by Tim Curran
Palmquist chuckled low in his throat, dropped his face into his hands. “You wouldn’t believe me. Nobody would. I’ve told other people…they thought I was nuts.”
Romero pulled off his cigarette. “Shit, I’d believe anything by this point, kid. Really, I would.” He paused. “Okay. Let me tell you then. It’s this brother of yours, dammit. You called him Damon that first day. I remember. You said he wasn’t like other people, he was different. That if somebody fucked with you…he’d straighten them out. Except, well, I thought he was on the outside, but he’s on the inside, isn’t he? He’s inside you.”
“Yes, he is.” Palmquist clenched his teeth, scratched fingers over his scalp. “He’s always been in me. See, Romero, I was one of a set of twins. My brother, he died at birth. Well, he was already dead. Sometimes, when you have twins in the womb, one of them will assert its dominance and absorb the other one. I was the dominant one, though sometimes I don’t think that’s true at all…”
Palmquist said sometime in the first trimester of his mother’s pregnancy she had an ultrasound, and they discovered twin boys in her womb. She named the boys Danny and Damon. Whichever came out first was to be Danny, the other Damon.
Only Damon never came out at all.
By the second trimester, there was only Danny and some rudimentary tissue that had never taken. It was absorbed by the other fetus. Rare at that date, the doctor told her, but it did happen.
“She told me about it when I was like five or six. My old man died in a car accident and I guessnt " a it was time for confessions,” Palmquist said. “Part of me already knew, because somehow, someway, I always knew I was never alone. I just sensed it, I guess, and as the years passed, that sense of another in me grew stronger and stronger. No, Damon never came out, never really formed, but what he was, it hid inside me.”
Palmquist said he never really talked to Damon, was never in direct contact with this other because Damon only had dominance when he was sleeping…then, only then, would he come out. Come out and play. Palmquist would wake up in the morning when he was a kid and his toys would be in disarray, things moved and sometimes things broken or lost entirely. It was Damon. He would come out at night and play like any other child. But he was not like any other child. Palmquist sensed this right away as a kid. Whatever Damon was, it was something that had taken the shape of all the awful, black and grotesque things that hide in the subcellar of children’s minds. Things from closets and ditches.
“When kids would pick on me, Damon would get them at night,” Palmquist admitted in a low, wounded voice. “Oh, he wouldn’t kill them or anything. Maybe pinch them or bite them or push them out of bed. By the time I was a teenager, he got more vicious, more aggressive, you know? All those hormones must have touched him, too, and when some kids picked on me, Damon would pay them back. A girl made fun of me endlessly in ninth grade bio. Called me a faggot and all that. Damon twisted the head off her dog. He pushed another kid down a set of stairs, clawed the shit out of a bully that was tormenting me. Candy Boggs. She was a popular chick, a real looker. I got up the balls and asked her out. She laughed in my face and she and her friends taunted me for days. Damon visited her one night. I don’t know what he did to her, but she ended up in a psycho ward for almost a year…”
Insane as it all was, Romero could see it happening, that hideous brother hiding inside, coming out to protect the only thing in the world he really loved. If such a thing could love. “That girl…the one he killed and got you here-”
“That was the first time he murdered anyone,” Palmquist said with complete honesty. “I swear to God, it was. Then came Brickhaven…and, well, I suppose you know the rest. He’s part of me just as I’m part of him. I’d wish him away if I could, you know? But it’s not that simple.”
The guard opened the slot in the door. “All right, Romero, you two can suck tongue another time.”
The slot closed.
As Romero made to rise, Palmquist put a hand on his arm. “Those guys who did this to me…Damon will hunt them down one by one. Do you understand, Romero? Keep away from them. Especially at night.” Palmquist released his arm. “He’s afraid of the light. Remember that, okay? And tell the hacks to leave the lights on in here or things are going to happen.”
Romero nodded. “Tell me something, kid. We’re okay, you and mee yoou -usright?”
Palmquist managed a smile. “Of course we are. You’re a good guy, Romero. I knew the moment I saw you that you wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Not if you could help it.”
“Maybe you know me better than I know myself.”
“And that thing with Gordo…man, that was really something.”
Romero just shrugged.
“You made us feel safe,” Palmquist told him. “I know you’ve been through the system and had it tough all the way…but you’re one of the good ones. You really made us feel safe, feel protected…”
And then the hack opened the door and dragged Romero out and Romero felt a lump of something in his throat, quickly swallowing it down as he remembered who he was and where he was and that this was no place for such things.
“Keep the light on in there,” he told the guard.
But the hack just laughed. “Your boyfriend afraid of the dark, Romero?”
“No, but after tonight, I bet you are.”
20
At Shaddock Valley, there weren’t many people Romero trusted.
Surely, not the hacks and precious few prisoners. But JoJo Aquintez was one of them. The state had dropped him for eight years on an armed robbery conviction. He was a tough boy and his little vacation at Shaddock was the second time the state had sent him away to college. But for all that and for all the swindling and menacing he’d done in his time, Aquintez was all right in Romero’s way of thinking. He was a good guy to have at your side. When you were his friend, you could trust him absolutely. He wouldn’t steal from you, snitch on you, or try to ram a homemade knife into your back.
And in a maximum security prison, man, that was saying something.
Romero was being up front about what he knew, exhuming all the demented little secrets from the black soil of his soul, rattling yellowing skeletons from closets he would just as soon have left bolted. “I know it’s fucking jiggy crazy stuff, JoJo, but I swear to it on my mother’s grave. Palmquist…Jesus…he ain’t like other people. That shit he was saying about his brother, well, it’s true.”
“I believe it. I think we all believe a lot of things we didn’t believe before, don’t we?” Aquintez said quietly as was his way. “Things have a way of adding up. Even things we’d rather not let ourselves believe.”
Aquintez was about 5’6 with shoes on, but stocky and powerful from working the iron pile in the gym. He wore glasses, slicked his thinning hair straight back from his high forehead, and was into Medieval history of all things. Had read every book in the prison library on the subject and had read about a hundred more through inter-library loans and purchases.
He wasn’t your average con.
But then, as Romero had learned in his many wasted years in lock-ups and hard-time state joints, there was no such thing as your average con. Some were jailhouse lawyers and some were artists, others were poets and still others were farmers at heart. And many others, of course, were just plain hoodlums and bullies and homicidal maniacs. One thing you could never put in a box were cons…figuratively, anyway.
“I gotta tell somebody this shit,” Romero said, “so it might as well be you.”
“I’m listening.”
“Palmquist…you see…he had this twin…”
Aquintez just smoked a cigarette and listened, patiently, absorbing every word and weighing them out carefully in his mind. And it was a good mind. One that easily picked out implications, subtle nuances, and unspoken possibilities. So he smoked and listened and watched the cons out in the yard playing their games, strutting around like randy males with no females to impress.
“He’s really a
good kid, JoJo,” Romero finished by saying, his face sweaty and his eyes blinking rapidly as if he were trying to blink away some image he couldn’t bear to look upon. “We could have made him into a good con, one that knew the ropes but wasn’t like those guys out there. I really believe that. What happened to Weems and Gordo and Heslip and Burgon-”
“Those pricks deserved what they got and we both know it,” Aquintez said, just stating a fact that was widely known.
Romero nodded. “I guess what I’m saying is that we can’t blame the kid for any of that, he’s not really responsible for…for his brother.”
“Of course not. Man, the tales people have been telling around here-about the kid having a demon guardian and shit, about him being some kind of antichrist, having psychic powers like those little blonde bastards in that English movie there-well, what you’re telling me now ain’t any harder to swallow.” He shruow. ut the kidgged. “In fact, it’s a lot easier. As far out and implausible as it might seem, at least we have something of a scientific explanation…shit, straight out of the Outer Limits, but it’s at least something we can get our hands on.”
“Don’t make me feel much better,” Romero said.
Aquintez smiled thinly. “At least it’s not ghosts and demons here. You’ll never get those dumb shits out there to believe it, but I do. Let me get this straight,” he said, crushing out his cigarette. “The kid’s twin…Damon, you say? When the kid is asleep, this twin that somehow never died but crawled deep inside him can externalize himself physically?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking unbelievable.”
“Scares the shit out of me,” Romero admitted, not ashamed to do so. “If you had heard it…”
“What…what did you hear?”
“Oh, it was crazy, I thought I was going to scream,” Romero said in a high, squeaking voice. “I was laying there and I heard movement. I smelled something like rotten fruit but bad enough to gag you. And those sounds…it must have been pulling itself out of the kid, coming out of his head and I heard it, I fucking heard it…like somebody was pulling the guts out of a pig, wet and slopping. And that stink, the sounds it made sliding along the wall, oh Jesus and Mary…”
“But you only heard it the night Weems was put down?”
“The night it got Gordo I was in the infirmary and when it got Heslip and Burgon, I took enough Seconal to drop a bull elephant. I slept right through it. I knew what was going to happen and I just couldn’t bear to hear it…” Romero clutched his hands together to stop them from shaking. “Something has to be done, JoJo, but I just don’t know what.”
Aquintez shook his head. “Nothing we can do but stay on that kid’s good side. You know what’s coming here, I think we all do…”
Romero did.
And if it came down, well the kid wouldn’t survive it. Because they were talking riot here. It had been whispered about for years, but now it looked like it might happen. The four brutal murders at the prison had acted as sort of a catalyst and now everyone was talking about it, black and white and Hispanic. For once they were all together on something.
And when it came down, not if, the cons wouldtheanic. For take over the place. One of the first things they’d do after taking control of Shaddock, as all cons did in a riot, would be to storm the PC units where the snitches and weaklings were kept. Then they’d liberate prisoners from Ad-Seg.
And Danny Palmquist? They’d kill him on sight.
21
If ever there was a prison that was inviting an uprising, it was Shaddock Valley.
It was an ancient place, dating from the early 19th century and precious few improvements had been made in all that time. It was cold as a mountain ice house in the winter and hot enough to make paint run in the summer. A drafty, leaking, bug-infested hellhole that was old by the time of the First World War and positively decrepit as the millennium approached and then passed. As Shaddock limped into its third century of existence, it remained what it had always been: a dump where the state stowed away its garbage and then turned a blind eye when the rats and maggots started coming out.
Prisoners complained about everything from the food to sanitation to accommodations and were answered by stony silence. Same went for improved medical care and visitation rights, simple things like better mattresses and access to a dentist once every third year.
The guards were vicious and beatings were commonplace…as were weeks spent in the hole over minor and often manufactured offenses. The white boys had it hard and the blacks and Hispanics just a little bit harder. The guards were corrupt and would smuggle in anything from bone movies to drugs if you paid them to do so. But what cost a white man $20, cost a Latino $30, and a black $50. The guards encouraged snitches, even paid inmates to rat on each other…which they did with unsettling regularity. The guards also believed in divide and conquer. Sometimes, out of the blue, they gave certain black prisoners privileges, while denying them to whites, thereby increasing race hatred and encouraging violence which always came sooner or later, usually in the form of blacks and whites going at each other out in the yard with sawed-off pipes and shanks. Sometimes the guards gave special treatment only to certain individuals within a racial group, then made bets on how long it would be before his friends threw him a beating…or worse.
The guards spread rumors, routinely told prisoners lies about their wives and family, anything to stir the pot and make their rodents run the maze. On any given day, inmates could expect their cells to be tossed. Personal belongings were confiscated, drawings made by their children ripped up, pictures of girlfriends taken away and sold to other inmates…and particularly if said girlfriend was wearing a bathing suit or a sexy outfit.
The guards were, for the most part, country boys. , youdth="2em" Big, brutal rednecks who hated anyone darker than white on sight. The blacks were beaten on a regular basis and the Hispanics just barely tolerated…unless their English wasn’t real good, then they were officially made prime targets. White criminals such as organized crime types were fawned over and idolized by the guards who waited on them hand and foot, bringing in food from Italian delis for them, wine, fresh fruit and select cuts of meat. Black organized crime figures of no less stature could expect to be thrown in the hole or beaten if it looked like they might try to unify the loose collection of black gangs into a single entity.
Jailhouse lawyers were also hated by the guards.
Starvation rations were commonplace for so much as hinting at filing a writ. Country music was tolerated, but rap and hard rock would get your radio or boombox confiscated and particularly if the guards fancied having it for their own. Letters from home were stalled if you were considered a troublemaker and any outgoing mail was read before being posted. And any tidbits of a personal or intimate nature they could glean from your mail were used to harass you with.
Such was life at Shaddock Valley.
The DOC liked to talk prison reform, but it was yet to be seen at Shaddock. And like old sores that have never been properly treated, only allowed to scab over, the bile and poison built up until it contaminated every nerve ending and strand of muscle, made the blood run toxic, and the entire diseased body of the prison was filled with infection.
And it was only a matter of time before somebody lanced it.
22
It was a bad night.
There were never any truly good nights at Shaddock when you didn’t have a prisoner going after another or vomiting in his cell or throwing piss at a passing guard, but some were just plain worse than others. And some guards just seemed to pull the worse duty night after night.
Leo Comiskey was like that.
He seemed to be on permanent duty down in the hole, watching the Ad-Seg prisoners, hearing their endless gripes and complaints, listening to them scream in the dark and beg for the lights to be turned on. Even through those iron doors, you could hear them…but muffled and tinny like a voice coming from a buried box, filtered by soil.
There were seve
n guys in Ad-Seg at present and they were all nervous and scared. And the reason for this was that an eighth prisoner had been added: Danny Palmquist. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was maybe the Devil ors.
Comiskey didn’t care for it.
For he knew what was going on with Palmquist and it wasn’t just the cons that were afraid of him. The guards, even the warden…they all got a funny look about them when the kid’s name was mentioned, like maybe they needed to get sick and couldn’t find a good place.
And what surely wasn’t helping anything was the yellow crime scene tape over the door to cell #3 where Tony Gordo had died. No, that didn’t help at all.
Two of the cons down there were newbies, both had swallowed drugs it was suspected and both were on shit watch. And that was a real treat for any guard, having to check a con’s stools. Jesus.
It was maybe midnight when the sounds started coming from Palmquist’s cell. Funny, high-pitched squealing sounds that went right up Comiskey’s spine and echoed around in the back of his head like screams heard in the dead of night.
Comiskey called it in, went over to the door to #14 where the kid was.
He reached up for the bolt that would open the little security port. But like Jorgensen days before, that’s about as far as his hand got…because something inside him was hearing those sounds in there and it had literally pulled his hand back. Like a man taking a swan dive off a ten-story building, it wanted him to think very carefully about what it was he was doing here. Because there were things in life, you did them or you saw them, there was no going back.
So Comiskey stood there, shivering like something yanked from a deep-freeze, remembering with an almost vibrant clarity the stories the other guards were telling about what they’d heard and-in the case of a few unlucky correctional officers-had actually seen.
There are some things in life, Sergeant Warres had told his guards in an ominous whisper, that you get in your craw and they don’t never leave you. Things that’ll turn your hair fucking white and make you sleep with the lights on. You boys seen what I saw, you got a look at it and had that smell rubbed in your face, you got all you can do not to stick your service pistol in your mouth…