Prior Bad Acts

Prologue

HE KNEW BEFORE he entered the house that day that something was very wrong. It was July. The sky pressed down like an anvil-ominous, dark, gray. The afternoon was over, evening not yet begun. Time had ceased to mean anything.

The air was still, as if the day were holding its breath in anticipation of what would come. Dead calm. Lightning ripped across the western sky. Thunder rumbled, a distant drumroll.

In his memory there were never other houses around the foursquare clapboard house with the peeling green paint and the porch that bowed midway across the front of the building like a weary smile. Everything else receded, slipped into the trees, dropped over the horizon. He saw the house, the yard-turned weedy and straw colored by the lack of rain. He saw the trees back by the train tracks, leaves turned inside out.

No one was around. No cars on the street behind him. No kids ripping up and down on their bikes. There were no dogs, there were no birds, there were no squirrels or rabbits. There was no sound but the thunder, drawing ever closer.

In his memory, he didn’t draw near the house. The house advanced on him.

Bang!

His heart stopped. His head snapped to the left.

“You better get in the basement! Tornado’s coming!”

The neighbor, whose dreary ranch-style cracker box had crept back onto the periphery, stood on his back deck. He was a guy with Elvis sideburns and a gigantic beer gut. He held a camcorder. He pointed to the west.

A storm was coming.

The air was electric. Colors were sharper, crisper. Everything seemed in hyper-focus. His eyes hurt taking it in.

The house lunged at him. He tripped on the first step and stumbled onto the porch. The hinges on the screen door screamed as he drew it back and stepped inside.

Crack! Boom!

The lightning was so bright, it seemed to fill the living room. He called out. No one answered.

In his memory his feet never moved, but he was suddenly in the dining room, then the kitchen, then the TV room at the back of the house. The room was small and dark, wrapped in cheap wood paneling. The heavy curtains at the windows were old, and they didn’t hang right. They had been made for some other window in some other house, and cast out when the fashions changed. Light seeped in around the edges and down the center, where the panels didn’t quite pull all the way together.

The television was on. Storm warning. Outside the house, the wind came in a gust. Lightning flashed.

He found the first body.

She was sprawled on the couch, propped up like a giant doll, eyes open, as if she were still watching television. A wide strip of duct tape covered her mouth and circled her head. Her hair had been chopped off with a scissors or a knife. Coagulating blood marked gouges in the scalp. Her clothing had been cut down the center and peeled back, exposing her body from throat to crotch.

Storm coming.

Crack! Boom!

She’d been cut down that same line. Through skin, through muscle, through bone, like a fish to be gutted. Drooping daisies had been planted in her chest.

Bile rose in his esophagus at the same time that his throat closed. Terror wrapped two big, bony hands around his neck and squeezed. He stumbled backward, turned and ran into a floor lamp, jumped sideways and tripped over a footstool, fell and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table.

Crack! Boom! Crack! Boom!

Dizzy, weak, scared, he scrambled to get his feet under himself and get out of the room. A strange mewling sound squeezed up out of his throat, like a dog that had been beaten.

He ran to the kitchen. He ran out the back door. He couldn’t stay in the house, couldn’t get away from it fast enough. The world had taken on a weird green cast. There was a roaring sound coming, coming, like a freight train. But when he looked at the tracks, there was no train, or if there had been one, it had been swallowed whole by the huge black funnel cloud that had touched ground and was chewing up everything in its path.

This had to be a nightmare. None of this could really be happening. But he felt the debris hit him. Slivers and splinters and dirt pelted him. He threw his arms up around his head to protect his face. The roar was deafening.

The old storm cellar door was open and clinging to the frame by a single hinge as the wind tried to rip it free. He all but threw himself down the concrete stairs and kicked in the door to the basement itself. It was old and rotted with damp, and it split away from the frame on the third kick.

The basement was as dank as a cave, and smelled of mildew. He couldn’t find a light switch.

Above him, the old house had begun to shake. He had the impression of it pulling upward as the tornado tried to rip it from its foundation.

The rain came in a deluge. The bullwhip crack of lightning. Thunder drumming. The basement was illuminated in bursts of stark white light. The darkness between was absolute.

He curled into a ball on the floor-cold, wet, sick at the thing he had seen upstairs, sick at the smell of the basement.

He didn’t know how long he stayed there. It might have been five minutes or five hours. Time meant nothing. All he would remember later was the dawning of awareness that everything had gone silent again. So silent, he thought he might have gone deaf.

Random flashes of lightning still illuminated the night beyond the high basement windows, but he couldn’t hear the thunder.

Slowly he rose from the cold, wet floor. Something like a hand touched the back of his neck, and the sweat coating his skin turned to ice. Something nudged him in the back as if to make him turn around to see a surprise.

Lightning burst outside the windows like the flash of a camera, and the image was forever imprinted on his brain. A memory that would never fade, never lessen in its impact or in its horror: the bodies of two children hanging from the ceiling beams, their lifeless eyes staring sightless into his.