Free SHUDDERVILLE TWO by Mia Zabrisky

 
Episode Two
Do Not Enter Welcome Street
    Not many people lived in the boonies of Hope Hollow on the north side of town. There was nothing out here but dying family farms and woods and fallow cornfields. But this was where I decided to land. 32 Welcome Street.
    I had killed a widow in Ohio.
    I had killed a mechanic in Mississippi.
    I had killed a minister and his wife in North Carolina.
    I hadn’t killed anyone in New England yet, so I was open to anything.
    It was 1971, and a war was raging. American soldiers were dying. I bought a cup of coffee at a diner on the edge of town, opened the daily newspaper and found an ad for a boarder. Delilah Kincaid of Welcome Street was renting out a room. Her husband had died in Vietnam and she needed the money. Another widow. I dug a quarter out of my pocket, located a phone booth a few blocks away and made the call.
    Okay, here’s the truth. I’m one of those people who can get away with anything. I’ve led a charmed life. I don’t know why. I guess I have an angelic look about me. I guess an angel kissed me in my cradle. Maybe it’s my smile? I have a great smile, or so I’ve been told.
    My name is Clay Purvis. I’m not especially handsome or good-looking. I’m pretty average in every respect, except for my hands. I inherited my father’s broad, long-fingered hands. I can grip baseball bats, shovels and axes with the same fierce assurance. My aim is true. My fingers never seem to rest. They’re always moving, tapping, fidgeting, or just plain itching to do something. My fingers will drum on any surface, telegraphing my impatience. I go through countless pencils, gripping them so tightly they snap in half. My hands like to linger on things—a car fender, the blade of a knife, a slender neck.
    I move around a lot. I have lived in every state, including Alaska, where the mountains form a ring of snow-capped peaks floating in a powdered-sugar sky. My first victim was young, maybe 19—a pretty girl with hazel eyes and curly, bouncy auburn hair and razor-straight bangs. While hiking in the pristine Alaskan wilderness, I struck her on the head with a shovel and watched her stagger around for a while, her pale blue boots leaving soft impressions in the drifts. The overcast sky spit snow in my face, and the crystal cold air froze my lungs. I stood and watched her take a few staggering steps up a steep incline and then sink knee-deep into a drift. She lapped at the falling snow with her tongue. “Look,” she said, dazed and disoriented. “I’m eating snowflakes.”
    It made me think twice about finishing her off.
    Anybody who could say something that sincere while in the throes of death—well, it got to me, anyway. Her boyfriend was a big guy—mid-20s, healthy as a horse—and he was already dead. I’d taken care of him. Wrong place, wrong time. I split his head neatly in two with an axe, blood gushing out and freezing in a splash pattern across the unblemished snow.
    The girl took one last unsteady step and sank to her thighs in the drift. She sat in the snow, tilted her face toward the sky and watched with stunned innocence as big fat flakes mushroomed out of the clouds and landed on her eyelashes. “Do you like snow?” she asked, softly astonished.
    “Yeah.” I lifted my tongue to the sky. “Delicious.”
    She nodded and started to cry.
    All around us was a punishing silence.
    I knelt down beside her and took her gloved hand. Snow fell off the distant trees with the dull thud of a small avalanche. I wondered what would happen if I stayed there with her. How long would it take before we froze to death? Minutes? Hours? I wondered if they’d find us curled together in the morning, our bodies covered in ice crystals, little blue icicles leaking out of our eyes—our frozen self-pity.
    Her hands inside those brightly colored thermal gloves fascinated me.
    After she was dead, I took her gloves off and played with her fingers.
    *
    The rambling Victorian was in desperate