The Only Child

by Andrew Pyper

  “What are you looking at, momma?”

  She turned her head to Lily. “I’m looking at you,” her mother said.

  Lily thought it was an odd thing to say—why would she have lowered herself to the ground just to look at her?—but she was used to her mother doing and saying odd things. She lay down next to her. The two of them in their secret place, watching the clouds turn into chickens and angels and bears.

  Later, when she was on her own, Lily was never adopted, but transferred from home to home. There was always a reason to move on: the death of a foster parent, the realization that even a quiet child such as her was one child too many. And then there was the fact that with each passing year Lily became less adoptable. She recognized that her orphanhood made her someone who could be viewed as pitiable, the sort of person potentially corrected by the protections of love.

  There have been those who offered that very thing, and each time they did Lily slipped away. It wasn’t only their sympathy she found intolerable, it was the suggestion that intimacy or family or partnership was something she needed to get along in the world. She had resolved early on to demonstrate how professional competence and orderly habits were all one needed to pass as whole.

  Excluding the police when she was six she had never told anyone that she’d seen her mother die at the hands of a real-life monster. It wasn’t discretion that prevented her, but the fear that such a declaration would make her interesting. In her line of work, this was another way of saying there was something wrong with you.

  * * *

  SHE’S THE ONLY ONE TO get off the bus at Szilvásvárad.

  It’s colder up here in the hills, and Lily wraps her arms around herself. She’s been left at the side of the road and has to guess which way to go. No other vehicles pass after five minutes of standing there. The only other life she can see is a rooster strutting in a circle in the backyard of a stucco house across from her. Eventually she decides on a direction she figures to be north.

  Around the same bend the bus had taken there’s a food truck in a gravel lot with an open window in the side. A woman with hands covered in flour appears. Though it’s the last thing she needs, Lily points at the espresso machine. After the woman takes her money Lily asks where the horse museum is. When it’s clear that not a word she’s said has been understood, she mimics the neighing of a horse and drums her fingers on the counter to suggest a gallop. The woman laughs in Lily’s face before pointing farther up the road.

  Another quarter mile on there’s a dirt lane heading to a stone manor just visible through the trees. The doctor’s property is almost exactly as she pictured it: the house square with its door set in the center of its façade, a hill disappearing into the low clouds behind it. A plaque at the gate designates it as of historical interest. She can’t read any of it except for a single word.

  Eszes.

  Lily knows that when she looks to the left she will see the stables up the slope. The sight of the building triggers the smell of hay and manure. There’s a fence around the property and a booth at the gate where Lily guesses tickets can be purchased during the high season. But today the booth is empty, the gate open.

  As she enters the stable the horses turn to look at her. Seven of them, all white. They watch her as if awaiting a command. The muscled flanks smooth as porcelain, the manes composed of visibly distinct hairs, each strand possessed of an internal glow. Lily has never seen animals as beautiful as these.

  In all likelihood, this is where Michael had stood at some point as well. His appreciation of the horses’ magnificence so great he incorporated them into his fantasy, making their blood his own. Lily can understand why. If she had to pretend to be descended from a species of animal, she’d choose the same one.

  She approaches the closest stallion and it offers its head to be stroked. At the contact of her hand she senses a presence behind her.

  “Michael?”

  She turns and sees a caretaker in overalls and rubber boots, his face a red web of burst capillaries.

  “Contessa,” he says. “Hotel?”

  For no other reason than it’s two words she understands, she nods. “Yes, please. The Contessa Hotel.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, SHE RISES FROM her bed and goes to the window.

  As in a dream, he’s there.

  Sitting on a bench in the hotel’s gardens. Even in the dark and from this distance she can detect the half-smile that shapes his mouth at the sight of her.

  Go to him.

  Lily remains where she is. The thinking part of her knows it isn’t safe to be anywhere near him, yet that’s what the deeper part of her wants. To hear his voice again. To feel if his skin is warm like the living, or cold like the dead.

  Come.

  Not her voice this time. His.

  She rushes from the room without putting on her shoes so that her feet slap along on the marble floor. As far as she can tell, Lily is the only guest in the place. It lent a strangeness to every sound that echoed in the high-ceilinged, stone-floored lobby and hallways.

  Outside, the cold hits her hard. But she doesn’t go back. Rounds the corner of the building and down the grass slope to the garden.

  He isn’t on the bench. She scans the area, not believing he could have made it to the forest that borders the property in such a short time, but she can’t see him. So she keeps going. As fast as she can through the meadow below the garden and toward the silhouette of the tree line, the high grass wiping its dewy stalks on her bare legs.

  She stops at the edge of the trees. Behind her the orange windows of the hotel look as distant as a passing ocean liner viewed from the shore.

  You’ve come too far, her voice says. Nobody will hear you scream out here.

  From deep within the forest something moves through the leaves. What might be the flapping of wings. A single, yielding screech.

  Lily backs away from the trees, stops when she turns to look up the slope to the garden.

  He stands at the center of the organized flower beds where there was nothing a moment ago.

  You’re seeing things, psycho.

  As if in reply, the figure beckons to her.

  “I’m here,” Lily whispers.

  Then come, he says, his voice in her head, before starting away around the corner of the grand house and out of view.

  Come.

  15

  * * *

  The stable is heated by the breath of the animals who stare at her from their stalls, their hides pale as the two dimmed bulbs hanging from the rafters. Lily returns their hushed greeting with a bow she performs before she’s aware of what she’s doing.

  The stallions look away from her to the far end of the stable where Michael stands.

  “You must be cold,” he says. “Come away from the door.”

  Lily approaches him, her bare feet shuffling over the straw on the concrete floor, and feels the temperature rise with each step she takes. She can’t tell if it’s from the collective heat of the animals’ bodies or being closer to him. She stops when they’re separated by the head of the last horse in the stalls. One of its liquid eyes on her, the other on him.

  “I am so glad you had the chance to see them for yourself. The one you stroked today—that one there, beside you—belongs to the same bloodline that Dr. Eszes so dearly prized. I like to think that touch alone brings us closer.”

  “Is that why you’ve led me to this place?” she says. “To put my hand on a horse?”

  “It is one piece of the puzzle, yes.”

  “Okay. I’ve done as you wanted. Now let me go.”

  “I’m not detaining you, Doctor.”

  “You’re stalking me.”

  “You are mistaken,” he says, his eyes black as the animals. “It is you who is following me.”

  He doesn’t move closer but it feels as if he does. A growing cold within Lily that she guesses must be the part of her brain that’s smarter than thought, the part that knows she’s made a terr
ible mistake and that she’ll be murdered here. It fills her with the heavy ice of fear, starting at her feet and moving up to her heart, closing her throat. But along with the terror there’s also anger for believing in the instincts that brought her here, the judgment that promised he wouldn’t hurt her. Instincts, she of all people ought to know, are what pull us from reason. Instincts get you killed.

  “Why are we here?” Lily asks, working to swallow the cold spit in her mouth.

  “You must have an idea.”

  “I’m asking you. Why are we here, Michael?”

  He curls the corner of his lips to show that he’s not convinced by her attempt to be the doctor again, questioning her patient. His control is complete and she knows it. Yet there is something that turns his head away to gather his thoughts before returning his gaze upon her.

  “This is the true meaning of blood,” he says. “To look upon someone and see yourself.”

  “I look nothing like you.”

  “Perhaps not in appearance. But I recognize myself in you.”

  “A delusion.”

  “Is your solitude a delusion? Does it ever puzzle you why you have no real friends, no husband or lover?” he says, his lips stretching in what might be a smile of pity. “How do you reconcile your incapacity to love?”

  She has to hide the fight required to pull the next breath into her chest. It’s the surprise from what he’s just said. The exact kind of questions Lily asks the lone wolf killers and isolated psychotics for a living, now being asked of her. And she has no answer for any of them.

  He speaks again, changing the subject, before she can summon an unconvincing reply.

  “You know there are people pursuing you?” he asks.

  “There was a man in Budapest. But I lost him.”

  “He is one among many. And I very much doubt you have lost him for long.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Me. So if they’re after you, they are aware of our relationship.”

  “Relationship? That’s not even close to the right word.”

  “What would the right word be?”

  Lily can’t answer this, so she works to return things to where she needs them to go if she is to remain alive into the next moment, and the next. Make this her story instead of his.

  “Tell me about my mother,” she says.

  “In time.”

  “We’re out of time.”

  “We have all night. And more, if we choose it.”

  He squints. A warning sign. Don’t push me. Lily knows what he’s capable of, but at the same time she remembers from her practical training that to survive an interaction like this, she can’t allow herself to appear intimidated. It’s crucial that some part of the authority she started out with at the Kirby be preserved by not wholly yielding to what he chooses to say and when.

  He will try to make it a matter of the body, she recalls Dr. Edmundston advising her before her first solo interview with a client, a dismemberer. You must keep it a matter of the mind.

  “You have to be careful,” she hears Michael saying. “If they find you, tell them nothing. Delay them until I can come to you. If you fail in this, they will kill you. Do you understand?”

  “Are they the police?”

  “They are vigilantes,” he answers. “A sophisticated version of the villagers carrying torches and pitchforks.” He laughs a little at this, and the sound of it makes Lily start trembling, unable to stop.

  She must resist him, maintain the boundary of she and him. She saw what he did to Dr. Edmundston, how calm he was, how sure. As calm and sure as he is now. It invites her to speak openly with him, be honest with him, confess whatever she’s feeling so that those feelings might be understood.

  “I want to go,” she says.

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Of course I’m afraid!”

  She didn’t mean to admit to this. She meant instead to remind him that he’s desperately ill, but it’s over. She intends to go to the police, tell them he’s set her up to look like a murderer. She’d lost track of that for a while, but she’s not letting go of what’s real again. Instead she only shouts aloud the only part of her thoughts she’s certain to be true. She’s afraid.

  There’s a silence between them. He blinks in regular intervals as if counting in his head, measuring her life against her death.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Lily says, and feels the tears race down her face, her throat so tight it’s like speaking through a straw.

  “Doing what? You’re here because you came.”

  “Because I had no choice!”

  He reaches into the pocket of his long coat. Pulls out something in a clear plastic bag.

  “Here,” he says. “Have your choice back.”

  Lily sees how the bag is dappled in blood, but it doesn’t completely obscure her Henckel knife lying inside. She reaches out and takes the bag from him, holds it against her as if it’s meant to keep her warm.

  Michael takes a step back. It’s her chance to go. But something holds her there.

  “That was you, wasn’t it, in the cellar of the old house yesterday,” she says.

  “My darling daughter, I am so grateful you made it to that place. However off-putting the circumstances, it makes me feel like a proper father for the first time. The patriarch delivering his offspring to view his birthplace! A rite of passage for both of us.”

  Michael raises his hand level with his chest and Lily looks behind her to see all seven stallions bow their heads.

  “Never seen horses do that before,” she says.

  “That’s precisely what Dr. Eszes’s groomsman said when he saw them do it,” Michael says, laughing. “He decided to hate me from that very moment. He was a hateful man by nature. A trait I would otherwise be indifferent to if he didn’t sometimes take out his frustrations on the horses. When the tail struck their hides I could feel it myself. The horses’ rage instantly mine as well.”

  The warmth of being near him brings another chill through Lily, one that lingers at the top of her head like a colony of spiders spreading through her hair.

  “What was it like?” she asks. “Once the doctor brought you here?”

  He considers her question, seeing the attempt to distract him for what it is. But his pleasure at the two of them being here, alone, plays out over his face, winning over the stony irritation at her playing games with him.

  “Come,” he says, pushing open the gate to the empty stall next to him. “We cannot stand like this all night.”

  Lily steps in and sits with her back against the wall in the corner, her body settling into the straw. Michael chooses the corner opposite hers, but he doesn’t sit, only crouches. It enables him to keep his eye on her as well as the stable doors.

  “I was assigned chores, and performed them for the first few days,” he begins. “But soon I grew hungry, the jars of Lipizzaner blood only sipped at. It sickened me to ingest from animals, particularly these white stallions who were as close to brothers as I would ever know.”

  “Weren’t you happy to be free?”

  “I wasn’t free. Not yet. But I loved to ride. I required no lessons, not that any were offered to me. The groomsman was against my riding, but he soon feared me even more than the doctor, who kept to the main house, the door locked. In the space of a single week the roles of all lodged there had been flipped, so that although I held the lowest position, it was clear I would do as I pleased. And what pleased me was to feed.”

  He lowers himself onto his knees and comes toward her. Lily doesn’t move other than to press her back harder against the stone. There’s the worry that even a flinch of apprehension might trigger attack, so she focuses on him, the man now stopping to kneel an arm’s length from her.

  “When did you start?”

  She has asked the same thing of at least a dozen serial murderers before now, but this time she hears an intimacy in her question, a personal interest distinct from completing a diagnostic as
sessment.

  “I will never forget riding into Eger one night and tying my horse to a tree in the square,” he answers. “How brilliant my stallion looked in the darkness! There was a music academy there, the same one that’s there today. Even in the November damp the windows were parted, expelling a symphony of lessons out into the night: piano, flute, violin. And a voice singing an aria. Mozart’s “Un moto di gioia mi sento.” It wasn’t the perfection of the performance that moved me, it was the sad beauty of it, the way it lamented life’s brevity even as it celebrated the joy of living. It opened a door in me. It was the music of my first killing.”

  He closes his eyes. Savoring the memory of the sound, the night. Then the recollection of violence opens his eyes again, glinting and darker than the moment before.

  “Who?”

  “A chambermaid,” he answers. “Walking along the banks of the river. I followed her, filled with heat and sweetness. This was my poetry and I knew it. The hunt. The anticipation of the flesh a music of its own. She heard the steps approaching behind her and I could feel her thinking through her options—run, shout for help, face whoever followed her—and decide on doing nothing. I have since become used to this course of nonaction, but at the time it surprised me that the girl would let her end come so easily. It prompted me to speak to her. A friendly voice, asking directions to the town square. That is when she turned. Not that she believed me to be merely a lost visitor, but because it was how she was trained, how all civilized people are trained.

  “Her skin. I remember that perhaps above all. How it glowed in the dimness of a quarter moon. The roar of blood through her veins like a waterfall. As she spoke to me she smiled, because I spoke to her as well—something about having traveled far and being in search of an inn for the night—and she thought the moment of danger had passed. She made a joke, a remark about the bedbugs at the inn and how they made a breakfast of you before you had a chance to breakfast yourself, and as I laughed—as we both laughed—I leapt.”