Authors: John Curtis
CHAPTER 36
The glow guttered out. As their eyes adjusted, the trio could make out a figure full-formed in the salt circle. Jay had been anticipating this moment since he had arrived in Haddonfield, but he still had trouble believing what he saw. It was Frank, just as he remembered him the last time he saw him.
He was dressed in his black burial suit, tie, and white shirt. But something wasn’t quite right. It was the incongruous smile on his face and then there were his eyes, black and shiny like basalt marbles. Somehow, Frank seemed placid, almost normal. Until Jay saw that his feet were hovering a few inched off the floor.
Jay’s heart skipped a beat when Frank broke the silence.
"Well, well, well. If it isn’t my three favorite people in the whole wide world." And then Frank grinned, a big, broad grin revealing crimson teeth, as if he had just gorged himself on a bloody feast.
His laugh was an insane cackle as he stepped forward a bit in the circle, allowing them to see his face in the dancing glow of the candlelight. No, stepped wasn't quite the right word for it. He hovered and bounced in the air.
Frank's countenance was pale, pasty, like a bad wax model from Madame Tussaud’s. There was no glow to his features and when he reached out to them with his hands, the beds of the nails were blue.
When Frank reached the line of salt at the edge of the circle, he stopped, his face pressed up against an invisible piece of glass.
"Now is that any way to treat an old friend?"
Jay retorted, with contempt in his voice, "You’re no friend of mine. Not anymore. You’ve got to go back where you came from. The killing has to stop."
Gary brought the spear gun up to firing position, but Jay raised his hand. The law man stared straight into Frank’s eyes, which had an opalescent quality. The effect of them was hypnotic as reflected light flared and rotated in the place where the pupils should have been.
"I’m still the same old Frank. A few improvements, but I’m still me." He turned his gaze toward Meg, entrancing her almost immediately. "You see? I was right about you and her," he said to Jay out of the corner of his mouth, "you two were made for each other. At least that’s what she thinks."
Jay blinked and shook his head. As he reached for Meg’s arm, he said to her, "Remember, don’t look into his eyes!"
The words of warning came too late. Meg slumped to the floor, her breathing shallow, her eyes open. Her blank gaze aimed at the ceiling.
Jay knelt beside her, saying to himself, "He wasn’t supposed to be able to get to us… the circle." Then he turned on Frank. "What did you do to her you son of a bitch," he yelled angrily.
The corners of Frank’s mouth curled up into a distorted imitation of a smile. "Oh, she’s just asleep. I wouldn’t hurt my buddy’s best girl. Now why don’t you just stop all of this?" He motioned with a sweep of his hand toward the line of salt, which parted like the Red Sea for Moses. "It can be just like it was when we were kids. Friends to the end."
Gary stood with his hands gripping the spear gun so tightly that his knuckles turned white. He wondered why Jay bothered with the talk and wouldn’t let him finish Frank off.
"It can never be that way, Frank," Jay continued. "Now let her go and let us finish this."
Instead of answering, Frank moved to the very edge of the circle, his toes right on the line, that horrific, gory grin still on his face.
"Jesus Christ, Jay! Don’t argue with him," exclaimed Gary. "Let me shoot him! He’s broken the circle!"
Frank turned and locked his eyes on Gary. "No. I don't think so. I still have lots to say."
Gary suddenly felt as if he were carved in marble. Frank’s passive mask turned into an angry, writhing mass of wrinkles and lines.
"Jesus, man," yelled Jay. He grabbed hold of the spear gun and yanked it from Gary’s fingers. His arms shook as he drew a bead and pulled the trigger. The spear flew true, but just as it was about to ram home in Frank’s chest, he seized it in his fist.
Frank stood for a moment, holding it there, just a bare centimeter from its intended target, examining it. His eyes blinked in confusion and the black glint disappeared from his eyes for a moment. Then, he let spear drop to his side and sneered.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Oh, well, I guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way. I’m not sure what you think you’re going to accomplish by not giving me what I want."
He stepped out of the circle and began to walk toward them. Jay shook Gary’s shoulder and held the spear gun out to him. "Take this thing. I don’t know how to use it."
Gary, roused from his torpor, grabbed the spear gun. As he frantically worked to reload, Jay tried to delay Frank by reasoning with him.
"Your time is over, pal. You’ve got to realize that."
Frank continued to hover-slide toward them.
"Time. I’ve got lots of time now thanks to Gene. What a brother." He laughed a raspy laugh.
Frank was almost on them when Gary whipped the spear gun up for another shot. Frank’s hand shot up from his side to wrench the weapon from his hands. He held it up like a prize.
"You quit playing with such dangerous toys. You could put an eye out."
Gary’s jaw dropped as the spear gun went limp in Frank’s hand like the watches in that painting by Dali. It dribbled onto the floor into a quivering, metallic lump at Frank’s feet.
Frank turned back to Jay. "Join me, Jay. Think of the fun we’ll have and the places we’ll see. We can do anything we want. Hey, remember those old westerns we used to watch? Take a look at this."
Frank froze Gary with his gaze once again and swept his hand forward and up; a slow, elegant motion. The pistol in Gary’s holster flew to his hand, fitting perfectly into his palm. He stood examining it for a moment, feeling the heft of it. Then he looked Gary up and down. He was still entranced by Frank’s gaze and motionless, not batting an eyelash.
"Marshall," he said with a drawl, "this town ain’t big enough for the both of us. I’m giving you until the count of three to get out of town. One…"
"Christ, Frank! What are you doing?"
"Two… Three… So, ya ain’t yella. Glad to see that."
Frank dropped the gun to his side as if he were holstering it. He stood there, eyeing Gary for a moment longer, and then in a flash, his hand brought up the ten millimeter. As it came level with his waist, he fired. Jay could almost see the bullet as it flew at Gary. It was one of those moments where everything seemed to go slow and the bullet was flying through a tub of thick syrup as it struck Gary square in the chest.
The load tossed him backwards and onto the floor, where he sprawled, motionless, his eyelids closed and fluttering. Jay couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was one thing to know Frank’s evil in the abstract, when he couldn’t see him at work, but to see him now just made it strike home with him how much his friend had changed. He didn’t know that any one person was capable of bottling up so much bitterness and anger in one body.
It seemed like a larva that had been planted into him that day he had died. It grew, gnawing at his insides for all those years in the cold, dark grave, until, one day, in a misguided attempt to show love, Gene had awakened it. Frank was just the chrysalis, no longer his own being, but the outer casing for an evil older than humanity.
Frank lifted the muzzle of the gun up to his pursed lips and blew away the smoke like any good movie cowboy would. Jay dropped down on one knee next to Gary and ran his hands over his body, searching for a wound. He could see where the bullet had gone in, but there weren’t any signs of blood. He was about to check for an exit wound, but then, Frank's hollow, grating falsetto voice spoke again.
"Always wanted to do that. So what do you say, pal?"
"About what?"
"About joining up with me. It’s a blast and we’ll never get old and we’ll never die. Kinda like Peter Pan."
"Peter Pan never had to kill people every once in a while to stay alive."
Frank chuckled and tilted his head to the side. "Well, nothing worthwhile is ever clean and easy."
Jay stood and looked Frank straight in the eye, no longer afraid of what might happen. "I’ll never join you. If it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll hunt you down and destroy you. I’m not sure who you are, but you’re not Frank. If I ever had a doubt of that, then seeing you here, tonight, has erased that from my brain."
"Well, I take that as a no. How unfortunate."
Frank backhanded Jay in the side of the face with enough force to send him flying across the room and into the wall. The brittle, old lathe and plaster cracked with the force and chips and dust settled on him as he fell to the floor.
Frank walked over to Jay, who was shaking his head, dazed, and leaned in close enough to his face for Jay to get a whiff of his breath, which smelled of graveyard earth and rotten flesh. He reached out tentatively and brushed his fingertips lightly over Jay's hair.
"Yeah, well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, huh?"
Then Frank turned back to Meg. He slipped his arms under her and carried her toward the kitchen. Jay heard a voice say, through the fog in his brain, "When you're ready, pal, you know where we'll be."
CHAPTER 37
Jay got to his hands and knees and crawled over to Gary. He was so still that at first Jay thought he was dead. When he laid his ear on Gary's chest, though, he could hear a strong beat. He still couldn’t see any blood, so he ripped open Gary's uniform shirt, revealing the reason that there was no blood - a bulletproof vest. Jay stuck his fingertip into the singed hole and could feel the bullet, which had burrowed deep into the layers of Kevlar.
When he pressed on the bullet, Gary’s eyes fluttered open and he gave a little moan as he looked up at Jay. As soon as his eyes were able to focus, he looked down at the vest and said, "Standard department issue." He grinned anemically.
"God, man, I thought you were dead for sure," whispered Jay.
Gary took a couple of rasping breaths and winced.
"Don’t try to move. I think that you’ve got something broken inside."
"Oh, I’ll take a couple of cracked ribs over being dead anytime. At that range, I was a goner for sure."
Jay’s delight at Gary’s being alive turned serious. "He’s taken Meg."
"I guess we fucked up, eh?"
"Yeah, we fucked up. I shouldn’t have gotten her involved in this at all. I mean, she wasn’t there that day. She had nothing to do with it all."
"He wants you, though. As long as she was important to you, she was always going to be a target. Just so that he could draw you in. This would have happened sooner or later."
"I shouldn’t have come back, then. It was a stupid thing to do, but when I heard her voice…"
Gary pulled himself up onto his elbows, shuddering. "No. You did the right thing. I was jealous for the longest time. Before you ever came back, I mean. We’d gone out a few times and all, but there was all these things that would come up in conversation about you. I never had a chance."
"I love her."
Gary felt around at his side, grabbed one of the spears that had been scattered there, and held it out to him. "Then get after them. He’s not going to go far. Just you knowing what he wants gives you some advantage. I don’t think that he’ll hurt her. He has no other way of keeping a hold on you."
Jay took the spear out of Gary's hand and got to his feet. "Well, this story isn't going to have the happy ending he pictured."
Jay left, figuring Gary would be safe enough where he was. Frank wouldn’t be hard to find. There was only one place where they would, could, settle things.
Jay reached the kitchen doorway. When he reached for the flashlight in his pocket, he discovered that the lense had been shattered. He had to feel his way toward the door. Along the way, he tripped over some old boards piled in the center of the room.
He fell flat on his face and the burning pain that shot through his side told him that his run-in with Frank had done more damage than he thought. He slowly got back to his feet and grabbed at his side.
There was a crack between the boards over the empty window frame in the back door. Jay peered through it, checking out the lay of the land just to make sure that Frank was not waiting for him on the other side.
The pale blue light of the moon allowed him to see almost to the edge of the pond. There wasn’t a thing moving but the black fingertips of the trees, scratching at the sky with the slightest breeze.
Satisfied that it was safe to open the door, he gave it a pull. The door sounded as if it were being dragged across sandpaper and opened just over an inch before it jammed. Jay grabbed the edge of it with both hands and pulled hard. He had to yank three times, leaving deep gouges in the thick linoleum, before he had an opening wide enough to squeeze through.
He stepped out on to the back stoop. It was really just a frame box with steps down to the ground. The wood cracked and squeaked ominously as he brought his full weight to bear on the boards. The snow at the base of the stairs was blown up in a deep drift. When he stepped down into it, he could feel the rush of clammy cold from the slush beneath the snow as it shoveled into his shoes and soaked his socks.
Even with his thick coat, the sub-freezing air caused him to shiver and gooseflesh to break out all over his limbs. He looked down and ahead of him on the moonlit path. No footprints.
Frank must have been using that levitation trick. Jay would have to watch out for that when he finally caught up to him. If the spear he hefted in his hand worked, it wouldn’t matter so much. If he had to cut and run on the ice and snow, that would be a different matter.
The only sound as Jay walked toward the pond was the dull, squeaking "crump" of the snow beneath his feet. As he got closer he could see dead reeds along the bank, rendered a mousy grey by the moonlight. The old dock had been reduced to about two feet of warped, weathered boards. Two files of metal pipes marched from where he stood to where the end of the dock had once been, out to where the deep water was.
Jay looked down at his toes. There was a thin layer of snow on top of the ice. No way to tell whether it was thick enough to support him, but the water here was only about a foot deep, so he took it on faith and stepped down onto the surface, using the spear to steady himself.
"Frank," he yelled. There was no answer. The sound of Jay's voice was swallowed up by the soft powdery snow that lay all around.
The shadows cast by the fall of the banks around the pond made it look like a vast, black pit. Jay knew, though, where he should find Frank. He began walking out toward the center, where the flags had stood all those years ago. He grasped the metal shaft of the spear firmly in his bare hands. The freezing metal burned the bare flesh as he probed at the ice, searching for a safe route.
It was not an easy walk to make. Every snap and pop as he crossed the ice was magnified ten-fold in his mind. His heart raced when, with one step, there was the sound of a pistol report that bounced off the banks to either side and a jagged seam appeared in the ice at his feet. He was on a part of the pond where he knew the water was over his head. If he went in now, Frank might just get what he was after by default.
Jay's next step took him to the edge of the crack. He could feel cold water well up over his feet just as he leapt to the other side. He slammed the point of the spear into the ice to steady himself. The ice was definitely thinner here, springy under each step he took. When he looked back the way he had just come, he could see the full moon reflected in inky wavelets as a pool formed.
He became so intent on watching his feet that he almost ran into one of the flags, now ragged and torn with age. The red appeared a dark grey. The pole was canted at an angle, but it was reassuring to him that someone still cared enough to trudge out in the middle of the winter and mark the circle. But, then, he reached out his hand to touch the nylon fabric and his fingers passed through it as if it were smoke.
"Frank," he thought out loud.
As if cued, the scenery in front of him shimmered and went out of focus. Then a trompe l'oeil curtain parted in the center of the circle of ghostly flags, revealing Frank with his feet on the ground and Meg at his side.
"Right here, buddy," Frank announced with a wave and flourish of his hand.
"Meg! Are you alright?"
"She can’t hear you. She’s kinda otherwise engaged right now." He tapped the top of Meg’s head lightly with his knuckles, eliciting only a dumb stare from her. "She’s doing just fine and she’ll stay that way as long as you agree to discuss a little unfinished business with me."
Frank laughed and it drove through the pack of snow, down to the bare ground, so that it echoed across the barren landscape as no other sound could. It rattled the tree-skeletons all the way to the hills on the other side of the valley. Jay could hear the cawing of the crows as they were shaken in their roosts and the hoosh of the snow as it was shed by the bare branches.
He realized that the only way he could deal Meg out of the equation was to give Frank what he wanted.
"All right," he said. "You win. Now let her go." It was a childish ploy, but wasn't that essentially what he was dealing with? An adolescent?
"Oh, no," replied Frank. "You got me in a circle and now it’s your turn. I can play games, too." He motioned at the ring of flags. "This place is mine and I want you to step through before I’ll even think of letting her go."
Jay hesitated for a moment.
"What’s the matter, buddy? It’s not like you’re gonna get electrocuted or something."
Jay slid the tip of one shoe across the line marked by the flags, just to test the surface to make sure it was real and not a trick. Frank hadn’t lied. Jay stepped through the line of flags.
"All right. Now let her go!"
Frank brought his hand across Meg’s face. She blinked and as soon as she realized what was going on, she began squirming in his tight grasp.
"I said let her go!"
Frank held her in front of him by her arms. Then looked Jay up and down, as if sizing him up for a schoolyard fight.
"Come on," Jay thought to himself.
Frank, evidently satisfied by what he saw, shoved her toward Jay. He caught her as she slipped and stumbled across the ice into his arms.
"Are you okay?"
"Yes, but you can’t stay here," she replied.
When he looked down into her eyes, he could see that he had made the right decision to return to Haddonfield.
"I have to," he said, as he turned back to Frank. "I've got to have a heart to heart with my best friend. Isn’t that right, Frank?"
"I think that nowadays, they would say we have a lot of issues to discuss," said Frank. "You give me what I want. You know what could happen to her if you don't."
Jay held Meg, looking deeply into her eyes. "It’s the best thing. Now go back to the house. The long way, not the way I came. Gary’s there and needs to be looked after. I want you to remember that I love you, that nothing’s ever going to change that."
A single tear ran down her cheek. He wiped it away with his thumb. "Now go on."
She gave him a tight embrace before he pulled her around behind him and gave her a little push off with his hand. Jay never looked back as she walked away. He gritted his teeth and took up the spear in both hands.
"Now let’s get on with it. This isn’t about revenge."
"If I had wanted revenge, I would have just taken out that fatass, Tommy, and been on my way. It was all his fault, anyway, you know. His, theirs. But I'm not about that tonight. It’s about friends, man. Everybody needs friends."
Frank walked across the circle to where Jay stood and placed his hand on Jay’s shoulder. When Jay looked into his eyes now, he saw him as he had been all those years ago, before he had gone into the water. Before Jay's life had become a complicated mess of signings and editorial meetings. Was it some kind of illusion to catch him off-guard or was this really some part of the Frank he remembered forcing its way to the top?
"You’re my bud, man," Frank said. "We ought to be together. Friends to the end."
Jay wasn’t sure what it was, but just as he said those words, there was a tingling where Frank touched him on the shoulder. He thought that he could see a sort of shimmer and shift in Frank’s eyes. It made his skin crawl."
"The operative words are ‘to the end’. Frank's time ended here, in this place, that day."
He felt the hand on his shoulder flex and squeeze. The eyes winked for a moment between Frank's deep blue and this thing before him's native dead black.
"I don’t know what you are, but you can never be my friend," he continued. "I don't even think that you know the meaning of that word! All you know is how to make others feel pain and suffering!"
It had finally come to him, what he was facing. It was those hidden emotions, all those glances and looks that had never been shared, fighting their way to the surface. They wanted their place in the spotlight, powered by the anger of a twelve-year-old mind that saw what had happened on the ice so many years ago as betrayal of unrequited attentions. It was what Jay saw in the bloody retribution and shark's eyes of the creature before him. The only hope he had of beating this thing was if he could pull out some ounce of the boy he had once known, just long enough for him to penetrate the guard that had been thrown up.
The spear suddenly felt warm in his hand. Something told him that the time was now. He threw his arm up in a sweeping motion. Frank grabbed the shaft just behind the razor sharp tip and batted it out of the way just before it could strike him in the chest.
A look of hurt and confusion came across Frank's face. Whatever fantasies Frank had entertained didn’t include the object of his affection trying to kill him. "I don’t want to hurt you," Frank said. "Never...never that. Why did you do that?"
"But you are and you will. Once you understand that I can never be what you want. You want too much. More than I could ever have given you when you were alive and nothing I would be willing to give you now when you're ... this."
Frank frowned and his eyes cast down. He released his hold on the spear just for a moment, but it was enough time for Jay to lunge at him again.