At the End of the Road

by Grant Jerkins

  Then the monster had appeared. The monster was wearing a disguise that made him look like a harmless old man. Bald head with wisps of fine white hair. Pudgy and soft-looking. Christian. He said he was Christian.

  He had a tow truck. And he pushed the car, got it rocking, until it landed on its tires back in the road. The monster towed her car to his house—the next house up the street. He took Melodie into his house and lay her down on the living room couch. He’d even put a cool dishrag on her head. She had gone to sleep then. A black sleep from the head wound.

  The monster was strong. His disguise made him look weak. But when Melodie woke up, he was carrying her. She remembered that quite clearly, but it was a single sensation of being cradled and the image of the monster’s smiling disguise looking down at her.

  Then she stayed in the dark. Her leg was chained, and she could move in a small circle around the metal pole she was chained to. He came to her in the dark. He did hateful things to her in the dark. Hurtful, hateful things. He had stuck a needle into her throat. He injected something into her throat. It burned and it burned and it burned. She could feel it like acid eating away at her. And when the burning had gone away, she could not talk. She could not scream, she could not whimper—she was no longer able to make any sounds at all. The monster stuck other things inside her.

  He brought her smelly table scraps to eat. Sometimes the food was spoiled and had thick, fuzzy mold growing on it. One time when she reached in the dark to scoop the scraps from the bowl that was bolted to the floor, she had scooped up a mouse. It scurried through her fingers with a little eek and ran away. And then after just a few days, the monster had stopped coming to her. He stopped bringing her the table scraps. And the little bowl of water she lapped from went dry. Now the mouse was hungry too. She could sometimes hear the soft scratch of its tiny claws searching for scraps in the empty metal bowl.

  Melodie came to believe that the monster was dead. And her mind started to fill back in. Where before she had existed on the most primitive level of her brain, just a skeletal web of function and survival, when the monster stopped coming, she allowed her mind to fill in again. She allowed herself to remember that she was Melodie Godwin, and she allowed herself to remember what the monster had done to Melodie Godwin.

  And the seam. She had found the seam. Just a rough edge of what felt like plastic at the apogee of her reach. She could just flick it with the tips of her injured fingers. During every period of wakefulness, Melodie worked at stretching and lengthening her cords, joints, and tendons. Every tiny increment of length helped, until the time came when she could play her fingers lightly over the seam, but couldn’t quite get them under it so that she could pull on it. While she worked at it, Melodie thought of the old Lee Dorsey song, Working in the Coal Mine. She would have liked to hum it while she worked, but, of course, her vocal cords had been dissolved with a hypodermic shot of Drano. (He’d told her on the second day that it had been Drano. “Just a drop. A dab’ll do ya,” he’d said, and if she wasn’t good, she’d “get a shot of it up her twat.”)

  After a long while, her strength had dissipated. She had had no food or water in a very long time. A week, at least. She decided to catch the mouse and eat it. She had never bothered the mouse before, so it was not leery of her, and it accepted her presence as normal. She knew that she would only have one chance; for once she made her intentions known, once she became a predator, the rodent would go nowhere near her. So, in the dark, she waited and listened. Even though she had licked it clean long ago, Melodie licked the inside of the bowl, hoping her saliva might activate a dormant food smell. She held her hand well above the empty bowl, poised to strike, so that she would be ready when the time came. It was excruciating to hold her arm out like this for so long a time. After what felt like hours of holding her arm raised and ready to strike, it went numb, so she was unsure if her aim would be true when the time came. And that time came at long last. She heard the soft scratching of the tiny paws, searching for microscopic bits of food. Melodie did not hesitate. She brought her hand down in a deathblow.

  There was no repulsion, no talking herself into doing it. She tore off the rodent’s head with her teeth and drank the blood greedily. As good as the flesh had tasted, as delicious as the sensation of actually chewing something had been—she was dehydrated more than anything else.

  She sucked the bones for a long time, enjoying the smooth feel of them in her mouth. And then she realized, the bones were tools. She selected a curved rib bone, and stretched herself out to the seam. She was able to get the arched bone under the seam with no problem. It slid under the seam as though it were a specialty tool constructed for that purpose alone. She rolled the bone and she heard and sensed the seam pop up. In fact, she saw it. A faint glow. With the edge of the seam popped up, the plastic stuck out enough for her to grasp it between thumb and forefinger. She pulled, and more of it came free. There was daylight far behind the seam. A razor thin beam fell across the wood floor. She adjusted her grip, clenching the black plastic in her hand, and pulled with all her strength.

  Light flooded her world. Painful, painful light. It was a window. Once her eyes had adjusted to the new presence of light, she saw that she was in an attic, and that the walls and even the ceiling had been covered in thick layers of black plastic garbage bags secured with duct tape.

  By standing at the very limits of her chain, she could see out the window. She could see a dirt road. The dirt road. Eden Road. And beyond the road, she could see a field of corn bordered by a pasture dotted with cows. And farther off, what looked like a boy and a girl. And a green pond.

  IT WAS JUST STARTING TO GET LIGHT OUT-

  side when he crawled back through the window. Grace was asleep, and Kyle saw that she was sucking her thumb and clutching a pillow since she didn’t have her Wonder Woman doll to hold on to.

  Kyle didn’t want to get in the bed with her. He smelled like death. He’d washed himself with the garden hose, but the smell from those bodies still hung on him. The paralyzed man had brought out a flashlight to make sure Kyle got all the pieces. Some of it was just like a skeleton in the movies, but some of it was wet and runny. It wasn’t hardly human. Kyle reckoned he must have cut them up into pieces before he buried them out there. It ended up taking four garbage bags before it was all cleaned up.

  He crawled on in the bed with Grace, bringing that smell of death with him. There wasn’t nothing else to do.

  THE THROBBING IN HIS GOOD WRIST

  wouldn’t stop. He had fallen down the stairs. Stupid. The stupid nurse must have measured the shot wrong. (I’m not a nurse, Mr. Ahearn, I’m a health care assistant, she’d always say. Whatever.) She fixed him up a week’s worth and laid them out on a dish towel in the Frigidaire. But she must have measured wrong. His sugar had dropped and he’d gotten dizzy and fell.

  If the wrist was broken, Kenny would be essentially incapacitated. He was slowly regaining use of his paralyzed side. In fact, the nurse—excuse me, health care assistant—wouldn’t be coming back. Said the Medicaid wouldn’t cover it anymore.

  He had been able to get up and down stairs for some time now, so instead of sleeping on the couch in the living room, he could go upstairs to sleep in his own bedroom, or up to the attic if he was feeling frisky. The nurse had taught him how. Kenny would put a crutch under his right arm, and hold on to the handrail with his good left. The good left leg would go up the step first—while keeping his weight on the crutch and the handrail. Then he would just sort of drag the right side of his body—crutch and all—up to the same step. He reversed the process to come back down. It took a damn long time. But it worked. Except this morning he had a sugar spell and had fallen from the third step. His wrist was sprained (hopefully not broken), but otherwise he was fine.

  The boy was young and strong; let him do the work. He was in it with the boy now. They had each other.

  Kenny used his mind to draw the boy to him. He set the thoughts in motion and waited for the
universe to deliver.

  He knew it had been a big risk, using the boy to clean up his mess. The boy could be home right now, telling his parents. The police might be on their way this very minute. But what choice did he have? The county workers would have found his discarded pets. What a God Almighty mess that would have been. Body parts strewn across the yard.

  There was a knock at the kitchen door. Kenny peeked out the front window and saw a green Pontiac Catalina sitting in the driveway. Opal Phillips! For the love of God. He went to the door and smiled warmly at Opal. She was holding a Pyrex casserole dish nestled in a little yarn cozy she had undoubtedly crocheted herself. Christ, give me strength. Kenny reversed his chair and ushered Opal into the kitchen. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, and Kenny could just feel the lipstick staining his head like malignant melanoma.

  “Oh, Kenny, how are you getting along?”

  Already she was starting in on the longing looks. Kenny could feel his skin crawl. This was not what he had asked the universe to deliver.

  “Fine. Just fine. You are so good to come see me, Opal.”

  “Why Kenny, I just think about you nearly every day. You need a woman around here to look out for you.”

  “You are too sweet,” Kenny managed, his mouth already dry as lint.

  “Just look at your face. It’s a mess.” Opal produced a Kleenex seemingly from nowhere, and swooped down on Kenny. She picked away the tight little balls of white spit that had formed at the corners of his mouth. God, how he hated her.

  “Opal?”

  “What is it, dear?”

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I’ve developed feelings. About you. Feelings about you.”

  A fire lit in her eyes. “Feelings?”

  “Yes, and I need time. Time to pray on it. Time to sort out what I’m feeling. To talk to God.”

  “Why Kenny you don’t have—”

  “I’m on a spiritual journey now. Spiritual.”

  “But God wants us to—”

  “None of us knows what God wants.”

  “But, Kenny, I care for you too. You know that.”

  “I need guidance. From The Lord.”

  “Of course. We all do.”

  “And time. To pray. I just ask you that. You better go.”

  Confusion replaced—but didn’t extinguish—the fire in Opal Phillips’s eyes. She wasn’t sure what had just happened. Was it victory? Or defeat? It was hope, she decided.

  “Kenny Ahearn, you talk to God. And I will too.”

  “I want you to stay away for a while. I think it’s best.”

  “You’ll call me? When you’re ready?”

  “I’ll call. But give me time.”

  LATER, KENNY SAT ON HIS PORCH. HE WAS

  changing. It wasn’t like him to toy with Opal like that. What was wrong with him? Maybe it was the stroke. He indulged in a daydream imagining that he had indeed been caught, that the county crew had unearthed the bodies. He imagined how the sight would have sickened them. The police would be called. Newspaper reporters would show up, shouting Kenny’s name, hoping for a quote. The Atlanta TV stations might come down here too. The church people would be shocked to their very souls, and they would tell the TV reporters that Kenny Ahearn was a quiet man, a good Christian man. And Opal. Opal Phillips would be shaken to her crocheted core. Kenny giggled.

  Across the road, the corn parted and the boy emerged. The universe had delivered. Kenny flipped a switch on his wheelchair, and the motor hummed low as he navigated it into the house. The boy followed.

  THEY SAT THERE AT HIS KITCHEN TABLE. IT

  was like they were friends and he was having Kyle over for a glass of milk. Except they had been sitting there at the table, not saying anything, for a good long while. And it wasn’t milk in the tall glass sitting in the middle of the table. No, the fluid in the glass was a cool neon blue. It could’ve been Kool-Aid, maybe. But it wasn’t that either. Kyle knew what it was. It was Liquid Drano. The tall red, white, and blue bottle it came out of was sitting right next to the glass. He had made Kyle pour it, because he said his wrist was sprained. Tough on clogs, the bottle proclaimed. Won’t hurt pipes.

  The paralyzed man’s eyes were blue too, like the sky might look over the North Pole. They were so blue that they hurt Kyle. They cut him. And he could feel it all over, those eyes cutting into him, trying to get into his mind. Trying to charm him.

  “I can make you drink that,” he said. “Do you believe me?”

  Kyle didn’t answer him, because he did believe him. Kyle did believe that he could make him drink it. That he would end up just like Joel Sewell. He would be disfigured. He could imagine the way it would feel in his mouth, how it would burn away his tongue and eat his flesh.

  “Now I don’t mean that I’ll physically force you to do it,” the paralyzed man said, and Kyle noticed that he didn’t mix up his words anymore like he used to. Like he was getting better. “I mean that if I tell you to, you will pick up that glass of acid and drink it.”

  He just stared at Kyle and held him in those polar eyes, cutting him up like a thousand frozen knives.

  “Pick it up.”

  Kyle didn’t move.

  “Your sister will do whatever I say. I can call her over here. With my mind. Do you believe that? I changed her. I put a piece of me inside her. Do you want me to summon her now? She’ll drink it for me.”

  The thought of the paralyzed man putting Grace under his spell was all it took. The thought of him tricking her into tasting the pretty blue drink. Kyle reached out. The glass was warm, like the acid was giving off heat. Kyle picked it up. He couldn’t resist those eyes. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  Kyle took the thick fluid into his mouth.

  It coated his tongue, and he spit it right back out. He waited for the pain, for the burning. But it didn’t come. The paralyzed man was laughing. He was laughing so hard his face turned red and tears came out the corner of his eyes. He reached out with his sprained hand and gingerly picked up the metal Drano bottle. He took a deep chug off it. “It’s cornstarch and unsweetened Kool-Aid, boy. I wouldn’t kill you. Not yet. Do you think I’m crazy? You’ve got work to do. Now listen, I want you to reach up in that cabinet there and reach down them crackers.” Kyle got up and did like he told him. “Them orange ones right there,” he said. “Now reach in the Frigidaire there and get a co-cola. Now run that upstairs. To the attic. My pet’s hungry.”

  “In the attic?”

  “Yes, boy, the attic. She’s a mouser. Catches ’em and eats ’em.”

  “And you want to feed her crackers and co-cola?”

  “You ever ate a mouse? Ain’t very filling. Now you run along and be back directly. Directly, you hear?”

  AND THEN SHE COULD TELL DAY FROM

  night. With the window exposed, she felt the passage of time. She enjoyed the daylight and the view of the outside world, but she was starving to death. Her lips were hard and dry like crinkled tinfoil, and she had no saliva in her mouth with which to lick them.

  And then one day she heard people outside the house. Men working with nails and hammers and electric saws. Their voices, muffled, floated up to her. She had no way to signal them. Nothing to throw at the window. She had no voice with which to scream. She could perhaps try banging on the floor with her fists or her heels, but she had no strength. She could no longer move. She was dying.

  The next day, the monster came back. When she heard the cars pull up the drive, Melodie found the strength to stand up and look out the window. She saw a station wagon and an old Ford pickup. Two men hopped out of the pickup’s cab and set about unloading a heavy-looking wheelchair from the bed. A woman dressed like a nurse opened the back door of the station wagon. The monster was inside. The woman dressed like a nurse reached in the car and pulled the monster up to her. She held him braced against her hip,
pivoted, and dropped him expertly into the seat of the waiting wheelchair. The monster tried out his wheelchair. His disguise was grinning. He drove the chair out of sight, then back into the driveway. Each of the men clapped the monster on the shoulder, then climbed back into the pickup and drove away. The nurse and the monster came into the house.

  Later, after the nurse left, Melodie thought that the monster would come for her, but he did not. Days passed. The attic held all of the heat from the house as it baked in the midsummer sun, but Melodie could no longer sweat as her body was so dehydrated. Her skin looked wrinkled, mummified.

  On the third day after his return, Melodie heard the monster on the stairs. There was the creaking door. Then the familiar sharp hollow sound of a boot striking a wooden step. That was followed by a new sound: a little rubber squeak. And then the rustling sound of the monster dragging its dead part up the step. And again. The hollow strike, the tiny squeak, the dragging of the dead part. And again.

  The attic door opened and Melodie’s first thought was that the monster had changed his disguise from harmless old man to some kind of robot. His head was covered in a metal helmet and long lenses of steel and glass protruded from his eyes. And then Melodie recognized that he was wearing night vision goggles. Her daddy had brought a pair just like them back from Korea. And she understood that was how the monster was able to see her and do those things to her in the blackout room.

  “Still alive? Just barely, I see.” The monster unbuckled the strap under his chin and the goggles fell to the floor. He pivoted on his crutch and reached down into his pocket. He tossed a can of Coca-Cola and a package of fluorescent orange Toast Chee crackers at her. He leaned against the wall and looked around the room, nodded at the little pile of mouse bones, then lifted the cane to indicate the exposed window with remnants of black plastic hanging from it. “You’ve got it looking right pretty in here.”