Mercy almost started crying harder when she thought how much easier it would be to explain everything to Mom. Women understood how messed up they were. They knew their bodies were uncontrollable vessels of perpetually battling hormones. A woman could be giddy with happiness one minute and completely devastated at the crippling power of some perceived fear the next. She could not explain everything to Dad. She couldn’t tell him how she felt about Mom, about her desperation to have sex with Joel, her overwhelming feeling of failure about her music and her fear that her life was a pointless string of disappointments. Mom would have understood, let her voice her shopping list of worries and then shared a secret smoke with her and told her that life for a woman was much harder than a man could ever realize. Dad would blame himself because he was sensitive and then she’d feel even worse.
She almost surrendered. She almost told Dad that she wasn’t feeling well and that she’d rather just go home and curl up in bed with a book. Spend tomorrow at the bookstore helping Pete.
The bookstore. Where she had seen that guy.
Since high school, Mercy worked a few days a week at a local bookstore called Rune Books. Pete Harwinski started the place in the eighties and managed to keep it profitable through all the publishing scares. He created an online presence to make his place known for the people who prided themselves on shopping only at privately owned shops. He’d recently added free Wi-Fi and was building a coffee bar with a few plush chairs for costumers who didn’t want to buy books but liked scrolling the Internet in such ambiance. Since graduating, Mercy worked there six days a week. She’d probably end up serving coffee by the end of next week. Not very impressive for someone with a Bachelor’s in Literary Theory with a minor in English Literature.
The store was never very busy except around Christmas, but Pete made enough to keep the business going and pay Mercy twelve dollars an hour. She lived at home and didn’t really care about the money. She worked there because Pete was such a nice guy, a second father, really, and because she’d always loved books. She could sit in the store, breathing in the sweet intermingling aromas of new and old books and read all day long.
The small size of the store and the way the towering shelves of books obscured what dim lighting there was always intimidated newcomers. Most newbies wanted the latest bestseller from whoever, but some were on a mission to get a rare hardback copy of some novel published in the sixties or seventies.
Maybe two-dozen regulars frequented the store every few days or so on what seemed like a rotating schedule. Most were nice, some weird. She knew all their names, too, all except for the guy she had just seen in the diner. She should have recognized him immediately. He usually came into the store every three or four days an hour or so before closing. He never returned her hellos. He went right to the far end of the store, opposite the cashier counter. He never seemed to find anything to buy. Pete called him “the perpetual browser.”
Mercy was reorganizing a shelf of horror paperbacks from the eighties with their flashy covers of gory monsters and blood-soaked landscapes when he caught the man peering around the corner of the bookcase at her. She asked if she could help him. His eyes did some kind of weird jiggle or something and he said no. A moment later, he was running out of the store like he had forgotten some urgent appointment.
That had been a month ago. Since then, he had been in the store but always like a ghost, hidden from view, only felt as some kind of different presence. Not threatening, exactly, but certainly strange.
He probably wanted to ask her out.
Perish the thought.
SEVEN
Victor cleaned himself up and stuffed the towel back into the glove compartment. Free of that stuff, his body was calm, his mind focused. When he didn’t relieve himself for a while, he could get a little crazy. He accepted that. The pleasure he gave himself was part of his maintenance, like brushing his teeth or bathing.
With a clear mind, he could see the situation better. See the pitfalls. The danger. He had been stupid to enter the diner. Stupider still to stare at the girl and, stupidest of all, to make eye contact. It wouldn’t take long for her to place who he was. Not that she knew anything about him, but he hadn’t exactly been as covert as the situation required.
The girl might get freaked, call off the camping expedition. She’d told her friend over the phone that her father thought the night on the mountain would be some kind of bonding thing but she would much rather see a therapist together. The girl had laughed at something her friend said before saying that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe they would run into a cute hiker.
Victor had been near the back of the bookstore where she worked, on his knees, pretending to scan the bindings of old hardcover books. The girl’s voice echoed through the store and teased him with its sensuality like those mythological creatures and their songs that lured sailers to their death.
The girl was no beast. She was an innocent, perhaps marked for death as the old world gave way to the New Time, but he would give her a chance to save herself. At least for a while.
It was the how of this situation he had never fully calculated. He couldn’t simply speak to her. She would see the truth of his nature, discover he was a cleanser, and rebuke him. Then he would have to kill her.
For now, he would stay out of the way. Trail them up the mountain. Hide in the distance. Wait for his opportunity.
Like when the rats came out. He could spend hours waiting in the dark of his basement. His hearing would get fuzzy and then adjust to the silence. His eyes would find the outline of the furniture and then gradually reveal their hidden dimensions. If he waited long enough, his senses grew super keen.
Then the rats had no chance.
Sometimes he killed them outright. Other times he amputated their legs and then gradually sliced open their bellies to see how long they would keep fighting to live.
The struggle could last for some time.
He would trust in his patience, in his senses, in his self-control. In the power the universe had given him.
That was easy to do when his mind wasn’t flooded with images of the girl on her knees before him, mouth wide. In those fantasies, her eyes were black holes that cried tears of blood.
Like the tears the trees cried on the mountain.
The girl and her father were at a table in one of the windows. The glare from the sun painted the girl in a holy aura like a giant halo.
Two teenage boys were smoking on the opposite side of the front stairs. They were laughing about something.
Victor got out of the car and opened his trunk. He checked his supplies. He hoped the rifle would not be necessary. He had never fired one. It was the same kind Hugo Herrera had used. He must have been quick, reloading and firing to kill five people without anyone stopping him.
Too quick to almost be unbelievable. Why didn’t anyone try to stop him?
Because in those final minutes, everyone in that diner knew the bell of a special hour had rung. People spend lifetimes looking forward to things but when destiny catches up with them they are helpless.
We are all helpless before the Great Plan.
Victor caressed his backpack. The hunting knives were in there. Set of seven. Each sharpened and polished. Sometimes he stared at his reflection in those blades and imagined blood traversing the grooves like open veins.
He grinned.
____________________________
For a sample of J.T. Warren’s haunted house novel, HUDSON HOUSE, keep reading …
HUDSON HOUSE
by J.T. Warren
PART ONE—1984
CHAPTER 1
