by Pete Kahle
Statistically speaking, every town over a certain population was bound to have one or two “dirty men” that mothers warned their kids to avoid at all times. This town was different, an anomaly. Child molestation and abduction were higher here than in any city in the country. Cities in war-torn countries often had lower reported cases of child abduction. That’s why the school had a gate and there were no after-school activities. If residents moved out of town they always lied about where they were from—said they were from another town. Any town. People looked at you differently and held their kids close if they heard where you were really from.
Jon’s department dealt with child molesters. A special room in the station house was used to examine evidence: photos and videos—hard drives with gigabytes of kiddie porn. It wasn’t a job they could make the new guys do, it wasn’t just something you rolled downhill. No, evidence needed to be gathered meticulously and that meant looking at men doing disgusting things to children.
Jon’s sex life suffered, an odd mistrust creeping into his wife’s eyes, and a divorce followed quickly. One day he’d get out of this fucking town, leave for good and take Aidan with him.
The town itself had slowly embraced its reputation, put it on like a cloak. Litter gathered in alleyways and paint flaked off the walls of buildings. Government money for renovation or city projects always seemed to find its way to other towns. Autumn came early every year and winter overstayed its welcome. Spring was merely a cruel hint as to what the rest of the world was like and the summer heat just threw up the stench that had waited out the winter, trash rotting under dirty snow.
Sociologists couldn’t explain why so many pedophiles lived in a single town, try as they might. A few years back one of them wrote a book that got some media attention and the town became famous for fifteen minutes. It had since become notorious. But it was home.
Jon’s department was responsible for making a dent in the town’s notoriety, by catching an impressive number of the men. He had a good record, though every now and then one of them got away on a technicality. The media reminded the public about any that went free, made the police seem clumsy for “letting” them go. Very few remembered the men he helped get convicted.
And so his son became a target, and the victim of overprotection.
“I’m off duty and Aidan is with me,” Jon said. “We were going for pizza.”
“The chief said you yourself told him you wanted to see it.”
“Yeah, okay. Look, I have to drive my son first then I’ll come over.”
Jon hung up the phone and looked at his son in the passenger side seat. “Sorry kid, I have to go to work. Look, I’ll only be an hour or so and I’ll bring the pizza once I’m done, anything you want.” Jon did not foresee having much of an appetite in an hour. “You can play on the computer while you wait, okay?”
Aidan didn’t look as disappointed as Jon hoped he would. A silly affectation of parenthood, really, wanting your child to be both attached to you and independent at the same time. Just about the only thing he didn’t regret about marrying Lisa was Aidan.
# # #
An hour later, Jon walked into the police station’s small conference room and sensed an odd tension.
His partner, Detective Tobin, a tall and lean stick of man held a small garbage can under his chin and looked sweaty and pale. Captain Landmark, a broad shouldered man that could best be described as “beaver-like” sat in a chair on the other side of a small table, eyes wide open in unblinking shock. A television set, hooked up to a VCR, one of those old jobs with the buttons sticking out like tabs that you had to press down, sat on a little metal cabinet at one end of the table. It wasn’t often they found something recorded on actual videotape, not in these internet times.
Landmark blinked and then focused on Jon for a moment. Only a moment.
“Stefansson? Yes, good.” He spoke slowly—there was an absence to his voice, as if he couldn’t actually see him. “You worked on that...” he hesitated and looked at the TV. He then looked at Jon, eyes devoid of sentiment. “...Cliffside basement case, right?”
This was clearly not good.
“Yeah,” Jon said. “Why?”
Cliffside. A man had kept three boys in an unlit room for months. The boys were rescued, dirty and stick-thin, all bearing marks of the abuse. The man went to prison; one of many times Jon wished the state supported capital punishment. Therapists and counselors tried, but the boys would not speak of what happened.
The last Jon knew, one of them had committed suicide and the other two spent their days swimming around the bottom of a case of cheap beer or on meth, prostituting and stealing to keep the habit going.
Perhaps death was better sometimes.
“Sit. No, stand. Sit.” Landmark shook his head to clear it and then looked at his hands on the table, grasping a remote control. His knuckles were white.
Jon stepped into the room and turned to see the screen. It was blank.
“What the fuck were you watching?”
Tobin answered by dry-heaving into the garbage can, arching his back with the effort and then coughing.
Captain Landmark didn’t even look at Tobin. His eyes seemed to admit to the world that they had been defeated, and nothing in Tobin’s posture said anything to the contrary.
“Captain? Tobin? Are you all right?”
Landmark turned his head towards Jon and stood up. Thick fingers clutched at the remote, as if they held the last of his sanity. He handed it to Jon, and looked him straight in the eyes, a man notorious for avoiding eye contact. Jon didn’t like what he saw.
“Rewind it first,” the captain said. “You have to rewind it. Remember doing that, as a kid? The man at the video place would get angry if we didn’t rewind the tapes before returning them.” He laughed then, a small, subdued mimic of laughter. “Rewind it. Watch it and take notes. We need to know who the man was. It’s your case now. You and Tobin’s.”
He walked out of the room and into the hall without closing the door.
“Captain? Captain?!”
Jon reached over and closed the door. The room was small, usually reserved for unofficial conversations with possible witnesses. Every now and then it was used to go over cases in small groups or review evidence. Small towns had no need for large rooms—or the formalities of larger police stations.
Jon looked at the remote in his hands and then over to the TV on the wheeled little steel cabinet. He saw himself reflected and distorted on the TV glass—a stretched and faceless version of himself. Goosebumps crawled over his hands, as if they had just slithered out of the remote. He looked over to Tobin on the floor, breathing in wheezy gasps.
What the fuck did they just watch?
Jon bent over and pressed the rewind button on the VCR and sat down where Landmark had been sitting. He heard a small mechanical click as the taped finished rewinding and he then pressed play. The screen came to life.
Jon saw an out of focus shoulder, along with a dirty and poorly lit room in the background, walls covered in cheap wooden paneling and faded pin-up posters. The set-up made him think of amateur porn and he immediately felt his stomach twist into knots. The person in front of the camera was shaking, as if he was cold. Then someone off-camera spoke and the skin on Jon’s back contracted.
“Yessss. Good.” Whoever it was spoke slowly, while air was drawn in. Something made Jon think the speaker was tall, the voice like whispers in a megaphone.
The man whose shoulder was on camera took a step back so Jon saw more of him. A white man, around forty-five by Jon’s guess, average height, brown hair. Widow’s peak. He was crying, and he was naked from the waist down, small flaccid penis visible from underneath a t-shirt bloody at the hem.
“Please, please...” he said.
“Now...” the speaker behind the camera said. It felt like a cold and clammy hand was gripping the top of Jon’s head, stroking. “…fetch the child from the cage.” It was not a normal human voice. This person had
to have a voice box of some kind, or maybe Hendsley’s attempts at destroying the tape caused the voice on the tape to sound distorted.
“No, please.” The man spoke to whoever was behind the camera. Jon noted that the man’s eyes did indeed look up, as if looking at someone taller than himself. “Please let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I don’t care. Just let me go...” He started sobbing into his hands.
That distorted voice again: “Now. Fetch the child from the cage.”
Nothing, and then Jon’s heart stopped as an angry shriek tore forth from behind the camera, the sound of an animal falling into ice water screaming for help, a rake on a blackboard, bones broken, a flash of light against the eyes in darkness. Every nerve exposed and covered in salt. Vision blurring and afterwards there’s that single stretched-out high-pitched tone in the ears.
“Fetch the child!” The speaker had to be harming his vocal cords, speaking like that.
The man twitched with fear and took a step off camera. Jon heard him sobbing and then the metallic snap of a clasp being opened. He came back into view, holding a small boy by the shoulder. Leading him on. Jon guessed the boy was about ten, maybe younger. He was naked and clearly drugged—or in a stupor of shock and fear.
Again came that indrawn-breath voice from behind the camera. “Now do it to the child, as I did to you. Do it to the child, as I did to you.”
Jon wanted to stop the tape, as if doing so might stop something terrible from happening, might stop them from hurting the boy. His stomach now filled with oil slick ice water. Jon wanted it to stop, wanted the tape to stop, but it rolled on.
“No, please,” the man said. “I’ll just go. I’ll never tell anyone what happened, I promise I won’t. Just don’t”
“Do it to the child,” the voice said. “As I did it to you.”
Something about the voice, the pitch or the slowness, made him think that he was speaking with an empty can in front of his mouth. There was a hollowness—a malicious apathy.
“Now!”
The man cried out and grabbed the child and did as he was told and Jon watched and his legs went numb. A creature stepped in front of the camera then and the sun sank forever on Jon’s world.
His first thought was that it was a costume, it had to be, some sort of fetish costume, but it seemed so real. The creature stood about seven feet tall, gaunt with unnaturally long hands. It was naked, its skin the color of old leaves, wet in gutters, wrinkled and gray. Its hands covered its face, with just enough space between the fingers for it to peek out. It spoke, sounding muffled, into the palms of its hands.
“Yes....” it let out a sigh of relief, of pleasure.
“Yes,” it said. It lowered its hands slowly and the man fell to his knees in front of it, crying like a child. The man cried, though the child had not, not even when the man had used the knife. Jon reminded himself the child was drugged, so perhaps it wouldn’t have realized what had happened or felt any of it. Perhaps. It didn’t matter now.
The creature lowered its hands until they were grasping the man’s head, exposing eyes that were bulging, almost compound like an insect’s, and white as fresh snow in sunlight.
“Please...please...” the man said weakly, crying.
The creature’s arms twitched for a moment and then the man’s head cracked. It raised its head to the ceiling and took a deep, loud breath. A long tongue slithered out of its mouth, as if alive, and separate from the creature, and licked at the blood flowing from the cracks in the man’s skull. Afterwards, the creature let the man go and his body fell to the floor with a dull thump. The creature picked up the child in its large grasping hands and ate the boy slowly but in big bites. It then gasped and walked off camera.
Static, as the tape rolled on. Static as the world kept turning.
Jon pressed stop on the remote. He exhaled. Insects crawled around in his bowels, up into his head. He felt as if the world was spinning and growing alternately dark and light. Jon collected himself, stood and went over to Tobin who stank of vomit and breathed uneasily. That tape, that creature, now throwing what Jon thought he knew of the world into chaos.
Jon’s head felt light and buzzed. Like a balloon, filled with black flies all trying to find their way out, slamming against the sides. He went out into the hall and walked on unsteady legs into Landmark’s office.
Captain Landmark sat in his chair facing the wall, back turned to Jon. A gun hung precariously from his hand, the way private detectives hold black-and-white bottles of bourbon in the movies.
Jon took a slow step towards him. “Captain? Captain, are you all right?”
Landmark talked to the wall, his voice monotone, lifeless. “When I got assigned here, they said the town was cursed, that there was something in the water. I used to laugh at that. Later they said that the police just didn’t care if kids got raped, and that got to me. But now...”
He tilted his head down and looked at the gun and lifted it.
“Captain?”
“There was never anything we could have done.” He put the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The noise filled the room and slammed a single thought into Jon’s head.
Aidan.
He had them bring up evidence from older cases; photographs, hard drives and videotapes. Jon looked at the piles of boxes containing records of the vilest filth imaginable. He prayed the sneaking hunch he had was wrong. It was insane to even think it; that the pedophiles in town were spurred on by an actual, real-life monster. It had to have been a guy in an elaborate suit, some sort of movie prop.
# # #
The car skid on the glistening asphalt. It had taken Jon a while to get free of the inquiries at the station. Officers sent to his house to check on Aidan said no one was home.
Jon threw the car door open in the driveway and ran to the front door. He pulled out his keys and opened the door, immediately smelling something odd.
“Aidan? Aidan are you here?”
“Dad! I’m—” and then a muffled sound.
Somewhere in the house something exhaled very loudly and outside lights dimmed.
“Welcome home, officer.”
A man stepped out from the hallway towards Jon. He looked familiar.
“You don’t remember me?”
The man was fat and pale, as if he’d been living with slugs under slick stones. His lower lip stood out and a drop of spit rested in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were sunken and dark and what little hair he had was greased back on his head. He took a step forward.
“Where’s my son?” Jon asked.
“I had a cellmate that told me stories,” the man said. Calm. As if Jon wasn’t pointing a gun at him. “He said that he didn’t do what he was accused of, not really. The bad man made him do it, the one who covered his face, he made him do it, he would say”
Jon shot the man in the face, fired his weapon for the first time and then took quick strides into the house.
“Aidan? Aidan!”
Another exhalation, loud and raspy and the lights in the house went out. As if the house itself was breathing out, trying to rid itself of something, but only managing to blow out the light.
“Dad?”
Jon rushed towards the sound of his son’s voice, down the stairs and into the basement. He knew the house—he didn’t need any fucking lights. He stopped in the darkness, turning his head to try to gain his bearings.
Something spoke then, and Jon froze in his tracks. A thread of cold razor pulled through his spine. “You took them away from me.”
Jon spun and pointed his gun in the darkness but he couldn’t be sure. Aidan was there somewhere. An exhalation of breath, bats and snakes fleeing a cave. And then the voice, grating, speaking with an indrawn breath.
“They touch the children as I tell them but I never watch. I never watch. But you found so many of them, put them into prisons away from my beautiful children.”
Jon shook from the knowledge that the thing from the tape was in the basement, now
, and so was his son.
“Aidan , are you all right?”
“Dad, I’m—”
Jon spun. Aidan was not in the same place as the creature. It exhaled and a dim bulb in the corner, naked and caged, lit up and showed Jon an impossible sight. The basement was full of men, pedophiles he had put away and worse; men he knew to be long dead.
“Hello, Jon,” they all said at once. One of them held Aidan, who was crying.
Jon counted around twenty men. He had fourteen bullets left in his gun, fourteen chances to kill the creature. He aimed it wildly, and the men grinned at him in return. He felt dizzy.
“What do you want?” he said.
“We want nothing,” they all said at once. “It is he who is full of want.”
One of the men stepped forward and Jon shot him. He fell to the floor and the other men looked at him with a morbid lust in their eyes. They lusted after death. Jon gave it away, shooting two more men.
Eleven, he thought as he searched for Aidan. The men spoke again, all as one.
“They are just men with soft minds, receptacles for my my desire. The children are so pretty. Some of them even wanted it.”
One of the men chuckled at this and Jon shot him in the crotch. The man crumpled in a heap, hands groping where there was just a greasy smear now. Ten.
“Aidan?”
“Dad...”
Jon turned, and saw Aidan’s blue sweater behind an exceptionally fat man who had his hand behind his back. The Cliffside child killer, who had been beaten and killed by fellow inmates seven years ago. Pedophiles never had an easy time in jail. Worms for crows to peck at.
“The men will now hurt your boy, and you will see and you will hurt as well.”
Jon spun and shot the Cliffside killer in the head, and then the men to either side of him. He ran and reached Aidan before the men realized they were dead.
Breathing was hard, the air stank of sweat and dirt and the deep dark secrets of the town. He hugged Aidan close and looked at the remaining men as they walked towards them. The creature bent over the fat man on the floor and grabbed his head and lifted him off the ground. It licked at his belly and ripped his throat open and drank.
