by Unknown
“Don’t you want to know what I did tonight? Out There?”
Alison flinches, cold from terror. “No, no, no! Not Mommy and Daddy!”
“Whoa. I’ll never hurt them. Not as long as you tell me stories.”
“But I’m in the Wrong Place!”
“So what?”
“I can’t think of any stories here, it—it isn’t pretty and smells like peepee!”
“Oh.” He sighs, a big show of regret. “That’s too bad, Alison. I really wanted to hear a story tonight.” Big Boy shrugs, on his way to the door.
“W-where’re you going?”
“The only other place I can go,” Big Boy says with a glance over his shoulder.
“Oh no please don’t!”
Big Boy hesitates at the door.
“It’ll be dark for a few more hours. I’ll find another pretty head to twist off.”
“No no no wait!”
“Alison. It’s what I like to do.”
“Tell you—tell you a story if you don’t!”
That sly Big Boy grin. “But you said you couldn’t think of a story. Because you’re in the Wrong Place.”
“I’ll try I’ll really try!”
Big Boy considers her appeal, then nods.
“Know you will, Alison. Because the one thing you don’t want is for me to twist Mommy and Daddy’s heads off. Because without Mommy and Daddy to go to, where would you be? You’ll just have to stay with the Crazy Children forever. And nobody loves you here.”
“I’ll … try …”
“Okay, okay, Alison. Don’t cry any more. Tell you what. I’ll help you out.” Big Boy sits on the side of the bed with her. “Let me put my thinking cap on, now. Umm-hmmm. Hey, I know! I’ve got a swell idea for a story. Want me to start? Then you can pitch in.”
“Oh—kay.”
“It’s a story about … Dolly, and how she got lost.” And before Alison can react, tighten her grip on one-eyed Dolly, Big Boy has mischievously snatched her away with the hand that has the missing finger. He holds Dolly high in the air, letting her swing by a stuffed lanky leg, delightedly watching Alison’s mouth open and close in horror.
(“His name was Walter Banks,” Ed Lewinski says to Lorraine. They’ve stopped at a Wendy’s for burgers after the movie. “I heard about him from an old-timer at the jail; the case file went into dead storage twenty years ago. I thought old Eb was just yarning, so I looked up Banks in the Tribune’s morgue. Sure ’nuff. Between 1943 and 1945 Banks may have murdered as many as eight women in Bluefield. Same m.o. every time. He broke their necks. He was all of sixteen when he started his career as a serial killer. Eighteen when he disappeared, and the stranglings stopped, about the same time as World War Two ended.” Lorraine adds ketchup to her double with cheese, takes a bite, stares thoughtfully at Lewinski until he smilingly waves a hand through her line of concentration. “Sorry,” Lorraine says.)
(Ed says, “Your eyes turn a different color when you do that.” Lorraine nods but she’s already out of focus again, thinking. “Is there a photo of Walter Banks in the Trib’s file?” “From his high school yearbook. I copied it for you.” “I don’t suppose you know where the Banks kid lived.” Lewinski takes an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and lays it on the table. “Two-oh-four Columbine Street. The house is still there, but it’s badly run-down.” Lorraine gives him a questioning look. “I drove by this afternoon and took some pictures. Two-oh-four Columbine is occupied, but they all look like slackers and drifters. Take better care of their Harleys than they do their own selves.” He shakes his head before Lorraine can ask. “Yeah, Doc, I showed the present occupants Alison’s picture. They didn’t know her. But like I said: drifters.”)
Six-year-old Alison on the candy-striped swing set in the side yard of the big white house on the hill. Drawing tablet in her lap, crayons in a pocket of her apron, blue like the one Mommy always wears. Alison has been drawing furiously all afternoon: bears, dragons, spaceships. But now Mommy calls from the steps of the back porch: it’s time to go shopping.
(“Alison? How about some lemonade now?” A few minutes before the close of their hour together, during which Alison has been deeply involved with her artwork and uncommunicative, she sighs and closes her drawing tablet, careful not to let Lorraine see what she was working on—that’s a special intimate privilege when things are going well between them, but not today—and replaces all of her crayons in the box. She looks at the pitcher on Lorraine’s desk. There’s nothing Alison likes more than lemonade when she’s thirsty. Lorraine pours a cupful for each of them. “Alison, I wonder if you’d mind looking at a couple of pictures for me?” Alison nods, sipping. Lorraine places one of Ed Lewinski’s shots of two-oh-four Columbine Street on the edge of her desk. Alison leans forward in her chair, needing to crane a little to see. She doesn’t touch the digital photo. Studies it with no change of expression. “Is that where you live, Lorraine?” “No. I thought you might—” “I’m glad. Because it isn’t pretty.” Alison’s nose wrinkling. “I wouldn’t live there.” There is a hint of something in the girl’s face that gives Lorraine a reason to press on. “But have you ever been to this house?” “NO,” Alison says, with a show of revulsion to close the subject. “It looks like it has rats.” Lorraine smiles and withdraws the photo of two-oh-four Columbine Street. “Could be.” She replaces it with a murky copy of Walter Banks’ old yearbook photo. “Do you know this boy?” Alison stares at the likeness of Walter Banks for almost ten seconds before blinking, twice. Then she sits back in the deep leather chair and closes her eyes. “Alison?” “I have to go home now,” Alison says. A small hand twitches in her lap. There is a sighing in her throat, a windy plaintive sound. “I have to … help Mommy bake the cake. Because today is … Daddy’s birthday.”)
And what a wonderful party they have, in the big white house on the hill! Surprises galore for daddy after his special birthday dinner. And the cake, oh, oh, she can’t count how many candles blazing in thick swirls of icing. Alison did most of the frosting herself.
With tears in his eyes, Daddy gathers Mommy and Alison into his arms and kisses them both. He loves them so much. Alison knows that they are the happiest family that ever lived. If Lorraine could be there she would see that, and never ask another question. But there are barriers Lorraine cannot cross. Alison won’t permit that. And this has made Lorraine jealous. Alison is fearful of her jealousy, afraid of what she might do. Because somehow she has found out. She knows. “She knows who you are,” Alison tells Big Boy later, after everyone is in bed. Alison treated to a cool breeze from the open windows, nightingale’s trill, treasure-house of stars.
Big Boy is silent for quite a long time. Silence making Alison nervous. She plays with the yarn curls of Dolly’s stuffed and sewn head.
“So what?” Big Boy says at last.
“Well … I thought …”
Big Boy, arms folded, waits. Alison arranges the yarn curls this way and that.
“What?”
“You might want to … do something about Lorraine.” Unexpectedly he grins.
“Having Bad Thoughts, Alison?” Alison thrusts Dolly away, face down, in a tangle of curls. A seam, twice re-stitched, is popping again where Dolly’s head joins her neck. Alison looks at it, face filled with dread. No, she doesn’t think Bad Thoughts in the big white house under the stars, because … because otherwise what good is it to be there at all? Shuddering, she recalls one of the smudgy photographs Lorraine showed her. That shabby brick bungalow with its mildew and greasy kitchen smells. It’s what Lorraine wants her to go back to, instead of to her real home, Mommy and Daddy’s clean, airy house. The place where instead of stars shining into her bedroom there were the eyes of prowling rats. She wants Alison to go back to that. Lorraine is not her friend any more, if she ever was. Alison’s heart beats furiously at the thought, she feels a flush of outrage in her cheeks. No never! And rising blood forces a flood of tears.
“She wants to … send me back
to that stinking ol’ place! And if I have to go … you’ll have to go back there too!”
Alison grabs a corner of bed sheet to wipe her streaming eyes. Big Boy sits beside her.
“There’s some snot on your upper lip,” he says. Alison wipes it away, glaring at him.
“Well … what can you do?” But Big Boy shakes his head.
“It’s only what you can do that matters, Alison.”
(Lorraine gets up slowly from her side of the bed so as not to wake Ed Lewinski, who is sleeping on his stomach. She bends to kiss a naked shoulder, then pulls on a nightshirt from her chest of drawers before walking downstairs to the kitchen of her garden condo to get something to drink. Mouth parched from all the kissing and those other things she did with him, after more years than she cares to remember new meaning to going all the way; around the moon and back with sweet Eddie Lew. Carton of tomato juice on the top shelf in the fridge. She pours a glass, adds a squeeze from the fat plastic lime juice container, adds Tabasco: Virgin Mary. Leans against the sink smiling to herself as she sips, probably could use a shower but relishes the smell of her lover on her still-tingling body.
The phone. It’s the hospital. Damn!
By the time Lorraine walks into Alison’s room in the children’s wing Alison has been sedated and is half asleep.
“Must’ve been a nightmare,” the charge nurse says. “She woke up hysterical, and what a time we had with her. She wet the bed.”
Alison’s head moves on the pillow. Her face is nearly colorless except for the small cherry bow of her mouth.
“Rats and bugs. Fights … all the time. She hurts me.” Lorraine looks sharply at her.
“How are you doing, Sweetie?” Alison can open her milky eyes only part way.
“Headache.”
Lorraine holds her hand. “Can you tell me what you were dreaming about?”
“Nuh.”
“That’s okay. We’ll talk about it later. You rest now.”
Instead of closing her eyes and subsiding into her sedative cocoon, Alison trembles.
“Where’s Dolly?”
“Oh,” Lorraine says, noting that Dolly isn’t in her usual place in the crook of Alison’s arm, “I don’t see her.”
In spite of the rockabye sedative more hysteria threatens.
“Dolly!”
Lorraine glances at the charge nurse, who shrugs. Alison begins to wail. Lorraine has a quick look around the Spartan room but Dolly isn’t lurking anywhere. Then she remembers: Alison wet the bed, so the sheets would’ve been changed … she questions the nurse, who nods. Possible. Dolly could’ve left the room in a wad of soiled sheets. Lorraine moves swiftly to Alison’s side.
“I think I know where Dolly’s gone. She’s not lost. I’ll bring her to you.” She holds the girl close.
“P-promise?”
“Just give me a few minutes.”
Lorraine takes the elevator to the second basement level.
Dead quiet down there, no working in the laundry at one thirty in the morning. The machinery of the elevator seems unnaturally loud to her ears in the silence of the cavernous basement. Corridors criss-crossing beneath the entire hospital complex. The concrete walls are painted gray and pale green. Yellow ceiling bulbs in wire baskets. Signs point to different areas. Crematory, Electrical, Maintenance, Storage.
Laundry.
The metal door, twenty feet from the elevator, is closed. Lorraine pushes it open.
There’s a windowless outer room with a couple of tables, chairs, vending machines for the laundry workers. The room would be full dark except for the illuminated facades of the machines. By their glow she sees, inside the laundry itself, a dumpster-size canvas hamper on wheels that sits beneath the drop chute. And there’s a dim light deep inside the shadowy room. She hears a lone clothes dryer thumping dully as it makes its rounds.
Lorraine draws a breath that burns her throat, eases around the canteen tables into the laundry. The big room has glass block windows on one wall, above the pipe complex that grids the ceiling. The one light is behind pebbled glass in an office door eighty feet away; not enough light to cast her shadow. She tries a wall switch inside the door but nothing much happens to the fluorescent fixtures overhead: a cloudy flickering in two or three of the five-foot tubes.
She draws another breath and begins to search the hamper, pulling out sheets one at a time, shaking them. There are sheets recently peed on, all right, but no Dolly.
“I think I have what you’re looking for,” he says. Lorraine turns with a jolt that has her skin sparking.
“Who’s there?”
She hears a phlegmy chuckle, then the quavering voice again. “It’s only me. Did I scare you?”
“Did you—? Hell, yes,” Lorraine says, shaking her head in annoyance. She is unable to tell where his voice is coming from. Next she hears a dry reedy sucking sound, like someone pulling on a straw to get the last drops from a container of soda or fruit juice. That gets on her nerves fast. “Who are you?”
“Oh—I work nights around here. Just washed my old sneakers, now I’m waiting for them to come out of the dryer.”
“What did you mean, you have what I’m looking for? How would you know why—”
She sees him then, shadowy, as he rises from a stool behind a long sorting table; his head, in silhouette against the glass of the office door, looks shaggy. “I believe you come down here for her doll. Throwed out by mistake, was it?”
“Yes. But—”
“Come and get it, then,” he says, chuckling, his amusement causing him to wheeze at the end.
“No. Bring it to me,” Lorraine says. And adds, “Please.”
“All right. All right.” Sounding a little cross. The stool legs scrape on the concrete floor. He comes toward Lorraine, slowly, soundlessly. His sneakers clunking around in the dryer. “How’s little Missy doing? She calm down some from her bad dreams?”
“Were you upstairs earlier? In the children’s wing?”
“That I was. That I was.”
“I see. But how did you know Alison’s doll was missing?”
“Oh, I know things. I know lots of things. Been here almost all my life.”
“Do I know you? What’s your name?”
At the instant she asks, the fluorescent lighting flares overhead with the violence of lightning, the laundry is garishly illuminated, and he is closer than she thought, white-haired, stooped, unkempt head thrust forward of his shoulders as he shuffles toward her. Alison’s Dolly offered in his right hand. Chuckling fit to kill, is Walter Banks. The thumping of old sneakers round and round the dryer tub is like an echo of the accelerated tempo of Lorraine’s heart. She stares in hammering fright at the missing finger on the veiny hand that grips the doll.
“Oh Jesus—!”
The door is only a few feet away. He is old now, and slow and obviously not strong, she can get away easily; Lorraine turns but—
There is no room for her to run.
Because Alison is standing in the doorway in her nightie, arms folded, looking up at her, rigid in her purpose, baleful.
“Oh Alison! But—you can’t do this!”
Alison shakes her head slowly, unyielding. Then Lorraine feels the hand with the missing digit on her shoulder. She glances at it. Not an old man’s juiceless spidery spotted claw—the skin is smooth, unblemished, his hand large, strong; strong enough to grind her bones. Even with a finger gone.
“Alison—God—it’s wrong—listen to me!”
Alison in a quiet kind of huff shuts the door in her face and is gone.
Big Boy bears down and Lorraine screams. He pulls her slowly around to face him. He smiles fondly at Lorraine.
“You don’t want to go yet,” he says. “It’s story time.”)
Answering the Call
BRIAN FREEMAN
Brian Freeman originally sent us a story that was not quite right; but he was willing to take it through three revisions. When it still wasn’t quite right we felt c
ompelled to ask for a fourth draft. He complied by sending us a completely different story, which was so original and creepy, it hit the mark on its first attempt. There’s probably a lesson here, but we’re not sure what it is.
The young man must be lonely.
There is something unflinchingly terrible about the look in his eyes, about the way his body slumps over the heavy, black answering machine that is perched on his lap. He sits on a barstool in the middle of a nearly empty room, naked except for his white underwear and a gold watch. He’s sweating profusely from every pore. A single tear hovers on the edge of his pale, trembling lips. He has dark hair and narrow fingers with fingernails chewed to the quick.
The dark wood floor groans when he shifts his weight. The walls are white. There are no windows, only a door to the hallway and a door to the walk-in closet. The ceiling is white with crown molding. A single lamp next to the barstool glows with a yellowed light, but the corners of the room remain dark. An extension cord snakes across the floor, powering the lamp and the old, boxy answering machine.
He pushes the large button that was once marked ANNOUNCEMENT but now only says OUNCE. The tape crackles, there is a beep, and a woman’s voice speaks: “You’ve reached the Smith Family, we can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, we’ll get right back to you.”
This is the voice of the dead. The sound has deteriorated a bit with age, but when the young man plays this tape, the dead woman lives on, just for a moment. The recording crackles, there is a second beep, and the woman is dead once again.
The young man plays the tape one last time, then checks his watch and sighs. He pushes himself off the barstool and puts the answering machine in the closet. He must get dressed. He wouldn’t want to be late for work.
And the dead woman will still be here when he returns.
This is a nice enough neighborhood, and the young man feels immediately at home. The day is cold and blustery. Fallen leaves are blown about in the wind, thrown from yard to yard, into the air, and out onto the black pavement of the road. There are dozens of tall trees lining this street, and the houses are old, refined, made of stone, surrounded by large multi-acre properties. The young man parks his van a block away from 1804 Equess Court. He puts on his black gloves, removes the key from the ignition, and steps out into the street. There are still several cars along the curb in front of his destination, and he walks slowly.
