Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “I want out.”

  He curled his upper lip; I thought he would answer, but first, he spat in my face. “I saved you. You don’t even care. Out is not where you want to be. In here’s the only safe place. You get fed, you got a bed.” He leaned closer to me. “You have someone who loves you.”

  I was prepared this time. I brought my fist against his face and smashed him as hard as I could. His head lolled to the side, and I heard a sharp crack as his skull hit the mildewed tile wall. When he turned to face me again, there was blood at the comer of his lips. A smile grew from the blood.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “You want out. It can be arranged.”

  “Good. Next time, I kill you.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded.

  As I left the shower room, I glanced back at him for a second. He stood under the showerhead, water streaming down—it almost looked like tears as the water streamed in rivulets across his face, taking with it the blood at his lips.

  9

  An hour later, Hype found me out by the crude baseball diamond we’d drawn in the Yard, under the shade of several oak trees that grew just beyond the high fence.

  “Your lover told me we’re moving up the schedule. Shouldn’t do this but once every few years. You should’ve gotten out that night. Joe shouldn’t have stopped you. Any idea why he did?”

  I kicked at home plate, which was a drawing in the dirt. Aurora was a funny place that way—because of things being considered dangerous around the inmates, even home plate had to be just a drawing and not the real thing. The real thing here were the fences and the factory-like buildings.

  “No,” I said. “Maybe he’s in love with me and doesn’t want to lose me. I don’t care. He can go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I once tried to get out,” Hype said, ignoring me. “It was back in the early fifties. I was just a kid. Me and my buddies. I tried to get out, but back then there was only one way—a coffin. Not a happy system. I didn’t know then that I’d rather be in here than out there.”

  “Make sense, old man,” I said, frustrated. I wanted to kick him. The thought of spending another night in this place with Joe on top of me wasn’t my idea of living.

  “A little patience’ll go a long way, Doer,” he said. It felt like a commandment. He continued, “Then they started doing those tests—bombs and all kinds of things, twenty, thirty miles away. Some closer, they said. Some this side of the mountain. We lived below back then. Me and Skimp and Ralph. Others, too, but these were my tribe. We were shell-shocked and crazy, and we were put in with the paranoid schizophrenics and sociopaths and alcoholics—all of us together. Some restrained to a wall, some bound up in straitjackets. Some of us roaming free in the subterranean hallways. Skimp, he thought he was still on a submarine. He really did. But I knew where we were—in the farthest ring of hell. And then, one morning, around three a.m., I heard Skimp whimpering from his bunk. I go over there, because he had nightmares a lot. I usually woke him up and told him a story so he could fall back to sleep. Only, Skimp was barely there. His flesh had melted like cheese on a hot plate, until it was hard to tell where the sheets left off and Skimp began. He was making a noise through his nostrils. It was like someone snoring, only he was trying to scream. Others, too, crying out, and then I felt it—like my blood was spinning around. I heard since that it was like we got stuck in a microwave. The entire place seemed to shimmer, and I knew to cover my eyes. I had learned a little bit about these tests, and I knew that moist parts of the body were the most vulnerable. That’s why insects aren’t very affected by it—they’ve got exoskeletons. All their softs parts are on their insides. I felt drunk and happy, too, even while my mouth opened to scream, and I went to my hiding place, covering myself with blankets. I crawled as far back into my hiding place as I could go, and then I saw some broken concrete and started scraping at it. I managed to push my way through it, farther, into darkness. But I got away from the noise and the heat. Later, I heard that it was some test that had leaked out. Some underground nuclear testing. We were all exposed, those who survived. Never saw Skimp or Ralph again, and I was told they were transferred—back in those days, no one investigated anyone or anything. I knew they’d died, and I knew how they’d died. There were times I wished I’d died, too. Every day. That’s when I learned about my divinity. It was like Christ climbing the cross—he may or may not have been God before he climbed onto that cross, but you know for sure he was God once he was up there. I wasn’t God before that day, but afterward, I was.”

  Hype was a terrific storyteller, and while I was in awe of that ability, I stared at him as if he were the most insane man on the face of the earth.

  “So I found a way out,” he concluded.

  “If that’s true, how come you don’t get out?”

  “It’s my fate. Others can go through, but I must stay. It’s my duty. Trust me, you think God likes to be on Earth? It’s as much an asylum out there as it is in here.”

  I was beginning to think that all of this talk about going through and getting out was an elaborate joke for which the only punch line would be my disappointment. I decided to hell with it all: The old man could not get me out no matter how terrific his stories were. I was going to spend the rest of my life with Joe pawing me. I went to bed early, hoping to find some escape in dreams.

  I awoke that night, a flashlight in my face.

  10

  Joe said, “Get up. This is what you want, right?”

  His voice was calm, not the usual nocturnal passionate whisper of the Joe who caressed me. He hadn’t touched me at all. I was somewhat relieved.

  “Huh?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “You want to get out? Let’s go. You’ve got to take a shower first.”

  I felt his hand tug at my wrist.

  “Get the hell up,” he said.

  The shower was cold. I spread Ivory soap across my skin, rubbing it briskly under my arms, around my healing wound, down my stomach, thighs, backs of legs, between my toes. Joe watched me the whole time. His expression was constant: a stone statue without emotion.

  “It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I don’t like liars.”

  After I toweled off, he led me, naked, down the dimly lit hall. The alarm was usually on at the double doors at the end of the hall, but its light was shut off. Joe pushed the door open, guiding me along. The place seemed dead. Hearing the sound of footsteps in the next ward, he covered my mouth with his hand and drew me quickly into an inmate’s room. Then, a few minutes later, we continued on to the cafeteria. He had a key to the kitchen; he unlocked its door. I followed him through the dark kitchen, careful to avoid bumping into the great metal counters and shelves. Finally, he unlocked another door at the rear of the kitchen. This led to a narrow hallway.

  At the end of the hallway, another door, which was open.

  Hype stood there, frozen in the flashlight beam.

  11

  “Hey,” I said.

  Hype put a finger to his lips. He wore a bathrobe that seemed shiny purple in the light.

  He turned, going ahead of us, with Joe behind me. I followed the old man down the stone steps.

  We entered the old Aurora, the one that stretched for miles beneath the aboveground Aurora. We walked single file down more narrow corridors, the sound of dripping water all around. At one point, I felt something brush my feet—a large insect, perhaps, or a mouse. The place smelled of wet moss, and carried its own humidity, stronger than what existed in the upper world. For a while it did seem that Hype had been right: This was the farthest ring of hell.

  But I’m getting out, I thought. I’ll go through any sewer that man has invented to get out. To go through. To be done with all this.

  Joe rested his hand on my shoulder for a brief moment. He whispered in my ear, “You don’t have to do this. I was wrong. I love you. Don’t get out.”

  I stopped, feeli
ng his sweet breath on my neck. Even though I had been in Aurora only a little over four months, I had begun getting used to it. If I stayed longer, I would become part of it, and the outside world would be alien and terrifying to me. I saw it in other men, including Joe. This was the only world of importance to them.

  “Why the change?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to go through. I want you here with me.”

  “No, thanks.” I put all the venom I could into those two words. I added, “And by the way, Joe, if I had a gun I’d shoot your balls off for what you did to me.”

  “You don’t understand.” He shook his head like a hurt little boy.

  Hype was already several steps ahead. I caught up with him while Joe lagged behind.

  “I’m going out through that hiding place you talked about,” I guessed.

  “No,” he said. When he got to a cell, he led me through the open doorway.

  A feeble light emanated within the room—a yellowish-green light, as if glowworms had been swiped along the walls until their phosphorescence remained.

  It was your basic large tank, looking as if it had been compromised by the several earthquakes of the past few years.

  Joe entered behind me. “This is where Hype and his friends lived. This is where it happened.”

  He shined the flashlight across the green light.

  I shivered, because for a moment I felt as if the ghosts of those men were still here, still trapped in the old Aurora.

  “Tell him, Hype. Tell him.”

  Hype wandered the room, as if measuring the paces. “Ralph had this area. He had his papers and books—he was always a big reader. Skimp was over there,” he pointed to the opposite side of the cell, “his submarine deck.”

  “Tell him the whole thing,” Joe said.

  In the green light of the room, as I glanced back at Joe, I saw that he had a revolver in his right hand. “Tell him,” he repeated.

  “Where the hell did you get that?” I pointed to the gun.

  “You can’t ever go back,” Hype said. “Once you’re out, you can never go back. I won’t let you back. Understood?”

  I nodded. As if I was ever going to want to return to Aurora.

  “Tell him,” Joe said to Hype. This time he pointed the gun at Hype. Then, to me, he said, “The gun was down here. I get all my weapons here. We get all kinds of things down here. Hype is God, remember? He creates all things.”

  ‘To hell with this,” I said, figuring this bad make believe had gone too far. “You can’t get me out, can you?”

  Hype nodded. “Yes, I can. I am God, Joe. Those underground tests, they made me God. They were my cross. I’m the only survivor. The orderlies, the doctors, the patients, I’m the only one. That’s when I became God.”

  “You want to get out, right?” Joe snarled at me. “Right?” He waved the gun for me to move over to the far wall.

  Hype turned, dropping his robe. Beneath it he was naked, the skin of his back like a long festering sore. The imprint of hundreds of stitches all along his spine, across the back of his rib cage. To the right of this, a fist-sized cavity just above his left thigh, on his side.

  “Tell him,” Joe said.

  The old man began speaking, as if he couldn’t confess this to my face. “Inside me is the door. The tunnel, Joe. To get through, you’ve got to enter me.”

  The must vulgar aspect of this hit me, and I groaned in revulsion.

  Joe laughed. “Not what you think, Doer. Not like what you like to do to me. Or vice versa. His skin changed after the tests. Down here, it changes again. Look—it’s like a river, look!”

  At first I didn’t know what he was pointing at—his finger tapped against Hype’s wrinkled back.

  Then, before I noticed any change, I felt something deep in my gut. A tightening. A terrible physical coiling within me, as if my body knew what was happening before my brain did.

  I watched in horror as the old man’s skin rippled along the spine. A slit broke open from one of the ancient wounds. It widened, gaping. Joe came closer, shining his flashlight into its crimson-spattered entry. It was like a red velvet curtain, moist, undulating. A smell like a dead animal from within. The scent, too, of fresh meat,

  Joe pressed the gun against my head. “Go through.”

  My first instinct was to resist.

  Seconds later, Joe shot a bullet into the old man’s wound, and it expanded further like the mouth of a baby bird as it waits for its feedings.

  Joe kissed my shoulder. “Goodbye, Doer.”

  He pressed the gun to my head.

  The old man’s back no longer seemed to be there; now it was a doorway, a tunnel toward some green light. Green light at the end of a long red road. His body had stretched its flesh out like a skinned animal, an animal-hide doorway.

  With the gun against my head, Joe shoved me forward, into it. I pushed my way through the slick red mass and followed the green light of atomic waste.

  Once inside, the walls of crimson pushed me with a peristaltic motion farther, against my will. Tiny hooks of his bones caught the edge of my flesh, tugging backward while I was pressed into the opening.

  12

  We are all in here, all the others who got out through him. Only, “out” didn’t mean out of Aurora, not officially. We’re out of our skins, drawn into that infested old man.

  When I had rein of him for an afternoon, I got him to go down and bribe the psych tech on duty. I pulled up both of their files, Joe’s and Hype’s.

  Joe was a murderer who had a penchant for cutting wounds in people and screwing the wounds. This was no surprise to me. Joe is a sick fuck. I know it. Everyone who’s ever been with him knows it.

  Hype was a guy who had been exposed to large amounts of radiation in the fifties. He had a couple of problems, one physical and one mental. The physical one I am well aware of, for the little bag rests at the base of my stomach, to the side and back. Because of health problems as a result of the radiation, he’d had a colostomy about twenty years back.

  The mental problems were also apparent to me once I got out, once I got through. He suffered from a growing case of multiple personality disorder.

  I pulled my file up, too, and it listed:

  Escaped.

  I had a good laugh with Joe over these files.

  Then God took over, and I had to go back down into the moist tissues of heaven and wait until it was my turn again.

  There are prisons within prisons, and skins within skins. You can’t always see who someone is just by looking in his eyes.

  Sometimes, others are there.

  Sometimes, God is there.

  “I am infinite,” the old man said. “I contain multitudes.”

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  BOOKS BY DOUGLAS CLEGG

  Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Afterlife

  Breeder

  The Children’s Hour

  Dark of the Eye

  Goat Dance

  The Halloween Man

  The Hour Before Dark

  Mordred, Bastard Son

  Naomi

  Neverland

  You Come When I Call You

  NOVELLAS

  The Attraction

  Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters

  Isis

  Purity

  The Chateau of Devils

  The Words

  SERIES

  THE HARROW SERIES

  Nightmare House, Book 1

  Mischief, Book 2

  The Infinite, Book 3

  The Abandoned, Book 4

  The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)

  Isis (Prequel Novella)

  THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES

  Bad Karma, Book 1
<
br />   Red Angel, Book 2

  Night Cage, Book 3

  THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY

  The Priest of Blood, Book 1

  The Lady of Serpents, Book 2

  The Queen of Wolves, Book 3

  COLLECTIONS

  Lights Out: Collected Stories

  Night Asylum

  The Nightmare Chronicles

  Wild Things

  OMNIBUS EDITIONS

  Coming of Age

  Criminally Insane: The Series

  Halloween Chillers

  Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)

  The Vampyricon Trilogy

  With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.