As I Die Lying Page 26

  Mother was asleep when I got home. I locked my bedroom door and huddled under the blankets. I was afraid of hearing her feet scruff the carpet, afraid of hearing her knock on my door. Because I knew I’d have to answer.

  But I was equally scared of sleeping. Because when I slept, the Insider worked. What were to me only dreams, wisps of nightmare, were the Insider’s bricks and mortar as it walled me off from my feelings and hung up a cute knitted sampler that said, “Home Sweet Home.”

  I woke up sweating, the sheets in a tangle. Alone. I went into the hall. Mother’s door was closed. Was she...

  I yanked open the door. Red sheets and deviled ham.

  I screamed and the Insider shook me awake.

  Bad dream, Richard. Do you think I’d let you miss out on something you’ve looked forward to for so long? What kind of monster do you think I am?

  “I’m afraid to think what kind. Because that’s what kind you’ll become.”

  You’ve been talking to Bookworm. He thinks he has it all figured out.

  “We’re all getting tired of you.”

  You’ll be rid of me soon. But, believe it or not, you’ll be begging me to stay. It happens every time. I move in, set up camp, dig up a decent wicked streak that most people don’t even know is inside, and then they find that they like it. They LIKE the freedom to do whatever I make them. They LIKE the misery. It’s all so...human.

  Look at your religions. All violence and guilt. You demand martyrs. Every single pathetic one of you would love to lay it all on the doorstep of a higher power. But in the end, I am your fondest wish and deepest fantasy. I am everything you want to be. Because I AM you.

  “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?

  Why shouldn’t I? I knew that someone had to die before sundown.

  The telephone rang. I picked it up.

  “Richard Coldiron?” came a familiar reedy voice.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Detective Frye. I was wondering if you could come down to the station today.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no. Just have a few questions to ask you.”

  “What about?”

  “About the death of Monique Rivers. Thought you might help me fill in some of the blanks. We’ve got a person of interest.”

  “Sure. But it would be simpler if you just waited for my autobiography to come out.”

  “Funny. You’re a writer?”

  “I don’t know. Would it make me a suspect?”

  “Writers are known to be crazy, unless they’re bestsellers. Then they’re just strange.”

  “Okay, Detective, I welcome the chance to assist you and prove I’m not crazy, but I can hardly wait to be strange. I’ve been rejected 117 times.”

  “Wow,” he said, though there was not a hint of “wow” in his voice.

  “But I’m revising as I go and–”

  “I appreciate it. Is ten-thirty okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “See you here, then. Bye.”

  The dial tone buzzed in my brain, stirring up Mister Milktoast. “What are we going to do, Richard?”

  “We aren’t going to do anything. I’m going to think about what I want to do.”

  “Do you think Frye knows?”

  “He only knows what the Insider lets him know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bastard was just trying to amp up the tension to keep us all juiced for t
he climax.”

  “Is it time, then?”

  “It’s time,” said Bookworm.

  It was nine o’clock. By the time I dressed, the snow had completely covered the ground, a soft white shroud on the skin of the earth. I sat at my desk and looked out at the shadowed ancient mountains. Their peaks were capped like sharp teeth.

  I folded the paper and slid it into an envelope, fearing that the Insider would stop me at any moment. This was its flesh, after all, finally, ultimately, forever. Past, present, future.

  “Seal it with a kiss for me, Richie.”

  “Sure thing, Loverboy.”

  I wrote “Mother” on the outside of the envelope and went downstairs. The house was peaceful, empty. Mother must have rolled back into her stuporous slumber. The aquarium glugged on, oxygenating the water that held no life but scum.

  Shelley Birdsong was dreaming her everlasting dream in a distant basement. Monique had cashed her check for the bit part, wandered out of the script and on to other roles where she would play the minor romantic interest. Brittany would never know how close she’d come to celebrity, and she’d probably live out her life married to some Alpha male psycho instead of ending up on the victim list of whatever snazzy name the press would give me after I got caught. I could afford a moment’s nostalgia, but I was spiritually bankrupt.

  “Nobody’s vault but yours,” Mister Milktoast whispered.

  Bookworm tried to send a tear down my cheek. I left the letter by a half-empty bottle of bourbon where Mother would be sure to find it. I stopped at the front closet and put on my coat. The Insider checked to make sure the knife was still in the front pocket.

  It’s not the end, Richard. It’s never the end.

  “No, it’s not the end. Just good-bye for now.”

  I wasn’t leaving. I was going. Icarus in a no-fly zone, Ishmael in a paper boat, Cupid playing Russian roulette with a squirt gun.

  Every door has “Exit” on one side and “Entrance” on the other. Depends on whether you’re inside or outside.

  Me, I could never tell the difference.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Storytelling tradition demands that you hide your transitions, that the ventriloquist’s mouth doesn’t move, that the stitches on the B-movie monster costume don’t show. Sleight of hand is for sissies, something those cotton candy-assed “literary writers” pull while they’re in their Parisian garrets jacking off to James Joyce. I told you I was a liar right from the beginning, but you didn’t believe me. Fuck. I might as well have said, “I love you.” You’d fall for that one, too, wouldn’t you?