NightWhere

Chapter Thirty-One

Gordon

There are moments in everyone’s lives that they wish they could change. That insult you hurled at your father just before he had a heart attack. That moment when you were drunk and leaned over to kiss your best friend’s girl. Or that moment that you took a steak knife out of the wooden block by the kitchen sink and plunged it into your wife’s face. Actually, her right eye.

Gordon wished he could have taken all of those moments back, but mostly, he wished he could undo the last. He could live with his dad going to the grave hating him. He could live with the broken nose his friend had given him for tasting his dumb slut’s tongue when they were both drunk.

He was going to have a hard time living with Miriam’s corpse, though, which was currently bleeding all over the linoleum. He hated messiness. So this only pissed him off further. Gordon pulled the tablecloth off the dining room table and threw it over her. He had to go take care of Freddy, who was crying in the back bedroom again. Then he’d decide what to do with the naggy bitch that bore the boy.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had loved her once. Before Miriam had turned into a nag. An endlessly bitching, whining shrew. He didn’t know exactly which word had finally broken his bubble of protection. Was it pathetic, dickless, loser or joke? One of those words had made him drop the piece of leftover ham in his fingers and pick up a knife. It was all a red blur in his mind now.

Gordon pulled the tablecloth back and stared at the congealed blood across his wife’s face. The silver blade of that fateful knife was spotted in red above where it protruded from her eyeball, and the white of that eyeball was also spotted in her blood.

Gordon had rocked Freddy to sleep in the next room, and now he was going to take care of some outstanding business with the boy’s mother.

Actually, he’d already taken care of business when he’d pulled out the knife and silenced his haranguing wife once and for all. But sometimes taking care of one problem only led to others.

Like a body.

And child care.

Damnit.

Gordon wrapped Miriam in the tablecloth, after pulling the knife from her eyeball. Something creamy oozed out from the hole as he did, but Gordon didn’t wait around to consider what it was. He pulled the cloth over her mouth, silent for the first time in all these fucking years.

He wouldn’t miss her.

But Freddy would. Gordon was going to need some child care.

He’d deal with that tomorrow. After he tucked Freddy’s mom’s body in the basement. He slung her corpse over his shoulder and clumsily twisted the doorknob to the basement. He maneuvered her weight (slight as it was) through the opening and then carried her down the wooden plank stairs.

“You ain’t ever gonna yell at me again,” he whispered. And then he dropped her body to the sand of the crawl space and shook his head.

“Nope, never again.”

Gordon smiled, in a crazy, I-have-finally-gone-over-the-rainbow way and walked away from her without burying the body or saying any other last words.

Sometimes, you were just done.

But for Gordon, done was just a temporary thing. He couldn’t just leave Miriam here like this. But she would keep for now.

In the meantime, he had things he wanted to do. Things that would hurt. Not himself. But someone else. Like that Amelia chick. In fact, after sticking the knife in Miriam’s eye and then feeling the way she had jerked and trembled as he held her while the life bled out of her, and then laying her down on the floor, still kicking… Well, after experiencing that, he had a feeling that he could finally do something to satisfy Amelia’s desire for pain. He was looking forward to the next invitation from NightWhere, more than ever.

Of course, this time, he was going to have to find a babysitter.