by Nico Augusto
“Sure, thank you,” Eddie followed her to the garage where she opened the door to reveal a white Ford pickup with a double cab. As soon as he saw it, he knew it wasn’t the right one. He thanked her and headed on again.
Eddie was able to talk to four of the seven people on his list that morning. He would see the others the following day if he didn’t get anything from the last one on his list. That was the one the waitress told him was on the “bad side of town.”
Eddie had lunch and then drove out to find the address of the last one. The house stood alone just on the edge of town. It was not in a terrible state from the outside, yet not remarkable well kept by any means. It was probably about thirty or forty years old and it was just a square of brick walls with four windows in front that didn’t add a thing to the aesthetics of the place. There was a small cement porch out front and Eddie saw a woman probably in her late fifties sitting in a folding chair looking down at him as he approached.
He introduced himself and the woman said,
“I’m Elizabeth Lewis,” the woman told him.
“I’m looking for the owner of a white Ford pick-up. He may have witnessed an accident over in New Jersey a few weeks ago.”
“The woman had a strange way about her. She didn’t seem upset or concerned or the least bit suspicious that a New York City detective was here in Little Rock asking questions about an accident that happened in New Jersey. All she said, was,
“I don’t have no truck,” she said.
Eddie looked at the paper in his hand and said, “It says it’s registered to a Frank Lewis at this address.”
“We best talk about this inside,” she said. Her tone was the same, but something about her demeanor had changed.
Eddie cautiously followed the woman inside the house and after taking a quick look around, he took the seat she offered him. Once they both sat down she said, “Frank ain’t been around here for a long time. I’m not sure why he would use this address.”
“And Frank is?”
“My son. He’s…disturbed detective. He’s been in trouble most of his life.” She said that with a matter-of-fact voice. She wasn’t complaining, she was just stating the facts.
“Is Frank here right now?” Eddie asked.
“No, I told you, he doesn’t come here anymore. I’m glad of it. The boy ain’t right in the head.”
“Can you tell me about him? Where does he live? How can I get ahold of him?”
“I don’t know where he’s at and I doubt that he’s working. He don’t keep a job for long.”
“What kind of work does he do?” Eddie asked her.
“Nothing specific. He gets a job here and there…fast food, mechanics…Hell; he was even into taxidermy for a while. Like I said though, I ain’t seen him in a while….”
While the woman was talking, Eddie was taking a better stock of the house around him. It was a dark…depressing little place. There were no school pictures on the walls of a young Frank…no family vacation photos….the windows were covered with dark black curtains and the room was lit with a single naked bulb on a string in the center of the room. The furniture was old and stained and the only wall decoration in the place resembled a pentagram. The whole place gave Eddie the creeps and made him determined to find and talk to this Frank person.
“Does Frank still have a room here?”
“I ain’t touched it since he left. He’s got a temper…I try not to make him angry….” The old woman showed Eddie to Frank’s room and she left him there. Eddie looked around at the walls, from the looks of it, Frank hadn’t been here…or at least updated anything since he was a teenager. There were posters on the wall of teen movies and singers and an old dusty hi-fi system in the corner. There were stacks of clothes that had been in one place for so long they’d gathered dust. He didn’t find anything special there, so he went back out to once again talk to Frank’s mother.
“Mrs. Lewis, I need you to tell me everything you can about Frank, as far back as his childhood.”
“Ain’t much to tell. He’s a “special” man. He grew up here with his Daddy and me. He was always an imaginative child. He used to tell people that we were into satanic cults and that we waited around for the darkness to come nourish itself off of our neighbors. Got some teachers and CPS workers all in an uproar over it once. He even told them I kept him in a closet when he came in from school. It were all nonsense that he made up in his head.”
“Why would he tell people things like that?” Eddie asked. His inclination was to believe it. He’d found out since becoming a police officer that in cases where children reported abuse against their parents it was usually true.
“He was just always different. We was poor and I couldn’t afford to take him to no fancy doctors for a diagnosis, but the truth was my family has some schizophrenia in it and I think maybe Frank got a touch of that. He tried to make himself “normal” by inventing his own world. At school he was always getting picked on and beat up for acting crazy. He used to talk to himself…all the time and he was never happy…saddest kid you ever seen. ” The woman actually said that like she thought he’d deserved that kind of treatment. The poor kid probably talked to himself because he didn’t have anyone else to talk to…no one who cared about him anyways. Eddie was feeling sorry for Frank…at least the child version of him. She wasn’t finished yet,
“When he was a teenager, he stopped talking…to everyone real anyways. He talked to someone that no one else could see. He called him “Frank” too. Weird kid, I’m telling you.”
“How old was he when he moved out?”
She shrugged. What kind of mother doesn’t know how old their child is when they move out of the house?
“He got beat up real bad one Thanksgiving. He was out in the woods and I don’t doubt he brought it on, playing with that invisible friend of his. A group of kids jumped on him and beat him senseless. He spent a couple a days in the hospital…or maybe more…anyways, he told me he was in a coma for two days.”
“He told you? You weren’t there?” Eddie didn’t want her to stop giving him information, so he’d been trying to control his tone, but that was too much.
“I didn’t know he was in the hospital until he got home. They should call us or something. He was ranting and raving about people called “The Banished” who needed him in Heaven. I had to laugh at that, Frank in Heaven? That’s a joke right there. Anyways, he packed up a bag and took off that day. He’s come around a time or two since to steal from me. He got even more hateful than ever. He didn’t even bother attending to his daddy’s funeral.”
“I need to know where you think he might be, ma’am…”
“I told you, I ain’t seen him in a long time. Don’t you have enough information from me?”
“No, I don’t. I need you to give me some detail, something that could help me to find him. Was there a place he used to hide himself, where he felt good, maybe a kind of shelter of his? Try to remember!”
She thought about it and then finally said, “There was something like that. When he was young, after the incident with the children from the village who had sent him to the hospital he used to go the old cabin near the treatment plant. I saw him there once.”
“Can you show me on the map where it was?” Eddie said, excited.
She showed him where the treatment plant was on the map and then said,
“It’s up there around the back side of the plant. There ain’t no real road leading to it, just dirt.”
“Mrs. Lewis, what else can you tell me about Frank?”
“Like what do you mean?” she said. Eddie had to wonder if she knew her son at all even before he left.
“How about his appearance, what does he look like?”
She shrugged and said, “He’s plain. He’s got light hair and pale blue eyes. His skin always looks pasty when it ain’t covered in acne…you know, just plain.”
Eddie almost shuddered at the lack of interest this woman showed in her own offspr
ing. “What about photographs? Do you have any pictures of him?”
She looked like she was thinking about it and then she got up and went over to a desk that sat in the corner. She took out an old album and handed it to Eddie. He flipped through it, disappointed to see that they were all school photos and only went up to the third or fourth grade. When he’d finished he looked at her and said,
“You don’t have anything more recent than this?”
She shook her head and said, “You know, he’s just plain. Who wants a picture of that on their wall?”
Eddie left with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Such a lack of feeling for your own child was unimaginable to him. He’d been a cop for a long time and he’d talked to a lot of people. As far as the bad mother award goes, this woman took the cake.
Eddie at least left the Lewis house with directions to the old cabin Frank’s mother said he used to stay at sometimes. The place was several miles outside of town and Eddie drove through torrents of rain and mud to get there. He finally came to a place in the road that was so muddy and slippery he could no longer get enough traction to drive. Worried about getting stuck in the mud, he got out and began to walk the rest of the way.
The air smelled terrible. The smoke coming from the treatment plant filled the air with the smell of human waste. Eddie would have liked to travel quicker and get out of the smell faster, but he was forced to walk slowly both by the weather and the conditions of the dirt path he was walking on. He had his weapon out and in his hand just in case Frank was in the cabin or somewhere in the woods along the way. After the talk with his mother Eddie was convinced that if he wasn’t his guy, he was dangerous at the very least.
He walked through the woods which were marked as a “hunting preserve.” There was no one else around and from the looks of the tangled brush and dead trees; Eddie guessed that it hadn’t been used in a while. There was a gloomy pall that sat over the whole place and just to make it spookier a flock of black ravens flew away into the dark sky just as Eddie came to the end of the path and approached the old cabin.
The cabin was made of wood, but the roof was corrugated sheet metal and the rain made a loud tap-tap noise as it pelted down on top of it. The place was covered with brush and the wood was rotting. It looked deserted.
Eddie tried the door but it was blocked by something. Using his elbow, he broke open the dusty glass window and then using his jacket as a protective barrier he climbed inside. The room was dark and covered in dust and cobwebs Eddie shuddered to think of what kind of vermin might be resting in the corners. The smell outside had been bad, but the one in the cabin was a pungent mix of dust and mold that made Eddie sneeze repeatedly. It seemed as if no one had been there in years.
Eddie took out his little flashlight and ran it across the walls. He stopped it on one wall that was covered in newspaper clippings. Eddie stepped closer where he could see them better. They were news reports about the children who had gone missing in Little Rock all those years ago. There were also multiple Polaroid photos of various children. Most of the pictures didn’t look posed, as if the children had no idea they were being photographed.
He ran the flashlight along the rest of the walls. One thing stood out, the word “Banished” had been engraved in the wood in several places and above some of them were spray painted the word, “Liberate us” in big, block letters. Eddie wondered what it all meant. Frank’s mother mentioned something about him talking about the banished after he was beaten. Was it a delusion that came about after a head injury? He kept shining the light along the walls and he came to another place where the words, “You only get one chance” were written. Eddie had seen those words before. He went over and looked closer. They were written in red. In this case it was paint, or a marker he thought. The last time he’d seen them they’d been written in blood on the wall of the warehouse the night that Tim was attacked.
There was a small bookshelf in the corner with three leather-bound books on it that looked like journals. Eddie went over and took one off the shelf and opened it up. After reading the first entry he felt like he’d struck gold. He sat down on an old stump that was fashioned into a chair and with the help of his flashlight, he began to read. It seemed that Frank kept a journal detailing his conversations with what he called “the world beyond.”
The first chapter said, “Who are the Banished?” Underneath that, Frank wrote: They have been rejected by the Ancient People for a number of reasons. Some of them lied, some killed, and some of them had simply trampled on the rules of their community by collaborating with humans. These men and women lost a part of their bodies. Their behavior and their hatred turned them into dangerous creatures, shapeless and phantom like. They nourished themselves with the sadness.
It all sounded like wild ramblings of a disturbed mind to Eddie. He kept reading however and the next sentence said: They will do all they can to make James’ journey impossible.
Eddie wondered who James was and if the poor guy knew that there was a group of evil “banished” ones who wanted to possess him.
The most disturbing thing on the page that Eddie read said in red ink and underlined twice was:
On the Earth, Banished will guide the most vulnerable men to help them exterminate human children.
Eddie shuddered. He put that book down…for now and picked up another. The second one looked older and when Eddie opened it up, he could see why. It was Frank’s journal that he’d started as a boy. He wrote about his parents and their satanic rituals and he wrote about the way his mother would lock him in a secret closet behind the wardrobe in the dark when he was only ten years old. He had printed out in excruciating detail the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his parents and at the hands of the children he went to school with as well. He described being beaten in the woods by the kids his own age and left for dead only to wake in the hospital two days later all alone. That was the point that he decided there was no longer any point in even pretending to be a part of the human race.
Eddie was disgusted and fascinated at the same time as he read on. Frank’s journal told of his “first kill.” It was a young woman that looked like his mother and he’d enjoyed it so much because it was like he’d finally gotten to kill her. Throughout the scrawling’s were places where he would suddenly begin to talk about the invisible voices that told him what to do and who to kill.
After he’d killed the woman he’d left the adults alone and he’d begun killing the innocents: the children. He said the Banished asked him to get rid of the small ones. He was told to observe families and find their weaker points and use them to take the children.
Eddie had to stop reading every so often. It was almost like being in Frank’s tortured mind and it was taking a lot out of him.
Frank wrote about explicit examples of how he would capture the children. He would feel bad for them sometimes and try not to kill them even though he knew that he had to do what the Banished asked of him. He would stroke their soft hair and look at them for a long time wishing that he could breathe in some of their innocence, their purity. After he killed them at last, he would keep their belongings…usually their backpacks in an effort to continue to feel close to them.
He had listed out the states where he’d committed these crimes: Oregon, Wisconsin, New Jersey…it even said that he’d been to an old castle in Aquitaine in France and to a farm in the south of Italy. Both places had dark history and Frank had written that these places were where the Banished “sucked” the souls from the children.
At the bottom of the page Frank had written: The depopulation of the world has begun. Without children there is no future. The goal of the Banished was to attack humans at their weakest point…the children they loved dearly.
Eddie felt nauseous. This was really sick stuff. He told himself one more page and then he would leave this gloomy place and have the crime scene techs come up and clean it out. The next page detailed the killing of a little boy that Eddie had heard Tim refer to in on
e of his cold cases. It was a boy named Thomas who had disappeared and his father had been accused of the crime. Frank admitted in his journal that Thomas was the first child he killed. He killed him in an open air daycare center where he had worked at one time. He stabbed him and then let him die as the Banished consumed his soul
Frank had described in his journal in intimate detail how it had felt to pull the knife across the flesh of the young boy and watch as it split open and the blood began to spill out. He said that it was horrifying and exciting at the same time. He talked about looking into the little boy’s eyes and the look there going from shock to terror and then nothing. The life drained out of him right in front of Frank’s eyes. Afterwards, after the Banished had consumed the boy’s soul, Frank thought about him a lot. He wondered about his life and if there were people who missed him. He fought the feelings of guilt that he had and eventually let it be replaced by an intense feeling of satisfaction that he had accomplished what had been asked of him and if he had to, he’d be ready to do it again.
Eddie suddenly had to put the book down and run outside. As soon as he hit the fresh air of the woods he began to vomit. The remains of his lunch were spewed onto the muddy ground. When he finished heaving he stood against a tree. He felt unclean just from reading Frank’s thoughts. He wasn’t sure who these “Banished” were or if they were even real. Frank’s head seemed to be mixed up and confused between delusions and reality. What Eddie had been able to discern was that Frank was a sick son of a bitch and if these people the Banished did exist….the world was in serious trouble, on the verge of becoming as macabre as the thoughts in Frank’s head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“MONSTER”
James was moving slowly under the suddenly scorching sun. He was in bad shape; his body was marked with scars, scratches, dried blood and bruises. He was also sweating profusely and brown stains marked his neck and arms. He entered the forest, at last sheltered by the close trees from the heat of the sun. He looked around the dark place, realizing that it’s much less welcoming than other places he’d seen since coming here. His mind kept going back to the things that he’d discovered in the office, and he was talking to himself like a mad man as he made his way through the gnarled forest.