The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Origin of the Knife - 10/7/04

Thursday, October 7, 2004

Finally. Finally. Got in touch with Gwendolyn tonight. 

When I asked where she'd been the past few nights, her answer was vague: "Research. Some late night research for work. I apologize for not calling you back until now."

"You didn't call me back," I said. "I called you again." 

"Oh. Right." Distracted. 

"Listen," I said, "tell me more about the knife." 

"Huh? The knife?" 

"The one I used to aerate Lynne Samuelson's organs. You know." 

Flinches usually aren't audible, but I swear I heard one then. The line was silent except for the crackling of static on Gwen’s landline. Then she said, quietly, "What about the knife, Mark? Do you want to know what kind of knife, or—" 

"No, I know exactly what kind of knife. I want to know if you know where it came from. And where it went after I stabbed her. Some evidence locker at the police station? Or in a file cabinet at INER?" Just listen to those questions pile up, Naomi-style.

A pause. Got that flinch again, particularly on the last word.

"Let me, um, tackle the second part first," said Gwendolyn. "The knife— after you attacked her— I don't know where it went. That's the unsettling part. It was there, and then it wasn't." 

"I thought you weren't there to see the attack," I interrupted. 

"No," she said, "but I was there soon after. And I saw that knife, only for a couple seconds. Then— gone. Like somebody had taken it away from you in the blink of an eye. Or you... made it go away. But that doesn't make sense, I'm positive they searched you afterward...." 

"Somebody might have lost the knife?" 

"I don't know, Mark." 

Somebody wouldn't have lost the knife. Somebody would surely have gone looking for the knife. But what if they never looked in the right place? I stared at my hand, the one not holding the phone, then said, "And the first part of my question? Where I got the knife?" 

She was silent for a moment. Just when I was about to press her, she spoke up. "I didn't tell them, you know. That I'd seen the knife before. I was afraid of getting in trouble.... for not having said anything before. But I was sure..." 

"Sure of what?" 

"Sure that you hadn't taken it. Taken it with you. There was not any place you coulda put it!" Her careful, attorney-to-be cadence had slipped. I heard a frightened kid underneath. 

I needed to tread more delicately here. I'd been aware, of course, that this was dangerous psychic ground for me—but I’d failed to consider that, for poor Gwen, the earth might be just as precarious. 

"So… when was this?" I asked. Gently now. "When did you first see the knife, Gwendolyn?" 

"We were playing in the woods," said Gwendolyn, slowly. As if she were pulling the memory from her mind detail by detail as she talked. "Couple months before. Whenever you were over my house, we'd have adventures in the woods in the back, past the backyard.”

“Adventures,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, and I could hear a smile in her voice. “But this one time, we wandered off a lot more than we ever had. We got lost. Do… you remember my parents searching for us? Do you remember them hollering our names?" 

I shook my head. Then remembered I was on the phone. "No... sorry, I don't."

"Anyway. We got into some…” Here her adult voice reasserted itself: “… fairly thick undergrowth. And we were playing superheroes—pretending we were superheroes— and right in the middle of it you broke off and said that you wanted to dig." 

"To dig? Why?" 

"You wouldn't say. It seemed so random. But I wasn't going to stop you. You got down on your hands and knees and started digging with a stick right under the thick bushes. You were getting all scratched up by some thorns and sharp branches, but you didn't care. You were so focused on what you were doing. And then you found it. A knife... a long knife. All dirty. I didn't like it. It scared me." 

"Because we weren't supposed to play with knives?" 

"More than that. Just something not right about it. I figured I wasn't old enough to understand. Except I'm not sure I would even now." 

"Hmm." I was bursting for her to go on, but I controlled myself. Seemed that I was capable of considering other people’s feelings when there was something in it for me. "Wish I could remember this myself, Gwendolyn." 

"So you threw it around a little, played with it," she went on. "You weren't nervous about the knife, yourself. You were excited. You wanted to stab something with it, you said. Of course you didn't mean me, but at that moment I was afraid you did. Please don't stab me, I said. Then— I guess you were teasing— you pretended to stab in my direction. 

“I, that did it for me. I screamed and ran away. You cried out you were sorry, and I guess you tried to follow me. But I'd gotten too far away. And you stumbled around. I turned around finally, ready to find you again. But I couldn't. Then I heard you scream.”

She collected herself. Took a noisy sip of something. Said, “Drake, get down from there.”

Then she went on. “It was different than my girlish, flighty little scream. This was deep, somehow, even though puberty was still a long way off for you. Deep and full of fear. It was—was— the most awful thing I'd ever heard. I would've thought it was some dying animal, but I knew it was you. I ran in the direction of your scream, sure now that you'd stabbed yourself accidentally and you were... " She muffled the phone for a moment.

"But you were okay," she said when she came back. "Of course. You were pale, and shaking all over, but you were all right. No blood or any kind of wound that I could see. And the knife was gone. I asked what happened to it. You stammered to me that it had scared you and you'd tossed it away. It didn't make much sense to me. But I knew you didn't have it on you hidden. You didn't have any pockets to put it in. I would have been able to tell if you were hiding it under your clothes. It had to be in the undergrowth somewhere."

The case of the disappearing knife. Just like at the wedding reception. Curiouser and curiouser. But I wasn’t going to tell her a word about attacking the caterer—or about the things crawling in the purple that surrounded him—not tonight.

"Right then was when we heard my parents calling for us. They’d come into the woods to find us. All of the sudden I forgot about how much you’d scared me. The only thing I could think about was the wicked bad spanking I was going to get. So it went out of my mind, and I didn't really think about the knife again until the... until I had to."

"And I never mentioned it?"

"No. You didn't talk about our little expedition at all. But that doesn't mean you weren't thinking about it. And, clearly, you went back for the knife at some point before the day that you attacked Mrs. Samuelson. 

“Because I swear by my family and my cat and everything else that I love that it was the same knife."

posted by Mark Huntley @ 10:26 PM

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