Lori Malcolm bolted to a sitting position, awakened
by her own scream. She surveyed her night-enshrouded living room and
battled to sort out her confusion. She was alone in the darkness,
lying on her living room sofa, dressed in a gown and
robe. She had been dreaming.
That same horrible dream.
Again?
But more than just the dream had awakened her. A
fist pounding at the front screen door galvanized her to her feet.
She clench her robe tightly at her throat. In the silence that gathered, a cricket on the porch began to chirp hesitantly. A distant
jet tore through the night sky. Closer to town, a freight train bellowed
across the sleeping countryside like a forlorn monster.
"Lori, I didn’t mean to frighten you. Please, it's
just me!"
The sound of Karen Radcliff's voice startled her and
damped her panic, because there were no strangers lurking in the night
after all, only trouble of another sort altogether, a familiar kind of
trouble, the kind that inspired dread and despair rather than the growing
paranoia she has been suffering.
"Please! Lori, I need help!"
"I'm here," she
called out, her voice hoarse
and flat with resignation. She stepped into the glow cast by the street
light to make herself visible. She cleared her throat and tried to
present herself with as much dignity as possible.
Karen snapped the screen door hook letting herself
in. She danced on the threshold in a frenzy. "Virginia Cornell dropped
me off at the house an hour ago. She just called me and said there was a
prowler in the house. And then she screamed and the phone went dead."
Lori’s heart skipped a beat. "For God's sake, Karen,
call the sheriff's department."
"I did, but they said the nearest squad is fifteen
miles away!"
She warmed to the emergency, although helpless to
lend a hand. "You know my car's not running!”
"Yes, but you can drive! Use Carol's station wagon!
Please?"
A glance out the front window
confirmed the old Buick
station wagon parked at the curb across the street. A single window to Carol
Fisher's house glowed warm orange, an indication that Carol was home and
sleeping. Lori snatched the handset of her living room extension and
pecked out a familiar number regardless, simmering with resentment at
Karen's imposition while the phone rang. She has crises of her own to
attend to this unsettled night.
Carol finally mumbled a sleepy acknowledgment.
“Who’s making all that fuss out there?”
"May I use your car? Karen has an emergency."
"Use the key under the seat," Carol murmured
sleepily, unconcerned. "Don't wake me again unless someone gets killed."
The phone rattled and went dead. Lori hurried to the
bedroom to dress. Maybe the mystery of Virginia's interrupted phone call
would be a welcomed diversion from a wayward husband and two kids stranded
in Clayton thirty miles away. Karen was always overreacting to a steady
succession of petty crises, although Lori could not fault the woman.
Anything at all out of the ordinary might in some way relate to the
year-old disappearance of Gloria Radcliff, Karen's thirteen-year-old daughter.
Lori brushed by on the way out the front door,
dressed in leather slippers, denim shorts and a blouse.
"Let's book, woman."
The cool night air and the short dash across the
street forced the nightmare of the glass eye into the recesses of her mind
where it lurked, biding its time. Karen leaped in on the passenger's side
and set the car to creaking on its springs. Lori fumbled for the key
slipped beneath the seat and brought the noisy engine to life.
She drove around the block, shot through the business
district, and went all but airborne on the railroad tracks bisecting the
rural town of Sorrel. The car slid onto the deserted highway. Slowly,
the speedometer crawled to fifty and then sixty miles an hour.
A doe leapt gracefully through the tunnel of glare
cast by her headlights. Lori envied the animal its freedom from the
complexities of human existence. Karen had braced herself against the
dash with her gaze locked with grim determination on the road ahead. Lori
finally found the emotional resources to switch gears and mull over the
possible nature of Karen’s emergency.
She knew Virginia Cornell by sight, but had never
spoken with the woman. Virginia and Karen were a study in contrast,
Virginia a petite, pretty chain-smoker, and Karen a health-conscious,
belligerent and unattractive giant of a woman. The two had been attending
the Children's Defense League meetings in Clayton on Friday evenings.
Karen's daughter had vanished from the face of the earth a year ago, and
Virginia had dedicated her life to disadvantaged children and related
crises as a compensation for her own childless marriage.
Three miles east of town, the malodorous aroma of
livestock and a sign glowing in the car’s headlights marked their approach
to Virginia and Richard Cornell's Hog Genetics. Pulling into the drive of
a well-groomed yard, Lori eyed the pool of light spilling from an open
side door of the sprawling ranch-style home. Karen threw her door open
even as the car slid to a stop, although her excess weight limited her top
speed to a power walk across the intervening distance to the house. Lori
rush to join her and together, they paused at the entrance to the house.
Neither were anxious to enter unbidden.
Karen called inside.
"Virginia?"
Karen grimaced with worry and then fidgeted with
mounting anxiety when no response was forthcoming. Turning to the dark
and silent night, she cupped her hands to her mouth. Forewarned, Lori put
her hands to her ears.
Karen had a voice like a thousand decibel foghorn.
"Virginia!"
Startled grunts and snorting of a dozen or so boars
sounded from out back. Sodium vapor yard lights dimly illuminated an
assortment of buildings and fences sprawled over several acres of the
property.
"I don't like this!" Karen wailed in mounting
agitation. She turned back with a groan of misery, stormed into the
house, and vanished around a corner inside.
Lori stayed put. She felt like an intruder and
wished she didn’t have to be involved. Karen thundered from room to room,
calling. When she fell abruptly silent, Lori’s curiosity became
unmanageable. She ventured inside. A glimpse of a modern kitchen filled
with stainless steel appliances annoyed her. Bill Cornell worked as a
machine operator at the Denton tractor plant. Lori’s husband was a
foreman and Bill’s boss, but Bill and Virginia made far better money with
their prized breeding hogs. She and Dave had never lived like this at any
time in their entire lives.
Karen's cry filtered through the tomb of silence.
"Oh, my God!"
Karen reappeared looking ashen. Lori flattened
herself against the wall to make room. Karen stormed past and waddled out
into the night to roam in restless circles on the lawn.
"Virginia, damn it! Where are you!"
Lori ventured deeper into the house to investigate
for herself the cause of Karen's upset. She paused alongside a bathroom
halfway down a connecting hall to the bedrooms and tried to make sense of
what she saw.
Water cascaded over the lip of an overflowing bathtub
with gold fixtures to the floor of blue ceramic tile. A cordless phone
lay in the center of the spreading pool of water as did a bathrobe and
gown fallen into a soaked heap.
The stuff of which nightmares are made.
Karen's words echoed in her memory. “And then she
screamed and the phone went dead.”
Outside, from somewhere out back, Karen wailed,
intensifying Lori’s conviction that this was, in fact, a waking nightmare
as deeply horrific as any of her own.
"Not again! Oh, my God, not again!"
Lori bolted back through the house and out into the
darkness. Karen stood screaming with her arms thrown into the black sky
near a wooden fence surrounding a barn and stock yard. Her terrible cry
frightened the unseen hogs into a tumultuous racket behind the horizontal
slats of wood.
Lori’s bobbing shadow preceded her approach and
alerted Karen. Karen turned in time to block her way.
"You don't want to see," she said in a tone of voice
suddenly deep and icily calm. "I swear on the graves of your parents,
Lori, you don't want to see."
Lori tried to push past regardless. Karen grabbed
her arm in a dangerously powerful grip.
"Karen, you're hurting me!"
"Then go back to the car! I won't let you see!”
Lori thought better of forcing the issue. She turned
back to the car with Karen following close behind. A distant wailing cry
rose and fell with the shifting night breeze.
Lori paused at the car. "Karen, you shouldn't have
to deal with this by yourself."
Karen stood entranced by shock. "Dave wasn't home,"
she said in a flat, drained tone of voice.
Lori’s teeth chattered. "I think he's out getting
drunk. He forgot about fun-night at the school. Wendy and Leslie are
stuck in town with friends."
"Take care of your family," Karen said softly. "I'll
take care of this."
Karen was right. News would spread fast in the rural
community. Dave would hear about it. He'd remember the children he had
forgotten and rush home. She needed to be there for her family when they
arrived.
Lori started the engine and backed down the drive to
the highway without further word. She looked back with a stab of guilt at
the dark figure standing alone in the night. She then drove away with
tires skipping on the blacktop.
Two county squad cars sped past halfway to Sorrel.
Their ear-splitting sirens and dazzling lights send her into nervous
convulsions of panic. She pulled to the side of the road to recover and
kept her mind carefully clear of nightmarish scenarios eager to fill the
void. She then finished the drive home and returned the car to the curb
in front of Carol's dark house. She shut off the engine. Silence snapped into place around her. And darkness.
“Don't wake me up unless
someone got killed.”
She had no intention of waking anyone. She hurried
across the street feeling small, alone and vulnerable in the night.
She locked
the door behind her, and huddled in a corner of the darkened living room.
Trees stirred in the glow of the street lamps and cast moving shadows
through the picture window.
Dreams were just dreams no
matter how terrible, but death prowled the darkness of this terrible
night. Of that, she could be certain.
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