Shivers VIII by Richard Chizmar

Author:Richard Chizmar [Chizmar, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Dance Publications
Published: 2019-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Hour In Between

by Adam-Troy Castro

Oscar crept up on his sleeping wife and shattered her skull with five blows from a claw hammer.

The years might have robbed much of the strength from his legs and obliged him to do most of his walking these days with a cane, but his right arm was still almost as powerful as it had ever been. The first thundering impact struck Deanna with a crunch he could feel at the base of his spine.

There was still value in being sure, and so he raised the hammer again and brought it down a second time, burying much of its head in everything she had been: the toddler who had chased butterflies, the bride who had beamed in her wedding photos, the teacher who had taught English Comp for twenty years, the mother of one failed daughter and one merely defeated son, and finally the old woman who in her last years had precious little to say to her husband beyond businesslike reminders of whatever needed to be done around the house. He did not want her to linger, so he struck her the third, fourth, and fifth times, none of these three blows as accurate or as effective as the first two, but devastating enough between them to put out Deanna’s right eye, and flatten her nose, and turn the crater he had made into a larger and wetter obscenity.

This, he understood once the deed was done, was the moment that would forever come to define him. Very soon, he would only be the man who, at the end, bludgeoned his sleeping wife before then joining her in death. It was only Deanna who’d be remembered in her fullness, Deanna whose passage through her last seconds would not become the image that defined her forever, but would instead be the sad footnote to a life well-lived.

As he’d always expected, nausea struck.

The room had been dim enough to protect Oscar from seeing everything his hammer did, and was now light enough to ensure a quick retreat to the master bath. Oscar hurried around the queen-sized bed, past the bookcase and bureau, and into the room he thought he needed.

For a second or two he thought he would not make it, but by the time he was ready to kneel by the toilet, the spasm had faded. The water in the bowl could remain unsullied.

He stopped at the sink to scrub his bloody hands and he almost got sick again when he flipped on the light. The face in the mirror was covered with a fine spray of red freckles, larger wet spots that looked like open wounds, and, sticking to the side of his face like postage, one shard of something that could only be chipped bone.

Washing his face was pointless. It would only get bloody again later, when he shot himself. But there were too many things still left to do, and the thought of continuing to do them while pieces of Deanna dried on his skin seemed beyond obscene.

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