Supernatural Noir (28 page)

After, we stood breathless, staring at ourselves in the window. She spoke to me, moving my lips and forcing air from my lungs through the vocal cords and over my tongue.

“We’re very good together,” she said. “We can accomplish so much.”

I asked her what it was she hoped to accomplish, and she showed me the face of a bucktoothed man named Toady. His expression was tense and hateful. He drew back his fist and punched us in the cheek, and Sylvia’s loathing of the cretin became mine.

“There are others,” she said. “So many others. All we need are the icons.”

“And each other,” I said.

“Of course.”

——

We stand at the window, observing the crude bumps and tightly stretched planes of skin, and we whisper back and forth—plans and dreams and longings so deep we have never spoken them aloud to another soul. The words spill quietly from my lips and I observe their formation in the pane, and in one heart-stopping moment we fall silent.

I find us so beautiful I can’t speak another word.

——

Lee Thomas
is the Lambda Literary Award– and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels
Stained
,
Damage
, and
The Dust of Wonderland
, and the short-story collection
In the Closet, under the Bed
. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies
Darkness on the Edge
,
Dead Set
,
Horror Library
Volume 4, and
Inferno
, among others. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas
The Black Sun Set
,
Crisis
, and
Focus
(cowritten with Nate Southard). His latest novel,
The German
, was released by Lethe Press in April 2011.

Tom Piccirilli

—

I woke up at four a.m. to a whistling, icy draft and found a teenage girl downstairs feeding my goldfish, Cecil. She’d been at it for a while. The box of fish food was empty, Cecil was dead, and she was scratching at her temple with an S&W popgun .22.

October rain slid against the living-room windows and brown, wet leaves clung thickly to the bottom of the open front door. There was a rusted key in the lock and an overturned rock at the foot of the porch steps. I hadn’t known about the hiding spot. I shut the door.

Emily Wright didn’t glance up.

I knew who she was even though I hadn’t seen her in six years. The chubby little girl had turned a delicate sixteen, with the pale and inviting face of a freshly sculpted young woman. Her once-vibrant blue eyes had grown smoky and muted. Seams around her mouth added a kind of evocative maturity that was already provocative. Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she’d be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn’t aged well.

She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.

I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.

She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.

Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.

I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”

I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.

Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.

“You’ve got scars,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Where’d you get them?”

“Lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”

“They’re cool.”

Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.

I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.

“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.

I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”

“My parents were murdered in this house.”

“I know.”

“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”

I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”

No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.

I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.

She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”

She sounded like John Acton—
Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!
—the realtor who’d sold me the place.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”

She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”

“I was engaged when I bought the place.”

“But you never got married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”

“How do you know?”

“I found out.”

I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.

“Emily, you need to go back.”

“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”

“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”

She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”

“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”

“So you’re a criminal.”

Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.

Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.

She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”

“I went back and forth.”

That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”

I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.

I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“Who are you going to shoot?”

“The person or people who murdered my parents.”

By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.

“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”

She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”

“We have to get you back now.”

She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.

Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”

“Give me the gun, Emily.”

She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure.”

A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.

“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.

“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”

“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”

Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.

Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.

The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.

I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.

I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.

The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.

She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.

“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.

“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”

I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.