People who’ve lived in proximity to a monster will sometimes acquire a little tangential notoriety of their own.
No, and I shook my head, when the news team came asking up and down the neighborhood, my voice sounding regretful I couldn’t be of use to their story, I can’t even say I knew him.
Not in any space now inhabited by my children.
***
I could never shake it out of my bones—Rickie’s very being a deliberate repudiation of grace—beauty and power willfully incarnated in the wrong form. I’m not perverting alchemy in gilding him with glamour and mystery. This isn’t his story, it’s mine.
***
Truth is sometimes found in the silliest places.
The TV was on—one of those “train your naughty dog” shows—and I wasn’t paying very much attention, until the host introduced a woman struggling to handle a pair of actual wolf-dogs she was trying to take for a stroll.
Something caught the attention of those two and they went dead still, mirroring each other, the light in their eyes colder than the coldest thing you know, and the impediment at the other end of their leashes had vanished right out of existence—utterly irrelevant to their purpose.
Sitting on my sofa, transfixed by those beautiful unsubjugated creatures that would never see us as more than the source of a meal, I knew they had Rickie’s eyes.
***
He must have scented the rage in me, the summer we first spoke. Everyone else saw just the awkward little girl. I think he took me as a pet, to see what I’d turn into.
Our backyards converged on the shores of the same lake but our worlds had different orbits. His people had always owned their property, or far enough back to grant them native status, but he and his parents were only seasonal inhabitants now. My grandmother’s death gave us—my mother, my brother and me—cover to mutate stealthily from summer visitors into permanent residents. The act of closing up her house never concluded; we never went back to my father. My mother wouldn’t put herself in harm’s way whenever he’d felt it necessary to correct his children; grandma saved us in the only way she could.
Children hate cowardice in all its forms. I hated both my parents but it was only my father I’d wanted to kill.
Neighbors are easy about boundaries in places like ours; on a hot, bright day, I thought the rarely-used boathouse on Rickie’s property would be a wonderful place to curl up and read without anyone bothering me.
I was startled and embarrassed to be found there by a striking teenage boy, but he saw the title of the book in my hand and said it was one of his favorites.
My face went from pink to crimson, but as he kept talking, it cooled to a shade I prayed was unremarkable. He spoke to me with the easy courtesy that’s called the mark of a gentleman.
But I could never describe his eyes until I saw those wolves.
Evil acts are purposeful desecrations of a moral order. That’s irrelevant in the universe of the monster. The tiger is inescapably savage in our world—its beauty doesn’t mitigate its nature. And we’ll acknowledge its rights until our spheres collide.
But the were-tiger hunting amongst us—what place has it anywhere? Those reporters would have asked if I ever felt myself to be in danger. I never did. Everything inside me kept his boredom at bay.
That summer we talked only of sci-fi; he introduced me to authors a kid could only get her hands on by devious means. He gave me every book he’d finished with; he was one who moves on.
I could never give away a book. The library couldn’t slake all my thirsts and it only increased my hunger. Rickie was my lifesaver.
Words I’d use now sound untrue in recalling the thoughts of a child. But they are true; I felt in him some kind of impervious power. I wanted to be like him; devouring the books he gave me was like taking the heart of the other into myself.
There wasn’t anything more. A shared taste isn’t kinship; adulation is a lonely and unreciprocated emotion. We were only partly alike; he knew that from the first and spared me anyway.
I don’t excuse his crimes but I understand it’s just an accident of wiring that distinguishes our natures. If you feel rage you might be able to love; instinct lies outside the realm of passion.
If that silly woman from the TV show ends up eaten by those wolves she thinks she owns, my pity will go to them—creatures dragged into a world not theirs and forced to live by its conventions. As I pity Rickie’s victims—they couldn’t have known he was an alien prowler.
It’s one of life’s great cruelties that one wrong choice can be fatal. Most of us deserve second chances.
Rickie gave me mine. He submerged me in Ellison and Farmer; ways of killing my father became less interesting thoughts. Hatred dwindled to contempt and left only a rough-edged scar on my soul. I learned to be glad of having something that could ache so badly.
It was the only thing about me Rickie couldn’t have understood.
_________________________
An earlier version of this story was published 6/19/12 in an editorially-curated webzine.
I read your works repeatedly...not typical with fiction. Feels more like I am engaging them...places behind my eyes take note and respond. It’s not just reading.
I think you aptly describe sociopaths, psychopaths. Their eyes do betray them, describe them. Animals who savor blood mirror the look.
I have found that the people described in Peck’s book don’t have that look yet are far more cruel...not necessarily more deadly, but that too.
I feel sure that sociopaths would judge ‘people of the lie’ in the same way murderers judge pedophiles: decisively.