Prodigal Blues

by Gary A Braunbeck

  I started to ask something else, and then it hit to me: "How… how did you know about any of that? Edna's name or the food being delivered to my room or the car rental or—?"

  False-Face set the gun in his lap and reached down beside the chair to lift up something that looked like a hybrid of a large metal plate and opened umbrella. "This," he said, and proceeded to explain about the parabolic dish, what it could do, and at what distances.

  I waited until he was finished, then pointed at the dish and asked: "So how much do you know about me?"

  "We know your name, where you live, and that you came to Kansas to sign some release papers for your sister's share of an inheritance. We know that your brother-in-law's name is Perry, and that he loaned you a piece-of-junk car from his lot. We know that you did not tell anyone about our bus and our trailer. We know that you are traveling alone and like to pretend you are an obscene phone caller when you talk to your wife—and that as far as Tanya knows right now, you are stuck at a motel until you can rent a car in the morning. Which means we have about eighteen hours before any serious questions about you will be asked."

  There might very well have been holes in his reasoning, but I sure as hell couldn't find them at the moment.

  I took a deep, slow breath, swallowed, then licked my lips and said, "Please listen to me. I'm a goddamn janitor, you hear me? I'm not anybody important. I don't know what you want or what you think I have, but I'm asking you to please, please not hurt or kill me. I have no idea where we are right now, understand? No idea. You could just leave me here with my leg chained to the bed like this and be two states away before anyone finds me." I looked at the bedside table and saw that he'd disconnected the phone; the cord lay across the table top like a dead garden snake; the phone itself was nowhere to be seen. "You've taken the phone, so I sure as hell can't call anyone—"

  He put down the dish and again picked up the gun. "That is true, but you could describe the bus and trailer to them."

  "Unless we paint the trailer," said the younger boy's voice from the other side of the room. "I think we have enough to do that."

  False-Face shook his head. "You have watched too many bad crime movies, Arnold. Besides, you are all too tired. You need to sleep." He looked directly at me. "I was hoping that I could convince you to help us."

  I almost laughed—not out of any false, macho bravado, no, but at the sudden, surreal absurdity of it. "Let me get this straight—you kidnapped me because you need a fucking standby painter?"

  "Not exactly. No one will be painting anything. And please do not use profanity. It is very discourteous."

  "And I suppose these restraints you have me in are an expression of your humanitarian compassion?"

  "Please do not raise your voice like that."

  "What the hell do you expect? I'm scared, in case you're not getting the idea."

  "I will ask you again to please not curse."

  Something about the way he spoke struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

  "Look, I only swear when I'm nervous or angry," I said as evenly as I could. "I'd feel a whole helluva lot less anxious if you didn't have that gun pointed at me."

  He tilted his head slightly to one side as if considering something. "Why have you not looked at anyone else in this room? You know that we are not alone."

  "Because if I don't look"—again, he flinched at something—"then I can't give the police any descriptions, can I?"

  "But you have seen me."

  "I've been looking at you for five minutes, pal, and I honestly don't think"—again, he flinched—"that I could describe one detail of your face if an FBI sketch artist walked in here right his second. Nothing personal, but you're"—another flinch—"not exactly blessed with the most distinctive features, and—what the hell do you keep jumping at?"

  He shook his head and set the gun aside. "I do not think that you would understand."

  "You 'do not think'? What gives with all the formality? Did you learn how to speak from reading Daymon Runyon books or—?"

  And I figured it out.

  Just like that.

  Contractions.

  False-Face wasn't using contractions in his speech; he'd flinched every time I'd employed them, as if they were invisible hands slapping his face, or something that he found repulsive or frightening.

  He looked at me and gave a little grin. "I see that you have figured out what it is about the way I talk which bothers you." Something was wrong with his upper lip; it moved when he spoke, but not in synch with his words; it was shifting independent of his speech.

  He noticed where I was staring and reached up to cover his mouth. "Oh, no…"

  "I told you that we needed to take everything off, did I not?" said Rebecca, and at last I turned to see how many other people were in the room. I was expecting to see two—Rebecca and Arnold, the younger boy who'd checked the map and computer—but there were three; the third, a boy, was the farthest away, sitting in a wheelchair by the corner near the bathroom door. His legs were missing from the knees down; the pants he wore had been rolled up and tied into knots near the stumps, which were seeping; the knotted pants legs were badly stained. He moved his torso slowly back and forth in time with some song he was humming, his breathing labored and asthmatic—though it might have sounded worse because of the plastic Hallowe'en mask he wore: Elmer Fudd, trying to figure out if it was duck season or wabbit season. I tried to place the song he was humming.

  Rebecca was sitting nearest me, on the edge of the room's second bed. This close, and at this more natural angel, two things about her were obvious: one, her long, black hair was a wig and, two, her features were just as smooth and without lines or character as False-Face's. I stared at her a moment longer, then sniffed the air; the odor of makeup was quite strong—and I don't mean your typical, over-the-counter compact, blush, cosmetic-counter makeup, no; what I was smelling was theatrical makeup: base, greasepaint, pancake, powder, latex and spirit-gum; do any amount of theater in high school, college, or even with community players (as Tanya and I had done in the early days of our marriage) and those smells, once experienced, stay with you for the rest of your life.

  I looked next at Arnold, and was slightly surprised; his face, just as phony as those of his traveling companions, was of a different hue; he was black. This surprised me because there had been nothing about his speech—I had, after all, only heard him up to this point—to hint at his ethnicity. A lot of the guys on my crew are black, and I guess that I had come to associate their slang and speech patterns as being representative of all blacks. I promised myself I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions like that in the future… providing I even had a future beyond the next eighteen hours.

  Arnold wore a small, floppy fisherman's cap, the type used to hold hooks and flies, and sported a bright white, long-sleeved cotton shirt. It didn't take a genius to figure out why; if asked to describe him, a witness would say, "A black kid in a white shirt." They'd remember only the colors, nothing more.

  He was sitting on the opposite side of the bed from Rebecca. In front of him was a cheap metal typing stand, the kind on rollers that you can buy at any office supply store for ten bucks. An expensive laptop computer was set on the stand, while another, equally expensive laptop was on the bed, by his right side. Both computers were running; the one on the stand displayed what looked like an enlarged map detail, full of colored lines and areas highlighted in either red, blue, or orange; the computer on the bed showed a complex grid, in the center of which was a blinking white dot. Attached to the grid computer through a USB port was a smaller device that I at first thought was a cell phone because of its extended (though short) antenna, except that it had an LCD screen bigger than any I'd ever seen on a cell; this screen also displayed a white dot which blinked in perfect synchronization with the one on the grid. It took me a moment to figure out what this device was—until now I'd only heard about universal locators, or read about them in tech-geek magazines left lying a
round the common areas I cleaned in the Science building. I wondered where they'd gotten all this equipment. I wondered how they'd learned to use it. I wondered what it was they were tracking with the locator.

  The boy in the wheelchair coughed, made a hawking noise, then swallowed loudly and resumed his song, this time singing it in a whisper.

  "The crooner in the corner," said False-Face, "is Thomas. Until Denise, he was the youngest of us."

  Denise.

  Jesus.

  This was the first time since the restaurant I'd really thought about her and not myself. I turned back toward False-Face. "In the restaurant, Denise said that she wasn't traveling with the man who took her."

  "That is true."

  "Who took her? Do you know?"

  "Yes."

  "Where is he?"

  His eyes narrowed, then he gave his head a quick shake. "It does not matter anymore."

  "Has Denise… had she been with the four of you since she disappeared?"

  He sighed. "What do you think?"

  "She didn't"—False-Face winced again—"talk like the rest of you."

  "Of course she did not."

  "She used contractions when she spoke."

  I'm real sorry, mister.

  I now understood why she'd said that: she knew False-Face and the others had targeted me for… whatever it was they had in mind. God, she must've felt terrible about it. I wished I could see her to tell her that it was okay, that she didn't have to feel bad—poor little thing had more than enough to deal with without feeling guilty over me.

  "She used contractions," said False-Face, "because Grendel did not have her long enough to… teach her otherwise."

  "Grendel?"

  "Our master," said Rebecca.

  "Our watcher," said Arnold.

  "Our keeper," said Thomas from under Elmer Fudd's face, then went back to humming.

  "Our Eternal Lord of life, of death, of reward, of punishment," said False-Face.

  "Grendel," said Rebecca. Or it might have been Arnold. Even Thomas. For the next few minutes, as they spoke rapidly in turn, their tones and inflections became so similar in my ears they might as well have been one voice; I suppose, in a way, they were.

  "…'So the company of men led a careless life…"

  "…all was well with them…"

  "…until One began to encompass evil, an enemy from Hell…"

  "…Grendel they called this cruel spirit…"

  "…the fell and fen his fastness was…"

  "…the march his haunt…"

  "…this unhappy being had long lived in the land of monsters…"

  "…since the Creator cast them out as kindred of Cain…"

  "…for that killing of Abel the eternal Lord took vengeance. There was no joy of that feud…"

  "…far from mankind God drove him out for his deed of shame…"

  "…from Cain came down all kinds misbegotten—ogres and elves and evil shades—as also the Giants…"

  "… who joined in long wars with God…"

  "…He gave them their reward…"

  "…and so with the coming of night came Grendel, also…'"

  I couldn't even begin to grasp—let alone understand—this: how in the hell would a bunch of children know Beowulf well enough to recite it from memory?

  Then False-Face said: "Our Eternal Lord Grendel did not allow the abbreviation of speech…"

  And the litany started again, spoken by them in the rapid, well-practiced cadence of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or the alphabet or basic multiplication tables:

  "…contractions are for the lazy…"

  "…the simple-minded…"

  "…the disrespectful…"

  "…and the ignorant…"

  "…and there is no place in the House of Heorot for the discourteous…"

  "…and there is no room in the burg of the Scyldings for the ignorant…"

  "…Grendel was proof of that…"

  "…he told us over and over and over…"

  "…and over and over…"

  "…there is no forgiveness…"

  "…not for forgetting that…"

  "…for lessening the flow and music of God's language…"

  "…no forgiveness…"

  "…only a new lesson…"

  "…a different approach…"

  "…God does not reward the lazy…"

  "…He does not love the simple-minded…"

  "…He does not tolerate the discourteous…"

  "…to Him, they are as monsters…"

  "…and there is no heaven for monsters…"

  "…so lonely…"

  "…and how do monsters begin…"

  "…they are born first with lazy tongues…"

  "…careless grammar…"

  "…which makes their voices ugly…"

  "…and the songs they sing shrill and tuneless…"

  "…and that ugliness spreads to their faces, and then to their souls…"

  "…but some of them cannot see it even then…"

  "…because the soul of a monster is a tricky thing…"

  "…a mischievous thing…"

  "…and Grendel would quote something whenever we did not understand what he meant…"

  "…over and over and over…"

  "…about what monsters would walk the streets…"

  "…and over and…"

  "…if our faces were as deformed as our souls…"

  "…and Grendel would punish those whose speech fell offensive on his ear…"

  "…offensive speech deforms not only the soul of the speaker…"

  "…but of the listener, as well…"

  "…and with each transgression, you would lose a part of your soul…"

  "…the part that was hidden in your face…"

  "…what monstrosities would walk the streets…"

  "…if we lost enough of our souls, then we would understand…"

  "…and if we lost enough of our souls…"

  "…the part hidden in our faces…"

  "…then he would turn to our bodies…"

  "…because the monstrosity spreads, you see…"

  "…it spreads so fast…"

  "…and our souls continued being punished…"

  "…terrible punishment…"

  "…awful, painful…"

  "…lonely…"

  "…and if you dared to scream or call out…"

  "…so lonely…"

  "…if you cried…"

  "…if you so much as whimpered…"

  "…or even wept…"

  "…so lonely…"

  "…Grendel's outrage was openly to be seen…"

  "Slow down," I said.

  "…you did not want Grendel to be angry…"

  "…oh, no…"

  "…so lonely…"

  "…because his anger would not be just yours to suffer…"

  "…oh, no, never…"

  "…always never…"

  "…not ever…"

  "…a family suffers together…"

  "…if one hurts, you all hurt…"

  "…he told us it was only fair…"

  "…only just…"

  "…only moral…"

  "…only honorable…"

  I lifted my hands. "Stop it, please."

  "…if one of us made a mistake in speech…"

  "…or in actions…"

  "…then it was all our faults…"

  "…our mistake…"

  "…and mistakes must be chastised…"

  "…only fair, that is what Grendel said…"

  "…and so he hurt us…"

  "…he hurt us so much…"

  "…I still bleed down there…"

  "…I still leak…"

  "…still feel the burning…"

  "…the pieces of skin that are missing…"

  "…the taste…"

  "…his taste…"

  "…all over…"

  "…inside…"

  "…sometimes his ta
ste was all the food we were allowed…"

  "…for days and days…"

  "Jesus Christ!" I shouted. "Stop it, please. I can't—"

  "…sometimes he would lock us away…"

  "…one by one…"

  "…lonely…"

  "…and leave us in the dark to think about what we had done…"

  "…and wonder what he was going to do to us when he brought us back out into the light…"

  "…so bright and scary…"

  "…I miss my mommy…"

  "…I wonder if Dad will remember me…"

  "…if they are even still there…"

  "…do not want them to have forgotten me…"

  "…hurts so much sometimes I just want to die…"

  "…scared, I am so scared of the light all the time…"

  "…please do not be afraid of us…"

  "…do not scream or call out…"

  "…it is important…"

  "…you have to understand…"

  "…we do not want to hurt you…"

  "…honest, Mark, we do not…"

  "…oh, no…"

  "…but this is something we cannot do by ourselves…"

  "…not like this…"

  "…not the way we are now…"

  "…so safe in the dark because Grendel was not there…"

  "…because we were discourteous…"

  "…we were lazy in speech and manner…"

  "…and did not know any better…"

  "…until Grendel…"

  "…our Eternal Lord Grendel…"

  "…taught us what we needed to know…"

  "'…Grendel, they called this cruel spirit…'"

  "…I hate him…"

  "…he came with the coming of night…"

  "…oh, God, how I hate him, too…"

  "…cut them off…"

  "…and I know it is wrong to hate someone like this…"

  "…but I do not think he was human…"

  "…always lonely…"

  "…he just wore a really good mask that made him look that way…"

  "…I thought he had a nice face when I met him…"

  "…cut them off…"

  "…he smiled and told me not to worry…"

  "…do not cry…"

  "…I will help you find your mommy…"

  "…that is what he told me, too…"

  "…you do not have to be scared…"

  "…he cut them off! HE CUT OFF MY LEGS!" screamed Thomas from his wheelchair, wrenching forward with such anguished force he almost fell face-first onto the floor, but Arnold was there in an instant, grabbing him underneath his arms, steadying Thomas as his body shook, wracked by sobs as he reached up and tore away the mask—