Paul Cleave - Collecting Cooper

He gets into the car and drives fast down the driveway. It’s getting dark out now, with shapes in the distance only shadows within shadows now. It feels good to be on the move again. It releases the pressure in his chest a little, but it’s nowhere near enough.

His home is no longer his home! Even at the halfway house the Grove remained out here safe and untouched and waiting for him, and now. . and now these people have ruined it! Why are they being so mean to him?

He knows the roads out here, and stays well away from the main ones in case there are cop cars about. After all, he’s still driving a dead girl’s car. He reaches the highway without seeing anybody, then it’s a trip further west until another set of back roads. There isn’t much in the way of traffic. The sun gone now, but the sky not yet black. There are no other cars around and he goes beyond the speed limit, something he’s never done before, the headlights swaying across the roads as his shaking hands move the wheel. He keeps his grip tight. He’s doing nearly 100 kph and his heart is racing. He has never driven this fast before.

He knows Cooper thinks their temporary home is Sunnyview, but Cooper doesn’t know everything. Adrian has driven here twice. The first time was when he was learning to drive and Ritchie thought it would be fun for them to learn on back roads without risk of being caught. They drove here and parked at the top of the driveway, both of them too nervous to go any further, both of them daring each other and laughing. The second time was Monday night when he followed Cooper out here when Cooper had the girl in the trunk of his car, and that time he stayed well back in case Cooper heard him.

This time he pulls up the driveway, there is nobody to dare him, nobody to laugh with. Sunnyview is a much bigger building than Grover Hills and he doesn’t like it; it doesn’t have the homey feel that the Grove has. It’s more modern, it’s made from brick and it’s more boxy and in better condition and life may have been different if he’d been sent here instead. The lawns are overgrown with patches of thistle coming through, and around the back it’s knee length and tickles at his legs and he hates it. The skin on his back tingles as he carries the shovel and follows the path by the brick wall, using a flashlight now to light the way. At the end he turns left and takes a few footsteps before remembering he was supposed to go right. He should have taken notes. He knew it at the time, but he thought he would do okay. The sky is mostly dark now, purple way in the distance. There are big trees only a short distance away and thankfully Cooper didn’t bury the girl in there otherwise he’d never find her. He runs in line with the building and actually trips into the ditch. It’s about a meter lower than the normal level. He follows it looking carefully at the dirt. He finds the tree. It’s a silver birch and the branches are all brittle. He climbs over it and it snags at his shirt and tears a small hole in it. He reaches back and drops the shovel and his foot gets tangled and he falls into the ditch, tearing his shirt even more. He picks up the shovel and bangs it flat against the ground twice, then tosses it forward a few meters, bangs his fists into the ground, and starts to cry. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

It takes him a minute to get back up. His shirt is ruined. He finds the shovel and carries on. He has a headache. He counts out what he thinks are ten meters. The dirt looks different, it’s raised up a little at the ten-meter mark, and he stabs the shovel into the ground. His itches fade as he digs, but he doesn’t have to dig long before he finds her.

For a girl who has been dead only a couple of days, she is a real mess. In fact she is so much of a mess that he wonders if this is the girl at all and not another of Cooper’s victims. After all, he did say he’d killed six people.

He is frightened that if he picks her up she is going to fall apart. And anyway, he doesn’t want to touch her with his fingers. There are bugs and worms squirming around in her body. He looks around, sees nothing useful, then decides to use his shirt. After all, it’s already damaged. He takes it off, wraps it around the dead girl’s foot, and pulls.

The foot remains attached to the body, and the body slides up and out of the grave, lots of dirt stuck to it, some ugly-looking bits of flesh being left behind. He scoops her up. He keeps her held away from his body. He thinks if he tried dragging her all the way back to the car, there wouldn’t be much of her left by the time he got there. He carries her around the silver birch tree instead of over it. He gets her back to the car and into the trunk. He leaves his shirt with her.

He needs to clean up. He’s covered in dirt and what he thinks might be bits of the dead girl.

He takes a flashlight up to the main entrance of the building and tries the door. There is a chain going across the handles with a padlock that looks much newer than the one he smashed from the Grover Hills doors. He steps away and returns with the shovel. He rests the flashlight on the ground so it’s pointing at the chain, gets a secure grip on the handle of the shovel, and swings. The first swing he misses the lock completely, and the edge of the shovel slides down the door and into the concrete step, vibrating through his hands, a few small chips of cement flicking up and getting him in the lip. When he swings again, it’s out of anger. He hits the door three times before connecting with the chain, and when he does connect nothing happens, not until a few swings later when he hits down on the chain with enough force that the door handle it’s attached to splinters away. He’s curious-curious as to what it’s like inside, curious as to what his life may have been like if he had been sent here instead. The hallways and rooms are as black as a cave, and the flashlight struggles to penetrate the dark. He leaves the shovel behind and moves through the building slowly, comparing the rooms to those of the Grove, the flashlight always keeping ninety percent of his surroundings in the dark. He finds a bathroom and rinses himself down. The water is ice cold. He carries on. He finds a strange-looking room unlike anything he has back home. It has a padded table bolted into the middle of the floor, arm and leg restraints connected to it. There are lots of power sockets around the walls and spaces on the floor and on benches where big pieces of equipment used to be, and a piece of wood with bite-marks in it with a strap connected to each end. He thinks this is one of those rooms where people used to get electrocuted when people thought that kind of thing helped. They’d put wires on you and turn up the voltage and it was supposed to fix up your brain. Geez, back then they’d even slice out part of your brain because the doctors thought it would help. He hopes they don’t do that kind of thing anymore, and he’s thankful that’s one thing he never had to go through at the Grove. The basement was bad, and some of the things the orderlies did to him down there were worse, but he thinks he would still choose that over having bits of his brain cut off.

The naked girl in the next room comes as a complete surprise. His heart jumps in his chest when he sees her and he almost drops the flashlight. It’s the girl Cooper brought out here the other night, the girl Adrian was sure that Cooper would have raped, killed, and disposed of by now, and yet here she is, so the girl he dug up is definitely a different girl. She doesn’t look dead, and as if to confirm it, one of her arms moves slightly toward him, a spasm, like a cat chasing mice in a dream. There is duct tape across her eyes and two empty water bottles on the floor next to her. Her arms are tied behind her.

When he followed Cooper here on Monday night, he had hidden his car off the side of the road and approached on foot. At the driveway where he and Ritchie had stopped that day, he argued with himself what to do next, wanting to creep forward to get a better look but afraid he’d get spotted. He was brave enough to go as close as the Sunnyview entrance, but no further. He couldn’t hear what was going on inside, but he didn’t have to hear or see to know. He ran back down the driveway and down the road to his car. From Sunnyview he drove into town and left his car on the side of the road and took the car that had belonged to the girl Cooper took. This whole time he just assumed she was dead, and finding her alive is a blessing.