Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  He is seated there beyond the bars, has pulled a chair up close and is looking through them at me as I lie there on the bed.

  He is smiling.

  'I heard you had some trouble with Mister West,' he said. 'I'm sorry, Daniel, sorry I wasn't here. I had to take my wife… and if it's any consolation she's gonna be fine.'

  It wasn't. No consolation at all.

  I moved my head and tried to smile anyway.

  'I know it's tough, Daniel -'

  Fuck you do.

  '- but I want you to know that there's folks who believe in the basic goodness of people too, and that there's a better place in the end. So pray with me a while, okay?'

  I didn't respond; I turned over and looked at the wall behind me. The side of my face was bruised and swollen. My tongue felt too big for my mouth.

  'Our Father, who art in Heaven -'

  Hell is in my brain.

  'Thy kingdom come -'

  My will is gone.

  '- on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day -'

  The day we're dead.

  '- and forgive us our trespasses -'

  As you just leave those who trespass against us.

  And let them walk the face of the earth while you kill the innocent and the lonely and the weak and the defenseless, you Almighty son-of-a-bitch…

  'Shut up! Shut the fuck up! Leave me alone for God's sake!'

  I started to cry.

  Mr. Timmons didn't say a thing.

  He rose from his chair, lifted it quietly, and returned to his desk at the end of the corridor.

  He didn't pray with me again.

  Food came later.

  The food was better down here.

  Why was the food better down here?

  Wanted to remind you what you were going to be missing? Wanted to do everything they could to ensure you held your strength up? Or was it that they felt sorry for you?

  Fuck knows.

  Fuck knows and who gives a shit.

  I ate the stuff.

  All of it.

  And then I chain-smoked even though I knew Clarence Timmons didn't smoke and it would bother him.

  Fuck him.

  And his prayers.

  Fuck everything.

  I had been asleep, for how long I didn't know, but when I woke Clarence Timmons was gone and Frank Tilley was there.

  I wanted to ask him what day it was, even the time, but I didn't.

  Because I decided I didn't want to know. That way I could make believe I still had a week, or six days, or five. I knew I didn't have that much. I didn't want to know how much less.

  I thought of John Rousseau.

  I asked Frank where he was.

  'Don't know, son… don't know much about his comings and goings. Why?'

  I told Frank that Father John Rousseau and I had spent many hours together for some weeks, that he said he would see me back on October 27th, that I missed talking to him.

  Frank Tilley assumed an expression of philosophical resignation, and he said, 'Just because he's a priest, Daniel, don't mean that he's necessarily any more reliable than anyone else. Wouldn't get your hopes up too high, you know? If he comes he comes, if he doesn't he doesn't.'

  He waited for me to respond.

  I didn't. I had already accepted the fact I would never see Rousseau again. If he was a representative of God, then either God needed to be more selective about his staff, or God was in on the joke and loving it.

  I forgot about it, tried to sleep, couldn't, and for some time I lay there looking at the ceiling wondering if it would be tomorrow that I would die.

  They came a little later, two men in white tunic-tops. They brought an electric razor, a towel, a plastic bowl half-filled with water. They rested the bowl on the floor outside the cell, and the first one, the taller one, looked at me through the bars.

  'I gotta shave your head,' he said. 'I know that it's fucked up, I know this is possibly the worst that it's ever gonna get, but I still gotta come in there and shave your head. You either co-operate and it's done in five minutes, or we have to call Medical and they come down and stick a tranquilizer in your ass and you go down like a lead weight… how's it gonna be?'

  'I co-operate,' I said.

  'Good enough,' the man replied, and he nodded to Frank Tilley to come open up the door.

  My hair was already very short, shorter than it had ever been, but they ran that thing over until I could feel my skull vibrating. It was not an unpleasant sensation, but beneath it was the awareness of why it was being done.

  To get good contact.

  When they'd gone I sat there on the edge of my bed with my hands on my head, and realized that the last time I'd had no hair was when I was born.

  Go out as you came in.

  Bring nothing with you, take nothing away.

  I didn't eat later, but I puked on the food tray.

  'No word from Rousseau?' I asked Clarence Timmons the next time I saw him.

  Clarence shook his head.

  'Fucker,' I whispered.

  A while later Clarence asked me some questions.

  Anyone you want to call?

  No.

  Anyone you want to be informed?

  No, there's no-one.

  And your… your remains, Daniel… you understand that a cremation will take place, and the ashes are buried here within the confines of the Penitentiary?

  Flush 'em, Mr. Timmons… may as well just fucking well flush 'em down the john…

  We speak of prescience, premonition, omens and portents, patterns in sand and waves, and the way the moon turns half its face towards you and tells you the future. There are dreams and nightmares, the lines in your hand and the wrinkles in your face, the discolorations in your eyes and remnants in your teacup after you've drunk the last drop. There are soothsayers and mind-readers and fortune-tellers, and the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter through a Romany line that runs all the way back to the old country.

  There are all these things.

  And then there is intuition.

  Gut feelings.

  And these things tell me I will die. I have never been more certain of anything. And I have never been more uncertain about what comes later.

  What lies beyond?

  What comes afterwards.

  The walls are plain. There is no decoration. Upon those walls I can see all the images of my life. Everything that came before.

  Sometimes I smell something familiar, and realize that this is the smell of myself. My own bodily scent. My own physical being. I am the one person I have never been without. And I think of things I should have said and done. Like my father once told me: Folks never really regret what they've done, only what they didn't do.

  I didn't say anything.

  Not to Linny Goldbourne - because of my envy, because of my pride, because of my own conceit and rightness. And she found herself lost somewhere within the system, much the same as me. The State would not be killing Linny Goldbourne, at least not physically.

  And I said nothing to Nathan.

  And he was killed.

  So I should die too, right?

  Father John Rousseau would have been all too quick to justify the universal balance in all things, wouldn't he?

  If he were here.

  But he is not.

  Fucker.

  Somehow I knew.

  I knew the time had arrived.

  I was sleeping, and I woke with a jolt.

  And I knew.

  A week had gone.

  So fast.

  Like a breath.

  Like a heartbeat.

  I lay on my side facing the back wall, and even as I heard sounds behind me there were other sounds as well. Sounds inside sounds. Sounds beneath sounds.

  Somewhere I heard a child laughing and realized it was … me, standing there on the front path watching a dog chase a cat, and the dog was so fat, and the cat was so fast, and the cat seemed to be laughing at the dog because it knew a
great fat dog like that could never catch him…

  I smiled.

  There were tears in my eyes.

  'Ford?'

  It was Mr. West's voice.

  Mr. West had come to take me. This was my perfect justice.

  I didn't move.

  Didn't dare to breathe.

  Play dead and they'll leave you alone.

  'Ford… you gotta get up, you little cocksucker.'

  And then, with such a sense of satisfaction in his tone, 'It's happy hour, you little fuck…'

  I heard the key in the lock.

  'Sit upright, sit still, and then don't fuckin' move 'til I tell you.'

  I started to move and his hands were under my arms, under my shoulders, and I was being hoisted like a dead animal. I was hauled to the edge of the bed, and then Mr. West shackled my feet, put the belt around my waist, put my wrists in the cuffs and pulled me upright…

  And then we were walking…

  I was crying.

  I know that.

  We came out of the cell and crossed to the end of the corridor. We paused while the door was unlocked, and then we were moving again… and somewhere inside myself I resigned everything to some other force, some other power, and I hoped that there was a God, and I tried to believe…

  I tried so hard to believe.

  I asked for a sign.

  I was a dead weight.

  Dead meat.

  We reached the end of the corridor, each footstep a labored and impossible movement, and each time I slowed Mr. West was there behind me, his arm, his hand impelling me forward…

  And with each footstep there seemed to be a thousand heartbeats, and within each heartbeat a thousand memories, and within each memory a million reasons I didn't want to die…

  'Mister West… Mister West, I don't wanna die…'

  I heard my own voice from a distance.

  I was a mile beyond here, a mile again beyond that.

  'Mister West…'

  'Too fucking late for that now, asshole… just too fucking late.'

  I heard him.

  I heard everything.

  I heard my own heart and thought it would stop any moment.

  Mr. West was now beside me. He indicated right.

  'This way,' he said.

  I glanced back at him. He was expressionless, implacable.

  We went through a second and third door, and then down a flight of stairs.

  I sensed we were heading towards the rear of D-Block.

  How long now? I seemed to remember asking.

  Perhaps I just thought it.

  Mr. West looked back at me, but said nothing.

  My heart was thundering in my chest, my pulse was racing. My hands, my legs, my entire body was a river of sweat, and yet I was chilled to the bone.

  We passed through a door at the base of the stairs, and the light was brilliant.

  I was dazed for a second, dazed into blindness, and even as I instinctively raised my hands and could not, even as I tried to turn and see where I was, I heard the sound of a car engine.

  I turned to my right, and even in that moment I knew the end of my life was closing up against me.

  Warden Hadfield stood there, immobile, his hands folded together like origami in front of him. His face was quiet, expressionless almost, and then there was something in his eyes, something warm… It's okay, Daniel, he mouthed.

  I knew he wasn't there. I knew without doubt that my mind had slipped its moorings, and was now playing games, merging the present with past memory. I knew I was hallucinating, for beside him stood Father Rousseau, and Father Rousseau smiled understandingly, and beside Father Rousseau stood Caroline… Caroline Lanafeuille… and I believed perhaps she was my imaginary angel, sent to guide me out of this dark place…

  I looked for Nathan, for my mother and father. I looked for Eve Chantry and Larry James, for the boys that became men in some desolate waterlogged field in a country we had never heard of before…

  But they were not there, none of them… and how I longed to see someone with whom I could share what I was feeling.

  I wanted to say something but Mr. West carried me forward, carried me punctually, precisely, effortlessly, to my death.

  My knees gave.

  'Daniel.'

  Another voice.

  Mr. Timmons.

  His hand beneath my arm, holding me up.

  Another hand on my shoulder, someone guiding me, and then they were telling me to duck my head. I could feel them bearing me up, and I was sitting without being aware of where I was sitting or why.

  'Mister Timmons!' I shouted, and even as I heard my own voice it was the sound of a terrified and desperate child. 'Mister Timmons!'

  'Quieten down now, Ford,' Mr. West said.

  'You told him?' I heard Clarence Timmons ask. 'You told him where we're going?'

  'Sure did,' Mr. West replied. 'Sure I told him.'

  'Told me?' I asked, my voice a painful twisted sound. 'Told me what?'

  A door slammed.

  I was inside a vehicle.

  The bright light had come from windows high up in the wall.

  I was seated in the back of a car.

  The car was moving.

  Mr. West sat facing me, smiling, smiling like I'd never seen anyone smile.

  'Time's up, little man,' he whispered. 'Special arrangement for you, son, special arrangement altogether. Little trouble with the generators back there so we're takin' you someplace else to finish up. Won't take long, twenty, thirty minutes 'til we arrive… an' that gives us a little more sharing time, don'tcha think?'

  I think I pissed myself.

  'Ain't so full of your self-righteous bullshit now, eh kid?' West hissed.

  He leaned forward and gripped me around the throat with his right hand. He leaned closer still, and when he spoke I could feel the dampness of his words against my skin. There was a smell there, something fetid and rotten, something age-old and rank from the very deepest of Florida swamps.

  'You figure it gets easier here, son?' he asked. 'You figure we're in for a little ride and then they plug you in an' we's all done for the night. I think not. You have no fucking idea how much this is gonna hurt, no idea at all. No-one knows how much it hurts… hell, we ain't ever had a chance to ask anyone, have we?'

  West gave his coarse laugh.

  He said other things - dark and hideous things - and somewhere within the beating of my heart, within the rumbling of the vehicle and the throbbing of the engine, I think consciousness slipped away.

  I could see Caroline's face.

  We should… you know, we should… before I leave…

  And then her face was a pattern in the wing of a moth, and then there was a flame, a brief rush of color.

  … and moths are attracted to light because they wish to be seen, to have their own magical beauty recognized…

  I could hear my mother's voice calling me from the bottom of the stairwell.

  Dan-ny! Dan-ny! Daaaa-ny!

  And then there was a sensation like falling backwards, backwards in slow-motion…

  I felt a sharp pain in my side.

  I opened my eyes.

  'Get it together, shit-for-brains,' Mr. West hissed. 'You ain't passing out on me now, you fuck!'

  I closed my eyes again, couldn't help it.

  Felt like something dark and cool was dragging me inside itself.

  I saw Eve Chantry.

  … so she went out on her own, took that little boat out across the water one morning…

  Another pain in my side, sharper, harder, and then Mr. West brought his hand up and slapped me hard across the face.

  'What the fu -'

  His hand gripped my throat. His face was in mine. Closer than I imagined it could be.