John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

We sat with him for a while and then stood up to leave. “Mr. Tyler,” I said gently, “just one more thing: where is the house where the children were found?”

“About three, four miles up the road from here. The old Modine estate starts there. There’s a stone cross at the start of the track leading up to it. The house is pretty much gone now. There’s just a few walls, part of a roof. State wanted to knock it down but some of us protested. We wanted to remind them of what had happened here, so the Dane house still stands.”

We left him then, but as I was going down the porch steps I heard his voice behind me.

“Mr. Parker.” The voice was strong again and there was no quaver in it, although there was the lingering sound of grief in its tones. I turned to look at him. “Mr. Parker, this is a dead town. The ghosts of dead children haunt it. You find the Demeter girl, you tell her to go back where she came from. There’s only grief and misery for her here. You tell her that, now. You tell her that when you find her, y’hear?”

At the margins of his cluttered garden the whispering grew in the trees and it seemed that just beyond the line of vision, where the darkness became almost too dark to penetrate, there was movement. Figures drifted back and forth, skipping just outside the light from the house, and there was childish laughter in the air.

And then there were only the limbs of evergreens fanning the darkness and the empty jangling of a chain in the wreckage of the yard.

ON THE Casuarina Coast of Indonesian New Guinea lives a tribe called the Asmat. They are twenty thousand strong and the terror of every other tribe near them. In their language Asmat means “the people, the human beings,” and if they define themselves as the only humans, then all others are relegated to the status of nonhuman, with all that that entails. The Asmat have a word for these others: they call them manowe. It means “the edible ones.”

Hyams had no answers that would have indicated why Adelaide Modine behaved as she did, and neither did Walt Tyler. Maybe she, and others like her, had something in common with the Asmat. Maybe they, too, saw others as less than human so that their suffering ceased to matter, was below notice apart from the pleasure it gave.

I recalled a conversation with Woolrich, after the meeting with Tante Marie Aguillard. Back in New Orleans, we walked in silence down Royal Street, past Madame Lelaurie’s old mansion, where slaves were once chained and tortured in the attic until some firefighters found them and a mob ran Madame Lelaurie out of town. We ended up at Tee Eva’s on Magazine, where Woolrich ordered sweet potato pie and a Jax beer. He ran his thumb down the side of the bottle, clearing a path through the moisture, and then rubbed his damp thumb along his upper lip.

“I read a Bureau report last week,” he began. “I guess it was a ‘state of the nation’ address on serial killers, on where we stand, where we’re goin’.”

“And where are we going?”

“We’re goin’ to hell is where we’re goin’. These people are like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big petri dish to them. The Bureau reckons we could be losing a couple of thousand victims a year to them. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribin’ to Jerry Falwell, they don’t wanna know that. They read about them in the crime mags or see them on the TV, but that’s only when we catch one of them. The rest of the time, they don’t have the least idea what’s goin’ on around them.”

He took a deep swig of Jax. “There are at least two hundred of these killers operating at the present time. At least two hundred.” He was reeling off the numbers now, emphasizing each statistic with a stab of the beer bottle. “Nine out of ten are male, eight out of ten are white, and one in five is never goin’ to be found. Never.

“And you know what the strangest thing is? We’ve got more of them than anywhere else. The good old U.S. of A. is breedin’ these fuckers like fuckin’ Elmo dolls. Three-quarters of them live and work in this country. We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.

“And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other in every other way than we’ve ever been before. And then these guys come in, with their knives and their ropes, and they’re even further removed than the rest of us. Some of them even have cop’s instincts. They can sniff each other out. We found a guy in Angola in February who was communicating with a suspected killer in Seattle using biblical codes. I don’t know how these two freaks found each other, but they did.

“Strange thing is, most of them are even worse off than the rest of humanity. They’re inadequate-sexually, emotionally, physically, whatever-and they’re taking it out on those they see around them. They have no”-he shook his hands in the air, searching for the word-“no vision. They have no larger vision of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it. It’s just an expression of some kind of fatal flaw.

“And the people they’re killing, they’re so dumb that they can’t understand what’s happening around them. These killers should be a wake-up call, but nobody’s listening, and that widens the gap even more. All they see is the distance, and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.” He finished his beer and raised the bottle up, calling for another.

“It’s the distance,” he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, “the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.”

And it seemed to me, as rain poured down on the window, that Adelaide Modine, the Traveling Man, and the others like them who roamed the country were all united by this distance from the common crowd of humanity. They were like small boys who torture animals or take fish from tanks to watch them squirm and gasp in their death throes.

Yet Adelaide Modine seemed even worse than so many of the others, for she was a woman and to do what she had done not only went against law and morality and whatever other titles we give to the common bonds that hold us together and prevent us from tearing each other apart; it went against nature, too. A woman who kills a child seems to bring out something in us that exceeds revulsion or horror. It brings a kind of despair, a lack of faith in the foundations upon which we have built our lives. For we believe that women should not take the life of a child. Just as Lady Macbeth begged to be unsexed so as to kill the old king, so also a woman who killed a child appeared to be denatured, a being divorced from her sex. Adelaide Modine was like Milton ’s night hag, “lured with the smell of infant blood.”

I cannot countenance the death of children. The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future. I recall how I used to listen to Jennifer breathe, how I used to watch the rise and fall of my infant daughter’s chest, how I felt a sense of gratitude, of relief, with every inhalation and exhalation. When she cried, I would lull her to sleep in my arms, waiting for the sobs to fade into the soft rhythms of rest. And when she was at last quiet, I would bend down slowly, carefully, my back aching from the strain of the position, and lay her in her crib. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.