Fic: Lix Tetrax
Title: Lix Tetrax
Rating: R (violence)
Summary: Everyone knows that Bobby Singer killed his wife, stabbed her in the chest. Everyone thought he was a nice man, taught up at the university, but just goes to show, you never really know a person.
Notes: Thanks to samidha for the cheerleading and coaching and to kelios for being a great beta. I started this ages ago, after having a brief conversation with delphinapterus in September, so, in a way, this fic is for her.
Dr. Robert Singer, History.
Bobby smiled at the plaque on his door. Even after the past year of being a real professor at the university, it was all still a little unreal. Sometimes he’d wake up at night in the bed he shared with Susan and think that it had all been a dream, that they were still in that tiny, cramped apartment in Evanston and that he still needed to work on the dissertation on heretical desert sects. But then Susan would roll over and mumble something about rabbits in the garden and the sleep would clear from his eyes a bit and he would recognise the house in Sioux Falls.
It was all a dream come true, really. There had been days - weeks, even - where he’d thought that he’d live and die trying to wring a PhD out of Northwestern’s cold, dead hands, but here they were. Sioux Falls hadn’t originally been their dream, with the average January temperature of 15 degrees and being a couple hundred miles from family, but they’d turned it into one, together. When Bobby had realised that his dissertation was finally coming to a close, after seemingly interminable years, they’d looked for colleges and universities that might have some openings for a green professor who knew more about obscure cults and practices in classical antiquity than modern politics.
As it turned out, not many people were looking for that, so the Singers had been overjoyed when the University of South Dakota Sioux Falls offered him a position that, if things went well, might put him on a tenure track. Susan hadn’t even complained about moving out of Illinois or changing jobs. She’d just grinned right back at him and started house hunting. The place on Old Cherry Road was, the real estate agent had insisted, perfect for raising a young family. They had a huge yard, a couple of quiet neighbors, and plenty of rooms. He and Susan took their Saturdays to work in the garden together and make the old farm house into a real home.
“Professor Singer! Professor Singer!”
Bobby turned to see Catherine Ricketts, one of the freshmen from his seminar class on the Cultural History of the Mediterranean, flagging him down as she ran up the hall, her heels clacking loudly on the linoleum floor. “Can I help you?”
“How long does the midterm paper have to be again? I’m supposed to be writing on Christian desert hermits, but I can’t find any sources.”
“Your syllabus has the information; ten to twelves pages minimum,” Bobby told her. “Look for Peter Brown as a secondary source. You can find plenty of early Christian primary sources at the library. I wouldn’t have let you sign up for a topic that you couldn’t cover.”
“But -”
“I have office hours on Tuesday and Thursday from two to four. If you’re still having problems after the weekend, come in and we can work on it, but the library should have everything you need. If you’re really having trouble right now, you can consult with one of the librarians, but I really need to get going.”
Catherine’s face fell a little, but she nodded and wrote the name ‘Peter Brown’ on the back of her hand in blue ink and large, looping handwriting.
Bobby finished locking the door to his office and made his way down the hall, out the door, and into the parking lot, where his truck was waiting for him. Normally, he wouldn’t be quite so eager to leave campus, but Susan had promised him a surprise tonight, to make up for the long hours she had been spending at the office. It had seemed that for the past two months they had been both trying to burn the candle at both ends and it had worn them thin. Susan’s surprises could range anywhere from a new engine part to a romantic homemade dinner for two and everything that came after.
He stopped at the little florist shop about a mile from campus. Mark, the owner, smiled and told him that Blanche had set aside some flowers for him that afternoon. Bobby picked up the festive bouquet - violets, peonies, marigold, and baby’s breath, Susan’s favorites - and handed him the money. He imagined that Susan would put them in water and he knew that, even if she didn’t say anything tonight, she had been so quiet lately, she dearly loved the rich gold of the marigolds.
The little farm house with its white walls and orange autumn flowers was a welcoming sight as Bobby pulled in the driveway. He could see Susan’s Ford in her place by the porch and his old ‘57 Chevy on the other side of the driveway, both illuminated by the lights blazing in the first floor windows. A romantic dinner for two it was, Bobby thought with a smile. He didn’t know what he would ever do without Susan.
She met him at the top of the porch steps with a kiss. Susan was wearing that little white dress she used to wear in Illinois when they were both still young and poor and students. Bobby shrugged off his jacket and wrapped it around her goosebumped shoulders with a smile. “You’re going to freeze.” He handed her the carefully wrapped bouquet.
Susan grinned, her smile making his exhaustion and frustration with his current article lift, and tucked the flowers under her arm. “Oh, you know you like it. Anyway, I’ve been in the kitchen and it’s hot as July in there, so I really haven’t noticed. The cool air is nice.”
“So we’ve got, what, potatoes from a box and Sloppy Joes for dinner tonight?” Bobby asked, wrapping a long arm around her shoulders. “Or did you grab a to-go box this time?”
“You!” Susan slapped him gently across the chest. “No fancy dinner for you tonight! I’ll share the steak with Chester!”
“Fish don’t eat steak,” Bobby pointed out. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure I can see the candles and tablecloth from here. You pulled out all the stops, didn’t you?”
Susan spun around, her white skirt swirling around her knees as though she were dancing. “I know I’ve been working crazy hours and even when I have been home, I haven’t been great company. And I know how much it means that we’re here and we’ve got the house and we’re actually, really, finally doing this. So, I guess this is my way of saying -”
Bobby cut her off with a kiss. “It’s okay. I get it. And you’re here now. Let’s just sit and eat and talk.”
Susan walked barefoot into their mismatched dining room, looking as young and beautiful as she had the day they’d met, and Bobby was more than happy to follow her. The table was set with their best wedding china and the plates were piled with steak, mashed potatoes, maple-squash, and grilled peppers. It was times like this, when everything should have been hectic and crazy and stressed and falling down around their ears, that Susan made it all better, kept the world spinning on its axis. He had no idea where she found the time to cook a giant meal (including what smelled like apple pie baking in the oven) or set out the table, not when their lives had been like living in a modern madhouse, but somehow she did it, somehow she made it all worth it.
Bobby uncorked the wine and poured them each a glass. “Thank you.”
They ate their meal and talked about inconsequential thing for a little while: one of Bobby’s students hadn’t known how to make his citations, one of Susan’s coworkers was pregnant, their neighbor’s son had come home from Vietnam. Bobby complimented Susan on the steak and Susan told him that they could take this weekend to work on the Chevy instead of the garden. It was like the stress of the past few months, of the past few years, of interoffice politics, of international politics, of the tattered state of their finances, of all of the strains of living, were peeling off him in light layers, leaving him more relaxed and calm than ever.
“So, I’ve started doing some research on spellwork and symbolism in some pre-Islamic desert sects. I figure it’s good for an article, maybe even a book,” Bobby said, as he began to cut his peppers. “Some of the drawn work - and the work incorporated into their architecture - is absolutely exquisite. I was thinking about putting some into the gingerbread knotwork on the porch - it’s mostly geometric figures and with a little practice, I could incorporate it myself. What do you think?”
He looked up to catch her initial reaction quickly enough to see, oddly, her eyes turn black.
“No.”
“Well, why don’t I show you what they look like first? They’re actually quite nice and it’s not like anyone is going to ask us why we have symbols binding demons of the air over the front door. I mean, no one else in the state knows what they are.”
The wind started to rattle the windows in the dining room, like it did during the bad summer storms, and he could feel the air whipping around him from the open window in the kitchen. “I don’t want them, Bobby.” Susan’s eyes were that strange black again and Bobby, strangely, felt like backing up - or maybe looking for something sharp.
“You didn’t care that I carved the Greek good luck symbols into the mantle,” he protested blindly. “It’s not any different.”
“You never wanted me here, not in here with you in South Dakota, not with you in this fucking hideous house. When I gave up everything, gave up my family, my parents, my friends, to come out here to the middle of nowhere and you don’t even want me here. Me! Your own wife!”
Bobby froze as the wind began to wail like a gale force wind outside, shaking and howling at the windows and doors. He could hear the appliances in the kitchen rattling around, but they were just a secondary thought to Susan, his beloved, his everything. Her voice was high and carrying on the wind and he couldn’t understand at all what was going on. She had never been upset by his work before - bored, at times, but never angry, never furious.
He pushed his chair back from the table, his cooling mashed potatoes and squash forgotten. “Why don’t I just grab a preliminary sketches and show you them?”
Susan rose to her feet, her hair blowing in the wind coming through the opened windows, her voice that same high, reedy sound. “You brought them into our house?”
“Well, yeah. I thought I would go over them tomorrow night when you’re out at the gardening society. With midterms coming up, I’m not going to have a lot of time, so I figured I’d take it when I can get it.” Bobby pushed his chair back from the table and twisted to reach for his case. “Why don’t I just show them to you?”
Susan let out a cry, the sound of a nor’easter wailing up the coast, and, in a movement that was almost too fast for Bobby to see, lunged around the side of the table. He barely had the time to raise his arms in front of himself before she was on top of him.
It was a moment that Bobby had never imagined was even possible. Susan was like a force of nature and her movements were punctuated with the whining, keening wind that seemed to be inside the house. She cut across his face with her steak knife, still heavy with her homemade maple squash, and it was all that he could do to hold her wrist back and keep it from his eyes. As the blood spilled from his forehead and down across his face, she clawed at him with her free hand, her sharp pink nails cutting into his cheek.
"Susan!" Bobby was bigger than Susan, broader, with more muscles. He had never thought of it before, except when he would whisk her up into his arms, as he had done on their wedding day and when they bought the house, but he tried to use that to his advantage, to hold her back. Somehow, though, she was stronger, her slender white arms more powerful than his. It seemed impossible, unreal that his sweet Susan, his wife, was hurting him, attacking him, fighting him, and beating him back. "What are you doing?"
The winds whipped through Susan's dark hair, causing it to coil and writhe like a cloud of snakes, and her eyes were that same flat black. He couldn't even see the whites of her eyes. She opened her mouth, but the sounds that came out were nothing like anything Bobby had ever heard in his life. Her voice was as changed as her eyes, high and whistling, and the sounds, long and wailing drawn out noises from the back of her throat, were wild and nothing like English. The sound pierced Bobby's ears and made him wince and try to roll away from her.
"Susan!" he yelled again, wishing that they were back in that cramped Illinois apartment, back where neighbours would wonder what was happening. "Susan, stop!"
She lunged at him again, heavier and stronger than her light frame had ever been before. This time he was not fast enough and the steak knife plunged into his right arm, near the shoulder. Bobby let out a howl of pain, feeling the blood soak into his shirt as she pulled out the knife. With strength he didn't know he had, born of pain and fear, he kicked out at her with both legs, an old school yard fighting move from his childhood.
When she fell, he scrambled away and pulled himself to his feet. He gripped his arm where he was bleeding and staggered away from her, back toward the living room. Her right hand, the pale hand that had held his, that had touched him so gently, that had been the source of so much kindness and so much comfort, was stained with his blood from where she had stabbed him. She opened her mouth and the frightening, howling sounds came out of it again.
This time, when Susan lunged at him, he was prepared. He blocked her down stroke with two braced arms and then lunged at her himself. His father's words, that when your life was at stake, it was no time to play games, echoed in his head, but it was instinct. He barely knew what he was doing, only knew the pain in his arm and on his face. She clawed at him again, scraping and tearing skin across his neck. Bobby blindly grasped at the knife in her hand, turning it away from from him, wrenching it from her grasp.
Even pulling the knife away from her didn't stop Susan, though. She kept coming, kept attacking with everything she had, clawing and biting and howling at him. The wind was still roaring through the house and he could see his books and papers flying about, caught up in the storm. It was all madness, nothing made any sense anymore. It was a storm and pain and horror and he was blind in his own mind.
Then his world exploded in an agony of pain as her fingers, curled into claws ending in sharp and filed nails, caught onto the skin and blood where she had stabbed him and she pulled. He let out an agonised scream and lunged forward himself, plunging the knife into Susan's chest. She released her hold on his arm, but didn't fall or collapse. He pulled the knife out of her and stared in horror at the blood on the knife, his own Susan's blood on the blade.
She let out another mighty roar, the wind raging through the house like they were caught in a hurricane, and lunged at him again, despite the wound in her chest.
Bobby swung out with the knife again, crying out, "Susan, no!"
The knife seemed to have no effect on Susan. It was as though she wasn't hurt by the knife plunging into her chest, swiping past her neck. There was no blood. There appeared be no pain. The winds shook the house wildly and she continued to scream in that high pitched, unnatural tongue.
Pulling the knife out of her a final time, Bobby scrambled backwards again, sliding over his papers and sketches, over Susan's magazines, over everything that had been spilled over the floor, in a desperate attempt to just get away. She followed him, stepping carefully and deliberately over the papers, her eyes flat and black.
"Oh god, please, Susan, stop, please," Bobby cried, the knife shaking his his hand as he slipped on some of the papers carpeting the floor. "Just stop, I'm begging you."
Susan froze, as suddenly and sharply as if she had tried to walk into a wall. She lifted her bloodied fist and pounded against the air in front of her as though it were as solid and firm as brick. She looked at him, her eyes brown again, but hard as cold flint. "What did you do?" she asked, her voice still high and hoarse. "You did this on purpose, trapping me here! You were just trying to draw me out!"
Bobby kept a careful distance from her, still afraid, still bleeding and in pain. "I don't know what you're talking about! I don't know what's going on!"
The winds were slowly dying down in the house as she remained frozen in place, still standing on one of his student's papers. She looked around, staring at the papers strewn about and then at him, still holding the bloody knife. "You're going to send me back, aren't you? That's what all this research is! To get rid of me!"
"What are you talking about? I love you! Susan, I love you!"
She stared at him intently, her eyes turning black again. "You know, your brother died in agony, bleeding out into the mud and water."
Bobby paled and dropped the knife. "But Mike -"
"He wasn't shot by the Vietcong." Susan's voice took on a hollow, reedy quality, her vowels drawn out and empty, like the wind echoing through dead trees at midwinter. "He was shot by an American, a frightened, inexperienced man from Pennsylvania. He was only 18 and he didn't want to be there. The other men thought it was enemy fire and left your brother there, dying, bleeding, in pain. They abandoned him! If they had bothered to see, if they bothered to care about him, your brother would be alive today."
"Shut up!"
"He suffered for so long, waiting to die, wanting to die. He tried to bandage his own wound, to try to find his own way back to base camp, but he couldn't. He lost too much blood, was in too much pain. He cried out for his fellow soldiers, for his friends. He screamed for you, near the end. He screamed for your father. 'Bobby! Dad! Help me!'" she mocked. "But you weren't there. You couldn't save your baby brother, could you, Bobby?"
"Shut up!" Bobby screamed. "You fucking shut up about Mike!" He reached down and threw one of the books by his feet at her, but his aim was off, effected by pain and blood and rage.
Susan stared at the book, an older set of articles regarding a treatise comparing Greek Orthodox and Shi'ite exorcism rituals and the varying religious components attached to them. "This is it then? You're going to exorcise me? You're going to send me back to the Pit? To burn, burn like your brother?"
Bobby took a deep, shuddering breath, not having the words for his rage. He snatched another book up off the floor, one with a Sufist exorcism rite in the first chapter as a discussion of Islamic mysticism. In a shaky voice, he began to recite the Arabic, wanting Susan to feel the pain of her husband hurting her after she had talked about Mike's death like that. His Arabic was rusty, but the pronounciation came back to him easily and it rolled off his tongue like poetry, giving voice to his pain.
As he neared the end of the rite, Susan began to gasp and shudder, as if someone were shaking her violently. When he finished it, she collapsed to her knees, gasping, with tears running down her face. Then she gasped again and black smoke poured out of her, flooding the room. Bobby took a sharp step back and crossed himself for the first time in fifteen years.
Then, as soon as the black cleared out of the room, Susan fell to the floor, bleeding from where Bobby had stabbed her. She clutched at her chest, crying out when her hands came back covered in her own blood.
"Susan? Suzy?" Bobby asked, still keeping his distance.
She turned and looked to him, her eyes the same soft brown he had always loved. "Bobby... help me."
"Susan!" Bobby ran to her side when he heard her voice, the lilting vowels he had always known. He realised, quickly, though, that he didn't know enough to save her or to even help her.
He ran to the old black telephone in the kitchen, clutching his left arm as he ran. He dialed the number for the local police as quickly as he could, wincing as he got blood on the telephone. "Officer... This is Bobby Singer... Yeah, Old Cherry Road... You need to get an ambulance. I stabbed my wife."
Bobby could smell the apple pie burning in the oven.
*
Bobby sat in the county jail, fingering the bandage on his arm. The other inmates had been avoiding him, after his story got around. No one, it seemed, wanted to bother the man who had brutally stabbed his wife to death in their own home. Bobby didn't mind; he didn't want to make new friends. He spent most of his time wondering if he should hope that he could be executed or if he should explain what had happened and see if he could get an insanity plea.
"Singer?" One of the guards eyed him warily. "You've got a visitor."
"I don't know anyone around here," Bobby told him.
"He came all the way from Minnesota." When Bobby frowned, the guard motioned for him to keep moving, to see his visitor. "Go on. Confess your sins. God knows you've got plenty."
There was a young man with dusty brown hair and a Roman collar sitting on the other side of the glass. His brown eyes were gentle, reminding Bobby painfully of Susan. "Bobby, it's good to see you."
"Who the Hell are you?" Bobby asked roughly, taking his seat on his side of the glass. "I don't care what you told them; I've never met you in my life."
"My name's Jim Murphy and I have a few questions to ask. I might be able to help."
"Questions? For a paper?" Bobby's voice was bitter. "More headlines about me?"
Jim winced slightly. "I'm a man of God. I won't sell your story. I am here to help."
"God can't forgive what I've done." Bobby stared at the man for a moment. "What do you want to know?"
"It looks like there were some strange circumstances surrounding your wife's death, Dr. Singer. Some very unusual things. And you're a large man, you could have easily overpowered a petite woman like your wife, but you needed to visit the hospital yourself after the police arrested you."
Bobby frowned. "My recollection of that night is not what it could be, Father Murphy, and I'd say that my wife's death was a strange enough circumstance on its own."
"You can just call me Pastor Jim. I'm not Catholic." Jim sighed. "I don't want to pry or to cause you to grieve any more than you already are, but could you tell me what you do recall from that night?"
"It's madness. Insanity." Bobby shook his head. "Look, you don't want to hear this. I killed my wife. Murder is a cardinal sin and I deserve every punishment I can get."
Pastor Jim smiled, small and grim. "Sometimes there's truth in madness. I assure you, it won't be anything worse than what I've heard in the past."
"I - I brought her flowers that night, picked them up on my way home from campus. She'd made a romantic dinner for the two of us. We were talking and then - everything just went all wrong. She was angry, so angry. She was furious about my work, about this new article I was working on and work I wanted to do on the house with it, just incorporating some Zoroastrian symbolism into the moulding. And then, I could swear her eyes, they just turned black." Bobby laughed humorlessly. "But that's impossible. Her eyes were brown. And then we fought. When we were fighting, it was like there was wind, inside the house, even though the windows were closed and it was a fine night. She stabbed me in the arm. I tried to get her off; I didn't want to hurt her. She just kept coming at me, you know? And I stabbed her again and again, but she kept coming at me."
"But something stopped her," Jim prompted, when it appeared that Bobby was not going to continue.
"Oh god, I'm going to sound crazy. She just stopped. She froze. She told me I trapped her and then -" Bobby stopped short and took a deep breath, reminding himself that he was just confessing to a priest. "She talked about my brother, about how he died. He was a soldier in Vietnam. Taken down by enemy fire. I was so mad, so angry, I threw a book at her. She asked me if I was going to exorcise her. I just knew it would make her angry, so I did." He looked Jim in the eye. "It's not like I had it memorised or anything; I just read it out of one of my books. And then... she just collapsed. There was all this black smoke and then she died."
"I am so sorry for your loss," Jim said, his voice sincere. "I am sorry that you had to go through that."
"Go through that? I killed her. I killed my sweet Susan. It was Susan who went through that."
Jim frowned. "I wish I could have been there to help you."
Bobby just stared at him, confused.
"I am going to give you the name of a lawyer who can help you. Tell him what you told me. Then, come to Blue Earth, Minnesota. I can help you there."
"Help me?"
"There's a lot you need to know."
Bobby stared as Jim Murphy walked away and held the slip of paper with the lawyer's name in his hand. The lawyer, if he was good enough, if he could spin a story, might be able to get Bobby off on his charges with minimal jail time. This priest, he thought he could help. The night Susan died, Bobby's world turned upside down. Something broke and the world went dark and mad. No matter what kind of magic wand this Jim Murphy could wave, no matter what platitudes and prayers he could say, Bobby's world would never be right, never be sane again. What could ever be right about having Susan's blood on his hands? What could ever be sane about hearing her last gurgling breath, knowing that he had punctured her lung with a dinner knife?
Rating: R (violence)
Summary: Everyone knows that Bobby Singer killed his wife, stabbed her in the chest. Everyone thought he was a nice man, taught up at the university, but just goes to show, you never really know a person.
Notes: Thanks to samidha for the cheerleading and coaching and to kelios for being a great beta. I started this ages ago, after having a brief conversation with delphinapterus in September, so, in a way, this fic is for her.
Dr. Robert Singer, History.
Bobby smiled at the plaque on his door. Even after the past year of being a real professor at the university, it was all still a little unreal. Sometimes he’d wake up at night in the bed he shared with Susan and think that it had all been a dream, that they were still in that tiny, cramped apartment in Evanston and that he still needed to work on the dissertation on heretical desert sects. But then Susan would roll over and mumble something about rabbits in the garden and the sleep would clear from his eyes a bit and he would recognise the house in Sioux Falls.
It was all a dream come true, really. There had been days - weeks, even - where he’d thought that he’d live and die trying to wring a PhD out of Northwestern’s cold, dead hands, but here they were. Sioux Falls hadn’t originally been their dream, with the average January temperature of 15 degrees and being a couple hundred miles from family, but they’d turned it into one, together. When Bobby had realised that his dissertation was finally coming to a close, after seemingly interminable years, they’d looked for colleges and universities that might have some openings for a green professor who knew more about obscure cults and practices in classical antiquity than modern politics.
As it turned out, not many people were looking for that, so the Singers had been overjoyed when the University of South Dakota Sioux Falls offered him a position that, if things went well, might put him on a tenure track. Susan hadn’t even complained about moving out of Illinois or changing jobs. She’d just grinned right back at him and started house hunting. The place on Old Cherry Road was, the real estate agent had insisted, perfect for raising a young family. They had a huge yard, a couple of quiet neighbors, and plenty of rooms. He and Susan took their Saturdays to work in the garden together and make the old farm house into a real home.
“Professor Singer! Professor Singer!”
Bobby turned to see Catherine Ricketts, one of the freshmen from his seminar class on the Cultural History of the Mediterranean, flagging him down as she ran up the hall, her heels clacking loudly on the linoleum floor. “Can I help you?”
“How long does the midterm paper have to be again? I’m supposed to be writing on Christian desert hermits, but I can’t find any sources.”
“Your syllabus has the information; ten to twelves pages minimum,” Bobby told her. “Look for Peter Brown as a secondary source. You can find plenty of early Christian primary sources at the library. I wouldn’t have let you sign up for a topic that you couldn’t cover.”
“But -”
“I have office hours on Tuesday and Thursday from two to four. If you’re still having problems after the weekend, come in and we can work on it, but the library should have everything you need. If you’re really having trouble right now, you can consult with one of the librarians, but I really need to get going.”
Catherine’s face fell a little, but she nodded and wrote the name ‘Peter Brown’ on the back of her hand in blue ink and large, looping handwriting.
Bobby finished locking the door to his office and made his way down the hall, out the door, and into the parking lot, where his truck was waiting for him. Normally, he wouldn’t be quite so eager to leave campus, but Susan had promised him a surprise tonight, to make up for the long hours she had been spending at the office. It had seemed that for the past two months they had been both trying to burn the candle at both ends and it had worn them thin. Susan’s surprises could range anywhere from a new engine part to a romantic homemade dinner for two and everything that came after.
He stopped at the little florist shop about a mile from campus. Mark, the owner, smiled and told him that Blanche had set aside some flowers for him that afternoon. Bobby picked up the festive bouquet - violets, peonies, marigold, and baby’s breath, Susan’s favorites - and handed him the money. He imagined that Susan would put them in water and he knew that, even if she didn’t say anything tonight, she had been so quiet lately, she dearly loved the rich gold of the marigolds.
The little farm house with its white walls and orange autumn flowers was a welcoming sight as Bobby pulled in the driveway. He could see Susan’s Ford in her place by the porch and his old ‘57 Chevy on the other side of the driveway, both illuminated by the lights blazing in the first floor windows. A romantic dinner for two it was, Bobby thought with a smile. He didn’t know what he would ever do without Susan.
She met him at the top of the porch steps with a kiss. Susan was wearing that little white dress she used to wear in Illinois when they were both still young and poor and students. Bobby shrugged off his jacket and wrapped it around her goosebumped shoulders with a smile. “You’re going to freeze.” He handed her the carefully wrapped bouquet.
Susan grinned, her smile making his exhaustion and frustration with his current article lift, and tucked the flowers under her arm. “Oh, you know you like it. Anyway, I’ve been in the kitchen and it’s hot as July in there, so I really haven’t noticed. The cool air is nice.”
“So we’ve got, what, potatoes from a box and Sloppy Joes for dinner tonight?” Bobby asked, wrapping a long arm around her shoulders. “Or did you grab a to-go box this time?”
“You!” Susan slapped him gently across the chest. “No fancy dinner for you tonight! I’ll share the steak with Chester!”
“Fish don’t eat steak,” Bobby pointed out. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure I can see the candles and tablecloth from here. You pulled out all the stops, didn’t you?”
Susan spun around, her white skirt swirling around her knees as though she were dancing. “I know I’ve been working crazy hours and even when I have been home, I haven’t been great company. And I know how much it means that we’re here and we’ve got the house and we’re actually, really, finally doing this. So, I guess this is my way of saying -”
Bobby cut her off with a kiss. “It’s okay. I get it. And you’re here now. Let’s just sit and eat and talk.”
Susan walked barefoot into their mismatched dining room, looking as young and beautiful as she had the day they’d met, and Bobby was more than happy to follow her. The table was set with their best wedding china and the plates were piled with steak, mashed potatoes, maple-squash, and grilled peppers. It was times like this, when everything should have been hectic and crazy and stressed and falling down around their ears, that Susan made it all better, kept the world spinning on its axis. He had no idea where she found the time to cook a giant meal (including what smelled like apple pie baking in the oven) or set out the table, not when their lives had been like living in a modern madhouse, but somehow she did it, somehow she made it all worth it.
Bobby uncorked the wine and poured them each a glass. “Thank you.”
They ate their meal and talked about inconsequential thing for a little while: one of Bobby’s students hadn’t known how to make his citations, one of Susan’s coworkers was pregnant, their neighbor’s son had come home from Vietnam. Bobby complimented Susan on the steak and Susan told him that they could take this weekend to work on the Chevy instead of the garden. It was like the stress of the past few months, of the past few years, of interoffice politics, of international politics, of the tattered state of their finances, of all of the strains of living, were peeling off him in light layers, leaving him more relaxed and calm than ever.
“So, I’ve started doing some research on spellwork and symbolism in some pre-Islamic desert sects. I figure it’s good for an article, maybe even a book,” Bobby said, as he began to cut his peppers. “Some of the drawn work - and the work incorporated into their architecture - is absolutely exquisite. I was thinking about putting some into the gingerbread knotwork on the porch - it’s mostly geometric figures and with a little practice, I could incorporate it myself. What do you think?”
He looked up to catch her initial reaction quickly enough to see, oddly, her eyes turn black.
“No.”
“Well, why don’t I show you what they look like first? They’re actually quite nice and it’s not like anyone is going to ask us why we have symbols binding demons of the air over the front door. I mean, no one else in the state knows what they are.”
The wind started to rattle the windows in the dining room, like it did during the bad summer storms, and he could feel the air whipping around him from the open window in the kitchen. “I don’t want them, Bobby.” Susan’s eyes were that strange black again and Bobby, strangely, felt like backing up - or maybe looking for something sharp.
“You didn’t care that I carved the Greek good luck symbols into the mantle,” he protested blindly. “It’s not any different.”
“You never wanted me here, not in here with you in South Dakota, not with you in this fucking hideous house. When I gave up everything, gave up my family, my parents, my friends, to come out here to the middle of nowhere and you don’t even want me here. Me! Your own wife!”
Bobby froze as the wind began to wail like a gale force wind outside, shaking and howling at the windows and doors. He could hear the appliances in the kitchen rattling around, but they were just a secondary thought to Susan, his beloved, his everything. Her voice was high and carrying on the wind and he couldn’t understand at all what was going on. She had never been upset by his work before - bored, at times, but never angry, never furious.
He pushed his chair back from the table, his cooling mashed potatoes and squash forgotten. “Why don’t I just grab a preliminary sketches and show you them?”
Susan rose to her feet, her hair blowing in the wind coming through the opened windows, her voice that same high, reedy sound. “You brought them into our house?”
“Well, yeah. I thought I would go over them tomorrow night when you’re out at the gardening society. With midterms coming up, I’m not going to have a lot of time, so I figured I’d take it when I can get it.” Bobby pushed his chair back from the table and twisted to reach for his case. “Why don’t I just show them to you?”
Susan let out a cry, the sound of a nor’easter wailing up the coast, and, in a movement that was almost too fast for Bobby to see, lunged around the side of the table. He barely had the time to raise his arms in front of himself before she was on top of him.
It was a moment that Bobby had never imagined was even possible. Susan was like a force of nature and her movements were punctuated with the whining, keening wind that seemed to be inside the house. She cut across his face with her steak knife, still heavy with her homemade maple squash, and it was all that he could do to hold her wrist back and keep it from his eyes. As the blood spilled from his forehead and down across his face, she clawed at him with her free hand, her sharp pink nails cutting into his cheek.
"Susan!" Bobby was bigger than Susan, broader, with more muscles. He had never thought of it before, except when he would whisk her up into his arms, as he had done on their wedding day and when they bought the house, but he tried to use that to his advantage, to hold her back. Somehow, though, she was stronger, her slender white arms more powerful than his. It seemed impossible, unreal that his sweet Susan, his wife, was hurting him, attacking him, fighting him, and beating him back. "What are you doing?"
The winds whipped through Susan's dark hair, causing it to coil and writhe like a cloud of snakes, and her eyes were that same flat black. He couldn't even see the whites of her eyes. She opened her mouth, but the sounds that came out were nothing like anything Bobby had ever heard in his life. Her voice was as changed as her eyes, high and whistling, and the sounds, long and wailing drawn out noises from the back of her throat, were wild and nothing like English. The sound pierced Bobby's ears and made him wince and try to roll away from her.
"Susan!" he yelled again, wishing that they were back in that cramped Illinois apartment, back where neighbours would wonder what was happening. "Susan, stop!"
She lunged at him again, heavier and stronger than her light frame had ever been before. This time he was not fast enough and the steak knife plunged into his right arm, near the shoulder. Bobby let out a howl of pain, feeling the blood soak into his shirt as she pulled out the knife. With strength he didn't know he had, born of pain and fear, he kicked out at her with both legs, an old school yard fighting move from his childhood.
When she fell, he scrambled away and pulled himself to his feet. He gripped his arm where he was bleeding and staggered away from her, back toward the living room. Her right hand, the pale hand that had held his, that had touched him so gently, that had been the source of so much kindness and so much comfort, was stained with his blood from where she had stabbed him. She opened her mouth and the frightening, howling sounds came out of it again.
This time, when Susan lunged at him, he was prepared. He blocked her down stroke with two braced arms and then lunged at her himself. His father's words, that when your life was at stake, it was no time to play games, echoed in his head, but it was instinct. He barely knew what he was doing, only knew the pain in his arm and on his face. She clawed at him again, scraping and tearing skin across his neck. Bobby blindly grasped at the knife in her hand, turning it away from from him, wrenching it from her grasp.
Even pulling the knife away from her didn't stop Susan, though. She kept coming, kept attacking with everything she had, clawing and biting and howling at him. The wind was still roaring through the house and he could see his books and papers flying about, caught up in the storm. It was all madness, nothing made any sense anymore. It was a storm and pain and horror and he was blind in his own mind.
Then his world exploded in an agony of pain as her fingers, curled into claws ending in sharp and filed nails, caught onto the skin and blood where she had stabbed him and she pulled. He let out an agonised scream and lunged forward himself, plunging the knife into Susan's chest. She released her hold on his arm, but didn't fall or collapse. He pulled the knife out of her and stared in horror at the blood on the knife, his own Susan's blood on the blade.
She let out another mighty roar, the wind raging through the house like they were caught in a hurricane, and lunged at him again, despite the wound in her chest.
Bobby swung out with the knife again, crying out, "Susan, no!"
The knife seemed to have no effect on Susan. It was as though she wasn't hurt by the knife plunging into her chest, swiping past her neck. There was no blood. There appeared be no pain. The winds shook the house wildly and she continued to scream in that high pitched, unnatural tongue.
Pulling the knife out of her a final time, Bobby scrambled backwards again, sliding over his papers and sketches, over Susan's magazines, over everything that had been spilled over the floor, in a desperate attempt to just get away. She followed him, stepping carefully and deliberately over the papers, her eyes flat and black.
"Oh god, please, Susan, stop, please," Bobby cried, the knife shaking his his hand as he slipped on some of the papers carpeting the floor. "Just stop, I'm begging you."
Susan froze, as suddenly and sharply as if she had tried to walk into a wall. She lifted her bloodied fist and pounded against the air in front of her as though it were as solid and firm as brick. She looked at him, her eyes brown again, but hard as cold flint. "What did you do?" she asked, her voice still high and hoarse. "You did this on purpose, trapping me here! You were just trying to draw me out!"
Bobby kept a careful distance from her, still afraid, still bleeding and in pain. "I don't know what you're talking about! I don't know what's going on!"
The winds were slowly dying down in the house as she remained frozen in place, still standing on one of his student's papers. She looked around, staring at the papers strewn about and then at him, still holding the bloody knife. "You're going to send me back, aren't you? That's what all this research is! To get rid of me!"
"What are you talking about? I love you! Susan, I love you!"
She stared at him intently, her eyes turning black again. "You know, your brother died in agony, bleeding out into the mud and water."
Bobby paled and dropped the knife. "But Mike -"
"He wasn't shot by the Vietcong." Susan's voice took on a hollow, reedy quality, her vowels drawn out and empty, like the wind echoing through dead trees at midwinter. "He was shot by an American, a frightened, inexperienced man from Pennsylvania. He was only 18 and he didn't want to be there. The other men thought it was enemy fire and left your brother there, dying, bleeding, in pain. They abandoned him! If they had bothered to see, if they bothered to care about him, your brother would be alive today."
"Shut up!"
"He suffered for so long, waiting to die, wanting to die. He tried to bandage his own wound, to try to find his own way back to base camp, but he couldn't. He lost too much blood, was in too much pain. He cried out for his fellow soldiers, for his friends. He screamed for you, near the end. He screamed for your father. 'Bobby! Dad! Help me!'" she mocked. "But you weren't there. You couldn't save your baby brother, could you, Bobby?"
"Shut up!" Bobby screamed. "You fucking shut up about Mike!" He reached down and threw one of the books by his feet at her, but his aim was off, effected by pain and blood and rage.
Susan stared at the book, an older set of articles regarding a treatise comparing Greek Orthodox and Shi'ite exorcism rituals and the varying religious components attached to them. "This is it then? You're going to exorcise me? You're going to send me back to the Pit? To burn, burn like your brother?"
Bobby took a deep, shuddering breath, not having the words for his rage. He snatched another book up off the floor, one with a Sufist exorcism rite in the first chapter as a discussion of Islamic mysticism. In a shaky voice, he began to recite the Arabic, wanting Susan to feel the pain of her husband hurting her after she had talked about Mike's death like that. His Arabic was rusty, but the pronounciation came back to him easily and it rolled off his tongue like poetry, giving voice to his pain.
As he neared the end of the rite, Susan began to gasp and shudder, as if someone were shaking her violently. When he finished it, she collapsed to her knees, gasping, with tears running down her face. Then she gasped again and black smoke poured out of her, flooding the room. Bobby took a sharp step back and crossed himself for the first time in fifteen years.
Then, as soon as the black cleared out of the room, Susan fell to the floor, bleeding from where Bobby had stabbed her. She clutched at her chest, crying out when her hands came back covered in her own blood.
"Susan? Suzy?" Bobby asked, still keeping his distance.
She turned and looked to him, her eyes the same soft brown he had always loved. "Bobby... help me."
"Susan!" Bobby ran to her side when he heard her voice, the lilting vowels he had always known. He realised, quickly, though, that he didn't know enough to save her or to even help her.
He ran to the old black telephone in the kitchen, clutching his left arm as he ran. He dialed the number for the local police as quickly as he could, wincing as he got blood on the telephone. "Officer... This is Bobby Singer... Yeah, Old Cherry Road... You need to get an ambulance. I stabbed my wife."
Bobby could smell the apple pie burning in the oven.
*
Bobby sat in the county jail, fingering the bandage on his arm. The other inmates had been avoiding him, after his story got around. No one, it seemed, wanted to bother the man who had brutally stabbed his wife to death in their own home. Bobby didn't mind; he didn't want to make new friends. He spent most of his time wondering if he should hope that he could be executed or if he should explain what had happened and see if he could get an insanity plea.
"Singer?" One of the guards eyed him warily. "You've got a visitor."
"I don't know anyone around here," Bobby told him.
"He came all the way from Minnesota." When Bobby frowned, the guard motioned for him to keep moving, to see his visitor. "Go on. Confess your sins. God knows you've got plenty."
There was a young man with dusty brown hair and a Roman collar sitting on the other side of the glass. His brown eyes were gentle, reminding Bobby painfully of Susan. "Bobby, it's good to see you."
"Who the Hell are you?" Bobby asked roughly, taking his seat on his side of the glass. "I don't care what you told them; I've never met you in my life."
"My name's Jim Murphy and I have a few questions to ask. I might be able to help."
"Questions? For a paper?" Bobby's voice was bitter. "More headlines about me?"
Jim winced slightly. "I'm a man of God. I won't sell your story. I am here to help."
"God can't forgive what I've done." Bobby stared at the man for a moment. "What do you want to know?"
"It looks like there were some strange circumstances surrounding your wife's death, Dr. Singer. Some very unusual things. And you're a large man, you could have easily overpowered a petite woman like your wife, but you needed to visit the hospital yourself after the police arrested you."
Bobby frowned. "My recollection of that night is not what it could be, Father Murphy, and I'd say that my wife's death was a strange enough circumstance on its own."
"You can just call me Pastor Jim. I'm not Catholic." Jim sighed. "I don't want to pry or to cause you to grieve any more than you already are, but could you tell me what you do recall from that night?"
"It's madness. Insanity." Bobby shook his head. "Look, you don't want to hear this. I killed my wife. Murder is a cardinal sin and I deserve every punishment I can get."
Pastor Jim smiled, small and grim. "Sometimes there's truth in madness. I assure you, it won't be anything worse than what I've heard in the past."
"I - I brought her flowers that night, picked them up on my way home from campus. She'd made a romantic dinner for the two of us. We were talking and then - everything just went all wrong. She was angry, so angry. She was furious about my work, about this new article I was working on and work I wanted to do on the house with it, just incorporating some Zoroastrian symbolism into the moulding. And then, I could swear her eyes, they just turned black." Bobby laughed humorlessly. "But that's impossible. Her eyes were brown. And then we fought. When we were fighting, it was like there was wind, inside the house, even though the windows were closed and it was a fine night. She stabbed me in the arm. I tried to get her off; I didn't want to hurt her. She just kept coming at me, you know? And I stabbed her again and again, but she kept coming at me."
"But something stopped her," Jim prompted, when it appeared that Bobby was not going to continue.
"Oh god, I'm going to sound crazy. She just stopped. She froze. She told me I trapped her and then -" Bobby stopped short and took a deep breath, reminding himself that he was just confessing to a priest. "She talked about my brother, about how he died. He was a soldier in Vietnam. Taken down by enemy fire. I was so mad, so angry, I threw a book at her. She asked me if I was going to exorcise her. I just knew it would make her angry, so I did." He looked Jim in the eye. "It's not like I had it memorised or anything; I just read it out of one of my books. And then... she just collapsed. There was all this black smoke and then she died."
"I am so sorry for your loss," Jim said, his voice sincere. "I am sorry that you had to go through that."
"Go through that? I killed her. I killed my sweet Susan. It was Susan who went through that."
Jim frowned. "I wish I could have been there to help you."
Bobby just stared at him, confused.
"I am going to give you the name of a lawyer who can help you. Tell him what you told me. Then, come to Blue Earth, Minnesota. I can help you there."
"Help me?"
"There's a lot you need to know."
Bobby stared as Jim Murphy walked away and held the slip of paper with the lawyer's name in his hand. The lawyer, if he was good enough, if he could spin a story, might be able to get Bobby off on his charges with minimal jail time. This priest, he thought he could help. The night Susan died, Bobby's world turned upside down. Something broke and the world went dark and mad. No matter what kind of magic wand this Jim Murphy could wave, no matter what platitudes and prayers he could say, Bobby's world would never be right, never be sane again. What could ever be right about having Susan's blood on his hands? What could ever be sane about hearing her last gurgling breath, knowing that he had punctured her lung with a dinner knife?