He gritted his teeth and took hold of the oxblood colored lid and slowly inched it open. Microscopic dust bunnies filled the air as the lid was disturbed, making the boy's nose itch and his eyes water. An odor of mildew rose along with the dust. Still, he had to go on. His dead mother's shrill words cheered him on, filling his ears. Higher, higher, closer he came to unleashing what was inside. He caught a glint of glassine tubing and steel bands, as on a coffeepot with a snaked tube end, and a strange flick switch along its center, all wrapped half-assed in a yellowed sheath of newspaper. Another piece of newspaper clung to the roof of the lid until it came away and slithered into his peripheral vision. Giles made out only half of the words in the bold headline: Torture Level… Blood Addict. Then he slammed the lid shut, tied it tight and rushed from it, leaving it on the table. It had traveled with him to his foster home in Millbrook, Minnesota, and later it had traveled with him to Portland, Oregon, and later it had come back across the country when he moved from Portland to Milwaukee after he'd taken Sarah Towne's spine. Since he had been in Milwaukee, almost a year now, the box had resided beneath his bed. Giles had at times forgotten of its existence, and now here it was, again begging him, pulling him toward it, pleading to be opened, to be completely explored and fully digested.
On hands and knees now, staring below the bed at the dirty old brown box left him by his birthmother, Giles again felt like the child in the kitchen, afraid to touch the damn thing, for as evil as he felt, something far more sinister than Giles Gahran resided inside the box gifted over to him by his mother.
Open the damn box! he heard his mother's dead wail reverberate though the coils of his inner ear, bouncing off the walls of his brain, echoing down the corridors of his cerebellum. You cheated me long enough! Open the damned box! It was always strongest-this insistence-after he had claimed someone's spine.
A part of him wanted to tear it open, spill out all of its contents, spend hours pouring over all that she had planned to rub in his face-all that she had horded all those years for his eyes only. But another part of Giles screamed to burn the damnable parcel from hell.
He reached beneath the bed and pulled the box toward his eyes. Dust flew. He held his breath, felt it catching as if he might be somehow cutting off his own air supply. “Fuck this. It's just a box of crap, old papers, shit, nonsense. I'm a man now. I don't need this shit.” Even as he said it, he felt the beads of perspiration that'd formed on his forehead and hands, and he felt his stomach churning and lurching as if some phantom bitch was rhythmically suctioning his insides like butter in a bucket.
You don't have to open it, Son, came a voice, a male voice, one he had no recollection of save as the one he'd made up as a child-the voice of his loving father, the one his mother had lied about all those years. The box is just a pack of lies, Son. Burn the fucking thing, Son. Burn it all. She's with Lucifer now and can't ever hurt you again. Send the box back to hell, back to that cunt who dared call herself a mother!
He sat Indian fashion just staring at the box between his legs for a long time. Minutes passed. The trash chute out in the hallway was mere feet from his door, a straight shot to the incinerator. Why not burn the fucking box and send it back to Hades? asked his loving father. Why not get shed of it forever. Why not take some action, my helpless Hamlet? came the soothing father's voice.
He grabbed hold with both hands and rushed to the door, tore it open. Eyes wide, he rushed toward the trash chute, but Mrs. Parsons, the eighty-year-old hag from down the hall was standing there with three trash bags, working each in one at a time.
“Hello, Giles!” she called out.
“Mrs. Parsons.”
“Nice weather we're enjoying.”
“Yes ma'am indeed.”
“Whatcha-got-there-inyer-hand?”
“Ahhh… this? This old box? Nothing… nothing, really.”
“Interesting box. Can't get boxes like that anymore. Find it in an antique shop? Seen some file boxes with ties wrapped round them, but they were just cardboard. That's a fine box.”
“Hell of a box.”
“Wanna part with it? My granddaughter would love it. How much would you want for a thing like that?”
“I'm… ahhh… afraid… you see, if it wasn't a gift maybe…”
“Oh, really? An heirloom! How enchanting.”
“Ahhh… you could say so. It was gifted to me by… by Mother… upon her death.”
The landlady's hands shot instantly up in a mock gesture of surrender. “Oh, dear, I'm so sorry for your loss. You can't possibly part with a thing like that, and I certainly understand.”
“Thank you.”
“Just that last time I saw one like that, it was in a library, housing important papers.”
“Yes… I keep all my important papers close,” he lied. “I've got to finish packing now, Mrs. Parsons. I gotta go.” He began disappearing from the hallway as he spoke, inching spiderlike back into his apartment.
“You sure created a ruckus in there last night!” she called after him. “Making that art of yours. My, but it must take a lot of perspiration indeed, all that banging! Makes a body go loco to hear all that incessant hammering.”
But Giles had safely returned to his apartment and closed the door on the woman's ranting. He dropped the box into one of the crates. He'd move it again, put it away at the new place, and perhaps one day he'd have the guts to open it and look on every word, every item collected by his mother.
He stared around at his studio and slid down the side of the crate, exhausted. He pulled the phone to him and called UPS to come get the boxes and crates he'd be shipping.
“Chicago, City of Blues and Dirty Politics, here comes Giles Gahran, and as for professor of art, Keith Orion, get ready Dr. 0, for a visit from an old flame.”
He looked across the wood floor of his studio apartment and saw a fleck of blood he'd missed with his cleaning fluids, and while on the phone with UPS, ordering them to pick up his crates as soon as possible, he saw a trail of other specks he'd overlooked, mocking him. Lucinda's blood. He lifted a jar filled with red fluid, already labeled LW. He remained on the line, on hold, listening to “Sweet Lorraine” in its original Nat King Cole version. Annoyed by the culmination of these circumstances, he located his concoction of ammonia, bleach, Mr. Clean, and that muriatic acid the Ace hardware man had assured him could clean a gravestone of a hundred years of accumulated mold, and he sprayed the powerful, nose-pinching, eye-gouging concoction over the last remnants of Lucinda's blood.
When Jessica lifted her ringing cell phone from where she had left it beside the bed, she stood shower refreshed and staring out at the terrace where Darwin Reynolds had wandered to stretch and to lift his face into the early morning rain.
She opened the phone, careful not to allow the camera to see anything but herself. When she pressed to receive Richard's incoming call, the first noise she heard was the sound of a working backhoe.
“Richard? Is it you?” She could hardly hear him over the backhoe's grunting and bawling hue. “What the hell's that noise?”
“Backhoe!” he shouted.
“Are you in the middle of a construction zone?”
“Exhumation-in-progress zone!” he shouted back.
“What're you talking about, Richard? And what time is it? And what kind of a gin mill're you in?”
“Six-fifty… ahhh… no, seven here now… Minnesota time. What is it there? Same time zone, isn't it? Sorry to wake you, but wanted you to know…” The backhoe won out over several of his words, but she caught the single-most important one: exhumation.
“How did you get… embroiled… in an exhumation?”
“Hold on! Hold on!” He stepped away from the rhino-bellowing machine and found a quiet distance beneath a tree. There he informed Jessica of events at the Milwaukee M.E.'s office that led to the exhumation. She took the bad news about the lack of DNA evidence on file with Krueshach's office in relative stride, but Richard could not hold back. He took a moment to get his ire off against Millbrook authorities.