by Martin Rose
I crushed it with my fist, grimacing, and smeared insect parts across the cloth. Unsettled, I forged on.
We traversed a stock room filled with boxes on shaky industrial metal shelves, shelves leaning against the back wall, and a black door with scored and peeling paint. She waded through the dusty interior, the hem of her skirt dragging over the floor littered with scraps of discarded paper and dust bunnies. Faded and yellowed invoices. I stepped over what looked like old blood stains on the concrete and they aroused questions I couldn’t answer. A stray earring. (And was that a piece of earlobe attached to the metal charm on the end? No, surely not.) I shuffled after her faster with every sense and each dim eye hunting for evidence of the snare closing in around me. I could all but feel the loop of wire set across the game trail, waiting only for me to stick my neck through it.
She opened another door and I followed her through and into a narrow pathway of descending steps. Total darkness broken by bare bulbs set in the ceiling. They glowed like distant stars in a gasping void. Down we went. Damp and musty air. I kept my hands loose and ready to pull the gun. Would a series of brain-washed goons swapped out from a cheap horror movie appear at the bottom and apprehend me? No one appeared, and I craved such familiar and identifiable enemies to comfort me and give me a framework for this trepidation and fear drumming up from my very marrow.
At the bottom, my feet touched down on concrete. She’d been here before, I could tell by the confidence in her gait. Well-versed and certain of her terrain even in the darkness. She made a hard right with a sweep of her gypsy skirt so the fabric twisted like minnows darting through a flow of water. My footsteps echoed her tread. Another door yawned ahead, illuminated by a yellow light.
“Welcome, Vitus,” she said and opened the door and stepped aside to beckon me in. “They’ve been waiting for you.”
I stooped to duck through. Permanent midnight engulfed me and I turned to look for her, but she was gone. The door swung emptily behind me. I could leave if I wanted, retreat back up the steps. I dared not call out her name, and in the shadows beyond the entryway; I heard sounds beyond—shuffling steps, whispering clothes, steady breathing.
I attempted to penetrate the darkness with a touch. My fingers met with fabric, smooth velvet. The sound of my steps echoed the substance of wood, and while I attempted to understand what new level of maze I’d been forced into, the darkness broke like the shell of an egg.
Overwhelming light flooded and blinded me. I held my arm up and shielded my face. Heat enveloped me. A collective gasp of a thousand held breaths broke the silence. A whirring of velvet curtains parted before me. I pulled my arm away from my face and I saw my shoes firmly planted on a wooden stage that dropped off into nothingness several feet beyond.
My dead eyes adjusted and I let the brim of my hat do the work for me as I looked down.
I stood before a large room with a hundred people in long red robes standing before the stage, watching me. Their faces immersed in shadow beneath the peak of their hoods and I wondered if I had not been kidnapped by a series of Harry Potter wizard wannabes who wished to induct me into a bizarro Hogwarts school.
“Honor your Lord!”
The voice projected from the back of the room in symphony with the hum of unseen speakers. In unison, the congregation fell to its knees, a rustling of red cloaks and hoods. A sea of red poppies falling in concert. I moved for my gun, but did not draw, remained frozen with my fingers over the shape of it, unable to articulate the fear that peeled my lips back from my teeth—a grown, undead monster terrified by a gathering of innocent children.
I had never felt such an excruciating focus brought to bear upon me; I knew what insects knew, to be poised beneath a magnifying glass under a shaft of hot and burning light. A hundred sets of eyes studied me as their red figures genuflected.
They pulled their hoods back from their faces, emerging like worms from cocoons, their bright, coffee eyes—their soft, corn silk hair.
“Clay,” I whispered.
Clay was there. And Clay was also next to the first Clay I laid eyes on, and next to him another Clay, and another, and another.
A room full of a hundred Clays.
A hundred sons that should be dead, but weren’t; sons I killed in my blood-soaked memories, over and over again.
My fingers clenched over my gun; I did not have enough bullets. I had sixteen shots; not sixteen hundred. But is that what I had come here to do, kill my son?
My sons.
“Who are you?” I whispered. I asked the question as though they were one entity conspiring against me, and they would answer with one collective voice. But they never had the chance.
“I kept my promise, Vitus.”
Madam Astra emerged from the archway toward the back. The stage lights limited my vision and I held a hand up to focus and lock in on her. The heat sweltered beneath the lights. She waded into the ocean of red. My lips were dry and cracked as they parted to release breath. And all this time, I thought there was nothing so terrible as myself.
“Now you keep yours.”
*
What does a man do when confronted with a hundred children from Christmas Past?
A better man—a living, breathing man—might have fallen to his knees and cried. I stood in a sea of children, reflected ghosts of my son. But they were not only my son from the moment he had died, that chubby toddler still learning how to walk a straight line and practice his vocabulary for his proud father—no. Each one was Clay, from his blond hair to his brown eyes, but they were Clay from every age. A ten-year-old Clay, a six-year-old Clay, a fifteen-year-old Clay. A living timeline.
Clones, I thought frantically, my eyes jumping from figure to figure in a desperate attempt to connect them, to make sense of the trick that had been played on me. Their faces took on science fiction proportions as I imagined a laboratory filled with scientists—scientists specifically lacking in moral fiber, like my brother Jamie—filling petri dishes with dividing cells soon to be my hundred sons.
But they were not clones. In this dark and musty basement, with the millions Astra made from fortune telling? Unlikely.
The fevered moment of panic passed from me. These were not my sons. They could not be. Logic took over and ticked off a thousand reasons, deconstructing the desires of my heart. They were strange children gathered with the purpose of pulling me into an intricate trap whose shape I was still determining. Nothing more—no son here.
And then the first of them reached up with a hand and clasped my gloved fingers in his own. I felt the warmth of his young skin against my dead, cold flesh. His touch punctured a bullet wound, shot straight up from my wrist to the tip of my spine, rattling every bone.
I looked down, and he looked up at me, a ten-year-old Clay, with large doe eyes. His face a cherub’s, unlined and so unlike my own, free of the corruption of age and bitterness.
“Will you come with us, Daddy?”
I sucked in a breath.
“I’m not your Daddy.”
“Who will save us?” the child wailed. He latched onto my gloved hand with his other one, pulling and tugging at me. His face collapsed in on itself as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes, his mouth pulled down as dry, heaving sobs escaped his lips.
Disconcerted, I kneeled down to his height, bones creaking against the concrete. Brown eyes watched and studied me from every corner as I set a hand against a curl of his blond hair, and he stopped his howling.
“Listen,” I whispered, “I’m not your Daddy, but I’ll save you, okay?”
He pouted, making fists against his hips. “Only Daddy can save us. So you have to be our Daddy.”
“Fuckin’ Christ kid—”
“You said a bad word,” he whispered, his eyes wide and round.
I never said I was a good father. Only that I was one.
“You drive a hard bargain. I’ll be your Daddy, and I’ll try to watch my mouth.”
The child watched me, searching for
a trick, a lie behind my opalescent white eyes. When he was satisfied with my sincerity, or show of it, at least, he turned and the crowd of Clays absorbed him, blending back into their crimson robes and their similar faces.
Sure, kid. I’ll be your Daddy. Right up until I figure out what the fuck is going on. And then, like every true relative, you’ll learn to hate me.
I smiled down at the congregation, and a slightly older boy, perhaps thirteen, parted through the crowd. Astra stood at the back, combing a child’s hair back from his forehead, rubbing a smudge out of a red robe in motherly fashion.
The boy approached me, his eyes as wide as all the others. They stared at me the way I imagined natives had greeted the conquistadors.
“Madam Astra says I should show you your quarters, now.”
“Lead on,” I said, and gestured that he should lead the way.
*
In the underground dampness, the altar room led out into a hallway, branching off into separate rooms. I glanced through the doorways as I passed and noted the bathrooms, the guest rooms with small cots set up beside end tables and vases with red and white flowers, and picture frames.
A paused before a door while the child continued forward, unaware I stopped to peer through the threshold. What caught my eye and stopped me dead in my tracks was the picture frame in every room. I took a step forward to confirm what my eyes perceived.
It was my picture. Not just any picture—Jessica and me on our wedding day. If my heart wasn’t already stopped, this was enough to ensure it never started again.
Jessica and I stood side by side. A white rose nestled in the lapel of my wedding suit; her hair twisted up and curled in blond cascades, the same hair she would pass on to our son. I would keep the darkness for myself and thank God every day I had not passed it down.
In the picture, I was human, alive, dewy skin that breathed and glowed like any human’s. The contrast startled me. A reverse portrait of Dorian Gray. I had no more pictures of myself, and to be confronted with one here threw off my balance and sent my internal compass spinning.
“Clever,” I whispered. “We’ll see how clever you are when you’re picking lead out of your skull.”
“Sir?”
The child’s voice broke on the word and he winced, waiting for me to turn and acknowledge him.
“I’m coming,” I said, turning away from the photograph to follow once more. A perfect square of hurtful memories.
I took advantage of Astra’s absence; all the rooms appeared empty and there was no one in the hall to interrupt us.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Owen Rogers.”
“I mean, your real name.”
“Owen Rogers is my real name.”
I sighed. He stood before the door of my room. A simple cot with white sheets, a vase with roses, and the terrible picture of my wedding day repeated here, as it was in every room. A reminder of everything I had lost.
I entered and picked up the frame before setting it face down on the end table.
“Where were you born?” I asked him.
“Here.”
“And you don’t remember your parents from before?”
The boy regarded me with a blank expression. My questions did not strike him as unusual and he answered in hushed notes as though he did not understand what I was getting at. His conversation sounded coached.
“What parents? You’re our father. And Madam Astra is our mother.”
“Do you like Madam Astra?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned against the wall beside the door, not quite blocking his exit, but making it clear I was in the way. He did not move and remained in his eager to please manner. A puppy programmed by a trainer with endless dog treats. Anyone will salivate when they’ve been given a steak enough times.
“I love Madam Astra. She’s my mother.”
“So by that logic, you love me as well?”
“Of course! We’ve been waiting so long for you. Madam Astra has been unhappy all these years, preparing for your arrival.”
“Has she.”
My words were not phrased as a question. I could stand here and shoot the shit with this kid all day, asking him question after question, but his answers were getting me no closer to what I needed to know. Madam Astra was a clever brainwasher—she’d secured these children’s most basic needs. They wanted for nothing, not for food, security, shelter, and most of all, unconditional love. By providing that, instead of the normal cult tactic of withholding it, she’d bought their loyalty lock, stock, and barrel. If I wanted to break that, I needed to offer something new that Astra could not. Something a boy in his teenage years might want.
I confirmed once more that we were alone with a furtive glance down the hall and reached into the suit jacket, withdrawing the Glock.
“Ever seen a gun before, Owen?”
“No, sir.”
His eyes became larger, if that were possible, round as saucers. His brow wrinkled in severe concentration as he studied the lines of metal in my palm, the sleek black surface of the most perfect killing machine. For his benefit, I dropped the magazine out onto my palm and opened the chamber to empty it of the round inside. I deftly caught it in the air as it ejected and deposited both bullet and magazine into my pocket.
I held the empty gun out to the boy.
“It’s safe now, so I’ll let you hold it, if you want.”
Gingerly, he reached for it, small fingers on the butt as he lifted it into the air, as though it were a snake that might reach back and bite at any moment.
“Don’t put your finger on the trigger. Yeah, you’ve got it, keep them along the barrel. That’s right. How does that feel, sonny?”
“It’s cool,” he spoke, his voice a near whisper. He held it in both hands, aiming at an imaginary target in the dark corner of the room, making a shooting noise with his mouth in imitation of a gun blast.
Now. Spring it on him now.
“What kind of games would you play with a thing like that?”
“Um, I don’t know.” He stared at the barrel. “I like arrows better.”
I laughed. “That’s probably for the best, because weapons aren’t toys. But ain’t no harm in pretending, eh?”
“No-oo.” He shot it into the wall again with his imaginary sounds.
“What do you picture shooting?”
“Dragons! But I’m pretending they’re arrows.”
“Did you ever get to play with guns before?”
“No, Mommy wouldn’t let them in the—”
He stopped, a horrified expression filling his features as his cheeks flooded red. His lips formed a thin line as he turned the muzzle on me, maintaining his shooter’s stance. With the black hole of the barrel before me, I didn’t appreciate his gun enthusiasm.
“You tricked me!” he accused.
I smiled, rotted lips cracking and dropping bits of flesh as they expanded.
“Madam Astra doesn’t need to know. It can just be our little secret, eh? So what’s your Mommy’s name?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about them. She’ll be angry.”
“She’ll be angrier if I tell her that you slipped up, buddy.”
“You wouldn’t do that!”
I smiled again and let the silence draw out between us. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and his forehead as he stewed in thoughts of the consequences of his actions. I saw no signs of physical abuse, no visible bruises, but who knew if Astra had mastered the art of hitting without leaving a mark.
“Why should I care what happens to a boy who does nothing but lie all day?” I pointed out, and his facade cracked like a shattered diamond, broken apart by its own flawed nature. His happy boy mask came away, revealing a hollowed, haunted child underneath his eager-to-please demeanor.
And he began to turn the gun on himself.
The chamber was empty, I had seen to that myself. I tore it from his small fingers with vicious locomotion and he reeled backward a
gainst the wall, eyes frightened and broken.
“Don’t tell her!” he begged, collapsing into sobs. Look alike Clay cried between his soft, pink fingers, covering his hot face in layers of shame. “Please don’t tell her! She says if we aren’t good, you’ll go away!”
Quickly, I turned and closed the door behind us. Even alone, our privacy could be an illusion, and I wanted as many layers as I could manage between us and Astra. I returned to the boy, pulling up a wooden chair and seating myself before him so we were on level with each other.
“What does she do to you if you talk? Does she hit you?”
I was going to rip each of her toenails out and make her dance Swan Lake if she so much as laid a hand on these boys. I reached out and hesitated an instant before letting my hand fall on the boy’s shoulder. He didn’t move away or flinch at the contact but gathered strength from the fatherly touch. As though it were something he missed.
“No, it’s just that . . .”
“What? What is it?”
“I told you already,” he whispered. “If we’re bad, you’ll go away.”
“That’s why you are crying? Because you’re afraid I’ll go away?”
He swallowed a great gulping breath, before continuing on, his tear-wet hands falling away from his face as he looked me in the eye.
“We’ve been waiting for you for so long.”
*
Beep-beep.
Time for candy.
I turned away from the boy, reaching inside my jacket for the bottle of pills and knocked two of them back. While I dry swallowed my dose, the boy’s words ran back and forth in my mind. I knew when I had entered that nothing I would find would bring me peace, but I had expected something more overtly sinister. Instead, I was in a labyrinth where every answer plunged me into dead ends. Logical deduction came to a standstill; rational conclusion sent me into a further tailspin. What would the cost be to me, to these children, if I could not decipher this twisted game?
“I should get back,” the boy broke in, motioning for the door. I stepped before him, blocking the way.
“So soon? I’ve only just begun to get to know you, sonny,” I said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. I lit one up, bitter smoke filling the atmosphere between us. He stood there, watching me, with something like worship and fear.