Devil House(31)

When Jesse and Gene let themselves in through your unlocked front door, the radio is playing “Hold Your Head Up” by Argent, a hard rock band. You remember this because it’s not your sort of thing; it’s a type of music you sometimes hear coming through the open windows of cars in the school parking lot. That it feels somehow aggressive seems, to you, a sign that you’re getting old; pointless to resist, it seems. The chorus is beginning to grate on your nerves as you work away at the oysters, prying their shells open and pulling the soft flesh loose, but this work requires focus, so you’re waiting the song out, hoping they play something mellower next. But at trial, later, you can’t remember what came after. Whatever it was, it has not been able to rise above the memory of the panic, and the chaos.

Neither of them announce themselves when they enter: they aren’t seasoned thieves, but they know that a doorknob turned gently enough makes hardly any sound at all if there’s ambient noise to mask it: a stove fan, a countertop radio. Everyone was a child once; everyone’s moved stealthily sometimes, either at play or from sheer animal need. Your awareness of their movement in your peripheral vision is sharp and sudden, the momentary flash you get just before an especially large bug hits your windshield: thwap. Just like that, the huge abstract splatter of guts and carapace across your field of vision. The wind widening its spread, rippling in the splotch.

When Gene covers your mouth with his right hand and pulls your body tightly against his, your fist reflexively tightens around the handle of the shucking knife, and your eyes go wide. You can’t stop your mouth from trying to open, to scream, to call for help: it’s pure instinct. “Easy, easy,” he says in a hot whisper, just next to your ear; you feel his arm against your right breast as he moves his hand to your wrist, intending to squeeze hard enough to make you drop the knife. Jesse, per his instructions, is already heading for the bedroom, since Gene has told him several times that the valuables are always in the bedroom.

But Gene, although a very dangerous person in many ways, has not planned for resistance. His assumption that there won’t be any is based on his own experience: every time he resisted a blow as a child, it only made things worse. Other people know that, too, he imagines; how would they not? The teenagers he shakes down for small change at school all lend support to this theory; his menace, the immediacy of the threat, is enough to dissuade them from putting up a fight. But here, at Oakside Court, he is on new ground—just as you are, but in a different sense; and, although he’s spent several days convincing Jesse that he’s thought all the angles through, he hasn’t. When he hears Jesse pulling down shelves in your bedroom closet, he jerks your body in the direction of the hallway. You fall into him; you are being dragged. A clear view of how things will play out if you fail to act explodes across your inner vision like a sped-up movie reel.

You jerk your right hand free, going against his thumb, as an article in a magazine once told you to do. Gene grabs your hair and pulls, hard, and the pain burns, but your motion now is natural, fluid if desperate, full of purpose. You don’t see the knife pierce his eyelid, which has only squinted itself to cover the eye in the split second before the blade arrives: Gene’s mind is on subduing you, not protecting himself, and he doesn’t register the threat of your right hand until you’ve thrust it forward with a terrified, needful strength, and then jerked the knife free.

You scream, and the sound that comes out of you is low, more roar than shriek, a single vowel with no markable beginning or end; it degrades into panting and grunting as you rise to a standing position. Gene is screaming, too, a panicked falsetto, both of his hands covering his left eye, blood flowing down his cheek. He has to move his hands back into place over the eye, because they slip. You scream again, not as loud, and not for any reason you can later state—it just happens—and then you stab him in the neck. He hits his head on the kitchen counter as he falls, and he says, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” landing on the floor as blood begins erupting in spurts from the wound in his throat.

Jesse is not prepared for this. He has one foot in the hallway between your bedroom and the kitchen when he hears Gene’s scream; he freezes. He needs Gene to tell him what to do; he’s afraid of making things worse, and he’s afraid of the unknown. The sounds reaching him while he ransacked your bedroom closet, looking for jewelry, locked boxes, or things that shine, began as unpleasant distractions from his work: Gene had warned him that you weren’t going to like this. But he hadn’t said anything about an actual fight, and he hadn’t gone over any contingencies: he’d sketched out a clear timeline that made no allowances for bumps in the road. Over the course of several minutes, the noises made it impossible for Jesse to focus on his task. You’re just a teacher. There are two of them, young strong boys. How dangerous could you be?

Gene is crawling toward the front door, trying to drag himself forward with his right hand while keeping the left pressed up to the wound on his neck. You lunge, stabbing him again, the blade entering this time at the base of his skull; this is the blow that will be most damning at trial. Pulling the knife loose for the third time proves hardest, but you manage it; he falls, face-first, onto the carpet, and his limbs begin to twitch.

Behind you, Jesse’s shock has finally spurred him to action: he grabs the nearest thing he sees, your vase, and hurls it, with all the strength his skinny arm can muster, at what he hopes will be your head. It connects instead with Gene, whose body does not react to the insult. Jesse’s eyes widen when he sees the vase land on his friend; he is terrified. He dashes for the door now, escape his only thought, but there’s so much blood, just everywhere, and he slips and falls, landing halfway on top of Gene, who is technically not dead yet.