by Jeff Strand
Arnold dropped the toothbrush onto the floor. The floor was actually rather clean because of all of the available child labor, but still, one never appreciated having one’s toothbrush dropped onto the floor. “What’s wrong with your mouth?”
Nathan closed his mouth and said nothing.
“Hey, everybody, come over here!” said Arnold, beckoning to the other orphans. “The new kid has fangs!”
“I do not!” said Nathan.
“Look at them! Those can’t be real, can they?”
The other boys all crowded around him, and Nathan felt his face burn red with embarrassment. He covered his mouth with his left hand.
“Go on, show them your fangs!”
“They aren’t fangs.”
“They sure are! They’re like Dracula fangs, except it’s all your teeth! What happened? Were you born like that? Show the others!”
Nathan shook his head.
“I said, show the others!”
The other boys began a chant. “Show us! Show us! Show us!”
Nathan covered his mouth with both hands now, and desperately tried to keep himself from crying. His face burned so hot that he thought it might disintegrate into ashes.
“Show us! Show us! Show us!”
“What the blazes is going on in here?” asked Steamspell, peeking his head into the large (but not really large enough for fifty-four boys) bedroom.
“He has weird teeth and he won’t show us!”
Steamspell chuckled. “What are you trying to hide, boy? Think you can keep those choppers covered forever? You might as well get it over with.”
Nathan didn’t want to get it over with. He was pretty sure he could keep his teeth covered forever, if necessary. But instead, he pulled back his lips and tried to give the other kids a pleasant smile.
They gasped. All of them.
One of them said a word that Nathan didn’t remember having heard before but which he thought might be one of the bad words that his parents had told him never to say. “He does have fangs! He’s a fangboy!”
“Fangboy!” several of the others shouted. “Fangboy! Fangboy! Fangboy!”
Nathan turned and ran. One of the kids on the edge of the crowd tripped him, and he fell to the floor, landing hard on his elbow.
“Freak show!” one of them yelled.
“Creepy mouth!” yelled another.
For a moment, Nathan thought they might hoist him above their shoulders and take him to be tarred and feathered (which had actually sounded kind of fun when his mother read to him about it, but sounded much less fun now). They did not. Instead, they just kept laughing at him and shouting new names until finally Steamspell angrily told them all to get back to their chores. Nathan very much doubted that this was done to salvage his dignity.
He lay there on the floor for a while, until Steamspell harshly suggested that he quit doing that.
FOUR
If you excluded the beatings, the bad food, the ridicule, the stolen personal items, the lack of privacy, the noise, the toilet that never quite flushed properly, the drinking water with colorful specks in it, the scary shadows that danced across the ceiling at night, the drab décor, and the overall mood of desperation and misery, the orphanage was still a rotten place to live.
At least the other kids—most of them, anyway—weren’t truly mean. Once the novelty of Nathan’s appearance wore off they—again, most of them—treated him as one of their own. Which is to say that they included him in their daily discussions of how awful it was to be stuck in such a place.
Nathan’s first beating happened on his second day, when Nathan failed to pull the weeds in the backyard garden to Steamspell’s satisfaction. Nathan protested the punishment on the grounds that Steamspell had not actually bothered to look at the garden before picking up his paddle, and also because if Nathan were to pluck all of the weeds, the garden would have no actual contents.
Steamspell did not appreciate either of these explanations.
Nathan’s mother and father had believed in the value of a good spanking, so he was not a stranger to receiving this sort of discipline. He was not, however, used to the level of cruelty and sheer exuberance on display. The spanking from Steamspell hurt, and went on for a good five minutes beyond what seemed necessary to send any message beyond “Bernard Steamspell is a sadist.”
Nathan’s second, third, and fourth beatings happened on his third, fourth, and fifth days at the orphanage. Then Steamspell’s attention was captured by a new boy named Thomas who was on crutches, and Nathan’s beating schedule switched to an every-other-day basis.
“I hate him,” said Reggie, an eight-year-old whose mattress was on the floor next to Nathan’s. They lay in the dark. “I wish he would plop right onto the ground, dead.”
“Shhhhh!” said another boy, Jeremy. “He’ll hear you!”
“I think he’ll beat us even if he’s dead!” said a boy named Malcolm. “He’d find a way!”
Nathan was certainly in favor of the idea of Steamspell dropping dead, but he said nothing.
“He wouldn’t be able to beat us if we buried his body,” said Reggie.
“He’d dig his way out,” said Malcolm. “Even if we filled the hole with rocks he’d dig his way out.”
“If we cut him up he wouldn’t,” said Reggie. “If each boy was responsible for burying his own piece, we could be sure he would stay in the ground. Maybe an arm or two would find its way out, but he couldn’t beat us if he were nothing but an arm.”
Nathan cringed. This wasn’t the sort of conversation he ever had at home with his mother and father.
“How could we do it?” asked Malcolm.
“We’d cut off his head first. Once his head was gone, I can’t imagine the rest of him would cause us that much trouble.”
“What would we use?”
“A knife from the kitchen.”
“We don’t have any that are big enough.”
Reggie considered that. “You’re right. But we have tape. And two knives taped together would be more than long enough. We’d draw straws for who got to do it, and that person would sneak in while he was sleeping—”
“Somebody would have to hold him down,” Malcolm said.
“We’d draw straws for that, too. And so the lucky boys would sneak in there, and they’d saw, saw, saw away until the job was done.”
“That’s horrible,” said Nathan. He slapped a hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
“Horrible?” Reggie asked. “Horrible? I’ve heard the way you yelp when he goes at you with the paddle. What would you have us do, throw parties in his honor? Make statues? Bake Steamspell-shaped biscuits? I’ll tell you what, if you’re so in love with him, why don’t you take the beatings for all of us?”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Nathan, pulling his blanket more tightly around him. “I just…does it have to be so messy?”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s not messy enough!” Reggie narrowed his eyes (or, at least, spoke in such a tone that Nathan thought he narrowed his eyes in the dark). “Maybe there’s a way that you could be useful, Fangboy.”
“There isn’t,” said Nathan. “I’m not useful to anybody.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jeremy, the boy who’d shushed them. “They talk about killing Steamspell all the time. They won’t really do it.”
“The hell we won’t! Maybe we won’t really tape two knives together, but we have a boy here with the sharpest teeth I’ve ever seen. He wouldn’t even have to press them together very hard to rip out Steamspell’s throat.”
“Like a vampire!” said Malcolm with great excitement.
Reggie shook his head. “No, vampires don’t rip anything away after they bite. They just use their teeth to poke. I don’t want Steamspell to have an inconvenient neck wound, I want a large piece of his throat in Fangboy’s mouth!”
“That’s disgusting,” said Jeremy.
“Is it? Is it?” Reggie nodded. “Yes, I s
uppose it is. But disgusting in a fine way. That tyrant must die, and I believe that Fangboy here is the one who can make it happen.”
“But not tonight, right?” asked Nathan in a pleading voice.
“No, not tonight. There’s a lot of planning left to do. But soon.”
* * *
Thursday was Adoption Day at the orphanage. The orphans would line up outside, using their best posture, and potential parents would file through, hoping to find a child to call their very own. The Bernard Steamspell Home For Unfortunate Orphans was not a quality orphanage and thus did not attract the highest caliber of parents, but each and every one of the children desperately hoped to be chosen.
“No, no, no,” said an elderly man, shaking his head as he walked down the line. “These are slim pickings indeed. If I drove an hour north, I could adopt a grandson nearly twice as good.” He let out a snort of contempt and left.
“Haven’t we seen all of these already?” asked a man walking hand-in-hand with his wife. “It seems like every week it’s the same group of kids, only a little thinner and dirtier. Where’s the turnover?”
“I agree that it’s a sorry lot,” said Steamspell. “You have to understand that I take only the ones that are given to me. If I wished to go out kidnapping, I could offer a selection of the tallest, most charming boys you’d ever seen. But a man must follow his moral compass.”
“Oh, of course,” said the man’s wife. “If we adopted a child, we’d want one whose parents were dead, not out searching for him.”
“But though our turnover is indeed low, I’m pleased to say that I’ve made a new acquisition since your last visit.”
Nathan stood up as straight as he could, and kept his mouth tightly closed.
“Look at this one,” said Steamspell, slapping the newest boy on the shoulders. “Ones with freckles don’t come through very often. And he’s clever. Boy, say something clever.”
“I’d watch eighteen hours of television a day if I could,” said the boy. Suddenly he frowned, as if realizing that what he’d said was not as clever as what he’d hoped he’d say.
“He’s on crutches,” said the man.
“Yes,” said Steamspell. “A tragic thing.”
“Will he always need them?”
“Well, I don’t know. I suppose not. And rest assured that the adoption fee would include both crutches. I wouldn’t just send him home with you, unable to walk.”
“May we have a moment?” asked the man.
“By all means.”
The man and his wife stepped off to the side. They whispered amongst themselves for a minute, then returned to where Steamspell stood.
“No, we don’t want the crippled one. What else have you got?”
“No others, sorry. Next week, perhaps.”
Nathan waved his hand. “Mr. Steamspell!”
Steamspell gave him a look that could melt skulls.
“I don’t think we’ve seen that boy before,” said the man.
“Oh, you don’t want to see that one,” said Steamspell. “He’s quite diseased. It’s actually very irresponsible of me to have him so close to the others. Next week, then?”
After the man and wife left, Steamspell smacked Nathan on the back of the head. “What did you think you were doing?”
“But I’m new!”
“I’m not saying there aren’t parents for you out there, but even a drunken hobo knows that boys on crutches outrank boys with demon teeth. If they passed on him, in what possible universe do you think they’d be interested in the ghoulish likes of you?”
Nathan hung his head. “No universe, sir.”
“That’s right. So I can’t have you scaring off potential clients who were never going to adopt you anyway. What if you’d given them such a jolt that they never returned? Is your conscience flexible enough to accept the idea of frightening away the new mother and father of one of your fellow orphans? A mother and father who would give them food, shelter, and a parent’s love? One of these boys might have the chance to sit in a large warm house, sipping hot chocolate next to a roaring fire with a cat on their lap, but because of your selfish attempt to bring attention to yourself they might die in this place, nothing but skin and bones and two deep crevices in their face where the tears eroded their flesh. Is that what you want?”
Nathan was sick to his stomach. “No, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the other boys, whose chance at happiness you crushed. Go on, walk down the line and say you’re sorry to each one of them.”
Feeling the most intense shame of his life, Nathan walked down the row of boys, head lowered as he told each of them that he was very, very sorry for what he’d done. Some of them thanked him, some snickered, and some glared at him as if he truly had destroyed their chances of not dying in this hellhole.
The boys continued to stand at attention for a while longer, while Steamspell grumbled about how few aspiring parents had shown up that day. Another husband and wife arrived but didn’t even make it halfway down the line before the woman sighed and tugged on her husband’s sleeve. “Let’s just go. There’s nothing here.”
None of the boys were adopted that day.
“This is very disappointing,” said Steamspell. “How is it possible that I could not unload even one of you? There was not even an attempt to haggle! What are you boys doing wrong that makes you so unlovable by even those who are actively seeking children?”
Reggie raised his hand.
Steamspell glared at him. “What?”
“If you could provide more soap, more parents would want to adopt us. The sliver of soap I’m given each day barely lasts beyond my chin.”
“Why, you filthy little rat! How dare you question my soap allotment? I had planned to spend this evening beating him—” Steamspell pointed at one of the boys near the end of the line. “—and him—” He pointed at another. “—but instead I’ll be beating you. And I’m in a foul mood, so I intend to beat you until my spirits have brightened!”
The boys marched back into the orphanage. After a meal of soup that was more like water with a mild carrot flavor, they spent the rest of the day doing chores. Nathan’s job was to shake a rug until every last tick had been dislodged.
Reggie’s screams echoed throughout the orphanage.
“I’m glad I didn’t say anything about the soap,” Malcolm admitted, while he shook out his own assigned rug. “I was thinking it, and I thought he wanted a real answer.”
Reggie didn’t return from Steamspell’s office until shortly before dinner, limping and bruised. “He won’t feed us properly, but he spared no expense on that paddle,” he muttered. “I thought it would break in half, but it didn’t even chip. Did you see that it has diamonds on the handle?”
“Are you okay?” Nathan asked.
“I won’t be okay until his throat is sliding down your throat.”
“I’m not going to kill him.”
“You stingy little miser. What makes you so special? Don’t you think that if the good lord above gave you teeth of that sort he’d want them to be put to use? By ignoring your gift, you are spitting in the face of God. Spitting right into his all-seeing eye. Blasphemy!”
“I won’t do it.”
“Very well, then. It’s your soul. Do what you want with it.”
Life in the orphanage did not take an upswing in quality during the following week. Nathan missed his parents and he didn’t like anything about this place and he hated being called Fangboy. He didn’t cry as much anymore, and thought it might be because his body had run out of water to transport to his eyes.
Every night, Nathan thought about running away. All of the boys did. Unfortunately, tales abounded of all of the measures Steamspell had taken to prevent their escape. Hungry wolves lurked in the woods. The area around the orphanage was filled with so many land mines and bear traps that a boy wouldn’t be able to take more than three steps before either blowing up or having iron jaws snap
shut upon his ankle. (It also stood to reason that many of the wolves ended up getting caught in the traps as well, and if there was anything more fearsome than a wolf, it was a wolf who was angry about having been forced to gnaw off its own foot.) Goblins, or at least people dressed as goblins, roamed outdoors with giant clubs. Sharks dropped from the sky. Pits were plentiful. Men with rifles had a standing offer to earn eighty coins per orphan head.
None of these were true, and in fact any boy who made it half a mile northeast of the orphanage would have found himself in the care of kindly nuns, but none of the boys dared risk it.
The only thing Nathan had to look forward to was Adoption Day. He’d much rather have his real mother and father back, but since that wasn’t a possibility (at least not in a non-supernatural, non-terrifying manner) he hoped to find replacement parents soon.
Nathan marched out with the other boys, trying to think merry thoughts in hopes that parents would want a happy child.
The first visitor was a portly woman who explained to Steamspell that her husband had gotten caught up at work, but that he trusted her to make the right decision. Green eyes were a preference, though not a requirement. Upon hearing this, Malcolm opened his green eyes as wide as he could, so wide that Nathan worried they might roll right out of their sockets and Malcolm would have to go chasing after them, which would be awkward since he wouldn’t be able to see what he was chasing after. Nathan decided that should this happen, he would help Malcolm find his missing eyes, even if it meant receiving an extra beating from Steamspell.
“I do like this one,” the woman said, looking at Malcolm. “But how do I know he is not evil? That’s what my friends warned me about. ‘Don’t get an evil child or you’ll regret it.’ My friend Catherine, she adopted an evil one, and oh, the stains!”
“I understand your concern. I’m given evil children every once in a while, and rest assured that they are all…” Steamspell hesitated, trying to decide which answer would most please the woman. He decided that “executed” was not the way to go. “…hugged into a state of goodness.”
