Deep in the Darkness (14 page)

"They have Christine..." she spat, teeth baring down on her bottom lip. Blood poured out like a fountain.

Jesus Christ, how does she know my wife's name?

Then she let go of me and went back to her spasms, legs and arms and head twitching like mad. I had the nutty desire to start shaking her but this song was about to end. I threw myself back against the wall, looking at a kidney or a liver on the cement walkway that'd met its fate beneath my knee. Her body stiffened up one last time then released itself and went motionless. Something foul-smelling hit me like a bag of potatoes. Her eyes glossed over.

End of song.

I sat there against the house for an indeterminate amount of time, knowing very well that someone, my family included, might nonchalantly stumble upon this horrific scene—items brought in loving arms would undoubtedly drop to the ground. I waited until my breathing returned to a somewhat normal rate, and shivered as the sweat on my body cooled. But then my vision faded, a gray sheet enveloping the environment around me. My head spun like mad, body swaying like a pendulum. Sickness found my gut and for the second time in twenty-four hours I threw up, this time all over myself. When everything found its way out of me, I lay myself down against the cement foundation of the house and allowed the gray to turn to darkness.
  

W
hen I came to, feelings of surrealism and bewilderment made me feel as if I'd woken up from a dream within a dream, although I knew that this waking nightmare would not go away. The true magnitude of how I felt right now could never be described in the right words, although I imagined that this was how an addict felt after an all night binge of needles and spoons.

I was still hopeful that an emergency team would soon stream in, but as we all know by now, my closest neighbor is a light-year away and as those Alien movies tout,
In space, no one can hear you scream
. The whirlwind that went down in the yard on the side of my house might as well have taken place on Mars. No one had seen or heard anything, hence, there was no help on the way. It was up to me to grab the bull by the horns with what little strength I had left.

Dizziness tried to claim me as I stood. I balanced myself with one hand against the house. The bloodprint it left on the shingles was still slickly wet, and made me realize that I'd only been out for a few minutes. I looked at the body—what was left of Lauren Hunter. In this unmoving state I could see that her injuries had been much more severe than I first observed, if that seemed humanly possible. Her legs were covered with what I could only describe as bite marks, circular-shaped punctures befitting the size and shape of a human child. The skin around the horrible gouge in her side had deep jagged impressions along the edges, signifying the application of some crude weapon (or claw, I reminded myself). I could see four deep notch-like grooves inside the injury to her face, reinforcing my belief that she'd been swiped at by some kind of taloned fist. Once the horrific attraction wore off, and the gross realization of the situation set in, I lurched away, threw off my shirt and shoes, and stepped inside the house.

All was eerily silent inside.

I picked up the phone, noticing that there were no messages (for a change, I was thankful for the slow season), and pressed '0' for operator. A woman with no personality came on the phone.

"Operator."

I took a deep breath, went to speak, but a dry tickle in my throat set me into a fit of coughs. Once I had control of my voice, I said, "I need some help. It's an emergency."

"What type of emergency, sir?" So matter of fact this Miss Operator was.

"What type?" I found it strange that the operator would ask this. Then again, I wasn't thinking too clearly at the moment.

"I need to know where to connect you. Fire, Police, or Medical?"

Good question. Definitely not fire. Police maybe. No...I needed medical. Yes.
Jesus, am I losing my mind? I'm a doctor for Christssakes!
"Medical emergency," I panted, wiping my free hand across my forehead.

There was a brief silence on the other end, and in this time my mind wandered back to Lauren Hunter and the uncanny utterances that had come from her mouth. Just noisy chokes, I told myself. I must've grossly misinterpreted these as purely intentional sentences referring to Christine and the Isolates.
I couldn't have heard her say those things
I kept repeating in my mind, grabbing the seemingly purposeful sentences that were sticking in my head as if pinned there with thumbtacks, wrapping them up in pretty little mental boxes and sending them off to gather dust in some room within my untapped subconscious—a room whose door had the word
denial
stamped on it in big bold letters.

I felt the phone slipping from my grasp, and I did my best to hold it against my mouth, but that only captured the mad giggles that started to swell in my throat.

"Sir...sir? Are you all right?"

I heard her but couldn't answer right away, and she heard me laughing, I knew. That tipped me a bit, made me dizzy. I took my hand and wrapped it across my waist to keep me here, on earth, in this plane of existence.
Yes, I'd heard only the yips and yaps of a human being drowning in the swells of death. That, and nothing more
.

"Sir, do you have an emergency to report?"

"Y-yes...yes I do."

"I'll connect you to the hospital in Ellenville."

Seconds passed, then minutes. In this time I tried to make myself feel better, but I couldn't help going back to those impossible instances...the moments when Lauren Hunter had spoken to me.
Damn it, she spoke to me!
I felt like a fateful submarine that no matter how many times tried to climb to the surface would slip down further into the depths of insanity. One step forward, two steps back.

And then, I was disconnected.

A dial tone met my ear like a whistling wind in the middle of a barren desert. At that instant I felt like a sole survivor on some desolate planet, my only means of communication taken away by some unseen force. My heart pounded, my hands were shaking. I dialed up the operator again. This time I got a male voice on the phone.

"Operator."

"Ellenville hospital please."

"One moment..." Another void met my ear; I never knew silence could be so deafening. Finally, after a minute of flexing away the tightness of drying blood on my hands, a ringing met my ear. A woman answered, "Ellenville Medical." Her voice was curt. Clearly I'd interrupted something important. Tough cookies.

"This is Dr Michael Cayle calling from Ashborough. I have a medical emergency and need an ambulance here at once."

There was an impending silence on the other end. I could hear the woman breathing before a backdrop of rushed voices and ringing phones.

"Hello? Are you there?" Surely she heard the impatience in my voice. "I said I have a life and death emergency."

"You said you're a physician from Ashborough?"

"Yes...as far as I know I'm the only God-damned one here. What seems to be the problem?"

There was a shuffling of papers on the other end. "What is your address, sir?"

"17 Harlan Road."

"There'll be an ambulance there in ten minutes."

"Thank you!" I hung up the phone, but not before I heard the other end disconnect.

I wondered at that moment if I should have simply called the coroner, but I wasn't sure whether I'd have to call into Ashborough or Ellenville—this was a poor time to realize that I'd never once looked into the names and addresses of my constituents. Regardless, wherever this coroner resided, whoever he was, he'd have to come up with a cause of death and I'd be his only material witness to a death that would clearly blow him out of the water.
Animal attack? Cancer? Isolate? Close your eyes and flip to a page in the family medical journal. Here we go, she died of thanoplastic dystopia. Whatever the hell that is
. Suddenly Small-Town USA didn't seem as charming as it once appeared. Beneath every charming little vista seemed to lie a cold dark enigma.

I walked to the door and peeked out the window at Lauren Hunter's sprawled body. There was blood everywhere, on me as well, and I knew that a good part of the afternoon would be spent cleaning it all up. After the body was taken away. After I gave a statement to the police.

The police.

I should've called them. I moved towards the phone. Stopped. Something told me not to do it. Not yet.

Instead I went into my office, dug through the prescription drug sample case and snatched a two-milligram Xanax. Zany Xanax, we used to say in med-class. We'd pop them after an exam then assemble in clusters of six or eight and mellow out to some Pink Floyd before passing out on the carpet. Ecstasy for the post-grad scholar.

The phone rang. I picked it up expecting the police, or the medical team. It was Virginia Hastings canceling her three o'clock appointment. All the better.

T
en minutes had passed. No sign of an ambulance. I called Ellenville again and was put on indefinite hold.

Something didn't smell right.

Finally I hung up and dialed 911, hoping that the police might be a wee bit more prompt than the pokey Ellenville medical team; I'd bag another two inches on my hairline before they showed up. I got a tired-sounded female on the phone, a young girl that sounded unmotivated and bored, not spent from a hard day on the job. I reported a life and death situation, my voice cracking with anxiety and unsettling impatience. Another promise was made for an ambulance.

"How about the police?" I asked.

"I'll notify the Ashborough Sheriff."

"Thank you," I said unappreciatively. My fear and anxiety was peaking. Couple that now with frustration and you had one shredded individual.
 

Another ten minutes passed. No one showed.

I went back outside. Lauren's body was starting to pale—rigor mortis setting in. The blood had rushed to her head which was angled off the edge of the walkway into the grass, turning it a purple color with sticky black blood pooling from her mouth and nose. There were so many questions that needed answering. I stood there realizing that I'd have to be the one, for now, to try and find out what exactly had happened. If a person in Lauren Hunter's condition popped into my office (actually, the emergency room, but I'm being hypothetical here) in a similarly distressed state, we'd come to immediate assumptions: dragged by a bus (or a subway), maimed by an angry mob (or a pack of wild dogs; every now and then a trio of pit bulls goes haywire on some poodle-walking bystander in Central Park). Other than that, what else could it be? Here in Ashborough with its unexplored woodland and uninvestigated maimings and dare I add its ominously unpleasant lore, anything goes.

With all these thoughts running around in my mind, more time had passed, and in this time my head had screwed itself back on to some degree. I was thinking more clearly now, and now was the time to trust my instincts.

I
went into the garage and got the tarp back out. Noon was approaching and more than an hour had passed since I placed the first call for help. I'd subsequently left a message at the Sheriff's office, tried Ellenville again, 911, ran the whole helpline gamut. No one had come, and that scared me even more that what'd happened to Lauren Hunter.

I laid the tarp down next to her body, keeping my eyes and ears on high alert in case someone—a patient, Phillip, whoever—decided on a visit. Christine and Jessica were probably having lunch in town by now, and an educated guess said they'd do some shopping afterwards. Plus having Page with them wouldn't be a problem. She was a calm pup and small enough to be held, and I'm sure most store owners wouldn't mind a cute little canine to pet as long as she didn't lick at them too much. So, no worries about them coming home right now. Fingers crossed.

The July sun beat down on me like a hammer, and it didn't do much justice to Lauren either. The smell was like nothing I'd ever encountered before, thick and assaulting on my nose in a cesspool kind of way. The thought of her cooking under the sun's rays put my nausea back into high gear, and I had to look away from the organic burst before I added more of my own sloppy colors to it.

This was the first time I noticed her footprints. She'd worn tennis sneakers and their flat soles had left clear impressions on the cement path. I eyed them all the way to the right corner of the house, where the walkway angled left and wrapped around the front of the porch. But the footprints...they didn't lead that way. They went off in the opposite direction, on the grass.

Into the woods.

I'd never gone more than five feet into the woods on this side of the house. But I'd spent a good amount of time peering into them; the window over the kitchen sink glimpsed out across the side yard and provided a serene view every time I washed the dishes. The addition of the bloody trail (second one in two days; things seemed to work in pairs around these parts) leading into the woods ate into the serenity like crude graffiti on a stark white wall. It began to eat into my mind as well, shaving away at my stability one slice at a time. Like a revelation, the unhappy passion of the entire scene hit me suddenly and made me realize that despite my experiences as a physician, this one ordeal would stay with me forever—would change me into a man who from now on would cover himself in a protective film and become thinly disconnected from reality—a bystander of circumstance. From now on I'd have to go with the uncontrolled flow.