Prodigal Blues

Arnold was now twelve; he had been a week removed from his tenth birthday when Grendel snatched him away.  "My stepsister took me to a carnival in the church's parking lot.  He was dressed up like a minister when I met him.  He asked me if I would help bring out the folding tables for the lemonade stand."

Thomas was eleven; he'd been nine the day he disappeared.  "I was waiting for Daddy to get out from seeing the doctor at the hospital.  He got sick all of a sudden and we had to take a cab because Mommy was still at work and she had the car.  I thought he was a doctor.  He said it was okay for me to come with him to see my Daddy.  He had the white coat and everything."

And Christopher… Christopher had just turned twelve when Grendel seized him; he was now twenty-one.  "I was useful to him.  It was necessary to remain useful.  If you were not useful, you were taken to Ravenswood—that is what he called the sub-basement.  The group of us, we shared a room in the basement, directly above Ravenswood, so everyone always had to… listen whenever Grendel had someone down there.

"I never knew there were so many different ways to scream."

He would offer no explanation about how he came to be taken.

This is what the four of them knew to be true:

Grendel told them he had been a medic in Vietnam; he spoke German, French, Spanish, and knew sign language; he had either once been a surgeon or a surgical intern, because his medical knowledge was encyclopedic; he knew quite a lot about electronics—computers, digital cameras, recording and listening devices, you name something, Grendel knew about it—and kept his house's security systems up to date, including a massive electrified fence surrounding the property.  "He soldered electronic collars around each of our necks," Christopher said.  "If any one of us moved farther than seventy-five feet from the outside of the house, all of us got a shock that knocked us out for hours.  If you wet or soiled your pants when you got the shock, you had to wear them for two days afterward as punishment for being 'undisciplined.'"

Grendel believed human beings could discipline themselves to the extent that even when their systems suffered massive trauma, they could control their excretory functions.  The fence was put up to guard against the possibility one of them might somehow manage to remove their collar; it stood fifteen feet high and would fry you to a crisp.  "Even if the power was turned off and you somehow made it to the top," said Rebecca, "you would never get over the rolls of barbed wire.  'I must keep all of you safe and sound,' he'd say."

Grendel might have been married once, because he had a daughter—or, at least, a girl who called him "Daddy":  her name was Co

But Grendel's friends were.

And he did have friends.  Quite a few of them.  They came over for monthly meetings.  Rebecca was their preferred party favor, her body having three orifices, but eventually all of them received their turns at the meetings.  "He did not believe in playing favorites," Arnold said.  "He was concerned our feelings would be hurt.  He was real thoughtful like that."

"I wish someone would have hurt my feelings that way just once," said Rebecca.  "His friends were rough.  One of them used to hold a hot cigar against the back of my neck to make sure my head stayed down.  None of them were ever gentle.  And they tasted awful."

"Heard that," said Arnold.

Christopher nodded his head.  "Preaching to the choir."

"Bingo," sang Thomas.

Except for the monthly meetings, Grendel and his friends communicated solely through the internet.  The third floor of the house had been converted into one large room where Grendel kept several computers, as well as a server.  For all appearances, he was the network administrator for about two dozen small businesses, all antique dealers, each with their own web site, email address, private chat rooms, all of it.

"No one ever said what they meant," said Rebecca, "not even in the chat rooms.  Everything was in code.  If you saw one of the emails, it just looked like a list of stuff people wanted to buy, or prices, or receipts."

Arnold gri

"Configurations," said Christopher.  "Text configurations."

"Right, configurations—you know, the way the letter was put together, the way the paragraphs were indented, stuff like that?  Even how many spaces or periods there were between the end of one sentence and the start of the next one meant something."

They knew this because, once a month, Grendel would gather them together and show them the "purchase orders" for the upcoming meeting, so that each would know what was expected of them.

"He insisted on teaching us the codes," said Christopher.  "That way, he never had to look us in the face and tell us what we were going to have to do."

"I do not ever want to see the words 'decorative bathtub fixtures' again," Rebecca said, then shrugged, embarrassed.  "Anytime they ordered 'decorative bathtub fixtures,' that meant me."

"I was any Louis XIII furniture," said Christopher.

Arnold scratched at one of his scars and tried to smile.  "Mostly I was walnut.  Or mahogany.  Or cherry.  Any of the darker woods."  He shook his head.  "Man, I hated seeing an order for a mahogany dining room table.  That meant they were going to… eat off of me before they did their business."  He wiped his eyes, then tried once again to smile.  "I remember when Mom used to take me out for ice cream.  I would always order a big banana split with extra whipped cream on top.  It was not a real banana split without that extra whipped cream, you know?"  His eyes narrowed, and for a moment he looked as if he might get sick.  "Him and his friends ruined that for me.  I almost hate him more for that than my face."

"Thomas was an antique radio, or phonograph, anything like that," said Rebecca.  "I will bet you can guess why."

Grendel's friends included lawyers, doctors, police officials, city fathers, and others whose positions guaranteed these meetings would always be discreet.

"They never called each other by name in front of us," Arnold said.  "But they would, you know, talk about their jobs.  The doctors gave Grendel any kind of medical stuff he asked for.  Bandages, scalpels, equipment, thread for stitches, needles, cough medicine… all kinds of stuff.  There were always a lot of drugs in the house."

"Pick a prescription medicine," said Rebecca, "and it was there.  A lot of it.  He never wanted for any of us to have to see a doctor if we were sick or hurt.  His doctor friends, they did not like the idea of having to treat us as patients, so they gave him everything he might need."

They were always blindfolded during the meetings so as to not see anyone's face.  "He would tape our eyes closed with duct tape," Christopher told me.  "Then he would put the blindfolds on.  'No peeking,' he would always say, and then laugh."