She stopped talking. It even sounded like she’d stopped breathing.
“Brian had you…I can’t say it, Apollo.”
“I want to hear it,” Apollo told her, though he wasn’t quite sure.
“He had taken off your clothes, and he had you in the tub.”
“I thought you said the water was hot. Steaming.”
“It was,” she said. “He had his hands on your chest, and he had you under the water, and you were kicking and crying because the water was burning your skin.”
Apollo’s hand slipped and he slid down to the floor. “What?”
“Your father tried to kill you,” Lillian said. “And when I came home, he planned to kill me. Then himself.”
“Why?” Apollo whispered.
“I told you. I wanted a divorce. I was leaving him and taking you with me. Your father had a terrible childhood. His mother and father were awful people. He wanted a family so badly. He wanted to make up for everything he’d missed. He’d been telling himself stories about how it would be since he was twelve years old. But twelve-year-olds don’t understand adulthood. Even when he became a man, he still thought like a child. He couldn’t change, couldn’t adapt. I served him with divorce papers, but he had other plans.”
Apollo sat with his back against the door. “But I always thought—” he said. “The stuff in the box. The book.”
“Your father lived in terror that he’d lose you. That’s what the whole book is about. When he was young, he didn’t have an Ida who could come save him. He always felt like the goblins had stolen him and raised him and no one came to bring him back. That’s why he had it, why he wanted to read it to you. He was always going to come for you. He loved you with all his heart and he tried to take your life. I’m sorry, Apollo, but both those things are true.”
She cleared her throat. Her voice became the steadiest it had been this whole call.
“You have the right to think whatever you like about him, and about me, but at least you’ll know it all. That’s the only way to understand anything.”
Apollo pressed his free hand over his eyes. “I’m amazed anyone survives childhood,” he said.
“Apollo, you hear me? I want you to know that no matter who your father became, you’re not him. I’m proud of the man you turned out to be.”
He looked up at the ceiling, rested his head against the den’s door. “I spent my whole life chasing him,” he said. “But you’re the one who was always there.”
“I was where I wanted to be,” she whispered.
“What happened to him?” Apollo asked. “I mean after you found us. I’m sure he wouldn’t just apologize and walk away.”
“You think a man is going to hurt my child and I’ll just see him to the door?”
“Did you call the cops?” Apollo asked.
“No,” she said. “They weren’t needed. I stepped into that bathroom, and I saw my son in danger and I…turned into something else.” She went silent.
“Where is he now? Do you have any idea?”
“I know exactly where Brian West is,” Lillian said. “He’s where I left him.”
Apollo held the phone to his ear, expecting her to reveal more, but instead she said, “You sound tired. Are you eating? Do you want to come over and I’ll make you dinner?”
He laughed hoarsely. “I’ll eat something soon,” he said. “But I do want to come over, very soon.”
Apollo began to form the words—Emma is here with me—but before he could say them, he realized how cold the first floor felt, even here by the den’s door. He told his mother he had to go, hung up, and opened the door. The room looked exactly as it had a day ago, but that didn’t mean the room was unchanged. He walked inside, shivering.
The space heaters weren’t on.
No heat. No sparking, sputtering, rattling clatter.
He stooped in front of them. All three were cool to the touch. Maybe a fuse had blown. But when he turned the dials, each one lit up and hummed. The fuses were fine. That meant last night someone had come into this house and turned the heaters off.
APOLLO KNELT IN front of the space heaters, and Emma stood behind him. She’d pulled the top sheet off the bed as she came down the stairs behind him, and now she coiled it around one shoulder and draped it over the other so it looked as if she wore an off-white sari.
“If they turned this off, then they must’ve seen Jorgen, right?”
It seemed impossible someone would miss a seventy-year-old man with a knife lodged in his throat.
“He’s in the kitchen,” Emma said. “And down on the floor. So maybe not.”
“But the blood,” Apollo said.
She put a hand on the back of Apollo’s neck and the touch soothed him. “If they didn’t come in through the back, they might not even know he was there.”
“But that would mean Kinder Garten came in here just to turn off the space heaters,” Apollo said. “Why would he do that?”
“What?”
Apollo waved an arm. “William Wheeler, I mean.”
“And who’s William Wheeler?” Emma asked.
Apollo actually laughed when she said this, like maybe she’d just been fucking with him. But of course, how would she know? Good God, the man at the center of all their misery might as well be a phantom to her. An avatar on a screen and nothing more.
“He’s the man who sent those texts to your phone, then made them disappear.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t imagine it.”
Apollo explained as much as he could, as quickly as he could, right there in the den. How Kinder Garten had even infiltrated Patrice’s machine, hidden inside the hard drive, lurking.
“He’s a troll, too,” Emma said.
Her face tightened with anger, and she threw one arm out. She needed to strike something just then, and the only opportune targets were the Japanese panels in the middle of the room. She hit one, and when it fell, the other panel fell, too. They landed with two muted thumps because of the shag carpeting, but they raked the far wall and brought down twenty or thirty of the children’s portraits hanging there.
Emma pointed. “What is all this?” she asked. Though she had been haunting Jorgen’s head, she hadn’t ever been in his home.
Apollo didn’t know where to begin, so he walked to the far end of the room and pointed at the small ink rendering. “This is Agnes Knudsdatter,” he began. “She was the first. I don’t know the names of most of these other kids, but Kinder Garten’s daughter must be here. Her name was Agnes, too.”
She stepped closer to the wall. She brought a hand to her mouth and scanned every face. Then she looked down and saw the frames that had fallen. She bent and picked up two, hung them back on the wall, then dropped her hands.
“All those mothers,” she whispered. “This is an evil home.”
Emma went to the space heaters and turned all three back on. Once their coils glowed orange, she tipped each one over, facedown on the shag carpeting.
“That’s going to start a fire,” Apollo said.
“I hope so,” she said.
Jorgen’s home stood alone on its lot, driveways between it and the houses on either side. Room enough, he hoped, to prevent a blaze from spreading before the fire department would arrive. Quickly they moved through the rest of the first floor, shutting all the windows. They used the months—years—worth of newspapers and circulars on the dining room table like kindling, crowding the papers around the space heaters, then placing more around the two rooms so the fire would spread. Then back to the den.
She pointed at the suitcase. “Show me the clothes you brought me,” she said.
Apollo set them out on the carpet as Emma undid the sheet she wore. After dressing she raided a closet in the hall and found a heavy parka with a fur-lined hood. She had to fold each sleeve up twice, and the bottom of the parka came down just past her knees. Now she wore Jorgen’s clothes, and Apollo wore William’s. They had become the Knudsens, burning down the an
cestral home.
Already the carpet beneath them stank as it singed. The first traces of smoke could be seen in the den. Now the suitcase had nearly emptied. The only things left were the mattock and Brian’s outfit. Apollo took the former, Emma the latter. They left the den and walked through the kitchen. Jorgen’s body remained pinned to the cabinet like a butterfly in a display.
“When this house goes up in flames, he’s going to get a Viking funeral,” Apollo said.
“Better than he deserves,” Emma said.
Apollo set down the mattock and leaned close to the body one last time, but he wasn’t planning some sentimental goodbye. His fingerprints were on the handle of the knife. The house might burn, but who knew what might survive? At the very least he should take the murder weapon. He grabbed it and tugged, but the tip had lodged deep. Apollo had to plant a foot against the dead man’s chest to yank it free. Jorgen’s body flopped down on its side making a dull thud. Emma had already gone out the back entrance.
Apollo and Emma walked alongside the house. From the street no one would guess at the arson inside. Not yet. Meanwhile the interior of Jorgen Knudsen’s home had already filled with fog. Shutting the windows, slipping a few of the circulars under the front door, had helped to turn the place into a smoke box. The lack of windows in the den meant even a nosy neighbor wouldn’t see the flames until they spread. By then it would be too late to save the place.
They were halfway down the drive when they were bathed in light, bright as a brilliant idea. The motion sensor had done its job again, capturing them. But this time Apollo didn’t flee or freeze up. In the middle of the day, the light wouldn’t even be noticeable to people across the street, or even on the other side of the alleyway. He and Emma stopped at that curious door. No handle. No locks.
“Look at that,” Emma said.
At hip level, a faint handprint.
“That’s blood,” Apollo said.
Emma pressed at the door, but it didn’t move. “What’s down there?” she asked.
“I never got in,” he said.
“If the old man kept pictures in his den, what do you think he might be hiding in the basement?”
She didn’t speak again but pointed at the mattock in his left hand. He lifted it and slipped the adze end in between the door and the frame. He looked across the street and behind him. No neighbors watching. He pulled back, and the wood squawked loudly. He didn’t hesitate, moving the adze lower and yanking again. A third time, lower, and the door lifted off its hinges and fell back. Apollo pushed it farther so they could get inside.
A long staircase led down into the basement. They remained there at the threshold, silent, and heard the faintest tapping sound. Another moment, and they heard it again.
“I’m going to activate subject twelve. You guys will like this one.”
A man’s voice.
Apollo recognized it.
He gestured down with the mattock. As they descended, they felt heat from the floorboards above their heads.
A BOILER, A WASHING machine and dryer; six cans of paint so old their lids had oxidized; an air mattress with a comforter heaped in a pile on top; one thin pillow, and two garbage bags containing a jumble of clothes fit for a stocky, middle-aged man; a black ergonomic office chair, a computer desk and computer system exactly, perfectly the same as the one Patrice had built in his basement apartment; and an iPad propped up beside one of the monitors. The iPad showed a photo of an infant cradled in a man’s hands.
And Kinder Garten was down here, too.
He sat in the office chair, staring at the middle screen of his rig, a pair of giant headphones on his ears. Droplets of blood stained the floor beneath his seat.
“This is the place in Charleston,” William said, as if answering someone’s question. He laughed softly. “No, I will not give you the address. Only paid subscribers get platinum access.”
Apollo and Emma watched this man in a choked silence.
Kinder Garten had slipped a camera into the home of a family in Charleston, South Carolina. Five people—a father, two grandparents, and two teenage girls—flitted around an expansive kitchen, preparing breakfast. And he watched them from here in Queens.
Not only had Kinder Garten found a way inside their home, it seemed like the camera wasn’t even well hidden. The perspective suggested something right at counter level. The kind of thing at least one of the people in that kitchen should see, but all five appeared oblivious. Worse was the moment when the grandfather came right up to the camera, leaned close, and looked into the lens with no apparent concern. He raised one finger and typed slowly, occasionally looking up at the camera.
This was when Apollo and Emma realized what was going on. “It’s their laptop,” Apollo said. “He turned their own laptop into his camera.”
Both of them tensed now, waiting for Kinder Garten to hear them, but with those headphones on, the man had no idea they were there. He’d turned his computer station into a kind of sensory deprivation tank.
With a sting, Apollo realized Kinder Garten must’ve done the same thing with Patrice’s computer. Apollo, Dana, and Patrice had been in the basement playing the video of Emma’s escape while Kinder Garten, quiet as you please, watched them. He felt weariness weigh down his eyelids. You could never outthink these guys.
Now Apollo noticed the other screens, the ones that weren’t spying inside some middle-class kitchen. On each there were four smaller boxes, and in each smaller box a man sat at a desk. Each face was captured in the greenish reflective light of his computer screen. Each man wore headphones just like Kinder Garten’s. Each had a small microphone arm extending from the right ear cup. They could’ve been a crew of online buddies playing a videogame, but instead of pillaging a dungeon or fighting some simulated war, they were invading a family’s home together, a bit of harmless fun.
“I don’t think I can stay up that long,” Kinder Garten said. “Come on, man, we’ve been at it for, like, eight hours! I’m crashing.”
Apollo and Emma stood immobilized.
“No,” Kinder Garten said. “The mother’s in Chicago. She’s staying at the Renaissance Blackstone Hotel. Two more nights.”
Quiet for a moment, he leaned forward as one of the men in one of the small boxes spoke. Apollo watched the lips move.
“Yup,” Kinder Garten said. “The dad is a true beta cuck. The mom is fugly, but the girl’s all right for now. But you just know if the mom looks like that, the girls are going to turn just as fat when they grow up.”
Emma snatched the mattock from Apollo. “That’s enough,” she said.
She swung the mattock at Kinder Garten sideways, more like a bat, so the sharp ends of the head weren’t aimed at his flesh. She wasn’t being gentle, the mattock just turned out to be heavier than she’d expected. It connected at shoulder level, sending Kinder Garten out of his chair. He fell sideways, and the chair came down with him.
A puddle spread out on the basement floor when he landed. The chair had been collecting his spilled blood. It was as if a jar of raspberry jam had been shattered. His headphones flew off. The man actually yipped like a puppy. He looked up to find Emma standing there, and Apollo right behind her.
“Fuck,” he said, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t. The right side of his sweatshirt showed dark with dried blood.
Emma, realizing her mistake from the first swing, turned the mattock so the pick end faced Kinder Garten. She leaned back and raised the weapon.
“No, no, no,” he shouted. “I can help.”
Emma brought the mattock down. The pick end pierced Kinder Garten’s collar, and now the man screeched, small and shrill like a bat. The tip of the pick lodged just above his clavicle. His legs thrashed. Apollo flinched, remembering Jorgen’s last moments in the kitchen upstairs. Emma pressed one foot to Kinder Garten’s chest and cracked the mattock free.
Kinder Garten’s eyes swam in his head and found Apollo. “Please,” he pleaded. “Control your wife.”
Emma raised the mattock again and brought the pick down. This time it landed in his chest, the sharp edge sank in about an inch, lodged in the pectoralis major. “You don’t beg him,” she said. “You beg me.”
Kinder Garten nodded. He tried to raise his arms and bring his hands together beseechingly, but they were trembling too much. Besides, there was still the matter of having a mattock stuck in him.
“Please,” Kinder Garten said. “I know I’ve done you wrong, but please don’t kill me.” He panted before he could speak again. “I have a daughter of my own. And she just lost her mother.”
Emma placed a foot on his collarbone and pressed hard as he spat and choked and howled, while she wrenched the mattock free again. Blood seeped out of this wound.
Apollo touched her arm. “I didn’t know you were going to do that.”
“I didn’t know either,” she said.
Apollo reached for the mattock, but she wouldn’t let it go. He didn’t fight for it, he just stooped closer to Kinder Garten. “Your father is dead,” he said. He meant to hurt him.
“I know,” Kinder Garten said. “I saw him.”
“And you just left him there?” Apollo asked.
Kinder Garten brought one hand to his sweatshirt, pressing against the second wound, the larger one.
“He’s been suicidal for months. I came upstairs to get something to eat, and then he’s just there on the kitchen floor. I figured he’d finally gone through with it all the way.” He blew out a breath. “It was kind of a relief, honestly.”
Apollo almost fell over.
Even Emma seemed shocked. “Damn,” she said.
“I mean, I was going to call the cops eventually, but I was in the middle of something down here. So I came back to it. It’s not like he was going anywhere, right?”
“But why’d you leave the front door open?” Emma asked.
Now Kinder Garten shifted, trying to raise himself. “I came in through the back. Was the front door open? But he would only do that if…he was trying to warn me you were here,” Kinder Garten said softly. “Did you two kill my dad?”
Apollo looked up at Emma then back to Kinder Garten. “We did,” he said.
The Changeling Page 36
