A Guide for Murdered Children

by Sarah Sparrow

  On the way, he stopped at a bar in Richmond for a drink.

  Through the weeks, Lydia saw that he was becoming depressed. She was too, and understood why, but handled it differently. “Don’t go there,” she warned, referring to the dangerous ennui that had overtaken them only weeks before. Both knew that Annie’s “haywire” virus was in play, and indeed the stakes seemed higher now; with Honeychile’s chilling example, the option of suicide as a response to the anguish of stalemated landlord-tenant relations was in play as well. She gave him little pep talks. She knew the Daniel side of him was violently impulsive and urged him to remain cautious—she worried that he’d go off on someone, like that time he beat the shit out of the men who mugged her. “I need you,” she pleaded. “We need you. We can’t afford your suddenly winding up in jail or worse.” Plus, Lydia feared that an innocent person could die, like what happened to that dreadful woman in Jacobs Prairie. “That is not our purpose. So please be careful, Daniel. And you have to share about the way you’re feeling. You need to share about it at Meetings! It’s important.”

  Everything tingled now—he knew that their moment of balance was nigh. A vision had come to him that it was Roy Eakins who had killed them yet how could that be? How could they have come so far on the train, only to murder a man who was already dead? Daniel was energized, but depressed; everything seemed possible and impossible all at once. He wanted to talk to Annie but in his opinion, she had grown too weak. He did think of speaking to Willow about his overall dilemma but decided the man just wasn’t ready. The Porter uniform didn’t fit him yet.

  He finished his beer and left for Smiths Creek.

  * * *

  • • •

  He fumbled for the right key (he hadn’t been there in a while), and when he came in, the sizzle of a Taser brought him to his knees.

  He was shocked a few more times—for fun because he offered no resistance—and as he lay gasping, a rag was shoved in his mouth and sealed in with duct tape. He was lifted up, as if by a crowd of men, and propped against the sofa. The light switched on.

  “Hello there, Christian soldier!”

  Everything flooded back. That was exactly what his abductor had said on July 4, 2000, after pulling Troy off his bicycle. Then he threw him in the trunk where Maya and her bike already lay. The last thing Troy ever heard was “Gotta run—your dad’s making me a badass burger. Catch you and dream girl later!”

  “Hey!” said Roy, sidling up to the couch. “I see you’re having some trouble with that gag so I’m going to take it out. ’Cause that’s the thoughtful kinda guy I am. But when I do, say one word, little man, and I will shit down your throat. Promise you’ll zip it?” Daniel nodded and Roy removed the rag. “Got a little surprise for ya. Not the surprise I had way back when—not yet, anyway.” He shoved a handful of gummy bears in Daniel’s mouth. “Chew! Come on, ol’ buddy! That’s right . . . chew, chew, chew, Chewbacca, like the Christian soldier from space that you were meant to be. So sorry they ain’t green—I was starting to run out and couldn’t spare any. Nobody ever called me the hostess with the mostest. I really should make a candy-store run . . . but no worries, there’s orange ones and red—chew! chew! chew!—those are actually my second and third choices, when I’m in a pinch . . .

  “But that’s not the surprise I was talking about, no, no, no. See, there’s a shiny automobile waiting out front. And sitting in the front seat of that automobile is—guess who? Can you guess?” The prisoner shook his head. “Maya! Maya is sitting right there in the front seat of that shiny car! Hahahaha!” Daniel closed his eyes in anguish. “That’s right—Maya the pigtailed Christian soldieress! I should say ‘Maya-Lydia,’ queen of the cold case coppers! The original Dead End Kids hottie! Boy oh boy does little sissy in all her incarnations make me come! And here’s what’s gonna happen next: you will accompany me to said shiny vehicle. Didn’t think we were going to stay here all night, did you, shit punk? And listen up, Troy—or Daniel or Dudley Do-Right or whatever you’re supposed to be—listen up and listen good. If you try to fuck with me during our lovely little stroll to the car, if you try to run or fuck me in any way, my associate has been instructed to lop your Romper Room sister’s head off. And you will watch it happen.”

  Daniel’s eyes were fully open now.

  “Do you know who that ‘associate’ might be? Because that’s another surprise—can you guess the identity of my partner in crime? Oh come on, at least try. I’ll give you a hint: she’s old and she’s dying and her personal hygiene leaves much to be desired . . . oh, and she serves treats on a train. Or used to. That’s right, it’s the Porter! Little Orphan Annie! She’s betrayed you! She betrayed us all!” He laughed like a hyena and then grew contrite. “Just kidding. Not that it wouldn’t have been a genius idea, but . . . I didn’t have time to pull it off.”

  He had trouble negotiating the stony path leading to the street but Roy stayed close, holding him up as if helping a friend who had too much to drink.

  “And for the record,” he said as they walked, “I fucking hate gummy bears. Even green ones, especially green ones. And when I say ‘I,’ I mean me, Roy, Roy Eakins hates ’em, ’cause I’m the only one left. That’s right! I’m afraid my tenant’s sailed off into the wild blue yonder—Dabba Doo has left the building. Which is why it’s a puzzle to me that I still crave that sticky shit. Never touched the stuff until that dodo Dabba Doo came along.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He saw two shadows in the front seat.

  As they got closer, Daniel assumed the woman on the passenger side was Lydia and hoped she hadn’t been hurt. He couldn’t bear to see Maya or Lydia suffer—

  But it wasn’t her.

  The windows were open and a man with a deranged smile sat behind the wheel. Roy said, “Christian soldier? I am pleased to introduce Solomon Grundy and his knocked-up angel, my daughter-in-law, Laverne.”

  He opened the back door and pushed Daniel in while his son turned in his seat, tasing the deputy into unconsciousness.

  YOU ONLY DIE TWICE

  1.

  The image of the landlord filled the television screen. The Porter knew her as Violet but the man on the news called her something else: Sarabeth Ahlström. The thirty-five-year-old IT worker at a large insurance firm lived alone and had been raped and murdered in her town house in Dearborn Heights. Police were reaching out to the public for help.

  At least it explained Annie’s distressing, premonitory dream of some days ago, when Violet jumped from the train into the void. In her experience, the “death” of a landlord before its child-tenant could achieve his or her moment of balance had never occurred. (The concept of a “second,” simultaneous death of a landlord and its child-tenant seemed the ultimate conundrum.) If one were to apply logic, which of course would be absurd, not only did the reanimation of the dead make no sense, but the presumption that landlords could remain “intact” long enough to serve their vengeful purpose made none either. It stood to reason—and statistics—that a small percentage would be destroyed by fire or accident, even homicide, thus subverting the moment of balance. But it was madness to apply rules of probability to the paranormal . . . Annie had always held her mentor’s mantra close: that nothing made sense, in this world or the next, nor ever could. That her kids would succeed was inviolable and axiomatic, a part of the Great Mystery she happily took for granted. Perhaps, she thought, this horrific departure from all that she knew was part of the mystery as well.

  It had to be . . .

  The mess leading up to that other unheard-of event—the suicide of the landlord Honeychile—brought what the Porter euphemistically called “a new wrinkle” to the heretofore tidy, time-honored equation: the children of the train now seemed capable of botching their moment, not only by killing the wrong party but by killing themselves. But the death of Sarabeth Ahlström was even more disturbing—it felt dark and malignant
, somehow proactive. She wondered exactly who was to blame for such an aberrant thing, if anyone at all: tenant or landlord? The children, of course, were the original victims . . . yet might their landlords be inclined to “call” victimhood as well? Could it be that in such cases of complete system failure that the fault lay in the emotional makeup of the landlord, in the genetics and neuroses of the organism itself? Annie had grown used to thinking of those bodies as tools and vessels, a means to an end, but what if they were capable of postmortem volition, a kind of kamikaze free will that led to their own deaths or the deaths of others?

  What if landlords could be corrupted by the arrival of their tenants or were already corrupt at the moment a child entered them—

  More “wrinkles” came, furrowing space-time and Annie’s brow. There was the matter of Willow having known Maya and Troy before they were murdered—and the additional twist of both children’s landlords working for the new Porter in their day jobs! She supposed it to be plausible, statistically speaking, but it was bewildering nonetheless.

  Her thoughts returned to landlords; the nature of those beings who had died, only to become the reinvigorated weapons of their tenants. Was it possible for hosts and parasites to become mutual contaminants? You’d have to be a scientist to answer that one . . . perhaps combatants, not contaminants, was the better word. Could one act like a cancer upon the other? And if so, was this a symptom of “haywire”? Or had it always been that way, and she’d simply been lucky enough not to have encountered such scenarios? Was there now a cancer in that world, like the cancer killing Annie in this one?

  It chilled her to the bone.

  She turned off the TV. She closed her eyes and in moments was on the train again. Far away, in the middle of the car, a small boy nervously stood at the same window Violet had leapt from. Annie sprinted toward him, at times slicing straight through fog-clumps of loitering Subalterns. As in a classic nightmare, each time she got close, the corridor elongated and she was forced to start over, impossibly redoubling her efforts.

  She drew near enough to see that it was Troy.

  2.

  Willow lay in bed, staring out at a piece of the living room wall. Dixie was asleep beside him. He left the blinds open because he liked the way the moonlight shone on the mural, making the train iridescent.

  He finally understood why people turned to painting late in life. Willow used to scoff at that, especially when he read about old movie stars becoming born-again artistes. Now it made perfect sense. Call it a hobby, call it a whatever, but he believed he had real talent. Though maybe everyone who took up the brush long after their shelf life expired felt the same. Maybe you kind of had to.

  He looked over—Dixie was gone from the world. It was uncanny but amid the chaos and insanity of his predicament, Willow could still see a future with this woman. A selfish worry came with that thought: he wondered just how much time he had left. Being a painter was a voluntary pastime; being a Porter wasn’t. The fifty-seven-year-old out-of-shape detective was convinced he’d have a much better shot at living to a ripe old age if he and Annie Ballendine had never met. She’d taken him by force and now he was saturated in unspeakable secrets and death, far more than his natural abilities had ever shown him, steeped in the morbidity and despair of tiny souls in transit. He was certain he would be injured by that world, regardless of the Porter having extolled the so-called power of his gifts (easy for her to say, and ironic too, because she was dying). And why was she dying? Who was to say the cancer taking her out wasn’t a direct result of all those years she’d midwifed the dead, giving shelter to the slaughtered innocents whose lives had been pornographically cut short?

  Though maybe he’d been wrong to believe that Portership was mandatory—Annie never said those who were “chosen” couldn’t simply refuse. What a concept! Suddenly, the idea that Willow could bail was a great comfort. He whispered I didn’t sign up for this into the ether and felt instant relief.

  He shut his eyes, letting the riddle of Roy Eakins wash over him. When the kids told him that Roy used to come to the Meeting, he was flummoxed. It short-circuited his instincts to further pursue the man as a suspect. But now, thoughts came pell-mell, like the turning of a kaleidoscope, and he felt Annie’s presence as if she were inside his head. What if a landlord happened to be a child-killer in the life before he was conscripted into Annie’s world? What if the very being who was animated by one of the children of the train in order to enact the moment of balance turned out to be malevolent, infected, impure? And so? So what if they were? Would that necessarily preclude a successful result, an effective moment of balance? Wouldn’t the process itself—the arrival of the dead child-tenant—serve to distill or remove such impurities? In AA, they say, “Principles before personalities” . . . in the quest for the moment of balance, wasn’t it “Principles before personality disorders”? Yet what if “haywire” meant that things had gone so askew that the unknowable force responsible for selecting those landlord-vessels had become damaged and willfully perverse in itself, and was running amok? You’d have to be some kind of psychedelic scientist to answer that one . . . an astonishing corollary followed: Was it possible for a returning child to inhabit the same body of the person it had actually been murdered by? If Roy Eakins had killed Maya and Troy, then who was “Dabba Doo,” the child who became his tenant? Another of Eakins’s kills? Or had Dabba Doo been murdered by someone else—and his tenancy in the body of Roy, a child-killer other than the one he sought, was random, coincidental? To complete the brainteaser, if Dabba Doo was killed by Roy, then the hapless phantom’s moment of balance seemed surely, almost poetically doomed: a captive of his predator yet again, he would have no way of killing him because the man was already dead.

  Willow called it “haywire squared”—

  Dixie cried out in nightmare, startling him from his feverish cogitations. That was when Willow realized he was in the living room, standing before the mural like a sleepwalker. He rushed to the bedroom and held her until the terrors passed. (She never fully awakened.) He gently kissed her head. He felt a stir and thought of making love but was prudishly mindful that she’d set her alarm for an early-morning shift.

  As he tucked her foot beneath the sheet, a shock went through him.

  “It isn’t a palm print,” he said aloud. “It’s a footprint,” he whispered. “A fucking footprint.”

  He grabbed his wallet from the end table. Folded inside was the phone number that Roy had written down and then stepped on.

  I don’t have athlete’s foot, he’d said.

  We’ll see about that, thought Willow.

  3.

  “We’re going to go a lot slower than the last time,” said Roy. “Tell you one thing: if someone would have told me I’d have the chance to do you again, I’d have said they were crazy to their face. But here we are! Will wonders never cease? Your little sister actually went faster than you did—which kind of surprised me, ’cause the Lolitas usually hang in. The lollipops are tougher than they look. Anyhoo, I blame myself for that. Wasn’t like it was my first rodeo. Mea culpa. When it’s your culpa, you gotta say mea.”

  Roy never shut up. It took nearly an hour to drive from Smiths Creek to the farm in Wolcott Mills. Grundy and his wife half-carried Daniel into the house. He was barely conscious but could hear and smell a river. When he came to, he was nude, spread-eagled on a bed. They didn’t gag him and he immediately understood why. They were far enough away from the world that his screams would never be heard.

  The Porter said that in “endgame time,” the children of the train summoned superhuman force to confront those who had harmed them. In confused recognition of the moment of balance that would soon become a miscarriage, Daniel’s tenant thrashed within like a punch-drunk heavyweight. Wishing to protect him from their common enemy, the landlord instinctively shooed Troy away, though with little success.

  “I’m rusty so please forgive
—haven’t done this in a while! Violet doesn’t count, not really, but boy oh boy that gal sure gave me the taste again. She’s what they used to call a ‘ten.’ Real marriage material. But you know grown-ups were never my thang. To each his own.” He pursed his lips and grew quiet. “I’m going to make a confession, man-child, and I hope you’re flattered. I never told anyone this before—not that there was anyone to tell. Never even told Grundy. Some things just aren’t appropriate for fathers to share with their sons. But I’m going to tell you. What I want you to know is that out of the baker’s dozen—give or take a few cupcakes—you and your sister were my pièce de résistance. Pardon my French toast. And mind you, don’t get me wrong, all my kids were wonderful; like Mr. Twain was fond of saying, they didn’t repeat themselves but they often rhymed. But the Rum-Rum-Rummers stayed with me all these years, providing much constipation during sleepless nights. I meant consolation. Pardon my Portuguese.”

  Grundy laughed (his wife had been banished to the living room) and his father said, “Shut the fuck up.”

  “You know,” said Roy, “this whole landlord-tenant thing has been utterly fascinating—I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that—but really, don’t you think? I mean, who could have imagined? It’s inconceivable. I mean, my dead jaw just drops. Still does. Definitely given me food for thought. I was a teacher, as you know, so I’m given to analysis and reflection—unlike my dull-witted son, whom I’ve sometimes been ashamed to call my own. Oh, he has other ‘abilities,’ but not in the lucubration department. Put a major crimp in my style for years. But I took care of him when the world wanted to flush him. Didn’t I, Grundy? Didn’t I take care of you?”