Ignoring Rigby’s glare, I worked my mop, enjoying the squelch it made. Without my realising, I was soon watching the boy again, who sat alone in the far corner of the rec room.
The sound of the odd tooth dropping into the tobacco tin should have assured me that Rigby was hard at it, but I suddenly saw he was watching me watch the boy. The hint of a smile tugged the corners of his mouth. His eyes gleamed darkly. His position on the floor reminded me of some smug celebrity pressing his palms into the Walk of Fame, which isn’t to imply that Rigby was in any way photogenic.
“What is it?” I demanded, gesturing angrily at my mop. Admittedly my thoughts had been elsewhere, but the effort I’d put into my task since Rigby’s bollocking had doubled.
Rigby gave a rotten chuckle. “Nothing,” he sing-songed, leaving a pause for either punchline or put-down. He stood with a groan, clutching the small of his back as though it were an aching war wound, the kind that played up when even the most minimal exertion was performed. He crept into my personal space to nudge my ribs with an elbow, jerking his head in the boy’s direction.
“There’s Thailand for things like that, you know,” he said, adding a wink, as if taking it into his confidence that he’d caught—seen—me looking at the boy.
“If you must talk that drivel, at least have the sense to lower your voice,” I said, relishing his expression as I turned his attention to Pinkus.
Pinkus stood by himself by the ping-pong table, head bowed, one hand rolling a ping-pong ball around and around on the table, the other just as rhythmically stimulating his balls through a hole in his trouser pocket. Pinkus was a paederast; to remind him of past adventures in Thailand was unwise, as Rigby ceded with a guilty little nod. Nostalgia was routinely discouraged at the Hospital.
“Wasn’t thinking,” he muttered, a misunderstood comedian.
“Now there’s a surprise,” I smirked. And then blindly I stepped onto the blood-slick floor. I cringe to think of my superior expression when I lost my balance. I danced a mad tarantella, arms pinwheeling, before my legs betrayed me and I crashed onto my back. My breath fled my lungs. My eyes blurred through tears. I saw my mop still standing upright...before it clattered by my head like a felled tree.
Rigby roared with laughter. There were only a handful of patients in the rec room to witness my humiliation, the boy included, yet still the applause that greeted my fall deafened me like a football crowd. Still winded, I looked about helplessly while they mocked me, pointing and jeering.
I saw the boy softly clapping his hands, like a clockwork monkey with cymbals.
I could feel the back of my shirt soaked through, Burrows’s blood on my skin. I reached for Rigby with a trembling hand. “Help me up, for Christ’s sake...” Rigby hauled me to my feet with one hand, with the other still wiping away his tears of laughter.
I wobbled like a wino, holding out my arms for balance as the room cartwheeled. Rigby cackled and clapped me hard on the back. Managing to compose myself, I wiped a string of drool from the corner of my mouth, the applause of the patients still ringing in my ears. “Jeez,” Rigby deadpanned. “Are you alright, Moss?”
“Piss off.” I grabbed my mop and got back to work, head down, ignoring the stickiness of the shirt glued to my back.
The patients were restless. Though their wild laughter had trailed off when Rigby hauled me up, the room was electrified. They wouldn’t forget my little accident any time soon. At least until their next treatment of shock therapy.
Rigby shushed the madmen with a sharp clap of his hands. The rec room fell silent. Shamed faces stared at their shoes. The patients knew better than to defy the orderlies. Even I, on occasion, had been known to vent my frustrations on the patients—as I admit to have been contemplating then—but Rigby was especially brutal, and the patients were right to mind him.
Rigby snapped shut his tobacco tin and slipped it inside his breast pocket. “Well, I’m all done here. I’ll leave you to it,” he said, adding, “careful now.” He flashed an ugly grin and then left the room, still shaking his head in amusement. He would waste no time in sharing my humiliation with the other orderlies.
With Rigby gone, I stopped mopping. Still seething with rage, I whirled towards the patients, daring someone to meet my eye. But only one person did.
In my rage I’d forgotten the boy. And I wasn’t likely to hit him. He was such a frail creature, I was sure I’d break him. I dropped my mop in its bucket and wheeled it towards the boy, his head rising comically as I approached. There was barely an ounce of flesh on him. Skin clung to bone like shrink-wrap plastic. It was a living skeleton looking back at me. I assumed my most authoritative pose, hardening my expression.
“What’s your name?” No reply. “Well? Speak up, son.”
The boy just stared. He gave a slight shake of his head.
I wasn’t sure if he was playing silly beggars. “What do you mean, no? What’s your bloody name?” I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but it didn’t seem to disturb him in the slightest. He was watching my mouth.
The boy raised a bony finger to his own mouth, and again shook his head.
“I don’t understand...” It was like speaking to a mime.
The boy opened his mouth. He had no tongue. A gnarled pink stub waggled at the back of his throat. It appeared to have been bitten off.
“Oh, I see...” I said, when my revulsion had passed.
The boy looked at my chest, where my pools coupon and a pencil jutted from my breast pocket. He pointed.
“You want this?”
He nodded.
I couldn’t give him the pencil. It was against Hospital rules. But the boy continued to stare, and something in his eyes intrigued me; he yearned to communicate. Curiosity got the better of me, and so against my judgement I gave him the pencil and the pools coupon to write on; it was out of date and I’d bastard lost, anyway.
He began to write, his hand neat, as I’d expected since he couldn’t speak, but small as a pinhead and condensed; like the journal of a serial killer, and I’d seen a few in my time at the Hospital. When he showed me what he had written I was forced to squint.
My name is Christopher Dodd. I am here because I have been a naughty boy.
He nodded at me, gesturing for the coupon to be returned. Introductions made, he continued to write. I watched as the words poured out of him, this boy possessed. I looked at the bandages covering his skull, his ears, and surmised that the poor sod was likely deaf as well as mute.
I left him to continue, returning to my task of scrubbing Burrows’s face off the floor. When I was done, the scratching of his pencil adding eerie accompaniment to the squelching of my mop, Christopher Dodd had stopped writing, the pools coupon filled with words in his lap. He stared at me with tired eyes, as if whatever he’d written had drained him. Naturally, I was curious to see what that was.
- - -
With Dodd’s story in my pocket, I wheeled my mop out of the rec room. As he’d handed me the paper I offered him a pursed smile of thanks, which he didn’t return. He was staring into space again—lost in his own little deaf-mute world—as he had been when I first noticed him.
I hurried to the staff locker room, where I could read under the pretence of cleaning my uniform.
When I was 13 my tongue started saying bad things. Bad things I was thinking. Things about Adrian and Ruth my foster parents. If I was to tell you some of the bad things my tongue was saying you’d wish you hadn’t heard and be angry. They were really bad. Honest. I didn’t want my ears to hear the bad things my tongue was saying. So I bit off my tongue and then I swallowed it. Adrian and Ruth sent me to a special hospital where I stayed until I was sixteen. I didn’t think any bad things in the hospital. Or if I did I didn’t have the tongue to say them. So Adrian and Ruth said they would have me back. But back home my ears kept remembering what my tongue had said. Bad things. Bad things. Bad things. I couldn’t make it stop. It wouldn’t stop. Bad things. I didn’t know what to do. I cou
ldn’t tell Adrian and Ruth. Not after they’d been nice and taken me back. And I couldn’t tell the doctor from the special hospital who used to visit me sometimes. He’d only take me away again. Bad things. Bad things. Bad things. I don’t remember, but one day I was in the kitchen and Adrian and Ruth were on the floor and there was lots of blood and they were dead and there was a knife in my hand. The really big one Adrian used to carve the Sunday roast with. I cried and cried. Then I washed the blood off me. I went in the garage and I fetched an axe and a saw and the hedge shears. And some rubbish sacks. Adrian fit in 3. Ruth fit in 1 and a bit. The kitchen was a bit of a mess. Ruth wouldn’t have liked that. I sat at the table with the shears on my lap and I looked at the rubbish sacks and I cried. Because I’d liked Adrian and Ruth. And I could hear them inside the sacks saying “Why did you do this to us, you naughty boy? We always looked after you.” I tried to tell them it wasn’t me. Not really. But they didn’t believe me. Bad things. I put one of my ears in the shears and I cut it off. Then I put my other ear in the shears and cut that one off too. It hurt a lot. There was a lot of blood. Not as much as Adrian and Ruth. But still a lot. I sat there with blood dripping down me and my ears on the floor and then a policeman came round and I don’t remember.
The paper trembled in my hands as I read. I was sitting by my locker, sucking at a cigarette. This would take some beating. What would The News of the Screws pay for this shit? I wondered. I smiled at the prospect, dropping my cigarette lighter into my breast pocket.
I froze.
I felt in my pocket for the—
(oh sweet god jesus)
—the pencil!
The pools coupon seesawed to the floor as I bolted from the room.
Things have been better here. But it’s scary sometimes. And the people are weird. I just try to be good. I just want to be good. But my eyes won’t let me because they’re showing me that people aren’t what they seem. That inside everyone is full up with bad things. My eyes are showing me bad things bad things bad things. That I don’t want to do. That I don’t even want to see. And I won’t.
I reported it after racing back to the locker room and burning Dodd’s story. Before an inquiry commenced, Rigby and I warned the patients in the rec room against speaking out. God help me if any mention of what they’d seen ever reached official ears. Thankfully, the pencil was never linked to me.
In my heart, I know that the patients said nothing, not through fear of physical abuse, but because they wanted to savour it; seeing Dodd plunge my pencil into his eyes, again and again, screaming a mute’s silent scream, until it had disappeared to the eraser in his left eye. They didn’t want this image to fade with counselling.
It was our secret.
The Afterlife of Ellen Easterling
by Michael Penkas
Ellen Easterling had decided to stay in the house where she’d died, rather than the apartment where she’d lived. It was a nice enough apartment for a single woman, but the only window looked onto a brick wall and all the rooms smelled faintly of cabbage from her neighbours’ cooking. The house she’d died in, on the other hand, smelled like vanilla and cinnamon. The windows in back looked out onto a vast tree-filled yard. The walls were all painted off-white and, during the day, sunlight would stream in through every window and fill the place. On a good day, she could feel the light flowing through her and it was unlike any pleasure she’d known while living.
Most days, while Ted was working, she would walk from room to room, finding the best place to feel the light. When she wasn’t walking, she would often sit in the kitchen and stare out the window into the backyard. Living things looked so much more interesting now that she was dead. There were squirrels and birds and chipmunks and rabbits and the occasional child who snuck in to retrieve a ball. And there were cats, which were especially notable because they seemed to be the only ones who could see her. Whenever she saw a cat wander into the yard, she would wave and it would stare at her long enough to show that it saw her, that it acknowledged her, before moving on. Cats cared no more for the dead than the living, apparently, but she still regretted never getting one.
On occasion, she would go into the living room and watch television. It had taken her a week to muster the strength to turn on the set. The soap operas and talk shows could be distracting, but frankly they were never as interesting as just staring out the back window or soaking in sunlight. She could watch whatever videos Ted had left in the cassette player, but they were usually homemade films that disturbed her. Sometimes it was fun just to leave the television turned on to a station that Ted never watched, so that he’d wonder about it when he got home from work.
The only part of the house where Ellen never went was the basement. That was where Ted had tortured and killed her six weeks earlier. As soon as she’d died, she’d gotten out of that basement and hadn’t gone back down there since.
It was half-past six when Ellen began to wonder what was keeping Ted. He always came home by six o’clock. He would put something in the microwave and sit down to watch the news on television. Sometimes, she’d sit beside him, touching whatever he’d heated up to absorb some of its warmth. This would always leave fingerprint-sized cold spots on the food that bothered him. Sometimes, she’d run her fingers through his hair, which would raise it and make him shiver. The best moments were between commercial breaks when the screen went black for maybe half a second and Ted could swear that he saw a woman sitting beside him in the reflection. Sometimes she would grin or contort her face in a mock-scream just to maximize the effect.
At night, while he slept and she didn’t, Ellen would sometimes whisper to Ted. She told him about her older sister and the terrible fights she had with her mother and the dreams she’d given up on and how she’d always planned to adopt a child and what she’d been thinking that night when he’d picked her up at the singles bar. Sometimes she told him about what she’d watched on television or what she’d seen in his yard that day. She didn’t know if her words could be heard in his dreams; but she did know that he never looked happy in the morning if she’d been whispering to him through the night. Another favorite nighttime diversion for her would be to write something on the mirror over the bathroom sink with her fingertip. When the room filled with steam from the shower the next morning, the writing would frost over and be visible to him. She’d tried MURDERER and RAPIST and BASTARD, but found she got the best reaction with I’M WAITING FOR YOU.
It was nearly ten o’clock when Ted finally came into the house. Beside him was a blond woman in her early thirties, obviously drunk. She was dressed for office work and stumbled on her low heels over the threshold. Ted knelt down and quickly slipped the shoes off her feet, placing them on a mat beside the door. He let a palm linger for several seconds on her ankle before standing up. “That better?”
The blonde nodded. “Much.” She looked around the living room. “You have a nice house.”
“Thanks, can I get you something to drink?”
“Maybe a cup of coffee.”
As the two of them walked through the living room, Ellen pressed the power button on the television’s remote control and the set sprang to glowing life.
The blonde pulled back from the set. “Shit. What happened?”
Ted shook his head, trying not to look worried and almost succeeding. “It...just goes on like that once in a while. I don’t know why.” He moved towards the remote when Ellen pressed another button, the one that turned on the video player. The screen was filled with an image of Ellen Easterling, six weeks ago, naked and strapped to a metal autopsy table that Ted had set up in his basement. There were small cuts criss-crossing her body as she pulled at the restraints. A butcher knife came into the frame, sliding slowly up her inner thigh before the blade sank into—
The screen went black as Ted took hold of the remote control. “It must be the neighbour’s remote. Our houses are close enough to one another that the signal just crosses over to my set.”
“What was
that?” the blonde asked, but looking only mildly concerned.
“One of the movie channels, I guess,” Ted offered dismissively. “I should probably cancel them. Never anything good on.”
Satisfied with his answer, the woman joined him in the kitchen for coffee. Beyond making the coffee unpleasantly cool, there wasn’t much that Ellen could do to help her. She just watched, mildly surprised that he used nearly the exact words with this woman as he’d used with her. The same words calmed her. The same words aroused her. The same words made her laugh. The same words made her reach out to touch his hand so gently. The same words convinced her that there was just something interesting that he wanted to show her in the basement.
Once the two of them went into the basement, Ellen didn’t follow. She sat by the door and stared at the clock above the oven. It was five after eleven when they’d gone down there. The sounds of a struggle came almost immediately and ended quickly. The woman began talking at 11:23. She began crying at 11:26. The screaming had begun one minute later and continued, on and off, for the next forty minutes. After that, the screams became more infrequent over the next four hours. Ellen remembered that Ted would occasionally stop to cauterize the wounds he’d made, probably to prevent her from dying of blood loss. The screams would grow fainter, breathier for a time before regaining their volume once again. Ted was probably pouring a glass of water into her mouth from time to time like he’d done for Ellen, to keep her throat from drying out completely.
At 4:37 in the morning, Ellen Easterling looked at the door leading into the basement and saw the blonde standing against it, staring back at her. She was so pale. Ellen hadn’t been able to properly see herself in a mirror since she’d died and wondered if she looked that pale as well. If so, it was no wonder that the cats wouldn’t come near her.
One Buck Horror: Volume Two Page 3