Fragments Read online

  Sometimes she would refuse food for days at a time, or send out books and other offerings shredded, but she always came around. It disappointed him in a way. If she had been stronger she could have starved herself to death. But if she had been stronger maybe it wouldn’t have happened to her in the first place, and maybe she wouldn’t have turned into a monster.

  He regretted not putting a radio in the room for her. They were too big to get through the opening, so he took to sitting downstairs and listening to the radio loud enough so she could hear it. She never asked to hear anything in particular, so he mostly listened to news and band music. When TV finally seduced him away from the radio, he would turn the radio on in the evenings, putting it on a rock-and-roll station. He didn’t know if she liked the music; she never said. But one day when he came downstairs he thought he heard her singing an Elvis Presley song.

  At Christmas he always wrapped gifts and slid them through the opening. On the morning of her seventh Christmas in the room he sat on the floor of his living room and wrapped her presents. He had a pink cashmere sweater, a set of pastel drawing chalk, and a radio small enough to fit through the opening. He wrapped the presents in Santa Claus paper. It was kiddie wrap, but he thought of her as the sleeping four-year-old in his mind, not the eighteen-year-old maniac he’d last seen. When the presents were wrapped with red ribbons and red bows, he put a candy cane on each present and took them down the stairs. He slid the presents through the opening, but when he turned to leave something slid out. A small package lay on the floor, wrapped in sketch paper she’d colored red. There was even a bow on top made out of shredded paper. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to thank her, but he hadn’t spoken in the basement for years and no words would come to him in that environment.

  He picked up the small package and carried it upstairs and put it under his tree. It was the only package there. He looked at it for a full hour before he got up to start the ham cooking. He checked on the package off and on all day, not wanting to open it, only to be sure it was there. It was heavy for its size, he knew that, but it might be some cruel joke. He feared he would open it and find it full of human waste or something worse.

  At dinnertime he took ham, mashed potatoes, peas, and dinner rolls down to her. He always brought her a glass of milk—she always loved milk as a little girl. When he came to her room in the corner he heard Christmas music coming out of the opening—she was playing her radio. He came back an hour later for the dishes and slid a piece of apple pie into her room.

  He couldn’t bring himself to open the package that afternoon, although he picked it up twice, feeling it and shaking it like a curious little kid. He brought her more ham for dinner and another piece of pie. The radio was playing rock-and-roll music now.

  He turned off the living-room lights and spent the evening holding her package and watching TV by the lights of his Christmas tree. He was still sitting in his chair when the TV went off the air. He watched the test pattern for a half hour and then turned it off and sat in the dark. It wouldn’t be Christmas much longer and it would be disrespectful not to open a Christmas present on Christmas. But it was hard for him. When he opened it he would know whether there was any love for him left in his little girl.

  He unwrapped it slowly, preserving the paper bow. The paper fell away, revealing a small white statue carved out of a bar of soap. It was a little girl sitting cross-legged in a chair. The detail was amazing and the surface polished smooth. The little girl’s face was turned up as if she was looking at someone standing in front of her. The face was the face of his daughter and he imagined she was looking up at him, her daddy, towering above her. The expression was a sad look, a forgiving look; the look she and her sisters gave him after he had punished them. It was a look he knew to mean I understand, and I still love you. He began to cry, and he put the statue down, afraid his tears would mar the surface.

  It was two in the morning when he had enough control to go back downstairs. The opening to her room was dark, and the radio silent. He still couldn’t speak in that place but he slid another piece of pie through the opening. It was a pitiful thank-you, but it was all he could manage. He never got another present, but he didn’t care. He knew she was insane and a killer. He knew he was insane, too, or he wouldn’t have sealed her in. But in one moment, when they were both lucid, they had connected one last time. The father-and-daughter bond was there, buried in the madness that had enveloped them, and for a brief moment they had found it. He coated the statue with lacquer the next day and then placed it on the nightstand by his bed with her picture.

  Six years later he retired and stayed home with her full time. A year after that he experienced chest pain and ended up spending two days in the hospital. He had been so insistent on getting out that they had nearly sedated him. Finally he convinced them to let him go, and they sent him home with nitroglycerin in his shirt pocket. She was famished when he got home, and he fed her generously. He didn’t sleep that night, worrying about what would happen to her if he died. Would she starve to death, or would someone find her and release her? If they did, would she kill again? She wasn’t sane when he sealed her in; what would she be like now? He got up at 4 A.M. and wrote out a note explaining what he’d done and why, and where to find her; then he went back to bed. At eight he got up and tore up the note.

  Six months later he stopped worrying. He came downstairs with breakfast and found her arm sticking out through the opening. Her palm was open as if she was reaching out to grasp something. He touched her arm, keeping away from her hand for fear she would grab him. Her arm was cold. He poked her palm with a finger but got no response. She was dead. He didn’t know what had killed her. Perhaps it was suicide, perhaps she’d had a heart attack, or perhaps her appendix had burst. All he knew was that she had lived long enough to crawl to the opening and put her arm out, reaching for something—reaching for him. He sat holding her hand, crying for the little girl that had died twice—once on that terrible night, and then again some time in the early morning.

  At noon he gently put her hand down and then drove to the lumberyard to buy more bricks. When he got back he held her hand for a few more minutes, said a prayer for her, and then kissed her palm. Then he gently pushed her arm into the opening. He mixed up the mortar and pried out what was left of the wooden frame. He laid an even layer of mortar and put the first brick into place. It was lighter than the other bricks. It only took a few minutes to fill the opening. When he tapped the last brick into place he felt a rush of relief and sadness. He had finished a painful chapter of his life, but if there was another chapter to come he couldn’t see what it would be. She had been the last of his children, and the last of his family. What was left for an old man to do but to spend his days in loneliness and end in some nursing home in the company of strangers? He hadn’t spoken to her since he entombed her, but they had shared emotions through the small slot he had just sealed. As long as she had been in the basement he had not been alone—he was alone now.

  A week later he returned to the basement and began dismantling the canning shelves and reattaching them to the brick walls of the shop. He worked slowly, only putting in a couple of hours a day. He filled the rest of the south end of the basement with storage bins. When he was done the end of the basement was a maze of storage spaces, neatly hiding her room. Then he moved the contents of the basement onto the shelves and into the bins. The basement looked cleaner than it had in years, and you could actually see the floor again. That empty space made him sad, for he could remember watching his girls tricycle around and around the stairs on that floor. When they were older they played hopscotch and jump rope there on rainy days, or roller-skated—when they could find their skate keys.

  He seldom returned to the basement after that. Three years later he suffered a heart attack and was taken to a nursing home. After a month in the nursing home he realized he would never leave it alive and asked to have some of his personal belongings brought to his room. One of the nurses
brought him his pajamas, robe, slippers, toiletries, and a picture of him and his wife and their four daughters. The only other thing he requested was a small soap statue of a little girl sitting in a chair. When he died the house was sold.

  1

  DEATH BY SUGGESTION

  Present day

  He never thought of it as murder, since he never once touched his victims—at least not physically. He merely suggested behaviors to them, and those behaviors led to their deaths. He had long since reasoned away his guilt. After all, was it his fault their minds were weaker than his? If they were stronger they wouldn’t take his suggestions. He was merely a part of the continuing evolutionary cycle—new genetic characteristics giving an advantage to one subset of the species. He was meant to survive, and those who took his suggestions weren’t. He could live with the deaths of evolutionary dead ends and it looked like he might have to make another suggestion. Dr. Birnbaum was acting suspicious. He had taken over from his assistant, and had a determined look on his face.

  He had been tested by the best ESP experts in the world, and none of them had yet figured out how he did it. Of course, the different researchers didn’t know they were testing the same person, he made sure of that. He also made sure he showed them just enough to keep them interested, but not enough to frighten them. Besides, they were always asking the wrong questions and looking in the wrong places. The eggheads at Ohio State University were typical.

  Birnbaum and his graduate students had been testing him in a typical room for these kinds of experiments. He sat on one side of a table with a screen in front of him, while on the other side was the experimenter. This morning he had been working with a squat female graduate student named Sylvia. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a complexion problem. She was all business and totally serious, so he didn’t try to kid her along. The screen kept him from seeing her hands or the cards she had in front of her. She had been using a standard set of psi cards. Each card was printed with a different shape. There was a cross, a circle, a star, wavy lines, and a square. The experimenter would shuffle the deck and then turn the cards over one at a time, concentrating on the card. His task was to read the experimenter’s mind and indicate which card the experimenter was looking at. By chance anyone could get a match twenty percent of the time. If you could consistently exceed that twenty percent the experts assumed you had telepathic abilities. He made sure his percentage hovered around forty percent. Any more and he would become a sensation and there would be publicity. Any less and they would lose interest in him. At forty percent they paid him to be available for study, and at the same time he picked their brains, trying to learn more about himself and his ability.

  He couldn’t read minds but he used his ability to convince them he could. It was easy. Parapsychology was a young field, but already rigid in many ways. They recognized only four categories of abilities: telekinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind; telepathy, the ability to send and receive thoughts; remote reviewing, which was perceiving from a distance; and prescience, the ability to see the future. He had none of these talents and that was why they were so easy to fool.

  He always insisted that he be tested alone. He told the researchers it was to keep from being confused by the thoughts of others, but it was actually to keep from being found out. The experimenters typically started with a shuffle of the psi cards, and then they would turn them over one at a time and concentrate on the image. He would then either make a guess, which was wrong eighty percent of the time, or he would guess and then make a mental suggestion to the tester that it was a correct response. With just a gentle push the tester would record his response as right and move on to the next card. It worked like a charm and they tested him day after day, ever frustrated in trying to understand how he consistently beat chance.

  Like most parapsychologists this tester was an easy mark. She wanted so badly to believe he had psychic ability that it took almost no push at all to get her to record a correct answer. All of the graduate students that had tested him were easy, but they seemed to be getting tired of him here, and he knew that his support money would dry up soon unless he gave them something to get them excited again. He had decided to show them a sudden burst of psychic activity and get seventy percent right. At other universities that had driven them into a frenzy, insuring weeks of continued support. He had worked the scam a dozen times and it worked well—until this morning. Sylvia had been flushed with excitement when she left the room to share her results. But a few minutes later Dr. Birnbaum had come in with that serious look. He was suspicious, and suspicious people were a danger.

  Dr. Birnbaum showed no excitement over his burst of psychic power. Instead, he had asked him to be patient for a minute as he worked with the psi cards on the other side of the screen. He could hear the psi cards being worked, and he presumed he was shuffling them. He wished at that moment he could read minds, because he was sure Dr. Birnbaum was up to something. He might have gone too far with that seventy-percent success rate and cursed himself for being careless. He considered letting his performance drop to chance, but that might suggest he was hiding something. No, it was better to revert to his forty-percent success rate. Then, no matter the outcome, he would be leaving Columbus, Ohio, for good.

  “OK, Carl. I’m ready now. Let’s begin.”

  Carl was what he was calling himself now, and he had used his power to ingratiate himself with Dr. Birnbaum—just a suggestion and a push, and Dr. Birnbaum warmed up to him. He was an attractive man with a dark complexion and sharp features, and was generally affable, so with a little push he was everyone’s best friend.

  Dr. Birnbaum began the test in the usual way, but he held back pushing thoughts into his mind, watching to see if anything was different. Guessing on the first few cards he answered “square,” “square,” and “ripples.” Dr. Birnbaum’s face showed no expression. He knew he couldn’t wait too long before making his suggestions or else he would have to run a string together right at the end to get his forty percent, and that wasn’t his usual pattern. He had no choice but to suggest.

  “Card,” said Dr. Birnbaum.

  “Cross,” he replied, and then he thought “correct” and pushed with his mind.

  Dr. Birnbaum continued without response.

  “Card,” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “Circle,” he answered and pushed again.

  He let the next two cards pass without a push and then he guessed “star” and then pushed a “correct” thought at Dr. Birnbaum. No response. He finished the trials, getting his forty percent. Dr. Birnbaum thanked him and told him that would be all for today. He said his goodbyes and then left the lab and went out past the offices and into the hall. After a few minutes he retraced his steps to Dr. Birnbaum’s office. The door was partly open and he could see the crossed legs of one of the graduate students. He crept close and then leaned against the wall as if he were waiting his turn to see the professor. They were talking about him.

  “If he’s not psychic then how’s he getting them right?” one of the students asked.

  “That last series was phenomenal. He matched over seventy percent. You think he was reading my face?”

  “No, I’m sure of that,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “You have a perfect poker face. The truth is I don’t think he is getting them right,” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  His heart started to race. Dr. Birnbaum was on to him.

  “No way. We’ve tested him a hundred times with ten different experimenters.”

  He couldn’t see who was speaking and he didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Ever wonder why he insisted on being tested alone, and with the simplest procedure?”

  “He said other minds confused him. That would be consistent with a weak ability like his,” Sylvia said.

  “Maybe, but it also makes it easy for him to fake it.”

  “You think he’s cheating?” the male voice asked.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking. Let me show you what I did in that
last session.”

  He could hear some rustling like Dr. Birnbaum was clearing off his desk. Then he heard the sounds of psi cards being shuffled.

  “I presorted the cards before I went in.”

  “You stacked the decks?” Sylvia asked incredulously. “Doesn’t that violate American Psychological Association standards?”

  “Get serious,” the other graduate student replied.

  “Listen!” Dr. Birnbaum commanded. “I sorted one of the decks by symbol and then set out a pile for each symbol on the table in front of me like this.” He heard the sounds of cards being moved around. “Then I shuffled the other deck and ran through the series in the normal procedure, except for one difference. This time whenever I turned a card over and concentrated I would reach out and pick up whatever card I heard him respond with and place it in a pile next to the first, and then I would record his answer as right or wrong.”

  “To double check?” Sylvia asked.

  “Yes, but look what happened. Let’s go back through the two piles and record the matches. He got forty-two percent, right? That’s twenty-one matches. Sylvia, you turn over one pile, I’ll turn over the other. Jack, you record the matches.”

  He listened as they turned over the cards and Dr. Birnbaum called out either match or no match. He knew what they would find, of course, but waited to hear it played out. When they were done Jack added up the score.

  “It doesn’t make sense. I get only nine matches. That’s . . .”

  “Eighteen percent,” Sylvia finished for him.

  “What happened to the forty percent?” Jack asked.

  “That’s the mystery, isn’t it?” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  He didn’t like the tone of Birnbaum’s voice. He sounded smug, like he knew something he was holding back.