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When we were twelve,
Bobby Milton and I rode our bikes to the library to look at
naked pictures in the National Geographic magazines they
kept on the second floor. We would go after school, in the
autumn of our seventh grade year, before the weather turned
too cold for boys on bikes. Bobby’s older brother, Nate,
told us about the pictures of bare-chested native women.
Being dumb and horny and without access to real nudie mags—Bobby’s
dad was a youth pastor at the Baptist church and my dad was
in Hawaii with his secretary—we scurried up the creaking
stairs to the magazine room and spent an hour or so flipping
through the glossy pages.
The Springdale Carnegie
Library was an imposing structure of stone, like a tomb
filled with creaking, dusty innards. The woodwork, though
intricate and beautiful, had weathered years of abuse from
school children. Railings groaned with the slightest
provocation, floorboards rubbed against each other with
wails and whimpers, and the whole place reeked of yellowed
paper and mildew. The second floor, where the magazines
waited in tall cardboard sleeves, was illuminated by only a
few naked light bulbs and always rested in uneasy shadow.
We stayed long enough
for the sun to skirt closer to the horizon, almost vanishing
from the narrow second floor windows—just long enough to
find other pictures under the yellow magazine covers,
grotesque cave paintings from Lascaux in France or artists’
renderings of Neanderthal man. Pictures that inspired an
imaginative game of chicken, with Bobby and I conjuring the
poor Neanderthal into some hunched creature of the shadows,
a man-beast that chomped and crunched away at the bones of
little boys who stayed on the second floor past dark.
“He’s got awful teeth,”
I’d say, “yellow-saw teeth, for grinding and tearing.”
Bobby countered. “A
big, flat forehead and black eyes for seeing at night.”
“Hands as big as your
head.”
“Muscles and veins
popping out of his skin.”
“Face like rough
leather.”
“Looks like a bear,
extra hair all-over.”
“He bites his prey on
the neck, tearing out the jugular.”
Our original purpose
lost, we pushed our hideous descriptions until one of us
broke and bolted for the stairs. We clambered onto our
bikes and rode to my house because it was closer. On the
way, every crooked tree limb reached out as the gnarled hand
of our prehistoric man-thing, and we collapsed on the front
lawn, heaving and panting until our hearts slowed and our
panic crackled into laughter.
Winter came, and we
stopped our trips to the library. Bobby’s father was
transferred that spring, and I lost the courage to climb to
the second floor alone. In time, I forgot the smashed face
of Neanderthal man.
It’s a shame how some
things can be forgotten.
Six years later, when I
took Stacy Pfiefer to the second floor of the library under
the guise of studying for a physics exam, the memories of
our man-thing had been pushed into the most primitive bits
of my brain. Stacy said she wanted to study—alone—and my
broiling hormones only allowed one motive.
“We need a quiet place
to study,” she had said.
I heard, I want to be
alone with you, Nick, and my heart quickened.
But once she spread her
homework across the walnut table in the reading room, once
she flicked on the little lamp and started reciting
equations, once she pushed me away when I started nibbling
at her neck, I knew my interpretation of “quiet place to
study” had landed well wide of the mark. I was aroused
though, maybe prompted by memories of the twelve-year-old
who climbed those creaking stairs with his buddy to sneak a
peek at a naked breast in an old magazine.
After one more failed
attempt at romance, Stacy shoved me away and said, “Look,
mister. I’m here to work. I thought you understood that.”
Her faced was twisted and grotesque in the dim light.
“Sorry,” I said, happy
to be in the shadows so she couldn’t see the bulge in my
jeans.
Embarrassed and horny, I
excused myself to the bathroom, intending to relieve a
little tension. There were three rooms on the second
floor: the big periodical reading room, with its boxed
copies of old magazines and racks of newspapers, the
non-fiction collection on the opposite side of the building,
and a small alcove between with the stairs on one side and a
tiny storeroom with the toilet on the other.
Stacy only had the one
lamp on in the reading room, so I stumbled toward the
bathroom in the dark and smacked my foot against a heavy
object, nearly toppling to the floor. My eyes adjusted
gradually, and my arousal was lost to curiosity. I stooped,
and lifted a yellow bordered copy of National Geographic;
the box was full of them, for sale—a nickel a piece.
What’s more, I
recognized the cover: paintings from that cave in France,
bizarre renderings of animals and men from prehistoric
times. The memories started to flicker: Bobby and I, boys
of twelve, the shadow-men we imagined. I flipped the
magazine open, hungry to find the picture of our
Neanderthal, the one that inspired so much childish terror.
“Nick?” Stacy called
from the next room. “You all right?”
“Yeah, fine. I’ll be
back in a minute.”
“Hurry, okay? It’s a
little spooky in here. I heard a noise.”
“It’s an old building,”
I said.
I turned every page and
couldn’t find the picture. I knew that magazine. We’d
looked at it so many times just before launching into our
terrible game. Confused, perplexed, and just a little
frightened, I moved to the doorway of the small storeroom,
reached inside the opening, and felt for the light switch.
The light flickered with
a buzz and sputter, illuminating the room like a quick flash
of lightning, and went out. A blown bulb. In that brief
moment, I saw images on those walls—misshapen paintings,
renderings in black and red of stylized and deformed things,
not quite human. There were other beasts too, animals,
engaged with the man-things in carnal acts. Smears of
blood. Elongated arms, legs, genitalia. The walls spread
with twisted, pornographic cave paintings—not the hunting
images from National Geographic. Twisted. Once the light
flickered out, I was momentarily blinded, but those images
remained, floating behind my eyes.
My heart lodged in my
throat.
I opened my mouth, ready
to call for Stacy, but a thumping sound stopped my voice,
followed by a heavy crash, like a body hitting the hardwood
floor. My limbs became stone; terror wriggled up my spine
and locked onto my brain stem—the primitive brain. I was
twelve again. I stumbled away from the dark room, glanced
to my right, to the reading room where I’d left Stacy.
Black shapes moved across the lamplight. I fled, crashing
down the stairs and through the front door.
I left her alone on the
second floor. I climbed into my car and drove away like
Bobby and I rode when younger—spurred by fear, frightened by
every misshapen shadow along the quiet, neighborhood
streets. I breathed for the first time in my driveway,
panting like a child after a vicious retreat by bike.
I laid my head against
the steering wheel and waited for my heart to stop its
assault.
After a few moments, I
laughed. I pounded the steering wheel and laughed at
myself. The laughter pricked my courage and embarrassment
replaced fear. The paintings, the hunched shadows, they all
had been just my imagination, my memories of those
afternoons six years ago, when I was a horny, stupid kid.
When the light popped, I had been startled. No body hitting
the floor, just the protests of an old building. I glanced
at the clock on my car’s dash. Nine o’clock, closing time
at the library.
Stacy was going to be
pissed.
I worked excuses through
my mind, writing my script for Stacy, trying to find a
reason for my sudden flight. As I turned down the final
block on my return trip, flashing red and blue lights
screamed at me. Police lights—and an ambulance. I parked
the car and wandered toward the lights, drawn like a
Neolithic primitive to the fire. A small crowd gathered,
watching as they wheeled her out on a gurney, covered with a
sheet. Our shadows were blown obscene by the flashing
lights—strange shapes dancing around the parking lot and
lawn.
The librarian fingered
me, said I’d come in with Stacy. She said she heard me
pound down the stairs, running away from the scene. It
wasn’t until closing time, when the she checked the second
floor, that she found Stacy’s body crammed into the narrow
bathroom. The police questioned me, took molds of my teeth
to compare with the marks on Stacy’s neck and chest.
Springdale broiled with the cannibal case for four months.
In the end, I was absolved by the snatches of skin found
under her fingernails, the flesh that Stacy gouged out as
she fought for her life. The DNA wasn’t a match.
Of course, I was as
guilty as anyone, but I wasn’t alone. That thing in the
library had been borne of two fathers all those years ago in
the depths of our imagination. The teeth marks on her body
may have mimicked mine, but the skin belonged to Bobby
Milton.
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