by Robert Bloch
“Daddy,” called the little girl, “can you come here?”
He entered the darkened bedroom.
The bathroom door was open and steaming. She wrapped herself in a big towel and jumped up on the bed. She opened the towel.
“Dry me?”
“Listen,” he said, “who told you to do this? I don’t think it’s such a good idea to—”
“’S okay. I can do it myself.” She made a few swipes with the towel and dropped it on the bed. Even in the faint light he could see how pink, how clean she was. And how small, and how vulnerable. She lay down and wriggled under the sheet.
“Sleepy,” she said.
He sat next to her, on the edge of the mattress.
“Kiss me good-night,” she said. Her pale arms stretched out. He started to push her away, but she clung to him with all her might. He felt her tears as sobs wracked her body.
“There,” he told her, patting her between sharp shoulder blades. “Shh, now. . .”
“Don’t go,” she said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He lay down next to her till her breathing became slow and regular. After a while he covered her with the blanket, and planted a kiss on her cool forehead before he left the room.
Ruth and Will parked behind Chrissie. He watched from the porch as they helped her carry the take-out food into the house.
He cleared his throat. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“We already know,” said Ruth.
“How?”
“They didn’t hear it from me, I swear,” said Chrissie.
“A little bird told me,” Ruth said. “And all I can say is, it’s about time.”
Will plopped down on the sofa. “Well, I think it’s great. No point in paying rent on two places.”
“This place sure isn’t big enough,” said Ruth. She stopped on the way to the kitchen and scanned the dining room. “Even if you got rid of these bookcases, it wouldn’t work. You need more space.”
“You know, Jack,” said Will, “I have a friend in the real estate business. If you need any advice. Where’s the Scotch?”
“Hold on. . .”
Chrissie winked at him as she passed. “They want to know if we’ve set the date. What do you think? Should we tell them everything?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Wait a minute,” said Will, rising and navigating for the bedroom door. “I want to hear this.”
His stomach clenched. “Where are you going?”
Will grinned. “To take a leak. That all right with you?”
“Uh, would you mind using the other bathroom? This one’s—stopped up.”
Chrissie said, “It is? You didn’t tell me that.”
“I was going to. I was going to tell you all.”
“Tell us what?” asked Ruth, coming out of the kitchen.
They looked at him expectantly. There was a long pause. His hands were shaking.
“I don’t know where to start,” he said. He tried a laugh but it came out wrong.
“Take your time,” said Ruth. “We’ve got all evening.”
Chrissie squeezed his arm. “Who needs a drink?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we could have a drink first.”
“What’s this?” said Chrissie. She kicked the book bag on the floor, where the little girl had left it.
“Nothing,” he said. “Here. Let me give you a hand.”
He walked her to the kitchen.
“I can explain,” he said.
“Explain what? You look tired, Jack. Was it an awful week?”
He took a deep breath. “Just this. I know it sounds crazy, but—”
On his way out of the small bathroom, Will stuck his head in the kitchen.
“Am I interrupting anything?”
“Of course not,” said Chrissie.
“If this is a bad night for you two—”
There was a piercing scream from another part of the house.
He knew what it was before he got there.
The little girl was in the bedroom doorway, rubbing her eyes. She had on one of his shirts.
“Daddy?”
Ruth and Will looked at her. So did Chrissie. Then they looked at him.
“Oh, Daddy, there you are! I had a nightmare. There were people. Are they going now?”
“Daddy?” Chrissie stared at him as though she had never seen him before.
He focused on the little girl as his stomach clenched tighter.
“Tell them,” he said.
“What?”
“Everything.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Daddy.”
“All right,” he said, “that’s it. You’re leaving—right now. I’ll tell them the whole story myself. Come on. Let’s go.”
“No! I’ll tell. How you picked me up at the bus stop and got me in the car in front of all those people? Or how you cheated and stole for me? Or the part where you gave me a bath and dried me and kissed me and we took a nap together?”
“I think we’d better be leaving,” Ruth said.
“Yes,” said Chrissie. “That might be a good idea. A very, very good idea.”
“Wait.” He followed her out. “Chris, I—”
“Don’t,” she said. “I have to think. And don’t call me.”
He watched numbly as the cars drove off. It started to rain softly, a misting drizzle in the trees above the mercury-vapor lamps. He watched until their red taillights turned the corner, like the reflection of a fire passing and moving on, leaving the street darker than ever.
“No,” he said, hunching his shoulders. “No. No. No. . .”
He went back into the house.
“Where are you?” he shouted.
She was in the kitchen, helping herself to the food.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “You got dinner for us. Just you and me. Thank you!”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
He shook her violently.
“Daddy, you’re hurting me!”
“I’m not your daddy and you know it, you little wretch.”
“You’re scaring me!”
“Don’t bother to turn on the tears this time,” he said. “It won’t work.”
She broke free and ran.
He braced himself against the table to stop shaking while he reached for the bottle of scotch and poured a double shot.
Then he walked slowly, deliberately to the living room.
“Out,” he said. “I don’t care if it’s raining. You’ve done enough. Get your things and—”
She had the phone in her hand.
“Daddy?” she said into the mouthpiece. “C-can you come get me? I don’t know how to get home. . .and I’m scared!”
He tried to take the phone away, but she dodged him and kept on talking.
“It’s cold. . .and dark. . .and there’s a man here. . .I think he’s crazy! Daddy, tell me what to do! I don’t like this place!”
She gave a description of his street.
“Daddy, please come quick!”
Then she began to sing sweetly, a high, plaintive keening like the wind outside, and the rain that blew with it, settling so coldly over the house.
“Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home. . .your house is on fire. . .and your children will burn. . .”
Her voice trailed off as she started to cry.
She hung up. She stopped crying. Then she went about her business, collecting her clothing and her book bag as though he no longer existed.
He stood there, wondering what it was that was supposed to happen next.
Waste
Kathleen Buckley
The sweet-sour smell of corruption filled Mildred’s nostrils, overwhelming the scent of damp earth and rotting vegetation. Her first thought was that some animal had crept into the brush-ringed hollow to die. But by the gray light she saw that the accumulation of fallen
leaves no longer lay as smooth here as it had on her last inspection of the ravine.
Oh, drat, she thought, overcoming an impulse to back away. She really could not let squeamishness interfere with her schedule. Her morning jog had another half hour to go, which did not allow time to find another place. So she edged closer and began to nudge the mold aside.
There was a foot—about size six and a half—in a turquoise leather pump. Working northward, Mildred made out a length of slim leg, a skirt shorter than strictly necessary even for a young girl. Then a silky-looking blouse stained, torn, and plastered to the slimy flesh. At the sight of the mangled face, Mildred’s stomach roiled and tried to surge toward open air. She fought it down. Thank goodness she never ate before her morning exercise.
No point in uncovering more. She scraped the toe of her running shoe on clean leaves before starting back to her car. The back road was still deserted, she found with satisfaction. Some of the other teachers advised her to stay on the main roads where there was traffic. “But I don’t want to have to dodge around joggers and people walking their dogs and waiting for the bus and bicycling,” she always answered. “I like to be able to commune with nature.” And they shook their heads and talked about crime in general and all those missing girls and children in particular. “Those girls weren’t exercising,” Mildred pointed out. “They all vanished from bars. Besides, I’m too old to fit the pattern.” “The third one was thirty-eight,” the vice principal said. “She was a swinger,” Mildred said dismissively. “In any case, I am not the stuff of which victims are made.”
So she continued to take her exercise in the lonely places, and really, it was difficult to know how she could have done anything else, under the circumstances. She glanced automatically in both directions before opening the trunk. She heaved the plastic-wrapped bundle out, slammed the trunk and half slid, half trotted down the slope into the trees. If she had not taken up aerobics after her nearly disastrous second project, it would have been hard for her to carry so much dead weight over rough ground.
It fitted neatly into the hollow beside the other. Mildred carefully spread over it the leaves she had shifted earlier. Then she kicked around the rest of the tiny clearing so that the disturbance in the depression was less noticeable. Good! It looked as if children had scuffled up the newly fallen leaves.
Back on the road, she still had time for a quick run before going home to shower, dress, and eat a light breakfast. She limited herself to grapefruit juice and half a cup of granola. So much better than a heavy meal first thing in the morning. Naturally, she recommended that the children eat more—well, they needed it to build up their little bones and muscles, didn’t they? She looked forward to going to work each day. Teaching was so much fun: especially when you could help the children learn and change. Turning the difficult ones around was her life.
Tanya Roberts played tag with several of the other girls at recess; Jason raised his hand in arithmetic—and his answer was correct. Peter wet his pants, but it had been a whole three weeks since the last incident, so Mildred did not consider it a major setback. With one thing and another, it was not until the end of the day that she had time to consider her discovery.
It was not until she left school that she began to think it through. She felt quite indignant that someone else was using her ravine. She had only employed it once before and had expected it to serve her for some time. Her first several deposits had been made inconveniently far from home. And now she would have to look for a new disposal site. It hardly seemed fair.
Over a cup of herbal tea she wondered whether the interloper posed a danger to her. The disappearance of half a dozen young women had upset everyone; the discovery of one of the supposed victims, her face hacked beyond recognition, raised a storm of demands for police action. As long as he was at work, people would be watching for any suspicious circumstance. She should have thought of it sooner. Why, someone might even have noticed her taking the dead kitten away from the unspeakable Riccoletti boy.
Besides, he must be a psychopath, Mildred reasoned, shuddering, to pick up all those women and chop their faces up with a hatchet. How could anyone do such a thing? She was reminded of Joshua Stern, who had used his mother’s Chinese cleaver to chop off his baby brother’s ears. And Joshua had seemed a nice, well-mannered little boy. It was only afterward that she realized his eyes were as empty as an erased chalkboard. She knew then, although some people believed Joshua’s story about a masked intruder. Perhaps no one ever believes that a friend or family member would rape or murder or torture animals or set fires. Mildred could not understand it, but she knew it was true: ninety-nine of a hundred students were basically good. The hundredth was bad to the core. It was unfortunate no one had recognized the pattern in the serial killer when he was in school. Now women were dead because of him, and it was every good citizen’s duty to stop him. Mildred prided herself on teaching her classes to do their civic duty.
What if he came when she wasn’t here to watch? Mildred asked herself, pulling her knitted cap down over her ears. Of if he never used the ravine to dump another victim? She wriggled her toes inside her hiking boots and wondered if it was cold enough for frostbite. There was too much traffic on the road for him to risk stopping during the day, as she knew from her own experience. And no other approach to the ravine was practical, not for someone carrying a large, heavy load. So he must come at night or around dawn. He would not abandon such a convenient location: it was too hard to find a place.
She had read all the newspaper articles about the disappearances. The police refused to speculate about his modus operandi—if that was what it was called—but Mildred thought she could make a pretty good guess. For the last three weeks she had spent every Friday and Saturday evening from after dark to shortly after dawn crouched in a bush near the entrance to the ravine. Her bicycle was stowed away in the weeds nearby.
Mildred peeled off her gloves and fumbled with her thermos of hot chocolate. An hour ago she had already been able to see her breath; it was going to get colder still. Maybe she should give up and go home now. She drained the plastic cup; the dregs were cold. Stealthily she returned the thermos to her pack and felt for her flashlight. She was preparing to ease out of the bush when she heard the car. She froze: a passerby might think it was odd to see someone crawling out of the shrubbery on a deserted road.
The automobile slowed and pulled off the road onto the rutted track, stopping at the barrier with its no dumping sign. The driver switched off the lights. In the darkness, the car would be almost invisible from the road. Mildred waited, peeking cautiously from her screen of blackberry bushes. Was it a couple looking for a lovers’ lane? To her dark-adapted eyes, the car looked expensive: knife-sleek and low-slung.
The driver’s door opened and a tall figure swung himself out and ran lightly around to the other side to open that door.
“Here we are.” The pleasant baritone carried clearly in the chill air.
“It’s dark as a cow’s inside,” a woman’s voice remarked. She sounded common as dirt to Mildred. “I’m not really dressed for this, Barry.”
“There’s a good path. You won’t have any trouble. Anyway, it’s worth it to see the stars the way you’re going to see them. You can’t appreciate them from a city street, because the lights drown them out. You can lie on your back looking up at them and be part of the cosmos.”
“But it’s cold and the ground will be damp and hard and full of bugs.”
“No problem!” Barry, whoever he was, had opened the trunk. “See this bag? There’s a down sleeping bag in here, a flask of brandy and a ground cloth. Also a battery-powered cassette player with a tape of Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’ Perfect music for a little bump-bump, if you know what I mean.”
“All in that little bag? Really?”
“The best down bags pack small. The recorder is the kind NASA uses in space. Microchips and miniature cassette tapes. Nothing but the best for me, Karen, baby.”
The boast
ing annoyed Mildred. He wasn’t the one whose back was going to come into contact with the ground, after all. His bubble-headed little friend should have held out for a nice warm apartment or at least a seedy motel room, if she must be immoral.
Mildred listened to their voices recede, Karen squealing every time a springy branch swatted her. Once she uttered “Oh, shit!” Probably she had twisted her ankle. The way down to the ravine was treacherous enough even for someone wearing hiking boots or running shoes.
Presently a breathless voice asked, “Are we there?”
“Yes,” the man said. “This is the end of the line.” There was a pause. Deploying the tools of seduction, Mildred supposed.
“I hope I haven’t snagged my pantyhose. . .Barry? Bar. . .!”
The meaty swak! swak! was perfectly audible and seemed to go on for a long time.
Very carefully Mildred crept out of the brush and scuttled over to the car. Stepping softly, she pointed the flashlight at the rear license plate and snapped it on. “EZX-666, EZX-666,” she whispered, then played the beam over the trunk. The car was canary yellow, and the make was foreign and not too common. Then she returned to her hiding place—the chances were he would leave soon. She could hardly follow him on her bicycle, while if she left first, he might overtake her and be startled to see a bicyclist out so late, on such a road.
Before Mildred’s heartbeat had returned to normal, he went back the way he had come. That was no clue: the town was in that direction, and so were a shopping mall and several apartment complexes which housed overflow from the city twenty miles away. She emptied the vacuum flask, screwed the cap on tightly and retrieved her bicycle. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
“. . .so since you’re the only dealership in town, I was wondering if he’s ever brought it in here for service. It’s just the model and color I want, but of course it is secondhand and I wouldn’t want it if it’s going to need a lot of work. I didn’t catch his last name, we only talked for a few minutes at the laundromat, but his first name is Barry. You don’t happen to remember working on it?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s been in here a time or two. That’s Barry Lind. I’ve never done any major work on it; fixed some scratches on the door once and gave it a tune-up. He’s real careful how that car looks. Nice guy; he wouldn’t cheat you, but I’ll be glad to check it out for you before you buy it.”
