Cage of Night (11 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Thanksgiving came and went in the usual way. Mom slaved away in the kitchen all morning, we had our feast, then Dad, Josh and I settled in to the living room to watch some serious football.

I had trouble concentrating though. All I could think of was what Garrett had said to me about Cindy asking him to the Christmas dance.

The next day, I became a criminal.

There was a new state law that prohibited one citizen from following another citizen. The anti-stalker law had been voted in after two women, in the same week, had both been killed by stalkers.

I was a stalker.

The first night, I only followed her for an hour. She led me out to the mall. I waited thirty, forty minutes for her to reappear but then got so bored that I just drove on home.

The second night, I got more adventurous. She went to a movie with three girlfriends. Once she was inside the Cineplex, I drove over to a tavern, drank two slow beers and played a little bumper pool, and then eased back out to the movie house just about the time the film was ending.

Cindy and her friends went to get a pizza. I guess I was mostly trying to see if she met up with Garrett any place. She didn't, not in the half hour I sat down the street from the pizza place.

The third night, I knew right away something was going to happen.

She drove straight from her house to a city park that had been closed down for the winter. The temperature was just barely 20. The snow flurries were starting to get serious.

Following her wasn't easy.

The park was heavily forested and the roads narrow. Even if I hung back as far as a half mile, she'd be able to see me in her rear view.

The park looked lonesome, all shorn tree limbs and empty tennis courts and battened-down concession stands.

Where was she going?

She went all the way through the park and then turned down a short gravel road that led to the boat docks.

A few houseboats bobbed darkly on the cold water. A stray dog, hungry and sad, sniffed around the rusty door of one of the boats.

She parked and got out of the car and walked down to the dock.

She looked small and vulnerable against the winter night, bobbing up and down with the turbulent water.

I'd parked my car behind a copse of trees on the hill above and looked down on her now with my binoculars.

The car appeared without warning, headlights garish in the darkness.

As it passed me, going down the steep slope to the docks, I could see that it was a police car.

The car stopped right at the waterline. He cut the beams down to the fog lights.

When he got out, he stretched lazily, not seeming to acknowledge her in any way.

Then he strolled over to the walk and started across the bobbing boards toward her, a kind of lazy insolence in his step. In just a month on the force, Garrett had already become the worst sort of cop.

He took her in his arms and kissed her.

It was that sudden.

He walked up to her, slid his arms around her, brought her to him, and kissed her.

For a long moment, they were one in the night, two darknesses fused.

Then they separated and started walking together toward the far end of the dock, their bodies finding the rhythms of the chopping waters, undulating in a way that was almost comic.

They didn't seem to be looking at each other as they conversed. They just walked and talked. No touching. No more kisses.

When they came to the end of the boards, they stopped and stared out across the water to the bluffs silhouetted on the far side of the river.

This time, she took him in her arms. I could almost feel the smooth touch of her fingers on the back of my head as she pulled me to her for a kiss. I could taste her mouth again, her sex, see the way the moonlight painted her naked breasts in the back seat of the car. It had been like a space capsule, my little car, us all snug and warm inside of it, her loving me as she'd loved no others even if she had given them her body—a space capsule blissfully lost in space, just the two of us, for all eternity.

And now she was bringing Garrett to her as she'd brought me to her.

That queasy mixture of rage and grief worked through my stomach again.

I leaned against the cold black tree and thought how foolish and pathetic I must look—spying on a girl who no longer cared anything about me.

I left.

Got in my car and left.

She could have him, then.

There was nothing I could do about it anyway.

By the time I got home, a bitter wind had swept down from the hills. In my room I pulled out the skin magazine and tried to interest myself in that but I was beyond the lonely solace of masturbation.

I couldn't read, either.

I just lay there with the light out wanting to cry but I couldn't even do that.

She was lost to me, forever.

"Oh, Lord," Mrs. Myles said, and started crying.

In high school we studied a playwright named Henrik Ibsen. He believed that there is a good kind of lying and a bad kind of lying. The good kind is when you keep something from someone so as not to hurt his feelings. Or you invent something to tell him so he'll feel better.

Mr. Myles had stopped by the store again that day—three days following my last glimpse of Cindy at the boat dock—and asked me if I could stop over at their place tonight.

David Myles had been popular because he'd been a good looking football star, not because his parents had money. They lived in a fading crackerbox in one of the town's first housing developments. The living room was surprisingly cheery, the couch and arm chairs in good condition. The walls were a bright buff blue, complementing the deeper blue of the furnishings. There was a bookcase filled with book club bestsellers. From the kitchen came the pleasant smells of a good dinner.

Mr. and Mrs. Myles vaguely resembled each other. They were both worn looking, and every word they spoke was filled with apology. He wore a cardigan sweater and a white shirt and slacks. She wore a ruffled white blouse and dark slacks. They looked like two people who'd played parents a long time ago in a fifties sitcom. Strapping David Myles really must have come from their recessive genes.

The moment she started crying, Mr. Myles leaned across the couch and put his arm around her.

I wondered if I'd done the right thing.

I'd been here twenty minutes, giving them a highly cleaned-up version of that terrible Saturday night. Good lies, mostly of omission.

But then I decided to tell a few lies for their sake. And so when Mrs. Myles asked me, "Did he say anything about us?" I said, "He said he wished he'd been a better son, and that he loved you very much."

But now that I saw her sobbing, I wondered if I'd done the right thing after all.

Mr. Myles got her calmed down and she looked over at me and said, "He really said that?"

"Yes, he did."

"That's what people didn't understand about him."

"Ma'am?"

"How sweet he was. Inside, I mean."

"Yes, ma'am."

"They just saw the aggressive football star."

"Yes, ma'am."

"They didn't see the sensitivity and the caring."

"Yes, ma'am."

"He really was a good boy," Mr. Myles said. "A lot of people didn't know that."

"It was her," Mrs. Myles said, fingering the brooch that she wore on the front of her ruffled white blouse. "That Cindy Brasher."

"I guess I don't know what you mean, ma'am."

"My wife thinks that she got David to believe all sorts of crazy things, and that that was why he snapped and—Well, why it all happened." He gave her a tiny hug again, as if to second her theory.

"What sort of crazy things?" I said.

"All sorts of crazy things. You should hear the tapes. Right, George?"

He nodded. "David always had a good, level head on his shoulders but then he started acting really—" He shook his head. "And it started when he met that Brasher girl. Started right away, too."

"We could barely recognize our own son," Mrs. Myles said, "the way he was carrying on."

"You mentioned tapes, Mrs. Myles."

"On his little tape recorder. He used it instead of a journal."

I see.

"We didn't find them till the other night," Mr. Myles said.

"We tried to give them to the Chief of Police but he wasn't interested." For the first time, she sounded not only sad and angry but bitter. "You listen to those tapes and you'll see what we're talking about."

"I'd
like
to hear them, Mrs. Myles."

She glanced up sorrowfully at her husband. She was speaking to me but she didn't take her eyes from him. "Wait till you hear him start talking about the well."

I knew better than to act disturbed or excited. I just said, "I really would like to hear them, Mrs. Myles. I feel a kind of—bond, I guess—with David. After Saturday night—"

She nodded solemnly.

"There was no reason for that Garrett to kill him, either," she said. "David didn't have a weapon."

I didn't want to tell her that I'd called out to Garrett. It would only make her feel worse, and there was no solution for it, anyway.

"You ever been out there?" Mr. Myles said.

"Out there?"

"To that old cabin in the Hampton woods."

"I guess so," I said, casually as possible. "When I was a kid."

"There's on old well out there," Mr. Myles said.

"He became obsessed with it," Mrs. Myles said.

"And that's the right word for it, too," Mr. Myles said. "Just wait till you hear these tapes. I really believe my son was clinically insane at the time of his death."

"And she did it, that Brasher girl," Mrs. Myles said. "She did it. Putting all the crazy stuff in his head."

We talked for another fifteen minutes, and then Mr. Myles went and got two tape cassettes, dropped them into a manila envelope, and handed them over to me.

"You tell me if this doesn't sound like a boy who's clinically insane," he said.

By the time I reached the door, Mrs. Myles was sobbing again.

CHAPTER FOUR

I started following Cindy again two days later.

During that time, she met Garrett four different times, twice at the mall, once at a closed skating rink, once in a parking lot behind an abandoned warehouse. At the warehouse, they got into some very heavy sex. In the front seat of his cop car, no less. The way she was straddling him, I was pretty sure they were doing the deed.

All the time I followed her, I had David Myles' cassette tapes playing on the portable player on my front seat.

I could see why his parents had been so disturbed, and why they thought he had gone insane.

He spent most of his time talking about the nightmares he'd had ever since he'd gone to the well with Cindy.

He saw alien creatures, he saw a strange aircraft, he saw an old man, one hundred years ago, lowering an infant into the well.

And he saw himself in a mirror transformed into a creature that made him scream.

Over and over again, he talked about one night at the well, Cindy standing next to him, when he saw a blue glow deep down in the well.

He talked about how the glow was very hot, made him begin sweating in fact, and seemed to coat his skin with an invisible but faintly sticky coat of moisture.

Then he talked about begging Cindy not to make him go back to the well anymore.

That's how he expressed it.

That she was "making him" go. As if she had this power over him.

Toward the end of the second tape, he began to disintegrate completely.

He became so psychotic he couldn't tell the difference between his nightmares and reality.

He mentioned setting fire to a school bus filled with young children and watching it burn.

He mentioned smothering his mother to death in her sleep, and then disemboweling his father with a butcher knife.

He mentioned raping a ten year old girl.

He was tormented by the fact that he couldn't tell for sure if these things had happened or not.

I must have listened to the tapes ten times in three days. Some of it I got used to, some of it I didn't.

The crying was the worst of it. I kept thinking of how he'd been in the car right before he died, the sudden weeping. He sounded like that on the tape. It was terror, that's what I was listening to, and it scared me.

Josh stood in my doorway. He said something but I couldn't hear him.

I lay on my bed with the headphones on, listening to David Myles' tape.

I took the headphones off.

"I'm sorry, Josh. What'd you say?"

"I said that must be some great tape, the way you've been listening to it the last couple days. You going to let me hear it?"

I figured he might ask me about the tape I played over and over so I was ready with my answer. "It's disco."

"Oh, bullshit," he said. "No, really. Big hits of the '70s."

"Disco sucks."

"Yeah, I read that on a bumper sticker."

"You're really listening to disco?"

"Yeah, I really am."

He shook his head. "Well, I guess I don't need to hear it then."

I smiled. "Sorry."

He leaned against the doorway. He wasn't just looking at me, he was examining me. "How you doing?"

"Oh, pretty good."

"You haven't been around much lately."

"Yeah. I know."

"The folks're kind of worried about you."

"I'm fine."

"They think you're still pretty depressed about Cindy Brasher."

"I guess I am. At least a little."

"You look real tired."

"I'm fine, Josh. Honest."

"You hear who she's going on with?"

"Uh-huh."

"He's a fucking dork."

"Yeah, he is. But then so am I."

"You're not a dork. You're a dweeb. And there's a difference."

"Oh, yeah, like what?" I laughed. "Well, a dweeb can change."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. If somebody wants to take the time and energy to show a dweeb how to be cool, a dweeb can make it, eventually. But a dork—"

"Hopeless?"

"Dork is a state of mind. At least the way I see it. No matter how hard a dork tries to change, he can't."

"That's good to know."

"This is serious shit, brother. I hope you're paying attention."

"So what you've been doing, with the fashion tips and everything, is—"

"—trying to undweeb you."

"Well, I appreciate it."

"But there's no hope for Garrett and Cindy's out of her mind to go out with him. He thinks he's king shit, the way he struts around all the time. The kids think he's dork number one."

"I'll let him know your feelings."

"I ain't afraid of him, brother. Not even with that big Magnum of his. In fact, all the kids on the team think somebody's going to take that gun of his away from him and put it up his ass."

"Now there's a pleasant image."

He didn't say anything for a moment, then. "I'm on the yearbook committee with Cindy. I'm going to have a little talk with her."

"No," I said, "please don't."

"I just want to find out what's going on. Why she dumped you."

"It'll really piss me off if you bring it up to her."

He shrugged. "Just trying to help."

"I know. And I appreciate it. But just let things lie."

"Then you let Mom and Dad know you're all right."

"I'll do that. I promise."

He nodded to the tape recorder and then did a little imitation disco dance. "You going to start wearing platform shoes and stuff like that?"

"I figured I could borrow a couple pairs of yours."

"The red ones, fine. The pink ones leave alone."

"I'll remember that."

He started to walk away and then stopped. "You sure you don't want me to say anything to Cindy?"

"Positive."

"I could tell her about the difference between dorks and dweebs."

"Then she'd come running to me, huh?"

"She would if you weren't wearing platform shoes."

"Thanks, Josh."

"I just want you to be happy, man."

"I know. And I will be. I'll get over this." He nodded and left the room. I put the headphones on and started playing the tape again.

I'd left David Myles in mid-scream.