by Rin Chupeco
“Tarquin’s here?” the woman says, this time with more animation. “Where is he?”
“Hey, Mom,” the boy says. His voice is low, trembling with pent-up emotion. Gone is his usual derision, all traces of sarcasm lacking from his tone. For now, Tarquin Halloway is a fifteen-year-old boy who, for all he has endured, still misses his mother. For all his hurt, there is much forgiveness in him.
“Tarquin? Where are you?” The woman twists her head and moves as if to stand.
“He’s here, Yoko,” the man says, “but the doctors say you can’t see him today.” Forty-one dolls, forty-two dolls, forty-three.
“Did I hurt him?” Terror rings in her voice. “Did I hurt him again? I am so sorry, Tarquin, I am so sorry!”
Overwhelmed, she starts to sob. The man wraps his arms around her. The boy can only watch their shadows, helpless.
“It was the only way,” the broken woman whispers. “I didn’t know what else I could do. I didn’t have much choice. But I couldn’t let her out. Don’t you see? I couldn’t let her out!”
The White Shirt steps forward, alarmed, but the woman quickly rights herself, shaking off her ramblings. The sudden queerness in the air that had settled around her like dense fog is gone. She sits up straighter in her chair, now prim and delicate, though her hands twist and clench without her knowledge at invisible paper she is slowly tearing to shreds. Sixty dolls, sixty-one dolls, sixty-two.
“It was very nice of you to visit, Doug,” she says calmly with no trace of her previous hysteria. “It’s been so long since I last stepped out of these walls that I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be outside.”
“Yes,” the man says, at a loss at how to respond.
“I’d like to go back to Japan again,” the woman says, and her voice sounds like it is coming from somewhere else, far away. “It’s been so many years since I’ve been back in Tokyo. I miss hanami in the springtime. Do you remember, Doug? All those times we would camp out underneath the trees and watch the cherry blossoms bloom ’til nightfall. How long has it been?”
“It’s been seventeen years since we graduated from the University of Tokyo, Yoko.” The man’s voice is choked.
“Has it been that long since our Todai days? How odd. I still remember them as clearly as if they were only a week ago. I remember the hanami well.” She laughs. “We had to look at six different shops just to find a yukata in your size.”
“You always insisted on doing things the traditional way,” the man said, smiling at their memories. Eight-five dolls, eighty-six dolls, eighty-seven.
“For hanami, it is only proper to dress in the right manner.” She squeezes his hand. “The old ways of watching are always the best. Cherry blossoms die as quickly as they bloom, so one must always come with the proper clothes and the proper attitude to admire their beauty before they pass away so quickly. The great writer Motojirou-san said it best: ‘Sakura no ki no shita ni wa shitai ga umatte iru.’”
Dead bodies lie under the cherry tree.
The woman whips her head to stare at me, as if I had spoken the words out loud. Her face turns white, her eyes staring.
“Who’s there?” she whispers, growing more agitated by the second. The man reaches out to take her hand again, but she shakes him free.
“Who’s there?” She jumps out of her chair and begins to advance toward me, unexpected anger bleeding from every pore in her body. “There is someone in here! You! Who are you?” Her voice grows louder until she is all but screaming.
“Who are you?”
The White Shirt starts forward, intent on restraining her, should it become necessary, but there is strength in the woman still. The drugs that cloud her vision prove to be his undoing. She pushes him away, harder than it would seem possible, given her small frame, and the White Shirt crashes into the shoji screen, knocking it over and revealing the tattooed boy standing behind it, stunned and shaken by his mother’s rage.
The woman sees her son, and then she begins to scream.
It is a howling symphony of loss and fear and madness. She leaps toward him, her eyes blazing and her hands clawed, transforming that pale, pretty face into that of a creature of malevolence.
“You!” she howls. “I will not let you escape! You will not have him! I will not let you have him! I’ll kill him first! I’ll kill him!”
At the same time, I see that aimless shadow drift up from behind the boy’s stricken form, the same darkness I saw in the classroom that day, though there is more to its shape. Something is rising out of the boy’s back—something with terrible, burning eyes, yet not quite eyes at all, preserved behind a bloodless, decaying mask that hides its face from the world.
Our gazes
meet.
The woman is still screaming, hurling vile curses into her stunned son’s face. She fights off her husband’s attempts to restrain her. “Get away from him! I will never let you out! I’ll kill him first! I’ll kill him I’ll kill him I’ll kill him!—” She stops only to reel off sutras and chant at breakneck speed in a language that should be familiar to me but is not, a language that crackles in the air, which now grows uncomfortably hot from the heat of her words.
The door flies open and several more White Shirts run in. With efficient precision, they surround the woman, cutting off her chants. She lashes out with her legs and her fingernails, dislodging dolls from their shelves in the process, but the Shirts are successful at incapacitating her, holding her long enough to jab a large needle into her arm. In time her struggles grow weaker until she finally sinks, exhausted, against a White Shirt’s chest, her head nodding as she spirals into sleep.
“I’m sorry,” a White Shirt tells the man and his son. “She’d been responding well to the lorazepam. I’m not sure what triggered this outburst.”
“That’s okay,” the father replies. The boy says nothing, though his face is as white as those of the dolls that surround him. The dark fog has disappeared.
“I’m so sorry you both had to see this. But I think it would be best if we cut this visit short and give her more time to rest.” The man nods and gently ushers his son out of the room.
With one final effort, the woman’s eyes fly open. She lifts her head over the sea of White Shirts attending to her and stares directly at me. In her eyes there is desperation but also a sudden realization of my purpose here in this room of one hundred and eight dolls.
“I am so sorry,” she whispers, imploring. “Please. Please protect him. Please…” The words trail off. Her head lolls to one side and her eyes fall shut. Within seconds, the drugs have taken their toll, and she is fast asleep.
The boy is frightened. He keeps glancing back at his unconscious mother, who is now being lifted by one of the bigger White Shirts onto her small bed.
“What did she mean?” he asks. His father looks at him. “Was she talking about me? Who was she talking to?”
“Your mother isn’t well, Tark,” the man tells him. “You shouldn’t take to heart anything she says while she’s in this condition. We just came at a bad time.”
“We always come at a bad time!” the boy responds with violence in his voice. “What is it about me that she hates so much, that she can’t even stand the sight of me?”
“Tark…I…”
“Forget it. Just forget it. I’m getting out of here.” The boy brushes past his father and tears down the hall. Several of the patients jeer and cheer him on as he runs by, but the boy does not pay attention.
“Tarquin!” His father takes off after him. A woman reading a newspaper on a nearby bench lowers it to stare at the retreating visitors and then at me.
“Mad people,” she observes sagely. “They’re all mad.”
Then she grins to show off rotting teeth, and she winks at me. “Not like us, dearie,” she coos. “Never like us.”
CHAPTER SIX
T
he Murder
This little town is not known for its displays of violence, and so the murder takes them by surprise.
It starts with the man who trudges into the block of apartments that litter the side of one street with gray. The man pauses by door 6A and pounds on the frame like he expects the wood to fall away from the force of his fists alone.
“Hey, Mosses!” he roars. “Mosses, open the fuckin’ door and give me my money, you sonofabitch!”
If there is anyone alive inside, they do not answer. The knocking grows furious, violent.
“That’s it, you fuckin’ bastard! I want you the hell out of my place! I don’t fucking care if you gotta sleep in the gutters tonight!” He yanks out a set of keys and fits one into the lock. He twists the doorknob and all but kicks the door open.
The rumors spread: first like tiny ripples, then growing until they overlap into wider spirals of gossip.
The first thing that people are told is that “there is a dead man in the Holly Oaks apartments.”
The second thing they will be told is that “his face is bloated, like he was held underwater for a very long time.” And yet there is not a drop of water on or around him, nothing to suggest foul play other than the appearance he presents. That is why the apartment manager, whose name is Shamrock, throws up all over the stair banister in his fruitless bid to escape the room and his first sight of the body, spattering an unfortunate couple standing below.
The police come next. They park their sirens in front of the building and mark off the area with yellow tape. “You can’t go in there,” one policewoman says to passersby and curious onlookers, as the other officers cordon off the scene. “This is a crime scene.” They turn down interviews by reporters. “We cannot divulge anything more specific until after a full investigation has taken place.”
Some of the reporters showed up before the police arrived. “This is Cynthia Silvia from WTV Channel 6,” one reporter tells the camera and the world watching through the lens. I count them—the police, the growing number of people. I drift past the camera and peer into the frame, though no one notices. “Very little information has been released so far, though the police believe this to be a homicide by a person or persons unknown. We’ll update you as soon as we know more…”
“A thirty-five-year-old man was found dead in his apartment this morning. Sources tell us he may have been dead for days, though the police have yet to release any information corroborating this…”
“This marks the first homicide case in Applegate in almost ten years. Not much is known about the victim, thirty-five-year-old Blake Mosses. He was a loner, according to his neighbors, and lived in Holly Oaks for only six months before his body was found…”
“This is Cooper Wilkes of ANTV Channel 5 News, reporting live from Holly Oaks…”
“This is Tracy Palmeri, Channel 2 News. Back to you, Jeff.”
It would surprise these reporters to know that few stories begin with death. Often, they start with grief.
This story starts hundreds of miles away, where a small town in South Carolina gathers to pray for a young girl who has been missing for four months and who will never return home, although they do not realize it. Posters of her decorate every inch of tree and wall, and her sweet, gap-toothed smile enchants those who care enough to take a cursory glance. Her parents, a listless bearded man and a weeping woman, clasp hands as they implore the public to help in the search, knowing that in time their daughter will slip through their fingers and disappear into the archives of unexplained cases and old news.
The reports are different here from at Holly Oaks.
“Officers from two counties are continuing the search for eleven-year-old Madeleine Lindgren, who disappeared in May. Police have set up an AMBER Alert for the missing girl, and so far, thousands of tips have come through the hotline…”
“The police say they are going through every piece of information that passes through the channels but admit that, with the number of tips coming in everyday, filtering through the information will take time. More than a hundred officers and volunteers have joined in the search for little Madeleine…”
“If you have any information related to this case, please call the following numbers: 242-45…”
Strings of a story move through states and cities, leaving parts of the story at every stop. People find themselves at the beginning of a tale without an end, or in a middle that neither starts nor finishes, or at a conclusion that knows no beginning. Only two have read this story in its entirety, can quote it from cover to cover, and had been there from introduction to curtain fall.
One is the Stained Shirt Man that people are now calling Blake Mosses.
I am the other.
And when the news provides no other answers, gossip takes center stage.
For the neighbors at Holly Oaks apartments, it is their moment to shine. “Always knew he was a bad seed,” says Greta Grunberg from 6D, who said no such thing to anyone until after the fact. “Skulking up and down the stairs, never leaving the room for days. He was going to come to a bad end, I always thought.”
Annabelle Mirellin from 5C believes that Mosses was attacked by a wild animal and wonders if this could be possible grounds for suing Holly Oaks for mismanagement. She is not swayed from this belief by the fact that the door was locked from the inside and no trace of a wild animal was found inside the room.
The police, more sensible creatures than the neighbors, are baffled. But it will be days before they discover the small strand of hair hidden underneath the dislodged carpet, and it will be months before they fully understand its importance.
• • •
The Smiling Man is unconcerned about this most recent development. The town of Applegate is already proving to be a distraction, and he is busy planning, plotting his next move.
He parks his white car at one corner of the street and strolls toward where the crowd of people (fifty-seven) have gathered, watching in fascination as medical personnel (four) wheel out a large gurney that carries something (one) large and bulky, hidden from view by a large, black blanket. Many have never seen this manner of death up close, one that does not point the blame at old age or sickness.
This provides ghoulish enjoyment, for the town is too large to know of the little perversions that move in villages, yet too small for its residents’ spirits to have been toughened by the crimes of cities. There is a thrill in relishing the suffering of strangers, and they hide their interest with worried faces. The dead man, Blake Mosses, had not been One of Them, and they can afford to treat him as a source of unfortunate entertainment rather than one of genuine bereavement.
The Smiling Man wanders in and out of the crowd, the dead children forced to keep up with every step. He does not bother to look at the man’s corpse, for he does not specialize in this kind of death. His eyes are trained on a young girl who has wandered some distance away from the group. She sits on a small park bench opposite the apartment block, engrossed in her music.
The Smiling Man sets up shop at the other end of the bench, ostensibly to watch the drama unfolding on the other side of the street. He observes her when she is not looking.
“I don’t think your mother would want you watching all this,” he says after considerable time has passed.
The girl shoots him a suspicious look. Few adults, in her experience, would condescend to talk to children the way this man does with such impunity. She takes an earbud out of one ear. “Mommy’s a policewoman,” she says. “We were driving home from school when the alert came on her radio. She was the closest to the crime scene, so she had to investigate. Mommy says we don’t have enough cops in this town, so we always have to adapt. She told me to stay inside the car,” she adds, as if this was a trivial detail not worth repeating. “But it was stuffy inside.”
“That is true,” says the Smiling Man, whose interest wanes slightly once th
e girl divulges her mother’s occupation. “But I don’t think she’d like to hear you’ve been talking to strangers, either.”
“Mommy said talking to strangers is dangerous,” the girl admits. “Are you a stranger?”
“I live in Massachusetts,” says the Smiling Man. “So I suppose you can call me a stranger. Can you say Massachusetts?”
“Massachusetts,” says the girl. “I’m not an idiot. Are you dangerous?”
The Smiling Man laughs at her courage. “Well, it was dangerous for that man over there, wasn’t it?” he asks, sidestepping her question and pointing toward the crime scene, where the crowd surges closer, straining to see more of the dead man as the medical technicians begin loading the body into the back of an ambulance. A flock of reporters (eight) swarm around the police officers (five), firing volleys of questions into the air at them like bullets. “They say he was a stranger, too.”
“That’s true,” the girl concedes. “Maybe strangers can also be dangerous to each other.”
The man laughs again, amused. “My name is Quintilian.”
“Sandra,” the girl counters and adds, “That’s a weird name.”
“My mother named me after a Greek philosopher.”
“Mommy named me after her favorite soap-opera actress.”
“Sandra is a nice name.”
“I wish she’d named me after someone more famous. Like Marie Curie. I think Marie is a nice name. Or maybe Marie Antoinette.”
“Marie Antoinette had her head chopped off by a group of angry Frenchmen.”
The girl is unfazed by his choice of words. “But she got to go to parties and wear wigs and eat a lot of cake. What are the names of all your other friends?”
“What friends?”
“All those kids sitting on your back.”
The man stills suddenly, and his smiling face changes. His gaze is now wary, and his hand slowly dips into his coat pocket and stays there. “There aren’t any kids on my back,” he says, trying to sound like a patient adult dealing with a rather precocious child.