by John Gault
Jamie stood at the broken-fence entrance to Whately’s Copse and waited until they were beside him. “In there,” he pointed. Freddy looked puzzled, then a little scared. Christina looked a lot scared; she wanted to run, and she wanted Freddy to run with her. She was glancing back down the empty road and pulling a little let’s-get-out-of-here pull on Freddy’s arm. Jamie leaned against the broken fence and folded his arms. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, “I know this forest very well. Just follow me.”
“Freddy,” Christiana whimpered, “I don’t want to go into Whately’s Copse. Oh, Freddy, please, let’s go back to the party!”
Jamie wanted to laugh at her, but he thought better of it. He wasn’t sure he could disguise his laugh as well as he had his voice. The final move in the plan was just too close now to mess it up. He had begun to feel the tingling, the excitement of it all. His mouth was getting dry and he had to gulp a couple of times to clear his throat. Then, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, he said, “If you’re afraid, Fred-dee Hoek-straaa, then run away with your little friend. I will tell Jamie that you couldn’t come tonight.”
“I’m not afraid of anything, pal,” Freddy said, shoving Christina aside and lunging for Jamie. Jamie dodged and jumped into the woods, back-peddled a few feet and then beckoned slowly. Freddy grabbed Christina’s hand roughly and dragged her, still snivelling, behind him. With the ease born of months of practise, Jamie floated through the woods in front of them, close enough to be seen and followed, but far enough ahead to avoid Freddy. When Jamie got to the clearing he waited until they were just a few feet away, then ran hard to the side of the largest hummock. There, in the dim light he waited. Freddy wasn’t feeling all that pirate-bold anymore, Jamie could see, but he kept up his pursuit, Christina still in tow.
At that moment Jamie strolled around the hummock and stopped to face the other two children, who were now positioned with the unseen hole between themselves and Jamie. Then, slowly, Jamie pulled back the hood of his costume and peeled off the rubber mask. “Hello, Freddy,” he said in his own little-boy Jamie voice.
“You son of a bitch!” Freddy—his anger restored—yanked himself away from Christina’s clutching hand and leaped across the mound of earth, his left hand reaching for Jamie’s throat, his right balled into a fist. Then, suddenly, he found himself sliding down the edge of the hole, his arms flailing, his hands grabbing for something, anything, to stop the fall. The boy’s long scream, full of primitive terror, was abruptly cut off by a thumping crunch. Jamie didn’t try to look down, since it was too dark to see. Instead, he walked slowly around the mound to Christina, who was standing there frozen, with rigid hands held to her mouth and eyes horror glazed. She didn’t move, didn’t even seem to notice as Jamie walked around behind her.
He grabbed her blond frizz with his left hand and twisted. The pain of that snapped Christina out of her spell, and she tried to struggle away. But Jamie held her tight and forced the girl down to her knees. With his free hand, he slid down the zipper of her ballet costume, then flipped her on her back and stripped the cloth off her shoulders and over her arms. Getting rid of the rest was more difficult, because getting clothes off girls was, after all, very new to him. Before long, though, he managed to rip away all the girl’s clothes: her ballet costume, her little cotton panties, and the nearly cupless bra. All the time Christina just wept softly with no fight in her at all. When at last he had her fully naked, Jamie stared at the girl in the moonlight. Christina was all white, except for the little dots of her nipples and the skimpy patch between her legs. She did not make Jamie very excited, this skinny, pale, weeping child. He thought of Miss Livingstone, and he thought of Sandy, and he felt a stirring down there. But then he looked at Christina, and the stirring went away.
“Jamie?” He heard her panicked whisper. “Please Jamie. Don’t do anything to me. Please?”
Jamie smiled a terrible smile, and when he spoke, he saw her swollen eyes grow wider and wider with fright. Oh, he realised, I’m using that voice, the one Teddy said to be careful not to use around people. Well, it really doesn’t matter now, does it?
“You laughed at me, Christina. You laughed when Freddy beat me up, when he called me dirty names, when he made me run away. You thought it was funny, didn’t you?” He stepped forward and stood over her, looking down into that helpless, terrified face, and enjoying the sensation of having her completely within his power. Then he reached forward and grabbed her by the hair again, pulling her to her feet with a strength that he’d never felt before. Using his other hand to twist her arm behind her, he then forced her to the lip of the hole.
“There’s your fucking Freddy,” he growled, pushing her face over the side. “You can’t see him, but he’s there. And soon my friends will come—oh yes, Christina, I do have friends—and they’ll take care of him. They eat meat, Christina, young tender meat.”
He released her hair, lifted up hard on the arm, and she lurched forward, down into the blackness. Jamie could tell from the soft crunch that she had landed right on top of Freddy. Christina gave one last little cry, and then there was no sound in the hole, the clearing, or the forest. The silence was total, unbroken by not even a cricket’s chirrup or the messages of night birds. Jamie stretched out on his stomach on the safe part of the lip and peered into the depths below. “Hey,” he said in his Jamie voice, “come on out. I’ve brought you more food. Something special.”
In a few moments he heard the grunting, at first far-off but then, in a minute or two, directly below him. The grunting had come to sound almost like words, and Jamie was starting to believe he almost knew what his friends were saying to one another. The next thing he heard was flesh ripped from bone. How he wished he could see that! But it was just too dark down there. Maybe tomorrow he’d stay and watch.
At twenty minutes after midnight on Sunday, June 22, Mildred Wagoner phoned Beatrice Hoekstra to ask if Christina was there. “No,” Beatrice Hoekstra said, “Christina’s not, and neither is Freddy.” Beatrice woke her husband, Ernie, who’d fallen asleep in front of the TV, and Ernie staggered into his car and drove over to the Jameson’s house. A sleepy but pleased Richard and Glenda were just taking down the last of the Chinese lanterns, and a yawning Billy was feeding the last of the leftover pizza into the garberator. Their mood changed quickly when Ernie arrived, and for the next half hour, in separate cars, Ernie and Richard and Vince Wagoner, who’d just come off shift at the paper mill, slowly patrolled the streets of Jericho, looking for a boy dressed up like a pirate and a girl dressed up like a ballerina. Shortly after one A.M., Annie Goring, who was on duty that night, picked up the phone to hear the frightened voice of Mildred Wagoner tell her that Christina had disappeared. Annie took down the description, then flipped on her microphone and alerted the four officers on cruiser patrol to watch for a Christina Wagoner, four feet eleven inches tall, caucasian, blond, aged twelve, and Fredric Hoekstra, five feet four inches, caucasian, brown hair, aged thirteen; last seen wearing a ballet costume and a pirate outfit respectively. At two thirty A.M., after another nearly hysterical call from Mildred Wagoner, Annie picked up the phone and dialled Chief Torrey’s number. He listened sleepily, then instructed her to call everybody in. He would be there in about ten minutes to supervise the search. Annie lit a cigarette and dragged deeply a couple of times lifting the receiver again. The boys and girls were not going to like this.
Before the sun rose, every other child who had been at the party, every other child save two—Abergail Buhl and Jamie Benjamin—in the graduating class of James K. Polk, had been shaken awake by half-asleep, berobed parents, and brought into living rooms to be closely questioned by police officers. Not one of them remembered when Freddy and Christina had left the party. It was such a fun party and they’d all been having such a good time that they hadn’t much noticed Freddy and Christina. A few recalled that the two weren’t around when the pizza came, about eleven, but they hadn’t thought too much about it because Freddy and Christina often just
sort of went off alone together.
About six A.M. old Scotty Tumbrell, who was proud to think of himself as the official town drunk—a belief with which the police department and the other citizens fully agreed—woke from his usual stupor with a powerful hunger. He wandered out of the park and down an empty Main Street toward John & Jane’s Diner to see what the garbage cans had to offer. He started to reach into the first can, then yanked back his hand and blinked. Right on top, its sequins glinting in the slanted rays of the morning sunlight, was what looked like a wedding dress. Gingerly he lifted the strange garment out and held it up. He was still trying to figure out what the thing was when a car screeched up behind him, a door opened, and David Bentley’s knife-edged voice said, “Freeze, mister!” When Scotty turned, all he saw was the huge black hole of the gun muzzle. But before David could say, “Oh, relax, Scotty,” now that he recognized the old guy, Scotty had passed out.
C H A P T E R
20
“Good morning, Miss Oliphant,” Jamie said.
“Who’s that?” Miss Oliphant snapped. She peered in the direction of the voice but could perceive only a gray shape.
He came closer, stood behind the wheelchair, and introduced himself. “It’s me, Miss Oliphant, Jamie Benjamin.” She stiffened. But Jamie’s voice was soothing. “Please, Miss Oliphant, please don’t be mad at me. I just wanted to talk to you for a while. I mean, we’re moving, I mean my parents and I are going away for good, and I just wanted to apologize to you before I go. I know I was bad, that I said awful things to you, and I’m really sorry, honest I am.”
She couldn’t quite understand why the boy was trying to be nice, but she relaxed some anyway. She still wished, however, that Louise would come back. She knew now that she should have accepted Louise’s invitation to come to church with her, instead of sitting alone and helpless outside in the park, but it just wasn’t in Miss Oliphant’s Baptist soul to cross the threshhold of an Episcopalian church. It was too close to Papist for her liking.
“Well, Jamie Benjamin,” she said, forcing herself to be at least civil with the boy, “I accept your apology.”
“Oh thank you, Miss Oliphant,” he replied happily. Then he reached down and disengaged the braking system on the chair and eased Miss Oliphant out from under her shade tree and onto the wide macadam path that cut diagonally through the park. The path ended at the two lane blacktop of the secondary highway that divided the built-up edge of Jericho from Whately’s Copse and the farmland beyond.
“Jamie! What are you doing, boy?” The boy had given her no warning. He hadn’t even asked if she wanted a ride; he had just started to push Miss Oliphant along. “Stop it this instant, do you hear me?” They were soon out of the park; and the road—because it was just a few minutes after nine on a quiet Sunday morning—was deserted. Miss Oliphant did not know this, of course, and she began to holler for help in her cracking old-lady’s voice. But Jamie just kept pushing faster and faster down the road and across onto the gravel, then through long sun-dried grass and finally to the fence itself.
Miss Oliphant twisted in the chair, trying to fall forward. If she could just get out, she thought in increasing panic, perhaps this boy would be too weak to get her back in. But no, there was no chance. If he was going to harm her—and her mind was bursting with images of rape and murder and mutilation—he would not be stopped. Why, oh why, could nobody hear? Why didn’t somebody come along. Oh, Blessed Jesus, please save me!
Then . . . salvation! She heard a car coming. They’d see, they’d hear, and she’d be saved. What Miss Oliphant couldn’t know, however, in her world of dim sight, was that she and Jamie were already hidden from the road by brush and tall grass. And she would not be heard, either. Strong hands had her by the throat from behind, squeezing, and the most terrible evil voice she’d ever heard spoke a few inches from her ear.
“If you make one sound, you dried-up old cunt, I’ll kill you right here.” There was no inflection in the voice, no anger. Just a flat statement that was so full of vicious threat that she wet herself in fear. The car passed and the grip on her throat was relinquished. Then she was moving again, bumping and dragging over a floor of rotted leaves and soft rich black earth, her face and body and arms constantly lashed and cut open by low tree branches and high bushes. She was being hurled forward faster and faster, and all she could do was to cling tightly to the arms of the wheelchair and whimper long-neglected, half-remembered prayers for forgiveness and deliverance.
Then, she realized, the chair had stopped. She felt the full force of the warm June morning sun, and a soft breeze stirred her hair and caressed her scratched and torn skin. She sensed that Jamie—or whoever this monster was—had moved away from her, and she squinted, picking up movement to the right ahead of her. The boy seemed to be lying face down on a small hill, but she could tell no more than that. Then her other senses, improved by twenty years of functional blindness, came into play. She immediately wished they hadn’t, that the superb hearing and sense of smell she’d developed in compensation for her blindness had gone with her sight.
She knew the smell. After more than fifty years, she remembered it, even remembered how sick it had made her the first time, how, after she’d left that abattoir in Springfield, Illinois, she’d rushed across the street and vomited behind the bushes until nothing was left to come up.
But she didn’t know the sound, though she did know it was a noise she never ever wanted to hear again; the only image she could give that terrible sound was of a huge, hungry dog, ripping and chewing meat from a fresh bone. Her stomach, fuelled only by two pieces of toast and a cup of tea that morning, began to roil and erupt, and her hands went instinctively to her mouth. She began to gag, and she felt the sour, hot liquid dribble on her hands and down her chin.
Then in her chest something exploded, and agony flooded up into her shoulder, down her left arm, back up again into the chest, redoubling the pain every second. Heart attack. The stink and sound of ugly death faded, returned, worse than before but only briefly, and then was gone. She knew she was dying, and she was satisfied. Soon it would be bearable, soon she would be unconscious and she would never wake again. One more great spasm, and . . .
Jamie looked up from the hole, from watching his friends feed on the last of Freddy Hoekstra and Christina Wagoner, their “midnight snack,” as he’d come to regard it. The old woman was gasping, her breath whistling in and out of her; her body arched forward, then threw itself back against the chair; then she slumped and was very, very still. The boy stood up and went over to her. He lifted off the dark glasses and looked inquisitively into the empty, rheumy, washed-out eyes. He replaced the glasses, leaned down, and put his ear against her chest and listened for a few seconds before straightening and stepping back. Then he went around behind the chair, shoved it forward until it was near the top of the hummock’s slope, and tipped her out. Next he moved the chair away, lifted Miss Oliphant up onto the lip of the hole, and rolled her in. “Look out below!” he yelled in his Jamie voice, realizing just as Miss Oliphant dropped from his sight that his five friends were still down there munching on Freddy and Christina. He was pleased to see when he looked a second or two later that his friends had managed to get out of the way in time. They were all looking up now, yellow eyes blinking; more than ever before, Jamie believed that they knew him and that they understood what he was doing for them. The figures, while he watched with fascination, formed a tight little circle and began that grunting jabber of theirs; then they broke off and looked up at him again. One of them—the one Jamie had determined was the leader, although he couldn’t be sure because they looked so much alike—raised a clawed hand and pointed at him, then back to its own, bloodied mouth. Jamie thought it was smiling—its eyes had seemed different, softer—but he wasn’t sure about that, either.
“Yes, yes!” he said, pointing at the partly visible corpses of Freddy and Christina, their heads, like Allan’s, apparently unpalatable and therefore uneaten, and
at the broken body of Miss Oliphant, collapsed there facedown. “Oh yes, that’s right. Food!” He pointed to his own mouth and made chewing sounds and movements with his teeth and face.
The yellow eyes seemed to grow excited, and there was another short conference down below. Then they all looked up at Jamie again, and the leader grunted, “Furrd?”
“Oh yes,” Jamie laughed, clapping his hands in a very little boy gesture, “that’s right! Food!”
“Foord,” the creature said.
By eleven A.M. Chief Becker Torrey and his officers had just about reached a consensus. They were agreed that Freddy Hoekstra and Christina Wagoner must have been abducted after they had left the party at the Jameson place. They must have accepted a ride in a car with a man (or men), who must have taken them out of Jericho entirely. With nothing more to go on than Christina’s ballet costume and cotton panties that Scotty Tumbrell had found stuffed in a garbage can, kidnapping seemed the most likely guess. Radio bulletins, which had been playing since about eight thirty that morning, had produced not one helpful call.
David slipped off the desk top he’d been occupying silently throughout the briefing and wandered over to the coffee maker. He poured a half-mugful, sipped it, and made a disgusted face. He had not been willing to go along with the consensus, but at the same time he had not felt ready to explain just why. From the moment he’d drawn down on poor Scotty Tumbrell that morning and picked up the ballet outfit where Scotty’d dropped it, his mind had kept wanting to make a connection between this disappearance and that of the Reverend Morley and—and this was the truly tenuous part—the horror that Margaret Livingstone had been subjected to. The trouble was, there was no connection other than proximity in time. In his imagination—where it would have to most certainly stay for now—he saw a faceless, nameless, almost formless maniac, loose in this town, in their midst. And he believed that in some unfathomable way a nightmare had begun in Jericho that would not end that day. And yet . . . and yet . . . why, in his mind, did every scenario take him back to that clearing in Whately’s Copse, to the mound, to the hole where he’d felt such evil?