Free Endless Night by Richard Laymon Page A

hands on her—my cock into her. Oh, shit, where was I? Better rewind a little.) Okay. Put myself into her shoes. Right. What I figured was that she might lay still, either because of getting hurt in the fall or maybe because she decided that hiding was the safest thing she could do. If she did keep still, we might stand a good chance of finding her if we fanned out and searched down there.
    Or she might try to reach help.
    So I kept a sharp eye on the back yards of the houses down there.
    In a way, I almost hoped the girl and the kid would make a dash for one of those houses. They’d call the cops the minute they got inside of one, and we wouldn’t have any choice except to bail out.
    That gave me an idea.
    Just suppose I ran and told the others that those two had made it into a house?
    There’d be hell to pay if they found out I’d lied, of course.
    Hell for me and some others.
    But how were they ever gonna find out?
    It seemed like a terrific idea. And even if it was a lie, it might save us. It struck me as awfully risky to stick around this place and search for those two. After you’ve done a massacre, you don’t want to linger around. You want to get out and far away as fast as you can.
    If we carried out a hunt, we might have to stay another hour. Or even longer, depending on how it went.
    Tom might even keep us here till daybreak.
    He wouldn’t let us leave, not while there was any chance at all of laying our hands on them.
    It isn’t just because they might be able to identify us. I sure don’t want them alive to pin any of this on us—especially since I’m the one the girl got her best look at—but Tom’s big concern is keeping everything quiet. The last thing he wants is for things to get spread around on the news so we wouldn’t be a secret society anymore.
    He’s very big on this secret society stuff.
    According to him, it’d ruin everything if people found out about us and what we’re up to.
    We call ourselves the Krulls, by the way. (Or Kruilers, when we’re feeling whimsical.) Tom came up with the name for us, right at the start of things. He found it in a book. That was back when we were in junior high. Tom was always reading these trashy slasher books, and this one had to do with a group of people called the Krulls who ran around the woods like savages doing all sorts of weird shit. They were a bunch of real sick puppies. They loved to torture and kill people. They ate people, too. A lot of them just ran around naked, but some of the others wore clothes they made out of human skin. This one gal wore a bikini top that was made out of the faces peeled off two dead babies. We all thought that was pretty cool.
    Maybe the guy that wrote about Hannibal Lecter read the same book we did way back then. Or maybe both those writers got their ideas from Ed Gein in Wisconsin, who did some of those things for real.
    Anyway, Tom was really turned on by all that Krull stuff. The book was like his Bible. He made us read it, and he went around all the time quoting from it. Whenever we got together, we used to talk about the Krulls and how much we’d like to be running around in the woods that way, killing and raping and having a great old time.
    It was just something we got a kick out of going on about, though. I don’t even think it was all that abnormal. I knew plenty of other kids who weren’t part of our group, but who also got turned on by stuff about perverts and psychopaths and ax murderers and the Nazi death camps—about anything that had to do with brutal, sadistic slaughter.
    One guy I knew, George Avery, always carried around this paperback that had about fifteen pages of photographs near the middle. The pictures were in black and white. They weren’t very clear, either. But two of them showed naked dead women who’d been found in the woods. You couldn’t see whether the gals were pretty or not. The shots were so pale and blurry that you could hardly even see their tits. Their nipples were