“Well, this is easy.”
He began to move across like a tourist at an island fire walk.
John didn’t burn.
He felt as if he was in an asbestos suit, clumsy booted feet sliding through flames, hooded and visored head square as a movie robot’s. The fire was dancing tongues of scintilla. Colors in a twisting, splendid oil like taking a stroll through Saturn’s rings. No big deal.
He could almost forget that this wasn’t a scenario from a safely incandescent dream. He could almost forget he was a fireman there to rescue the little ones in the back bedroom on the second floor.
But John was no longer a fireman. He was a sad, haunted man moving in slow motion through spirit fire. It had only reminded him…because it was a sort of fire…
And because the kids had stopped crying and were screaming in an altogether different pitch.
John might not be burning but they were. They melted away from him like silk scarves tossed into a fireplace. They blistered, swelling and shrinking in turns, hair and play clothes igniting to shock blackly into instant ash, dripping like candle effigies of children. They blackened through their already savaged layers like stacks of wet newspaper until the steam turned the air a wormwood sepia.
John cursed and bent, wrapping his arms around the two that clutched at his trousers. Which was the way out? He could see only the writhing forms of the young ghosts, panicked shrieks causing hairline cracks along his skull. He leapt to one side and then jumped again, clearing the pit. He began to beat the flames out on the two he’d carried free, dismayed at the charred ravages on soul flesh, their naked bodies leaking mixtures of blood and water that shouldn’t exist in their state. How was that possible? They were dead and should have been beyond any further damage.
This was supposed to free them. Mr. Milk had promised.
It had sounded like a promise.
John readied himself to enter the fire again to pull others out. It was too late. The spirit fire was faster than any corporeal inferno. The screams of the little ones left behind as he saved these two were already vanished, faded. He turned back to the pair who had started crying again, fresh wounds roasted into them. One was the auburn-haired boy, most of that hair singed off close to the bone. The other was the girl with the pigtails, now a very Raggedy Ann.
John gathered them close to him, smelling the ruination. In a distance he heard an occasional childish sob, throbbing softly as if locked behind a closet door. It wasn’t the sound of a dying child but of a receding one, being carried to a place more remote than the dimension from which they had haunted John.
“I’m sorry!” he cried out. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. This time it really is my fault.”
“The bad man hurt us,” the boy’s ghost lisped in a whisper, still afraid someone would know he’d told.
“The bad man,” the girl’s ghost repeated.
It took John a moment to realize they meant Mr. Milk.
John lightly kissed each blistered cheek and stood up. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor. The two souls followed as he began to open the doors along the hallway. He opened the one he’d earlier seen ajar.
This was where Milk was. It was filled with mirrors and was even mirrored on the floor and ceiling. He wore his bone-white clothes, ivory hair flowing as he danced around, chattering in a litany.
“Julius Dalmatius, Aelia Galba, Flavius Plautus…”
John couldn’t believe his eyes. The mirrors reflected countless children pressed close together, wailing in fear and pain.
“Bernard le Camus, Jean Toutblanc, Jean Hubert, Guillaume Delit…”
They extended through walls to a point beyond them where John could no longer see except where the weight of their numbers pushed more confused faces into sight. Then the crowd slipped back to retreat beyond view again.
“Caleb Adams, Stephen Arnold, Patience Boston…”
Mr. Milk lifted a white shoed foot in the air, flapped his arms, jiggled and laughed as he babbled. Sometimes he merely lilted notes of wordless music but most were clearly names.
“Grace Budd, Billy Gafney, Charles A. Lindbergh…”
Infants were held by other children. The crying was plaintive. Some were almost teenagers, barely pubescent, still child-eyed and streaming back in more than a chain of souls. It was a tapestry of them woven out from Mr. Milk himself.
“Anne Frank, Gertrude Albermann, Kimberley Leach, Lesley Ann Downey…”
John’s hands gripped the door, seeing how the lights from the hall stabbed off the mirrors.
“Vanya Fosnin, Dima Ptashnikov…”
So many lovely faces, as every child born was a creature of infinite grace and hope, all screwed tightly into uncomprehending torment. And there were too many names he knew. Who hadn’t heard of the Lindbergh baby? Of Anne Frank?
There were others John had read about when he’d done a study on child killers throughout history. When he was on that serial killer case. The one he never solved. He’d read everything he could get his hands on. Grace Budd had been a victim of cannibal Albert Fish in the 1930’s. Gertrude Albermann had been killed in the 1920’s by the Dusseldorf Vampire, Peter Kurten. There were names associated with beasts like Bundy and Kallinger and Chikatilo. Atrocities from the British Moor Murders and the Atlanta Child Murders. Even the names le Camus, Toutblanc, Hubert: young victims of nobleman Gilles de Rais in the fifteenth century who’d fought alongside Joan of Arc and then slaughtered hundreds of innocents in perverse rites.
How did Mr. Milk have all these children attached to him? Could he acquire the spirit baggage of these past butchers?
Or could he be all of them, from some demented criminal in ancient Rome through medieval Europe, Russia, here? With his shelves of milk cartons.
Some of my success stories.
He didn’t need mirrors to see them. He had the mirrors so he could watch himself reflected with them. He danced, seeing the trapped martyrs he’d hoarded the way other misers kept gold. He repeated their names, rolling off his tongue in ragtime and rote. He used snatches of music to represent those who had been nameless and unbaptized. He cavorted and grinned and drew them around him like a demonic Mr. Rogers. “Yusef and Joey and Polly!”
John felt that badge against his heart, felt a windshield shatter before his face, the fireman’s helmet smothering and blinding him to the right direction through the smoke. He rushed into the room and threw himself at the magician, knocking him to the floor. The spirits rippled. John grabbed two handfuls of the gleaming white hair and wrapped it into whips around Milk’s neck. It crushed in strands of spun glass beneath his fingers. John pressed against the stem of the windpipe and watched the man’s eyes widen.
“Liar,” John seethed. “You bastard. Boogie man.”
The face shifted. It flowed like flesh melting in fire—only without blisters or blackening. It became a hundred different faces, a thousand of them. One of them was even the gunman from the school who had looked like John. All of them grinned and grimaced and hissed out names of dead children. The eyes then went black without bulging the way John expected them to. They winked out, leaving obsidian spaces. The throat didn’t snap but sagged, caving in bonelessly. There wasn’t even cartilage to crack.
John pulled back from the scarecrow sack of dead boogie man. He wiped his hands on his shirt, surprised to find them so dry.
The two burned kids from John’s haunting stopped crying. The children reflected back in the mirrors stopped, too. Here and there a few tears squeezed out, and a few hiccups. They pressed close to the mirrors as if checking to make sure Milk was dead. That the bad man wasn’t going to hurt them anymore.
Was that it? Was the murdering of children everywhere stopped? Would no child ever suffer again?
John doubted it. Mr. Milk would be back in some form or another. They always came back, no matter how many times they were hanged or burned at the stake or put in an electric chair.
John had killed this o
ne. Did it free the beast’s victims?
They began to cry again in a chain reaction. Their images turned shadowy—dark holes appearing in rents. John remembered his dream where they were lost and beyond reach. Their voices wisped, receding back to closets, to boxes below ground without light, without company or touch. The red-haired boy and the pigtailed girl clung to him as if they knew what was happening to the children in the mirrors.
They tugged on his coat. “Mr. Piper? Please?”
John stepped forward and slapped his hands to the mirrors. “No! Don’t go there! Stay with me if you have no place left!”
The shadowing stopped. The night ceased poking holes in them. They whimpered and mewled but they began to leave the mirrors.
His closed his eyes and sighed. Thousands of small hands—perfect or bruised, cut or beaten or burned—touched him. Under the stench of blood and ashes was a hint of milk and spring grass tugging at him in a tidal crush that begged for his compassion.
“Well,” he said as he struggled to stay on his feet from their weight, knowing he’d have to learn to walk again under this pressure, “someone has to love Hamlin’s children.”
| — | — |
ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT
She had dark men and dead men in her delirium.
Belle opened her eyes.
She stared for a moment at the stagecoach seats, the leather brown with tobacco stains. She could hear the rolling of the wheels. The hooves of the horses struck the ground with the near perfect synchronization of a team used to running together. The top of the stage creaked.
How long had she been aboard? Did she remember climbing on?
She gazed out the window to her left. In the distance was a lone man on horseback, little more than a black silhouette. Belle wondered if this was her stranger, the dark man of her abstraction.
But it had been years since she’d last seen him. It had been a lifetime since the first meeting.
Belle closed her eyes, drifting back into sleep helplessly.
««—»»
“She’s only thirteen, Irma,” Granny Gettings was saying as she stirred a pot of grits on the iron pot-belly.
Belle’s mother was using a sorry-looking broom to sweep dead grasshoppers out of the soddy. They had died up in the mud and grass roof overnight when the season’s first real cold snap came. She cast an irritable glance over at the old woman and muttered, “Lots of girls get husbands at her age. And Elias Sedeen’s got water rights we need.”
“If you can call that muddy hole on his farm water,” Granny replied. “Just don’t seem right. There be some folks who reckon was no accident caused his first wife’s death.”
Belle overheard this as she carried the buckets toward the oversized lean-to that served as their barn. There were two men riding up to the house. Her mother came to the doorway and set her broom aside. She wiped sweaty hands on her long apron. Belle ignored the visitors, anxious to set the heavy buckets down.
“Hallo! Mrs. Gettings?” one of them cried. The star on his coat flashed crookedly in the sun. “You see any riders out this way this mornin’? The stage met up with a road agent.”
Belle trudged into the barn and set the buckets of feed down. There was a dry castanet rattle that made her jump. A diamond-back snake was coiling to strike. An arm darted from a shadow and snatched it at the base of its skull with one hand. A knife emerged held in the other hand to quickly severed the venomous head. He pocketed this as Belle started to run. The man grabbed her. He slipped a palm across her mouth.
A voice whispered, “Please be quiet, Miss. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
He pressed close to her. He appeared to be listening to the conversation outside. His black horse snorted softly behind him.
Belle blinked, taking in the measure of the man’s broad shoulders and uncommonly tall frame. The eyes were dark with long lashes—all she could see for the mask. It wasn’t just a half mask like the rich wore over the tops of their faces at masquerade balls nor was it the bandanna that some bandits tied across the lower half. It was a full dramatic piece, molded delicately until the features provided a handsome disguise. It was lacquered in black, the eyes and lips outlined in scarlet as if slightly bleeding.
“Something precious was taken from the stage,” one of the lawmen in the yard told Belle’s mother. Or did Belle hear it wrong?
“I could easily have let you get bit,” the dark man breathed into Belle’s ear. “I probably should have. You were meant to get bit by that rattler. But I didn’t let it happen. I spared you instead. So will you be silent for me?”
She nodded. He took his hand away but continued to hold her next to him so she couldn’t flee.
“So what’s this outlaw look like?” her mother asked the visitors.
All Belle could make out was the word mask.
The law rode away. The stranger held her a few minutes longer but his grasp was gentle, not restraining. She sensed him smiling through the ornate camouflage. His body was disturbingly warm.
He sighed and murmured, “Swiftly walk o’er the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, which make thee terrible and dear…”
Belle trembled, not convinced it was completely in fright. What he spoke was poetry and she recognized it. It was from Percy Shelley. Had there ever been anyone more romantic than Shelley?
The stranger talked like one of those actors she saw in a play once in Tucson. But he wasn’t in fancy clothes with lace cuffs and a long cape. He was in the coat, boots, and trousers of most fellows found on the road these days. They were either riding up to Fort Bowie to join sides in the war between the states—-now in its third year—or deserting because they’d had enough of it. The only difference was that his suit was a hard black, like the mask.
He cupped her chin to tilt her face up, brushing aside wisps of her chestnut hair. He then planted a kiss on her mouth. The visor’s leather was as soft against her as her own lips.
“Someday I will take you away,” he said.
The man released her. He mounted the horse, ducking as he rode through the low opening of the lean-to. He turned to Belle and waved before riding off.
She waved back, the imprints of dark man and dark horse burned onto her retinas. She’d dreamed suitors before but never one the law was actually seeking. She wondered, why didn’t he take her now?
««—»»
Belle opened her eyes. The coach was crossing a shallow black river. The sand on the bottom clutched at the wheels like dead men’s hands.
The top creaked. It was probably piled high with sacks of mail and maybe even a treasure box full of gold. Belle assumed her baggage was up there as well. Did she even have baggage? (Doesn’t everyone? she thought.)
People might even be riding up there; they often did.
Belle considered this. No, folks only piled up top if all the seats in the coach were occupied. She was the only one in here. And if there were people up there, they would be talking to each other—leastwise from time to time.
There was no conversation. There was just the groaning of the ceiling under a ponderous weight. It made her feel claustrophobic. She gasped for breath. Would she stop breathing altogether?
She looked out the window again. Was her stranger still out there, poetry in his mouth and rattler heads in his pockets?
There was a man on horseback and he was closer than before. But it wasn’t her rider. It was an Apache. And the horse wasn’t dark; it was an Appaloosa.
Belle sighed deeply, sure she should be more anxious. But everything was a blur. It did seem as if her bodice had suddenly shrunk till it was two sizes too small for her. Was the stage about to be attacked? Shouldn’t she scream? Did she have the energy to scream?
A terrifying name roared through her ears, Cochise. He’d been captured by General Crook long ago. He was dead now. But did that mean that all Apaches were on the Chiricahua Reservation?
She struggled to slowly go from window to window, looking for other Indians. Even if she didn’t find them, did that mean they weren’t out there? The white man may have taken it over, but this had been their desert. They knew it better than anyone and could hide in it better than everyone.
In truth, it was still theirs. It always would be.
“Driver! There’s an Indian out there!” Belle cried, the effort to make any sound almost more than she could manage. It actually surprised her that she could summon enough interest to be concerned about imminent danger.
There was no response.
“Do you see him?” she called.
He probably had and just didn’t answer her because it was only one distant Indian. The drivers were famous for their unwillingness to speak to passengers. They had a job to do, a timetable to keep, and were surly besides.
Belle settled back into her seat and shivered, remotely cold. She closed her eyes and thought about Cochise. She drifted back to sleep again.
««—»»
Belle winced as she bent to lift little Marcus into his crib. There was a raging pain in her right side, sharp and jabbing. Elias must have actually cracked a rib this time. She wasn’t even sure what she’d done to annoy him. It was so easy to make him angry.
She was afraid one day soon her husband would begin to strike the baby. She’d already lost two—miscarriages due to Elias’s temper. She was eighteen and had been married to him for five years. Three children conceived—only one making it to be born.
The neighbors noticed how she moved in pain. And there were bruises on her cheeks she couldn’t hide. No one said anything but there were pitying glances. They did, of course, have more important things on their minds.
They were all gathered at the Sedeen place, getting ready to trek en masse to Fort Bowie where they hoped the army could protect them. Cochise had been raiding again, killing settlers and setting places ablaze. Folks were scared to stay put. Perhaps their only chance to make it out was to travel together as an armed group.
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