The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Older than most. Younger than a very few.”

  She shaved under his chin without speaking for a minute, and needles of pain pierced his traumatized nerves. Stonebrenner regarded her face critically, watched her small breasts when she leaned forward and the loose shirt she wore hung partly open. So this was the one he had waited for, not man, not woman—but his.

  He could hear a question hanging in her mind, though she hesitated to give it words. “What are you?” she asked at last.

  He could hear the name in her mind that she was afraid to voice. She wanted to know if he was Satan. His lip curled into a grin, causing a painful cramp to grip one side of his face.

  “Just a man,” he answered.

  She carefully slapped a glob of lather and whiskers into the sack and stooped to pick up a small drop from the floor. “Who did this to you?” she asked. “Who buried you?”

  “Another man,” Stonebrenner answered. “A man whom I had helped and trusted. A man who taught me a great deal and then betrayed me. I’ll tell you all one day.”

  He drank from his glass of sweet refrigerated blood while Angel finished shaving him. She placed a warm wet towel on his face, and his nerves did a frenzied dance. He held up his hand and looked at his fingernails; they were long yellow-brown cracked claws.

  “Trim them,” he ordered. “Collect them in the bag too. My enemy must not find a single whisker or nail.”

  Angel left the room and returned with a pair of nail clippers. She began with his left hand, and it felt as if she were snipping off his fingertips.

  “I used to call you Baby Beddybye,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’ve loved you all my life.”

  “I know. And I’ve loved you too.”

  “May I call you Baby?” she asked. “Would you mind terribly?”

  “You pulled me from the tomb. You may call me what you like.”

  When she had finished with his fingernails, she knelt to trim his toenails. Each snap of the clippers sent a hot poker plunging up his leg. He could hear the name-bringer moving around in the next room.

  “Tell me about him,” he said.

  “Hamelin? He’s just some silly college student. He believes he’s in love with me. Each day he writes me a love poem.”

  Stonebrenner considered this for a moment, amused and not amused that this puny interloper begrudged the attention that Angel was giving him. He could sense the poet’s resentment radiating from the other room.

  “We may need him for a while,” he said. “Tell me about the other one.”

  “His name is Peter Bellman.” She snapped the nail clipper, and the pain shot clear to his groin. “His brain is going fast. He could be trouble. The police are watching him.”

  “I’ll have a word with him,” he said. “Can he be called on the telephone?”

  “Yes, but only from a pay phone or a prepaid cellphone. The police are probably tracing his calls.”

  “I know nothing about the world today,” Stonebrenner said. “What are cellphones?”

  Angel told him about cellphones and other innovations. He asked her many questions about computers. The materialists, he thought, struggling to make genies out of electricity because they believed in no other sort of genies.

  “Where can I find one of these computers?” he asked.

  “Hamelin has one. He can show you how to use it.”

  When she had finished his nails, Stonebrenner studied his face in the mirror. His color was still not right, not nearly right, but maybe by tomorrow he would be able to go out.

  He told Hamelin to show him how to use his computer, and he played with it with great interest until the pixels dancing on the monitor made his eyes throb so badly that he had to stop. He spent the rest of the afternoon lying naked on the sofa in front of the television, drinking blood and painfully stretching each limb until it hurt too badly to stretch it any more, then stretching another. He had learned self-discipline like no ordinary man. It had saved him in the box, and it would speed his recovery now. He used the remote control to shuffle through the channels, watching bits of new movies, commercials, news programs, music videos, all of them fascinating. He was amazed that the rabble had managed to invent new music even uglier than rock and roll.

  By evening he was able to walk a few feet on his own and keep down a few tablespoons of beef broth mixed with blood. Before long maybe he would be able to eat normal food. The dark blue was draining from his skin, leaving a sickly blue-gray that felt less painful. He ordered Hamelin to go out and buy him a walking cane and some clothes.

  Stonebrenner loathed sleep because it was too much like his long ordeal, but his body needed it, so he forced himself to take naps throughout the night. His dreams were haunted by faces, Charles Newman’s especially, the deceitful visage that had tormented him for so many years, and after an hour or less he would awaken with an agonized cry, believing himself back in the coffin.

  Angel was always beside him in the bed, trying to comfort him with her voice and gentle fingertips. Even now he sometimes believed that this was an illusion, lying here with her, free at last—believed that it was just another long fugue of madness that would end with him back in the box. He was relieved when at last the sun leaked through the curtains.

  The calisthenics had paid off: today he could walk without Angel’s help, stiffly but surely, using the cane only a little. He drank a large breakfast of blood and beef stock and dressed himself in the dark gray suit that Hamelin had bought for him. It was exactly what he had ordered, light-weight wool, conservatively cut, not much different from what he had been buried in.

  He looked in the mirror and wanted to look away. His blue-gray skin was stretched so tight that his face looked like a death’s-head. The teeth were the worst: they were yellow-brown and had grown so long that they looked like fangs. He had been in the grave too long, and he wondered if he would ever resemble a normal man again.

  He put on a pair of dark glasses and called for Hamelin. “You’re taking me for a ride,” he said. “Bring your money.”

  “Where are you going?” Angel asked.

  “I’m going to find a gift for you,” Stonebrenner said. “I’m going to bring you centuries of time.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Stonebrenner and the poet were gone for several hours. Finally they returned with grocery bags full of weeds and dozens of little boxes and sacks.

  Angel followed Baby to the kitchen and watched him unpack beakers, flasks, retorts, and Bunsen burners, turning the poet’s kitchen into a chemistry laboratory. He lined the counter with vials of herbs, pills, powders, and liquids. When she asked what he was doing, Baby glanced impatiently at her and said, “Don’t interrupt me. I’ll explain when I’m ready.”

  Angel found Hamelin sitting in the dining room, staring gloomily at his frail hands. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  He looked up at her with a tragic expression. “First he made me drive him to pharmacies and health-food stores, where he purchased countless poisons and quack nostrums and flasks and whatnot. Then we went to the riverbank and he picked toadstools and unsavory weeds. Deadly nightshade, hemlock, and who knows what other noxious tares.”

  “What are they for?”

  “To kill me,” the poet muttered morosely. “Maybe to kill both of us. He’s envious of our love. Though he can tyrannize our mortal bodies, he cannot abolish our love. I’ve seen how he enslaves you, forcing you to serve the unnatural needs of his cankered flesh. Like a perfidious puppeteer, he can jerk the strings of our tendons to his pleasure, but he cannot overrule what the heavens have ordained. He knows our love was writ in the stars in the infancy of time, and therefore he sulks with spiteful and lethal schemes. But do not fear, milady. In the shadow-land of death, beyond the black river Styx, our love bed awaits us, already bedecked with flowers. There, beside the gentle banks of Lethe shall we rinse away all sordid remembrances of his ma
lignant tyranny. Prepare yourself, milady, for the blessed journey.”

  “Can’t you just speak English once in a while?” Angel said.

  The poet slunk sullenly away to the bathroom, and soon she heard him working on George’s body with his handsaw, cutting it into parts small enough to carry out of the apartment inconspicuously.

  Angel returned to the kitchen and watched Baby grind something that looked like chalk with a mortar and pestle. He poured some of the white powder into a beaker. Flasks were bubbling above Bunsen burners, and a retort fitted with copper tubing was distilling a greenish liquid. Herbs and weeds simmered in two big stockpots on the stove.

  Again she asked him what he was doing. This time he glared at her with his black-button eyes and said nothing. She retreated to the bedroom, but by now the whole apartment was filled with nauseating odors, bitter, sweet, acidic, ammoniac, sulfuric.

  Baby was still working in the kitchen when Angel went to bed. Several times she awoke choking from the fumes and crept to the kitchen to find him toiling over his flasks. When she got up in the morning, he was still in the kitchen. Presently he came to the living room and ordered Hamelin out of the apartment.

  The poet stared resentfully at the floor, unable to meet Stonebrenner’s eyes. “‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour,’” Hamelin quoted. He gave Angel a significant look and left.

  “Come to the kitchen,” Baby told her. “I’ll answer your questions now.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper, his vocal cords still not recovered.

  The Bunsen burners were turned off, and the flasks and beakers had been emptied. All of the liquids and powders apparently had cooked down to a cup or so of thick green-brown syrup simmering in a saucepan on the stove. Angel sat at the kitchen table.

  “I’m four and a half centuries old,” Stonebrenner said. “I would like you to share the rest of my long years with me.”

  Angel simply stared at him.

  “You must understand the dangers before you consent,” he whispered. “The strongest medicines are also deadly poisons; they can kill as easily as cure. The medicines I’ll treat you with would kill most ordinary people—but you’re not ordinary. Over the years you have ingested all seven of the words needed to release me from my paralysis. For most people, even one of these words would cause brain damage, and two of them would kill. You’ve built up a tolerance, and that’s why I’m confident you will survive the treatments. But be warned—the treatments will be horrendously painful and will make you sick unto death.”

  Angel thought of her castration, its scar still not fully healed. She still needed to apply Betadine each day to keep infection away.

  “I’m used to pain,” she said. “It doesn’t scare me. I’ll put up with pain to be with you. But I wouldn’t want to be immortal if I couldn’t be with you.”

  “Don’t say immortal,” Baby said. “Not even the stars are immortal. They’ll burn out in time. And even the angels that rage in hell will have their last day. I’m not an immortal, nor shall you be. I’m a Longevital.”

  A nice word, Angel thought. The accent fell on the second syllable: lon-GEV-i-tal.

  “We are told that Adam lived 930 years,” he rasped, his voice as dry as parchment. “His son Seth lived 912. Methuselah lived 969 years. It would be your genetic birthright to live this long, except that in those ancient days the Nephilim were born of human women.”

  “What are Nephilim?” she asked.

  “The sons of God had intercourse with women,” he answered. “Fallen angels, what Christian theologians call demons.”

  “Angels?” she asked.

  “Angels are just creatures from another place,” he answered. “A different race, as much like people as horses are like donkeys. But they bred with humans, and their offspring were the Nephilim. Genetic hybrids, like the offspring of the horse and the ass. The human gene pool was corrupted, and death was planted in our chromosomes. Modern man is genetically degraded like the poor mule. But the treatments I offer will destroy the death gene, and your rightful genetic heritage will be given back to you.”

  “How long will I live?” she asked.

  “You may live for centuries, as long as Methuselah. Ordinary poisons and diseases and wounds won’t kill you. There are a few ways to kill a Longevital, and those I’ll teach you when you’re a Longevital yourself. Until that time, I mustn’t trust even you with those secrets.”

  “You know you can trust me, Baby. I love you.”

  Again he smiled. “I know many recondite mysteries,” he said. “But the mysteries of the human heart I have yet to fathom. Still, in due time I’ll put my fate in your hands and trust you with secrets that could injure me. In the meantime, know that the path to Longevity is painful, and that a Longevital is not invulnerable. You saw, for example, the state of paralysis that was inflicted on me. I might have existed like that for several more miserable years if you hadn’t unlocked the spell with the seven words.”

  “Who did it to you?” she asked.

  “Another Longevital named Charles Newman.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “An enemy who was once my friend. A fiend who was once my mentor and is now my nemesis.”

  “Why did your friend become your enemy?”

  “Some men have much wisdom but are ignorant of love,” he answered. “That’s the gnosis I seek to learn. I’ll teach you many powers, and in return you’ll teach me the power of love. Is your answer yes or no?”

  “You know my answer.”

  Stonebrenner got up and stirred the mixture simmering in the saucepan. “There are seven treatments altogether,” he said, “each one more poisonous and painful than the previous. Each treatment will harden you for the next. The remaining treatments will have to be administered after I’ve reclaimed my house. I have ingredients there, powders made of rare fungi that I grew in my basement, rare weeds that I planted long ago in the woods, which should still be growing wild. Some of the ingredients are from plants and insects long extinct, but I possess them in dried powders. In two days I’ll reclaim my house, but I want to start your first treatment at once. There’s no time to waste.”

  “We waited so many years to be together, why do we have to hurry now?”

  “Because Charles Newman may already realize that I’ve been released. If not, he’s bound to find out soon. I have woven a veil to hide myself from him, but his powers are equal to mine, and soon he’ll penetrate the veil if he hasn’t already. Sooner or later there will be a contest between us. I want to give you your birthright before that happens, in case I should prove the loser.”

  “But I don’t want to be a Longevital unless I can be with you,” Angel said. “I’ve had too many years already—alone.”

  Baby sniffed the mixture, then looked at her carefully, his stone-black eyes seeming to weigh and measure her.

  “Longevity is for the courageous,” he whispered. “You mustn’t be weak or cowardly. If it turns out that your long years are spent apart from me, then bear them bravely. Besides, who can know how the contest will turn? You may have another chance to rescue me before it’s over.”

  “If there’s a chance I can help you, I’ll do it,” she said. “But I want to spend my years with you.”

  He smiled and turned off the heat beneath the pan. “Take off your shirt and lie on the sofa.”

  Angel went to the living room and removed her shirt, relieved that Hamelin was away so that he couldn’t gaze at her breasts with his sad weak eyes. They had grown; they had become the breasts of a young woman. If Hamelin were to see them, he would no doubt write a dozen stupid poems about them.

  She lay down on the couch, and Stonebrenner came in with the hot pan. He put it on the coffee table, knelt beside her, and said, “When the treatments are complete, I want you to be my wife.”

  With his words in her ears, Angel scarcely noticed the pain when he began to cut her with the scalpel just above her stomach.

  “The
first treatment is to the liver,” he explained. “It will give you some immunity against the next treatments, which would otherwise kill you.”

  He cut deeply, and blood pulsed from the wound. The incision was semi-circular, like six of the seven stigmata on Stonebrenner’s body, and Angel realized they were the scars of his own seven treatments.

  He scooped some of the mixture from the saucepan with a spoon, held open the incision, and filled it with the hot ointment. At first there was just a scalding sensation, which she could bear. He added another spoonful of ointment and another.

  “Just relax,” he said. “Try not to be afraid. It will begin soon.”

  It did—reeling sickness and excruciating agony like being turned inside out. Before long there was a new discomfort: Baby was sewing the wound shut with a darning needle, sealing the poison inside.

  “Try to be brave because it will soon get worse,” he said. “Later, while you’re in the deepest throes of your sickness, I’ll lop off your penis. You’ll be in so much pain by then that you’ll probably not even notice.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Monday morning, after Ben left to see his patients, Sarah filled the riding mower with gas and got to work on the front yard. She had already mowed it on Friday, but then she had set the blade as high as it would go so the tall grass wouldn’t stall the mower, and now she was redoing it with the blade set lower. Ben had put her up for nearly two weeks, and since he refused to take any rent money she had been trying to repay his kindness by mowing, pulling weeds, cleaning house, buying groceries, cooking meals, and whatever else she could find to do.

  The grass needed a good dose of fertilizer with weed killer, but a yard this size would take a lot of fertilizer. She wondered how much the farmer who rented Ben’s fields would charge to spray it with his tractor. She should ask Ben.

  As she mowed around the fruit trees and the stone-edged flower beds, she could see how much loving care he and Isabel had put into the place in happier times. She thought of how brutality infected everything in its victims’ lives, Isabel’s paintings growing darker with each canvas, the yard becoming overgrown with weeds, the neglected barn weathering into a monument of misery. She thought of how long the effects could last, Gus Dietrick’s evil still haunting the present two decades after his death.