Nightmare Child (8 page)

"Mindy, are you…feeling okay?"

"What's going on here, Jeff? You give me your solemn word that today you'll take care of her, and then you don't do it."

"Take care of whom?"

"Of whom? Whom the hell do you think? Jenny, of course. Dear little Jenny."

"Mindy, I still don't have a clue as to what you're talking about. How was I supposed to take care of Jenny?"

"Holy shit, Jeff! She's done it again, hasn't she?"

"Done what?"

"Played with your mind. Taken away all of your memories. You don't remember anything about last night, do you?"

"Last night?"

Snow. Naked. Brook Crash. Diane.

"You know what she's doing, don't you?"

"Jenny, you mean-"

"Yes, dear heart—Jenny, I mean. She's playing with us. Pitting us against each other."

"Jenny?"

Mindy sighed. "Well, if you won't do it, I will."

He wondered if Mindy had snapped. Ever since the day they'd put Mindy in that box in the rear of the BMW—"Do what?" he said.

"Kill her."

"Kill Jenny?"

"Strangle the little bitch with my bare hands. Or at least give it the old college try."

"But she's just—"

"Just what, sweetie?"

"Just an innocent little girl."

"Right." She coughed. "God, she must have wiped your slate clean. Entirely. You don't remember anything, do you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mindy, I admit, but before we say anything else, I want you to promise me that you won't lay a finger on Jenny."

"You didn't say it."

"I didn't say what?"

"Innocent little girl. She loves when you say stuff like that. It makes her laugh. But you wouldn't remember that, would you? Boy, she really did a number on your memory, Jeff. She really did."

"You've neatly evaded the issue."

Mindy sighed again. "Oh, okay, I promise I won't lay a hand on her. Not until you're here. Maybe I can bring you back up to speed again."

"You promise you won't hurt her in any way?" He wondered whom he should call: Police? Priest? Shrink?

"I promise." Her tone grew nasty. "You don't remember about my dog
Ringo
, then, do you?"

"What about
Ringo
?"

"You never did like him."

"I like
Ringo
all right."

"Listen to you. 'I like
Ringo
all right.' Now there's enthusiasm." Pause. "You don't remember, do you?"

"Remember what?"

"What you did to
Ringo
?"

"I didn't do anything to
Ringo
."

"Of course you did. And you weren't sorry about it, either."

"Sorry about what?"

"Not only won't you remember it, but you won't believe it when I tell you."

"Tell you what?"

"What you did to
Ringo
."

"Which was?"

Another sigh. "You tore him apart with your bare hands and then you ate him. You sat right at the kitchen table and ate him. You had a pile of entrails in front of you and you'd scoop up a handful and just…eat them. You even made slurping sounds. I just kept sobbing, thinking of poor
Ringo
."

"You're insane, Mindy. I've been needing to tell you this for some time. You are insane."

"Of course, I don't blame you for what you did. I mean, she made you. She took off her glasses and made you stare into her eyes and—" She coughed again. "Any way you could come home early?"

"Around five would be the earliest."

"Tonight's going to be the night. Tonight we're going to take care of her, Jeff. Or she'll take care of us."

"Mindy, I wish you'd please lie down."

"Oh, now, that would do a fat lot of good, wouldn't it?"

"Lie down. Take two of your tranquilizers."

"And just get some rest?"

"Exactly. Get some rest."

"You're the one who should get some rest,
Jeffie-poo
. You're going to need it for tonight."

"What's tonight?"

"We're going to kill Jenny. And this time do it the right way."

With that, she hung up.

It was by accident that Jeff ran into—literally—Brenda Kohl.

Out of coffee in his office, and his secretary having gone home early because her oldest boy was ill, Jeff carried his Mr. Coffee pot down to the lunchroom for more water and to see if there was any Danish left from that morning. Jeff liked Danish just as it started to turn stale.

Finished with his task, carrying both pot filled with water and peach Danish, he came around the corner and slammed directly into Brenda, dousing the front of her white linen suit with water.

Jeff made all the expected noises of apology and regret. He had not been in the
Hubba-Hubba
Room with Brenda in more than three months. Not that he hadn't asked her. He did so regularly, at least once a week. She always turned him down. Having finally gotten her promotion to Art Director—thanks to Jeff's intervening—it soon became obvious that she wanted no more to do with him. There was even talk that she had a new boyfriend, an intense, swarthy young man in the television production department named Gillian.

Finished daubing at her with several pieces of paper towels, he took her elbow and led her away, to an alcove in the hallway.

"You don't know how badly I feel," he said.

"It's not that big a deal. It's just water." She glanced at her diamond-studded watch, obviously eager to be gone.

"That's not what I mean. I mean—" He knew he was whining again. He couldn't help himself. "I mean, you're all I've been thinking about, and I finally get a chance to see you and I end up doing something stupid like this."

"It's all right, Jeff. It's really all right." This time she looked at her watch in a dramatic, unmistakable fashion so he'd get the point.

She started walking past him, but he stopped her with the hand carrying the Mr. Coffee.

"How about going—you know—downstairs?"

She seemed startled. "God, Jeff, don't be pathetic. You know it's over between us."

He had never seen a woman with less compassion in her eyes than Brenda displayed at this moment.

"I just want to talk to you for a few minutes."

Pretending not to hear him, she waved at two men passing by. One of them winked at her. Jeff's failed love for her was common knowledge in this pitiless hallway.

"A few minutes. In my office. We don't even have to go downstairs, then. In my office? How would that be?"

She frowned. "God, Jeff, you're really frightening me. You're losing it. Don't you see that? You're losing it."

He felt the heat begin in his belly. It was like the pain of an ulcer, only fifty times worse. He started to double over and clutch for the wall, but it was then that he noticed his hand and heard her begin to scream.

Across from where he stood was a framed oil painting of the agency founder, a white-haired man all got up in a white commodore's suit. In the glass of the painting, Jeff could see his own reflection. He understood why Brenda was screaming. He wanted to scream, too.

His head was a bubbling mass of leprosy-like open sores dripping green pus. Over this was a scraggly covering of oily black hair. His hands had also distended and were large, gnarled claws with the same open sores as on his head.

He reached for her to assure her everything would soon be all right, but she only screamed all the more and fled down the hall.

He could hear doors opening and male voices shouting, asking her what was wrong. She was so upset that she couldn't tell them in any coherent way.

Jeff glanced around. In either direction he went, he was bound to run into somebody. He had no idea what had happened to him, and there was no time right now to think about it.

Instinctively, he started down the carpeted hall. Footfalls sounded behind him. People--getting closer.

Seeing a broom closet, he dived forward, grasping the doorknob, and jumping inside.

In the darkness, pushed far back against the wall, he stood sweating, chest heaving, feeling the searing warmth cover his body, smelling a fetid odor that was like an animal that had lain dead for days in extreme heat.

At some point in his terror and delirium, he passed out, sliding down the wall, unconscious before he reached the floor in a heap.

He had no idea what time it was when he awoke. Disoriented, he grasped into the darkness, touching the edge of a tin bucket and the handle of a broom.

Closet.

A few memories came flooding back. He had been talking—well,
pleading
was a more accurate term—with Brenda when suddenly he had…

He did not want to think about it.

On hands and knees, he crawled to the door, eased it open.

The hall was in shadow. The building thrummed with building sounds. No human voices, not even faint ones, could be heard.

He glanced down at his digital watch. It was nearly midnight.

Stunned, he realized he must have been in the closet for nearly…ten hours!

Grappling to his feet, he went down the hallway, past darkened and silent work areas, to his own office.

In the frost-rimmed window was a portrait of the city late at night, the red light on the fifty-story Hawthorne Building warning pilots, the downtown area still ablaze and vast display windows filled with goodies, and the further city, up in the timbered hills, an unbroken chain of lights from the suburbs.

He was enjoying a certain peace looking at all this when the phone rang.

He turned sharply and looked at it as if it were a gun that had just been fired at his back.

It continued ringing, shatteringly loud, almost ugly in its ceaselessness.

He picked it up.

"You should have seen yourself, Jeff. You were really scary this afternoon."

Then she started laughing as, lately, she always laughed.

She hung up.

He stood there, frozen, numb, listening to the words she'd just spoken, wondering how she'd known about—
Naked. Snow. Brook Crash.

The terrible memories were a little plainer now. He felt last night's pain from the cold, from his suicide attempt.

Yes, she had had something to do with that, too. Just as she'd had something to do with turning him into a repellent beast this afternoon right in front of Brenda…

He looked back at the phone.

How had she known just when to call?

"Oh, God," he said, slipping down into his chair, covering his face with his damp hands. He was no longer a monster, but he was not quite a man, either.

Jenny and her phone call had seen to that.

Jenny.

The following morning, Diane got up early to bake chocolate-chip cookies for an orphanage she worked at a few hours a month. She found the young people of the orphanage very appreciative of her efforts. She'd gotten to know many of them and liked them.

By ten o'clock that morning, the temperature outside below zero, the kitchen was warm and smelled sweetly of baking.

A yellow apron tied around her thin waist, Diane sat at the counter sipping decaf coffee and reading the paper. A festive red ribbon was affixed to the side of her lustrous dark hair.

From across the way, the
McCay
house came a shout.

When she looked up, she recalled for the first time that morning how a similar shout had awakened her last night. Her initial impression had been that Jeff and Mindy had been having a furious argument. But while one voice was definitely Jeff's, the other voice did not necessarily belong to Mindy.

Now, she realized that voice definitely was not Mindy's. A harsh crone's voice, the person made screeching noises that Diane could not quite comprehend as words.

As abruptly as it had come up, the voice vanished. Diane sat in the kitchen, brow furrowed, looking across the way at the
McCay
house. The curtains all drawn, smoke curling up from the chimney, the place seemed quiet and normal enough.

Shrugging, Diane went back to her newspaper, reading for twenty minutes until the timer went off, and she took the first batch of cookies from the oven.

Using a spatula to pick the cookies up neatly from the cookie sheet, Diane was filling a plate with plump chocolate-chip dreams when she heard another shout from next door. The voice was positively that of Jeff
McCay
.

Sensing the urgency of his tone, she set the spatula down next to the cookie sheet, and then ran across the kitchen to the window.

Jeff, dressed for the cold weather this time, stood on the front porch shouting to a closed door, "This is your only chance, Mindy! You'd better take it!"