Silhouetted and unaware of his mother, seven-year-old Giles Gahran held the cat's backbone overhead and sucked on its end. A clear yellowy, oily fluid spilled over his lips. With a penknife, he then dug deep into the bone and pulled out chunks of a dried bloodlike substance, the bone marrow, and he consumed this.
Larina stood watching the thing in the shadows that moved with the clumsiness of a child and the precision of a monster all at once. It grunted, moaned in pleasure, licked its chops, touched itself all over, rattled the bones, shaking them for more fluid, more marrow in a kind of eternal squatting animal dance where Giles, cross-legged with arms raised and hands holding on to the cat's spine appeared in the throes of a bliss that she herself had never known, one at once fascinating and terrifying.
A squealing board underfoot gave her away and Giles's catlike, penetrating eyes burned through his mother.
“Get out of here, Mother! Away with you! Now!”
His voice raged out of control, a gravelly, draconian, motorized metallic thrumming thing fueled by venom. Indeed, a child possessed in need of serious help, a child, possessed of a demon.
She dropped Squeakums and the makeshift coffin to race upstairs. She was panting, feeling faint, certain she would die here and now, and terrified that Giles would do to her what he'd done to Squeakums-feed on his own mother's spinal fluid and bone marrow.
Once upstairs and in her kitchen, she fought to maintain control and conscious behavior, tearing into a cupboard for a fresh inhaler and grabbing a knife from the butcher block only to see a larger slit in the block wink back at her.
Gasping, panting, feeling light-headed, and fearful, she leaned heavily against the island block in the kitchen when she heard his footsteps coming up.
“Mom? Mom!” he called out. “I know what it must look like,” he calmly spoke as his form materialized from the darkness, “but it's not a bad thing. Just practicing for the day I become a surgeon. You said Father was in medicine. I'm just a curious kid is all.”
“You fucking killed my cat!”
“No, no! Poor thing, she got hold of something bad, a neighbor's poison, maybe… Least I think so…” He'd stopped short at the top of the stairs and remained in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at her.
“St-st-stay the fuck away from me, Giles.”
“Ahhh, Ma, don't make a big deal of it.”
“Of what?”
“Of what you think you saw.”
“And what… did… I see?” She gasped between each word now.
“A little kid experimenting, curious about life's all. I think maybe I'll grow up to become a doctor maybe. Or an illustrator for medical books. I just like to know what makes things… and people run, you know?”
“Is that what I saw? I saw Squeakums's head caved in is what I saw, Giles. You killed my cat!”
“No way. I just put it out of its misery. It was suffering bad. In pain and suffering, and I did the right thing is all.”
“And you saw fit to cut out her backbone and-”
“It's called a dissection, Mom.”
“-and… and feed on it?”
“I was curious when I smelled the stuff inside, so I sort of tasted it. You just happened to barge in at the worst time, that's all.”
“I don't want to ever hear of your doing anything even remotely like this again, do you understand, you little monster? You little bastard… so like your sick father.”
“Sure, Mom, sure. I'm really not any kind of monster.”
“Then go to the bathroom where I keep more inhalers and get me another one, now!”
He made a step toward her and she flinched. “Sure, I'll go get the inhaler.”
Alone again, Giles's mother feared she might catch his madness, his and his father's. She wondered if she dared try to institutionalize him. She wondered if she could. The worry brought on a new wave of fast gasps for air and a coughing jag at once.
She thought of the years yet ahead of her with him as her child. She wondered what might become of Giles, wondered again if he would ever contemplate robbing her of life for her spinal column the way he had Squeakums's.
In the will, she would insist on him never being left alone with her body. She would insist on immediate cremation.
She got a mental image of him feeding on her bone marrow, his lips and tongue slick with her spinal fluid.
He had enjoyed it too much with the cat.
ONE
One of the many appeals of Minnesota-aside from the lakes-is that if the world ended, you wouldn't hear about it until the next day.
Millbrook, Minnesota November 14, 2002
Louisa Anne Childe closed a dying fist around the blood-soaked charcoal drawing she'd so loved-the impeccable image of her sitting in the park across the street, doing what she loved, feeding the late winter birds. With a trapped breath in her throat, believing it her last, she knew- feared-gasped. Her only hold left on this life-her sketch. Perhaps in the next life, things would be as peaceful as in the black-and-white drawing. Still, birdlike breaths of air fluttered, perched, and then struggled past her lips and into her lungs; and when she felt the dagger rip into her spine, she wished desperately that it had been her last breath.
Cheated, she felt a wave of anger against God for allowing this murder-her murder. She'd always imagined herself dying peacefully in her sleep. Instead, she would die a fool, a victim of murder, by a cunning killer who had led her down a grim-rose lane with a mere bit of artistry, the sleight of hand of flattery playing no small part. He had been so good for her ego… until now. What would Papa say…? He'd say she was a fool woman, that's what, and that she'd be left with the now-worthless sketch and her own disgrace.
Disgrace at being found dead at the hand of a man she had invited past her threshold. How stupid was that? How disgraceful her body would present itself. She feared her spirit would hover, witness to the disgrace. The thought of it, the horror of a scene involving paramedics, policemen and women, detectives, coroners… it was simply horrid. She feared being manhandled by those strangers, certain none would look like Basil Rathbone, Clark Gable or George Clooney. She feared strangers seeing her nude form, her clothes ripped from her, her naked body bloated and ugly with the passage of time, as she had no one.
No one would come looking until the rent was long overdue. Even more painful, the truth: She had literally put herself into an early grave by a murdering con artist. Louisa felt this humiliation above all, even above the pain of the cold giant chasm now being opened down the length of her spine.
The last earthly words she heard, he whispered in her ear, “You will still sit for me, won't you, Louisa.” It wasn't a question, more a statement. Little wonder he had failed to sign her charcoal drawing.
Louisa Anne Childe had endured the flesh-separating blade, feeling it course from the nape of her neck and race to the bottom of her spine. When the second cut snaked from the bottom up and up, and finally returned to the nape, Louisa still clutched the drawing. Her killer had seduced her with the enticement of charcoal drawings of her in the park, sitting, feeding birds.
She now fell into unconsciousness, her fist frozen about her favorite of four sketches.
By the time the rectangle of flesh was removed from her back, Louisa had died from hemorrhagic shock. She didn't feel a thing when her murderer's gloved hands latched on to her spine with one hand and worked a rib cutter with the other. He cut the twelve thoracic vertebra of the rib cage from their hold on the spinal cord. This finished, twisted wirelike nerves snapped as he tugged and ripped the backbone, but it jammed and held.
“Godfuckingsonofamotherfuckingbitching bastard!” he erupted and immediately covered his mouth with his gloved hand to silence himself. “Like fighting with a metal snake,” he added as he continued to tug. Finally, the spinal octopus let go and came free, almost sending Giles tumbling over.