The Grim of the Valley

Dr. Jando “Jan Stan” Stanley, PhD, DMD sat across from me in a padded metal folding chair. The room we were in was small, made more cramped by the two men looming over the doctor and I. These men stood, though there was a third vacant chair. The air was extremely stale and I found it difficult to breathe. I was uncomfortably aware of the scent of my own body, dank and almost vegetal. Dr. Jan made a smacking sound with his mouth and used his fat hand to fan out a stack of five photographs on the shiny table between us.

The pictures, of course, were horrendous. I felt the detectives study my face for reactions as I absorbed the images. They depicted the brutalized bodies of various women, severed into five neat rectangles. My eyes watered as protection against bruises and broken capillaries, exposed pink meat, breasts, thighs, vulvae. Stretched, domed flesh, tight and rotten. A hand with unnaturally curled fingers topped with blue polished nails. I blinked and looked away. A plump tear loosened from my left eye and I wiped it away with my shoulder. I couldn’t use my hand to do this as my handcuffs were looped through a bar built into the table.

“Oh no, no, no way Jose. You’re going to look right here,” said Dr. Jan. “You’re going to tell me what you see.” He pushed the pictures closer to me. His palm left an oily smear on one of them and I chose to focus on that.

“Um. Well. I see injuries?” I said. I thought of a month ago when all this would have seemed impossible.

“You see injuries? That’s it?” Dr. Jan let out a sarcastic whoosh of air. The other men in the room shifted in an awkward way. Dr. Jan arranged his hands into a powerful triangle, pressed the shape to his florid lips, then pointed the triangle’s apex at me. “Do you want to know what I see when I look at pictures like this? I see the utterly demonic.” He paused for effect, his small eyes unblinking. “I see the personal calling card of the demon that lives inside each and every one of us.”

“Jan,” one of the other men started but Dr. Jan fluttered his hand at him.

“Those of us who can’t cope with that demon, well,” he continued, gesturing at the photographs, “We get something like this.” He dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “It’s like art, isn’t it, Justin?” I looked down at his hands and then back up to his face. He was shaped like a snowman; a round, hairless head on an even rounder body. His tiny eyes were deeply set but they shone with an unwholesome inner vitality. He leaned forward and smiled at me with all of his teeth. “What I’m getting at here, Justin, is since we all have this demon inside of us, stuff like this, as sick as it is, isn’t bad exactly. It’s just an inside-out version of good.”

“Jan, I really think we can consider wrapping this up,” said the taller of the two detectives but he was ignored again.

“All I’m trying to say here, Justin, is that there is no right or wrong, no good versus evil. There’s just what has transpired and what currently is. Therefore there’s really nothing left to do but unburden yourself. Nothing to do but quiet that inner demon, at least for a while, right? It’s your chance for the do-over everyone wishes for, lucky boy.”

“But I don’t need a do-over. I didn’t do any of this.” I told him for maybe the thousandth time that day. My tongue felt thick and furry, still covered with fast food grease from the meal they had brought me hours ago, when they still felt like letting me out of the handcuffs. One of the standing detectives made a scoffing noise at my statement and cracked his knuckles against the wall. Dr. Jan’s deep eyes flicked up at him and then back to my face. His cheeks were flushed with cloud-like patches of red.

“Yes, yes, of course it wasn’t you. This is you. This perfect young gentleman sitting here and having a civilized conversation with his fellow humans is you.” He took a paper napkin from his front pocket and dabbed at his upper lip. “Justin, do you know what a persona is?”

“Um, yeah, it’s-”

“It’s the mask you wear around other people. It’s the mask you’re wearing right now, Justin. For all intents and porpoises it is you. But we all let that mask slip sometimes, don’t we? We just let that mean old demon out. And it feels good. It feels good to let go and bite, doesn’t it?”

“No, I never did anything like that. I don’t bite people. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what you guys want from me,” I murmured. I was insanely tired. The room swam in front of me and I felt a lurch of vertigo. Dr. Jan looked at me for a long while and asked if I needed the trash can. The taller detective yawned though his nose and pulled his phone out of a leather holster on his belt.

“Okay, Justin, I didn’t want to have to ’go there,’” Dr. Jan said, making air quotes with his fingers. I swallowed my nausea. “I had you pegged as a smart guy, someone who could pick up on poetic subtlety, but it looks like I am going to have to get out the clown mallet.” He picked up a binder that that was resting at his feet and flipped it open on the table. The shorter detective finally sat down on the unoccupied folding chair. Air hissed out of the chair’s padding and his tie pooled between his spread legs. The taller detective excused himself for coffee, still looking at his phone. He didn’t ask if anyone wanted anything. “That’s okay, Frenchy, the coffee is abysmal,” Dr. Jan told the closing door. When the door snicked shut, he continued with me. “We have your dental records. Do you know what those are?”

“Uh, records...of my teeth?”

“Ding-ding, son, you got it. Now, we’re going to have to take current molds, of course, but my prelims show you’re about a 93.3 percent mark match.” He slid a transparent sheet from the binder and placed it over one of the awful photos, the one he had previously smudged. “Lucky for me, you’ve had extensive orthodontia and I can kind of set the stage here with your available molds. See, I can tell that you obviously didn’t wear your retainer. There’s shifting here, and here, specifically giving you a distinctive lateral incisor. Well, distinctive to me, but I’m kind of at the top of my field. Also, this beveling here? It perfectly matches this diagonal drag on Vianne’s left thigh. Do you see that? Textbook.” He moved the transparency over the gore, placing it just so. The shorter detective pursed his lips and leaned in to look at the display. Dr. Jan continued, dropping his voice back down into intimacy. “I could do this with all the pictures, Justin. Poor Miss Vianne here, of course, but I could do it with Sierra Newel’s, Lauren Kulter’s, Lauren Ridgeway’s and this one here. Blanca something-with-a-b. Barbelo. Good looking Mexican girl, if I recall correctly. Well, not anymore. Because of you. Because you bit her. You bit all of them, didn’t you, Justin? Tell us now. We can all be done with this dog and pony show. It’s up to you.” I leaned back in my chair, away from Dr. Jan and his photos, away from the wriggling outlines of my own teeth. I was sweating again and my head felt strange and medicated.

“I didn’t bite Vianne. I didn’t do anything to her. I don’t even know these other girls; did they go to Central or what? I don’t know how else to say it, you guys.” I flicked at the pictures, rattling the chain connecting my cuffs and ruining Dr. Jan’s neat formation. He began to chuckle soundlessly, his shoulders popping up and down.

“Son, I have been doing this job for near on thirty-three years. I have looked at over five thousand bite wounds. I have convicted two hundred and sixty-nine souls using this type of evidence. I am what you would call an expert. If anyone thinks they can do a better job than me, I challenge them to go to the ever-loving morgue and spend ten minutes dealing with what I have to marinate in daily.” Dr. Jan’s eyes grew slightly unfocused as he continued. “Try spending all night with fifteen autopsied dead babies and I practically guarantee you’re going to come out of there a babbling fruitcake.” The shorter detective sucked in his lips and looked at me almost apologetically. The taller detective came back into the room at that moment and immediately spilled his lidless cup of coffee.

“Oops, haha, royal flush too,” the detective said, referring to the playing card design printed on the cup. Dr. Jan sighed.

“Paper towels in the break room, Frenchy. No, don’t throw that away, let me see it.” Detective Frank “Frenchy” Rochas exchanged a glance with the shorter detective, handed the cup to Dr. Jan and scooted back out the door. Dr. Jan studied the cup. “All spades. You know, they used to give out all-ace-of-spade decks to soldiers. They left the cards on the dead bodies of their enemies.” He set the cup down on the table. “A more artistic time.” Detective Rochas returned then and we all watched him smear a paper towel over the puddle of coffee using the tip of one shiny dress shoe. I felt reality slip another notch away from me and I had to suppress a wild giggle. I opened my mouth to ask what the hell was in the bacon cheeseburger they gave me earlier but Detective Rochas took that moment to place his hand on my shoulder and squat next to me. When he spoke it was directly in my ear.

“Okay, it’s time to cut the crap. We’re all tired and we know pretty much everything. I mean, we have enough here for the state to be able to put you away for a long time. There’s the Kingsburg gas station footage. There’s the footprints, the nail polish flakes. Obviously the bite mark matches, that’s why Dr. Stanley is here. Oh and the Del Taco receipt that puts you within five square miles of where Vianne Shermantine was last seen, time-stamped directly after we feel she um, expired, not to mention all the area cell phone pings. It’s looking pretty grim for you, Mr. Alexander. So let us help you. I’d love to tell the prosecutor that you decided to be honest here today. I’m sure you want Vianne’s family to have a little closure, not to mention all these other girls’. That’s a lot of people you’ve affected. I’d like you to be a man here today. I can tell you’re not a monster. Things just got a little out of hand, didn’t they?”

All their eyes were on me. I looked at Dr. Jan.

“Let’s get these men home now, Justin,” he said. “Let’s quiet that demon.”