Nightmare Child Read online

  NIGHTMARE CHILD

  By Ed Gorman

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Ed Gorman

  Copy-Edited by David Dodd– Cover Design by David Dodd

  Parts of cover image courtesy of: Noel Taylor

  http://samurai-b.deviantart.com/

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  Cast in Dark Waters

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  For Charles Spicer

  The Nighmare Child

  Deep into the steamy August afternoon they drove, Jeff with his allergies, Mindy with her menstrual cramps.

  The little girl was not fortunate enough to be up front with the BMW's air conditioning blowing and festive rock music playing on the tape deck. No, nine-year-old Jenny lay inside a four-foot wooden box in the trunk. She had been blindfolded, her mouth taped shut, and her wrists bound together with clothesline cord. Inside the box it was dark. Inside the box it was one hundred six degrees above zero.

  "You think we should check her?"

  "Jeff, will you relax?"

  "She could've worked her way loose or something."

  "And then what? She's in the trunk, for God's sake. Where's she going to go?"

  By now the red BMW was climbing up into the steep clay cliffs and rough timberland above Silver Lake. Tourists were everywhere, plump in gaudy vacation clothes as they broiled in the sun along the side of the road, bug-eyed in dark glasses, packed into the station wagons and campers that zipped by in the opposite lane.

  Jeff was careful to drive fifty-five.

  Please, God don't let me get stopped for anything now. Not now.

  "I should never have started that diet yesterday," Mindy said. "Not with my period and all. But, I guess, I needed to."

  "Oh, honey, you know I like you fine the way you are."

  "Dr. Goldberg said I needed to lose twenty-five pounds."

  "Did you ever see Dr. Goldberg's wife?"

  "No. Have you?"

  Jeff nodded. Blond, he was one of those handsome men who would appear boyish well into his fifties. He was thirty-seven. "A blimp."

  "His wife's a blimp?"

  "Absolutely."

  Dark, fat Mindy slapped the dashboard. "Then where does he get off telling me I need to lose twenty-five pounds?"

  "That's what I'm trying to tell you. He wants to tell his own wife that she needs to lose twenty-five pounds but he doesn't have the nerve, so he takes it out on you."

  "Oh Jeff, thanks. I really needed to hear that. I've had only seven hundred calories since yesterday. Now I can eat."

  "Eating sensibly. That's the key, Mindy. Eating sensibly."

  After another quarter-mile, Mindy said, "Do you suppose we could hit a DQ? There's one about a mile outside the park. I wouldn't get a big one. Just a dinky one. A real dinky one." Mindy always called Dairy Queen "DQ," and whenever she used the word "dinky" she illustrated it by putting her right forefinger and thumb about a tenth of an inch apart to show that "dinky" meant nearly infinitesimal. "Huh? Could we?"

  "Sure," Jeff said. "Why not? A dinky one wouldn't hurt anything."

  In the sunlight, the white DQ was blinding. Kids with stuff all over their faces tugged tirelessly on the tired arms of parents, wanting permission to pee or play or get another cone.

  As Jeff aimed the BMW into a parking place, Mindy said, "Did you really see Dr. Goldberg's wife?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "At the supermarket one day."

  "How did you know it was her?"

  "She was with him."

  "You don't have to lie to spare my feelings."

  "Now, honey."

  "Really. You don't. If you think I'm fat just say so and I'll go right back on that diet."

  "Honey. Please."

  "Really. I will."

  "You're not fat. And I love you."

  "And you really did see Dr. Goldberg's wife?"

  "And she was a blimp?"

  "Huge."

  She smiled. Made her "dinky" thumb-and-forefinger sign again. This "dinky" was slightly bigger than the last "dinky" she'd flashed. "Could I get a…well…not a big one, but not a small one, either?"

  "Something in the middle?"

  "Yes. That's right. In the middle." She kept her "dinky" sign up in the air.

  As he got out of the car, Jeff wondered if he should have made up that lie about seeing Dr. Goldberg's wife. It was just giving Mindy permission to keep on gorging herself and she was getting so fat he could barely stand to look at her.

  Dusk was purple. The windshield was fretted with the dead, black nubby bodies of mosquitoes. The air conditioning was almost cold now. Mindy, her head back against the seat rest, her mouth wide open, snored. She'd put a sweater across her knees.

  Jeff drove through the dusk, glad for sight of occasional yellow headlights. With Mindy asleep, he felt isolated and afraid. All he could think of was Jenny in the trunk and what they were about to do.

  While he couldn't actually say he loved Mindy's little sister, he certainly liked her. She was polite, obedient, and pretty. (He'd always felt uncomfortable acknowledging Jenny's good looks because she was so young, but, dammit, she was attractive and there was nothing wrong in admitting it.) Unfortunately, she was also the only person who stood between them and two million dollars, Jenny's inheritance. Mindy and Jeff had already squandered their part of the inheritance and now needed more. Lots more.

  Getting her in the box had been no problem. Earlier that day he'd taken two Benadryl, an over-the-counter allergy medicine, and told her to take them too. Within fifteen minutes she was asleep. Within ten minutes she was in the box.

  He hit his brights as he angled the BMW up a gravel road to the fishing cabin. Dusk in the forest was dark as night. Stars burned beyond a gray spectral haze.

  Reaching the crest of the hill, Jeff gazed down at the ragged terrain of buffalo grass and scrub pines that was to be Jenny's final resting place.

  He pulled the car off the road, yanked on the emergency brake, and turned off the ignition.

  Mindy came awake immediately.

  "God, what time is it?" she said, stretching as if she were in her own bed and this was some fine lazy yellow morning.

  "Nearly nine."

  "We here?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "You don't sound too good."

  "Uh-huh. You know."

  She leaned over and kissed him with breath that could crack plaster. "Hon, by midnight we'll be back home. You can play that new video tape you got. The one with Candy Dane."

  "How'd you know about that?"

  "Well, I was cleaning your desk in the den and I just happened to find it."

  "I thought we had an understanding about my desk."

  "Hon, don't get cranky just because you're all plugged up with your allergies. Anyway, I don't mind if you have tapes like that. There's nothing wrong with masturbation. I do it, too. I just don't need videotapes to help me."

  He knew h
e was blushing. He sat there and smelled the heat of the day dying and heard the nighttime crickets and gazed up at the lemon slice of quarter-moon and wondered just what it all meant anyway.

  How did a former altar boy, Boy Scout, and Young Republican ever come to be sitting in a car in which his overweight wife told him masturbation was all right, while in the trunk a little girl waited to die?

  How, exactly, did you get here, anyway?

  "We'll have some smoked salmon."

  "Huh?" Jeff said.

  "You weren't paying attention."

  "Sorry."

  Sorry.

  "I said we'll have smoked salmon."

  "When?"

  "Tonight. When we're home. We'll have smoked salmon and then we can watch that Candy Dane tape."

  "Together?"

  "Sure." She giggled. "Maybe it'll give me some new ideas."

  He slumped in the seat. It was as if a giant invisible wrecking ball had just crashed into his stomach. "I can't do it."

  "What?"

  "I can't go through with it."

  "Hon, you're not thinking very straight."

  "I'm not?"

  "Hon, she's probably already dead."

  "Oh, my God."

  "You mean you didn't understand that?"

  "No."

  "Well, I didn't want to say anything in case you didn't understand that. But I'd bet you a hundred dollars that she's already…well, you know."

  "My God."

  And with that, he flung open the BMW door, leaped into the night, ran around to the trunk of the car, inserted his key, snapped up the lid, and peered inside with the help of the flashlight he'd brought along.

  The wooden box had never looked more like a coffin. Cheap pine, unpainted. He opened the lock with such force that he cut his finger. Throwing back the lid, he shined the light inside.

  She lay as he recalled, bound, gagged, blinded in her virginal white blouse, her loose jeans, her white anklets, and her new blue Reebok hightops. Blond and slender, she was the daughter every man wanted to have and so few would ever know.

  Staring at her now, at her frail, unmoving chest and her tiny pale hands, he could hear her on another gentle Summer night, creaking in her rocker with her doll held tenderly to her beautiful cheeks, a sweet lullaby coming from her perfect pink lips.

  "No!" he shouted.

  And began undoing all the restraints Mindy had put on her during the day.

  Off came the blindfold.

  Off came the gag in her mouth.

  Off came the cords wrapped around her wrists and legs.

  He was just lifting her from the box when Mindy, coming around the car, said, "Oh, God, Jeff. I really didn't want to have to see her again. I really didn't. It's just going to make it all the harder. For both of us."

  He sat on the ground, Jenny in his arms, as if she weighed no more than an infant. He rocked her gently as he kissed her face and spoke soft, insistent, meaningless words to her.

  Finally Mindy sat plumply down next to him and put a soft hand gently on his shoulder and said, "Hon, I'm sorry but she's dead. She suffocated."

  But far into the night, he rocked the little girl and sang to her, there in the buffalo grass with the crickets, which were later joined by barn owls and Savannah sparrows in crying tribute to the warm, starry night.

  Finally, the little girl began to smell and Mindy, quieter than he had ever seen her, took Jenny from Jeff's arms and put her back in the box.

  "We'd better get it over with," she said.

  Nodding, numb, Jeff took a brand-new shovel from the trunk and followed Mindy down the hill.

  They buried her where they planned to bury her, beneath a stand of heavy scrub pine where nobody would find her for a long time. The grave was four feet deep.

  Jeff, exhausted, sat in the car running the air conditioning. He didn't care if he later got a chest cold. He needed relief and now. The digging had been incredibly exhausting.

  In the shadow-light of quarter-moon, he saw the lumpen silhouette of his wife as she stood near the grave site. She was talking. To herself or to Jenny, he wasn't certain.

  When she came back, she got in the car and quietly shut the door.

  "You all right?" he said.

  She said nothing.

  "Honey," he said. She had taken care of him. Now it was his turn to take care of her.

  "Please," she said. "Drive."

  Forty-five minutes later they came to the DQ again. It was an oasis of light against the prairie night.

  "You want a DQ?" he said.

  "No, thanks."

  "A nice big one?"

  "No, thanks."

  "A Buster Bar, then?"

  "No, thanks. I don't want to look like Dr. Goldberg's wife," she said.

  And then she started crying.

  He had never heard her sob this way. She sobbed all the way back home. Once, he put his hand on her, hoping to stop her. But she pushed it gently away. Another time, he started saying "honey" there in the roaring highway darkness sweet with the smell of corn and grass and alfalfa, but that did no good, either.

  She spoke only once. She said, "She was my little sister."

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  Today Mr. Culhane had a new diamond ring. In case you failed to note this fact, Mr. Culhane made it easy for you by rolling his pinkie finger back and forth and examining the ring the way a jeweler might.

  Of course, if you did remark on it (and, by God, you'd better), he'd play coy and say, "Oh, it's nothing much. Just something my old football team gave me at the University Club last week when Hank…er…I mean the vice-president was in the city."

  This disclaimer conveyed three important pieces of in-formation: 1) the "nothing much" told you that Mr. Culhane, though a millionaire many times over, still thought of himself as a self-effacing man of the people; 2) the "old football team" told you all over again that Mr. Culhane had been the star running back of the 1939 team at the U, the one that had gone to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, and to the record books forever; 3) the "vice-president was in town" told you that Mr. Culhane knew the vice-president of the United States well enough to call him Hank…er…V. P..

  He was fat, pink, bald, usually dressed in a black pin-striped suit that only a Mafioso could love, and an indefatigable user of Binaca breath spray. He was also two other things: 1) the Foster Dawson Agency's largest account; and 2) Jeff McCay's wife's uncle, which, in some people's cynical minds, came to explain how a mediocre account executive like Jeff McCay came to handle the Reddy Teddy Dog Food account, Reddy Teddy being the four-decades-old drawing of a cocker spaniel that appeared on every can of RT food and every RT TV commercial.

  "Gosh, that's a great ring."

  "Oh, it's nothing much."

  "Nothing much? Hey," Jeff said, "as if I didn't know the circumstances surrounding it. You guys hear about the dinner at the University Club last week?"

  In the formal conference room, replete with Eames chairs, a mahogany table as long as a basketball court, and Impressionist paintings by a nineteenth-century French artist whose name no one could pronounce--three men shook their heads.

  "God, Mr. Culhane, you didn't get another award, did you?" Ken Miner said.

  "How many does that make this year? Twenty? Thirty?" Bob Conroy wanted to know.

  "Is it another one from that organization for crippled kids?" George Hart inquired.

  Mr. Culhane shook his bald head and put on his after dinner-speaker smile. "You boys just insist on flattering an old man like me."

  All four agency men laughed along with Mr. Culhane's usual protestation of modesty.

  So Jeff, enthusiastic as a game-show host, walked the other guys through all the brownie points: the football team's 1939 triumphs (heard at every meeting), and calling the vice-president "Hank" (heard at every other meeting and usually alternated with Mr. Culhane's story about having a date with Jane Russell right after World War II, and "making Howard Hughes damned mad, let me tell you").


  The social amenities out of the way, Mr. Culhane leaned forward, steepled his pudgy fingers, and said, "Now I want to see some goddamned good advertising from you boys."

  Reddy Teddy Dog Food had a problem. Three years ago it had changed formulas, and, while it was nutritionally a better dog food than ever before, it stank. Dogs would point their wet, black noses at the food bowl and then back away slowly and inexorably, never to eat the stuff no matter how long their masters starved them.

  Reddy Teddy went from number one in its category (meat-based, medium price range) to number three, which scared the hell out of everybody involved, Mr. Ray Culhane included.

  A year ago, finally perceiving the situation correctly, Reddy Teddy chemists found a way to leap all the new nutritional benefits while going back to the old texture (the new stuff goopy in the way diarrhea was goopy) and the old smell.

  So Reddy Teddy was in phase two, phase one having been a successful campaign that told consumers the old smell was back.

  But now Mr. Culhane wanted the agency to be bolder. Where before they'd been merely informational (You remember the good old smell of Reddy Teddy? Well, it's back and nobody knows it better than your dog), now he wanted them to sell the sizzle, the goddamned, you know, magic.

  Jeff, trembling slightly, rose and walked to the rear of the conference room where a draped easel stood.

  "I know you don't like any preamble, Mr. Culhane, but if you don't mind, I'd like to pay my respects to our creative department in advance. They hunkered down for this one. They hunkered way down." One of Mr. Culhane's favorite phrases was "hunkered down," so Jeff used it whenever possible. (Over beers one night, wanting to impress Mr. Culhane—he never called him Ray—with how much he loved Mindy, Jeff had said, "When I met Mindy, I knew I'd have to hunker down to win her love, Mr. Culhane, hunker way down," a piece of ass-kissing that had left him vaguely disgusted with himself for months after.)