Those to be Forgiven

Published: 18 Jan 2018

You do know that what happened to your friend, when you were seven years-old, wasn’t your fault don’t you Mr Quaid?

Like I said… I know and I don’t.

What happened to Tommy would very likely have happened to some other kid if not him.

But it didn’t happen to some other kid did it? It was Tommy.

Do you believe that thoughts of Tommy coloured your relationship to the Donny Baldwin Case?

I don’t think it did, no. Maybe somewhere in the back of my mind it might have made me a little more eager to find out what happened to Donny. But I wasn’t seeking to redeem my seven year-old self. I had learned to live it with it. Accepted my part in it.

So trying to find Donny Baldwin wasn’t your way of also trying to find Tommy Barton?

That would be a little on the nose don’t you think? Sounds like the motivations of a protagonist from some bad fiction.

What about Pickman? You said that you felt that your relationship with him was changing?

I’m not sure changing is the right word. But like I said, I was certainly beginning to find him a lot less objectionable than I had in the past.

Do you put that down to the Donny Baldwin case or that you were, then, both caught up with Christian Christiansands and The Dutchman?

A little of both. Plus, you know, I had never actually spent as much time with him as I was spending with him on that North Carolina trip. Hearing him talk about growing older and thinking about leaving the life he had made himself behind for something a little more wholesome… I wished that for him… If we can build new and better lives for ourselves out of the ashes of old ones why shouldn’t we? Pickman was a creep and a weasel faced oddball whose life and fortune was made on people’s worst instincts… but he wasn’t a ‘bad’ man, he wasn’t beyond redemption. Why shouldn’t he have the chance to live that life if he wanted to… if he was capable of doing so.

A better life? Interesting choice of words.

Is it?

How about you? Did you wish for a more wholesome life?

You mean white picket fences a dog and a couple of kids?

Of a sort.

Perhaps. I mean I used to. I thought David and I would end up there someday. Maybe in retirement. Still being relatively young and with everything that The City offered we weren’t quite there yet.

And now you don’t wish for that?

No. Knowing the things that I know now and with everything that happened… With the things that I’ve seen… I don’t know how I could go to that. I don’t know how I could pretend that living a normal life of any sort is possible.

People do it all the time.

People who don’t know what’s out there maybe. People who can have families and homes and think that they have forever to enjoy it.

So no fairytale ending for Mr Ramsay Quaid?

I don’t believe in fairytales.

No? If not that then why continue to do what you do? What drives you now Mr Quaid? Hunting the monsters that hide under children’s beds?

Because what I do is necessary. Because monsters are real… It’s what drives you isn’t it?

There are many drives that keep me doing what I do Mr Quaid. Not least a sense of duty.

To your country?

To the human race.

How very noble of you… You almost sound as if you think that we’re worth it.

Of course we’re worth it. The whole of human history… what we have achieved, what we can achieve…

Remember I told you about that supernova I watched when I was seven years-old? The SN 1987A? That was my first inkling of how small and pointless and hollow human existence actually is. Because the thing is, that when the universe throws exploding suns at you I don’t see how you can view the human race as significant or worthwhile in any way whatsoever.

Seven is a little young to be embracing Nihilism Mr Quaid.

Maybe not Nihilism… I’ve not given up completely.

You read literature at college with a view to perhaps becoming a teacher Mr Quaid. A molder of young minds… You quote Steinbeck and MacDonald Fraser. What is literature if not one man’s search for meaning.

Ego.

So all literature is Ego?

Of a sort. ‘I know how things really are so I’m going to write it down and bind it and sell it to the world’. That takes ego.

You don’t think people have the need to tell stories?

In a sense yes. Just as people have the need to hear or read them.

Did you ever consider being a writer Mr Quaid? Displaying that Ego for an audience?

I toyed with the idea. But I prefer other people’s stories. It’s perhaps part of the reason I became a Private Investigator.

Interesting…

Is it?

I think so. Even if you do not.

(…)

So you and Pickman, now friends, were sitting in a parked Ford Pinto awaiting Johnny Ives to leave Penny’s diner in Goldsboro, North Carolina…

Yeah. I couldn’t think of another way of tracking him down to his trailer park. The road between Goldsboro and Kinston was thirty-two miles long with a mix of woods and farmland on either side. It would make sense that he was closer to Goldsboro than not, considering that he ate at the diner so often. But tailing his truck seemed like the quickest way to get there. You gotta remember that Christiansands expected us back in the city in a couple of days.

Was it the incident with Johnny Ives that made you stop you believing in fairytales Mr Quaid?

Heh… No. It was the incident with Johnny Ives that made me believe in monsters.

The sun hadn’t quite set but the sky had streaked purple and orange and the clouds were more shadows that circled like a swell above us. We had been sitting in Pickman’s Pinto for a little over an hour while we waited for Johnny Ives to finish his sausage and grits. Time passed and we killed it by talking and listening to the radio. Pickman was hung up on how I was going to approach Ives. I told him that that wasn’t something that he’d need to worry about. In truth, I had no real idea at the time. I figured that I could wing it.

I checked through the emails on my notebook to find that Roland Burgess had sent through the PDFs of the Cine Boys playbills along with the nine copies of Stephen Crops ‘All American Boy Pictorial’. I gave them a quick glance but I didn’t let my eyes linger on them for long. With Pickman in the car with me it seemed… inappropriate somehow. I will say that the magazines didn’t phase me. Nudist in nature and with little more ‘erotic’ than a couple of half erect cocks in the centrefolds I could see the allure of material like this. I mean… I wish I couldn’t… but I can. Of the boys featured I recognised two from the last issue (dated August nineteen seventy-four) that had been in the film loops. Crops and Sisk must have started working together around that time. With the speed of everything that had happened after I leaving Burgess’s office I hadn’t had the opportunity to do a search on the two Stephen’s. I’d rectify that once I got back to The City.

The playbills were very much the same as the one that Roland had showed me in his office. A few of the pictures for the film loops came from scenes that I had seen on the porn site that Darnell had directed me to. But most were new. It gave me a better idea of the scope of Crops and Sisk’s operation. What did keep my attention a little longer however was that a couple of the film loops advertised showed stills of the boy from the clip with Donny: the slightly older brunette with the scar on his face. I wondered what came first for him: the Cine Boys films or the ones that they didn’t show in the gay porn theatres.

Burgess had written that if I hadn’t made it down to NC yet he’d pay me handsomely for any old films of Johnny’s that I could lay my hands on. I had no interest in playing any part of whatever kiddy porn ring that Burgess was running; the thought of being party to his business made my flesh run cold. But I did consider that I might need his help again. I didn’t respond in the end, figured that I’d see what came out of my conversation Ives first.

When I finally saw Ives’ vintage Ford Texaco truck pull out of the diner’s carpark I closed my notebook and counted to twenty; getting Pickman to follow him along the road. Close enough that we could keep a beam on him but not so tight that he’d think we were tailing with intent.

I’ve no idea how long it had been since he’d washed that truck – caked as it was in dirt and dust. I made a note of the registration and took a couple of photos of it with my phone. The pictures are included in the report there…

We’d only been driving for fifteen minutes when he took a turn right down a narrow road just before a small town called Walnut Creek.

“Should we keep on him?” Pickman asked, not wanting our mark to notice us.

“Yeah. Hang back a bit though.” I counted to twenty again as we sat at the turn off and then nodded for Pickman to follow.

Along a road lined with densely packed trees to our right and open farmland to the left; we kept the break lights of the truck in sight in the distance. Picking up speed at the far end of the road we could see Ives turn right as if heading back toward Goldsboro along the road than ran parallel to the US70.

“Keep on him but stay back.”

While Ives continued North we could see the glittering surface of Spring Lake through the trees on our left and little through the impenetrable mass of forest on our right. It was only another five minutes before the truck turned down a dirt road that lead into the woods.

As we pulled up to where Ives turned off of the road Pickman asked: “You want to follow him?”

“On foot. Leave the car.”

“Don’t you think…”

“No. On foot.” I reached over into the backseat and pulled my briefcase to my lap. I took out my Glock-22 and checked it over.

“You reckoning on needing that?”

“I hope not.” I took out the copies of the photos of Donny, that had been sent to the Brother, and folded them before placing them in my jacket pocket.

“So we just gonna walk up to him and start asking questions?”

“I don’t see any other way.”

“What if he’s not the talkative type?”

“Then we take a page out of Marko Keena’s book. If this guy is as described by Roland Burgess I’m not going to lose any sleep over getting rough with him. Are you?”

“I’m not exactly the rough and tumble type Ramsay.”

Tossing the briefcase back to the backseat I turned to look out of the window and took a deep breath. My knees were shaking and I could feel those nerves radiating up my body.

“Ready?”

“Nearly.” I popped the glovebox and took out the bottle of cheap whisky.

Pickman watched as I downed a few gulps and then shook his head when I offered him the bottle.

“You nervous?”

I snorted as I put the bottle back. “Not going to lie…”

It had gotten dark; but the stars shining through the canopy above our heads gave us enough light to follow the tire tracks. As long as we’d stayed with our feet skiffing the dead leaves and dirt to the right we wouldn’t leave any footprints. We’d been walking through the forest for little more than fifteen minutes with only the sound of the occasional passing car on the road behind us, when we heard the sound of a kid crying in the near distance. Pickman looked to me and I to him and we picked up our pace.

When, eventually, we saw the pinpricks of light through the trees we veered away from the tire tracks to avoid making an entrance through whatever counted as the front drive.

The trailer park wasn’t much to look at. Under the awning of leaves provided by the woods: six static trailers stood lifted up on bricks with faded and peeling paintwork; a couple of ripped couches sat out in the open; a couple of fold-out lawn chairs; an unused lamp-style outdoor heater; a bar-b-que pit and a children’s blow-up paddling pool half filled with water and half filled with dead leaves and bits of scruff. There were lights strung up through the trees surrounding the trailers with power leads plugged into a gas generator that ticked away quietly behind what looked like a quickly made fence of corrugated iron and wire. I took a few more photos with my phone. You’ll have to excuse the quality. I didn’t feel confident enough to use the flash.

“Looks homely!” whispered Pickman with an upturned lip.

Johnny Ives’ truck was parked up outside a maroon painted trailer, it’s screen door wide open and the ground about the steps littered with cigarette butts. A red plastic crate of empty beer bottles sat on its side. The crying kid had stopped and all was silent.

While we hesitated as I tried to gather enough nerve to push forward; one of the trailer doors to our left clicked open and Pickman braced his thighs ready to run – until i grabbed him by the wrist.

Out of the trailer stepped a skinny kid of fifteen. Dark hair, tan and wide eyes, in a white and powder blue North Carolina Tar Heels basketball vest and black shorts. He lit a cigarette with a match from his pocket, struck against the side of the trailer, and walked over to the Johnny’s truck – kicking at the wheel before planting himself down on the crate of empty beer bottles.

“Are we going in?” Pickman whispered in my ear.

“Not yet.”

We watched the kid finish his cigarette and toss it to the pile of others by the maroon trailers steps, throwing out his leg to squash the butt under the heel of his sneaker, before reaching into his black shorts and adjusting himself.

“Mike? Mike?” An adult voice hollered from inside the trailer.

“What?” the kid sitting on the beer crate stood up and sniffed his fingers.

From the open door stepped Johnny Ives. Somewhere in his mid twenties, shirtless and wirey, a sleeve of black and gray shaded tattoos down his right arm and a single symbol on his on his left pec – something that seemed kind of tribal. His hair was scruffy and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He wiped his hands down the front of his jeans leaving damp grease marks over the thighs and fixed the kid with a stare.

“Go get me a beer boy!”

“Get it yourself!”

Johnny slammed the palm of his hand against the side of the trailer and sent the boy: Mike, into a startled jump. “You get me another beer you little whore or I swear I’ll tan your hide like you ain’t ever had before.”

As Johnny disappeared back into the trailer Pickman and I walked around the perimeter, following the boy to a small makeshift shed behind a green trailer; wires and cable trailing the ground toward the generator. From inside we could hear the rattle of glass bottles and the kid talking to himself under his breath: “Fuck you Johnny. Fuck you, you crazy fuck! Get your own goddamn beer you son-of-a-fucking-bitch.” He’d been in there for less than minute under the light of the open refrigerator door when the tone of his voice changed from contempt to fear: “Shit! Shit-shit-shit!”

“Where’s my beer faggot?” Johnny called out from inside his trailer.

As the kid frantically tossed glass bottles around the fridge in the shed his voice grew more panicked.

“I swear, kid… If you ain’t getting my beer…” Johnny had left his trailer and was moving towards the shed, a folded belt in his hands.

“I’m sorry Johnny… I’m sorry…” The kid came out of the shed and face to face with a furious looking Johnny Ives. “You had the last one Johnny. There ain’t no more…”

Ives grabbed the boy by his shirt: “Whose responsibility is it to keep that damn cooler full?”

“Mine Johnny. It’s mine.”

“Damn right it is!” pushing the boy away.

“I’ll go get some Johnny. I’ll go into town and get some… I…”

The belt came down hard on the kids shoulder. Quickly, out of fear rather than the pain of the blow, he crumbled to his knees by Johnny’s feet.

“You ain’t gonna do shit you dirty little faggot!” He raised the belt again and brought it down on the boys arm. The kid yelped with at the strike and reached up pleadingly.

Pickman looked to me but my hand was already reaching behind me to pull my gun from the back of my slacks. I could feel my body stiffen – every muscle tensing.

“No good piece of shit fag whore!” The crack of the belt across the boy’s shoulder. “Lazy fucking little slut!” The belt on his back. “You ain’t nothing.” Again across the back. “You ain’t shit!” Again. “You ain’t fit to be fed upon!” Rather than strike the kid a final time; Johnny Ives stood over him and wiped his nose along the back of his forearm with a grin. “Piece of crap… You ain’t no use for nothin’ but a fuckin cunt hole… You know that right?”

I watched Johnny start to pop the buttons on his jeans as he stared down at the crying boy – freeing his already hard dick: “Pull down your pants!”

“Johnny no… Please…”

“Pull down your fucking pants you little whore!”

“Lay one more finger on that kid one more time and I swear I will shoot you cock off!” I stepped out of the woods, Pickman behind me, my gun pointed towards Johnny Ives privates.

“Well who the fuck are you?” Johnny’s accent was thick and from further south than where we stood.

“Johnny Ives?”

The kid clambered up onto hands and knees and scrambled through the dirt to Pickman’s feet.

“You ain’t gonna shoot me.” Johnny dropped the belt to the floor and squared up. “You know who I am? I’m Johnny-fucking-Ives! I’m untouchable mother-fucker!”

I could hear the kid whispering by Pickman’s feet through whimpered short stabbing breaths: “Shoot him… Shoot him…”

“I just came here to talk. But I’m not going to let you hurt that kid again.”

Ives smiled wide, his lips stretching his face almost unnaturally. It was the first time I noticed the faded scar on his left cheek: running from the corner of his mouth to his cheek bone.

“Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc…”

Something about the words? that he was saying. I didn’t recognise the language… if it even was a language… but I knew it was ugly and I knew it was old… I can’t rightly explain how, I just… I just felt it under my skin and in my stomach… in my throat. I wanted to vomit…

Johnny reached behind his back and I saw the flash of gunmetal lit up by the lamps surrounding the camp. I heard the kid by Pickman’s feet shout loud: “SHOOT HIM!” and I was quick to raise my gun and fire, hitting Johnny’s left shoulder and sending the gun flying from his hands as he fell backward into the leaf trash. When he scrambled quickly, to turn and reach for his gun I popped off a second shot just a few inches from his outstretched fingers.

“You’re going to want to sit up and steer clear of the weapon.” I tried real hard to steady my nerve and look like I was more confident than I was actually feeling. All the while he looked up at me from his place in the dirt with hate in his eyes and that horrible twisted half smile on his face.

That was when the kid sprang from Pickman’s feet and launched himself at Ives. A volley of savage punches and slaps landing about the man’s face and torso amid screams and shouts. I looked to Pickman who, ran over to the boy and lifted him kicking, punching and screaming from the man on the ground.

“Where are the others?” I asked Ives as he spat blood to the forest floor.

“What others?” Johnny wiping blood from a fresh cut on his lip.

“The other boys.”

“Locked in the trailers.” The kid said between sobs. “He’s got the keys.”

“Get up!” I tipped the gun at him and watched him lift himself up to his knees. “Slowly.”

Ives smiled again, one hand on the bullet hole as he stood.

“You’re going to need to do what I need you to do or I’m going to let you bleed out.” The bullet hadn’t gone through him. Instead lodging itself somewhere in his shoulder.

“Get on with it.”

“Into your trailer.” I motioned from him to the trailer door with while Pickman jogged over and picked up the gun that Ives had dropped – holding it in his hand like some alien thing he’d never thought to see before. I asked him about it later on and he’d told me it was the first time that he’d ever actually held one in his hands.

Pickman went in first, then the the kid, then Ives and finally me. The stench of his trailer was overwhelming: Cigarette smoke, body odour, stale beer and cum – catching in the back of my throat and forcing a retch as I entered. It was too dark to see, the only light coming from the flickering screen of a television, but when the kid hit the light switch my eyes were assaulted. On every available flat surface were some of the vilest and most heart sickening photographs I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. Images that are going to stay with me until I die. The most horrific scenes of abuse and degradation were pinned to walls and cabinet doors, scattered over counter tops and tables… Who knows how many childhoods ruined?

“Sit down!” I barked.

“You know… I could do with a little first aid here.” Ives took a seat on a wooden chair by what passed as a kitchen counter.

The kid opened a cabinet above the sink and pulled out a first aid kit and passed it to Pickman, who set about bandaging Ives shoulder. All the while; that creep smiling at us like he knew some great and terrible secret. Let the bullet sit in him, I thought. Let shards of it ride the rivers of his veins and find lodging in his heart.

I looked to the television to see more horror… more abuse… a boy no older than ten being… I asked the kid to turn it off.

“Give him the keys to the other trailers?” I motioned from Ives to the kid.

“Or what?”

“You want me to put a hole in your other shoulder?”

“Give him the keys.” Pickman finding his voice and pressing down hard on the wound.

Ives squirmed under the pain and relented – reached into the pocket of his half unbuttoned low slung filthy jeans and threw a set of keys at the kid.

“Get them out. Make sure everyone is OK. Don’t come back in here.”

The kid looked between me and Ives and then left.

“What now?” Pickman was twitchier than usual, as he finished wrapping Ives shoulder, which I can’t blame him for considering the situation we found ourselves in. For some reason I was as calm as I had ever been – considering the nerves I had felt in the car and as we neared the trailer park I kind of shocked myself. I can’t rightly explain it. It was the first time that I had fired my gun outside of a range and the first time that I had put a bullet in someone. You’d think that I would have been shaking with the adrenaline.

“Tie his wrists behind his back.” Pickman looked around the trailer, trying his hardest not to look at the photos that filled every available space, while I kept my gun pointed at the filth in front of me. He found a length of rope in a drawer by Ives’s unmade bed and proceeded to do as I had asked.

“Check on the boy. Make sure all the kids are safe. Take the first-aid kit and wait outside for me.”

“You sure about this?”

I nodded and waited for Pickman to leave. I had never been so sure of anything in my life.

Ives sat staring up at me, licking his lips with a grin. He seemed pretty confident for a man who had just been shot and now found himself tied to a chair.

“All I wanted to do was ask you a couple of questions.” I said once we were alone in the trailer. Feeling safe enough I put the Glock back in the waist of my slacks and started to pull down the photographs so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at them – tossing them into the sink.

“You pulled a gun on me you son-of-a-bitch!”

“You would’ve killed that kid.” I didn’t even look at him.

“That kid ain’t dying anytime soon.”

I stopped… and stared through him wanting to hit him. To pistol whip him with the butt of my Glock until he was a broken bloody mess on the floor of his trailer.

“How’d you find my little paradise? Someone been talking?” He was chewing on his tongue like it was tobacco.

“Roland Burgess. In New York.”

Ives started laughing. “What that limp wristed fairy offer you for the hit?”

“It’s not a hit. I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

“BULLSHIT!” he spat. “That good-for-nothing homo’s been after my collection for years. How much did offer you huh? He paying by the reel or by the amount of blood spilled?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead wondering to myself whether Burgess had set me up to do his dirty work.

“Looks a little like you’ve been through the wars yourself.” His smile returning to his face.

I lifted my left hand in its cast and wondered how much it would hurt me if I smacked him across his smug face with it.

“Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc…”

“What is that? You said that to me out there… That language… what was it?”

He laughed. “To believe, to begin. The purpose of your flesh… of all flesh is for Him!”

“What? Him? Him who?”

“You ain’t fit to have his name reach your ears.” That fucking smile: “The Violator! The Profane! The Lord of Man’s Desire!” He was getting excited – his hips lifting off of the chair like he was fucking the air.

“Is this some cultist bullshit? Because between missing kids, Gangsters, Dutch gun runners and weed farmers I’m neck deep in shit as it is! I don’t need…”

“G’ tekeli’li tekel’d gnh’gua h’k e’ latho! J’ngc’ubbuc b’nugh rrthna-tep!”

Again. Something in those guttural sounds. Those… ‘words?’ that sounded so alien, yet so familiar… that dripped from his lips… they set my flesh alight with some terrible cold fire. Then: something in the look that he gave me! Something in that smile and in those eyes… I suddenly recognised him! I recognised him but it was impossible! Johnny Ives, the man in front of me, must have been ten years younger than I was – but there was no doubt in my mind in that moment… The eyes, the smile… the scar from his lips to his cheek… He was the dark haired kid in the video clip with Donny Baldwin!

I was dumbstruck at first as my brain went into overdrive trying to figure out how what I was seeing could be even remotely possible. Was he the kids kid? No… they wouldn’t share a scar. Was he just similar looking? No… the eyes had it… that scar on his face… I was certain it was him.

“What happened to Donny?”

“What?”

“Donny Baldwin! What happened to Donny?”

“I don’t know what…”

I pulled the folded copies of the photos from my jacket pocket and held them out for him to see.

“Donny Baldwin! You were in a film with him nearly forty years ago. It should be impossible… but I’m right aren’t I?”

Looking at the photo of the boy on the bed Johnny Ives smiled at me and began to laugh.

I struck him as hard as I could across the face, sending him flying back in the chair. He kept laughing as his head hit the floor. I threw the photo of Donny to the sideboard and leapt on him. My hands at his face… but he kept laughing and thrusting his groin upwards into me. After slapping him across the face again but being met only with hoots and howls of demented laughter; I stood: disgusted and walked out of the trailer, leaving the door open and having Johnny’s laughter follow me.

Fresh air was what I needed. Lungfuls of the stuff.

Pickman was standing by the battered sofas in the soft lights of the lamps that glowed from the trees. Nine boys around him, each one looking as terrified as the last.

The expression on Pickman’s face was one of horror and disbelief as he looked over the kids. The oldest was the one we had first seen, the one that Johnny Ives had been whipping raw with his belt. The youngest… can’t have been more than six years-old. Few of the boys were fully dressed. None looked particularly clean. I could see bruises and cuts on their skin; tears in their hollow sad eyes.

“This is insane!” Pickman looked frightened. Unable to comprehend what had been happening to these boys. “How does shit like this happen? Who does this?”

I couldn’t answer him. I had no idea what kind of man Johnny Ives was. There isn’t a name or word in existence that accurately describes the monster that lay laughing in that trailer. “I need you to do me a favour.”

He looked up at me.

“I need you to take these kids to Kinston. Find a hospital. Get them checked over and don’t tell anyone at the hospital who you are or where these kids came from. Make sure the kids stay quiet for a few hours. Then drive back to Goldsboro. I’ll meet you there. At Penny’s Diner. Give it an hour or two.”

“How am I supposed to keep the kids quiet?”

“I’ll speak to them.” The kid in the Tar Heels basketball vest was looking up from his position on his haunches in front of one of the younger boys. “They won’t say anything til you want them to.”

“What are you going to do?” Pickman looked at me half knowing.

I didn’t answer. Just turned my back and started back towards Johnny’s maroon trailer.

“I wanna stay!” A voice behind me.

I turned and it was the kid in the basketball vest.

“I wanna stay.” He stood straight with his chest puffed out and his chin pointed at me – determination on his face.

“You know this isn’t going to end well for Johnny Ives right?”

“I know.”

I looked him over and it was the first time I noticed how handsome the kid was; a little thin and just as covered in bruises as the other boys – along with the fresh welts on his skin – but definitely handsome. Before he had looked scared. Terrified in fact. Now there was something about him; a confidence and a strength. Maybe in the space of the fifteen minutes between laying on the ground being beaten; to standing with Me and Pickman while Ives was at our mercy in his trailer… maybe in that space of time he could finally see a light at the end of what had been a very long dark tunnel.

“You’re Mike right?”

“Yeah.” The kid looked from me to his sneakered feet and back. “My name is Mike.”

I should have sent the kid away. Made him go with Pickman to make sure the other boys were safe. But there was something in face… something in his eyes that persuaded me that he needed this.

“Help Pickman take the kids to his car. Ives’ll still be here when you get back.”

Mike looked reluctant but eventually he nodded and turned away, arms outstretched as he began herding the younger boys towards the camps entrance.

I steeled myself. Took deep breaths and tried to find some sort of centre. I thought about all the Mindfulness bullshit that David had gotten into for about three months last year and focused on a field of lambs under a blue sky. But my mind was in overdrive: trying to figure out how the Johnny Ives in the trailer could possibly be the same kid that was in the film loop with Donny Baldwin.

Back in his trailer Ives was still on the floor, chuckling to himself like a lunatic. I grabbed the back of the chair and hauled him upright.

“Donny Baldwin. Nineteen Seventy-seven. Thirteen years-old.”

He continued to laugh as he tried to catch breath.

“I know you were in a film loop with him. I don’t know how… but I know it was you…” My hand had grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked his head up so I could look him in the eye.

“You don’t know nothing!” The smile never leaving his face. “You don’t know shit!”

“How old are you?”

The laughter had stopped but that cruel grin remained.

“How is it that a man who should be in his mid-fifties looks to be in his twenties?”

“H’k jyt’r mn’gh’rih-tep!” That needle scratch over my skin every time he uttered that profane language.

“If you want to get through this and see the light tomorrow morning you’re going to need to start answering my questions.”

“Lions and Wolves…” Some darkness behind his brown eyes. “Fuckin’ Lions and Wolves! Which are you little broken man?” His voice: low and deadly serious. “Your shadow under the noon sun inflating your sense of self worth? Or does the fox not dare enter your sickbed? Lions and fuckin’ Wolves… I was warned… I was told one would come eventually…”

Things I thought to be gibberish at first… I learned otherwise though didn’t I?

“You were in a film loop made in the nineteen seventies. You, another boy and Donny Baldwin… A film loop made by Stephen Crops and Stephen Sisk!”

“Crops is gone. Sisk saw to that. Sisk is gone… long time gone…” Ives laughed again. He seemed to be dipping in and out of some sort of mania.

“What do you mean Sisk saw to that? Did Sisk kill Crops?”

“Ain’t no honour among perverts and thieves.” I let go of his hair and looked at the symbol tattooed on his left pec: Something black and tribal, phallic and indecorous. “You want to know what happened to Donny?”

“Yes.”

“I fucked him! I fucked him while they filmed it. I fucked him til he begged me to stop and then I fucked him some more.”

I didn’t think. I just struck him with my left – pain shooting through my broken hand, up into my arm and down my spine.

Johnny Ives spat blood down his chin and over his chest.

“Why did they take him? If they had kids like you? Why take Donny?”

Ives chuckled under his breath. “Virgin boy. Pure and clean. Wholesome little peewee quarterback… Tight… so very tight.”

I struck him again. This time with my right. This time knocking him back and tipping his chair over and to the floor once more. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him through violence… I just couldn’t help myself.

I was also struggling to reconcile the idea of the Johnny Ives before me with the kid in the film loop. If indeed it was him, then he had to have been as much a victim as Donny was at some point. What was it that clicked in him? What was it that made him the way he was? You can research a thousand abuse victims and find them all dealing with the horrors that were inflicted upon them in different ways… Yes, some become abusers themselves but that’s a minority of cases. Some will retreat into a shell until there’s nothing left of them. Most though… most are survivors, they’ll go on to live as normal a life as they possibly can… What Johnny Ives was… Shit! That was far from normal.

“You wanna see the films?” he asked from the floor. “I got all the films I’d been in. You wanna watch me fuck Donny in the ass, little broken man? It’ll get you good and hard. I know you do. Can see it in your eyes. You wanna watch me fuck that boy over and over and over….”

I was finding it difficult with Johnny Ives. I’ll admit it. In the space of minutes he was lucid and cruel and then he’d switch to manic: talking nonsense while humping at the air like there was an ass in his lap… and then he’d swap back again… I don’t know what I was expecting to be honest. But I can’t say that I was expecting what I got.

“You wanna watch together?” Laughter. “I can get one of the young ‘uns ta suck your dick while you watch me fuck Donny! You’d love that wouldn’t you. How young you want to go little broken man? All ages catered for at Casa de Ives!”

“The boys are gone Johnny. You can’t make a single one of them do anything anymore.”

He stopped laughing then. Glared up at me through half shut eyelids.

“What you done?”

“They’re already away. Far away.”

“LIAR!”

“My lips speak the word of God Johnny.” I mimicked his accent: “Ain’t no young ‘uns left for you ta hurt.”

Johnny Ives started thrashing about trying to break free from the restraints that held him to the chair on the floor. He shouted and hollered and demanded that I bring his ‘cattle’ back.

In need of a break from his bile and a breath of air away from his stinking trailer, I thought it best to leave him there on the floor screaming profanities until he tired himself out. I stepped outside, but could still here his muffled hollers and howls..

Under a cool summer evening in the woods I took a breath and tried to close my ears to the wittering and chatter of Johnny Ives from inside his trailer. I wished that I had brought the bottle of whisky out from the glovebox of Pickman’s car. To say that I was beginning to feel out of my depth would be an understatement. And I’m not shy of admitting it.

While sitting there, still trying to find that field of lambs and clear spring sky, I saw the kid, Mike, make his way back into the trailer park: something like determination on his face.

“Everyone get away OK?” I asked him.

“At a squeeze but they all got in.” Mike spat on the ground to his left looking down at me where I sat on the arm of one of the sofas. “Where’s Johnny?”

“Trailer.” I nodded behind me.

“He still alive?”

“Can’t you hear him?”

Mike curled his lip and listened hearing Ives’s muffled shouts about his ‘god-damned property’. “He gonna stay that way?”

I couldn’t answer him. If anyone I’d met since I had started this case deserved death it was Johnny Ives. Guessing at what he had been through himself though; he deserved pity too.

“How long have you been here? With Johnny?” I asked Mike.

“Since I was ten I guess.”

“How long is that?”

“Five years maybe.”

Trying to imagine what he had been through in the course of five years, spent living under the human trash that was Johnny Ives, I felt sick.

“I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“That you had to endure this. That no one tried to help you or those other kids…”

“Been so long as most of us don’t remember much else.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“No. But if you don’t know or can’t remember what else there is maybe it’s not so bad.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Mike reached into the pocket of his black basketball shorts and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “No. I don’t.”

Johnny had gone quiet in the trailer. Either exhausting himself or accepting that he had lost his ‘property’.

As Mike lit his cigarette I smiled and nodded at him: “You think maybe I could bum one of them off of you?”

He handed me a tab and lit it for me. I’m not a smoker. I had smoked for about a year when I was sixteen and trying to impress David when we started dating. We stopped at the same time. Well… I did, he continued to sneak in the occasional cigarette when he thought I wasn’t looking. But like I told you before: I knew. We’re all entitled to our secret vices. Right?

“What happened to your hand?” Mike asked to fill the silence.

“A very bad man.” I replied turning the cast over in the light.

“Worse than Johnny?”

“Different.”

The kid sat beside me on the sofa and stared into the ashes of the Bar-b-que’s fire pit.

“Your friend told me that you were a detective.” He said eventually. Mike and Pickman must have talked on the way to his car.

“Yeah.”

“Like Sherlock Holmes?”

I allowed a little laugh to slip out: “My husband wishes.” I caught a quizzical look in Mike’s chestnut brown eyes. “That would be nice but I’m not nearly half as smart.”

“He said that you were looking for a missing kid.”

“From a long time ago. He’d be in his fifties now.”

“You think Johnny knows where he is?”

I nodded, thinking back to what Johnny had said in the trailer: “What can you tell me about Johnny?”

“Not much. He drinks too much. Hurts us when he doesn’t get his way. Hurts us when he does.”

“That language he spoke. You know what that is?”

Mike clammed up suddenly. I could see fear in his eyes and he started to rock his leg.

“It’s okay. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of anymore. Johnny’s done hurting you.”

He was hesitant. The way his hand shook as he lifted the cigarette to his lips, the way his feet kicked at the stones and dirt of the duff. “They speak it sometimes.”

“They? Who’s they?”

Mike dropped the cigarette to the floor – let it burn out in the dirt: “Johnny… the others.”

“What others Mike?”

“The men who come here sometimes… the men in the hoods… The Hurdy Gurdy Man.”

“The Hurdy Gurdy Man?” In the back of my mind I heard that tambura and the distorted voice that reached out at the listener through times dense fog.

As if hearing our conversation and wanting to put an end to it, Ives called out from inside the trailer: “Donny’s still alive!”

I looked between the trailer’s open door and Mike’s face trying to decide what was the more urgent matter. The Hurdy Gurdy Man had found reference in the song played over one of the film loops… in the quoted lines from that Email from TiCK ToCK… but it was about Donny. It was always going to be about Donny.

“I want to hear about this when we’re done here.” I said to Mike as I stood and walked back towards Johnny Ives.

“You gonna take me with you?”

I didn’t answer. I honestly hadn’t thought about it. Couldn’t think about much beyond the information that I needed from Ives.

Johnny was still lying with his back on the floor and the chair under him. That cruel smile still stretched across his face.

“Donny’s still alive?”

“Yeah. That little hole’s been sold and traded more times than I can count.”

“But he’s in fifties…”

Ives just lay there smiling.

“He won’t have aged.” Mike in the doorway, his arms up as his hands rested on the frame. “Not on the outside at least.”

I shook my head. “What?”

“They keep ‘em young as long as they can.”

“That’s… that’s crazy. It’s insane!” It didn’t make sense… It was impossible… I thought it was impossible. “It… makes no sense…”

“I got films of him too.” Ives looked up at the kid. “Don’t I Mike?”

Under his breath with eyes on the ground Mike whispered: “Fuck you Johnny.”

“You wanna see that, little broken man? You wanna see Mike fucked so hard his eyes nearly burst from his head? How many men Mike? How many times did I film it? A hundred or more I’d say!” Ives was squirming in his place – bound to the chair on the floor – hips gyrating and tongue lashing at his lips. “That pink little pussy of yours sure takes a cock like there ain’t little else worth a damn dunnit Mike!”

Mike leapt at Johnny screaming. I managed to throw an arm around his waist and pull him away before he could touch him. Not that Johnny didn’t deserve it… Not that Mike didn’t deserve to be the one to deliver it. I held the kid close and tight while he screamed at Ives on the floor – hot tears running down his cheeks.

“Go outside.” I whispered in his ear as he started to calm down. “Get some air.”

As I loosened my hold on Mike his body went soft and he relented. I watched him walk to the door of the trailer and stop to look back the grinning face of Ives on the floor: “Fuck you Johnny.”

While Ives lay on the floor chuckling to himself, finding some pleasure in having upset the kid I thought about putting my heel to his nose. “You need to answer me straight: What happened to Donny Baldwin?”

“You want answers you return what’s mine.”

“The boys are gone Johnny. They’re not coming back. Non-negotiable.”

“Then I ain’t tellin you shit!”

“How is it that a man in his fifties looks so young?”

“How old you think I am?” Johnny smiling up from the floor.

“In that film loop you must have been fifteen, sixteen…”

His laughter started rising – making its way to fill the trailer.

“Lookit them films little broken man. You can take ‘em. I got others. You can watch me do all sorts of things to that kid over the years. Not just me neither. Hundreds of us had him.”

I remembered the photos that Thomas Baldwin had handed me in my office. Donny Baldwin gagged and bound on the bed. Michael Jackson’s ‘Off the Wall’ in a stack of LP’s by the record player. An album that wasn’t released until two years after Johnny was taken off of the street in Shaolin. I remembered thinking that the kid hadn’t seemed to have aged at all in that time… There’s commonly a big physical difference between most thirteen and fifteen year-olds. But I had brushed it off.

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. He provides for us and we provide for Him.” His voice adopted a sing-song quality.

“Him who? The Hurdy Gurdy Man? Is this more cultist bullshit?”

Then he started to sing. A verse to the song that I hadn’t heard before: “As ancient truth lays inhumed deep, Buried down milenia of years asleep, Eternity will burn unbound, What once was lost will again be found…”

I remember that I started to feel sick while Johnny Ives sung at me from the floor of his trailer. Dizzy and nauseous. I gripped at the sideboard – my hand clasping at photos of grown men abusing little boys.

“Tis then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man comes singing songs of love… J’l yii’mk kvr’gh hkk’gh-tep hna dho…”

My shoe found Johnny’s chest and I kicked him hard.

Winded by the blow Johnny stopped singing and started coughing.

“Where’s Donny?” I screamed lifting him back to the vertical. “You think that I’m going to leave here without answers?” I slapped him with my right hand. “Tell me… where is Donny Baldwin?”

“…that’s when the Hurdy Gurdy Man comes singing songs of love…”

Left hand in its cast under Johnny’s chin and at his throat, I ripped off the bandage that Pickman had applied, with my right, and forced my thumb into the wound on his shoulder – felt the gristle and meat of cartilage and muscle push back against the intrusion.

Johnny howled in pain loud enough to bring Mike back; from outside the trailer and in through the door.

“Where. Is. Donny. Baldwin?” I pushed my thumb in deeper – up to the first knuckle and wriggled it.

“I dunno man!” Johnny was crying. It seemed like the sharp reminder of physical pain brought about some scant clarity in his thinking. “I dunno.”

I forced it in further while pushing harder onto his throat my cast – causing him to gurgle and sputter. “I promise… I dunno… I promise.”

“You lying to me Johnny?”

“Take the films!” He was struggling to catch his breath. “In the cupboard by the door.” I followed his eyes. “You’ll find something in the films!”

“What will I find in the films?”

“Florida… He was taken to Florida… Manasota Key.”

I dug in deeper with my thumb until it was all the way in and the palm of my hand lay flat on his shoulder. Ives was sweating and gritting his teeth – eyes caught between bulging and clenching shut with the pain. “What’s in Manasota Key Johnny?”

“Cr… Crops house. Near Englewood beach.”

“You said Crops was gone.” I twisted my thumb around into his shoulder as his eyes started to roll back into his head.

“Sisk! Sisk killed him. Too many bad business deals… The house is still there. Abandoned… Untouched.”

I relaxed off of his throat with my cast but kept my thumb in place: “What will I find in the house Johnny?”

“In… in the basement… proof.”

“What proof? What will I find in the basement?”

But it was too late. Johnny had passed out with the pain.

I looked to Mike. The kid seemed to be enjoying what I was putting Johnny Ives through. I can’t really say that I blame him considering the wealth of shit he had experienced at his tormentor’s hands.

“You think he deserved that?” I asked withdrawing my thumb with an entirely unpleasant squelching sound and wiping it on a dirty dish cloth.

“He deserves worse.”

As I replaced the bandage over the hole in Johnny’s shoulder; I looked between the two of them: The handsome kid with daggers for eyes and the passed out pervert tied to a chair. “That maybe so but who’s going to give it to him? You? Besides I still have questions that need answering.”

Opening the cupboard door I saw the two dozen blue and steel 8mm film canisters and wealth of VHS cassettes. Sighing to myself I started to pull them out and stack them on the kitchen counter top. “You’d think that he’d have digitized all this.”

“About the Hurdy Gurdy Man?”

“Sorry?”

“The questions you need answering? Are they about the Hurdy Gurdy Man?”

“For one… but he said Donny was still alive. And you said that he won’t have aged.” I turned back to Mike. “I can suspend a certain amount of disbelief but this… this is outlandish to say the least.”

“It’s true…” Mike believed what he was saying, even if what he was saying was bullshit. I could see it on his face.

“And how do they manage that?”

“Sacrifices.” Mike looked close to tears. “I seen them do it.”

“So what? Bunch of guys in hoods around an altar? Swirling smoked filled light?” I shouldn’t have been mocking him but I can’t stress enough how insane I thought this all sounded.

“No. They’d say words. In that language they speak. Read from a book while jerking a kid off. They’d make the kid they wanted to stay young drink his… his cum.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t see… whatever that was. But to believe that…”

“You see him don’t you!” Mike raised his voice and pointed at Johnny slumped unconscious in chair. “You said that you recognise him from a film with that kid you’re looking for!”

“Look… I don’t know how he looks so young but…”

“Goddamnit!” Mike disappeared into what I presumed was Johnny’s bedroom and came back with a small leatherbound book. He held it out to me. “Here! It’s all in here!”

I opened the book and leafed through the pages. It wasn’t old and I presume written in Johnny’s hand. There were a few sentences written in English but it was largely nonsense; Letters jumbled around with apostrophes, too many consonants and not enough vowels; Sketches of genitals, erect and soft, triangles and circles and swirls in the margins. The product of Ives diseased mind.

“That’s Johnny’s book. He copied bits out from some of the other guys books. I’d seen him at his desk doing it when the men in the hoods would come.”

“What’s this?” I held the book open at full two page illustration drawn in careful detail by Ives hand: It looked like a fat maggot or an uncircumcised penis, oozing from both ends, it’s felshy wet surface covered in tiny mouths.

“That’s the thing that they pray to. Johnny and the others… the Hurdy Gurdy Man too. It’s the thing that lets Johnny stay young.”

“J’ngc’ubbuc…” Ives had come to and was looking up at us with undisguised hatred. “Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc…”

I don’t know what it was that had gotten into him or how he managed it or if maybe he could have even done it all along but in a swift and violent movement Ives broke free of the the restraints that had bound him to the chair. In an instant he was on me and punching and slapping and foaming at the mouth. All the while screaming in a deep malevolent voice that seemed to be coming less from his lips and more from the walls of the trailer those words: “Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc!” His hands were wrapped around my throat; squeezing with a strength I would have doubted he was capable of; his knees on my shoulders pinning my arms to the ground. “Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc! Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc!” I tried kicking, tried twisting my torso but he was improbably strong. “Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc! Vug’r nghai dho tegoth glakki hna e’ J’ngc’ubbuc!” I swear that I could feel the life leaving me as my vision became cloudy while I gargled and gagged and tried my damndest to throw him from my chest..

It was as I was resigning myself to the fact that this was it; that I’d never see my husband David again; that I’d never lose at another computer game to Darnell Cooper; that I’d never hear Pickman whine and complain about his lot in life… That was when I saw the tip of the knife burst through Ives’ throat.

The strength seemed to immediately leave his hands as his eyes widened and a last wet gurgle escaped his lips. He coughed, flapped his mouth wordlessly and fell to the right. It was then, with my vision returning that I saw Mike standing over me. Blood on his hands and a look of sheer shock at what he had done across his face.

To Be Continued…

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