Keeper of the Children

by William H Hallahan

  Precisely at eleven, with no warning, something pounded—thundered—on the kitchen door. Pots jangled. Dishes jumped. The whole house seemed alert, listening. After a wait, the kitchen door shuddered again—a pounding heel of an angry fist, almost strong enough to drive the door off its hinges. In Renni’s room the moonlit dolls seemed to draw closer in mute fright. A third time the door was pummeled, a booming drumlike sound.

  Minutes ticked away. The thrush even resumed trilling in its secret tree.

  Then came a faint scraping on the front door, followed by a thumping like a battering ram. The booming filled the main hall and shouted up the stairs. Peremptory, angry, determined.

  Minutes passed again. At last, downstairs, a door slammed. Something heavy walked through dark rooms, across the carpet and bare floors. The steps stopped in the hall at the bottom of the stairwell.

  Now it was on the stair, soft-footed, scraping against the wall as it ascended. In the doorway it appeared, massive in a forest ranger’s hat—the stuffed brown bear. He held at the ready his two-headed woodsman’s ax. Both glass eyes peered at the room. Impatient, the bear emitted a powerful sigh.

  The German war helmet moved; it tipped up slightly, like a clamshell opening. It tipped up a little more. Something beneath it moved. A gleaming metallic snout protruded into the moonlit room. And, behind it, two red eyes stared at the bear.

  The bear hesitated. He looked around at the marionettes dangling from their control strings, all seeming to stare back at him. He looked at the bookshelves, at the mirror, the bureau, the canopied bed and then again at the helmet on the desk.

  He stepped toward the helmet. He hesitated again. Then he took another step, and another, lifting the ax. At the last possible moment, the toy brass cannon under the helmet went off with a blinding green and red flash. The house shook as a full load of twelve-gauge shot hit the bear’s shoulder and slammed him back against the wall. Shreds of kapok hung from the shot hole, and gray smoke boiled from its edges.

  The bear lunged across the room and drove the ax blade through the helmet, through the cannon, through the desk top, shattering it. A small felt mouse with two red-bead eyes scurried out from the cleaved helmet and darted behind a jumble of books.

  The bear swung again and again at the mouse, cleaving thick books in two, missing the mouse by millimeters. It chopped the desk to splinters.

  The mouse leaped up on the bookshelves above the desk. The bear battered the shelves to flinders, scattering fairy tales and nursery rhymes. The mouse escaped behind a heavy framed mirror over the bureau; the bear pursued it, shattering the mirror and splitting the frame in pieces that all crashed down behind the bureau.

  The mouse darted behind a hairbrush on the bureau, and the glancing ax blade severed a piece of felt hide from its left rear leg. The bear kept swinging the ax with abandon, filling the night with the sound of destroyed lumber and glass. The bureau collapsed. Drawers burst open and clothing tumbled out.

  As the mouse scurried under the bed, the ax blade sank into and through the mattress, hooked. The bear yanked it off the bed, flinging it behind, then destroyed the bed frame. The canopy came crashing down like the sails of a dismasted ship.

  The mouse now ran into the puppet theater, which the 164 ax destroyed in one swing. The mouse ran up the wall among the dolls. Marionettes, strings, controllers, pegs, long wood splinters—all went leaping in pieces under the flaying ax.

  As the mouse darted behind a Don Quixote, the ax blade drove into it, severing the knight’s body and cutting off the mouse’s tail, just missing the base of its spine.

  The pegboard broke up and fell; the ax slashed at the wall behind. At the end of the wall was a shelf, and the mouse scrambled up to it and behind a jack-in-the-box. The bear quickly drew back to aim at the box as the top flew open. Instead of Jack, up sprang another toy cannon. As the bear began its swing, the cannon went off in its face.

  At point-blank range, the bear’s snout and jaw and throat were torn open in a violent twelve-gauge explosion of green and red. The bear staggered; his left eye started out of his head and his muzzle burst. In response, the bear’s fury increased. He chopped at the shelf, destroying the doorjamb and wall along with the shelf. The door tilted away from its broken hinges. The bear battered it down out of his way and continued his pursuit of the mouse.

  The mouse, having tumbled to the floor, ran under the rubble, ahead of the ax. The blade attacked the floor and the debris on it: powerful, violent strokes of the ax made the floorboard jump up in pieces. The mouse stayed hidden.

  Now, something tapped on the inside of the closet door. The bear swung the ax at it, shattering the louvered door.

  Inside, barely visible, stood a life-size clown. The clown chuckled, a delighted, low chuckle, then swung his baseball bat. It hit the bear on the torso, denting it and driving him back against the wall. The enraged bear turned back and swung. Arm-weary, he misaimed the ax blade and drove it into the doorjamb.

  The clown’s bat crashed down on the bear’s head. The head burst open, the remaining glass eye shot away and the kapok stuffing hung down over the broken snout. Blinded, the bear swung the ax again and drove it into the wall. The next swing of the bat carried away the remnants of the bear’s head.

  The bear stood headless, still holding the embedded ax. The clown touched the bear, pushed it curiously and watched it fall over onto the floor.

  Kheim had left.

  Benson put on the light.

  The room was destroyed. Almost all the walls were gone, hacked to expose skeletal laths and studding. The desk and bureau were smashed, broken glass covered the floor; the closet door was kindling. What remained of the bed was tangled in the shreds of the canopy. Chopped wood lay mixed with various articles of clothing. And everywhere there were the entangled marionettes in bits and pieces.

  Searching for the mouse, Benson picked up several ruined dolls, noting the craftsmanship that had gone into them and into the finely detailed costumes. He dropped them and searched further. Under pieces of the puppet stage, he found the mouse. It had been cut in two. One red-bead eye was gone; so was the tail, and a slice of a haunch. He put it in his pocket.

  He next got down the four cameras and examined the footage indicators. All had run the same amount; seven minutes’ elapsed time. He looked again at the wreckage: in only seven minutes a frenzy of hate and supernatural strength, chasing one toy mouse, had done all that.

  The bear lay on its back, its head a hanging rag of felt, its body split in several places. Benson tried to remove the ax from the wall stud. It wouldn’t move. He gripped the handle and hung his weight on it until, slowly, it gave and came away.

  The clown, still holding the bat, each eye in a white star of face paint, smiled sadly at him over a small tomato nose.

  The Film Center on Vine Street housed film studios, recording studios, developing and print laboratories, equipment rental and a retail store. In a few hours the laboratory had developed Benson’s film. Now he sat in a viewing studio with four projectors, playing the four rolls of film simultaneously. The bear’s actions had been recorded by at least one camera at all times, and now, no longer a participant, Benson was able to observe the entire action.

  The footage of the destruction was awesome. Everything the ax touched collapsed, shattered, exploded. The cameras had jumped with each blow. Plaster and wallboard flew, the closet door broke up—and at all times the ax pursued the mouse.

  The clown particularly impressed Benson. It had stepped clear of the closet doorway, avoided the swing of the ax that could have cut it in two and struck a thundering blow at the bear’s ribs. The bear had been driven against the hall doorjamb and, rebounding, had been too eager to strike back. He’d missed, driving the ax blade into the closet wall a fraction of an inch from the clown’s left ear. The third stroke had destroyed the bear’s head. It was this stroke that had made Kheim quit, leaving the headless bear holding an imbedded ax.

  Benson rewound the f
ilms and played them through again and yet again. Ironically, the bear never realized that one of the ax strokes, through plasterboard and fabric, had cut the mouse in two. But by then the mouse’s work had been done. The bear was obviously tired before the clown appeared. Exhausted—the film clearly showed that. And Benson pondered it.

  About an hour before dusk he returned to the house. He looked at the sunlight on his garden wall and at the long afternoon shadows. Twenty-four hours earlier he had sat there, convinced he was seeing his last sunset. His survival amazed him.

  And now it was coming again, like a lazy Susan: one day later and the same circumstances had wheeled back. Another dusk, another wait, another attack.

  He went up to Renni’s room and, in the midst of the rubble, stood the bear up and pushed some kapok stuffing back into the felt cloth of the head. He closed the split seams with safety pins, pinned a glass eye back and, as an afterthought, tied a handkerchief around the bear’s head, bandana-style. The bear was still missing a glass eye and this, along with the safety-pinned seams and handkerchief, gave him the air of a Frankenstein castoff. Into the bear’s paws, Benson fitted the ax. The clown regarded the one-eyed bear with sorrowful mirth while, in its hands, the bat was aimed right at the jury-rigged bear’s head.

  Benson cast a sour eye over the destroyed bedroom and went back to the patio. The sun was all but gone, a red disc sunk three-quarters into the horizon beyond the trees. He waited for dark and the first familiar waves of anxiety.

  They didn’t come. He sat as the evening chill rose with the darkness; sat waiting, open to sensations of apprehension and aware of time passing. But he felt nothing.

  Benson looked at the dark house. Maybe Kheim had already entered it. Maybe he waited in silence there. Benson walked across the patio and opened the kitchen door to listen, to feel Kheim’s presence.

  He stepped inside and pushed the door to. The house was completely silent, muffled and shut away from the world. He walked into the family room and pushed a key on the piano keyboard. The note rang loud in the stillness. He struck it again and waited. There was no response.

  He walked softly up to the second floor landing and sat on the top step to wait, and for the first time, unnagged by anxiety, he was struck by the childishness of this contest. Kheim was playing by some unstated rule that required the elaborate charades in Renni’s bedroom. Benson resented his own life having been made an element—a counter, a piece—in the monk’s infantile game. The parents on the committee had died, he saw now, stripped of their adult dignity, terrified. A contempt-filled game conducted by a vicious child.

  The waiting went on. By ten o’clock, the moon rose and looked in through Renni’s window above long scarves of motionless night clouds. Benson dozed and yanked his head up.

  At three, Benson had had enough.

  He took the bat from the clown, took aim and swung the bat against the bear’s head. The head, the stuffing, the pins and handkerchief—the whole battered mess was carried away, leaving a decapitated bear brandishing an ax. Then the body fell over.

  Benson went down the stairs and out to his car. He drove into town, into the warehouse district. Dawn lit the sky like milk glass.

  Benson stood in the alley, watching Kheim’s building. Through the high, open window he heard the children talking inside. He smelled the food cooking. Another day of begging in the streets to enrich Kheim.

  He walked up to the wrought-iron door and pressed a button, then stepped back. Presently, the lower door opened and an Oriental man stepped into the vestibule. He extinguished the kerosene lamp that hung from the chain, unlocked and opened the wrought-iron gate. He stared at Benson.

  “Give this to Kheim,” said Benson. Extending his hand, he put the two pieces of the felt mouse into the old man’s hand and walked away.

  In a flood of brilliant sunlight, Susan Benson stood on the stair landing and looked into Renni’s room. As her eyes took in the scene, she felt she was witnessing the aftermath of mass murder.

  All the lovely marionettes, from all over the world, chopped to pieces: as she looked at each one, she remembered their performances in Renni’s puppet theater. With Renni’s deft hands and great gift of mimicry, they had been as real as people.

  Benson stood on the stair, watching her. Firmly, she turned away.

  “Where’s Top? I don’t want him to see that. He’ll have nightmares for weeks.” She hesitated, then sat down on the top step. “So will I. My God. He did all that with one ax?”

  Benson nodded.

  She stared at him: he was actually prepared to face another night of this.

  Top came into the lower hallway and looked up at her. “I found his grave. It needs a cross. Maybe I can hang his old puppy collar on it.” The morning sun touched his face, and his eyes recalled Renni’s. But he held his head just as his father did, though he was said to look just like his mother. Susan looked from son to husband. Everybody was part of somebody else—part of everybody else.

  Benson drove his wife and son to her mother’s apartment at four o’clock. The sunlit Schuylkill River was festooned with rowing shells at practice.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  She stood at the curb and watched him drive away, watched the car out of sight, watched until Top pulled her hand and turned her to the apartment entrance.

  Another night.

  Benson parked the car and walked along Chestnut Street. Sue’s eyes haunted him, making him indecisive again.

  It was his move: he could choose the weapons, choose the ground and the time. Kheim had reneged. Or had he? It’s a trap, said an inner voice. Trap. Trap. The hidden cabin in the Rockies beckoned again in his mind.

  “Hey, you bastard!”

  Benson looked at the slowly passing car. Stanley leaned his head and the crook of his arm out of his car window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Stealing apples,” said Benson.

  “You ready to go to work?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “You dirty bastard. You win! They’re ready to come to terms. I’ve been phoning all over the place for you. We hear you got an agent. Listen. They’ll make a deal. But the girl cameraman is out. O.U.T. She’s gone to Afghanistan with an Argentinian producer and two dwarfs. Ha ha ha! Jesus. Dwarfs! So call me. Tell me in the morning. Okay? Bring your agent. Bastard!”

  The car drove off in the traffic past Independence Hall. “Jesus Christ,” shouted Stanley. “Dwarfs!” And there went the man who was going to mark him lousy from N.Y. to L.A.

  Benson resisted the impulse to laugh. Win? Terms? All that time, staring at that wall, at the very bottom of his life, standing on a landing in the dark facing a witch marionette, the chessmen, the ax assault—all that and they thought he was holding out for money!

  He looked about on the spring streets, sun-filled, quickpaced. He felt he’d been away and was now recovering from a long illness; everything on the streets had a mint newness to it. The shadows had sharp edges, the colors were extraordinarily vivid. Life had, as he watched, an added value.

  To Benson, the message seemed clear: don’t go back tonight. Kheim has capitulated, just like the agency people. You’ve beaten them all. Enjoy life. Enjoy the sunshine. No more battles out there beyond the night with that homicidal Oriental.

  Sunset was near. If he were to implement his plan he had to do it soon. At dusk. Or forget it all and live in doubt.

  Choose, he told himself.

  CHAPTER 10

  The cats began gathering before the sun set.

  In the sunlight they crouched along the base of the masonry walls of the pier shed.

  They cleaned themselves with their rasping tongues and their tongue-wet front paws. Some of them exercised; they hooked their claws into the old pier doors and stretched and pulled. The old, worn claw sheathes came off, exposing the new deadly sharp claws within. As the sun settled lower over the downtown office buildings, they flexed their muscles, cleaned their fa
ces, prepared their claws and patiently endured the ache of hunger in their bellies. They could hear in the walls of the pier their evening meals scurrying back and forth.

  Benson’s car rolled slowly under a parapet and stopped. He stayed in the car and watched the cats, who observed him indifferently for a moment before resuming their nightly preparations.

  The striped cat showed up late. He was enormous. More than eight inches high at the shoulder, he weighed over fifteen pounds. He was heavily muscled, with long legs and a flat, compact head. As he approached the other cats, he walked with the languid assurance of a boxer. His face and shoulders were variously scarred.

  Behind him trailed a younger cat, not fully grown although already an accomplished hunter. He was principally Abyssinian, with deep-green eyes and a tawny coat. He sat against the sun-warm wall, feeling it through his haunches, and began systematically to clean himself with his tongue.

  The older cat did not. He sat down heavily, grateful for the warmth of the wall. He laid his right cheek against it.

  He was, in fact, on hard times. He’d already lost four of his thirty teeth; one vital carnassial tooth, another an important canine. He’d also lost two of the five claws on his right front paw and one of the four on his right rear paw. He’d gotten the swollen jaw by making a silent drop in the dark down on a fast brown rat, missing and suffering a rat bite on his masseter jaw muscle that was now infected. The jaw throbbed and his gut ached for food. Having been driven off twice this year by other males, he had failed to mate for the first time in eleven years.

  He was old enough, experienced enough, hungry enough and desperate enough to be exceedingly dangerous.

  The young tom with him was just fifteen months old. He weighed twelve pounds and would weigh more, with powerful jaws that killed a rat with one bite. He was very long in the leg and exceptionally fast. He’d bested the old cat in a mating fight and now they hunted together, a combination of experience and speed.

  Benson studied the young tom for a long time.