Farmington Correctional
Page 6
Before any of that though, there is this moment, these images. Images that leave her waking in a cold sweat night after night, feelings of guilt, of failure lingering long into old age, following her to her deathbed.
And she hears this old man’s voice in her head.
The only God here stands before you.
The clouds in the black sky seem to swirl, sucked down towards the field, the celestial sphere split by the invisible wall around the clearing. And it’s as if this invisible barrier, knowing it’s no longer needed drifts off like smoke in the wind. In its wake an enormous vortex spirals in the ground; a bottomless pit of dark matter, a portal of black with an array of the light spectrum mixed within, hard to look at for long.
The old man beside Chuck stares at her, one last time. Her blood runs cold. For the shadows that swim about him are not a separate thing, but form the shape of something monstrous, leviathan. What she took for separate entities swirling about the air around the old man are in fact a part of him, rising from the howling vortex. Sarah finally realizes what she’s looking at, that the black in the pit is not shadow, not dark matter. The thing in the pit is the true form of this old man. The terrible thing is trapped in this vortex coming out of the Earth itself.
And in these last moments of consciousness she sees the dawning horror shift across Chuck’s face, as the old man snatches him to dart off into the trees, lifting him from the ground like a rag doll.
AFTERWORD
The New England that gets marketed to tourists isn’t necessarily the same New England its citizens know.
Sure, there are some similarities, a few points in common, a stereotype or two with more than a hint of truth about it. The tourism promoters aren’t making things up out of whole cloth, after all.
Boston sports are, indeed, a big deal throughout the region. New Englanders really do consume a fair amount of lobster meat, whether via the preferred method (dripping with butter on a toasted bun) or otherwise. Yankees living in rural areas, especially if they’re older, really do say “ayuh” when they mean “yes” (or sometimes when they mean “no,” or even when they mean “what is this idiot talking about?”; it’s a versatile idiom). And the people here really do think our crummy winters are an annual test of character (that we always manage to pass, naturally).
But, by necessity, most of what makes up “New England” to the New Englander doesn’t make it onto tourism websites or cheerful commercials urging you to come home this summer, America, to where it all began.
The region’s industrial decline began about two decades before it started to set in elsewhere in the country, and our progression along that route offers some sobering data for regions still getting used to manufacturing jobs leaving town and never coming back: Mill towns where the only businesses seem to be pharmacies, dollar stores, and heroin; crumbling roads and rickety bridges left to rot by a shrinking tax base and penny-pinching voters; cities that used to be “The Brass Capital of the World,” “The Shoe Capital of the World,” “The Thread Capital of the World” that are now, at best, the troubled school district capitals of their respective metropolitan areas.
And of course, the prisons.
In a region that has resisted the mania for privatization which has seized so much of the country, prison jobs are some of the last good jobs for people without a four-year college diploma (and even for some of the ones who have that supposed token to the middle class life): union benefits, hazardous duty pay, job security strengthened by a steady stream of newcomers who found themselves in the position of badly, badly needing heroin but not having any more money of their own to buy it.
The novella you’ve just finished takes place in this New England. The New England of dead ends and shortened lives, of no-luck towns that depend on prison work – and the kind of things that keep prisons open – to keep paying for the failing schools and pothole-strafed roads. Not the New England of “chowdah” and comfy flannel shirts, not the New England of Pilgrims and Patriots, not the New England of “yuh can’t get theayuh from heayuh,” especially if by “theayuh” you mean “anywhere with a future.”
Don’t get me wrong; Sean M. Thompson’s gripping, unsettling novella isn’t a “true” story in the strict sense, but like those tourism promoters, he bases his version of New England on elements drawn from real life.
I could tell you about the specifics of how Thompson went about writing this novella, about the people he talked to in order to learn about life inside one of the bleak prisons in this region, about the correspondences between the places and events in his tale and their very real, very true counterparts, but what kind of chef wastes time listing the ingredients and the prep time for the meal? Just know that this novella wasn’t cooked up in leisurely hours spent on a Nantucket deck after pleasant cocktail hour chatter with members of the Harvard faculty. Thompson’s characters face decisions, pressures, and tests that real New Englanders encounter, and the supernatural here, as in the best horror fiction, is less a fantasy element than an x-ray, showing us what we can’t see with the naked eye.
From my own conversations with Thompson, I’m left with the impression that this isn’t the last time he’ll invite us into this New England, a prospect that is tantalizing and chilling in about equal measure. As much as I want to see what else Thompson has waiting for us in the woods around Farmington, I’m not sure how much I relish another long, deep look into the eyes of the grinning skull sitting a few inches below the mundane New England where I spend my life. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
But you, though? You should make yourself at home in Thompson’s New England. Pull up a chair in front of the Franklin stove here in the general store, kick back with a mug of mulled cider, and let the rage and terror contained in these pages soak in, good and deep. On your long, lonely ride home, past the old cemetery and the abandoned mill, you can tell yourself this story isn’t real, that New England isn’t really like this, and maybe you’ll even start to believe it.
Tom Breen
Author of Orford Parish Murder Houses and founder of Orford Parish Books
Sean M. Thompson is the author of Too Late and Th3 D3m0n from McManbeast Books, and Hate From The Sky, a novella in the bizarro genre from Eraserhead Press. He’s cohost of a comedic horror/weird fiction podcast Miskatonic Musings. You can find him on Twitter @SpookySeanT and at his official website SpookySean.com.