Christopher Conlon - Savaging the Dark

Is what I’ve written fiction, then? I don’t think so. It’s truth, but of a different sort.

They made a movie about the case—they called it Savaging the Dark. Maybe you saw it. I had nothing to do with the film, other than getting a fee for it. It was quite a large fee. My father managed to spend a lot of it in the couple of years before he died, but enough was left that it put me through college. And they changed the names, so I didn’t have to cringe every time I told people my name was Connor Blue. Since I was a minor at the time my name rarely appeared in news reports about the case anyway, but it did leak out here and there on the Internet, which was a new thing then. Still, for most people “Mona Straw’s eleven-year-old kidnapping victim” was utterly anonymous. Nameless. Faceless.

It was a pretty good movie. I saw it one afternoon by myself, just walked into a theater in the town where I was going to college, paid my admission and watched it. How accurate was it? Not very. But there were a few scenes, especially the early ones, when the Mona character—they called her “Mindy”—is getting to know the boy, “Colin,” that rang true, that touched soft bells of memory. Occasionally when I’m channel surfing I come across the film on cable even now, watch a few minutes of it. Generally it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me at all. I think Mona would have liked it, actually. It’s not High Sierra or Strangers on a Train, but it’s not bad. Roger Ebert gave it three stars.

I’ve been back to Silver Spring a few times in the years since, sometimes alone, sometimes with my wife. I always visit Kylie McCloud’s grave, always place flowers before the headstone, and her mother’s next to it. But I don’t cry. It was simply too long ago and I just remember too little. The Kylie I’ve described here, in my Mona-narrative, is mostly fiction. She was small, she read a lot, she wore glasses that slipped down her nose. Beyond that it’s mostly a darkness to me. But I wonder. When I make up the details, are they just my imagination? Or are they actual memories returning to me, tugging at my mind’s sleeve?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the movie got the end of the story completely wrong. Mona did not die in that violent shootout you saw on screen. Her end was much stranger than that. It turned out that the police weren’t even there for us; they had no idea who we were. Instead there had been an armed robbery nearby and the police were simply canvassing the area to see if there were any witnesses. That’s it. It had nothing to do with us. When she opened the door the policeman began to ask his routine questions but Mona’s hysterical laughter stopped him. Then he saw the gun in her hand, back-stepped fast, started to draw his own weapon. Mona ran. At some point she dropped the gun. Shrieking, screaming, she charged through the parking lot and out onto the busy road facing the motel. An SUV crashed into her.

A silver key ring was found in the road, knocked from her pocket. It held a key to the handcuffs, and they used it to free me.

I was in the hospital then, for a very long time. Several hospitals, actually.

But in the end I came out and resumed my life. I went to a different school, a smaller one, a kind of therapeutic place. I liked it. I attended a regular high school and did as well as most. I met Linda—my wife, eventually—in college. Our first child, a daughter, is on the way.

What do I do for a living? Oddly enough, I’m a CPA. That same math that was such a darkness to me in middle school opened up to me later, became strangely comforting and beautiful to me, maybe because it represented a world over which I could exert total control. I don’t know. It’s as good a theory as any. I’m happy enough in my job, anyway.

I mentioned that I’ve revisited the Silver Spring area from time to time and stopped by Kylie McCloud’s grave. Until recently I’d never visited Mona’s, which is in a different cemetery, in Washington itself. Finally I did, not very long ago. It was a perfectly clear spring day, a light breeze, very comfortable. I happened to find her parents’ stones first; then, next to them, her brother Michael’s. Finally hers. I stepped up to it, one of those simple gray plaques they embed in the lawn. It said Mona Straw along with her dates. That was all.

I stood there in the lengthening shadows of an April afternoon looking down at the name, shifting the flowers I’d brought along from hand to hand. When I bought them I wasn’t sure I would leave them for her. Perhaps, I thought, I’d just place them on a random stranger’s grave and go. But as I stood there it felt right, somehow, to set them there, so I did. Half-a-dozen white roses. Nothing too fancy.

I knew I would never come to her grave again.

And yet I also knew that, in her way, Mona had loved me. Perhaps part of her—the sick, confused part—was really loving someone else, someone she lost, someone I resembled and whose sudden death had broken her, broken her for all time, even if she didn’t know it. But there was another part of her that truly loved me, loved me more than anyone should ever love another person.

Again, I don’t know.

But I cried for her then, the only time I’ve ever cried for her or ever will. And I cried for Kylie McCloud and her mother and Bill and Gracie and for all the loss, the damage, the irretrievable black years of my own life.

When I was finished I knelt down and touched the flowers, ran my fingers across the engraved shapes of the letters of her name. Then I walked back to the parking lot, got into my car, and drove away.

Christopher Conlonis best known as the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend, which was a selection of the Science Fiction Book Club and which has appeared in multiple foreign translations. He is the author of several novels, including the Stoker Award finalists Midnight on Mourn Street and A Matrix of Angels, as well as five volumes of short stories, four books of poetry, and a play. A former Peace Corps volunteer, Conlon holds an M.A. in American Literature from the University of Maryland. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area. Visit him online at http://christopherconlon.com.

Lullaby for the Rain Girl

A Matrix of Angels

Midnight on Mourn Street

When They Came Back: A Horror Story

(with photographs by Roberta Lannes-Sealey)

The Oblivion Room: Stories of Violation

Herding Ravens

Thundershowers at Dusk: Gothic Stories

Saying Secrets

Starkweather Dreams

Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt

The Weeping Time

Gilbert and Garbo in Love

Midnight on Mourn Street: A Play in Two Acts

A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock

He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson

Poe’s Lighthouse

The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl

Filet of Sohl: The Classic Scripts and Stories of Jerry Sohl

“If there’s a single author working in the horror genre who deserves wider notice, it might be Conlon, whose astonishing A Matrix of Angels (2011) is the most wrenching serial-killer novel of the past decade. This follow-up button-pusher would pair perfectly with Alissa Nutting’s controversial Tampa (2013), if not for the opening scene: a terrified 11-year-old boy gagged and handcuffed to a bed while our narrator, sixth-grade English teacher Mona Straw, licks the dirt from his feet. From there, we backtrack to learn of Mona’s evolving infatuation with student Connor Blue, a kid as average and unremarkable as his teacher. Connor soon graduates from extra study lessons to yard work to an overwhelming sexual relationship, with every step utterly believable as Mona cycles through giddy elation, mordant depression, and, most of all, tortured self-justifications of her actions: ‘The top buttons are undone on the blouse but that’s because I’m just casually hanging around the house, no other reason.’ Conlon’s prose is so sturdy that Mona’s impaired viewpoint (for example, her concern that the power of their relationship is shifting to Connor) almost makes sense before it plunges them both into unavoidable disaster. Conlon writes with literary depth and commercial aplomb; his days of too-little recognition seem numbered.”