Dark Screams, Volume 8 Read online

  Then Nine abruptly turned back on the beach and, looking up, realized how far we’d come. “Jesus, where are we? I got to get back.”

  I tried sweet talk and pointed toward the pier. We could hear the waves shushing through it. She refused and even pulled away, my hand on her arm.

  “You let me go,” she said, the angel voice vanishing and a sharp edge coming into it. “I don’t feel good down here in the dark. We came too far.”

  I tried romance, taking her slim body into my arms and burying my face in her ropy neck.

  She pushed me away with force and stumbled back, eyes widening. It’s as if she detected something now, something riding the crest of her rampant fear. Looking in her eyes, I knew this was going to get messy. No easy go, this one.

  I took her arm again and started off for the pier. Protesting, she began to kick sand and curse at me. I pulled her off her feet and onto my shoulder, where she struggled, but she was so slight she couldn’t get any purchase or do any real harm.

  It took more than an hour to subdue her under the pier. When I brought out the goblin’s cane and she saw it in the moonlight, she screamed and wriggled and fought. I could feel her heart like a terrified bird trapped beneath my hand.

  I put a trickle of sand in her mouth, then more and more, and sat on her belly until she stopped moving. When I plunged the driftwood cane into her chest she jerked. I pushed it all the way down through her heart by using the handle on the top of the cane and I felt life leave her, thumping as it fled, from the inside of my thighs, where I sat on her.

  Blood gushed and I almost withdrew the cane to take with me, maybe use again, but it was red slippery all the way up to the crooked handle, and I didn’t want it anymore now.

  I wanted to be done with the Oklahoma girl and her tornadoes and casinos and horses. I wanted to leave her and wash myself in the sea. The water was warm and the blood leached away down into sand and depths where there were eels and sea snakes and other ugly, wiggly things that lived in the deep waters.

  By the time I got back to my parked car, my clothes were dry. I looked like I belonged on that street at that time of night. People still laughed in the cantinas and the bars. I drove home distraught. It was the messiest murder I’d ever committed and I didn’t like it. Did I leave prints on the cane stuck in her chest? I hadn’t had time to put on gloves.

  A mistake. But blood slicked the driftwood cane from top to bottom, so it probably didn’t matter. I’d watch the newspapers and news reports on TV. They’d be sure to make the story a sensation—girl found beneath a pier with a piece of sharp driftwood in her heart.

  It was only later when, sitting in my car, that I got the jitters and thought over leaving the cane in Nine’s chest. I loved that thing. I don’t like many material objects, don’t collect anything, but the gnarled smooth bone of driftwood with the deadly point seemed made just for me. Hadn’t it dispatched her quickly without bending or breaking? Couldn’t I use it again?

  I started the car, hurrying back the way I’d come. I’d get it. I’d get the goblin’s cane and take it with me.

  I didn’t notice I’d stepped in the blood-wet sand near her chest when I pulled the cane free of her flesh. I had what I wanted. I was leaving nothing behind.

  Except later I’d discover I did. My footprint in the sand.

  The Woman

  I felt the swarm come on now and trembled. In the dimness of the bustling bar no one noticed. I said to my daughter, “Why don’t you go home with me?”

  Cara frowned and twisted away to the bar and the sea-green eyes of the man standing next to her. I knew she was attracted and I didn’t blame her, but hooking up with strangers in bars gave me the heebie-jeebies. She knew I didn’t like it.

  The “swarm” is a way of describing…intuition. Native born, been with me all my life. It’s like precognition or a psychic feeling or what old-timers used to call “the shine.” I called it a swarm because when it came I felt as if the world swarmed me. Colors and motion and sound swirled around and around in a cone with me in the center of it. It meant something bad, never anything good. It meant something was coming or about to happen. I really didn’t want Cara out alone when I’d just been swarmed.

  I had never told her about it. She knew I was spooky right when I predicted certain things, but never questioned it since it had happened her whole life. “Don’t get near that tree,” I’d warn, and when she did anyway a fierce rash broke out all up and down her arms. “Don’t step on that porch board.” And sure enough someone else did, and it broke clear through, trapping a man’s leg. I couldn’t even count the swarmings I’d had and how often they’d moved me and Cara away from harm. I thought of it as guardian angels keeping us safe. We’d been on our own since Cara’s father died when she was a girl. Without a swarm I might have been less successful, certainly less safe.

  Now I’d just half-swooned with a second swarm hit and I clutched my daughter’s arm hard. “Cara, come with me.” I spoke low and fierce and urgent.

  “Mom, stop already. I’ll come home in an hour, I promise.”

  “You won’t go anywhere else? Just here, then home?”

  “Cross my heart, hope to…”

  I put two fingers against her lips. “Don’t say that. One hour. I’ll be waiting.”

  One hour later the swarm came a third time and spun me out the apartment door, down the steps, and to the sidewalk. I stood swaying, my heart pounding, a shushing in my ears, and I knew this time it was something really bad. Catastrophic, even.

  I ran down the street toward the bar with my lips flapping, my mouth open wide, and breathing hard. Don’t let it be, I prayed. Don’t, don’t, don’t hurt my baby.

  The Man

  It was three weeks since I’d left Nine under the beach pier. I’d cleaned the goblin cane and it rested on the mantel in my living room, a crooked little thing that drew my gaze from anywhere I went in the room. It had taken on a slightly pinkish stain from Nine’s blood that I couldn’t get out, no matter how I washed or bleached the wood. It looked like a jolly pink cotton-candy circus midget’s evil wand.

  I took it with me tonight because it was time for Ten. I’d watched the girl for three weeks. On Wednesday and Friday nights she went to a local bar accompanied by her mother. I knew it was her mother because they could be sisters—same square jaw, petite build, and dark hair. And anyway, the girl called her “Mom.”

  This mother was evidently overprotective. Therapeutically I’d call it an insecurity issue that bordered on mental illness. She hovered over the girl like a mother hen and seldom left without her. Tonight she did leave. I knew she did that now and then. Their apartment was just six blocks down and one over, so it wasn’t as if this grown young lady needed the security of her mother. The girl was at least twenty, the mother twice that.

  I slipped the goblin cane down into the specially elongated pocket of my overcoat. It was brisk out, mid-November. The air along this part of the coastal highway north of Long Beach tasted of brine. My hair flew over my forehead and into my eyes like black bats. I swiped it away just as the girl emerged from Willigan’s Bar and Grill. She was alone. She’d dumped the guy chatting her up at the bar.

  I caught her two blocks away. I could hear her humming a pop tune. Her hand was in her jacket. Maybe she clutched a cellphone. I’d bank on it. She was oblivious that she was being stalked. Between the bar and her apartment complex it wasn’t deeply dark but shadowed by lacy acacia trees and lined with velvety green hedges.

  She jerked, trying to get away, but I had my hand over her mouth, her petite upper body in my arms, and my car waiting just across the street.

  I had to knock her out once I had the passenger-seat door open. She slumped onto the seat just as I heard a grunting sound and saw the mother across the street, running for all she was worth up the sidewalk toward the bar.

  Time to disappear.

  Like a goblin under a bridge.

  The Woman

  They found Cara
not far from the bar, in an alleyway with a piece of cardboard from a packing box draped over her body.

  I knew she was gone the second I rushed inside the bar and saw she’d left. I also knew she hadn’t gone in a car with the man she’d been admiring at the bar.

  Yes, I knew things. I winced and turned away to weep, I knew so many things. They didn’t have to tell me what had been done to her. I knew already and felt my heart fold over like an accordion while scream-crying and wringing my hands and looking to heaven for some kind of reason in a universe where a lovely, kind girl like Cara could be butchered for nothing. Patrons of the bar surrounded me in wonder at my grief when it appeared nothing had happened.

  It wasn’t her fault for staying behind and not my fault I couldn’t force her to come home with me. It was his fault, the crazed killer who waited in the dark to pounce.

  A swarm hit me and I stood frozen, waiting for it to pass. It showed me a shadowy figure and it was the man of the night. Tears sprang to my eyes and I tried to wipe them clear so I could see the figure better. I brushed off the consoling hands of the people around me. Leave me alone, I thought. I have to see. The figure was medium height and weight. He was a brown man with slightly hunched shoulders. Brown hair and eyes, white skin, freckled. He had a studious air about him, a man who spent his days self-absorbed. If I saw him again I’d recognize him. He didn’t look like a monster. He looked like a nicely dressed insurance salesman. Maybe all the monsters looked like that; it was their favorite costume. I’m just a common man, their appearance shouted. I’m no one in particular, no one to be afraid of.

  A jolt of blue-purple-pink flattened me in the face and inside that swirling color was a…stick. Some small, smooth stick or branch with a handle and a sharp point. Two, two and a half feet in length. Pinkish. A little sword? A child’s toy? What did it mean?

  I asked the swarm to tell me, but the feeling sped away and vanished. I’d know no more for now.

  I pulled away from the crowd and, weeping, walked slowly home to call the police. She’d been missing only a couple hours, but I had to tell someone. I sank onto the side of Cara’s bed in her empty bedroom and, putting my face in my hands, I cried enough tears to wet my knees.

  The Man

  Ten was a hasty kill. I knew it would be, that close to Willigan’s Bar. I did it in my car with flickering shadows from the acacias punctuating the kill. People coming and going, someone might see. I only got to plunge the gnarly wood into her heart and pull it free, that’s it. No posing of her body when I got her to the alley. No excitement of making her look all Hollywood, with her shirt pulled down and her hair brushed off her face. I killed and hurried away, sliding through darkness like the wraith I hoped to be.

  If I’d chosen another subject, it wouldn’t have been that way. I could have taken my time, done my creative best to twist the limbs into ungodly formations. I don’t know why it had to be this particular girl. It just did. There’s no way to answer the question. The overweening mother, maybe. The close relationship they enjoyed. I admit I hated it.

  A month later I was ready to shadow number Eleven, when the night before I planned the kill I saw a news report on television tell me there was evidence found at the pier. A shoe print in the sand where I’d dropped Nine.

  I began to hyperventilate and rushed to the hall closet for the shoes. They were Archer brand, some knock-off Chinese shit, and as ragged as garbage. I turned them upside down and peered close at the soles. Just like the print blown up large on the television. Sand still snuggled in the rugged warp and weave of the cheap rubber. Was that blood? I looked closer, so close my eyes started to cross. There were tiny dots and clots of black…it was…something. They smelled bad. I threw the shoes on the floor and stomped them like live snakes. I cried out in frustration.

  Nasty goddamn things! Cheap fucking Walmart crap sneakers that hadn’t lasted a year. And I’d stepped in the sand, leaving the print in the bloody mud for everyone to see. Was I losing my brain, the only element I thought I could count on? Was I really so sloppy I left this evidence and didn’t even know it? How stupid am I?

  “You’re gifted,” they said. “You’re Mensa, high Mensa,” they said. “You’ll be brilliant no matter what you decide to do.” They said. Would a smart killer step in bloody sand and just walk away?

  The authorities didn’t know I’d become a serial killer who was successful until I found a goblin cane and took a young woman with it beneath the pilings of a noisy pier on the oceanfront. A detective began putting cases together and realized what they were dealing with. The artful poses, the stabbings, the dead women littering the West Coast rim of California like dots of icing on the edge of a cake. It was serial, all right. A task force was set up immediately. As far as I knew they hadn’t named me with a serial killer moniker yet. The media hadn’t got hold of it.

  Now they had a piece of me. I was a known thing who wore certain easily identifiable sneakers.

  I ran into the living room, grabbed the cane from the mantel, and in a fit of rage threw it all the way across the room into the living room, where it bounced off the glass dining table and landed in a corner. It had to have Nine’s DNA all over it. I should get rid of it for good, but…I did love it.

  Breathless, I stood seething at the incredible ignorance of my mistake. My stupidity. Grabbing up the mauled sneakers, I took them into the kitchen and with the kitchen scissors cut both of them into ribbons. When finished it wasn’t evident the mess had been shoes or a canvas purse, or horse shit, for that matter. Blisters rose on my fingers from the pressure of the scissors. I bared my teeth at the red swelling skin. Outside in the yard I hauled the metal fire pit into a dark corner and set fire to the round pile of dead shoes. I squirted it all with charcoal starter and kept at it until there was nothing left but stinking, melted rubber and ash. After it cooled, I bagged it and carried it to the garbage can on the curb. Let them have the print. They’d never have the shoe that made it, by God.

  The Woman

  There was no question I would track the monster who stole Cara from my life, my heart. I hadn’t used the swarm that way before, but there was always a first time. I made false starts and stops and almost gave up, but hatred and sorrow wouldn’t let me. I called the swarm. I didn’t control it, as the paranormal can’t be controlled. After all, it exists outside people. I might be given insights, but that didn’t mean I could call it on the phone and tell it to boogie like a meth head promised a fix.

  One day during a swarm of light and ethereal sound, I saw his house. I didn’t know where it was yet, exactly. I saw that it was a modest bungalow and it was north, near Stanford, California, between San Francisco and San Jose. That was as close as I could come, no matter how hard I concentrated, meditated, begged, and prayed. I’d find it. If it took a year, two years, I’d find it.

  I’d find him, and when he wasn’t suspecting, I’d come up behind him and I’d stab him in the back so the knifepoint pierced his black heart. I’d ride him down like a mad dog and stab him until he stopped moving. This was murder I contemplated, but if I didn’t do it, who would? I couldn’t tell the police.

  Here’s how that would surely play out. “Sir, it’s a bungalow, nice place, good neighborhood. He lives alone. How do I know he’s the killer? Well, there’s this ‘swarm’ that happens, and…”

  Like that was going to work out well. If I didn’t know it was the truth, I wouldn’t even believe it myself.

  I asked for time off from work. They knew I was still mourning and let me have whatever time I wanted.

  I equipped the trusty Camry with a cooler for water bottles and ice. I selected three different kitchen knives and then went to JCPenney, searched the kitchen utensils, and bought two more. I brought along a baseball cap, sunglasses, and surgical gloves. I wasn’t going to prison for avenging Cara and ridding the world of this murderous bastard. I had my cell charged and a charger in the car’s lighter socket. I had a flashlight with new batteries. Maybe I could have
used a gun, but I didn’t own one, and buying one new wasn’t going to happen. Buying one illegally wasn’t going to happen, either. I didn’t even know those kinds of people, the ones who sell guns.

  This killer stabbed my girl with some sharp instrument—the medical examiner wasn’t quite sure what—and I would stab him in return. It seemed to me he should reap what he’d sown, feel the pain he’d dispensed, and die the sort of death he most heartily deserved. Had I ever killed before? No. But this wouldn’t be like that. It would be taking back what was stolen from me and paying the piper for the strange tune he sang to lure away my girl. It would set the scales aright. I didn’t think I could live unless I did it. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and could hardly breathe from the time I woke in the morning until I passed out at night.

  I had to do it.

  —

  I watched him watching her. The monster sat in his indistinguishable concrete gray Ford Taurus for hours, his head turned toward her house.

  First I found his bungalow. The swarm helped a little once I got close. I’d driven the streets of a dozen neighborhoods before it happened. I had to rent a motel room for days, it took so long. When I neared his place I ran off the street and onto the curb and sidewalk. Had to jerk the wheel. I passed the house and slowed. I parked, sweating or crying, the dampness coming down my cheeks from somewhere. I hung over the steering wheel, trying to breathe. I was too close to him. I could feel his darkness like a cloud at my back. His sickness poisoned the air and left it short of oxygen. I had to leave here, run, hide. I had to get away, fast, fast.

  Back at the motel I sat on the bed with the draperies drawn, and in the dim lamplight I arranged the shining knives on the white sheets. I had to choose one, the right one. If I wanted to be sure to kill him and not get myself killed, I better choose well.

  I finally picked it up. The big, shiny new knife with the stainless-steel shaft, the razor edge, and the fine wood grip. It would do. If I came with enough speed and aggression behind it, the blade would sink right through muscle, slide off rib bone, and puncture the heart like a bag of salt.