Scare Tactics

by Farris, John

  They went into the principal’s office and Stack made his call. No one was home but the maid. Practice leaned against the doorjamb and waited, his arms folded, a small frown creasing his forehead. The school had the familiar chalk-and-polish odor of childhood; down the hall a mixed choir was practicing.

  “I was afraid to ask too many questions,” Stack said, replacing the receiver.

  “You did fine,” Liles said approvingly.

  “I think I can tell you how they left the grounds,” Stack said, eager to atone for the reprimand of Liles’s presence. “Will you follow me?”

  They went out into the hall.

  “At lunch hour all the children line up outside their rooms, then march together to the cafeteria in the basement,” Stack explained. “It would have been possible for Chris and Hugh to slip into the bathroom at the head of the stairs, because sometimes there’s a little confusion at that point. We try to keep them orderly and quiet, but on a day like this the kids are restless and mill around ...”

  He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief and opened the door of the bathroom. There were four casement-type windows in the north wall, about five and a half feet from the floor. One was open, and underneath was a pasteboard barrel with a metal bottom.

  Practice and Liles went to the window and looked out. A narrow brick corridor ran behind the school at the edge of the ravine. It was obvious that from the windowsill an agile boy could reach the top of the fence and let himself down on the other side.

  Practice scanned the bottom land as far as the river’s edge a half mile away. It was a poor area; some shacks were perched on the sides of the wide ravine and along the twisting gray tributary of the river. In a marshy pocket, within the shadow of Tournament Hill, stood the half-ruined old prison, a Victorian relic of iron-roofed towers and heavy oak and iron doors. The surrounding wall had long ago been reduced to heaps of stones and isolated gateways.

  “Looks to me,” said Liles, “as if they’re off on a jaunt. They’ll turn up before long. Jim?”

  “It looks that way,” Practice agreed. “But I’d like to know where they are.”

  “Should the Governor hear about this?”

  “I wouldn’t bother him just now. He’s having a tough fight in the Legislature today—his road-tax bill. I think the kids will turn up in the next couple of hours—wet, tired, an unhappy.”

  —

  Liles dropped Practice at the mansion and returned to his office.

  Dore Guthrie met Practice at the kitchen door. She looked a little haggard without her customary heavy coat of makeup.

  “Is Chris all right?” she asked expectantly.

  “I’m sure he is,” Practice said, but something was brooding in his mind, trying to take shape. “Chris and a buddy of his apparently got fed up with school and declared a holiday for themselves. How are you feeling?”

  She glanced away. “I remember—some awful things from last night. I was ...” He nodded.

  “This morning when I woke up, John was there.” She sat on a high stool with her hands clenched between her knees, “lie was looking at me—staring at me as if I were a stranger. I pretended I was still asleep. Then he—I felt his hands, touching me, all over, and I heard him crying. I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know what to do. Finally he went away. I wanted to hold him. But I was afraid to put my arms around him.” She looked up at Practice, her eyes startled and fearful. “I was afraid if I put my arms around him, he’d disappear, just like that, and then everything—the bed, the room, the mansion—would disappear, too.” Tears started in her eyes, and she wiped at them. “Everything. Chris. My—baby.” She put her hands flat against her thighs and stared down at them. Her voice was low, but with a hint of desperate strength.

  “Jim? What’s mine? Is anything mine?”

  “I’d have to answer that question for myself, Dore, before I could help you.”

  “He—was in love with me, Jim. I swear it. A lot of people would never believe that. Me. How could John love me? But I swear it. He did. And he ...”

  “I believe that, Dore.”

  “Well, what did I do?"

  “You think he’s disappointed in you?”

  She threw her head back. “Well? Isn’t he?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “Dore, he’s not—he’s not happy with himself.”

  “Why, Jim?”

  “A lot of reasons. You’re a part of it; so is Chris. Chris baffles him. John can’t remember his own childhood, and so he doesn’t know what Chris wants or needs. I guess he blames you for not showing the way.”

  Anger appeared in her face. “I want to love him. Him. The way it was. I pleased my husband, Jim!”

  “Now it’s different.”

  “But I don’t know how to love a little boy!”

  The silence between them grew, and Dore shook her head. In the dimness of the kitchen, loneliness seemed to press down upon them both from the heights of the empty mansion. Dore put a hand in her hair and tugged fiercely, then her hand dropped.

  “When I was in college,” she said, “I had the same dream. Everything would disappear, a little at a time. And when everything I had ever wanted was gone, then I—I’d start to disappear, too. And nothing could stop me.”

  “That won’t happen, Dore.”

  “Then where is Chris?” she said, hissing, and instantly began to sob. Without thinking, he took Dore in his arms and held her as soothingly as he could, a little perplexed by her weight and warmth.

  “Don’t let me disappear, Jim.” For a moment she looked at him pleadingly, her eyes big, then she put the tip of her tongue catlike against her lower lip. “Don’t let me ...”

  She lifted her shoulders and raised her head and kissed him. There was a thin cold edge to her teeth, and her tongue was ripe and quick. He responded easily, but at the same time was repelled and appalled by the twist of her shoulders, the lurid pressure of her breasts, and the digging fingers at the nape of his neck.

  His resistance became obvious as his reason asserted itself, and Dore let him go, her expression at first annoyed, then bewildered, at last ashamed.

  “Some people think I’m this way with any man,” she mumbled.

  He touched his lips where her kiss still burned.

  “Stop telling me what people think, Dore,” he said sharply.

  She stiffened at his tone, and sat facing away from him, wounded.

  “I’m going to go out and have a look around for Chris myself,” he said more softly. “When he comes home, you can either bawl him out as he deserves or you can gush over him. I’d bawl him out. But a little later I’d find the chance to show him I loved him. If I were you, I’d just pick him up and hold him, and maybe tell him a story—the way Lucy does.”

  “I might do that,” she said grimly, “if I could get him away from Lucy. I haven’t yet.”

  “Then get rid of Lucy,” he snapped, and carried the image of Dore’s eyes—staring, surprised—with him as he went outside and hurried away from her, from them all, with a taste of rust in his throat and a tremor in his hand where it had brushed against her breast.

  Oh, no, he thought. That would be just fine, wouldn’t it, Dore? But I won’t let it happen, not because I’m afraid of John Guthrie, or respect him too much. Not because I think you’re a sulky child who needs a lick now and then to straighten up. But only because I’m afraid there’s not enough of me for any man or woman to feed on and grow strong, and I fear anyone who tries.

  • 11 •

  He drove slowly back to the east end of town and Tournament Hill. The rain had quit, but if anything the sky was darker, the air more gloomy. At the top of the hill, the highest part of which was occupied by Major Kinsaker’s house, he looked down from his car at the school and beyond to the mist-shrouded river. Suddenly he smiled and focused his attention on the old prison buildings. Chris had called it “the fort,” and it was obvious that at some time or other he had gazed down from the windows of the school at the r
uined buildings, wanting to explore them. He wouldn’t be likely to go alone, though, and it must have taken him a while to find another boy willing to accompany him.

  Practice put his car in gear and headed for the old prison.

  The street ended two blocks from the prison site. Part of the ravine had been used by the city as a dump at one time, and jagged precipices of rusted metal loomed through the few slender trees that clung to the slopes above the creek. Practice made his way across the soggy ground by using a series of stones and flattened cans for a haphazard path.

  As soon as he was within the wall line of the prison he wished he had brought a flashlight, but he wasn’t willing to go all the way back to his car for one.

  The heavy doors of the entrance to the larger of the two buildings were still secure on thick hinges, and he passed them by, looking for a window low enough or a hole big enough for a boy Chris’s size to get through.

  He used a pile of fallen stone to reach one of the windows and peered inside, but couldn’t see much.

  “Chris!” he called, and listened patiently. If the boys had come this far, the odds were they had made only a cursory inspection and then wandered off. Unless ...

  “Chris?”

  He shrugged, pulled a sharp stone off the window ledge, and crawled carefully through, letting himself drop the seven feet to the floor below. He stood for a few moments under the window, until his eyes had become adjusted to the faint light inside. There were rents in the timber roof, and a couple of crossbeams sagged dangerously. Pools of water stood where sections of the thick flooring had tilted and sunk into the ground. In one corner there was a faint scratching, as if a rat had backed away at his intrusion.

  He called again for Chris, more loudly this time, and waited, his eyes on a far doorway. Then he made his way across the floor and brushed aside cobwebs before passing through.

  Light came weakly into the cellblock from several sources. Practice glanced at the rows of cells with their old-fashioned latticework iron. Some of them bulged from the pressure of stones and timber fallen from the roof. He listened intently, hearing the slow drip of water, and shuddered. It was cold and wet, and the stones at his feet were slippery from the drainage of water into the underground cells. He picked up a bit of wood and tossed it down the nearby stairwell, but there was no answering splash.

  Then he froze, staring at an object on the floor ahead of him, just out of reach of a pale shaft of light from above. He made his way across the treacherous floor and picked it up—new and shiny, a school lunchbox. He lifted the lid and read the name of the boy printed inside: Hugh McAdams.

  Hugh hadn’t touched his lunch.

  Again Practice called, feeling tension and alarm in his heart. He called out the names of both boys, but still there was no reply. Squatting, he examined the floor beneath the shaft of light. Some of the green slime had been scraped away near the place where he had seen the lunchbox. There were two long skid marks, as if one of the boys had fallen.

  He rose and walked slowly toward the stairway, looking into corners, trying to see into the cells.

  His foot hit something and sent it skidding across the stones. Puzzled, Practice struck a match and held it near the floor. A halo of light flickered over the boy’s shoe he had kicked. He picked the shoe up and studied it.

  One of the boys had lost a shoe. Then why hadn’t he retrieved it and put it on?

  Because he had been running and hadn’t wanted to stop, or even think about stopping.

  Practice made his way back to the stairs and struck another match. The stones here were dry, covered with dirt. He saw footprints in the soft dirt, the imprint of shoes and of a foot wearing only a sock.

  But there were three sets of footprints. The third set was that of a man, and the prints obliterated some of the smaller ones.

  “Chris!”

  Practice hurried down the iron stairs, one hand on the railing for support, and found himself in a chamber with iron rings around the walls and half a dozen doorways. Iron doors leaned from sprung hinges. The sound of water dripping onto stone was louder, faintly echoing. Practice struck another match, looking around in dismay.

  Then he heard the sounds, distant, regular sobs, ghostly and disembodied.

  He plunged toward one of the doorways, then backed off, finding the passage choked with rubble. He started into the passage to the right of the first one, pausing to strike another match.

  Some light filtered through the blackness at the other end of the passage. He went toward the light, but the sounds of his own hurried footfalls obliterated the cries.

  The passage ended in a huge, many-pillared room filled with overturned, rotting benches. The light was poor and, cursing, Practice fumbled with his matches, listening again for the cries.

  He called Chris’s name several times, then dropped the burned-out match and struck another, turning, holding out his match, the light stabbing into the corners of the room, over the heaped shadows and tumbled stone, over the thing that hung heavily from the crossbeams by a rope.

  He wasn’t even aware of the match until it seared his fingers, leaving him in darkness. He didn’t want to light another. He shook his head, dazed, and his fingers reacted automatically, scraping the head of another match against the side of the box. Flame dazzled him; he looked up slowly, at the rope, the heavy, lumpy burlap sack, slashed and torn and stained. He stumbled forward, not able to take his eyes from it. In the light of the match the stains seemed to turn red before his eyes. Blood dripped slowly from the soaked bottom of the sack to the stones below. There were three red pools on the floor.

  He held the match higher. In the last flicker of light, through a rent in the burlap, he saw the dark, mutilated head of a child.

  For a few moments, in the darkness that followed, he thought that he must be losing his mind, because the dead child seemed to be calling out to him. Then he realized that the cries, echo-distorted, came from somewhere else in the depths of the prison.

  Backing away from the sack that hung dripping from the beams, he took two more matches, and struck one.

  “Where are you?” he shouted. But he had seen a doorway, and stumbled toward it.

  Inside the passage, he heard running water. The passage sloped downward and, as he followed it, the cries were louder, desperate; the terror in the child’s voice seemed to accelerate in concert with a different guttural sound: something heavy and metallic, like a manhole cover, dragging over concrete.

  There was meager light in the passage from a tower window high above; Practice could distinguish the rippling of water in near darkness. Apparently all or part of the creek had been diverted so that it flowed under the prison and spilled down into an aqueduct, then was channeled through a sewer to the river. The aqueduct was about half filled.

  He had two matches left. The scraping of iron on concrete continued; and he heard heavy breathing as the screaming abruptly stopped. Not hearing the childish screams anymore was unendurable: Practice screamed himself as light flared above his fingertips.

  “I’ll help you! Where—”

  He had a glimpse of the far wall, an uncovered well near where the racing waters of the aqueduct dropped underground. And something was moving swiftly toward him, a shadow on the wall that could have been a beast or a man. He heard a terrible low grunting sound, and as the match flickered in a draft, saw the curved blade of an upraised sword.

  He had no weapon, no time to think. It was combat again, always the unexpected—groping for the enemy in darkness, the swift, violent encounters where you killed men whose faces you never saw. Instead of backing up, which probably would have been fatal, he hurled himself down and forward in a rolling block, cut the legs of the sword-bearer from under him, heard a hard whang of steel on the stone floor as he went rolling toward the opposite wall.

  He got up slowly and silently, holding his breath. His ribs were bruised and one hand smarted from skinned knuckles. He heard footsteps echoing, then nothing except for a
soft splash, no louder a sound than a frog would make jumping into a pond.

  Disoriented, trembling, he waited, not knowing if the other man had run or if, perhaps, there was more than one. Someone might be waiting, only a few feet away in the dark; a misstep, the slightest miscalculation, and he risked dismemberment.

  When he moved he went quickly, sideways, crouching, brushing against the rough damp wall opposite the aqueduct. He could just make out the surface rippling of water again. And heard the child whimpering.

  The well, he thought. He could barely make it out across the chamber.

  But where was the man with the sword?

  He knew he had to take the chance that he was alone now with the child in the well ... oh, God, God, had it been Chris Guthrie hanging up back there in the bloody Hack? The survivor might be seriously wounded or dying. He moved again cautiously across the uneven floor, pausing to listen, trying to see through the gloom to hiding places, frightened of the terrible swift sword, reluctant to light his last match and make of himself an unmissable target.

  “Bastard!” he whispered, ashamed of his fear. “Bastard, if you’re here, come and get me!”

  The well. His right foot stubbed against the iron cover on the floor. He looked down into the well but could see nothing. The nape of his exposed neck felt cold. He was sluggish with dread, but he had to light the remaining match.

  • 12 •

  “Who’s there?” Practice whispered into the well, striking lire from his thumbnail.

  Chris Guthrie, his face dead white around a puckered scar of a mouth, gazed up blankly at him from three feet of swirling water.

  “Oh, God,” Practice moaned, and threw the match away, He reached blindly into the shallow well, got his hands under Chris’s arms, and lifted him, drenched and shivering, from the water, knowing that this would be the moment the attacker might have waited for: waited until he was certain that Practice, with the boy in his arms, could not defend either of them.

  Practice turned, his back to the well, and wrapped the boy in his trench coat. He saw nothing, heard nothing but Chris’s chattering teeth.