R. S. Belcher on Shirley Jackson's
“The Lottery”
I remember being in English class—Mrs. Burton’s fourth period, I believe, when I was first introduced to Shirley Jackson. The story was called “The Lottery.” It’s short—twelve pages, but in those twelve pages, Jackson, changed the way I perceived horror, taking it out of the dark shores of Poe’s kingdom and showing me that the dizzy vertigo of fear works even better when it is wrapped in the trappings of our calm, ordinary, “normal” world. Her work made horror personal, made familiar things seem ominous, and taught me that you can’t hide from terror in the bright sun. Many of my horror stories, like “Hollow Moments,” are anchored in the familiar harbor of the “real world,” and I thank Shirley Jackson for teaching me that horror, at its most visceral, is personal and as familiar, and as inescapable as your own backyard.
◙◙◙
Hollow Moments
R. S. Belcher
The dark, sticky things LaGrue whispered to me while we were alone in the box would never wash off, but I was thankful for the rain anyway.
I flashed my gold shield to two transit cops, shook the rain off my coat, and walked down the stairs to the platform of the Metro. Lieutenant Montgomery and Chief of Police Glasse were standing by a small triangular column illuminated with posters advertising the Kennedy Center. The D.C. Crime Scene Investigation Unit was swarming over a subway car that was part of the Orange Line.
“Morning,” I said.
Montgomery nodded and handed me a paper cup of coffee. Chief Glasse frowned. He was a burly black man with salt-and-pepper muttonchops and a gut that looked more muscle than flab.
“You look like you’re half in the bag, Detective Pang.”
“Thank you, Sir, and might I add that you look exceptionally radiant this morning yourself.”
Both men chuckled.
“That was good work on LaGrue,” Glasse said. “We need quick closures like that when the damn media gets wind of the weird ones.”
Stanley LaGrue’s family, bloody and raw, was there, behind my eyes, pounding on the walls of memory for attention. Closure.
“Thanks,” I said and sipped my coffee.
“I understand you worked the psycho in the interrogation room for twenty hours straight before he rolled,” the Chief said.
“Uh-huh,” I replied, looking for my notebook in the pockets of my raincoat.
“You had any sleep since then, Detective?”
“Yes sir,” I replied as I flipped open my notebook to a clean page and clicked my pen. “About two hours and forty-five minutes, not including the ride over here. What do we have?”
“Weirdest damn thing I’ve seen in a long time,” Montgomery said. “About 8:15, this guy puts his fiancée on the Orange Line. He remembered it was this car, Number 23.” Montgomery was a big white guy in his early fifties. He used to play football in college, and it showed. He wore a little American flag pin on the lapel of his suit coat.
“So, he’s walking away when he remembers he has her debit card. He jumps on another car of the same train just as the doors shut, so he can give her the card at the next stop—here.
“He goes straight to Car 23, but she’s not in the car. There were no stops in between. He freaks out at what he sees in the car and grabs a transit cop at the next stop.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “Is this all for one missing person?”
“It isn’t one missing person,” the Chief said. “It’s everyone on that subway car. About 120 people we estimate. Gone between two stops in less than five minutes.”
Cops can’t stand stuff they can’t easily and neatly catalogue. The Chief hated it because it wasn’t something that fit in a box on a form.
“Gone,” he said again.
◙
I stepped around the working crime scene technician in a Metro Police windbreaker.
It was bright inside the subway car after the cave-like shadow of the metro station. The walls and the seats were beige plastic and orange vinyl. Metal poles ran from floor to ceiling for standing commuters to steady themselves. A map of the multi-colored subway lines of the Metro system was attached to the wall near the doors at opposite sides of the car.
With latex-gloved hands, I kneeled and picked up an overturned Diet Coke can. Most of its contents had become a dark stain on the carpet. The can was still sweating and cool. Near the can was an umbrella with rainwater still beading on its white-and-blue panels. A cereal bar with a single bite out of it lay near cell phones and briefcases, gym bags and paperbacks. Purses with fortunes in cash and plastic sat abandoned. Laptop screens burned brightly. Newspapers scattered, open to today’s sports or finance or funnies.
I felt weight, heavy on my chest. It was like standing in the wake of a neutron bomb, no traces of humans—blood or struggle. The car’s interior suddenly seemed too bright, the ceiling too low. Sometimes crime scenes hold the charge of the event. You can call it ghosts or vibes, but whatever it was this place had it bad.
I realized I was holding my breath.
“Detective, you might want to finish up,” a voice called to me from beyond the open doors. “They’re about to move the car out to the yard so we can go over it without holding up the line anymore. It’s a mess all over, hell of a morning rush.”
I made my notes, eager to be out of the car.
◙
A uniformed cop led my last interview out of the noisy and crowded squad room. Everyone was in—all shifts, all departments. It was a madhouse. We were working it at our end and the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, NSA, and CDC were all working theirs. It was on every network.
Chief Glasse paused at my desk for a few seconds between meetings with the Feds and the mayor’s people.
“Ben,” he said. “You work this as hard as you worked LaGrue. You stay on it until you hear different from me.”
I nodded and got back to it.
I typed up the interview with another family member of the lost of Car 23 and drained my sixth cup of black coffee. Virgil Whitehurst sat down in the chair beside my desk. “Solved it yet?” he said.
“Well, so far I’ve got about fifty interviews with people who are all scared as hell over what happened to their loved ones. No solid connections between the missing people, other than most of them took the Orange line daily to and from work. Oh, and almost everyone hated their jobs and dreaded the commute. I anticipate major arrests within the hour.”
Whitehurst smiled. He was a slender man with heavy “Clark Kent” glasses. We had both joined the department seventeen years ago.
“Same with the folks Perry and I’ve been interviewing.”
Whitehurst nodded. “Press is getting lots of ‘no comments’ from the Chief and the Feds about this being some kind of terrorist thing,” Whitehurst said around a yawn. “Lots of talking heads saying this is an alien conspiracy or a cult like those psychos who gassed the subway in Japan. What do you think it is?”
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “Other than that, I really don’t know.”
I had taken pressure and caffeine as far as they could go. I needed to crash. I grunted good night to Virgil, grabbed my coat, and headed for the parking lot.
I vaguely remembered the trip home.
I walked into my apartment, stepping over the three-day pile of mail and automatically clicked on the TV just to have some noise. I could care less about the dirty laundry overflowing the hallway closet. My dad would have had a coronary if he saw my place.
I fell asleep on the couch, the TV babbling. I dreamt of hands pulling at me, grabbing me, the smell of dead cigarettes. The phone, ringing far away. I fought hard to reach it.
Bright sunlight was stabbing through my blinds and into my eyes. The TV was droning on as it had done all night long. I answered the phone.
“Pang, Homicide,” I said without even realizing I wasn’t at work
“Ben? Virgil. It happened again.”
◙
; Crystal City is an island of blue steel and mirrored glass towers that hold the offices of some of the most powerful corporations in America. I was one of thousands of cars locked into the arterial clog of morning rush hour on the G.W. Parkway. I mechanically started and stopped with the flow of the traffic. Time seemed stretched and frozen all at once. Empty time, wasted time.
Virgil was waiting for me when I walked in the lobby.
“We have seven people vanished out of an elevator between floors,” he said. “Same deal as the subway—personal items left behind, no signs of violence or struggle. At least this time we got a witness.”
“Who?”
James Debois, seven-years-old, was sitting at a table in the corporate break room. A uniform cop talked softly to him while he played with his bright blue Power Ranger action figure—not a doll, an action figure.
Whitehurst drifted over to me and nodded toward the boy.
“The kid is scared of something,” he said softly. “We got him calmed down, but he’s not talking. His mother is Sharon Debois. She’s a customer service rep for a travel agency on the 16 floor. James was sick, so she had to take him with her to work.”
I walked over to James and sat down across from him.
“James, this is Detective Pang,” the officer said as she stood and shook my hand. “He’s a very nice guy, and he’s here to help us find your mom. He needs to talk to you and ask you some questions, okay?”
James’s chocolate-brown eyes looked down at his Power Ranger for guidance or escape. He squirmed in his chair.
“’kay,” he muttered.
The officer smiled and excused herself to go get James a soda. I asked for anything with caffeine.
“Pang,” James said looking up at me. “That’s a funny name.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “it’s Chinese. My dad stuck me with it. You can call me Ben if you like.”
“You from China?” James asked.
“Nope, New York. My grandfather was from China, though.”
This seemed to satisfy James. He showed me his Power Ranger.
“You like it? Momma got it for me today ‘cause I was sick, and I had to come with her to work. Momma wanted to stay home with me, but she had to go.”
“You and your mom were in the elevator with the other people, right?” I asked.
“Um-hum.” His gaze retreated to his toy.
“My friend Tray, he says policemen take people to jail for not doing nothing. Am I in trouble?”
“Nah,” I said. “We try to help people and catch bad guys. You haven’t done anything wrong, James. You’re cool.”
“You like being a policeman?” James asked.
“Yes,” I said automatically. “Listen, James, this is important. I know you’re scared, but I need to know what you saw. I need you to be brave for me like a Power Ranger would be. Can you do that?”
The kid nodded. I opened my notebook and scribbled a few notes to myself.
James’s little face twisted as he tried to think of the words. His hands fidgeted with the toy and fear welled up in his eyes, darkening them.
“The Wall People got her. Got all of them.”
“Who are the Wall People, James?”
“Don’t know,” he said clutching his toy tightly like a charm. “They’re just hands coming out of the walls. Lots of hands. They don’t got no faces. They pulled Momma into the wall. They pulled all them people into the wall.”
My mouth was dry and I felt a little dizzy. My internal compass was spinning wildly.
“Did they come through the little panel in the top of the elevator car, James?”
“No,” he said softly. “They just came out of the walls. I only saw them for a second. They had already grabbed Momma and the other people. They were hard to see.”
I leaned over the table to look into James’s eyes.
“Did they try to grab you, James?”
“Nuh-uh,” he said shaking his head.
“This is important. Are you telling me the truth, James?”
The boy nodded. His eyes were damp.
“Are the Wall People going come get me now?”
“No,” I said numbly. “I promise I won’t let anybody get you James, and I’m going to try to find your mom, too.”
I left the boy with a police artist. I asked James to help the artist draw the Wall People for me.
◙
Back at my desk I stared blankly at the computer monitor, the lines of the standard report screen burning into my retinas. I drummed my fingers on the desk and tried to remember something from yesterday.
Something about somebody coming to get them. Coming to get them.
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock over the doorway to the squad room. I had been staring at the screen for twenty minutes.
I tapped the keyboard and brought up the report Whitehurst’s partner, Perry, had done yesterday. It was an interview with the wife of one of the missing from Car 23.
My eyes watered with fatigue as I re-read the report I had absently skimmed yesterday evening.
“Mrs. Jetter said her husband had been suffering from work-related stress for the past few months and had been making irrational statements about people following him and being out to get him,” the report said. “Mrs. Jetter assured the detective these suspicions were unfounded. However, she believes her husband may have run away or done harm to himself.”
I picked up the phone and dialed Louise Jetter’s number.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I said, as Mrs. Jetter ushered me into her home.
Louise Jetter had the haggard look of someone who was one pill away from a nervous breakdown. She had been pretty once, now she was just handsome.
“Have you heard anything from William?” she asked after offering me a cigarette with a shaky hand.
“I’m afraid not. Actually, I was following up on the statement you gave yesterday. You said your husband had been exhibiting some…strange behavior lately?”
Mrs. Jetter nodded curtly and exhaled smoke thorough her nostrils.
“Yes. William was given a lateral transfer to a new division last year in lieu of being downsized. There was a lot of stress at the new job, and he really didn’t care for the work. He hated it, actually.”
“And that was when this behavior started?” I asked, scribbling notes.
“At first he would just sit and stare at night,” Mrs. Jetter said, frowning as she remembered. “We stopped having conversations. He would stare at the television, but I could tell he wasn’t paying attention to it or anything else. Then came the nightmares, and then he went on about the people following him.”
“What did he say about these people?”
Mrs. Jetter looked at me oddly, crushed out her cigarette and immediately lit a new one.
“You aren’t taking William’s delusions seriously, are you, Detective?”
“At this point, we’re looking into any possibilities. What did your husband say exactly?”
“Well, he said he would look up, and they would suddenly be there. He said no one else saw them. He said they were like ghosts or something—shadowy, made out of smoke. He said he could never see their faces but knew they were watching him.
“Once we were on a long car trip to see our daughter at college, and William suddenly screamed and nearly lost control of the car. He said he looked in the rearview mirror, and one of them was in the back seat. That was when I asked him to get some help, but he just became more withdrawn, more depressed. It was like he’d given up.”
She began to cry, but it was obvious she was used to it. She kept it together; she had been mourning her husband for a long time. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and took a long drag on the cigarette.
“Mrs. Jetter, did your husband ever say that these people were trying to grab him or touch him?”
She blinked several times and looked at me with a little bit of fear in her tired, wet eyes.
“Yes. How did
you know that? William used to wake up screaming, crying like a baby. He said he felt like they were suffocating him, trying to drag him down into some awful dark place.”
I handed her the sketch James Debois helped our artist to draw.
A forest of odd-angled arms and oversized clawing hands the color of ash growing out of the plastic-paneled walls of the elevator, wrapping themselves around the mouths, arms, and legs of the victims.
The shadowy arms and hands didn’t look like limbs attached to a human body; they were reminiscent of both tentacles and wisps of milky smoke.
The artist had left the victims’ faces blank, but my mind could fill in the details. Eyes wide with terror, desperate attempts to scream—clawing against the hands that could not really be there. Fighting like panicked drowning victims to resist the pull; then they were under, beneath dark, unforgiving waters. Gone.
Mrs. Jetter stared at the drawing. The tears slid down her gray face and this time she did not have the will to push them aside.
“This is like one of William’s dreams,” she whispered.
As I was driving back to the office, the dispatcher patched through a call.
“We got a hit on a credit card belonging to one of our people from Car 23. It was used in a restaurant in Chevy Chase about twenty minutes ago,” Montgomery said. “I’ve got uniforms on the way.”
◙
A half- dozen police cars were already in the parking lot of the Mongol Horde Barbecue and Mega-Buffet, when I arrived.
I jumped out of my car as four burly, uniformed cops wrestled a slender man through the double glass doors. He was kicking, squirming, and screaming unintelligibly as the cops struggled to hold on to him. They slammed him against the trunk of a police car and tried to wrestle cuffs on him.
He got an arm free and took a wild swing at one of the cops. This resulted in him being bounced against the trunk a few times and pinned under 600 pounds of unhappy cops. They got the cuffs on him, and I walked over.
“Sonovabitch,” one of the cops said wincing as I approached. “Freak took a bite out of me.”
Deep Cuts Page 9
