Post by The MRP! on Sept 22, 2014 4:53:02 GMT -5
The rain pelted off the aluminum awning as Todd Bailey took one last drag off his cigarette before he threw it on the ground and stamped it out with his foot. He exhaled the smoke, and it hung in the air in the heavy wet air, framing his dark features in the wan light cast by the lone bulb next to the awning. It was a chilly evening as the first nips of autumn air filled the rainy early October night. Todd shivered and coughed. Smoking was prohibited on the grounds of the Siegel Psychiatric Hospital, but Todd always sneaked a butt on Thursday nights. He needed it to steady his nerves before cleaning the Henderson Wing, or as folks called it, “The Ward” with a shudder or an eye-roll as they said it. It was off-limits to all except authorized personnel, and Todd had drawn the shit duty of having to clean the hall as the nightshift janitor.
There was only one patient in the ward, a little boy of about ten or so, but he creeped Todd out. Todd wasn’t sure what his deal was, no one was, but there sure was a lot of gossip about him. Rumor had it the boy had been here since he killed his family nearly fifteen years ago, but that couldn’t be true; he only looked ten at most. Of course, Todd was one of the few who had actually seen the boy, so he knew the kid was way too young to have been alive fifteen years ago, let alone killing his family. The only one who might have the real scoop on what the kid’s deal was is Dr. Bernard. Well, him and the two women everyone gossiped about who regularly visited the boy, but Todd had no clue who those visitors were. Some said family, some said specialists, but no one knew shit for certain. These women had a special entrance, and were never on the books according to the water cooler chatter.
Todd had asked around about the boy after his first “weird incident” in The Ward, but no one seemed to know much, and anything more than idle gossip, and the subject was a surefire conversation killer. Any real inquiry made people uncomfortable and likely to change the subject or walk away. As far as he knew, aside from Dr. Bernard and the two nurses on his personal team, Todd may have been the only one on staff to have been inside “The Ward”. And he had been required to sign an NDA regarding the Henderson Wing when he took the nightshift position.
Todd took a deep breath and steeled himself to go clean the ward. He checked to make sure the IPod was still in his pocket. Electronic devices were prohibited inside for hospital, and in particular in The Ward, but after the last few incidents inside, he needed something to drown out any sounds. He slid the spray can of deodorizer out of his coat pocket and sprayed himself down to cover the smell of cigarettes, and slid through the door he had propped open with a rock and back inside the hospital.
He stopped by his locker and ditched the jacket and his pack of smokes, and grabbed a breath mint. He took a second to look at himself in the mirror, his dark complexion staring back at him as he shook some of the rain from his dreads before heading back to pick up his cleaning cart. He slid the spray can of deodorizer back into the cleaning supplies, repositioned the mop so its handle lay comfortably on his shoulder while he pushed the cart, took a deep breath and headed for The Ward.
As he arrived, he looked around to make sure no one was looking, stepped out of the view of the closed circuit security camera, and pulled out his earbuds, slipping them inside his ears and turning up his collar to obscure them from the camera’s view. He arranged his dreads to cover his ears and slid his hand into his pocket to cue up his favorite playlist. The first few notes of Parliament Funkadelic kicked in on his 70s Bootyshakers list, and he walked up to the door to swipe his security card.
The door itself unnerved him. It was the only door in the entire hospital that had etchings in it. He wasn’t sure what they were, or why or how they got there, as they were there when he first took the job. They looked like some of the stuff Alicia, his girlfriend, read in her astrology and wicca books, like something out of one of those Army of Darkness movies or something. He had asked the doc about it once, and Dr. Bernard said they were put in at the request of the patron who paid for the wing and for the boy’s care, which had surprised Todd, as he had thought it was a state case with the boy’s family supposedly dead and all, but who the hell knew. He shrugged his shoulders and opened the door. The faster he got started, the faster he was done and could be back doing some bootyshaking with Alicia.
The door shut behind him with a clang, but Todd couldn’t hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything. Every time he came here it was something different. The first time it was the sound of the boy crying, but when he had looked through the window at the boy, the boy was standing there staring hatred at him, standing motionless in his straightjacket, no signs of tears anywhere on him. That was the first weird incident. When he tried to report it to his supervisor, he had almost lost his job and they had sent him for a drug screening, so it was the last incident, he had reported, but this shit happened just about every Thursday when he came here to clean as part of the weekly to do list. At first he thought he was being punked by some of the other staff, but he was the only one besides Dr. Bernard and the nurses with a pass key to get in here, so it couldn’t be that. Crying, screaming, laughing, the ecstatic moaning of an orgy, it was different every week, but there was always something.
He had started taking the IPod a few weeks ago, and it helped drown out that crap. Alicia had given it to him. She had wanted him to go see that weird fortune teller lady she went to in Chinatown when he had told her about it, but he was having none of that. Alicia was the only one who believed him, even though telling her technically broke his NDA, he trusted her. Hell, he had been saving up for a diamond for the last six months, and that was the reason he had taken the nightshift job, it paid better and he needed the extra cash. So, he wasn’t about to go tell some stranger and break the NDA and lose his job.
Alicia said she understood and had dug out her old IPod and given it to him. There was no way he could get his smartphone in, they checked for those, but no one thought to look for an IPod anymore, so he loaded that baby with his jams and used it to drown out the sounds. Of course, since he started doing so, the boy had just sat there smirking at him from behind the glass. When he started the job, the doc had said the boy was catatonic and immobile, but Todd knew better. He thought that was just the “party line” to keep people from trying to get into “The Ward” to see the weird shit. That may have been part of the reason the admins had thought he was on something the first time, when he reported he saw the boy staring at him and had heard the crying.
With a sigh, Todd started to work. Todd swished his mop in time with Car Wash by Rose Royce, shaking his ass as he moved along. He stopped suddenly as the music stopped.
“Awww man, you have got to be fucking kidding me!” Todd swore as he fished the Ipod out of his pocket.
Staring down at it, it was doing something funky as it seemed to be searching for a track. After a moment, it stopped, and track 32 came up. Todd could hear the first notes of a song not only coming from the IPod’s earbuds, but also from the speakers that were part of the hospital’s PA system.
“Now you always say…
That you want to be free…
But you’ll come running back (said you would baby)
You’ll come running back (I said so many times before)
You’ll come running back to me!
Oh, tiiiiime is on my side, yes it is…”
Todd glanced over his should at the boy through the window. He stood there, his little ten year old self, wrapped in the straightjacket, his curly brown hair all tousled with bed head, mouthing the words to a song that wasn’t loaded on his IPod, but was playing on it anyways. Todd looked at the boy’s eyes…black pools of darkness, and started screaming…
September 29, 1985…
The hurricane swells crashed on the beach with a roar as the wind tore through the seaside community. The eye of the storm was well south, but even here as far north as Falmouth Bay, Hurricane Gloria was wreaking havoc. Two figures made their way to the shoreline through the Chaos of the storm. One was seemingly nonplussed by the weather around him, walking as if he was on a casual stroll through a summer shower. His sallow skin glistened sickly in the rain and his beady eyes radiated with delight at the events around him. He led a second figure, who walked as if she was an automaton, blindly putting one foot in front of the other, huddled under a blanket and oblivious to her surroundings.
“Now, now Miss Spencer, no need to worry,” the sallow man said in a cracking voice to the adolescent girl huddled in the blankets. “Nothing to worry about, this is what happens when the Great Master awakes from his slumber,” he said, excitement causing spittle to fly from the oozing film of mucus covering his thin batrachian lips.
Her blank stare showed no acknowledgement that he had spoken to her. She stopped walking when he stopped guiding her forward, slumping slightly like a puppet with the strings dropped. The sallow man let go of the girl for a moment, unafraid she would run, and raised his hands in supplication to the storm. He began to chant a phrase ancient before life on this planet crawled from the seas for the first time, mouthing words that human physiology was not designed to form. The intonation of his voice seemed to buzz and crackle in the storm, gathering the ozone like a lightning strike about him as he chanted. The beady eyes sparkled with mad glee as he regarded the storm swell; it surged higher and higher. His chanting stopped abruptly, and he began to cackle madly while capering about. Grabbing a hold of the witless girl he led her into the surge, wading into the ocean until the water was waist deep.
“He comes for you Miss Spencer…he awakes and we his faithful shall give him his bride…” he squealed as the swells surged over them, engulfing them in the crashing waves. The sea itself seemed to roar in triumph as the waves crashed down onto the shore, and then the storm broke abruptly. The winds stopped of a sudden, and the waves receded back towards the sea. The beach stood empty as a ray of sunshine broke through the cloudbanks…
Chinatown, Hub City, the second floor office of Jim Corrigan…
Jim Corrigan looked down at the yellowed newspaper clipping on his desk and snarled at the headline: “Hero Cop under suspicion in Spencer kidnapping case...”
The clipping was from early October 1985; in fact the date of the clipping was twenty-nine years ago tomorrow. Twenty-nine years since Corrigan’s life went off the rails. He looked at the stock photo of himself back then-a young twenty-something cop just made detective with a knack for bringing down some of the east coast mob’s big boys operating out of The Hub. No trace of white in his hair then, he sighed and reached for the half-empty bottle of Scotch on his desk. He pulled the bottle open, took a long swig and walked to the window.
Looking out, he watched the October rain and ran his hand through the mop of red hair on his head, streaked with white revealing the toll of years on him, and then scratched the stubble of a few days growth on his face. It was near midnight, and usually Chinatown was bustling, even at this time of night, but the cold autumn rain had driven most folks inside. He took another swig of Scotch and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Nearly thirty years since he has been investigated by IA. Thirty years since he had given up the badge and become a P.I. The girl had disappeared, the daughter of Theodore Spencer, the Federal prosecutor Corrigan was working with to bring down the Howard crime family in Hub City. Everyone was certain Don “Sugar Daddy” Howard was behind the kidnapping to pressure Spencer off the case, but when the girl never turned up, the focus turned to perceived irregularities in the police investigation and led some to believe Corrigan, who was lead on the case, was on the take from the mob. There was no proof, and no formal charges were ever brought against Corrigan, but it had been enough to ruin his rep and make him person non-grata on the police force.
He took another long drag from the bottle, nearly emptying it. If it hadn’t been for the old man, Dusk taking him in and offering his a job as an investigator, he wasn’t sure what path his life would have taken. Yeah old Nate, what a guy...asshole. Now Corrigan himself was old, an old drunk in Chinatown, working divorce and other b.s. cases struggling to make ends meet.
He leaned up against the window and stared out at the street.
Corrigan watched as a young black man raced through the rain towards his building. He certainly wasn’t dressed for the weather, running around in a sweats and a wife beater. The guy stopped to shake the rain from his dreads before Corrigan heard him as the guy began to pound on the door to the shop below Corrigan’s office-Madame Xanadu’s House of Cards. Xanadu was a fortune teller, so he was used to all kinds of crazies showing up at odd hours, but the Madame X wasn’t there when he arrived tonight.
“Takes all kinds,” Corrigan shrugged as he killed the bottle with one last long swig and turned to look at the news clipping on his desk again.
“Some fucking life…” he barked as he tossed the empty bottle in the metal wastebasket, with a loud clang, misjudging the distance and force of his toss, knocking the wastebasket over and sending the bottle scuttling across the floor and the waste basket rolling around in a weird elliptical arc.
Corrigan just stared at the wastebasket for a moment and then walked to the coat rack to grab his hat and jacket. Looking out at the rainy night once more, he shrugged, hung the jacket back up, loosened his tie, and sat heavily in the desk chair. Leaning back, he put his feet up on the desk and positioned the hat to block the lights from the street coming through the window.
“Nothing to go home to anyways…, maybe that asshole will stop pounding soon so I can get some shuteye” he muttered as he drifted off to sleep.
One hour ago…
Todd Bailey sat in the mostly dark room dragging heavily on his cigarette as he watched Alicia sleep under the blankets of her bed. He wore a pair of sweats and a tank top style t-shirt, and shivered even though the room was warm. He’d run to Alicia’s place after the incident at work, not knowing where else to go. He didn’t want to be alone, and he didn’t want to close his eyes, because all he could see when he did was those eyes…or actually the pools of blackness where the eyes should have been. He shuddered and took another drag, hoping he didn’t wake her up.
The flickering light of a television set played with the darkness in the small bedroom in the fourth floor walk up apartment. Todd watched absently as a rebroadcast of the late local news played across the scene. A handsome square-jawed white dude was on the screen talking about some local political corruption scandal or some such. Alicia couldn't afford cable, so he was stuck watching this crap…but he wasn't really watching. He stared out the window and dragged on his cigarette again and shuddered again.
<“How deep does this corruption embed itself in our community? How deep does the mob have its claws into the Hub?” > The voice of the square-jawed newsman rang out from the television and cut through the otherwise quiet room. <“We’ll get to the bottom of this! They can’t hide from justice. They can’t hide from Vic Sa….”>
The voice stopped as Alicia clicked the television off and looked at Todd.
“What’s wrong baby? Can’t sleep?” she asked as she crawled out from under the blankets to snuggle up to Todd, the pale light coming through the window casting her naked form in silhouette.
Todd sat still and unresponsive for a moment before shuddering again. His head slumped and his body began to wrack with sobs.
Alicia enveloped him in her arms and cooed softly to comfort him.
“Its okay baby, it’ll be alright. You’re here now, everything’s gonna be alright.”
As she cuddled and caressed him, her voice took on a sing song quality. Her hand stroked his hair, the motion causing the bandage from a fresh tattoo on her shoulder to fall open, revealing a stylized number 32 tattooed there.
“Just give it time baby…cuz tiiiiiiime is on your side…” she began to sing in a voice that was not her own.
Todd yanked himself away from her and stared in horror at the pools of blackness where her eyes should be and ran out of the apartment, racing down the stairs and into the cold rainy night…
There was only one patient in the ward, a little boy of about ten or so, but he creeped Todd out. Todd wasn’t sure what his deal was, no one was, but there sure was a lot of gossip about him. Rumor had it the boy had been here since he killed his family nearly fifteen years ago, but that couldn’t be true; he only looked ten at most. Of course, Todd was one of the few who had actually seen the boy, so he knew the kid was way too young to have been alive fifteen years ago, let alone killing his family. The only one who might have the real scoop on what the kid’s deal was is Dr. Bernard. Well, him and the two women everyone gossiped about who regularly visited the boy, but Todd had no clue who those visitors were. Some said family, some said specialists, but no one knew shit for certain. These women had a special entrance, and were never on the books according to the water cooler chatter.
Todd had asked around about the boy after his first “weird incident” in The Ward, but no one seemed to know much, and anything more than idle gossip, and the subject was a surefire conversation killer. Any real inquiry made people uncomfortable and likely to change the subject or walk away. As far as he knew, aside from Dr. Bernard and the two nurses on his personal team, Todd may have been the only one on staff to have been inside “The Ward”. And he had been required to sign an NDA regarding the Henderson Wing when he took the nightshift position.
Todd took a deep breath and steeled himself to go clean the ward. He checked to make sure the IPod was still in his pocket. Electronic devices were prohibited inside for hospital, and in particular in The Ward, but after the last few incidents inside, he needed something to drown out any sounds. He slid the spray can of deodorizer out of his coat pocket and sprayed himself down to cover the smell of cigarettes, and slid through the door he had propped open with a rock and back inside the hospital.
He stopped by his locker and ditched the jacket and his pack of smokes, and grabbed a breath mint. He took a second to look at himself in the mirror, his dark complexion staring back at him as he shook some of the rain from his dreads before heading back to pick up his cleaning cart. He slid the spray can of deodorizer back into the cleaning supplies, repositioned the mop so its handle lay comfortably on his shoulder while he pushed the cart, took a deep breath and headed for The Ward.
As he arrived, he looked around to make sure no one was looking, stepped out of the view of the closed circuit security camera, and pulled out his earbuds, slipping them inside his ears and turning up his collar to obscure them from the camera’s view. He arranged his dreads to cover his ears and slid his hand into his pocket to cue up his favorite playlist. The first few notes of Parliament Funkadelic kicked in on his 70s Bootyshakers list, and he walked up to the door to swipe his security card.
The door itself unnerved him. It was the only door in the entire hospital that had etchings in it. He wasn’t sure what they were, or why or how they got there, as they were there when he first took the job. They looked like some of the stuff Alicia, his girlfriend, read in her astrology and wicca books, like something out of one of those Army of Darkness movies or something. He had asked the doc about it once, and Dr. Bernard said they were put in at the request of the patron who paid for the wing and for the boy’s care, which had surprised Todd, as he had thought it was a state case with the boy’s family supposedly dead and all, but who the hell knew. He shrugged his shoulders and opened the door. The faster he got started, the faster he was done and could be back doing some bootyshaking with Alicia.
The door shut behind him with a clang, but Todd couldn’t hear it. He didn’t want to hear anything. Every time he came here it was something different. The first time it was the sound of the boy crying, but when he had looked through the window at the boy, the boy was standing there staring hatred at him, standing motionless in his straightjacket, no signs of tears anywhere on him. That was the first weird incident. When he tried to report it to his supervisor, he had almost lost his job and they had sent him for a drug screening, so it was the last incident, he had reported, but this shit happened just about every Thursday when he came here to clean as part of the weekly to do list. At first he thought he was being punked by some of the other staff, but he was the only one besides Dr. Bernard and the nurses with a pass key to get in here, so it couldn’t be that. Crying, screaming, laughing, the ecstatic moaning of an orgy, it was different every week, but there was always something.
He had started taking the IPod a few weeks ago, and it helped drown out that crap. Alicia had given it to him. She had wanted him to go see that weird fortune teller lady she went to in Chinatown when he had told her about it, but he was having none of that. Alicia was the only one who believed him, even though telling her technically broke his NDA, he trusted her. Hell, he had been saving up for a diamond for the last six months, and that was the reason he had taken the nightshift job, it paid better and he needed the extra cash. So, he wasn’t about to go tell some stranger and break the NDA and lose his job.
Alicia said she understood and had dug out her old IPod and given it to him. There was no way he could get his smartphone in, they checked for those, but no one thought to look for an IPod anymore, so he loaded that baby with his jams and used it to drown out the sounds. Of course, since he started doing so, the boy had just sat there smirking at him from behind the glass. When he started the job, the doc had said the boy was catatonic and immobile, but Todd knew better. He thought that was just the “party line” to keep people from trying to get into “The Ward” to see the weird shit. That may have been part of the reason the admins had thought he was on something the first time, when he reported he saw the boy staring at him and had heard the crying.
With a sigh, Todd started to work. Todd swished his mop in time with Car Wash by Rose Royce, shaking his ass as he moved along. He stopped suddenly as the music stopped.
“Awww man, you have got to be fucking kidding me!” Todd swore as he fished the Ipod out of his pocket.
Staring down at it, it was doing something funky as it seemed to be searching for a track. After a moment, it stopped, and track 32 came up. Todd could hear the first notes of a song not only coming from the IPod’s earbuds, but also from the speakers that were part of the hospital’s PA system.
“Now you always say…
That you want to be free…
But you’ll come running back (said you would baby)
You’ll come running back (I said so many times before)
You’ll come running back to me!
Oh, tiiiiime is on my side, yes it is…”
Todd glanced over his should at the boy through the window. He stood there, his little ten year old self, wrapped in the straightjacket, his curly brown hair all tousled with bed head, mouthing the words to a song that wasn’t loaded on his IPod, but was playing on it anyways. Todd looked at the boy’s eyes…black pools of darkness, and started screaming…
Episode One: Storm Season-Part One
By M.R. Proteau
September 29, 1985…
The hurricane swells crashed on the beach with a roar as the wind tore through the seaside community. The eye of the storm was well south, but even here as far north as Falmouth Bay, Hurricane Gloria was wreaking havoc. Two figures made their way to the shoreline through the Chaos of the storm. One was seemingly nonplussed by the weather around him, walking as if he was on a casual stroll through a summer shower. His sallow skin glistened sickly in the rain and his beady eyes radiated with delight at the events around him. He led a second figure, who walked as if she was an automaton, blindly putting one foot in front of the other, huddled under a blanket and oblivious to her surroundings.
“Now, now Miss Spencer, no need to worry,” the sallow man said in a cracking voice to the adolescent girl huddled in the blankets. “Nothing to worry about, this is what happens when the Great Master awakes from his slumber,” he said, excitement causing spittle to fly from the oozing film of mucus covering his thin batrachian lips.
Her blank stare showed no acknowledgement that he had spoken to her. She stopped walking when he stopped guiding her forward, slumping slightly like a puppet with the strings dropped. The sallow man let go of the girl for a moment, unafraid she would run, and raised his hands in supplication to the storm. He began to chant a phrase ancient before life on this planet crawled from the seas for the first time, mouthing words that human physiology was not designed to form. The intonation of his voice seemed to buzz and crackle in the storm, gathering the ozone like a lightning strike about him as he chanted. The beady eyes sparkled with mad glee as he regarded the storm swell; it surged higher and higher. His chanting stopped abruptly, and he began to cackle madly while capering about. Grabbing a hold of the witless girl he led her into the surge, wading into the ocean until the water was waist deep.
“He comes for you Miss Spencer…he awakes and we his faithful shall give him his bride…” he squealed as the swells surged over them, engulfing them in the crashing waves. The sea itself seemed to roar in triumph as the waves crashed down onto the shore, and then the storm broke abruptly. The winds stopped of a sudden, and the waves receded back towards the sea. The beach stood empty as a ray of sunshine broke through the cloudbanks…
*
The Present…Chinatown, Hub City, the second floor office of Jim Corrigan…
Jim Corrigan looked down at the yellowed newspaper clipping on his desk and snarled at the headline: “Hero Cop under suspicion in Spencer kidnapping case...”
The clipping was from early October 1985; in fact the date of the clipping was twenty-nine years ago tomorrow. Twenty-nine years since Corrigan’s life went off the rails. He looked at the stock photo of himself back then-a young twenty-something cop just made detective with a knack for bringing down some of the east coast mob’s big boys operating out of The Hub. No trace of white in his hair then, he sighed and reached for the half-empty bottle of Scotch on his desk. He pulled the bottle open, took a long swig and walked to the window.
Looking out, he watched the October rain and ran his hand through the mop of red hair on his head, streaked with white revealing the toll of years on him, and then scratched the stubble of a few days growth on his face. It was near midnight, and usually Chinatown was bustling, even at this time of night, but the cold autumn rain had driven most folks inside. He took another swig of Scotch and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Nearly thirty years since he has been investigated by IA. Thirty years since he had given up the badge and become a P.I. The girl had disappeared, the daughter of Theodore Spencer, the Federal prosecutor Corrigan was working with to bring down the Howard crime family in Hub City. Everyone was certain Don “Sugar Daddy” Howard was behind the kidnapping to pressure Spencer off the case, but when the girl never turned up, the focus turned to perceived irregularities in the police investigation and led some to believe Corrigan, who was lead on the case, was on the take from the mob. There was no proof, and no formal charges were ever brought against Corrigan, but it had been enough to ruin his rep and make him person non-grata on the police force.
He took another long drag from the bottle, nearly emptying it. If it hadn’t been for the old man, Dusk taking him in and offering his a job as an investigator, he wasn’t sure what path his life would have taken. Yeah old Nate, what a guy...asshole. Now Corrigan himself was old, an old drunk in Chinatown, working divorce and other b.s. cases struggling to make ends meet.
He leaned up against the window and stared out at the street.
Corrigan watched as a young black man raced through the rain towards his building. He certainly wasn’t dressed for the weather, running around in a sweats and a wife beater. The guy stopped to shake the rain from his dreads before Corrigan heard him as the guy began to pound on the door to the shop below Corrigan’s office-Madame Xanadu’s House of Cards. Xanadu was a fortune teller, so he was used to all kinds of crazies showing up at odd hours, but the Madame X wasn’t there when he arrived tonight.
“Takes all kinds,” Corrigan shrugged as he killed the bottle with one last long swig and turned to look at the news clipping on his desk again.
“Some fucking life…” he barked as he tossed the empty bottle in the metal wastebasket, with a loud clang, misjudging the distance and force of his toss, knocking the wastebasket over and sending the bottle scuttling across the floor and the waste basket rolling around in a weird elliptical arc.
Corrigan just stared at the wastebasket for a moment and then walked to the coat rack to grab his hat and jacket. Looking out at the rainy night once more, he shrugged, hung the jacket back up, loosened his tie, and sat heavily in the desk chair. Leaning back, he put his feet up on the desk and positioned the hat to block the lights from the street coming through the window.
“Nothing to go home to anyways…, maybe that asshole will stop pounding soon so I can get some shuteye” he muttered as he drifted off to sleep.
*
One hour ago…
Todd Bailey sat in the mostly dark room dragging heavily on his cigarette as he watched Alicia sleep under the blankets of her bed. He wore a pair of sweats and a tank top style t-shirt, and shivered even though the room was warm. He’d run to Alicia’s place after the incident at work, not knowing where else to go. He didn’t want to be alone, and he didn’t want to close his eyes, because all he could see when he did was those eyes…or actually the pools of blackness where the eyes should have been. He shuddered and took another drag, hoping he didn’t wake her up.
The flickering light of a television set played with the darkness in the small bedroom in the fourth floor walk up apartment. Todd watched absently as a rebroadcast of the late local news played across the scene. A handsome square-jawed white dude was on the screen talking about some local political corruption scandal or some such. Alicia couldn't afford cable, so he was stuck watching this crap…but he wasn't really watching. He stared out the window and dragged on his cigarette again and shuddered again.
<“How deep does this corruption embed itself in our community? How deep does the mob have its claws into the Hub?” > The voice of the square-jawed newsman rang out from the television and cut through the otherwise quiet room. <“We’ll get to the bottom of this! They can’t hide from justice. They can’t hide from Vic Sa….”>
The voice stopped as Alicia clicked the television off and looked at Todd.
“What’s wrong baby? Can’t sleep?” she asked as she crawled out from under the blankets to snuggle up to Todd, the pale light coming through the window casting her naked form in silhouette.
Todd sat still and unresponsive for a moment before shuddering again. His head slumped and his body began to wrack with sobs.
Alicia enveloped him in her arms and cooed softly to comfort him.
“Its okay baby, it’ll be alright. You’re here now, everything’s gonna be alright.”
As she cuddled and caressed him, her voice took on a sing song quality. Her hand stroked his hair, the motion causing the bandage from a fresh tattoo on her shoulder to fall open, revealing a stylized number 32 tattooed there.
“Just give it time baby…cuz tiiiiiiime is on your side…” she began to sing in a voice that was not her own.
Todd yanked himself away from her and stared in horror at the pools of blackness where her eyes should be and ran out of the apartment, racing down the stairs and into the cold rainy night…
To be continued…