Farmington Correctional

by Sean M Thompson

  Farmington Correctional

  by

  Sean M. Thompson

  A Planet X Publications

  presentation

  Copyright © 2018 by Planet X Publications

  Cover art by George Cotronis.

  Cover design by Michael Adams.

  Interior designed by AW Baader.

  All rights reserved.

  The contents of this volume should not be reproduced by any means, either mechanical or electronic, except in the cases of short excerpts for promotions or reviews. This is a work of fiction.

  Also available from Sean M. Thompson via McManbeast Books

  Too Late

  Th3 D3m0n

  from Eraserhead Press

  Hate from the Sky

  Also available from Planet-X Publications

  Test Patterns

  Test Patterns: Creature Features (forthcoming 2018)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Afterword

  About Sean M Thompson

  Chapter One

  April 12, 1995

  From the outside Farmington Correctional appears as a sort of Victorian asylum, enveloped by dense New England forest. Past fences, with barbed wire that snakes along the top of the gates, the institution looms as a monolith in the noonday sun, the blanched grey building nestled on the east side of the Raft Pines conservation land. This protected wilderness cuts through the towns of Chesterville, and Ostium, respectively, but the prison is of course on the Farmington side.

  The institution was built in 1902, and past that Sarah’s forgotten the particulars of its history. A single glance at the building reminds her of its heritage. It’s a legacy of pain, a century of punishment housing many lifetimes of isolation, and the screams and tears of men caged.

  Thirty-three and out of grad school for a scant number of years, 1995 has been kind to her, if not with its share of job stress. She figures if you aren’t stressed about working at a prison once a week, you have serious issues; you might even be on your way to residence.

  Every walk into the front lobby there’s low-level anxiety she’s learned to swallow down. Despite the number of times she’s done this, Sarah never thinks she’ll get used to the gates metallic slam as the lock crashes into place. The noise itself is disquieting, violent somehow. A grating electronic buzz rings out to signal a new entrance, followed by the guard’s shout of "two coming in." There’s no emotion to his voice, he shouts a variation of this phrase many times a day.

  These are the noises of freedom being locked out, viciously separated from the outside world. They remind its occupants, those judged by the state, that life now exists in confinement. A new world, one of concrete, of steel. And once a week these sounds let Sarah know, without any doubt, she’s trapped in the belly of the beast with thieves, rapists, and killers.

  Terrence walks beside her. He’s one of the guards she often sees on her Wednesday visits to talk with a group about anger management, and to see certain prisoners she deems worthy of individual attention. Terrence matches her height of five foot nine, but is broad shouldered, quick with a smile though she’s seen the glare he summons at will to let inmates know he’s not fucking around. Sarah likes the way he smells, a scent of musky deodorant with a light tinge of sweat underneath, which she knows intellectually shouldn’t really smell that good at all, but something about the whole je ne sais quoi of the guard sends a funny stirring to her stomach, and tingle to her spine. Of course, she’d never tell him this to his face, both because it would be wildly unprofessional, and because she knows it would sound creepy.

  As they move she takes in the cell blocks, the prisoners milling about, ever aware of the sideways glances, the energy of the room, an almost palpable hostility.

  The staff of Farmington Correctional, including the warden, have made her lack of safety within these walls abundantly clear. She’s had to sign documents letting her know the prison waives all responsibility to any injury she might incur within the facility. This was just the paperwork, the individual guards gave her warnings about certain prisoners, saying things like “watch out for Ralph, he tried to choke a guy last week” or “We caught Sam raping an inmate, so keep your distance.”

  Her friends thought she was crazy to voluntarily work in a prison, and she had to admit part of her thought that maybe they were right. What else would you call a person who, of their own volition, decided to counsel some of the most violent, damaged men in the state?

  There's no real way to stop the fear from pumping through her blood when she hears the men whistling at her, yelling out all the foul things they'd like to do to her. Terrence yells at them to knock it off, but she gets the sense from the way he sighs he's as sick of worrying about Sarah in with general pop as she is. After a year and a half you think she'd be used to this, but she guesses it’s like being a wildlife photographer: a little caution around predators is wise.

  After what feels like an eternity they make it to the little white room she uses for her meetings, with its grey plastic folding chairs. Silly as it is, when she gets to this room she feels safe. She probably shouldn’t, considering the odds are only slightly in her favor inside the meeting room. Still, she’ll take any comfort, even if it’s irrational.

  Sarah gives her best seductive smile, unsure if it’s having the desired effect on Terrence. “You want to stick around? My group doesn't start for another ten minutes.”

  Terrence shakes his head, a slight glint in his eye. Sarah isn't sure what to think.

  “No, I’m alright,” he says.

  She turns away, not wanting him to see her disappointment. She’s never handled rejection well, has merely learned to hide her tells. It’s easier to fake like it doesn’t bother her, to try to bury her raw emotions from scrutiny.

  “I'll see you in a few hours. Are you sending Dave in this time?’

  “Sarah.”

  Terrence gently places a hand on her shoulder. She turns, and in his hand is a small business card. At the top of the card, in red capital letters, the words, SECURITY FOR HIRE below which are Terrence’s full name and contact information.

  Sarah smiles, and can’t hide the little flutter of happiness inside.

  …

  "The medication you started, is it making you feel calmer?”

  Across the room, sitting in a folding chair that makes him look comically oversized is Chuck McDougal. Chuck is one of those men who looks like he doesn’t have a neck due to how wide and heavily muscled it is: It looks like he has a head that connects straight to his upper torso. Sarah thinks in another life he would have made a hell of a linebacker, and in another era would have made a great gladiator. If Chuck gets out ready to integrate back into society he could easily find a job as a bouncer, or something similar. This is of course assuming it’s an employer willing to hire an ex con. Not everyone wants to, for obvious reasons.

  Chuck is a violent offender who’s served three months of a three-year sentence for beating one Vincent Deprano into a coma. Deprano attempted to steal Chuck’s car one night earlier in the year, a decision the man may, or may not, live to regret. Sarah tries to think of the incident only in relation to how it affects Chuck. If she were to think at length about Deprano, it would get in the way of her job. So, as best she can, she blocks out any type of empathy for the car-jacker, in a hospital bed attached to tubes and wires.

  In contrast to the tiny chair, the open space of the meeting room, now cleared of the eleven men who comprise her weekly anger management group, seems vast. The buzzing of the lights above annoys her
to no end, seems like some alien language she can never quite wrap her head around. Sarah can only imagine how Chuck feels about it.

  He’s probably used to it by now, he’s had to sit under lights like these every day for the past three months. Bet he doesn’t even notice the noise anymore.

  “They make me feel apathetic,” Chuck says in a monotone.

  “That’s a common complaint with the type of medication you’re taking. But that must be better than being angry though, right?”

  “I guess…”

  Sarah has heard these same complaints from many patients on psychotropics before. Men in particular loved to complain about the sexual side effects, though most of her clients were men so it stood to reason she didn’t have the best cross-section to draw from. Likewise many of the clients were in prison, so unless they got conjugal visits, sex was the last thing they wanted to think about.

  Sarah was on low doses of antidepressants herself, and an anti-anxiety prescription she took before bed that effectively acted as a sleep aid. Though she hated to admit it to her parents, her mother in particular who loved to get all indignant about the prison work, many of the inmates did get to her, and thinking about them, whether worrying about their mental health, or just worrying they might get out one day and become repeat offenders and hurt others… Obviously, it made sense she’s had trouble sleeping at times.

  “Have you had any more nightmares this week?”

  Chuck had complained of “strange dreams” repeatedly, which after some questioning proved to be nightmares, though Chuck barely ever mentioned how the dreams made him feel.

  That was another aspect of assessing cons Sarah has grown accustomed to. Most inmates were on the defensive all the time, and never liked to admit to anything that could be perceived as a weakness. Even in a safe setting with a counselor they hid their emotions.

  In any case, in the dream Chuck told her about last week, he’d been strapped to a wheel and spun round as a “man in a black robe that hides his face” threw daggers with handles made from carved oak branches. Though none of the blades ever hit Chuck in his dream, when the blades stabbed into the wood of the wheel behind him a “terrible squealing screech” rang out, and he’d told her the wheel had bled. As always, when pressed, Chuck never really says how the dreams make him feel, save for one short comment about how he wondered why “none of the blades the man in the robe threw hit me.”

  Sarah takes notes, jotting down lines she thinks might help her later. Even with her time assessing convicts, Chuck has proved to be one of the more inscrutable clients, and it’s this detachment that compels her to have the private sessions. A man so shut off from any kind of emotional response, coupled with the severity of the violence of his crime was less like a ticking time bomb, and more like a mail bomb filled with nails set to blow at random.

  Sarah wants to make sure Chuck won’t hurt anyone else, or himself, but she’s having a very hard time gauging what Chuck’s triggers are.

  Some men yelling outside the room in the common area distract her, and Chuck nods in the direction of the shouts.

  “Don’t worry about them, Miss Tenent.”

  Sarah looks back to Chuck, desperately trying to gauge his emotional state, but the look he gives her is completely blank. He may as well be a mannequin.

  “We’re almost out of time, is there anything else you want to talk about before I leave?”

  A flicker of sadness spreads across the man’s face like a ripple in a pond.

  “Do you think they’ll ever let me see my son again?”

  …

  On days like this, when alone and able to drift into quiet reflection, Chuck relives the night he lost control. The way his breath steamed in the November air as his fists hammered the flesh of Deprano’s face, his chest, his throat, over and over, until time itself bled together into one never ending moment of rage, and pain; a dam broke, and madness burst through like a boiling river, scalding away everything.

  What was it about the stranger trying to steal his car that let loose a lifetime worth of repressed anger, unleashed a violence so simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying from some previously hidden place inside? Chuck still doesn’t know.

  His scream had split the black sky, a crack of brilliant white, the darkness cascading down; the firmament roaring, the rough backed beast finally reaching Bethlehem as his own personal apocalypse began. He’d collapsed into unconsciousness, came to in a hospital bed; came to in a courtroom during sentencing; came to in a prison cell.

  Chuck doesn’t have any windows, and some days the lack of a view of the yard and forest beyond bother him, but today he finds himself merely apathetic. Lying on the bottom of the metal bunk bed, surrounded by institutional white painted over the concrete, his mind feels like Jell-O left too long on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

  The meds they have him on leave him very middle of the road, anesthetized to the point nothing fills him with joy, sorrow, or anger. He simply exists.

  His cellmate Fred is off playing poker with some guys from the Aryan Brotherhood but Chuck isn't a fan of the white power assholes, or their shitty tattoos. His size and strength mean he doesn’t have to try as hard as Fred to buddy up to the zig-heiling motherfuckers. This doesn’t mean they don’t freak him out a bit, though. Chuck might have been born large, but that doesn’t mean a roomful of coked-up skinheads goose-stomping the shit out of him sounds appealing.

  The media got prison all wrong. The reality of life in Farmington Correctional was far more mundane, boredom the prevailing emotion: more so than fear, more so than anger. Eat, work-out, shit, piss, sleep, read, repeat. At this point Chuck almost wishes the Aryan Brotherhood would beat him to a pulp. At least that would break the monotony.

  Chuck wasn’t sure how to feel about the social worker, Sarah. For the most part he thinks therapy is hot garbage, but it gives him someone relatively intelligent to talk to, so he never misses the opportunity.

  Chuck has never told Sarah about the voices, or the things he's seen, but since the meds they've gone away. Mostly.

  He delicately picks the corner of the page of The Bible between thumb and forefinger, and flips to the next page. His family was never religious. Chuck wasn’t either until he found himself locked in a cage for a three-year sentence for aggravated assault, two for good behavior.

  He thinks about his son Billy, and how he’ll look when he gets out. Billy will be in his early teens once he’s out. The concept of his little boy getting acne and going through puberty stir strange emotions in him, but they’re deep under a layer of anesthetization.

  The selection in the library is good, but he's bought The Bible, using money his brother wired to his account at the commissary. Chuck wants to know what wisdom the pages of the good book contain, which of the passages he can apply to his life, now thrown into the fray. An admittedly narcissistic urge directs him through the text as well.

  He wants to read of others who've heard the voice of God.

  …

  Chuck walks under dense tree cover, the setting sun obscured by branches reaching for the heavens, rays diluted like blood in water. A susurration surrounds him, whispers of the dead and the damned, forever trapped in a hell of shadow.

  An old man stands in a clearing just past the tree line. The old man does not move, implacable as stone, but Chuck feels him move, deep in his guts. This person’s silhouette against the dying light makes him question his vision, as shadows around the old man seem to dance and move with frenetic intensity. Chuck starts to understand the voices, moving ever forward.

  They needed me, like I needed them, but the only way they could go with me was if they were no longer breathing. The knife was the only way. Such sweet little angels, they came to sing sweet music to me among the pines. Another voice, a woman’s: The forest called to me like a lover, and I found a branch, a sturdy oak branch. And it was like the tree wanted me to hang the noose off of it, and the rope felt so good wrapped tight around my throat.
Another voice, a small boy’s: my baseball went too far, ‘cause Danny hit it real good, so I went into the trees to go find my ball, ‘cause it was my favorite baseball. I heard it growling, and then I hurt, it hurt so much, and I tried to scream, but it stopped me. I miss my parents, and my cat Snuffles.

  And there is one voice louder than the rest, with a confidence clear in his tone even as he whispers.

  These woods are mine. They have been since the great darkness. I can show you how it was, when the world was new and hungry. Whispering Pines will have its glorious day. You may join me when the time comes.

  And still he steps forward, unsure why.

  This place eats what it kills. Its appetite is unfathomable. How do you quell a hunger that never ends?

  The old man in the field slowly floats from the ground, hovering above Chuck as his voice hisses out like steam.

  They whisper my name in the lost places where the lonely ones wander forever. They all know my legacy. Henry Scatherty, and death is never far behind the utterance.

  …

  “Hey Chuck, wake up-”

  Before his eyes are open he has his hands across Fred’s throat, squeezing tight. The man thrashes, hits his chest, kicks him in the shin.

  Chuck’s eyes adjust, and he shakes off the remnants of the dream. He sees who’s in his grasp, and releases his grip. Fred falls to the floor, coughing.

  “Jesus Christ man,” Fred coughs “are you trying to” he coughs again “kill me?!”

  “Sorry, Fred.”

  “That’s…” Fred coughs “that’s all you’ve got? Gee Fred, sorry I almost crushed your trachea, my b? Fuck, man!”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  Chuck finds he has a perverse desire to keep choking Fred just to keep him from fucking talking. But Fred was only trying to help, and besides they’d throw him in the hole if he offed his roommate, which would definitely ruin his chances for early release. Strangulation did not count as “good behavior.”