Authors: Alan Spencer
“You could do that?” He brightened, imagining the kid in his mind and mentally squashing him. “The things I could do to that kid, he’d know true pain.”
Dr. Krone heartily shook his hand. “It’d be my pleasure, sir.”
The Late Call
Craig was venturing from one extreme to the next, and the adrenaline rush didn’t recede. Endorphins were replenished and burned and replenished again. His armpits were sopping wet and so was his back. He quivered in the wake of such an experience. It’d been years since he pictured and recreated the scenario in his mind, how he’d change the way that night had unfolded. He whooped, and hollered, and cheered. “Yeah! Fuck them. Fuck Janna in the ass. She’s a slut. Nobody crosses Craig Horsy and gets away with it clean.”
He was driving an ’81 Fiesta now. The rust bucket struggled up the hill, the engine gasping and clunking. The evening air blew with a chill, and he shivered, being glazed in sweat. He read the dashboard clock, and it was 7:30. He was dressed in black jeans and a navy-blue sweater with a red stripe across the chest. Craig’s hardhat and orange reflective vest were heaped on top of each other in the passenger seat. This was the brief spell he was working beside his father with the city. It lasted three months, and he vowed never to work alongside his father again patching roads and sidewalks. It was to pay rent, and that was it. But tonight had nothing to do with Brandon or his job prospects. Alice Denny called him twenty minutes ago. She was desperate, and she wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. He sped across town at Briar Ridge, which was about twenty miles from his original home. He lost touch with Alice post high school. She started dating a guy named Dylan Thomas, and like many friends, time had its way with them. It’d almost been a full year since he’d last spoken with her.
Alice lived with Dylan in an apartment downtown. He passed the Indiana Airport and Amtrak station. The main road turned into an avenue of fast food restaurants and low-rent hotels, and on the outskirts of that area, stood the apartment building named Corner Square Commons. The buildings resembled tall white houses, four stories tall. There were six huddles of them. Alice was located on the very end of the series in apartment 4C.
He dreaded the arrival. Alice wouldn’t tell him why she wanted him there. Her voice was flat and without character, the throat stripped down to the barest of functions. “Please come over to my place, Craig. I need your help. Don’t ask me anything. Just come here now.” Weeping, “
Please
.”
Craig steadied the wheel and drove into a parking space. Getting out and stepping to the entrance of the apartments, the night had disguised the run-down façade of the building into a shadowy tower. Green shutters were broken. The rails of the stairs wobbled at the touch. The carpet over the stairs inside was faded and coming up at the edges. The walls had been punched with holes and poorly spackled.
He froze on the first level. “I don’t want to do this, Dr. Krone.” Turning back to the door, but freezing in place, he knew there was no turning back without facing the next thing. Craig waited, caught up in his indecision. Would the doctor show up and save him from the horrible memory, perhaps bring him to Lake Jacomo and have a chat? A blink, and he’d be there. That’s how it kept happening. He wasn’t allowed much reaction time to any of this, and it was exhausting. The last round would’ve been a wonderful finale, but there was so much else to accomplish, he sensed, before the treatment was over.
“What else do you have for me?” he asked the walls, the ceiling, the stairs, anybody who’d listen. “I need a break. Time out, okay? Where are you, Dr. Krone? Speak to me. Why are you hiding? You’re watching, aren’t you? Show yourself. Damn it, why are you treating me like this? If I’m your patient, why won’t you see me?”
Dr. Krone wasn’t coming. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The staircase was blank of human presence or the desperately needed answers he required.
This is supposed to make me feel better?
Fuck you, Dr. Krone. Fuck you.
Craig charged up the stairs, fired up for the wrong reasons. He couldn’t avoid it. Dr. Krone ran the show. He was helpless to choose his next move because it had been provided for him.
“This is truly against my will. I’ve missed you, Alice, but I didn’t want to see you like this. Not like
this
.”
He walked the stairs up to the second floor and completed the third. The final floor, the fourth, he read across the board—4A, 4B, and 4C—and he kept quivering, feeling his pulse rise, the heat on his back a beast of a blush. His instincts commanded him to turn around and forget the venture regardless of the consequences.
Just see it through. It might not happen the way you remember. It’s worked out that way a few times.
Still uncomfortable, he was close enough to Alice’s apartment that he could see her door was a fraction ajar. He opened it all the way and closed it behind him. He called in softly, “Alice, are you there?”
“Lock the door behind you,” she managed through tears. “I’m in the bathroom.”
“Where’s Dylan?”
“He’s gone.” She wept harder. “I showed him what had happened, and he left me. He said, he said,
he said he loved me.
”
Craig carefully chose his next steps. The lights were off in the other half of the apartment. The thin crack of yellow light beckoned him from a short hallway.
He tried to dodge any surprises, “What’s wrong, Alice?”
Now her voice was flat. “I want you to come in and help me.”
“You said Dylan’s gone?”
Alice was quiet. He stayed outside the bathroom door, afraid to open it. “I’m here, Alice. Tell me what’s going on.”
Under her breath, “
Just come inside
.”
Craig edged the door open with two fingers. Slowly, he entered, and then viewed Alice who was deathly pale, as white as the terrycloth bathrobe she had wrapped around herself. She sat on the edge of the shower, eyes affixed on the closed toilet. She didn’t blink or look up when he entered. He wasn’t sure what to say.
He noted the droplets of blood around the circumference of the toilet. Ruby-red drops. He eyed the blood, Alice, the blood, Alice, the blood. “W-what’s this? What happened, Alice?”
He touched Alice’s arm lovingly, lowering to her level. “Are you hurt?”
Alice’s eyes pooled, wet and fat tears spilled down her cheeks. Her skin flushed a purple shade, like she’d been holding her breath for too long. “I told Dylan, and he left me. He said he didn’t love me anymore. He doesn’t understand. I didn’t tell him because I was scared. He just doesn’t understand.” She eyed the closed toilet, mentally cursing it. “He’ll be back. He’s just scared.”
“I don’t understand what’s wrong?”
She pointed at the toilet. “You have to…
look
.”
He reached for the toilet rim, but he didn’t lift it up yet. Alice watched him. She wanted him to see it. He didn’t understand what possessed him to lift it—because he knew what it was, and that’s what had him running the first time he’d done this in his life—but he did so now anyway. The water was blood red. Spattered.
The miscarriage.
Craig fell through the door, landing on his palms and knees, and scooping himself up, he fled into the living room. Frantically collecting himself, he dialed 9-1-1 and demanded an ambulance. And after he belted out the information to the dispatcher, he hung up, the phone missing its destination and hanging from its cord, bobbing in place. He rushed out the door, and listening, Alice didn’t call for him again. Down the stairs, he conquered the task of escaping, and once the night air struck him, he could breathe again. He was dizzy and plopped down onto the seat of his car. He couldn’t stay with her, the bloody sight churning his stomach, forever branding his memory with a blot of horror. He wanted Alice to be of sound mind, but this was beyond his reach and beyond his experience. The dead half-formed baby sucked any fight he had left to change the past. Again.
Lake Jacomo
Craig couldn’t be any happier to return to the frozen-over lake. The refuge appealed to him so much he ran straight for it. He pressed his back to the snow-covered ice and formed snow angels. Flakes dropped from the sky in light blankets, and he let them touch his tongue and melt.
He was free of Alice’s tragedy. Guilt attached itself to his freedom. It was the same regret he experienced that exact night. He abandoned her. He failed to see her through the ordeal. But it was over now. The snow, the lake, the seclusion, it was easy to shove Alice back into his deepest memories and move on.
As he expected, Dr. Krone crunched across the snow, bounding down a set of long ice-covered stairs to reach the lake. Craig was about to verbalize a greeting when he caught the doctor’s grim expression. He stopped three yards from the iced-over lake.
Dr. Krone accused, “
You
.”
The scowl continued to take shape, everything in his features curling and then hardening. The fat man’s face was capable of many expressions despite its soft quality. “You’re not going along with the program. You ran away from her. What kind of a friend are you? This was supposed to be a turning point for you. A big one, too. You were supposed to see her through her horrible time.”
“I was scared,” Craig argued, standing up from the ice and struggling not to slip on the way up. “I’m doing fucking fantastic, I think. It’s hard going back in time and reliving your hardest memories. It’s messing with me, so forgive me if I screw up. I’ve always had regrets about Alice. I have no idea if she’d ever forgive me for that night or if she hates me.”
“You had no problem with that memory with Susan. Oh, and those kids who played the joke on you at the Italian restaurant, you embraced it. You have to take the good with the bad, Mr. Horsy. It’s part of your treatment. You can’t get better without complete participation. Give yourself over to the treatment.” Now a whisper. “
Give yourself over to me
.”
Craig refused to accept the scolding without a fight. He charged at Dr. Krone and pushed him to the ground. He flopped backwards, legs lifting high, as he connected against the ice with a thud. “Fuck you, Doctor! Until you’ve run the gauntlet yourself, I suggest you settle down.”
He glared up at Craig, offended. His face was cherry red and turning darker. Dr. Krone worked back to a standing position, and after a long struggle—even waving Craig off after he offered to help him despite his current sentiments—he moved in close to Craig, cocking his head to the side. “Mr. Horsy, I’ve experienced my mind inside and out. I have ‘run the gauntlet’. I’m perfectly happy with my past. And I’ve been in many heads—yours and maybe a thousand others. It’s mesmerizing, and it’s a dreadful shame you’re not embracing the tragedies with the rewards. It offends me that you shirk in the face of perfection. Yes, you flinched. They all do. That’s why I’m the doctor, and you’re the patient. You need guidance. I give all my patients a chance to treat themselves, so to speak, but it sounds like you need my help as much as the rest.” Eyes brimming with angry tears, he rasped, “
I guess I have to intervene
.”
Craig backed up, suddenly terrified of the man, the genius lunatic. He was the one in power, and the doctor wanted to use it. He was unsettled and knew he couldn’t continue with this mysterious, cutting-edge treatment anymore. “Okay, let me go. Unhook me from the machine. This is finished. I don’t trust you. If you’re so genuine and honest, then I can leave when I want to, right? You forced me onto that machine against my will.”
“It had to happen that way,” the doctor said. “Nobody hands themselves over to treatment without sedatives and restraints. This happens in many treatments. You’re no exception, Mr. Horsy.”
“How did I get here?—that letter, I was really supposed to be at Dr. Herbert’s office. You did something to me. Tell me how I got here, and no more of your lies.”
His eyes widened, their color as bright as wind-kissed embers in a fire pit. “Fine, I’ll show you.”
The blink happened.
Craig rose from his twin-sized bed and clutched his back. Every time he slept longer than eight hours, the kink in his back was razor sharp. It was the day of his psychiatrist’s visit, and he dreaded it. Afterwards, he’d drive to the unemployment office and seek work. The first unemployment check hadn’t shown up. His case was under review.
He stripped from his pajama bottoms and the faded Cinderella metal band T-shirt. He trudged to the bathroom, washing his face in the sink. When he lifted up his head from the first splash, Rachael opened the bathroom door. Startled, the event happening too fast to process, he was seized by the neck, bent over, and a pinprick entered his back. His body went loose, and he flapped his arms against invisible waves of liquid, and drowning in them, he dropped to his knees. Then a black curtain fell, ushering him to sleep in the darkness, but first he seized Rachael by the leg, brought her down, and that’s when she growled at him, and the weapon swiftly came down in a blur of metal. A quick refraction of silver in light, and the head of the hammer pounded into his skull.
The blink happened.
He returned to Lake Jacomo. The winter. The snow pelted him, the light curtains now firing down in blinding fury. The doctor was disguised by the curtain of snow and rain mixture. The man’s secret was revealed, and he was prepared to explain why it happened.
“I kidnapped you. Yes, you were supposed to be at Dr. Herbert’s, but I took the initiative to take you in as a patient. Nobody gives themselves completely over to any treatment. But like my father, I want to cure people through and through. I won’t waste your time with expensive and pointless visits and introspection that fails to go anywhere. Talking does nothing. Dr. Herbert would’ve failed you. That’s why I reference other doctors’ patients in the area, and I get my hands on whoever I can, like you. Rachael’s a master of breaking into facilities and stealing information. It’ll benefit society in the long run. You’ll see. I did this for the good of mankind. Sometimes bad things have to happen before something good can happen.