Читать книгу Head To Head - Linda Ladd - Страница 13

The mother was in excruciating pain, but she pulled the child by the hand across the upstairs landing. The embalmer had beaten her again with the strop because she’d objected to the child going down into the cellar, where the corpses were. She had been terrified, but the child had come upstairs from the cellar for dinner, all covered in blood and stinking of embalming fluid. The father kept the child in the cellar all day now, away from her. He called the child Brat now, all the time, and the child refused to talk and had eyes that were empty and haunted. She had to escape, had to get the child away. She packed one suitcase for their things, and as soon as the child was sent upstairs to be readied for dinner, she got the suitcase and pulled Brat along the upstairs hall. The embalmer had kept Brat down there until five-thirty, and she didn’t have much time to flee. They had to get out now. She held her side where he must have cracked her ribs when he kicked her two nights ago. It hurt to walk, even to talk.

She whispered to the child, “Hurry, hurry, before he comes…”

But he was standing at the bottom of the staircase, waiting. She screamed in utter horror, and the child awakened from a stupor because screaming was against the rules. She ran for the back stairs, dragging the child with her, but the father took the steps three at a time and caught her by her long blond hair before she could slam the door. He jerked the child from her hand and flung the child against the wall. Breath knocked out, the child slid limply to the floor and watched the parents fight. The mother went wild then and attacked the man with all her remaining strength. She clawed at his face and eyes and screamed until she couldn’t scream anymore, and he hit her hard with his fist and knocked her to the floor. He grabbed her up like a rag doll and forced her back against the wall. He held her off the floor, his fingers clutching her throat harder and harder. The child struggled up and screamed for the first time ever and ran and jumped on the father’s back. The father shook the child off and rammed a fist into the child’s stomach.

Gasping and coughing, the mother fled for the front stairs, but he reached her and held her with one hand while he hit her with his other fist; then he flung her down the staircase with all the force of his rage. She screamed, but it died when she hit the stairs and tumbled over and over until her head hit the floor below with a loud thud.

“This is your fault,” the embalmer raged, jerking the child off the floor. At the bottom, the woman was moaning, and the child said, “Momma, momma,” and the father said, “Go ahead and die, you whore.”

Then he picked up the struggling child in one arm and dragged the mother by her left foot down the cellar stairs, her head hitting each step along the way. Thump…thump…thump…He went to the cold room, where he kept his corpses. He tossed the screaming child down the steps into the darkness, then picked up the mother and threw her down beside the child.

“Nobody leaves this house,” he said, so angry his voice was breathless in a way the child had never heard before. “If I have to keep you down here forever, you’ll learn not to break my rules.”

The embalmer slammed the steel door shut, and the child cradled the mother’s head and held it still and listened to the wheezing sounds coming from her chest. The cold, black darkness surrounded them like a dank and malignant blanket, and the child sat shivering in the dark until the mother’s breathing stopped, and the child was alone with the dead.

The next morning the father opened the steel door, and light slanted into the cold room. The child was too chilled to move. The father draped a blanket around the child and, once they were upstairs in the house, sat the child down beside the roaring fire. The father was no longer angry. He sat in a rocker and watched the child shiver uncontrollably. Then he said, “You shouldn’t have made me knock your mother down the steps. Now she’s dead, and it’s all your fault.”

The child looked at the flames.

“But I’m not angry with you. It’s probably for the best. I can fix her where she looks like herself again, so she’s smiling and beautiful. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Brat? For her to look peaceful and happy?”

The child nodded, remembering how the mother’s head was twisted and her mouth was frozen open in a silent scream. “That’s good, Brat. That’s the way you should behave. Come along. You can help me prepare your mother.”

The embalmer picked up the child and returned to the cellar. He sat the shivering child on the tall swivel stool and walked into the cold room. When he came back out, he had the mother in his arms. He laid her gently on the steel table, straightened her broken neck with a gentleness he had not shown her in life. “See how beautiful she is, with all that long blond hair. Why don’t we braid it so it’ll look all neat and pretty? Will you help me do that?”

The child nodded, and together they took the rest of the hairpins out of the mother’s big, soft bun. The father washed the blood out of it with the water hose suspended above the table and taught the child how to braid.

“There, see, that makes her look very nice. It’ll only take a jiffy to stitch up those cuts on her face, and I can put make-up on the bruises. Watch. See how I can make her smile.” He closed the dead mother’s mouth and prodded the cold, stiff lips until they curved in a caricature of a smile. “See, look how happy she is now.”

The child thought she did look happier now.

“You must never tell anyone that you killed your mother,” the father told the child then, leaning close and speaking in a stern voice. “They would come and take you away and bury you alive in a deep, dark hole in the ground. You’d never see your mother or me again.”

The child stared at his mother’s strange grimace, afraid.

“Now you can help me prepare her, like we’ve done with the others, but this time it’s special because it’s your own mother. This is an honor for both of us.”

The embalmer gathered the sharp tools and rubber hoses and chemicals he’d need and rolled the towel-covered instrument tray beside the child. “You can hand me the tools I need. You can make up for killing your mother by being my helper.” He pointed at an instrument on the tray. “Now hand me that big scalpel.”

The child picked up the scalpel. It felt heavy and cold. The father took it and began to work. The child took the mother’s cold hand and squeezed it tightly but didn’t cry as the father cut into her soft white flesh.

The child was eight years old.