Malice (12 page)

Lysander crept down the hallway. He could hear the sound of his own feet shuffling reluctantly across the cold hospital tile.

Pausing before the square window, he peered inside. A thick layer of condensation obscured his vision. The metallic door handle was long and cool to the touch as he grasped it and pulled. A chilly blast of air ruffled his hair. He stepped inside. Before him sat six gurneys. Five were empty. On the sixth was a clear body bag. Inside, a lump of pink flesh.

These people are dead
, he reminded himself.
They can’t hurt you
.

He edged toward the form in the bag, his breath billowing out in white plumes. He began tugging at the zipper. It was stuck. He pulled harder. Soon he had two hands on the bag, holding the fold with one, yanking with the other. Suddenly, the zipper broke free and went whirring down the length of the bag. He could see clearly now a creature with cavernous black eyes. Lysander felt his heart exploding in his chest, felt himself turn and run from the room. But when he blinked, the dull realization hit him that he hadn’t moved a single muscle. That thing on the gurney was still staring back at him through yawning holes that were once eyes. As Lysander’s fear began to curdle in his chest, he could see that this was no demon. It was a man. A man Lysander had seem somewhere before. The memory felt insubstantial and dreamlike.

Dreamlike, yes. He had dreamt of this man, hadn’t he? It was a terrible dream. The slender man in the yellow cardigan, the one who had smashed his face until almost nothing of it remained. The one who had let the shadow into his home. Into him. But it was more than that. This was someone he knew. This was the insurance salesman. Peter Hume. And his warning to Lysander that morning came back with horrifying speed.

You haven’t remembered yet, have you?

A picture was drawn onto Peter’s naked chest. It looked like an eye and he could feel the harshness of its gaze burrowing into him.

I SEE YOU…WHERE YOU LIVE…WHERE YOU SLEEP…WHERE YOU EAT…WHERE YOU’LL DIE…WHERE YOU LIVE…WHERE YOU SLEEP
…

Turning on his heels—this time for real—Lysander ran from the room and straight into a wall. The wall shouted with fright and staggered backward. Lysander looked up, his face twisting in alarm. The wall came forward into the light. His belly and right shoulder were illuminated by the harsh glare spilling out from the cold storage room. This time it
was
Randy.

Samantha’s head dipped like a fishing pole forgotten along the muddy bank of a river. It bobbed a second time and then a third. She was drifting off into sleep. She snapped awake, her body jerking violently. A vague disquiet settled over her. In that brief period of sleep, she had dreamed that a face had been staring at her through the window. The man’s lips were stretched as if something were prying them apart. But stared wasn’t even the right word because it didn’t have eyes with which to stare, just two empty cavities. They looked like two tiny black holes swirling in the middle of its face.

But that face was unmistakable. Filled with sadness, shock and anger, all at once. Its lips were moving. This thing was trying to tell her something.

2 …

6 …

It rose to a deafening pitch

3 …

and then silence.

His lips were still moving when he turned away. Samantha felt her stomach tighten as she saw the back of his head, or what was left of it. Loose chunks of hair and flesh and fragmented bone swung lazily at the edges of a massive hole where there had once been a skull. The result of a violent ...
shotgun blast
.

She didn’t need to see any more to know who it was. James McMurphy.

When the room around her came into sharp focus she could see two girls with teased hair pointing and giggling. She was in Mrs. Wayne’s economics class. Red lines were etched under Sam’s eyes. The dreams had been visiting her with growing frequency, and despite slight variations, all of them were exactly the same. The snake. The room with the glowing light and then that disembodied voice begging her not to enter.

After economics, not one iota of which she could recall, she returned to her locker and found Lysander, fumbling for his books. “There’s something really important I have to tell you,” he said.

“Yeah, well there’s something—” she began to say when from the corner of her eye she saw Summer and a group of her friends heading toward them. Sam threw down her books, pushed Lysander up against the locker and mashed her lips against his. Summer and her friends passed with raised eyebrows. One of the girls made a catcall. As soon as they had passed, Sam pulled away, conscious of the blood rising in her cheeks. They stood blinking stupidly at one another.

Lysander wiped a hand across his lips, embarrassed. “Whad’ya do that for?”

“Well, you said you wanted to make Summer jealous.”

“Oh,” he said, catching sight of her blonde hair down the hall. “I guess I did.”

The bell rang.

“Listen,” he said, growing somber. “There’s something important I have to—”

“It’ll have to wait,” she interrupted him. A smile filled her whole face. Her body felt light and tingly. The kiss had felt as good as she hoped it would. The problem now was how to get more of them.

From far enough away, it looked like Lysander and Sam were caught in the web of a gigantic spider. The supports for the old railroad bridge, now green with age, crisscrossed around them. Their legs dangled over the edge, kicking back and forth. Now long in disuse, these tracks had at one time lead to the maw of the Millingham steel mill. Once the mill had closed, the town had resigned itself to a slow economic death.

Lysander had been unusually quiet since they arrived. He was still trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together in his own mind. Lysander followed Samantha’s gaze down to the river below. He watched the water as it rushed by. The reflection looked like polished jewels twinkling in the sun. He reached a hand into the school bag beside him and withdrew a thin stack of old pages.

She looked up at him. “You found it, the autopsy?” Her voice trembled somewhere between fear and excitement. Lysander held them out to her.

She eyed the page on top. “Delores McMurphy …” she mumbled, “… Thomas.” She flipped through the pages until her large brown eyes grew saucer wide. James McMurphy. She studied that one page for a long time, her face growing ashen.

“There’s more,” Lysander said hesitantly. He had never told her about what at the time had seemed like a sick dream about a man in a yellow cardigan and the dark thing that had crept in under the man’s skin and killed him. He had decided to spare her the awful things the man had done to himself—plus his shame over the fact he had been unable to look away. His discovery that it had all really happened and that there was a body etched with the strange mark of an eye to prove it. Things were different now, and she deserved to know everything.

***

Deputy Morgan wasn’t crazy about spending such an unseasonably warm and sunny day inside tracking down leads. He had already made a dozen calls just to get the numbers he needed. Alex snatched up the receiver, checked the list he had put together, and started dialing. On the second ring, he was already fumbling with his free hand inside his desk drawer, fishing out two tablets from a bottle of aspirin.

Tensions at the Millingham police department had taken on an almost surreal quality of late. Millingham’s larger than life mayor, Gilis “call me Gil” Schroder, had caught them the day after the murder, offering them his full support and with it a sprinkle of friendly advice:

It’s election year, gentlemen. Find this fuck, and do it fast. Your jobs depend on it
.

The steely smile on the cold sonofabitch’s lips had never faltered for a second. Needless to say, the threat did not sit well with Alex. Then things had gone from bad to worse. Two hunters had found a homeless man, presumably a passerby, camping in the woods. When they approached him, the man was nervous. Dried blood was streaked down the arms of his jacket.

Alex had jumped into his cruiser and sped to the scene. Something nagging at him the whole way. This wasn’t the guy, the voice kept saying. The guy they were looking for was organized, methodical, not some sloppy nut bag who spent his nights spooning rabbits. But if it
was
him and the guy got away, or worse, if Jeff had arrived first, he could kiss his chances of ever becoming sheriff good-bye.

Alex stiffened against the back of his chair when the voice answered on the other end. “HCPD,” a middle-aged woman said in a thick Massachusetts accent.

“Detective Danforth, please.”

“One moment, sir,” replied the women rather blandly, dumping him into a hold pattern with terrible muzak.

Of course, Alex had taken the scraggly man into custody, but when the tests came back from the blood on the man’s jacket, it belonged not to Peter Hume, but to a raccoon. The man had been living in the woods for two weeks now, living off whatever he could hit with a rock, which in this case proved to be a small family of raccoons. Apparently, when you killed the mother, the babies didn’t run away, so he had slaughtered them at his leisure. Even long after Sheriff Crow had stopped yelling, Alex’s ears were still ringing something awful.

Part of him wanted Lysander to be guilty. Tracing back Peter Hume’s client list, a surprising entry had come up. Hume had paid the Shores a visit shortly before his murder.

But the worst part about it was that Sam liked him so much. The time he had picked her up in his cruiser and brought her to the station, he had seen the signs as clear as day. Alex was nobody’s fool. He knew a boy Lysander’s age, especially one who dressed the way he did, would only ask how high, if Samantha had told him to jump. He had even told Dorothy to fire the boy on account of him being a suspect, and she had refused and then proceeded to blow his entire theory out of the water with a single question: “Where was this boy when Diane Crow was killed?”

“Hayward,” he had answered her and dropped the subject flat. His suspicion of Lysander hadn’t faded entirely though.

Alex realized his foot was tapping a steady beat on the floor. He was keeping time to a bad muzak rendition of “Get Down on It,” by Kool and the Gang.

The line crackled. “Danforth here.”

Alex finished swallowing the last aspirin in the bottle. “This is Deputy Morgan from the Millingham police department. I understand you’ve been with the Hayward County police department for a number of years now.”

Danforth answered simply, “I have.”

“Great.” Alex was smiling now. “I’ve been told you might have some information for me on a Lysander Shore.”

A turbulent cyclone of emotions was fighting for supremacy within Samantha. At the forefront of those emotions was shock that three people nearly fifty years apart had died under such similar circumstances. First McMurphy in 1965, then her mother, and now some guy named Peter Hume—all three by their own hand, each with eyes ripped from their skull. Her body felt heavy and sluggish. Her stomach tightening and retracting painfully.

When the initial shock began to settle, she was left in a blinding fury. She was furious, of course, that her father had hidden this from her. The first
she’d
heard of it was from Lysander.

All these years she’d faced an insurmountable wall of denial over her mother’s death. She wasn’t sure what felt worse. That she was right or that they’d suspected all along and kept it from her.

Thinking back over the last few days, she could see now that her father had been acting strange, at times dazed, consumed with what she had assumed was a losing battle with exhaustion. But now she was realizing that the expression on his face had been something else entirely. No, he looked like…like a man haunted by what he may have missed. Her eyes filled with hot salty tears which threatened to spill down her cheeks, but she choked them off. There would be lots of time to cry later.

“You wanna head home?” Lysander asked her.

“No,” she said, her mind still racing. “Nothing for me at home.”

Slowly they stood and began following the rusted-out train tracks, overgrown now with spiny-amaranth and carpetweed. Ahead was a dirt road that led back to town.

“My father still won’t go into that bathroom. He uses mine.” She turned to him. “You said there was some kind of mark on Hume’s body when you saw it…at the morgue.”

Lysander nodded.

She handed him a stick that appeared at her feet. “Draw it for me.”

He took the stick from her and scratched an image into the dusty road.

She studied what looked like an eye. She took a bewildering step back. “I’ve seen this before,” she said, puzzled.

Lysander looked at her.

She swung off her school bag off and began rooting through it. From one of the side pockets she produced a notebook. Old, worn.

“Where’d you get that?” Lysander asked, not entirely sure he wanted to know.