Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  It’s the same dog that was up at the car window, staring at Lyon the way it’s staring at him now, a steady and urgent stare, waiting for something, for a response from Lyon, for an answer to some question those dark almond eyes are asking.

  Lyon eases the chair between himself and the dog, although the chair affords little comfort because the dog — some kind of cross between wolf and German shepherd and hound from hell — looks as if it could easily rip the chair apart and then turn those jaws on Lyon. The horror he feels is not only that the dog will kill him but that it will actually consume his flesh.

  In his peripheral vision, Lyon sees the little man moving, turning from the cabin and heading for the woods at the edge of the clearing.

  “Hey, what about your —”

  But Lyon is interrupted by a low, rumbling growl that seems to vibrate the porch’s floorboards. And when Lyon finally manages a quick glance at the clearing, he sees that the little man is already gone.

  Now what?

  Lyon takes one hand off the chair, reaching around behind him to find the door handle, opening the door, easing backward into the cabin — and all this time the dog doesn’t move, doesn’t avert its eyes from Lyon’s. No one, not mother or lover, has ever looked at Lyon with such intensity, such intimacy: no one has ever looked at him as a meal.

  Once inside the cabin, the door locked behind him, Lyon turns into the kitchen to confront another horror, to see in the soft yellow light of the kerosene lamp that the woman’s right hand, which he had uncuffed, has moved, her right arm lying now completely across her bare stomach, her fingertips grasping the leather restraint that still holds her other wrist. Although the woman is rigidly still, is once again comatose, it’s obvious what she was trying to do, trying to escape.

  CHAPTER 13

  Will she be able to remember what I did? Lyon wonders as he struggles to get her out of the box and then, in a panic of shame and fear and concern for the woman’s life, carries her quickly through the cabin, careful not to bump her head in the doorways, rushing her into the bedroom. She feels impossibly light in his arms.

  Lyon places her gently on the bed and then works the summer blanket and top sheet from beneath her body, pausing briefly to marvel at how black and small she appears lying on the starched white bottom sheet. He covers her with the top sheet, bundling the summer blanket in his arms and tossing it on a nearby chair. He reaches under that top sheet to find the young woman’s wrist, checking her pulse and finding it strong and steady. For a long time he sits on the side of the bed watching her face.

  Finally he leaves her and stands by one of the bedroom windows to await dawn and deliverance. And if not deliverance, then surely dawn.

  Some hours later John Lyon is at the cabin’s locked front door, looking out at the porch and then the clearing and then back at the porch. The night has turned dark again, the moon having dropped below the surrounding hills, but Lyon can see enough to confirm that the dog is gone.

  He steps into the kitchen, searches through the crate for documents or messages (finding none), and tries to get a drink of water at the kitchen tap but of course the electricity is still off. The taste in Lyon’s mouth is so horrible that he keeps fighting the urge to swallow.

  He returns to the bedroom and stands by the bed looking down at the young woman who appears now just as she did in the crate, peacefully asleep. He takes her pulse again and has just put his hand to the side of her face to check for a fever when he is startled by the overhead light coming on.

  Glancing at the doorway to the tiny bathroom he sees that the light there is on too. He can hear water running, filling the toilet tank. And when he listens carefully he can also hear the distant hum of motors working elsewhere in the cabin, pumping, pressurizing, heating, cooling.

  These various indications that Lyon has once again been connected to the grid of civilization comfort him enormously.

  In the morning when he brings people here and tells them what happened, shows them the comatose woman, Lyon will act in a manner that is bloodlessly professional. No tears, no quavering voice; he won’t rant and rave about hell dogs and misshapen little man-creatures peering in the kitchen window. Lyon will simply relate what happened, tell the police he has absolutely no idea what these bizarre occurrences mean, and then offer to cooperate however he can in the investigation. He certainly won’t mention that he fondled the woman while she was in the crate, while he was still operating under the belief she was dead. And he’s assuming her coma is deep enough that she won’t be aware of what he did either. In other words, no one’ll ever know. The craziness is over. He slipped his moorings during the night but Lyon is confident that daylight will find him once again tightly secured. There’s a story here — who cuffed that comatose woman into a crate and brought her to the cabin, why was it done, who is she, and what does this all have to do with Dr. Mason Quinndell and Claire Cept’s accusations against him? From now on Lyon’s only connection to the young woman and to this entire mess he finds himself in will be as a reporter getting answers to questions, doing his job, resurrecting his career.

  When he steps to the bedroom window, Lyon nods slightly, approvingly, at the arrival of dawn.

  CHAPTER 14

  But dawn brings no comfort to the hermit arriving just now at his shack, located on the far side of Rosebush Ridge, a hard three-hour hike from the rental cabin where John Lyon is staying. As soon as the hermit steps up on his rickety porch he hears the baby crying, crying in that tired, voice-worn-out way that means she’s been crying most of the night — maybe ever since he left. What’s wrong with her? The hermit looks down at his black dog but it doesn’t have any answers either.

  He’s tried everything, different formulas and special supplements, vitamins, and just about every kind of baby medicine you can order, that beleaguered UPS truck grinding its way to the hermit’s shack two or three times a week with something new for the baby. But whatever’s wrong with her is getting worse.

  For the first three months she was fine except for that place on the bottom of her spine, and of course her head which never did seem to be exactly the right size, but at least she ate well and slept through the night. Then a few weeks ago she went off her food and started crying too much. And now the past ten days or so, it’s like she’s dying.

  He hurries into the shack, puts his shotgun in the rack, and run-trots into the back room to change the baby’s diaper and offer her a bottle. She drinks less than a third of it before spitting up and resuming her incessant crying. The hermit fusses over her but nothing seems to help. He pinches a bit of skin on her tiny forearm, watching how long it takes the skin to smooth out. She’s dehydrating.

  He tries to be hard-hearted about these matters, having buried four of these babies on his property in the past five years — and now this one’s time has just about come too. In fact he’s already thinking about where he’s going to put her, maybe under that big cedar on the ridge behind his shack. Or did he already bury one there?

  If anyone ever finds out what he’s done to these babies, he’ll be taken back to the institution and put in that little locked room, spend the rest of his life there, he knows that much. He thought maybe if he kept this last one alive, he could explain what’s been happening the past five years. But explanations don’t come easy to the hermit.

  He’s carrying the baby girl around the shack, patting her on the back. He loves the way babies smell. But how would he explain that, for example? She’s quiet now but he continues carrying her up on his shoulder, still patting her back, humming more to himself than to the baby as he thinks about which of her new outfits he’ll dress her in when it comes time to place her deep among the roots of that big cedar tree.

  It was the UPS driver who told him about this famous man everybody in town was saying had rented that cabin on the other side of Rosebush Ridge. The hermit can’t get television reception where he lives but he knows what TV is of course, he used to watch it all the time back when he li
ved in the institution and he remembers how men on TV were always explaining things, so the idea was he’d hike over to that rental cabin and see if the famous man couldn’t help him explain to people about these babies the hermit’s been burying on his property. To the hermit’s way of thinking, if it was all just explained right then maybe they wouldn’t take him away and put him in the little locked room, maybe they would let him stay on his property for the rest of his life. He’d promise people he’d never cause trouble again if they would just make sure no more babies came his way.

  But after that TV man went driving away crazy-like on the logging road, the hermit caught up with him over at the rental cabin and saw enough through that kitchen window to realize the famous TV man had his own problems. At least the hermit never touched the babies after they were in their burying boxes, not like that TV man was doing to that black woman in her burying box — touching her with one hand and touching himself with the other hand. Mother always said you’d go to hell for doing something like that.

  He puts the baby in her bed in the back room and then collects the dogs’ bowls and begins his morning chores.

  He’s tired of burying babies and scared that he’s either going back to the institution or going to hell. One thing he’d like to have explained to people, one way of looking at it, you could say he’s just giving those babies back to God. But even if he had a TV man doing the explaining, the hermit is almost sure people won’t look at it that way.

  CHAPTER 15

  Driving out of the mountains that Monday morning, July 2, easily finding each of the turnoffs marked by a tree with red paint on it, John Lyon is buoyant. The visuals on this story are going to be terrific, all these ridgelines and hills that fold in on you, giving this area a hidden enchantment that exactly matches the otherworldly events of last night — perfect. Lyon can see the segment’s opening (hell, the network might even make this into a special): a shot of the cabin at twilight, kerosene lantern flickering in a window, a hand-held camera walking the viewer up to the cabin’s door, into the kitchen, a lingering close-up on the closed crate while Lyon delivers the voice-over, describing how it felt to be all alone in that cabin with a mysterious crate which he finally opened to find a comatose woman. Dynamite stuff.

  And now that Lyon is hot on a story he feels none of the inner turmoil or bitterness or world-weariness that seemed to be dominating his life just one week ago. He’s not going to bust out crying or laughing anymore, by God, he’s a journalist again. Lyon drives all the way off the mountain without coming to any tree blocking the road, realizing again how truly lost he was last night.

  It’s 8:00 A.M. when Lyon reaches Hameln, a mean little coal town with outskirts of shacks and trailers perched on hillsides, the main residential area a tight collection of formerly grand (and formerly white) houses on small lots at the bases of the surrounding hills, the three-block commercial strip almost entirely boarded up — a town where a rental car with New York plates causes people to stop and stare.

  Hameln is, however, the county seat. The sheriff’s office is in the basement of the only major structure in town with its windows not broken out — the county courthouse.

  Lyon finds a public telephone in one of the courthouse corridors and places a call to a network producer he’s worked with half a dozen times. When he finally gets the producer on the line, Lyon describes as coolly as he can the events of last night, Claire Cept’s charges against Quinndell, and Lyon’s plans on how he’s going to start an investigation into those charges. The producer says “uh-huh” a lot.

  “I know what you must be thinking,” Lyon tells him, “considering my performance a week ago Sunday and then my sudden disappearance, but after I talk with the sheriff I’m going to fax you his report on that woman who’s in a coma — she’s still out there at the cabin — then I’m going over to the county hospital and talk with people who knew Claire Cept and Dr. Quinndell. I’ll dig out all the old records, interview the mothers of those children who died under Quinndell’s care —”

  The producer interrupts to say he doesn’t think it’s a very good idea for Lyon to be going around representing himself as on assignment from the network when that is not, in fact, the case.

  “All I’m asking from you right now,” Lyon replies, “is to keep an open mind. If I come up with something solid to go on, make your judgment then whether any of this is worth pursuing.”

  Lyon continues pressing his case with such unemotional clarity and logic that the producer finally agrees to “kick it around” with a few people and find out if the network can commit any resources to the story. “But first, John, I’ll need to talk to the sheriff myself. After you file your report and after he looks into the matter. You understand, don’t you? I mean, this whole thing’s going to have to be confirmed.”

  That hurt, to hear how totally his credibility has been destroyed. But he suspects the real reason he’s not trusted now is that he was never liked or particularly trusted in the past, even when his reliability was absolute. Always too much of a loner, too private. But Lyon tightens up and doesn’t let the hurt show in his voice. “Absolutely,” he tells the producer. “I understand totally.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her in with you?” is the first question Sheriff Stone asks after listening to Lyon’s account.

  Lyon doesn’t have an answer. In fact, he can’t even manage to speak and knows he must be looking at the sheriff with a dumb-founded expression.

  Sheriff Stone uses Lyon’s silence to press the matter. “If that woman was in a coma or drugged, seems to me you’d want to get medical attention for her ASAP. I can understand you not being able to drive her to a hospital last night, heck even I get lost in those mountains — but why didn’t you bring her in with you this morning?”

  Why didn’t I? That would’ve been the logical thing to do, the right thing. It didn’t even occur to me to put her in the car this morning. Because I was more interested in getting to work on the story.

  “Mr. Lyon?”

  His mind is in such a muddle over this that he can do nothing but continue staring dumbly at the sheriff.

  At first Lyon was relieved to discover that Sheriff Mike Stone was not beer-bellied or heavily armed or beetle-browed, that he was in fact a transplanted Washington, D.C., yuppie with sandy-blond hair, clean fingernails, and an obvious affinity for L.L. Bean. But now Lyon feels intimidated by the sheriff’s bland good looks and relative sophistication.

  “You all right, Mr. Lyon?”

  Last time someone asked him that, he was sobbing on the set and couldn’t answer. I’m not going to lose it again, Lyon tells himself. “Yeah, I’m fine. I should have brought her in with me this morning. Why don’t you make arrangements for an ambulance and we’ll continue talking on the way out to the cabin.”

  “Sure.” But now it’s the sheriff who seems in no hurry to get the woman to a hospital. “All that stuff that happened to you last night, is it connected to some story you’re working on?”

  Lyon hasn’t told Stone about Claire Cept or her accusations against Dr. Quinndell. “I can’t really go into the details of that right now. Maybe you should be calling an ambulance, it’ll take a while for us to get to the cabin and if the woman does need medical help—”

  Ignoring this, Stone says, “I told you I wasn’t a native. Followed a girlfriend down here from Washington and then decided to stay on. What I didn’t tell you is that I was in the Reagan White House.”

  “Really?” Lyon tries to act suitably impressed but is distracted by his belated concern for that woman lying in a coma out at the cabin.

  “Yeah, worked on speeches, position papers. I wasn’t even thirty yet and I was impacting on domestic policy and international relations. Heady stuff. We called ourselves the Conservative Corps, those of us who were under forty, true believers. We thought we were going to change the world. Then the Bush people came in.” Stone makes a sour face.

  “Must have been fascinating. Maybe we can talk ab
out it on the way —”

  “You know how I got elected sheriff, an outsider running in the primary against a couple good ol’ boys? One thing and one thing only did the trick — my slogan. Mike Stone: Hard On Crime.” He laughs. “Talk about your subliminal messages! Of course this job doesn’t pay enough to live on so I’m still doing income tax returns, but I am on the bottom rung of a ladder that I expect to climb all the way to Congress. Hameln’s the place to start ’cause there’s no competition here. The point being, Mr. Lyon, someone like you, connected at the network and all, I’ll really bend over backwards to cooperate with you any way I can. Then maybe I could ask you for a favor someday. But first I have to know what you’re working on, why you’re here.”

  Lyon can’t figure out if Stone is dumb — laying out that business about doing each other favors in such a crude fashion — or if he’s only playing dumb. Lyon finally decides he has to tell the sheriff something. “I’m here looking into some charges against one of your local doctors. And if you can help me, I could see you getting some significant air time, definitely.”

  Stone doesn’t miss a beat. “Dr. Quinndell, right?”

  Lyon nods. “You know what he’s being accused of?”

  “Sure, killing babies,” Stone replies quickly, almost jocularly. “I can’t imagine how you got interested, though. It’s an old story, it’s been investigated, and as far as I know there’s nothing to the charges.” The sheriff pauses, staring at Lyon. “I saw you on TV a week ago this past Sunday.”

  Lyon decides to brass it out. “I had a breakdown. But that’s all over with now.”

  “Miracle recovery, huh?”

  Before Lyon can reply, the sheriff stands and announces he’s going to another room to call the volunteer rescue squad. “Soon as they get assembled they’ll swing by here and follow us out to your cabin.”