Savaging the Dark

by Christopher Conlon

  I used to have fantasies about a life I’d lived. I was a teacher, a wife, a mother. I remember names: Bill. Gracie. Cutts. All those children. None of them existed, I’m sure. They were a dream I had. But this doesn’t exist either, this room, this boy in the pink handcuffs on the urine-stained bed. How could it? This can’t be my life.

  It’s night again.

  “I’m not dirty, Connor,” I say, my voice strange in my throat, hoarse, husky. “We’re not dirty. Nothing we did was dirty.”

  To prove it to him I slip the pistol into my belt, sit next to him on the bed. I take one of his feet. Initially he resists but then I say, “Relax, sweetheart, I’m not going to hurt you, Mona would never hurt you,” and I look at it. He had been walking barefoot outside not long before he came in to sleep and there are bits of grass between his toes, even some dark substance, oil or grease. I go to the bathroom, wet a towel, bring it to the bed.

  “Sweetheart? Let me wash your feet. They’re not clean. Come on. Don’t be shy. You’re dirty.”

  I hold his foot carefully, nuzzle it with my cheek, wash it with the cloth. Then I pick up the other. Yet he still looks suspicious, frightened.

  “Clean,” I whisper. “Clean, clean, clean, clean, clean.”

  Then I begin licking his foot. I will lick his foot clean, his entire body, and when he is completely clean he’ll see that all I ever offered him was clean. I consider biting down on his foot, tearing it in half, eating it, eating him, making us part of each other forever, but no. That wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be clean.

  I suddenly realize that there are red and blue lights flashing outside the window. I jump up, my breath shallow. I hear footsteps, boots on the gravel outside. I take the gun in my hands. I lean close to Connor, sidle up next to him. I let him see me switch off the safety. I let him watch me cock it. I feel light, even blissful. None of this is happening, not to me. This is not my life.

  I hold the barrel close to his eye so he can peer down into its darkness. He’s shaking his head, quivering, trying to scream through the gag.

  Then I move the barrel to my own temple.

  I hold eye contact with him as I slowly squeeze the trigger.

  Snap.

  His eyes widen and I hear myself laughing. I’ve never laughed like this. It’s a high-pitched sound, very different from my usual laugh. As I laugh, or someone who looks like me does, there’s a knock at the door. It’s a strong, masculine knock.

  “Police. Open the door, please.”

  My laughter settles for a moment. I point the gun straight at Connor, cock it again and again. Snap, snap, snap, snap, snap.

  “The movie’s over now, sweetheart,” I say, or someone does. “I’m sorry it didn’t have a better ending.”

  I stand then. The knock comes again, louder this time. I hear my laughter reverberating throughout the room, echoing off the walls, bouncing through my brain, laughter that once started can never stop, will never stop until the end of the world, the end of time. Gun in hand, laughing, shrieking, screaming, I move to the door. I unlock it.

  I pull it open.

  Epilogue

  Some of what I’ve written here is true.

  But in fact, there are great swaths I don’t remember, and even more I never knew. I was only eleven, after all.

  I’ve tried to portray Mona as I remember her. It’s difficult, nearly fifteen years later. Much of what happened between us has remained unvisited territory in my memory, dark and unwanted, and so I’ve lost a lot of it over the years.

  The facts are accurate, to the best of my knowledge. Some of them come not from my own remembrance but from news articles of the time as well as a book or two that was written about the case. A few bits and pieces I learned from her husband Bill not long before he moved with Gracie away from the Silver Spring area and vanished from my life.

  What I don’t know, of course, what I’ve imagined here, is what it was like to be Mona Straw. Her thoughts, her perceptions. And yet that seemed the only way to record this, the only way to make it worth recording. To, in a sense, become her. To try to understand what perhaps defies understanding.

  Is what I’ve written fiction, then? I don’t think so. It’s truth, but of a different sort.

  They made a movie about the case—they called it Savaging the Dark. Maybe you saw it. I had nothing to do with the film, other than getting a fee for it. It was quite a large fee. My father managed to spend a lot of it in the couple of years before he died, but enough was left that it put me through college. And they changed the names, so I didn’t have to cringe every time I told people my name was Connor Blue. Since I was a minor at the time my name rarely appeared in news reports about the case anyway, but it did leak out here and there on the Internet, which was a new thing then. Still, for most people “Mona Straw’s eleven-year-old kidnapping victim” was utterly anonymous. Nameless. Faceless.

  It was a pretty good movie. I saw it one afternoon by myself, just walked into a theater in the town where I was going to college, paid my admission and watched it. How accurate was it? Not very. But there were a few scenes, especially the early ones, when the Mona character—they called her “Mindy”—is getting to know the boy, “Colin,” that rang true, that touched soft bells of memory. Occasionally when I’m channel surfing I come across the film on cable even now, watch a few minutes of it. Generally it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me at all. I think Mona would have liked it, actually. It’s not High Sierra or Strangers on a Train, but it’s not bad. Roger Ebert gave it three stars.

  I’ve been back to Silver Spring a few times in the years since, sometimes alone, sometimes with my wife. I always visit Kylie McCloud’s grave, always place flowers before the headstone, and her mother’s next to it. But I don’t cry. It was simply too long ago and I just remember too little. The Kylie I’ve described here, in my Mona-narrative, is mostly fiction. She was small, she read a lot, she wore glasses that slipped down her nose. Beyond that it’s mostly a darkness to me. But I wonder. When I make up the details, are they just my imagination? Or are they actual memories returning to me, tugging at my mind’s sleeve?

  I don’t know.

  What I do know is that the movie got the end of the story completely wrong. Mona did not die in that violent shootout you saw on screen. Her end was much stranger than that. It turned out that the police weren’t even there for us; they had no idea who we were. Instead there had been an armed robbery nearby and the police were simply canvassing the area to see if there were any witnesses. That’s it. It had nothing to do with us. When she opened the door the policeman began to ask his routine questions but Mona’s hysterical laughter stopped him. Then he saw the gun in her hand, back-stepped fast, started to draw his own weapon. Mona ran. At some point she dropped the gun. Shrieking, screaming, she charged through the parking lot and out onto the busy road facing the motel. An SUV crashed into her.

  A silver key ring was found in the road, knocked from her pocket. It held a key to the handcuffs, and they used it to free me.

  I was in the hospital then, for a very long time. Several hospitals, actually.

  But in the end I came out and resumed my life. I went to a different school, a smaller one, a kind of therapeutic place. I liked it. I attended a regular high school and did as well as most. I met Linda—my wife, eventually—in college. Our first child, a daughter, is on the way.

  What do I do for a living? Oddly enough, I’m a CPA. That same math that was such a darkness to me in middle school opened up to me later, became strangely comforting and beautiful to me, maybe because it represented a world over which I could exert total control. I don’t know. It’s as good a theory as any. I’m happy enough in my job, anyway.

  I mentioned that I’ve revisited the Silver Spring area from time to time and stopped by Kylie McCloud’s grave. Until recently I’d never visited Mona’s, which is in a different cemetery, in Washington itself. Finally I did, not very long ago. It was a perfectly clear spring day, a l
ight breeze, very comfortable. I happened to find her parents’ stones first; then, next to them, her brother Michael’s. Finally hers. I stepped up to it, one of those simple gray plaques they embed in the lawn. It said Mona Straw along with her dates. That was all.

  I stood there in the lengthening shadows of an April afternoon looking down at the name, shifting the flowers I’d brought along from hand to hand. When I bought them I wasn’t sure I would leave them for her. Perhaps, I thought, I’d just place them on a random stranger’s grave and go. But as I stood there it felt right, somehow, to set them there, so I did. Half-a-dozen white roses. Nothing too fancy.

  I knew I would never come to her grave again.

  And yet I also knew that, in her way, Mona had loved me. Perhaps part of her—the sick, confused part—was really loving someone else, someone she lost, someone I resembled and whose sudden death had broken her, broken her for all time, even if she didn’t know it. But there was another part of her that truly loved me, loved me more than anyone should ever love another person.

  Again, I don’t know.

  But I cried for her then, the only time I’ve ever cried for her or ever will. And I cried for Kylie McCloud and her mother and Bill and Gracie and for all the loss, the damage, the irretrievable black years of my own life.

  When I was finished I knelt down and touched the flowers, ran my fingers across the engraved shapes of the letters of her name. Then I walked back to the parking lot, got into my car, and drove away.

  About the Author

  Christopher Conlon is best known as the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend, which was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club and which has appeared in multiple foreign translations. He is the author of several novels, including the Stoker Award finalists Midnight on Mourn Street and A Matrix of Angels, as well as five volumes of short stories, four books of poetry, and a play. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Conlon holds an M.A. in American Literature from the University of Maryland. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area. Visit him online at http:// christopherconlon.com.