Slowly, very gradually, the breathing grew louder. She lifted her head, trying to locate its source. A flash of light came and she caught a glimpse of something monstrous, like a man but much larger, and bent over and deformed, and lumbering toward her.
The light flashed on again, and it was there, closer now. She could make out its deformed head, one large eye and one smaller one, two horns winding up from its skull, one of them to twist back down and burrow into the bone. And then it was close to her. She could hear the breathing as loud as the wind now, and could feel its hot breath and smell its fierce musky odor. When the
Jesus Saves
light flickered on again, the creature was standing between the sign and her, blocking it, so that all she could see was its silhouette, huge and monstrous and looming over her, and the strange reddish glow of its large and small eye.
It stood there watching her. She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could but the sound seemed just to drift off into the darkness and vanish. And once she had finished screaming, the figure opened its own mouth wide and offered a resounding, demonic laugh.
When she regained consciousness, it was with the impression that she was hanging upside down in the air, clinging to the ceiling. If she moved at all, she worried that she would lose her grip and fall down, and perhaps would never stop falling.
But slowly she began to realize she was wrong, that she was disoriented, that something had gone wrong with her perception. Her face was pressed not against the ceiling but against a dusty wooden surface that, she started to realize, was a floor. She moved her hand and didn’t fall. No, she was not hanging in the air but lying on the floor.
What had happened to her? She had been suspended in darkness, her arms and legs pinned. She had seen the creature and it had approached her and it had laughed at her and then she had felt herself exiting her own body, falling off into the darkness. But what had happened after that, and how she had made her way back to her body afterward, and why she now found herself here, unbound and lying on a floor, she couldn’t say.
What happened?
she asked herself again. But a part of her, a very large part of her, did not want to know what had happened.
She groaned. She was sore all over, her stomach and thighs especially, as if they had been beaten with a stick. Slowly, she lifted her head and pulled herself to her feet.
She was, she suddenly realized after glancing around, in apartment five.
It was empty and dark, lit only by the cast-off light of a streetlamp from outside and by the glow coming in from the hallway through the open door.
How the hell did I get in here?
she wondered. And then thought,
I have to get out. Now.
She stumbled out of the apartment and into the hallway, steadying herself against the wall. Her clothes, she realized once she was in the light, were torn and there were scratches and bruises visible on her sweat-drenched body. What had happened to her? A dream? Was she still having one?
Slowly, she made her way toward her apartment. Behind her, she heard a whispery noise and she turned to catch sight of something pale and white flitting through the depths of apartment number five. Though, no, she wasn’t exactly sure she had seen anything. Maybe it was just the light. She backtracked and closed the door to the apartment, just in case.
By the time she was approaching the door to her own apartment, she was starting to get her mind around things. Her clothing, looking at it again, didn’t seem torn exactly, only rumpled, and what she’d thought were scratches and bruises were instead just lines and creases from sleeping on a bare floor. Plus, she could hear Steve scratching on the inside of the door, which meant that he was okay, that there was nothing wrong with him, that it had all been just a bad dream.
The only question she had was, if it had been a dream, why had she woken up not in her own bed but in apartment number five? There was definitely something wrong with her.
She was just opening the door when she heard a creaking down at the end of the hallway. Despite herself, she turned to look. The door to apartment five was open. And there was something strange about the darkness of the doorway itself. It was almost as if, when she looked hard enough, she could begin to see someone standing there.
Very quickly, heart pounding hard, she entered her own apartment, locking the door behind her.
Steve was okay, still had all his paws anyway. He was definitely a little skittish, but maybe she was just passing her own mood along to him.
Talk about a fucked-up dream
. But she felt like she hadn’t gotten any sleep, and like she wasn’t likely to get any. She was reluctant to go back into the bathroom, but when she did everything seemed normal. There was a little water on the floor, puddles of it here and there, but nothing out of place. It was just an ordinary bathroom.
But still she felt unsettled. She sat on the toilet and held her head in her hands, and then she began to shiver and shake. Once she started shaking, it was hard to stop. It just kept coming. She stayed there for a moment, jittery as hell, then
Fuck this,
she thought, and she stood and grabbed a bottle of pills, quickly downing several. She slumped back on the toilet, waiting, hoping they would have some effect.
Francis yawned, still tired. He was curled up on the couch, still wearing his pajamas and robe, despite it being late in the morning. He’d been more worked up than he’d realized after the radio program and then he’d allowed his research to get the better of him. What time exactly it had been when he finally closed his books and came to bed, he wasn’t sure.
“Do you want more coffee?” asked Alice. She was sitting in the armchair, feet propped up, reading the
Salem News
.
“Excuse me, dear?” he said. He looked down at his cup, which was still more than halfway full. To be honest, he’d forgotten he was holding it. “No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
He lifted his cup and took another sip, turned his attention back to the television. An old Western was playing on it, something he vaguely remembered having seen years ago, perhaps even when he was a child.
He cleared his throat. “Do you think there is anyone under the age of a thousand who still remembers Randolph Scott?” he asked.
Alice turned her page. “Nope,” she said.
“Shame,” said Francis. He took another sip. “Do you remember… what was it…
Ride the High Country
?”
“Nope,” Alice said. She suddenly paused, put the paper down. “Hey, weren’t he and, um… Cary Grant a couple?”
Were they?
wondered Francis.
Why am I always the last to know?
“I don’t want to think about that before lunch,” he said.
Alice gave a curt nod, raised the paper again. For a while she read in silence. Francis turned back to the TV, tried to watch the Western again. A man in buckskin was crouching behind a rock. Every time he tried to poke his head out, someone fired a shot and a puff of dust rose on the stone a few inches from the man’s head. No, he’d be trapped there for a while. Was he the villain or the hero? If he was the villain, probably eventually he’d make a run for it and then keel over, shot in the back or, if he was lucky, the leg. Then there’d be a deathbed scene if it was the back, an arrest scene if it was the leg. If he was the hero, then he’d hold out, cling to his rock until the villains shooting at him ran out of bullets or the cavalry showed up. Usually you could tell which it was pretty quickly but in this case he was having a hard time figuring it out. Man didn’t look like a villain nor really like a hero, just like some ordinary bastard who was about to die.
“I see they’ve released the identity of the murder victim and his killer,” said Alice, lowering the paper again.
Without fail
, thought Francis.
I start getting caught up in the show and she has to say something to pull me out of it.
“Not interested,” he said. “I don’t need to know.” But it was too late; his concentration was broken. He was no longer lost in the movie anymore. He felt irritated. “I don’t
want
to know,” he added. “Murder as gossip does not concern me.”
Alice gave him a hard stare over the top of her glasses, but as usual she didn’t rise to the bait. How could she always remain so calm? It was something he couldn’t help but envy a little. “I thought this might interest you, Francis,” she said. She ruffled the paper and was hidden behind it again. “Says here the murderer was named Maisie Mather.”
“Mather?” said Francis. It was like his research was haunting him. First that radio woman in all likelihood related to Hawthorne and now a descendant of Justice Mather, Hawthorne’s crony.
He held out his hand. “Give it here,” he said.
Alice folded the paper over, handed it to him. He took it and tried to look at it a moment at arm’s length, but the print was too small. He fumbled his reading glasses off the end table and began to read.
MURDER VICTIM IDENTIFIED
The victim in the murder that rocked Salem, MA, yesterday has now been identified as Jarrett Perkins, 33. His body had been dismembered and mutilated, though the degree and nature of the mutilation has not been released by the police.
Early this morning, Maisie Mather telephoned the police station. “I want to confess to a murder,” she said. “I killed my boyfriend.”
“She seemed calm and collected,” according to the 911 operator she spoke to. “When I asked her how she was sure her boyfriend was dead she said, ‘Because he no longer has a head.’ When I asked her for the address, she gave it without hesitation and added, ‘Please come take me away before it happens again.’ ”
When police arrived, they found Perkins dead and Mather weeping, sitting in a pool of his blood.
Perkins, originally from Trenton, NJ, moved to Salem nearly a year ago. He is reported to have met Mather at a local music show shortly after arriving and had, according to friends, been seeing her ever since.
Mather, a lifelong resident of Salem and descendant of Judge Samuel Mather, a man notorious for his role in the Salem witch trials, has fully confessed to the murder of Perkins. She
has, however, claimed not to have been able to control her actions.
“Clearly she is laying the groundwork for a non compos mentis plea,” said Prosecutor Michael Stewart, a plea otherwise known as not guilty by reason of insanity.
When asked if the state would encourage such a plea, Mr. Stewart shook his head. “Considering the brutality of the crime itself and the nature of the mutilation, we have no choice but to pursue the maximum penalty.”
That penalty would be multiple life sentences. Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1984.
According to her own confession, Mather was engaged in intimate acts with Perkins when an uncontrollable urge struck her. She got up, shaved her head, carved a symbol into her chest, and then killed Perkins with a pair of scissors.
When asked why she had done it, she claimed she didn’t know. When asked what the symbol meant, she also claimed she did not know. Police have not released a description of this symbol.
Mather is described by her former employer Brian Conn as “a normal, ordinary person. I never would have expected anything like this to happen in a million years. I can’t even believe it was her.” Neighbors describe her as “sweet” and “generous to a fault.”
Mather has no history of mental illness.
Francis sighed. What was life coming to? What happened to the good old days when you could just hide behind a rock and, as long as you stayed there, you wouldn’t get shot? Never any dismemberings in
a Western. At least not that he could remember. There was a picture next to the article and he took a close look at it. Yes, the face meant something to him. He could see a resemblance to the old paintings of Judge Mather of course, but it was more than that.
“Hmmm,” he said.
“What?” said Alice.
“She looks familiar,” he said. Where was it? Where had he seen her before? “I remember this girl.”
Alice rose and went over and stood behind his shoulder, looking down at the picture. “I don’t think I know her,” she said.
Francis snapped his fingers. He had it. “She came to that summer fund-raiser we had at the museum last August. She was a sweet kid,” he said. “Didn’t seem the type to go in for dismembering.”
“What do you think would drive a girl like that to do something so dark?” asked Alice.
Francis kept studying the picture. The resemblance to Mather was there, but with very little sign of Mather’s intractability and cruelty. No, at the fund-raiser she’d been completely normal, really a lovely person. It just didn’t make any sense. “Hell, I don’t know,” he said, feeling depressed now. “I don’t know why anyone does anything anymore.”
Alice put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed it. For a while they were silent, staring at the picture of the girl.
“It isn’t like she just woke up one day and thought, ‘I’m going to shave my head and murder the first person I see.’ ”
Francis shrugged. “Maybe that’s exactly what it was like,” he said.
God, her head hurt. Her awareness of the night before was blurring now. Weird shit, that was what it was. She felt like she was really losing her grip. She had screamed herself awake—how fucked-up was that? And now she was walking in her sleep as well? What the hell? She’d woken up in the hall, pounding on the door to apartment number five. Or thought she had. She wasn’t even sure of that anymore now that it was light outside. The nightmares she’d had seemed so real, so vivid, and that shit of falling asleep in the bath and that fucked-up dream were the worst of all. How could she have gotten to sleep after that? To top it off, she had had too much of Lacy’s wine, so when she wasn’t busy screaming herself awake or listening to her heart beat louder and louder in her ears she’d been queasy and could feel the room spinning around her. And there was a period, she wasn’t sure if it was real or another dream, when she’d been kneeling on the floor and vomiting into the toilet, with Steve, sweet dog that he was, wagging his tail next to her and licking her face and trying to cheer her up. Or maybe he was just trying to get a taste of that vomit, who knows? Gross.