Shards Read online

  As the horns trickled away, a tapping sound came in to take their place, a light pitter-patter as if of approaching footsteps. The tapping got progressively louder until it became the sharp rat-a-tat-tat of a snare drum, a percussive beat that sounded like gunfire.

  The space between the drumbeats was soon filled by the razor-squeal of violins. A pained sound, as if the instruments were being tortured rather than played.

  The auditory onslaught continued with a deep, pummelling bass that felt like a series of hammer blows against their eardrums.

  Marcie suddenly jerked upright like a puppet whose master has pulled too hard on its strings. The music pounded out of the gramophone, causing the entire cabin to shake. The windows rattled in their frames. The floor was vibrating so much it looked like Marcie was hovering six inches above it. Later on they would all agree she didn’t turn to face them. She spun around. Like a record.

  They knew right away something was wrong with her. Her eyes were glazed, her mouth hung slack, and her head was slumped at an unnatural angle. The autopsy would later determine her neck had been broken by that first burst of sound. She should’ve been dead, and yet she wasn’t.

  As the others watched, Marcie reached out with one marionette arm and snapped off the gramophone’s tone arm. The record continued spinning on the turntable, and although there was no needle—no Shard—to play it, the sounds kept blasting out.

  Sounds that became the soundtrack for everything that followed.

  * * *

  Donna was sitting on the front porch when the police arrived.

  Who called them? she wondered.

  Even though her arms were wrapped tightly around herself, she couldn’t stop trembling. She thought that being outside to catch the first light of day would help to drive away the icy aura surrounding her. It didn’t.

  The first officers on the scene pointed their guns at her and told her to drop it. She didn’t know what they were talking about, then realized she was still holding the fireplace poker. It was covered in blood. So was she.

  She understood how it must have looked. Only some of the blood was hers. Most of it was Marcie’s. There was a chunk of flesh stuck to the end of the poker. That was Marcie’s, too. It had come from one of her massive shoulders. Hitting her with the poker had been like hitting the tough hide of some large animal. It hadn’t stopped her, not at first. Not until the others joined in to help her. Killing Marcie had been a group effort.

  Donna thought about letting the cops shoot her. She could stand up, raise the poker high over her head, and make like she was going to charge them.

  She didn’t do it. Not because she was unwilling but because she was so fucking cold she could barely move. Her hand felt like a frozen claw, and it took all her strength to open it and let the poker fall to the ground. The police told her to stand up and walk toward them with her hands raised. She ignored them. She was done. If they wanted to shoot her, they could shoot her.

  They didn’t. More cops showed up, and some of them stayed with her, watching her warily with their guns still drawn, while the others went into the cabin. Chad, Mark, and Annabelle were in there. And Marcie. Marcie was all over the cabin.

  An ambulance arrived and a pair of EMTs tried to get Donna off the porch. She was hurt, they said, nodding at the slash wounds on her arms. She refused to move, wasn’t even sure she could move. She was so cold it felt like her ass had frozen to the plank floor. One of the EMTs noticed she was shivering and put a blanket around her. It didn’t help.

  The EMT told her it was shock and would wear off eventually.

  They were wrong on both counts.

  * * *

  Detective Russo entered the cabin and almost stepped on a severed arm. It was a strong, muscular arm with a large hand lying palm-down on the floor. For a moment he thought the nails on the fingers had been painted with red polish. Then he realized it was blood.

  There was more blood at the mangled joint where the arm was once attached to the shoulder. A few feet away was the shoulder, still attached to the torso. Over there was another arm. A leg. A head with blood-splattered hair pulled back in a ponytail. The room looked like a slaughterhouse. Russo’s gaze drifted over to a pile of smashed wood and a dented brass horn, what looked like the remains of an old record player. What the hell happened here?

  Two young men were seated on a ratty couch being treated by EMTs. The one on the left had a vertical gash running from his temple to the edge of his thinning hair. The other had what appeared to be a stab wound to his lower left side. A uniform was in the kitchen talking to a young woman sitting on a stool. She appeared uninjured.

  Russo headed over that way, stepping carefully to avoid the puddles of congealing blood. As he was passing an open trap door, the head of another uniform popped up, giving Russo a minor heart attack. He froze in mid-step, clutching the mantel for support.

  The uniform winced. “Sorry, Detective.”

  Russo closed his eyes. “What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing down there.” He looked around the cabin floor. “Looks like all the action happened up here.”

  The other uniform came over from the kitchen. Russo nodded at the open notebook in his hand.

  “Tell me.”

  * * *

  They told their story to the police, and from there it went to the media, and then out into the world.

  Four friends had murdered a fifth after a night of partying at a cabin in the woods. The murder was committed in self-defence, after their friend experienced a psychotic episode and attacked them. Some reports insinuated that drugs may have been a factor, but this was never confirmed. There was no mention of the mutilation of the body.

  Russo didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  When he questioned each of the survivors, they had spoken calmly and clearly, with no outward signs of lying or evasion. Their stories matched and their wounds were consistent with the makeshift knife they recovered from the scene. None of them had criminal records or a history of violence. All four were squeaky-clean college kids, due to graduate in a month. But there was something wrong about them.

  “Wrong how?” asked the police chief.

  Russo shook his head. “I can’t explain it.”

  The chief spread his hands. “Try.”

  Russo paced back and forth across the office, running his hand through his hair. “The dead girl’s body. Why did they chop it up?”

  “You read the shrink’s report. They claimed it was the only way to stop her. It’s abnormal, but considering their state of mind at the time…”

  “I know,” Russo snapped. “Their story makes sense, I get it. But it’s not the truth.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it,” the chief said. “But you have to close it.”

  So that’s what he did.

  The coroner’s inquest determined that none of the four survivors was criminally responsible for their friend’s death and no charges would be brought.

  The case was closed.

  But not for Russo.

  * * *

  Summer.

  Donna couldn’t get warm. One of the hottest summers on record and she was freezing. On the news, they talked about climate change and record-breaking temperatures. Donna was glad to hear it—if they were talking about the weather that meant they no longer cared about what happened at the cabin—but it didn’t change the way she felt. She was still fucking cold.

  All summer long she cranked the thermostat in the house, and her parents kept knocking it back down. They argued about it constantly. Donna’s parents tried to be patient, figuring it was her way of dealing with the stress and the trauma. They told themselves it would pass.

  One day in August, they returned from work to find the house so stifling it felt like they’d walked into an oven. In addition to turning up the thermostat as high as it would go, Donna had a roaring fire going in the hearth. They found
her sitting on the floor in front of the dancing flames, clothed in three layers of sweaters and her winter coat.

  Her parents yelled at her—Donna couldn’t hear them at first with the earmuffs she was wearing—then sent her to her room, something they hadn’t done in ten years.

  Donna was holding the brass poker she’d used to get the fire going, and for a moment she considered using it on her parents. The way she’d used the poker at the cabin on Marcie. The way she’d used it on the empty vodka bottle.

  When Marcie was dead and the music stopped, the bottle had still been spinning on the floor. It showed no sign of stopping, and to Donna this was the final indignity of the evening, so she smashed it with the poker. Smashed it and smashed it until it stopped spinning.

  That was when she started feeling cold. It was like a chill wind wrapped itself around her, enveloping her, sinking deep into her skin. It ran through her veins like ice water, turned her bones into frozen sticks. It numbed her very soul and filled her with a hopeless dread that she would never be warm again.

  Donna decided not to use the poker on her parents. She went upstairs like the good girl she’d been all her life. She thought about calling Mark—that’s what she normally would’ve done—but she didn’t. They hadn’t spoken since the cabin. None of them had spoken to each other. It was strange. They’d always been so close; they’d always been there for each other. Now they were like strangers. She didn’t feel sad about it, which was even stranger. She felt nothing about it whatsoever.

  She climbed into her bed, pulling up the duvet and the heavy quilt she’d brought down from the attic. The heat from the fire and the furnace hadn’t been enough. She was still cold. Her parents said it was all in her mind, but what difference did it make? Hot, cold—they were all signals sent from the body to the brain. How was this any different?

  She decided her parents were the problem. She couldn’t get warm with them constantly stopping her.

  So she waited a couple weeks, until they went away on a weekend trip. They’d been spending a lot of time out of the house since Donna returned from the cabin.

  After they were gone, Donna turned up the thermostat and made a fire. Like before, it did nothing to stave off the cold she felt deep in her bones and all through her body.

  She stayed up late, shivering in her layers of sweaters as she fed one piece of wood after another into the hungry flames. It made no difference—she was still freezing, so she decided to make another fire, this one in the basement. She emptied a can of turpentine onto a stack of old wooden chairs her father had been meaning to take to the dump. Then she tossed a lit match onto the pile and went back upstairs to start another fire in the living room. And another in the den. She locked the front and back doors and went up to the second floor. She lit more fires in her parents’ bedroom and the guest room.

  She went back downstairs. Thick black smoke chugged out of the basement door. The living room and den were burning nicely; flaming particles whirled through the air like a swarm of fireflies.

  Donna surveyed her handiwork and decided it would do. She retrieved the brass poker from the rack of fireplace tools and went upstairs. She climbed into bed and pulled up the covers, clutching the poker to her chest like a teddy bear.

  She listened to the strident beeping of the smoke alarms and the rustle of flames as they grew louder and louder. A flickering light soon filled her doorway. She closed her eyes.

  The fire slipped into her room, climbed up the door, and spread across the ceiling in a red-orange wave.

  Even as the room was engulfed, even as the flames crawled across the carpet and leaped up the bedsheets, even as the fire surrounded her body and encased her in a burning cocoon, even as her hair burned and her skin melted, even as her eyes boiled and spilled down her cheeks, Donna trembled and shuddered and shivered.

  Right up to the end, she was cold.

  * * *

  Fall.

  Chad couldn’t stand the silence. He could feel it nibbling at his mind, eroding his sanity. He couldn’t believe how much of it there was in the world, with all the people, all the noise. But it was there, vast mountains of peace and small pockets of quiet, lying in wait, threatening to destroy him.

  It didn’t make sense. At the cabin all he wanted was silence. When the music had come blasting out of the gramophone, his first impulse was to shut it off, to stop those sounds from entering his head even if it meant driving iron spikes into his ears. The music was more than unpleasant; it was toxic, polluted, a raping of his auditory canals.

  While Chad had taken no pleasure in what they’d done to Marcie, there had been a beatific smile on his face when they finally stopped the music. In the lull of silence immediately afterward, he’d felt a euphoric sense of calm and relief.

  It didn’t last.

  He was fine when the police arrived. Better than fine, actually, because they bombarded him with questions—questions that began as thinly veiled accusations but quickly escalated into perplexed demands for the truth.

  Chad didn’t mind. He welcomed their inquiries, welcomed the sound of their raised voices, the louder the better. The others were sullen and barely coherent, but he was a regular chatterbox. He talked so much one of the officers suggested he might want to remain silent until his lawyer showed up. Chad couldn’t do that; he was already growing suspicious of the silence. The only way to banish it was to fill it with sound.

  So he talked to the police, to his parents, to the lawyer they got for him, to the press (even though the police and the lawyer advised him not to). He didn’t care. He talked to anyone willing to listen, anyone willing to talk back to him, and it pushed away the silence. For a while.

  Even though the cabin was big news that summer, interest waned over time and attentions eventually turned to the next tragedy. Soon Chad didn’t have anyone to talk to—even his parents were tired of listening to him and responded only with single-word replies and grunts—and the silence returned.

  It became a presence in his life, haunting him, infiltrating all the gaps of his existence that he couldn’t fill with sound.

  Nights were the worst. Lying in bed, trying to sleep with the house gone quiet around him. Leaving his television on helped him fall asleep, but in the depths of slumber the silence would return, telling him there was no escape even in the dreamworld. He’d wake up gasping, sometimes screaming, and although the sounds were caused by fear and anguish, they were sweet relief to his ears, reassuring him, telling him he was okay, when he knew he wasn’t.

  The people he could’ve talked to about this, the ones he should have talked to—his friends—he made no effort to contact. He couldn’t say exactly why he didn’t reach out to them, only that he knew on some level they wouldn’t be able to help him. Just like he knew he couldn’t help them.

  He felt bad about not attending Donna’s service, but the silence there would have been too great. There was no funeral, only a spreading of her ashes on the lakeshore, which Chad found ironic since ashes were supposedly all that had been left of her. The fire in which Donna had committed suicide ended up consuming almost every house on the street. The news said it was a miracle she was the only fatality.

  Chad needed a miracle of his own, but he didn’t think one was coming. No one wanted to talk to him anymore, and talking to himself only helped in a small, putting-off-the-inevitable sort of way. He figured it was only a matter of time before he ended up like Donna, taking his own life once the silence became too much to bear.

  As the days grew shorter and the leaves changed colour, the silence took on a new aspect. Almost as if it were adapting itself to Chad’s efforts to eliminate it.

  Now when he entered a room, even if it was occupied, the silence was there. If he was at work, or a party, or a mall filled with people, he would experience a sensation like the volume of the world was being turned down to nothing. Then, at the moment he was about to start screaming, the volume would go back up again.

  He went to the doc
tor even though he knew it was pointless. This wasn’t a hearing impairment. It was a life impairment. A warning from the silence that it could get to him anywhere, at any time.

  One day while he was out for a walk—and pondering the idea of buying a gun to blow his brains out—a car drove by with its stereo blaring. The windows were up so he couldn’t make out what song was playing, but it didn’t matter. The sound was what mattered. The music. It was like an oasis in a desert. A blast of sweet relief from all the crushing silence.

  He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Talking to people, talking to himself, even leaving the television on while he slept. They were all stopgap solutions. The silence couldn’t be sated by the mere babble of spoken words. It wanted something more mellifluous. It wanted the pitch and rhythm of music.

  Chad ran home and went up to his room. He had a small stereo and a couple dozen CDs. He put on the loudest one he could find—Nirvana’s Nevermind—and cranked the volume as high as it would go.

  He nodded his head to the opening guitar riff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” followed by the rumble of drums that ushered in the full blast of Kurt Cobain’s power chords.

  It was music, and it was loud, but he could tell right away it wasn’t the solution to his problem. Even though it held back the silence, he could still sense it in the gaps between the music and the lyrics—lurking, waiting, biding its time, waiting for the song to end. It wasn’t the miracle he needed.

  The next day he went to a pawn shop and looked at a selection of record players. Many of them were old, although none were as ancient as the one Marcie had found in the cellar of the cabin. He bought one and brought it home. There were records at the pawn shop, but none that he wanted. Perry Como. Lesley Gore. The Beatles. No, no, and no.

  He needed big sounds. Horns that could make your ears bleed. Drums that could pound your bones to dust. Music that could lift you off the ground and make your very soul tremble.