69: A Short Novel of Cosmic Horror

by Tim Meyer

  “Oh, okay. Well, that's nice, Grandmother. Can I get you something to eat? I think I have—”

  “Do you know what boys I'm talking about?”

  Phelps looked away, her eyes focused on her jacket and the breakfast bar she'd brought with her. She felt her grandmother's eyes probing her, studying her, peering through her, into her soul. Phelps checked her phone, hoping someone would call, hoping someone would relieve her of this troubling situation.

  But she had no one. No friends. No college boyfriends. She wasn't close with her cousins, aunts and uncles. They all lived far away and rarely talked to her. Never even bothered to call and wish her a happy birthday or a Merry Christmas.

  No one.

  No one loves you.

  (the boys)

  “No, grandmother,” she said, knowing she shouldn't feed whatever monster her grandmother had placed between them. It was the way she had said the boys that freaked her out, for no other reason than the tone of her voice. Oh, and that grin didn't help. She was old, eighty-two now, but she didn't have dementia, had never once exhibited Alzheimer's symptoms. She'd always been lucid, though, after her husband died a few years back, she had gotten a little zanier. But nothing terrible. Nothing like the grin she now wore, the crack between her lips that displayed semi-decayed teeth, blackening near the gum-lines. “No, I don't.”

  “We killed them,” she said, dead serious. She wasn't grinning anymore. She glared directly at Phelps—no, not at her. Past her.

  Phelps turned, saw nothing but the sink and the mirror. Her grandmother was looking into the mirror as if she were telling the story to herself.

  “Arthur and me. We killed them. They never knew. Never found out. We took them, walking home from school. Only one each year to avoid suspicion. Brought them home.” Her eyes turned on her granddaughter. Phelps felt tears rolling down her cheeks. She knew her grandmother wasn't making this up, wasn't joking. She never joked, not like this. At first, she thought the woman had just lost it—her mind had finally cracked under the stress of the doctor's visits, the chemotherapy, the surgeries. But something in her eyes, that little twinkle, gave away what this truly was—a confession. “Brought them home and diced them up into pieces. Ate what we could. We were terrible at first. Hardly any meat. Hardly any—”

  “Stop,” Phelps said, getting up and rushing over to the sink. Her vomit covered the white porcelain, every inch. When done, she wiped her mouth on a paper towel, tossed it into the garbage. “Stop.”

  She was in the field now. In the middle of the clearing, in the center of the trampled tall grass. It was night. The stars speckled the dark skies. Next to her rested grandmother's hospital bed, the old woman comfortably tucked under the covers. Peering at her. Into her. Probing her thoughts.

  “I know you hate me, child.” The voice came out in a rasp. She didn't remember her grandmother's voice ever being that deep, but, then again, this wasn't her. An imitation, The Field's best. “I know you hate me for what I've done. I won't apologize for it. It was good. I liked killing those boys. Arthur did, too.”

  Phelps dropped to her knees. Tears ran freely from her eyes; there was nothing she could do to stop them.

  “You want to know why we never took you? Or your brother?” The old woman laughed with delight. “You were our family, sweetie. We loved you. The both of you. We'd never do anything to hurt you. No, no, no. You were always safe with us. It was the boys we liked. The nameless boys. The faceless boys. We never read the papers, never followed up on their strange disappearances. Once a year we'd take them, careful so no one would suspect. Never the same town twice. It was our Christmas present to ourselves. Oh, Merry Christmas, dear.”

  Her face warped into some melted-wax mask, as if the thing imitating her suddenly wanted to purge its human qualities—all monster from here on out. The thing's teeth grew sharp and long, ivory stalactites in the thing's cavernous mouth. Blood sputtered over its lips, blood and other unknown fluids, dark like the sky above them. She still smelled the hospital, the faint odor of potent antiseptics and bleach. There were new smells now, overriding the old. Alien scents. Fruity, yet, unique. They choked the air around her, seeped into her, and she couldn't look away from the awful sight of the thing her grandmother had become, which was fitting because that was much like how she had viewed her after the hospital confession—a repulsive monster.

  She was glad the woman had died a horrible, painful, and long death.

  (our secret)

  (tell no one)

  (the boys)

  (once a year)

  She was back in the office, the walls seeming closer than they ever were. On the monitor, several news articles had populated, each of them dating back to the seventies and eighties, even the nineties. They all took place in central Kentucky, Phelps's home state. Near the town where her grandparents had lived. Each article showed their faces, displayed their names. Names and faces of the missing little boys who were never found. Names and faces that haunted Phelps's dreams from time to time. Names and faces that begged for her help, begged for their missing bodies to be found, reunited with their mothers and fathers, once and for all. Begging her to assist in their unsolved murders.

  They came to her in dreams. Nightmares. And they'd never leave. She knew that. Not as long as she held onto her grandmother's confession. Not until she told the world what she knew.

  They killed them. Twenty-five boys. They killed them and buried their bodies in the woods near their house. Never to be found.

  Unless she said something to someone, told the local police. But she couldn't. Couldn't bring that down on their family. Her parents might not understand. Her father definitely wouldn't. Even if everything she claimed was found to be true, he'd still think of her differently. Either hold it against her for disgracing their family or hold it against her for not coming forward with the truth sooner. He was like that. He'd cut her out of his life completely either way. And she didn't want that. She had no one in her life who meant anything, save for her parents, and she couldn't risk losing them. Their love.

  She needed them.

  Didn't she?

  Phelps looked at the clock on the computer monitor and realized she'd just lost ten minutes to that awful memory, that day at the hospital she'd trained herself to never think of again.

  That thing in the field.

  It had touched her, here, and brought that day back to her. Delivered her to the hungry mouth of the past. Fed her to her own secrets. Used her own brain against her. When she'd been in the field, when Cunningham had ripped out his own eyes, she had seen her grandmother, propped up on the hospital bed, grinning that sick, terrible grin. She could tell she was thinking about the boys, her boys, the ones she'd kidnapped with her husband, gutted in their kitchen, stripped the meat from their bones, and... and even ate a little.

  She could tell she'd been thinking this because she'd been foaming at the mouth. Drooling.

  She was hungry. The Field was. And Phelps's memories were the perfect snack.

  After she hit the Keurig and refilled her coffee, Phelps cleared her mind, through a series of meditative exercises she'd learned over the last few years, and immediately got back into research mode. She started digging through the town's history, most notably the newspaper articles reporting on strange deaths. Since the “strange sightings” keyword search proved relatively pointless, she'd chosen “strange deaths” as her next best option. Scrolling through the four pages of results, she finally stopped when the headline, “SPRING LAKE WOMAN DIES SUDDENLY AND MYSTERIOUSLY” populated on the feed.

  Her heart jumped as she clicked on the article.

  This was what she'd hoped for.

  “Holy shit,” she said, popping a cigarette in her mouth. She wondered how pissed Kim Charon would be if she lit up back here. Her heart raced as she scrolled through the article, hanging onto every word. “Holy fucking shit.”

  Last week, a woman, Lacey Metcalf, 69, died at Spring Lakes Assisted Living. Her dea
th was sudden. As of right now, there is no cause. Ms. Metcalf was found in her room, sitting in her rocking chair, seemingly paralyzed at first, but later pronounced dead by local medical examiner, Henry Lee, at 8:59 Tuesday morning.

  Lee told reporters that it took six men to carry her out.

  “Damndest thing I'd ever seen. Woman couldn't have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Took six of us and we were struggling.”

  Lee offered no medical explanation for the woman's mysterious heaviness and a cause of death has not yet been determined.

  “Natural causes would be my guess,” Lee said.

  Natural causes, Phelps thought. Yeah, right. There was nothing natural about any of this.

  She opened a new search window and typed “SPRING LAKES ASSISTED LIVING DEATHS” into the new bar. She narrowed the search to include New Jersey only, as there were other Spring Lakes assisted living facilities across the country. Then she only allowed articles containing the number “69” to remain visible.

  Her heart lurched.

  She opened each article in a new tab.

  Each article documented the strange deaths that had taken place here. Over the last thirty years, there had been eleven of them. All with the same symptoms. The deceased appearing paralyzed at first but dying within twenty-four hours. All of them weighing triple, quadruple what they should. Different medical examiners provided different quotes, but each held the same main idea—these were strange deaths, however, natural was the word they'd used in every single case.

  “Holy shit,” Phelps said, the unlit cigarette falling onto the desk. She jotted down the years from when the articles had been written. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Half of them had happened over the last five years.

  “How come no one looked into this?” she asked herself and got up to find Amanda and Barnes, until she noticed a quote on the latest article, written less than a year ago.

  “We are deeply saddened by what happened here,” the quote said. “We, at Spring Lakes, will greatly miss Mr. Allen.” When asked if Mr. Allen exhibited any strange behaviors or sickness of late, director Kimberly Charon simply replied, “No. None at all. This is quite a shock to all of us.”

  Phelps went back through the articles, reading every word instead of skimming them for keywords. Some of them contained quotes from Charon, some didn't. The ones that didn't were absent of any official statement from the facility. Anything before ten years ago, the response from the facility had come from an Eduardo Ramirez, the director at the time. His quotes were equally uninspiring and smelled like bullshit all the same.

  She read Charon's quotes again.

  She knew. That bitch, she knew the whole the goddamn time.

  As she ran down the hall to find Amanda and Barnes, she wondered what else Kim was hiding from them.

  16

  Amanda plopped the folder full of news articles down on the desk. Kim glanced at the headlines peeking out from the top. WOMAN, 69, DIES MYSTERIOUSLY AT ASSISTED LIVING FACILITY.

  Kim straightened her posture, ready to strike an intimidating pose, gave her jacket a nervous tug, and faced her three visitors, all of them wearing expressions of disgust and utter disappointment. “I don't see what this has to do with anything?”

  Amanda stared sharply at the woman while Barnes and Phelps scoffed from behind her. “You lied to us.”

  “I did no such thing.” Her lawyers shifted uncomfortably, the nature of this conversation befuddling them.

  “People have died here. Eleven of them.” Amanda pointed toward the door. “The same way these people are dying out there.”

  She watched the woman's throat bob. “Hatterman, Hart,” she said to the two men. “Please excuse us. Give us a little privacy, will you?”

  The shorter, portly man known as Hart raised his finger. “I must object—”

  “And I must insist you leave at once.”

  There was no more conversation about it. The two lawyers shuffled toward the door, objecting quietly on the way out. Once they were gone, Kim told Barnes to shut the door, which he did without hesitation.

  “You have to promise me that whatever is about to be said will not leave this room.” The tone of Kim's voice caught Amanda off guard. She wasn't the confident, sassy woman she'd been only moments ago. Her demeanor had shifted. She was scared now, maybe. Unsure of herself. Not confident of the words that were about to be spoken.

  The three remained silent, promising no such thing.

  “Do I have your word?” asked Kim, almost as if she were begging. Whatever she had to say shook the woman. Scrambled her assertiveness. Amanda watched the woman's fingers tremble ever-so-slightly. When Kim noticed Amanda was staring, she covered up one hand with the other, pretended to massage the muscle between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Why don't you just tell us,” said Amanda, “and we'll judge as to whether this warrants anyone else knowing.”

  Kim sighed, realizing that was the best they could do. It wouldn't get any better than that, plus she probably figured her three visitors already had a low opinion of her. The only way to prevent them from going to the authorities, which would undoubtedly stunt her career at Spring Lakes, was to set the situation straight. Come clean. Maybe they would have mercy.

  Amanda figured it'd have to be a pretty good reason for the three of them not to throw her under the bus.

  She hid things from us. Details. Deaths of almost a dozen sixty-nine-year-olds. Granted, not all of them were under her watch, but Amanda was smart enough to know the woman was at least aware of the other deaths. She knew Kim would know the history of this place, every single thing that had transpired under its roof. Why hadn’t she told us?

  What is she hiding?

  She probably figured the current situation would play out like the others. Come tomorrow, the sixty-niners would die. The CDC would investigate and find no trace of any illness or disease, slap a generic “natural causes” tag to their files and call it a day. Life would carry on, just like before. And no one would be any wiser as to what was really happening at Spring Lakes. What was happening in the field.

  Beyond it.

  “Okay,” Kim said. “Yes, it's happened before. But never this many guests at once. That's why Lee called you. He thought it was a disease maybe, something that could be transferable to the other patients. We panicked, and, well, here we are.”

  “You knew something was wrong before and you continued to let it go on. For how long, Kim?”

  “I didn't know anything was wrong, not at first.” Her somber appearance and quiet inflection were enough to convince Amanda she wasn't lying. Or, at least, that she believed her own bullshit.

  Barnes stepped forward. “Don't cry innocence. What about your predecessor? Don't tell me he didn't know about the other sixty-niners, that he didn't tell you about what was happening here.”

  “He said nothing to me.” She shook her head adamantly, her face long and drawn. Amanda thought she might cry. “I never met him. He killed himself a month before I took over this facility.”

  “I'm sorry?” Amanda unfolded her arms. “Killed himself?”

  Kim shot Phelps a nasty look. “Didn't discover that in your little research mission?”

  Phelps shook her head.

  “Yes,” Kim continued, looking increasingly uneasy. “Killed himself. Right in this office, actually. Overdosed on blood pressure medication. Took over fifty pills. An assistant found him the very next morning. No note. No nothing.”

  “Jesus fuck,” Barnes said, leaning on the wall for support.

  “You believe us?” asked Amanda. She squinted as if trying to get a better look into the woman's eyes, as if the truth evaded her there. “About the field? You believe us, don't you?”

  Kim glanced about the room. “I...”

  Amanda slammed her fist down on the table, causing a few stationary items to jump. “Do you believe us?”

  “I... I've never seen anything remotely close to what you've described.�
��

  Amanda got the sense she was being lied to. “But others have claimed to? See things? Out there?”

  Kim didn't reject this. Her eyes continued to bounce between the three of them.

  “Who?” asked Phelps.

  Kim closed her eyes, as if wishing to be done with this whole thing. The situation clearly weighed heavily on her shoulders, and she was quickly losing the strength to deal. “Some of the... of the sixty-niners, as you call them... had claimed to have experienced... things... leading up to their deaths.”

  “What kinds of things?” Amanda demanded to know.

  “Visions. Seeing things that weren't there. Ghosts. Some claimed their dreams intensified. They came in the form of memories. Past things they'd done. Traumatic life events.”

  “Give me examples.”

  Kim frowned, then went for the folder. She plucked out the article near the top. “This woman,” she said, pointing to the photograph of the deceased guest, her smiling face. “Amber. She... she had been attacked by a dog when she was little. Said she needed over a hundred stitches. Claimed a dog came to visit her over the weeks leading up to her... uh-hem—death. Not just any dog, mind you. The same dog. The German Shepard that had ripped apart her legs. She began to see it everywhere. In her room. In the halls. Outside, across the street. Also, she said every time it came near, she felt phantom pain near where she'd been stitched up.”

  “And this woman,” Barnes said, “she ended up exactly like the others? Paralyzed, but still alive?”

  Kim nodded. “For approximately twenty-four hours. Then, she... uh... expired.”

  “The others,” Amanda said, flipping through the contents of the folder, scanning each victim's name and face. “The same? Similar experiences? Visions? Dreams? Identical deaths?”

  “Yes. All the same. Except for this time. They've always gone, as far as I can tell, one at a time. But now, it's all of them. Everyone aged sixty-nine.”