Mister White: The Novel

by John C. Foster

  “Go away!” He shouted, blood flinging from a bitten and rapidly swelling tongue. “This is Fed—”

  Bang!

  The door rocked again.

  BANG-BANG-BANG!

  The impacts were coming faster, heavier than any fist, bony and hard unlike any human shoulder or boot. Warmth spread across the crotch of Ronald’s sweat pants as he voided his bladder, and the door danced under the unimaginable assault.

  “Stop it!” Ronald cried out, and at the sound the attack on the door doubled in ferocity. He heard an animal screaming, and before he knew it, he had backed into the pitch darkness of the interior room, hands pressed over his ears as he yelled, “Stopitstopitstopitstopit!”

  And, as if at his command, the door stopped shaking, the thunder stopped crashing. Crouched in the dark and straining to listen past the drumming pulse in his ears, he recoiled from a horrible stench, incredible in its magnitude. It was as if some great beast had entered the room. He spun in place without rising but could see nothing behind him. His mind flashed back to his childhood and the behind-the-scenes tour his Cub Scout pack had enjoyed at a traveling circus. He recalled the incredible bestial stink of the elephant trailers, a force so physically powerful he had felt dwarfed in its presence.

  Ronald felt that now, something vast pressing against him, the hairs on his forearms standing straight even as his scrotum grew tight against his body.

  He heard it then, in the quiet darkness. The ringing of an old phone and the eerie murmur he had heard so many times before, like a talk radio station, the volume turned down low but slowly increasing. His stomach roiled and he fought back the urge to vomit as his ears pricked at the familiar sounds. Somehow, he knew that in moments he would understand the words, understand what they were saying.

  An explosion ripped through the interior room as the bookcase detonated, spattering the walls with the shrapnel of holy writ.

  Ronald bolted for the front door, forgetting about the intruder outside until he had thrown the bolt and yanked the portal open, charging forth only to have his bare foot skid on something hot and wet, dumping him hard on his shoulders.

  Ronald gasped, struggling for air, only gradually becoming aware of the warm liquid soaking through his t-shirt and sweats, and the rank, coppery stink of blood.

  He sat up amidst the carnage, hiccupping for air as he took in the red wreckage of the three goats.

  Awestruck, he turned to look at the door itself and saw the crimson-tinged dents they had made as they dashed their brains out against the metal.

  Around him, the night was quiet. An owl hooted from the trees, and he felt goosebumps from the cold spring up along his exposed flesh.

  “Oh shit,” he said, using the doorjamb for balance as he climbed to his feet. He tottered inside leaving a trail of bloody footprints as he made for the phone.

  His eyes strayed to the battle on-screen as he waited for the ringing phone on the other end to be answered. But he saw none of it, his mind’s eye consumed with the sight of exposed bone and cottage-cheese brains.

  A voicemail recording answered after an eternity, and Ronald waited for the beep. “Sir, something’s happened. You gotta call me back.”

  Ronald was peeling off his blood-soaked clothes when the desk phone sounded, and he let out a shriek.

  - 2 -

  The headlights picked out a narrow funnel of visibility as Bierce navigated his Mercedes down back-country roads, the boles of trees on either side dancing past in unsettling, shimmering waves.

  The file lay on the passenger seat beside him, beneath the black leather case with its array of silver snaps holding it in place. The horrid book bounced on the empty seat behind him as if it were a living thing chafing to be opened. The musty scent of its aged papers filled the car with a cloying atmosphere, lining his nostrils with a miasmal swampiness more suited to Louisiana bayou country than Virginia. He cracked the window and lifted his nose into the fresh stream of cold air.

  He had received the three calls in rapid succession. The report from his own man that Lewis Edgar was wanted in connection to a multiple homicide in Finland. No sooner had he hung up the phone than it rang again carrying a warning from Chambers at the FBI. Lewis Edgar had been spotted at the site of a train accident in the German countryside and was wanted by local authorities for questioning. Chambers warned that connections would be made in short order and involvement by Interpol was inevitable. Did Bierce have any new information or means to contact Edgar?

  And then the terrified call from Ronald.

  It was happening.

  Had happened.

  Something unexpected.

  Bierce was uncertain, frightfully aware of his lack of real experience in the matter. He had the notes from his predecessors, solutions for the unthinkable. What to do if Mister White had been deflected from his course or had somehow defied control. Paltry pieces of paper so utterly inadequate. He was expected to defuse a bomb with no actual experience, relying on scribbled anecdotes. The object was a secret even within the temple of silence that was the Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved from Europe in the aftermath of Hitler’s madness by agents of the OSS, and first employed by Americans during the crazed explorations of the Cold War—MK Ultra, drugs, psychic research, the occult.

  But nobody truly understood it, only that it must be placated. Directed.

  Madness. Madness. Madness.

  It was dark, so dark beneath the trees, only a thin river of starry sky visible overhead. The night seemed to gather in the car with him until he flicked on the overhead light to dispel it, his own skull-like visage reflecting from the inside of the windshield.

  He snapped off the dome light and gripped the wheel in white-knuckled hands, wishing for the hundredth time that he had never done business with Abel. That Abel had not decided to branch out yet further, jeopardizing everything.

  Most of all, Bierce wished that he had found another solution for his wandering operative.

  He should never have dispatched Mister White.

  - 3 -

  Bierce wheeled the Mercedes around in front of the Millhouse, pointing the nose uphill towards the still-open gate. His headlights illuminated the sheep clustered up on the hillside, as if the herd were trying to get as far away as possible from the house.

  He pushed open the door and stepped out with the engine running, file under one arm. In the red of the taillights, he beheld the lumpy smear on the front step, and the shining footprints and wet streaks where Ronald had dragged the dead animals inside.

  So he had at least achieved that much.

  Bierce patted his jacket near his left armpit, not at all comforted by the flat hardness of the holstered .380 Smith & Wesson.

  One last glance back at the rumbling Mercedes, dome light on and an irritating chime chiding him for leaving the driver’s side door open. Seconds might be critical.

  He knelt in the crimson light, feeling the tackiness of the blood soaking through the knees of his slacks. With the file and book tucked beneath his left arm, he undid the snaps on the case and unfolded it to reveal an array of stoppered vials and eye droppers, all color-coded. He filled the first dropper and dripped liquid on each palm, then rubbed them together with the thoroughness of a doctor scrubbing for surgery. The process was repeated with the next vial and this time he tilted back his head, wincing as he dripped liquid into his nostrils, which descended in thick coils down the back of his throat. The contents of the third vial were dripped onto his tongue, and that of the fourth were dripped onto his vulnerable eyeballs until the pain compelled him to close his lids and shake his head. He blinked for what might have been several minutes until the shining blur before him grew detailed and he could see once more.

  He stood and pulled out of his pocket several salt packets taken from a fast food restaurant and, balancing like a drunken stork, sprinkled them liberally on the sticky soles of his shoes.

  He blew out a breath he was unaware of holding and, in the macabre light,
entered the Millhouse, his shoes grinding with each step.

  A quick glance around revealed the squalor of a degenerate living in a single room. Bierce noted the bedding on the couch and determined that Ronald had been sleeping there. Proximity to the metal door in the bedroom was already unnerving the man. Faster than normal. Sooner than Ronald’s predecessor. Either Ronald was weaker of mind—a distinct possibility—or the process of decay was accelerating. The clozapine should have shielded him longer. Bierce’s own protections were, of course, too precious for a man such as Ronald.

  A replacement would be needed.

  “Ronald?” Bierce questioned the empty room. The caretaker had been instructed to return to the front room after taking the dead goats and a matching number of live ewes inside.

  The trail of gore led through the door into the interior room, and Bierce beheld the wreckage of the interior as if witnessing the aftermath of a localized storm. The bookcase, which had once concealed the door to the lower levels, had been split in two as if by a giant axe, and the tomes themselves scattered about the room, pages still slipping and fluttering about in a wind he could not feel. He felt a subsonic pressure against his eardrums, an invisible chisel attempting to pry him open. The urge to flee grew to near irresistible levels, but he shook his head and sucked in several deep breaths to steady himself.

  The great door to below stood open in invitation, a dark rectangle that could not be more frightening if it had been lined with teeth. Somewhere beyond, a faint light flickered, and Bierce breathed the tiniest sigh of relief. The notion of penetrating the lower levels in subterranean blackness with only a flashlight was almost unthinkable.

  But Ronald had done it. Craven, twisted Ronald had ushered the livestock and deadstock through the door and down.

  And had not come back.

  Bierce bent and picked up one book, a quick glance revealing that each and every line of text was charred into illegibility. He tossed the holy text aside, its purpose complete. Or failed in its purpose, depending on point of view.

  The red trail had gathered into a wide smear before the metal door that led below, growing sticky and dark. He could imagine Ronald’s hesitation, the influence of the object chewing through the protective chemical haze of clozapine that was all that kept the caretaker from going mad.

  Bierce patted the items under his arm in a last, futile gesture of security, and stepped through the dark doorway, following the trail of blood.

  - 4 -

  Bierce stood in shadow at the top of the great, grinding escalator and watched the metal teeth rolling down, ever down, each moving riser streaked with viscera and hideous, unnamable smears sprouting patches of blood-stiffened hair.

  It was if the caretaker had driven his small herd not down the long escalator, but into the threshing viciousness of it. And still it rumbled contentedly, grinding and spreading, stretching and tearing, God’s gentlest creatures not even recognizable as meat.

  Mister White drew sustenance from the fear of his prey, but the meager notes in Bierce’s possession indicated that, on occasions not entirely understood, he required more. The carnage of feeding. An abattoir.

  Bierce panned the flashlight function of his phone across the moving stairs until he stepped onto the slick wetness of one, slipping, grabbing at the sliding rubber rail with a disgusted curse. Already he could feel the damp grue seeping through the salted leather of his shoes.

  He steeled himself and descended in silence towards the flickering light, down the length of several ordinary escalators strung together, stories beneath Virginia’s fertile green surface, to where the earth grew secretive.

  Bierce had not lied when he sketched the facility’s past for Ronald, though he had failed to color in the true horror of the place. America’s proud tradition of medical experimentation on prison inmates had continued at this secret facility. An attempt to weaponize syphilis, the tactical plan being to insert infected operatives into Soviet submarine ports, whereupon they would convert eager young sailors into disease vectors on the closed confines of a submersible. Eliminate the submarine-born missile threat without firing a shot.

  Remaining records indicated that forty-two prisoners had died during the experiment, screaming syphilitic madmen with decaying brains. Deemed unreliable, the weaponized strain remained under lock and key at the Center for Disease Control. The corpses had been fed to the onsite incinerator.

  Wicked, unhallowed earth full of pain and memory, perfect to house the object.

  Bierce shivered and panned his light along the descending wall, frowning at the brown traces of graffiti. They shouldn’t have been up this far.

  He touched the gun through his jacket and told himself he was reassured by it.

  The descent was timed to be exactly three-and-one-half minutes in length. At the three-minute mark, the uneven light from below had grown enough to reveal details, and Bierce involuntarily stepped back and up as he beheld the fleshy carnage at the base.

  A red and lumpy slurry had formed at the bottom of the escalator where the collapsing stairs disappeared into the metal teeth of the landing plate, a churning, splattering mulch revealing here the white of bone, there the slap of fur-covered skin. Even as his stomach roiled at the sight, a thick butcher-shop stench assaulted his nostrils. Bierce slapped a hand over his nose and forced himself to breathe through his mouth, but he could feel the foulness of it crawling on his tongue.

  He leapt over the ugly froth at the bottom, heels skidding in the ichor until he caught his balance, glancing down at the darkening cuffs of his slacks. He silently damned the men who had brought the object back from the hell of World War II as he removed a long iron key from his pocket.

  He had hoped to discover Ronald waiting by this final gate, but the man was nowhere to be found.

  Bierce approached the rusty metal mesh, feet sucking off the floor with each step. He inserted the key with a tiny clatter, his hand shaking, and turned it hard to the right.

  Tumblers clicked inside the gate and he pushed it open with a horrendous screech, flakes of rust falling to the floor. Beyond the doorway he saw more bloody footsteps.

  Bierce stepped through and closed the gate behind him, kicking aside a scattering of empty dog food cans. He listened for sound of the lock engaging before striding forward into madness.

  - 5 -

  Bierce covered his nose and muffled a cough. The smell beyond the security gate was an almost physical force combined of human body odor, horrendous flatulence, the acidic tang of urine and a nauseating under-smell of organic rot.

  The corridor itself was narrow and windowless, the air unmoving. Only a few of the overhead fluorescents worked, and Bierce made out peeling paint and a filthy floor of black-and-white tiles stretching ahead to an intersection where a light strobed irregularly.

  There was not a living soul in sight.

  He thought briefly of calling out for Ronald but decided against it. The stillness of the place urged silence.

  Bierce proceeded, heels peeling from the tiles as he stepped over a carefully arranged circle of empty dog food cans. A few fat flies buzzed sluggishly over the rancid containers, scattering as Bierce moved through their air space and reforming after he had passed.

  He listened for voices and heard nothing. At the intersection he paused, listening again. The footprints had grown fainter and eventually vanished altogether.

  The corridor to his left had only a single working light. It flickered off as he looked and plunged the hallway into pitch blackness. When it flashed alight again, Bierce made out open doorways on either side of the hall.

  He glanced to his right and saw another hall lined with closed doors and a floor covered in dust. The rotting smell was stronger from that direction and Bierce recoiled, turning back.

  A woman of pure white was watching him from twenty feet away. Nightgown, hair and skin reflected like dull alabaster.

  “What?” Bierce said, startled.

  The light flickered out and
he took an involuntary step back, kicking through another circle of empty cans with an ungodly clatter.

  “Hello?” he called out softly as the light snapped on. He wondered how much of her mind had been consumed, cored by Mister White’s hunger for her fear.

  The corridor was empty. Bierce stepped carefully down the hall to the place where the woman had stood, his feet brushing through curls of torn newspaper.

  “Hello?” he said again as the light went out.

  He froze, ears straining, and heard nothing until a buzz and snap heralded the return of the light. He continued forward.

  The first several doors opened into cramped rooms with rusted furniture. His tension grew as the light stayed on, and he wondered when it would go out. Madness felt inevitable in such a place.

  Instinct led him closer to the wall and he sidled carefully up to the next door, leaning around for a quick look.

  “What—”

  It looked like the inside of a dumpster. Faded food wrappers and ancient soda cans littered the floor, and an enormous pile of shredded newspaper was heaped in a far corner. The light overhead had been smashed, despite the protection of a wire cage.

  The hall lights went out and Bierce pulled back in surprise. He was just gathering himself, straightening up, when he heard a loud rustling from inside the room.

  Buzz-snap.

  The light came on and Bierce froze.

  The pile of newspapers had moved, halving the distance between the far corner and the door.

  Bierce backpedaled, unnerved. When the light vanished again, he turned and took several long strides, not quite breaking into a run. The rustle behind him grew louder and then stopped. A word floated to him through the dark.

  “Hello?”

  An open double door was visible up ahead, dim light and a hissing sound emanating from it. Bierce hurried towards it, slipping around the corner to find himself in a large bathroom.

  “Hello?” The voice was muffled but getting closer, and Bierce moved across the moldering bathroom towards the sound of flowing water. He had the vague memory of playing in an indoor pool, the shouts of the children amplified in the damp space.