Firetale Read Free Page B

with
two children that he had stolen from a frame in a supermarket a
dozen towns ago. Sometimes he said the family had died in a car
accident and he left his hometown because he could no longer live
in a house once filled with his children’s laughter. Sometimes he
liked to add a little drama, claiming that his wife learned he had
cancer, divorced him, and put him out of the house to avoid paying
the bills for his treatment. Then his listeners’ eyes filled with
tears, and they muttered words filled with righteous anger. Mr.
Berry was always amazed that people so easily believed such
nonsense.
    Mr. Berry was lucky with his
professorial face. People looked in to his big sad eyes behind the glasses and
believed his every word. Outside of work, he tried to be clean and
tidy, and he avoided controversy and arguments.
    Until the age of thirty-two, Mr. Berry’s
life had been as in a fog. He worked as a manager, selling used
cars. He even had a girlfriend. But Mr. Berry’s head was always
muddled, and he could not concentrate on his work nor on his
romantic relationship. He was a mediocre employee and a boring
boyfriend.
    And then he killed a hooker. It
happened four months after Mr. Berry had been dumped by his
girlfriend ,
who had found a more interesting man. It was the first and last
time Berry paid for sex. It made him confused. He was overwhelmed
with doubt and shame. The prostitute started to taunt him because
of his meager manhood. Berry was a timid man, but he could not
tolerate such insults. The fact that the woman was drunk was even
more offensive. The murder occurred by chance. He shoved her, and
she fell, hitting her neck on the edge of the bathtub. To his
surprise, Berry was not afraid. He was excited, and the fog in his
mind had cleared. Ever since then, he’d had a goal.
    He never again paid attention to
whores. Their filth, their lust, their flabby thighs and painted faces
disgusted him. He realized what he was once afraid to admit. Sex
with older women did not clear the fog in his head, but only made
it less thick. They had too much rot, too many lies, too much
hatred. Children, on the other hand, were innocent and trusting.
Their skin was clean, and their scars healed with incredible
speed.
    Berry had to leave the big
cit y. In big
cities, everybody was much too concerned about children’s safety.
The schedules of some children looked like those of top managers in
big corporations. If a child was an hour late from school, parents
would call the police and every friend and relative in town. The
bigger the city, the more dangerous for a child, they
claimed.
    In small towns,
everything was easier. Children knew who and what they needed to keep
away from. Who could harm a kid in a town where everyone knew each
other? Police in small towns dealt with domestic quarrels, shooed
teenagers holed up in their father’s car at the roadside, and
booted out long hitters from bars. When a child was lost, they
interviewed the parents, friends, and teachers and checked the
lakes, rivers, and forests. Mr. Berry was unconcerned. By the time
the fruitless, wasteful search was over and panic had begun to
spread, Mr. Berry would have hidden all the evidence.
    In this town, Mr. Berry noticed
too late the girl in the white dress with red polka dots. By the time he saw her
among the other children walking with their parents to a traveling
circus, he had already chained another girl to the floor in the
basement of his house. Her name was Julia. He had stalked her for
more than two months. He had watched, learning her daily routine so
that he could calculate when she would be alone and not at home. He
wrote nothing down, lest documents incriminate him if something
went wrong. Now that his life had a meaning, his brain worked much
better, and it was easy to memorize all the necessary details. On
Fridays, Julia left school before her girlfriends. Mr. Berry
kidnapped her when she went to pee in the bushes on the way
home.
    Still , the