man’s Masterpiece
Copyright 2012 Norman Crane
It was Danvers who finally pushed him in. We’d been feeding the fire with hardwood since the afternoon and it had gotten big as the wind picked up by nightfall, flickering cross our faces and warming our cheeks better than a gas heater. He didn’t even scream when he fell. The flames just swallowed him up—sparks shooting out like hot vomit. He knew what he’d done. He knew it was wrong. When he lifted himself up and came out of the fire he stood dead still, staring at us, smiling like we’d done him a favour. Maybe he thought he deserved to turn into ash. Maybe he did deserve it. I know I kept my fingers tight round the handle of the axe just the same till he keeled over and Cauley had touched the corpse with his foot and we knew he was dead. The three of us, we kept silent for a long while after that. There was just the sound of wood burning and it was better that way. None of us touched the body but none of us looked away, either: you could still make out his face, unmistakable, when the rest of him was dark and formless. He was a face on a pile. Then the wind started taking bits and pieces and carrying them away. Like I told the police, he didn’t touch me, but I knew some of the kids he’d done it to. He’d done it to Danvers. I remember once when all the other kids were gone, I’d stayed after class, Mr Gregor bent himself close to my ear and told me the real story. “You’re a wicked one,” he said when he was done, “just like Don Whitman.”
They used to scare us with Don Whitman, the adults: the other teachers, our parents, the priest. But no one ever explained it. They’d just say, “You better do what we want or else Don Whitman will come back and get you.” Mr Gregor was the only one ever to tell it to me with details. He told it different, too. He said he remembered because he was the same age as Don Whitman and they went to the same school. He said that what the others say they remember is like Cain and Abel or Little Red Riding Hood. Even the landscape tells the fairy tale. After it happened, Don Whitman’s school got torn down, then his house. And the bells in the Church got changed: the ones they rang after Elizabeth Cartwell had come back hysterical with the news.
You can’t tear down or change a man’s memory, Mr Gregor told me.
Once you see, it’s forever.
Elizabeth Cartwell’s parents moved away as soon as the police investigation finished. A lot of people moved away. But Mr Gregor showed me a newspaper from Hill City, North Dakota from some years later. The paper was yellow but you could read the black print fine. The story was about a girl who’d killed herself. The photo was of Elizabeth Cartwell. As he held it out for me to see, his hand shook and I felt his breath grow warmer against the skin around my neck. Nothing made him shake as much as what happened to Elizabeth Cartwell, not even the details.
Don Whitman was seventeen when he did it. He was handsome, with wide shoulders and played football. All the girls liked him. He was going to go to college. Maybe that’s why they thought he was ready: they thought he was a man. They thought he’d be with them. It was a school night when they woke him and drove out to the old pumping station, so that he could see everything for himself. They wanted to make him a part of it just like they were. If he saw, he would want it just like they did. I was always told that he drove out there by himself, but Mr Gregor told me that’s part of the lie. He said Don Whitman’s father was in the car with the mayor and the chief of police. He said, “How would he have found the place by himself—why would he have gone looking?”
The place is in a wood not far from the border. Of course, the whole underground is filled with cement now, but you can still see where the opening used to be: a fat tube sticking out of the ground, just big enough for a man to crawl down into. There was a hatch on it then, and thick locks. The hatch was sound-proof. If you stood right beside it, you couldn’t hear a thing, but as soon as you opened the hatch you could smell the insides and hear the moans start to drift upwards into the world. A steel ladder led down. Mr Gregor says they all knew about it, everyone: all the adults. They’d all been down that ladder. All of them had seen it.
Don Whitman went down the ladder, too. He must have smelled the insides grow stronger and heard the moaning echo louder with every rung but he kept going. On the ground above, his father spoke to the mayor and they both felt proud. Don Whitman must have been more scared of coming up and disappointing them than of not going down to the limit. But when he reached the bottom, the very bottom, and put his feet to the hard concrete and saw it before his own eyes, something inside of him must have broken—
“They sugarcoat it and they make a child’s game of it because they’re too scared to remember the truth,” Mr Gregor told me, “They can’t forget it, but it’s a stain to them, so they cover it up and pretend that everything’s clean.”
Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within them, the writhing, ecstatic, swollen no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, women and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans—humans Don Whitman knew and recognized—among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another, and then someone, someone Don Whitman knew, must have put a hand on Don Whitman’s shoulder and Don Whitman would have asked, “But what now, what am I supposed to do?” and then, from somewhere deep within the chambers, from a place not even Don Whitman would ever see, a voice answered:
“Anything.”
Mr Gregor pulled away from me and I felt my body turn cold. Icy sweat crawled under my collar and below my thighs.
I’d been told Don Whitman had found the old pumping station and lured the police to it, that they’d called others—including Don Whitman’s father—to talk him out of any violence, but that he’d snapped and murdered them all without firing a single shot, with his bare hands, and dumped the bodies into the metal pipe sticking out of the ground, the one just wide enough for a man to fit through. Then he’d disappeared. It wasn’t until days later that Elizabeth Cartwell found the bodies and there was never any sign of Don Whitman after that. The manhunt failed. So the church bells rang, the school was torn down, the pipe was filled in and, ever since, the adults scare their children with the story of the high school boy who’d done a terrible, sinful thing and vanished into thin air.
“And why would she decide to go out there?” Mr Gregor asked—meaning Elizabeth Cartwell—his eyes dead-set through a window at the raining world outside. “It’s as transparent as a sheet of the Bible, every word of it. They all pretend to believe because they’ve all made it up together. But the police reports, the testimony, the news stories, the court records, the verdict: a sham, a falsification made truth because a thousand people and a judge repeat it, word-for-word, every night before bed.”
I tried to stand but couldn’t. My heart was pounding me back into the chair. I was thinking about my mother and father. I had only enough courage for one question, so I asked, “What happened to the no-people?”
Mr Gregor turned suddenly and laughed so fierce the rain lashed the windows even harder. He came toward me. He put a delicate hand on each of my shoulders. He bent forward until his lips were almost touching mine and, his eyes staring at me like one stares at the Devil, said:
“Buried in the concrete. Buried alive, buried dead—”
I pushed him away.
He stumbled backward without losing his balance.
I forced myself off the chair, praying that my legs would keep. My knees shook but held. In front of me, Mr Gregor rasped for air. A few long strands of his thin hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating.
“He wa
s a coward, that little boy, Don Whitman. Without him, we wouldn’t need to live under the whip of elaborate lies designed by weaker people turned away and shamed by the power of the natural order of things. They trusted him, and he betrayed us all. The fools! The weakling! Imagine,” Mr Gregor hissed, “just imagine what we could have had, what we could have experienced down there, at the very bottom, in the chambers...”
His eyes spun and his chest heaved as he grew excited, but soon he lost his venom and his voice returned to normal.
Finally, he said without any nastiness, “You’re a wicked one, just like Don Whitman.”
And I ran out.
Danvers prodded me awake. I must have fallen asleep during the night because when I opened my eyes it was morning already. The sun was up and the flames gone, but the fire was still warm. Mr Gregor’s dead face still rested atop a pile of ashes. Cauley was asleep on the dirt across from us. I could tell Danvers hadn’t slept at all. He said he’d been to a farmhouse and called the police. We woke up Cauley and talked over what we’d say when they got here. We decided on something close to the truth: Mr Gregor had taken the three of us camping and, when he