Mr. Clarinet

"He was a fun guy. He made all the kids laugh. He told us stories, gave us presents—candy, clothes. He was like a great dad and a big kid brother all rolled into one. He used to film us too with this Super 8 camera he had. It made him look like half his face was this black ugly machine with a protruding round glass eye—kind of creepy and funny at the same time. He filmed Treese most of all.

"One day he took me and Treese to one side and told us he was going away. We were real sad. My sister started to cry. And he said not to worry, he'd take us with him if we wanted to come. We said yes. He told us to promise not to tell our parents anything, otherwise he couldn't take us.

"We agreed. We left the village that afternoon without telling anyone. We met our friend in a car all the way down the road. There was another man with him. We'd never seen him before. Treese started saying maybe we should go back. The stranger got out of the car, grabbed her, and threw her inside. He did the same to me. We both started crying as they drove off. Then they injected us with something, and I don't remember much else that happened after that—how we got to the house on La Gonâve or anything."

They'd passed the Carver estate and were heading uphill along a bumpy, potholed stretch of road. They'd had to stop once for a broken-down truck and another time for a man coming down the mountainside with his herd of skeletal goats.

"You saw the tape, right? The one I left for you? You watched it?"

"Where'd you get it?" Max changed gun hands.

"I'll tell you later. You saw what was on it—the potion they gave us?"

"Yeah." Max nodded.

"My memory's pretty fucked up from that whole 'indoctrination process.' You couldn't put me on a witness stand because whatever I've got up here"—Huxley tapped his cranium—"my brain is like spaghetti. I remember things like they were in a dream. I don't know how much of it is disassociation and how much is down to the zombie juice they fed us.

"It wasn't as strong as the stuff the voodoo priests make people catatonic with, but it was enough to make you lose all control of your senses. They used to feed it to us every day. Like communion. We'd go up, receive this green liquid in a cup, drink it.

"Then there was the hypnosis with music notes. Gustav Carver would sit in the middle of this all-white room and we'd stand around him in a circle, holding hands. He played his clarinet to us. And while he was playing we'd get our 'instructions.'"

"What about your sister? Where was she in all this?" Max asked.

"I don't know. The last time I remember seeing her was in the back of the car when we were kidnapped." Huxley shook his head. "She's most likely dead. We weren't allowed to grow up."

"How do you know this?"

"I'll come to that too," Huxley answered, and then resumed his story. "I was sold to a Canadian plastic surgeon called Leboeuf. He always looked at me like he was stripping me down to the bone. He made me watch him doing his operations. I learned how to cut people up. I got handy with knives. I taught myself to read out of medical books.

"Justice was on my side when I killed him, but it was also in Gustav Carver's pocket because they never tied Leboeuf in with him. No one believed what I told them about being kidnapped in Haiti, about being brainwashed, about Tonton Clarinette, about my sister. Why should they? I'd just cut a man up into little pieces and redecorated the house with his insides."

"What about when the cops searched the house for evidence, right after they'd found the body?"

"They didn't find anything linked to Carver—or if they did, it never found its way out into the open. The old man had tentacles everywhere," Huxley said. "I busted out of the hospital they had me in because Gustav tried to have me killed in there. No one believed a damn word I said. It was a nuthouse. I wasn't surprised. By the time they

did start thinking that maybe there was something in it, I was gone, a fugitive, on the run, a wanted man.

"I lived on the street. I hustled. I did what I had to do. I didn't like some of it, but that's the life I was handed. All the while I was on the run I started putting it together—what had happened, who was behind it. I remembered a person LeBoeuf had known—not someone from the surgery, a friend of his. Shawn Michaels. He was a banker.

"I tracked him down. I made him tell me about Carver's business—how it worked, everything."

"Then you killed him?" Max said.

"Yeah." Huxley nodded. "I took his address book. He knew other pedophiles, people he'd recommended Carver's service to."

"You went after them?"

"I only got to one."

"Frank Huxley?"

"That's right. He had a stack of videotapes of what went on in La Gonâve and Noah's Ark. The tape you found was a compilation I made—you know, a preview of forthcoming horrors."

"What about the rest of the people in the address book?"

"They were too hard to get to."

"What about Allain, when did he come into the picture?" Max asked.