23 Hours: A Vengeful Vampire Tale

5.

The special housing unit at SCI-Marcy was constructed in a circle around a central guard post two levels high. The cells all faced the glass post and were all identical—narrow rectangles, eight feet wide by sixteen deep, each with a toilet at the back and a solid steel door at the front. The doors were three inches thick and padded on the inside. Each had a small square window set in it at head height and underneath that a narrow sliding panel, a “bean slot,” where the guards could hand in food at mealtimes. There was no separate cafeteria for the women in the SHU. They ate in their cells. They did most things in their cells: they stayed inside of them for twenty-three hours out of every day.

Three types of prisoner were kept in the SHU. There were AdSeg cases, like Caxton—the most violent or the craziest inmates in the prison, who were deemed a danger to others. Secondly were the protective custody prisoners, who were a danger to themselves. Either they’d pissed off some particularly vengeful gang, or turned evidence against other prisoners, or had committed some crime so heinous that the general population hated them enough to want them dead. There were only two child molesters in SCI-Marcy, but they were both in protective custody. Two-thirds of the women in the prison were mothers, separated by the law and circumstance from the children they loved. Being so far from their kids made some of them crazy. Some of them liked to prove they were still good mothers by attacking baby-rapers on sight.

The three women in the SHU who were not in AdSeg or protective custody were model prisoners who kept mostly to themselves, passing the time as best they could. These three women alone were given the privilege of a “Cadillac” cell, a private room with some small luxuries allowed. They had barred windows that looked out over the exercise yard and were even allowed to keep radios as long as the volume stayed low. No one in the SHU complained about their getting special treatment, however, because those three cells made up Pennsylvania’s only all-female death row.

When Caxton came into the SHU for the first time she was nearly blinded. The walls were scuffed and dinged, but they had been painted a brilliant white, and they caught all the light coming down from above from a ring of powerful klieg lights in the ceiling. The light was merciless and all-revealing. She was brought in through the only door leading into the SHU, where a row of COs in riot gear waited for her just in case she tried to make a run for it or, even stupider, tried to fight her way out.

She could understand why some inmates would try. For a lucky few who had just pulled temporary AdSeg by stabbing someone or bringing drugs into the prison, a stay in the SHU could last only a few days or weeks. For the women on protective custody and death row, the SHU would be their home for years to come.

Just like Caxton.

The CO sitting in the guard post lifted one hand and the COs in riot gear took a step back, letting Caxton come forward.

Her legs were shackled together and her hands were bound behind her with plastic handcuffs. One guard grabbed her wrists and guided her to the left. There was a red line painted on the floor, equally distant from the cell doors and the guard post, and she was made to walk along it with one foot on either side. She was marched up to a cell door marked with a seven. Two transparent plastic brackets were mounted on the door. One was empty, while the other contained a photograph of a woman with bad acne and the name STIMSON, GERTRUDE R. Below this was a list of known allergies (peanuts) and special restrictions (zero stimulants) and the legend PC, which Caxton assumed meant that the woman inside was in protective custody.

Caxton looked up and saw the woman from the picture staring out at her through the window in the door. Her complexion was much clearer in person.

“Wall up,” one of the guards shouted. Caxton didn’t know what that meant, but apparently it wasn’t directed at her. The woman in the cell—Gertrude Stimson—moved away from the window at once.

“Prisoner Caxton,” the CO said, bending down to unshackle her legs. If she felt like kicking him for his trouble she only had to look to the side and see the stun gun another guard was pointing at her neck. “Welcome to the SHU. You will be confined to your cell at all times unless we come for you. When we do, we’ll say ‘wall up.’ That means you move to the back of the cell with your back against the wall. If you don’t wall up, we will perform a forcible extraction. You don’t want that. Mealtimes are at six-thirty, noon, and four-thirty. Your exercise period will be from one in the afternoon until two. You’ll be taken to the showers once per week, at six P.M. every Thursday. You just missed your slot, it looks like. We’ll bring around a deodorant stick for you a little later on. If I remove your hand restraints now, will you behave?”

“Yes,” Caxton said, in the meekest voice she could manage.

He unfastened the plastic handcuffs. Caxton flexed her fingers to try to get the circulation going again. “Here’s a clean blanket and a clean washcloth.” They were both made of the same scratchy nylon that looked like it couldn’t be torn or burned. “Prisoner on the floor,” he shouted, and COs all around the circular housing unit repeated the call. “Door opening!”

An alarm sounded, a high-pitched clanging that went on for ten seconds, and then an electronic lock in the door thunked open. The CO pulled a lever that released a second mechanical lock and then hauled the door back.

Inside, Gertrude Stimson was standing up against the wall, her hands above her head. She didn’t move at all except to blink as Caxton stepped inside the cell.

Before they could close the door on her Caxton turned around to say, “I’d like to make a phone call. An email would be fine as well. Is there a sign-up roster, or—”

“No outgoing calls. No computer time. If you want to write a letter, let us know and you can dictate it to us through the bean slot. Now wall the fuck up so I can close this door.”

Caxton hurried to the back of the cell and pressed her back against the wall.

The CO poked his head in to peer into the corners of the cell, as if someone else might be hiding inside. “Enjoy your stay.”

The door alarm rang again for ten seconds and then it was shut with a double thunk of closing locks.

For a long time Caxton just stood there with her back against the cold wall. She didn’t move. Didn’t say anything. Eventually she realized she was waiting to be told what to do next.

It was getting to her already. They were turning her into an inmate, even inside her own head.

Stepping away from the wall, she rubbed at her wrists and looked around. There wasn’t much to see. The cell wasn’t wide enough for two beds side by side, so much of the space was taken up by a tall bunk bed made of scratched aluminum. It had been designed in such a way that it had no sharp corners nor any pieces that could be broken off, even by a determined prisoner with a lot of time on her hands.

The only other furniture in the cell was a combination sink and toilet made of the same rounded aluminum construction. There was no seat on the toilet, and its opening was narrower and long rather than round.

“It looks funny, I know, and it ain’t comfortable. It’s made that way so you can’t shove my head in there,” Gertrude Stimson said. “You know, if you had a mind to.”

Caxton turned and stared at the other woman. Her new roommate—her celly In the general-population dorm where she’d been before, Caxton had seven cellies in a cell about three times as large as this one. They had been morose women, relatively quiet unless one of them was moaning about how badly she wanted a cigarette or another was shaking and moaning with withdrawal symptoms. They had mostly been black, with two Latinas, and they had all spoken Spanish most of the time, a language Caxton barely understood.

Gertrude Stimson was pasty white, with stringy red hair that she kept tied back in a stubby ponytail. Her fingernails, Caxton noted, were chewed down to round red stubs.

“You can call me Gert, or Gerty, it’s one and the same,” she said.

“Caxton.” Caxton didn’t offer her hand.

“Oh, I know you, for sure. You’re famous. They made a movie about you, and those vampires you killed. And then at the town of Gettysburg—”

“I don’t like to talk about that,” Caxton growled.

“I never thought I’d have a famous lady in here, is all,” Stimson said, with a little laugh.

Caxton tried to ignore her and went to the bunk bed. The bottom bunk was clearly Stimson’s. Photographs of babies had been taped up along the wall, but not snapshots—these were just pictures of babies torn from magazines. The bed was unmade, with the blanket shoved down at the bottom in a heap. The top bunk was empty, with nothing on it but a mattress that crinkled when she pushed on it and a pillow made of the same rip-stop nylon as her blanket and washcloth. A plastic bag containing her personal effects lay at the foot of the mattress.

“I want you to know, I’m a little famous myself,” Gert chattered. “But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

Caxton did think the name was slightly familiar, though she couldn’t place where she’d heard it before. No doubt she would get to hear about Gert’s moment of fame in excruciating detail soon enough, so she didn’t bother to ask.

She made the bed carefully, knowing she had plenty of time to keep things neat. Then she opened the bag. The warden had said her things would be moved for her, but there was very little in the bag—her brush, her comb, and most of her books were all missing. She’d been left a couple of dog-eared paperbacks and one photograph. It was a picture of Clara that Caxton had taken one day at a sheriff’s office picnic. It had been in a frame before, but the frame had been seized and the picture removed. One corner had been torn in the process.

“Who’s that? Friend of yours? Or—girlfriend?” Stimson asked, her voice rising slyly at the end. “I heard you was a lesbo, too. So is she? Your girlfriend?”

“None of your business,” Caxton said. She climbed up on the bunk and laid herself out flat. Breakfast was at six-thirty she thought. That was a long time away. She wondered what time lights-out might be. Stimson would know, but she might also take that as a desire on Caxton’s part to start a conversation.

Not that she needed much prompting.

“You been here long? How much longer you got?”

“If it’s alright, I’d like some quiet time,” Caxton said. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“Sure thing,” Stimson said. She disappeared under the bunk and Caxton relaxed a little. She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. She could do this. She could stay strong, and do the time quietly and without losing her mind. She could.

From beneath her she heard a high-pitched squeaking sound. Then a muffled grunt of pain. The squeaking sound came again a second later. And again. Eventually she realized that Stimson was chewing her nails.

It was going to be a very long five years.