by Ronald Kelly
Tommy Lang was gone.
Cindy’s heart sank. Her father must have scared him off.
She thought of the boy with the dark hair, brown eyes, and easygoing smile, and felt a twinge of anxiety. A peculiar sensation settled in the pit of her belly; like a swarm of butterflies trying to take flight, but instead careening off the inner walls of her stomach.
He was just a silly old boy, she told herself. A runaway, more’n likely. Nobody you need to be trifling with.
But, walking back toward the house, she had a hard time convincing herself that what she was telling herself was the God-honest truth.
By Friday afternoon, they had located nine bodies.
Five were missing girls that the FBI had files on, while four weren’t. The victims that they had no information on seemed to bother Agents Upchurch and Moore to no end. I reckon I’m upsetting their perfectly-balanced investigation, she thought, not without an underlying smidgen of satisfaction. In her eyes, the girls who hadn’t been reported were every bit as important as those who had.
The sun was beginning to drop to the west, when Cindy stepped on a patch of earth halfway across the field and felt a jolt run through her, from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. Then, abruptly, time and place shifted.
“Need a ride home?”
“I…I really shouldn’t,” she said, still walking along the roadside, trying to ignore the man in the pickup truck. She remembered how her mother always warned her about steering clear of strangers. She walked a little faster, her school books held tightly against her chest. She still had a half mile to go.
“Come on… I ain’t gonna hurt you none.” The sky rumbled with distant thunder, followed by a few stray raindrops. “Better get in or you’ll be soaked to the bone.”
The rainfall began to intensify. She knew he was right. Against her better judgment, she opened the passenger door of the old Ford and climbed inside. The second she was inside, the heavens opened and the rural countryside was enveloped in a drenching downpour.
“See? Now accepting my generosity turned out to be a good idea after all.”
“Uh, I reckon so.” She pointed through the rain-speckled windshield. “I live a half mile up the road. The white house with the picket fence out front.”
The man shifted into gear and sent the truck heading up the road. He held a Coca Cola bottle out to her. “Want a drink?”
The girl licked her lips. It had been a month of Sundays since she’d had a cold drink. “I better not.”
“Go ahead,” he urged. “I haven’t drunk from it yet. Just popped the top a minute before I happened upon you.”
Timidly, the girl took the bottle of pop. She took a drink and grimaced. “It doesn’t taste right. Bitter.”
The driver shrugged. “Just went flat, I reckon. Oughta go back to that country store and get my nickel back.”
Thirty seconds later, the girl knew that she had made a bad mistake. Her vision began to swim and her arms and legs grew heavy and sluggish. “What… did you do to me? What did you put in that drink?”
She tried to reach out to open the door, perhaps to attempt escape, but she couldn’t seem to find the handle. Her heart sank as they passed her house. Her mother was in the side yard, quickly trying to take down the clothes she had pinned to the drying line. She wanted to yell out, to cry for help, but she simply couldn’t find the strength.
With some effort, she turned her head toward the driver of the truck. He smiled at her, but it wasn’t the good-natured grin he had displayed before. This time there was cruelty to his smile, as well as something dark and dangerous in his stone gray eyes.
She began to cry as his free hand ran up her thigh and disappeared within the folds of her skirt.
“We’re gonna have such a good time… just you and me.”
Again, Cindy found herself on the earth; this time lying on her side, knees curled toward her chest. “The bastard,” she muttered. “The ugly, evil bastard.” Her fingers clawed at the earth, as if trying to gouge the eyes of Bully Hanson out of his smug, grinning face.
Sandra knelt beside the teenager. She refrained from reaching out to her. The woman had discovered that it only hampered the girl’s readings, or visions, or whatever they were. “Cindy?” she asked softly, holding her fountain pen expectantly over her steno pad.
The girl looked up at her, tears streaming down her face. “Elsie Baxter. Mount Ansel, North Carolina.” She sobbed softly, anguish in her hazel eyes. “She was twelve years old, Miss Sandra. Only twelve!”
“Humph,” grumbled Moore beneath his breath. “Another stray cat.”
“Cindy,” said Agent Upchurch, crouching next to her. “Cindy… do you think you could find some of the girls that we are specifically looking for?”
The sorrow in Cindy’s eyes turned into rage. “Does it matter that she wasn’t in one of your precious files?” she snapped, climbing weakly to her feet. “She was a poor, defenseless child! She was walking home from school and he took her and violated her!” The sixteen-year-old approached Upchurch, causing him to back up a few steps. “Do you want to know what he did to her once he brought her here? Do you! Because I can! I can tell you every horrible, nasty, hideous thing he did to poor little Elsie!”
The FBI agent swallowed dryly, at a loss of words. “I think we ought to knock off for today. Cindy needs her rest.”
“I’d say so,” Clay Biggs said. He embraced his daughter and his heart ached as she leaned limply against him, weeping forcefully against his chest. “Let me give you fellas a bit of advice. Start treating every one of these girls that Cindy’s finding for you like they were your own long-lost daughters. Each one was as important as the other. If you don’t want to do that, then me and my daughter will step back onto that train to Tennessee and you’ll still have a field of corpses, with no earthly idea on how to pinpoint their whereabouts.”
“I apologize if I sounded insensitive, Mr. Biggs,” Upchurch told him. “It’s just a little frustrating that most of these girls that are being exhumed aren’t the ones we are actually looking for.”
“Don’t you think it’s frustrating for Cindy, as well? Good Lord, man, she’s not just finding these girls for you, she’s feeling and experiencing everything that they did. Their fears, their despair, their agony. And it sure as hell is taking a toll on her, too. We’ve only been here a couple of days and it looks like she’s already lost a pound or two. Honestly, I don’t know how much longer she can do this.”
Cindy mumbled something into her father’s shirtfront.
“What’s that, pumpkin?” Clay asked, pulling away.
“I said, I can do it for as long as it takes,” his daughter told him. Her moist eyes were full of determination. “I’m the only strength these poor girls have now. They can’t climb out of the grave under their own power, so I have to help them… even if it hurts me in doing so.”
Later that evening, after supper, Cindy slipped away from the others and made her way, unseen, across the shadowy pasture, to the stone wall. For some reason, she wasn’t at all surprised to see Tommy Lang sitting there in the same spot he had occupied earlier that day.
“Howdy, Miss Cindy,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
I’ve missed you, too, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “Have you been out here all day, hiding? Did you see me at my work?”
The boy’s smile faded and he nodded solemnly. “And grim work it is, from the looks of it. I watched them dig the bones out and stick ’em in those wooden crates.”
Cindy suddenly felt self-conscious under his gaze. “So, what do you think of me now? After you saw what I can do?”
“I’d say you’re mighty special for doing it,” he said. “Makes me want to jump down and give you that kiss even more.”
“Then why don’t you?” she asked boldly. She thought better of her question an instant later and regretted challenging him. If he did make a move toward her, she would likely cut and run like a frightened doe.
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br /> But Tommy remained where it was. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t come right over there and give you a big ol’ smooch on the lips.”
Cindy planted her fists on her narrow hips. “Could be that you’re just plain lazy.”
The boy chuckled and extended the palms of his hands. They were thick with calluses. “Do these look like the hands of a slouch to you?”
“What… have you been working at one of the local farms or something?”
“Naw.” His smile grew broader, until it nearly looked too big for his lean face. “I got me a job digging ditches.”
“Well, you didn’t dig no ditches today, if’n you were in the thicket yonder, spying on me,” she told him.
Tommy Lang simply sat there, staring at her. “Yeah, I certainly oughta try to steal a kiss. Or play you a pretty song. I’m right good on the harmonica, if I do say so myself.” His smile upended into a frown. “Only I lost mine a while back.”
“Well, find it and you can play me that song,” she said coyly. “And if I like it, I might just let you have that kiss.”
“Hot dog!” he said with a laugh. Then he swung his legs over the stone wall and disappeared into the thicket and the gloom of dusk.
Later that night, after her father had drifted to sleep, Cindy quietly left the back porch, careful not to let the screen door squeal on its rusted hinges. Barefoot, she padded across the earth to the glow of the trailer’s campfire. Dr. Polyak sat there, hunched before the flames, watching them listlessly. She could tell, not only by the sadness on his face, but his very thoughts, that his mind was thousands of miles away in a hell called Mauthausen.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked softly.
Polyak jumped. He looked up at her and smiled, embarrassed. “You startled me, Fräulein. But what couldn’t startle a man on a parcel of land such as this? One so full of death and lost dreams.”
She sat on the ground on the opposite side of the fire from the forensic anthropologist. “You were thinking about…” She closed her eyes for a hesitant second, and then reopened them. “About Ward 7.”
A haunted expression shown in the middle-aged man’s weary eyes. “Yes. Ward 7. The laboratories of Doctor Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll all rolled up into one, with the playground of Baal and Beelzebub thrown in for bad measure. It was to be my turn… the day following my escape. They were to open my head and extract a fragment of my frontal lobe, perhaps even more.” His eyes returned to the dancing flames of the fire. “Sometimes I wonder what sort of man I would have become if they had succeeded. Or, rather, what sort of slavering, thoughtless creature.”
“Monsters like Ziereis, like Bully Hanson, can tear down one’s body and mind,” Cindy told him, “but they can’t conquer one’s soul. That is forever beyond their grasp.”
Doctor Polyak removed his eyeglasses and studied the sixteen-year-old. “Such wisdom and bravery in such a young girl. How have you come to possess such gifts in such a short period of time?”
Cindy matched his gaze, sadness showing in her youthful eyes. “By staring death nakedly in the face, Doctor. Time and time and time again.”
Polyak shook his head and stirred at the flames with a long stick. “I wish you had never been brought here. You don’t deserve the grief that has been foisted upon you… as well as the insolence and disrespect displayed by that pair of buffoons in tailored suits.”
“Upchurch and Moore? They’re just doing their jobs.”
“They’re twiddling their thumbs and drawing a nice, fat paycheck,” Polyak told her. “You are the one doing all the work. And doing a fine job of it, too.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly, not quite sure that it was a skill to be particularly proud of.
A minute later, the Hungarian spoke again. “I have been meaning to ask a favor of you.”
“Of course,” said Cindy. “Anything.”
He stood up, ducked inside the oval doorway of the trailer, and emerged with something cupped in the palm of his hand. He held the object out to her. It was a fragment of bone; about four inches long and brown with age.
“Would you mind telling me your impressions of this?” he asked, almost sheepishly. “I know it is silly, but it was one of my first discoveries when I studied anthropology as a young university student. There were fragments of ancient pottery in the same vicinity, as well as stone arrowheads and tools.”
Cindy reached out and took the sliver of bone. Instantly, impressions flooded her young mind. “This belonged to a man. Different from men today… very brutal, very primitive. He was in his mid-thirties, I believe, strong and a great hunter. He went upon the plains to find meat for his family, but he met a violent end at the mercy of some great beast. A huge cat with long fangs.”
Polyak’s eyes twinkled. “A sabertooth tiger!”
Cindy nodded. She handed the relic back to the doctor. “How did I do?”
“Excellently!” He stared at the piece of bone and then reverently stuck it in the pocket of his britches. “I thank you kindly for that, Fräulein. More than you could know.”
Again, their conversation lapsed into silence. When it resumed, it was Polyak that spoke. “You know, I have heard you out there, in the pastureland. In the morning and late in the evening… talking to someone.”
Alarm shown in the girl’s eyes. “It was… just a friend,” she stammered nervously. “Please, don’t tell Pappy about it. I’m not sure if he would be very understanding. When it comes to me, he’s mighty protective, like a grumpy ol’ bear protecting its cub.”
Polyak smiled and nodded, but the expression in his eyes was peculiar. “I will keep what I have heard to myself,” he assured her. “But my advice to you, Cynthia Ann, is to take care. Watch yourself and do not let anything deter you from the work you have been brought here to do. It is extremely important work… much more so than even you realize.”
His words made the girl feel a little uncomfortable. She stood up and rubbed her arms, despite the muggy heat of the night. “Well, I’d better get some sleep. I’ve enjoyed our talk.”
“So have I, Fräulein,” replied Polyak. “Rest well.”
Cindy started back across the short stretch of dark earth that stretched between the silver trailer and the farmhouse. Silently, she crept back through the screen door and settled into her blankets on the oak boards next to her father.
She sighed deeply and closed her eyes. Heavenly Father, please give me strength, she prayed, listening to the crickets in the darkness beyond the mesh of the screen.
It wasn’t long until an uneasy slumber claimed her… and she began to dream.
She found herself lying not on the boards of the porch floor, but on a bed. A sagging bed in a cramped room. Moonlight shone through the single window. The nocturnal glow revealed dark linens beneath her. She reached down and ran the palms of her hands along the bed sheets. They were coarse and stiff with dried blood.
Cindy wanted to leap up and flee that awful killing place, but she could not. She could only lie there, motionlessly, staring at the room around her. On a table nearby, stood a long metal tool box. It was open and, scattered around it, were a dozen or more utensils. Hammers, screwdrivers with their flat ends filed to wickedly sharp points, C-vises, hacksaws… all coated with blood and thick clots of flesh and hair.
She heard footsteps beyond the closed door. Footsteps that echoed distantly at first… then grew nearer.
Again, Cindy attempted to pry herself from the gory mattress, but she was held in place. This time she looked at her wrists and ankles. They were bound with thick rope and the heavy leather of old shaving strops. Her breath hung in her chest, afraid to exhale, as the brass knob slowly turned and the mechanism opened with a click.
Slowly, the door swung inward. But it was not the hulking, broad-shouldered form of Bully Hanson that filled the doorway. Rather it was a procession of young girls… dozens of them. The gathering filed into the killing room, one by one, and stood around the walls.
They were all naked and mutilated… as they had been in their final frantic moment of life.
“You can not trust him,” said a fair-haired girl of fourteen. Empty sockets yawned where her eyes had once been..
“Who?” Cindy asked. “Who are you talking about?”
“You can not trust him.” This from a girl with hair as long and red as Cindy’s. Her teeth had been yanked free with a pair of pliers, as well as her fingernails.
“Can’t trust who?” Cindy demanded. “Agent Moore? Doctor Polyak? Who?”
The girls simply stood there and stared at her… those who still possessed eyes, that was.
Then the moon in the window drifted behind a cloud and the room was choked with pitch darkness.
Cindy awoke to find herself standing in the center of the field.
“What am I doing out here?” she said aloud. Frightened, she turned in the direction of the house and started back.
She had taken only a few steps, when she stubbed her toe on an object partially protruding from the earth. Curiously, she stooped and dug the article from the soil.
Cindy held it in her hand for a long moment, taking in the sensations it conjured, letting it tell the whole sordid story in flashes of darkness and flowing crimson.
“Oh no,” she whispered, her lips trembling. “No… it can’t be true. It just can’t!”
Still holding the object, she swiftly ran back to the rear porch of the old farmhouse, crying all the way.
The following morning, at the crack of dawn, Cindy returned to the place where she had discovered the object the night before.
She stood there and faced the stone wall. A moment before, the top of the rock barrier had been empty, but now Tommy Lang sat there, beaming that boy-next-door smile at her.
“Well, you wanted to kiss me,” she told him. “Come and do it.”
Tommy’s smile broadened. “You kidding me?”
“No. I’m willing, if you are.”