The Bleeding Season (31 page)

“I’m just trying to find a girl.”

“Why you want to go messing around with the dark?”  

“Maybe the dark’s messing around with me,” I said.

“Could be.”  She nodded and gave me a look somewhere between accommodating and challenging.  “You want to see, then I’ll show you.”  She closed her eyes, drew several deep breaths then consulted the cards.  After a moment she said, “There’s trouble all around you.”

“Go on.”

She shook her head and the flesh on her neck swayed as she reached again for the deck.  “Usually when I do this it’s clearer but this don’t…It don’t really make sense, I…”  She counted off a series of cards from the deck then selected one and pulled it free.  Carefully, as if afraid the table might collapse beneath it, she very slowly laid the card next to the one in the center.  “There’s something here, I—Jesus, Lord—I ain’t never seen anything like it before.  Not like this, not like…”  For the first time her face registered more fear and discomfort than confusion.  “I seen my share of negative energy and dark spirits before but not—not like this—never like this.  It’s so strong.  This ain’t just dark, it’s—it’s
unclean
—evil.”  Despite the heat in the room Mama shivered and began to rub her bare arms with her hands.  “And there’s something else, something… something about the eyes.
Occhi violenti
.”

“Say again?”

“
Occhi violenti
,” she said, her face a mask of sorrow and burgeoning terror.  “Violent eyes.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Death,” she said in a loud whisper.  “Sacrilege—it’s
sacrilege
, you can’t—you can’t stop it now, it’s all around you.”

“I don’t—”

“Whole lot of death.”  She shivered again, her doughy face contorting into one pained and fearful expression after another.  “Jesus—sweet—Sweet Jesus, this…”

I felt my earlier anger returning.  I’d had my fill of shadows and smoke.  What had begun as a routine she’d probably been through thousands of times before was now transformed into something more, something real, and something she had clearly not expected.

“It’s like a current it’s so—so strong, but…I never seen nothing like this.  It’s
cold
.”  Her hands were shaking with such ferocity she was having difficulty holding the cards.  Even as I struggled with the stagnant and engulfing heat in the room, I noticed goose pimples rising along her arms.  She was rocked by another shiver.  The deck fell from her hands and cards scattered across the table.  Again, she shook her head, as if in answer to voices only she could hear.  Her face twisted into a grimace and her eyes narrowed as she stared at the clutter of playing cards.  “Jesus, God,” she whispered, her hands hovering just above the table.  “Jesus…Jesus, God.”

Donald dropped his cigarette to the floor, stepped on it.  “This is nonsense,” he said with little conviction.  “Absolute—”

Mama’s massive body began to tremble, her lips moving rapidly as if in silent prayer.  She seemed to be looking beyond the cards to some deeper horror that had opened a portal known only to her.  “No, you—you need to go.”

“What do you see?” I asked.

She blinked her eyes rapidly.  “You don’t understand, you—you have to go.”    

I stood up, leaned on the table.  “
What
 do you see?”

“Get out of here,” she growled, her clarity of mind returning.  “Get out, I—”

“What!”  I slammed the table with my hand.  “Tell me, goddamn it!”

Mama’s body continued to shake.  She held her hands up as if to ward me off.  “I don’t go there, I don’t go there, Christ Jesus, I don’t go there, I—”

“The natives are getting restless,” Rick said, motioning to the bar.  “Let’s move.”

I felt someone grab my arm, realized it was Donald.  I pulled free and stepped closer to Mama.  “Where don’t you go, Mama?  Where don’t you go?”

Her eyes turned wet, and as she held her hands out for me I saw that her fingertips were somehow raw and bloody about the nails and cuticles.  They looked as if she’d been clawing at cement for hours.

I remembered the dream with Bernard, and how his hands had looked much the same.

“Good Lord,” Donald said softly.

A chill scampered up the back of my neck.  “Where, Mama?” I pressed.  “Where don’t you go?”

She began to choke.  “There’s—there’s so much blood, it—
rivers
 of it.”

“Move!” Rick said suddenly.  He stood in the doorway, partially blocking my view of the bar, but even through the smoke and haze I could see movement out there.  The volume of Mama’s voice had signaled something was wrong, and they were coming.

“Mama,
where
?”

A quiet whimper escaped her.  “The dark.”  She looked at her bloody hands and began to weep, though she seemed far off now, unaware.  “The dark beneath the dirt.  You don’t never come back from that dark.  You don’t—you don’t know what’s down there, it—it ain’t like us.  It wants you—it—wants to bring you down there with it, under the dirt.”  Her lips moved slowly, slightly out of sync with the sound of her voice.  “It’s got a taste for you.  It’s been waiting for you down in that dark under the dirt.  You don’t never come back from that dark.  Never.”

“Why Mama?  Tell me why.”

“‘Cause you got to be dead to be there.”

Before I knew it Donald and Rick were hustling me to the doorway.

“You got to be dead,” Mama’s voice cried behind us.  “You got to be dead to be there.”

Tooley and the tall man ran by us into the backroom, hesitating a moment like they weren’t sure if they should stop us or attend to their friend first.  They opted for the latter and we kept moving, Rick in the lead, Donald between us, and me pulling up the rear.

The bartender scurried out from behind the bar and stepped in front of us, blocking the door.  He held a baseball bat, cocked it back in a threatening posture.  “What the fuck did you do to her?”

Rick pivoted and threw two rapid kicks, the first into the bartender’s midsection and the second into his throat.  The man vaulted back and crashed into the bar, scattering two stools.  As the bat left his hands it rattled against the floor and rolled toward the corner.      

We were nearly to the door when I heard screaming and the sound of heavy footfalls behind me.  I turned in time to see the tattooed man closing on me, Tooley lumbering along a few paces back.

I might have been able to make it through the exit had I kept running, but probably not.  Either way, I was not destined to find out, because I came to an abrupt halt, and as the tall man tried to stop he practically ran right by me.  I swung at him as hard as I could while he was still off balance.  My fist connected with the side of his face, and as the impact reverberated through my hand and up into my arm and shoulder, he groggily staggered back and fell to the floor.

In the blur of confusion Tooley rushed past, and seconds later, behind me I heard scrambling and heavy, urgent breathing, some shouting—Donald’s voice—then a grunt.  I turned toward the scuffle.  Donald swung awkwardly at the man but missed, and Tooley knocked him aside with two hard shots to the stomach and head.   As Donald fell, Rick came to his aid and fired a three-punch combination that dropped the man.

I moved to help him when someone hit me from behind.  The blow landed between my shoulder blades with tremendous force, and I staggered forward.  I spun in time to see that the tattooed man had regained his feet and was closing on me quickly.  Struggling to maintain my balance, I threw a punch but he ducked away in time, raised a fist and hammered it across the side of my head.

I knew he had connected directly with my temple because my equilibrium was suddenly off, and a tingling feeling spread across my eyes and jaw—like a yawn that wouldn’t stop.  My vision blurred, cleared then blurred again before I realized I was toppling to the floor face-first.  Before my chin slammed the dirty tiles, I broke my fall with my hands and did my best to roll through it.

I scrambled to my feet, head still spinning a bit.  The man laughed like a moron, and there was something so inhuman, so sick in his drug-glazed eyes, I hesitated for just a second.  From the look on his face, I knew he had sensed my indecision and interpreted it as weakness.  As he charged me again, I timed a punch, braced myself then threw it.

He ran right into my fist.  His head snapped back and he stumbled.  There was no blood, just a puzzled expression, as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.  While he wobbled about on shaky legs, I stepped in to finish him, but Donald came out of nowhere and hit him with a wild, arcing punch.

This time he went down.  I rushed forward, straddled him and hit him again and again.  He covered the back of his head with his hands and started to crawl away, mumbling something unintelligible as he went, but I kept punching him until he was no longer moving.

I fell off of him, my hands slick with blood, most of it his.  He was moaning and just barely conscious, his arms still folded across his head in a feeble attempt to protect it.  On the floor next to him, near his face, a trickling stream of blood was beginning to pool.

Still a bit disoriented, I watched Donald crouch and pick up the baseball bat the bartender had dropped.  Over his shoulder, I saw Tooley and Rick circling each other like a pair of jungle cats.  Due to the blood both were sporting, I knew neither had gained a clear advantage since Rick’s initial knockdown.

Tooley lunged and Rick countered with a combination that put him down a second time.  He coughed, spat blood then slowly began to rise, but Rick pounced again, raining fists down on him in rapid combinations that made sickening sounds as they connected with skin and bone.  Bloodied about the eyes, nose and mouth, the man fell again.

Rick stood at the ready, chest heaving.  “Stay down, asshole.”

The man grunted and began to rise yet again.

I scrambled over to Donald and pulled the bat from his hands just as Tooley let out a defiant growl and stormed Rick in a frenzy of rage.  “Rick!”

He looked to me as I tossed the bat into the air.  In one fluid motion he caught it and swung it down across the man’s shins.

Tooley howled and crashed to the floor.  Moaning, he rolled back and forth clutching his legs, knees pulled in to his chest.

Rick and I stood staring at each other a moment, out of breath, dazed and oddly satisfied, if not thoroughly surprised.

Donald had sunk to one knee, perhaps due to the blows he had sustained earlier.  I reached down and helped him to his feet.  “You all right?”

“Oh, spectacular,” he groaned.  

Rick threw the bat aside and wiped a slow trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.  “Let’s get the hell out of here before any more of these cretins show up.”            

We turned our backs on the fallen bodies, the blood and the muffled cries still coming from the backroom, and together, walked out of the bar.      

Still riding an adrenaline rush, I stepped into the street.  No remnants of daylight remained.  A hot summer day had become a hot summer evening, and everything was heightened, sharpened and more vivid than normal.

It seemed apt that night had fallen.  We’d glimpsed the wisdom of the spirits in this old city—however briefly—and after all that had happened, after all that was breathing down our necks, for now, we were better suited to the dark.

CHAPTER 23

It was still early summer.  We were a few weeks away from tourist season, so the landscape had not yet changed.  Though a handful of early bird summer residents had arrived and opened nearby cottages, most of Donald’s neighborhood remained in the tail end of its hibernation.  We’d cleaned ourselves up, nursed our minor wounds then taken the short walk through a small section of woods behind Donald’s cottage to a bluff overlooking the ocean.  The moon had turned burgundy, and was so full and bright that it didn’t look real in the otherwise clear sky.  Despite its brilliance the powerful pulse of strobe lights swirling from the public beach below overshadowed it, even at this distance.

The three of us stood in the sand and beginnings of tall grass along the dunes, watching the official vehicles that were still parked at haphazard angles along the beach.  A tent had been constructed where the body itself had been discovered, and several temporary stadium-like lights had been set up, giving the small area an oddly surreal look, an artificial glowing oasis surrounded by darkness.  Though it was several hundred yards away, we could make out policemen and various authorities still scouring and investigating the area.  Beyond the barriers they had put up along the parking lot, a small crowd had gathered to watch the goings on.  Since the body had been found hours before and was long gone from the scene, I wondered what the townsfolk were hoping to see.  I watched the red and blue beams pan and play about Rick and Donald’s faces, and wondered the same thing about us.

“I wonder if he came here,” Donald said.  “The night he put that body there.  I wonder if when he was done, after he’d buried that poor woman’s remains down there, beneath the sand, I wonder if he came here to see me.  I wonder if he came and sat in my home and talked about nothing at all the way Bernard was so good at doing, the way he could do for hours.  I wonder if he laughed to himself about it later.  I wonder if he found it amusing.”

Rick was holding a six-pack of beer held together by plastic rings.  He pulled one can free and ran it against his forehead.  “Lot of FBI guys down there.  They must be turning over every grain of sand hoping to find something.  The local politicians were already bitching on the news about how this is going to hurt the tourist season.  You believe that shit?  Even the poor folks who can’t afford a real Cape Cod vacation won’t be showing up here if they think a serial killer’s on the loose.  Hell, they can go further toward or up Cape and be safe.”

“Or so it would seem.”  The lights painted Donald’s face.  He looked so strange with a bit of dried blood along his slightly swollen lip.  It didn’t suit him, the face of a fighter.  “They can bring in the CIA and it won’t matter.  They’re hunting a ghost.”