FIFTEEN

THE MOCKINGBIRD’S SONG

Early-morning light shines gray through a shattered window, capturing in its beam whorls of dust and flakes of rot, and the beam ends on the face of Lauren Martin, age eighteen, strapped to an old doctor’s table. The leather padding beneath her is cracked and bites into her naked back, thighs, buttocks. Smells braid together: sweat, urine, steel, and through all of it the thread of a sharp chemical stink.

Lauren is gagged with barbed wire, wound all the way around her head, front to back—the rusty barbs tearing into the corners of the girl’s mouth.

The wire binds her head to the table.

Her tongue and lips are dried. She’s been here awhile.

The walls around her are blackened and charred. Wallpaper bubbled like blistered skin. The ceiling is pulled down in places. Knob and tube wiring dangles, caught in saggy bundles of ruined insulation, bundles that look like gray clouds dragged down by hard rains.

Moths dance. Crickets chirp.

A man emerges out of shadow. He’s singing a song:

“Young people, hark while I relate

The story of poor old Polly’s fate

She was a lady, young and fair

And died a-groaning in despair.”

The song is folksy, old, measured. His voice is gravelly, yet behind it, the voice warbles and wavers from low pitch to high pitch, as pleasant as the tines of a fork dragged across a piece of slate. Sometimes, the voice is a man’s. Other times, a woman’s.

“She’d to go frolic, dance, and play

In spite of all her friends would say

‘I’ll turn to God when I get old

And then I’m sure he’ll take my soul.’ ”

Lauren whimpers against the gag. Scabs at the corners of her mouth crack, and fresh blood flows over dry. Her palms are marked with Xs. Shallow cuts, but cuts just the same. Her feet bear the same marks.

“One Friday morn, Polly took ill

Her stubborn heart began to fail

She cried, ‘Oh, no, my days are spent,

And now it’s too late to repent.’ ”

A new odor, a pungent odor, fills the air. Smoke. Strong, of dry flowers, funeral flowers, rose and lavender and carnations, an oily tincture of bitter orange.

“She called her mother to her bed

Her eyes were rolling in her head

A ghastly look she did assume

And then she cried, ‘This is my doom.’ ”

The man’s face is that of a bird, a featherless beast with flesh of leather and a beak as long as a child’s arm. Wisps of greasy wet smoke drift up from holes in the beak. Human eyes blink from behind filmy goggle lenses bolted to the flesh. This is not his head but rather a hood, a hood that covers down to his shoulders and leads to a bare and sallow chest. Across that chest is a tattoo, blue as a vein, dark as a bruise: the boomerang wing of a barn swallow, twin tails sharp as a barbecue fork.

He reaches into the dark corner of the room, past a scorched mattress. From the shadows he draws a fire ax.

“She called her father to her bed

Her eyes were rolling in her head

‘O, earthly father, fare you well,

Your wicked daughter screams in Hell.’ ”

Lauren struggles upon seeing the ax. She rubs her head back and forth, trying to escape, trying to free some part of herself—her scream a hollow and harrowing call as the barbed wire saws into her cheeks.

Blood in her throat. Almost choking her.

The man in the beaked hood leans in, caresses the girl’s face. His fingers return wet with red. He steps back, ax held against the tattoo’s ink.

“ ‘Your counsels I have slighted all

My carnal appetite shall fall

When I am dead, remember well

Your wicked Polly groans in Hell.’ ”

The man’s eyes close. Rapturous. Ecstatic. The ax raises aloft. A pair of insects suddenly move to circumnavigate the blade: moths in orbit like tiny satellites.

As the man sings, the girl writhes and screams and cries.

“She wrung her hands and groaned and cried

And gnawed her tongue before she died.

Her nails turned black, her voice did fail

She died and left this lower vale.”

The ax blade falls heavy against the table. It falls into a groove that’s not new. Lauren’s head, silenced, tumbles behind the table. The man kicks it into a ratty wicker basket lined with a black plastic garbage bag.

The killer drops the ax to the ground with a clatter.

He picks up the head, still singing as he holds it aloft. Blood pitter-patters against the ruined floor. His voice changes now: gritty, growly, throaty. His own voice? The words now are barely sung. They’re not even spoken so much as they’re coughed out of his throat and spat to the earth. A crass expectoration.

“May this a warning be to those

That love the ways that Polly chose

Turn from your sins, lest you despair

The Devil take you without care.”

The man pulls a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his ragged jeans, then cuts out Lauren’s tongue. He has to work to get a grip, and it takes a while for the cutters to bite through.

Her eyes, still wide, go still as placid pools.

The killer laughs, a throaty, happy trill.