Читать книгу In the Language of Scorpions - Charles Allen Gramlich - Страница 10

CHIMES

Author’s Note: This version of the “Chimes” is different from the Kindle ebook version published in 2010. I discuss the differences further in the section called “about the stories and poems.”

Dena Parker came awake to the sound of wind chimes tinkling. Dozens of them hung on her back porch, just under her bedroom window, and others were scattered beneath the eaves of her house. They were made of river stones and sea shells, of cut glass and polished metal, of thin wires that were like the fragile rib cages of birds. She had collected them over many years and normally she found their music sweet and pleasing. Now she heard the sound as a warning, a warning that the opening winds of Hurricane Carmin were beginning to sweep over New Orleans.

It was only 2 A.M. by her clock but Dena knew she wouldn’t sleep anymore tonight. She reached to switch on her reading lamp, and the chimes rang again as the coming of brightness lanced her eyes. The sound was louder now, as the delicate pieces whipped about in the grip of a mounting breeze.

She should have brought them in when she put the plywood over the windows, Dena thought. She’d have to do it now. She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet fishing for slippers when she remembered. She had brought them in. They were hanging downstairs in her living room, where there was no wind to move them.

Dena’s sympathetic nervous system reaction was instantaneous and almost painful as her mouth dried and the skin stitched itself taut over her muscles. She thought about Jeremy, her three-year-old, and before the thought finished she bolted out of bed and down the hall the few short steps to her son’s room.

Jeremy was untroubled by the chimes, or by the gathering moan of the storm outside his window. He breathed soft and even with sleep, and his face in the dim, butter-yellow of the night light reminded Dena so much of his father. But she couldn’t think of that now. She reached out to shake the tiny frame, then stopped herself. Maybe she shouldn’t wake him. Maybe she’d left some chimes outside by mistake, or maybe the gale had found a crack and was exhaling into the house. And if there were someone in the house with them, the last thing Dena needed was to have her little boy clinging to her in fear while she tried to react.

Call somebody, the thought hit her, and she turned and ran back into her bedroom for the phone. The police line was busy—Dena had figured it would be with the hurricane—so she punched the number for the Kellers next door. Morgan was an ex-marine, Marge an artist. They had helped Dena a lot after her husband left. Maybe they could help her again.

Outside, the wind tested itself on the boarded up windows, though Dena knew it would be hours before the main part of the hurricane reached them. The phone started ringing, sounding more distant than the wind, and Dena prayed her friends would answer. A moment later they did, or at least their recorder picked up. Before Dena could tell which, the first assault of rain swept against the roof; the chimes sounded as heavy drops exploded on the shingles; and the phone voice died in a crackle of static. Dena wanted to blame the storm for that static. She wanted to believe the lines had gone down outside the house. But her bedroom light was still on. Why hadn’t the electricity gone too?

At that moment, softly, the chimes began to clink together, glass against metal, curled shells against tiny brass beads. A melody wove itself into those sounds, a tune Dena recognized but wished she didn’t. Her nervous system iced over as she glanced at the dresser where her music boxes sat. An empty space marked where one piece had been thrown out. She was hearing its song now, though, transformed but recognizable.

Coincidence, Dena told herself. The human mind often added meaning to random collections of sound, like making footsteps out of an old house settling. Her body didn’t believe that line of reasoning. It just kept pumping out fear and adrenaline.

Dena bit her lip, then put down the phone and opened the drawer of the bedside table. Inside lay the 9mm Browning automatic she had bought for her husband after he was raped in the house, and before he went away to escape the self-loathing that had filled him afterwards. She thought of the music box again, and wondered if Troy really had thrown it out. The rapist had caught Troy asleep and had knocked him out and tied him up, then waited for her husband to awaken before sodomizing him. The bastard had let the music box play during the assault, and it scared Dena to think that Troy might have taken it with him.

A loaded magazine for the pistol was hidden under an old TV Guide in the drawer, and Dena stuck it in the gun and chambered a cartridge. The slide popped loudly as it closed and Dena reached out and switched off the lamp. It was near black in the house with all the windows dressed in plywood, and she didn’t want to silhouette herself with light while anyone else could stay invisible in the shadows. Besides, what if the lights went out like the phone and her eyes weren’t adjusted to the dark? Anything could come at her then. And she wouldn’t know until it had her.

With the gun in her right fist and her left hand feeling along the wall, Dena moved back toward her son’s room. She stopped just inside the door there, listening to everything with ears as wide as they would go. They reported nothing but the storm outside, nothing but rain and wind.

Inside, Jeremy slept, curled up with one bandaid-ornamented knee out from under the covers and both hands clutching his stuffed panda. Dena decided against waking him. God! She had to make sure no one could hurt him, but she didn’t dare run for it through the darkened house with him. And the plywood was nailed over the windows from outside; they couldn’t get out that way. She’d have to go downstairs by herself. Dena gripped the pistol tighter, wishing she’d practiced with it more.

She stepped into the hall and every hair follicle on her body came to life as the chimes belled out a jangling, discordant note, as if they had been ripped from the ceiling to adorn the body of someone dancing a berserk chorea. Dena sucked in a mouthful of air and almost yelled. The chimes gonged and clanged. Her finger tightened on the automatic’s trigger and she clenched her teeth instead. A gagging sound came from downstairs. Quiet followed.

“Mommy?”

Dena jumped, and turned to see Jeremy sitting up in bed. He was rubbing his eyes and she moved quickly over beside him, putting her arms around him as she lay the small head back on the pillow.

“It’s all right, Sweety. Just a noise. Go back to your dreams.”

Jeremy’s arm found his panda and pulled it to him. “Kay, Mommy,” he said. As fast as that he fell asleep again.

Dena turned back to Jeremy’s door, peeking around it to study the upstairs hallway. Her eyes were fully dark adapted now but the house stood so black that she couldn’t make out her own feet. Her ears could listen, though, and had gotten better at screening out the gale. She found herself able to ignore the outside and focus on what was inside. There was nothing to hear, however, as if all sound had been flushed from the house and the tank had to refill itself. She found herself wishing for a sound, a drip of water in the tub, a clock ticking, just something to let her know the rest of the world wasn’t all gone away.

Even more than sound, Dena wanted light. The switch for the stairwell tickled just under her hand, but she wouldn’t let herself touch it. If she touched it, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from turning it on. And once she had light she would never be able to stand the dark again, even though the dark would come. Through the agency of the hurricane, or through a more human act, the dark would come. Dena could picture herself screaming when that happened, and it would be better not to have had the light at all.

As she fought her need for light and won, Dena felt the blunting of her adrenaline rush. At least temporarily, her physiology was listening to her brain. She knew someone was in the house now. She knew she had to protect Jeremy. But she could visualize the place better in the dark than her visitor could. And she had a gun. True, she hadn’t shot much in the last few years, but she had grown up in hunting country with four older brothers and she understood how to squeeze a trigger and hit what she aimed at. She shut Jeremy’s door behind her and padded softly toward the stairs.

Dena’s way to the first floor was clear and at the base of the steps she crouched. The front door stood behind her and she could have walked out easily if she’d brought Jeremy down. But she hadn’t known the stairs would be safe. To her left opened the garage. Across the other way was the kitchen. In front of her ran the hall that split kitchen and living room off from the den and from her home office beyond. Dena’s eyes hurt as she strained to see down that hallway. Even as she stared, a set of chimes rang, as if someone’s head had brushed lightly against them.

Now Dena would allow herself light, but not the room-brightening light of the overheads. She needed something to ruin her visitor’s night sight and leave hers alone. That meant the heavy duty Maglite in the closet just down the hall. She started snailing her way toward it.

Somewhere ahead of her was a slow drip. A leak from the rain, Dena guessed. Her foot found the residue of it just as she reached the closet, and the slick wet spot that had spread across the floor almost felled her. She grabbed the doorknob for support and it creaked under her hand. The chimes rang, soughing as if a faint wind ghosted among them. Dena wanted to run, her imagination telling her that something was coming down the hall toward her in the blackness. Instead, she forced herself to open the closet and reach in for the Maglite, her skin crawling as the sleeves of raincoats and old sweaters brushed against her hands like the shed husks of monstrous insects.

The long, thick handle of the flashlight made a comforting weight when Dena’s fingers gathered it in. She didn’t turn it on yet, though. Her mind shrieked for a look down the hall but she didn’t want to be holding the flash when it lit. That would only shout out her own location. She stepped into the closet and knelt, laying the Maglite on the hall floor. Then she switched it on and quickly stood up amid the clutter. One glimpse down the hallway made her wish she’d left things in the dark. The drip she’d heard didn’t come from the rain.

Where the hall intersected the living room there hung a cheap, brass chandelier, and a body in black clothes and black knitted cap dangled from it. Blood dripped from the leg to the floor, but the person had not been killed at that spot. Someone had dragged them across the linoleum, leaving red smears behind. Those swirled patterns started outside the closet and Dena looked down to see her feet stained and sticky with crimson. The sight made her gag and she fought to swallow the acid lifting in her throat. Then it hit her. The killer had hid in this closet too!

Dena stiffened, started to suck in air that seemed too weak to feed her. In the reflected light of the flash she could see shoes sitting next to her reddened feet, and she could imagine them full of legs. She could imagine the empty clothes behind her gradually swelling with human shapes. She could hear breathing, ragged. You’re hyperventilating, her mind yelled, but the adrenaline was shouting too loud for anything else to be heard. Something brushed her cheek and she whooped in fear as she leaped out of the closet. Her feet slipped in blood and she fell.

The chimes whipped into sound as Dena’s fingers scrabbled for the Maglite. They found it, closed around the handle. The closet was empty; she could see that now. But the sliding glass door at the back of the house had just grated open. Dena pushed to her knees, both the gun and the light stabbed down the hall. A gust of hurricane struck her in the face. Shadows spattered before the light, made grotesque by the gale-stirred movements of the dangling corpse. The plywood that had covered the sliding door at the rear of the house was peeled back and the glass was open, letting rain into the living room, letting in wind that sent the chimes into a mad skittering dance.

Dena jumped to her feet and ran across to the back door, trying not to glance at the dead body hanging from her chandelier. The killer must have fled, she figured, and through the left-open doorway the gale came roaring into Dena’s living room. She pushed the glass closed and locked it, the chimes falling silent as their wind supply dried up. The house still thrummed in the big wind outside, and Dena could see trees in the yard bending down like old men. She also saw something else, an odd design scrawled on the glass door. It was a heart with a cobra inside it, drawn in shiny lipstick. When she realized what it was she stepped back, her stomach suddenly churning with bile.

The symbol represented a tattoo, the one Troy’s rapist had worn on his chest. Troy’s attacker had hidden behind a mask and a long blonde wig, and the tattoo had been the only identifying characteristic Dena’s husband could remember. Dena had sat in horror as Troy described it to the police sketch artist in a voice that held an emotionless void. And later, she had accidentally surprised her husband while he was drawing the symbol in a cold hand in the notebook where he kept his private thoughts.

“The bastard came back,” Dena muttered, staring at the image of the tattoo and lashing herself with words. But who had been in the house with him? A friend? A burglar? And who had killed who? Was it the rapist hanging in the hall? She hoped it was.

A single set of chimes rang.

Dena spun away from the sliding door, flashing her light over the walls and ceiling. The chimes hung still and stiff as cocoons. And there were no others in the house. Except! When Jeremy was born she had put a set of porcelain teddy bears over his crib, and though the crib was long gone the chimes were still there above the place where he slept. Jeremy wasn’t tall enough to reach them.

Dena started to run, heading down the hallway on the fastest route to the stairs. She didn’t even glance at the hanging corpse; she was too busy swallowing the terrified shouts her throat wanted to let out. They would only warn the invader that she was coming.

The teddy bear chimes rang again, louder than before, as if someone had picked up Jeremy and brushed him against the wires. And Dena heard her son’s voice, murmurous with sleep as he asked a question.

“Mommy?”

Dena was on the stairs, taking them three at a time, making noise now that she couldn’t control. She heard Jeremy’s bed creak as something was dropped on it, and by that time she was to the doorway of her son’s room and stepping inside. The night light had gone dark—the hurricane had finally killed the electricity—but the glow of Dena’s flash was enough to still the scene, enough to see her little boy fallen on the bed, screaming of a sudden as he saw his mommy at the door and not in the shadow looming over him.

That shadow moved toward her, its hand gleaming with a knife. Without thinking, Dena pushed the gun out from her body and pulled the trigger twice, aiming for the torso. She saw the figure stagger as it was hit, saw its hand still moving, reaching out. She fired again, the slug punching into the face. As the shape went back and down, the reaching hand closed over the porcelain bears and ripped them shrieking from the ceiling. A knitted cap spun away and long blonde hair poured out to frame a sharp-featured face that shown waxy and bloodless in the Maglite’s glow.

A woman!, Dena thought, as she saw the cloud of hair and the crimson lips. Then her mind translated what her eyes had registered. No. A mask and wig.

She looked down at Jeremy. He was staring at the body where it lay pinned to the floor by the stabbing beam of the flashlight, and she stepped forward and scooped him up, tucking his head into her shoulder where he couldn’t see anything but her T-shirt. He wasn’t crying, but his arms went around Dena’s neck so hard that she thought she would choke, in more ways than one. She put her hand to her son’s back, holding him tight, and she was crying for him as she started out of the room and out of the house. She wanted him away from here, though she had an idea that it would take more than just walking out the door.

* * * * * * *

Twenty minutes later Dena walked back into her house without Jeremy. It had taken a while to wake Morgan Keller next door, and by the time he had answered the bell both mother and son were soaked by the slanting rain. Keller had brought towels and blankets for Jeremy, and Dena had explained the night’s events while she rocked her son back to sleep. As soon as the little boy’s eyes closed, the man carried him upstairs to bed. Morgan had asked Dena to stay while he woke his wife, but she had decided against waiting to see Marge. Jeremy trusted the woman. Keller had said he was going to call the police, too, but it might be hours before they could get here and Dena wasn’t going to wait to see them either. She had to put faces on the dead.

Down her hall was the chandelier with its cargo of the dead, and Dena went toward it with the Maglite in one hand and the pistol in the other. She wanted to know which of the two corpses belonged to Troy’s rapist. This one had been strangled with a set of wind chimes but Dena didn’t think it was the rapist. She looked up at a face that had turned all purple from lack of air, and she realized that Marge Keller was not next door with Jeremy. She was here, with her shirt torn away and a lipstick tattoo of a heart and a cobra scrawled between her breasts.

As if to accompany the sudden insane thud of Dena’s heart, a music box started to play. The tune was familiar. Dena had already heard it once this night, and many times before when she owned the box from which it tinkled. With fear daggering her spine, she turned to see a figure in the doorway of her house; a light in its hand was strong enough to brighten the whole hall. Morgan Keller stood behind that light, a shotgun leveled at Dena’s chest. The music box sat on the floor, its lid open.

“Marge always liked that tune,” Keller said, as if reminiscing with an old friend. He started walking forward, kicking the door partially shut behind him. “Troy gave it to her,” he continued, stopping a few feet away. “You know...after. I think he couldn’t bear having it around. But he didn’t wanna throw it out either.” He chuckled. “Maybe your husband secretly enjoyed his experience. You think?”

Dena’s right hand moved slightly, almost involuntarily, and Keller’s voice turned hard as the shotgun lifted. “Drop...the damn...pistol! Or I’ll turn you inside out with this thing.”

Dena’s eyes swallowed the cold gleam of the 12-gauge and she knew the man would enjoy using it. She let the Browning slide from her fingers to clatter on the floor.

“Where’s Jeremy you son of a bitch?” she demanded.

“Sleeping.” The calm had already returned to Keller’s voice. “I gave him a Valium to make sure he won’t wake up for a while.”

“If you’ve hurt my son—”

Keller chuckled again. “Don’t worry. That was more Marge’s line of work. I like my humps a little older.”

“You raped Troy?”

“I’ve got the tattoo. And I have to tell you, it was a hell of a lot of fun watching your husband dying inside while I was right there on top of him. He had been bullshitting himself too long; that was his problem. It’s always worse for the ones who lie to themselves. Because they can’t lie anymore while I’m there with them.”

“You’re sick.”

“And you’re just full of original observations. Way I see it, I did your husband a service. I could tell by the way he looked at me he was a homosexual. God, I hate those scum.”

Though not a psychologist, Dena sensed more than a paranoid homophobia behind Keller’s words. She might have called it evil if she’d had time to think about it. But right now she had to keep him talking while she figured a way out of this mess. “So why come here tonight?” she asked. “You know Troy’s gone.”

“Oh, I’m afraid your hubby was a bit smarter than I’d hoped. I think he figured out the mask I wore on the big night was Marge’s work. I got a little note yesterday telling me you and Jeremy would be going to your mom’s for the hurricane, like you always used to. Hell, I thought you were gone too. Never even looked in your garage for the car.”

“My parents are in Vegas.”

Keller shrugged. “Too bad. I guess Troy didn’t know they’d gone. Anyway, he sent me this note inviting me over. Said he knew what I’d done and it was payback time. He wanted to kill me. Scare me first, then kill me. That’s why the chimes and the tattoo on the glass door. He just didn’t realize that Marge was my huntin’ buddy. That threw him off.”

“Troy was in the house tonight?” Dena interrupted, her chest tightening as she realized what Keller was saying.

“Who you think killed Marge? While I played tag with shadows. I never thought he’d be that good, and when you came down it was two against one. Course, I didn’t know it was you. Figured he’d hired a professional and it was time for old Morgan to go home.”

Keller was grinning widely now, as if he’d just heard the punch line to a dirty joke. “I know you saw him, though. Dressed sort of like I was that first night he and I were together. Mask. Wig. Didn’t you tell me you shot somebody like that upstairs?”

Dena had known what Keller was going to say, but actually hearing the words still spiked nails into her soul. She slid to her knees, throat heaving but nothing running out. Keller sat his flashlight on the floor and took a step forward to kiss the 12-gauge to Dena’s forehead. The metal was cold. “Guess I’ll have to adopt Jeremy,” he said. Then the door behind him blew open and wet leaves and rain swirled in on a rushing wind. Chimes rang and Morgan turned halfway around in surprise. Dena hurled herself into his legs.

Keller fell backward, the shotgun discharging, spraying the ceiling with pellets. Chimes shattered, and Dena came to her knees and smashed the Maglite across the man’s face with all her might. Glass popped and the bulb winked out, but Keller’s flash still burned and its light showed the man’s head snap to the side from the blow. She would have thought it was enough to knock him out. It wasn’t. The ex-marine lashed out with his left leg, his booted foot crashing into her chest with enough force to knock her loose from her air. She fell back against the wall, throat aching as she tried to draw in just a little of the wind that raced all around her.

Keller started to lift the shotgun and Dena kicked out as hard as she could, knocking the gun from his grasp and sending it spinning against the wall. As he lunged after it Dena’s hand found something angular and cold on the linoleum. The pistol!

She grabbed the automatic by the butt and swung it around, starting to fire before the barrel even aligned with her target. Two shots walked across the wall; the rest began to hit meat. The 9mm cartridges weren’t very powerful, but the gun held fifteen of them, minus the two misses and the three she’d used earlier. The other ten bullets kept snapping and snapping and snapping, and Keller kept jerking and jerking and jerking. He was dead before the last shot took him in the throat.

But Troy might still be alive, Dena thought, as she picked up Keller’s flashlight and ran for the stairs.

Behind her as she ran, the house seemed full of the hurricane’s boom and roar, full of wild chiming, but Dena ignored it all as she stepped into her son’s room and listened for the sound of breathing. She heard none, and Keller’s flash lit up a space that was empty of her husband’s body. Then the front door slammed downstairs and the house fell still.

Dena turned, listened, the empty gun useless in her fist. She heard movement downstairs, heard a sound like cloth ripping, and a moment later footsteps came up toward the second floor. Dena wasn’t surprised when Troy walked into the room. She didn’t run into his arms, though.

Her husband had removed the mask and wig, and Dena could see dried blood on his face where one of her shots had creased him. She figured the other two slugs had hit the bulletproof vest Troy was wearing beneath his now opened shirt. Covering the front of that vest was a badly tattered symbol that dripped red mucous. Morgan Keller’s tattoo didn’t look much like a heart and a cobra anymore.

Dena lifted the flash slightly, light spattering off the knife in Troy’s hand and then falling into his eyes. The pupils constricted but the lids didn’t blink, and the face behind the eyes was a pale oval etched in white wax. A phrase came to Dena from a college class in abnormal psychology, “flattened affect,” no facial expression at all. Her husband was over the edge, long gone into a Freudian landscape from which there would be no easy return.

“Troy.... Troy!”

Dena’s voice seemed to hot-wire Troy’s emotions and he looked at her with hatred dripping from his lips. “You watched him didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Troy. You’re hurt. You need a hospital.”

“You watched him use me! I know you did! Maybe you and him were doing it together yourselves. Is that right?”

“You’re talking crazy, Troy.” Dena fought the tears that wicked toward her eyes. “You’ve gotta calm down and let me help you.”

“Where’s Jeremy?”

The abrupt change of subject startled Dena but she quickly recovered. “That’s right. You’ve gotta think about Jeremy. He needs you.”

“Don’t play with me, bitch. I want my son. We’re going away from here. I won’t let him stay another day in this house with you.”

Dena felt wetness on her cheeks and realized she had lost the fight against tears. “Stop it, Troy,” she shouted. “Can’t you see it’s over. We’ve got to—”

“I said don’t play with me!” Troy’s eyes went wild in the light. His shoulder lurched against Jeremy’s dresser, tipping it over and spilling toy trains and Little Critter books onto the floor. Then he was coming at her, swinging the knife from side to side. Dena threw the emptied pistol at him, saw it bounce off his chest. She tried to dodge around him but he caught her with one arm and threw her back onto Jeremy’s bed. He stabbed at her, missing, and she swung the flashlight at his head only to have it batted from her hand. She watched it flying, saw it hit the wall. The light went dark.

Dena slapped out, fingers curled as she tried to find Troy’s face in the pitch black room. Instead, her hand found the knife blade coming down and she screamed as it went through her palm and drove her arm into the mattress.

Troy straddled her chest, pinning her, screaming with her. “Do you know what he did? Do you know? I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch. I’ll kill you.” And Dena knew that Troy wasn’t talking to her anymore, wasn’t feeling his wife struggling beneath him. He was feeling Morgan Keller raping him again.

Abruptly, the knife was wrenched free of Dena’s hand, wringing another scream from an already raw throat. She couldn’t see the blade lifting, but she could feel it. And she could feel Troy’s legs tense as he readied the knife for another plunge. She bucked the lower half of her body upward, her feet finding precarious purchase on the side of Jeremy’s bed. Troy’s balance was poor and Dena’s desperate lurch threw him off onto his side. She slipped from beneath him and bolted for the door, slamming her shoulder into the frame as she went past. She heard Troy coming after her and knew there would be no reasoning with him now. She could think only of getting away, of getting to Jeremy and protecting him.

The stairs loomed and Dena went down them in a stumbling, sliding lurch, grabbing at the handrail in desperate hope of keeping her balance. Somehow she managed it. Troy didn’t. Dena heard him curse and felt his weight as he pitched forward to strike her in the back. She fell, landing on elbows and carpet-burning her cheek. Troy rolled over her, smashing hard against the door, blocking her exit.

Dena’s thoughts danced away from the door, tripped over the 12-gauge that Morgan Keller had dropped in the hall. For a moment she shoved the thought aside—Troy was still her husband—but then she felt the knife again as Troy spun around onto his stomach and slashed through the dark with the blade. A line of agony scorched across her ankle and she threw herself backwards. Her scooting hand struck the shotgun, sent it sliding further down the hall. She scrambled for it, tears on her face, her mouth filled with a steady keening. Troy’s knife slapped into the linoleum where her foot had been an instant before.

Dena’s hands found Morgan Keller, and lying just beneath him was the long length of the shotgun. She grabbed it and spun around, back to the soft wall of Keller’s body. She heard Troy coming, sounding huge and alien in the darkened hall. She screamed at him to stop, screamed that she had a gun. Yet she could hear what he was saying, like a litany. “Kill you kill you kill you.”

She pulled the trigger into the blackness, felt the slam of recoil and heard the awful chunk-thud of a hit. And then she was just shrieking, just shrieking, feeling the horror like a wind swirling over her. Insanity was a hurricane, full of roaring chimes that rang like hyena laughter. She wanted it, could feel her need for it. How easy it would be to fly away. Only one thought stopped her:

Jeremy.