by Kim Powers
Just then, that majestic beast swiveled its head and saw me.
It looked in my eyes, and knew.
Man is in the forest.
I pulled myself through the window, to get a better look at what I couldn’t believe, at what couldn’t be, but there it was.
My mind scrambling, to take it all in—getting the thing up here, in this enclosure, the poem guiding me to it, and then . . .
That’s what it was. A hind—the hind in Hercules’s labor—was female. A hind is female. This wasn’t. This bloody beast I was looking at was male. It had antlers. The female of the species didn’t. Either the kidnapper had fucked up—and from the poem guiding me here, we knew he didn’t, he didn’t make casual mistakes—or there was something extra I was supposed to read into all this.
And looking more closely, I saw it.
Sick. As sick as the poems the kidnapper was sending me.
Somehow a set of antlers had been attached to the deer’s head—turning it from female to male. Making it something it wasn’t. Antlers had somehow been mounted on it, just like my father used to mount his hunting trophies to our walls. Blood was running down the deer’s head from where strands of wire wrapped around and attached the antlers. God knows how long the deer had been trapped inside, waiting for me, in agony: the antlers were tilting, where the weight had been too much, and the deer had been blindly knocking them against every solid surface to try to get them off.
What did that mean? What did that sadist want me to figure out from this? Something turned into something else. A female turned into a male. Forced to wear a disguise, a crown of antlers. A female being hurt, someone getting back at a woman?
And something else: speared through one of the points of bone and moss was a piece of white paper, now streaked red with blood.
My next clue, delivered without mercy.
Was that it? Being forced to wear the antlers, just to have something to stick the next sick clue onto?
I tried to get close to it to unhook the antlers, but it took a run at me every time I got close, sideswiping me with blood.
The poor animal reared back, but it was already on its last legs, as if it had never recovered from being doped up and somehow transported here. I saw its belly, dipped low like a barrel, hair matted. A pitiful sound like nothing I’d ever heard before—a cross between a moan and a bleat—came from the deer as it fell back on its rear haunches, too spent to even attack. It couldn’t stand anymore, but kept trying, its legs splaying out from under it in all the blood that was already on the floor, that I kept slipping and sliding in as I tried to figure out what to do.
But there was nothing to do. Except one thing.
“What the hell?” Mizell and the FBI were at the window now, their weapons drawn.
“No! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I yelled back at them.
Tame the deer, don’t hurt the body,
To keep me from getting much more naughty.
The deer had already been tamed, past the point of no return. But I couldn’t leave it here like this. In agony. Not even a genius like Wendy could fix it. I had the tranquilizer gun she’d helped me get from the zoo, that I had thought in advance I was going to need to capture it. But the time for that was long gone.
He had seen to that.
Mizell took out her own gun and aimed, but I took it from her.
“No. This is mine. Damn the Labors. I can’t leave it like this.”
I pulled the trigger, and the bang echoed through the hills.
“I raised one of my canes and started to bring it down on Roberta’s head.”
“Oh my God,” Skip let out, shaking her captor into remembering that he had an audience.
“Funny. People never expect that from a gimp,” he continued on, seeing the scene in his head once more. “I guess that explains the look of . . . shock on her face. And started, I said, but didn’t follow through. I couldn’t. I ran . . . well, I stumbled my way out. Horrified at what I’d almost done. She had simply reported the truth—or caused me to; she hadn’t caused it.
“Tame the dear, my dear Roberta, don’t hurt the body,” he started keening, over and over, “tame the deer, don’t hurt the body, tame the deer . . . she was tamed alright . . . ”
“What? What are you saying? What do you mean?”
And ever so quickly—for someone who couldn’t move anything except his arms—he bent down in his wheelchair behind her and started tying her wrists back together. “Tame Skip. Thought I didn’t. See. What you were doing. Your. Escape plan. I wanted you to. Hope. We all need hope. I had hope. Back then.”
The duct tape from a roll in his lap sounded like it was screaming as he ripped off giant strips of it and began binding her wrists again. “Now you know. What I’ve gone through. Hope. It doesn’t exist. Not anymore. For either of us.”
“I’m sorry! Please . . . I won’t move. I promise. I didn’t mean to . . . you’d be scared too. You’d try to get away . . . ”
He ferociously snatched off another length of tape. It sang. It shrieked.
And so did Skip, as he tied her hands back up.
Hope. Gone.
For her.
For him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Be careful. There’s blood.”
I heard Mizell say it downstairs to Wendy, finally released from the hospital. This woman I loved, finally out, and all I could do was cower upstairs in my bathroom, hiding from her after what I’d done.
The sound of that hind, rearing up, snorting, trying to buck, collapsing. We taught children all the barnyard sounds—the moos and cluck cluck clucks and oinks—but we never thought to teach them the real sounds of nature. The important ones. A deer, fighting for its life. I’d never heard it before, and now I would never forget it.
The sound of clicking my cell phone made, when I forced down my revulsion and snapped a photo of the dead animal, another trophy for the kidnapper to post on my Facebook page.
Skip on the phone: “Daddy?”
I wanted the spray from the shower to seep into my ears and clog them up for the rest of time, but it wasn’t working.
I could still hear those horrific sounds from the last few hours, even though they were just in my head.
Downstairs, Mizell continued to prepare Wendy. Warn her. “He didn’t want to do it, but . . . he had to. Be careful. Go easy on him. There’s blood. A lot of it.”
Mizell was wrong about that. There had been a lot of blood, but now I was watching it all disappear down the drain, as I bent over and let the hot spray rain down on my spine, my arms dropped all the way down to the shower floor like some hulking beast.
“Ethan? It’s me . . . I’m coming up, okay?” she said.
Wendy could follow my trail of breadcrumbs, my trail of bloody clothes to lead the way. Bloody boots, bloody shirt, bloody pants, all leading to the bedroom, like the droppings of animals she could track in the wild.
Wendy jerked open the shower curtain. “What’s wrong? Is it Skip . . . have they . . . ”
“Twelve hours. Twelve hours gone. He made me kill. Like Hercules. The real one.”
On the sink in the bathroom, my laptop computer, its top opened and set to my Facebook page. After nothing for months—except birthday greetings from a few days ago—I was going crazy with posting what he demanded.
Me, in a flash of bare white light, holding the stolen hydra.
Me, next to a dead deer in a pool of blood, its eyes still open. A macabre trophy. I was holding the piece of paper with the next Labor in my hands, dead eyes myself.
Wendy stopped and looked at it, a recap in two photos.
“I did that. I had to. I had to put it out of its misery. He’d strapped these antlers on it . . . on its head, wire . . . biting into its neck. I didn’t want to, but . . . I did the Labor wrong. The deer’s supposed to be alive. ‘Tame the deer, don’t hurt the body, tame the deer, don’t hurt the body . . . ’ But I did. I did hurt it . . . But I couldn’t leav
e it like that, suffering . . . ”
I began keening back and forth, reciting nursery rhymes. Wendy stepped in to hold me, her clothes pelted by the shower. Past the plush white towels on my bathroom floor, sopping up water and blood.
“I’m so sorry. The hospital, the shot . . . the deer, everything . . . ” I said, rocking back and forth in Wendy’s arms.
“You did the right thing,” Wendy said soothingly, back to me. “It’s what I would have done too. Nobody could have saved it after that.”
“I’ve never hunted, never killed anything. My dad did, he wanted me to . . . working out . . . then hunting. That’s all he did. Hanging up those trophies: mounted heads, mounted medals . . . my medals . . . ”
“Turn on the TV!” We heard Mizell running up the stairs to us. “They’ve got the sketch up.”
Wendy helped me up and into my robe; she grabbed a still-dry towel as we went into the main bedroom, outside the bath. Mizell already had my little set turned on: It was that Dana Rossen reporter from this morning, now on the six o’clock evening news, showing the sketch of the man TJ had helped put together, the man who shoved the poem with the Second Labor at him.
“As we continue to follow the breaking story of the kidnapping of Elizabeth ‘Skip’ Holt, the daughter of Canaan professor Ethan Holt, this composite sketch has just been released by investigators. There is a reward, and the FBI is asking anyone with information . . . ”
The landline phone rang downstairs. The line only he called on now. In my robe, I ran down to grab it, nodding at the cop stationed in the kitchen to start his trace equipment.
“I’m getting tired of that woman—Dana, is it?—having to be our go-between. We must meet. And soon. I am. Of course. Disappointed. About showing the sketch of my. Associate.”
“You sadist. That deer . . . ”
“Doe a deer. A female deer. A female Skip.”
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?”
“From you. For you. To remember.”
“Remember WHAT? I’ve had enough of this shit . . . ”
A pause, a sort of sputter, as the kidnapper weighed what to say next, then snapped it out at me.
“I am the one who’s had. ‘Enough of this shit.’ Which you will be cleaning out of the Augean stables. Very. Soon. Indeed. I see you’ve found. The next clue . . . ”
“At least this way I can read it instead of having to listen to your voice . . . ”
“My voice, I might remind you, is the only thing . . . ”
“ . . . your voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard . . . ”
“I’ll show you. Fingernails.”
The phone slammed down, on his end.
Mizell whipped off her headset. “Do you WANT your daughter to die? What the hell . . . ”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . ”
“Sorry doesn’t count! Don’t you get it? This is real.”
I sank onto the floor and looked at them, pleadingly. Mea culpa, mea maxima maxima culpa. Mizell, the cop, Wendy . . .
“He’s making me become Hercules . . . don’t you get it? The real Hercules. He kills animals, kills his wife, his children . . . he goes mad and loses it and . . . I’ve gone mad, just like Hercules.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The kidnapper was gasping for air, stabbing at the crook in his left arm with a fresh needle. Only stabbing at himself would take over his rage, the rage he wanted to inflict on everything in his wake. On that person. On the other end of the phone. And on himself and how far things had gone. He wanted to stab it all away. Make himself hurt so bad for what he’d done . . . but his body could barely feel anything anymore, as the disease took over more and more of it. He plunged the needle at his own useless thigh, wasting away in the wheelchair. He plunged the hypodermic through his pants, waiting for relief to come. But it didn’t. He kept looking for a new patch of skin, as he yelled at Skip.
“He’ll regret it, the way he talked to me . . . ”
“Please, what . . . what happened, what did he say . . . ”
He bucked in his wheelchair behind her, like the trapped deer of Ceryneia. “Tell me, tell me fast, like Scheherezade begging for her life, tell me something good about that man, tell me before I . . . ”
“Please! What happened? What did he say? How can I . . . ”
He gulped for air that wouldn’t come, like the panic attacks Skip had had when she first woke up here, her chest so paralyzed she couldn’t take in a breath. Giant hulking spasms, trying to get air. Get life.
“What, what? What can I do?” Skip said, straining at the duct tape that held her in place, terrified that she couldn’t see behind her.
“Nobody can do anything. This! Cannot be. Undone,” he screamed in return, now throwing the syringe across the room and picking up something else. Something that glinted, even in the dim light of the room.
“Undo me! I’ll get help! Daddy’ll help you!”
“HELP me? He’s the one. Who DID this. To me.”
His hand slammed a shining scalpel down behind her desk.
Where her hands were. Into her hands.
Silver, and blood, and fresh, hot, searing pain.
And then nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The headlights of Mizell’s unmarked police car cut a dim swath through a soupy November fog. We couldn’t see much, but we could see a giant wooden thunderbolt, rigged with neon and flashing, almost like the kidnapper saying, “You are here.”
And “here” was the Lambda Chi frat house. Wendy had figured it out back at my house; while I was wallowing in my misery, certain my actions had already killed Skip, Wendy was the only one who had actually done something, taking the blood-soaked poem I had gotten from the deer’s antlers.
Number four is the boar
I’d like to hear it roar . . .
It’s in the land of the Greek
You’ll need to hide and seek
Your next clue will be under . . .
Where Zeus let loose his thunder.
“‘Land of the Greek’—the poem . . . it’s that row of frat houses over on Hennepin! The boar, the pig . . . they’ve got a pig, it’s their mascot. The Lambda Chi’s. I had to go out there last week to treat it . . . they call it the ‘Zeus house.’ They’ve got this thunderbolt in front . . . this cutout. With neon. That has to be what he means.”
Wendy was right, and I knew it too. Knew them, at least. I had been a Lambda Chi when I was at Canaan, back when the frat was altogether different: made up of the BMOCs and scholars, the school leaders. Guys who wore khakis and V-neck sweaters. Over the years, the frat had devolved to party boys; it barely had a charter anymore. Now, they’d taken their fun and games—and their thunderbolt—off-campus, alongside a row of crumbling two- and three-story houses, painted with garish fraternity and sorority colors, Greek letters camouflaged into the exteriors in some way.
Mizell cut the engine and parked across the street from the house, the homemade thunderbolt zig-zagging down off its roof. With the car windows down, we heard the sound of the car cooling off; metal pinging, mixing in with night sounds. And then . . . I wasn’t even sure I heard it at first, but . . . something. A sound that didn’t belong to the night, coming from the back of the Lambda Chi house. A low rumble, but no specific words that broke out into meaning.
It was just like the Arcadia ski lodge had been—the deer—a sound in the distance, luring me. And just like Arcadia—where Patti and I had gone—this group had a connection to me too. I had been one of them.
“It’s like he’s replaying my greatest hits. Scenes from my life. He knows me,” I almost whispered to Mizell, inside her car. “Is that it? Why is he picking out these things? They’re things I’ve done. Places I’ve been.”
“Not just making you revisit them, but . . . it’s more like he wants to be you. To have your life, starting with your daughter,” she whispered back.
“Fui quod es, eris quod sum,” I repeated. When Mizell looked at me,
I said, “That other paper TJ had. The one he’d kept from us. ‘I once was what you are, you will be what I am.’ Like he’s making us switch places . . . turning me into him, while he turns into me. He’s doing everything I used to do.”
We got out of the car and crossed the street, trying to stay low to the ground.
Closer to the house, the sound got louder, more distinct. A lot of voices, not just one.
Soo-wee, soo-wee . . . com’ ere, little piggy. Piggy piggy piggy . . .
From behind a spiked wooden fence in back of the house, I saw smoke, dark smoke, like that particular color a citronella candle gave off, inky and oily. I slowly nudged open the gate into the backyard, afraid its creak would give me away, but inside, they were too far gone to notice.
Nothing came charging at me, no wild animal lay dying, only . . .
Frat boys, drunk frat boys, animals in togas, performing some ritual around a bonfire. That’s what I’d seen, and heard, and smelled, from across the street. The upperclassmen—I guess they were the older ones—were dressed in purple and red velvet, robes and sashes, olive leaves banded around their heads. The younger ones—pledges—were in silly togas made of cheap sheets. The older kids had made two rows, and their initiates were weaving down the middle, stumbling as the big guys pelted them with belts. One or two of the kids lurched away to throw up on the side.
Following them, I saw it: what I’d been brought here to . . . see? Confront? Kill?
Their pig mascot—the “boar”—the one Wendy must have treated, pawing against wire mesh in a long mud pen, wanting to get in on the action. It was decorated too—although not like the deer in the ski lodge. Just fake boar fangs, hanging around its neck.
Number four is the boar
I’d like to hear it roar
Or Skip will be no more.
The flames of their bonfire shot higher, and I wondered if they were going to roast the pig, if that was their big climax. Whether or not the pig was part of their ritual—no one was paying any attention to it, not yet—I knew it was supposed to be part of mine. I snuck inside its pen and the oinking got louder, going head to head with their chanting.