The Devil's End Read online

  Spiro was reluctant to release his new treasure, but it wasn’t his nature to deny requests made of him. His lack of assertiveness made him the perfect clown, the jester marionette that required no strings. Pick up the pennies, Spiro! Hey Tardo, jump up and down! Go give Vickie Sebring a kiss; she’s dying to go out with you, Ape Face! No matter how degrading the order, he would typically do exactly as he was told. He handed the puppy over, eyes downcast.

  The girl proceeded to delight herself with the animated bundle of fur, rubbing its face against hers like a powder puff, kissing its forehead, giggling as the tiny pink tongue lapped out to return the amity. After a few minutes she said without looking up, “My name is Lana; I’m your new neighbor. What’s your name?”

  Spiro wondered if the question was directed at him or the pup. He glanced up at the girl’s face, her sculptured features framed by a halo of white-blond hair. Her wide blue eyes, now lifted to meet his, showed no hint of the anticipated abhorrence. “My—My name?” he stammered.

  The girl rolled her eyes, playfully muzzling the puppy with a delicate hand. “Yeah, so who else would I be talkin’ to?”

  Spiro impulsively looked around. “Nobody, I guess.” He was already aching to hold his new pet again; why didn’t the girl with the strange accent get her teasing over with and leave him alone? “Can I have him back now?” He held out his massive hands in a pleading gesture.

  “Soon as you tell me your name,” Lana said firmly. She sat down Indian-style and nestled the pup between her legs.

  Spiro’s eyes bulged slightly; she was wearing a short yellow skirt, and the way she was sitting allowed him a brief view of her lacy white panties. The puppy didn’t cover them completely, and if the girl was aware of it, she didn’t seem to care. Spiro memorized the exhibition and then turned his head. “Spiro. Hardly no one calls me that, though.”

  “What do they call you?”

  Spiro winced. “Tardo, mostly. Stuff like that.” His eyes stole another peek at the tantalizing view being offered him; Lana was too busy petting the puppy to notice.

  She asked innocently, “Tardo…? What kinda name is that?”

  “I’m…slow. It means retarded,” he admitted with a heavy sigh. He reached again for his precious bundle, keeping his gaze averted when the girl handed it back. He could well imagine what she might do to him if she caught him taking advantage of her position. Yet, it was equally easy for him to creatively interpret the situation as a direct come-on, to hear her whisper softly, though her lips were sealed, Would you like to touch me, Spiro…?

  The puppy began to whimper. “I’m going to name him Sam,” Spiro declared with a loose smile, his secret safe and sweet within him. He could hardly wait to sit at his desk tonight with paper and pencil.

  “People sure can be assholes,” Lana stated flatly as she rose to her feet. “Well, don’t you pay any mind to that crap, Spiro. Just tell ’em, ‘I know you are, but what am I!’ No matter what they say. They’ll get mad an’ give up sooner or later. Well, see ya. I gotta get back to work.”

  Spiro watched her walk back to her own property and disappear behind the truck, astounded that a girl— especially such a pretty one—should be so nice to him. It had never happened before, and he didn’t know quite what to think of it. He stretched his bulky frame out on the ground to play with Sam, but the illicit memory of seeing between the girl’s legs lingered to distract him from fully enjoying the experience.

  Two

  In the northern foothills surrounding Sharon Valley, South Dakota, was a development called Cameron Estates, where the wealthy and influential of the community lived in homes of quiet elegance, most of them on three-to-five-acre tracts of land surrounded by lodgepole pine, aspen, and spruce trees. A quarter mile west of this development was Beacon Hill, the highest point overlooking the bedroom community, and the site of a graveyard with some stones dating back as far as the eighteenth century.

  In the center of the graveyard was a white marble tomb. The engraving on the upper front wall announced the silent inhabitants as Myrantha and Nathaniel Ober, both dead at the age of thirty on October 31 almost seventy years earlier. The fact that they had died together on All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween night, gave rise to diverse speculations about the couple, which were ritualistically repeated during adolescent slumber parties, or around the dancing flames of a midnight campfire made by Boy Scout troops roughing it in the “wilderness.”

  There were presumably no Obers left in Sharon Valley to give denial or verification to any of these speculations, but as time had not yet completely erased all traces of their existence, neither had it totally expelled the basic truth from which legend had been spawned. One remaining link was eighty-year-old Jasmine Annabell Colter, who claimed to have known the Obers’ daughter, Morganna. But it wasn’t until after Jasmine had been placed in a nursing home that she began to insist—and quite vehemently—that Morganna had been a witch from a long line of black art practioners, and thus her rantings were, for the most part, dismissed as senile fantasy. But not by her granddaughter Marla Mingee and her best friend, Nancy Snell.

  Marla and Nancy were seniors at Sharon Valley High, and both looked forward to the day they would leave Sharon Valley for college; both had been accepted at Princeton, much to their parents’ delight. But before embarking on their scholarly adventure, they conspired to do what apparently no one before them had dared: they planned to break into the tomb on Beacon Hill and open the coffins of Myrantha and Nathaniel Ober. If there were any secrets to be disclosed about the mysterious couple, that would be the sure-fire way to find them out. On the following Saturday night a substantial moon was promised, and Nancy had decided they’d kept themselves in suspense long enough. Marla had agreed, though somewhat reluctantly. The deed would be done then, only six days before the seventieth anniversary of the Obers’ death.

  The two friends, having successfully climbed the social ladder during junior high school, enjoyed the fringe benefits of their popularity, one of which was the slack they were allowed by their peers for delinquent behavior —in their case delinquent usually meaning mild obnoxiousness and brattish behavior designed to draw giggles from their friends. They had three classes together, which included second-year algebra during their last period. It was taught by Albert Montgomery, a sourfaced, balding, potbellied man in his early fifties who had written the book on teacher burnout. What Albert liked about his profession he could write on the back of a postage stamp; what he liked about teenagers he could write on the head of a pin. He was known as Dr. Doom to the majority of his students, and being aware of the nickname, made all the more effort to live up to it. His homework assignments went beyond cruel and unusual punishment—rumors persisted that they were originally dictated in Hell—and God help the kid who came to class tardy or unprepared, or who was caught talking, passing notes, or committing any other infraction of Montgomery’s Rules and Regulations for the Ideal Student, which he listed on the blackboard at the beginning of every semester and made his students copy. Marla and Nancy were convinced he simply changed the name on a pamphlet for the Hitler Youth faction.

  Montgomery would have liked nothing more than to send Marla and Nancy to the gas chamber. But for their obstinate habit of passing notes to each other in class and giggling like inebriated chipmunks, he had to settle for sentencing them to longer periods of detention in combination with forcing them to grade his papers, relieving him of a considerable amount of the detested duty. And ah, yes, the homework. Tons upon tons of it, due in an impossible amount of time, though for some irritating reason they always got it done. Montgomery had his suspicions, but he couldn’t prove anything, so he had to accept what they turned in as their own work.

  It was a quarter to five that Thursday when they finally finished grading the tests he had given them. Nancy, the more dominant and strong-willed of the two, slapped the thick bundle of papers on Montgomery’s desk and asked with
her usual air of insolence, “Can we go now, Mr. Montgomery?”

  Albert looked up from his book of poetry and studied the slightly plump, dark-headed girl with deep-set eyes, pug nose, and bee-stung lips which were always glistening with tintless gloss. “Sit down, Miss Snell. There is something I’d like to discuss with you two before I let you go.” Beneath the patience in his voice ran a current of sweltering hostility, which could always be detected when he was speaking to an adolescent. It didn’t intimidate Nancy. Very little did.

  “Listen, if it’s about that note—”

  “I told you to sit down,” Montgomery repeated sternly, gritting his teeth.

  Marla tittered nervously as Nancy returned to her seat beside her on the front row, making a face Montgomery couldn’t see. Marla and Nancy could have been sisters, with the same raven hair and rounded noses, but Marla was a good fifteen pounds lighter than Nancy, and her lips were on the thin side. High cheekbones hinted of Indian ancestry.

  Montgomery opened his top desk drawer and removed a folded piece of notebook paper. He opened it and frowned as he read for the second time what had been written on it. Normally when he caught students passing notes he would force them to write their messages on the blackboard for the purpose of humiliating them in front of the entire class—which worked rather well on the less popular kids—but in this case the tactic would have backfired on him. He put the note down and glared intensely at Nancy, her smug expression doing little to dilute his rage. “Tell me, Miss Snell…why the preoccupation with my sex life?”

  Maria clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from bursting into hysterical laughter, but Nancy had no trouble at all in keeping a poker face. She casually flipped back a lock of her shoulder-length hair, her chestnut eyes locked fearlessly into her teacher’s. “I was just wondering, Mr. Montgomery, if the reason you’re so crabby all the time is that you don’t ever get any.”

  Albert, who was divorced and could barely remember his last sexual encounter—with a partner; there was always the Vaseline jar and his left hand—felt his cheeks redden; what had he hoped to accomplish with this inane confrontation? He said tersely, “The reason I’m so…as you say, crabby all the time, Miss Snell, is because I have to tolerate the likes of you year after year. What I’d like to know is why you and Miss Mingee seem so bent on setting the world record for being insufferable little monsters?”

  Marla snickered derisively behind her hand; Nancy simply cracked a wry grin and answered flippantly, “I didn’t know there was a world record for that.”

  Montgomery stood up, gripping the edge of his desk, his knuckles turning white. “I’ve had quite enough of you two,” he spat, glowering at them with dark intensity. “And I’m sure you realize what flunking this class would mean to you. It would mean summer school, which I also teach, by the way—and if you fail summer school, you won’t have the required credits to graduate and therefore go on to college. Do I make myself clear? One more incident—just one—and you can both look forward to receiving F’s on your report cards.”

  Marla dropped her hand and threw a sober glance at Nancy. Marla’s father, Harold Mingee, was one of the three attorneys in Sharon Valley, and she felt free to hurl this fact in the face of a variety of dangers, including threats from teachers. She countered Montgomery’s flagrantly unethical ultimatum with, “You can’t flunk us for an attitude problem, sir. We make the grades. You try something like that and my dad will see you in court.”

  “I’ll see both of you in the principal’s office first thing tomorrow morning!” Montgomery thundered, incensed at the calling of his bluff. “We’ll see if a three-day suspension won’t do something about your attitude problem! Now get out of here!”

  He turned his back to them and began to viciously swipe off the equations on the blackboard with an unclapped eraser, producing a thick cloud of chalk dust which made him sneeze like a trumpet.

  The girls angrily gathered their books and homework assignments, pausing to glare daggers into Albert’s back before leaving. Nancy silently reached over and swiped his favorite writing tool, a gold-plated fountain pen, from the holder on his desk and stuffed it into her purse. Satisfied with her small act of defiance, she marched ahead of Marla from the room and slammed the door behind them so fiercely that the glass in the long narrow window shattered. Giggling, they ran down the wide-tiled corridor, empty but for Harry Bellows, the custodian, who leaned on his mop handle and watched their fleeing figures with disgust.

  Outside the building, in the student parking area, they found Marla’s boyfriend, Dennis Bloom, lounging against the driver’s door of his blue ’83 Monte Carlo, which was parked beside the new cherry-red Cutlass Marla’s father had purchased for her sixteenth birthday. Dennis’s size and build marked him as a linebacker for the football team, which he probably would have been if his grades hadn’t been so deplorable. He had straight, dark brown hair which he wore short on the sides and top, down to his shoulders in back. His face had a false look of maturity, his hazel eyes always suggesting possession of some arcane philosophy .

  Dennis grinned as the two girls approached. “Montgomery again, eh? I was beginning to wonder if he was going to keep you all night.”

  “That bastard,” Nancy seethed. “He’s going to try to get us suspended tomorrow for three days. If he does, my mom will have a shit fit.”

  “I’ll probably lose my allowance for a whole month,” Marla lamented. “Or worse—I’ll get my phone disconnected. Rick brought two D’s home on his report card the first quarter, and I thought Dad was going to tear his head off and stuff-the rest of him down the garbage disposal. He doesn’t go berserk very often, but when he does—look out. That damn Montgomery! I’d like to stuff him down a disposal…he even threatened to flunk us if we broke any more of his stupid rules.”

  Dennis took a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lit it, with some difficulty due to the cool gusts of wind whipping around them. “Well, what did you do this time?” he asked finally through a belch of smoke.

  “Nothing worth getting suspended over,” Marla snapped, irritated that Dennis hadn’t offered to relieve her of her burden of books. “Nancy slipped me a note is all.”

  “It was a bad one for him to catch, though,” Nancy added, smiling at the memory of Albert’s face when he’d first read it. “I asked her when she thought he’d last had a piece of ass.”

  Dennis nearly choked. “Jesus—he caught you with that?”

  Marla sighed. “What I wrote back was even worse. I said if he’d ever had any at all it was from eating a rump roast. I also mentioned something about his playing pocket pool. He does it all the time, the slimy pervert. Uh, these books are getting heavier by the second, Dennis.”

  Dennis ignored the hint, musing how stupid the two girls were for passing comments like that in writing, and right under the nose of the man those comments pertained to, but he knew better than to say so. Even though he disliked Montgomery as much as anyone else, he thought the actions of his steady and her friend were deserving of whatever punishment was dished out. Such idiocy begged for retribution. “Well, you wanna go to the drive-in for a Coke?” he asked.

  Marla was thoroughly peeved at his apparent lack of concern over their dilemma, in addition to the fact he’d still made no move to take her books, even after being slapped with such a strong hint. “We don’t have time for a Coke—the jerk gave us enough homework to keep us busy until the year 2000,” she responded coldly, and added with an extra dose of venom, “As if you really care.”

  “So when have you ever done your own homework?” Dennis shot back accusingly, readily on the defensive whenever anyone spoke to him in less than magnanimous tones. Being his girlfriend didn’t give Marla any special privilege to slide. “I thought you always paid that geek friend of your brother’s to do your homework for you.”

  Marla’s anger deepened. “He said he wasn’t going to do it anymore.�
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  “Well, that’s too, too bad,” Dennis retorted with mock empathy.

  “It sure is,” Marla shot back, moving past Nancy to get to the driver’s side of her Cutlass. “Too bad for you, because obviously I’ll be too busy to see you this weekend. And if I get suspended, you’ll be lucky if you ever see me again!”

  Dennis brayed laughter. “Lucky? You think my life’s gonna end if I can’t see you? Don’t bet on it.” He tossed the remainder of his cigarette down on the gravel and jerked his car door open, angry at himself for waiting almost two hours on such a spoiled, conceited ingrate. Moments later he was blasting out of the parking lot, leaving Marla and Nancy behind in a cloud of gravel dust. Marla shot him the finger before getting in her own car, and as soon as she’d leaned over to unlock the passenger door for Nancy, she turned on her stereo—the best that money could buy, and the most important feature of the car, in her opinion—and cranked it up full blast.

  Nancy got in and grimaced. “Do you have to turn it up so loud?” she yelled over the reverberating sound of electric guitars.

  Marla rammed the key in the ignition and fired up the engine, gunning it several times for effect. Like her father, she rarely lost her temper, but when she did…“As a matter of fact, I do!” she yelled back.

  They were two blocks from Nancy’s house on East Pine Drive before she finally turned the radio down low enough to allow conversation, having convinced herself that she didn’t care whether or not Dennis was even alive, and that Montgomery’s attempt to get her and Nancy expelled from school could prove to be the worst mistake he’d ever made. After hearing the embellished story she was thinking of later telling her father, he would get on the phone and call his good friend Judge Campbell, who in turn would have a little chat with his brother, the principal of Sharon Valley High. Montgomery would be damn lucky if he didn’t lose his job.