SUSPENSE THRILLERS-A Boxed Set (78 page)

She folded the paper and put it and the pen in her purse again. "Anywhere you'd like," she said. "When you were a boy? Or when you were grown and living through the Depression, that might even be better."

"Well, it started when I was just a boy. I had turned just thirteen…"

"The Depression started then? But…"

"No," he said. "I'm not going to tell you a story like you've gotten from the other old people around here. My story isn't about surviving the Depression or what it meant to go from horse and buggies to cars or from slaughtering our own animals to buying store-wrapped meat. I have an entirely different tale to tell you."

She gave him a perplexed stare, but her attention was rapt, open to whatever he wished to tell her. "Well, go on, then. Whatever you want to say is all right with me. What started when you were thirteen?"

"Murder." He must get that out into the open before he lost his courage. There was no point in wasting this young woman's time.

The girl was visibly shaken. Her eyes widened perceptively and she swallowed and blinked.

"I'm afraid this won't be pleasant for you," he said.

"Murder?" Her voice was small and shocked. A fly landed on her cheek and she shook her head to make it leave.

"That's when it started. My first kill. I'd like to tell you how it happened…"

Then the fluttering of unease in his heart settled and he stared out across the yard and across the dirt road to the deep green forest beyond. This was hard, but he could do it. He had done many arduous things n his life.

He told her how he came to have an abiding hatred for the man who ran the sugarcane mill. The mill took in the cane from farmers in the country and put it through a press to get the succulent juice squeezed into a great vat where it was made into syrup and canned and shipped throughout the state. Hank's father grew a few acres of cane and Hank was the one who took it by the wagon-load to the mill and sold it.

"His name was Rufus, the mill man," he said. "A more cruel individual you might never want to meet. He not only called me names, but he would reach out and slap me when I didn't unload the cane lengths quickly enough to suit him. My ears would ring half a day afterward. I've always suspected I don't hear so well because of that.

"The thought of revenge haunted me day and night. It was like a tumor growing down in my gut. I didn't tell my Daddy Rufus treated me so awful. Daddy needed the money from the cane, he'd just have told me I must be slow and quarrelsome and that Rufus had every right to slap me around for it.

"I'd lie in bed at night and ponder how to do away with Rufus. I planned it all very carefully, every detail, and then when my chance came up, and there were no witnesses present, I rushed Rufus on the cat-walk that ran around the perimeter of the huge syrup vat, and I knocked him into it.

"Oh, did he scream and curse me! Then he grew frightened because there was no way out of the vat, no ladders along the curving slick inside of it. It was at least six or eight feet to the top from the level of syrup where he slapped around, fierce and furious. He was going to drown in all that sweetness when he tired of dog-paddling and keeping his head up. When the thought got through to him, he began to beg me to throw him a rope.

"I just stood on the cat-walk and grinned. It took some time, but Rufus started losing strength and began going under. His hair was slicked down on his scalp and syrup had glued his eyelashes into clumps. He kept licking his lips and coughing. He flailed a while. He even cried.

"But when I left for home, my cane unloaded and paid for, Rufus was drowned, his lungs full of sugarcane syrup. They found him the next day and thought it an accident. All I remember is feeling triumphant. It was a great victory, that first murder. I had rid myself of a burden that made me feel lighter and happier than I had ever been. It is
exhilarating
to kill, you know? There is absolutely no other adventure like it."

The girl sucked in her breath and he glanced at her.

"Do you think I care if you tell people this?" he asked. "You can go straight to the sheriff when you leave here if you want, that won't bother me. But first you might want to hear the rest."

She nodded, her lips pressed together in a tight line. She disapproved vehemently. So be it. He had not expected otherwise.

"After that, it was much easier," he said, continuing. "Anyone who crossed me or caused me pain, I found a way to send to the grave. I made them look like accidents and no one questioned the deaths. There's an advantage to living in the country and that is one of them. People don't expect violence and the law doesn't look for an explanation." He paused before he said the rest. It was bad enough he admitted killing for revenge. Now came the part he hardly understood himself. He wondered if he could explain it so that it made any sense at all. He had contemplated these events for decades now and he was still confounded.

"There were maybe six or seven murders like that, where someone did me wrong and paid for it. I had a high sense of justice--too refined some might say--and there were just too many folks around here who treated me without respect. Then…"

He stayed silent so long, remembering, that she cleared her throat and that prompted him.

"Then something happened to me. Inside. Here." He lifted his liver-spotted left hand and pointed to his head. "And here." He lay his hand against his heart and sighed audibly. "Maybe it was because I'd killed so many already. Maybe it was because I was hard now and cold and had stopped caring for the value of human life. It might have been because it was so
easy
. People are vulnerable, they don't watch out for themselves. They walk right into the most dangerous situations without proper consideration of the jeopardy.

"I've thought on it and am not sure what exactly made me change."

He gazed at her, his eyes reflecting bewilderment. He glanced away and leaned forward in the rocker to spit tobacco.

"In my thirty-second year of life I killed for the first time without having a grudge against the person. I killed a woman. A
stranger
to these parts, someone passing through."

He saw the girl turn aside her head and close her eyes. Yes, he thought, this is the worst. You must be strong to hear this.

He continued, his voice removed and unemotional. "I flagged her down that night. I was walking outside of Paul, aimless and restless. I felt this
urge
tearing at me…"

It came back to him, that spring night with the crickets chirping in the ditches alongside the road, and the pines swaying and sighing with a sweet gusty little breeze that cooled his face. The blacktop was still warm from a day in the sun and he could feel the heat through the soles of his shoes.

He was in a state. He had been walking the floors of his old house in the dark before he felt compelled to leave it. His parents were dead and he was alone, too alone. He was not a good-looking man and women were not attracted to him. He was socially inept and couldn't start up conversations with women. He passed them on the streets in Evergreen when he went shopping there and was mystified at how tongue-tied he found himself.

But this night he hadn't started feeling agitated over the lack of female companionship. Something had entered his mind and it wouldn't leave. It was a raging thought process that came from the deep down inside him, not a voice, not some demon or other personality, just his own mind turning on itself and going crazy. Like a snake that swallows its tail, his mind was devouring itself whole.

He couldn't sit, couldn't be still. His hands clenched and unclenched as he paced back and forth, back and forth through the darkened rooms. The sound of his footsteps on the bare boards of the floor unnerved him. The breeze blew the window curtains in, billowing them and he swatted at the ghostly whiteness of the muslin as he passed by. He wanted
something
, what did he want? He wanted to be anywhere but here in the old creaking house. He wanted to be anyone but himself. He wanted…

He wanted to
kill
someone
.

When the realization came, was internally verbalized, he fairly sprinted through the hallway to the porch, leaped to the ground, and headed into Paul. He walked quickly, his breath coming in and out of his lungs, arms swinging to propel him even faster toward his destination. He didn't hate anyone. He didn't despise or fear anyone.

But someone must die, Jesus, yes. If he didn't kill he knew he would explode into a million tiny pieces and be absorbed into the universe. If he did not find someone to murder, he would lose his mind, it was as simple as that. There was a
gnawing
going on, as if a hungry rat ate at his brain matter. He felt his control going, dissipating like smoke filtering out through his ears and thinning into the fragrant pine-scented night air. The only way to preserve his sanity was to commit murder.

Her car came along slowly, the headlights shining on his back and throwing his tall shadow onto the pavement before him. He turned, stepped into the blacktop's center line, and began waving his arms over his head.

She was in a 1950 DeSoto, dirt brown. She pulled over to the side of the road and he came to her side of the car.

"What's the matter?"

He looked down at her face, a round, bland, doughy face, and he said, "Get out of the car."

His voice must have scared her. She drew back and began to put the transmission into first gear.

He reached inside the window and turned off the ignition, taking the keys. He punched in the light button and dark swelled around them, wrapping the two of them and the car in an ebony cocoon. "Get out of the car." The rage he felt was a tidal wave rolling over him.

He couldn't see right. Her outline blurred for him as she stepped from the DeSoto. The car dimmed into nothingness at her back. He couldn't hear anything, but his own fury screaming KILL, KILL, KILL, setting up a cacophony in his head. She was talking to him, he saw her mouth moving, but she might as well have been talking to a deaf man.

He reached out and took her arm, led her behind the car to the grassy embankment and down it into the ditch. He was heading for the woods, knowing even in his frenzy that he should be careful and not do anything out in the open where another car might drive by and its occupant see him.

In there, in that midnight wood, he threw her to the ground, straddled her body, and choked her to death. It was over in minutes and as soon as it was, the storm in his mind released him. He hung over her panting, dripping saliva, his heart beginning to slow to a normal pace.

This would not be thought accident.

And that did not make any difference or deter him for a minute. He would take her body and they would never find it.

"So she was the first I killed for no reason that I understood," he said, finishing his tale for the girl and her recorder. "But not the last."

"Oh, God."

The girl had her face covered with her hands. Hunched over that way she reminded him of a little Raggedy Ann doll, bent into a pretzel shape. "Please don't tell me anymore," she said. "I don't want to hear."

"But I have to," he said. "I've begun now and we have to finish it."

He looked at the tape through the tiny window of the cassette recorder and said, "It's almost to the end. Why don’t you get another? I have a lot to tell you."

While she found another tape in her purse, he thought he should reassure her. He saw how her hands trembled. "I'm not going to do anything to you. I don't want you to be afraid. I'm too old, for one thing, with a bum hand. You could easily free yourself. But that's not why you needn't be scared of me. You see, a few years ago, it stopped."

She fumbled with the tape, loaded it, and hit the record button again. Her head came up. "It stopped?"

"The urge. It just went away and never returned. I don't know how else to explain it. One day I woke, I'd overslept, it was almost noon, and when I sat up, I knew. It was as clear to me as if an angel had visited the room and spoken through a megaphone in my face. I wouldn't have to kill again. I was free of whatever madness had stalked me all those years of my life. It was like coming up from deep down in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. I swam into the day and into a newfound life. I felt sorry for the first time. I felt so sorry that despite my jubilation at being loosed from the killing urge, I began to weep. I folded over my legs and I cried like a baby. All those people. Those…corpses…"

The girl shuddered. Tears stood in her eyes.

"They're behind the house," he said sadly.

"Who?" she whispered, horrified.

"The ones who weren't accidents. The ones I killed to satisfy the rage."

He looked back out across the road to the forest wall. He spied two cardinals in flight, red flashes through the green. "There are plots for them that I couldn't even now lead you to. The woman from the DeSoto is there. She'd be a skeleton, nothing left of her. And there were many others, so…many others. I never counted them,, it wasn't like I was tallying up a score or something. I only know I was on the hunt for years. All my waking hours were spent on the hunt."

"For your next victim?"