The Neon Jungle

Chapter Twenty

Paul Darmond lay in darkness, his fingers laced at the back of his neck. He turned and looked at the clock. The luminous hands made the right angle of three o’clock. He remembered the tall good look of her as she walked away from him. He did not believe in premonition, but he had slept several times, and had awakened each time with the nagging thought that he would never see her again. That forever in his mind would be that last look of her as she walked away.

The clock said ten after three.

He sat up in the darkness and threw the covers aside and sat on the edge of the bed. He yawned and dressed slowly in the darkness. He let himself out and stood in front of the building. It was three-thirty. He turned resolutely in the opposite direction from the market and the old shambling house. He walked a few blocks and then slowed and stopped and stood for a time, and turned back and walked slowly back and passed his apartment. It was childish, but he knew it would make him feel better to just walk by the place where she slept. He wished he knew which window was hers.

When he was two blocks from the house he quickened his step, and felt an odd prickling of apprehension at the nape of his neck.

But when he arrived at the house it stood huge and dark and silent. He stood in the soft warm night on the narrow sidewalk looking up at the third-floor windows. Like, he thought, a lovesick kid.

The second-floor light startled him when it went on. Then he realized it was probably Gus getting up to go down to the market.

The sound came loudly, shocking its way through him. It was like no sound he had ever heard before. It took him the space of three heartbeats to identify it for what it was: the hard full crazy-throated screaming of a woman, short shrill bursts of screaming as she sucked her breath in, let it burst out in a scream lasting no more than a second, and then did it again and again. He ran for the front door of the house as hard as he could run, and as he went up the steps in one bound, the last metronomic scream was abruptly cut off. He tore the door open and ran up the flight of stairs.

Filled with the restlessness of a sense of impending trouble, Lieutenant Rowell, after the last of the joints in his area had closed, cruised slowly down the empty streets, making random turns. The metallic voice suddenly filled the car. Rowell listened, and then made a U-turn, bouncing the right front wheels off the far curb, and tromped the gas pedal down hard. He shrieked to a stop in front of the Varaki house and drew his short muzzled revolver as he went toward the front porch in a bandy-legged run.

Rick woke up when the alarm went off. He was astonished to see that it was dark outside. It took him a few moments to remember why he had got up at this hour. He felt sodden and greasy with sleep. He turned on the light and dressed quickly. He felt abused. Saturday was always a hard day. Now people wanted you to get up before the birds did.

He went quietly through the house and tiptoed up the stairs to the second floor. He started down the hall and thought he heard a sound behind him, a sort of grunting and a stir of movement. He stopped and listened and heard no other sound. Darkness had always made him uncomfortable, had always given him the feeling of something all teeth that was about to jump out at him. He licked his lips. He stopped in front of Gus’s door and he wanted to knock at the door. Behind the door was a bed where a man and a woman slept together. He did not like to think about that. He wiped his hand on the side of his pants and gingerly turned the knob and opened the door. He wanted to cough or something. He tiptoed in and he could make out the bed. He could barely see the prone figure of the sleeper. As he tiptoed across the room he could hear breathing sounds. It didn’t sound just right for somebody sleeping because they seemed too fast. He stood by the bed, peering down, and wiped his hand on the side of his pants again and reached gingerly down to shake Gus by the shoulder. His hand brushed and touched an odd heavy roundness, and something caught at his sleeve. He heard a hard thumping like somebody running. Somebody running in the hall. And the harsh overhead light went on suddenly and there alone in the bed was Jana, and he turned quickly toward the door and saw a man running at him, mouth wide open and twisted in a funny way, a man with a face he didn’t know for a moment, and then he saw it was Gus running toward him. He felt his own lips stretch in the smile that had protected him from so many things, and he said, “I was just—” And he saw Vern in the doorway behind Gus and felt relief because Vern would explain. And he saw a flashing glint in the light and saw in a thunderous part of a second what Gus was doing to him even as the quick flashing slanted up toward his head, and the flashing turned into a great hard white hot burning light that slid him tumbling over in brightness like a bug in a lamp shade, tumbling, grinning, his ears saying back to him “just... just... just...” in the instant before a great hairy hand turned out all the lights in the world.

He had squatted on the stairs with Vern and he heard the slow creaking as some animal that walked on two legs like a man began to make his cautious way up the stairs. Violator of my house and my pride and my dignity as a man. Someone who waited until the little truck rattled away and who thinks now he is safe from the vengeance of the Lord God Almighty.

And he comes closer and turns down my hall toward my wife, filled with his animal lust, and I cannot keep entirely quiet. I make a small noise and someone near me I have forgotten in this moment puts his hand on my mouth. Then I am still and the one who creeps toward my wife stops and we wait and listen for a sound of each other like animals in the forest darkness. I am still and he walks on and then the one with me fumbles at my hand and my fingers close around the good and familiar handle of the great cleaver, the one kept razor-keen by Rick. It feels good in my hand and by now the animal has had time to reach my wife. I start quietly down, and I am quiet until I reach the hall and then I can be quiet no longer. I run and reach around the doorframe and snap on the light and half blinded I see her eyes and the man who turns is Rick, and as I run at him I swing the good keen weight, swinging it up with all strength and hate, and feel the good deep bite and hear the deep wet sound of the way it bites up into the animal brain of the thing I kept in my house and never knew. And I wrench the blade free as he is falling, his pink hands half lifting as he falls. And her mouth is wide and the cords in her throat stand out and she is sitting, kicking her way back away from me. And I take one step and there is a funny breaking in my chest, with something warm that spreads itself inside there. I am on my knees and the house had tilted so that the floor is a hill that slopes to the window. And I go over face down on the hill slope feeling the warm wetness inside my chest and wondering about it, and at the same time watching the slow rug pattern come up, and come close to my face and strike hard against my cheek, yet without pain. And as I am wondering curiously about these things, the slope becomes steeper and it is very slippery, and I slide down the slope to the dark window and through it and fall down out of the dark window, turning in the air in darkness and thinking that this is something of a great oddness indeed...

He crouched beside Gus on the stairs and together they listened to the silence, and then to the slow creaking as Rick continued on down the hall. He had his hand on Gus’s shoulder and felt the movement of the shoulder muscles. He found Gus’s hand in the darkness and worked the cleaver handle into it and let go cautiously as he felt the shift of weight. He gave a gentle push at the broad old back. The old man went quietly down the stairs, but as he reached the hallway with Vern close behind him, he began to run. Vern ran quickly after him. He saw the room lights shine out into the hall the instant the old man ran through the doorway. Vern stopped in the doorway. He saw the hard swing, matched to the plunging run, and saw Rick’s smile and the soft uplifting of the small hands as the blade hit just under his left ear, upslanting, cutting jaw, brain, and smile. Jana screamed the first time as Rick fell, and she scuttled backward away from the approaching menace of the cleaver.

She screamed again and Gus faltered and dropped heavily to his knees, shaking the room, as though the very scream itself had knocked him down. He saw what he had to do quickly and he scampered frantically for the cleaver, snatching it off the floor near the still hand of Gus. She sat back in the corner, eyes squeezed tight shut, chin up, throat taut with the constant nerve-shattering screams. He swung hastily at her but the cleaver tip bit into the wall and the blade stopped an inch from her temple. He wrenched it out and as she began another scream he struck again at the source of the scream, knowing only that he had to make that sound stop.

The sound of the truck driving out awakened Bonny. She thought perhaps it would help Jana if she were to open her door if Vern started out of his room to go down to her. She put on her robe and stood close to her door, listening for any sound. For a long time there was no sound. At last she thought she heard somebody moving about on the floor below. She cautiously opened her door in order to be able to listen a bit better. The slow seconds went by. And then she heard somebody running along the hall below her.

There was then a sound that seemed to come up through the floor. A hard scream of ultimate terror. There was a sound of something heavy falling. Her scalp prickled all over as the scream came quickly on the heels of the last one. Without conscious awareness of how she got there, she found herself at the head of the stairs as the screams kept coming. When she was midway down the stairs the screams stopped and there was a more terrible silence. She hurried down the hall to the patch of light shining through the door. Walter came out into the hall in pajamas too big for him, staring stupidly.

As she reached the doorway she heard the odd sound. She looked into the room. She saw the split melon that had been Rick Stussen’s head. She saw Gus, face down. She saw the man who knelt on the bed. He held a red cleaver in both hands. He struck with solemn intentness, like a small boy hammering nails. For a moment her mind could not encompass the enormity of what she was looking at. She stood and frowned and in the moment of his turning to look at her she was able to focus her mind on what the eyes had already seen. The room turned vague and she swayed sideways against the doorframe.

She would have fainted, she knew, had he not turned and looked at her. He wore a dead face. From the eyes down, the face was utterly, hideously slack, as though all the muscles of cheeks and mouth had been removed. The slack face seemed to hang from the eyes. And the eyes were utterly dull, absorbing all light and reflecting none. And as he started toward her, smeared, stained, hideous out of the charnel stink of the room, she turned and ran for the stairway, wanting only to get out into the night, to run down the dark street.

She blundered hard into Paul Darmond, hearing behind her the bang of the door as Walter popped back into his room. She clawed at Paul as he tried to hold her, and she yelled, “Run! Oh, run!”

His dullness of wit in that moment infuriated her. She heard the familiar clattering sound of the truck coming into the drive and, out front, a hard screech of tires as a car stopped quickly. She knew that she could not bear to scramble past Paul and leave him to face what came down the hallway. Perhaps only a moment passed before he sensed and comprehended the immediacy of the danger. His fingers locked hard on her wrist and they went down the stairs and she could hear it coming after them. It was like one of the nightmare of childhood, like running through glue, your steps a slow drifting, while something comes after, comes nearer.

They went out the front door and across the porch and down the front steps, and Rowell, with the gun in his hand, was one of the most comforting things she had ever seen.

“What is it?” he demanded, his voice unexcited.

“Vern,” she said. “He’s killing them.”

Rowell went across the porch and into the dark house. Paul said, “Wait in his car, Bonny.”

“No. You can’t do anything. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t go back in there.” She was beginning to shake all over, her teeth chattering, wavering as she stood. He put his arm strong around her shoulders. There were lights on in most of the houses. People had come out on porches in robes and coats.

Another police car came riding in on the siren’s wail and two uniformed men piled out and trotted heavily toward the house and the sound that came out of the open front door stopped them in their tracks. A chittering whinnying sound, a sound of pure madness.

There was a thrashing and a scrambling and silence. The porch light came on and the hall light came on. Rowell appeared in the doorway, his face cramped with pain, nursing his right hand against his stomach.

His voice was ancient and rusty with pain, yet full of authority. “Moran. Get out there and call in. There’s some deads upstairs and a crazy in the hall and I need a doc. I got a busted hand. Bracelet that crazy while he’s still out, Schantz. Wrists and ankles. There’s a kid sitting on him.”

Inside the house a woman began to scream. It was not like the other screaming. This was thin, weak, petulant. One cop had trotted out to the prowl car. The other had gone in the house. Walter came hurrying out onto the porch. “The baby’s coming!” he hollered. “The baby’s coming!” Sirens grew in the distance. “Do something, somebody!” Walter yelled.

The intern on the first ambulance, at Rowell’s request, gave his attention first to Doris Varaki. She was sent off in the family sedan, Walter driving.

Paul said to Bonny, “You can’t stay here. I’ll have one of the police sedans drive us to my place.”

“I’m all right. I’ll be all right.”

Rowell said, quite softly, as though explaining to himself, “Not a sound when I went in there. Not a damn sound. Some light coming down the stairs. Then something moves right beside me and as I start to turn around he chops at my hand, chops at the gun with that cleaver. Didn’t know what it was then. Thought it was a club. Handle must have been slippery and turned in his hand, because he broke my hand with the flat of it. Had me trapped then, right against the wall at the foot of the stairs. Saw what he was holding. Saw that face. My God! Never closer to dying. Couldn’t even twitch. Then that punk came out of nowhere. Came in through the back someplace. That pet of yours, Preach. One of those gutless wonders of yours. Oh, damn him! Saw everything in a split second and banged into Lockter so the swing of that cleaver missed my face by a half a whisker. And Lockter turned around and the punk ducked the swing and grabbed him. I came out of the trance and yanked that cleaver away from him. Then the crazy started making those gobbling noises and going for the kid’s eyes with his hands. That punk kid, Paul, he shoved him away and chopped him one right on the button. Oh, God, a pretty punch.”

“That punk kid,” Paul said softly.

Rowell looked up at them. “I know. I know. What am I going to do?”

“Thank him, I’d imagine.”

“Back up, you people!” Moran bellowed. “Nothing to see. Nothing to see here. Back up. Break it up!”