As I Die Lying (39 page)

That I still had feelings.

“
It’s okay now, Beth,” I
said, panting from exertion. “We’re going to make it.”

She was as pale as the snow. She gripped the
dashboard as I turned the corner and hit fourth gear. In the
rearview mirror, Frye’s car was making a U-turn. The
front-wheel-drive cruiser wasn’t made for icy roads, and it slipped
and spun on the bed of snow. The front end hopped up as Frye drove
onto the submerged curb. I turned the next corner and angled off to
the main strip.

I didn’t want Frye to catch me before the
psychic battle was over. That would wipe out the element of
surprise and give the advantage back to the Insider. Because I had
no doubt that the Insider could use and manipulate Frye, just as it
was trying to manipulate Beth. Just as it had always manipulated
everyone in my life.

“
What’s going on, Richard?”
Beth gripped the dashboard with both hands as the Subaru hit a
slick fifty.

I winced as the Insider
belched its acid. It was struggling with the Little People,
startled, used to one-on-one combat but not gang warfare. How long
had they been planning this? And why were they on
my
side?

“
I’ll tell you everything,”
I said. “I owe you that much.”

There were only a couple of other cars on the
slick highway, a big green boat of a Chevy and another Subaru. I
passed them and got behind a yellow Highway Department truck. Rock
salt and bits of gravel bounced up from the road bed and peppered
the windshield. I saw the Crown Victoria small in the mirror,
losing ground but still giving chase. Its blue lights pulsed off
the silent buildings that lined both sides of the road.

“
Where are we going?” Beth
asked again.

“
Just going,” I said. I must
have looked as mad as I felt, because sweat popped out on my
forehead. My eyes bulged in their sockets. My hands were white on
the steering wheel. But the real tension was inside, where an
ancient, invisible battle was being waged, perhaps one as old as
Eve and the serpent, Abel and Cain, God and the nothingstuff He had
whipped together to create heavens and Earth.

The Insider said he’d nearly been sucked by
Virginia into that gray land of death. So it was beatable, mortal.
What had the Insider said? Something about selflessness and purity?
Sounded like a maguffin, a clue planted for convenient misuse later
on, the lazy out for a hack thriller writer. But I could worry
about that in the second draft. Right now, I had to leave Frye
behind.

I swerved around the salt truck just as we
reached the Paper Paradise. Behind the big windows, the squares of
books were arranged behind like a monument to human thought and
emotion. There were so many titles Bookworm would never get a
chance to read, dead leaves, unwitting classics. So many imaginary
friends never met. I said a silent “So long” to all those
overlooked chapters and turned the page toward the climax.

I was sluicing along at sixty miles an hour,
as fast as I dared on the slick pavement. The snow fell heavily and
the sky was almost black. It was as if the Insider was extending
itself out over the entire world, trying to enfold and swallow
everything, not just the Little People that were pecking at its
shadow like crows at roadkill.

“
Richard. Slow down. That
policeman...you have to
tell
me.”

Now that it was confession time, I didn’t
feel the surge of emotion actors expressed in their crime dramas.
Perhaps my writer wasn’t as skilled. Or my show had been canceled
in mid-season. The words came out beaten, worn, years weary.
“Remember Shelley Birdsong?”

“
That girl who went
missing?”

“
That was me.”

“
You, what? She turned up in
Los Angeles, reading scripts for a studio. Didn’t you
hear?”

My foot reached for the brake but at the
finish line you’re compelled to accelerate.

“
She was in my basement. I
had her tights.”

“
Richard, it doesn’t matter
who you were with before. I wasn’t a virgin, either,
remember?”

I was angry, and this time, it was my anger,
not some maudlin bit of melodrama shunted into my life in the
interest of plot development. Plus, she’d forgotten that I had lied
and told her I was a virgin. “The carnation. Jack the Ripper. It
was me, Beth.”

“
I don’t
understand.”

Of course not. What kind of drugged fog had
the Insider put in her head? What kind of sweet insane lullabies
was it whispering even now, what siren’s song of decadent rapture?
What rule would it break next to cheat the ending?

I swerved off the main highway onto Tater
Knob Road. There were no tracks in the smooth white roadbed. The
Subaru cut through the virgin snow and I saw Frye’s headlights
behind me. He had gained some ground on me back at the
interstate.

“
I killed Monique, Beth,” I
said.

“
You couldn’t
have.”

“
That couldn’t have been
Richard.” So the Insider had fought free. But he was weak and
wounded. “Nothing’s ever his fault.”

“
Richard? Honey?”

“
Sooner or later, all we
serial killers end up referring to ourselves in third person. It’s
a genre convention.”

“
Stop it. You’re freaking me
out.”

“
And it wants me to kill
you, too.”

Beth was whiter than ice, her lips parted,
her mouth round and black with horror.

We passed a barn that was huddled under the
weight of snow. Its open door was a like a black, leering eye.
“Glaring balefully,” Mister Milktoast punned from some distant
hallway.

I glanced in the rear-view and saw that the
Crown Victoria had slid sideways into a ditch. One front wheel was
spinning uselessly a foot off the ground. At least Frye would be
safe from the Insider’s knife.

“
But I won’t let it kill
you,” I said to Beth.

“
We won’t let it kill you,”
Bookworm said.

“
There. Your voice just
changed again. And what’s all this about killing? You’re freaking
me out.”

“
It wants to eat the light,”
I said. “There’s a psychic spirit in my head that’s millions of
years old—“

The Insider cut in like an Alpha male at a
beta test for one-liners at closing time. “—and I’m going to fuck
you with a knife. I’m going to make you love me, then I’m going to
let Richard see his little progeny. I’m going to make Richard hate
you, you human bitch.”

Beth wailed, shuddering, sobbing, pounding
the window. “That drummer killed Monique. Jimmy whatever. They
arrested him three days ago. Have you been drinking? Stop the
car.”

I faded in and out, a television set with bad
reception. I didn’t want to sleep, not yet. I didn’t want the
Insider to walk or float or swap skins. Not yet, not yet.

I drove along a ridge, and below me the land
sloped away, white and steep. A few gnarled apple trees cowered
like witches two hundred feet down. One turn of the wheel. Maybe
Virginia knew something I didn’t.

“
Not a chance, Richard,” the
Insider said.

And it was too late, we were on a level
stretch of land now that I recognized even in the storm. It was
Arlie’s farm. His warped log cabin looked down on the road from the
side of the hill. The road was giving out. The Subaru leapfrogged
into a frozen meadow and stalled.

“
Now, you pretty little can
of potted meat. Tell Richard you love him, so we can get this over
with.”

I dug in my pocket for the
knife. The blade sliced my index finger, but the pain was borrowed
and distant. Not
my
pain. My pain was deeper, darker, more hellish. Because I
wasn’t sure where the Insider ended and I began.

I grabbed Beth by the hair
and twisted her face toward me.
“Look at
me!”

The knife curved inches from her nose.

She saw the Insider in my eyes. Realization
crossed her face and fear tightened her jaw. The Insider had taken
away the veil, dropped the rubber mask, rubbed off the ham fat and
come out for a bow. She saw me as I was, a haunted murderer. A
murderer who had planted a child in her womb. A murderer who wanted
to dig it back up.

Love was no longer blind. She saw the real
Richard Allen Coldiron. Her sperm donor, her lover, her captor, her
killer.

The moment was frozen, an ice sculpture of
time:

Stands of silver birch and naked oak watching
from the hills.

The sunless sky pressing down like a great
gray mitten, closing and suffocating.

White flakes pirouetting in the wind like
ashes of long-dead volcanic fires.

My hand tangled in Beth’s amber hair, so soft
beneath my cruel grip.

Her heart-shaped face, radiating the light of
beauty. Twin eyebrows furrowed into gull’s wings. Underneath the
eyebrows, two sea-green eyes, pools, lakes, cosmic oceans,
spreading out calm and eternal.

And the eyes saw into mine, saw through the
Insider, looked into the mirror-caves of my soul.

We both saw the light.

“
She doesn’t love us,”
Bookworm said.

Beth gulped, ready to say anything to save
her life. “Yes, I do, Richard. Please don’t hurt me.”

“
She does,” the Insider
taunted. “And you know what happens to the ones who love you? Now
get this over with. It’s a long walk home to Mother.”

“
She doesn’t love us,” I
said. The knife quivered with a life of its own, animated by the
Insider’s raw hatred of the human race, by my own need for
completion.

“
Now, Richard. Rip the
bitch. You know you want to. You know you
will
.”

“
No light,” I
said.

“
Kill
her
.”

“
Make me.”

My head was splitting open as if the tectonic
plates of my skull were grinding against each other. Rusty nails
probed my fingertips, painting silver strips of agony across my
mind. My heart blazed with the sulfur of the Insider’s rage. But I
couldn’t surrender yet. She was the mother of my child.

Besides, I loved her.

That L thing.

What can you do?

“
Run,” I croaked, pointing
toward Arlie’s cabin. Beth pulled the handle and the door opened.
She kicked it wide against the snow and jumped into the meadow. I
watched as she ran twenty feet away, struggling against the surf of
whiteness. She took one look back, but I waved her away. Then she
was gone, disappearing into the trees.

Richard, Richard, Richard. After all I’ve
done for you. I was going to be all Mister Nice Guy, let you have a
little fun, enjoy your misery a while longer, watch as you cut up
your lover and your unborn child and then your mother. I was going
to spare you the guilt. I was going to hang around so you could
blame it on me.

But now.. .NOW. . .you’ve made me angry. Now
I’ll just have to go ahead and join with Beth. Now I’ll just have
to take my pleasure from the other side, as SHE cuts YOU into
little pieces. A good host swings both ways and plots twists can
always swallow their own tails and, besides, you’ve had no respect
for any of us, despite paying lip service to trust.

The Insider’s voice was deep as tombs and
dusty as crypts and bright as blood and sharp as bone. My blood
vessels were electric wires, my skin was cellophane. The fucker had
fooled me, played me for a patsy, made me insane, then was ready to
cast me aside like a squishy rubber.

Come to think of it, that’s
the kind of thing you
do
to the people you love.

So long, Richard. It’s been fun. But all
good things must end. It’s a shame you won’t get to keep all these
sweet memories, but that’s life, right? Oh, and say hello to
Virginia for me.

“
You’re not going anywhere,”
I said. “You begged me to take you into my heart, and now you’re
stuck.”

The Little People had played possum, just
like we had planned. We swarmed the Insider again. I joined them.
Five against one. Pretty good odds.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

I stumbled out of the car and fell in the
snow. We lifted me to my feet, as if dangling from the strings of
some high puppet master with palsy.

“
It’s just like I said it
would be,” Bookworm said.

“
Classic three-act
structure,” Mister Milktoast said. “Big deal. I saw it
coming.”

“
Yeah, what do you want, a
fucking medal or something?” said Loverboy. He glanced wistfully at
the tracks Beth had made in the snow. “I’m going to miss that
little bounce-bunny.”

“
Not now, guys,” I said.
“The Insider’s not done yet. Can’t you feel it squirming in the
crawlspace?”

I staggered in the opposite direction, away
from Arlie’s cabin, toward the slopes of Widow’s Peak. It rose
grand and white and pure, bristling with jack pine and stiff
hickory and white ash and brittle laurel. The wind whipped around
the mountain’s passive face. It would welcome us. It would open its
granite heart to us, lock us in its frozen soul forever. It was
older than the Insider, older than imagined heavens and gods and
devils and the other toxic by-products of the human race.

My mind exploded with pain
as the Insider rose. It punched me with its fist of razor blades.
But I
loved
it. I
loved the Insider more than anything in the world.