Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

One of the displays was for Tom Thumb. His mother truly believed her son’s diminutiveness was caused by grief she held over her puppy drowning while she carried Charlie, the boy’s real name. I went home and told my mother this story, how Tom Thumb became rich and married a woman who told him he was just as beautiful as she, so that my mother needn’t worry about me.

My mother smiled sadly when I told her this, and now I realize it was because she knew how my adult years would hurt me, and that my coming school years would only foreshadow this hurt. She smiled the way one does when they are recalling that the person they are talking to used to be so young and tiny. The sadness of the first recognition of mortality. My mother expected the worst. And so I would still hear her cry at night.

But the school I went to was Childermas Research, one of the Cook County clinics.

During my first year of classes, I met Celandine Tomei. Some of the other children and their parents whispered about her.

The ages of the children in class varied; some learned slower, others had inhibited body functions and needed to be taught with much patience.

Celly was a 1959 baby, just like me.

She was the first girl I ever saw naked.

* * *

Childermas Research was one weird fucking place. You entered this maze of buildings at Eighteenth and Honore, passing a little sliver of what looked like a Philadelphia rowhouse; this building that was the burn ward for the entire county, and the Lighthouse For The Blind. On the northeast horizon, a huge pair of red neon lips, advertising Magikist carpets, beckoned.

The classes of reading and spelling lessons weren’t too difficult; our rehab sessions reflected our needs. The therapists were great. Vonnie Llewellyn and Ron Szawlus had the patience of saints, I swear. Rehab mostly consisted of coordination exercises, games to make each person use their right and left sides independently, or in tandem.

What was weird about Childermas was my classmates. Not all of us were allowed out on class trips, like the one to Ripley’s. Sometimes I felt as if it was a prison. I was never treated badly, but I felt as if all of us were being manipulated in some way that I could never hope to comprehend.

Juvenile Rehab—where we were—was Room 18, big black numerals on an orange door. Room 20 should have housed the burn ward, but there were people of all ages in there, hooked up to various machines. I heard several orderlies grousing about having to work the Pain Detail, which was kat-corner to Room 20. A blank blue door.

I never saw any of what went on in that long corridor of sub-rooms. But I heard the screams. Several times over the years, I have vomited into my palm or my garbage can, whichever is more convenient, when I recall those damnable, high-pitched, keening screams.

Once it had nothing to do with memories. In a medical magazine, I came across photos of stillborn thalidomide babies like Celandine.

One of these “stillborn” children was nothing more than a nerve column wrapped around bone in the placenta.

* * *

I come back into the bedroom, my hands washed fresh. I can still smell the vomit in the faint spring air. May 31st, Chicago’s first real breakaway-fromthe-throes-of-winter days. It is not a bad smell. It will go away within a few minutes, like when me and Celly were kids and sneaking smokes on the back porch of the Plichtas’ two-flat.

Celandine is sleeping soundly. The sun will rise soon, the sky already aqua. Her breasts rise and fall, rise again. The head beneath her left breasts lolls to the side.

As Celandine breathes, the head looks like a buoy bobbing off Fullerton Beach. Its eyes are open, and it is staring at me.

Silently staring.

* * *

So many deformities in one classroom. A boy who looked like his skull had been caved in with a lead rod, another with one bug-eye, as if his head was a bubble being blown from a plastic pipe. Many could barely stand. I was able to, but the weight of the excess blood in my brain made my head slump down. My chin often touching my chest, I’d stare up, my eyebrows framing my view, at the lovely Celandine.