by Ninie Hammon
Daniel knew that eventually they’d ask him what he’d seen. He’d been the closest one, had the best line of sight, and for just a moment, Daniel considered lying. But he couldn’t. Play the game like he played it and you became like him.
“What was your business here today?” the trooper asked.
A voice from behind the officer answered the question.
***
“We came here together, the three of us,” Jack said. “We had an appointment to see Chapman Whitworth.”
When the trooper turned to face Jack, the officer conspicuously did not look at Jack’s holster. He knew what he’d see there, or rather what he wouldn’t see there. Jack’s gun was gone, and he couldn’t help feeling positively naked without it. Jack had handed his weapon over to a lieutenant from the Cincinnati Police Department. It wasn’t the first time Jack had surrendered a weapon. It was standard operating procedure. The moment a police officer discharged his weapon, the gun became evidence. Jack would be issued another one, of course, even though he’d be riding a desk for some time after this. Or maybe worse. Yeah, this time—for sure worse. Deep in the pit of his stomach, Jack understood this could be a career-ending shooting. It could even land him in prison with hundreds of sleaze balls he’d put there.
He grabbed his thoughts and forced them away from the abyss. This building was in complete lock-down. No one would get in or out without passing through the metal detector, run now by super-vigilant security guards at the checkpoint. They’d find the gun. Somebody had it and they’d find it!
Whitworth’s warning echoed in his ears: Before you leave this building, you’ll have nothing to smile about. Jack felt sudden gooseflesh appear on his arms and he missed the first part of what the trooper was saying to Daniel and Theresa.
“… nature of your business with Mr. Whitworth?” the trooper asked.
We came to tell the demon possessing him that we’re going to send it screaming back to hell.
Jack didn’t say that of course. But it was true.
He, Daniel and Theresa are alone in the elevator as it rises slowly to the second floor. They don’t speak. There isn’t a whole lot left to say. With every second, Jack is less and less convinced that confronting Chapman Whitworth like this is the right thing to do, but it’s too late to back out now.
Their footsteps sound hollow in the long hallway with high plaster ceilings, gingerbread crown molding and plaques beside each solid oak door listing the names of judges and departments and prosecutors. The office they are looking for is on the end. Probably a corner office with a view.
The sign in ornate gold script reads: Chapman Wainwright Whitworth, Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
The secretary presiding over an outer office with a regal air of self importance directs them to be seated while she announces their arrival. Before any of them has settled into the comfortable chairs that are definitely several pegs up both the comfort and style ladders from the wooden pews in the offices of small-town county prosecutors Jack has visited, the secretary tells them formally:
“Mr. Whitworth will see you now.”
It is, indeed, a corner office with a view. Floor-to-ceiling windows form the back wall, though there is nothing to see out them today except brooding black sky and rain.
The room is warm, inviting and pleasant. Jack wasn’t expecting that. Oh, there are the obligatory tomes of thick law books occupying a set of shelves on the wall beside the door. But everything else is decorated tastefully in American Southwest style.
On a table in front of one of the windows rests what Jack suspects is not a reproduction of a Charles Russell sculpture of two cowboys astride horses and a third horse loaded with gear on a rope behind. A brass plaque on the bottom says it’s called “Changing Outfits.”
Two other sculptures—a Texas longhorn bull and a buffalo—are set on a row of shelves beside the window. A lamp in the shape of a coal oil lantern rests on another shelf, along with scaled-down versions of a stage coach and a Conestoga wagon. A third shelf holds a selection of genuine Native American pottery.
Navajo rugs hang on the walls and decorate the shiny hardwood. A turquoise blanket—a Pendleton—is draped over a chair. Obijwe dream catchers dangle from both ends of a giant arrow that forms the curtain rod.
But the most prominent decoration in the room is a gigantic cow skull mounted on a large piece of raw cowhide on the wall beside the window that’s directly behind the desk. The hollow-eyed, white bone skull is fitting somehow and sobering. Even more sobering are the two figurines on the desk, in the place you’d expect to find a gold-framed picture of a pretty wife and adorable children. One figurine is a tarantula spider. The other is a rattlesnake. The sight of the figurines takes Jack’s breath away and propels an image from his mind.
What Comes Behind blocks his retreat, accompanies him forward with the awful sound of scales on dirt, the hiss of forked tongues and menacing rattles. And the other sound that Jack knows he can’t possibly hear but he does, the scuttle of eight-legged creatures crawling over the snakes, over each other in a foot-deep tangle of poison. Even if he could break free of the vice grips clamped on his arms—who’s holding him captive, dragging him along?—he would face What Comes Behind, be overwhelmed by it, blanketed with spiders and snakes, his cries of horror and pain muffled by hairy legs in his mouth when he opens it to scream.
Jack is suddenly weak and almost sinks without invitation into one of the chairs covered in colorful Native American-design fabric that face the big cherry desk. He can tell the life-like statues have had the same effect on Daniel, who turns pale at the sight of them, his eyes wide. Jack suspects Daniel, too, is remembering that day. Daniel had been there—not with Jack, but there!—in the dark cavern that housed…what? Jack’s mind won’t reveal that to him and he’s glad. But both he and Daniel had seen it, whatever it was. So had Becca. Or the three of them had shared the same hallucination. No, it couldn’t have been a hallucination. Daniel’s little sister had been bitten by one of the spiders from What Comes Behind and the bite had killed her.
Chapman Whitworth sits in a high-backed office chair facing away from them toward the window where angry raindrops attack the glass, then slither down it in shiny, defeated worms. He does not turn to face them until they’re all standing in front of his desk. When he does, Jack is surprised—and relieved—to see that the silver-haired man with aristocratic features and a huge red scar on his right cheek doesn’t look as menacing as he had feared.
Then the man speaks.
“Jack. Theresa. Daniel.” His gaze lingers briefly on each one as he speaks their name. “Please sit down.” He says nothing else until they’re all seated. “We have a lot to talk about, the four of us. Much to settle here in this room today.”
His voice.
It is more than mesmerizing, stronger than hypnotic. Jack is utterly paralyzed by the sound. A mighty humming, buzzing rises up in his head—a million bees swarming around the filth that’s suddenly gushing into his mind like a sewer backing up, and the stench of it—
“You can stop that now,” Theresa says. Her voice seems so distant Jack has to strain to hear it, though she is sitting next to him not even an arm’s length away. “You probably ain’t got no ax today.” Her voice is tremulous but strong. “’Sides, you ain’t gone hack us to death ’cause it’d make a bloody mess of this fine office you got. So I figure we’s safe for the time bein’.” Theresa’s voice grows louder and as it does the hum in his head dials down until it is gone altogether. “You think you gone scare us away with your parlor tricks? You think that, do you?”
Light returns to the room that Jack hadn’t even realized had grown dark. In that darkness, Jack had seen the red glow that rises off Whitworth like undulating heat waves rise from the horizon in the desert. In the light, the glow fades, though the man still seems almost to have an outline, as if he’d been cut out of red felt.
“And do you think you can do any
thing about my plans?” Whitworth asks, and even though his voice is no longer hypnotic, it holds a restrained power that is somehow as intimidating as he had sounded before. “From prison? Locked in a cage where you can’t escape the stench”—Theresa wrinkles up her nose as if some sickening odor has assaulted her—“and the noise?”
Her face suddenly looks stricken, as if Whitworth had slapped her, and Jack knows Theresa is hearing something he can’t hear, some indescribable horror conjured up by the scar-faced man seated across from them with an amicable half smile on his face. That makes Jack mad.
“I’m not real sure who…or what you are,” Jack growls and is grateful that his own voice reveals nothing of the quavering fear in his belly. “But I really don’t give a rip—you know what I mean. I’ve seen you in every punk coward I ever arrested who was determined to prove he was the biggest, meanest dog in the junkyard.”
“I am the meanest dog in the junkyard.”
The words sear into Jack’s head with the instant, excruciating pain of a brain freeze after a Slurpee. All at once, his skull feels like it has been attached to his temples with roofing nails.
“And the ugliest one, too,” Daniel says. He sounds just like he did as a kid, with that glorious ring of moral authority Jack had heard in what he’d come to call his “hurled memories.” In them, Jack is always stunned at the power of a kid whose voice had only just begun to change. And here Daniel is, twenty-six years later, still doing what he’d done then—directing the attention away from Jack, taking away the hot glow of the spotlight to give Jack a chance to regroup.
“I’d like to claim you don’t scare me but that’d be a lie and the Father of Lies isn’t one of my favorite relatives,” Jack continues. “I once asked Bishop if it was possible to be brave even if you were scared and he said that was the only time you could be. So yeah, we’re scared—but that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t now…just like it didn’t then.”
Whitworth shudders. Or maybe Jack just imagines that a wave of trembling flows down over his body. But even if Jack is mistaken about how he’s reacting, he is reacting. Whitworth hasn’t forgotten that Daniel, Jack and Becca had beaten him when not a one among them was old enough for a driver’s license.
And it was a safe bet he didn’t like being reminded of it.
“We’ll stop you now,” Jack says, “just like we did then.”
“An evil like you—you ain’t gone sit on the Supreme Court of the United States of America,” Theresa says. “Not while there’s a breath left in this fat old body.”
Whitworth laughs then. Not the mean, hateful, mirthless laugh you’d expect. It was the full belly laugh of a man who’s been surprised by the punchline of a really funny joke.
“That’s why you came here?” The sound of laughter is still full in his melodious voice. “To tell me you’re going to stop me?”
“And to give you a chance to back off while you still can,” she says.
That’s how Jack had finally convinced Theresa and Daniel to confront Whitworth face to face. “Show up at a crime scene all by your lonesome and Simon the Scumbag will try to beat the crap out of you,” he’d said. “But roll in with a dozen officers and the SWAT team and he is so intimidated he drops his gun and gives up without a fight.”
“And you think you, me and Daniel’s gone intimidate a demon?” Theresa had asked, incredulous.
“Daniel and Becca and I defeated that demon when we were only twelve years old!” Jack had fired back.
Then he’d proceeded more reasonably. “Look, that thing doesn’t know we have no idea how we did whatever it was we did that got rid of him twenty-six years ago. So far, the only opposition the ‘magnificent’ Chapman Whitworth has faced is two defenseless old people. Maybe if he’s confronted by the three of us together, he’ll…I don’t know. He remembers that we beat him. Probably not his favorite recollection. Who knows … maybe we could intimidate him. It’s worth a shot.”
They’d reluctantly agreed it was worth a shot. And they’d been wrong. So very, very wrong.
“Back. Off?” The voice says the words separately. Distinctly. The voice of the other. Jack’s mind goes instantly dark, like somebody has switched off a whole panel of stadium lights. Dark and cold and terrifying. He’s never felt any sensation like it. He is utterly alone, the entity who is the essence of Jack Carpenter—his soul—is completely isolated in a darkness so profound it is much more than just the absence of light. It has substance, this darkness does, shape and form and it has gobbled Jack up so he is deep in its belly, and it has also slithered in through Jack’s mouth so it fills up every molecule of his being. Inside and outside. The darkness is absolute, impenetrable and inescapable. His thoughts stop. Like they’d been on a ticker-tape running across the screen of his mind and the power had failed. Every thought hangs there, suspended, still. There exists no fear as great as this, the fear of being cut off from every other organism in existence, alone in the cold dark for all eternity.
And then it is gone. Dark/Light—flip a switch and one becomes the other in less time than it takes to blink an eye. But Jack knows, without knowing how he knows, that the creature, the other, has only turned the light back on so it can communicate. That it has the power at any time to turn it back off. He knows that the creature has won and they have lost and all resistance is futile.
Theresa leans forward to speak and as she does, she places her hand on Jack’s knee.
“You heard right,” she says. “I said back off.”
Jack can’t speak, couldn’t have forced a word out through his lips if his total existence depended on it.
“Or we’ll beat you,” Jack says, his voice firm. “Just like we did before.”
Where did that come from? Jack had absolutely not thought that thought. He hadn’t formed words around it, either, or pushed the words out of his mouth. He hears himself continue. “Only this time, it’ll be permanent.”
“You listen to me!” All the power and evil and horror the beast can summon are in the words.
But it’s different this time. Jack is still terrified, so scared he can barely draw breath, but it doesn’t get to him this time, doesn’t get in. It’s like there’s some kind of—what? barrier?—around him, around his mind and his heart and his soul. He glances over and sees that Daniel has reached out to take Theresa’s hand. Daniel holding Theresa’s hand; her hand on Jack’s knee. Is that it? The connectedness, somehow…is that how they’d done it?
The thought brings a genuine smile to Jack’s lips.
The thing that was once a man named Chapman Whitworth stands and leans across the desk.
“You can’t beat me.” The voice is the sound of truck tires grinding in gravel. “I’ll have all three of you locked up in cages like lab rats.” He looks at Jack then. “Enjoy that little smile,” he purrs. “Before you leave this building, you’ll have nothing to smile about.”
Jack looked over the shoulder of the trooper asking questions and watched the guards pat down three men leaving the building. One of them was Chapman Whitworth. After he passed through the metal detector without setting off any alarms, he cast a backward glance at Jack. A mirthless smile slashed a broad ax stroke across the bottom of his face.
It must have been a slow news day. Jack had dated a reporter once who told him nothing ever happened in the rain except traffic accidents and floods. Apparently, Cincinnati had been wreck-and-flood free because the media-spun version of how a black police officer had shot and killed an unarmed white man in the federal building rotunda that afternoon was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news that night. On all the networks.
Jack had stayed up late after watching the televised accounts of the event that bore little resemblance to what had actually happened. It was like he and the news crews had been at entirely different crime scenes. He finally dozed off about three o’clock in the morning and was awakened right after first light by the sound of breaking glass and screaming tires and the smell of smo
ke. He rolled off his bed onto the floor, grabbed his service revolver from the bedside table and crawled through the shadows to his living room. The couch that faced the small picture window was on fire, set ablaze by the Molotov cocktail somebody’d thrown through the glass. He stood upright, then crouched, and kept out of sight as he made his way to the window and looked out. The lawn and the street beyond were empty and still.
Then he ran to the bathroom to get a wet towel to beat out the flames.
Yeah, yeah, yeah I ought to have a fire extinguisher. I’ll get right on that.
Gratefully, whoever made the bomb was as stupid as he was bigoted. He had stuck a piece of fabric—was that underwear? Eww!—down into a long-neck bottle of clear liquid. The smell told Jack the liquid was alcohol, but with no label on the bottle, he couldn't be sure exactly what kind. Maybe Everclear, 190 proof grain alcohol. Shoot, might even be moonshine. Whatever it was, the bottle of it hadn't exploded on impact as the moron obviously intended. The fuse wasn’t stuck snugly in the bottle. It came out when the bottle hit the window, plopped over on the side of the couch and lay there burning. Jack was able to snuff it out with a towel before it caught the alcohol-soaked couch cushions and rug ablaze.
After he’d put out the fire, Jack stood panting, trying to decide what to do next.
“Jack…what happened here?”
He looked out through the broken glass to see Mrs. Peabody standing just beyond the bushes.
“Hi, Mrs. Peabody,” he said. Greeting her through the window like that added just the right touch of weird to make the whole scene surreal.
Mrs. Peabody was his elderly next-door neighbor, the one who brought him chicken soup when she noticed the police cruiser parked in the driveway hadn’t moved for three days (“You must be feeling poorly, Jack. This’ll make you feel better.”) and cookies/pies/fruitcakes/candy and all manner of other goodies no matter what time of the year it was. She always invited him to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner with her family and the one time he wasn’t on duty and took her up on the offer he found her children and grandchildren welcoming and the food outrageously good. After that, whenever he had to work on the holidays, she’d save him a plate wrapped in tin foil and bring it over piping hot when he got home.