Suffer the Children

by John Saul

  “Are you sleeping?” she asked. She reached across the table and prodded the corpse with one finger. Then she left her seat and moved around to kneel beside Cecil. She carefully forced each eye open, peeling the lids far back until they did not snap shut again when she released them. She went back to her seat.

  “There,” she said. “Now we can have a nice conversation. Would you like a piece of cake?” Elizabeth picked up an imaginary cake plate and offered it to the vacantly staring cat. When there was no response, she pretended to scoop a slice of the cake onto a plate that was apparently already waiting in front of Cecil.

  “Now,” she said, pausing to take a bite of the cake that wasn’t there and wash it down with a swallow of the imaginary tea. “What would you like to talk about?”

  She waited for a response again and glared at the limp, unresponsive body that sat propped across from her. Empty eyes stared back at her.

  “It’s very rude not to talk when you’re spoken to,” she said softly. “Nice children answer questions.”

  There was still no response from the corpse, and Elizabeth’s face flushed with anger.

  “Answer me when I speak to you,” she snapped. Still there was no response.

  She peered balefully at the cat, and her eyes flashed in the strange yellow glow of the flashlight.

  “Talk to me,” she demanded, a hard edge of hatred coming into her voice. “You talk to me, you disgusting child!”

  Elizabeth’s anger mounted as the dead thing across from her failed to respond to her demands, and her voice rose and grew shrill.

  “Don’t you sit there like that, you bastard!” she yelled. “That’s all you ever do. I spend my life with you, and what do I get from you? Nothing. Nothing! Well, now you’ll talk to me, or I’ll beat your ass bloody.”

  She suddenly leapt at the cat, grabbing the corpse and yanking it across the table. She flipped it over, held it on her knee, and began spanking it. The slapping of her hand against the cat’s haunches echoed back at her, and she put all her strength into the beating she was administering. Then she set the cat back on the rock and smiled at it.

  “There,” she said. “Now that you’ve had what you deserve, we can get back to our tea party.”

  She went on chattering mindlessly for a few moments, miming the actions of refilling the cups and plates she imagined were before her. Then she asked the cat another question and waited for a response. When there was none, her anger flashed back, flooding over her like a red tide.

  “Don’t you do that to me, you fucking no-good monster!” she screamed. “I hate it when you do that to me. Hate it, hate it, hate it!”

  As her voice rose, she grabbed the cat and began swinging it over her head, then brought it crashing down on the stone table. In her rage, she didn’t hear the crushing of the skull.

  “You’ll answer me,” she raved. “God damn you, you’ll talk to me or I’ll kill you!”

  Suddenly she hurled the cat against the wall of the cave and grabbed the bag once more. She reached deep into it, and when she withdrew her hand she clutched a large butcher knife. Her anger cresting, she fell on the cat’s limp body and began slashing at it with the knife, her voice rising as she cursed the unresponsive animal.

  Suddenly she had the cat on the table again, and the knife flashed through the air once more. Cecil’s severed head rolled away from the torso and fell to the floor. Elizabeth stared at it, not comprehending what had happened.

  “Don’t do that,” she breathed. “Don’t do that to me. I want you to talk to me. Talk to me!” she screamed once more, then stopped, her breath coming in gasps. She felt a pain throbbing through her head, and heard something that sounded like wind. Then the pain passed, and the sounds of the wind faded into a strange whimpering from above. She looked up into the darkness of the shaft.

  Seeing nothing, she found the flashlight, and shined it upward. The beam illuminated Sarah’s dark face, her huge brown eyes blinking in the glare of the light.

  Elizabeth smiled up at her, and her face softened.

  “Sarah,” she almost whispered. “Did you see? Did you see that naughty baby? She isn’t like you. She isn’t like you at all. You’re such a sweet girl, so sweet …” She turned bade to look once more at the decapitated feline body, which lay, still clothed, on the rough rock. Then the light picked up the head, still encased in the old-fashioned bonnet, the eyes dully reflecting the glare from the flashlight.

  “You should have talked to me,” she hissed. “Really, you should have.” She picked up the knife and placed it carefully on a ledge near the ceiling of the cavern.

  Then she slipped the flashlight, still glowing, into her pocket and began to make her way back up the rope ladder. Sarah crept back from the edge as Elizabeth emerged from the pit.

  “It’s late,” Elizabeth whispered. “But not too late.” Then she slipped the bracelet that was still on her wrist off her own arm and onto Sarah’s.

  “This is for you,” she said. “It’s from Beth. She wants you to have it She says it should belong to you.”

  Ignoring Sarah now, Elizabeth crept through the tunnel and emerged once more into the night. Quickly, she made her way back up the face of the embankment and disappeared into the woods.

  Elizabeth lay once more in her bed, staring at the ceiling. She wished she could fall asleep again, but she couldn’t. She had awakened from a dream which had fled as she opened her eyes, and now sleep would not come to her. She thought she heard a noise outside, and went to the window. There, making her way slowly across the field, she saw her sister. Elizabeth went downstairs and met Sarah at the front door.

  She was covered with mud and slime, and her hands were badly scratched. She stared helplessly up at Elizabeth.

  Silently Elizabeth took Sarah upstairs and into the bathroom. She cleaned her sister up and threw the filthy clothes into the laundry chute. Then she tucked Sarah into bed.

  Elizabeth wondered where Sarah had been. But soon she slept. It was a peaceful sleep, and there were no more dreams.

  11

  Mrs. Goodrich opened the trapdoor at the bottom of the laundry chute and watched the clothes tumble to the floor at her feet. She picked up a particularly dirty pair of blue jeans with a ragged tear at the knee and looked at them critically.

  “Just look at that,” she said to the empty room. “I’ve never in my life seen anything so filthy. Looks like she’s been crawling around in some kinda slime.”

  She fished out an equally dirt-encrusted shirt and examined it carefully. The filth had dried overnight, and it flecked off into the old woman’s hand as she held the shirt to the light.

  She sniffed at it, and her face wrinkled even more deeply as she recoiled from the smell of rotting seaweed. Her face tightened, and she turned toward the laundry-room door with an air of determination.

  She found Rose and Jack Conger sitting silently in the dining room, and would have noticed the strain in the air if she hadn’t had other things on her mind. She stumped into the room without her usual pause, and Jack looked up curiously. Mrs. Goodrich ignored him.

  “Miz Rose,” she complained, her Yankee twang taking on a hint of outrage. “Just look at these. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get things like this clean.” She held the shirt up for Rose’s inspection, primarily because the filth showed up better against the white of the shirt than the blue of the denim. Mrs. Goodrich was a great believer in the best effects delivering the best result. She shook the shirt slightly, for good measure, and was gratified to see some of the dried mud flutter to the carpet. The vacuum would take care of that.

  “What is it?” Rose asked curiously. “It looks like mud.”

  “Mud? You call that mud? I call it slime.” She held the shirt nearer, and Rose was able to get a good whiff.

  “It smells like dead fish,” Rose commented, wondering what was expected of her. “Whose is it?”

  “Miss Sarah’s,” Mrs. Goodrich stated. “I don’t know what that child�
�s been, up to, but it should be stopped. She didn’t get this dirt from playing in the yard, or even the field. I don’t know how I can get it out.” She did know, of course, but saw no point in admitting it. Over the years she had discovered that life was much easier if she feigned incompetence, and this seemed like a good time to exercise that knowledge.

  “Well, do your best,” Rose said, still not sure how she was supposed to deal with the situation. “I don’t really see how we can find out where she picked up that dirt, under the circumstances.”

  Mrs. Goodrich, her feelings aired, stumped back out of the room, leaving the air filled with grumblings. Rose thought she heard a reference to things like this not happening in the old days, and wondered if it could have been true. Then she saw Jack staring at her, and suddenly felt uncomfortable. Briefly she wondered what had happened to the peace they had had so recently.

  “Well, what was I supposed to say?” she said, feeling a little guilty but not sure why.

  “Nothing,” Jack said. “Don’t worry about the dirt—Mrs. Goodrich can handle that with a good hard look. But where did Sarah pick it up?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Rose snapped. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “That’s cruel, Rose, Jack said quietly. And not just to me. It’s cruel to Sarah, too.”

  Rose took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, willing the tension from her body. She chewed her lower lip for a moment, then tried to smile at her husband.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course you’re right. But, God, Jack, what am I supposed to do about it? If she went somewhere by herself, there’s absolutely no way in the world that we’re going to find out where it was.”

  “It probably has something to do with the scratches,” Jack said.

  Rose nodded. “And she could have gotten those anywhere.”

  Then they looked at each other and they both remembered. Early this morning, Rose had looked in on Sarah. The child had thrown her blanket off in the night, and as Rose bent to cover her she saw that Sarah’s hands were badly scratched, and one knee was scraped. But she had been clean. The wounds had been clean too. They’d assumed that something had happened during the night, that the wounds had been somehow self-inflicted. But now, with the filthy clothing, they had to reassess the whole thing. They each avoided the subject in a different way: Rose by stirring her coffee moodily, Jack by mopping up the last of his egg with a piece of danish.

  “It did smell like the sea,” Rose said at last.

  “Around here everything smells like the sea,” Jack countered.

  “I suppose she could have decided to go down to the beach.”

  “In the middle of the night?” Jack said. “Besides, that trail’s not slimy, and it’s an easy trail. Even if it was pitch-black, all you have to do is keep one hand on the guardrail and walk. And the beach is sand.”

  “There are rocks,” Rose offered, and it was true. There were rocks on the beach, but they weren’t of the rough variety. They were, for the most part, beach pebbles worn smooth by years of tumbling in the light surf of the south side of the Point The rough rocks, both of them knew, were on the north side, jutting out of the face of the embankment. Neither of them was willing to confront that possibility yet.

  “What about the quarry?” Jack asked suddenly. “She could have walked over to the quarry for some reason. It’s always muddy there, and God knows those old slag heaps are hard on the hands.”

  Rose stared speculatively into space and tried to believe in the idea of the quarry. It would be easy, except for the smell. Her nose wrinkled as she remembered the awful rotting kelp odor that had permeated the shirt. She decided to put it out of her mind.

  “Well, I don’t see that there’s a thing we can do about it now,” she said. “It’s too late. Besides, we’ve got other things to worry about,” she added pointedly.

  Jack felt the familiar sick feeling begin to form in his stomach, the feeling he was not getting used to—and was experiencing more and more.

  “Don’t you think things are bad enough?” he asked, his voice carrying a quaver that he hoped Rose wouldn’t hear. “Let’s not make them any worse.”

  “How could it get any worse,” Rose said bitterly. She kept her voice low, ready to break off the conversation if she heard the children coming downstairs. But she was not about to let it go. She remembered the previous night—his rejection, her long, thoughtful vigil at the window—and wondered how many more of them there would be, how many more of them she would be able to stand without blowing apart from the rage, the frustration, and the humiliation.

  Last night she had taken herself in hand and squeezed her anger back, forcing herself to sleep through it. But this morning it was still there, waiting to be served up to Jack along with his coffee and orange juice. He had not been surprised.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you got back into therapy?” she asked softly, trying another tack.

  “I don’t want to go into it,” Jack said sourly.

  “The subject or the therapy?”

  “Take your pick,” he said. “Is there a difference?”

  “That depends,” Rose said, deliberately keeping the poison out of her voice. “I know you don’t get off on therapy—”

  “I don’t get off at all,” Jack finished for her. “You’re getting predictable.”

  “And you aren’t?” Rose snapped, no longer bothering to hide the hostility she was feeling. “Listen to me,” she hissed as he began turning away, as if his back might shield him from her words.

  “It’s no good, Jack, it’s just no good. I’m a normal woman, with normal desires, and I deserve some kind of normal satisfaction. Although God knows why I should expect that in a home that’s anything but normal. Maybe there’s nothing we can do for Sarah, but I should think that you, at least, would want to do what you can before you get just like her.”

  “It’s not that easy—” Jack began, but she didn’t give him time to defend himself.

  “What is easy? Is it easy to live with a man like you? Easy to live with a child like Sarah? Easy to keep on acting as if nothing is the matter? Business as usual? How long do you think I can keep it up? God knows, every woman that’s ever married into this family has had her hands full just being the latest Mrs. Conger for this godforsaken village. But that’s not enough, not any more. Not only do I have to be Mrs. Conger, but I have to be a loving mother to a traumatized child, a loving wife to an impotent husband, and push real estate on the side.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Jack put in, grabbing at the only available straw.

  “Don’t I?” Rose demanded. “Don’t I? Well, let me tell you one more thing. Pushing real estate is the easy part It’s the only fun I get out of life any more, and besides, it gives us enough money to keep Sarah at White Oaks. So don’t talk to me about what’s easy. For Christ’s sake, all I’m asking you to do is go and talk to somebody!”

  Talk to somebody. Talk to somebody. The words echoed in his mind, bouncing back and forth off the inside of his skull It sounded so easy.

  Just go talk to somebody.

  But about what? About what he’d done to Sarah? About why he’d done it? He wasn’t even sure what he’d done, and if he wasn’t sure what he’d done, how could he begin to be sure why he’d done it? And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried. He’d spent months with Dr, Belter. The psychiatrist had spent hours with him, hours with Sarah, hours with the two of them together, watching them interact, trying to discover from some clue in the way they related to each other what had happened. He’d beaten her—Jack knew that now. But he couldn’t remember starting to beat her; he couldn’t remember administering the blows. All he could remember was being in the woods, then carrying Sarah out of the woods. And her face. For some reason he could remember her face, the tiny, dark, great-eyed face, peering desperately up at him, the frightened eyes not understanding what was happening, pleading with him to help her.

  If he could remember, he cou
ld deal with it. But it was as if it had all happened to somebody else and he had been a witness to it. A witness who didn’t want to see.

  They had even tried hypnosis. But that too had failed. Dr. Belter had warned him that some people simply cannot be hypnotized, and he had proved to be one of them. Deep inside he harbored the distinct feeling that he could have been hypnotized, but simply didn’t want to be; that whatever was inside him was too fearsome to bring out, that he was protecting himself from a weakness too ugly to face. And it had formed a vicious circle, the guilt feeding on the doubt, the doubt growing as the guilt increased. Finally, when he could no longer face those awful silent hours with the doctor, sipping coffee and wishing desperately that he could bring himself to talk, if not about the incident with Sarah then at least about the impotence that had resulted, he had given up. He had come to terms with himself, and they were not easy terms. He would live with the guilt, and he would live with the impotence, and he would live with the questions about what had really happened. But he would not have to know. And he had come to believe that to know what had happened would be the worst thing of all.

  He stared silently across the table at Rose, wondering if there was any way to convey all of this to her, trying to think of what he could possibly say, when he was rescued from having to say anything at all. Mrs. Goodrich’s voice was pouring forth from the kitchen.

  “Miss Sarah, you stop that, do you hear me?”

  There was a crash, the sound of pots and pans falling to the floor, followed by the sound of Sarah’s voice rising into the wordless wail that for a year had been her only means of communicating her pain to the world.

  “Dear God,” Rose breathed, letting her head sink into her hands. “How much more?” Then she pulled herself together and started toward the kitchen, wondering what it would be this time. She didn’t see Elizabeth enter the dining room from the other door.

  Elizabeth paused as her mother left the room and waited a moment, listening to the chaos from the kitchen. As it subsided, she relaxed and moved to the table. Still in his chair, Jack stared vacantly at the door leading through the butler’s pantry to the kitchen, his face pale. Elizabeth reached out a hand to touch him.