Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“Melanie,” the doctor says, crying, blubbering like a baby. “Please, please, God forgive me, God forgive me for what I’ve done,” he says.

Caleb takes the pressure off the knife. “Good choice,” he says, and he steps away from the girl and tucks the knife into the side of his pants. “A very good choice. I’d have made the same one. Get rid of the one with the smart mouth.”

Stanton doesn’t answer. Caleb reaches him and swings a foot into his stomach. The doctor grunts, then Caleb rolls him onto his back. “This will help,” he says, and he jams a funnel into the doctor’s mouth and pokes five sleeping pills down it. They hit the back of the doctor’s throat, then Caleb follows it with water and another punch to the stomach. The doctor swallows them. Caleb takes away the funnel.

The doctor coughs and struggles to compose himself, and when he does he sounds short of breath. “You’re. . you’re worse than Whitby,” he says. “Whitby was, was sick,” he says, puffing. “He had genuine mental problems, what you’ve. . you’ve got inside you is, is evil. Whitby couldn’t help himself, but you, you’re making decisions to delib. . deliberately hurt people. Whitby didn’t think about that, he didn’t think anybody would mind what he was doing. He just didn’t get the world. They should never have let you out.”

“Maybe,” Caleb says, “but they did, the same way they let everybody out at some point. You’re the one fighting to let the nutcases out earlier than anybody else.”

He picks Katy up and carries her out to the car, past the crying baby. He lays her across the backseat and throws a blanket over her. When he comes back in he can see the doctor is struggling so hard against the plastic ties that each of his wrists are bleeding. He’s also struggling hard to stay awake.

“Please don’t do this,” Stanton says, his voice sounding raw.

“No more debate,” Caleb says, and he shows Stanton the knife. “It’s not the same knife I used on the others,” he says. “Your daughter, she gets her own. She won’t be contaminated by the blood of those monsters who let Jessica die. She won’t feel anything, I promise you.”

“No, no,” Stanton says, shaking his head, crying harder than Caleb has ever seen another person cry, and he’s trying to squirm toward him, kicking dust up off the floor, the rage and fear fighting off the sleeping pills. “Anything. . I’ll do anything, anything you ask. . it doesn’t matter what just anything, anything. . please, oh God, please don’t. . no don’t hurt her. . just give me a chance to. .”

“Jessica, she felt everything,” Caleb says, and he unzips Melanie’s jacket and opens it. “He stabbed her over and over, but your daughter, I’ll only cut once. I promise, she won’t feel it,” he says, and he lines the knife up.

He pushes it quickly into Melanie’s chest.

For a second there is nothing. No noise. No blood. Nothing. The girl doesn’t even move.

Then the second turns into a second second, and before it can reach a third Stanton begins to choke on his own vomit.

The base of the handle is flush against the girl’s chest. Caleb keeps his hands on it, holding it down, pressing firmly. Her face doesn’t twitch.

Cold blood pools out from around the knife.

It soaks slowly into her T-shirt and onto his hand.

He pulls away the knife and rests it next to her, then wipes his hand across the floor. He looks over at the doctor. He’s stopped squirming. His mouth and neck are covered in blood and vomit, and he’s struggling to breathe through it all. Caleb gets up and closes the distance. He reaches down and drags the doctor to his feet, but the doctor’s legs just buckle beneath him. He’s still sobbing. Loud sobs that Caleb doesn’t have the time for. He smells of piss and shit. The sleeping pills have been thrown up, the edges of them slightly dissolved, two of them hanging from Stanton’s chin. He drags Stanton out of the room, and still he keeps crying, so he strikes him in the side of the head, once, twice, and the doctor goes quiet, the blows more efficient than the sleeping pills. He gets him out to the car and fits him into the trunk, and each time he lifts the man now it’s harder than the last. He wipes the rest of the blood off his hand onto the doctor’s pajama top.

He goes back and looks over Melanie. The police will be here soon to take care of her. He lays her more comfortably on the blanket. He rolls up the corner of it and props it under her head as a pillow. He places her hands across her chest in the blood and interlocks her fingers, then drapes another blanket across her. He tucks her in. He strokes her hair from the side of her face, trapping it behind her ears and brushing her fringe back. He has shown her a grace his own daughter never received.

He uses the marker on her before stepping away. Her young skin is smooth and easy to write on.

When he leaves the slaughterhouse with Octavia and Katy in the backseat, Stanton in the trunk, he knows it’s for the last time. The plan is changing, but the end result will still be the same. He’ll go and see Ariel Chancellor. He’s still unsure exactly what he wants to say to her, or do with her, but he has time to figure it out on the way.

The day is moving quicker than it should, partly because of the unfolding events, partly because of daylight savings, mostly because that’s what happens in a murder investigation when things start to fall in place. The day is still light, but with the sun heading toward the horizon a little quicker every day it’s only a matter of weeks until it’s dark by five o’clock. I’ve been given the use of an unmarked patrol car that doesn’t struggle to start and has a heater and window wipers that work.

While Schroder takes a team out to the slaughterhouse, I drive to Ariel Chancellor’s house and park out front. It’s taken me a little longer than I’d have hoped, the first of the boy-racers that Schroder warned us about are already warming up the streets for later on tonight. I don’t have Detective Kent with me because I don’t need help asking a bunch of questions, and I need to get through it quickly so I can see my wife. I have twenty minutes before my five o’clock appointment with Dr. Forster, and from here it’s a twenty-minute drive, longer if the boy-racers decide to circle the nursing home. I figure I can be ten minutes late, maybe even twenty. It’ll take Forster half an hour or so to look over my wife. So that gives me ten minutes to talk to Chancellor.

I knock but nobody answers. If I were still a private investigator, then right now I’d consider breaking in. I weigh that up against my responsibilities as a policeman, then I weigh those up against my responsibilities as a human being who’s trying to save the lives of three young girls and their father. All that weighing pulls me around the side of the house where my feet sink halfway into the boggy lawn. There are patches of mold growing around the edges of the back door. I use a lock-pick set that has come in handy over the years and will continue to do so in the future, even in my role as a policeman.

I call out a hello before making my way inside. The air temperature drops a few degrees. Any damper and I’d need swimming trunks. I step into the living room. To the right is a kitchen with rinsed dishes forming a pile next to the sink. There’s mouse shit along the floor near the oven, and beside a rubbish bin is a dead mouse broken in half in a spring trap. On the dining room table are a couple of fantasy paperbacks that possibly help Ariel escape her past and present. Next to them is a small plastic bag with half a dozen white tablets in it, all on display for somebody to steal-or in this case eat, because there are holes in the base of the first bag and some of the tablets are scratched up and there’s a dead mouse on the table that got high really quickly and OD’d before he could share the find with his friends.