by Al
He told her to think about it, and if anyone came to her to let him know right away.
~ * ~
At that point Schneider did the conventional thing: he followed the child’s footprints as far as he could. And it was quite a job: behind the Wendt property was a patchwork quilt of pumpkin fields owned by various farmers. He nonetheless was able to follow the boy’s movements through four of these fields to the edge of a fifth, which then dropped off down to a shallow valley and a thin ribbon of water known as Martin’s Creek.
From the marks he found, it looked as though the boy had slid or fallen down the embankment.
There were indications that he had crossed the creek at one point.
For a moment Schneider’s heart climbed into his throat, when he saw how deep the creek was at the point the boy entered. He followed the line of water downstream, fearing that the boy’s drowned body might turn up at any moment.
But he found markings on the other side of the water at a shallower area where a fallen tree bridged the creek (perhaps the boy was in trouble until he came up against this spot) and these fresh marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.
The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search, and discovered that, a second, oddly-shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.
Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been following someone?
Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.
It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.
There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints—which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints—led away.
And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.
At that point the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still was hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered with leaves and dead branches.
Where…
He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.
One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on the back of Schneider’s head stand on end.
Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.
3
The poster, which read: UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU! was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted—they ran over their borders and looked still wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment—some of which Mom had—and for calcium and vitamin supplements—he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (his favorite book) and The Wizard of Oz and Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn’t were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.
But the smell wasn’t gone here—it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.
That was funny, heating paint in a pan…
He felt light-headed, and suddenly wanted to throw up.
Ahhhhh…
The discomforting noise he made caused another noise out of his vision, a shuffling like a dog had been disturbed. He could not see. Except for the upside-down poster and an upside-down coat hook next to it with a rain coat which was hung near the floor and ran up the wall (again: funny! And despite his queasy stomach he gurgled a short laugh) he could see little else. The wall was colored chocolate brown, and it was stuffy in the room.
Again he heard the dog-shuffle.
Something new came into his view, in front of the wall poster—something just as brightly colored. It was accompanied by the shuffling noise, which was caused, Jody saw, when he strained his eyes to look up (which hurt) by the slow movement of a pair of huge clown feet, which were red with bright yellow laces. His vision in that direction was impeded by a sort of cap that appeared to be on his head, though he felt nothing there. There was a sharp rim, and he could see no farther. What he saw of the ceiling under the clown’s feet, was the same color as the wall.
Jody looked down, and his sight trailed over the figure of a circus clown dressed in blue pants, a red and green-striped blouse with baggy sleeves and white gloves, and a white face with impossibly wide, bright red smile, eyelashes painted all around his eyes, all topped by a snow-white cap with a red pom-pom.
The shuffling stopped; the clown was facing him now and Jody noted that the figure’s real lips inside the painted-on smile weren’t smiling. The eyes looked serious inside their cartoon lashes, too.
“Ted?” The clown whispered, in an impossibly gentle voice. “You’re awake, Ted?”
Jody tried to tell the clown that his name wasn’t Ted, but the feared throw-up rose hotly in his throat, out his mouth and ran up his face.
It was now, through the paint smell and dizziness and headache, that he realized he was upside-down, not the room.
The clown tsk-tsked, and a wet cloth was pressed to Jody’s nose and cheeks, rubbed gently.
The bile was gone.
It was getting very stuffy in the room.
“Soon, Ted, soon…” the clown said, and then he shuffled out of Jody’s sight.
“I—” Jody managed to get out.
The shuffling stopped. “Yes?” the clown asked, and there was a closed-in hush in the room.
“I…no…Ted…” Jody spit out, along with more bile, before his vision began to blur.
“I know, Ted. Yes,” the Clown answered, in what was almost a sing-song whisper.
Then, Jody closed his eyes.
~ * ~
When he opened them again, he was hungry.
The paint smell was still there, and the queasiness, and the headache, which was worse now, and he was still upside-down and couldn’t move. But, somehow, he felt more alert.
He saw immediately that the poster—UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU!—was partially blocked by a familiar sight: the Pumpkin Boy, or at least part of him. The Pumpkin Boy’s chest, which was a thicker tube of metal than the articulated stalks that composed his arms, was open, revealing a cavity within with something red, suspended in a web of golden wire, that throbbed darkly. The web shivered noticeably with each beat. The cavity’s door lay hinged back against the Pumpkin Boy’s side. He seemed to be missing from the legs down (or up, to Jody’s eyes) and his head was hinged open on the top. Now, in the light, Jody saw that the head itself looked to be made of some sort of ceramic or plastic or other hard surface; it was too hard-edged and brightly colored (a hue as bright as the poster colors, and the Clown suit colors) to be real. There were no seeds stuck to the inside of t
he lid, which looked smooth and clean.
A trail of golden wires led out of the Pumpkin Boy’s head, the back part behind the eyes, nose, and grinning mouth (could there be a hidden compartment back there?) and were bundled together with white plastic ties. There looked to be hundreds of individual hair-thin wires. The bundle ended in a curl, like a rolled hose, on the floor.
Jody saw that the Pumpkin Boy wore a pair of ordinary leather carpenter’s gloves, like the ones his mother used in the garden.
Jody now realized how quiet it was.
“Hel…lo?” he said. His voice sounded like a frog’s croak.
There was no answer.
Feeling stronger than he had before, Jody tried to twist himself around.
Whatever he was trussed to, it gave little, but it did give. He turned a bit to the right, then swung back, as if he were suspended on a rope. He had seen the wall beyond the Pumpkin Boy and the poster: flat brown, unadorned.
He twisted again, harder. His legs were asleep, which at least meant that his twisted ankle didn’t hurt anymore. His hands were also asleep, but he could feel enough of them now to discover that they were bound behind his back, tightly.
He tried for a time, but couldn’t loosen them.
This time as he turned he saw the wall and something on the true floor: a table, a bright silver machine with a big black dial and the edge of a huge white clock-face with too many numbers around the edge.
He came stubbornly back to rest.
He was growing weaker.
The Pumpkin Boy hadn’t moved, was staring straight through him.
Jody gave a mighty turn, with an ooofff!
This time he felt as if a lance had pierced his forehead. He cried out in pain—but he saw the whole silver machine, which was on casters, and other machines, one of which looked like the emergency generator Mom kept in the garage, and a door. No windows. The clown suit was draped over a single chair, next to a lamp—
The door was just opening.
Jody swung back to rest, the pain still driving through his head. He knew he was crying.
The shuffle sounded frantic.
“Ted—!”
He passed out with the man’s hands on his head, or what felt like through it.
~ * ~
A hum in his ears.
It sounded like bees, or millions of ants. He’d seen millions of ants once, two armies fighting in the forest, brown and black. He went back three days later and they were still fighting. His cousin Jim, who was fourteen years old, told him to make a cone out of the comic book in his back pocket and when he did, and put the wide end of the cone near the massed ants and the other, the tighter end next to his ear. He heard a roaring, a scrabble and hum that sounded like the mighty armies he saw fighting in books.
He thought Jim had played a trick on him, and took the homemade horn away from the battle, but there was Jim ten feet away from him, grinning.
“Somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Wow…”
It had sounded like this, only less so…
Jody opened his eyes. It felt, now, like his head had been split in two, like a melon. There was a dry burning behind his eyelids, and a circle of hot pain all around his head, as if a heated clamp had been tightened around it.
He heard a mewling sound, and realized it came from his mouth.
“There, Ted, there…”
A cool hand rested on his brow, above his eyes, and then withdrew.
The hot pain circling his head increased.
His eyes were watering, but he blinked and then could see, almost clearly. The Pumpkin Boy sat where he had been, staring mutely at nothing. To his right the silver machine with the big black dial and white clock face had been positioned at a slight angle; next to it, on another dolly, was a similar, smaller machine.
The thick bundle of hair-thin silver wires was now plugged into the side of the silver machine; another bundle was plugged into the opposite side of the machine and ran to the floor…
…toward Jody…
He cried out, in pain and terror—
“There, there, Ted…”
Again the soothing hand, the clown glove; as it withdrew from his face Jody saw the clown face close to his own, peering into him as if his head were a fish bowl. The lips didn’t smile, nor the eyes.
“…out!”
“Yes, Ted,” the soft voice sing-songed. “Yes…”
The clown hand came back to pat his forehead.
He writhed, tried to loosen his hands, his feet, to snake down from his captivity.
The soothing voice became almost scolding.
“Ted, you mustn’t—”
The clown hand reached out to the huge black dial on the silver machine—Jody saw the hand grip it hard and twist it—
Pain came, and he went back to sleep.
4
Pictures of Jody.
She didn’t know whether to take them down, put them away, turn them to the wall or put them in new frames. Nothing, Emily Wendt knew, would work. If she put them away it would be a defeat, an admission that he was gone, as well as giving up hope.
But having him staring out at her from every room in the house was almost unbearable. She had never realized how many pictures she had of her son: they were everywhere, framed on the hallway wall, in a gilt frame next to her bed, stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, herded with other family portraits on top of the television, on the hunter’s table behind the sofa, the last Sears portrait, from Christmas, on the phone table—
In the end, she put them all away except the one next to her bed.
That had been the first portrait she’d ever had taken of him, when he was one. Jack had still been alive, then. She remembered how much trouble they had keeping Jody still; the photographer had posed him in a chair covered with a blanket and Jody, who had recently taken his first steps, kept trying to dismount the chair. It was obvious he was fascinated by the camera and wanted to study it. Finally the photographer had to let him look it over, click the shutter twice and then promise him another look if he sat still for the picture.
You’d never know he had been any trouble by looking at the finished product. The portrait showed him staring quietly, with big eyes, at the camera; his face held a measure of interest that proved he was only thinking about getting his hands on that machine again. A lick of his thin auburn hair had fallen over his brow (later his hair would thicken, becoming almost coarse; unless cut very short it tended never to stay combed or brushed for long) and his pudgy hands were folded on his lap.
This would be the picture she wouldn’t put away.
Later that day, after the session, she and Jody and Jack had gone to the taco place in the mall, the one and only time they had ever eaten out together. She still remembered what Jody had done to the burrito they had gotten him, how he had dissected it like a frog—
She found herself weeping—the first time, in the week since Jody had been taken, that she had cried. She had thought her life was over after Jack was killed, but now she knew just how much she had still possessed, even after the loss of her husband. There was a hollow place in her now that felt as if it had been scooped out with a trowel, and she knew it would never fill in.
This was nothing like it had been when Jack died.
She collapsed to the floor, hugging Jody’s picture, and sat with her legs folded beneath her, rocking and crying.
“Oh, Jody, Jody…”
She thought she heard him call her name.
She froze in mid sob, and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.
“Jody…?”
She knew how foolish this was, but she had heard him call to her.
Forgetting the picture, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the back of the house. The noise had come from the kitchen.
A blast of cold air hit her. She saw that the kitchen door leading to the backyard was open.
Holding her sweater closed and shivering, she stepped out onto
the back stoop.
“Jody?” she called, almost fearfully.
The backyard was awash in unraked leaves pushed into dunes by the wind. The sky was overcast, huge banks of gray cumulus clouds rolling over one another from west to east. The temperature was falling. The pumpkin fields beyond the fence looked ominous, cold, brown and wet. The far hills surrounding Orangefield were dark, the trees stripped of green.
It looked like the landscape of a particular kind of hell.
She shivered, still holding her sweater closed, and turned around.
She gasped, and put her hand to her mouth.
There, staring straight up at her, was the face of a pumpkin. Puffs of steam issued from the eyes, the nose. The surface of the face looked hard and glassy, and, from within, there was a soft orange glow.
There was a body below it, the size of an older boy or young teen, sharp angles and shiny metal. The thing had its hands on her shoulders, holding her. There were gloves on its hands, but she could feel sharp metal fingers within.
The face came closer. There was a flat metallic smell, like 3-in-1 oil. The eyes stared into her, studying her, as if watching her from a far distance.
A long puff of metallic-smelling steam hissed forth from the mouth, which was smiling impossibly wide through its two angled teeth.
The jet of steam held a word, in the form of a question:
“Mmmmmom?” Jody said.
5
It was getting dark.
Len Schneider looked like a man who was thinking. He stood with his head down, hands in the pockets of his jacket.
He glanced at his watch.
Almost time to go.
His hands clenched into fists.
It had turned even colder. The last few days had each announced, with increasing earnestness, that autumn was here and winter wasn’t far behind. A curt wind was dervishing dead leaves into some of the shallow pits they had dug. The deeper holes were filled with muddy water and blankets of leaves.
There was nothing else in any of them.
Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?