by Gary Fry
And it was then that the man in the room did exactly what the medical professional had proposed.
For one brief moment, Daryl had turned slightly away, perceiving from the corners of his eyes the four people standing directly behind him. It must have been his oblique point of view that had made this image appear so dismayingly abstract, as if each of his companions had been transformed into rudimentary geometric representations, little more than symmetrical combinations of triangles, oblongs, squares and circles… But then Daryl’s attention was drawn by the frenzy beyond the door, and he gave these half-glimpsed sights no further consideration.
The man inside what was clearly a prison cell was going wild.
His outline, still etched in glistening moonlight, had already expanded beyond the commonly acceptable limits of a simple man, becoming something infinitely more terrible, almost as capacious as his place of confinement. Then he roared, his god-awful breath beating against Daryl’s face like some mighty furnace; the sound was dreadful, like a tiger baying for vengeance after the murder of its offspring, and it made the cell begin to smell like a zoo full of rebellious animals. What the man now resembled, Daryl could only imagine. The shadows inside the room masked most of him, but every second that passed, Daryl caught sight of some unruly portion: an arm hideously enlarged and pitted by tumorous distortions; a head implausibly bloated and turning a deep, dark purple; eyes bulging grotesquely with red hairline cracks; the torso swelling and contracting, swelling and contracting, with surely much more than mere respiratory force…
Daryl, shocked and awed in equal measure, was immediately reminded of the contrast between unruly nature and all the tailored plant life he’d observed while entering this village. Then a frightening insight occurred to his startled yet well-trained mind: it looked as if, in this chaste place whose residents didn’t even drink alcohol, the man beyond the door had become an unmodified form of wildness, the beast beneath the tenuous shell of civilization…but if that was true, what did it make the people behind Daryl?
Turning quickly away from the travesty inside the cell, Daryl addressed the four people in his company, who no longer betrayed those weird geometric forms he’d surely only imagined earlier, just a trick of unreliable perception.
Daryl could certainly admit to being scared, not a common state of mind in his experience, and when he finally spoke, he only just managed to retain his usual composure, the voice he used in lectures to occasionally mocking undergraduates or during conference presentations in front of so many critical peers.
“What’s…what’s going on here?” he asked, his thoughts charging around like dogs on a track, which made him feel as if he’d placed a large bet on each of them. Then he hitched a back-pointed thumb over one shoulder, while refusing to turn again and look through the panel in the door. The creature inside the room was still making its thunderously unpleasant noises, bestial cries and many thumps against the walls. “This is just…bizarre. Can someone please explain?”
His escalating unease had lent him enough courage to make these demands. After all, he hadn’t asked to come to this building, had he? Three residents of this strange village had directed him here, withholding the terrible truth as a way of heightening his natural curiosity. But now it was surely time for some answers.
Judging by the standoffish looks on their faces, Daryl didn’t expect to receive a cogent reply from any of his companions, but then the bearded man—the councillor—paced forward, his eyes keenly focused.
“We were hoping that you might tell us,” he said, turning to his associates with outstretched arms. The three others nodded solemnly. “You are, after all, an expert in such matters. You said as much back in The Tempered Wolf. Please don’t tell us now that this isn’t the case, certainly not after what we’ve just revealed to you.”
Daryl, who often entertained private fantasies about achieving universal approval and professional respect as an academic, believed he could be described as an expert in his field…but this was hardly a moment for pride. Then, trying to keep his mind focused on the task at hand, he replied, “This is not anything I’ve ever encountered before, alas.” He could still hear the “man” skittering and raging beyond the door; it was like the activities of a stinking beast in the room. “I’m an expert on human psychology. And what you have here appears to be…to be…”
But the police constable refused to let him finish. “He’s certainly not human,” she said, as if bitter recollections arising from a recent experience still haunted her. “If you’d witnessed any of the crimes we believe he’s committed…”
“Crimes?” asked Daryl, unable to suppress his deep intrigue. “What do you mean?”
“Murder,” replied the doctor, his voice shaking along with the rest of him. If this man had examined the thing’s alleged victims, the sight of what had been done to them had clearly shaken him up. “Three have gone missing in the village this last year alone. It’s been a truly dreadful affair.”
Daryl thought for a moment, mentally reassessing a phrase the female police constable had used. This hadn’t been the assertive: If you’d witnessed any of the crimes he’s committed… but a decidedly more speculative: If you’d witnessed any of the crimes we believe he’s committed… And those two additional words—“we believe”—had led the scientific part of Daryl to hesitate a moment.
If this highly organized community had been violated by such a heinous act as murder, it was no surprise that its residents might blame someone unable to control himself in the same way as everyone else Daryl had witnessed today. If the person in question was a misfit or a loner, he’d surely be the most likely suspect, someone to scapegoat without fear of repercussions… Nevertheless, despite all these intuitive insights, flowing from the woman’s use of two simple words, Daryl was overlooking a crucial fact about the case. What he’d just seen while gazing through that panel in the door was certainly something of a different order from the norm; it was unthinkable—impossible, even.
Switching his attention back to his companions, he indicated the cell again and then asked, “But why do you think it was he who committed the murders?”
“Because only he among us,” replied the councillor at once, his voice resolute and perhaps even growing a little impatient now, “has displayed symptoms of being undisciplined.”
Here was that phrase again, the one first used by the girl back in The Tempered Wolf. Continuing to hear the creature behind him wrestle and rage, Daryl quickly reassessed the community into which he’d accidentally strayed today, the perpetrator of no greater crime than overlooking the amount of petrol he’d need to get safely home this evening, which had led to a frustrating breakdown.
Daryl, now deeply disturbed and afraid, knew he was in terrible trouble here. He felt exposed, observed, caught out. All the social problems he’d experienced over the years—harassment about conformity from schoolmates, colleagues, even family—came rushing back, sharp-edged and corrosive. He genuinely believed that his way of life, how he’d carefully marshaled his long-term personal development, was now under threat from that thing behind him…as well as the people up ahead.
With a reticence he tried to combat with characteristic determination, he asked, “The…undisciplined?”
“That’s right, the undisciplined,” the councillor replied, closely followed by the doctor who added, “The cursed undisciplined,” and then the police constable who said, “The brutal undisciplined,” before even the guard, that bald-headed man in a peaked cap, emphasized the communal disdain with which his riotous captive was regarded: “The woeful undisciplined.”
Daryl could certainly understand how the killer—if indeed that was what the bizarre creature in the room was—might be considered a threat to this ruthlessly marshaled village. Its solitary pub served only warm beverages and soft drinks, and its clientele were clearly paragons of sobriety, refined in dress and succinct in expression. Even the place’s plant life was as regimented as all its solemn prope
rty, whose architecture bespoke a bygone age, when much more somber values had been adhered to, way before the animal times of the modern age had destroyed communities forever… But this was what made Daryl nervous. He could accept such an isolated location achieving a degree of social order that could become the envy of the latter-day world, but it also appeared to have transformed the laws of nature.
At that moment, he pictured the desperate face of that girl in the pub. Then he heard that manic entity in the room behind him shape-shifting again, like a werewolf with mutated hormones lurching way beyond mere lycanthropy.
That was when Daryl glanced back at the fierce quartet of highly disciplined villagers…and felt his flesh begin to crawl with involuntary disgust.
They no longer appeared as human as they had earlier.
Their postures had lost the natural curves of people, now boasting all the edges and angles of carpentered objects. Their faces had become little more than inverted triangles, bearing squared and circular features, like fuzzy-felt additions. Stirring from their places, taking a resolute pace forward, their limbs looked rigid inside smart clothing, as if replaced by metal bars as flat as polished blades. Then their arms were elevated, horizontal extrusions from the vertical blocks of their torsos, all the fingers brandished like sequences of parallel lines. They were headed inexorably toward Daryl.
Shocked by his vision, he looked quickly away, his mind awhirl…but then he succumbed again to curiosity and glanced back at his assailants, seeing them for what they truly were.
Only people, after all: smartly dressed, well-groomed, and rigorously well-mannered.
But what did they now see in him?
Their faces, as fleshy and complex as they’d been earlier, suddenly registered obvious disgust, as if Daryl had just become as repulsive in appearance as that roaring creature beyond all of them. Indeed, only seconds later, Daryl felt his body slip free of its usual orderly habits, as if straying beyond a familiar repertoire of behavior, reaching out to defend itself by any means possible.
“He’s not disciplined,” said the councillor, and his similarly eminent companions gasped. Then there was a brief standoff, four against one. But that was when the guard, splitting away from the group, poked another key into a second door, opposite the one they’d already addressed. As unlocking commenced, the councillor, police constable and doctor, in a three-pronged maneuver, began to steer Daryl in the other cell’s direction. Its heavy door arced open with a noisy creak, and as the thing elsewhere let loose another of its hideous growls, Daryl was eventually shunted inside the new room, before its entrance closed with a bang.
8
There was great darkness…which actually came as a mercy.
This was Daryl’s first observation after hearing the four people outside the locked door retreat along the unseen corridor with evenly spaced footfalls.
Minutes later, he checked his wristwatch and discovered that it was after eight o’clock. Wan moonlight fell through a small window at the back of the chamber in which he was now being held. Daryl removed his mobile phone, hardly expecting to get a reception inside all these stone walls, let alone the village into which he’d unwittingly ventured.
And then, his mind attempting to come to terms with this dreadful situation, he reconsidered all that had happened since his arrival.
First he’d taken a walk down a deserted high street, whose vegetation and architecture had appeared decidedly regimented. This had been followed by that session in a pub, during which he’d confronted a sullen, uppity girl who’d later revealed obvious fearfulness. Finally, Daryl had been brought here by the local councillor, a doctor and a police constable, before the guard had revealed the prison’s solitary tenant. A murderer, this man had been called, and then moments later, a phrase Daryl had now heard several times today: the undisciplined.
And was this what the villagers now thought of Daryl? He found it difficult to believe anyone could ever think he was capable of murder, but the other phrase certainly fitted the way he’d responded to situations lately. Indeed, he was almost certainly being held here because he was now regarded as, what the community seemed to refer to collectively as, one of the undisciplined.
Daryl snapped out of his deep reflections, looking down at his trembling hands. His phone was dead, of course, and he reckoned he was lucky not to be so himself. He recalled the looks on the foursome’s faces as he’d tried defending himself in the corridor, how an overly controlled shock had appeared to transform their appearance, all the flesh and bone reverting to a symmetrical underlying form, as if its organic richness had become just a geometrical stencil.
But surely none of this could be true; it contradicted every conclusion he’d ever drawn about life. Perhaps he’d simply hallucinated these latest images; maybe he’d experienced illusions triggered by the villagers’ talk and by what had happened to the figure beyond the wall he now had his hands pressed firmly against.
And what on earth had that thing in the other cell been?
The more Daryl considered this matter, the less he found his mind could focus on it; it was as if some rational fuse kept tripping out each time his thoughts turned that way. Then all he could do was reassert everything he’d once believed in, reminding himself how foolish it was to suspect—as the villagers surely now did—that he possessed anything other than a highly moral character. After all, before matters had run awry, he’d been able to pass himself off as a native of the community, and that surely implied that his obsessive-compulsive nature was a good fit with the unnatural chasteness of this place’s small population. At any rate, he was certainly nothing like the monster he’d spotted through that panel in the door beside the one now restraining him.
Like a tongue probing some cracked tooth, Daryl reconsidered the thing that must still lurk beyond the wall. It was silent now, having lapsed in its irascible struggle only a short while ago. Then Daryl tried holding his breath, reducing any noises he produced to a minimum, before listening carefully. Was he hoping to hear manic, nonsensical muttering—something to suggest that the guy was indeed the insane killer those three professional people had claimed?
But even after several minutes spent squatting with his ear to the wall, Daryl heard nothing—not even the gentle sound of breathing in the adjacent cell. It was as if the frantic creature he’d witnessed earlier no longer existed.
But how could that be?
Just then, desperation and fear getting the better of him, Daryl called out, “Hey! You in the next room. Are you there? Can you hear me?”
And he was shocked to receive a prompt response.
“Yeah, I’m here.” The speaker paused for breath, but only for a moment. He went on quickly with renewed vigor, “Now you just listen to me. They’re crazy, every one of them. Okay, so I like a drink from time to time, and this sometimes makes me a bit free with my fists. But I’d never do what they’re claiming. I just don’t have that in me.”
The man’s voice was clearly defeated, the sound of someone who’d ventured beyond exasperation and now approached despair…but it was a person who’d spoken nonetheless, just an everyday guy like Daryl.
His mind racing, Daryl replied, “I don’t understand. Can you tell me more? I mean, when you say they…who are they?”
“Everyone who lives in this godforsaken place…well, almost everyone. I guess the young folk still have a chance to escape. But the older people, the ones set in their disciplinarian ways, have lately turned this village into a parody of life. Everything has changed now, even things that have no right to. I’m telling you, my friend, they’re all insane.”
Daryl recalled all the chaste Victorian architecture he’d observed earlier, and then the girl’s comment in response to his question about how exciting life could be: “Not around here it can’t.” Then he remembered having unwittingly conspired against this girl, claiming that other things in life were more important than mere fun…and was this why the other villagers had initially taken him as
one of their own? Was this why they’d mistaken him for another of the disciplined?
Moments later, Daryl found himself rifling his ruthlessly organized memory, summoning back his fellow prisoner’s last words: Everything has changed now, even things that have no right to. I’m telling you, my friend, they’re all insane.
Surely that was why Daryl had visualized the man in the next room in a similar way to his four companions earlier: because Daryl was every bit as joyless as they were, rigorously subscribing to a rational existence; privately fearing getting too close to Frederique; dedicating himself solely to work; deferring gratification for later in life, even though he knew, deep in his heart, that he could never take pleasure from what he regarded as trivial experiences, because his childhood had turned him into an emotionless droid…
Daryl pulled away from the wall, picturing the occupant of the adjacent cell now looking a lot like himself, just a common, misunderstood guy. He’d only be visible in such a hideously undisciplined way to anyone who privileged rigorous order above unpredictable yet fundamentally more worthwhile aspects of existence. After all, what was a life without personal contact, emotional engagement, and spiritual communion: a joyless shell, surely—a lot like events in this village seemed to have become.
As he absorbed all these insights, which came at him like wild animals, Daryl heard a sound from elsewhere. He ceased moving, listening carefully, his mutinous heartbeat growing louder and louder beneath his ribs. And then he heard the noise again. Someone was pacing along the corridor beyond his locked cell door. Here came a rattle of keys and then the lock was being freed. A second later, the door started opening, groaning on its metal hinges, and that was when a figure appeared in the poorly lit entrance.
Daryl’s eyes, already adapted to the darkness, squinted with anxiety. But then, with a burst of passionate relief he hadn’t thought himself capable of, he found himself observing the girl from the pub, the one who’d complained about this locale being dull and who’d clearly expressed concern as its latest visitor had been marched away, by three people obviously serving as its ruthless gatekeepers.
