Charnel House (34 page)

Later that night, after they’d been back by the Gateway Shopping Center for his mom’s station wagon—the carnival was dark and quiet, closed for good—and gone home, he had showered and gotten ready for bed. His mother came to the bathroom door while he was brushing his teeth and set a small pink pill on the counter.

“It will help you sleep tonight, if you’re worried about nightmares,” she said.

But it can’t stop the
real
nightmares, Mom. For that I need something like Dad’s gun.

He swallowed the pill and padded down the hall to his bedroom. Before he fell asleep, his father came in and lay down on top of the bedclothes beside him.

“The police called while you were showering,” he said in a soft voice. “They told me the man who attacked you today spent time in prison for doing something very bad to another little girl, in Virginia. In case you’re feeling bad about what you had to do. You shouldn’t.”

“I don’t,” Bobby said.

“Glad to hear it, kiddo.”

And it was the truth, Bobby thought, even if it made him a bad person to admit it. He hadn’t thought twice about the ride attendant. The only thing that mattered to him was keeping Amy safe, and to do that he would kill a hundred people if he had to. If that meant he was going to go to hell, so be it. She was worth it. Even so, he felt a little better now that he knew Dennis Ray had been a bad man. He wondered if that made it easier for the thing from the Barlowe house to possess him.

They lay together in comfortable silence for a moment, then his father said, “Your mother is going to take you to see someone tomorrow—a specialist—who you can talk to about what happened and the feelings you have about it.”

“A doctor for crazy people?”

“No, nothing like that. Just someone to talk to.”

And how long after I get there until Norman shows up... or the thing with the big black eyes?

“Look at it this way,” his father said, and Bobby heard a smile in his voice. “One hour talking is better than having to spend a whole day in school, right?”

Not when Amy will be at school, waiting for me.

He didn’t say that, of course, because his dad would never understand the kinds of feelings he was feeling for her. Just one more thing you lost when you got old, Bobby knew. He wanted to argue with his father, to tell him that he’d rather go to school, but if he did that his did might really think he was crazy.

So he said, “I didn’t think about it that way.”

His father patted his leg and chuckled, then sat up. “Get some sleep. It’s been a long day. If you have bad dreams and want to come sleep with your mother and me, don’t hesitate.”

But he didn’t have bad dreams, or any dreams at all that he could remember. When he awoke the next morning a little before nine, sunlight flooded the room and the house was quiet. Birds sang joyously in the back yard, and looking out the window he saw nothing but clear blue through the bare branches. The pain in his lower back was just a dull ache, and his ankle didn’t hurt at all. For the first time since Saturday morning he was completely calm. Even though he would miss seeing Amy, it was a good day for missing school, he thought.

And for killing monsters.

His mother sat at the table in the breakfast nook, reading a Harlequin romance. She bought them by the boxful at the used bookstore downtown near Penn’s, and called them her only vice. Bobby wasn’t sure what that meant, but she always smiled when she said it so it must not be too bad. She folded down a corner of the page she was on and closed the book when Bobby walked in.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked.

“Good. The pill helped, I think.”

“You can have another one tonight if you think you’ll need it.”

I don’t think I will, Mom.

She stood and set her book on the counter. “Why don’t you go brush your teeth and get dressed, and I’ll make you something to eat? Want some eggs?”

“Okay.” He turned to go, then turned back. “When are we leaving?”

“Your appointment with Dr. Potter isn’t until ten-thirty.” She glanced at the clock on the stove. “We’ll leave in an hour or so.”

Perfect
. She would be busy making his breakfast for the next several minutes, and then reading her book after that. She wouldn’t even notice he was gone for an hour, as long as he could get the window in his bedroom up without making any noise to alert her. Bobby passed through the den and into the hallway, but instead of going right, where the bathroom he shared with Dana was, he went left, toward his bedroom... and the one his parents shared.

He stopped in his room and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, then went back to the hall and paused for a moment, listening. From the direction of the kitchen he heard the rapid clink of metal on glass that meant his mother was whisking milk into eggs for scrambling. Good. He went to the end of the hallway, where the master bedroom was. Slipping through the doorway, he took a quick look around the gloomy room—the only windows faced north, and it was always the darkest place in the house—to make sure his dad had really gone to work. The queen-sized bed was neatly made and the bathroom dark. The bowl on the marble-topped dresser where his dad kept his keys and loose change was empty.

Bobby went around to his father’s side of the bed and pulled out the drawer of the nightstand. Lying on a washcloth that had been folded in half to keep it from getting scratched, the Ruger revolver was black and ugly and had a malevolent sheen in the dim light.
Like a black widow’s body.
It looked to him like it
wanted
to kill, and he was more than happy to oblige it. Picking up the gun by the grip, he was surprised by its heft. Starsky and Hutch always waved theirs around like they didn’t weigh a thing. He turned the weapon over in his hands, examining it, trying to figure out how it worked. He found a latch on the side and pressed it, and the cylinder swung out. The six empty chambers reminded him of a piece of Honeycomb cereal.

Toward the back of the drawer, he found a cardboard box labeled HORNADY in wide red letters. Underneath, it read .357 MAG, which he understood, and 125 GR JHP, which he did not. He flipped the tab on the box and opened it. Twenty-five shell casings rested within, the shiny primers centered in each like the yolk on a fried egg. One by one, he removed six and slid them into the waiting chambers in the cylinder, and when he flipped his wrist it snapped back into place with a decisive click.
All I have to do is point it and pull the trigger now.
He closed the box of rounds and returned it to the drawer, then closed the drawer. As he turned to leave, he caught sight of movement from the corner of his eye, over by the dresser.

Norman was there, leering at him from the shadows.

Only that wasn’t quite right, he realized. Norman was there, but he wasn’t
there
.

The beveled mirror atop the dresser base no longer reflected the bedroom around him. It looked in on the crawlspace under the Barlowe house like a window. Norman squatted on his haunches in the dirt, his nightmarish face in the shadows between two of the joists supporting the floor above. Despite his resolve, Bobby felt a frisson of fear in his chest and gut.
Not really there.

But he
was
.

With dawning horror, Bobby realized he could see blackflies crawling on the other side of the mirror glass, like they were looking for a way through. Norman crept forward into the spill of light that fell from the bedroom into the crawlspace, his yellowed eyes full of malicious glee. The place where his nose had been looked like bloodied hamburger in the light, and his oozing lips glistened. He licked them suggestively, and Bobby felt something in his chest go tight.

Stronger
.

Norman held up a finger—
just a second
, that movement said—and poked his hand inside his ratty jacket like magician preparing to perform a trick. He withdrew a crumpled slip of cloth and flicked his wrist to open it up.

He held a pair of pale blue panties, just the right size for a girl of twelve.

The hobo must have seen something on Bobby’s face that amused him, because he burst into laughter, although no sound made it through the glass. The fear inside Bobby blossomed into terror and his bowels felt loose and watery. Was it too late already? Then Norman said a single word that Bobby understood even though he couldn’t hear it.

Soon
.

The hobo pressed the panties to the gaping wound where there was no nose and pantomimed breathing deeply, then laughed again like he’d done the funniest thing in the world. Before he could stop himself, Bobby raised the revolver with one shaking hand so that Norman could see it.

Soon
, he mouthed back.

Norman’s suppurating lips curled into a sneer. He casually reached down with the hand not holding the panties and gave his crotch a squeeze, then nodded his head and licked his lips a second time.
But this time the motion was nervous, not suggestive, Bobby thought. The hobo’s eyes had widened, and his grip on the panties was so tight his scabrous knuckles had gone white.

He looked scared.

Good.

“Bobby? What are you doing in here?” His mother was suddenly in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “Your eggs are—oh my
God
, put that gun down
now
!”

Bobby started guiltily at the accusing sound of her voice, and the gun went off like a thunderclap in the bedroom. The beveled mirror exploded into a cascade of glass shards and the crawlspace and hobo were gone. Bobby let the gun drop from his hand. Wanting to cry, because he knew he would have to face whatever waited for him under the Barlowe house without the gun now. And after what Norman had just done with the blue panties, he couldn’t wait for a chance to get it back. He had to go, and he had to go
right now
, because Amy was no longer safe.

“Are you okay?” his mother said, rushing across the room to him, her face a rictus of terror. “What were you
thinking
, Bobby?”

“I wanted to stop the monster,” he blurted before he knew he was going to, and then the tears came for real and he felt like something inside him was breaking.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said, and wrapped her arms around him. “Being scared after what happened to you yesterday is perfectly normal. I’d be worried if you weren’t. But that monster is dead, thanks to you.”

He loved her so much right then that it almost hurt him. She wouldn’t understand if he told her she was thinking of the wrong monster, and he didn’t correct her. He was almost out of time. He had to leave.

“Go eat your breakfast,” his mother said, and gave him a pat on the back. “I’ll clean this up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, sweetie. It’s going to get better.”

It will. As soon as I’m done.

As he walked down the hall wiping his face he heard the sound of her dialing the phone.
Calling Dad to tell him.
Even if he got in trouble for what he was about to do, he was thankful that the one thing he didn’t have to worry about was getting whipped by his father when this was all over, like he would if his name were Tanner Frank or Joey Garraty. Score one for the hippie-dippy lifestyle. Not that either of the other two boys would have the guts to do what he was about to, he reflected.

A steaming plate of eggs and toast sat with a glass of orange juice on the kitchen table near his mother’s paperback, but he ignored them, feeling a stab of guilt. He wanted to get the little notepad his mother kept in the drawer below the one where the silverware was and leave his parents a note, telling them not to worry and that he loved them and would be home soon, but he knew he didn’t have time. The last time he’d thought he did, his mother had walked in and taken the one thing he could use to fight—

His gaze landed on the silverware drawer.

A knife wouldn’t be as good as the gun, but it was
something
, and there was a whole set of them back behind the organizer that kept everything else separated. His mom had gotten them a few years back at the grocery store with what seemed like fifty booklets of S&H green stamps—most of which he had licked and plastered in sloppy columns himself. Bobby opened the drawer all the way and rummaged through the knives as quietly as he could, looking for the right one. He picked up the butcher knife.
Too big.
He needed something that would easily fit in his pocket and not draw attention. The fact that he would be on his bike for a couple of hours on a school day was bad enough without waving around a big knife like a crazed killer.
Taken separately, those two words describe me pretty well, don’t they?
The four steak knives were too flimsy, and there was a serrated knife that was a good size, but without a sharp point. The lone knife that remained wasn’t as big as he would have liked, but it should work. It had a sharp blade, and was long enough to do some real damage. His mom used it to cut up potatoes, and it really did a number on them. He carefully slid the knife into his pocket. It should do the job.
As long as I don’t wreck my bike and cut my nuts off.