His nausea rose, and his throat spasmed. Seven days, then. Seven. He should try to remember that.
When they folded the blanket around him and carried him through the arched doorway into the church, he fell asleep, apparently of his own accord.
* * *
He regained consciousness as they threw him into the sky, bundled in his cocoon, arms strapped to his sides, legs straight and bound together. Instantly he panicked—he couldn’t move! The rough cloth of the bindings abraded his neck and wrists. He screamed as he fell, to be silenced abruptly as his impact into the blanket knocked the wind from him. He sailed through space and tried to suck air into his lungs, bounced again, saw the squad below clutching the blanket’s edges just before he hit one more time. They were in the swing of it now, and fresh, and for the next few times he flew up horizontally, not spinning, and he could count them. Thirteen in all and…surely two of them were family. A brother? A sister?
I am Jumping Jackson, he thought. They do this day after day.
I never see over the wall.
That church is the same church, its walls blackened by urban pollution, its spire pointing heavenward. Showing them the direction they must throw me.
And it’s the eighth day of this torment.
The eighth day! Clutching at the knowledge, Jumping Jackson felt his panic recede. Whomp! He hit the blanket again, askew, and spun dizzily up into space, hung for an eternity, then the sickening fall back downward. He saw a flash of yellow—surely the markings for a game of some sort, yet not one he recognized. For a moment his consciousness flickered, then he flowed back to himself again as the crazy rhythm echoed in his bones.
He tried not to let his body adjust. If he accustomed himself to this insanity, if it became acceptable, it might last forever. But if he stayed off-kilter and dizzy, it would stop. He remembered that if he was close to throwing up, they’d cease and take him inside for another interval of timeless sleep.
Jackson thrashed within his bonds. He moved only a fraction of an inch, yet in his victory it felt like he twisted and turned. Almost as if he was dancing. Almost as if he was winning. He spun in the air, his ground-church-wall-sky world a striping blur before his eyes. As the tears came, as the hugeness welled up in his stomach and throat, he shouted “You’re my brother, you shit! My sister! And you, you bitch…I should have—oomph!—I…when I had the chance…”
They faltered, tossed him askew, ran to catch up. His gorge rose. He coughed, and heaved.
It stopped. They caught him and stilled him, and bore him to the door in silence.
He smelled their sweat, familiar and almost comforting.
* * *
He fuzzily swam up into consciousness. Black-garbed men carried him in a blanket into an area surrounded by high brick walls. No—some of them were women.
“What happened?” he said. “Am I ill? Was there an accident?”
Without warning, they stretched the blanket out between them and threw him into the sky:
—bundled in his cocoon, arms strapped to his sides, legs straight and bound together, rough cloth abrading his—
He was Jumping Jackson. This is what his loved ones and hated ones did to him, day after day. What they would do for the rest of his life. This was Day Nine of Forever.
Today the terror abated more swiftly than before. He relaxed in his bondage and let himself fly. Really, there was nothing else he could do.
Perhaps they’d break his neck by accident, ending his trial…But his head seemed to be held straight by splints and padding. And they were skilled with the blanket; when he fell badly they’d jerk it sideways as he landed to spill him onto his shoulder and make him take the brunt of the impact full-length.
He studied the sky. Was this truly the ninth day, or just the ninth time they’d brought him out in a single day?
The sky was the same, a cloudy gray. The climate of late fall, perhaps. In another thirty days of being thrown into the sky, it might snow. The asphalt of the schoolyard might grow slick with ice. They might drop him.
Or maybe the weather would mysteriously endure, just as the blanket and the bindings and the black clothes and the dark brickwork endured.
“What’s the point?” he shouted, when he had enough breath. He crashed into the blanket again and met it feet-first with a shock he felt all the way up his spine. Immediately he had a blinding headache. “What the hell are you … oomph…trying to do?”
* * *
Up, down. Abraded neck, wrists. Gray clouds. Jumping Jackson. Day Ten.
None of yesterday’s pain remained. They must be fixing him up overnight with some powerful drugs. Or maybe this was Year Ten and he’d naturally healed in his coma.
The repeated thuds dulled his thoughts. After a while he closed his eyes.
* * *
He came out of a thick, indistinct dream to find that his fraternity brothers were marching him out of the house on a blanket. But that made no sense. He’d graduated years ago. Decades?
Confusion turned to a blind, shrieking panic as they threw him into the sky, bundled in his cocoon, arms strapped to his sides, legs straight and bound together. The rough cloth…
Jackson screamed as the abyss yawned in front of him. Then he slammed back into the blanket and the black-clad men swayed with the force of it and threw themselves backward, jerking the blanket taut, hurling him up once more. The gray sky slid by his eyes. Dazed, he saw a church spire.
He screamed again. College was years ago and indistinct, the time in between an empty void. This wasn’t hazing; this was just torture. Soon, he’d complete his second week of this absurd and painful ritual.
His face thudded into the blanket. His nose bent but did not break. His momentum reversed in a second, and Jumping Jackson flew back into the air.
And laughed, a strange hiccupping sound, for his lungs held barely a thimbleful of air.
Not hazing, but perhaps the principle was the same. A test to destruction, to measure his mettle.
They would not destroy him. Jackson was tougher than they.
Bounce, throw. Up again into the gray sky, not quite high enough to glimpse the world beyond the wall’s crest, beyond this stupid schoolyard.
The schoolyard was their prison, not his. They were bound by it. And they were bound by gravity, but Jackson was not. He was above them all. They’d never break his will, and he would climb to heights they could never reach.
To survive he had to adapt. He must embrace this reality and make it his own. He must dwell on its freedoms—flight, absence of responsibility, immunity from the crippling backache that must affect the others. He must ignore its negative aspects—powerlessness, danger, futility, nausea.
His terror dwindled. Surely this pattern must have been the same in his prior world, where his compatriots had worn no masks and he had worked with them as colleagues, cleaved to them as lovers, raised them as children. He must have had freedoms and constraints. This existence was no different.
To panic was animal. To accommodate, human. He would live and die a human, and that was how he would win.
He relaxed his whole body and allowed the bindings and splints and jumpsuit to control him and keep him straight, as they were designed to do. His eyes closed naturally as he hit the blanket, and opened again as he flew into the sky. He breathed in rhythm with the motion.
The riotous spinning eased. By declining to fight, Jackson was making their job easier. He was assisting his wives, lovers, and brothers in their task. Did they appreciate his cooperation? He could not think how to frame the question, quickly between bounces, without it sounding like a taunt.
They gave themselves to this backbreaking work, day after day. Jackson’s was the easier burden to bear.
His nausea receded, and he began to enjoy the madcap sensations of flight. Surely he had felt this giddy abandon with some of the women below, under different circumstances.
Perhaps his acquiescence was impolite. A good lover should play his part.
The next time he came down flat, he jerked himself rigid as he left the blanket. It helped. Once he got into the swing of it, the Thirteen did not have to work so hard to throw Jackson to the same height, that tantalizing level just short of the wall’s parapet.
Jackson could keep this going all day.
They got their second wind now, his lovers, his friends, his family. Their efforts redoubled, and he matched them. He called out to them, single syllables of encouragement. And they threw him higher still.
They were all imprisoned in this black yard, with nothing to see but the bricks and mortar of the wall and the spire of the church, but perhaps, just perhaps, Jackson could see over the wall, and recount to them what he saw. Share it with his family.
Jackson summoned his strength and gave it everything he had. A subtle electricity flowed between them all.
In his concentration, the final push seemed timeless. He floated down towards his brothers and they stood and waited. He landed sideways-on, shoulder and hip to the cloth, and felt them absorb his impact and bend almost to the ground. His heel grazed the asphalt through the blanket, and then they leaned and jerked, a superhuman pull, a gigantic effort from this masked but familiar clique. Up he went like a bullet, up and up, as if gravity had finally given up the struggle against the team that fought to vanquish it.
“Yes!” called Jackson in exhilaration.
He sailed up, and the wall fell below his eye level, brick by brick. He tilted on his axis very gently, came even with the crest of the wall, then his body was fully above it. Higher still, and now he could see shards of glass twinkling in the concrete coping.
His eyes raked the horizon in a single sweeping arc.
The church was the only building that still stood. Beyond, he saw the blackened remains of walls, shattered towers, smashed windows. Craters pocked a city wreathed in smoke. Houses and halls alike were wrecked and gutted. Legions of shambling and misshapen men picked and clawed their way between the derelict buildings, the rusted cars.
Time slowed as Jackson reached the top of his trajectory. His heart pounded in his throat, ice crystallizing in his veins. This, then, was the world beyond the schoolyard, the world they were locked away from.
He would tell his brothers and sisters and friends. They would face this adversity together.
A makeshift arrow pierced his shoulder and set him spinning. One of the shamblers, his reflexes quickened by anarchy, had seen Jackson appear over the wall and plugged him. Perhaps the shambler had heard his earlier shouting and had been waiting for him to appear. Jackson’s shoulder blazed with pain. He squeaked out a cry, and heard an answering moan from the Thirteen below.
He fell, head over heels over head, and the wall came up like a cat’s eyelid and mercifully screened his view of the devastated city.
Jackson tumbled back towards his family’s loving arms, already dragging in the breath he would need to call out the truth to them. He spun lazily to face them.
The Thirteen walked towards the church door. The giant blanket lay crumpled against the wall where they had thrown it. Beneath him he saw only blackness, lined with the yellow markings of an unknown game.
As Jumping Jackson screamed and plummeted into the ground, not a single one of his family looked back.
Drawn
by Daniel L. Naden
How did it start?
I sit here with Teresa and Anna, huddled in the remains of our apartment, and I wish to hell that I didn’t know. Around us our building is in ruins, walls and ceilings collapsed, two-by-fours poking jaggedly through the debris. Outside the noise of chaos and destruction continues. How did it start? Was it bad luck? Bad choices? I don’t think it really matters now. I just want to hold my wife and my baby and wait for it to be over. When I close my eyes, it all replays. I see the day my daughter was born.
It was ten months ago.
At 12:03 PM, following nine hours of labor, Anna Marie Cooper came into the world, pink and bloody and squalling with gusto. In a flurry of activity, the nurses swabbed, tested, and weighed Anna, wrapped her up in a neat little bundle, and set her into Teresa’s tired arms. Against the backdrop of the buzzing fluorescents, with IVs and wires tangled every which way from the odd collection of equipment surrounding the bed, Teresa and Anna looked like a gift of angels. Mother and child: the Renaissance painters never did the subject justice. It was like light had come into the world and settled on them.
Teresa looked as beautiful as I had ever seen her—an aching grace and peace that tugged at my heart more deeply than I would ever have imagined possible. Anna was a delicate flower, cradled in Teresa’s arms. Tiny fingers clenched into little, chubby fists. A perfectly round face with a dimpled chin, a classic button nose and a shock of black hair. Her eyes…
Anna’s eyes.
Well, that’s where all of this really began.
Ordinarily, when babies are born, their eyes are a deep, dark shade of blue. They don’t usually get their natural eye color for a couple of months, sometimes longer. Anna’s eyes were auburn, a rich, almost-coppery color, shot through with flecks of black and irises that opened into pools of night. When she looked at you with those eyes, you couldn’t look away.
I stood beside Teresa, both of us looking at our baby, and we were spellbound. From a distance, one of the nurses was saying how sometimes babies are born with unique eye colors, assuring us that Anna’s eyes were perfectly ordinary. While we listened to every word she said, neither of us ever looked up from Anna and her perfect, enigmatic eyes.
We were drawn to them—we simply could not look anywhere else.
* * *
Time passed for us like it does for all first-time parents. A lot of sleepless nights and hectic days, rotating through feeding shifts and messy diapers. We had smiles and laughter and tears and scores of other emotions that new moms and dads go through in the earliest stages of their children’s lives. But even from the beginning, there were hints of the shadow to come.
The mobile for Anna’s crib had been a shower gift. It was fairly typical—a collection of dangling moons and leaping cows on a carousel that could be wound up to play a lullaby. It was designed to be secured to the headboard by a clamp with a thumbscrew. At three months old, Anna had been giving us a bit of trouble with bedtime. She could keep herself awake crying for quite a while. Teresa thought if we set up the mobile, it might distract Anna and help her fall asleep. Anna had been fussy all day, so by her bedtime, we were ready to try it. I dug the mobile out of the closet and screwed it onto the headboard of Anna’s crib.
Anna started crying as soon as I set her in her bed. I wound up the mobile, flipped off the light and pulled the door closed, waiting outside and listening.
Almost immediately, she calmed down, evidently fascinated by the new sound and sight. Every now and then, she whimpered, but seemed to be done crying. As I walked away, I heard a clatter and Anna started shrieking.
I opened the door and hurried to her crib. Anna was tangled up in the mobile, screaming in fear and anger. She didn’t appear to be hurt. I scooped her into my arms as Teresa appeared over my shoulder.
“What in the world happened?”
“The mobile fell on her,” I said.
Teresa arched an eyebrow at me.
“I put it up the right way,” I told her. I was whining and not hiding it well.
We examined the headboard. The base of the mobile was still firmly in place. About four inches from the top, the plastic arm that held up the mobile had snapped off. I picked up the part that had fallen into the crib and examined it. The break matched the headboard piece exactly.
“See!” I said, sounding petulant. “It’s broken. She must have pulled it down.”
Teresa regarded me again, this time with a smirk. “Do you know how ludicrous that sounds? She’s a three-month-old!”
“I don’t know,” I replied, deadpanning as best I could, “maybe she jumped…”
Teresa groaned in mock exasperati
on. Together, we tucked Anna into her crib and kissed her good night. I deposited the pieces of the mobile in the trash dumpster outside. We didn’t think of the incident again until three months later when things began to fly around the apartment.
* * *
In retrospect, we should have known.
I can sit here and tell myself that we were new parents and didn’t find it odd the way Anna always seemed to turn up with her favorite teething toy or the TV remote. Or how we’d hear her jangling the car keys that we knew we’d left on the table. I could try to believe that we didn’t feel the pull on our arm whenever she saw her bottle coming. Or that we didn’t notice how we simply couldn’t turn away when she was looking at us. I’d really like to believe we were blind to what was happening with Anna. But I know I’d be lying.
We were happy to pretend that nothing was really odd or different with our daughter. That lasted until the day I came home from work to find Teresa in tears.
For me, the day had been ordinary. I got up and went to work before Teresa and Anna were up. I came home at the normal time, enjoying the unseasonably pleasant weather. The sun had fought its way free of the morning’s overcast and left behind a bright, breezy afternoon. I specifically remember thinking that my life so far was turning out pretty good. It sticks out in my mind because it was the last truly carefree moment I can remember.
Teresa met me at the door of our apartment, her eyes red and her face splotchy. She pulled me in, quickly shutting and locking the door behind me. I heard Anna screeching from her bedroom.
“Oh Pat, I don’t know what to do! It’s Anna, she…”
“What’s wrong with Anna?” I got two steps toward her room before Teresa stopped me. She clung to my arm with a death grip.
“No NO! Let me tell you. Anna was eating and…um…She…Oh God, how can I describe…?”
“WHAT?”
The words were suddenly pouring out of her. “I was feeding Anna…had her strapped into the high chair. She went through a whole jar of strained plums and I left to get another one and…and…well you know how cranky she can get when she’s hungry. She was mad at me because I walked away from her. I set the empty jar on the counter and turned to pull another one from the pantry and when I turned back, the jar wasn’t there!”
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 10