Walter
Dorothy Taylor had heard of the gruesome deaths in nearby Lynnview by six p.m. on the evening of the 21st, the day of their discovery, but by the time she arrived at her apartment from work, they had largely been dismissed from her thoughts. In a city as large as Los Angeles, the daily news was rife with various murders and savage assaults. Survival in a financial sense was more than enough to occupy her thoughts, since she had a sixteen year old brother to support and her only marketable skills were the ability to type fifty words a minute and a mediocre command of shorthand.
Dorothy opened the apartment door and was instantly ill at ease due to the fact that she was not met by either Walter, her brother, or Mr. Bromwell, the neighbor who stayed with him during the day. Maybe Walter was sleeping; his physical schedule was hardly what one might call regular, as last night’s little episode had so clearly demonstrated. Being extra careful to make no noise that might awaken him, she put away her things and strolled into the tiny kitchen to begin the evening meal. As she had expected, she came upon Mr. Bromwell there.
“Hello,” she whispered. “How did today go?”
She had surprised the sixty-six year old man, and he started before looking up to her guiltily from a half-eaten sandwich that he held. “Uh, fine, Missy, everything went just fine,” he replied. “About this sandwich … we had a light lunch, and—”
Dorothy patted his shoulder. “Now, don’t go apologizing for a sandwich, Mr. Bromwell.”
“Well, I know how hard it is for a young girl like yourself to make ends meet, and if an old goat eats up your refrigerator, it can’t help matters.”
“Listen, haven’t I told you that anything in this room is yours for the taking, especially since you won’t let me pay you any more than I do?” Bromwell, a retiree on pension, wouldn’t take more than fifteen dollars for staying with Walter Taylor during the five day work week while Dorothy plied her trade as a secretary with a public relations firm.
The gray-haired man considered her words for a moment and then resumed eating his sandwich.
Dorothy quickly gathered together the beginnings of a spaghetti dinner—though Walter would eat literally anything fit for human consumption, he did have a number of favorites, of which spaghetti was one—and was contemplating asking Mr. Bromwell to dine with them (since the widower had finished his sandwich and remained at the table), when he took something from a chair at his side and said, “Miss Dorothy, I have to tell you some not so good news.”
Oh god, she thought, Walter killed a dragon while he was out last night and wrecked somebody’s car. “What is it?” she asked.
“We had a quiet day here; I guess the boy tired himself out last night during his roaming. He’s slept off and on through most of the afternoon.” Bromwell paused, still holding the incriminating object hidden at his side. “But, I went into his room at lunchtime to, you know, to check and see if he was hungry. And I found him with this.” He held out the evidence: a glossy paperback book.
Dorothy took the book and glanced at its cover, though she knew instinctively what sort of novel it would be: she was right. “Cave of the Gryphon’s Bones,” screamed the title in raised, blood-red letters. The blurb went on to promise, “A Tale of Enchanted Warfare, Fabulous Beasts, and Kurrec the Barbarian Hero.”
“It looks like a new book,” Bromwell pointed out almost apologetically. “I figure he got it somewhere while he was out last night.”
“I hope he didn’t steal it,” Dorothy sighed. He’d never done that to her knowledge, but she couldn’t even imagine her brother carrying out so civilized a transaction as buying a book. “Do you think he had read much of it?”
Bromwell nodded. “He was four-fifths of the way to the end when I found him with it. He didn’t give me any trouble at all when I took it from him, but, of course, I was very, very polite when I asked for it.”
Dorothy managed to smile. At least Walter had never really hurt anyone, not even in the depths of his monster-slaying madness.
“Does it really do so much harm, Missy? You can just see how much he enjoys reading those things, and it’s not like it was pornography or something. Maybe it sort of gives him a … what is it they call it? … a vicarious experience so that he won’t try to really live it out.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Bromwell,” she admitted. “When his condition began to develop, back even before our parents died, the first thing that was done was to take him off of his diet of these … novels. He was reading six or eight of them a week. But that’s been more than six years ago, and I honestly can’t see how it’s helped. All of the doctors say to keep them away from him, though.”
Bromwell gave the tired young woman a reassuring smile. “Things will work out, you’ll see. He’s a good boy, and he’ll beat his problems, especially with somebody who loves him as much as you do helping him along. Listen to this, though, a person would think I was an old man trying to turn into a poet or something. I’ll see you tomorrow, Missy, same time, same place.”
Dorothy thanked him again and saw him to the door before returning to the kitchen to work on the spicy sauce. She hoped that Walter would sleep until everything was ready and not wander into the preparations. All she needed now was for him to sit at the table, slam one huge fist down on it, and bellow for “sustenance” or “aliment”. Her eyes fell on the garish cover of the “sword and sorcery” novel that her brother had somehow obtained during the long hours of freedom that had been his the night before, and the years fell away. She thought back to the time before the leaden blanket of responsibility had descended on her so abruptly, before her parents had taken that last flight, and before Walter had entered that strange, shadowy mental prison that kept him removed from reality. She had been fourteen then, and so proud of her quiet, withdrawn, but obviously brilliant brother. Back before this pointless comedy had begun.
Maybe it wouldn’t help to modify Walter’s behavior, but there was only one positive step that she could take at the moment: with fingers that were slippery and damp with raw hamburger, she quickly dropped the book into the trash.
Walter slept on, but Dorothy still wasn’t able to complete the dinner without interruption. This time the apartment doorbell chimed, and she rushed to answer it before more than her culinary concentration was disturbed by the noise.
She slipped open the door and gazed into the face of Mr. Fremantle, the building superintendent. “Ms. Taylor? I’d like to speak with you, please,” he said.
The slender, dark-haired young woman opened the door to admit the man and was both surprised and puzzled to encounter three other people behind him. “Won’t you, um, have a seat?” she asked, hoping that they would refuse. But her luck was holding, however, and the three men and one woman settled themselves on her small sofa and single large chair. “What can I do for you, Mr. Fremantle?” she added, still confused.
The superintendent, a short, wiry man, took a fortifying breath, opened his mouth as if to reply, and then sat frozen that way for several long, embarrassing seconds. He obviously was uneasy and was rescued from the predicament by one of the men who had accompanied him into the apartment.
“Let me introduce myself, Miss Taylor; my name is Howard Jessup, this is my wife Deidre, and this is our mutual neighbor, Mr. Davis Whitehouse. Though we’ve never officially met, I’m sure we’ve passed one another in the hallways from time to time.”
Dorothy nodded but didn’t bother to extend her hand in greeting. She was already beginning to feel distinctly anxious about all of this.
Jessup continued, “We are something of an informal committee, Miss Taylor, who have taken it upon ourselves to … to speak with you about a problem that seems to be affecting all of us who live in this building. Mr. Fremantle graciously agreed to come along to help with the mediation of this affair.”
“Problem?” Dorothy repeated cautiously.
Mrs. Jessup smiled carefully and responded, “Yes, dear, the one with which you deal regularly and which, by extension, affects us all.”
The warning bell rang within her mind. “You mean Walter,” she said with certainty.
“Your brother, yes.”
“Walter is not a problem.”
The members of the “committee” glanced briefly at one another. “We all admire your self-sacrifice, Miss Taylor, and we can understand how much of your private life is … ruined by having to care for a retarded relative—” Jessup began.
“He’s not retarded!” Dorothy snapped.
The man shrugged. “Ill, then. We really admire you for what you’re attempting to do; but, as fellow residents of this building, we also have to consider the well-being of our own families. What happened last night is already common knowledge throughout the complex.”
A cold rage began to swell within Dorothy, and it was made all the more galling by the fact that she knew it would be useless. “Tell me, Mr. Jessup,” she said with forced calm, “just what did happen last night?”
Jessup gave her a flat stare. “I mean the midnight walk that your brother took, naturally.”
“A sixteen year old boy walking the streets of Los Angeles after dark, yes, I agree with you, that was a dangerous stunt for him to pull. Especially with that maniac who killed those people over in Lynnview on the loose. But that’s my fault, not his. Thanks for your concern, and I promise to be more careful in the future.”
Davis Whitehouse had been silent until then, and he gave a short, nervous cough before answering, “You know that’s not what we mean, girl. We’re talking about the danger that big guy holds for us and our kids.” His tone was straightforward and not the least tentative. “He’s not right, and those kinds of people are capable of just about anything.”
Dorothy sighed. She knew she had to try to fight back her anger and put up some form of rational defense before these vigilantes, just as she knew that it would be futile exercise. She spoke slowly. “Walter has never in his life intentionally hurt anyone, in spite of his size and the fact that he’s ‘not right,’ as you so delicately put it. He’s autistic, not retarded, and since you probably don’t know what that means, I’ll explain it for you:
“Walter sees a world other than the one we can perceive. Actually, people—all people—are friends to him, and the only things that he ever tries to fight are the imaginary demons and monsters in his world! We’ve lived in this apartment for almost eight months, haven’t we? Who has he hurt in that time? You? Anyone?”
Deidre Jessup reached out to touch Dorothy’s hand. “No one, but—”
“He threatened the security guard at the front door last night!” Whitehouse stated in a voice close to shouting.
The security guard was the man who had allowed Walter to leave the building and who, later, had awakened Dorothy to report his absence.
“Just how did he do that?” she demanded. “What were his exact words?”
Fremantle mumbled, “He said he’d run the guy through with his saber if he didn’t let him out to chase some monster.”
“And did he have a sword? Did he have any kind of weapon?”
“Uh, naw. But he is big, ma’am, big enough to do pretty much whatever he wants.”
Dorothy allowed herself a sarcastic laugh. “I weigh a hundred and five pounds, and Mr. Bromwell is sixty-six and, I’d guess, a really huge one hundred and forty or so, but neither of us has ever had any problem handling him. I don’t even have to ask, because I know that he didn’t lay a hand on that guard! Aren’t we allowed even one mistake?”
“Come, now, Miss Taylor, we’re not going to argue with you about these things,” said Jessup. “Can’t you see that it would be to your and Walter’s advantage to place him in an institution where he can receive qualified help?”
“He’s been in those places. Six years ago, when our parents were killed in a plane crash, I was only fourteen and not old enough to become his guardian, so he was placed in a hospital. None of their treatments had any effect on his condition, none of them, and as he continued to grow, it became easier for the doctors to keep him unconscious for twenty or twenty-two hours a day than to work with him. So they started shooting those drugs into his blood almost continuously. When I turned eighteen, the first thing I did was to get a lawyer to remove him from that place before he could be burned out completely.
“No, he isn’t cured now, but he is alive and happy in his own way. When I’ve saved up enough money, we’ll begin private treatments, but I’m not going to allow him to be turned into a vegetable until then!”
The Jessups looked away from her, embarrassed and touched by Dorothy’s words, and Fremantle remained as uncomfortable as ever. But Whitehouse was not affected in the least. “The hell with what you’re ‘going’ to do, girl! We are concerned about right now! The kid’s—what? Sixteen? Things begin to happen to a boy around that age, biological things; I know. He’s going to start looking at girls soon, and a lot of us have young daughters in this building—”
“You sick man!” Dorothy cried out. “You sick, ugly-minded man! If I had children, I’d be a lot more worried about you than some lost boy who lives in a fantasy world and will never grow up!”
Whitehouse’s face turned bright red. “You just can’t talk to some people, you know what I mean? Not like they’re responsible adults! I wouldn’t be surprised if the big animal killed those people over in Lynnview last night!”
Dorothy gasped aloud.
“Please, please!” Jessup said quickly. “This is getting out of hand! Mr. Fremantle, you spoke to the owner of this building, didn’t you?”
The superintendent nodded. Uneasily.
“And what did he say?”
The other man’s voice was hardly audible. “He said that if the majority of the tenants wanted me to, I should ask Ms. Taylor and her brother to move.”
“I have a lease,” Dorothy said firmly.
“It can be broken.”
“There are laws against this, Mr. Fremantle. It’s discrimination, and you know it.”
“If you want to go to court, that’s your privilege.” Unlike Whitehouse, the superintendent seemed to take no pleasure in what he was saying.
Dorothy smelled the burning meat in the kitchen, but she no longer cared. “How soon do we have to move?”
“Oh, uh, we can give you time to find another place. A week, maybe.”
After a moment of thick silence, Jessup and his wife began to rise, and the two others followed them. Before they could turn toward the door, however, a deep, powerful voice rang out from behind the closed doorway of the next room. “What fares beyond?” the man asked. “Who calls, the legions of the Black King or friends of the Right Lord of the Region of Light?”
“Jesus, I’m getting out of here!” proclaimed Whitehouse.
Jessup placed a hand on Dorothy’s shoulder and whispered, “Miss Taylor, I have some contacts in the county mental health department, and if you’d like I could call—”
“Just go, please!” she replied sharply.
“Really, this is the best way to handle the matter, best for us all.”
“Mr. Jessup!”
Shaking their heads, the others followed Whitehouse out the door.
Dorothy stood alone with herself for almost a minute before walking into the kitchen to switch off the ruined spaghetti. When she returned to the living room, he was standing in the doorway with a confused smile on his face and his ruffled brown hair brushing against the jamb overhead.
“Ho, lass, what forms of mishap have befallen whilst I did battle with the more real hazards upon the far side of the veil?” he asked in the colorful, if ridiculous, speech pattern inspired by countless faceless, penny-a-word-and-less hack writers.
She attempted to return his smile and barely succeeded. “Nothing at all, Walter. Everything’s fine.”
“Aye,” he laughed like an Olympian god. “ ’Tis fitting.”
The doorway in which Walter Taylor stood was three feet wide by six feet, eight inches in height, and he could barely fit through it at age sixteen. Dorothy knew that in half a year’s time, he would have to stoop to pass through an opening of equal size.
“Everything’s just fine,” she repeated.