Эд Горман - Blood Moon

“He died in a prison escape.”

This time the smile was bleak. “He died a long time before that, Mr. Hokanson. A very long time before that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m speaking spiritually, Mr. Hokanson. Spiritually, he died a long time before that.” His fingers touched a manila envelope placed across his lap.

“One day I came home from work — this would have been back in the early sixties, when my son was probably seven or eight, and I saw my wife in the kitchen with our Mexican maid. They were arguing. I’d never seen my wife — who had always been a frail and quiet woman — this angry before. Then my wife slapped her. I couldn’t believe it. My wife just wasn’t a physical person. She hated machismo in particular — you know, settling arguments with physical force.

“The maid was in tears and ran out of the kitchen. I went over to my wife. She seemed to be in some kind of trance. I wasn’t even sure that she knew I was standing next to her. I tried to touch her, but she jerked away from me. Upstairs, I could hear the maid opening and slamming doors. Then she came downstairs carrying her bags and went out the side door to her car. She had a little VW Bug she was very proud of.

“I asked my wife why they’d been arguing but she wouldn’t even look at me. I really did wonder if she was in some kind of trance.

“And then without a word, she left the kitchen, went upstairs to her room.

“I just stood there looking out the window at Maria, the maid, backing her VW out, and then pulling away. I never saw her again.

“I was just about to go upstairs, and try and get my wife to talk to me, when I noticed the blood on the top of the stairs leading to the basement.

“It was very dark, and there was this iron odor to it.

“I knew enough to be afraid — knew enough to sense that I was about to find something that I would be better off not knowing — but I couldn’t help myself.

“I went over and turned the basement lights on and followed the blood all the way downstairs.

“Six months earlier, we’d had new tile put in, the same kind of tile we had on the stairs, a kind of amber color, and the blood was very stark against it. There was a lot of it — the blood, I mean.

“The basement had been turned into several rooms, one of which was my son’s ‘den,’ as we called it. He had his TV, his stereo and all his comic books there. He was a great comic-book collector.

“That was when I saw the first piece of flesh, just outside his door, flesh and white hair soaked with blood.

“I knew right away what I was looking at. A few weeks previous, my son had stopped by a pet shop and found these two rabbits he really liked. He called them Dean and Jerry. He loved Jerry Lewis movies. He kept the rabbits in a large cage in his den.

“You can guess what happened.

“Craig had killed the rabbits. And not cleanly. Didn’t just shoot them, or put a blade into their hearts. From the pieces I saw, and especially from the way their eyes gaped when I found their decapitated heads, he tortured them first and then started cutting them up into chunks while they were still alive.

“Later that night, I learned what the argument between my wife and Maria had been about. Maria had found the rabbits and gone to my wife and told her that Craig had killed them. My wife absolutely refused to believe this. Of course, this wasn’t the first time we’d had troubles like this with Craig. When he was eight, he’d been playing with a little girl he’d invited home from school. He was out in the old barn — this was when we lived outside of Des Moines — and he took a hammer and nails and nailed her to the ground. Even at that age, he was smart enough to gag her so we wouldn’t hear her.

“We sent him away to a school where he spent half his time with psychiatrists and the other half on his schoolwork. But even then my wife wouldn’t admit that there was anything fundamentally wrong with Craig. She always said it was just a ‘stage’ he was going through. She also clung to the idea that Craig didn’t fit the general profile of disturbed young boys. We’d never brutalized him — we were very obedient disciples of Dr. Spock and didn’t even spank him — and we certainly expressed our love to him. I spent at least a dozen hours a week doing all the things you see fathers in movies do — we played baseball, we went fishing, we rode horses.

“But Craig was never much interested in anything I suggested. He didn’t hate us exactly, but he certainly didn’t love us either — not in any way we understood.

“When he was sixteen and home for the summer and adamant about us letting him get his driver’s license and giving him a car, he brought a girl home to walk down by the lake on the east end of our property.

“I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard somebody screaming, and I threw on some clothes and ran out of the house. I knew I shouldn’t call the police; I don’t know how I knew, I just did.

“He had her tied to a tree and stripped completely naked. He was cutting her with a switchblade. She had a gag on, but it must have slipped off for a few moments, and that’s how I heard her scream.

“He wasn’t killing her; he was marking her up for life.

“I knocked him out. It took a rock to do it — he was a very slight boy, but he had incredible strength and energy — and I got both of them up to the house.

“After that, my wife didn’t have any choice but to see Craig for what he was. We were able to settle a great deal of money on the girl and her parents to keep them quiet, but we had Craig committed to a sanitarium right after that.

“He stayed four months, and then escaped. Believe me, people had been trying for twenty years to escape from that place but nobody before or since Craig had been able to.

“We had no idea where he went, but about eight months after he escaped — and by this time his mother herself was in very serious therapy, and she was also drinking a lot — about eight months afterward, we started getting Polaroid photos of girls who were eight to twelve years old... and they were cut up and sexually mutilated beyond belief.

“There was never any note. Just the photos.

“After the sixth photograph, each of a different girl — and we always knew who was sending them — his mother overdosed on gin and barbiturates.

“I was in Phoenix at the time.

“Craig didn’t come back for the funeral.

“In fact, I didn’t hear from him again for two years.

“You know the way I heard from him again?

“Polaroid photos started arriving.

“Very young girls again. Tortured and maimed in ways I can’t ever quite get out of my mind.

“He was going all over the country — just the way Ted Bundy did — slaughtering young girls.

“I wanted to stop him — I wanted to tell the police what was going on — but I... couldn’t. I’d come very close but then I... couldn’t.

“Pride, I suppose, though I hate to think I’m that selfish and venal.

“Anyway, one day I got a letter from a law firm I’d never heard from. Out-of-state.

“Craig was being tried for several crimes unrelated to the murders. I flew up to see him. I hardly recognized him. There was such a... strange... aspect to his face. If I said ‘diabolical,’ that would sound very melodramatic, wouldn’t it? But that’s the only way I can describe it. Very handsome; very handsome... yet even being around him made me nervous.

“He asked me for help, but I turned him down. I told him that he was going where he belonged. He was very angry. He cursed me.

“I didn’t see him for years. He wrote me a few letters, but I burned them. His lawyers would call from time to time and ask me if I’d go visit him but I said no... I no longer wanted to see him.