Jonah got his hands on its forelegs. He pulled its claws from him. It growled its protest. Jonah used one hand to hold it upright, as he moved the other down its body.
“Rowlllllllllll!” the cat screamed as Jonah pulled its back legs out. Not releasing it, Jonah slammed the cat down on the concrete, where it cried out again. He saw it was the orange-stripped cat. It struggled against the ground, but not like it was trying to escape, so much as it was trying to get back at him. Jonah cupped his hands around its head, then slammed that head into the concrete several times, until it was no longer struggling.
Jonah let go of the creature, whose head was now a crushed bloody mass. His head bleeding in several places, he ran to his car, fearing further attack. He made it to his car without another incident. He started the engine and backed out of the slot. That was when he saw the St. Bernard. It stood a few feet to the side of his car. It didn’t try to rush him, just waited there ominously. Jonah left.
At home, sitting in his car, Jonah scanned the lot. It was peopleless, this late, on a Thursday in Stanton. He could see no other animals. This time of night, it was impossible to get the ideal parking space. Jonah would have to move about fifty feet to get to his apartment.
His cheeks stung and so did the back of his neck, where the cat had gotten him. But he was more afraid than he was in pain. He just wanted to be inside now. He had pondered spending the night in the car, but he knew he would be much safer inside, where he could reinforce the entrances. He got his key ready.
Jonah opened the door and darted from his car, shutting the door behind him. He moved a few steps and tripped over his own feet. He fell forward and caught himself with his hands, but he dropped his keys. There was a sound like rustling in the bushes. Jonah was quickly up, grabbing his keys from the ground. As Jonah walked, he fiddled with the key chain, trying to find the right one. Jonah’s apartment key was similar to the key to the front door of his office. It had been only a minor inconvenience before. But before, he hadn’t felt like he was running for his life.
By the time Jonah was to his door, he had the right key ready to go into the slot. Then he dropped his keys again when the bird hit his head. The blow dazed Jonah and dropped him to his knees. Then two more birds came from the dark night and attacked him. They weren’t sparrows either. No, these were bigger, black, crows maybe. Jonah got his head covered, but the birds took what he left open. They seemed to take turns flying up and nipping at him. After a dozen or so of their strikes, the pain overcame the disorientation. Jonah got up, keeping his head covered, still being nipped at elsewhere. He opened his door and stumbled inside, then shut the door behind him.
One of the birds was caught between the screen and the wooden door, but that was fine. Jonah was safe now. He’d rest, then reinforce the apartment. Jonah fell onto the floor and lay on his back. Lying there, coming from the disorientation a little more, logic began to set in. Jonah thought of how he had fumbled with the keys to find the right one. Then, the bird had hit him, and he had dropped them again. He’d not picked them up. He’d managed to get inside, though. The door had been unlocked.
Tate came from behind the chair in the corner.
Before Jonah could get up, Tate put a foot in his chest. Jonah saw Tate’s wicked eyes look into his. Tate’s high-pitched laugh filled the room, then he said, “Got ya, mother fucker!”
Jonah started to move, but Tate was quickly down on him. He shoved a piece of cloth in Jonah’s face. Seconds later, everything went black.
Chapter Nine
There is a fluttering sound. There is pressure. He can’t move his arms or legs. He can’t open his mouth. He opens his eyes. He’s in the middle of his living room, facing the dining area. He can see that one of the straight-backed chairs has been moved from his table. It’s the chair he’s tied to. The table has been cleared off. It feels like tape on his mouth. There’s a rope wrapped around his upper torso and around the back of the chair. Another rope binds his thighs to the seat of the chair. His shins are bound to the chair’s legs.
After a time of more orientation, Jonah realizes that the bird is still between the doors, making the fluttering sound.
Where is Tate? Jonah thinks. Then he passes out again.
#
Again, there is a sound, but this time it is a squawking. The bird is attacking. Panicked, Jonah opens his eyes. The crow is on the table. It’s looking at him with beady black peepers. It starts to move, then falls forward. Jonah sees that its legs are gone. It flaps one wing. The other is stiff, against its side, broken. A few inches from the crow is a pistol, squarely shaped, modern looking, with an attached silencer.
Jonah is afraid, but he is still very tired. He falls back under.
#
Someone is talking. He opens his eyes. The bird is still on the table, but it is quiet, alive, but motionless. The gun is in the same place as before. He can hear Tate talking in the other room. He can’t make out Tate’s words, but Tate’s voice is high-pitched, like a man talking to a baby. Then Tate’s voice changes, yelling, but low-pitched, authoritative. Jonah had thought the sound being muffled through the door was what made Tate’s words unintelligible. But now he realizes Tate is talking gibberish. Tate switches back and forth between the yelling and the high-pitched voice. Tate is conversing with himself.
Jonah falls back under.
#
Squawking again. Then there are footsteps coming toward him. Jonah is coming to, but he dares not open his eyes. The footsteps go past him, to the table. The bird squawks louder. Then footsteps go by him again and so do the squawks. Tate is taking the bird.
Jonah falls under.
#
There is no sound this time. Jonah comes to on his own. He opens his eyes, then quickly shuts them. Tate was there. He was sitting on the table. He can’t let Tate see that he is awake. Because then Tate will do what it is he wants to do to Jonah.
Jonah waits for about a minute. Then he opens his eyes slightly. Through his eyelashes, he can see Tate sitting on the table, his legs crossed. It’s the same position Tate meditates in. Jonah goes on the assumption that that is what Tate is doing and opens his eyes the rest of the way.
Tate’s eyes are closed. He’s barely breathing. He has a straight-lipped expression. There is a thin line of blood coming from Tate’s mouth. There is a sudden jerking motion in Tate’s neck. It happens a few times, each time more violent. Then Tate opens his mouth. The crow’s head comes out, and Tate smiles.
Jonah closes his eyes, but he knows it does not matter. Tate knows he is awake. Jonah opens his eyes and meets Tate’s stare, and Tate’s eyes are even more intense than usual, a red tint emanating from them.
Tate speaks, but it is with the voice of Jonah’s father. “I’m sorry, my son.” Tate laughs his own wicked laugh. Jonah passes out.
#
Tate’s back in the other room again, conversing with himself. Now there are three voices: the high-pitched voice, the yelling, and a dignified intellectual voice. It’s still all just gibberish.
The gun is still on the table, but there are also three large plastic syringes, all empty. Jonah wonders what the syringes are for. He suspects that the gun would be better.
Tate stomps around in the other room. The high-pitched voice is begging. The yelling voice is demanding something. The intellectual voice is conversing with the yelling voice and is apparently the one doing the stomping, punishing the high-pitched voice.
Tate is insane. Jonah passes out.
#
When Jonah awoke, it was morning. He could tell because there was a narrow band of light cast against the wall that could only be daylight. Tate sat in a chair at the side of the table, his eyes closed. In front of him were the gun and the syringes. One of the syringes was filled with a dark black substance. The other two were filled with thicker substances, one cream colored, the other beige. There were round needles on the tips of the syringes now. Jonah wondered if he was to be drugged. Or was it poison in those
syringes? Whatever was in them, Jonah was sure it would be maddening, tortuous in some way. That was Tate’s style. The gun, of course, would be too quick. Jonah was going to suffer.
Surprisingly, he wasn’t in pain now. He couldn’t feel the cuts where the cat had clawed him, or the places where the birds had pecked him.
Tate opened his eyes and looked at Jonah. “Good morning, bro. It’s about time we got started with today’s activity.”
Jonah, with the tape on his mouth, couldn’t respond. He might have nodded or shook his head, but he was too afraid to move.
Tate looked away from Jonah and began to speak in a monotonous voice. “I haven’t told you much about me, brother. At least, I haven’t told you where I came from. But you have to understand, I was waiting for the right time to present itself.” Tate looked at Jonah as if expecting some kind of response. Jonah didn’t give one. Tate reached forward and put a hand on the gun. He fiddled with it like it was a pencil or anything else a person might mindlessly move around as he talked.
“I come from Florida, like I told you, but I didn’t go there last week. In fact, I’ve been here all week, watching you.” Tate paused for a few seconds, then said, “I spent most of my childhood and adolescence in and out of mental hospitals. My parents thought I was crazy, and so did all the doctors, but I knew I wasn’t crazy, bro. I knew what I was hearing was real.”
He stopped, as if pondering what he was saying for a little while, then he continued, his tone calm, no bitterness at all. “They pumped me full of so many different drugs. I saw all kinds of therapists, but nothing worked. I still heard what I heard, and it was only getting stronger. It got to the point where not only was I able to hear it, I could sense it intuitively too. I eventually figured out that it wasn’t going away, and I figured out that if I didn’t want to live the rest of my life amongst doctors and crazy people, I had to learn how to fake it. It took a little while, but I eventually convinced everyone that I was fine. I even got them to let me off the meds. I just walked around like it wasn’t there. I was sixteen years old.
“What I hear is kind of like a voice, but what’s said is in no particular language, and it’s electric. And the sense, that’s what you come to know. It comes from people, not all people, actually not most people, but more than you would expect. It varies in its power. It varies in the grip it has on the person it comes from. With what I sense, you get to know how much evil is around. That’s why I got into the martial arts. I was afraid that what was inside people would find out that I could sense it and cause the people to come after me. I know now that it doesn’t work that way. But the martial arts paid off anyway. I was in college when one of my martial arts instructors introduced me to meditation. Up to that point, living with the sense, I had not done well in school or in the arts. I was too distracted, dealing with the sense and trying to fake being normal. But meditation changed all of that. I learned to take the sense wherever I went. I learned to have the sense without letting it control my life. I read a ton of books. I even spent a summer in Tibet, refining my meditation skills. The more I got into meditation, the better I did.
“I became more fascinated with the sense than afraid of it. I even researched it. I read stories of others like me. Most go mad. You’ve met a few of the mad ones. In your position, where you see hundreds of psychotics, you were bound to.”
Tate was one of them. He was a more refined version of the client who had attacked Jonah and the two that had run away.
“I read a lot on the paranormal while in college. But that was mostly just academic knowledge. It was when I was in graduate school that I truly came to understand the paranormal experientially. I took a hypnosis course, and I blended what I learned about hypnosis with what meditation had taught me. I began hypnotizing myself, and I opened up a part of me that I had not had access to. It showed up in my dreams. I met a man there. He told me his name and showed me what he had done. I researched him and found out that he was real, not just a figure in my dreams. The man showed me this place, Stanton, Michigan. I came here and waited.”
Tate smiled and began to speak louder. “I was here for two years. I was beginning to think that I had made a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to come here. Then, one day I was sitting in my apartment when I was suddenly hit by the sense. What I heard was a hundred times louder than what I’d ever heard before, and the sense was a hundred times stronger. I looked out the window and saw what I thought was the man who had intruded my dreams, but it wasn’t the man at all, Jonah. It was the man’s son.”
Tate stood up, and Jonah felt his heart pick up. It would soon be over.
“I know what your father did, Jonah, and I’m not about to let you do the same or worse.” Tate looked at the table, and Jonah did too. What would it be, the gun or the syringes? Tate looked back at Jonah. Then he laughed. “Oh shit, bro! You thought . . .” Tate laughed again. “No, bro. The gun's not for you. It’s for the animals, in case one of them should somehow get in. And the syringes are your breakfast. One’s coffee. The other two are food. The white one’s a dietary supplement, packed with all kinds of vitamins and shit. You’re going to need your energy, at least at first. The other one is soup.”
Tate laughed again, and said, “Come on, bro. Give me some credit. Killing you would be way too easy. I wouldn’t have spent all this time working with you, just to kill you.” Tate picked up the syringe he claimed had coffee in it. He brought it over to Jonah. “I’m sorry I had to restrain you so much, bro. I’m afraid that what is in you would kill me otherwise. And if I took off the tape it would make you yell out until someone came and stopped me. It has to be this way.”
Tate adeptly stabbed the needle through the tape and into Jonah’s mouth without cutting him. “Now, you’re going to have to trust me and take this in, bro.”
Jonah didn’t completely trust Tate, but he didn’t see where he had another option. He let Tate feed him breakfast.
#
Tate left Jonah shortly after feeding him. Jonah sat alone as his breakfast sat in. Before, he had not noticed all of the discomforts of being tied. He had been too tired and too afraid to dwell on such things. But now, with the food in his stomach, he had to go to the bathroom. And, awake enough to attend to himself, his skin was beginning to itch.
Jonah wasn’t sure his sense of time was accurate right now, but he thought Tate must have been gone for at least an hour. Finally, Tate came back and sat in the same chair he had sat in before. He had a thick roll of tape in his hand.
“I’ve been listening to what’s inside you, bro. It’s been quiet since you woke up.”
Jonah thought Tate was probably right. He hadn’t felt any of the urges since he had come to the last time.
“It was active last night, while you were out, though. Not like it’s active when it’s sending out its messages. More like it was just toying with your head.”
Yeah, something had been toying with his head last night. But was that something Tate?
“I’m going to keep you bound, bro. The reason is that I think it will be good for you.”
Yeah right, Jonah thought. This was sounding more like a hoax.
“If I keep you tied, it will force you to deal with a lot of the sensations your body gives you. You’ll have to do the work that we have to do with them there. And proceeding without being able to satisfy even the most basic of urges is something you’ll have to learn how to do. You’re going to have to learn how to watch what’s in your head at all times, no matter the state of your body and mind.”
That made sense. He’d had to learn to not satisfy the smoking urge no matter how much his mind and body were screaming at him. But, even though it made sense, he was still wary of Tate.
“Now, I take it from watching you that the meditation worked and you’ve learned how to resist it.”
Jonah nodded.
“So, if I take the tape off your mouth for a little while, and it rises up, you’ll be able to resist it?”
A
gain, Jonah nodded.
Tate got up, the roll of tape still in his hand, no doubt wanting to be prepared for an emergency. He reached out, and in a quick swipe that took out facial hair, removed the tape.
For a few seconds, they just stared at each other. Then Tate said, “I’m going to put that back on in a little while. I want you completely focused on your experience, and talking may prevent that. But I wanted to give you a chance to air out anything you needed to before we get started.”
Jonah wondered if Tate knew he was wary of him. But then he thought Tate probably did know that. This was Tate, after all.
That was what he wanted to satisfy now. Could he trust Tate? Could he trust Tate after what he saw last night?
“The bird,” Jonah said, his voice rough.
“What?” Tate asked.
“The bird that was trapped between the doors,” Jonah said.
Tate looked briefly at the door, then back to Jonah. He smiled. “I had to strangle it, bro. It was making too much noise. I couldn’t let it out. I wasn’t about to open that door, because who knows what I would have let in. Besides, after what was in it, with its small brain, it never would have made it anyway.”
“Where is it?” Jonah demanded.
“It’s in the trash, bro.”
“Show it to me?”
“Why?” Tate asked. He looked truly surprised. Of course, Tate could do that, act naïve when he knew exactly what you were talking about.
Jonah didn’t say why, but he didn’t have to. Tate walked into the kitchen. A few seconds later, he came out with the trashcan. He tilted it so Jonah could see inside. The crow’s head was twisted around backward, but it was still attached.
Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner Page 15
