Bring Me Children

by David Martin

  “Go ahead and kill me, get it over with!”

  “Not yet, goodness, not yet,” the doctor says, raising the pipe and then bringing it down with a sharp rap on Lyon’s shin, again causing him to arch his body as if an electrical jolt has been administered.

  Quinndell raises the pipe once more. “And now, where is Claire’s granddaughter hiding?”

  “I don’t know!”

  He smashes the pipe against Lyon’s shin a second time, Lyon crying and cursing, his free hand opening and closing in Quinndell’s direction.

  “How about something truly painful?” the doctor asks, turning to a counter where he finds a hypodermic. Holding the needle upward, he taps the syringe several times, pushing the plunger until a stream of clear liquid shoots out the needle’s point. His glass eyes actually seem to be focusing on the syringe.

  “This is naloxone, Mr. Lyon. Would you like to hear the effect it’s going to have on you?”

  “No — please.”

  “Your brain produces enkephalins, which are small peptide —” Quinndell chuckles. “But let’s not get too technical, hmm? The reason morphine and other painkillers work is that they resemble substances that your brain produces on its own, natural opiatelike substances called opioids. Right now for example your brain is flooding itself with these opioids and although you feel pain, it’s nothing compared to the agony you’d be suffering if the opioids weren’t present.” Quinndell pauses, smiling, enjoying himself. “Do you think I’m overly theatrical?”

  A fucking scenery chewer, Lyon thinks — but says nothing as he continues staring at the syringe Quinndell is holding.

  “Anyway, naloxone blocks the reception of morphine in the brain. One shot of this and a heroin addict under the influence goes into immediate withdrawal. Naloxone, however, also blocks the effect of the natural painkillers produced by your brain. In other words, John, when I inject this into you, within a few minutes whatever pain you are now experiencing will be so dramatically magnified that … well I’m afraid the effect is quite indescribable.”

  “You’re going to kill me whether I tell you where Claire’s hiding or not!”

  “But if you tell me right now I will immediately give you morphine instead of naloxone. I’ll remove the pencil and put salve on that wound and on your burn. Within five minutes you will be largely pain-free. If you don’t tell me, I’ll spend the next hour or so ruining you. I have a variety of operations in mind, Mr. Lyon, believe me.” Preparing to administer the injection, the doctor steps toward Lyon — but not close enough yet that Lyon can reach him.

  “It’s up to you, John. In fact, I might even be convinced to let you live. I’m leaving the country this evening and if I were simply to walk out of here, by the time you got loose and then managed to get the door opened, I’d be long gone. No matter who you told your story to, no matter who believed you, I’d be out of harm’s way.”

  Lyon is coughing and crying, still reaching for Quinndell but wanting to believe the doctor’s offer of life too. “Okay, do that, do it! Leave me here and get out of the country. But give me something for the pain before you go, I was dragged into this investigation, it doesn’t mean anything to me, I swear it doesn’t, please.”

  “We’re on the right track, John. Killing you is not necessary, honestly it isn’t. I could prepare the morphine right now.”

  “Thank you … thank you, Doctor.”

  “I told you I was an admirer of yours.” He’s standing less than two feet from Lyon’s reaching hand, still holding that syringe, needle pointing upward. “So what’s it going to be, a shot of this nasty naloxone or a nice soothing injection of morphine?”

  “The morphine!”

  “Then tell me where Claire’s granddaughter is hiding. You see, she’s a zealot. You might go home and eventually try to forget about all of this but she’ll spend the rest of her life putting curses on me and praying to God for calamities to befall me, just as her grandmother did. I must have her, John, you understand that, don’t you?”

  “Claire’s crazy, she can’t hurt you. She was lying in a coffin, that’s how I found her, who’s going to believe anything she says?”

  “No one believed her grandmother either but look at the trouble she caused me. The choice is yours, John.”

  Lyon wants to grab Quinndell by the throat and choke him to death, but the only way he can do that is if Quinndell comes closer. “We saw her tonight at the cemetery.”

  “Saw whom?”

  Spook him, Lyon thinks. Get him pissed off enough to rush over here so I can get my hand on him. “Claire’s grandmother.”

  The doctor smiles.

  “No, we did. It was weird, she was dressed in her nurse’s uniform, standing on her grave, she must still be after you.”

  Quinndell is unable to hold on to that yellow smile, the doctor suddenly angry, stepping toward Lyon and reaching to find his upper arm.

  Waiting … waiting until Quinndell is well within reach, Lyon keeping the fingers of his left hand outstretched, waiting … then striking, grabbing the doctor by the hair and pulling him close, turning him and getting his arm around Quinndell’s neck, feeling the gristle of Quinndell’s windpipe against his wrist, Lyon squeezing for all he’s worth, squeezing and shaking the doctor, determined not to let up or let go until Quinndell is dead.

  The surprise of being attacked causes the doctor to squeeze the syringe’s plunger, the contents shooting upward in a thread-thin line as Quinndell grabs Lyon’s forearm with his free hand, trying desperately to relieve the pressure on his neck.

  But Lyon holds on, never more determined than he is now, the muscles of his left arm bulging with the effort, maintaining that death grip, throttling Quinndell.

  And it’s working, the doctor’s handsomely chiseled face blood-red and his glass eyes bulging from their sockets, Quinndell unable to breathe or speak, his tongue protruding between those small and discolored teeth.

  Lyon is also red-faced with the effort, shaking Quinndell and squeezing all the harder, the blood lust rising in Lyon as the doctor chokes and gags.

  Quinndell is manipulating the syringe, turning it around in his hand until he is grasping the barrel of the syringe the way you would a knife handle, stabbing Lyon in the forearm.

  Lyon holds on, screaming with pain and rage as he keeps choking the doctor, who pulls the needle out and stabs Lyon a second time, a third, the needle bending but still going in, through Lyon’s flesh and all the way to bone, Quinndell pushing harder and harder, moving the needle around in circles until Lyon is forced to release him, the doctor collapsing to the floor.

  Lyon shakes his arm and rubs the hypodermic against the edge of the table until he gets it out, then watches in horror as Quinndell scoots across the floor to sit up against one of the counters, both of his fine hands at his neck, still unable to speak, struggling to take breaths, his beautiful blue eyes leaking blood-tinged tears.

  With his left hand Lyon jerks at the rope around his neck, managing to work loose some slack but unable to reach the knot holding that rope. Neither can he free his right hand or either of his ankles. What’s Quinndell going to do to him now?

  Still stunned, the doctor finally gets around on his knees, one hand up to the counter, pulling himself to a standing position, his back to Lyon, Quinndell breathing with difficulty, coughing and gagging, spitting up blood.

  And when the doctor does turn around, Lyon sees a face beyond horror, a mask of monstrous rage.

  Quinndell lurches to a cabinet in the corner of the room and pulls it open. Keeping his back to Lyon, he is forced to choke out his words, making a mockery of the civility with which he normally speaks: “Mr. Lyon …” More choking. “I’d like you to meet Mr. Gigli.”

  Then he turns and shows Lyon what he has in his hands.

  CHAPTER 37

  Claire is hiding in the cabin’s attic just as she did when she was a child, when Claire was in her midteens and her grandparents regularly brought her out here to t
his tucked-away hollow because they knew she was tormented by something. “What is it?” her grandmother would ask. “Nothing you’ve done or nothing that anyone has done to you is so bad you can’t tell me about it.” But on this matter, Claire’s grandmother was wrong — Claire couldn’t tell anyone. Maybe if she had run out of Quinndell’s office right after he did it to her, had run to her grandmother then and told her what the doctor had done, maybe then the words would’ve come out. But after waiting a day, a week, the longer Claire waited, the more impossible it became to talk about it.

  Her grandmother made sure Claire was treated carefully, handled as you would an object of great value and fragility, always telling Claire, “Whatever it is, whenever you want to talk about it, I’ll be ready to listen.” But the closest Claire came to talking about what the doctor had done to her was saying to her grandmother, “I just wish I could disappear, I wish I was invisible so nobody could ever see me again.”

  Then came the day her grandmother took Claire to the house where the two blind women lived, placing the girl in the corner of a room as the grandmother and the two women chatted. Claire never found out if the two women were aware of her presence, if her grandmother had arranged the visit beforehand, but what Claire did know is that her grandmother had briefly granted her the wish: invisibility.

  And then it turned out to be a disaster when Claire tried to extend that power to John Lyon.

  What’s happened to him?

  An hour ago someone came out to the cabin looking for her, a woman who walked all around the place, calling Claire’s name, saying John had sent her — but Claire knew it was a lie. The woman had been sent by Quinndell, and he’ll keep sending people, he’ll send Carl out here with five gallons of gasoline to burn the cabin down if that becomes necessary — but he won’t give up. He’s like Claire’s grandmother in that way, neither one of them capable of surrender.

  Claire lights a candle and opens an old suitcase. Standing balanced on two floor joists, she removes her dress and underclothing, running her hands over her breasts and down her stomach, marveling at a sense of voluptuousness she has never before experienced. It’s because of John, the size of his desire for her making Claire feel powerful for the first time in her life. Even if he is white, John Lyon is a man she could marry without disappearing.

  But if Carl delivered him to Quinndell, how long is it going to be before John is forced to tell them where she’s hiding?

  From the suitcase she takes out a nurse’s uniform that belonged to her grandmother, one from the days when her grandmother was just beginning her career as a pediatric nurse, a uniform yellowed with age but that fits Claire exactly. To protect herself from Quinndell’s evil, Claire puts the uniform on inside out. She retrieves the nurse’s cap, still stiff with starch, and affixes it to her hair with bobby pins. Claire was wearing the uniform and cap several nights ago when she saw the monster defile her grandmother’s grave.

  And now he has John. I shouldn’t have run out on John, I should be in town trying to rescue him, not hiding here playing with hoodoo.

  But even as she thinks this, Claire works a piece of white wax. When she has formed it into the shape of a doll she takes a sheet of parchment paper and writes upon it the monster’s name. The first step toward controlling evil is to name it.

  Claire turns the doll over and with a butcher knife slits open its back. Into that incision she stuffs the folded piece of parchment, sprinkles in some cayenne pepper, and then loosely sews up the slit with black thread. Everything she needs she finds in her grandmother’s suitcase.

  By teaching Claire about hoodoo, her grandmother had hoped to empower the child: you think you are weak, at the mercy of those stronger than you, but there are ways you can bend people to your will.

  She finds two tiny glass marbles, the size of peas, and embeds them in the wax doll’s face.

  By raping her in that examining room when she was fourteen years old, Quinndell fashioned the rest of Claire’s life just as she has fashioned this wax doll in her hands. And Claire never did anything about it. Even when her grandmother was being driven insane trying to bring Quinndell to justice for the murders of those babies, Claire restricted herself to taking care of her grandmother, providing her a place to stay, never really joining the campaign against Quinndell — not until her grandmother killed herself.

  And now the monster has John and here I sit playing with hoodoo.

  Claire understands the attraction of hoodoo of course, the power it has over believers. Claire, after all, is an expert on the subject, a professor of American folklore, but she doesn’t believe in it.

  “Then why do I keep doing this?” she asks aloud.

  Because I don’t know what else to do, where to go, who to turn to.

  Because the police won’t believe her, Quinndell will have the grave filled in, he’ll kill John and then get away with that murder too.

  Because Quinndell has power — the power of being a doctor, a man, being white, being rich, the power that comes when you can function without a conscience.

  And what power do I have? she wonders, looking down at the wax doll that seems now to be mocking her, Claire putting her thumbs on those two pea-sized marble eyes and pushing them deep, out of sight into the doll’s head.

  CHAPTER 38

  Quinndell is holding a piece of stainless steel wire, not much thicker than string and serrated along its entire twenty-inch length. Into small loops at both ends of this wire, Quinndell affixes stainless steel handles resembling those on the top of corkscrews.

  Approaching the foot of the examining table, Quinndell reaches out and feels for Lyon’s ankles — to find out if they’re still tied.

  “Keep the fuck away from me!” Lyon screams.

  But Quinndell has already touched the ropes. “You had only one arm around me,” the doctor says with a raspy voice, “so I assume you’ve managed to free just your left wrist.” He moves his hand from the ankle ropes down to Lyon’s feet, which overhang the end of the examining table. “We’ll still be able to operate.”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  Ignoring that, Quinndell holds up the steel wire by one of its handles. “Gigli’s wire saw, developed in the latter part of the last century by Leonardo Gigli, a Florentine …” He coughs painfully. “A Florentine gynecologist. Signore Gigli developed the wire saw to perform lateral sections of the pubic bone, a nasty bit of business, that.”

  From one of his pants pockets Quinndell takes the linen handkerchief and holds it against his mouth, coughing into it. The handkerchief comes away bloody.

  “Also used for …” The doctor coughs again. “Amputations. The wire is inserted in a hole made around the bone so that the bone section, the amputation, causes minimum damage to surrounding muscle and other tissue. Quite effective, still used today.” Quinndell opens his mouth and works his jaw back and forth. “In your case, however, I’m going to lay the wire across the lower anterior surface of your tibia — across your shinbone, Mr. Lyon. Then …” He clears his throat and coughs into the handkerchief again, the injury caused by Lyon’s choking forcing the doctor to speak now in a whisper.

  “I will press down on both handles, putting my entire upper body weight onto the wire, sawing the Gigli back and forth, the first stroke slicing through skin and what little subcutaneous tissue lies above the bone, then into the tibia itself. It’s the second largest, longest bone in your body, so Mr. Gigli and I have our work cut out for us. Not a lateral section of the pubic bone admittedly, but still …” Quinndell pauses, swallowing several times with difficulty before he is able to continue, still whispering. “A few centimeters into your tibia and I’ll be tearing through the tibialis anticus — your calf muscle. While Mr. Gigli is wonderfully effective on bone, I’m afraid he does a rather sloppy job on muscle and tissue.”

  Quinndell puts the handkerchief away and takes the Gigli saw by both handles, pulling the wire taut. “When we’re through, your foot will of course drop off onto
the floor.” He pauses to let that sink in. “It’ll hit the floor like something made of rubber, a heavy rubber thud is how I would describe it. Oh, John, I’ve done this before and please take my word for it, the effect is extraordinary. There’s really no way I can adequately explain the pain, you’ll have to experience that for yourself, but the effect of a person seeing his foot drop off onto the floor … Goodness. Sometimes I pick it up and try to give it back but the person always refuses it. Strange, don’t you think?”

  The doctor moves into position at the end of the table, his stomach just touching the bottom of Lyon’s right foot, Quinndell placing the Gigli wire across the shinbone, a few inches above the ankle.

  “I’ll cut the rope before we’re finished and along the way I’ll be administering certain drugs that should keep you conscious during the entire procedure. Mr. Gigli is so disappointed when they go into shock before he’s done, and I know I certainly wouldn’t want you to miss that dramatic moment when the foot actually drops onto the floor. Then we’ll have the other foot to work on. Of course for your genitals I have something quite special in mind.”

  As Quinndell continues his whispered litany, Lyon thinks this must be what it feels like to face the wrath of God: terrible and inescapable. A sightless God who’s going to cut bone and muscle from his body, feet dropping onto the floor, dismembering Lyon piece by piece, reversing creation. And what would you say to such a God, how would you plead your case?

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, too late for weeping regrets now, John,” Quinndell whispers as he presses down on both handles, the serrated wire across Lyon’s shin already hurting even though the sawing hasn’t begun yet.

  “I’ll tell you where she’s hiding,” he offers.

  Quinndell shakes his head. “You’ll tell me only reluctantly, with great regret. No, John, when you betray her I want you to do so eagerly.”