Beyond Recognition

27

He was late, and terrified of the consequences.

Ben had turned and locked the door from the inside before he ever smelled the guy.

He wasn’t exactly thinking about it, but his mind was registering that a house, a home, is a sacred place, with sacred sounds and sacred smells; a place of familiar sounds and familiar smells; each with its own identity. These markers represent safety and sanctuary.

That smell did not belong: sharp, salty. Not at all the sour smell of booze he had come to live with, not the smell of a girl. It was …

The smell inside the back of the camper.

At that moment of realization, a hand clutched at his shoulder and Ben screamed and took off for the stairs. The low, angry voice said something from behind him, but Ben missed all but the sensation of it, the strange tingling inside him, coupled with the palpable echo of that hand locking onto his shoulder. His reaction was born of instinct: make it to his room, lock the door, get out the window, run like hell for Emily’s, never come back.

A plan. Something upon which to focus. A few years earlier he might have thought about it. But he had learned that thought slowed you down. He glanced over his shoulder. The face belonged to Nick, the driver of the pickup truck, the guy with the burned hand and the leather belt. He was faster than Ben’s stepfather, sober, in better shape. “My money, you little shit!” A flood of fear ran like a hot liquid over him. He slipped on the stairs. Nick grunted, precariously close behind. For Ben, the hallway seemed to shrink, the seconds shortened. The world was a painful place, a voice inside him reminded. Panic seized his chest. No more plan, only the certainty that bad things happened to bad people and that by taking the money he had made himself a bad person, had crossed over to where little separated him from the man scrambling quickly up the stairs.

The strength in the man’s one good hand was not like anything human. It strangled his left ankle, tripping him, and his chin banged on the stairs as he was dragged downward. He bit his lip, and the metallic taste of his own blood filled his mouth. He understood vividly that it would not be the last blood spilled. The man dragged him closer, the rug burning against his face. Ben reared back with his right leg and drove the sole of his sneaker into the center of his attacker’s forehead. The man let go.

Ben recaptured the stairs and once again began his ascent. The suffocating fear dissipated somewhat; Ben was in his element, he knew all about escape. This was a game he understood.

As he cleared the top of the stairs, Ben heard the man right behind him. He didn’t look back. He didn’t scream. He hurried.

His bedroom door loomed at the end of the hall-a safe passage, freedom.

The entire house shook as the back door slammed shut. “Kid?” the familiar drunken voice called out.

Ben couldn’t remember a time when that voice had sounded so good.

The footsteps behind him paused.

“Help!” Ben shouted. “Look out!” A few steps from sanctuary, Ben skidded to a stop. Nick was suddenly more concerned with Jack. Ben’s drunken stepfather wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Who the fuck are you?” Jack had reached the bottom of the stairs. “Get out of my fucking house!”

“He took my money!” the intruder shouted. “Your fucking kid’s a thief.”

Ben hurried back to the top of the stairs. If his stepfather believed what he heard, Ben was dead. Nick was standing on the stairs, looking down at Ben’s stepfather. A gun was tucked into the small of his back. “Dad!” Ben shouted, wondering where that word had come from. Overcome by an unexpected protective instinct, he began to slide feet first down the stairs like a runner going for home plate, undercutting the intruder, knocking him off his feet, and propelling him toward Jack, who stood there unflinchingly, numb, gazing drunkenly at the spectacle.

A fight erupted between the two men, but it was nothing like television. They rolled around on the floor in a tangle of limbs and a blur of swearing. Ben clawed for purchase as he continued to slide down the stairs, his chin banging against each step, his brain rattled. He scratched and clawed, attempting to brake, finally grabbing for the handrail.

He stopped just short of the fray. The one called Nick was pummeling his stepfather. Ben was strangely torn by the pleasure he took in such a sight.

“I … want … my … fucking … money,” the intruder said with each hit. “My fucking money!” He slapped the man with that grotesque paddle and hit hard with the opposing fist. There was blood coming from his stepfather’s swollen eye.

Nick glanced hotly over his shoulder and met the boy’s eyes. Ben felt his stomach go to jelly. Nick grabbed hold of Ben’s shirt, which tore off in his hand as Ben jerked away. Ben screamed, stumbled back, and fell.

The intruder sprang like a cat, blocking Ben’s chance at the front door. Boxing him in, he stepped closer, arms spread wide. Ben threw a lamp at the man, turned over a chair, and reached for the door of the downstairs closet, the only escape available to him. From the corner of his one good eye, Ben picked up movement to his right; his stepfather was conscious and coming to his feet, unseen by the intruder, whose full attention was fixed on the boy. The man said clearly, “I want my fucking money.”

Ben realized that by standing there he could buy his stepfather time to come up from behind. But instinct won out-he grabbed the closet doorknob and turned.

The intruder lunged for him. Ben kicked out, blindly connecting with something that cracked. The man let out a ferocious cry. Ben slipped into the darkness, yanked the door shut behind him, and held the doorknob tight. It rotated despite Ben’s efforts. The door opened a crack. That burned hand, with its shiny pink skin, slipped through the crack in the door.

At that moment there was a huge crash. The flipper was smashed in the door and the intruder screamed again and withdrew it. Ben, retching, was sent reeling backward onto his butt, onto the trap door that led to the basement crawl space.

How many times had his stepfather cautioned him not to go down there? He had put the fear of God into him, which of course had done nothing to convince Ben to stay out. Even nailing the trap door shut had not prevented Ben from prying it open, but his subsequent expedition, his encounter with thick spider webs and a terrible smell, had finished off his curiosity once and for all. That had been over a year ago, and yet he still remembered that disgusting smell.

The enormous crash was followed by total silence. Someone’s dead, Ben thought. He pulled hard on the trap door, shaking it left and right to wiggle free the nails he had loosened a year earlier. It opened. He slipped down inside, the trap door closing above him.

The crawl space was perhaps three feet high. He had to crouch in order to move. At the far end, light seeped through the cheap construction, casting a dusty gray light throughout. It smelled damp and foul, though better than a year before. Ben crabwalked toward the darkest corner, immediately caught in a sticky tangle of spiderweb. He smacked his head on a cold, sweating water pipe.

He froze in place as he heard slow footsteps overhead. Fear pumped through him. The next sound was the closet door coming open. “Kid,” the muffled voice cautioned, “you’re pissing me off here.”

The trap door squeaked as the man stepped on it. He was in the closet!

Ben inched toward the darkness, heart pounding, chest heaving, throat dry, skin prickly. A heavy foot thumped loudly on the trap door, testing. It thumped again.

Ben dragged himself deeper into the darkness, consumed by spiderwebs, convinced that his stepfather was dead and his own death imminent.

Light flashed sharply behind him as the trap door came open. “Don’t fuck with me, kid. You’re pissing me off something bad.” He tested. “Kid?”

Ben stopped, suddenly wanting to answer. He didn’t care about the money; he would gladly give it up. He opened his mouth to reply, but nothing would come out. Slowly, carefully, as if someone had let the air out of him, Ben laid himself down prone on the dusty gravel. He would hide. It was all that was left.

The ground was disturbed there, humped, the gravel mixed with dried mud. He tried to make himself as thin, as low, as invisible as possible. The intruder’s leg entered through the hatch. The man was coming down after him.

Ben had run out of options. He couldn’t think what to do. Face pressed low to the gravel, he peered toward the open hatch and the flood of light there.

Ben’s one good eye shifted focus, the resulting perspective out of proportion. It was not gravel or stone or mud that he saw. It was not the wooden supports rising at equal intervals from poured concrete pads to support the floor overhead. Nor was it the pair of legs groping for where to land. All this remained within his field of vision, yet all that Ben could see, the entire focal point of his attention, was an arc of dull yellow metal a few inches in front of his face.

He reached out and pinched the yellow metal between his fingers. A ring. A gold ring.

At once he knew. It spoke to him in the familiar soft, tender, feminine voice that he had longed to hear. Hearing that voice brought a tightness to his throat and blurred his eyes.

His mother’s wedding ring. He knew this absolutely and without doubt. His mother’s grave.

Impelled by anger, rage, and grief, without a second thought, he sprang to his feet, crouched low, and flew through the crawl space, fingers clutching the ring. He charged wildly, knocking over the man named Nick without any outward effort other than the sheer determination to be gone from this place as fast as his feet would carry him. The intruder fell back. Ben leaped through the trap door access and hurried out of the closet.

His stepfather was just coming to, dazed and badly beaten. Ben stopped abruptly and stared down at him. Disappointment drained him: The man was alive. Their eyes met. Ben held up the ring for him to see. He reared back and kicked with more force than he knew he possessed. Jack’s head snapped back sharply and thudded onto the floor.

Ben had never dared raise a hand to the guy. The realization of what he had just done, coupled with the knowledge of his mother’s grave and the presence of the intruder behind him, sent him out the door at a full sprint. The call to 911 would come, but not until he reached a pay phone several blocks later. “I want to report a murder,” the terrified young voice was recorded as saying. “He killed my mother! She’s under the house!”

For the second time that youthful voice was recorded by the Seattle Communications Center. This time, the address given by the boy matched the address of an earlier recorded call, though that connection was missed. The center’s computer-aided dispatch system assigned the call to a patrol car near Seattle University. The driver of that car, officer Patrick Shannon, would find an unconscious man on the living room floor, the victim of an assault.

As directed, he would hold this man for questioning and pursue evidence of a possible body in the crawl space.

A second car was dispatched to the pay phone from which the 911 call had been made. The phone was back on the hook, the receiver warm to the touch.

Far away from this phone, a small boy sped through the night. Running, running, running. Running until his legs would carry him no more.