THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go (5 page)

             
"He left the state or something?" Brain just stared at me. "You don't mean...you're not saying..."

             
"No, he didn't leave the state, he left the planet. I caught him out behind his house and dragged the bastard down to the creek and held his head under until he stopped fighting. He only had one arm. He couldn't fight me off. I threw his stupid metal hook arm into the deepest part of a fishing hole and I guess it's still there today."

             
"You killed him?" I whispered.

             
Brian stood up and stretched. "Bedtime," he announced. "I've told enough stories for tonight."

             
I couldn't sleep for thinking about Brian being a killer. I understood the grief and pain his girlfriend's death must have cost him, but he took the law into his own hands. Is that what they always did in the South? Was that idyllic picture I had of it as twisted as a corkscrew? What Brian had confessed to was one cold business.

             
But then he called all these tales "stories" and maybe he just made them up.

             
It wasn't until he really lost it and went berserk at the outpost that I truly believed he was capable of murder and had probably killed Folcum, just as he claimed.

             
#

             
It was weeks after he'd told me about the man with the hooked arm and the death of Betsy Ann that Brian started acting weird. He stopped telling me stories and clammed up tight. He didn't want to play cards or watch video or throw darts. He started keeping to himself in his quarters and when I went to see about him, he was gruff and unfriendly. I asked him, "What's gotten into you? What's wrong?"

             
He claimed to have headaches, they were killing him. The McMurdo Sound medic wouldn't prescribe anything stronger than aspirin. Radar techs have to be careful about what medications they take. No one wanted them seeing flying saucers or incoming missiles on the screens.

             
I left him alone and started reading an Edgar Allan Poe collection of stories I found in the station library. I worried about Brian, but if he didn't want my company, I was not about to force it on him.

             
The shift radar techs started coming to me and asking if I knew what was wrong with Brian. I was his friend, I should know what was up. He'd been saying he heard things and couldn't keep his mind on the radar blips. Couldn't they
hear it
, he asked them over and over, that terrible scraping sound like someone outside the hut dragging something metallic along the corrugated metal sides?

             
They couldn't hear anything, they claimed. They were afraid Brian was losing it and might have to be shipped out on the next available transport. "See about him," they said. "Do something."

             
I stood in the rec room, staring at the coffee pot, thinking whether I wanted to pour a cup or not. It looked like black poison. I decided not. I went to the nearest window and stared outside into the dark. Security lights spread a white light over white snow; the world was white and silent and so empty. I knew the guys were probably right--Brian was in real big trouble. He shouldn't have talked about Folcum and that May night of murder. He shouldn't have told me about the creek and the drowning. It was hard on me keeping that kind of secret. You shouldn't have to know about a murder--no matter how deserved--and care so much for the murderer.

             
Snow began to fall, the light winking and speckling outside the ice-rimmed window, the night drawing nearer as if slithering softly toward the compound, the emptiness beyond the night growing into galactic proportions.

             
I hurried to brace Brian in his quarters. If I was chosen to save him from himself, then I would do the best I could. The entire base was constructed of Quonset huts made of corrugated metal and fully insulated on the inside. Nevertheless you could still hear the rising of the wind wailing out there and once in a while the creak of shifting ice or the thunder of a far off avalanche falling into the Sound, but I knew that's not what Brian thought he was hearing. He'd become obsessed with a mechanical hooked arm.

             
"Brian, the other guys in radar are threatening to go to the C.O. about you. It's serious. We have to do something."

             
He looked up at me from where he lay on his bunk and said, "They don't hear it, or they pretend they don't. Did they admit to you they heard it?"

             
"It's that story you told me, Brian. About Betsy Ann. It's like you let it take over your mind or something. You're imagining those sounds."

             
He jerked up in bed, sitting rigid, his head cocked to one side. He glanced over at the small square of dark window. "You heard that, right? Didn't you?! Don't lie about it."

             
I shook my head slowly. "Wind, that's all it is. It's snowing and the north wind is up. It's the damn
wind
, Brian."

             
"Wind can't thunk against the side of the building and then rumble down the side, slapping those corrugated valleys. You're lying, just like the others. You hear it, you know he's there, but you just won't admit it."

             
I walked over and took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. "Snap out of it! You've been here in McMurdo too damn long, that's all. Your mind is starting to play tricks on you, it happens to a lot of guys. Folcum's dead. You told me so yourself, you killed him, he's
dead.
"

             
Brian wrenched free and pushed me back. "Get out of my room. I want to be alone. You never were my friend, you prick."

             
I gave up in defeat. I'd have to go to the C.O. myself, explain how this came about. I wouldn't tell them the story about Folcum, but I'd plead for Brian's relocation before his obsession spread any further. Sometimes a superstition or an idea that gets loose in such close confines has a way of spreading like a contagion in the air. It can infect everyone.

             
#

             
Brian's first victim was an office clerk sent by the C.O. to summon Brian for an interview. From somewhere Brian had found a length of lead pipe and after he invited the private to enter his room, he cold-cocked him right in the head. They say the man was dead before he dropped, his skull cracking right down the front over his forehead.

             
When the body was discovered, Brian was gone and not to be found. A massive search was put on, the entire base under emergency alert. We had an escaped killer on our hands. We had a man driven by the searing cold, the isolation, and old bad memories who was on a rampage. It wasn't as if it hadn't happened before, but this time it was my friend, it was someone I thought I'd known well. I knew he had to be stopped for our sakes and for his own. I just didn't want him to suffer any more than he had to and I didn't want anyone to have to hurt him.

             
They say in regions like the Antarctic a man comes to know his real self. Mannerisms are exaggerated over the passage of time, habits grow into obsessive behavior, and a man's mettle is tested in myriad ways. I came to understand I didn't know as much about the human heart as I had once thought. I didn't really know human nature or where the limits were. I only knew Brian had been my best friend and he was haunted now by a man with a mechanical arm. Folcum was as real and present to him as any of the rest of us who shared the base compound--maybe Folcum was
more
real.

             
Last night they found one of the radar techs who had worked with Brian bludgeoned to death in his bed. This morning the FBI arrives and the search intensifies. Where could Brian be hiding? What nightmare is he living through now?

             
#

             
I had just sat down on my bunk and opened the Poe to where I'd saved my place. All day long the special FBI force team questioned me about Brian. I was bone weary and the wind rattling around the small wooden window frame unnerved me. It often
did
sound like someone was out there. I scooted my back against the wall and lifted my legs onto the blanket. That's the moment Brian chose to speak.

             
"Hello, traitor," he said quietly.

             
He was under my bed! I leaped up and leaned down to see him. He pushed from beneath the bunk. I didn't like the grim grin that rode his lips. I didn't like the cant of his shoulders or the dark gleam in his eyes. He looked like a man having a bullet removed, grinning and bearing it. "Brian! They're looking for you."

             
"I know. I'll let them find me soon. But first I have work to finish."

             
"What work?" I didn't mean to let the trembling reach my hands that hung at my sides. I gripped them together behind my back so he wouldn't see. Brian was no longer the game-player and storyteller. He was insane as a drunk camel and he was dangerous.

             
"What work? Why, your disposal, of course," he said. "You turned me in. You went to the C.O. You've wanted to get me out of here for months now. It's so petty, you know? I beat you at games, I tell better stories, and you can't forgive me for that, can you?"

             
"Look, you know that's not it. You know you're my friend and I care about you..."

             
"You've done other things, too, haven't you?" he asked, interrupting. "Dark things, dirty dark deadly things."

             
He withdrew the pipe from behind his back. He had done something to it. He had welded pieces to it. Two or three pieces of pipe, some kind of object on the end of it with two...pincers...

             
"Oh my god, Brian!"

             
"I need to send you to hell, my one-armed friend," he said, advancing.

             
Out of pure instinct I raised both my arms in the air and waved them around. "Christ, I'm not Folcum! Look at me!"

             
As he advanced, I backpedaled, then when he swung, I ducked. I was yelling, out of my head with fear. "Listen to me! I didn't do anything to Betsy Ann! I don't have a missing arm! Brian look at me, just look at me!"

             
He began to laugh, a wheezing, crazy laugh that filled my room and hurt my ears. "You really believed my stories, didn't you? Don't you know that's an old story people have been telling for years? About the man with the hook? You didn't think he was real, did you? DID YOU?"

             
Then he raised the pipe-arm above his head. I was pinned against the wall, the door too distant to reach. My head was filled with his questions and questions of my own. If death was impending, it was coming slow, slow enough I could puzzle this all out if I had a few more seconds of time...

             
Brian's arm stayed raised and now he hesitated. His head swiveled on his neck so he was staring at the window. "Look.
There
, see him? He was never real until I told you about him, making up that stupid story. Now he's come to get revenge. He doesn't like his story told, not by anyone. People think it was just a legend, all made up to frighten teenagers and kids, but it must have really happened somewhere, sometime; he must have once been real because he walks now. He walks outside, dragging his arm along the walls, waiting to get inside."

             
My gaze was drawn along with his to the window, the dark square with the snowstorm blowing outside. For a brief second or two I saw what Brian was seeing. A wizened face pressed to the icy glass, the eyes mad and senseless with rage. And there, next to that face the mechanical hand clenched so that the two pincers were curved, gleaming, pressed together into a hook.

             
Startled, I gasped. But then the apparition vanished and nothing but snowflakes gusted past the window panes.

             
I turned my attention back to Brian and saw he was still mesmerized, lost in that dark dream. It was my chance to make a move. I rushed forward and grabbed the weapon in his hand and twisting, wrestled it from his grasp. I hurried to the door to call for help and heard footsteps ringing in the hall, some of the other men coming to see what the shouting was about.

             
#

             
Now that they've taken Brian away I wonder if the story he told was true or not. Or had he been the one who murdered Betsy Ann? Had there even been a Betsy Ann? It was maddening not to know the truth. Had he told me it was a lie, an urban legend, just to throw me off? And what had that been at the window, that madman with the hook? Had we shared a psychosis and a vision together, Brian and I?