Iceman

9 Days Later

It was Sunday and Donna had taken Jonathan to church with her. She tried to get Jack to go and he begged off. Work.

“It's Sunday, honey,” she said.

“I know."

“Do you have to work on Sunday?"

“No choice, Donna. Sorry,” he lied.

“We'll miss you. Won't we, my big boy?” He said nothing, dressed in his finery. Clean. “Won't we miss Daddy?"

“No,” the boy said loudly.

“There you are,” Eichord said.

“NO."

“Say YES. Jonathan. Say YES. Can you say YES?"

"NO!"

“Please?"

“No,” the child cooed pleasantly.

“Okay.” Donna turned to Jack. “Come with us?"

“Can't do it, babe.” He was afraid that everything showed in his voice. He had the doll house and the three dolls waiting for them for after church. He'd had them for days, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't wait any longer. They had to start trying to pull the little boy out of whatever darkness had hold of him.

Church had been a disaster for Donna. Jonathan had misbehaved, she told him, and she'd finally been forced to take him to the cry room, off the nursery, where a woman had entertained him until the services were over and Donna could reclaim him.

“Were you a bad boy in church?” Jack asked.

"NO! NO! NO! NO!" Screaming at the top of his voice.

After he'd had some time to calm down, the three of them had a light lunch, and then Jack and Donna sat down on the floor with Jonathan and played dolls. This is Mommy and Daddy. They love each other very much. God gave them a little son. This is Jonathan. They loved Jonathan with all their hearts. They lived together in a house by the side of the road. And so on...

About five-forty-five Donna walked in front of the TV set in the family room where Jack sat vegetating in front of a football game. She was sobbing.

“What is it, angel?” He leaned forward, starting to stand up, and froze at the look of horror on her face as she showed him what she had in her hands.

“He-he brought them to me.” It was the Mommy and Daddy dolls. They were headless. Hey, things take time. No big deal. He's just a little boy.

He waited until about eight that night, and on the pretense of going out to pick up a magazine, he left the house and called Doug Geary long-distance from a payphone. He took him through the recent chain of events.

Dr. Geary said, “Jack, my friend, isn't it possible you've blown these things out of proportion? Two-year-olds don't take photographs out of picture frames. Their hand-to-eye coordination wouldn't allow it. Don't you think you may be reading into the—"

“Doc, it wasn't like that. He pulled that picture down and the glass broke. It never did fit in the frame right anyway, and when it hit the floor, the picture fell out. But he reached a little hand into that pile of glass and got the photograph. I saw him tear it. I saw his eyes."

“He'll grow out of it. Jack. They all do."

“He tore the HEADS off the dolls that represented us. He HATES us."

“Listen, it's perfectly natural.” He spent ten more minutes doing his best to reassure Jack Eichord that two-year-old Jonathan was going to be all right. It would work out. The kid wasn't a latent psycopath, after all. Everything would work out.

Finally Jack rang off with self-deprecating apologies, some laughter, and profuse thanks. But he wasn't smiling when the line went dead. Inside him there was something worse than any horror he'd ever known. A gnawing thing that he was afraid was chewing out a permanent place in his guts. He had lived to see one of his worst fears realized: finding himself having to constantly fight his own thought processes, the one horror you can never escape. Thought cancer.

Driving back home under the painful weight of it, he could understand that he was working overtime to throw off verboten thoughts, fighting to shake loose of them like someone throwing off piles of extra covers on a hot summer night, only to awake the next morning drenched in sweat and covered in the same blankets.

And in the morning Eichord woke up petrified with the fearful leftover vision from his night dreams: the official form with the space marked accident—suicide-homicide. The one he'd dreamed was marked cause of death—deferred.