Morse stared at him for a moment, silent and unmoving until a deafening crack of thunder and jagged flash of lightning broke the spell.
“Ten minutes?”
Tim nodded his head. “I promise I won’t rat you out to the rest of the staff.”
“Or construct a nuclear device?”
“The plutonium I ordered hasn’t arrived yet.”
Morse rose from his metal stool and grinned. “Okay, ten minutes—but I’ll be clocking your ass, so no more, understand?”
“I really appreciate it.”
“I know.” He stared at Tim a moment, then: “Would it kill you to say any of that stuff at one of the nightly meetings?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I’m still worried about being judged.” He looked Morse straight in the eye and said: “What about you, Steve? What’s your opinion of me?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Don’t lie to me. I’ve seen that picture of your two little girls that’s on your desk. As a parent you have to have an opinion about what I did.”
“If I answer it, there’s no way you’re not gonna take it personally.”
“Try me. I might surprise you.”
Morse thought about it for another second, then said: “Do I have an opinion about what you did? Sure, I’ve got an opinion about that. It was a hideous, violent, monstrous act of brutality against a defenseless child, and it makes me sick, too, thinking about what she went through during those twelve hours she was left locked in her room. What you did makes me depressed right down to the bottom of my spirit…but we’re talking about the act here. You’re not the same man now that you were then. As a person, I don’t judge you for what you did. It’s taken me a lot of years to get that point, and I never wander too far off that particular highway. So I have no opinion about you as a person one way or the other. But what does that matter? You’ve already condemned yourself, pal. What can any of the other residents do to you?”
“Take away my oatmeal privileges for a week, then I would truly have no reason to go on.”
Morse laughed as he opened the door and steadied himself against the wind and rain. “You are so full of it.”
“Yeah, I get a lot of complaints about that.”
Then Morse closed the door and Tim was alone.
It was bliss.
And so Timothy Beals gently, with great concentration and even greater skill, made a last check of the repairs to the radio and replaced it in its protective casing.
Then sat there and looked at his handiwork.
After a few moments he unwound the radio’s electrical cord and plugged it in to an outlet under the table, switched on the power, then turned the radio’s knob as various layers of static entered the room. It took almost a full trip ‘round the dial before he picked up an oldies station: the 5 Stairsteps singing, “Ooh, Child.”
The sad irony of the first verse was not lost on him; nonetheless, he was surprised to feel a swelling in his throat and a soft, persistent burning behind his eyes.
Carol had loved this song. He remembered the way she used to sing herself to sleep with it most nights. Seemed she used to do everything for herself or by herself. Four years old going on thirty-six.
He reached over and snapped off the radio, then jerked the plug from the outlet.
For some ooh-children, things never did get easier.
People like him made sure of that.
Take it easy, bud, he thought. Just think about what you’ve accomplished today.
He stared at the repaired radio, then slowly, almost reverently, laid his hands on it, feeling its solidness, its worth, and knowing that it was he who had given it back its purpose.
Maybe, in a way, this was what redemption was all about; not condemning yourself for past sins but learning to live with them, with the guilt and shame and hurt and pitiless bouts of self-loathing, while trying to get on with the business of living, contributing what little you could to make things easier for those who shared the planet with you; maybe, in some obscure way that only Heaven fully comprehended, these little things, these tiny kindnesses and acts of reparation, maybe they, bit by bit, one dark spot at a time, balanced out the shadow of your sin, whatever it may be.
At times like this, Timothy could almost believe in the love of God, could almost believe in mercy and forgiveness.
Almost.
His reverie was broken by another thunderclap and the loud, persistent scritch-ing noise made by the branches of the cedar tree outside as the high winds bent them down against the metal roof of the garage.
Tim looked out the window and saw the silhouette of Morse at the kitchen sink. Doubting the supervisor would see it, he waved.
The silhouette did not wave back but instead moved away from the window, in the direction of the downstairs bathroom.
Told you that second can of Pepsi’d make your bladder madder, thought Tim.
He busied himself with straightening up his work area in preparation for tomorrow night when he was going to tackle a troublesome portable color television set. If prison had left him with nothing else, it had, at least, taught him some useful skills.
Like how to bleed rectally, he thought, not without a touch of bitterness.
Then again, you don’t really deserve anything better, do you?
(I sick, Daddy...)
The sound of the branches against the roof was getting a lot louder now, nagging and rhythmic.
Daddy, Daddy, I sick, Daddy…Daddy, Daddy, I sick...
Time to pack it up and go beddy-bye.
He looked once more upon the repaired radio (which belonged to his parole officer, for whom Timothy was fixing it as a favor) and felt a sense of pride and accomplishment.
A good day’s work, yessir.
And with a heart as close to peaceful as anything he’d known for the last thirteen years, Timothy Beals climbed down off his stool, stretched his back, groaned, and was reaching for the light switch when half the roof was torn off the garage.
At first he couldn’t get his head wrapped around what he was seeing—it looked too much like something from a Saturday morning cartoon, the metal just peeling back like a lid on a can of tuna—but after a second or two, after the coldness and violence of the rain drenched his face and torso with all the gentility of shattered glass, he rallied himself to get the hell out of there and back to the house because any wind strong enough to rip half the roof from a garage could sure as hell lift a man off his feet and make him do a Dorothy-into-Oz, so he grabbed his coat and started for the door—
—and the roof peeled back a little farther, seeming to follow his retreating steps—
—and then the moon, so cold and gray, dropped from its place in the storm-shrouded sky and landed right outside.
The suddenness with which the thing appeared, coupled with its size, caused Tim to stumble but not fall. Christ on the cross but it looked like those old storybook drawings of the Man in the Moon, only in those drawings he was smiling and friendly, his face so kind and gentle, not like this—this looked more like a skull unearthed from a concentration camp graveyard than any storybook illustration; cold, deep, dark sockets that might have been eyes but the blackness was too total to tell, and its mouth was twisted into a grimace, not a grin, and it was covered in dirt and rot and dead leaves and wriggling worms and now it was reaching—
—a section of wall splintered outward, pulled down as easily and quickly as you might knock down a house of cards; a moment later, when the dust had been drowned by the rain or scattered by the fierce winds, Timothy Beals saw the thing in its totality.
He was aware neither of wetting himself nor of dropping to his knees like a celebrant before the image of a divine god; he was conscious only of the rain, the coldness, and the Impossible Thing that towered over him.
This is it, pal, right out of that damned nightmare you used to have in prison, here it is, found you at last, your punishment, Retribution in the flesh.
He stared
up at the thing in wonder and awe.
There was no fear in his heart; fear was for someone who actually had a chance of survival, and Timothy Beals knew he had none.
So, drenched in freezing rain and his own fluids, Timothy spread his arms apart in awe, throwing back his head and crying out.
He might have screamed, “I’m sorry,” but he couldn’t hear himself.
The thing reached down for him with one of its huge hands and wrapped his torso within its quadruple-jointed fingers, slowly crushing him.
The pain brought with it a sad form of glee in Timothy’s heart, for of all the punishments he’d imagined for himself, of all the tortures and degradations and countless cruelties of which he felt he was so deserving, none could compare with the exquisite agony of what gripped him now. With every stab of pain there was, in his mind, a choir of angels singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah; with the snarling, power-drill sensation of every breaking rib puncturing a new organ there were celebratory candles lighted as children approached for their First Communion; and with the first trickles of blood that spluttered from his mouth, soon to become a fountain, there was the priest, covered in colorful robes, lifting the chalice skyward and intoning, “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the cup of my blood that was shed for you and all men so that you might live...”
He was going to die the kind of magnificently horrible, gloriously painful death he’d often wished for himself, a death to rival that of his daughter’s, filled with a suffering that dwarfed—and maybe, if there was a Divine God, canceled—her own.
For you, honey, this is for you, he thought as his body, independent from his mind, began to thrash in the thing’s powerful grip.
His bowels emptied themselves of their contents, squittering liquid shit down the backs of his legs, fouling him as he wished to be fouled, a final humiliation in this life to prepare him for those awaiting him in the next.
The creature eased Timothy closer to its face.
He saw himself reflected in the obsidian pits of its eyes.
He looked so pathetic.
And that made him happy.
Then the creature, the Miracle, the Impossible Thing stretched out its arms, holding Timothy at a distance, and as he looked down at his executioner’s body Carol Beals’ father saw Retribution’s torso begin to move, to ripple, its crypt-gray pallor seeming to be lit brightly from within, the blue veins underneath becoming fragments of a broken rainbow as its center became alive with shapes that appeared in bas-relief; faces, all of them, dozens, hundreds, thousands of faces, all belonging to children, all of them screaming in agony.
No! Timothy thought with what little consciousness remained. They shouldn’t be screaming, they should rejoice! Another monster is dead and can’t hurt them anymore!
And, indeed, the children’s expressions changed from the pain of the abused to the ecstasy of the avenged as he heard, clearly, beautifully, their cries and shrieks become Handel’s majestic, angelic chorus.
The creature began to pull Timothy back, closer, closer—almost there, yes, that’s right, shh, be patient, I’ll make it last—and Timothy once again, with his last burst of energy, opened wide his arms to embrace this most splendid of deaths as the creature opened the gaping maw of its mouth and the lightning crackled above and the thunder roared with the sound of cheering multitudes and then, at the moment before the creature’s rot-scented mouth closed around Timothy’s neck, all the sounds coalesced into one; simple, pure, untainted:
“I sick, Daddy.”
Daddy’s coming, thought Timothy in the last five seconds of his life. Daddy’s coming. He’ll make things right again, he’ll repair the damage done...
Daddy’ll fix it.
* * *
No one was there at the park to see Mr. Hands’ triumphant return.
He didn’t mind.
Within him, children sang happy tunes, filled with love and devotion.
He was more than happy to let them sing their praises.
The storm was beginning to die down. Soon there would be light and people and too many eyes to see him.
So Mr. Hands gripped the sides of the sculpture at the entrance to Moundbuilders Park, gracefully swung his mighty body upward in a smooth arc, and slid back down inside the pit, making himself smaller—but not too much smaller—so as to fit inside and not be seen.
A few minutes later, the storm ceased.
Wrapped in the warmth of the children’s cumulative essence, Mr. Hands closed his eyes and slept the sleep of the just.
Chapter Two
Lucy did not so much wake up the following morning (a task that, though simple enough on the surface, proved far too complicated for someone in her condition) as she did lurch into consciousness.
Most mornings now there was no greeting the day for her, only a knee-jerk response to its threat: Don’t make me come in there.
And so she sat up, rubbed her eyes, and took stock of her surroundings.
Eric’s old desk. The computer monitor and keyboard. The office chair. The lamp attached to the cubby above the desk’s surface, turned on, its circle of light illuminating a section of the Walls of Madness.
She was on the couch in the study.
She rose unsteadily to her feet—marveling once again how she never had a classic hangover but instead just a case of cotton-mouth compounded by the Dreadful Dizzies—and made her way to the light switch, flipped it, and flooded the room with brightness.
That’s when she got a good look at the state of her clothes.
Torn hose, caked mud and vomit over nearly every inch of her skirt and blouse, dried leaves stuck here and there for aesthetic effect, small cuts and abrasions on her hands, arms, legs...
Jesus, what had happened last night?
It wasn’t until she was pouring a small shot of Bailey’s Irish Creme into her coffee that she remembered the police officer shaking her awake and asking what was wrong. She remembered that he didn’t seem to notice the smell of liquor on her, and so she told him that she was driving home when she suddenly got sick, pulled over to get out of her car and threw up, then slipped in the mud while getting back inside. The officer bought it, then asked if she was okay to drive herself home. It took some Academy Award-worthy acting on her part, but she at last convinced him that she was sound enough in mind and body to operate an automobile. The officer and his partner followed her, anyway, their cruiser idling right outside as she slipped the key into the front door, waved her thanks to them, then stumbled inside and to the couch in Eric’s study.
She stood in the doorway now—freshly showered with wounds cleanly dressed—in her terrycloth bathrobe, sipping her Irish coffee and getting her bearings.
Staring at the Walls of Madness—Eric’s moniker, that.
Nearly every available inch of space on three of the four walls was covered with newspaper clippings, each one detailing the disappearance, rape, murder, torture, exploitation, or mutilation of a child. Many had pictures of the crime scene. Some of them in color.
There were at least forty grainy black-and-white photographs of small, sheet-covered bodies.
Lucy knew the name and age of each pictured body, as well as those of which there were no photographs.
She scanned the various rows of stories, saying good-morning to the ghosts of Heather Wilson, Daniel McKellan, Rosie and Thad Simpkins, Billy Lawrence (who’d been only eleven months old when his mother decided the best way to stop him from crying was to hold a hot iron over his mouth until he stopped), Crystal and Emily Ransom, dozens and dozens more.
She made it a point to say good-morning to each of them every day.
Just to let them know that someone remembered, someone still mourned.
Then she saw the gaping, empty space halfway down the second wall.
Where all the clippings about Timothy Beals and his daughter Carol had been.
She walked slowly toward the empty space, staring at the torn and wadded
clippings on the floor near the base of the wall.
The warmth of the coffee in her suddenly turned to ice as she remembered climbing up the side of the sculpture, holding Mr. Hands.
A seed of fear began to sprout within her—but not any form of adult fear, mortgage, the bills, rising crime and cost of living, no; what was inside her now was akin to childhood’s fear of the bogeyman lurking out there in the dark or waiting in the closet for when Mommy and Daddy shut the door and turned out the light because you just knew that’s when he was going to come creeping out of the closet and get you.
This feeling, this silly childhood fear, passed after a moment. Half-laughing, half-snarling at herself, she wiped her forehead and whispered, “Get a grip, kiddo.”
A loud knocking at the front door startled her, and she nearly dropped her coffee; as it was she managed to spill a lovely little blotch right at the area that covered her crotch.
“Dammit!” she snapped, then made her way to the door.
Staring through the peephole, she found herself looking at the shrunken, fish-eye-lense image of Detective Bill Emerson.
The childhood fear wafted through her yet again, whispering: You’re in trouble now.
She straightened her wet hair, adjusted her robe to make sure she was fully covered, then disengaged the locks and opened the door.
“Detective Emerson.”
“Miss Thompson,” he replied somewhat curtly. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour but I need to ask you a few questions.”
Saying nothing, she stepped back and gestured for Emerson to come inside. Declining her offer of coffee (she could tell he smelled the Irish Creme on her breath and must have thought, It’s not even ten in the morning yet, for chrissakes!), the detective took a seat in the middle room and opened his notebook, then glanced up and saw the open door of the study. Trying to be as casual about it as possible, Lucy pulled the study door closed, hiding the Walls of Madness.
By now Emerson’s seemingly wandering attention had spotted the gun case and the impressive variety of firepower contained within.
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