Tony found the spot without having to search. Even with the storm and the dark, there were visible signs: the tracks on the soft shoulder of the road that the winter’s worst had failed to obliterate, scraped rubber on the asphalt that would probably be there at the turn of the century. But had there been no evidence, he still would have recognized the place where he had lost control of the car. For him, it was a haunted place, and his ghost, as well as the man’s, often walked there at night. He stopped his car, grabbed his shovel and flashlight, and climbed outside.
The rain was lighter here in the desert and his waterproof coat was warm. The daylight hours probably would have been a less morbid time to have come but he had wanted the cover of night. Besides, grave robbers should work the graveyard shift. Plus it had only been a little while ago that he had deciphered the Caretaker’s hidden messages. He hadn’t known for sure until then, or so he told himself, as he turned the flashlight on the trembling tumbleweeds; it was a poor excuse. He should have come to this grave immediately after he had left Neil’s grave. But he had been afraid. He was still afraid.
Slamming the car door shut, taking a firm hold of the shovel, he pressed forward, his tennis shoes sinking in the listless mud, the damp but still sharp shrubs clawing at his pants. A year ago, he had counted fifty paces that they had carried the man into the field, and tonight he counted them again. When he reached the magic number, he found himself standing in a small rectangular clearing of uneven footing. The soil here did not look like it had been left a year to settle, and that reassured him as much as it oppressed him. Finding out what a corpse looked like after a lengthy decay would be about as pleasant as confirming his hunch. Either way, he was going to be sick.
Confirm what? He gave you his name!
He set the flashlight down and thrust the shovel into the ground, throwing the earth aside. With the rain and the sandy mixture, it should have been easy going, but each descending inch wore on him. Soon he was sweating and had to remove his jacket, the wind and rain pressing through his shirt. When they’d buried the man, they’d had little to work with and hadn’t dug deep; each stab of his shovel carried with it the fear he’d cleave into something dead. His thoughts were a whirlwind of wordless dark images: vultures circling above parched bones, men in tuxedos holding stakes and bibles in black and white cemeteries, and, worst of all, scenes from his life before the man and the Caretaker—disturbing because the scenes seemed the most unreal.
He had dug himself waist deep when he stopped to stretch his tiring muscles. Was it possible he had the wrong spot? He had been drunk that night and the terrain here was fairly undistinguished and what did tumbleweeds do if not tumble all over the place? There was no way the man could be under his feet, not this far down.
Had he not a minute later found the crucifix that Neil had draped around the man’s neck in the mud under his shoes, he might have talked himself into digging a few more holes. But with the tiny gold cross in his hand, still bright in the flashlight beam, he knew his trip had been in vain. The man was not here. What was left of his burned skeleton was in a casket six feet under in Rose Memorial Lawn.
Tony rested his head in his arms at the edge of the empty grave. He was tempted to replace that which had been taken and lie down in the hole and cover himself. He might have wept had he not known the worst was yet to come.
He did not remember walking back to the car but a while later found himself exhausted, soaked and muddy, sitting behind the steering wheel. The faded yellow piece of newspaper that had brought him to this forsaken place and that should have spared him the journey lay on the passenger seat. He had only studied the first of the Caretaker’s column two ads, but that had been sufficient.
Fran: syrilorryeunahokijnieaesknaesedrl
supwehycoeiojlldoilpulonitcwohig
Using the given key, starting with the first letter and including every third letter, the message told Fran to streak naked through school at lunch. As the Caretaker’s notes had always been terse, it should have been obvious he was not one to waste words or letters. But surprisingly, none of the group had thought to study the extra letters. What had brought Tony to re-examine the ad had been a desperation to do anything but return here to where they had buried the man. That desperation had been growing all along but it had peaked sharply during his walk back to the cemetery chapel with Alison.
“I was just afraid that she would feel uncomfortable losing a family heirloom.”
“I don’t think Neil’s mother even knew he’d had it.”
“Oh, for some reason, I assumed it had been in the family.”
He had known for a fact Neil’s mother had not known about the emerald ring because before going to the funeral, he had asked Mrs. Hurly if it would be OK if he gave it to Alison. Also, at Alison’s remark, he had specifically remembered that Neil had nodded during their meeting at Fran’s house when Alison had asked if the ring had been in his family.
“How did you know?”
“The green matches your eyes. It’s beautiful.”
Had Neil lied, or had he, in a deranged way, in a manner they were all familiar with from the chain letter, told the truth? Standing on the cemetery road with Alison, surrounded by rows of tombstones, he had realized that only someone who cared deeply for the man, whose soul wept for the man, who actually in some incomprehensible way identified with the man, could refer to the man as family. And on the coattails of the realization he had remembered that the man had been wearing an expensive ring, and that Neil had been the last to touch him when he had folded the guy’s hands over his heart.
The hourglass runs low.
Neil had been dying. Neil was dying.
In more ways than one, Neil had warned them that the Caretaker was right in front of them. Starting backward, using every third letter, Fran’s ad had read:
Go To Police Please Tony Or I Will Die Yours Neil Hurly
There was pain. At first it was everywhere, heavy and unbearable, and she struggled to return to unconsciousness. But her aching body dragged her awake, taking back its many parts, each with its own special hurt: her head throbbing, her arm burning, her back cramping. She opened her eyes reluctantly, feeling the sting of a grating, white glare.
She was in a small square unfurnished room with people that looked familiar, sitting on the floor beside an unshaded lamp that seemed to be emitting an irritating radiation. Her hands and feet felt stuck together and, looking down, she noticed without much comprehension that metal bands joined her ankles and wrists together. Turning her head, a sharp pain in her neck made her cry softly. The people, also arranged on the floor, looked her way, their forms blurring and overlapping before settling down. The face closest to her belonged to someone she remembered as Joan.
“What are you doing here?” Alison whispered, her throat bone dry. Trying to swallow, she began to cough, which made her head want to explode. It felt as if someone had beaten her repeatedly with a club. Then she remembered that it had been a brick. The rest came back in a frightful rush. She closed her eyes.
Neil, it was Neil. Of all people. He was dead.
“Keeping you company,” Joan said. “Wake up, Ali, naptime’s over.”
“Shh.” That was Brenda. “She doesn’t look so good.”
“That’s because she didn’t have a chance to put on her makeup,” Kipp remarked. Alison ventured another peek. Except for Neil and Tony, the whole gang was present, each bound as she was, each with two sets of interlocking handcuffs. Both Brenda and Joan looked miserable, and Fran, looking thinner than she had ever seen her, appeared to have been crying. Kipp, on the other hand, wearing bright green pajamas with an embroidered four leaf clover on the shirt pocket, seemed perfectly at ease.
“My God,” Alison breathed.
Kipp smiled. “I told you she’d think that she’d died and gone to heaven.” He spoke to her. “Do you feel well enough to start worrying again?”
“How’s your head, Ali?” Brenda asked, concerned. Alison tried to touch it to be sure it was all in one piece, but her hands stayed stuck down by her calves. Flexing her jaw, she felt dried blood along her right ear.
“Wonderful. How long have I been here and where is here?”
“Almost two hours,” Kipp said. “You’re in a house down the street from your own. Would you like to hear our stories? We’re tired of telling them to each other.”
She reclosed her eyes. If she remained perfectly still, it wasn’t so bad. “The highlights,” she said.
“You go first, Fran,” Kipp said, playing the MC.
“He’s going to kill us!” Fran cried. “He’s going to take us out to where we hit the man and dump us on the road and run us over.”
“Now, now,” Kipp scolded patiently. “Don’t ruin the story for her. Start with how you were kidnapped.” Fran tried to speak but only ended up blubbering. Her outburst didn’t initially faze Alison. That the Caretaker wanted to kill them sounded like old news. But as the information sunk past the layers of bodily misery, she decided that whatever they had to tell her had already been ruined.
“Fran’s story isn’t really very interesting,” Kipp picked up. “She was in Bakersfield at her grandmother’s house when her sweetheart Caretaker dropped by for a friendly visit. She was so flattered that when he asked her for a walk and offered her a spiked carbonated beverage that tasted like a codeine float, she didn’t think twice. At least I had an excuse, I was drunk when I downed the drugs Neil must have slipped into my beer. Naturally, this is only Fran’s version of the story. Personally, I feel Neil simply kissed her and she swooned at his feet.”
“I did not kiss him!” Fran said, indignantly.
“But did he kiss you?” Kipp asked. “All those hours you were unconscious in that van he stole, he might have done all kinds of nasty things to you.”
“Neil would never have . . . ” Fran began, before realizing that defending Neil’s personal integrity at this point would be a losing proposition.
“Kipp,” Alison groaned, “just the facts, please.”
“But aren’t you happy to see that I’m still alive?” Kipp asked. “Joan wasn’t, but Brenda gave me a big kiss.”
“I’ll give you a kiss later, if we don’t all end up getting killed.”
“Actually,” Kipp said, thinking, “none of our stories is very interesting. I went to sleep one night in my bedroom and woke up the next morning in this bedroom. Fran and I have been keeping each other company ever since. She’s not the girl I thought she was. Did you know she once painted a nude poster of Brad Pitt?”
“Kipp!” Fran whined.
“Neil’s been feeding us,” Kipp went on without missing a beat. “For lunch this afternoon, we had apples, and for dinner last night, we had apples. He’s not big on condemned prisoners enjoying delicious final meals. Last week, though, he brought us a bunch of bananas. He even lets us go to the bathroom whenever we want.”
“Neil flagged us down a few hours ago about a block from your house,” Brenda said. “Joan was driving. She almost ran him over. Man, we were spooked. I practically peed my pants.”
“You did pee your pants,” Joan growled. “All over my upholstery. But I wasn’t that scared, not till he pulled out that damn gun.”
“He has a gun?” Alison asked, her alertness growing with each revelation. She did not have to ask why Joan had used the same line as the Caretaker. When she thought about it, Joan was always talking that way. Neil could have swiped any of their remarks for his chain letter.
“Yes,” Kipp said. “Didn’t he show you the nice black hole at the end of it? Tell us how he captured you. We heard him play the music and people tape. I bet you thought you were coming to a party.”
“I thought I was coming to a party,” she muttered.
“We heard a shot,” Brenda said. “What happened?”
“I missed, twice. It’s a long story.” It struck her then that her room, minus the furniture, was identical to this one. A pair of binoculars lay discarded beneath the cardboard-covered windows, and even before the arrival of the first letter, she had felt as if someone had been watching her. “How did you survive losing all that blood?” she asked Kipp.
“Brenda told me about that,” Kipp said. “What a dramatic exit! A trail of blood reaching to the street! You got to grant Neil one thing, he’s got style. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t lose any blood, not as far as I know.”
“Interesting,” Alison said. The police had verified that the blood had definitely been human. With his illness, it was relatively easy to understand how Neil had obtained the drugs. And he had probably picked these cuffs up at a swapmeet or an army surplus store. But where did he get the blood? From his own veins? Siphoning it off over a period of time? If that were so, it provided a unique insight into his madness. He would torture himself as readily as he would torture them. “Has Neil talked to you much?” she asked.
“Brenda has explained his cancer,” Kipp said, catching her drift. “Watching him these last couple of weeks, Fran and I had pretty much figured on something like that. He doesn’t complain but that guy is really hurting. I think it’s obvious that the disease is to blame, the malignancy has gone to his brain. I don’t hold any of this against him. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, the poor guy.”
She nodded, though that sounded a bit pat to her: tumor in the head and the sick boy goes on a rampage. It also sounded self-serving, The Caretaker—she couldn’t quite interchange Neil’s name with the villain’s—had repeatedly spoken of their evil. Was it possible he had a—granted perverse, but nevertheless—consistent motivation for what he was doing? If that were so, and she could understand what it was, perhaps she could get through to him. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Downstairs,” Fran said. “He’s got a terrible cough. I think he’s dying.”
“Pray that he hurries,” Brenda said.
“What a terrible thing to say!” Fran said.
“You’re the one who’s worried about getting squashed out on that desert road,” Brenda said.
“Well, so are you!” Fran shot back.
“My point exactly,” Brenda said. “He’s nuts. He’s . . . ”
“Would you two please shut up,” Alison said, and it seemed when they had first received the chain letter, Brenda and Fran had been arguing and she had had a headache. “Kipp, has Neil spoken to you using the Caretaker’s style of language?”
“Not exactly, but he has said things like having to ‘balance the scales,’ ‘purge our filth,’ and ‘pay for our crime.’ ”
“Have you tried to talk sense into him?”
“Endlessly. And he sits and listens to every word we have to say. Neil always was a good listener. But he doesn’t let us go, doesn’t even argue with us, just brings us fresh bags of apples.” Kipp stopped suddenly. “But maybe he will listen to you. He’s brought you up a few times, not in any specific context, just muttered your name now and then.”
“Favorably or negatively?”
“Both ways, I would say.”
“Do you really think that he intends to kill us?” she asked.
Kipp hesitated. “I’m afraid so. I think he’s just been waiting to get us all together. The guy’s gone.”
“But could he kill us?”
“Alison, anybody who could pull off what he has could probably do anything he damn well pleases.”
“But we’re not all together,” she said. “Where’s Tony?”
“Dead,” a sad and worn voice coughed at the door. To say that Neil did not look well would have been the same as addressing such a remark to a week-old corpse. His yellowish flesh hung from his face like a faded and wrinkled oversized wrapper. His back was hunched, and it was obvious that his right leg was painful. The once irresistible green of his eyes was a pitiful blur, and the left shoulder of his dirty leather jacket was torn and bloodied. Back at her house, when Alison had thought she was giving Joan her due, he must have shoved open her bedroom door and then jumped back, but not quite quick enough. That she had wrestled him and come out the loser was a testament to how driven he must be. An ugly black gun protruded from his belt.
Tony, she wailed inside. No matter how badly she had been flattened tonight, each time, her strength had returned. But if Tony was gone, she was gone. Mist covered her eyes, and she heard crying, not Fran’s, but Joan’s.
Neil limped into the room. In one hand he carried a hypodermic needle, in the other, a medicine bottle filled with a colorless solution. Obviously, he intended to sedate them before dragging them down to the van and driving them out to the desert road. He knelt unsteadily by her side and, it would have been funny in another time and place, pulled a small bottle of rubbing alcohol and several balls of cotton from his coat pocket. His breathing was agonizing. He refused to look her in the face.
“Neil,” she whispered. “Did you really kill Tony?”
“He killed himself,” he said quietly, arranging the cotton balls in a neat row, as a nurse might have done.
“Is he really dead?” she pleaded. Neil nodded, his eyes down. A pain, bright like a sun rising on a world burned to ruin, overshadowed the injuries in her body. All that kept her from giving up completely was that Neil might be lying. “You would not,” she stammered, “have killed your friend.”
He didn’t respond, just kept rearranging his cotton balls. She leaned toward him. “Dammit, you answer me! Tony was your best friend!”
Endless misery sagged his miserable face. He sat back and stared at her. “He killed himself,” he repeated.
He was speaking figuratively, she realized, and it gave her cause to hope. “Neil,” she said patiently, “when Tony and I were at your funeral—when we thought you were dead—he told me how you felt about me. He said that I was important to you. Well, you are important to me, too.”
He glanced at the covered window. In the lower right hand corner was a bare spot, probably through which he had watched her. “I wasn’t,” he said. “Only the man cared for me.”
“The man? Neil, the man was a stranger.”
“He was somebody. And he was wronged, and he never complained. How could he? He was never given the chance.” Neil lowered his head. “He would have been my friend.”
The emotion in his voice made her next step uncertain. Even as she sought to reach his old self, her eyes strayed to the revolver in his belt. Her hands and feet were bound, but her fingers were free and the weapon was not far. “I am your friend,” she said carefully. “We are all your friends. Hurting us will not bring back the man.”
“That’s what I told him,” Kipp remarked cheerfully.
“We don’t want to bring him back, I just want all of us to be with him.” Neil nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “You’re very pretty, Alison, and you see, he’s very lonely.”
She thought she saw perfectly. She shifted position slightly, angling on a clean approach to the gun. The maneuver made her next words sound hypocritical to her own ears. “He’s not lonely. It’s you, Neil, who’s lonely. Let us go. We’ll stay with you.”
“You would?” he asked innocently, mildly surprised.
“Yes. Don’t be afraid. We’ll help you with the pain.”
A shudder ran through his body. “The pain,” he whispered dreamily. “You don’t know this pain.” His eyes narrowed. “You never wanted to know me.”
“But I did,” she said, striving for conviction. This was not going to work. She was having to use half truths and he was, even in his deranged state, extraordinarily sensitive to deceit. “I thought about you a lot. Just the other day I was telling Tony that . . . ”
“Tony!” he yelled scornfully. “Tony knew how I felt about you! But he didn’t care. He took what he wanted. He took the man’s life. He took you. He took and took and gave nothing back. He wouldn’t even go to the police.” A spasm seemed to grip his stomach and he bent over in pain. She squirmed closer. The gun, the gun . . . if she could just get her hand on it, this would all be over.
“He was afraid, Neil. He was like you. He was like me. You can understand that.”
He shook his head, momentarily closing his eyes. “But I don’t understand,” he mumbled. The gun handle was maybe twenty inches from her fingers and the interlocked handcuffs had about ten inches of play in them. If she could keep him talking . . .
Good God, be good to me this one time.
Unfortunately, just then, Neil sat back and picked up the hypodermic. “We need to return to where all this started to understand, to the road,” he said, regaining his confidence, sticking the bottle with the needle, the clear liquid filling the syringe. He pulled up her pants leg and picked up a cotton ball.
“But you promised to tell me your dream,” she said quickly, playing a desperate card. A drop oozed at the tip of the needle, catching the light of the naked bulb, glistening like a deadly diamond. It was very possible be would simply finish them here and now with an overdose. Yet Neil hesitated, and the play went on.
“When?”
“When we were standing on Kipp’s street in the middle of the night. Before Tony came over, we were alone, and I told you about my nightmares and how they were frightening me. You tried to cheer me up. You started to tell me about a wonderful dream full of colors and music and singing.”
“What a night that must have been.” Kipp sighed.
“So?” Neil said. He lowered the needle.
“I asked you if I was in it,” she said.
Neil winced. “No.”
“Yes! I started to ask. Remember, just when Tony interrupted us? I wanted to know if I was that important to you that you would have dreamed about me.” She swiveled her legs around, disguising the overt movement with an expression of pure sincerity. Neil was listening and she prayed that Kipp kept his mouth shut. At Neil’s next solid blank spell, she was going for the gun.
“I dreamed about a lot of things,” he admitted. “You were one of them. But I can’t see that mattering to you.”
She held her tongue. In spite of his words, she could see that he wanted to believe her. His madness and sickness aside, he was just like everyone else: He wanted to know his love had not been wasted on someone who couldn’t have cared less. He ran an unsteady hand through his tangled hair, fidgeting. “You were always too busy,” he said, raising his voice. “I tried to talk to you. I called you up. But you always had things you had to do. That was OK, I could understand that. I could wait. I could have waited a long time. But then . . . I saw I couldn’t wait forever; not even until the summer when you would have had more time . . . I saw I was going to end up like the man.”
“How was it different in your dreams?” And surely her soul would be forever cursed, for as she asked, she leaned forward, gesturing that he should whisper his answer in her ear, stopping at nothing to get next to the hard black handle. Neil was too much of a child to succeed as a murderer. He did exactly what she wanted.
“I was never sick in my dreams,” he began. “We were . . . ”
I’m listening.
She grabbed the pistol. Next to the shotgun, it was a cinch to handle, and she had her finger on the trigger and the barrel point between his eyes before he could even blink. “Sorry,” she whispered.
He absorbed the deception silently, sitting back, his sore leg jerking once then going as still as the rest of him. Before, he had been ashamed and had had trouble looking her in the eye. Now the roles were reversed. He said nothing, waiting.
“I want the key to these handcuffs,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
“That’s all you want,” he echoed.
“Don’t shoot him!” Fran cried.
“Neil,” she said firmly, “I’ve shot at you twice tonight. I won’t miss a third time.” She shook the gun. “Give me the key!”
“No.”
“Don’t be a fool!”
He raised the needle. He was not afraid of her. In her rush to get the gun, she had never stopped to consider that she might have to use it. He squeezed out what bubbles may have been in the syringe, a couple of drops of the drug dribbling onto the floor. “I don’t have it,” he said.
“Get it!”
“Listen to me, you’re going to be as bad off as the man if you don’t get it!”
Neil nodded. “That’s what all this has been about.” He unscrewed the cap of the alcohol jar and dabbed one of the cotton balls.
“Kipp?” she moaned.
“Don’t give him the gun, whatever you do,” Kipp said in his most helpful manner. Unreality rolled forth unchecked. Using the moistened white ball, Neil sterilized a spot on her calf. He was asking to be killed, she told herself. She could close her eyes, pull the trigger and never see the mess.
He’s going to die, anyway. It would be quick.
“Neil?” she pleaded, trembling.
He shook his head. “I’m not listening. Everything you say is a lie. You don’t care about me.” Like a nurse administering an injection, he pinched her flesh.
“I swear!” she cried. “I’ll kill you!”
“I know you will,” he said sadly, pausing one last time to look her in the face. “You’re like Tony, just like him. Since last summer, he’s been killing me.”
She cocked the hammer. He had terminal cancer. His mother had already buried him. Tears had been cried and respects had been paid. She would just be doing what was already practically done.
You were his love.
But staring into his eyes, it seemed impossible that she could snuff out what dim light remained there. She had brought herself to this terrible decision as surely as he had.
“Hello, Alison, this is Neil. Would you like to go to a movie with me this Friday?” “How sweet! I would but I’m busy Friday.” “Would Saturday be better?” “It would be better but not good enough. Sorry, Neil.” “That’s OK.”
“I’ll give you the gun,” she whispered, the narcotic inches from her bloodstream: “If that will prove to you that I do care.”
“Nooo!!!” Kipp, Brenda, and Joan howled.
Neil considered for a moment. He nodded.
She gave him the gun. He took it and set it down behind him. “Thank you, Alison,” he said, and taking the needle, he stabbed it in her leg.
· · ·
The rain had begun to ease and the freeway was empty and fast. Tony remembered the night of the accident when he’d been driving and had thought that, although he didn’t know where he was going, he was making good time. He was beginning to feel that way now. The proper one to see at this point was Neil’s mother, it was the obvious thing to do, and yet, with each passing mile, his doubts grew. Telling Mrs. Hurly her son was still alive would also mean she would have to be told about the Caretaker’s mad plot. How could he possibly make up a story to cover the facts? On the other hand, how could she possibly accept the truth? The only part she probably would believe, or that would at least give her cause to wonder, was that her son was somewhere in hiding, still hurting. Neil would die on her twice and whatever followed could only tarnish her memories of her son.
Should I do the right thing for the wrong reasons or should I do the wrong thing for no clear reason at all?
About the same time his indecision was reaching a climax, he was closing on a fork in the freeway. Alison’s house was over twenty miles out of his way, but just the thought of her got him thinking of all the times Neil had talked about how beautiful she was. Neil had once said he could stare at her all day and not get tired.
“That would be my idea of heaven, Tony.”
Where does a guy go after his own funeral if not to heaven?
Tony swerved onto the north running interstate, picking up speed. He hadn’t spoken to Alison all day.
A half-hour later he was cruising up Alison’s submerged street; this new tract still had a lesson or two to learn about flood control. He noticed lights on in a house a couple of hundred yards before Alison’s, but only in passing. He assumed another family had finally moved in.
Her place was dark as he parked across the street. Her parents were out of town, he knew, but it was close to midnight, and if he went knocking on her door, he would scare her to death. Then again, it might not be a bad idea to wake her and take her to Brenda’s or even to his own house. His folks were gone, too, but that didn’t mean his motivation was in any way remotely connected with sex. They could sleep together in the same room for protection, maybe even in the same bed, and not actually . . .
Oh, Neil, no.
The front door was lying wide open. He was out of his car in a moment, running to the porch. The glass panel next to the door was cracked. Dark stains tipped the jagged glass—blood. Steeling himself as best he could, he went inside. For now, he would do what was necessary. Later, he told himself, he would feel what he had to feel.
None of the lights would go on. He did not need them to know the house was empty. It was not the absence of noise that told him, it was the feel of the place—like its life had been yanked out of it. He went to the back door, in spite of his resolve, his heart was breaking at the splintered shambles that he found. Forcing himself forward, he stepped outside to the circuit breakers, finding each one snapped down. He restored the power and returned inside, heading upstairs to Alison’s bedroom. There wasn’t a step that wasn’t smeared with blood.
His nerve almost deserted him when he saw the hole blasted in her door. The fact that the shot had been fired from the inside out, and that the hall was not soaked with blood, was all that kept him together. He turned on her nightstand lamp and sat on her bed, seeing a picture of himself on her desk. He felt as if he was back in the man’s grave, only now all his friends were with him, and they were unable to get out of the hole, and they were asking him again and again why he had brought them to such a terrible place.
Minutes, like those ticked off by watches with dead batteries, dragged by. Somewhere amid his grief he took out his phone. He was going to call the police. He would tell them everything. Then he would lie down on her bed and try to pretend she was there beside him.
But his phone was dead, and suddenly, it didn’t matter. He was remembering the night in his car with Alison not fifty yards from where he now sat. He had kissed her and he had wanted to continue kissing her. But then he had thought of Neil and had felt guilty. Only he just hadn’t started to think of him, he had actually felt as if Neil was in his head, like that crazy way he had occasionally felt on the field during a game when he had just known that there was this one fat slob in the audience who was praying to God and Moses that that hotshot Tony Hunt would suddenly get an acute attack of arthritis and maybe have his right arm fall off. It had been like Neil had been near at hand, watching him defile his goddess.
Tony slipped the phone back into his pocket and went to the window. That house with the light on, that was the house that had drawn his attention the night of their date. He had driven by the place and not even slowed down. Fool!
He ran down the stairs and out the door, but not so fast did he go that he missed the soggy sock lying in the road halfway between the two houses. It was blue, Alison’s favorite color, and the evidence was piling up quickly. There was a shotgun resting in the grass near the house porch. He cracked it open, sniffed the chamber. Both barrels had recently been fired.
He did not knock. The front door was unlocked. Except for a few lamps, he found the living room and den empty, but rounding into the kitchen, he stumbled across a makeshift bed: a thin piece of foam rubber, a tattered blanket, and a slipless pillow covered with long brown hairs. Beside the bed were Neil’s phone and a ring of miniature keys, which he pocketed. There were also a bottle of cough medicine and two prescription pill containers. The latter reminded him of many things, not the least of which was that, of all the people he had ever known, he had loved Neil the most.
His next move was to go upstairs, and he did so cautiously, hearing voices before he reached the top step. They were faint, muffled by a closed door, but he recognized one as belonging to Alison, and his relief broke over him like a warm sweet wave. Almost, he rushed to be with her; the sound of Neil’s voice stopped him cold. He tiptoed to the door and peered through the crack. The whole group was assembled. Fran appeared well if a bit skinny and Kipp’s big nose had never looked so good. Only Alison had been banged up—her left arm looked like it had been put through a meat grinder—but she was alive and that was what mattered. Neil was not a murderer after all and Tony was thankful. Yet Neil had a gun in his belt—a revolver Tony had more than a nodding acquaintance with—and it might be a mistake to trust Neil while overlooking the Caretaker. Who were these two people? How were they connected?
“I wasn’t,” Neil told Alison. “Only the man cared for me.”
“The man? Neil, the man was a stranger.”
“He was somebody. And he was wronged, and he never complained. How could he? He was never given the chance. He would have been my friend.”
“I am your friend. We are all your friends. Hurting us will not bring back the man.”
Listening, watching, two things struck Tony. First, Alison was as much intent on reaching the gun as she was on reaching Neil. The movement of her eyes betrayed her. Second, in spite of her itchy fingers, she was doing a master psychologist’s job of forcing Neil to confront the truth, and she was doing it quickly. As the conversation progressed, Neil answered less and less with incoherent remarks. In fact, he started to get painfully clear.
“Tony! Tony knew how I felt about you!”
He took and took and he gave nothing back.
Tony could not have defended himself. It was all true. He had always been nice to Neil. Yet, at the same time, in a very quiet way, he had taken advantage of him. Neil had not always acted like a saint. He could get angry like anybody. But no matter what the situation, whether he was laughing or yelling, he had always been more concerned about how he was affecting Tony Hunt than he had been worried about how he might be hurting Neil Hurly. While Tony Hunt had usually been pleased as pie to congratulate himself on how neat a guy he must be to bring out this devotion in Neil Hurly. His friend’s affection had just been another thing to boost his self-image. Nevertheless, he felt there was something else that was necessary to explain the craziness, something that Neil was not saying. Neil obviously blamed him for the death of the man and for stealing Alison, but these were effects, not causes. He was sure of this for the simple reason that Neil had never blamed him for anything before.
“. . . I wanted to know if I was that important to you that you would have dreamed about me.”
“I dreamed about a lot of things. You were one of them. But I can’t see that mattering to you.”
Alison was so blatantly baiting him that Tony had trouble believing Neil wasn’t aware of the deception. Could it be that he wanted her to kill him? Or was it that the gun was not what it appeared?
“You don’t think it would scare the Caretaker empty?”
“Not if he knew it was empty.”
“. . . But then . . . I saw I couldn’t wait forever, not even until the summer when you would have had more time . . . I saw I was going to end up like the man.”
“How was it different in your dreams?”
“I was never sick in my dreams. We were . . . ”
Oh, God, she had the gun. That Alison sure had nerve. Now all he had to do was fling open the door and play the big hero. He stayed where he was. If he interrupted this fine edge Alison had led Neil to, this place where Neil wandered lost between pain and sanity, truth and insanity, he might never be able to take Neil back there, and Neil might never open up again, and he might die misunderstood. Tony knew it was ludicrous to risk what was at stake—he was banking on an unloaded gun—for an insight that might never be found. Nevertheless, he did not interfere.
A moment later, he was given Neil’s why. It cost him.
“Give me the key!”
“No.”
“Don’t be a fool!”
You can’t threaten him, Ali; he has nothing to lose.
Tony dropped to his knees, digging holes in his palms with his clenched fingers. The cold draft from the open front door felt like Death’s breath on the back of his neck.
“I’m not listening. Everything you say is a lie. You don’t care about me.”
“I swear! I’ll kill you!”
“I know you will. You’re like Tony, just like him. Since last summer, he’s been killing me.”
Divine vengeance . . . all along, he’s been telling me.
At last, he thought he understood. He did not fool himself that he was a psychiatrist, but he could see a pattern. Neil had sympathized with and related to the man to an unheard of extent. Much of the Caretaker’s strange language in the chain letter probably came from that unnatural identification. Plus Alison’s rejection of him in favor of the person who had killed the man couldn’t have helped matters. Yet it appeared that the main cause of the whole mess was very simple. Neil thought that he had become sick because he had done a serious wrong, that the cancer was his just punishment. As the disease had progressed and the pain had intensified, he had probably begun to believe that if they confessed, particularly his best friend who had after all been the main instigator of the crime, he would be healed. Of course the confession would have to be to the police instead of to a priest, and it would have to be sincere. That is why the Caretaker hadn’t just told them to turn themselves in. Repeatedly, Neil had warned them that the chain letter’s only hold on them was their guilty conscience. Maybe the accident had caused the disease. Who knew how much deep guilt could contribute to an illness?
So caught up was Tony in his analysis that he did not immediately respond to Alison’s surrender. But when Neil set aside the gun and reached for the hypodermic, he decided enough was enough. He was a bit late with the decision. He kicked open the door just as the needle plunged into Alison’s calf.
Neil did not react like a sick man. One glance at his unexpected company and he was on his feet, backing into the corner, dragging Alison by the throat. With her two sets of handcuffs still in place, her arms stretched halfway to her feet, she was a clumsy burden. The syringe swung haphazardly out of her leg, the majority of its dosage unadministered. The gun lay forgotten on the floor. Neil had no need for it. Tony was surprised at the switchblade that suddenly materialized in Neil’s hand. There was no question that the razor tip was sharp.
“Hello, Neil,” he said, keeping his distance. Neil had the knife pressed against Alison’s neck. Her eyes were wide, but she was keeping very still.
“Hello,” Neil answered, uncertain.
“How ya doin’, Tony?” Kipp said. “I bet you’re glad to see me.”
Tony ventured a step forward, two steps. Neil poked Alison slightly and she stifled a cry. He halted. “I read your secret message in the paper,” he said. “Can we talk about it?”
“We have talked,” Neil said. “You love to talk.”
The room was claustrophobic, the walls seeming to press in from all sides. The tension was so thick it was like a mountainous weight, smothering all external sounds. He could hear his heartbeat, the anxious breathing of his friends, nothing else. The rest of the world could have ceased to exist. “I’m willing to go to the police,” he said honestly. “Let Alison go.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“It’s not too late. We’re still friends. No matter how you feel, you’re still one of us.”
“I am not one of you!” Neil shouted, his knife hand trembling. A pinprick of red appeared under Alison’s chin, a thin streak of blood staining the collar of her sweater. She remained silent. “I would never have done what you did. The man . . . ”
“Forget the man,” Tony interrupted, afraid Neil would slip into the Caretaker’s prattle. He noticed Kipp’s fingers creeping toward the plug that juiced the room’s only lamp and stopped him with a slashing hand signal. He took another step forward. “Let’s talk about you, Neil, and about me. This is between us. You don’t want to hurt Alison.”
“I want to hurt you all!” Neil cried. “You hurt me! All of you with your M.I.T. scholarships, your great paintings, your star performances, your big trophies! I wanted all of those things! And I would have gotten them for myself! But none of you would give me the chance!” His eyes flashed on Alison, who had her own eyes half closed. “You had to kill me!”
The condemnation hit Tony like scalding steam. The switchblade was sharp, and an ounce of pressure could spill Alison’s life over the floor. Nothing was more important than to insure her safety. All the things Neil was talking about were already lost. Still, Tony strove inside for the perfect response that would address both the past and the present. It never came; instead, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Fran. Pale and frantic, she looked an unlikely hero, but the last couple of months had taught him well how deceptive appearances could be. He turned away from Neil and Alison and came and knelt by her side, pulling out the key chain he had taken from beside Neil’s mattress downstairs. The first key he tried worked and Fran’s cuffs snapped open.
“Go get Ali,” he said gently, giving her the keys. “Don’t be afraid.”
“He’s . . . he’s sick?” she asked, unsure.
He nodded. “He’s been hurt. He’s been used. But never by you. He won’t hurt you.”
He helped her up—she was stiff from her captivity—and she composed herself admirably and crept toward Neil and Alison. Neil’s anger changed to confusion.
“Stay back!” he said.
“She just wants Alison,” Tony called.
Neil shook his head desperately. “I won’t let go! I can’t let go!”
“Then hold me instead,” Fran said in her usual meek voice. Kipp went to laugh but wisely cut it off. The offer was not funny; it was genuine, and it touched Neil like nothing else they had said. Neil could hear things most people couldn’t; he was practically a mind reader. Fran had always cared for him. She was not trying to manipulate him. He could see that. And he seemed to see something else. A glazed film lifted from his eyes. Fran held out her hand. As if in a trance, he took it and squeezed her fingers around Alison’s hand, nodding in resignation. He lowered the knife and, using the keys, Fran released Alison’s cuffs. But then neither of the girls moved, waiting for Neil to decide. He did so a moment later, when he pushed them aside and leaned alone against the wall, barely able to remain upright, the knife still in his hand.
His madness departed like a foul spirit, leaving an aching void. Another evil took its place.
Suicide.
“Leave,” he whispered.
Tony moved closer. “I’m staying with you.”
“For how long?” he asked, unbearable torment twisting his mouth. “Till the end?” Tears gushed over his wasted cheeks, his bloodshot eyes falling on the knife as it slowly bent toward his heart. “This is the end.”
“But you did nothing wrong last summer,” Tony pleaded, approaching to within an arm’s reach, feeling his own heart being cut in two. “And you haven’t actually hurt any of the girls, or Kipp, or me. How can you punish yourself for a crime you didn’t commit?”
Neil’s ravished body quivered. He looked to each of them, into them, and love, the old Neil, glimmered. But shame claimed it too soon, and the tip of the blade came to rest on the soft flesh beneath his sunken ribs. Tony went to grab the knife, but Neil raised his other hand, stopping him before he could try. “I’ve done enough,” he said.
Tony shook his head, beginning to choke up. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Always, Neil, always, I thought you were the best of us. Don’t end it this way, please?”
Neil leaned his head back, his eyes falling shut, lifetimes of care etched in his face. “The doctor didn’t say the word,” he whispered, “but I knew what it was, I had read about it. When I went to bed at night, when it was dark, I tried not to think about it. Then I began to get sore, everything hurt, and I got scared. They gave me so many drugs, I was sick all the time. I kept wondering and worrying and I tried, but this thing got in my head and I couldn’t get rid of it. I don’t know where it came from. It was like a voice, saying this is true and this is a lie. It wouldn’t shut up! I had to listen, and I did listen, and then . . . I did all this.” He winced as though he had been struck and his grip on the knife tightened. “I’m sorry, Tony, I just can’t take it.”
Then I will take it from you, Tony thought. He could do that for his friend. He could kill him, and stop the pain. Fortunately, it was an offer he wasn’t given a chance to make.
“Neil,” Alison said softly from the corner. Neil’s exhausted eyes opened slowly and followed her as she ignored the knife and came close enough to touch him. “I gave you back the gun because I really did want to be in your dreams.” She brushed a strand of hair from his face. “Live a while longer, for me?”
Her concern, which hurt him, and saved him, was the final stroke. The switchblade dropped from his hand onto the floor as he sagged against the wall, the last of his strength departing. “Take me away, Tony,” he moaned, sobs convulsing his body. Tony caught him as he fell, and cradled him in his arms.
“I’ll take care of him,” he told the others, and carried him out of the room.