Seldom Seen in August

CHAPTER EIGHT

Days seemed to pass him by as he lay on the dirt floor suffocating beneath a sheet of sweat and above a mattress of old dirt. He tried hard not to let Cochran’s words drain the fight from him. August was a month that meant nothing. The longer he spent obsessing over it, straining his mind, the less chance he stood of keeping it together long enough to deal with whatever came next, so he banished it from his mind.

Then something on one of the monitors caught his eye. At the same time he was startled by a shriek of static. It quickly abated, fading to a muffled stutter as someone fed audio from the screen he was watching into the basement.

A tall thin man dressed in a dark suit was absently scratching his thigh with the muzzle of a revolver while his other hand turned the hot water faucet in the bathroom sink. The bathroom looked identical to the one in which the phantom child—Eddie—had killed himself, only reversed, like a mirror image. A simulation, Wade reminded himself. That’s all it was. Nothing to do with me no matter what that old bastard said. I don’t control what other people do with their lives. Onscreen, the man in the suit leaned over to stare into the sink. The water was exposing something that had been written there, washing away a thin veneer in the basin to reveal a clue, or a message. With great effort, and disregarding the absurd twinge of jealousy that he hadn’t thought to do what the man was doing now, Wade tried to straighten his head to make out the words. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary. The man in the bathroom spoke them aloud in a low gravelly voice.

“Revelation.”

Beneath the crackle and hiss of the audio, the familiar humming began. To Wade it was like invisible hornets had been released into the room and were coming closer.

The man in the bathroom stopped scratching, set his gun down on the rim of the bath tub, his attention still focused on the sink.

“Repentance.”

A noise distracted the man and he turned, made a grab for his revolver, but only succeeded in knocking it into the tub. He cursed loudly as the shower curtain tried to strangle him, and retrieved the weapon. When he straightened, he saw what Wade had already seen. An enormous shadow had darkened the bathroom, cast by someone or something standing on the threshold, just out of frame. Fear contorted the man’s face and he jerked out his arm, reflexively and without aiming, pumping one, two, three rounds into the shape before him. The reports were too much for the small speakers to handle. They sounded like a gloved fist thumping a microphone.

Apparently the bullets had no effect. The man screamed and fell back against the sink, cracking his skull against the porcelain rim. He slid to the floor, unconscious.

Allowing Wade to see the final word.

Wade yanked at the restraints so fiercely he felt the flesh bunch up and begin to tear around his wrist bone. He didn’t care. He was well able to handle himself, well able to think his way out of damn near any situation, no matter how hopeless it seemed. The pain his efforts incurred was inconsequential in the grander scheme of things. But this situation made him nervous because he wasn’t sure what was coming next. The humming was getting louder all the time and the dark was unsettling, obscuring as it would any enemy Cochran might throw at him. Worse, whatever it was would be something from his own head. Something apparently he had forgotten, and what worse monster is there than one with which we are not familiar?

He yanked again and his wrist caught fire. His head swam, lightning bugs sailing through the dark before his eyes. Teeth clenched, he persisted until he felt the zip-tie on one hand slip lower, taking with it a flap of skin. Wade hissed air through his teeth, and looked back at the screens to distract himself from the mounting agony.

The woman with the knife was standing in the living room, watched by a half-dozen indistinct and curiously faceless shapes. They twitched and shook every time she raised the knife and brought it down on her abdomen. At least a half-dozen of them were small, like children, watching impassively, shivering with almost orgasmic glee.

“Fuck,” Wade said and redoubled his efforts. Skin tore free, muscles strained, and nerves sang. With a startling burst of pain, his thumb broke with a dull popping sound, but there was no time to consider the injury. Slick with blood and sweat, his hand slipped free of the zip-tie.

“Hallelujah,” he said, hoarse from the effort it took not to scream. He took a moment to nail down consciousness as it struggled to leave him, then pulled on the seat of the chair while moving his feet downward. A bit of wriggling and the chair legs were free of the plasticuffs, freeing his own legs in the process. He stood, shakily, his limbs numb, the pain fierce in his right hand. Briefly he inspected it and grimaced. It would need some work, and soon, if he didn’t want it to get infected. He had come close to slipping the skin off like a latex glove. The restraint on his left hand proved no easier to remove now that he had all but flayed his right, but eventually he managed to snap the frame of the chair and slide the hand free.

Then he turned to face the screens.

The humming was so loud now it seemed to come from inside him.

Three of the screens had gone dark. Not just blank, they’d been switched off. Wade felt he knew what that meant, and didn’t like it much. He felt a modicum of relief that he wasn’t on one of those screens, waiting to be switched off, then realized he probably was, in some other place, with some other captive watching fearfully on the other side.

Resisting the compulsion to massage the blazing pain from his hand, he used his other hand to search his pockets, his waistband. He was not surprised to find they’d relieved him of his gun, and everything else he’d had on him.

On another of the monitors, a small squat man with a comb over was peering up at the light bulb in one of the upstairs bedrooms while behind him, a black man with half his head missing wriggled like a lizard out from under the sodden mattress.

August, Wade thought as he headed for the door through which Cochran had exited. The hell happened in August?

Another screen went blank. Wade could tell only because the blue light from the bank of screens faded a little. It inspired urgency in him. He did not want to be in this musty room when the lights went out.

August…

Despite what Cochran had said, he was sure that particular month held no significance for him. Unwillingly, he ran through a mental list of the people he had encountered and the things he had done over the years. It was difficult, as there had been more than one incident that had occurred during his “gray period”, a time in which, like the ill-fated Gail, he had worshipped a chemical god. Of the memories he was able to summon, was not proud, nor could he stand to dwell upon them for long, a development that Cochran might have found of great interest. Wade was not immoral; he did have a conscience. He had just found a way to exist and do what needed to be done without it plaguing him. Regret and remorse were like a pair of mean dogs he kept staked out in his backyard. He knew they were there, but only because he heard them barking, and it was easy enough to drown out the sound.

He found the door. It was made of metal and cold to the touch. There were a number of dents in the surface. Wade scrabbled for a knob and found it, turned, and the door would not open. It hardly budged at all.

“Shit.” He hammered on it with his good fist. “Hey!”

To his ears it sounded as if his cry had not gone further than his lips. Meanwhile, the humming seemed to have settled in his ears, those industrious hornets searching for the fastest route to his brain.

His shadow, blurred at the edges, faded as another screen died.

Wade turned. With only a half-dozen screens still on, he would need to find an alternate way out before the room was in total darkness. Quickly, he inspected the ceiling, but saw little, the light blocked by the heavy beams. He recalled how they’d looked in the full light—as if a few tugs would bring them down. It was a risky proposition. If it did come down, he’d be standing right under it and stood a good chance of getting crushed under the weight of its collapse. Another problem was that he was now one-handed and as such doubted he had the strength to cause those rafters much distress.

Sudden frantic motion on one of the screens made him look at them again. Just before it went dark, he thought he saw an obese man try to punch a sobbing woman, until she looked up at him and screamed from the open, fleshless hole of her face.

Wade winced and shook his head, his wounded hand throbbing and dripping blood on the floor. He looked back up at the ceiling. Darker now, the shadows thicker still. Okay, forget trying to bring it down, he thought. If it was as fragile as it looked, there was a chance he might be able to use something to knock a hole in it large enough for him to squeeze through. The table would help give him the boost he needed to reach up and pull himself out. Of course, he didn’t know where it would lead, but considering his options, it was the better one.

He squinted around the ever-darkening room, eyes scanning the gloom for something, anything he could use, and found only the broken remains of the chair. With difficulty, he braced the broken frame against his chest and kicked out at the legs until they broke away and fell noiselessly to the floor.

Another television went off.

Grabbing one of the chair legs, Wade all but leaped onto the table. It wobbled but held under his feet. He looked up at a dark space between the beams. There was nothing to see there, so he reached up with his unwounded hand and pressed his fingers against the wood. It was soft, spongy and crumbled at his touch. Wade smiled. Perfect. As he’d guessed, it wouldn’t take much to punch through, though the space between the beams was going to make it a tight squeeze.

He stepped back, the leg of the chair held like a sword before him, splintered end up, and paused as abruptly, Cochran’s words came back to him: I suggested we build a fully functional neighborhood right in the middle of Harperville’s black zone. Wade frowned, so preoccupied by this newest mystery that he scarcely noticed when another television died. If they had built the neighborhood only recently, why was the basement ceiling decayed, as if it had suffered the weathering of countless generations? The answer, when it presented itself, reduced dramatically the hope that he’d felt at the sight of that crumbling wood.

The ceiling was old and weak because in an otherwise sealed room, it would be the only logical escape route. The decay was deliberate, subtler than a flimsy trapdoor or a neon sign pointing upward, but the nature of it was the same. Like so much of what had occurred since he’d come to Seldom Seen Drive, this move had also been premeditated. Just not by him.

He swore and rammed the chair leg up into the ceiling. It punctured a hole in the wood on the first try. He quickly withdrew the spear and attacked the panel as hard as he could with only his left hand. It was an awkward assault, but the objective was reached. The leg penetrated as if the ceiling were made of bread. With almost manic glee he watched as a hand-sized hole appeared in the wood, lit by the faintest suggestion of daylight.