Cage Of Night Part 19

Mr. Myles had stopped by the store again that daya"three days following my last glimpse of Cindy at the boat docka"and asked me if I could stop over at their place tonight.

David Myles had been popular because he'd been a good looking football star, not because his parents had money. They lived in a fading crackerbox in one of the town's first housing developments. The living room was surprisingly cheery, the couch and arm chairs in good condition. The walls were a bright buff blue, complementing the deeper blue of the furnis.h.i.+ngs. There was a bookcase filled with book club bestsellers. From the kitchen came the pleasant smells of a good dinner.

Mr. and Mrs. Myles vaguely resembled each other. They were both worn looking, and every word they spoke was filled with apology. He wore a cardigan sweater and a white s.h.i.+rt and slacks. She wore a ruffled white blouse and dark slacks. They looked like two people who'd played parents a long time ago in a fifties sitcom. Strapping David Myles really must have come from their recessive genes.

The moment she started crying, Mr. Myles leaned across the couch and put his arm around her.

I wondered if I'd done the right thing.

I'd been here twenty minutes, giving them a highly cleaned-up version of that terrible Sat.u.r.day night. Good lies, mostly of omission.

But then I decided to tell a few lies for their sake. And so when Mrs. Myles asked me, "Did he say anything about us?" I said, "He said he wished he'd been a better son, and that he loved you very much."

But now that I saw her sobbing, I wondered if I'd done the right thing after all.

Mr. Myles got her calmed down and she looked over at me and said, "He really said that?"

"Yes, he did."

"That's what people didn't understand about him."

"Ma'am?"

"How sweet he was. Inside, I mean."

"Yes, ma'am."

"They just saw the aggressive football star."

"Yes, ma'am."

"They didn't see the sensitivity and the caring."

"Yes, ma'am."

"He really was a good boy," Mr. Myles said. "A lot of people didn't know that."

"It was her," Mrs. Myles said, fingering the brooch that she wore on the front of her ruffled white blouse. "That Cindy Brasher."

"I guess I don't know what you mean, ma'am."

"My wife thinks that she got David to believe all sorts of crazy things, and that that was why he snapped anda"Well, why it all happened." He gave her a tiny hug again, as if to second her theory.

"What sort of crazy things?" I said.

"All sorts of crazy things. You should hear the tapes. Right, George?"

He nodded. "David always had a good, level head on his shoulders but then he started acting reallya"" He shook his head. "And it started when he met that Brasher girl. Started right away, too."

"We could barely recognize our own son," Mrs. Myles said, "the way he was carrying on."

"You mentioned tapes, Mrs. Myles."

"On his little tape recorder. He used it instead of a journal."

I see.

"We didn't find them till the other night," Mr. Myles said.

"We tried to give them to the Chief of Police but he wasn't interested." For the first time, she sounded not only sad and angry but bitter. "You listen to those tapes and you'll see what we're talking about."

"I'd like to hear them, Mrs. Myles."

She glanced up sorrowfully at her husband. She was speaking to me but she didn't take her eyes from him. "Wait till you hear him start talking about the well."

I knew better than to act disturbed or excited. I just said, "I really would like to hear them, Mrs. Myles. I feel a kind ofa"bond, I guessa"with David. After Sat.u.r.day nighta""

She nodded solemnly.

"There was no reason for that Garrett to kill him, either," she said. "David didn't have a weapon."

I didn't want to tell her that I'd called out to Garrett. It would only make her feel worse, and there was no solution for it, anyway.

"You ever been out there?" Mr. Myles said.

"Out there?"

"To that old cabin in the Hampton woods."

"I guess so," I said, casually as possible. "When I was a kid."

"There's on old well out there," Mr. Myles said.

"He became obsessed with it," Mrs. Myles said.

"And that's the right word for it, too," Mr. Myles said. "Just wait till you hear these tapes. I really believe my son was clinically insane at the time of his death."

"And she did it, that Brasher girl," Mrs. Myles said. "She did it. Putting all the crazy stuff in his head."

We talked for another fifteen minutes, and then Mr. Myles went and got two tape ca.s.settes, dropped them into a manila envelope, and handed them over to me.

"You tell me if this doesn't sound like a boy who's clinically insane," he said.

By the time I reached the door, Mrs. Myles was sobbing again.

CHAPTER FOUR.

I started following Cindy again two days later.

During that time, she met Garrett four different times, twice at the mall, once at a closed skating rink, once in a parking lot behind an abandoned warehouse. At the warehouse, they got into some very heavy s.e.x. In the front seat of his cop car, no less. The way she was straddling him, I was pretty sure they were doing the deed.

All the time I followed her, I had David Myles' ca.s.sette tapes playing on the portable player on my front seat.

I could see why his parents had been so disturbed, and why they thought he had gone insane.

He spent most of his time talking about the nightmares he'd had ever since he'd gone to the well with Cindy.

He saw alien creatures, he saw a strange aircraft, he saw an old man, one hundred years ago, lowering an infant into the well.

And he saw himself in a mirror transformed into a creature that made him scream.

Over and over again, he talked about one night at the well, Cindy standing next to him, when he saw a blue glow deep down in the well.

He talked about how the glow was very hot, made him begin sweating in fact, and seemed to coat his skin with an invisible but faintly sticky coat of moisture.

Then he talked about begging Cindy not to make him go back to the well anymore.

That's how he expressed it.

That she was "making him" go. As if she had this power over him.

Toward the end of the second tape, he began to disintegrate completely.

He became so psychotic he couldn't tell the difference between his nightmares and reality.

He mentioned setting fire to a school bus filled with young children and watching it burn.

He mentioned smothering his mother to death in her sleep, and then disemboweling his father with a butcher knife.

He mentioned raping a ten year old girl.

He was tormented by the fact that he couldn't tell for sure if these things had happened or not.

I must have listened to the tapes ten times in three days. Some of it I got used to, some of it I didn't.

The crying was the worst of it. I kept thinking of how he'd been in the car right before he died, the sudden weeping. He sounded like that on the tape. It was terror, that's what I was listening to, and it scared me.

Josh stood in my doorway. He said something but I couldn't hear him.

I lay on my bed with the headphones on, listening to David Myles' tape.

I took the headphones off.

"I'm sorry, Josh. What'd you say?"

"I said that must be some great tape, the way you've been listening to it the last couple days. You going to let me hear it?"

I figured he might ask me about the tape I played over and over so I was ready with my answer. "It's disco."

"Oh, bulls.h.i.+t," he said. "No, really. Big hits of the '70s."

"Disco sucks."

"Yeah, I read that on a b.u.mper sticker."

"You're really listening to disco?"

"Yeah, I really am."

He shook his head. "Well, I guess I don't need to hear it then."

I smiled. "Sorry."

He leaned against the doorway. He wasn't just looking at me, he was examining me. "How you doing?"

"Oh, pretty good."

"You haven't been around much lately."

"Yeah. I know."

"The folks're kind of worried about you."

"I'm fine."

"They think you're still pretty depressed about Cindy Brasher."

"I guess I am. At least a little."

"You look real tired."

"I'm fine, Josh. Honest."

"You hear who she's going on with?"

"Uh-huh."

"He's a f.u.c.king dork."

"Yeah, he is. But then so am I."