As I Die Lying (36 page)

“
Wonderful. Now you have
delusions of godhood. That’s just what I need, a soul-stealing
psychic spirit who also happens to be going chipmunk-spunk
nutty.”

“
Black mine,” Bookworm
said.

“
Ether ore,” Mister
Milktoast said.

I heard sounds behind the door to Mother’s
room. I hurried downstairs in case she was undressed.

“
Let me just have a peek,”
Loverboy said. “Promise I won’t touch. Pleeeeze.”

“
Yeah. I trust you about as
much as I could trust Sally Bakken.”

“
Heh. Sister Milktoast told
me about that. Wish I’d been around back then. Things might have
turned out different.”

“
Loverboy, I don’t think she
was your type.”

“
Hey now. If it’s old enough
to bleed—”

“—
it’s old enough to
butcher,” Little Hitler said.

“
And a Happy Thanksgiving to
you, too, Little Diddler.”

“
Come on, guys. Can’t we all
get along, at least for one day?”

“
We’d hate to screw up your
holiday with Mommy,” Little Hitler said. “And blow Loverboy’s
prospects.”

“
Hey, blow
me
, Swizzlestick, I can
get it anytime I want it. And I’m smooth as a baby’s ass and harder
to hold than a pig in Crisco. You just hack and slash. No charm at
all.”

“
But plenty of depth,”
Mister Milktoast noted.

“
Come on, guys,” Bookworm
said. “We’ve got to stick together now, more than ever.”

“
Well, well, well, if it
isn’t Sickworm with more of his cosmic crap. This isn’t some
Eastern religious text, you know. This is the real
deal.”

I was so mad that I yelled out loud without
thinking. “Just shut the hell up, all of you.”

“
Richard?” Mother called
from upstairs. “Is somebody there?”

“
Nobody here but us
chickens,” Loverboy said aloud.

“
Fowl play,” Mister Miltoast
chimed in.

“
Foreplay,” Bookworm said,
forgetting he was making a transition into one of the good guys,
the minor character who wins the affection of the audience and
plays a key role in the redemptive arc.

“
What?”

I looked up the landing. Mother leaned
against the doorjamb. She was always leaning. Mercifully, she was
wearing her robe, though I don’t think she’d washed it since I’d
moved out of the apartment. She looked a hundred years old, like a
Pharoah’s mummy, shriveled, bone-dry, hollow.

“
Nothing,” I said. “I was
just thinking out loud. How did you sleep?”

“
Like the dead. Had a bad
dream, though. Something about the door opening and—”

“
Coming down for
breakfast?”

“
Yeah. Think I’ll take a
shower first.”

Loverboy leapt, throbbed in
pulse-beats.
Come on, roomies.
Let’s have some fiveplay and soap up for a
gangbang.

I turned and rushed for the kitchen.

“
Richard?”

“
Yes, Mother?”

I hoped she wouldn’t ask for someone to wash
her back. Because I knew several willing volunteers, and a couple
of unwilling ones.

“
Thanks for inviting me
here. I know we’ve had our problems, but...this can be a new start.
For both of us.”

“
It’s good to have you
here.”

“
Maybe we can talk, you
know, about the old days.”

“
We’ll see.” Yes. We
definitely will see. Every square inch, from the inside
out.

“
Oh, yeah. And Happy
Thanksgiving.”

“
We have so much to be
thankful for, Mother. Pass the stuffing. I feel a little
empty.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

We survived Thanksgiving. Cold turkey on
white bread as the wind blew dead and cold, cutting across the
hills like a scythe. We talked of little nothings, leftovers,
Iowa’s corn, the continental divide, grandfather’s funeral. How the
sky was bluer and the clouds grayer in winter.

We drank two fifths of the liquor, watched
cartoon pilgrims on television, and went to bed, each mercifully
alone. The Little People were silent, perhaps taking a holiday
themselves. The Insider didn’t claw at my guts, but I could feel it
waiting, getting stronger, raiding the refrigerator for
leftovers.

I awoke Friday to the first ashes of snow
whispering down to the hard ground. My first thought was of Beth,
hoping that she made it to Shady Valley before the roads got bad.
My second thought was that Mother and Beth would soon be under the
same roof, exactly where the Insider wanted them. And my third
thought...

Something flushed and straight-piped raw
sewage into my chest. Fresh memories spilled from the cracks in the
dam, the dam burst, the red currents roared, rivers of blood washed
through my mind.

Mother on the bed, writhing, limbs hacked off
at the elbows and knees. Still alive, her mouth open to scream, but
only thick gobs of crimson oozing out. Her tongue lying on the
pillow next to her cheek. Wiggling her stumps like a turtle flipped
over on its back.

Loverboy grinning, sliding on his knees
toward the flesh that is unable to fight him off, even if it wanted
to.

“
No, no, NO!”

Something had walked in the night.

Little Hitler had taken the hatchet from the
downstairs closet.

While I slept, the Insider rewrote the part
where I’d killed Mother in a dream.

I looked at my hands. No blood. I looked
under the sheets at my naked flesh. No blood.

Had Mister Milktoast once again cleaned up
the mess? Was the crime covered? Were the bedspreads washed? Were
the chunks buried?

But such a thing could never be buried in the
heart. The Insider wouldn’t allow that. The Insider would drag it
out, disembowel it, bone and fillet it, stuff it and mount it on
the walls of my life.

I pressed my eyeballs, trying to squeeze the
visions away. I rolled out of bed and ran across the hall. I flung
open the door to Mother’s room without knocking.

She was whole. The blankets rose and fell
with her breathing.

Had you going that time, didn’t I,
Richard?

“
You insane
bastard.”

Little Hitler wanted to. Oh, yes, he stood
over her for at least an hour. But I couldn’t let you miss the
party, could I? Besides, how much fun would it be if you and she
slept through the whole thing? I mean, if you’re going to sleep
together, you should be awake, right?

Mother stirred under the blankets, nudged her
head against the pillow, and opened her bloodshot eyes.
“Richard?”

As she stared at me, the Insider froze my
legs so I couldn’t run. I was a statue, a marble nude, as cold and
hard as the mountains outside.

“
Are you okay?” I
asked.

“
I dreamed about you,” she
said, her eyes slowly trailing down my body before finally fixing
on the ceiling.

“
It’s snowing,” I
said.

She kept on talking, as if to herself, her
voice frail and barely louder than the snowfall. “We were walking
down a long black tunnel, and we kept walking and walking. The dark
was so thick we couldn’t hardly breathe. Then the tunnel opened up,
and there was a light. We were in a high cave, with those pointy
rocks hanging down, and the sides of the cave were damp and covered
with gray mold.

“
And there was a flat rock,
about table-high, sort of like an altar. And there was a girl on
it, Richard. Naked and scared. Her eyes so wide they was about to
pop, and she looked at us like she was begging for help, only she
didn’t make a sound.”

I tried to back away. Loverboy wanted to move
closer. The Insider laughed.

“
Before we could run,”
Mother said, smearing the back of her hand against her greasy
forehead, “a big dark shadow swooped out of the other end of the
cave and covered her, then swirled down into her mouth and
disappeared like muddy water down a drain. And she screamed and
screamed like she had eaten razor blades.”

Mother blinked as if trying to drive away the
lingering vision, incapable of grasping extended metaphors, knowing
only that her head throbbed with hangover.

“
And she was screaming ‘Help
me, bookworm.’ Ain’t that weird?”

“
Hmmm. You know how dreams
are,” I said. “Must be the stress of moving and
everything.”

“
The girl on the rock, it
was the girl in your picture. Downstairs.”

The Insider let me have control of my legs,
now that its joke had been played. I backed out of the room. “It
was just a dream. You already used that gimmick once. What, you’re
getting so lame that you have to pull a Freddie fucking Krueger and
pile up the remakes?”

Just a dream. All you have
to do is wake up and shake your head. And all the bad little
shadows will go away
.

“
Remember when you were
little?” Mother said, her dark eyes locked on the ceiling, as if
looking through it at the snowy hell above. “You used to dream
about the monsters.”

There are no monsters in
the real world, right, Richard? Only the ones you
make
.

“
I don’t want to talk about
it,” I said from the hall.

“
After your father went off
to work, you’d come in and snuggle with me under the blankets.
You’d tell me all about what Mister Milktoast did while you were
asleep. You remember that? You remember Mister
Milktoast?”

“
A little.”

“
Why, you said he was your
imaginary friend. Every time you broke something or got into
trouble, you blamed him.”

Never could point the finger at yourself,
could you, Richard?

I shivered from more than the cold.

“
Your father would get so
mad when you’d do that,” Mother said. “He’d practically bust a
neck-vein, he hated it so much. He’d get bug-eyed and bend over you
with his stinking, slobbery breath, then...then…

“
...his boots would do their
dance,” Mister Milktoast said, in his small four-year-old
voice.

“
He couldn’t help it. That
was just his way. He always felt so trapped, you know? And he was a
good man, except for that.”

“
But he beat you all the
time. How could you still love him?”

“
Sometimes love ain’t about
flowers and kisses and a hand to hold in the sunshiny fields.
Sometimes, it’s just a matter of putting up with. ‘Cause what’s out
there, what’s dark and creepy and God-only-knows-what, is even
scarier than what you got ahold of. Or whatever’s got ahold
of
you
.”

“
Is that why you never left
him?”

“
There’s worse things than
getting beat. Like being alone.”

Alone. What I wouldn’t give for that. “And is
that why you told the police you killed Father? Because you were
afraid they were going to take me away from you?”

Her breath got shallow, short. I clenched my
fists and stepped back into the room, not caring that I was
naked.

“
Well, that wasn’t all,” she
said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

“
Tell me, damn it,
tell me
.”

“
Well, I just felt like I
was supposed to. When you love somebody, you try and protect
them.”

She quit pretending to avert her gaze and
looked me in the face.

Then why did she let Father beat you? Ask
her.

“
Then why did you let Father
beat me?”

She sighed a wind of resignation, a graveyard
wind, a wind that flapped the sail-tatters of a ship stranded on a
great dead sea where mothers never had to say they were sorry.

“
I don’t expect you to
understand, Richard. Hell, I don’t even understand it myself.
Sometimes, when he’d punch my eye or knock me against the wall, I’d
be laying there, trying not to pass out. I’d be fighting those
little fuzzy scraps of rags at the edges of my brain. Because I
knew if I went under, I’d just keep on going down and down and
disappear into the dark. And the voices. . .the voices would
whisper... ‘Just come on down, you bitch, come on down and let’s
play.’”

“
Voices?” I grabbed her
blankets and ripped them off the bed. The stench of unwashed flesh
filled the room. She trembled inside her soiled
nightgown.

I pressed my face close to
hers, and I could feel my features contorting into a rubber fright
mask. “
What goddamned
voices?
”

She whimpered and raised her arms as if to
ward off blows.

Like father, like son. The
Coldiron Curse lives on
.

No. It wasn’t her. It was the Insider. It had
always been the Insider.

Is it, Richard? I’m only
what you have made me. What all of you have made
me
.

I ran out of the room, slamming the door
behind me. I went into my bedroom and began dressing. It had always
been the Insider.

How convenient, Richard, that you’ve always
had someone to blame. Father. Sally Bakken. Little Hitler. And now
Mother. What do you care what happens, as long as Richard Allen
Coldiron keeps his nose clean? Why SHOULDN’T you help me kill a
dozen, a hundred, a thousand, since you can always pass the
buck?