SHUDDERVILLE SIX (2 page)

The next day, he heard a voice inside his head. A woman’s voice, and she was crying. He followed the voice in a southwesterly direction to Hope Hollow and rescued Cassie and brought her home to his cabin in the woods, and during the first week she was there, she slept a lot. During the second week, she told him all about herself and her disastrous wedding and Sophie and Jayla and Ryan and Hope Hollow. More than anything else, she told him, she craved normalcy. No more adventures. No more wishes. No more surprises. Benjamin tried very hard not to surprise her. He made homemade chicken soup for lunch and baklava for desert and taught her how to sign, “Thank you,” and “I’m freezing my ass off,” and “Where are you going?” He had fallen in love with her. But Cassie was in love with a dead man.

During the third week, after he’d explained his love of Mozart to her, how he could feel the vibrations of the music whenever he cranked the volume and stood next to the speakers and put his hands on the cabinets; how he could feel the cellos and violas and pianos and kettle drums pounding through his arms and chest and the bottoms of his feet; how he would crank the music so loud that he could feel Mozart’s heart and soul in his muscles and tendons and deep in his bones; after he’d explained all of this to her, Cassie had crawled into bed with him and made love to him, even though she didn’t love him. He knew this. He accepted it.

Now Benjamin waited in the dark, watching her dream. He loved the way her nostrils flared and her eyelids moved with REM sleep. He rested his head against his bunched pillow and watched her with the avid fascination of a sap who was head-over-heels in love with a girl who couldn’t love him back.

Just as he was about to nod off, he heard a terrified scream and bolted upright in bed. The sound was jarring, like knives and forks being tossed into the air.

It was too soon for another voice. Way too soon. They usually came about six months apart. He wanted it to stop. Cassie wasn’t the only one who craved normalcy.

But it didn’t stop.

Minutes later, Benjamin was standing out in the front yard in his pajamas and winter coat, having hastily tugged his boots on over his bare feet, waiting for it to happen again. Every single time it happened, he wished it would go away. It was a curse. A horrible disruption in an otherwise normal life. Once, in college, he’d gone to a psychiatrist and had asked him to remove the part of his brain that “heard” things. Needless to say, that didn’t turn out well. They’d committed him for 72 hours and had put him on anti-depressants, and he’d never gone to see another shrink again.

Now an anguished cry pierced his consciousness.

He shuddered and signed to the voice:
Who are you? What do you want?

Nothing.

No response.

His breath came out in little puffs in the moonlight. Sylvan Lane was a dead end street. People rarely ventured out this way, but now he could see a pair of headlights surging in and out of the fog, flaring through the trees. He stood motionless while the vehicle skated dangerously fast around the corner and vanished into the night.

Teenagers. Nothing but trouble.

He surrendered to the darkness again and listened to the emptiness inside his head, wishing he could shake this weird ability out of his skull. He remembered them all—the little boy who’d gotten lost in the Kentucky woods, a young girl kidnapped in Philadelphia, an elderly woman practically starving to death in her Rhode Island apartment. And then there was Ruby. His first.

Just as he was about to turn around and go back inside, he heard another scream.

Loud.

Terrifying.

Sick and twisted.

It made him shudder.

It reminded him of a maggot feeding frenzy he’d once seen on the carcass of a dead deer deep in the woods—thousands of squirming hungry yellow larvae crawling in and out of decaying pockets of flesh, the air above it pungent and thick.

Gooseflesh rose everywhere on his body. Benjamin turned full circle. Where was it coming from? Now he understood why hearing people tilted their heads in different directions. He circled around through the woods.
Why are you shouting? What do you want? What is your name? How can I help you?

He paused. He listened.

But the screams had faded away again. Gone. They were gone.

He went back inside and wandered aimlessly around for a while, letting himself settle down. Making sure that the voice was truly gone.

Enough already. He’d done his duty. He’d saved enough tortured souls.
Please stop. No more.
He paced back and forth in the living room, burning off excess energy, while the silence stretched from room to room.

Dignity, Vermont

The man was cruel. Bella couldn’t tolerate his cruelty anymore. She sat huddled in her cold basement dungeon-like room, while he walked around upstairs, free as a bird, pacing the floor above her, the rotten floorboards creaking. She heard him shift and turn swiftly and approach the basement door. He unlocked the door with his key, and her heart seized. The rusty hinges creaked as the door swung open, and she shrank back into her corner. He hesitated at the top of the stairs, and she tried not to be too afraid. The old wooden treads began to pop and crack as he descended. His gait had a strange bounce in it, stiff and cocky. Bella winced as the pain spanned her shoulders and traveled through her wings. They were caught hopelessly in the old twine he’d wrapped around them, again and again. Over time, these bonds had warped her feathers and deformed her wing bones.

Like a slow fog he rolled down the stairs. She heard him pause to rifle through the outer room. The faucet in the bathroom drip-dripped. Now he quickened his pace, using lighter footsteps to trip down the three cement steps. He unlocked her door, and she wasn’t surprised by his appearance. He had a pinched look in his ill-fitting shirt. He had a masculine chest and sagging shoulders, a flat face, a broken nose, and cauliflower ears. He was a monster. He carried a length of rope.

“Ready?” he said.

She stared at him from her dark corner. This was as far away as she could get from him, scooting backward into the dark, her wings pressed against the dank stones. She glared at him. She hated him.

“Go on, put your boots on,” he told her in a soft rasp. “It’s cold out there.”

She obeyed. She knew what would happen if she didn’t. She put on her boots, which were caked with dried mud, and then he moved toward her quickly and fiercely, as if he were afraid of her. As if she, Bella, was some sort of wild animal who could slash him in two with a single blow.

He tied her hands together with one end of the coiled rope, her scarred, pale hands, and then he grabbed her by the tangled wings and led her up the stairs and out the back door.

For a moment, she felt hope. It was cruel, this hopeful feeling. It happened every time they went outside and she was allowed to inhale the cold crisp air. It was winter. Glorious December. On the far hillsides were leafless winter-gray trees. Icicles dangled from the roofs—they reminded her of jewels. Dying sunlight glimmered on patches of snow. Everything was stunningly beautiful.

They did a slow death march across the property toward the barn. Her boots sank into the snow, and it was a glorious feeling. She inhaled the cold crisp air and listened to the crows and tried to catch a glimpse of the distant mountains.

He escorted her into the barn, where he tied one end of the rope around her feet, and secured the other end to the harvester. He took out a knife and tugged at the twine that bound her broad wings together, and he cut through enough of it so that her wings flapped open. Then he stepped back. “Okay,” he said. “Go.”

She waited.

“Go ahead,” he told her.

Her wings were sore and bleeding. They felt weak and they ached. It had been almost two weeks since he’d let her into the barn, and she wasn’t used to this feeling of freedom. It scared her. She had to get used to it again. She fluffed and fluttered her wings.

“Fly,” he commanded.

She obeyed.

She closed her eyes and imagined she was escaping from this place.

Suddenly her wings rose and gained strength and flapped open, and she pumped them hard, flying away from him. As she lifted into the air, joy filled her heart.

She flew into the rafters, as far as she could before the rope around her ankles pulled taut and she was flung back down to earth. A rude awakening. She landed on a bed of ancient hay and crouched there for a moment, breathing hard. She glanced to her left. Hidden in that corner of the barn was a blade of broken glass she’d found two weeks ago. She knew exactly where it was. All she had to do was work up the courage and strength to use it.

Blackwood, New York

The next day, Benjamin came home from work and found Cassie soaking in the tub, up to her chin in bubbles. “Hey, beautiful,” he said, while at the same time signing, “How are you?”

“I’m getting fat,” she said, a small frown pinching her mouth.

“You? Nah. You’re perfect,” he told her, watching her slightly puffy belly protrude through a blanket of suds.

She signed the word
fat
over and over again. “It’s all your fault. You keep feeding me all those brownies and sauces and
pasta al dente
. Do you always eat like this?”

“It’s comfort food. You need comforting.”

“Right. They’re going to have to lift me out of here with a crane.”

It was nonsense. She was light as a bird. He smiled and reached for her belly, his fingers exploring her soft stomach, and then inching their way slowly down. There were tears in her eyes. She lifted her chin, waiting for his kiss.

He heard another scream inside his head and jerked away.

“What is it, Benjamin?” She sat up, suds sloshing. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he lied.

“You flinched just now. Are you okay?”

He shrugged it off. “I’m getting a migraine, that’s all.”

“A migraine?”

He settled his hand on her stomach again.

“Do you need an aspirin?”

“Just took a couple,” he lied. “Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

“Oh.” She settled back into the water, and a stifling humidity filled the room. She caught his roaming hand and stopped him. She looked at him with sad, very sad eyes, and said, “I thought about him again today.”

He nodded—barely a nod of acknowledgement—and let his fingers spread wide, and then he ran his hands over her face and shoulders and neck and breasts and stomach and thighs, trying to encompass all of her at once.

Just last week, they’d squeezed into this bathtub together, naked and giggling, her skin so slick beneath his hands it felt as if he’d given birth to the woman of his dreams. Her eyes had burned with a kind of pureness, of enormous giving. He was deeply in love with this woman. But the question was—would she ever love him back?

Dignity, Vermont

Once in a while, Colton got an itch that needed scratching, and so that night, he slapped some Old Spice on his face and drove into town and had a few drinks at a rowdy bar, just to be around other people for a while. The brick walls were spray-painted with mindless graphics, and the spotty sound system was loud and pounding. His salt-encrusted baseball cap said
200 MPH Club
, and there were spots of dried blood on his pants. He realized too late he should’ve changed his pants. Well, if anybody asked he would say it was paint. He sat like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, clutching a cocktail napkin in one hand and a bottle of imported beer in the other.

There were lots of people crowding into the bar, talking and dancing. He recognized a few sweaty faces. He gazed at some of the women with round, haunted eyes. One of them came over to him and smiled. She was drunk. She was middle-aged. Her name was Abby. The two of them had known each other since elementary school, but they were worlds apart. Throughout the years, they’d barely exchanged more than a few garbled words.

“Hey there, stranger,” she said, looking right at him, which startled him because people usually looked right through him. “What’s your poison?”

“I’m drinking Pabst,” he said.

“Buy me one?”

“Sure.”

He bought them a couple of beers.

They danced a little.

As the hour approached midnight, Abby suggested they take their beers outside, and they did, ignoring the sign on the front door that said,
No Alcohol Allowed Outside the Premises – or Else!
They stood on the sidewalk beneath the star-studded sky and listened to the percussive boom of the bass guitar and drums pounding on the walls of the bar like a prisoner trying to escape. They clinked bottles. The beer tasted crisp.

“I never knew you could be so much fun.” Abby finished her smoke and spoke softly. “Your place or mine?”

He shuddered a little. “What makes you think I’m interested?”

She scowled at him. “You embittered old bastard.” She spilled some of her beer on him, and he leapt backward and laughed. Then she threw the bottle at him and he deflected it with his elbow, and the bottle clunked to the ground and rolled into a gutter.

“Hey,” he said angrily.

“Fuck you!” She turned on her heels and headed for her car.

He went back inside and had another beer. He sat rubbing his sore elbow and watching the ladies dance until last call, when he staggered outside, climbed into his Chevy and headed for the interstate. He hummed along with Willie Nelson on the radio as he drove two towns over toward the old railroad yard, deserted now, and picked up a prostitute. She wasn’t half bad looking. Late-twenties. Bottle-blonde. Bloodshot eyes.

“Where we going?” she asked in a distracted voice.

“To the lake.”

She nodded. “That’s cool.”

They chatted. He kept things light.

She smoked a joint in the car. Offered him some. He got stoned with her.

As they approached the lake, he said, “Hey, listen. I’ll pay you extra to spend the night at my place.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Don’t worry. It’s not like I’m a serial killer or anything,” he said with a laugh.