New Tales of the Old Ones

by Derwin, Theresa

  “Where’s the General? Anybody gonna tell me what I did to get cut off?”

  “Did you come from your room?” Malloy asked. They were dressed the same, and this gentleman’s garments had to be custom-ordered, not second-hand from a corpse. It was clear the man was a patient.

  “Where else would I have come from?” the man retorted.

  “I mean, just now? You’ve been in there all this time?”

  “Finished my ablutions – that means meditation, I’m no goddamn priest – and the door was open. Now what’s your game? I’ve never seen you. You’re not kept here.”

  “I am. They don’t let me roam about. Until today.”

  The man raised an eyebrow. “Name?”

  “Malloy. I’m afraid that’s all you’re getting.”

  The man smiled. “Kilhauser.” It wasn’t too crazy a smile. Didn’t compare to Bierce’s that much was certain.

  “So you don’t know where my meds are? He doesn’t keep them with the regular stock.” Kilhauser stepped past him and evidently didn’t take notice (that or offense) of Malloy’s flinch. Kilhauser started pulling open file cabinets. “I figure they’re in here somewhere, but not with the others. My nighttime blues change the lining of my stomach, see, and I need the rise-and-shine greens if I’m gonna be able to eat. It’s not exactly mind control, but when men like Kilhauser...” He turned to Malloy. “See, I have a habit of over-thinking. That I’ll admit. Spent forty years learning how to resist every sort of mental attack. But I haven’t quite hit the Nirvana city limits yet. A man can only eat so much qi, and so The Man—” Malloy knew those two words were capitalized “—found another way to get to me.”

  Malloy guessed that Kilhauser’s nighttime blues and rise-and-shine greens treated, among other things, paranoid delusions, and he decided to keep that truth and all the rest to himself. He didn’t dare attempt to translate the old tongue to this giant or anyone else until he was outside Chamber Seat’s walls.

  “He let me read your file,” Kilhauser said over his shoulder. “That’s why I believed you when you gave your name. That’s why you’re still alive.”

  “He what?”

  “Last week, he let me go through the files. Said he knew I’d always wanted to. He was too transparent about it for it to be some sort of trick, at least not a straightforward trick. So I read. You’re four rooms down from me.”

  “Wait – did you see the body in the hall? Headless?”

  Kilhauser raised his eyebrow again. “No.”

  “The blood?”

  “No blood. Your file didn’t say anything about visual hallucinations.”

  “That’s because I don’t have them,” Malloy said, and nearly added or any other kind. “Doctor Bierce has been killing people. That’s his ‘game.’ He finally caught our bug.”

  Malloy pointed to the open window. Kilhauser walked over and looked out. “I didn’t know we were on the third floor.”

  “You see him?”

  “I see Bierce, sure, what’s left. But you said he was the one killing.” Kilhauser turned from the window. “You mix something up?”

  Malloy told Kilhauser what had happened when he opened the door. The big man laughed without restraint.

  “So they finally retired the General.” He wiped tears from his eyes. “If the rest of the folks here went off the deep end with him, I’d guess they’ve gassed us. Chemtrails, one-two-three just that easy. A riot, they’ll say. Mass hysteria, they’ll say. Might even use it to push some new medicines through the FDA. Mm-hmm.” Malloy could see an intricate web constructing itself behind Kilhauser’s eyes. Then the man snapped his fingers and turned back to the window.

  “The wind,” he said. “They got the weather satellites working.” Kilhauser stroked his chin. Malloy’s face fell. For a moment he’d thought maybe he could reveal what was really going on.

  “A neurotoxin, then. And they didn’t just hit us. Could be the whole region or worse. Another 9/11. 9/11-Thousand this time.” Kilhauser studied the sky. “This is it. Well, I know why I’m still here. Why I’m not dead or crazy. Don’t know about you, but you must mean something to them.”

  He started going through Bierce’s desk. “Probably just another guinea pig, but at least you’re alive. You might have a chance with the way you gave the heave-ho to the General.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “There are no accidents.”

  Malloy could agree with that, in his way. He felt that was a good note to part on. “I’m going to find a way out of here. Goodbye.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Kilhauser lifted a revolver from the middle drawer.

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you, Malloy. Christ. You’re a gone sucker, my friend. All that shit about the voices being gods? Okay, so you hear voices. I’ll go along with that. But why do they have to be gods? I mean Jesus, you’ve got fifteen fillings in your mouth and you think it’s gods talking to you?”

  Right, the file. Malloy’s face reddened. “If you’re through, I’d like to go. I don’t mean anything to you, and you don’t mean anything to me.”

  “They’d like us to think that,” Kilhauser muttered. “Look at this baby. Never fired, I’ll bet.” He turned the gun in his hand. “Planted. Or gifted.”

  “All right,” Malloy snapped. He was ready to give it to Mr. Conspiracy Theory 101, but Kilhauser waved his anger away with a hand the size of Malloy’s face.

  “We’re leaving. That’s not the royal we, Malloy. Trust me. Stick with Kilhauser.

  “By the way,” he added, “you might be a programmed killer. I’m gonna have one eye on you and one finger on this trigger at all times. Again, trust me.” He tapped the revolver to his temple and said, “Total control.”

  Two

  She was, at first, deemed “flighty.” Distracted, overly-imaginative, a poster child for Ritalin. She barely spoke when spoken to, and didn’t start reading until she was eight – her parents and teachers agreed that she could read but simply refused to concentrate, that was all. The girl’s home life was hardly troubled. She didn’t want for anything. She was just a born brat, nothing modern medicine couldn’t remedy.

  Father knew she was a smart girl because of what distracted her. She would leave a conversation or lesson to draw something on one of the sketchpads she always had. Drawing colored pencils from a cardboard sleeve with quiet reverence, she composed fascinating abstract images. Yes, Father knew she was a creative, but he didn’t want to encourage her to the point of retaining her unwholesome eccentricities into adulthood. He learned he could limit her art time only by taking her out of the house to parks and museums. If he actually tried to take pad and pencils from before her eyes, she’d launch into a screaming fit. And the girl was now thirteen.

  Her mother wasn’t even aware of the flinch until her husband pointed out that it was increasing in frequency. The girl’s head would dip to the right and sometimes turn in that direction. Father had long noticed the tic and thought it was “just something she did;” but when it began happening all the time, even while she drew, he grew concerned.

  A series of doctors could find nothing physically wrong with her. Nothing, that was, except the muscle and nerve damage that was being caused by the flinching. It had to be stopped. It was the seventh doctor, upon reviewing her entire case, who suggested a psychiatrist.

  After Doctor Bierce interviewed the girl, he asked if he could keep her over the weekend for some personality tests. He assured her parents that there was nothing to panic about, not yet.

  Bierce let her draw. He talked to her while she did so, and though she didn’t answer any questions – didn’t say anything at all, in fact – her drawings became less abstract. In a sense, anyway. The things she drew resembled nothing that existed in the real world. When she drew the great black beast with the enormous wings and brightly-colored cluster of eyes, she was the whole time flinching painfully, twisting her head away from the drawing until the black crayon was
a pitiful nub and the surface of the entire paper bore a charcoal sheen.

  “Is that what you think it looks like?” Bierce asked. “The thing you hear?”

  He motioned toward her left ear and she covered it with her hand. Shook her head.

  “It’s all right,” Bierce said. “You don’t have to be afraid to tell me. In fact, I think I can help.”

  She shook her head again.

  “What does it say to you?” Bierce asked, but she didn’t respond. She would, in fact, never speak again.

  Bierce placed the drawing in her file. In his notes, he called it “the devil on her shoulder.”

  X

  It was 104 steps from Bierce’s office to the stairs, and there were 52 stairs – exactly half that number – to the first floor. By stretching his legs to their limits, Malloy was able to make it another even 104 steps from the end of the stairwell to the exit. Kilhauser seemed to know what he was doing, and didn’t say anything as he led the way. They didn’t see another person, living or dead, in their path until they were outside and were greeted by Bierce’s broken form.

  The wind didn’t howl now, but for the first time Malloy felt its push; the insistent, ceaseless eastward pressure tugging at his hair and his sleeves. And for the first time he felt the oddly comfortable warmth of it. Though no gentle caress, the wind bore a calming quality unlike anything he’d ever experienced. But of course. It carried the words he had always heard, words which were even now returning to him as the chemicals fed into his bloodstream for so long began to wane, as Chamber Seat’s other walls began to fragment.

  Your kingdom! Your kingdom!

  Leaves and twigs and bits of paper danced across the half-empty parking lot. Kilhauser shielded his eyes with his hand and muttered, “My allergies are gonna start acting up.” Malloy didn’t ask which government agency was to blame for them.

  Chamber Seat was in the hills outside the city proper. The highway was deserted. Malloy had anticipated perhaps an assortment of abandoned vehicles, but there wasn’t a single car in sight. Kilhauser seemed to hesitate at this and looked from horizon to horizon. No bodies, no smoke, no planes falling from the sky. He cupped his hand to his ear. No explosions, no sirens, no reports of gunfire. The only sound on the open road was the wind, omnipresent, a single writhing mass coiled and spinning about the Earth.

  It had to be going on around the entire world. There was no question in Malloy’s mind.

  Kilhauser spat and flinched as the wind cast his saliva across his nose. “I don’t trust this apocalypse,” he said, wiping it away.

  “It’s no apocalypse,” Malloy said.

  “Right. The gods.” Kilhauser started down the highway’s shoulder, heading westward, into the wind.

  “It’s a renewal,” Malloy called. Kilhauser didn’t reply. Maybe the words had been torn away before they could reach his ears.

  Then he turned. “Oh, I agree with that,” he called back. “Believe me, the big boys are holed up beneath our feet, watching every move we make. They’ll make their moves based on ours.”

  “My theory makes as much sense as yours.”

  Kilhauser roared with laughter. “You think so? Man, my truth is in the headlines every day! Yours comes from fairy tales!”

  “When’s the last time you read a headline?”

  “No need, my friend, no need. It all repeats itself.”

  Kilhauser waved the gun at Malloy. “Come on already.”

  They walked in silence for a bit, just the wind whispering around them. “All right,” Malloy finally said. “So you know all about me. No sense in my keeping quiet.”

  Kilhauser said nothing, just swung his long legs out in front of himself.

  “I’ll emerge from this a king. I’m king already. Maybe you’re meant to protect me until I get wherever I’m supposed to go.”

  “The voices haven’t given you any clues?”

  “Not yet. I suppose I’m meant to find my own way to the throne.”

  “I’m going to the Federal Records Building downtown,” Kilhauser said. “There’s a fallout shelter beneath it. Might be some heavy hitters tucked away down there. It’s always the unimportant facilities.”

  “The old government doesn’t matter anymore.” Malloy’s foot dislodged a crumpled cigarette pack from the grass. The wind plucked it immediately from sight.

  Kilhauser stopped. “You ever hitchhike?”

  “Yes...”

  He nodded at something ahead, and Malloy saw a pickup truck, slowly increasing in size.

  “I don’t,” Kilhauser said, and Malloy knew what he meant.

  “Put the gun away.”

  “No dice. You’re in or you’re out. Decide now.”

  “They might be like us! They might give us a ride!”

  “How about you just tell them you’re the emperor of the universe and they hand over the keys?” Kilhauser shook his head along with the revolver. “This piece speaks truth to every man, I don’t care which of us is right.”

  “Please put it away. I don’t want to see anyone else die.”

  “They’re armed, I guarantee it.”

  The truck’s color was discernable now, a rusty brown. Malloy heard a clatter coming from the thing. Then a short, friendly honk. “Put the gun away!” he pleaded.

  Kilhauser turned to him. “You realize we look like a couple of mental patients, right? If they pull over without being forced, they’re crazier than us.”

  “They might have information.”

  “Programmed routines. Delusions. Crazier than we are.”

  But Kilhauser slipped the gun into the front of his pants, pulling his shirt down to conceal it, and approached Malloy. His voice lowered to a barely-audible snarl. “All right. You listen then.”

  “I am.” The intensity that had flared in Kilhauser’s eyes was terrifying. He was once again the stranger Malloy had met in Bierce’s doorway. He was an escaped lunatic.

  “There are KEY WORDS,” Kilhauser said slowly, “TRIGGERS that I know by heart. If I hear a spoken TRIGGER either from yourself or any of the occupants of that vehicle, I will not hesitate to use LETHAL FORCE against you all. Clear?”

  Malloy shook his head in a panic. The pickup slowed and cruised to the shoulder before them.

  Single occupant, male with a mullet and goofy mustache. His face was streaked with grime, and the hand which emerged with it from the driver’s-side window appeared to be broken. “Salutations, survivors!”

  Kilhauser stepped in front of Malloy and said, “Where you from?” He made no attempt either to introduce himself or explain their clothes.

  “Back to nature!” the man drawled. He slapped his broken hand against the door. The ring and pinky fingers splayed out and the man clenched his teeth, making a pained sucking sound that was amplified by the wind – TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSST! – then his grimace became a flushed grin. “Need a lift, black man?”

  Interesting way of addressing Kilhauser, Malloy thought, and waited for the crack of the gun. But Kilhauser’s only response was to start toward the truck. “C’mon Malloy.”

  The number of steps to the passenger door was thirteen. Malloy normally wasn’t given to ancient superstition, but this unnerved him enough that he made a small circle and added a few more steps before climbing in after Kilhauser.

  It smelled like carrion inside the cab. Malloy remembered the smell from his youth, from hunting with his father in New England. He’d watched skin being stripped and organs spilt from hanging does, watched steam issue from opened cavities like the breath of life. Even the sanitarium hadn’t smelled like this. It had maintained its cloying antiseptic scent, a farce of a charnel-house; that this man was disheveled and smelled of death made more sense. Here was an apocalyptic vision they could believe in. Kilhauser could trust this scene. Hopefully.

  “Name’s Jenkins,” the man offered.

  “Malloy.”

  Kilhauser reluctantly gave his name. He seemed to be studying Jenkins’ face for any reaction
; there was none but for that odd grin.

  “You’re heading away from the city. Is it bad?” Kilhauser asked.

  “Not too bad,” replied Jenkins as he pulled back onto the road. “Most folks have cleared out already. You come from the loony bin?”

  Every muscle in Malloy’s body tensed. Kilhauser just said, “We did.”

  Malloy watched Kilhauser’s hands. They were folded on his lap, inches from the revolver. He sat stiffly, shoulders back, eyes forward, like a lady on a bus.

  “So I guess you two aren’t headed anywhere in particular,” Jenkins said.

  “Actually, we need to get back into the city,” said Kilhauser. “Think you can help us out?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to go back there, black man.” Jenkins patted the wheel with his good hand. “Game’s out here now.”

  “The game?”

  “Last guy I rode with wasn’t really into it. He was one of your typical Jonny-come-latelys. I told him I was tuned in, you know, and I knew where to go.”

  “For the game?” Kilhauser asked.

  “Exactly! And I knew we’d see you too. I knew I’d be able to spot you straight away. You didn’t need that gun of yours – it’s okay, I don’t need it either.”

  Kilhauser took hold of Jenkins’ arm. “How do you know about me?”

  “I’ve been tuned in since the beginning, black man! C’mon. I was one of the first!” Jenkins laughed pleasantly. “I know you’ve got a lot of them out there, but you oughta remember me!”

  “What are your orders?” Kilhauser growled. The gun was already in his hand, and already pressed into Jenkins’ crotch.

  “I’ve got it all down pat!” Jenkins insisted. “I’m doing just what you were doing! Hell, you must’ve really cleaned up back at the loony bin. Why did you dress up in their threads? To trick them?”

  “What?” Kilhauser demanded. “What! Speak human!”

  “Look,” Jenkins said, raising his broken hand. “Listen. I know I haven’t gotten many of them yet, but that’s why I came out here. The city’s old news! This is where the game’s at!”

  He doesn’t mean a game, Malloy’s mind screamed, he means prey—