There was Kathy asleep in the bed they once shared. She was beautiful, her skin looked so soft and relaxed. She was always so beautiful when she slept. Shepard wanted to touch her. He knew it was a hallucination but he went with it. He ran his palm along her warm cheek. It felt so good. She snuggled back into his hand with a gentle smile forming on her lips.
What if? Sheppard thought, what if I was there with her.
“Kathy?” He said softly.
She jerked up away from his hand and looked all around the room.
“Kathy.” He said again.
She trembled. Kathy brought her knees up to her face and wrapped her arms around them. She sobbed.
“I’m right here.” He said sitting on the bed next to her.
She jumped and fled the room, quickly turning on every light in her apartment.
Why would those idiots eat the mold to experience this? Kathy had looked terrified. She had moved out into the living room and was crying. How could he be causing his memory of her such pain?
Shepard was back in his concrete nightmare, the effects having worn off. A cart began to squeak towards him. But soon passed by for which he was grateful. Another figure came out of a shadow and lurched forward. Until the figure spoke Shepard did not know it was Odius.
“Shepard. You would’ve been better of never having met me.” Odius said. He looked immensely sad and before he dared tell Shepard the news, Shepard knew.
“Odius?”
"There is no exit. We are dead, Shepard. You have had the mold?”
Shepard’s heart sank, “I tried it.”
“It is my fault. Forgive me. You would’ve passed on when you finally starved. The mold, it grows within you and keeps you bound to this place. I thought they were memories but others know. They are not dreams or memories. We are haunting the ones we love. We are dead.”
Shepard didn’t understand. How could he be dead? Odius was crazy that was all.
“You can’t leave with the mold in you. It just makes you want more. It just reminds you of the things you have lost. I have to go, I have to leave. I don’t want to be a ghost. That’s why they fear us in our dreams.”
Odius stuck his finger down his throat and tried to induce vomiting.
Shepard watched.
Odius tried harder to throw up. He began to wretch. Then it started to pour from him. A terrible black vomit sprayed from his mouth and nose like a burst fire hydrant. Then there was a cough.
Then Odius was gone. He had disappeared right in front of Shepard. How could that happen? But Shepard knew Odius had escaped. Or was this all just a strange nightmare he would wake up from soon enough? Shepard looked at the mold, he thought about throwing up and he thought about seeing Kathy again.
THE END
It Even Casts Shadows by Douglas Kolacki
The unvarnished wooden infirmary chair proved as hard and unyielding as the rest of Death Row. Not concrete, not steel--Dr. Larssen saw those everywhere he looked here--but close enough. Oh yes; enough to signal the start of a sore back after less than five minutes. He shifted, tried as best he could to relax, reading the prisoner's note on a featureless scrap torn from a prison memo pad.
So the painting's bothering him?
He lowered the paper to reveal the inmate sitting across from him: shrunken by a diet of powdered eggs and thin sandwiches to a hundred and thirty pounds, loosely clad in an orange collarless jumpsuit, hair gone white, face drawn and eyes hard to read. He'd probably perfected the art of the impassive stare during all the months the trial had raged around him.
The doctor squirmed slightly. Even here in the infirmary, these prison chairs must have been designed for discomfort. He doubted anyone much cared to accommodate these men marked for execution. "Did you want to talk about the painting?"
"Yeah, I..." The man sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I'd like to, if that's okay."
"All right. But keep in mind, Mr. Padilla, I'm here to interview you to determine the possibility of temporary insanity."
This was the defense team's idea. The new defense team, hired by Padilla's mother and sisters and aunts and uncles after his sentencing to death by lethal injection. Recast the defendant as mentally retarded and the forensic evidence as "faulty," (or at least file a motion into the system where it could hold things up), and he could hope to pass away from natural causes before the state got around to deciding what to do with him. "It's not so much a counseling session."
"Well, ah..." The inmate sputtered out a laugh, quickly extinguished. The raw concrete, the uniforms, the bars; nothing around here encouraged laughter. From the cell block, a tramp of boots, the clang of a door shutting, the shouts and curses of caged men arguing. "Well, let me just tell you, all right? Then tell me what you think of it."
"Go ahead. But try to keep it quick." Dr. Larssen reached for the black digital recorder on the table.
"No, no. Can we keep this off the record?"
The doctor moved his hand back. "All right. But I'm still taking notes."
Dr. Larssen possessed the following information. Padilla was twenty-two years older than himself, having turned sixty yesterday. The number 19831-1610 was stenciled in black across his back. He wore gym shoes and handcuffs. The sum total of his worldly possessions came to two pairs of boxers, three pairs of woolen socks, two undershirts, a small radio and two bags of chips from the canteen, hardly enough to crowd the footlocker underneath his bunk. He'd learned the art of brewing "buck," a homemade wine made of orange juice, sugar and bread, mixed together and left to ferment for several days. In his bathroom-sized cell hung a wall calendar still showing the month before last, two centerfolds...and the painting delivered three days before.
"Your lawyers brought you that?" Larssen asked.
"Yeah. Someone sent it to them. I guess they thought it'd be a good idea if I kept it in my cell."
"To show people you regret what happened?"
"Yeah."
"And it was allowed."
"They convinced the warden, or somebody."
Dr. Larssen had not seen the painting. According to the news, it was a 36 X 48 representation of a field west of State Route 75; long grass, northern white cedars in the background atop a shallow rise. A night scene. "It's a pretty fair depiction of the area where she was found?"
"I guess so." The prisoner slouched in his seat. The manacles clinked between his hands.
"It's just the plain field?"
"What do you mean?"
"People have decorated the spot with flowers, wreaths, notes..."
"No, no, it's all covered in snow. In the picture, I mean."
"So..." The doctor sat up, winced, rubbed his back. "The idea was to capture the area as it was after you left?"
--Left her that is, with a slash across her throat, raped, and beaten, and the remnants of a plastic bag over her head... Larssen set aside the thought, as he had done in numerous cases such as this. He was used to such details.
"She's there, if that's what you're wondering, but you don't see her 'cause she's buried under a drift." The prisoner tried another laugh, which just as quickly sputtered out. "Doctor? My face isn't glowing, is it?"
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, you know. When Moses went up on the mountain and talked to God, some of God's light rubbed off on him, and his face shone. He put on a veil when he came down, so it wouldn't freak everyone out."
Larssen jotted a note. "Watching church services." Death Row inmates were permitted to view those on closed-circuit television.
"Once or twice."
"So you're seeing a 'light' in this painting, that wasn't there before?"
"Yeah. That's right."
Claims hallucinations, the doctor scribbled.
The inmate inched forward. "I'm not crazy. Not now, I mean. I did confuse her with my old babysitter--you know, on the night it happened--"
"The one that molested you?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"But about the painting. Has anyone e
lse looked at it?"
"I asked the guards to, when they took me to the showers next. They didn't see anything."
"But you still do."
"Doctor, I know how it sounds, but it's there. I turn away and look again and it's still there. I go to sleep, and in the morning it's--now don't look at me like that."
The psychiatrist put down his notepad. "You could have it removed."
"I can't! My lawyers said I need every little thing to--you know--convince the judge."
Larssen sat back, squirmed, grunted. "So where in the painting is this light?"
"It's under the snow."
"Shining from underneath? Could someone have rigged it, with wires and a battery?"
"No, there's no room for that. It's thin--flat."
###
Why was Padilla bringing all this up? He had already claimed to be molested at four years of age by a blond babysitter. On the night of the crime--eight years ago next month, come think of it--he saw the blond girl and, in an attack of insanity, confused her with that evil woman. Things escalated from there.
Time ran out. The psychiatrist rid himself of the chair and promised to return tomorrow, when--he vowed to himself--he would get to the actual interview questions.
"It's changed," said Padilla the next day.
The inmate fidgeted in his chair, staring at some point beyond the psychiatrist, and made eye contact only when he spoke.
Still claiming hallucinations, Larssen wrote. "How so?"
"The snow's melted."
"In the painting, you no longer see the snow?"
"Not most of it. I really don't. I keep squeezing my eyes shut and looking again and seeing the same thing, the snow's melted and patches of ground are showing now, grass poking up from below."
"That's a big change. Are you sure it wasn't like that before?"
Why was he making this all up? For a moment Larssen debated whether to remind him that he wasn't helping his case. But that wasn't why the doctor was here.
"I thought it was like that before," Padilla was saying. "I'm not sure now if it really was. I woke up and saw it and thought, wasn't it different yesterday? It wasn't bright like that. The snow wasn't all melted."
"It's all gone? So, the body...?"
The inmate's face muddled for a moment. "I guess it's still there."
"You guess?"
"Doctor." He lowered his voice, glanced at the two guards in starched blue trying to impersonate mannequins in each corner. "I still haven't told you the main thing, all right?" He sucked in a breath. "I saw her."
"I don't follow. You said the body--"
"No no no, she's all made of light now!"
"A ghost?"
"You can't understand. Nobody can. 'Ghost' doesn't describe it. It's like comparing that--" he threw a finger up at the buzzing fluorescent tube bolted to the ceiling--"with all the stars in the sky. Sort of. That's the best I can do."
Dr. Larssen thought about standing up; the chair was doing a number on his back and backside. "Mr. Padilla, I think you've made your point about all this. Now if we can get down to these questions--"
"It's not an act. I swear to God it's not." The inmate inched forward in his chair. The guards moved closer. "Doctor, I've told myself over and over it's all in my head, to snap out of it, nobody else sees anything...it won't go away. It even casts shadows. I look at the wall, I raise my hand, there's a shadow of it. And..." He sucked in his breath again. "She's higher!"
"Higher?" Near-death experiences came to mind. "Rising up out of her body?"
"Doctor." Padilla gripped the edge of the table with both cuffed hands. Another minute and his knuckles would turn white. "That glare--it's bright, now that it's uncovered, and--and hot--it's like standing near a furnace--the whole cell is stuffy now, like someone opened a furnace door--and the glare...last night I had to sleep facing the wall, but even then it was like sleeping in an oven--"
The doctor thought about this. "She's going up to heaven. That's what you're seeing, right? So it stands to reason that, by and by, she'll move up out of the painting and that'll be it?"
"No!" Practically a snarl. The guards' hands went to their batons.
"Calm down. Could you tell me what's bothering you so badly?"
"Doctor, could you come look at it?"
The inmate knew this wasn't possible. "Mr. Padilla, just tell me--"
"It's like she's cut out of lightning. Her hair, it's so long now, and drifting around her...I can make out hands, feet...I know what the light is." He stared past the doctor as his mouth moved. "I know what it is!"
"The light of heaven," the psychiatrist offered.
"It's shining through her, like she's a living window for it. Maybe it's the chaplain's fault. He said the Almighty dwells in 'unapproachable light.' Doctor, there's one thing I haven't told you yet. Before, you couldn't really see it because it was night."
"What's that?"
"The sky. It's all covered over with clouds."
Larssen put down his notepad, rubbed his eyes. "Mr. Padilla. If you're not willing to get on with the interview--"
The prisoner rose. The guards sprang to his side. "Doctor, listen, please! The clouds, they're starting to glow, too. From up above them. You see? It's..."
The doctor retrieved his notebook. "God?" he guessed.
"He's coming to meet her. In the sky, I guess. The clouds are blocking most of it now. But it's got to be a billion times brighter, and hotter, and the clouds won't last against it for long. They'll part, dissolve...and then..."
"Mr. Padilla, you need to calm down."
The inmate nodded, sucked in a breath, sank back into his seat. The guards stayed close.
"Doctor, listen...I can't have that in my cell. Yeah, yeah, I know what my lawyers said, but they're not the ones living with this. They don't have to wonder if they're losing it. Nothing else has changed, not the other pictures, not the walls, the food, my cot or the toilet. Whoever had my cell last made scratch marks all over the walls, with his fingernails I guess. Those haven't changed. When I first got there I counted two hundred and three scratches, most of them over my bunk, and those haven't changed. So I was gonna take down the picture and put my knee through it."
"But you haven't done that?"
"No." Padilla shook his head. "Look at this."
And he held up two hairy hands, palms outward.
"There!" He wiggled them a little. He thrust himself up straight, grin tight on his face, as if he had outwitted all the forces of the universe conspiring to convince him of his own madness. "You see?"
The doctor leaned closer. "I see blisters." Two of them: one on the right middle finger, one on the left thumb. "Have you seen the doctor about those?"
"What would he say? But--" he wiggled them again--"you see?"
Dr. Larssen sighed, ran a hand through his hair. Now he would have to notify the defense team, and they would have to come and investigate the whole thing. Is it the coffee? Do they even serve that here? Hot enough to stick your fingers in?
"Mr. Padilla. May I ask you something?"
"Yeah, sure."
"You seem absolutely convinced this hallucination is real. Your account of it indicates both visual and thermoceptive manifestations. Let's just say...just for the sake of argument...if you truly were being granted some sort of second sight... "
"Yeah?"
"Would it cause you to seek forgiveness?"
Padilla spread out his hands. "Doctor, I was molested when I was four years old. That's the formative years, you know? It messed with me growing up."
"So," Dr. Larssen listened to himself slowly enunciating the words, "you don't feel any guilt, Mr. Padilla?"
This was out of bounds. Whether or not the inmate regretted anything was irrelevant, and Larssen had already let a whole session slip away without getting to the interview. But it didn't matter. He had to ask this, and could not go on until he had.
"Insanity, doctor, temporary insanity! I'm not happy about i
t, but what am I supposed to do about it now? Would it change anything if I was executed?"
Dr. Larssen leaned back, grimaced. "So you're afraid the 'light of God' is going to burn you?"
"Do you need to see these again?" He wiggled his fingers. "He--it--it's coming down to meet her, and because the painting's in my cell it's like I'm there too, in the field. It'll shine through the painting. And when it does..."
Larssen jacked himself up straight. "You know what I think this is, Mr. Padilla? I think it's all a manifestation of a conscience you never thought you had--"
Padilla lunged. The guards seized him. "Don't you understand? It's gonna fry me alive, doctor! It'll fry me alive!"
The guards struggled, grunting, to restrain him. The psychiatrist backed away. Presently a physician arrived with a sedative.
"Take it down," the prisoner cried. "Don't listen to my lawyers, please, just take it down, use gloves or something but take it down, throw it away, for God's sake throw it away..." His voice dissolved into incoherent mutterings. From the blocks beyond came the faint sounds of radios, and two prisoners shouting out chess moves.
The shift foreman walked in. Like many of the guards he had too much belly straining his shirt buttons, but he also had a cherubic face with a look of compassion about it. "Sorry about that."
Dr. Larssen picked up his notepad. "Just business as usual for me."
"What do you think, sir?" The foreman nodded toward the hall. "Up to you. Should we do what he's asking?"
Larssen thought about it. Slowly he said, "It's really not up to me...it's up to the defense...and they want it left up in his cell."
"Should we call them, then?"
"No, I don't believe that will be necessary. Better for the prisoner, actually. He needs to realize for himself that there's nothing to this. Temporary insanity."
"Very well." The foreman had the guards show the doctor out. After navigating the labyrinth of cages back out to the world, he went home, cooked lamb chops, and crawled into the bed he had somehow never shared in the six years he'd lived here. He'd have to do something about that.
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9 Tales Told in the Dark 6 Page 9