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She hesitates. From a hip pocket of her jeans, she extracts a slim wallet, flips it open, and shows me a photograph of a handsome boy of about eight.
“Is that Maxy?”
“Yeah. Hiskott said Maxy had to die ’cause he was too beautiful. He really was a cute little boy. So we’re supposed to think it was envy because Hiskott has changed into something super-ugly. But I don’t think that’s why he killed Maxy.”
Even as tough as she has become, Jolie is silenced by grief. A tremor of the mouth tests her composure, but she presses her lips together. She folds the lost boy away and returns him to her pocket.
“Lately,” she continues, “he’s been taunting all of us, using my family to tell me I’m beautiful, more beautiful than Maxy. He’s trying to terrify me and torment all the others with the thought that he’ll use them to beat me and rip me apart the way he used them to kill Maxy. But it’s a lie.”
“What’s a lie?”
“I’m not beautiful.”
“But Jolie … you really are.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t see it. I don’t believe it. I know it’s a lie. I can’t be beautiful. Not after what I did.”
“What do you mean?”
With one foot, she pushes a folded moving blanket close to Orc. She kneels on it, staring down into the creature’s shriveled face.
When she speaks, her voice is controlled, allowing no sharp emotions that might be suitable to her words, colored only by a quiet melancholy. “It starts, and it’s horrible. I’m screaming at them to stop, pleading. One after another of them going at Maxy—my family, his family. And they were trying to restrain each other. They were trying. But Hiskott moves so fast, from this one to that one, you never know where he’s going next. Such violent kicking, punching, gouging. Maxy’s blood … on everyone. I can’t stop them, Maxy’s almost dead, and I’ve got to run away, I can’t bear to see the end of it.”
With no evident distaste, with a deliberate tenderness, Jolie lifts the hand with which the briefly animated, mummified cadaver had tapped the floor.
Examining the wickedly long fingers, she says, “I start to run but then I’m standing over Maxy, and I don’t know where I got the knife that’s in my hand. Big knife. He’s not quite dead. Bewildered, half conscious. He’s just eight. I’m nine. He recognizes me. His eyes clear for a moment. I stab him once and then again. And again. And that’s the end of him.”
Her silence has such substance that for a moment I’m not able to force words into it. But then: “It wasn’t you, Jolie.”
“In a way, it was.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“In a way,” she insists.
“He was controlling you.”
In that awful voice of tightly tethered sorrow, in words too mature for her age, she says, “But I saw it. Lived it. I felt flesh and bone resist the knife. I saw him seeing me when the life went out of his eyes.”
My sense is that if I drop to my knees beside her and try to comfort her, she will not allow herself to be hugged as before. She will thrash away from me, and the bond between us will be damaged. This is her grief, to which she clings in honor of her murdered cousin, and this is her guilt that, although unearned, is perhaps proof to her that in spite of what she was made to do, she is still human. I know a great deal about grief and guilt, but while this is like unto my grief and guilt, it is not mine, and I have no right to tell her what she should feel.
Lowering the monster’s hand to the floor, she returns again to the study of its face, in particular the large sockets at the bottoms of which lie the mottled and furred tissue that is what remains of its eyes, like the once flourishing but now fossilized mold at the bottom of a long-dry well. Again the cove lighting flutters, does not go out this time, but summons throbs of shadow from those bony orbits, so that it seems a pair of eyes repeatedly roll left to right and back again, entirely black eyes like those of Death might be when he shows up on a doorstep with an eviction notice.
“I’m not beautiful. That’s not the reason he’s getting ready to kill me. During the past few months, there are times when he seeks me and can’t find me because I’m here. And later, when he takes me and reads me, in my memories it seems I was always somewhere ordinary where he should have found me. For a while he thought the fault was in him, but he now suspects I’ve learned how to hide a thing or two that I don’t want him to know.”
The power to shut out the puppeteer from even a small part of her memory should be a hopeful development, but she seems to take no hope from it.
“And is he right? Have you learned to hide a thing or two?”
“They say you should study languages when you’re just a kid, because you get them a lot faster than when you’re grown up. I think it’s that way with figuring how to fake out Hiskott. I can’t hide much, but a little more month by month, including this place, where I go to escape him. I don’t believe any of the adults have been able to do that, but I think Maxy might have been about where I am now when he was killed. Maybe Hiskott suspected Maxy. Maybe he was afraid Maxy might learn to resist being taken, so he murdered him.”
“You think you could learn to keep him out, deny him control?”
“No. Not for years if ever. And he won’t let me live that long. But there’s another thing I did.”
She lightly taps a forefinger against the points of Orc’s lower teeth, moving left to right along the cadaver’s sharkish grin.
If Orc’s hand can abruptly drum fingers against the floor, its jaws, which seem to be locked open by withered tendons and shrunken muscles, might snap shut on her tender fingertips.
I consider warning her. But she surely has thought of the same danger, and she will ignore me. Something about this moment suggests that it is neither Orc’s existence nor its origins that intrigues Jolie, nor any particular feature of its demonic face. Instead, brow furrowed, testing the cutting edges of her teeth with her tongue as she assesses Orc’s array of daggers with her finger, she seems to be contemplating a question that worries her.
And then she puts her concern into words: “Does a monster know it’s a monster?”
Her question appears simple, and some might find it ridiculous because, as modern thinkers know, psychology and theories of social injustice can explain the motives of all who ever commit an evil act, revealing them to be in fact victims themselves; therefore such things as monsters do not exist—no Minotaurs, no werewolves, no orcs, and likewise no Hitlers, no Mao Tse-tungs. But I can guess why she is asking the question, and in this context it is a complex inquiry of profound importance to her.
Jolie deserves a thoughtful and nuanced answer, although in our current circumstances, a textured reply will only encourage in her further self-doubt. We don’t have time for such uncertainty because it reliably breeds indecision, and indecision is one of the mothers of failure.
“Yes,” I assure her. “A monster knows it’s a monster.”
“Always and everywhere?”
“Yes. A monster not only knows that it’s a monster, but it also enjoys being a monster.”
She meets my eyes. “How do you know?”
Indicating Orc, I say, “This isn’t my first monste
r. I’ve had experience with all kinds of them. Mostly the human kind. And the human kind especially revel in their evil.”
Returning her attention to the teeth, the girl seems to consider what I have said. To my relief, she stops risking a bite and touches instead the creature’s large, bulbous brow, where the crinkled skin sheds a few flakes under her forefinger.
“Anyway,” she says, wiping her finger on her jeans, “there’s another thing I did, besides keeping from him the place I go when he can’t find me. I imagined this secret cave, hidden by brush, high in the hills, as far from the culvert on the beach as you can get and still be in the Corner. And yesterday, when he took me for a while, I let him see the cave in my memory, as if it were real, but not where it’s supposed to be. So now that he’s ready to kill me, maybe he’ll waste time using some of the family to search for the cave.”
“How can you be sure he’s ready … for that?”
“Too much is slipping out of his control. You know about him, so he’s got to kill you. Then he’ll kill the lady with you because he can’t control her. He was going to kill me in a day or two, before you showed up, so he’ll just go ahead and do it as soon as he’s finished with you two.”
Annamaria seems to have uncanny knowledge superior to mine. She says she’s safe in the Corner. Maybe. Maybe not. I wish I could be in two places at once.
“I’ll get him first.”
“I think you might. But if you don’t … the three of us will be buried in the meadow beside Maxy, with no coffins and no headstones.”
She gets to her feet once more and stands with her hands on her hips. In her skull T-shirt and rivet-decorated jacket, she looks both defiant and vulnerable.
“If Hiskott gets you first,” she says, “what I need is a little extra time while he’s looking for the cave that doesn’t exist, just a little extra time to get ready to be killed. I don’t want to beg or scream. I don’t want to cry if I can help it. When he uses my family to kill me, I want to be able to keep telling them how much I love them, that I don’t blame them, that I’ll pray for them.”
