The Grey Matter

THE GREY MATTER

BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN

Copyright © 2014 Billie Sue Mosiman

All rights reserved.

Post Mortem Press - Cincinnati, OH

www.postmortem-press.com

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

FIRST eBook EDITION

eISBN: 978-1311230294

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Kat Yares, my good friend and confidant, professional writer and reviewer, thank you for your kind help during my writing of this novel. I’d also like to thank Franklin E. Wales and Jaime Hobbs for consenting to read this work and give this writer an honest response. Storytellers depend on readers, preferably those who have read many books and possess a wide background in literature. I’ve been lucky in finding these three people to give me an indication whether I reached what I set out to accomplish. Frank Wales is a fine man and writer, husband to his good wife Jacki, and a popular author. Jaime and her husband, Vincent Hobbes¯writer and publisher, are lovers of good fiction. On top of their selfless help, all three are my friends and the finest people ever. Thank you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the mentors and good friends from my past who were always there encouraging me. Ed Gorman, the famed novelist, has always been my friend and he and his wife, Carol, are aces, not only to me, but to myriad other contemporary writers. I salute you, Ed. The late novelist C. Kerry Cline, Jr. early on corresponded with me while I struggled to find my footing as a writer. We lost him this year, in 2013, and his passing left a hole in the world. He was my beloved mentor.

Darkness approaches and we’re bringing it."

Billie Sue Mosiman

We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (The Thing)

Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

CHAPTER 1

He could boil them, burn them, hang them from hooks. He could bludgeon them, turn their ankles until their bones snapped and their feet faced backward. He could pound nails in their heads or wrap them in freezer paper and drop them into a large freezer while still alive. He thought of all these methods of torture and more, but that was just for fun. Thinking wasn’t doing. What he did wasn’t as imaginative. He kept them prisoner for a time, often raped them, and strangled them with his own hands. No one would ever write him up in the annals of crime as a Dahmer, a Bundy, or a John Wayne Gacy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t spectacularly smart, methodical, and efficient. Here’s what was important in the end: How long could he remain free while killing who he wanted, where he wanted, and when he wanted?

No one knew he committed murder. He had no police record and he kept no totems or trinkets. He wasn’t even under suspicion.

He sat now on a lone kitchen chair in a bare kitchen, the day dying outside the windows in a huge splash of violet and rose. Downstairs his latest victim waited his attention.

In the not too distant future, he, along with all Americans, would face the end of the world as they knew it. Even now faceless men halfway across the world were hatching the plan and finalizing the details.

But for now, in this place, this empty house, his only concern was the woman in the basement he intended to kill.

* * *

Miranda Deering woke to nightmare. She might still be asleep. She couldn’t really be shackled in a dark place smelling of earth. The fecund scent was thick and overwhelming, leaving a taste of the grave on the back of her tongue.

She shook the chains binding her wrists and found them anchored to a wall. Her fingers tracked the length of chain, encountered rough concrete, feeling the bolt there. She jerked back hard, but the bolt held. She cried out, Somebody help me!

Chains bound her ankles, and one snaked around her waist. Her hips and back hurt. She was damp from lying on the ground, wetness and deep cold seeping through to her bones.

She shut her eyes and thought, Wake up, wake up, this is not the world.

She opened her eyes and looked above her head. A bit of light filtered down through floorboards, but it was far away—fifteen or twenty feet. The light hardly reached where she sat bound, a prisoner on a dirt floor. The little light gave no luminosity to her surroundings. She lay trapped in a ring of darkness.

Her last waking memories had been of…

…she’d been on her way home from work at Pick ‘N Save on Broad Street. She worked until eleven P.M. six nights a week. This Wednesday night she had done as before, cashing out her register tray, locking the day’s receipts in the floor safe, before letting Bobby at the register to count his change so he could take over for the night shift.

She pulled her shoulder bag from beneath the counter, smiled at Bobby, said, Keep it together, and went for the front glass door while searching in her bag for the Corolla’s car keys.

As she went out the door, Bobby said, Later.

She was parked at the end of the row near the corner of the low, squat white building where the boss asked them to park, leaving the spaces closer to the door open for customers. The fluorescent lights of the store reflected poorly near the Corolla. The car gleamed in near darkness like a dark green squatting insect. She thought of an iridescent-backed dung beetle.

Just at the right front fender he came out of a clot of shadows so quickly she thought he was a big black bird. She flinched, turned, keys in her right hand, mouth open, and he decked her. From one instant to the next, she was out.

She woke up here. Chained. In a dirt room.

This was the crux of her entire life and she knew it. It was either prevail some way over this abduction, or she’d lose her life. She recognized this hard truth.

She wondered how long before she was pronounced missing. She lived alone. Her boyfriend had left town for two weeks, looking for work in Huntsville, Alabama. He might find work right away or stay gone the whole two weeks. They’d miss her at the store, call her cell, but when they didn’t get her, they wouldn’t care. They’d hire someone new within days. Even Bobby wouldn’t care.

She began to sweep the dark floor with her hands, feeling for her purse. Of course it wasn’t going to be here, and if it was, it wouldn’t have her cell phone in it. Still…she had to search. Her hands before her, she patted the dirt all around the front as far as she could reach, then around at her sides, and found nothing.

She’d gotten dirt beneath her nails. She hated having anything lodged beneath her nails. She began to weep. Then to wail. Then to beat her head on the concrete wall in a depth of despair so deep it was like being dead already. Skin scraped free, droplets of blood welled on her forehead. Her head rang with the thuds against the wall and still this was the world. This was the nightmare.

* * *

He came down the basement steps treading softly. He knew she heard him coming above the sound of her sobs because she stopped crying suddenly. It was so quiet she must have been holding her breath. He speared her face in the beam of a flashlight. She had tears and snot running from her nose. She looked like a younger, stranger version of herself. As if just realizing her nose was running, she wiped it with bound hands.

Pretty. So pretty. Even with a wet and splotched red face.

Please let me go, God, let me go.

How old are you? he asked.

She hesitated. Her voice was a squeak. I’m twenty-one.

Young enough.

He turned off the flashlight. He moved closer in the dark.

She began to scream.

* * *

Raping her once was not enough; he hadn’t reached a climax. While she begged to be released and though she promised all manner of things she could never deliver, he took the woman once more with a savagery that bordered on animal horror.

There was no remorse. He felt no more feeling for her than if she were a blow-up doll. She was a warm receptacle, that’s all.

He didn’t care she screamed. No one could hear her down here in the dirt basement of an empty house.

When satiated, he reached around her throat with one arm and began shutting off her air. She bucked and he almost let go to take her again, but forced himself to hold still. She fought her last good fight, a hard fight, and then succumbed.

He unlocked the padlocks on her chains. He dragged her up the stairs. In the back of the house he had the truck parked and waiting. He lifted and threw her body into the bed of the truck where she landed with a horrible thump. He covered her with a silver-gray tarp, tucking the ends under her body.

He drove her into the woods outside Herndon and dug a three-foot deep grave. He wasn’t going to work harder than that. Who needed six feet of dirt anyway? Afterward, he spread leaves and debris over the new earth, camouflaging it.

For just a while he was done with killing.

She had been his twenty-third victim in ten years.

Lately it seemed he had to have them more often. Dangerous. Likely to make a mistake when he didn’t plan it well enough in advance. For instance, he should have known her age. He had watched her working at the store and guessed she was between nineteen and twenty-two. He should have known everything for sure, everything. He risked a lot to get her without knowing every single thing about the woman.

So dangerous.

He folded the tarp and drove out of the woods between trees and back onto a dirt road. He was dirty, his hands coated with soil, his nails thick with it.

A monster?

It was a question he sometimes asked himself.

Was he a monster?

He figured he probably was. He knew right from wrong. He did wrong anyway. Did it like a man does it who means to ride out to the edge. Like someone who, if he slips, doesn’t care if it takes him down into a rocky crevasse leaving him broken like a fine china plate.

He wiped his right hand on his jeans, leaving a dark streak. Didn’t care.

Didn’t care about anything now, but reliving in vivid daydream her breathing, giving, slick body and then her struggle at the end. Reliving the power he possessed over life and death.

Yes, he admitted, he was a sort of monster.

* * *

Years before the murder of Miranda, he discussed his state of mind with a doctor.

Do you think you’re insane? His victim was a female psychiatrist. She was bound and being kept in an empty house. He found it amusing she wanted to understand him.

No, I’m not insane. He stood in the doorway looming over her, the shadows of evening deep and gloomy in the walk-in closet.

Do you think a person can murder and yet still be sane? she asked.

He shrugged. Maybe I’m narcissistic and amoral. That doesn’t make me insane.

I think you’re insane.

Tell me why.

She hesitated, then launched into a list. Being amoral and narcissistic—and I’m not saying you aren’t those things too—but being afflicted with those failures of character can spin out of control and you convince yourself you have the right over life and death of strangers. You go beyond normal behavior. But the act of murder itself indicates a state of sanity has left us. Sometimes sanity returns and the insane action of taking a life was a temporary burst of unleashed anger or the letting go of repressions. This happens in crimes of rage. But you’ve abducted me and brought me to this…place…with a premeditated plan to kill me. I’m not wrong about this, am I?

Oh, you’re going to die, yes.

She blinked and a deep sadness and recognition crawled like a dark snake within her eyes. A man who carefully plans and carries out sadistic murder is, in fact, insane. You are insane. Maybe not by law only because the courts would want to convict you rather than send you away for mental treatment, but you are, clinically, insane.

I don’t think I am. And whether I am or not isn’t going to change the outcome today.

I know that, she said reasonably. I’m not trying to talk my way out of death. I’ve accepted it.

Have you? Does anyone, really? He was interested in her answer.

"I have. I don’t see any escape. I don’t expect to change your mind. I don’t imagine a last minute rescue—you’ve done your homework well. I know you’ve done this before. I’m not your first."

No, you’re not.

Some can’t bring themselves to holding the insane responsible for their crimes. I do. You are entirely responsible for this. I’m a human being with a family and a life that belongs to me. By taking it away, you’re committing not just an unlawful crime, you know, at least at this moment, what you’re doing. But a man who kills for pleasure is an insane man. Don’t ever mistake it. Your brain is so maladjusted—though you seem intelligent and that’s something else altogether—your brain is so ruined, you refuse to believe you’re insane. I just wanted you to know the truth. I want you to live with it. I don’t think it’ll stop you from doing what you want. You needed to know. You should lock yourself up. You should be committed.

Maybe. But I won’t and neither are you. You aren’t the doctor who’s going to stop me. He approached her slowly. Her eyes doubled in size and fear came through her gaze like flecks of shattered light. "You are afraid, he whispered. You should be."

* * *

Miranda Deering had been wrong. Her disappearance was reported early on to the law. Her boyfriend, Hiram Gordon, returned the same night she went missing. He went to her house and let himself in to wait. Seeing she didn’t come home from work, he called the store at midnight. He’d meant to surprise her. He had brought a bottle of rum and a six-pack of Coke to celebrate the job he’d found in construction down in Huntsville. They could move there now, get married, and start a new life.

Bobby told him she had left at eleven as always.

Hiram waited another hour, pacing the little empty house.

At one A.M. he called the Herndon police station and reported her missing.

Two hours isn’t long enough to make a report, the cop on the desk told him with a trace of impatience. Maybe she visited a friend.

Two hours is enough when she has nowhere else to go but home and never did this before, Hiram insisted. She wouldn’t visit anyone this time of night, c’mon.

Well, we can’t act on it, is what I’m saying. You come in tomorrow, we’ll talk about it.

Hiram was awake all night. He sat on the sofa staring at the bottle of rum on the end table next to him. He didn’t want a drink now. He didn’t even want the job in Huntsville, as important as it had seemed earlier in the night.

He just wanted Miranda home.

* * *

The story hit the small town paper when it came out on Thursday. Miranda had been missing for five days by then. It was under the police report column, ran two inches, and raised no widespread public alarms.

By the next weekly edition of the Herndon News, Miranda Deering was on the front page with an old picture showing her as a cheerleader in Herndon High school.

Hiram Gordon was a suspect only because they had no other, but he hadn’t been arrested since they didn’t have a shred of evidence against him. He insisted he’d been in Huntsville and even supplied a witness from the construction site who interviewed him, but since she seemed to be missing after work, he was in town at that time. He called Bobby at the store at midnight. Still, no evidence came forth and no motive at all, pointing to him as having to do with her disappearance.

People began to talk. Miranda’s parents, living on four acres outside of town, came to apply pressure to the police. The sheriff said, I wouldn’t worry. Maybe she wanted to get away from her boyfriend.

Mr. Deering said no, uh-uh, she was set on marrying that boy.

The sheriff said he was really looking into this. What he didn’t say was he wasn’t real sure where else to look. Her car had been found at the store where she’d parked it for her shift work. It was still locked. That meant she had been taken or left with someone else.

If she’d been taken, it could be anybody. A passing stranger. A whack job resident they didn’t know about. They didn’t have kidnappings. Ever. And they didn’t have murder in this town, it just wasn’t a regular occurrence. And even when it happened, it was from something that made sense. Drunks. Drugs. An argument gone bad.

People were going to talk with a young girl missing this way. They were going to make it a hot topic until they tired of it.

The Herndon police chief hoped to find some kind of lead before the talk got out of hand. Where in the world could that girl have gotten off to?

CHAPTER 2

Josie Taylor swept the cabin’s front porch. Dust and dead leaves flew off the porch edges into the dirt yard, creating small clouds of brown dotted with yellow, red, and maroon leaves. In the forest of trees draped around the cabin like a party crowd, birds sang. An errant breeze ruffled Josie’s hair, lifting it from her brow, drying the few sweat beads formed there.

Gabby, a six-year-old mixed breed, but mostly wolfhound dog, lay on the steps in the sun, her head lifted to the sunlight and her eyes closed. She was a gray, spike-haired dog and her eyelashes were like an old man’s whiskers. Strangers thought she was an ugly dog. Josie believed that was in the eye of the beholder, and in her eye Gabby was a beautiful animal. Most of all, she was all the best love in the world rolled up into the body of one medium-sized mutt. That was the beauty.

Josie paused in her task, smiling down at the sunbathing Gabby. Until the boys, Gabby was all she had. The dog loved her, protected her, and gave her a reason to get up in the mornings. Gabby needs fresh water, she would think upon opening her eyes and feeling the dog’s weight across her legs. Gabby needs walking. I have to get up.

Since teaming up with the boys, Gabby had been group-adopted. They all loved her and treated her like part of the family.

The dog’s ears peaked two seconds before the sound of a car reached Josie’s ears. She glanced up the road and saw Caleb’s Jeep coming, a trail of dust in