Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  He drew the spine of the blade across the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand where they gripped the mouth of the scabbard, and in a graceful flash that slowed toward the end of the motion, resheathed with another long, low, audible exhalation. His eyes remained fixed on the eyes of his victim as they ceased to blink.

  Now he reached between his knees and slapped the pleats of his hakama out to the sides so that he could kneel in seiza. He drew the short blade, the tanto, and with the casual confidence of a surgeon cut the blood soaked polo shirt away and sliced into the corpse’s pasty flesh, removing the liver with flawless efficiency. No motion of the knife was superfluous. All was executed with ceremonial concentration, unhurried grace, and cool equanimity. He felt no rage and no fear as he rose from the ground and tossed the liver onto the grill among the charring hamburgers. The fire flared again as the dripping blood sizzled and smoked on the coals.

  Sensei thought of the profile pictures. Even at the advanced age of seventy-five, his memory was diamond sharp. While his meat cooked, he walked down the lawn to the dock in search of familiar faces.

  Chapter 19

  The haunted house where Shaun Bell had spent an October chopping the heads off of wax dummies was deserted now. Approaching the familiar building, he felt an ache of nostalgia for simpler days, and wondered—not for the first time—how it was that the police had never come looking for him after Sandy Parsons was beheaded. After all, how many locals had watched him do the deed, sending a wax head flying on the crest of a wave of theatrical blood without so much as clipping an errant lock of hair from the mannequin’s wig?

  But those days were gone. The owners of the Palace of Pain had packed up and moved south, leaving the abandoned shell of the attraction to finally settle into the business of the authentic neglect and decay that it had for so long artfully imitated.

  Bell drove his secondhand Saturn up the long dusty road to the barn behind the Palace. The boy lay sleeping on the back seat with his hands cable-tied. They’d been on the highway for a while, and Bell figured the stress must have knocked the kid out. Either that or he was only pretending to sleep to get his kidnapper’s guard down, planning to kick him when he opened the door. But the kid was only four. Was he really capable of that kind of plotting?

  Kidnapper.

  Bell had been thinking about that word for a while now. He was already a killer, so he couldn’t say why it felt uncomfortable adding this to his list of felonies. If his role in the boy’s life remained kidnapper only and didn’t progress to killer, then it would be a step back from the precipice. Yes, he had killed, but he had not yet killed a child. Sensei was now hundreds of miles away, but Bell could still feel the momentum of his master’s wishes like a gale-force wind at his back, pushing him forward, at times lifting his feet off the ground.

  He got out of the car and watched the kid through the window. The boy didn’t stir when Bell closed the door. He stood silently for a moment, staring through the film of brown dust they had picked up on the back roads, and when the boy still appeared to be sleeping, he had a momentary flash of panic. Was the kid still breathing? Had he suffocated under the duct-tape gag? A peculiar mixture of fear and relief welled up in his chest as he wiped the dust from the window and narrowed his gaze to the boy’s torso, looking for the rhythm of respiration.

  The boy’s shirt was rising and falling. Bell let himself breathe in again.

  At this very moment Sensei might be wiping the blood from his blade, confident that Bell had already cut this final, low hanging fruit from the Parsons’ family tree.

  Would Sensei feel confident that his apprentice had completed the task he had been trained for? Or did the old man doubt his yamato damashi? The last thing the old man had said to him on his way out the door with his suitcase in hand was the same old farewell they had established years ago, a teasing refrain: “Don’t start watching TV.”

  Bell vividly remembered the first time they had sat down in front of one to watch a program together, one of the only times, back in California. Mr. Hashimoto didn’t have a TV in his apartment, but he had asked Shaun, while his parents were at work, if they had a VCR connected to theirs. Of course they did. The old man had fetched a tape from a mailing envelope, and together they watched a documentary about the atomic bomb in rapt silence. Shaun had learned that the tens of thousands vaporized in the flash were the lucky ones. The effects of the radiation made the Nazi showers and ovens look like amateur hour. In quiet moments, the stories of the survivors still echoed in his mind: the mother too weak to lift the wreckage from her burning children as they pleaded and screamed in agony; the farmer who bred mutant animals after the black rain fell; the smiling bomber who told the camera, “The target was there just as pretty as a picture…. I made the run, let the bomb go. That was my greatest thrill.”

  There was a dusty television in the house he and Sensei shared in Port Mavis now, but it was seldom on, and when it was, always tuned to the news. Watching reports of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Shaun wondered if American flyboys still got a thrill when firing at a wedding party with a joystick from a trailer in the Nevada desert. The mathematics of war enraged him. There was no honor in it. Two countries invaded for two towers, and two atomic bombs for Pearl Harbor. Two. Fat Man and Little Boy.

  But recently Shaun had begun to wonder if Sensei also killed more for the thrill than for the mission.

  He walked through the dust to the barn door, put his shoulder to the wood, and slid it along the stubborn track. Inside the barn, moldy hay lay in mounds left over from the days before the Jensen family had turned a farm into a Halloween attraction. Wedges of sunlight sliced through the darkness from the window seams and traced an angular geometry of gold dust across the dark green hull of a well-maintained tractor. Bell hesitated and then looked back at the car where the boy slept. He scanned the stark landscape for other vehicles tucked into the shelter of the house, anything he might have overlooked while driving in, any sign of occupants. He had planned to park his car in the empty barn to hide it. But if the tractor was here…had Jensen really abandoned the place? Wouldn’t he have sold the machine? The thing was in top shape, relatively new. Jensen had used it to cut the corn maze each year, and while he probably wouldn’t have trailered it to Georgia, he certainly wouldn’t have just left it to rot. You might not be able to sell off a bunch of homemade animatronic ghouls, but you damn sure could sell a tractor in New Hampshire.

  Bell stepped back out of the gloomy barn into the full blaze of day and rolled the door closed again. He would have to find somewhere else to conceal the car.

  If I don’t find someone home.

  He ran to the cover of the cornfield and crept along its edge to the rambling farmhouse that had been converted into the Palace of Pain. The Jensen family home was an outbuilding across the road, little more than an apartment atop a garage. The residence wasn’t visible from the gravel road he had followed to the customer parking lot (a muddy field cordoned off with ropes and barrels each October) but when he came to the end of the corn maze, he could see that the driveway beside the apartment was vacant. The place had an uninhabited look to it, the composite result of too many subtle details for him to put his finger on.

  There was no one here. He ran back to the car, only now realizing that he hadn’t locked it. One of the rear doors was open and the boy was wriggling onto the ground like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. His eyes were wild and red. At the sight of Bell, a muted scream trumpeted through the duct tape and mostly back-drafted through the kid’s snot-clogged nose.

  Bell slowed to a jog, then to a walk. Even if his quarry could manage to get to his feet right now, there was nowhere to run to. He reached the car and bent to pick the boy up but had to shuffle backward to avoid a flurry of flailing kicks. He should have cable-tied the kid’s ankles too, should have at least done it while the kid was sleeping in the car, but now it would be impossible. Somehow he’d assumed that the boy would walk on his
own two feet when they got here, but why should he? Bell would have to carry him like a sack of potatoes—an impossibility if the kicking continued.

  Bell stood back and gave the boy time to kick himself out, to exhaust the urge. The Boy. The Kid. He’d been avoiding thinking of him by name. By thinking of him only as the boy, or the kid, he’d been dehumanizing him in preparation for the slaughter. He forced himself now to embrace that ugly word. Slaughter. It tasted rancid in his mind. Was he going to slaughter Lucas like a pig at what used to be a farm and was now a house of horrors? The tape over Lucas’s mouth changed the look of his face, robbed it of almost enough personality to help Bell gain some distance. But the boy’s eyes were so big that it was little help. I’m doing it again, he thought. Lucas has big, expressive eyes, he thought. And right now they are expressing pure hatred.

  Lucas had managed to stand up, but now he toppled into the dust again from kicking out too far. His head bounced off the car door on the way down, and he became still except for a steady shudder that would have been a crying fit if not for the tape.

  Bell stepped forward and touched the back of Lucas’s head. The unwashed hair felt coarse, yet delicate against his palm. Lucas didn’t recoil immediately at the touch, not in a way that would indicate a pain reflex. He turned his head and looked at his captor’s face with a darkly furrowed brow that surprised Bell with its maturity. It was amazing how quickly children learned to imitate the expressions of their parents. Did Desmond Carmichael wear that serious, dark expression so often that his son had picked it up like a regional accent?

  Bell lifted Lucas by the shoulders and set him on his feet.

  Lucas broke into a run, cutting across the field for the tree line. Bell watched him run while reaching into a duffel bag on the passenger seat for a few extra-large cable ties. Then he gave chase with long strides and swept the boy up in his arms. He flipped him sideways and fell to his knees, trying to hold the small body still while absorbing kicks to the gut as he fumbled to get the cable ties threaded and locked. He should have taken the kid’s sneakers off in the car and made it harder for him to run, harder for him to land a kick with impact. The kid. Maybe that was best.

  It took most of Bell’s strength to subdue the boy and bind his legs. Even then, the flailing continued for a moment, rippling out from the child’s midsection, and making him look like an undulating eel. Finally, the squirming stopped, the futility of it sinking in, until the only sound was the rapid, ragged intake of breath through the nose. It sounded like it could be hyperventilation.

  Bell didn’t like the look or the sound of it, so he braced himself for the screaming, and ripped off the tape.

  But the screaming didn’t come. The boy just dragged in deep, panicky draughts of air, his eyes closed, tears cutting trails across his dirty cheeks. Eventually the gasping slowed to a deep heaving, which soon took on a tone, a slow rising whine that grew into a fit of crying. The tension in the little body had dissolved into helplessness. Bell slung the boy over his shoulder and carried him with both arms wrapped around the bound legs, half expecting to feel tiny teeth biting into his back.

  They passed the entrance of the corn maze and continued along the wall of rustling stalks. The only sounds were the sporadic chatter of birds and insects and the coarse botanical gossip of the stalks as they swayed in a gentle breeze. Bell remembered how he had cut his fingers trying to pull one of the stalks from the ground in an idle moment one day, paying for the attempt when the edge of a husk surprised him with its sharpness. It was a lesson to him that a sharp enough blade didn’t need to be made of steel to cut cleanly. At the right angle and speed, even paper could cut. As he trudged past the rows of corn with the boy over his shoulder, he reflected that he would need to be careful with this one. Sometimes it was the smallness of things that made them dangerous.

  Bell remembered last year’s corn maze. Every year Jensen chose a theme for the maze, a design that could be seen from the air and, after cutting it, had a crop duster photograph it for the website and brochures. Last year it was a spider web, but a peculiar one: an intricate labyrinth of dead ends with only one true path leading out. It took most patrons most of an hour to find their way back to the Palace of Pain after being led to the giant spider topiary in the middle. More than a few people had to raise the red poles they’d been given upon entry to signal that they were hopelessly lost and giving up the game.

  It looked like the web maze was still mostly intact. The winter had roughed up the corn with freeze and thaw, but the field hadn’t been razed.

  Lucas was snuffling now, his respiration almost normal. Bell hurried his pace to get into the building before a second wind of kicking or screaming started up. Hurrying, but not breaking into a run (that might jar the kid into resistance), he jammed his hand into his jeans pocket and fished out the key he’d retrieved from under a whiskey barrel beside the barn. Thank God the key had still been there. It nagged at him that this was one more sign that maybe the place wasn’t abandoned for good, that maybe Jensen would be back, but there was no time to worry about that now. Better to take it as an auspicious omen: if the key hadn’t been under the barrel, Bell would have had to break a window or kick in a door, all while handling the boy.

  The entrance hall was claustrophobic by design. The decorations hadn’t been removed. Long strands of dusty, theatrical Spanish moss hung from the ceiling and crawled across the sculpted foam walls, which had been spray-painted in motley shades of gray-fade to create the appearance in low light of a stone crypt. At the end of the hall a ninety-degree turn, invisible until one reached it, led to an arch, usually lit with a black light to make the neon-green inscription glow but now dark. Bell had passed under it countless times and knew that it established the theme of the attraction. Beneath an inverted pentagram were the words: IN MY HOUSE THERE ARE MANY MANSIONS.

  The Palace of Pain had been designed with a sweeping global ambition in mind. Dreamed up by a hick with a gift for machines, a man who had toured his home country extensively with a carnival but had never left the continent, it nonetheless presented a tour of the horrors of cultures far flung across history and geography and did so with painstaking attention to detail, beginning with scenes from European folklore—elements of the Brothers Grimm set in the woods and cottages of Germany’s Black Forest—and extending to the headhunters of the South Pacific.

  Lucas went limp and silent as Bell carried his bound body into the first exhibit between transported tree trunks. Even without dry ice to provide a heavy ground mist or theatrical lighting to cast eerie shadows, the scene still suggested a haunted forest to young eyes adjusting to darkness.

  Bell expected the power to be out, but he carried Lucas to the sidewall anyway and parted a curtain of silk leaves to feel for the switch. When he flipped it, there was a familiar heavy clack and hum, and the ceiling lit up with constellations of pinprick stars, while the pale shadow play of wolf and crow silhouettes embarked on their circular climb across the dusk-painted walls, rising and falling, round and around the room.

  Bell felt the boy gasp at the scene—out of fear or awe he didn’t know, but he wished he’d shoved the flashlight from his duffel bag into his jeans pocket before bringing him in. It was a minor miracle for the place to have power at all, but he would need to be careful about which lights he turned on. The farmhouse was an electrician’s nightmare, each room on its own circuit to keep fuses from blowing when the animatronics were running all day. Most rooms had triggers on door hinges or motion sensors to choreograph the action and pace the progress of visitors through the exhibits. He didn’t need Lucas freaking out at the sights of the mummified aliens in the Egyptian room or the African cannibal masks in the Congo room.

  The Hindu charnel ground was innocuous enough without Pete Gruen, who used to spend his days crouching in there wearing only a loincloth and a coating of ashes, gnawing on bones like a Saddhu on the banks of the river Ganges. The horrible climax of the tour, the Mayan sacrificial chamber, was
at the far end of the building where the tour reached the Americas. The room they were headed for, the room Bell knew best, came before that.

  Moving deeper into the interior, Bell flipped on the plain white house lights selectively, which meant stumbling through several rooms in total darkness, clamoring through sets revealed only partially by touch: fur, silicone, and the sticky residue of theatrical blood.

  When they reached the Japan room, Bell left the lights off and set Lucas down on a straw mat in the center of the floor.

  Before the frightened child could get his bearings, Bell ran back through the Palace and out into the dazzling sunlight. He parked the car behind the barn, then took the duffel bag with the food and bottled water in one hand and the silk-wrapped sword in the other. Left hand. Right hand. Divergent paths, and he had yet to choose.

  Back in the Japan room he turned on the lights and saw that Lucas had rolled across the dusty floor and kicked through one of the paper screens. At least he hadn’t hurt himself by tangling with the kimono clad automaton—the half-wax, half-machine mannequin that knelt in the center of the room waiting for spectators to trigger the floor tile that would initiate the seppuku sequence: mechanical arms plunging the dagger into the abdomen until the moment when Bell would step forward and cut the head off, severing a dowel and clearing the way for a blood tube to spray red sucrose across the floor.

  When the lights came on, Lucas craned his head around, his eyes darting, trying to take in the whole scene at once. “What is it?” The boy’s voice was hoarse.