The Bleeding Season (40 page)

Something emerged, sliding from the opening like the granules before it, but these objects were bigger and shaped in various patterns, and rushed from the open wall like they had been piled and hastily hidden away behind it.

It was the bright white color that gave them away.

I backed away, watched the growing pile of bones accumulate as they continued to pour from the ruptured wall.  Little skulls and legs and spines and teeth and pelvises tumbling one atop another, cleaned and so white they appeared bleached, the remains of countless small animals that had been systematically killed, skinned and dismembered, their remains sealed off behind this wall.

Bile gurgled in the back of my throat.

The skeletons just kept coming, spilling onto the floor until the mountain of bones was complete.

I choked back the horror and realized I was seeing Bernard’s early work, those things he had killed before human prey became the preferred method of achieving whatever sick and demonic triumphs he had hoped to attain.

Our mutual love of animals had been a common point between Bernard and me.

More fucking lies.

The fact that he had left the brick loose in the wall could only mean that from time to time he had returned to this portion of the cellar to view his little trophies from the past.  He had come here and pulled that brick free and watched the bones fall as I had, then—what?  What did he do down here?  Plunge his hands into them like a pirate rummaging a treasure chest?  Relive the moments when he first killed these poor creatures?  Compared them to his slaughter of human beings?  Was there any difference, or was it all just death, ugly, violent and unnecessary death, killing just to kill?

Regardless, it had begun the same for Bernard as it had ended, in a cellar, alone in the dark with his deeds and demons.

I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there, but crouched down and made myself study the bones instead.  They were glossy and white.  The sonofabitch had cleaned and polished each one.

I took a closer look at the opening in the wall and noticed something protruding from it.  A piece of lightweight metal, the corner of a larger piece, was clearly visible.  I reached in and pulled it out from under what I thought were the few bones that hadn’t yet fallen out.  But the items lying across the metal sheet were not bones.  It was jewelry.

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered.

Several women’s watches, rings, necklaces and earrings rained across the pile of bones.  None of them looked to have any significant value, and one was even a medical alert bracelet.  But they were scraps, belongings of human beings who were surely as dead and gone as the animals who had once inhabited those bones.

And Bernard had killed every last fucking one of them.

The bile was back.  A shiver grabbed me by the neck and throttled me a moment, so I turned my attention to the piece of metal I had pulled free.  To my surprise it was fairly large, at least two feet in height and perhaps one foot in width.  The corners were worn with age and the entire thing was caked with dirt, but overall it was in relatively decent condition, and most of the colors were still distinguishable.  The cartoon face of a man smiled at me, waving a hand as if we were old friends.  I wiped at the dirt caked across it with my thumb and more shapes beneath began to form.  Letters.  I stood up and moved closer to one of the windows, holding it up to the slowly dying light.

It looked like something out of the 1950s.  It was a poster of sorts, with an illustration of a man waving, complete with pompadour, big bright smile and a jumpsuit reminiscent of factory workers at that time.  Across the top of the poster were the words:
Employees! Please be sure to wash your hands
!  Each corner of the discolored and aged metal had a hole where it had been fixed to a wall, and along the bottom, in small but still legible print it read:
Buchanan Textile Corporation
.

Another evil souvenir, a clue, an inside joke—what?  Had he laughed when he tore it from the wall?  Had there been a dead body within reach?

Buchanan Textile was one of the old mills that had once operated in Potter’s Cove years before.  For decades now, like the string of other dinosaurs that had once constituted the town’s industrial area, it was an old, immense, condemned and forgotten husk of a building on the edge of town.    

Now I knew where he killed them, where he bled them.

I dropped the poster, left it there with the bones and jewelry of the dead, with the memories and nightmares and secrets, and slowly made my way back across the cellar, up the stairs and out of the house.

As I slipped through the side yard gate, I froze.

Rick was across the street, watching me.

CHAPTER 29

His Jeep Cherokee was parked in front of my car.  Rick was leaned against it, arms folded.  I crossed the street, approached him.  “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was gonna ask you the same thing,” he said.

“You tailing me?”

“Yeah, since you went to see that chick in the shack in New Bedford.”

“Thought you wanted out.”

“I do.”

“Then why are you following me?”

“Somebody’s got to watch out for your stupid ass.  Besides, I can’t let you do this shit by yourself while I hang on the sidelines, ain’t my style.”  Rick’s gaze alternated between the house and me.  “What’s the matter?” he asked.  “Don’t know who to trust?”

“Do you?”

“Not anymore than you do.  But I’m hoping.”

“Well that’s not exactly the same thing, is it?”

Above us, the sky was turning bleak and gray.  Storm clouds were creeping in off the ocean, promising much needed rain and a respite from the heat wave.

Rick sighed.  “I figure it’s like shooting craps, you know?  Even if it’s not your turn to throw, you take a long hard look at the guy rolling the dice, at his history and your history with him, then you decide.  You place your bet and you watch him throw, and in a way, you’re throwing too.  You
think
 you know, you even go so far as to bet on it, but until the numbers come up all you really know for sure is that you hope you’re right.”

“Maybe it’s all in the history.”

“That and the throw.”

We were quiet a while, recognizing and remembering that history in each other’s eyes.

“We good then?” I asked.

“You tell me.”

I held my fist out to him, and after a moment he tapped it with his own.

I motioned to the house.  “Have you been in there too?”

He nodded slowly, as if not certain he should, and from the look on his face I knew he had found the same things I had.  Despite his efforts to mask it, the dread Rick was feeling was apparent.  “Me and Donny checked it out.  I was gonna tell you, man, but then when you headed here I knew you’d—”

“Tomorrow night,” I said.  “That’s when we make our move.”

“Tomorrow’s the fourth.”

“Exactly, the whole town’s going to be distracted with the fireworks, parties and all that shit.  The cops will be tied up with traffic and crowd control.  Nobody’s gonna be watching the edge of town, and that’s where we’re going.”

“OK, I’ll grab Donny and—”

“No, leave him out of it.”

“Why?”

“Let him know what we’re doing, but he stays home.  We need somebody on the outside of all this in case something goes wrong.  In case—”

“I say we stick together and—”

“
Rick
,” I said, grasping his arm, “in case we don’t come back.”

He thought about what I’d said for a while before reluctantly agreeing.  “OK.”

A moment later I said, “The old Buchanan mill.”

“You think that’s where Bernard is?”

“The evil he left behind.”

“What if it
is
 there, what do we do then?”

I looked back at the house, at the past.  “We end it.”

CHAPTER 30

The plan was set, but still twenty-four hours away.  Rick went to work and I decided to kill some time at
Harry’s
, a quiet lounge I sometimes went to a few blocks from my apartment.  I’d been drinking a lot more heavily than I normally did, but it took the edge off my constantly wired nerves, and although the results were only temporary, I needed the reprieve from anxiety liquor provided.

I recognized some regulars huddled at the bar, and since I wasn’t in the mood for conversation, I ordered a drink and sat instead at one of the tables along the opposite wall.  The bartender was a summer-hire I didn’t recognize.  He brought my drink along with a little white napkin, placed it before me and hung his hands on his fleshy waist.  “Hot enough for ya?”

I was certain if one more person asked me that I’d snap.  “Rain’s coming.”

“Yeah, any minute.  About time, huh?”  He scratched at the stubble along his chin.  “You believe the shit going on?”  He lowered his voice.  “Scary, huh?”

I nodded, sipped my whiskey.  “Sure is.”

“You hear the shit he did to them poor girls?  Christ.  Sick mental fucking bastard.”

I gave an obligatory smile and wondered if this was the way Bernard had felt when he was alive, knowing something no one else did, carrying around knowledge of things others could only speculate about and all the while pretending he was as clueless as the next guy.

“Anyway,” he said, motioning to my drink, “you need another one gimme a holler.”

I thanked him and he went back behind the bar.  I sipped my drink and tried to clear my mind, but everything was piling up, streaming through me as if a floodgate had burst.  Even stronger than what had happened in the house were the things Claudia had told me.  I could hear her voice in my head.  I could see her face, her body, her feline-like movements and dark eyes.  We could not have been more different as people, and yet, I felt an undeniable bond between us.  We were both isolated, in pain and afraid in our own ways.  Truth was, I hadn’t stopped thinking about her and all she’d said since we’d met, and wasn’t certain I ever would.

A thunderclap shook the bar.

The rain had finally arrived, but all I could think about was Claudia, and whether she’d left town yet.      

I finished my drink and signaled the bartender for another.

*   *   *

By the time I reached my car I was soaked to the bone.

The rain was falling in torrents, bringing with it the darkness of night and pouring from the heavens with a steady ferocity that made driving more of a challenge than it should have been.  The downpour had begun to cool things down almost immediately, but the heat was still high.

With three whiskey and sodas under my belt, I took the highway to New Bedford.

Visibility was low, and by the time I reached the city limits the rain had become even heavier.  Occasional forks of lightning split the black horizon, and thunder exploded every few seconds, as if in timed intervals.  No one was on the street, and even the normally busy interstate was eerily empty.

I pulled onto Milner Avenue, which was deserted as ever, and followed it to Claudia’s cottage.  The entire area was pitch black.  I remembered there had been a light bulb above the front door, but it too was dark.  Between the rain and darkness I couldn’t even make out the building until I turned toward it and crept closer with my headlights on high beam.  The dirt lot was flooded, a mass of puddles and rivers as the rain continued its assault.  I checked my watch, holding the face close to the lighted dash.  It was only a little after nine.  Claudia was a night person, so it seemed doubtful she’d be in bed at this hour.  Odds were she had already left town.

Still unsure of exactly what the hell I was doing there, I wiped some rainwater from my face and neck and sat watching the cottage, as if for some sudden revelation.

It came to me in the form of a slight flicker of light.

I sat forward and squinted through the rain and swing of the windshield wipers.  A tiny patch of light wavered in the darkness.

I dropped the headlights down to low beam and waited.  After a moment the front door opened a few inches.  I leaned out of the car, into the rain.  “Claudia?”

“Who’s there?” she called from behind the door, her voice barely audible above the storm.

“It’s Alan.”

“Who?”

I shut the car off but left the headlights on.  “Plato,” I said.  “It’s Plato.”

The door opened a bit wider, and I could see her eyes reflecting the light.  “What are you doing here?”

I stepped out of the car.  Thick raindrops pelted me like water-bullets.  “I was hoping maybe we could talk.”

“Didn’t we already do this?”  She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the headlights, so I reached in and shut them off.  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that Claudia was holding a candle.  She opened the door wider still, but I couldn’t see much of anything beyond her face.  “What do you want?” she asked.

“Getting out of the rain would be nice.”

“So go home, you got a roof there, right?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Again?”

“Yes, for Christ’s sake—obviously.”

She may have smiled a bit, but I couldn’t tell for sure.  She watched me a few seconds then motioned with her head for me to come inside.  I tramped through puddles and mud to her front door.  Rain dripped from my hair to my eyes and across my face.  My clothes were drenched and pasted to me like a second skin.  Claudia held the candle higher for a better look at me.

“I wasn’t sure I’d still find you here,” I said.

“Well I wasn’t sure I’d still be here.”  She swung the door enough for me to pass and stepped back out of the way.  Once I was through the threshold the door closed behind me and she was at my side, the candle providing enough light to reveal pieces of the front room and bits of us.  Claudia was wrapped in a large white towel and nothing else.  Her hair was nearly as wet as mine.  “What do you want?  What are you doing back here?”

I stood dripping on her floor.  Rain spattered against the windows and gushed from gutters along the roof, splashing into puddles in the mud.  “I just—I was hoping maybe we could talk for a while.”