Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  It must’ve been something about the smelly, dead-and-alive pork chop that finally tuned Sean’s radar to the same frequency as Ellen’s own, but it had decisively permitted them both to be frightened enough to decide upon egress. Nevertheless, it was just then, just as they were leaving, never to return, not even in their minds, when Ellen spotted an old ammo canister, circa 1972 Vietnam. If it would have been sealed shut, she could have left it, abandoned just like the rest of the godforsaken pit of despair the man had called a home. Probably just like the men who had carried the canister into the South Pacific jungle to do battle with enemies that didn’t care and carry out orders that weren’t clear.

  The canister was not sealed shut, though. The canister was not wide open, but instead was cracked just enough to reveal the corner of one wrinkled page of one weathered book, which would change Ellen’s life forever. Not just change it, but become it. She, an avid reader, had no choice but to pry it open and see what the pages revealed. She was, after all, only a child. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back,” she said to Sean who was screaming that he didn’t want to die in this shit shack, and for her to hurry. Clearly, the dead-cat smelling thing in the refrigerator hadn’t been satisfied, She thought. No coming back from that.

  And so, she ended up with the book, but had no intention of reading it. Or, at least, that is what she told the curious cat of her imagination as she pried the rusty metal lid from its frame. Off ya go, she told the cat. Just want to see what all’s in here, is all, she told that cat.

  Meow, the cat said back, granting her permission in its apathy. And so, her intentions of not reading the book slowly transmogrified into a need to know what was inside.

  You knew I was going to read it, all along, she accused the cat, who sat licking its furry balls in the corner of her mind while she thumbed back the cover and read the first page.

  Chapter One—The Girls, it read.

  Chapter one

  The Girls

  Only it didn’t read like any book Ellen had ever read, and wasn’t exactly about any girls so much as it was about the man, Cirril, and his meaningless job working for Amboy Elementary School, over off Macarthur Drive, just before it turns into Old Conway Highway. He had been a janitor there, perhaps still was—the journal wasn’t specific as to whether the odd, greasy man was still under their employ, but he had written about his working days and responsibilities laboriously in the opening pages of the journal. In all that writing the only substance was that he had done quite a few sneaky things across the months or years of his tenure, including, but not limited to, the calculated theft of hundreds of tiny cartons of General Mills’ answer to a balanced breakfast. Although he admitted to having stolen the boxes of cereal from the school cafeteria, it only half explained their presence in the abandoned apartment. After all, a real thief would have taken his loot with him, or would have eaten it all.

  Now, and for the first time, Ellen considered that the man, Cirril, might possibly be dead. Then she began to imagine how. And why. She began to wonder if, perhaps, that wasn’t a pork chop rotting in the refrigerator, after all, and was, instead, the remains of Cirril. She pictured him, disgusting as he undoubtedly was, carving off pieces of his own flesh and sautéing them, savoring himself one morsel at a time until all that was left was the tiny hunk she’d found. When he was all full and couldn’t possibly eat anymore, she thought, he must’ve placed the rest of himself onto the top shelf of the refrigerator for safe keeping. It wasn’t until sometime later that Cirril would have realized he was, in fact, dead, and therefore couldn’t finish his leftovers. What a waste, Ellen thought finally, and shook her head in disgust.

  “Ok, forget that. It doesn’t matter,” she told herself and began to read the same paragraph again.

  Cirril had been using his jingly keychain, attached to the belt loop of his dungarees, and rattled out a creepy and foreboding warning to listeners as he rambled up and down, up and down the halls. He shook out this rattle-jingle as he stared into students’ eyes, those who were unfortunate enough not to look away in time, and let them gaze upon his emptiness. He threatened to taint the onlookers with his ugliness, voidedness, and murk. His keychain rattling lured their eyes into his own like a siren song and he turned them to stone with his retched gaze. He used those noisy keys in another manner to gain access to various sectors and scant hallways and closets, all over the building. It wasn’t just food he was after, he had stolen something much harder to digest than Fruit Loops, though fruity cereals do give this writer the shits. Nor was it just the ability to take a piece of a child’s soul by staring them into the voice and showing them his hollowness. He wrote about things truly sinister. He wrote them down for reasons unknown, and the journals were the only link we ever had to him, the only lead we had on the case in over 20 years of searching. Perhaps he had to write his activities down to process them. Perhaps it was to drain the pus off his mind. Or, perhaps he simply wanted Ellen to read them all: His gift to her, his spiritual concubine.

  There were six girls in all, at least that he had listed in the journal, including Ellen, though we have since uncovered at least ten more cold cases that could be linked to Cirril, but nothing concrete as of yet. It doesn’t matter. Six is already too many.

  Late at night or early in the morning he would venture into the principal’s office, or the assistant principal’s office, or wherever they were kept, and he would carefully thumb through the records of the student body, searching for some specimen that met his criteria. This criteria was not clearly outlined in Chapter One - The Girls, nor in any of the subsequent chapters, as Chapter One was mostly about Cirril and the next few were mostly about where to find dead bodies.

  As a detective, you hoped for a pattern, something to give you an edge. There didn’t seem to be one, the department had no edge and so spent their time chasing their tails … even after Ellen turned over the journals. Now I am no detective, but I have a keen eye for how those guys and gals work, what they look for, and in hindsight it was pretty obvious who the circumstances pointed to, but this was small town and a long time ago. Sure the guy had an alibi, but still he could’ve been leaned on a little and I’m sure his accomplices would’ve popped out. Cirril wasn’t as dumb as he looked, but not too far from it. I guess I can’t fault them too much.

  Of the girls listed, Ellen was the only one who still attended school. This was not simply because the other five had been buried in underwater graves out at Jeffrey Stone, the old North Little Rock swimming hole that was at one time a rock quarry. They dynamited boulders there to make smaller boulders and then took those smaller boulders by truck and then boat and barge and raft to make the Arkansas River Bridge, Lock and Dam, as well as Cook’s Landing and, later, a hydroelectric plant. The quarry was now dead as the girls in Chapter One, the cranes and trucks were hauled to another site, probably Emerald Park. And the rest of the site was left to rot and gather squirrels and raccoons.

  The small one-and two-room buildings that had once been air-conditioned by small, easily movable window units purchased wholesale from a factory in Virginia, and had once held fat men with blueprints and skinny men with sledgehammers and medium-sized men with dynamiter skills, were now defunct and dilapidated. They were no longer air-conditioned, and the tiny window units had been transferred to the new site along with the trucks and the blueprints and the dynamiters. The giant pockmarked crater left behind from the blasting and sledgehammering, and hauling, which was only slightly deeper than the scars of Cirril’s face, was now filled with water and Volkswagens; Beatles mostly, but there was the occasional VW Bus, and even a few Toyotas. And in the trunks of some of those cars were chopped up little girls. In others still were a few little girls who were left whole, but they were all as dead as the quarry, some had just been portioned into smaller bits to make yet smaller things, just like the granite that had rested there before the fat men and skinny men and dynamiters with their dynamite. Before the Second World Wa
r and before the Slug-Bug made it all the way from Germany and across the bloodless American shores into the time capsule location that was Central Arkansas, there had been granite and rock and fossilized plants and bugs and such. And now there were Nazi cars with hacked up children. And catfish. Bloodless shores seems a silly thing to say considering all the bloodshed in America, from the Natives to the British to the Redcoats to the Mexicans, this nation was forged in a pot of boiling blood, but we don’t think of that like we used to. And Pearl Harbor and September Eleventh and the Boston Marathon rattle us to our core.

  We are the violent nation that has forgotten the effects of violence. And so it goes.

  Back then, though, in the Eighties everything seemed stuck in another time. The Great War of our generation was fought in the shadows and not televised with Shock and Awe, but hidden with cloaks and daggers, and therefore never existed. But if you were to go back now, back to the quarry known as Jeffrey Stone, or to Emerald Park, or to Burns Park where they still play volleyball and drink beer and blast music form El Caminos, you will be locked into another time as well. A more innocent time, the place where time stands still: home.

  Something in particular about the innocence of that time and that place makes it all the more sinister and alluring. Of course, Ellen didn’t know about the girls in quarry just yet. She also didn’t know about the sinister innocence of her hometown. She hadn’t packed up and moved away to Arizona yet, she couldn’t see home for what it was at the time.

  What she did see was her name on a list of other names that she had never seen before. And on that list her name was the only one not crossed through. And even under the veil of youth and naiveté she thought it quite strange that her name should be circled in red and that she had found the list on her own. Nothing had led her there other than her own curiosity and Sean, the neighbor boy with the dull wit and homely mother.

  Later, Ellen would wonder if all of the other girls, whose names had been circled in red at one time and were now scratched through and circled, had seen the journal too. If they had gotten to read about, as Ellen was about to, their impending doom and dismemberment, like time traveling detectives who went back to solve their own cases, though not able to alter the outcomes.

  There would be no stopping Cirril. That much was obvious by the sheer volume of red ink on the page. And what brashness, leaving a detailed account of the girls and the water and the German cars and the school, just lying around for anyone to find. If, in fact, it had been left for “just anyone” and not for “just Ellen,” the apparent “next on the roster,” as it seemed to her in that moment.

  She skipped ahead, through the gory details of the older girls, though older only in chronology and in death and not in age. They all stopped aging, at about ten. None of the girls had reached maturity, and the dates scrawled in the composition book stretched back to the early 70’s. He’d seen her at school, just like all the others, she would later discover when she decided to read the bits she’d skipped over in order to find her own story. In his account of first seeing Ellen, she was in the cafeteria, the very one from which he’d stolen the Frosted Flakes burdening Sean, and had marked her there. She had smiled at him and apparently pardoned herself by being immune to his jingle keychain siren song, though she didn’t recall having done so. This was further evidence that she hadn’t been paying attention, or she would surely have felt the vacuum of his stare. He’d watched her on the playground at recess, when she was sure no one was looking and she had embarrassed herself with a fall.

  He was looking in the girl’s restroom when she had started spotting just a month ago, some king of pituitary abnormality causing her to suffer from hormonal imbalance, she was told. This one factor made her the exception to the rule of Cirril’s specific “type.” She looked fifteen instead of ten, her father always said, and asked her to dress more modestly around the house. This, it would turn out, was a defense mechanism of her father’s and had turned out to be a quite disturbing conversation with her therapist later.

  Ellen, of course, didn’t know that she was being watched, or that her father was looking at her, picturing her dead mother as she scampered through the living room in nothing more than a long tee shirt with unwelcomed bosoms suddenly filling the top half. All she knew on that day when she got her first period, when Dottie came to town, old Aunt Flo, she was in the bathroom of the school and was in just about as much sock as Stephen King’s Carrie, or a gut shot bystander at a picnic who’d been tagged by a stray bullet. The only difference between her and Carrie was that she was sure she was without an audience. Instead of a slew of taunting, misguided students who were calling her wicked names, she had a single, greasy haired and faced stranger peeking through a vent hole or a crevice in the wall or even a hole in the drop ceiling. Where he watched from wasn’t clear, but that he had watched was without question, and that he was stalking her premeditatedly was sinister. She got to experience her first menstruation twice, the horror, fear and guilt from two points of view. Each perspective was increasingly unsettling, and she threw down the journal in disgust.