by Kim Powers
“What did you say? Bullshit?” Frankenstein slapped him, hard, on the butt.
The boy screamed out a new series of words.
Bring out forces, rein in horses . . .
Then to the small of his back. That was unexplored territory. Frankenstein had never prodded him there before.
In the Labors, in his mind, the boy had just gotten to the belt of the Amazon queen. He imagined Frankenstein’s hands were a belt, squeezing him around the waist.
Won’t leave a welt, her beautiful belt . . .
“There’s something wrong with your spine. If we could only straighten out your spine.”
Frankenstein tried to.
It hurt the boy so much, so he said even more words.
Escape I’ll tattle, so better count cattle . . .
The rhymes were coming more easily now, but the boy was having to scream them, because the pain was getting so much worse. His spine could feel things, even if his legs couldn’t. Frankenstein started jabbing in the needles, anywhere he could. The boy screamed out words, any words, just to try to block the pain. Nonsense words, for nonsense cures.
Visit chapels, steal those apples . . .
Frankenstein switched to a different needle now, one with medicine in it, medicine that would make the boy pass out. He jabbed it into a vein in the boy’s neck, so he would close his eyes faster. So Frankenstein could do more damage, after the boy was asleep.
That’s when the boy let out his very last rhyme, to say he had won, no matter what Frankenstein did to him.
The pain hadn’t touched him, and never would, as long as he had his rhymes.
If you want to tame Cerberus, God will preserve us.
It’s the last thing the boy remembered saying, as his eyes closed, and his tormentor climbed on top of him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Just think. Concentrate. Close your eyes and . . . you’ve got to remember something about him. You were here and he . . . where was he?”
I was at Cousin Charlie’s with TJ, going over the sidewalk outside as if it were a crime scene. Mizell had already been here, hoping to find out that some of the stores had security cameras, but no such luck. She’d gone back to the station with the flyer that the poem was on, for her team to see if they could pick up any fingerprints or trace from it. But I couldn’t just sit still, so I’d come downtown with TJ to see for myself. It was my daughter: my eyes would be sharper.
But no, it was still just Brockett Street, still the street I walked down every day near campus. The fancy men’s store that was more for the parents who came to visit than for the students. Funny golf pants. Cuff links. IZOD shirts and monogrammed sweatshirts. The art house cinema, its lit marquee just now shutting off for the night, even as the light inside the pizza parlor seemed to get even brighter and more fluorescent, luring late-night studiers with its smells. Every time the door opened, a potent blend of grease, garlic, and oregano filled the street. And then The Purple Pup, one dangling purple light bulb over its door, pulling in students who wanted to pretend-slum, side by side with the real-life drunks and never-left, never-graduated kids who just hung on.
At the crest of the street, where Brockett intersected with the main thruway that went through town, was that triangle of grass with the concrete bench on it. A boy and girl were sitting on it, laughing. A little nervous, nudging close, teasing. How many times had I seen that on campus: first love in bloom? Who’s going to make the first move? Are we going to sleep together? How many times had I wished I could go back there, and fall in love with Patti all over again? I was half dreading, half looking forward to talking to Skip about something like that, when she was really in love for the first time, and . . .
Normal life, in a small, affluent college town, where girls didn’t get snatched out of their homes.
Until they did.
“Are you sure you don’t remember . . . ”
“I’m sorry. I really am. But . . . nothing.” TJ’s eyes were shining, like he was about to cry. He’d make up an answer if it made me happy, but he had nothing to say. “I didn’t notice what was written on the back of the flyer until I went inside, and by then, he was already gone. Whoever it was.”
But I couldn’t let TJ go. He was the missing link, the only link. Mizell had already grilled him, and now it was my turn. I grabbed him, pleading.
“So now what you’re saying is that we just track down a Hydra and cut its fucking head off . . . ”
“I’m not saying it. He is. The note is.”
We went inside Charlie’s with our copy of it. There was nothing more out here for us, but there was something on that note to figure out. I just had to look at it like I had the book of Daniel, in the chapel. I had to work over it, like a Latin translation. It was all there. I knew. He was giving me clues.
I just had to figure it out, where it was pointing us to next.
Charlie kept the place open until two in the morning; it was the campus hangout, for late-night study breaks. Charlie took us to a booth. “I’m praying for Skip. I’m gonna name a sandwich after her. The Skip Special, something strong and spicy. Keep her name out there.”
“Thanks, Charlie. Appreciate the food you sent over, too.”
“Anything I can do. Anything. You want something to eat? On the house. Just name it. A Herc Hero? Gotta keep up your strength.”
“That’d be great, Charlie. Thanks.” I said it to give him something to do. I didn’t think I could ever eat again.
From where we sat in a booth in the back, I saw one of the Skip flyers that somebody had taped to the front door, only now, through the pane of glass, I saw the big bold words in reverse:
?LRIG SIHT NEES UOY EVAH
It was a foreign language, Kidnapper instead of Latin. Same as the rhyme in front of us.
“So what do we do now?” I asked. “The Hydra’s a mythological creature. It doesn’t exist.”
“He thinks it does,” TJ said, in TA mode. “Somehow. Just like the lion. He wouldn’t send you on things you couldn’t do.”
“He’s crazy. He’d do anything.”
Charlie plopped down a plate and coffees on the table.
“Maybe it’s so obvious, we’re missing something. Why the Labors? Is it just that damn nickname?” I asked, almost talking to myself, after Charlie left. Maybe I needed to go back to the very beginning. Not just solve the puzzle in front of me, but why the kidnapper was sending the puzzles. Why somebody I’d kept waiting was only now springing into action.
“How’d you get it, anyway?” TJ said, grabbing half my sandwich. He wolfed it down, student-starving fashion. “‘Herc’ Holt. That’s what they called you, wasn’t it?”
I gave him a “not you, too” look. “For about fifteen minutes for a bunch of headlines and that stupid book. I wish Casey had never started the damn thing.”
“Who?”
“A guy on the team. Mark Casey. It was a joke, but I went along with it. Nobody calls me that anymore.”
“But he calls you that. The guy. He thinks you are Hercules. Why else pick the Labors? You’ve gotta start thinking like him.”
Maybe TJ had a point. “So talk it out. Hercules 101.”
“Well, he’s a god. At least a half god. Father Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, but a mortal mother. Alcmene.”
“That blows the whole thing to smithereens before we even get started. My father was the least godly person ever . . . ”
“I can relate,” TJ said, for once looking me straight in the eye. Then he grabbed a pen and started taking notes on his placemat, like the face-to-face contact had been too much. “Okay. So family tree. Zeus, Alcmene, a half-brother from her, the Labors, he romances all these women, has tons of children . . . “
“Well, that leaves me out too. I grew up alone. Just me. And I just have one kid. Skip. And he’s got her.”
“But could it be a woman who’s got her? Someone you romanced once and dumped?”
“No. We heard the voice on the p
hone. It was a man. Besides, I hardly ever dated. And nobody serious after I met Patti.”
It was the most I’d ever said about my personal life to TJ. To any student. “Let’s get back to the Labors. That’s what he’s having us do. Hercules has to do the Labors because . . . ”
“Punishment,” TJ jumped in, adding to his notes. “He’s forced by the Oracle to atone for killing his children . . . ”
“ . . . whom he’s killed in a fit of madness . . . ”
“ . . . so the gods make him purify himself. To atone.”
I pointed at our copy of the riddle. “But that’s where it all falls apart. Again. Maybe this whack job thinks I’m Hercules but . . . I never killed anybody . . . I never killed my kids . . . my kid. I’ve never gone crazy.”
“So he blows everything out of proportion . . . he exaggerates, he uses metaphor . . . ”
“I guess you could say I did go mad, nuts, after Patti died, but . . . I went crazy to win the Olympics, to push my body through that kind of pain. But how could he know that? He’d have to have been there. Or when Patti died . . . I didn’t hurt anybody. I wanted to, I wanted to hurt everybody. I wanted to hurt God. Not Skip, though . . . I’d never hurt my child.”
“Who have you hurt, then?”
“This is ridiculous. I’ve never hurt anybody,” I said to TJ. We were wasting time. “You keep track of all the mistakes you’ve made? All the . . . the . . . stupid stuff you’ve done that maybe pissed somebody off? When you don’t even know about half of it, it’s just in somebody else’s head?”
I turned away from facing TJ. In the long rectangular opening into the kitchen, meals were sitting out under orange counter lights to keep them warm. The orange, sulfurous glow of Hell, that’s what it looked like to me. And bizarrely, it looked comfortable. Welcoming. I wanted fire, just like I had when I had those dumb tattoos put on my ankles. I wanted to hurt, to feel something greater than this pain.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” TJ wouldn’t let it go. “To make somebody hurt you this bad . . . ”
I didn’t like this game anymore. “I wanna get outta here. I’m going to the police station.”
“I’m just trying to think the way he does,” TJ said, looking down quickly. Embarrassed.
“Then you’re in the wrong department. We study old things. Dead things. Things that can’t hurt us.”
But that wasn’t really true. The classics were all about people getting hurt, and hurting others in return. Vengeful gods. Wars. Sacrifice. I took a sip from my coffee; it was bottom-of-the-pot stuff, burned, oily streaks floating on top.
“Okay. You wanna play games? Then let’s play. The worst thing I’ve ever done? It was a day ago. Not being there for Skip when she needed me. Doing my stupid run when I could have been there, keeping him from getting inside. You want more? Five years ago. Letting my wife drive the car that day, when it was so icy. More? Thirteen years ago. The Goddamn Olympics. Letting . . . never mind.”
“What.” TJ didn’t ask it like a question. “What about them?”
I looked back at that orange glow coming from the kitchen. The hell I’d put myself through. “Winning. It was all I cared about. It’s what my father wanted. He’d turned me into this . . . this machine, from the time I was a kid. I couldn’t let him down. That’s what all that book of Daniel stuff was about. Winning. False idols. Precious metals. Gold. Whatever it took.”
Now I was the one looking down at my food, as embarrassed as TJ had just been.
“None of it matters anyway. He’s nuts. That’s all there is to it. Crazy people do crazy things. No more, no less. Let’s get outta here. You should go home and get some sleep. You’ve gotta take my class in the morning.”
“I don’t mind staying. I never sleep anyway.”
“No, I’m good. And take the other half of the sandwich.”
He pounced on it as he stood up, not needing to be asked twice. “Call me on my cell if you find anything. I’ll be at the gym after class.”
“The gym? That’s a first.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll be like you one day. Strong.” He pushed his long fingers through his hair and then stumbled out. “Just remember. It’s something you did. Something he thinks you did. In his mind, he isn’t doing anything wrong.”
And with that bizarre bit of armchair psychology, he started heading out as I called out to him one last time.
“Hey, since I spilled the beans . . . Your turn,” I dared TJ. He’d pissed me off with that last thing he’d said. “What’s the worst thing you ever did?”
TJ paused—not even turning back to look at me—and said, “Scies satis.” Then left. So fast, I’m not sure I even heard him correctly.
Scies satis. You’ll find out soon enough.
For just a few seconds, when he was swinging open the front door, I saw Skip’s flyer from in front, like it was supposed to be seen. My daughter’s face, and those words, now back in terrifying English: “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?”
I whispered a question that was more like a prayer—Skippy, where are you?—then went back to the rhyme, the question it was asking no easier to answer. “If I were a Hydra, where would I hide?”
“The Biosphere.”
I looked up; a science geek was looking back at me, from way down the aisle. “The Biosphere.”
“What? I’m sorry . . . ”
“The Biosphere. That new science building. They’ve got tanks and tanks of ’em.”
“I’m sorry . . . my mind is sorta . . . ”
“Yeah, mine too. Midterm tomorrow.” He opened a science textbook to a diagram and read from the caption underneath. “‘Hydra: any of a group of small, soft-bodied, freshwater polyps with a tube-like body and a mouth surrounded by tentacles. Also known as thin reeds.’”
I looked back at the poem, its letters floating around as much as the images in my head:
Whose head grows back if you give it a whack?
Find that reed, or watch her bleed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“It’s time to. Get you ready. Let you. See. Again.”
Hearing the kidnapper say that scared Skip more than the thought of him touching her. Ready for what? See what? She didn’t want to see anything. If she did, didn’t that mean he’d have to kill her, if she could identify him? Her eyes hurt, and her head did too because she’d been in the dark for so long, but still, she was too afraid to pretend she was asleep, or that she didn’t hear him.
“No, no, I don’t care . . . I don’t wanna see . . . I’m used to this now. Please. It’s okay. Keep the blindfold on.”
But he didn’t listen. She felt him behind her, his long thin fingers brushing against the back of her head and the nape of her neck as he fiddled with the knot of gauze at the back of her head.
“Please. No.”
With him behind the desk she was tied to, Skip was afraid he’d see how she’d been sawing away at the duct tape that held her hands together. It had been slow going: to get close enough to the little bit of screw that poked out, she had to curve her wrists in such a way that it was agonizing. She couldn’t hold them in that position for too long—the ache went all the way up to her shoulders—before she had to take a break, and since she couldn’t see what she was doing, she cut into the flesh of her arms more than the weave of the tape. She felt the sticky blood on her wrists, mixing with the adhesive of the tape; the white-blond, almost invisible hairs on her arm got stuck to it, and kept pulling out, every time she got more of the tape cut away. At least now she could flex her wrists out a little more, but she could feel that he’d wrapped three or four layers of tape around them, so it was going to take forever. And who knew if blood from her wrist was dripping onto the floor behind her; he’d see that before he saw what she was doing.
Please God, please, don’t let him see don’tlethimseedon’tlethimsee . . .
The first layer of gauze fell on the bridge of her nose, and all she could think was how much it tickled
. She scrunched up her face, and he unwrapped the rest of the blindfold. She winced again, feeling some hair come off with it. She thought maybe her scalp was bleeding too, just like her wrists.
Skip had once heard the phrase “the scales fell from his eyes”—maybe it was at church?—and it had terrified her. She got this picture in her head of bits and pieces of eyes falling off somebody’s face, or like your eyeballs had fish scales on them or something. That’s what she thought of now, as darkness gave way to the light of the room, and her blindfold was suddenly gone. She blinked her eyes to wake them up, as he put her glasses back on her and began talking again.
“Just look forward. Not behind. Not at me. Just at what’s in front of you. Don’t be like Orpheus in the Underworld. Checking up on Eurydice. Don’t look behind. Don’t be. Too curious. Not yet.”
He was still behind her; his hands were on either the side of her head. Even if she’d wanted to move around, she couldn’t. They forced her to look straight ahead, to see.
And what was in the dim light was worse than anything Skip could have imagined.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Wow,” Mizell said.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” That was me. “No wonder the school’s so expensive.”
That kid at Cousin Charlie’s had been right: a biosphere. There was no other word to describe what we were seeing down in the basement of the new science building, the price tag a reported 38 million during a recession. And a lot of it must have gone down here, in the underground hallway a guard was walking us through. For every step you took, a new patch of light came on, and the area you’d just left went dark, each footstep triggering just the light you needed, at least in the middle of the night. Nothing wasted, super-green, super-eerie, as the lights kept fading behind us, like the past literally disappearing into blackness.
And when you couldn’t see where you were going, you could hear it. At the end of the hall, something that sounded like water, pooling and bubbling. The whole thing seemed like a cistern or cave, everything a little cooler, damper, as if dark, loamy earth was closing in, like something really was growing, on either side of the cinder block walls. But as the guard kept moving us along, the scent of dirt disappeared, and something clean and fresh took its place.