by John Moralee
Jim blanked the noise out. Blanked out their pain. Yet he could hear the prisoners shouting, accusing him with one word.
“Stalk!”
*
“Carson’s ready, Mr Mulloney.”
Jim finished his cigarette with shaking hands. He knew Carson had been shaved of all body hair, had eaten his last meal, had seen a priest and a lawyer. Just like Dolbey and Franklin and Murphy and Mendoza and ... in six years as executioner, Jim had executed seventeen men. Seventeen men. He had killed them because nobody else wanted the job and someone had to do it.
He followed the guard into the execution room.
Carson sat strapped to the chair staring through the glass into the viewing room. His mouth was gagged and hands fastened to the armrests. His eyes went to Jim pleading for him to stop – but there was nothing he could do.
Jim walked to the control button and waited for the governor to give him the nod.
The governor nodded.
When Jim was in there, watching them die, he became Stalk. It wasn’t him. It was Stalk – the executioner.
Stalk pressed the button.
Carson screamed silently as his whole body fought to live as the electricity shot through his body. He tensed and arched in the chair, thrashed again and again, then sagged, still. The air was scorched. The smell sweet, sickly.
Ten minutes later the coroner declared Carson dead.
Jim watched the spectators leave. He watched two officers unstrap the body and take it away. He was alone with the electric chair.
Instantly, he sensed someone in the room.
Carson was standing behind the chair, weeping. “You killed me. You killed me.”
... and then all eighteen dead men appeared, crowding around Jim, pushing him towards the chair, forcing him down, pulling the straps tight and gagging his mouth. He was powerless. The dead stepped away from the chair, heads bowed, remembering their own deaths, waiting for their moment of revenge.
Franklin leered and walked to the controls, his index finger hovering over the button. “I told you it was payback time.”
“No!” Jim didn’t want to die.
Franklin pressed the button.
Jim bucked in the chair and screamed.
He fell forward, onto the floor, gasping - but alive.
Franklin laughed. “You thought we really could kill you? We’re dead, Stalk. The only thing that can kill you is you. That don’t mean we can’t have some fun trying.”
Jim looked back at the chair. He realised the straps had not been tied. The dead were in his head, haunting him. He left the room. He found the dead waiting in the corridor. He laughed with the insanity of it.
“What’s so funny?” Franklin said.
“You don’t get it,” Jim said. “You want payback on me? You’re dead because of the things you did. Every single one of you deserved to die. You’re in hell because of it. You can drag me there with you – but you’re making a huge mistake. Imagine what I’ll do to you when I’m dead like you. I’ll make you wish you never existed. I’m Stalk. The man capable of getting payback on you. You’d better pray I have a long and happy life, boys, because as soon as it’s over, I’m coming to get you all.”
The eighteen killers suddenly looked afraid.
“You can’t hurt us,” one said.
“You want to bet?” Jim said. He grinned and stepped forward. “I’ll remember your faces, boys. Payback will be a bitch.”
Jim glared at them until they faded away.
He had a feeling they would not be back.
He wanted a good drink – but he decided to go somewhere else.
He was sure there would be an AA meeting nearby.
Behind Closed Doors
Carver arrives last. The others in the group - twenty-five this week - have already arranged stiff-backed chairs in a circle with a place left for him near the windows. He sees men and women of all ages. None you’d recognise in a crowd, but that’s an advantage. Nobody here wants to look different from the ordinary folk on the streets of New York. But to trained eyes - Carver’s eyes - there is one subtle difference: their eyes burn with a disturbing intensity, the dilated pupils seem to suck light into them like black holes. In some ways that is the truth. There is a hushed silence as Carver closes the door, deadbolts it, then switches off the lights. The sunlight through the closed curtains casts a dull red glow, making their faces appear blood-smeared, their mouths dark slits.
Carver hurries to his black leather chair and sits.
They are ready to begin.
An old woman with grandmotherly features speaks the first word. It is like a whisper of breeze, a tingle at the back of the neck, a ripple of nervous energy, a refocusing of spiritual powers. She is the Old One, the creature that binds them together in their unholy union. Her words are like ice forming on a windowpane. Anticipation rises. Carver and the others speak as one the incantation engraved on their hearts. The air becomes colder, thicker, heavier. The sunlight wanes as the stream of photons becomes sporadic, visibly slowing down until he can see every single one, like water dripping from a leaking faucet. Carver feels the power rush into him - soaring his mind into higher levels of consciousness. Time slows even more. Each heartbeat becomes separated by a billion years. He can feel the blood moving inside his veins and arteries, through his hearts four valves, pumping, pumping, pumping. He can see every Brownian motion a dust particle makes in the smoky atmosphere.
He sees.
Carver pushes his mind out of his body. The sensation is like a butterfly shaking off its pupa, shedding what is not needed, becoming its true self, ready to fly. (He knows this from first-hand experience.) Now he sees himself as an omniscient viewer would, both inside and outside, everywhere and nowhere. He feels like a director looking into the dark room from any angle, many at once, zooming in, panning out, pausing, reviewing. The others are with him, invisible, warm entities that are entwined like snakes or lovers.
It is time to fly.
Carver exits the room by thinking himself outside.
East Manhattan is a time-frozen panorama of asphalt and metal packed with midday human traffic. He goes up and looks down from a mile up, his hawk-like vision studying the tracery of roads packed with yellow taxis and gas-guzzling cars. The group of minds disperse over the city leaving him to do his own work alone. He descends and allows time to begin again.
By the time he reaches street level, events are running at normal human speed, just how he likes it. He squeezes into the mind of a man crossing the road. The man is late for a business meeting. Carver subliminally tells the man his wife is sleeping with another woman. (Carver doesn’t care if it is true or not, but it is the man’s deepest insecurity.) Shivering, the man enters the subway, thinking about his wife’s adultery. Carver leaves him to worry.
Carver flies down into the subway station. He chooses a woman at random. A young Asian woman in a business suit. He tells her all men are out to rape her. Look at that man over there. He wants you. He hates you. He wants to hurt you.
Carver moves on. He focuses his attention on a man on the train. There is something delicious in the man’s past. Curious, Carver seeks it out and draws it forth. A memory, forgotten, suppressed. Five years old, the boy that became the man was abused by his uncle and step-father. His step-father held him down while his uncle used a ... the memory strikes the man with full clarity. The man screams. People look at him as if he is crazy.
Carver moves on. His spirit enters a little girl holding her mother’s hand. He tells the little girl her mommy doesn’t really love her, that she was a mistake. Her mom and dad never wanted a girl. She starts crying.
He moves on.
Next he tells a gay man that he really wants to be straight, that he is an abomination.
He moves on.
He tells an old woman that she has wasted her whole life and should kill herself.
He moves on.
He tells both members of newlywed couple that their par
tner is probably having an affair with someone at the office.
He moves on.
And on. And on.
Carver leaves the train for Central Park. Should find something good here, he thinks. He targets a dozen joggers, mostly because he doesn’t like their smug grins. He tells each exactly what they will die of and when. Their strides falter. One throws up in spectacular style. He targets a group of smoking executives sitting on a bench. He fills their minds with images of black lungs and cancerous growths and brain tumours the size of toadstools. He makes them feel the cancers burrowing inside them.
He moves on.
The lunch hour is almost up. Damn it.
As always, he treats himself to a special victim.
A man sitting on the park bench eating a steak sandwich.
The man is thinking about his wife and kids ... how he will surprise them this summer with a trip to Disney World.
Until Carver enters his mind.
Now he is thinking about the hatchet he keeps in his toolbox. Won’t it look good if he splits his wife’s skull in two? Whammo. Then chop up the kids in their beds. Hack. Hack. Hack. Dismember them, then put their heads in the microwave. Turn it on high power for ten minutes. Watch their eyes pop, skin blacken, fat sliver out, juices bubble, blood boil.
It will be so good.
Carver removes all love and caring from the man, so the implanted thoughts mean everything. The hatchet grows to enormous size. It is the man’s reason for existence. He must get it. He must kill his family.
Carver exits the man’s mind.
The man looks up at the sky almost as if he can see Carver. Then he shrugs and gets up. He has things to do. People to kill.
Carver lingers awhile, riding the negative emotions he has stirred up. He meets up with some of his friends and they pool together their experiences and admire each other’s inventiveness. One of the most popular tricks that they have been doing recently is the creation of alien abduction memories, making rational people believe they have been kidnapped and tortured by aliens. It is fun to watch these stories on the news.
The lunch hour ends. The Old One calls them back to their bodies. Carver feels the tug of his own physical body. Unable to resist the call, he returns to the dark apartment. He slides into his body and wakes up wonderfully refreshed. He stretches his limbs. He shakes hands with his friends, having a moment of idle chat about the television last night. Carver looks at his watch. He has to get back to work now. There are dozens of similar groups in the city doing exactly the same thing, and thousands more doing it in other cities, here in America and across the rest of the world.
“See you next week,” he says as he is leaving.
Carver takes a cab to his office, where he looks at brass plaque on his door that all of his patients see before going in: Dr William G. Carver, Therapist.
Inside, he smiles. He knows people will come to him with their mental problems. He knows what they will be thinking. He knows they’ll need his professional help for $100 an hour. He is the only person they can truly trust with their darkest secrets. He is the only person who understands. He is the only person who can remove those terrors.
And replace them with new ones.
Carver loves his work.
It is so satisfying to be needed.
Deathware
They take you to the tank room and strip you naked. Then they stick neurotrodes up your nose and into your spinal column. Then you stand on a cold metal grille and wait, staring at your feet.
You can see the biofreeze frothing in the tank like liquid mercury. Your crimes are read out - a litany that moves you to tears, tears you hope will convince the victims’ families of your regret. You hope they will reverse their decision.
But they aren’t fooled. And it doesn’t happen.
An anonymous judge sentences you to a period of reform. At the word “reform” you chuckle.
There’s no such thing. No tank can reform you.
Your laughter isn’t so self-assured once the grille descends towards the biofreeze.
This is it. Worse than death, they say.
You plunge into a pain unlike anything you’ve imagined. While your body freezes, you scream and scream. The biofreeze drowns you. It enters your mouth and nose and ears. You still scream, but silently.
The neurotrodes pump white noise to keep you from drifting, from fading out.
You are living - but not alive.
The neurotrodes keep you conscious - but they stop you having thoughts of your own. You imagine voices. It is like the accusing chatter of your victims.
You try to block it.
It’s impossible.
Soon there is only the white noise and a meaningless jumble of sensations. It keeps your neurones ticking over, dreaming the dream.
You want to die but you can’t.
You want it to end.
But time is a Möbius strip you ride and ride.
And finally, after the white noise has taken its toll, after you can’t take any more, after your silent screams have become mute even to you, you understand what it is to be dead - like your victims.
The deathware makes you understand the magnitude of your sins.
And the sensors, the sensors you have forgotten about, detect the change in your personality and alert the tank that your sentence has been fulfilled.
You have learnt what has to be learnt.
The tank starts to dethaw.
A voice announces you are release.
You open your eyes.
This time you promise it will be different.
No more killing.
You are lying to yourself.
Because there’s one thing you have forgotten.
You enjoy it too much.
A Distant Roar
Insects, he could handle.
Lizards were another thing. There was one in the hotel bedroom - a grey-green iguana or something - that watched him from the corner nearest the bed. It hissed if he got too close. It was too big to crush under his shoe, if he dared. He did not dare. Those black, swivelling eyes, raised above the armoured skull like gun turrets, looked right at him and watched his every move. It looked like a scaly rat.
“Go to hell,” Holden muttered.
The lizard stared.
He threw an empty Coke can at it. It skittered under the bed. “Missed me,” its dark eyes said.
Holden walked to the window. The jungle was locked outside, dark and brooding. It was his third day since arriving in Africa, and the first day he hadn’t been continuously sick with diarrhoea. Real diarrhoea, not the namby-pamby British version. Each time he’d been to the toilet it had felt like he’d passed broken glass and razor blades. He’d lost half a stone grimacing in the dirty bathroom, voiding brown-yellow water. His soft immune system wasn’t ready for the tropics, he realised, if it ever could be. Finally, he had run out of liquid, so the diarrhoea left him, finding him not up to its challenge. After sleeping uneasily under the mosquito net until noon, he figured it was time to venture outside, even though the prospect was daunting. He could see the lush canopy of banana trees through the grimy, fly-stained plastic window. Something black shuffled in the upper branches. Creepy, he thought. He shivered: the real jungle didn’t start for another ten miles that way. What horrors awaited? Today, the temperature outside was a hot and sticky 95 F; it was slightly cooler inside, but just a couple of degrees. His cotton shirt was glued to his chest like wet sandpaper. What he really wanted was an ice-cold beer while cooling off in a nice cold bath. What he needed to do was to haul himself into activity.
He picked up the telephone and asked the receptionist for an outside number, the number Mr Lee in Hong Kong had given him. It rang twice, then it was answered. A man with a very deep voice said, “Yes?”
“An elephant is a pig in disguise,” Holden said, feeling stupid as the codeword left his lips. He half expected the man to chuckle and hang up, an expensive practical joke on the ignorant white guy. But h
e did not.
“Everyman is an island,” the man said.
It was the contact, after all.
“Is this line safe?”
“Yes. Talk.”
“I have the money.” It was in his suitcase, under the false bottom. “Ten million American dollars.”
“Two hours, sit by the pool at Gakak’s Bar.”
That was it, the man hung up.
Poachers, they thought they were secret agents.
Two hours. There was time for that nice cold bath.
Before stripping off, Holden was careful to check the bathroom for lizards. The plumbing in there was all wrought-iron pipes twisting in and out of the flaking plaster wall; there could be anything hiding in the shadows. (Lizards, bugs and spiders could live in communities, have their own welfare system, he would never know.) Satisfied there was nothing to worry about, he ran himself a bath, the cold tap chugging the water out in sporadic bursts. He still felt watched: his neck itched not just where a mosquito had left a red welt, but all over. Holden placed his clothes on a chair. (Out of the reach of any lizards, he hoped.) He sunk up to his neck in the oh-so-cold water. So good. He began lathering his body with pink complimentary soap.
No beer, he thought. I forgot the beer. Forget it; I’m not climbing out dripping wet. Relax. Tomorrow the deal will be done. My wife will be safe.
The cold water soothed his body.
There was a movement across the room. There. On the pipe. A lizard. It was barely invisible, its skin matching the colour of white enamel paint. It’s a chameleon. Those creepy eyes are staring at me.
He wondered if lizards had teeth.
There was another lizard (another chameleon?) on the same pipe. Once he knew what he was looking for he could see it clearly, and another. Jesus, there were dozens of them. Darker, to fit the shadows. All watching him. It wasn’t his imagination; those swivel eyes could look backwards if they wanted, but they didn’t. He was their subject of scrutiny. The bath no longer seemed relaxing; it seemed cold, very cold.
