Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-10950063-20140714192528

 I woke up to the phone ringing. Confused, disoriented, unsure why I was suddenly not sleeping, I rolled over to look at my nightstand   1:53 AM. As soon as I saw those softly glowing green numbers on my alarm clock I knew who it was. He called   every few months. Every few months for the last three and a half years. If it were anything else, I would be used to it, but still my stomach churned, hot and unsteady. My breath became heavy, jagged, wavering.

 I reached for the phone. I didn’t have to. Really, there was no point. The phone records never showed anything. It was always pay phones hundreds, thousands of miles apart. Sometimes it was residences, but they always belonged to people who had been away on vacations or long business trips and came back to find their house disturbed. Like someone had been living there while they were gone. And the mail would still come tomorrow. It always did the day after a call. I picked up the phone.

 “It’s you,” I said, my voice as even as I could make it.

 “Yes,” he said. His voice was a distant, raspy whisper, just barely audible over the fluctuating static that served as a bed for his calls. There was silence, except for the white noise. I knew how these calls went, next came the nonsense.

 “Her hair,” he paused, he spoke in fragments punctuated by beats of labored breathing, whimpers, wet noises that sound like chewing, clicks and squishes, lip smacks, or sometimes just the hiss of the static, “has turned a shade. . .of green. It falls. . .it falls off when the wind blows and gets carried away like dandelion seeds. Her eyes are so big now. Like. . .dinner plates. She stares. . .at the sun.”

 “Okay,” I said, softly.

 “She saw. . .an elephant today. It told her. . .a secret. The secret is about. . .the moons. . .of Jupiter. I know a secret, too. Mindy told me. Do you. . .do you want to know, Mr. Polk?”

 “Yes.”

 “She told me she had. . .peeked at her,” this pause was long, as if he was having trouble speaking. I don’t mean he found it difficult to say, I mean like his mouth was working. I heard little squeaks, the starts of syllables grunted, laced with frustration, wheezing breath. “Christmas presents,” he finally said, “before. . .I took her. She told me. . .that she knew there, there WAS NO Santa Claus. . .and that made her sad. Because she thought that he loved her.”

 “Okay,” I said, quieter than before. The next part of the pattern. The part where he tries to make me hurt. It always work. A few tears slipped down my face as I thought about Mindy, then only six-years-old, having to find out Santa was real just. . .weeks? Days? So shortly before she was taken. A little death of innocence before she was ripped away.

 “She knew she was going to get. . .a set of Barbie. . .walkie-talkies.” The part where he reveals information he could only know if he had Mindy, if she told him. “I’m right, aren’t I, Daaaviiiid?”

 “Yes.”

 “You’ll get a letter tomorrow.”

 “I know.” The last lull in the conversation. The static swells. “Tell her,” I choked, I tried so hard to keep the sound of my oncoming breakdown out of my voice, “tell her I love her.”

 “No,” he says and hangs up. The static disappears, replaced by a dial tone. I sat on the edge of my bed and cried until I was so exhausted and drained that all I could do was sleep.

 The next morning, I called off work. It’s the same job I worked when Mindy was taken. My boss is a good man. He kept me on when I taking weeks off, when I was the major suspect in my daughter’s disappearance, when the drinking started and through the divorce. Everytime I get one of the calls, he gives me the day off.

<p class="MsoNormal"> I call my ex-wife, let her know I’ll be getting a letter today. She gets calls, too. Her’s are just noises: children crying, industrial machinery,   lawn mowers, dogs and cats, typewriters, overlapping bird calls, high-pitched screeches, metallic banging and muffled shouts.

<p class="MsoNormal"> The phone call lasts a long time, but we don’t say much. Next, it’s the pills. A forest of bottles sprouts up from a corner of my kitchen counter. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, mood stabilizers, even some painkillers to ease a severe and chronic back pain that didn’t exist, anything that alters the way I feel. I swallowed my prescribed dose, then, at random, I filled my palm with a cocktail of extra pills. These I chewed and hardly paid mind to the bitter powder when it clung to my tongue. It wasn’t there long before I washed it away with whiskey straight from the bottle.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Now, the pictures. The ones that had come every few months. I keep them in a drawer in a cabinet in the dining room. I took them out and laid them on the table in rows, making a mosaic of my lost baby set against a blue check table cloth.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Here’s my daughter in the back seat of a car. She sits rigid on the red leather seats, a tiny girl made tinier by the expanse of the vehicle. Dressed in Disney princess PJs, face rigid, eyes downcast, her blonde hair tangled and messy.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Here’s my daughter in a dog carrier. He buzzed her shoulder length hair down to stubble. Her big brown eyes look up through the caged metal front, tiny pink hand clutching one of the intersections of the bars.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Here she is dressed as a flower girl, barefoot on top of a hill. Mindy’s hair is done up in complex braids that circle her head. She wears a simple white dress. If my wife and I had taken it, we would’ve framed it, hung it in a hall, stopped just to look at this beautiful little creature we made together. The bouquet of wild flowers has been worried and worked on. Stems split by fingernails, petals wrinkled and rubbed thin by anxious hands. These are the things you notice when it’s all you have left.

<p class="MsoNormal"> In this one, she’s in the arms of a policeman. His badge and most of his face has been scribbled over with black marker. All I can see of him is an oblivious smile.

<p class="MsoNormal"> There’s twenty in all. No patterns, nothing recognizable except for my little girl. No DNA traces or fingerprints and the postmarks are never the same twice. It must’ve been while I was looking at the pictures that the knocking started. I think I noticed the sound, but just barely.

<p class="MsoNormal"> In this one, Mindy is dressed like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. A dirty, unkempt brunette wig sits uneven on her head. Her ruby slippers are coming apart and the blue gingham dress is too big. At her feet sat a small basket, with a little stuffed Toto sticking its head out. She stands in the center of a neglected living room, yellow walls and a dingy carpet pocked by cigarette burns and covered with spots that looked like port-wine stain birthmarks. It must be Halloween, because she’s ringed by men smoking cigarettes and drinking bottles of beer, all wearing masks. Some were cheap, like the rubber monkey or the thin, plastic Superman face, the kind held on by a rubber band. Others looked. . .my mind always jumped to real, but that was silly. They looked professional, like the bulbous, hairy fly’s head with the massive eyes or the mask that was just a set of human teeth that took up the entirety of the face. I hope it was Halloween. I don’t know what else it could have been.

<p class="MsoNormal"> The knocking continued.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Here she was high up in the branches of a tree. How she-

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Mr. Polk? Mr. Polk, please open the door.” The voice, dampened by distance and obstruction, snapped me out of my self-imposed torture. “Mr. Polk! This is about your daughter! I’ve come a long way and I,” a hesitation, “I can help you.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> My fingers dug into the table cloth. There were a lot of these people in the first few months after Mindy was taken. Journalists, private investigators, internet detectives, self-proclaimed psychics, pathological confessors and people whose hearts were in the right place, but had nothing real to offer. Soon, the rest of the world got bored and moved on. Every once in awhile someone will show up or find my e-mail address. It’s never happened on the day I was supposed to get a picture, though.

<p class="MsoNormal"> I shouted in the direction of the door, my voice cracked as I tried to project, “Thank you, but please leave.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Please, Mr. Polk! Open the door. I know. . .I know where she is and I know where he is.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> That’s what got me in the end.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Go to the police. I can’t do anything,” I said.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “It doesn’t work that way, Mr. Polk. You’re the only one who can go.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> I stood. “Give me a minute, I’ll be right out,” I called, as I headed toward my bedroom. I don’t know what it was. A little of it was probably from the booze mingling with the pills, the bad night of sleep, the coincidence of this guy showing up today of all days. I think that, mostly, it was just because I didn’t have anything left to lose. This stranger could be the one who took Mindy, he could be taking me somewhere to kill me. So what if he did?

<p class="MsoNormal"> And if he wasn’t going to kill me, there was always the chance he actually would take me to them.

<p class="MsoNormal"> In the bedroom, I pulled open a drawer in the bedside table and took out the handgun I bought three years ago. In that time, I’ve had alternating daydreams of using it on the man who stole my Mindy and using it to blow my brains out. The gun still hung limply from my hand when I opened the front door.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Take me there,” I said. The stranger glanced down at the gun and nodded.

<p class="MsoNormal"> We took my car. I insisted. I thought that if anything happened to me then the cops would find my car and know that I would be nearby. In reality, this guy could just drive my car back to my house. He drove. He insisted. I thought it was because of the slight weave in my walk and slur in my speech.

<p class="MsoNormal"> We had been driving for awhile when he asked, “Do you know where we are?” The stranger, who introduced himself as Carl Sheff, was a tall man in a brown suit. I knew his face. I mean, I didn’t know him, I knew the wear that worries put on a person. I knew those lines and the dark circles around his eyes.

<p class="MsoNormal"> I threw up my left hand and let it flop back down to my lap. “No,” I said quietly. My other hand still held the gun, my head leaned against the window watching the trees pass as we drove through a windy forest.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Good. That’s how you get there. I think.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Get where?”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “It’s. . .it’s not really a place, David. It’s nowhere, at least nowhere on Earth.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> My grip tightened on the gun, “You’re not making sense, Mr. Sheff.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “The man who calls you isn’t a man. It’s a thing. . .I guess, it’s a monster.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “No shit.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “I mean it, David. It’s something that comes from somewhere else and the place I’m taking you is. . .I don’t know, in between here and there? It’s like a pantry, a store room.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel and his mouth tightened in frustration. “I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it, too, when someone took me there just like I’m doing for you. The guy who took me, he didn’t understand it either. Neither did the guy who took him and. . .it’s clueless schmucks all the way down, David. And we all thought it was crazy until we got inside.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t a convincing speech.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “I’m not going to kill you, David. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Okay.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> We sat in silence for most of the rest of the ride. A massive headache started to form inside my head. It felt like my skull was shrinking, getting too small for my brain to fit, but still becoming more and more compact.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Does it hurt?” Carl asked. “Your head, I mean.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “Yeah. . .it’s bad.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> “We’re close, then.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> Carl added pressure to the accelerator and we climbed a small hill. At the top, the forest was gone, replaced by a field of high, brown grass. The sky was the yellow of near-sunset. The terrain was completely flat and I could see forever in every direction with nothing to block my view. Except for directly in front of us, that’s where the factory sat, huge even at a distance and getting bigger as we drove toward it.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “There it is,” was all Carl said.

<p class="MsoNormal"> The building was a massive, decaying industrial behemoth made out of crumbling red brick. A good number of the little glass squares that made up the windows were broken. In a few places, the roof had caved in and one of the smokestacks had toppled over, leaving a scatted red tail on the ground.

<p class="MsoNormal"> Carl stopped at the end of the dirt road, about 100 feet from the factory’s huge, black metal double doors. By now, my headache practically crippled me. Carl got out, walked around and opened my door for me. He helped me out of the seat and gave me a gentle push toward the doors. I walked in staggering, jerky steps. The gun in my hand slapped against my legs. I was too distracted by the pain to keep my arm steady. Halfway there, I managed to look back over my shoulder. Carl was still by the car.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “I can’t go with you, David. I’m sorry. You can’t go back in. I’ve tried.”

<p class="MsoNormal"> I continued on, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. I wanted to shoot myself, just to relieve the pressure in my head. After what felt like years, I made it across the lawn of crumbling grass. I put a hand on the door and turned back to look at Carl one last time.

<p class="MsoNormal"> “David,” he called, sounding much farther away than he looked, “there’s a lot of them in there, but you can only bring out one. Make sure you take yours.” I nodded, or I tried to, and pushed touched the door handle. As soon as I touched the metal, the world shifted.

<p class="MsoNormal"> I was inside. The door was at my back. The interior was dark, I could only barely see the brick walls and the wet and muddy floor. I heard the sound of water, flowing and dripping, coming from somewhere. Even dimmer, was the sound of machinery and crying.

<p class="MsoNormal">

<p class="MsoNormal">'''Author's note: All right, this is about 3/4ths or 3/5ths of the way finished. I've kind of lost confidence in it. It started as a story about a kidnapper who calls and torments the father of his victim, but I started thinking, "Well, I guess this kind of has to go somewhere." From there, I kind of started playing with the idea that the kidnapper is kind of a monster who feeds on misery. It uses lost children to extract misery from their parents.'''

<p class="MsoNormal">'''I don't know how well it's working so far. I don't know if I should just find a way to end it after the dad starts reviewing photos. I don't know if I should keep going with it. Even unfinished, this is long. What can I trim?'''

<p class="MsoNormal">'''I think the last section, all the stuff with Carl needs re-written. I kind of was writing it just to get through it, so I could post it. Maybe it works, I don't know? Does it?'''

<p class="MsoNormal">Those are my main concerns, but, obviously, I want general and other feedback as well. <ac_metadata title="The Hell of Lost Children (Work in Progress)"> </ac_metadata>