Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  Then she felt her knee drag into the sludge on the bottom. With a cry of effort she started crawling and thrashing her way through the shallow muck, and the last few feet toward shore. Grasping at long grass with mud-slicked hands, Cathy desperately fought to pull herself clear of the creek. Working herself halfway out of the creek, she managed to grab the base of a slender sapling and yank herself clear. Rolling over, she lurched to her feet and stared back out over the water.

  Across the creek, the water thrashed in a tangle of large spidery limbs and flailing claws. It appeared that not one but two of the beasts followed her down the creek, for now they fought over the food she had thrown at the far bank. Locked in combat with each other, they harbored no further interest in her whatsoever. She could have waded to the bank at her leisure.

  Hands on her knees, she gulped down air and watched the combatants on the other side of the creek. She found it impossible to follow the thrashing of legs and claws in the churning water, and couldn’t tell if either was gaining an advantage or not. Not that it mattered. As far as she cared, they both could die in the fight. Wiping the mud off of her face with her sleeve, she resisted the urge to scream and curse them both. Besides, she would deal with them later. She decided that she liked her earlier plan better, and intended to soon be the proud owner of a whole lot of bleach. After all this, she could care less about whatever value they offered to science.

  Now she needed to move on. Reason suggested the best idea would be to follow the creek from a distance. Sooner or later, it would come to a road that crossed it, and she could catch a ride back into town. The trick would be not to get too close to the water, and the territory of these nasty things. Especially that monster hanging from the..

  Cathy stared in open mouthed confusion at the blank spot between the support columns in the river. The leviathan was gone. She watched in disbelief as the empty boat drifted between the supports unmolested and continued its plodding way down the creek. The loud thrashing in the water on the other side of the creek finally subsided, allowing her to hear the crunch of the brush parting behind her. Even the cicadas fell silent.

  She resolved not to scream.

  “I’m sorry, Ryan.” Cathy whispered and closed her eyes.

  Rendered Verdict

  Justice William K. Traverton woke to the feel of cold metal under his cheek, and the knowledge he was in very bad trouble.

  His eyes felt gummed shut, giving him the impression of having been unconscious for quite some time. He lay on his side with his hands pinned painfully behind him. They seemed to be handcuffed, and a gentle bit of experimentation revealed them to be cuffed to something on the floor.

  He didn’t want to reveal the fact of his consciousness, so he tried to gather as much as he could of his situation while keeping his eyes closed.

  The surface he lay on felt metallic, and he sensed a slight give to it as he shifted his weight. Perhaps some form of sheet metal? He groped behind him with his hands, and found a heavy ring through which his handcuffs were threaded. The rounded heads of bolts in the ring’s base dispelled any notion of pulling it free of the floor. Traverton realized that escape would not be an immediate option.

  The air held a blend of different earthy smells, reminding him of the stables at his club. The scents of hay and manure led him to guess he lay in a barn of some kind. He didn’t ride, but his niece competed in equestrian jumping so he spent some small amount of time around barns. The sound of a chicken clucking nearby lent weight to the notion.

  “You’re awake.”

  The voice stated it as a fact, not as a question.

  Judge Traverton opened his eyes to find he lay in the bottom of a lozenge shaped, galvanized watering trough. The roof beams and rusty corrugated metal overhead gave him the impression of a shed, as opposed to a barn. He couldn’t make out much more than that in his position, so he struggled to sit up. After at least a full minute of twisting and straining, he managed to work himself into an uncomfortable seated position. Panting from the exertion, he faced the somber man standing outside the trough.

  His captor sported graying hair and a denim vest over a flannel shirt. The thick plastic frames of his glasses betrayed both failing vision and a disdain for fashion that comes with late middle age. The look on his creased face said nothing. The water hose in his hands spoke volumes.

  Mustering his will, Traverton tore his eyes off of the dripping end of the hose and fixed his most withering glare on the man.

  “Whoever you are, you are already in more trouble than you can possibly imagine.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of that, I assure you. Now release me, before you make things worse for yourself.”

  That didn’t get the cowed response he hoped.

  Instead, the man set the hose down on the rim of the trough and turned to reach for something in the depths of the shed. When he turned back he held a large mirror, like one that would top an old dresser, to his chest. He appeared to examine Traverton with mild curiosity while the cuffed man studied the picture in the mirror’s surface.

  His captor held it at an angle revealing another trough sitting next to his. Water filled it to the brim, dripping in places onto the dirt below. An object bobbed in the water at the center and the judge felt his throat constrict as he realized what it had to be. The man in the other trough must have been shackled to the bottom too, for just the top of his head broke the surface.

  So much for threatening this man with trouble. He had already crossed that line some time ago.

  “Very well, I concede your point. I’m in no position to threaten you.”

  “Do tell.”

  The rustic gent started feeding the water hose into the judge’s trough with practiced efficiency.

  “Now hold on! I don’t even know what this is about! If you are trying to frighten me, you have succeeded.”

  Traverton then forced his voice down an octave with effort.

  “Let us discuss this like rational men. I am a man of means, and connected to many other people of even greater resources. Whatever you want, I imagine it can be arranged.”

  “You didn’t even ask.”

  “P-pardon?”

  The man finished feeding in the hose and nodded in the direction of the other trough.

  “Your neighbor, there. You didn’t even ask who he was.”

  “Well…I…it is simply a case of accepting the obvious fact that he is beyond any help I could offer him. Surely it doesn’t matter now.”

  “It matters.”

  The man reached for something below Traverton’s line of sight.

  “I don’t see how it could. Let’s focus forward and work out a way to satisfy you, and end this with no more harm to anyone else.”

  A second later the shock of cold water caused him to yelp as the water hose gushed to life. Traverton thrashed and kicked at the hose with energetic futility. The heels of his shoes drummed on the bottom of the trough like thunder. Water circled the bottom, soaking his tailored pants, and he arched himself up to try and hold himself out of the torrent. A moment’s further thrashing convinced him of the uselessness of his efforts.

  Gasping from his exertions, he refocused on the man who now leaned against the side of the shed and lit a cigarette. Something in the casual idleness of the gesture scared him worse than anything the man had said so far.

  “I’d say you have about 14 minutes, at least going by the experience of your companion there. You’re a little bigger, so it might take less.”

  Traverton gaped.

  “That’s it?”

  “I reckon so. What else is there?”

  “Why, Goddamnit! That’s what!”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No!”

  “You sure? Your lack of curiosity about some things suggests to me you already have a notion or two.”

  Traverton glowered at the smoker, not wanting to play this game. But the water rising around his ankles gave him little choice. He raged insi
de over the helplessness of his situation, and swore to himself that if he got out of this he would throw every ounce of influence he owned into seeing this man strapped to a table in an execution chamber.

  The operative words being, “if he got out of this.”

  “Very well, who is the poor man in the other trough?”

  “That “poor man” in the other trough is Alfred Lasker.”

  Judge Traverton now appreciated what pitiful little hope remained. He struggled in despair against the handcuffs holding him down. The water now reached halfway up his calves, and tickled the bottom of his ribcage. His struggles managed to churn the swirling waters but accomplished little else. He stared at the rising surface, struggling to think of any words, any trick, or any possible move that could stop this from happening.

  “I’m sorry about what he did to those kids.”

  “Say again?”

  “I said I’m sorry about what he did to those kids!”

  “And yet you let him go.”

  “The officer didn’t have a proper warrant!”

  “Not to mention the Laskers being such prominent members of your club. Some of those ‘people of means’ you were referring to earlier? Old money, too. What’s a dead kid in a trunk compared to that?”

  Somewhere out of sight, the chicken squawked in triumph over a discovered worm or bug.

  Traverton closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He didn’t find it easy. The water rose at an unnerving rate, making it difficult for him to focus on anything but his diminishing time. All he knew was this shouldn’t be happening to him. His world consisted of walnut panels, marble floors, and black robes. A world far removed from the squalid vengeances that the uncouth and vulgar called justice.

  Yet here he sat in this trough, about to die at the hands of some ignorant yokel whose feelings were hurt over some decision of his he probably didn’t understand anyway. The odds were the dumb bastard thought he was meting out some form of justice. The judge realized his best hope lay in shaking the other man’s confidence in his own rightness.

  He opened his eyes to see his antagonist leaning against the side of the shed, flicking ashes from his cigarette, and watching him with the same look of indolent interest one would expect from a spectator of a card game.

  “You must think you are delivering some form of justice, don’t you.”

  “Do I?”

  “Don’t you? Look at this setup. First you take it upon yourself to execute Lasker, then make sure and show me his body. I imagine you even think you were doing my job for me when you killed him, didn’t you. And now you intend to punish me for not delivering your so-called justice in the first place.”

  “Go on.”

  “I will. Except what you want isn’t justice. It’s revenge.”

  “I never thought of the two as mutually exclusive.”

  “Well, they are. And my job as a judge is to ensure that justice is rendered, not revenge. I understand your outrage at the monster who hurt those children, but I can’t allow my own outrage to color my judgment. It is my job…no, it’s my solemn duty…to hold myself above those emotions and treat each point of a case on its own merits as it comes before me. I know that can sometimes result in decisions that seem monstrous and unfair, but it’s for the best. For all of us.”

  “How was it best for that boy in the trunk?”

  Traverton paused, and tried not to think about how the water now reached midway up his chest. He knew he needed to tread with care here. He didn’t remember this man from Lasker’s trial, but he could have been any one of a large number of the victims’ relatives involved. Perhaps a grandfather, by the looks of him. But of which kid? He doubted it could be the one found in the trunk of Lasker’s car, or the man would have called him by name.

  “That boy is dead…and that is a tragedy…but he is beyond help from me or anybody else in this life. My job concerns justice for the living, and I have to concern myself with that above all other things. It’s not easy, it’s really not. But somebody has to sit up there on that bench and see to it the rules are followed.”

  His captor’s face betrayed nothing while he took another long drag off of the cigarette. He lounged against the wall of the shed, staring at the smoke as it curled its way to the roof.

  “What about those boys’ families? Don’t they count as part of the ‘living’ that requires justice too?”

  Sweat beaded on Traverton’s face, despite the cold water beginning to tickle his underarms. He had the man talking, and that offered the slimmest ray of hope. But at the same time this topic presented a minefield. He needed to tiptoe with care through emotional tripwires here. He hated having to answer to this bumpkin’s private little inquisition, but water still rose around him, and angering this individual would not stop it. Better to elevate the discussion as soon as possible.

  “Sir,” he kept his voice as humble but as firm as he could, “I can’t imagine the pain, grief, and rage that those kids’ families must have been, and still are, going through. But they aren’t the ones on trial before me. I can’t take their feelings into consideration in my rulings without distorting justice into something that looks like revenge.”

  Another puff on the cigarette.

  “I’m still waiting to hear how those are mutually exclusive.”

  “A philosopher named Phaedrus once wrote that ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.’”

  “Who?”

  “Phaedrus. He was a Roman. But the point is that we, as civilized men, have to fight back against the urge for revenge or it will be our undoing. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts, because that’s when we are tested the most as men. As humans we can’t help but grieve in the face of atrocity, but we can’t let that grief turn us into something less than what we are.”

  “I gotta admit, that sounds awful noble,” his tormenter blew a long cloud of smoke up towards the ceiling from where he leaned, “but it still comes up kinda short in the results department.”

  The “results department” was what Traverton feared the most at this point in time. The water now swirled around his collarbone, and he fought back the urge to try and arch himself further out of it. Adding to the distraction, a spider must have fallen from the roof into the trough for it now wriggled in lazy circles in the water about a foot in front of him. The judge possessed a deep loathing for vermin, and shuddered at the thought of the creature crawling out of the water onto his neck or head.

  At the moment though, he needed to get back on task.

  “Results? Now that is where we enter difficult territory again. How often is the cry for results, in reality a cry for revenge? You may be more familiar with the words of another, more recent great man…for as George Washington once said, ‘Tis more noble to forgive, and more manly to despise, than to revenge an injury.’ And we have to…”

  “Franklin.”

  “Eh…what?”

  The man leaning against the shed now had his face buried in his hand, shaking with suppressed laughter. Traverton gaped in dismay at him, as the water crawled up his neck.

  “Franklin!” His captor finally choked out again. Laughing aloud now, the bespectacled man left his position against the wall and walked over to the end of the trough. Leaning forward, he put a hand on each rim while hanging his head in another bout of laughter.

  “It was Benjamin Franklin who said that, you pompous idiot.” He looked up and into Traverton’s face with a huge grin, “Sweet Jesus, Willie! I’ve spent so much of the past thirty years hating you for the corrupt and self-absorbed bastard that you are, I forgot how intellectually lazy you can be on top of it. And for your information, Phaedrus didn’t make that earlier quote of yours either. Francis Bacon did, around half a millennium later. And Phaedrus was Macedonian, for God’s sake, not Roman.”

  “I – I know you?”

  “Oh come on, Willie! Surely you remember me! Your old law school roommate?
The one whose work you stole, and then accused of stealing it from you when the professor noticed the obvious similarities? Of course, I and my student loans couldn’t put up much of a contest against you and your money.”

  “Jerry? Jerry Moller?”

  “There you go! I know, I know…I’ve put on a few pounds, and shortened my hair, and I’ll admit the years have taken their toll. But that happens sometimes when life doesn’t turn out the way you hoped and planned. Especially when the life you planned and worked so hard for gets stolen, along with your honor, by some lazy, narcissistic piece of trash lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I didn’t have any wealth to fall back on. Just a huge debt to pay back on a law school I was no longer allowed to attend.”

  “Wait…if…but…what about Lasker?”

  “Who, him?” Jerry nodded toward the other trough, “Oh, that’s Lasker alright. Right now, he’s carrying out what might very well be the one useful function he’s ever performed in his entire existence.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The water now closed around his neck, tickling the bottom of his chin.

  “It’s simple. When the police find his drowned body in a trough next to your own, they are going to have several families full of suspects to wade through. I came up with this idea last year when reading about your decision, and how it freed him. There’s got to be at least twenty or more people with motive for wanting him dead, and I’m none of them. And the police have every reason to tie his death to yours, and no reason at all to look up a roommate from thirty years ago.”

  Moller stood up and walked back over to the wall of the shed.

  “No Willie, when the old man who owns this pasture shows up to feed his cows and chickens this evening, he’ll call the police into a pretty straightforward situation…the bodies of a murderer and the judge who let him go. And nothing else but motive to go on.