Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  The sheep were clustered downslope between Ronald and the old Millhouse beside the pond. A small plaque beside the door stated that the Millhouse was a HISTORICAL LANDMARK erected in 1785. The outer shell of weathered boards and gray shingles certainly supported the deception. On rare occasions an ungrateful, questioning thought wormed its way up through the clouds of clozapine fog and Ronald wondered, Why the deception? If it was a government facility, as stated on the metal sign adorning the gate—FEDERAL PROPERTY: NO TRESPASSING—why the need to hide?

  He leaned his weight on the rake and studied messages in the clouds of his breath, smiling in a wonder that had not faded in the months since he was called forth from the segregation unit to meet The Man who called himself Bierce. It was inside a windowless interview room that The Man had offered Ronald redemption. A caretaker was needed and he qualified for the position. That he was required to wear a tracking anklet didn’t worry him at all. Anything was better than seg. Better? It was Shangri-fucking-La compared to that tiny cell with its lidless toilet and unyielding cot, his only access to the outside world a narrow slot in the door through which he was fed.

  Care for the grounds, and care for the sheep and goats that trimmed the lawn with their endless chewing. When it came to the sheep, Ronald’s primary job was to keep them from drowning themselves in the millpond. They were warm, curly-haired things with black faces peering out from thick, off-white wool and very, very dumb. Still, they never bit or kicked him. Instead, they crowded around him whenever he came outside, or bumped against him and nuzzled his ears when he sat on the old stone lip of the pond with his fishing pole.

  The goats were another matter, but there were only three of them, and he had worked out an accord with the stunted brutes. “I’ll leave you alone and you leave me alone.” Like the sheep, however, they refused to enter the Millhouse. Ronald had learned the wisdom of flight early in life, and he retreated inside whenever the goats grew ornery.

  He resumed his work, enjoying the scratch of the wooden teeth against the grass. After his third fall for kiddie pictures, he never expected to see the outside world again. Expected to die face down in a shower as a series of angry convicts ran a train on him, or a guard hit him one too many times with a lead-cored baton and caved in his fragile skull.

  Then The Man offered Ronald a second chance, and he was one grateful sex offender.

  A bat fluttered overhead, and Ronald saw the smiling disk of the sun sink below the western trees. He lowered his gaze to the Millhouse, the historical monument hidden in the woods.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  His digital watch chimed, reminding him it was time for another pill. The pills were in the bathroom, and the bathroom was inside the Millhouse.

  Inside.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He told himself it was the time in segregation that made him reluctant to enter the building. After all, in the Millhouse he had all the food he could warm up in the microwave and near unlimited cable television. Each night, as he fell asleep on the couch, the moans and cries of pornography eased him into chemically lubricated dreams. So what if he wasn’t allowed alcohol or marijuana? The clozapine made him feel pretty good. When The Man called all Ronald had to do was answer the old phone on the metal desk and report, “All’s well.”

  The watch chimed again and Ronald’s slack lips assumed a petulant twist. He had agreed to the medication as part of his work release program. Compared to prison, the rules of his new existence were simple, really.

  Don’t leave the grounds.

  Don’t touch the phone unless it was to report to The Man.

  Don’t explore the tunnels beneath the Millhouse.

  - 2 -

  Her voice: “But I didn’t order a pizza.”

  His voice: “Lady, somebody ordered a meat lover’s.”

  Voices from the old, blocky television squatting in the corner. Ronald came back to himself sitting astride the wheeled desk chair, around him the dispassionately ugly cinderblock front room outfitted in government ugly, circa 1950.

  His chin was wet and he sat facing the doorway to the dark bedroom.

  “What I really want is a big cock,” the woman’s voice said from the TV.

  Ronald shifted and the wheels of the chair squeaked on the cement floor. Sometimes he lost time because of the clozapine.

  Sound from the dark bedroom and Ronald sprang from his seat, the chair rolling backwards to bang against the old metal desk as he braved the black rectangle and thrust his arm into the dark, hand slapping against the painted cinderblock wall as if to attract attention, call something forth—

  The light switch.

  Fluorescents overhead flickered to life with an audible hum and threw unflattering light over the sparsely appointed bedroom with its single, unmade bunk and incongruous bookcase of religious tracts.

  Tapping sounds echoed from the painted cluster of pipes that ran down one corner of the room and disappeared into the floor. Random noises. Water pressure. Not Morse code.

  Ronald rubbed a hand across his comb-over and left the greasy black strands standing erect. “Aww, shit,” he said. He had forgotten. Soon the pipes would start picking up random radio sounds. Disjointed voices that he could almost understand.

  Ronald staggered past the couch with its rumpled pillow and blankets, where he had slept since that first unsettling night in the bedroom, during which the tapping and radio voices had kept him awake in an ecstasy of shivering terror. He bumped his shin against the coffee table and dislodged a CD jewel case, scattering crushed lines of clozapine on the floor.

  “Shit!”

  His boxer shorts strained across his wide backside as he bent and lifted a cardboard box from the metal shelves, lugged the case of dog food into the bedroom and dropped it on the floor below the hatch to the dumbwaiter. He pulled hard and the door came down, revealing an empty box into which he fed the cans of DAVE’S ALL NATURAL DOG FOOD. Closing it, he hummed TV theme songs while he pressed the red button to lower the tray. Faint moaning came from the actors on the television, and he wished he had remembered to turn up the volume before feeding time.

  “This used to be a quarantine space for infectious disease research, defunct and unused for more than twenty years before we picked it up,” The Man had told him. “But you will never have to go below to the quarantine area. You would not want to. It is dark, empty and very easy to become lost.”

  Ronald glanced at the bookcase against the wall. He had pushed it aside on that first day before he learned to fear the bedroom. Behind the bookcase of Bibles and Torahs and Bhagavad Gitas was a great metal door with an oblong keyhole in place of a handle.

  After two minutes he heard a quiet thump when the tray hit bottom and couldn’t help but wonder how far down the dumbwaiter went.

  A flurry of taps rang from the water pipes and he slammed the dumbwaiter’s hatch closed, backing away to the antiseptic safety of the front room, with its desk and microwave and television.

  Dogs can’t open boxes. Dogs can’t open cans.

  What am I feeding?

  Don’t explore the tunnels beneath the Millhouse.

  There was no chance of Ronald ever going down there. No chance at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  - 1 -

  A thin coating of ice covered the big house on the hill, steaming faintly in the bright morning light. The building was unused to so much warmth, with a fire burning in the front room and two extra bodies slumbering. A stranger’s body slept in the guest bedroom, and a room that had never fulfilled its purpose did so now with a different child. The owner of the big place had laid out an air mattress in a dusty, upstairs room that he hadn’t visited in years and ruminated on the idea of change.

  - 2 -

  The old building creaked and whispered its own strange logic.

  It was a house used to quiet and loss, and it spoke to Hedde as she lay on the stiff mattress atop scratchy blankets her uncle had pulled from a closet. It was a sma
ll room with a floor of uneven boards and a single window through which moonlight flooded in, painting the nearly empty space in shades of blue. Hedde suspected the peeling old house was haunted.

  A handmade crib stood in one corner, a box of wooden bars on tall legs covered with carved images but lacking a mattress. As far as Hedde knew, Uncle Gerard had never had a child, though he had once had a wife, and her quick mind saw a dark path to his taciturn personality. If she was right.

  Hedde was always right.

  She was right about her father spending more and more time away from home, right that he liked doing whatever he did overseas more than he liked living in a small town in Westchester. She was right that her mother was moving in another direction, like a planet breaking orbit from the sun. She was right to pull in her own tendrils, to fasten her seatbelt and assume crash position. She was right that something bad was coming that would hurt her.

  She was right that somehow, in the space of a day, everything had changed. Something worse had happened, something that meant her father was in danger, enough danger to give her mother a gun and a note and money like she had only seen in movies. She was right in knowing that those tendrils she had thought retracted were still fully connected to her parents, and they opened her to hurt.

  She did not want her father to go away. Did not want her mother to break orbit. She was filled with a fear that gathered in her belly with a sick heaviness, and so she stared at one of the only other features in the small room that was meant for another child.

  An old, iron horseshoe hung over the door on a single nail, covered with rust but, she suspected, still potent. Old magic, protective magic. Bene gris gris to guard the child who slept in the room.

  Her.

  She sat up on the thin mattress in the corner of the room and pulled on her boots, lacing them up to the top.

  The floor spoke as she crossed to the window, which opened with a protesting screech. Cold air rushed in and she felt the goosebumps break out on her arms. She shivered even as her eyes watered, casting mirages and prisms across the beautiful expanse of snow-covered land, the leafless branches of nearby trees limned in white, the hulking barn draped with a wintry blanket, as if in sleep it had pulled up the covers.

  Below her, she heard a noise, an unsettling sound. She cocked her head to listen, but it wasn’t repeated. Her eyes were drawn to the quiet barn and she wondered about its mystery, aware that she was distracting herself on purpose.

  She shivered again and told herself that the icy wetness on her cheeks was simply the cold, not crying, she was too old to cry. Eventually the crying girl slipped out into the dark hallway and crept to the staircase, unable to avoid the constant chorus of the house announcing her every movement.

  Her mother’s gun was sitting dead center on the kitchen table and she picked it up, feeling the deadly weight of it, the ugly, bulldog attractiveness of the device. She played her fingers over its shape, careful to avoid the trigger, until she was able to find the lever that allowed the cylinder to slide out to one side. She rotated it with one finger, touching the visible ends of the bullets before snapping her wrist like Uncle Gerard. This proved harder than she thought, and she had to use her left hand to press the cylinder home until it clicked.

  She placed the gun back on the table and went outside into the night.

  - 3 -

  What’s in the barn?

  Hedde stood in the yard looking over the pleasantly dilapidated structure, all gray wood with gaps between the boards and she recognized a postcard shot with the dark line of trees across the field behind it. She curled her hands into fists and sucked them up into her sleeves, but she was still cold.

  Something’s in there. Something that moved and made noise.

  There was a shiny padlock securing the big front doors, the only thing new she could see in the whole yard, including the house and her uncle’s old pickup truck.

  Hedde stepped closer, her Doc Marten’s punching holes in the crusting snow, and gave the padlock a tug.

  Nothing.

  She spit and wished for a cigarette, then kicked her way around the side of the barn until she found a conveniently placed crack. Probably stores bodies in there, she thought, picturing her uncle’s axe buried in the big stump. Mom took us to stay with a serial killer.

  Placing both hands against the wall, careful not to get splinters, she leaned in and placed her right eye against the crack, opening it wide in an effort to drink in more light.

  It was dark, with a dim red glow coming from behind some sort of low wall. She could see the faint outline of piled junk and rusting farm machinery, all giant wheels and bent blades.

  A low and ugly thunder rumbled from the darkness, and Hedde jerked back so suddenly she almost fell down.

  What the…

  She leaned closer, ready to spring away again, and peered again into the gloomy interior.

  A shadow moved inside, emitting a deep sound like the bass at a rock concert, vibrating the fillings in her teeth.

  “Zut alors!” she said, hopping back until she could see around to the front doors and the sturdy lock. Is that supposed to keep people out, or something in?

  Snow crunched behind her and she spun to see the black form of Etienne standing utterly still, watching her from the front yard. The fur on his shoulders bristled and his upper lip raised, showing huge teeth, but he didn’t make a sound. The big shepherd just watched her.

  “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay,” Hedde said, holding her hands out and backing away in a direction that let her keep an eye on both the dog and the barn. “Uncle Gerard doesn’t want anyone to know what’s in the barn? I won’t go in the barn.”

  She backed onto the icy dirt of the driveway and felt a surprising sob catch in her throat. What the fuck? She fought it down with a wave of anger, aware that her attempt at distraction was failing. She felt a hot prickling behind her eyes and closed them against the return of tears. Blind, she backed into the old Camaro beneath its snowy cover.

  Of course he has a Camaro. The disdainful thought was automatic, and she was beginning to think, undeserved. Shame joined the chorus calling for surrender to the thorny emotions jabbing at her wavering control.

  Something wet nudged her hand, and she jerked away from Etienne, who trotted calmly over to the front door of the house and sat in the snow, watching her.

  “Do you want to go inside?”

  The tail thumped once and Etienne said something like, whuff.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Whuff. Etienne stood and turned in a circle, then sat down and stared at her as she crunched to his side and opened the door. He pushed past and she closed the door behind her as she followed the big dog upstairs. He paused in the hallway, head lifted and nose twitching, before trotting down to her room and going inside.

  “Hey,” Hedde said when she entered the room. “That’s my mattress.”

  She closed the window and bent to untie her boots before kicking them off.

  “Shove over,” she said, wedging herself between the Shepherd and the wall, aware of his body heat and the thick animal smell of him. A strong smell, but not unpleasant once she got used to it.

  “You gonna sleep up here?”

  His tail thumped once.

  Hedde settled in, one hand on the thick fur of Etienne’s shoulder, eyes wide in the blue moon light.

  - 4 -

  Gerard opened the door quietly and looked into the girl’s room, catching the glint of Etienne’s eyes as the dog lifted his head to regard him. His niece was asleep, snoring quietly, and Gerard thought that was good. He had heard her moving through the house and the unmistakable click of the revolver’s cylinder. He had watched through a window as she skulked in the yard and explored the outside of the barn. Even from a distance he could feel her need, her fear. But it was as if the part of him that understood such human things had burned out, an old motor long since gone to rust. He was quietly glad for Etienne. The dog understood better than he
.

  If Gerard was aware of conflicting emotions about entering a room that had remained undisturbed for so many years, he paid it no mind. He was so accustomed to ignoring the calls from that part of his wounded soul that he no longer heard them.

  He heard them.

  And so he was also unaware of the surprising warmth he felt on seeing a child in the room, sleeping with his trusted companion.

  Etienne lowered his head and closed his eyes. Gerard, respecting the message, stepped back into the hall and quietly closed the door.

  - 5 -

  Hedde awoke to the smell of coffee and coughed when she discovered her face pressed into Etienne’s thick coat. A long tongue lapped at her ear and she recoiled, pushing the big dog away.

  “Gross! Move!”

  Etienne trotted around the perimeter of the room before pausing at the door. Hedde crawled off the mattress, knees aching on the hard wood, until she could reach up and turn the knob.

  The thunder of Etienne’s charge downstairs faded as she pulled herself to her feet. She was still wiping sleep from her eyes when she shuffled into the kitchen and Uncle Gerard offered her a cup of steaming black liquid.

  “Merci.”

  “De rien.”

  Hedde blew ripples across the surface of the coffee and glanced at the kitchen table. She saw a note in her mother’s handwriting and fought down what might have been a frightfully adult sound of disgust. She didn’t need to read the note to understand what it said.

  “My mom’s gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “She took the gun?”

  “She took the gun.”

  Gerard slid the paper towards her, but Hedde pushed it to the side and, after a moment, responded to his unasked question.

  “Doesn’t matter what’s in it. She left.”