DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Part 42

(John Schaefer. He is thirty years old and somewhat r.e.t.a.r.ded. He lured me here with the promise of drugs.) Lured? That isn't a word she'd use. The combination of beer and pills is doing funny things to her head.

Doesn't matter who he is, because the guy's gone. That usually means he'sstiffing you, ripping you off. She doesn't worry too much. After all, this is the guy's house. He wouldn't rip her off and leave her here, huh?

She shakes her head and feels a pain that seems more than simple hangover.

She- (Betty Dnpree. I am twenty-one years old, and 1 ran away from home when I was thirteen.) -Betty steps out of the sagging bed. Her feet sink into gray pile carpet. The carpet's filled with dust, making her feet feel dirty. She's naked, and the cold makes her s.h.i.+ver. The second story of this ancient farmhouse isn't heated.

Wind creaks wood in the walls and rattles windows in their frames. She s.h.i.+vers again.

All Johnny's money came from his disability checks, so they gave Johnny a public defender. The defender's name was Larry. Larry said he was Johnny's friend.

Johnny told Larry about Mosh.

Larry brought in a man with a computer. The man made faces appear on the computer screen. Johnny told the man about Mosh's wild black hair. About Mosh's gray-shot beard. About the earring Mosh wore, the n.a.z.i cross in black, red, and white enamel. About how Mosh's eyes would go cold, and he would sit there for hours staring at Momma's TV, even though it didn't work no more.

He told them about the three scars on Mosh's cheek, and his broken nose, and the cobra tattoo on his arm that snaked around until you could just see the tail peeking from the collar of a grease-stained T-s.h.i.+rt.

In the end, the image burning on the monitor's screen was Mosh. It was so much Mosh that it frightened Johnny.

Despite the pictures, no one found Mosh Frazier.

They found a lot of bikers in Johnny's county, but none was Mosh. None said they knew Mosh. Most said, like the police, Mosh didn't exist. Larry printed up the computer picture of Mosh and gave it to people, newspeople, mostly.

Once Johnny was scared when the picture showed up on the TV. But then the picture was gone and the news talked about Johnny. Johnny listened because he'd never heard anyone important talk about him before.

The news told him that he was about to have a "competency hearing."

Johnny didn't know what that was, but if that hearing said so, then Johnny'd go to court. Johnny didn't want to go to court. If they found him guilty, he'd face a "mandatory life sentence," and a "mandatory empathy treatment," for every dead body they'd found.

Empathy treatments sounded scary.

Eventually Johnny had the competency hearing. They decided that he could stand trial for the murder of the fifteen women found buried on his land.

Betty searches the bedroom for her clothes. She doesn't bother turning on thelight. Her eyes are adjusted to the dimness. She moves stacks of yellowing newsprint, freeing clouds of dust to dance in the moonlight.

She sneezes.

She finds her bra and panties hiding by the end table, half-buried in beer cans. Once she does, memory comes like a voice in her ear- (My clothes were found downstairs.) -telling her that the rest of her clothes are downstairs. She can't remember much else about last night. Can't remember much of anything.

This is a really bad hangover.

To her disgust, she steps on a used condom from last night. She kicks it away, and it sticks to the wall. She turns away, feeling a burst of self-loathing.

This place makes her feel dirty. The money doesn't matter at the moment, and neither does the vial of meth that had been promised to her.

She just wants to feel clean.

The guy- (John Schaefer. This is his mother's house. His mother died ten years ago.) -Johnny isn't going to mind if she uses his shower.

That's what she'll do. She makes the decision, and has the odd sensation that someone is deciding things for her.

She shrugs away the thought.

She'll take the shower, get what she's owed if she can get it, and leave.

She'll hitch back to Rochester if she has to, but she doesn't want to stay in this house any longer than necessary. If she stays, she feels that the house's rot will eat into her.

Betty walks to the bedroom door. Her feet leave the carpet and are chilled by unheated hardwood. Her left foot, the one that had stepped on the condom, sticks to the floor. She steps over beer cans, food wrappers, and male clothing.

Mason jars of debris fill the top of the bureau next to the door, and she nearly knocks one over.

Her hand catches it before she realizes she'd brushed against it. The move feels as if it was programmed. Betty is frozen by a momentary sense of predestination, a sense she is walking inevitably toward an evil fate.

Betty forces the feeling back. Such an admission might break her, like this mason jar almost broke upon the cold hardwood floor.

She stares involuntarily into the jar. Bolts and washers inside the gla.s.s are fused into a solid ma.s.s of rust. Within the ma.s.s of fused metal crawl c.o.c.kroaches.

Dozens of c.o.c.kroaches.

She gasps and her hand lets go of the jar. It falls and she watches, frozen- (I am frightened. This house frightens me. This house is supposed to frighten me.) -frozen by fear. She doesn't know why she is scared by the roaches.The jar hits the ground and explodes into fragments.

Washers and bolts are strewn across the floor. Amid the shrapnel, roaches scurry from the site like an insect cl.u.s.ter bomb. Gla.s.s fragments bite her s.h.i.+ns, her calves, her feet. The sound echoes through her head as if her skull is exploding, and those are fragments of her brain scurrying to the shadow-cloaked walls.

Johnny isn't going to like that.

(John Schaefer is dangerous.) "s.h.i.+t," she whispers to the last visible roach, and she opens the door without moving her feet. Bolts and gla.s.s are caught by the bottom edge of the door. They sc.r.a.pe across the floor like fingernails on a coffin lid.

"Forget Johnny," she whispers, "after a shower I am out of here."

(John Schaefer is dangerous.) Larry told Johnny that the only chance he had was to plead "not guilty by reason of insanity."

"But it was Mosh who did it," Johnny said, on the verge of tears.

"I know, Johnny," Larry said, patting Johnny's hand. "But no one has ever seen this Mosh Frazier. There's no evidence he ever existed."

"I saw him. He was my friend."

Larry nodded. "I know, Johnny. I know that's what you believe."

"Where is everybody?" Betty whispers.

There had been other people at the party. She knows it.

(Tanya Gideon. She's only sixteen but she's gone on so many hard trips that she looks thirty. She was the third one he-j "Tanya?" she calls.

No one answers.

She inches sideways through a hallway too narrow because of sagging bookcases. The cases hold tattered cardboard boxes and old cracked-plastic radios with missing k.n.o.bs. There's an old headlight, radio tubes thirty years beyond use, c.o.ke bottles filled with cigarette ash, and children's books dog-eared, water-stained, and smelling of mildew.

She sucks in her tummy and clutches an arm across her b.o.o.bs to avoid brus.h.i.+ng any of the filthy-looking artifacts. She wonders if Johnny might be a little nuts. Before, he seemed a bit dim and helpless. She and Tanya had taken pity on him when- (John Schaefer picked us up at a highway rest stop outside of Rochester.

The same highway where he found the thirteen other-) -he picked them up.

They picked them up. Not just Johnny.

Betty wonders why she is only thinking of Johnny. Johnny's friend is much more frightening. Johnny's friend is much more dangerous.

At the end of the hall are the stairs, tall, narrow, dark as ink. She looksdown and feels the dark reaching for her, sucking her in. Silent whispers urge her on, and she starts down, not wanting to, powerless to stop.

The shower- (The indoor bathroom was added long after the house was built. When John Schaefer's father lived, there was no indoor water. The shower is downstairs.) -the shower is down there.

Her clothes are down there.

Tanya is down there.

They are- (he is) -down there.

Betty descends the stairs.

During the trial Larry said that Mosh Frazier did exist. Mosh existed as part of Johnny's broken personality. If Johnny had taken part in the deaths of fifteen women, it was because of that other part of himself. The part that was Mosh Frazier. It was Mosh Frazier that was doing it.

They shouldn't punish Johnny. They should help him. Help him get well.

Johnny went along because Larry said it was the best way, the only way, out of this mess.

But it hurt Johnny's mind to think that way. Mosh was a loud fat bull of a man. Mosh was smarter than Johnny. Mosh gave him beers and said, "You ain't bad for a r.e.t.a.r.d." Mosh knew how to find drugs, and money, and women who would do anything for either.

None of that's me, Johnny thought, and I never did nothing to n.o.body.

Johnny couldn't believe that he was Mosh.

Betty descends through the dark.

The stairs creak under her feet. The only other sounds are the winter wind blowing outside and soft dripping from a faucet somewhere.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

She can't see. Dark wipes everything with a black hand. She tries to remember how many steps there are. Her memory is much too fuzzed by drugs and her hangover.

And more than drugs, and more than hangover.

Her mouth tastes like paste. Her head feels like a blood-filled blister throbbing in time to her pulse. Her skin is cold and sticky. And all she can smell is beer, cigarette smoke, and her own rank odor.

"h.e.l.lo?" she calls again, halfway down the blind stairs.

No answer but the wind and a soft leak from somewhere.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Betty's heart accelerates. A shadowy sense of deja vu clouds the aching fog in her skull. This has happened before- (I am Betty Dupree. I am John Schaefer's fourth victim.) -happened before. But this is wrong. This is happening wrong.She shakes the thought from her head. She whispers, "Forget the shower. I find my clothes, and I'm gone."

Her breath burns in her nose and her throat. She feels her pulse in her neck, her temples, her brain. She wishes she'd had the sense to turn on the lights when she'd been at the head of the stairs.

Still, against her will, pushed by something she doesn't understand, she continues downward.

In the end, the jury didn't believe Larry.

Johnny, who could barely read the charges against him, was convicted for all fifteen murders. He was sentenced to fifteen mandatory life sentences. He was also sentenced to fifteen mandatory empathy treatments.

In the short history of the treatments, no one had ever been sentenced to so many.

But New York law demanded one treatment for each of the murdered women.

But none of this meant as much to Johnny as the realization that he was Mosh Frazier. He had to be Mosh Frazier. The police couldn't find Mosh.

Everyone said that Johnny was Mosh. Even the newsman on the TV said that Johnny was Mosh, or that Johnny had invented Mosh.

It had to be true.

So Johnny was taken to the state prison, to wait. Johnny waited as correctional officers programmed the first empathy treatment from expert testimony and the forensic record. All Johnny knew was that it was a long wait.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Betty stumbles at the bottom of the dark stairs. As she pitches forward, she grabs for support and finds none.

Her right hand hits the floor first, lands in something wet, and slides out from under her. She slams into the hardwood floor. The floor beneath her is hot, sticky, and wet. Even though she's dizzy to the point of pa.s.sing out or throwing up, she pushes herself up immediately.

Her head swims back and forth as her feet slip on the wet floor. Her stomach tries to push its way up through her throat. She realizes what might be here.

(Tanya Gideon.) Despite her panic, despite the razor of fear ripping at her heart, she fumbles for the lightbulb chain. She knows now that the leak is much closer than she'd thought at first.

Drip.

Closer than the bathroom.

Drip.

Closer than the kitchen.

Drip.Right next to her.

Her hand finds the chain and pulls it before she is ready.

Betty is naked in the front hall of the house. In the living room, sits Tanya Gideon, sixteen-year-old that looks like thirty.

Half of Tanya's neck is gone.

Tanya's head bobs at an obscene angle as the rocking chair silently tilts back and forth.