Bloody Finish

Tim Curran BLOODY FINISH

Moth to flame, Belachek drove 200 miles to see the old woman.

And this in a blizzard. He barely made it, what with all the roads the state cops were closing. A foot of the blowing white stuff already and another foot in the offing. None of it mattered to Belachek: he would’ve crawled naked through broken glass and razor blades for this. This was a good one. And the great part of it was, with the field being so overcrowded and all, nobody had yet to secure the old lady’s story. She was getting on in years. This was probably the last chance anyone would have.

Belachek was a writer. Wrote true crime books. His specialty was serial killers, mass murderers. Rapists, cannibals, vampires, ghouls, stranglers, torso murderers, yeah, grim and ghastly, but it was his bread and butter. Some people cringed from his choice of study, the monsters among us, but Belachek justified it by telling critics that in understanding them, he understood himself all that much better. Man was, by nature, a killer. Modern trends in homicide and sociopathy were only to be expected. And, shit, the money his books pulled in didn’t hurt, either.

Didn’t hurt a damn bit.

That’s why the old woman was so important… at least one of the reasons… her story had not been told. And, really, how many books about Ed Gein, Jeffry Daumer, and Henry Lee Lucas was the public expected to swallow? A fresh killer, a fresh slate of crimes, these were the things publishers lusted after.

Belachek made it to Calumet in one piece.

The snow banks were higher than the cabs of pick-up trucks. Cars had orange Styrofoam balls on the tips of their aerials so you could see them coming around corners. And still the snow came down, blowing, drifting, whipping blankets of white across the roads. A few more hours of this, the place would be snowbound come nightfall.

Belachek decided he’d be long gone by then.

He found the house without much difficulty. A big Victorian. Weathered, slouching, ramshackle. It looked pretty much like the dinosaur it was. Town was full of ancient houses like that. In the old days, when the mines and the railroads were going strong, there was a lot of money in this part of the country. Had been over a 100,000 people here back in the twenties. Barely five-grand now. Much of the town was desolate, vacant, entire neighborhoods empty and boarded-up.

Belachek tucked his notebook and tape recorder in his parka, stepped out into it. The wind-driven snow ripped into him like a storm of needles. He stood before the gate — rusted, collapsing — just looking, looking, absorbing the atmosphere of this malignant little Upper Michigan town.

“Yes,” he said under his breath, “exactly.”

The walks hadn’t been shoveled and he had to fight through the drifts like an arctic explorer, the blowing snow sometimes causing complete whiteouts where you couldn’t see three feet in front of you. He climbed the crumbling, icy steps, pounded heavily on the door. It was opened quickly.

A tall, hatchet-faced woman. Lethal eyes. “Yes?” she said, a microcosm of the town itself: dismal, weather-beaten, hopeless.

“I’ve come to see Ida Swanson,” he told her. “She’s expecting me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Mister Belachek?”

He nodded.

She let him in. The wind pushed him through the doorway. He slipped out of his parka, stomped his boots on a threadbare oriental rug. “Christ, it’s bad out there…” But he was alone, his host vanished.

All right, then.

He stood there, waiting, watching, soaking it all in like a dry sponge. There was a fan light above the door, stained glass. Dirty, dusty. The light it cast, not brilliant, but dim, clotted. He was in the hall. It was huge, drafty, smelled of mildew. The carpeting was rich, ornate, but scuffed and worn by too many feet. The centerpiece of it all was the stairs climbing to the second floor. Goose-neck balustrade, balusters carved like winding, flowering vines. The oak rail polished smooth by generations of hands.

“Mister Belachek.”

He turned. The tall woman stood there.

“Mister Belachek.” Said it like she’d just bitten into a spider. “Miss Swanson will see you now.”

He followed her down a shadowy corridor. He was pretty certain that old lady Swanson was barely getting by. From the looks of this place, goddamn mausoleum, money wasn’t flowing in. Yet, she had herself a retainer here, a servant. Interesting. Through double doors and into what might have been a conservatory in the quaint old days. Long, thin room, high-ceilinged, damp like an open grave. More stained glass.

“Mister Belachek.”

Ida Swanson was sitting in a rocking chair, her lap covered in a succession of crocheted afghans. She was sparse, frail, more bones than skin. Her eyes were filmed white. Blind as a bat, yet she knew exactly where he was in the room.

“Hello, Miss Swanson,” he said. “Thanks for seeing me.”

She nodded. “Let’s get it done with.” She rang a bell and the tall woman appeared. “Could you bring us some coffee, Lana? Thank you.”

The tall woman vanished again.

Belachek lowered himself into a small, plump sofa.

The old lady kept her hands under the afghan. It had to be hell, Belachek figured, being old in a house like this. So many stairs, so many corridors. Chilly, damp. Not a good place for someone like Ida Swanson.

“You want to know about Andrei, I assume.”

“Yes. As much as you can tell me.” Belachek had his notebook out, his recorder going. His fingers were trembling, his eyes staring. “It needs to be told.”

“Very well. My son Andrei.” The wrinkles on her face seemed to expand, spread out like fingers of frost on a window. The memories were wearing. “Why don’t you tell me what you know, generally, then I’ll tell you what I know.”

Belachek paged through his notebook. “Well. Andrei Swanson. Your son. Admitted killer of four women. Escaped from prison six years ago, but is believed to still be alive. That’s the general info on him. I could go into details -“

She smiled thinly. “Not necessary. Generally, I said.”

The specifics? Andrei raped and murdered four women, dismembered them down in Ann Arbor. He chose college girls as his victims. Abducted them, chained them in his cellar, raped and tortured them before dispatching them with a straight razor, cutting and hacking at them for hours. It was by no means an easy death. And Andrei Swanson was by no means a human being, he was a monster. A sexual sadist. When the police arrested him, he gloated in lurid detail about what he’d done. Only the repeal of the death sentence saved him from execution.

But that was public knowledge.

Belachek had researched and documented all that before making this trip. It wasn’t enough to know the facts, what he wanted (what the readers wanted) was to know what made an animal like Andrei Swanson, what sort of cesspool gave birth to a rabid malignancy like him.

The coffee arrived. Lana gave Belachek a look like maybe she wanted to pull his eyes out through his asshole with salad tongs. Belachek smiled politely. The coffee was tepid, tasteless black fluid, the consistency of drawing ink. He sipped it sparingly.

“First, you should know about my husband. Andrei’s father. My relationship with him was quite brief, though most gruesome.” Her white eyes stared into the distance. “His father, Charles, was a sadist. Though I didn’t know that at the time. We dated several times. He was a perfect gentlemen, a wonderful conversationalist. On what would be our last date at Christmas Ball held annually back then, Charles forced me into the back seat of his car. He raped me repeatedly for several hours. He cut three fingers off my left hand and carved obscene words into my skin.”

Belachek was breathless. “What words, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Her sightless eyes fixed on him. “Oh, but I do mind you asking. I’m not about to tell you any more than I’m going to show you my hand and the stubs of my fingers.”

“I couldn’t convince you -“

“No.” She sipped her coffee. Returned her hand, the right one, immediately beneath the afghan. Belachek could see she was massaging her left with it. “He let me live. Why? I don’t know, perhaps so I could carry his pestilent seed to fruition. The police arrested him, but, like his son, he escaped. En route to prison, he fled. He raped and murdered two teenage girls in as many weeks. When he was captured, he was sent to prison in chains. He was hung shortly thereafter.”

Belachek scribbled in his notebook. It was much better than he’d hoped for. “And then…”

“And then nine months later, Andrei came into the world. A sweet, beautiful child. Conceived, yes, conceived in horror, but touched by the angels nonetheless. I loved my child, Mister Belachek. He was a fine boy, very smart, very loveable, very outgoing. But then things changed.” Her face had gone rubbery and slack, yellow like a mask. “Puberty is what did it. He was a normal child in all ways until then. Back then, the nineteen fifties, nobody had much of an inkling into what made men turn into monsters, what the warning signs were. Not like today, where it’s a veritable science.”

Belachek licked his lips. “But you began to notice… irregularities?”

“Yes. He was murdering animals. First, family pets disappeared and then, soon enough, neighborhood animals. He was hanging them out in the woods, enjoying their pathetic little deaths. Yes, the onset of puberty turned my lovely little boy into a monster.”

“A monster?” Belachek seemed offended by this. “Troubled, surely, but a monster?”

“Yes!” Ida Swanson’s words were like a pistol shot. “A monster, Mister Belachek. People who are frightened of going out of doors, who talk to imaginary companions — these people are troubled. My son was a fiend. It was his inheritance, you see, from his father, a genetic curse that puberty freed. Don’t you see that? He was a normal, healthy child before that. There was nothing to suggest the perverted, freakish deviant he would become.”

Belachek was not writing now. He looked disturbed by such talk. “Go on.”

The old lady rocked slowly. “Then came a flurry of incidents. He was exposing himself at school, trying to talk the girls into aberrant practices. And, of course, still killing animals. He attacked one of our maids, tried to rape her. He led a twelve-year old girl away from a playground, his intentions obvious, but, thankfully, her father arrived and gave Andrei a good thrashing. But it didn’t stop him. Not at all. Things got worse…”

“Did they?” Belachek’s notebook was open in his lap. Nothing in it but doodling.

“Yes, far worse. Hideous occurrences.”

“Yes, yes, hideous, you say?” Belachek said, excited now, very excited. He was sweating, his heart pounding as the old lady gave him all the gruesome details. He had an erection, but he was unaware of it, knowing only that his palms were wet, that his skin seemed too tight for the bulging, bloody mechanisms beneath. In his belly there was a raw, inhuman hunger. “Go on, go on, yes…” his words dripped from his lips.

If Ida Swanson was aware, she gave no indication of the same. She continued on in a flat, dead tone. “…thankfully, no one was hurt. Not yet. It came to a head, you see. I discovered, in an unused woodshed out back, that Andrei had been collecting the heads of animals. Some were fresh, others nearly mummified. It was out of control, this savage beast within him. It hungered and demanded more and more by the day.” She was visibly shaking now. Belachek was on the edge of his seat. “I cornered him, told him he was going to be sent to a sanitarium, that he was sick.”

“And… and what happened then?” Belachek demanded. His tape recorder fell, dropped to the hardwood floor. He didn’t even notice. “Tell me what happened then! I have to know what happened…”

“Yes, of course you do. He attacked me with a straight razor. Even then, apparently, it was his weapon of choice. He slashed me brutally, paying special attention to my eyes. Then he ran off. I was blinded by his brutality. I have not seen the light of day since that horrible afternoon.” She stopped, breathing hard, forcing herself to be calm. “No, I haven’t seen him since, Mister Belachek. But he’s not dead. I know that. Even after he escaped from prison, he was killing. Constantly. He can’t help himself. I haven’t seen my son since that day, that depraved, vicious monster… until now.”

Belachek froze, the razor in his hands. “You knew,” he hissed. “You knew all the time!”

“Of course, I knew. You think a mother doesn’t know her own son? You think using your father’s name wouldn’t tip me off?” She was not frightened, just fixed with deadly purpose. “And now you’ve come back… to finish what you started?”

Belachek was giggling now, drooling. He advanced with the razor, bits of light sparkling off the fine-edged blade. “For the book, for myself, for you, mother…”

Ida Swanson — remembering the sweet, precious boy she’d once had before the darkness swallowed him, vomited back out this demon — let the afghans fall from her lap. In one arthritic claw, her right one, was a revolver. A small, sleek .38. Andrei Belachek froze, then lunged. The .38 spat a slug into him. It caught him in the belly, propelling him back onto the sofa, an ocean of red flooding its banks. The next slug caught him in the chest. The third in the throat. The fourth and fifth in the head. Belachek, still looking stunned and shocked by it all, slumped down into the cushions and went still.

Lana came into the room. “All done, then?”

“Yes,” the blind woman said. “Yes.”

“Very well then.” She took the gun from the old woman, began bundling Belachek’s corpse up. “The sofa’s ruined, I’m afraid. Worth the price, I assume.”

Ida Swanson looked ancient. “It’s done now. What should have been done forty years ago was done today,” she said and said no more.

Lana, after bundling Belachek up nicely so he wouldn’t leak, pulled her burden away. Its ultimate destination was the furnace in the cellar, where she would feed the worthless remains of Andrei Belachek into the flames piece by piece.