The Axman Cometh (19 page)

(Something
happened.
More than her bowels slipped while she was sprawled, insensibly, on the elevator floor.

(Look. What harm can there be in looking? The lights may have come on.

(No. I'm blind. I want to be blind. I want my eyes, my brain, to be as empty of vision as my veins are empty of blood.

(Do you understand?
I have no blood. No sight. I'm worthless to you. Go away, forever!)

Silence.

. .. Music.

No! I will be deaf, too! I will not hear your damned music!

(Oh, too late. She has not prepared, she cannot shut out the symphonic torrent.

(Turning, she hammers both fists against the elevator wall. The elevator shudders and she knows she has miscalculated: wheels, cables, brakes, they have no strength to resist the force of her terror; she must fall.

(Unless, in this instant of her undoing, she can go to sleep again.

(But where will she wake up
next
time?)

In her own bed, of course.

Saturday, June the sixth, 1964.

It is now four minutes after five in the morning, and no longer quite dark out there. The city birds are awake and thriving: bush- dwelling prairie warblers that live in the tall lilac by the side of the garage, the tinny- sounding nuthatches, chattering wrens, genial robins.

Shannon sighs deeply, then rolls to her right toward the center of the bed but does not, as she expects, come up against Chapman's warm boyish body. Someone to hug and hold against her breast as she has done since he was very little.
Some day
, perhaps this year, she will no longer be able to sleep with him; that special innocence will be lacking and they both will know it. Just as she, with the onset of menstruation, had felt wrong about creeping into Allen Ray's bed those nights when she craved his brotherly protection.

The lightness of her bed, the absence of Chap's raspy breath, lifts her a little above the surface of sweet oblivion, and she makes another sound in her throat, moistens her lips with her tongue. Her eyelids twitch and she tugs at the top of her pajamas, which are twisted and putting pressure on her sore breasts. Shannon thinks Chap must have gone back to his own room when the birds began to stir and forage. But her little brother is not in his room. Nor is he asleep. And she is the last one left.

The narrow beam of a pencil flashlight touches one shoulder, her charmingly bent earlobe. Lingers there. Vanishes. Reappears on her smooth forehead. Illuminates a high round cheekbone. Grazes, caresses.

She is lying on her back.

Her eyes open suddenly.

"What?"

"Don't be afraid," he whispers from the darkness. "It's me."

Sitting up quickly, recognizing his voice, thrilled but knowing he shouldn't be there, in her bedroom: my God what
is
he doing there, or did he tell when he called yesterday that he was coming by this early? Did they make a date for breakfast, has she overslept? No, that couldn't be it, something must be wrong, he needs her.
An accident,
she thinks. He's had an accident, his plane—
he's hurt—

"Rob," Shannon says quietly, though her heart is stuffing blood at an unmanageable rate through her throat to her brain, "just a minute. I'll get up. Let me turn on the light."

Perry
Kennold
knows he's going to be late for work, but he can't help himself. No willpower. He just can't turn the key in the ignition, put the truck in gear, drive away from Shannon's house without giving it his best shot.

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell

you.

He has a notebook on him, in which he sometimes jots down his thoughts, observations in poesy. What he'd like to do now is ask her for a date, but in a way that will cause her to take some notice of him, alert her to the fact that he's not just another guy with a bad complexion and no future. He has deep feelings about life. He wants the note to be amusing, clever, sensitive. So she will read it and think, This is the real Perry.
I'd love to go out with you; why didn't you ask me sooner?

He finds a clean page at the back of the pocket notebook, and a pencil stub in the dashboard compartment of the pickup. He uses his right knee for a writing desk, and has enough light from the glow of the instrument panel. The clock reading four-and-a-half minutes after five. He hears a distant rooster. A car goes by up the block, crossing West Homestead. The truck's radio is on, tuned very low, to Patsy Cline.

Dear Shannon:

Another minute goes by.

His eyes begin to burn from concentrating on the paper, his face is stiff and dry. Too much Clearasil. He glances up at her windows, yearning for inspiration. A lamp goes on; his heart lights up as well. Past the leaf- pattern darkness of a tree there is an interior shadow on a window shade; he recognizes her. The shape of her head, the distinctive ducky haircut. Then another shadow, unexpected, swift, overtaking, overwhelming her; the shadows merge, the light flares as if the lampshade has been knocked off. Perry leans toward the window on the curb-side trying to see better, but the lamp, apparently, is on the floor. Then it's off again, just as one of the window shades is disturbed and goes flying up. He has a blurred impression of something pale, like a bare foot, near the glass. But nothing more.

Perry opens the door and gets out, disturbed, tingling all over. He sees somebody there in her bedroom, briefly, as the shade is lowered. Just a torso, an arm—a dark, perhaps gloved, hand.

He goes running up the walk to the porch, boots clumping heavily on the floorboards. There has to be a doorbell, but he can't find it. The screen door isn't latched. The front door is not locked. Perry barges right in.

"Shannon!"

His mind is boiling, his heart lurching as if crippled by terror. His voice does not come out too strong. Almost a croak. He swallows, a foot on the first step of the stairway, calls again. Wake them all up, who cares? Something's not right here.

"Shannon, it's Perry!"

"Who?" A cross and sleepy voice, not Shannon's. From the top of the stairs. He can't see who's up there. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm a friend of Shannon's. I was just driving by. I saw—somebody was in her room. Who are you?"

"Allen Ray. Shannon's brother." His voice down to a whisper. "Shannon had a— nightmare. I put her back to bed. You'd better get out of here. I've got a gun in my room. So does my dad. You don't want to wake
him
up."

Perry, suddenly not so sure of anything, takes his foot off the step. The sudden drop of blood from his overloaded brain leaves him dazed. He can't believe he's made a mistake, done something really-stupid like this. But—

"Is she awake? Could I—" "Keep your voice down." He's angry. "If you don't get out of here right now you're going to be in trouble. A lot of trouble."

"All I want is to be sure—"

A heavy sigh. "I suppose I'm not going to get rid of you that easy, am I?"

"I have to go to work. I'm late now." Shannon must have heard him, Perry thinks. She couldn't have gone back to sleep in the half-minute since he ran up to the house. Unless she was sleepwalking to begin with. Maybe that was it. The only thing to do is apologize, turn around and walk out—

"You've really interfered. Now I've lost it. The entire score. I have to start over. I hope you're satisfied. Whatever your name is."

"Perry. I'm sorry." Interfered? What score? Allen Ray sounds a little weird. Not like an ex-jock who works in a garage, races cars for a hobby. "Look, I'm going. Maybe you better not tell Shannon about this. It was just a mistake."

"Come up and tell her yourself. She's not asleep. I'm going back to bed."

"Come up—?"

"I said it was okay, didn't I? I'll turn on the light for you." Perry hears the creak of flooring. "Damn. It's out. Come on anyway. I'll turn the lamp on in her room."

He hears Allen Ray walking in the hall
upstairs. The stairs are dark, beyond the first two. He puts a hand on the railing and starts up, slowly. Not sure it is the right thing to do. He'll have to invent some good reason why he'd been passing by her house at this hour— oh, the hell with it, Perry thinks. Just tell her how he feels, get it over with. This recklessness excites him, scares him. He moves more quickly up the stairs, ten, twelve of them, but still he can't see, there's no light anywhere. Allen Ray seems to have vanished. Perry knows he's in a forbidden place at the wrong hour: it's eerie, not unlike some dreams he's had, but he can't stop himself.

The top step. Which way? He looks around the corner to his left and there's a streak of light shining through a doorway down the hall, he can see green leaves with brown tips in a planter.
Your brother said you wouldn't mind if I just said hello. I've got to get to work—you know, out on the Interstate. Maybe I'll see you tonight, if that's okay. Better get back to sleep now. ("Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.")

At her door, which is half-closed.

"Shannon?"

He hears something. Not a word. Like a groan. Maybe telling him to come in. He pushes the door open, smiling sheepishly. The reading light clamped to the wrought-iron headboard is pointed at him. Hits him right in the eyes. The bed quakes. He sees her frantic tied-together hands and flailing feet. Then her face. Red from strangulation, the blue eyes watery, fathoms of terror. There's a rope around her neck, tied to the headboard. A patch of shiny silver-gray duct tape across her mouth.

She—

This isn't—

It can't—

"Oh, my." He hears the high-pitched voice behind him. "I thought you'd have your dick out by now, ready to f—"

Perry can't turn around quickly enough. Something hits him stunningly in the back, the left shoulder blade, and he is driven headfirst into the brass planter and bowl that contains a fat rubber plant. The ax blade is wrenched free of the shallow bone it lodged in, the ax comes slashing again with hardly a pause, blade clanging off the planter and ricocheting at a deep angle into the bicep of his left arm. He knows he's grievously hurt; the arm just hangs, blood flowing. Perry gets his feet under him quickly. Sensing certain death behind him, instinctively he doesn't turn around. The next swing of the ax is off the mark, missing him, blade striking the wall an inch from the back of his head. He tumbles through the doorway into the master bedroom.

On his back, foot lashing out, he kicks the door shut in the Axman's face. What little he sees of that face in the backlighting from Shannon's room is a terrifying sight: yellow hard hat, clear goggles of the type construction men wear to protect their eyes from dust and bits of rock and metal. A gauze mask smeared with blood covers the nose and mouth.

The ax rips into a panel of the stout door, sticks momentarily; the Axman has to work it free.

Perry sits up, fumbling for the Buck knife on his belt.

"Shit!" In a frenzy to be after Perry, the Axman kicks the door, kicks it again.

Perry puts the handle of the knife between his teeth and opens it with the fingers of his right hand. On the left side, all numb, the numbness spreading down his leg, scaring him worse than the copious bleeding. The madman with the ax now takes time to turn the knob, open the door, step into the room.

Perry rolls frantically to his right onto fringed carpeting. The ax thunders down like the hammer of Thor into the carpet and lodges solidly in the oak flooring. The Axman must work it loose as Perry scrambles blindly backward, pulls himself up again, slowly, at the foot of a four-poster bed in which lie sleepers.
But how can they be sleeping through this
? He feels a drip of something on his face and looks up to discover a partial answer: there is a severed head impaled at sort of a cocky angle on one of the bedposts. Then the Axman is on him again, swinging horizontally and cutting him two inches deep across the belly.

In shock already, he feels almost nothing. The Axman, half-turned away from Perry at the conclusion of his full-length swing, has his right foot twisted in the carpet. Perry reacts unthinkingly. Right hand shooting out, five-inch blade up, almost all of it slicing through the Axman's liver and into his lung. He hears a squeal of dismay. His weight has shifted to his left and his leg can't hold him. Perry falls, knife coming out of the Axman. Bad cramp in his stomach. He must do something. Crawl.
Under the bed,
he thinks. Where the ax can't find him. But it's too late.
Oh, Shannon. I love you.
But too late.