The Laughterhouse

by Paul Cleave

  “No, no,” Stanton says.

  “Which one?”

  “I can’t.”

  “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this,” Caleb says, and it’s true. “So be it.”

  He picks up his knife. He walks over to Katy. He has to get it done. If he holds back, if he lets the doubts creep in, then he may not do what needs to be done. He has no room left for humanity, all he has room for is the plan, and if he pulls back now it’s not going to happen. He has to focus on that. He looks at Katy. He can’t think of her as Katy Kitten. He has to look at her as a tool. But God how she reminds him of his own daughter, the same way they. .

  Stop it! Shit like that is only going to make it harder!

  He moves toward Melanie instead.

  Munchkin Mel. The same thing, really. .

  “Please, please don’t,” Stanton says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I am, I really am.”

  “It doesn’t help.”

  “Don’t do this! Fuck, fuck, don’t do this. You don’t have to do this!”

  He crouches down over Melanie. “Choose somebody, Doctor, make it as painless as possible.”

  “I can’t,” Stanton screams. “Don’t you see that? If it were you, if you’d had three children and had to decide, you couldn’t have done it either,” he says, and his words are quick and hopeful, as if there is enough logic in the idea to make Caleb stop doing this.

  And it is a good point. But Caleb isn’t here to debate good points. He’s here to make Stanton suffer.

  “Choose,” he says.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “I agree. It’s impossible, but you still have to choose. One dies now, or all three die now. Focus on that and it becomes less impossible.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Maybe. It still doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t give me a name in the next five seconds you’re going to start seeing a lot of blood.”

  “I-”

  “One,” Caleb says.

  “Wait-”

  “Two,” he says, and he remembers giving his daughter similar countdowns, only he’d give her till the count of three to tidy up whatever mess she had just made or he’d put her in time-out. He’s giving Stanton two extra seconds. He’s being generous.

  “Octavia. I choose Octavia.”

  Caleb feels his stomach drop and his throat tighten. He straightens up and stares at Stanton and slowly shakes his head. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted, but I’m certainly surprised.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Why don’t you like her?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Stanton says, looking down.

  “Yes you did. You wouldn’t have decided so quickly.” Caleb lifts his hands into the air, the knife catching the light coming through the dirty windows and sending a white spot across the wall like a shooting star. “You still had three seconds left. See, I think you knew all along who you were going to choose. Why is the decision so easy for you to make?”

  “Are you so fucked in the head that you think this is easy for me? That it could be easy for anybody?”

  Caleb scratches at his face. He ignores the jab and thinks about Octavia. He waggles the knife at Stanton and the shooting star races back and forth. Then he shakes his head. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “I mean, how you chose somebody so quickly. Less sense is how you chose the baby.”

  “None of it makes sense. How about you choose, huh? How about you go and have a family and I make you choose who dies first.”

  “Explain it to me,” Caleb says. “I used to be a math teacher. I understand about statistics. You must have weighed up values of life or something. Tell me. Or is it really that simple? Did you just choose the one you like the least?”

  “I’ve done what you wanted,” Stanton says, looking up and looking defiant. “Are you happy? That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asks. “You sick, twisted fuck.”

  “Happy? I’m not doing this to be happy,” Caleb says. “Look at you, you should be ripping your own arms off to try and get to me.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “I thought it’d have been harder than this for you.”

  “You’ve made your point, Caleb. You really have. Anything you do to my kids is just you getting off on hurting people.”

  “Why don’t you like her? Is that why she doesn’t have her own nickname?”

  “What?”

  “You want something to match the others, right? How about Obsolete Octavia?”

  “You’re wrong. I love her the same as the others.”

  “Obsolete Octavia. I like it. And it does seem you have no use for her. However in this case you’re going to have to choose somebody else. When I said before I was going to start cutting off fingers, did I mention Octavia’s name?”

  “Yes,” the doctor says, not looking so sure.

  “Actually no. I would never cut the fingers off a baby. What is wrong with you?”

  “With me? How can you-”

  “Choose somebody else.”

  “What?”

  “You have to choose between the other two girls.”

  The doctor stares at him, his eyes wide open-he’s hearing what Caleb is saying, Caleb is sure of it, he’s just not understanding it. Then he blinks quickly a few times as if trying to wake from a really bad dream. “You can’t do that,” he says, sounding like a kid in a playground defending himself to a teacher. “That isn’t what you said before, you can’t just change your mind like that. I made my decision! It’s not fair!”

  “It’s an unfair world, Doctor, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Now, I’m not going to cover old ground with you, but you need to make another decision. I say you’ve got about ten seconds. I think that’s probably a better time than two minutes. It makes it more instinctual.”

  “No, no, you can’t make me decide something like that.”

  “You decided two minutes ago that it should be Obsolete Octavia.”

  “No, no, you can’t do this.”

  Caleb crouches back down. He grabs Melanie’s hand and spreads her fingers, then puts the knife against the top of her index finger. He looks over at Stanton, who is not only crying now, but who has gone bright red. He inhales loudly, snorts, then strings of bloody snot explode from his nose, hanging down over his lips and sticking to his chin. His hands are bound behind him. He keeps trying to wipe at his face with his shoulder. Veins are sticking out in his neck.

  “Choose, Stanton.”

  “Okay, okay damn it. Give me a minute.”

  “You have five more seconds. Tick tock, Doctor.”

  “Okay, okay. Fuck,” he says, crying harder now. “Choose me,” he says.

  Caleb nods. He had expected that answer. Only it was the answer he expected first.

  “Okay.”

  “What? Oh, Jesus, Jesus, no,” and the words are barely out of his mouth before he manages, just like Octavia, to wet himself. “Please don’t kill me.”

  “You’re pathetic,” Caleb says.

  “Please-”

  “Tell you what, Stanton, if you really mean it I’ll kill you right now and let your children go. Is that what you want?”

  “I. . I don’t want to die.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m just kidding.”

  “You’re kidding? You’re not going to hurt anybody?”

  “Oh, no, I’m not kidding about your daughters, just about you. So save your breath begging for your life. That would be too easy. You have to go through what I went through fifteen years ago.” He has to experience it all. He has to understand loss.

  Right through to the end.

  That’s the point of all of this.

  Stanton looks confused, and bolstered by the fact Caleb doesn’t want to kill him he becomes more insistent. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, it’s that easy, just kill me and let my children go. You don’t want to hurt them.”

  “You’re such a slimy bastard,” Cole says.


  “They’ve done. .” Stanton says, and then hiccups loudly as the words get jammed in his throat and die. He makes a high-pitched squealing sound as he panics to replace them, and then they come again. “They’ve done nothing to you. Nothing.”

  “Just like my family did nothing to you.”

  “I didn’t kill your family! James Whitby killed your family!” he cries, using his playground voice again.

  Caleb can hear Octavia crying louder outside. She’s probably distressed at the sounds she’s hearing from in here. Distressed at being obsolete. He’s going to have to feed her soon. “James Whitby was a loaded gun,” he says, “one you fired into a crowd.”

  “It’s not like that. You don’t understand, I was only doing. .”

  “Come on, Stanton, stop trying to defend it. You’re a coward. You proved that by choosing to kill a baby before you’d take your own life.”

  “I’m choosing to die now.”

  “I’m going to cut Melanie’s fingers off now,” Caleb says. “Maybe then you’ll see I’m not fucking around.”

  The next words out of Stanton’s mouth are muffled as he squirms across the floor, fighting with the bindings, his face pressing into the concrete as he talks, the side of his cheek getting grazed. He inches his way closer. Caleb admires the determination. “Stop,” he tells him, and when the doctor doesn’t stop, he tells him again, this time more forcefully. “Stop!”

  The doctor stops. He looks up at Caleb, and he keeps the knife over Melanie’s fingers.

  “Caleb, listen to me, listen to me. You’re becoming the thing you hate. You’ll become the man who killed your daughter.”

  “Not just my daughter,” Caleb says, “my entire family. And it’s too late-I’ve already become him. Pat yourself on the back, Doctor, you’re the reason why.”

  “No, no, you’re worse than him. And, in this world of yours, if your son was still alive, would that mean somebody who loved me would be allowed to kill him for what you’re doing?”

  “What do you mean?” Caleb asks.

  “I think you know. When all this is over, are you okay with somebody who loved me or my children coming along and hurting others you love?”

  “There is nobody left that I love.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “No, the point is you helped to take away everybody I loved.”

  Stanton is shaking his head. “It wasn’t like that. And you’re still avoiding what I told you, and that’s because you see it. If you hurt me, it will never end-at least that’s the way it would be in your world. Somebody I love will kill somebody you love, and it will go on forever.”

  “Like I said, there is nobody I love.”

  “Goddamn it! Why don’t you get it?”

  But Caleb does get it, it’s just that it doesn’t change anything. It can’t. It’s not about the future, it’s about the past; it’s not about hypotheticals, it’s about payback, about an eye for an eye. It’s about being old-school biblical. He holds Melanie’s index finger apart from the others, puts the tip of the knife into the floor and slowly lowers the edge of the blade so it touches the skin.

  “Wait!” Stanton screams, his voice sounding raw. “Just wait. Please, please, wait-”

  “You took too long to decide,” Caleb says. “Somehow I knew you would. I sympathize with your situation, Doctor, I really do, but you’re not acting like a man who believes what I’ve been telling him. There’ll be some resistance, probably a hard crunch, but it’ll happen. I hope I can get right through in one cut. I don’t want to keep hacking at the same fingers over and over. Let’s hope she doesn’t wake up.”

  Stanton, hysterical now, thrashes up and down, he looks like some 1980s meth addict trying to break dance. “Wait, for the love of God, let me think!”

  “No,” he says, curious as to why there is much more anger from Stanton now that he has to choose one of the other girls. However he’s running out of time to be too curious. He needs to get this done.

  “I’ll fucking kill you if you touch her, I swear, I swear I’ll kill you.”

  “We’ll see,” Caleb says, “but by then your daughters are going to be dead.”

  He pushes down a little further. The blade starts to indent her finger, but there is still no blood. Just a fraction more and a bit of a forward and back movement too, then the bleeding will begin. He doesn’t want to do it, but what choice does he have? A puddle of snot and tears are pooling beneath Stanton’s face, dirt covering his skin, speckles of blood from his grazed cheek. And still he thrashes up and down, perhaps only a few more seconds from having a heart attack.

  “I. . I can’t. I fucking can’t.”

  “You can, you’ve proven that already. Let’s see how many fingers we have to get through before you remember that. You’re condemning them both, Stanton, when all you have to do is give me a name.”

  “Wait!”

  “Simple arithmetic. It’s all about the greater good.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Now, Stanton, now,” he shouts. “Who dies? Who the fuck-”

  “Wait-”

  “-dies because I’m going to-”

  “Please, please, just wait-”

  “-start cutting, I swear I’m going to fucking cut them all into-”

  “Don’t!”

  “-little pieces, I’ll cut them all day long until-”

  “No, no.”

  “-there’s nothing of them left. Let’s start right now!”

  “Melanie,” the doctor says, crying, blubbering like a baby. “Please, please, God forgive me, God forgive me for what I’ve done,” he says.

  Caleb takes the pressure off the knife. “Good choice,” he says, and he steps away from the girl and tucks the knife into the side of his pants. “A very good choice. I’d have made the same one. Get rid of the one with the smart mouth.”

  Stanton doesn’t answer. Caleb reaches him and swings a foot into his stomach. The doctor grunts, then Caleb rolls him onto his back. “This will help,” he says, and he jams a funnel into the doctor’s mouth and pokes five sleeping pills down it. They hit the back of the doctor’s throat, then Caleb follows it with water and another punch to the stomach. The doctor swallows them. Caleb takes away the funnel.

  The doctor coughs and struggles to compose himself, and when he does he sounds short of breath. “You’re. . you’re worse than Whitby,” he says. “Whitby was, was sick,” he says, puffing. “He had genuine mental problems, what you’ve. . you’ve got inside you is, is evil. Whitby couldn’t help himself, but you, you’re making decisions to delib. . deliberately hurt people. Whitby didn’t think about that, he didn’t think anybody would mind what he was doing. He just didn’t get the world. They should never have let you out.”

  “Maybe,” Caleb says, “but they did, the same way they let everybody out at some point. You’re the one fighting to let the nutcases out earlier than anybody else.”

  He picks Katy up and carries her out to the car, past the crying baby. He lays her across the backseat and throws a blanket over her. When he comes back in he can see the doctor is struggling so hard against the plastic ties that each of his wrists are bleeding. He’s also struggling hard to stay awake.

  “Please don’t do this,” Stanton says, his voice sounding raw.

  “No more debate,” Caleb says, and he shows Stanton the knife. “It’s not the same knife I used on the others,” he says. “Your daughter, she gets her own. She won’t be contaminated by the blood of those monsters who let Jessica die. She won’t feel anything, I promise you.”

  “No, no,” Stanton says, shaking his head, crying harder than Caleb has ever seen another person cry, and he’s trying to squirm toward him, kicking dust up off the floor, the rage and fear fighting off the sleeping pills. “Anything. . I’ll do anything, anything you ask. . it doesn’t matter what just anything, anything. . please, oh God, please don’t. . no don’t hurt her. . just give me a chance to. .”

  “Jessica, she felt e
verything,” Caleb says, and he unzips Melanie’s jacket and opens it. “He stabbed her over and over, but your daughter, I’ll only cut once. I promise, she won’t feel it,” he says, and he lines the knife up.

  He pushes it quickly into Melanie’s chest.

  For a second there is nothing. No noise. No blood. Nothing. The girl doesn’t even move.

  Then the second turns into a second second, and before it can reach a third Stanton begins to choke on his own vomit.

  The base of the handle is flush against the girl’s chest. Caleb keeps his hands on it, holding it down, pressing firmly. Her face doesn’t twitch.

  Cold blood pools out from around the knife.

  It soaks slowly into her T-shirt and onto his hand.

  He pulls away the knife and rests it next to her, then wipes his hand across the floor. He looks over at the doctor. He’s stopped squirming. His mouth and neck are covered in blood and vomit, and he’s struggling to breathe through it all. Caleb gets up and closes the distance. He reaches down and drags the doctor to his feet, but the doctor’s legs just buckle beneath him. He’s still sobbing. Loud sobs that Caleb doesn’t have the time for. He smells of piss and shit. The sleeping pills have been thrown up, the edges of them slightly dissolved, two of them hanging from Stanton’s chin. He drags Stanton out of the room, and still he keeps crying, so he strikes him in the side of the head, once, twice, and the doctor goes quiet, the blows more efficient than the sleeping pills. He gets him out to the car and fits him into the trunk, and each time he lifts the man now it’s harder than the last. He wipes the rest of the blood off his hand onto the doctor’s pajama top.

  He goes back and looks over Melanie. The police will be here soon to take care of her. He lays her more comfortably on the blanket. He rolls up the corner of it and props it under her head as a pillow. He places her hands across her chest in the blood and interlocks her fingers, then drapes another blanket across her. He tucks her in. He strokes her hair from the side of her face, trapping it behind her ears and brushing her fringe back. He has shown her a grace his own daughter never received.

  He uses the marker on her before stepping away. Her young skin is smooth and easy to write on.

  When he leaves the slaughterhouse with Octavia and Katy in the backseat, Stanton in the trunk, he knows it’s for the last time. The plan is changing, but the end result will still be the same. He’ll go and see Ariel Chancellor. He’s still unsure exactly what he wants to say to her, or do with her, but he has time to figure it out on the way.