Failure Read online

  “Cool it, dorkhead, she might hear you.”

  “As if. She’s out for the count.”

  Cind felt the cool chill of tile beneath her head, and realized she had slipped from her chair to the floor. She’d blacked out from the pain. A hand touched her head then, and Mr. Servente’s voice asked,

  “Cind, are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  The hand pressed her mouth to open and then a finger pried up an eyelid.

  She coughed and wriggled under his touch.

  “What happened, honey?” he asked, and she struggled to sit up.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, noting the stares of her classmates who were converging in a circle around her aisle.

  “Bad period,” she hissed, and then used her teacher’s shoulder to pull herself to her feet. Something moved in her belly and she almost fell down again, but steadied herself before letting go.

  “I’ll be fine,” she promised. “Just need the bathroom.”

  With that, Cind jolted through the throng and slipped through the classroom door before Mr. Serventes could think of hitting the call button to send for the nurse.

  Cind wasn’t going to the nurse.

  The time was here. Fucking hell. Nobody could even tell—she hadn’t started to show yet. Just as he’d promised. “It won’t take the full term,” the crazy old pervert had promised. “No one need ever know what you’ve birthed.”

  She hoped she’d make it.

  The time was here. Now.

  * * *

  The sharp electronic trill of the phone made Raymond fall off his chair.

  The house was completely still, and he’d been listening carefully for the soft thud of a downstairs door closing as he ransacked his parents’ bedroom looking for ammunition for his purloined pistol. The last thing he wanted to happen was have his mother walk into the room while he was sorting through her lingerie. She’d automatically think he was a perve, and he sure wasn’t going to tell her what he was really looking for.

  His fingers had just touched on what he bet was a box of bullets hidden behind the comforter on the top shelf of his parents’ closet when the phone rang. His grip closed and he jerked around, throwing the chair up on two legs. Raymond grabbed for a handhold on the top of the closet door as the chair started to go over, dropping the box in the process and raining a dozen gold capsules around the room as the chair hit the ground and he fell farther, sideways, crashing ungracefully into the bed on his left shoulder before rolling off to land in a crouch.

  The beige carpet was now speckled with shining projectile tips.

  Projectiles he could fire into his brain and end his whole stupid, silly life.

  The phone rang again as he managed to pull the receiver off his parents’ nightstand at the end of the fourth ring, narrowly saving the call from going to the machine.

  “Yeah?” he coughed into the phone.

  “It’s me,” a female voice responded.

  “Me who?” Raymond spit, almost hanging up. Probably one of his sister’s lamehead, watermelon lipgloss friends.

  The phone erupted with a scream, and Raymond pulled it away from his ear.

  “What the fuck,” he barked, and then he heard the thin call of her voice again, the receiver hovering halfway between the nightstand and his ear.

  “Raymond, it’s me, Cind. Please don’t hang up. I need you.”

  Raymond looked around the room at the overturned chair, comforter hanging halfway off the shelf in the closet, bullets littered around the room.

  “I’m busy right now, Cind. Sorry.”

  Busy trying to kill myself…again.

  He hung up.

  Raymond rearranged the comforter, so his mother wouldn’t suspect someone had been in her precious things. Then he stowed the chair back in its place against the wall by her makeup table, and stuffed all the bullets he could find into his pockets. Satisfied that the room was back in order, he returned to his own room to retrieve the gun. He was testing its heft in his hand and nodding at the solid feel—it was almost too heavy—when the phone rang again.

  “What?” he answered, this time on his own extension.

  “Raymond, please,” Cind cried. “I can’t reach Sal and I’ve got to get back to the house. You know the one. I think it’s time ‘cuz I’m bleeding all over. I passed out in class and I don’t feel like I can stay …ugh…awake…ugh…much more. Oh god it hurts, Raymond. It hurts so bad. You’ve got to come pick me up. Please.”

  Raymond rolled his eyes and snorted. Always a drama with Cind. But she was cute. And she had fucked him that time when Sal set them up with the old man and the intense weed. He took a deep breath and didn’t say anything, just considered.

  “Raymond, please. You helped get me into this. It’s your fault, too. I need you now.”

  He let it out and spoke softly into the phone.

  “All right. Where are you now?”

  “At the gas station across from Central. Thank you, Raymond,” she moaned. “I can’t do this part alone.”

  Raymond hung up the phone. They hadn’t done the first part alone either. He and Sal and Cind had made a tripod one night, as the weird old man looked on and gave direction. He’d kept them positioned in the center of the strange painted circles, and Cind’s breasts had been smeared with the crimson gloss of a dead virgin. Sal and he had laid her out on her stomach, and her tits had slipped over the line, and the old man had yelled to pull back, pull back.

  They had, but not before Cind had become coated in the blood of a former classmate. The three were so high the dead girl’s blood had only made them fuck harder. Sal hadn’t cared; he’d grabbed onto Cind’s hooters like they were saddlehorns and took her roughly from behind on the increasingly blood-drenched floor while Raymond lay next to them, kissing Cind’s full, slack, iron-drenched lips.

  No, they hadn’t done the first part alone.

  Pulling shut his bedroom door, he went to the garage and borrowed the Toyota he wasn’t allowed to drive. Like the parents would ever ground him at this point. Oooh, he might kill himself if they did!

  Raymond grinned and backed out of the three-car garage and onto the oak-lined street. Maybe he really would.

  Maybe after this little sidetrip. He patted the heavy steel in his pocket.

  Maybe tonight.

  * * *

  Sal swam with the dolphins. The water was rich, drowning blue and the sky was pearly, suffocating blue and the skin of the dolphin was ice-razor blue and the tips of his fingers definitely looked sickly blue, he’d been in the water a long time—it took a long time to swim out from the shore to the dolphins—and suddenly the burning orange sun had turned into a blue moon and he wondered if it was really made of blue cheese like his grandma had always claimed.

  Something burned on his thigh and he shook, swam, stood and a slam of pain woke him to the realization that he’d just tried to put his head through the roof of the truck.

  There was no dolphin, no water, no moon…only the dead roach and a dizzying spin around his eyes.

  Sal closed and opened. Closed and opened.

  This always worked for him. Bat the eyes. Didn’t get him girls, but it did clear his head.

  The neon flashes flickered into numb reality and he stared at the twilit trees in front of the cab. He didn’t dare drive for awhile.

  Sal dug out his cell phone from the glove box and pressed “power.” Might as well check in.

  The world moved beneath his ass slightly…just enough to make him feel like there were bugs in the cab with him. He shivered, and swatted at the felt upolstery next to him, just to make a point.

  “Any roaches here besides the one I’m smoking? Clear out,” he mumbled.

  The phone lit to life and found its local service. And promptly beeped like a four-alarm fire.

  Sal hit the message button and shook the cobwebs away once more. He didn’t get many messages.

  The phone connected with voicemail and asked his password. He typed in hi
s favorite combination: 69.

  “You have one message,” a disembodied bitch said. “Message one.”

  “Sal, it’s Cind. Look, I’m…I’m…Sal, I’m bleeding. I think it’s time. I need help. I gotta get to the house or I think I might die. This fuckin’ hurts, man. Listen, I’m gonna try to raise Raymond. If you get this today, Wednesday afternoon, swing by the gas station across from school. If I’m not there, hopefully I got Raymond, and we’ll be at the house. You know where. Sal…I need you now, man. Bad.”

  Click.

  Sal tried to blink back the fireflies from his vision. Everything looked…just a little round. Maybe the windshield was dirty.

  He shook his head again and then turned the key in the engine. It was after 8. Maybe Brenda didn’t want him around, but Cind had begged for him. He was headed to the house. He knew the one.

  It had old creaking wooden floors and bloodstains on the carpeting.

  If she had gone there again…she needed all the help she could get.

  IV. Blood On The Move

  She was hunched over the curb like a bag lady when Raymond pulled into the BP station. Head between her legs, hair a twisted knot hanging over her cheek, pants stained with splotches of some-thing dark. Something that still looked wet. Raymond pulled up to the air machine (50 cents) and got out next to her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Do I fuckin’ look okay?” she moaned, and spread her knees apart.

  Raymond gasped. The curb was purple, and the V of her crotch glistened a dark blue. It was darker than the sheen of her denim and somehow even darker than the black of her sleeveless black t-shirt.

  “No,” he said. “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t think so,” she whispered. “I haven’t stood up in over an hour.”

  Raymond looked around the lot, searching for eyes. Who knew they were here in the middle of the day? Who else was watching Cind bleed to death on the curb? Who would see him help her?

  The street was a blur of cars fleeing the green and beating the yellow; he couldn’t see any bystanders. Just the charcoal grey of the gas station parking lot, and the rush of revving cars. Raymond gave Cind his arm and pulled her up, and then helped her stagger to the passenger’s side of his car.

  “Here,” he said, pressing her palms to the roof. “I can’t have you stain the seats. They’ll kill me as it is for taking the car, if I don’t do it myself.”

  He pulled his Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt off and reached through the open window to spread it on the seat.

  “Get in,” he said then and helped her step backwards and then step in as he opened the door. “You never told me you actually got pregnant,” he said. “I thought it was all a mindfuck.”

  She slouched low into the bucket seat.

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “So did I.”

  * * *

  The powder was green. Florescent, electric green, like the strands of a bad Halloween wig. Aaron drew his fingers through it, relishing the feeling of touching the bones of the old witch beneath his pores. He’d boiled and burnt her down, rendering her into a dark dust that made the air smell foul, and then combined her essence with the distillate of mint and lime shavings, possum heart and Black Forest mold.

  She would serve him well or he would blow her remains so far that she could never recombine. She would make the right choice. All good wizards knew the promise of recomposition. And knew the threat of being, once and for all time, blown to the four winds.

  He smiled as he touched her burnt and powdered skin.

  “You will tell me your secrets or you will be forever gone,” he whispered.

  Aaron brought a finger up to touch his lips.

  “I promise.”

  The taste of bog slime leached his mouth like sewer gas.

  * * *

  “February, March, April…” Raymond ticked off on his fingers, once Cind was in the car. “It’s only been six months,” he said.

  “Six months and six days,” she answered, then jerked forward with a moan. “And maybe six hours,” she whispered, when she straightened back up in the seat. “Nobody ever said this would take nine months. Fuck, why shouldn’t a spawn of Satan come at six-six-six?”

  Raymond pulled out into the mid-afternoon traffic with a screech of tires. He headed south and beat the speed limit by 10.

  “Who says it’s a spawn of Satan?” he finally said, and slapped his hand on the wheel. “Shit, Cind, that could be my kid.”

  “If it is, your family’s gene pool’s got some awfully…sharp…teeth,” she cried out again as an answering stab ripped through her abdomen.

  “I don’t think I’m gonna survive this,” she moaned.

  “Don’t talk like that, Cind. You’re going to be fine. Women go through this every day.”

  She punched his shoulder and pointed at the dark slick stain of her crotch.

  “Women don’t go through this, you idiot. This is different. Whatever this is…it’s not normal.”

  Raymond didn’t answer, but the speedometer began to climb ever higher as he shifted in and out of lanes, barely missing the rear bumper of a fat woman who started slowing down to make a turn a block ahead of her destination.

  “Fuck,” he screamed and jammed the wheel hard to the right. The motion drew another scream from Cind and Raymond responded by hitting the gas harder, turning the car into an airborne bullet of steel as it shot down the hill towards the old part of town.

  Cind didn’t say anything more, just moaned in sympathy with the car as it whined and squealed towards the house of the man. The devil. The wizard. Whatever the freak was who had done this to her. To them.

  In his mind, Raymond played that night of six months before over and over in his head, each scene punctuated by a silent “fuck.”

  * * *

  “Fuck,” Raymond said. “Are you serious?”

  Sal shrugged, and blew smoke at the roof of the truck cab.

  “He said if we could get one girl to come with us, we’d score all the shit we could smoke in a year. And it was some pretty fly shit, dude, I’m telling ya. I saw colors I haven’t seen before.”

  “It was laced, man. Pot don’t give you that kind of high.”

  “No way. Serious. This was just really strong, concentrated shit. Hypo-organic.”

  Raymond laughed and took the joint from his friend.

  “And all we have to do is come to his house and smoke it with him.” Raymond put his free fist to his head. “Are you absolutely stupid, man? That’s a total set-up. He’ll ask us for a buck once we’re high and then the cops’ll pop in, slap cuffs on us and arrest us. Nothin’s free, man.”

  “I didn’t say that was it. He wants more’n our company.”

  “Then what?”

  “He wants us to fuck the girl inside of a pentagram or something.”

  Raymond took a deep drag and passed the joint back to Sal who took his own hit. As he exhaled, he smiled wide as a clown. “He’s a pervert and he wants us to perform for pot. Where do we lose? Free sex, free pot…”

  Raymond shook his head. “And what makes you think Cindy Herlford would go for it anyway?”

  Sal grinned wide.

  “That’s the best part, man. She pretends like she’s some kind of honors kid, but that’s a total act. She fuckin’ cheats off everyone. And she’s a huge stoner. But she’s totally strapped. Her dad just got laid off, she’s got no job, and she can’t score. I saw her last Friday under the bleachers giving Ramone a blowjob for a hit. I watched him force her to swallow and then he dropped a nickel bag on the ground and walked away laughing at her. She’s desperate. But he wouldn’t even touch her. And she’s not bad.”

  Raymond nodded slowly, imagining Cind Herford with her top down and her mouth wide.

  “Not bad at all,” he said.

  The orange tip of the joint lit the night for a second as he inhaled. And then the black shadows of the forest were all the world again.

  “Have you asked her yet?”


  Sal didn’t respond.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. All talk.”

  “Not talk,” Sal railed. “But I can’t be the one to ask her. I need you. She’d never fuckin’ talk to me. But you…they all talk to you.”

  Raymond laughed and put his hand up when Sal offered him back the stub of the joint.

  “Man, do I look like your pimp?”

  “Oh, like you wouldn’t mind getting it wet in Cindy Herlford. Look, I got the connection, the free pot. You can get us the girl that gets us the free pot—and a good lay in trade. Why do you think I asked you?”

  “Cuz you’re a chickenshit?”

  “No. Because we need to have three for it to work—the old man insisted. It has to be two guys and a girl or two girls and a guy. They have to all do it inside the pentagram on the floor. And there’s no way I’m going to score two girls, let alone one. I need you, man. And for another hit of this shit…you need me.”

  “Huh?” Raymond said after a second. The world had suddenly turned into a cascade of comet dust. Swirls of silvery white slipped in and out of the night like cocaine on a black velvet cushion.

  “Feel good?” Sal said, after a gap.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “There’s more where this came from. A lot more. But we need the girl.”

  Raymond’s lips felt heavy and he struggled to form the words he heard repeating like a mantra in his head.

  “I’ll get her,” he said finally. “I’ll get her.”

  V. Sal Arrives…And Remembers The First Time Around

  Sal drove the interstate like a mad-man let loose for a 48-hour spree. He had a gun in his hands and he was trigger-ready. The truck growled and kicked as he rounded the corner of Iphod’s Hill and shot across the intersection of Main and Levy without slowing.

  Cind was in pain, and it was his fault. He’d gotten them all into this, promised them a free ride all the way…and now it was time to pay the bill.

  “Damn,” he spat and pulled the wheel hard to the right, taking the alley cutoff from Lawton down to old town. The narrow pitted lane ended behind the old meatpacking plant, and just in front of the tall narrow grey-wood house that they had all been to once before.