But this time, they’d come on my terms.
CHAPTER 19
A while later I found myself sitting in the den, a Robert Johnson CD playing on the stereo as I worked at finishing off the whiskey. The glass no longer necessary, I had taken to occasional swigs directly from the bottle while rummaging once again through Bernard’s planner. I studied the photograph of the mystery woman for a while then slipped it behind the lip of a pocket on the inside cover. I wondered if she could be another victim, but that seemed unlikely. Still, he’d known her—he didn’t have her photograph for no reason or by coincidence—I was certain of it. There had to be some connection.
I flipped through the remaining pages of the planner, and just like the times before, found nothing unusual. In one of the plastic storage pockets I noticed a few business cards. All were people I didn’t know, and I assumed they were most likely customers he had met while at work. The only other card belonged to one of the salesmen Bernard had worked with. Chris Bentley, Sales Representative, it read. The dealership name was emblazoned above his name, and a telephone number was listed beneath it, followed by the italicized phrase: Nobody Beats Our Deals! I pulled the card free and stared at it. I remembered Bernard mentioning Chris Bentley now and then. He was one of the few people he worked with he ever talked about, and from everything I could recall, if Bernard’s side of it was to be believed, they had a decent working relationship. It was a long shot, but I didn’t have much else to lose, so I figured I’d pay Mr. Bentley a visit in the morning and see if he could shed any light on anything.
I closed the planner and put it aside, pictured Toni sleeping in Martha’s cottage—maybe somewhere else—then thought of the woman in the newspaper. Her face faded, replaced by Tommy’s. “Here’s to you, man.” I raised the bottle, took a long pull.
The room tilted and distorted as Robert Johnson’s mighty Blues riffs echoed and slurred; his haunting voice singing of hellhounds on his trail and the Devil’s relentless pursuit sounding like it was coming to me from the far end of a tunnel.
As my drunken stupor gave way to something resembling sleep the ghosts ended their silence, slipping memories to me piecemeal like a demonic slideshow from the past.
Behind the curtain separating then from now, I saw Tommy sitting on a big boulder out in Potter’s Cove woods. The same boulder we’d all congregated around now and then in years past. Tommy, with that knowing smirk and… I had to think for a moment what color his eyes were. Why couldn’t I remember something so basic about him? Gray. I remembered them as a kind of light gray. He sat atop that old boulder, smiling down at me, sunlight breaking through the trees and shining against his blond hair and fair complexion, casting him with an angelic aura. Like some wise forest prince, he looked down at me from that boulder and smiled. But now, unlike when he was alive, there was nothing to it, nothing behind it. Blood dripped slowly from his hairline, trickled along his cheek. He seemed disinterested.
And while he sat bleeding, Toni and I leaned against the base of the boulder, our arms around each other the way young lovers constantly cling together so desperately, sharing a beer while Donald stood a few feet away with a can of his own, laughing and talking with Bernard. Bernard—much younger than I remembered him—dressed in fatigues as counterfeit as he was, spinning tales about the Marines and his ill-fated early return, drinking his beer and laughing with the rest of us. We’d all gone to that spot in the woods to celebrate Bernard’s homecoming, taking along a couple six-packs as we’d done for years, knowing this could be the last time now that adulthood had caught up to us, now that spending Saturday nights out in the woods drinking like a bunch of high school kids would no longer do.
Rick, still serving his prison sentence, was absent. Bernard raised his beer to toast him, his hand clutching the can, the same hand that just months before had slaughtered two young women in New York City, hands that had stabbed and mutilated, that had held heads steady while cutting, slicing away pieces of flesh, hands that had mingled, played with the dead.
And now he was playing with us, pretending to be the same old harmless and unexceptional Bernard he’d always been, chugging a beer and contemplating his future just like the rest of us. No longer merely a torturer or a rapist, he had by then become a killer—savage, unremorseful, performing rituals and making sacrifices to whatever dark gods he served. Surely there was some sign, some clue we’d missed.
Even in the realm of dreams and whispers, it all seemed so absurd.
Tommy, long dead himself by then, watched us from the top of the boulder, his hair tinted red; the blood from his cracked skull leaking faster, dribbling down the front of him in a steady, sticky stream. His eyes shifted, gazed off toward another section of woods not so far from there, where an even younger Bernard had brutalized Julie Henderson.
Julie, all these years later, existing in that dark apartment, silver crucifixes hanging in the windows, Bibles and used syringes scattered about, the putrid stench of cooked heroin lingering in the air while she struggled so desperately to hang on to whatever slivers of sanity and well-being remained. Working a job slinging diner food, one eye always on the door, hurrying through the neighborhood with head bowed, making drug buys in filthy alleys and on desolate street corners, waiting for the demons to come looking for her again, hoping to make it to the safety of her apartment, her sanctuary, her fortress and tomb, where Adrian waited, scratching at bruised arms.
She emerged from shadow gradually, rocking gently, her nightgown pulled up around her waist as she rode Adrian’s emaciated form. Lying beneath her on the bed, his eyes rolled back in a heroin daze and little eruptions of intoxicated laughter escaped him between slurred words of encouragement.
As she bucked harder, increased speed and ground deeper, tears fell from her eyes like the initial slow and steady raindrops that precede a heavier storm. She wrapped her arms around herself and twisted at the waist as if suddenly forced into an invisible straight jacket. The tears grew worse, flooding eyes crazy and wild and stained with madness wrought by unclean spirits, eyes that had seen Hell, and not from a distance.
Teardrops became the ticks of a clock, and I knew then that the recurring dream had begun again. I had joined Julie in the gulch between that which was real and that which was better left imagined.
The ticking clock began to irritate me right on cue, and from my position on the bed, I heard the floor creak, felt it shift. The headache tingled behind my eyes, same as always, but I ignored it and sat up. I knew Bernard would be standing in the room staring at me, so I wasn’t surprised to see him there, pale and dead, smiling his sad smile. This time, I knew why I was afraid. I looked to the doorway. The others would be coming for him soon. He stepped closer, gleeful in the madness, and reached for me with dirt-caked fingers, his nails cracked and brittle and looking as if he’d been burrowing through earth and stone and scraping at casket lids for hours. He leaned closer, touching me now, leering at me the way a butcher leers at a prize hog, rubbing my legs and squeezing my thighs, running his hands over me as I sat paralyzed.
His hand slid between my legs, stroked me roughly before cupping my scrotum. Vomit burned the back of my throat. He laughed soundlessly, his fingers pulling at me, prodding; his breath rancid and warm against my face.
In his free hand something flashed, reflecting what little light existed in the room. Small razor blades moved quickly, individually between his fingers, from one to the next in rhythmic motion, turning and rolling and flipping the way a gambler manipulates a deck of cards with a single hand.