Ferguson smiled as he continued to pace.
“You have no idea how scared I was when I saw you. I mean really, really scared. I thought I was going to piss myself. And you, of course, made straight for me. You had this look in your eye like all your Christmases had come at once. Do you remember what you did?”
Charlie still wasn’t speaking and was now ignoring the photographs too. He was staring at the wall, his teeth clenched as he waited for what was coming.
“Of course, you remember. I'll remind you anyway. Your buddies, Ringwood and Schofield held me down whilst you made me eat the frog spawn. Remember? You made me eat it all then you took my clothes and threw me in the lake. I almost got pneumonia. I was sick for two damn weeks. But as if that wasn’t humiliation enough, you went and told everyone at school. Do you have any idea how it feels to be ridiculed by everyone? Hell, I even saw one of the teachers laughing at me. A damn teacher. You made my life hell Charlie. Every single day.”
“I don’t know how many times I can tell you I’m sorry man. I was a dick at school I get it, but you have to admit you were weird. So damn quiet all the time.”
“It’s called lack of self-confidence, brought on by assholes like you.”
“Either way, don’t you think this is a bit of an overreaction?” Charlie bellowed. “I tried to make amends; I tried to make it right.”
“Oh, this isn’t right. Not by a long shot.”
The way Ferguson said it intensified the fear in Charlie, and he flicked his eyes towards the rolled carpets at the back of the container.
“So you are just going to kill me? Doesn’t that make you just as much of a bully as I was?”
“I’m not going to do a thing to you. I already told you. I may be out for a little payback, but I’m not a killer.”
Charlie looked at the rolls of carpet again, and this time, Ferguson joined him in looking, then grinned.
“Relax. It’s not what you think.” Ferguson said as he returned to his chair.
“So if you aren’t going to kill me, what happens now?”
“I want you to be sorry Charlie. For everything you did to me.”
“I am sorry, I told you already, I don’t know how else to say it.”
“I think you need to take some time to think about what you have done to me. You need to learn to be sorry.”
It was then that Charlie knew what Ferguson had in mind.
“You're framing me for killing them aren’t you?” He said, nodding towards the rotting corpses at the back of the container. “You're going to make sure I spend the rest of my life in prison.”
“You aren’t as stupid as you look,” Ferguson said with a smile. “But I know you, Charlie. You wouldn’t shut up until you convinced the police to investigate me. I just can’t risk that happening. No, I need you to learn true forgiveness. I need for you to appreciate the isolation that I felt.”
Charlie looked around the container and shook his head.
“Please no, not here. Not with them.” He said, his voice wavering.
“Yes, here with them. You need time to come to terms with what you did was wrong. More importantly, I need you to be sorry so I can move on with my life.”
“Please, don’t leave me here. It’s inhuman.”
“No more than some of the things you did to me.”
Charlie was broken. His lip trembled as he looked for any shred of compassion within Ferguson, but his cold stare said there was none.
“Come on man, I’m claustrophobic, please, I’m begging you not to do this.”
“Just like I begged you not to do all those things you did to me.”
“That was just kids’ stuff. It didn’t mean anything. I’ll die in here!” He looked at the open door. “Somebody, please help me!” He screamed. Ferguson made no effort to stop him and laughed.
“You think I would be stupid enough to bring you to a populated area to conduct our business?” He asked, shaking his head.
“You really are a stupid fuck, aren’t you Charlie?”
“Charlie stopped screaming as Ferguson stood and walked to the doors.
“I don’t suspect we will see each other again Charlie. But I want to give you every chance to extend your life as long as possible. This container is twenty feet long and nine feet tall. Once the doors are locked, you will have air enough for three days, maybe four if you take shallow breaths. That could all go to hell though once the isolation gets you. Schofield lasted two days. He panicked and used up all his air. Ringwood made it to four and a half, but the dark and isolation combined sent him off the rails.”
“You sick son of a bitch,” Charlie whispered.
“I wouldn’t expect you to experience something I hadn’t myself. I spent the night in here just last week in preparation for this. The dark is total, and the silence is deafening. Worse is the smell. You think it's bad now with the door open, just wait until the air is closed out. It gets really bad.”
“If you want me dead just kill me. Shoot me, slit my throat with that damn knife of yours, anything but this. Please…”
“I’m sorry Charlie; this is how it has to be. Once I’m gone, you can feel free to scream, shout, and bang on the walls as much as you like. You are far enough away from anyone to hear or even find you. Just remember that screaming uses up air, and air for you, is about to become pretty precious.”
“What can I do to make you change your mind?”
Ferguson paused, and considered, and for a moment, there was absolute silence.
“Absolutely nothing,” Ferguson said, and then stepped outside. First swinging one door shut, and then partly closing the other.
“Please!” Charlie said as he tried to push himself up the wall to his feet, then fell back down, his nose and face smashing into the floor. He looked up at the door, his last tantalising glimpse of the outside world beyond.
“Ferguson... please…”
“Goodbye, Charlie.”
Ferguson closed and locked the door, then sat in the sun, resting his head against the container door and listening to Charlie’s muted screams. He took the knife out of his pocket and etched three words into the dirt, then stood and admired his handiwork.
Long Tall Coffin.
He put the knife back into his pocket, took a deep breath of good clean air, then without looking back, made his way through the maze of storage containers. He didn’t feel bad. The world was a better place without bullying assholes like Charlie Brooks in it. Ferguson got in his car, switched on the radio, and went home to his family.
THE LANGTON EFFECT
I wasn’t certain at first, but now I’m pretty convinced that the old guy at the homeless shelter is who I think he is. As impossible as it seems, I can’t help but buy into the fact that that scruffy old toothless hobo with the deformed cheek is me, or what I will become at least.
I have been working over there at the shelter for the last seven months, on community service for screwing over a drugstore. Don’t judge me, I get it. I’m a bad seed, one of those people shaped by society to be a degenerate fuckup. All of that, however, is beside the point. I want to get back to talking about the old man.
He calls himself Langton, which freaked me out because that was the name of my imaginary friend when I was a kid. Nobody knows about that, and although it could be a coincidence, I doubt it.
Although Langton has skin like old leather and tired, watery eyes which say they have had enough of living in this shitty world, I can’t deny it.
He does kinda look like me, or how I might look after fifty years addicted to crack and moonshine.
Anyhow, this all started when I caught him staring at me, his cocky, half smug grin as familiar as the one I see in the mirror every day. I thought he might have had a cleft lip, or something else wrong with his face, as the left side of his face was sunk inwards, and his top lip overhung his bottom, making him slur as he spoke. Despite his appearance, I held his gaze, because at that point I was still trying to portray th
e bad ass, to make sure everyone knew I wasn’t to be messed with. But Langton didn’t seem in the least bit intimidated, and he waved me over. Now normally, I would tell a guy like this to go screw himself. I wasn’t there to help the homeless like Jason and the rest of the asshole staff who worked there. My presence was required by law, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it.
Anyway, I had intended to give the old man some verbal, just enough to maybe frighten him off and make sure he kept his nose out of my business, but before I could do anything, he held up a grubby hand and stopped me in my tracks.
“Save it, Monty.” He said, watching me with that shit eating, knowing look on his face that I would grow to hate.
Now I’ll admit, I was freaked out. Nobody calls me Monty anymore. Not since I was a kid, and although I had never seen the old bum before, he knew, and it knocked the wind right out of me.
I forgot about trying to frighten him off then. In fact, I forgot about trying to be the big man altogether. Instead, I sat down opposite him, and as he began to talk, I listened, and the more he talked, the more convinced I became that I was in conversation with a version of myself from some alternate reality or something. The funny thing is that all the things he told me were things that only I could know.
He told me about things that would happen. Things that had already happened and he had no reason to know.
He was crafty with it too. He told me all about how his brother had been put into a Young Offenders Institute for taking part in a botched armed robbery of a pharmacy and then had his sentence uplifted to murder when one of the other kids tried to touch him up and got himself beaten to death.
The story was familiar of course because it was my brother that had been institutionalised and my brother who had been convicted of murder, only my brother had tried to hold up a petrol station, not a pharmacy.
I was numb as he recounted experiences of my life as if they were his own, always making them just different enough to give the benefit of the doubt.
His father died of a stroke, mine of a brain tumour.
His mother had Parkinson’s disease and lived out the rest of her years in a nursing home; mine had just been diagnosed with the disease.
Days melted into weeks, but I could never find it in myself to outright ask him if my suspicions were true. I kept hoping that he would come out and say it, but it became the big old elephant in the room, the unspeakable conundrum, so we both skirted around it.
For as much as I wanted to, I knew I couldn’t mention it, not without sounding as crazy as he was, and that got me thinking if maybe that’s how I ended up like him, by being branded as crazy and starting on that slippery slope towards the warm embrace of smack, meth, and cheap booze.
I knew I shouldn’t meddle, but I needed to know, and I asked him what happened to him, what went wrong in his life to make him become like he was. He gave me one of those looks, like he knew what I was asking, but wasn’t prepared to say it outright. It was like in those movies where the actors acknowledge the camera and give it a goofy look or a wink. We both knew what we were talking about, but we were in character and went on with the lie.
The story of his life mirrored mine almost exactly, but by then I had grown accustomed to the weirdness and wanted to know what came later.
He told me about how he had been shunned by his family and had spent his early twenties going in and out of prisons for petty offences. It was then that his mood changed. He didn’t seem quite so keen to talk, and I had to threaten to have him tossed from the shelter and go hungry. He must have known I would do it because he told me.
“I killed some people.” He said as he slurped down his soup.
My heart was racing, but I needed to know. I needed to know what was going to happen.
I asked him how many, and for what felt like hours, he didn’t speak, he just looked at me, sucking his deformed jaw as he breathed. I waited, and eventually he answered.
“A lot.”
He didn’t say anymore, and in truth, that was enough. Without saying another word, I stood and left. He didn’t try to stop me. At that point, I didn’t care about anything other than making sure I changed what I was to become, no matter what.
The burden of knowledge made any sensible thoughts impossible, and I started to micro analyse every decision in my life, desperate to do something to avoid becoming Langton. The ironic thing is that now it has reached the point where I’m afraid to do anything but sit here in my shitty apartment with the curtains closed and think about everything that I have learned. I have also started to do certain things that I tell myself will rid the bad Juju brought on by the combination of Langton and my brain, which I’m pretty sure is sick now.
I convinced myself that I have to turn the light switch on and off fifty-seven times before I enter or leave the room, or it will set me on my way to becoming like Langton. Or I have to take a step back for every five I take forwards, or, you guessed it, it will somehow set me on the first step towards becoming Langton. To only eat foods that are green or yellow, or it will… well, you get the picture.
I had to kill the cat from the apartment next door because it walked from right to left across my window ledge instead of left to right. There was no pleasure in it, and I made sure I washed it thoroughly before I threw it out of the window into the street. (Cold tap on, cold off, hot on, hot off, cold on, Just to make sure I don’t catch the Juju)
It’s all gotten out of hand, and it’s now to the point when I’m too afraid to even leave the apartment. I know that if I touch the door handle, it will set off a microscopic chain of events that will lead to my future fifty years from now as that deformed, broken old murderer, and I don’t want that.
Everyone in my life has always called me a loser, they always said I would never amount to anything, and I’ll be damned if I’m about to prove them right.
Langton had all of his fingernails I think.
I peeled three of mine off to make sure we weren’t the same.
If it rains I have to walk backwards around the apartment until the sun comes out.
It sounds odd to you, I know, but it’s something I have to do.
One worry is that I ran out of food a couple of weeks ago, and my stomach almost continuously reminds me that I’m hungry, but I tell it to be quiet. If I eat the wrong thing, I could set things in motion that will lead me to you know where.
It’s a strange feeling, knowing that the door is unlocked but I’m still a prisoner, but the doorknob can only be turned right, as to turn it left would surely mean I would go out, and then anything could happen.
Butterfly effect? Try the Langton Effect! Ha!
If I have learned anything as I sit here and waste away, it’s that the human mind is far more powerful than people give it credit for. Take this situation for example.
I know I’m hungry.
I know I need food.
I know that if I go outside, I can get food.
But this stupid fucking brain of mine overrides all of that and tells me that if I want to avoid becoming like Langton, then I have to stay where I am and not risk doing anything to set things in motion.
It’s funny because I always wanted to know the future, about how things might pan out further down the line. I always believed that I would get on track, that I would put my life straight and make a difference. But all of that was before, and right now I would give anything to go back and never have to meet that crazy old bastard.
At least the isolation has given me time to think, and I’m pretty sure that now, at last, I get it.
Screwing around with light switches, killing cats and making sure I count the spots on the curtains before I go to sleep won’t stop me from becoming like him.
There is one way to be sure, and I must be right because my brain, for once isn’t objecting.
The pistol in my hand is the last symbol of my gang days. Something which seems like it was not only another lifetime, but one lived by someone else. I always though
t I would be scared to death, but after everything that I have been through, it has to be better than lying here on the floor, a pathetic, emaciated shell of a man who is afraid to do anything in case it sets in motion that chain of events that I’m desperate to avoid. My hands were surprisingly steady as I loaded the weapon, and its weight feels reassuring in my hand. (Now that I think about it, maybe Langton was missing a couple of fingernails). It’s almost over now anyway, and as I wedge that oily barrel up behind my front teeth, I wonder if when I pull the trigger, it will also mean that Langton would never have existed. I believe in science, they call that a paradox. I’ll leave these notes for whoever finds me. I want to be cremated, and for them to play The End by The Doors at my funeral. I might also ask another favour of whoever finds and reads these notes, and that is for them to head down to the homeless shelter on Maple, and look for a guy with brown hair, a cleft lip and grey eyes who wears a brown trench coat and answers to the name of Langton. I’m pretty sure you won’t find him, and I hope that’s true, because if he’s there then it either means I was wrong, or this suicide is about to fail.
That is a sobering thought, and I need to end this now before I allow myself to think about it too much.
Load the gun, unload the gun, load the gun, unload the gun, load the gun, unload the gun, load the gun, unload the gun.
Load the gun.
APARTMENT 11
Fifteen.
Fifteen years since I last left this place. A hundred and thirty-one hours, four hundred and eighty-seven minutes since I last saw the outside world. That’s a long time. A long time to think. A long time to wonder. A long time for the human brain to create and invent scenarios. This flat is my sanctuary and my prison. My curse and my gift.
At The Edge of Night - 28 book horror box set - also contains a link to an additional FREE book Page 16