Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  “I have a better idea,” Quinndell says, stuffing the hundreds back into Henry’s pocket. “You keep the money, you’ll earn every cent of it before the evening’s over, believe me, you will. Correcting God’s inequities is tough work.” Then the doctor turns and points toward a cabinet in the corner of the room. “Do you know who lives in there?”

  “Lives in there?”

  “Mr. Gigli lives in there. And do you know what Mr. Gigli’s job is?”

  Henry pulls again on the restraints, working himself into a sweat.

  “Mr. Gigli’s job is to balance the pain, to make you hurt physically, because that’s the only type of pain someone as spiritually numb as you would understand, to make you hurt physically as much as I’ve been hurt spiritually.” Quinndell steps very close to the table and takes a heavy tablespoon from the pocket of his suitcoat. “This spoon has a job too, Henry. Its job is to balance the vision inequity.”

  “Hey, mister, you get that fat deputy on the line, I’m not kidding!”

  “Oh, I’m not kidding either. By the time Mr. Gigli and Mr. Spoon finish their work this evening, the scales might not be in complete balance but they will have moved one small notch in that direction.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I really don’t.”

  “Let me explain then. In Mr. Gigli’s case I’m talking about the amputation of your hands and feet and in Mr. Spoon’s case I’m talking about enucleation.”

  Quinndell moves to the head of the table, grasping the man’s forehead tightly with one hand as he grips the tablespoon in his other, moving the spoon across the bridge of the man’s nose, raising the spoon and placing its tip against the outside corner of the man’s left eye. “Can you say enucleation, Henry?”

  CHAPTER 10

  People he works with, especially those who sneeringly refer to him as His Lordship, wouldn’t recognize John Lyon now, ashen and trembling and sucking down a mouthful of Scotch right from the bottle. He’s so rattled he drinks too quickly and gags, forced to spit up in the sink, no dignity left in this man, it’s been frightened out of him. He tries to wash away the mess in the sink but nothing comes from the tap. Lyon remembers too late that the electricity powering the water pump won’t be turned on until tomorrow.

  Walking around the perimeter of the kitchen, giving the open crate a wide berth, in fact refusing even to look at the corpse, Lyon keeps glancing out the kitchen window, still expecting that hell dog to appear there.

  He finally steps right up to the window and looks into the clearing.

  No dog, but Lyon is surprised by how light the night has become, the moon having finally risen high enough to top the surrounding hills. He glances at his watch, almost midnight.

  Not trusting himself to carry the kerosene lamp without dropping it and catching the entire cabin on fire, Lyon takes a flashlight from the box of supplies and uses it to find his way through the living room, the dark bedroom, and into the bathroom. After peeing he flushes the toilet, but of course there’s no water to refill the tank. Next time will he have to pee outside? Where that dog is waiting for him and probably snakes too.

  Back in the kitchen he finally gets enough nerve and Scotch in him to stand at the crate and look at her. Someone obviously entered the cabin while he was gone, opened the lid, and pulled the shroud loose. Whoever did that wants him to look. They’re aware of Lyon’s emotional instability and are trying to push him over sanity’s edge.

  Time passes, Lyon sipping Scotch into an empty stomach, trying to convince himself to kneel at the crate and remove the cloth from the rest of her face. It’s not Claire. Lyon can tell even from her partially exposed face that the woman is much too young to be Claire. He finally kneels there on the floor, images from a dozen horror films leaping to mind, the corpse coming suddenly to life, bolting upright to grab him.

  He waits for it to happen, for something to happen.

  Then with the finger and thumb of one shaking hand he delicately pinches the top edge of the cloth and s-l-o-w-l-y pulls it from her face.

  Seeing her, he breathes more easily, placing the Scotch bottle on the floor, staring at her face and exposed breast, surprised by his sudden sexual arousal.

  The white cloth looks more like a negligee than a shroud, a negligee that’s been pulled aside by a lover to expose that breast. The woman’s face is beautifully exotic, her skin deeply black, big eyes gently closed, flared nose, prominent cheekbones narrowing to a delicate chin, her mouth wonderfully large, lips full and still tinged with a lifelike pinkness — looking nothing at all the way Tommy Door looked in his coffin, mummified and overly made up and resolutely dead. Ever since seeing Tommy like that, Lyon has been in mortal fear of ending up the same way. But what’s the alternative?

  He again pinches the top edge of the cloth between finger and thumb, pulling it down far enough to expose the other breast. He wants to touch them. What would the breasts of a dead woman feel like — and why is Lyon even thinking along these lines, what’s wrong with him? Maybe he should cover her back up again. But Lyon doesn’t want to, he can’t stop looking at her.

  Most of the black women he knows back in New York are, for want of a better term, American blacks, skin the various shades of light coffee, features narrowed and homogenized by the white blood in their ancestry. Not so the face into which Lyon now stares, a face shining with the heart of Africa, ebony black, racially pure, black-to-the-bone black.

  She’s only a girl, can’t be much more than twenty.

  Before Claire stepped in front of that cab she vowed she would send someone to help Lyon, that her soul would be watching over him — he wouldn’t be alone, she promised.

  Lyon rubs his face with both hands.

  Then he gets up and again walks unsteadily around the kitchen, glancing nervously at that window, worried he might be so totally crazy he’s not even aware of how crazy he is. He has dedicated his entire life to maintaining control, never letting anyone know how he feels deep inside, keeping his interior a secret for so long now that he doesn’t know what’s in there himself, all those protective layers poured like concrete over his soul: no wife, no children, living alone, selfish, independent, tough, can’t-touch-me, no social or financial debts, an island. And now that concrete is breaking up and whatever it is coming loose deep inside Lyon, that’s what’s scaring him worse than this corpse or that dog or anything else that’s happened to him this past week.

  Lyon returns to kneel at the crate.

  Her breasts are plump and high on her chest, a young woman’s breasts topped with deeply purple nipples so richly swollen that Lyon can too easily imagine them in his mouth, imagine tasting that soft black flesh, chewing it gently, his arousal returning as he sees all too vividly in his mind how he could bend over right now and suck that nearest nipple between tongue and palate.

  He actually dangles one hand over the side of the crate.

  She appears to be only sleeping. Lyon argues to himself that it’s perfectly normal to be aroused by the sight of a beautiful young woman, half-naked and asleep. He has come upon her in bed, a silken sheet slipped to her waist, and here she sleeps in front of him. He can stare at her without censure, even venture to touch a breast without awakening her. John Lyon tries hard to justify this rancid desire he’s suffering, his dangling hand moving closer and closer until the knuckles of that white trembling hand brush across one black nipple.

  He’s not horrified to be doing this, her flesh feeling cool but not dead, however dead might feel, certainly not repulsive. Lyon moves his knuckles across the nipple a second time, his arousal setting itself like a steel bolt, urging him on, go ahead and take that black breast in your hand, who’s to know, you’re isolated out here and when you bring the police back in the morning she certainly can’t tell them what you did, go ahead and do it, lean your head down, John Lyon, and suck that nipple, go on, see what it tastes like, you’re the only one who will ever know what you’ve done and you can handle it, suck bo
th of them, do it, why not?

  Torn up inside by desire and by the self-hatred that desire is creating, Lyon lowers his forehead onto the edge of the crate so he can’t see what his hand is doing, covering her breast and gently kneading it.

  Past midnight now, John Lyon stands at the kitchen window and stares out, waiting for what he isn’t sure.

  He turns toward her again, the lust he was previously feeling replaced now by shame. He can’t tolerate looking at her. Hurrying to the crate, intending to replace the cloth over her body, he notices that her right wrist, the one nearest him, is tucked down toward the bottom of the crate and is bound in a thick leather cuff apparently anchored to the crate. Leaning over, he finds that her left wrist is similarly cuffed.

  Maybe the woman was alive when she was placed in the crate, alive and struggling so that she had to be strapped down. She’s alive now.

  Lyon freezes. Of course she’s alive, her nipple puckered under his touch, of course she’s alive, he’s been repressing that knowledge so that he could … Oh Jesus. And now Lyon is nervously reaching down next to her hip, pulling loose a leather thong that is laced through that cuff, taking her slender black wrist in his hand.

  Just as the tips of his fingers touch the underside of her wrist, Lyon’s peripheral vision catches a movement. Lyon turns — Jesus God, at the window. He drops her hand and jerks around on his knees just in time to get a good look before it ducks down out of sight beneath the window’s ledge.

  CHAPTER 11

  The screams cause Mary Aurora to bolt upright in bed. She had no idea the doctor was doing this tonight. Mary lowers her head to her knees and covers her ears with her hands and then with a pillow, but of course nothing can shut out the screams, because once you hear screams like that, you hear them inside your head. Inhuman? Of course they are inhuman, or at least like nothing a human should be capable of producing, like no scream-shriek-bellow Mary has ever heard before she came to live in Dr. Quinndell’s house. Surely neighbors can hear them, what do the doctor’s neighbors do, roll over in bed and put more pillows on their heads? Just like me, Mary thinks — cover your ears and hope the monster doesn’t come visiting you.

  Then after the initial screams, after shrieks have injured the vocal cords, after the volume has gone as high as it can go, then come the more pitiful sounds: the moans, the begging for death, for release, and finally a long, low, wordless pleading. If you could hook a microphone to a soul in hell, it would sound like what Mary is hearing right now.

  I’m not doing this for the money, Mary tells herself. I’m not.

  The sound stops abruptly. Now Mary waits in dread. Will he come up here? And if he does, will he —

  Footsteps on the stairs, Mary bundling herself into a ball on the bed, arms hugging her legs, shivering and praying and then ashamed of herself for praying but praying some more.

  The door to her bedroom is pushed open, Dr. Quinndell lighted from the hallway lamp. “Oh Mary,” he says, “it was awful.” His suitcoat off, sleeves rolled up, that pristine white shirt splattered black with blood, he comes to her.

  Mary makes room for him on the bed, less an invitation than an effort to avoid his touch.

  “Mr. Gigli was especially voracious tonight.” The doctor finds her shoulder with one bloody hand, moving the hand down to her breast. “I need you.”

  “Yes,” she tells him, hating whatever it is inside her that allows her to say yes to him.

  “I need you to give me an injection.”

  She’s relieved. Maybe once he gets his shot he’ll go away and leave her alone. Mary’s not sure what he puts in the syringes. From his reaction she guesses it is some mixture of amphetamine and cocaine, something that enhances his madness without greatly impairing his speech or the function of his hands — which are moving down her stomach, digging between her legs.

  After receiving the shot, Quinndell stands and walks around her bed, hitting the base of his palms together in silent applause, describing what he did to the man, Mary wounded by the details of this account but hoping that if he continues talking maybe he’ll talk himself out, exhaust himself, work through the effects of the injection and then go to sleep.

  “When you go down there and see what I’ve done, you’ll appreciate what I’m telling you.”

  Mary says nothing.

  “I want you to clean up the mess. Pick up the pieces, so to speak.”

  “Carl always does that.”

  “Tonight you’re going to do it.”

  “Please.”

  “Turn over.”

  She does, Quinndell standing now at the edge of the bed, standing between her legs.

  “Don’t make me go down there,” she begs. “Carl’ll do it.”

  He unzips his pants and lies on top of Mary, prodding her. “You like it this way?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, I like it this way, I do.”

  “Convince me you like what I’m doing,” he says, pushing against her, “convince me that you’re not just tolerating it but that you’re really enjoying it, that you adore it, that you want it — convince me of that, Mary, and I’ll call Carl and make him bag up the parts, clean the room, you won’t even have to see it. But if I detect one false tone, one faked response, then you are going down there and clean up what’s left of Mr. Henry Robarts.”

  Her lower lip is between her teeth.

  “And although I can only listen for your duplicity,” Quinndell continues, reaching into his pants pocket and taking something out, laying it in the small of her back, the wet-flesh clamminess of it causing Mary’s skin to crawl, “Henry will be keeping his eye on you.”

  Mary bites her lower lip as the doctor pushes harder against her, holding her hips with his bloody hands.

  “You like that, don’t you?”

  She says she does, moving her ass against him, arching, purring, saying things that take small bites out of her soul.

  CHAPTER 12

  Not even human. Tiny, ancient. Both ears perfectly round and cupped, sticking straight out from the sides of its head like two halves of a china teacup. Large black eyes, a bulblike forehead, chinless — spying in on Lyon with an idiot’s grin.

  Nature is supposed to prevent something like that from being born. When something that monstrous forms in the womb, nature is supposed to ensure it is aborted before it can be carried to term. What Lyon saw at the kitchen window — something like that is not supposed to live.

  After he gets over the initial shock, Lyon scrambles to his feet, stumbling backward, reversing so hard into the kitchen stove that it rears up on its back two legs, Lyon’s eyes flashed open and his heart full of such terror that it feels as if it’s trying to escape his chest, having already crawled up into the base of his throat, cowering there as it pounds out its fear.

  Lyon wishes he had a gun. Yes, this New York liberal who has broadcast commentaries in support of restrictions on the purchase and ownership of handguns, now he wants a big ugly pistol in his hand — or an automatic assault rifle, something that fires the most powerful and deadly projectiles ever manufactured, and Lyon wouldn’t care if the weapon was unregistered, stolen, serial number filed off, used in heinous crimes, inappropriate for hunting, the more of a man-killer the better. He would sign a lifetime membership to the NRA and appear in their magazine ads and tithe to them ten percent of his income, do anything right now to have in his hand a big goddamn loaded gun.

  Unarmed, he waits for that face to appear again in the window. Maybe it’s Quinndell.

  No, that face does not belong to a doctor, not even one who butchers babies.

  It’s the hunter, that little man Lyon caught in his headlights, the one holding the rifle — which means that the dog is out there with him.

  Lyon waits.

  Nothing happens, no face at the window, no sound from the porch, nothing.

  He picks up a sturdy wooden kitchen chair and advances carefully toward the door, trying to convinc
e himself he shouldn’t be afraid of someone so small. Lyon himself is six one, two hundred pounds, though nearly twenty of those pounds is carried in a gut he’s put on in the past five years. Still, he is broad-shouldered and strong, has been since high school, a man whose size and strength has always made him confident around other men, unintimidated. I’m twice the size of that little creature out there, he tells himself.

  Except he’s got a gun and a dog.

  But Lyon has to do something, he can’t simply wait for the creature to keep popping up at windows.

  Holding the chair in front of him, Lyon makes his way to the door. He looks out into the clearing in front of the cabin and, yes, there it is, standing a hundred feet from the cabin, just standing there looking back at Lyon. No gun, no dog.

  “What do you want!” Lyon hollers through the door. “What’re you doing here!”

  No response.

  He’s retarded, Lyon decides. Just some local retard who gets his jollies peeping in windows.

  Lyon unlocks and opens the door. “Hey there, listen to me! I want you off this property!”

  Illuminated eerily by moonlight, the little figure stands unmoving like a statue from a horror film, awaiting animation.

  Bringing the chair with him, Lyon steps out onto the porch. “All right, if you don’t leave I’m going to come out there and break this fucking chair over your head!”

  Back across the clearing comes a tiny but resolute voice, “I tink not.”

  Lyon is trying to figure out what the hell that means when he once again senses eyes on him. Looking down he sees that the dog — huge, black — has been sitting there the entire time, right here on the porch, just to the other side of the door, sitting and looking at him.