There are pessimists in this world and there are optimists. There are the hunted, the hunters, the victims, the victimizers, the fools, the frayed, the genius, the ignorant, the oblivious, the obvious, and the incomprehensible. There are those who must deal with having been dealt impossible hands, those who know only the soft sides of luxury, and those who dwell in the small distance that often separates them. If you stop to consider it there is nothing more important than your life. And by that I am implying that your life is something altogether separate from yourself. Just because you are you does not make you your life. Life is too often misused to be considered the property of someone that never bothered to actually live it. No matter what happens during it, or how it is lived, you will eventually have to give it back. If you spend some time pondering such strange logic you may find yourself not going to work tomorrow morning. You may decide instead to sell the kids, kill your spouse, and head off into the adventure you always said that your life would be. But don’t worry, you won’t.
There are angry people in the world and there are those who know only the bliss of a simplistic ignorance. There are those who sell and those who buy. At the same instant that a child in some small village in Africa is getting their arms chopped off amidst the turmoil of yet another people’s revolution, another of the same age and relative appearance might be nagging their mother to buy them the latest video game halfway around the would. Distraught that they will not get their way in the matter, they may say “I wish I was dead.� There is quiet in the world and there is the noise of those who are too fractured to let it grow. There is force and there is frailty. There is worth and there is worthlessness.
This is a story about a little boy who was none of the above.
Just The Sky
Milton Hadley was a genius. When he was seven years old he could multiply six-digit numbers in a matter of seconds. His father, who was a retired United States Air Force Captain, sent Milton to a military academy when he was ten. He had hoped that Milton would one day work for the government cracking Soviet codes and such. Thankfully, the following year, both Mr. and Mrs. Hadley were killed by a freak tornado that swept through their suburb on the outskirts of Wichita. Had Mr. Hadley lived, Milton would have most likely remained at the military academy. Which would have been tragic, since the dorm that Milton had lived in was completely destroyed by an artillery shell that one of his classmates had hidden in a footlocker. Everyone on the top floor was killed by the blast. Everyone on the second and first floors were crushed to death by the third floor. Milton, it seemed, was the beneficiary of impeccable timing.
Following the death of his parents, Milton was sent to Bellingham, Washington to live with his Uncle Rex, whom he had never met before. Rex was socially baffling. He lived in a renovated barn with his third wife, Cora, and an assortment of animals that were, for the most part, matted with dirt and permanently smelt of marsh water. His acreage was considerable though, and was home to numerous wrecked cars, buses, and tire fires. It was also home to four very well-constructed ramps, three world-class jumping bikes, two street bikes, and one of the world’s ugliest RVs. Since the age of twenty-four Rex had been a daredevil. Hence the name: Reckless Rex.
Milton arrived at the bus station still wearing his uniform, expecting his uncle to be the mirror image of his father. As he walked off of the bus he looked to his right and saw Rex and Cora standing there with his name written on a piece of yellow construction paper in purple marker. It was raining lightly and the paper had started to break apart in places. Rex, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, stood there leaning on the seat of his bike, covered in mud from head to toe. Milton was so mortified that he fainted.
Four months after Milton moved into the barn with Rex and Cora, Rex was severely injured during a performance at a monster truck show in the Tacoma Dome. Three days after the accident he would die of complications in hospital. This left Milton in the care of Cora, a borderline alcoholic, who knew very little beyond how to operate a kiln, roll grass, and make instant coffee. Knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to take care of Milton properly, she was left with little choice but to send him to live with Rex’s first wife, Anna Hadley St. Claire, who was the nearest thing to a blood relative—as Anna and Rex had two daughters together. Cora gave him some half-assed explanations and put him on another bus.
Some days after his departure, Cora fell asleep while watching television one night and her cigarette, ill-balanced in the ashtray, fell to the floor and started a fire. The flames consumed the barn, killing Cora, the animals, and the majority of the world’s Reckless Rex collectibles. Had Milton been there he too would have perished.
Dizzy from the orbit of his life, Milton had no clue what he would have to deal with in Massachusetts. He was about to play a key role in one of the most bizarre happenings in world history. All he wanted was a Coke and a bag of Lay’s.
Just A Calm
Anna Hadley St.Claire met Rex Hadley at Boston College. The daughter of one of the most powerful industrialists in the Northeast, Anna had spent the majority of her life, up until college that is, in exclusive beach and country clubs.
When the unthinkable occurred—being rejected by Harvard—her father decided it would be best to sober her up by making her endure dorm life. Her roommate was a girl named Camille Stewart, the daughter of a Motel 6 maintenance man. Camille, who would—years later—go on to become a world-renowned and award-winning botanist, knew Rex Hadley from a local restaurant where the two of them had worked.
Rex did not attend Boston College. Rex was pretty much an idiot. The type that rich girls use to piss off their fathers.
The first time Anna met Rex he was naked. She had returned to her room following a literature class to discover him standing in front of her full-length mirror, flexing. She immediately began to laugh. After the initial shock of being discovered wore off, so did he. Camille had been allowing Rex to sleep in her bed during the day because he had been evicted from his apartment and was working as a bartender in a nearby tavern to pay off a gambling debt.
The two of them hit it off and the next thing they knew Anna was naked and Rex was flexing elsewhere. Two months later Anna dropped out of school and they eloped to Orlando during spring break. They were drunk, of course. Following their elopement they moved to Bakersfield, California, where Rex got a job working at a garage and began his love affair with jumping motorcycles. Anna, on the other hand, despised the place and everyone in it. She slowly began to realize that her actions were motivated by some need to anger her father. Late one October night, she left Rex, stole his car, and headed back to Massachusetts. When he awoke the next morning, Rex was not surprised when he read the note that she had left. He was somewhat angered that she took his car, but beyond that he didn’t care much. What Anna failed to tell him in that note was that she was pregnant. With twins no less. But Rex would never learn of it.
Her father welcomed Anna back with open arms. Overjoyed that she had left Rex, their lifelong feud ended mere minutes after her arrival. And, even though he was secretly disappointed that she was having Rex’s child, he realized that regaining his daughter far outweighed the whispers that would fill the locker room at the golf club.
Anna moved back into her parents’ house and gave birth to the twins in June. She named them Emma and Erica. Decades later Anna would be struck with massive bouts of guilt for denying her daughters any sort of relationship with their real father. She had remarried, of course, but not until the girls were old enough to realize that their stepfather wasn’t their biological father.
Eleven days after Cora had buried Rex, she received a letter in the mail from Anna asking if Emma and Erica could get to know their real father. And that’s where Cora got the idea. She knew that she would most likely deter Milton from becoming anything useful so she decided to write Anna back and work the guilt thing. She told Anna that Rex had recently been killed and that his nephew was now in need of family to look after him. Four days, two postmen, and three phone calls later it was settled. And Milton was packed off to yet another accident waiting to happen.
Just Some Black Clouds
Milton arrived at the St. Claire residence in the middle of an argument. The twins, Erica and Emma, were in front of the house screaming obscenities at each other while they hoisted .38s from time to time in threatening gestures. Anna was nowhere to been seen.
Anna’s second husband, Jack St. Claire, had given up on the three of them four years earlier, having met someone altogether younger and far more sexually capitulating. This left the housemaid, Uma, to deal with the girls. An ex-Soviet power lifter, Uma was not the kind of woman to permit such nonsense for very long. Years of steroid use had left her nerves in a very precarious state. Stressful situations caused her head to start twitching uncontrollably, leaving her no option but to wedge her skull between a door and a doorframe until it subsided. Uma feared the twitching more than death itself.
When she realized that the girls were outside with the pistols again she immediately got the house shotgun and fired a shot out one of the windows. This caused several things to occur. The first was to cause the girls to dramatically throw themselves to the ground, where they immediately began rolling about with their guns pointed every which way in search of the illusionary threat. The cab driver that had dropped Milton off decided it best to simply depart the residence at the highest possible speed available him, his fee no longer a concern. And Milton fainted. He would awaken minutes later to discover the twins standing over him, their guns still clutched in their hands. And, before fainting the second time, he heard one say to the other “you get his feet, I’ll get the device.�
It is commonly thought that identical twins tend to get along better than most siblings. There are even those that contend that they share a special telepathic bond, one being able to detect when something happens to the other. This was not the case with the St. Claire twins. Their only aim was to kill each other. They attended school for all of four days before being sent home for their behaviour. They physically attacked four different private tutors, injuring one so badly that she spent three months in hospital. Their crowning achievement, though, was the accidental shooting of the their gardener, Dale Sellers.
Emma had fired several shots at her sister while she had been diving behind a hedgerow. As fate would have it, Dale was also behind the hedgerow, trying to coax a wounded parrot from beneath it. The bullet took him in the forehead. Erica spent a year in a juvenile detention facility, while her sister received three months for her part in it. The girls had attempted to kill each other on seven other occasions.
Fortunately the St. Claire estate was large enough to offer a buffer between the insanity of its occupants and the outside world. The twins hadn’t left the grounds in over eleven years, having since moved out of the main house, taking up residences in diametrically opposed buildings on the property. Emma had turned the pool house into a fortress while Erica lived in the basement of the staff house (where she spent the majority of her time mixing volatile chemicals).
It was rare for the twins to work together on anything, so it came as a surprise to Uma when they wheeled Milton through the front door in a wheelchair that had been fitted with restraints. Erica had designed the chair to kill Emma. She had also built a runway from the top of the highest hill on the estate down to the duck pond. Her plan was to surprise her sister, knock her unconscious, strap her in the chair, wait until she came around, and then push her down the runway into the pond where she would drown.
Erica was pleased that she actually got to put one of her inventions to use. Emma just eyeballed the thing, frantically trying to figure a way to break out of it if ever she found herself strapped in. There was never a dull moment at the St. Claire’s. Sort of like there was never a dull at Stalingrad.
By the time Milton had regained consciousness Anna had returned from the city. The twins were nowhere to be found by then, as they rarely ventured near the large estate house when their mother was at home. Uma had carried the boy upstairs and put him in bed well before Anna’s return. Milton lay there looking up at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering what was to become of him. He counted the spaces between the shadows. There were 210,346 of them.
That night the twins did not sleep. They paced back and forth in their respective dwellings attempting to deduce the meaning behind the arrival of the little boy. And, in their own demented ways, they both came to the same conclusion. Each was convinced that their mother was in league with the other and that the boy had been brought in to replace them. Emma went immediately to her machine gun and fired several volleys into the corner of the staff house. Following this brief outburst Milton drifted off into what would be the last deep slumber of his life. And that night he dreamed of a land of baguette lovers occupied by barrette haters.
Ninny Hawks
In 1951 Colonel Albert St. Claire spent the majority of his time casually walking his estate. A full life of industrial strong-arming comfortably behind him, he favoured wandering the wooded bits of his property flushing out fowl with his dogs and blasting them from the sky. The colonel enjoyed it so much that, when proper game was out of season, he would pay top dollar to have a variety of domesticated birds released around the grounds so that he might continue to spend his days flushing and blasting. Many a cockatoo and parrot met their end in the sights of his shotgun.
Years later his granddaughter would spend her nights wondering from whom her daughters had inherited their instabilities. She had read the appropriate literature, conferred with the appropriate specialists, adopted and abandoned the appropriate religions, and even spent tens of thousands of dollars travelling to the Italian Alps to meet with one of the world’s foremost psychics. But try as she might she could never put a finger on it. Her twin daughters, whom she loved, detested each other. And one day their inability to successfully do away with one another would come to an end. What Anna did not know was that her grandfather was partially to blame.
In the summer of 1951 the butler at the St. Claires’ was a coloured man by the name of Albert Hawks. Albert hailed from Kentucky. He had come north in search of work as a small boy some thirty-four years earlier. And, since the day he left home, he had neither seen nor heard from any of his relations. Albert started at the St. Claire manor as a yard boy at the age of sixteen. By his thirty-fifth birthday he had become the estate’s butler. In his later years the colonel tended to trust Albert more than his oldest friends and even his own family. Albert did the firing and hiring of staff. Albert kept in phone contact with the lawyers and doctors and politicians. Albert kept up the colonel’s correspondence. When President Kennedy was assassinated, Albert attended the funeral for him.
Late one Saturday morning in the summer of 1951 the phone in the staff house kitchen started ringing. Albert Hawks was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and perusing a copy of Life magazine. He got up from his chair and answered the phone. And, to his great surprise, his youngest sister was on the other end. Her name was Ninny.
Ninny Hawks had, up until that week, been the victim of a very violent marriage. Her husband had done time for a variety of crimes during their twelve years together. He had returned home from a three-year term five days earlier and had taken up where he had left off. This meant that he slept all day and beat his wife when he was sober enough to keep his balance. Having just spent the better part of two years alone, Ninny came to the conclusion that enough was enough. She planted an axe between his eyes when he was asleep, packed a suitcase, and walked out of town in the middle of the night. Five days later she arrived in Boston and called the only number that she had for her brother. Albert had sent it in a letter when their mother passed away. He had not been able to attend the funeral and sent a letter to his siblings and aunt in his stead.
Ninny had kept the letter, realizing that she might one day need some way of contacting Albert in the event that the family ever attempted to get together for a reunion or whatnot. As it turned out her reunion with her older brother was not a joyous one. Albert was not pleased with the circumstances surrounding Ninny’s arrival. It was one thing to show up unannounced on his doorstep, it was something altogether different to show up with a murder rap.
The first thing that Albert did was put Ninny in his bedroom so that no one would see her. He then went directly to the colonel’s study to have a conversation about what to do with her. Despite what most might have thought, the colonel and Albert were the closest of friends. This would explain why Albert looked after the colonel as he did right up until his death.
Albert walked from the staff house to the main house and found the colonel in his study, reading. The two had a brief conversation that was followed by a minute of violent screaming. Albert then left the study, walked back to the staff house, gathered up his sister and her things, put on a coat, and led her out into the woods. To this day, Ninny has no clue what was said between her brother and the colonel. But whatever it was, it ended up with her living in a filthy cabin in the backwoods of Massachusetts.
And, since the 12th of July 1951, Ninny Hawks had not left the St. Claire estate. Even when Albert died she did not venture from the small, self-imposed confines of her time-warped condition. Albert always told her that the colonel strictly forbade it. For all of the 1960s she did not venture further than a half mile from her shack. She kept chickens and goats, a garden, and she fished. And during all that time she went, for lack of a more grandiose term, completely mad. Ninny would inadvertently turn the twins against each another when they were very little.
One evening, during a violent storm, Ninny lost her footing on some rocks and fell off of an overhang into a creek. She landed on her right leg, puncturing her thigh. Realizing how serious the wound was, she decided to do what was for her the unthinkable. The next night she would make her way to the estate house and find something to help prevent infection. It was easy enough, seeing as the doors on the estate were never locked. Once she made it to the house, she simply entered and went about looking for some alcohol or antiseptic. Luckily, in one of the ground floor washrooms, she came across some peroxide. It was during that visit that Ninny met the twins. Erica and Emma caught her red-handed as she limped down the hall between the main foyer and the kitchen.
Ninny, realizing that the girls could quite easily tell their parents about her, decided to do the only thing that she could think of. She sat the girls down in the kitchen and told them this story. It went a little something like this…
A real long time ago there was this little girl that lived in the country. One day, when the girl was walking through the forest, she came upon a small little fella standing on a rock. The little fella didn’t say nothing. So the little girl picked up a stick and gave him a little poke. Still the little fella didn’t say nothing. So she poked him some more. Finally, after a whole heap of poking, the little fella put his hands on his hips and said “Now little girl! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking at a little fella such as me?�
The little girl just stood there and didn’t say a thing. So the little fella jumped off the rock and climbed up into a nearby tree. The little girl thought that he looked real funny up in that tree and she started laughing at him. The little fella inched his way out onto one of the big, overhanging branches until he was right over the little girl, and then jumped off the branch and landed on the little girl’s head. The little girl wasn’t laughing anymore. The little fella went back to his rock and stood on it as he had been before. The little girl’s body eventually rotted away, though some of it was eaten by a fox that came by.
The weeks went by and the little girl’s parents were beginning to think that they were never going to see her again. Her pap thought it best to go wandering in the woods to see if he could find her. So he went into the woods and started calling her name while he searched around. But no matter his calling, the little girl never answered.
One day, while he was wandering, he came across the little fella standing on the rock. And, like before, the little fella didn’t say anything. So the man picked up a stick and gave the little fella a poke. Still, the little fella didn’t move from his rock. Hours went by and then the little fella finally put his hands on his hips and said “Now sir! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking a little fella such as me?�
The man just stood there shrugging his shoulders. So the little fella got off his rock and climbed up the tree. The man thought the little fella looked funny, and he started to laugh. When the little fella got up onto the branch he crept out on it until he was right over the man’s head. And then, while the man was pointing up at him laughing, the little fella jumped on his head and knocked him to the ground. Eventually, his body rotted away just like his daughter’s had.
Months went by and the mother of the little girl was beginning to think that she would never see her daughter or her husband ever again. So one night, in a fit, she went running out into the woods and came across a little fella standing on top of a giant diamond.
She said, “My, that’s a very pretty diamond you have!�
And the little fella jumped down, took off his little cap, wiped his brow with his sleeve, and said, “Ma’am, you’re the first person that ever realized I was standing on a diamond.�
And at that wondrous point in the telling, Ninny produced a very large piece of glass from her handbag and slammed it down on the table. And from that moment on both Emma and Erica St. Claire considered Ninny Hawks to be the greatest person they had ever met.
Two Little Rich Girls in a Pot of Stew. Add a Dash of Garlic, Cook Em ’Till They’re Through.
The twins viewed their mother as a figure constantly in transit. Occasionally she might dare to put on the mask of motherhood for a while, but for the most part she spent her days in Boston playing bridge and drinking a considerable amount of gin. Their stepfather, to be fair, was even more of a shadow than their mother. He commonly deemed it necessary to personally oversee the completion of whatever project his company was involved in at the time. Of course such things invariably meant travelling to distant parts of the world for extended periods of time. Being as young as they were it seemed to them as if their stepfather was merely a voice that came floating out of a telephone receiver. Surely all fathers were the same, they thought. Perhaps all fathers lived in a far-off land. And there was only one phone in this land. Surely, had his phone time not been limited by the fact that all those other fathers had to call their daughters as well, he would have called more often. But to their credit, the twins dwelled on the absence of their parents for only a brief time in their early childhood. The truth of the matter was that they were far too intelligent to give much thought to it once they realized that their parents were worse off than themselves.
The girls read the paper and watched the news. They realized how well-off their family was. And they also realized that their parents only had themselves to blame for their lives. So it seemed to them that there were better things to do than lament over the absence of love and support. Such as tracking down old ladies that surely dwelt somewhere on the vastness of their estate.
The twins set about finding Ninny in the most expedient way possible. Tapping into the psychosis that would eventually engulf them, they got theYellow Pages, thumbed through it until they found what they were looking for, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. A rented helicopter arrived at noon the next day.
Discovering Ninny’s location was simple after that. Being that it was winter they had the pilot hover high enough to allow Erica to survey the entire estate with a pair of binoculars. All she needed to do was search for signs of chimney smoke. They had the pilot fly to the area where Ninny’s shack stood and made sure to note the location on a map. They then had him turn back and return to the house.
You might think this unlikely of girls so young but I assure you that it did occur. Some of you might think that no one in their right mind would rent a helicopter to two young girls. A free-flowing multitude of one-hundred-dollar bills can have that effect on a financially ailing helicopter-rental company though. And, despite the fact that they were preschoolers, they were astoundingly smart for their age. Imagine being confronted by two small girls with fists full of hundreds trying to explain to you that they’re looking at various options for a landscaping endeavour that they wish to surprise their parents with for their anniversary. After five minutes of standing there completely stunned I just took the money and kept my mouth shut.
The following morning Erica and Emma set out from the house in search of Ninny’s hideout. Having packed the provisions and equipment they considered necessary for the journey, they marched through the rear gardens, past the greenhouses, and into the park. The St. Claire estate was, for the most part, littered with stands of trees separated by small clearings, ponds, and creeks that spread out across a small range of hills. The further one went from the gardens and polo park, the rougher the terrain became. Having underestimated how difficult it would actually become, the twins found themselves faced with a variety of ravines and other impassible terrain that they were forced to circumnavigate. This took time of course. Time that, under such circumstances, slipped by quite unnoticed.
Having walked deep into the wilds of their property, the girls paid little attention to the fact that the afternoon had turned into evening. Things under the spreading trees were clouded by an encroaching darkness that is legendary in the forest. One minute the sun is shining and the next it isn’t. An hour after sunset the girls were pushing through underbrush in the dark, unable to see more than five feet in front of them. And it was then that the unthinkable occurred.
Having taken the lead most of the day, Emma had started to cut corners when it came to paying attention to things such as dips in the ground and branches that lashed back to hit her sister. The further they went the more careless and annoyed she became. They were little girls, mind you, which meant that smallish holes were, in fact, medium-sized holes and so on. It also meant that they were somewhat frightened. Geniuses or not, they were still children. It also meant that they spent most of the latter portion of their expedition arguing. About things like who had finished the cream soda or who had allegedly read the map incorrectly. When Emma fell off the cliff the two of them were going on about who was to blame for this adventure.
Ninny Hawks had been following the girls for about an hour when Emma fell off the cliff. Despite the fact that Ninny knew they were approaching the cliff, for it was there that she had fallen and hurt herself only weeks before, she did nothing to alert the girls to the danger. She had doubled back behind them in an attempt to ford the river at a shallow point and then watch them as they argued about how they were going to get across.
Ninny thought quite highly of the twins at first. She was impressed that they did not turn back at the first sign of adversity, nor when the sun went down. They pushed relentlessly forward, which is what made Ninny change her mind about them. In the beginning she thought it sweet that the girls were trying to find her. But it is not like rich little girls to go to such extremes as this. Rich little girls give up after several hours of being lashed in the face by pine boughs, they do not wander further into the woods with night setting in. This made Ninny think that they were up to something. At that moment she decided that the girls must never find her or her house.
Emma fell off the cliff and down into the icy waters of the creek below. She landed flat on her back which, due to her small stature, probably saved her life. Had she gone in head first she would have hit the creek bed and split her head wide open. Had she gone in feet first she would have easily broken both legs. Thankfully she weighed so little that landing on her back, though painful, allowed the shallow water to break her fall.
She cried out in pain, which terrified Erica to no end. Having heard but not seen her sister plummet in the blackness before her, she stood clinging to a tree trunk, paralyzed with fear. Emma, on the other hand, once her crying abated, sobered up to the reality of the situation. It was extremely dark and extremely cold. And, to top it off, her attempts to coax her sister into looking for a way down to her were futile. Erica refused to move. The two talked for a while until Erica was cut off abruptly in mid-sentence. That was all she remembered. After screaming her sister’s name in terror for four or five minutes Erica was hit on the head from behind as well.
When the twins regained consciousness they were lying on a wet mattress facing each other, their hands and feet bound with gardening string. The room that held them was faintly lit by a candle and the mattress smelled as if it had been soaked in gasoline. Ninny Hawks was nowhere to be seen, though the girls could hear something or someone moving around in an adjacent area. Their first order of business was to begin wailing terribly, which they did for some time. Following the outburst Emma decided the best thing for them would be to attempt an escape, though she could offer no plan as to how it should be done. They deliberated on into the night or the morning, neither could be sure.
At long last, as the girls were about to admit to each other that, despite their formidable brains, neither could come up with any realistic escape method, Ninny emerged through a rickety door and walked over to them. Too terrified to say anything, they lay there watching her. After standing over them, moving her eyes from one to the other, Ninny reached down, grabbed them by the feet, and dragged them across the floor. The twins started to scream. Ninny stopped dragging them and began kicking them in the back. The twins screamed even louder.
Ninny returned to dragging them across the floor and up a small dirt tunnel into another room. Once inside the room Ninny dragged the girls towards a large pit that was situated in the centre of the room. The pit was about ten feet from side to side and seven or eight feet deep. It smelled of offal and teemed with flies. Loosening the bonds on their legs, she kicked the girls several more times to subdue them and then tipped them into the pit. The girls fell in tandem, Erica landing squarely on her sister.
The pit was filled with the remains of various animals in varying states of decomposition and what smelled like human waste. Having screamed themselves hoarse, the twins struggled to free their legs and then worked together to loosen their hands. This was easier said than done, as Emma had broken several ribs during the fall and was having difficulty breathing. The girls lay there clinging to each other, their voices spent, tears streaming down their faces. And then, as if the situation couldn’t be made any worse, the lights went out.
A Fraction of an Inch Either Way.
Ten hours would pass before Uma thought to trouble Mrs. St. Claire with the news that her daughters were nowhere to be found. Having tied one on the night before, Anna dismissed the intrusion with a wave of her hand, adjusted her night mask, and went back to bed. Her instructions on the matter were clear. “They’ll turn up,� she said.
By nine that night Anna was a nervous wreck, the police had been summoned, and Uma had been fired and rehired a half dozen times. The police were convinced that the twins had fallen prey to kidnappers and were most likely miles away, locked in the trunk of a car. They spared Anna this theory, of course, thinking it best to feed her false hope by convincing her that the girls were just hiding.
The local police did not think to search the St. Claire estate for the twins, nor did they inform other law-enforcement agencies concerning the possibility that the St. Claire girls had been abducted. Instead they sat around waiting for the inevitable phone call that would confirm their theory. But no ransom call would come.
Within walking distance of the twins’ location, the police spent the better part of a week trying to piece together what had become of the girls. It wasn’t until a junior officer dropped a chocolate bar behind a desk in the foyer that they turned up the receipt for the helicopter rental. Later that day the police came to question me and I returned to the St. Claire estate with my helicopter to show them what I had done with the twins.
You’d think that the police would have been suspicious of chimney smoke rising from the woods off in the distance but it really didn’t occur to them that it was out of the ordinary. Another four days would pass before a detective, quite harmlessly, mentioned to Anna that he admired the estate and inquired why the guest house was located so far from the main house, referring to the chimney smoke he’d seen from my chopper. Anna perked up at this of course, telling him immediately that the only other lodging on the property, besides those located within plain view of the estate house, was the stable house.
This confused the detective, who did his best to match up the location of the stable house with the smoke he had seen rising from the woods off in the distance. Anna gave it little thought as well, automatically thinking the man to be one of those Better-Homes-and-Gardens types that loves to find cheap ways to make their paltry suburban houses look majestic.
I won’t bore you with the arduous details concerning the eventual realization that there was something odd about that smoke. I won’t bother telling you about how they spent the whole night and most of the next morning searching the property in grids. But I will tell you that, when they finally did discover Ninny’s shack and kicked in the door, Ninny was dead.
They found her lying on the floor with a fire poker stuck in her stomach. The girls, on the other hand, were discovered at the end of the earthen tunnel that Ninny had burrowed out over three decades of delusion. They found Erica first, crouched up in a ball at the edge of the pit, covered in blood, gripping a large piece of glass. Emma, who had been run through by the fire poker as well, was lying comatose in the pit, barely alive. Thankfully my helicopter was at hand and the police had me fly her to the hospital. Another half hour and she wouldn’t have lived.
The days and weeks that followed teemed with innuendo and scandal. Firmly in the hot seat, Anna was badgered by the media day and night about Ninny Hawks and how something of that nature could occur right under her nose. Anna’s only option given the circumstances was to drink, sleep all day, and try to forget that her life had turned into a nightmare. The sheer bizarreness of the situation could be easily encapsulated by the fact that Anna’s husband, having been contacted and presented with the details, chose not to come home.
In the months following the ordeal the girls were seen by a variety of psychologists in an attempt to help them deal with what had happened. Neither had talked about it though. Nor would they ever.
Once the twins returned home from the hospital the bizarre hatred that now exists between them was glaringly evident. And it was then that the murder attempts began. The first such attempt came when Erica tried to stab Emma with a kitchen knife during breakfast, right in front of their parents. Her stepfather was forced to wrestle her to the floor, as Emma rushed over and immediately started kicking her in the head. It’s been like that ever since.
And So—The War.
Milton awoke to unfamiliar surroundings. Having been at the St. Claires’ for only two weeks he was still not used to the place. Replacing the smell of wet hay was the harsh, headache smell of lemon Pledge. And every morning, as he drew air in through his nose, it reminded him that he had been packed off to this place to avoid complication. He was beginning to wonder what exactly the complication was. Him? Or everyone else?
And during those first fourteen days at the estate he had not encountered either of the girls that had set upon him on the front drive. He had spent time exchanging pleasantries with Anna and Uma, but his only formal introduction to the twins came in the small hours of the morning when they exchanged heavy weapons fire and insults at the top of their lungs. No one ever brought it up though, so Milton never bothered to ask. To Milton the only advantage to being at the St. Claires’ was the many books that the colonel had been wise enough to collect during his life. His library was extensive. Having spent the majority of his veraciously available reading years living in a barn with a stunt man and the wife of a stunt man, he viewed the St. Claire library as ancient scholars must have the great library of Alexandria.
On the fourteenth day of Milton’s habitation there came a knock at the front door that went unanswered. Having been left to fend for himself that day, as Uma had gone into Boston with Anna, Milton had forgotten that there was no one else to answer it. An hour passed before Milton, who was reading in the library, realized that there had been no answer to the knocking. Curious about who it was, he put his book down and started to walk across the room towards the main foyer. As he was walking something caught his eye through the large rear library windows. Walking over to investigate, Milton found himself staring at the most bizarre sight of his young life.
There was a man in a suit dangling over the swimming pool, his arms and legs attached to ropes that had been tied between the pool-house balcony and an upper window of the staff house. The man, who struck Milton as being rather calm, was facing the water, his head moving about in an attempt to survey his bonds. The twins, who had obviously subdued the poor old man, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the pool, both simultaneously slotting 9-mm bullets into handgun clips. Why they had worked together to dangle a stranger above the swimming pool was anyone’s guess. Since Milton was not the confrontational sort, he could think of nothing better to do than simply watch. Thankfully the old man had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do. He would melt the guns with his mind and then implore the boy at the window to cut the ropes.
The Incredible Dr. Chalky
It all started in a chair. Ernie Chalky was sitting in the larger of his two living-room chairs flipping through a National Geographic when the phone rang. It was not as if he commonly received calls about ceramic dogs that had allegedly attacked and killed human beings. Over the years Ernie had discovered that the clergy, compared to most, almost always tended to blow things out of proportion. So when he found himself talking to a frantic priest he really thought little of it. The fact that the priest was attacked and consumed by a ceramic dog mid-sentence had nothing to do with his inability to take the priest seriously. Granted, once Ernie heard the receiver hit the floor and the priest’s screams echo off into the bare-walled corners of the room, he realized there was a good chance that the priest was on the level (and, more than likely, in a basement). It wasn’t until the dog picked up the phone and started talking that Ernie knew he was dealing with a very serious situation. Because it is, in the opinion of most, quite odd for ceramic dogs to be able to speak perfect Latin.
For someone in Ernie’s profession it is not uncommon to come across inanimate objects that possess the ability to move about of their own free will and speak a variety of languages. For example, four years earlier Ernie had spent the better part of three months tracking a Portuguese-speaking flaming sword all over northern Madagascar. He prevailed, of course, but it was not without anguish. It had been appearing out of thin air and hacking unsuspecting villagers to pieces. You may think it trivial, but it is actually quite difficult to catch something that pops in and out of a standardized molecular constitution. But who are you to call when such abnormalities abound? Ghostbusters was just a movie.
Ernie was just a boy when Captain Chalky found him in a ditch in the dead of winter. England was a different place then, having survived German bombs and rockets. Perhaps that’s why Ernie’s parents decided to leave it. His mother was an Essex girl, but moved to Wales after his father was unable to find work in London. His father was a Welshman, as was Ernie. His mother, being that she was entirely English, didn’t think much of the Welsh. Perhaps that’s why she left Wales and returned to England when Ernie was seven years old. After all, it was filled not only with Welshmen but Ernie’s father, who was, to his great discredit in her eyes, as Welsh as one could be. Ernie ended up staying with his father. Perhaps she simply forgot him in her haste to leave. Perhaps, realizing that she had, she paused some distance away and considered going back for him. In doing so, she realized that she might wake her husband and thought better of it. So Ernie’s mother left him and his father in the dead of night and went back to England with his unborn brother Andrew as passenger. Ernie has never met Andrew. He hadn’t really met his mother either.
Ernie’s father was not what you would call an intelligent man. His father was a coal miner. The life of a miner is one filled with nightmares of suffocation and collapse. Maybe that is why a great many of them drink as they do. To see if they can destroy their livers before they succumb to the inevitability of black lung. Ernie’s father would die from a combination of the two. So Ernie found himself in the care of Father Michael O’Reilly at the Boys School of Holy Seclusion. And during his time there Father Michael repeatedly attempted to convince Ernie that Jesus was ever-present, if only he looked hard enough. But try as he might, Ernie would always come to the same conclusion: the Almighty’s picture was everywhere, but He was nowhere to be found.
Five months after his arrival at Holy Seclusion, Ernie came to the realization that his life would be doomed if he were to remain for long. Ernie, not unlike his mother, left Wales in the middle of the night and travelled to England. He would get no further than Lydney before the horrific reality of his actions would set in. He would spend that night in an abandoned barn and would awaken the next morning to find that his toes had turned completely purple. He would then hobble as far as he could in an effort to find help. He made it as far as the roadway. And that’s where Captain Chalky discovered him.
Doctor Captain Finnegan Chalky was a Cambridge man. He was also an ordained Anglican minister and a highly decorated RAF fighter pilot. These three things had very little to do with one another, and he would later tell Ernie that each was a foolish pursuit of three goals: 1) knowledge 2) presumed access to the afterlife 3) a vehicle in which to test the boundaries between being smart enough to know better and ignorant enough not to. To the best of Ernie’s knowledge Captain Chalky didn’t hold a Ph.D in anything except himself, despite the fact that he could speak four languages and knew the answer to every question that Ernie ever put to him. He was, in Ernie’s eyes, someone that one would consider to be the perfect representation of a human being. Well, up until the point when he told Ernie that he could bend metal with his mind anyway.
He could melt the fenders of cars, turn doorknobs, open locks, and so on. The first time Ernie ever witnessed it Captain Chalky was attempting to loose some earth under a fence with a hoe. He couldn’t get the hoe far enough under the fence so he simply bent the end of it and slid it under. For days Ernie could not believe what he saw. Captain Chalky could in fact bend metal with his mind. And Ernie, as his student, would receive the secret of this gift before the captain’s passing.
Ernie lived with Captain Chalky in a variety of places up until his death in 1976. Known in various circles in Europe as paranormal superstars, they were employed by a wide variety of organizations that included such celebrity members as the Pope, the Prince of Monaco, and Salvador Dali. When Captain Chalky died, Ernie decided to carry on their work by himself. He packed and moved to Mexico, where he purchased a large estate near San Carlos on the Baja. From there Dr. Ernie Chalky would conduct the business of dealing with those things that no one else would believe possible.
Ernie Chalky, hot on the trail of a Latin-speaking ceramic dog, has tracked the beast through Central America, up the west coast of the States, and then east to New England. Two days before arriving at the St. Claires’ front door he had learned that the dog was camped out on their property. He was oblivious to the added danger of the insane twins that had full run of the grounds. Before he knew it he found himself dangling above a swimming pool, having been hit on the head and knocked unconscious. And, to make matters worse, there was a demonically possessed ceramic dog somewhere in the area that was out for blood.
Good movies…
Having finished loading before her sister, Erica attempted to move towards a nearby retaining wall for cover. But something wouldn’t allow her to. Instead she found the weight of the gun change, as if she was no longer burdened by it. She then felt the gun raise her arm, coming to rest in line with her sister’s head. And then, without her finger being on the trigger, the gun went off. As if in slowmotion, as all horrific things in this world tend to happen, the shot took Emma in the forehead, ripping her head apart.
What had begun as a promising day had turned suddenly sour. The arrival of the old man had provided the twins with a welcome distraction. As intrusions tended to, their fantastic hatred for one another abated long enough for them to subdue the stranger and dangle him above the pool. Then it was back to business. But how this could have happened was beyond Erica. She stood there wobbling, the gun falling from her hand to the pool deck. Her eyes, as if out of focus, searched for some explanation, forcing her head from side to side in a druglike trance. And then she fainted and fell into the pool.
Milton was in shock. His eyes refused to leave the expanding pool of blood on the pool deck. Somewhere in the background he could faintly hear a man’s voice yelling, but it failed to register. The contents of Emma’s head took a slippery ride from her skull onto the concrete and tiles, filling a nearby pool-filter cap. Milton vomited. Which was, of course, a step up from passing out.
Ernie Chalky stopped yelling. There was no point. He would have to wait there until the boy came to his senses and realized that he was in need of assistance. He hung there casually counting the air bubbles that rose to the surface of the water, after having crept out of Erica’s lungs. Almost an hour would pass before the little boy from inside the house would emerge. But unfortunately for Ernie Chalky it was not to aid in his escape.
…end badly.
Milton woke to find himself lying next to a swimming pool. Which was strange since the last place he remembered being was in his bed at home in the loft of a barn. Being that he was a genius, he was quick to come to the realization that he was not dreaming. He was nauseous, though nowhere as profoundly as he would become after pulling himself up to survey his surroundings. In doing so he would discover three bodies. One of an old man hanging above the pool, blood cascading from his body into the water below. A drowned mermaid. And a third on the far side of the pool deck with no head.
After a considerable amount of time, Milton got up, walked the length of the pool, and slumped into a sun chair, where he hopelessly began trying to piece together what had befallen him. He could feel the sun against his face and arms. Despite the gruesome display before him, he felt somehow assured that he had played no part in it. Sitting there he began to laugh. Sitting there, laughing in that sun chair, his eyes came upon the strangest thing.
From the pool-house door there came a dogged little fella carrying an enormous burden. A giant sack slung over his shoulder, the little fella wobbled his way as far as the sun chairs before stopping to take a rest. Removing his tiny cap, he wiped his brow and looked around as if determining which direction to go.
Then he looked up at Milton.
And being that Milton was at a loss for words he could think of nothing better to say than “What’s in the sack?�
Replacing his cap on his tiny little head, the little fella lifted the sack and slung it back over his shoulder. Standing there wobbling, he replied
“Funny you should ask.�
December 1, 2002 