Voices of the Damned

by Barbie Wilde

  Upstairs, it was perfectly modern, sunny and cheerful, beautifully decorated by her mother, but downstairs lay all sorts of terrors. Maybe aliens had taken up residence underneath the floor by the bunk beds, issuing forth to drill her father in the back of the neck to deposit a mind-controlling crystal as he snoozed in the downstairs cool of a late summer afternoon, a la the 1950s, black and white, sci-fi paranoia-fest, Invaders from Mars. Like countless other kids in America who were persuaded by the film to think that their parents had been taken over by Martians, Lorraine checked her father’s neck for evidence of an extraterrestrial wound every time he came up from the basement. Not an easy task, as he was six feet tall and she was only a pint-sized seven-year-old.

  And what if those face-eating spiders (creatures that a friend of hers in Brownies had sworn had killed her cousin while she was sleeping in her grandmother’s basement near Fairchild Air Force Base) came out from the corners, crept up the stairs and found their way to Lorraine’s bed, nibbling Lorraine’s face off, but not killing her. Damn! She’d never get a date to the High School Prom without a face!

  Basically, although basements (and spiders, and aliens, etc.) were to be feared, the real problem with Lorraine was her over-active imagination, at least that’s what her mother told her again and again.

  Eventually, Lorraine’s parents bought their house, but for reasons that were never explained, The Room remained locked and sealed.

  One day, after visiting a real estate agent to put the house on the market, Lorraine decided it was time to face her fears. She hadn’t been in the basement for years, but she had to make sure that all was well down there for any potential buyers. After bolstering her courage up with a couple cups of coffee, she opened the basement door and turned on the lights. She could see from the top of the stairs that the pink picnic table was still in place. She walked down and her heart started palpitating again, just like the day of her arrival. How many dreams of this dank horrible place had she experienced since she’d left to go to the University of Washington in Seattle all those years ago? The leaving of this place physically didn’t mean that it had left her mind. It haunted her for decades.

  In addition to the bare light bulbs, daylight filtered in from the dirty windows. It was a big space and it was a shame that Lorraine’s parents never had the money to finish the basement. There was even a brick fireplace in front of the picnic table where her mother used to draw.

  It was cool down there and she walked towards the bunk beds, determined to check out that damn mysterious room that had caused her such nightmares. It was still there, still locked, still impervious to the world. She looked down at her dad’s Sullivan Road Industrial Park key ring festooned with every conceivable useful and not so useful key and tried each one in the lock. Why the hell her dad needed nearly twenty keys was beyond her. Finally Lorraine came across one that looked different than the others, older and bigger. There was a stamp on the key: a griffin, the legendary creature with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion; the head and wings of an eagle and an eagle’s talons as its front feet.

  That’s the one, she thought. Her heart leapt in her chest again and she thought how ironic it would be if she had a heart attack right then and there, just because of her stupid basement phobia. Lorraine put the key in the lock and tried to turn it, but it was very stiff. She wiggled it around, making a bit of noise and that’s when she heard it.

  A sound. In the long-locked basement room. The sound of something shifting inside.

  Goosebumps ran riot over Lorraine’s body. All her bodily reactions said “flee!” but her mind, stubbornly attempting to be rational, said “it’s probably a rat,” which was bad enough, but not (hopefully) life-threatening. Her parents had lived in this house for forty years, so there couldn’t be anything really dangerous in there, or they would have found out about it years ago. Right?

  Her hands shaking now, Lorraine tried to turn the key again, but it was still stuck. She removed the key and rummaged around the basement, finding a can of WD-40, plus a large metal flashlight in case the light bulb didn’t work in The Room.

  Lorraine squirted the lubricant through the attached red straw into the lock and put the can down on the floor. She struggled with the lock again and was finally rewarded with a snick of the key turning. She pushed on the door, but it was still stuck. “Fuck!” she said under her breath, “Fucking open, you fucking monster door!”

  Lorraine’s wish was granted after she put her shoulder into it and the door popped open. She stumbled in and grabbed the flashlight out of her pocket. She was right, the light bulb wasn’t working. And disappointingly, the room seemed empty, except for what looked like a wicker toy Victorian baby carriage in the corner. She shone the light all over the room and (with visions of the face-eating spiders dropping down onto the back of her neck) up at the rafters.

  Nothing. Not even dust. Not even cobwebs.

  She walked over to the baby carriage and peeked in. She squealed in alarm and jumped back, nearly dropping the flashlight. There was a dead baby in the carriage! She edged closer and shone the light inside. It wasn’t a baby. It was almost something worse: a mummified dead cat lay curled up on the moldy mattress, paw in mouth, for all the world looking like it had tried to eat itself as it starved to death in the hellhole of the locked room.

  Lorraine shuddered, but she was determined to search further. She noticed an alcove in the far left hand corner of the room. Since the back of the room seemed to be level with the walls of the basement, this alcove looked like it had been dug into the ground outside the walls of the house.

  Lorraine moved forward, wondering why she hadn’t thought of just paying a handyman to check The Room out. Well, because she didn’t have much money for one thing, but now she definitely thought that hiring some hunky guy to do her dirty work would have been worth a few weeks of beans on toast.

  She stood opposite the alcove now, shining her light into it, marveling at the fact that it wasn’t just some kind of shallow opening. Instead it was as deep as a hallway. What was in there? Lorraine listened intently, but she couldn’t hear a peep. The shifting sounds must have been her imagination.

  Hey, maybe this was a tunnel to a fallout shelter! She remembered back when she was eleven years old, begging her dad to build the family a shelter in the back yard during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said in his rational, scientific way: “What’s the point, Lorraine? So we go into a fallout shelter. We’d never be able to come out because of the radiation, so we’d have to live in there for decades before it was safe to emerge. Much better to die in seconds in a nuclear holocaust than to suffer for years starving in a shelter, going quietly insane.” Needless to say, this was not exactly the comfort that a young Lorraine was looking for.

  The idea of her house having a secret fallout shelter was irresistible. It could potentially bump up the asking price as well. Lorraine cautiously moved forward, into the darkness of the alcove.

  There was a corridor stretching beyond, dingy and miasmic. She followed it for a few yards and then came up against another door. Lorraine searched through her dad’s keys again and found an even older one that looked like the ticket.

  This key slid in like butter and turned easily. Flashlight at the ready, Lorraine again used her shoulder to push at the inner door. It flew open; she staggered in and found herself in a massive, brightly lit, white tiled room, the walls lined with enormous crystal tubes. There was a Perspex bed-sized table at the left of the room, complete with a strange mechanism over the head of the table that looked like a fine, surgical drill.

  The door slammed automatically behind her. The flashlight fell from Lorraine’s nerveless fingers and she began to tremble uncontrollably.

  There were people strapped inside the tubes, standing propped up, eyes closed, very obviously dead from their coloration. Lorraine walked closer and was shocked to recognize some of them. N
eighbors who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, never to be seen again. Although at the time, it was always assumed that they had simple done a midnight flit, fleeing bad debts, or the taxman, or other financial horrors. There were the Rosenblads. He was a dentist and their house was the only one on the street with a pool in the backyard. There was Mrs. Hauglon, Lorraine’s busty fourth grade teacher. One of the few that she’d actually liked.

  Dead. They were all dead.

  Lorraine was horrified to spot her mother in one of the tubes, although she was supposed to have been incinerated in a car crash three weeks ago. She ran over to the tube, but there was no way of opening it. However, for her poor mother, rescue had come far too late anyway.

  Overcome by her devastating discovery, Lorraine sank to her knees in front of her mother’s tube, crying and pounding the crystal walls, trying to make some sense of the whole macabre scene. Eventually, she gave up and turned around. She was startled to see a different kind of crystalline globe-like object on a pedestal to her right. Inside was a silver and green octopus-like creature with a humanoid face. Its emotionless black eyes stared back at her. Her mind did a fast rewind to Invaders from Mars. This creature was exactly like the Martian Mastermind who was plotting the takeover of Earth! She nearly had a seizure right then and there, expecting the Mastermind’s large, bulky, almond-eyed, green cronies to materialize and start drilling into the back of her neck, but then she noticed that the creature was motionless. She edged closer and saw to her relief that it appeared to be a painted, plaster cast, fake monster.

  That’s when Lorraine noticed another door, barely visible in the corner beyond the Perspex bed. There was no doorknob, just a cleverly embedded silver button. Figuring there was no turning back now, Lorraine pressed the button.

  The door opened and she walked through to another brightly lit room, however, this one was the mirror image of her father’s den upstairs, complete with desk and packed bookcases, with the added luxuries of a small fridge, stove and a comfy camp bed in the corner.

  A man was sitting at her father’s desk and Lorraine wished she’d kept hold of the heavy flashlight from the other room. Then he turned around in his chair and exclaimed, “It took you long enough. I thought you were never going to arrive.”

  It took all of Lorraine’s control not to pee her panties, as she realized that her father was not dead. He was still alive, living down here in the fallout shelter of her dreams.

  “Dad, what the hell is going on? I thought you were dead! What happened to Mom?” Lorraine yelled. She wanted to rush towards him and give him a big hug, but the disturbing memory of the dead bodies in the outer room kept her at bay.

  Her father stood up and raised his arms in a triumphant salute. “I’ve been waiting for this moment to show you my work,” he said. “For all these years, I’ve been working on a project for my Martian Masters. I was sworn to secrecy, Lorraine. They promised me that they wouldn’t hurt you if I did their will.”

  “Dad, what have you done?” Lorraine asked.

  “Let me show you. It’s amazing,” her father replied with a gleeful smile.

  He led her back to the outer room. He gestured to all the people in tubes and said, “Under the instructions of my Martian Masters, I tried to implant the precious mind-controlling crystal in our neighbor’s brains. Unfortunately, I had to invent the crystal delivery system machine myself, as the Martians kept their machines on their spaceships. It’s been a bit hit and miss, as you can see. I’m still perfecting the technology. But I’ll get there in the end, don’t you worry. They’re all vacuumed packed in the tubes in case the Martians can revive them at a later date.”

  There were a lot of things that Lorraine had thought were odd about her parents over the years: their total inability to explain sexual matters to their teenaged child, their lack of outward emotion, their sometimes strange financial choices, but nothing on the planet could have prepared Lorraine for her father’s confession to being a serial killer. However, it was quite evident that he was also totally, utterly psychotic. If anyone had a chance at a M’Naghten’s plea for mental disease or defect, it was her dad.

  “Dad, this is so fucking wrong. You’ve got to come with me now. We have to get you some help. It will be okay, honestly. I’ll make sure that you get a good lawyer.”

  Her father turned to look at her and she knew that she’d made a very big mistake.

  “Watch that potty mouth, young lady. I protected you all these years and this is how you repay me? Your mother said the same thing when I showed her this room. I couldn’t let her tell anyone. It’s not just me anymore. There are others that have to be protected.”

  “What others? Who are you talking about?” Lorraine replied. At the same time, she spotted the industrial sized flashlight that she had dropped earlier.

  “Don’t you understand? This is big, big, big, big! The Martians have landed. They’re here among us. They control EVERYTHING! Well, almost everything. They are infiltrating the government, and the police, and the army.”

  Lorraine felt that she’d moved out of Invaders from Mars territory and was firmly in X-Files conspiracy land.

  Grateful that she’d taken those Kung Fu classes all those years ago, Lorraine made a snap decision and performed a quick shoulder roll across the floor to the flashlight, grabbing it as she passed. Whether she’d be able to clobber some sense into her father was another matter, but she felt a hell of a lot better having it in her hand.

  “That stupid flashlight isn’t going to do you any good. They have lasers and photon rays and devices that make the phasers on Star Trek look like toys on Sesame Street!” her father shouted.

  He was losing it. Her beloved dad had gone psycho. Lorraine wasn’t a big person, but the adrenalin and fear were giving her the strength she needed. She took her best shot. She did another shoulder role (just like her hero James T. Kirk used to do so effectively when he was fighting aliens in Star Trek) and popped up behind her father. Before he could turn around, she leapt up and tried to hit him on top of the head with the flashlight as hard as she could.

  Unfortunately, he twisted at the last moment and Lorraine smacked her father right over his left eye. He screamed and blood spurted from the wound. He clasped his hands to the gash and fell to his knees. Lorraine screamed too, in guilt and horror at what she had done, but there was no retreat now. He was a dangerous maniac and she had to subdue him.

  Lorraine’s heart was broken as her father started to cry. How could this have happened to the man that she’d loved and admired all her life? But his desperate rant then broke through her mental turmoil: “You fool! I’m the only one who can protect you. If I’m not here, the Martians will come for you. Don’t you understand?”

  As much as she adored her father, Lorraine was completely terrified and devastated by his lunacy, not to mention the fact that it looked like he’d actually killed her mother, amongst many others. She gingerly conked him on the top of his head once more, hoping that she wasn’t hurting him too much.

  He screamed again, more blood spattered down on the white shiny floor. Lorraine screamed in tandem with him, desperately wanting this unbearable scene to be over. Finally, she hit him on the back of the neck.

  The third whack did the job and her father collapsed into unconsciousness in a puddle of blood on the floor. Lorraine stood trembling over him, aghast at what she had been forced to do, but she recovered quickly. Now she had to get him out of here. Dropping the flashlight, Lorraine grabbed his arms and started to slowly, agonizingly drag her oblivious father towards the door, leaving a trail of dark red blood in their wake. Not an easy job, as he was still a big guy. She’d just about reached the door to the outside corridor when she heard a noise. She looked up.

  And then all of Lorraine’s worst nightmares from her childhood came true in an instant.

  The little silvery-gree
n octopus guy was alive, squirming and squiggling around in his crystal goldfish bowl. She turned around to look behind her and two enormous hulking green aliens with almond eyes were blocking the door to the outside world. They definitely didn’t look like they had zippers up the back of their furry costumes, unlike the hapless monster actors in the original Invaders from Mars.

  With perfect synchronicity, the aliens marched forward, grabbed Lorraine and dragged her across the room to the Perspex table. She shrieked and struggled against them, but she was helpless. They ripped her clothes off and strapped her down.

  One of the aliens approached and uncoiled a long slimy green penis-like tentacle from between its legs. The tentacle split into two. The creature inserted one squirming loathsome probe into Lorraine’s mouth and down her throat. The other slithered up her vagina.

  Lorraine gagged and heaved and writhed, trying to dislodge the horrors, but it didn’t make any difference. Then she felt grotesque spurts explode inside her and the alien reeled its weird members back into the cavity between its legs. The extraterrestrial squirts had an immediate tranquilizing effect. Lorraine stopped struggling.

  The aliens untied her and flipped her over on her stomach, placing her head under the surgical drill and brushing aside the hair from the back of her neck. It wasn’t necessary to strap Lorraine down again. The narcotic effect was radiating from her stomach and vagina to her limbs, rendering her numb and unable to move. Lorraine was deadly calm now. She could feel tiny busy entities beetling around inside her, taking over her viscera, assaulting her uterus, scuttling along her Fallopian tubes, invading her ovaries and fertilizing every one of her eggs. Lorraine was transformed into an alien breeding machine.