by Vivian Barz
The wheezing got louder. No, Eric realized, it wasn’t getting louder. It was closer . He unscrewed his eyelids and found the boy’s face so close that they could have kissed.
The boy leaned in closer. Wheeze-wheeze, kiss-kiss.
Eric squeezed his eyes shut.
Closer . . .
Closer . . .
So close now that Eric could detect two cracked lips brushing against his cheek like rotten twigs, frigid exhales raising the hairs on the back of his neck.
Suddenly, Eric thought of nothing. He became nothing. He was frightened beyond comprehension and sensation and reaction, frightened out of his very humanness . He simply existed, a skeleton covered with tissue, some guts mixed in between, nothing more.
“Tell . . . them . . .” Wheeze-wheeze. “Tell them . . .”
Eric flickered back to awareness: Head throbbing. Heart pounding. Nakedness. Scratching sliminess at his cheek. Spinning and spinning around in his mind, he whirred back into himself, eyes flashing open, horrified all over again when he locked eyes with the boy corpse.
It had to stop. It had to stop right now .
“Who?”
“Tell them . . .” Wheeze-wheeze.
“Who? Tell me who , God dammit!”
Wheeze-wheeze. “Find . . . Milton.”
The boy lifted a putrid hand and stroked the bone of his index finger across Eric’s forehead. He pressed his lips to Eric’s ear.
Sleep.
Eric fell slack as a sack of jelly. He melted away from the headboard, eyes rolling back into his head, a pool of a man spreading across the mattress. From the ground his mother’s quilt lifted, unfolding in the air above him. It dropped down softly over his body, tucking him in like a child.
He slept.
Upon waking, Eric found that his memory of the young undead visitor was foggy. He had an overall feeling of anxiety, his mind struggling to grip the foggy nightmare. He could recall it as horrific, yet its subject matter was fleeting, like trying to grasp a fistful of sand.
It came crashing down on him when he entered the kitchen and saw the writing that was literally on the wall . . . and the floor, cupboards, and ceiling. The name that had been repeated dozens of times, squirted in ketchup, mustard, salad dressing. Honey. Chocolate sauce. Doodled in a dense layer of coffee grounds spread across the countertop. Carved into a stick of butter that lay melting in the center of the floor. Every terrifying moment of the corpse-boy’s visit was remembered in a half blink: the quilt whooshing down off the bed, the rotten handprints on the sheet, the unholy smells, the clump of wormy dirt upchucked, the rotten, bony finger sliding over his forehead.
All because of one name: Milton.
Everywhere: MILTON, MILTON, MILTON.
Eric stood gaping at the mess, naked except for the sauces smeared up his arms. The television had turned itself on at full blast—or had he left it on and just not noticed? The news updated him that the FBI had unearthed five more children on Gerald Nichol’s farm. Images flashed from a helicopter’s bird’s-eye view: body bags, barking German shepherds, a swarm of FBI agents. A tally of the latest body count blinked in the corner of the screen like an athlete’s stats: 14. The media had now given the site a moniker: Perrick Death Farm.
Tell them , the boy had said. And now he’d shown Eric whom he meant.
And if he didn’t tell the authorities, then what?
It was a question Eric did not want answered.
Shivering, he rubbed the raw rope burns on his wrists (he had a matching pair on his ankles). He was at a loss as to what had caused them, but he was certain they’d surfaced sometime during the night—during the nightmare .
Eric couldn’t understand why any of this was happening to him, but even he, so dismissive of the otherworldly, was having a hard time rationalizing all the phenomena he’d experienced since his move to Perrick.
And then there were his prodromes.
Eric cocked his head to the side, frowning. What about my prodromes? he thought.
(Your recent so-called hallucinations have come on without them. No warning whatsoever. One minute you’re fine, the next: shit storm. Funny, that.)
Okay, sure, but which possibility seemed more likely: that a certified schizophrenic (he had papers to prove it, too, you’d better believe ) was seeing things that did not exist or that there was a greater conspiracy taking place in his very home?
Eric was also a Man of Science—hell, he was a science teacher . There were lots of folks out in the world who thrived on finding mystical origins to the mundane—attributing creaks in the house to the dead communicating, a dove flapping by as a sign of good fortune—but Eric was not one of them. If he started entertaining the possibility of
(What, psychic visions?)
such nonsense , he might as well pour his meds down the drain now and start walking through the house burning sage and waving crystals, speaking in tongues.
He briefly toyed with a wild theory that involved Jim and Maggie: they’d hired a child actor to pose as dead, broken in to his house while he’d been at work, and switched out his meds with an LSD-based hallucinogenic. Eric understood such ideas were ludicrous even as he was having them (pure idiocy, really) and were the sorts of paranoid delusions he would have entertained when schizophrenia had first afflicted him in his late teens. Furthermore, Jim and Maggie were the wrongdoers, so if anyone should be plotting a fantastical revenge, it was him .
It seemed there was no rational explanation for what was happening. Perhaps, Eric thought, such occurrences might be studied in a century or two by more enlightened humans. Maybe his so-called phenomena (for want of a better term) could easily be justified by mere cosmic occurrences that were beyond the world’s current grasp of physics. What if his visions were simply glitches in time, imprints created when the past or the future overlapped with the present? It all sounded very sci-fi, but it wasn’t so long ago that society had been in the dark about things like how gravity worked. Less than a few centuries ago, humans—scholars , no less—were finding hidden messages in the stars, dismissing earthquakes and floods as punishment from the gods. Times when a guy like Tony Hawk probably would have been burned at the stake in Salem if a Puritan had seen what he could do on a skateboard.
But Eric wasn’t out to solve any of the world’s great mysteries. He only wanted to put an end to the ghastly visions of dead kids and that god-awful horse. For his house to stop being vandalized, even if he was the one doing it while in an unfathomable fugue state. And even if it was all a manifestation of his schizophrenia, maybe going to the authorities would have a placebo effect, cure whatever the hell was ailing him.
CHAPTER 22
Susan checked the clock, saw that there was still plenty of time left until her shift started—after yet another fitful night of no sleep, even being at work early was preferable to her eerily quiet, empty home—and made her decision about the phone call.
She could land herself in a spot of trouble for contacting the morgue again, but she was so tired that she hardly cared, her biggest hope being that her inquiry would put her troubled mind at ease, provide some answers to the confusions that niggled at her brain. Ed and the FBI were being tight lipped as ever. If they weren’t going to let her into the loop, she’d have to find her own (extremely covert) way inside.
Medical Examiner Salvador Martinez picked up after the first ring.
“Your mouth sounds full,” she said. “Are you eating in the morgue again?”
“Guilty as charged. Chocolate croissant.”
Susan snickered. “You are so gross. Easily the grossest person I know.”
“Ha! Well, I’m proud that you think so.” Susan could hear the smile in his voice. “You’re lucky you didn’t call yesterday—was eating spaghetti. You don’t even want to know what I was up to then. A busload of tourists had rolled over on the highway—”
“You’re right. I don’t want to know,” Susan said hurriedly, in case he was thinking about expanding h
is story. She could picture Sal’s family at dinner, listening intently as he regaled them with narratives from his day: scooping brains and cracking ribs, sawing chests. It wasn’t that the Martinezes were gruesome people; they were just the sort of family who approached life with a wholesome exuberance Susan felt bordered on the macabre, as if they’d react to news about their house burning down with the same unflinching optimism they’d show when learning that they’d won the lottery. Boy Scouty to the extreme. Here was a man who wore family man like a badge of honor.
“So what can I do you for?”
“I’m . . .” Susan wasn’t quite sure how to phrase her request without making it obvious that she was sidestepping Ed and the FBI, though it was a bit too late for that now, anyway. She had already called the morgue a couple of times earlier in the week, not exactly pumping Sal for information but also not stopping him when he felt like divulging details that higher-ups would probably feel that she did not need to know. Information like how they’d found jacks and a ball in the pocket of one of the victims. Or the true number of bodies found. The news kept getting it wrong, lowballing the count.
Susan settled on being direct, though she kept her voice low, cognizant of potential eavesdroppers. “I’m calling about the Death Farm.” The Death Farm. Susan hated the term, but it was what everyone was now calling it.
“FBI still withholding?” Sal deduced.
“Well . . .”
“Yeah, they’ve pissed off a lot of people over here too. A couple of their guys came up from Frisco last night. What a pleasant bunch they are.” He sniffed. “Coming in here swinging their dicks around like they own the place. I may not have trained at Quantico, but I didn’t get my medical degree out of a Cracker Jack box either.”
Knowing that Sal was being excluded made Susan feel a little better about being left out of the loop herself, though she suspected much of his aggravation stemmed from him being a scientist and wanting his workstation laid out exactly as he favored. Medical examiners had a reputation for being territorial.
“What’s their issue?” Susan said.
“They think that we’re moving too slow—well, they used to think that, but their tune has changed fast now that they’ve seen the state of the bodies. Would it be unprofessional of me to say I told you so while giving them the finger?”
Susan chuckled, trying to imagine Sal ever doing such a thing. “And here I’d been thinking it was just me they hadn’t warmed to.”
“Warmed has nothing to do with it. I bet some of these guys would toss their own mothers in Millstone if it meant advancing their careers.”
“Ha.”
Sal cleared his throat. “What sort of information are you looking for?”
“I don’t want to put you out if you’re busy . . .”
“Suze, come on. Don’t you go playing coy with me. After what you did for my papa, you know I’ll always bend over backward for you.”
Susan flushed. She always did whenever Sal brought up the time she’d saved his father’s life. It had happened while she was off duty and in the park having her lunch. She’d just felt there was something bad happening to the older gentleman sitting quietly on the bench across from her. Sure enough, he was having a stroke. The medics later said that he would have died had she not performed CPR. “You don’t owe me a thing. It was nothing, Sal.”
“It wasn’t nothing to my papa. The man would be dead if it weren’t for you.”
“I just don’t want you to think that I’m trying to cash in on a favor.” To lighten the mood, she joked, “Maybe I call so often because I happen to find that deep Latin voice of yours enticing.”
“Ay ay ay, girl! Ha! That must be it!” Sal let out a throaty laugh. “Seriously, though, I’m always here for you, day and night.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, self-conscious. “So I’m wondering, Is there anything new? You still at twenty-one bodies? I know they’re still out on the farm searching.”
“Twenty-one kids , yes.”
“What do you mean, kids ? Are there other kinds of bodies too?”
“We found an adult. A woman.”
“Old? Young?”
“Our guesstimate: twenties to thirties. Decomp is severe. No signs of sexual assault—at least from what we can tell. The decomp is better on some of the bodies than it is on others, but the woman is one of the worst.”
“This awful case keeps getting weirder,” Susan said. “A child molester would probably have little interest in raping an adult woman, so I wonder where she came from. I’m glad for her, whoever she is—that she wasn’t raped, I mean. Do they know who she is? The FBI?”
“They haven’t a clue,” said Sal. “My guess is that she’s probably collateral damage, the mother of one of the kids Gerald snatched. She probably intervened during the kidnapping, and he bashed her for getting in the way. Her body is one of the older ones, so it’s going to take some time before we get an ID, if we ever do.”
“You said she’s older. What is the age range of the bodies?”
“You mean the age range of the kids themselves or how long they’ve been dead?” Sal asked, confused.
Susan took a second to think. “How about both?”
“Sure, but again, this is only our best approximation. The kids range in age from about five to eleven. The majority are in the five-to-eight range.”
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said, disgusted. “He certainly liked them young.”
Sal made a grunting sound in agreement. “As far as how long they’ve been dead, some for decades. Some are newer, though.”
“How much newer?”
“None are recent, but we think the latest ones died within the last seven to ten years. The FBI wants us to focus on identifying those kids first—the newer ones,” he said. “They want us to be thorough, but it’s been slow going.”
“Why’s that?”
“The biggest problem is that not every kid has been fingerprinted or gone to the dentist, especially the really young ones. So identifying them has been practically impossible. And there’s been a lot of decomp. Gerald didn’t seem to care too much about body preservation.”
“The first body—Overalls Boy,” Susan said. “You still think he was from the sixties?”
“That’s right,” Sal answered. “And we’re all in agreement that he’s still the oldest of the bunch.”
“Gerald’s first kill.”
“Mm-hmm.” Sal sounded tense. Susan could only imagine how horrific it would be, examining the bodies of so many dead children, especially for a man who had four of his own.
“Were any of the other bodies moved like we think Overalls Boy was?”
“No. He was the only one.”
“Odd,” Susan muttered and then paused. “Wait, you said ‘bashed her’ earlier. The woman. What did you mean?”
“Oh. We’ve got a cause of death for her, at least: blunt force trauma. We found grit embedded in the wound on the lower half of her skull, probably from a large stone, which is why I don’t think it was a premeditated attack. Usually with premeditation of this type you’d see the use of a tool—a hammer or baseball bat, something of that nature, which would result in a cleaner injury. The back of her skull was also fractured up near the crown, and we found the same pebbly grit up there, so the same object was used. Gerald really went to town on her—her mandible’s obliterated. Seems he was covering his bases. He must’ve been in a real rage, which makes me wonder where he’s taking these kids from.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if the woman is the mother of one or more of the kids, they must’ve been taken from a place fairly isolated. You couldn’t just roll up to a public park and beat a woman to death without somebody noticing.”
“But I doubt that he’s been doing the killing at the kidnapping sites, since he’s been burying them on his property. My guess is that he brings them home, has”—Susan swallowed down the bile that was rising in her throat—“his way with them, and then
kills them once he grows tired of them.”
“Good point, but that doesn’t explain the woman. Why would he bother bringing a woman all the way home? There’d be the chance that she could overpower him, make an escape. You’d think that it’d be easier to just kill her on-site.”
“And drive her dead body through town, with the kid still living, all the way back to his farm?”
“It’s a strange one, I know. Here’s something else—and here’s where it gets really weird. Two things, actually.”
“Do tell.” Susan’s stomach growled, upset from her morning diet of all coffee and no food. She reached into her desk and rooted around for the jar of Skittles she kept hidden—it was better than booze, she figured, though her dentist might disagree—in the bottom drawer. Breakfast of champions.
Sal’s voice grew quiet as he said, “But first you have to promise that you won’t share this information. I could get in a lot of trouble if anyone found out that I’ve been talking to you. The FBI would probably see to it that I was shitcanned.”
Susan could understand Sal’s trepidation, being at risk for a serious reprimanding herself. “I promise that I’ll keep my lips zipped about whatever you tell me. Have I ever blabbed before?”
“No, and that’s why I continue to trust you,” Sal answered. “Okay, the first thing is actually kind of good news. I guess good is the wrong word, but—”
“Focus, Sal!”
“None of the kids were sexually assaulted.”
Susan released the Skittles she’d been holding onto her desk. Her palm was rainbow colored. “What? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Let me get this straight: a child sex offender murdered those kids but didn’t touch them? What the hell was he doing with them, then?”
