The brownish ghost of a bloodstain remained in a wide circle amidst the matted grass. Standing up close, it possessed a fouled mocked-up look, as if someone had added another quart or so of blood later on, long after I'd gone to bed. From there a swath journeyed up into the woods, lines of blood thinning out across the soil, about ten feet away. They disappeared just beyond that, near a thicket of saplings. Hesitantly, I walked over to the shed and peered through the door. Even now, beneath the bright morning sun, darkness reigned inside. Still, there were a few gaps between the rotting slats—and the open door of course—that allowed enough light through for me to see that there was no baby deer. Just a brownish stain, with no streaks. Whoever took it had picked it up and carried it away, nice and quickly with no intention of being seen.
Until this moment, everything had been peaceful, nice and quiet. A typical morning, just as Ashborough liked it. The birds were serenading. The trees quietly whispered beneath a gentle breeze. Somewhere, far away, a dog barked.
I backed out of the shed, leaned the thatcher against the door, then walked over to the birdbath, feeling suddenly giddy. This return to the scene of the crime had me unnerved a bit; after all, I killed a deer out here last night, albeit one seemingly determined to bring my head home to mount on its primitive trophy wall. And then my concerns as to who grabbed the carcasses while I wasn't looking—that had the wheels in my mind skipping gears, and I did my best to battle these bad feelings by itemizing some of the tasks that needed attending to, like filling out all those insurance forms and drug-stock purchase orders piled on my desk. But, alas, it didn't work—it seemed there was plenty of room in my mind for everything. A downfall of being smart.
The birdbath was dry, and I realized now that it hadn't rained for weeks. I could remember only one instance since we moved in where it showered with any merit, and that was a late afternoon thunderstorm that'd transformed the skies into a mean charcoal gray color; it also had a yelping Page scurrying fearfully away under Jessica's bed. I ran my finger along the rough cherub statuette, totally engrossed in thought, thinking for a passing moment that another cup of coffee might go down just fine right now—when a scream ripped through the backyard.
I startled and shook like a maraca, then bolted around as though I'd expected all along some kind of terror was about to take place (Stories of golden-eyed goblins? Animal bodies being dragged from my back yard? That might've had something to do with it). I saw nothing, but a shriek as high and as sharp as a guillotine issued from around the side of the yard. This was followed by the dull thud of something hitting sharply into the house.
I darted around the side of the house and was immediately greeted with blood—at least it was the first thing I became aware of. Blood, everywhere. A lot of it: on the walkway, in the grass, on the shingles alongside the entrance to my office. Then I saw the body, and in a reflexive action shoved my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming.
Lauren Hunter had arrived for her appointment, yes she did. But she'd run into some big trouble along the way. What exactly that trouble was I had no clue, and I could do nothing but stand frozen and stare down at her hoping that some miracle group of paramedics would show up in their bleating ambulance, toting their black bags, IV, and stretcher while rushing to my patient's rescue. That's how it's done in New York—stand back and let the pros handle the situation. Here in this wee little township of curvy back roads and Smoky-The-Bear forests, I was the only show in town, flying solo and manning the cockpit in a plane I couldn't operate very well.
My knowledge and experience in emergency situations is limited—I'm just an internist, my specialties are sniffles and coughs, snot and phlegm. Still, the diagnosis was obvious: in a few minutes Lauren Hunter would meet her Maker. Given her condition, it was amazing that any life was left in her at all. A good portion of her face had been stripped away. What remained was a bloody slab about the size of an Ellio's pizza that ran from her scalp line to her trembling jaw. Her shirt had been reduced to ribbons, a dangling left arm twisted from the socket like a storm-damaged branch. Two shattered ribs swelled through the bruised skin beneath her right breast. She coughed, and blood and yellow phlegm showered out onto the grass. Then she moaned—loud enough to make me jerk back some—and rolled over, both legs twitching much like the deer's did last night—as if charged with electricity. This revealed a large gouge in her waist, and when she shifted, purple-gray organs spilled out onto the cement walkway. A large pink tube wriggled out too. It looked alive, one end leading back into her body like a leash.
In my mind I heard Phillip Deighton say, the animal can't be dead, Michael. It has to be sacrificed on the big stone.
I became harried and distressed, and I knew for certain that if I'd been forced to say something, only gibberish would come out. It didn't matter anyway, I told myself. Nothing I could say or do would change the fact that Lauren Hunter, a patient under my care, was going to die.
She coughed again. Clotty swirls flew out with such force they spattered the shingles. Amazingly, she kept moving. In fact, she attempted to lean up. Her eyes quivered then opened, the cocoa browns unfocused and stirred with tiny masses of blood. Her head bobbled back and forth like one of those sport-figure dolls, and I finally kneeled down before her, hands at once pinning her neck, mindful of the fact that the shock and trauma striking her body didn't deter the nerves from squirting gallons of pain-juice out.
My knees slid forward and I said to myself, the hole in her waist...her organs...Jesus Christ! And all I could wonder was what could have possibly happened to Lauren Hunter. My crazed common sense kept saying over and over, same thing that happened to Rosy Deighton, same thing that happened to Neil Farris, same thing that happened to... To think otherwise would be a waste of good thought. Something evil and horrible was going down in Ashborough, and damn the residents here who're obviously accepting it as readily as a hot meal on the dinner table at supper time.
I had to shove those thoughts aside for the moment. More importantly right now was what to do next. I stood and thought about running inside for a blanket, but that would serve in only ruining the blanket. Still, I couldn't just let her suffer. I needed to call for help in spite of the fact that she'd be dead long before they got here. It wouldn't ease her suffering, but it was the only option, given the dreadful circumstances.
I leaned down next to her. "Lauren?"
Her head shook. Her lips puckered like a fish's. She said, "Ah...puh…ahg."
"I'm going to help you, Lauren. You just be good and try to relax. Help will be here soon." It was the grandest lie I'd ever told. I waited for the lightning bolt to strike but He never threw it.
Her head turned in my direction. It appeared as though she were trying to look up at me, but there was no way to tell for sure...there was too much blood everywhere. I wanted to get up, get away, perhaps go inside and wait in some dark corner while she writhed herself to death. Instead, her one good arm jutted up like a moray from its lair and grabbed my wrist. A spurting sound came from her throat. Her tongue moved, I could see it flicking around in the swamp of blood and snot in her mouth. Some unclear sounds spilled forth, odd foreign syllables like dar and uug. I tried to make some sense of them, but interpretation wasn't very high on my to-do list right now, plus I was growing more confused by the second. I tried to break free of her bloody grasp. I couldn't. She had quite a grip on me. Reflexive bodily instinct they once taught us at Columbia.
They never taught anything like this during family practice 101, Michael.
"Isolates..." she barked, then choked up some lung fluid.
I gazed down at her, in total denial of what I'd just heard. It came out fully intentional, as clear as the skies above our heads. Not as some misinterpreted hack or gurgle. And not as some stress-induced delusion on the ears. Can't be, Michael. It can't be that she just said that word. No. It was nothing more than some ironic string of nonsensical utterances coincidentally formed into a word that's been haunting you for the bette
r part of twenty-four hours.
She was still looking at me. I managed to ask, my voice barely a whisper, "What?"
And then her voice changed. It was deeper, stronger, not the voice of a woman who lay buried in agony, seconds from death. "They want you...they're coming for you..." Her eyes rolled up into their sockets, revealing bloody ruptures. The corners of her mouth drew downward, as if pulled by invisible strings.
And then my mind went back to six weeks ago, to the day we first moved in. I'd met Phillip for the first time, and he was kind enough to invite us to his home, and despite my encounter with the rusty nail on my front lawn, I'd thought everything was just going to be sweet and peachy here in Ashborough, but then I'd taken a wrong turn while looking for the bathroom in his house and I'd come face-to-face with his monster of a wife, Rosy Deighton, and she spat at me through her black hole of a mouth, They'll come for you, just like they did for me, just like they did for Dr Farris, like they will for everyone else in this God-forsaken town!
And now, a similar warning from a woman also in distress. Terror shot through me, changed me, made me a different man in a matter of seconds. Smaller, weaker, a man who needed to call the hospital not for the human mess on the sidewalk, but to reserve myself a room in the mental ward, ASAP: I'd been dealt a big blow this morning and needed to check myself in fast.
Instead, I leaned close to her head—her naked bloody head. At this close proximity I could see a tiny slice of white skull peeking through. It looked like an eye. I turned away, said, "Lauren...speak to me. What are you trying to say?"
"They have Christine..." she spat, teeth baring down on her bottom lip. Blood poured out like a fountain.
Jesus Christ, how does she know my wife's name?
Then she let go of me and went back to her spasms, legs and arms and head twitching like mad. I had the nutty desire to start shaking her but this song was about to end. I threw myself back against the wall, looking at a kidney or a liver on the cement walkway that'd met its fate beneath my knee. Her body stiffened up one last time then released itself and went motionless. Something foul-smelling hit me like a bag of potatoes. Her eyes glossed over.
End of song.
I sat there against the house for an indeterminate amount of time, knowing very well that someone, my family included, might nonchalantly stumble upon this horrific scene—items brought in loving arms would undoubtedly drop to the ground. I waited until my breathing returned to a somewhat normal rate, and shivered as the sweat on my body cooled. But then my vision faded, a gray sheet enveloping the environment around me. My head spun like mad, body swaying like a pendulum. Sickness found my gut and for the second time in twenty-four hours I threw up, this time all over myself. When everything found its way out of me, I lay myself down against the cement foundation of the house and allowed the gray to turn to darkness.
15
When I came to, feelings of surrealism and bewilderment made me feel as if I'd woken up from a dream within a dream, although I knew that this waking nightmare would not go away. The true magnitude of how I felt right now could never be described in the right words, although I imagined that this was how an addict felt after an all night binge of needles and spoons.
I was still hopeful that an emergency team would soon stream in, but as we all know by now, my closest neighbor is a light-year away and as those Alien movies tout, In space, no one can hear you scream. The whirlwind that went down in the yard on the side of my house might as well have taken place on Mars. No one had seen or heard anything, hence, there was no help on the way. It was up to me to grab the bull by the horns with what little strength I had left.
Dizziness tried to claim me as I stood. I balanced myself with one hand against the house. The bloodprint it left on the shingles was still slickly wet, and made me realize that I'd only been out for a few minutes. I looked at the body—what was left of Lauren Hunter. In this unmoving state I could see that her injuries had been much more severe than I first observed, if that seemed humanly possible. Her legs were covered with what I could only describe as bite marks, circular-shaped punctures befitting the size and shape of a human child. The skin around the horrible gouge in her side had deep jagged impressions along the edges, signifying the application of some crude weapon (or claw, I reminded myself). I could see four deep notch-like grooves inside the injury to her face, reinforcing my belief that she'd been swiped at by some kind of taloned fist. Once the horrific attraction wore off, and the gross realization of the situation set in, I lurched away, threw off my shirt and shoes, and stepped inside the house.
All was eerily silent inside.
I picked up the phone, noticing that there were no messages (for a change, I was thankful for the slow season), and pressed '0' for operator. A woman with no personality came on the phone.
"Operator."
I took a deep breath, went to speak, but a dry tickle in my throat set me into a fit of coughs. Once I had control of my voice, I said, "I need some help. It's an emergency."
"What type of emergency, sir?" So matter of fact this Miss Operator was.
"What type?" I found it strange that the operator would ask this. Then again, I wasn't thinking too clearly at the moment.
"I need to know where to connect you. Fire, Police, or Medical?"
Good question. Definitely not fire. Police maybe. No...I needed medical. Yes. Jesus, am I losing my mind? I'm a doctor for Christssakes! "Medical emergency," I panted, wiping my free hand across my forehead.
There was a brief silence on the other end, and in this time my mind wandered back to Lauren Hunter and the uncanny utterances that had come from her mouth. Just noisy chokes, I told myself. I must've grossly misinterpreted these as purely intentional sentences referring to Christine and the Isolates. I couldn't have heard her say those things I kept repeating in my mind, grabbing the seemingly purposeful sentences that were sticking in my head as if pinned there with thumbtacks, wrapping them up in pretty little mental boxes and sending them off to gather dust in some room within my untapped subconscious—a room whose door had the word denial stamped on it in big bold letters.
I felt the phone slipping from my grasp, and I did my best to hold it against my mouth, but that only captured the mad giggles that started to swell in my throat.
"Sir...sir? Are you all right?"
I heard her but couldn't answer right away, and she heard me laughing, I knew. That tipped me a bit, made me dizzy. I took my hand and wrapped it across my waist to keep me here, on earth, in this plane of existence. Yes, I'd heard only the yips and yaps of a human being drowning in the swells of death. That, and nothing more.
"Sir, do you have an emergency to report?"
"Y-yes...yes I do."
"I'll connect you to the hospital in Ellenville."
Seconds passed, then minutes. In this time I tried to make myself feel better, but I couldn't help going back to those impossible instances...the moments when Lauren Hunter had spoken to me. Damn it, she spoke to me! I felt like a fateful submarine that no matter how many times tried to climb to the surface would slip down further into the depths of insanity. One step forward, two steps back.
And then, I was disconnected.
A dial tone met my ear like a whistling wind in the middle of a barren desert. At that instant I felt like a sole survivor on some desolate planet, my only means of communication taken away by some unseen force. My heart pounded, my hands were shaking. I dialed up the operator again. This time I got a male voice on the phone.
"Operator."
"Ellenville hospital please."
"One moment..." Another void met my ear; I never knew silence could be so deafening. Finally, after a minute of flexing away the tightness of drying blood on my hands, a ringing met my ear. A woman answered, "Ellenville Medical." Her voice was curt. Clearly I'd interrupted something important. Tough cookies.
"This is Dr Michael Cayle calling from Ashborough. I have a medical emergency and need an ambulance here at once."
"Hello? Are you there?" Surely she heard the impatience in my voice. "I said I have a life and death emergency."
"You said you're a physician from Ashborough?"
"Yes...as far as I know I'm the only God-damned one here. What seems to be the problem?"
There was a shuffling of papers on the other end. "What is your address, sir?"
"17 Harlan Road."
"There'll be an ambulance there in ten minutes."
"Thank you!" I hung up the phone, but not before I heard the other end disconnect.
I wondered at that moment if I should have simply called the coroner, but I wasn't sure whether I'd have to call into Ashborough or Ellenville—this was a poor time to realize that I'd never once looked into the names and addresses of my constituents. Regardless, wherever this coroner resided, whoever he was, he'd have to come up with a cause of death and I'd be his only material witness to a death that would clearly blow him out of the water. Animal attack? Cancer? Isolate? Close your eyes and flip to a page in the family medical journal. Here we go, she died of thanoplastic dystopia. Whatever the hell that is. Suddenly Small-Town USA didn't seem as charming as it once appeared. Beneath every charming little vista seemed to lie a cold dark enigma.
I walked to the door and peeked out the window at Lauren Hunter's sprawled body. There was blood everywhere, on me as well, and I knew that a good part of the afternoon would be spent cleaning it all up. After the body was taken away. After I gave a statement to the police.
The police.
I should've called them. I moved towards the phone. Stopped. Something told me not to do it. Not yet.
Instead I went into my office, dug through the prescription drug sample case and snatched a two-milligram Xanax. Zany Xanax, we used to say in med-class. We'd pop them after an exam then assemble in clusters of six or eight and mellow out to some Pink Floyd before passing out on the carpet. Ecstasy for the post-grad scholar.
Deep in the Darkness Page 10