A title card replaced the gruesome scene. This time it said THE END with the same skull-and-bones decorative border. Another half a minute and the screen went black. The video popped out of the VCR and the eerie green glow of the time display lit up the room.
Calvin pivoted his head toward his stationary desk again. He couldn’t see so well in the dark, but he was sure his scissors were missing from the coffee cup of pens and pencils.
Mind at ease, Calvin lay down and pulled his covers up to his chin. He lay on his right side as not to agitate the scratches on his left arm.
He found falling asleep after such a beautiful movie to be quite easy now that he had let it all go.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As Ronnie drove home she felt as if she could drive her car right off a cliff or maybe pull up the off ramp onto the freeway going the wrong way full speed. Not that she would give Calvin the satisfaction of knowing that she committed suicide in the wake of his betrayal.
Not that she would actually commit suicide. Even during the self-loathing and trying years of teenagedom she had never truly considered something as selfish as suicide.
She rubbed her belly. There was another life to think about.
Ronnie had gone through rough breakups and heartache and never had she felt so crushed as she did when she saw Celia in Calvin’s living room. To add insult to injury, he walked out of the bathroom with his shirt off. Had Ronnie given even the slightest shadow of a doubt it had fled her troubled mind when she saw him like that. It was a clear indication of what they had done or were planning on doing, what Ronnie was now sure Calvin had been doing for some time. Maybe it was Celia who had a fetish with having him suck and lick on her neck. Maybe that’s where he was getting his strange desires, what Ronnie had misinterpreted as a newfound interest in her.
She passed the turn that would have taken her home, electing to drive for a while so she could think. To go back to the room she had grown up in wouldn’t help right now. There was no peace in that room. Just a lot of old memories, tears shed when boys turned out to be dogs and hearts seemed to be meant for breaking over and over again. Now that she was older she couldn’t fathom crying in that room again. Calvin was something special, or at least she’d thought he was. He was going to propose to her and they were going to have a child together and she was going to get out of that house and away from her mother. She was going to live a good life, have some kids, buy a house. Sure, it was the atomic American family dream, but who cares? She could dream just as well as anyone else.
Images of the confrontation with Celia played in her mind like a looped clip of footage on the evening news. Celia had basically said that Calvin had chosen her now. And Calvin, he just stood there like an imbecile, like he couldn’t understand how it was that Ronnie had appeared at his door that time of night after he’d had his goddamned cell phone turned off for hours on end. What did he expect Ronnie to do? That in itself was suspicious enough for a welfare check. And she had to admit that a part of her suspected she would find something—maybe not Celia, but someone.
She told herself to forget it, but how was Ronnie supposed to forget something like this? Not in a matter of hours and not even days. She could drive and think, but really all she was doing was wasting gas, and what for?
She slowed to a stop sign and pulled an illegal U-turn when she didn’t see any police in the vicinity, deciding to head to her mother’s house. Looks like she was going to have another night of crying herself to sleep after all. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as heartache had been when she was a teenager. Maybe she would find that she could accept loss and move on. Focus on her studies. Don’t worry about meeting a man and getting married. Too many of them were dogs. Too many of them were the cause of so much hurt. Her mom was right—they were from Mars.
On the other hand, she was pregnant with his child.
Her child.
There was a lot to think about.
Ronnie pulled her car up to the curb in front of her house and put it in park. The night was cool and quiet. The neighborhood was one of families and sleeping children, by and large, with the occasional elderly couple of whom have been staples of the community for many years.
She walked up a cracked concrete path to the front porch. There was a paper folded and crammed into the handle of the screen door. What Ronnie assumed to be an ad for landscaping or painting turned out to be quite a detailed pencil sketch of her face.
She looked up from the piece of folded paper. Her gut seized and she felt, for a second there, like she was going to puke. Adrenalin surged as she looked up and down the street, but there was nothing to be seen. It was a perfectly average midweek night.
The picture had been placed there by Lance. Maybe he was trying to be nice, but it was coming off as creepy and Ronnie didn’t like it. It also told her that he wasn’t convinced that she was just visiting friends. Either that or he thought she would get the picture when she left. She didn’t remember it being there when she left, and that had only been an hour ago. Either she missed it or Lance had been here recently and placed it in the door handle, which would indicate that he thought she lived there. Why else would he leave the sketch when her car was gone?
It was a good sketch; however, unsettling to find it tucked into the door handle like this.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The blaring of Calvin’s alarm clock was like a nuclear reactor warning, blasting him from a great sleep. He just about smashed it with his fist to turn the damned thing off.
He didn’t remember setting it last night. Must have done it out of habit, because he had absolutely no intention of going to work today or ever again for that matter.
Calvin sat up and wondered how he could be so sure he wouldn’t need to go back to work. How was he going to make enough money to pay the rent?
He stretched and yawned and somehow knew that he wouldn’t have to worry about rent any longer. He wouldn’t have to worry about the petty things normal people stressed about. His life was on a completely new track and he couldn’t be more thrilled, though he felt somewhat in the dark. It was a strange feeling to know that life as he knew it had changed so drastically, yet he couldn’t say why he was so certain of this fresh development.
And then he opened the bedroom door. He saw the body just as his nose registered what had been released from her bowel and bladder that danced a sickening waltz with the lingering aroma of blood. There was a large stain in the carpet around Celia’s mess of a head that was so dark it was black. The scissors protruded from the back of her cranium the way an axe sits in a stump after chopping wood. The mound of flesh, brain and crushed skull where the scissors were embedded looked like a damaged chocolate lava cake.
Calvin was not surprised or shocked at what he saw. He couldn’t remember having committed this atrocity. He remembered the strange film he watched last night, and though what he saw were dodgy black and white images, he held them as dearly as he would a cherished memory.
You did this. You know that, right? You and you alone did this.
Calvin nodded.
Yes, he knew that. Through his stoic and reserved exterior he was exploding with excitement from within. This would surely please Mr. Ghastly.
Hazel too.
Twenty minutes later Calvin hit the street with a backpack slung over his shoulders and a small carry-on bag in hand. He wasn’t concerned about leaving his possessions behind. He was just going with it. All those material possessions were nothing to a Gorehound. Time for hesitation was over. What Calvin needed to do was to prove himself to Mr. Ghastly, and that’s just what he did. He wasn’t even uncertain about it—he knew it as deep as he’d once known he loved a girl named Ronnie.