July 1935
Somehow it seemed fitting to carry the scrawlings from a dead woman into the depths of a prison such as Eastwater. The place was an example of how plain looks could be menacing. Its wall was featureless save for the mortar between the bricks and rolls of barbed wire along its top. The barrier stretched the length of the street with no buttresses or pillars or deviations of any kind from its mundane persistence. This particular Hell was not the baroque underworld imagined by Dante, with all its caverns and edifices. Eastwater was a place of deprivation and endless repetition.
Arthur was standing with his rifle slung over his shoulder. The sergeant, his supervisor, was inspecting the prisoners lined up against one side of a dirt square surrounded on four sides by the main residential building. One of these men was Randall, who turned his head and made the briefest of eye contact. Since the fire that killed his cousin, the mother of Arthur’s little girl, their alliance had been an uneasy one. The guard tried to pay down his guilt as best he could by ensuring little concessions to Randall. For his part, Randall found a way to not hate Arthur forever. This meant the world now that Arthur’s pocket held the strange missives of his fiancee’s spirit and Randall was the only one who could read them.
The inmate was a shadow of his former self, looking as though he was held together by bits of wire. In 1931 he’d taken up an offer to run bootleg in his cab. Randall was no kingpin; just a desperate man. His demise was a simple matter. He and a couple other guys were loading drums when a rival gang pulled up. In the ensuing fight, Randall’s “colleagues” gunned down their assailants and took off in the cab, leaving Randall with the bodies. Blood splattered and injured, he’d tried to escape. He didn’t make it far.
On his break, Arthur visited the officer’s washroom. He held a chocolate bar with brown and orange wrapping and the words “Spanish Night”. The damn thing was full of almonds and Arthur hated almonds, which made the candy useful for other things besides eating. He removed the wrapper and broke the bar into bits which he flushed down the toilet. He found the paper on which he’d written the message from Ethel’s ghost and folded it inside the chocolate wrapper. This assemblage went into the garbage.
Arthur checked his watch. Randall would be coming by in ten minutes on his cleaning detail. Arthur liked Spanish Nights for two reasons. One, they had huge wrappers and that made them useful for concealing things. Second, everyone knew he hated them and that made him a less likely suspect should his secret notes be discovered.
When Arthur returned to the block watch-stander room, the shift commander told him to help arrange the convoy for the work crew. Not long after, he and a few other guards were loading prisoners onto buses and securing their chains. Randall passed by Arthur as he climbed aboard and once again exchanged the briefest of glances with Arthur to say that he’d found the message. The convoy left Eastwater.
Their worksite was a long, wide ditch filled with mud and sewage. It was the worst site Arthur had ever been to. A few months back, Eastwater River had started turning colors. The state sent some people down to survey the land and discovered that the sewer main, built of brick during the Civil War, was leaking. Since then, the prisoners had been digging the trench along the length of the giant pipe until the source of the spill revealed itself. One wall of the trench was formed by the curved surface of the ancient viaduct. They must have been getting close, because the dirt had turned to mud that smelled like shit.
Arthur walked along the top of the trench while the cons shoveled putrid earth into buckets. Their luckier comrades were on high ground and hauling the loads up. Arthur stopped. Something was odd. He went to find the sergeant, who was standing near the bus with two dogs.
“I think there’s something you should see.” said Arthur. They walked over with the dogs. “See where the sewer wall is bulging a little? There and there? And I think the ground where we haven’t dug yet is sinking.”
“Good. We should get all the men digging there.”
“Do you want me to radio the shift commander?”
“We only have the car with the one-way radio.” said the sergeant.
He walked back down the line and whistled for the other guards. Soon they were herding the entire chain gang to the end of the hole. They got to work digging in the place that Arthur had indicated. Soon brown water was falling over the curved brick wall, dripping through channels made by the mortar, and swirling in nasty puddles by the prisoners’ feet.
“You might be right about this.” said the sergeant.
Arthur noticed that the problem wasn’t the dirt. Those bricks along the bulge line didn’t look steady to him at all. A group of prisoners, Randall among them, were shoveling muck right there. They were striking the wall to loosen the earth’s hold on it. Then Arthur noticed a brick shift. It was a single brick, but he’d never seen that happen before. Something had damaged and weakened the wall. The ground is what was holding it together. Removing the ground meant letting the sewer wall crumble.
He shouted for the sergeant again, but now the men were yelling. More bricks were shifting and the water flow was increasing. It submerged their ankles. This made the ground beneath them softer. They began to sink in and fall as they moved. This pulled down others to which they were connected by chain.
The sergeant saw what was happening and ordered the gang out the trench. This proved to be a slower process than he had likely anticipated. The trench floor had become quicksand. A few of the guards were trying to pull out prisoners at the end of the string of them, but they were stuck good. When one inmate came free and climbed up the makeshift earthen ramp at the other end of the ditch, he stumbled and fell back down a few feet, smashing into the man behind him. Then the ramp itself started to sink in. Arthur was struck by the image of the trench as a massive grave, as though these men were already dead and the ground was pulling them back inside where they belonged.
Sewage was flowing faster now. Water had a way of finding the points of least resistance. Right now that point was the breach which the prisoners had opened. The pressure of that flow was pushing out the bricks more, turning the river of sludge into a rapids of free flowing sewer water. It was now filling up the hole at an alarming rate.
Arthur found Randall struggling against the flow. There wasn’t much point in pretending they were strangers now. He climbed down into the maelstrom and sunk his hands below the dark water. He managed to find the chain and one of the locks that held it. He pulled out his keys and fumbled with one of them until it slipped into the hole. Arthur stumbled to the other side to find the other lock. He was crab walking along a wall of slanted earth that was coming apart as he moved over it. This was a time when his size was a disadvantage. He couldn’t move quickly enough and his weight weakened the packed dirt.
The sergeant found him and shouted at him to get out of there. Arthur was hindering the operation further down the line. It sure wasn’t helpful that he was making the unsteady ditch wall worse for the other guards to scramble over. Arthur looked across the trench and up. Some of the prisoners had managed to find their way out. Guards were doing the same thing as Arthur, unlocking the chains to make it easier to pull out more. One prisoner saw his opportunity and made a break. The sergeant released one of his dogs and the canine knocked the would-be fugitive to the ground. He ordered that no more men be freed from the chains.
“They’ll drown that way.” said Arthur.
“Well I’m not going down for letting them loose.”
“And for them dying?”
“What about all the innocent people out there? What if one these apes gets free and kills?”
Arthur kept fumbling for the other lock. The sergeant was screaming at him now and tugging his arms, but as he saw how precarious his stance was, he backed off. Then he signaled one of his dogs. It charged until it reached the end of its leash and snarled at Arthur. It managed to get a grip on his shoulder. Arthur fell and slipped all the way down into the mud. He felt a hand on his other shoulder. Arthur turned and saw Randall looking at him.
“Give me the key.” he said. “And get out of here.”
The sewer water was up around his knees. Arthur glanced up the side of the ditch. The dog was still barking at him. He couldn’t see the sergeant though. He unhooked the key from its loop and handed it to Randall. With his good arm he hauled himself up. The guard flopped onto the ground above. He stared up into the clear sky. All around him were the voices of men screaming as they tried to escape dying in someone else’s waste.
The sergeant pulled Arthur to his feet. He ordered him down the line to help the other guards. Arthur helped them haul free a few more, all the while with the water rolling faster and faster. They unlocked a string of five men but kept those five chained to each other. These were the last five that came out of that hole.
Arthur surveyed the damage. There were bodies now. Because they couldn’t float freely, they bobbed. He’d see a head crest over the surface of the brown water, only to be pulled back under by the chain and the rapid flow. He didn’t see Randall, but he was sure the man must’ve been under there somewhere. All that could be done was done.
A few hours later, Arthur was sitting on the couch in the living room. His sister brought him a cup of coffee. Then Dorothy sat next to him while he finished his story. Arthur looked across the room to where his daughter sat.
“Do you think Uncle Randall is gone?” said Beverly.
They all heard a sound from outside. Arthur went to the back of the house, where he could see the flashing of the Eastwater River in the dying daylight and the shed that stood a few feet from the water’s edge. It’s door was ajar. Arthur kept a Browning rifle in the house. He took this and ventured into the yard.
“I don’t want to kill anyone.” he said. “But I will shoot if I have to, so come on out.”
Someone emerged. His prison uniform and his stink was enough to announce his identity before Arthur could see his face.
“Glad to see you.” said Arthur. “But what the hell?”
“I still got a chain on me.” said Randall.
“You should’ve come into the house first or else I might’ve blown your head off. Did you swim here?”
Randall laughed, saying. “Blow my head off, eh? I’ll bet money I don’t have that you didn’t even check to make sure that rifle was loaded.”
Arthur opened the breach and looked. When he found that there was no bullet, he shook his head at Randal.
“Yeah.” said Randal. “You make a scary shadow, but violence was never your answer. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I can say my fellow inmates talked about how you weren’t one to beat them on the slightest reason.”
“Come on.” Arthur turned back to the door, where his sister was standing just inside. Let’s draw a bath.”
Minutes later, the fugitive was luxuriating in warm soapy water. Arthur sat on the floor nearby, with his back propped against the door. Randall stared at the pitched ceiling, where the lattice boards were visible in a hole from which the plaster had fallen. Other sections of ceiling looked spotted and warped by moisture and close to crumbling as well.
“I saw your message.” said Randall. “It’s from Ethel?”
“Dorothy brought her out. I asked her to. I wanted to find a way to help Beverly and…”
“I know. It said so in the letter.”
“Was there more?”
Randall’s face turned to the tile floor. He looked as though he was about to answer Arthur’s question, but then his eyes caught something and he tilted his head to one side. Arthur followed the gaze and notice it led to a green tile beneath one of the tub’s claw feet. The tile itself wasn’t significant. However, the grout around it had turned brown. From there, the darkness extended along the seams in the grid, forming a web that ended near where Arthur sat now. It became fainter as it stretched away from its center, until the grout assumed its usual color, dingy but not nearly so dark. Arthur knew his friend was thinking of what it was like when Arthur was child and his mother had whipped him until he was bleeding before dumping him in that tub. Then Randall looked up.
“Yeah there’s more.” he said. “Pass me my clothes and get out. I’ll show you in a minute.”
Arthur went back to the front room with Dorothy and Bev. A few minutes later, Randall appeared in clothes that were much too big for him. He’d tried his valiant best, however, to tuck and roll them so at least he didn’t trip over himself. He turned to Dorothy.
“Is it okay if Arthur and me go out for a minute.”
“Don’t get caught.”
Randall smiled and nodded. The two men left the house and crossed the street. Seven years ago, there had been a ramshackle little house standing here and a shed full of jars. On the night that Arthur had seen the house’s owner murdering his children, the night that he and Randall first fell out, the house caught fire. Arthur hadn’t returned home that day. He and Dorothy had left town and hadn’t returned until another day, six months later, when Ethel died and Arthur’s life changed to become about nothing more nor less than caring for his crippled daughter. Now he and Randall stood on the hard packed square of dirt, barren save for a line of trees that had somehow survived. Randall lined his feet against the street edge of the property and counted paces.
“Looking for pirate treasure?” said Arthur.
“Pretty much.” said Randall.
He stopped at one point and began digged with his hands. Arthur asked about fetched a shovel, but Randall went on digging, so the man with the larger hands knelt down and joined him. It wasn’t long before their fingers scraped the top of a wooden box. It wasn’t a large package. Once freed from its grave, it fit easily into the palm of Arthur’s hand. He opened it and found a single object wrapped in familiar brown paper. The paper, however, did not conceal the hourglass jar that Arthur had expected. Instead he found an object more like a coffee tin, only entirely black and quite heavy. There was a screw cap on one end and it was very cold to the touch.
“There’s pain and then there’s disease.” said Randall. “You know those jars your mother had, the same ones Bonnie had - you could put all the pain inside them you wanted and still not get away from anything that kills you or fix a face that’s been burned off. But this thing can do that.”
“Ethel told you about this?” said Arthur.
“That’s what she wrote. Your daughter doesn’t have to die. She doesn’t have to hobble around the world. But you know it’s got to be a devil’s deal. Shit like that don’t come for free. I’m sure you figured on it.”
“If you left the pain inside the jars for too long, they would explode.” said Arthur. “I can’t imagine what happens with this thing.”
“Nothing.” said Randall. “You don’t put the disease in there. There’s no jar or tin or iron pipe strong enough to contain it. What you do, Arthur, is you give it to another person. It’s a trade, you know?” He took the container from Arthur and opened the cap. The gelatinous liquid that Arthur had seen before was inside. “You put this on Bev. When it changes color, you put it on another person.”
“Such as myself.” said Arthur with a smile. “And then it all comes to me? And Beverly gets to live?”
“I know.” Randall said as he put the cap back on and handed it to Arthur. “No parent would think twice about it. I can’t say it will work or something else won’t happen. I can only tell you what I’ve been told.”
“Thank you Randall.”
They returned to the house. Of course, the girls had been watching in the window. Neither man said anything about what they had brought back. That wasn’t surprising, but the strange thing was the silence that Dorothy and Beverly met them with. They looked as though there were questions burning at the tips of their tongues, but Dorothy seemed to know it was better that she not press right now, and Beverly simply followed her aunt’s lead.
It was deep in the night when Arthur retrieved his canister. He crept into the room across the hall and knelt next to his daughter’s sleeping form. He opened the top and scooped the gel inside with his fingers. Once placed on Beverly’s face, it began to turn from green through darker and darker colors. Arthur didn’t pause when it was done. He wiped all the stuff off and did just as Randall had instructed, which was to swallow it. The taste was wretched. He expected nothing less. However, the taste was so far the worst of it. Arthur didn’t feel a lump in his stomach or burning or really any discomfort at all.
He walked to the front room and sat in Beverly’s chair, beneath bars of moonlight. Arthur caught a motion near the kitchen. He looked. The door to the outside was open and a dark shape was standing in it. The thing was taller than Arthur and had to crouch to keep the top of itself inside the frame of the opening. It didn’t look like it had any roundness, like a person. Rather it was flat, like a shadow.
It was silent and still as a wall. The more Arthur stared at the figure, the more the edges on it appeared to fade into the other shadows in the kitchen, those cast by the table and chairs and cabinets above the counters. After a minute, the thing moved its head as if to bring its enormous body into the house with Arthur. Without moving from his crouched position, Arthur scrambled backwards. The movement gave his visitor pause.
A breeze blew through the house. It gave the rear door a gentle push and the door swung out and back again on its spring, bouncing off the side of the house with a distant and muted crack. It sailed out into the darkness again and again, each time returning with a little slap.
slap
slap
slap
Then it didn’t come back. Something had caught it and held it open. Arthur looked down the hallway, past the door to the bedrooms, and through the rear door. There was an orange light near the neighbor’s house and it covered the small patch of dirt and grass behind Arthur’s home in strange colors. Despite the light, Arthur could not see all of the shed. Another human form, this one bigger than the one that had already come in, was eclipsing it.
A black foot composed of the perfect absence of color stood on the concrete slab by the rear door. The limb stretched from the place where the thing stood to the door, keeping it ajar. The foot moved and the door opened wider. It ducked beneath the frame and came in. As it moved with the grace befitting a hole in space, it revealed that others had come with it. They were emerging from the waters of the river and walking without a sound up to the house.
These things don’t like loud noises, thought Arthur. Why such a calm and rational thought passed through his mind at that moment was a mystery to him. Perhaps the only reason he conjured it was because right then he was sure it was the only thing he knew was true. They hated noise and there was no doubt about it. They hated sudden motions as well.
Wind chimes played a melody outside. Arthur looked to his left, where a window stood open. There was another shadow man, perhaps eight or nine feet tall this time. Because its head was blank, he couldn’t tell if it was looking at him or somewhere else. Then it ducked, just as the first one had, so that its head was level with the window. There were no eyes in that head, but it could see and it was watching him.
The first one was in the living room with Arthur now. Arthur had to tip his head all the way up to see the whole of it, to see where it was bent near where the lower edge of the rib cage would’ve been. The top of the wall creased it there and the rest of it stretched along the ceiling. Its shoulders consumed the light fixture. Its face, such as it was, was directly over Arthur and it appeared to be staring straight down at him.
And arm slid across the wall. At first it looked like a stump, but then the bulge on its end widened and split suddenly into a tangle of undulating fingers. They snaked around each other and untwisted again, never stopping their sinuous play. The head dipped downward and crossed from the wall to the floor. The wormy fingers reached in Arthur’s direction. Though looking to be nothing more than shadow, Arthur felt the tips of those little snake fingers. He felt their writhing beneath his body.
Arthur stood and stumbled backwards. He didn’t fall, which was good, but he didn’t make much progress either. THere were three of them behind him now and five or six more outside the windows. They were slipping in through those windows and standing upright in the room. Many more hands with many more long appendages were reach over all the surfaces.
He felt them cover his body. They weren’t merely fingers, but ropes that wrapped around him and searched for something on his person. Sometimes the knobby ends pressed into him with a sudden punch and he let out an omph. Arthur tried to pull them away, but another hand wrapped its fingers around his arms and held him steady. The others were searching, searching and searching… but for what?
One slipped itself under his belt. It pulled outwards and the belt snapped open. The fingers were gripping the folds in his clothes, pulling his shirt and pants apart. As the clothes ripped, more and more things slithered up from the floor and down from the ceiling and the walls, dashing through the openings in the fabric and slithering all along his skin. They were touching him, not searching but probing.
A knob pressed into his gut and at first it was just a round lump. Then its smooth surface rippled. The wrinkles turned to bristles, a thousand tiny, sharp needles sticking out the end of that giant finger and waving back and forth, crawling along Arthur’s naked body. He couldn’t scream. Another finger had wrapped itself around his face and around the whole of his mouth and nose. Arthur sucked in. He tried to pull air into his burning lungs and got nothing but the tiniest wisp and the smell of rot.
Then the bristled seemed to turn away, but it turned out that they were merely rearing back to build up force for a powerful lunge forward, a lunge that propelled them right through his skin. They were liking needles, needles everywhere, passing through him without a sound. Arthur began to feel his senses fading. Before passing out, his last thought was I can’t do anything. I am not in control.
/* -------------------------------------*/
Thank you for reading! This was part 8 of 12. For those who have been reading all along, I appreciate you sticking with it. If anyone else would like to read the previous parts, here you go.
