She said, “Thank you daddy. I love you.”
“Very well done,” Nicolas replied, knowing she hated expressing her love. His voice sounded calm, yet agitated; it always sounded agitated. “You’re a good baby today, yes you are; yes you are.”
Nicolas wrinkled his nose playfully, raised his shoulders and opened his housecoat so Cathy could see his semi-erect penis. He released the lever on top of the cage.
The bottle rolled another two inches.
Cathy rammed a hand through the small cage door and grabbed the formula; flies buzzed around her. She put the bottle to her mouth and drank greedily, burning her mouth and tongue. She hardly even noticed.
On the other side of the room were two more cages. One was empty. It had been empty for three weeks. The other cage had a young girl in it. The girl’s name was Olive Thrift. She was fourteen years old, might have been Asian. At this stage, it was hard to tell.
Nicolas named her Pumpkin.
Olive said, “Daddy, may I have a bottle too? I’ve been very good lately. I didn’t cry tonight or anything. Honest I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry dear,” Nicolas said, stepping away from Kathy the Kitten. “I only brought one bottle with me. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
“Oh.” Olive’s eyes slipped down to the stumps on her hands. She only had three fingers left; she didn’t want to lose them. A multi-legged insect walked across her face and she swatted it away thoughtlessly. “Okay daddy. I understand. I love you.”
“I love you too, Pumpkin. Have a nice night. I’ll see you tomorrow, or maybe the next day.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes dear?”
“Can I please have some water? Both of my containers are empty.”
“Mine are too,” Cathy quickly announced. “Can you fill mine too?”
Nicolas approached Olive’s cage with his housecoat wide open and his genitals exposed. He put his knuckles to the wire.
Olive suspected that he would. He had been doing that a lot lately. She figured it made him feel like royalty.
She crawled toward Nicolas on her mangled digits and knobby knees, closed her dark and cheerless eyes and put her lips to the wire. Flies flew in circles around her. She kissed his hand as gently as she could manage.
“You’re a good little Pumpkin,” Nicolas said. “Yes you are. And if you keep being a good little girl I’ll never have to smash your face in with a sledgehammer. Or set your cage on fire. Because you don’t want that, do you? No. Of course not.”
Nicolas walked across the room, smiling insanely. He lifted a hose from a hook on the wall, turned a faucet, and approached Olive spewing hose-water where it fell. As he stood over Olive’s cage, she held out two water jugs and he filled them. He made his way to Cathy’s cage and poured water inside her coop for a little more than twenty seconds. She was able to fill one container and wet her hair before he dropped the hose and turned the faucet off, deciding enough was enough.
At the top of the stairs he clicked the light switch on and off, several times. He was tired. He hadn’t been sleeping well plus he had to get up early. He had things to do, although he couldn’t quite remember what those things were.
“Oh yeah,” he whispered. A grin that could have given a slaughterhouse butcher nightmares crept across his face like a spider on a corpse. “Now I remember.”
Closing the cellar door, he thought he heard a whimper.
Sounded like Pumpkin.
Pumpkin was a good girl; she was trying. And that’s what counted most in his books: trying. He hadn’t been forced to punish her lately, which was a nice change. Not since the incident with Pauline Stupid-Head had he been forced to perform one of his little operations. Not since he emptied the third cage.
Thinking about Pauline’s empty cage made him sad and lonely.
Empty cages need to be filled. Sure they did. An empty cage was wrong; everybody with a lick of sense knows that. But Nicolas was a busy man, he had things on his mind and his work was never done. The cage would have to wait.
Nicolas crawled into bed wearing his housecoat. He lifted his cup from the nightstand, smiled at the clown holding the balloon, and slowly emptied the cup’s contents on the floor. Water splashed, creating a miniature lake where no lake had once been. He named this lake, Lake Empty Cage. He wondered how long the lake would last, and when he would be forced to make a new one.
The clock beside him read 4:19 am.
It was late, too late for feeding babies and making lakes. Maybe tomorrow he would punish Kathy the Kitten for waking him—maybe, but maybe not. He wasn’t sure yet. He would see how he felt in the morning.
Nicolas woke up early, went to the kitchen and mixed another bottle of formula. He warmed it perfectly, added a little chocolate and brought it to Olive; he apologized for not giving her a bottle the night before. Afterwards, he cleaned the basement and found each of his babies something to read. He gave them fresh blankets, a rice-crispy square, and a nice cup of coffee. Shortly after, he stepped inside a closet, stripped naked, and screamed for twenty minutes while pushing his fingers into his eyes.
Preview of:
JAMES ROY DALEY ~ INTO HELL
1
Carrie Paige’s favorite duffle bag in the whole wide world had a picture of Kermit the Frog on both sides. The bag was black and cute and it said IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN on the strap and Carrie thought it was the greatest thing she had ever seen. She brought her bag into the backyard with her when she was playing with her dolls, and she was planning on showing it off on her first day of school, which was eleven days away. She was excited. Big kids go to school, her mother often told her. Big kids go to school and little kids stay home. Eleven more sleeps and it would be official; she would be a big kid. She was so excited she could hardly think.
Carrie reached into her Kermit bag and shuffled through her important possessions. This included a flower made of construction paper, playing cards, multicolored rocks, a bag of marbles, a handful of crayons and a plastic horse with a squished head.
The playing cards were always in her Kermit bag. If they were out of the bag she had them spread around so she could see every card at once. They were very special to her. She cherished each and every one of them and as a result the cards looked like hell.
Her favorite boy card was the one that said READY FREDDIE.
Ready Freddie looked so adorable sitting at the kitchen table with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other that sometimes she kissed the card. Freddie had yellow socks, a green bandana, and his tongue was sticking up from his pencil-line lips suggesting that he couldn’t wait another minute to eat.