The Nameless Dark Story #5

I knew a really fucked up kid when I was growing up. His name was Bradley. His family was that family. No one really knew where they were from, but judging by their accents were confident it was somewhere where inbreeding was considered acceptable. The children were all towheads, with identical cowlicks swirling up off the back of their skulls. It only added to the general aura of poverty they gave off. When they moved to the vacant house at the end of the block near the culvert the neighborhood collectively sighed and braced itself.

We never saw the father, but we knew he existed because we could hear him yelling at night. Our parents tried to cover up the gunshot-loud slaps with our televisions but we knew he was slapping her around. Their mother was a doughy woman with small eyes and a perpetually stained apron who seemed to perpetually be wandering the house touching things. It was highly contested what her actual function in the house was, as anyone who ever went in there reported it filthy beyond all imagining.

I never had cause to interact with six out of their seven children but Bradley crashed into my life one summer afternoon when I was sitting in the garden reading a book. I'd created a space inside the hedge bordering our yard and I sat in there most days. It kept cooler than any other place and no one could see me, so I went mostly undisturbed.

I was on the third chapter of Huck Finn when the branches around me rustled and a dirty freckled face peered into my little cave. He grinned and there were two red pits where his front teeth had been.

"Hey." He said.

I didn't know how to respond. I pretended I hadn't heard him.

He broke a branch and started poking me with it. I ignored him. He moved the branch up my face and almost poked me in the eye before I swatted it away.

"What?" I snapped.

He grinned wider. "Wanna see something?"

I shut my book and left it in the cave when I crawled out. I brushed off my pants and crossed my arms. He had one arm behind his back and he was giggling a little.

"What." I said.

He brought his arm forward and held up the fuzzy white thing he was clutching.

I recognized the rabbit as one of the angoras the Jacobsen family raised in hutches in their back yard. What he had done with the body I wasn't sure, but he held the head cruelly by the ears, and the stump of the neck dripped occasionally into the grass. I froze in place and stared at the red eyes, which hadn't grown dull yet and seemed so painfully alive.

"Watch." He said. He flipped the head upside down and shoved two fingers into the neck and up through the base of the skull. When he had them as far in as they could go, he spun the head so that it faced me. "Watch."

The jewel eyes suddenly bulged out and moved in opposite directions. He laughed and one eye deflated as the jaw opened and closed.

"Help me, I'm dying!" He squeaked. "Help me!"

When he closed the jaw with a snap and one of the long teeth broke with a tiny crack, I turned and fled up the porch, urine trickling down my leg and I ran. Behind me I could hear him giggling.

"Help me! Oh no! Help!"

I slammed the door and ran up to my room. From my window I watched him duck into my cave and when he came up he didn't have the head. He wiped his hand on his jeans and wandered away.

I didn't say anything that time. I wanted to forget about it. Even after two more rabbits vanished, I kept my mouth shut and avoided Bradley at all cost.

The Jacobsens eventually moved their hutches into the barn and we never heard about the rabbits again. I kept track of the other neighborhood animals but none went missing. The school year started and neither Bradley nor his siblings attended. We weren't sure where they went during the day, but one boy reported seeing them out in the fields harvesting corn and pumpkins during class and we suspected their father wasn't bringing in any income.

Their mother grew rounder and more doughy and we learned that she was due to have another child soon. Our parents shook their heads over dinner and told us to stay away from those children. We happily obliged.

As the fall began to turn to winter I started hearing Bradley outside at night. He would wander the front yards, going through mailboxes for any unclaimed mail or putting his face to peoples windows, leaving spade shaped oil stains on the glass all around the neighborhood. When snow was available, he built strange snow sculptures. Odd shapes stacked together in riddles we couldn't solve. I heard him break into sheds and steal whatever he could find inside. His mother began to look healthier and we heard stories of people hearing him speak to strangers when he was out with his mother. He was possessive of her, would stand in front of her belly and refuse to let anyone disturb the child growing inside her. He used that phrase frequently. He seemed to attach some kind of importance to it that remained a mystery when his mother finally left to give birth in the town clinic.

There were complications, and she was gone for a long time. In her absence Bradley grew restless and we almost never saw him at home anymore. No one knew where he went until I found him in the library, devouring an endless stream of books with an almost manic concentration. I read the titles. They were books on trees, plants. Soil and minerals and how to plant and where and when. Every day he woke up at dawn and went to the library and stayed until the doors closed. I never saw him eat. His skin was tight and his freckles began to fade.

His mother came home alone. No one talked about it. The house was quiet at night and there were rumors. The baby had been deformed. It had been born without a brain. Her husband was gone and now it was her and her surviving children and the house deafened all of us with its silence.

At night Bradley wandered the neighborhood with a shovel and wheelbarrow and dug up flower beds, leaving the crushed blossoms in favor of the soil they grew in. He carted load after load down the block and a peek over his fence one afternoon proved that he was taking it to his backyard and leaving it in chaotic piles. I could not imagine what he was planning. As soon as he had what he needed, he vanished, and I never saw him out at night again.

Then animals began to go missing.

He was smart enough not to take pets. He went after the wildlife instead. Whether they were alive or dead when he took them appeared to be irrelevant. The streets were clear and all around the neighborhood the cats wandered in search of any living thing. After he shot down a crow with a rusty pellet gun and planted bug bombs in the hollow trunks of trees, even the birds stopped coming. Our neighborhood was clean and quiet and all of us held our breath and waited for the countdown to come to an end.

As it turned out, I was there when it happened.

I woke up because I could hear him crying.

The wind carried his voice to my window and I listened for a while. He keened, and intermittently there was the sound of metal against metal. I slipped on my robe and padded down the hall. I held the screen so that it wouldn't creak and when I slipped out the world was quiet and still except for that soft broken sound. I followed it to Bradley's yard, where I knew it would be coming from, and I peered through a hole in the fence at him.

He was hunched over the wheelbarrow, which was full of sod. His hands were buried up the to his forearms, and he held them still as the rest of him hitched and shook. Abruptly he kicked the wheelbarrow and the sound caused me to flinch. He heard my sound of surprise and before I could get very far he had exploded out of the back gate and was at my heels. He closed his hand around my hair and dragged me back to the yard. The pain stunned me into silence and the only sound I made was a whimper when he held my head above the wheelbarrow and forced me to look at what was inside.

It was half buried in the dirt and I saw that he had been lifting it out of the dirt slowly. A soccer ball sized pouch made of some kind of animal tissue. Stitches bit at the surface, roped across it in every direction. In places the bag was split, and where he'd torn it open it oozed something foul and black. The smell was unimaginable. I gagged and he cried harder.

"It didn't work! It should have, I read everything! I got it right but it still didn't work!"

He took my hand and wrenched it down into the black tar. It was cold and thick and when I began to scream he clapped a hand over my mouth.

"Just feel it, maybe you know. Do you know why?"

Deep in the bag where my hand had been thrust I could feel the porcelain surface of bones and the bristle of hair. I struggled and he held me tighter.

"I put all the right minerals in. It's got bone for calcium and everything."

He pressed against me and I could feel the sickly fever heat radiating off of him.

"Homunculi don't even need it but it didn't hurt, right? Is that why it's dead? Is that why?"

Something in the bag shifted as I struggled and with a final heave I managed to break free. I shoved him into the wheelbarrow and he caught himself but the barrow tipped. The contents cascaded onto the lawn and the bag exploded with a wet pop. He wailed and fell to his knees, trying to gather the contents to his chest, and as she fled she looked back to see him staring after her, his eyes dark and wide.

"I was going to give it to her!" He called. "Why didn't it work?"

The entire way home, I could hear him screaming. Even after all the lights came on and I was running my hand under scalding water I could hear him scream and scream.

"Why didn't it work?"