Echoes of Darkness (21 page)

MUTES

Tape begins:

Test, test, is this thing on? Okay. Right. Okay . . . where to start? I found this old tape deck, and I have one tape. I need to get this told, just in case, but I have to hurry. I don’t know how much time I have. Granny McCalloum was right. She always said—wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

My name is Scott St. Armond. I’m making this recording in my apartment, and I swear I’m of sound mind. I swear to God.

I’m from Slaughter, Louisiana, population about 1,000. My Granny McCalloum is the local hoodoo woman there. She used to claim I have the sight, too. But I wasn’t like her. Not then.

Anyway, I came to the big city when I turned eighteen, trained up and got work as an EMT. That’s when shit got weird. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but the first time I noticed anything was at this car wreck my partner and I responded to out on Route 18.

Oh, hang on—

I just checked the window, and there’s too many to count. Jesus, this is bad.

Okay, Route 18. Some kid out speeding around lost control of his car and went off the road, into a tree. The driver was banged up, but walked away. His girlfriend, though, wasn’t wearing a seat belt and was thrown from the vehicle into another tree. We found her at the base of an old pine, in rough shape. She’d been impaled by more than a dozen branches, some of them as thick as my two thumbs together. She’d rolled to the ground with snapped-off pine stakes sticking out of her torso, legs, and one eye.

She was still conscious. We found her by following the screams.

Another crew showed up for the driver while we went for the girl. We strapped her to the stretcher, branches sticking out of her this way and that, and started carrying her up to the road. I’m a pretty big guy, lots bigger than Jerry, and I had a hard time carrying her over the uneven ground in the dark. I don’t know how he managed.

We jostled her a little, and that got her screaming again. Now I was still green, and this was easily the worst thing I’d ever seen. You can watch videos and movies, even real stuff like the surgery network, but it’s nothing compared to up close and personal. Especially the screaming. I was freaked out.

So when I looked up from watching for rocks and holes and saw five dark silhouettes backlit by our ambulance strobes standing not ten feet away, I reacted badly. I caught a whiff of a sweet licorice smell. I thought
Sambuca
and figured they were drunk.

I yelled, “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t your fucking entertainment! Back away; get back to your cars! Go on now!” But they just stood there.

Behind me, Jerry yelled, “Scott! What the hell are you doing, man?”

I glanced back at Jerry and shouted over the girl’s crying.

“What the hell’s it look like?” I said, “I’m telling these looky-loos to—”

I stopped dead and the stretcher gouged my lower back. The night was clear with a good moon, but when I turned back to them, they were gone. The field between us and the road was empty, not a soul in sight.

Jerry struggled not to drop the stretcher, and yelled at me to move my ass.

We got the girl into our bus and Jerry started us rolling while I tried to stabilize her. Jerry waited until we’d left the ER to ask what the hell I was doing out there.

“Didn’t you see the people?” I said. “The people in the field?”

He just squinted at me and said, “I didn’t see anybody but you. Yelling at a field.”

Jerry had worked there a couple of years already, so it was practically part of his job to rib me as the newbie. He walked around for a while saying I’d already cracked from the strain, but that wasn’t it.

That was the first time I saw the Mutes.

The next time was the night of my accident.

I guess it was about a month after we pulled Tree Girl out of that field when we got called to the warehouse. One of the eighteen-wheelers had been pulling into the warehouse when the big rolling security door let go. That heavy steel door came down in its track like an axe, chopping right into the windshield. The driver was unconscious, steering wheel bent right down into his chest. The truck was still rumbling out diesel fumes as it idled with that massive door propped on the hood.

I ran into the warehouse, and some of the guys helped me stack a couple of spare eighteen-wheeler tires next to the truck, like a platform to work on. Jerry was more experienced, and would fit in the cab better than me. I stayed on the ground, ready to hand up anything Jerry might need. I didn’t actually see what happened. Jerry told me about it later.

Jerry jacked up the steering wheel, but the driver was also bound up in his seat belt’s shoulder harness. Jerry cut the belt and the driver collapsed sideways onto the gearshift. Suddenly the idling truck was dropped into reverse without the benefit of a clutch. I know the truck jumped backward with the sound of tearing metal. It knocked me and the stacked tires to the ground, and then that huge steel door came crashing down. I’d landed on my back when the tires cut my legs out, and I saw that door coming down at me like the Hammer of God. I didn’t even have time to scream.

I’m told that it came down on me and, luckily, the big tire that had knocked me down. The tire compressed, then bounced the door back up to a height of about eighteen inches. Before the door bounced, though, it came low enough to hit me right across the chest, cracking my sternum and stopping my heart.

Now, here’s the thing with
commotio cordis
, or cardiac arrest due to impact trauma: it’s quick. There’s no buildup, no arrhythmia, no moving pain or shortness of breath; there’s no time. Your heart is beating, and then it stops.

Period.

And it hurts. A lot.

My chest hurt more than I’d ever imagined anything could hurt. I’d both heard and felt the crack, and I knew it was bad. I’m told it was only about ten seconds before I passed out, but time sort of . . . stretched out for me.

Jerry was screaming, but I wasn’t sure what he was saying. Everything sounded all drawn out, like slow motion in the movies. I couldn’t move, all I could do was stare up at the distant warehouse ceiling—and then they were there.

Angels.

That’s what I thought at first. A half-dozen faces leaned into view, moving just as slow as everything else, and they were smiling. I mean smiling
big
. Like it was the happiest day of their lives. Their skin and hair were paper white, their lips and teeth making big white grins. They wore jeans and jackets in regular colors, not white robes, and as they leaned closer I saw their eyes had color, too. They were red. Not bloodshot. Solid liquid red, like their sockets were full of fresh blood, but it was their eyes.

That’s when I started thinking maybe they weren’t angels.

I finally managed to draw a shallow breath, but as it came in all I smelled was licorice, so sweet and strong I would have choked on it if I wasn’t already busy dying. The little breath caused the pain in my chest, already immense, to grow. As it did, the grins on the faces widened, and those eyes of blood closed, as faces screwed up in what looked like ecstasy.

Suddenly there were warehouse workers mixed into the crowd above me. These guys looked scared, all talking, yelling, but it was all stretched out like everything else and I couldn’t understand it. The shard of pain in my chest suddenly shattered, exploded, and everything went white.

Then black.

I woke to the harsh lights and stinging smells of a hospital room. Jerry was there, thank God. At least there was something familiar to hold onto, because I was disoriented as hell. I had strange memories: white light and kind-eyed, faceless beings looking down at me from above, and the feeling of a vast void. I’d always laughed at people who told stories of dying and seeing Heaven, only to find out later they were just hazy memories of the emergency room. But the feeling that I’d been dead was so strong it was almost funny. It was kind of spooky when Jerry said, “Welcome back to the land of the living, partner,” and asked if I was planning to hang around for a while.

When I tried to answer, my mouth and throat were too dry, and the pain in my chest flared when I pushed at the words. Jerry saw I was having trouble, and stopped asking questions. Instead, he gave me some ice chips for my thirst, and brought me up to date. That last flash of pain back at the warehouse had been Jerry pulling me out from under that door.

“I’m sorry. I had to,” he said.

One of the guys inside had yelled that I was alive, but he couldn’t find a pulse, and had no way to lift that door. That’s when Jerry told me about that tire that kept the door from cutting me in half. He told me, “Even with the tire, the damn thing killed you.”

A second ambulance had arrived, but I died as they were loading me in. No pulse, no respiration, pupils fixed and dilated. My heart had stopped when the door hit me, but apparently it took a minute for the rest of me to catch on to the idea.

“So,” I asked, “I was . . . dead?”

Jerry said “as a doornail,” which almost made me laugh. He told me about resuscitating me on the ride, but then described how I woke up just as we were getting into the ER.

“You started talking in spite of your chest, spouting off about angels with eyes of blood. Spooky shit! You scared the hell out of that new ER nurse. Man, you sounded awful!”

—I just checked the window again. There’s more of them, and they look like they’re organizing. They were just milling about before, but now they’re in little groups. Christ, I hope I have time to finish this. Where was I?

Oh, right. Angels with eyes of blood. That’s when I remembered the weird stuff from before I died in the ambulance.

Spooky shit is right
, I thought,
those “angels” seemed more like demons to me
. My thoughts must have shown on my face, because Jerry asked if I was okay and went to get a nurse. Which I guess he was supposed to do as soon as I woke up.

As the door swung shut behind him, a woman in street clothes walked by, peeking in as she passed. I only saw her for a second, but what I saw chilled me despite my no doubt heavy medication. She had hair and skin the color of typing paper and her eyes were one solid color: no whites, no pupils, just the bright red of a Crayola crayon, fresh from the box.

An angel with eyes of blood.

Once the nurse was gone again I asked Jerry if he’d seen anything strange back at the warehouse.

He said, “I saw you lying there with a one-ton door on your chest.”

I remembered the ribbing he’d given me after Tree Girl, calling me crazy; what would he say now? That I was seeing things? I decided to keep my mouth shut.

A couple of days later, when I was up to taking a few steps, I shuffled slowly to my room door, held onto the frame, and peeked out. I saw what I thought was a husband and wife having a conversation, with one of these albinos, a woman, leaning right down in between them. They just kept talking like the pale figure wasn’t there, within kissing distance of the bandage covering the wife’s eye. A man with an external fixator was wheeled by. It looked like he had a birdcage bolted around his leg. The orderly pushing his chair paid no attention to the two white shapes pacing them, who were smiling and bending over to . . . well, it looked like they were smelling the guy. One of the nurses saw me hanging onto the door, and I guess she misread the look in my face, like Jerry had, and came to help me back to bed. I just had to ask about the girl with the couple.