Journalstone's 2010 Warped Words for Twisted Minds (19 page)

“Uh huh,” I nodded noncommittally. Claude reached up toward a section of hinged glass at the top of the enclosure. The snake’s massive head thumped the opening, wanting out.

“Only thing worse than a man killing for his own sick, demented needs is that man getting away with it. You know what I mean?” He spoke each word slowly, staring me down. What the hell was this guy’s problem?

I didn’t speak. I took another swig of lager and watched the hand that could let loose a monster on me at any moment. “Oh hey,” he laughed again, “How ya liking that beer?”

“Delicious,” I said. Claude was scaring the hell out of me. I was feeling a buzz already. The alcohol content must have been pretty high. ‘Course, it was my first drink after more than a year of water, orange juice, and Sprite.

“It’s called Detroit and Mackinac,” Mister Neighborhood Watch motioned to my drink. This guy was creepy. I couldn’t believe that such an obvious dumbass would be in charge of keeping the neighborhood safe. He didn’t seem remotely trustworthy. “It’s a local microbrew I’ve been into lately. I get these little mini kegs shipped in.”

Suddenly I felt so dizzy I almost lost my balance.

“Whoa there, partner!”

Claude pounced and grabbed my arm. Instead of guiding me to the nearby chair, he wrapped my hand around the load-bearing basement pole and helped me stand. “You alright? Why don’t I walk you home?”

Walk me home? What was he? My prom date? I was so dizzy, sick. How could one beer make me feel like this? It must be messing around with my meds. Come to think of it, I hadn’t had any breakfast today either. A strong, mid-afternoon beer on an empty stomach. I felt myself retch involuntarily.

“No, really, that’s fine. I’m right next door,” I told him as I held my stomach and tried to make my way up the stairs. I stumbled again, grabbing the railing for balance. I could feel nails rip loose from the drywall. I let go of the rail and almost fell backward until Claude pushed me upright. His irritating guffaw sounded again. There was a definite streak of schadenfreude in him.

“I’m not taking no for an answer, sir. Neighbors gotta watch out for each other, right?”

He half-carried, half-dragged me home. I no longer felt capable of running anywhere, though I was terrified of going back inside. I just wanted to sleep, to dream of my girl again, alive, happy, everything like it was.

“Mind if I use your facilities?”

Claude pointed down the hall that ended in the bathroom, office, and the tainted bedroom. Just get out. Get out, get out, get out of my house… I wasn’t thinking straight. I could barely move. When I didn’t answer, Claude started down the hall, his voice bouncing back toward me. “Oh, is this your office? What kind of work do you do?”

Was he just trying doors at random? What the—? I groaned and with great effort, pushed myself up from the leather sofa.

“Hey! Wait a minute—” my panicked cry came too late.

I threw my hand out uselessly, unable to stop him flinging open the bedroom door. What could I do? I couldn’t even run for it. I could barely stand. He might do any crazy thing in the world when he saw—

“Oh, my God,” Claude murmured, staring into the bedroom. It must have been ghastly for him. I winced, waiting for the explosion. “Is that a Victrola?”

For the first time, I noticed my grandmother’s antique phonograph in the corner of my tainted bedroom. No girl. No blood. Just fresh, clean bedclothes and a spotless room with an old Victrola.

This had to be a joke, a put-on. I squeezed into the bedroom after him. She was gone. No baseball bat, no sad cascade of blonde hair lying in the crimson pool. I could feel the remaining color drain from my face. Could I have imagined it? I don’t see how that’s possible. I was so sure, terrified even. I remember the fear. It was real. Wasn’t it? But I must have made it up. It was shock or post-traumatic whatever they called it. What other explanation was there? Unless it was…the demon. The real demon. But that couldn’t be.

“You gonna be okay if I leave you here?” Claude’s voice snapped me back into focus, into reality. I gave him a non-committal shrug, having no idea if I was going to be okay or not.

“You been grocery shopping yet? I can have the wife bring you by something to eat, maybe?”

“No, please, don’t go to any trouble. I’m just gonna lie down.”

That was a lie. The very idea of lying down in that bed, even going into that room was repulsive. There’s no telling what I might see in there next. What the hell was wrong with me? They told me that none of this was my fault. They told me all that therapy crap was supposed to make this better. I told them they never should have let me out. Why didn’t any of them listen to me?

Part 3: The Confession

“Kirk, my God! Are you okay? What happened?”

Connie looked worried, no, frightened to see me at her door at whatever the hell time this was. I didn’t realize until she answered the door in her pajamas that it was totally dark outside. She didn’t even ask me how I found out where she lived. I was much better with computers than I let on.

“Tell me what happened.,”

Her voice was calm, not angry or accusing. She cared about me. She was the only person left in the world who thought I was worth saving. If I were ever going to trust another person again, it would be Connie. I told her all about coming home and finding my girl, bloody and broken in my new bed. How everything was ruined again. I explained how sure I was that she had been there. I touched her. I felt her. The blood all over her arms, her hands, like she fought. I remember her feeling warm, sad, still, and there. My girl was there.

“We talked about this, remember?”

I nodded, knowing just where she was going.

“We discussed how the medication and the EMDR therapy would lessen the hallucinations and the panic attacks. But Dr. Rand did say that either could reoccur.”

But that wasn’t what it was. I saw her!

“Kirk, maybe we should go over it again.”

Connie wasn’t a doctor, just a social worker from the hospital. Her job wasn’t to counsel me, just to make things right. She got paid by faceless people in government who believed, in theory, that people like me deserved some kind of social justice.

“The first strange thing I noticed was that splotch on my hand. In a way, it ran up my arms and around my neck. I thought it was trying to strangle me.”

I shuddered at the nightmarish memory.

“Yes,” she was forcing herself to be calm, so as not to upset me. “The drug interaction was giving you hives. That’s normal, Kirk. You remember, Dr. Rand told you it was perfectly normal.”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed.

“It is! There are many drug interactions that can give you hives. The pharmacist’s  mistake—”

“Mistake?” Hardly. A mistake is when you order soup and they bring you salad. This was not a mistake. This was a tragedy, a grave, life-destroying injustice.

“Yes, they told you the pills looked different because they were generic now.”

She looked at me piteously. I took their word for it. I didn’t research it, didn’t check. Just popped their poisons in my mouth according to doctor’s orders. I was a sheep, and my girl paid for it in the worst way imaginable.

“It wasn’t your fault. You did your best to stay healthy. You never would have hurt anyone otherwise. We’ve talked a lot about how much you need your medication to be healthy. Remember?”

I nodded, not looking at her.

“You weren’t given it. Worse, you were given something that actually hurt you. We talked about manic episodes and the things that can happen.”

So what? I wasn’t going to be magically absolved just because I didn’t mean for it to happen. That wasn’t going to bring my girl back or make anything like it was before.

“Tell me what you saw in the bedroom.”

She leaned forward, and I looked away from her cleavage.

“I didn’t just see her. I touched her. She was warm…but dead and bleeding. Just like when…”

“Say it out loud, Kirk. Say what happened.”

“…when I killed my girl. When I hit her with the bat.”

The guilt was on me again, the fear. Tears.

“I was so scared. I didn’t know what was happening. The terror of…her…”

I was sobbing in front of Connie again. She kept asking questions and trying to reason with me. Doctors knew it was no use reasoning with a schizophrenic, but not Connie. She never gave up.

“But Kirk, if she was really in your house, where did she go? Why wasn’t she there when you got home?”

I tried to think back. Where could she have gone? It wasn’t just her…it was the blood, the bat – it was all gone.

The anger came on suddenly, sharply, thrusting into my gut. Somebody was doing this to me. Toying with me. Someone who knew what I had done. Once I realized it, it seemed so obvious. How had it taken me so long to figure it out? Claude! It had to be him.

“What?” Connie said fearfully…I hadn’t realized I’d been thinking out loud. What had I said? What did she know? It was all so confusing, racing thoughts.

“Kirk, you don’t really think that your new neighbor—what do you think, exactly, Kirk?”

She was trembling, her voice shaky.

“I think I’d like to go home.”

As I remembered everything that happened since I got out of the taxi, the anger multiplied. Claude stopped me when I was trying to get away. Claude made me go drink beer with him, beer that made me far too drunk. Mister Neighborhood Watch came to my house and into my bedroom for no good reason. Since when does a man want to walk into another man’s bedroom? He knew about me, about my girl. He hated me, just like the newspaper people and those muckraking local pundits who thought it was big humor to call me crazy and make jokes about how fun and cushy my life in the mental hospital would be. Bastards! I needed a reason to live, and this would be it. I would get all of them.

Part Four: The Mad Dash

“Can you give me a ride home?” I asked her as calmly as I could. She was one of those people who, if you told them you were going to get someone, they’d think they had to call the cops. I didn’t want to trouble Connie; she believed in people. She was good.

 Connie drove down the road, still in her pajamas. The worst part of that night played over and over in my anger-addled mind. I swung the bat. I hit my girl and hit her. Over and over. Each swing felt like a lifetime. The terror. The complete and utter terror of it happening right in front of me. The fear that I would never get my girl back if I couldn’t kill the evil thing inside her, everywhere. I loved her. There was no choice. Her screaming in the distance was torture, every second a lifetime of pain. The beast went into terrifying death throes. I raised the bat again. But before I could bring it down, I’d fallen into a black oblivion. I woke up in the hospital.

“Kirk? Are you okay?”

I jerked back into reality with Connie still driving, her open purse hastily tossed between us on the long front seat. In her rush to get out the door and drive me away from her place, she had still taken the time to pack the telltale black case that every staff member carried in the hospital. If I did anything physical that Connie didn’t like, she was going to fire electricity into my body by way of a non-lethal taser. Brave Connie.

“I want you to listen to me,” Connie said sternly, “Claude doesn’t hate you. None of your neighbors hate you. I’ve met him. I’ve spoken with him, he didn’t even know about your case until…”

“Until?” She had my full attention now. “Did you tell him?”

My heart fell into my gut. Connie. She told the neighbors about me, made them hate me. I’m sure she didn’t mean to. Poor Connie believed that deep down everyone was good. When I was ridding the world of that malicious jackass Claude, I’d have to get a swipe or two in for Connie.

“I wanted to prepare him, in case…”

She cut herself off. She wanted to warn them. She didn’t want to feel responsible, just in case it wasn’t the switched pills that made me crazy enough to hurt my best girl. “In case anybody got the wrong idea about you, about what happened. There’s already been such a glut of misinformation. Claude is such a nice man, wanting to be helpful. There aren’t a lot of people like that left in the world.”

She kept glancing away from the road to give me sympathetic looks. I hated knowing she was so sad for me. She took a hand from the wheel and took one of mine. It felt warm and sweet, no one had touched me nicely in so long. In another life, Connie and me...it could have happened.

“He hates me. I’m telling you. I can see it in his eyes.”

I could feel her eyes roll without even looking at her.

“Answer me this, Kirk. Why? What possible reason could he have for wanting to trick you? Or hurt you? Or do anything bad to you? He just doesn’t strike me as that sort of person. It so happens that I know a thing or two about humanity.”

She smiled like it was a joke, but I don’t think it was. Connie really did pride herself on her people skills.

“People don’t always need a reason to be assholes,” I told her, as if that needed explaining.

“I’m gonna drop you off, but I’ll come by tomorrow. You and I can go talk this out with Claude and his wife together. You’ll see there’s nothing to—”

I stepped out of her car and slammed the door harder than I meant to. She looked up at me, clearly startled. I couldn’t think about that now. Mister Neighborhood Watch himself was bounding toward me in the darkness, his arms outstretched as if he was about to hug me.

Part Five: The Confrontation

“Burning the midnight oil, are ya?”

Claude’s wide smile looked freakish in the moonlight. He seemed to almost glide around to the driver’s side of the vehicle, opening Connie’s miraculously unlocked door. “I’m that way myself. Insomnia, I guess. You guys out for a movie?”

His eyes slid over Connie, taking in her penguin-print pajama pants.

“She’s just dropping me off.”

I wasn’t ready to do this yet. I couldn’t do anything until I was ready. And Connie shouldn’t see it.

“Oh, you two should come over for a drink. The wife could sleep through a plane crash, but I’m bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”