Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  “Killing us,” Claire says calmly, “won’t stop you from hearing crying babies, you’ll hear them crying for the rest of your life.”

  “What?” Quinndell takes a moment to think this through. “What, you’re trying to make me think I’m insane, that’s awfully feeble, my dear, that’s —” But he can’t talk with that goddamn crying going on, Quinndell again losing his composure and shouting toward the back room. “Shut up!”

  The baby continues shrieking.

  Quinndell’s scalp suddenly itches and he begins scratching it, causing his hair to stick out all over his head. “I know what happened, nothing very mysterious about this, Welby found one of the babies before it rolled off that rock, he brought it back here —”

  The crying has stopped.

  Quinndell pauses, cocking his head one way and then the other.

  “What’s wrong now?” Claire asks.

  “It stopped.”

  “What stopped?”

  “The —” But then he catches himself. “Nice try, folks.” Quinndell moves carefully toward a small table where two oil lamps are burning. “I smell kerosene so I know he has lanterns in here somewhere,” the doctor says, moving his hands until they find the table. “I gave directions to the men who are picking me up, but I also told them that a fire would light their way.” He has found one of the glass lamps and is grasping it by the base. “The scenario is perfectly clear. Welby killed Carl and Mary and then set the cabin on fire, burning himself to death along with you, Claire, and with your famous boyfriend too.”

  Claire asks him if he still hears babies crying.

  Quinndell’s face is set hard as he heads for the post where she is tied. “If you think this blind man is afraid of fire, you’re sadly mistaken, dearie. I’ll break this lamp at your feet, burn you at the stake for the witch you are, I’ll dance to your screams. The baby will burn too, unless of course I was just imagining —”

  “Hey, Doc,” Lyon says, “if you’re setting this up to make it look like Welby killed us all, how do you explain the fact that he’s tied to a post?”

  Quinndell stops. He doesn’t want to give Lyon the satisfaction of being right but it’s true of course, he can’t leave the hermit tied up. Still holding the kerosene lamp, Quinndell slides his feet along the floor until he comes to Randolph’s legs, which he kicks several times. “Dead,” he says, kneeling on the floor, putting the lamp down, slipping the pistol into his pocket, reaching for the rope tied around Randolph’s chest.

  “I tink not.”

  Quinndell jerks back just as Randolph kicks out with his uninjured leg, knocking over the lamp, which breaks, spilling kerosene that ignites with blue and yellow flames spreading across the floor.

  Making whimpering sounds, Quinndell leaps to his feet and takes rapid steps backward as he pats his legs with both hands, checking to see if the fire has ignited his clothing, carelessly backing up until he is within Lyon’s reach.

  Pressing his torso against the post, Lyon has stretched his arms out as far as he can, waiting for the doctor’s arrival. Although his wrists are tied together, Lyon can still use his hands, grabbing Quinndell by the hair and pulling him close, the two of them struggling now, the post between them, Lyon determined not to let him go, not this time, no matter what.

  Lyon slides his arms down the post, pulling Quinndell to the floor, one of Lyon’s hands gripping the doctor’s hair while the other is trying to reach his throat.

  The kerosene fire has spread to a bookcase, igniting a row of westerns, filling the room with smoke as the baby begins crying again from the back room.

  Now Lyon is trying to slip his tied wrists over Quinndell’s head, wanting to use the rope as a garrote, but his position is made awkward by the post, and the doctor, flat on his back, manages to escape that intended choke-hold, trying to scoot out from under Lyon’s hands, both of those hands ending up on Quinndell’s face, Lyon’s thumbs on those beautiful blue eyes.

  “Bwind him, Mistah Wyon!” Randolph shouts as the infant cries all the more loudly.

  Blind him? Lyon presses on the glass eyes but lacks the will to press harder, trying desperately to keep Quinndell’s head from slipping away.

  Now it is Claire who is screaming it. “Blind him!”

  Quinndell eases his hold on Lyon’s wrists, enabling Lyon to half stand, maneuvering to put his weight behind his arms, both fascinated and repulsed by the feel of those glass eyes under his thumbs.

  “Please, John,” Quinndell says as he sneaks a hand down to his coat pocket, reaching in for the pistol.

  “What?” Lyon demands.

  Quinndell has the gun out. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Claire shrieks a warning but Lyon pays it no attention, the doctor’s plea having already enraged him, Lyon instantly dropping his weight onto his thumbs, driving them into the doctor’s eyes.

  Lyon watches as those blue and white eyes twist crazily in their sockets, briefly making Quinndell appear cross-eyed before the glass orbs are forced up out of the sockets, Lyon’s thumbs replacing them as he pushes down harder, Quinndell struggling beneath this piercing like an animal being ritually tortured, the doctor losing the pistol as his body arches, as Lyon growls deep in his throat, gritting his teeth, spittle forming at the sides of his mouth, bouncing his weight onto his thumbs to drive them deeper into what feels like wet gristle, some kind of tough tissue that Lyon can’t break through, Quinndell howling, Lyon increasing the torture by moving his thumbs around within those eye sockets, feeling a shelf of bone on the interior roof of the sockets, pressing hard against that flat bone, Lyon’s fingers clawlike over Quinndell’s forehead, getting a firm grip and pushing upward with his thumbs, using all his strength, that shelf of bone cracking and then breaking, cutting Lyon’s thumbs as they push up into Quinndell’s brain, the doctor’s howling and the infant’s crying competing in some kind of crazed bidding, each raise in volume matched and raised again until the howling and crying achieve merger, one voice now, inharmonious but joined, one single, final crescendo terrible enough for God to hear.

  EPILOGUE

  Lyon straightens his suitcoat and fixes his eyes on camera one, anticipating the red light.

  “Good evening. At the top of our report tonight, an announcement of a new twist on an old peace proposal that has some United Nations negotiators cautiously optimistic for a settlement to the latest round of hostilities in the Middle East. Here’s Michael Barnes reporting from Jerusalem. Michael.”

  When Lyon first resumed newscasting, the ratings set records for all the wrong reasons: people wondered if he would cry again and there was also a morbid curiosity about watching someone who had killed a man with his bare hands. But Lyon’s former cold-bloodedness was warmed now by a certain vulnerability and as he continued on-air over the fall of that year, viewers stayed with him.

  The special, called “Bring Me Children,” aired in mid-September and earned a decent thirteen rating points and twenty-three share. Everyone at the network was saying Emmy, and in the spring of the following year it proved true: Lyon became one of very few journalists ever to have won both a Pulitzer and an Emmy.

  Killing Quinndell didn’t save their lives. Claire, Randolph, and Lyon were still tied to the posts, the fire was spreading throughout Randolph’s shack, the smoke became blinding and then made breathing dangerous, the baby still crying in the back room.

  It was Claire who got them loose. She managed to reach Carl, pull the knife from his neck, and use it to cut the ropes from her wrists. Then she freed Lyon and he pulled Randolph from the shack while Claire ran into the back room and saved the infant girl.

  The men Quinndell had hired showed up just before dawn. They watched the fire, honked the car’s horn, called for the doctor, talked between themselves, watched the fire some more, and then left.

  While Claire, Lyon, Randolph, and the baby were off in the woods, hiding and waiting for the men to depart, Lyon whispered an explanation of everything that Quinndell had
told him.

  “I don’t know if Quinndell was ever a good doctor. When he did that awful thing to you, Claire, when you were fourteen, he was already falsifying the deaths of those babies, arranging for their adoptions to wealthy couples, already thinking of himself as God. But it wasn’t until he lost his sight that he went truly insane. He believed his blindness was God’s punishment, and he reacted by trying to punish God. Leaving those babies to die in a cave, killing others who were powerless. There’s no way to explain it except for what your grandmother said. He’s a monster. And what you said. Evil exists.”

  Randolph kept nodding. See, he thought — this is exactly what I wanted someone to do, explain everything.

  As the sun finally began to backlight the eastern ridges and with only a stone chimney remaining of Randolph’s shack, Claire carried the baby to the rental car and then half carried, half dragged the hermit there. When she came back for Lyon she told him he couldn’t report what Quinndell had done with those twenty babies, faking their deaths and then arranging their adoptions.

  Leaning on her and limping his way to the car, Lyon was incredulous.

  “What’s it going to accomplish?” she asked. “The twenty women who were told their babies died all those years ago will be devastated. How does a mother even begin to think about something like that? The adoptive parents will be horrified that now someone is going to take their children away from them. And the only innocent parties in this whole mess, the kids, they’re going to be pulled apart. It’ll be a circus, no one’ll come out of it with any dignity.”

  Lyon said he had no choice: he was a reporter.

  “Of course you have a choice. Report Quinndell’s murders, just leave out the part —”

  Lyon insisted that you can’t leave out parts. And even if he didn’t report it, someone else would. “People are going to be all over this story.”

  “Doing something because if you don’t someone else will,” Claire told him, “is an immoral argument.”

  But it was an argument they continued to have even after Lyon told the police the entire story, even after they returned to New York and Claire moved into Lyon’s apartment, even after the Quinndell horrors were written about in newspapers — even after Claire’s prediction turned out to be true: a troupe, a circus troupe, of lawyers and reporters converging on the twenty children whose deaths had been faked by Quinndell, some of the biological mothers suing for the return of their now teenage children, some of the adoptive parents fleeing the country with those children, no one coming out of it with any dignity.

  She was never angry with Lyon for betraying her hiding place to Quinndell; in fact, the only time Claire ever mentioned it was to tell Lyon that betrayal under torture is not betrayal. But her opinion on the reporting of what happened to those twenty children was absolute. “You don’t have to be a part of it,” Claire kept insisting.

  So when Lyon began working on the special that August, she moved out of his apartment.

  “I’m John Lyon and that’s our report for this Sunday evening. Thank you and goodnight.” He keeps smiling until the red light goes off.

  After the newscast he attends a meeting to discuss future assignments, deciding not to participate in another special the network is planning, this one on the adoption of foreign-born children. The producer says she’s disappointed but understands Lyon’s position.

  After that meeting he has a drink with his director, who points out that it was exactly one year ago today that Lyon broke down and cried while reading that story about murdered children. “And now you’re back on top, got an Emmy and all — who would’ve thought, huh?”

  “Certainly not me.”

  He takes a cab home.

  When the doorman, Jonathan, sees who it is limping up to the doors, he rushes to open them.

  “Good evening, Mr. Lyon. Scorcher, huh?”

  “That it is, Jonathan, that it is.”

  The doorman walks with him through the lobby, always unsure whether he should take Lyon’s arm or not. “You need some help, Mr. Lyon?” Jonathan asks, wincing a little with each pained step Lyon takes.

  “No, no, I’m fine, thank you. Some days it hurts worse than others, I don’t know why.”

  The doorman stands there until the elevator arrives. As Lyon steps on, Jonathan tells him, “You’re a hero, Mr. Lyon.” He’s said this maybe twenty times since Lyon’s return.

  And Lyon never knows how to reply to it. On this occasion he nods and smiles, pressing the button for his floor and waiting for the doors to close.

  I don’t feel like a hero, Lyon thinks on the way up. Claire’s grandmother was a hero. And Randolph Welby too. Lyon paid to have a new cabin built for Randolph, who was pestered by reporters for a mercifully short time primarily because interviews with him consisted exclusively of Randolph replying either “I bewieve so” or “I tink not.”

  To Lyon’s credit, in the “Bring Me Children” special, he tried his best to make sure people knew who the real heroes were.

  He limps off the elevator, opens the door to his apartment, switches on the lights, and lowers the air-conditioning’s thermostat. After listening to the messages on the answering machine, Lyon makes a sandwich and opens a bottle of beer. He eats, reads awhile, then goes to the bedroom and undresses, throwing his shirt over a thirty-five-pound concrete frog. Lyon’s in bed by eleven.

  The last thought he has before falling asleep is that his shin hurts worse than ever. Primarily psychosomatic, the doctors keep telling him. Yeah, Lyon thinks, that’s what they said in retrospect about my emotional breakdown too — but just because it’s all in your head doesn’t mean it hurts any less.

  He sleeps until a few minutes past midnight when he is awakened by a baby crying, Lyon bolting upright in bed, instantly awake.

  He grabs his robe and limps into the living room.

  His wife is on the couch with their two children. Lyon’s treatment of her grandmother in the news special is the reason Claire began speaking to him again. She moved back into the apartment a week after that program aired; they were married at the beginning of October and because of the extraordinary circumstances involved were able to adopt the baby girl, the one who had been crying in Randolph’s back room, by Thanksgiving. But it’s not the little girl who is crying now; she is, in fact, fast asleep.

  “You’re late.”

  “You know how my sisters are when they get their hands on these children,” Claire says. “I told you not to wait up.”

  “I didn’t.” Lyon takes the girl from Claire. “The crying woke me. How can this one,” he says, patting the girl’s back, “sleep through all that noise?”

  “She can sleep through anything,” Claire replies, laughing as she rearranges the howling baby boy on her knee. He was born in April, three months ago.

  Lyon sits on the couch next to Claire and pulls the edge of a tiny hat away from the infant’s face. The baby considers Lyon only briefly before scowling all the harder and then squalling all the louder. “I keep telling you, Claire, every day he looks more and more like a café au lait Winston Churchill.”

  “And I keep telling you, John, that every day he looks more and more like his father.”

  Recognizing the truth when he hears it, John Lyon doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  ARABEL, ALL WAYS

  ALSO BY DAVID MARTIN

  Tethered

  The Crying Heart Tattoo

  Final Harbor

  The Beginning of Sorrows

  Lie to Me

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Martin is the author of The Crying Heart Tattoo, Final Harbor, Tethered, The Beginning of Sorrows, and Lie to Me. A former Bread Loaf fellow, he lives with his wife, Arabel, on a farm in West Virginia.

 

 

 
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