The Barrens & Others (27 page)

I pointed the way to the kitchen as I continued to stare at the photo.

"In the fridge."

This was the killer of dear Jessica. Regina Ciullo. When she tired of slashing rats she went out and found a child. I felt my pulse quicken, my palms become moist. The photo trembled in my grasp, as if she knew I'd be coming for her.

"Where on Shore Drive is she staying?"

Caskie popped the top on a can of Bud as he returned to the living room.

"The Jensen place."

"Jensen! How'd you get her in there?"

The beer can paused inches from his lips.

"You know them?"

"I just know they're rich."

He took a long gulp.

"They are. And they're hardly ever home – at least in this home – except in the spring. They're on a world cruise now. And since Mr. Jensen is a friend of the present administration, and a personal friend of the Bureau's director, he's allowed us to stash her in his mansion. It's a perfect cover. She's posing as Mr. Jensen's niece." He shook his head slowly. "What a place. That's the way to live, I tell you."

The woman who murdered my daughter was living in luxury out on Shore Drive, guarded by the FBI. I wanted to scream. But I didn't. I closed the file and handed it back to Caskie.

"I'll keep the picture," I said. "The rest is all yours."

He snatched the folder away from me.

"You mean it?

"Of course. You'll never hear from me again...
unless
, of course, Papillardi is convicted and she isn't indicted.
Then
you'll hear from me. Believe me, you'll hear from me!"

I had put on a performance of Barrymore caliber. And Caskie bought it. He smiled like a death row prisoner who'd just got a last minute reprieve.

"Don't worry about that, Santos. As soon as Papillardi's case is through, we're on her. Don't you worry about that!" He turned at the door and gave me another of his thumps-up gestures. "You can take that to the bank!"

And then he was gone.

For a while I stood there in the living room and stared at the picture of Regina Ciullo. Then I took it into Jessica's room and tacked it over the head of the latest outline on the wall. Then I stabbed the figure so hard, so fast, and so many times that there was a football sized hole in the wall in less than a minute.

*

A week later the walls of Jessica's room were so swiss-cheesed with holes that there was no space left for new outlines.

Time for the real thing.

I'd been driving by the Jensen place regularly, sometimes three times a day. I always kept the photo on the seat beside me, for quick reference in case I saw someone who resembled Regina Ciullo. I was sure I'd know her anywhere, but it's good to be prepared.

The houses on Shore Drive all qualified as mansions – all huge, all waterfront, facing Connecticut across the Long Island Sound. Although there was always a car or two in the driveway behind the electric steel gate – a Bentley or a Jag or a Porsche Carrera – I never saw anybody.

Until Thursday. I was in the midst of cruising past when I saw the front gate begin to slide open. I almost slammed on the brakes, but had the presence of mind to keep moving. But slow.

And who pulls out but the bitch herself, the slasher of my daughter, slayer of the last thing in my life that held any real meaning. She was driving the Mercedes. Speeding. She passed me doing at least fifty, and still accelerating. On a residential street. The bitch didn't care. The top was down. No question about it. It was her. And she was alone.

Had she given her FBI guardians the slip again? Was she on her way to find another innocent, helpless, trusting child to slaughter?

Not if I could help it.

I followed her to the local Gristedes, trailed her as she dawdled along the cosmetics aisle, touching, feeling, sniffing. Probably looking for the means to whore herself up. As ordinary as the photo had been, it had done her a service. In the light of day she was extremely plain. She needed all the help she could get. And her body. Caskie had described it as "incredible." It was anything but that from what I could see. I guess there's no accounting for tastes.

I caught up to her in the housewares aisle. That was where they sold the knives. When I saw a stainless steel carving set displayed on a shelf I got dizzy. Visions of Jessica's mutilated body lying on that cold, steel gurney in the morgue flashed before me. A knife like that had ripped her up. I saw Martha's face, the expressions on her brothers' faces –
Your fault! Your fault!

That did it.

I ripped the biggest knife from the set and spun her around.

"Remember Jessica Santos?" I screamed.

Shock on her face. Sure! No one was supposed to know.

I pretended she was one of the outlines on Jessica's wall. A deep thrust to the abdomen, feeling the knife point hesitate against the fabric of her dress, and then rip through cloth and skin, into the tender innards. She screamed but I didn't let that stop me. I tugged the blade free and plunged it in again and again, each time screaming,

"This is for Jessica! This is for Jessica!"

Somebody pulled me free of her and I didn't resist. She'd been slashed like Jessica. The damage was irreparable. I knew my duty was done, knew I'd avenged my daughter.

But as I looked into her dying eyes, so hurt, so shocked, so bewildered, I had the first inkling that I had made a monstrous mistake.

*

I slammed my fist on the table.

"Call the FBI! Check it out with them!"

They'd had me in this interrogation room for hours. Against my lawyer's advice – who wanted me to plead insanity – I'd given them a full statement. I wasn't going to hide anything. This was an open and shut case of a man taking justifiable revenge against his daughter's murderer. I wasn't going to be coy about it. I did it and that was that. Now they could do their damnedest to convict me. All I needed was the FBI file to prove that she was the killer.

"We
have
called the FBI," said Captain Hall, chief of the Monroe police department. He adjusted his belt around his ample gut for the hundredth time since he'd stuck me in here. "And there's no such agent as Caskie assigned anywhere in New York."

"It's a deep cover thing! That woman posing as a Jensen is Regina Ciullo, a federal witness against Bruno Papillardi!"

"Who told you that?" Captain Hall said.

"Agent Caskie."

"The agent who doesn't exist. How convenient. When did you meet him?"

I described my encounters with Caskie, from the cemetery to my apartment.

"So you were never in his office – if he ever had one. Did anyone see you with him?"

I thought about that. The funeral had been over and everyone was gone when I'd met him in the cemetery. We'd stood side by side for less than a minute in the foyer of the FBI building, and then we'd been together in the alley and my apartment. A cold lump was growing in my gut.

"No. No one that I recall. But what about the picture? It's got to have Caskie's fingerprints on it!"

"We've searched your car three times now, Mr. Santos. No picture. Maybe you
should
plead insane. Maybe this FBI agent is all in your mind."

"I'm not crazy!"

Captain Hall's face got hard as he leaned toward me.

"Well then, maybe you should be. I know you've had a terrible thing happen to your family, but I've known Marla Jensen since she was a girl, back when she was still Marla Wainwright. And that was poor Marla you sliced up."

He had to be wrong! Please God, he had to be! If I did that to the wrong woman –

"No! You got to listen to me!"

A disgusted growl rumbled from Captain Hall's throat.

"Enough of this bullshit. Get him out of here."

"No, wait! Please!"

"Out!"

Two uniformed cops yanked me out of the chair and dragged me into the hall. As they led me upstairs to a holding cell, I spotted Caskie walking in with two other cops.

"Thank God!" I shouted. "Where have you been?"

His face was drawn and haggard. He almost looked as if he had been crying. And he looked different. He looked trimmer and he held himself straighter. The rumpled suit was gone, replaced by white duck slacks, a white linen shirt, open at the collar, and a blue blazer with an emblem on the pocket. He looked like a wealthy yachtsman. He stared at me without the slightest hint of recognition.

One of the cops with him whispered in his ear and suddenly Caskie was bounding toward me, face white with rage, arms outstretched, fingers curved like an eagle's talons, ready to tear me to pieces. The cops managed to haul him back before he reached me.

"What's the matter with him?" I said to anyone who'd listen as my two cops hustled me up the stairs.

My attorney answered from behind me.

"That's Harold Jensen, the husband of the woman you cut up."

I felt my knees buckle.

"Her husband?"

"Yeah. I heard around the club that she started divorce proceedings against him, but I guess that's moot now. Her death leaves him sole heir to the entire Wainwright fortune."

With my insides tying themselves in a thousand tight little knots, I glanced back at the man I'd known as Caskie. He was being ushered through the door that led to the morgue. But on the threshold he turned and stole a look at me. As our eyes met, he winked and gave me a secret little thumbs up sign.

foreword to "The Barrens"

John Betancourt wrote to me sometime in 1989 asking if I'd be interested in participating in a "Special F. Paul Wilson Issue" of
Weird Tales
magazine. Like I could say no? An entire issue of the world's first and greatest horror fiction magazine – where the classics of Lovecraft and Howard and Bloch and Bradbury first saw print – devoted to me? How could I
not
be interested? I was restarting REPRISAL then but promised I'd send the requested 20,000 words of new fiction just as soon as I got free.

"The Barrens" was intended to be those 20,000 words. Because
Weird Tales
was the target market, I designed it to be Lovecraftian, but not without my own little twists. It was August and I was cruising along on it when I got a letter from Bob Weinberg requesting a story for
Lovecraft's Legacy
, an anthology he and Marty Greenberg (see how that name keeps popping up?) were editing in honor of H. P. Lovecraft's centennial. I realized "The Barrens” was perfect.

So now I had a dilemma. Which meant more: the ego stroke of an issue of
Weird Tales
devoted to me, or being part of a one shot anthology dedicated to the work of one of the most influential dark fantasy writers of all time?

I chose the latter.

Why? Because HPL is special to me.

Donald A. Wollheim is to blame. He started me on Lovecraft. It was 1959. I was just a kid, a mere thirteen years old when he slipped me my first fix. I was a good kid up till then, reading Ace Doubles and clean, wholesome science fiction stories by the likes of Heinlein, E.E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, and the rest. But he brought me down with one anthology. He knew what he was doing. He called it
The Macabre Reader
and slapped this lurid neato cool Ed Emshwiller cover on it. I couldn't resist. I bought it. I read it. And that was it. The beginning of my end.

The Macabre Reader
is an excellent collection – Bloch, Wandrei, Smith, Bishop, Howard. Good stories – dark, eerie, intense, the emotions jumping right off the page – like nothing I'd ever read before. But the one that grabbed me by the throat was "The Thing on the Doorstep" by somebody named H. P. Lovecraft. I was dragged into the story by the opening line ("It is true I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer."), captivated by the setting ("...witch cursed, legend haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic."), blown away by the dense prose that tossed off words like eldritch and foetor and Cyclopean and nacreous, that spoke of poets who die screaming in madhouses, that casually mentioned strange, forbidden books and towns like Innsmouth (where even Arkhamites fear to go) as if I should be familiar with them.

But it was the heart of the tale that lingered in my mind long after I'd finished it – the concept of another reality impinging on ours, knowledge of which could drive you stark raving mad; a dimension of perverse logic and bizarre geometry, full of godlike creatures with unpronounceable names, aloof and yet decidedly inimical.

My thirteen year old world did not seem quite so safe and sane, my reality seemed a tad less real.

"The Thing on the Doorstep" delivered on the up close, breath clogging horror that
The Macabre Reader
's cover had promised, but it also served as my Cthulhu Mythos primer, my introduction to what is known as Cosmic Horror.