The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares
Page 31
“At first I thought it was a family dog or something,” Ramirez later recounted. “The place was such a horror show, we had no idea what we’d find. I’ve seen some pretty fucked-up things, but this? Nothing like this. Anyway, we entered the kitchen, and for a moment we didn’t hear shit, so I started thinking my ears were playing tricks. Nerves can do that to you. But then we heard it again, all of us this time—a child crying—and nobody breathed. We found the boy under the sink, wedged between the disposal motor and cans of roach spray, bone white and shivering, like some kind of animal waiting for the slaughter. I don’t know who was more scared, him or me.
“We couldn’t get the kid to talk. Not a word. Needed a neighbor to identify him. He had this look in his eyes like he’d seen the devil himself. Can’t get it outta my mind, that look. Only other time I saw something like it was in Kabul. We’d be clearing a house of mujahideen, most of ’em in body bags, and sometimes we’d find their kids hiding, pale as ghosts, piss running down their legs from the fear. Toby Rheva looked at us like that.”
—
A social worker brought Toby to Beth’s office twice a week. At the first session, they were accompanied by a homicide detective named Alice Ganza, a fireplug of a woman, small and tough. “No one’s been able to get through to him,” Ganza told Beth, nodding to the dark-haired boy with the haunted eyes sitting in her waiting room. “I’m hoping you can.” Then she added, “It’s not just to help him cope with what happened.”
“I don’t understand,” Beth said. “You know Padesky did it. What else is there?”
Ganza shifted her weight, as if unsure how much she wanted to share. “You’re right. Officially, the case is closed,” she said. “But I knew Jerry Padesky. We weren’t close but I knew him well enough. His boy John was friends with my son.” Beth went still. She was no longer talking to a cop. She was talking to a mother. “People close to these kinds of killers always say they had no idea so-and-so was capable of such a thing, and I never buy it,” Ganza continued. “I’ve been working homicide for twenty years and there are always signs. No matter how out of character the act may seem at first, if you dig deep enough, you will find some overlooked detail that whispers in your ear, This one’s a monster. But with Jerry?” She shook her head. “I’ve gone over it six ways from Sunday, and I still can’t find a damn thing that convinces me the man I knew was capable of killing his own family. Something happened to Jerry Padesky, Dr. Harper. Something that changed him. And that boy is the only person alive who might know what it is.”
There was a troubled silence before Beth spoke. “I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but my first responsibility is to Toby, and I won’t force a child to relive a trauma he’s suppressing before he’s ready.”
Ganza gave Beth a hard look, as if she’d been reserving judgment about the kind of person Beth was and had finally come to an unpleasant conclusion.
“Of course,” she said, handing Beth her card. “Call me if anything comes up.”
—
Four sessions had passed since Beth began treating the silent boy. Despite her efforts to draw Toby out by encouraging him to play and express himself, he remained verbally unresponsive, and she decided to take a new approach.
“Your teacher, Ms. Barnes, told me you’re good at art,” she said to him.
Toby stared into his lap and shrugged in a way that suggested he didn’t disagree with the statement. Beth placed a sheet of blank paper on the coffee table in front of him along with a basket of colored pencils.
“I was wondering if you would draw something for me?” Toby eyed the paper with rising interest and shrugged again. Beth smiled, taking that as a yes. “Okay, I’d like you to draw a picture of a tree, a house, and a person. Can you do that?”
After a moment, Toby slid forward on the couch and peered into the basket of colored pencils. Choosing a green pencil, he began to draw. Line by line, color by color, the images formed with care and precision. First the tree, then the house, and finally, the person. Occasionally, he glanced up at Beth, looking for approval. She was careful to smile and nod her assent for him to continue. When he finished, Toby sat back on the couch as if to say, Now what?
“May I look at it?” she said, rotating the drawing to her. What she saw caused her smile to waver. It wasn’t what he had drawn that disturbed her so much but rather what he hadn’t. “This is very good, Toby,” she said in a measured tone. “Ms. Barnes was right about how talented you are. Can I ask you some questions about your drawing?” She pointed to the house with its rectangle base, triangle roof, and four squares for windows.
“Where is the door?” Toby offered his now familiar shrug. “Well, then how do people get in or out?” she pressed. His eyes shifted between her and the house as if the idea never occurred to him. Sensing him start to close down, she moved on to his drawing of the person, which was little more than a stick figure with a large circular head, black dot eyes, and a jagged mop of brown hair like Toby’s own. In this image too something important was missing.
“You didn’t draw a mouth,” Beth said. Toby stared at the face of the figure, fear crossing his expression. “How does he talk?”
He looked up from the drawing, his dark eyes drilling into her.
“He doesn’t,” the boy said in voice that was high and clear.
Beth’s breath caught in her throat, as if all the air had been drained from the room. She should have felt a sense of breakthrough and professional accomplishment at hearing him finally speak, but something about his voice, its lingering prepubescent register mismatched with his older boy’s countenance, cut through her like a hot knife. She pictured herself standing on the edge of a precipice while across from her, on the other side, was Toby Rheva, her patient, a traumatized boy, beckoning her forward.
—
Beth’s father was a minister at the Grace Baptist Church in Fairchance, a small borough on the outskirts of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Her mother died when Beth was three, and her father chose God and a fifth of bourbon over remarrying, leaving her an only child in an otherwise empty house. During the summers, when she was off from school, Beth’s father would pack her into his rusting Ford F-150 and drive south from Fairchance into West Virginia, stopping to preach in towns even smaller than theirs with names like Monongah, Granville, and Salem. She would watch him from the back of the pews, thick sweat slicking his forehead, his hollow voice settling over the parishioners like a gray fog.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
On their long rides home, her father, flush with the pride of being heard, would tell Beth how it was their duty to spread the Gospel, to share the Word of God with as many people who would listen and, even more important, with those who would not. Beth loved these hours alone with him, the rise and fall of his speech, the comforting glow of his attention.
Not all their road trips south went so well. Sometimes no one would show up to hear him speak, and Beth’s father, a stubborn man if ever there was one, would preach to an empty hall. On these occasions, Beth would sit close to the pulpit, careful to hang on his every word, hoping he would feel it was enough that she heard him. Afterward, they would drive the hundreds of miles home in silence, her father’s heavy-lidded eyes fixed on the dark road ahead, a cigarette dangling from his lips and an open bottle of Jim Beam on the seat. Beth could sense the quiet storm of anger building in his mind with each passing mile. She longed to speak to him, to fill the silence with the sound of familiar voices, but she knew this would only make him angrier. He withheld his voice as punishment for her sins. She was the reason why no one came to hear him preach. It was the only reason that made sense to her.
As the years passed, her father’s silence grew until Beth became lost in its inescapable shadow. He preached less and drank more. He no longer took her on his summer trips south, leaving her to be cared for by old Ed and Mary Clancy, members of their congregation and the close
st either of them had to family.
“Your daddy loves you, Beth,” Mary Clancy said, helping her onto the porch, suitcase in hand, as she watched her father’s truck disappear down the road. “Even if he can’t always find the words to express it.”
When news came of her father’s death in a road accident one summer when she was fifteen, Beth reacted as he would have, not with sound and fury or cries of anguish, but with silence.
—
At home that night after her session with Toby, Beth watched her husband, Alan, help their eight-year-old daughter, Rose, with her spelling. Rose sat on the living room floor, her worksheets spread around her, chewing the end of her pencil, staring expectantly up at Alan as he read aloud sentences for her to write down. “She could not see the coat that hung behind the door.” Rose pitched her head up, eyes narrowing, spelling the words in her mind before committing them to her worksheet. A moment later, she looked up at her father again, ready for more.“Do not show her the small mirror that broke.” Beth frowned at Alan.
“That’s really what it says?” she asked.
He turned the study guide to her with a smirk.
“That’s not even the weirdest one,” he said. “How about, ‘Soon the boy will tell you about the bear?’ ”
Beth laughed.
“Whatever happened to those lists of like-sounding words to spell? Lock. Smock. Clock.”
He smiled at her. “Care. Dare. Stare.”
Rose lifted her gaze from her worksheet to watch her parents, unsure of what kind of game they were playing.
—
“I have news,” Beth said to Alan in bed that night. “The new boy I’m treating, I got him to talk.”
“That’s fantastic, honey,” he said, putting his hand on hers. “You should feel proud.”
She nodded with a half smile, comforted that he knew her well enough to sense she felt something less than pride. He went back to his book, and then, realizing he’d forgotten something, looked up at her again.
“Did he tell you what happened?”
“No,” she said. “But he will.”
—
Toby’s opening up was like the easing of a tightly knotted fist. He was never going to be a verbose child, but she soon had him talking freely about the food in the state-run home he was currently living in—bland—or a cartoon he liked on television—Star Wars Rebels. After a time, it seemed he would talk about anything—anything, that is, but the Padeskys. Whenever she asked him questions about them, Toby would fall silent again, abruptly ending what had otherwise been a productive session.
“We’re making good progress, but it’s going to take time,” Beth told Detective Ganza during one of her follow-up calls. Beth sensed the only reason the city was paying for Toby to see her instead of some wet-behind-the-ears grad student was because of Ganza’s continued interest. As soon as the detective had the information she wanted, or believed no new information would be forthcoming, Beth’s sessions with Toby would end. Despite Beth’s professional reluctance to push her patients, the reality of this time pressure weighed on her.
“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” Detective Ganza said after a long silence.
Her “best” was a variation on a novel therapeutic technique used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. EMDR involved encouraging the patient to talk about the traumatic event while pulsing a light in his peripheral vision. The light disrupts the body’s physical stress response often felt when recounting a traumatic memory, allowing for gradual desensitization and recovery, or so the theory went.
At their next session, Beth dimmed the lights in her office and told Toby they were going to play a game wherein he was to describe as vividly as possible whatever she asked him. They had already played a number of “games,” and Toby had responded positively to each of them. She started with the innocuous, asking him to describe things she knew he enjoyed talking about: the Star Wars Rebels TV show, the latest Jay-Z album, an old gray cat he cared for at the Home. All the while, she held a penlight near his right temple, just on the edge of his peripheral vision, and clicked it on and off as he spoke. Click on. Click off. Click on.
When she sensed he was ready to proceed, she eased him into a more difficult subject.
“Describe your room at the Padeskys.” Click on. Click off. Click on. At first Toby looked at her, unsure, like a child standing at the edge of a pool, staring at a parent, arms outstretched, who’s telling him to jump. Beth was afraid Toby would fold in on himself, as he had done many times before, ending this experiment in failure, but then, after a swollen silence, he spoke.
“It was okay, I guess. Kinda small. I shared it with John.”
Beth was so surprised by his response that she forgot to operate the penlight. She regained her composure and shifted the light from Toby’s right temple to his left.
“Tell me about living with the Padeskys.” Click on. Click off. Click on. This time, Toby’s response came more easily. He told her that he missed Mrs. Padesky’s meat loaf and that Mr. Padesky could make him laugh with his funny faces. He most enjoyed Sundays, when the entire family would watch football in the living room and Mr. Padesky would shout at the television.
As the words began to flow from Toby, Beth couldn’t help but feel she was experiencing one of those moments she’d only dreamed of as a therapist. How many times had she imagined herself like Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, the heroic therapist helping a desperate and suicidal patient face his most traumatic memories and be miraculously healed? All through the power of talk. So hypnotic was her reverie that it took her a moment to realize that Toby’s recollections had taken a disturbing turn.
He was talking now about Sara, the other foster child who came to live with the Padeskys only a few months before Jerry Padesky put her to sleep for the last time. She was quiet and scared, Toby said. All he knew about her was that her mother had died in a car accident and that Sara had been in the car when it happened. At first, she didn’t say much to anyone and stayed in her room most of the time, but eventually, little by little, she began to talk to Mr. Padesky. She felt safe with him.
Then, one night, a week before the murders, Toby overheard Mr. Padesky arguing with his wife. He sounded different, somehow. He kept talking about Sara’s mom and the car accident until Mrs. Padesky told him to stop because he was scaring her. He said he needed Sara to tell him what happened.
Beth lowered the penlight, the elation of moments before replaced by a jolt of confusion and fear, the self-reflexivity of the boy’s story making her think of a snake biting its tail. She felt as if she’d wandered halfway down a road she no longer wished to be on, but she knew she couldn’t stop now.
“Did he?” she asked, forcing herself to raise the penlight again. “Get Sara to talk about the accident, I mean?” Click on. Click off. Click on.
Toby nodded, his eyes locked on hers. “Yeah, and that’s when he started telling us about the Mouth.”
“The Mouth?” she said, her throat dry, her voice barely above a whisper.
“The one inside his head,” the boy replied. “He said it talked to him. Told him to do things.”
So there it is, Beth thought. The whispering detail that Ganza failed to find had at last revealed itself. Despite Jerry Padesky having no history of psychiatric issues, he’d been hearing voices, a textbook paranoid schizophrenic, and tragically no one noticed. It made perfect sense, she thought, given what he had done.
But Toby wasn’t finished talking, and what he said next made no sense at all.
“Mr. Padesky said the Mouth spoke to Sara’s mother too.”
—
Beth was quiet at dinner that evening, and Alan took care of Rose so she could go to bed early. At first Beth’s dreams were untroubled, but as the night wore on, an image surfaced out of the recesses of her subconscious. She saw a mouth, disembodied, floating in darkness, its lips a flaccid gray with skin cracked, but the teeth? O
h, the teeth were fine, ramrod straight and glistening white.
“I’m sure you’ll do your best,” the Mouth said in Detective Ganza’s voice. Do your best. Do your best. Do your best!
“Honey?” she heard Alan say. “Who are you talking to?”
Beth was awake now, standing in the kitchen near the dim light of the stove. She looked up to see Alan leaning against the doorway, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded quickly, trying to hide her disorientation. That’s when she realized he was staring at the kitchen knife in her hand.
—
The days passed and the Mouth increased its hold over Beth, until thinking of It became like an unconscious tic or mannerism, a part of her she couldn’t control.
Sometimes the Mouth looked like her father’s, with his reed-thin lips set against those small, tobacco-stained teeth. When It spoke, she heard his voice:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Other times the Mouth was Alan’s:
“Lock! Smock! Clock! Soon the boy will tell you about the bear!”
She tried everything to silence It. Talking with patients. Turning up the volume of the television. Increasing her daily dose of Lexapro. Nothing worked. Its voice was always there just below the surface, inhabiting her.
Detective Ganza had given Beth the case files on the Padesky murders in the hope that some kernel in them would help her draw out Toby. She hadn’t looked at the files since their first session, finding little of therapeutic value. Now she returned to them, a question gnawing at her, searching for information, not about Toby, but about the other foster child, Sara Brobeck. As Toby told her, Sara had been under the Padeskys’ care a shorter time than Toby, arriving only a few months before the murders, after having been bounced from foster home to foster home for more than a year. Beth could find no explanation for why none of the prior placements had stuck, other than a single cryptic comment on one of the transfer forms calling her behavior “antisocial and uncommunicative, likely due to acute traumatic stress disorder.” Beth stared at the diagnosis. It wasn’t unusual for children in the foster care system to be afflicted by similar disorders—after all, if their lives were easy, they wouldn’t be in the system in the first place. But the parallels between Sara and Toby’s cases troubled her. It was almost as if the trauma had been passed from one child to the other. She looked through the case files again, searching for details about the car accident that killed Sara’s mother, but there were none.