by Shock Totem
“If they’re so dangerous, why did you give them tools?”
He points. “The kids with the picks? They’re pretty benign. Most sex offenders are passive as a general rule. The more aggressive ones, though? They get the shovels. No sense in being stupid, right?” He grinned. It didn’t look natural.
“What about that boy over there?” I pointed to a tall kid hauling buckets. His body language was stiff and angry.
My coworker turned to me, the grin gone. “Don’t even get close to that one. I’m not kidding. If he approaches you, call for staff backup. We’re having a lot of trouble with him right now. He tends to get violent.” He took a look at my face and tried the ill-fitting grin again. “Like I said. You’ll learn.”
I learned, all right.
I learned never to have my back to the door. I learned that it was necessary to know where each kid’s hands were at all times. If I had any doubt, I’d yell, “Hand check!” and if every hand didn’t go immediately into the air, we were going to have problems.
I learned that the sweet, cherubic face of a child can be utterly deceiving.
“So many victims,” I said, falling into a chair. “The new boy’s victim count staggers me. I can’t read his file anymore.”
“Just think,” said a coworker, “he isn’t old enough to drive, yet. Think what will happen when he gets his license and can actually travel. He’ll have a whole new playground.”
I learned about things like frottage. I learned how the kids chose and groomed their victims. I learned about the warning signs that the parents—of the abusers and the abused—ignored.
“I’m never going to be one of those parents,” I said one day. “I’ll keep an eye on my kid. Things aren’t going to slip by me.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all think.”
After a while, I got used to it. I’d throw my hair back in a ponytail, wear a figure-covering gray sweatshirt, and walk into the home like I belonged there. That’s the scariest part sometimes: realizing how much I came to accept.
“You, keep your eyes down,” I said. “You, hands to yourself. You, you know that you can’t have that unless I cut it into pieces for you.” Watching a young boy simulate fellatio on a corn dog wasn’t something that I ever wanted to see again. Everything became a prelude to sex. Borrowing a pen suddenly became lascivious foreplay. They couldn’t exchange anything unless it went through me or the other staff.
“Mercedes, can I let him borrow a piece of paper?”
“It’s ‘May I’.”
“May I let him borrow a piece of paper?”
“No.”
It wasn’t my personality to say no all of the time. I wanted to say yes. Really, what harm could it do—if they shared paper, if they listened to music, if they split cookies from their home packages? It couldn’t really be that bad, right? It couldn’t lead to that much?
It could. And it did. The tiniest thing could throw the house into a frenzy. I could feel it in the air when I first walked in, this sense of deviousness. The palpable lust. We were a Level 6 house. Three-to-one client to staff ratio at all times. Sensor alarms over the beds, hardcore rules to follow. If you screwed up here, you were sent to lockdown. We were the next closest thing.
One day a boy arrived. He was bigger than the rest, and so was the chip on his shoulder. He hated women more than usual, and that’s why he was sent here.
Fantastic.
There were maybe thirty different staff, and only three of us were women. The other women worked the day shift, so they watched the boys while they were in school. I was the only one who had them after hours.
“Mercedes, you have Room One today. Cool?”
“Cool.”
Except that it wasn’t. Although not openly aggressive for the most part, I could hear the anger in this kid’s voice whenever he said anything. “Yes, staff. I’m sorry, staff. I’ll do it right away, staff.” His fists clenched when he spoke to me. I noticed it. We all noticed it.
It came up in staff meeting. “So what are we going to do with the new kid and Mercedes?” It became a debate. There were underground rumblings that he and one of his roommates, a big but soft boy, were planning something concerning me. It was like waiting for a storm to arrive.
“Well, we’re going to change some protocol,” my boss said. He looked at me. “From now on, whenever you have that kid, you’re never to be out of sight of the other staff. Not for any reason. I don’t care if the house explodes; you make sure that one of us is nearby.”
I nodded. It made sense, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling unsafe. I didn’t like depending on “one of the guys” for protection. At the same time, the bells in my head had been ringing since the new kid arrived. It didn’t matter what I liked, or what I didn’t; I wasn’t going to be stupid.
There was more.
“Also, we’re switching rooms up again. Gonna separate those two, maybe put the kid with somebody less easily led. All right?”
“All right.”
I was good at following the rules. I was meticulous. No touching, no keeping your back to the boys for any reason. I felt myself becoming hard. I felt myself detach. Again, I didn’t like it, but it kept me safe.
One night I was working graves. The kids were asleep, and the rest of the staff was downstairs while I took the upper level. I did my paperwork, documenting how the day went and what we hoped to achieve tomorrow. I took a couple of the kids’ notebooks and quickly flipped through, keeping an eye out for warning signs. Suicide notes, for example. Violent manifestos. A list of potential victims.
I hesitated when I realized whose notebook I was holding. It was the kid who hated me. He’d been more quiet than usual, less trouble. Surely something was up.
I leafed through until I came to a horrifically, painfully detailed drawing. It was a woman’s body on its back, flayed open. The organs were penciled in with exquisite care, and there were handwritten notes saying, “eat this first” and “save this for later.” A red pen filled the cavity with blood.
She had my face. She had my hair. This woman was me.
Here’s what I should have done: I should have picked up the notebook, walked smartly to the photocopier, and ran that baby through. Then I could have deposited the picture on the therapist’s desk in the morning, saying, “Check it out. What do we do?”
But sometimes the mind shuts down. There are some things that can’t be processed, like the thought of a young boy hating you so much that he fantasizes about eating you. I put the notebook back on the shelf, walked downstairs, and told the guys that I needed ten minutes to myself in my car. I slid behind the wheel of my Geo Metro and leaned my head back against the seat. I didn’t cry. I just sat there and thought about my body. It’s so fragile. Humans are broken so very easily. It was a lot to take in.
I didn’t talk about it with the other staff that night, although I should have. It was too shocking, too raw, and I knew these particular guys would give me a hard time. When I came back the next afternoon, the notebook was gone. The kid noticed me looking for it and caught my eye. There was this sense of connection, this knowing, and it made me ill. I talked to his therapist about it but without solid proof there wasn’t anything that she could do. The kid would deny it, of course. The notebook was eventually found, but it was conspicuously missing a page.
I felt like he had taken something from me. I felt terrorized, which I’m sure was the whole point.
So one day I left the home. I climbed into my car, drove away, and that was it. The boys were still caged, but I was free—at least, for the most part. There are a few things that I can’t seem to shake. I still never sit with my back to a door. I always know where everybody’s hands are. I laugh and joke, but secretly I’m probing to see where people draw the line, to find out how deeply they hide the sickness. I’m certain that it’s there.
Mercedes M. Yardley wears red stilettos and writes whimsical horror. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthol
ogies including John Skipp’s Bram Stoker Award™-winning Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, and A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Special Needs. Mercedes lives in Sin City.
Visit her at www.abrokenlaptop.com.
PRETTY LITTLE GHOULS
by Cate Gardner
The girl in the lead-lined prison stood on her tiptoes and looked out at the surrounding green fields. Daisies clustered against the fence line, pretty little ghouls with smiling faces awaiting the long shadow of death. She yearned to pick several. On Sundays, the guards allowed her out into the yard where nothing grew and only when the other prisoners were locked in their cells.
Familiar footsteps pounded along the hallway.
“Stand back,” Warden Reid barked.
Ivy knew they drew straws in the prison canteen as to who would take her outside that week. Warden Reid often lost. She was of a mind to tell him the guards had fixed the draw.
Voices slipped from the neighbouring cells as Ivy and the warden passed. “The grave is almost dug, the grave is almost dug, the grave is…”
Once outside, the metal door slammed shut behind her.
Even the guards didn’t join her as she walked the yard. Her toes curled on the dry, cracked earth, and she ran her hands down her arms. The electrified fence sizzled beneath her touch and burned her palms. To her right, the men digging her grave stopped. They weren’t supposed to work on Sundays. The law stipulated that they pitch a tent to hide the offending chamber and today’s flouting of it confirmed that the day of execution approached.
Nine months previous, Ivy had escaped her hospital ward. The beat of her bare feet against tiles, road, bridge and street had killed two hundred and seven people and injured dozens more. In that moment, with all she touched crumbling behind her, she knew that the sweat from the soles of her feet had killed her parents, and that the authorities hadn’t lied when they said they’d found her as a baby bouncing on her mother’s dried husk.
She’d stopped then, shaking along with the world that was collapsing behind her. She waited for the Army to bring in a crane to lift her out of there. They hadn’t returned her to the hospital—it no longer remained. Instead, they’d brought her here.
A short while later they had passed her death sentence.
The fence ceased its burn and began to melt beneath the sweat of her fingers. She pulled at the chain links until a large hole formed, and stepped through, onto soft blades of grass. Dew kissed her toes, and in return they offered death. She plucked a daisy from the withering crop and looked out at the expanse of freedom before her. To her right, the men stood still, and stared—possibly due to her nakedness, but more likely they contemplated flight.
No one would stop her if she decided to run. Bullets absorbed into—but did not cut—her skin. Beneath her feet, the ground fissured, leaving it as bleak as the prison yard. The green fields tempted, but she knew they wouldn’t be fertile for long. She walked toward the wary men, to the grave they’d spent the past four months constructing, lining its walls with thick lead.
With a final look out at the world, she jumped down into the hole and cried, “Pour in the concrete.”
She hoped a crowd of daisies would gather above her.
Cate Gardner’s fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Postscripts and Necrotic Tissue. She is currently searching for an agent. Though many have informed her she won’t find one behind the bookcase or under her desk, she checks both places daily.
You can visit her on the web at www.categardner.com.
Messages From Valerie Polichar
by Grá Linnaea & Sarah Dunn
Valerie Polichar sometimes searches Facebook for people she knows are dead. She doesn’t know why.
When she was twenty, a girl she knew in college tried to kill herself by jumping from the third floor stairwell. She’d never talked to the girl in real life—no one did—but after she jumped, Valerie remembered she had accepted the girl’s friend request. Her wall, which hadn’t seen activity in months, was covered with things like “We love you,” “We miss you,” “We hope you’re okay,” and “We’re sorry.”
Valerie herself wrote, “I cheated off you in German class once.”
Valerie grew older. She turned twenty-five, then thirty. Now she is forty and the statuses on her feed change: Brian Hatch is dead...Eric Callahan is dead...Hannah Perkins is dead. She writes each of them messages, saying things she never bothered to say when they were alive. They never respond.
The messages feel good to write. Surprising, too; she finds poetry and heartfelt emotion in her posts to friends she hasn’t spoken to in years.
There is a parable somewhere that says our ancestors wait while we look for them. She senses the same is true for friends, lovers, dead people she has unfinished business with. She hopes the messages help them on their way a little faster; but she doesn’t know.
She’d like to know.
Her husband becomes concerned. “You’re changing,” he says. He used to be spontaneous and silly. Now he unconsciously wrings his hands. She thinks he looks twice his age.
“It’s a hobby,” Valerie replies.
Her husband mentions her hours on Facebook to friends and family. She tells them, “There’s something profound here, really insightful.”
Her husband says, “You spend so much time online, already.”
“An Anthropology student or Media Studies grad student could write a paper on grieving processes through Facebook. Fiery-eyed neo-pagans might turn it into a new religion.” But he looks blank. No one seems interested—no one understands—except for Valerie. And even she’s not sure she understands.
And the list of dead people grows. She reads the obituaries carefully, sends friend requests to the people she finds. Older people don’t usually have Facebook accounts, but the young ones always do. Sometimes she gets messages in response—a mother or a sibling or a lover has the password, and asks, “Did you know my brother (or son, wife, father, lover)? Did you know he died?”
She doesn’t respond to the living, but she uses the search form as a prayer wheel. Keeps another tab open to Classmates.com, reading the listing of her graduating class. And another tab to the genealogy site, Geni.com.
She thinks that she might wonder too much about the dead.
She suspects they’ve emailed her; maybe through the garbled messages in her spam filter, half-quotation, half-French. The messages make surprising sense, like someone is reading her dreams and repeating them back to her.
Valerie doesn’t believe in ghosts. She believes in the Internet and in the dead. Maybe there are hundreds, millions of minds floating out there, trying to communicate.
It’d be nice if someone communicated back.
Her husband issues an ultimatum. “Get off the computer and pay attention to the people around you, the ones who are still alive!”
It’s not like she doesn’t have other things to do—she has a job for money and a job for love. She has music and books and knitting, and there’s usually a party to go to on Saturday nights. But it’s all chatter and white noise. The important things—the things worth saying—are always said too late.
She trawls the profiles of her living friends, looking for sparked memories of others who have passed. She eschews the back button, only clicking from a link within a profile to another. Another, to another, to another. Never closing her browser, she has the history set to infinite. Her computer holds a record of every visit, every search.
She types into Google:
“It’s so dark, I can’t see in here.”
“The last thing I remember is hurting.”
“Contacting the dead via the Internet.”
There’s a medium named Alistair Challenger who claims he can communicate with the dead via downloadable screensavers, like Electric Sheep. Valerie e-mails him her notes. She keeps searching when she doesn’t get an immediate response.
She weeds through other
possibilities—BoingBoing, 4chan, ONTD. Valerie is pretty sure the dead wouldn’t hang out on BoingBoing. The dead would want to connect to people; people are on Facebook.
She gets older. Friends die, leaving behind empty ghost profiles. She visits them daily to see if they’ve updated their status. She searches through their contact information, photos, and interests to see if anything has changed.
But unfortunately their status message are always the same. Thomas Moore is dead...Susie Kirkland is dead...Brian Hatch is still dead.
She loses her job. Her friends stop calling. Her husband claims he’ll leave one day, but he never does. He begins to look fragile, like he’s becoming brittle. They talk less and less.
She knows in her heart there is an equation at work on Facebook, a hidden code. Someday, when she weaves through the profiles in the right order, when she searches the right name at the right time, then the site will unlock and she will see the other side. She collects books on Internet infrastructure, networking, and programming.
A link from a dead friend’s page leads her to someone whose profile picture is just a gravestone.
His name is Mort. He has no networks. He has several thousand friends listed. All of them are dead.
Valerie wonders whether he’s a kindred spirit, or perhaps not kindred at all. She friends him.
She continues to send all her notes to Alistair Challenger, the medium. When she sends an e-mail about Mort’s Facebook profile, he finally replies.
He seems cautious in his emails. She isn’t sure if one or the other of them is a crackpot.
“What do you say to a dead person?” she writes.
He replies, “The same things you’d say to a live person. You just get a different response.”
She tells him she sends messages to the dead, and he promises to keep an eye out for their names in his automatic writing—see if they send her any messages back.