Blanky

by Burke, Kealan Patrick

  But instead of sad or smiling faces, those pages now showed nothing but swirling black holes.

  * * *

  The lights next door were off, the Deans retired for the night, when I finally parked the car and let myself in, a bottle of Jack Daniels tucked beneath my arm.

  Home, as I had always thought of it, but seldom did now, was dark and quiet.

  I threw my keys on the side table and turned on the light, allowed my eyes to adjust.

  And saw the thing lying on the floor of the hall.

  It was stained with mud and smelling of grave dirt.

  Blanky had come home too.

  * * *

  After donning rubber gloves from beneath the kitchen sink (I didn’t want to touch it, not directly, not when I clearly recalled the jolt I had gotten when I’d picked it up from the floor of Robin’s room), I picked up the blanket and spread it out flat across the coffee table in the living room. Then I turned on the overhead light, sat, glass of whiskey in hand, and for the first time ever, well and truly looked at the thing that had destroyed my life.

  When Robin died, I believed it a terrible accident nobody could have foreseen or prevented. But on the night Lexi video-called me and I watched as the blanket shoved its way into her throat hard enough to break her jaw while she pulled and struggled against it, when I saw it undulate like a snake, rolling its muscles and pushing against her in a way that only something with will and the strength to accommodate it could, I knew it was acting with purpose. And if that makes me sound like an absolute lunatic, believe me, I know. But I also know what I saw. It killed my child. It killed my wife, and though it sounds like the product of an enfevered mind to claim that anything so mundane and innocuous as a child’s blanket might possess nefarious intent, it also requires you to move your focus from the instrument to the owner.

  Blanky was just the weapon.

  And to paraphrase the old adage: weapons, alone, don’t kill people.

  Someone with murder in mind needs to wield them.

  I traced my gloved fingers over every inch of the material, the old faded rabbits with their unkind stares watching all the while, their faces now smudged with the same mud that had been used to fill in my wife’s grave. I wondered if it had ever been just a normal child’s blanket or if it had been created solely to cause suffering. And why? How many people might it have killed in however long it had been around? I imagined old ladies falling asleep in front of the fire with the blanket on their laps only for their husbands to discover them in the morning, cold and blue, throats swollen and hemorrhaged eyes staring in incomprehensible horror at the ceiling. I wondered how many babies hadn’t lived to see their first year because of this awful thing, how many lives it had destroyed.

  And again: why?

  I don’t know what I expected to find, but when I reached the frayed blue linen hem of the blanket, I paused, pressed my fingertips down hard above the seams and felt resistance. There was something hard in there, sewn into the hem, and it moved beneath my touch. I put my fingers to the right and then to the left of this unyielding mass and felt more hard nubs roll beneath the material. I continued my inspection until I ended up back where I started, then went and grabbed a scissors from the drawer in the kitchen. Part of me wondered what manner of horror I might be inviting upon myself by desecrating the thing, but I had to know what I’d felt in the lining.

  With no small measure of trepidation, I sat down, picked up one corner of the blanket, and, holding my breath, slid the lower blade of the scissors into the lining and jerked it upward, half-expecting it to shriek and come alive in my hands.

  It did nothing of the kind.

  Instead it hung limp in my grip as I poked my fingers inside the hole and worried out one of the hard objects I had felt in there. Upon realizing what I was looking at, I dropped the scissors and yanked the hem apart in my hands. The contents rained down upon the coffee table like pale white stones.

  Whoever had made the blanket had filled the hem with baby teeth.

  7

  I considered destroying the blanket, for surely it was the only sane thing to do, but after I came back from the bathroom to find the hem intact and the teeth tucked back inside it where they belonged, I realized the folly in trying. Only the scissors lying nearby indicated that I had done anything to it at all. The concern became then that I might wake in the middle of the night to find the blanket worming its way down my throat, punishment, perhaps, for daring to violate it, but even such fears couldn’t counter the soporific effects of a half bottle of whiskey and soon I was asleep.

  In the morning, the blanket was where I’d left it, spread out across my coffee table like the hide of a hunted animal.

  I stood sipping coffee and staring at it for the longest time.

  Would it scream and writhe if I burned it?

  Would it stay submerged if I weighed it down with rocks and threw it into a lake?

  Or would I be punished for trying?

  Worse, would it summon her?

  I took a shower, shaved myself and dressed in clothes that didn’t stink of sweat and alcohol and sat at the kitchen table. I was hungry but couldn’t eat, so instead I had a beer. If nothing else, it might help penetrate the noxious caul of the hangover, or at least delay it, and I waited.

  The sun was out. A beautiful Sunday. The kind of day that makes one feel glad to be alive.

  But not me, not now.

  I checked my watch. Quarter to noon.

  I drained the beer, trashed the bottle and donned the rubber gloves just long enough to stow Blanky in a plastic grocery bag. Then I tied the handles and tossed it into the trunk of my car.

  Mind clearer than it had been since Robin died, I gunned the engine, backed out of the drive, (pausing only long enough to wave at Marcy next door, who was pretending not be watching me from her living room window) and headed for the Columbus Market to meet the man who had sold us the blanket.

  * * *

  In contrast to the last time I had been there, the market was a hive of activity. Shoppers lured from their homes by the fine weather meandered without apparent purpose through the labyrinth of booths and stalls. Merchants hollered of bargains as if this was a dock in the eighteenth century and not the civic plaza between a Chase Bank and the People’s Park. Prime cuts of various meats were displayed in the shade as the vendors waved away flies. Fish of all kinds lay on trays of ice staring in openmouthed shock at nothing. Booksellers sat fanning themselves with leaflets while looking bemused at noncommittal browsers idly flipping through the titles on their tables. There were booths set up to sell pet clothing, handmade jewelry, henna tattoos, porcelain dolls (I quickly averted my gaze from those little fuckers), baked desserts, homemade candies, seeds and plants, shrubs and flowers, garden sheds and ornaments, birdhouses, fishing lures, and antiques. There was even a local author seated at a Formica table shilling copies of his books. His gaze showed such desperation, I couldn’t meet it for long.

  Away from the epicenter of vendors, a garishly painted food truck passed out gyros and kabobs to an ever-growing crowd.

  The air was redolent of sweat, fried meat, cotton candy, and asphalt.

  I infiltrated the throng, not even bothering to pretend I was interested in their wares, and shrugged off the more aggressive of the vendors, one of whom tried to direct me to a fortune teller, as if this was not a market after all, but a carnival. I glared at him and moved on. I didn’t need to pay some overly made-up charlatan to tell me that my future was likely to be an ugly one.

  After jostling my way through a crowd of people who appeared to have forsaken civility in favor of the best bargains, I thought I spotted what I was looking for, and roughly shoved aside the burly man who was obscuring my view. He turned, a red-bearded man holding an enormous gyro wrapped in foil, and glowered at me.

  “The fuck’s your problem?”

  I just looked at him and he went away. Later he would probably sit at a bar with his friends and tell them he
hoped his life never went so far down the shitter that he ended up looking like the man he’d met at the market.

  He moved on through the crowd and in the brief gap he left in his wake, I saw, not four feet away, nestled snugly between a stall selling stuffed toys on one side, and wind chimes and painted lighthouses on the other, the sign that had come to mean so much: BABY CLOSE. It was painted in childish white letters on a rectangle of thin black metal. The shape of the sign and the faint suggestion of indented letters still visible between the words BABY and CLOSE indicated it might once have been a license plate. It was suspended from two small nails that had been driven into the wooden ledge that served as the booth’s counter. Atop the counter were—as the sign promised—various items of clothing meant to be worn by infants: booties, tiny T-shirts with cute messages like I LOVE MOM & DAD and LATEST & GREATEST ADDITION, gowns, bodysuits, sweaters and jackets, little woolen hats and mittens.

  The sight of them gave me pause.

  I had come here armed with rage and vengeance, but it was impossible to look at all those tiny clothes and not remember buying them for Robin. Of course, we hadn’t bought them here, and given what I now knew, thank Christ for that. Nevertheless, Lexi and I had spent countless hours browsing the baby stores at various malls, fawning over how cute everything was (with the occasional gasp reserved for how expensive it all was too). We wanted everything to be just right for Robin. We wanted her to have everything, and we broke ourselves making that happen. I can’t recall ever being happier.

  I heard a creak and an old man swerved into view. He’d been sitting behind the counter, head lowered, reading a newspaper, so that I hadn’t seen him there at first. Now he looked up at me from his chair through thick reading glasses and smiled a smile of large yellow teeth.

  “Hello, sir. Are you looking for something for the baby?”

  He looked just the same as I remembered him.

  His skin was tanned and well-lined, like a man who has spent much of his life laboring in the sun. Behind the glasses, one hazel-colored eye watched me with polite interest. The other was fake and watched me not at all, aimed instead at something just to the right of me. He wore a weathered old straw fedora that had passed its prime right around the time JFK took office and a pinstripe brown suit that was probably purchased on the same day. His white shirt was the color of dust.

  “Sir?” Although he still maintained his smile, it was now hanging on his bony face like a wet shirt on a clothesline. “You are looking for something?” There was a faint trace of an accent to his voice. German, maybe? I didn’t know. I opened my mouth to say something and nothing came out.

  I stared at him as, with the help of a cane, he rose from his chair. Now the smile was almost entirely gone. I didn’t think he recognized me. He wouldn’t have had much reason to. The day we came to his stall, I’d left Lexi to peruse his wares while I went hunting for treasures among the stacks of old books on the opposite side of the market.

  “You sold my wife a blanket,” I said at last, the words like broken glass tumbling off my tongue. “A…a child’s blanket.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, bracing one gnarled hand on the edge of the counter for support. He wasn’t remembering Lexi, merely acknowledging that yes, indeed he sometimes sold people blankets.

  Jesus Christ, I thought. What are you doing here? He’s just an old man. Just a regular old man selling off his children’s ratty old clothes for some spare change.

  “I…” Though I had practiced them in my sleep and before the mirror, heard them echoing around my skull a hundred times prior to my coming here, the words would not come now that I was face to face with him. It killed her, I’d imagined telling him. It killed her and I think you know that. I think you knew it would when you sold it to her. Looking at him there, squinting at me in confusion, a threadbare old man in a threadbare old suit, I saw that I was wrong. I had vilified him because I needed a villain and in my despair, he was truly the only tangible, reachable one. Without him, I was left chasing ghosts or letting them chase me until there was no place left to hide but the grave.

  I started to back away. “I’m sorry. I…I’m sorry.”

  “Wait, sir…”

  I ignored his summons as I made my way back through the crowd, my mind in chaos. I had put everything on this moment. There were no cards left in my hand. Without him as the man with the answers, I was left hollow and defeated. I hurried back to the car, tears streaming down my face, ignoring the curious looks from the bargain hunters. Sweat trickled in cold rivulets down over my ribs. This was it. This was the end. Nowhere left to turn.

  Three feet from the car, I remembered the blanket in the trunk.

  That alone might not have been enough for me to change my mind about the course of action I was going to take, one that would end this nightmare forever—home, drink, pills, eternal peace—but the more I tried to shake it, the more a single question persisted. How did he not know?

  Assuming I wasn’t completely out of my mind with grief and imagining everything that had happened since Robin died, how would an old man have possession of that blanket and not know there was something wrong with it? There were, of course, any number of sane and logical responses to this question, foremost among them the possibility that Blanky was just a fucking blanket, after all. Another possibility was that, if there was indeed something supernatural about it, maybe the old man truly didn’t know what he’d been selling us. Maybe it had never acted in a way that gave him pause. Maybe it had been dormant until it found itself with younger people to destroy, like an animal holing up for the winter until prey made itself available.

  One hand on the car door handle, I decided there really was only one way to be sure about the old man.

  I was going to have to reintroduce him to Blanky.

  * * *

  The afternoon grew late, the shadows long. The clouds behind the Chase building were the color of bruises as they chased down the sun. A breeze had risen. I could hear it whispering through the decorative evergreens surrounding the park even over the siren song from Agnes Obel on my car stereo.

  It was quarter past five and the square was not nearly so full now. The mob had dispersed, leaving only stragglers behind, those tenacious few unwilling to go home without a prize. They wandered around like zombies, eyes narrowed as they scanned what little treasures remained. The food truck was gone now too, and most of the vendors were packing up their wares. They looked exhausted but satisfied, their pockets and lockboxes stuffed with cash from the horde of buyers seduced into purchasing things they didn’t need, just as Lexi had been.

  The old man was breaking down his stall. It was a deceptively simple process. Four walls, a roof, and a canopy, all of them disconnecting as easy as you please, like a hut made of Lego. The material looked cheap and flimsy, probably particle board, and in a matter of minutes, it lay in a pile at his feet. With the stall undone, I could see the car parked behind it. It was an old reddish-brown Dodge Dynasty, so rust-eaten and full of holes it looked as if a gunman had used it for target practice. The windows were opaque with dust, and the front bumper was held in place by a twisted wire hanger. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks on the passenger side. A blue handicapped placard hung from the rearview mirror, which probably explained how he was still able to drive a vehicle that should long ago have been bent into steel origami at a wrecking yard. Into this monster, the old man dutifully fed his piles of baby clothes. He did not toss them in there as I had Blanky. No, he placed them in there with such tenderness they might have contained the babies for which the clothes had been made. Then he shut the trunk, dusted off his suit, looked around at nothing in particular, and got into his car, his work done for the day.

  It took him a long time to start the engine. The handful of vendors still occupying the square jumped at the sound of gunfire and looked in the direction of the Dodge as it coughed out a cloud of dirty blue smoke the breeze carried straight into their faces. If the old man noticed, he o
ffered no look of apology. He simply continued grinding the engine until it finally, begrudgingly caught.

  When I saw him look out through the back window in order to safely guide the vehicle out of the square, I keyed the ignition. It started smoothly, the engine rumbling to life. Still, what little sound my car had made had clearly been enough to draw the attention of the vendors, all of whom turned as one to look at me.

  There were ragged dark hollows where their faces should have been.

  8

  Drawing upon every crime show I had ever seen—Barney Miller would have been proud—I followed the old man home at a safe distance, keeping three or four cars between us on the highway at all times. It wasn’t easy, though. The plume of smoke from his exhaust coupled with his penchant for pumping the brakes at odd intervals led almost every car to overtake him, many of them with vehicular exhortations of their displeasure. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure why I took such pains to ensure he didn’t spot me. It’s not like he knew my car, or would have noticed me behind the wheel. I guess I was just being cautious out of fear that he knew a lot more than he’d pretended, that it might behoove me to be wary of a man who could knowingly sell an instrument of murder to a pregnant woman.

  Twilight fell as we left the city behind, the traffic narrowing along with the roads, and pretty soon, as Venus sparkled in the gloaming like a diamond on blue velvet, it was just me tailing the burning red lights of the old man’s Dodge through roads enwombed by gnarled and leafless trees.

  As I sailed through the encroaching dark, an awful loneliness crept over me as I recalled how many times I had driven this car with Lexi in the passenger seat laughing at some inane joke I’d made, or navigating with measured patience when the GPS failed us. I even missed having her there to argue with me. I’d have sold my soul to see her face twisted in rage, to feel her spittle on my cheek as she snapped at me over yet another instance of my insensitivity. All these moments, even the less pleasant ones, are snapshots we can never replace once they’re lost, and it leaves us wishing for just the slightest glimpse of them if it means we can feel whole again. If it means we can pretend just for an instant that we’re still alive.