The Judas Child Read online

  She looked up through the branches to see patches of the brilliant ceiling. Above the crisscrossing pipes were clusters of common lightbulbs, but so many, perhaps a thousand of them, and they seemed to be growing out of the plaster. There were other shapes she’d never seen before, squared and hexagonal bulbs screwed into upended lamps protruding from holes. Heavier fixtures housed long fluorescent tubes and round ones. Lines of Christmas tree lights dangled from the edge of the electric sky where the ceiling dropped by half its height. It was a dazzling collection of every kind of lightbulb and fixture on the planet.

  Gwen winced. Shock was wearing off, and she was feeling the pain of the dog bite. It came on as a stabbing sensation. She lowered her face to hide the tears from Sadie. “So you’ve been down here all this time? With that animal?”

  “Yeah, I finally got the dog I always wanted,” said Sadie. “There’s only one snag—he wants to eat me.”

  “What’ve you been eating?”

  “Mushrooms, and I’m damn sick of them.”

  They came abreast of the last log bundle, so different from the others, for this was a mass of twisted, gnarly branches. Gwen recognized these misshapen limbs as the cut-off arms of the one oak tree that had died. The mushrooms growing on this bundle were strange and beautiful, resembling fat flower petals of bright pink all melted together.

  A low buzzing sound grew in volume as they walked toward a long cavelike area with a low ceiling. This space had irregular stone sides and the more normal proportions of a cellar. An overhang of wood shielded it from the sun-bright ceiling of the forest. One lightbulb shone over a door in the only smooth section of wall. The glow of dimmer lights emanated from row upon row of narrow steel tables, each topped by a rack of metal shelves. Two of the shelving units supported beds of straw and bright fungus, and the rest were stacked with rough blocks of wood chips with mushrooms sprouting from their sides. Some were gray button shapes, others were chunky rounded umbrellas of bright orange and mute green.

  This dank cave was not quite as warm as the forest behind them. It was a patch of August shade in winter, and the world became a stranger place with every step. Gwen was distracted from the pain as they passed a shelf of blocks with delicate parasols of purple, and one species that resembled sculptured worms clustered in the loose shape of a mushroom dome. A bright yellow group had the texture of rounded honeycombs, and at the other extreme were large flat pancakes of reddish brown. The last fruit of the wood blocks in this row were cream-colored goblets lined with pink flesh, resembling wide-mouthed baby birds waiting to be fed. Though botany was a favorite subject, she had no idea there were so many different mushrooms in the world, and in so many colors.

  Now she regarded Sadie’s plain white underwear. “Where are your clothes?”

  “Too hot for clothes. I stashed them.”

  It was warm—and muggy. The air was sweating. She looked up to the top of the nearest shelf of wood blocks and saw a tangle of plastic tubing and a nozzle. A fine spray of water washed her face in a miniature rain shower. Her eyes traveled down the shelf boards to the supporting table and a small buzzing pony motor like the one that ran the fish tanks in the biology lab at school. These motors must be powering the plant misters.

  Sadie guided her along this wide center aisle. “Hungry?”

  “God yes.”

  Sadie stopped by the last table in the row and reached up to a middle shelf to harvest a few mushrooms of a common supermarket species. “You can only pick them from the back of the block. Remember that, okay?”

  Gwen nodded as she took the mushrooms from Sadie’s hands and put them into her mouth, trying to eat them all at once.

  “That hungry.” Sadie made a pouch by lifting up the hem of Gwen’s red jersey, and then filled it with more mushrooms. “How did you find me?” She waited patiently while Gwen chewed and swallowed.

  “I came through the hamper—a laundry chute in an upstairs bathroom. I’ve been up there for days.”

  “In a bathroom?” Sadie walked to a crude flimsy door in a wall of whitewashed board. She opened it to display a small toilet strung with spiderwebs. Rusty pipes lined the back wall of the tiny room, and the floor was dirt. It had the foul wet smell of bad plumbing. “Was your bathroom as nice as this one?”

  “Nicer and larger—big enough for a cot and a chair, and this great—”

  “A cot and a chair? Well, that settles it. He definitely likes you best.”

  The pain stabbed her again, and Gwen leaned over the table at the end of the row to hide her face, pretending to look at the underside of a shelf. Tiny lightbulbs were hidden by an overhanging slat. She guessed the mushroom blocks needed less light than the oak trees.

  The pain subsided, and now she stood back and looked at all the tables along the aisle on both sides. Below each of the shelf tables were narrow wooden carts on wheels. Some of them contained large clear plastic bags with tubes running from white patches. Inside one of the bags was a dark, porous material which must be alive, for some of it was green in striations of mold. Two of the carts contained nothing but the common dirt the floor was made of. And one was filled with sawdust and topped off with purple material—Sadie’s sweatshirt and jeans.

  “He ripped me off my bike on the way to your house. So how did he get you?”

  “Sadie, don’t you remember? You told me to meet you at the boathouse.”

  Sadie shook her head. “I never saw you that day. I didn’t even get close to your house before he—”

  “You left a message on my pager. It said, ‘Urgent, boathouse, tell no one.’”

  “No way. I didn’t send you any messages. But I think he said something like that. I’m not sure. God, he has this really creepy whisper—when he’s not yelling at the dog. Damn dog dragged me all over the boathouse. Chewed my parka to shreds. My mom’s gonna kill me when she sees it. Then I knocked my head on something, and I woke up here.”

  At the end of the aisle, Gwen could see the interior of another room. Sadie pulled her through the open doorway and turned on a light switch. This space was white and perfectly clean. The painted cement floor was cool beneath her bare feet. A chilly, humming breeze came through a small vent near the ceiling of the back wall. Though the door was open, she could barely hear the buzzing of the pony motors outside the room. The air was dry, and the temperature had to be at least ten degrees lower.

  A stainless-steel sink gleamed, as did the bottles in the glass-front cupboards along one wall. The Formica countertop was lined with racks of test tubes and stacks of petri dishes alongside a tidy row of bound notebooks. Each leather binding bore an old-fashioned script of numerals for successive dates. The first in the row dated back thirty years. One of the journals lay open, and so near the lip of the countertop, it threatened to fall off at any moment. Without thinking, she reached out to push it back from the edge.

  “Don’t touch that!” Sadie’s voice had a rare note of panic, but she was calm again as she explained, “We have to leave everything just the way we found it, okay?”

  Gwen nodded, absorbing this new rule of the game without question. She was distracted by the throbbing pain in her leg, and then hunger won out as a priority. She took more mushrooms from the pouch of her jersey and popped them into her mouth.

  A loose collection of petri dishes lay on the counter near the open journal. One was missing a cover and its contents were spoiled, overgrown with black mold. She ate another mushroom. The hunger was subsiding, and the pain was growing again.

  “Thirsty?”

  Gwen nodded as she sat down on a metal chair with rolling wheels. Sadie filled a glass jar with water from the faucet and placed it on the counter. Gwen drank in big gulps.

  “This is where he keeps all the cleaning stuff.” Sadie was rooting around in the closets under the sink, and now she pulled out a roll of thick white gauze, a handful of paper towels and a bottle of liquid soap. She knelt on the floor in front of Gwen and ripped a larger hole in the shredded denim pa
nt leg. After wetting a paper towel, Sadie cleaned the blood away from the wound.

  The soap stung. Gwen bit down on her lower lip. Her teeth were grinding; her hands clenched into tight fists. She wiped away the new rush of tears, and now she could see the tip of a bottle on the floor, almost hidden by the edge of the low closets. Small white pills had spilled from the open plastic mouth. “Are those aspirins?”

  Sadie bent low to read the white label on the bottle. “Tylenol with codeine.”

  “Our gardener takes those for his arthritis. Give me some. My leg hurts.”

  “We can’t touch them. We can’t move anything.” Sadie stood up and opened a drawer next to Gwen’s chair. “There’s more in here. I don’t think he’d notice a few pills missing from one of these—as long as we put the bottles back exactly the way we found them.” She read off the labels of a large assortment of pharmacy containers. “Motrin, Advil, Orudis, Soma Flexeril—”

  “Give me one of each.”

  “Can’t.” Sadie was holding up one bottle, reading from the label. “They all have instructions. Most of them say one pill every four hours.”

  “Since when do you care about instructions? I want the pain to stop now.”

  They compromised with one pill from each of three different containers. Sadie replaced the bottles, carefully rolling each one to show the same portion of the pharmacy label that was visible before she picked them up. Then she knelt down again and stared at Gwen’s wound, fascinated by the puncture marks and the reddening welts. “It’s swelling up already. That’s fast. Do you remember the giant mosquito at the Museum of Natural History?”

  Gwen nodded. The model was monstrous in size, and each time she remembered it, the insect had grown larger and larger, almost reaching the dimensions of the thing that had visited her in the upstairs bathroom. She hated the museum mosquito.

  “Totally cool,” said Sadie. “Biggest bug I ever saw. It was huge.” She bent over the wound again, studying a pink fluid oozing up from the deep holes. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this was the bug’s work.”

  Sadie was very gentle as she rinsed the soap from the wound and dried it, only dabbing around the holes, constantly looking up to Gwen’s face for signs that she might be causing more pain. Finally, the puncture marks disappeared under a winding of white gauze, and the bandage was tied off with a knot, while Gwen read a queer shopping list pinned to a bulletin board over the sink. In faded ink on yellowed paper were mentions of cement bags to finish the floors of the growing room and greenhouse sheeting to line its walls. Another line said, “Damn bugs,” but named no material to solve the problem.

  As Gwen finished eating the last of the mushrooms, the pills were already taking effect. Her leg continued to throb, but the pain was ebbing away. She leaned down and pulled open another low closet to see a wad of purple canvas. “Isn’t that your knapsack?”

  “Yeah, but my pager’s gone.” Sadie closed this door, and then she began to clean the floor with a paper towel and uncharacteristic tidiness. “He took my phone book too.”

  “So that’s how he got the number and the code.” And now the hurt was forgotten, and Gwen was feeling light-headed as she pulled the pill drawer open a bit wider. This must be the source of the drugs that had put her to sleep. At the back of the drawer was an open box of disposable rubber gloves—another mystery solved. So these were the monster’s rubber fingers. She looked up to an overhead cabinet. Through the glass door, she could see an old microscope. It resembled an outdated model from school which had been recently replaced with a new one. On the higher shelf were rows of jars labeled as bleach and alcohol, yeast and sphagnum. Malt agar? One wall was lined with a standing army of stoppered bottles of dark material. Others were full of sawdust.

  “Sort of like the biology lab at school, isn’t it?” Sadie walked across the room and opened the door of a large closet to show her a cylindrical metal container with a thermostat on one side. Gwen knew what this was, an oversized pressure cooker. That would fit with the petri dishes on the countertop. These cultures resembled the ones she had grown in lab class.

  “Maybe the stories about St. Ursula’s are true,” said Sadie, grinning. “We’ve been sold off for weird science experiments.” She stood in the open doorway and looked out over the fruiting blocks on the rows of tabletop shelves. “Kidnapped by the mushroom people.”

  And now it occurred to Gwen that she was being sucked into another one of Sadie’s horror stories. It was such a familiar routine she forgot for a moment that the horror was real. She smiled at Sadie, consummate spinner of tales. Drowsiness completed the atmosphere of a typical sleepover with her best friend.

  “Yup.” Sadie returned to peer into the open petri dish on the counter. “Definitely weird science.” And now she showed Gwen the label of a package. Her smile was almost evil as she read the line aloud, “Spawning material.”

  “Hmmm.” Gwen looked up at the bottles in the glass-front cabinet and read the names of complex chemicals. One jar of green powder was the same potent fertilizer the Hubbles’ gardener had used to revive a dying tree. Apparently it had failed to save the barren stumped oak in the cellar forest. The old gardener had called this green mixture a strong potion of last resort. A small amount of undiluted granules had killed one of Mr. Stuben’s guard dogs. The gardener had almost lost his job for that. Mr. Stuben still maintained that the poisoning had been deliberate. But Gwen could not believe the gardener had been that cruel, for the dog had certainly died in pain. Its mouth and tongue had been burned by the corrosive chemicals.

  She looked down at the countertop and scanned the scrawled lines on a page of the open journal. She was getting sleepy, and the text began to blur as she came to the last words, which ended midsentence in a long shaky line trailing off the paper.

  “So he was inoculating the mushroom cultures, and something must have interrupted him.” Gwen’s eyes drifted to a plastic box pushed to the rear of the countertop. She opened the lid and looked down at a cluster of large fungi, dark, marbled and coated with dirt. She sniffed. This was familiar. “Sadie, do you know what these are? Truffles.”

  “Ugly-looking, aren’t they?”

  “A truffle is a—”

  “A subterranean fungus,” said Sadie. “You think I sleep through all my classes.”

  “Truffles come from Europe, and it costs the world to buy them. Even my dad complains about the price.”

  “Really?” Sadie reached into the box, pulled one out and washed it under the sink. “Maybe they’re not so ugly. Take this one for instance.” She held it out for Gwen’s inspection. “It looks like a cute little bird, doesn’t it?”

  Gwen nodded, drowsing, almost losing her balance on the rolling chair. She stared at the truffle nestled in the palm of Sadie’s hand. The small outgrowth at the top might be a beaked head, and the strange shaping in the bulk of it could pass for sweetly folded feathers. Her mouth dropped open when Sadie bit the head off and laughed.

  “Not bad.” Sadie held out the box. “Wanna try one?”

  “I don’t think so.” Gwen smiled. “Did you know that truffle spores are usually spread by deposits from the assholes of burrowing rodents?”

  “Rodents? Rat shit?” Sadie pulled the truffle out of her mouth and spat into the sink. Gwen was extremely pleased with herself; she had finally grossed out the master.

  When Sadie had washed her mouth out with water, she looked up at the clock on the wall. “We have to be very careful.” She pulled a rag from the cupboard under the sink and began to clean up each dot of blood on the painted white cement floor. “He comes back here twice a day. If he finds anything out of place, he’ll know I’m still breathing.”

  “He thinks you’re dead?”

  “He’s pretty sure I am.” Sadie made a wet ball of the dirty rag and stashed it behind the store of boxes and cans under the sink. “He buried me alive.”

  “Oh, right.” By the grace of the pills, Gwen was feeling giddy now, and only
deeply ingrained politeness prevented her from laughing out loud.

  “He did,” said Sadie, insistent and somewhat wounded by this disbelief. “And I got a real good look at him while he was filling in my grave.” She opened another low closet and hauled out a bulky green trash bag. “You want to see what he looks like?” The child opened the bag wide to display rolls of black material: the knit of a sweater, the wool cuff of a pant leg and the toe of a large shoe. Sadie dug deep into the bag and plucked out a piece of black felt, a ski mask. She pulled it over her head—instantly morphing into an entirely different creature.

  Gwen was jolted awake, eyes wide and all her attention riveted to the black felt mask. So this was the thing that had come to sit by her cot in the bathroom. The eyes were cruel slits crowned by slashes of white stitching that resembled angry eyebrows. The mouth was sewn shut with thick white embroidery thread to create the outline of intermeshed triangular fangs. Sadie was showing her the face of the monster.

  “What do you think?” Sadie’s words were muffled by the material, her voice unrecognizable and barely understood.

  “Take it off! Please, take it off!”

  “Okay, okay.” Sadie hurriedly removed the mask and plunged it back into the bag. “We have to hide soon. When he knows you’re gone, he’s gonna tear this place apart looking for you.”

  “He’ll think I’m outside. I tied the bedsheets together and left them dangling out the bathroom window.”

  Sadie nodded with approval. “Good job. But he’ll be back soon, and he’s still gonna search the house. I would. We’ll know when he’s here—you can hear the car engine. We have to find a place to hide.”

  They walked out of the sterile room and back into the vast space of the mushroom farm and the hum of tiny motors. Any one of the carts beneath the rows of tabletop shelves would make a good hiding place with room to spare.