The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  The explanation sufficed, but did nothing toward illuminating how it got into Russ’s coat pocket. Though this, too, was as plain as the nose that wasn’t on the little dolly’s face.

  Russ’s latest hussy—whoever she was—was somebody’s mother.

  “God damn you, Russell Cavanaugh,” Theodora rasped, snatching the figure from the floor and squeezing it tightly in her fist. “God damn you.”

  She squeezed the doll so hard that the stitching at one shoulder popped. A heady aroma, spicy and sharp, erupted from the opening. Theodora narrowed her eyes and brought the figure close to her face. She sniffed at it, taking in the scent of cinnamon and cloves, and was that cedar?

  Strange stuffing for a doll.

  Some little girl’s doll, she reminded herself. Some little girl who calls him Uncle Russell and listens in the dark while he gives it to the woman in the next room.

  Theodora shook the doll and green seeds rained down from the tear in the shoulder. Fennel, she imagined. Stranger still.

  She was infertile, of course, wholly unable to be a mother in the physical sense, which never bothered Russ in the least. He’d never wanted children, anyway. At his worst, she could only imagine what sort of a nightmare he’d be to a daughter or son, no better than her own father (God rest his soul). But still, the pain of it . . .

  And now this.

  Her lips curled back, receded from her clenched teeth as she seized the dolly with both hands, curled her fingers around an arm and its opposite leg. She pulled, and the stitches snapped, unravelled; the spices and shavings and seeds within exploding out of the body in a dusty, sweet-smelling cloud.

  You are a naughty little girl, she faintly recalled Papa seething, foam frothing at his wrinkled mouth—naughty, naughty, and naughty children get no playthings. Sweat mixed with tears on her cheeks as the limbs came off and the doll dropped to the floor. Theodora choked on a sob and dropped the dismembered limbs, bent over and retrieved the body. She then repeated the procedure, tearing away the remaining extremities. Next, the head.

  The limp pocket of cloth left over—the dolly’s torso—drooped in her grasp, spilling its remaining contents on the floor. The air was pungent with its ambrosial entrails. It was done.

  Theodora wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her vision until she could blink them clear again. The blurriness ebbed, and her eyes refocused on the mess on the floor. Torn blue fabric and brown shavings, greenish seeds, and something else. She squatted, sifting through the chaos with the tip of her index finger. The grey-white fragments that protruded from the herbal muddle . . .

  They were bones. Tiny, broken joints, the fingers (or were they toes? no, definitely fingers) of a small child.

  A babe’s hand.

  Theodora gasped and stumbled backward, losing her balance and crashing onto her rump. She whispered her husband’s name as though it were a forbidden word. She laughed helplessly at the absurdity of her grisly discovery, though her titters soon dissolved to tears. And when she was finished with that, Theodora hefted herself up from the floor, retrieved the broom and dustpan from the closet, and swept it all up.

  She dumped the contents of the dustpan in the kitchen trash, spices, bones and all. Just another phase of her late night cleaning project, nothing more. Nothing a stiff drink wouldn’t dull down, at any rate.

  “Funny,” she said to herself, pouring a splash of Russ’s gin into a tumbler. “I don’t even drink.”

  She swallowed the drink, gasped from the heat of it. Then she poured another. When she finished that one off, Theodora stamped up the steps to see about the laundry.

  Chapter Six

  Jojo smacked himself on the forehead with the heel of his palm.

  “Idiot,” he remonstrated himself.

  He had books—he had scads of damn books, and his quarters were just a thin, peeling wall away from where he presently sat in Jake’s cage. Here he’d sat, rotting, for the last hour and a half, chain smoking and staring through the mesh like a mental case, all for the want of something to read. Idiot.

  Sleeplessness, he rationalized. That, and the brain-melting dullness of that lousy picture at the Palace. He’d already thumbed through the thin volume he picked up off the street, but a lousier assortment of regurgitated nonsense he’d never seen—all half-truths and licentious sensationalism. It was no wonder the reedy little guy had tossed it in the street.

  Now his mind rattled past the sundry books in his room, stacked slapdash on a length of pine supported by two concrete blocks beside his cot. He had a Rex Stout and a couple of Raymond Chandlers, he had Hilton’s latest—Random Harvest—and a fair-sized stack of story magazines with spacemen on the covers. There was Hemmingway and Greene, and even some scary stuff from the likes of Clark Ashton Smith and Arthur Machen. None of which appealed to Jojo at the immediate present.

  No one was likely to peg the rumpled, scruffy, scar-faced house dick for much of a reader, and that was just fine with Jojo Walker. He learned quite prematurely that folks almost never looked beneath the surface of things: beneath the fur, beneath the scored flesh, to the soul that might dwell inside. Too much trouble, he’d long assumed, with so many people out in the world to choose from. So he fit a type, but that suited him; it provided him with a sort of blissful anonymity he’d never known until the day he melted into the scenery, became a caricature, started anew in this quiet, lonesome way. There were bright young things in town with beaming mugs and pink faces anyone might like to know, or try to know—enough of them that no one bothered with a dour, ugly fellow like Jojo Walker, even if they didn’t know every nasty detail, which they did.

  Fine.

  He had his books, and his cot. A job that never asked much and, God help him, still a few friends about, even if they were pariahs like him.

  He felt a little like Koestler, maybe—there was something about Rubashov in Darkness at Noon that was starting to remind him of himself in a decidedly self-pitying sort of way—so Jojo got out of the cage and whistled shrilly across the lobby at Charles.

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “I ain’t your boss, Charles.”

  Charles smirked.

  “I’m going to step into my office for a minute—keep a look out, would you?”

  Charles offered a mock salute in affirmation. Jojo shut the cage door and went through his own. His copy of the Koestler book remained where he’d left it, between Eliot’s Four Quartets and Smith’s Out of Space and Time on the knotty pine plank, as did the strip of newspaper he used for a bookmark. He cracked open the book and his eyes drifted to the last sentence he remembered reading, the one that had kept him awake a lot longer than he would have liked, just thinking about it.

  Satan, on the contrary (Koestler wrote), is thin, ascetic, and a fanatical devotee of logic.

  Good old logical Satan.

  Jojo returned the newsprint strip and closed the book, and his hand had only barely brushed the doorknob when he heard the shriek ripping through the lobby.

  The volume sailed across the room. Jojo was already out and rushing headlong into the lobby before it landed anywhere.

  Charles stood by the cigarette machine, slightly hunched over with his feet planted three feet apart. He was supporting a swooning woman Jojo recognized as one of the nurses from the sex picture—the cute one, the one who could smile. She was still in her nurse’s uniform, though her cap and stockings were absent and her blouse was unbuttoned to her sternum.

  She was absolutely spattered with blood.

  “Mr. Walker!” Charles cried, his face a mask of horror. “Mr. Walker, come quick!”

  He did not need to be told. Jojo instinctively reached for his side as he ran, fumbling for a gun that wasn’t there. He reached Charles, empty-handed, and cradled the woman’s head. Her eyes rolled around in their sockets, her mouth hanging open. She moaned plaintively.

&nbs
p; “Let’s get her to the couch,” Jojo said.

  Charles nodded, and together they carried the blood-soaked nurse to the cramped sitting area where they lay her across the couch. She trembled violently, and just when she seemed about to pass out, her body went rigid and she let loose another shrill scream.

  “It’s all right, lady,” Charles assured her. “He’s ugly, but he won’t do you no harm.”

  Jojo shot a glance at the bellboy, who shrugged apologetically.

  “Are you hurt?” Jojo asked. She resumed her silent tremors, working her mouth but not saying anything. “Charles, you’d better call for Dr. Hornor.”

  “Right,” Charles said, scrambling for the front desk.

  “And Sheriff Rich, too,” Jojo called after him. He hated the idea of having Ernie Rich on what little area of authority he commanded, but it couldn’t be helped. There was so much blood. . . .

  But none of it appeared to be hers.

  “Miss,” Jojo called to her, lightly smacking her bloody cheeks with the back of his hand. “Miss—miss, snap out of it. You’ve got to tell me what happened.”

  “I called the doctor, Mr. Walker,” Charles shouted across the lobby. “I’ll call the police now.”

  Jojo nodded and continued to slap at the hysterical woman’s face. She gibbered incoherently.

  “Christ,” Jojo muttered. “This broad is gone.”

  Charles came scampering back from the front desk, his eyes wide and sweat glistening on his face.

  “They all on the way, Mr. Walker.”

  “It’s Jojo, Charles. I’ve told you—”

  The woman screamed again, startling Jojo and Charles into silence.

  “I’d better go up,” Jojo said with a deep sigh.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Charles countered. “Maybe you best wait for the police. I don’t ’spect Sheriff Rich would much like—”

  “I don’t give a damn what Ernie Rich likes or doesn’t like. I want to see this for myself, before that blowhard gets here.”

  Jojo stood up and regarded the quivering woman on the couch, wondered if she would ever get over whatever happened to her.

  “Well, what about me?” Charles asked, panic rising in his tremulous voice. “You can’t just leave me alone down here.”

  “She won’t bite, man.”

  “I don’t mean her, Mr. Wa—Jojo. I mean the cage; I can’t sit in there.”

  “You’re going to have to. I’m the house detective, for crying out loud. I have to check this out.”

  “But Jojo! If I set foot in that cage Mr. Hibbs will put me on the street!”

  Jojo frowned and planted his fists on his hips.

  “All right, then how about you go see where all this blood came from?”

  Charles furrowed his brow.

  “You wouldn’t be callin’ me a coward now, would you, Jojo?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, pal. Look, just hang around the lobby. See the doc and the local constabulary in when they get here. Me, I’m going up.”

  He pointed at the staircase and raised his eyebrows.

  “We ain’t got but nine rooms occupied,” Charles offered.

  “It’s got to be one of ’em,” Jojo said.

  Charles dropped his head and groaned. Jojo went back to his office, grabbed his gun from the desk drawer and went directly to the stairs when he came back out.

  “And keep an eye on her, too,” he said as he passed the bellboy.

  Charles groaned again and said, “Lord, help.”

  Jojo drew his gun halfway up the steps to the second floor. At the top, he met a man in a silk robe and house shoes who gasped upon sight of the weapon and dropped his pipe.

  “It’s okay,” Jojo assured him. “I’m the house detective.”

  “Sweet Jesus, you gave me a fright. There was a scream. . . .”

  “I’m not holding this peashooter because my hand is lonesome.”

  Taken aback, the man stepped to the side. Jojo brushed past him into the narrow hall.

  It was dim and dingy, the well-trodden carpet was brown when once it was orange, and of the fifteen lights strung along the length of the ceiling, only nine worked. A pair of shoes rested just outside the door to room 203—a guest with presumptions of staying in a classier hotel. Jojo heard the distant sounding drone of a radio emanating from 206.

  He gripped the gun tighter, his palm beginning to sweat, and frowned at a curious thought nagging at his brain: that gun won’t do you any good.

  The roadshow people occupied the rooms at the far end of the hall—213, 214 and 216, respectively. 215 remained unoccupied in perpetuity out of respect for the former owner, whose late wife hung herself in that room one October morning. None of the current management even had a key for it, though Jojo supposed his skeleton key would more than likely do the job. He’d never tried it.

  From his perspective in the muted light of the hallway, Jojo could detect nothing out of place—everything seemed to be precisely as he last saw it, warts and all. Everything, he noted with a rigid spine and widening eyes, apart from the dark crimson smears on the door, knob, and frame of Room 214, matched by splotches of the same sanguine colour marring the carpet just below. Jojo swallowed, hard, and dragged a deep, ragged breath into his lungs; he tasted the stale tobacco smoke and accumulated dust of decades.

  George Walker had seen blood before: plenty of it.

  He had seen blood, for instance, when he was a sheriff’s deputy—

  —Agatha Dinwiddie, John Dinwiddie’s second wife and half his age, in the “wayout,” as Ernie Rich called it: the far outlying planters’ homes that were only part of Litchfield on paper. Dinwiddie’s like the rest (sagging tarpaper roof, grease paper windows, dirt on the floor if dirt wasn’t the floor itself) and who could say why Agatha shacked up with the likes of him? In the end, no one, because only Agatha could answer that question, and she’d been slashed from stem to stern, which was to say her husband inserted the blade just under her taut belly and wrenched it upward until it got stuck in her sternum. The result was an awful mess, and Rich said to Deputy Walker he’d have made John Dinwiddie clean it all up if he hadn’t gone and blown most of his own head off with his dad-gum blunderbuss.

  And he had seen blood even here, in the Litchfield Valley Hotel—

  —Jane Smith, the name she gave on the register, though she was later identified as Caroline Atkinson of Bullfrog Valley, who stopped at the first town to come along when the labour pains made driving impossible. The baby, the deputies and Dr. Hornor were not particularly surprised to discover, was mulatto—it was also dead, as was Ms. Smith/Atkinson, who bled to death on the narrow twin bed in Room 303 hours before anyone smelled the strange and unpleasant odour wafting from beneath the door into the hall. Her corpse still held onto the corpse of her child. Both of them were bathed in blood.

  . . . and then, naturally, there was Sarah. And Beth, too, later. Then, the blood was comparatively minimal; barely any at all, in fact. There really wasn’t much a little .22 like that could do.

  He’d seen plenty of blood, none of it anything less than tragically spilled, enough of it that a raging red sea of the stuff didn’t seem likely to elicit much of a response from him.

  But then he opened the door to Room 214.

  Worse than Agatha Dinwiddie, her murderous husband John, Caroline Atkinson and her stillborn child, Sarah and Beth combined—when Jojo switched on the ceiling lamp in Room 214, he found himself facing the goriest tableau that side of a minefield.

  Indeed, that was the first conclusion he reached: that some manner of incendiary device had been detonated, blowing the body apart and painting the small room with his blood and entrails. But no, that couldn’t be—he would have heard the explosion. And besides, there was nothing in evidence to suggest a blast of any kind. The remains of the room’s occupant wer
e all that was disturbed. . . .

  Disturbed, he thought with a disgusted sneer. Slaughtered, more like.

  On the floor at the foot of the bed was the torso, half-wrapped in a terrycloth robe. Unattached and scattered hodgepodge around the room were the arms (one atop the dresser, the other beneath the heater), the legs (one on top of the other, forming a grotesque cross by the window) and the unfortunate fellow’s head (gaping, dripping, on the middle of the bed). Blood spattered everything. On first glance alone, Jojo could see that these were no clean cuts; this man had been torn apart.

  But by whom?

  Or what . . .

  The girl couldn’t have done it. A dozen of her couldn’t have done it.

  Jojo braced himself in the doorway and surveyed the carnage. The very walls dripped with blood and gore. His nostrils were filled with the sickly-sweet, slightly metallic odour of so much blood, which only marginally masked the gut-churning scent of the shit smeared on the floor beneath the dismembered torso. He took a single step forward, into the room, but stopped there. White spots danced before his eyes and the entire hotel shifted around him at crazy angles.

  Jojo’s head swam. He staggered out to the hall and vomited. He retched long and loudly, prompting a few curious faces to peek out of cracked doors. Jojo swatted at the air, shooing them off.

  “Stay inside,” he gasped wetly. “Stay in your rooms.”

  “What’s doing out there?” barked a bleary-eyed traveller from the doorway to Room 208.

  “Just . . . stay,” Jojo demanded. “Please. The police are on their way.”

  He spit on the floor. The damage was already done, carpet-wise.

  His stomach lurched again, leapt inside him, contracting, but there was nothing left for him to puke. Instead, he dry heaved. When he finally stopped, Jojo realized he was hunched over and looking at a pair of black-stockinged feet in the doorway directly across from him. One of them fussed at the carpet with small, painted toes. Jojo spit again, wiped his face on his sleeve and straightened up to look the other nurse, the grave, lethal looking one, in her baby browns.