Dead Echo

  *

  She missed it on the first pass because negligence had let a bank of azaleas reach up over the lettering of the subdivision sign. She realized her mistake and turned around at the power plant just down the highway and drove back slowly, mindful of any approaching cars in her rearview (there were none), trying to fix an impression of the place in her mind to run as a baseline. None came until she turned onto the main road. Then it descended with such arbitrary maliciousness she had to pull over to the side, narrowly avoiding dropping her passenger side tires in the ditch as the car lurched along the grassy shoulder like a coughing drunk. She felt a sudden budding nausea, the same sickening response as if from a wave of corruption. She held her hand over her mouth and nose and tried to concentrate. Told herself to breathe, slowly, in, out. Because it was not a smell; whatever it was (if anything really, now it was hard to pinpoint) it was not a smell. After a moment her stomach unclenched slightly and she took her hand away from her face. Breathed in slowly and shallowly. No, definitely not any smell. The air conditioner was blowing freely, and that was not it. She chanced a look around. A lake farther back to the right surrounded by high grass and mostly immature trees, a stark sprinkling of bigger, broken ones in their midst. Peering harder, she noticed that only deeper into the verge on the other side of the lake did any sustained tree line start, and there a long, stretched line of hardwoods that pushed all the way up to front the highway and extended out of sight on the far border of the neighborhood. From the map legends she’d familiarized herself, she knew the area had been farmland years before and much of it remained untouched still. She turned her head to look down the street where she was parked, idling on the shoulder.

  On the left a string of new middle-class houses, each with a small front yard, wood fences cordoning off the back, passed down to the first cross street. It was about a hundred yards farther down and even though Skate couldn’t see where the street on the left curled around to, the one on the right ran straight up to a dead end seventy yards across the neglected field that ringed the lake. She thought about what James had told her at lunch, that ‘feeling’ he’d described. He’d said nothing about this sensation of nausea, but she intuited what he was talking about even if she couldn’t describe it in words.

  Palpable, looming…deadly.

  She placed her right hand back on the steering wheel and prepared to pull back onto the roadway. Then the right word clicked home. Evil. Her hand fell away from the wheel to her lap. A cold chill rippled through her body. She looked down at the goosebumps speckled across her forearms. She reached out suddenly and slapped off the air conditioner. The sensation of nausea was gone, but something deeper, much more evil, remained. She tried to shake off this illogical thought, her old theological battles were long since finished, but deep down where the childhood monsters lived she was glad it was still daylight. Just the thought of passing this way in the night sent another random chill through her body.

  “Okay, enough of that,” she said as forcefully as she could muster. She was a professional psychologist, for Christ’s sake! What was she doing shivering in the summer heat out here with her car damned near planted in a ditch? She shook her head in disgust. Tried to lose the eerie strangeness by searching through the scatter of papers on the passenger seat to find the address for that damn woman. Found the pad of paper and focused her attention. She shut her eyes, counted to twenty, and opened them with what she hoped was a more clinical eye.

  What could have caused the sensation?

  Suggestion? There was no doubt the seed had been planted by James’s story but Skate didn’t believe that was the whole ball of wax. No. She did a slow pan of the area, trying not to let her eyes rest on any particular spot longer than any other. It only took a couple of studied seconds before it hit her. The whole place might as well have been deserted. There was nobody jogging, nobody playing, nobody walking. Nobody. Like a ghost town. She glanced down at the outside temperature display on the BMW’s dash. Late afternoon and 88 degrees. Nothing out of the ordinary for a typical Louisiana summer day, but the facts spoke for themselves. Where the fuck was everybody?

  Armed now with the address in her free right hand, she dropped the car into Drive and pulled back onto the roadway, trolling along at a snail’s pace, glancing at each house as she passed. The first thing that struck her was how many curtains were drawn. And it wasn’t just in a room or two. Even as Skate passed down the street she craned her neck into the side yards and found most of the windows fronting these likewise screened off from prying eyes.

  She reached the cross road and glanced left. The road swept back past four houses on the right to a 90 degree turn before heading deeper into the neighborhood. Still, not a soul. She looked right, back about thirty yards where the road ran up against a metal gate secured by a heavy gauge of chain and an equally ponderous padlock. Nothing.

  She continued on, checking the addresses against the piece of paper. And then, up ahead on the right she noticed the car, the one she’d happened to see Patsy Standish get out of on the only day they’d met. The same silver Impala alone in a double carport. She slowed even more, almost welcoming suspicion now. She wished that someone would do something innocuous like open a front door to stare after her taillights. At least it would bring a breath of normalcy to what she now felt in her very bones to be the exact opposite.

  She stopped in front of Patsy’s driveway. Idled nervously. Noticed the shades here were drawn too. Considered for a moment pulling in but had no idea how she could explain it off. Just by being here she’d consciously disregarded countless rules of professional etiquette and knew she could have a lot of explaining to do, not just to Mrs. Standish, but to the police also if the woman so wished it. She swiveled around to see if anyone had yet taken notice. No, the street was still empty. The houses and yards motionless. As if the entire neighborhood was holding its breath. As if there was a mighty secret she stood just on the verge of.

  She took her foot off the brake pedal and slowly tooled down to the STOP sign at the end of the street, trying to find reason in what she was doing. Told herself it was all just as normal as--and her breath came suddenly in vicious little stabs, her heart pounding in her chest. Out of the clear, blue sky, seemingly, this wave of paranoia from nowhere. She jerked her head left and right, searching out a clue, and saw him. A lone man standing outside on his porch. Looking directly at her. She looked down and fumbled at the papers again, pulled out a random map and pretended to study it, all the while checking him out from the corner of her eye. Undeniable. He remained motionless, looking her way. Sizing her up. A bug under a microscope. Another cold chill rifled her bones and she put the map down and put her foot on the gas pedal. Turned right slowly as if looking for an address and rolled past him, his head swiveling to follow her the entire way down to the next STOP sign. In her rearview mirror she watched him leave the porch and begin walking down the concrete walkway that led out to the ditch in front of his house. He seemed to waver like a heat-image and her courage broke. Was the sonofabitch coming toward her?

  She stepped on the gas and made another right. Glanced back and saw the man gesturing with his hands, as if signaling her to turn around and come back. But surely not, that couldn’t be—and another wave of nausea hit her and she stepped down on the gas pedal harder, running the engine up to put some distance between her and whomever that happened to be.

  And at the same time she became aware of other people, finally, these exiting their own homes. A tighter wave of claustrophobia began to bite at her insides. Her hands were cold and clammy on the leather steering wheel. Their faces were emotionless, slack and droll, except for the eyes, which were fixed in her direction. She could not deny that. Some of them stumbled along like those horrible zombies from the movies. This was not paranoia, no, but God how she wished it was. By now she was so disconcerted she considered running the STOP sign at the end of the street, but fought back the urge. She could feel herself on the very edge of panic an
d rebelled against this illogical reaction. Dammit, this is ridiculous, she told herself. Yeah, sure, ridiculous but true. She looked in the rear view mirror again; it was as if she were pulling these people from their houses in a wake behind the car. There were at least ten, maybe fifteen, people all the way out to the street now and plodding her direction. And as far as she could tell, nobody was saying anything. Their heads were straight ahead, their direction unerring. They really were like fucking zombies.

  They’re coming to get you, a frantic little voice whispered in her head. Then, No shit, Carolyn, get the hell out of here! Trying hard to maintain her composure she turned right again, shaken to the present, and reality, when a horn went off loud and close. She swung her head around and saw she’d almost clipped a car making the same turn from the opposite direction. The driver’s head was no more than ten feet away from her own and she and this other were looking directly at one another. It was a middle-aged man, his eyes murderous, his horn continuing to blare as she dragged her car over to the side. She heard the grating slash of branches passing along her passenger side from a bush growing too close to the road, at the same time sensing the car’s taillights she’d almost hit blink to life. She felt her gorge rising, feared she would throw up any second now. Everything wavered as if from the same heat-image she’d noticed around the first man she’d seen. On top of the nausea she had a strong sense of vertigo and her stomach lurched. A mouthful of bile hit the back of her throat bringing tears to her eyes and further obscuring her vision.

  Other people were coming out of their houses now. Some of them carrying tools, garden rakes, shovels…long kitchen knives, for God’s sake! For a moment she pictured her office, its neat little pandemonium, and a jolt of nostalgia swept her as if gazing into a deep and lost past. She whimpered far down in her throat.

  And the car died.

  It gave no warning, just cut off cool and dead right there in the street. Its forward momentum carried her a few more feet and then nothing. She stared down through the steering wheel at the ignition switch. Still in the ON position. All the gauges on the dashboard fading away as if the battery had gone suddenly cold. A cold that swept her also. She chanced a glance in the mirror and saw the other car’s taillights change from red to white.

  The sonofabitch was backing up!

  “Oh fuck,” she murmured, aware now of the awesome range of panic that was descending all around her. Like a net. She gripped the keys and frantically twisted the switch back and forth, mindfully and absurdly aware of how the keys jangled noisily. But nothing happened.

  The carport door of the house off to her left swung open and a woman emerged in a dirty shirt and panties, her eyes vicious as a feral animal’s, even from a distance. In her hand she had what appeared to be a short handled machete. Skate’s stomach twisted again terribly and she jerked forward spraying vomit onto the BMW’s dashboard. The woman over there moved with jerking steps past her car and into the driveway. She was coming to get her, by God.

  Then the horn again, loud and braying. Breaking the trance that had held her tight. Skate wiped the vomit remnants from her mouth with a quick swipe and saw the backend of this other car. Stopped now a few feet behind her own bumper. The door swung open and a big leg appeared. From around the corner from the STOP sign the growing crowd of people had made the bend, some on the road, some cutting through the yards on that side. Not running (thank God for small favors) but they were coming.

  The sudden realization that they were coming to kill her got Skate moving. Regardless of the fact that it was still daylight, that everything was coming in surreal waves, that a whole street, perhaps a whole neighborhood, of people she didn’t know and had never wronged, were coming to kill her, finally pounded the last nail into her initiative. She threw her shoulder into the door, afraid for one gruesome second that the electronic lock had engaged when the motor quit, at the same time working the lever, feeling the minute catch and then the rush of outside air as the door swung wide.

  She fell into the street, a sudden, ridiculous justification of her refusal to wear a safety belt. She looked in disbelief at the concrete before her face, her hands pressed onto its hot surface. For a moment she really thought she’d gone crazy, certifiably lunatic, and the irony of this almost bubbled laughter from her throat. But the maniacal moment passed when she heard the shuffling footsteps beside her. Saw the heavy work boots attached to the leg she’d seen getting out of the car. She looked up from her place in the street into the dangerous yellow eyes of the man she’d almost hit seemingly years before. Time had gotten all jumbled up somehow.

  In his hand dangled a tire tool.

  This last little detail broke her out of her funk and to her feet. She didn’t even notice the people coming up the street now, all she could see was the hulking man standing in front of her. Crazily she noticed how white his hands were against the black metal of the iron. “Mister,” she said, fighting for calm. Surely he didn’t intend to brain her with that thing out here in front of all these people in the middle of the day. Right in the middle of the goddamn street. Her whole brain screamed against it. “I don’t—“ and she stopped as he took a shuffling step forward and swung the tire tool at her full force. Luckily her reflexes were good and she ducked, feeling the whiz of air pass directly above her head. She stumbled back a step, falling to her knee, taking in the whole scene like a still shot in a movie.

  They did mean to kill her. Right here, right now.

  The reek wafting off the man caused her gorge to rise again and she fought the urge, struggling with every ounce of courage she had left to regain composure, to somehow find her way out of this nightmare.

  And as she backed up, her arms out in front of her, the man came on in earnest, his partners in crime, the whole multitude, moving in quickly for the kill. She screamed and broke into a stumbling run. The woman in panties and the T-shirt had by now made it into the street with the machete raised above her head. She slashed down at Skate as the woman ran past and the machete cut a long, jagged rent in her left arm from shoulder to elbow. The pain was immediate and excruciating. For a moment Skate was afraid she would lose consciousness. She stumbled across the ditch, into the woman’s front yard, only dimly aware of a great, encompassing warmth of stickiness along her left side. She paused a moment to assess the damage and almost passed out when she saw the glistening wetness of exposed muscle. She could feel nothing on her left side and realized crazily that her assailant had obviously severed the major nerves in that arm, if not the arteries. The blood came prodigiously enough and she knew she didn’t have much time until escape would become mute. If it wasn’t already. Behind the loud buzzing in her ears she heard the rest of them gaining and looked over her shoulder. The closest, the woman in the panties and T-shirt, was now no more than ten feet away, climbing through the ditch now, the machete angled out in front of her and stained a bright red.

  Even now Skate found this hard to accept.

  But acceptance had little to do with reality and she struggled on across the expanding front yard to the street perpendicular to the one where she’d left the car.

  A phone. She had to get to a phone.

  There was no way she was going to outrun the mob coming up from behind, and the highway where she’d turned into the neighborhood seemed a continent away. The houses over here were still largely devoid of movement but there was one where the curtains were not drawn. She made toward it like a famished desert survivor to a watering hole.

  She almost fell again crossing the street and did go down once more as she attempted to jump the ditch on the other side. A great splash of blood spattered the ground before her and her stomach lurched again. She looked across the smaller front yard toward the front door to the house and set all of her will to reaching it. She had no idea how far the mob was behind her. At any second she half-expected a club or knife to reach down into the small spot between her shoulder blades but she dared not look back now. Already the blood loss was sapping wha
t little remained of her strength, soon the adrenaline would wear through also. “Just get to the fucking house,” she whispered and clasped her good hand to the mangled arm in an attempt to slow the bleeding.

  She reached the porch, pulled up against the railing, and reached out a bloody hand to pull the screen door back. Thinking she heard the tortured breathing of the ones following she threw herself against the door, working the knob with her slippery hand and praying whoever lived there was not in the habit of locking the damn thing.

  Then, suddenly, she was sprawled in a bleeding mass on the carpeted floor of the foyer, her legs splayed out behind her. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw she still had a moment left her; the mass of people had yet to cross the front yard but were coming with a fatalism she readily understood.

  “Help me,” she croaked into the muggy stillness of the house. All was silence and she pulled her legs inside, kicking the door closed. Fighting off the terrible waves of darkness that threatened her dimming consciousness, she made it to her knees and reached over and threw the deadbolt with her bloody right hand. Then she looked at her destroyed, hanging arm and vomited again on the carpet. Already a great pool of blood spread around her. She knew she didn’t have long; the blood was coming too fast. The maniac out there had hit an artery and without immediate medical attention she was going to bleed to death.

  She was going to die.

  The simple logic of this idea drove her to her feet, the room swaying disastrously before her eyes. “Hello?” she tried but even realized the request was no more than a choked grunt. She had to hurry.

  She heard the screen door pulled open outside. Something heavy and hard pounded at the door. There was no time.

  She slid down the wall to the living room leaving a great, red smear as she went. All the lights were off and the only illumination was what filtered in through the drawn curtains at the large porch window. And even this light danced grotesquely from the gathering forms out there trying to get in. Any second now Skate prepared to hear the sound of breaking glass as the multitude came to get her. But it didn’t come. They continued to just mill around out there. Almost comically she heard the doorbell ring.

  Then she remembered; it was getting so hard now. The phone. Where was the fucking phone?

  She knocked over a side table and a lamp slammed to the hardwood floor. Leaned up hard against the back of a couch. And saw it. A hundred miles away on the other side of the room. An old white, rotary job. The kind that took forever. Fuck it, she thought. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  They were pounding on the door now, really battering the motherfucker, and Skate knew it wouldn’t be long. She cut a zig-zag path across the remaining couple of feet and picked up the receiver from its cradle. She almost cried when she heard the dial tone and thought just for a second that she might, just might, still get out of this alive. But she’d only dialed the 9 when a ghostly figure slipped out of the hallway, unseen, behind her, and silently crossed the room in slippered steps to punch the long-handled screwdriver into her spine.

  Skate hit the floor like a sack of meat at a slaughterhouse and saw nothing more.