by Ike Hamill
“But I want to help,” Ray whined.
John took him by the shoulders and shook him. Ray lost his grip on the pail and it spilled from Henry’s hand. The baby rabbits ran from the bucket as it rolled away.
“You go now, Ray. Do you hear me?” Jonathan asked.
Ray nodded. Henry took his hand and the boys ran towards the big door of the barn. They weren’t big enough to slide the door open on its track, but they knew how to wriggle their way past it.
John ran for the other door—the door to the milking shed, where his father kept the rat gun. It was an oily old shotgun.
He stopped when he heard his mother scream. John turned to see her hanging from the window again. She had the baby in her arms. Smoke billowed through the window around her. John ran back for the house.
“Climb up here, John,” she said. “Climb up here and take the baby.”
John nodded and ran for the porch.
He stopped again as the man came through the back door.
In town, John might have mistook the man for a banker, or a lawyer. His clothes were neat and expensive. They were things you wore to sit behind a desk, not to do an honest day’s work. The cuffs were rolled and buttoned. The vest was buttoned. The glasses were high up on his nose.
When he moved, John saw something different. This man slipped through the door like smoke. A long, sharp knife danced in his fingers, catching the morning sun in bright flashes as it spun. The man leaned against the very post that John had been about to climb.
“You can climb up and save that baby,” the man said, as he slipped down the stairs.
John backed up a step as the man turned and moved towards the corner of the house.
“You might even save your Ma. Or, you can run into that kitchen and save your dad. He’s lost a lot of blood, but if you get a tourniquet on him right this instant, he’ll live.”
# # # # #
James kept writing as the alarm went off. The alarm meant he had five minutes left until dawn. He hated that the stories still sucked him in. He hated that he always lost track of time and was surprised by the alarm. More than any of that, he hated that he needed to see where the story would go. Even if the story didn’t finish by the final alarm, he would probably keep writing. How could he not?
# # # # #
John could hear the fire crackling away at the front of the house. He could hear his baby sister up in the window, warming up to begin crying in earnest. And, beneath it all, he heard a low moan from the kitchen, where he imagined his father dying from a knife wound.
John’s eyes twitched left and right, as if his brain was spinning off-balance and his eyes had picked up the vibration.
He made the only decision that he could live with.
John ran, grunting and screaming as he did, and he caught the strange man in the middle of the back. He meant to knock the knife from his hand. It should have been easy—the man wasn’t really gripping the knife. He was still twirling it.
John didn’t account for how quickly the man could move. Nobody could move that quick.
With John’s impact, the man spun in his arms and turned to John before they were even halfway to the ground. The knife did not bounce from the man’s loose grip. Instead, the man flipped the knife until the blade pointed down. The man drove the knife in to John’s shoulder. When they hit the ground, the man used the force of the collision to drive the knife even deeper.
John screamed.
He reached up to grab for the knife. The man caught John’s arm, and used John’s momentum as a weapon. He spun John around and pressed his face into the dirt of the dooryard. A rock shattered John’s front tooth as the man pulled the knife from his shoulder.
The strange man made quick work of John as he tried to curl up to protect himself.
The knife flashed and cut John under each armpit, incapacitating both of his arms. Next, before John even saw the man turn, he had cut the tendons on the backs of John’s legs.
John groaned with pain as he rolled over.
The man was already walking away.
Flames licked up the side of the house from the window at the bottom of the stairs. Smoke puffed from the back windows, and from the slats on the side of the house that vented the attic. His mother crawled across the porch roof with the baby clutched tight against her chest. She tried to swing her legs over the side and slipped.
John tried to yell. He couldn’t seem to find a deep breath. His shout came out as a squeak.
His mother tumbled from the edge of the roof and spun in the air as she fell. She landed in the dirt on her back. John heard the crack from where he lay. The baby screamed.
John turned towards the barn and tried to shout again. He tried to call for his brothers. No sound came out. His mother left the baby in the dirt and ran back into the house. The screen door banged behind her. The sound was almost lost to the music of the hungry fire. John closed his eyes and opened them again to see her dragging his father across the porch. She pulled him by the legs. His arms dragged behind.
By the time she was pulling him down the back steps, flames erupted from the kitchen door.
His mother screamed and shielded her face from the heat. The baby’s cries intensified. His mother ran back for the baby and moved her another dozen paces farther from the house. Then, she ran back to her naked husband and began dragging him again.
The scene repeated when the baby cried again. She looked to be running some strange relay race.
John’s pain came in waves. As soon as he thought he’d mastered the intensity of it, it rolled in stronger. His eyes fluttered and everything seemed dim. It was like the sun had started to come up, had seen what was in store for the day, and then decided to retreat.
John realized that he was dying.
His mother finally got her husband and the baby to a safe distance. She turned and screamed towards the barn.
“Heinrich! Raymond! Get over here.”
She began to move towards John.
John turned his head to see where the strange man had gone. He saw footprints in the dusty dooryard that headed for the cornfield. Just a few paces away, the footprints disappeared.
“John? What did he do to you?”
John turned back to see his mother kneeling over. He tried to smile, but the movement brought on a fresh wave of pain. The sound of the fire was soothing, and the heat was beginning to reach him.
John smiled up at his mother.
The waves of pain began to recede. John knew that pretty soon, he wouldn’t feel any pain at all.
# # # # #
The pen fell from James’s grip as the alarm sounded its final bell.
He exhaled and began massaging the meaty part of his right hand with his left. The writing on the page in front of him was smeared and sloppy. He stacked up the night’s papers and collected them with his father’s version on top. As he tried to slip the paper clip over the corner, he remembered his thought about reinforcing the corner. He shook his head and returned the papers to the box.
James pushed back from his desk and rose to his feet.
He arched his back and stretched his shoulders.
“I need food, sleep, and eye drops.”
He picked up the big plastic bottle and the dropper. He shuffled towards the kitchen.
James dumped a can of soup into a pot and turned the burner on low. While the soup warmed, he dumped out the saline solution and mixed another batch. This time he was careful, and it showed in the results. When he squeezed a test drop into each eye, they were instantly soothed.
James turned off the soup and grabbed a spoon.
He ate sitting on his bed, leaning on the wall. When he was done, he didn’t bother showering, or brushing his teeth, or even undressing. He stretched out on top of his covers and fell asleep.
He dreamed of fire.
CHAPTER 4: PRISON
Diary of Thomas Hicks, 1977
I SPENT THE FIRST hour of my faux incarceration trying to get
a sense of the place. I imagined the cell block alive with the sounds of other inmates. I imagined arguments and scuffles. I imagined secret trades, passed from cell to cell by reaching hands.
But my cell is at the end of the line. Any commerce happening here was intended for the occupant. It must have been a lonely place, even compared with the isolated existence of the neighbors. My roommate is the machinery of the building. It’s just me and guards in here tonight, but there’s still a chorus of machines working to heat the place, move air, circulate water, and whatever else those things do. Just when you think everything is quiet, a distant fan will shut off and you realize what quiet actually sounds like.
The cell has been cleaned out and painted. Even with a space this small and sanitized, it’s impossible to erase the traces of the former inhabitants. I find “ALEX” scratched into the wall where the bed frame meets the concrete. I find a series of tick marks on the floor near the toilet. Perhaps the man was counting his days inside, or maybe the number of times he flushed.
I flush twice. I realize that Fradeux hasn’t left me any toilet paper, but it hardly seems like a big enough issue for me to start yelling.
As the sun descends through the windows at the end of the hall, my little cell begins to feel claustrophobic. The lights come on automatically, which lends a little comfort, but I find myself flipping almost frantically through my calendar. I almost hope that I’m wrong. Maybe Jeremy miscalculated the pattern. Maybe I gave him the wrong dates. There was a decent amount of guesswork involved. I’m ninety-percent sure that The Big Four—as Fradeux called them—all became homicidally insane during their time in this very cell. It’s a lot more difficult to pinpoint the exact night that each of them transformed. If I was off by a day or two, I don’t have any idea if that would have changed Jeremy’s prediction.
Al Hudson is the easiest to date. He was nothing before he came to Stanton Valley, and by all accounts, a pussycat until the morning of February 9, 1956. He moved through inspection and the breakfast line without incident. Some of the inmates interviewed after the fact said that they saw a change in Al, even before he sat down. People always see a lot in retrospect. The man sitting on Al’s right, Morgan Oliver, didn’t see anything at all after that breakfast.
When his butt hit the bench, Al picked up his spoon and turned to Morgan. They say he moved so quickly that nobody knew that Morgan’s left eye was out until Al was jamming his spoon in Morgan’s right. In a prison cafeteria, mayhem begets mayhem, so the subsequent accounts are a little loose.
Most believe that Al turned to his other side and went to work on that neighbor. His name has been lost to the winds of time, but if one believes the stories, Al removed the man’s heart and kidneys with the same spoon still dripping with Morgan’s eyeball meat.
Al was never the same after that morning. He couldn’t be tamed by drugs, shocks, or lobotomy. The psychiatric prison took custody of him, but sent him back a week later. His mumbling was unintelligible to the staff, but is believed to have caused two other inmates to commit suicide.
Al was kept in solitary confinement after that. The warden decreed that Al should be kept there for the rest of his life. The segregation almost worked. For a year, they stifled Al’s murderous intentions by keeping a two-foot thick wall between him and any other human being. Eventually, Al found a way to trick them. He laid still for thirty hours, until everyone was sure he had passed away. The warden kept a man on constant vigil, watching through the slot where they passed Al food. He never twitched, and nobody saw him breathe. When they opened the door, Al claimed the lives of two guards before the others beat him to death.
The other three of The Big Four were not as easy to pinpoint. After their time in this cell, they were changed, but they were also crafty.
David Mitchell waited until he was paroled before he began his crime spree.
Dr. Hopkins committed his crimes secretly. He wasn’t even suspected to be the culprit until he’d executed dozens of felonies to be added to the relatively minor crimes that got him locked up in the first place.
Chris Poole, the most notorious denizen of this cell, was perhaps the craftiest. He engineered his escape and then began to murder and maim.
It was his escape which led to this wing being shut down. Since the details of his plan were never uncovered, they could no longer trust the security of the wing.
It seems very secure to me. The bars are thick and immovable when they’re locked. The walls, floor, and ceiling are solid concrete, which hurts if you try to bang on it. The only other exit would be through the toilet or the sink drain.
I stop my inspection when I hear a noise.
I’ve never had a particular fear of rats until this night. Somehow, as soon as Fradeux rounded the corner, I began to imagine a dozen hungry rats, weaving between the bars and coming for my feet. With all the food and inmates gone, they would be very hungry indeed.
This doesn’t sound like a rat though. This sounds like a piece of chalk on a chalkboard. It’s drawing a long, slow line. I’ve got my eyes peeled for any movement at all. Dust flies through the shafts of yellow light. As they pass behind the shadows of the window, they’re dark, then light, then dark again. All the flashing, swirling dust makes it hard to focus on the cell across the aisle, but I do. The chalk noise stops. I figure it must be another piece of equipment somewhere, and the proximity of the sound is just an illusion. But when it starts again, it’s hard to deny. I move to different parts of my cell and try to triangulate the source. Best I can tell, it’s coming from the under the bed across the way.
Now that I’m here, it’s easy to come up with a whole list of things I should have brought. A camera, flashlight, walkie talkie, or even one of those portable tape machines would have been handy. But I was fixated on doing this just like The Big Four did.
Some things made perfect sense when I was in my living room and my wife was getting ready to give our son his bath. They make a lot less sense now.
The chalk sound stops.
I chew my cheek and return to my notebook.
Assuming I guessed the dates correctly, and assuming Jeremy’s calendar model was correct, tonight will be the seventh time that this cell became infectious. The first time turned Al. The second time, the place happened to be uninhabited. Dumb luck moved the inmate to the infirmary with a burst appendix just as the night approached.
And, of course, the place has been empty ever since Chris got the whole wing shut down. So the place was empty during its last cycle. I wonder if that helped the cell build up a charge, so it will be even more potent tonight. David Mitchell was here after a vacancy, and he was a messed up guy. Then again, he was the most unpredictable criminal of the bunch even before he stayed in the cell. Some might argue that he didn’t need any help in going crazy.
Lucky for me, I don’t believe in ghosts, or goblins, or psychic things. I believe in science, and statistical analysis, and reporting. That’s why I’m here. If there is a pattern to The Big Four, and if there is a reason why they all shared this cell before they turned bad, I’m going to witness it firsthand and document it. In the name of science, I will observe and report before this place can be torn down and plowed under in the months to come. Perhaps, for my great achievements, they’ll erect a plaque on this location.
It will read, “This is the location where Thomas Hicks proved, once and for all, that he is definitely afraid of rats, but never feared in the face of demonic possession from building or other architectural landmark. Oh, he’s also afraid of chalkboard noises.”
The chalk sound starts again.
CHAPTER 5: BALCONY
Present Day
JAMES WOKE UP IN the afternoon. The sun was still pretty high in the sky, so he didn’t bother to check the time. If he knew the time precisely, he would only end up counting down the minutes until sunset. He shaved and showered. With clean clothes and brushed teeth, he felt almost like a human being again. He cooked a real meal—one with representatives f
rom actual food groups.
He ate on the balcony.
His was a second floor apartment on the side of the building with the parking lot. A couple of tall trees gave him shade and also blocked his view of the highway. The constant hiss of passing cars sounded almost like the ocean. He could imagine that the horns of angry motorists were really fog horns, warning ships of hazards. Weighed down by the meal, he felt himself drifting off to sleep again, which was fine. During naps, he rarely dreamed.
A thought startled him awake. James unlocked the door to his living room, navigated the columns of boxes, and looked through the peephole. It was there. While he’d slept, his provisions had come. He was lucky someone hadn’t walked off with the box.
James watched for a minute or two, to convince himself that nobody was going to come up the stairs while his door was open. He fumbled with the deadbolt and slid the huge box inside. James was panting by the time he got the door shut again. He left the box there. He could move it to the kitchen later, when his strength returned.
Back on the balcony, he discovered that a breeze had picked up. If anything, it made the afternoon even nicer.
# # # # #
The creaking sounded like a rocking chair. James pictured the rockers on the front porch of that unfortunate farm family, where John had died because of his poor decision. His eyes flew open.
At first he didn’t see the source of the sound. The hand came up over the edge of the balcony and James tensed. His neck was sore. He’d been napping too long in the chair. He tried to prepare himself for whatever would come up over the side.
Bo’s head appeared.
“Hey, neighbor,” Bo said. “I hope you don’t mind the drop in. You said come by any time, so I saw you here and thought I would.”