The Whittier Trilogy

by Michael W. Layne

  He followed the small group of residents as they left the bar, walking a bit behind them as they made their way over to The Towers. In the dark, they either didn’t notice him or didn’t care. Maybe they thought he was just another drunk neighbor stumbling home. The double shot of Jäger was starting to hit him, so he didn’t even have to fake his drunken shuffle through town. At one point, he thought he heard someone walking behind him, but when he stopped to listen, he heard only the wind.

  At first, Trent followed the crowd to The Towers because he was sure he could at least curl up on a communal couch and get a decent night’s sleep. Then he remembered Christina. He only knew approximately where she lived, but he figured he could find her place pretty easily. He knew on which floor and on which corner her apartment was. If he had her cell number, he would have sent her a text, because he didn’t like the idea of dropping in on her unexpectedly. But he didn’t know what else to do or where else to go. And if he was honest with himself, he was also a little excited about the possibility of having sex one more time with her before he left Whittier for good. Of course, if Alice was there…he might be lucky to just snag a spot on their floor.

  After the group of residents entered the building, he stood outside in the chilly silence. He suddenly felt like there was someone just behind him, but when he turned around, he saw nothing.

  At around 11:55, he got up his nerve to enter the front door of The Towers.

  As soon as he walked in, he felt strange. He couldn’t place the feeling, but he did recognize the strong smell in the air. It was…fish. Not so odd, he thought, given that Whittier was a fishing town. But the smell was stronger than he would have expected at midnight on a Thursday, and the fish smelled worse than normal—almost rotten.

  He hit the up button on the elevator and pressed the call button for floor twelve once inside the elevator car. Slowly, the old elevator groaned upward.

  When the elevator doors opened at the twelfth floor, he stepped into the hall and started walking toward the corner where Christina said she lived. The floor was eerily silent. No sounds of television. No screaming kids. Nothing.

  As he rounded the corner, he heard a doorknob turn.

  He looked up and saw that it was Christina backing out of her apartment and bending over to lock her door.

  As he walked closer, she turned around with a start.

  “Holy shit! You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

  “Not exactly the greeting I was hoping for,” he said, with the best attempt at a sincere and charming smile that he could muster. “I did my best to leave, but I missed the tunnel. Sorry to barge in on you, but I double-checked the Inn, and nothing was available.”

  She looked at him in disbelief, then walked over and softly grabbed his forearm.

  “I don’t mean to be a bitch, but you have to get out of here. How did you even get in the building?”

  “The front door. I just walked in.”

  Christina went back and finished locking her apartment door, then pulled him along by his elbow to the elevator. As soon as she slapped the down button, the elevator doors opened and she pulled him inside with her, pushing both the button for the first floor and the button for the basement.

  “Listen very carefully to me, Trent. You have to get out of here. This is not about us. I like you a lot. A whole lot. But you need to not be here tonight.”

  “I thought that if I missed the last tunnel out, I had to spend the night in Whittier?” he said, with a bit of nervousness in his laugh now.

  Christina shook her head slowly as the elevator descended.

  “You don’t understand. I’m not talking about Whittier anymore. I’m talking about here. In The Towers.”

  “Is this about Alice? I can talk to her if you want…”

  Christina practically pushed him out of the elevator when the doors opened for the first floor.

  “Get out of the building. Sleep in the lobby of the Inn, or park under a light and sleep in your car,” she said as the elevator started to close. “Just go.”

  He put his foot inside the elevator to stop the door from closing.

  “Please tell me what this is about,” he said.

  “Trent,” she said. “Get out now. If the doors are locked, find a way out somehow, maybe through a window on the second floor. And as soon as you get out, run as fast as you can to your car. Trust me, please.”

  He pulled his foot back and let the elevator door close. He was not used to being the one left in the dark about things. It also made it the second time that day that he felt his own skin crawling like there were living creatures shimmying up and down his arms and legs.

  He walked quickly down the hall and to the row of doors through which he had entered just recently. He didn’t like the idea of going outside, especially given the hand-made sign he had seen earlier about the bear spotting. He’d read that bears were intelligent, but he was sure they wouldn’t give a crap about how charming he could be or about any of his routines. As he stepped up to the door, he pushed the handle down and shoved the heavy metal door outward. The door swung open about three inches before stopping as if something on the other side was preventing it from opening further. He put his face to one of the glass panels in the door and looked down. In the light of the overhead bulb mounted outside the door, he could see that someone had run a thick chain through the outside handles.

  Trent and the rest of the residents were locked in the building.

  He could understand the residents of The Towers locking themselves in for the night, just for safety’s sake alone. But the doors to The Towers had been locked from the outside, and he wasn’t sure exactly what to make of that. All he knew was that chains on the outside of the doors probably meant that, for whatever reason, someone didn’t want the residents of The Towers to leave.

  That realization alone made his heart beat faster. He tried the doors again, this time pushing harder, trying to break the chains, but nothing gave. He was beyond the point of caring if he disturbed anyone. Maybe he could break the glass, but it was reinforced with wire mesh so that it wouldn’t shatter, and the glass portals in the doors were too small for anyone to fit through anyway.

  When he ran out of strength, he stopped, and the building returned to its normal silence. Looking around, it didn’t appear that anyone lived on the first floor, just as Christina had told him. Right next to the entrance there was a locked general store and what passed for a common area. He ran down the hall as fast as he could until he arrived at another bank of doors at the far end of the building. He tried those doors with the same results. Lastly, he looked until he found a rear exit, but that also was locked.

  As he made his way back to the main front entrance, he checked the doors to the various outside-facing rooms, but they were all locked. He passed by the door to the general store and looked in. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like the window was reinforced with the same wire mesh as the front doors.

  He knew Christina was not going to be happy about this, but with no other option, he had to find her again. He hadn’t gone inside her apartment upstairs, but he got the sense that Alice wasn’t up there. Maybe Christina would just let him crash on her couch if nothing else.

  He went back to the elevators and hit the up button. He could hear the elevator gears churning behind the closed door. Very quickly, the door opened, and he stepped inside. He almost pressed the twelfth floor button on instinct, but then thought about how quickly the elevator had arrived. It had not traveled in that short of time from all the way up on the twelfth floor. It was more likely that the elevator had just come from the basement level. He pressed the button for the basement and held his breath.

  Even before the door opened a few seconds later, he was overwhelmed by the stench of dead fish that suddenly invaded the elevator. He stepped out into the basement and heard what sounded like wild animals growling and grunting from somewhere down the hall and around the corner. He almost turned back, but his rational mind pr
evailed and assured him that there was no way that wild animals would be allowed loose in the basement of an apartment building, even in Alaska. Slowly and quietly, he walked down the short hallway before turning the corner and stopping at the entrance to a large common area.

  Trent had seen many things in his life. His parents weren’t really gypsies, of course, but they had taken him to the circus when it came to town, and had even paid for his admission to the freak shows. Trent had grown up watching human oddities on display in dark tents and also had thrived on a regular diet of R-rated horror and slasher movies. He thought he had been desensitized to everything.

  But he had never witnessed anything like what he saw in the basement of The Towers at Whittier.

  The space sprawling in front of him was dimly lit and huge, taking up the majority of the building’s footprint, with support poles positioned throughout. Pushed up against the walls and spread out across the floor were well over a hundred barred metal cages filling almost the entirety of the basement. As best as Trent could tell in the dim light, each cage contained at least one and in some cases two naked human beings. Most were either balled up on the floors of the cages writhing in pain or pressed up against their bars, rattling their cages and growling like animals. He observed several people ripping into raw fish with their teeth, and he could hear the crunching of bones and scales as they chewed.

  Trent prided himself on being unshakable, but his legs refused to move. He was accustomed to presenting the improbable as possible to his audiences, but what he was witnessing now defied even his most extreme sense of the macabre. The only way he could even pretend to process what he was seeing was to compare the scene in front of him to a human zoo or maybe a laboratory where bizarre tests were performed on humans instead of monkeys.

  When his legs finally responded to the signals from his brain, he almost turned around and went back to the elevator. His survival instinct told him to go back upstairs and to look for another way out of this crazy building.

  Then he saw Christina.

  She was sitting in a metal fold-up chair in the middle of the room, her body facing the caged humans like they were members of an audience trapped there and forced to listen to her lecture. He inched closer, still not entering the huge common area. He could see Christina slumped in her chair as if she were sleeping. He also noted that she was the only one in the basement, besides Trent, who was not naked.

  Against his better judgment again, he moved forward, trying to make as little noise as possible, as if he could make it all the way to her without being noticed. After only progressing a few feet, several of the caged humans stopped what they were doing and thrust their noses in the air like they were sniffing a new scent. Within seconds, the place erupted in pandemonium. The caged people were all focused on him, shaking their bars so violently that he was afraid their cages would fall apart.

  As he walked closer, he tried his best to not look at any of the people directly, applying the same logic that one would apply to wild animals. A few times he felt liquid, which he hoped was only saliva, spraying past him or landing on his suit in different places.

  When he finally arrived at where Christina was sitting, she didn’t even turn to look at him. Her head was slightly bowed and her long hair hung over the side of her face that was toward him. Now that he was only a few feet away from her, he finally gave in to the urge to look more closely at the human animals surrounding him.

  The people ranged from the very young in the same cages with their mothers and fathers to teenagers and middle-aged people in their own separate enclosures. All body types were represented, but most of the people where white, with only a few minorities to be seen.

  He took the last two steps and stood next to Christina. In the cage directly in front of Christina, a naked Alice pressed herself hard against the bars, her face contorted in rage as she glared at him. Alice looked more like a wild animal than the lively Australian he had spoken to earlier in the day, but there was something in her eyes that was different than the others—a spark of human comprehension buried but still present.

  He stepped around in front of Christina even as Alice stretched her hands out as far as possible in an attempt to grab him.

  He looked down at Christina. Her eyes were open, but they were watery and she was looking past him at something that might be far away.

  “Christina,” he said as he touched her on her shoulder. “Are you here with me?”

  Christina looked up at him in slow motion. She blinked and wiped a thin piece of drool from her chin with her sleeve. Her vision seemed to clear slightly.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked quietly like she was half asleep. “You were supposed to go. Not safe here for you.”

  “What the hell is all of this?” he said. “Why are these people locked up down here, and why are there chains on the outside of the doors?”

  Christina squinted her eyes then shook her head and then focused again on him.

  “Sorry, babe,” she said with a little slur in her words. “Took too many pills this time, I think. Have to keep everyone inside, where it’s safe. Until the sun comes up,” she said with a slight grin.

  “Do these people live here? And what are they doing locked in cages acting like animals?” he said.

  Christina turned her head away from Trent and surveyed the naked people in the cages, jumping, howling, and growling as they tried to break out of their prisons. Christina turned back to Trent and looked at him as if he were the insane one.

  “You weren’t supposed to see this, babe. These people don’t think that they’re animals, they are animals. And I don’t think they’re very happy that you’re here.”

  Chapter 8

  EVEN IN THE dim light of the basement, Trent could plainly see that the people locked in the cages were neither bears nor wolves nor any in between. There were, however, details that made the scene appear primal all the same. First and foremost, none of the residents wore clothing or jewelry or any other adornments such as eyeglasses at all. And none of the humans were actually acting like humans.

  The rage and hunger he saw in their eyes was unnerving. Some were still lying on their cage floors, either curled up in naked balls, holding themselves, or chewing on the raw fish that seemed to be everywhere. The majority of the residents of Whittier, however, were throwing themselves at their bars, reaching their arms through and swiping at the air as if they had claws. Some even bit down on the metal bars, blood pouring out of their mouths from their vain attempts at ripping open their cages.

  Despite the chilly temperatures outside, the basement was hot and humid from the proximity of close to two hundred humans caged together in relatively confined quarters, and as such, human body odor mixed clumsily with the overwhelming pungency of dead fish. The majority of the people were even covered to differing degrees in fish entrails and oil, and the place was littered with fish remains. And the majority of the men wore beards, had unkempt hair, and were as opposite in appearance from the popular metrosexuals of Northern Virginia as Trent had ever seen.

  In spite of his initial revulsion that human beings were being kept in cages under these conditions, he had to admit to himself that he was thankful they were all locked away at the moment.

  All he could figure was that maybe they were suffering from some kind of group hallucination. He remembered reading in one of his Psychology textbooks from college about a condition sometimes caused by depression called clinical lycanthropy, where people actually believed that they turned into various animals. Subjects hallucinated that they had the attributes of animals, like fur and claws, and they spoke in garbled imitations of the sounds animals made. Even though the werewolf was the most commonly fictionalized form of lycanthrope, the wolf wasn’t even the most common of animal transformation that scientists observed. People thought they turned into cats and birds, and some people even believed they could turn into bees. And from the way most of the residents were acting, he suspected that people also
believed they could turn themselves into bears.

  There were no limits to what the human mind could convince itself of—Trent’s own career as a mentalist depended on that. But he had never heard of this kind of mass hallucination before much less an entire town being caged up on the night of a full moon for what reason he could only guess—maybe to protect tourists, maybe to protect themselves.

  Regardless, he had no intention of freeing a bunch of insane people who thought they were grizzly bears and wolves—at least not while he was locked in the same building with them. If they had been going through what he assumed was a monthly ritual for some number of years already, there was no reason they couldn’t survive this way for another night. Maybe when he got out of Whittier the next day, he could alert some state official about what was going on here, but as to which one he would report this kind of incident, he had no idea.

  “How long did you say they stay this way?” he asked.

  “Sun rise. Then they’re fine,” she said wearily.

  He tried to establish eye contact with her.

  “How bout we go upstairs to your place and relax for a few minutes. I know everyone’s locked up, but…they’re giving me the creeps, and all their noise is giving me a headache again. Plus, no offense, but you don’t look so great right now—like maybe you should lie down.”

  Christina produced a thin smile and finally looked up at him, her eyes still fighting to stay open.

  “What’d you mean earlier when you said you took too many pills?” he said, shaking her gently.

  As soon as he touched her, she stood up with surprising speed before wobbling once and grasping the back of the chair for support. She leaned into him and whispered in his ear, “Too much Xanax.”

  Xanax was a standard anti-anxiety medication that could easily act as a tranquilizer in the right doses. Taking it would certainly explain why Christina seemed so out-of-it and how she could be so nonchalant despite the fact that she was surrounded by naked, crazy people in cages. As he started walking away from the center of the room with Christina in reluctant tow, the caged residents grew quiet, their eyes fixed savagely on him.