The Only Child
Page 19
A pointed tongue comes out of his twisted mouth and lengthens as far as his waist. But when he speaks it’s in the demon’s voice.
I’ve tasted you. But now it’s time to eat . . .
31
* * *
When she wakens Will is sitting at the end of her bed.
“Things have changed,” he says. He looked tired before. Now he’s worried.
She sits up on her elbows. “What things?”
“The people I work for, this whole mission—it wasn’t what I was led to believe.”
“You need to be a bit more specific.”
“My job was to bring the man you call Michael to this place so he could be exterminated. I’ve done that. But now they’re telling me they’re on their way here. Not just the money men. Scientists, surgeons. In a couple days this place is going to be transformed into a research facility.”
“Studying him?”
“They want to know how he’s been able to live for two hundred years without aging. They haven’t been funding us to remove a threat from the world. They’ve been after the one and only fountain of youth.”
“You’ve been misled.”
“Fucking right I’ve been misled.”
“It never occurred to you that was what they were after all along?”
“Believe it or not, it didn’t. I only saw what I wanted to see, which was to see him dead.”
“Why did you want that so badly?”
“You don’t understand. I sought these people out. I needed them to kill him. It couldn’t be done on my own. I know because I tried.”
“Why?” Lily asks again. It brings Will closer.
“He killed my sister,” he says.
32
* * *
Tell me,” Lily says.
Will wipes his hand over his mouth and Lily sees that both his hands and lips are trembling.
“It was a Friday night,” he says. “Me and Amanda went to see the nine o’clock showing of The Usual Suspects. We were walking home and I got the feeling we were being followed. Everyone in Madison—that’s where we lived—was talking about the missing persons cases that had hit the papers that week. A student last seen walking across campus, a mother of two who didn’t return from a drive downtown to pick up a new pair of glasses. It made people nervous.
“We could see our house on the far side of the playground, the lights on in the kitchen, the TV on. Our mother was waiting up. Just a quick walk up the lane to the front, or a climb over the backyard fence, and we’d be home. It didn’t make me feel any better. So I made Amanda an offer. If she beat me home I’d give her twenty bucks. A race. I even gave her a five-second head start. Bam! She was gone. And I was counting. Five . . . four . . . three. On two I saw it.”
Will squints into the middle distance and Lily can see how he’s there. Back to the night when everything shattered and couldn’t be put together again.
“A figure rising up from the little bridge connecting the jungle gym to the slide. Amanda didn’t even see it. I tried to run to catch up to her but my feet wouldn’t move. There was this invisible hand on my chest, pushing against me. Something that made me watch as the figure took its time sitting down at the end of the bridge and sliding down the slide.”
Will shifts his gaze to Lily. It lets her see how his eyes have blurred with tears. Not grief, but rage.
“I called out to her but the hand on my chest pushed so much of the air out of my lungs I couldn’t speak. The figure stood up. I could see its long fingers now. Pointed and hooked. Amanda was even with it when she almost tripped. The thing must have said something. She watched it come closer, taking its time. I was screaming but it was only in my head. Amanda! Come back! I had to get to her. And to do that, I had to tell myself that the invisible hand holding me there wasn’t real. The thing had suggested it was, but it was my mind alone that had frozen me. And I was in charge of my mind. Me. Not the thing that put its clawed hand on my sister’s shoulder.”
Will swallows. Sits up straight. Breathes in the strength it takes to tell what happened next.
“I broke free. Sprinting right at them. Even as I got closer and she came into focus the thing—it went for her throat. I remember her face. No pain, just this kind of disappointment, like she’d expected to win a contest but had learned the prize had been given to someone else. When I hit the playground’s sand it slowed me a notch. I was so close I thought there was still time to tackle the thing—I never thought of it as a man, not once—and pull it away. But as soon as I was close enough it swung the back of its hand at me. It spun my head around so hard I thought it was going to rip clean off. And the claws—the points met my face before I went down. That thing did this to me.”
He touches his face without thinking, his fingertips playing over the marks as if he were a blind man reading Braille.
“When I landed it was on the metal edge at the bottom of the slide, the sharp edge slicing through the top of my arm,” he goes on. “I was close to passing out, could feel it inside me like a chemical smoke. But I could still watch the thing feeding on my sister. Her eyes on mine for the last moments of her life so that I witnessed her passing without being able to give her any comfort. When it was done, it dropped her onto the sand like a bag of garbage. It looked at me. Remember. I told myself that over and over. Remember its face. And I did. Every crease in its lips as it opened them to speak. ‘Honey sweet,’ it said.”
33
* * *
I gave the police a description and they drew up a composite,” Will says a moment later, after Lily offers him her hand and he takes it. “It looked like the thing on the surface but wasn’t him. They turned an it into a him, know what I mean?”
“ ‘Something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable . . . He gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point,’ ” Lily says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
“Yeah? Well that pretty much nails it.”
Lily is about to tell Will about Michael’s journal, his encounters with Shelley, Stoker, and Stevenson, maybe even the blood relationship between herself and him. She wants to offer something in return for what he’s just shared with her, but decides to hold on to it. There’s value in what she knows, which makes it the only thing she has to bargain with.
“Why not do it now?” Lily says. “Kill him. Before they get here.”
“Because they’d kill me. If that was all, I’d still do it. But they’d also kill you. And I’m not having that on my head.”
He pulls away his hand and places it on her leg. The heat of it stops the shiver that had started at the base of her spine. Part of her wonders if he’s about to venture his hand higher and is surprised to find that part of her wants him to. But she knows that’s not what this is about. He’s using her as an anchor.
“What are you going to do?”
“Make sure you’re safe,” he says. “I’d get you out of here right now but that would be more dangerous than convincing them to agree to it.”
“What would you say the odds of that is?”
“Fifty-fifty.”
“I want to see him.”
Will lifts his hand away. “Why?”
“If things go bad for me, I want to speak to him before they do.”
“What could you say that would make any difference?”
“He’s here because of me,” she says. “When he thought your men were going to kill me in the subway it brought him out into the open. He tried to save me.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” Lily lies. “Maybe that’s why I want to see him.”
Will doesn’t move. It could be that he’s making the same calculations about betting on her as she has just done about him.
“Okay,” he says, abruptly standing. “The zoo is this way.”
34
* * *
Eventually Will opens a door that looks like all the others and the two of them enter a grimy room smelling of fried hamburger. There’s a table with a single laptop on it. Will closes the door and goes to stand next to a control panel set into the wall.
“Ready?”
Lily isn’t sure what he’s asking, but she nods anyway.
Will turns a dial on the controls and a rectangle of light appears on the wall farthest from the door. When her eyes adjust, she can see it’s a window, one that looks into a room on the other side.
There’s more furnishings in this room, all of them suggestive of a maximum-security asylum combined with a surgical theater. A gurney with leather and metal restraints hanging over the sides, an exposed toilet in the corner. No mirror, no sink, no bed.
Lily approaches the glass and sees the monster.
It sits in the middle of the bare floor, rocking back and forth, its eyes on the door. As she watches, its head slowly turns. When it finds her through the glass, it stops, the eyes held on her.
“Can it see me?” she asks.
“No. Can’t hear us either unless I turn the speaker on.”
“Then why is it staring right at me?”
Will waves at the creature, knocks at the glass, but it doesn’t blink. “I don’t know,” he says. “You could detonate a grenade in here and you wouldn’t hear it where it is.”
Lily raises a hand and places it against the glass. It brings the creature to its feet, though it takes several seconds to do it. Its body rearranges itself as it rises, an assembling of parts like a broken doll stitching itself together. When it stands, Lily sees for certain it’s not Michael anymore. The skin is the skin she’d touched, the face comprised of the same features. But this thing is no more her father than a stranger who’d stolen his coat.
“Can I speak to it?”
“Be my guest,” Will says, and turns the two-way sound on, the volume up so high the two of them listen to the thing’s wet breaths on the other side. Then they see it too: a long string of yellow spit stretching from his lower lip before it breaks away to slap onto the floor.
“You,” the thing says.
A single word that frightens her more than any sound she’s ever heard. A voice embodied by the shoulders slanted to one side, the spine bent into an S. The forward thrust of its head and snap of its mouth with every step forward.
“Honey sweet.”
Lily turns to Will and sees the fury these words provoke in him. But the anger is instantly smothered by something greater, the fear that comes with finally meeting the nightmare from his childhood and being a stricken child again.
It turns to face Will through the glass. “My little girl,” it says.
Until now, Lily has seen only one side of Michael. The hunched creature in front of her is the other half, the thing that emerged from Dr. Edmundston’s kitchen, the monster that tore her mother to pieces. The demon Robert Louis Stevenson named Hyde.
“I want to speak to Michael,” Lily says.
The thing looks around, trying to find where her voice is coming from. It’s been a while since it’s been in charge of the body it inhabits, and it’s getting used to the world all over again. When its eyes land once more on the rectangle of one-way glass Lily stands behind, it freezes on her. Its face contorting into an expression of agony, though something about it tells her it’s an attempt at a smile.
“Your voice,” it says. “You will sing so sweetly when I make you scream.”
“I’m not interested in you. I want to speak to Michael.”
It steps closer to the glass, the twisted smile dropping away.
“He’s dead,” it says. “He’s always been dead.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be.”
“You forget that I work with psychotics for a living. There’s no profanity or threat I haven’t already heard.”
“But you know I will do what I say I will do. And you know I am not one of your psychotics.”
Lily has to force herself not to pull away from the glass. She glances over at Will. He motions toward the button that will cut off the speaker but Lily shakes her head no.
“Look around,” she says, returning her gaze to the thing. “You’re the one in a cage.”
The thing does as she says. It looks around the cell and utters a single bark of laughter.
“This is my cage?”
“They will torture you in there. You’ll feel what you’ve done to others for once.”
It raises one of its hands for Lily to see and takes the forefinger and thumb of the other hand to grip the index finger’s nail. Lily can hear the sound of the nail slowly pulled back, ripping away from the skin.
“Fun,” it says, flicking the nail against the glass inches from Lily’s face.
“An empty show,” she manages. “It’s over.”
“But I have such great plans for us.”
“If you can get out, why don’t you?”
“That would ruin the surprise.”
Lily slides to the right and the thing’s eyes follow her. If it could break through the barrier between them it already would have. But with every passing moment she weakens, it gains in strength.
“Are you feeling all right, daughter?” it says. She has to look away and fight to swallow hot bile before she can speak again.
“Are you Peter Farkas?” she asks.
“I am no one.”
“But you remember him, don’t you?”
“I remember all of them. Their eyes and hearts and assholes and cocks. Their pain.”
The thing leans closer to the glass until its nose and lips are pressed against it, the pink flesh whitened at the points of contact.
“And now . . . you live in Michael,” Lily says in a broken whisper.
“No Peter. No Michael.”
The thing’s voice is in the observation room with her, filling the space so that there is nothing but its words. Even the smell of its breath has seeped through to the other side.
“You’ll see this for yourself,” it says. “I promise no names will come to you. No language. No prayer.”
Lily motions for Will to turn off the sound and darken the glass. In her peripheral vision she sees him trying to do just that but he’s in a hold of some kind, his hands gnarled into arthritic hooks that won’t do what he asks.
The demon speaks so low it’s as if its words rise up from the earth below.
“I can already taste you. Soon—”
Will’s hand smacks against the control panel and hits the audio button. The thing still speaks but the observation room’s speakers don’t let the sound pass through. It doesn’t matter. Lily can hear it all the same.
Soon you’ll be inside me and I’ll be inside you.
“Turn off the light,” Lily tells Will.
“I’m trying. My hands—”
“Turn off the light!”
Will turns the dial with his palm and the window darkens.
For a second, even when it’s black as the bottom of a well, the thing’s face remains visible. The whites of its eyes. Its teeth.
35
* * *
The fuck was that?”
Will rubs his hands and looks to Lily with the same bewildered expression many of the lawyers gave her when visiting their clients for the first time at the Kirby.
The thing Dr. Eszes made Michael out of.
A serial killer named Peter Farkas who died in the early nineteenth century.
A devil.
“I don’t really know,” she says.
“It was holding me.”
Will shakes his arms as if trying to throw off invisible ropes still binding them.
“Are you saying he has a split personality?”
“It’s more than that. There are two beings in the same body,” Lily answers. “One is the thing we just saw. The other is a man—something less and more than a man—who was brought to life over two hundred years ago.”
“Brought to life,” he repeats. “You mean a resuscitation? A reanimated corpse?”
“He’s not the same thing who occupied the body in life. He’s something new. No conception. No childhood, no growing up. No father, no mother, no family, no home.”
Now that she’s said this out loud a sadness comes over Lily. Most of it in sympathy for the thing she calls Michael, but also for herself. If he has proceeded out of nothing it confirms what she’s always felt, that some of her is unknown to herself as well.
“He’s told you all this?” Will asks.
“Some of it. And some of it he’s wanted me to discover. He wants me to answer for him the same things you’re asking of me.”
“You got a working theory?”
“I’ve wondered if he’s a stray soul who found an opportunity to live again in another’s skin,” she says, speaking aloud a thought she’s barely entertained before now.
“Whose soul?”
“I don’t know. Even he doesn’t know. He’s searching for his name. An identity. It’s part of why he came to me.”
“Is that what he was saying about ‘my daughter’?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
She takes a step back from the glass as if the thing in the darkness is still there, listening.
“Yes,” she says. “Michael is my father.”
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