The Bleeding Season (25 page)

“Fucking wonderful,” Rick said.  “This is nuts, what does any of this have to do—”

“The body was left sitting up, the head turned completely around to the point where the neck was broken,” Donald went on.  “The police felt it was more than likely tied to one of the satanic cults known to be operating in the area at that time.  Apparently some were very violent.  This was never proved, but no other murders took place with these same specifics.  According to the info on the site regarding both cases, police believe the killer was either apprehended for some other crime and was sent to prison, moved elsewhere and continued his killing in another location, or died.”

“They had two of the three right,” I said.

“We have no way of knowing if those murders were committed by Bernard,” Donald said, “but let’s face it: the similarities between those murders and what little we know about the murder here in town is disturbing to say the least.  While they’re holding out on some of the specifics, we do know that the woman killed here suffered a very violent death and that her body was bled out in another location, a location where she was probably killed before being dumped in the field.  The papers have reported that much.  And they don’t end there.  There’s another consistent aspect to all three killings that’s absolutely chilling.  All three women were single mothers with young male children.”

Rick froze.  “Are you serious?”

“Just like Bernard and his mother,” I said.

“Knowing what we know now, and after listening to Bernard’s tape, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Yes you do, Donald.  We all do.”  I shut out the sudden memory of the woman in the warehouse.  Her eyes had begun to bleed after she’d grabbed hold of me and filled me with those hellish hallucinations.  They had also seemed unnaturally wide.  The way a pair of eyes would if the lids were removed from the face.  “Bernard did it.  He’s guilty as sin.”

“You’re talking almost twenty years ago,” Rick reminded me.  “Come on, this is crazy.  You’re telling me Bernard was killing people for that long and never got caught, never fucked up?
Bernard
?  Yeah, fucking maybe.  Even if he was capable of doing some of this stuff, he couldn’t get out of his own way half the time.”

“He’s got a point.”  Donald put the folder aside.  “Bernard was hardly criminal mastermind material.”

“He didn’t even have his shit together enough to be psycho material,” Rick said.  “None of this adds up.  None of it.”

“It does once you realize that Bernard was more than a criminal, more than a psychopath.”  They looked at me in unison.  “He was evil.”

“Here we go again with this shit,” Rick sighed.

“You’ve changed your tune since the talk we had at Brannigan’s,” I said.  “You were convinced Bernard did this.”

“Yeah, the murder here in town.  Bernard had problems, and maybe we didn’t have any idea how bad they really were.  Maybe he couldn’t take it anymore and one day he snapped and killed this chick.  I can believe that, Alan, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to believe he was some fucking serial killer.”  Rick stomped around the room like a spoiled child then stopped suddenly and glared at me as if another thought had just then occurred to him.  “And I’m sure as hell not ready to believe all this boogieman horseshit.  Bernard was our friend, but he was a huge fucking loser, and we all know it.  He couldn’t do anything right.  He—”

“Remember Julie Henderson?”

His face turned pale as a corpse in winter.  “Yeah, sure, I remember Julie—Brian’s sister.  What about her?”

I killed my drink and let the glass rest in my lap.  “I went to go see her today.”

*   *   *

By the time I was finished telling them all I had learned from Julie, Rick had stopped his incessant pacing and taken up position in the recliner.  Donald remained on the couch next to me throughout, listening quietly, and now stared down into his empty glass with his usual look of isolated sorrow.  I let the silence hold us a while as memories of crucifixes dangling in windows flickered through my mind.

After a while, Donald slowly rose from the couch.  “Well,” he said softly, “who needs another drink?”

I handed him my glass and he headed for the kitchen, moving as if sleepwalking.  Rick hadn’t moved since I finished talking, and was looking everywhere but at me.

Neither of us said a word until Donald returned with my drink.  He remained standing.  It was his turn to pace.  “You believe her, don’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.  “I do.”

The recliner squeaked as Rick pushed himself to his feet.  “OK, look, maybe you didn’t hear, but Julie Henderson has some serious problems herself.”

I nodded.  “And now we know why.”

“But you’re—you’re putting all your faith in some broad that’s out of her fucking mind, Alan.”  Rick looked like he might burst into millions of tiny pieces at any moment.  “The bitch is crazy.  She’s been in and out of nuthouses for years.  Ask anybody in town, they’ll tell you.  Julie Henderson’s a loon.  She had some kind of breakdown or something and—”

“Have you heard a word I just said?”  I stood up.  We were all standing now, three grown men trying to figure out what in the hell to do with ourselves.  I looked to Donald, but he was staring into space as if in a trance.

“Yeah, I heard you,” Rick growled, “I just don’t believe any of this shit.”

“Why not?”

He moved closer to me in a manner that would have felt threatening had he not been so obviously nervous.  “You’re awful quick to sell a lifelong friend down the river, aren’t you?  You believe what some girl with mental problems says about ghosts and goblins and demons and whatever the hell else she was babbling about without even stopping to think that it’s probably all in her demented head.  She’s nuts, Alan, you understand?  She’s fucking insane.”

“You knew, didn’t you.”  There was no doubt I had made a statement, not asked a question.

A spasm-smile wrestled with his face.  “What?”

“You knew.”

“What are you, serious?”

“He told you he raped Julie Henderson, didn’t he?  You two talked about it, fantasized about it like typical hormone-crazed teenage boys, maybe even plotted and planned out how you’d do it.  But you never expected him to actually go through with it, and when he did and he told you, then it was too late to—”    

“You know what, Alan?  Fuck you.”

I took a sip from my drink then placed it on the coffee table.  “No, Rick.  Fuck
you
.”

He was on me so quickly I didn’t have time to react.  Before I knew it he had grabbed hold of my shirt and pushed me clear across the room.  As he slammed me against the wall I grabbed his forearms and tried to loosen his grip, but there was no chance.  I could have hit him, but I didn’t want to escalate it into anything more violent than it already was.  He slammed me a second time and I heard Donald screaming for him to stop as my head snapped back and slapped the wall.  Pain fired from behind my eyes and blossomed across my face.  “Who the fuck are you to accuse me?  I don’t have to take this shit!”

As my vision cleared I saw Donald trying to push himself between us.  Rick let go of me then, pushed his way by Donald and headed for the door.

I regained my balance and stepped away from the wall.

“Are you all right?” Donald looked into my eyes then spun back toward Rick.  “Are you out of your mind?  What the hell is the matter with you?”

Rick stood near the door looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to leave or stay.  Finally he turned back toward us, his anger apparently softened.  “How did…How did you know he told me?”

“I didn’t,” I said.  “I guessed.”

He dropped his head like a reprimanded schoolboy.  “Bernard said a lot of things, you guys know that.  He lied all the time—exaggerated about everything—made himself out to be more than he was.  I never believed half the shit he said and neither did anybody else.”  He raised his eyes to meet mine.  “He told me he made it with Julie Henderson.  He told me that he did it but I didn’t believe him.  Why would I?  Why would I believe him?  I thought it was just more Bernard bullshit.  I blew it off, never thought about it again, you see what I’m saying?”

“This is real, Rick,” I told him.  “It’s all real.”

“I didn’t know,” he said, the last word catching in his throat.  “I swear to Christ, I didn’t know.”

I had never seen such emotion from him, and wasn’t sure what to do.

“Of course you didn’t,” Donald said for me.  “Alan only meant—”

“I shouldn’t have…” Rick reached out as if to touch me, but he was too far away.  “Look, man, I…I’m sorry.  Are you OK?”

I rubbed the back of my neck.  “Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“This’ll destroy us if we let it.”

“Well then we won’t let it,” Donald said quickly.  “We’ll get through this.  We’ll stick together and we’ll get through this.”

“I’m as scared as you guys are, but we can’t deny what’s happening here.”

Rick shook his head.  “But Jesus Christ, dude,
demons
?”

“It’s just like Julie said.  You can’t see evil, but you know it’s there.  Maybe I’m the only one who had visions, but we all had the nightmare.  We all experienced it.  We all felt it.  You gonna stand there and tell me we’re
all
 crazy, Rick?”  I grabbed my drink and powered it down in one swig.  “I’m telling you right now, there’ll be more bodies, more death, and more darkness.  Bernard may be gone, but the evil he used isn’t.”

Donald lit a cigarette.  “Let’s go with the fantastic then and assume it’s true, that this evil is real.  What’s the solution?”

“We find it,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice had become.  “We root it out, get it out of the shadows, into the open and into the light where we can see for ourselves just what in the hell it is we’re dealing with.”

“And then?”

“We kill it.”

CHAPTER 18

In an instant, life can change.  Sometimes it is reduced to fragments, disjointed shards of a once larger and intact whole, strewn about like pieces from a shattered vase.  And those things once striking and beautiful are suddenly rubble, as without warning, existence changes, sometimes irrevocably, sometimes not.  If we’re wise, or even just lucky, these experiences remind us of who we are, and why.  If we’re unlucky, we fade to black.  No explanations, no condolences.

When I got home, Toni was packing, transferring neatly folded items from her bureau to the suitcase without looking at me, without saying a word.  I stood in the doorway to our bedroom and watched, helpless.  “What’s all this supposed to be?” I said.  She shot me a quick, oddly neutral glance, and continued her duties with motions so repetitive and studied they seemed more robotic than human.  “Great timing.  This is the last thing I need right now.”

“The last thing
you
 need.”

“Come on, Toni.”  She stopped then, a tan silk blouse I’d bought her as a birthday present a few years before dangling from her fingers.  “I remember when I got you that,” I said.  “The clerk wanted to know if it was a gift, and I said it was, so she offered to wrap it for me.  I told her—”

“No.  You told her no.”

I nodded.  “Even though I can’t wrap for shit.  Never have gotten the hang of it.  I told the clerk I always wrapped your presents myself anyway.”

Toni pursed her lips to prevent them from trembling.  “And what did she say?”

“She said that was very sweet, that most men would jump at the chance to have a gift wrapped for them, especially men with no talent for doing it themselves.”  I wanted to reach out and pull the blouse from her grasp, or maybe to just hold it with her.  “I told her I wasn’t most men.”

A glint in her eye told me that despite it all, she still believed the same thing.  She turned away, folded the blouse as neatly as her shaking hands would allow and slipped it into the suitcase.  “When I got home from work today, instead of coming right in I went over to one of the benches by the water and watched the ducks and swans for a while.”  She pushed some hair from her face and even smiled a little, though not at me.  “I sat there and smoked a cigarette, and for a little while everything—all the noise and the bullshit—seemed to soften a little, like somebody had lowered the volume.  It was so nice.  There was that feeling in the air—you know the one—when you can actually feel the change in season, you can feel spring slowly becoming summer.  The air changes, the light, everything.  It’s new, but it’s familiar, and I started to think about how spring used to last so much longer when I was a little girl.  Remember when it was more than just a couple weeks?  Nothing stays the same—not even the seasons—yet nothing really changes.  Maybe that’s the whole point.  I watched this one swan gliding along the water and I thought, I could stand up, get into my car right now and drive away.  Just…drive away.  No one would kill me or put me in jail.  I could just slip away and no one could stop me.  If I wanted to do it, I could.  I
could
, and the world wouldn’t even notice.”

“The world never does,” I said.

“It made me wonder why we do what we do, you know?  Why we stay.  Do we do it because it’s the right thing to do, or because we’re afraid of the consequences?”

I found it interesting that she hadn’t included love as a possible reason—on either side of the argument.  “Regardless, you’re leaving town, is that it?”

She shook her head, disappointed.  “You’re such a literalist.”

“Oh, sorry about that.  I figured packing your bags was pretty fucking literal.”  I’d mustered as much sarcasm as I could, and it hardly seemed enough.  “So you’re not leaving town then.  Just me.”

She looked genuinely surprised.  “Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Am
I
 supposed to leave?  I mean, is that what I’m supposed to do?  I’m not sure how this kind of thing works.”

She gave a little shrug.  “Me either.”  She looked so beautiful I could’ve killed her.

“I can’t believe you think this is the way to—”

“You know the little cottage Martha has down by the beach, the one her parents left her?  She said if I needed it for a while I could use it, which is nice of her since she could easily rent it for the entire summer.”