Sins of the Fathers

by John Richmond

TWENTY FOUR

  EMMA GROUWE HAD witnessed her share of tragic cases in her twenty-five odd years of nursing the mentally unstable. The most pathetic had been a pretty young woman, happily married with a shining career, who had one day started crying and not been able to stop. She and her handsome young husband had been viewing Casablanca on DVD for what was possibly the third time just that year, when her drippy tears—a routine part of watching her favorite movie—swelled into steady crying and finally exploded into wracking sobs. She’d stayed on Nurse Grouwe’s ward at St. Vincent’s for three years before Emma transferred, always crying, hair turning brittle, falling out. The most horrific had been the fifty-seven year old grandfather. He’d been baby-sitting his fourteen month-old grand daughter while her parents enjoyed a rare night out. Grandpa’ had been a successful mechanical engineer and held patents on a few integral parts of most modern industrial grade HVAC units. He’d loved his children and their new baby daughter, but some silent worm had twitched in his mind that night. When his daughter and son-in-law had come bustling through the front door, flushed and laughing, smelling of restaurant food, they found him standing in the little kitchen, his mouth open, a quicksilver line of drool stretching almost to the floor. They’d rushed over to him and asked after the baby. “Dishwasher,” was all he’d said. It had just finished its final “Heated Dry” cycle. Those were the last words he’d ever say. Emma had watched him sink deeper and deeper into a catatonic mire until there was nothing left but a fleshy shell. A career as a psychiatric nurse had brought her all manner of patients with all manner of troubles, but Emma had never seen anything like the monsters that marched behind Frank Mason’s eyes.

  When she came to, the first thing she saw was his head eclipsing the dome light of the Lincoln. Her head, where Calvin had sapped her, sang an unbroken harmonic of leaden pain. Her vision cleared a bit and she began to understand where she was. She was a big woman, nearly six foot and a square one seventy-five, but Mason had managed to squeeze her into the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car and climb in on top of her. His breath came in hot and stale on her face, a Santa Ana wind blown over a swamp.

  “Helloooh, nurse!” Mason sang.

  “Whas ah…Missr Mason?” she slurred. Mason jammed his .44 into the crotch of her jeans and everything focused as if a cheese cloth had been pulled from her perceptions. She jerked and tried to sit up, but he bore down on her. The stark click of a the pistol’s hammer silenced her struggles in spite of the pain. She breathed, hard and fast, confusion blotted out by terror. To hell with where she was, the fact that she was in mortal danger was clear enough. She’d had her intuitions about her employer’s mental stability, but now she didn’t need her years of experience to verify that Frank Mason was a total fucking loon.

  He pushed harder with the gun and she let out a little whimper of pain, frozen in terror, but still managing a little self-loathing at the note of helplessness in her own voice. Mason’s face bloomed into a wide smile. Not at her little sound of protest, but at the look on her face after she’d made it. The bastard was happy that she’d disgusted herself. Her fear was backlit with anger now. If she could have, Emma would have pissed on his gun.

  “You a dyke, nurse Grouwe? Lotta big girls’re dykes.”

  She turned her face away. A tear slipped from the corner of her eye and pooled, hot and slippery, against her face and the leather seat.

  He prodded her. “No, no, up here Emma. Good, thank you.” Mason leaned in even closer, a planet-killer meteorite blocking out the sun. His smile vanished. “Where’s my son, you bitch?”

  “I don’t—“

  Mason pulled the trigger again and again and again.

  FRANK MASON PULLED the Lincoln into his garage and turned the engine off. For a long time, he sat there with his fingers still wrapped around the wheel, the Lincoln’s big power plant ticking as it cooled. The remains of Emma Grouwe also cooled, but did not tick. Her bones might tick and creak as the flesh fell from them over time, but that was about all the movement he expected out of her.

  Mason put his right hand on the passenger seat headrest and craned around to survey his handiwork. He’d once read a book about Whitechapel’s most promising son, Jack T. Ripper, complete with old police photographs of his victims. Jacky had taken his time with the third victim, sequestering her away in a tenement. Police accounts described the body as having been peeled open, the internals yanked out. Emma Grouwe looked a bit like that: head and limbs intact, but the trunk appeared to have exploded. Well, it made sense. His eyes scanned the interior of the car. Bits of Emma textured nearly every inch of the once gleaming leather and dried in the creases of Mason’s knuckles and in his hair.

  He faced forward and let out a long, slow sigh. In retrospect, it probably hadn’t been the most practical thing, blowing Emma to smithereens. She might have known something about his son’s whereabouts. He’d lost himself when she began to answer in the negative, his rage cresting and taking over. Oh well. Hindsight, twenty-twenty and all that.

  Things were not proceeding according to plan. Not that he strictly adhered to any one plan. The people and events of his life had always seemed to unfurl around him like petals around the complicated bud of a rose. Now, it was as if some of his petals had broken off and were attempting to create flowers of their own. That didn’t make sense to Frank. And while his mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around the idea of his people as independent entities from himself, he understood that it was a very bad thing. If someone was apart from him, he couldn’t control them.

  “Unacceptable,” he muttered.

  First it was the boy, stolen from him. Then it was Sinclair, also stolen and by the very same brash thief. And Finch, who had attempted to steal Jeremy even farther away, had not succeeded but was himself stolen. Then the not so good Father Calvin, the reverse savior, came in and set events in motion to trim another petal from Frank Mason’s rose. He couldn’t even be sure Horton belonged to him any longer. And Tiesha, his fine tract of fleshy land, now seemed to be missing as well. He’d called her apartment on his cell phone only to be assaulted by repetitive rings. They were hollow, empty. She was gone. He could feel it.

  He’d find them. That was all there was to it. He’d find them and bring them back under his reign. It wasn’t as if this was the first time petals had fallen away from him. The boy’s mother had fallen away, then fallen overboard. He’d watched her face, white and stark, surprised, as it sank into the deep black. Her memory, held fast in Mason’s mind, was all that remained of her. A memory that was part of him, internal and under control. And if he had to kill them all to bring them back—he mused this was most likely the way to go—then so be it. His mind was a big house with plenty of empty rooms yet to decorate.

  An absence in the corner of his eye asserted itself and he looked over to where the Lotus should have been sitting, a loyal, metallic beast. Gone. Well, Horton obviously. Sure, that made sense. Mason had taken the other car. Perhaps when Mr. Horton returned with his son, Frank would position Horton beneath the rear wheels and spin the skin from that shiny bald head of his.

  Mason stared through his own reflection in the window, gore solidifying in the car and on his person. He thought about nothing, listening to his own footfalls as he roamed the empty rooms of his mind. He would furnish it with their bodies, a quiet, pliant corpse for every room. After two hours, a cramp from his bladder shook him loose and he walked into the house.

  Mason moved through the darkened mansion, his own mental house superimposing itself over his vision like a transparency. Here in the front hall, atop his mahogany foyer table would rest Mister Horton’s skull. Perhaps Mason would remove the top and use the cranial cavity as the base for a floral arrangement. Daisies might work. Be the kind of the thing Tiesha would know about, but of course, she’d be little use once her corpse was spread in front of the fireplace in his bedroom. He liked that idea, spre
ad her out naked, like a safari kill. That’s what you were supposed to do with game from Africa. Okay, so she was from Toledo, but Tie was a jungle bunny so it was kind of the same. He passed the library where Calvin’s skin would serve as binding for several rare editions of the bible and pushed into the kitchen.

  Mason surprised Rosario, his only remaining live-in servant, as she heated a glass of milk. She cried out and almost dropped the glass, her heart a crazed bird in her chest. At her age, a scare like that could do a woman in. Dios mio, it wasn’t as if she were a spry young thing anymore. Of course, working for a man like Senior Mason tended to age a person that much faster. She dredged up a smile and tossed off an offer to make him a midnight snack before she noticed the coat of viscera flaking off him. Starting with her eyes and dripping down her face like tallow, her smile melted into a terror mask.

  Mason took three big steps toward her, yanking a metal crab mallet off the counter as he closed the distance. The blank expression on his face never even flickered as he brought the mallet down on the top of her head. Her skull cracked and she thudded to the floor, an almost mournful sigh slipping from her lungs. Mason knelt and continued to strike with the mallet until Rosario was effectively beheaded. His pants filled with hot water as his bladder let go, but he didn’t notice. He was daydreaming about how he might be able to turn his son’s skeleton into a high art wall hanging for the office. Finch could do that for him, use those chemicals of his. Wait, Finch was dead.

  Mason stopped pounding and sat back on his soggy haunches. Every one of his closest people was either dead or missing and soon to be dead. He held the end of the crab mallet between his thumb and forefinger and set it to swing like a dripping pendulum. Tick tock, tick tock.

  “I’ll have to put an ad in the help wanted section,” he said and frowned as his stomach grumbled. Damn, he could have used a snack after all. His face blanked out again as his mind emptied. Mason’s head tipped to one side, his mouth open a sliver. He leaned over and grabbed Rosario’s left hand. He fanned the pudgy fingers out and proceeded to flatten each one with the mallet. He started singing under his breath to the steady, smashing rhythm.

  “If I had a ham-mer. I’d hammer in the morning. I’d hammer in the evening. Hmm, huh-hmmm, hm.”