Page 71 of The Chain House

“How would …” Sam backed away.

“My father, from prison, begged me to take care of my little brother, of Tommy. And it turns out that Tiny Tommy took care of me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“How do you think I was arrested? Who do you think called the police on his own brother? Tiny Tommy became the Tattler.”

Sam shook his head, felt suddenly disoriented.

“Have you wondered why I have to keep saying your full name, Sam Harper?”

“Because …” Sam put a hand to his temple, nauseous as well as dizzy now. “Because …”

“Because I have to constantly remind myself that’s your name now. Just as Trevor Harper and Annie Harper took new names, so should the boy they stole from my house.”

“No …”

“The boy once named Steven Batise.”

“No,” Sam hissed, but at the same time knowing Batise was telling the truth. But when he looked up at Batise again and saw the man’s right hand frozen, fingers splayed, up in the air, like he was waiting for Sam to give him a high five but was, in reality, making fun of a gesture he and his father—whoever the fuck he was—had always cherished, Sam lost it. The ball of fury in his gut rose like an erupting volcano and he saw dizzy and he saw blood and he charged at Batise like a bull loose in the streets of Pamplona. He placed his hands on the chained man’s chest and pushed with all his strength and Batise went backward in his chair. Sam backed away as the guards leaped forward, one holding him back while the other helped Batise upright, and the fucker was laughing and saying he was okay, and all Sam could think of in that moment was Agent Givens—who was on his way into the room as well—telling him that none of this was normal.

None of this is normal, Sam.

Sam and Sal, Sal and Sam …

And then it dawned on Sam, as he was pulled from the office, how many times in the past few hours Sal Batise had referred to him as son. He’d thought it was just an older man speaking to the youth of the world, but the implication now made him want to throw up.

And Batise wasn’t finished. He shouted toward the open door before they could get Sam through it. “You were in the closet, Sam Harper,” he shouted. “I hear there were at one time five kids in that closet.”

Warden Wren then entered his office. “Enough,” he said to Batise.

Batise glared at the warden and then Agent Banks. “You all wanted to know who the Kentucky Cannibal was? Who the Kentucky Cannibal is, rather, so I’m telling you. He’s out there, and it isn’t Justice Minks.” The next part he said directly to Sam. “You were in that closet, son. You were in that house. The Raven was there, right? The Kentucky Cannibal was there. And the Raven IS a liar.”

CHAPTER33

MAYBE IT WAS a mistake coming here, Trevor thought, after entering the kitchen of the dilapidated house and feeling his legs turn rubbery, like they no longer contained the necessary bones and muscle required to hold him upright.

Without warning, his body failed him; he dropped to both knees with a thud on the old linoleum floor, and the impact felt like it had shaken the house. Up until entering the kitchen, he’d been rejuvenated by returning to the past, because it was a past in which he’d too often felt like the hunted, like the prey, and he’d returned after so many years as a more emboldened hunter, the predator—The Raven. But all that had fallen by the wayside as soon as he entered the kitchen. It wasn’t a kitchen he’d entered often during his time on the Freedom Ranch; he did his best to avoid the main house in general, just as he’d lived his life avoiding confrontation at every turn. But this had been his brother’s house. This had been the house where Justice Minks, whenever he showed up, would stay, as he was the only member of The Collective seemingly able to come and go as he pleased. Which had often made Trevor wonder if Minks had ever truly been a member of the cult at all.

From his knees, he looked toward the stove, or rather, toward the gaping hole in the cabinetry where the stove had once been, the infamous stove where the authorities had found the even more infamous stew congealed in a pot on the front right burner. Vandals had no doubt taken the oven as a sick keepsake. Maybe they’d broken it down into parts and sold them on eBay as pieces of the stove used by the Kentucky Cannibal. The backsplash on the wall behind the oven was completely covered in graffiti, crude pictures of genitalia and laughing faces and bullets and knives and creepy blood splatter, all perfectly disguising the fact that the words—The Kentucky Cannibal was here—had ever been there at all. But Trevor didn’t need the newspaper and television reports to tell him so, because he’d lived it. He’d watched Sal spray-paint the words on there while Justice Minks laughed, and even while Trevor knelt on the kitchen floor, twenty years later, the tears came. The tears came, and right along with them the fear and the fury in equal measure.

But what are you gonna do about it, Tommy, huh? Minks had hissed in his ear as he held a knife to his throat in one hand and with the other grasped his hair so tightly his scalp burned from the searing pain. Nothing, because Tiny Tommy Batise is nothing … Your brother always told me you couldn’t fend for yourself, so he always had to fend for you. That you don’t know shit from Shinola. That he’d seen wet paper towels tougher than you, Tiny Tommy Batise.

And Trevor cried now just as he’d cried then, except now it was no longer in shame, but from some kind of catharsis, churning in his gut and through his bloodstream and transforming him into the man he’d always wished he’d become. Because back then Annie had been hiding under a bed and he’d been scared for her, but even more scared for the children he’d hid upstairs in the closet, and he’d prayed they’d stay quiet because none of this was part of the plan, having to quickly hide them because their fire diversion hadn’t diverted them long enough, and Sal and Justice had returned before they’d had a chance to fully escape with Steven and the other four kids. And Trevor—Tommy, back then, but known on the ranch as Raven—knew damn well what was really bubbling inside the pot atop the stove.

“Trevor?” Lizzie said behind him now.

But he barely heard her.

Because part of him was still back there, back then, and he wasn’t about to tell them anything different from what he already had, that Annie—Yellow, back then—had already taken all five kids into the woods and they were long gone by now, even though every one of them was still hiding inside the house, right under Sal’s stupid fucking nose.

“Trevor,” Lizzie said again, this time kneeling on the kitchen floor to embrace him, to wipe his tears. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

And he stared at where the stove had been, his tears already drying, his eyes now as clear as his vision, as prevalent as the memory of that horrible night, and he said, “They made me eat it, Lizzie. He grabbed my hair. He forced my mouth open. I knew it was meat from a dead body in that pot … on the stove … and my brother, my own fucking brother, they made me do it. He was high … I could see it in his pupils, he was always high, Lizzie, just like everybody was always high, and he brought the big mixing spoon over from the stove, from the pot, some if it dripping on the floor, and he made me eat it.” He gagged at the memory smells and could still feel the grit of it between his teeth and sliding down his throat. “They made me fucking eat it, Lizzie, and they laughed, but I wouldn’t tell them where the kids were, I wouldn’t give them up, and that was the right thing to do, right? That was brave, right?”

“That was brave,” Lizzie said, gently touching his head of short hair, touching his cheek, “That was brave.”

“And they called me a cannibal,” Trevor said. “They thought it was funny. And Minks said that wasn’t the first time I’d eaten human meat. The week before, one of the times Minks had stayed for a couple days straight, he’d offered me a quick dinner inside my brother’s house, and maybe I thought it tasted funny even then, but a lot of times our meals tasted funny, Lizzie, because we cooked up whatever we could find in that forest. Maybe I should have known something was up because Minks was being nice to me for the first time ever and I’d convinced myself maybe a corner was being turned, but it wasn’t, and that had never been truer than when they force-fed me that … that stew that night in the kitchen, this kitchen, Lizzie, and they called me the Kentucky Cannibal because of it and they spray-painted it on the wall above the stove.”