by Billy Wells
Realizing the futility of explaining something so bizarre to anyone else, Clyde thanked the officer for his time and left. On his way home, he contemplated what he would have to do if Verizon couldn’t resolve the problem.
Two days later, he received a call back from the same service rep he’d spoken with before. She started in the same annoying monotone, “The maintenance man traced the phone number to a dilapidated building that was once the sales office of the Morningside Cemetery. Like I said before, the business was located in Hell, Massachusetts, which he said is now a deserted town at the tip of Cape Cod. He tested the line, and as I expected, found it to be totally disconnected. He did say a fallen tree had knocked over two telephone poles along the right side of the parking lot that once supplied service to the building, which was originally a church.
“So, in a nutshell, you can’t stop the person from calling me.”
“Mr. Bottoms, it’s not possible for someone to call from that location, and it hasn’t been possible for more than twenty years.”
“Regardless of what the maintenance man said, the fact remains that I’ve received five calls from that number. Well, this is getting us nowhere. I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and shut down my current number and start a new one. Make it an unlisted number. Hopefully, the ghost in Massachusetts will have to find someone else to haunt.”
* * *
Three days after Verizon activated the new number, Clyde received the sixth call from the same number at 3:10 a.m. Scrambling for the phone, he shouted, ”How did you get this number, you retard.” He held the phone tightly against his head and listened to the silence on the line, hoping to hear the slightest hint of a sound.
Suddenly, the rich baritone vibrato of someone who sounded like a seasoned Shakespearian actor answered, ”I’ve been waiting for you to knock my block off, Clyde.”
The words hit him like a sledgehammer right between the eyes. A cold shiver ran up his spine as he sat upright in bed. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. Then came the click, and the long drone of the dial tone. The complete silence that surrounded him in his own bedroom seemed foreign. The shadows on the wall from cars passing in the street raised the hairs on the back of his neck as he turned on the lamp on the end table and surveyed every inch of the room.
Thinking about what the voice from Hell had said made him feel inadequate for the first time since a bully had bloodied his nose in the schoolyard when he was ten.
He had just received a challenge from the caller in Massachusetts.
He leapt from the bed, went downstairs to his gun cabinet, and withdrew two rifles and two handguns.
The creep in Massachusetts had been forewarned that he was no one to mess with, and yet, the crazy bastard would not stop harassing him.
Clyde had been a one-man army in Viet Nam. He had the scars of the bullet wounds to prove it. He was forty years older now, but he weighed the same as the day he’d been drafted. His arms were like molded steel from bench pressing 300 pounds after breakfast every day of his life. He’d wasted more Viet Cong soldiers than anyone he’d ever met. He’d also killed his share of women and children along the way.
He had no remorse. To him, they were collateral damage, and they could kill you just as dead as a man. He had a scar across his cheek from a knife a small boy had used on him while he raped his sister. He’d never forget the look on the kid’s face when he blew his brains out. Sometimes, he still saw the terror in that slant-eyed child’s face in his nightmares.
Clyde packed a bag and left a message at work on voice mail he’d be out for a few days for personal reasons. Putting Hell, Massachusetts in his GPS, he turned on his headlights and headed toward the interstate. The readout estimated the trip to be seven hours.
As he proceeded up the highway, he wondered what he’d do if he didn’t find the culprit when he arrived in Hell. Just because the caller talked big on the phone didn’t mean he would really show when Clyde pulled up at the Morningside Cemetery. It made no sense, but for some uncanny reason, he believed the crazy bastard would be there waiting for him when he arrived. But why?
* * *
Seven hours and ten minutes later when Clyde passed the turnoff to Provincetown, mist and patches of fog engulfed the road. The eerie mountains of sand dunes surrounding the car seemed to smother him with creepy premonitions that reminded him of the setting for John Carpenter’s movie, The Fog. He could hear the chilling soundtrack playing in his mind as the waves crashed below him on the sandy mounds. The dead smell of the ocean hung in the air like a Goliath fart. In the distance, the rusty girders of an ancient bridge that he thought he’d seen before in one of his most horrific nightmares emerged from the fog.
An overpowering sense of dread gripped him as he crossed the narrow suspension bridge. Even in daylight, he could barely see the road in front of him. Proceeding at a snail’s pace for fear of plunging through the battered railing into the murk, he finally reached the end of the rickety monstrosity.
Like magic, the fog lifted, and he saw a lopsided sign hanging by a nail from one corner that read “Hell, Massachusetts.” The derelict buildings shrouded in mist and dark shadows along both sides of the street made him feel like he’d crossed over into another world. He saw the faded sign “Morningside Cemetery” and stopped in the middle of the street.
As the Verizon maintenance man had said, the sales office for cemetery plots had once been a church, complete with stained glass windows and a steeple that rose into the sky until the top disappeared in the fog. Many a teenager had hurled a rock at Jesus and his disciples over the years since most of the glass lay in pieces on the blue stones bordering the exterior. Part of the roof sagged into a giant opening, and the steps leading up the portico had several broken slats. In the distance, a gigantic tree had fallen across two telephone poles at the edge of the parking lot. Telephone wire littered the gravel and disappeared in the tall grass.
Behind the weather beaten church, Clyde saw a hillside of headstones of all shapes and sizes. Scattered among them, moss covered gnarled trees stood like ancient sentries among the ruins of the dead. Across the street, Clyde saw another faded sign with barely legible letters that read “Maggie’s Kitchen” lying on the sidewalk. The ravages of many storms and hurricanes and the corrosive salt air of the ocean had turned every paint peeled board of siding to a somber gray.
Getting out of his car, Clyde stood in the dreary ruins of downtown Hell, and wondered why on earth he had been goaded into coming to this godforsaken place at the tip of Cape Cod. Walking up the meandering path, he noticed most of the tombstones had been placed there in the 1930’s. Unlike the cemetery where his parents were buried, he knew no one would ever place a flower on these graves. Even the children of these lost souls were long forgotten. After browsing the epitaphs he could still decipher on the tombstones, he returned to his car parked in the middle of the street in front of the church.
As he pushed the remote to unlock the doors to the car, he heard a telephone ringing inside the church. Each ring felt like someone sticking a dagger into his heart. Each repetition gripped his soul with a tremor of impending doom. He’d never backed down from a fight in his life, but he knew if he had a brain in his head, he should get in his car and drive away.
Ignoring what his inner voice was telling him, he proceeded to the massive doors that stood agape like the jaws of a steel trap ready to spring. Paying no heed, he strode like John Wayne into the dark shadows of the interior. The wind in the eaves sounded like someone playing a dirge on an organ as the phone continued to ring. In the light from the hole in the roof, Clyde saw a telephone on a table on the altar and blundered toward it. Taking a deep breath, he picked up the phone, and gathering all his strength to sound as macho as possible, he barked, “Hello.”
“I’m waiting for you, Clyde,” the eerie voice hissed.
Clyde looked around at the roomful of gray, metal chairs, caked with dust, and asked, “Where, motherfucker?”
> “At the top of the hill overlooking the ocean,” said the voice that grated like fingernails on a blackboard. Then came the click and the constant drone of a dial tone.
Returning the receiver to its cradle, Clyde noticed the old dialup phone had no wires attached to it. Undaunted, he said as a cruel smile lit up his face, “Still playing tricks with the phone, huh, asshole?” He pulled the army knife from his belt and peered through the broken windowpane at a lone figure at the top of the hill silhouetted against the sky.
As he made his way toward the front door, Clyde noticed enormous spider webs crisscrossing every window cavity. Legions of bats hung from each rafter above him. Entering the deserted street, he looked at his car and thought of taking the sniper rifle he’d used to exterminate hundreds of Vietnamese civilians from a ridge overlooking their village. He remembered sitting in the cover of the trees at long range and randomly cherry picking whoever stepped from their shack. Some of his cohorts were raping and pillaging while he did what he loved best. Wasting gooks. He had to stop when his shoulder was too sore from the recoil to hold the rifle against it any longer.
As he walked toward the top of the hill, the images of his victims with their heads exploding flitted across the face of his memory like a bloody slideshow bringing a smile to his lips. At the crest of the overlook, a fog bank rolled across the landscape so dense he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
Not far ahead, the stranger’s voice cried out, “I’m still waiting, Clyde. You’re taking a long time to come and knock my block off. Have you lost your nerve?“
Instantly, a surge of unbridled fury began to boil out of control through every sinew of his body as Clyde bounded forward in a trot with his knife at the ready, screaming, “Here I come, motherfucker.”
Reaching the top of the rise, the stranger seemed to evaporate before his eyes. Like magic, Clyde found himself at the edge of a cliff enveloped in fog. He had to grab hold of a boulder to keep from falling headlong into the abyss. The putrid stench emanating from below made him wretch as he stumbled backward from the precipice and tried to catch his breath. As he turned back toward the town, he saw a tall, mountain of a man with pointed ears blocking his path about ten feet in front of him.
Clyde immediately crouched into a hand-to-hand combat stance, and raising his huge army knife with the serrated blade, bellowed, “Are you the miserable son of a bitch that’s been calling me at three o’clock in the morning who is about to receive a new asshole?”
“Clyde, skip the macho bullshit,” the malevolent stranger replied, “Look around. Didn’t you see the sign when you drove in? You’re in Hell, can’t you smell it?”
“I know where I am. I’m in Massachusetts. It’s cold as a witch’s tit on this hill, and the smell of the ocean would gag a buzzard. Before I carve you up, tell me why you’ve been calling me?”
“It’s your time.”
“Time for what?”
“Time for you to spend eternity with the innocent villagers you massacred in Viet Nam.”
“They can’t hurt me. I killed them over forty years ago. They were worm bait then, and there’s certainly nothing left of them now.”
“Really. Take a closer look into the pit,” said the stranger, his voice brimming with sadistic glee.
Clyde turned and found the fog had magically disappeared from the edge of the cliff where he stood. Looking into the abyss, he saw a stew of decomposing, half eaten bodies of all ages. Mingled with the reeking corpses, rats and other vermin scurried in and out of the gelatinous torsos, biting and clawing for their share of the dead carrion.
Clyde recoiled away from the grisly stew of things in the pit. Then, mustering a battle cry from the depths of his loins that even Rambo would have applauded, he ran amok plunging the knife in sweeping arcs at the devilish thing before him. The blade split the air again and again with no consequence as the cloaked figure began to shift from one monstrous entity to another before Clyde’s eyes.
A raspy frog-like voice croaked, “You still don’t seem to know who you’re dealing with, Clyde, but stupidity becomes you.” Raising his open palm to his lips like preparing to blow a kiss, the Devil’s breath lifted Clyde from the ground like a toy soldier and sent him flying headlong into the chaos of bodies below.
Struggling to find purchase in the putrefying cesspool, Clyde saw unspeakable things with half their heads blown off slithering toward him in the muck. He groped for the knife that had slipped from his grasp in hopes of committing suicide, but a multitude of icy hands held him fast. He felt the excruciating pain of being eaten alive, and longed for his heart to stop beating.
A voice boomed from above, “I designed this pit especially for you, Clyde. It’s a place where the dead are eternally hungry, and the flesh of the damned is restored each morning so it can be eaten again and again until the end of time. Now, that’s what I call Hell, if I do say so myself.”
Clyde tried to scream, but he’d swallowed too many maggots.
THE DOME
A heavy set man accompanied by three others in black suits steered a wheel chair occupied by an unconscious man named Earl Breedlove into the enormous domed space.
All four members of the Pacifico mob wore night vision glasses as they made their way to the center of the interior marked by a red X fashioned from Day-Glo tape. The dimensions of the perfectly circular space were 600 feet from wall to wall in all directions.
The derelict arena had been built to accommodate a climate controlled practice field for football, baseball, basketball, and tennis before the financing collapsed, and the project was scrapped. After the dome and the adjacent parking garage had remained vacant for ten years, a Mafia kingpin had purchased the multimillion-dollar property for $200,000. The larger cost was the contractual obligation to pay the annual real estate taxes for $300,000.
Reaching the red X in the middle of the floor, two of Pacifico’s beefy men lifted Breedlove from the wheelchair. After removing his clothes, they left him spread-eagled on the floor where X marked the spot. He had been beaten severely by the four men before he had been delivered to the dome Pacifico used to torture his enemies.
Breedlove had foolishly moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to set up a concrete business in Northern New Jersey. The concrete and trash removal businesses had historically been monopolized by the mob, and anyone who dared to infringe on the territory primarily around Newark would be a target. Breedlove had been warned repeatedly to dispense with his insane attempt to start a competing concrete business and return to South Carolina. When he continued to pay the threats no mind, Pacifico’s goons had firebombed his storage sheds, destroyed several expensive mixers, and called his home on numerous occasions to threaten his wife and daughter. Breedlove continued to ignore the threats and solicited the help of the local authorities who did as little as they could to help him since most of the higher ups had been on the Pacifico payroll for many years.
Three hours after Pacifico’s men had left him nude on the hard concrete floor in pitch-blackness, Breedlove began to regain consciousness. In addition to the vicious beating, he had been tasered repeatedly in extremely tender places. His head continued to throb with a debilitating migraine. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He immediately realized to his dismay he was as naked as the proverbial jaybird. The bastards had attacked him in his own parking lot right after closing time. As he struggled to stand, his hand felt the smooth floor that had no texture to the touch.
Throwing out his arms in all directions, he touched nothing. He had the eerie feeling he was in a huge space of some kind. He cried out and heard a slight reverberation. What was this space? What would come next?
He started walking forward with his arms extended to prevent him from walking headlong into something. Twenty paces out, he felt nothing. Fifty paces out, still nothing. One hundred paces out, he had to lower his arms to quell the pain of holding them out in front of him for so long. Sweat beaded his for
ehead as the sensation of the room getting hotter piqued his senses. His lips were parched, and he suddenly realized he was extremely thirsty. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but he imagined it was for many hours.
He heard a low whine from above and a blast of hot air descended upon him. In seconds, his whole body dripped with perspiration. He lowered himself to the floor that seemed cooler, at least for the time being. Pacifico was behind his kidnapping; there was no doubt of that. Breedlove had called his brother, John, an Army vet who had just returned from the Middle East for help. He hoped he was on his way, and wondered if he would ever find him now that Pacifico had made his play.
A half an hour later, Breedlove lay in a pool of his own sweat. He was certain it was well over one hundred degrees in the dark suffocating space. Whichever way he turned, he felt the same smothering hot air. His skin somehow felt like he’d been lying in the sun for hours with no sunscreen.
Suddenly, the low whine stopped, and he heard a loud whoosh of some kind of motor turning on. In a few seconds, he felt the invigorating breath of cool air rather than heat falling from above. Almost immediately, he felt refreshed like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water in his face. In fifteen minutes, he could feel the goose bumps rising on his arms and his nipples getting hard.
One of Pacifico’s men had turned the air conditioner to a bitter cold setting. He was naked and totally exposed to the frigid air swirling around him. The floor felt like a sheet of ice as he balled himself into a fetal position. His teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Suddenly, a booming voice echoed from high above, “You know, Breedlove, I don’t think the weather in Jersey suits you. You should have stayed in North Carolina.”