The Bleeding Season (23 page)

“I wish I could,” I said.

“Leave it alone.  Walk away.”

“I can’t.  It’s not that easy.  And I think you know that, don’t you, Julie.”

“People think I’m fucked up,” she said.  “Fucked in the head—and I am, I admit it.  Since that day I’ve had problems, but—but I’m not crazy.  I wasn’t then and I’m not now.  I’m
not
.”

“Right about now a lot of people think I’m crazy too.”  I managed a halfhearted smile.  “Whatever you’re willing to tell me, I’m prepared to believe.”

She sipped her tea, smoked her cigarette; said nothing.

“Julie,” I pushed, “who was with Bernard in the woods that day?”    

“There weren’t any other
people
 with him—not really,” she said blankly.  “But he wasn’t alone.”

CHAPTER 16

With Julie’s words still hanging in the air, I tried to convince myself that her statement had been made metaphorically.  But even then I knew it hadn’t been.  I pushed the fear back like the bile that it was, did my best to keep it under control and contained beneath the surface.

“When it was over, he left me out in the woods,” she said, splitting the silence.  “Like I told you, I had a concussion from hitting my head and I was dirty, had leaves and twigs and things in my hair and all over my clothes from being pushed down into the earth.  It was like for a few seconds he had contemplated killing me, suffocating me there in the clearing, forcing me to breathe in all that loose dirt.  I realized later that it was probably just his way of letting me know he
could
 have killed me had he really wanted to.  In some ways it would’ve been more merciful if he had.”

As Bernard’s friend, as an intruder in this shattered woman’s life, I couldn’t help but somehow feel a sense of responsibility, a need to assume the fault in his absence and to apologize for what he’d done, for what he’d become.  “I’m sorry,” I said pathetically.

“I told my parents I tripped while I was on my run,” she said, her mind still far away and trapped in that horrible forest.  “I told them I hit my head and knocked myself out and came to a while later.  I never talked about the rest of it.  I couldn’t, I mean—even if I had they all would’ve thought I was crazy.  Most ended up thinking so anyway.”

“I’m not passing judgment with this question,” I said carefully, “but why didn’t you tell, Julie?  Why did you let him get away with doing that to you?”

She let out a burst of pessimistic laughter that was brief and violent and possessed the cadence of rapid automatic gunfire.  “My parents kept taking me to doctors.  They were sure my bump on the head had caused the changes in me.  The nightmares I had, the screaming in the middle of the night, the inability to focus or concentrate anymore because it always felt like I was being watched, the depression and the suicide attempt not even a year later.  That little trick landed me in a special hospital in Boston.”  She sat back a bit in her chair and assumed a more defiant posture.  “And that was my
first
 stop.  Been in and out of nuthouses for years.  Ever been on the inside of an asylum, Alan?”

I shook my head in the negative.

“Well, let me tell you, there are some crazy motherfuckers in those places.  Full throttle, out of control nuts—I’m talking
crazy
.  Only I wasn’t one of them.  And you know what?  I wasn’t the only one.  There were other people in there just like me, people who knew, people who’d seen.  Only they talked about it.  They talked about it until their medications stopped them from talking or thinking or being anything with an intellect higher than that of a fucking coffee table.  But I knew the truth about things too, and all I wanted was to die, to snuff myself out and hopefully put an end to the chaos.  Of course no one could understand why.  Just months before I’d been this perfect little Barbie doll with perfect grades and perfect friends and everyone loved me and just knew I was going to go to college and meet the perfect Ken-doll man and have the perfect Ken and Barbie life.  I was Julie-fucking-Henderson.  How could Julie go crazy?”  Tears again filled her eyes, but she somehow managed to prevent them from spilling free.  “And I wanted to tell them, believe me I did.  I wanted to tell my friends, I wanted to tell those doctors and nurses and the other lost souls in that awful place, I wanted to tell my parents and anyone else who’d listen that I wasn’t crazy, that there was an evil in this world I’d never known existed, but I’d seen it, I’d witnessed it, experienced it firsthand.  It was real.  That’s what that day in the woods taught me.  That evil isn’t just a concept or a theory.  It’s real.  It destroyed my life.  Destroyed it.  You live in Potter’s Cove; I’m sure you heard all the whispering and talk about how I’d gone off the deep-end.  Everyone knows everyone else’s business there.  Can’t fart in that town without someone hearing it.”

“If it’ll make you feel any better,” I said, “I had no idea until your brother told me you’d had some problems.  I always just assumed you’d gone on to college and moved off somewhere else.”

She gauged the candor of my reply before she spoke again.  “Will you answer a question
I
 have?”

“Of course.”

“Do you expect me to believe that you were his friend—his close friend—and never suspected, never knew what Bernard had done?”

“I had suspicions, but—no—I never knew for sure that he’d done this to you.”

“You never knew what he really was?”  She slowly shook her head, as if she pitied me.  “Jesus, you really don’t.”

I leaned forward over the table and slowly brought myself closer to her in as non-threatening a manner as I could.  “I need your help.  Please tell me what you know.”

Without breaking eye contact, Julie reached for her cigarettes.  “Careful, I just might.”

“What really happened in those woods that day?” I asked.  “What was it you saw?”

“The dark,” she said softly.  “I saw the dark.”

I waited for her to continue.  When she didn’t, I grabbed her lighter from the table, produced a flame and held it out toward the cigarette resting between her fingers.  The ignition sound, or perhaps the flame itself, caught her attention and broke the trance that had fallen over her, and with a startled jump, she rolled the cigarette into the corner of her mouth and leaned into the flame.  I placed the lighter back on the table and watched as she ran a hand through her hair, stopping to rub the skin along her hairline before continuing on toward the back of her head.  She’d left the cigarette in her mouth, and it dangled there like a tiny smoking limb.

I wondered if she always smoked so heavily.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your life become one continuous nightmare?  I guess we all do on one level or another, huh?”  She raised her head, plucked the cigarette free after a deep drag and exhaled a cloud at me.  “But how do you describe evil, what it looks like, what it feels like?  How do you describe darkness, how do you describe oxygen?  I felt…I felt things watching us, watching me.”  Her eyes narrowed.  “And they were pleased.”

I wanted out of that apartment more than ever, but gripped the edge of the table and held myself in place.  What if Julie Henderson really was insane?  What if we both were?

“He had a stick,” she continued, staring at the wall over my shoulder now.  “He was saying things but I couldn’t make out the words.  They were strange words that I later learned were an obscure, ancient form of Latin.  But he spoke them quickly and under his breath, and I was dazed and sound seemed to filter in and out—everything came and went like that while I was on the ground—sight, sound, and sensation—all of it.  But he had this stick and he made drawings in the dirt next to me while he chanted those strange words and phrases.  Urgent drawings in the dirt, he kept scratching them into the ground like he only had a certain amount of time, like he had to do this fast or it might not work.  I couldn’t see what they were because I couldn’t lift my head, I—I tried to lift my head but I couldn’t, all I could do was let my eyes fall in that direction.  All I could make out were glimpses but I started to feel…I felt something welling up all around us, and then inside me like—like the way a yawn starts in the back of your head and then that tingling slowly spreads out across your body, you—you know how I mean?  It was like that sort of sensation, only instead of feeling good, instead of feeling like a release or relaxing, it was just the opposite.  It gave me that feeling in the pit of my stomach, deep in my gut, the kind like you get right before you’re sick or…or have you ever heard the brakes on a car screech at night?  In the dark, you lay there listening for that awful sound of impact, and when it comes, you get that twisting feeling in your stomach—it was like that.  Only worse.  Much worse.

“Then I heard voices,” she continued.  “His at first, when he got on top of me.  His breath, I—I could feel his breath on me and it made me want to vomit, I wanted him off of me and away from me but I couldn’t stop him.  He kept saying these odd things and his voice was distorted, like in a dream, only…only then there were other voices too.  Voices of torment, of people screaming and wailing in agony and all of it swirling around us like a whirlwind, it…” A tremor coursed through her and she took another greedy drag on the cigarette.  “And then I saw things no human being should ever have to see.  Things I can never erase from my mind.  Things beyond comprehension, beyond description.”

Like I had seen when the woman had grabbed my arm in the abandoned factory, I thought, the visions of depravity and gore that had surged through me, as if summoned directly from Hell then injected into me through her.

“I can tell from your expression that you think I’m out of my mind,” she said.

“No, Julie, I don’t.”  One of her hands was resting on the table.  I reached out tentatively and let my hand touch hers.  “I don’t think that at all.”

She slowly slid her hand free from beneath mine but seemed to understand it had only been an attempt at comforting her and nothing more.  “You don’t just go on with your life after something like that.  You don’t just pick up and move forward as if nothing ever happened, as if you never saw or experienced those things.  Oh, you try, but it doesn’t work, the denial doesn’t take.  It lingers like a foul odor.  It clings to you the way perspiration clings to your skin.  And slowly, eventually, like the slow drip of water torture, it drives you insane.”

I believed her, fearful that in looking at her I was glimpsing my own future.

“One of the strangest things about everything that happened that day,” she mumbled, that distant look returned to her face, “was that in a way, he seemed afraid too, kind of like he wasn’t sure of it yet, of what he had, of what he could do.  It was like he had this genie in a bottle, and he’d let him loose, only he didn’t have total control, he didn’t have complete command yet.”

“So he was experimenting with—what—Satanism, or something?”

“Or something,” she said.  “It’s not as simplistic as people think.”

“
What
 isn’t?”

“Good, evil—all of it.”  Julie pushed her chair away from the table, stood up and motioned first to the books between us and then to the crucifixes hanging in the windows.  “Those are my reality, my beliefs, so they protect me.  I’ve read and studied as much as I can since that day and all I know is that there’s a force in this world we can’t just dismiss as a bad dream.  It crosses all boundaries: age, race, religion, gender, culture—all of it.  But there’s also a force of positive energy—of good—you just have to seek it out.  Evil is always there, like a loyal companion; see what I mean?  It’s always available to us, always there, waiting, tempting.  The only thing evil requires is consent.  You don’t have to sacrifice, you don’t have to deprive yourself of anything, you just do; you just take it.  Good’s there too, but you have to search a little harder, dig a little deeper to find it.  Good requires that you look beyond yourself, it
does
 require sacrifice, thought, awareness of something greater, better than all of us.”  She wandered to the sink, fired her cigarette into the basin then ran the water.  The butt extinguished, she turned and leaned back against the counter, facing me again with those sad, telling eyes.  “And hanging on to it is a whole other story.”

“Did you ever see him again?” I asked.

“Every day.  Every night.  Every time I closed my eyes.  Every time my mind wandered, it led me back to him.  To that frail little boy, to those woods.”  She shook her head and seemed to snap out of the trancelike fog that had enveloped her earlier.  “It was only a matter of time before he took it to the next level.  I knew what he did to me wouldn’t be enough later on, the more consumed he became.  Before me, there were probably other steps—maybe he tortured animals or molested children in the neighborhood or God knows what else before he was able to do what he did to me.  From there, killing was the next step.  I knew sooner or later the bodies would start piling up, and the more I researched, the more I read and tried to learn about all that Bernard was and what he was still becoming and would eventually become, the more it all made sense.  Read the papers, watch the news—there’s a commonality in the crimes happening—and it’s existed since the dawn of humanity.  Do you think that’s an accident?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But even if it isn’t…isn’t it just human beings being…”

“Themselves?”

“Yes.”

“You think I’m one of those do-gooders who believes no one is responsible for the shit they do?  Do I strike you as that sort, Alan?  You think I went through the torture of my life—and continue to—because I believe everyone’s innocent, everyone’s just a puppet to some grand evil no one can help themselves against?  The Devil made me do it, right?  The
Devil
 made me do it.”

I stood up, wiped a single trickle of sweat from my eyebrow with the back of my hand and asked, “Then what are you saying?”

“If you take the Devil’s hand, it’s still your fault, it’s still your choice, and you’re still to blame for whatever happens, for whatever you do, for whatever that evil causes in you.”  Julie moved closer, as if she wanted to be certain I heard what she was going to say next.  “But just because you’re to blame doesn’t mean the Devil was never there.”