Tomorrow I Will Kill Again Read online

  TOMORROW

  I WILL KILL

  AGAIN

  A NOVEL

  MATTHEW ALLRED

  Tomorrow I Will Kill Again

  © 2016 Matthew Allred & Hardword publishing

  Edited primarily by Danielle Probst

  Thanks to my proofreaders: Heather Williams, Micah Fry, Sheldon Phillips

  Thanks to A.J. Carella for giving me the push and knowledge I needed to make this happen.

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  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  Fortunately, this is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  I dedicate this work to Damon Stokes & Danie Probst, without whom it would be much worse. I’m not sure if you two have ever met, but this book connects you. How morbid.

  †

  Warning to the reader: This narrative contains mild spoilers for Lois Duncan’s Down A Dark Hall, as well as for numerous novels that don’t exist.

  This book is my own examination of evil and madness. Above all else, regardless of what the story may seem to be telling you, I ask you to remember the following as you read:

  Choices are personal, consequences are not.

  -MA, 2016

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE † MANUSCRIPT

  PART ONE † WRITER

  PART TWO † BABY

  PART THREE † MAYHEM

  EPILOGUE † SPIRIT

  PROLOGUE † MANUSCRIPT

  She didn’t know if the story was true. No one did. But whether the [beings] were fact or fiction, they were like Santa Claus or the boogeyman, a force to be reckoned with. They wielded power, even if they didn’t exist, and everyone was afraid of them.

  —From Bentley Little’s The Store

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  UNABLE TO FULLY ENTERTAIN the meaning of what she saw in front of her, her disgust and unease left. Something altogether darker took their place.

  The manuscript had been here, resting on the desk as if it belonged, just as she’d been told it would be. She read on:

  Deeny tore into the other eyeball with his long fingernail. The child was crying. Still alive. Too alive for Deeny. Deeny needed this child dead, but he didn’t mind the screams or the crying. On the carpet the mother lay dead already. She was just barely dead enough. Her jaw was separated from the rest of her head, and Deeny thought she looked beautiful that way.

  She flipped forward about ten pages:

  “Please, I’ll do anything!” the man said, but the only thing he needed to do was die. Deeny didn’t need anything else. The man’s children cowered in one corner. They were hiding, but Deeny already knew where they were and what he would do with them. Deeny stabbed their father just above the hip, then wrenched the blade upward and to the left. Blood—Deeny’s absolute favorite—coated all the organs like thick oil. The children screamed.

  Suppressing an impulse to throw the bound pages as far across the room as she could, she closed it and put it back in the center of his desk. She’d had enough. First the bizarre encounter with her co-worker, and now this… Page after page, chapter after chapter, the same incoherent narrative stumbled on. The same fat man killed anyone he could find without opposition of any kind. No, narrative was too strong a word. This was, at best, a disturbing bloody jumble of words.

  If Paul had wanted to write a horror story, Jen would have backed him even though it was miles from the Civil War historical fiction he usually wrote. But this… this couldn’t be considered a story. It was five hundred pages of meaningless gore. She thought, Paul could not have written this.

  Even as the words formed in her mind, she knew they weren’t true. He must have written it. This was his office—the room of the house where Jen felt least like she belonged. His name was on the manuscript’s cover. His handwriting scrawled on the front read final to differentiate it from any other hard copies he had printed off before revision. It was his book. She knew that. But she didn’t know what it might mean. All this time she thought he’d been writing Scott’s Anaconda, he’d actually been working on… this.

  The darkness outside shined in through the windows like reverse sunlight. At least, that’s how it suddenly seemed to Jen. Her stomach dropped and she recognized the metallic taste of adrenaline in her mouth. The office—well-lit to avoid eyestrain on the writer who worked there—did not seem bright enough. The shadows were not like shadows at all; they had become heavy segments of drapery hidden around the room, under the desk and cabinet and chair. She tried to breathe deeply, but found the air in the room thin and stagnant, incapable of giving relief.

  If pressed, she could not have explained why her dread was swelling up inside her so forcefully. After all, it was just a bad book. But Paul, the Paul she had married, did not write bad books. He wrote long, intricately woven novels, finely crafted stories, each one requiring hundreds of hours of research before his fingers even hit the keyboard. Somehow, Jen didn’t think the primitively titled Deeny’s Adventure would be printed with high praise from Philip Lee Williams or E. L. Doctorow like Paul’s last two books.

  She settled back in the leather chair, startled by the hiss it made as it let out air. Normally Jen was a levelheaded woman, but now—with the stupid yet alarmingly detailed descriptions of murder from Deeny’s Adventure still playing out in her mind—she began to panic. She was a thin, stately woman. With her glossy shoulder-length brown hair tucked up in a bun, and her intensely brown eyes, she’d always had something of a presence in a room. But now—feeling like she’d been swallowed by something she didn’t understand—she felt more like a child than the capable adult she was. Her thinness no longer seemed attractive to her, but weak. She tried to slow her large, quick breaths.

  They’d only moved from their apartment in Chicago to Peoa, Utah five-and-a-half months previous—and it was impossible to think he may have been writing this before the move—and yet… something about the manuscript felt old to her. Ancient. Inevitable.

  And there was something else. Something she didn’t want to think about now.

  As if summoning that something, she felt the faintest presence; the downy hairs on the back of her neck were brushed by a playful, gentle touch.

  “Please,” she said aloud, frightened as much by the shaking of her voice as by the feeling of being toyed with.

  There was, of course, no one in the room but her.

  Suddenly she hated the house and the trees it had been built so close to. It seemed to be the very reason for Paul’s apparent madness—for what could Deeny’s Adventure be called, if not madness? She didn’t know why, but in that moment she knew the house, this land, shared in the blame.

  Paul loved the stupid McMansion, and she’d thought she would too. It was supposed to be their dream home. When Paul’s writing took off about six years ago, they had started planning. She could still remember the elation that overcame them both when that first substantial check came—or as Jen thought of it, The Big Check. That’s when they’d realized unequivocally they would actually be able to do it; they would actually be able to build the perfect home. Paul, normally shy of praise, especially from his own mouth, had set the check on their mantle as if displaying a professional certification. The money was inarguable evidence that someone found value in his work.

  Jen had not been sure
about the Utah culture or the people—and she still wasn’t, even after living there for four months—but she let Paul choose the location, trusting his judgment. She thought she had wanted the home, and she had, but she could never feel as Paul did for it. Where Twin Nest Lane just outside of Peoa turned into a dirt road, Paul wasn’t in Utah anymore, he wasn’t in America, he was in his own world. The patch of trees outside the window, the stars blinking in the darkness, the bubbling of Rockport River, all of this enchanted him. She couldn’t say why it didn’t have the same effect on her.

  For the first time she really considered how strange it was that they had come here of all places, so far from family or friends. For the first time she considered—her paranoia fueled by the strangeness of the night and the silence of the house—that there had been more behind Paul’s decision than either of them had realized.

  Normally she liked the tranquility of their property, the remoteness, but now, with the panic welling up in her like an approaching ambulance wail, she longed for the sounds of people and life, the noise she had grown to hate so much in Armour Square in their apartment by the truck yard in Chicago. As much as she had thought she liked the house, she had the feeling that it was now as much the home of this manuscript—a manuscript no sane publisher would ever print—as it was home for her.

  Jen glanced at the silver wristwatch hanging loosely over her thin wrist, trying to ignore how much it looked like a body with its neck snapped, and saw the time was ten to nine. The cold December night—Christmas Eve actually, not that either of them had been feeling very festive—had grown dark hours ago. Paul would be back from meeting with his agent anytime. She was horrified that he would even think to show this to any one. He had two completed war manuscripts sleeping in the bottom drawer of his desk that no one but Jen had read because he was so insecure about them, but now he seemed to have no qualms with showing Deeny’s Adventure to his agent or publisher.

  The thought of Paul coming home turned her single inner wail of panic into a full death choir. She ran to the window to see if his headlights were approaching. An unbeckoned and confusing image came to her mind. She saw Paul as one side of a Middle-Eastern scarab emblem and the house as the other: when the two pieces of the golden beetle interlocked they would reveal the true nature of its power.

  She went to their over-large bedroom and fished the car keys from her coat pocket. She didn’t know where she would go or who she could go to, only that it was vitally important that she get out of the house before he arrived. The darkened corners of the room were swallowed up in the same silence that fills spaces between the stars. Thankfully, her boots where still on from when she’d come home, so she didn’t have to waste time squishing her feet into them. She hurried down the steps to the living room. But before she could get to the door she heard the crunch of gravel in the distance and the heady, confident hum of Paul’s ILX coming up the drive.

  She tried in vain to calm herself, but she could feel the home breathing new life as its master approached. Deeny, whatever or whoever Deeny was, seemed to call to her from the office, from out of the pages of the book. No force in the world could have convinced her then that she was alone. Too quickly, a key slipped into the lock, the metal crunching sound like a saw on bone. The dead bolt turned.

  Paul entered with a smile on his face and blood smeared across his tan coat.

  PART ONE † WRITER

  “You don’t understand what you are, and I doubt you ever will… Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of.”

  —From Stephen King’s The Dark Half

  CHAPTER ONE † TWO MONTHS EARLIER

  PAUL WOKE FROM THE NIGHTMARE sweating and gasping. He couldn’t believe it, but he’d actually shed a few tears. Images he could not quite recall flitted around his thoughts like dark songbirds. Something red. Something wet and heavy. He tried to stop his heart from throwing itself against his chest like a caged animal. He peeled a layer of blankets off his body, not feeling too warm, but trapped beneath them. After a while he was breathing more normally.

  Amazingly, Jen—World’s Lightest Sleeper—lay undisturbed beside him.

  He could feel the presence of someone else in their home.

  Sweat covered his body, and salty tears dripped into his mouth, yet he felt thirsty and dried out. He struggled to fully wake himself; although he felt there was an intruder in his home, he was absurdly tempted to lie back down and return to sleep.

  He sat up and saw that the light was on in the hall. The dream was still with him, confusing him. Something red. Something wet and heavy. Crossing the room and pushing the door open, Paul was aware he was naked save a thin pair of boxer shorts. The light was on, but he could neither see nor hear another person. He thought of waking Jen and telling her, but the rational half of his brain kicked in and reminded him that would be childish. He had probably forgotten to turn the light off when he came to bed. To his knowledge, he had never done so before, but there’s a first time for everything, as they say. He looked over the banister to the large entryway below. Still no one. The kitchen light was on as well, but he couldn’t see in without rounding the corner.

  His footsteps on the stairs creaked loudly under his weight. Looking back, he could still see Jen sleeping though the half-closed door. Incredible, he thought. A spider’s sneeze would wake that woman. Then the unmistakable whir of the blender started up, deafeningly loud in the silence, and Paul rushed downstairs thinking nothing. He had no weapon or any way to defend himself against an intruder. He was of average height and built, maybe a touch on the feminine side given his slight bone structure, soft sandy brown hair, and cloudy light-brown eyes; he did not think he would be intimidating to the kind of man he imagined twisted enough to break in, but it wasn’t logic that moved him then. He wanted to protect his home.

  In the kitchen there was nothing and no one, just the silent blender on the counter, plugged in. He heard no movement from upstairs, either. Had she slept through that, too? The expensive kitchen lights shown down on the spotless room; the silver flecks inlaid in the granite tabletop glittered like fake jewels in a toy chest; the cold, rocky tile below him warmed slowly under the skin of his feet. He could see Cards, their black-pepper-colored puppy, sleeping soundly in her too-big, absurdly soft pet bed near the laundry room. If it was strange for Jen to sleep through the noise, Cards’ sleeping was a miracle. The eight-month-old poodle wasn’t much of a barker, but her curiosity was immeasurable.

  Paul knew he was alone again; the feeling of an outsider in the house was gone.

  He unplugged the blender, wrapped its cord around it, and put it away in its drawer, careful to make no unnecessary noise. He felt like he was sneaking around in his own kitchen, though he had nothing to hide.

  At the time, Paul was able to sufficiently convince himself nothing had been there all along. He told himself he had just been spooked from his strange, but ultimately unimportant, nightmare. In the weeks and months to come, however, he would think of this as the night Deeny had first truly entered his life.

  2

  In the morning, Paul woke to his alarm clock. It wasn’t a typical alarm; it played a soothing bubbling brook that slowly got louder as the minutes drew on toward the time of waking. At the pre-set time, it would become momentarily loud enough to wake just about anyone. He lay in his bed for a few minutes, listening to the recorded sound of water return to a pleasant volume thinking about what had or had not happened the night before. He decided he should say nothing to Jen about his midnight adventure downstairs. He laughed off the idea that he kept from telling her because he was afraid… afraid she would ask him why the blender was out at all. He was content to tell himself that she had been the one to use it last and had simply neglected to put it away. He also laughed off the silly question of why she would take the blender out, put it on the counter, plug it in, and then not use it.

  Paul knew he had other, more important things on which to focus hi
s attention, namely going to the Acura dealership. Today was a big day for him—a luxury vehicle wasn’t just a symbol of wealth for others to see. For Paul, it was a personal milestone. He could afford a nicer car than the one he planned to buy, but why? The Acura would be enough. In fact, it would be perfect.

  He got out of bed, shuffled down the hallway, and began the unpleasant task of shaving away the black-brown stubble he’d accumulated over the past couple of days, hating the way the razor seemed to pluck at some of the hairs. Jen was gone already. She was gone a lot these days, even though she could to some extent choose her own hours. He supposed he couldn’t hold it against her. Paul was still not yet ready for children, and what was there for her to do here? He thought she had probably bought Cards to help release some maternal instincts, but unfortunately or otherwise, the dog was not needy, and spent most of her time exploring the house or the patch of trees just outside. Paul sometimes thought Cards was more like an unusually energetic cat than a puppy.

  He sat on the lacquered wood of the mudroom bench, bent over to grab his Ecco loafers, and wondered if a child would ever sit where he was now, pulling off his or her soaked-through boots after a serious romp in the snow. Thinking about children of their own had thrilled Paul when they first got married—it was something both of them felt strongly about—but back then they never had the money. But now that they had enough dough he had lost his nerve. The thought of becoming a father terrified him, though he could not fully conceptualize why. It wasn’t a normal, I’m-not-sure-I-can-do-this terror. This was the real stuff: his pulse quickened when he thought of children. He felt watched, stalked by some vicious Angel of Responsibility. If he was being one-hundred-percent honest with himself, which he knew he wasn’t being, he would probably admit the issue had become a borderline neurosis in his own mind. The money excuse was probably not going to work since they had the new home now. How could he explain that his doubts had only increased since moving here? Jen was thirty and he was nearly thirty-five. In their new Utah community, a fair number of women her age had two or three kids already, some had more. Jen would probably be content with one, but even the thought of that gave Paul something close to a panic attack