The 13th Read online

  There were white stars.

  There were screams. Probably his own.

  There was darkness.

  And then there was a dull, persistent noise. “Ruuullrriiiite. Shhhhhthshhhht. Rullllrriiitte?” It repeated itself several times before he realized what it really said.

  “Are you all right?” he finally made out through the haze. When he opened his eyes, there was first a flash of green, and then a woman’s face peered over him. Looking up at her was like seeing someone through the water of a bath—if you were on the bottom of a deep tub.

  David tried to rub the blur from his eyes and realized he couldn’t feel his arm. He wanted to ask the woman where his arm was. He could see a wisp of frightened hair hanging down over her nose as she bent in closer, asking him again, “Are you all right?”

  He wanted to say, “No, there’s a rock in the back of my head and someone pulled my left kidney out and stomped on it.”

  But he didn’t ask about his arm or complain about his head. Instead, he said, “Guh?”

  To which the woman replied, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”

  David took that as a good cue to go to sleep.

  When he woke up the next time, the woman’s face was gone. In its place were two deep-set blue eyes, and a mouth carved from pink granite. A close-cropped goatee accented the pale color of his skin. “He’s waking up now,” the man said.

  David’s first intelligible words after the accident were somewhat academic.

  “What hit me?” he murmured.

  There were white fluorescent lights behind granite lips, and then those were obscured by an already-familiar pair of brown eyes.

  “I did,” the voice that went with those soft eyes said. The voice seemed a little harder than the eyes. Like maybe the eyes worked in a soup kitchen but the voice had kicked back a couple shots of Jack before deigning to speak to him. That wouldn’t be the first time that it had taken a little Jack to convince a girl to look his way.

  David tried to sit up, but a pain like a crowbar to the base of his spine convinced him that a prone position was exactly the pose he wanted to model for the brown-eyed girl and the granite-mouthed man.

  Instead, he looked past them to the white walls, and saw a poster with two human figures detailed in spread-eagle fashion with arrows and diagrams highlighting various points of anatomy. The poster hung above a pink counter and aluminum sink. The room seemed very clinical, he thought, and then realized that granite lips wore a white coat beneath his chin, and as a hand came into view, rubber gloves.

  “Where am I?” he managed.

  The man smiled, and leaned down to pry open David’s left eyeball. He peered into it a moment, nodded, and then let go. He nodded again.

  “Welcome to Castle House Asylum,” he said. “I’m Dr. Rockford. You’ve had an accident, but there doesn’t appear to be a dangerous concussion. Nothing is broken. You’re going to be fine.”

  David let that sink in for a moment.

  The woman stood at the doctor’s side, brown eyes wide with concern, and…something else. She looked from the doctor to him, and then asked in a small, but tight voice, “How do you feel?”

  “Been better,” he said. David looked at Dr. Rockford. “Asylum? This place used to be a hotel.”

  “What better setting for an asylum?” the doctor answered. “We have lots of rooms, a big kitchen, exercise rooms, consultation offices and lots of privacy, given the location. We’re still renovating the place, but we’ve taken in our first patients.”

  “Who would they send all the way out here, to the middle of nowhere?” David asked. “Who are you treating, serial killers?”

  Rockford shook his face and smiled, a little sadly. “No, nothing like that. These patients wouldn’t hurt a fly. Let’s see if you can sit up, shall we?”

  The doctor pressed a hand to David’s back, and gingerly, he sat up. His head throbbed and the room swirled just a moment when he got all the way up, but otherwise, he felt okay.

  “Can you stand?”

  David slid his feet off the examining table, and let himself down to the floor. The doctor held his elbow to steady him, but aside from some throbbing spots on his left shoulder and right calf, which he supposed had hit the dirt hard on his roll from the bike, he didn’t hurt too badly. Not as bad as he would have thought after being run over by a skidding car, anyway!

  “Let’s take a walk,” the doctor said. “I’ll give you both a little tour of our facility, and see how your legs are working after your spill.”

  The doctor led them through a white door and into a slate-floored corridor. Paintings of hilly country interrupted the yellowed walls every few feet. David supposed they were artists’ renditions of the countryside surrounding the old hotel.

  “These paintings are all vintage pieces,” the doctor offered. “Many of the guests of the old resort hotel were artists, and they left some of the work they did while they were here to the owners.”

  At the end of the corridor, the rich tapestry of fall and summer trees turned abruptly to a frame holding a kaleidoscope of color. David stopped and looked at the piece, trying to ascertain what, exactly, it depicted. There were arcs of red and shadows of orange. An explosion of magenta and yellow lit the top right corner, as if a bomb had lit the night sky in a grove of apples.

  “We’ve tried to continue the tradition,” the doctor said. “One of our patients used to paint before she…” His voice trailed off, and he motioned them into a wide foyer. In the middle, two women in blue hospital gowns sat cross-legged on the black floor. Both had long hair, one with straight blonde bangs hanging half over her eyes, the other with dirty bronze curls slipping down her shoulder to drape her chest. Their feet looked white as bone against the glossed surface. David thought they were staring at him. Staring, and yet, their eyes were blank, empty.

  Another woman walked into the room from a different hallway. She seemed to float along like a ghost, silent and slow. A wraith in azure with silent eyes. When she reached the center of the room, she went down on one knee, almost in slow motion, preparing to sit next to the other two women. Her belly looked thick, and David wondered if she was pregnant. He shook his head and guessed not. They couldn’t drug a mother the way she obviously was, and not harm the baby.

  She hung there, one knee in the air for a good minute, and then finally slipped to the ground with the blonde and the bronzette. And then, as she settled, cross-legged like the others, her face rose like a crane moving an unwieldy hunk of concrete and steel. Stark cheeks raised centimeter by centimeter until her gaze evened out with the others.

  And there were three women now staring, blankly, at David, and Dr. Rockford, and the woman who had nearly run him over.

  “You see, these patients are no danger to anybody,” the doctor said softly. “This is a home for women. Women who have been pushed beyond their limits.”

  “Battered women?” asked the woman who’d run him over.

  “Some,” the doctor said. “Not all. Sometimes people lose their way. For no reason we can even tell. The brain is an unpredictable organ. But we try to help them. And we need the privacy of a place like this to do that.”

  David looked at the women and suddenly forgot the ache in his back. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He shivered as he stared back at three sets of empty, unblinking eyes. The blonde put a hand on her stomach and began to rub herself in slow, circular motions. A low hum issued from her lips and she rocked forward and back, fingers kneading her breasts before slipping inside the part in her thin robe to touch places unseen. The woman beside her only continued to stare straight ahead. Straight at David. Her eyes never seemed to blink. David felt the blood rush to his face, as he recognized the naked eroticism in the movement of the other woman’s hands, which now disappeared with clear intent below her belly. A soft moan escaped her lips as she rocked.

  “What is she doing?” he whispered.

  “Feeling,” the doctor said. “This is a good sign. She�
��s in touch with the sensations of her body. These are difficult cases and sometimes the treatments leave them so numb they can’t recognize sensation for months.”

  David shifted his legs, embarrassed at the reaction of his body to the spectacle. The pain seemed to slip away in favor of a strange, urgent heat. His hands ached to reach out to someone, anyone, to…touch them. Next to him, color also crept into the female driver’s cheeks and she crossed her arms over her breasts to hide her own obvious arousal.

  “My God, what do you do to them?” David whispered, watching the zombielike patient blatantly rub herself to orgasm.

  The doctor frowned, seemingly oblivious to the obscene actions of his patient and the discomfort of his unexpected visitors. “We treat them, of course,” he said. “We’re here to help.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Billy elbowed TG once in the ribs and yelled, “Slow it the fuck down, asshole.” Only he couldn’t stop laughing as he threatened.

  TG responded by stepping on the gas and the Mustang shot through the next bend with a slalom that sloshed enough beer around in Billy’s stomach that his kidneys threatened to void.

  “You wanna spend the night in the drink?”

  “Hell yeah, I wanna spend the night in the drink.” TG grinned. “Guzzling one pitcher after the other.”

  “Yeah, well, y’all keep up the lead-footin’ and we’re either gonna be at the bottom of the valley, or we’re gonna be playing Five Card Draw in a cell next to Chief Maitlin’s work boots for the next eighteen hours. He ain’t forgot that night he caught you with Stacy in the park, and he sure ain’t gonna miss the Bud on your breath if’n he pulls us over after clockin’ an eighty-five in a forty.”

  TG grinned, then turned to spit a long stream of brown juice out the window of the beat-up ‘stang. One strand disappeared over the edge of Crossback Ridge to slap with a wet plop on a tree branch forty feet below the road. The other slapped back on TG’s neck, and he absently rubbed it off and onto his jeans.

  “Yeah,” he admitted, turning his attention back to the blurring, winding mountain road. “Chief wasn’t too happy with me when he caught my mitts in his daughter’s pinks, but that Stacy, she was worth it. And she was a screamer too. Fine poontang there, I’m a tellin’ ya!”

  “Fine or foul, he ain’t gonna show us any slack if he’s got you drunk and fifty miles over the limit. So slow the fuck down! We got us a job to do tonight—cain’t afford to be hanging in the Trinity jail. I need the green, Kemosabe!”

  “Lighten up, Billy. I need it too. But, if yer gonna be a pussy…”

  TG stomped on the brake and the car shimmied to a stop, halfway into the intersection at Ridge Road and 190. The stop sign seemed pointless out here, but TG made the token stop before letting off the brake and sliding past the valley intersection, on their way back up the ridge away from town.

  “Chief don’t bother coming out this way during the day, believe me, I’ve checked. He’s making the rounds in town. But we can slow it up. We got a couple hours to kill anyway. Cain’t do this job ‘til dark, or we will be spending the night with the chief. And the next month or two!”

  “We pullin’ this one in town then?” Billy asked.

  “You wanna drive fifty miles around the switchback to Oak Falls?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then we’re working local. So it’s time for a little picnic ’til dark. Anyway, we need to get that shit out of the trunk. We need room.”

  “There’s a whole keg back there, Holmes. Whaddya thinkin’?”

  “Keg’s staying here,” TG said, as he ripped the car to the left and they pulled up a steep dirt road that bent up and around a stand of old pines. In seconds, the mountain pass was out of sight and they were in a small clearing next to a beat-up A-frame cottage. Well, shack was really more like it. Cottage would imply some kind of vacation spot. This piece of graying fractured wood was absolutely a shack. But the black electric line that hung through the trees to latch onto a panel on the side of the building showed that the place wasn’t just an abandoned bit of decaying planks. This shack was still alive, and TG laughed and slid the car up as tight as he could to those graying timbers, dust clouding the air all around as the car coughed itself silent.

  “We need to fill the fridge ‘fore we fill the trunk,” he said.

  Billy rubbed his crotch suggestively. “We ought to fill what we fill the trunk with before we take her down the mountain.”

  TG grinned and slapped his partner on the shoulder. “See, that’s why I like to work with ya, ya dipwad. I likes how you think. Only one problem. How do we turn over the merchandise if she’s screaming ‘rape’ over and over again?”

  Billy shook his head and faked a yawn. “You telling me that every girl you took up to Fallback Point was fully cog-nigh-sant of where’s you was drivin’ her?”

  TG rolled his eyes and shrugged. “No?” he asked with false innocence.

  “Damn blotto-babed-right the answer is no,” he said. “We need to find us a chicky tonight who wants some ‘shine. Time we got some payment ahead of the green.”

  “Let’s just get that keg on ice,” TG said. “I’m thinking we’s gonna have us a party tonight.”

  “A party’s where you find it,” Billy agreed.

  “I think I know just where to find her,” TG said, poppin’ the trunk.

  “Think she’ll remember in the mornin’?” Billy asked.

  “Not if my tire iron has anything to say about it.” TG grinned, holding up a rusted rod from the trunk.

  “Oh, this is gonna be a fun time.”

  “My brother, would I pull you into a business that wasn’t a good time?” TG asked.

  Billy shook his head.

  “I’m glad you think so. Now let’s get this fucker in the house.”

  Together, they hoisted the keg out of the trunk and up the peeling gray-painted steps to the mountain shack.

  A lot of people would have been a lot happier if Billy and TG had drained the keg and forgotten about the business of the evening.

  But they didn’t.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  If Brenda Bean hadn’t spent so much time trying to get that one pink strand of hair to tuck in “just so” behind her ear, she probably would have caught the #190 bus into Oak Falls and not ended up spending the evening with the hicks at the Clam Shack. A lot of things might have been different if Brenda had caught the #190. But while she may have been a punk, Brenda was still firmly a girl, and so she did lean over the sink again and again, first wetting the strand, then blow-drying it out, then pasting it with some gel, then shaking her head in disgust, rinsing it out, and starting all over.

  When she left the bathroom and saw the time, she swore out loud. The bus only ran this route every couple hours and the next one would be too late. Her mom heard the F word from down in the kitchen.

  “Brenda! You know what I told you about using foul language.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” she answered, and then did a double take on the stairs. She was wearing the ripped black T-shirt her mom hated, and she really didn’t feel like dealing with a lecture on that at the moment. Brenda didn’t know what her mom hated more about it—the fact that it was two sizes too small and showed very clearly that Brenda hated bras, or the sayings that middle-fingered the world on front (“Fuck You If You Can’t Take A Toke”) and back (“Virgins Do It Behind Your Back”). She slipped back into her bedroom and pulled her dad’s old khaki button-down off the doorknob. He had dropped the shirt in the basement on the rag pile a few weeks ago, but she’d instantly retrieved it.

  “Why would you want to wear that?” he’d said the first time she had appeared in it, untucked shirttail hanging way below her butt.

  “It’s a cool color,” she’d said. “And it’s cool to wear a guy’s shirt.”

  Her dad had grinned and then shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as it’s not some other guy’s shirt. Because then I’d really have to ask why you were wearing it.”
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  “And I’d just have to tell you probably ‘cuz he forgot it when he climbed out of my bedroom window this morning after sleeping over last night,” she’d teased, and ducked when he threatened to cuff her.

  “Kidding, Dad!” she’d laughed. “I’d never make him climb out the window. He’d just have to wait ‘til you left for work.”

  She ran out of the room at that one, khaki shirt flapping behind her like a pauper’s gown.

  The shirt was ratty, but looked too-too comfortable against her faded denim jeans, and it effectively hid the offensive T-shirt from her mom’s eyes as she breezed through the kitchen on her way out of the house.

  “Gonna be late?” Dorrie Bean asked.

  “Not as late as I’d planned,” Brenda moaned. “I missed the 190, so I’m staying in town tonight.”

  “Good.” Her mom nodded. “I hate you taking that bus home from Oak Falls so late. You never know what kind of loser could be on that bus.”

  “Same losers who are everywhere, Mom. The bus doesn’t have a lock on lowlifes.”

  “Yeah, well, the freaks come out at night. I’m not too fond of you hanging out at the Clam Shack either. Talk about asking for trouble.”

  “Mom, everybody hangs out at the Clam Shack. If you don’t head into Oak Falls, where else IS there to go?”

  And that was the truth. As Brenda stepped out onto the sidewalk and headed down the hill toward Main, she saw a couple other heads bobbing along the streets below, moving in the same direction. You could always find someone to talk to at the Shack, because it was the only watering hole for at least twenty miles in any direction. You could also usually find someone there to go home with after last call for the same reason. The running joke at the Clam Shack was that you could eat your clam and take it home too. And the more you drank, the better your catch.

  Brenda didn’t want to catch anything at the Shack tonight…she just wanted to get buzzed. She was bummed about not going into Oak Falls, because the conversation there was always more interesting. Here, well hell, everyone in town already knew everybody else’s business…What else was there to talk about? Ron O’Grady’s latest scheme to start an Internet porn site with high-school girls…Well, cops’d nipped that one right quick. Or how about Sheila Halterman’s latest recipe for holiday eggnog—with just a hint of that secret spice she’d never reveal? Oh, the talk went from sinfully perverse to diabolically dull in the span of a heartbeat at the bar. And most of the time, she’d heard it all before anyway. But, it was still better to hang at the bar than to sit in her room or downstairs with the parents all night.