Fear Me

22

It was a bad night.

There were never any truly good nights at Shaddock when you didn’t have a prisoner going after another or vomiting in his cell or throwing piss at a passing guard, but some were just plain worse than others. And some guards just seemed to pull the worse duty night after night.

Leo Comiskey was like that.

He seemed to be on permanent duty down in the hole, watching the Ad-Seg prisoners, hearing their endless gripes and complaints, listening to them scream in the dark and beg for the lights to be turned on. Even through those iron doors, you could hear them… but muffled and tinny like a voice coming from a buried box, filtered by soil.

There were seven guys in Ad-Seg at present and they were all nervous and scared. And the reason for this was that an eighth prisoner had been added: Danny Palmquist. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was maybe the Devil or something that had oozed into the joint to suck their blood and lick their brains out of their skulls. Because there was no getting around one thing: they were frightened, terrified even. And these were big boys, tough boys, kind of boys you didn’t dare turn your back on unless you wanted a razor across your throat.

Comiskey didn’t care for it.

For he knew what was going on with Palmquist and it wasn’t just the cons that were afraid of him. The guards, even the warden… they all got a funny look about them when the kid’s name was mentioned, like maybe they needed to get sick and couldn’t find a good place.

And what surely wasn’t helping anything was the yellow crime scene tape over the door to cell #3 where Tony Gordo had died. No, that didn’t help at all.

Two of the cons down there were newbies, both had swallowed drugs it was suspected and both were on shit watch. And that was a real treat for any guard, having to check a con’s stools. Jesus.

It was maybe midnight when the sounds started coming from Palmquist’s cell. Funny, high-pitched squealing sounds that went right up Comiskey’s spine and echoed around in the back of his head like screams heard in the dead of night.

Comiskey called it in, went over to the door to #14 where the kid was.

He reached up for the bolt that would open the little security port. But like Jorgensen days before, that’s about as far as his hand got… because something inside him was hearing those sounds in there and it had literally pulled his hand back. Like a man taking a swan dive off a ten-story building, it wanted him to think very carefully about what it was he was doing here. Because there were things in life, you did them or you saw them, there was no going back.

So Comiskey stood there, shivering like something yanked from a deep-freeze, remembering with an almost vibrant clarity the stories the other guards were telling about what they’d heard and—in the case of a few unlucky correctional officers—had actually seen.

There are some things in life, Sergeant Warres had told his guards in an ominous whisper, that you get in your craw and they don’t never leave you. Things that’ll turn your hair fucking white and make you sleep with the lights on. You boys seen what I saw, you got a look at it and had that smell rubbed in your face, you got all you can do not to stick your service pistol in your mouth…

And there was truth to that, Comiskey got to thinking. Maybe Warres was a bossy, brutal asshole, but that didn’t mean he was wrong. All you had to do was ask Jorgensen… except he’d had a nervous breakdown and wouldn’t be doing any talking for some time to come.

These were the things bouncing around in Comiskey’s head like stray bullets, chewing up everything in their path. He was hearing that shrill, mournful wailing like the kid had given birth to something seeded in Hell, and his fingers were on that bolt, shaking, cold, colder than cold. So goddamned cold he could barely feel them.

Do it for chrissake, he told himself, just do it.

He threw the bolt and a blast of air came out at him, hot and yeasty and offensive and his guts tried to crawl out his ass or up his throat. And that stink, worse by the second, boiling and sulfurous, hitting him full in the face like tear gas, making his eyes water and his throat constrict and his nostrils burn.

He clicked on the light.

Palmquist was lying on the bed, dead asleep maybe, and he was covered in a net of white, cobwebby material like ectoplasm. It was coming out of his mouth and ears and eyes and trailing from his fingertips in ropy, pulsing tendrils that seemed to be alive. The netting was undulating as if it were breathing, trailing up to the ceiling and there, right there, connected to that stuff and splayed out was something pale and bloated and spider-like—

Jesus.

It was getting larger, swelling up like rising bread dough.

And that’s what Comiskey saw.

He saw it for maybe a second, no more than two, and then the thing shrieked and hissed and scrambled over the ceiling, tangled up in that white goo that looked oddly like silly string.

Comiskey screamed and shut the port.

In there, that grotesque horror squealed and roared and whined like metal on a grinding wheel. Then… slowly, slowly, it began to subside. There were awful sounds coming from inside the cell. Things like cement poured into buckets, wet laundry slapped against the walls, someone pissing on the floor. Then Palmquist began to moan and then… nothing.

After that, Comiskey left the light on.