Ten
At noon on a cloudy Monday morning, in a rundown
boarding house on the outskirts of Eagle Junction, Julian Ackorage handed
over a fistful of crumpled bills and took his key with a murmur of thanks,
but without once looking into the gnarled face of the gum-chomping
landlord. He waited until the door clicked shut before inspecting the
best his money had been able to buy.
The furniture was ancient but too worn and damaged to
be thought of as antique, the floor stained by decades of spills and the
wallpaper yellowed and peeled away from the cracked plaster. The sink in
the bathroom spat rusted water at him. The cracked toilet leaked into the
rug and filled the room with the stench of a sewer.
None of that mattered. He hurried instead to the
front window and fought with the rotting frame until it broke free and
lifted open. He took a deep breath of the fresh outdoors and closed his
eyes in ecstasy.
The room filled with the chiming laughter of
children. Hundreds surged about in the chain-link enclosed playground of
the elementary school directly across the street.
Julian breathed a shuddering sigh of relief. Feeling
a bit unsteady on his feet after his initial surge of excitement, he
pulled a chair over and sat down. He spent the next hour staring down at
hordes of little girls. A moment with any one of them would have been
enough to put him back in prison for the rest of his life.
Nothing at all mattered for the balance of the day.
The school bell rang and took them all inside and out of sight, but Julian
waited with baited breath until they gushed forth from the school later in
the afternoon and poured out into the streets. One or twice a pretty
little face tilted upward and saw him looking. Whenever it happened,
Julian's heart skipped a beat.
When they were gone, he closed his eyes to
fantasize. If only he had a safe way to lure one of them to his
apartment. If only he had a means of ensuring their silence. But they
were too young to bribe, and, if seen leading some little blonde angel
away from the school grounds, he was too distinctive with his long
silver-gray hair and thick glasses to be easily forgotten. He had risked
it once. It had put him behind bars for fifteen long years. The father
of the child had threatened to kill him when he got out. He couldn't be
certain an attempt on his life wouldn't still be carried out.
But he hungered so for those soft young creatures and
their trusting eyes.
He rose to his feet finally. Every bone in his body
creaked. Prison food had kept him slim, but physically weak and as
flexible as a dried noodle. Chuck, his parole officer, had given him a
deadline within which to register as an offender and find a job, as if he
was physically fit to work. Julian wasn't looking forward to filling out
employment applications.
Previous employment? Oregon State Prison.
Previous occupation? Pedophile.
Personal skills? Self-gratification.
It was a miracle that he had been turned loose at
all. Neither did that matter. He hadn't looked forward to getting out,
except for the opportunity to find one more victim with which to fulfill a
decade's worth of his ultimate fantasies. And then he would have to kill
himself as he had always planned. He fantasized that the FBI would him
corner him with his three hundredth victim in a fifteen hundred dollar a
month penthouse financed by a career of kidnapping and blackmail. He
would die in a bloody shoot-out.
In his wildest dreams, maybe.
Going straight, he reminded himself, was equally
unlikely. Sooner or later, he would have to look someone in the eye and
risk being beaten to death for what they would see there, or be laughed at
until he died of humiliation. As a registered sex offender, everyone
would know his face.
Physical hunger, too, gnawed at his gut. He had a
few bucks left, and then he'd have to go after food stamps, beg Chuck to
put him back in jail, or jump out the window. There was that one other
lethal alternative, to go on the prowl again even before he had eaten a
decent meal, although he hadn't expected to make his move so soon after
being released.
Wouldn't Chuck be surprised? Julian replayed his
last encounter with his parole officer in the arena of his mind's eye. It
had begun with the question that had plagued him since his release hours
earlier. "You going to tell everybody about what I did?"
Chuck glanced up from his paperwork. "You don't
think parents got a right to know you're in town?"
"I paid my debt to society."
Chuck put the papers down and leaned back in his
chair. "What debt did you incur, Julian? Describe to me exactly what
debt you incurred to put yourself in prison for fifteen years?"
Julian went rigid, raging on the inside with anger
and humiliation.
"Did you steal a car? Rob a bank?"
Julian couldn't maintain eye contact knowing what was
coming next. He looked quickly away.
"Did you hurt somebody's little girl," Chuck said
softly. "Would you like to tell me what you did with her? Maybe I'm a
sick bastard like you. Maybe I'll get off on it. What do you think?"
Julian pursed his lips, thought it unlikely, and said
nothing.
"I got a little girl at home myself, Julian. Blonde,
blue-eyed. She's four years old."
Julian's gaze darted back to the icy stare.
"Tell me my wife and I don't deserve to know you're
in town. Tell me that you paid your debt to that child who has to live
the rest of her life with the memory of your ugly face, the rancid stench
of you, and the horror of what you did to her."
"My life has been threatened," Julian said with as
much dignity as he could muster.
Chuck gazed at him for a time. "The law's never been
good at preventing crime, Julian. It never prevented yours. The father
of that child you hurt is going to have to decide for himself whether
killing you is worth whatever debt to society he incurs. I'm sure
he's given it lots of thought."
Julian thought he was going to be sick. And in the
next second he was. He puked all over Chuck's office floor and a corner
of his desk.
Cockroaches ventured from the woodwork in the
afternoon. They filled the sink, fled in all directions when he turned the
bathroom light on, and lurked beneath and behind each and every loose
object in the room. He didn't bother locking the room behind him when he
left to follow the children home from school. He had no intentions of
ever returning.
He walked away from the old, dirtier end of town to
the service stations and fast-food restaurants lining the highway. He had
seen an isolated residential area perched high on a hill on the way in.
The surrounding wilderness offered the perfect place to hunt and consume
his chosen prey. He was climbing the winding blacktop when the sun
dropped behind the horizon behind him. To save time, he turned off the
road and started up a clear slope to where a stand of trees towered
against the blue sky. The houses he had seen lay just beyond.
A few hundred feet from the road, he stopped dead in
his tracks. A little girl in a short pink dress blocked his way. A large
bird circled above her, and a small flock of little black birds. Julian
stood quietly for a time, puzzled, but more afraid that he'd scare her
away than unnerved by unusual circumstance. He inched forward, certain
she would run. If she did, he was in no condition to chase after her,
although he'd try, and failure would be a torture greater than any hell
had ever threatened. His passions had peaked to unbearable levels since
his release.
"Little girl!" he called out. "I'm lost! Can you
help me?"
It was a ploy that had worked well in the past.
Little girls were always eager to help a lost soul.
He stopped well back from the child when he saw the
things moving at her feet. Bugs. Repulsed, he took a step back.
They were gone in an instant, but he paused in
confusion and glanced again at the circling birds. Maybe he was like a
deprived alcoholic suffering the DTs. Suddenly, even the birds overhead
were gone. That left only the little girl in the pink dress.
She wasn't at all pretty. Ugly as a mud fence,
actually, and a bit on the plump side. But if the pickings in Eagle
Junction were this easy, he'd probably do better the next time around.
"Want to play with me, mister?" She turned and
pointed toward the nearby stand of trees a bit higher on the hill. "We
can play Little Red Riding Hood in the dark woods. You can be the big bad
wolf."
Julian gawked in astonishment. Was she for real?
She had to be. At her age, guile was a decade away. Besides, how could
she have known that the Little Red Riding Hood story was one of his
favorite fantasies? She would have to discover for herself the exquisite
manner in which he had modified it to his own satisfaction.
Julian quivered with tension. "Really? Can I?"
"My name is Jackie Kahl," she called out in a voice
than rang with clarity. "What's your name, mister?"
"Bob," Julian said on impulse. "My name is Bob."
Jackie smiled and turned away. Julian followed her
up the hill. Ahead, he could see the ground crawling again, although it
all went away as he got closer to the trees. He put it down as a mirage
caused by the fading daylight. He had paced a jail cell for so long, he
would have forgotten about such things.
Jackie Kahl reached the trees. She glanced back at
him, then vanished into the underbrush.
"Little girl?"
"I'm in here, Julian!"
Julian took a step or two before freezing in his
tracks. He had told her his name was Bob. He was certain of it. A
creeping sense of dread dampened some of his blind lust, which put him in
a quandary, because only two things motivated him in life, his
all-pervasive passion and chronic fear of retribution.
"Ouch!"
The cry was one of genuine alarm.
"Mister, I fell down and hurt myself!"
He had heard that taut pitch of pain and fear
before. Many times before. It stirred his very soul.
"I can't get up! Mister, please help me!"
Seduced by crippled prey, Julian lunged forward into
the underbrush. He stopped dead and teetered at the edge of a small pool
of water. He spun his arms to keep his balance, but lost it anyhow and
put his right foot forward, resigned to getting at least one shoe wet.
His foot plunged through a depth he had not
anticipated, and as he fell, he saw clothing lying on the surface of the
pool. He fell face down into a pink dress stained with blood,
underpanties, patent leather shoes, a hair ribbon, all the things worn by
the little girl waiting for him on the other side of the water. For some
inexplicable reason, maybe for no reason other than to watch him get his
feet wet, she had tricked him.
Below the surface, the dry wings of birds fluttered
into his face. He plowed through myriad of cold bugs and moist
amphibians. Here too, the little girl lay waiting for him, all pink and
plump and naked with opened arms. They impacted with one another, and
somehow merged. In more surprise than any two human beings had ever
known, they came together and united.
Above the mirror, a pair of man's pants floated to
the surface to join the pink dress. Other clothing appeared, and then a
partial denture plate, a stainless steel surgical pin and three screws
that had once held a shattered femur in place.
Overheard, the crow and the starlings began their
mindless wheeling through the evening sky. The intelligence projecting
their image had no idea what kind of prey they might attract, but it knew
that flesh fed upon flesh wherever it was to be found in the universe.
