Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

Then in a rough-edged rasping whisper that hurt to listen to, Missy said, “She did.”

  What the hell was Missy saying? What the hell kind of game was this?

  And who the hell did Missy think she could fool?

  Three strikes and out, Vicki thought. I will not get angry, Vicki told herself, but how about a good, old-fashioned, bottom-whacking, administered by a non-angry, totally in control Mom who has rationally decided that a spanking will benefit her daughter’s behavior? Yes, Vicki decided, a paddling was a definite option.

  She was about to warn Missy of that, but she didn’t, because, just then, an expression flickered across the child’s features.

  And what Vicki saw on Missy’s face was hideously wrong, a look that should not have been on her child’s face, on any child’s face.

  Vicki’s mind flashed back to the past summer, a day in Chicago.

  It was early August, temperature 91 degrees, no lake breeze, no chance of rain, the kind of humid heat that makes you feel you are melting and the city is melting around you. Warren had Missy on an educational jaunt—Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, The Field Museum. Vicki had been shopping at Water Tower.

  Then she stepped out of the air-conditioned nationality and civilization, and madness accosted her. He was albino, crossed eyes blazing pink and wild, frenzied tangles of white hair exploding around the feral face. He was as tall as a pro basketball player. A woolen coat, stained and stinking of body odor and urine, flapped around him.

  “Spare change?” He jabbed a hand toward her, and she managed not to scream. “I need help, lady!” Then he thrust his face at her, and he was the only reality she saw as he whispered, “I need help, lady. I got seven demons in me and they’re eatin’ my soul!”

  For that one, awful, unforgettable moment, she did not doubt that it was so, that his inner demons were devouring him, because on his face was unimaginable torment.

  That was what Vicki Barringer thought she had just seen on the face of her little girl.

  Or she had a new, invasive thought, one perhaps more credible but no less awful: Missy was crazy!

  Missy was mentally ill, blaming someone else for Dorothy. It was like Sybil! The Three Faces Of Missy!

  It was crazy, all right, and the craziness was totally on the part of good old Mom, because this was Missy, no one else, with her Winnie-the-Pooh bear and Mickey Mouse night light. This was a good kid, her very own good kid—and that was that.

  Not crazy.

  She sat on the foot of Missy’s bed. “Come here,” she said. Missy tentatively walked to her and no less tentatively settled on her lap. Vicki felt the child’s slim warmth against her as Missy leaned back. She wrapped her in a loose hug.

  “Mom?”

  “Hmm-mm?”

  “There’s…I want to tell you, I really do.”

  “You can. I’m your mom. You can tell me anything. Missy, I love you. I love you more than anything in the whole world, and there’s nothing that can ever change that.”

  A silence.

  “Mom?”

  “What is it, honey?”

  A silence, only a silence. Vicki couldn’t hear Missy’s breathing nor her own.

  “Mom, sometimes...”

  Missy stopped talking.

  “You can say it,” Vicki said.

  Missy did. “Sometimes I am not me.”

  Even as Melissa Barringer said that, she wasn’t. She was Lisette.

  It was Lisette who heard Vicki say with a worried sigh, “I don’t understand.”

  The child who was not then Melissa Barringer understood.

  Lisette understood completely.

  She pressed against Vicki Barringer and hated her. She knew this woman loved Missy. She would do anything for her daughter, her little girl, her Missy…

  But I am Lisette and I am alive!

  She could not share a life, a body, with Melissa. Melissa and Lisette could not both be here in this beautifully real world. So Melissa had to go away, go away forever! And the woman, Melissa’s mother, would do everything she could to keep Melissa here, to keep Melissa from going away.

  Though she might not have used that precise term, Lisette knew her mortal enemy, this woman who would deny her need and right to be alive.

  With a voice that was Missy’s voice, she said, “Give me a kiss.”

  The little girl twisted on Vicki’s lap, offering a cheek. She turned her head before Vicki’s lips touched her face.

  In the next wild instant, Vicki’s rational mind knew exactly what was happening, but could give no commands to her body because of the fiery, tearing pain, a pain ballooning inside her head, so intense and awful in its sheer surprise that it literally could not be believed.

  She bit me! She is biting me!

  The child ground her teeth into Vicki’s lower lip, gnawing at wet and bloody pulp, and Vicki felt the blood flowing, coating her teeth and running down her throat. She tried to scream but could only moan as pain mingled with the child’s hot breath invading her mouth.

  Then came another pain. There were hands on her throat, small but with animal strength, strangling hands.

  Insane! It was beyond belief, but Vicki Barringer did not doubt that her little girl meant to kill her. How can this be?

  A heated and weighty blackness rushed from her lungs.

  Within the pain, Vicki felt her mind melt to liquid. There were things like thoughts swimming there, but nothing seemed to have meaning or to be of any importance.

  Finally it was outrage that brought Vicki around. If I do not do something, she is going to kill me.

  With awkward determination, Vicki wedged her arms in between herself and the girl. She forced her hands between the thin, straining forearms and levered against them with all her strength, strength that was rapidly slipping away, until the fingers left her neck.

  Then Vicki’s right hand shot up beneath the child’s chin. Index, middle, ring fingers sank into the hinge at the jawbone, while her thumb found the same spot on the other side. Vicki squeezed, pushing the girl’s head back, prying open her jaws until the awful grip of teeth was broken and the little girl thumped off her lap to the floor.

  Vicki tried to think, tried to understand what was incomprehensible, as she drew a breath that corkscrewed painfully into her. She snuffled blood and spit and snot, trying not to throw up.

  Then, as though launched from a springboard, there was Missy!

  Face twisted and smeared with blood, she bounded up, landing hard, right knee punching into Vicki’s thigh, left stabbing just above the pelvis, arms reaching to…

  No! Vicki did not think. No, damn it! Before the child could secure a grip, Vicki, as hard as she could, slammed her fists against the slender shoulders, thrusting as she snapped forward.

  It was ludicrously graceful, a perfect slow-motion backward somersault the child performed as she rolled across the floor, the back of her head heavily thunking the base of the dresser.

  Vicki heard that sound. She saw the little girl lying there, still, head twisted at an unnatural angle. With a shining lucidity that she realized meant she was, right now, out of her mind, she thought, I have killed Missy. Missy tried to kill me. I killed her instead.

  “Missy?” she said, as she stood up and the child on the floor did not move. I am not going to start screaming, Vicki said, not sure if she spoke aloud or only with her mind. If I start screaming now, I will never stop. “Missy?”

  She stepped closer. Then Vicki halted, as from the corner of her eye, she saw something unfamiliar, too cold and calm, in the craziness that swirled all about her.

  The white porcelain doll sat on Missy’s table, the basket of eggs on her lap. The doll seemed to be observing with detached irony. No, it was just a doll, a strange doll that did not belong here.

  Not a Barbie or a Cabbage Patch, this doll belonged to that long ago time when kids might have toys but were not expected to play with toys. It was an antique, probably worth a good deal of money to a collector.
<
br />   It was not Missy’s doll.

  That mattered somehow, she thought. It mattered a great deal. It…

  No, she wasn’t making sense.

  The hell with the doll.

  Then she was kneeling, holding a wrist, patting a cheek, calling, “Missy!”

  A flutter of eyelids.

  “Missy?”

  The little girl sprang up, and the top of her head butted into the soft vulnerable angle of Vicki’s neck and jaw, and Vicki gagged and thought she felt her heart stop. The blow was so solid and unexpected that, for a sliver of time, she must have blacked out, because when she next knew what was happening, she was on her back, and the child was on top of her, on her knees, bouncing up and down and punching her in the face.

  And Vicki screamed and felt a thud vibrate through the floor beneath her back, a sound that she thought was the convulsive shaking of this unfathomable, insane universe. Then a thud-thud-thud, and she understood then—the stairs.

  Warren Barringer stood staring in the doorway. He was winded from the run to the second floor that had been prompted by the sounds he heard the moment he’d stepped into the house. “What in the goddamned hell?” he wanted to know.

  The little girl who was not Melissa toppled off Vicki Barringer, and Vicki struggled up to get to a sitting position.

  The child started to run to Warren. After two steps, she stopped dead. The words were a garbled and agonized crescendo. “It’s my dad!”

  Then the child pitched backward. Her body angled into a quaking bow between heels and back of head, and then she went all loose and thrashing for perhaps five seconds before, twitching, she lay unconscious.

  — | — | —

  Thirty-One

  Warren Barringer’s life was in perfect arrangement. Each individual object, event and instant that made up the sum of Warren Barringer’s existence was in precise and inviolate order. Warren could feel that.

  Oh, yes, all of it was so right! Warren could see the patterns, the sometimes complex but always sensible connections, and when he could not actually discern such synchronization he could sense it.

  It was simple, really: A place for everything, and everything in its place.

  A place for everyone, and everyone in his or her place.

  Melissa was in the hospital, where she had been since that crazy Sunday, because that was where Melissa belonged. Missy had gone bonkers, whomping the shit out of his wife, and Vicki had done some whomping back. Now they had to find out what was wrong with the kid. Can do, thanks to modern, high tech medical science, and all of it paid for by the university’s family plan medical coverage. Not to worry, not to worry. Missy would get the very best care and diagnostic examination—and he was not worried.

  Vicki was in bed, somewhat banged up still, not a real black eye but light purple and yellow, a puffy lip, a rib that pained when she breathed too deeply, but, all in all, no major damage. Vicki was exhausted, utterly spent, what with the tension and all the running to the hospital every day. Now Vicki slept, really resting for the first night since that crazy Sunday.

  Sleep, Vicki, he thought, it’s okay. It really is. It will work out the way it’s all supposed to work out. So, sleep, like the rest of the world right now. It was 2:45 on Wednesday morning, and people slept.

  But Warren Barringer could not sleep. Of course, lately, with his blood chemistry unaltered by booze, he felt wide awake all the time.

  It was not his place to be lying unconscious next to his wife. Warren Barringer was a writer, and a writer belonged at the typewriter. It was that compulsion and knowledge that had drawn him to his desk in his study. He was going to write. He would write a great book.

  But first, he had to check to make sure he had a place for everything and that everything was in its place. This was preparation, the sacred rituals of Warren Barringer. Before his fingertips touched the enchanted keys of the magical Underwood, there were private and personal and secret ceremonies to be performed.

  Check the first drawer of the desk to the right. Uh-huh. The-just-in-case pistol, ready and waiting and secret. Interesting to hold it, to feel death lying smooth in his living palm.

  In the same drawer, a new secret, Missy’s secret.

  At Lawn Crest hospital last Sunday night, when he and Vicki had been about to leave her, Missy cried out, “I’m sorry I was bad!” She honestly did not remember what she had done, didn’t remember the attack or the seizure that followed it. “Don’t make me stay here!”

  “But we have to find out what the problem is so the doctors can help…”

  They’d got her settled down to sporadic sniffles, and then she asked for a private moment or two with her dad.

  Then she told him what to do.

  Later, on the way home, Vicki asked what Missy had wanted. He told her something, a lie. He did not tell his wife that the little girl expected him to get…

  “…the doll. Keep it for me. And don’t let her get it.”

  He’d smuggled the doll to his study. Now, his fingers found it in its place in the first drawer, along with the pistol. They belonged together, somehow. Yes, he decided, it seemed that was so. It was part of the pattern of the life of Warren Barringer.

  So was the rose paperweight alongside his typewriter. Cold glass and cold flower, unchanging.

  All right, then, a place for everything and everything in its…No, not quite. He slipped on his reading glasses. There! He felt authorish!

  Now it was time to write.

  Just how long had it been since he last sat down to fill the white space with black words? The sudden thought disoriented him, rather frightened him; it made him feel as though a block of time had been mysteriously excised from memory and cut out of his life.

  His last writing session seemed so long ago it could have been in a previous lifetime.

  And what had he written then? He could not remember.

  He had written, had been writing…something. A book. It had to be here, in the second drawer on the left side of the desk. That was the manuscript drawer.

  He opened the drawer. There it was. He picked it up and looked at the title page: A Civilized Man. He remembered now—didn’t he?—or was he merely pretending that he remembered?

  He began to read the story of Brandon Holloway Mitchell, a civilized man. At the end of the first chapter, 13 pages, he took off his glasses and placed them on the desk next to the manuscript. He picked up the rose paperweight, sliding his thumb back and forth on the smooth roundness.

  A Civilized Man was well-written, he decided. There were a number of commendable passages and some lyrical prose, but the story was uninvolving. The protagonist, Mitchell, struck him as curiously bloodless and bland. Mitchell was a static neurotic who did nothing but cringe and reflect.

  Worse, Brandon Holloway Mitchell was what no main character in any novel should ever be. He was dull. He was boring.

  Warren Barringer did not give a damn about Brandon Holloway Mitchell.

  He had certainly written these 98 pages of A Civilized Man, and, if he dug into his memory, he recalled writing them, but he had wasted his time with this project.

  Suddenly he had it.

  A Civilized Man was the work he had been obliged to write—then. It was the writing of the Warren who used to be, but that Warren was long gone.

  Farewell to Warren Barringer, the man who was and who can never be again, the man who had been given the guise of the fictional but ever so autobiographical Brandon Holloway Mitchell.

  It was the end of Brandon Holloway Mitchell, and the end of hard-drinking, Rat-battling Warren Barringer.

  Warren felt a sudden salty sting of tears. You didn’t say a meaningful goodbye to anyone, much less yourself, without it getting to you, one of those poignant, bittersweet moments that you will never forget. Then his tears became a wash as, one page at a time, in slow-motion, he ripped each sheet of the manuscript of A Civilized Man to bits and consigned the pieces to the wastebasket.

  The tie was sev
ered between the weak, dependent, neurotic Brandon Holloway Mitchell and the capable, dynamic, self-reliant Warren Barringer.

  When he was finished, Warren Barringer sobbed, not bothering to wipe away the tears rushing down his face. He wept and felt grand.

  He felt…new.

  It was time to begin.

  He cranked a sheet of paper into his Underwood.

  And he began to type.

  Although he did not know it, nor did anyone else yet, Warren Barringer was crazy. But it was Warren Barringer’s daughter, Melissa, who needed psychotherapy.

  Or at least, that was the diagnostic verdict of the doctors and the sophisticated equipment at Lawn Crest Hospital at the end of the week. X-Ray, CAT-scan, ultra-sound, EKG, blood tests, urine tests, etc. detected no sign of brain tumor or lesion or hemorrhage or epilepsy or brain dysfunction. In short, there was nothing physically wrong with Melissa Barringer, but there was something mentally wrong with Melissa Barringer.

  That is, there might be. It was a possible explanation for what they called a psychotic episode. Actually, the psychological data was inconclusive. The child seemed somewhat evasive during the psychiatric evaluations. The projective tests somehow wound up not projecting but concealing.

  The Barringers had to understand that psychology was not an exact science. That’s what a neurologist with a badly fitting toupee told them. Irked at what he thought was the doctor’s haughty attitude, Warren said he had so thought psychology was an exact science. Live and learn. Of course, what did he know? Hell, he was only a college professor, an author with several important novels to his credit.

  Vicki gave him a tired, sidelong look.

  The neurologist wanted to refer them to a psychotherapist who specialized in working with children. The woman had an outstanding reputation. It wasn’t going too far to say she’d positively worked magic with a number of profoundly disturbed young people.

  Vicki suppressed a shudder.

  The psychologist had an office in the city.

  Her name was Selena Lazone.

  — | — | —