by Bolz, Stefan
“My nails are too long. It’ll be hard for me to open the lock,” she said with a smile. “Why don’t you try it one more time, sweetie?”
While he lay there looking up, his mother’s face blotting out half of his field of vision, his neck hair pricked up. It wasn’t the underlying annoyance in her voice. It was like the moment you hear someone behind you in a dark alley and you turn around, knowing that it’s too late. If this wasn’t his mother, what was it that held his head within her hands? He could feel the pressure increase inside his temples. The woman smiled. But now the teeth were rotten and pointy, a foul stench emanating from her mouth. Her eyes took on a yellowish tone. Her nails dug into the skin of his face, her right thumb pushing into the eye that was swollen.
Jack couldn’t scream. His vocal cords didn’t belong to him anymore. He couldn’t get any air either. And while the woman screamed in utter rage, she — it — stood up. Jack saw what he later remembered as hooves. They disappeared too fast for it to become a solid memory. But deep inside, he knew he had seen them.
“He will give it to me,” she said. Her voice was much deeper than before. “He will not want the pain anymore.”
The men came back. Two of them pulled Jack up and tied his hands to the pipe, securing his legs to the floor.
“He will give it to me,” it said again. “Or his mind will seize upon itself long before I will feed upon his flesh.”
The lights came back on. Jack shut his eyes. But when he did, he looked straight into an abyss. He saw himself cowering at its edge with nothing to hold on to. He felt its pull on him. Hands grasped for him from below. “Come down to us,” the voices whispered. “There will be no pain.”
Over the next six hours, Jack learned several things. If he tilted his head downward and away from the lights and opened his left eye slightly —actually, he was able to open his right eye a tiny bit as well — he saw a blurred image of the floor and his knees. He didn’t have to look into the abyss and the bright light was bearable. The pain in his knees and arms were a different story. They had become a red maelstrom in his mind, a vortex into which every thought he tried to hold on to fled. He wished to slip away, to let go and somehow lose consciousness. But he knew he wasn’t there yet. It would take longer. He began to look forward to it. Death and oblivion seemed like a release.
There was a movie theater in Albuquerque that only showed Kung Fu films. Jack had been there many times as a kid. His favorites were the ones with Shaolin monks. In one of them, called The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the main character, San Te, wished to enter the monastery and live there to learn Kung Fu. But in order to be accepted, he, together with all the others who wanted to join, had to kneel outside its walls for days on end with nothing to eat or drink. That was the first test to becoming a Shaolin monk.
As a kid, Jack had dreamed of traveling to China and entering the order of the Shaolin. He wanted to learn Kung Fu, mainly because of the bullies in his class. Until he hit fifteen, he was smaller than most of the other kids. He also stuttered. Not much but enough to be teased relentlessly. During projects, when he had to give a presentation in front of his class, he froze after the first few words, unable to continue, to the laughter and ridicule of the others.
Someone turned the lights off. One of the men grabbed Jack’s head and jerked it up.
“You gonna take it off?” the man shouted. Jack felt the spit on his face when he spoke. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you. You gonna take it off?”
“Why don’t you take it off yourself,” Jack replied. “What do I care?” He didn’t have anything left. He didn’t think he could open the catch on the necklace even if he wanted to. The question of why he had to be the one taking it off and not them hadn’t yet entered his mind.
The man cut Jack’s ties and removed the bar above his knees. Jack slumped to the ground. Someone poured a bucket of water over his head and chest. The cold made him jerk onto his side. The steps moved away. He was left with silence.
In The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, after day five of waiting outside the monastery, someone came out with a large pot of rice. Most of the candidates were completely exhausted at that point. They crawled toward the pot, grabbing the rice with their bare hands and eating it. Not San Te. He stayed kneeling even though you could see in his expression how much he wanted, how much he needed to eat something.
After the rest of the group had emptied the rice pot, they were sent home. The head monk told them that they were unworthy of becoming Shaolin monks. Only the strongest were able to enter. The monk then stood in front of San Te and bowed. He gestured at him to get up and enter the temple with him. San Te hesitated, thinking that this might be another test. But the monk helped him up and together they walked through the large oak doors and into the temple.
Other than the light of a dim streetlight outside, the warehouse lay in darkness. Jack saw a door in one of the corners. He assumed it was a door but he couldn’t tell for sure. Maybe they had enough and won’t come back. Not very likely. The pain was now everywhere. From his knees it extended into his feet and up into his back. Very slowly, the feeling in his hands and arms came back. He couldn’t move them yet. His shoulder muscles screamed in agony each time he attempted to lift his arms. The thought of getting up and running toward the door occurred to him. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to do that. At least not in the next hour.
“Tell me,” the voice behind him said. Jack turned his head. The man sat in a light blue armchair. He was probably in his sixties. His reading glasses had slipped all the way to the tip of his nose. He was wearing a gray vest, long sleeved shirt and dark pants. Jack searched his memory for the corresponding image. He knew the man but couldn’t place him.
“Tell me again why, when your parents’ house burned down, you ran outside and left your sister in her room to die?”
The heat came up from his stomach. From there it went into his chest. He had not thought about his sister in weeks. As he lay there, looking at the man in the armchair, Jack felt the pressure in his chest just like so many times before when he spoke about the day his sister had died. Dr. Martens. That’s it. The man in the armchair was child psychologist and early trauma specialist Dr. Gerald Martens. Little Jack had begun to see him regularly when he was six years old and he went on seeing him until he was eleven.
“I was six years old,” Jack answered.
“That doesn’t matter,” the Dr. Martens thing said.
“I couldn’t have saved her. Even though I wanted to.”
“Bullshit, Jack.” The doctor thing took off its glasses — just like Dr. Martens always used to do. “You knew she was in there. All you needed to do, Jack, all you needed to do was open her door and get her out. But you didn’t. You screamed like a baby and ran downstairs.”
Jack pressed his eyelids together despite the pain that it cost him, despite the abyss he peered into.
“You are not Dr. Martens,” Jack said.
“That may be true,” it said. “But that doesn’t change the facts, Jack. The fact is, you’re a coward. Look at you. Lying there in your own piss. You are weak and I know for a fact that you know that. Don’t you, Jack?”
“No.”
“Oh come on. You don’t have to pretend with me! I’ve known you since you were six years old.”
“No!”
“Jack, Jack, Jack.” The doctor thing shook its head in disgust. “All of us, including your parents, had thought you’d end up differently, you know. But here you are: high school dropout, no prospects, nothing to show. What you think you’ll do, Jack? You think your dad is going to get you a job in his company one day? Is that what you think?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“He won’t and if you still believe that, you’re not only naive, you’re plain stupid. I’ll tell you where you’re going to end up. In some program for drug addicts on and off the streets until you get a job at Walmart greeting people when they come in. Only you’re going to be in your fifties and it’ll be
in a city where nobody knows you because you just can’t stay in one place long enough to make any sort of connection.”
“Shut up.”
“Uh-oh, Jack is getting upset—”
“Shut up!”
The thing got up and moved toward him. Actually, Jack saw it standing next to the armchair and one second later it stood in front of him. There was a blurry movement in between. It went down on one knee.
“I tell you what. You know why we’re here. You have something I need — that thing around your neck. I have something you need — your life. Easy trade. No hard feelings.”
Jack looked at the thing. He felt as if his mind was caught in a vice and someone turned the spindle, increasing the pressure inside the jaws with each revolution. The hopelessness he felt was unbearable. He had to use all the strength he had left not to give in, not to slide into it and abandon his life altogether.
“Go to hell,” he said quietly.
“Uhh, Jack, let’s not get metaphorical here. Listen to me—”
“No you listen to me!” Jack cried out. He couldn’t breathe but as he had just decided to fight for his life, he didn’t care. “Here’s what I think and… correct me if I’m wrong,” he spoke a few words at a time, pushing each one out with force. “You need this, whatever this necklace is I’m wearing. You can’t get it off yourself. Can’t touch it.” Jack laughed a little even though it was painful. “I have no idea why, but let’s just say it somehow messes with your evilness. The people you’ve hired to do your dirty work can’t touch it either, otherwise they would’ve ripped it off of me a long time ago. You want me to take it off myself. I gotta tell you, the bit with my mother worked. It really did and I’m scared as shit right now lying here, not knowing what you’re gonna do next and what’s going to happen to me. And I know you know that, as you seem to know everything I’m thinking. But here’s the thing. I won’t take it off. You must know that by now. Why should I? I’m dead anyway. And once I am, you’re gonna have to wait until I decompose to get it off…”
Jack’s head was spinning and he had lost his train of thought.
“We don’t need you to take it off, Jack. Not anymore.” The thing walked around him as if to inspect a piece of merchandise before the purchase. “Someone will take it off for you. And we know she will, because you’re going tell her to do so.” Those last words were whispered into Jack’s ear.
“You won’t find her,” Jack said defiantly.
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. You humans have such potential, but then you screw it all up. We don’t have to find her. She will find us. She will want to find you. And save you. Such is her heart. And when she finds you, we will have found her. And you will have fulfilled your purpose. So, you can be stubborn and spend the next day or five days or however long it will take for her to get here, on your knees, your arms tied to a metal pipe, or you either take it off or tell us where she is so she can do it for you.”
Jack looked at the doctor thing. There was no choice.
“Go to hell,” he said for the second time that day.
“So be it,” the thing said.
The abyss opened and Jack’s mind was swallowed by the unimaginable.
He awoke from the pain in his hands and arms. The chasm inside his eyelids was his sister’s room as the fire broke out. His knees were cups, filled with lava. He pushed his weight into them to lessen the strain on his shoulders. When he opened his eyes, he became aware that the four lights surrounding him were off. Through the narrow windows high up, the first light of dawn was visible.
There had been pain and not much else throughout the night. Sometimes it came from memories, other times from his tortured body. It was never absent and was almost part of him now. Twice, he’d heard helicopters overhead and once what he thought must have been a prop plane. At first, he was sure the plane was part of the search and rescue mission to get him out. But the sound faded, only to be substituted by another. That one was lower in tone, and through the red fog of pain that clouded his mind he recognized the sound as motorcycles. They approached from his left.
In the distance, at the other end of the large building, an overhead door opened. He felt the vibrations in his abdomen when the bikes approached. The cacophonous noise of two dozen engines filled the space. He could only see the bikes as shadows within darker shadows that soon surrounded him. One by one, the engines were turned off, but the riders never got off their bikes. He felt them more than he saw them. The ones he did see were dark silhouettes. Rider and bike sat motionless. No sound escaped them. Not even breathing.
Jack lost himself again — sometimes floating on top of the pain, at other times drowning in it. He didn’t know how much time had gone by when he turned his head and his gaze fell to something beyond the shadows. Where there was darkness before, there was now an opening. A door.
She stood in its frame, half in the shadows. He saw her silhouette against the light behind it. Kasey. She had come. She had found him.
This is a trap, he wanted to scream. Get out of here!
“Jack?” her whispered voice echoed through the space. Never in his life had he heard anything sweeter, anything that he’d cherished more and anything that he’d dreaded so much at the same time.
“Jack?”
No. Don’t come any closer!
She ran toward him and he fell into her embrace.
Saturday, June 22nd, 12:20 p.m to Sunday, June 23rd, 0:42 a.m.
The combination of complete darkness and the sun burning her face at the same time was utterly strange. Kasey had opened the windows of the Jeep. She turned off the AC as well. She wanted to be able to hear what was going on outside, as disturbing as it might be. The fact that she could see a few shapes here and there was comforting at first but now she realized that it had given her a false sense of security. Somehow, the roofs and hoods of the cars, heated up by the sun, were visible as green, blurry, lines. But this was a residential neighborhood and most of the cars were parked in their driveways or in front of the garages.
Furthermore, the absence of cars didn’t necessarily mean an intersection. On the other hand, some of the cars were parked in the middle of the road. Some cars still had people in them, waiting for help to come. Kasey could only hope that nobody had collapsed on the street as there was no way for her to see anyone lying on the ground. By the second intersection, Kasey no longer knew where she was. She thought she’d just passed Marlborough Avenue but now she wasn’t sure anymore. She needed to get to Little East Neck Road in order to cross Sunrise Highway.
Then she had an idea. She stopped the car at what she thought was an intersection, got out and felt her way toward the nearest street corner. Most streets had signs. The first metal pole she came across was a stop sign. The next one, a bit further in, was thicker. She climbed up a few feet and even though the metal from the pole cut into her thighs, she managed to hold on long enough to feel the surface of the sign. The letters were slightly raised. N Railroad. Good. Make a right. Go straight. Next right and you’re on Little East Neck.
She went back to the Jeep and turned onto North Railroad. Except for the low gurgling sound of the car engine it was eerily quiet. She envisioned mothers and fathers with their children, inside their homes, cowering in corners in utter panic over not being able to see anything. Sudden darkness might be one of the most frightening things to any human.
The sound came out of her stream of thoughts. She wasn’t aware of it at first. As it became louder, its familiarity sent a cold shiver down her spine. To her right was a row of houses, just like on any of the other roads in the neighborhood. But to her left, there were no houses. To her left was the railroad. She had grown up with the sound of the train, had always heard it from a distance as it slowly approached and passed through the neighborhoods. She and her friends would wave and watch for anyone to wave back.
This one was too fast, its approach too quick. The trains slowed down significantly when going through densely populated a
reas. This one hadn’t. Kasey stopped the car. Even though she was about twenty feet away from the tracks, it felt much too close for comfort. The sound of the approaching train was suddenly more terrifying than anything she’d experienced today.
It came toward her like a wave, an unearthly sound quadrupling in volume each second it approached. “Oh God,” she whispered when she remembered the switch point a quarter mile down the road. Very soon after the Little East Neck overpass, the rail split. One went straight. The other curved to the right and toward Farmingdale.
The train passed her. This wasn’t a commercial train. The typical dud-dud, dud-dud, as the boxcars passed was missing. This was a passenger train. When the last car flew by, Kasey found herself slowly releasing her breath. The noise faded. The switch point was most likely set to continue straight. She relaxed and started the car.
The shrieking sound reached her approximately two seconds later. It was the sound of steel grinding on steel, as the wheels of the train cars couldn’t counteract the centrifugal force of the curve and the train began to derail.
There were eerie screams buried in the massive echoing crashing sounds. Their distance didn’t lessen their impact on Kasey. She sat there in utter shock, trying to stop her hands from shaking. She screamed, mostly to drown out the chaos. But Kasey couldn’t stop the low vibration in her diaphragm that accompanied the cars crashing into each other and into the warehouses past the tracks.
“Drive,” she said to herself. “Drive!”
She started the car and drove forward. She wanted to push the gas pedal down all the way and escape the sounds and the darkness that was all around her, but she knew she had to drive slowly. She also knew that she had to drive not away from but toward the still-derailing train, at least for a while, until she hit Little East Neck Road.
