Mr. Shivers

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Going to be trouble,” said Connelly.

  “Yeah,” said Peachy.

  But there was not. The two of them waited in silence, letting the hours pass by, yet no one came. There was no sound at all. The entire jail was quiet.

  As night fell a gray sheet of clouds crawled over the moon. The wind rose until it hammered the building and the temperature dropped until the two men shivered and they began to see their breath. Somewhere in Connelly’s belly the animal thing yowled and cried, full of strange knowledge of being hunted, of something watching out in the night.

  “What’s going on?” asked Peachy through the crack in the wall.

  “Something’s coming,” said Connelly.

  Less than an hour later the sheriff came for him. Two deputies put him in handcuffs and marched him down to the cinderblock room where the sheriff had beaten them not more than a week ago, by Connelly’s reckoning. He cuffed Connelly to the stool and looked at him without speaking, eyes heavy as though he was envious of him. Then he took his pistol and whipped Connelly across the side of the head. Connelly curled in his seat and the sheriff bent down and spat into his face. He looked at Connelly a moment longer and then left, shutting the door behind him.

  Connelly sat and tried to recover. No one else entered. Minutes ticked by. He waited, trying to stay conscious.

  Soon he was aware of a horrible stench in the room, a stink of putrefaction and lye. He coughed and tried to find some pocket of fresh air.

  A quiet, cold voice said, “You’re taller than I remember.”

  Connelly looked up and around for the source of the voice. At first he saw nothing. Then he spotted a pair of scuffed shoes in the shadows next to the desk, and above those a pair of patched trousers and a coat the color of trainsmoke with gray-white hands nestled in its folds like chunks of quartz in granite. And somewhere above that he could make out a face, queerly colorless, heavily lined, with calm, placid eyes like jet and ribbons of scars running across its cheeks, its forehead, its neck and brow, a delicate calligraphy of violence.

  Connelly was bellowing before he knew what was going on. He strained forward in his seat and planted his legs and pulled until the cuffs bit into his wrists and his palms were wet with blood. The gray man did not seem to even register it. He let the screams go on until Connelly was gasping for breath. Then he walked around and looked at where the cement floor was spattered with blood from Connelly’s wrists. He examined it as though faintly curious and nodded to himself.

  “I see,” he said, “that you are still alive.”

  “Fuck you,” snarled Connelly.

  “You’ve come a long way since Memphis.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “As have I.”

  Connelly growled and heaved himself at the man. The gray man stood just inches away, looking down on him calmly. This close Connelly could see one scar on his cheek went up into his scalp, cutting his ear in half and nearly splitting half his head. The gray man seemed strangely still. He did not even seem to need to breathe.

  “You should not have followed me,” he said with a trace of sadness.

  “Bastard! Bastard!” Connelly howled. “You killed my daughter! You killed my little girl! My little girl, my little fucking girl!”

  “You should not have followed me,” said the gray man again.

  “I’m going to kill you,” snarled Connelly. “I’m going to kill you. Cut your throat, you fucking bastard. Kill you.”

  “It has been a long time since I have been aware of men,” said the gray man. “A man, more specifically. You are all so alike. I can no more tell you apart than I could a drop of water in the ocean.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “It’s so strange. If I were to take a man from the hills of this country on which we stand,” said the gray man, “and then take another from some foreign place—China, perhaps—and if you were then to cut a foot off of each of those men I am certain the noises they would make with their mouths would be similar. Their histories and cultures and names would crumble and they would be the same man then, would they not?”

  “Bastard,” said Connelly. “Fucking bastard. You sick, sick bastard.”

  “But you are different,” said the gray man. “You and I. I notice you, I even know your name, which is strange in its own right. We are alike in some fashion which I find difficult to perceive.”

  Connelly screamed and heaved himself forward again. The gray man seemed not to notice. His blank eyes were fixed on Connelly and he might have been blind, seeing but not seeing, staring through everything like all matter and all creatures within his eyesight were immaterial.

  Connelly finished screaming. The gray man said, “You don’t agree?”

  “Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell. I am not like you, I’m not.”

  “You have taken lives in getting here. You are willing to take more in the future.”

  “I don’t kill little girls!” howled Connelly.

  The gray man considered this, accepted it with a tilt of the head. “No. You do not. Not yet.”

  “I ain’t never going to, neither. I ain’t like you and I ain’t like the goddamn sheriff. I don’t kill, you bastards, I’m no murderer. You’re all fucking monsters doing whatever the hell you please, ain’t you?”

  “The sheriff does as I ask. I see you survived his little poison. I’m somewhat impressed.” Then he reached forward and dropped something onto the floor. A pile of twigs and string, horribly mauled. Chewed, almost. “An old magic, and a minor one,” he said. “You fed the taint and made it slow and fat. But it would have gotten you in the end, you know, had you not found it.”

  “I’ll kill you both,” said Connelly, now almost sobbing. “Kill the both of you. I don’t understand why the hell you’d bother to do this.”

  “The sheriff is a friend of mine,” said the gray man. “I have given him something very precious and he does small tasks for me.”

  “And what the hell could any man ever want from a bastard like you?”

  “Life,” said the gray man. “Peace. These things are valued, yes?”

  “I’m going to kill you,” said Connelly. “Maybe not now and maybe not today, but goddamn you, the last thing you see on this earth is going to be my face. Last image your fucked-up brain is going to take in is going to be my face, and I’ll say her name. I’ll say her name and that’ll be the last thing you hear because that’s what killed you, the second you touched her you were dead and I’m going to be the one to do it. And you’ll die knowing it. You’ll die knowing it. I swear.”

  The gray man listened to that and once more Connelly saw some strange fear work its way into his face. He said, “Mr. Connelly, you should go home.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You should give up now and go home.”

  “Keep running. I don’t care how long it takes. I’ll find you.”

  “You think I am running from you?” said the gray man. “Is that what you think?”

  Connelly didn’t answer. The gray man bent low. His eyes were huge in his face and his ruined mouth twisted into a snarl. “Dawn is breaking,” he whispered. “Night has fallen and the dawn comes. It is on the horizon. Do you not feel it? Each breath this nation and this world takes is one taken in anticipation, for in our future something rears its head, something new and terrible, and the sun shall show it. These past years have been the long night before it, the long midwinter. But now I ask you, what will you see once that dawn breaks? What will it reveal? When the cold gray light washes across the face of this earth, will it be the same earth you fell asleep in? Or will it be something new? Will it be something so great and awesome that it will deny words and dwarf language, something to belittle all the previous creations of man and beast? Can you say for sure?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Do you not? Why not? Does your life matter so little? It is happening out there!” he cried, pointing westward. “Just out there! The years and
ages line up and somewhere in those endless flats time itself heaves with pangs of labor, a sick, red cunt that readies to birth a new age! A new era! Do you not understand?”

  “You’re crazy. You’re a fucking loon.”

  The gray man thought about that and stooped to eye level.

  “No,” he whispered. “No.” He leaned close. “Do you know what I’ve seen out there?”

  Connelly did not answer.

  “I have been to the far reaches,” said the gray man. “I have walked to the edge where the black vaults swallow creation and I stood on the edge of the world and pissed into nothingness. I’ve seen the things that hide and dance behind the stars in the sky and I pinned them to the ground and laughed and made them tell me their names one by one, one by one.”

  The gray man drew himself up to his fullest height, an impossibly tall man, and as he spoke Connelly swore his scars were no longer scars but it was all one mouth, enormous and ragged. His voice grew loud and as it did the light seemed to shrink.

  “I have walked in dark places where eyeless things of no mind and no soul gnaw the bottoms of mountains and eat rock and stone the likes of which mankind has never known and will never know. I have watched eons being devoured by crushing waves and as I watched I knew in my heart that I was the sole witness of their existence and their passing. I have stalked the forests that ring the top of this earth where snow is thick and silence has gone undisturbed for centuries, and lifetimes may pass before finding a single footprint in the snow. And I have walked toward the center of this vast spinning world, Mr. Connelly, where light has no meaning and all is consumed, and I looked at the great violation that makes this land’s heart, that fills it with hunger, and on the sides of that black crack was my name written again and again and again. And again and again and again. Do you hear me, little man? Do you hear me?”

  He looked down on Connelly, eyes still blank. “I have done things which your mind cannot possibly comprehend, which you cannot ever approach. I am in all shadows and in no shadow, I am in every atom and I am in every heart. And I will not allow the new day to break. Night everlasting, if it may be so. And you must stop, Mr. Connelly. You must stop. You must leave me be and stop.”

  Connelly said, “Then kill me.”

  The gray man charged forward, his long white hands grasping out, but they stopped inches away from Connelly’s neck. He saw the scarred man struggle, face contorted, like he was pulling against an unimaginable force. He shuddered, then withdrew, his chest heaving and a sheen of sweat across his pallid brow.

  “I could,” said the gray man. “I could. I dearly wish to. But there are rules. There is order. Natures which cannot be denied.” He stared down on Connelly. “You will die here. If you follow this path you will be destroyed. I know. And if you follow me any further, Mr. Connelly, everyone you know and everyone you trust will find their end here as well. Know that. Know that and do what you will, if you survive the next day.”

  The gray man turned to walk away. He opened the iron door and as he stood in the hall light he looked like any tramp again, just a tired old tramp with a ruined face.

  “I want to know something,” said Connelly.

  The gray man looked back, his expression inscrutable.

  “I want to know why you killed my little girl.”

  The gray man cocked his head. There was no thought in his face or his posture. He regarded Connelly for a second and said, “So that she would die.”

  The door shut. Connelly began screaming again. He screamed until the guards came and beat him and threw him back into his cell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When they dumped him off Connelly spent the better part of the next hour hurling himself against his cell door. Peachy tried his best to talk him down but Connelly would not listen, could not listen. He raged and flung himself against it until his shoulders were bruised and his ankles ached and it was only when he paused that they realized they could hear another noise.

  Screaming. A man somewhere in the jail was crying in fear and pain.

  “What is that?” asked Peachy softly.

  “Roosevelt,” whispered Connelly. “Rosie. He’s doing something to him. He’s doing something to my friend.”

  “What do you think he’s doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you scared, Connelly?” asked Peachy.

  “Yeah. Yeah. You?”

  “Yes. What’d they do to you?”

  “Hit me. And…”

  “And what?”

  “Nothing. They didn’t do nothing good, that’s for sure.”

  “You… you think they’re going to kill me too, Connelly?”

  He looked at the little crack in the wall. Somewhere Roosevelt stopped screaming. “No,” said Connelly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I-I don’t know. Just don’t think about that, Peachy. Just don’t.”

  “You think we should pray?”

  “I guess.”

  “Come on. Pray with me, Connelly.”

  “All right.”

  Connelly sat on the floor and put his hands together and bowed his head. It was not until his palms touched that he realized he was trembling. He could not remember the last time he prayed. He listened to Peachy’s whispering but he could not understand any formula or any process in it. So he steeled himself and sent a wordless, desperate cry for aid up into the sky, hoping it would pierce the roof of the jail and the mantle of clouds and the net of stars behind that, venturing out beyond to where nothingness had no claim and there might be some consciousness, some intelligence that would listen and understand and sympathize. Something, just something. But it seemed unlikely that anything so vast would notice or care.

  He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing.

  But still he steeled himself, culled those thoughts of higher powers and purpose from his mind, and thought about simpler matters—of getting out of the jail cell, and of tomorrow, and of murder, which appeared simpler by the second.

  Then they waited for the executioner’s footfall. It seemed like there was something they needed to say. But they could think of nothing.

  Three hours had passed when they heard a sound: a rustling, not outside, but somehow below.

  “You hear that?” asked Peachy.

  “Yeah,” said Connelly.

  They listened. There were voices whispering, cursing and shushing one another. Connelly stood to his feet and looked down. The voices were right below him. They stopped and he heard a giggle, and then a voice said, “Hey, you.”

  Connelly shrank back against the wall.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello?” said the voice.

  “H-Hammond?” he said.

  “Yeah. It’s me. Give me a sec.”

  Connelly fell to the floor and grabbed at the warped wood, feverishly trying to find some way to pull the planks apart but finding none.

  “Get back, you damn fool, we don’t want to cut you any.”

  He stepped back and before him a small saw pierced the bottom of the floor, rising up between the cracks. It wriggled to get a better bite on the wood and then began moving up and down, sawing diagonal across one of the boards. It seemed to take hours to get through the wood. They pushed up on it and Connelly grabbed the severed end and tried to pull it back.

  “Not so loud! You’ll wake up the whole damn place!” hissed Hammond’s voice.

  “Connelly?” said Peachy. “What… what’s going on?”

  “Who the hell is that?” said Hammond.

  “Just hold on, Peachy,” Connelly said.

  “Peachy?” said Hammond, incredulous.

  They pried the board up and sawed through a few more and Connelly saw Hammond and Roonie crouched below in a curiously large space, like the j
ail was not built on any firm foundation but instead was on a basement of some kind. They were covered head to toe in mud and soil.

  Roonie stared up at him, mournful and terrified. “You won’t believe what we had to dig through.” He shook his head. “You won’t believe it.”

  “Shush,” said Hammond grimly. “Jesus, Con. You look like shit.”

  Connelly dropped through the hole in the floor. When his bare feet touched earth he began weeping.

  “It’s okay,” Hammond said. “You’ve got to… Come on, Con, buck up.”

  “Peachy,” said Connelly. “We got to get Peachy out.”

  “Who the hell is Peachy?” said Hammond.

  “Peachy’s my friend.”

  “We don’t have time for this. We still have to get Pike and Rosie out.”

  “Peachy’s my friend,” insisted Connelly.

  “Damn it all.”

  They sawed through Peachy’s floor in minutes. When the floorboard was pulled away Connelly peered through and looked at the face above.

  Connelly blinked. “You’re colored,” he said to Peachy.

  Peachy smiled, white teeth shining bright in his dark face. “Am I? Never noticed.”

  Connelly considered this and shrugged. “Okay. Come on.”

  Peachy wriggled through the hole. He was tall and thin and lanky and his beard and hair were overgrown, much like Connelly’s.

  “I thank you kindly for the exit,” he said to Hammond.

  “Hell,” said Hammond. “We got us a merry band of mother-fuckers now, now don’t we?”

  “What is this place?” said Connelly.

  “A basement,” said Hammond, now grim again. “We think. We dug in through the side of the hill and we thought it was going to take weeks. As it turns out, this hill’s been hollowed out for some time. And… and he’s been doing things down here.”

  “Who?”

  “Your sheriff.”

  “Awful things,” whimpered Roonie. “I don’t know what he does to the prisoners here, but…”

  “He beats them,” said Connelly. “He’s got a little room he does it in.”

  “No,” said Hammond. “He does a little more than that.”