The Death Agreement

by Kristopher Mallory

  I smiled and waved back before flashing my ID to the gate guard. Once through security, I headed toward my room, but halfway there I stopped and considered going the other direction.

  Something about the dream had me shaken.

  "The saw," I whispered. It had been the same one that Taylor and I had discovered in the sub-basement of the closed-off building. Yang had said the police found a saw in the trunk of Taylor's car. "Could it be?"

  It seemed unlikely. Probably just my subconscious trying to make sense of the madness. That's what I thought, but I knew I wouldn't be able to rest until I checked that room.

  I turned toward the old abandoned wing of the hospital, sighed, then marched like a man heading to the gallows.

  ***

  "Still be there," I whispered. "Please, please, still be there."

  Making my way through the building in the darkness wasn't easy. Every shadow moved as if it was alive, and I felt as if someone had been watching me. Taylor and I had joked about ghosts on our excursions, and even though I never bought into the supernatural, each nerve tingled as if some kind of power radiated from the walls of the old hospital ward.

  "It's not real," I said. Then a small voice in the back of my mind, the voice I had often ignored said: Yes it is, Jon.

  I made my way to the passage that led to the sub-basement and stood outside the entrance for what felt like an eternity, remaining silent, listening for any sound at all. At that moment, if a pin were to have dropped, I would have gone insane and screamed for the rest of my life. I clung to my cellphone, imagining horrors outside of what the dim light of the phone provided.

  Not knowing is the cruelest torture. Maybe that's why God gave us knowledge of our own mortality. Horrifying as it is, there's comfort in the certainty of death. It presents us with a clearly defined border—no matter what happens, death is the limit. If we weren't aware of that limit, terror would be infinite. Terror would be all we could know.

  I found the courage to climb through the hole in the wall and continue on. I walked through the winding passageway, treading lightly. Thirty-three paces later, the walls opened up into the room that shouldn't exist.

  Corner by corner, I scanned the room, expecting to see Taylor standing somewhere in the darkness, holding the saw, waiting to strike. But the room was just as empty as before, and my fear subsided.

  I aimed the light at the ceiling. The hook was still there, and so was the string. I moved the light down the string to where the saw hung. Only, the saw was gone. In its place, hung an envelope. Scrawled on the front: FOR JON RANDON.

  I had to jump to grab the envelope, and in the process of landing, my prosthetic hit the ground at the wrong angle and I fell backward, cracking my head on the hard ground. I reached back and felt the sticky wetness of blood. When I tried to stand up, I felt dizzy. It would be a few minutes before I could walk. I knew it was a bad idea, but I opened the envelope, knowing what would be inside.

  Taylor's Death Agreement had been folded neatly into thirds. I slid it out of the envelope as cautiously as an EOD tech would dismantle a bomb.

  Slowly, I flattened it out on my lap and began to read. Most appeared unchanged. Taylor's final entry in the history section talked about the prospect of a future promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and how he and Lorie were discussing having a baby. They had hoped for a girl and wanted to name her Leena.

  I flipped through the pages and found an area that had a whole section scratched out. I recognized it as the passage that Taylor had meant to be his final words.

  He had wrecked it thoroughly, as if angry, ripping the paper in places. The main points could still be seen through the deep pen scratches. To sum it up: He loved his family; he loved his friends; he wanted his children to know him after he was gone.

  Below the carnage of the destroyed words, he had written something new, something chilling….

  ***

  Final words:

  They will say a lot of bad things about me, so let me address that first: It is all true. That was easy, was it not? But if you are reading, you are probably wondering how I got here. That is what you want to know, is it not?

  It started with this feeling of dread. Something was very, very, very wrong. I could not figure out what and that made it worse. The dread dug under my skin. Then the voice came. It began as a whispering in the back of my mind. It kept me awake at night.

  The voice said it could help me. I tried to ignore it. I really did. But it grew louder . . . and louder . . . AND LOUDER.

  Eventually the voice overpowered my own. I had no choice but to listen. It spoke about the shadows and the secrets, about the good time. It named all of the evils which hide beyond our vision, all thirty million. It shared revelations of twisted worlds. It laughed as my feeble mind tried to hold it all in.

  The voice never stopped, and as it spoke, the cadence sped faster . . . and faster . . . AND FASTER.

  The voice sounded like someone had spun a record with their hand until the centrifugal force ripped it to shreds. I could no longer hear the words but I still understood and nodded along in agreement.

  The voice said I knew a place tied to dark history. It said a presence in the black hole of time had been roused for another chance to exist again. It named the evil, though I cannot pronounce it in writing. It commanded me to serve. It told me what I must do.

  I plugged an old radio into an extension cord. 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home,' an old Civil War song, blared from the speakers.

  I sang along.

  Get ready for the Jubilee,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  We'll give the hero three times three,

  Hurrah! Hurrah!

  The laurel wreath is ready now.

  To place upon his loyal brow.

  And we'll all feel gay when,

  Johnny comes marching home.

  As I sang, I filled the bathtub with water. I stepped in and then I dropped the radio. The song continued to play as an eternity of Hell flashed before my eyes. The voice said I would not die. The voice was right: I did not die. Living was a reward and punishment. Now I could see what the evil had done. Somehow it had gotten into my blood. It was a black and viscous, pulsing, crawling, as if it were alive. The voice named it the bad blood and it said the bad blood needed to be removed. It reminded me there is truth in every lie like there is a key to every horror. The key to mine is the hidden saw.

  I am a believer, so as a believer, I retrieved the saw.

  Then I did a man's work. A work which was not pleasant.

  Little Jon was first. The bad blood had gotten into his little head. I used the saw. I wrapped him up in his blanket and then went downstairs and handed him to Lorie. I hoped he would get better once the bad blood was gone. He did not. Lorie let out a shrill scream when she saw. She ran, but she did not get very far. I held her down and planted my seed inside of her while she pretended to wither in agony. I thought it was love we shared but all I did was leave bad blood in her abdomen. So I used the saw. Lorie did not get better.

  The bad blood must have infected ALL of my family. That is why Jon and Lorie were not getting better. I needed to remove the bad blood from each of them. The arms of my mother and sister were infected with the bad blood. I used the saw.

  The neck of my father pulsed with the bad blood. I used the saw.

  I beckoned for my brother. As I suspected, the bad blood was in his leg. I used the saw.

  The screams lasted a long time. I missed them when they stopped.

  I hoped my family would get better. None of them did. Why did they not get better? I asked the voice. The voice did not reply. Suddenly I remembered my bastard grandfather. It was a message from the voice. Surely my family will get better after I saw him.

  But what of Jon? I asked the voice. I wanted to speak to him, to see him, to saw him if he had the bad blood.

  The voice did not answer, so I went back to the basement. I reached out to Jon, yet Jon did not answer either. I knew time was r
unning out. I knew I could not wait. Jon has no idea how close he came to feeling the saw.

  Today is my day and I will leave The Death Agreement for Jon to find.

  Time is short. I need to collect my grandfather. I need to discard the useless parts. I need to saw. There is bad blood in my leg. The voice wants me to use the saw because that is what the saw is for. Then we can all get better.

  The voice promises.

  Jon, you are family, but you are not blood. I saw the bad blood in everyone. I hope it is not in you.

  Saw everyone . . . but you.

  - J.T.

  ***

  The next page added to Taylor's copy of The Death Agreement was worse than the confession itself. The top of the paper read, "Family portrait." It showed what Yang had been unwilling to tell me.

  "Pieces are missing," he had said.

  The drawing was a segmented sketch of a person. Taylor had used a label maker to mark each section. Instead of words like "Head," or "Arm," he used names like, "Little Jon," and "Kyle." Taylor's whole family—all eight of them, including himself—was represented on the paper in a jagged, Frankenstein-like fashion.

  Pieces.

  Unable to look at it anymore, I turned the page. On the reverse side of the morbid drawing, he'd sketched a dead tree with long, claw-like branches and at the base of the tree were piles of leaves drawn in red ink. That little voice in the back of my mind laughed, then said: Blood.

  I turned off my phone and sat in the pitch-black darkness, gripping The Death Agreement tightly. No matter how hard I tried, my hands refused to stop shaking.

  Since learning of Taylor's demise I had clung to the hope that he had been a victim along with the rest of his family. Even after talking with Yang at the funeral home, part of me still refused to believe he had done the horrible things everyone accused him of doing. But this irrefutable proof, written by Taylor's own hand, sealed that possibility forever.

  My hands continued to shake. I thought I understood insanity. I've seen war. I knew men could break. But that letter…. Words like crazy, or mad, or psychotic…words like those don't even come close to describing what Taylor had done.

  Once I knew the truth, dying seemed like the best option. It would have been so easy to just lay down in the dark until my body starved to death.

  "I'm nothing but a worthless fucking cripple," I said, not for the first time.

  No one would have missed me. Hell, no one would have found me. I wondered how long before every memory of me disappeared? How long would it be until Jon Randon became just another missing person poster, another lost piece?

  Self-loathing and depression, my two old friends, tore at me. As hope faded, Taylor's words came to life and began to play like a movie in the darkness of my imagination.

  I watched Taylor sawing off Little Jon's head then handing the corpse to his unsuspecting wife, only to rape her before the terror of seeing her decapitated little boy had even fully registered. Next he happily cut through the flesh of his mother and father, blood spraying the room. Then I saw his brother and sister begging for their lives while the saw ripped off flesh and limbs.

  Each slice, so vivid in the nothingness. The bodies piled up and the blood continued to flow like a never-ending waterfall. The corpses pumped out black and rancid liquid until it filled every corner of the perverse setting. Even Taylor couldn't escape the onslaught. He laughed hysterically as the tide rose around him, inch by inch, until only his wild eyes remained visible in the sea of death.

  The container of my mind couldn't hold all of the horror. I don't know how anyone's mind could. When the pressure went past the maximum, the scene burst, exploding outward.

  Blood rained down and faded from dark red to pitch black to the color of dirty water. The walls of the kill room dried like clay and crumbled in the wind. Then six corpses, Taylor's discarded trash, his useless parts, materialized in that new pond, some floating, others sinking. Then I saw Taylor's body. He lay dying not far from water's edge, leg gone and losing blood fast, resting under a large, white maple tree, surrounded by leaves soaked with blood. And yet that fucking smirk was still plastered on his face.

  My visualization didn't match up perfectly to Taylor's words though. I realized the timeline he described contained a flaw. Six bodies were found in the pond—six, not seven. Jesse's grandfather was alive and well.

  In the confession, Taylor claimed he would be seeing his grandfather next, before going to the pond. The plan must have changed. There had to be a reason why Taylor let him live.

  "Yang," I said to the empty pitch black room that shouldn't exist. He needed to know. I owed him that.

  "Jon, can I call you back?"

  "Wait. You'll want to hear this. I found Taylor's confession."

  "That's great, but I can't talk right now."

  "That's great? Really? What the hell, Yang?"

  "Listen, I need to call you back. I'm in the middle of something."

  "Oh, I also found a picture of what he did. He drew a fucking picture."

  I heard Yang talking to someone else, shouting an order. Lots of commotion, the sound of picture's being taken.

  "Taylor was going to go after his grandfather."

  "I know." Yang said. "I'm here now."

  "What? How did you know?"

  "Do you think detectives just sit around and blow each other all day?"

  "I'm serious. How did you find out he had planned on going there?" I asked, annoyed. Then added, "And how is he doing?" I tried to sound concerned for the old man. Though I really didn't care about Howard Taylor, I cared about what Yang thought of me.

  "I followed up on that Goodtime lead. The techs didn't have much from the computers, a forum post and some web searches for a pawn shop, dead ends mostly, so I checked on the newly-arrived batch of credit card transactions. A change in habit tipped me off."

  "What kind of change?"

  "For the past nine years, Howard Taylor had gone down to the corner deli each morning for a cup of coffee. Yet, no charges had come through in weeks. As for how he's doing…well, not much better than the rest of his family I would say."

  My stomach dropped. "He's dead?"

  "Yes, and he's missing a part, too."

  "Then who…" I swallowed hard. "Who have I been speaking with? Who sent the fucking flowers?"

  "We'll figure it out all in good time, but really, I gotta go. Once this crossed the state line, the FBI had to come in to serve the warrant. I'll be up in Williamsport, PA for the rest of the night."

  "But—"

  "Listen," Yang said, "fax over what you got, the number is on my card. Still got it, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay. I'll either send someone to pick up the original tomorrow, or I'll collect it myself."

  "Yang?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Taylor wasn't working alone."

  "I know," he admitted, then let out a deep breath. "We'll talk tomorrow."

  "Christ, Yang. I don't like this."

  "Me neither. Goodnight, Jon."

  "Goodnight."

  SECTION VI - WISHES

  I tried not to think as I walked back to the barracks. I had spoken to Taylor's grandfather on multiple occasions. Or at least I thought I had. Every question spawned more questions. Like, why was his grandfather's body left behind when he'd dumped the rest of the family in the pond? Maybe he loathed the old man so intensely that those remains weren't good enough to share the same trash bags.

  "You're beginning to think like him, Jon."

  Laughable, I know. Oftentimes what I say isn't what I think, even when I'm talking to myself. I wanted to cast my thoughts away as lies, but I knew better. I wasn't beginning to think like Taylor. Truth is I had always thought like Taylor.

  Best friends share a certain mental link, a bond that doesn't easily break. If Taylor had the capacity to snap then so must I. Maybe it had already happened. Maybe I just hadn't realized it yet?

  Before I knew it, I had climbed the st
eps and stopped at the front desk. I asked the young night watch soldier to send a fax for me, then handed him Taylor's drawing. Next, I took out the handwritten confession, and when I went to hand the soldier the letter, I could see that the blotches on the pages were not ink—they were bloody fingerprints.

  I folded the letter and put it back into my coat pocket. I don't think the soldier noticed. He seemed focused on the picture, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. When he realized I was staring at him, he tried to hide the revolting look on his face, but failed miserably.

  "L.T.? Are you sure you want to send this?"

  "That's what I said, Corporal. Is there a problem?"

  "No, sir. No problem at all."

  The soldier sent the fax without taking his eyes off me. I didn't blame him for being spooked. A picture like that would put anyone on edge. I'm actually surprised he didn't call the MPs. Funny what a brass stick of butter on your shoulders can get you.

  I heard the fax receipt rip from the roll of paper. He handed it to me along with the original document.

  "Thank you, Corporal."

  "Anything else, sir?"

  "Yeah. Keep this to yourself. I'll know if you don't."

  Before he could respond, I turned toward the elevators and strolled away. Too much had been dumped on my plate that night, and the last thing I needed was Colonel Litwell getting involved.

  I made it to my room and nearly collapsed the moment I walked through the door. It felt as though more had gone down in that one day than all my days in Afghanistan combined. I looked at my bunk like a starving man looks at a medium-rare steak.

  I couldn't recall the last time I'd had a full night's sleep. The nightmares had been getting worse, more vivid, and rest had become a rare commodity. It's amazing I hadn't developed hypnophobia, or whatever it's called when you're afraid to close your eyes.

  Tired or not, it made no difference. I couldn't allow myself to fall asleep. One last item remained on my list of things I needed to do—a game of Wishes.

  Instead of heading toward the comfort of my pillow, I went into the kitchenette and reached for the cabinet above the refrigerator. When the door swung open, I expected to find a wide variety of high-proof spirits, but instead I found the space nearly empty.

  "Damn."

  Taylor and I had decimated the collection, and I had never made it back to the Class 6. I had hoped to find a half-full bottle of Jameson, at least. St. Patrick's Day was only a day away, and it would have been perfect for the occasion. Then I recalled a vague memory of finishing that off weeks ago, back when I had first heard that Taylor had died.