by Mia Zabrisky
SHUDDERVILLE
FOUR
MIA ZABRISKY
Episode Four
Have You Seen My Little Girl?
Tobias Mandelbaum sat in his living room with the air-conditioner on full blast, cooling his chest and ankles. He had aged like the desert, baked in the sun. His face was leathery. He was thicker around the middle than he’d been in his youth. He was slower. His joints hurt him a little. But he was not vain. He didn’t mind the lines on his face or the gray in his hair.
He made himself a cup of espresso and sat in front of the bay windows overlooking the ocean. A sea gull alighted on the deck railing. He tapped on the glass and the bird flew away. It was hot and humid today, and the palm trees made a shaggy backbone along the shoreline.
He had dreamed last night of being back in New England with his wife. He had dreamed of a house full of warmth and music. The memory was so alive on his skin that he could almost feel Estelle’s presence. Almost.
There were plenty of pretty girls on the beach this morning. Blondes everywhere you looked. Strolling across the sand like Marilyn Monroe. He noticed one young beauty with a flock of boys orbiting around her. Her long blond hair moved in the wind like a tentacled jellyfish, like something separate and alive. What a dazzling sight.
Mandelbaum traveled a lot, but he always came back to this modest house on the east coast of Florida. He’d been rich, and he’d been poor, and there was very little difference between the two, except that you could buy more stuff when you were rich. But you couldn’t buy peace of mind. You couldn’t buy happiness. All the tired clichés were true.
Now he clapped his hands on his thighs. Time to get moving. Time to get going. He had work to do. His knees hurt him, but he stood up and smiled. Grin and bear it, buck-o. The heat, the sweat. What are you going to do?
Mandelbaum knew things most people didn’t.
There were mysteries out there more powerful than any human being.
Now he stood gazing at the sea. It was one of those moments when he missed his wife terribly. Her laughter used to make his day. They fought and bickered, like most couples, but the good times were great. He had her back, and she had his.
There was no putting off the task, so he went over to his desk and opened the decades-old box. The relic’s leathery, mummified body had been severed at one of the thoracic vertebrae. It looked like a puppet whose strings had been snipped. He gingerly lifted the two separate halves out of the box and laid them on the desktop, his thin lips pressed together into a hard line. Mandelbaum wasn’t a squeamish man. But nothing disturbed him more than the sight of this almost-child, between 25-30 weeks of gestation, lying naked and mummified on his desk next to his pens and pads of paper. He scrutinized the perfect little eyelids, the insect-like eyelashes, the miraculous fingernails and toenails, the calcified umbilical cord. Most striking of all was the tapered two-inch tail, curved like a pump handle.
Oh Toby. I want to have a baby, of course! That’s my wish.
Just one?
Two babies! A boy and a girl. That’s my fondest desire, since you asked, sweetheart.
He smiled at the memory, recalling how Estelle’s fringed hair swayed with every swing of her head. He breathed in the relic’s fetid perfume and frowned. The bones, although fully matured, were weak and delicate. The tiny ribcage had been cracked and peeled back to reveal the mummified tissue. The organs were puttylike—brown, gray, green. There was very little dried blood. The lungs were not yet fully developed. He studied the articulated joints. The papery skin was tight to the skull. The shriveled ears were eerily human, except for the pointed tips. The genitalia were those of a normal human male. The fetus was about seven months old. He thought about his wife’s death at the premature birth of this child, and it sank like a hot rock in his gut.
A boy and a girl, Toby. A little devil and a little angel! That’s what I want!
He felt the old shame and humiliation blacken his heart. He had a million questions. Where was the Judge now? What had he done with Jayla McKnight? It was all John Driscoll’s fault, the idiot. He had stupidly, selfishly handed the girl over to the Judge. If Mandelbaum ever got his hands on the bastard… You have no idea what you’ve done. Decades of work. Decades of methodical planning. Down the drain. He was shaking. He was livid.
He tried to get his bearings, while he played with a rosary of questions. The Judge would do everything in his power to prevent a catastrophe from happening. A catastrophe that Mandelbaum had been counting on, a catastrophe he’d been plotting and planning for years. A ‘catastrophe’ he’d welcome with open arms.
His aging body shook from trying to hold onto some stability, something solid and real. He willed the fear to lift out of him. He reminded himself he was only a man, and that good men did not run away from the truth.
Estelle was gone.
But it wasn’t too late to get her back.
He scooped up the two halves of the small corpse and put them inside the box, then gently folded over the crinkly tissue paper and lowered the lid. He picked up his espresso and stood gazing at the sea in surly silence.
What had he done?
He’d unleashed something terrible into the world.
And it had changed him permanently.
*
Sophie went home, locked the door and threw off her coat and scarf. She closed the mini-blinds and sat down at her desk, switched on her computer and rubbed her pounding temples while she waited for her plodding PC to boot up. She remembered the doctor’s prescription, took it out of her pocket, ripped it into tiny pieces and tossed it away. She didn’t need pills. She needed her daughter back.
With trembling fingers, she did an online search for ‘Tobias Mandelbaum’ and ‘Estelle’ and found an archived wedding announcement from the Boston Globe. “Miss Estelle Falke, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Sebastian Falke, was united in marriage with Mr. Tobias Mandelbaum of Newton, Massachusetts on Sunday evening, May 21, 1955. The wedding was solemnized at the Methodist Church, with service read by Reverend Thomas Nightingale. At the ceremony, only immediate friends and relatives of the bride and bridegroom were present. A reception was held at the home of the bride’s aunt, and Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum left immediately afterwards for a honeymoon trip abroad.”
There was a picture of the bride-to-be posing in her white wedding gown with her fiancé, an average-sized, thin-lipped, younger version of the Tobias Mandelbaum Sophie knew. He was holding that ever-present cane.
Next she did an online search of Sebastian Falke, Estelle’s father, and found a brief biography from an obscure history text written in 1988. “Born in 1904, Mr. Falke graduated from Yale University in 1925, before venturing into mining operations in Russia, copper in Eastern Europe and gold in South America. He was something of a sportsman, who loved tennis, polo, sailing and racehorses. He formed several companies, including the Lon-Gen Foundation, with a silent business partner, Mr. Atticus Rudge. Mr. Falke and his wife, Judith, sold their mansion in Newton, Massachusetts in 1972 and settled in Rome as ex-pats, where he later died at the age of 74.”
Information on Lon-Gen was scarce. The Institute was now defunct. After half an hour of hunting, Sophie finally found a brief biographical footnote for Atticus Rudge: “Chief Executive Officer of the Lon-Gen Foundation, Atticus V. Rudge was born abroad on January 2, 1915, while his parents were on an archeological expedition in Egypt. He grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Phillips Academy and Oxford University. He received his Masters in mathematics from Oxford and earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He devoted his life to quantum physics research, but after the Institute closed its doors in 1972, he retired and died abroad in 1992.”
Sophie sat very still. Something had happened in 1972. She fe
lt a powerful ache in her stomach as she sat listening to the slow ticking of her blood. Her phone rang, startling her, and she picked up. “Hello?”
“Sophie McKnight?”
“Yes?”
The man’s voice was quiet, dignified. “I have the information you requested.”
She wrote everything down on a yellow lined pad. “Thanks,” she said. She pocketed her phone and tore out the piece of paper. She folded it up and put it in her pocket. She took a deep breath, turned off her computer, fetched her coat and scarf, grabbed her keys and locked the apartment door behind her.
*
Tobias patted his pockets, making sure he had everything—his keys, his wallet, his watch. Through the bay windows, he spotted a flock of gulls feeding on the waves, and an amazing calm spread over him. Something about the birds—their assessing eyes, their strange dignity—comforted him. He didn’t know why. Birds understood danger. They feared for their lives, never trusting, constantly battling over food and territory with their sharp claws and beaks. They were fearsome. And yet they were lovely and harmless to our eyes.
He caught his reflection in the glass. His hair was sticking straight up from his head as if he were hanging upside-down. Since when had he turned into a crazy old guy? He flattened his unruly hair with his hands and went into the kitchen to make a peanut-butter sandwich, but only took a bite before losing his appetite. He drank the tablespoon of milk that was left in the sticky milk carton and cleaned up a little. He put the dishes in the dishwasher, tied the trash bag with a twisty and wiped off the granite countertop.
Then he went back into the living room and opened the lid of the box to make sure it was still there. Of course it was still there. Where would it go? He paused to study the fragile relic with its tiny brittle bones.
Bones were like secrets. You could bury your deepest secrets in the back yard, but they wouldn’t stay buried for long. Bones had a way of knuckling out of the earth over time. Even the deepest secrets never stayed hidden forever.
He put the lid back on the box and picked up his hat. Keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Watch? Check. Take a deep breath. Go slow. Easy.
Too much coffee. Nothing in his stomach. Jittery nerves.
He opened the front door and walked into the brilliant sunshine.
*
Sophie glanced at herself in the rearview mirror of her car. Her lips were buttoned up tight, and beads of perspiration sat like sequins on her forehead, as if some crazed, enthusiastic arts-and-crafter had Bedazzled her. She’d been following Mandelbaum around for days. Florida was a sickening blur of palm-studded boulevards and terra cotta roofs. The morning sun warmed the tar on the pavement until everything smelled like an oil field.
She waited until the old man came limping out of the house. He leaned heavily against his polished cane. There were bags under his eyes from lack of sleep. Now he put on a pair of sunglasses, got into his gas-guzzling Buick and drove off.
She swung out onto the road and followed him. She squinted at the sky and saw nothing but the pale blue of it. She drove past private beaches with locked gates and DO NOT ENTER signs. Closer to the main drag, the traffic snaked past art galleries, surf shops and cafes.
Her phone rang.
Sophie answered. “Hello?”
“Stop following me.” A choking, furious whisper.
“Never.”
The line went dead.
She knew things most people didn’t. There was a world beneath the world. The sky momentarily darkened. But it was only the shadow of a hawk passing overhead.
*
Mandelbaum had been feeling out of sorts lately. Nothing mattered anymore. He felt edged out of the conversation. He was skirting the periphery of things. He wasn’t really there. A million other thoughts crowded his mind. He was only faking it. Faking the laughter, faking the warmth. When he studied people’s faces in the dim light of bars and cafés, he could sense their stress and he wondered—were they faking it too?
He had one more appointment to keep.
And then there would be nothing holding him here.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the dusty blue Toyota following him. Sophie McKnight had no idea what she was up against. She was playing with fire. She could screw up his plans. But then again, she might be useful. He was on the fence about what to do with her.
Right now he had to ditch her. He took a left, then a right. He knew the area better than she did. Soon he’d shaken her.
Mandelbaum took a deep breath. He was on his way to see Olga Vonovich, the supposed seer, when he passed an antique shop and pulled into a parking space and got out. He walked over to the window and gazed at the collectibles. Why did beautiful old things make him lust after them? The more broken and cracked the better. He went inside and found a pair of antique sunglasses with one of the lenses missing and bought it. Another haunting item for his collection.
Next, he paused to study the menu of an interesting restaurant he hadn’t been to yet. Costolette in graticola, pollo con fichi. He procrastinated like a child dawdling on his way to school. He was carrying the box under his arm. He was sweating. He was worried that the sweat might soak into the box.
Mandelbaum found the old woman’s house at the end of the lane and knocked. Olga greeted him warmly at the door—a rail-thin old lady who seemed cursed to shake forever. “Why, good afternoon, Mr. Mandelbaum. Please come in. Wipe your feet.”
He took off his salt-stained hat and dutifully wiped his feet on the welcome mat. Olga looked so frail and fragile, he imagined flicking her away with his finger. And yet she terrified him. A seer. Who saw things. What things?
Now she stood smiling up at him, revealing a set of narrow teeth inside her shriveled, consumptive face. She wore bright white orthopedic shoes and a quilted dressing gown that was frazzled from repeated washings. Her spindly legs had varicose veins running through them. She shuffled into the living room and plopped down in the nearest chair, as if she couldn’t make it any further into the house.
There was a tray on the coffee table, with a teapot and china cups, a delicate bowl of sugar and a tiny pitcher of milk, and also a plate of warm cinnamon buns.
“I made these for you,” she said with a prideful smile.
“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” He set his box on the table next to the tea tray and picked up the teapot. He poured them both a cup of tea, added milk and sugar without asking, and handed Olga her cup and saucer, along with a cloth napkin and an elegant silver spoon. “Here you go. Just the way you like it.”
“How do you know what I like?” she asked, surprised.
Mandelbaum shook his head. “I can tell you like things sweet and creamy. I’m looking around your place, and I see you have many comforts here. Many toss pillows and footstools and such. Lacy curtains and deep-pile carpets. Knick-knacks with cherubic faces. It keeps death at bay—cream and sugar. It cushions the loneliness.”
Her hands trembled and the china made a loud clattering sound as she took a few sips and then set the saucer on the edge of the table. “Sit and talk,” she commanded.
He picked up his cup and saucer, his spoon, his napkin, and sat down. He told her about his journey. He told her everything.
She strained to catch every word.
“And you remember my wife, Estelle?” he asked politely.
It took her so long to respond, he thought for a moment she hadn’t heard him.
“Of course. A lovely girl. So full of life. And yet so barren. Well. Until, that is... well.” She peered at him, her calcified jaw setting moodily. “It’s terrible. No?” She turned away, the color rising in her withered cheeks. Her coifed hair was white as snow. Her eyes were pale and shiny. She was oddly beautiful in her old age, like a scratched marble. It almost made him want to purchase her from an antique dealer’s shelf. She tugged the fringed ends of her quilted robe closer together and repeated, “It’s terrible.”
“That’s one word for it, I suppose.”
She pointed at the box on the table. “Show me.”
“But you haven’t finished drinking your tea.”
“Yes. With cream and sugar. I know. Show me,” she thundered, shaking so badly her bony knee hit the table and her teacup threatened to overspill.
Mandelbaum quickly got up and scooped it away from the edge of the table and set it back down on the tray. “I will show you,” he said quietly.
“Good.” She nodded, calmer now.
His hands wouldn’t stop trembling as he opened the box and parted the tissue paper. He gingerly lifted the leathery, mummified little body out of the box and laid it on the polished mahogany table.
Olga pressed her hands together. “Closer,” she said.
Obeying, he handed her the little body, and she rested it in her paltry lap and studied the perfect eyelids, the strangely pointed ears, the miraculous fingernails and toenails.
Fright traveled in waves through his stomach. “We named him Teddy.”
Olga said nothing.
Mandelbaum sat in miserable silence.
Finally she waved him over and whispered, “I picture a brutal killing machine. A man shut off from the rest of the world. A loner. Dead inside. Driven to madness. He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. He can’t stop thinking about his wife. He can’t stop imagining how she died. How she suffered. He tried to bury his son. He cobbled together the coffin himself. It was horrible. The smell alone. The despair. Something snapped inside of him. He couldn’t do it. Broken and alone. He’s lost his mind. My gift to you—an explanation. Only one among many. Just a guess. Based on nothing but air.” She tapped her thinning, white-haired skull.
Words nudged out of his mouth, reluctant sentiments. “Yes. Pity. But what can you do?”
The wise seer took a few scratchy breaths. She was very old. “You must bury your son. After all these years—why hang on? Why cling? A formal burial. Of course, it will cost you.”
