Beneath the Mask of Sanity Read online

  43.

  As Frank got closer to the shacks, a smell began to hit him. There were all sorts of smells, mostly dirt and filth, but this one was different. This was a smell that Frank was quite familiar with, and he separated it out of all the other smells.

  For a second, he paused and looked back towards his car. It was brown, dingy and unmarked. No one knew he was out here, if something happened to him…

  “So call the station.”

  “Can’t,” he whispered.

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Don’t want to until there’s something to actually report.”

  “Than get your ass up there, you know which one it is.”

  And he did. There were four shacks close to the edge of the woods. One of them sat apart from the other three. It hung more towards the road and leaned just slightly to the right. The smell was coming from there. Frank followed his nose and leaned forward to steady himself as he crested the small embankment that led up to the dwellings.

  As he got closer, the buzz of flies made its way to his ear. From the smell of things, this was going to be bad.

  “You don’t have a warrant.”

  “Are you kidding me? The smell is enough for probable cause.”

  “Really? Out of your jurisdiction on a case to which you are not assigned? You really think that’ll hold up in court.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If there is something to find, I’ll go through the proper channels, until then there’s no point.”

  “I think you know you’re going to find something.”

  “Yes, but maybe just someone that died of natural causes.”

  “Does that smell like a bum that had a heart attack?”

  It didn’t, and Frank knew it. The smell of a simple decomposing body was one thing, but there was something more pungent about a corpse that had been murdered. The blood was in the air, and Frank had been trained to smell for it.

  As, he approached the shack, Frank focused on his ears. All the sounds of the woods opened up to him. The birds were there, the rustle of the leaves. What he didn’t hear was any sound from the shack ahead of him. In fact, it seemed like there weren’t any signs of human life at all.

  “Maybe they’re all abandoned?”

  “Probably the bums are out collecting their change for booze and some shit-stained garbage for food.”

  The front of the shack had a hole cut into it big enough for an adult to move through. The door (if you wanted to call it that) had a piece of cardboard over it. Frank thought that meant it was closed. Still, he reached out and pushed it open. The cardboard (likely part of an old refrigerator box that had been kited from a trash bin) fell down onto the ground.

  The smell intensified, and for a second Frank thought that his sandwich was going to make an encore visit all over his shoes. He swallowed hard and his stomach settled.

  It was clear what was producing the smell. It lay in the corner of the shack, naked, with blood dried around it. The light shining in through the pieces of wood made the shack dim, but Frank’s eyes were good and he spotted something next to the man. It was small, just a tiny little bump. It looked like a…

  “Is that a dog?”

  “It is,” a voice spoke up from behind him.

  44.

  The mall was much easier to deal with. For one, with his clothes changed, Bentley looked like a young man with means, and that was all that mattered to the bloodless vampires that preyed on teenage money. For another, there was no spouting of Jesus and God. There was only one God at the mall and his name was Benjamin Franklin.

  Bentley had no idea where to go. He saw the GAP and gave it a passing glance, but that might be a place where only girls shopped. Instead, he watched the people. Even for mid-day there were a good number of them milling around the mall, and a good many of them were teenage boys.

  The destination for most of the latter was the GameStop near the cookie stand. Bentley watched as they moved around the small store and selected games where one could steal a car and kill a prostitute, or murder a squadron of Nazis, or go on one kind of killing spree or another. If only they knew.

  These boys would invariably make their way to the FYE on the other side of the mall and then sample CDs that talked about money and power, and look through movies with blood and gore.

  Bentley had no interest in games, or movies, or music. These things didn’t turn his dials up. They weren’t real. They were a fake life that all the cunts and rich bastards had formed for themselves because they couldn’t deal with a boring reality. So, they turned themselves off from the world and did something else. They either watched television shows where the people were living lives that they wanted to live, lives of adventure and excitement, or they plugged themselves into a video game where they could live out their dark fantasies.

  In the end, they were all like him whether they wanted to admit it or not. The only difference was Bentley loved reality. Reality was his video game, and in it, he did whatever he pleased. Of all the people in the mall, he was the only one that actually lived in reality one-hundred percent of time and loved every minute of it.

  On the trip between GameStop and FYE, nearly every boy stopped at a store called Hollister. Usually they just ducked in, took a look at a few things, and then left to continue their trip for more carnage.

  Bentley stood outside the store for a long time. It appeared as if Brandon had been a shopper to this store, because Bentley spotted all three shirts that he currently rotated between on mannequins in the store. The mannequins were horrible things. Pale white plastic, that looked more like plaster. None of them were complete. Their heads were missing, and the arms stopped about mid forearm. They looked like bad imitations of the Greek and Roman sculptures that one would see in a museum.

  There weren’t many people inside the store, but there were two men that looked like they were not too far removed from high school themselves. They wore the store’s apparel, but were distinguished by the lanyards they wore around their necks with big plastic nametags on them.

  Bentley took a deep breath and walked in. One of the men standing by the counter spotted him and rushed over. His hair was brown, and neatly trimmed. The top of it was spiked up making him look like he’d just woken up.

  “Hello sir, can I help you find something today?”

  “Actually, you can,” Bentley said. He squinted his eyes at the tag around the man’s neck. “Rex. You can help me find something appropriate for a party.”

  “Okay, great. What kind of party is it?” The man’s voice rose on every other word, making him sound like he was singing a song rather than speaking. Bentley wondered if that was something that they taught you to do when you hired in. He could hear the focus group now.

  If the sales staff sounds like they’re high as a fucking kite, then everyone that walks in here will think that these clothes have the same effect as all the pot our customers smoke.

  “A friend of mine from my high school is having a party at his house, sans parents.”

  “Sand’s parents? Is that your friend’s name?”

  Bentley rolled his eyes. “It means his parents aren’t going to be there. There’s a girl at this party that I’d really like to impress and I need something that’s going to catch her eye.”

  “I get it.” The man smiled so big it looked like his head would crack open.

  Revealing nothing, Bentley thought.

  “So do you have something like that?”

  “We sure do,” Rex said. I can see that you’ve shopped here before so I take it that you wanted something a little more updated.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you’ll walk with me, I’ll show you a few things that just came in.”

  Bentley followed the man. His chest ached and his hands shook as he did it. Here was this little rich asshole’s bare back just ripe for the stabbing. He could cut into it and taste the sweet nectar that poured out. But it wasn’t time for that; it was time to play along, to
go with the flow.

  “We just got these Harbor Beach shirts in,” Rex said.

  Bentley looked. Rex stood in front of a rack of button-up shirts. Most of them looked wrinkled.

  “Don’t you iron these things?” Bentley asked.

  Rex smiled. “That’s the style now. Where have you been buddy?”

  Bentley looked at the man’s hair. “So the style for kids nowadays is, I just woke up from a night of drinking so much that I slept in my clothes, why don’t we fuck?”

  Rex’s smile faltered, and Bentley cheered a little inside.

  “Well…I…guess.”

  “Okay, fine, I don’t care. You’d know better than me, what’s good.”

  Bentley grabbed a faded blue shirt with pinstripes running down it and across at the arms. “So what do I wear with this?”

  “You can wear a white undershirt underneath, or, if you want to add a little style, you can get one of our tees and put that under it.”

  “So I don’t button this all the way up?”

  “Well, you could,” Rex said. The smile was still there, but it was the smile of a predator that had captured a nice meal. “But that looks a little dorky. You want to leave the last two or three buttons undone so that people can see the shirt underneath.”

  Rex hesitated for a second and then spoke again. “You have been here before, haven’t you?”

  “No,” Bentley said. “I got these clothes from a cousin of mine. I just moved here from Michigan and I don’t know anything about fashion. I’m trying to fit in.”

  “Cool, no worries. We’ll set you up.”

  “So in addition to this shirt, I’m going to be buying a tee and, what? Jeans?”

  “Yeah, we’ll rock you out with a cool pair of jeans.”

  “Great.”

  The shopping took another twenty minutes, which was far too long for Bentley’s liking. When he was done, he’d purchased the button-up shirt, a tee and a pair of faded jeans that seemed far too tight. Rex told him that was how they were supposed to feel and that he’d break them in.

  Bentley stuffed the shirts into his backpack, not worrying about wrinkling, since that was apparently how the clothes were supposed to look anyway.

  Put away the ironing boards, mothers of America, Bentley thought.

  45.

  Frank turned slowly; he saw the gun in the man’s hands before he was fully turned. When he got all the way around, he found that his imagination had run away with him, the man was holding the top of a long branch that had been whittled down into a make-shift cane.

  The man’s face was pruned and the few long strands on his head were stringy. He looked as though it had been a long time since he’d seen any kind of water, let alone soap.

  “You do that?” Frank asked, pointing at the body.

  “Hello no. I seen the guy that did it though. He didn’t know I was here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guy came tearing in here one night. Looked through all the houses. I think he wanted to see if anyone was here. Course the other two are probably arrested or dead.”

  “You’re the only one that lives here now?”

  “Yeah, me and Reed, course Reed’s not doing nothing now cept rottin’ away.”

  “So how was it that this guy didn’t find you?”

  “I was out doing my business in the woods, ya know, shittin’.”

  “I understand.”

  “So when I saw him ripping through our houses I stayed back. Reed came out of his place and the guy ran right over to him. Fuckin’ ripped him up good with something. Reed screamed for a long time.”

  “What did this guy look like?”

  “Well I didn’t really see him.”

  “I thought you just said you knew the guy that did it?”

  “I do. He’s been living in Reed’s place since he killed him. Brought that dog here one night and tortured the shit out of it. Thing was crying all night.”

  “So what did you see?”

  “Just his shadow. He was taller, looked thin. Plus, he had a lot more muscle than us guys.”

  “So you’ve been watching him from your place since he moved in?”

  “Hell no! You think I’m nuts. I haven’t been back to my place since he come along. I just hide in the woods and watch him sometimes. I’m hoping he moves away soon so that I can move back in.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  The old man fixed Frank with an assessing glance. “Yeah, I call the police and then they

  come through and tear this place apart. They rip down all the houses, mine too. You think I want that?”

  “But your friend is dead.”

  “We all dying, buddy. So what? That your dog or something?”

  “No. I’m a detective investigating a murder.”

  “Jesus jumped up Christ! You gonna bring your buddies out here to tear my place up?”

  “Don’t worry. Where is the guy now?”

  “Don’t know. I came here a couple hours ago and he was gone. Ain’t usual for him. Usually he leaves in the mornings and stays gone for a while, but on Saturday and Sunday he’s usually there. I’m hoping he ain’t coming back.”

  “Have you been in there anytime he was gone?”

  “Hell no. If I was in there, he’d know. Then he’d come after me.”

  “Well, I’m going in there to check things out.”

  “You sure you want to do that?”

  “No. But you’d better get back into your normal spot in the woods. If anything happens to me, go to the police.”

  The old man hesitated for a second, seemed to want to say something, and then just walked off back towards the woods.

  Frank looked inside the shack for a second, and then plunged in.

  46.

  Bentley saw the car first. It was a late model sedan, brown, a little dirty, completely unremarkable and parked in a place where Bentley had never noticed any car parked before.

  “Fucking cops,” he muttered.

  Immediately, his mind turned to his magazines. He didn’t have many possessions, and those magazines comprised just about everything he owned, with the exception of the clothes and ID that were in his bag.

  Bentley hung back towards the crumbling, brown building on the other side of the street. The cop was still there, and that was bad, but there was only one car and no people milling outside the shack, and that was good. It meant that the cop was probably alone or, perhaps, with a partner. It also meant that he’d gotten there recently, and things might still be able to be salvaged.

  The pulse in his left leg seemed to throb against the knife. Bentley fought if off, in time that might be an option, but for now, it was a waiting game.

  47.

  Frank stepped into the shack and noticed an odor that he hadn’t detected from the outside, urine. It was musky in the air, but the smell of rot had covered it pretty well.

  “So in the hierarchy of smells, decay wins over piss, good to know.”

  The man in the corner was obviously Reed. His body had begun to sink its way back into the ground. It seemed like parts of him were simply sloughing off, like a snake shedding its skin. The dog was fresher that much was clear.

  “So what the hell do you intend to do here? You don’t even have a fingerprint kit. Don’t you think you should call crime scene?”

  “Probably, but which precinct?”

  There was a small table in the corner. Something else that looked like it had been plucked from the garbage. The legs didn’t look exactly even and there were great swatches of enamel that had been worn away.

  Frank made his way over there, careful to watch where he stepped, in case there was something that might be useful in his footpath.

  Magazines covered the table. Some of them were open, but enough were closed to the covers that Frank got a general idea of the kind of person he was dealing with.

  “What the fuck kind of sicko lives here?”

  The first title
that caught his eye was: Bound Bitches. The cover depicted a woman wearing a criss-crossing leather outfit that showed her bare stomach and breasts. There were two large studs stabbed through each nipple. She was tied to some device that looked like a wheel-of-fortune with no numbers on it. Just plain, brown wood with some stakes to tie the hands and feet. Another woman (whose bare ass was exposed) held a whip, and what looked like some kind of motorized dildo.

  Frank looked to another magazine, this was titled: Eager Beavers. It showed a girl of about nine or ten, sitting naked on the grass with daisies growing around her. She was rocked in a reclining position with her legs spread wide apart. No hair had grown on her pubic area and her privates were wide open for the world to see. The girl’s face was smiling, but Frank thought the eyes looked dead.

  Next to the last magazine was a picture. A big glossy one, with a girl that couldn’t have been too much older than the one on Eager Beavers, and this one was clearly dead. Blood pooled around her body and her eyes held a lifeless look that Frank had seen too many times. A man stood over her, his face was directed away from the camera, but his head was completely bare and his pants were down. There didn’t seem to be any hair on his body at all, not the legs, not the ass. A stream, that could only be urine, arched from him to the girl. The picture had been snapped, as a little bit of the liquid splashed up from the dead girl’s face.

  “Where the fuck does someone get this shit?”

  “I get it mostly from urchins on the street.”

  Frank spun around. A tall, thin man with no hair on his head stood just inside the doorway.

  “I think they get them from Amsterdam, but who the hell knows.”

  The man shrugged his shoulders and smiled. The smile seemed so natural and easy. Frank’s stomach turned. At the same time, his hand stole towards his shoulder holster.

  “Looking for this?” The man asked, holding up Frank’s gun.