Ugly Behavior

The Child Killer

All the mommas cry when the sackman comes.

It was the neighborhood fairytale, the nursery rhyme, the cautionary fable meant to scare the children just enough that they wouldn’t stray too far, talk to strangers, or cross the wrong borders. He’d been hearing the stories for forty years, from the beginning of it all. And at one time the image of the large man (but not tall, not fat) with the huge, sure hands, walking the night streets with the voluminous gray sack across his back—a sack that sighed and cried, wriggled and shook as if there were small animals inside—had an almost romantic appeal. He felt flattered, and in fact the image hadn’t been that far from the truth.

All the mommas cry when the sackman comes around. Back in the beginning, people minded their own business. Sackman. Like some sort of superhero. Now if people saw you with a sack like that they’d call the police. Even as all the mommas used the sackman to scare their kiddies out of misbehavior.

Now his hands shook, the way the children shook while he told them their special, their final, bedtime stories.

When he’d started it had been back after the war, and a sack wasn’t all that unusual to see. Sometimes a sack was all a man had to carry what was important to him. And surely children were the most important things of all. Children were a comfort. Children were our future.

And he was the man whose task it was to murder the future.

Better get in before the sackman comes. Don’t touch that if you don’t want the sackman comin’ round here! Better be good tonight or the old sackman may just up and take you for his dinner!

Back then, as now, what was important was the children he found. And no matter how good parents were, a few children confounded the purpose of these scary old cautionary tales. A few children were even more daring and reckless upon hearing of the sackman’s activities. A few children were seemingly eager to fill his sack.

These were not bad children. The sackman had a hard time thinking of any of them as bad. Most often he thought it was, in fact, the best children who came into his sack, the ones with their heads all full of fairytales and visions of the future.

The sackman would send them all back to heaven if he could. This was impossible, of course, especially at his present age. Even if he recruited and shared his mission with thousands of like minded others, and surely they were out there, others cognizant of the need for such drastic measures, he couldn’t send them all back. He knew it was impossible because they all needed a song or a story to send them on their way, much as small children about to fall into dreamland need a story to send them on their way, and he knew he would never be able to trust anyone else with such a grave responsibility.

The little girl with the red dress was once again in his park. She always wore the red dress and he had come to assume that she must have little else to wear. The dress had torn lace in the back and had faded almost to pink in the seat area. She always came to the park unsupervised. Sometimes her face was dirty, or bruised. He wondered, in part because of these things, if she understood yet that adults were monsters.

He would be very surprised if she had such an understanding. One of the stellar charms of children was that they could be so trusting. This quality never failed to move him. They could be lied to, cheated, and abused by half the adults of their acquaintance, and still the little angels continued to put their trust in these grown-up monsters.

“Where’s your mother, dear?” he asked her again. She looked up at him solemnly, but said nothing. He patted her shoulder. He noticed with some inner disturbance that his hand trembled again. “Ah, at least someone has taught you not to speak to strangers. That’s an important thing to remember, dear.” He looked around and saw that no one else was around. He looked back down at her. “But I’m no stranger. You see, I’m just the grandfather you’ve never met, the kindly old man you’ve always dreamed about.” Her eyes grew wider. “I can see that dream in your eyes right now, dear. I can see every little thing you’re thinking. I know about little girls and little boys, you see.”

Then he took her hand and she held on tightly, letting him know once and for all time that she was at last ready to go with him. They left the park hand-in-hand, in no particular hurry. He had been wearing makeup on all his trips to this park in another town, and he had been watching the child for weeks. Her calmness, her peace with him would allay all suspicions. Anyone who did see them together would assume he was an older relative taking the child to the park. If they wondered about anything it would be why the old man didn’t buy the child a new dress. Obviously no one cared about this child. No one but the sackman.

She slid easily into the front passenger seat of his ancient, dark blue Buick. She was too short to see over the dashboard, but appeared fascinated by the old gauges beneath their highly-polished glass. He made sure she buckled the seat belt he had installed. His hands shook again (small animals in his sack) when the car wouldn’t start, then calmed when the engine coughed into rough activity. He smiled down at the little girl. It warmed his old heart when she smiled back.

The drive back to his own home town was a long one, but the little girl sat through the trip patiently. At least someone had taught her manners. Now and then she would comment politely on the beauty of the drive. He had not lived in the actual town itself for many years, preferring the relative obscurity and safety of the mountains and lakes beyond. The old Buick struggled its way up the steep incline of the initial part of the drive, then relaxed as the highway leveled a few miles from his home. He had no idea how much longer the Buick could manage these trips. He supposed that once it failed his career as the sackman would be finished.

Not once on this long trip did this little girl ask where they were going. He took this to be clear evidence of a long pattern of deprivations. Normally he would have had to trot out any one of a dozen different fantasies in order to placate the little darling. Depending on the perceived needs, they were visiting long lost parents or friends, conducting a secret mission for the government, aiding a dying or injured relative, or visiting a castle, space ship, or miscellaneous wonderland. But the little girl asked no questions, so he was careful not to provide any answers.

When they finally arrived she jumped out and ran toward the house. “It’s like a cave!” she exclaimed, and indeed it was.

More than half of the house had been built into a hollow carved into the mountainside.

Here comes the sackman, sweetheart, he thought as he followed her to the undersized front door. As always he had to stoop with the key in his trembling fist in order to let them inside.

“Wait here while I get the light,” he said softly to the darkness. He reached overhead for the cord to the bulb. That was when she ran away into the shadows of his mountain home.

He was too startled to speak, reduced to gripping and ungripping the cotton light cord as if in a spasm. The bulb flickered into yellow dimness.

“Where? Are you!” he finally sputtered in rage. There was no answer from the shadows of his cave.

He waited by the door for a time, listening carefully the way the sackman was supposed to listen—the sackman who all the mommas said could detect a small child’s heartbeat amongst all the other heartbeats in the deep dark woods—but he heard nothing. He felt suddenly exhausted, as if all the bright red blood had run out of him, and he was compelled to collapse into the overstuffed chair by the door—placed there years before for exactly these attacks of sudden fatigue. He could remember placing the chair here himself one day after a young boy of seven had run him practically to tatters in the surrounding woods. He could remember, too, how he had felt when he’d finally caught the boy (who, also tired, could only look up at the sackman with eyes the size of quarters), and telling the boy about the lands that lay beyond dreams, the countries where children had no bodies that puked and stank but instead travelled within beams of pure white light, had placed his huge rough hand over the small boy’s face and with only the tiniest of disturbances—a cough and a squirm as if the lad were stirring within a bad dream—had sent him swiftly into that wondrous land.

But the sackman could not remember when he had grown so old.

“Little one!” he called, after catching his breath enough to say it softly, tenderly. “Come back to see your old grandpa, honey. We’ll play hide-and-go-seek later. I promise.” There was a distant giggle back in the dark far-off rooms of his house, but nothing more. The sackman bit into his lower lip until the blood spurted, and then he began to suck. He closed his eyes and stared at red circles in the darkness. When he at last opened them again, the giggles had started again. It had been a very long time since a giggle had been heard in his house.

To the casual observer, the sackman’s front room was furnished unremarkably—the more obvious mementoes of all his children were displayed in the back rooms of the house, the chambers down under the cool mountainside, the shadowed places where the little girl in the red dress now laughed and hid.

“Are you Little Red Riding Hood? Is that who you’ve decided to be, my sweet?” Then the sackman howled his best wolf howl, an old wolf certainly, but without a doubt a huge, snarling horrific wolf it was. For the sackman had had much practice over the years playing the part of the wolf.

There was no answer and the sackman laughed as loudly as he had howled, and felt young again.

Then the sackman sucked some more of his own salty blood, smiled and looked around his front room, and saw:

A large pot he’d once upended over a small girl, four or five years but small for her age, the smallest child he’d ever had in his home. (Although not the smallest he’d ever sent back to heaven. Back during the fifties he’d sent back a half dozen babies who’d been sleeping in bassinets and on blankets in the park. All that had been required was something to distract the mothers. There’d been time for only the briefest of bedtime stories, but babies required very little, being half dream and parental anticipation already.) He’d kept her in that pot until she’d been quite convinced he was going to cook her, so that she was almost relieved when finally it was his hands that sent her on her way.

A worn-out sofa with oversized cushions. For three full days he’d once lain on that sofa, taking his meals there, even relieving himself into a hole in the worn-out upholstery when he couldn’t hold it any longer. A visitor would have seen a smelly, sickly old man lying there, perhaps breathing his last. A visitor never would have guessed a skinny ten-year-old boy lay underneath those cushions, the life squeezing out of his semi-conscious body an hour at a time.

A tall kitchen trash can over in the corner once contained twin six-year-olds tied together, face-to-face. He’d used both his huge hands to send them on their way, at the same time, providing them with a joint fairytale, a shared dream, making sure that they might look into each other’s eyes as they began their long journey back. Now he could not remember if they had been boys or girls.

The fireplace along a side wall appeared much too large for the room, but otherwise was unremarkable in every way. It didn’t even sport a rudimentary mantel. But more than once it had contained giant logs of newspaper wrapped in wire, each with a small child completely hidden inside. He would never have considered burning a precious child, although he had been content to let them think so. It was all part of his game, and their personalized fairytale.

The sackman had no illusions about what an outsider might think if he or she (some matronly social worker, going house to house in behalf of children’s welfare) stumbled onto his doings, or witnessed any of the games he played with the children. He had given up hope for understanding many years ago, although he was convinced there were hundreds of people like him in the world who might appreciate his mission. Who understood that children were lied to, made to anticipate an adulthood full of promise and dream, when all the time the promises and dreams ended with the onset of puberty. The life of an adult was made putrid by constant disappointments and betrayals. Only a child, a mere eyeblink out of heaven’s embrace, could glimpse glory. But after the development of the sexual organs and the accompanying desires it was as if they had been blinded, never to see the brilliant light of heaven again.

The sackman loved children, and envied them. So what better way might he show that love than to send them back to heaven where they belonged, where they would truly want to go if they only had the understanding ironically wasted on adults?

From the sackman’s under-the-mountain rooms, where much more obvious secrets and mementoes of his career were kept, came the sound of footsteps and giggles and can’t-catch-mes. Surely it was time for this particular child’s game to end, and her final fairytale to begin.

The sackman’s eyes were old, but they were still the eyes of the sackman. Who sees everything, child, so just you watch out!

Don’t let him catch you out tonight! He could still see clearly where this one little girl had been.

One of the giant clothes closets off the east hallway had been opened up, and decades of children’s dresses and shorts, pants and socks and shirts and underwear had spilled out, some of it vomit- or blood- or other-stained, all of it precious reminders of the children he had known and loved into heaven. He stopped for a moment and tried to pick some of these up, trying to match pieces of outfits, trying to match clothing with vague, frightened, then peacefully sleeping little faces, but it was an impossible task. There were too many dead children spilt here, too many tiny ghosts struggling into these scattered outfits every morning. With tears washing his face he cast them aside and called “Darling!” and “Sweetheart!” and even “Grandchild!”, careful to keep the growing rage out of his voice, but all he heard was the distant laughter, the small feet running from room to room, crashing through all the doors of his life.

“Baby!” he shouted, kicking the piles of torn little body parts aside. “Baby, come here!” and pounded his feet into the floor to make a Giant’s footsteps guaranteed to terrify even the bravest Jack.

He could hear her somewhere just ahead of him now, racing in and out of the numerous dimly-lit or dark rooms that spread far under the mountainside.

In one room numerous toys, furred in greasy dust so that they appeared half-animal, half-appliance, had been removed from their storage shelves and scattered about the floor. The hands that had once played with these played with toys of pure light now. But it still angered him that they’d been touched, perhaps even damaged, without his permission. “Nice little girls ask before playing with another’s things!” he shouted into the darkness. But the darkness continued to run and cast its laughter back at the sackman.

He inhaled deeply of the cold, musty air of these backrooms, these storage chambers of his past, this air redolent of ten thousand children’s screams, children’s fear sweat, breath stink, and blood. He felt the air lengthening his stride, putting the power back into his huge hands. With each inhalation, with each new insult from this anonymous little girl, he felt as if his mass and muscle were increasing, his old man’s fatigue draining away, until by the time he reached the farthest, deepest rooms, he’d become convinced that he was the sackman of forty years ago, the terror of children and their parents for three states around.

The doors to wall cabinets had been thrown open, countless pairs of small children’s glasses spilled out onto the hard gray rock floors. Some were shattered, some had their frames bent and twisted. He gathered them up by the handfuls and piled them on a nearby table alongside two miniature prosthetic arms, a prosthetic leg, and several cigar boxes full of dental appliances. One pair of glasses had snagged on his black coat sleeve—he picked it off and examined it, recalling how he’d always been amazed by these prescription lenses for children, how small they were, as if fitted for dolls or ventriloquist dummies. He tried to wedge the glasses over his own eyes, and his eyes seemed larger than the lenses themselves (The sackman has great big saucers for eyes. He can see you wherever you go. He always knows what you’re doing.) From beneath the small lenses he could feel the darkness pushing down in a spiraling rush, a huge face suddenly looming over him, greasy lips parting to show dancing teeth as the sackman began his recital of the final fairytale.

He jerked the glasses off and threw them across the room. When he turned, he could hear the footsteps in an adjacent room. Far too many footsteps.

At the next room he opened the heavy door (heavy as stone the door to his home) and was greeted by a shower of children’s shoes: high-tops, sneakers, black patent leathers, flip-flops, leather sandals, Buster Browns, Oxfords, Minnie Mouse slippers, skates, tap shoes—as they fell from upended shelves and splintered apple crates. He screamed a not very sackman-like scream as the shoes tumbled over his head and shoulders, soles slapping a staccato as if in footless dance. Yet even as he screamed he could still hear the high hysterical giggles of sung accompaniment gradually fading into the rooms beyond.

The sackman kicked his way through the knee-high piles of shoes into the disarray of the next room (crude children’s drawings of knifings, stranglings, and decapitations littering the floor like gigantic leaves), and then the next (piles of naked dolls, dark bruises and red tears painted on their faces), and the next (volumes of candid photographs of dead children, taken immediately before and after their last moments in this loathsome world, ripped and torn and tossed up into the cold drafts like confetti).

“Enough! Enough!” he cried, feeling uncomfortably like a timid schoolmaster who’s lost control of his class. “It’s fairytale time! You like fairytales don’t you?”

“Oh yes oh yes,” she murmured from not so far away.

He turned his head and staggered in fatigue, suddenly feeling old again. He was alarmed to find that he could not quite catch his breath. “Just let me… let me catch my breath… please…”

“No! I want my storyyyyyyy!” The little girl appeared at the end of the hall swathed in sheets stained maroon from dried blood (she’s been in my private bedroom!) and started running toward him. Startled, the sackman lost his balance and fell to the floor. As her laughter reached for an ever higher pitch he lifted his huge, child-killer hands to protect his face.

She pulled a round, flat object—larger than a dinner plate—out of the bloody sheet and threw it at him much in the manner of a Frisbee. He recognized it as a trophy he had made for himself many years ago. It broke into pieces on his arms, cutting and (gnawing) into his tender old flesh. He groped for the pieces on the floor and came up with handfuls of his children’s precious baby teeth which had been glued on to the trophy as decoration, and finally the larger pieces—part of what had once been a beautiful lily glued together from thousands of such teeth.

“You little bitch!” He scrambled to his feet and lunged toward her ghostly form. She backed away and backed away, tittering and chuckling, the snot running from her nose as she grew more hysterical. He almost had her within his grasp when she turned and ran. He lunged again, pulled the rotting sheet from her body, and crashed through the next door, huge splinters piercing his face, ramming through the loose flesh on his arms, hammering through knuckles and the webbing by each thumb, working themselves deep into his belly as if conscious and determinedly murderous.

They were in his secret bedroom (my heart!). The little girl in the tattered red dress jumped up and down on his bed, picking up the old blood-stained covers and tossing them into the far corners of the room. Oh, she’s found my secret heart!

“Can’t catch me now can’t catch me now…” she chanted breathlessly. The sackman could see that she had smeared herself with the rancid fluids of corruption from his bottle collection underneath the bed (even he would not have done such a thing—for him it was always enough just to know they were there beneath his reclining form). She stuck out her tongue demonically.

He tried to get up off the floor but each movement brought the sharp splinters deeper into his body. He knew she had done real damage to him because he had a vague sensation of soft, secret things tearing away inside him. But strangely enough all his rage had fled him. He felt too old for such anger. His mission, as always, was most important now. “Child… sweet child,” he implored weakly. “It is time for your story. Surely you want your story? Hurry! While I still have the strength…”

“I love stories,” she said quietly, but not looking at him. Instead she looked around at his bedroom. She was the only person besides him ever to be in his bedroom.

“All children love stories,” he replied. “Especially bedtime stories.” But still she wouldn’t look at him, intent on the walls of his bedroom, walls decorated with all the collages of his universe he had constructed over the years:

Along the bottoms of the walls were countless pictures of children, but with heads, arms, legs removed, eyes cut from their sockets, genitalia snipped and glued to their foreheads, ears and eyes glued over small, immature breasts, tongues affixed to the bottoms of tiny feet. The children were stacked and piled until they made a terrible weight at the bottom of each collage, where sometimes the paper was cut, and passages were made to other collages which were even more crowded with segmented children. Brown and red offal and old excrement had been smeared in and out of these segments for this was the world, this was the everyday ground human beings walked on, slept on, rutted and conducted their commerce on.

Arranged at eye level were various upright figures: roaches and mayflies and lizards and centipedes and dark birds. These were built from shapes outlined in charcoal, cut out, then arranged to construct the desired form, or sometimes they were photographs of world leaders—Stalin, Reagan, Thatcher, De Gaulle—with bits cut away until the hidden creature had been uncovered. Each held a knife or an axe or a sack or a pair of scissors, for these were the harvesters. Here and there their barbed legs or wings reached down into the collages below to snare a child and free it from its own corporeal filth.

But above eye level, further than a child could reach on his or her own, was heaven, where the walls had been scrubbed until they were practically no color at all. There the sackman had pasted small bits of paper. And on each piece of paper was scribbled the final words of a child he had personally harvested, liberated, discorporated, sent back. All the no please momma stop daddy yes I’ll be good your eyes why your hands can’t why Why WHYs, and prayers far more obscure than he had ever heard.

“You’re a bad man,” the little girl said, and grinned. A stare into the brilliance of the little girl’s grin and the sackman felt bathed in ice.

“No. No, honey. I’m the very best of men. You’ll understand that after I’ve told you your story.”

Then he grabbed her by one scuffed tennis shoe and began pulling her off the bed and into his bloody, splintered embrace. The little girl squealed as if it were a game. The sackman began to relax, because it was a game, the most important game she would ever play.

“This is a story about a little girl in a red dress,” he whispered from bloody lips.

“And you’re making it lots more redder,” she said moistly into his ear.

“Who never wanted to grow up,” he continued.

“I wouldn’t want to be like you!” She giggled.

“Stop interrupting,” he said firmly, and she snuggled closer to him, soaking herself completely in the blood seeping from his enormous lap. “Now that might sound strange to some people, not wanting to grow up, but this little girl was very smart, you see…”

“Very smart,” she interrupted, but he ignored her.

“…because she’d known lots of grownups in her time, and she’d learned what awful beasts grownups could be. They’d forgotten what it had been like to be a child, how very hard it had been, and it was this absent mindedness that had turned all the grownups into scaly, putrid monsters!”

“Really?” the little girl asked, wide-eyed.

“Really.”

“So what did she do?” She seemed genuinely interested. He’d never had a child so relaxed in his arms before, despite all that had happened. Perhaps this would be the one child who really understood. Perhaps she would go easily, with no need for a struggle. He stretched his fingers and spread his huge hands (watch out! watch out!). He brought his fingers closer to her neck (when he comes), closer to her tiny, grape-shaped eyes (when the sackman comes).

“What did she do, you ask? Why, she visited the sackman, of course.”

“That was stupid!” she squealed, and rammed a long splinter of wood up through his belly until it found the sackman’s chest.

As the sackman felt himself falling into bits and pieces, his legs tumbling one way, his arms and belly another, he tried to think of the word he’d want the little girl to write down for pasting into his sackman heaven.

She let him pull her closer. He could see her leaning over his lips with an anxious expression on her face, ready to hear and record. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, and felt her eager fingers tearing at his tongue.