The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  The face was still there.

  At first, he felt disbelief.

  Then the insanity of hope. Except when he stood to run toward the ghost, he knocked over the candle along with his glass of Laphroaig.

  By the time he’d managed to right both, the image of his long-dead daughter at the window had disappeared.

  Three

  andlelight cast gargoyle-like shadows that were barely visible on the black painted walls in the small room. The celebrants wore pointed hoods to conceal their faces. Anyplace else and any other time, this would have been a parody of the grotesque.

  But this was not playacting.

  Ten of them. Breathing and sharing hot, humid air, which added to the heightened sense of the forbidden.

  The celebrant, the priest, wore over his robe a chasuble with the Sigil of Baphomet—an inverted pentagram. Starting from the lowest point and reading counterclockwise around the five points of the pentagram were the Hebrew letters LVTHN that represented Leviathan, the beast of Satan.

  Beside him, the thurifer, who swung the chain connected to a metal canister that burned incense on a hot piece of charcoal. And beside him, the illuminator, who held a single lit candle for the reading of the texts.

  The remaining light came from candles at the altar, beside an upside-down cross. Near the upside-down cross was a chalice of blood, and beside that, a rough loaf of black bread.

  The scent of that burning incense added to the swelling sensation of the atmosphere, and the Black Mass began, as a gong sounded, and the celebrant intoned:

  In nomine Magni Dei Nostri Satanas. Introibo ad altare Domini Inferi.

  Madelyne Mackenzie was among the ten in the congregation at this, the witching hour. With them, she responded:

  Ad eum qui laefificat meum.

  The celebrant said:

  Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini Inferi.

  Then Madelyne and the others, in the hushed tones of heightened awareness:

  Qui regit terram.

  Madelyne knew what was coming next and kept her hooded head bowed as the words filled the room, seeming to swirl with the smoke of the incense.

  “Before the mighty and ineffable Prince of Darkness,” the priest said, his voice somehow soothing and rumbling and erotic all at once. “And in the presence of all the dread demons of the Pit, and this assembled company, I acknowledge and confess my past error. Renouncing all past allegiances, I proclaim that Satan-Lucifer rules the earth, and I ratify and renew my promise to recognize and honor him in all things, without reservation, desiring in return his manifold assistance in the successful completion of my endeavors and the fulfillment of my desires. I call upon you, my brothers, to bear witness and to do likewise.”

  With incense swirling through the candlelight in ghostlike vapors, the congregants shivered and exhaled in anticipation.

  That’s when Madelyne felt the vibration.

  It could have been interpreted by the others as a shared visceral reaction to the calling of demons to witness how the next moments of worship would unfold at the altar, but Madelyne knew differently.

  The vibration was nothing darkly spiritual.

  Instead, it was a cell phone. Strictly forbidden. And strapped to the softness of her inner thigh by a wide band, well hidden beneath the robe. Inconceivable that she would answer it.

  Each vibration sent a rush of adrenaline through her body. Intellectually, she knew no one in the room would notice. Emotionally, however, she suddenly felt as if she were the woman exposed on the altar.

  No one around her shifted or stirred, however, and she prepared herself for what held this small congregation in thrall.

  The impending ritual of sacrifice.

  Four

  wo homeless women found Jaimie Piper at the phone booth, just after midnight, only a half hour after she had ridden her bicycle away from the small bungalow that she knew would never be a home for someone like her.

  The tattered women, undernourished from years of drug abuse, looked like lepers.

  Jaimie backed away as the two of them tried to crowd her with zombielike certainty toward the massive pilings of the Santa Monica pier, where she had been killing time while waiting for Dr. Mackenzie to answer her phone. Jaimie had called the number four times already. Dr. Mackenzie had promised Jaimie that she would always answer no matter what. Except when no-matter-what had arrived, all Jaimie got was voice mail.

  And now she had these homeless women to worry about.

  They showed no sense of excitement as they closed in on her just beyond the beams of a security light; these creatures were souls in bodies that had long ago given up on the luxury of anticipated pleasure.

  They didn’t waste energy on the enjoyment of threats either. Hawks in the air shriek to startle their prey; vultures descend in unified slow circles to pluck and tear at their leisure.

  One of them cackled and lunged for Jaimie’s arm. Her clawing fingers grasped Jaimie’s bracelet, and she pulled hard, as if expecting a snap. But this bracelet was a band of curled, smooth metal. It slipped away from Jaimie so effortlessly, that the momentum of her pull startled the woman, and the bracelet flew from her fingers and bounced across the pavement, clanging against the side of the Dumpster.

  The bracelet didn’t drop but clung to the metal. Jaimie felt the hunter again, as if Evil had flowed from the man at her foster home into the second homeless woman, who began shaking as if she were having an epileptic fit. She screeched unintelligible words and her hands darted in erratic circles, aimed at Jaimie.

  At the woman’s touch, it seemed to Jaimie like a blue arc of electricity crossed between them.

  “You!” Jaimie said. “I know who you are!”

  The homeless woman was one of the people who Dr. Mackenzie had talked about, people who caused Jaimie’s horrible feelings of darkness. Jaimie hated those feelings. She hated Evil.

  Since her meetings with Dr. Mackenzie, Jaimie had begun to wear a crucifix on a chain around her neck. She held it up in front of her and began a chant, the way that Dr. Mackenzie had taught her to deal with Evil.

  Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli, sia santifico il tuo nome …

  The homeless woman gave an unearthly snarl and lurched forward to claw at Jaimie’s face. But she was old and uncoordinated and probably more than a little drunk. Jaimie ran as hard as she could into the woman’s body, catching a whiff of stench, and spun past her, sprinting to safety on the beach.

  From a safe distance, she watched. The homeless women were too broken to chase her.

  Eventually, they moved on, hyenas scuttling sideways back into the darkness.

  She waited until she knew they were gone, then returned to the Dumpster. The bracelet clung to it as if glued there. She pulled it loose and slipped it on her wrist.

  Evil was continuing to stalk her.

  She knew it. She didn’t know if she’d be able to make it through the night.

  Jaimie was shaking again.

  She wanted what she’d felt at the window of the small bungalow.

  Calm and peace. And the knowledge that Evil could not touch her there because of how good the man inside the house was.

  Five

  hen Crockett again saw his dead daughter peering through his window, the vision came with a rapping of knuckles against the glass.

  By then Crockett had managed to reduce the Laphroaig by another half, and he was quietly weeping, engaged in imaginary conversations with Ashley. A few times in this drunken monologue, he’d included Mickey, his five-year-old son, as if Mickey were there too. Introducing Mickey into the imaginary conversation would reduce Crockett to hiccups of weeping. So amazing to be the dad of a little boy, but why, God, couldn’t Crockett also still be the daddy of a little girl?

  When the knocking on the window sounded, Crockett had already set aside the photo album with reverence, leaving it open on the coffee table. He had a box for it, and in the morning, it would go into the box, and the box would go into the attic.
For another year.

  On the couch, as the candle’s wax spilled onto the floor, he had allowed himself to roam through memories, letting the tears spill without wiping them away, allowing the sensation of bitterness that he tried to keep at bay the rest of the year.

  Bitterness.

  Crockett had always believed that he was laid-back by inclination, but twelve years earlier, becoming the father of a beautiful girl had introduced him to the unpleasantness of a worry list. Worries that she’d run out on the street at the wrong time. Worries, for crying out loud, that if he didn’t clean the lint from the dryer screen, it might catch on fire and he’d be unable to rescue her from a burning house. The list was a long one, but well worth the trade-off—it was there because he loved his daughter beyond life.

  Nothing dramatic had taken her. Just an on-off switch in a protein in a cell somewhere in her body that triggered the insidious attack of cancer. All his worries had consisted of items that, if he was vigilant enough, he could prevent. He was her daddy, but he’d been helpless to protect his little girl from the real enemy.

  A year after she’d died, a sheet of newspaper had blown into Crockett’s face while he was sitting cross-legged on the sand at the beach, head bowed. Not in prayer. Anything but that. The sun was bright, and his eyes needed a break from staring at the ocean water. He was in that out-of-body state between consciousness and sleep, barely aware of sweat trickling between his shoulder blades.

  A gust had thrown the paper into his face with a snap and naturally startled him.

  A small headline had grabbed his attention as he began to crumple the page.

  “Baby falls from five-story balcony.”

  That’s what the media does, he thought. Draws us in with the misery of others. Who wouldn’t read a story about someone who backed up his SUV and ran over his own child in his own driveway? Something to cluck about by the water cooler, a way to feel righteous that you wouldn’t be that careless when it came to something as precious as your children.

  Or the media drew people in with that other great mesmerizer. Fear. Threatened them with embedded headline words like might, could, possible.

  There had been a time in Crockett’s life when he dismissed each of those threats with counter phrases. Might not. Could not. Possibly not. Back when he’d point out that the number of good deeds in a single day outnumbered the bad headline deeds by such an incredible percentage that it was only an illusion that the world was a horrible place to live and getting worse every year.

  On the beach, snapped out of drowsiness, he would have continued crumpling the paper, except for the smaller headline underneath. “Firefighters express disbelief at baby’s survival.”

  The back of the baby’s diaper had first caught on a spike of a high fence that surrounded the building. That slowed the fall enough that when the baby landed on his butt, the diaper, totally full, had literally exploded like an airbag, cushioning his impact.

  Others might have found it funny, the image of a shower of baby poop, with a happy baby unscathed in the center of the mess. Others might have found a measure of joy, imagining a relieved mother lifting the baby to gives thanks for divine intervention.

  Not Crockett. The article had just made him bitter. What were the odds? First that the spike snagged the back of the diaper, instead of impaling the poor child. And then the baby landing butt first.

  This capriciousness was a result of external actions imposed on the child. How about the capriciousness of a gene programmed from conception to lurk for years inside a little girl—his little girl—until it begins a blossom of death? Someone explain that.

  Crockett didn’t believe in heaven or any of the other platitudes; laughing and crying with Ashley in the altered reality of drunkenness was as close as he could come to accepting any resurrection of his daughter.

  Mournfully drunk and immersed in memories, he took another sip of scotch. With his eyes closed, he saw Ashley outlined against the fireplace in her much-too-small flannel Dora the Explorer pajamas she wouldn’t give up. He listened to Ashley lisp her way through a Christmas song, during that all-too-short period between losing her front teeth and growing new ones.

  Then came the knocking at the front window that sent Ashley hopelessly out of reach. Crockett’s first reaction was drunken fury at the intrusion, an anger that drove him to his feet and sent him to the window with the candle in his hand.

  But what he saw in the light of the flame was Ashley—for the second time that evening—her face framed by the long, straight hair that he had once enjoyed watching his wife brush.

  The main level of the house was set above a crawlspace, so in the window the girl’s shoulders were barely above the bottom of the window frame. Feeling like he was spinning, Crockett knelt, so that his eyes were level with the girl’s. He stared, trying to shake off the juxtaposition of this face against the one he’d been clinging to. He took a swig of his scotch, nearly emptying the bottle.

  This time the face didn’t vanish.

  Instead, the face stared back. Blurry. And he finally realized the long, straight hair belonged to someone else.

  “Mr. G, it’s me, Jaimie.”

  Jaimie Piper. One of his ABC students from a class of seventeen whom he had prodded and cajoled and defended from the bureaucracy for the previous ten months. Crockett taught the ABC kids in the upper-elementary school. Twelve-year-olds. Adaptive Behavior Classroom. A labeled classroom filled with kids with labels. ADD, ADHD, and the rest of the initials that were in fashion these days.

  No way would he share his evening with Jaimie, Crockett told himself. It was the end of the school year. His responsibilities went only so far.

  “I’m scared,” Jaimie said, her voice muffled by the glass. She brought her hands up, placed her palms against the window in supplication. “I need you.”

  Six

  rockett opened the front door, and Jaimie bolted inside and hugged him.

  This was a first. Jaimie was not a hugger. She was a loner, someone who shunned others as much as they shunned her.

  Crockett knew Jaimie’s file. Foster kid. Lived in a home with seven other foster kids. The female foster parent was a tiny middle-aged woman who seemed to vibrate with stress. Crockett had never met the husband, who was unemployed, but given the thirty-five bucks per day per foster child payment from the state, Crockett couldn’t help but cynically wonder about the numbers, since the yearly revenue for housing the kids was over a hundred grand. Lots of room to skimp on the kids in a situation like this. In an essay on where she lived, Jaimie had described a big, old three-story house with narrow hallways, peeling wallpaper, and lots of tiny rooms.

  The more important part of Jaimie’s file, however, was the psychological assessment. Her parents had been killed in a car accident when she was only months old. She had spent her entire life in the system.

  Given all that was stacked against her, Jaimie had been trouble for him only once. September. On the playground, one of the boys had taken her bracelet, run away with it. She’d chased the boy to the chain-link fence, where a homeless person outside the school yard had begun howling at Jaimie to taunt her, clinging to the fence to try to get at her. She smashed the homeless man’s fingers with a baseball bat.

  Crockett’s big triumph with Jaimie had been introducing her to reading. She’d gone from nearly illiterate to bookworm, and Crockett was convinced it happened because of the simple argument that he’d presented to Jaimie. Books are friends, there whenever you are lonely or afraid. Only trouble was that fiction seemed to feed Jaimie’s near pathological urge for solitude.

  “Jaimie, Jaimie,” Crockett said. He was sure his words were slurring. Just thinking that phrase was difficult. Schlure that I am schlurring. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said slowly.

  Drunk or not, Crockett was acutely conscious that he was a thirty-five-year-old man, and a twelve-year-old girl was now alone with him. A student. In his house. At night. Careers of any kind ended because of situ
ations like this.

  “I didn’t want to come here,” Jaimie said, still clinging to Crockett. “But I was too afraid to sleep in a park.”

  Crockett gently disengaged her, tried to draw a deep breath. It only made him queasy.

  “Sit,” Crockett said. “Sit. Sit. Sit.”

  Jaimie stepped back and looked up at him quizzically.

  Crockett could only guess that he had just schlurred the command to sit.

  “On the couch,” Crockett said, confused and frustrated. He enunciated the sibilant “s” as carefully as he could. “Sch.… Um, sit on the couch.”

  The correct thing to do was to send Jaimie on her way. But a frightened child? Even one who spooked herself with too vivid an imagination?

  “Sit, sit, sit,” Crockett muttered to himself.

  Jaimie moved to the couch, and Crockett wobbled the short—mercifully short—distance to the kitchen. Advantage of a small house.

  A glass of water later, Crockett felt more composed. Not even close to sober, but composed. He returned to the living room. Jaimie was sitting as small as possible on the couch. She was wearing jeans and a dark hoodie, and she’d drawn her knees up inside the hoodie, stretching it, with her arms inside the front kangaroo pocket, tight around her knees.

  Jaimie didn’t hear Mr. G come back to the couch. He caught her looking at the open photo album. She flipped it closed, the way it was when he’d left her on the couch.

  Mr. G sat on the couch with her but gave her lots of room.

  She really liked Mr. G. He was nice, but you couldn’t fool him. He let you get away with stuff that didn’t matter but didn’t let you get away with stuff that did matter. Mr. G had made her start reading books, and it turned out he was right. Books were like friends and books were cool. Especially Black Beauty. It was one of her favorite books. And Anne of Green Gables. Black Beauty because of the horse, and Anne of Green Gables because Anne didn’t have parents either. It would be cool if Mr. G adopted her, but that would never happen. And all the kids in class knew that Mr. G had a girl who died and it had messed him up. Jaimie had just seen the girl in the photos. Long hair like Jaimie’s, but the face of the girl in the photo looked like it had never been touched by anything dark. Jaimie knew her own face was different. Jaimie knew a person had to always be on guard. It made her instantly sad for Mr. G, thinking that a girl as nice as the one in the photos was dead. She’d seen the tears on his face when he opened the door. It wasn’t hard to guess he’d been looking at the photos and thinking about her.