Джош Малерман - Inspection

And that maybe D.A.D. meant it when he said he could give them to him.

“K,” he said quietly. “Her name is K.”

Even then, under unfathomable conditions, speaking her name felt good.

Telling D.A.D. the truth did, too.

And his boat advanced. Far.

“Good move, J.” D.A.D. was seated again, removing the nodes from his body. J sat halfway up, saw water spilling over the edges of the table. “Saving the heavy truth for rocky waters. Gives you more distance. You might have won this game after all.” D.A.D. took his coat from his chair back. “But we’re done here.”

As D.A.D. put his arms into his red jacket, J saw it as blood, real blood. As though K’s ax-wielding girls walking the Turret halls had already been to this room.

“D.A.D.?”

But D.A.D. was lifting the black receiver on his desk.

“What’s going to happen to her?” J asked.

The Inspectors stepped to the table. The woman to D.A.D.’s side.

“J is spoiled rotten,” D.A.D. said into the phone. “Your K is, too. No surprise there. K and B. Thick as thieves.”

He hung up.

“D.A.D.?”

D.A.D. was heading for the door.

“Like cockroaches, you fucking kids. I save you from death before you’re even born and somehow I’m the bad man.”

“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” J said, up now, stumbling toward D.A.D.

The Inspectors were on him fast.

“You ask what’s going to happen to her,” D.A.D. said, “but you never stop to think what’s going to happen to me .”

The Inspectors dragged J to the door. D.A.D. opened it, then bent until his nose was touching J’s.

“You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?”

J only stared. Only thought, K.

Meet me in the tunnel after dark.

Beyond the windows of D.A.D.’s quarters, dark was near.

“You ever seen bread when it sours?”

We have to do it soon. Before they change how they do things.

“It grows mold, J. It rots.”

K.

“You’ve gone bad . And the only thing to do with boys who have gone bad is to throw them out.”

D.A.D. gestured, and the Inspectors dragged J out the door.

Meet me in the tunnel…

K would be in the tunnel, too.

…after dark.

Her voice like a door of its own. Not closing. Opening.

J was on his way.

As the Inspectors took him, as he clawed to get loose, as he imagined a wood door with melting blood-red letters, the names of boys and girls, T-H-E C-O-R-N-E-R dripping to the floor, J thought, yes, he would meet her in the basement after dark.

It wasn’t until they were in the staff bathroom, caged momentarily in a nightmare acoustic box, that J accepted the high-pitched wailing that had accompanied them from D.A.D.’s quarters as his own.

It smelled bad below, something dead, something wet. Having spent his entire life in the clean Turret and the fresh air of the Yard and Orchard, J had nothing to relate it to. The closest association he made was his wet winter clothes on the heater in his rooms, but this thinking didn’t last long, as his reality was unspooling by the second.

The rumbling hum of the boiler brought him to dig his nails into the arms that dragged him through the cobblestoned halls. The Inspectors didn’t seem to mind. Either J’s strength was insignificant or, as he had fleetingly seen in the storm of blurred terror, the men felt too guilty to swat his small fingers aside.

J was certain every door they passed was the Corner, until he could actually read the nameplates, the stencils, the pieces of paper. With his mind’s eye (piqued, cleaved) he saw blood-black letters, the blood of the child, the blood of dead brothers and the Letter Girl J. In his mind’s eye the letters were uneven, the word getting smaller as it was spelled, as though the man responsible for labeling the door did so in a rush to get away from it.

You ever pay attention to the bread in the cafeteria, J?

He heard breathing from up the hall, from behind him, from either side. The Inspectors? It sounded more like the halls themselves were breathing. As if the basement had begun the process of swallowing him.

“Turn around!” he called. “I haven’t done anything wrong! You’ll feel…” He thought of the book Needs and how perfectly Warren Bratt had titled it. “You’ll feel contrite !”

“Easy, J,” Collins mumbled. “This isn’t any easier for us.”

How human the Inspectors looked to him now! How unlike men and like grown-up boys instead!

These men had protected him his entire life. These men had loved him. He’d loved these men!

Let me show you how to tie your shoe, J.

Let me help you with those gloves, J.

I hear you’re doing well with your studies, J. Tell an old man, what’s your secret?

“ You’re the ones with secrets!” J yelled as Collins tugged him around a corner and Jeffrey attempted to quiet him with a hand over his mouth.

Luxley once wrote of a gothic castle, and J now believed he’d modeled it after the basement of the Turret. Lanterns high on the walls. Wet stones. Sweat stones? Funereal was a word J had to look up in the Parenthood Dictionary. He loved that word. Dreamed of that word many times. Even tried to use it in an essay in grammar class. But now, here, it was much too real. He was the focus of the funeral, dead soon, the shrieking, bleeding boy.

He reached for the stones in the walls, to put a stop to this forward motion, but the stones were sharp, damp, without pattern, and his fingertips bled like the letters on the door they took him to.

With every supply closet they passed, J thought he heard a smacking, big lips hidden here in the basement, the world beneath his own.

J imagined faces as worried as his own in one office they passed.

“ YOU’RE ALL SO SCARED!” he screamed.

Then, swiftly, the fresh clacking of newly arrived boots ahead. A slash of red in the black heart of the basement.

“A perfect match,” D.A.D. said, leading now, his back to J and to the Inspectors that dragged him. “Let them play together in the Corner.”

Was K already there? In the Corner?

“Jesus,” Jeffrey said. “Look at his toes!”

J’s feet were bleeding badly. The big toe on his right foot was almost shredded to the bone. Yet he tried to find purchase with his feet. Tried to slow down the funeral, his funeral, the end to his book of needs.

Where was Q? L and D? Did they know he’d been sent to the Corner? Did they cry? Did they think he deserved it because the Parenthood said so?

“You don’t have to do this!” J yelled to the Inspectors. “If he lies to us, he lies to you!”

D.A.D. stopped. Turned to face J. In the lantern light his face looked more like a stranger’s than it had yesterday morning, when he discovered Warren Bratt’s brilliant book.

“What did you just say, J?”

The Inspectors stopped, too.

J, naked, hanging in the arms of the Inspectors, looked up to Collins. “You don’t have to do this.”

Collins looked away and in doing so revealed, behind him on the wall, an arrow painted as red as D.A.D.’s gloves.

J felt hope.

Oh, K, oh, K, oh, K.

And just beyond D.A.D., J saw the tunnel entrance itself. A gap in the wall. Something too dark to be a closet, too wide for an office door.