Read The Ninth Step Online

Authors: Grant Jerkins

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense

The Ninth Step (6 page)

BOOK: The Ninth Step
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Principal Cleage, around bites of chicken wing, talked to a
group of teachers from the school. They all laughed at something Cleage said.

Jane Ketchum emerged from the kitchen and grabbed Edgar by the hand, extracting him from his chair. In the kitchen was Jane’s husband, Steve, as well as their children: Tyler, seven, and Savannah, four. Judy had wanted children from day one, but, Edgar remembered, she had never once shown resentment over Jane’s children. Judy had attended each of their births and spoiled the children as a grandmother might.

Jane presented Edgar with a large packing carton. She opened it and showed him that it was packed full with Tupperware containers of individual meals she had prepared for him.

Tyler grabbed one of the containers and pried off its lid to peek inside. Jane snatched it from him. “Goddamn it, Tyler, stop it!” Edgar had heard her say worse to the children. “Take Savannah outside to play. And stay away from the pool.”

Tyler complied, taking his sister’s hand and heading out the back door. “I’ll go watch them,” Steve said, and followed them out.

Jane began transferring the containers from the carton to the freezer.

“Listen, Edgar, each one of these has a complete meal in it, okay? All you have to do is put it in the microwave. Ten minutes if it’s frozen, five if it’s thawed.”

She showed him the contents of one of the containers. It contained pale turkey, tired-looking green peas, and a blob of mashed potatoes. To Edgar, it didn’t look very good at all.

“Now I’m going to bring you some more in a couple of weeks. And we’re going to help you any way we can.”

“Jane, this isn’t necessary. Judy was your sister. You’re not—”

“Goddamn it, Edgar! Just let me help you.”

“You’re not responsible for her husband. And you have your own husband. And kids.”

Jane stuck her fingers in her ears and said, “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. I’m not listening to you. You’re getting this food, so shut up about it, okay?”

Jane hugged him, but Edgar didn’t really respond.

17
AN ACCUMULATION
OF RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES

One of the cars lining Edgar’s street, just beyond the mass of mourner vehicles, was a black Honda Insight.

Helen watched people come and go. Her fingers played lightly along the red welt around her neck.

Helen started the car and drove away. She left the old section of town and entered the main strip with its shopping plazas. She drove to Jerry’s Liquor Warehouse.

Inside, Helen pushed a metal shopping cart up and down the wide aisles. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed high overhead. The harsh light was unkind to the scabbed ring around her neck. She had closed the veterinary clinic for a few days. When she reopened, she was hoping the injury would have healed enough that she could conceal it with makeup. The scab
ring was too high up on her neck to conceal with clothing unless she alternated between turtleneck sweaters and Elizabethan collars.

She did not remember doing it, but the evidence when she woke up had been self-explanatory.

Seemingly every kind of booze known to man was on display. Whiskey, gin, rum, tequila, bourbon, brandy, scotch, schnapps, and, of course, vodka. Helen had decided it was time to take a break from vodka. It was affecting her judgment. Plus the blackouts. Oh, and killing somebody. Mustn’t forget that. Or that trying-to-kill-yourself thing. Right, the suicide attempt. Vodka was definitely not agreeing with her.

Helen selected a bottle of light rum and a bottle of scotch. Her mother had drunk scotch. She approached the checkout aisle and then changed her mind. She returned the rum and the scotch. She picked up a liter bottle of vodka. But not Absolut. It must be something about the Absolut that was warping her mind. Vodka had never bothered her before. Absolut was made in Russia. It was made from grain. She was pretty sure the Chernobyl disaster had occurred in Russia, or Ukraine—which amounted to the same thing. All that radioactive waste was released when the nuclear reactor melted down. But no, Absolut was made in Sweden. Said it right on the bottle. But weren’t all those countries kind of clustered right there together? She was pretty sure they were. Helen remembered reading that four hundred times more fallout was released from Chernobyl than had been created by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A giant cloud of it had drifted all over the top half of Europe. And radioactivity
lasted for hundreds of years. Thousands. If the grain that was used to produce Absolut was grown in Sweden or Ukraine or Russia, who was to say that it couldn’t possibly be contaminated grain? Who was to say that her mind hadn’t been poisoned with an accumulation of radioactive isotopes? It had all started with the schizonucleosis. Then the blackouts. It made sense. Sure, it was probably low doses, but when it came to radiation, accumulation was the key.
Accumulation
. Did the Swedes even drink Absolut? Or was it all exported to the United States? No, they wouldn’t push that poison on their own people. Sell it to the stupid Americans. They’ll drink anything.

Something was certainly going on with her. She knew it sounded crazy, but alcohol, and in particular vodka, had never been a true problem for her. She was functional. She had always been functional.

Helen chose Grey Goose vodka. It was made in France. The French knew what the fuck they were doing. And they were upwind from the radiation cloud. The more she thought about it, the angrier she grew.

She took her Grey Goose and placed it in front of the bearded clerk at the checkout counter. The man, who had apparently been observing her, said, “Tough choice?”

Helen felt herself getting ready to unload on the man. Say something smart and ugly. But the anger she had felt was followed by relief. She realized that maybe the things that had been happening to her were very likely not truly her fault. She was a victim as well.
Accumulation.

She shook her head and handed the man her debit card.

18
WEIRD SCI-FI SHIT

The television was tuned to Animal Planet. Helen had decided that she didn’t need any more weird sci-fi shit fucking with her mind. It put ideas in your head.

She watched the television, the unopened vodka bottle resting next to a drinking glass on the coffee table in front of her. Mitzi, her body on the floor and her head in Helen’s lap, looked up at her owner. One of the cats, Molly, a black-and-white longhair with hypnotic green eyes (she was the black half of The Yellow and Black Attack), jumped on the coffee table and wove expertly between the glass and bottle of Grey Goose. Helen chose to believe that it was the cat that had drawn her attention to the vodka. She chose to believe that she had forgotten that it was there, but now that she had been reminded about it, there
was certainly nothing wrong with having a drink in the privacy of your own home.

She deserved it. It was hard work covering up vehicular homicide.

And stressful.

In fact, it was Absolut Murder—LOL ha-ha-ha-ha-ha ROFLMFAO.

She needed a drink. Deserved a drink. She was going to have a drink.

Then she could think about it. Then she could allow her mind to reflect. But she forced herself to think about it anyway.

When she thought of the taking of a human life, what it meant, Helen found the whole concept bigger than her mind was capable of processing. She simply could not internalize that particular truth.

You could perpetrate all manner of violence—the most unspeakable of horrors—against another human being, but in the end, they were still left as human beings. The spark of life remained. A rape victim could be stripped of her dignity, her sense of safety, and left a shattered shut-in, her life irrevocably altered—but still, she did have life. That had not been taken.

Parents of brain-damaged children (casualties of sporting accidents, car wrecks, drug overdoses) still had their children even if the once-vibrant sons and daughters they had formerly cherished were gone forever, wiped out with a bit of cerebral tissue, wisped away with the oxygen that had been denied. They still had a living thing to touch and hold and kiss.

But once life was gone, all was lost. There was no hope.

Had it not been her own sense of life, her own self-preservation that had driven her to conceal what she had done? To cleanse herself of culpability. To say to the world,
No, not me, I had nothing to do with this
.

And now, she only wanted to cleanse her mind of this unspeakable burden. Alcohol, the most versatile of the chemical solvents, was, Helen knew, the preeminent Windex of the mind. Albeit a temporary one. Yes, alcohol gave a streak-free shine to even the most occluded of brains. It dislodged the dirt. And if the grime of misdeeds was back in the morning, sullying one’s placidity yet again, why, there was always the next night, wasn’t there? Ask any housewife: Things don’t stay clean forever; you have to keep cleaning them over and over.

But killing another human being was different, wasn’t it? There was no escaping it. The booze couldn’t clean that knowledge away. Drinking only magnified. It opened the chasm. It gave you the courage to look. It made your mind capable of processing the truth. And that was too much to accept.

Needed a drink. Deserved a drink. Going to have a drink.

There was no escape.

Helen snatched the bottle off the table and carried it to the kitchen. All of the animals followed her. Helen stood over the kitchen sink. She studied the bottle. Then she peered into the drain of the sink.

She took the bottle back to the living room and sat down with it. She pressed it to her forehead, feeling the smooth cool
glass. It was like bone. She rubbed the bottle over her face, smearing her makeup.

Helen carried the bottle to her bedroom and climbed into bed still holding it. She cradled it like an infant.

Many hours later, Helen slept.

19
SWOLLEN BLACK BODIES

An oily, foul-smelling sweat glistened sickly on her forehead. It covered her body. It stung the corners of her eyes. Helen could feel her pulse in her wrists, hot and insistent. She just couldn’t figure out what to do with herself. If she wasn’t going to have a drink, what was there to do? What exactly would she do? There was no answer. It was like looking into an abyss. And yes, the abyss looked back. The abyss wondered just what the fuck was she going to do with herself if she wasn’t going to drink. What was there to do? How could she exist?

That was the beginning. The existential puzzle of the dry drunk. And there was no answer. Except the obvious. You do
nothing. If you don’t drink, you do nothing. She’d done a sober night here, an alcohol-free day there. Mostly to repair. To recuperate. But this was different. This was staring into the infinite despair of a life without drinking. Life without the cure for it. Where was the hope? Where was the pleasure? What was the point? There was no point.

When the hallucinations started, Helen denied them. There was simply no way she could be having hallucinations. It was not possible. She was not
that kind
of alcoholic. This had to be something more akin to a visual disturbance. A waking dream. She was
functional
, goddamn it! She was not some fucking grizzled stew bum.

But the spiders disagreed. They were emerging from the shadows, high in the corners where the walls and ceiling met. Just crawling out of the darkness with thick, juice-plumped black legs, dragging their bloated, venom-laden bodies down the wall, making their way to Helen’s feet—which she was, for some reason, unable to move. She watched in frozen horror as they inched up her legs, and up her arms, their dripping stingers at the ready.
But no
, some part of her mind reminded her,
this is not real. Spiders don’t have stingers.
Except these do
, another part of her mind answered.
These are special. These were incubated in the hot radioactive dregs of discarded vodka bottles. Mutations hatched for you. Borne of you.

Still unable to move, Helen watched the black hairy stingers penetrating her flesh. But there was no pain. No pain because
they were not stingers after all. They were some kind of unnatural proboscides. Their function was to suck blood. To feed from her. And now she could feel it, except the sensation was not of something leaving her body, of something being drained from her—but of something going in, something being left behind. They were laying eggs.
Eggs.
Beneath her skin, laying eggs. She was the host.

Helen’s long-deceased Uncle Billy knelt in front of her, his kind face alight with a comforting smile.
You can move now
, he told her.
Just brush them off. That’s right, sweetgirl, just brush them right off. They can’t hurt you. You’re okay.

And he was right. She could move her body. And the spiders flicked right off. No problem.
Oh, thank you, Uncle Billy.

You’re welcome, sweetgirl. Those spiders can’t hurt you.

No, they can’t.

From his kneeling position in front of her, Uncle Billy held out his hand. Helen looked down at it. His hand was thick, the fingers plump and callused. Helen took his hand. And they were in the water together. She was just a little girl. This was a memory. She could see the dense mat of curly gray hair that covered Uncle Billy’s chest. It was coarse and wet with chlorinated pool water. Under the hair he had saggy man-boobs. He was just an old man. Helen floated on her back in the water; Billy’s thick arms (also matted in dense gray hair) supported her, kept her from sinking. And she was scared. She was scared of sinking. She couldn’t swim. Billy was teaching her. Teaching her how to swim. She trusted him. It felt good to be in his arms. Safe. He took one hand away and told her to kick her legs.
See, you’re
practically swimming now. Just keep kicking. One at a time. Hold your arms out. See.

She was moving through the water. Gliding. Swimming. Just Billy’s one arm supporting her. She was swimming! Then the hand Billy had taken away was on her thigh. Moving up. It found its way to the V between her legs. Grabbing her roughly. Ugly gouging fingers. Rough and hurtful. Why?
Be quiet
, he told her.
Just be quiet.
And he pulled her open. His fat fingers opening her. Then the spiders came out. The spiders came out and their swollen black bodies covered them both.

BOOK: The Ninth Step
2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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