Dreams and Reality Set 3: Cannibal Dreams and Butchered Dreams

by Hadena James

  Thirty-Three

  Xavier came in through the front of the barn. He looked terrible. Blood flowed from his forehead and ran down his face.

  “Get me out of this cage,” I said very quietly.

  “Oh,” Xavier frowned. “Let me tend to the girl first.”

  “Now, Xavier.”

  “I don’t think you can kill him, he’s in custody.” Xavier began untying the little girl and identifying himself. She cried as her arms fell to her sides. Her pain was second to her terror at the moment. It would change when she discovered she was safe.

  I had bound the jaguar with zip cuffs and the woman in the cage with me wasn’t going anywhere. I stood very close to the bars. Gabriel brought in August. John brought in Gertrude.

  “Let me out,” I told Gabriel. Gabriel looked at me, then at the woman on the floor, then back at me.

  “I can’t,” Gabriel told me. “Not until both suspects are secured.” This really meant protected.

  “Let me out,” I repeated.

  “Go out the back,” John said. I had forgotten about it. Gabriel looked like he had just choked on a bone. He made a gagging noise.

  Once outside, I didn’t walk to the front of the barn, I ran. August consumed my thoughts. I wasn’t just feeling the calm, I was filled with rage. More than I had ever experienced before. The door swung open hard, slamming against the outside wall of the barn. John and the little girl rushed past me, away from me. Gertrude and August weren’t so lucky. Gabriel had a firm grasp on August and was standing in front of him. Xavier had backed my great aunt up, almost touching the bars. For a moment, I wished I had released the woman in the cage.

  “Get away from him, Gabriel,” I growled.

  “I can’t let you kill him in custody, Ace,” Gabriel told me.

  “That woman in there is feral, Gabriel. Feral. She’s been a prisoner in this barn since she was three years old. She can’t speak. She doesn’t walk upright. She’s battled jaguars all her life to stay alive and god only knows what this son of a bitch has done to her. Just walk away, Gabriel, just walk away. We’ll tell everyone that I went into the barn and found myself alone with the two suspects and the kidnap victims, no one will ever know.”

  “How do you know she was three?” Xavier asked.

  “Because that woman is Vera Callow,” I spat at him. “August has been keeping her as a pet since she was three when he kidnapped her.”

  “Are you sure?” Gabriel asked.

  “Callow had a very particular shade of blue eyes. In the pictures of Vera, she had them too. That woman has them. It’s her.”

  “You sick fuck,” Gabriel suddenly reached back and slammed August into the bars of the cage. “You kidnapped a child and forced her into cannibalism? I ought to give you to the jaguar and your prisoner.” He slammed his head against the bars again. Blood began to run down the cold metal.

  “Gabriel,” Xavier let go of Gertrude and grabbed hold of our boss. Gabriel drew back, like he was going to hit him and stopped.

  “I’ll take Gertrude out,” Gabriel looked at me. “Xavier will escort out August.” He paused. “However, I would like nothing more than to let you have him.”

  “Then let me,” I told Gabriel.

  “I can’t, Ace.”

  “To hell with the law,” I told him, taking my Marshal creds out of my pocket and tossing them on the floor at his feet.

  “It isn’t about the law,” Gabriel moved in very close. “If you kill him now, in this state, you may never come back and I don’t want to lose you. We’ve lost too much lately anyway.”

  “Why don’t you guys just get a room?” Gertrude snorted. “And don’t think I’m not going to tell everyone that she tried to kill August or that you beat him up while he was in handcuffs.”

  “Tell them,” Gabriel spat at her. “Tell them I Tasered you too.” With that, Gabriel pulled his Taser and shot my aunt with it. Her body crumbled into a heap and she made mewing noises.

  “I think everyone needs medical attention,” Xavier said. “Including the little girl and John.”

  “Oh shit,” I felt the calm slip away. “I must have scared her to death.”

  “You scared me to death,” Xavier quipped. “If you ever look at me like that, I’m fleeing.”

  “It was deserved,” Gabriel looked at August. “He should die, slowly and painfully. If we still did executions, I’d pull the switch myself.”

  “That’s why we don’t have them,” I said. “If the profession of executioner still existed, we wouldn’t have had botched executions and we wouldn’t have had the controversy with continuing them. Since it’s an extinct profession, we now have The Fortress.”

  “With friends inside,” Gabriel added. I didn’t point out how twisted it was that Gabriel had immediately thought of my “fan club” inside The Fortress. I had thought it, but we had never encountered a killer that made Gabriel want to torture them. He might want revenge from time to time, but that was different.

  “What do we do about her?” I asked, pointing into the cage.

  “Do you want to take her out and control her?” Xavier asked. I noticed again that he looked like he’d been in a brawl.

  “Not really,” I said. “What happened to your face?”

  “I was attacked,” Xavier scowled. “By a freaking capuchin monkey. Who trains a capuchin to be an attack monkey?”

  “I offered to go first,” Gabriel looked at my great aunt. “You know, we have a few minutes. I can’t leave Aislinn and Xavier unsupervised. John will be getting back-up out here, but let’s face it, it’s going to take a while. So, let’s talk.”

  “I have nothing to say,” Gertrude answered, sticking her chin into the air and turning away from him.

  “I think you do, here’s your one-time offer. We won’t report you as assisting a serial killer, we’ll just process you for fraud. This means that you’ll go to jail for a year or so, but it won’t be in The Fortress. In exchange for this very generous deal, you’re going to tell us how The Butcher kept tabs on Aislinn and you’re going to tell us where he is,” Gabriel told her.

  “Go fuck yourself,” my great aunt responded.

  “Wow, that was very unladylike.” I spoke in long, drawn out tones. “Here’s where you should be brought up to speed. He has never actually attacked me. Also, we are going to collect August’s DNA and prove that you and your brother are his parents. This says all sorts of weird things about you by the way...”

  “He is not August’s father!” Gertrude looked horrified. “He did try to feed August to a hog, but not because he’s his father. That’s not just absurd, it’s disgusting.”

  “Lee said he was,” I told her.

  “Lee is wrong,” she huffed at me. “August might not be Lee’s son, but he certainly isn’t my brother’s.”

  “Then who is his father?” I asked.

  “That is none of your business,” she sniffled ever so slightly. Bells went off in my head.

  “You don’t know, that’s why my grandfather tried to kill him.” I shook my head. “That’s what Nina has over you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I do,” I looked at my great aunt a little differently for a moment. Nina once told me that during the 1960’s she went to a party. Someone slipped something in her drink and she woke up nude in a strange bed. She always claimed she went alone, but I hadn’t believed her. Now, staring at Gertrude, I realized that I had been right. They had gone together. I was willing to bet they had both been drugged and raped. Gertrude’s had resulted in August. “So, you told an unstable man that you had been raped and August was the result and he tries to kill the child. When that fails, he redirects his rage at his wife and slaughters her.”

  “Nonsense,” Gertrude said.

  “Fine, but I’m making sure to run August’s DNA through CODIS and any other databases on the planet to see if there’s a match.” I told her.

  If she was going to say somethi
ng it was interrupted by the arrival of paramedics and sheriff’s deputies. There was even an FBI agent, not Malachi or a member of the VCU, but a different one that I hadn’t seen yet.

  “Hey!” I shouted at a paramedic that was nearing the cage. “Be careful. She seems to be feral. I’d suggest full restraints. She’s been injured, but treating her will not be easy. I’m not even sure she understands language.”

  “That will make it hard to identify her,” the sheriff’s deputy closest to me said.

  “Her name is Vera Callow. She went missing roughly twenty years ago. I’m not sure how much family she has left. Her uncle is dead, her father committed suicide within a few days of her uncle dying. I don’t know about her mother or if she had siblings.” I looked at Vera. She wouldn’t know any of them and in some ways, it would be better to tell her family they’d found her body. She’d been turned into a wild animal, living off human flesh and whatever else August gave them to eat.

  Thirty-Four

  Gertrude Clachan and her son, August Clachan, were facing a lot of charges. They’d be tried for trafficking in exotic animals, importing critical endangered animals, kidnapping, holding Vera Callow hostage for twenty years, animal abuse, assault, and sexual assault, but only one would matter; serial murder. They’d found nearly two hundred feet in August’s house.

  During the last twenty-some years, he’d been doing a lot of travelling and abducting homeless people, hitchhikers, vagabonds, runaways, and anyone else that was easy prey. After the abductions, he’d bring them back to the barn and start feeding them to Vera and his assortment of jaguars. He’d taped all of it.

  Gabriel excused me from watching any of the videos. Instead, I had worked with Xavier to collect DNA from August and Gertrude. When Gabriel and John emerged from the room, Gabriel once again looked like he could kill someone. John was white as a ghost.

  Malachi and the VCU were headed to Maine. What my grandfather was doing in Maine was beyond my comprehension. It seemed far more likely that he was living in Kansas City. Especially since we had figured out that August had mailed several of The Butcher’s letters and packages during his hunting trips.

  Vera Callow was being taken to the Fulton State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. She kept trying to eat people. There, they would attempt to socialize her and get back some of her humanity. I wished them the best of luck, I didn’t think it was possible. However, I did ask her doctors to keep Xavier appraised of her situation. I had killed my abductor, but there was still a smidge of a feeling that she was a kindred spirit. I wanted to be kept informed.

  I had been shot three times. None of them by our serial killer. I felt like that was an accomplishment. I’d also had my ass kicked by a feral human woman, but she hadn’t killed and eaten me. Now, she had eaten the chunk of flesh she tore from my wrist, they found it when she threw up at the hospital. It was still another win.

  If my great aunt or August would spill their guts and tell us everything, it would be even better. Neither was talking. There were a lot of unanswered questions and I didn’t like that. We had discovered that Gertrude had supplied the DNA sample for the body originally thought to be August’s, from a hair brush. Other than that, we only knew that August was a serial killer and his mother had known about it.

  Beating them with phonebooks had crossed my mind, but Gabriel had nixed it. Even though it looked like he wouldn’t mind taking a swing or two at both of them.

  I sat in the conference room, staring out the window. It was snowing again. The roads were nearly deserted. In a few hours, we’d be leaving Columbia. When I got home, I had another great aunt waiting for me, ready to spill all the family secrets that she knew. This wasn’t much comfort. I felt annoyed.

  Xavier came into the room, hitting my feet as they rested on the table. Not hard enough to knock them off, but enough to make me readjust my position.

  “Stop sulking,” he said.

  “I’m not sulking,” I told him. “I’m very annoyed. We have a lot of bodies. It is going to take months to sort them all out, if we ever sort them all out. We have a serial killer that isn’t talking, a mother of a serial killer who knew about it and isn’t talking. I hate loose ends and this case has a lot of them.”

  “It happens. The key is focusing on the positive.”

  “Vera Callow is most likely damaged beyond repair.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Vera. I was talking about Joanie.”

  “Who is Joanie?”

  “The little girl, strung up in the barn, Vera’s next meal. Her name is Joanie Cole. She’s seven years old, a straight-A student, an avid participant in sports and according to her parents, very good at math.”

  “I’m still waiting for you to get to the positive.”

  “Are you so far gone that you don’t realize she’s alive?” Xavier narrowed his eyes and frowned.

  “So, she’s alive. She’ll be scarred for life. She’ll need a ton of therapy and if she’s really lucky, she’ll eventually be able to live on her own. And why the hell did he abduct a girl? He’d been taking teen boys, not little girls, as of late.”

  “Ace, she’s seven. Yes, it will be rough, but she’s alive. She’ll bounce back. And she’s here.”

  “They brought her here for questioning?” I asked, appalled. God only knew how long she’d been suspended from the ceiling, waiting to die. She should be in a hospital.

  “No, her parents brought her here.”

  “Bad parenting.”

  “Ace, she wants to thank you, personally, for saving her life. The cage was unlocked, you never tried the door. We didn’t either, but Joanie says a little while before you burst into the cage, August came in and unlocked the door. I’m letting them in.”

  Before I could stop him, the door opened. The little girl entered, along with her mother, father, and a teenaged brother. I stared at the brother.

  “I wanted to thank you,” the little girl stepped forward. “For saving me and all.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I told her, tearing my gaze off the boy. “I’m glad you are safe and unharmed.”

  “You’re very pretty,” the girl said to me. “Earlier, you were scary, but now you’re pretty.”

  “Earlier, you were scared and in pain, now you’re safe, it changes how we see things,” I lied through my teeth. “Joanie? Would you mind staying here with my friend, Xavier, while I talk to your parents for a second? And you can just call him X, Xavier’s so hard to say.”

  Joanie giggled. She might get out of this with only a little bit of scarring.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “I’m going to leave your brother too,” I told her, standing up. In the hallway, I tried not to glare at the parents. They hadn’t done anything wrong, I was just tired and irritated. “I have a question, I’ve been wondering for a while why he abducted Joanie...” I pursed my lips unsure how to phrase my question without being very blunt. Sometimes I could be diplomatic.

  “We reported her missing yesterday,” her mother broke down, sobbing hard enough to make her shoulders heave.

  “Tommy and Joanie were getting some stuff from Wal-Mart yesterday. The man tried to abduct both of them, but Tommy says both he and Joanie were fighting with the man. Tommy, being the bigger of the two, got away from him. Joanie didn’t. Tommy’s small for his age, he’s nearly seventeen, but he was able to fend off the abduction and call the police immediately.” The father told me.

  “He did a good job,” I assured the parents. “Joanie and Tommy are both safe. Joanie will need therapy and lots of support to get over this incident. Hopefully, it will bring her and her big brother closer together. He’ll be her most valuable asset as long as she doesn’t become angry with him.”

  “You say that like you know from experience,” the mother composed herself.

  “We deal with serial killers all the time, I’ve seen cases similar,” I lied, again. I had been speaking from my own experience. Eric hadn’t been there for me after Callow. I had become
angry with both my siblings, feeling like it was their fault even though I had known it wasn’t. It was one of the reasons I wasn’t close to my family. I blamed all of them. The cycle of violence had started centuries ago, I had just been another victim of it and it was their fault. It sounded good. I had actually distanced myself from my family simply because I didn’t want to be around them. But it was the perfect excuse.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” The mother asked.

  “I’m not a therapist, I don’t know for sure, but she seems to be fine right now and that’s a good sign. She’s young, she might bounce back without so much as a hitch in her step or she might require special attention as she grows older and deals with all the mixed feelings involved.”

  “Mixed feelings?” The father asked.

  “This is really something you should speak with a therapist about. I have seen kids spring back from things much worse, but I’ve seen them crumble from things that weren’t that bad.”

  “How bad was this?” The father asked.

  “Do you know the circumstances of the case?”

  “Only that she was abducted by a pedophile,” he answered. I frowned, suddenly needing Gabriel. The family would find out when it hit the news that their daughter was nearly cannibalized by a feral woman and eaten by a jaguar for the perverse pleasure of a serial killer. However, I didn’t think I was the right person to tell them. “Is that not correct?” The father pressed.

  “Um,” I shifted. “He wasn’t a pedophile in the traditional sense. He’s a voraphile, Joanie’s age didn’t interest him all that much, she was just easy to catch.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what a voraphile is,” the mother told me.

  “Well,” I searched for the words.

  “A voraphile is someone that achieves sexual arousal through the fantasy of eating or being eaten,” Lucas walked into the hallway. I nearly jumped out of my skin I was so happy to see him. I willed my feet to stay in one place and not run to the giant.

  “What do you mean ‘eating or being eaten?’” The father sounded suspicious. The mother looked like she would faint.