Keepers (26 page)

The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.

A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage I stopped before. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman—or had been, once—with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-razor; she looked at me through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.

I made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of my throat as if it were afraid of the light, then I backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.

My legs felt weighted down by iron boots. I did not so much walk as shuffle, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow me.

Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous Man-of-War tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the next cage was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down Syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but with a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and -thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at me first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.

I staggered backward, pressing myself against the bars of the cage behind me to keep from collapsing to the floor. I closed my eyes and shuddered, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.

“You
don’t
want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”

I spun around and saw him standing—
standing
!—in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows; I could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. I’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.

“
Whitey
!”

“Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hooray-hooray.”

I gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place—goodness
gracious
me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss—one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, and then made a disapproving
tsk
-
tsk
. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy—not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our
friends
. You may quote me on that.”

“Whitey, for chrissakes!
What is this place
?”

“Hark—what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ‘em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”

The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of border collie dog filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.

It took a second for me to realize what I was looking at.

A man with his back to the camera was running down the alley toward another man who looked as if he were doubled over in pain or looking for something because he was kneeling. Then the running man pulled back his leg, did a half-pirouette, and kicked the kneeling man in the ribs.

I stood there outside Whitey’s cage and watched a film of myself attacking Drop-Kick that afternoon after Dad’s funeral.

“Didn’t think you had it in you to do a Bruce Lee like that,” said Whitey. “You have good form, by the way.”

The scene had been filmed from two different angles, one from each end of the alley. What struck me as odd about it—aside from its existing in the first place—was the angle from which it had all been filmed; it was very low to the ground, as if the camera operator had been lying on their stomach so as to—

—no.

I remembered how the face of the collie had filled the screen. I remembered how the animals had sat so unnaturally still. I remembered how the sunlight had glittered off the tags hanging from some of their collars.

This had been filmed with the cameras held at about collar height.

“Technology’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” said Whitey. “A camera no bigger than a tag on a collar. Been around for a
long
while, from what I hear. I mean, just look at
that
.”

The alley scene was gone, but the camera remained just as jerky as it had been before. A shadow passed over the lens, leaving a smear in its trail. This kept happening for several seconds until, at last, the blurry image of a face formed. The face bounced up and down, as if it were looking into the lens of the camera it was carrying while trying to clean something off the lens and—

“Oh,
no
,” I said.

My thumb passed over the lens one more time and I looked into my fifteen-year-old face. I was crying like a baby, my lips moving, forming words that could not be heard but I didn’t need to hear them, I knew what I’d said to that poor cat as I stood there by the trash cans in back of Beckman’s Market.

The image of my bawling face was very clear, indeed; I’d wiped more blood from the tag on its collar than I’d thought.

I slowly shook my head. “I never was able to make out its name.”

The image faded back into the home movies of before.

“You got a good heart, Captain,” said Whitey. “That counts for something in the end. Or so goes the rumor.” He jerked his head down and to the left once, twice, three times, then made a chuffing sound as he kicked at the thick layer of straw covering most of the floor. “They’ve been aware of you for a long time now, Captain. They’re very good at keeping track of folks who interest them.

“To answer your question about what this place is: It’s sort of their version of Ellis Island. And don’t ask me”—he chuffed once again, shaking his head—“who ‘they’ are because you have to know at this point and, besides, a pro never wastes time repeating a gag that everyone in the peanut gallery has heard a dozen times. But I digress. Do me a favor—there’s a bag hanging on the wall to your right. Be a splendid fellow and get it for me, will you?”

I grabbed the canvas pouch by its strap and lifted it from the hook on the wall. “Who are they, Whitey?”

He laughed. “You might say they’re not from around here.”

I held the pouch through the bars. It must have weighed ten pounds. “What
is
this?”

“Dinner,” he said, moving forward into the light.

His arms were gone, that was the first thing that registered; in their place were two large clumps of ugly knotted scar tissue that protruded from his shoulders like the padding under a Vaudevillian’s oversized coat.

Then I acknowledged the whole of him and went numb. All I could hear was the blood surging through my temples and the echo of Whitey’s voice from another time, another world.

I love horses
,
hope I’ll be one in my next life
.

He was almost halfway there.

His head had been shaved except for a hand-sized, Mohawk-like patch directly in the middle; the rest of his exposed, scabrous scalp was implanted with the same silver matchboxes I’d seen on the others, only these weren’t hooked up to any electrical wires dangling from the ceiling. His now-massive torso was lacquered in thousands of short brittle hairs that grew denser as they neared his waist. His neck was twice as long and twice as thick as it should have been, glistening with sweat and frothy streaks of lathered mucus. Before I could snap out of my stupor he cantered forward, dipped down, craned his neck, and slipped the handle of the pouch around the back of his head, all the time singing the words to the
Mr
.
Ed
theme.

From somewhere nearby a low, thrumming groan began to take form, rolling across the floor, slowly growing in volume and power.

“Nothing like room service,” said Whitey, then shoved his face deep into the pouch and spun around as the thrum grew louder and stronger.

The heavy white mane flowed from the center of his head all the way down a dense, ashen, solid back whose spine was thick as a forearm; with every move its powerful muscles stretched and quaked and rippled. His gaskins and hocks were mostly concealed by the leather towel—which wasn’t a towel at all but something organic, something sentient, a living mass that pulsed and breathed as it made itself a part of his flesh—but the rest of his legs were clearly visible; the hard cannons, the steel-like tendons, the pasterns and fetlocks and, worst of all, the burnished, astonishing, impossible hooves. Moving in stops and starts as he fed, hooves scraping through the straw and clopping loudly against the cement floor, his mane fanning out like a column of bleached flames, Whitey continued to shake his head and chuff.

The thrum whip-cracked like the snap of a bone and became an eruption, bouncing off the walls, resonating up and down the corridor, spiraling overhead, within and without, a ripped-raw, berserk, frenzied, lunatic siren of a sound with enough power behind it to throttle me to the floor, legs scrabbling to push myself backward, far back, away from the harrowing shriek, and I began to cover my ears but each time I did the sound tripled in volume and force, there was no stopping it, no blocking it out, it engulfed everything but I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I ground the heels of my hands into my ears and held them there, throwing myself totally into the rattling cacophony as something shredded deep in my throat and I realized the sound was even closer than before because it was coming out of me but I didn’t care, couldn’t move, and wouldn’t stop screaming, screaming, screaming.

Whitey pulled his face from the bag and clopped forward to kick a hoof against the bars.

“
Will
you stop that irksome racket? Stop it right now!
Stop it
!”

I pressed the knuckles of my fist into my mouth and bit down, choking off the noise; whether the blood I tasted was my own or Mabel’s, I couldn’t tell.

“That’s better,” said Whitey, cantering around the cage. “Hysterics are so unbecoming. Downright distasteful, if you ask me. I personally feel diminished by your behavior and think you should”—he shook his head and chuffed, spraying gummy globs of oat-flaked spit—“apologize at once.”

I pulled my fist away and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“You damned well ought to be. Is that any way to behave when you visit a sick friend? I think not. Sincerely.”

“Please,
please
tell me what’s happening.”

“No begging, if you please. Hey—would you like to see a trick? Ask me what two plus two equals, go on—oh, never mind, you’re a terrible audience. I’ll do it myself.” He cleared his throat and said, “‘Whitey Weis, the renowned Double-Dubya, here’s your question—quiet in the studio, please: for a handful of sugar cubes, tell us—what’s two plus two?’” He extended his left leg and scraped his hoof against the cement four times. “Listen to that applause, folks, isn’t he amazing?” He trotted forward, pressing his face against the bars and looking down at me. “Did you like that? Please say you did, it’s my best one.”

I nodded my head. If the heart makes no sound when it shatters, then the mind is even quieter when it begins to collapse.

Whitey’s head jerked down and to the right once, twice, three times; he held it like that for a moment, then a shudder ran down his sides and he stamped a hoof against the floor; when he turned his face toward me again his eyes were still and his expression pensive. “Look at me, kiddo.”

“
What
?”

“Watch that tone. Mind telling me why you had to come here?”

I pulled in a ragged, snot-filled breath and wiped my eyes. “I’m trying to find Beth.”

“Your fair lady-love? Stands about yea-high with one of the ten greatest smiles in the history of history itself?
That
Beth? She was here earlier. She told me about Mabel, the poor old girl. Not that you’ll understand or even believe me, but I wept when I heard the news. Mabel was one of the good ones, and there are so very few of them in the world as the days go by.”

I stumbled to my feet. “Where did she go?” I pointed to my right. “Did she go down there? Is that why I can’t find her?”

Whitey stretched one leg forward, bent the other back at the knee, and leaned low. “If I say ‘yes,’ you’re going to
go down
there, aren’t you?” He shook his head in the slight, subtle, human manner, and then gave a disapproving whistle. “I don’t know, kiddo. I was serious when I said you don’t want to do that. You have to be pretty desperate to get
this
far, but down there...once you hit the bottom of those stairs, there’s no coming back up as you once were.”

I slammed a fist against the bars. “
Goddammit,
Whitey! For once in your miserable life would you give someone a straight answer?”