Nightrunners (3 page)

He didn't like heights. He didn't like crowds, made him nervous.

Skitty Monty, that was him.

Right now he was in the kitchen boiling water for instant coffee, probably terrified that the water would leap out of the pan at him.

God, thought Becky, I certainly come down hard on him. Monty wasn't the one who raped me (actually, there had been several, but she could only remember Clyde's face and the others seemed more like extensions of him); wasn't the one who held a knife to my throat while he grunted out his passion, slobbering on my shoulder and face as he did.

Perhaps, she thought (as she often did), I should have forced Clyde to use the knife. At least there wouldn't be the dreams.

Dreams? Well, that wasn't exactly right. There had been dreams all right, but these others . . . what were they?

Visions?

That was the only word that struck her right.

She remembered the first visions as clearly as if they had occurred moments ago.

It was less than a week after the rape. Monty had gone to bed early that night, and she, in need of some sort of brain drain, stayed up to watch Johnny Carson and then the flickering snow of a dead television set.

And the images came to her. Clearer than Carson and Rickles had been an hour earlier.

She not only saw, but she experienced the moment of Clyde's death; felt the emotional intensity of it, as if she were living inside his head.

She could still see/feel the knotted shirt strips about his neck. Feel his sudden regret as he kicked away from the wall and let go of the window bars, allowed himself to dangle like a rope over an abyss, flapping back from time to time to slap the wall.

His face went blue. His boiled-egg eyes (reminiscent of when he had exploded his orgasm inside her) seemed about to leap from his head. The shirt strips were slicing into his throat, blood was welling around them—

—and she came to on the floor of the living room, coated in sweat, her nightgown sticking to her as if glued.

Just a dream, she thought. Wonderful in its own vengeful way, but still, just a dream.

But the next morning the images came again while she was showering. Fine spray from the shower head turned to long, light-colored strands that wove into a noose, and suddenly Clyde hung from it, blue-tongued, puppetlike, the cloth biting into his neck, forming first a red welt, then a blue-bruise collar that turned to black.

The image maintained for a moment, weakened, faded away.

Becky sagged to her knees.

Water beat down on her in a warm, pleasing rhythm.

God, but it had felt good. Her best daydream ever. Clyde getting his. Wish fulfillment to the one-hundreth power.

Or so she thought.

A moment later, while she was toweling off, the phone rang. She threw on a bathrobe and made for it. Monty, who was enjoying his Saturday morning with a book, came up behind her, waiting to see who the caller might be. He looked the question at her and she formed the silent word "Philson."

Both Sergeant Philson and his wife had been very kind throughout the ordeal, and Becky thanked the fates that he was the one assigned to her case. He was understanding; didn't look at her as if she had given the kids the come-on; didn't treat her like a flophouse whore. He was the kind that gave cops a good name.

It was strange news he delivered, and his voice seemed undecided on how to tell it.

"The Edson boy," he finally said. "He hung himself in his cell."

Becky felt not a drop of grief. She stood there with the phone to her face, and after a moment, she realized Philson was still talking.

She gave the phone to Monty, leaned against the wall in a daze, listened as he spoke to Philson; spoke words to match his liberal position; words about how bad it was a boy so young had wasted his life. Too bad. He was real sorry. Perhaps in time he might have rehabilitated, mumble, mumble, mumble.

Hypocrite. She knew he hadn't meant a word of it. It went with his cowardice, his inability to go against his trained sociological thinking, his inability to toss out his liberal crutch.

To Monty's way of thinking no one had to be accountable for their actions. There was always the environment and parents and poor potty training to blame. The individual was never responsible. Each and every one of us was nothing more than a rudderless boat adrift on a sea of fate, constantly in search of a snug harbor and its protection against the ragings of environmental storms.

Or so went the philosophy of Montgomery Jones.

After he hung up the phone, she told him about the visions, and he had smiled, talked about strains and wishful thinking.

It made her mad, but at the time she thought he might be right. But as the days passed, she recalled the vision, and became certain that it was real; knew for a fact that she had been in tune with Clyde the moment he had taken the sweet plunge. It was as if the rape had inextricably linked her with him, formed a sort of psychic umbilical cord that had been severed with his dying.

How she would have loved to have been there— and in a way she had had the next best thing, a psychic ringside seat—when he stepped into space. She could have asked him how he liked it, how it felt. The same questions he had asked her during the rape.

Monty interrupted her thoughts, came in with two cups of coffee, that stupid smile on his face. The same stupid smile he wore when she first told him of the dream; the patronizing, good-husband smile he tacked on while he soothed her and prepared the way for the psychiatrist.

And the idiot psychiatrist had worn the same stupid smile. And he had a mile of jargon:

"Mrs. Jones, there is no evidence for the existence of clairvoyant dreams. These dreams are the result of a drastic emotional and psychological trauma. Nothing more. It only seemed that you dreamed of the boy's death in the exact manner it happened.

"It gave you a sense of revenge, and you have convinced yourself it was a vision, when in fact, your mind tricked you. Such a thing is not uncommon.

"In time, these dreams, these visions as you call them, will go away. Forget this psychic mumbo jumbo. There's a very logical explanation for this contained within the electrical impulses of your brain. Now go home. Try and forget. Time will ease the pain, and the dreams will go away."

But they had not. And each mention of them to Monty earned her a sympathetic nod, and that goddamn smile.

She sipped her coffee, looked over the cup at Monty.

He smiled the silly smile.

The rain danced more briskly-on the cabin roof.

THREE

Later, after a vain attempt to entertain themselves with small talk, Monty and Becky gave it up and went to bed.

The rain grew heavier, and the rhythmic beat of it on the roof lulled them to sleep.

And less than fifty miles away, the '66 Chevy rolled along, drawing itself up the concrete line of the highway like a yo-yo engulfing a string.

FOUR

October 30, 1:OO A.M.

In the dark, when hit from time to time by the light of flashing skies, Malachi Roberts' skin looked purple.

He lay in bed with the sheets pulled halfway down across his thick chest, watched the lightning come and go outside his window. Watched the rain fall. Listened to the low growl of gentle thunder; an occasional Chinese gong crash that shook the house.

Malachi sighed. He could not sleep, and it was not because of what was happening outside his window. Not the rain, the lightning, not even the thunder. He was lonesome somehow. The pit of his stomach felt as empty as the end of the world and his heart was wet slush in his chest.

Careful, so as not to awaken his wife, he slipped his worn body from beneath the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed, looked out the window and wished for clear skies and plenty of daylight.

Lightning flashed.

His black skin jumped purple. Jumped back black again.

Holding up his hand, he spread his fingers and waited for the sky to explode once more.

It did.

Black fingers went purple. Purple went black.

He grinned to himself. He felt like a kid. When he was a boy he used to do that; watch the lightning between his fingers, see the color the quick-flash made his skin.

For a moment, loneliness left him, but like a bounding flea it leapt right back.

Rising slowly, wearing nothing but his under-shorts, he padded softly into the kitchen.

Maybe he was hungry.

Rain cascaded down one corner of the kitchen, gathered whispering into a big black pot.

Damn, Malachi thought. Every time it rained, same thing. He'd been telling himself he was going to fix that leak for over a year now. But when it was dry, he didn't think of it. It was amazing Dorothy didn't complain more.

Malachi knew that he was not a lazy man, but after a day of turning bolts and dipping his hands in grease and oil and gasoline and crawling over the insides of cars, he just didn't want to do anything with his hands.

What he wanted to do was sit on his front porch, smoke his pipe and watch the world go by on the highway. Or watch his snowy television set, or take his woman to bed.

But that damned leak.

Angry at himself, he went to the refrigerator, got a half gallon of milk out, drank right from the carton.

No. That wasn't what he wanted.

He sat down at the kitchen table, the carton of milk in front of him.

From where he sat, he could see out the window above the sink, could watch the lightning sew a crazy stitch across the sky. It was really getting fierce out there, and it didn't show any signs of slacking off.

He glanced at the kettle. It was almost full. He'd have to empty it now if he didn't want it running over before morning.

Taking another draught of the milk, he returned it to the refrigerator, crept back to the bedroom, pulled on his pants and slipped on his shoes without bothering with socks.

After looking at the sleeping form of his wife, and smiling, he tiptoed back to the kitchen, quietly rummaged a pan from beneath the cabinet.

Being as careful as possible, he slid the kettle aside and replaced it with the pan.

For a moment, water struck the pan with a sound like dried peas falling.

Malachi glanced apprehensively toward the bedroom.

Usually, the slightest noise would awaken Dorothy, but tonight she slept like a rock.

Unusual for her.

He was glad of that, her health being what it was. Her blood pressure had been giving her a particularly hard time of late. She needed all the rest she could get.

After a moment of waiting, of listening for bed-springs or padding feet—for he fully expected Dorothy to appear in the bedroom doorway with hands on hips and a wry smile on her face—he took the heavy black kettle and began duck walking it toward the front porch.

He set it down temporarily to prop the door and screen open, then managed it onto the porch, tilted the water over the side. It made a loud noise as it hit the bare and muddy flower bed below.

He glanced back inside the house.

So far so good.

Leaving the kettle on the porch, he went inside and got his pipe and tobacco off the drainboard. He packed it, lit it, went back outside for a smoke. This time he closed the door behind him.

He looked out at his yard. Just one big mud pie. Beyond it, the surface of Highway 59 appeared to boil. Above him, the tin roof rattled and trembled beneath the buckshot rain.

Then he saw the light. Way out on the highway, coming from the south; car lights made fuzzy by the rain.

He thought whoever was driving that crate was going much too fast; cruising like they had bone-dry highways and lots of light.

"Gonna end up in a goddamn ditch," he said around the stem of his pipe.

And now the car was splashing by with a hungry roar—

—and Malachi felt cold; more so than any rain should make him, even a late October rain. The wet slush in his chest that had been serving as a heart turned to a fist of hard ice.

He shivered.

For a moment it was as if nothing else lived in the universe but him.

Lightning flashed, lit the night bright as day. Malachi could see the car clearly—a black '66 Chevy turning off 59 onto the Old Minnanette Highway, which was hardly a highway at all anymore.

Then it was night again and there were only the taillights winking away in the cold, dark sockets of night and the growl of the engine receding in the distance.

Suddenly the driver hit down on his horn.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Sharp, harsh punctures in the messy, wet night.

Then silence.

Malachi shivered again. Thought: It's as if Old Man Death himself just drove by with his window cranked down and his breath leaking out; the rotten, chilling breath of the sick and the dying.

After a moment the sensation passed. Malachi thumped the contents of his pipe out and hauled the kettle inside, put it in its place and put the pan away.

Then, removing his shoes, pinching them between thumb and forefinger, he stole silently back to the bedroom, pushed the shoes beneath the bed and removed his pants. He eased softly under the bedclothes and for a moment lay still on his back, looking at the ceiling.

Dorothy did not awake.

He had it made now.

Gently, he rolled on his side and put his arm around her—and felt the marble-cool flesh of the recently dead.

FIVE

October 30, 1:30 A.M.

The black car pulled off the Old Minnanette Highway and rolled down a wet, clay road. It found harbor in front of a barbed-wire cattle gate. Sat there while the sky went about its wet tantrum.

After a moment, a back door opened. A girl got out, moved across the road and into the woods behind the car. She found a place thick with overhead branches and surrounding foliage, dropped her pants, squatted to pee.

She could see the car from where she squatted, and even in the darkness, she could see the white face of the driver. It was pressed up against the door glass, looking out at the night. It didn't look quite human, a white, pasty thing with gun-barrel eyes; eyes loaded with hate and fury.