—Nah. Time’s up, Suzanne. I think maybe it always was. Still love me?
Of course. She sounded sad.
—Don’t be said. I’ll see you soon.
That’s just it, Ronnie…you won’t. And we were all hoping that you’d tell us some stories and we could sing songs together and…
—What?
But there was no reply at all.
So there, in the rain, in the silence from within and without, with only the photocopied picture of a little girl he’d failed to save, Ronald James Williamson died, thinking himself a monster and wishing there had been some way he could have taken the other monsters with him…
Chapter Four
Sometime in there—the buzz getting so strong it nearly drowned out the thunder—Lucy Thompson reached into her purse and pulled out Mr. Hands, holding him tightly in her grip, aware of the caked blood and mud, now flaking away, that fell into her palms or attached itself to her fingers.
Sometime in there she started weeping for her Sarah, both surprised and relieved that she could still find it in her to mourn the loss of What Might Have Been.
And sometime in there her fury awoke from its dark hiding place in the center of her mind, threw back the covers with a snarl, turned on the lights, and decided it was time to Do Something.
And somewhere in there the spirit of Ronald James Williamson, having been left, abandoned, in the place where his body died, felt the silver thread of long-ago pull taut once again.
Lucy threw open the car door and stumbled out into the incredible storm, falling twice before she reached the gate. The rain turned her hair instantly to dead weight, heavy ice hanging in her eyes, and the merciless wind turned each drenched strand into a painful whip against her face.
She didn’t care.
She climbed over the fence and walked toward the sculpture.
Let the dead rest with the dead, she thought.
Then stood before the sculpture. She’d forgotten about the empty spaces the artist had incorporated into the piece, small, gaping holes between some of the faces—”Lost fragments of time they never lived to see,” he’d explained, further asserting his pretentiousness. She realized, looking at the way the holes formed patterns all the way to the top, that a person could climb twelve feet to the opening, if they so desired.
And she did. Drunk, crying, angry, and unsteady as hell, she was going to climb the damned thing and give Mr. Hands to the dead.
To her surprise, she only slipped a couple of times on the way up.
She looked down into the pit that was the center of the piece. Already it was filling with water and mud and dead leaves…she could even spot the remains of small, dead animals—birds, rats, squirrels, it seemed, pieces of tiny skeletons…it was a testament to death, this thing was.
She got a good grip on the rim of the piece with her left hand, then held out her right hand but did not yet open it.
Jesus Christ, what was she doing? Why couldn’t she get past this? Why was it so impossible to get past the grief and go on with her life? Why couldn’t she just pay the fine and go home?
Because, said a voice somewhere within and without her.
Because she had to have suffered horribly at the hands of the Monster. And as much as you try, you can’t not keep yourself from imagining the depravities the Monster must have inflicted upon her. You can’t not imagine her screams, her crying Mommy, Mommy, help, or Please Mister, stop, it hurts, it hurts, ithurtsithurtsithurts!
Because Monsters like that must be punished, and without fury, there can be no proper punishment.
Another burst of lightning and ear-splitting thunder, and the wind blew her hair straight back as the rain cleansed the mud from her face.
“You dirty, filthy fuck!” she screamed against the roar of the storm. “Goddamn you to hell for what you did to her! GODDAMN YOU! I’d kill you myself if I could…I’D KILL YOU MYSELF IF I COULD!”
She opened her fist and let Mr. Hands enjoy the storm.
“I wish you could have protected her,” said Lucy. “I wish you could have bitten the head off the fucker who took her from me.”
She brought the figure to her lips and kissed it, then dropped it into the pit.
“I wish you could avenge them all. Good-bye, Mr. Hands.”
Then a powerful gust of wind caught her by surprise and she slipped, tried to regain her footing, hit a slick patch of stone, and fell to the ground. She landed in a puddle of mud that was deep enough to prevent any serious injury but not so deep as to prevent her back and legs from screaming in pain.
She tried to stand but couldn’t.
Able to see only by the flashes of lightning, she half-stumbled, half-crawled toward the gate.
Somewhere in there she was able to stand again, and staggered the rest of the way toward her car.
She got inside, slammed closed the door, and immediately lay down across the front seat.
A few seconds later, she passed out.
But not before muttering to herself, as if in prayer, “…kill them all if I could. Filthy fucking Monsters, all of them...”
Lucy Thompson lay in her car, unconscious, shuddering and jerking in the grip of a nightmare.
Outside, hidden by the darkness and baptized by the storm, a confluence began in a damned place where grief and rage meet and say No More.
Within the pit of the sculpture, something began to form around the carved figure of Mr. Hands; a soupy, shapeless pool at first, with no discernable hint of structure—bits of dead leaves, pieces of tree bark, pebbles and exposed bones of dead birds and squirrels mixing with the mud and water—but there was life there, pulsating like a spurting heart suddenly torn from a chest, and it continued to grow as the ground drunk in the essence of Sarah, hidden in her blood that still clung to Mr. Hands’ body, as he slowly came into awareness, developing senses left for him by others who had suffered the fate of Sarah, the blood of children long dead and forgotten whose bodies might never be found, or whose place of torture and death was never known; their blood and tears and fear finding its way into the earth, and Mr. Hands drank it all in, drawing his energy from the death all around him, beneath him in the ground, trapped in the bits of consciousness that drifted through the air around him...
...in her car, Lucy’s thrashing began to subside...
…and the mortal remains of Ronald James Williamson, now over a decade under the mud and rot and wetness of the season, buried so far down that not even the small animals could dig far enough to get to his meat, these remains gave themselves over to the figure above, offering bones and remaining flesh and tissue and sinew and cartilage and what veins remained as Mr. Hands drank in the blood that Ronnie had allowed to soak the ground around him…
…and in her car, Lucy shuddered once more, for an instant remembering the face of a young man who’d grabbed her shoulders and asked nearly in tears if Sarah had been found yet…
...and Mr. Hands felt his limbs growing, unfurling to life, accepting all that Ronnie had to offer him, all the strength, all the power, all the sight of the Hurting, and Mr. Hands took in his first sentient breath, sucking in the pain and anger and grief like a vacuum taking in dust, moving, yes, he was moving now, growing, he could feel the sensations of existence as he began to move his body, intermingling his being with the essence and blood of what the dead once carried with them, tasting the pain still so strong in those who were left behind, and he turned his head and opened his cold, black eyes to gaze upon the beauty of his form, the glory of his hideousness, and something more fluttered to life in his center as he absorbed the remains of every once-living thing that shared the wet pit with him...
...Lucy’s body began to relax, the shudders growing less constant, the jerking gone...
...and in the orgy of his terrible birth Mr. Hands let forth a scream that was the cry of a million babies doused in gasoline and set aflame, and then, as the storm was reaching its peak, he thrust up one of his huge hands, its tree limb-sized
fingers grabbing the upper edge of the rim around the pit…
…and in a series of rain-soaked, exploding-light flashes, Mr. Hands pulled himself upward and out of the pit: one hand shot upward, covered in vines and dripping weeds that looked more like veins, then the next hand, pulling upward toward the strobing light, its fingers unfurling in glory like the wings of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, followed by his massive, skull-like head, wreathed in worms and dead spiders, and finally his wide, rounded torso arose and he burst fully from his place of birth and stood upon his hands, towering nearly three feet over the sculpture, and sloughed the water and soaked earth from his leg-stumps like a snake shedding its skin.
His long, lethal fingers rhythmically clawed the wet ground as they gained strength.
He smelled the storm and the sky; it was pure ether to his awakening senses, filling him with life, making him sick with pleasure.
His limbs pumped with blood, juicing with exhilaration.
And he laughed.
It was a wet sound, loud, choked, filled with dirt and bile...
...Lucy lay very still now, very peaceful in her car, and no longer heard the screams of her daughter; instead there was a voice, strong and soothing, that made her feel safe, and this voice said to her: Shall there be mercy, then?
And, in peaceful sleep, she answered: Not for the likes of monsters like them, no...
...Under no circumstances?...
...Absolutely not; anyone who would do such a thing doesn’t deserve it...
—So, then…under no circumstances? asked the part of Mr. Hands where Ronnie and his children were settling in, happy at last to be together but wanting to make absolutely sure.
—Goddamn right, under no circumstances, replied Lucy.
—So be it, said Mr. Hands.
...and there was an unbelievably powerful rumbling in the night that many people who lived near the park believed to be merely another strong burst of thunder.
Mr. Hands ran off into the storm and darkness, knocking down a few of the smaller park trees on his way.
Joyous; wrathful.
Enraged; exultant.
The bittersweet taste of human terror on his tongue.
It was time to begin what She had brought him here to do.
* * *
Fourteen-and-a-half miles away, just across the street from St. Francis De Sales Church on Granville Street, in a large but still cramped garage behind the Spencer Halfway House, Timothy Beals, occupying his time by trying to repair an old radio with one of the house supervisors, was beginning the last ninety minutes of his life.
Interlude: The Hangman
1 a.m.
Henry waited in the silence for someone to say something; when no one did, he finished off his coffee, set the cup on the bar, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and said, “That’s the part where most of the doctors whip out the prescriptions pads, by the way.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Jackson. “By the way, the fellow you mentioned, Thalidomide Man. We know him.”
Henry’s mouth actually fell open a little. “You’re kidding?”
The Reverend shook his head. “Nope. His name is Linus—not after the Peanuts character, mind you.”
“After the character Humphrey Bogart played in Sabrina, with Audrey Hepburn,” said Grant. “He’ll lecture you for ten minutes if you don’t understand that.”
Henry stared at all of them for several minutes. “How do you know him?”
“He’s a regular at the open shelter,” said the Reverend. “I’ve known him for…oh, I’d say at least ten years.”
“Eight for me,” said Jackson.
Grant nodded. “Same for me.”
Henry’s eyes grew wide. “Is he still alive?”
“I’d say ‘…and kicking’, but that would be in questionable taste,” replied the Reverend.
“Linus’d laugh at it,” said Grant.
“Yes,” said the Reverend, “and then make me suffer for it. No thank you.” He turned back toward Henry. “Why the interest in Linus? You actually damn near jumped off your stool when we said this.”
“No…no reason, really. It’d…it’d just be nice to actually meet someone from this story,” said Henry.
The Reverend nodded his head, saying nothing, only casting a quick glance to both Grant and Jackson. “Yes, I imagine that it would—but, come, dear fellow. We’ve once again interrupted your story for no good reason. Do please continue.”
Henry saw Grant glance again at the long knickknack shelf above the bar. “What is it?”
Grant turned. “Beg pardon?”
“When you guys started talking about Linus, you looked at something on that shelf. What were you looking at?”
The Reverend placed a gentle hand on Henry’s forearm. “One story at a time, okay?”
Henry nodded. “Okay…but you guys have to tell me at least one of the stories behind something on that shelf or I’m gonna be mad.”
The three of them stopped their lighthearted banter and looked at Henry.
“You feeling any better yet?” asked Grant.
“A little. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Grant. “You finish your story and help the rest of us clean up after Last Call, and you pick any item up here and ask us about the story behind it.”
Jackson coughed. “What’s this ‘…help the rest of us clean up…’ shit?”
Grant smiled. “No such thing as free lunch, Sheriff.”
Jackson sighed. “Fine, I’ll help.” Then, to Henry: “So what happens next?”
Henry got a refill on his coffee and asked for more popcorn. “Well, Timothy Beals…”
Part Three:
The Mount of Mercury
“Every thought and its resultant action should be judged by what it is able to draw from suffering. Despite my dislike of it, suffering is a fact.”
–Albert Camus, Notebook IV, January 1942 – September 1945
“…I saw the hideous phantasm…”
–Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Chapter One
Timothy Beals was still looking for the damned Phillips-head screwdriver when Steve Morse—one of three fulltime supervisors at the Spencer Halfway House—looked across the worktable and said, “Okay, that’s it for me. It’s starting to sound too damned nasty out there.”
Tim looked over his shoulder to the only window in the garage and saw that the storm was turning into one mother of a whompbompbaloobomp, as Little Richard might say. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and looked back to Morse.
“Can I just find the screwdriver and get the casing put back on this thing?”
“You know the rules, Tim.”
“Yeah, yeah, ‘Residents must be accompanied by a supervisor after normal curfew hours,’ cha-cha-cha. Look, you can stand right at the sink and keep an eye on me from the kitchen window. It’s not like there’s a second door I can sneak out of. Besides, you think I’d try taking off in this ‘burg after all the flattering press I’ve gotten the last couple months?”
“You might. People here have tried dumber things.”
Tim located the Phillips-head, proudly displaying his triumph to Morse. “Steve, I’m…asking...please? Working out here on all this busted crap is the only real enjoyment I get out of the day.”
“Me and my sparkling personality will try not to take that personally.”
Tim reached across the worktable and gently gripped Morse’s shoulder. “Look, Steve, I’m asking you for ten minutes out here by myself, okay? I’m not gonna hang myself or drive a screwdriver through my eye into my brain or manufacture a nuclear device. It’s just that…look, since I got out I haven’t had any time to myself except upstairs at lights-out…then I just lay there and stare at the ceiling and think about…a lot of different things, y’know?”
Morse shook his head. “No, I don’t. You haven’t exactly been the chattiest new resident we’ve had here since your arrival.”
Tim was looking down at the newly-repaired radio, waiting for its protective casing. “Mostly I think about what a…a puddle of dog puke I was. I think back on that night with Carol and…and I keep hoping that the years will have muddled some of the details, but they never do. I remember everything that happened as clearly as if it’d happened yesterday.” He wiped something from one of his eyes. “Christ, Steve, I can’t even use being stoned as an excuse. I killed my daughter. It’s that simple. I kicked her until I ruptured her pancreas and then shut her in her room and went back to partying and screwing while she was laying up there in…in pain I can’t even begin to imagine. I mean, when the Joy-Boy Brigade gang-banged my ass in prison—to this day, I’m not sure why they didn’t just kill me—anyway, I thought that was the worst pain anyone could ever endure…but from everything I’ve read about what happens to a person with a ruptured pancreas, what I felt when they were butt-buddying me a wider asshole was nothing compared to what Carol went through.
“Ah, hell, Steve, I think about the look on her face when she came in asking me to help—’I sick, Daddy, I made a mess, I sorry’—and the way I was too...” He shook his head. “I look back on the miserable piece of shit I was back then and I want to kill him! She had the greatest little laugh, you should’ve heard her. And I killed her—call it involuntary or not, I did it, and I’m more sorry than I can ever make anyone understand and I miss her and it hurts and makes me sick and every day I have to go out there and see the disgust and hatred on peoples’ faces when they realize who I am and…and the thing I look most forward to is sitting out here for two or three hours every evening and fixing broken things. Can you understand that, Steve? At least here, with these tools in my hands, I can fix, I can repair, make right again. It helps me to face the next day, y’know? I can’t tell you if I’m a good person or one of the bad guys, but, man, I need this, okay?”
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