Mr Hands

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Yours?” he asked.

  “All of that belonged to my ex-husband’s late father. He was a member of a Search-and-Destroy unit in Vietnam. Two tours. My ex inherited that when his father died, and when we divorced, Eric gave them to me—I guess he thought they didn’t convey the proper image for a new partner in a prominent financial consultancy firm. Stare all you want—none of those are loaded and I’ve all the legal paperwork and permits to own them.”

  “Did I say anything after ‘Yours’?”

  “No.”

  “Green Beret?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Your ex’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  Emerson gave a low, long whistle. “Boys’re crazier than the Marines. Being an ex-Marine I feel qualified to make the judgment call.”

  She almost decided to freak him out and tell him about the flame-thrower of his father’s that Eric had stored in the basement, but she was still too anxious about Emerson’s presence to test his sense of humor. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  Emerson stared at the closed study door a couple of seconds more, then turned his gaze toward her. “First of all, Miss Thompson, I need to tell you that while my questioning you is part of an official investigation, you are not a suspect.”

  Lucy nearly choked on her coffee. “A—a wh-what?”

  “Suspect.” A beat, then: “Timothy Beals was murdered last night.”

  Lucy said nothing, nor did her face betray the shock, terror and—maybe worst or best of all—the elation she was feeling inside.

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  “Where were you around ten-fifteen last night?”

  She had to think, be sure, be absolutely certain of the time she thought she saw on the dashboard clock.

  “I think I was being woken up by one of your patrolman. I, uh…I got sick while driving home, then I sort of…passed out, I guess. This was right around Moundbuilders Park. A patrolman woke me up, then he and his partner followed me home. I think that was right around ten-fifteen—I think. I wasn’t in the best of shape.”

  Emerson searched back a few pages in his notebook. “It was ten-twenty. According to Officer Banks, you were in a pretty sorry state.”

  “Charming.”

  Emerson flipped the notebook closed. “I just needed to check.”

  “Do you think I did it?”

  “After your exit from the meeting last night, yours was the first name that sprang to mind when the call came in.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No, I don’t think you did it. You couldn’t have done to him what...” Emerson let the sentence remain incomplete.

  Lucy had to know. “How did he die?”

  A beat, then: “He was decapitated and his torso crushed. To be more specific, his head was bitten off, most of his bones were crushed damn near into powder, and all of his internal organs were pulped. You’d have to run over someone with a steamroller to do that to a body.”

  “You said his head was…was—”

  “—bitten off, yes—and, no, I can’t come up with any animal that could do that, save for a lion or tiger or gator, and Cedar Hill isn’t exactly a haven for that sort of wildlife. Least, not the last time I checked.” He slipped the notebook back into his jacket pocket, stood, and started toward the front door but stopped at the study. “You mind some advice, Miss Thompson?”

  “Why not?”

  Emerson gave her a look she couldn’t read, then said: “Be careful what kinds of things you say in public when you’re drunk and upset.”

  That caught her by surprise. “You could tell I’d been drinking?”

  Something like a smile ghosted across his face. “You been a cop as long as I have—always wanted to say that in real life, so rarely get the chance—anyway, you learn how to spot a drunk, even one as outwardly steady as you were.”

  Lucy stared down into her coffee cup, embarrassed.

  She snapped her head up again when she heard the sound of the study door being opened. “What are you—?”

  “Jeezus-H...” whispered Emerson. He looked back at her and said, “Mind if I take a closer look?”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “No, but like I told the group last night, cooperation is preferable—”

  “—to coercion, yes, I remember. I wasn’t quite that drunk.”

  “I repeat, Miss Thompson, you are not a suspect.”

  Lucy sighed, set down her coffee, and escorted Emerson into the study, explaining the Walls of Madness to him.

  She found his fascination with the Walls amusing in a sad sort of way, right up until he bent over and picked up one of the wadded newspaper clippings and unfolded it.

  “All about Beals’ release last month,” he said matter-of-factly. He seemed to consider something for a moment, then turned and handed the clipping to Lucy. “Under any other circumstances, Miss Thompson, I’d be reading you your rights about now. How come you tore down only the Beals stories?”

  “I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t even remember going into the study after I came inside.”

  “Still drunk, were you?”

  “Falling-down fractured, yes.”

  “Ah, an honest one.”

  “Going to charge me with DWI?”

  Emerson shook his head. “Not much point now. Banks saw no reason to suspect you were intoxicated, and for all I know you might have taken some kind of medication that exacerbated the effect of the alcohol. Doesn’t matter. You didn’t hit anything or run over anyone.” He looked down at the clippings on the floor, half-heartedly kicking at a few of them. “Besides, I know there’s no way you could have gotten over to Beals’ side of town in less than twenty minutes, not in that godawful storm.”

  “You’re sure he was killed at ten-fifteen?”

  “We have something of an eye-witness. A supervisor at Spencer named Morse. He’d been working with Beals in the garage. Came inside to take a leak and heard what sounded like the wind blowing the roof off the garage. By the time he gets his fly zipped up and can run outside, there’s what’s left of Beals lying outside the wreckage of the garage.” He looked at her again. “You’re also not suspected of any complicity in his death, Miss Thompson. Besides, even if that were the case, if you know someone or something that can do to Beals and that garage what was done to them—” He shook his head. “I don’t want you siccing them on me.” He paused. “That’s a joke. My humor sometimes leans toward the macabre.”

  “You must have them rolling in the aisles down at the morgue.”

  “Packed house every night.”

  She opened the front door and he stepped out onto the porch, then turned to her and said: “Look, I know it’s none of my business, okay, but have you ever thought about getting involved in volunteer work? I mean, I think you should continue going to counseling, but why the hell not focus your anger and grief? I could give you names of people at a couple of different child welfare organizations who’d be more than happy to bring you aboard, train you. It’s a way to make a difference.”

  “You’re right,” said Lucy. “It’s none of your business.”

  She was closing the door when he pressed his hand against it and said, “Listen to me. Fifteen years ago a kid named Andy Leonard went on a shooting spree and killed a bunch of people, a lot of them in Moundbuilders Park where they were watching the fireworks that Fourth of July. My sister was there with my niece and nephew. My wife and me, we don’t have any kids ourselves, so my sister’s kids sort of adopted us as their second parents. We loved them dearly. My nephew was seven, my niece was three. Andy Leonard killed them both. My sister got a bullet in her leg, that was all. It damn near killed all of us, the kids getting shot to death like that. My sister didn’t handle it very well—hell, who could? There was more than one night I had to leave work early to go talk her out of a drunken, suicidal rage. But she got through it. You know why? It finally dawned on her that being bitter like she
was, thinking about killing herself and hating the whole goddamn world, well…it was an offense to the memory of her children, to all the love and happiness they’d brought into her life. For a while there, I didn’t think any of us were going to be able to move beyond what happened, but we did. I’m not saying that I don’t find myself just crying like a baby sometimes when I think about all the things I’m never going to be able to do with my niece and nephew…but I remember all the hugs and kisses they gave me, I remember their sweet childhood secrets they told me with these serious looks on their little faces…and I’m grateful for being blessed with what little time I did have them in my life. You can move beyond that kind of pain. I also think you can move beyond your Walls of Madness and use your anger and grief to do something positive.”

  “Why do you even care?”

  “Because I loathe waste, Miss Thompson, and that’s all you’re doing with the drinking and those newspaper clippings. You’re wasting life that you’ll never get back. Never.”

  “I’ll be sure to impart your wisdom to my daughter, if I ever see her again.”

  With that, she slammed closed the door, locked it, then ran into the bathroom and threw up.

  After she finished expelling her stomach’s scant contents, she leaned her head against the cool porcelain and closed her eyes.

  At the exact same moment, hidden within the pit of the sculpture in Moundbuilders Park, Mr. Hands opened his eyes.

  Shall there be mercy, then? he asked.

  The words sliced into Lucy’s brain as easily as a scalpel in a skilled surgeon’s hands. She snapped up her head, gasping aloud as the memory of what she’d believed to be a dream played itself out.

  Running through the park yet looking down at the treetops, filled with Purpose, with power, the rain and lightning, the roaring thunder urging on the Mission, then the structure, so easily was it torn open, and the Monster offering itself for sacrifice...

  Lucy cowered against the bathtub, burying her face in her hands: No, no, no, no, no!

  Within his hiding place, Mr. Hands smiled, children singing joyous songs within him. No mercy. So be it.

  Lucy cried out as the memory of Timothy Beals’ death replayed itself.

  Then she saw it again.

  And again.

  And one more time again.

  And with this last repeat of the memory, she knew with profound certainty that she had, after all, handed down Beals’ death sentence.

  I wish you could’ve bitten the head off the fucker...

  Her wish, her order…but she’d been thinking of the monster who’d stolen Sarah, not Beals...

  ...but a dead monster is still a dead one, whispered the voice of Mr. Hands inside her brain.

  Lucy sat very still, letting those words sink in.

  A dead monster is still a dead one.

  A dead monster is still dead.

  Dead.

  Shall there be mercy, then?

  “Not for monsters like them, no.”

  Under no circumstances?

  “Absolutely not.”

  So be it.

  “So be it.”

  It’s probably wrong to assume that madness is something born on a note of epiphany; sanity rarely ends amidst a glorious, cataclysmic, earth-shattering moment of Götterdämmerung; no: when a human mind can no longer maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting grasp on reason, when it begins to buckle, when it’s been confronted with too much horror, or grief, or confusion, or pressure, or fear, or a quietly crystallized combination of all five, sanity slowly grinds to a halt in a series of sputtering little agonies, flaking away in bits and pieces, flotsam of a refugee column casting off sad little remnants—a hope here, a fond memory there—on a road of defeat as a deeper and deeper darkness falls. And perhaps this is why so many madmen are found laughing in locked cells; at some point the only thing left them is their sense of humor, and it all becomes rather funny.

  A dead monster is still a dead one.

  Sitting there with closed eyes, almost—not quite, but almost—unaware of it, Lucy Thompson laughed.

  Very softly.

  Just for a moment.

  Because something in her mind had just sputtered, broken free, and deserted her.

  “So be it,” she whispered again, the last word rising slightly in pitch as her voice cracked.

  She rose from the floor with renewed energy, empowered, and strode toward the study and the Walls of Madness.

  She could make a difference…she and Mr. Hands.

  A difference the likes of which Detective Bill Emerson and everyone else couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  She scanned the clippings on the wall, promising Heather Wilson, Daniel McKellan, Rosie and Thad Simpkins, Billy Lawrence, Crystal and Emily Ransom, and the dozens upon dozens of other children whose sad and pained final hours were detailed before her, that their deaths would not go unavenged.

  Not as long as they had her.

  And Mr. Hands.

  For a dead monster is still a dead one.

  She walked slowly, almost reverently, toward the Walls of Madness.

  And there shall be no mercy for the likes of them.

  She reached out and plucked a clipping from the same wall from which had come the Beals stories.

  She read the details over, though she already knew the facts in the case by heart.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “You’ll do nicely.”

  Chapter Three

  “She’s here again.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  The young couple were walking the mounds in the park, something they made it a point to do every week. It was late October, a crisp autumn afternoon on whose breeze you could smell winter’s approach, perfect for a romantic stroll. For the last five visits, every time they reached the end of their hike, there was the Sculpture Lady (as they’d come to think of her) standing before Things Left Behind and chattering on as if she thought the thing were somehow alive and could understand what she said.

  “It’s so sad,” said the young woman.

  “I think it’s kinda creepy,” replied her fiancé.

  “Maybe because neither one of us has ever been that lonely?” The young woman stared. “She must be awfully empty to do something like this every week.”

  “What makes you think it’s just every week? For all we know, she might come here every day.”

  The young woman—whose friends often accused her of being too empathetic for her own good—wiped the beginnings of a tear from one of her eyes. “That’d just be too terrible. Poor woman.”

  The young man kissed her among the swirling, dry, colorful leaves, then said: “I promise you that you’ll never be that sad.”

  “I hope not.” She cast one last glance at the Sculpture Lady and thought, I hope it gets better for you, somehow.

  And then they were off for one more stroll around the mounds, the Sculpture Lady soon forgotten as the romantic spell of autumn consumed them.

  * * *

  In her high-school days, Three Dog Night’s “One” had been Lucy’s favorite song, and remained so (though she’d never admit it) well into her adulthood.

  Later she would think, albeit briefly, that there must have been some kind of irony at work, though she was hard pressed to fathom its subtleties by the time this occurred to her.

  For in the end, it was the number 1 that undid her.

  * * *

  Somewhere between the death of Timothy Beals and the October afternoon when the young lovers had their brief discussion about her, Lucy Thompson came to the conclusion that God’s affection for humankind could best be measured by the joy He/She/Them/It seemed to take in the suffering of the innocent. If ever she had doubts on that score, there were always the occupants of the Walls of Madness to remind her, to reinforce her belief that God was a sadist and probably didn’t even know it, and it seemed to her that a Being of that sort deserved a more fitting title than the one given it by those
ancient scribes who’d invented purple prose and decided to celebrate by authoring the Bible. She then took it upon herself to bestow this Being with a more appropriate moniker, and when at last it came to her, it was so simple...

  Lucy had always thought of God not as “He” but in terms of He/She/Them/It. She wrote those four words down one night while, on the outskirts of Ross County some ninety-plus miles away, Mr. Hands was slowly, gleefully peeling the face off of Karen Lawrence, who’d killed her infant son Billy with a hot iron because he wouldn’t stop crying, and who was later acquitted by a jury of her peers because several reputable doctors had testified that she was suffering from a severe case of Post-Partum Depression and was not responsible for her actions.

  As Karen Lawrence was releasing the last horrified, ragged, gore-clogged scream of her life, God’s new title came to Lucy.

  Rearrange the words He, She, Them, and It so they read: She, He, It, and Them, then take the first letter of each word and—presto!—you have the perfect acronym for a Being who seemingly created the innocent so It could rejoice in their suffering.

  Ergo, God became SHIT.

  Lucy liked that right down to the ground.

  Vengeance is Mine, sayeth SHIT; Let us pray to SHIT and rejoice in SHIT’s love for us; I believe in one SHIT, the Feces Almighty, maker of monsters and death; SHIT is great, SHIT is good, let us thank SHIT for this food...

  Yes. To the glory of SHIT, who rejoiceth in the tortured screams of the innocent.

  It restored certain grace-notes to her soul, and made the rest so easy. There was never any guilt over the deaths of the monsters; in fact, she hadn’t slept so well in years as she had in the last fifty days—and she had Detective Emerson to thank, in part, for that.

  For almost two months now, three times a week, Lucy had been volunteering at the local offices of Licking County Children’s Services. Most of it was gruntwork—filing, typing, routing phone calls, making coffee—but it was the type of gruntwork that, while very much appreciated, went for the most part unsupervised.

  Which meant access to files. Two of the dispatched monsters had been chosen from those files. Lucy had been very careful to choose monsters who lived outside of Cedar Hill, and had made doubly sure that Mr. Hands dispatched them while she was at the office, in full view of witnesses.