by Unknown
Over the following days, Bob Bandolier relaxed. He would forget who was in the room with him, and lapse back into the old talk of the “hypocritical lowlife” and the “corrupt gang” that worked with him. Then he would look up from his plate or his newspaper, see his son, and blush with a feeling for which he refused to find words. Fee witnessed the old anger only once, when he walked into Bob Bandolier’s bedroom and found him sitting on the bed, leafing through a small stack of papers from the shoebox beside him. His father’s face darkened, and his eyes darkened, and for a second Fee knew the sick familiar thrill of knowing he was to be beaten. The beating did not happen. His father slipped the papers into the shoebox and told him to find something to do in the other room, fast.
Bob Bandolier came home with the news that the Hepton had let him go—the hypocritical lowlife had finally managed to catch him in the meat locker, and the bastard would not listen to any explanations. It was okay, though. The St. Alwyn was taking him back. After everything he had been through, he wouldn’t mind going back to the old St. Alwyn. He had settled his score, and now they could go forward.
He and Fee could not go forward together, however, at least not for a while. It wasn’t working. He needed quiet, he had to work things out. Fee needed to have a woman around, he needed to play with other kids. Anna’s sister Judy in Azure had written, saying that she and her husband Arnold would be willing to take the boy in, if Bob was finding it difficult to raise the boy by himself.
His father stared at his hands as he said all this to Fee, and looked up only when he had reached this point.
“It’s all arranged.”
Bob Bandolier turned his head to look at the window, the porcelain figures, the sleeping cat, anything but his son. Bob Bandolier detested Judy and Arnold, exactly as he detested Anna’s brother, Hank, and his wife, Wilda. Until this time, he had refused any contact with his wife’s family. Fee understood that his father detested him, too.
The next day Bob Bandolier took Fee to the train station in downtown Millhaven, and in a confusion of bright colors and loud noises passed him and his board suitcase, along with a five-dollar bill, into the hands of a conductor. Fee rode all the way from Millhaven to Chicago by himself, and in Chicago the pitying conductor made sure he boarded the train to Cleveland. He followed his father’s orders and spoke to no one during the long journey through Illinois and Ohio, though several people, chiefly elderly women, spoke to him. At Cleveland, Judy and Arnold Leatherwood were waiting for him, and drove the sleeping boy the remaining two hundred miles to Azure.
10
The rest can be said quickly. Though nothing frightening or truly upsetting ever happened—nothing overt—the Leatherwoods, who had expected to love their nephew unreservedly and had been overjoyed to claim him from the peculiar and unpleasant man who had married Judy Leatherwood’s sister, found that Fee Bandolier made them more uncomfortable with every month he lived in their house. He screamed himself awake two or three nights a week, but could not speak about what frightened him. The boy refused to talk about his mother. Not long after Christmas, Judy Leatherwood found a pile of disturbing drawings beneath Fee’s bed, but the boy denied having drawn them. He insisted that someone had sneaked them into his room, and became so wild-eyed and terrified that Judy dropped the subject. In February, a neighbor’s dog was found stabbed to death in an empty lot down the street. A month later, a neighborhood cat was discovered with its throat slashed open in a ditch two blocks away. Fee spent most of his time sitting quietly in a chair in a corner of the living room, looking into space. At night, sometimes the Leatherwoods could hear him breathing in a loud, desperate way that made them, want to put the pillows over their heads. When Judy discovered that she was pregnant that April, she and Arnold came to a silent agreement and asked Hank and Wilda in Tangent if they could take Fee in for a while.
Fee moved to Tangent and lived in Hank and Wilda Dymczeck’s drafty old house with their fifteen year old son, Hank Junior, who regularly beat him up but otherwise paid little attention to him. Hank was the vice-principal of Tangent’s Lawrence B. Freeman high school and Wilda was a nurse, so they spent less time with Fee than the Leatherwoods had. If he was a little quiet and a little strange, he was still “getting over” his mother’s death. Because he had nowhere else to go, Fee made a greater effort to behave in ways other people expected and understood. In time his nightmares went away. He found a safe secret place for the things he wrote and drew. Whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered that he wanted to be a policeman.
Fee passed through grade school and his uncle’s high school with average grades. A few animals were found killed (and a few more were not), but Fee Bandolier was so inconspicuous that no one imagined that he might be responsible for their deaths. Lance Torkelson’s murder horrified the community, but Tangent eventually decided that an outsider had killed the boy. At the end of Fee’s senior year, a young woman named Margaret Loewy disappeared after dropping her two children off at a public swimming pool. Six months later, her mutilated body was discovered buried in the woods beside a remote section of farmland, and by that time Fielding Bandolier had enlisted in the army under another name. Margaret Loewy’s breasts, vagina, and cheeks had been sliced away off, along with sections of her thighs and buttocks; her womb and ovaries had been removed; and traces of semen could still be found in her throat and anus, and in the abdominal wounds.
Far more successful in basic training than he had ever been in high school, Fee applied for Special Forces training. He called his father’s telephone number when he learned of his acceptance, and when Bob Bandolier answered by saying “Yes?” Fee held onto the telephone without speaking, without even breathing, until his father swore at him and hung up.
This is for Stephen King
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Table of Contents
Introduction—Elizabeth E. Monteleone & Thomas F. Monteleone
A Wind from the South—Dennis Etchison
House of Cool Air—William F. Wu
Morning Terrors—Peter Crowther
Misadventures in the Skin Trade—Don D’Ammassa
Circle of Lias—Lawrence C. Connolly
Watching the Soldiers—Dirk Strasser
One in the A.M.—Rachel Drummond
A Side of the Sea—Ramsey Campbell
Painted Faces—Gerard Daniel Hourner
Monotone—Lawrence Greenberg
Dead Leaves—James C. Dobbs
From the Mouths of Babes—Bentley Little
The Late Mr. Havel’s Apartment—David Herter
Union Dues—Gary Braunbeck
Earshot—Glenn Isaacson
Fee—Peter Straub
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