Dead Scared

by Ivan Blake

  That’s when the barn exploded. Maybe Mallory, maybe a can of gasoline? Whatever the cause, the force of the explosion brought the building down and drove Chris and Gillian clear across the yard. Gillian struck the corner of the house and fell unconscious in the snow and long grass. Chris hit the stair railing and fell on his face in the slush at the foot of the back steps.

  He lay gasping for breath and coughing up blood. Even so, he felt…good! It wasn’t the pain or the fear or the dread of what was still to come he felt, it was the satisfaction at what they’d done! They’d stopped Meath, the grave robber was no more—the Mortsafemen had triumphed!

  “Retribution!” he cried out, then coughed and clutched his chest in agony.

  In the distance, Chris heard sirens. He rolled onto his back and squinted upward into the falling snow. The pain in his chest was excruciating. He could feel the jagged ends of several broken ribs grinding against each other as he tried to breathe. He grimaced and pinched his eyes shut, coughing up blood again. Then he heard the air above him crackle. Slowly he opened his eyes…and looked straight into the grinning face of unmitigated hate.

  Mercifully, he lost consciousness.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dying days of the year

  Darkness...floating. Then sound. Movement. Shuffling close by. Something touched Chris’s cheek. He was too scared to open his eyes to see who. Then it hit him; he was still alive! Absolutely bloody amazing!

  Near as he could tell, he was stretched out on a firm bed with a single sheet covering him. He hurt everywhere and was unable to move; his arms suspended in slings of some sort, neck held fast in a kind of brace, legs being pulled straight down the bed, and jaw fastened shut. Had Meath done this? Then the image of the doctor’s severed head floating in the flames came back to him.

  From the smell of the place and the bustle around him, it became obvious—he was in a hospital. He opened his eyes.

  “Doctor!” a large woman fiddling with an IV drip beside the bed called out. “He’s coming round.”

  “Oh, Chris!” His mother appeared above him. “You frightened us so!”

  “Mo...” he tried to say. All he managed to do was drool.

  “Don’t try to talk, dear, the doctor needs to look at you.”

  “Christopher, Christopher Chandler,” a brusque voice said. An older man appeared above him. “You took quite a beating.” The man shone a light in Chris’s eyes, listened to his heart, and ran a hand across his ribs. Chris winced in pain. “Still tender? To be expected. Three broken ribs. They’ll take several weeks to knit properly. You also have a perforated lung, a broken nose, lacerations to your face and numerous bruises, some far worse than others.”

  Mallory’s first attack.

  “Then there are the torn muscles in your neck and three ruptured discs in your spine.”

  He probably had Meath’s Activator to thank for that damage.

  “Your jaw is broken back here at the right ramus, and will be wired shut for a month or two, so get used to drinking through a straw. Both your tibia are broken and we had to repair them with pins, hence the pulleys. And finally, both your arms are fractured, the humerus of your right and the ulna of your left. Oh, and your left hand has been crushed.” Chris’s left hand was one huge ball of gauze.

  He couldn’t recall any of those injuries. Mallory’s work after he’d hit the house most likely. Still, she hadn’t killed him, and that was the most incredible thing because she sure as hell could have. Or maybe she couldn’t; maybe her gods wouldn’t let her. Or maybe she enjoyed tormenting him way too much to kill him just yet.

  “The good news is most of your injuries will heal,” continued the doctor, “your jaw, your arms, your legs, your ribs. The bad news is your spine has suffered some significant damage, and I cannot say whether you’ll ever walk upright or without pain again. And your hand, well, we’ve done what we can to reconstruct it. I doubt you’ll ever regain its full use, however, and you’ll likely never again have sensation in your fingers.”

  Chris struggled to speak.

  “No, you can’t talk,” the doctor said. “Not until the wire comes out of your jaw. You’ll have to write on this.” The nurse placed a small slate beneath his right hand and a piece of chalk between his fingers. Ever so slowly, he printed,

  Gillian?

  “Ah, Gillian Willard. I’m afraid she suffered a fractured skull and we’re keeping her in a medically-induced coma to give the swelling in her brain some time to diminish.”

  Be all right?

  “Too early to say. We’re cautiously optimistic. She’s going to be with us for some time however. So, if there is nothing else, I’ll see you tomorrow.” And with a simple nod to Christopher’s mother, he hurried from the room.

  Chris’s mother pulled a chair up to the bed, took Chris’s hand and began to sob, “We were so worried about you!”

  Where’s dad?

  “He, he’s been called back to Milwaukee. They’re moving us back to headquarters. He and the kids have gone ahead. What with all the publicity here, we just thought...”

  Chris didn’t know how to react. Back to Wisconsin, great. He’d had his life ripped to shreds and the crap beat out of him, and the rest of the family got to leave goddamned Maine. Then again, in his heart, he knew their leaving was for the best.

  “All this!” his mother whispered. “Oh, Chris, what happened? What did you do?”

  Nothing wrong, I swear.

  “That’s not what the police are saying, dear. They say you’re going to be charged with murder! Oh, my poor baby.” She wept inconsolably.

  But Mom, he wrote, as she read his words aloud, I fought the darkness...and I won!

  She gasped, smiled weakly, and wept again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  1986

  January

  A month later and the beginning of a new year, Chris was still in casts and unable to speak; some of his injuries were actually worse, and although the doctors were perplexed, Chris was not. Every other day or so, when no one was around, Mallory found some new way to make him suffer. Mallory’s attacks were not as frequent as they’d been in those first hellish days after the fire. Frequent enough though. She perforated ear drums, scratched corneas, bruised kidneys, ripped out stitches, broke fingers and toes, and so on; nothing that would kill him, merely cause excruciating pain. All the same, and in spite of his condition, at mid-month, he was summoned to court.

  Since Chris was almost eighteen, authorities first had to decide whether to charge him as an adult or a juvenile, and with what? Of course, Chief Boucher let everyone in Bemishstock know where he stood; the Bangor paper quoted Boucher as saying, “Try the creep as an adult for murder.” The paper had had to clean up the real quote.

  The District Attorney had a different view. He was concerned the evidence did not support a murder conviction. There was nothing to suggest the fire had been started by anyone other than Meath, and he was known to often burn rubbish late into the night. There was no proof the Chandler boy had overturned the barrel which in turn had ignited the barn. And finally, the bodies of Meath and his wife had been too badly burned to determine what injuries, if any, they might have sustained before the fire. The best the DA believed he could get was a conviction in District Court under the Juvenile Code on charges of criminal mischief and animal cruelty. Even so, both were serious Class C offenses punishable by 5 years imprisonment, and the DA told the Bangor paper the State would seek the maximum penalty.

  At his initial court appearance, Chris was assigned a public defender because his dad satisfied the Court he could not pay. All the talk at the hearing about his mother’s medical expenses caught Chris completely off guard; he pressed his father for an explanation but got none.

  All his dad would say was, “I love you, son, more than you will ever know, and I’m certain you’ve only ever tried to do the right thing. Me too, I’m just trying to save your mom, you have to believe that. She isn’t strong, not like you
. You don’t need me to get through this. You can get through anything. I know, I’ve seen what you can endure.”

  Him? Strong? His dad thought him strong? Chris was dumbfounded, overwhelmed. He sobbed and moved forward, arms outstretched to embrace his dad, but the bailiff pulled Chris back. Thank god, too. In that moment of reconciliation, he’d forgotten all about Mallory.

  Chris’s attorney was a local kid fresh out of law school, who made no attempt to conceal his contempt for Chris. When Chris tried to tell his tale of grave robbery and a vengeful spirit, one scribbled sentence at a time, the young lawyer lost patience and threatened to quit if Chris ever repeated the story. “Say any of that bullshit in court and you’ll almost certainly be locked up in a psych ward for years.”

  His lawyer was firm. “I’m telling you, address only the charges. You’re charged with stalking the old man, destroying his goat shed, and provoking a confrontation indirectly resulting in a fire and the deaths of two people. Say nothing about grave robbery or weird experiments because you have absolutely no proof, and it makes you look nuts. Besides, what Meath was doing is irrelevant; he’s not on trial, you are. Admit only that you were watching Meath because you kept seeing lights on the tracks late at night, and that you did not intend to hurt him when you went to his house, merely to find out what he was up to. Say you struck his shed and killed his goats by accident, and you didn’t see how the burn barrel got knocked over. Got it? Nothing else!”

  A tight enough story, and basically true. From the get-go, however, Chris’s cause was lost.

  Because of the seriousness of the charges, Chris’s adjudication hearing—as a trial under the Juvenile Code is called—before a judge in District Court was open to the public. It snowed heavily that January morning, but the drifts didn’t prevent a huge crowd of townsfolk and high school kids from showing up for the spectacle. Ed Balzer, Principal Dell, many of Mallory’s former groupies, Billy and the rest of the school hockey team—they were all there. Even the Bangor paper dispatched its star reporter, Martin Koyman, to cover the hearing because of the loss of life.

  There were gasps when Chris was wheeled into the courtroom on the first day, arms and legs still in casts, neck in a brace, and jaw still wired shut. He’d lost nearly thirty pounds, his eyes were sunken and the bruises all over his body had turned from purple to a sickly yellow. His attorney had hoped Chris’s condition might elicit some sympathy. Instead, as he sat slumped at the defense table, he looked evil and menacing.

  From the beginning, the prosecution wasn’t content to focus on the facts of the case. Chris may have been charged with stalking, but the DA wanted to convict him of being a right royal bastard. He used Chris’s own books and writings to show the boy had an unnatural fascination with death, and police testimony to make the case for his anti-social behavior. The DA then read an affidavit from Mr. Duncan who, according to the Prosecution, was too ill to appear, to prove Chris had been obsessed with Meath, and paranoid when he began stalking the old doctor. The DA’s summation made it clear he considered Chris devious and dangerous and probably guilty of killing Meath even if the State couldn’t actually prove murder. The courtroom erupted in applause when he finished.

  For his part, Chris’s attorney conceded Chris had been watching Meath but only because Meath’s own conduct was bizarre. He conceded Chris may have had some wild theories about the doctor’s behavior. No one could prove the doctor had been aware Chris was watching him however, and Chris’s suspicions had had no impact on Meath’s reputation or his job. Chris’s lawyer said crashing an old car into the goat shed had been an unfortunate and almost unavoidable accident given Meath’s poorly maintained lane and the ice and snow which had recently fallen. As for the confrontation with Meath, Chris had only wanted to satisfy his curiosity about Meath’s behavior when he went to Meath’s place that night, and there was no proof their confrontation had turned physical. “In fact,” the lawyer asked, “if the court would agree to delay proceedings until Gillian Willard is well enough to appear, she will testify Chris Chandler had no intention of hurting Dr. Meath in spite of what she told the police over the phone.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” the judge replied, and the courtroom applauded. “Miss Willard is in a coma. To delay these proceedings until she can testify would be ludicrous. In fact, she might never again be well enough.”

  The remark was like a dagger to Chris’s heart.

  As for the fire, the lawyer reminded the judge Chris hadn’t seen the burn barrel being tipped over. All he saw was Gillian Willard arrive in time to pull Mrs. Meath away from the blaze. “Perhaps,” Chris’s lawyer suggested, “Mrs. Meath tipped the barrel over; after all, she’d been fighting with her husband even before Chris showed up.”

  And there was another possibility, suggested the lawyer. Someone else might have been involved in events that night. Chris had been attacked by unknown assailants on his way home from Mallory Dahlman’s funeral. Rudy Dahlman had been attacked and was still recovering in the Caribbean with his mother. And no one knew for certain who had tipped over Meath’s burn barrel. “Could it be,” the lawyer asked, “that a mad man was on the loose in Bemishstock?” A Hail Mary pass at best, and even Chris could see the writing on the wall.

  One thing puzzled Chris about the hearing; why was there no mention of Mallory’s remains? Surely someone had found parts of her near the burn barrel. Gillian couldn’t have picked up everything. So why hadn’t anyone mentioned other bones? Chris pressed his lawyer to ask Chief Boucher if any other human remains had been found. After a brief hesitation and an angry stare in Chris’s direction, Boucher said, “No,” and the lawyer didn’t pursue the matter. What had happened to Mallory’s remains?

  The outcome of the trial was inevitable. Christopher’s father, who’d attended the trial from the start, was seated right behind his son and put his hand on Chris’s shoulder when the judge began to read her verdict. Chris felt the grip tighten as she spoke.

  “Guilty of criminal mischief,” she said, and then announced Chris’s disposition hearing would be the next day, its purpose, to determine how best to rehabilitate the convicted delinquent. Normally, a judge would have asked for recommendations from the Juvenile Corrections Office before pronouncing sentence. In this instance, she said, “I have already formed my own impressions of the young man based on the evidence presented.”

  Things got nasty after that.

  At the judge’s invitation, several members of the Bemishstock Secondary School staff were asked to comment on Chris’s character. The school counselor described Chris as “vindictive and given to bizarre fantasies.” Teachers said he’d been brooding and disrespectful, and Principal Dell recounted Chris’s vicious and insensitive reaction to the news of Mallory Dahlman’s death.

  The Judge then asked Chief Boucher to summarize his dealings with the boy. With obvious delight, Boucher told about the hate letter with Chris’s name on it, about Chris’s wallet found on Mrs. Holcomb’s porch, about the malicious cartoon that had cost the Balzer boy his life, about the note stolen from a teacher’s house after Chris’s late-night visit, and about the confrontation with a grieving father at his son’s funeral.

  Chris’s attorney tried to have the Chief’s remarks struck because Chris hadn’t been charged with any of those incidences. The judge overruled the objection. Chief Boucher was merely reporting on his informal encounters with the boy, she said, not on the boy’s record. Then the judge muttered to herself in a manner audible to the entire courtroom, “Still, where there’s smoke...”

  Chris’s lawyer called no one on his behalf. He considered asking Mrs. Willard to appear. Chris refused however, afraid she blamed him for Gillian’s injuries, and with good reason.

  The one person who did come forward on Chris’s behalf was an absolute shocker, and to no one more than Chris. Mr. Duncan had asked to appear. A hush fell as the former teacher entered the courtroom. He certainly wasn’t the man who’d fled Bemishstock Secondary two months
earlier. He was thin, ashen, with a glisten of sweat on his face and several bright red blotches around his nose and mouth. Even so, there was a determination in his bearing.

  Mr. Duncan began by saying he stood by his affidavit as a faithful account of his conversations with Chris. Then he told the judge he’d had a lot of time of late to consider further his impressions of Chris Chandler and had concluded there were two things the Court needed to hear about the boy.

  “First, whatever else Chris Chandler may be,” Mr. Duncan began, “he is bright, imaginative, and has promise. He may have lost his way in Bemishstock, but that’s because he got caught up in a web of bitterness and deceit he did not understand and could not control.”

  Mr. Duncan paused at this point, as if summoning his strength before tackling a difficult task. “And second, Chris Chandler is brave. He was the only person in this town who had the courage to say out loud what others knew but were too cowardly to admit, that a poor boy named Floyd Balzer had been shamed and beaten to death by the very people who should have protected him.”

  The court erupted with cries of queer, and lies, and shame, and threats of death—Ed Balzer even had to be restrained—but Mr. Duncan pressed on.

  “I’m beginning to think that if Chris Chandler told the truth about Floyd Balzer when no one else had the courage to, then perhaps he was telling the truth about Dr. Meath.”

  With that, Mr. Duncan left the court. He didn’t even make eye contact with Chris.

  The judge took a day to consider her decision. The court was again packed when she read the sentence: Chris Chandler would serve two years in the South Portland Youth Detention Center. The courtroom exploded in anger; given all the hoopla around the case, people had expected the Chandler kid to be branded with an M for Murderer and horsewhipped in the town square, or some equally barbaric punishment. But no, he was shipped off to detention.