The Skull Ring (9 page)

A minute passed, one in which Julia breathed only twice.

Another minute, and still the clock stood at 4:06.

Julia peered over the edge of the bed. The clock was plugged in. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillow.

A malfunction, that's all. Something in that idiot digital brain has a hang-up about 4:06. Throw the damned clock out and buy another one instead of worrying about it.

She reached out, found the plug, and jerked it free of the wall socket. She didn't look at the clock as she shoved it into the wastebasket. She was afraid those same numerals might still be glaring, even without electricity.

After she dressed, she called George Webster and told him the wiring had been acting up. She described what had happened with the clock and the VCR. Nothing major, but she just thought he might like to know. Maybe ought to get it checked. Webster said he'd send somebody around to check it that afternoon, and asked if she would be there.

Yes, she would be there, armed and ready if need be.

Before she went to work, she walked around the back of the house. The footprints were still there. Were there more, a fresh set pressed into the dewy grass? She couldn't tell. Leaves had fallen overnight, making a carpet of red and brown. She hoped enough would fall to cover the tracks so that she wouldn't have to see them anymore.

The day passed swiftly as she wrapped up a couple of articles and sat through a staff meeting with the graphics people. Graphics people always complained that they were pushed up against the deadline by slack advertisers who turned in their copy at the last minute. Poor graphics people. They were artists, while writers were only hacks and glorified typists. In the world of modern media, words seemed the least-valuable commodity.

Walter's Jeep was parked in the drive when she got home. A little shiver wended through her belly, and at first she thought it was fright. Then she realized she was glad to see him. She and Walter had already shared a mutually embarrassing moment–after all, it wasn’t every guy who came across as a crazed killer on the initial encounter.

Her front door stood open. Walter was in the living room, kneeling by an outlet, a meter in his hands, wire probes sunk into the outlet slots. He looked up and smiled when he saw her.

"Hey there, ma'am."

"Hello, Walter. Have you found anything?"

The room was dark, and she realized he must have switched off the power main. He stood, his face in shadows, his dark eyes glinting. "Nothing so far. What kind of problems are you having?"

"Remember the clock?"

"Yep."

"It got stuck again."

"That's weird. But it's more likely the clock than the wiring."

"It was stuck on the same time. 4:06."

Walter's mouth twisted sideways. He smelled of sawdust and sunshine, honest, warm aromas. "Hmmm. I'd throw that thing in the weeds. It ain't worth the cost of fixing it."

She told him about the VCR problem. She showed him that the programming was still set to record the game. Only, instead of taping the game, she had taped God's greatest snake-oil salesman.

"You like baseball?" Walter asked.

"I love the Cardinals. Ozzie Smith was my favorite player. Just watching him turn backflips made me happy."

"I played a little baseball in high school. I could hit like crazy, but I couldn't catch water in a thunderstorm. Anyway, it looks to me like the VCR is set up okay. I tested all the electric lines, and I ain't found any short circuits."

"Darn. I was hoping it would be something obvious."

"Maybe it's just a stretch of bad luck. Sometimes it happens that way. They make machines smarter than people these days." Walter put his tools back in his belt.

Julia looked at his boots, sizing them up. Walter caught her staring.

"I wiped my feet good," he said. "I noticed you had dogs around the neighborhood."

"Oh, sorry," she said. "Did you by chance go around back when you were here the other day?"

"Yeah. I checked the windows inside and out."

Julia hoped her relief wasn't too visible. "I just saw some footprints around back, and it made me wonder."

"Don't blame you," he said. "Lots of bums and Creeps in the world nowadays. Too many outsiders. You ought to keep your bedroom window locked, though, if you're so worried about it."

"Locked?" She
had
locked it, almost always kept it locked except when she wanted to air out the house.

"I put the screen back up, too. One of those Tennessee winds must have blowed it off."

Screen off, window unlocked. Clock stuck on 4:06.

Suddenly she wanted Walter out of the house, wanted to bar the door, the windows, and never ever ever open them again. But that was stupid. If Walter wanted her in any of a number of Creepy ways, he'd passed up plenty of opportunities. So far, he'd been a tiny island of sanity in this strange sea of uncertainty.

But he did have several sharp tools in his belt. And Mabel Covington had reacted strangely at the mention of his name.

"Thanks, Walter," she said. "I appreciate your checking the wiring."

"Glad to," he said, pushing back his cap. "Sorry I didn't find nothing wrong. Usually its something simple."

“Nothing’s ever simple in my life.” She followed him to the door.

"I'll turn your power back on," he said. "Reckon I'll see you later. Lots of things seem to go wrong in this house."

"I reckon so," she found herself saying. She waited until he drove away. Then she locked the door and went to the bedroom. The window was closed. The clock was still in the wastebasket.

Julia was tempted to plug it in again, to see if those same haunting numerals were still frozen on the display. But what if they were? Or, almost as bad, what if they weren't?

Had someone taken her screen down, perhaps crawled in through the window she had somehow forgotten to lock? Or had the wind really blown off the screen while she was at work?

Or had she opened the window and forced herself to forget?

Julia sat on the bed and picked up her cell phone, punching the top number in her book.

"Hello?" came that comforting voice.

"Hi, Dr. Forrest?"

A pause. "Yes."

"It's me, Julia Stone. Sorry to bother you at home."

"That's quite all right, Julia. That's why I gave you my number." Someone else's voice, a man's, was in the background. Julia couldn't make out the words. "Is there a problem?"

Of course there's a problem
, Julia wanted to scream.
After four months of therapy, you've probably figured that out by now
.

But that was misplaced rage, the kind of thing that didn't bring awareness and healing. That was abdicating responsibility, as Dr. Forrest had so carefully explained. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, "I . . . I think I'm having another episode."

"Worse than the last one?"

"Not as intense, but longer in duration. I'm imagining things." Julia tried to sound matter-of-fact, almost bored. She related the stories of the clock, the VCR, and the footprints at the window.

"Hmm. Have you been keeping the journal like you promised?"

Julia nodded before remembering that Dr. Forrest couldn't see her. "Yes."

"Did you write down those incidents?"

"No."

"Julia, it's very important that you keep track of everything out of the ordinary, each thought or idea, each fear. I'm very disappointed in you."

"I . . . I'll try harder from now on."

"You do want to get better, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You know that you have to work hard at it. You have to fight. I can help, but only if you let me. Will you let me, Julia?"

"Yes."

"Can you come by the office tomorrow?"

"Sure. But tomorrow's Saturday."

"We'll just squeeze in a little extra session. The problems are very close to the surface. You just have to let them go, bring them into the light."

"What time should I come by?"

"Eleven in the morning."

"Okay. What should I do tonight?"

"Try not to worry. Think about the things we've worked on. The truth is locked inside you. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Pay attention to your dreams."

"Thanks, I'll do that. See you in the morning."

"Bye. And Julia?"

"Yes?"

"We'll beat this thing."

Dr. Forrest hung up. Julia slid the cell back on the nightstand. She wrote the clock incident in her journal and added the part about the VCR. Lastly, she wrote down her dream of bones. Then she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

Bones.

Rattling at the window, hanging dry and dusty in her closet, tumbling around on the floor of her childhood bedroom like so many Barbies and wooden blocks.

The bones stitched themselves into a skeleton.

Julia was four. She got up from the bed. Chester Bear had fallen behind the headboard, but she didn't retrieve him. Instead, she went to the door, listened to the voices in the next room, turned the knob.

The skeleton stood before her, its skull grinning like a jack-in-the-box puppet.

She tried to cry out, but then its hard clattering fingers were on her, dirty-white, squeezing, sharp, insistent. The skeleton pulled her from the room, dragged her into the living room. Daddy was gone. The bad people in the robes stood around, watching her. She opened her mouth to scream but a blanket was thrown over her. The wool scratched her skin.

She was carried from the house into the cool dark night. A long time later, maybe hours, the blanket was pulled from her. Two of the people in robes held her. Others stood watching in the darkness. They took her clothes and tied her. Someone stuck a needle in her arm.

She was laid on a stone, its hard chill sinking into her flesh. The bad people circled around her. She wanted to yell for help, but she was so tired, so sleepy.

Candles burned near the stone, along with other things in clay pots. Trees loomed overhead under the bright, full face of the moon. A sweetish, heavy smoke filled the air. The bad people began swaying, singing slow songs that made her blood freeze in her veins.

One of the bad people stood over her and held out his hands. A large ring, of a silver skull with tiny red jewels for eyes, flashed on one finger. The hand with the ring went inside the fold of his robe. He brought out a long knife, its blade gleaming in the moonlight.

The bad people gathered near, the stench of their sweat making her want to throw up. The skull ring flashed a gleaming grin. She struggled against her bonds. Why couldn't she scream?

The bad man with the knife leaned forward and raised the blade high. He lifted his head as if to gaze imploringly into the night sky and his hood slipped backward. Four-year-old Julia looked up at the lower portion of his face revealed beneath the wedge of shadow. That mouth, that chin—

No.

Not him.

Pleeezzzzzzzzzz–

At last she could scream, and she awoke in her bed, the darkness thick around her, the sheets entwined in her limbs. She sat up, a clammy sweat on her skin.

For a horrible moment, that face was still frozen in her mind. She fought for breath. It was all a dream, only a stupid, strange nightmare.

Then why did two rivers of pain sluice down her abdomen?

She ran her hands under the sheets and touched the scars.

They were moist.

She fumbled for the bedside lamp, nearly knocked it over before she found the switch. The light burst to life. Julia looked at her fingers.

Only sweat.

Not blood.

Julia glanced instinctively at the clock then remembered it was in the trash. She lay back down and thought of soft, sunny things, the lake shore at the country club where Mitchell had taken her virginity, the little beach house at Cape Hatteras that her adoptive parents had owned, the playground at Denton Elementary where she'd been a diminutive kickball star.

Soon she was breathing evenly. She pulled out her journal and wrote down the dream. The images of the fire and smoke and skull ring sliced into her willful focus on mundane things. She thrust all memories aside and calculated the Cardinals’ chances of moving up in the division standings the next year and their perennial search for a decent closer, centerfielder, and left-handed starting pitcher.

Julia turned out the light. As much as she feared the dark, and the things it could harbor, she hated the thought that something outside could see her more easily than she could see it.

Darkness won’t win. Please, God, if you’re up there, don’t let it get me.

She couldn’t fix an image of God in her head. The pasty, stringy-haired old man with the shimmering aura that was popular in children’s Bible books was the first to emerge from the mists of drowsiness.

That stern, paternal visage was no comfort, so she let it shift to a woman. She had no model for a female godhead, except the popular depictions of Venus, Athena, and other mythological goddesses, and their beautiful faces came off as haughty and vain instead of generous. She killed the formative image before it could sneer down at Julia in disdain. She recalled something she’d read once, probably by Nietzsche or Heidegger or one of the other renowned existentialists, that posited the theory that if God were dead, he’d have to be replaced.