They Kill, page 14
And with this realization, the muck turned to water once more, and when she looked at the basin, the globby bits of the stuff were gone. All she saw was clear liquid swirling around and down into the drain.
The tasteless water now filling her mouth disgusted her, and she spit it out violently. Then she stood and looked around to see if anyone had been watching her. Students and faculty passed by, but no one looked in her direction. Despite the scene she’d made, no one seemed to have noticed, and she was relieved. She looked for the man in the black suit, but she saw no sign of him. The…a term drifted into her mind: aqua sexus, the water of sex. Yes, that was perfect. The aqua sexus had started flowing the instant after the man in the black suit had touched the fountain’s nozzle. It was crazy, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that the man had caused the aqua sexus to flow. She wanted to find him—
—and thank him.
She felt deliciously warm inside, her muscles relaxed and loose, not an ounce of tension to be found in them. For the first time since that awful day with Ronnie and his friends, she felt completely at ease in her body. She felt free. She could take off her clothes right here and stride down the hallway naked without the least hint of self-consciousness. The thought of doing so, of everyone’s eyes on her as she walked past, excited her, and she felt her sex grow instantly wet.
She let out a languorous sigh and stretched, reveling in the sensation of her body moving. She felt as if she’d awakened from a years-long dream, a butterfly finally emerged from its chrysalis. She felt so good, so right. She’d been reborn, and she wanted to share this magnificent feeling with others, help them experience the great gift of carnal liberation. And she knew where a group of people in dire need of hearing her message were gathered, and brother, did they need what she now had to give them.
As she started walking down the hall she removed her suit jacket and dropped it to the floor. She undid the first few buttons on her blouse to display her cleavage, then reached up to undo her bun. She shook her hair loose and ran her fingers through it to straighten it out. The sensation felt so goddamned good, a small orgasm shivered between her thighs. She smiled. That had been nice, but it was only the beginning.
There’s more where that came from, girl, she thought. A lot more.
“I’m going to fuck the world!” she shouted, then she laughed when startled faculty and students turned to look at her, not believing what they’d heard.
She continued on, her hips swaying in a way they never had before. Better than Sierra’s, I bet. This afternoon’s meeting of the Traditional Values Club was going to be something special.
Chapter Eight
Corliss emerged from an empty classroom after Mandy walked past. It had been a busy day for him up to this point, but now that all the pieces were in place, he could sit back, relax, and watch as the events he’d set in motion played out. If he’d wished, he could’ve peeked into the future and glimpsed all the possible outcomes of his efforts, but he refused to give in to the temptation. Where would be the fun in that?
He had one last errand to attend to first, though.
He stepped back into the classroom, opened a rift, stepped through, and sealed it behind him. The next three people who walked through the space where the invisible rift scar was would begin hearing voices whispering the most obscene and blasphemous things in their ears. The voices would continue their awful litany day and night without cease, driving these people to jam sharp objects into their ears in an attempt to find relief. They’d succeed in destroying their hearing, of course, but the voices would continue uninterrupted, whispering filth in their minds until the day they died.
* * *
Randall pulled his Lincoln Town Car into his driveway and parked. He didn’t bother putting the vehicle in the garage since he planned to return to the Historic District soon. He had more work to do there – a lot more.
He got out of the car and paused to look across the street at the Sowells’ house. Most of the homes in the neighborhood were of a type, and theirs – his too, for that matter – was no exception. Two stories, white siding, black roof and black shutters, short driveway, small yard, one tree in front (oak) and another in back (elm). Dana Sowell wasn’t much of a landscaper, unlike his Erika, who planted flowers every spring and tended them lovingly. Hedges surrounded the Sowells’ house, and they always needed trimming. Their roof was missing a number of shingles, their cement driveway had several large cracks in it, and their grass was always too high. Randall believed a family’s house was the face they chose to present to the world, and that face told you everything you needed to know about them. The Sowells’ face said they were lazy, inconsiderate people. Lazy because they didn’t maintain their property the way they should, and inconsiderate because their house was a blight on the rest of the neighborhood.
No wonder Sierra had turned out the way she had.
As he walked toward the front door of his house – which had green shutters, a green roof, and yellow siding – he clutched his special Chuck in his hand. Except it no longer felt right. He looked down at his hand and didn’t see the coppery blade or the handle with the three-dimensional Chuck on the end protruding from his grip. He opened his hand and saw that all he held was a normal Chuck – a penny with a smiley face on one side. He frowned. He could’ve sworn that he’d grabbed the knife off the passenger seat when he’d gotten out of the car. But this obviously wasn’t it.
He returned to the car, opened the door, and slid into the driver’s seat, not bothering to close the door behind him. He didn’t see the knife sitting on the passenger seat, and he spent several minutes searching for it, checking to see if he’d placed it in the glove compartment or if it had fallen between the seats. But he couldn’t find it. He ran his hand over his head in a gesture of frustration and was surprised to find hair on the back of his head. He angled the rearview mirror so he could look at himself and saw he appeared as he always did these days: a tired, middle-aged man. His skin wasn’t yellow and his features were normal.
That couldn’t be right. He’d changed. Not only had he felt it, he’d seen his yellow hands, had reached up and touched his oversized round head, the line of his mouth, the smooth place where his nose had been. He’d become a living Chuck, and he couldn’t have been happier. Had it been some kind of delusion? A bizarre imagining produced by his aging mind? But it had seemed so real.
He’d thought he’d come home to share the wondrous transformation that had befallen him with his wife, to show her that his making and handing out Chucks all these years hadn’t been a foolish and annoying hobby, as she’d once told him. But he had nothing to show her now.
Depressed and more than a little worried about his mental health, he got out of the car, closed the door, and headed up the walkway to the front door. It wasn’t locked – they never locked it during the day – and he went inside. He immediately heard his wife puttering around in the kitchen, humming happily to herself. Erika was constitutionally incapable of being quiet for more than a few seconds at a time, and he could always locate her by listening for the sounds of cupboard doors being shut loudly, the refrigerator door being slammed, or one appliance or another running.
He entered the kitchen and found Erika standing in front of a counter, chopping vegetables on a wooden cutting board. A large pot rested on the stove beside her. He assumed she intended to make her famous vegetable soup for dinner tonight. She thought it was one of his favorite meals, and he’d never had the heart to tell her that he thought the soup was just okay. She hadn’t started cooking anything yet, and the kitchen smelled only of the lavender perfume she wore. She always put some on in the morning, regardless of whether she planned to leave the house or not. He didn’t recognize the tune she was humming, but that was no surprise. She loved music, but she couldn’t carry a tune to save her soul.
She glanced over her shoulder as he came in and smiled.
“You’re back early.”
Erika was a short woman, just under five foot, and she used a small stool to stand on when she worked in the kitchen. She’d been a tiny slip of a thing with fiery red hair when they’d married, but her hair had long ago become gray, and her body was matronly plump. She wore makeup and jewelry every day, even if he was the only one who would see her. A girl likes to look her best, she’d say whenever he told her she didn’t have to fuss about her appearance, not at her age, which was a long way from when she could’ve been considered a girl.
She didn’t dress up at home, though, opting for comfort over fashion. Today she wore a white sweatshirt decorated with pictures of autumn leaves, a pair of jeans, and house slippers. She couldn’t abide walking barefoot in the house or going about in socks. She made him wear slippers too when he took off his shoes, and he suspected she had some kind of aversion to seeing bare feet, kind of the opposite of a foot fetish.
He expected her to put down her knife, step down from her stool, walk over to him, stand on her tiptoes, and give him a peck on the cheek. It was what she always did when he came home, a ritual so often performed that by now it was as immediate and unthinking as a reflex. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she stared at him, eyes widening.
“What in the world happened to you? Are you all right?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She still stood on her stool at the counter, but now she turned around to face him.
“Your clothes,” she said.
He frowned. “What’s wrong with—” He broke off as he looked down and saw dark splotches on his sweatshirt and slacks. At first he couldn’t figure out what the stains were or how he’d gotten them, but then it came back. He remembered the young mother with the tattoos and piercings, remembered what he’d done to her and her squalling bastard child.
He grinned. It hadn’t been a delusion! It had happened! He didn’t know why he’d changed back to his normal self, but that wasn’t important now. All that mattered was for a time he had been a Chuck, had been the Chuck.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’ll come off in the wash.” He said this even though he had no idea if the stains would come out or not.
“But it looks like blood. Are you sure you haven’t been hurt?” She stepped off the stool and came toward him, obviously intending to examine the stains more closely, as if she didn’t trust his self-assessment.
He held out his hand and opened it to display the Chuck that had until recently been a copper knife.
Erika stopped dead when she saw the Chuck and scowled.
“You’re not trying to give me one of those damn things, are you? You know how much I hate them.”
He bristled at the derisive tone in her voice.
“No. I want to tell you about something that happened to me today in the Historic District. Something wonderful.”
“You told me you were going to go walking down by the river. You said you haven’t been getting enough exercise and that a walk in the fresh air was just what the doctor ordered. Are you telling me you didn’t go walking?”
Erika was the sweetest woman he’d ever met – until it came to the subject of Chucks. She’d never understood his hobby, and his numerous attempts to explain it to her over the years hadn’t helped. She told him it was weird, that it made people uncomfortable when he approached them, that not only were Chucks creepy, there was something almost indecent about giving them to children.
It’s like you’re a pedophile using your goddamn Chucks as a way to get close to kids, she’d once said.
That one had really hurt. Randall loved children, and he’d never do anything to make them feel the least bit afraid and unsafe. And to insinuate that he had sexual urges regarding children wasn’t only disgusting, it was also insulting. He suspected the true reason Erika hated him passing out Chucks was that it embarrassed her, just as it had embarrassed their son and daughter while they’d been growing up. Erika couldn’t bear the thought of other women looking at her and whispering, That poor thing. You know she’s married to that freak who passes out the smiley-face pennies? I’d just die if my husband did anything like that.
He was tempted to make up another lie rather than tell her the truth, but he was sick of hiding the part of him that wanted to make the world a better place from his wife. It was the best part of him, damn it, and he was proud of it, regardless of what Erika thought.
“It’s true. I didn’t go walking by the river. I went to the Historic District so I could pass out Chucks. I lied because I didn’t want to deal with you giving me grief about it.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “You promised me you weren’t going to do this anymore.”
“I said I wouldn’t pass them out at the mall over in Ash Creek anymore. I never said I planned to stop altogether.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Randall flinched at her casual blasphemy. Erika only swore when she was nail-spitting mad, and nothing got her worked up like the subject of Chucks.
“I did pass some out today. I ran into Sierra Sowell and tried to give her one, but she refused it.”
“Good for her,” Erika said.
Up to this point, Randall had worked to maintain a positive attitude, but Erika’s negativity was making it difficult. He felt anger rising in response to her, and he knew that if he let it take hold of him, they would end up in a shouting match. And that went against everything the Chucks stood for. They were about happiness and togetherness, about Have a nice day, not Fuck you, bitch.
The Chuck he was holding twitched in his hand, and it felt heavier now. Not much, but a little. Its shape had changed too, oval now instead of round.
Despite Erika’s attitude, he continued on, determined to tell his story. Once he began in earnest, the words tumbled out of him, and he went on until he was finished. Erika didn’t interrupt him further, but as she listened her expression changed from angry to disbelieving to horrified.
“You’ve finally lost your mind,” she said. “I’ve been worried for years that you’d go crazy one day, but I always told myself I was letting my imagination get the best of me. I never thought it would really happen.” Her gaze focused on his clothes then, or more accurately, the stains on his clothes. “Did you really…hurt someone?” Her voice was tentative as she asked this, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted him to answer.
He frowned. Hurt? He’d taught the woman and her brat a little respect, sure, but he hadn’t hurt them. Had he?
A mélange of sights and sounds tumbled through his mind then. The child screaming, the woman begging him to stop, the copper Chuck blade rising and falling, blood arcing through the air. So much blood….
The Chucks in his pocket rustled against one another with soft metallic whispers.
“We need to get you to a hospital.” Erika’s eyes shone with tears, and her voice was close to a sob. “They’ll be able to help you there.”
She took hold of his sleeve and started to walk away, obviously intending to lead him to the car. Instead of going along with her, he wrapped his left arm around her chest and pulled her against him. She let out a choked squeak and tried to pull away, but he held her too tight. The Chuck in his right hand lengthened and grew heavier as it once more assumed the form of a copper knife. He closed his fingers around it, and it felt so right in his hand, as if it were a long-lost part of himself that he hadn’t realized was missing until it returned. He felt his head swell, his hair fall out, his features simplify and became exaggerated, cartoonish. He looked at the hand that held the knife and was gratified to see his flesh had become yellow once again.
“Randall! Let me go! Please!”
She struggled to turn her head to look at him, and when she finally managed to catch a glimpse of his visage, she screamed.
“Call me Chuck,” he said.
* * *
When he was finished, Erika lay on the kitchen floor. Her mouth and throat were jammed full to overflowing with Chucks, and her sweatshirt was riddled with slash marks and the white cloth was soaked dark red. Blood pooled on the floor around her body, splattered the cupboards nearby. The ceiling was stippled crimson, and Randall thought it made an interesting Jackson Pollock-type pattern. He’d never been a fan of modern art, but he liked this. Oh yes, he did.
He thought Erika might’ve liked it too, but her dead eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling, her days of appreciating art over.
He was glad to be back to his smiley-faced self, what he was beginning to think of as his true self. Maybe he only became Chuck when there was Chuck’s work for him to do, when his blade was needed to excise a piece of negativity from the world and make it a better place. That’s what Chucks were for, after all. To make everything better. So if he wanted to stay Chuck, he needed to keep busy. That would be easy enough. The world was full of negative people who needed a permanent attitude adjustment.
Like Sierra.
He thought of their encounter earlier, of how she’d not only spurned his offer to give Chucks to her students, she’d told him how she really felt about his modest attempts to make the world a better, nicer place.
You’re not making people feel better. You’re not brightening their day. All you do is creep them out and make them feel sorry for you!
How long had she felt like that? Had she been lying to him ever since she was a child? It didn’t seem possible, but after today, his notions about what was and wasn’t possible had become considerably more flexible. He supposed Sierra couldn’t be blamed for her attitude, not entirely. Children learned from their parents.
