Victor spent the night in the recliner in Stanley’s living room. As tired as he was when he finally went to sleep, he couldn't make himself climb into that miserable troll Stanley's crisply-made bed. He stayed up late that night watching videos on social media and found the return to his old routine comforting. It made him forget about his predicament. He may even have laughed a couple of times at ridiculous fail videos.
God, he loved watching those.
He hadn’t been able to completely forget about his predicament though. He understood he was going to have to do something better with Stanley's body. He didn't know the man well enough to know what kind of network of friends he had, but he assumed he might have some buddies somewhere. Maybe some old Navy guys like him. Maybe some other old dudes in jumpsuits who stopped by to suck down a Budweiser in a lawn chair. That seemed like a Stanley kind of thing, sitting on the porch with another old curmudgeon, cursing what their country had become.
If he did indeed have a circle of friends, they might get concerned when they couldn't find him and couldn’t reach him by phone. From his experience with his own mother he was aware that old people liked to check on each other just to make sure their friends were still alive.
In some ways it didn't do him any good to get rid of Stanley's body. If they even suspected the guy was missing, Victor would be the only suspect. If they did find the body, there was enough evidence there to nail him for it. Just before their death match, Victor had been covered in the hair Stanley had shorn from his head. There were probably thousands of hair fibers on the frozen old man.
Should he try to burn the body?
Even if he was successful in getting rid of any trace evidence, the police still knew Stanley had been the one who bailed Victor out of jail. They would come looking for him, and when they couldn't find him, he would become their primary suspect in the murder.
He needed to get out of this house. He needed to get out of this town. It was the only way to buy himself some time. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror at one point last night and was shocked by what he looked like with no hair. He was nearly unrecognizable from the person he had been. Anyone who knew him before, in his old pre-murderer life, would immediately describe him by his long bushy hair and beard. They would mention the streaks of color that made him stand out from the crowd.
His clothes had dried and he’d never been so happy to get dressed in his life. Being naked in Stanley's house had been very uncomfortable. Getting his own clothes back on was almost a step toward normalcy in his currently upside-down life.
With his own clothes and shoes back on, Victor decided to start at one end of the house and work his way to the other. He had no idea where he was going to go from there but he needed to make sure there were no resources left behind he might be able to use on the journey. It was just like in some of the games he played. He would toss the house, steal anything of use, and leave town in Stanley’s little clown truck.
Stanley's wallet was on the countertop with his truck keys. Victor started there and took the paper money and plastic. There was only one credit card and a debit card. At his own home, Victor's mother kept money in a cookie jar on the kitchen counter so Victor went there next. He looked in the cookie jar as well as the flour and sugar canisters. The cookie jar paid off and Victor found seventy-eight dollars there.
There was a door in the kitchen that led to a basement. The basement door was fastened with the security chain and locked from the kitchen side. Victor unlocked the door to reveal a set of crude wooden steps that disappeared into the dark abyss of the basement. He slid a meaty palm along the wall and found a light switch. When he flicked it, a bare bulb glowed at the bottom of the steps.
He started down and the steps popped and cracked beneath his feet. The basement was the same size as the small ranch house. While the upstairs was immaculately neat, the basement was where Stanley allowed clutter to exist in his home. There was cast-off furniture, some of it covered in old sheets. Other pieces of old furniture were stacked and gathering dust. Stanley was from the generation that never threw anything away because they’d known poverty and deprivation. They lived in fear there would be a day when they had to pull out all of those old things and begin using them again.
There were cardboard boxes stacked on pallets to keep them dry if the basement flooded. The contents were scrawled on the outside in magic marker. From the vintage logos displayed on some boxes, it was obvious they had been there for decades. When you got as old as Stanley a twenty year old box was not all that old. For Victor, it was most of the span of his entire life.
In a corner was a vintage weightlifting bench and barbell with the cast-iron weights coated in rust. There was a furnace along one wall and copper lines leading to an oil tank. Along another wall there was a section of well-built shelving, neatly packed with camping and outdoor gear.
Not only did Victor not own any camping gear, he didn't even know anything about it. He’d remembered his dad saying they needed to go camping sometime but he died before they ever got to. After his father’s death, Victor had asked his mother about going and she’d scoffed at the idea.
“Sleep in the dirt like a fucking hobo? You can forget it.”
That was the end of that. As a result, Victor had never been camping in his entire life. He recognized some of the basic gear but there were other things he didn’t. He saw a sleeping bag and pulled one off the shelf, thinking it might come in handy when he hit the road. He tossed it toward the base of the stairs, starting a pile of things he wanted to take with him.
On another shelf he found a long cylindrical pouch. He didn’t recognize it, but the label said it was a three-man tent. That was another thing that might come in handy so Victor put it in the pile along with a rolled up foam mattress. He found a plastic tote and dug through it. As best he could tell, it was full of assorted small camping gear.
He dumped the tote out on the workbench so he could sort through it. He found a cooking set, a box of plastic utensils, and a canteen. There was a hank of rope, a folded canvas tarp, and a pouch of spare tent stakes. These tent stakes looked like foot-long nails, made of solid steel with sharp faceted points ground onto them. He decided to take the entire tote with him rather than sort through it now. If he dug through it later and found things he didn't need he could just throw them away. He was in the process of putting everything back in the tote when he heard the front door open.
Victor froze in terror. He had not heard a car drive up and had no plan for what to do. The front door groaned as it opened fully, then he heard steps in the entryway as someone came into the house. The storm door swung shut behind whomever had come in. They were right above him now, taking small tentative steps into the house. Victor reached into the camping tote and retrieved one of the sharpened steep tent stakes. He went to the base of the steps and tried to ascend them quietly. It was impossible. Each of the hastily built steps cracked and popped beneath his weight.
"Stanley?" came his mother's shrill voice.
The sound of her voice fully dialed up his terror. She was the worst possible person who could come by. Even the appearance of the police would not raise such fear in his heart.
Hadn’t he texted her? Hadn’t he tried to keep her from coming to the house? What was she doing here?
"Stanley?" she repeated. "Where are you?"
Victor considered not answering but it would be pointless. He couldn’t escape the door-less basement and his mother would not go away without knowing what was going on. He could think of nothing else to do.
"Mother? Is that you?"
His mother came toward the kitchen, toward the basement door, and he rushed to the top to meet her. He concealed the tent stake behind his back, shoving it into his waistband. He was at the very top of the steps, his body blocking the entrance to the basement, when she came around the corner.
"Victor? What are you doing in the basement?"
She stood in front of him, a look of disdain, of dismissal. He was not who she was looking for. Yet again, she assessed his worth and found him lacking. He was nothing but an obligation to her, an anchor.
"Stanley has me cleaning the basement, Mom."
He felt uncomfortable standing a few steps lower than her. She already made him feel small enough without towering over him. He climbed the rest of the way into the kitchen. He tried to be casual, looking around, hoping there was nothing out of order that would give away what had taken place there.
"Stanley? Are you down there?" she called into the basement.
Victor’s mind raced for an answer. "He's gone. He went into town. He wants me to do some landscaping so he had to go pick up some stuff. Mulch. That kind of thing."
His mother stared at him. "Bullshit. Stanley and I go to bingo at the fire hall on the same damn day at the same damn time every damn week."
"He said he texted you that we needed some time. For you to not come over."
"Yeah, well I didn't think it meant we weren’t going to bingo. We always go to bingo."
"I'm pretty sure he meant the bingo too," he said nervously. "I'm pretty sure he did."
His mother continued to stare at him, stare into him. He'd never been able to lie to her. He could feel himself crumbling, the sweat gushing from his pores like water pouring through a cloth bag. Any moment he would start trembling with anxiety. Any moment he would start crying. Such was the effect she had on him.
"Where is Stanley?" she repeated, stepping closer to him.
"I told you. He…he went into town."
Clara whipped her cell phone from her pocket, unlocked the screen, and hit a button.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
She didn’t reply.
“Who are you calling, Mother?”
"Stanley. We'll settle this."
Victor panicked, feeling his world start to fly apart. He felt like the last child on a Merry Go Round spinning too fast. He was trying to hold on but his fingers were slipping. When they did, he would fly loose and who knew where he would land?
Then, in his back pocket, Stanley's phone began ringing. Victor stared into his mother's eyes. He watched her go through a range of emotions. There was surprise, then shock. There was rage, then comprehension. Finally, there was fear. Genuine fear. For the first time ever, she was the one afraid.
She looked down and ended the call. She was nervous and her fingers were fumbling as she tried to do something else.
"What are you doing? Who you calling now, Mother?"
Most of the people his mother called were dialed from shortcuts on the screen. She was not using those shortcuts. She was trying to bring up the keypad now, trying to dial a number she never dialed before. Victor saw that the first digit was a nine. It had to be the beginning of 9-1-1. He couldn't let her do that.
"Put down the phone,” Victor said with a surreal calm.
His mother backed away from him. She was still trying to dial but kept hitting the wrong numbers. She had to back up and clear them and try again. Victor could not allow her to finish. He yanked the tent stake from his back pocket and moved toward his mother. She heard him coming and panicked, dropping the phone. On the floor, Victor could see the digits displayed on the phone.
911.
She dropped the phone before she could send the call. She would not get the opportunity to pick it up and try again. Victor was on her.
She raised her hands to him and screamed. “Victor! Nooooo!"
Victor had gone too far to stop now. He brought the sharp tent stake down and drove it with all his force through her face. It pierced the delicate bones of her cheek and tore the thin flesh as it went into her skull. It was not a killing blow and she screamed like a wounded animal. She tried to fight him off but she was no match for his strength. She went down and Victor went down on top of her.
He yanked the tent stake back out, hearing the sound of her thin facial bones scraping against the shaft as he pulled it loose. He leaned forward on to her prone body using his forearm to pin her down. She fought and kicked but he plunged the stake directly through her forehead. Her eyes went blank and she checked out, her wiring short-circuiting within her skull.
She was dying but not yet dead.
Victor rolled off her body and scuttled away. When his back hit the cabinets he looked at her, his hand over his mouth, his face a mixture of revulsion and satisfaction. He could not believe what he had done. At the same time, he could not believe it had taken him so long to get the courage to do what had always needed to be done.
She was a bitter and cruel woman. He could not imagine there was any place in her where love and compassion ever resided. She had never liked his father and she had never liked him. Now he had punctured a hole in her hateful head, surely one of the places where her evil originated. His body shook with the after-effects of violence.
He was in shock but he was also free for the first time in his life. He needed to do something with her. Was there room for her in the freezer?
Victor staggered out the back door into the yard. He stared at his hands, his mother's blood glaring and bold on his hands. The blood carried with it an accusation that provoked Victor.
"I hate you, Mother. I hate you, Mother. I hate you, Mother."
It was a chant, a mantra that in some ways healed him, that forgave him for what he did. It reminded him of why it was totally okay that he’d killed his mother. After all, look at everything she had done to him over the course of his life. She was not a loving mother. She had never supported him or encouraged him. She'd never done anything to make him anybody other than what he was now.
And what he was now had killed her.
He wandered around, unsure of what to do, unable to pull his thoughts together. At some point, after the passage of an uncertain amount of time, it hit him that he should get rid of the blood on his hands first. If the blood wasn’t on his hands, wasn't staring him in the face, then surely he could think clearer.
The water hose was still coiled where he left it on the back patio. It was the same water hose he had already used to wash away the evidence of his violence and it would do that yet again. He turned the water on and rinsed the bloody spigot handle, then sprayed his hands clean. He sprayed water in a cupped hand and used that to wash the water hose nozzle. It would not be perfect. He had seen enough crime shows to know detectives had a way to find even the smallest traces of blood. This was not a perfect crime. He already knew he would probably be the only suspect.
Now he had a second body to get rid of. He wandered randomly around the yard trying to think. He couldn't fit her in the freezer. Stubby Stanley took up most of it. Part of him wondered why he just didn't leave her where she was and hit the road, but anything he did to delay the police investigation would buy him time. He again considered burning the bodies but could only imagine the macabre sight that would create in the backyard. Then, besides the evidence of the scorched earth, he would have to deal with dragging the charred corpses to another location if they failed to fully incinerate.
He returned to frantically pacing Stanley's immaculately manicured backyard. He passed over a scalped spot, a place the mower had cut too low. In the otherwise perfect lawn the blemish stood out. His mind distracted by other things, Victor subconsciously was drawn to it where he found the edge of a large stone. He scraped it with the toe of his shoe, determining it was in fact a concrete lip. As he kicked at it some more he realized it was the septic tank.
With a malicious grin, Victor realized a body immersed and decomposing in the effluent of a septic tank would be an extremely unpleasant piece of evidence to recover. He went to the garage and found a shovel, not surprised Stanley had an assortment of them. He couldn’t recall that he’d ever used a shovel before. He chose one at random and returned to the septic tank where he began scraping dirt from the top of it.
Victor knew very little about home repair. He would not have recognized the septic tank had he not seen a tank at his own home being dug up and repaired several years ago. There should be a concrete lid somewhere in the top. If he could find it and pry it open he could drop his mother and Stanley inside. As a finishing touch, he might even build a small flower bed over top of the disturbed soil, complete with mulch and landscaping timbers.
It only took him a few minutes of digging to find the lid. The tank was inches beneath the soil, though it got deeper as Victor worked his way toward the back. The lid was around two feet square and fit tightly inside a beveled opening that kept the lid from dropping into the tank. The opening was so tight he had no luck getting the shovel into the crack between lid and tank. He went back to Stanley’s garage, looking for something better suited to the job.
He found a crowbar hanging on a nail. The lid was heavy but the thin end of the crowbar went in far enough and produced just enough force that it raised the lid. Each time it budged, he slipped the bar in farther and was eventually able to dislodge the lid and slide it to the side. He could not avoid seeing the tank was nearly full of exactly what he expected to find.
He went back to the house and grabbed his mother by the ankles. She was wearing thin white old-lady tennis shoes and one of them came off as he tugged. He picked it up and slipped it in his back pocket. He indelicately pulled her over the threshold and onto the flagstone patio. He dragged her across it and through the yard. Without ceremony, a goodbye, or any hesitation, he fed her through the concrete opening.
She slipped feet-first into the vile liquid like it was a hot tub of filth. Though the top of the contents appeared to be firm and semi-solid, it was just a cap of slime floating on liquid. His mother slipped beneath the surface, gurgling and bubbling a few times as her lungs emptied of residual air. Pleased with his results, Victor went to the freezer and opened it. Stanley appeared even more ghastly than last time, a coating of frost having developed on his entire body.
Victor touched him tentatively and found him frozen solid. In fact he was also frozen to the interior of the freezer and Victor had to rock him loose. He heaved the human Popsicle from the freezer and set him in the floor. He closed the freezer back and decided to drag Stanley. It was too unpleasant holding the frozen man against his body.
Stanley held to his awkward frozen position as Victor tugged him across the yard. It looked like some bizarre performance art with Stanley as a talented Chinese acrobat able to hold his pose as he was being dragged. The shape of his frozen body ended up making it difficult to get him shoved into the tank. Several times Victor thought he’d found the correct angle only to discover some frozen appendage prevented the body from slipping through. With each attempt, the odiferous liquids in the tank formed a frozen coating on Stanley, which to Victor’s disgust reminded him of a chocolate dipped ice cream cone.
He soon reached the point where he would not touch the body again as there was no part of it not despoiled by the contents of the tank. He went back to the garage and returned with an axe. Anything that protruded in a way that prevented it from going into the tank was bashed until it went or hacked until it folded. In short order, a sweaty, stained, and slightly-nauseated Victor dragged the concrete lid back in place.