The Unquiet

I leaned back. He had sacrificed himself for another child. Aimee had told me as much, but to hear it from Kellog himself was another matter. There was no boastfulness about his tale of self-sacrifice. He had done it out of love for a younger child, and it had come naturally to him. Once again, I was aware that here was a boy trapped in a man’s body, a child whose development had ceased almost entirely, arrested by what had been done to him. Beside me, Aimee was silent, her lips clasped so tightly shut that the blood had drained from them. She must have heard this before, I thought, but it would never get any easier to listen to.

“But they found out, in the end,” I said. “People discovered what was happening to you.”

“I got angry. I couldn’t help it. They brought me to the doctor. He examined me. I tried to stop him. I didn’t want them to come for Michelle. Then the doctor asked me questions. I tried to lie, for Michelle, but he kept tripping me up. I couldn’t keep all the answers straight in my head. They brought me back to Dr. Clay, but I didn’t want to talk to him no more. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I kept quiet. They put me away again, but then I got too old and they had to let me go. I fell in with some people, did some bad things, and they put me in the Castle.”

The Castle was the name given to the old Maine Youth Center in South Portland, a correctional facility for troubled youths built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had since closed, but it was no great loss. Before the building of the new youth facilities in South Portland and Charleston, the recidivism rate for young inmates had been 50 percent. It was down to 10 or 15 percent, largely because the institutions now focused less on incarceration and punishment than helping the kids, some as young as eleven or twelve, to overcome their problems. The changes had come too late for Andy Kellog, though. He was a walking, talking testament to everything that could go wrong in the state’s dealings with a troubled child.

Now Aimee spoke. “Can I show Mr. Parker your pictures, Andy?”

He opened his eyes. There were no tears. I don’t think he had any left to shed.

“Sure.”

Aimee opened her document case and removed a cardboard wallet. She handed it to me. Inside were eight or nine pictures, most done in crayon, a couple in watercolor paint. The first four or five were very dark, painted in shades of gray and black and red, and populated by crude naked figures with the heads of birds. These were the pictures that “Bill” had told me about.

The rest of the artwork depicted variations on the same landscape: trees, barren ground, decaying buildings. They were crude, with no great talent behind them, yet at the same time a great amount of care had been lavished on some of them, while others were angry smears of black and green, still recognizably a version of the same locale, but created in a burst of anger and grief. Each picture was dominated by the shape of a great stone steeple. I knew the place, because I had seen it depicted before. It was Gilead.

“Why did you draw this place, Andy?” I asked.

“That’s where it happened,” said Kellog. “That’s where they took me.”

“How do you know?”

“The second time, the bag slipped while they were carrying me in. I was kicking at them, and it nearly came off my head. That’s what I saw before they pulled it back down again. I saw the church. I painted it so I could show it to Frank. Then they moved me to the Max, and they wouldn’t let me paint no more. I couldn’t even take them with me. I asked Miss Price to take care of them for me.”

“So Frank saw these pictures?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you could remember nothing of the men who took you there?”

“Not their faces. I told you: they wore masks.”

“What about other marks? Tattoos maybe, or scars?”

“No.” He frowned. “Wait. One of them had a bird, here.” He pointed to his left forearm. “It was a white eagle’s head, with a yellow beak. I think that was why he wore the eagle mask. He was the one who told the others what to do.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Yeah. I never heard nothing more, though. I guess it didn’t help.”

“And Frank? Did you tell him about the tattoo?”

He screwed up his face. “I think so. I don’t remember.” His face relaxed. “Can I ask a question?” he said.

Aimee looked surprised. “Sure you can, Andy.”

He turned to me. “You going to try to find these men, sir?” he asked. There was something in his voice that I didn’t like. The boy was gone now, and what had taken its place was neither child nor adult but some perverse imp straddling both. His tone was almost mocking.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’d best hurry then,” he said.

“Why is that?”

Now the smile was back, but so was that hostile light.

“Because Frank promised to kill them. He promised to kill every one of them once he got out.”

And then Andy Kellog stood and threw himself face-first at the Pleixglas barrier. His nose broke immediately, leaving a smear of blood on the surface. He rammed it again, opening a wound on his forehead just below his scalp. And then he was shouting and screaming as the guards descended on him, and Aimee Price was calling his name and begging them not to hurt him as an alarm sounded and more men appeared and Andy was submerged beneath a mass of bodies, still kicking and shouting, inviting new pain to drown the memory of the old.

Chapter XVIII

The colonel of the guards was fuming quietly as we walked back to the reception lobby. There he left us for a time. Aimee took a seat, and we waited in silence for Long to come back to us with news of Andy Kellog’s condition. There were too many people around to enable us to talk about what had occurred. I looked at them, all caught up in their own pain and the misery of those whom they were visiting. Few spoke. There were older men who might have been fathers, brothers, friends. Some women had brought children along for the visit, but even the kids were quiet and subdued. They knew what this place was, and it frightened them. If they ran around, even if they spoke too loudly, they might end up in here like their daddies. They wouldn’t be allowed to go home, and a man would take them and lock them up in the dark, because that was what happened to bad children. They got locked up, and their teeth rotted, and they beat their faces against Plexiglas screens to numb themselves into unconsciousness.

Long appeared at the lobby desk and gestured for us to join him. He told us that Andy’s nose was badly broken, he had lost another tooth, and he had sustained some bruising during the attempt to subdue him, but otherwise he was as well as could be expected. The injury to his forehead had required five stitches, and he was now in the infirmary. They hadn’t even Maced him, perhaps because his lawyer was present on the other side of the glass. There were no signs of concussion, but he would be kept under observation overnight, just in case. He had been restrained, though, to ensure that he didn’t injure himself again, or try to hurt anyone else. Aimee retreated to use her cell phone in private, leaving me alone with Long, who was still angry at himself and the men under his command for what had happened to Andy Kellog.

“He’s done that kind of thing before,” he said. “I told them to keep a close eye on him.” He risked a glance at Aimee, an indication that he blamed her in part for making his men keep their distance.

“He doesn’t belong in here,” I replied.

“Judge made that decision, not me.”

“Well, it was the wrong one. I know you heard what was said in there. I don’t think he had much hope from the start, but what those men did to him took away what little there was. The Max is just making him crazier and crazier, and the judge didn’t sentence him to gradual insanity. You can’t keep a man locked up in a place like that with no possibility of release and expect him to stay balanced, and Andy Kellog was barely holding on to start with.”