Bad Thoughts

Chapter 18

That night Shannon dreamt about Herbert Winters again. Like before, Shannon was pulled from a mindless, blissful drifting to have Winters hovering over him, grinning like there was no tomorrow. And like before, Winters seemed like a caricature of the man who had tortured him twenty years earlier; now balding, fortyish, his features bloated, his body looking as if a few extra layers of stucco had been slapped on.

But he still had that malformed chin. He still had those pale, rattlesnake eyes…

For a long while Herbert Winters seemed content just to grin at Shannon, his eyes dead within his fleshy face. There was an odor that came off him. A sour rancidness. It assaulted Shannon’s senses. Winters noticed the effect and grinned even wider.

“The smell of death,” he said with a sly wink.

Shannon tried to pretend he wasn’t there. Tried to keep from breathing in that smell. It was like garbage and rotting flesh and sickness all mixed together. It hung in the air and made his skin feel dirty.

“You know all about that smell, don’t you?” Winters asked. “You inhaled a big whiff of it from your mom that day. And an even bigger whiff of it from me, didn’t you, boy?”

Shannon didn’t answer. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to keep from smelling that smell. Breathing in through his mouth didn’t help any.

“You just can’t get enough of it, can you, Billy Boy?” Winters asked, laughing lightly, the fat on his body rolling gently. “Is that why you like working homicide so much? To be around that smell?”

Shannon didn’t want to answer him but he couldn’t help himself. He heard his voice telling Winters it was so he could put shit like him away.

“I don’t think that’s it,” Winters said after thinking about it. He shook his head, his lips forming a small pout. “No, I just don’t think so. I think you need that smell. But by the time you get to the body it’s faded. It’s all but gone. And the little that lingers is no longer enough for you, is it?”

Shannon clamped down hard on his teeth. He tried like hell not to breathe.

“That’s why you had to kill those women. So you could get that smell fresh. So you could inhale it deeply into your lungs. So you could let death fill you up.”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Keep telling yourself that, boy.” Winters started making a laughing noise deep in his sinuses. “You forget I’m part of you. I know what you’ve been up to, Billy Boy.

“And don’t take too much comfort in those test results!” Winters snapped at once, his dead-fish skin beginning to redden. “All those test results showed was that you didn’t kill Roberson. It proved nothing about those other two women.”

“Roberson and those other two were-”

“Were what?” Winters rudely interrupted. “Killed by the same person?” He burst into laughter, his thick body now convulsing wildly. It sounded like he was choking on food. “Says who?” he sputtered out when he could, his eyes now alive, now glistening with amusement.

“They weren’t killed by the same person,” he explained after a while. “Remember one thing, Billy Boy. You and me are part of the same ball of wax. When you went bye-bye last week, you let me out of the bottle. And, Billy, you may not remember all the gory details, but I do. I have to tell you we had a hell of a time-”

The smell had become unbearable. It had become like a thick, oozing liquid. Shannon had an image of it filling up his lungs. He felt like he was drowning in it, and like a drowning man he started to panic. In a mad rush he felt himself moving away from the smell… Winters’s image dimmed. His voice started to fade… The smell.. .

Shannon woke up. His heart pounding, his skin clammy wet, the sheets around him damp. For a brief moment he thought he detected that smell. He jerked himself upright, inhaling deeply as he concentrated. He forced a stillness within him as he desperately tried to find if that smell was anywhere around. But it was as elusive as his peace of mind, and similarly, just as distant.

Shannon exhaled and looked over at Susie. He touched her gently along the cheek to make sure she was still alive and then let his fingers gingerly trace the outline of her small body. She murmured softly in her sleep.

The last thing he wanted to do was wake her. If she found out about his dream she’d leave him for good. He had no doubt about that. Because he wasn’t supposed to have another breakdown, at least not ’til next year.

Lying among dirty sheets ten miles away in an eight-dollar-a-day rooming house was the flesh and blood embodiment of Shannon’s nightmare. On cue, his eyes opened and his lips formed into a crooked smile, framing an almost nonexistent malformed chin.

He was pleased with how things turned out. More than pleased, really. He had guessed right about the blackouts, and more importantly, how that little piece of shit didn’t have a clue what he did during them. It was the reason why he could never visit the little pissant during those times. You can’t visit someone who’s not there.

He started laughing. A thin, wheezing sound. It oozed out of him like a noxious gas filling the room. “Just wait, Billy Boy,” he breathed softly in a wispy, singsong voice, “you might think your nightmare just ended but it hasn’t even begun. And when it happens it’s going to be a real eye-popper. You can bet on it.”

It took a long while before he stopped laughing. Before he closed his eyes again.

Of course, the man wasn’t Herbert Winters. Winters was long dead, his corpse cremated twenty years earlier. But while the man may not have been Herbert Winters, he knew what had happened in that house that day. He knew because Herbert Winters wasn’t alone.