As I Die Lying Read online

  “Richard, your voice changed,” Beth said. “And your eyes... what’s going on? Are you on drugs or something?”

  She laid a hand on my arm, their arm, its arm. I felt the distant tingle of her touch, but I was too far gone to return the touch. Why didn’t she run?

  “Richard doesn’t need drugs, Angel Baby. He’s got me, the best drug you’ve never seen. And look, here comes our old friend now.”

  An aqua Crown Victoria cut around the corner at the end of the block, sliding sideways in the six inches of snow that had fallen.

  “Let him come,” Bookworm said. “If we’re caught, that means you’ll be locked up for a while, that’s all.”

  Locked up? I’m the gatekeeper, Bookworm. I decide which doors are open and which are closed. I make the rules here. But you don’t want me to be arrested. All that will do is force me to leave. Who will get the pleasure of being my new host? Will it be Richard’s mother, or...

  It ran my fingers down Beth’s soft cheek. Then it gripped her chin hard enough to leave red marks. The Insider twisted her head to face me, measuring the light of her love, the juiciness of her fear, the depth of her guilt.

  Oh, yes, and baby makes three.

  Maybe I’ll just go straight for the little guy, saddle him up for a good long piggyback ride, make him just like his father.

  After all, it would be a shame if the Coldiron Curse died now that there’s potential for a sequel?

  That was when they rose, when they all poured out, swarming like pissants over a black beetle. The Little People came out of their rooms, but this time, instead of fighting to see who got to wear the Richard-puppet, they were fighting to suffocate the Insider.

  Extreme home makeover with a wrecking ball.

  “Rock and roll in a doughnut hole,” Little Hitler said, throwing out his battle cry. I was a satellite orbiting the collapsed star of my own psyche.

  Too many things were happening, too much sensory input flooded my brain, too many people were happening. I felt them all, Bookworm, Little Hitler, Loverboy, and Mister Milktoast, wrapping their energy around the Insider, enveloping it in a pocket of confused mist. An ensemble cast upstaging the prima dona and stealing the show.

  I was dimly aware of Beth pulling on the door handle and beating on the window. The Insider wouldn’t let her escape, not when the party was just getting started.

  I concentrated and tried to throw off the jagged shackles and razor chains and frozen ropes with which the Insider had bound me. I broke free and fluttered to the surface of my own mind, Houdini in a rabbit’s hat. I threw the Subaru in gear, popped the clutch, and the wheels spun on the ice. The car caught traction just as the Crown Victoria pulled alongside.

  I glanced over and saw Frye’s thin startled face, the lit tip of a cigarette jabbed between his clenched teeth. Recognition flashed across the beads of his eyes, as if he had suddenly realized what he was doing in that part of town. As if he had connected the dots between Shelley Birdsong and Monique Rivers and formed a picture of Richard Coldiron. His mouth opened in surprise and the cigarette tumbled down his necktie.

  Then I was gone, heading down the snowy street in four-wheel drive. The Insider was busy fighting off the Little People, but it had a little extra for me. It turned corkscrews in my brain, shaved pieces of my arteries away, peeled the hot copper wires of my nerves. It raped me with its brass talons. But the pain was welcome. The pain was good. It meant that I was still alive.

  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 head
lights 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 heav
ens 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.

  “Self-actualization,” said Mister Milktoast. “Egocide. A masochist’s massacre, masturbatory manslaughter.”

  “All you knead is love,” Loverboy said.

  “Hey, you’re catching on,” Mister Milktoast said. “Maybe next time I’ll give you more lines.”

  “It was always love,” Bookworm said. “And don’t forget, I’m the writer here.”

  “You’ve never loved, none of you,” the Insider rumbled, thunder in a teapot. “That’s why I could do anything I wanted. My power always came from you.”

  “No dice, Insider. You can’t lay your little guilt trip on me anymore,” I said.

  I said it. Me. Forget Bookworm. I was the writer here and I got to change things around to suit me before I mailed it off to my agent.

  “You were always mine, Richard Coldiron,” the Insider said.

  “And I have always loved you.”

  “No. You despise me. Because I am you.”

  “And that’s why we love you,” Bookworm said. “Because you are us.”

  I was deep in the trees now, in the hushed world of winter, the Subaru and Arlie’s cabin out of sight. The air was thin and cold and sweet. My lungs sucked it in and welcomed its harshness. Snowflakes fell in their endless whispers.

  The Insider struggled, and I knew it was trying to escape me then. It sensed that it was trapped. We had built a prison with our love. Turned the Bone House into an improvised Alcatraz, with hope for barbed wire and self-esteem for bricks, surrounded by a gooey moat of sacrifice and topped with a weathervane that pointed away from ill winds.

  “That’s it, big boy, come into my heart. Come on, Angel Baby. It’s open, a room with a view just for you,” I said. “Believe in me.”

  “We all love you, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said.

  I concentrated on the swirling thing in my chest. “You see, Insider,” I said, as my feet churned through the snow between the silent trees. “In your search for light, you forgot the brightest light of all.”