Among Prey

by Alan Ryker

  “I promise I’ll give it right back.”

  She interpreted his blank stare.

  “Only one minute, I promise.”

  He held out his hand, the remote sitting across his wide palm.

  Carol flipped through the channels. The Miltons got hundreds of channels, and on Bobby’s television every one of them except the twenty-two children’s stations were locked. Carol gave him back the remote, and he quickly found his cartoon again.

  It had been a long shot. Even if he had figured out how to unlock the restricted channels, the sounds of adults speaking would have immediately gotten Carol’s attention. She went back to the dolls and placed them carefully in their special toy box. She sensed Bobby’s attention, and looked up to find him watching her. His gaze went from her face to the drawings in her hand, and she placed them in the box.

  “Bobby, can I look at your drawing pad?”

  He didn’t respond. If she asked him to show her his drawings, he would, but he didn’t answer questions.

  She went to the table where he did his art and opened his sketchbook. She never paid much attention to what Bobby drew, because he didn’t show her his drawings.

  Carol flipped through the pages. Everyone treated Bobby like a toddler, but judging by the drawings, Carol guessed he was as smart as a third-grader. He just didn’t respond in a way that could be easily tested. His drawings were filled with battle scenes between superheroes or Power Rangers. There was nothing particularly morbid portrayed anywhere. So the drawings of the girls were anomalous.

  Carol couldn’t figure out if that made them more or less frightening.

  * * *

  “Carol, it’s for you,” Martha, the housekeeper, said over the phone system.

  “Thanks!” Carol shouted across the room at the phone. She looked over to Bobby first, a habit whenever anything happened. He was engrossed in another episode of Power Rangers. She picked up the phone. “Hello? This is Carol.”

  “Lacee’s been gone for three days now. She never came home from school on Wednesday.”

  It was Julie, talking about Carol’s niece. For longer than a moment she couldn’t speak. It wasn’t that she had nothing to say, but that she had too many things to say, too many questions to ask, and they were all trying to come out at once. She finally settled on, “So Lacee hasn’t slept at home for the past three nights?”

  “Right.” Julie was sobbing so loudly the word barely made it through, but Carol could feel nothing but rage. The maelstrom of emotion had spun into a tight little bundle of rage.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me? What is wrong with you?”

  “Because I figured she was just being a bad kid and you’d gripe me out over it like you always do!” The phone distorted Julie’s roar into digital buzzes and squeaks.

  If Julie had been standing there, Carol would have thrown her to the ground and pummeled her like she had when they were kids. She would have banged her sister’s thick skull off the floor. But Julie wasn’t there, and having a shouting competition over the phone wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

  So after finding control over her voice, Carol asked, “When did you last see her?”

  Julie’s breathing quieted a little, became less ragged, less ready to fuel a scream, and she said, “Wednesday morning, before she left for the bus stop.”

  “Did you watch her get on the bus?”

  “No.” Sensing the accusation flinging itself back and forth in Carol’s skull, Julie continued, “I was in the damn shower getting ready for work.”

  “Did she make it to school?”

  “No.”

  Oh God, he’d taken her. Whoever was stealing the girls had stolen Lacee. She was so beautiful and so goddamn trusting because Julie had failed to instill any sense of the world’s dangers in her.

  “I gave a list of her friends to the police. They all swear they don’t know where she is.”

  “Do the police think…?” The words caught in Carol’s throat like a bite of something doughy, and it was expanding.

  “They won’t rule it out. They said one other girl was twelve.”

  Was. Julie just said was. Julie had given up on Lacee, but there could still be time. The other girls might be dead, but there could still be time for her.

  Carol dropped the phone and ran to Bobby’s special toy box. She scooped the dolls out. They still hadn’t been back to LYLAS Dolls, so the dolls weren’t important. She took out the drawings that had been shuffled to the bottom. Only two, the two she’d already seen.

  A shadow blanketed her. Bobby loomed over her, watching her.

  “Are there any more?” she asked as calmly as she could. He stared at her with those eyes, the eyes that told her he was much smarter than he let on. He stared and he said nothing.

  He stood between her and the table. Probably not intentionally, but she pushed past him and snatched up his sketchpad.

  “Is it in here?” she asked.

  He raised a hand, slowly reaching for it. She spun around and began to flip through the pages one at a time.

  Power Ranger. Power Ranger. Superhero. Superhero battle. Power Ranger. Tank. She went through them faster and faster until the pages hovered on the other side, refusing to settle any more quickly. She slapped them down, but they seemed to move even slower when she did. She began tearing the pages out and tossing them aside.

  Bobby reached past her for the pad. She spun to face him and shouted, “No!” and he slowly withdrew his hand.

  Soon, every flat surface was covered in ripped drawings. The last drifted to the Berber carpet as Carol looked at the spiral-bound sheaf of blank pages in her hands. She grabbed a corner, curled the pages and flipped through them. Nothing. There were no new drawings of girls, no drawing of Lacee.

  Carol tried to think. Did that mean Lacee was alive? He only drew them with wounds.

  “Bobby, do you know about Lacee? Do you know if she’s okay?”

  Bobby backed away a step. He stared at her, but then flicked his eyes down to his drawings quickly before continuing to stare. His expression was blank, and this time, Carol couldn’t read him. He’d shut himself away from her, and he presented her the inscrutable face other people always saw.

  “In one of those?” Carol asked. She’d only seen drawings of the stupid shit he watched on TV all day long, but she knelt down and began sliding the drawings around. Their ragged spiral edges snagged the carpet, and their rips snagged each other, and they didn’t slide smoothly, and soon Carol was crushing them up and throwing them aside. Tank. Power Ranger. Tank. Superhero. No girls. No Lacee.

  “How do you know?” Carol asked. She fought to speak calmly and quietly.

  Bobby didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t answer.

  Carol stood and swept the ripped pages that had landed on the table onto the floor. She placed the drawing pad on the table and pulled the chair out. “Sit.”

  Bobby sat.

  She grabbed the Tupperware full of colored pencils and dragged it to his right hand. “Draw her.”

  He didn’t move. Carol took a pencil out and pressed it flat against the back of his hand.

  “Take it.” His palm had been resting on the tabletop, and she saw the effort in his body as he pressed it flat. She pried at his fingers, tried to slip the colored pencil beneath them. “Take it!”

  He glanced at her quickly, then took the pencil.

  “Now draw her. Draw Lacee.”

  Once again, he didn’t move. He sat, shoulders hunched into a flannel mound.

  “Draw her,” she said again. She could feel they were the last calm words she would be able to speak. When he didn’t begin drawing, she started to move his hand for him, drawing a starter line on the page. She’d forced a green pencil into his hand. Hadn’t even noticed. She took her hands away from his, and the line stopped. “Draw!”

  But he didn’t move. He bunched his shoulders higher. He no longer looked at her, but looked straight ahead, out one of the big windows.r />
  He wasn’t even paying attention.

  “Draw her! Draw her! I know you know, so fucking draw her!” She tried moving his hand again, but this time he tightened the muscles in his forearm, and she couldn’t move it. She smacked his arm, and the pencil snapped against the pad.

  She hit him. She smacked him in the head with the butt of her palm. It rolled sideways and then back. He still didn’t look at her. Tears filled her eyes, and her throat closed down to nothing. She held it back for a moment, but then the sobs came.

  She snatched the broken half of pencil sticking out of the top of his hand away, then slid another down into his fist.

  “Draw! Draw! Draw!” Her voice rose to a shriek. He didn’t move, sat as stubborn as a mountain, looking ridiculous even on his oversized chair.

  She shook his arm.

  “Draw her!”

  She hit him in the head again, and again his head rolled to the side, then slowly came back. He didn’t look at her. She grabbed his enormous face in both her hands and turned him to her, but he would not look into her eyes. “How do you know?” she asked. “How the fuck do you know? Are you doing this somehow? How do you fucking know?” She slapped his hairless cheek, and he finally moved. He turned his head away, buried it in the crook of his opposite arm as she smacked him with both hands on his arm and shoulders. Once she started in with both hands, she couldn’t stop. She pummeled him, imagining Lacee, imagining little lady Lacee covered in mud with bruises around her neck. This sick fuck would have made a doll of her. She screamed at him, but they weren’t words, or at least she couldn’t remember them.

  “Carol, stop!”

  Carol did stop, hand raised. She turned and through tears saw a person-shaped blur in the doorway to the dayroom, but she recognized Martha’s voice.

  She fell to the floor, first to her hands and knees, then settling her forehead on the ground and her butt onto her heels, sobbing.

  The Giant

  Bobby spooned the Corn Pops out of his bowl and into his mouth. He’d prefer to have put his mouth to the bowl and shoveled it in, but he wasn’t allowed. He would have preferred to use a larger spoon, but he wasn’t allowed. He liked to eat out of a mixing bowl, but he wasn’t allowed. His parents wanted him to act like a “human being.”

  He finished the Corn Pops in his bowl and reached for the box. He would have liked to drink the sweet milk between every bowl, but he wasn’t allowed, because he could go through a gallon of milk in one morning that way. So he poured more cereal into the already twice-used milk.

  Bobby sat at the kitchen table, but he listened to his mother and Martha speaking at the counter. The island. He liked that it was called an island, and when he sat there on his stool, the big metal one, and when he remembered it was called an island, he’d put his feet on the bottom rung and imagine sharks swimming down below that would bite his feet if he sat them on the ground.

  They talked more quietly than they normally would, but not so quietly that he couldn’t hear. The quiet voices let him know he should listen, because they might be talking about him.

  “She said Lacee came back,” Martha said.

  “Came back?” his mother asked.

  “Turns out she met some guy on the Internet. He convinced her to go to a concert way over in Levington, where he lives.”

  “That’s two hundred miles!”

  “He bought her and her friend tickets to this concert, a friend in high school with a car, and she drove them out there. She said the police never connected it because Lacee is in junior high and the friend in high school, and apparently this other girl is such a problem child that her parents didn’t even report her missing.”

  “How old is this Internet person?”

  “Carol didn’t go into it, but over eighteen for sure. He had his own place.”

  “I’m glad she’s all right, that she wasn’t… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, and for Carol’s sake… But that little girl is trash. Her mother is trash. Carol might have come from the same background, but she’s…” His mother trailed off. He wanted to hear more about Carol.

  “You wouldn’t hire her back, would you?”

  “No. Of course not. We need to find someone, though. This is exhausting me, and I need to get back to work.”

  Carol wasn’t coming back. Bobby wanted to fling his bowl. He wanted to smash the table. He almost did. Instead, when he caught the muscles in his whole body tensing, he held them perfectly still, then made them relax. He placed his hands palms-down on the table, let the lightning bolt trying to electrify him into motion pass through him, out of his palms, into the table, into the ground. He stayed still, like they’d taught him in the home.

  Carol wasn’t coming back.

  Bobby pushed his bowl away.

  * * *

  The ghosts of the little girls came to him at night. He knew he wasn’t dreaming. In his dreams, the world was strange. The house would be different, or his room, if he even had a house or room. When the ghosts came to him, his room would be exactly as it really was.

  Before the little girls, he’d seen other things. Maybe not ghosts. Worse, darker than ghosts. The spirits of things that had never lived. Men in black coats who stood in the corners. He would try not to move, not to let them know he knew they were there. Things haunted him. Things lived under the bed. They’d take the form of snakes and bite his feet if he stepped down. They’d take the form of spiders and lower from the ceiling onto him, sending him careening around the room slapping himself. But they weren’t really snakes and spiders, but monster spirits. They’d disappear when the night man heard him moving and turned on the light.

  He knew they were not dreams because dreams happened when you slept, when your eyes were closed. What your eyes saw, what your ears heard, that was the real world.

  When the first girl came to Bobby, he knew she was not like the monster spirits who tormented him at night. She’d been alive once. She glowed. She had dark bruises on her neck. Blood had once run from her nose, and being dead, she had not wiped it away and it had turned to black crust. She was muddy. She explained to him she had gotten into the car with a man because it was raining hard, so hard her clothes were soaking wet like she’d jumped in a pool with them on. She’d asked for a ride home. He’d taken her to a place with trees and done things to her Bobby didn’t want to remember. He couldn’t forget, but he could refuse to put words to them in his brain. She said she screamed and screamed while he did bad things to her, until she almost couldn’t scream anymore.

  Then the man choked her and when she woke up she was dead. She said it so strangely that it scared Bobby more than if she’d cried. If she’d cried, he thought maybe he could have put a hand on her back and patted, something that was usually too overwhelming for him to manage.

  When Bobby awoke in the morning, he could see her so clearly in his head. He felt her with him, her ghost. That was another way he knew she was a ghost and not an evil spirit. The evil spirits, the ones who could change shape and had never been alive, they only came out at night. He didn’t know where they went during the day. The dark places were like doorways. The darkest places. The closet. Beneath the bed. The two corners where no light went. If he stared into them, even before they came through, he could see them there, preparing. The black would start to swirl, like when there was water on the road so that the water was as black as the road, and then there was oil on the water. If he stared into the dark, it would swirl like that, and then shapes would emerge and he’d see the spirits waiting to come out and torment him.

  The little girl glowed. Not at all like the evil spirits that arose from puddles of darkness, barely less black than the inky shadows they spilled from. The girl glowed. She was a ghost. And she didn’t go away. He couldn’t see her during the day, but he could feel her sadness. She wandered. He didn’t know how to help her.

  Some nights she came to him, others, she didn’t. She kept telling him how she died, how much it hurt, how she’d screamed. He wan
ted to help her. Help her get to Heaven. He didn’t want to hear her story over and over.

  One day, as he and Carol went to get ice cream, he saw her. He stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk, and turned slowly, afraid that if he moved too fast she’d disappear.

  It wasn’t her. It was a picture of a doll. But it looked so much like her.

  The doll he made, though, looked even more like her. He wanted to make it a happy doll. He thought maybe it would make the ghost girl happy. But when he was done, he felt she didn’t think it was done—she wanted him to show the world what the bad man did to her.

  She still came to him at night sometimes and told him about the horrible way she died and showed him her wounds, but during the day, he thought she stayed with her doll-self. He thought maybe he’d helped her find a little peace. He wished he could do more.

  Then another glowing ghost girl visited him. Then another. Then another.

  He made dolls for them all, and then he felt them less during the day. He hoped that meant the dolls helped.

  Amber the doll woman helped him. He liked her. She wasn’t fake nice. He thought she must like him for real, too.

  Then they stopped going to the doctor’s office by the doll store, and he didn’t know how to tell Carol to take him there. But the ghosts kept coming.

  So he drew them. He remembered what they looked like at night, floating in his room, staring with their big eyes, not at him, but into the darkness, a million miles away, looking at something he couldn’t see and didn’t want to, something you only saw when your heart stopped beating.

  He didn’t know why they came to him. They weren’t as scary as the evil spirits, but they made him so sad. He felt bad for them, but he wanted them to go away.

  * * *

  Bobby wanted Carol to come back. Sitting across his dayroom table from his mother, he drew a picture of Carol. It wasn’t as easy as drawing superheroes or Power Rangers, because there weren’t as many things about the way Carol looked that were so different from other people. She didn’t wear a colorful costume with a shape on the mask that made the Power Rangers so fun to draw. She looked like a normal lady. But she was Bobby’s favorite lady in the world. His mother sometimes called him a mama’s boy, and he always thought, I’m a Carol’s boy.