Authors: Tim Curran
6
Lights out.
Romero was laying on his bunk, thinking and trying not to. There were a lot of things flying around in his head, a real shitstorm is what it was. He was thinking about the kid, about Palmquist, thinking how it was going to be for the little bastard when Reggie Weems and his crew started turning up the heat, started making these beatings a daily thing. How it was going to be when they all started using him, passing him around like a five-dollar hooker in a lumber camp. Because that’s where this trail always led. The kid was in for it. Maybe he already had a taste at Brickhaven, but it was going to be worse here.
Things were always worse at Shaddock.
Romero had seen it before and it always made him sick. Sick to watch some kid putting up with that, his dignity stripped away from him day by miserable day until there wasn’t anything left when those animals were through. Until Palmquist was a pale, trembling thing, a bitch that only spoke when spoken to, that would suck dick or spread his cheeks anytime some lifer snapped his oily fingers.
Romero couldn’tlit get involved.
He got in Weems’ way and there was going to be trouble. And it could only end one way, with Romero shanking him, stabbing that dumb fucking spade until he bled out. And if Romero did that, he made that choice, one of Weems’ crew would rat on him. See to it that he was sitting here at Shaddock Valley for another ten or twenty years. Jesus. The idea of that made Romero’s throat squeeze tight until he could barely fill his lungs with air. But to watch Palmquist go like that…
Reggie Weems is going to be the least of that kid’s worries and you know it now that Papa Joe is putting Tony Gordo on him. Even if the kid slips away from Weems there’s no way in hell he’ll get away from that fucking monster.
Romero had done his share of time. But never in all those years did humping somebody’s ass seem like a good alternative. It was that bad on you, you used your hand. But some of these guys, they liked it just fine, the sex you could get here in prison.
So you’re just going to let them degrade that kid, aren’t you?
a voice of guilt hammered at him, just when he’d thought it was long dead. A con with a conscience of all crazy things.
Let them turn him into their whore, break him wide open, tear his soul right out…and you’re just going to stand back and let it happen?
Romero didn’t know.
He didn’t know much of anything these days.
So he shut his eyes and tried not to see Reggie Weems or Tony Gordo. He let sleep take him, because tomorrow was just another day like this one and the one two years ago and the one two years from now. Day by day by pissing day, it never changed when you were doing time.
You hardened your heart and bleached your soul white and just looked the other way. It was the only way to get by.
7
Romero woke and he had no idea what time it was.
It was just late.
And dark.
Something was going on and he wasn’t sure what the hell it could be, but it was real or otherwise it wouldn’t have woken him. He listened. Heard his own breathing, the kid’s above him. But something else, too, something that made his throat go dry and the flesh at his scalp go tight and hot. It was a funny wet sort of sound, all sqen uishy and slimy-sounding like something was being pulled out of a drain with a coat hanger.
The springs above him creaked ever so slightly and Palmquist shifted up there…only Romero could still hear him breathing deep and long. He was thinking that whatever was moving up there…it wasn’t the kid. He didn’t know what it was, but he could hear it sliding around with a moist unpleasant sound like a baby crawling free of afterbirth.
Jesus…those sounds…what the hell is happening up there?
Romero figured he didn’t want to know, because whatever it was, it was just plain bad, something you just didn’t want to look upon. The air had gone hot and dank with a gassy odor like rotting cabbage and Romero was gripping the edges of his bunk as if he was on a rollercoaster and was afraid the car might tip him out at any moment. It was a wild ride and his guts were slicked with cold jelly, his eyes wide and sightless in the darkness. He was thinking about that homemade knife behind the radiator…but he didn’t dare go for it, didn’t dare make a sound.
Didn’t want what was up there to
hear
him.
So he lay there, stiff as a plank, his muscles bunched and his nerve endings jangling like Christmas bells, a scream lodged in his throat in a sharp, cutting mass.
More movement.
Whatever was up there with the kid, it was in motion now, moving along the bunk with a stealthy, slithering sound. It found the wall, slapped wetly against it and started to inch along, making for the bars. Romero was thinking something like a slug here, but big and fleshy and horrible and he didn’t know all what. As it pulled itself along the wall, it made faint chirruping noises, clicking sounds like claws or teeth kissing that concrete.
It would ooze forward a moment or two, then pause…as if checking now and then to see if anyone was listening.
Romero was listening, but not moving. For hearing it was one thing, but seeing…no, the idea of that curdled his guts like sour milk.
And then it…
leaped
through the air, hit the bars with a splattering sound. Romero could hear it breathing, gurgling. In the wan light from the guard’s station, he could see something large and shapeless spread out on the bars like a huge, rubbery spider, contorting boneless limbs spread out in every direction. It was shuddering and pulsing, taking its time and Romero just squeezed his eyes shut, could not look at that thing any longer, told himself it was a nightmare and the thing was just some nebulous horror that had crawled alive and kicking from one of his childhood dreams.
And then…it was ghe n…it one.
It went right through the bars with a sound like bacon grease dropped in a bucket or mush stirred with a spoon.
Romero was shaking, sweating, doing everything he could not to piss himself or vent that scream buried in his throat. He lay there, trying to catch his breath, wiping perspiration from the gutters under his eyes. Above him, Palmquist was dead asleep, breathing deep and even, lost to the world.
Romero started to think all kinds of awful things, but none of it made a lick of sense and his mind was full of shit and he wondered, really wondered, if maybe he could have dreamt it all.
And part of him latched onto that, told him in an authoritative, reasonable voice that, yes, of course it was a dream…what else could it have been?
About twenty minutes later, though, somebody started screaming.
And the screams…they didn’t last long at all.
8
Of course, the prison came alive.
Sometimes you heard screams at night, guys getting shanked or raped and sometimes it was just some con losing his mind, cracking up from the solitude and the cage they kept him in and dozens of things you would never really know about. His mind would go to sauce and he’d start thrashing around, throwing himself at the walls and biting the bars and throwing his shit at anyone that got near like a monkey in a carnival pen.
Sergeant Warres was in charge of the hacks on the graveyard shift and he came up the stairs to D Block, looking pissed-off and anxious to break some skulls with the stick he was swinging at his hip. He was on his walkie-talkie, wanting to know what in the name of Jesus H. Jumping Clusterfucking Christ was going on up there. He cut some orders straight away over his box and his guards did their thing, told the cons to shut their mother-raping, cunting mouths and go to sleep or the lot of them would be thrown in the hole.
It worked and D Block got real quiet, though everyone had to know that there were only thirty Ad-Seg cells to be had. Administrative Segregation, politically correct title, was where guys went when they got out of line and sometimes even when they didn’t. It was a nasty, dark, buggy place. And if you thought you’d been alone a lot in your life, you had no conception of what real solitude was until you were locked down in the damp, crawling darkness by yourself.
But it worked and Warres came down the corridor, ignorinup 8g his guard’s request to turn on the big lights. Security lights were fine, he figured. They were spaced every fifty feet and dim, so that the block corridors were thick with shadows. But that didn’t bother Warres, for once the switch was thrown and those doors were shut, nobody got out of their cells…except on the late, late show.
Houle was down there. He was one of the newbies and he looked just as green as frog shit, pale and sweating and about half out of his mind. Warres passed by all those cons pressed up against the bars of their cages, bulging white eyes in black faces and shining red eyes in white faces and damn, he’d never seen them looking so scared before. All the tough-guy, hardass con bullshit had dried up like a pond.
These guys were scared shitless.
Warres got up to Houle, said, “What do you got?”
Houle could barely get a word out without gasping. “Don’t go in there, Sarge…Jesus, Weems…I think it’s Weems…he’s all ripped apart…”
The cell door was open and in his flashlight beam, Warres could see something wet and dark slicked on the bars, a puddle of it coming out under the door. He sucked in a breath and put his light in there, almost screamed himself. Weems looked like a pillow that had its stuffing scattered in every conceivable direction. His insides were on the floor, smeared on the walls, dripping from the ceiling.
His head was bobbing in the shitter, eyes wide and glistening in the flashlight beam.
Weems’ cellie, a skinny black guy everyone called Porker, was kneeling on his bed, the top bunk, holding himself and shaking, completely out of his mind. There was blood on him and bits of tissue. He was shivering and sobbing and whispering something no one else could hear.
Enough.
“All right,” Warres said. He got on his walkie-talkie. “We got an incident down here…”
9
After the scream, Romero did not get back to sleep.
He lay there like the rest of the inmates, bunched and tense and holding his breath, thinking about things that made his flesh crawl. There was electricity feeding through him, as it was probably feeding through everyone on D, like a wire had been stuck up his ass.
But Romero wasn’t like the others.
He knew things and maybe he did not know at all. He’d heard that scream just fine, long and high and sharp and cut short as if something wet had been stuffed in its owner’s mouth.
So he lay there until things began to die down and a silence that was heavy and thick lay over the prison. Around that time he heard something slither back through the bars and smelled the hot, yeasty stink of rancid fermentation. Palmquist started to moan and thrash.
Sometime later, he began to cry in his sleep.
Or maybe it was Romero himself.
10
Next day, it was all you heard about.
Didn’t matter where you were or whom you were with, the topic of conversation was always the same. The prison became a rumor mill and awful, unbelievable stories began to circulate in that close, sullen atmosphere like disease germs, infecting anyone with a set of ears. Some of the stories were darkly humorous, others like something yanked out of a horror comic or a campfire ghost story. But they kept making the rounds, from the carpentry shop to the craftshop, the mattress factory to the library and the metal shop where license plates were stamped out.
And it was funny, but all the groups and gangs that hated each other on site, mellowed incrementally, seemed to realize that they were all in the same boat together, running the same risk of sinking in the night like Reggie Weems. Sometimes, a common enemy or common fear could do wonders at a place like Shaddock Valley.
Out in the yard that afternoon, Romero was sitting with his usual bunch—Riggs and Aquintez, a few Latin gangsters and white criminals that had been around the block a long time—discussing the shit, sifting fact from fantasy whenever possible. But it all kept circling back like buzzards on the trail of roadkill: what had happened to Weems was a lot like what had happened to those cons over at Brickhaven. And that got a guy to thinking, maybe trying to make some connections where there weren’t any or where they were strung so thick they’d trip you right up.
Romero’s crew was joined by a shifty, bearded black guy in a wool hat called Beaks because of his sharp, Roman nose. Beaks was doing all-day for murdering his wife and her lover while he was on a coke binge: life without parole. Beaks was locked in the cell across the corridor from Reggie Weems, so people were listening to what he had to say.
“Heard that scream, fuck yes,
shit
…how could you have not heard it? Weems…motherfucker was screaming like something was tearing his balls off. Never Fgerd did hear nothing like that before.” Beaks pulled off his cigarette, watching some cons playing a game of pick-up in the distance. “Weems, shit, ya’ll know Weems, big ape-ugly motherfucker what ate his meat raw…I thought right away, somebody was in there, got to him. Shit, but you know that motherfucker, nobody play tag with his black ass.”
“What’d you see?” Aquintez wanted to know.
“It was dark and shit over there, but I heard something, something wet and sliding…I don’t know what the fuck it was…making funny-ass sounds or something, squealing or hissing or some such shit. That’s what I hear first and I think: Shit, what the fuck going down over there? Then Weems lets go with that scream. Man, it was crazy hoodoo bullshit, way I’m remembering it.”
And that was as close as he could get to it.
In the joint, murders were common place. Guys got shanked or piped, thrown off railings or had their food laced with Decon. Now and again, you had something more creative like an electrocution or what was known as a “down-home barbecue”: gas dumped through the bars while some con was in lock-up, his cell and himself drenched with the stuff, then a match tossed in there.
But what the forensic team that went into Cell #17, Weems’ cell, found was unpleasant even for a prison killing. More than unpleasant, but vicious and psychotic and unexplainable. Houle, the hack who first found Weems, said he’d been ripped apart, mutilated, but that didn’t begin to cover it. He had been dismembered and eviscerated, his bowels strung around the cell like streamers of crepe at a kiddy party. His spinal column had actually been pulled out of his back, his head severed but not before his genitals were sheared free and shoved so far down his throat the pathologist had to open his esophagus to get them out. And that was only part of it. Besides the blood and macerated organs, some of Weems’ bones had been yanked through the skin and were riddled with teeth marks.
And then there was Porker, Weems’ cellmate.
They had to take him out in a straight-jacket after he was held down and shot full of Thorazine, the entire time babbling and moaning and whimpering crazy shit about “monsters” and “things that looked like people without bones.” He was taken to the state hospital that morning for intensive psychotherapy.
“All I know for sure, man,” Beaks was saying to them, “is that something got in there, something I don’t want to be thinking about. Whatever it was and whatever the fuck it wanted, they had to take Weems’ ass out in bags and buckets, had to mop the floor to get the rest of him.”
Romero listened and didn’t say a thing.
But he was thinking plenty.