Escaping Midnight (What Goes On in the Walls at Night Book 3)

by Andrew Schrader

  Escaping Midnight

  What Goes On in the Walls at Night, Vol. III

  Andrew Schrader

  Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Schrader

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Praise for Other Books

  Vanish Into Midnight

  (What Goes On in the Walls at Night, #2)

  "★★★★★ This might just be my top book of 2018. Schrader has a gift. Every single one of these stories is not only beautifully written, but they are haunting in their truthfulness. They are tales of the darkest and most corruptible sides of humanity."

  Roxie Reviews

  What Goes On in the Walls at Night

  "★★★★★ "Schrader's writing does much more than amuse. He urges us to acknowledge that while life is mind-boggling and frightening beyond belief, it's also fascinating as hell. Schrader has proven that even some of our nightmares are worth remembering."

  Red City Review

  Winner: 2018 Red City Review Book Award (Fantasy)

  Thank you for buying this book!

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  The world is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here.

  — Robert Bloch

  To the extent that men have escaped the control of nature they must submit to the control of society.

  — Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

  Contents

  Prologue: Escaping

  The Half-Printed Man

  With Withered Hands

  Scan Them All, Every Last One

  There’s a Garden Up My Nose

  Triggered

  On Windy Days, I Wonder

  Sheckley’s Asylum

  Croakman

  Still You Hear the Soldier Scream

  Wreckoning

  The Cosmos of Meaning

  Head Shows

  See You In Theaters

  Epilogue: Midnight

  Bonus Film “ZØØ”!

  Promote This Book!

  Prologue: Escaping

  I had originally traveled to Pickering Cemetery to see for myself whether the stories about the walls were real. You can find those in my first book, What Goes On in the Walls at Night, which were told to me by Shorty Grey, a longtime writer and activist, now deceased.

  My second book, Vanish Into Midnight, recounted the stories I heard in the basement at Pickering. Shortly after the voices stopped, I was pulled through the wall by an unknown entity.

  It’s here that my story continues.

  I walked through a door and presently found myself at the start of a long hallway with high ceilings and linoleum floors. A diffused yellow-white light shone from somewhere down the hall. Closed doors lined each side—some with rusty chains wrapped around the knobs, others streaked with cobwebs. I began to walk, the clip-clop of my steps echoing spookily.

  After ten minutes or so, I grew weary. I was getting no closer to the light. Was there no end to this place?

  I’d come through some kind of portal to an undiscovered world. Was there no escape? I ran, gasping for air, wheezing, my throat ragged, my head aching. Finally, I tripped and pitched forward onto the endless linoleum floor, my cheek sliding against the cold surface.

  It appeared I was stranded in this strange mystery zone. Of all the places the basement wall in Pickering Cemetery could have taken me to—why here?

  The stories I’d heard through the walls were possible futures for the human race, I thought. Maybe each room held a different story. Perhaps this corridor was simply a container for these potential futures.

  With this in mind, I walked to the next room on my right. Locked. I turned to the door across the hall. Locked as well.

  Continuing on. The next pair of doors—no luck. But the following door on my right was slightly ajar. Taking a deep breath, I pushed it open and was greeted by a pregnant darkness. I poked a foot in like I was hoping to avoid a land mine. The expansive gloom swallowed my shoe.

  Reflexively, I reached for a light switch on the wall to my left, found it, and flicked it on.

  About fifteen feet away, ahead and to the left, was a bald figure draped in robes. It faced away, sitting cross-legged on a small mat on the floor. I paused, waiting for it to say something, or to move—but it did neither.

  I glanced around. The room was maybe twenty feet by twenty feet, blank beige walls with empty bookshelves straight ahead. Empty picture frames hung to my right. Beneath those, cubbies like you’d find in an elementary school. Also empty.

  I slowly circled the being in front of me. I say “being” because it had no face and no ears. Its bald head wrapped around all sides. It appeared androgynous in every way.

  What to do now? I asked myself.

  To say I heard a response to my question wouldn’t be accurate. Instead, I received an answer telepathically, through simple emotion and understanding.

  The being—this humanoid monolith—told me all the stories that follow, which I’ve translated from my shorthand notes as best I could.

  The Half-Printed Man

  The heiress Burnell, Meredith Burnell, seemed to be taking the imminent death of her husband John better than most soon-to-be widows. Then she gave an odd request.

  “I’m sorry,” McAvoy said. “You want what?”

  “You heard me. His consciousness. Stored indefinitely.”

  “Meredith—”

  “Mrs. Burnell.”

  Her attorney blinked. “Mrs. Burnell, that’s an experimental procedure—”

  “I don’t care, and neither did my husband. It was his dying wish.”

  McAvoy shuffled his papers. “He doesn’t mention it in his will.”

  “He told me, and me alone.”

  McAvoy started to speak—

  “And what it costs doesn’t concern me. My husband was one of the richest men on the planet. Don’t insult us.”

  He deflated. “Yes, Mrs. Burnell.”

  “Make the arrangements. We didn’t build this company to let its inventions go to waste. Have Peter Robinson meet me here at 8 p.m. to make the transplant. Tell him to bring no one else; I will assist. Do you understand?”

  McAvoy rose. “Yes, ma’am.” He walked to the office door and turned back. “You are aware of the consequences?”

  She stared stonily. “If you’re asking if I understand that the procedure will kill my husband’s body, then my answer is yes. But we aren’t killing him. We are helping him live.”

  McAvoy nodded and left, shutting the ornate oak door behind him.

  Meredith leaned back in her chair and surveyed her husband’s office. Her mouth curled in distaste; she found the smell of leather oppressive, nauseating. Stuffed animal heads from John’s exotic hunting trips grinned at nothi
ng. I’m helping him to live, all right, she thought. Helping him to live a slow, crawling existence worse than death.

  “Forever and ever,” she dared to whisper.

  The knives. The knives.

  Meredith stood alone in the kitchen in their five-bedroom home—their smallest home—watching the servants through the window as they carried their belongings to their cars and drove off for the last time. Total solitude was key now.

  And she stared at the knives. The finest, sharpest in the world. Hand-crafted in Switzerland. Often Meredith would return home to find John cooking—one of the few activities he had still enjoyed performing manually—and wonder what it would feel like to introduce one of their handles to his sternum by way of the blade. Before he got sick, he usually spent his free time in the kitchen, ignoring her completely. She’d tried to talk to him about it once, told him that he was driving them apart. Later, she found it hard to look her servants in the eye—so loud had been his screaming.

  “Tea,” she said to the house. Water boiled and was poured into a mug on the kitchen counter over a bag containing the world’s finest chamomile. She sipped once, then abruptly set the mug down and shoved it away. It overturned, spilling tea onto the counter and floor. The automation of the house disgusted her. The heated floors. The 3D printer John had spent a fortune on, so he could work through the night on his adolescent fantasy projects. In fact, he had made this very mug, she realized; the vaguely narcissistic catch phrase he’d printed on it caught her eye. “If you think it, it will be done.”

  She tossed it in the trash.

  Peter arrived wearing a smock, carrying his bag of tools. Meredith uttered a brusque welcome and led him upstairs to her husband’s room.

  John was lying in the king-size bed, arms propped up on two bamboo pillows with two more under his knees. He stared languidly into nothing, as his consciousness rapidly deteriorated. The blood pressure and heart monitors beeped in synthetic torpor.

  “Is he—” the technician started.

  “We’ve removed the life support,” she said. “He’ll die very soon. You must work quickly.”

  Peter—thin, wiry, mid-forties—set his two bags on the dresser and removed his computer, electrodes, and hard drive from the first. From the second he took a bone saw, a chisel, and a hammer. He slipped on his hospital scrubs and gloves. Then he and Meredith rolled her husband onto his side, secured him with straps, and steadied his head with the vise that they affixed to the bed.

  Meredith changed into her own scrubs and assisted Peter as he shaved the back of John’s head, exposing the pink skin at the base of the skull. He removed the syringe from his bag and filled it with a near-fatal dose of—

  “The tranquilizer won’t kill him,” he explained. “It will only depress his nervous system until we can transfer his consciousness. Afterward—”

  “Yes, I know. We’ll end his physical life after the transfer. Please continue.”

  John Burnell was given the shot.

  Two minutes passed. Peter made the first incision and parted the scalp. With his red-hot cauterizing gun, he sliced through the suboccipital muscles and carefully peeled them away. He bored a quarter-inch hole into the base of John’s skull. The air smelled faintly of bone-smoke.

  Peter stepped away and returned with a half-gallon glass jar filled with a bright green, energized liquid and a wire coil.

  Meredith laid a metal pan underneath her husband’s head, while Peter removed the coil from the jar and snaked the “+” end into the hole in the skull. A million microscopically tiny wires, too tiny for human eyes, protruded from the coil. They would connect with the synapses of John’s brain. They alone would transmit the stored memories and awareness to the hard drive. Peter plugged the “-” end of the wire into a specialized converter, then plugged the converter into the hard drive.

  He attached the external hard drive to his computer and turned to Meredith.

  “You know, you could upload him to the cloud. You could access it from anywhere and—”

  “Someone could hack it,” she said curtly. “Terrorists would want it for political purposes. Or politicians. Industry titans. Some hacker kid.” She dismissed his suggestion with the wave of a hand. “Just upload it to the hard drive.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Burnell.”

  Meredith removed her gloves and smock, retreated to the opposite side of the room, and lit a cigarette. Pale-blue smoke was illuminated by the moonlight spilling through the window. From Peter’s vantage point, Meredith looked like an evil, long-legged woman from an old movie.

  Peter started the computer program.

  The transfer was anticlimactic. There was no gasping for breath or anything else to indicate that the intellectual and emotional life of Mr. Burnell was being sucked out of him and placed into a metal cage.

  An hour passed. Meredith’s ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. She was content to watch her husband’s body die from across the room.

  Peter checked the pulse. “That’s it,” he said. He turned to the new widow. Tears, he saw, yes, there were tears on that stony face.

  “Thank you, Peter. I’ll call the coroner.”

  “Allow me, Mrs. Burnell.”

  “No,” she said, and smiled faintly. “I want to do it.”

  Meredith Burnell, now with controlling interest in Burnell Inc., spent the next several weeks assuming control of the company’s affairs. For her plan to work, she’d need complete autonomy.

  Returning home from work each night, she would pour herself a brandy and light a cigarette. She liked to sit and watch the hard drive as it sat numbly on the mantel above the fireplace. Knowing that her once-vicious husband was contained in that blank, black hole of silicon and electrodes soothed her. He had no escape, no voice. No power.

  Today, however, was special. Meredith took the hard drive upstairs to the office, attached it to the computer, and ran the program that would allow her to access his consciousness. While it loaded, she plugged a camera into the computer and powered it on. Then she went to the mirror and dolled herself up with more mascara. Hoisted her dirty-blonde hair up in a bun, then decided against it and let it hang wildly. More blush. Pouty lips. She removed her jacket to expose her cleavage in a low-cut dress.

  When all was ready, Meredith Burnell took her seat at the computer and clicked on the camera. The consciousness program flashed a message: Ready for Intake.

  That means he’s ready to see you now, she reminded herself. Peter had told her that.

  “You will only be able to transmit to him,” he’d said. “His consciousness won’t be able to respond. It’ll still be getting used to its new body. But it should be able to understand, at least in some rudimentary way. Over time it may get stronger, just like a baby. The program needs to learn, after all.”

  Excellent. She lit another cigarette. Then she pressed the button. The light on the camera turned green. Her face appeared in the program and she began to speak.

  “Hello, John. Are you feeling well? Fresh?” She dragged on her cigarette, her hand shaking in nervous excitement. “I hope so, because I want you to live a long, long time. That’s why I bought a hard drive rated for two thousand years. Even after I’m gone, it’s important to me that you be here, watching.

  “If you’re wondering what’s happened to you, John, I’ll tell you. We were married for twenty years. And during that time I suffered just about every injustice a woman can take from her husband. It took me over a decade to understand what you were doing, because in the beginning I believed you when you told me it was my friends, or my brother, or my cousin Janet trying to destroy our marriage. So I drove them away, told many of them I never wanted to speak to them again. A couple years ago, when you became ill, I learned the truth.

  “I found the letters, John. Like the one you wrote to my sister, frightening her, paying her off to cut ties with me. She was my last friend in the world. You threatened her life, and what was she supposed to do, stand up to one of the world’s ric
hest men? Stupid you, you always were a sucker for trophies. You should have destroyed those letters; instead, you kept them.

  “I know it was you who killed my parents on their trip to the Balkans, John. I know you arranged their plane crash. It was no accident. I found the records. Your records. You son of a—

  “No. I won’t swear. Not even you can make me do something I don’t want to do. You won’t control me anymore.

  “You used me any way you could, so I would be there for you as you grew your empire. You only cared about what you could take. I was your trophy, a thing to show off at parties, a model for the media. You took from me everything I had, while I watched, and now I’m going to take everything from you. While you watch.

  “And for once, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  The funeral was attended by three hundred in-person guests and thousands more beaming in from around the world. The death of a digi-industrial giant like John Burnell was the biggest business event of the year. His company had increased life expectancy by twenty percent, eradicated colon cancer from the human experience, and introduced robotics into the human genome.

  His widow sat coffin-side, her expression like blank paper. The dark sunglasses, hat, and veil helped to conceal her unbridled delight. She acted the part well, and though her tears were not of sadness but of joy, no one questioned their authenticity.