by Chaz McGee
“What do you want me to do?” the man in the house whispered, his cheeks wet with tears. He had twisted his arms around his torso, as if he might explode if he let go.
“You know what to do,” the colonel said scathingly. “It’s been done to you often enough.” The colonel’s malevolent laughter filled the silence that followed. “Trust me, my friend, once you begin, you will not need to ask me what to do.”
“Why?” the man pleaded. “Why are you making me do this?”
“Why?” The colonel sounded matter-of-fact. “Because I cannot do it myself.”
He was lying. He wasn’t doing it because he was confined to a wheelchair. Like all evil men, he was harming others because it fed a rapacious hole that burned within him, a nucleus of malice that fed on hatred of all that was good in the world, and a companion need to destroy anyone and anything that was happy. He did it because he could. Because he was strong and he had found someone weak. He did it for the power, and it was this power that fanned his lust.
“It wasn’t my fault,” the first man whispered.
“You were the one driving.” I knew it had been years since the accident that had left the colonel in a wheelchair, yet his tone was confident he would prevail in this most familiar of arguments between them. “Do you want people to know what you are?” the colonel continued. “Do you really want people to know who you are, what I’ve done with you all these years?”
The man did not answer. He did not need to. His lowered head, the way his body shrank inward on itself, the twisting of his torso were all proof to the colonel that his words had found their mark. The man would do his bidding.
“Do not fight me anymore,” the colonel advised in a deceptively kind voice. “You are about to discover your destiny. How many men can say they have achieved that?”
The first man could not bring himself to reply. His shame was palpable in the silence.
“Daddy?”
A child’s voice cut through the silence with the purity of a handbell resonating in the hush of a church.
“Daddy?”
There it was again—Tyler Matthews calling out from the back bedroom, whether to the man twisted in agony a few feet away or to his own imagination, I could not say.
But the man in the house heard him through his pain. I could feel the good in him flicker as his heart responded to the artlessness of that single word.
“Where did you go?” the little boy’s voice called out.
“I’m right here.” The man turned his back on the camera and walked slowly toward the hall.
“Don’t you dare move until I say you can,” the colonel thundered after him, but the man did not turn around.
Tyler was lying on his stomach, holding a tiny plastic chicken and pretending it was pecking at grain on the floor. He looked up, his brown eyes wide. “I want my daddy,” he said.
The man sat slowly beside Tyler and patted his back ever so gently. Once, I knew, someone had done that for him. But how long ago? Would the memory be enough to save them both?
“Your daddy isn’t here,” the man said. “Remember? He was in the war.”
“He says you can be my new daddy,” the little boy said confidently. “That you’ll look after me.” Tyler touched the man’s cheeks with a chubby hand. “My other daddy had rough skin. He let me hold his razor once.”
The man held his breath and something in him swelled and broke. It was sorrow, but it was sorrow that stemmed from the loss of love—and it was that love I needed to reach. I searched through his memories as he spoke to the little boy, promising Tyler that he would return him to his mother one day soon. I cannot bear to dwell on the memories I found within the man. They were of things no one should experience, of events dark and ugly and all too real in those places where evil souls walk the earth. But they were a part of him, and I had to go through them to find the good that lay underneath. At first, I could only detect the memory of smells. Of perfume as faint as gardenia bushes in a yard, of soap and aftershave and a kitchen warm with the heat from an oven. Then I could hear faint voices in his mind, a tune, though I could not discern which song it was. It was there, underneath that memory: the man had once been loved.
“I need to go to the potty,” Tyler told the man.
“Okay,” the man agreed. “I’ll help you. You remember where it is, right?”
The little boy nodded and took his hand. The man led him out into the hall. I followed, trying to hold on to the thread of that one distant memory. I felt love surrounding that moment, and a total lack of fear, with no thoughts of the past or the future, just the warmth of a present that was utterly and unequivocally safe.
“I need help with my pants,” Tyler told the man, struggling with the top button on his cotton shorts.
The man helped Tyler with the tiny fastener on his shorts, revealing underwear printed with colorful cars.
“I need some piracy,” the little boy said proudly, repeating a lesson his mother had taught him.
“Piracy?” the man asked, confused.
The little boy nodded solemnly, holding his shorts up over his knees with two chubby fists, unwilling to give an inch.
“Privacy?” the man asked, understanding.
The boy nodded again.
“Of course,” the man agreed. “Tell me when you are done.”
He turned his back on the boy and I knew the moment had come. I let his memory of love and safety wash through me. It filled me and I gave it life. I held it within me, almost vibrating with the love and care the man had once, himself, been given, even if so very long ago.
“Get back here!” the colonel’s voice boomed from the living room. “Get back in here at once.”
Don’t do it, my friend, I willed him. I did not know if it was presumptuous of me to interfere in this way, if my shaping human events was an affront to whatever power decided such things. But I was willing to risk everything I had, to risk my very soul if that was what it took, so that this man might turn from the evil the colonel embodied. I began to pray, though I did not know who or what I was praying to. I had often been angry over the last few months at being kept on this worldly plane. I had experienced bitterness and resentment, wondering why I was doomed to wander and others were granted the right to move on. But all that seemed petty now. All that mattered was that the man who stood in front of me do the right thing, a man who had once been as small and innocent as Tyler Matthews, a man who had surely been loved by someone, for however briefly, before his life had gone terribly wrong and he had joined forces with the colonel. I left my bitterness behind me. I thought nothing of myself. I lifted my heart to whatever power guided me through my lonely world, and I asked for help in turning the man. I prayed that he might break free from the terrible hold the colonel exerted over him. I prayed for his salvation.
“I’m done,” Tyler announced proudly. “No drops, see?” The boy pointed to the toilet seat. “I’m the best at potty in all preschool. Of the boys. Girls are good at potty.”
The man knelt before Tyler like a suitor proposing marriage, helping him untangle his shorts. “You’re a big boy,” he said in a kind voice.
Yes, remember those who once said that to you.
“Will you button them for me?” Tyler asked, wiggling as he tugged the shorts up over his legs.
As the man fumbled with the fastener on the waistband, Tyler wobbled and put his hand on top of the man’s head to steady himself. It was a simple touch, whether made out of trust or a desire to stay balanced, I do not know. But I do know that this single touch, from that tiny, trusting child, turned the man away from evil.
He stood up abruptly and tucked Tyler’s shirt back into his shorts. “There,” he said. “Good as new.” Something vulnerable in him shifted and grew, holding back the anger that usually commanded the man. He had made a choice.
“We’re going to play a game,” the man told Tyler. “Do you think you can remember the rules?”
The little boy nodded, anxious
to make the man happy.
“I want you to stay here in this house alone for just a little while,” the man told him. “I’m going to lock the door, and I don’t want you to open it for anyone but me. Okay?”
The little boy hesitated. He did not want to be left alone.
“I just have to go out for a while, but I’ll be back soon, okay? And when I come back, I’ll take you to your mommy, as long as you wait for me.”
The little boy’s smile took my breath away. “We’re going home to my mommy?” he asked.
“Yes,” the man said. “I just have to do one thing first. Okay?”
Little boys are creatures of few words. Tyler had no words to express his feelings that he would soon see his mother. Instead, he wrapped his arms around the man’s legs and held on tight, butting his head against the man’s thighs in his joy.
The man laughed and pried him free. “I guess you’re cool with the plan?”
Tyler nodded.
As the man left the bedroom, I could hear the song in his memory growing louder: his voice, a mother’s voice, a father’s voice, too, all joined together in one pitch-perfect sound.
It wasn’t much to carry a man through an entire lifetime of pain, but it had been enough to save his soul.
Chapter 24
I sat next to the man who had taken Tyler Matthews as he drove away from the house, wondering what life had done to him to make him two separate people. He had left all feelings of goodwill within him behind in the house with Tyler. A rage now filled him, one that fed on its own momentum, rising like a tide that pushed him forward toward some unknown destination. I could not influence the emotion, because I did not understand the forces that fueled it. It was as if something profound inside the man fed it, perhaps memories of long-endured torments, but something external fed it as well. There was a source of fury coming from outside the man, egging him on.
With that recognition, I realized that I was not alone as a passenger in the car. The otherworldly little boy who had once let me pretend to push him on a swing on a fine spring afternoon was sitting in a corner of the backseat, where he had a direct view of the driver. Gone was any shred of innocence in the apparition. His childishness had been replaced by something terrifying and thunderous, far beyond either my control or my understanding. The boy barely moved and did not make a sound, yet the power he emanated was immense and ripe with vengeance.
I wondered if the man driving the car could see him. There was a connection between the two, that much was certain. The boy was staring at the man with his curiously blank eyes, eyes that lacked knowledge of life in some strange, vacant way, yet nonetheless burned with an intensity that led directly to the man and was filling him with immeasurable fury. I could feel it, and I feared for my own soul just being near that power. This was not a benign being, this small apparition of a child who had wanted to pretend he could swing, stretching his legs upward to the sky. He was not like me. He was something new to my world—and I did not think I liked him.
What I thought about him was immaterial to the otherworldly little boy. He gave me not a glance, not a single sign of recognition. All he cared about was the man driving the car. His control of the man’s emotions was relentless and it was overwhelming.
The man began to drive faster and faster, running red lights when no one else was around, taking corners too quickly and clipping the curbs, his mind tumbling with a chaos of bitter memories and cascading pains that consumed him. The faster he drove, the more the little boy in the backseat seemed to enjoy it. His eyes had begun to glitter. He terrified me.
The man grew so agitated that he missed a turn and screeched to a halt, backing up a busy road despite the near certainty someone would come up fast behind him. He swung in an arc and sped into the parking lot of a drugstore, hurrying inside while I remained mystified in the car, seeking to understand the apparition sitting behind me.
I turned around and stared at the boy. He stared back, his eyes suddenly as placid and benign as a pond on a hot afternoon. He had no quarrel with me. He had no need for me. It was as if he was looking right through me.
The man was back within a few minutes, carrying a paper bag filled with his purchases. I wondered what was inside.
Within another few minutes, I knew where we were heading. He turned into a familiar neighborhood, sped past Robert Michael Martin’s house with no sign of recognition, and kept going, past the intersection that divided the blocks around the playground from the area I had just visited: he planned to confront the colonel. He began to drive faster, consumed by a need to fight back against the man who had manipulated him into taking Tyler Matthews, and sought to orchestrate their dual ruin for his gratification.
He parked his car a quarter mile away from the colonel’s house, walking quickly past the handful of homes on the block. Each one looked deserted under the night sky. This was not a neighborhood where you moved to be neighborly. This was where you lived when you wanted to be left alone.
The colonel’s van was parked in the driveway near the ramp that led to the entrance door. Lights were on at the back of the house. The colonel was in his computer room, removing evidence before detectives arrived to search the KinderWatch files.
The man glanced toward the lit windows, confirmed the colonel was inside, and got to work. He took a coil of wire from the bag that held his drugstore purchases and wrapped wire tightly around the doorknob to the house, twisting and doubling back repeatedly. He then wound it around the railings of the ramp, over and over, snaking it up support beams and the handrail until a spiderweb of wire stretched from the edge of the ramp to the front door handle, cinching it firmly in place.
The colonel was trapped inside with no way to open his front door. If he pulled on it from the inside, he’d only tighten the wire that now bound it shut.
The man pulled keys from a pocket of his jeans and walked to the side door of the garage. He let himself in with an ease that told me he lived at this house with the colonel. In what kind of relationship, I did not know, but he knew his way around. I waited outside, one eye on the strange little boy with the vacant eyes; he had appeared at the house behind me. He was barely visible in the dark, yet I knew he was there. He was not done with the man who had taken Tyler Matthews. His need for vengeance hummed inside like a motor. He wanted to see it done.
The man emerged from the garage holding a can of gasoline. He ducked behind the house, and I followed. Quietly, without so much as a scrape, he rolled the gas grill on the back stoop closer to the back door and wedged it firmly against the frame. He poured gasoline beneath the propane tanks, soaking the wood until saturated, and then pouring even more until it formed a puddle. Done with that task, he began to splash gasoline against the wooden frame of the house, avoiding the brick foundation so he would not waste a drop. He worked with a fierce efficiency. His mind was blank, but his body burned with intensity, as if his need to avenge all he had suffered and all he had lost at the colonel’s hands had transmuted itself into a physical need.
When he ran out of gasoline, he siphoned more from the tank of the colonel’s van, kneeling in the dark and using tubing from the garage. His moves were so confident that I knew he had performed the same task many times before. I picked up on a sudden memory of his. He was kneeling beside a car on a blazing afternoon, surrounded by the desert sands and flat mountains of the Southwest, pouring stolen gas into the tank of a sedan while the colonel waited impatiently behind the steering wheel. It was a glimpse of what his life had been like as the colonel’s companion, probably moving from town to town, evading the police, sometimes hungry and living on the edge of poverty, sometimes prosperous with a profitable scam like KinderWatch to support them. But always completely under the colonel’s control, every movement dictated by his desires, as years of abuse crawled by.
His gas can refilled, the man set to work again, methodically soaking the sides of the house, not even hesitating when he was beneath the windows of the room where the colone
l was transferring files onto storage drives and deleting the originals from his system, completely unaware that his victim had turned predator and was creating a hell here on earth, one designed to trap him.
There was nothing I could do. I had no power to stop the man from carrying out his plan. Nor did I know which side represented good in this battle. What do you do when evil is avenged? How do you justify stopping a force when it has rightly turned and is heading straight for those who created it in the first place? Besides, I could feel a new emotion stirring beneath the fury that drove the man to torch the colonel alive. It was a pain as deep and eternal as the oceans, with a power that ripped at his soul, leaving gashes that I knew could never be repaired. The terrible memories of his existence with the colonel tumbled over me now, flooding my mind with images so vile and emotions so painful that I thought I might combust and start the inferno myself.
How can I judge this man, so filled with pain, and say he is not entitled to revenge?
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the drugstore bag and began to methodically light them one by one, placing each lit cigarette on the rim of the brick foundation where it met the clapboard frame. He started at the end of the house near the entrance door, as far from the colonel as he could get. Each time he laid a cigarette in place, he dragged a finger across the gasoline-soaked walls and then lightly tapped the barrel of the cigarette, as if he were anointing it. By the time he had finished with two walls, the house had begun to burn, the fingerprint of gasoline flaring and flickering up to join with the fuel-soaked wall above it. Once the first spark flared, the fire took on a life of its own, racing upward toward the roof and rimming the house itself in a ring of fire as precise as if Lucifer himself had dragged a finger around the house, leaving a trail to hell itself in his wake.
