Shadows Burned In (3 page)

“What would your monitor say?” her dream-father asked.

She rolled her eyes.
He’d probably say I wasn’t
completing my homework assignments!
she mind-shouted. Yelling back at her
father as she so often did, if only in her head, steadied her step. She looked
back to the front door.

The sun had almost totally set now, so she could see only a
little ways inside. Slanted rays captured the dust stirred up by the light,
dusky breeze. But beyond the snow of dust specks, she could see only dim
shapes. Elizabeth looked back at her dusty footsteps again, and already they
seemed to be disappearing beneath lightly stirring leaves. Screwing up her
courage, Elizabeth stepped through the door.

Her back felt warm as her eyes adjusted. Mold crept into her
nose on itchy feet. She realized her hands were sweating when the cold, heavy
air of the house began to tickle them. Somewhere in the back of her head, her
father’s voice lectured on airflow and wondered who paid the old woman to
air-condition the neighborhood. Looking down the length of the breezeway, she
saw the last rays of daylight streaming from the back of the house.

A light at the end of the tunnel
, she thought. The
light seemed to dim at just that moment.

Elizabeth took another step in, wiping her chilled hands on
her T-shirt, coughing once as the mold settled in her lungs. Her eyes finally
adjusted to the dusk light. To her left, the short, wide entryway led to a
larger room off to one side, the parlor maybe, behind two large doors. She
advanced slowly, staring at the dull, fuzzy knobs.

“Open the doors,”
said her 3V voice.
“Open them
and let’s see what’s inside.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Babybaby, look at the baby!”
Again the voice
mimicked Michael.

“No.”

I’ve done what I said, I’ve come inside, I’ve
—

(not made it all the way to the back door yet)

Her thoughts paused. Was this the house speaking to her,
then? Something. Not her 3V voice. Not her dream-voice. Not her at all, she
didn’t think.

“Fair enough,”
the 3V voice relented.
“The back
door’s that way.”

Elizabeth looked up the hallway. The sunlight was gone now.
She wondered what time it was. She thought she’d left the house around six, so
she ought to have plenty of sunlight.

“Dreams don’t have time,”
her 3V voice supplied
smugly.

“Shut up.”

She took timid, halting steps toward the double doors on her
left. She held both hands out away from her, eyes still adjusting to the
near-darkness. Elizabeth could taste the mold now, microscopic flakes of
seaweed coating her tongue, acrid and slick. She worked her mouth as she walked
farther into the house and spit once onto the dusty hardwood floor.

Elizabeth pushed the doors open. Their hinges creaked. The
latch snapped once.

Even as the doors parted, something in the main hall to the
right caught her eye. It was hanging from the ceiling, swaying slightly. An old
faux chandelier with broken bulbs and cobweb tendons drooping like cables on a
suspension bridge. Her eyes moved to the vague outline of the cherry oak
staircase that wound its way upward. It was a sharply steep, circular stair
that seemed to reach the second floor too soon, a coiled spring meant to be
stretched out more. The staircase looked ancient in its disrepair, its wooden
elegance dusty and fragile. On the second floor, Elizabeth noticed, more closed
doors invited her to explore. She turned back to the parlor, her eyes landing
on what must have been Old Suzie’s chair.

It rested in the center of the room, facing away from her
toward a rickety cart that might have once held an old television set. The
chair itself was a dirt-brown recliner, sitting straight upright with what
looked like tendrils of gray hair hanging over the back of the headrest,
blowing lightly in the breeze. She stopped and stared as the gray hair floated,
and she thought of the curly, gray beards drooping outside in the mimosa trees.
Elizabeth felt goose bumps as the hair on her arms stood up. Was Old Suzie
sitting there? Comfortable in the chair she died in, feet up, watching her
shows?

“Don’t interrupt my shows,”
said her 3V voice in a
mocking imitation of an old woman who smokes.
“I don’t like it when folks
interrupt my shows
.
”

But the steely strands hanging down from the chair barely
moved. Elizabeth thought then about turning around, heading back past the
too-steep staircase and the two doors with dull knobs, retracing her fading
footsteps across the splintered porch

(
almost as gray as the hair
hanging from the chair)

and running for home. But then she decided to go on, find
out if what they said about Old Suzie was true, if she was fat and ugly and had
actually become part of the chair itself. She inched her way into the parlor,
waved forward by the gray creepers.

“That’s right. Go on. Don’t be a baby,”
her 3V voice
said.

A shriek struck her dumb with fright, her limbs suddenly
without energy, unable to move. Elizabeth saw it coming right at her across the
floor, and her mouth opened to scream but nothing came out, and she found she
couldn’t breathe either. She reached out to try to steady herself, but her arms
were leaden, and she was in the parlor now, beyond the support of the entryway
walls, and her arm that weighed a ton threatened to pull her over it was so
heavy. She just stood and stared at the mouse as it came at her, then veered
off and ran under Old Suzie’s chair. Elizabeth couldn’t inhale, and for the
longest minute or ten, she felt like she might pass out. Finally, reluctantly,
her lungs accepted the moldy air of the old house again, leeching enough oxygen
to keep her awake. She instinctively wiped her hands on the front of her blouse
and was surprised how soaked they were.

“God, that was scary, huh?”
enthused her 3V voice.

“Shut
up
.”

She was determined now to walk right up to the chair.
Whatever the weather had forced into the house over the years now crunched
under her tennis shoes, but she took a second step, not letting her 3V voice
taunt her with thoughts of what she was grinding into the hardwood floor. A
third and fourth step. Now Elizabeth could see the gray hair better, though the
chair was tall backed, and she couldn’t see over it.

“I’ll bet Old Suzie’s sitting right there and that’s why
all the kids run through the house, not creep through it like a mouse
.
”

Old Suzie’s dead
,
she thought back.

“Yes. Your point?”

Suddenly very angry for scaring herself so badly, Elizabeth
took three gigantic steps forward and whirled on the chair, ready to face a
skeleton with rotted flesh, its arms open, its mouth shouting obscenities at
the little girl who’d interrupted Old Suzie’s shows. What she saw were
cigarette burns in the arms of the chair, arms bloated with stuffing spilling
out of the leather. Dust coated the old fabric. Elizabeth thought that if she
patted the Naugahyde seat

(where they found Old Suzie, melted back into her chair,
permanently joined, never to part)

a sandstorm might erupt and smother her. The gray hair,
she saw now, was nothing more than airy cobwebs draped over the back of the
chair, cousins to the hangers on the chandelier. Elizabeth thought she could see
stains from years of Old Suzie’s body sitting in the chair

(or maybe just two weeks)

as if the old woman had left her shadow behind when she
died.

“This is the chair where they found her,”
the 3V
voice reminded her.
“This is where she started to go bad.”

Go bad?

“Like old milk left in the fridge too long. Lumpy and
stinking.”

Elizabeth scrunched up her nose, trying to block the picture
out of her mind, which the 3V voice happily held up with a big fat smile on her
face for Elizabeth to enjoy.

“Like old meat left out on the counter too long. Two
weeks too long.”

She turned away from the chair toward the old TV stand, her
eyes shut, determined to make the voice shut up.
You’re disgusting
.

“Yeah, yeah, and you love it too.”

No I don’t
.
.
.

“Don’t lie to me, you.”

(Elizabeth)

She started, shaken by the voice. Who said that? It didn’t
sound like Michael. It wasn’t her father.

“It wasn’t me.”

Who—

(Elizabeth, it’s time)

She wanted to turn around, look at the chair again, make
sure the shadow hadn’t spoken.

“Shadows can’t speak,”
the 3V voice reassured her.
“But
corpses can. Bu-wa-ha-haaaa.”

“
Shut up!
”

(what)

“Shhhh
. . .
”

(what did you say to me)

Elizabeth opened her mouth to speak and gagged on her own
breath. The mold closed up her throat, plugged her windpipe, and then she
wished she
had
climbed the too-steep stairs, done anything other than be
standing here with her back to Old Suzie’s chair.

“Should’ve run straight for the back door,”
she
teased herself.

She felt the hand on her shoulder then, felt the force
behind it

(Elizabeth)

and started to beat an airless scream against the dam of
dust inside her throat. She sat up and opened her eyes wide and saw her mother
sitting beside her, shaking her awake.

“If you don’t wake up, you’ll be late for login,” said
Susan. “And your monitor will report it to your father, and then you’ll
really
be in for it . . . What’s the matter?”

Elizabeth looked around. She was very cold. She shivered
once as the ghost of her fear lifted from her, and then she looked at her
mother. “Um . . .” she croaked from a throat full of cotton.

“Bad dream?”

“Umm hmmm,” she managed.

“Well, you’re awake now. Go and shower, get really awake.
Fifteen minutes till you’re online.” Susan stood up and started to leave, then
turned back to Elizabeth. “You’re okay, honey. It was just a dream, okay?”

Elizabeth nodded, not really listening. “I’ll be up in a
second, Mom.”

Her mother paused. “
Don’t
go back to sleep,” she said
sternly.

“No ma’am,” her daughter answered. Elizabeth had no
intention of doing that.

When her mom had left the room and Elizabeth had taken a
deep breath, she heard tiny giggling from the back of her head.

“
Now
what do you want?” she pleaded.

“When we get out of the shower . . .”

Yeah?

“. . . let’s boot up some 3V games.”

I can’t. If I don’t get my grades up, my monitor
—

“Will call your dad and then you’ll really be in for it.
Yeah, I know, I know.”

I’m going to take a shower
.

In a mocking imitation of an old woman who smokes, the 3V
voice wheezed inside her head, saying,
“I don’t like it when folks interrupt
my shows either.”

Chapter 4

“Give me that other marker,” Wayne Alan Kitts said. His cell
mate, sitting across from him on the stone cold floor, handed him the black
one.

“Dis de one?” Stu Metzger asked. “Dat wat you want?”

Kitts nodded, removing the cap. The water-based marker
couldn’t be sniffed, and that was its primary drawback as far as Kitts was
concerned. Stu had his nephew bring them in. Kitts and Stu had a reputation
around the cellblock as sweet on one another, something they encouraged along
with the assumption that, since they were gay, they enjoyed making water-based
art using magic markers. They weren’t really lovers, but what other people
thought didn’t concern Kitts. Soon enough, they’d see what he was made of.
Warden Ramirez in particular.

Warden fucking Ramirez.

It took a minute, but he worked the plug from the top of the
marker, then poured the ink into a bucket of water he kept under his bunk.
Kitts stirred it up a bit.

“You really tink dis gonna work?” asked Stu. His face held
the simple expectant wonder of a child’s.

“Well, if it don’t,” said Kitts, “we ain’t gonna be around
to cry about it.”

Stu grunted. “We be dead.”

With the practice of thirty years of patience, Kitts
resisted the urge to say, “No shit, you goddamned retard.” Instead he said,
“Yep. Dead, Stu.” He pulled the marker out, shedding what black-stained water
he could back into the cloudy bucket. “Okay, hand me the next one. And get to
work on something, will ya? Do you want ’em to get wise?”

Stu quickly handed over the kelly-green marker, then moved
the rest closer to Kitts so he wouldn’t have to reach too far for them. “No,
Kitts, no, ’course not. I just slow sometimes.”

While Kitts began to pull the plug from the next marker, Stu
took up the poster board and began to flesh out his “painting,” as he called
it. When Kitts had first cooked up the scheme to dye their clothes, they’d
needed a cover story to explain all the markers Stu got in his packages from
home. Kitts had demonstrated a serious ineptitude for making art. Stu, on the
other hand, had taken pride in his vocation of forgery prior to being
incarcerated. He’d taken on the role of prisoner-artiste with gusto. At times
he actually seemed more excited about his current project than the notion that
he might just one day walk out of Huntsville’s Goree Unit in a blue-black
jumpsuit with a Mr. Goodwrench patch embroidered on the front.

Kitts, the plan’s mastermind, thought he might just head
back to Hampshire, that little shithole of a town that had produced him, maybe
start over there.
Start over
? The thought made him laugh.
Start over
at sixty-eight
? But he had distant relatives there that loved nothing more
than to hear about the wilder exploits of his younger days, and they’d feed and
house him in exchange for the stories. He could live the rest of his life on
the banks of the Brazos River in relative obscurity.

Stu, on the other hand, planned to head west to La Grange
and the Texas Czechs he’d grown up with. He hadn’t missed the family feeling of
living there until it was gone, he told Kitts.

Yeah, whatever
, thought Kitts.
Just keep drawing
.

Stu was pretty good, he had to admit. What God had cut out
of Stu’s head, He seemed to have stuffed into his eyes and hands. The pictures
he turned out were something worth looking at.

It don’t matter
, thought Kitts.
None of it
matters. We’re gettin outta here.

“That was real smart the way you thought up how to dye our
clothes,” Stu said. “
Real
smart.”

Kitts shook the stained water off the green marker. “Next,”
he said. Stu handed him a red one. “It ain’t the clothes I’m worried about,”
said Kitts. He pointed to his neck. “It’s this.” He tapped the skin below his
ear.

The transponder felt like a hard rock deposit under his
skin. A lithium-powered computer chip the size of a small wristwatch battery
was inserted into each new prisoner’s neck. It kept track of vital signs and
fed the monitoring data back to the prison’s central tracking system.

The company that made the devices had sold them to the
legislature with the PR boost that they made it possible for the prison doctor
to more easily diagnose inmates’ medical problems. That might be the case, but
Kitts knew their real purpose. All the prisoners did. They called them
“tattlers.” The transponders sent out a steady, unique locator signal,
confirming every prisoner’s whereabouts twenty-four hours a day. Guards could
trigger the built-in electric stun at any time, minimizing the danger to prison
personnel during an emergency and maximizing the deterrence to inmates who
thought about creating one.

“Yeah, dees tangs is de devil all right,” said Stu.

“Shut up and draw.”

Stu looked wounded for a moment, but Kitts didn’t care. He
was turning his brain on the last puzzle, the final obstacle to their escape.
How
to get the goddamned thing out
. Tattlers had been in use for nearly a
decade now, and prisons had come to rely heavily on them. Occasionally a guard
would walk up and down the cellblock to check on the inmates in their bunks in
the wee hours of the morning, but by and large, prisoners were left to
themselves during lockdown. And that’s when Kitts and Stu made their dye.

Kitts knew the prison doctor implanted and extracted the
tattlers. When necessary, the guards used a barcode device—called “the
switcher” by inmates—that could turn them on and off. If the units were
extracted without first being disarmed by the switcher, a prison-wide alarm
would sound. The computer would know exactly which prisoner had set it off
because each transponder was assigned a unique number. If an inmate attempted an
escape, the transponder sent a charge of electricity like a mini-stun gun to
the back of the skull as soon as the inmate crossed the prison’s perimeter.
Kitts had heard of other prisoners standing at the fence and putting their
hands behind their neck in a mockery of standard police procedure. They weren’t
giving up; they were using a broken bottle to cut the tattler out before making
a break. But the screws had thought of that too. If the tattler wasn’t kept at
standard body temperature, an alarm sounded. It usually took about ten seconds
for an active, extracted tattler to set off the facility-wide squawk box. An
inmate wouldn’t get fifty feet beyond the first fence, not even close to the
second, before the whole prison was alerted. Kitts had thought about stealing a
switcher from a guard, but try that and he might as well ask to be shot
straight out. Besides, he’d have no idea how to use it once he had it. So that
brought it down to one simple fact: The tattler had to come out . . . without
setting off the alarm.

“Kitts,” mouthed Stu quietly, breaking the other’s
concentration. Kitts made ready to snap at him, call him a moron—

“Guard, man,” mouthed Stu, already putting the markers quietly
back in the cigar box.

As Stu quietly scrambled to hide his latest masterpiece and
the markers under his bunk, Kitts did the same with his bucket of dye, careful
not to rush it and risk sloshing water everywhere. With practiced precision,
both were in their bunks with only a squeak or two of sneakers on cement floor.
Kitts slowed his breathing, the rise and fall of his blanket becoming restive.
They heard the echo of the guard’s boots on the floor, walking leisurely up the
block. Occasionally, The Man spot-checked the prisoners, transponders or no,
and tonight was one of those nights. The guard stopped outside their cell,
shone the flashlight in.

It’s a big fucking rat, you dickhead
, Kitts thought
at the guard.
That’s all you heard.

The guard mumbled something incoherent, flicked the light
around once more, and moved on. Kitts lay there while he walked, worried Stu
would freak out and give them away. But the retard had actually saved him, had
to give him that.

Figuring out how to get rid of the tattler while you’ve
got a baton shoved up your ass ain’t worth shit, dumbass
, he thought.
Be
more careful next time
.

He turned his mind on that problem again while the guard
began his return patrol. The slow clock – clock – clock of his boots on the
cement marked time like molasses curing in a Mason jar. At some point Kitts
started counting the bootfalls of the guard as they fell on the block floor.
Soon the sound spiraled him down into sleep.

“Dunk it,” said Kitts.

He watched as Stu unfolded the overalls they’d pilfered from
the laundry room that morning, carefully laying them in the cloudy dye, pushing
them an inch at a time below the surface until they were soaked, then feeding
the next portion of material, as if through a sewing machine. “Don’t waste the
water,” hissed Kitts. Stu shook his head, mouthing, “No, no, no.” He folded the
treated cloth back over the bucket to catch whatever runoff there might be from
the soaked overalls. Soon enough they were soaking wet in magic marker ink.

“Okay, we’ll let them soak overnight,” said Kitts. “Be sure
and put them far under your bunk, away from the slightest ray of light, Stu.
We’re beyond innocent explanations now. They find that bucket, they know we’re
up to something, understand?”

Stu nodded as he wedged the overalls down in the bucket,
then repeated the entire process for Kitts’s suit while Kitts kept an ear
cocked. Midnight rounds would begin soon. Kitts had made Stu dye his own suit
first, in case something went wrong with the dying process. Kitts wore a size large
because of his “stature and thickness,” he liked to say. Stu wore a medium, and
that seemed big on him. In any case, it looked like the dye job was working.
But they’d know for sure after the suits dried.

“Patches?”

“Right here,” said Stu, smiling. As part of his homosexual
façade, Stu had taken up cross-stitching, and he’d managed to conceal a single
needle and enough black thread for stitching on two decently faked Mr.
Goodwrench patches. Kitts had told him that once they were beyond the wall,
with a little luck they’d get away with the charade long enough to boost a car
and lie low until the manhunt was over.

“All right, then,” Kitts said. “That’s tomorrow night.”

Stu had a goofy grin on his face, like a child seeing his
parents wrap up the presents on Christmas Eve.

Kitts heard the slow clock – clock – clock of the guard’s
boots at the far end of the block. Panic shot down his spine. Butterflies
invaded his bowels.

“Dey early,” whispered Stu, but a little too loudly.

Kitts turned on him, raised a hand, then realized the guard might
hear. He settled for barking, “In your bunk,
now
.”

It must’ve been a slow night. No sooner were they settled,
had they had time to breathe once, twice, than the boots passed their cell.

Kitts got no sleep. The pot was too close to boiling.

“
God it hurts
,” Stu almost screamed. “
It feels
like my guts is acid!
”

“What the hell’d he
eat
?” asked Thompson, the guard
on duty the next night.

“Same thing’s everybody else,” Kitts answered, concern cracking
his voice. “Come on, Wes, do somethin for him.”

“
Ohhhhh
.”

“Do
what
?”

“I don’t
know
!” Kitts tried his best to sound like a
concerned wife. Though who was the husband and who was the wife, the guards often
debated, was hard to tell.

“
Ahhhhhh, Jesus, let me die, please
.”

Wes The Guard looked down at the writhing prisoner, heard
others begin to stir in their bunks. “All right, come on,” he said reluctantly.
He thought he probably ought to call for backup, but he was getting tired of
the little one’s wailing. “I’ll take you down to the infirmary,” he said to
Stu.