Demon's Door (22 page)

She was more than a third of the way up the grassy bank when she took off her bronze satin blouse and tossed it aside. Underneath she was wearing a black bra, and without any hesitation she reached behind her with both hands and unfastened it, and tossed that aside, too. As he came running up the bank after her, Jim could see that her bare back was covered in dark red bruises.

Now the grass-mowing tractor was less than twenty yards away. The groundskeeper was wearing ear protectors, and he was twisted around in his seat with his back to Maria, watching the stripes that the mower was leaving in the vivid green grass.

Maria, don't!
said Jim, inside his head. The clattering noise of the tractor was too loud now for her to be able to hear him, even if she had wanted to listen. She drew off her brown leather belt, and then she hesitated and hopped and half-stumbled for just a moment as she took down her purple jeans. Jim thought he might be able to reach her, but the harder he struggled up the slope, the further away he seemed to be. It was like a nightmare, like
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
, in which you had to run as fast as you possibly could just to stay in the same place.

He could see Maria and the lawnmower coming together with a terrible inevitability, like two converging lines on a radar screen. ‘
Maria!
' he screamed. ‘
Maria!
' but still she took no notice.

When she was less than twenty feet away from the lawnmower, Maria pulled down her large black stomach-control panties and threw them aside, so that she was naked, apart from her wooden-bead necklace. Her dimpled buttocks, too, were covered in bruises. Still she kept walking – even faster now, if anything. Jim prayed that the groundskeeper would turn his head around and see her, but the groundskeeper was obviously too concerned with making sure that he was mowing a perfectly straight stripe.

Maria reached the path in which the lawnmower was heading only seconds before the lawnmower itself. Although she was quite a plump girl, she lay down on the grass with fluidity and grace. She crossed herself, and then she stayed there with her arms by her sides, her feet together, facing upward and looking at the sky.

Jim roared, ‘
Stop! Stop! Stop!
' so harsh and so loud that he felt as if he were tearing the skin from the back of his throat. He willed his legs to run faster. If he could have willed himself to fly, and scoop up Maria in his arms, and lift her away from the lawnmower's approaching blades, he would have done that, too.

But he knew that he was going to be too late, and he knew that time was playing confidence tricks, and that when Maria had staggered into Special Class Two on the first day of the new semester, naked and lacerated and covered in blood, it had been
this
day, and that what they had seen had simply been a warning that
this
was coming.

THIRTEEN

H
e closed his eyes tight, but he couldn't stop himself from hearing the crunching and the grinding and the squealing of gears as the lawnmower's blades were jammed with arms and legs and hair and flesh.

The lawnmower stopped. The groundskeeper switched off the tractor engine. In the sudden quietness, Jim opened his eyes and saw Maria underneath the machinery, still alive, staring up at him through the cutters as if she were looking through the bars of a prison cell at the world outside.

The groundskeeper jumped down from his tractor cab and came up to Jim with his mouth hanging open in shock. He was only young, no more than twenty or twenty-one, with ginger hair and spots and a straggly goatee like Shaggy Rogers from
Scooby-Doo.

‘Man,' he said. ‘I never saw her, man. I mean, like, what was she
doing
there, man? I mean, Jesus H. Christ.'

Jim knelt down on the grass and took hold of Maria's bloodied hand. Half of her thumb and her index finger and her middle finger were missing.

‘Maria?' he asked her. ‘Can you hear me, Maria?'

She closed her eyes and then opened them again. ‘Yes, sir,' she whispered. A bubble of blood formed on her lips and then softly popped. ‘I can hear you.'

Jim bent down to see how the lawnmower blades had bitten into her. She was seriously cut up. Her left shoulder was split right down to the whiteness of her bone, and the left side of her stomach was gaping like a bloody mouth, but as far as he could see she wasn't trapped. He turned around to Shaggy and said, ‘Can you lift this thing off her? We really need to get her out.'

‘Sure. Sure thing. Jesus.'

‘Just go easy, OK? It doesn't look like she's tangled up or anything, but we don't want to hurt her any more than she's hurt already.'

‘OK, sure. I got you.'

Shaggy climbed back into his tractor and started up the engine again. Then, very slowly, he raised the hydraulic arms so that the lawn-mowing unit rose upward, and Jim could gently pull Maria out from under it. She left a wide trail of glistening blood on the grass.

‘Right,' said Jim, when Shaggy had switched off the tractor and come back to see what he could do. ‘Go tell Nurse Okeke what's happened. Tell her that I've called for the paramedics already, because Dunstan's been hurt, in the boiler room. His eye has come out of its socket. But as soon as the paramedics arrive, tell them they're needed up here first. They'll probably need to send another ambulance for Dunstan.'

The groundskeeper blinked at him.

‘Did you get all of that?' Jim demanded.

‘I think so, yeah. Go tell Nurse Okeke. Tell her to come up here real quick.'

‘That's right. And don't forget to tell her about Dunstan, too.'

‘Dunstan's been hurt. His eye's come out. In the boiler room.'

‘That's it. You got it. Now
go
!'

Jim watched Shaggy cantering wildly down the slope toward the main entrance. Then he turned back to Maria. She was still conscious, still looking up at the sky. To his surprise, she was smiling.

‘What happened, Maria?' Jim asked her. ‘Why did you want to hurt yourself like that?'

She turned her head a little so that she could focus on him. ‘Mr Rook? Is that you?'

‘Yes, Maria, it's me. I just want to know why you lay down in front of that lawnmower. You're not
that
unhappy, surely?'

‘It doesn't hurt,' Maria reassured him. ‘I can't feel anything, anyhow.'

‘But why? You're much too young to think about ending your life. You have so much ahead of you. So many years, so much happiness.'

Maria shook her head, and coughed up blood. ‘I saw myself. I saw what was going to happen to me.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I saw myself in the future. I saw myself in two, maybe three years' time.'

‘How did you know it was the future?'

‘I don't know. I just did. I knew that I wasn't at college any more, and I had a job at Dillard's.'

‘So what happened that upset you so much?'

‘When I woke up, Barto was there, in my room, and not just Barto. All of these other men, too. I didn't know who they were.'

‘Barto? Who's Barto?'

‘My stepfather. He always treats me mean. He always wants me to
do
things for him, and if I say I don't want to, he beats me. Last week he beat me so bad that I was sicking up blood.'

Jim heard an ambulance siren whooping in the near distance. ‘Maria, that's the paramedics. Lie still, OK? You're going to be fine. We're going to get you all patched up and then we're going to sort your life out, too.'

Maria shook her head. Her bloody hand was growing very cold, and her eyes were filming over. ‘It is too late, Mr Rook. I can do nothing. Barto will never leave me alone. He wants me every night. My mother, she can't help me. He beats her, too, just as bad.'

‘Maria, once you're better, we can go to the police. We can have this Barto locked up, so that he never touches you again.'

‘I saw the future, Mr Rook. I woke up and I saw what was going to happen to me. Barto and all of these other men, in my bedroom, maybe five or six men, and Barto said to them, “Here she is, do whatever you like to her, and I mean
whatever
.” I know this is going to happen to me, Mr Rook. I know this is going to happen to me for sure, and I would rather die.'

Jim turned and saw the ambulance speeding up the college driveway. It circled around and stopped in front of the main entrance, its lights flashing. Jim saw Shaggy and Nurse Okeke and Dr Ehrlichman talking to the paramedics. He waved to them and shouted, ‘Here! Quick as you can!' Nurse Okeke waved back to him, although she was probably too far away to have heard him. The paramedics climbed back into their ambulance and started to drive it up the grassy slope toward them.

‘Hold on, Maria,' Jim told her. ‘I promise you, you're going to be OK.'

Maria smiled. ‘You cannot save me, Mr Rook. The only way to change the future is not to go there.'

‘Maria, listen to me – that is absolutely not true. You can never tell what's going to happen to you until it happens. From now on, your life is going to be different. I swear to God, that stepfather of yours is never going to hurt you again, because if he does I will personally beat five colors of crap out of him myself.'

‘Kim told me,' said Maria.

‘Kim? Kim told you what? What does Kim have to do with it?'

‘I told Kim what I saw and he said I
couldn't
change it, no matter what. He said the future has happened already.' Maria coughed more blood, and then she said, ‘How can you change something that has happened already?'

‘You shouldn't have taken any notice of Kim,' Jim told her. ‘Kim talks a whole lot of Korean BS. This is where your new life begins, Maria, and you're going to be happy and successful and you're never going to let a scumbag like Barto ever hurt you again.'

The ambulance had reached them now, and jounced to a halt next to the tractor. Two paramedics climbed out, a man and a woman, and came hurrying across the grass.

‘How the hell did this happen?' asked the woman, kneeling down beside Maria and opening up her first-aid bag. ‘How are you feeling, honey? Can you hear me?'

Jim stood up to give her some space. ‘Please help her. Her name's Maria Lopez. She walked into the lawnmower on purpose.'

‘Any idea why?'

‘She's been abused by her stepfather. That's what she told me, anyhow. I guess she couldn't take it any more. Did the groundskeeper tell you about the janitor? He's down in the basement, in the boiler room. Some cat went crazy and took his eye out.'

The male paramedic nodded. ‘We've called for back-up already, and in the meantime your nurse has gone to take care of him. How about you, sir? Are you OK?'

Jim held up both hands and realized that they were criss-crossed with clawmarks and sticky with blood. His shirt and his pants were stained with blood, too.

‘I'm fine,' he said. ‘Just a few scratches, that's all.'

The female paramedic looked up at him. She had red hair, green eyes, and freckles across her nose. ‘We need to contact Ms Lopez's next-of-kin. Her mother, I guess, after what you've told us about her stepfather.'

‘Sure,' said Jim. ‘I'll do that now. Where are you going to be taking her?'

‘I'm not sure yet. I have to contact the coroner.'

‘The coroner? Why the coroner?'

‘I'm sorry, sir. Ms Lopez is dead.'

‘What?'

The paramedic turned Maria's head sideways, and it was only then that Jim could see that the back of her skull had been chopped open by one of the grass-cutting blades and that her brain was exposed.

‘She wouldn't have suffered,' said the paramedic.

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean that death would have been pretty much instantaneous.'

Jim took two or three steps backward. How could Maria have died instantaneously, when she had been talking to him, and smiling? He felt giddy, and he saw stars in front of his eyes, as if he were going to faint. The male paramedic saw that he was losing his balance and took hold of his arm.

‘Why don't you sit down, sir? Sit down right here on the grass and put your head between your knees.'

Jim stared at him. He was tempted to tell him that Maria had been conscious, and lucid, and that he never would have known about her stepfather's abuse if she hadn't been able to speak to him. But now that she was dead, there was really no point, and he only would have made himself look like a fool.

He realized what had happened. He had seen Maria's spirit, before it had left her body, which had made it seem as if she were still alive. It had happened to him before, two or three times, when he had visited elderly people on their deathbeds. They had gone on talking to him long after they had died, especially when they had obviously felt that they had some important secret to tell him, which they had never told anybody else. They hadn't yet grasped the fact that they were dead, and that there was no need for them to panic, because they would have the rest of eternity to tell him, if they wanted to.

As Jim walked down the slope toward the college, another ambulance arrived, and he saw Nurse Okeke come around the side of the building and beckon the paramedics toward the basement. Class must have finished now, because several students were trying to push their way out of the main doors, but two members of the college security staff were ushering them back inside.

Jim mounted the steps. Dr Ehrlichman was standing at the top, waiting for him.

‘Maria Lopez,' Jim told him. ‘She's dead.'

‘Oh, God, that's terrible. Young Billman here said she walked right into his lawnmower. He didn't see her until it was too late.'