Текст книги "Prodigal Blues"

Автор книги: Gary A. Braunbeck

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

7.  The "One" Days

They never learned his real name; for them—and several other children—he was and would always be Grendel.

"He was very careful about that," said Christopher.  "No mail ever came to the house—it was all sent to a Post Office box.  Anything he ordered online was always sent through the mail, never through FedEx or UPS or any delivery company like that.  He did not carry a wallet.  There were no personal papers anywhere in that house, not that we ever found.  And we looked.  When Arnold and I started going through the computer files looking for his internet accounts information, we found at least fourteen different names he was using.  All the names belonged to guys who have been dead for years."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

He glared at me.  "Because he kept files with all that information locked up in one of his desks.  Social Security numbers, dates of birth and death, names of relatives—all of them deceased, of course—all the information you would need to set up an internet account or apply for a credit card."

"He must have… had help," I said.  "I mean, information like that isn't exactly easy to get your hands on."

Christopher's hands balled into fists.  "I thought you were supposed to be listening."

I shut up.

Rebecca was fifteen now; she'd been thirteen when Grendel took her.  "My mom and me were driving up to see her brother.  Mom had to go to the bathroom, so we pulled off the highway when we found a rest stop.  Mom told me to stay by the car while she went inside to pee.  I saw this man and little retarded girl walking around between some buildings.  They were both crying.  They said they were looking for their puppy and asked me if I could help them look."

Arnold was now twelve; he had been a week removed from his tenth birthday when Grendel snatched him away.  "My stepsister took me to a carnival in the church's parking lot.  He was dressed up like a minister when I met him.  He asked me if I would help bring out the folding tables for the lemonade stand."

Thomas was eleven; he'd been nine the day he disappeared.  "I was waiting for Daddy to get out from seeing the doctor at the hospital.  He got sick all of a sudden and we had to take a cab because Mommy was still at work and she had the car.  I thought he was a doctor.  He said it was okay for me to come with him to see my Daddy.  He had the white coat and everything."

And Christopher… Christopher had just turned twelve when Grendel seized him; he was now twenty-one.  "I was useful to him.  It was necessary to remain useful.  If you were not useful, you were taken to Ravenswood—that is what he called the sub-basement.  The group of us, we shared a room in the basement, directly above Ravenswood, so everyone always had to… listen whenever Grendel had someone down there.

"I never knew there were so many different ways to scream."

He would offer no explanation about how he came to be taken.

This is what the four of them knew to be true:

Grendel told them he had been a medic in Vietnam; he spoke German, French, Spanish, and knew sign language; he had either once been a surgeon or a surgical intern, because his medical knowledge was encyclopedic; he knew quite a lot about electronics—computers, digital cameras, recording and listening devices, you name something, Grendel knew about it—and kept his house's security systems up to date, including a massive electrified fence surrounding the property.  "He soldered electronic collars around each of our necks," Christopher said.  "If any one of us moved farther than seventy-five feet from the outside of the house, all of us got a shock that knocked us out for hours.  If you wet or soiled your pants when you got the shock, you had to wear them for two days afterward as punishment for being 'undisciplined.'"

Grendel believed human beings could discipline themselves to the extent that even when their systems suffered massive trauma, they could control their excretory functions.  The fence was put up to guard against the possibility one of them might somehow manage to remove their collar; it stood fifteen feet high and would fry you to a crisp.  "Even if the power was turned off and you somehow made it to the top," said Rebecca, "you would never get over the rolls of barbed wire.  'I must keep all of you safe and sound,' he'd say."

Grendel might have been married once, because he had a daughter—or, at least, a girl who called him "Daddy":  her name was Connie, she was eleven, had Down's Syndrome, and would do whatever he asked without question or fuss; he had money, because the house was large and the property wide and private; he did not tolerate the use of contractions, foul language, or nicknames, Connie being the only one exempt from the first and last—none of them were exempt from the foul language rule.

But Grendel's friends were.

And he did have friends.  Quite a few of them.  They came over for monthly meetings.  Rebecca was their preferred party favor, her body having three orifices, but eventually all of them received their turns at the meetings.  "He did not believe in playing favorites," Arnold said.  "He was concerned our feelings would be hurt.  He was real thoughtful like that."

"I wish someone would have hurt my feelings that way just once," said Rebecca.  "His friends were rough.  One of them used to hold a hot cigar against the back of my neck to make sure my head stayed down.  None of them were ever gentle.  And they tasted awful."

"Heard that," said Arnold.

Christopher nodded his head.  "Preaching to the choir."

"Bingo," sang Thomas.

Except for the monthly meetings, Grendel and his friends communicated solely through the internet.  The third floor of the house had been converted into one large room where Grendel kept several computers, as well as a server.  For all appearances, he was the network administrator for about two dozen small businesses, all antique dealers, each with their own web site, email address, private chat rooms, all of it.

"No one ever said what they meant," said Rebecca, "not even in the chat rooms.  Everything was in code.  If you saw one of the emails, it just looked like a list of stuff people wanted to buy, or prices, or receipts."

Arnold grinned, shaking his head.  "It was slick, I had to give them that. What they did, see, was they had a bunch of phrases, certain phrases, numbers, icons, text… text… oh, what is the word?"

"Configurations," said Christopher.  "Text configurations."

"Right, configurations—you know, the way the letter was put together, the way the paragraphs were indented, stuff like that?  Even how many spaces or periods there were between the end of one sentence and the start of the next one meant something."

They knew this because, once a month, Grendel would gather them together and show them the "purchase orders" for the upcoming meeting, so that each would know what was expected of them.

"He insisted on teaching us the codes," said Christopher.  "That way, he never had to look us in the face and tell us what we were going to have to do."

"I do not ever want to see the words 'decorative bathtub fixtures' again," Rebecca said, then shrugged, embarrassed.  "Anytime they ordered 'decorative bathtub fixtures,' that meant me."

"I was any Louis XIII furniture," said Christopher.

Arnold scratched at one of his scars and tried to smile.  "Mostly I was walnut.  Or mahogany.  Or cherry.  Any of the darker woods."  He shook his head.  "Man, I hated seeing an order for a mahogany dining room table.  That meant they were going to… eat off of me before they did their business."  He wiped his eyes, then tried once again to smile.  "I remember when Mom used to take me out for ice cream.  I would always order a big banana split with extra whipped cream on top.  It was not a real banana split without that extra whipped cream, you know?"  His eyes narrowed, and for a moment he looked as if he might get sick.  "Him and his friends ruined that for me.  I almost hate him more for that than my face."

"Thomas was an antique radio, or phonograph, anything like that," said Rebecca.  "I will bet you can guess why."

Grendel's friends included lawyers, doctors, police officials, city fathers, and others whose positions guaranteed these meetings would always be discreet.

"They never called each other by name in front of us," Arnold said.  "But they would, you know, talk about their jobs.  The doctors gave Grendel any kind of medical stuff he asked for.  Bandages, scalpels, equipment, thread for stitches, needles, cough medicine… all kinds of stuff.  There were always a lot of drugs in the house."

"Pick a prescription medicine," said Rebecca, "and it was there.  A lot of it.  He never wanted for any of us to have to see a doctor if we were sick or hurt.  His doctor friends, they did not like the idea of having to treat us as patients, so they gave him everything he might need."

They were always blindfolded during the meetings so as to not see anyone's face.  "He would tape our eyes closed with duct tape," Christopher told me.  "Then he would put the blindfolds on.  'No peeking,' he would always say, and then laugh."

If they did well at the meetings, if they behaved themselves, if they did not cry or struggle or protest (unless crying, struggling, and protesting were part of the purchase order), and if they pretended to like it, then the following Thursday would be a "One" day.

"We lived for those," said Arnold; then, after a moment, added:  "You had to live for something, you know?"

Grendel and Connie would go into town with a list of items the others had given to them.  He would buy each of them one book from the bookstore, one movie from the video store, one new piece of clothing, one food of choice from the grocery store, one snack item ("And chewing gum counted," said Arnold, "which I never thought was fair."), one new toiletry item, and one piece of miscellanea—a tablet of writing paper, a jigsaw puzzle, a deck of playing cards, a music CD, etc.  "The clerks and checkout girls always thought he was a father spoiling his child," said Rebecca.  "They thought all the stuff he bought was just for one kid."

"We got pretty good at combining the stuff we needed on the list," Arnold said.  "Since we only got, like, one toilet item each, one of us would ask for toothpaste, the other one would ask for mouthwash, someone else would ask for toilet paper, stuff like that.  We did the same thing with the snacks and the food, so we would have enough for meals.  I would ask for bread, Christopher for sliced cheese, Rebecca would want lunchmeat… you know.  That way, we would always have everything we would need.  If we were careful, we could make all the 'One' day food last maybe eight or nine days."

"Providing we remembered to ask for a two-gallon jug of water," added Christopher.  "Sometimes we would need the food more than the water."  He shrugged.  "If you got thirsty enough, there was always the toilet tank."

"We all got hooked on Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket," said Rebecca.  "Connie picked them out for us.  She recognized the books because she got to see the first two Harry Potter movies."

Then Thomas spoke up:  "I like Lemony.  Lemony is very funny."

"He never cared about the movies we asked for or the books we read," said Christopher.  "If we did well, we got whatever we asked for."  He looked up.  "So, after a while, we always made sure we did well."

No one said anything for a few moments after that; they only sat staring at me.

"What?"  I said.  "Am I missing something?"

"You can learn things from books and movies," said Arnold.  "If you start picking the right ones."

"That is enough with 'Twenty Questions,'" said Christopher, rising to his feet.  "He is a janitor, not a journalist.  There are only two more things he needs to know."  He crossed to a corner of the room and picked up a large green-canvas duffel bag; from the way he struggled with it, whatever was inside must have weighed quite a bit.  It rattled.

"Christopher," said Rebecca, the warning evident.

"Time for all of you to shut up," he snapped at her, then heaved the duffel bag onto the foot of my bed.  "All right, Pretty Boy, have you gotten your sufficient jollies listening to all of this?  Do you have a nice, nasty story to shock your pretty friends with?"

"I never asked about—"

He backhanded me in the mouth; hard enough to hurt but not draw blood or raise welts.

"BE QUIET!"

Rebecca jumped up, activating the Taser again, but froze in place when Christopher pulled the gun from the back of his pants and pointed it right at my face.  "Sit down, Rebecca.  I killed the last guy and I will kill him if you push it, understand?"

Rebecca gave me a sorrowful look, then laid the Taser on the bed and sat down, hands folded in her lap, looking at the floor.

"Now," said Christopher, slipping the gun into the back of his pants, "it is time you understood a few things.  Do you know why there is only the four of us?  After all, we have told you about the others.  I assume even a janitor can do basic math."  He began unzipping the duffel bag.  "In the last four years, twenty-one children have passed through the House of Heorot.  Not all of them adapted or learned as well as we did."  He grabbed the unzipped bag at both ends, and began turning it upside down.  "I think it is time you met a few of them."

He gave the bag a violent jerk and the yellow bones tumbled onto the bed; pieces of hands, pieces of arms, legs, feet… and skulls.  There must have been a dozen skulls of various sizes in the pile forming in front of me but I didn't count, I was too busy crying out and pressing my body against the wall and headboard as the pile tumbled out and forward, clacking, rattling, one nearly-whole hand flopping outward and almost touching my leg as a skull skittered down the pile and rolled down the length of the arm, coming to rest almost perfectly in the center of the opened hand; until that moment I had managed to not scream but as soon as that skull came to rest and I read the name—RANDY—written in black marker across the top I couldn't hold it in any longer and let fly, just opened my mouth as wide as I could and screamed from the bottom of my balls upward, twisting my head from side to side and wishing to hell my eyes would just close but they wouldn't, no matter how much I begged them to, they just kept staring at that skull and that name and then my legs gave out and I collapsed but Christopher was there to catch me from behind, one arm across my torso, the other coming around my shoulder so he could press his hand over my mouth and hold my head still—

"Take it easy, Pretty Boy," he whispered into my ear.  "They are long past being able to hurt you.  They are long past being hurt.  Take a good look, Pretty Boy, look long and hard.  See that hand right there?  That belonged to a little girl named Jennifer.  She was four.  It took me three days to super-glue that hand back together, and even then I did not find all the bones, there were too many.  That is why there are so many pieces.  Unless you were right there watching when he cleansed them of their undisciplined flesh, you would have no idea which bones belonged to who.  But I was there for all their cleansings, hear me?  And I know all the bones by name, all of them!"  He spun me around to face him.  "I did not have to dig up any of them, either."  I started to say something—or maybe I started to scream again, I don't know—but he pressed his hand over my mouth again.  "You do not get to talk now, you get to pay attention.  Do you know why we were always so careful to make the 'One' day food last as long as possible?  Come on, Pretty Boy, take a guess!" On the last word, he twisted my head around so I could have another good look at the bones.

"Oh, Jesus…" I groaned.

"You see, we did not always get 'One' days.  Sometimes during the meetings one of us would squeal when we should not have, or maybe he would see a tear in one of our eyes, or sometimes one of us would have the gall to bleed too much!"  He snapped my head back around; he was right in my face now.  "Have you ever been starving, Pretty Boy?  Have you ever been so hungry that the emptiness in your stomach begins to swell?  Do you have any idea what it is like to go without food for so long that you start chasing spiders and cockroaches?  I once broke Arnold's nose over a couple of silverfish!"

"You got that right," said Arnold.

"I will let you in on a secret, Pretty Boy—when you have been left chained up in a basement room for two weeks with only water from a toilet tank to drink and the occasional bug for protein, you will eat anything that is put in front of you, even if it is something that you had to help slaughter, even if it was something that had a name and could call you by yours.  I suppose we should be grateful that Grendel had a thing about germs and at least cooked it first!"  He yanked me to my feet, spun me around, and pushed me down into the chair.

"Roll it over here, Arnold."

"Oh, hey, look, man, I do not think we need—"

"DID I ASK FOR AN OPINION?"

"Settle down, dude."

In three actions so quick and smooth they might as well have been the same movement, Christopher pulled the gun from the back of his pants, spun around, and fired a shot into the pillow on my bed; the gun made a short, sharp whistling noise like a single tweet from a bird, and the air was suddenly alive with dancing bits of stuffing.

"I swear to God," said Christopher through clenched teeth, "the next one goes through his right eye if you guys do not stop giving me grief.  Roll it over here right now, Arnold."

Arnold shook his head and sighed sadly as he rose to his feet.  "I hate it when you get this way, man.  This is not you."  He rolled the typing stand and computer around the bed and toward me.  He looked at Christopher as if he was going to say something else, then thought better of it.  He positioned the computer in front of me, then reached out and gave my forearm an apologetic squeeze before returning to the second bed.

Christopher stood beside me, pressing the silencer against my temple.  It was hotter than hell and scorched my hair and skin; I bit down on my lip and waited for the pain to ebb.  I wasn't about to try anything right now, even something as harmless as moving my head.

With his other hand, Christopher reached out and used the computer's trackpad to open a series of sub-folders labeled "Pictures", "Video", "Ravenswood", and "Cleansings".

"Please," I whispered.  "Don't…."

"Sorry, Pretty-Boy, but when we put on a show, you get the whole program."

He highlighted a file in the "Cleansings" folder:  Connie.

"Connie was special in more ways than one," he said.  "Grendel would schedule private meetings between her and his friends—one at a time, of course.  And these private meetings were expensive.  Connie never said anything about them—or, at least she did not say anything about them for a long time.

"After he took Denise, Connie started acting different.  She talked more.  She complained.  She started saying no.  She started telling us secrets, like where he kept extra keys and cash.  I think she realized he was training Denise to be her replacement for the trips into town.  I think she must have been jealous.  She would be rude to Denise, pinch her or slap her when she thought Grendel was not looking.  He put Connie in the basement with us, and gave Connie's room upstairs to Denise.  Connie did not like that.  She tried to hurt Denise the next chance she got.  She tried to cut her face with a knife.  And that was it."

He double-clicked the file and a video screen came up.  He enlarged the screen to three times its size; there was no loss of video quality.

He pressed harder against my temple with the still-hot silencer.  "You will watch every second of this, Pretty Boy, or I will put a bullet in your kneecap."

"Why are you doing this?"  I sounded on the verge of tears or hysterics, and hated myself for the loss of control.

When he spoke again, his voice sounded almost sympathetic.  "Because I do not want to be the only person who knows what he did down there, and I will not make any of them watch."

He started the video.  "Welcome to Ravenswood."

I was looking at a large room with gray cinderblock walls.  Everything in the room was illuminated by harsh fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling.  Metal shelves lined the walls on the left and right.  Specimen jars of various sizes were on the shelves; I couldn't quite make out what was floating inside them, then decided I didn't really want to.  In the left corner of the room sat two large medical waste barrels with locking lids.  In the center of the room was a long metal table with straps hanging from each corner.  The table was bordered with a gutter on both sides and both ends, and in each of the corners was something that looked like pool table pocket.

I had cleaned the School of Medicine's building long enough to recognize an autopsy table when I saw one.  Except none of those had straps.

Two medium-sized operating room lights, for the moment turned off, hung over the table.  A tray with a white cover sat next to the far right corner.

A door opened and a young man came in.  It took me a moment to recognize him; Christopher still had his nose and upper lip.  I suppose the metal jaw should have been the giveaway.

Christopher wore tight rubber gloves.  Leaving the door opened behind him, he walked to the table and uncovered the tray, revealing the medical instruments underneath.  Then he switched on the two overhead lights, positioning them with well-practiced movements.  After that, he pulled a step stool from under the table and crossed toward the camera; setting down the stool, he disappeared from view for a moment before re-emerging three times as large.  His eyes were glazed and dead-looking.  He checked the camera settings, shifted its position slightly, then dropped out of sight once again.

As he was replacing the step stool, an older man and younger girl entered the room.  Both wore flimsy hospital gowns.  The man had rubber gloves; the girl did not.

Even though I'd never seen her before, it was obvious from the characteristics of her face that this was Connie.  She was carrying a stuffed doll that I recognized; Blossom, of The Powerpuff Girls fame.  The man whispered something in her ear, and Connie, smiling, took off the robe and climbed naked onto the table, dropping Blossom to the floor as she did so.  The man signaled Christopher to close the door, and then, for the first time, stood still long enough for me to get a good, clear look at his face.

I had seen Grendel before.  Several times.  You've seen him, too, remember?  He's the guy who bags your groceries at the store on Friday night; the man who checks your gas meter every other month; the fellow who manages the graveyard shift at that Steak 'n' Shake twenty minutes from your apartment; he's that one guy who pumps your gas at the station downtown, or the other guy behind the Customer Service counter at the department store, or that dude who empties the trash receptacles in the food court at the mall.  Remember him now?

That's whose face I was looking at in the video.  Right—that guy.

Grendel checked the positioning of the lights, all the while whispering things to Connie that I was glad I could not hear.  She giggled and nodded her head; this was some kind of a game Daddy was playing with her.  Grendel signaled Christopher to assist him with strapping down Connie's arms and legs.  Once that was done, Grendel took off his hospital gown and massaged his penis into a stiff erection, which he then covered with lubricant from a tube Christopher handed to him.  Once he was satisfactorily slick, Grendel turned and climbed up onto the table, positioning himself between Connie's legs.  I watched Blossom then.  She was smiling, looking toward the camera with those terribly cute, oversized eyes.  I could almost hear her telling Bubbles and Buttercup that the city of Townsville was under attack again and Mojo Jojo was holding Professor Plutonium hostage and the Mayor was on the phone saying "Oh, dear," over and over and to top it all off, her favorite hair brush was missing, would the terror never end?

I stared at Blossom as the leg of the table behind her shook and shuddered from the constantly-shifting weight above; it would jerk slightly forward, then right itself before jerking forward again, a steady rhythm for a while, then getting faster, and sweet, sweet Blossom, she just sat there smiling at me, shaking from the vibrations, never complaining, not even when the shaking became so fast and hard she lost her balance and fell over on her side; she never stopped looking or smiling at me, and I decided then that she was my new favorite Powerpuff Girl, and I sure hoped that Buttercup wouldn't cop an attitude over this; after all, she'd been my favorite until now, but Blossom was here when the chips were down, and she lay there singing and smiling and telling me stories about cute pink fuzzy bunnies, never looking away, not even when the shadows above her began to shift and move and jerk and spread; not even when the straps began to pull so tight she could have bounced a quarter off them; not even when one of Grendel's bare feet stepped on her for a moment; not even when the shadows above began flailing as something slopped over the side of the shaking table and spattered her lovely outfit; at no time did Blossom ever behave in a less than ladylike manner, and I decided that I was in love with her.

Then one of Christopher's shoes passed by and kicked Blossom away.  I was so startled that I blinked and looked up at the table where Grendel, covered in gore, was on his knees ejaculating into the opened stomach cavity of something that looked like it might have once been a human being but was now only a steaming heap of bones and liquids and tissue and blood and—

–I lurched forward, shoving everything out of my way as I tried to get to the bathroom but my foot caught on the typewriter stand and I fell forward onto the bone pile, then dropped to the floor, the bones raining down on my face and chest as my arms jerked and flailed, knocking them away in a chorus of clattering as I rolled to the side before my stomach exploded, reaching out for the other bed as I felt the first burp of bile splatter into my throat, then I was on my feet and staggering ahead, hands over my mouth and praying my legs didn't melt away beneath me and there it was, there was the bathroom, but now someone was yelling my name and someone else was yelling Christopher's and a part of the doorway splintered away with the chirping of a bird and I threw myself forward and onto my knees, sliding across the smooth blue tile to the toilet whose seat Rebecca had thought to leave up and then I was doubled over, clutching the sides of the bowl as my torso heaved and my stomach blew up and my throat was scorched by the flood of vomit that came sailing out for what seemed hours, giving me so little time to pull in a breath between bursts I thought I'd pass out again and I didn't want to do that because then the bones would get me….

When it was finally done, I fell backward, coughing, the foul taste of everything I'd eaten in the last twelve hours swimming in my mouth and forcing dry heaves; I had one arm pressed against the toilet, the other against the wall behind me, and my legs splayed out like a marionette hastily dropped in mid-performance.  I gasped and spit and coughed and groaned, my throat and chest feeling far to swollen for my body to contain, my vision obscured by the tears in my eyes and my eyes forever seared but what they'd seen after Blossom had been kicked away…

"Are you all right?" asked someone.  "He did not hit you, did he?"

I looked up and saw Thomas in the middle of the doorway; Arnold and Rebecca stood behind him.  I saw where Christopher's shot had struck the door frame and realized how close he'd come to hitting the back of my skull and almost vomited again, only there was nothing left.

"He only helped Grendel to protect us," said Arnold.  "If Christopher ever refused to help with a cleansing, then one of us would have been next."

"And he would have made Christopher pick," said Thomas.

Rebecca was crying.  "We were the four who had been with him the longest, you see?  The four of us were all the family we had.  He had to help him, don't you see?"  At realizing she'd just a contraction, she gasped, her hands flying up to cover her mouth as her eyes widened with terror.  Arnold and Thomas looked as if they were waiting for the next bomb to go off.

"Whatta you know," I choked out.  "The world didn't end."

Tears welled in her eyes—I hadn't until that moment realized that tear ducts could still function with a glass eye—and shook her head, not blinking.

"It's okay," I said.  "It's okay, really."

Thomas rolled his chair a little farther into the doorway.  "We want to go home.  Will you help us?"

"Do not beg him!" shouted Christopher from somewhere behind them.  "I will not have any of you ever beg for anything again!"

"What do you say, man?" asked Arnold.

Rebecca lowered her hands, then pushed past Thomas, knelt down in front of me, and laid her palm gently against my cheek.  When she spoke, her voice was a sad and ruined whisper from a darkness where bones were known by name and faces were things other people took for granted:  "…p-please…ohgod, Mark, please…."

Her hand so soft and sad against my cheek; Thomas so small in his chair; Arnold so tired with a face so scarred; these three little ones, with big brother stewing behind them; my captors, who were, in their way, as much at my mercy as I was at theirs.

I reached up and took hold of Rebecca's hand, then turned my face into her palm and kissed it.  It seemed like the right thing to do.

"How touching," said Christopher from the doorway.  "If we are all finished with the lovey-dovey, perhaps we could gather up our stuff and get the hell out of here."  He stopped, then laughed at his having just cursed.  "You're right," he said.  "Curses and contractions, and the world didn't end."  His eyes narrowed; he looked at Arnold.  "It feels strange."