The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “You know there’s no record of Bobby ever being treated by Henderson?”

  She said nothing.

  “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?” he asked.

  “Probably he destroyed them,” she answered. “Why keep records of your failures? Or maybe he just hid them.”

  Metger was silent a second. Then: “The other day you said something to me about children being killed. Something like that.”

  “Did I?”

  “Outside the supermarket. You remember?”

  “I might,” she said. Her face was tight, like a closed fist.

  “What did you mean when you said that?”

  “I don’t remember.” She turned over the palms of her hands. “I don’t always remember things I say, Sheriff.”

  “It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget easily,” he said. Why had he come here anyhow? he wondered. It seemed to him suddenly that he was lost, that somewhere along the way he’d misplaced his maps, his sense of direction. If there were arrows he was meant to follow, if there were a spoor he was supposed to catch, they were indetectable. “You must have had something on your mind to make you say what you did, Florence.”

  Florence Hann adjusted the cuffs of her gray wool cardigan, a shapeless garment that hung around her thin body in deep folds and hollows.

  “What difference does it make anyway?” she asked. “My son died. I live with that thought every day of my life. You have any idea what that’s like? Living with one thought all the time?”

  Metger moved toward the fireplace. He turned, facing the opposite wall—he saw what it was that had taken Florence Hann’s attention before.

  In frames, bleak beneath dull glass, there were half a dozen or so photographs of Bobby Hann hanging against the floral wallpaper. They showed—like jump cuts in a strip of film—the deterioration of the child. A normal baby. A normal two-year-old. A Christmas picture showing young Bobby sitting beneath a tree of lights surrounded by wrapped packages; his eyes were red from the camera flash. But he was normal. There was no sign of any illness. No connection between these pictures and the last two that hung on the wall.

  The last pair were dreadful.

  Metger couldn’t look. He turned his face to the side and shut his eyes briefly and he thought, People are lying to me in this town, people are falsifying or destroying records. In this small town there’s some kind of darkness that lies beneath the lights, something scurrying away into unlit corners.…

  “Try, Florence. Try to remember.”

  Florence Hann sat down. She held her hands, palms outward, toward the fireplace, as if she thought she might get some heat from the long-dead ashes.

  She wished the cop hadn’t come here, dredging the past the way he wanted to. Trawling old waters. She stuck a poker into the ashes, twisted it around, saw a pink spark rise up into the hollowed-out dark of the chimney. Try to remember, she thought.

  Remember what? Memory had no purpose to it.

  Wherever memory went, there were only sinewy trails of pain.

  “People come here all the time,” she said.

  “Come where? To this house?”

  “To Carnarvon,” she said. “They come and they keep coming. They don’t know, do they?”

  “What don’t they know?”

  She covered her face with her hands. “They don’t know about the children.”

  “Suppose you tell me,” Metger said. He bent down, staring directly into the woman’s face. He felt hot suddenly—a film of warm sweat lay across the surface of his skin. He placed one hand on her cheek and turned her face toward him. But she kept her eyes averted. They were dull and secretive and directed inward.

  “Why don’t you tell me about the children, Florence?”

  “They get sick,” she said.

  She had the strange sensation all at once of Bobby’s small shriveled hand held inside her own—a phantom hand, wrinkled, clutching, desperate.

  “Why do they get sick, Florence? Why does it happen?”

  She stood up briskly. She moved toward the photographs. She looked at them for a while. Now she couldn’t feel Bobby’s hand anymore. Instead, there was a terrible emptiness within her, a hollow where her heart should have been.

  Metger went toward her. The photographs captured his attention again. Bobby Hann’s eyes had a look of inestimable sadness. They stared out at Metger with a pathetic resignation. There was a patch of light on the boy’s bare skull and the ears protruded slightly. The skin around the mouth was puckered, drawn into a hundred little lines.

  Metger suddenly thought about Anthea Ackerley and the way she’d looked in death and the white hairs matted with freshly spilled blood and the way her hands had been.

  He laid his palms on Florence Hann’s bony shoulders.

  “Does the name Caskie mean anything to you?”

  She didn’t speak.

  “Caskie,” he said again. “Sammy Caskie.”

  She was silent a moment. She strolled to the window and patted the curtain and stared out into the dark street. Then she turned around to face him and asked, “Do you have your car outside, Sheriff?”

  “My car?” Puzzled, he nodded. “Sure.”

  “Take me for a drive.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  She was already stepping out into the hallway, plucking an overcoat from a rack that sat just inside the front door.

  He followed her outside.

  When they reached the car he opened the passenger door for her and she climbed in.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked again.

  “I’ll give you directions,” she answered.

  He gazed at her face a second. What was it there? Some form of resolve? Purpose? Or just a surge of madness? He got in behind the wheel, drumming his fingers on the rim and waiting for her instructions.

  “St. Mary’s Road,” she said.

  He knew then where they were headed.

  Dennis Untermeyer woke. His bedside lamp was still lit. He rubbed his eyes, then gazed at his hands under the soft glow of the light.

  The nails looked dull and the tiny half-moons were almost gone and the hands themselves appeared bloodless. He brought them back to his side, smuggled them under the blanket. The inside of his mouth was dry. His gums seemed to ache. What had wakened him? He couldn’t remember dreaming.

  He swung his legs out of the bed, dangling them against the rug. He was oddly breathless, the way he sometimes felt when old Mittelmann, the PE instructor, made his class run six pointless laps of the football field. He needed water; he felt dehydrated.

  His attention was drawn a moment to the photograph under the lamp. As he stared at the picture he thought he could actually feel the texture of the clothing Dick and Charlotte were wearing, all the small threads and stitches and the depths of the folds. He thought, too, that he could hear the steamship’s horn in the background—the low, throaty sound emerging from the vicinity of the funnel. He rubbed his eyes again. When you woke suddenly from sleep you were always kind of spacey and you imagined all manner of things.

  He stepped out of bed. He had the feeling the Summers were observing him from the picture. Their eyes appeared to track him. He cracked his knuckles as he moved across the room and out into the hallway, where it was dark save for the small light glowing over the stove in the kitchen. He peered at it, trying to find his bearings. From the upper part of the house he heard the steady drone of Max snoring.

  Dennis went inside the bathroom. He filled a glass with water and drank it quickly, spilling the liquid down the front of his pajamas in his haste. The breathlessness he’d felt before was still there, like a claw inside his chest. He took a Vicks inhaler out of the medicine cabinet and inserted it into one nostril and he breathed as deeply as he could, feeling the stuff tickle his nasal passages. It helped for a moment.

  Then he removed his pajama jacket—it was damp and unpleasant against his skin—and he twisted around to examine his back in the
mirror. It was difficult but he managed to get a look at the marks his mother had mentioned before. They were red now, and they crisscrossed his flesh like the welts that might have been left there after a whipping, but they didn’t hurt. They simply itched. Charlotte’s fingernails, he thought. He hadn’t felt anything at the time.

  Dennis stepped out of the bathroom. He paused at the foot of the stairs. He stared in the direction of the stove light—a dark moth beat against the glow in a useless, panicky fashion. Outside, a sudden outburst of wind shook the trees and branches rattled against the side of the house. Dennis moved down the dark hallway and opened the front door. On the porch he breathed the night air into his lungs—he felt like he was choking, like his lungs were suddenly shriveled little things lying prunelike in his chest.

  The moon, sucked behind black clouds, threw out a thin light. Dennis gripped the porch rail. The wind came up again, like some big playful dog, and the trees swayed. There was a hint of rain in the air. Tiny drops of moisture struck his face. An owl screamed in the distance. Dennis, who decided that this night—replete with the trappings of a horror movie, owls and whispering trees and black clouds masking a moon—wasn’t quite to his liking, went back indoors.

  Inside his bedroom he sat for a while on the edge of the mattress. He looked at the bait in the glass jar. Maggots, stirred up by the light from the lamp, crawled all over the inner surface of the jar. As he watched he breathed slowly and deeply, trying to fill his lungs with air, but the restricted feeling persisted. Making a fist of his hand, he struck himself on his rib cage, as if a decent blow might open up clogged passageways. He wondered if maybe he was allergic to something. Between the ages of one and seven he’d been allergic to pollen and cat’s fur, he remembered this now, but he’d grown out of them the way his dad had said he would. Had allergies returned to plague him?

  He punched himself again, feeling kind of idiotic as he did so. Boy brutalizes self in effort to breathe! Sighing, he let his hands dangle against his thighs.

  He was sleepy now. He started to lay his head down when he observed strands of his own hair spread across the pillow. Seven or eight sinewy hairs. How could he be going bald at the age of twelve! What was he—some kind of freak!

  He smiled, brushing the hairs aside. He realized that what he should have done was wash his hair after Charlotte had cut it—if you didn’t do that, you were bound to get loose ends.

  He closed his eyes and lay very still. His breathing was shallow and there was a wheeze in his chest. He listened to himself, annoyed with the noise he was making. He yawned and thought, Sleep, beam me up.

  Beyond the railroad tracks the narrow road climbed up. It was used mainly by two kinds of vehicles: cars that transported lovers to the furtive leafy places alongside the edges of the road—and hearses. Metger turned on his full beams. Beside him Florence Hann’s face was a dark silhouette. The limbs of trees flapped against the windshield.

  Ahead, at the crest of the hill, the cemetery came in view. Headstones, catching the lamps of the car, stretched backward into shadows. Then there was gravel and the sound of the tires crunching and Florence Hann was telling him to park. He switched off the engine, pushed his door open, listened to the silences of the night all around him.

  “You got a flashlight?” she asked.

  He rummaged in the glove compartment. It was a big rubber flashlight with a strong beam.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Now we walk, Sheriff.”

  Metger stood on the gravel, the flashlight glowing in front of him. Florence Hann, as if she knew this place intimately, as if she carried around a mental map to the intricacies of the pathways, was striding ahead of him into the darkness. He hurried to keep up with her, thinking, Why here? Why this place in the dead of goddamn night? Below, between slats of trees, there were lights casting an eerie yellow glow along the central strip of Carnarvon.

  “Keep moving like that, Florence, and I’ll lose you,” he said.

  She stopped some way in front of him. In the beam of his light her face was white, her eyes dark smudges. She put one hand up to her eyes. “You trying to blind me?” she said.

  He turned the light away.

  Through the silences he was suddenly conscious of a sound coming from a distance behind him. It was the noise of weight pressing against chips of gravel, a muted slurring of small stones.

  He listened, his head tilted, even as he was aware of Florence Hann calling out to him.

  “Come on,” she was saying. “Come on. It’s this way.”

  The noise stopped. You’re spooked, Metger, he thought. Even at your age, boneyards spook you after dark. He started to move after Florence Hann when he heard a sound again and once more he stopped, turning his flashlight through the dark. The beam, like some big white knife, cut across headstones and through patches of shrubbery, but he couldn’t see anything out there even though he had the impression of a presence some yards back.

  Shrugging, he followed the woman.

  They were going deeper into the cemetery. Florence Hann’s overcoat brushed the edges of stones and Metger thought she was like a demented bat, a creature accustomed to that awful combination of darkness and death.

  Now a night wind was rising out of the earth, reshaping the shadowy trees around them. And still the woman was hurrying, as if she had the gift of night sight and didn’t need Metger’s rubber flashlight. Breathing hard, he caught up to her again. He reached out and gripped her elbow and she swung around to face him.

  “Where are we going, Florence? Where exactly are we going?”

  She shook her arm free, turning away from him. She said nothing. She just kept walking, weaving among the graves, and Metger scurried behind her. Madness, he thought. Madness and all its devious forms.

  But now she was slowing. And then she was standing perfectly still, looking from side to side, her hands sunk deep in the pockets of her long overcoat.

  “Over here,” Florence Hann said. “Give me some light over this way.”

  Metger did so. A splash of white light fell on a small gray marker, which was surrounded by weeds. The woman went down on her knees, working her fingers through the clumps of weeds, hauling them out of the earth, or pushing them aside when she couldn’t tug them from the soil. As he watched her he was aware yet again of another presence nearby. Nervously, he looked behind—but there was nothing, nobody, just the wind scouring the surfaces of the headstones and whispering harshly.

  Florence Hann raised her face toward him. She stood upright. Metger could smell the ripe soil on her skin, the perfume of broken stalks of weeds that the ground had released.

  He understood that he was meant to look at the stone at his feet. He bent down, turned his light on the granite, read the pale simple inscription cut there in Gothic script.

  SAMUEL S. CASKIE

  1935–1942

  He stood up, looking at Florence Hann, seeing the dark outlines of her face. He was silent—the wind blew against his face and hair, filled his nostrils. He was aware of the woman’s hand reaching out to touch his arm. An odd sadness swept through him, a sensation of something broken deep inside. Sammy Caskie, aged six. The kid his dad had called “Old Sammy.”

  “Tell me about him,” he said. “Tell me about Sammy Caskie.”

  The wind whipped at the woman’s hair. “What is there to tell? The thing that killed Bobby killed this child too.” She shrugged in the darkness.

  “What thing, Florence?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have a name, Sheriff. Sure, there’s some fancy name doctors give it … but that’s not its real name.”

  “What is its real name?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer his question. She made a sighing sound.

  “How did you know about this grave?” he asked.

  “I looked for it.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw this boy once. I was twelve years old. I remember thinking how funny he looked. I remember seeing him look out of the
window of a passing car and I laughed because …” She paused, pushing windblown hair from her eyes. “Because, goddamnit, he looked funny. I was a kid, I didn’t know any better. And kids are cruel. They were cruel to Bobby, at least.”

  Metger wanted more. But it was tricky now because she was drifting in the direction of her own tragedy and when she entered that dark center she might never come out again. He rubbed the back of her arm with the palm of his hand.

  “What else do you remember about Sammy Caskie?”

  She turned her face toward him and in the oblique angle of the flashlight her eyes were the only things visible in her face. “After he died his family went away. They left Carnarvon. I seem to recall they went back to the Midwest, where they came from, but that’s vague and I wouldn’t swear to it.… Anyhow, they left. Nobody ever saw them again. It was like they wanted to bury the child here in this place and just walk away from the memory of his existence.… You can’t do that, though, Sheriff. You can’t ever just walk away. You can try but you never get very far. Believe me. I know.”

  Metger shook his head slowly. He stared through the trees. The town, hidden from view, was nothing more than a faint electrical dust in the darkness.

  “What else do you remember, Florence?”

  “They said the boy was perfectly normal when the family first came to Carnarvon. That’s what I heard.”

  An echo, Metger thought. Wasn’t that what Ackerley had implied? That Anthea changed after she’d come to Carnarvon? Suddenly the darkness was like a maze to him and he was stumbling through it with all the elegance of a blind man.

  She stepped toward the stone. She observed it silently a moment.

  “Miles Henderson said it was a rare disease. When Bobby first showed the signs of it he said it was a one-in-a-million thing. One in ten million. I don’t remember. He said it was so rare there were barely any studies about it. And nobody had a cure.…”