The Cured

by Deirdre Gould

  Henry stood up and left the pen, gently shutting the gate behind him to keep scavenging animals out. He was going to burn the camp down when he was done. Make it burn until the whole place was a gray smudge of grief being swallowed by the forest. But first Phil was going to understand what he’d done here. Henry walked to the back of the lodge where the old shed and his own dirt circle orbited a tall splintering post. He wondered what good it would do to revisit the place where he had suffered so much, but he was drawn to it anyway. Haunted by an older self. Compelled to touch the dirt circle that had been the circumference of his entire world for so long. He ran his fingers down the length of the cool chain, hearing again the soft clinking as it moved. He could still see his own bare footprints where they had frozen and then baked into the mud. He had intended to put Phil here, at the end. To let him see the world as Henry had seen it, to bake in the sun without water or food as Henry had. But after returning, Henry didn’t know if he could go through with it. He didn’t know if he could calmly chain another man, even one who had done the things he knew that Phil had. He didn’t know if he could sit here day after day and watch him go mad first with fear and then thirst and finally die. Henry sat in the dirt and leaned his back against the warm post and looked up at the lodge beyond the fence palings. He could hear the metallic ringing of Phil banging on the truck. It was no use pretending that he didn’t know what he was there for. He knew Phil deserved what was coming, probably more than what Henry had planned. He tried to muster up all the old anger and hurt he had felt since waking up, but returning to this place had been a mistake. All he felt was sorrow. He turned his head. The old woodshed was there, its tin door still closed, the dark seeping out of the bottom cracks. There was no point to putting it off any longer. It was time to do what he had promised himself and the others he would do.

  The shed was still lined with plastic and Henry could still see flecks of dark matter that the hose hadn’t reached. It was sweltering inside and he was surprised at the lack of smell, but then, it had been six years since he had been kept inside. No windows, no light, no air. Henry backed away from it and left the door propped open. He returned to the truck and struggled with the plastic suit for what he hoped was the last time. He used his right sleeve to conceal the choke collar and a leash restraint he’d picked up from the pens. He unlocked the back doors and leveled the stun gun as they shot open and Phil threw his weight out toward Henry. Henry took a quick step back, allowing Phil to fall into the dirt in front of him.

  “You ought to be more careful now,” he said, “Your body won’t do quite what you tell it to any more. You’ll overestimate distance or put your foot in the wrong spot and down you go. It gets worse and worse.”

  Phil glared up at him. “I’m not sick.”

  “You ready to cooperate?”

  Phil slowly stood up and dusted himself down. He started walking toward the lodge. “Nope. Not that way,” Henry said.

  “Fuck you. What are you going to do about it? Hit me with your useless shock gun? I’ll just beat the shit out of you when I get back up.”

  “Try it and see,” said Henry, his voice cool, his mind calm now that things were in motion. He let the choke chain and leash slither down his sleeve and into his palm where Phil couldn’t see. Phil sneered and turned back toward the lodge. Henry shot and Phil fell shuddering back into the dust. Henry leapt onto his back in a perverse replay of the night he had escaped. He wrapped the collar around Phil’s neck and snapped it closed while Phil was still twitching. Then Henry stood up and began dragging Phil behind him toward the back pens. Phil scrabbled to get his fingers between the chain and his throat. Henry let up to give him a breath, but as soon as Phil’s fingers touched the collar’s clasp, he took off again, Phil gasping and turning purple behind him. Henry let up again as they rounded the corner for a few breaths and dragged him the remaining distance to the open door of the shed. Henry lifted the gun again and unclipped the leash but left the collar. He waited until Phil’s breath evened out.

  “Get in.”

  Phil rolled his head to the side, looking at the dim interior of the shed. “No way,” he said, his voice harsh and ragged.

  “If you want to do this the hard way, we can.”

  Phil turned to look at him. “You’re really going to do this? Put me in there, wait for me to die? Are you enjoying this?”

  “I could chain you to a post instead. Bind your hands and keep you on a leash. I would enjoy that more. I thought this was marginally kinder for both of us. You’ll be free to move around inside the shed, able to relieve yourself when you wish, for as long as you’re sane enough. Be able to change positions, be out of the elements. All things I was denied. And I won’t have to look at you or wear this suit until you die. I thought it was a fair trade, but again, I’d much rather chain you outside, like a bad dog waiting to snap.”

  Phil slowly stood up, the shock and near suffocation had taken a toll on him. He stooped to enter the small shed. Henry shut the door behind it and slid the bolt home. He shucked the plastic suit and hung it on the door of the shed. He walked away toward the big house, not sure if he was going to return and need it again or not.

  Forty-six

  The lodge had changed during the years Henry had been ill. It had been expanded and winterized, the well had been fitted with a hand pump and most of the modern appliances had disappeared. Still, nothing had been done to make the place sustainable in the long term. There was no garden, no work rooms and Henry had seen no hand tools of any kind except for a hammer and saw that must have been used to improve the lodge. These people weren’t creators. They didn’t produce anything. They lived off the lives of others, either scavenging goods from abandoned homes or raiding nearby camps and taking what and who they wanted. There was always more, so what they had they didn’t care for. The inside of the lodge was not the spare, clean place Henry remembered. There were piles of trash in the corners and thick dust lay over almost everything. There had been struggles inside the house, leaving scratch marks and broken furniture, but most of the mess had been there for a long time. Empty liquor bottles rolled over the kitchen floor as Henry opened the back door to enter. He started to pick them up and stack them neatly on the counter but then realized what he was doing. What’s the point? It’s going to burn in a few days anyway, he thought. He waded through a few inches of trash to get to the living room, not sure what he was there for. He didn’t know if the living room had been converted into some kind of camp clinic that nobody ever cleaned or if it had been the scene of a very bloody battle the night of his escape. The once gleaming wood floor was dark and chalky with dried blood and the only furniture were some overturned cots blocking the front door. Henry wondered if this was where Marnie had hidden with the people who couldn’t defend themselves. A breeze blew the tattered curtains from the front window. He walked up to them and looked out of the missing pane at the bright summer day. He remembered stapling plastic over it from the other side, trying not to hear the news bleeding through the walls from the television as he did. There was a green wire hanging down from the upper sill. Henry reached out, careful not to touch the jagged glass and gently pulled on it. The wire fell into his hand, one chili pepper light still hanging from it, the rest of the strand long gone. Henry walked farther into the house, its addition becoming a warren of bedrooms made of warping plywood. They were dark without windows, just simple boxes with a dirty mattress in each. Whether they had been used by Phil’s men or as hospital beds or for more twisted purposes, Henry wasn’t sure and didn’t try to determine.

  Light came from the very back cube and Henry walked toward it, curious. It was even smaller than the others, but it had a small square of wood cut out from the back wall. Plastic sheeting, probably from the very same roll Henry had used, was stapled over the hole to make a crude window. The little box was tidy, unlike the others. It didn’t have a mattress, just a few thin blankets carefully spread over the splintery plywood. There was a short stack of b
ooks in one corner and a dingy piece of red velveteen hung from a nail on the wall alongside a tiny whisk broom that had evidently been used in the room since it lacked the grunge all the other rooms were covered in. Henry sat down in the hallway and took off his shoes. It felt wrong, somehow, to bring in the dirt that had been kept out for so long. He walked up to the piece of velveteen in his socks and picked it up. It was an old Christmas stocking, the kind that used to come prefilled from the drug store. Henry placed it gently back and turned to the window. He was surprised to see that it looked out into his pen. With the gate open he could see his old post clearly. He didn’t need any more clues to know whose room this had been, but his foot brushed against something soft and lumpy beneath the edge of one of the blankets. He leaned over and pulled the blanket back. It’s stuffing had clumped and fallen into it’s lower paws and the battery for its light had long ago died or corroded, but Henry recognized Marnie’s bear as soon as he saw it. He sat down on the pile of blankets and closed the flimsy plywood door to shut out everything else. The saggy bear sat on his stomach staring its disappointed one-eyed stare at him as he lay back on the dusty blankets. Henry tore a small strip of frayed blanket and tied it around the bear’s forehead, covering it’s missing eye.

  He thought back to the first night he’d seen the bear, when it was almost new. In the car with Marnie. If only he’d said no when Dave asked him to come with them. If only he’d hidden in his apartment instead. And then the bear had been a flashlight for him and the girl the night the power went out. He could still feel her small fingers in his palm as they’d walked down the hall together, away from the scary face in her window. This was all his fault. This whole place, everything that had happened here. Phil would have died in that shed if he hadn’t brought him back inside. He could have died on the living room couch a few days later if Henry hadn’t gone to get medicine. He could have been kicked out and died in the snow down the road somewhere if Henry had warned Dave and Elizabeth about the woman he found strangled near the snowmobile. Henry curled around the bear, rubbing a shirt sleeve over its dead light. Everything came from Henry’s decision that night. They’d been safe and he invited the devil in. All my fault, his brain kept repeating, his breath thrumming against the lump in his throat like wind in a wire. What am I going to do? I can never lessen it. I can never make it right. He fell asleep, worn out with guilt and grief.

  He dreamed that Vincent stood in the doorway of the small room. “I can never make it right,” said Henry.

  “Neither can Phil. You think its easy to avoid conflict, to let those who have wronged you go free. I suffered here too,” said Vincent, gazing out the plastic window toward the empty pens. “It’s hard to let go. It takes a strong person to forgive.”

  “You know what he did.”

  “Yes, as well as you.”

  “You want me to let him go? Let him live out his life? Die old in his bed, maybe surrounded by people that love him, though he doesn’t deserve it?”

  Vincent smiled. “None of us deserve to be loved Henry. That’s why we can’t just take it, it has to be given. If Phil can become the kind of man who someone can love, if he can become a good man, who are we to stop it? Don’t you want the chance to become a better man too? Isn’t that what all of this has been about?”

  Henry woke up to find he had been weeping in his sleep. The sun was shining directly into the room and Henry’s skin was damp with sweat. He wiped his face and opened the door. He pulled his shoes on and took Marnie’s bear out to the truck. He looked around him at the tortured mess the once peaceful place used to be. He’d already decided to let Phil go, but he couldn’t let the place stand. It had to be struck from the earth. He backed the truck up to the road. He got out and locked the truck. He tied the chili pepper light to the key ring and buried the keys in leaves on the side of the road, just in case Phil didn’t feel like leaving peacefully. He started going through the sheds, gathering paper and old bottles of alcohol, kerosene lanterns and the tiny propane tanks from camping stoves. After the first week in the City, the weather had been dry and clear. Henry hoped it had been the same here. He pushed piles of leaves into the central hut and soaked them in alcohol and kerosene. He lit it and watched it begin to roar and expand, catching on the shed’s thin walls and consuming everything that had been left behind. Then he went back to the woodshed to talk to Phil. He banged on the tin door. There was no answer. Henry unbolted the door.

  “Phil?” he said. He could hear the crackle of the fire several hundred yards behind him, but that was all. He swung open the door, holding out his knife.

  “I’ve had a long time to think Henry,” Phil’s voice floated out of the dark mouth of the shed, but Henry couldn’t see him. “You remember how we first met? It was right here.”

  “I remember,” Henry muttered, the words tasted bitter on the roof of his mouth.

  “Thing is, Henry, I can’t decide if you’re the kind of man who would actually infect me with something. I think you’re bluffing. What was the plan? To make me think I was turning and then– well, what? Kill me? Torture me?” Phil appeared in the doorway, his eyes glittering as they adjusted to the afternoon light, his grin like a dog’s, there in shape, but not on purpose. “See, the guy that dragged me out of this shed and patched me up, he wouldn’t torture anyone. Not even after all these years. And the guy that was chained to that post over there, he wouldn’t risk getting infected again. Not for the sweetest revenge in the world. I think you’re bluffing.” He didn’t wait for Henry to respond, he just sprang and twisted the knife out of Henry’s hand.

  Henry fell onto the hard ground and lost his breath as Phil knelt on his chest and slid the choke chain around his neck. “See, I don’t need a fucking stun gun,” he said, twisting the collar into Henry’s throat. Henry knew this was it. Whatever intentions he may have had, whatever regrets might pass through his mind later, none of it mattered now. He shoved upward with his feet and twisted, trying to throw Phil off, but Phil was heavier and already in control. Henry collapsed again, no better positioned than before. His sight began to gray out at the edges as Phil squeezed the collar even tighter. Henry knew he was going to lose. He was no match for the man hovering above him. He decided to use his last breath as Wyatt had. To let everything go, to be free of it all at last.

  “I was going to let you go,” he croaked.

  “What?” said Phil, without loosening his grip.

  “I– forgive– you,” gasped Henry. Phil punched him, shattering his nose with a violent burst of warm blood and Henry lost consciousness.

  Forty-seven

  When Henry opened his eyes, He was standing, tied upright to his old post, his collar clipped to it’s old chain and his hands bound behind him to the pole with an old belt and a thick, spiny rope. The flames had spread from the sheds to the front pens now and onto the porch of the lodge. He thought he could make out a man’s figure in the smoke several yards from him but his eyes were already swelling closed. The heat of the blood on his face made him nauseous. He struggled for a few seconds, trying to slip his hands out of the belt, but they too, were swelling and he was unable to feel them after a few moments. He knew he was going to die. Maybe he’d known the whole time. Maybe that’s what he’d come back to do. Part of him worried about his friends, now that Phil was free, but he didn’t regret letting him go. This place would soon be gone, and Henry with it. All the misery of it swept away and only living in Phil’s conscience. His friends would go on, safely hidden at the farmhouse, start a better life. A free life. Outside the City, outside the guilt that history tried to pile on a person. Brand new.

  The smoky figure became larger as it grew nearer. It was Phil. He broke through the cloud of ash and Henry saw him running across the camp toward him. He reached Henry. “Where are the keys?”

  “What keys?”

  “The truck keys, where are the damn truck keys?”

  Henry started laughing. “Your legs work,” he said.

  “Yo
ur’s won’t if you don’t tell me where the keys are,” growled Phil.

  Henry’s throat was laced with fire from the choke chain and the smoke, but he didn’t stop laughing. “I’m about to die, Phil. What does it matter what happens before?”

  Phil’s hand flashed up and twisted the collar again. Henry’s laughter was cut off. “I’ll make it matter. I’ll make these the longest, most hideous seconds of your miserable dog life,” Phil hissed.

  Henry’s eyes rolled back in his head and he saw a flicker of a shadow behind Phil. The chain released and he sucked in a ragged breath. The world’s sound came back in slow chunks. “Told you–” started a girl’s voice, “ever came back, I’d–” Henry blinked and heard a sigh and then a thud. He looked down and Phil was bleeding on his feet, lying there, his breath bubbling away in dark gurgles of blood pouring from his throat. He looked at the girl who was wiping a long knife clean on Phil’s shirt. She was young, fourteen maybe. Too skinny. Far too skinny. She looked up at Henry, her eyes squinting at him as the smoke rolled over them both.