Plaintive, almost a wail—
“Little boy . . . ! Please! Don’t run away! You mustn’t . . . !”
She stumbled forward, tripping on a root, regained her balance, rushing to the left, and then to the right, heedlessly, entering a wooded area so thick with trees it appeared to be a dense forest. And all the while, her voice was strained between a shout and a whisper—
“Where are you . . . ? Little boy . . . ? Little boy . . . ?”
She rushed on, quite as if she knew where to look, exactly where to find him. Yet her movements were truly haphazard and arbitrary: this way and that, or at best, instinctively tropistic, drawn to where any darkness thinned out, where the glow from some distant lamp managed, however dimly, to reach and illuminate an area.
A patch of mud sucked off one shoe; she didn’t notice until moments later, then knowing she could never find it, simply kicked off the other rather than stumble lopsidedly, risking a fall at every step,
The boy was nowhere, and even though she stopped dead still every minute or so, she heard not a sound. Yet she had the knowledge, the conviction that he was close by and that he heard her, and listened. So the litany continued . . .
“Little boy . . . ? Where are you . . . ?”
The last word caught in her throat and she leaned against a tree in a spasm of hard coughing. When she could breathe again, and speak and press on, her tone, now edged with hysteria, grew insistent and sharp. . . .
“No one . . . can stay in the park all night . . . Not you . . . Not anyone . . . Especially not a child . . . ”
A tangle of branches caught her, pulling her back: almost angrily she wrenched herself free, shouldered her way through a misty patch of pale light, and found herself, with surprise, in a kind of valley, a somewhat round, open clearing, towered with rocks that were a wall on all sides.
She paused, breathing quickly, suddenly dizzied and sick. Her hair was so wetly scrolled about her head she might just now have risen from the depths and broken the surface of the sea; she was muddied and plastered with leaves; her shoes were gone, as well as both books and the notes from the lecture. Only her carryall remained; this seemed infinitely precious, as if it contained the secret that would save her, and she hugged it wetly to her heart.
What next? What next to do? She was lost. Absolutely. Directionless. The child was gone. She had no sense of his “being there” any longer. Or perhaps he was, but her growing fright had crowded out the intuition, blurred the initial inexplicable “feel” of his being near her.
Well, to go on searching was certainly senseless—even more so than the complex of insane desires and decisions that had brought her to this place and this moment. She would have to find her way back, simply wander about until she discovered a path or a road, saw a glimmer of light, somewhere, anywhere.
But before she turned, she couldn’t resist one last pathetic try, a final insanity . . . whispered, strangely melodic, like a song that puts a child to sleep, or gently wakes him—
“Little boy . . . ? Have you no place to go . . . ?”
Tremulously—
“Please, I want to help you. . . .”
Imploring—
“Let me find you. . . .”
Begging—
“Come to me. . . .”
He had parted a thick clump of bushes and was squatting close to the ground, half hidden by foliage.
Her paralysis was instant, so shocked was she to have suddenly turned her head and seen him there. Yet, curiously, having found him, or he her, the corners of her mouth turned upward in slow pleasure while the gooseflesh seemed to begin in the column of her rigid spine, flooding outward, covering her shoulders and arms, racing down her thighs.
She felt the nipples of her breasts tighten and grow hard; of this she was aware with a kind of amazed horror, knowing that somewhere in the panic of this night’s puzzle was a kind of submerged sexuality she could in no way decipher.
The boy’s eyes were quite as before: steadfast, intent, glowing, but this time the lax mouth hung open slightly, and she could hear the sounds of his breathing: quick, short, light pants, as if he’d been running hard.
And seeing him so: crouched, openmouthed, breathing rapidly, staring, no longer shy or timid, his insolence even clearer, she felt the edges of the design begin to assert itself. She had not wandered, bewildered, uncertain, lost, into the very heart of the wildest, most isolated part of the park; he had led her; she had followed!
Why? Why?
She watched the boy’s chin lift toward her, and just as the nose widened, sniffing the air like an animal that had just gotten the scent of its prey, there was a soft rustle behind her.
She knew what it was before she saw it.
Another child!
Older. The skin darker; even more beautiful than the first. As naked as he. But a girl, with a flood of black, shining hair that reached to her waist; half shadowed, half silver in the wet, leafy darkness, brazenly full-viewed, but like the boy crouched, poised, alert, ready for instant flight.
Another rustle—to the left of the girl—and the woman’s head spun just in time to see a third child, this one smaller, as shy as a doe and moving as quickly, now here, now there, as if it were actually leaping, the eyes glinting through the leaves, the light skin flashing.
Like an instant stinging rash, the gooseflesh again prickled the woman’s body, head to toe, for she could finally actually see and count five children; five: all graceful and strong, all shaggy-haired, wet, inexplicably naked; and all— what?—drugged, mad, possessed, rabid! No word would suffice, no word explain.
They had formed a wide, crude circle around her, and were now in constant movement, their sounds initially so subtle and accidental she had to strain to hear: rustlings, broken twigs, running steps, the suck of mud when a foot slipped in too deeply. But underneath all this were sounds that began to dizzy her senses, warp her awareness of time and space, as if by simply letting her mind go, melt, dissolve away, or atomize, shatter itself into nothingness, she could escape the magnitude of the nightmare; and these sounds were: ripples of faint laughter, coughs, grunts, growls, yelps, snarling.
The bag she’d been hugging to her heart slipped free, falling at her feet. Her arms hung useless. Her eyeglasses were thoroughly misted now, filling her world with silver and fog, but she counted this a blessing as she began to turn slowly, revolve like a giant figurine on a mechanical base.
A voice half choked, thinned out, and wild passed from her mouth like a medium’s control.
“Little boy . . . !”
Then a great shredding sound burst from her throat, imploring, begging piteously, acknowledging absolutely herself as victim—
“Children . . . ! Children . . . ! Please . . . ! Please . . . !”
But they were already in the air, hurtling down upon her from the blackness on all sides, so simultaneous and precise, the attack seemed the attack of one single, great animal.
It was as stunning as birth, and so intolerable in concept, in actuality, that mind, body, nerves simply refused to believe or react.
She felt nothing. But as consciousness slipped away, she heard a fantastic variety of mingled grunts, growls, snorts, and the frenzied, ravenous tearing and eating of her flesh.
DAWN
THE DAWN, after a severe summer storm, is sometimes especially beautiful.
And when the wind shifts to the north, as it did, if briefly, on this particular day, the air, so maligned in New York City, can become as clear and bracing as anyplace in the world you can name.
By afternoon, the temperature again crowded the 90’s, and the humidity, so laden with smog it was a visible sea, flooded slowly back, but for a few blessed hours just after daybreak, the air was actually 59°, extraordinary for July, and the torrential rain the night before combined with winds of gale force, had washed Central Park clean. Its midsummer carpet of brown and yellow leaves had been swept away, leaving a soft, fresh color that seemed spring-new, sp
ring-green.
A fat young jogger in gray sweatshirt and ragged shorts found the body—though, finding it, he did not call it by that name simply because the word in no way occurred to him. Beaded with sweat, gulping for air, he merely looked down at a few mysterious, repellent, and quite inexplicable “objects” that were strewn across his usual path. He paused just long enough to realize that he was somehow seeing more than he really cared to, and then moved on.
Some minutes later a cruising police car nosed over a hill, looking so much like a film in slow motion, the jogger knew its occupants must be drinking coffee. He waved as it drew abreast and stopped it, stammering a bit in his perplexity to describe just what it was he had found, but at least telling the two men that there was “something” over there—pointing and locating the area exactly—that “I think you ought to see.”
Coffee, indeed, was the preoccupation of the moment, along with a bagful of Horn & Hardart whole-wheat doughnuts, but one of the officers, clown-mouthed with white powered sugar, nodded okay, meaning, presumably, that they’d investigate; then, before they could detain him with questions he probably couldn’t answer anyway, the jogger ran off. He heard a vague, full-mouthed shout as he disappeared into a wall of bushes at the side of the road, but ignored it, pressing quickly on.
Staring down with considerable amazement, neither of the two officers initially saw it as a “body” either, and would have been at a few moment’s loss for words to write in their notebooks what would in any way approximate the indescribable mass of mangled flesh and bared bone, mud, blood, crushed leaves, exposed roots, even bark-stripped branches that lay, indeed, were scattered about before them.
That there was a torso—a broken birdcage of ribs—was quickly evident however. And limbs of sorts. And something, God help them, round and hard, half-sucked down in a pocket of rosy mud, that looked distinctly like a skull with a few remaining shreds of flesh and hair.
If there was any real doubt, and doubt persisted irrationally simply to inhibit as long as possible the full shocked pain of the truth, six yards away, porcelain-white, exquisite, washed clean by the rain, and completely bled of its color, was a small human hand. It was obviously a woman’s hand, the nails frosted a pale pink, two fingers ringed, all of it gently curled, like petals, around the shattered, crushed remains of a pair of thin, gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
A uniformed governess with a sleeping baby in her arms counted seven, no eight police cars. Eight! Besides the ambulance and, good heavens, four or five other ordinary cars.
“What is it?! What happened?!”
Her voice was shrill, insistent, the accent thickly British, and her hungry eyes virtually prodded and poked at the thin, shirtless man with the bicycle, the nearest bystander to her in the crowd compelled to stand behind the wooden horses of a crude police barrier.
The man shrugged without bothering to look at her.
“I don’t know.” And after an irritating pause: “Somebody got killed.” He seemed only idly curious. “Somebody’s always getting killed.” He either laughed or snorted faintly. “In this park!? At night!? Are you kidding!?”
It was a curious way to express what the governess understood to be a reference to the dangers of Central Park after dark, but she was a visitor to the city and still not used to the many oddities of expression she encountered.
The man’s gaze, which she followed intently with her own, was focused on at least a half a dozen uniformed policemen and others who now, almost desultorily, since the principal search was over, kept pacing back and forth in a clearly aimless, haphazard manner, kicking through grass and underbrush.
“They kept finding things for a while.”
The governess could barely wait.
“Things?”
Now he turned, looking at her and the baby’s sweet sleeping face without even a flicker of expression.
“Yes.”
The corners of his eyes wrinkled ever so slightly as his leg swung over his bicycle.
“—I don’t know what.”
And as he rode off—
“Bloody things.”
A teenage girl who, listening, had moved close to them during their conversation, knew all about the “bloody” things they kept finding and volunteered the information readily.
“Parts of a body. You know—! Hands. Legs. Like that. All chewed up. That’s what I heard one man say.”
Incredulously—
“All what?”
“Chewed up.”
The girl made a growling, grinding bite over a thick wad of pink bubble gum visible between her front teeth, enjoying herself.
“—Like something wild had attacked her; maybe some animal from the zoo. The zoo’s not far. See—” Pointing—“That flag. That’s the top of the main administration building. But all the big animal cages are there too, outside. And every once in a while one of them gets loose, a gorilla or something, or somebody gets hurt, like getting a hand chewed off from getting too near to a cage.”
She glanced idly at the sleeping infant, her tone matter-of-fact, her expression really quite dull, without discernible mischief.
“Once a baby got eaten. Truly. Snatched right out of its mother’s arms through the bars of the cage. I was there. So I know.”
The girl’s eyes seemed as clear as still water, truth sparkling like sunlight. “That time it was a bear. They’re the worst, you know; and the quickest to escape. They’re smart and walk on their hind legs like a man, and grab you and hug you to death before they eat you.”
The story was much too fascinating to let go without hearing the end.
“But how could a bear escape?”
The child’s eyes became wide with absolute belief.
“Oh they do! You read about it all the time. In the papers. Don’t you? I certainly do. Perhaps you don’t turn to the right section. You must look under Animals in the local news index. Or “Animal Escapes . . .” that’s usually the heading. I’ve read about bears many times. I’ve seen accounts of snakes getting loose, too. Surely you’ve seen those! —Huge boa constrictors. They travel through the sewers, you know, and come up right in the apartment where you live. It’s true. You could walk right into your bedroom—tonight!—and there, before you know it, is a big boa constrictor arching up with its jaws unhinged, ready to eat you alive!”
All of which was just a bit too much, and with a weak smile the governess moved quickly away, having covered the baby’s ears for fear some of this unwarranted gore might slip dangerously into the child’s slumbering subliminal.
Sewers and snakes and unhinged jaws! It was not for nothing that the American people were judged to be among the most bloodthirsty and violent on earth!
Isolating herself, she remained content merely to watch—though there seemed now very little left to see. Very few bystanders remained, possibly because the ambulance had long since left—with its obscure and carefully covered remains, whole or parts. Whatever was on the stretcher, it certainly wasn’t body-shaped!
Most of the police cars had left; indeed, the last two were now bumping over a curb, ready to take off.
A doctor remained—at least a white-uniformed somebody, writing in a little book. And over there—why hadn’t she noticed them before?—resting in the shade of a huge overhang of umbrella-shaped rock—were two men whom she surmised to be detectives. What else? Who else? They had that look, and so American: with their ties off, both with their jackets removed.
So untidy! So unlike Scotland Yard!
One was quite young, with blond hair, long and hideously unkempt, but that presumably was the fashion—even for detectives apparently. But she was being unfair. Surely it was the soggy heat, and all that prowling he must have been doing. He was soaked with mud from the knees down and the front of his shirt was brown with dried blood, from the corpse no doubt.
The other detective was a much older man, and had managed to stay cleaner. He was short-haired and sucked on an unlit pipe under a thick, sandy musta
che during moments of silence in his dialogue with the other.
A sudden thought struck the governess. She could lip-read! Once years ago she had been governess to two mute, deaf children, and it was necessary that she go to school with them to learn.
She moved closer, as near as the police barricade allowed, and though the distance was great, narrowed her eyes and concentrated.
The young man with the wild hair was speaking and she watched his mouth closely:
“. . . It isn’t as if I really cared; I mean—Hell, Jim— It isn’t prestige or anything like that, and it isn’t jealousy.” The lips were still for a moment. “—Though I think some of the guys think so.”
Staying with the young man, she missed “Jim’s” reply, but it had been brief, whatever it was.
“—Well, let them think so. The only thing that’s really bothering me is the money, and the fact that I did have seniority. Maybe only two weeks, but so what? I was in the department, and working, two weeks before he was. That’s seniority. And another thing . . .”
They weren’t talking about the crime at all! Something dreadfully mundane: work, a job, seniority. How very disappointing!
But anyway, Bonnie Dee was awake; and hungry; and setting up a lusty cry.
Enough of these peculiar Americans and their dismembered corpses in Central Park!
It was time for home, and a bottle.
“Yes, sweetheart? Yes, love?”
THE DETECTIVES
LIEUTENANT JAMES SCHRADER had given up two-packs-a-day smoking and was in his third tortured week of total abstinence. In virtually useless compensation, he had chewed yards of sickly gum, sucked with smacking vigor countless pounds of hard candy, eaten everything within reach, and lately, since nothing eaten really seemed to work, had begun taking occasional lung-deep whiffs of strong ammonia from a small vial he carried. Actually, this helped most of all, until some lunkheads on the force were sure he was sniffing coke. This was such an inconvenience and an embarrassment finally, that it was easier to give up the ammonia than keep explaining or sticking the vial under some creep’s nose.
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