The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  Wendell instinctively tried to raise his head, forgetting about the muzzle. It was more of a leather strap than a traditional animal’s muzzle, with each end tied to the bed’s rails, extending over his jaws, with wire netting over the mouth for breathing. It allowed him to only lift his head a few inches, to turn left towards the moonlit window, or right towards the door. Each of his hands and feet were tethered to the bed.

  Listening to the roars, he could almost hear that last gasp of the human. Quickly changing.

  “Not me,” he said, through the wire and only to himself, “don’t let me be next.”

  That will be you if you don’t get out now. Time’s running out.

  And then what? Escape and he would be in the outside world, in which no one knew—or cared to know—that he was still alive. His mother, never any hope to him, was now dead. There was no other real family.

  The roars grew, and Wendell had no doubt that the core of that beast down below had been engineered into him as well, and as it grew, hope—for escape, for healing, for any sort of help—quickly faded.

  A siren screeched. A blue strobe like incessant lightning flashed in the hallway. Shadows ran past the window in the door. The tech was now glued to his tablet, oblivious to everything outside.

  The roars continued, sounding more desperate.

  Wendell turned to the window. Flooding it was the alabaster moon, cold, the cyclopean eye of some malevolent deity. He clenched his fists, pulled at the tethers, and turned back towards the door. Outside it were more shadows, and shouts for tranq guns and ropes, filling the screaming electric blue.

  “No need to worry Mr. Mackey,” said the tech, turning from his tablet to pull his stethoscope out of his lab coat pocket and drape it around his neck. “Just the regular old grind for you and me.”

  Wendell pulled at the tethers, harder. His right hand…

  “Everything copacetic, I assume. Feeling fine?”

  Wendell’s right hand moved higher than the left. The tether loosened.

  “All that racket outside is for the old boiler downstairs,” the tech said. “Rattles and bellows like crazy.”

  Wendell wondered if it was throwing the nurses against the walls of its room down below. The tether was caught on something, but it was slipping through its buckle. He pulled higher.

  “The siren…”

  “A little fire is all,” said the tech. “Someone left the boiler’s door open. No big deal.”

  The tech busied himself with his tablet as he stepped over to Wendell’s right side.

  “So the fever you were running last night has…”

  The tech noticed Wendell moving his lips.

  “You’ll have to speak up,” he said, leaning in.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” whispered Wendell, flush with an unnerving energy, “I just wanted to say that…”

  The tech leaned in more. “Yes, Mr. Mackey?”

  “…I’m not staying.”

  In one fluid movement Wendell yanked the tether up, pulled his hand free, and grabbed the tech’s neck. For a moment, the two men locked eyes, and Wendell watched the boredom, the drab ordinariness of the tech’s life, drain out of his like water. Wendell yanked his head down into the bedrail. The tech’s head sprang back, a puzzled brow with eyes no longer seeing. He tumbled into a pile as Wendell unbuckled the left tether and then tore at the leather strap over his face until it unhooked on one side. Then he undid the tethers on his legs.

  Faster.

  Roars became screams. Whatever was down there knew it was dying.

  Wendell swung his legs off the bed and slapped his feet onto the floor. Before him was the closed door, and beyond it a throbbing and shrieking hallway. Freedom began with a footstep. Towards the door. And then a chance at a different day, with sunlight instead of that hateful albino eye looking through his window, a day with a different sky, in a different life.

  But first, escape. All guided by a monstrous impulse not of his making, and promising violence.

  He was on the floor in the kitchen, the urine now dried but leaving its trace in an acrid stench. Wendell stood up, cold and naked. He put on his pants, the bloodstains now dried and less noticeable. But the t-shirt was a total loss. He tossed it into the sink and walked into his bedroom, surprised that, with his mutant feet, he could even stand at all. His powerful legs must have shifted his center of gravity, he thought.

  In his room, Wendell went straight for his closet, bypassing the messes laid out in front of him on the floor. In it he found an assortment of unnecessaries: an egg carton holding spent light bulbs, buckets holding unused cleaners, picture frames stacked in a corner, and shopping bags of clothes, most of them women’s dresses and skirts. Wendell pulled the bags open, finding that the last one contained clothing odds and ends: a bra, tube socks, a winter scarf and child’s mittens, and a red t-shirt with an iron-on image—a sports team, a rock band, something—long since worn off. He pulled it over his head and down his shoulders, assuming that, even though it was one of his childhood shirts, it would fit, skinny as he was. His ribs, after all, were sticking out like piano keys. But it was still tiny, stuck to him like vacuum-packed meat.

  “But no more blood,” he said.

  He turned, started to walk out, but stopped to look down at the fanned out pages on the floor. One caught his eye. More importantly, three particular words caught his eye:

  Power of Attorney.

  He didn’t remember signing one of those for his mother. She wanted full control, until the bitter end. He reached down and picked it up.

  “I, Wendell H. Mackey,” it started, with Wendell H. Mackey spelled out in his own—or looking much like his own—careful cursive. The form went on, detailing a “designated health care agent” and dropping the bomb in the middle of the page with one sentence:

  I hereby designate and appoint Diane Evelyn Correll-Mackey as my agent to make all mental health-related decisions for me as detailed in this document.

  Under it was his mother’s signature, the long sharp cursive letters written in her hurried hand.

  That feeling, which sat like a burr in the back of his brain for weeks, that feeling that remained unformed but persistent, which Wendell wrote off as a drug side effect or another result of his dying mind, that feeling now blossomed and came to the fore: betrayal.

  “Wait, I don’t understand…”

  Of course you do.

  Yes, he did. He didn’t want to understand, but he did. He now knew that she had done it. These must have been just another copy of the papers Scotia had shown him when they detained him in the NAG. And Scotia had never let Wendell read them, because then he would have known: she had started it all. She had forged his name and then signed her own, as though signing a death certificate.

  He closed his eyes and saw her, standing over him, her arm still raised and tensed, ready to bring her full force down on little Wendell. Insignificant Wendell. He opened his eyes and picked up the other pages of the document.

  “‘The potential for electroconvulsive…’” Wendell read. “Wait, what the hell?” His eyes scanned the pages, and he continued: “‘The use of laboratory trials and experimental… The potential for surgical… Mental incapacity will be determined by… My designated health care agent may consent to place me in an institution that is not my preference.’”

  Down that winding road, off Industrial Parkway, you can see it, Wendell, swelling up in front of you, ringed with trees like it was meant to be forgotten. But even that ring of trees doesn’t grow too close. Nothing wants to get too close.

  At the bottom of page three were two lines for the witnesses to the document. The first was Maggie Singer.

  “Mom’s nurse,” he said. She was the one sent by the county to help his shut-in mother. She had been the one who initially mentioned the job opening at the institution, the job his mother had suggested he take and drop the one he had at the Kenniport Charter Schools. Kind Miss Maggie was in on it all.

  The
second signature pounded him in the chest:

  Dr. Arthur Laughlin.

  Laughlin, his old foreman at the institution. The man too stupid to correctly fill out his own time card. Lecherous old Laughlin, pinching girls’ asses at the bar, chewing with his mouth open, breaking wind, driving the pickup with an open beer bottle between his legs. It was all a show, all for Wendell.

  “Son of a bitch…son of a—bitch!”

  He crumpled the papers in his fists, dropped them to the floor, and in one motion grabbed the night stand with both hands, lifting and launching it through the air. It crashed into the back of the closet, tearing the drywall and spilling books and bottles and a tiny blue Buddha onto the carpet.

  “She did this,” Wendell growled, feeling an urge to propel himself through the damaged wall and into the hallway, to destroy anything, everything, to show them all that decisions had consequences, and that a few quick pen strokes were all that it took to bring about utter ruin. And now he had the body to do it, to destroy. If he could hollow out a man in mere seconds, then he could tear through a line of cops. He could bring the apartment building to the ground. He could start a fire that would consume the whole city. And he would lick his lips and watch it burn.

  Breathing heavily, Wendell pushed a box off the bed and sat down. Yes, he could, and likely would, kill again and leave a path of ripped apart bodies and rubble in his wake, not because he wanted to, but because he had to. It was now in his nature. Revenge fantasy was one thing, but this wasn’t fantasy. He couldn’t stop any of it. And now, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  You’ve still got the gun, Wendell thought.

  “Gun?” He laughed. “Who needs a gun now?”

  He picked up all of the crumpled papers off the floor—the power of attorney went on for some length—smoothing out the paper balls, laying them flat into a pile, and placing them in an open box next to him. He was a lost cause, but perhaps there was room for justice. If he could get those papers to Agatha, if he could unload on her the entire story, with places, names, clear physical evidence of what was done to him, then perhaps someone would pay.

  “They won’t believe me,” he said. “If they forged my name, if they could keep me in that place for so long, then they can do anything.”

  Still, there was the chance that Agatha could make someone listen to her. It was a blind, aimless shot in the dark, but it was all that he had left.

  And with that, Wendell got up and walked out of the room, going to one of the windows in the great room. He pulled one of the drapes free of a nail keeping it in place, and looked out the window, for them. They were coming, he knew, and more than likely were already nearby, watching him and waiting for their moment.

  Where am I?

  The spotlight came on, but it wasn’t Biddle in its beam, it was Wendell. What started as a sea of smiling faces morphed into collective confusion. Wendell was naked, and they saw him, all of him on display, saw his hands, his face, his whole twisted body, gnarled and knotted like an old tree. They were confused, but not afraid.

  They should be running, he thought, just tossing their chairs and running, hands beating their breasts screaming for God to kill that thing that’s up there because this is a church and it’s no freak show.

  They weren’t running. He was a monster but they weren’t running. Confused, yes. But…

  They don’t know what they’re doing. I could kill ‘em all right now.

  He wasn’t a lab specimen, not there. He moved to the center of the stage and the spotlight followed him, like he was accepting an award and they all expected a speech. Confused or not, they were waiting on him.

  He cleared his throat, surveyed the crowd.

  “Pitchforks and torches,” he said.

  Smiles again. They rose to their feet in unison and clapped.

  DAY EIGHT

  THE DREAM MAN IS COMING with his train of cars, with moonbeam windows and with wheels of stars…

  Wendell must have dozed off. He was no longer at the window. He was…

  “Where am I?”

  …so hush my little ones and climb in here, the man in the moon is the engineer…

  Wendell was looking down on the kitchen table, looking down, from the top of the refrigerator, or higher, clinging to the ceiling like a bat. His vision went fuzzy, then dark.

  …hush for mister dream man, hush for mister dream man…

  “I know that rhyme,” Wendell muttered, “I know it, know it, from—”

  The yellow house, long before he and Dad ate sandwiches out under the beech tree. It was from Grandma Mackey.

  Wendell’s vision cleared and he was in the bathroom, hunched precariously on the edge of the sink. His back was on fire. His head throbbed. The lights went out.

  …till daylight comes again, we’ll see all the wonders of wonderland, in the dream man’s train…

  Grandma Mackey, a woman never young, with her mothballed dresses and licorice in her pockets. For a time she lived with them, before her strokes and her final trip to the nursing home, and she had sung Wendell to sleep every night. She would smile down on him, stroke his hair, and hold the last note of that song—How did it end again? Wendell asked himself—as long as her wavering voice would allow, and then kiss him goodnight. But it wasn’t her voice singing now.

  His eyelids felt heavy, but he forced them open. He was standing, staring at the apartment door. He could have been there for hours. He still smelled the urine on the floor.

  “Sing it again,” he said. But nothing came. His eyes closed…

  …and opened with him in his mother’s bed. Met with a tidal wave of nausea, he lurched up and covered his mouth with his hands. Below him on the floor was a dried puddle of yellow vomit, its smell far worse than the urine in the kitchen. He didn’t remember vomiting. He didn’t remember much of anything since—

  The power of attorney, he thought.

  Exhausted, he flopped back down onto the bed and fell asleep.

  Thump-thump.

  Wendell awoke. It was the door.

  Thump.

  “Who’s there?”

  Nothing.

  He paused, grinding his teeth together, his new teeth.

  “Hello?”

  Still nothing.

  And then came the pain, volcanic spasms in his back that made his chest arch upwards and sucked the air out of his lungs. He writhed on the bed and his fingers cut into the sheets. The spasms stopped, echoing in dull throbs. He rolled over onto his chest, trying to catch his breath. Pushing up to his knees, he reached for his red t-shirt wadded up at the foot of the bed, and stopped.

  “Please God no,” he said.

  The skin on his back had peeled away, curling like dead leaves. Even in the darkness he could make out the thin shapes on the sheet. Some small, some long, all the pieces were a gory jigsaw puzzle that fit together to make something that no longer existed. They were gray, thin like wrinkled paper, and there was blood. The sheet was old and yellowed, but he saw the blood, sprinkled onto it and painted softly on one side of each piece of flesh. He picked up a piece, brittle at the edges, and put it to his nose. It smelled dead, like dirt and expired milk, or like something that had been buried in the corner of a damp basement closet. He dropped the piece on the bed, stood up on the floor and walked to the bathroom.

  In the flickering light of the bathroom, Wendell stood with his back to the mirror, twisting his head around to inspect. Yes, he had left most of the skin on the bed. The flesh beneath was similar to that of his legs, but lighter in color, closer to a more normal flesh color. Closer, but certainly not normal. The muscles in his back were more prominent, a clearly un-Wendell development, he thought, as he had been skin and bones for most of his life. The tips of his vertebrae ran like a rocky outcropping down the center of his back. And two thick gashes ran where once there were the two healed incisions from the tops of the scapulas down at least twelve inches. What was protruding from them looked like black bone, covered in a translucent
membrane. They pulsated—

  wings

  —in rhythm with his heartbeat.

  Wendell tensed the muscles in his neck and back, and the black things pulsed more. He could control them. These weren’t tumors; these were new appendages.

  “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  He thought back to those men who had been ushered into his room at the institution by Thane and Scotia, that international collection of iron-necked buffalo, finely tailored men whose eyes and scars gave them away as anything but goodwill ambassadors; these were men comfortable with violence. Perhaps they were buyers. And perhaps Wendell was a prototype of something for sale to the highest bidder, some sort of next next generation military biotech. Infiltrate, kill, escape, neither carrying in nor leaving any weapons behind because he was the weapon. Myth would become reality on the battlefield. So the institution needed him back, not just because they couldn’t afford for the world to see what they did at the end of that winding road off of Industrial Parkway, but because they couldn’t afford to lose their investment.

  Wendell stared at his new organs. When they unfurled, the trench coat wouldn’t hide them. So whether they got him back or not, their secret would be exposed.

  “Once upon a time,” he whispered, seeing the yellow house as vivid in his mind’s eye as if it were on the other side of the bathroom mirror. Back there at the house, he would only imagine flying, a comic book superhero with a bath towel draped over his shoulders and held in place by a clothespin. But such were life’s cruelties. What he had wanted, what every boy at some point had wanted, was granted him in technicolor horror.

  A siren wailed outside.

  He whipped his head around, left the bathroom and went back into his old bedroom, to the window. Pulling the drape back, he looked down to the street. The afternoon was quickly receding; the morning had never existed, at least not to Wendell, as he had apparently spent most of it passing in and out of consciousness. On the street cars lined the sidewalk, with one sticking out awkwardly like a fractured bone. Black garbage bags sat in a pile on the curb. A man squatted on a front stoop, fanning himself with a folded newspaper. Bicycles, pedestrians, a slowly leaking hydrant, all was well. And then a delivery truck rumbled by, and as it passed, two men appeared, not there before the truck but clearly there after, as if they had hopped off of it, or materialized behind it. Two men, their polo shirts and khakis exposing them as not of the neighborhood. They spoke to each other and gestured at the apartment building. One pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and spoke into it.