by Joe Lansdale
PRISONER 489
BLACK LABYRINTH II:
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events or organizations in it are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
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Prisoner 489 © 2014 Joe R. Lansdale
Dark Regions Press, LLC
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Edited by Chris Morey
Cover art and interior illustrations © 2014 by Santiago Caruso
Cover and interior design by Cyrus Wraith Walker
Electronic Edition
Black Labyrinth Imprint
Ten original psychological horror novels and novellas from the living masters of horror and dark fiction illustrated by world renowned artist Santiago Caruso published by Dark Regions Press.
Book I: The Walls of the Castle by Tom Piccirilli
Book II: Prisoner 489 by Joe R. Lansdale
Book III: Untitled 2015 novella by Ramsey Campbell
Contents
Prisoner 489
About the Author
About the Artist
About Dark Regions Press
Thank You to All Our Supporters
FOR KEITH
Prisoner 489
Bernard thought his small island was beautiful, though it served an ugly purpose. A necessary service perhaps, but ugly just the same.
The island across the way was larger and less beautiful. It didn’t have the trees of the smaller one, and there were the great and imposing walls of the prison, one side visible from the lesser island’s small but sturdy two-story sanctuary made of shell and rock and shipped-in materials. It was wide and high with seven large rooms and plenty of garage space for a bulldozer, front-end loader, and a workshop, all of those positioned at the center of the building in the wide dog run that could be sealed on both ends by large metal doors with strong locks, as if theft was a problem.
This building, which they called Island Keep, had rows of windows on all sides, and the windows could be opened wide to let in the cool sea breeze. There were trees around the building, and they were tall and gave shadow to the structure during the days when the sun was high and the air was hot. At night they wrapped the place in moon-shadows, and sometimes Bernard would sit at the open window in his bedroom and take in their mystery. There was a gap in the trees, and between them Bernard could see the big island and the walls of the prison. At night the lights of the prison were savagely bright. The prison could be seen clearly from along the shoreline, which was a white sand beach that curved halfway around the island. You could also see the prison clearly from the dock that stuck out in the water. The dock was built of sound, black-painted wood that creaked and moved in high winds and high seas, but held firm.
On all other sides of the small island, once you made your way through the trees that bordered it and that were slightly bent from frequent night winds, all you could see was the sea. On one side was a straight-down wall of rock that ended in jagged pokes of rock and smooth, round boulders, shiny white and large like the backs of partially submerged hippos. They called that part of the little island The Big Drop. It was rumored an earlier caretaker, fed up with isolation and a lack of black tea, his favorite, had thrown himself off the Big Drop and had exploded like a watermelon on the rocks below. Bernard, when he stood on the edge of the Big Drop and looked over, could understand the urge to leap. It was like a siren call. He had experienced it many years before in a car, when on a near whim he nearly weaved his machine right into the path of an oncoming semi. It wasn’t something he had thought about at all, but watching those trucks come toward him he thought of it suddenly, felt his hands tighten on the wheel as if he might do it. Sometimes he wished he had. There were times when he felt that way looking over the edge of The Big Drop.
From his bedroom window in Island Keep, Bernard often looked at the prison as if he might be able to see through its walls, knowing full well if he could he wouldn’t want to. Those pale concrete walls of the prison rose high and thick and stole in the heat of the day like a thief, and the walls from any angle shimmered with ripples of sunlight. If you were to touch the walls on a hot day they could burn you as surely as touching a hot iron. At night when the moon was bright, the walls were the color of clean, white marble. They cooled slowly, but by midnight touching them was like touching a corpse freshly washed in cold well water. Bernard had been on that island for only a short time, as an observer, as part of his training, but he remembered it well, and almost pitied the souls inside, held there by nature and guards and the United Nations. It was a bad place and he didn’t like it, and only went there now when he was to leave for awhile. He exited out from the prison island, went out into the Real World, as it was called, for a week of R&R. He went back to the Real World mainly to flog the dog in some prostitute, but it never really made him feel any better. The whores liked to talk more than he did. He felt as lost in that world as this one. He had served out his prison time, but he had stayed on the job. Why go back when back was nothing he missed. He didn’t always like the isolation here, but ashore on the mainland, he felt pretty much the same way, even though he might be surrounded by people. He had been thinking seriously about giving up his “home” time altogether.
Below Bernard’s window was the garden, and Bernard always thought of it as the Garden of Gethsemane, though why he chose to think of it that way was beyond explanation. It was lush with smaller trees and all manner of plants and hardy flowers; red and yellow, orange and white. A patch of vegetables was grown there from time to time. Bernard didn’t grow them and he didn’t work the garden. Wilson did.
Wilson wasn’t much more than a kid, but he had a way with the greenery. He could grow tomatoes and cucumbers with a wet, rich taste that would make you cry with satisfaction. Wilson had come from a farming family, and he knew what he was doing. He spent a lot of time there, building trellises for tomato vines, hoeing hills of squash and cucumbers and even a few mounds of potatoes. Not to mention beans and random stalks of corn that on some nights you could actually hear growing. The corn gave off a sound like a small man cracking his knuckles.
The white stone path Wilson had built glared in the sunlight, shone in the moonlight, wound like a snake toward the sea but didn’t quite reach the beach. Wilson said he planned to make that happen when he had the time. He had the time, of course; just not the will. The rocks were heavy. He could load them in the scoop of the front-end loader, bring them back and put them in place with it, mostly. But it was time-consuming, and Wilson preferred the plants and vegetables in the garden. Bernard was glad he did. It was a nice garden and seemed right for a beautiful island. Wilson also did other work: driving the digging equipment, fixing this and that. He was handy with many things and dependable, but Toggle was the main guy on all that. Toggle seemed to have been born with a tape measure in one hand, a hammer in the other. He was the kind of guy who could fix a motor and change a tire with harsh language.
The ironic thing was Bernard had taught both of them how to do it all. But now the things he had taught were their jobs, and they were better at it than he ever was. He was the foreman, or some such thing. Wilson and Toggle called him boss, or Bernard, and behind his back Toggle may have called him a son-of-a-bitch for all he knew, as they had never quite jelled. He got
along with Wilson well enough, and Toggle enough to get by, but working on the island was not a case of creating a family.
What blood family he might have had was gone before he had memories, and the memories he had were of an orphanage and later a foster home or two, a priest putting a dick up his ass after he became an altar boy. The priest cried later about it and asked him not to tell because god would forgive them both. Only thing was, Bernard was uncertain what he was supposed to be forgiven for. He was the one who had been raped—and any god that would forgive that priest wasn’t worth believing in.
What life he had went to shit after that. Which was why he was here. Too many petty crimes, too much jail and prison time, and then some officials, men in suits, looked at him through the bars, said: “We think you might be made for better stuff,” and this was supposed to be the better stuff. And when the sun was bright and the sea was blue, or when the night was white with moonlight and the stars were clear in the skies like animal eyes, it was a nice life. It beat prison, a cot, three squares, and an unpleasant rendezvous with Buster, who insisted you lose the underwear and wear your prison jacket like a skirt. It beat looking out through bars and feeling your life ooze away like water through a sieve.
To the far right of the garden, not completely visible from where he now stood at the window, was the cemetery. Like everything else, Island Keep, The Big Drop, they had their name for it: The Lot.
It was The Lot that gave them their duties, though there wasn’t a great amount to do. They waited on news about corpses to come, and in between those arrivals, they just waited. The island was a prison in a way, but without bars and with the freedom to walk about and swim nude in the sea.
Twisted trees with dark bark and thorns the length and thickness of a fat man’s thumb grew scattered about The Lot. There was one large tree at the edge of The Lot, close to the shoreline. It was not a thorny tree and was wide and not very high, but the trunk that held up the vast number of limbs that sprouted out of it was big enough that four men would have to link arms to reach around its circumference.
The graves in The Lot were indicated with simple markers, nothing more than thin white slats with dead black numbers painted on them. The numbers corresponded to names in the record books Bernard kept. There was no information about the occupants—the executed, to be more exact. Not even their date of birth; just the location of their interment, date of their burial, and their number. 73 is buried here. 98 is buried there. And so on. They hardly seemed like records worth keeping.
All in all, there were 488 graves, and they had been laid out over a period of one hundred years. Bernard had been told by Kettle, the boatman who brought supplies over and sometimes the dead, that one hundred of the graves had been dug at the same time to take care of one hundred bad people who had been put down in some kind of uprising on the prison island. There may have been more to the rumor, but that’s all Bernard had heard, all Kettle had told him.
In The Lot there was more space for more graves, and at the current rate of execution—about three a year—it would take some time before the allotted space was filled, unless there was another mass uprising and burial. If The Lot did fill up, Bernard was uncertain what happened then. Maybe a new location, but it was his guess that the graves would be dug up with the bulldozer or the front-end loader, and heaped into one large hole to save space. This would be easy to do when the graves no longer contained anything more than bones. The coffins, such as they were, were made of biodegradable products; cheap wood and hard paper. The bodies were put inside of those after they had been tucked into what looked like long, gray duffle bags. The bags were designed to rot quickly. Like the cheap coffins, they too were biodegradable. And when you got right down to it, so were the corpses. If they did that, he wondered what kind of marker would replace the others. It wasn’t much to think about it, but it was something, and Bernard found that he thought about all manner of things that under normal circumstances might not interest him.
The prisoners in the graves had not only been deadly, they had been different. He wasn’t sure how different, but he knew they were in fact different. Not like your run-of-the-mill rapist or murderer. They were worse than that. He wasn’t sure what it was about them that made them worse, but he knew it was true. They had been evil. Not mustache-twisting evil, but true evil, rotten inside, wearing their blackness deep at the core. It made him shiver just to think about it.
While he was there at the prison for orientation, something all caretakers had to do, one of the guards came to like him and spend time with him. He was kind of Bernard’s guide, the one who helped orient him, let him know just enough about the prison and what was going on there without letting him know too much. The man’s name was Charlie, and Charlie told him that his was the worst job in the world and that a few of the guards had gone mad. Plain snake-licking, ass-clenching mad.
Charlie told him he knew of one guard who had beat his own brains out on a concrete wall, and several had hanged themselves, and a few had gone down to the ocean to drown. For that reason, the time a man or woman worked there as a guard was limited to three years. You could then take a year off and come back for two if you wanted to, and then you were out for good after that. No coming back.
He said he only knew of one guard who returned after leaving, and that he lasted two days before he cut his own throat with broken glass. Charlie said he found himself thinking about bad things from time to time, and he felt it was because so much evil was in that prison that it had a presence, like a shadow that flickered along the corridors and through the cells. He said he dreamed of some of the prisoners, and he dreamed they were trying to suck his own shadow out of him. He said the dream was so real he sometimes checked when walking along the halls, where the light shone bright, to make sure he still had a shadow and that it slid across the wall with him as he walked.
“They are here without writ and without trial, and for these people, that’s how it should be,” Charlie said. “They are the bad of the bad. Only way they leave here is by illness, old age, or electricity.”
Bernard had seen a few of the prisoners—though he was only there for a short time, to await an execution. The deal was, you were going to be a caretaker, and you were taking orientation during an execution, you had to attend. If there was no execution Bernard was uncertain what it would have been replaced with. All he knew was it was his misfortune to have to witness one. They had a big room with a wide glass that you could see through, but the other side was opaque. The person being executed couldn’t see you back. He watched as they strapped in a heavy woman with greasy hair and one eye turned white as a snowball, the other moving in her head as if it thought it might find a place to hide.
She struggled with them, but they got her in the chair. They strapped her down, a thick belt around her waist, straps fastened to her wrists and ankles. They put a rubber pad in her mouth, held there by clamps on either side of her head. They placed a black mask over her eyes and brought the metal cap down and pushed it into place, the wire coiling back to the generator. It made her look like some kind of weird spaceman about to launch into space. There were no last words, no priest, and nothing said. She was strapped in, the warden and the guards stepped back out of the way, and a man wearing a hood threw the switch, which looked like a big lever in a Frankenstein movie. The air hummed like a million bees, and the execution room appeared to waver a little, the way sunlight will do on water. The woman jerked and rose up out of the chair as if she might levitate, but the straps and clamps held her. Smoke curled out of her mouth and out from under the mask and licks of fire slipped from beneath the cap and toasted her ears and turned them and her cheeks black. Her fingers lifted off the chair like quivering worms trying to escape. Then she was still. A guard fanned the smoke away and leaned forward and looked at her. A doctor came into the room and put a stethoscope to her chest, nodded. He removed the mask and her dead eye eased out of the socket and hung down on her cheek by the tendons. The eye was
no longer white: it was red, and there were tendrils of smoke drifting up from it.
At that point, Bernard and the others (he didn’t know any of them) left the room. They were let outside into the fresh air the prisoners inside never tasted, and he stood there with the others, quivering, not knowing them, not speaking to them, and then they were all led away, and within moments he was separated from them and never saw them again and never knew why they were there, only why he was.
Now he had that dark remembrance boxed up in his memory like a Jack-in-the-box. He never knew when it might pop up. From time to time he thought he smelled that woman’s cooking flesh, like bacon burning in a pan, though he had never actually smelled anything, and he could see that dead eye dangling, the way the smoke curled up white to the ceiling and spread out and misted away.
When Bernard asked the boatman, Kettle, about Charlie, the guard, actually inquiring just to have something to say, Kettle told Bernard about three months after he had begun his work on the small island, Charlie had disappeared from the big island. They thought he might have drowned himself and been carried out and deposited somewhere deep down and forever by the sea. No one knew for sure, but no one thought he had left the island alive. The prisoners couldn’t escape, and neither could the guards unless they were taken away by boat or copter. Charlie’s disappearance was long ago, but Bernard thought about it from time to time when he went down to look at the sea. Sometimes he imagined Charlie might wash up. Even after ten years he thought about that. It was ridiculous, but he thought about it anyway. What could be so bad you couldn’t wait out your time to leave? Though Bernard had seen a few of the prisoners, and the execution, he knew nothing about those barred in the Keep, and from what he could tell, it would remain that way for the rest of his days. It was Bernard’s guess he was better off for it.