Valknut: The Binding (30 page)

Someone from outside.

He stopped his attack and let his arms drop
to his sides. Sharon roared and landed a blow to his head. He
didn’t move to defend himself. Closing his eyes, he felt her fists
bloody his nose and loosen a tooth, but he told himself this
couldn’t be his wife. This wasn’t his bathroom. There was no cold,
damp tile beneath his bare feet. Those little girls weren’t his
daughters. Jessie would be eight now, and Alexandra would be
eleven.

This couldn’t be real.

The blows grew weaker and disappeared. The
screams faded along with the smell of grape bubble bath, and he
could feel the shoes on his feet and the hug of a belt and bow tie.
He opened his eyes, certain he would find himself under the
cardboard, safe within the ring of Ashley’s favorite ride. But he
was wrong.

He was back in his house. It was empty except
for the litter of a hasty move. He bent and picked up a crumpled
paper. Straightening it, he saw that it was one of Jessie’s
drawings—a crazy-looking girl with wild hair and spaghetti legs.
There was a turtle in the bottom corner. All her pictures had a
turtle somewhere. He folded the paper carefully and put it in his
coat pocket. When he looked up again, Sharon stood before him. This
time, she was not alone. Bill Sutter stood beside her, one arm
draped possessively around her shoulders.

Fat Bill. Jovial Bill. Bill, his friend. The
man whose life he had saved.

“Yes, Jim,” Sharon said. “I’m leaving you.
Can you blame me? Bill has a bigger income, a bigger house.
Lord knows he has a bigger brain.”

She nibbled at Bill’s neck. “In fact, pretty
much everything about him is bigger.”

She stuck her tongue in Bill’s ear. It was
far longer than it should have been. Sweat broke out on Bill’s
forehead. He licked his lips and pulled Sharon closer. She wrapped
her arms around him and leered at Jim.

“Jessie and Alexandra have a new father
now.”

She tilted her head and her tongue
disappeared into Bill’s mouth.

Jungle Jim’s hands balled into fists inside
his pockets. The back of his neck burned and the air seemed too
thin to breathe. 
This never happened
, his inner
voice insisted. 
Sharon left without saying anything at
all.
 But that small thought was lost in violent
emotion.

For years, loss and rejection had sliced
Jim’s heart with the sharp blade of grief. He wandered town to
town, trying to fill the emptiness by bringing laughter to others,
laughter that rang hollowly in his chest. But Sharon’s betrayal had
awakened a dark animal in him, one that sneered at those weaker
emotions. One that howled for revenge.

He awoke.

This time, Fenrir allowed it, holding Jim
tightly in the prison of his delusions. Jim struggled to his feet.
Fenrir stepped back and let him rise. “Yes, Jim. Go to her...kill
her.”

It was a long walk to Bill’s house, but Jim
found he wasn’t tired any more. The closer he came to Bill’s house,
the angrier he became, until his mind burned white-hot. Anyone on
the streets that late would have seen a lone man dressed in shabby,
whimsical clothes with the look of murder on his face. After his
passing, they might have felt a chill, as though Death himself
followed close behind.

Bill lived on a street lined with young maple
trees and an occasional old elm. His house was a small bungalow
with beige stucco siding and trim the color of dried blood. The
windows were dark. They were asleep, then. The girls were tucked
into the smaller bedroom for the night, and Bill would be in the
master bedroom—with Sharon.

Jim crossed the grass and stepped into the
front landscaping. The moon broke through the clouds, lighting his
way. He found a small resin frog nestled in the mulch between two
bushes and bent to pick it up. The mixed scent of cedar and roses
stopped him. He loved Bill’s roses, with all the different colors
and blooms the size of his palm. Ashley loved the white ones
best.

He nearly gave it up then. Bill could have
Sharon. Jim could go back to the jungle and have some coffee with
Soo. But a sharp image of Sharon’s leering face intruded, the false
memory more real than the smell of any flower.

Jim snatched up the frog, gripping it so
tightly that the stone-hard legs cut into his fingers. Then he
grasped the upper half, and lifted. The house key lay inside,
glinting in the moonlight. The key to hell.

Jungle Jim stood at the front door for a long
time.

“Why am I here?”

Why am I here...why am I
here...why...why?

For a moment, the layers of memory separated
in his mind. Confusing and contradictory images fought for
prominence—the sorrow in Sharon’s eyes as she leaned over his
bandaged head in the hospital...Sharon’s snake-like tongue
thrusting into Bill’s ear...playing elephant with his daughters on
his back...the hatred and revulsion in Sharon’s eyes as she
snatched 3-year-old Jessie from his arms...having dinner at Bill’s
house and telling Ashley a bedtime story...his own daughters
clinging to Bill’s legs and looking at Jim in fear.

It always came back to that—his children. His
baby girls. They were his, and she had taken them.

The jumbled memories slammed together into
one complete set. The contradictions were gone. There were only
betrayals and spite and little hatreds. He saw Sharon in bed with
Bill...the sneer on Sharon’s face...the sweat on Bill’s forehead. A
furnace burned in Jim’s chest. His breath came in short explosions.
The house key grew hot in his hand. He reached for the doorknob.
And stopped.

“No.”

He jerked his hand back as though the knob
burned red hot. The key lay in his palm, gleaming innocently in the
moonlight. It didn’t matter what was real, or why Sharon had left
him, or who the girls now called “daddy.”

He was Jungle Jim Tuttle and he would not do
this thing.

He flung the key into the yard and turned
away from the house. The false memories crumbled and fell away. He
was whole again, free of the evil that had invaded his mind. He
hugged himself and smiled up at the moon.

“We beat it, Petey!” he howled. “There ain’t
no foolin’ Jungle Jim.”

Then he clamped his hands over his mouth. He
wanted to laugh and sing and do a silly jig, but not here. He
didn’t want to wake Ashley. Maybe Soo would still be awake back at
the jungle. She could play her guitar while he sang. He tried to
take a step away from the house, but his feet wouldn’t move.

Shocked, he looked down at his stubborn
shoes. His hand raised on its own, clenched around something hard.
One by one, the fingers uncurled, though he didn’t will them to.
The house key lay in the palm of his hand.

Horrified, he tried to fling it away again,
but it stayed in his hand. His traitorous feet turned him back
toward the house. The hand reached for the doorknob. This time, he
couldn’t stop himself. The key slid smoothly into the lock and the
door opened.

Moonlight streamed through the picture
window, highlighting the blocky shape of Bill’s armchair to the
left of the door. A couch ran along the far wall. At its elbow
yawned the hallway that led to the bedrooms.

The floor was covered with what looked like a
hobo jungle for Barbie and all her friends. Jim’s feet threaded
relentlessly through the clutter. He fought his rebelling body
until sweat stood out on his face, but the dark arch of the hallway
loomed closer. That’s when the true nightmare began. One after
another, hideous images paraded through his mind. Images of himself
with Ashley, torturing her, doing unspeakable things, finally
throwing her limp body into the Mississippi. He tried to close his
eyes, to shut out the visions, but how could he escape pictures in
his own mind?

A scream swelled in his throat, but his mouth
wouldn’t let it out. No! he wanted to say. I never did that! I
wouldn’t...

Yet these weren’t false memories. As sure as
he knew his own name, he knew he was being shown the things
he 
would 
do. And, just as certain, he knew this
was as much a punishment for Bill as for himself, though he didn’t
know what for.

He was in the hallway. The moonlight didn’t
reach this far. He could only see the dim outlines of doorways, the
dark rectangle of a painting on the wall. He knew the painting
showed a lighthouse on a rocky hillside. Bill’s grandmother had
painted it from a magazine picture. Jim stared hard at it now,
wishing it would light up and burn the darkness from his brain.
Then he was past it, and the hallway only got darker.

He was at Ashley’s doorway. Drawings were
taped all over its surface, obscured by darkness, like windows he
couldn’t see through. His hand reached for the doorknob. He willed
it to stop, and for a moment it seemed to work. He became a statue,
unable to go back, unwilling to go forward.

But only for a moment.

Yellow eyes burned in his mind, shredding his
will like torn tissue, and he knew he couldn’t fight this thing.
His eyes grew hot, casting yellow light on one of Ashley’s
drawings—a crayon bird flying on impossibly small wings. He grasped
the door. His trapped screams echoed through his mind, and behind
the screams he heard the howl of animal laughter.

He was in Ashley’s room. A blue canary
nightlight cast a dim light on her sleeping face. The candy smell
of a child’s perfume hung in the air. Her room was as messy as the
living room, her desk and floor littered with toys and dirty
clothes. He lifted a pair of leggings from the back of her desk
chair and stretched them between his hands. Ashley muttered in her
sleep. He froze and watched her roll to her side, her white-blond
hair tinted blue by the nightlight. She cuddled around her stuffed
bunny, but did not wake up.

The yellow eyes in his mind glowed brighter.
Slowly, he wrapped the ends of the leggings around each fist. His
feet tread softly toward the bed. Heat spread from his groin and he
felt himself grow hard.

His mind began to gibber in horrified panic.
Tears ran down his face—the only action that was his own. He
struggled for control as he leaned over the girl. This was Ashley,
the same age as Jessie. Ashley, who ran to him when he came for a
visit, who didn’t care that his brain didn’t work quite right, who
loved him in his shabby clothes, who would hug him through the
smell of the railroads. A child, a baby, and he loved her more than
he loved himself. Anger surged in him, real and all his own.

I am Jungle Jim Tuttle and I will not
do this thing.

He built an image of himself in his mind, a
clown in a bow tie and yellow shoes, with laugh lines around his
eyes and a heart that beat in its own time. A man who would die to
protect a child. The Jungle Jim in his mind reached into an
imaginary duffle bag and rummaged through silk scarves and decks of
cards, discarding Mexican jumping beans, a hand buzzer, and a
squeaky nose. Then he found what he needed.

He pulled forth a plastic flower and faced
the glowing eyes. Foreign, wolfish laughter filled his mind. He
ignored it and stepped closer to the eyes, holding out the flower.
A tube dangled from it, with a bulb on the end. Gathering all his
will, all his need and love, he squeezed the bulb. A thin stream of
water sprayed out.

The eyes blinked.

Jungle Jim wrenched control of his body. He
had only an instant, but an instant was enough. He staggered
backward, crashing into the desk chair. The chair tipped over and
fell onto a toy piano, which began to play a tinny version of
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Before he could move again, the
yellow eyes were back. His body no longer belonged to him.

That’s all right, he thought. I don’t need it
anymore.

Ashley sat up in bed and stared wildly around
the room. Jim stood next to her desk, a dark figure to the child,
face obscured in shadow except for glowing yellow eyes. She
gathered the covers to her chin and screamed the thin dog-whistle
scream of a child. Jim crossed the room and clasped a hand over her
mouth, but the piano played on and on.

The bedroom door burst open.

There was a pause. The piano segued to “Mary
Had a Little Lamb.” Then there was a man’s shout and a flash and a
loud noise. Jim’s body spun around. A second noise. Jungle Jim
slammed into the closet door and slid to the floor.

The laughter in his head became a howl of
rage rampaging through his mind like a mad dog. Jim smiled, his
face his own again. He was free.

***

Bill fumbled at the wall next to the door and
switched on the light. He kept his weapon trained on the figure
sprawled by the closet. The guy didn’t move. Good thing. Bill’s
hands were shaking so badly he’d probably miss if he had to shoot
again. He risked a glance at Ashley. She huddled on the bed,
sobbing into Bun Bun’s matted fur, but she seemed all right. Relief
washed through him, leaving him weak. He lowered the gun and sank
to his knees.

But in one small part of his mind, the place
where Fenrir dwelled with his threatening yellow eyes, Bill knew he
would have been almost as relieved if she had died.

The thought sickened him.

“Everything’s all right now, baby,” he said,
though he knew it wasn’t. Not for him. “You just stay right
there.”

The man by the closet groaned and raised one
knee as though trying to sit up. Bill lifted the gun, his finger
tensed on the trigger. From the clothes, it looked like some kind
of bum. He wondered how the guy got into his house. Then he saw the
shoes. Bright yellow, from the eyelets to the soles.

“Jim!” He dropped the gun and climbed to his
feet. “Oh, my God—what have I done?”

Jim lay still again, his face ashen. His
polka-dotted bow tie had twisted so that one loop touched his chin.
His jacket had fallen open. Blood bubbled from two soupy patches on
his chest, already soaking into the carpet. He looked into Bill’s
face and smiled.