Savaging the Dark

by Christopher Conlon

  Advance Praise for Savaging the Dark

  “If there’s a single author working in the horror genre who deserves wider notice, it might be Conlon, whose astonishing A Matrix of Angels (2011) is the most wrenching serial-killer novel of the past decade. This follow-up button-pusher would pair perfectly with Alissa Nutting’s controversial Tampa (2013), if not for the opening scene: a terrified 11-year-old boy gagged and handcuffed to a bed while our narrator, sixth-grade English teacher Mona Straw, licks the dirt from his feet. From there, we backtrack to learn of Mona’s evolving infatuation with student Connor Blue, a kid as average and unremarkable as his teacher. Connor soon graduates from extra study lessons to yard work to an overwhelming sexual relationship, with every step utterly believable as Mona cycles through giddy elation, mordant depression, and, most of all, tortured self-justifications of her actions: ‘The top buttons are undone on the blouse but that’s because I’m just casually hanging around the house, no other reason.’ Conlon’s prose is so sturdy that Mona’s impaired viewpoint (for example, her concern that the power of their relationship is shifting to Connor) almost makes sense before it plunges them both into unavoidable disaster. Conlon writes with literary depth and commercial aplomb; his days of too-little recognition seem numbered.”

  — Daniel Kraus, Booklist (starred review)

  CHRISTOPHER CONLON

  Savaging the Dark

  EVIL JESTER PRESS

  Savaging the Dark

  Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Conlon

  Evil Jester Press

  Ridge, NY

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover art by Gary McCluskey

  First Digital Edition: June 2014

  ISBN: 978-0615936772

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER CONLON

  NOVELS

  Lullaby for the Rain Girl

  A Matrix of Angels

  Midnight on Mourn Street

  SHORT FICTION

  When They Came Back: A Horror Story

  (with photographs by Roberta Lannes-Sealey)

  The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation

  Herding Ravens

  Thundershowers at Dusk: Gothic Stories

  Saying Secrets

  POETRY

  Starkweather Dreams

  Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt

  The Weeping Time

  Gilbert and Garbo in Love

  DRAMA

  Midnight on Mourn Street: A Play in Two Acts

  AS EDITOR

  A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock

  He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson

  Poe’s Lighthouse

  The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl

  Filet of Sohl: The Classic Scripts and Stories of Jerry Sohl

  Straight? What’s straight? A line can be straight, or a street. But the heart of a human being?

  — Blanche duBois

  1

  I am not I. This is not me. I haven’t come to this place, this end, this. I’m in a dream—a fever dream, vision, hallucination. Or a film, insubstantial figures of shadow and light flickering before me. Unreal. It can’t be real. This is not my life.

  Connor’s green eyes watch me. His arms are above him, wrists handcuffed to the bed. I’ve had to gag him: one of his white T-shirts rolled up like a rope and tied tightly around his head, between his jaws. It must be terribly uncomfortable. I want to run to him, set him free, stroke his hair, weep on his shoulder, say, It’s all right, baby, I’m here, and have him put his arms around me as he used to, hold me, whisper into my ear, I love you, Mona, I love you so much. That’s impossible now.

  He wears nothing but a pair of old shorts. They’re stained yellow. The color runs down the crotch of the shorts and onto the bed under him. The stain darkens the sheets, as if it were blood running out of him, not urine at all. Otherwise he’s naked, his skinny, hairless white chest quickly rising and falling, his pale legs splayed before him.

  The bottoms of his feet are dirty, I notice. I slip the pistol into my belt and move to the bathroom, grab one of the faded old motel washcloths there. I run it under the cold water faucet for a moment, wring it out, and come back to him.

  “Sweetheart? Let me wash your feet. They’re not clean.”

  I crouch down but with an intake of breath he pulls his legs back.

  “Come on,” I say. “Don’t be shy. You’re dirty.”

  He studies me, his eyes wide. Sweat glistens on his skin. I reach out a hand—slowly, gently, as you might to a wounded bird. Finally he allows me to take his left foot in my hand. It smells, I notice, but I don’t mind, not really. I move the wet washcloth over the foot carefully, making no sudden moves. I don’t wish to frighten him. I’ve never wished to frighten him. Not once in my entire life.

  I finish cleaning his foot and study it closely—the smooth uncalloused heel, the cute little toes. This little piggy went to market… He seems to tense but I look at him tenderly, shake my head, try to let him know that I’m not going to hurt him. Instead I lean close to his toes and kiss them, one by one, on their soft undersides, the sides that meet all the disgusting undergrowths of the world. I run my tongue between the toes slowly, watching him watch me. I lick the graceful arch of his foot and the tender heel.

  Finally I put the foot down and reach to the other. He allows me to, doesn’t resist. I study the foot closely. A small blood streak on his heel. Black smears—dirt? oil?—along the arch. Bits of the motel’s shag carpet clinging, even tiny jagged pieces of plant.

  I can tell from watching his eyes that he doesn’t trust me anymore, doesn’t believe I’ll do the right thing, doesn’t perceive that everything I’ve done has been for him. I’d hoped that washing his foot for him would convince him but it hasn’t, not yet. But then I realize. Anyone, his mother, a nurse, could hold his foot and wash it with a wet cloth. A stranger could do that! But a stranger would not, could not do what I decide to: taking the still dirty foot in my mouth I extend my tongue to it, lick it slowly, suck it, swallow the grime and the blood and the oil—yes, it’s oil—and take them all inside me, take away everything that makes his life unclean and bring it into myself. Bits of carpet, bits of thistle and grass. He watches me, as he always does. He doesn’t try to move. Once he flinches slightly and I remember that he can be ticklish. But this is no time for silly games. I keep on cleaning the foot with my tongue and lips until it’s as clean as the other. Then I put it down gently. Surely he knows now. Knows that I love him, and how much, how dreadfully, how unendurably.

  It occurs to me that it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen Connor cry. He cried a lot, once. Now, no. I suspect he doesn’t want to give me the satisfaction, doesn’t wish to allow me to see him open and vulnerable. Connor is closed to me now. I know that. He doesn’t need to tell me. Yet my life is nothing without him, this eleven-year-old soul-stealer, this heart-thief. My life is absolutely nothing without him.

  I hear a car pulling up fast in the parking lot outside, tires on gravel, automobile doors slamming, voices. Through a slit in the curtain splinters of light play on the wall opposite us: red-blue, red-blue. There is no siren. I’d thought that there would be sirens. It’s quiet, really. I can hear their crunching footsteps and the static sounds of their car radios. How like a movie scene this is, a scene from some ’30s or ’40s crime picture by Fritz Lang or Raoul Walsh. I wonder if Connor realizes it as well.

  Will they knock on the door? And if they do, wi
ll it be gentle, a meek little tapping like a shy child might make? Will a soft voice say, Excuse us, ma’am, we’re very sorry to bother you, but would you mind terribly opening this door? Or will it be like in the movies, all bluster and man-noise, the banging on the door like the sound of a cannon? Open up, police!

  Or will they not knock at all? Is that why they’re gathering out there so quietly? Waiting?

  Connor hears them too. I can tell. I sidle up next to him on the bed, pull the pistol from my belt again. His eyes widen as I switch off the safety. I want to touch him, caress him, hold him. I want to love him forever. I want to rip him to shreds.

  2

  Memory. The exact moment I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I’m in high school, walking home after classes one day, books held close to my underdeveloped chest. It’s a cool autumn afternoon, breeze caressing the branches around me, maple leaves tumbling before me in the road. Though I’m wearing my favorite blue cardigan I’m aware that my checkered skirt is a bit light for the weather: my legs are cold. I walk quickly to try to warm up.

  Across the street I habitually take to get home is a soccer field. I rarely take any notice of it, or of the middle-school games that are played there, but that afternoon something strikes me about those shouting pubescent voices and I stop for a moment to watch. It’s a boys’ game: eleven- and twelve-year-olds in blue uniforms and gold ones charging up and down the field, jumping, kicking, falling. They don’t strike me as being particularly adept—there are missed kicks everywhere, balls flying the wrong way, boys skidding on the grass and landing on their bottoms. And yet they’re clearly having a good time, and I find myself enjoying their energy, their happiness. Lithe young limbs, arms skinny or muscular, legs fish-pale but quick. And their faces: I can see in some of them the men they’ll become, the growth, the expanding, the hardening of features that will happen. It makes me wistful, somehow. These beautiful boys seem perfect, as if they are in their exact historical and emotional moment, as if someone should figure out a way to hold them there, suspend time, keep the game going forever.

  I don’t know how long I stand there, but when the referee blows a whistle and the game ends it’s like being pulled abruptly from a dream. Daily reality slides into me again and I shake my head, move on. I think one of the boys in gold has vaguely noticed me, this tall older girl (all of fifteen!) staring at them from across the field. He seems to watch me for a moment before he turns back to his coach and friends and laughter and Gatorade.

  As I make my way home it seems to me that I could enjoy spending time with such children. Certainly not as their coach—I’m hopelessly maladroit at all sports—but perhaps as their teacher? I wonder what it would be like. I think about my own teachers: Mr. Arnold, Mr. Vale, Ms. Owen. It’s hard to imagine being them, standing in front of a classroom each day, talking, handing out assignments, grading tests. Though I spend five days a week in their company they never seem entirely real, somehow. And yet I know I’m smart, maybe as smart as some of them. I remember being shocked the previous school year when I’d overheard a student asking our English teacher, Mrs. Rocca, what old black-and-white film had the line “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”—and she didn’t know! I was so embarrassed for Mrs. Rocca that I didn’t have the heart to step into the conversation and tell her it was from one of my all-time favorite movies, Casablanca. My fellow student, a girl named Mary Rainey, went away empty-handed.

  I don’t think about the boys on the soccer field again, not for many years. But from that afternoon I have it in my mind that I will be a teacher, that it’s my fate. My destiny.

  ***

  But I was still half a person then, not a whole person. Since the age of twelve I’d been half a person, as lost and as clumsy and as despondent as any half-person would be. There was no whole me, no Mona Straw, only a crude, partial simulacrum, a shattered shipwreck, a body torn asunder. Sometimes I would look in the mirror and literally imagine myself without one-half of my body, stand there naked after a bath and see myself balanced on one leg, with only a single arm and half a head—one eye, one ear, a half-mouth. At twelve, at thirteen I wanted it to be true. I wanted someone to slice me from the top of my skull right down through my face and chest and belly and twat, tear away the other half which had no right to be there and discard it on some fly-strewn rubbish pit. I am not Mona Straw, I would think. I am not the real Mona Straw. There is no Mona Straw anymore.

  3

  Was there a Connor Blue, then? Yes, there was. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

  I knew Connor Blue for years before he showed up in my fourth period class—“knew” in the sense that I’d seen him on the playground while I was on duty, perhaps said good morning to him occasionally. Once I broke up a fight that was threatening to begin between him and another, much bigger boy. Connor had gone to the Cutts School since first grade. There was nothing especially notable about him then: just another little blonde boy, spirited, a bit silly. Back then I rarely saw him, since the very young children were kept separate from the older boys and girls—they had different recess times, different lunch hours, different ends-of-day. I thought no more about Connor Blue than I did about any other child five years too young for me to have in my classes, which is to say hardly at all.

  Later I imagined—convinced myself—that I’d known from the beginning that he would be special to me. Lying with our hair together on a single pillow, staring up at the ceiling and feeling the slow fan waft air over our skins, he’d say, “When did you first notice me, Mona?—really notice me?” and I’d say, “From the first, sweetheart. From the first moment I saw you.”

  It wasn’t true, but he believed me. He always believed me, then.

  At night, after Gracie was in bed and I was exhausted beyond reckoning, Bill would turn to me in the bed and begin touching me, first gently, then more insistently. Years before I’d welcomed such attentions, when we were younger and thinner and we had all the energy in the world for carnal fun. But after I went through having Gracie, my body softened and spread. (So did Bill’s, and he was already twenty years my senior.) By the time I was thirty I’d begun to feel old, old and tired. I would look in the mirror the way I did when I was a girl, remembering the fantasy of having half my body hacked away, and wonder what had happened to that child. My hair, a lifeless silver-blonde, hung limply to my shoulders. There were charcoal-colored smears under my eyes. My shoulders slumped, my breasts sagged. Oh, not terribly. Not humiliatingly. The objective part of my mind recognized that I was fairly well-preserved for a thirty-year-old woman with a child. Men might even find me desirable, if moderately.

  Some years previously, just before Gracie, I’d had a momentary affair with a teacher at the school: George Cooper. He was flabby, middle-aged—my husband was older than George but much better-looking, and in better shape. But George and I had gone to an educational conference together—not together, no, but we were there at the same time, the only two representatives from the Cutts School. Our rooms at the hotel weren’t far apart. He was married, had kids. It lasted all of two minutes, the actual thing, the act. Him grunting and slobbering, me just lying there and feeling him shoving at me, wondering what had possessed me to come to this pathetic man’s room. I felt sick immediately afterward, rushed into my clothes, said nothing to him. He sat in the bed, the bed on which we’d just disgraced ourselves, and smiled, all soft hairy fish-belly nakedness, his dick wet-shining and flaccid in the hard hotel room light. I could smell that he’d farted. He laughed as if what we’d just done together had been the most fabulous and joyous thing that anyone had ever done in the world. For God’s sake, George, I wanted to say, put your clothes on, you’re disgusting! But no, he wanted to do it again, started tugging at himself and asking me to come back to the bed. Aghast, I ran from the room in horror, spent the night shivering in my own hotel bed with the sheets pulled up to my eyes while George tapped at my door for hours, or what felt like hours. Mona, honey, Mona, come on, we alr
eady did it once, one more time won’t matter, please open the door, Mona, baby, sweetheart, Mona. I pictured him out there in the hall naked. He wasn’t, of course, but that’s how I pictured him, his clumpy flesh jiggling as he knocked, fart stink clouding around him, tears running down his puffy cheeks, dick in his hand oozing fluid in a sticky string down to the floor. After some time he gave up and I heard his melancholy padding back to his own room, the door closing.

  We never spoke of it. A year later he had a massive coronary. It felled him like a tree.

  For years after the initial passion had faded Bill and I were still companionable in bed. There was rarely much spark or excitement, but how much can there be after more than a decade, a child, after the weight of years began to pile up not just on him, but on me as well? It was more a friendly and mutually supportive act than anything genuinely passionate or even, really, in a sense, sexual. But at some point I grew weary of it, of the fuss, of the first touching and eventual realization of what was to come, the tiresome slow build for him (slower and slower as time passed), the even slower one for me, all the preparation, the mounting, the jostling and stabbing, the final mess. Perhaps he felt the same way. We never talked about it. But over time those initial touchings became less frequent, until we were something like roommates, warm and friendly to each other but only occasionally intimate. We concentrated on being parents. Most of our talk—really, all of it—was centered around Gracie. She became our lives, our lives entire.

  There had been times that I’d noticed the boys in my classes. I’d noticed how cute they looked in their basketball or softball uniforms, how funny they could be when they were trying to impress me with their athletic prowess—for they were trying to impress me. At the time the Cutts School had a curious lack of attractive young female teachers. There were young women, yes, but very plain ones. One or two struggled with obesity issues. It dawned on me one day, looking at my drab hair and face and body in the mirror, that to the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy I might be considered pretty. I might even be the prettiest teacher in the school. The thought was a revelation to me after years of desultory sex with Bill, after the disaster of George Cooper. I never felt desired, but I suddenly realized that I was, at least to young, uncritical eyes. I realized it in the looks of the eyes of many of my boys, the boys in my classes: half adoration, half something else, something that maybe even they, at their age, couldn’t define.