“Guess he was a basketball player,” Syd Gustavson said to James Teague, clapping him heartily on the shoulder.
In the doorway of the kitchen, Trace Masters was nursing his beer. Over it, he caught his wife’s eye for a knowing moment.
Eight days later, Lincoln Adrian would disappear from his bed.
Before that, though, there was Cathy Vance, the child who could have proved us killers instead of saviors. She would be the second Catherine to disappear. The first had been Cathy Gutierrez, already getting her big sister’s cheerleading skirts handed down to her.
This was Catherine Vance. A farmer’s daughter.
The sixth week of our ordeal, as it was now known on the news, her father, Theo, showed up at the door with a shotgun.
In one form or another, that’s how all of us had shown up.
Theo’s skin was patchwork, from a chemical accident in his childhood we all knew about only in the broadest of terms.
We told him we were sorry. We told him he was welcome here. We told him we understood what he was going through, but that was a lie. We didn’t understand anything. We knew full well that each of our griefs, it was fierce and individual.
You can’t compare grief. It’s not a contest, and it’s not a common well.
If anything, it’s a granular cool fog you’ve walked into. One that stretches for years in every direction.
But somewhere out there in it, there are small footsteps you know you recognize.
Run after them now. Close your eyes, reach down.
Once it dawned on us that Deputy Moonlight was a taxidermist, James Teague had winced, because he knew that.
For the detective, James Teague had tried to take all the blame.
We were all guilty, though.
To make up for it, James Teague organized us outside Veda Robbins’s trailer home that night Trace and Abby Masters had sent her son home with a timer ticking on his life.
We didn’t want to know if he would disappear.
We wanted to know how. We wanted to know who.
We were in concentric rings spaced all through the trailer park.
We didn’t use flashlights or walkie-talkies, and we didn’t whistle or resettle our feet in the gravel.
If you miss a deer, that deer just gets away. That deer, it goes on.
If we didn’t watch Lincoln Adrian’s bedroom close enough, Lincoln Adrian would get away.
Those of us who cried, standing watch, we did so silently, with our hands balled into fists.
Fifteen minutes after eleven, Veda Robbins’s current boyfriend showed up, staggered to the front door, and opened it without bothering to knock.
The television turned on. The light in the kitchen.
In that instant we all looked to that glowing yellow square—we think that’s when it must have happened.
Nothing had changed about Lincoln Adrian’s window.
What had changed was Lincoln Adrian.
He was gone.
In his steady, plodding way, Theo Vance surmised for us what made no sense about that night.
No, Lincoln Adrian’s bed hadn’t opened up, swallowed him.
No, Lincoln hadn’t stepped into a shadow, waited for it to fold around him.
What Theo Vance told us was to imagine what the world must look like to a fly, or a grasshopper. Or a horse.
A grasshopper looks away for an instant, to a vibration on the road maybe, and by the time that grasshopper looks back where it had been looking, and registers what it’s looking at, somebody’s painted a barn, say.
What was faded brown is now yellow, or red.
It was the same with Lincoln Adrian.
The instant we’d all had our eyes drawn away, the Pied Piper had woven through us like smoke but at his own peripheral speed, and stepped as easy as anything into Lincoln Adrian’s bedroom when Lincoln opened the window for him.
Because Lincoln recognized him.
Either the game was becoming real—that’s always the dream, isn’t it?—or this really was a dream, with no consequences.
Once the Pied Piper’s in, well.
Then all bets are off.
Theo Vance had nothing past that.
Probably because his daughter was still just two days gone.
Some rooms, you don’t look into.
Next for us, and last, was an accounting.
Not of our crimes and trespasses since our children had started to disappear, but of the days and weeks before that started.
In the story, the legend, the Pied Piper had been wronged by the village, hadn’t he?
Who had we wronged? Who would feel justice was being served by leaving that box of CDs in the fourth-grade hall?
What had we done to call this down upon us?
For this we convened in the gazebo in the park, where many of us had had our first kiss. Where our parents had watched movies on a wall of sheets sewn together by their mothers, our grandmothers.
The cigarette butts were already smashed into the peeling railings from the high schoolers. The beer bottles, we brought.
The park was good because the park was dark.
We spoke from that darkness, long wandering confessions punctuated by hesitation and tears. Adulteries, skimmed accounts, furtive glances at legs not legal yet. In addition to Mr. Dockett and Lincoln Adrian, there was even one body maybe still in the bar ditch of another state. As it turned out, Martin Able, Jr. was James Teague’s biological son.
Martin Able, Jr.’s former biological father turned away from the group, wouldn’t look back.
Syd Gustavson, upon hearing what really happened prom night of his senior year, walked evenly to his truck, stepped into the cab, and punched the windshield white.
Julia Garrett, in an attempt to save their son Theodore, still at home with both his uncles standing over his bed, stepped forward and in a high, wavering voice detailed a series of sexual escapades so daring and so broad-daylight that some of us would have blushed, had it been any different circumstance.
And then she stepped back beside Tom, their hands falling into each other’s.
That night, even though every install of that video game had been clicked away, all of those computers already becoming shrines, still, Grant Rucker went missing.
We were tiring of euphemisms, though.
What happened to Grant Rucker was that the night, it ate him, body and soul.
The Pied Piper can open his grinning mouth that wide.
He can do anything, really.
Our children were Jace and Alyssa and Bradley and Lincoln and Cathy and Catherine and Martin and Grant.
Maybe they still are.
After the meeting in the park, we became reluctant to see each other in the light. To see each other’s faces. An outcome we should have expected, we know.
Where we started to congregate next, it was Theo Vance’s barn.
Not to solve, but to remember.
Once, on a particularly low night, one of us started to dance alone through the floating hay dust, her arms out beside her, head lolling, eyes closed, just moving slow and mournful like you imagine a drowned body might float, and the rest of us clapped her a tune. The beat was faltering and uneven, but it was something, anyway.
That night Trace and Abby Masters killed themselves in their bedroom.
Three months later, Claude Weissman called that detective back from the city, where he’d returned once the disappearances had stopped, and asked to meet at the old gym.
The detective found him there, hanging by the neck.
We all wondered how that felt.
As it turns out, Theo Vance’s splotchy skin, it was from a pesticide spill that happened in the barn. Though it was years ago, all our arms and faces are starting to show the same patchwork lately—large dry spots that drink lotion, don’t take the sun.
We’re marked. On the inside and on the outside.
And, that second issue stemming from the baseboard words about the children having been gone a hundred
years? Not the possessive pronoun part, but the hundred years part.
Now we understand.
Even when your child’s just been gone five days, it feels like a century already. Like everything that’s left of your lifetime. Everything good and possible.
And we understand who the Pied Piper was now, too.
Here’s how this dark machinery works.
There is a village back there somewhere in medieval Germany. The children do get taken just like the story says. And the parents of those children, they kept meeting afterward, whispering their hearts to one another, their skin going pale and mottled from their choice of meeting place. Going piebald.
And those parents, their grief kept them alive, kept them searching in the fog long after they should have been in the ground.
We understand because some of us have started lingering by the playground, where the elementary children move in slow, graceful motion behind the chain-link.
We tell ourselves it’s because we remember.
The truth, though, the truth, it’s that we want.
The reason we could never find out who had shortchanged some drifter for yard work or killing rats or cleaning a gutter, it was that that’s just a part of the story you tell yourself. What it allows is a system where bad behavior is punished and good behavior is rewarded.
This isn’t that world, though.
Here, the Pied Piper doesn’t come to town because of something we’ve done or not done. The Pied Piper came because of what we had.
Just like us, the Pied Piper lost a child, and now wants another, and another, and another.
It’s an impulse that makes complete sense to us.
We know we can’t spirit away even a single child from the bus stop now, but in a decade? A quarter of a century? In another state?
Wait, we tell ourselves.
Wait just a little bit longer.
Just a few more years.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Stephen Graham Jones: It’s kind of an elliptical path that got me to this Pied Piper retelling. I was working with a grad student on his novel, and his model for it was Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm. But every time I’d be talking with this student about his novel, my head was always keying on Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter—which is all pretty ridiculous, as I’ve never read either The Ice Storm or The Sweet Hereafter. But I did for some reason know The Sweet Hereafter was a kind of loose retelling of the Pied Piper, so it was like he, the Piper, was always lingering at the edge of my thoughts for that semester. My initial plan for this story was for it be cyberpunk, too, but then, man, not even a page in, I realized this isn’t freewheeling digital fun and paranoia, this is a town’s children getting snatched. And that’s horror right there. So I dropped the cyber angle—it’s still there a smidge in the video game—stole that Virgin Suicides royal first-person trick and twisted its kind of built-in passiveness so as to erase agency, and went with it, just to see what dark places it could take me. That’s kind of always how it works, writing horror.
THE THOUSAND EYES
Jeffrey Ford
doubt South Jersey’s ever been called the Land Where No One Dies, but according to my painter friend, Barney, who lives near Dividing Creek on the edge of the marshland leading to the Delaware, back in the early sixties, out there amid the two-mile stretch of cattails, quaking islands, and rivulets there was a lounge called the Thousand Eyes, and there was a performer who sang there every Wednesday night, advertised on a hand-painted billboard along the northbound lane to Money Island as RONNIE DUNN, THE VOICE OF DEATH.
Barney heard all about it from another local painter, Merle. Old Merle was getting on in years, and I’d see him myself when driving through Milville, creeping along the sidewalk in his tattered beret, talking to himself. He swore that his apartment was haunted. Still, Barney said he never doubted what Merle told him. The reason he trusted him was that a few years back he’d asked Merle if he’d ever been married. The old man said, “Once, for a few months, to a charming young blonde, Eloise. It lasted through spring and summer, but come fall she up and fled. Left me a note, saying my breath stinks and my dick’s too small.” Barney vouched for the former, and then added, “Do you think somebody who’d tell you something like that would lie to you?”
Anyway. Merle was in his late twenties and it was 1966. He was living by himself in the top-floor apartment of a half-abandoned building in the town of Shell Pile. Even though the floorboards creaked, the paint curled, the windows let in the cold, and every hinge groaned, the place was big, with plenty of room to paint and live. He scrounged together an existence between doing odd jobs around town and working a few shifts when he had to load trucks at the sand factory. If he had to travel any distance, he rode a rusted old bike with a basket and pedal brakes. He ate very little, twice a day, and blew most of his income on cigarettes, liquor, and weed. The most important thing to him was that he had plenty of time to paint. As long as he had that, he was happy.
At the time, he was working on a series of paintings depicting the bars in South Jersey. He’d go to one, have a few drinks, take some shots with his Polaroid Swinger, and then go back to his place and paint an interior scene with patrons and barkeep, bottles and bubbling neon signs. Barney explained Merle’s style as “Edward Hicks meets Edward Hopper in a bare-knuckle match.” Still, he was a hard worker, and before long he’d been to all the bars in the area and painted scenes from each. He liked the individual paintings in the series, but overall he felt something was missing.
Then one day when he splurged for lunch and had a burger and fries at Jack’s Diner, served as they always were back then on a piece of wax paper instead of a plate, he overheard the conversation of the old couple in the booth behind his and realized what it was that was missing from his series.
“The Thousand Eyes,” he heard her say, and instantly it struck him that he’d not painted it.
“I heard it’s impossible to get to,” the old man said.
“Nah, I had Doris at the liquor store draw me a map.”
“That’s where you want to go for our fortieth, some mildewed old cocktail lounge sinking into the Delaware?”
“I want to hear that singer who’s there on Wednesday night, Ronnie Dunn. He’s got a record that they play on the local station, ‘Fond Wanderer.’ ”
“Wait a second,” he said. “That’s the ‘word of doom’ guy.”
“The Voice of Death.”
“Who wants to hear the voice of death?” he said.
“You know, it’s a gimmick. Mysterious.”
Their food came then, and Merle paid and left.
He’d heard about the Thousand Eyes since he’d moved to Shell Pile, but he’d never been there. It advertised only late at night on the local radio with a snappy jingle, “No one cries at the Thousand Eyes.” The place came up in conversation around town quite often, but he’d only met a handful of people who’d actually been. The shift manager at the sand factory told him, “I drank out there one afternoon during low tide. If a shit took a shit, that’s what it would smell like. I almost hallucinated.”
There was a woman he met at one of the bars he was photographing, who told him that she heard, and now believed, that only certain people were called to see Ronnie Dunn perform. The singer sent out secret invitations through his song on the radio. If one was for you, you would find the Thousand Eyes; if not, you wouldn’t. “I’ve been out there three times with my girlfriends and three times we got lost,” she said. “A couple of people supposedly went to look for it and never came back.”
“Is that true?” asked Merle.
“I guess so,” she said.
Luckily, Doris at the liquor store didn’t mind at all drawing Merle a map. So on a Wednesday night in September, he took off on his bike, camera around his neck, pedaling west toward the river. Doris figured by bike the trip would take him about an hour and a half. He was to look for Frog Road off Jericho, and then head west following Glass Eel Creek, looki
ng for a spot where a packed dirt path led off on the right into the cattails and bramble. She told him the Army Corps of Engineers built the road back in the early fifties when they were trying to eradicate mosquitoes. The sunset was rich in pink and the weather was cool. Merle rode fast, excited by the prospect of finally finishing what he’d started.
He found the path and took it out into the marsh, cutting through stretches of cattail, stretches of soggy earth dotted with green. He passed into a small wood, all its trees twisted and stunted by the salt content in the water. Stopping and resting for a moment, he took a deep breath. The call of mourning doves and the breeze in the dying leaves gave him a chill of loneliness. As he got back to pedaling, he wondered how lonely it would feel there in the dark on the way home. On the other side of a clutch of white sand dunes, he descended and crossed a wooden bridge over what looked like deep water. Beyond it sat the Thousand Eyes, majestic in its grandiose molder. A Victorian structure with a wraparound porch and a splintering wooden cupola over the entrance.
The dirt path became the dirt parking lot of the place. Situated at the spot where one turned into the other, there was a large sign held up by two 4x4s planted in the ground. The only writing it held was in the very bottom right corner; otherwise it was a big rectangle of eyes on a violet background. Carefully rendered peepers of all sizes with lids and lashes, staring, squinting, popping and red, sad and blue. In the corner it said, THESE ONE THOUSAND EYES WERE PAINTED BY LEW PHARO. Pharo was one of the local painters, and Merle knew him. He couldn’t recall Lew ever speaking of this job, though.
Beneath the signature, there was a vertical list in smaller script—NO BARE FEET, NO PETS, NO FOUL LANGUAGE, NO SPITTING, NO CAMERAS! Merle hid his bike in the cattails at the edge of the parking lot and then took his jacket off and wrapped it around the camera. Darkness swamped the marsh as he took the splintered steps to the entrance. He opened the glass door, and when he closed it the sound echoed through the place. His footsteps set the floorboards to squealing down a dim hallway. Off to his right, he saw a pair of doors flung open on a large room lined on two sides by windows. A lit tea candle sat on every table, and beyond there was a dance floor and a low stage with a curtain behind it. As he entered, the bar came into view off to the left.
The Starlit Wood Page 16
