Chapter 38: Dead Echo
Patsy Standish felt like a brick had landed squarely on her forehead. She’d slept very little the night before, what with the horrors that had taken place during the fading afternoon. She had been ill at ease the entire day, more so than usual, but suddenly at 6:47 (she knew precisely when because the clock had stopped on her kitchen wall at that very instant) the dull pulse that had grown to the full-sized migraine that had her now had begun. The first piece of the horror had come when she believed someone knocked on her kitchen door, light, furtively. She’d even twisted around on the sofa to stare out through the kitchen to the carport door but of course no one had been there. She’d been living here too long to be even mildly surprised. This place toyed with its captives like a young cat with a crippled mouse.
Then the pulse had come again, drawing her to her feet, the sensation more like a warning than the discomfort it would soon become. She’d paused where she stood, her ears pricked to every nuance but finding nothing. There was no smell of corruption on the air, no cloying footsteps echoing above her head, no tinkling laughter. She peered down the hall toward the bedroom but knew that was not it either. Because her eyes were unwittingly dragging themselves back toward the carport door. And as her body followed, the temperature seemed to drop with every step she took in that direction.
She laid her hand on the doorknob, feeling as if she were about to pass from one world into another, turned it. Pulled it back as she stepped out of its described arc and moved on to the storm door, pushing it out toward the car. Stepping outside, the pulse ramped up to the dire warning throb she’d first expected it to be, but now that she was here, it proved impossible to recede back into the house while whatever had drawn her continued on its lethal course. She’d had to know, had to see. Because, this time, it was murder.
The smell-taste of it was right there in the back of her throat.
She moved away from the door, her eyes darting right and left, trying to find whatever this new source of disquiet was. But met with no luck, not really, because whatever it was, was after all, everywhere. Nothing stirred. No one moved. It was as if hers was the only soul having drifted here, far away from any chance of help. She ran her hand unconsciously over the hood of the car and walked slowly along the driver’s side, still trying to---
And she heard the scream. Very clear, very loud, the power of someone beating a garbage can, in the still summer air. At first she couldn’t tell where it came from, but by the time she cleared the eve of the carport, there was no mistake. A clear range of sight existed all the way down to the cross street, Stickler, and she saw what appeared to be a stumbling woman crossing it to one of the houses on the other side. The screams were hers, and as Patsy craned her neck to shore up the details of this macabre drama the others came into view. A mob in hot pursuit (neighbors! the frantic voice pointed out), many with tools in their hands.
And the throb eased over into migraine world.
She watched, speechless, while the mob chased the woman into the house. Watched, as for a while they attempted to get in, scratching and pounding at the walls and door, until simply wandering around like ghosts in the dying summer light, like people looking for shells on a beach. Looking and shuffling around until they began trailing away. And still she watched. She looked up and down the street, but there was no one else apparent as witness to the crime that had just been committed! The migraine deepened, screwed down on itself, dropping her to her knees on the hot concrete, her shaking arms barely holding her upright.
Then the car moving down the street toward her. She didn’t have the strength to hide, to even stand up, and for a moment, when it slowed down and then came to a full stop, she thought, almost contentedly, that now she too would die, she would die and the whole fucking thing would just be over.
But it wasn’t like that at all.
The BMW idled in the street for a moment, the driver obscured behind the tinted, raised glass. Then the window on the passenger side came down and a strange man’s voice called out from the interior. “Mrs. Standish! Are you all right?” She hadn’t the slightest idea to whom it could belong, or why he’d be concerned in the first place, one of that cabal of murderers, but she slowly shook her head back and forth and even attempted a smile. Even now she could not imagine why.
And she’d said something. She had no idea what but the voice inside the car had laughed and told her to take care, that that was the most important thing of all. Then the window had gone up and the car dwindled down to the end of the street and took a right. She didn’t have to follow it to know where it was going.
At first true dark she’d gone back inside.
A great calm had descended after the violence of the day and the house was silent. Patsy sat on the sofa running the wild scene through her mind. Trying to find some kind of sense in this great tragedy building around her. Because something kept nagging at the back of her mind.
The car. It seemed so familiar…but for the life of her Patsy could not place it. And let’s be serious. There were probably half a million BMWs of that size and color all over the world. Still…it was significant. She could feel it. Which brought her endlessly back to the woman she’d seen. Who was she? Why had she been hunted like a dog? Patsy had been able to see the vague figure of the woman, the color of her hair (it had been brown), but as far as the rest there was really not much to go on.
But somehow she felt responsible.
Of course she was not so naïve to think the neighborhood had not taken on a savage personality of its own in these last days. She knew it had. She’d felt it building that first day on the trails and since then it’d steadily increased. Not that the random hauntings had gotten progressively worse (they’d already been terrible from the beginning), but there was an air of menace now, without as well as within, so palpable it seemed to carry its cottony fibers visible into the stony depths of night. Look what it had turned her neighbors into: a vicious mob set on the murder of a stranger. And she knew this woman was not the only one. She could hear the truth leaking in all around her in whispers of death and depravity. No, this neighborhood had gathered on itself siege mentality; there had might as well be electrified fences up along the borders, not to keep the likes of her in, but the outsiders out, dull to the game. She had to be realistic. From her kitchen window she could see the neighborhood going to seed. She now knew the mailman had been killed, probably in the same general fashion as this woman today. God knows what else was happening behind the closed doors, in the fenced-off yards. People were dying around her! That was a fact. She could try to deny its reality by making joking comments to murders when they happened along in their victim’s car, but Jesus Christ! how could she now, alone, right here!?
She hunched her head into her shoulders like a guilty child after a spanking. “No,” she whispered. “This is not about me. I haven’t done anything. I just want Terri back.” There it was in three little sentences except that two of them were lies. There was always Tomas Lorca and the image she held in her head, bent over the kitchen table while he went at her from behind.
That had been the final trigger.
Whatever the fuck was now taking hold of this place, it was childish to deny that event the significance she knew it demanded. She had done something. Some of these things were her fault. It was irrevocable.
And Terri was still as far away this very night, with the scent of murder and corruption in the air, as she’d been the night Patsy had seen her bloody shoe resting on the asphalt.