Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

She bent three keys before she gave up. There were others, but Amy doubted that they were any stronger. She sighed, long and low. And when she drew another breath through pursed lips, the sigh seemed to continue.

She turned, confronting pouting lips twisted into an expression that was just this side of amused.

Amy’s hands curled into fists at the sight of April’s corpse. Okay. Things were getting just a little bit out of hand. She was upset and she was scared. But she had every right to be. She’d spent the better part of the evening playing games with a fat slug who thought that he was clever. Said slug had directed her to the home of a man who kept a dead bimbette in not-so-cold storage, a man who mistook her for some kind of reincarnation of the heretofore mentioned bimbette. She’d watched the man become most distressed when he realized that she wasn’t exactly eager to step back into his life for round two. So he’d locked her up along with the expired object of his affections in said not-so-cold storage before going off to work like it was just another day.

Oh, and there was a little matter of murder in there somewhere, too-she’d sent said slug to the big flower-bed in the sky.

Amy laughed. The whole thing was David Lynch weird. If she wanted to appear on Geraldo when she got out of this, or sell her tale to the tabloids, sky would be the limit.

I WAS A GHOST IN THE CELLAR OF HORROR!

Hell, maybe this could even be a TV movie.

AMELIA, AND NECROPHILIA.

The slim bone of light flickered above. If it out…

God, she didn’t want to think about that.

She searched the room again. April’s corpse was there, of course. And there was a fancy La-Z-Boy that looked like it came from the nearest Grandpa Standard Equipment outlet. But there was nothing she could use to free herself.

A pair of muddy baseball cleats lay on the floor in front of the chair. A Jack Daniel’s bottle sat on a small table next to it. The bottle was half empty, or half full, depending on your perspective. A prescription bottle sat next to the JD bottle, two bullets remaining.

Amy examined the pills. Halcion. Sleeping pills. Amy had read about them. Critics claimed they could be dangerous. Lawsuits were flying back and forth. She seemed to remember something about psychotic episodes brought on by the drug. The pharmaceutical industry was denying everything, but the standard-issue skepticism of a corporate attorney’s wife told Amy that this stuff was bad news.

No wonder Steve thought that she was April. He was whacked out of his head on a world-class mindbender.

A bookcase stood to one side of the door. One of those teak Scandinavian Designs things that weren’t much more than coated fiberboard. Amy examined the spines of the books. Most were worn paperbacks. She wasn’t really surprised by what she found. April’s library had prepared her for it.

She ran a finger over the cracked spines of a half-dozen books that dealt with the mysteries of dreams. The dream section was bracketed by sections concerning numerology and reincarnation, and there were also books on ghosts and hauntings and out-of-body travel. The library was a near twin to April’s own, though much smaller. Amy studied the titles, trying to remember what Steve had said about April.

She sighed, brushing Farrah Fawcett curls away from her eyes. She really should take off the wig. She really should get out of the cheerleader’s outfit. But what else would she wear? There wasn’t anything else here in the basement, unless she wanted to swap outfits with a corpse. So she opted for the books. Reincarnation. Ghosts. With enough time, she could read each one and decipher the demons that had invaded Steve’s brain. Certainly, that would happen in her TV movie, AMELIA, AND NECROPHILIA. Plucky heroine Amelia Peyton-portrayed by Morgan Fairchild, no doubt-would do some heavy-duty speed-reading while the bad guy was away, earn a degree from the plucky heroine school of reverse psychology, outwit the nut and get him to deliver her straight to the cops. And if that wasn’t enough plot for two hours of prime time, maybe old Morgan could do some therapeutic role-playing and straighten out the poor confused villain. A happy ending would probably boost the ratings.

But Amy didn’t need to read anything. She was certain that she already knew the scoop. April Destino and Steve Austin. A match made in eternal-misery heaven. Reincarnation books. Ghost stories. Brought to you by the Trailer Trash Psychic Library.

April bites the big one, self-induced. Maybe she’s hoping things will be better on the other side of the fence. Steve goes nuts. Drinks too much and drugs too much. And he begins to hope that all the self-diverting nonsense April believed is really true. He stews in these juices good and proper, and then he digs her up. And what happens? Why, he’s real disturbed to discover that April is stone cold, eviscerated, sewn-up dead.

And then she shows up. Young, thanks to plenty of makeup and subdued lighting. Bouncy, thanks to plenty of tissue. Dressed in a cheerleader’s outfit. Steve is whacked out of his head and just a little confused. So he locks up his best girl together-both of them-and he does what any man would do. He goes to work and figures he’ll worry about the whole thing later, because it’s a little much to expect that something as simple as a man can handle all this stuff at once. After all, a man can’t work and think at the same time. But maybe he’ll have some free time on the weekend or something, between ball games and pay-per-view bikini contests. Get down to brass tacks then.

In the meantime, he’ll just let his little problem keep.

Both of her.

Together in not-so-cold storage.

Men. They were like little robots. Wind ’em up and watch ’em go. Want to figure them out? Open them up and look at the gears. Metal and wire. The schematic hadn’t changed in several thousand years.

But April Destino was another story entirely. Amy realized that. April had some part in this, too. She had set Doug Douglas in motion. She had left the cheerleading outfit. And while Amy recognized that her own anger had brought her here, she also knew that her anger had been stoked by April Destino. Her strings had been pulled by an expert, and now she was walking in April Destino’s shoes. Quite literally.

Amy returned to the corner. The room seemed very small. It didn’t seem like Steve Austin’s room at all. April’s books were here, and April was here. Nothing seemed as amusing as it had just a minute or two before. Amy stared at her feet, resisting the fear that churned in her belly.

She stared at April’s corpse.

She saw what April had become.

“You brought me here,” Amy said. “You made me come.”

Silence. Blue lips pursed as if to speak, but now Amy’s hard eyes discerned the dark slivers of thread on those lips. The pursed expression was a result of an undertaker’s shaking hand, a needle worked too fast through flesh that had always been much too pliant. A task performed too quickly, as if fearful that something dangerous might spill from those cold lips.

“Why did you do it, April?”

The question was simple. Amy waited for an answer, but none came.

No words would spill from April Destino’s lips ever again.

The fluorescent light refused to whisper. The stitched silence was as impenetrable as a locked room.

In the dream Shutterbug is standing before the big drive-in screen during the world premiere of his first movie. Rows of cars stretch into the darkness, each car wedged in tight like a bullet in a full clip, each windshield dappled with a summer’s worth of dead bugs that won’t wash away until fall brings the first heavy rain. And all those eyes behind all those windshields watch Shutterbug. All those eyes see his face through mosaics of dead bugs.