Chapter I

 "I always figured most of my problems could be solved if someone worked up the guts to drop a bomb on my hometown of Desert Trail, California. Somewhere in the back of my mind I figured I would be the one. It never occurred to me that a little girl would beat me to it." I said to the woman sitting across from me. I wished we were standing in the sand as we watched the city burn. In my mind I knew that fire occurred years before. It was still present in my heart, even after all this time.

"I was only five when it happened," she said. "Any memory of it remains in my dreams. The impetus for destruction is still unknown," her voice was cold and business-like. "There were three main fires that spread throughout the town. One in City Hall, the other at the football stadium and high school and the last found its target amid The Starfield Institute, which is almost like a small city itself. The explosions were slow in coming. Whatever the bombs were they lay in their shallow earth graves, smouldering before bursting into the firestorm that soon engulfed the town."

"That�s very poetic," I said.

"I don�t mean it to be," she answered. She was just as serious as I remembered her. As a child it had been endearing. As an adult, it was annoying.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I�m looking for an explanation for my dreams. I�ve been through years of therapy. I just need answers. You�re my last hope."

"You know what they say about me, then?" I asked.

"I know what the doctors told me. Everything else is rumour."

"The rumours are untrue. Tell me about your dream," I said.

"I was already on the outskirts of town, running for my life out into the desert night. I don�t know why I�m running, but I know there is danger. For twenty brief seconds the air is still and the night silent. When the explosion comes it bursts into my back with a force only man could produce and a fury only God could condemn. Consciousness is blown away from me, but my mind remains serene. I pull my own face out of the hard packed sand and for a moment I see you."

"A mirage, my dear."

"Certainly," she answered. "I stare at you, blood streaming from my nose and ears. You was sprawled on the ground unmarked, surrounded by a shimmering light which both exposed and protects you.

"I gather myself together enough to stand and approach you, but the mirage vanishes as I near. The storm was already smouldering above me and it soon washes my own blood into the dark sand. I turn to watch the flames devour my town. The images of my father and grandfather float across my brain, but I buried those thoughts for another time. The once silent night arouses from its slumber with retched screams. I hope Dr. Starfield is really dead. I feared that you are also."

"If it�s just a dream, you shouldn�t let it bug you, kiddo." She ignored me. She had something to say, but it was buried too deep, she was having trouble unearthing it.

"I know that despite its appearance the desert is a living thing; a subtle ecosystem which thrives on absence and lack." Her voice was still again. "But I felt no life. Not around me or within me. I was tapped out so that neither tears nor laughter could save me. Everything I had lived for, everything I had tried to save burned in those few minutes. Including my memory. True, you might still be alive, but you had never really existed except in my head. Or at least I thought. You were a made-up person in this make-believe world of Desert Trail. Up until today I wasn�t sure you had ever existed. There was so much I did not understand." She sighed deeply, wiping her brow with the back of her left hand.

"So what�s different now?" I asked. "What got you so fired up you had to come find me after all these years?"

"Last week I saw you on the news. It was the first time you allowed yourself to be photographed since the 1970�s. I remembered your face even if I had not remembered your name. That night I had the dream again, but with a slight modification. One things changed. A feeling grew in my chest that can only be manufactured by terror and destruction. It burned out all the sadness and hopelessness that had been festering in my heart.

"I was mad."

"Mad at what," I asked.

"Mad at all the things I don�t know about myself. Mad at all the lies I�ve lived. Mad at how I have looked at life, allowing fantasies to rule me. I�ve never known the truth."

"I think a lot of people live that way," I said.

"I�m a middle-aged woman, Mr. Connolley."

"I�m an old man, Miss Mueller. I still live without complete confidence in the truth. Age has nothing to do with it."

"It has been decades since that fire. Suddenly, I realise you are a person, not just some imaginary friend I had as a child. I made me wonder what other childhood fantasies were real."

"You want to know if your dream is true," I answered. "If all your dreams are true? You want to know if our city was destroyed because of you? If you started the fire? If you planted some kind of mental bomb meant to destroy the city of Desert Trail? If the fairy tales you remember from your childhood were in some way reality."

"Yes, I guess that is true," she said. "All my life I�ve had this strange guilt that I burned down Desert Trail, that I caused all those deaths. I know it can�t be true -"

"Wait just a minute there, kiddo," I was laughing despite myself. "You were not only the cause, you were the reason and the fire itself."

She gasped in realisation. "That�s not true. I came here so you could put an end to these false memories. These are dreams!"

"Dreams are your memory."

"But I�ve read all about this," she said. "I�ve researched it. This was a national case. There was arson, certainly, but the case was solved. People remember now only through history books."

"Memory is a funny thing," I said. "You can not trust it, but for many people it is all they rely on."

I pulled the memories from the locked box in my brain.

"You must realise, Ms. Mueller, that I was a mere observer in your life. I have waited forty years to tell you this story. But it�s nothing you don�t already know. Harold Whipple told the stories to you and others as children, just as my grandfather told them to me as a child. You just never put two and two together. You and the rest of the world."

"Please tell me."

"First, you must understand what Desert Trail, California was. It was not simply a town or a community in the western United States. It was a family. The people of that small town shared a life and a history. Most of them worked at the same place. You can not talk about anyone from Desert Trail without discovering the history of the entire town. Ask your shrinks. A family�s history has a great deal of effect on a child. You are children of Desert Trail. You inherited it�s dysfunction, as did I."

 

 

 

Chapter II

 Really everything went wrong in the summer of 1975. Both Eva Mueller and I were born in the town of Desert Trail. The similarity seemed to end there. She was truly one of those people I would claim to have known all my life. From the day I met her Eva was trouble for our home town. She had the eyes and demeanour of a victim, but the mind of a survivor. That�s a bad mix when dealing with the hand of fate and Desert Trail. Eva would become my purpose. She was, if not the fulfilment, the reason that I existed in the world. I would not meet her until my twenty-fifth year, and would not see her again until age had left its mark on my skin and soul. Our connection was Desert Trail. Our bond was memory.

I am not psychic. I have never claimed to be. I know things, though. I am an intuitive pessimist. I refuse to believe anything I am told without proof. I am chronically paranoid and getting worse. I have the gift of memory and dream as do many people in the town of Desert Trail. We were too close a town not to share some things. We were a cursed suburb. Looking back, we should have known the place was doomed. Eva Mueller was simply the one to doom it.

Teenagers called the town Cactusville. There were probably other, more clever, nicknames for the city, but somehow Cactusville stuck. Over the years you could hardly tell it had been a desert town. Only late at night, when the winds were just right, did the occasional tumbleweed snake down the highway or the dust ripple high into the air, coating the cars with a clumpy powder.

Progress had come to Desert Trail in 1945 under the name of Mayor Robert Whipple. A retired army officer, Whipple saw the town for what it could be used for, instead of what it should. Perfectly situated halfway between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Desert Trail blossomed into a tourist centre. It became a place for old army buddies to congregate and raise their families. By 1950 there was not one family in Desert Trail who did not have a World War II veteran living in their house. It was a warped barracks. They had each other, but they did not have jobs. I was born sometime in the midst of this boredom and fear.

The Whipple dynasty knew early on the town needed a transfusion of prosperity. So the brush was cleared from many of the remaining empty acres. A storm of construction commenced, leaving the last clinging townspeople barricading themselves against the torrential sound and pelting clamour. When it was all over there stood a building that stretched four blocks in either direction and fifteen stories tall. New residents poured into Desert Trail from across the nation. Jobs were more plentiful than they ever had been. The cranes and trucks began again erecting housing for all the new employees. No one really understood what went on inside that huge structure. Amazingly, the event never reached big city papers, except to advertise job openings. Somehow everyone involved knew they were in for something big.

The Starfield Institute for the Emotionally Handicapped was open for business.

Water was pumped in, trees were planted, hotel and restaurants were built, and most importantly advertising was bought along the highway. By the 1960�s Desert Trail had its own high school, its own courthouse, and a brand new Whipple as mayor, when Robert went on to Congress.

They beat nature there, but not time. It was easy to ignore the unnatural aspects of such lush life amid a climate of subtle, independent sparseness. However other desert cities flourished as well. The line between Vegas and LA was at first peppered with civilisation, then soaked and drenched in suburbia. The desert was becoming a rare adventure for hikers and visitors to national parks. With such an explosion, Desert Trail faded into the background.

Dr. Hans Starfield sat over the city as King, ruling us by owning The Institute, as it was called. Dr. Starfield controlled the jobs and the sanity of the population. It was well known, as I was growing up, you either worked at The Starfield Institute, or you lived there as a patient. There were few other options.

In 1970, Dr. Hans became a patient of his own Institute and his son, Dr. Frederick Starfield took over as head.

The Institution itself was a labyrinth of buildings comprised of the actual hospital ward, a separate school devoted to the post-graduate study of abnormal psychology, a dormitory and a day care centre. The land around The Institute appeared to me an artificial color green, without flowers or trees. Everything was a long expanse of conformity.

The people of Desert Trail vary in their recollections and passion for the town. There is only one issue everyone can agree on. We were a town of story-tellers. Taken from the military tradition of spinning war tales, the people of Desert Trail spun intricate webs of fairy tales and fantasy equalled only in diversity by the Grimm Brothers collections lining the library shelves. We hid ourselves from the world under a cover of dust and heat. We hid from ourselves with stories.

Eva alone remembers this differently. She proved how evil a mutant memory can become.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter III

 As a youth I despised this town and everyone in it. There was no specific reason for the hatred I felt other than that I was a teenager and was in the mood to hate everything. I remember Desert Trail as being very cruel. I have memories of taunting from other teenagers as to my status of having been born illegitimate, though I think they used a more concise term. My mother was never home, I survived without much money and a lot of work and my grandfather was locked up somewhere in the bowels of the wonderful Starfield Institution. I remember him living in our house throughout my childhood, though he was missing during my adolescence. The doctors argue this lack of a male role model accounts for my skewed memory and odd obsessions. I heartily disagree. Some of the craziest folks alive had fathers around.

By 1975 I had served one tour in a very unpopular war, graduated from a local police academy and put in almost a full year as a walking patrol officer in Desert Trail. Most of their police force had been lost to the war; either by death or otherwise. It was a wonderful opportunity for advancement.

Desert Trail was one of the last truly patriotic communities during the 1970�s. We followed tradition and became a town of veterans. If you could not live and work there you were welcome to be institutionalised there. Without exaggeration, every man was a veteran of the armed forces. Those men and their families seemed to be the kind who needed the most help. The Starfield Institute was there for this reason. As a private mental hospital it thrived on grants and independent funds. Even so, there were many men like my own grandfather, whose family supported the cost of hospitalisation. My mother worked two jobs; one to support herself and me, the other to pay Starfield�s bills. My new job on the Desert Trail PD allowed her to quit the latter.

That�s not to say the elder Dr. Starfield was a bad man. Quite the opposite. He deferred many of the costs we should have paid. My grandfather simply had the bad luck of having been dishonourably discharged. He received no veterans benefits. There were lots of men like that in our

town. As you would expect, a town that would be so dependent on a loony bin draws a lot of loonies.

Anyway, the county was desperate for police, I was desperate for a job. This job allowed me access to the town I was beginning to enjoy as an adult. I no longer wanted to be free of the people and the town I knew too well. In fact, I longed for the unique history and attitudes it afforded me. After experiencing the fate of a veteran firsthand, I craved the understanding Desert Trail could provide. The job also offered the chance to carry a gun. I was young and increasingly paranoid after the war. I wanted a gun bad. It made me feel safe. However, in Desert Trail, beat cops do not carry guns. Imagine Mayberry with an insane asylum and me as Barney Fife. I needed a promotion.

I have since read, in the many books and articles written of my life, that I was simply in the right place at the right time to witness the horrors of Desert Trail first hand. I do not agree. I believe now that everything surrounding this town was set in place a long time before I was even a factor. Yet at the same time I am just as important a part of the puzzle as was Eva Mueller.

In many accounts of that horrible summer, authors have twisted our town�s legends to better suit their dramatic purposes. I have dutifully read all of these accounts. Our stories were not full of blood and gore. They were hopeful pieces told by the men who lived through horrible times. Especially men like my grandfather, who served in both World Wars I and II, were loathed to exaggerate the importance of their missions. These tales were told to children as lessons, not as entertainment. Peter Baker�s book, The Fairy Tales of Desert Trail, best relates some of my favourite stories of my home town. Prevalent in my mind that summer of 1975 was the tale of The Angry Ogre. This story appears in nearly pure form in Mr. Baker�s compilation.

The Angry Ogre was a dirty creature. He was classified as an ogre due to his enormous, though proportionate human features. The Angry Ogre stood close to twelve feet tall, without counting the scraggly mane of hair he kept atop his head. This Ogre had been angry for

so long that most men had forgotten his name. Despite his anger, children loved to watch this giant being. He was a comic sight with his large limbs hitting trees and mailboxes as he meandered down the sidewalk. The children knew the Angry Ogre the best as they followed him around the small town.

Perhaps the Angry Ogre would have felt more at peace with his condition were it not for the lovely young woman residing in the pale pink cottage. This woman was not exceptionally beautiful, nor was she extraordinarily bright. She was simply lovely and calm. Her ordinariness attracted the Angry Ogre. He longed for such simplicity and normality in his oversized world.

This lovely young woman had an equally lovely young son who was part of the crowd following the Angry Ogre throughout town. The boy was still toddling about, not as sure of his steps as the older children. He did not fully understand the plight of his favourite ogre, or the Ogre�s fascination with his mother. Even so, he loved to run about with his friends and watch the ogre.

Such harmless voyeurism can never last long. The older children began to play awful games on the Angry Ogre. As the giant sat outside the lovely woman�s home, the children would drop apples on his head from a tree above. A week later, when they tired of this, the children spread honey on the grass where the Ogre sat. The large man found himself covered in hungry ants for days. The pranks were small and innocuous, though they served one purpose: to further enrage the Angry Ogre.

One day the children went too far. They struck as the Ogre slept on the soft grass, almost happy in the afternoon sun. Silently, they threaded coils of rope through his arms and legs, in between small trees and bushes and along the fence surrounding the pale pink cottage. Giggling until they thought they would burst, the children ran across a field to watch the reaction of their Angry Ogre. He did not stir. In fact, he lay too still in the grass. They could not even see his belly rumble with the movement of his breath. The children grew afraid. They had not meant to harm the Ogre, merely to tease him. Together they decided to send the smallest and quietest among them to

investigate. Surely, they reasoned, the Ogre would not harm such a small child if he awoke too soon.

The young son of the lovely woman in the pale pink cottage toddled to the side of the Angry Ogre. He tried to be silent, but the rustling of his diaper gave him away. The Angry Ogre woke violently, breaking the thin cords that bound his arms and legs. The rope left thin trails of blood on his skin that only served to feed his anger. The Ogre lifted the young boy in his arms. The blood pulsed in his temple as the anger he knew too well raced through his mind. He retained enough control to simply paddle the young boy. However, a spanking from so large a being is equivalent to a beating by an average man. The boy howled as blood ran from his own skin.

From the pale pink cottage rushed his mother, the lovely young woman. The Angry Ogre stopped, in awe of her. She was dressed in working rags, with a kitchen knife held in one hand. She was so average and perfect in her anger at the Ogre. She was rushing to protect her son. For that moment, the Ogre forgot his anger. He placed the boy on the soft grass and reached for the lovely woman.

His embrace was met with fear as the lovely woman struck hard, plunging the small knife into the Ogre�s large forearm. She ripped the blade out, screaming with fear and regret. The Angry Ogre stooped to embrace her, feel the normal pressure of affection and normal touch. When he let go, the woman dropped to the ground, the kitchen knife held fatally in her breast.

The Angry Ogre looked around him. His longing had led to this chaos. The children would never have followed him if he had kept to himself. The boy would not be crying on the grass, nor would his mother be dead beside him. It was then that the Ogre realised how utterly abnormal he truly was. The bliss of fantasy faded. The Angry Ogre felt a surge of fear and fright as he glimpsed himself in the death of so lovely a woman. He fell to the ground beside his victim, no longer angry, simply dead.

I can still recall my grandfather�s voice as he related that strange tale. He used to say we all have an Angry Ogre inside us, longing for acceptance and at the same time fighting against it. It was never a favourite story of mine, though it was told quite often to children for one simple reason. It was short. Mothers told it in line at the supermarket, fathers told it in the car on the way to school, babysitters told it during commercials. For that reason it is probably the most well-known of all the tales told in Desert Trail. I recalled it that afternoon for another reason entirely.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter IV

 In a town this small the sheriff�s office, state police and District Attorney�s office work fairly close. August of 1975 I found myself with Kenneth Parker, Assistant D.A., driving into Desert Trail in order to investigate the questionable suicide of Angela Davidson, housewife and mother of three.

We arrived at the house late. Parker loaded me up with his gear, mainly a briefcase and file folders, while he walked through the house shaking hands with Desert Trail�s two detectives. The body now lay on a stretcher in the hallway. I never saw Angela Davidson in her death state. The bathroom had been kept as found; the tub full of water, a pink tinge to it from the blood, a discarded razor on the tile, with evidence markers surrounding it. I closed my eyes and backed out of view. Even without the sight, the smell of blood in the still warm water nauseated me.

I have always had a knack for gasping the essence of things. I don�t mean to imply that I understand things better than most people. I�m sure not psychic or anything. I think some people listen to their subconscious more, and I happen to be one of those people. With one look I knew this death to be murder. There was fear in the air of the bathroom. There was fear in the bedroom also, though I felt it no where else in the house. Through my thoughts I heard Detective Alex Coffey briefing Parker on the situation.

"...like she even shampooed her hair. Did the full bath ritual complete with shaving her legs."

"And then killed herself," Parker asked.

"Yeah, weird. Her kid is out in the living room where he can�t see the body. I don�t think it would matter much. He found her and called 911, though he won�t talk to anybody now."

"Was she clothed?" I asked.

"No way," said the cop. "The clothes are all right there. She was really taking a bath. Must have been a spur of the moment decision. Maybe she didn�t think it would kill her."

Parker turned to me. We all knew that suicide victims almost always kept their clothes on. When it came down to it, no one wanted to be found naked.

"I want Connolley to sit with the kid," Parker said. He turned back to Coffey. "Boy or girl? What age?"

"Boy, age four, named Tommy," Coffey answered watching me. "If you go out there don�t leave him for a second. Not even for a bathroom break. I have to send a couple officers to his day care centre. The deceased had an appointment there this morning."

"The Starfield Day Care Centre?" I asked.

"Of course," was the answer. There was no other day care centre in town. Even I attended the Starfield day care as a young boy.

I followed orders and relieved the officer sitting with the little boy. The kid looked younger than four. He was small and thin. I felt dirty for thinking how easy it would be to snap a kid like that in two. It looked like he might even have a diaper on. He was laying on his stomach on the ground drawing on some blank paper. Well, scribbling would be closer to what he was doing. I don�t dislike kids, but I have not been around them much. I sat on the couch and looked around the room, trying to get a feel for what the little one knew.

There was nothing unusual about the room either through sight or sense. If anything, it was too normal. They had a couple sofas, a TV and a record player. There were some scribbles a foot or two off the ground, but still on the wall. The scribbles were hard and long slashes of red. No other colour. I wondered when they had been drawn. Tommy now had a blue crayon in his hand. A picture on top of the TV showed the late Mrs. Davidson with her husband and kids. Tommy was the youngest. I wondered where were Mr. Davis and kids one and two?

I felt a snap in the air. It was a crackle of electricity without the accompanied sound. My head turned automatically to face the little boy who was now sitting up and watching me.

"You�ve been to the jungle," he said. When I did not answer he continued. "Did you like it?"

"It was too hot and rainy," I replied without thinking.

"I dream about the jungle sometimes," he said. "Sometimes Harold tells us kids stories about the jungle. Sometimes about the forest."

I hoped it wasn�t the same jungle I knew about. I knew the forest was the same setting of most Desert Trail�s fairy tales. The forest surrounding The Poisoned City.

"Who is Harold?" I asked.

"My babysitter," he answered. That bit of mental connection seemed to exhaust him.

He started to move around on his bottom and I heard the distinctive crunch of diaper under his shorts. I remembered doing that as a child and hearing my mother say ...

"...do you have ants in your pants?" I asked him.

He stared at me amused. His eyes smiled, though his mouth never moved. Those were not the eyes of a little boy. Maybe it was because he brought it up, but his eyes did look like they had seen a jungle. Probably not the same as my jungle, but some other exotic hellish place without a real name. Of course, he had found his mother dead in the bathtub, but these eyes were older than a couple hours.

"I need to go potty," he said without getting up. I almost told him to be my guest, he had the diaper on, after all.

"Fine by me, but I have to go with you."

This was agreeable to him. I steered him through the kitchen to the hall bathroom to avoid coming face to face with his dead mother. I left the bathroom door open, but blocked the doorway with my body facing out to give him some privacy, and so I wouldn�t look like a pervert. I heard the rustle of his clothes behind me and the definite crunch of a still dry diaper.

Then I smelled it.

If I had not been in the mother�s bathroom in this same house only minutes earlier I might have thought nothing of that smell. It was the same salt that hung in the air, like two different ponds of water that flowed from the same sea. My nose did its own deductions, but I turned anyway.

He was standing, doing his business, with the diaper and his shorts crumpled beneath him. He didn�t look up at me, but instead watched from the corner of one eye. There was not a lot of blood in the diaper, but there was more on his skin. His young skin was scarred with large bleeding welts. I turned into the sink and promptly lost my lunch in loud, violent heaves. An officer popped his head in and called for Coffey and Parker. I was pulled out of the room and led outside.

Death had hung in this house like bloody stagnant water in a bathtub, but now the house came to life. Circumstances had changed. There was now a death and clear child abuse. More fingerprints were taken and phone records pulled. After a few minutes Parker came out carrying his own stuff and led me to the car. I had seen limbs blown off friends of mine. Hell, I had blown a few arms off people myself and never lost it. Something in that room spoke to me.

"He said he knew I had been in the jungle. He thinks I can help him."

Parker looked at me with pity. "John, don�t take this kind of thing personally. It�ll kill you. I have a feeling we�re going to see a lot of gruesome stuff like that in this case. Molestation cases rarely involve only one child. You can�t let it get to you."

I nodded like the good trainee I was.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Starfield Institute. Tommy went to day care there."

I wished a shadow had fallen then, or thunder struck. For me, darkness has a definite form and it is The Starfield Institute. Apparently Tommy�s darkness had been the same. Parker and I sat silently as he piloted the car toward the city limits.

"Do you remember that ogre story?" Parker asked.

"The Angry Ogre," I corrected.

"Right. Something seems familiar."

"A normal woman, a little boy with his bottom beaten. Similar to the ending. Who could be the ogre?"

"That was going to be my next question," answered my boss. "We�re fairy inundated with those stories. That kind of situation could have sprung up from the mind of any Desert Trail native."

"I guess we better start narrowing them down," I said.

Copyright (c) 2000 M A Adams. All rights reserved.