The Bad Box Read online

  “On the other hand, everything I’ve been saying is probably just crap. Like the killers themselves, psychologists have invented a pseudo-religion to persuade themselves that the voices in the head aren’t really there, that the dark figures in the soul are just neurons acting up.”

  It felt like a cynical prank, as if he had been teasing her all night with his analysis just to say ha ha, the joke’s on you.

  “Well, what do you think?” she asked. “Is Angel’s friend real or not?”

  Ben stared at her, his gray eyes hard as tombstones, and Sarah wondered if she was any safer with him than she would be with Darnell.

  “All I know is that mental illness is probably the ugliest damn trick God ever pulled on mankind,” he said. “You’re much better off with cancer. Whether there’s something even uglier standing behind it I don’t know. It’s late and I need to go to bed now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Sarah was aware of birds chirping over the drone of the window fan before she came fully awake. One of them sounded exactly like R2-D2, squeaking and hooting while Darth Vader pursued it with a ray gun.

  When she opened her eyes, it took her a moment to recognize where she was. However much she disliked Ben Easton, she liked this bedroom, the homey old furniture, the sunlit outdoorsy air blowing in through the fan, the cacophony of birds outside.

  She showered and dressed and came downstairs. There was no one down there, but through the kitchen window she saw Ben sitting out back at the picnic table by himself, reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. She had been hoping that Howard would be up to insulate her from him.

  There was a note on the table: “Cereal, milk, coffee. Help yourselves.”

  Sarah poured a cup of coffee and went to the dining room, not wanting Ben to see her through the kitchen window. The paintings on the walls were impressionistically sunny landscapes, light playing delicately on a ripe cornfield, a colorful woods, a sparkling creek wandering through bright autumn trees.

  She recognized the barn in one of them, so apparently Ben was the mystery artist after all, and in fact when she looked closely she saw the name Easton in tiny letters in the bottom right corner. It was a good painting with a sort of Andrew Wyeth feel, two trees in the foreground with the barn behind them, its weathered siding glowing warmly in the sun. He had some talent at least.

  There were two other rooms downstairs in addition to the kitchen, the bathroom, the dining room, and the living room where they had sat last night. One of them had its door shut, maybe Ben’s studio, and the other was a second living room.

  She received an unpleasant surprise when she stepped into it: the paintings in here were downright macabre. The palette had darkened, the brush stokes were jagged and crude, the trees and buildings were distorted, and shadowy faces with leering eyes peered through bushes that resembled bones.

  A painting hanging above an old upholstered chair appeared at first to be a purely black canvas. She moved closer and discerned deep grays amidst the black, a hulking shape emerging from the gloom, a dull gleaming of sinister windows, the suggestion of a roof like a monstrous forehead.

  It was the barn, transformed by the eyes of nightmare into an emblem of death.

  The painting struck some ugly chord deep inside her, and she never wanted to see it again. She went back to the kitchen, fixed a bowl of corn flakes, and sat at the old fashioned wooden table. A moment later the screen door opened, and Sarah’s spoon paused halfway to her mouth.

  She and Ben stared at each other like two gunslingers in a saloon. “Draw, you varmint!” she felt like saying.

  “Morning,” he said, and headed for the coffee pot.

  “Morning,” she said. “Where’s Howard?”

  “Asleep I guess. I don’t think whiskey agrees with him.”

  “Anything in the paper about Darnell?” she asked.

  “Nothing interesting.”

  Ben poured some milk into his coffee and went back out, screen door banging behind him.

  Goddammit, Howard, wake up, Sarah thought. All that whiskey must have half-killed him. She rinsed her bowl and glanced out the window. Ben was back at the picnic table, arms crossed, long legs sticking out like two telephone poles.

  Try to be friendly, Sarah thought. He is putting me up. She poured some more coffee, stepped out and headed for the picnic table. The grass was still dewy, soaking her sneakers. Last night she had noticed that the grass was neatly mowed back here. She figured he probably kept the front looking awful just to scare people away.

  He didn’t say anything when she sat down, but he handed her the paper. He was busy staring at the barn as if waiting for it to collapse. The weathered building looked as if it might oblige any minute.

  Small article in the front section about the manhunt, nothing helpful. Sarah turned to the rentals and had read most of the way through them before Ben spoke.

  “Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

  “Very well, thank you.”

  She noticed a furnished efficiency that was cheap: “AC, kitchen, laundry, $425/mo incls all utilities. NS environment.”

  “You rent this place?” she asked.

  “It’s mine. I rent out the fields to a neighbor.”

  “Have you lived here long?”

  “Seven years. I was born in Texas, came here to teach.”

  Sarah thought about the flower beds and fruit trees out front. They looked neglected, but definitely hadn’t been neglected for seven years. She wondered why he had cared for them once and no longer did. She glanced at him and saw he was still staring at the barn.

  “I like the barn,” she said.

  “I hate it. I’m thinking I should have it torn down.”

  “Looks like it just needs some paint,” she said. “I love old barns. I love fields and country air. It’s very nice here.”

  “It’s nice if you like privacy,” he said.

  Ouch.

  “Well, as to that, I’ll be getting out of your hair today,” she said. “I’m going into town with Howard and I’m renting a room. But I do thank you for your hospitality.”

  He stared at her as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

  “You misunderstood me,” he said at last. “That’s not what I meant. I very much want you and Howard to stay here until Darnell is safely behind bars.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Howard is probably my best friend, and you’re his friend,” he said. “I want both of you to be safe.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t like to be nuisance. Like I said—”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’m very aware that my social skills aren’t exactly at their peak right now, but that has nothing to do with you and Howard. It’s too much country air I guess, too much privacy. Right now I could use some company, so you’d be doing me a favor.”

  His gray eyes didn’t look so hard and chilly at the moment. She saw pain behind them.

  “Well, if I get in the way please let me know,” she said.

  “Howard tells me you want to buy a gun,” he said. “Have you ever shot one?”

  “No.”

  “Guns are dangerous if you don’t know how to use them. Why don’t I bring out a couple and you can try them. I’ve got a shooting range behind the barn.”

  Great. Not only was he a nut, he was a fucking gun nut too. It figured. His barn was probably full of fertilizer bombs.

  “Thanks. I dunno.”

  He ambled to the house and returned in a while with a big duffel bag strapped over his shoulder. She followed him to the barnyard, where there was a rough wooden shooting table and some targets at varying distances with bales of straw piled behind them to stop the bullets. Beyond the shooting range were cornfields on either side of a weedy lane that led to a woods.

  He set his bag on the table, pulled out a plastic gun box and opened it.

  “Let’s start you off with something simple, a .22 revolver. This is a Taurus, six-inch barrel, holds nin
e rounds. You can see that it’s empty, but the first thing you need to know is that a gun is always loaded, even if you know it’s not. Sometimes the things we’re most certain of turn out not to be true. You never ever point a gun at yourself or anyone else unless you mean business. You load it like this. Put on these glasses and ear protectors.”

  He showed her how to hold the gun. She aimed carefully, but when she pulled the trigger the barrel moved and the bullet ended up nicking a bale of straw two feet above the target.

  “Don’t pull the trigger,” he said. “Squeeze it.”

  She hit the edge of the target on third try, and after a while she was aiming at a more distant target and hitting it not too far from the center. He pulled out a .22 caliber Browning Buckmark semi-automatic, showed her how to load it and how to jack the slide, and pretty soon she was making five-inch groups on the 20-yard target.

  “You’re good at this,” he said. “Let’s try a bigger caliber.”

  He opened another box and removed a small revolver that looked familiar. “This will shoot .357 Magnum, but I think that’s more kick and flash than you’ll want, so I’m going to load it with .38 Special. Try this on the 20-foot target. It’s not made for long range.”

  She examined the gun more closely. It was the same Ruger LCR she had looked at in the gun store, the one priced way out of her budget at $450. It kicked and spat some fire, even loaded with .38 Special, but she didn’t mind, and pretty soon she was printing fairly tight groups on the target.

  Howard handed her a tiny leather holster. “This will protect the gun when you carry it in your purse,” he said.

  She stared at the holster, then at him. “If you’re thinking of selling it, I’m not sure I can afford it,” she said.

  “I can’t very well sell it because I just gave it to you.”

  “No, I can’t possibly accept it.”

  He turned away rather coldly, as if offended.

  “Whatever suits you,” he said. “If you want to give it back after Darnell is locked up, that’s your business. But until then I want you to keep it with you at all times.”

  Howard emerged from the house and shambled toward them with uncertain steps. He was showered and groomed but didn’t look well.

  “Thank goodness it’s you two,” he said. “I was certain that Armageddon had erupted. Benjamin, what on earth did you put in that whiskey? Today I shall take the pledge of temperance. Never shall Beelzebub’s venomous sour mash pollute these lips again.”

  Ben grinned. It was the first time Sarah had seen him smile.

  “Must be that dead raccoon I tossed in the still,” he said. “Howard, I want you to do the same thing she’s doing—learn how to use these things.”

  “Not now, dear friend, not now!”

  “Tomorrow then,” Ben said. “You guys ready for lunch?”

  “How can you even think of food?” Howard said. “I’m going to toddle back inside, curl up on the sofa, and hope it doesn’t spin around too much. Somehow I must repair myself. Tell me honestly, is it really Thursday? If so, I have a class to teach this evening. Oh, the horror.” He headed for the house.

  “Hungry?” Ben asked her.

  “I guess. Maybe I could just try a few rounds of .357 first.”

  “Fun, isn’t it?” He handed her the box of ammo.

  “It’s interesting,” she admitted.

  Sarah loaded the revolver and took careful aim at the 20-foot target. The gun kicked like a jack hammer and fire seemed to shoot two feet from the barrel.

  When she was finished, Ben removed his ear protectors and gathered up the guns. “Hell of a cartridge,” he said. “If what’s after you is flesh and blood, this will do the trick.”

  He looked back at the barn and she did too. It did look rather creepy, she thought, the once-white siding weathered gray and the glassless upper windows staring down at them with the deep darkness of the hayloft. Their gaze reminded her of Ben’s eyes.

  “Of course, some things aren’t flesh and blood,” he said. He strapped the bag over his shoulder and headed for the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Peter Bellman stood at his bathroom mirror and trimmed his beard. The Big Truth was what really mattered, but mundane details were also part of the scheme, and keeping up appearances was part of the detail work. The High Priestess of the Solitary One had no patience with sloppiness. He had been sloppy at first, before his brain had time to adjust to the Big Truth, but there would be no sloppiness tonight. Tonight was for keeps, and he wanted the details to be perfect.

  He wished now that his beard had been neater and his clothes cleaner two days ago when the detective had paid his visit. The ignorant heathen were obsessed with appearances, and Okpara even more than most. Such nonsense: if only Peter had shaved, then there wouldn’t be plainclothes cops parked down the street watching his house right now. They were easy to spot, coffee in one hand and donut in the other, sitting there for hours as if their car were a new house on the street, easy to spot but still a nuisance.

  Now his beard looked perfect and his living room was nice and spotless, in case the detective showed up again. The rest of the house was a mess, but he preferred it that way.

  This benighted age belonged to appearance-freaks, number-crunchers, detail-worshippers, and fact-mongers like that slut Sarah. They had grown powerful in the days of the Industrial Revolution, and each new toy wrought by capitalism had abetted them in their battle against truth. Now truth was plastered over with billboards, repudiated by glossy magazines selling expensive crap, painted over with expensive cosmetics and facelifts, drowned out by smiley-faced fools on TV, and smothered beneath the weight of useless gaudy junk.

  The hypocrisy of our time was like the falsehood of modern funerals, the beautiful truth of death painted over with mortician’s makeup, the coffin gilded so our eyes wouldn’t notice the dark dirt it was being lowered into. Peter of course had been aware of this even before his Awakening, but then he had doubted there was any great truth behind the phony facade. Now he knew there was. The squalor of his house was a kind of memento mori to keep his mind on the rich dirt of truth.

  Another memento mori was Sarah’s stupid cat rotting on the bathroom counter. He probably should toss it out before the maggots turned into flies, but he liked the smell.

  He had shaped his beard into a neat respectable Vandyke, and now he painted it jet black with liquid shoe polish. He cut his long red hair until it was just above his collar, then he painted it black like his beard and slicked it straight back until it was plastered flat against his head.

  Even Okpara wouldn’t recognize him now. He grinned at the mirror and said, “Ooo, who is that handsome young man!”

  He went to his bedroom to put on a freshly laundered shirt, khaki pants, and a nice pair of boat shoes with soft quiet soles. In the kitchen he slipped a pair of rubber gloves into his hip pocket and selected a boning knife with a thin seven-inch blade. He had read somewhere that a boning knife was ideal because it would give slightly to slip past bone. It was an expensive piece of German cutlery, and he was certain it wouldn’t break. He felt the blade for sharpness, slipped it into the cardboard sheath he had made, and taped the sheath to his leg near the ankle. When he pulled up his sock and dropped his pants leg, the knife was perfectly hidden.

  He went to the living room, lifted the drape and peered out. The cop car was still there, halfway down the block where the fools thought he wouldn’t notice them. That was good—he was afraid they might have sneaked away to get some more donuts. Dumb bastards were earning their pay at least.

  He stepped out onto his front porch so they could see that he was at home, and just to be sure they noticed him he yelled loudly at a little kid walking past: “Hey, you dumb fuck, get your ass outta my yard!”

  Then he realized that he didn’t want the cops to see his black hair dye, so he ducked back inside. Details, details.

  It was 4:15, time to get moving. He had checked the schedule of sum
mer classes and knew that Howard had a class from 5:00 to 6:20, which meant a certain sleazy ho was going to be home all alone pretty soon like Little Miss Muffet. He turned on the TV with the sound cranked up loud, turned on a couple lights to fool the cops after the sun went down, put on a pair of dark sunglasses, swigged some scotch from the bottle, and slipped quietly out the back door.

  There were many things these dumb cops didn’t know, like for example they probably didn’t know that there was a gate in the back of his privacy fence that opened to his neighbors’ back yard on the next street over, and they surely didn’t know that those neighbors were his friends, and they sure as fucking hell didn’t know that those neighbors were on vacation and had given him their house key so he could take care of their tropical fish.

  He used their key to open their back door and then used their phone to order a taxi. While he was waiting for it, he stared at the dead fish floating in their aquarium. Details, details.

  He had the cab drop him at a bar not too far from Howard’s house, but not too near either. The street he strolled casually down was the one just west of Howard’s, where there wouldn’t be any unmarked cop cars.

  One more thing these dumb cops didn’t know was that he had found a secret passage to Howard’s back yard. The old brick houses in this neighborhood were jammed so close together that some of them didn’t even have side windows, just a skinny little path between them to the back yard. A couple nights ago he had discovered the path between two houses that led to the backyard that adjoined Howard’s backyard on the next street over, with just a hedge to separate them.

  That night he had chickened out and just left a cheerful little note, but the High Priestess had no patience with cowardice, and he wasn’t going to chicken out tonight.

  He arrived at his secret path, peered casually at the two houses beside it, and couldn’t see any signs of life in either of them. It was better to do this sort of work after dark, of course, but there were some advantages to this hour of day. For one, the people who lived in this neighborhood were mostly white collar types, which meant most of them were still at work. Secondly, people who sneaked down a skinny path between two houses looked suspicious at night, but when the sun was still up they just looked like normal folks going to visit a friend’s back yard.