As I Die Lying Page 23

  No, Richard. I’VE won. It was always me.

  “I’m sorry, Richard. Don’t cry,” she said, barely able to disguise the pleasure in her voice.

  Loverboy let a long tear trickle down his cheek. He was laughing on the inside. Most of them were.

  “Tell me, Beth. Is insanity contagious?” Little Hitler said. “Because sometimes I wonder...that carnation...”

  “What? No, you must have dropped it at the party. And Monique must have picked it up, that’s all.”

  Didn’t she see? Or was the Insider preventing her from seeing?

  Of course I am, Richard. The party’s just getting started. I’m going to waltz your mannequin across the dance floor of hell like the puppet hand of hot peppers is up your ass.

  Bookworm whispered something about the Insider needing some help with its metaphors, but nobody was listening.

  “Did you tell the police about the carnation?” Mister Milktoast asked.

  “Why should I?”

  Of course she didn’t, for the same reason that the police hadn’t contacted me. It should have been a simple matter for Frye to connect Shelley and Monique and come up with a common denominator. The pieces weren’t in place yet, the plot threads hadn’t been woven into a tight enough fabric. The Insider needed a few more chapters.

  Beth took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red and shiny, but buried inside her pupils was a spark, a strange light, a distant hope of dawn.

  “Let’s not talk about Monique anymore,” she said. “I want to talk about you. Your poor father. That must have really torn you up.”

  I wanted to tell her that the world couldn’t build such miseries as ours, that gods couldn’t create such madness, that people couldn’t be this cruel and shallow and heartless. But I was vulnerable. After so much rejection, here was someone who pretended to care, who wanted to hear my story.

  “I’d better begin at the beginning,” I said.

  THIS CHAPTER DOESN’T HAVE A NUMBER, EITHER

  What a clever bastard.

  You know Richard is guilty. You will never let him forget.

  And you eat our pain. You carve up our psyche the way you did Shelley and Monique, then feed Richard the pieces of the memory. You force his mouth open. He eats his own sins until he vomits, then he eats his own vomit. Is that your trap?

  Because the more Richard hates himself, the stronger you are. The more we despise you, the more we serve you. The greater our pain, the greater your hunger.

  You have tasted. And now you want more. But not Beth. You’ll never have her.

  I love her, however I can and whatever that means.

  Did you come with Little Hitler? Or are you Little Hitler, a mask over a mask?

  Did you raise the blade against Father? Or were you Father? Was that your opening gambit, your narrative hook, the crack through which you slid into Richard’s mind? Or did you come later, like a grave robber to freshly turned dirt?

  You say you came to him through Virginia.

  Oh, I felt that twitch. You know where it bleeds. But I know where you feed. And I’m starting to figure you out.

  And understand one thing, you sorry son of a bitch.

  You can make Richard loathe himself. You can shove his face in the past. You can make him kill. You can make him hate.

  But you can’t make me not love.

  Because love is hope, and love is poison to you.

  You are what you eat.

  You are what we feed you.

  Bon fucking appetit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  November crawled away on its belly, wriggled like a cold snake into a cave. Winter sent its icy fingers into the granite mountains, clutching and squeezing. The brittle trees froze, either dead or sleeping and dreaming of green. The daytime sky shivered in its blue blanket and the nights were as black as the bottom of my heart.

  The police had no leads in Monique’s murder. Mister Milktoast followed the media coverage with great interest. My fingerprints must have been all over the crime scene. I didn’t doubt that the Insider could extend its reach to the lab technicians. And Frye surely would have solved the case by now if not for infernal intervention.

  The rejection slips rolled in, except now they were no longer addressed to me. They began, “Dear Mr. Zweicker, we regret to inform you...”

  Even more disturbing than the name change was that my cleverly original title, “As I Die Lying,” had been altered, first to “The Dying Light,” and then simply “The Insider.” Because the agents never returned my manuscript, I never knew which work they were considering, nor did I have a clue how to improve it.

  Bookworm wept in his upstairs room of the Bone House. He alone could describe what was happening, but he stuck to penning illegible entries in his diary, leaving me alone to stare at the typewriter.

  Little Hitler was jubilant. This was his deepest perversion brought to full, red, screaming life. This was nightmare made reality, murder made holy, hellhounds unchained. He savored the giblets of memory, and the best was yet to come.

  Mister Milktoast was wary but content. As the protector, he thought his job accomplished because I was safely tucked away in the Bone House. He spent his time preening around in Beth’s brown hat and Shelley’s stockings.

  Loverboy had no complaints. He was banging Beth almost every night, inventing new sex manuals, kama sutra as postmodern surrealism or maybe one of those endless fantasy fiction series where the author’s publisher keeps squirting sour milk from the cash cow long after the author is dead. Except sex is better.

  Beth had moved back into her apartment, though she refused to rent out Monique’s room and had to stretch her budget to cover the bills by herself. She dropped Ted and her other satellite lovers, her native nymphomania having met its match.

  On one horribly memorable night, Loverboy coaxed her into Monique’s room. Monique’s parents had cleared out her paintings and clothes and books, the only pieces left of their daughter now that the other pieces had been laid into the ground. The room was bare except for the desk, the chipped bedside table, and the unmade bed.

  There was a large brown stain on the mattress even though it had been turned over after the investigation. The stain was like a Rorschach test where crazy people are supposed to see a splatter pattern of spilled blood but normal people see Schroedinger’s profile or New Zealand or the coffee splotch on the manuscript they are revising.

  Little Hitler sat with Beth on the bed and made her talk about Monique, how lovely she was, how vivacious, how much she meant to Beth. Then he steered the conversation back to my past, or at least the new spin on the story of Father’s death. History is always written by the winners in the blood of the losers.

  The Insider twisted its trident in my guts as Beth tried to comfort Little Hitler. Of course, it ended with Loverboy between her legs on the same mattress where her roommate had been mutilated. The Insider howled with glee. Loverboy simply howled, not caring whether she was faking or not.

  I went through the motions at the Paper Paradise. We were busy because of the coming Christmas season, and Bookworm stayed dutifully occupied with stocking and reorders. Miss Billingsly commented on my absentmindedness. I wanted to tell her that my mind wasn’t absent, it was painfully present, sharper than ever, sharper than Mister Milktoast’s wit and the Insider’s knives. But Bookworm only nodded and smiled at her, mumbled something about the hectic schedule, and got back to work. Arlie spun his conspiracy theories and Little Hitler egged him on. Brittany teased me about Beth, and Loverboy cornered her in the storeroom once in a while to flirt with her, even while Beth’s feminine scent bathed his chin.

  Beth drew closer and closer, quick to share herself now that she thought I had opened up to her. Alpha male psychos got all the pussy but sensitive guys got to do the laundry and wash dishes. We settled into a routine. Waking in each other’s arms, then off to work and school, meeting for lunch at my house, evenings at Beth’s apartment, Loverboy’s bakery cooking around
the clock. Weekend afternoons at the park, bundled in our coats because the grass was crisp and we could see our breath. Sometimes stopping by a gallery or driving out of town for a show or hiking the muddy mountain trails.

  It was all so easy, so natural, almost too natural. I didn’t think people could change, but Beth had. She was relaxed around me, telling me she loved me, always planning mutual activities. We swapped spare door keys. She spent most of the days at my place, even when I wasn’t there, but she never rang the doorbell of the Bone House.

  I came to know Beth better than I knew myself. Our relationship was everything I had ever wanted back in my old, human life. She was becoming part of me, but that was the most frightening thing of all. I already had too many parts.

  I saw Alexandria downtown once, and she told me she’d never seen Beth so happy. She said she was unsure of me at first, but I had earned her “stamp of approval.” Maybe Alexandria was Beth’s version of Mister Milktoast, a distant protector who saw only what she chose to see. Or what she was allowed to see.

  Beth kept busy with her schoolwork, focusing on the future instead of the past. Bit by bit, Little Hitler unfolded a false biography of my life. He told her about Virginia, how she had broken my heart after saying she loved me. He told her Father was a sweet, loving man who occasionally lost his temper but would have moved the moon if I had asked. In my new life history, he became the saint and Mother the sinner. According to Little Hitler, Father wore Hush Puppies.

  On the day of the first light snow, in late November, Beth whispered that she had something to give me. We were sitting on the couch at her apartment, watching a rerun of “The X-Files.” I looked out the window as she slipped into her room. It was one of those merciful moments when the Insider was letting me out, letting me live so that I could fully appreciate what it was taking away. Just an ordinary day in the life of a possessed serial killer. An early darkness had fallen with the snow, crept down a flake at a time until the world outside was black and white.

  Beth returned to the living room with one hand behind her back. She snuggled into my shoulder and I put my face into her hair that always smelled of April or Dawn, one of those time names for women, or maybe Virginia or Dakota, one of those place names, or maybe Hope Hill, a character invented for this book who was actually a real girl I’d sat behind in the sixth grade and secretly loved. I nuzzled Beth’s neck, but stopped when I felt Loverboy stirring. Those damned inconvenient erections, always popping up when least expected.

  “What’s the big surprise?” I asked.

  “I’ve got lots of surprises,” she said. “This is only the latest one.”

  “As long as it’s not about babymakers,” Mister Milktoast said.

  “What?”

  “Inside joke,” I said.

  She tapped my temple softly. “You’re supposed to let me in there.”

  Oh, you’ll get your chance. You’re going to be in there soon. Soon and forever, right, Richard?

  “Hey, honey, what about your big secret? Don’t keep me waiting.”

  “Good things are worth waiting for.” She’d worn the line down to a nub, like the eraser on a dyslexic’s pencil. Or licnep.

  “How do I know it’s a good thing?”

  She rubbed her chest against mine. “Isn’t it always a good thing?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  Her lips found mine, quickly, surely, with the ease of experience. She tilted her head back and looked at me through those mysterious half-closed eyes. Her green irises sparkled between dark lashes.

  “I have to ask you something first,” she said.

  “Uh-oh. That can’t be good.”

  “It’s nothing bad. And you can always say ‘no.’”

  “Uh-oh reprise.”

  “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “I bet if I say no, I won’t get the surprise.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I can read you like a book.”

  Better than a book. I can turn the pages. I can rewrite the story. I can change the ending.

  “Okay, Richard. I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them since...”

  Since Monique.

  “...since forever and a day,” she finished.

  “That’s wonderful. But I have a feeling that’s not the big surprise.”

  “When I come back, I’m going to move in with you.”

  My limbs tensed, my heart alternately throbbed and halted, my Little People fluttered like a disturbed murder of ravens. “That doesn’t sound like a question.”

  Beth closed her eyes. She bent her neck like a praying nun. Little Hitler let her suffer for a moment as David Duchovny made some slacker cosmic observation on the television screen.

  “Hey, Angel Baby,” I said, the Insider moving my lips like sausage puppets. “That wasn’t a ‘no.’ I would like that better than anything in the world. But are you sure that’s what you want?”

  She looked up and her eyes were moist, but she was smiling. “I want to start over,” she said, making no move to wipe away her tears. “To get out of this place and forget about...about her. I want it to be just us from now on, without Monique’s ghost sitting in between us all the time.”

  I hugged her with both arms. One was Loverboy’s, the other Bookworm’s.

  “Just you and me,” I said. “I promise.”

  “I love you, Richard.”

  “That L word sounds so lovely on your lips.”

  “I don’t say it often, but when I say it, I don’t lie.”

  “I love you, too, Beth.”

  At that moment, I meant it. Darkness won each day’s battle, but there was always hope of dawn, always a thread of light in the fabric of despair. Love was hope. Love was light. Love was possible salvation.

  I would have gotten down on my knees and thanked the Insider. But the Insider already had me on my knees.

  Love was a word thrown in a book to get the character laid and then arc to a tragic ending.

  “Now that that’s settled, what’s the big surprise?” I asked.

  Beth reached behind her back for the thing she had dropped. She found it and pressed it into my hand.

  It was the white carnation, dried but still intact. It smelled of meadows and funerals where the petals crushed against my sweating palms.

  “I wanted you to have it,” she whispered.

  She’d already given it to me once. It was the gift that kept on giving. We locked our limbs in a passionate tangle. Loverboy even let me watch as they skin-wrestled on the sofa. He was just that kind of a guy, a generous housemate, always willing to share as long as he went first.

  And so I was lost in this brave and horrible new love, built on the sickest of lies. Perhaps it was Loverboy’s game, little toys pulled out of his bag of tricks that kept her amused. Maybe the attachment was solely because of the Insider’s psychic glue. But I believed some small secret part of me could still harbor hope and love and compassion and all the human things that I thought I had lost. Surely not all the closets had been swept clean and some cabinets were left unmolested, even if these emotions were only hiding under my dusty bed in the Bone House.

  I didn’t know if I would stop her from loving me even if I were able. Because the Insider had taught me one lesson well. It smothered from the inside, it isolated and crushed out any flickering light of love, stomped on the campfires of the heart.

  I wished I could warn her. I wished I could warn all of them. Because I didn’t know when the Insider might strike again. It stayed a riddle, but I could feel its ratwalk in the crawlspace.

  Shady Valley dressed in its pumpkin colors and dry cornstalks were stacked like the bones of a gone harvest. Paper turkeys stuck to school windows and dangled from strings in the grocery stores. Tiny radios whined the first measures of yuletide carols. Church signs reminded everyone of the reason for the season even though the Julian calendar had moved Jesus Christ’
s birthday around to accommodate the money changers. The town emptied as the Westridge students went on Thanksgiving vacation. The locals stooped under the weight of their fears and suspicions and went about their holiday shopping.

  Beth refused my offer to drive her to Philadelphia. She said she wasn’t ready for me to meet her parents. She boarded a Trailways bus and waved from the window as it pulled away. I felt a rare moment’s joy because I knew she’d be safe for a few days.

  Safe from me. Or the Insider. I no longer knew which was the lesser of two evils.

  I sat in the bus depot for an hour, watching faces. I didn’t believe the Insider was hunting. It was meditating, lulled by the human stream that flowed by on both sides. It was making me wait, but for what I didn’t know. A meat puppet on a sleepy hand.

  The bus pulled up and aroused a tingle in the pit of my chest. It was some sixth sense, some electrical charge, déjà vu through past-life regression. The Insider came alive, peeling back my eyelids and twisting my neck until I was staring at the bus doors wheezing open.

  Mother stepped out, complete with baggage.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “I got your letter,” Mother said.

  She stood at the entrance to the depot like a resurrected martyr, an ash effigy of Joan of Arc, her bony frame swallowed by a pink pastel ski jacket. The fur around the hood shadowed her face, her eyes shining like a cornered animal’s peering out of a cave. She swayed a little, as if the breeze of the passengers boarding the bus might push her over.

  I hadn’t sent a letter to Mother in at least six months. What did I have to say to her?

  You haven’t dared write to Mommy dearest since you found your true self. Or I should say, when IT found YOU.

  But did you send the letter?

  Sometimes you sleep. And when you dream, I’m awake. It’s not like you’re the only monkey that knows how to type.

  I nodded in miserable understanding. Mother, of course, thought I was nodding at her. The animal eyes closed, the cave momentarily empty. I opened my mouth to speak. With a hiss, the bus backed away from the bay and pulled onto the highway.