The Kestron Lenses

part 5

by Jonathan M. Sweet

“The Kestron Lenses” began in issue 111.
Part 4 appeared in issue 114.

A couple of the sorority girls he talked to later recalled to UPD officers that his skin had been pale nearly to the point of translucence, his eyes had been dark and vacant-looking, he had a persistent twitch on the right corner of his mouth, and that he has a nervous, undernourished air about him.

Harry awoke to a tight, crippling pain in his biceps, armpits, and the small of his back. Carolyn’s body has been heavy; he must have pulled a bunch of muscles lifting her.

The events of the twentieth filtered through the ache like water in a footprint made in mud... how he had stuffed several good-sized rocks in Carolyn’s pockets, filled her underpants with gravel and sand, and even poured a couple of handfuls into her mouth. Then he had lifted her over his head and given her a mighty toss. She sank like a dead tree branch into the black water.

He checked his watch and was surprised to see that it was just after eleven in the morning... on Sunday. Thank God it was the weekend. It’s likely most everybody at the party stayed in bed Saturday anyway, worn out from dancing and boozing and party-hopping till dawn. So I won’t be missed. If I can just hide here in my room until tomorrow, I’ll be fine.

He truly felt he was balancing on a spaghetti-thin strand of rationalization over a yawning cavern of unspeakable horror. He had murdered twice. B.J. was considered an accident, but Carolyn, when her body was discovered, would not be an easy ghost to put to rest.

Another thing that bothered him was that the blackouts were more severe and longer. When he saw the death of Miercoles, he had the luxury of preventing it, if he so chose. The murder-suicide of Jessie and Dick Wells (he saw their names now, as clearly as if written in front of him) had happened at exactly 5:03 p.m. Saturday. Eighteen hours had passed, and most likely the UPD had already begun their investigation.

Harry stood stiffly up. He noticed, with almost no surprise, that there was handwritten copy on his desk, right under his glasses, dated 5/20/01.

He’d have climbed back into bed, but his stomach was growling, obviously outraged at having no nourishment for 36 hours. He picked up his clothes — the same ones he had worn when he reappeared at the party — from the back of the chair, struggled into them, and headed to the Hoopes Center for brunch. His head felt like someone was squeezing it between two giant hands. He figured once he had some bacon and eggs in him, he’d feel a bit more human.

Harry only left his room once more for dinner; he spent the rest of Sunday in bed, trying not to think about what he’d done. But the faces that danced before his closed eyelids — Miercoles, Dr. Wayne, the Wellses, B.J., Carolyn — made for a very fitful sleep. Three times he had to get up and readjust the bedsheet that his tossing and turning had rendered a wrinkled, tangled mess. The webbing under his arms vigorously protested the exertion of stretching the fitted sheet over the mattress corners, and his back felt like a cricked, knotted nightmare.

Monday morning Harry arose at twenty after seven, breakfasted light, then headed over to the newspaper office. He typed his copy, dropped it in the box, and headed towards the Williams Building for his first class of the morning. He was twenty minutes early; poetry class didn’t start till nine.

Harry stopped short. Kirk was standing on the top step, blocking the entryway to the third floor. He had a stern look on his face, and though his eyes were watery and somewhat intoxicated-looking, they were painfully sharp as they stared down at him.

“Kirk, I don’t have time for this bullpucky. Get out of my dang way.”

“Carrie Monroe never made it back to Mays Hall the other night.” Kirk’s voice was gravelly and chilly. “They dredged the lake by the Pavilion and found her body. Now how you s’pose that happened?”

“I wouldn’t know. We parted company on Delia Road by the Convo Center, and she headed into the woods by her lonesome. Let me pass, please.”

“Was it you? Did you rape and strangle her in them woods?”

“No! I... I wasn’t the one who hit her on the head, and I dang sure didn’t rape her!”

“Who said she got hit on the head?”

Harry bit his lip. Unintentionally he had compromised himself, and Kirk realized it. “Well, didn’t you?”

“Said nothing of the kind.” Kirk’s stubbly face broke out in a warped smile. “There was a hammer in that lake bed, too, and a couple sweatsocks. Grey. Just like them you got on.” He pointed to Harry’s ankles.

“There must be a couple thousand guys on this campus what wear grey socks.”

“Maybe so. But only one was seen leaving the Piddle House with Carrie. Why’d you do it? You having some sort of breakdown? ’Cause I’m telling you, man, you look like a breathing corpse yourself these days. Pasty puss, empty eyes, shaking like you got palsy half the time. I... “

Harry threw himself into Kirk with full force, slamming his head against his chest. The two grappled like two Greco-Roman fighters, and Harry managed to push Kirk back just enough to allow himself access to the top step. Kirk grabbed his arm and hissed, “You murdering maggo... “

Harry’s arm flew out — seemingly of its own volition — and struck Kirk full in the nose. Kirk bent backwards, pinwheeled, clutched fruitlessly for the banister, and thudded down the stairs like an old pair of coveralls stuffed with plastic bags. His tin slid out of his back pocket and opened, spilling rolling papers and acrid loose tobacco over the steps.

Kirk’s body, its neck broken, came to rest near the ground floor, spread face-down on the last three or four steps. Blood trickled from his nose and a gash on his left temple, pooling onto the dirty cold concrete.

Harry dashed through the doorway and down the first floor hallway, looking at no one. He exited swiftly through the door at the opposite end of the hall, foregoing Dr. Nayles class, and thundered down the back stairs. He breezed across the quad, slipped through the side door at Faulkner Hall, took the stairs two at a time, and made it to his room, with his heart larruping in his chest.

It was then he cursed himself, for in his haste to escape, he had neglected to take a sample of Kirk’s blood for the glasses.

What? You kill your best friend and your biggest concern is that you didn’t take his blood? You’re a vampire! Kirk was right — you need professional help! Turn your butt over to the cops right now!

“Shut up,” Harry panted aloud. He took off the glasses and set them on the desk. “I’m not like this. You’re making me a monster.”

Who am I talking to?

I’m not making you a monster — I’m making you a god.

Harry sank wearily to the bed, his classes forgotten, and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

Leon Marks called Harry that afternoon around four. “Good work on the Wells story,” he said. “We had a reporter out Sunday afternoon talking to the police, but your angle on it was totally different. You got into the husband’s head and provided some real insights as to why he offed his wife and himself. We’re running that first story tomorrow, and yours as a follow-up on the twenty-seventh. That part about their sixteen-month-old girl bawling herself hoarse and to the point of dehydration nearly made me teary.

“You mentioned Jessie Wells was having a fling with...“ Leon ruffled some papers — “uh, a teaching assistant named Eric Morrison. The University police went to his house and questioned him, and he admitted he had been sleeping with her since before she got pregnant with her daughter. There’s even talk of a blood test to determine if Morrison is the father.

“I mean, wow. This is some pretty deep closet-skeleton stuff you’re digging up. Did you know these people or something?”

“Huh-unh. Never met them.”

“You wouldn’t think to know it from the way you write. Hell, you keep turning in gold like this, I’ll arrange for a couple of your stories to be sent to the Corrazon Award board for consideration.”

Harry thought of some of his work winning the greatest honor a student newspaper could be nominated for. He almost felt a sense of pride — but then he glanced over at his glasses and noticed a shadow slip over the right lens (though there was nothing there that could cast such a shadow), as if they had winked at him again. Instantly his jubilation turned into hot and sour shame.

“Harry?”

“Um — hmm?”

“Are you all right?”

“How so?”

“Last time I saw you, you looked peckish. And you don’t sound well at all.”

“Must’ve caught that bug that’s getting around.” Harry manufactured a cough to demonstrate.

“Well, by all means, stay in bed. Drink fluids. And keep your ears open. I expect big things from you, son.”

Harry said goodbye to Leon and hung up the phone. The glasses were still looking his way, somehow infused with their own mind and voice.

Big things, son. I can make them happen. As soon as tonight, I think.

“Shut the frig up,” Harry croaked bitterly.

Dawn Gardener was crossing campus at two minutes until five, heading for the Williams Building. It was getting dark, and she was cursing herself for being so behind. She knew her Composition students had an unwritten code that if the teacher was over five minutes late arriving, they had license to assume that class was canceled for the evening and go off to their various sluggardly debaucheries.

I won’t give them the satisfaction, she thought grimly, her tight mouth pulled in what was not quite a smile. The bitter irony of her life was while she enjoyed teaching, she hated anyone under thirty. Knuckle-walkers and brainless social disease-ridden harlots, every one of them. In my day a girl didn’t spread her legs to every unwashed ape who took her to a movie on Friday night and threw a burger down her throat.

Gardener was one of the old-guard Gloria Steinem/Betty Friedan-era feminists who saw all men as potential rapists. She’d written several scholarly papers outlining the failures of the feminist movement during the Reagan and Bush eras to fully follow through on the pie-in-the-sky promises of the turbulent 60s and 70’s, as well as critiques of those Republican gods Bob Bork, Newt Gingrich, and that grandfather of close-minded prejudice and misinformation, Senator Jesse Helms.

Her rabid left-wing politics fast found a niche in the growingly-liberal college environment fostered by eight years of Clinton and Gore and a Democrat Congress, and she was proud of that. She had a particular disdain for conservatives, who she often referred to as “those mindless AM talk radio-spouting neo-Nazis,” and made it a point to reduce to tears any student who tried to apply his right-wing wisdom in order to disprove the principles she clung to so dear. Once she had startled her class by engaging in a red-faced shouting match with some ignorant Limbaugh-spewing junior in the front row who insisted that the Democrat was going the way of the dinosaur and feminists were really just sneering elitists masquerading as saviors while making it their mission in life to confuse women with garbled propaganda masquerading as enlightenment. He later dropped her class two months into the semester and switched to Intro to German. Apropos for a budding Nazi, she later told her friends.

Gardener caught sight of a shadowy figure moving in the alley between the College of Mathematics and the old computer lab and slowed her pace. Her step quickened, her heart accelerating slightly. The Williams Building was in view. It was a minute after five. I can just make it.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2004 by Jonathan M. Sweet