Long black coffin, p.28
Long Black Coffin, page 28
Stella’s death bothered me.
I felt responsible in many ways. Maybe I was. But the bottom line was that she had signed her death warrant years ago when she let the thing called Bridey Borden into her life. I wondered many times after it was all done with just how many dark secrets lay moldering in locked closets in Lynntown and thousands of other towns just like it in the north, east, south and west.
Opium was still on the dodge from Jimmy Chambers. I assumed they’d be playing cat-and-mouse for weeks if not months. As I sat there with my old friend, not saying much, I was struck by the need for confession.
I wanted to confess it all.
I needed to confess it all.
“You know,” he finally said, tired of my brooding no doubt, “maybe you need to get away for a while…maybe you should go stay with my brother, get your head screwed on straight.”
I thought about it. Out in the boonies with County Jesus, smoking dope and listening to Country play his guitar and talk about his crops. It sounded very peaceful.
“He’d be okay with that?”
“Hell, yes. He’d love it. I’ll hook you up. You can go out there today if you want.”
I nodded. Then I said, “I had an affair with Kurt’s mom.” Just admitting that soothed me. I was like a pressure cooker letting off steam.
“No shit? Man, that’s fucked up…did you really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, tell me.”
So I did. We sat there for an hour and I spilled it all out for him nonstop from how I looked after Stella when Kurt was gone to college right up to escaping the burning garage with Ma Lake. And I didn’t leave out the stuff about Sagwa Woods and just exactly what sort of monster Bridey Borden was and what she had turned Vic and Stella into. The deeper I got into my confession, the more I wanted to stop, but I didn’t. This had to come out. It all had to come out. When I finished, I felt better. Opium just sat there for a long time, not saying anything.
I figured at the very worst he would say I was nuts.
But he didn’t. “I believe you,” he said. “I guess I gotta believe because you’re my friend and I know you wouldn’t make up something like that. You were going through something ever since Kurt died and we knew it. And this is what it was.”
“Somebody told me a tale like this, I’d think they were fucked in the head.”
He smiled. “Sure, maybe. But all I gotta do is ask Ma. If she corroborates what happened in the garage, then it’s true.”
“So ask her. Tell her I said it’s all right to talk about.”
Opium shook his head. “No. Not need for it. Your word is good enough for me.” He pulled off his cigarette. “Stella was nuts, man, and so was Vic. Fuck, everybody knew that. I just feel sorry for Kurt. I feel bad that he had to pay the price of the shit-storm they created.”
“I wish he could have died not knowing.”
Opium just shook his head.
He finished his cigarette in silence. Then: “It makes the world I know into a scary place, man, a real scary place. Makes you want to question every shadow you see. Freaky. So was it Bridey? What you saw?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“No. Not really. I think it was part of her, you know, the rage and hatred and sexual sadism and hunger and mania, all the bad, bad parts of her. They survived death. They were too strong to die. I think that’s what it was, coupled with that thing from the forest. The thing that emptied itself into Bridey’s mother. It didn’t just impregnate her, it poured the life force of that forest into her because it knew the Sagwa’s days were numbered and its ancient habitat was going to be destroyed. So it seduced her, then it raped her. When Bridey died, all the bad parts of her lived on coupled with the force of that forest elemental with all its primeval appetites. It had a very strong will to survive.”
“Man, makes me want to stay out of the boonies.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He laughed. “But you don’t want to let it rest, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you want to go tell Jimmy Chambers or someone about it, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess. Those missing kids and shit. Families out there are still wondering.”
Opium clapped me on the shoulder. “Just let it go. You’re not gonna do anything but throw a lot of dirt over a lot of lives by opening your yap. You said you had some sense of responsibility for the Tamerlyns, right? Some totally fucked up sense that you had to protect them, keep them from harm? Isn’t that what you told me after Kurt checked out?”
“Yeah.”
“You still feel that way?”
“I guess I do.”
“Okay, then do the right thing and say nothing. Don’t dirty up their memory with all this. Stella is dead. She paid for what she did, turning her death into a sideshow won’t accomplish anything. Kurt and Stella and Vic, they’re all dead. Why dirty up their memory anymore? Why open a can of worms and fuck up more lives? Bridey’s dead. So is her mother and Skinny Borden, maybe even her real father. Vic and Stella are gone. Leave it buried. People don’t need to know the kind of animals these people were, the disgusting secrets they kept.”
About that time, a car came rolling up and passed slowly by us. It was Jimmy Chambers. He’d seen Opium. There was no way he couldn’t have.
“Shit,” Opium said. “Well, I’ll catch you later. Think about what I said. I’ll set things up with Country for you.”
The car came around again. It stopped and Jimmy Chambers got out. “I was just out to your house. Your sister said she hadn’t seen you lately. She was worried.”
“She’s always worried.”
He nodded. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about Stella Tamerlyn.”
I swallowed. “Go ahead.”
“You helped her out a lot, huh? Did jobs for her and all that?”
“Yeah, for the past couple years. She needed help.”
“She drank a lot, eh?”
“Yeah, I guess she did.” I could have said more, but the idea of trashing on Stella even after all that had happened was suddenly unthinkable. “But nobody had a better reason, Mr. Chambers. She had a lot of pain in her life.”
“Would you have said she was unstable?”
“She wasn’t in good shape after Kurt’s death.”
“Did she ever talk to you about it? Any of that?”
I shrugged. “Some. It wasn’t easy to talk about. Why are you asking about this stuff?”
He sighed. “There’s a lot of loose ends in that business. We’d didn’t have much left to work with after the fire. Just bones. We’re guessing she died like her son died and then the fire broke out. That’s what we’re guessing. But like I said, a lot of things don’t add up.”
No, and they never will, I wanted to tell him. I shrugged. “Here’s how I see it. Vic killed himself and that started it all. That’s what made Kurt sit in that car when he was drunk. He didn’t kill himself. Kurt wouldn’t do that. He was just obsessed over why his old man did that. So he sat in that car and asphyxiated. That car was sort of a demon to Stella. It took her husband, then it took her son. So she did what Kurt did and died the same way. That’s all there is to it.”
“Sounds good…except, we still can’t figure what triggered the fire. It started in the car, we know that much, but the mechanism itself evades us.”
“I can’t help you with that. Maybe there was something horseshit with the electrical system. I don’t know.”
He told me that’s how it would probably be written up in the end. He thanked me and I watched him drive away, finally relaxing. I felt better, though. Better because I had told Jimmy what he wanted to know and I had got the truth off my soul with Opium.
I had taken care of the Tamerlyns when they were alive and I would take care of them now that they were dead. It was the way things had to be. I had to put it to rest. I would not dirty their memory with any of it and I would never allow anyone else to, either.
I owed it to Kurt, I owed it to the kid.
The awfulness that had started fifteen years before and whose roots were much, much older, was over with. I was content with that.
Other books by Tim Curran available now or coming soon from Crossroad Press
Blackout
Corpse Rider
Deadlock
Doll Face
Fear Me
In the Blood
In the Bones
In the Flesh
Long Black Coffin
Nightcrawlers
Puppet Graveyard
Sow
Symbiosis
Tenebris
The Underdwelling
Worm
Tim Curran, Long Black Coffin
