Chapter 16
Ken watched the evening news with growing disbelief. His attention had been drawn to the television set by the mention of Riveredge Township. A New York station had actually sent a crew here to cover the death of Ron Green, described as a veteran journalist. The hippies who had been picked up for questioning in connection with his death had all been released, thanks to the inexplicable arrival on the scene of one of the country's most highly paid and publicity-conscious criminal lawyers. He spoke a few high-minded words about freedom of expression and freedom of religion for the TV cameras and declined to say who was paying him.
The hippies were shown riling out of the local jail. Happily chanting comrades waited for them on the steps of Township Hall. A small crowd of local people had gathered too, perhaps attracted by the television cameras. The reporter spoke of a "lynch mob atmosphere," and the individuals who were asked to say a few words confirmed that notion. Ken assumed that they didn't know what they were talking about, but then the cameras switched to a house rented by some of the suspects. It had been dynamited during the night. One man had been killed and two children injured.
A seedy-looking priest named Collins, whom Ken had never heard of, was interviewed. He said that the killing of Green and Peachtree had been ritual murders perpetrated by Devil-worshippers. A group of his supporters clustered around him, agreeing loudly with everything he said to the TV newsman. He fell just short of accusing the hippies and applauding the people who had bombed their home.
"Screwy, huh?" Judy asked when the newscast switched to another item.
He nodded and grunted something. She was naked, but he found it difficult to look at her or speak to her. He had made love to her earlier, but it had been no more enjoyable than masturbation.
He forced himself to look at her. Her knees were bony. Her feet were too big, her toes were crooked. Her legs needed shaving. Her nipples were too small. Her lips were too thick. Her nose was too long. Worst of all, she was impenetrably stupid, and she looked it. He couldn't begin to imagine why he had ever found her desirable.
She caught him looking at her, so he smiled.
"You want I should turn off the TV?" she asked with a coy, sidelong look.
The thought of making love to her again depressed him, and that reaction produced an acute pang of guilt. She was, as she rarely was, being considerate of his wishes: the bleating of the television set never distracted her when they made love. She didn't seem to notice it. Why did she have to be nice to him when he was trying to work up the courage to tell her that he no longer wanted her? It was exasperating.
He stood up and walked away from her, lighting a cigarette. "I'm hungry," he said. "Put your clothes on, we'll go to a restaurant."
"Take your clothes off," she giggled, "and I'll give you something."
He felt her wrapping her arms around him, pressing her naked breasts to his back, and he fought the impulse to thrust her away.
"I mean it, I want to eat."
"I'll give you something to eat," she whispered, moving her lips against the back of his neck, making his hair crawl, making him want to gag at the image her words evoked, an image that would have excited him just a few days ago.
"Get dressed," he said, his voice harsher than he had intended.
"No," she said, pulling away from him, pouting. "I don't want to get dressed. Go get us a pizza or something, huh?"
"Christ. Don't you eat anything but junk? I want to eat a regular meal. It's supper time."
"All right, so get us a regular meal. Go to McDonald's."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Fucking neighbors are at it again," she said, before he could begin a lecture on nutrition. "What the fuck are they doing?"
He listened only half-attentively to the loud wheezing, whistling noise she had complained of more than once this evening.
"I wish you wouldn't use that kind of language."
"Fuck you," she said, flinging herself down on the couch, making the springs protest loudly. "You're awful picky all of a sudden. Don't do this, don't do that. You don't even want to fuck. Go get your hamburgers, for Christ's sake. And I don't want any onions on mine."
Maybe he should take issue with her words, pick a quarrel and storm out. But she had spoken teasingly, without rancor, and now she suddenly smiled at him. He didn't have the heart to do anything but smile back as he put on his jacket. He averted his eyes hastily as she lay back on the couch, letting her thighs drift apart to reveal the darkly matted curls and pink flesh of her vulva.
"What do you want, french fries, Coke?"
"Sure, the works. But no onions. And hurry back, 'cause I'm starting to get horny as hell again."
Her frankness had once been one of her charms. Now he saw it as crudity, and it offended him. He left without saying anything more.
He hurried down the creaking staircase and out the door into the balmy night, where the wheezing noise seemed louder. It hadn't been the neighbors in her building after all. The noise was like the muted hissing of a steam locomotive at rest, but steam locomotives had gone out with his boyhood. Perhaps it was a truck, testing its airbrakes. He gave it no more thought as he went to his car.
He was strongly tempted to drive away and never return. She held no more attraction for him; no interest, nothing. He called her to mind and posed her in a variety of wanton postures, all clearly remembered from the past, but they had no effect on him at all. The mental snapshots of their former intimacies were no more erotic than animal crackers.
No, he couldn't just leave her like this. She would pester the life out of him, call him at home or at the office, demanding an explanation. He had to tell her bluntly, unequivocally. He should have done it the moment he'd walked into her apartment. That's what he'd planned to do, but she hadn't given him time for words. She had all but dragged him into bed, insistent, insatiable-dull.
Any woman would be dull, of course, after Nora Curtis. Making love to her on Friday night, he had felt like a virgin. It was as if sex were only a mildly diverting subject that he had studied from a book, a shadow of the reality that Nora revealed to him. High though his expectations of Nora had been, she had surpassed them. Her lithe body had wrenched his soul out of his loins. His bones and his muscles and his brain had dissolved and pumped forth to fill her again and again. His appetite fed upon its satisfaction, so that he wanted her more urgently and desperately each time.
It was more than physical desire that he felt for Nora, though; far more. He had believed that falling in love was an affliction of adolescence; over forty, it was a pathetic exercise in self-deception. But he knew now that he'd been wrong.
The morning after that first night he'd gone home to unreality, speaking in echoes to phantoms who had once been his wife and children. Nora. Nora. The name was his heartbeat, his breath, his life, and that life didn't resume again until he crept out of his bed the following night to join her. And the following night.
Now it was Monday, and some impulse toward honesty had driven him to Judy. He had written off Marcia long ago. He could leave for Tibet tomorrow and she wouldn't notice he was gone. But he'd always tried to be honest with Judy. She said she loved him, and he believed her. He would have to tell her. He would have to tell her fast, because he was now wasting time that could be spent with Nora.
At the parking lot of the hamburger stand, he went to a phone booth and dialed Nora's number.
"Hello?"
"Nora." He said it the way a man lost in the desert might say "water." Some detached, critical part of his mind not yet eroded by passion marveled at his abject foolishness.
"Where are you?"
"I have to see someone."
"No, you don't. Come home."
"Home?"
"My home. Our home. Come home, Ken."
"No-please. Not yet. I have to tell someone that it's all over."
"Ken, I know where you are. Don't go back there. There's nothing for you there."
The sharpness of the command startled him. The fragment of detachment in his mind gained strength, surprisingly achieved control. "I have to go. I love you."
"Ken!" The voice he cut off by hanging up the receiver was shrill.
He went slowly back to the counter to collect his order, praying that he hadn't offended her. He wouldn't have believed that he'd have the willpower to hang up on her. He ought to exercise it more. He was in danger of becoming a prisoner, a puppet. He would demonstrate to himself that he was still a free man by going back to Judy and telling her directly that he would see her no more.
Driving back, he thought about Marcia. He would have to get rid of her-divorce her, although it would have given him more satisfaction to strangle her. She was nothing but a whore. No, that was wrong; a whore practiced a certain selectivity. Marcia just dove straight for the gutter, where she wallowed.
Those stinking hippies he'd seen the other night, they hadn't been walking down his street by chance. They were Marcia's friends. They visited her often when he was away. Nora had told him all about it. Apparently Marcia had never lost contact with the scum she'd known in her youth. They had followed her here to renew their intimacies.
Surprisingly, it hadn't hurt at all. He had been mentally prepared for something like that, some evidence that Marcia had never given up the disgusting excesses of her past, that her sanity had never been completely restored. Nora had told him a weird story of drugs and Devil-worship. He'd been reluctant to believe that part of it, but the news on TV tonight had almost succeeded in convincing him that she knew exactly what she was talking about.
According to Nora's story, Marcia believed herself to be a witch. She had been initiated into a coven, a secret ring of witches, many years ago. Recently, she had called the other members together for some degenerate celebration that would soon be held. That bag of filth he had found at the gate had been a sign connected with their beliefs.
Marcia was training Melody to follow in her footsteps. That made sense. That was why the insolent girl always looked at him so coldly, trying to conceal the mockery he could read in her eyes. Her mother was better at disguising her contempt for him. Marcia and Melody, practicing their mumbo jumbo under the influence of psychedelic drugs, had been responsible for the so-called poltergeist, and for the more recent vandalism of his study.
Marcia had confided some of these things to Nora, wrongly supposing that her neighbor's interest in astrology would predispose her to an acceptance of her vile beliefs. Nora had tried to draw her out, but Marcia had discerned that Nora's interest wasn't sympathetic. Nora had subsequently watched her closely, keeping her feelings to herself, picking up hints and clues and piecing them together.
He found it hard to follow Nora to her ultimate conclusion: that Marcia had ordered, perhaps even participated in, the murders of the two men. But the fact that she had discovered the first body was suggestive. The fact that she had taken Ron Green to the very place where he had later been killed was almost damning.
Nora had told him more, much more, of her observations and deductions. A dozen little oddities and mysteries he'd noted in his wife's behavior could be explained by Nora's theory. Even seemingly innocent acts took on a new and sinister aspect when viewed in the light of Nora's explanations. For instance, a witch was always accompanied by a familiar, a devil in the form of an animal, usually a black animal. Marcia, convinced that those around her were totally blind or ignorant, had arrogantly named her familiar Lucifer.
More foul than anything else in this web of madness and superstition were Marcia's plans for her own daughter. The Satanists needed a virgin for their ceremony, and that was why Marcia had habitually discouraged Melody's interest in the opposite sex. She had planted the idea in Melody's head that she was superior to other youngsters, that she had nothing at all in common with them. She was saving her daughter for the Black Mass.
He could do nothing for Melody. She was lost, totally enslaved by her mother's evil influence. She wasn't his child anyway. Maybe the courts would arrange help for her, once the police connected Marcia with the people responsible for the murders. The most he could hope to do was save his own two children by getting them out of Marcia's clutches.
But it was difficult to make plans for the future while his mind was so totally absorbed in his wonderful new lover. She would make a good wife. She would make a good stepmother for Roger and Karen. No judge in the world would give custody of them to a woman obsessed by the delusion that she was a witch.
He paused before turning up the street where Judy lived. Maybe he ought to answer Nora's summons and go directly to her house. He rejected the idea. It was too easy. Nora would never respect him if he took the easy way out of a moral dilemma. He had to break off with Judy; he had to tell her to her face that it was over.
Light poured out of the big old house where she lived. People swarmed around the front porch. He cursed under his breath. He hated to be seen by the students and other young people who rented rooms in the building. But this would be the last time.
He took the bag of hamburgers and climbed out of his car. Something unusual was going on. Every light in the former Victorian mansion burned. People kept going in and out of the front door. He heard a tumult of voices, a girl sobbing.
"... thought the boiler blew up when I heard it, but ... "
"I didn't call the cops. Charlie, did you call the cops?"
" ... an ambulance ... "
" ... who could have ... "
"I was just talking to her not an hour ago, I was just talking to her, and now ... "
"Oh, my God, did you see her? Did you see her? She didn't have no head!"
"Hey, mister, you can't go up there! Hey, mister!"
The last sharp cry was directed at Ken, but he shouldered his way through the press and gained the front door. He went up the stairs two at a time, ignoring officious cries to come back. Nobody tried to stop him.
People crowded the first flight of stairs, but the second was almost empty. The third was deserted.
"I wouldn't go up there, if I was you, buddy," called a man on the second floor, but he kept climbing. "Some nut is loose up there."
Halfway up the last flight of stairs he was struck by a disgusting combination of odors: one that suggested burning hair, sulphur, and decaying meat, and another that he recognized as the raw smell of blood. He pressed his handkerchief to his face as he hurried down the corridor.
Judy's door had been splintered, burst out from within, and it lay on the opposite side of the corridor from her doorway. Smudges of blood that could have been the prints of huge hands covered it. Somehow he had known that her room would be the scene of the horror.
He hesitated only an instant. He was spurred on by the sound of a police siren dying to a growl outside. The police wouldn't let him see. He had to see.
He peered through her doorway. The window, and much of the wall around it, had been smashed in. Every piece of furniture had been torn to pieces, every stick smashed, as if the tiny apartment had lain in the path of a highly selective tornado.
In the center of the room lay a naked female torso, its ragged stumps still oozing sluggish blood. He told himself that it wasn't Judy, that it couldn't be Judy; but the nipples of her pear-like breasts, the ones he had earlier criticized for being too small, were far too familiar to his eyes.
He didn't realize that he was screaming until the police came and gently urged him to be quiet.