Chapter 5

Jake never mentioned Trish again, and Béla never mentioned her daytime visits to the Target Club or the afternoons she spent with Frank while Jake was at work. Frank told her how much her regulars missed her, and she said that maybe, in two or three weeks, she might be back – who knows about these things?

That Saturday morning, Jake and Béla drove out to the mountains. Béla was having difficulty sitting still during the entire trip. She trembled with excitement as she thought about what she and Jake could do once they were by themselves. Personal mayhem excited her beyond sanity, and she eagerly anticipated the violence she hoped would be inflicted on her. She had been looking for a companion like Jake for a very long time.

“I don’t think we can get your car up that,” Jake said, grimacing at the washed out slope where the road seemed to go.

“This is as far as I’ve ever gotten by car,” Béla told him.

They climbed out and loaded their backpacks. They were carrying mostly food – some canned, but mostly boxed – whatever could be prepared by simply adding water. Béla shivered with aroused anticipation as she noticed Jake packing some cases of twenty-two caliber shells into his pack along with the small rifle. He’d also brought his hunting rifle, a 30-6, for maybe doing a little hunting, he said. A large thirty-six count package of toilet paper topped off Béla’s pack, precariously strapped so that it was pillowed against her head as she hiked along.

Béla was glad to be outside again. Although the sunlight hurt inside her head, living behind pristine walls surrounded by those damned, buzzing, fluorescent lights was even more disagreeable.

This was one of Béla’s favorite spots. The cabin was already old when she acquired it in the early 1930’s and it was now one of several properties she owned outright, her little bar, the Target Club being the most recent acquisition almost fifteen years ago. All her property was included in Betty Wilson Estates. Now, as her ‘daughter’, Béla Wilson, she often rented it from ‘herself’, her earlier self’s estate, that is, when she wanted to get away. It felt good to be back again.

“It just occurred to me,” grunted Jake as they clambered up a rutty ‘path’, almost a gorge created by melting snow, “that you have a car. Therefore you must have a driver’s license.”

“Yeah...”

“So, if you can’t read, how did you pass your driver’s test?” he wanted to know, taking the excuse of waiting for an answer to turn around and catch his breath.

“Who sez I can’t read?” Béla smirked up at him.

“Well,” he looked puzzled as he replied, “the other day, with the TV remote?”

Béla chuckled. “That’s different. That was a box with weird little letters on it. I didn’t know what they meant, but I could tell what the letters were.”

“So you can read,” Jake grumbled.

“Enough to get by,” Béla admitted, then pressed on by to take the lead in their journey up the washed-out path. She didn’t bother to tell him that she could learn almost any language in any part of the world she found herself, pretty much the same way she had raided his mind to find out how his TV remote worked. She figured that if he stayed around, he’d figure it out, eventually.

In another hour of climbing, with two more breaks so that Jake could catch his breath, the cabin suddenly appeared behind a small grove of scrubby trees.

“Well, no one will bother us up here.” Jake surmised, looking at the surrounding yard and an old, weathered outhouse. “We can pretty much do whatever we please; make as much noise as we want.”

“Whatever you please, and as much noise as I want,” Béla agreed, then dropped her pack from her shoulders and dragged it inside, managing to catch the edge of the toilet paper on the side of the screen door for only a second before kicking the door wider with her foot.

“Yeah, that’ll keep the flies out,” Jake murmured as he grimaced at several large holes worn through the screen. He followed her in and they dropped their packs in the middle of the room. Looking around, Jake was surprised at the amount of ancient weaponry mounted on the walls. There were spears, crossbows, a sword and corresponding shield, several axes and an assortment of leather and metal armor. It was very old, and very dusty.

“You got a lot of stuff,” he mentioned. “You collect all of this yourself?”

“No,” Béla grinned through her teeth, not looking at him as she began unpacking. “It came with the property. Some movie guy owned it. Most of these are props from old movies he made back a few years ... back in the twenties, I mean.”

“How did you ever find a place like this?” Jake asked, completely awed by the primitive and violent décor.

“Well, the owner invited me and my boyfriend up here,” Béla replied, wondering just how much she should tell him. “There was some kind of special movie they were going to make, and my boyfriend was, like, the ... um, contractor. It was his job to make sure his ... client got what he was paying for.”

“A special movie for ... What?” Jake surmised. “A training film or something? Ancient Greek battle?”

Béla frowned, definitely not interested in telling him. The previous owner and his cameraman, along with two actresses who had been executed during the production of that ‘artistic’ film were buried under the floorboards Jake was standing on.

Béla remembered quite vividly. Her boyfriend, rightly nicknamed ‘the Rat’, had sold her as well as two other, young, wanna-be actresses on the idea of making a ‘Nature Film’ – the catchall phrase the Mob used that covered everything from Prostitution to Porn to Snuff. After waking up and finding herself lying underneath the other two dead girls, sweet, innocent Betty (Béla’s name back then) violently butchered the three men who had planned it all.

At least, she thought she had, but her boyfriend, like the rat he was, managed to survive her feasting and later came after her and the money that was supposed to have been exchanged for the vanished film. But during that period of time when Betty had thought them all dead, she’d ransacked the little cabin and found papers – legal documents – that proved some of the illegal activities important people in the Mob and the Movie Industry had been involved in.

Those papers she found definitely incriminated a few legal types – crooked lawyers, that is, and she used those papers to buy off one of them. It was one of the best investments she ever made, as she gave the one she chose quite a lot of power over the others by exchanging the papers for several pieces of real estate owned by the (now missing) moviemaker. Her little cabin, her benefactor’s gravesite, was one of those pieces of property.

Béla’s continued silence let Jake know the general nature of what had probably been filmed here.

“The privacy of this place would make for some interesting porno stuff,” he grinned. “I can just imagine naked nymphs prancing around outside being chased by satyrs.”

Béla smiled and let him have his fantasy. Did he also imagine those naked nymphs being gunned down for the sake of some sick bastard who got his rocks off by watching young girls getting butchered?

Then she remembered why she’d brought him up here. The aura of this place seemed to bring out the raw, normally suppressed cruelty that men usually denied in themselves. Perhaps the moviemaker and his two victims haunted the place. Even Frank, when she’d brought him up here, had done cruel things to her, once he had her completely alone in that very bedroom where she’d killed those evil men, that he’d never done before.

Picking her pack up off the floor now that it was lighter, Béla dropped it on the table and began to put more stuff away. Jake started unpacking his own and started putting them away.

In the meantime, Béla went outside to start up the generator that powered the fridge, the water pump and heater and the lights. The noise was a little irritating at first, then became much quieter when Béla closed the shed door where the generator was kept.

“There’s no hot water yet,” Béla announced as she came back in, “but if you don’t mind cold, there should be running water now.”

To prove her words, she opened the faucet in the sink. After a few seconds, the pipes began their gastric protest of their usage, spitting lots of air and occasionally, noisily, a bit of muddy water. Gradually, the amount of air diminished and the amount of dirty water increased until, at last, clean, cold water was coming out of the faucet uninterrupted by any more coughing fits of air.

“How old’s the generator?” Jake wanted to know.

“Not too old,” Béla told him. “Frank put it in for me a few years ago.” She went outside again and as Jake was finished putting everything away in the kitchen, he followed her, curious about what she was doing.

It was completely mundane, but interesting. This tiny little stripper, definitely a city girl from all appearances, seemed to know exactly how everything in her little hide-away cabin worked. Now, she was bleeding off the accumulated dirty water from the water heater. When she was satisfied with the quality of the water spurting out the bypass valve, she twisted it closed and stood up.

“Well, everything’s working,” she said, sounding proud of herself.

“You sure know a lot about this old stuff,” Jake said, also proud of her. Then he remembered... ‘When I want to know how something works, I just look at the levers and dials or whatever, and I can feel the intention of what they’re for... ‘

She didn’t know how stuff worked, Jake realized. At least, she didn’t have knowledge of how stuff worked. She could just look at it, and she would know what was needed to make it work. It wasn’t really knowledge. He didn’t know the word for it, and she wasn’t really that smart. She was ... aware.

That was it, he realized. Béla was ... aware ... in ways that most people weren’t. Her perceptions were different. In that respect, her brain, if that indeed was what she was using, was as unusual as her body. He wondered what other abilities she might possess that even she may be unaware of.

“You’re amazing,” he said as she turned to go back into the cabin.

Béla smiled up at him as she slipped by, and gave him a peck on the cheek. When he grabbed her arm and pulled her to him, she grinned into his face and said, “A hot shower for me before you get your grubby hands down there – unless you really, really like grungy girls.”

He let her go into the cabin, then followed her in.