“I … I … I …” said Chris Thomas.
“Punk!” I swung him around till his legs slammed into the gravestone behind me.
“Ow! Shit, Wells!” he remarked.
“Where is it?”
“Wha …”
“The skull mask. Is it down in the cave?”
His eyes widened. “I don’t have—” I jolted him, banged him against the stone again. He said “Ow!” again.
“Why’d you kill the dog, Dracula?”
“I didn’t,” he cried. “I swear.”
I banged him back yet again. “Oh, my mood is worsening, friend. I went down into the caves that night. I found the paper you burned down there. It was the same paper Michelle drew her pictures on. I thought maybe it belonged to Janet Thayer. But it was something Michelle gave to you.”
Thomas started to cry. His whole face crumpled, the features collapsing into each other. He squeaked as he cried: eee, eee, eee. I’d had enough of him, and anyway my arms were tired. I hurled him down onto the ground. He lay there sprawled beneath the gravestone, crying.
“Did you kill her?” I said. But I knew the answer to that already.
Thomas shook his head, crying. “No,” he said. Eee, eee, eee.
“Do you know who did?”
He wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Death,” he said.
“Christ.” I needed time to calm down. I was ready to kick the bugger’s head in.
I put my hands on my hips and took a few deep breaths. I paced a step or two to the right of him, turned, and paced a step or two to his left. Then I stood over him, looking down. He straightened, afraid. He was now half sitting, his head resting against the stone.
“You watch too many horror movies,” I said, as calmly as I could.
He nodded, snuffling. “I know that,” he said sullenly.
“Don’t you have parents or something?”
“Just my mother. She works at night.”
“Right.” I gestured at him. “Stop crying.”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said. “I loved her. It was him.”
“Death.”
He nodded again.
“All right. All right.” I went into my pocket, pulled out a cigarette. Torched it, squinting at the sudden light of the match. The smoke went in hard, but I took it. At least if it killed me now, I wouldn’t have far to go. “Let’s hear everything,” I said.
Still snuffling, still wiping at his nose, Chris Thomas struggled to sit up on the grave. I listened awhile as he fought to control himself. Then he said: “I saw him. I saw him in the woods. I saw him watching us—me and Michelle—when we talked together at the root cellar. The last two days, I looked down into the woods, and I saw him standing there. We talked about death a lot. All the time. I knew he’d come for us in the woods.”
I snorted smoke. “Not death,” I said. “A person. A person in a skull mask.” But I remembered my first sight of him near Janet Thayer’s house. A tough sight to take for a mixed-up guy like Chris.
He put his hands to his head and moaned. “Oh God, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what Michelle told me. She told me it was someone in a mask. And then she was dead. A week later she was dead, and I just don’t know anymore.”
“Okay, okay,” I said quietly. “What happened then.”
“When … when she was gone … I went looking for him.… In the woods everyday. I wanted … I wanted him to take me too.”
“Oh great.”
“But he wouldn’t come. He wasn’t there. He wouldn’t …” He moved his hands to cover his face. “I’m so confused. I’m so fucking confused all the time.”
I sighed, feeling guilty. “It’s all right, son,” I said. “We’re gonna figure it out.”
“That’s what I thought. I thought, when you came, when Mr. Brandt introduced you to everyone, you looked … I don’t know, you looked like someone who knew … about death … you looked … like someone who could figure it out.”
“So you found out where I was, and came up to the hotel to see me.”
He nodded. “I traveled in the caves. I didn’t want him to find me at the last minute.” I heard him take a shaky breath. “But he did. I came out. I came out of the caves and saw him. He was … he had Sosh. The school dog. It was dead in his arms and he was …”
He told me. I felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. It was the first real glimpse I’d had of him: of the person who was Death. And what I glimpsed scared me. I saw the shadow of a deranged mind. Like Chris, he must have heard about me. Like Chris, he must have had something to tell me. Maybe he told himself he was hanging the dog up as a joke or a warning. But I sensed it wasn’t really that: it was a kind of confession. Whether he’d actually killed Michelle or not, he must’ve felt responsible for it. He must’ve wanted someone to know that. That also must’ve been why he kept coming after me. If he hadn’t, I probably would’ve dropped the story. But somewhere inside his head, I don’t think he wanted me to. Part of him wanted me to find him. The other part, I suspected, wanted me very dead.
“Okay,” I said when Chris was finished.
“Just like he did with Michelle, just like he made her do.”
“What then?”
“I snuck by him. It was dark. I snuck by him and ran up to your place. I saw you at the window and I … I wanted you to see, to see he was real.”
“Why didn’t you knock on the bloody door?”
“I don’t … I was afraid.…”
“Okay. So you led me down into the woods to find the dog, to tell me death was down there.”
He nodded.
“And what about tonight?”
He looked up at me. It was a miserable look, begging me to understand. I don’t know why the hell he thought I would, but he did. So I tried. “I’ve been waiting for him,” he said. “Watching. I knew he’d come back to your place. I knew it. I saw him tonight. I saw him try to break into your place. Then you came. I went down in the caves because it was faster. I thought I could help you, that’s all. I was trying to help.”
I sighed again. “You were trying to help.”
“I just fuck up everything.”
“Forget it. I’m sorry I roughed you up. You nearly gave me a heart attack. I’m not a young man anymore, you.know.”
He almost smiled.
“Can you drive?” I asked him. He shook his head. “Well, then, we better start walking.”
“I have my bike,” he offered.
“A bike.”
“A motorbike,” he said. “It’ll carry us.”
My kidneys hurt already. “Terrific,” I said. “Let’s go back up the hill.”
31 It beat walking. We plugged and putted up the mountain, back to the hotel.
In my room Chris sat wearily on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched forward, Ins head hung down. I sat at the desk chair, my arm draped over the back, a cigarette burning between the fingers of one hand, a glass of scotch wrapped up in the other.
After a long silence he said softly, “I feel like I’ve been in a nightmare.”
I didn’t answer. I listened. I figured I owed him that.
“I thought he was real … I thought he … Oh God, I just feel like … everything’s so …” His face contorted with pain. “What am I here for? Why am I still here when she’s gone?”
“Hell, that’s no way to talk,” I said. But I felt the question shoot into me, deep into the recesses of my brain. It hurt. “You don’t decide who lives and dies. They’ve probably got a committee that does that somewhere.”
“Well, it’s a stinking committee,” he told me.
“Most committees are.”
“I just can’t find the way,” he said. His eyes were swimming. His lips were swollen with crying. He looked about five years old. “I just can’t find the way to go on, Mr. Wells. You ever feel like that?” He looked up at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve felt that way.”
He looked surpr
ised. “You have?”
“Sure I have,” I said. I knew I should have said more, but I didn’t. I wished Chandler was there.
The moment passed. He went on. “She used to tell me how death was beautiful, how you became part of everything, how there weren’t any problems anymore, and she wouldn’t have to look at her mother and know she was disappointing her. Lying to her and all.” A thought passed through his mind. It made him smile bitterly. “It’s like with my mother. Only with her it’s the guilt.”
“She on you a lot, is she?”
“Huh? Oh. No, not my guilt. Hers. The way she looks at me all the time like she’s … so … sorry. You know?”
I shook my head, tried to keep him going. “Not exactly.”
“Oh, just … You know, my dad died when I was real little, and she had to work and I came home alone and all.” His smile was more like a grimace now. “I used to get scared there in the house by myself. I’d just climb into the closet and hide there till she got back. In the dark. Wishing Dad would … you know … come back.” He clasped his hands together where they dangled between his knees. “She used to come home and find me there, and she’d just look at me, you know. Like she was … just … so … sorry. It’s, like, a lot to take. Unscrews your head. And, I mean, she still looks at me like that. Sometimes I think she does this word processing stuff just so’s she can work at night. So she won’t have to see me. So she won’t have to feel … sorry all the time.”
I tried to think of something reassuring to say. I couldn’t. Sounded crummy to me too.
He was quiet for a minute. Then: “So we talked about dying.”
“Hell,” I said lamely. “That’s no answer.”
“Oh yeah?” He raised his head. His eyes flashed angrily. “You wanna tell me what the answer is?”
The buried hurt stirred again. I fiddled with my cigarette. Changed the subject. “So you two really talked a lot?”
The anger subsided. His shoulders straightened proudly. “I told you. She told me everything. We told each other everything.”
I took a sip of scotch. I took a drag on the cigarette. “Everything,” I said.
“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” he said, half smiling. “We just talked and talked.”
I leaned forward in my chair “Chris,” I said. “Did you ever talk about the hotline? About the conversations she had with people on the hotline?”
He snorted. “Oh yeah. Hell yeah. Some of that stuff was pretty gritty too.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Did she ever mention the fact that she talked to Fred Summers and Nancy Scofield before they committed suicide?”
His lips parted. “How’d you know that?”
“Did she?”
“Yeah … Yeah, she was pretty upset about it.”
“You think that might be the reason she killed herself?”
He considered it. “I don’t know. No. I don’t think so. I mean, we talked about it a long time, you know. And she seemed to get her mind right on it. She felt … see, at first she felt like it was her fault, like she failed them somehow. I told her, though … I told her, you know, I mean: they had their own problems. It seemed really to cheer her up after a while.”
I studied his earnest face. “What were their problems? Fred and Nancy? Did she tell you?”
“Well, yeah, some of it.” He ran his hand up through his crewcut. My eyes were fixed on him firmly now. “Nancy, I remember, Michelle said something about how she was screwing around with one of her teachers or something, and then—”
“Wait, wait a minute,” I said. I had gotten to my feet. I lay down my scotch glass on the table. I snuffed the nail. I paced in front of him. “That could be it right there. I mean, she had all these secrets. Michelle. Nancy calls her up and tells her she’s sleeping with a teacher. Nancy’s fifteen years old: it could cost the guy his job, his career. He could even go to jail for it. Maybe he found out Michelle knew ….” I stopped pacing. “Who was it? Do you remember?”
He searched around in his mind for it. “No, she never told me. I mean, I’d remember something like that if she did. I mean, you know, a teacher, man. She said she couldn’t tell me that ’cause he was still alive and all.”
I let my breath out. “Sure. Sure.” I rubbed my eyes.
Through the picture window I could see the black sky turning violet. The stars were fading. It was past five A.M.
I walked over to the desk. I pawed through the papers splattered around my typewriter there. I pulled out the notebook in which I’d copied Nancy’s poem, called “A Valentine.” I handed it to Chris. “I used this in my piece,” I said. “It got cut out.”
He looked at the page, squinting to make out my handwriting. He murmured the first lines, “‘Do you consider that I have not seen,/day after day, your moving away from me?’” He read on awhile in silence, then he handed it back to me. “I learned about Edgar Allan Poe in English. I love his stuff.”
“That doesn’t exactly surprise me about you, pal. Nancy liked him too.” I glanced up at him. “Did Michelle tell you that?”
“No, but he wrote a poem called ‘A Valentine’ too. It sounded like this one … I don’t know, kinda stilted, you know.” He pointed at the notebook still in my hand. “That’s ’cause he had to arrange the words to spell out the name of the person he was writing to.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It was kinda like a … whatchamacallit.”
“A cryptogram. How did it work?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I can’t remember.” I grabbed the phone, dialed McKay. It rang once, and he answered.
“Who the hell is this?” he said.
“Wells, buddy. Sorry to wake you up.”
“You didn’t goddamn wake me up. This goddamn baby woke me up. What the hell do you want, anyway?” I could hear the baby squawling in the background.
“Listen, daddy-o,” I said.
“Shut up,” said McKay.
“Go to one of your many bookshelves and pull forth your dust-encrusted volume of Edgar Allan Poe.”
“All right, God damn it, just hold on.”
I held on. The baby’s screaming faded. I waited. The baby’s screaming returned. So did McKay.
“Yeah, so what?” he said.
“Find a poem called ‘A Valentine.’”
I waited. “All right,” he barked at me.
“It’s supposed to be, like, a code or something ….”
“Yeah, it’s a cryptogram. There’s a footnote. It says you figure it out by taking the first letter of the first line, the second letter of the second line, and so on.”
“Night, dads.”
“Fuck you.”
I hung up. I set to work decoding the poem.
Then I said: “I’ll be damned.”
David Brandt.
32 I didn’t get much sleep after Chris went home. By nine-thirty I was standing in front of the high school. I stood on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette, huddled inside my overcoat. The sky had gone gray as granite and the wind had turned bitter cold.
In about five minutes a patrol car pulled up to the curb. Tammany Bird unfolded himself from within. His egg-shaped head hovered in the sky above me. He cast a pale glance down my way with his pale eyes.
“All right,” he said softly. “But if it’s no good, you got a date with the county line.”
I nodded. We headed up the walk toward the school.
Bird was greeted with smiles in the office. I sort of hung back behind him. Brandt wasn’t there. He was holding another assembly. The subject this time was the abuse of journalism. A sort of update on the meeting of the night before. I figured we could get there just in time for me to act as a diagram. I went after Bird as he strode down the hall to the auditorium.
The kids’ faces turned to us as we came in the back door. Bird’s khaki uniform held their attention a moment. Then they saw me. At once they began murmuring to each other. But Brandt called their eyes back t
o the front.
He was standing at the podium on the stage. He was wearing another of his snazzy dark suits, the ones that made his face seem whiter and his hair even more red.
“All right now, everyone,” he said. His voice exuded sincerity. “Quiet down.”
He waited another moment while the murmuring slowly died. After glancing down at his notes, he took up where he’d left off.
“This is a private meeting, but I can’t help feeling it would be a good thing if one of our visitors also heard what I have to say.” He cleared his throat. “What I’ve been trying to stress so far is that I know how many of you feel about this. How terrible you feel. I feel terrible too. I want to assure you that the responsibility for what has happened is not yours. You did nothing wrong. The fault lies partially with me. But primarily it lies with a newspaper—and a newspaperman—that served the profit motive above the truth.
“Now, before I go into more detail about last night’s meeting—and also suggest some actions we might take as a school—I want to show you some examples of the way in which some of the modern media have abused their freedoms.”
He leaned back from his podium and glanced underneath, looking for the materials. He held up a finger. “Just a minute,” he said. He walked off the stage into the wings.
The students sitting in the auditorium waited. I could almost feel their desire to turn and look at me. At first they restrained themselves. But as the moments passed, I saw the white flash of one face, then another, then another, glancing back. The murmuring began again. The students leaned toward each other. They cupped their hands before their mouths and whispered into each other’s ears. The stage remained empty. The murmuring grew louder. The stage remained empty still.
Beside me I heard Chief Bird murmur, “What the hell?”
He turned to me. I shook my head.
“What the hell?” said Tammany Bird, and he started down the aisle toward the stage.
I followed. His long legs carried him quickly. I had to walk fast to keep up. My body—stiff and sore and weary—complained at the effort.
Bird reached the stage and went up the stairs. A curtain hung to the right of the podium. He pushed it aside, went through. I was right behind him.