The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  “How’s your night going?” Ellen asked, unpacking a large spread of gauze.

  Jonathan set his book down and fixed his eyes on the gauze. He spoke with the cadence of a broken robot. “It was . . . good. I did everything they wanted.”

  Ellen cocked her head. She didn’t yet realize that nobody would ever find out about this conversation. “Oh? How so?”

  “I told the doctors I wanted to kill myself. But I didn’t really. Well, I did . . . but only to prove that it wouldn’t matter. I’d just . . . go on.”

  “Go on where?” Ellen Graber chose the words carefully, trying to smother them in love so that this boy knew he could talk to her if need be. She wasn’t a psychotherapist, but she was the only person he had warmed to over the afternoon. He needed an ear, and by God, she would give him one.

  Except he grew quiet. He was looking straight forward, as if into another world entirely. He swallowed air, breathing lightly through his mouth.

  Ellen waited. After about ten seconds, Jonathan gave her a quick shake of his head. His moment of transparency had passed, indicating it was time for her to provide some good-natured nurse filler. “Well, you seem like a smart young man,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just really hard being your age. You don’t have to feel bad or guilty about what happened.” Ellen could have sworn she saw Jonathan relax at this, just a little. “So, you go to Saint Michael’s, is that right?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you like your classes?”

  He shrugged.

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  No response this time. And it was just as well; she could tell he didn’t like being grilled about mundane things.

  “My daughter is in kindergarten, and she just loves the Train City books,” Ellen continued. “She wants to be on the Providence City Council, just like her dad. She thinks that means running the Amtrak station.”

  Jonathan sat there, limp. Not even a chuckle. No movement as she began wrapping his arm.

  “And my son, he’s three—”

  And suddenly he ripped his arm away and exploded toward her. At first it was a hug—he was hugging her, holding on for dear life, before she even had time to process it—and then he was crushing her neck. It couldn’t be; no, it couldn’t be. Jonathan was a good boy. You could see it in his eyes. And because she had always been an optimist, Ellen didn’t even consider that these might be the last moments of her life. It was just an incident she would later talk about with the other staff members, report to Jonathan’s doctors and therapists, and discuss with law enforcement officials if it became an issue with the Family Court. But her husband Craig would have to be kept in the dark at all costs. He had been worrying for years that one of her patients might someday become a threat.

  “Nobody believes me,” Ellen thought she heard Jonathan whispering, over and over, as he choked her. Then, she felt herself drifting as the blood in her carotid arteries failed to reach her brain. That was when she finally remembered there were no cameras in the room, and she had to reach for the alarm button clipped to her pants. But it was already too late.

  Her eyes lost blood and oxygen, formed a tunnel around the remaining light of her life, and then: black.

  Whether it was a second or a day or a lifetime later, she was standing outside her own body, watching this poor, young boy clutch it until the physical part of her brain died. And after somebody from outside the room finally noticed, it was too late. But no matter. Inside the fog behind her was a presence she would recognize the minute she turned to follow. She would check in on her husband and children first, but she already knew they would be okay, eventually. This was a part she had agreed to play.

  DR. THOMAS LUMEN FIRST SAW the PsychWire article on Jonathan Flite in 2034.

  It was March 31 in Wind Prairie, Minnesota, and the season’s first leaf buds dotted the trees outside his kitchen window. Trying to deny the headache from last night’s bottle of Shiraz, he sipped his English breakfast tea, listening vaguely to the ticking dolphin clock on the wall nagging him to jump in the shower. Sean, his son, had made it in shop class seven years ago. Dr. Lumen liked the ticking; it was one of the few reminders that he still had children, that they had once loved him. True, it commemorated his mistakes, all of them, but these days it kept him in line, whispering of a future made of better choices. Except now was not the time for rumination. His first patient of the day, a depressed widow named Valerie Stedman, was due in his office in forty-three minutes—at nine o’clock sharp—and she was never late. But the PsychWire article’s headline caught Dr. Lumen’s eye.

  Raising Eyebrows: Juvenile “Nurse Killer” Avoided Adult Court on Past-Life Claims.

  Dr. Lumen’s initial interest was purely academic; his years of medical school and subsequent decade as a psychiatric officer for the CIA had stamped out most of his interest in folksy parapsychology. By the time he finished reading the second paragraph, however, the walls of science he had built around himself had begun ever-so-slightly to crumble. His hands were clammy.

  Flite, whose legal proceedings with the Rhode Island Family Court were closed, has not escaped the public outrage of Providence city councilman Craig Graber, husband of the victim. In public statements and ActoVid posts that have flagrantly breached the Family Court’s confidentiality regulations, Graber has not only identified the boy by name but also provided reporters with multiple verbal accounts of his court proceedings, explaining that the juvenile’s homicide defense rested on his psychological history—of being called “crazy” by his mother and doctors after claiming “multiple times” to have past-life memories of seven teenagers who disappeared in Minnesota in 2010.

  The sweat on Dr. Lumen’s palms grew cold.

  Next came facts about Jonathan Flite’s defense, about why his judge, Barry Wallace, had sided with the boy’s public defender to try him as a juvenile and work toward rehabilitation: the silence for his first eight years, the drawings of stick figures (always the same, before he could even read), and finally how he inexplicably spoke his first words in French, because Jillian Pope, one of the girls whose memories he claimed to have, had learned the language while living in Geneva, Switzerland. The boy argued that he hadn’t wanted to speak until he found a good way to prove that his memories were legitimate, but everyone had thought he was crazy anyway.

  Then came an offhand detail that made the dolphin’s ticking sound like a death clock.

  Flite claimed that one particular drawing, shown in the courtroom, depicted the Idle County Seven in the Moon Woods, the forest where he says they disappeared.

  This tickled Dr. Lumen in all the wrong spots. There had been a search of that forest high and low. The place had swallowed people before—both their sanities and their lives—but it would seem like a sick joke if the Idle County Seven had actually disappeared there. And the fact that this random boy in Rhode Island had made these claims at all was beyond preposterous. Wasn’t it?

  Yet Dr. Lumen spent the next fifteen minutes scouring his tablet for anything else relating to young Jonathan Flite. All he found were different versions of the same story, and only the Providence Journal seemed to have covered it at any length.

  “Newport Boy Strangles Nurse.”

  “Attorney General Seeks Adult Trial for Nurse Killer.”

  “Victim’s Husband Enraged at Juvenile’s Move to For-Profit Rehabilitation Center.”

  Dr. Lumen showered. As he ran soap over his graying body hair, he realized just how many years had passed since Idle County propped open his intellectual door to the supernatural. There had been too many events to ignore, too many facts screaming to be justified. He was fifty-one now and had worked in twelve different countries, yet here he was, living once again in Minnesota, just seventy miles from Idle County. He had returned to save an already broken marriage, and now he was alone under the place’s shadow, forced every day to remember why he had left in the first place. Idle County’s poison lived in his very blood, and no, he had never to
ld his children about it. They didn’t have to know.

  Hey kids, you know Auntie Mary, the one who killed herself before you were born? Your Grandpa Joseph and all his cult buddies forced her to do it. And you’ll never guess why!

  Dr. Lumen doodled between his notes as Valerie Stedman spent her hour of therapy speculating about the nature of the universe and why anything mattered at all. Only after the session did he take any real notice of what his doodles actually were: scribbled circles of varying sizes, ringing all over the page.

  Not a good sign.

  With a sigh, he slipped on his ActoGlasses—a bulky older model—and scanned the page into his encrypted cloud file for Valerie. The pixel-equipped glasses’ software, always smart, ignored the scribbled rings. But it was as if they had flowed out of him like a sign, a push whispering, “It’s time.”

  He limped into his empty house later that evening, his cell phone in hand and thumb hovering over the call button. Autumn Hornbeck was about to retire from the FBI, but she would want to know about this Jonathan Flite boy. Her involvement in the Idle County Seven case in 2010 had been peripheral, but the Moon Woods cult scandal six years earlier had been her first corruption case out of the academy. She had personally arrested all but one member of the Idle County sheriff’s department, along with Dr. Lumen’s father, Joseph, and a number of other local men. Her pulled-back auburn hair, no-nonsense demeanor, and deceptively staid expression had been intimidating but dazzling at the time, proof of what one could achieve in life. Dr. Lumen had still been a month shy of his twenty-second birthday then, and it was a wonder she had allowed him to stay in touch.

  But it was late. He would call her tomorrow.

  On his way to the kitchen, Dr. Lumen stopped next to the living room mantel to look at the LED picture frames he still had running on repeat. His ex-wife Lilya, his daughter Sarah and son Sean, and their old dog Feebles were all smiling as if time hadn’t dripped between the cracks in their lives and blown everything outward. He chuckled as the screen transitioned to an old photo of Feebles licking Sean all over the face. That had been on their trip to the Amalfi Coast during the years in Zurich. They had almost—almost—made the globe-trotting work.

  In the kitchen, the dolphin clock ticked.

  After pouring himself a whiskey, Dr. Lumen grabbed a notepad from his briefcase and scratched on the first line a book title—one that had been swimming in his head for almost twenty years.

  Idle County: A Living Mystery.

  By the end of the night, he had a mess of notes, a chapter outline, and a four-page bullet list of all the challenges, questions, and concerns he would surely face in writing about Idle County. What he could not predict this night in 2034 was that, despite all the work he would do over the next three years, his eventual meeting with Jonathan Flite would prevent the book from ever being published.

  WHEN MOLLY BUTLER AND HER FRIENDS disappeared in 2010, her father Andrew first thought it was a sick joke. He had known by that point that Molly’s time on Earth was limited; it had been the very thing to shake away the stupor he had lived under in the years following his wife Miriam’s fatal car accident. Molly’s diagnosis in 2008—a brainstem tumor, untreatable—had somehow pulled the veil of grief up from his eyes and made him realize how precious time really was, how much he still wanted to share it with the only person left in his life who was worth a damn.

  On the morning of July 5, when the ash of fireworks was but muck washed into sewer gutters by the storm that had rolled in at 2:00 a.m., Andrew had gone to his daughter’s room with breakfast on a tray. It had become their tradition since she had taken a turn for the worse and he had gone on sabbatical from his accounting job. By late June, Molly had become a bit more dazed, and her walking had slowed.

  He swung through her door, into an empty room. Bed made. Tennis shoes (which she always kept at the foot of her bed) gone. Everything might have suggested one of the early starts Molly had been known for before the tumor began affecting her behavior and motor functions. It would have been perfectly normal for her to be out of bed by 9:00 a.m. Perfectly normal.

  But not since her diagnosis.

  Not since then.

  Andrew whipped out his brand-new iPhone and called Molly’s matching one, which he had purchased so that she could be plugged into her friends, even when stuck in bed. When he heard its Harry Potter ringtone play from her nightstand, he ignored the concern coiling in his gut. Molly had begun to disconnect from the world in recent months, so it wasn’t surprising that she would have left her phone. He grabbed the device to check her text messages, but it was password-protected.

  Okay, he thought. I can have the phone company send them to me if need be. No biggie.

  He called Molly’s boyfriend, Clayton Graf, the skinny, tattooed recovering drug addict (and a recently graduated high school senior) who had shown up in her life like an angel in 2008 and given her reason to smile. They were a match beyond understanding, but Andrew had come to love him like a son. Clayton would know where Molly was. Maybe he had taken her for a romantic night out—surely it would be one of their last. Andrew wasn’t about to stop his daughter from experiencing love while she still had time.

  No answer.

  He tried Pauline Gilbert. No answer.

  Then Elijah Bryce, Lindsay Thorsen, and Jillian Pope. None of them answered.

  He didn’t have Gabriel Creed’s number, so he next scoured the internet for everyone’s home landline numbers, wondering all the while if he had overlooked a doctor appointment, if Clayton might have come to bring Molly instead.

  But they would have woken me up. I would have known she was gone.

  Just as he found David and Sandra Thorsen’s home number, his iPhone buzzed. It was a local call.

  “This is Andrew.”

  “Andrew? Hi. It’s Shelly Bryce. I’m just calling . . . this is weird, and I don’t yet know what to think, but . . . is my Elijah over there? I can’t find him this morning, and his phone is going straight to voice mail. I figured he was trying to spend as much time with Molly as possible, and maybe . . .”

  It was only the first such call of the day. By 11:00, he had spoken with all pertinent parents except those of Gabriel Creed (but it turned out David Thorsen had spoken to them—they had fed him some crazy lines about Jesus Christ and the rapture), and the consensus was clear: their children were also missing. All their phones were going straight to voice mail, and there seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it.

  By noon, the sheriff’s department knew of the problem. “Stay at home,” they told everyone. “If the kids come back, you need to be there.”

  David and Sandra Thorsen, who had experienced the loss of one child already, somehow seemed the most calm. But Andrew called David every hour, and every hour, David’s voice seemed a bit more brittle.

  Late afternoon, still nothing. All the kids’ cell phones appeared to have had their batteries removed, because police couldn’t track a single one of them by GPS. As Lindsay, Jillian, and Clayton had iPhones, this seemed odd—it would have taken special tools to open the phones and remove the batteries. Even with the phones off, their locations could be triangulated. But it was as if the phones no longer existed. This more than anything sent a chill down Andrew’s spine.

  Another day passed.

  Then another.

  By Wednesday, dread had made a home in Andrew’s heart. He had already faced the reality that he would soon lose his daughter, but this was too soon. He had expected at least a few more months, maybe even a year, if they were both lucky. But something had happened; he was sure of it. Search parties were already forming, and he had it on good authority that Jillian Pope’s stepfather, the celebrity Victor Zobel, was personally overseeing a team that would search the Moon Woods. Where her real father Max was, Andrew had no clue. But it was a good riddance. Max Pope, though he had been fun to party with during Andrew’s college years, now trailed discord wherever he went.

  Early that morning, Andrew o
pened Molly’s bedroom door and stood just inside the door frame, taking everything in: her faded red bedspread, her nightstand full of odd knickknacks, her mirrored dresser conspicuously devoid of typical girly items like hair dryers, makeup, and lotions. Molly was a simple girl.

  Too simple for this world, Andrew thought. A sob growled in his throat, but he wrestled it down as he stepped into her room.

  Nothing incriminating in her closet, under the bed, or in her clothing drawers. He hesitated before opening the drawer to her nightstand. She was a teenage girl who probably did teenage things, and if he was jumping the gun by going through her private belongings too soon, he might blush when facing her later.

  But inside the drawer were just five items: a smashed-up knob of metal, a strip of tattered white cloth, a pressed flower dried almost to the point of dust, a small rock with a circle carved into it, and a crinkled pink notebook with yellowed edges. Against his own inner judgment, Andrew lifted out the notebook and opened it to the first page. On it were three words—big, blocky, and inked-in with black pen—the etchings of a much-younger Molly.

  THE GHOST HUNT

  It was then that, through no other means than his own unpolished intuition, Andrew Butler sensed this was the closest he would ever come to seeing his daughter again.

  FEET RUNNING OVER FRESH SNOW. A black-haired girl’s mingled feelings—fear and exhilaration—at breaking the rules. Her sense just a moment too late of hidden ice under her feet.

  It was February 3, 2004, and Molly Butler was running around the corner of Saint Andrew’s School with her friend Karen Young. They had been putting on red lipstick near the gym doors, against school rules, when their teacher Mrs. Stone had noticed and started walking toward them. Running was probably an immature move, but they weren’t even twelve. Who could blame them?