Prodigal Blues

by Gary A Braunbeck

  "I go over there and tell him that I got an e-mail from my brother who's been missing for a couple of weeks, and I ask him if there's any way he could find out where it was sent from."

  "He ran a traceroute on the computer the mail came from?"

  "How did you know?"

  "I went to college, remember. I read books. Me smart girl, know many things."

  "So you keep telling me. The kid explained to me how a traceroute to an IP address will show the last few routers of the ISP through which they got the connection. Most ISPs name their routers to include the city they're in. Someone more security conscious will either name them differently so the city doesn't show up, or block traceroutes entirely, but that doesn't much matter because other routers in other networks which you use to reach them will be obviously named. Isn't that interesting?"

  "Fascinating. Where is he?"

  I took out my wallet and removed the slip of paper I'd been carrying around all day, looked at it—

  16 pop1-col-P6-0.atdn.net (66.185.140.55) 101.196 ms 50.611 ms 50.027 ms

  17 rr-atlanta.atdn.net (66.185.146.242) 62.850 ms 63.504 ms 105.878 ms

  18 srp5-0.rdcoh-rtr2.atlanta.rr.com (65.25.129.102) 64.905 ms 103.651 ms110.467 ms

  19 gig2-1.rdcoh-swt7.woodstock.rr.com (65.24.3.254) 62.967 ms 63.869 ms 65.189 ms

  —then handed it to Tanya.

  "He's in Atlanta?"

  "Woodstock. It's a suburb. He was there at seven a.m. this morning. He could be anywhere now. And the only way to get any more specific than that is to have access to the city's phone company or cable records."

  "Couldn't a really clever computer hacker get that information?"

  "Yes." I looked at her. It took a moment for her to read my expression.

  "The guy in tech support?"

  "It took some really sterling acting on my part to convince him that this was a genuine family emergency, and it took him a couple of hours, but he got access to the cable company's records in Woodstock."

  Tanya took hold of my arm. "Do you have an exact address?"

  I nodded.

  "Did he check for a phone number?"

  "Yes. There isn't one. But guess who that cable account is registered to?"

  "I have no—oh, shit, yes I do. Beowulf Antiques, Inc.?"

  I nodded once again. "He went back to the only home he's got left."

  Tanya stood up. "All right, here's the plan; your court appearance is Friday morning. It's now Wednesday morning—or really late Tuesday night, depending on how you want to look at it. We get a flight out to Atlanta as soon as possible, rent a car, drive to Woodstock, and bring him back here."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that. He's alone and probably sick with grief and sacred and… and I don't know what else. He's got no one else to turn to but us."

  "Then why in the hell didn't he just tell me where he was?"

  "He's testing you again. Maybe he wants to see how much you're willing to go through to find him."

  "Sounds like something he'd do, all right."

  "So?" Tanya stood there, arms crossed over her chest—a really great and sexy chest that I hadn't groped or ogled in over a week—drumming her fingers on her forearm.

  I sighed. "Did I ever tell you how much I hate traveling? I mean really, truly, sincerely loathe it?"

  "You might have mentioned it once or twice over the years, yes."

  I stood. "Don't put us next to the wing, whatever you do. I'll keep flashing back to the Twilight Zone with William Shatner and the gremlin."

  "I like sitting next to the wing."

  "That's because you're an evil woman and know how much it freaks me out."

  She took my hand, squeezed it. "I love you."

  "You'd damn well better."

  Fourteen-and-a-half hours later, a little before six p.m., just as the Georgia sun was casting a twilight clay over the red clay soil of that great and beautiful Southern state, Tanya and I were driving a rented car down the longest side road I'd ever encountered. Trees stood tall and thick-leaved on either side of the road, creating a canopy. Getting this far, we'd passed three fields overrun with kudzu, which I had never seen before. It looked like a massive, violent knot of human tendon to me. Which is to say I wasn't thrilled, where Tanya kept wishing aloud that we had a camera so she could take lots of pictures.

  The road rose up, turning, and finally leveled out about twenty yards from a massive chain link fence with rolls of barbed wire running across its top. The gate entrance had been ripped from its hinges and the doors lay twisted and ruined on either side.

  So they'd simply run through it with the bus. I could almost hear Arnold and Thomas and Rebecca and Denise encouraging Christopher to floor it and break it down. Christopher probably told them all to shut up, he'd do what he wanted, and then rammed through it anyway, much to their cheers.

  It was almost enough to make me smile.

  I killed the engine and sat there, staring at the house—a near-monstrous gabled number that looked like something out of a Daphne Du Maurier novel. I could almost see Mrs. Danvers snarling down from one of the windows as Maxim de Winter was arriving with his new wife, whom Danvers would forever refer to as "…the second Mrs. De Winter."

  "Okay," said Tanya, "here's the big question: do you want me to come with you?"

  "No. Absolutely not. The idea of you being even this close to that… place makes me sick."

  "It's just a house, Mark."

  "Right, and Auschwitz is just a bunch of old bunkhouses with a primitive form of central heating, got'cha." I leaned forward and peered out. "I don't see the motorcycle."

  "He might have parked it in the back of the house. If he's hiding out here, that'd be the thing to do."

  "Been on the run a lot, have you? Keeping one step ahead of The Man? You been hiding copies of Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book from me? Not good for The Movement, baby, not cool, un-groovy."

  "Are you finished?"

  "I'm scared to death, Tanya. I don't want to go in there, I don't want to see what it looks like. Every smell's gonna make me think I'm sniffing… leftovers." I swallowed. Once. Very hard. "And I know what he did to them in there."

  "So do I."

  I kissed her cheek. "I'm sorry, I'm stalling."

  "Yes, you are. And if there's as much security in there and he said, then I'm guessing that Christopher already knows we're here." She pointed toward a security camera in one of the trees to our left. "Looks like the red light's on to me."

  I looked up at the camera, mouthed "All in favor," then raised my hand.

  "Go and get him, Mark."

  "Here," I handed her the keys. "You might want to start it up and run the air conditioner if it gets too hot."

  "If?" said Tanya, taking the keys. "The temperature's risen twenty degrees in the last five minutes just from all the hot air you've been blowing."

  "You make me feel so manly."

  "I will give you fifteen minutes, my love, to convince him to come out here and go home with us. If you're not out in fifteen minutes, tell him that I will be coming in for the both of you, and that nobody wants that. Go. Shoo. Fetch."

  "Woof, woof." I climbed from the car and began walking toward the front porch. As I neared the house, I could see a section of Grendel's massive garden off to the right; it covered about half the ground to the side of the house and extended all the way around to the back. I imagined the kids out here most of the day, tending to his tomatoes, his peas, his onions, all the while knowing what waited for them later that evening, any evening, every evening.

  The front porch was wide and spacious, decorated with potted plants and white wicker lawn furniture; it looked like the type of setting Eudora Welty often employed; two ancient Southern ladies, sitting on their porch at twilight, sipping extra-sweet iced tea as they watched the sun go down and told each other all about their day and their plans for the coming week, when the grandchildren were supposed to visit. It looked cool and safe, the front
porch of home from a Frank Capra film.

  I opened the screen door and knocked on the heavy oak door behind it. There was a wide stained glass window in the center of the door, depicting a scene of a bird with a flower in its beak flying over a church steeple with a ringing bell; beneath this scene was the word Welcome.

  I knocked louder, called Christopher's name several times, then pounded the door with the side of my fist.

  "Fuck this," I said, and picked up one of the potted plants, readying to smash the window; then I asked: What would you do, Dad?

  I'd check to make sure the door was locked before I went all ape-shit.

  Good idea. I set down the plant and checked the door.

  It was unlocked, and swung open noiselessly. Grendel must have had them oil the hinges every day.

  I took a deep breath, held it, and stepped over the threshold. I did not close the door behind me.

  The place was an antique dealer's Nirvana; from the wing-backed chairs to the little end tables to the china cabinets and the china inside them, there wasn't one piece of furniture within sight that probably didn't cost less than two-weeks' salary for most people. Even the area rug on which I was standing probably carried a four-figure asking price; homemade quilts of exquisite craftsmanship hung on the walls; an old Victrola in mint condition was placed just inside the entrance to the living room. The only thing modern in the entire downstairs was the massive 62-inch digital television in the corner of the living room.

  And then there were the jars.

  Dozens, hundreds of specimen jars lined the bottoms of the walls all around me, and continued on up the steps to the upstairs; they lined the floor of the kitchen, the pantry, the bathroom—even the back porch. The lids had been removed and the stench of alcohol and formaldehyde hung in the air, watering my eyes.

  I glanced too long at a few of the jars and saw what floated within them—a child's hand, a pair of testicles, a few eyes, something that might have once been a small girl's vagina—then doubled over and dry-heaved. When I could stand again and pull in my breath without gagging, I called Christopher's name twice as loudly as before, and was answered only by the muffled echo of my own voice.

  I had no choice but to search the entire house. I started upstairs and worked my way down.

  In my blackest nightmares I have never imagined any devices like those I saw in the various bedrooms; devices for torture, for restraint, for the mouth and genitals, strap-ons, leather hoods, spiked heels, whips, studded gloves, studded collars, an Iron Maiden, cages with children's toys inside them, chains, handcuffs, enema bags, rubber tubes, rubber gloves, leather underpants, a machine with needles and clamps stained with blood… if I stood still and held my breath, I could still hear the children’s cries.

  I never knew there were so many different ways to scream, Christopher had said.

  Back downstairs, shaking like crazy but still on my feet, I passed what I at first thought was a charcoal drawing of Jesus Christ in a gold frame, but I was wrong; the frame was gold-plated and it was an enlarged photograph of Charles Manson.

  I found the door to the basement and went down to the kids' room; all I found there were their beds, single-sized, arranged around the walls like bunks at sixth grade camp; if it weren't for the chains hanging from the walls, you could almost mistake it for a children’s bunkhouse. There was a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a small combination TV/VCR unit, a large stack of videotapes five-deep, a bookshelf that displayed such titles as Yertle the Turtle, Bridge To Terabethia, The Chocolate War, Summer of My German Soldier, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and many others… but no Winnie-the-Pooh books. Not a one.

  The floor down here was lined with opened specimen jars, as well.

  The door to the sub-basement, to Ravenswood, was at the far end of the room; it, too, was unlocked but creaked and screeched as I pulled it open. An opened specimen jar sat on either side of each step all the way down; twelve wooden steps, twenty-four jars. A single bare bulb hung from a wire in the ceiling, casting a sick white glow over everything and making the shadows to the side seem deeper and endless and hungry.

  "Christopher?" I called, my voice made deafening by the narrow space.

  No answer.

  I started down the steps, looking only at the large iron door at the bottom, never at what was inside the jars. What was inside the jars had once been the light of some parents' lives, a giggling ball of cuteness in a high chair plopping its face down into its very first birthday cake, a hyper thing that had to chase after constantly because they ran everywhere like they knew something really exciting might be happening over there and they didn't want to miss a thing…

  I hit the bottom of the steps and had to steady myself against the door.

  All this death, all these remnants of lives ended too soon and too brutally. I could feel all of them behind me, around me, above me; I could hear the ghostly echo of their voices crying out for someone, anyone, Mommy, Daddy, please somebody come help me.

  From their jars the remains of these forever-lost children whispered: How can you be a part of this?

  I think there are places in this world, ruined places, dark places, places where human apathy toward human perversity runs rampant, and these places become a cancer unique to any known disease; spreading, chewing apart anyone who comes into contact with them, forever infecting anyone who even knows they exist; places that, for whatever reasons, have gone unchecked and unnoticed and have become, through the horrors committed there, living, twisted, evil beings unto themselves.

  Places can be as evil as any human being.

  And I knew such a place lay on the other side of the door I now faced.

  I am a good and decent man, I thought.

  The image of Grendel's grisly rose flashed across my mind's eye.

  I am a good and decent man.

  The door was the same kind you see most restaurants use for their meat lockers; there was even a temperature-control panel in the wall beside it. Right now it was an even thirty-two degrees inside. The door was thick and heavy; if Christopher was in there, he wouldn't have been able to hear me.

  I grabbed the handle and yanked it back, opening the door.

  Cold mist rolled out, covering my hands, my legs, my torso, snaking up to my face.

  "Christopher?" I said, my breath foggy before my eyes. I blinked against the battling temperatures of the stairway and sub-basement, then stepped inside, waving the mist away.

  He was lying on the autopsy table, naked, a rubber tube around his arm and an emptied syringe hanging from his arm.

  I think I might have screamed as I ran toward him but I can't be sure. I do remember that I grabbed him and pulled him upright, slapping his face and shaking him but he'd been dead for at least a day; his back was discolored from the blood that had settled there. He'd gone to great lengths to make sure his makeup looked smooth and natural—he'd even added a few wrinkles near his eyes like Rebecca had done.

  I held his body against me and cried, rocking him back and forth like a father singing a lullaby to his newborn child. His head flopped backward and I could see that his facial prosthesis on the left side was starting to come loose from exposure to the cold. I pressed it back into place but it wasn't going to stay. I'd need to find some spirit gum. I reached down and removed the syringe from his arm. A glass vial lay on the floor near my feet; I could easily read the word methylmorphinan on its label.

  He'd given himself a massive overdose of morphine.

  At least he hadn't been in pain, that was something.

  Wasn't it?

  I kept rocking him back and forth, and was soon aware of the sound of someone signing, softly, slowly, with great tenderness. It was a voice I didn't recognize. It was my own.

  "Sleep my child and peace attend thee,

  All through the night.

  Guardian angels God will send thee,

  All through the night.

  Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,

  Hill and dale
in slumber sleeping,

  I my loved ones' watch am keeping,

  All through the night..."

  Except when I got to the "…hill and dale" line, I sang: "…Bill and dale look dumb-er sleeping…" but no one laughed.

  I stopped myself, then lay him back down carefully, pushing the prosthesis back into place once again.

  And that's when I saw the folded piece of paper held in his palm by a rubber band that he'd wrapped around his hand.

  I slipped it from his hand and unfolded it:

  Dear Pretty-Boy:

  If you're reading this, then I'm guessing you're not exactly thrilled with me at the moment. I'm sorry. This wasn't something that I did in the heat of the moment or in the depths of despair or anything all melodramatic and tragic like that. I gave it a lot of thought, and realized that it was really the best thing all the way around. I'm saying I was happy with the decision, okay?

  I had a great last night. I made pizza and popcorn, and I watched a bunch of great movies, and I listened to records, and I finally read Winnie-the-Pooh. Man, that was a good book, thanks for mentioning it to me.

  Here's the thing; I left the other computer in the upstairs hall closet for you. You need to take it. I figured out Grendel's password. You'll never believe what it was. Ready?

  Mommy. Ain't that a kick in the balls? Imagine what a psychiatrist could do with that one.

  Anyway, all his private files have been opened and saved in a folder called "Get This." It's got everything, Pretty-Boy; the code-key for the e-mails, phone numbers and addresses of all his party guests and distributors, receipts, everything. Take it, and use it, and fuck them up real good for me.

  There's also another envelope full of money in there, about another thirty thousand dollars. Take it and buy that wife of yours something nice. She deserves it for putting up with the likes of you. And don't get noble like I said, don't turn the money over to the police or anything like that or I'll be really put out. My guess is that once all of this is made public, the names of the families will come out soon enough. Send it to them, or give it to charity, or hand it out to homeless people, I don't care. Just don't tell anyone you have it. Consider it our way of spitting in Grendel's face one last time.