by Lee Pletzers
Dr. Chandler pulled a pad out of his briefcase and made some notes. This was all new information, not in Warwick’s file. A knock at the door distracted him. He looked up and saw Betty Jones.
“Are we finished here, doctor?”
“Not yet.” Dr. Chandler resisted the chance to call her Nurse Betty. She hated her nick-name. He knew she also hated the film and the TV series.
She gave a curt nod. “Very well,” she said and moved away from the door. It shut silently behind her.
Warwick looked shaken by her visit. “That was weird,” he said.
“What makes you say that?”
“She comes in when I’m talking about the panther.”
Dr Chandler smiled. “You’re starting to sound like Jerry and Dean, with their conspiracy theories.”
Warwick shrugged. “You never know,” he whispered.
He was starting to lose Warwick again—Damn that nurse barging in! He tried to think of a way to get back on track, he could still save this. But how? Progress, he thought. Keep moving forward. “What did the panther want?”
Seeming to study him, Warwick came to a decision. “You.”
“Me?”
“Not you exactly, but, like, people. Meat. Blood. Bones. Tasty.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“You would, you’re a doctor.”
“What I find hard to believe is that a panther from Hell would swim through the core of the Earth, enter the ocean and swim up through your scars, just for a feed.”
Warwick smiled.
The doctor’s eyebrows arched. “You know how that sounds, don’t you?”
“Sounds like I’m crazy.”
Dr. Chandler nodded.
“Maybe not to feed, then.”
“Maybe not,” he copied, and then waited for Warwick to continue. When he didn’t, Dr. Chandler said, “What’s the link you need to fix?” When he saw his patient’s eyes light up and a smile cross his face, Dr. Chandler quickly said, “I’m not saying I believe you—” Because I don’t, he thought. “—but I need to understand what you want to do.”
“No problem.” Warwick dropped his shirt to the floor. “Can you see that red spot?”
“Yes, I saw it earlier.”
“It’s breaking a link and the panther gets through that opening. I need to cut through the dot to reset the line.”
“What makes you think the design works?”
Warwick took a step back as if he’d just been slapped. His eyes narrowed. “You know it works.”
“I don’t know.” Dr. Chandler struggled to keep his voice neutral. “Explain it to me.”
“The voice told me.”
“Voice?”
“Inside my head. The voice that carried the screams.” He looked toward the window. “When I was depressed and cut my wrist, the voice came to me then. Told me I wasn’t going to die.” He ran his hands though his hair. “I didn’t listen to it at first. It was silent for a very long time. But when Sally screwed around on me, the voice returned. I was so hurt—and—it seemed to understand my pain. It told me to cut her name into my arm. It taught me that pain can be ignored. It silenced the screams.”
Dr. Chandler was stunned. He looked at his notepad and realized he hadn’t written anything.
“But I should never have carved anything into my arm. Once you start cutting, the beast comes.”
“The panther?”
“Yes. And with this break it can enter our reality, again. Time is running short, doc.”
“Are you saying that if you never cut yourself, the panther would never have appeared?”
Warwick nodded. “And the voice would have gone away.”
“Only one voice?”
“Yes, a male, older than me, I guess. The guy sounded like he was in—” Warwick groaned and clutched his chest. The groan turned into a grunt. His breath came in hard and fast.
Dr. Chandler got to his feet, turned towards the door for assistance, when it opened and Jerry entered followed by Dean and Tina. The two were discussing aliens again and Tina’s mascara was a messy blur, as if she’d been crying.
Jerry was the first to notice Warwick. “Dude, are you okay?”
“I’ll get a nurse,” Dean added. He turned to go.
“No,” Warwick said through gritted teeth. “It’s here.”
Ignoring him, Dean opened the door. “Hello!” He faced Dr. Chandler. “Back in a sec. They probably couldn’t hear me.” He ran out the door.
Warwick dropped to his knees. Jerry was at his side instantly. “Hey, everything’s gonna be okay,” he said in a soothing tone. He gave Warwick’s shoulder a gentle rub. His hand came away red.
“It’s chosen us,” Warwick said.
Tina walked up to him. Squatting down, she said, “Here you are, sweetheart,” and handed him razor blade.
He smiled.
Dr. Chandler got to his feet, ready to take the blade away, but surprisingly, Warwick didn’t accept it.
“It’s too late,” he said. “It’s behind you.”
Tina turned. “There’s nothing—” Her head snapped to the side. Blood poured from four claw marks. She tried to scream but only a gurgle came out. Suddenly, her neck split apart. Ripped flaps of skin drooped to her collar bone. Dr. Chandler watched her tongue slide out through her neck, forming a Columbian necktie.
Jerry rushed to the door. He grabbed the handle but the door wouldn’t budge. “It won’t allow you to escape,” Warwick said. Facing Dr. Chandler, he said, “I’m sorry.”
Dr Chandler had fallen back onto his chair. His mind was reeling and his muscles had turned to jelly. He couldn’t take his eyes off Tina. In the background, as if a million miles away, he heard Jerry screaming. A few moments later, Jerry was silent. Maybe Warwick was right; the panther from Hell came for a feed.
Something wet licked his cheek.
He couldn’t recoil from it, he was frozen solid. The panther’s hot, putrid breath hit his face, stroked his hair. A wet guttural growl rose up from the beast’s throat.
“What?”
Warwick’s voice broke the trance on Dr. Chandler and he quickly got up from his chair. He stumbled to the desk, eyes searching madly for the panther.
“Why?” Warwick was backpedaling. He held his hands up. “But I’m the vessel. Without me, you can’t—”
The door opened. Dean walked in. He smiled as he stepped over the torn body of Jerry. He looked from Jerry to Tina. “Nice work.”
“Now I understand,” Warwick said.
“Good.”
“You’re not having me.” Warwick ran for the window.
Dr. Chandler reached out for him, “Warwick. No!”
Warwick’s body was locked in slow motion as he hit the glass. It shattered around him. Each chunk and sliver hung the air, suspended momentarily, drifting to the floor like feathers. Suddenly time sped up and Warwick disappeared through the window. The glass clinked on the floor.
Forgetting the panther, Dr. Chandler was instantly at the window, his arm still stretched out, until he saw the crumpled body and the halo of blood slowly spreading out. He noticed the park was empty. No parents, no children. The hospital grounds were also empty. No patients, no doctors, no nurses. There was no wind. Looking to the park, he saw the trees turn black and crumble to the ground, the grass brown and rotted and quickly vanishing, leaving white space in its wake. It took only moments for the park to no longer exist. What the—
“Warwick’s reality is breaking down, now that he’s dead.” Dean stroked the bulky head of a black panther that sat at his side like an obedient dog. Dr. Chandler stepped away.
“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you. You can even pet him if you like.”
Dr. Chandler shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
Dean smiled. “There has to be two of us, always. You as the doctor, and me as the protector. The others were getting in the way, and at first I was pissed you had created them, but I forgive you. I believe you
were testing my skills. Am I right?”
The panther growled. Thinking fast, Dr. Chandler said, “And you passed with flying colors.”
The panther went quiet and Dean sat on the fold out chair. “That was a good test,” he said. “I knew I had to silence Warwick straight away, but you introduced Jerry to keep me talking about my favorite subject and Tina to keep me satisfied.” He nodded at the memory. “You’re a fucking genius.”
“You passed. You’re the genius.” Dr. Chandler took a seat next to him. What else could he do? He bent down and petted the panther.
* * *
Doctor Betty Jones entered the observation room. She nodded to the other doctors in the room. She took off the white apron and hung it on the clothes hanger and pulled off a clip-on nurse collar. She hated playing the nurse. She had far more important things to attend to, but it did further the case study in schizophrenia.
“Where are we at?” she asked her assistant.
“Dr. Jones, since your entry into their room, things have escalated.”
She raised an eyebrow and looked at the large rectangle sheet of two-way glass. Why they never saw the mirror and only a wall was a question she couldn’t answer. Maybe they didn’t want to see it? She doubted she would ever know the reason.
“Only the personalities of Dr. Chandler and Dean remain.”
“Dean?”
“Yes.”
“Well I’ll be...” her voice trailed off. “Dean? Are you sure?”
The assistant pointed to the two-way mirror.
“Why were the others killed off?”
The assistant shrugged. “We’re trying to work that one out.”
Dr Jones sat at her console and attached the headset. She adjusted the headphones and listened in to the conversation of one man talking to himself and answering back.
Liked Lee’s story? Check out his latest title:
2007, Agent Baxter pursues the entity, Darkness, following an accident that slew Doctor Hayden’s wife and son. Dr. Hayden studied the Darkness without realizing it was studying him. Shadows, however, have a way of vanishing into light and the entity flees the compound where Hayden thought it was contained.
In 27 B.C. a peaceful man’s family is slaughtered, turning his life upside down and bringing forth a leader. A leader who will drive an army into the bowels of hell for vengeance. At the moment of his death, he offers his soul to the dark gods of the underworld for revenge which is granted swift and deadly.
Thrown from his stead on his return to Hell, Darian crawls out of the blackness and into the modern world under the new name of Darkness and carrying an infection. An infection that will take mankind to a new level of evolution.
http://panicpress.org/2011/02/13/the-armageddon-shadow-by-lee-pletzers/
Back to TOC
Take a small but decent-sized American city and slaughter its entire population, over the course of a year. (Well, don’t, actually.) If a hostile country did that to one of our cities, we’d probably give them the Hiroshima treatment.
Yet, that’s how many people alcohol kills in different methods—cirrhosis, other diseases, drunk drivers (62 victims a day from that alone!), accidents, fights, mayhem—every year. It out-kills every other drug we’ve come up with, except possibly for tobacco, while we lock up nonviolent marijuana users by the thousands. And as a society, we let it slide. The legality, prevalence and perceived ‘normality’ of alcohol—and its enormous lobby and tax income—makes it seem ‘not so bad’.
In fact, if you were to give alcohol a human voice, it might just say so.
SHOWDOWN WITH DEACON BLUES
By K.K.
At 11:40 AM, Deacon Blues was almost finished redecorating the room. The framed EASY DOES IT and DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF placards were still there, along with the huge posters describing the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, but he’d added some real eye-catchers.
A Corona poster had been added. A hot model in a bikini posed with a bottle of the beer, but her beautiful face had been cut out of the picture. Other poster-girls for Coors Light and Smirnoff Ice posed on other walls, equally headless. Magazine ads for Captain Morgan’s Rum, Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels were taped up at eye level here and there as well. They were all very commonplace images, but very incongruous for a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. And if Rick didn’t arrive soon, Deacon Blues would have to take down all his work before the next meeting started. “Where are you, Tusgrin?” He growled under his breath to the empty room.
At 11:45 AM, Rick Tusgrin rolled his battle-scarred Impala to a halt next to Deacon Blues’ ancient Triumph motorcycle outside the West Side Group, and got out. As the door crunched shut with a pained metallic groan, he noticed all the damage he’d done to it over the last two years. Dented door, dented quarter-panel, dented fender, dented grille…it went on and on. Now that he was sober, he could connect each dent to a different bar or party. Funny how he hadn’t noticed before. He walked towards the building’s door, then groaned at his own malfunctioning memory and stalked back to the car to get the photos Matt had requested.
Inside, Deacon Blues raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Rick. Did you bring ‘em?”
Rick nodded, holding out a manila envelope. “Right here, Mr. Bluzinski.”
“Call me Matt, for the thirtieth time…and thanks. These are all Jane Does, right?” he asked.
Rick nodded. “Of course. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to look at ‘em.
What the hell did you want these for, any…” His sentence trailed off as he saw the new décor. “Awwww, no.”
Matthew “Deacon Blues” Bluzinski raised an eyebrow. “What?” Instead of waiting for a reply, he taped an eight-by-ten photo of a female corpse’s face where the bikini model’s face should have been. “Hmmm, probably ought to cut these down to size…ah, I’ll do it later.” He repeated the process on another headless model.
“That is freakin’ sick.” Rick grumbled.
“That is the exact point.” Deacon Blues kept taping as he spoke. “Advertising in reverse. Haven’t you seen those TV ads for ‘The Truth’? They’re freakin’ sick, but they get their point across because they’re sick. And that’s for tobacco. Nobody stands up to alcohol, no matter how many people die. People leave these meetings, they’re right back on the street, and every billboard shows people livin’ the wild nightlife. No wonder so many people relapse.” He touched up the Captain Morgan ad with a black and white photo of a crashed car. “Yeah, these are shock tactics. I think we need shock tactics. But if anyone tells me they’re disgusted, I’ll take them down. I bet you nobody does.”
“Okay, I’m disgusted,” Rick said with a smirk.
“You?! You’re a coroner, for God’s sake! How could anything disgust you?”
“It doesn’t. I was just kidding. You got any coffee going?”
“I just brewed it, help yourself. Hey, how’s that workout goin’?” he said as he finished up. Luckily, the Jane Does that Rick had selected weren’t impossible to look at; the women were young, mostly overdoses or drowning victims. Their faces were bloated and discolored but not mutilated. Still, Deacon Blues was right about their effect. They did make you think twice about hoisting a Corona.
“It’s killin’ me…and I’m still not as huge as you,” Rick muttered as he poured an avalanche of sugar into his coffee.
“Well, give it time, keep eatin’ right…”
The compliment seemed to have bounced right off him. Matt was one of those bodybuilders who didn’t seem to care how muscular they’d gotten. But the bearlike biker was also a cool trainer, and sponsor. Rick just privately wished he’d be a bit happier, maybe smile once in a while. The Deacon’s private war with demon rum had made him ultra-serious. He might have brought hundreds of people to serenity, but sadly he seemed to have won no serenity for himself.
Other alcoholics began to file in, ready for the meeting. Matt and Rick greeted them all. Most of them blinked at the new décor but didn’t m
ention it.
At 11:59 AM, Brandy stood on the sidewalk, watching the others enter the West Side Group. She gave a slight smile to them all, but inwardly she judged them all in turn: That one looks like a junkie…and she’s GOTTA be a hooker…and oh, sir, have you stopped beating your wife yet?
