Carved in Stone

by Julia Shupe

  Besides, he thought, uncharacteristically exuberant, he was only twenty-eight years old. His entire life was stretched out before him, a long and winding road with thousands of twists and turns, just waiting to be explored. He’d been sentenced for his crimes when he was nineteen years old, but now that he’d been released from prison, his life was just beginning again. Unlike his cellmates, he’d been given a second chance, and the possibilities, when considered, were endless. He had decades to build something new, something good, decades to compensate for so much wasted time. He shivered at the thought, finding it almost as frightening as it was intriguing. He’d dreamed of this day for nine long years, but now that it was here, the possibilities overwhelmed him.

  Stopping at the hotel bar, he purchased two shots of whiskey, and a beer, and setting them carefully on the carpet in front of his room, he worked the plastic key inside the strange lock box. When the green bulb lit, the door opened to precious solitude. For the first time in his entire adult life, Carlton locked the door to his very own room. Locks, he had learned, were luxuries; extravagances people took for granted. He stared at it with wonder, fingered the latch, and then feasted on the comforting silence of the room. It was meagerly furnished and not well spaced, smelled faintly of stale cigarettes, though none of that mattered. Though small, it was practically a palace to him. It was five short steps to the edge of the bed, and three to the bathroom’s leaky faucet, but to Carlton, this place was a castle, a fortress. Collapsing on the mattress, he stared at the popcorn ceiling, and tried to make out the chanting below. I’ll be damned, he thought. He couldn’t hear a single word. The clerk had selected a room on one of the highest floors, and up here, the sounds of the street couldn’t reach him. His eyes slipped closed, and his thoughts began to spin—landing, of course, on the reporter with the eggplant hair, the lithe body, and the open-toed shoes.

  He sat up quickly.

  “No,” he whispered, heart hammering his chest. “I can’t let this happen again.”

  Raising his hands, he pressed his fists to his eyes. He must work to prevent the bad thoughts from creeping in. Like a cancer they were, and had always been. They’d plagued him, even as a boy. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t dreamed of beautiful women, of their long hair, and their velvety skin, of the soft scents of their floral perfumes.

  Not that dreaming of beautiful women was particularly unusual. Boys fantasized about sex all the time. But Carlton’s dreams had always been frighteningly different, dark visions of pain and torture, of scarlet blood, and open-mouthed screams. From the tender age of eight years old, he’d imagined his hands in unacceptable places. Twice he’d been caught peeping into bedroom windows, hands down the front of his pants.

  But there were many more times when he hadn’t been caught, and those were the memories he kept to himself, locked in a vault, in the back of his mind. They were visions he’d recalled in his cell, late at night, while staring through the blackness, unable to sleep. He would pull them out and examine them anew, try to use them to combat the terrible loneliness. And though they had seen him through some difficult times, they’d also caused him a fair amount of trouble.

  Like a dog trained to alert on a scent, he bolted upright and set his feet to the ground. The thoughts—or so he’d been told in prison—were where his story had begun. His obsessions had rooted and bloomed in his head then decayed, festered, and poisoned his mind. He’d have to work hard to fight them, he thought, and it was a battle he feared he wouldn’t win.

  It had started with porn and become violent porn, and when he became a young man, prostitutes. Remembering those clumsy first times, a sigh escaped his lips. He hadn’t known what to do or where to place his hands, but as ham-fisted as he’d been back then, he still remembered every moment fondly. With a prostitute, he could indulge his strangest fantasies. To a hooker, nothing—or next to nothing—was off limits. With the right amount of cash, satisfaction could be bought. Those had been some of the most liberating moments of his life. At first, he’d been timid and spineless, sticking to what people considered “vanilla sex”, but all too quickly, those acts had dulled, and he’d found himself wanting to push past traditional boundaries.

  His palms dampened. His throat went tight. He rubbed his hands against his jeans and cursed himself. “Stop it”, he whispered, but his thoughts spun wild, remembering the first time a woman allowed him to tie her the bed, then later, when she agreed to let him to simulate strangulation. He licked his lips. He’d been happy with that. He’d been able to function. The whispering had stopped. If only the contentment had endured. It hadn’t. It hadn’t back then, and it surely wouldn’t now. He was kidding himself if he thought this would work. In the end, the boredom always found where he was hiding, and when it did, the voices started whispering again.

  He stared at the ugly floral pattern on the walls. His mind had taken him through a strange metamorphosis, like a bat slowly unfurling its wings. The fantasies were like that, dark, and seductive, an unfolding that was so slow he’d almost missed it happening. Like any hopeless addict, he’d eventually wanted more, something dark and daring to achieve the original high.

  Trolling, it was called. That was the clinical term. It was something he’d learned about in prison. It was an activity that helped shape fantasies into darker dreams, a pursuit that often brought evil from the depths. It was the calm before the storm, so to speak. He remembered it well. It was the deep breath one took before the icy plunge. Trolling put faces on all the possible victims, for it was only when Carlton first began to stalk that he noticed particular feminine traits; height, weight, hair length, eye color. He developed affinities for certain attributes, for things he preferred, and things he found repulsive. He began to focus on a particular type of girl.

  That was when he lost all control.

  Trolling was an activity to avoid, he thought—that is if one wanted to be free. Carlton learned about many such terms in prison. There were many epithets describing people like him. Spree killers, serial killers, lust killers, mass murderers: people like Carlton, or so he was told, were angry and psychotic, showing little—if any—empathy for others. They were described as mentally ill or unbalanced, and were said to engage in ritualistic behaviors.

  Frowning, his eyes traced the green vines along the walls, thorn-covered stems connecting rust-colored freesia. He hated being referred to as mentally ill, but he could attest to some of the ritualistic behaviors.

  Escalation. He drew a quick breath. Now that was real. That was something he knew quite a bit about. His escalating visions had ultimately caused his incarceration.

  The term referred to the progression of something, how an act so titillating and dangerous at first, could quickly loose its luster, forcing the perpetrator to seek something more.

  Cupping his hands over his knees, he stared at the wall and tried to focus. He refused to fall prey to his addictions again. He must fight the visions, and the voices that whispered them. But the voices, he knew, would become loud and shrill. They would worm their way in, and nest in his brain, and like larvae, devour his mind.

  During his first sessions with his prison psychologist, he’d refused to talk about things like that. He’d repelled her attempts to make a personal connection, to talk about his crimes, or his feelings. But as his release date approached, his perspective slowly changed. Perhaps he’d succumbed to the rising panic, or had wondered if he’d make it outside. But whatever the reasons, he’d opened up to her. He’d told her things he’d never told another person, things about his past, about his family, and his childhood. He’d confirmed the theory of escalation. He could personally attest to its validity. It was real, and dangerous, a sickness, a disease. But was it unstoppable? That was the million-dollar question. Could Carlton be cured—actually rehabilitated? Could his worst impulses be disarmed with conscious thought? He’d wanted to know what she thought about that, if she believed he was fated to commit such terrible acts.

  He’d b
een sent to prison for a particular crime, but what the courts didn’t know—or his therapist, lawyers, or cellmates, for that matter—was that there’d actually been many more. There were things he desperately wanted to forget. He’d been caught, captured, and sentenced for one specific act, but in fact, there’d been lesser ones.

  So against his better judgment, he’d opened up to Sandra. He was frightened of himself, and he’d said so aloud. But as he sat here now, in this dark and quiet room, he wondered if the exercise had done him any good.

  He moved to the window, parted the drapes, and peered at the crowd below. The collection of protestors was beginning to thin, and the sun was setting on his first day of freedom. He watched its golden rays lengthen across a field of grass. The sun was mesmerizing, so big in the sky. He wondered if he could sneak outside to watch it set. Setting his trembling hands to the sill, he stared across the vast landscape. Could he do this? Could he make it out there? Could he rejoin society without transgressing against it? His psychologist hadn’t thought so. He’d known. Though she’d never actually said the words, her stiffness and pursed lips had betrayed her inner thoughts. Her shifty eyes and fluttering hands spoke louder than words ever could.

  Pressing his forehead to the cool smooth glass, he whispered aloud to the empty room. “Escalation,” he murmured, the word tantalizing and terrifying. Would it happen again? Would it take him over? And more importantly, if he felt the familiar urges again, would he be able to ignore them this time?

  Peering across the lawn, he looked for the shadow man, hidden behind the trees. If his familiar friend came calling again, would he be able to slam the door in his face?

  Chapter 3

  The Shadow Man

  Dr. Waite had focused his therapy on the theory of escalation. She’d wanted to ensure he was able to recognize the signs, for only when one was conscious of something, was he equipped to fight its effects. Carlton wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but he knew the term described him to a T. As a young man, he’d often lost control of himself, and he remembered it happening so quickly. As he matured, his fantasies evolved with his body, from sexual curiosity, to sex with prostitutes, and then finally, to sex with women he didn’t have to pay. And at the age of nineteen, he wasn’t bad looking. Hell, he told himself, he wasn’t bad looking right now.

  It had been so easy to find partners back then, women who were both willing and hungry to please. The hard part was convincing them to do what he wanted, and the hardest part, of course, was when realized he preferred when they didn’t. Their cries of refusal were more stimulating than sex.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” Sandra had said at their last session.

  She’d been staring him down, trying to see past his protective shell. She’d always done that, and for a long time, he’d fought her. He’d fought the connection she seemed to want to forge. He’d struggled to hold the mask up to his face, but at some point, he’d yielded to her incessant prodding. Perhaps it was the loneliness of his empty prison cell, the mutterings of his angry neighbors, or the threat of imminent freedom. Who knew? But whatever it was, he’d let the mask slip, and had worried since that she’d seen too much.

  In the beginning, he’d worried about her rank and position. Could she convince the parole board to delay his release? Would she break his confidence after making him trust her? It was a harrowing thought, in his opinion, the reason why therapy seldom worked in prison. If she ever gave the parole board her notebooks and files, they’d likely hunt him down and throw a noose over his head.

  But at some point, over time, it ceased to worry him. She’d do what she would with his private words, and in the end, there was nothing he could do. The important thing was to give it a try; if he didn’t try something, he’d fuck up again, and wind up in the same place he’d started. So he swallowed his fears and let her inside. He bared his concerns and studied himself. Besides, he thought, as he watched the dying sun, he’d been curious about her life. In a strange way, he’d grown to respect her, and he wondered what she saw when she looked into his eyes. Did she think she was wasting her time on him? Did she think him capable of change, or a hopeless addict?

  He remembered every moment of their last session together. She’d asked difficult questions and he’d struggled to find the answers.

  “What are you think about?” she repeated, her voice gentle and soothing.

  Lifting his head, he cocked it to one side “Thinking about life on the outside, I guess.” He smiled. “Thinking about whiskey, and beer. Cheeseburgers, and—”

  Thankfully he’d pausing before blurting out the rest of that sentence. Other things had come to mind, but he’d caught himself before saying them aloud.

  “What?” she had pressed, leaning forward in her chair. “You’ve got to be thinking about more than just food. I know when you’re lying. You’ve definitely got a tell.”

  “A tell?”

  “Of course. Look at your arm.”

  “My arm?” Dropping his gaze, he flinched. She was right. He’d been scratching his arm again, adding new red lines to existing white scars. His arm was a patchwork of braided white lines, a map of self-abuse that began when he was a boy.

  “Carlton, it’s okay to be nervous about this. It’s normal. It’s okay to be scared. You haven’t been free in…well… almost a decade. Be honest with yourself—and with me.” Her eyes were sincere; it made him uncomfortable. “It can be difficult for ex-convicts to re-assimilate into society. Sometimes it’s hard not to repeat the same patterns.” Folding her hands, she stared him down. “Is that what’s got you opening up childhood wounds? Have you been thinking about the theory of escalation again?”

  He licked his lips and pulled his sleeves over his arms. “I’ve thought about it, yes, but I’m not afraid of it anymore. I really don’t think it will happen again. I’m over that stuff. I’ve put it behind me.”

  “But it’s happened before,” she argued gently, slicking a hand through her short blond hair. “Rape is a difficult crime to rehabilitate. It’s not about the sex. You know that now. It’s about power and domination; for you, it’s about your mother.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I’m different now. I can control myself, and because I can, I don’t have to control other people anymore. I understand what made me do those terrible things I did, and because I understand, I can stop it from happening again. That’s what you’ve been telling me. That’s what you’ve always said: when we understand something, we can make different choices. You said that’s what normal people do to solve problems: they try to see the situation through someone else’s point of view. You said if I mastered my control issues, the rest would be easy. Isn’t that right?”

  She ignored the question by posing a different one. “Have you thought about what you’ll do once you’re a free man? You need to keep busy, Carlton. It’s important to keep your mind occupied, to keep your thoughts focused on task-based things.”

  Glancing at her, he folded his hands, mainly to keep them from shaking. “I’ll get a job, I suppose, as a driver, I think, or a delivery man. I’ll tend people’s gardens or clean their pools. Gardening sounds nice, planting seeds, and flowers, something I can do with my hands. I’ll get a small apartment, Doc. I want to be alone.”

  She nodded. “I can understand why you’d want that. But being alone isn’t healthy for humans. Yours is a plan that won’t work long term. What will you do when you need companionship? How will you respond to those kinds of desires? You’re still a young man, Carlton. It’s unreasonable to think you’ll spend the rest of your life alone.”

  Sitting back in her leather chair, she crossed her legs with a whisper of cloth. She was distracting sometimes—when she did things like that. She was an attractive woman: feminine, but strong. He remembered how her pants folded against her shapely legs, how they cupped her perfectly formed knees. He’d been angry that day when she’d avoided his question. He’d leaned across the table so fast she had flinched.

&n
bsp; “I’ll answer you, Sandy,” he’d practically spat, “but not until you answer me first. You said I could be normal, like a regular man. You said if I mastered my control issues, the rest would be easy, so answer me this: were you lying to me? Were you saying those things just to make me feel better? Because I understand the control thing now. I know what triggers me, and what sets me off, so the rest should be easy. Am I finally normal?”

  For the first time since their sessions had begun, he remembered her shifting uncomfortably in her chair. She was squirming like a worm on hot pavement. He hadn’t liked it. She hadn’t hidden her emotions very well, or concealed the slight tremor in her hands.

  He also remembered how he’d wanted her approval, how badly he’d needed it, how much it had meant. In this huge world that had swallowed him whole, there must exist someone who believed in him, someone who had finally taken his side. There must be someone who had deemed him worthy.

  She lifted her coffee and took a small sip, obviously stalling for time. To her credit, she seemed to be pondering the question, but he wondered, now, if she’d always known her answer.

  “Carlton,” she began, her eyes settling on him. “I think this is a demon you’ll fight all your life. You’re not like other men.” She chewed her lip, deep in thought. “Normal is a difficult word to define. Try not to think of things in those terms.”

  He watched the setting sun flatten against the horizon. The prognosis, when she gave it, was devastating, and her delivery had been condescending and cruel. He’d been angry with her, and he’d let that anger show.

  “But doesn’t escalation usually end in murder? I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never taken it that far.”