Echoes of Darkness

by Rob Smales

  I ran into the warehouse, and some of the guys helped me stack a couple of spare eighteen-wheeler tires next to the truck, like a platform to work on. Jerry was more experienced, and would fit in the cab better than me. I stayed on the ground, ready to hand up anything Jerry might need. I didn’t actually see what happened. Jerry told me about it later.

  Jerry jacked up the steering wheel, but the driver was also bound up in his seat belt’s shoulder harness. Jerry cut the belt and the driver collapsed sideways onto the gearshift. Suddenly the idling truck was dropped into reverse without the benefit of a clutch. I know the truck jumped backward with the sound of tearing metal. It knocked me and the stacked tires to the ground, and then that huge steel door came crashing down. I’d landed on my back when the tires cut my legs out, and I saw that door coming down at me like the Hammer of God. I didn’t even have time to scream.

  I’m told that it came down on me and, luckily, the big tire that had knocked me down. The tire compressed, then bounced the door back up to a height of about eighteen inches. Before the door bounced, though, it came low enough to hit me right across the chest, cracking my sternum and stopping my heart.

  Now, here’s the thing with commotio cordis, or cardiac arrest due to impact trauma: it’s quick. There’s no buildup, no arrhythmia, no moving pain or shortness of breath; there’s no time. Your heart is beating, and then it stops.

  Period.

  And it hurts. A lot.

  My chest hurt more than I’d ever imagined anything could hurt. I’d both heard and felt the crack, and I knew it was bad. I’m told it was only about ten seconds before I passed out, but time sort of . . . stretched out for me.

  Jerry was screaming, but I wasn’t sure what he was saying. Everything sounded all drawn out, like slow motion in the movies. I couldn’t move, all I could do was stare up at the distant warehouse ceiling—and then they were there.

  Angels.

  That’s what I thought at first. A half-dozen faces leaned into view, moving just as slow as everything else, and they were smiling. I mean smiling big. Like it was the happiest day of their lives. Their skin and hair were paper white, their lips and teeth making big white grins. They wore jeans and jackets in regular colors, not white robes, and as they leaned closer I saw their eyes had color, too. They were red. Not bloodshot. Solid liquid red, like their sockets were full of fresh blood, but it was their eyes.

  That’s when I started thinking maybe they weren’t angels.

  I finally managed to draw a shallow breath, but as it came in all I smelled was licorice, so sweet and strong I would have choked on it if I wasn’t already busy dying. The little breath caused the pain in my chest, already immense, to grow. As it did, the grins on the faces widened, and those eyes of blood closed, as faces screwed up in what looked like ecstasy.

  Suddenly there were warehouse workers mixed into the crowd above me. These guys looked scared, all talking, yelling, but it was all stretched out like everything else and I couldn’t understand it. The shard of pain in my chest suddenly shattered, exploded, and everything went white.

  Then black.

  I woke to the harsh lights and stinging smells of a hospital room. Jerry was there, thank God. At least there was something familiar to hold onto, because I was disoriented as hell. I had strange memories: white light and kind-eyed, faceless beings looking down at me from above, and the feeling of a vast void. I’d always laughed at people who told stories of dying and seeing Heaven, only to find out later they were just hazy memories of the emergency room. But the feeling that I’d been dead was so strong it was almost funny. It was kind of spooky when Jerry said, “Welcome back to the land of the living, partner,” and asked if I was planning to hang around for a while.

  When I tried to answer, my mouth and throat were too dry, and the pain in my chest flared when I pushed at the words. Jerry saw I was having trouble, and stopped asking questions. Instead, he gave me some ice chips for my thirst, and brought me up to date. That last flash of pain back at the warehouse had been Jerry pulling me out from under that door.

  “I’m sorry. I had to,” he said.

  One of the guys inside had yelled that I was alive, but he couldn’t find a pulse, and had no way to lift that door. That’s when Jerry told me about that tire that kept the door from cutting me in half. He told me, “Even with the tire, the damn thing killed you.”

  A second ambulance had arrived, but I died as they were loading me in. No pulse, no respiration, pupils fixed and dilated. My heart had stopped when the door hit me, but apparently it took a minute for the rest of me to catch on to the idea.

  “So,” I asked, “I was . . . dead?”

  Jerry said “as a doornail,” which almost made me laugh. He told me about resuscitating me on the ride, but then described how I woke up just as we were getting into the ER.

  “You started talking in spite of your chest, spouting off about angels with eyes of blood. Spooky shit! You scared the hell out of that new ER nurse. Man, you sounded awful!”

  —I just checked the window again. There’s more of them, and they look like they’re organizing. They were just milling about before, but now they’re in little groups. Christ, I hope I have time to finish this. Where was I?

  Oh, right. Angels with eyes of blood. That’s when I remembered the weird stuff from before I died in the ambulance.

  Spooky shit is right, I thought, those “angels” seemed more like demons to me. My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Jerry asked if I was okay and went to get a nurse. Which I guess he was supposed to do as soon as I woke up.

  As the door swung shut behind him, a woman in street clothes walked by, peeking in as she passed. I only saw her for a second, but what I saw chilled me despite my no doubt heavy medication. She had hair and skin the color of typing paper and her eyes were one solid color: no whites, no pupils, just the bright red of a Crayola crayon, fresh from the box.

  An angel with eyes of blood.

  Once the nurse was gone again I asked Jerry if he’d seen anything strange back at the warehouse.

  He said, “I saw you lying there with a one-ton door on your chest.”

  I remembered the ribbing he’d given me after Tree Girl, calling me crazy; what would he say now? That I was seeing things? I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  A couple of days later, when I was up to taking a few steps, I shuffled slowly to my room door, held onto the frame, and peeked out. I saw what I thought was a husband and wife having a conversation, with one of these albinos, a woman, leaning right down in between them. They just kept talking like the pale figure wasn’t there, within kissing distance of the bandage covering the wife’s eye. A man with an external fixator was wheeled by. It looked like he had a birdcage bolted around his leg. The orderly pushing his chair paid no attention to the two white shapes pacing them, who were smiling and bending over to . . . well, it looked like they were smelling the guy. One of the nurses saw me hanging onto the door, and I guess she misread the look in my face, like Jerry had, and came to help me back to bed. I just had to ask about the girl with the couple.

  She looked where I was pointing, and said “What girl?” She saw the couple, even told me their names, then started looking around for the girl I was talking about. I told her to never mind, trying to sound natural, though I had ice water trickling down my spine. The albino was still there, grinning, almost nose-to-nose with the woman, but the woman and my nurse—they couldn’t see.

  Granny McCalloum always claimed I had the sight, and I had ignored her, but I guess dying changes a person. Now it was different. I kept seeing these . . . things. Everywhere.

  I took to wandering about the corridors and public areas of the ward. I saw doctors and nurses working with people, talking to people, these red-eyed freaks right there, but no one ever acknowledged them.

  I didn’t either, but sometimes it was so hard.

  The nurses acted all impressed that I was exercising, “trying so hard to get well,” they
said, but all I really wanted to do was keep an eye on the ward. I was also terrified one of those things might come into my room and I’d be trapped, with nowhere to run.

  So I watched them in secret. They were so silent, never speaking, that I thought for a while I might be seeing ghosts, but what I saw made me eventually decide differently.

  As far as I could tell these albino mutes were stealthy, but couldn’t pass through walls. Someone would enter a room and one or two pale figures would slip through before the door closed. I don’t know if they couldn’t open doors or if they just didn’t want it showing up on the security tapes. They could touch the doors: a couple of times I saw them knock on a door lightly, attracting enough attention that a passerby would check it out, and the Mutes used the opportunity to slip through.

  Then there was the smell I’d noticed at the warehouse: these things reeked of licorice. That made me realize what I’d seen back at Tree Girl’s accident. Those silent watchers had been Mutes. I hadn’t been able to see their skin and eyes in the dark, backlit by the ambulance, but I had smelled their sickly sweet scent.

  I used to like Good-N-Plenty candy. Now I can’t open a box without the smell reminding me of those things.

  I don’t eat Good-N-Plenty anymore.

  Another thing. Once my meds stopped dulling my mind, the pain came back, and this scared me most of all. The Mutes seemed to gather whenever someone was in a lot of pain. They always hung around fresh post-ops, or during physical therapy. Remember that guy with the external fixator on his leg? Every day when the nurses cleansed the pins holding the fixator to the bones, the Mutes formed a crowd. I sometimes heard him crying out during the procedure. The Mutes were enjoying people’s pain. Maybe . . . feeding on it, somehow. That thought really scared me, and I knew I had been right not to attract their attention.

  I spent three weeks in that hell, ignoring those silent parasites. I wasn’t sure how many of them I saw. With their white skin and red eyes, they all tended to look alike from a distance, only the hair showing that one might be a woman.

  After three weeks I left the recovery ward, and I spent five weeks here in my apartment before I was ready to go back to work. Emergency medical services work is pretty physical, and until I could move and lift a stretcher without pain again, I was no use to anyone out there. For five weeks, when I wasn’t exercising, I was sitting in the chair by my front window that overlooks the street, keeping an eye out for Mutes. In five weeks I didn’t see a one.

  Then I went back to work.

  Jerry had picked up a temporary partner in my absence, a new guy named Mark. No big deal, we’d just run a three-man team for a while. Happens all the time. We piled in the truck and were off.

  Our first call of the night was some guy who had passed out at a company party. Jerry was behind the wheel and I was riding shotgun, nervous as hell, as we rolled on in to pick the guy up.

  When we got to the restaurant, Jerry wanted me to check the guy out.

  “Naw,” I said. “I wanna see what the rookie can do.”

  That wasn’t it. I really wanted to stand back and look for Mutes. I was sure they were going to be gathered around the injured, smiling obscenely at his wounds, lapping up his pain, or whatever they do, and filling the air with their nasty sweet smell.

  There weren’t any. Not around the guy lying on the floor; not in the crowd of concerned co-workers; not even mingled in amongst the other diners. I scanned the place twice, but there were no white faces, no blood red eyes, and not the faintest hint of licorice. I started to relax until I noticed Jerry staring at me. Down on one knee, helping Mark get the patient ready for transport, he kept giving me long looks while Mark was talking.

  Tape ends, Side A.

  Tape begins, Side B:

  I just checked the window again, and there don’t seem to be any more of them than before. They might come soon. I don’t know. They seem to be gathering around one particular Mute. If they have a leader, I guess that’s him.

  Anyway, Jerry waited until we had the guy in the ambulance and we were en route to the ER before asking me what the hell I’d been doing back there in the restaurant. I told him it was nothing, I was just checking out the new guy, but he didn’t believe me.

  He kept his voice low, so Mark wouldn’t hear, but he said “You didn’t look at the new guy once. You were looking all over, but you barely looked at us, or even the pickup. What the hell were you looking for?”

  I tried to think of something smooth, but I’ve never been good at that shit. I just looked away and said I was watching, but it sounded lame, even to me.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t mean to be a hardass here. I know the door thing was bad—I was there, and it was bad for me, too. But if you’re not up to the job yet then you have to take more time. You can’t freeze like that. Not on this job, man. People will die. You understand me?”

  He was right, and I nodded, but his eyes were on the traffic. He glanced at me, a risky move at that speed, and asked me again.

  I said, “Yeah, I understand.”

  We pulled into County General, where up on the fifth floor recovery ward I knew the Mutes would be wandering about and grinning. I forced that thought from my mind as we climbed out of the truck.

  Jerry opened the rear doors to the vehicle and told me to help transport the guy.

  I nodded and took the foot of the stretcher. We dropped the wheels and started rolling. We burst into the ER and one of the docs came and paced us, directing us to take our patient to ER-2 while Mark gave her the rundown. I just pushed the stretcher, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to stare. Or scream.

  The Mutes were there.

  It wasn’t like up on five, where there were just a couple at a time—three or four at most. In the hubbub of the ER, they seemed to be everywhere.

  Next to us in ER-1 was a woman who looked like she’d gone through the windshield of a car. The side of her face looked like hamburger from sliding along on the macadam—what motorcyclists call road rash. She had little cubes of safety glass in her hair and ground into what used to be her skin. The blood running down her cheek on the abraded side of her face hinted that some of those little cubes were even lodged in her eye. Every movement and twitch of her optic muscles were grinding that eye to jelly. The doctor and two nurses slid, unknowing, in and out of a ring of almost a dozen red-eyed demons. The Mutes showed white teeth and red tongues as they silently laughed whenever the girl made a sound of pain. The whole thing had a strange grace, like some macabre dance.

  Mutes crowded around the patient in ER-3 so tightly I couldn’t even see what was wrong.

  Everywhere I looked, there they were—except in ER-2. We wheeled the patient in and helped transition him from our stretcher to the hospital gurney, and as far as I could tell, not one of them even looked our way. I looked at the guy we’d brought in, trying to avoid staring at the Mutes and going stark raving mad right there. I was trying to figure out why they weren’t swarming in here for the fresh meat when it hit me.

  Our guy was unconscious, and he wasn’t in any pain. He hadn’t even hit his head when he fainted. There was nothing here for them, so they were ignoring him.

  We trooped back out to our ride, and I brought up the rear, avoiding any conversation until we were outside. I tried to focus on Mark and Jerry, ignoring what only I could see around us, but we passed some folks waiting to be seen, and there were Mutes waiting with them. One guy’s hand looked like he’d caught it in a machine, fingers sticking out at every angle but the right ones, blood leaking from several places where the bone had poked through the skin. He was holding it elevated, sobbing in pain; there were two Mutes bending down to inhale dreamily over the ruined hand like they were sniffing a bouquet of flowers.

  I struggled not to cry.

  We took up our positions again, Jerry driving with me riding shotgun. Mark and Jerry kept up a constant stream of conversation, but I was mostly silent as we cruised for abou
t a half hour without a call. I started to hope it would be quiet night, which would have been fine with me; I needed some down time to try to assimilate what I’d seen in the ER and figure out what the hell I was going to do. But then the call came in, and like that one that sent us to the warehouse, this one wound up being a life-changer.

  There was a fire. A big one. Just thinking of it now still makes me want to scream.

  Burn victims go through more pain than any other trauma victim. It’s supposedly the most painful way to die. This wasn’t going to be some businessman fainting quietly at a company party. I had never been to a big fire before, but I figured I knew what to expect. Even with the Mutes.

  I had no idea.

  Jesus. I checked on them again and they were all looking at my window. They weren’t moving around or anything. The leader guy was in the front. I—I don’t think I have much more time.

  Anyway, the tenement was what firemen refer to as “fully involved.” Flame roiled out of windows on all four floors, reaching for the sky—the building was a lost cause. Hoses were aimed at the surrounding buildings to keep the fire from spreading, and toward the front door of the inferno in case any more tenants were able to escape. There were people still in there. The fire roared like a wounded giant but there were still occasional shrieks, the mindless sounds of someone driven mad by pain or fear, barely heard over the din.

  Jerry told us to stop gawking and start working, and gave us the plan. We would split up and triage whomever we could on the scene. Anyone who needed an immediate ride to County would go with two of us while the third stayed to keep working triage.

  Mark tore his eyes away from the fire and said “got it, boss,” in a voice that didn’t sound at all convinced it was going to be that easy. I just nodded at Jerry, not trusting myself to speak. I hadn’t been staring at the fire.

  I was staring at the Mutes.

  Dozens of them. Maybe a hundred of them—it was hard to tell in the flickering firelight and all the rescue personnel running about. The Mutes seemed to ring the entire structure, probably in as close as they could get and still bear the heat. Each time there was a shriek from the flames the whole ring of them swayed, leaning in and out, the faces I could see twisting with obscene pleasure. Their grinning, bone-white faces were bathed in the rippling red firelight as they seemed almost to dance.