it gently. “I do appreciate it, you know.” He tugged her downward and clutched her tight, the noises and mayhem of the dream nothing more now than a quick peek into hell, a little glimpse of the awful and the insane.

  Her hair was all over his face, fragrant, tickling his nose. He loved it. Beneath his enfolding hands on her back he could feel the outline of her bra straps beneath her sweatshirt, the fabled C-cups waiting to open up and spill their load of …

  . . . no no no, she’s a nice girl …

  fun and frolic. But … not now.

  “Tell you what,” he said, shoving aside thoughts of death and sex and the screwy life only star-crossed twenty-year-olds could experience. “When we graduate, we get married. I’ll teach at Harvard and you teach at Yale. We’ll write esoteric novels about people who have nothing better to do than contemplate their navels, and get rich. Never get old, never die young. What say?”

  She pulled away to stare at him. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were blue and bright. Too bad she had pizza breath.

  “With me all the way?”

  She smiled. “You certainly have changed in the last few hours.”

  He tried to return her smile, but traces of the dream dragged at the edges of his mind and he could almost hear the echoes of a scream. Bad shit, all of that. Mucho bad shit. But thankfully onl
y in the imagination, only in the mind.

  He strained upward to plant a well-deserved kiss on her lips. She bent down to receive it. And, of course, the phone rang, a habit all phones seemed to have picked up since the sexual revolution. Alison reached over and picked up the receiver. She said the mandatory hello.

  “Whoever it is, hang up,” Jonathan whispered. “Don’t spoil the moment.”

  She frowned suddenly. “Yes, he’s here, Lieutenant Parker. Just a moment.”

  She handed the phone over. “Your foster dad. He sounds funny.”

  “Don?”

  “Don’t you call him Dad?”

  He gave her a weak and apologetic grin. “Just seems weird, that’s all. I don’t even remember who my real dad was, so I call him Don. Make sense?”

  “Not really.”

  He put the telephone to his ear, grinning. “Don? Everything okay at home?”

  His grin vanished instantly. Alison watched as the color drained from his face. The receiver fell from his hand.

  She looked at him anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

  But even as the words were leaving her lips, Jonathan was up and running for the door.

  Chapter •

  Three

  It took less than ten minutes to run to the Parker house, the place Jonathan had called home for so many years. Jonathan poured on the speed, barely aware that heavy rain was spatting against his face and soaking his uniform. Lightning slashed across the sky, turning the world into a colorless, harshly brilliant fantasy land. Alison was behind him, crying his name again and again, trying uselessly to catch up.

  He could see the house four blocks away, but it was not a good sight. Four police cars were parked in disarray on the front lawn, strobing the night with their red and blue lights. The television people were already there, the familiar Channel 8 van parked across the street from the house. There were no ambulances. Bad sign, Jonathan thought as he came to the house. A very bad sign.

  His foster father, Don Parker, was waiting for him at the front door, purposely blocking his way. Jonathan tried to pass him, wanting to go in the house, needing to see. Don clutched his arm, holding him back.

  “You don’t want to go in there, Jonathan,” he said, dragging Jonathan away from the lights of the television camera. “Nobody should go in there.”

  Jonathan tried to shake him off, but Don’s grip remained firm. A policeman came out of the house looking green and woozy, and Jonathan caught a glimpse of the interior before the door was shut. He saw a small hand on the floor, a hand whose fingers were bent and broken. Three of them, pointing in weird angles.

  He quit fighting, knowing that he had seen this once before in a nightmare, in a dream. The television camera swung toward him, and under its blinding glare he could see that Don’s face—already deeply carved by sleeplessness and what he had seen before on this case—was now ravaged by grief as well. Jonathan slumped back, stunned.

  “Bobby and the new girl? Both of them?”

  Don nodded mutely.

  “And Mom, too?”

  Another nod. Jonathan felt a strange crumpling sensation, as if his body were made of fine glass that was now breaking and falling to pieces, leaving behind nothing but a husk full of shock and horror. He squinted into the camera, wondering if these people, these cops and reporters, had ever had such a monstrous tragedy come screaming out of nowhere and dump itself on them like burning acid. How could anyone survive this?

  Don waved the camera away. “They’re all dead. I wanted to tell you on the phone that you shouldn’t come, that there’s nothing you can do here. Go on home, and we’ll get together tomorrow to figure out what we do next.” He put an arm around Jonathan’s shoulders just as Alison burst out of the dark, panting while rain coursed down her face and the wet mat of her hair.

  “Was it—was it the same guy? Did he …” She made useless motions in the air. “Did anyone get killed?”

  Don looked over to her like a man awakening from a trance. “They’re all gone,” he said.

  “The kids, too?”

  He nodded. “Take Jon home, will you? There’s nothing here for him.”

  She went to Jonathan and rubbed his arms, as if to put the feeling back in them. Jonathan stared at her glumly.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk with you.”

  “My mom,” he mumbled. “She was the best.”

  A reporter jumped between Jonathan and Don, wagging his microphone in front of Don’s face. “Lieutenant Parker, please tell us—with the killer now murdering your own family, do you think this will intensify your so-far unsuccessful search for the identity of the killer?”

  Jonathan spun around, suddenly full of helpless fury. He grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and turned him around, ready to pretend this fool was a tackle dummy about to be creamed, but Don made a motion and two uniformed cops hauled the reporter back into the dark.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Don said. “You go get some sleep.”

  “Fat chance of that,” Jonathan muttered, and let Alison lead him away.

  The day after the funeral Jonathan decided it was time to find out if he was insane or merely psychotic. He called Don and asked him to meet him at a quiet local hangout around noon. Don had agreed, seeming puzzled. Jonathan got there ahead of time, trying to prepare himself, wondering if this was a good move or not. Would Don think he was crazy? Would he laugh in his face, or haul him off to the funny farm?

  He sat in a booth with his chin on his hand, idly watching the TV bolted to the wall behind the bar. The midday news report was full of the year’s hottest story, as usual. The anchorman with the funny hair was just going on and on about the murders, and the police department’s inability to find a single clue. There was a brief shot of the cemetery, where Jonathan, Alison, Don Parker, and a slew of fellow classmen and well-wishers were somberly watching three coffins lowered into the ground. Jonathan was surprised to suddenly see the camera zoom in on his face, filling the TV with it. He sat straighter, straining to hear.

  “Interestingly,” the anchorman said, “local college football star Jonathan Parker was also a foster child raised by the couple, after being found beaten and wandering alone alongside a country road when he was just seven years old.”

  The bar door swung open; Jonathan glanced over and saw Don come in. The bartender saw him too, and hurried to the television to change channels. A screeching heavy-metal rock video began blasting away.

  Don came to Jonathan’s booth. “Can’t go anywhere without hearing about the bastard,” he said, and jerked a thumb to the television. “I’m getting tired of listening to that airhead reporter guy.” He sat down just as the waitress came over. “Jack Daniel’s on the rocks,” he said without looking at her. “How about you, Jon? Gonna order a beer so I can arrest you?” He laughed, but there wasn’t much conviction in it.

  “Just a Coke,” Jonathan said, and the waitress walked away. He looked out the window to his left, where a hazy sun was making the wet streets dry again. Thin steam wafted up from the asphalt. He wondered what it must be like for his mother and the two kids, Sally and Bobby, so safe underground for the rest of eternity. What were they turning into? Mold and mush? Human soup?

  It was a nauseating thought and he forced it out of his mind. Not enough sleep, barely able to eat, he could feel himself disintegrating under the weight of grief and secret wonderings about his own sanity. Had he really seen it all in a dream? Was running headlong into a goalpost enough to make you a certified psychic? Fortune-telling might be an interesting sideline, twenty-five bucks per session, come one, come all to let the great Jonathini tell you what the future holds. How much did a crystal ball cost nowadays, anyway?

  He noticed that Don was staring at him. Jonathan pulled his eyes away from the window, thinking that anything he had to say now was preposterous nonsense. Why not just order a sandwich and call it lunch? It would be easier. Yeah, Don, just wanted to buy you a burger and rehash old memories. Re
member the time I stepped on that rake and got whacked in the face? Jeez, did you laugh. So anyway, see ya later.

  He leaned closer to Don. “I guess you’re wondering why I called you here.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do wonder. What’s up?”

  Jonathan swallowed, took a breath, knotted his hands on the tabletop, and proceeded to spill the beans. “I dreamed of the murder, Don. Dreamed it just the way it happened.”

  Don produced a cigarette and lit it. After a few puffs he shrugged. “It’s not that unusual, Jonathan. Things like this happen, people get bad dreams. I’ve had a few of my own lately.”

  “No, I mean I dreamed it the night it happened, before you called. Not only that, I saw what happened in the house.”

  Don took another drag of his cigarette. “You don’t know what happened in that house.” He dropped his voice to barely a whisper. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Okay, wait a sec. Bobby was killed in the living room. His flashlight was lying right next to him. The fingers on his right hand were broken.”

  The waitress came back and laid napkins on the table, then the drinks. Jonathan and Don stared at each other. “Look,” Jonathan said, and raised his right hand. “These three fingers.” He wagged his hand in Don’s face. “You can’t say I’m wrong. Mom and Sally got it up in Sally’s bedroom.”

  “Anything else for you two?” the waitress said. “It looks like you both need some joy juice.”

  Don waved her away, then leaned hard on the table. “What is this shit, Jonathan? How could you know that?”

  Jonathan smiled bitterly. “Then that is how it was, isn’t it? Just like I’ve been saying. Right?”

  Don’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He slugged his drink down in two swallows and wiped his lips with the back of one hand. “Is that the reason you got me down here? Pretty bad joke, son. Pretty bad.”

  “No joke at all. This is so weird. I knew it wasn’t just an ordinary dream. It was so real—I could smell the blood, hear the screams. And I know what he looks like. I even know he walks with a limp.”