9.
Shot, Bludgeoned, Stabbed
THERE IS A FUNNY PIECE of lore endemic to the counties west of the Potomac River. In the era of lead gasoline and medicinal cigarettes, a deranged man had escaped from prison transport into the woods above Clifton, Virginia. He used train tracks like a sick animal on a logging road. He killed easy prey. He threw old blankets on scurrying creatures, cottontails mostly, and stabbed them in the spine with a rail spike. Encouraged, he shifted to bigger, easier prey, children mostly, abundant in the woods in that era, employing the same methods. How he came into possession of an adult-sized rabbit costume in 1948 we’d have to invent out of bourbon and campfire, and why he’d wear it — to ingratiate himself with the herd? To lure nearsighted children? — is left to the invention of children. Why he would desiccate their hides by hooks in a country-road tunnel beneath the tracks is left to their older siblings.
“But the rabbit costume is the spectacle we need,” said Doc. “It is complementary. Gruesome murder, hanging hooks and corpses on display are nothing without the warm, albeit ridiculous counterpoint of a bunny costume.”
“Why do I imagine it as pink?” Veronica asked, kicking her legs from the top of Stuart’s desk and allowing the heels of her white tennis shoes to bang into the metal front.
“I do, too!” said Stuart. “Why are cartoon rabbits pink?”
Veronica swiveled, and with the mash of apples filling her cheek she widened her eyes and spouted at him, “Blood!”
“You know, I was thinking,” said Doc, “you wonder with a costume like that if a child, in the last moments, would cling to the felt of his killer.”
They contemplated this. “Geez, Doc,” said Stuart.
Veronica snapped off the top of an apple wedge. “The costume would be matted with gore,” she said. “Pink.”
“I grew up in Maryland and never heard of Bunnyman,” said Doc. “We had a goatman.”
Stuart pointed at him. “We had a goat man! Up in Stroudsburg! He carried an axe and also hunted along the tracks.”
“I know Bunnyman,” Veronica said. “It’s stupid. Why is American lore so dumb? The killers are always loners driven by some juvenile fetish. So many are dolled up in thrift store merchandise and their motives are always unaccounted for. Give me Scandinavian, or any northern European monster, any day. They come out of folktales, they’re hairy and bare-chested and carry conventional weapons of war. They kill for ancestral revenge or to reclaim the descendents of lost kin.”
“Krampus!” said Stuart.
“Well, that’s one example,” she said, “but there are better, less ridiculous examples.”
Doc interrupted. “Bunnyman is the legend here, and people know it. So we stage an event.”
Veronica allowed a long “cool…” before she asked, “but what’s the scary part?”
“The scary part,” Doc explained, “is that I think I’ve found a way to not only attract a possible killer — or at least a seriously deranged man with a history of violence — but also provide him with cover, as he pursues the trophy of a 5’8” woman with large doe eyes.”
Veronica smiled. “You’re insane, and also full of it.” And he was, but Dr. Thomas Hock could be convincing on a good day, and he rehearsed the preview with his teaching assistant that afternoon.
“First, we enlist the art students to build some buzz in the right communities.”
Stuart knew this part was true.
“They’re aces at it, and they know mobs of people who wouldn’t deny themselves a chance to be in the pictures of an event. We’ll build the buzz and set a date in the area of the purported killings. We’ll invite everyone to come in their best cosplay rabbit costumes, white, pink or bloody, and promise them pyrotechnics to light up the lenses of their cameras and phones. The irresistible part, though, the piece that will bring them out in droves, is the promise that Bunnyman himself will be there, and active.”
“Mmhmm,” smiled Veronica, “you are best buds? You have each other’s numbers?”
“I do,” Doc grinned. “I have his number.”
Stuart knew this part was true, too. Hock had contacted the Historian-Archivist of the county public library. His name’s Sean Muldoon, and he worked in the Virginia Room of the Fairfax City Branch. The frequency of queries about the Bunnyman had steadily increased over the last 15 years, and Muldoon was piqued. He had heard the story himself when he was younger, and now with a rising number of young, inquisitive, seemingly unabashed teenagers asking questions about a ludicrous tale, Muldoon decided to table his historical maps, plats, and handwritten accounts detailing antebellum property disputes. He was eager to.
He set out to put the story of Bunnyman under the scope of methodical historical inquiry, placing the weight of his post-grad training to bear upon the thin latticework of local lore, all the magazine and television reports that bait audiences with ranked lists of the scariest places on Earth. He began with web sites. He followed references to archived newspaper articles. He cross-referenced court records. He knew that most tall tales begin with the seed of some unusual tragic happening, and he turned his attention to criminal records and indices, applying filters to pare down the surprisingly hundreds of murders and suicides in the farming village, cutting out all those committed with sensible motives and executed by reasonable means. Hewing to the most common tropes of the tale, he filtered for animal mutilation, which for an agrarian community did not reduce the numbers as much as he wanted, but then selected for child murder, which thankfully did. He managed to bring the possibilities to three likely candidates.
A Charles Holbrook who used the occasion of a mud-bogged car to pick a fight with his wife, and then that occasion to plug her point blank in the temple and left breast with a ready pistol. That she should be buried in the same soft mud with their infant daughter was another opportunity. That the infant should be buried alive shows he didn’t have the heart to do anything more. He was committed to a state mental hospital down south.
Leonard “Lenny” Boebert bludgeoned to death a woman and her two daughters with the base of a lamp during a home invasion, which had occurred to him a sensible idea for a Wednesday morning in the summer of 1943, when his car’s timing belt had snapped and there was no way he could make it work. The boss who had threatened Boebert with one last chance the week prior knew the youngest victim because of her cleft palate, which they called a harelip in those days, and her sweet, squeaky lisp.
And Joseph Hindley in 1938 tied a twelve year old girl to a railroad signpost with the strings of her apron, and slit her throat. When he was arrested trying to steal a Lincoln coupe outside the post office, his shirt and the front of his trousers were stiff with dried blood, and his face was tiled with scratches. He wore an expression of permanent surprise.
All three men in the stretch of time before their executions lay in awe over what possessed them on a single ordinary day, or fixated without answer on the impish nature of children.
All of this so far was true. Stuart watched his boss strut and narrate with swooping arms. His eyes closed in ellipses and flashed in punctuation. Veronica had moved over to a cloth chair and bounced one leg on the other in the perfect pose of “uh huh…” and Stuart had to wrinkle his nose and nod at her because, so far, all of it was true.
“It is my hypothesis that sons and grandsons of killers who writhe immortal in the public’s unremembered dreams take one of two paths: either they live to interrogate their deadly forebears, as Hawthorne did, or they express their shame in commensurate deviance, a more common disposition of the guilty man. It’s the defiance of eternal judgment through the exercise of sin. Vice on display. To them, that’s their only atonement. They call it freedom.
“And of the three executed men, Muldoon found that only one left a trail of descendents, and that’s Hindley, the one who stabbed that poor girl in the throat. Hindley’s grandson still lives in Clifton.”
“Too perfect,” said Veronica. “Go on.”
“This boy is a character. His name is Jake, and he still carries his family’s name, Hindley.” (True.) “He has a past. He, too, has a court record. He, too, has killed.” (True…)
“Oh, really?” She crossed her arms.
Stuart looked to the floor. “Tragic story, actually.”
Doc told the story of when Jake, age 12, shot his brother. “Hunting accident. They were across the river shooting small game, anything that scurries — squirrels, birds, and rabbits.” (True! There are plenty for enterprising boys.) “But they weren’t too careful, and when his brother, who was quite a bit older, maybe ten years, ran up from behind to outflank some poor varmint in flight, Jake squeezed off a shot and caught his brother in the stomach. The police report described a most confused little boy. He’d remained crouched at the same spot for an hour or more, though it was timeless to him, with nothing but the alternating tempo of cicada wings and the heavy sighs of his big brother.
“Investigators and the court had a tough time reconciling the second shot, however. They allowed it was an act of shock, or mercy, or a twisted lesson on shock over mercy, but at some point Jake stood up, walked over to his brother, and shot him down the groove of his eye. The sheriff’s office found the corpse under a pale green canopy of a busted off branch.
“Jake was given a year of court-mandated therapy and home check-ins. His mother left one evening after washing the dishes and never returned. His father never showed a vestige of human emotion. Jake attended school sporadically, on whims only, and has since become a bit of a creep in the region.” (True.) “He sets himself in plastic lawn chairs outside of old classmates’ houses, leering at the front door. He sets trash across the railroad tracks and lights it ablaze at the approach of commuting trains — a funny sort of nuisance — and still hunts little anythings, leaving their little bodies on the sidewalk in front of the ice cream shop.” (True, true, and half true.)
“We did a reverse lookup and found his contact information,” said Stuart, and this was also true.
“Did you contact him?” Veronica asked.
“Doc did.” (True.)
“What’d he say?”
“I sent him an announcement of ‘Bunnyman Horror Night, a night of wrath, revenge, purgation, and hedonistic abandon.’” (Regrettably true.)
“Okay,” she laughed. “It’s a little long. Did you get a response?”
“I did, the following day.” (False.)
“And?”
“Just two lines. ‘Who is this?’ and ‘what do you want from me?’”
“He didn’t! Unbelievable.” (It was.)
“I wrote again and told him that I’m a promoter with a radical arts collective and we are sending out email blasts looking for authentic local talent to scare the bejesus out of people and do as they please, no holds barred, anything goes, everything imaginable.” (True, he did send this second message to a silent Jake Hindley.)
“And did he respond to that?”
“No. But we’ve made contact. I’m actually sending out others. I have leads to other odd characters in the area. Muldoon is finding me information and local beta. Now I’ll trigger the art students to produce the event. I’m drawing up logistics. I think I can put people in the right places with the right impulses. The ambition is to establish the perfect Hitchcock scenario, the classic thriller setup.”
“An ordinary man…” began Veronica.
“It will be extraordinary. But the scenario we seek is more of a classic setup. A person is trapped at the approach,” Doc loved that word, ‘approach,’ “the approach of her killer.” He rested his chin on his palm. “So we need a rabbit.”
She looked at Doc, and then over to Stuart. “Everybody will be there?”
“Well, spread out, yes.”
She munched on her apple, separating the flesh from the skin, which she flicked into the trash. “I’ll need a ride.”