Just tell the truth, that’s all I had to do. Just tell the truth. If I did it, I did it. I blanked and found a dead girl. No cover-up, no hiding the body or any of that. Just face the consequences.
Sure. Your “dad” will fly up and he’ll tell you not to talk to anybody and he’ll make noise about your record of mental illness and use lots of big words. You’ll get off, because he’s damned good at getting people off, and instead of jail you’ll get a stay in an institution smelling of ammonia and spoiled food, surrounded by people mumbling to themselves and smearing feces on the walls. It will work. It worked for the Hitchcock thing. No, don’t think about that. Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ . . .
From the darkness behind me, a very cold and very bony hand reached up and closed around my mouth.
The hand squeezed, pulling my head back.
I expected a blade on my throat.
Instead, something long and cold and wet and twitching slid across my neck and down my shirt.
I cranked the wheel and clawed at the hand. The truck skidded in the snow, jumped a curb and smacked a newspaper machine with a crash of ruined metal and glass. With a jolt, the front tires blasted through a snowdrift and landed back on the street, wheels spinning, grabbing, then spinning again.
The thing on my neck snaked across my collarbone and slid down my shirt, something with the texture of a slug or a leech but long, its tail snaking up from my chest around my collarbone. A cool, twitching, itching weight on my skin.
I screamed. I admit it. I blew through an intersection blinking yellow lights, I stomped around with my feet until I found the brake and went into a powerslide, the rear of the truck trading places with the front.
“No, no. Keep driving,” said a soft voice in my ear. “She will not bite if you keep driving.”
Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck. I stomped the brake and cranked the wheel. We skidded to a stop and—
I screamed again. A terrible, pinching pain pierced my breastbone. It was unreal, like my bones were sprouting razor blades. I screamed again and grabbed at the monster on my chest. A hand reached around and snatched my wrist with a quick, clean move.
“Be calm,” said the voice. “Drive. Just drive. She will leave you alone. If you drive.”
I didn’t even hear this, not really. I got my other hand into my pocket and clawed free the pistol. A pain ripped through my chest again, unimaginable, like being torn in half. It crippled me. All of my limbs stopped in protest.
The hand reached up from the backseat and very slowly took the Smith. Once more he said, “Drive. Just drive.”
The pain relented. Huge gasps of breath tore in and out of my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them again, and eased my foot onto the accelerator. I tried to look down at the thing that had me, its tail sticking out of the neck of my shirt. It had inch-long stalks all along its back, each ending in what looked like a small black eye. Several of the stalks tickled my chin as it wormed its way around, the end of the creature resting over my shoulder, squirming gently back and forth on the leather of my jacket. I heard the figure behind me shift on the upholstery, as if it was sitting back in the seat. I drove into the night, desperately trying to remember where I was going. I felt a drop of some kind of liquid crawl down my belly.
I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, “WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?” The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.
“Just be calm. You’re doing fine. Now tell me what you were doing before I made myself known.”
“Who—who the fuck are you?”
“My name is Robert North.”
“Congratulations. Now who are you and what’s this fucking thing you—”
“Please answer my question. Where were you going in such a hurry?”
“Home. Why? What’s it to you? What’s happening to night?”
I reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror to see in the backseat. It was just a man, thin, in his thirties. Brown hair, buggy eyes and a beak-like nose. Looked sort of En glish, but no matching accent. He spoke robotically, with difficulty. It’s the way some deaf people talk, not able to hear their own inflection. He was wearing a white, furry woman’s hat, what looked like a blue Wal-Mart vest with a little plastic toy sheriff’s badge tacked to the breast.
He nodded toward the rear of the vehicle, where the stereo speakers were. “That man, in your, whatever you call it, your communicator. Does he need help?”
“What?”
“He sounds wounded. Does he need your assistance?”
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Why do you not respond to my questions directly?”
“That’s just Fred Durst. On the radio. He’s not talking to us.”
“Are you certain? It sounds as if he is crying out while someone is strangling him.”
“I know. That sound is entertainment to many of us. It’s called a ‘song.’ ”
“I know songs. But—I thought they rhymed.”
I looked back again and saw the man was holding my gun by the barrel, studying it with detached curiosity. He had never held a gun before.
I said, “I’m turning off the radio so we can hear each other. Look.” I very gingerly reached out and clicked off the power button. “Okay. I’m driving home. I live there. Can you tell me who you are, and where you’re from? Or even better, who sent you?”
“I’m from right here, so far as you know it. Who sent me means very little right now. Why you are travelling home with such urgency, in these conditions, is of great importance.”
“Did I kill the girl?”
“I do not understand the question. My interest is only in you and in your desperation not to answer my question. I assure you that your own safety depends on your honesty.”
The thing on my chest began pulsing gently, making gulping twitches.
Okay, this bullshit has got to end
. I’m neither brave nor reckless, but this was simply pissing me off too much.
“I’m going to reach out again,” I said, “to make an adjustment to the heat in here. Okay?”
I very slowly and nonthreateningly punched in the cigarette lighter.
“Now,” I said, “I am going home to check something. In my toolshed. The, uh, the little building behind my home where I store things. Okay?”
He stayed silent for several seconds. A quick glance in the rearview showed a very grave expression on a bony face bathed in shadow and flickers of passing streetlights. The look of a man who’s going to have to put his dog to sleep.
“Fascinating.”
“What?”
I glanced down at the lighter. The slug on my chest slowly curled its tail around, coming to rest along my neck and earlobe. It gave a little shiver.
North stared off into the passing night and said, “They harvest insects here, do they not? For their honey? Do the bees know they make the honey for you? Or do they work tirelessly because they think it is their own choice? Have you never noticed that, after hearing a new word for the first time in your life, you’ll hear it again within twenty-four hours? Do you ever wonder why sometimes you’ll see a single shoe lying along the road?”
A single tear rolled down his cheek. It occurred to me that the man was batshit insane.
The lighter clicked. My heart leapt with anticipation and I realized, with disgust, that the slug thing could feel the change. It twitched and fluttered as if it were feeding off the excitement.
Or the increased blood flow
.
I shifted my hands, the left on the wheel, the fingers on my right resting on the knob of the lighter.
North didn’t seem to notice me plotting my escape, but said, “I am at a loss. I have been watching you for some time, but there are great gaps in my knowledge. You know, I observed a man who masturbated until he bled. Did he want to do that? And you, when you were alone you—”
I yanked the lighter free, the coils orange with heat. I slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel with my left hand. With my right I jammed the lighter onto the lump in my shirt where I guessed the creature’s head would be with a sharp
hiiiissssss
.
The slug thing shrieked and thrashed wildly inside my shirt. The truck spun and tilted up on two tires for a sickening moment.
The truck fell back down on four wheels with a thud. The lighter tumbled to the floor, a streak of orange in the darkness. A small yellow flame danced around a hole in my shirt where I had singed it with the lighter.
I grabbed around for the slug thing and for several terrible seconds I felt its teeth brushing against my skin, jaws working, struggling to grab on. I wrestled it free and suddenly I had it tight in my hands, slimy and writhing, slipping under my fingers. It had a little circle of tiny teeth, each curled and needle-sharp, like fishhooks. There was a thin, straw-like appendage emerging from the center, about as long as my finger and whipping around, flecking little droplets of blood.
I took one hand off it and opened the driver’s-side door. I flung the flopping thing out into the snowy middle of the street.
I spun around in my seat and saw Mr. North pawing around the floorboard, the gun nowhere to be seen. I threw a wild punch at his face. North flung himself back in an effort to dodge it and gave me a shot at the gun, laying half under the seat below me.
I threw my torso back there, my feet kicking around at the windshield. In a scramble of elbows and hands I grabbed the pistol and twisted my body around. I jammed the barrel under his chin.
We sat like that for a long moment, both of us breathing puffs of steam as the icy wind poured in the open door. I thought I could hear a soft thumping sound, our slug friend trying to deal with life in a world of ice.
“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay, okay. This thing I’ve got pointed at you, you know what it does?”
He nodded, said, “I believe I have an idea, yes.”
“And have you ever heard the old human saying, ‘I want to shoot you so bad, my dick’s hard’?”
“I have not. But I believe the context makes its meaning clear.”
“Shut up. Don’t move.”
I crawled back into the front seat, keeping the sights on him until I dropped my legs out of the driver’s-side door and stood up into the wind. I looked around the street for the squirming monster. It had crawled all the way to the sidewalk.
I crunched over toward the creature, lifted a boot and stomped on it. I grunted random curses under my breath as I pounded the thing, again and again, hammering with my boot heel. The slug exploded in a spray of brown and red. The red blood, I assumed with disgust, was mine. I kept stomping, little flecks of ice spraying with each impact, until the monster was a wet, twisted stain.
I kicked the shredded remains into a sewer grate nearby, then stomped back toward the truck. Sweat freezing on my face, my nose running freely. My teeth were clenched, my hand squeezed on the gun so tight I could feel the pulse in my palm. From a few feet away I could see that the back door of the truck was open now and when I got there I was not surprised to see that North was gone. I slammed his door. I got in. I drove home.
I SAW JUST
one other vehicle while I was out, a snowplow. I passed a cop in a convenience store parking lot, messing with the chains on his tires. He shot me a look as I passed, like I was insane for even leaving the driveway in this mess. I had to pull over once and go over my windshield with my ice scraper, the wipers unable to keep up with the storm.
I pulled alongside the road by my house and left the engine running. I crossed the yard, the network of footprints now just soft craters under new snow and ice. I clasped the toolshed key in my left hand.
You have an alibi. You were at work, all day. Alllllll day. Right?
Sure. Yeah, that’s right.
But who knows when she actually went missing. It could have taken days for anyone to notice. Even if it was last night . . .
I was in bed last night. Eleven
P.M.
Were you? Can you account for every minute you think you were asleep? There’s one period when you distinctly remember being a pirate, raiding a cruise ship full of naked women. Could you have been up and prowling and imprisoning a girl in your toolshed?
No. No way.
Maybe you had her tied up out there all day and you came home and decided you finally had to get rid of your plaything? Or put it out of its misery? So you came in and got your gun and—
I suddenly pictured the answering machine, on the little table by my front door. John had called, the red light blinking, slowly.
Slowly.
The new-message light blinks fast, like a strobe. The machine to night was signaling a
saved
message. One already played
.
No. I’d remember.
Would I? I thought of last summer, a month after Lopez and I broke up; she showed up at a bar where John’s band was playing. I had drunk, oh, probably seven hundred beers. I wound up back at her place, a rented house she shared with some other girl. The night was a lost blur. I remember sweat in my eyes, my own breath blowing back to me off her neck, damp sheets. And a fly. This fly that kept buzzing and landing on my back and my neck, tickling me, waking me up again and again through the night. The rest is lost. Days later it gets back to me, through one of Jennifer’s friends, that I had gone on a drunken, tear-filled rant about how Hell was waiting for me and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. I said it was bullshit, that Jen had made it up to make me look stupid. But had she? How would I know? Some memories bury themselves so, so deep . . .
And just like that, flashes of memory came pulsing in, like forgotten fragments of a dream.
You do remember. You remember rushing into the house and digging out the big book from the nightstand. You yanked the gun free and plunged out into the cold—
With the key clasped in my hand, I crossed the yard, continued around the house. The trail of prints that led back there were gone now, the space between the houses a wind tunnel that seemed to burn my ears right off my head. The Andersons lived next door; they were in Florida. The next house over was vacant, a Realtor’s
FOR SALE
sign buried under snow in the front yard. A single gunshot, carried by the wind? Who would call the cops? You wake up and you’re not even sure you heard it.