The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  She turned to me. A flame of recognition of something. “Ha-aah,” she said. “Ee-you. P’leasmn.”

  Policeman, I thought she said. The left side of her mouth drooped slightly, a stroke probably. I nodded and said hello. She returned to smoking and staring at the television. I had a vision of ancient programs trapped in the starchy sprigs of her hair.

  “That’s my aunt, Mrs. Benoit. I’m Velene Clay, sir.”

  I turned to a portly woman sitting at the table in the corner. She wore a simple yellow dress and had a tattered folder in front of her. The fingertips of both hands rested on the folder as though it were the planchette from a Oiuja board. Ms. Clay had been youth-services director in Choctaw County for five years and a caseworker before that. I asked for everything she knew about Will Lindy, looking at my watch to emphasize the need for speed.

  She spoke hesitantly. “I first saw him when he was thirteen. He’d run away from home. Not so unusual. He was brought to me for counseling. A bright, soft-spoken young man. But the first day I knew something was … very amiss.”

  Harry had heard some of her story over the phone. “Listen to this, Cars,” he said.

  Ms. Clay continued. “There was a waiting room outside my office. Chairs, magazines, toys for the younger children. I came through the door just as Willy dropped a magazine and bent to pick it up. My phone rang. I said, “Don’t move, I’ll be right back.””

  Her fingertips twitched over the folder. It shivered toward me, it quivered back. “The call took twenty minutes. When I came back he was still bending over to pick up the magazine.”

  I said, “You told him, “Don’t move.””

  “He looked like a statue. I said, “It’s all right, Willy,” and he picked up the magazine and placed it in the rack as if nothing had happened.”

  Mrs. Benoit stomped her foot and moaned. She began jabbing the air with her phantom cigarette.

  “Sorry,” Ms. Clay said. “She’s disturbed about something. We rarely travel. It’s so hard on “

  “What else, ma’am?”

  “The next time I saw him was in high school. He seemed to not have changed at all, a bit stouter. But still a tiny boy with the same eyes and the same expression. Blank one moment, engaged the next. Like a switch going on and off.”

  “Abuse?”

  “He had marks on his wrists and ankles like he’d been bound. He claimed he’d gotten wrapped in the ropes of a tire swing, playing jungle boy or something. It was a very elaborate excuse, coached, I felt. I tried to broach the subject of sexual abuse, but at any mention of the body or genitalia he’d grab his abdomen and start moaning, saying he had to go to the bathroom. Then he’d just turn mute.”

  Almost imperceptibly, Ms. Clay’s hands began moving the file toward me. “I had authority to inspect living conditions and went to his home and told his mama I needed to look around inside. I’d seen the woman in town, of course, spoken to her a bit during the first sessions. Always quiet and polite. It was a mask. She went crazy when I asked to come inside. The foulest language I’ve ever heard, every form of violent threat. She was like a rabid animal that spoke English.”

  “What was Lindy doing all this time?”

  “Ya-hhhh,” Mrs. Benoit said. She looked around the room as if noticing it for the first time. “Y-ahh,” she moaned again, balling her fists and striking the air.

  Ms. Clay said, “I saw him through the door. Just sitting in front of the TV, nose right up to it. No sound, but it was like he was hearing the TV just fine, but not hearing the to-do at the door. I noted his fascination with TV during office visits, preferring to stare at the screen in the waiting room instead of interacting with other children.”

  “You went inside the house?”

  “It took a sheriff and three big policemen to carry her away.”

  I said, “It was strange, wasn’t it? The house.”

  The folder crept the remaining distance across the table. “The police took pictures. I asked for copies, so I’d always know, you know. What might make a kid act like Willy Lindy.”

  “The bows,” Mrs. Benoit whispered. “Bows.”

  I slid the folder from beneath Ms. Clay’s fingers and opened it. Twenty photographs, numbered sequentially. The first was of a simple white frame two-story. Nothing behind but flat fields going out of focus, cotton. A heavy tree line in the distance, bordering the Tombigbee River, judging by what I took to be a couple of broken-down boats hauled up between the trees.

  The photographer took us inside, documenting his passage. Furniture was sparse. Two hard folding chairs in the living room. One faced a television in the corner. The TV was on, a cartoon judging by the bright color. We moved into the dining room. A square wooden table, one chair pulled to it. The same in the kitchen. A dog’s bowl sat on the floor of the kitchen, newspaper beneath it.

  “What kind of dog?” I asked.

  “They didn’t have one,” Ms. Clay said, avoiding my eyes. Another photograph, a pantry off the kitchen. Stripped bare of shelves. Nailed into the wall were various lengths of rope, tag ends friction-taped against fraying. The walls were gray. I saw the shadow of a small boy pass the wall. When I blinked the shadow disappeared.

  “There wasn’t anything upstairs,” Ms. Clay said. “Empty.”

  I tucked the photo of the pantry at the back of the stack. The next photograph was a small wooden outbuilding.

  “Out back,” Ms. Clay said. “About twenty feet from the house.”

  A white door with two heavy locks.

  The next photo took me into a small room with deep shadows and a stained concrete floor. Black tape covered the windows. In the middle of the floor was a banquet table drilled every few inches near its edges, rope threaded through the holes. Above the table a single hooded light, like a mechanical flower. Two pink snakes dangled from somewhere above with their heads compressing to stubby points.

  “What the hell are those tubes?” Harry whispered.

  The next photo followed the snakes to the rafters where they joined heavy bladders, one still distended with water.

  Ms. Clay’s soft sounds were damped by a tissue. “Poor Willy Lindy, poor, poor little boy.”

  “Bows!” Mrs. Benoit wailed.

  “Excuse me,” Ms. Clay said, dabbing her eyes and going to her aunt.

  “Bows, bows, bows,” Mrs. Benoit repeated, striking out with her fist as if she were trying to nail a shifting image into her mind. We excused ourselves and progressed to the next station in our pilgrimage of horror.

  Lindy’s house was a small, neat Craftsman cottage in midtown, tucked into a miniature forest of palmettos and ferns and wild grasses. Rain had started falling. We waved to the slickered cops on guard, passed the tape cordon, and entered. There was a wooden chair in the high-ceilinged living room, a TV in front of it. That was all. A small table and another wooden chair sat in the dining room. The decor had been foretold by the folder beneath Ms. Clay’s fingertips.

  Lindy’s sleeping bedroom had a mattress on the floor. His clothes were in precise stacks in the closet, the hanging garments spaced to not touch.

  There was a second bedroom and a large Master Lock hung open on the door. “Not locked when we came in.” Harry said. “Like he was scooting fast.”

  I walked in. A wall-long table supported several electronic devices, including a computer and video monitor. Two of the devices had tape slots and I took them to be VCRs. A video camera on a tripod sat in the corner. There were two lights on stands, reflectors clamped beside them. Cables snaked everywhere.

  “Videotaping and editing equipment,” Harry said. “Amateur but decent. Computer-controlled editing, special effects. Least that’s what Carl Tyler said, he’s the department’s resident tech-brain.”

  Four tapes were stacked on the table. “You or Carl look at these?”

  “No. I just wanted Carl to make sure this stuff wasn’t booby trapped or any other weirdness.”

  “You’re aces, bro. Let’s rack ‘em up.” />
  Harry put a tape in the player. The monitor screen turned to blue-gray snow. A voice issued from speakers below the table. Harry fumbled with buttons on the monitor and the volume elevated.

  “.. . the stomach is tubular and empty, indicating several hours since the last meal … “

  “Ava’s voice,” I said, staring into the snow. “See if you can find tracking.”

  Harry jiggered a knob and the picture resolved into a close-up of bloody, gloved hands lifting a stomach from an open abdomen. The camera zoomed out, framing Ava as she worked, her hands inside the body. I recognized it as Deschamps’s corpse.

  “.. . contents sparse, gruel like indicative of…”

  “What the hell is going on, Cars? What would anyone want with tapes of people getting cut into?”

  I fast-forwarded. Deschamps’s body, different angle; nothing more than the same autopsy shot from a different camera. I popped a second cassette into the player. Same thing, Nelson’s body, not yet into the cutting.

  “This guy gets off on autopsy movies?” Harry said. “Is that what this is about? Killing people to watch them get cut up?”

  “There’s more, Harry. The words mean something in all this.”

  I fast-forwarded. Several angles again. Lindy’d been playing with the controls as the tape recorded; some shots were skintight close, others distant, Ava and the corpse from knees to neck. Farther into the tape was more of the same. Lindy had pulled input from three cameras and dumped it all on this tape. Editing.

  The third cassette was the same, only the body was Burlew.

  “Three bodies, three tapes of scenes edited from the cameras above the table,” I said, picking up the final cassette. “Let’s try tape number four.”

  The cassette had a small star scratched on the case. I jacked it into the player. The machine clicked and whirred. The screen started black. A black-and-white mouth gradually took shape in the dark. The contrast had been punched up to full, the lips almost a moving abstraction. Opening and closing. Wet. Talking. A whisper.

  Will Lindy’s voice.

  “Don’t do that. It’s dirty and you’re not allowed. I’m telling my mama,” he said, his voice a mixture of pleading and admonition. Distorted music flowed beneath his words.

  “Oh, please … stop touching me. Help me, Mama. She’s here.”

  The scene cut to a woman’s fingers sliding down a man’s chest, kneading and stroking, teasing over a bicep, caressing a rounded shoulder. The camera zoomed in to an extreme close-up and Ava’s fingers played across a nipple. Lindy moaned and his voice increased in volume.

  “She’s here, Mama. The bad girl. Touching me everywhere.”

  The scene switched to another angle, one of the ceiling-mounted cameras above and slightly left of Ava, a quarter view from the back of her head. The field of view condensed as Ava’s hands trickled down the abdomen and across the flat belly, stopping at the pubic hair. She stroked it. Pressed on it. Put her hands beside the base of the penis.

  The camera angle shifted and became more oblique.

  Stunned and breathless, we watched Ava lean forward and began fella ting the corpse of Jerrold Nelson.

  CHAPTER 33

  The fat tires of the big ATV sank in a mudhole, spun, then bit. The machine skidded sideways before roaring toward the river. Less than a mile to go. His truck now rested at the bottom of a creek north of Chickasaw. A beautiful day, purple-gray clouds and sheets of lovely concealing rain. He cut around a fallen limb and jumped a soft hummock, rising from the seat to let his knees absorb the shock.

  Behind him, strapped above the rear fenders, he heard Mama moan lightly. The sleep drug was beginning to wear off. He’d put it in her coffee and when she’d gotten disoriented steered her out the loading dock and into his car. The drug would be vaporizing in her body now he knew this from personal trials and she’d breathe it quickly away as she awakened. He had to hurry, an angry Mama was a very dangerous Mama.

  In the distance he saw the cluster of trees keeping his boat from casual view. No one would find them. He would talk with Mama about the bad things that had happened in the past, then show her what he had become.

  He would save her.

  He had to cut the bad girl out. He was strong enough to do it now.

  The clouds swirled like dark ghosts and the rain fell harder. Will Lindy aimed for the trees and pressed forward through the flailing rain. It was a beautiful day.

  “My God,” Harry exclaimed, as we watched Ava’s jaws move back and forth, up and down. “Is she doing what I think?”

  “Yes. She’s reading, “Warped a quart of whores, warped, whores,” over and over.”

  Ava appeared to change her facial shape and rhythm. Harry said, “It’s different. Now she’s reading “

  ““Rats. Rats. Rats. Rats.”” I said. “Or “Ho ho ho ho.””

  “Without hearing her voice it looks like …”

  “I know. And remember, I’m standing almost next to her, barely out of camera range.”

  Harry whispered to himself while holding his chin. “He selected words that swing the jaw.”

  The writing made sense now. Lindy wanted to Ava to mi mick the facial motions of oral sex as she leaned close to read the tiny, faint writing, her head concealing where an erect penis would be. From the high angle the motions were slight, but suggestive. He had edited between multi angled shots of Nelson’s and Deschamps’s almost identical lower abdomens to extend the scene, then looped it over and over. Ava’s head bobbed, her jaw moved faster, then slower, as Lindy’s wet moans poured into the room. His arousal didn’t sound faked.

  The scenes had been filtered to reduce clinical reality, the whites blazing, the shadows dark and muddy. Beneath it all were the music and eerily distorted sound effects, a throbbing and scratching to haunt a saint’s nightmares.

  Lindy’s moans increased in speed and volume as Ava’s head began bobbing furiously. I realized she had been leaning away from reading the inscription and he had reversed and fast-forwarded her motion repeatedly.

  Lindy produced a blanketing orgasmic moan and the screen went black. A high-pitched squeal blasted from the speakers and Harry jumped. The video started again with close-ups of the dissection: scalpel slashing, gloved hands retrieving organs through the red slit.

  Harry said, “Uh-oh.”

  Ava’s voice: “Willy? Willet Liindy.”

  I was right. Lindy had cobbled his name together from individual words and syllables. Were the other words just distraction, chaff? I held my breath and listened in horrified fascination.

  “Will Lindy?” Ava said.

  Lindy spoke with a child’s voice. “Yes, Mama?”

  “You were with that girl again, weren’t you?” Ava’s voice was slow and monotonous, computer-voiced in its inflections, a verbal patch-work from Burlew’s back.

  “I didn’t want to, Mama.”

  “She makes bad things inside of you, doesn’t she?” The flatness of Ava’s voice charged the words with despair.

  “I won’t see her ever again. Promise.”

  “Willet, Willet, Willet … you know how the bad girl makes you lie.”

  “No, this time I mean it. I said I promise.”

  “We have to make sure, Will.”

  “No.” Quivering.

  “Time to get the bad things out, Will.” A hand sliding into the wet cavity. It squeezed and kneaded.

  “Don’t hurt me again, Mama.”

  I wondered if this was how it might actually have been: Lindy’s voice frantic and frightened, Mama’s voice dull and mechanical, a terrified child versus an insane robot. One moment she’s the Bad Girl, the next, she’s Mama.

  “She’s deep in you, Will. Mama has to get her out.”

  “No, please. Please don’t, Mama.”

  The gloved hands sliced and pulled. Scene dissolved into scene. A liver. Kidneys. Bladder. They glistened under the light, like mutant fruit. Most of the scenes were so close the stump of neck wasn’
t in the frame. When it was, I figured the identity-deleting beheadings must have allowed Lindy’s fevered mind to simply fit his own head in place.

  Harry spoke as softly as if in church. “Think she really cut into him?”

  I said, “Maybe that’s what he imagined when she was pumping his insides full of whatever.”

  “Did the woman crawl up from hell?” Harry asked, watching a lung emerge into the light.

  “Horror crawled down through generations.”

  Lindy’s voice moved up a register. “It hurts so bad, Mama.”

  “Pain makes us pure, Will.”

  The screen went black and quiet and the silence seemed total. Then Lindy’s voice returned; older, cynical.

  “I know something, Mama.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know a secret, Mama.” The voices had been stereo-phonically channeled, Ava’s voice coming from the right, Lindy’s from the left.

  “What do you know, Will?”

  “Secrets, secrets.” Taunting.

  “What do you know, Will?”

  Whispered: “You’re the bad girl.”

  “What did you say, Willy?”

  “I know you’re the bad girl, Mama.” He laughed, a voice thickened with lust. “Secrets, secrets. So many secrets.”

  Harry said, “Whatever’s shaking out, it ain’t gonna be good.”

  “You … just … shut up … now … Will Lindy.”

  “You’re the bad girl, Mama, you’re the bad girl, Mama, I know a secret … “

  Lindy’s singsong rant pitched headlong into a scream that cut the air like a scythe, then shivered into black. There was only the whirr of the VCR as over a minute’s time a body slowly appeared on the screen, surfacing from a coal-black sea. Nelson’s body. The color was completely washed away, leaving only black and white and shape-shifting gray. The camera panned to a bicep, zoomed in close.

  “Watch what I can do, Mama, watch me do this” Lindy’s voice was a taunting whisper.

  Nelson’s bicep was replaced by Deschamps’s arm in the same position, larger, thicker.