by Tim McBain
Is that the big nothing, though? That we’re just animals fulfilling our urges and impulses? And once all of the urges are quelled, we’re left to realize that there’s nothing else. There’s no deeper meaning. Not really. Just these complicated imaginations that twist us around and make it hard to see any of it very clearly.
Do we all just move from distraction to distraction in a life that adds up to nothing? And why doesn’t it feel like enough? Why does it all make me feel so empty? Is there any way to make that stop?
I guess Farber will make it stop for me. He knows the way to make all of my bad feelings hold still for good. My hopes and dreams will be dashed on the rocks at Cape Farber. Possibly my brains, too.
Why these thoughts would occur to me now, on the brink of what looks like pretty well inevitable death, I can’t say. Maybe that only heightens that sense, though. That my whole life led to this: I will be sacrificed as part of Riston Farber’s master plan, and I will submit to said sacrifice willingly to spare my friend, a person that has been kind to me.
I got this glimpse of something better, something awesome and weird and hard to believe or understand, but it didn’t lead to anything. It led to me being a suitable candidate for human sacrifice. And there’s nothing I can do about it. For a little snippet in time, it felt like anything was possible. Another world opened up, and I walked there, moved in a place that seemed to be made out of dreams, but in its way it led back to the same big nothing as everything else.
And fuck it. Maybe I was right in the first place. Maybe being honest is what hurts me. Maybe I need to play the game their way, feign power, feign importance. Isn’t that what adults do? I can play it that way. I can fake it just like Farber does. I can bluff. They gave me some time, so it’s not over yet, and I will fight until the end.
When you feel like all is lost, in a way it makes anything possible again.
Chapter 21
I sit outside of the diner again. My heart thuds. I can feel the blood throb in my neck, can see that flutter of pink in the corner of my eye. I catch my face in the rearview and find my skin all flushed with red splotches.
The heavens open up and the snow falls down. I roll down my window to clear the accumulating white away and keep my view clear. I guess it has been even colder than I thought. A coat would be nice, but I’ll be OK.
Nothing of interest transpires inside of Bucky’s. Maybe it’s the weather or something, but I’ve never seen the place so dead. One old guy with saggy jowls sits alone in the corner, eating pancakes. I’ll assume they’re chocolate chip pancakes. In a way I’m thankful for the lull in the action, though. It gives me time to think.
My plan is pretty simple. I will gun down Farber on sight. Pretty straightforward, yeah? That’s where it gets murkier, though. I need to improvise at that point, need to tell these fools something that will convince them to side with me rather than kill my friend.
I think it makes some sense, though. None of these guys are particularly loyal to Farber. I mean any loyalty they have for him is out of fear, I’d say. So once he’s gone, that goes away. And none of them has a reason to want Babinaux dead, either, at least none that I can think of.
So I think if I get the jump on Farber and end him right away, I’ve got a little window of opportunity. If I say the right things, this all comes out OK. No trouble. Nobody gets hurt... aside from Farber, I mean, but fuck him.
I don’t know. It’s crazy, but it makes sense.
I shudder. I can’t decide if it’s from nerves or the cold. Maybe both.
I turn on the windshield wipers, and the blades wipe away the snow. The chill numbs my fingers and the tip of my nose and starts its slow creep into my cheeks and palms. I sort of want to start up the Taurus and drive around the block a few times to get the heat blowing in here, but I can’t somehow. I can’t commit to the movement of leaving here. I sit still.
What if I do it? What if I manage to kill Farber straight away, a point blank death dealt to the back of his head like flipping a switch, and then my words fail me? I’m not some smooth talker. I don’t say the right shit. I’m not even a very likable guy in most ways. Just ask, like, any girls that know me, pretty much.
These are the things I find most maddening in life. The right combination of words exists to make this happen, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll have them. I mean, shit. If all goes wrong, we could both wind up dead. In the absolute worst case scenario I die, Babinaux dies, and Farber lives. Totally possible.
That shower warmth that held me in its arms is long gone now, a gray memory that guttered out like a lantern out of oil.
What would Glenn do? He knew how to improvise, how to impose his will upon the world, upon people. He got me to join his cause. He found a way.
He was a hell of a guy, though. The kind of guy that everyone likes even when he’s being sort of obnoxious as hell. I’m more of a straight-up jerkoff. The kind of guy that you forget all about while I’m still in the room.
I know I bring it up a lot, but after we cracked open that puzzle sphere, Glenn was like a damn super hero at the airport, elbowing a bunch of jags in the back to get them out of the damn way. It was great.
And I get that feeling like I’m about to have an idea, like something big shifting into focus. The smart part of my brain knows something important, it’s excited, but it’s taking the dumb part of my brain--the me part--a second to catch up.
OK the little tickle is getting stronger. Here it comes.
Holy shit.
Chapter 22
My feet slide out from under me on the sidewalk between the driveway and the front door. I guess that’s what I get for running in this snow and sleet. I catch myself enough to prevent a super hard ass-first landing, but I overcorrect and fall forward to my knees. The key jerks out of my fingers on impact, and I bite my tongue super hard.
I barely even feel the tongue for now, though. I watch the key tumble in the air in slow motion, terrified that I will lose it for good in the snowy ground cover to either side of the sidewalk. I lurch forward into a dive after it, like a punt returner trying to reel in a muffed ball and save some face.
The key disappears into the Virginia creeper, into the snow and greenery. I land flat on my belly, half on the concrete and half in the plants. My hands sink into the snowy plant life right at the spot where it entered. I feel around, fingers fidgeting like spider legs.
Got it.
I pull the key out of the pile, recovering my fumble. I want to do a touchdown dance or something, but I pretend like I’ve been there before. I show a little class.
Inside of Glenn’s I slide off my shoes, not to prevent tracking slushy stuff around so much as to avoid slipping and falling. Slick shoes + super smooth floors = crash landings.
I run to the library, and my heart sinks. It’s gone. It was right there on the shelf, holding up the Zelazny book that now slumps over to lean against the sideboard. Now? Gone.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
I bring my hands to my forehead. I pace back and forth, the wood floor squeaking underfoot.
Think, Grobnagger, think. It couldn’t just walk away. Did someone come here and get it? It seems so unlikely, but what else? OK, OK... Don’t panic. That’s all. Just don’t panic.
And I realize that I’ve been panicking this whole time. The more I say to myself, “Don’t panic,” the more I am freaking out, flitting from place to place like an idiot moth that thinks every light is the moon and tries to fly circles around it. Total dumbfuck.
I close my eyes, and I suck in a huge breath, hold it, hold it, and then let it out all slow. Maybe it helps. It feels like it, but I don’t trust myself to gauge this properly. I’m biased.
The furnace clicks on while I think. It’s weird that the house continues to operate after its owner passes away. The temperature is maintained for no good reason. The hot water heater does its thing, too.
Forget that, though. Think.
I picked th
rough this room pretty good. I probably moved it, though I can’t imagine a circumstance where I would have left this room with it. It’s not impossible, like those times you catch yourself about to put the remote in the freezer or something like that. Admittedly, I’ve been distracted so that wouldn’t surprise me. Odds are it’s here. That makes the task seem smaller, more manageable.
I open my eyes and go to work, scanning up and down every shelf of books. I do this with care, every move deliberate, my focus sharpening until all the world outside of that image falls away. I see only the stacks of books. And even still, I find nothing.
Damn. It doesn’t make sense.
I glance down at Glenn’s chair, and there it is. The puzzle sphere nestles into the corner, lodged in the spot where the seat, arm and back of the recliner meet. I must have tossed it out of the way when peeking behind the books for some kind of awesome wall safe that never materialized back there.
A jolt of adrenalin goes through me, the excited kind, which I haven’t felt in a while, rather than the scared shitless kind, which I feel with alarming frequency. This is just what I was looking for. When I last saw it, it was still cracked in half, the two sides laid on the dining room table next to each other like shucked clam shells. So Glenn put it back together, and he put it somewhere out of the way. Maybe he put something in there, too. Something important. It would be ironic to store anything important in the mall sphere with Youtube videos showing how to open it, but it seems like his style somehow.
I don’t know. My gut was so sure a few minutes ago. I was in such a fever to find the damn thing, certain it would contain my salvation.
But it suddenly seems far fetched. A little silly. What if he just wanted it out of the way and slapped it together? Totally plausible.
Jesus. I almost don’t want to open it. I’ll be so fucked if it’s empty. Right now I still have this glimmer of hope inside of me, some idiot child part that still believes. Once I peel these two halves apart and find emptiness inside, I will have nothing. Officially.
Holding the sphere upside down, I press and hold the button to reset the contraption. I hear the ball bearings scrape around in there, metal rolling on metal. I think it worked.
I click the metal ring around the sphere until the ball bearings clink down a layer. Then I wind it the other way, slowly, giving the little metal balls long enough to descend each step of the way if it’s meant to be. On the ninth step, they go down, chiming against the bottom level.
So this is the tricky part, the part that threw Glenn and I at first. If you don’t apply enough muscle at this stage of the process, you fail and have to start over, which is frustrating.
I slam the thing against the corner of the end table. Glenn’s glasses slide over the top of his book, and I gasp a little, but they dangle at the edge, don’t quite fall off. This somehow relieves me. I push them back to a safe area away from the edge. Even though he’s dead, I would hate to break his glasses.
I don’t know.
I take a deep breath, pressing the button as I exhale. The fingernails of the opposite hand scrabble along the seam to find purchase. I grip it. I rip it. It peels apart like a mouth, the back half sticking together so the open maw faces me. I can almost see inside, but I can’t get ahead of myself.
I change grips, point the orifice away from me and dig my fingernails into the crease on the stuck side. I pull it. Hard. It pops, and for a second, the pieces fall away from me, sliding out of my fingertips, the force of the pull yanking them apart from each other. But my reflexes kick in and I snag them out of the air, one then the other, without really thinking about it.
For a second I just hold them, the conscious part of my brain marveling at the physical act my instincts just pulled off. But I don’t have time to appreciate my athletic prowess for long. Time to see what this egg holds.
I turn the bottom shell toward me, squinting like part of me wants to close my eyes and never actually see inside. A piece of paper faces me, bubbled around the sphere’s cargo. The handwriting upon it is neat and small. Glenn’s.
“Thought you might need this some day,” the handwriting says.
I ease the dome of paper out, prying along the edges to get it loose. There is more writing on the back, but it’s in a language I don’t understand. Maybe a code or something. When I see the contents of the chamber, I know I was right, and I know what I need to do. It’s a huge relief.
Underneath the paper, I find three tiny baggies of black powder, the instruction leaflet from a child’s magic trick.
And a thumb.
Chapter 23
I stride into the hospital, a little surprised to find the front doors both unlocked and unmanned. I checked a couple of side doors first and found them chained. I took that to mean that the place had been secured. Apparently not.
The building may look a little rickety on the outside, but the inside is more... What are the words I’m looking for? Defiled? Ravaged? Hm... I’m going with befouled this time. Seems funnier.
Graffiti scrawls everywhere, most of it either obscene nonsense like, “Fuck your cock ass!” or crude spray paintings of dicks and scrotums. Very phallic, generally speaking, as graffiti often is, I guess. Cracked tiles cover the floors, like spider webs of dark brown crevices spiraling every which way underfoot.
Aside from the signs of erosion and vandalism, though, it really reminds of walking into a school. The glass doors, the high ceilings, the tiled floors and brick walls making all of the sounds bounce around a certain familiar way. It looks right. It feels right. It even smells right.
It smells like this time in second grade when Doug Jensen threw up chunky orange sludge all over the floor right next to my desk, and the janitor came and dumped sawdust all over it. Then later he came and vacuumed it up. Bam. Puke gone. The unpleasant vomit odor replaced by the unpleasant sawdust odor... I think.
I mean, I think the sawdust was scented. Of course, at the time, I also believed it to be a special cleaning product with antibacterial and possibly mild magical qualities, so it’s hard to trust my impression that it was scented with any sense of certainty. In any case, this procedure was much more interesting to me than anything else we learned all year. In fact, I remember nothing else particular from second grade aside from watching Michael Asher pick his nose and eat it. Forget that, though. I learned how to clean up vomit. It was a revelation. I told my grandma we needed to buy this special sawdust. I could hardly wait to puke everywhere just so we could use the dust.
Anyway, it smells like that here, like the special sawdust dumped on orange throw up.
The reception area appears on my right as I pass through the second set of glass doors and make my way another 10 or 15 feet down the hall. From there, the entrance pathway leads into a brick wall in front of me. So as I often seem to do lately, I pick a direction – left, in this case – and walk.
Everything looks foreign. Vacant. Creepy. The thin layer of painted plaster along the hall walls has chipped away almost entirely, revealing the bare bricks underneath. The paint was somewhere between avocado and armadillo green, so it may have looked worse before. It’s debatable. Florescent light fixtures dangle from overhead, no longer secured to the ceiling all that well. A few lie shattered on the floor, their bulbs and bodies broken by their leaps.
Anyway, the tunnel region that I traveled with Babinaux seemed in much nicer condition from what I remember. I suppose I’ve been through this area of the hospital before, though I was unconscious on the route to my cell.
There’s plenty of light streaming in the rows of front doors and the oversized windows there. As I move down the hallway, it grows dimmer, though. The shadows creep closer and thicken into something almost solid along the walls. I can see, though. Not well, but I can see.
My footsteps echo up and down the hall, which multiplies the creep factor some two to four times, I’d say. I consider trying to walk on my toes more to deaden the clatter a little, but what would the point be? I mean, I’
m not trying to hide or sneak up on anyone or anything like that. In fact, I’m turning myself in over a day early. I’m banking on that playing a role in the events about to unfold, but we’ll see.
It’s a hunch. It reminds me of playing poker. I know what makes my opponent comfortable, so I’m doing the opposite. I’m creating a sliver of an advantage by throwing him off. I think I know how he’ll play back at my move, and it’s exactly what I need him to do. So yeah. Should work. Might work. Maybe. The stakes are high as hell, though.
Like I said, we will see.
The hall grows a touch broader as I move along. Junk-filled rooms populate the area behind most every doorway to my left and right, at least from what I can see. Not all of the doors are open, but the scenery suggests more of the same beyond the closed ones.
A water-stained hospital bed sits under a rotted out circle in the ceiling. Other beds are overturned, slashed open so the guts spill out. Rusted metal trays and utensils intermingle in piles with bed pans and ratted up towels and gowns. Just walking through here with a camera would result in a pretty good amount of usable visuals for a found-footage horror movie about a TV crew looking for ghost activity in an abandoned asylum, which is the plot line of roughly 50% of such movies. And I know this because I watch them all for reasons that are never quite clear to me.
I look down at my hand, but I make myself look away at once. Don’t look at it, fuckhead. That’s pretty much rule number one if this is going to work.
I tilt my head, looking up at the cobwebs matted along the edges of the ceiling. That will be my move whenever I get the urge to look at my hand. I will tilt my head like I’m looking off into space.
Hopefully that’s good enough. Sheesh. The whole thing makes me so nervous. I rub my opposite thumb and forefinger into my eyelids like I can wipe the anxiety away. Doesn’t work.
I pass some elevators, which look to be out of order considering the large quantity of yellow tape stretched across the doors along with the large sign that says, “Out of Order,” in red letters. I can take a hint.