SHUDDERVILLE FOUR

by Mia Zabrisky

  “That’s not a problem.”

  “Good. I will preside.”

  “Yes,” he agreed immediately. “That was my hope.”

  “You can’t carry him around forever in a box,” she said with such force it made him feel ashamed. “Was that your plan?”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “We will give him a proper burial.” She raised her hands above the little corpse in her lap. “Please. Take it.”

  He picked up his son, and the thought of Estelle’s barren womb filled him with sadness. For years they’d tried to have children, to no avail. They’d done everything in their power. But then something miraculous had happened. He and the Judge discovered the secret. In 1966, Mandelbaum did something a man should never do. He lied and cheated and stole. And worse than that. Much worse. Yes, it was indeed terrible. And then he went home and told Estelle to make a wish. One wish.

  A boy and a girl, Toby! A little devil and a little angel!

  Mandelbaum had been overjoyed at his newfound abilities. His amazing godlike power. He could grant wishes. As a matter of fact, that had been his one wish—to grant people wishes! He thought it would be a good thing—a generous offering to mankind. Sort of like an ordination. He could minister to people’s needs. Cure their diseases. Fight their causes. He could help people—only now he knew that evil grew from seeds of goodness and purity. Evil inevitably grew out of a desire to help others. Not right away. But over time.

  And the very first person he’d granted a wish to had been his wife. Estelle. He’d hurried home that very day and asked her—what do you want most in this world? What is your fondest desire? Anything. Anything at all.

  Her wish was crystal clear. I want two children, Toby. A boy and a girl. What could be simpler? Twins. Fraternal twins. Why not? They’d waited so long. No more prayers. No more heartache.

  It hurt him to remember. It pierced him like a pin being pushed into his chest. He was falling into something that had no clear bottom. He could feel the adrenaline pulsing through his body in waves of apprehension, like a motor revving and dying. He felt the old shame and humiliation. He still had questions.

  With a sharp intake of breath, he said, “Yes, I will hold the burial tomorrow, and you will preside.”

  “Tonight,” she hissed. “As soon as possible. You have kept him so long. He needs to be blessed tonight.”

  His brain buzzed like a tuning fork. It was his fault the boy had been born so damaged. A little devil. They realized right away that they had to kill it—they both knew that. He could read the horror in Estelle’s eyes shortly before she died. Now he ran his fingers along the twig-like limbs, too repulsed to continue, too fascinated to stop. He examined the tiny hands, the opposable thumbs. Goodbye, my son.

  And where was Bella? His angel daughter? Where was she now? What did she look like? Could she fly at long last? Who had taken her away from him? Or had she died the night she’d wandered off?

  He stood completely powerless over the box, his rapid heartbeat animating his entire body. So much so, he throbbed like a bullfrog in the muddy heat of summer.

  “Did you hear me, Mr. Mandelbaum? Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” He deferred to her age and status. “I hear you.”

  She was leaning forward, shaking her tiny fist at him. “You’ll do exactly as I tell you. Not one iota more.”

  “Yes. Tonight. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  Finally satisfied with his answer, she collapsed against her seat like a scarf in a magic act. Poof. She landed in a boneless heap inside her frazzled quilted robe. “Good,” she whispered. “Good boy.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  His many fears subsided in small increments. The little corpse reminded him of a police chalk drawing on the sidewalk. So simple and pathetic, and yet it had the power to terrify. He placed it carefully inside its box and folded over the brittle tissue paper. “Rest in peace,” he whispered as he lowered the lid.

  *

  Sophie yawned and checked the street signs. It was one o’clock in the morning. She was parked a couple of blocks away from a house where several police cruisers tossed their beacons around the neighborhood like red-and-blue strokes of lightning. Investigators were at the scene. A body had been taken away. A detective was interviewing witnesses.

  Sophie observed the detective carefully. A man with a dense brow and dark cagey eyes. His shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, and he was perspiring profusely in the balmy night. The moon was three-quarters full. Beads of sweat popped out on the detective’s forehead, and his back muscles pulled and strained against his jacket.

  Sophie drew a troubled breath and held it in her lungs. She didn’t know what to make of this scene. Not yet. She only knew that all hell was about to break loose.

  She drove to Mandelbaum’s seaside home, parked on the street and stepped out of her air-conditioned car into the muggy heat. She took the chipped flagstone walkway toward the dark and silent residence. A pink stucco bungalow. Oceanfront property.

  Looking nervously over her shoulder, she went around the side of the house, where she put her nose to the glass and nearly leapt out of her skin. Mandelbaum stood peering back at her with his face pressed to the glass. He stared at her through the window, smiling at her confusion and fright. He motioned her inside.

  She met him at the front door. He wore baggy shorts and an unbuttoned shirt. His sandals were made of leather, and his wrinkled chest was the texture of roasted turkey. “I saw you walking around the side of the house,” he said with a laugh. “You should’ve seen your face, Sophie.”

  “Who died tonight? In that house?”

  He shrugged. “Come on in and we’ll talk about it.”

  “Did you kill her? That old lady?”

  “No.” He sighed. “I didn’t kill anyone. Are you coming in or what?”

  She rooted around in her backpack and clumsily pulled out a gun. She aimed it at his chest and motioned him inside.

  She followed him through the living room and noticed the gauzy drapes ruffling in the breeze. The French doors were open. The air smelled heavily of salt and faintly of dead flowers. The living room was decorated with lots of blonde wood and framed art prints. Picasso, Hopper, Miro.

  He didn’t seem surprised. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  “Don’t move,” she said, aiming the gun at his head.

  His teeth were stained from drinking endless cups of coffee. He had a rail-thin body and slate-white hair that snaked unpleasantly from his skull. “Pull up a chair,” he said cordially enough. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  “No.” She sat heavily.

  “Tired?”

  “Shut up. Just get yourself a drink and tell me where Jayla is.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You want to know about Jayla.”

  “What else?” She’d had it with him. Fear flared in her eyes, but she tried not to show it. She steadied her gun at his chest.

  Mandelbaum’s mouth turned down at the corners as he slowly buttoned up his Hawaiian shirt. His cagey eyes were surrounded by crow’s-feet and topped off by two fading white eyebrows. She could see the red veins on his nose. She could count the blackheads on his chin. There was a hurtful tenderness in her bones. She felt like a coiled spring, ready to pop.

  “Let’s be honest,” he said. “We’ve both suffered great losses. Sure you wouldn’t like a drink? Bourbon? Tequila?”

  She licked her parched lips. “Just tell me where she is and I’ll leave you alone. Tell me now, or I swear to God…” The gun wavered in her hand. Could she do it? Pull the trigger? Maybe. Was this how people died? Some person with a gun who honestly didn’t know if they could pull the trigger or not, until they finally did?

  There were plug-in air fresheners in the living room, and the maroon cotton sofa was jauntily angled between two matching armchairs. The tufted wall-to-wall carpeting was spec
kled like birds’ eggs.

  “Bourbon. The best. Cheers.” Mandelbaum finished his drink in several greedy gulps and poured himself another. He scratched the back of his neck with his thumb and exhaled loudly. “I’m not the man I used to be, ever since Estelle died. Here she is. This picture was taken forty years ago. Forty, is it? How time flies.” He handed Sophie the framed photograph of a pregnant young woman with impish eyes and a poodle cap of hair. “Be still my heart.”

  Sophie nodded, not entirely unsympathetic.

  “She was a snob, but she liked me okay.”

  She handed the picture back. “What happened to her?”

  “She died giving birth to our firstborns. Twins. She never made it to the hospital. They were two months premature. She miscarried inside the house, and the babies didn’t make it. Bless their souls. A boy and a girl. That’s what Estelle wanted. Mind?” He poured himself another drink.

  Sophie kept the gun directed toward him at all times. “What does any of this have to do with my daughter?” she said angrily, blood pulsing through her chest.

  He raised his chin and squinted. “There was a time when I couldn’t imagine life without Estelle. But what are you going to do? You go on living, no matter what. You think you’ll die of grief, but then you don’t. You wake up the next day. It’s the darnedest thing.” He took the decanter with him and sat in one of the matching armchairs. He settled in and said, “Look around you. This is how you grow old. Lazy-Boy recliner. Metamucil. Icy Hot. Reminiscing about old times. I’m an official citizen of Geezer Land.”

  “I don’t care,” she hissed.

  He leaned forward and said, “Sure, sure. You want to know where she is, right? Your little girl. You want all the details. Right? How all this started? What’s going on? Well, Sophie. I’ll tell you. If you’ll let me.”

  She stared at him hopelessly. She didn’t believe him, but at the same time she was dying to find out what he knew. She held the gun steady but her arm was getting tired. “Go on,” she said.

  “Estelle and I were married in 1955. I was twenty-six. She was twenty-three. What a cutie! She had these lively brown eyes and a funny, crooked smile… always with the jokes. We laughed a lot. Despite the tears. For ten years, we tried to have kids. For ten long years we tried. We wanted a whole passel. You know? Our own little F-Troop. But, ah, no such luck. Not for us. It put a strain on our marriage. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Turns out you need a healthy sperm and a healthy egg to conceive, and we thought we had plenty of both. But it wasn’t in the cards. Not for us.

  “Eventually we gave up. When Estelle stopped marking her calendar with her ovulation date, it was a very sad day for us.” He poured himself another drink. “And so we moved on. Like they say in the movies—get on with your life.” He winked at her. “Anyway, Estelle tried to preoccupy herself in other ways. Meanwhile, my career was going well. I worked for a company called Lon-Gen. We studied things. Fascinating things. I’m a mathematician; I’m pretty good at it. They hired a quantum physicist in the early sixties, and he and I got along great. We worked on some projects together. This and that. But then one day, we discovered something… how can I put this?” His voice had fallen to a mere whisper. “Something remarkable.”

  Sophie’s hands were trembling. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves. She tried not to accidentally pull the trigger—not now. Not when he was about to reveal everything to her.

  “Well, anyway, I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, I went home that very day and asked Estelle what she wanted more than anything else in the world. What was her fondest wish? I was flexing this newfound power of mine. She thought I was kidding around, you know? I was quite the jokester back then.”

  Sophie’s nerves fluttered. Her stomach tensed. Her mouth tasted sour.

  “But I told her—no, take this seriously, Estelle. And she confessed what she wanted. Babies, of course. Two kids. What are you thinking? I want babies, she said! A boy and a girl. A little devil and a little angel!” He gave Sophie a significant look, then paused to wipe his brow with his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. “She got pregnant the next day. Twins. We were delighted. We decided on the names. Bella and Teddy. We were over the moon. Pregnant at last. After all these years! It was a miracle. I immediately got to work turning the guest room into a nursery.

  “But then, as you well know, wishes can take strange turns.” He licked his chapped lips. “Seven months later, Estelle went into premature labor. It happened so fast. Before I could call for help, our son came out. And as you’ve probably guessed, Sophie, he wasn’t a normal little boy. He was a little devil. Literally. He didn’t cry. His eyes were bloodshot and not entirely human. I could tell right away there was something terribly wrong with him. He growled and snapped at me. I had no choice but to put him out of his misery. He was slithering around on the floor, alive and powerful, kicking and having all these seizures or something… it was awful. Just awful. It was terrifying, Sophie. I had to kill him. I remember looking around for something and finally went outside and got an axe. But I had to do it. No question in my mind.

  “And then, of course, there was Bella. Our little angel. I thought she was dead. Her eyes were fused shut, and she wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t have weighed more than a pound. I wrapped her in a dishtowel and put her in a shoebox and left her by the back door. I was going to bury her later on, along with her brother. But first I had to rush Estelle to the emergency room. I needed to save my wife, but she was already gone. She never woke up. The doctors told me she’d had a stroke. Died of complications. It knocked the stuffing out of me. I couldn’t believe she was gone. I begged them to do something, to bring her back. They were very patient and kind, but I had to face facts. She was gone.

  “Suffice it to say, after Estelle passed away, I forgot all about the babies—they were already dead in my eyes. I was focused exclusively on my wife. I had to talk to the hospital staff and make funeral arrangements. By the time I got home, early the next morning, I didn’t notice the baby in the shoebox. I’d forgotten all about her. I went upstairs and collapsed. The doctors gave me something to sleep.

  “Next morning, I was awakened by a faint, sweet cry. The cry of an angel. I couldn’t figure out what was making that noise, so I went downstairs and remembered the shoebox, and when I looked inside, I discovered she was alive—just barely.”

  Sophie’s eyes narrowed, and she could feel her willpower and determination beginning to slacken. It was being sucked right out of her, and the more she listened to Mandelbaum’s story, the more twinges of pity and empathy she felt. She didn’t want to feel those things, but it was a losing battle.

  “My little Bella,” he said faintly. “She looked like a newly hatched bird. She pushed out her arms and legs and turned herself over. That’s when I realized… what a little fighter she was.” His eyes glazed with awe and pride. “Her wings were the same length as her arms, but they were folded up against her back. You could see little feathers sprouting out of them. Anyway.” He sighed. “I couldn’t tell anyone about them—Teddy and Bella. Not a soul. It was too terrible. Too complicated. There were no birth certificates. No record they existed. So I kept her hidden, but I raised her like a normal child.”

  Sophie’s face began to itch. Sweat beaded on her skin. “Where is she? What happened to her?”

  “She disappeared one night when she was five years old.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “For the rest of my life, I’ve been wondering what happened to her. Where did she go? Did she fly away? Did somebody kidnap her? Maybe it was my fault? What do I know about raising kids? Especially little girls with wings?” He finished his glass of bourbon. “I hate stirring up old feelings. Makes my stomach hurt.”

  Sophie hardened toward him. “So you don’t know who took her?” she asked skeptically. “You, the great Mandelbaum who grants people wishes?”

  He shook his head slowly, as if to acknowledge that
it was worse than that—he didn’t know anything. “I raised her for five years like a normal little girl. She couldn’t fly with those wings of hers. They were undeveloped. They flapped like useless appendages. She must’ve wandered off somewhere. I don’t know. I’ve been looking for her for years. She left the house in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops, and she never came back.”

  “What did the police say?”

  Mandelbaum shrugged. “Do you honestly think I’d call the police? After all that time when I’d kept her hidden from the world? How could I explain it? They’d lock me up and throw away the key. As far as everybody else was concerned, Bella didn’t exist.” He sighed. “She weighed next to nothing when she was born, did I tell you? I honestly doubted she’d make it through the night. I went out of town for baby formula and diapers. Finally, she started to grow a little. Two pounds. Three.

  “Then we got used to the way things were. Nobody knew about Bella, and she didn’t care. She’d always lived that way, so it felt natural to her. I loved that little girl to pieces. I kept putting off decisions about what to do when she got to be school age. I figured I’d home-school her. Boy was she smart. She could read a book. She was fast on her feet. She could speak her mind.

  “But then when she disappeared, my legs caved out from under me. I couldn’t tell anyone about it. It was a tragedy I had to live with. It almost drove me crazy. It drove me to drink. So you see, Sophie. I understand much more than you know.” He picked up the decanter and poured the rest of the bourbon into the glass. “Bottoms up.”

  “Where’s Jayla?” she said in a low voice. “What have you done with her?”

  “Ah. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  She steadied the gun at his head. “Answer my question.”

  “The Judge has her,” he said softly.

  “Who?”

  “The Judge.”

  “Who the hell is the Judge?”

  “My old partner at Lon-Gen. The quantum physicist who got the ball rolling. You could say he’s the co-author of the wishes.”

  She blinked uncomfortably hard at him. “The Judge?”