HELLz BELLz (11 page)

Out in the night, the iron bell tolled with clockwork precision, never missing a beat as it ate up the fleeting moments of the present and rang in what promised to be a disastrous future for the small town of Druid Hills.

The stone church on Holy Cross Hill loomed above them like a giant gargoyle, crouched and menacing and ready to spring to supernatural life. The cross-crowned belfry was silhouetted against the jaundiced haze of the night sky, but the bell within was only a shapeless ripple of dark motion. This close to the source of the mesmerizing sound, James was caught, his feet held fast by the street’s tarry asphalt. The narrow street going up the hill telescoped his vision right to the front doorway of the church, the dark wooden doors standing ajar, inviting him in,
daring
him to enter, but his feet were stuck to the street and his legs wouldn’t move and he couldn’t focus his scattered thoughts because all his senses were arrested by the telescoping street and the tolling of the rocking bell, pitching and catching the clapper in perpetual flux and timeless motion. Out of time. Outside of time. Beyond the margins of history-in-the-making. Unmade. Undone. Understanding none of it. He stared. His pores poured sour perspiration. Hissing secrets taunted him, swirled round his axis of ignorance, and he sensed the underground surfacing at last, rising up from the darkest depths to claim its own—its secret spawn. This black underbelly of nightmare existence transparently tattooed with a red hourglass as a warning to mortals trespassing upon the timelessness of the dead.

“Ring out your dead.”

That was Josh, spilling broken words.

“Huh?” James managed to turn his head toward his forgotten—now remembered— friend.

“Owanknow.”

“What?”

“Jus’poppedinmyhead.” A crooked smile cracked over Josh’s splayed teeth.

Were his words really that run together or was James’s hearing totally screwed? He didn’t know. Didn’t much care. Not about that. There was something else. To know. “You reading my mind?”

“Huh?”

The bell tolled.

“Ring out the dead,” said James, relieved that he could still make coherent words and string them together in a sentence. “That’s what you said.”

“Naw.”

“The hell you didn’t.”

“Hearing things, man. Let’s get out of the fucking street before somebody runs us down.”

“That bell’s fucking with my head,” said James. “I was…something about the dead.”

“C’mon. Car’s coming.”

James discovered that he could indeed move his feet, that they weren’t stuck in the baked street’s quicksand tar. He picked up one foot, put it down, then did the same with the other, shuffling Pat and Joe, his feet named after one of his dad’s dumb old jokes. He moved off the broken yellow centerline, catching Josh in his wake through muggy air nearly as thick and dark as scummy creek water, moving toward the curb and out of the dubious path of the oncoming vehicle with one shining headlight—popeye, two points—and toward the front of his house.

“Dead,” James mumbled.

“Huh?” Josh skipped to catch up.

James shrugged, his train of thought derailed, boxcars jackknifed. The model train he had once engineered packed away in boxes in the attic. His childhood now revealed as false memory from someone else’s life. This gangling youth walking beside him a stranger. The house before him familiar, yet strange, an outpost in alien territory. Underground rising. Ghouls digging out of their graves. Ring out your dead.

“That’s the Butt Sisters,” said Josh. “Their PT Cruiser. Poon Tang Cruiser.”

The car cut over to the curb and stopped next to them. A blonde head poked out from the window. The head had a round face and a wide mouth and the mouth opened to speak. “Hey, jerk-off, what’s up with that fuckin’ bell?”

“I got your fucking bell hanging,” said Josh, grabbing the crotch of his jeans. Then he broke into song: “My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling.”

James put a name to the moonface: Brenda Butts. She was in his chemistry class. Smart but lazy, always cribbing homework answers from more diligent classmates. Chunky like her twin sister Barbra, but attractive in a whorish way. Word was, she gave good blowjobs and wasn’t opposed to swallowing spunk.

Brenda giggled. Barbra, in the passenger seat, giggled in harmony, several octaves higher.

“You shouldn’t be here,” James said, using words to clear the fuzziness from his mind.

“Who made you king of the street?” Brenda scoffed.

“Nobody. Don’t you know what’s happening?”

“My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling,” sang Josh, doing a little crank-yanking jig.

“No, what?”

“Whole town’s buggin’,” explained James. “Where the fuck you been?”

“We ate dinner at our grandmother’s, out in the boondocks,” Barb said, crowding against her sister to project her words out of the car. “What’re you talking about?”

“Whip it out, asshole,” Brenda taunted Josh. “Let’s see what ya got.”

“Fuck, you, ho,” Josh shot back.

“You wish,” Brenda said, flipping him off.

“Shut up,” James told her. Then to Barb, he said, “They’re rioting in the streets, killing each other off. Like the fucking Apocalypse or something.” He glanced at the church. “It’s that goddamn bell that’s doing it. Making everybody nuts.”

She laughed. “You’re tripping. You get ahold of some bad acid?”

“No, I ain’t shitting you. It’s for real. You better go home and lock yourself in.”

“Fuckin’ ice cream man tried to kill us,” said Josh, “but some other dude blew him away with a shotgun. But not before he whacked a bunch of little kids with a tire iron.”

“Oh my God,” the Butt Sisters said.

“Wrecked his ride, man,” said Josh, adjusting his privates. “Fucking ice cream truck.”

“So who’s ringing it?” Brenda’s eyes were big now. Her fingers twirling a curly lock of hi-lighted hair.

James looked across the street at the church. “Nobody,” he said.

There it was. His 180 IQ had worked it out while he wasn’t looking. “Nobody’s ringing it.”

“Whu—” Brenda’s mouth made an O. James imagined those O-ring lips closing around his cock. He looked back to the stone church.

“We’re gonna go see who’s doing it,” said Josh. “Wanna come with?”

The sisters exchanged questioning glances.

James stared at the dark church, still grappling with the revelation that no one was ringing the bell. It was true. No human bell-ringer was yanking a rope. No Druid Hills Quazimodo had gone berserk in the bell tower. He didn’t know how he knew this, but the knowledge was there, unmistakably, deep beneath his skin, in his gut, some primordial recognition happening there, an instinctual mechanism passed down from prehistoric man, the hairy hunter whose survival depended on instinct and extrasensory perceptions. Primitive men who appeased dark gods with bloody sacrifices.

“I outgrew the Hardy Boys a long time ago,” Barbra said.

“Who the fuck’s the Hardy Boys?” Josh wanted to know. He leaned a crooked arm on top of the car and hung his face in the window.

“I forgot you can’t read,” she said.

“Fuck you, bee-otch.”

“Just joshing, Josh,” she said. “Fuck
you
if you can’t take a joke.”

“Josh this.” He straightened up and grabbed his crotch again.

Barb shook her head. “You’re so lame.”

Brenda said, “My God, would you stop playing with yourself? Jeez.”

“Choking his chicken,” said Barb.

“Flogging the bishop,” said Brenda.

“Fuck you! Just get the fuck outta here,” Josh shouted.

The Butt Sisters laughed in unison, threw their doors open and piled out of the car in a way that reminded James of synchronized swimmers.

“We’re going with you,” said Brenda.

“No shit you ain’t,” Josh said, putting his hands on his hips.

“You invited us.” Barb slammed her door. Brenda slammed her door.
Bam-bam.

James raised his arm and pointed his finger at the church. “There’s a light. Somebody’s in there.”

“It just went out.”

“I saw it.”

“A flashlight, probably. Or a candle.”

“Who you think it is?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“No idea.”

“Let’s find out,” James said, in spite of his caveman instinct to stay away from that crouching gargoyle church.

* * *

All she could do was watch.

Oh, she could worry about the extent of her injuries from the fall (and she did wonder if her back was broken because she couldn’t move, couldn’t get up and run), but this grotesque scene unfolding in the church cellar made her worries pale by comparison—and by the realization that she could easily be the next victim of the fat butcher who was slicing open the pregnant girl’s belly. If the maniac turned his blade on her, a broken back would be the least of her worries.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do.

I’m half crazy—

The stupid song often slipped into her head at odd moments, and this was the oddest one yet. The stupid song from long ago, the song her daddy used to sing to her while he bounced her on his knee, and to this day she thought that, yes, Daddy had always been half crazy, at least half, but no crazier than Mommy Dearest, with her little bedside pharmacy of pill bottles and unguents and creams and medicated liquids in tinted bottles and all those tiny cotton-tipped sticks and hot water bottles and that long plastic tube with the rubber bulb on one end that looked like a turkey baster—what the hell was that thing for? What harsh chemicals had she basted her cunt with? Why had she found it so necessary to stick and poke her orifices with those things? Probably hadn’t been getting enough cock. Not even a half-crazy husband would want to fuck such an unappealing, hypochondriacal bump on a bed, a fat lump in dirty sheets.

Daisy, Daisy…

The blade opened a bleeding slit in the pregnant girl’s lower abdomen, but she didn’t react. Anesthetized or dead? The fat man doing the cutting was humming a tune. What was it? She knew that song. Something from the hippie era of peace, love, free sex and rock ‘n’roll. And good dope. Bad dope. ODs and bad trips. And that was what Daisy was having now. The bad trip to end all bad fucking trips. But what was that song?

Something by the Grateful Dead, wasn’t it?

Daisy turned her head so she wouldn’t have to see all that blood rolling down the mound of childbearing womanhood.

Did the fat butcher even know she was here, watching?

Daisy, daisy, you need to crawl away.

Don’t be crazy, you know what he’ll do if you stay.

It was her dead daddy’s voice singing in her head, back from the dead to save her from certain slaughter.

Crawl away.

Yes. That was the thing to do. If her body would cooperate.

But here came the other guy, the guy who’d made her fall by jabbing the knife at her.

Coming to finish the job. Dancing down the steps. Knife-dancing skinhead with a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“Who the fuck
are
you?” he asked, standing over her now, casually waving his knife.

She tried to speak but her mouth and throat were too dry to lubricate any words. Her lips cracked when she parted them. She licked them with a scummy vodka-dried tongue. Tried again to speak. “Nobody,” she managed.

Cueball’s grin was frozen in place. The blade of his knife caught more candlelight and flashed it at Daisy, a signal of her certain doom.

“I can’t move,” she croaked at him. “I think my back’s broken.”

His grin widened, wrinkling his hairless forehead. “You’re totally fucked, ain’t ya.”

“I won’t say a word to anybody,” she said. “You don’t have to hurt me. I—”

He said something else, but it was lost in the bong of the bell.

“Pardon?” Daisy said, knowing at once that the social nicety sounded completely inane and out of place.

“Pardon?
Pardon?
Lady, there ain’t no pardons. The clock’s running out and the governor ain’t gonna call to save your ass. The executioner’s in the house, dig?” Then he laughed at his own joke, genuinely amused. He glanced over at the bargain-basement cesarean his cohort was performing and his laughter died at the sight of the butchery. “God
damn,
Woofer. You sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Hell yeah. That’s a clean incision. A professional cut. I shoulda gone to medical school.”

“Shit, you’re lucky you finished high school, ya dumb shit.”

“I coulda. Just didn’t want to. Had a A in biology.”

“Well, shut up and get that thing outta da bitch, will ya. I wanna get the hell out of this fucking place.”

“What about her?” Woofer nodded at Daisy.

“Whaddaya think?”

Woofer chuckled. “I think you ain’t gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. When pussy falls from the sky, you got to fuck it, bro.”

“Damn right. A little long in the tooth and fat in the ass, but pussy’s pussy.” He looked down at her with a nasty leer. “You’re lucky, bitch. You get one last fuck before you die. Better enjoy it while you can.”

Daisy worked her mouth but no words came out. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

The iron bell mocked her with each resounding peal.

* * *

Suzie touched the back of his neck. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his face from his curtain-swaddled wife. Sara’s face was only partially visible within the blue material. Her eyes were open, but she was quiet, a serene look on her face. The curtain smelled faintly of stale cigarette smoke. “Just catching my breath.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Suzie, pointing to his forehead, “a little.”

“I’m all right.” He pushed up to a kneeling position and addressed Sara in a gentle voice. “Honey, we’re going to carry you out to the car and then we’re going to get out of town for a while. Then you’ll…be okay. Back to normal.”

“God, I hope you’re right,” Suzie said under her breath.

“Now don’t be afraid,” he continued. “We won’t let anything bad happen. Okay? We’re going to pick you up now and take you outside. Ready.”

Sara stared at the ceiling. She gave no sign that she understood his words. Her lips moved, but she made no sound.