by K. G. Duncan
It was a man, forty something, lying on his back and wearing soiled blue jean overalls over a bare chest. He was stocky, with a bit of a beer belly and his obviously dyed brown hair was cut mullet-style like something straight out of nineteen-seventy-seven. His left hand was clutched tightly by his chest, and his right arm was thrown back awkwardly behind him. In that hand he clutched a mason’s spatula, still covered in plaster. His entire body was covered in specks and flecks of it as well. He had definitely been busy working the plaster.
Next to this hand was a busted open ball of clay with another smaller spatula lying amidst the crumbles. Sheriff Hibbard fixed his torch on the man’s face, his expression contorted and pinched in a silent scream of terror, mouth gaping open, revealing a set of nasty rotten teeth. His brown eyes were open, their empty, glassy stare locked terrified and uncomprehending on the crumbling wall above him.
“That’s Henry Thierrey, the deceased.” Deputy Billy spoke up softly behind. “No sign of external wounds or foul play.” He paused to look down at his phone, thumb awkwardly scrolling down an open file. “He’s got a criminal record—petty theft, disorderly conduct. No felonies or history of violence. Busted for drugs a few times, but he and his girlfriend were recently involved in a case of fraud and reckless child endangerment. He managed to claim his ignorance. His girlfriend, one Beatriz Roy took the fall. She’s in Angola doing time right now. The child is a ward of the state in CHNOLA. He has no other family or associates.”
“That’s good,” the Sheriff muttered. “Gives us a place to start. I want to talk to them both.”
“Yessir! Already on it.” The deputy shined his light on the spatula in the dead man’s hand. “That would explain the chamber. According to the neighbor, he’d been at it for days. It’s plaster of Paris, the cheap stuff you can buy down at Home Depot. There are boxes and boxes of it in the garage, and in the bedroom, you’ll find most of the furniture from this room piled up every which way. You can’t get into the bedroom, cuz he covered up the door…” He pointed to the left side of the chamber. “But we could see into the bedroom through the window outside.”
He paused and flashed his light around the freshly plastered room. “Now in here, in what we think is the living room, he covered up everything in here including the windows to make this… this… egg chamber. But we were able to get in through the back of the house. It’s only this room where he built the chamber. The rest of the house is normal, ‘cept for the broken furniture and stuff.”
“Egg chamber,” Sheriff Hibbard echoed wryly and snorted. “I like that.” He reached up and touched the plastered ceiling. It was dry and hard. He could see swirly patterns hardened into the surface where Henry had applied the coating.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s been set for at least 24 hours,” Deputy Billy continued as he walked over to a large sloppily made mound of plaster. “What he couldn’t move, he covered up in big round balls of plaster.” He nudged the mound with his boot and it didn’t budge. “Hard as a rock.” He squatted down and scratched at the base of the plaster boulder. “I think this is the flat screen TV and stereo system—the whole wall unit been broken down into a pile. Some of it’s in the other room. Along with a big roll of chicken wire.”
He shined his light to the middle of the room on another large mound that was partially split open. “That’s a wheelbarrow, minus the wheels and the wooden frame and handles. You’ll find those parts in the other room as well. It’s all in a heap next to the furniture. This is just the basin, which he appears to have used to mix the plaster before he covered the whole thing up inside this chamber. Wheelbarrow included. There’s also about a dozen mixing bowls of the stuff in the kitchen, too. Mr. Thierrey certainly been busy. The neighbor man can tell you more.”
The sheriff crouched down to get a closer look at the body. The tell-tale clenching signs of rigor mortis had already begun to set in. He studied the hand with the spatula and the broken-up ball nearby. He pulled out a latex glove, snapped it over his left hand, and picked up the other spatula, sniffed it, then let it drop with a dull clink.
“What were you up to, Henry Thierrey?” The Sheriff half muttered to himself as he gazed around at the inexplicable scene around him. His latex covered fingers thrummed a vibrato rhythm on his knee. With a groan, he stood up and turned to the deputy. “Looks like a cardiac arrest. No sign of a struggle. Cause of death? Petrification. This man died terrified, by the look of him. Let’s get the coroner in here pronto.”
He reached down to pick up a paper-wrapped object that caught his eye. He unwrapped the object for scrutiny: a liberty-head dollar pinched between his fingers. “Don’t see one of these every day.”
“Well I’ll be…” Deputy “Billy” leaned in with his flashlight and tilted his head, inspecting the coin more closely. “Nineteen twenty-one,” the deputy declared reading the faded date engraved on the coin.
The Sheriff flipped over the paper that the coin had been wrapped in and clucked his tongue. In tiny red-painted brush strokes he could just make out the words that had been carefully written across the wrinkled paper:
They are coming. Very soon now.
Got to fill all the cracks before it’s too late…
“What does it mean?” The deputy muttered looking over the sheriff’s shoulder. The sheriff turned and handed it over to him.
“Put that into evidence,” the Sheriff said. “And get that light out of my face. I’m gonna break my neck in here.” The sheriff waved the deputy away and stooping low, headed for the door. “Better get the county CSI down here. I don’t want the State or the Feds getting’ in here just yet. We’re keeping this one in the Department, Billy. You understand?” The Sheriff stopped and waited for the deputy to catch up to him. He pushed the flashlight of the deputy down toward the floor and smiled grimly. He clapped the deputy on his back, which left a nice dusty hand print of plaster on his green uniform jacket. “See if we can find anything more of the unusual variety.” He pointed to the coin and paper that Deputy Billy had dropped into a plastic baggy clutched between his fingers.
“Yes, indeed.” The Sheriff quickly peeled the latex glove from his hand. “Let’s see if we can put the pieces of this puzzle together.”
He took a step before stopping short and turning back to the deputy, who nearly plowed into him. “I don’t want any of you clowns disturbing evidence, you hear me? No trinkets or souvenirs for show and tell with the little wife and friends. This is big, Billy. We’re gonna do everything by the book.”
The deputy nodded, “Yessir.” He pointed at the door. Jacques Boutin was standing in the frame of the door, leering.
“Ain’t no book for the likes of what happened here. No sir!” Boutin’s thick Cajun accent fell flat against the plastered chamber walls.
The man was still skittish, twitching from left to right and still wringing that greasy old baseball cap in his hands. But now his eyes glowed with a feverish light. Was he spooked or relishing the moment? The sheriff couldn’t tell and just stood there gaping as the man burst into a stream of high-pitched Cajun French, a garbled tangle of words that the Sheriff could hardly make heads or tails of.
Holding up his hand, Sheriff Hibbard barked out an order, “Put a lid on it, Monsieur Boutin!” The man audibly clamped his mouth shut. Then leaned back his head and laughed hysterically.
The other deputies suddenly loomed up behind Boutin and pulled him from the door. They dragged him backwards on to the porch and held him fast as the Sheriff emerged from the house.
“Sorry, sheriff… he just came to like a bolt from the blue and we couldn’t stop him…” The deputy named Martin stammered. Jacques Boutin continued to giggle and just hung limp between the deputies.
“You see him build that wall?” Boutin began, smiling wildly at the sheriff. “No, no… not just a wall. It’s a…a barrier.” Boutin was cackling again now, his body shaking and convulsing. “Henr
y say they gonna come through the cracks… He say they gonna come any time soon. He say he got to fill the cracks. He make everything smooth.” Boutin paused and struggled against the deputies, who still held him, to bring his hands together. He formed a large oval with his hands in the air between them.
“Like le oeuf, the… egg.” Boutin chortled again. Then he let himself go limp again before suddenly standing erect, arching his back and howling with laughter.
“Get that man under control!” The sheriff snapped, and the two deputies roughly dragged him, struggling, down the porch steps and on to the gravel driveway. They flung him to his knees and wrenched his arms behind him. One deputy pressed his night club against the back of Boutin’s neck as the other one hand-cuffed him.
Jacques Boutin continued to chuckle, but now his laughter subsided as he spat out a gob of blood and then spoke. “Don’t make no difference what you gonna do to me. They gonna come for us all, and when they do, ain’t nothing we gonna do no way, no how!” He suddenly let himself go limp and just chuckled, staring down at the gravel, spitting out more blood.
“What’s he talking about, sheriff?” The deputy with the night stick asked. The other deputies shifted uncomfortably, staring at each other, uncertainty painted across their faces.
Sheriff Hibbard strode over to Boutin and crouched down in front of him. He waited until the man, stopped chuckling and lifted his head to look him in the eye.
“You go on now,” the sheriff intoned calmly. “You say what you want to say.”
Boutin held the sheriff’s gaze, and slowly the mad smile slipped away from his lips. He softly spat more blood down on the gravel before he spoke again.
“Ol’ Henry… He gonna make himself inside the egg. Everything smooth. Cuz that’s how they come for you. Through the edges. Through the cracks. Henry, though, he say he smarter than all of them. He gonna make it so there’s not even one single line. Everything gonna be smooth, le grand oeuf!” Jacques paused dramatically, his gaze drifting afar, as if searching for some lost reverie.
“Who?” The sheriff impatiently snapped him out of it. “Who is going to come through the cracks, Jacques? What was Henry afraid of?”
Jacques brought his eyes back down to meet the sheriff’s, focused, then slowly rolled his shoulders back. With great deliberation, he scrunched up his right shoulder and then carefully wiped the bloody spittle from his chin against his shirt.
He smiled again, then spoke more slowly now, with less of an accent. “What, Monsieur Sheriff, not who. What. And whatever was coming, it was coming though the edges and the cracks. He said this repeatedly. He was very clear.” Jacques stared back at the sheriff impassively, all traces of his earlier hysterics gone.
“None of this makes any sense, Jacques.” The sheriff shook his head and waited.
A slow smile spread across Boutin’s face. “If it makes you feel better, you can say that Henry was crazy. Hystérique. All hot wires in his head. Hystérique, and three days ago he come to my house. He warned me to stay away from the edges, to eliminate all the lines… all the angles. He told me to fill the cracks, or they would come for me, too. Then he took my tools and drove off in his truck with all of my things.”
“Sounds like some paranoid, tweaker-addled bullshit to me.” Deputy Billy suddenly chimed in. “Goddamned egg… Why’s it got to be in the shape of an egg, of all things?”
Jacques fell into a fit of sniggering again, and it was several moments before he was able to look the sheriff in the eye and speak again. “An egg, a circle. The key, Monsieur Sheriff, the key is no edges. No lines. It is a question of… of géométrie, perhaps.” Boutin gasped as if holding back another outburst. “Henry was always talking about géométrie and numbers and the like. But his little egg, in the end? It did not protect him, no? He could not fill the cracks. They still come through the edges, and they still find him there.”
There was a long moment of awkward silence among Jacques Boutin, the Sheriff and the deputies before young Deputy Martin blurted out in earnest. “Why we got to fill the cracks, Sheriff?”
Sheriff Hibbard stood, hands on hips, and stared back at the young deputy’s solemn face, then he turned to walk back to his patrol car. The gravel crunched beneath his feet. None of it made any sense at all. There certainly were a lot more questions, and he had no answers. It was going to be a long night.
As if to remind him of how crazy all of this was, behind him, slowly, like a rolling wave, Jacques Boutin’s laughter bubbled up, and then it erupted, loud, frenetic, and relentless.
About the Author
K. G. Duncan lives with his wife, Xiao Qing, a dog and two feral cats in Los Angeles beneath the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. He grew up in a musical theater family and has a B.A. degree in Linguistics and Philosophy and an M.Ed in Education, both from UCLA. He lived in and travelled extensively throughout China and is recently retired from UCLA Extension’s American Language Center, where he taught English and developed curriculum for international students for over 28 years. He is currently the Executive Producer and Program Director for the John Raitt Awards for Youth (the JRAYs), a non-profit organization that celebrates and awards outstanding student achievements in high school musical theater throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside Counties and the Inland Empire.
This is K.G. Duncan’s debut novel. Check out some of his other projects at Underthesunpress.com facebook.com/kgd.underthesun
