Name: goes by John “JD” Doe
Age: 18
FC: Max Records
His Story:
From 1956 to 1974, nearly three dozen blonde women went missing along the highways of northern California. Many of them were classified as runaways or addicts and thought of no further, but the number was high enough that an investigation was launched in 1971. After about a year of dead ends, the case faded into obscurity, and was forgotten. The cops didn’t know where they were, the feds didn’t know where they were, but one little boy in a farmhouse just outside of Madrone knew where they were. They were in his basement.
Not all at once, of course, but two or three times a year some poor girl would wake up down there, shackled and screaming. The boy was used to the screaming, like he was used to the dogs snarling outside and the blood stains on the linoleum floor; like he was used to the dull ache of hunger in his stomach and the chain around his own ankle.
To be clear, the boy did not take the women. In some ways, he was one of the women. One of them had given birth to him, he supposed, but Hank never spoke about her, aside from that the boy had killed her during childbirth. He was very clear about that. It was Hank that took the women. His toys, he called them. The boy was pretty sure Hank was not his father: he didn’t look like him (Hank was blond and broad, with a bit of a gut), he never called him son (it was always boy or kid or skinny or dogmeat), and he certainly didn’t treat him like a son. If the women were toys, the boy was more like a pet.
He was never given a name, or a birthday. He ate sporadically, seemingly whenever Hank thought he may be starving to death, and usually out of a dog bowl. He slept on a pile of ratty blankets on the floor. As soon as he could walk, he had a shackle put around his left ankle, though he wasn’t kept in the basement. His chain was anchored to a kitchen wall, and was long enough that he could move about the main floor of the house if he didn’t get it too twisted up. At it’s full length, the boy could walk a little ways into the yard, just far enough to feed the dogs when Hank was away.
Hank was away a lot. The boy didn’t know what he did when he left, whether he was working or simply roaming the highways, looking for fresh prey. A little of both, he assumed. In truth, he didn’t much care. Time that Hank was away was time that he wasn’t being beaten, and the women weren’t shrieking all night. It was time in which the women spoke to him.
He almost always liked the women. They were kind to him, and so much softer than Hank. Soft hands, soft words, soft hearts. Hank told him that all women were liars and cunts and only faked at being nice to trick men into giving them things, but that didn’t seem right to the boy. In his experience, women listened. They sang lullabies. They told him stories about their homes and families that seemed so bizarre to the boy that they couldn’t possibly be true. They were strong, too. Most of them lasted for months down there in the basement, taking whatever horrors Hank inflicted on them, and so many of them never gave up hope. They always thought they’d escape somehow. They always wanted to take the boy with them. They didn’t understand that the boy had no desire to leave.
You see, when you’re born in hell, you don’t call it hell. You call it home. The farmhouse, despite the screaming and the blood and the beatings, was his home. Hank, even if he was a monster and even if he wasn’t his father, was his only family.
And he wasn’t all bad. No one is. He was charming, in a strange way. Charming enough to lure countless women into his station wagon. The boy could see how someone might find him handsome, or how he might have been handsome once. He was an excellent storyteller, always hitting the turns and the punchline perfectly. Sometimes he’d come home with burgers for the two of them, and they’d watch Bonanza. Sometimes he’d turn on Sesame Street in the morning, just because he knew it was the boy’s favourite. These things were rare, but they happened.
When the boy was nine, Hank started including him in the disposal of the bodies. It became a ritual for them. They would butcher the corpses, separating the meaty bits from the hands and heads and organs. The meat was ground and added to the dog’s slop, and the rest was burned. That was the boy’s favourite part. He loved fire, and it seemed Hank did, too. Macabre as it was, it was something they could share.
It was around this age that the boy started identifying more with Hank than the women. Obviously, he had to separate himself from them. It was too hard to dispose of them if he bonded with them first, and truth be told, he started to see them more like hank did, anyway. Like… meat. Like something less real than him.
One night, Hank brought him a gerbil. It felt small and warm in his hands, and he liked how it could only do what he let it do. The little thing bit him, and without a thought, he crushed it in his grasp. Hank asked him how it felt, and the boy just shook his head. He didn’t know how to explain it. He’d never felt power before.
You may feel your heart breaking for the boy, and you’re right, his story is tragic. But make no mistake, he never becomes a hero. A survivor, yes. A victim, sure. But not a good person. A little boy raised by one monster and a thousand ghosts does not grow up to be an angel. He grows up to be half monster, half ghost. He grows up to be the spectre of a little boy, with claws inside him, tearing their way out.
When he was twelve, the chain around his ankle came off permanently, leaving only a ring of scar tissue. He didn’t run away. Hank started taking him out hunting with him. He called it training.
At first, the culture shock was severe. The boy had never left the farmhouse, and the sheer size of the outside world overwhelmed him. It was too much, too loud, too endless. But like all newborns, he acclimated. He learned to fake it.
He loved watching people. Just people, doing people things; walking, eating, holding hands and laughing. Their lives seemed so foreign and small to him that it was like a child observing ants through a magnifying glass; they shared a physical space, but were on a totally different plane of existence, and had no idea that he could destroy them at any moment. It was both lonely and exhilarating.
Hank was very good at people. It was as if he became an entirely different person depending on who he talked to, his bullshit tailor-made for every new ear. Once he watched as Hank explained to a police officer that the unconscious woman in the back seat was his daughter, and that he and his grandson had just picked her up from the bar. The cop damn near wept as he sent them on their way.
They continued like this, long periods of strained isolation, punctuated by the occasional outing or dismemberment, for three more years before Hank was caught.
Of course, the boy didn’t know he’d been caught until the police were breaking down the door, shining their flashlights in his dirty face. They found the woman in the basement immediately, but no one suspected him. They looked at him, with his long, tangled hair and his filthy clothes, crouched on his rag bed on the floor, and felt nothing but pity. From the back of a squad car, he heard a policeman say “We’ve got a juvenile here, John Doe, in need of medical assistance-” and thought to himself ‘My name is John?’
It said ‘John Doe’ on his hospital charts, too, and he wouldn’t learn for another year or so, until he was used to the damn thing, what that term actually meant. It was disheartening, but fitting. By then he was known by most as JD, so he just stuck with it, though he doesn’t care much what people call him. Would a rose by any other name not smell like death?
At the hospital, they washed him and cut his hair as short as he’d allow. They gave him his shots and put him on an IV. They used terms like “chronic malnutrition” and “Stockholm Syndrome” that he didn’t understand. A few psychiatrists and psychologists frequented his room, though he didn’t say much to them. They seemed fascinated by the little he did say, anyway. It made him feel like a lab rat.
In all, he was only there for a couple of weeks. After that it all got to be too much. The nurses were too cloying, the policemen were too pushy. He didn’t know where Hank was, but he knew he wouldn’t want him talking to cops. Besides, they didn’t have his fingerprints yet, or any real identifying information, and giving that up seemed like handing over a super power. So he made a run for it.
After that he tried to stay mobile, mostly around San Jose and the surrounding areas. Sometimes he had a car or a hotel room, sometimes he didn’t. He found that if you have some beer or weed to offer up, there’s always a couch to sleep on. He also learned to keep himself clean and relatively presentable to avoid being hassled by the cops. If you saw him on the street, he would look like any other middle-class teenager dabbling in hippie shit, and as long as he didn’t talk too much, most slightly counter-culture youths accepted him as one of their own.
But he wasn’t one of them. He was something bigger and more real, and he was suffocating. As horrifying as Hank was, he had been someone who understood his darkest impulses and couldn’t judge them. There was something inside of JD, willing him to cut things open, willing him to get inside and explore. And even when he let go and indulged those impulses, felt the unparalleled rush of unspooling a trucker’s intestines or cracking open every one of a waitress’s ribs to rip out her still-warm heart, it didn’t work the same as it had with Hank. Feeling these things and then having to keep them locked deep down inside himself only made him feel more isolated and insane than ever before.
And then he found The Club, and he could breathe again. It was the first time in years he could be his true, creepy self. The first time he’d met people who even came close to seeming real, people he felt anything at all for. He’s quite certain that The Club is the only place he’ll ever truly fit in, and he’s both excited and terrified by the implications of that. He’s quietly desperate for acceptance, and would do anything to protect the group as a whole.
