A Soft Barren Aftershock by F. Paul Wilson
“I know he’s dead.”
Harrison froze. “Dead? That can’t be!”
“It sure as hell can be!” Without rising from his seat, he shouted through his office door. “Murph! Pull out that old file on the Baker case! Nineteen eighty-four, I believe!”
“Eighty-four?” Harrison said. He and Martha had been living in Queens then. They hadn’t moved back to Monroe yet.
“Right. A real messy affair. Tommy Baker was thirteen years old when he bought it. And he bought it. Believe me, he bought it!”
Harrison sat in glum silence, watching his whole theory go up in smoke.
The Old Jessi sleeps. Stand by mirror near tub. Only mirror have. No like them. The Jessi not need one.
Stare face. Bad face. Teeth, teeth, teeth. And hair. Arms too thin, too long. Claws. None have claws like my. None have face like my.
Face not better. Ate pretty faces but face still same. Still cause sick-scared look. Just like at home.
Remember home. Do not want but thoughts will not go.
Faces.
The Sissy get the Mom-face. Beauty face. The Tommy get the Dad-face. Not see the Dad. Never come home anymore. Who my face? Never see where come. Where my face come? My hands come?
Remember home cellar. Hate home! Hate cellar more! Pull on chain round waist. Pull and pull. Want out. Want play. Please. No one let.
One day when the Mom and the Sissy go, the Tommy bring friends. Come down cellar. Bunch on stairs. Stare. First time see sick-scared look. Not understand.
Friends! Play! Throw ball them. They run. Come back with rocks and sticks. Still sick-scared look. Throw me, hit me.
Make cry. Make the Tommy laugh.
Whenever the Mom and the Sissy go, the Tommy come with boys and sticks. Poke and hit. Hurt. Little hurt on skin. Big hurt inside. Sick-scared look hurt most of all. Hate look. Hate hurt. Hate them.
Most hate the Tommy.
One night chain breaks. Wait on wall for the Tommy. Hurt him. Hurt the Tommy outside. Hurt the Tommy inside. Know because pull inside outside. The Tommy quiet. Quiet, wet, red. The Mom and the Sissy get sick-scared look and scream.
Hate that look. Run way. Hide. Never come back. Till last night.
Cry more now. Cry quiet. In tub. So the Jessi not hear.
Harrison flipped through the slim file on the Tommy Baker murder.
“This is it?”
“We didn’t need to collect much paper,” Captain Hall said. “I mean, the mother and sister were witnesses. There’s some photos in that manila envelope at the back.”
Harrison pulled it free and slipped out some large black and whites. His stomach lurched immediately.
“My God!”
“Yeah, he was a mess. Gutted by his older sister.”
“His sister!”
“Yeah. Apparently she was some sort of freak of nature.”
Harrison felt the floor tilt under him, felt as if he were going to slide off the chair.
“Freak?” he said, hoping Hall wouldn’t notice the tremor in his voice. “What did she look like?”
“Never saw her. She took off after she killed the brother. No one’s seen hide nor hair of her since. But there’s a picture of the rest of the family in there.”
Harrison shuffled through the file until he came to a large color family portrait. He held it up. Four people: two adults seated in chairs; a boy and a girl, about ten and eight, kneeling on the floor in front of them. A perfectly normal American family. Four smiling faces.
But where’s your oldest child. Where’s your big sister? Where did you hide that fifth face while posing for this?
“What was her name? The one who’s not here?”
“Not sure. Carla, maybe? Look at the front sheet under Suspect.”
Harrison did: “Carla Baker-called ‘Carly,’ ” he said.
Hall grinned. “Right. Carly. Not bad for a guy getting ready for retirement.”
Harrison didn’t answer. An ineluctable sadness filled him as he stared at the incomplete family portrait.
Carly Baker . . . poor Carly . . . where did they hide you away? In the cellar? Locked in the attic? How did your brother treat you? Bad enough to deserve killing?
Probably.
“No pictures of Carly, I suppose.”
“Not a one.”
That figures.
“How about a description?”
“The mother gave us one but it sounded so weird, we threw it out. I mean, the girl sounded like she was half spider or something!” He drained his cup. “Then later on I got into a discussion with Doc Alberts about it. He told me he was doing deliveries back about the time this kid was born. Said they had a whole rash of monsters, all delivered within a few weeks of each other.”
The room started to tilt under Harrison again.
“Early December, 1968, by chance?”
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
He felt queasy. “Lucky guess.”
“Huh. Anyway, Doc Alberts said they kept it quiet while they looked into a cause, but that little group of freaks-‘cluster,’ he called them-was all there was. They figured that a bunch of mothers had been exposed to something nine months before, but whatever it had been was long gone. No monsters since. I understand most of them died shortly after birth, anyway.”
“Not all of them.”
“Not that it matters,” Hall said, getting up and pouring himself a refill from the coffee pot. “Someday someone will find her skeleton, probably somewhere out in Haskins’ marshes.”
“Maybe.” But I wouldn’t count on it. He held up the file. “Can I get a xerox of this?”
“You mean the Facelift Killer is a twenty-year-old girl?”
Martha’s face clearly registered her disbelief.
“Not just any girl. A freak. Someone so deformed she really doesn’t look human. Completely uneducated and probably mentally retarded to boot.”
Harrison hadn’t returned to Manhattan. Instead, he’d headed straight for home, less than a mile from Town Hall. He knew the kids were at school and that Martha would be there alone. That was what he had wanted. He needed to talk this out with someone a lot more sensitive than Jacobi.
Besides, what he had learned from Captain Hall and the Baker file had dredged up the most painful memories of his life.
“A monster,” Martha said.
“Yeah. Born one on the outside, made one on the inside. But there’s another child monster I want to talk about. Not Carly Baker. Annie . . . Ann Harrison.”
Martha gasped. “That sister you told me about last night?”
Harrison nodded. He knew this was going to hurt, but he had to do it, had to get it out. He was going to explode into a thousand twitching bloody pieces if he didn’t.
“I was nine when she was born. December 2, 1968-a week after Carly Baker. Seven pounds, four ounces of horror. She looked more fish than human.”
His sister’s image was imprinted on the rear wall of his brain. And it should have been after all those hours he had spent studying her loathsome face. Only her eyes looked human. The rest of her was awful. A lipless mouth, flattened nose, sloping forehead, fingers and toes fused so that they looked more like flippers than hands and feet, a bloated body covered with shiny skin that was a dusky gray-blue. The doctors said she was that color because her heart was bad, had a defect that caused mixing of blue blood and red blood.
A repulsed nine-year-old Kevin Harrison had dubbed her The Tuna-but never within earshot of his parents.
“She wasn’t supposed to live long. A few months, they said, and she’d be dead. But she didn’t die. Annie lived on and on. One year. Two. My father and the doctors tried to get my mother to put her into some sort of institution, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. She kept Annie in the third bedroom and talked to her and cooed over her and cleaned up her shit and just hung over her all the time. All the time, Martha!”
Martha gripped his hand and nodded for him to go on.
“After a while,
“After a while I began to hate my sister.”
“Kevin, you don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do! I’ve got to tell you how it was! By the time I was fourteen-just about Tommy Baker’s age when he bought it-I thought I was going to go crazy. I was getting all B’s in school but did that matter? Hell, no! ‘Annie rolled halfway over today. Isn’t that wonderful?’ Big deal! She was five years old, for Christ sake! I was starting point guard on the high school junior varsity basketball team as a goddamn freshman, but did anyone come to my games? Hell no!
“I tell you, Martha, after five years of caring for Annie, our house was a powder-keg. Looking back now I can see it was my mother’s fault for becoming so obsessed. But back then, at age fourteen, I blamed it all on Annie. I really hated her for being born a freak.”
He paused before going on. This was the really hard part.
“One night, when my dad had managed to drag my mother out to some company banquet that he had to attend, I was left alone to babysit Annie. On those rare occasions, my mother would always tell me to keep Annie company-you know, read her stories and such. But I never did. I’d let her lie back there alone with our old black and white TV while I sat in the living room watching the family set. This time, however, I went into her room.”
He remembered the sight of her, lying there with the covers half way up her fat little tuna body that couldn’t have been much more than a yard in length. It was winter, like now, and his mother had dressed her in a flannel nightshirt. The coarse hair that grew off the back of her head had been wound into two braids and fastened with pink bows.
“Annie’s eyes brightened as I came into the room. She had never spoken. Couldn’t, it seemed. Her face could do virtually nothing in the way of expression, and her flipper-like arms weren’t good for much, either. You had to read her eyes, and that wasn’t easy. None of us knew how much of a brain Annie had, or how much she understood of what was going on around her. My mother said she was bright, but I think Mom was a little whacko on the subject of Annie.
“Anyway, I stood over her crib and started shouting at her. She quivered at the sound. I called her every dirty name in the book. And as I said each one, I poked her with my fingers-not enough to leave a bruise, but enough to let out some of the violence in me. I called her a lousy goddamn tunafish with feet. I told her how much I hated her and how I wished she had never been born. I told her everybody hated her and the only thing she was good for was a freak show. Then I said, ‘I wish you were dead! Why don’t you die? You were supposed to die years ago! Why don’t you do everyone a favor and do it now!
“When I ran out of breath, she looked at me with those big eyes of hers and I could see the tears in them and I knew she had understood me. She rolled over and faced the wall. I ran from the room.
“I cried myself to sleep that night. I’d thought I’d feel good telling her off, but all I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was this fourteen-year-old bully shouting at a helpless five-year-old. I felt awful. I promised myself that the first opportunity I had to be alone with her the next day I’d apologize, tell her I really didn’t mean the hateful things I’d said, promise to read to her and be her best friend, anything to make it up to her.
“I awoke the next morning to the sound of my mother screaming. Annie was dead.”
“Oh, my God!” Martha said, her fingers digging into his arm.
“Naturally, I blamed myself.”
“But you said she had a heart defect!”
“Yeah. I know. And the autopsy showed that’s what killed her-her heart finally gave out. But I’ve never been able to get it out of my head that my words were what made her heart give up. Sounds sappy and melodramatic, I know, but I’ve always felt that she was just hanging on to life by the slimmest margin and that I pushed her over the edge.”
“Kevin, you shouldn’t have to carry that around with you! Nobody should!”
The old grief and guilt were like a slowly expanding balloon in his chest. It was getting hard to breathe.
“In my coolest, calmest, most dispassionate moments I convince myself that it was all a terrible coincidence, that she would have died that night anyway and that I had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s probably true, so—”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that the last memory of her life was of her big brother-the guy she probably thought was the neatest kid on earth, who could run and play basketball, one of the three human beings who made up her whole world, who should have been her champion, her defender against a world that could only greet her with revulsion and rejection-standing over her crib telling her how much he hated her and how he wished she was dead!”
He felt the sobs begin to quake in his chest. He hadn’t cried in over a dozen years and he had no intention of allowing himself to start now, but there didn’t seem to be any stopping it. It was like running down hill at top speed-if he tried to stop before he reached bottom, he’d go head over heels and break his neck.
“Kevin, you were only fourteen,” Martha said soothingly.
“Yeah, I know. But if I could go back in time for just a few seconds, I’d go back to that night and rap that rotten hateful fourteen-year-old in the mouth before he got a chance to say a single word. But I can’t. I can’t even say I’m sorry to Annie! I never got a chance to take it back, Martha! I never got a chance to make it up to her!”
And then he was blubbering like a goddamn wimp, letting loose half a lifetime’s worth of grief and guilt, and Martha’s arms were around him and she was telling him everything would be all right, all right, all right . . .
The Detective Harrison understand. Can tell. Want to go kill another face now. Must not. The Detective Harrison not like. Must stop. The Detective Harrison help stop.
Stop for good.
Best way. Only one way stop for good. Not jail. No chain, no little window. Not ever again. Never!
Only one way stop for good. The Detective Harrison will know. Will understand. Will do.
Must call. Call now. Before dark. Before pretty faces come out in night.
Harrison had pulled himself together by the time the kids came home from school. He felt buoyant inside, like he’d been purged in some way. Maybe all those shrinks were right after all: sharing old hurts did help.
He played with the kids for a while, then went into the kitchen to see if Martha needed any help with slicing and dicing. He felt as close to her now as he ever had.
“You okay?” she said with a smile.
“Fine.”
She had just started slicing a red pepper for the salad. He took over for her.
“Have you decided what to do?” she asked.
He had been thinking about it a lot, and had come to a decision.
“Well, I’ve got to inform the department about Carly Baker, but I’m going to keep her out of the papers for a while.”
“Why? I’d think if she’s that freakish looking, the publicity might turn up someone who’s seen her.”
“Possibly it will come to that. But this case is sensational enough without tabloids like the Post and The Light turning it into a circus. Besides, I’m afraid of panic leading to some poor deformed innocent getting lynched. I think I can bring her in. She wants to come in.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“She so much as told me so. Besides, I can sense it in her.” He saw Martha giving him a dubious look. “I’m serious. We’re somehow connected, like there’s an invisible wire between us. Maybe it’s because the same thing that deformed her and those other kids deformed Annie, too. And Annie was my sister. Maybe that link is why I volunteered for this case in the first place.”
He fin
“And after I bring her in, I’m going to track down her mother and start prying into what went on in Monroe in February and March of sixty-eight to cause that so-called ‘cluster’ of freaks nine months later.”
He would do that for Annie. It would be his way of saying goodbye and I’m sorry to his sister.
“But why does she take their faces?” Martha said.
“I don’t know. Maybe because theirs were beautiful and hers is no doubt hideous.”
“But what does she do with them?”
“Who knows? I’m not all that sure I want to know. But right now—”
The phone rang. Even before he picked it up, he had an inkling of who it was. The first sibilant syllable left no doubt.
“Ish thish the Detective Harrison?”
“Yes.”
Harrison stretched the coiled cord around the corner from the kitchen into the dining room, out of Martha’s hearing.
“Will you shtop me tonight?”
“You want to give yourself up?”
“Yesh. Pleashe, yesh.”
“Can you meet me at the precinct house?”
“No!”
“Okay! Okay!” God, he didn’t want to spook her now. “Where? Anywhere you say.”
“Jusht you.”
“All right.”
“Midnight. Plashe where lasht fashe took. Bring gun but not more cop.”
“All right.”
He was automatically agreeing to everything. He’d work out the details later.
“You undershtand, Detective Harrishon?”
“Oh, Carly, Carly, I understand more than you know!”
There was a sharp intake of breath and then silence at the other end of the line. Finally:
“You know Carly?”
“Yes, Carly. I know you.” The sadness welled up in him again and it was all he could do to keep his voice from breaking. “I had a sister like you once. And you . . . you had a brother like me.”
“Yesh,” said that soft, breathy voice. “You undershtand. Come tonight, Detective Harrishon.”
The line went dead.
Wait in shadows. The Detective Harrison will come. Will bring lots cop. Always see on TV show. Always bring lots. Protect him. Many guns.