Chapter 23
Curtis: Stop Dragging My Heart Around
Curtis is furious. He had one singular need. One. Ever since he left the radio station, he has felt different. Monstrous. He has no hunger, no thirst, no need to talk, love, pee, listen to music. He has one need and that one need is to kill Sharon Weiss and Shana Cummings. They were two entities that lived inside the same person. One of them once loved him and left him. And one of them shamed and embarrassed him. The small rational part of Curtis that remained let out a little laugh at that thought. Didn’t both Sharon and Shana embarrass him? Being stood up on your wedding day isn’t exactly a stellar moment in your life. It was weeks before he left the house after that incident. The embarrassment bestowed by Shana was less immediate. It was simply a shame he felt every time someone mentioned her, as if he had anything to do with her making her living as a fuck machine. It was a shame that burned deep inside of him, that made his stomach fill with acid and hatred fill his heart. She ruined Greener Valley for him. She ruined everything. And when he turned, when that shadow all but gave him the go ahead to kill her, he felt liberated. His open rage gave him the freedom to be the man he wanted to be since his aborted wedding day: a killer. A destroyer of life, soul, heart and breath. Everything he dreamed about, especially the rotting corpse of Sharon Weiss, would be told by his hand. He walked out of that building a monster with a mission and now, that mission was taken from him.
Curtis drags Sharon’s body, still trailing blood and tissue and skin. Sharon is only recognizable by her legs and red pumps and even then, they could be the legs of any woman. Her torso is a mess; the dress Sharon borrowed from the movie set has been torn and stained with gore. It’s not like she’s going to return it at his point, anyhow. Her head is, well, not so much a head anymore. Having been bashed in by the ice waste and then dragged down a street for half a mile, her skull and face have become a gaping, open wound. Curtis doesn’t really notice. He’s too busy contemplating what he’s going to do next and contemplation is hard for a guy who has been possessed by the power of darkness. He can’t seem to find the words he needs to finish a thought. All he can come up with is PEOPLE. MUST. DIE. He sees it written out like that in his head, in all caps like those kids who yell at him in chat rooms. DUDE, STOP BEING SUCH A DICK. Like that.
Curtis stops in front of his house. For a moment, the old Curtis is there, the one who would walk up those steps after work, change into some old sweats and a Star Trek t-shirt before he warmed up his can of Dinty Moore. He’d crumble some Saltine crackers over the stew, turn on Scratch and Skip with Stu McLundy and nod his head in time to whatever was playing, maybe Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold.” When the song ends, Stu McLundy’s voice would fill Curtis’s kitchen, bouncing off the toaster and microwave, absorbing into the ceiling, a warm caress around Curtis's head, an aural Zoloft. Curtis would finish his stew, clean off his plate, turn up the radio and do an awkward sort of dance across the tiled floor as “Brand New Key” wafted through the kitchen. This would go on for hours, as Curtis swept the floor, played two games of solitaire on his laptop, dished out a bowl of vanilla ice cream, read the daily comics in between all the minutiae of his life.
That Curtis has left the building.
The Curtis who stands in front of his house now, the Curtis who is walking the body of his ex fiancé like a lifeless dog, will not let the Curtis of Dinty Moore and “Brand New Key” think any more thoughts. He smiles, but it is not a pleasant one. It is a smile made of nightmares and horror and it is this smile Terri sees.