314 Book 2 (14 page)

“No, just mind-numbingly ignorant.
At the precipice of discovery, we find ourselves weighed down by fear. We stand on the verge of greatness, burdened only by our inability to take the final leap. What sort of…”

“Enough philosophical bullshit,” said Tom. “Save it for someone who cares.”

“He’s met The Skeleton Man,” said Oliver.

Tom looked down at Paul. “Just another reason to lock him up and throw away the key.”

Tom walked to the end of the bed and kicked a lever underneath it. Paul’s feet fell as his head
rose, a disorienting shift in perspective as he was stood upright, still strapped to the gurney. He felt his feet slide dawn against a cold metal shelf that he could stand on as the restraints around his ankle tightened. He wasn’t perpendicular to the floor, but rather at a slight angle that caused him to stare at where the walls met the ceiling. Tom moved around behind him and kicked another lever that made Paul suddenly mobile.

Oliver
blocked the door.

“Move it
,” said Tom from behind Paul.

“
Please reconsider this, Tom. I’ve been waiting for a chance like this for sixteen years. You can’t possibly understand what this could mean for us.”

“I understand that I was sent here to put an end to this, once and for all,” said Tom. “You’ve flushed enough funds down the shitter.”

“Money?” Oliver was exasperated. “Is that all you people ever think about? If you’d let me do my work we’d never have to worry about money again. Cada E.I.B. would be wealthier than most countries!”

“314,” said Paul.

Both Tom and Oliver stopped arguing. Oliver stared at Paul and asked, “What did you say?”

“The name of the company is code for pi,” said Paul. “Right?”

Tom chuckled from behind Paul. “Kid, you just keep digging your hole deeper and deeper.”

Oliver
hushed the old guard, and then looked back at Paul. “How do you know that? Why are you here? Were you planning on staying here until the fourteenth? What were you going to do?”

“That’s enough,” said Tom as he tried to push the gurney forward.

Oliver put his foot in front of the wheel, halting Tom’s progress. “Why did one of you write 314 on the floor in blood? Did you know Alma or her mother before they died?”

“What?” asked Paul, suddenly furious. “If you hurt her I swear to God I’ll…”

“Hurt her?” asked the doctor, bewildered. “We never hurt her. Alma and her mother died in a murder-suicide twelve years ago.”

Paul just stared at the doctor, unable to respond.

“Her mother drove her off a cliff and into a lake not far from here. They both drowned.”

“No.” Paul felt the blood drain from his face. “That can’t be. I love her. I was going to ask her to marry me.”

Tom laughed. “Christ, this asshole’s a mental case. He thinks he’s in love with a dead girl. Move out of the way, Oliver. It’s time we close the book on the Widowsfield experiment.”

There was a time when I was free to wander Widowsfield. I’d been working there with a man named Oliver, who wanted to know everything about how the town had looked right before the incident on March 14
th
, 1996. I drew pictures for him, detailing as much information as I could get. He wasn’t willing to pay me very much at first, but I was eventually able to get a sizeable raise.

When I first got to Widowsfield, I had no idea what I was stepping in to. This was just supposed to be a short-time gig, but it ended up dominating my every waking moment. Every time I sketched out a picture in that notebook for him, I felt tied even closer to the events. They intermingled into my own life, as if the fates of the people that lived in Widowsfield were somehow tied to my own.

All those poor people.

Maybe that’s why I come back; like the last living family member visiting a graveyard, hoping to connect with loved ones that have passed on. That’s not it though. If anything, I’m the last sentinel left that can keep the corpses in their graves.

Lost in Widowsfield

Alma didn’t know where to run.

The fog was behind her, and Widowsfield was ahead.

They were trapped in the Widowsfield of March
14th, 1996. It was nearly 3:14, and nothing made sense any more. She’d fled with the others from Aubrey, who had turned into some sort of demon, bleeding and breaking as they watched.

She looked back
and saw that the fog had closed in on her. Stephen was carrying Rachel, her ankle twisted from falling as they ran, and Jacker was in front of them.

“Keep going,” said the bearded stranger – the man that Alma couldn’t explain how she knew.
Her first memory of him was when he busted down the door of her apartment because he thought she was in trouble. Why he’d been guarding the door was a mystery to them both.

The fog advanced, yards ahead of where it had been, now well past the van. A black shape twisted in the mist, and when the green electricity coursed along the cloud it never penetrated the shade.

Alma faced forward, now running through an unfamiliar neighborhood. She closed her eyes and focused only on the sound of her bare feet hitting the pavement. The rhythmic slap and the sensation of the pebbles on the road were a sort of salvation from the hell that surrounded her.

“Keep going!” Jacker screamed at her, but
he sounded far off.

She glanced back, and saw that the fog had enveloped her friends. It was flowing down the street like a tidal w
ave, and the silhouettes of the others were hardly perceptible against the monstrous dark hidden within the mist.

“In here,” said a child from somewhere nearby.

Alma saw a girl, sopping wet, her black hair clinging to her pale forehead. She was at the threshold of a house to Alma’s right, wearing a nightgown that was stuck to her skin and nearly translucent. She waved at Alma, and then retreated into the house.

The fog bank continued to roll across the street, the green electricity crackling along its edge and snapping at objects that were swallowed by the mass. The little girl’s home seemed to be the only possible refuge from the wave, and Alma had little choice but to head that way. She ran into the house and slammed the door behind her.

A young boy yelped in shock as Alma came through the door. He was no older than ten, with dirty feet and rolled up jeans. He had on oven mitts and was carrying a pot of boiling water through the living room from the kitchen, following a muddy path up the stairs.

“Who are you?” asked the boy.

There were other children in the house, some up the stairs and others in the kitchen. They all stopped to stare at the invader.

“I’m Alma,” she said. “The girl invited me in.”

“What girl?” asked the boy with the pot of water.

“The one with the black hair,” said Alma. “She was just here.”

“There’re no girls here,” said one of the boys in the kitchen, the tallest of the group but still just a child. “They’re all headed to the reservoir to see the warship. They can’t come here. Only us men can handle these jobs.”

A piercing wail came from up the stairs. Alma stumbled back to the door as she stared up, terrified of what had happened to incite such a pained cry.

The boy with the pot of water headed up the stairs. “I have to go before the dead one tries anything.”

Two
other boys came down, moving to allow the child with the pot of water to go up. The two coming down had pots of their own, and scowled at Alma as they passed. She looked into their pots and saw that they were empty.

“What are you doing?” asked Alma. “What’s going on up there?” As a teacher, it was natural for her to feel suddenly protective of the children, like a mother hen adopting a flock. “Be careful with that water.”

A man screamed again from upstairs and Alma rushed ahead of the boy with the water. She pointed at the stairs and commanded, “Put that down, now.”

“No,” said the boy. “Who do you think you are? We’ll boil you too.”

“What?” asked Alma, but didn’t have time to argue. She needed to put a stop to whatever was happening in this house.

Then the fog covered the home, swiftly blocking the sunlight that had been coming in through the windows. She felt suddenly chilled as the cloud overcame them, but the children seemed delighted, some even cheering.

“We’re safe,” said a child from the kitchen.

“He didn’t forget us,” said another.

“Of course he didn’t,” said the boy on the stairs behind Alma. “He’s our friend. He’ll protect us.”

Alma walked down the hall, her feet squishing in the wet carpet as she went. There was something going on in the bathroom, and she went to the door to see if someone within was hurt
– what she saw was more shocking than anything she could’ve possibly been prepared for.

A young boy was
standing in the middle of the bathroom, his cheeks bleeding and a straight razor in his hand. Another boy was on the edge of the tub holding an electric drill that was plugged into an outlet beside the mirror.

“He keeps waking up,” said the boy with the
drill just before he saw Alma at the door.

Alma was aghast, a sense of true horror freezing her as she stared into the bathroom. A man, or what was left of one, was seated in the tub. His left arm was raised, tied to the shower head with a long wire, and his head was flopped to the side. The child with the
drill was grasping the man’s hair, and was pointing the drill bit into his victim’s lower jaw. The unconscious man’s skin was bright red, burned and ripped, with slices across his naked chest. His lower lip had been partially severed, left to hang like a piece of dinner from his drooping jaw.

“Don’t come any closer,” said the boy with the
drill.

Alma couldn’t speak. She was paralyzed by fear.

The boy with the razor turned to her and screamed in shock. “No!” He raised the blade to his throat and started to saw madly, easily slicing into his jugular and releasing a gush of blood. He dropped the blade as he fell to his hands and knees, the blood pumping from his throat and mixing with the fluid on the floor.

Alma had seen throats slashed in horror films countless times, but seeing it for real was something
completely different. The child didn’t fall dead, an immediate victim of his self-inflicted wound. Instead, he crawled on the bathroom floor as the blood pumped out, gushing with the cadence of his heartbeat. He reached up to touch his throat, seeming to want to cover his wound, but then had to put his hand back down to keep balanced. A sliced throat was not a quick death. It was agony.

“I don’t want to be your dog!” The other child, still holding the drill while perched on the edge of the filled tub, was screaming at Alma. He swung his legs over the side and into the hot, bloody soup, and then dropped the drill in.

The bathroom went dark as the lights above the mirror exploded. Alma was blinded for a moment and could only listen as the child’s body thrashed in the tub, splashing water over the edge. Then the socket where the drill was plugged in zapped, revealing a haunting snapshot of the room. One boy was still on his hands and knees, while the other was in the corner of the tub furthest from Alma, apparently propelled there by a violent reaction to his electrocution. However, even worse than the sight of the dead and dying children, was that the adult corpse in the tub was now standing.

Alma was frozen, but not by
terror. Her entire body was clenched and held in place, and if it weren’t for the sensation of pressure against her skin she might’ve assumed she’d been paralyzed. She could see and breathe, but it felt as if she were wrapped by some tightening restraint.

The light socket zapped again, revealing the man in the tub as he reached up to the wire that tied his wrist to the shower head.

Smoke filled the room, and the smell was sickening. Alma had never smelled anything like it – a mixture of melting wallpaper, burning wood, and cooking flesh.

The socket crackled again, but this time a flame came to life, shooting up the wall as if following accelerant. The darkness abated, but Alma’s vision barely improved. The entire bathroom was now flooded with what she thought was smoke, but then saw the swirling mass wrappi
ng itself around her body. She realized that the fog had caught her. It seized her as if it were a solid object, and was the reason she’d been forced to stand aside and watch as the two boys committed suicide.

Alma could hear the man in the tub
moving. She heard the wire scrape on the metal shower head as he pulled it off. Water dripped from his body, plopping in the tub, and then she heard the droplets hitting the floor and knew that he was walking her way. The fog was too thick for Alma to see, but she could feel the man’s presence coming closer.

Then his teeth chattered.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said The Skeleton Man. “It’s not time for you yet.”

March 14
th
, 1998