“I came to back in Petersburg where I was admitted to hospital for days,” I told Doctor Ettritch. “You and two of the other men were found several miles away – they were both raving mad men while you were found a...a physically broken man.”
Ettritch looked down wistfully at his chair.
“But you already know this,” I added, my voice and tone indicating that I now wished him to fill in my reason for being summoned to his chambers.
He caught my gaze, and sighed heavily.
“You left before I had regained my own wits,” he said, “and neither of us has spoken to a soul about the events of that day...”
“No one would believe us,” I said, “and I had not the time to tell anyone where we were going. It felt better to keep it all to myself and suffer the nightmares and terrors alone.”
“I know you saw the same beast I encountered,” he continued, and suddenly I was aware that he may be blaming me for something. “For I, too, was standing in that glade when the lightning struck!”
My mouth dropped open, and before I could utter a word he continued.
“The beast did not chase you!” he spat. “I was mere yards from you but you were so intent on the beast you did not hear my cry for help!”
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts and relive the encounter that I had tried so hard to repress since the previous year.
“When you ran for the trees so did I, but the beast chased me,” Ettritch said. “It hounded me for hours through the Monongahela Forest... toying with me... bounding up close to me and unleashing roar after roar in my ear...”
His eyes were now that of a man drifted deep in a fearful memory, and I could feel the hairs on my arms and neck rising as the storm around the building took on a new strength.
“Did you see the face in the storm?” he asked me so suddenly it caught me unawares. “The eyes of the storm’!” He suddenly burst with laughter, and my own eyes widened. The beast had not just ruined his body – it had destroyed his mind.
“Doctor Ettritch,” I said taking small steps backwards towards the door I had entered. “I’m going to fetch your assistant. I am sure he has some medication for you that you must require now?”
Ettritch laughed again.
“My assistant locked the door behind him when he left,” he said, his words sounding very final in a gap between the thunder and lightning.
“We were all sacrifices,” said the doctor as sheets of rain lashed against the window, the room regularly exploding with light and the rumble of thunder overhead. “All those who died were sacrifices to the Robben family... allowing them to feed.”
“How...” My mouth was so dry I had to attempt to speak again. “How would you know of this?”
Ettritch smiled, and the darkness of the action made his eyes light up abnormally.
“They always need to feed. The head of the family has a job to do, to feed the clan, to direct them to their next meal and next sacrifice to the ‘god’...”
“The ‘head’ being the monstrosity in the glade?” I asked my back now to the door.
“Good lord, no!” he replied. “The head of the family is the storm! Do you now recall the tales of the storm being the ghost of Jan Robben? Well the tales were true!”
“How ...?”
“Because Jan Robben and his bestial family sacrificed me to feed the ‘unholy ghost’!” His laughter was ominous, and filled the room over the growing thunder.
The man was clearly insane, and I knew the door behind me was truly locked even before I tried the handle.
“I would like to leave now.” I said, knowing my voice was too quiet to be heard.
“But, once sacrificed, one becomes a member of the family,” he said, and I could see an inner strength rising within him.
And then, with absolute horror gripping my soul, I could see tendrils of black smoke begin to unfurl from beneath the shawl that covered his frail body.
“Why am I here?” I asked my voice suddenly stronger than I had any reason to feel. “To sacrifice me to your ‘ghost’?”
Doctor Ettritch laughed again, and his eyes took on a red hue that could not be caused by the fire or the lightning.
“No, Mr Cope,” he said, his voice unnaturally deep and rolling with the thunder outside. “I brought you here so I could show you what I have become!”
I tried to apologise for anything; for something; but my mind and mouth suddenly became blank as I watched his cloak bubbling around his body.
“My dear boy...” he said as his frail form engulfed my vision. “Can you not hear my thunder?”
His eyes glowed red.
He threw off his cloak.
And his true form filled the room.
JUST THE WIND
David Dunwoody
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche
One
By Malloy’s meticulous recordkeeping, it had been going for 822 days, but he had yet to say anything. He didn’t want a shot. He didn’t want to lose count.
The passage of time had once been easier to mark but was now a nightmare, and he needed all his faculties at full capacity. At first he’d numbered his mental calendar by the cycle of abhorrent lukewarm meals. He had no window from which he could observe the sun or stars, and the little light in the corner of the ceiling never dimmed, so the meals were the only way. But then the meals stopped coming so often. The nagging in his stomach would tell him breakfast was late. A half-frozen sandwich – why frozen at all, he had no idea – would arrive hours later, well past lunch time. Then what absolutely felt like a day would pass with no food at all, nor any response to his pounding against the door (although he admittedly didn’t pound very hard, for, again, he didn’t want a shot).
When the orderly brought him a plastic tray bearing a baked shoe, he grew concerned. Surely he wouldn’t be asking for a shot if he were to inquire about this newest addition to the menu. But he didn’t. He wanted to make sure he didn’t miss the wind.
Eight hundred twenty-two days straight, that banshee-howl from the other side of the wall. He knew it was no auditory hallucination, and he knew it wasn’t anything within the wall itself or the ductwork. There was no mistaking that rising and falling scream, one which bore at times to Malloy a tone of pitched accusation, other times horrified discovery – oooooOOOOOOHHHHHH! It was the wind madly chasing itself between the wards of the sanatorium, and it had been doing so now for more than two years.
That the staff appeared to be losing their minds (Exhibit A: Nike a la king) puzzled Malloy. Surely the wind was mere background noise to them at this point. Only he, with his compulsions and nothing else to focus on in this wretched room, should have been so acutely aware of the unyielding presence. Yes, free men would have been forced to navigate through the storm, but would have adapted by now, both in their hearing and their temperament. It should not have worn down their psyches like this.
Exhibit B: the orderly inserting his fingers through the meal slot, and letting them dangle there. Fingers bruised and raw and already marred by several sets of teeth. Malloy had sat in frozen silence. After several seconds, the orderly had mumbled something unintelligible and swapped one hand for the other. This time Malloy saw bone. He’d closed his eyes and counted the seconds in his head. Four hundred fifty-three Mississippis before the orderly withdrew and padded away on what sounded like bare feet.
Maybe it was all quite simple, Malloy thought as he sat on his cot, legs and arms folded, listening to the wind. Maybe he’d been right all along, he was the sane one, and the methods of true madness had finally unraveled outside his door.
The possibility might also have occurred to him that some of the others had gotten out and taken control of the place; but he’d seen Dr. Bierce just two days before, and as he was escorted to and from the man’s office everything had seemed in its place, the “patients” in particular. No, there wasn’t a co
up afoot. Not even a mutiny. Dr. Bierce himself had been stark raving mad. And still Malloy had said nothing...Bierce handed out shots like coupons on his better days, and this day in particular had seemed less than that.
The first thing Malloy had noticed upon being led to his seat was that the window behind Bierce’s desk was wide open, meaning without glass, and that Bierce’s smooth pate was dotted with specks of blood.
“Oh, I’m fine,” the doctor had assured him, as if that were Malloy’s chief concern. “Wind just blew the thing in. Should have seen it coming. Actually, I’m rather glad I didn’t. Would’ve been the last thing I saw. Agree, disagree?” He’d begun drumming his fingers on the desk. Malloy hadn’t breathed, let alone replied. Bierce’s hands were the hands he’d seen stuck through his meal slot.
“What’s the matter, Malloy?”
“I... I’m not sure whether there’s a right or wrong answer. To your question. Sir.”
“There isn’t.” Bierce had smiled. “That’s good. It’s good you saw that. Sometimes a test isn’t a test. And that’s the test.”
Malloy had nodded.
Bierce’s face had gone white.
What did I do? Malloy had thought. Oh, God! What do I do now?
Then Bierce had gestured at the window and said, “It tried to rain yesterday morning. The wind blew it away. Not a single drop touched the ground. I don’t know where the rain went.”
He folded his scabbed and swollen fingers on the desk and looked stonily at his patient. “I believe God has killed himself. I mean that quite sincerely.”
He’d stared at Malloy for an hour, then sent him away.
Today, Malloy’s door simply swung open. He sat and watched the empty corridor for a while; listened to the faint hooting and hollering of what he presumed to be other so-called madmen, others under lock and key and perhaps safer there. He wished dearly the men in white would lock his door again. But they didn’t, and he walked out, and the first thing he saw was a dead man.
He knew it was a man because the balls of the decapitated thing were on grand display, exam gown hiked up about the waist. He had no way of knowing if the man had worked or lived at Chamber Seat. As he drew closer, slowly closer, he spied a piece of paper lying on the corpse’s chest.
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, read the note.
He heard the wind distantly, cruel whispers and crescendos of horror – there may have been real voices in the din, he couldn’t be sure. And then he was, as Bierce rounded the corner and waved. “Come on then, Malloy.”
He followed the doctor to his office, stealing glances into open rooms as they proceeded. Each was empty, entirely empty. It seemed as if he were the last to be let out. He wondered why Bierce had selected him for such an honor. He wondered if his head were meant to sit atop a mountain of heads, if he would finally be king.
Bierce gestured for him to sit in the same seat as always. The doctor removed his jacket and slumped in his chair. He had a nasty black eye, the flesh around it so puffy he could barely keep it open. “It’s been a wicked day,” he sighed.
“Are we the only ones left?” Malloy asked. He no longer feared the prick of the needle. He no longer saw the need to count the days, to track the wind – infinity was infinity, and he could call it and be done with the matter.
“The last here, almost certainly,” Bierce answered. “Some got into the old tunnels under D Ward. But I sealed them down there. Told them to stack themselves neatly. Nonetheless everything is in disorder,” he moaned, and a choked sob escaped him.
Then he glared at Malloy. “How did you know?”
“Know what, sir?”
“About the echoes.”
Malloy sat erect.
“The voices have come bouncing back,” Bierce said, “from the walls of eternity – finally, at long last, the screams of the dying have returned. And to what?”
“To nothing,” Malloy breathed. “To origins long since expired. To rebound forever in the void.”
“How did you hear them before we did? How did you know?”
Bierce yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out handfuls of foil-wrapped pills. “I’m taking you off everything,” he said, and rose the blinds to hurl them out the open window. Outside, the sky was the color of bone.
“I was called,” Malloy said. “Chosen. I don’t know why. They’ve never told me.”
“Do you think they’ll tell you now?” Bierce asked eagerly. “Once the meds taper off in you, do you think they’ll explain it?”
“I hope so.” Malloy smoothed the legs of his pants. For the first time since he could remember – he didn’t count things like that – he felt like himself again. And there would be no need to number the days of his reign. For infinity was infinity.
Vindicated! And in a way he’d never dreamed possible. He’d come to regard the promises the voices made as cruel lies. Oh, the voices had always been real, of that he was certain, and the ability of drugs to dull his sixth sense and close his third eye had never proven otherwise. But it was true that he had come to doubt their promise of the cosmic crown. He’d begun to think the voices were just echoes from an extinct dynasty of forgotten gods, and that the last of the kings as well as his crown were only cosmic dust.
“You hear them,” he said to Bierce.
“Yes. On the wind. They are the wind,” the doctor replied.
So then, they were not mere echoes at all. They were a cyclic call, and now was Malloy’s time to answer.
“So,” Bierce said to him, coyly drawing out the o, “here is the question. Can you see them, too?”
“No. I’ve never said that.”
“You haven’t said so, but maybe you were trying to get one over on the old doctor, eh?” With Bierce’s swollen eyelid it looked as if he were winking. “Maybe you didn’t want me to take away your socks. Which is fair. But I come to you now having renounced my degree. I was wrong, Malloy, that much I see – but do you see them?”
“I don’t,” said Malloy. “I promise you I’m telling the truth.”
“Am I unworthy?” Bierce’s voice trembled. Vindicated as he was, Malloy didn’t like this shift in power. Perhaps if he wasn’t still in the man’s asylum, or knew escape was possible. But there was a headless corpse in the hall and, if Bierce was to be believed, others suffocating in the old service tunnels beneath D Ward. And still others had to be tucked away here and there. Were they all mad as Bierce was, overwhelmed by the voices of the old ones, or were some of them still sane? Had there been an orgy of lunatics from which Bierce emerged the perfect madman, or had he played it straight and used his position to “get one over on,” as he’d say, the unaffected?
He wanted to ask, but he was growing nervous again. No, he didn’t feel like a king inside these walls. He wanted out. Bierce wasn’t loyal to him. Right now the man was rummaging through his desk and speaking gibberish under his breath.
“Here then,” the once-doctor said, and placed a wood chisel between them.
Malloy stared numbly at it.
“I only want one. I’ll give it right back.” And Bierce reached up and plucked the wet, malformed eye from his swollen socket.
He set it on the desk beside the chisel. Despite its bloodshot tinge, Malloy could see that it was blue-irised, and Bierce had green eyes.
“That belongs to Metevier,” Bierce said. “She has mine. Assuming she hasn’t traded again. She ran outside to look with it and didn’t come back, so I don’t expect to see it again. But I will return yours if you’ll just allow me a peek.”
He pushed the chisel toward Malloy. Then withdrew it. “I can do it for you if you’d like. Of course! You’re royalty now, aren’t you? I’ve been so rude. Let me.”
Bierce rose, and Malloy shot to his feet at twice the speed. He stumbled back into the closed door.
“Wait!” Bierce cried. A pink fluid ran from his empty socket, and he mopped at it with his sleeve. “Please! I know I’ve mistreated you. I plead ignorance! I beg you, Malloy, le
t me see!” And he lunged.
Slapstick wasn’t the right word for what happened next – Malloy would never, in retrospect, ever find it the least bit funny. But the moment elicited something in him, a feeling he couldn’t quite put his finger on – like the sort of feeling you can’t describe in English, only German or French, but even those words didn’t quite peg it. There wasn’t really a right way to express it either, so as in many such a case, Malloy laughed.
What happened was the door struck him in the rear, pitching him forward; his flailing left arm, which was at once both searching instinctively for stability and trying instinctively to block the plunging wood chisel, drove straight into Bierce’s chest and sent him bowling backwards over his desk. He landed in a sort of unfolding ball on his chair, which heaved beneath him, and then he went out the window.
Malloy stood in silence for a long half-second. The only thing that could have possibly given what he’d just seen any legitimacy, a grounding in any world he knew, would have been if Bierce had frozen in mid-air and held up a sign which read “@$%!#.” And Malloy let out his laugh, a monosyllabic hoot worthy of a Looney Tune.
I wonder who opened the door?
His blood ran from his hands and feet and left them in ice. He stood stiff, staring at the open window, waiting for it – a sound, a touch, anything. Finally, above the wind which nudged the cinched-up Venetian blinds, a heavy sigh.
He turned. A seven-foot black mountain of a man said, “I need my meds.”
Malloy’s jaw opened, shut. He tried to speak through his pinched lips. “I—”
“I need them,” the man boomed. “Can’t eat without them. He knows that. I need them.”
He looked Malloy over. “Who are you?”
“I don’t work here,” Malloy said.
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