by David Haynes
She tilted her head and looked upwards, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. “Someone’s murdered Phil Moody. Hammered nails into his head and cut his balls off.”
Just as she opened her mouth to say something else, Sheriff Taylor walked back in. He looked at them each in turn.
“You’ve heard then.” He didn’t wait for a reply, he just walked up the stairs and nodded at Wilson. “Better come this way,” he said and marched off down the corridor.
23
It took three hours for the Sheriff to go through everything that happened at Sonny’s. There was no reason for Wilson to keep anything back about what happened in there. Courtney had been there too and if he started creating gaps that only she could fill, it would make things difficult for her. Not to mention worse for Donovan.
He didn’t mention Donovan’s cell though. Despite what the Doctor had said to Taylor, the movie didn’t show Donovan in the best of lights. Besides, he didn’t trust that his own senses were showing him the whole picture.
“And he was in the room all night?” Taylor asked. “You’re absolutely sure about that?”
Wilson nodded. “Drinking that much Coke before bedtime doesn’t do me any favors these days. You know what I mean? I was up and down all night and he was there. Fast asleep.”
“What time did he leave the room?” Taylor scrutinized him.
Good question. He had no idea. And if he had no idea about that then what good or harm would his answer do? “About six.”
“About six?”
“I woke up just after six and he was gone then.”
“When did you last look at the time, prior to that?”
He hadn’t looked at the time since they left the bar. “Just after five-thirty,” he said without any further thought. John Donovan hadn’t used a man as a pincushion and he sure as hell hadn’t cut someone’s genitals off.
“So at some point between five-thirty and six, Donovan left the room?”
Wilson nodded. He just wanted this to be over. He wanted to find John and get the hell out of there.
“You’re not thinking of leaving town in the next few days yet, are you?” It was posed as a question but Sheriff Taylor was only expecting one answer.
“No, at least not until you’ve spoken to John, if that’s what you mean.”
Taylor shuffled his notes together. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
Both men stood up. Taylor handed Wilson his driver’s license.
“How long had you been representing Richard Pace before he died?”
“Not long,” Wilson replied.
“He asked you to come up here to check on his mom?”
“That’s right.”
Taylor nodded. “So why are you still here? It’s not for the conversation, is it? From what I understand, Mrs Pace is stable.”
Wilson raised his eyebrows. “Stable? I’m going to have to disagree with you about that. And after what’s happened in the last few days, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I left her here in all this... chaos.”
Taylor wanted to argue. Wilson could see it in his face, the way his jaw clenched. Instead he changed direction. “What I’m finding difficult to get my head around is how your two careers match up.”
Wilson swallowed.
“I mean, attorney and junk collector aren’t exactly in the same ball-park, are they?”
He could feel Taylor’s eyes boring into him. The man had clearly been checking up on them. The proof that Donovan’s cover story, website and credentials were holding up was that Wilson wasn’t wearing a pair of the sheriff’s handcuffs.
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he replied.
Taylor nodded. “I fish. Down there in the Kennebec. Not so many fish around now though, most of them left town with everyone else.” He paused. “Something bothers me here, something about you and Donovan. Something I can’t put my finger on right now. I will though.”
Wilson didn’t doubt it. He just hoped to be well gone by the time he did. He changed the subject. He wanted to move things along and being cross-examined by Taylor would only lead to more problems than existed already.
“There’s got to be CCTV either here or at the motel,” Wilson suggested to change the subject.
“Here, maybe. At Jerry’s, not a chance.” He opened the door and gestured for Wilson to pass through first. “I’m going to check the cameras. Hang around and I’ll give you a ride back to town.”
Wilson nodded. He intended on sticking around. He wanted to take another look at Frances Pace but he also wanted to know what the Sheriff had seen on the cameras before anyone else got to find out.
“Sure, I’ll go grab a coffee,” he said. They walked toward the landing. “John didn’t do that to Phil Moody. Not a chance.”
Taylor paused before turning toward Dr Hamilton’s corridor. “Maybe not but he’s not doing himself any favors now, is he?”
Wilson watched him disappear around the corner toward the office then walked quickly to Frances Pace’s room. John had gone in there for something. What it was, he had no clue but he was going to take a good look around anyway.
He looked up and down the empty corridor, opened the door and walked inside. Frances Pace was lying on her back, the sheets pulled tightly around her and the various machines beeping and whirring their way through their life’s work – keeping her alive.
He stood at the foot of the bed and looked down at the outline of her skeletal frame through the sheets. Thank God his mom never had to endure such a long withdrawal from life. Dead but not dead. Alive but not alive. What was this? What, or whose, purpose did it serve? Without her son, how long would she be forced to endure this?
He looked away, frightened that he might just grab the leads that plugged her life into the wall and rip them out, one by one.
The room was barren of any personal belongings. There were no photographs, no mementos of her former life, nothing to suggest she had any family. Not even a son.
“Where are you?” he whispered. “Where have you gone to?”
“Nowhere.”
He turned full circle. He was alone in the room.
“I’m always here.”
The voice came from beside him, above and around him. Inside his head.
The sheets rustled, drawing his attention back to Frances. Her arms, tucked neatly at her sides beneath the linen, twitched twice, like a shiver rather than a spasm.
The sound of laughter traveled through him. The noise echoed as if it were made in some vast and empty hall far away.
“Who’s here?” He turned around again, knowing that the room was just a box. There was nowhere anyone could hide in here. The laughter echoed again, the iterations bouncing off the cold walls of a cavernous vault.
Frances moved again, her body convulsing powerfully against the covers, pulling them loose from the bed.
He looked from her to the door and then back. He should call someone. His heartbeat rose sharply. He was acutely aware of any changes in its condition now.
And then it felt as if his heart had left his chest and exploded in the leaden sky above Hemlock Mill.
Frances levitated off the bed, sheets dripping from her body and falling to the floor all around her. He took a step forward and then two back, nearly falling over the hospital-issue plastic chair in the corner.
She rose another two feet before the leads that connected her to life became taut and restricted her like a straitjacket.
“This isn’t happening,” he whispered and closed his eyes. But there was no relief behind his eyelids.
The image of a yawning, vaulted hall pressed against him in the darkness. So vast, yet the feeling of emptiness bouncing off its unseen walls was demoralizing. And the low rumbling groan in the darkness drew closer and closer.
“No,” he hissed and opened his eyes.
He realized he was on his knees and when he looked up, Frances was still hovering above the bed. Urine and excrement gushed from her body in rivers of filth. It covered the bed, th
e floor and pooled around Wilson’s knees in a stinking lake. He heaved, adding his own foulness to the room. He pushed back against the wall and cried out. It didn’t sound like his own voice. How could it be? This wasn’t real, it wasn’t happening.
Frances righted herself in a creaking abdominal crunch and looked at him. Her eyes were full of pain, of the fight. The fight for what? For life? Or was she fighting for, or with something else entirely?
He heard her voice although her mouth didn’t move.
“Visitors are welcome. All visitors are welcome to stay.”
She dropped back down to the bed, her monitors screaming and shrieking for assistance. He tried to stand but his feet slid in the filth.
The door flew open and Joe, the nurse who had helped them at the mill, stood on the threshold, agape. He covered his mouth. For a big man, the move looked strangely child-like. He looked from Frances to the floor to Wilson.
He leaned back out into the corridor. “Assistance!” he shouted and then took several cautious steps into the room.
There was excrement everywhere. The walls, the ceiling, the windows and the floor were covered. Wilson sat in it and looked up at Joe, shaking his head. The dazed and confused look on his face said it all. He looked away, looked down at the pool of shit between his legs. ‘Baphomet’ was etched in the feces, polished white tiles shining through beneath. And then they were gone, swallowed up by the tide. He closed his eyes and listened to his heart thumping in his ears.
Something loosened in his brain; a nerve, a vessel, some kind of tissue that anchored him to something called reality. It wasn’t completely detached yet but it was tenuous. And bloody.
*
“She started shaking and then twitching.” He looked at Dr Hamilton. “Like she did when we first arrived. And then it just started... well, you saw the rest.”
He was sitting in her office. He had showered and was dressed in clothes he knew had belonged to someone who passed through the hospice. He tried not to think about it.
“I have never seen anything like that before,” she said from behind her desk. “What happened in there isn’t possible. I wouldn’t know where to even start to explain it.”
He hadn’t mentioned the levitation or any of the other stuff he felt in that room. Putting voice to it might be enough to dislodge his grip on reality completely.
“Did she do anything else? Anything at all?”
Wilson shook his head. “Nothing.” He wondered what Donovan had witnessed in that room.
She put her ring finger in her mouth and chewed at the nail. He could see it wasn’t a habitual action, her fingernails weren’t polished but they were well cared for. This was probably something she did when her scientific mind was at a loss for an explanation.
There was a loud knock on the door. Sheriff Taylor walked in without waiting.
“Sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but can I borrow Mr Wilson to have a look at something?”
She nodded, “Of course. Need me to come?”
He thought for a moment. “Why not, you’d recognize John Donovan too, right?”
She shrugged. “Well, yes, he’s been here on and off for the last couple of days.” She stood up and walked around the desk. “But Frank knows him better than anyone.”
“I need someone independent as verification,” Taylor replied.
They followed him along the corridor and then down the stairs. Nurse Jones smiled nervously as they walked behind her to a small office. Inside the office was the server for their computer system along with a pair of monitors. One showed the outside of the building, alternating between the front, both sides and rear. The other screen flicked between the corridors upstairs and the foyer. It wasn’t a second-thought, insurance premium-lowering system either. The images were crystal clear and in high definition. Like the rest of the facility, it was state of the art. No expense spared.
“You worked it out then?” Dr Hamilton asked. “Sorry I couldn’t help you. To be honest, I didn’t even know it was here.”
The Sheriff hunched over the system, moved the mouse around, clicked and then stepped back. “Is this Mr Donovan?” he asked.
Wilson and Dr Hamilton moved closer to the screen. It was a confined space, intimate to say the least. He hoped all traces of Frances Pace’s shit had gone down the shower drain.
“I’ve done my best to splice the footage together,” Taylor added.
The screen showed someone walking in through the main entrance, briefly pause and then continue forward toward either the stairs or the desk. The camera must have been high up because it was impossible to see who it was. The gait wasn’t John’s though. John walked with the slow and easy stride of a man comfortable in his own skin. It was a confident walk and he’d never seen him wring his hands like that. Whoever this was, they walked with quick jerky steps and seemed to have an uncontrollable tick that manifested itself through their hands.
“Not him,” Wilson said.
The screen changed to a different view. It was of the landing upstairs, pointing down toward Frances Pace’s room. The camera caught the lower part of a leg, a foot and an elbow going into her room. It could have been anyone. The camera stayed on that part of the building for a moment longer then moved to a different and equally empty corridor.
“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be seeing.” Dr Hamilton turned to the Sheriff. “I can’t tell who that is.”
Wilson saw the time at the foot of the screen showed as 05.37. It had been an educated guess and a small lie about the time he thought John left the room. Taylor believed this to be John and if it were, then he was pleased to see his guesswork hold up against the evidence.
“Keep watching,” Taylor replied.
At 05.43 the camera rotated again. It showed one of the corridors, it could have been any, they all looked the same. Then someone fell out of Frances Pace’s room. Wilson swallowed hard. Fell wasn’t the right word, he threw himself, or was thrown from the room. Wilson knew it was John, it had to be. The camera was much closer than the one in the foyer and his crew cut fair hair was obvious.
John pushed himself away from the door but kept his eyes on it, sliding across the floor until his back hit the wall opposite. He tried, not once but twice, to get to his feet before he gave up and scrambled away on all fours like an animal. Just before he vanished under the camera, he looked up. There was nothing but empty voids where his eyes should have been. His vivid blue, laughter-filled eyes were gone and in their place was the lonely shadow of despair. Even from here, Wilson could hear echoes of a vile laughter bouncing from within the vacuum his friend’s destroyed mind had become.
He closed his eyes.
“Was it him?” Taylor asked.
Wilson nodded.
“Seems like you were telling the truth then.” The Sheriff said this without the faintest trace of humanity.
Rage welled in Wilson. He stood up. “Of course I was telling the truth. Didn’t you see how scared he looked? Didn’t you see his fucking eyes?” They clearly hadn’t seen Donovan the way he did. If they had, they wouldn’t be reacting so calmly.
Taylor straightened. The room was so small they were chest to chest. Eye to eye.
“You need to calm down, Mr Wilson.”
“I need to find my friend, Sheriff. That’s what I need to do.”
He tried to turn away but Taylor grabbed his arm and stared at him. “And that’s just what I intend to do.”
“And then what?” Wilson asked. “Lock him up? He didn’t kill anyone. For Christ’s sake, he tried to stop that poor guy putting his head through the store window, he ran three miles to stop Lucy Beaumont hanging herself and he...” He stopped himself before he mentioned what had happened to Richard Pace. “He’d do the same for you if he thought you were going to hurt yourself.”
The Sheriff licked his lips. He was about the same age as Wilson and he looked just as tired as Wilson felt.
“When you two have finished puffing yourselves up, you m
ight want to look at this.”
Wilson turned and watched the screen. The door to Frances Pace’s room, from where Donovan had just fallen, was still open. A wedge of light jagged across the corridor floor and slid up the facing wall.
It created a screen; an old-fashioned projector screen. And on that screen, deformed shadow-puppets crawled in the light. The shapes were human, barely. Their silhouette heads were grotesquely out of proportion, some too large and some too small. They moved their limbs with a jerky fragility that appeared uncontrolled and random. Confused. The movement was confused, that was Wilson’s first thought. Directionless, without hope.
“What the...?” the Sheriff breathed.
The wedge of light narrowed as the door slowly closed. And then was gone completely.
“Who else was in there?” Taylor asked, blinking and rubbing at his eyes as if he had just been looking at the sun.
“We didn’t even know he was in there,” Dr Hamilton replied.
“Play it forward.” Wilson reached for the mouse and clicked the fast-forward icon. The images rotated quicker but there was still nothing to see. Not until 06.53 when one of the nurses entered Frances’s room. The camera captured her coming out too, her visit brief.
“Doesn’t look like she found anyone in there,” Wilson said.
“There had to be someone in that room. Someone made that happen on the wall.” Taylor paused. “Maybe they came in and out while the camera was on rotation? That’s it. That’s why we didn’t see anyone come out.”
He sounded confused. He had every right to be, Wilson was too and by the look on Dr Hamilton’s face, she was far from happy about it.
“Not unless they knew when the camera rotated, they didn’t,” said Wilson. He looked at the Sheriff.
Taylor met his gaze. “What do you want me to say, Mr Wilson? Maybe the window was open in there and the curtains blew around...”
“We don’t have any windows open at this time of year.” Dr Hamilton was still staring at the screen.
Taylor shrugged. “It doesn’t help us find Donovan.” The shadow-puppets were clearly a closed subject now.
