HELLz BELLz (10 page)

The naked, pregnant girl was wearing a nun’s hat, and her hands and feet appeared to be nailed to the cellar floor, making her look like an obscene parody of the Flying Nun. If this
was
some kind of blasphemous play-acting, the special-effects blood and wounds had been done by a real pro.

But Daisy knew this was for real. Nothing else made sense—not that a whole lot was making sense anyway, on this wild-and-fucking-crazy night. Somehow, she had known she would find something like this. Somehow, hell! She knew exactly how she knew. That fucking bell. The bell that had called her here in the first damn place. But what was so strange was that she was
enjoying
this cruel show. She
wanted
to see the fat guy cut open the crucified woman’s abdomen and steal her baby. How sick was that? And who really gave a fuck? It was a turn-on. Her cunt was slathering up again just from her watching this mondo shit. Only this time, there were two guys with dicks who would probably be happy to fuck her silly.

But that wasn’t such a good idea. These guys were clearly dangerous.
What’s to stop them from butchering me?
She could say, “Whoa, guys, I just turned my mother into a fucking vegetable. I’m a bad-ass too. Wanna fuck me? I’ll take on both you pricks at the same time.”

And they would fuck her, and
then
butcher her.

You’re drunk, she reminded herself. You aren’t thinking straight, you’re thinking with your cunt. You need to get the fuck out of here, go home and lock yourself in. Don’t dick around with these guys.

Then the guy with the shaved head started up the stairs.

She stood on shaky legs and was turning to leave when a soft voice spoke behind her. She didn’t catch all the words, but she thought he said “Titty lady.”

“Huh?” she said, turning toward the voice.

“Titillating, isn’t it?”

She giggled. She lost control of her bladder and pissed her pants. She was so scared she could hardly stay on her feet.

The man wore the darkness like a cloak. Daisy could make out a hawk-like beak on the guy’s long face, but where his eyes should have been, there was only a deeper darkness. Was he wearing a monk’s cowl?

She tried to speak. “Wh-who…who…?”

“You’ve come to worship, have you not?” he said. His intimate tone of voice suggested that his unseen lips were smiling. “You are the first to answer the summons.”

“Huh?” She tottered backward. Felt herself swaying over the precipice behind her. Glanced over her shoulder at the cellar below.

The iron bell bonged above. Louder than before.

“Careful,” the man in shadow warned. “You could fall from grace.”

Daisy lurched away from the edge of the charred floor. She reached up with both hands to steady her swimming head and accidentally bonked herself with her flashlight. “Oww.”

Bong!

“Who the fuck are you?” A new voice. Sharp, cruel, threatening.

The man cloaked in darkness withdrew into a syrupy blackness the candlelight from below couldn’t penetrate.

Bong!

The guy with the cruel voice and sunglasses pushed up on his cueball head was coming at her with a knife.

“Nobody,” she answered. And the truth of her one-word answer hit her like a jetliner slashing into a skyscraper. Disastrous truth.

Nobody.

Bong!

Sure as shit.

Nobody. Nothing.

Dead woman walking.

Bong!

“There ya go,” Cueball said and jabbed the blade at her belly.

She pinwheeled her arms as she went backward over the edge, falling, flapping her arms like broken wings and looking—she was certain—like a ridiculously fat bird dropping out of the sky. She felt the cellar floor rushing up to meet her.

Bong!

She opened her mouth to scream, but the cellar floor ripped through her and it was the sound of snapping bones that filled her mouth.

Bong!

* * *

Joe stepped inside and shut the front door. The air was smoky and thick with the smell of burnt food.

“Sara?” he called. “Sara, where are you?”

The Iris Johansen novel she’d been reading was on the floor in front of the couch, and the lampshade on the end-table lamp was crooked. He caught the faint scent of his wife’s perfume as he headed toward the kitchen, his heart beating hard and fast on his eardrums.

“Sara!” he shouted.

The kitchen was dark, except for yellow light from the metal hood over the stove that illuminated the smoke. But it was light enough to see that Sara wasn’t in the kitchen. He turned off the ring of blue fire beneath the pot of burned pasta. All the water had boiled away in his wife’s unexplained absence. A roach scrabbled across the counter and hid behind the glass canister of white sugar, some of the granules glowing like tiny diamonds. Joe hated that roaches had found their way into his house last summer, and ordinarily he would’ve gone after the bold pest and crushed the little bugger with whatever was handy, but now something else had found its way into his home—something he couldn’t put a name to, but he felt its chilling presence nonetheless. He hurried from the kitchen and bounded up the stairs, knowing in his gut the ominous presence had already found its way into his wife.

He heard the soft tinkle of music coming from their bedroom. His footfalls were muffled and faraway sounding, as if he were walking in some nearby hallway instead of this one. A parallel hallway? In a parallel world? He remembered the filters in his ears and pulled them out and stuck them in his pocket. Unfiltered sound seeped into his ears, raw and piercing, like a radio with the treble wide open. The church on Holy Cross Hill was a mile and a half from here, but he could clearly hear the chiming church bell. Did distance dilute the bell’s effect on human behavior?

The bedroom door was partially open, a thin edge of light cutting a yellow wedge in the dusky hallway. He pictured his wife sitting on the bed, holding his Colt .38. Pointing it at his belly.

“Sara?” he called softly and pushed the door wide.

She wasn’t on the bed. Wasn’t pointing the pistol at him.

The tinkling music was coming from behind the bathroom door. A music box. That was what it was. Playing the theme from—what was that movie?—
Love Story
? Yes, that was it. That wimpy tearjerker from the 70s, with Ali MacGraw dying of cancer and that sandy-haired actor (what was his name?) all weepy and brokenhearted. The tiled floor and walls of the bathroom gave the tune a tinny echo-chamber effect and it sounded herky-jerky and metal-spiked like the music from a jack-in-the-box when a kid cranks the handle, anxious for the mad little jester with bells on his hat to pop out and scare the hell out of the kid who keeps on cranking the crooked handle with mad glee, knowing what’s coming, but scared anyway and loving every second of sweet fear.

Joe rapped his knuckles on the bathroom door, knowing she was in there. “Sara? You all right in there?”

No answer.

Just the jerky off-kilter music.

“I’m coming in, okay?” He spoke to her with the tone and inflection you might use if you were addressing a disturbed child or a senile parent. “You decent?” he said as he turned the knob and opened the door.

Sara was there.

But not there.

Sitting naked on the floor, legs spread wide, the music box on the floor between creamy thighs, she looked up as he stepped onto the tile. There was a blankness in her eyes, in her face. He could see the rosebud lips in the middle of the sparse patch of cinnamon pubic hair.

She said, “I can’t make it stop.”

“What? The music box?” He squatted in front of her, resting his arms on his knees.

Sara closed the lid on the music box and the music played on. She opened and closed it several times, then looked at him with a petulant face. “See? It’s broken.”

“That’s all right. We can fix it later,” he told her, keeping his voice even and hiding his anxiety.

He reached for the music box. She grabbed it and jerked it to her breasts. Her nipples were taut, the areolas big and round as Spanish doubloons. “No!” she said. “Don’t touch it.”

“Okay. Why don’t you get up off the floor, honey? You can’t be comfortable like this.”

She regarded him with apparent suspicion. He wasn’t sure if she knew who he was. With the love theme from
Love Story
playing nonstop, the chiming of the church bell was barely audible, but from Sara’s strange behavior, Joe knew it was having its effect. Thank God, she wasn’t violent.

“They get in through the eyes,” she whispered, eyes darting about.

“Who does?”

“Can’t you smell them?”

“Come on, honey, let’s get you off the floor and into some clothes. Okay?” He extended his hand.

Still clutching the music box to her bosom, she twisted at the waist and turned a shoulder to him, rejecting his offered hand.

“Sara, please. Let me help you. I know what’s wrong.”

“They come in the music and get in through the eyes. You’d think the ears, but that’s just what they want you to think. It’s the
eyes.
To the soul.”

She started to shiver, though the air-conditioned climate wasn’t that cold.

“You’re shivering,” he said. “You should put some clothes on.”

She scooted backward, the bare skin of her buttocks squeaking against the tile as she backed into the nook between the shower stall and the john. “They can see me,” she whispered, “see me seeing them. See the notes? Do-do-do-de-doo, do do de dum-dum…”

“Sara…”

“I can’t…you don’t know…how am I…how…?”

Her teeth chattered.

Seeing her this way, Joe felt a cold fist closing around his heart. He wanted to snatch the music box from her and smash it against the wall. He wanted his wife back, wanted Sara to be herself, but he was afraid of making her worse. If he did the wrong thing now, he might drive her so deep into madness he might never get her back.

“Everything’s [chatter-chatter] changing.”

His mind was racing, swirling, looking for a solution, grappling for purchase, for a firmer hold on reality.
Think,
he told himself.
Think, goddammit, you’re losing her.

Then it came to him: Earmuffs. If he could muffle the sound of the church bell for her, maybe she could come back from the brink of psychosis.

He left her there and went to the bedroom closet to look for the earmuffs his niece Gail had given him last Christmas. Had he thrown them away? Or had he only thought about throwing them away? After all, earmuffs were for kids, not adult males.

He found them on the shelf over his hanging clothes, behind his deflated-looking gym bag. He reentered the bathroom slowly, trying to exude calm and control.

“I want you to wear these, Sara. They’ll make you feel better. And make you safe. Okay?”

She didn’t acknowledge him. She was hunched over the music box like an aborigine from some lost tribe who had never seen a music box, trying to divine the secret behind its magic.

Joe stretched the band over the top of her head and gently placed the fuzzy muffs against her ears. She looked up with a startled expression, eyes wide in terror, and without warning thrust the music box into his face. It caught him just above the left eye and clattered to the floor. He ignored the pain and grabbed at her as she jumped up and dashed out of the bathroom, screaming.

He went after her. Saw her rip off the earmuffs and fling them to the floor. She went to the window and started ripping at the floor-length curtains. Her screams became shrieking howls. He held up his hands to show he intended no harm, but she didn’t seem to see him. The curtain rod came loose on one end as a bracket gave way, and Sara cocooned herself in the heavy blue material and kept up her howling.

“Okay, okay,” he shouted to be heard above her howls. “You don’t have to wear them. Please, stop screaming.”

The room began to shrink, closing in on him. His vision darkened around the edges of his sight. His fists clenched. He wanted to hit her to shut her up. Blood trickled into his eye from his music-box wound. He wiped it away. Remembered the cigarette filters in his pocket. Dug them out and stuck them in his ears. He grew dizzy and sat on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands. A fierce headache was blooming like a napalm blast behind his eyes.

“What happened?”

He looked up. Through his spread fingers he saw Suzie Shrimpton standing in the bedroom doorway, warily eyeing his howling curtain-cocooned wife.

He felt his face form an expression of despair. He said, “Hysterical. She’s afraid of me.”

Suzie came into the room, keeping her distance from Sara. “The bell?” she said above Sara’s howls.

Joe nodded. “What else?”

“We have to get her out of here. Out of town.”

“How the hell do we do that?” The weight of his helplessness made his shoulders sag. “Knock her out? Tie her up?”

“I say we gag her,” said Suzie. “I can’t take that screaming.”

He looked at his wife and tried to see the problem objectively, rather than from the cauldron of emotions bubbling in his belly and chest. Ignoring the throbbing pain in his head, he pushed aside his shocked pity and misplaced anger, then stood and said, “All right. She’s already wrapped in the curtain. Let’s tie her up and carry her to the car.”

He grabbed three of his leather belts from the little rack on the side of his chest-of-drawers, handed them to Suzie and said, “I’ll get her on the floor and hold her while you secure her with the belts. We don’t want to hurt her. Ready?”

Suzie nodded, her breasts heaving in the halter with her adrenaline-fueled respirations.

“Christ,” Joe said, then went to his wife, ripped the hanging end of the curtain from the rod, draped it over her head and enveloped her in a bear hug and took her to the floor. Sara’s howls became shrieks of terror, shrieks that tore at his heart. She squirmed and kicked, but he and Suzie succeeded in belting Sara inside the curtain, effectively swaddling her in blue. Sweating and breathing heavy from their struggle, he and Suzie lay for a moment on top of the bundle to catch their breath. Sara quieted down almost immediately, the way babies do when swaddled.