Lost Echoes (3 page)

It was the smell of blood.

The hair on the back of Seymour’s neck poked up, and he thought—or imagined—that above the aroma of the tonk he could smell his own fear, a kind of sour stench of sweat and decay. And in the back of his mouth he could taste copper. He turned slowly, almost crouched, expecting someone to leap from the shadows like a goddamn gazelle.

And he saw someone.

But she wouldn’t do much leaping.

It was Evelyn Gibbons.

The formerly attractive, middle-aged Evelyn Gibbons. The owner of the tonk. The breezy little woman with the dark bobbing hair and the bouncy step and the bouncy ass, the latter usually tucked nicely beneath short black dresses, her buns jacked up by thick high heels.

She was sitting down by the jukebox, her head against it, leaning farther than it should have on a neck. That was because her throat was cut from ear to ear, and there was blood all over the jukebox, on her, and the wall behind her. Her hair was matted in blood and stuck to the jukebox like a big spit wad. The floor beneath her had plenty of blood too. Her dress was hiked up over her thighs, and Seymour could see her panties. They were dark, and had probably been white before they soaked up a lot of gore.

Seymour backed toward the door, looking over his shoulder carefully. He figured the blood, dried like it was, meant the murder had happened some time ago. But he looked about just the same, in case some madman armed with a blade should come for him.

He made it out into the blinding sunshine to his car, where he had a cell phone on the passenger’s seat. He called 911, and while he waited for the cops to arrive, he wished repeatedly that he had a beer. Maybe some whiskey. A little turpentine. Rubbing alcohol. A shot of piss. Damn near anything.

The cops showed up. They looked around. They took notes and photographs and fingerprints and such. They questioned Seymour until he really needed a drink.

Seymour was the prime suspect for about six months, but that died out. Even those who never gave up on him quit worrying about it when Seymour, full of gin, lost control of his vehicle, slammed on the brakes as he careened off the road, and was struck violently in the back of the neck by a case of gilt-edged Bibles thrown from the backseat. It was a good shot. It snapped his neck and checked him out.

After that, there wasn’t much shaking in the Evelyn Gibbons case. There were a few who didn’t think it was Seymour at all. They pursued leads, one or two in particular.

But it resulted in nothing.

No idea who.

No idea why.

A year passed.

6

So now Harry, he’s thirteen, and he’s got the horny on bad. If they rated how horny he was on a one-to-ten scale, he’d been about an eleven, maybe a twelve. So he’s got this horny on, and he doesn’t know shit from wild honey about such, but he’s got it going and he thinks he knows something, and what he doesn’t know, Joey Barnhouse tells him. Not that all of Joey’s information is right either, but it’s interesting, all this info from shithouse walls and the mouth of Joey and the technique of artful guessing.

One day Harry tries to steal a kiss from Kayla Jones, the pretty blond who lives down the road from him, on the other side of Joey, but she whips his ass soundly. After the ass whipping, he likes her even more. Kayla, she’s some sack of dynamite. Thin as a reed, hair yellow as the burning sun at high noon, fists like lead. Pissed off because her father yells at her mother a lot, and vice versa, and though Harry doesn’t know it at the time, he’d think back later and consider maybe they had, like, some kind of link.

Joey doesn’t like her, or says he doesn’t, thinks she’s too tall and too tough. This because he’s about four feet high and one foot wide and growing like dead grass. He’s got big feet, though, says that’s a sign he’s gonna grow, says he’s got a hammer like something Thor would carry, provided he could swing it between his legs.

Harry knows better. Joey, like him, darts about in the shower at PE, keeps his back to folks when he can, his hand over his privates, quick to grab a towel.

He ain’t showing nothing. Not like William Stewart, who has a goddamn python. Flaps it about like it might strike, maybe grab someone in the locker room, squeeze him dead, drag him up a tree for later consumption.

No, Harry figures Joey isn’t any better than him in that department. But it’s cold comfort.

He’s got that on his mind. Inadequacy. Stuff that his dad at thirteen probably didn’t think about at all, or didn’t have time to, working most of his kid life away, but there it was. His concerns. The worries of Harry Wilkes in all their glories. Late-night rambles over a girlie magazine Joey had given him and he kept hidden under his mattress.

Yeah, that was him. A magazine in one hand, himself in the other, doing the dirty deed, feeling guilty because of Sunday school and church, a bewhiskered, voyeuristic, smirking, self-righteous God peeking over his shoulder while he brought the juice to freedom.

It made a fella nervous.

No doubt about it, he thought as he lay there in bed. I’ve got one of them…what do they call it…?

Oh, yeah.

A complex.

That’s what I got.

A goddamn complex.

On the morning after Harry battled his complex, he awoke with a plan in mind.

Bravery. That was the thing.

Stand up against a ghost, do it in front of a girl. A girl like Kayla. You could show you were tough enough to be the boyfriend of a girl who could beat you like a circus monkey. Going after and seeing a ghost, that had to be worth points.

That said, he wasn’t that brave. Decided he would have to go down the road and find Joey first. Might be best to have reinforcements. He figured—hoped—he could make an impression with reinforcements. He liked to think it could be done.

’Cause, you see, there was a ghost, all woo-woo and ectoplasmic. He and Joey and Kayla had heard about it from other kids, older kids in the neighborhood, and he had even heard his mother talking to Joey’s mother about it. Down the hill and in the tonk. A specter.

Poor old Evelyn Gibbons’s spirit. Trapped in the abandoned honky-tonk, roaming about nights, her head hanging to one side, draped against her shoulder, her neck red as if she were wearing a scarlet scarf.

That was the story. There were those who claimed to have seen her. Some said you could hear her scream from time to time. Joey’s older brother, Evan, who beat them all up now and then, even Kayla, though she gave a good fight, said he had heard Evelyn Gibbons scream a couple times, and both times it had pricked the hair on his neck and made him run.

Evan could have been lying.

He liked to jack with them.

But on this matter Harry chose to believe him, because it suited his plans.

He had to believe in the ghost.

Mainly, Kayla had to believe in the ghost. Down there in the tonk, floating and moaning and screaming about.

Down there. Waiting.

The night was oozy-rich with velvet darkness, moonlight and moon shade. Their shadows darted across the ground as they ran, outlined by the silver rays of the moon.

When they got down the hill, near the honky-tonk, they paused to catch their breath.

“My daddy finds out I slipped off,” Joey said, “he’s gonna give me a worse beating than I got last week.”

Joey was talking about his eye. His father had punched him in the eye. Joey often had a black eye or a fat lip or a lump on his jaw or a bump on his head.

Harry had seen Joey’s father slap him alongside the head once. For hardly nothing, leaving a drawer open, something like that.

Harry’s father said James Barnhouse was a bitter old bastard. Mad because his leg had gone bad in high school. Football injury. Too many big guys on top of his kneecap. Before that he was hot shit, gonna go pro. After that he was lucky he got a caddy job, toting rich dudes’ golf clubs, living on a little wage and a few good tips. Reading crime magazines and old sex-and-bondage magazines, beating his boys if they found them and read them. Hitting his wife once in a while just to keep his arm loose and stay in practice.

Coasting. That’s what Mr. Barnhouse was doing, Harry’s dad said. Coasting. Feeling sorry for himself.

Joey’s old man didn’t scare Joey enough, though. He was always willing to take a chance and stand a beating. But he was nervous; Harry could tell that.

“I’ll get grounded,” Kayla said. “No TV. No phone. Nothing.”

“It ain’t the same as a punch in the eye,” Joey said.

“I’d rather get hit than be grounded,” Kayla said.

“That’s the way it sounds till you get hit,” Joey said. “Till my old man hits you; then you’d rather get grounded. You can trust me on that. Harry, here, he’d just get a talking-to, wouldn’t you, Harry? No grounding. No punch in the eye.”

“My parents aren’t much into spanking,” Harry said. “And they don’t do punching. But I could get grounded.”

“Yeah,” Joey said, “like when?”

“Grounding or no grounding,” Harry said, “I don’t want to get caught.”

“Your parents don’t punish you for anything,” Joey said.

This was pretty true. Since he got bad sick as a child, since the ear infection, his mother had been as protective as a hockey goalie. Worrying about asthma, which he didn’t have, allergies, which he might have, falling down, which he did a lot—just about everything. He and his dad went outside to play ball, she insisted on knee pads under his pants, wanted him to wear a bicycle helmet.

A bicycle helmet to play ball. Now that beat all. The idea of it—him out there in knee pads and a bicycle helmet to toss the ball around with his dad—well, that just wasn’t done.

Bad form, as he heard an English actor say on TV.

He was glad Dad had talked her out of it, ’cause if he did stuff like that, might as well have had a sign painted on his back that said:
I’M THE BIGGEST PUSSY THAT EVER LIVED. PLEASE KICK AND HIT ME UNTIL MY BRAINS FALL OUT
.

They stood for a while at the base of the hill, looking at the back of the dark, abandoned honky-tonk. Across the way the drive-in screen could be seen. Kung fu personnel were leaping about the big white square, mouths wide open, yelling silence.

“We come to see a ghost or not?” Kayla said.

“Yeah, sure we did,” Harry said.

“I don’t really think there’s any ghost,” Kayla said. “My daddy says there aren’t any such things, and he’s a policeman.”

“My brother says there are,” Joey said. “A policeman, he might know handcuffs and doughnuts, but he ain’t nothin’ more than anyone else when it comes to ghosts.”

“Since when do you care what your brother says?” Kayla said. “He told us you could get a girl pregnant by putting your little finger in her butt. So what’s he know?”

“He was just kidding.”

“I don’t think so. I think he’s that dumb.”

“Maybe it was the truth,” Joey said. “You want to bend over and let me try it?”

“I do that, it won’t be your finger; I know that. Just stay your distance.”

“You two are too nasty,” Harry said.

“It isn’t me,” Kayla said. “He’s the one’s got the stupid brother.”

They went on like this for a while, then eased up to the honky-tonk on the dark side. Joey grabbed at the window and pushed. It didn’t budge.

“We got to knock it out,” Joey said.

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “That wasn’t my idea, breaking nothing.”

“You want to see a ghost or not?” Joey said. “That was your idea, man. The ghost. I’m gonna get punched, I think I ought to go all the way, see what’s inside.”

“Just don’t think we should break anything.”

And no sooner had Harry finished saying it than he looked at Kayla. She was in shadow, and he couldn’t see much of her, but he could see her shape, and in some way that was more exciting than if he could see all of her. He wanted very much for her to think he was brave. He swallowed, said, “Sure, we can do that.”

“Maybe we ought not,” Kayla said. “It’s okay, you don’t want to, Harry.”

“Nah,” Joey said, “it’s all right. He’s all right. He don’t mind. Ain’t nobody using this place nohow.”

Joey picked up a rock, snapped it against a pane of glass. The glass shattered. Joey reached through the hole, got hold of the window lock, moved it. He pushed the window up easily and climbed inside.

Kayla came next. Harry linked his fingers together so she could step into the web of his hands and mount the window frame.

“Watch for glass,” he said.

Kayla smiled at him. She was out of the deep shadow now, and he could see her smile. It made him feel ten feet tall.

She stepped into his hands and through the window. He glanced at the drive-in screen before he clambered after her. It was a bloody death scene. A kung fu master with a sharp sword was beheading a warrior woman.

Inside the shadows were thick, and so was the dust. It choked them, and Harry began to cough. Kayla pulled a small flashlight from her back pocket, clicked it on.

There were tables and a long counter and against the wall a jukebox. The smell was strange. It gathered on them and clung like a cobweb.