Robert Walker: Absolute Instinct

Millbrook, Minnesota

The boy sat cross-legged, scrawny at a mere forty-eight pounds in seven years, big-headed, awkward, sickly at birth and all his life, and now set on a path to cure himself, to fill out the flesh, to strengthen muscle and tissue, to raise the sunken eyes as in his drawings of himself, but now he had gone too far. Thin and sticklike, his body battled the diseases of his father, evil curses he'd never be rid of. His mother believed it with a certainty after seeing what he'd done to harmless, inoffensive little Squeakums.

Giles had been in and out of hospitals all his life, but tests always proved inconclusive, and no one could tell Larina Gahran why her son remained only half formed. Giles's body was his enemy-the overactive metabolic rate kept him pinched and angular. He looked like an Eastern European WWII refugee, a survivor of Auschwitz, or one of those dead-eyed children on TV ads about Africa or South America. She fed him and fed him, but Giles's frail body somehow remained malnourished and starved-looking. And now he was seven years old and defying her, not eating any-thing she put in front of him anymore. He was now living on Coca-Cola and junk food filled with sodium and calories but nothing substantive.

Giles had the demons inside him, fighting for his soul, the demons that had stolen his father's soul before him-the sins of the father shall be visited upon the child-for how many generations? Three, four?

“Perhaps I should have taken Giles off that respirator when he was born,” she confided to her priest in the confessional. “Perhaps the girl I was… I should not have rushed Giles to the hospital that time when he fell from the apartment window, two stories, breaking his leg, collar bone and his back. All that pain in his back for months afterward had to play havoc with his mind. Perhaps I ought've crushed his skull in, claimed it as part of the fall.”

“But you didn't, did you? That speaks good of you. Your motherly instincts were absolute, unbreakable, resolute. You are to be-”

“No, Father, don't misunderstand. This is a small town with small-town cops, but given today's forensic science detectives, like the ones you see on TV, they'd figure out in an instant that it was murder.”

Now this.

The boy had killed her cat and had hidden the body in the basement of the old apartment house, stuffed little Squeakums behind the hot-water heater where it now stank of decay and desiccated flesh; dried blood and bile were matted in the dead calico hair. This sent a particularly horrendous odor throughout the building vents. Giles had killed Squeakums, his mother's only pleasure, the jealous little miscreant had murdered poor, innocent Squeakums, his latest outrage.

A little pleasure ball that never did harm to a single living soul, and now to find Squeakums like this, after thinking her only in the ranks of the lost. The truth hurt; it felt so painfully wretched.

Larina's eyes filled with tears. She found a box to put the poor creature's remains in, saying, “I'll see you get a proper burial, my sweet little Squeakums. I'll take care of you now.”

She'd been having nightmares of lost Squeakums out in the dark, lost, cold, alone, and frightened in the grid of the city of Millbrook, Minnesota-a small town some twenty miles from the Twin Cities where she had met Giles's father at Millbrook Memorial, where she had once worked as an admitting nurse.

Giles's father had charmed her out of her own life. Swept her off her feet. But he turned out to be the Devil incarnate, as attested to by his having been arrested on charges of murder. He'd left her with promises and pregnancy, and then got himself locked up in an insane asylum-a federal facility for the criminally insane.

She reached in with gloved hands and pulled Squeakums from the corner behind the hot-water heater where she'd been wedged in between the heater and the stone wall. The body was actually warm, she assumed from the warmth of the metal heated by the hot water.

Then she realized as her eyes and hand simultaneously saw and felt the huge rent in Squeakums's back, a gouged out elongated hole from the base of her little brain to the end of her backside, and the curious lightness of the cat's corpse combined to make Larina look closer at the enormous wound. She put the cat's body in the box she meant to bury it in and placed it on an old desktop below a light she had already switched on. Steeling herself, she again examined the puckered wound that was filled with dried, matted hair thick with blood. She also noted that the cat's skull had been caved in by some sort of blunt object.

“My God,” she muttered as she peeled back the hardened edges of the long gash down the cat's spine. “My God, he's cut out her backbone, but why? For what possible reason?”

There could be only one purpose, one obsessive, mad goal as satanic as the intent of the Antichrist himself. “Just like his father,” she said aloud, “just as insane. He's got the same lunatic psychotic gene, the mark of Cain.”

Then she heard a noise, a strange knocking together of metal balls, a creaking crackle of a noise, followed by a slurping sound, and it was all coming from behind a closed, several-times-painted-over door to a little used storage room.

So this is where he's been hiding? She took tentative steps toward the door and reached out to take hold of the doorknob. Her hand suddenly froze over it, shaking, unsure, as unsteady as her mind. She stood there for some time, listening to the sounds from behind the faded multicolored door. Giles was in there doing something unspeakable, something evil and horrid. Conjuring up demons? Playing a game, a little harmless game of divination? Or worse? Far worse?

Her hand continued to hover over the knob as breathing became harder and harder. She knew most certainly she'd be needing her inhaler to get through this but it was upstairs. Should she fling open the door and see something so entirely gross and disgusting as to bring on an asthma attack and be unable to get to her inhaler, should she keel over in one of her fits and become helpless to move or breath, would little sickly Giles rush upstairs for her inhaler doing all in his power to save her? Or would he brain her with a hammer and cut out her spine and take it into the dark storage room and do with it what he might now be doing with Squeakums's?

She knew she had to find a lawyer, make out a will, and see to it that her own body was cremated to keep it from ever falling into her son's hands.

Slurp, slurp… more noises from the other side of the door. Little boy sounds of gratification, possibly masturbation. Certainly quenching his thirst as if he had a pitcher of Kool-Aid in there.

Larina Gahran steeled her resolve and found the strength to grab hold of the doorknob in complete inch-by-inch stealth. She turned it slowly to be imperceptible. So far, she felt absolutely certain that little Giles hadn't the least notion she stood here with her cat in a box, angry as hell.

She now had the doorknob turned as far as it would go. She need only to snatch it open and dare to look at precisely what her son was. She hesitated again, wishing her inhaler was at hand, feeling the first shivering rumble of an attack in her cells, subtle but wanting to escape and invade her lungs.