by J. Thorn
He’d considered approaching Kracowski about the sightings. Kracowski had an easy answer for everything. Usually the doctor could open one of his journals or spew some charts from his computer and Bondurant would be left standing dumbfounded, overwhelmed by terminology and formulas. But Bondurant was always comforted by the doctor’s confident manner. The very lack of humility that made Kracowski irksome also made his explanations believable.
Bondurant leaned back in his chair. The office was quiet except for the faint ticking as the clock hands moved toward nine. Darkness painted the windows, and a few dots of stars hung above the black mountains beyond. The children would be settling down for evening prayers, boys in the Blue Room, girls in the Green Room. Except for the house parents on duty and the night-time cleaning lady, the staff was gone, either in the on-site cottages or far beyond the hard walls of Wendover to Deer Valley.
Bondurant opened the bottom drawer of his desk. His Bible lay next to the wooden paddle and a purple velvet bag. He lifted the bag. Crown Royal. The first sip bit his tongue and throat, the second burned, the third warmed him so much that he shivered.
Someone knocked on the door.
Bondurant traded the bottle for the Good Book, slid the drawer closed, and parted the Bible to a random chapter. The Book of Job. That was one of his favorites, with suffering and a defiant and unrepentant Satan, and someday he was going to get around to understanding it. That and the damned parable of fishes.
“Come in,” he said.
Nothing. He pressed the button on his speakerphone. The receptionist’s office was left unlocked at the end of the day in case the staff needed to get to the patient files.
“Hello?” he said, listening as his amplified voice echoed around the outer office.
Still nothing.
Bondurant rose, annoyed that he should have to answer his own door. He swung the door wide. No one there.
He crossed the receptionist’s office and looked down the hall. There, in the dim angles leading to the cafeteria, a shadow moved among the darkness. One of the boys must have sneaked out of the Blue Room, probably on his way to swipe a treat from the kitchen.
“Hello there,” Bondurant said, keeping his voice level. Even if you were angry, you had to feign calm. Otherwise, you ended up yanking the little sinners by their ears until they cried, or bending the girls over your desk and paddling them and paddling them—
Bondurant swallowed. The person had stopped, blending into the shadows. The hall was quiet, the air still and weighty. Bondurant’s lungs felt as if they were filled with glass.
“Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for Light’s Out?” Bondurant said, stepping forward.
The figure crouched in the murk. Bondurant cursed the lack of lighting in the hall. The budget never seemed to cover all the facility needs, though administrative costs rose steadily, along with Bondurant’s salary.
As he drew nearer, Bondurant realized that the figure was too large to be that of a client. What was a staff member doing creeping around the halls at night? The house parents were supposed to stay with the children, to act simultaneously as guardians and jailkeeps. The cleaning lady would be doing the toilets in the shower rooms in the boys’ wing, the same schedule she’d used for as long as Bondurant had served as director. Maybe it was one of Kracowski’s new supporters, one of the cold and shifty types who acted as if they needed no permission or approval.
“Excuse me, did you know it’s after nine?” Bondurant saw that the person was plump and squat, drab in the half-light. Nanny? Had she gotten headstrong and come back to prove she had in fact seen something that couldn’t exist?
“Everything’s going to be okay.” Bondurant wished he’d studied psychology now, because he sounded to himself like a TV cop trying to lure a suicide away from a ledge. He held out his hand and closed the twenty feet of distance between them. What if she broke down and did something crazy, like bite him?
“You can tell me all about it,” he said.
Fifteen feet, and he wasn’t sure the person was Nanny after all. Ten feet away, and he was still uncertain, though he could tell it was a woman.
She huddled face-first in the corner, shoulders shaking with sobs. But no sound came from the woman. She was aged, her hair matted and gray, her legs bare beneath the hem of her gown. The gown was fastened by three strings clumsily knotted against her spine. The skin exposed in the gap was mottled. The woman was on her knees, her broad, callused feet tucked behind her.
Bondurant hesitated. Perhaps he should get one of the house parents, or call the local police. But the police had long complained about Wendover’s runaways and the extra security calls. This was different, though; kids ran away all the time, but how many grown-ups ever ran to Wendover?
Before Bondurant could make up his mind, the woman turned.
Bondurant would have screamed if not for the delaying effects of the liquor. Because the woman’s face was twisted, one corner of her lip caught in a rictus, the other curved into a crippled smile. Her eyelids drooped, and her tongue moved in her mouth like a bloated worm. What Bondurant had taken for sobs now seemed more like convulsions, because the old woman’s head trembled atop her shoulders as if attached by a metal spring.
Worst of all was the long scar across the woman’s forehead, an angry weal of flesh running between the furrows of her skin. The scar was like a grin, hideous atop the skewed mouth and slivers of eyes. The woman held out her shaking arms. The tongue protruded like a thing separate from the face, as if it were nesting inside and had just awakened from a long hibernation. The lips came together unevenly, yawned apart, spasmed closed again.
Oh, God, she’s trying to TALK.
Bondurant took an involuntary step backward, forcing another breath into his chest. Sour bile rose in his throat, a quick rush of heartburn. He would have broken into a run if his legs hadn’t turned to concrete. The woman scooted forward on her knees, a shiny sliver of drool dangling from her warped chin. Her soiled gown was draped about her like an oversize shawl.
Her lips quivered again, the worm-tongue poked, but she made no sound.
Bondurant shouted for help, but he couldn’t muster much wind and the cry died in the corners of the hallway. Bondurant gave up on mortal assistance and sent summons to a higher power.
He remembered the tale of the Good Samaritan, how the Samaritan had helped Jesus on the side of the highway. Or maybe it hadn’t been Jesus, maybe it was somebody else, or Jesus might have been the one doing the helping. Bondurant was fuzzy on the details, but the long and short of it was that a Christian reached out his hand when someone was down.
Even if that someone was a twisted, shambling wreck that the Devil himself might have cast out from the lake of fire in disgust.
“It’s okay now,” Bondurant said, his voice barely above a whisper. “What’s your name?”
Again the lips undulated, the sinuous tongue pressed between the teeth, but still no words came out. The woman raised one eyelid, and Bondurant looked into the black well of an eye that seemed to have no bottom.
“Let me help you up,” he said.
He closed his eyes and reached for her hands. A cold wind passed over him, shocking his eyes open.
The old woman stood before him now, arms raised.
The woman brought her hands to her face, curled them into claws and began raking at her eyes. In her frenzy, the gown came loose, one shoulder showing pale in the dimness.
The woman’s mouth gaped open, the tongue flailing inside, and her fingers pulled at the skin of her eyelids. Bondurant could only stare, telling himself it wasn’t real, that Jesus and God would never allow something like this in the sacred halls of Wendover.
And, even through his fear, he was already scheming his cover-up, planning the story he would give to local authorities.
She broke in, I tried to stop her. No, I’ve never seen her before . . .
The woman’s gown fell farther down her shoulders, and Bondurant could se
e more scars criss-crossing the flaccid breasts. Still the gnarled fingers groped, and the flesh gave way beneath her fingernails. The lips trembled as if trying to shape a scream, but only silence issued from that dark throat.
Bondurant had been trained to handle violent or aggressive clients. He knew half a dozen different restraint techniques, from the basket hold to the double wrap. If he could only grab her, pin her arms behind her back, then—
Then he only had to wait either for her to get tired or for help to arrive.
He reached for her elbows and came away empty. She was moving away from him, retreating back into the shadows. Except she wasn’t running away, he saw.
She was floating, her obscenely-swollen toes inches above the floor.
The deformed mouth vomited its silent scream as she continued to rake at her eyes.
Just before she disappeared into the wall, the forehead scar curved slightly, as if giving Bondurant a smile of farewell.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Freeman was dreaming of his dead grandparents’ farm, a hundred and twelve acres of rolling woodlands, the green valleys pocked with cattle, a silver creek winding through the belly of the land. Freeman was in the garden near the barn, the smell of drying tobacco, manure, and hay dust hanging in the warm summer air. Broad leaves of zucchini plants and wires of runner beans surrounded him. He drove his shovel into the black earth, turning up nightcrawlers.
He turned the shovel and the worms spilled out, slimy and as thick as pencils. The shovel blade dipped again, and the ground fell away, becoming a huge black cavity. A monstrous worm reared up, glistening with mucus, its blind head probing the sky. The worm continued to swell, its girth like that of a rubbery tree.
Suddenly the worm grew a hundred arms and the dark mouth opened: “Hey, Crap For Brains, what the hell you doing jerking off in here when I need you?”
Now the worm wore Dad’s head, and Freeman struggled against his blankets as the worm’s millipedic arms reached for him, strangled him, slapped at him, smothered him, and, worst of all, hugged him—
“Psst. Hey, new guy. Freeman.”
Freeman shoved away, cried out, the sunshine of his dream gave way to six walls of shadow, and still the Dad-worm clutched at him.
“Whoa, man. Take it easy.”
Freeman groaned and opened his eyes. In the muted night light of the Blue Room, he could make out the face of the mossy-eyed boy. Isaac, from Group. The boy was shaking him awake.
“You must have been in a bad nightmare,” Isaac said in a loud whisper. He released Freeman and knelt by the cot.
Freeman blinked in the gloom, his heart pounding. Even in here, behind these dense stone walls, he couldn’t escape that damned asshole, Dad. Because Dad was deeper inside his brain than a maggot in a corpse, whether he was asleep or awake. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Thanks.”
“You were kicking up a storm. About broke my arm.”
“I was getting away. I’ve had lots of practice.”
“Who hasn’t? You either get away or you’re not around very long. You know how they are.”
The Blue Room was fairly quiet. At the far end of the rows of bunks, a couple of boys were talking. It might have been eleven o’clock or three in the morning. “Where are the house parents?”
Isaac snorted. “Probably playing kissy-face with each other, for all I know. They make themselves pretty scarce after Lights Out.”
Freeman lowered his voice. “And Deke?”
He pictured Deke pestering the smaller boys in the night, maybe even molesting them. The thought sickened him as much as the dream had.
“The fearless leader? Listen for a second.”
Among the nocturnal stirrings and small talk, an abrasive, rhythmic sound rose and fell.
“That’s his snoring,” Isaac said. “He’s big on sleep. At night, you can always count on being able to tell where he is. I’m Isaac, by the way.”
“I know. Like in the Bible. You ever get sacrificed?”
“Not that I know of. You know how hard it is to put up with all this Christian baloney when you’re a Jew?”
“I can imagine. But, if you’re like me, you learn to fake it pretty quick. I’ve been in enough homes to know that the faith-based ones make for easier time, and have better food, too.”
“Damn. Are you Jewish, too?”
“No, but I might as well be. Got nothing better going on.”
“Jews don’t trust their kids to be outside a Jewish family. When I got orphaned, my aunts and uncles tried to claim me. But the shrinks wouldn’t let them, because, swear to God, I don’t trust Jews, either. I mean, we’re pretty peculiar sometimes.”
The main door creaked open. “Hey, keep it down in there,” came an adult voice. A flashlight beam sliced from nowhere and swept over the rows of bunks.
Isaac put his face near Freeman’s and whispered, “Nazis.”
“Ah, the fathers of modern psychiatry,” Freeman said. “You know that’s how the Germans got their taste for genocide, by wiping out nut cases in the 1930’s. Then they started on the homosexuals.”
“Hey, I thought the Jews were first.”
“Nah. They were doing that stuff even before Hitler came along. All the while these doctors would twirl their mustaches and talk about what a great service they were doing by putting undesirables out of their misery.”
“Some of the doctors were Jews, I bet,” Isaac whispered.
“Well, Isaac, you present as a classic casebook example of ‘paranoia.’”
“You talk like a shrink.”
“No, I’m smarter than most of the shrinks I’ve gone up against,” Freeman said. “Always shrink your shrink until they’re smaller than you are. That’s my philosophy.”
“I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of philosophies.”
“Changes with the weather.”
“So what are you?” Isaac asked. “Manic D? Plain D? Schizo? Socio?”
“Manic D with a cherry on top. At least that’s what my case file says. What’s got you?”
“Demons. Ugly little Jewish demons with hooks for fingers. Can’t shake the bastards loose.” Isaac shuddered as if one of the invisible demons had just landed on his back.
“You should see a doctor about that.”
“Nah. They tell me that all I have to do is accept Jesus as my own personal savior and I’ll be cured. I’d just as soon put up with the demons. A lot lower maintenance.”
They were quiet for a moment. Deke’s snoring cut through the still air, halted as he rolled over, then picked up again, the rhythm crippled now. One of the guys in a nearby bunk broke wind in his sleep, and Freeman stifled a giggle.
“On nights we have pinto beans, it gets really rough in here,” Isaac said.
“There’s more than one way to gas a Jew.”
They shared a hushed snicker, and then Isaac said, “That was a pretty clever trick, what you did with the book today. I’ve been here for two years, and that’s the first time anybody’s stood up to Deke.”
“I didn’t stand up to him so much as just confuse him a little.”
“That’s easy to do, I admit. But you could have got your face broken. Keep an eye on him. He’ll be out to show the others you’re not so hot.”
“It burns me up that he picks on the little kids. What’s the deal with Dipes?”
“It’s not a good thing when you’re old enough to change your own diapers. Somebody or something must have screwed him up bad. He won’t talk about it.”
“Join the club,” Freeman said. “We’re all people of difference, exceptional children. The troubled. The little bumblebrains that society likes to keep out of sight and out of mind.”
The door to the Blue Room opened again, spilling a shaft of light from the hallway. A house parent entered the room, following his flashlight beam between the rows of cots. Isaac slid under the bed beside Freeman’s, then flipped onto his own cot. Isaac was under the blankets by the time the light settled on him.
“Were you sleepwalking again, Isaac?” said the house parent, Allen.
Isaac sat up and rubbed at his eyes. “They’ve got pointy fingers,” he murmured.
Freeman had to chew the hem of his blanket to keep from laughing out loud.
“Well, try to keep quiet,” the house parent said. He was thin, with styled hair and cologne that was so strong Freeman could smell it over the lingering odor of flatulence. The man’s voice was girlish and whiny. “The other boys need their sleep.”
“Sure thing, Phil,” Isaac said, rolling his face into the pillow. He said something else which was lost in the bedding.
The light played across the room, resting for a moment on Freeman. He squeezed his eyes tight and concentrated on breathing evenly. The light moved on, and Freeman listened until the footsteps receded and the door closed.
“Nar—nar—narcolepsy,” Isaac said out loud, imitating a snore.
“Fake sleep disorder,” Freeman said. “Good one. If you hadn’t already taken it, I might have added it to my repertoire.”
“Yeah, I can pretend to fall asleep whenever some shrink is droning on about my learned helplessness. But if you’re manic depressive, you got all the outs you need. Nothing like swinging both ways.”
“And then there are the in-between days. Or even hours. I’m a rapid cycler. Up and down faster than a damned elevator.”
“Shut the hell up,” came a brusque voice from the end of the room.
Freeman flipped his middle finger into the semi-darkness and settled into the covers. At least he’d made an ally. One thing he’d learned in group homes, you needed a few allies if you were going to pull through, as long as they didn’t become baggage. Even a loner couldn’t always make it alone, and sometimes a sidekick took a bullet for you. True in the movies, maybe true in the outside world. Maybe someday Freeman would find out.
But first there was a night to live through, and the dreams that sleep brought.
Dreams.
Which one would come next?
Dad as a giant whale, with Freeman in a tiny boat on a calm sea? In that one, a storm always blew up as Dad surfaced, the sky became a red hell of bloody lightning, the wind screamed like a thousand dying gulls, the waves rose up in monstrous hands of foam. And the whale opened its mouth, a mouth that swelled until it became a great black chasm and beyond that an everlasting night—
