Transcription (13 page)

James grabbed the man by his naked ankles and dragged. The man thumped when he hit the floor. He groaned as James pulled him through the door and around the corner to the hall. Blood seeped from his finger stump, leaving a trail on the carpet. With his other hand, the crushed one, the man pawed at the wall as it scrolled by.

James stepped over the old man and returned to the bedroom. He came back with a knife. As he stepped over him again, James jabbed the knife down into the man’s chest, like he was merely stashing it in a convenient place for later.
 

The old man gasped and craned his head while he tried to grab the blade. In the process, he seemed to realize that he was missing a finger. His mouth opened and a helpless wail came out.

It ended abruptly when James brought his palm down on the shaft of the knife. The blade drove deeper, settling into flesh. The old man’s wails bubbled then subsided. James dragged him into the bathroom. He piled the second body on top of the first. He maneuvered limbs until the bodies settled next to each other. Side by side, they almost looked like they were trying to hug each other around the knife. A narrow line of blood wove towards the drain.
 

James pulled the towels from the bar and rolled them into a cylinder.

He propped the towels over the faucet, at the couple’s feet. With his towels in place as a pillow, James climbed on top of the bodies and stretched out on the tangled flesh. He fell asleep immediately.

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When James woke up, the last of the alcohol was still chasing around the edges of his brain. He worked his tongue until his dry mouth moved normally again. His nose woke up before the soreness in his muscles registered. The thick stench of shit surrounded him. It had been there all along, just waiting for him to recognize it.

James began to thrash. He spilled over the lip of the tub and fell to the vinyl floor. His balance evaporated as he tried to push to his feet. He collapsed sideways into the toilet. When he saw the old couple in the tub, he scrambled backwards until he ran into the door. He accidentally shut it, closing himself in with the dead people. James clawed at the handle and tried to pull the door open. He couldn’t seem to tug on the door and get out of the way of its swing.
 

Panic ruled his brain. His breath came in short gasps. His eyes unwillingly took in the scene.

As he looked at their faces, the last moments of their lives flashed before his eyes. He flinched as he saw his own body, from over his shoulder, as he had easily dispatched the old couple. His hands flew to his mouth. He pulled them away, disgusted by the blood there.
 

James found the doorknob and somehow managed to free himself from the tiny bathroom. He ran down the hall and didn’t stop until his hand was ready to pull open the front door. He saw the broken chain and he stopped. His heart was beating so fast that his fingers and toes were tingling. Some misguided instinct was shutting down the circulation to his extremities, preserving the blood for his core.

He focused on his breathing until he could pull in and let out a breath without shivering. His hand was still on the doorknob. He stepped back. He turned and regarded the living room with fresh eyes.
 

It wasn’t too bad. He saw a blood streak going down the hall with a couple of footprints in it. The spot on the wool carpet looked like blood with perhaps a little bit of hair and skin mixed in. He kept his focus on his breathing as he forced himself back down the hall. This time, he carefully stepped around the blood.
 

The bedroom was worse. There, blood was spattered and smeared. James sighed.
 

He reached slowly around to his back pocket, already repulsed by what he knew he would find. The finger was dried to the patch of quilt. He remembered the scratch on his own face, and put the finger back in his pocket.

James backed out of the bedroom, stepping over the blood, and made his way to the kitchen. From under the counter, he pulled bleach, sponges, and a bucket. He found dishwashing gloves in drawer. He began working.

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By the time James returned to his own apartment, he was exhausted.

He wasn’t nervous about the thought that the police would coming knocking. He knew they would—it was just a matter of time. Even if nobody stumbled on the bodies, even if a concerned relative didn’t stop by because they hadn’t heard from the couple, rent was due in a few days. Surely the landlord would make the terrible discovery before long.

And James was guilty. He deserved to be punished. He picked up his phone and listened to the tone. He started to dial several times. A thought stayed his hand.

What would happen if he went to prison? The boxes in his apartment were filled with atrocities, thousands of them. He couldn’t burn them—his father had proved that. Burning them was the worst thing he could do.

Similarly, he couldn’t stop transcribing them. One night of irresponsible drinking on his part had led to the death of two innocent old people. How many other people would he doom to that fate if he stopped his work?

James couldn’t run, he couldn’t stop his work, and he refused to be nervous.

Still, the crime gnawed at him. The thought of the couple, right below him, pulled at the edges of his brain. He fell asleep thinking about it, and woke from a nightmare of the old couple having sex in their bathtub. The old corpses were consumed with their passion for each other. Their horrible death had brought them together once more.

James poured out all his alcohol that next evening.

He resolved to never drink in the morning again. It was too dangerous.

A week later, when the police failed to appear, James began to wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing. He went so far as to backtrack through his files, verifying that there was a date with no transcription from that year.
Something
had happened—he knew that much.

James had moved twice after the incident. He had gone from West Virginia to Tennessee. Then, he went from Tennessee to North Carolina. He left fake forwarding addresses, and changed his name each time.
 

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Waking up from his memory, James ran the water in the sink, washing away the smell of cheap gin.

“This could be dangerous,” he said to the empty kitchen. “I should tell Bo to stop bringing me gin.”

On the one hand, he seemed to be in a pretty good rhythm with the drinking. He was only doing it a few nights a week, and he never got blitzed. It was just enough to grant him a little distance before he sat down to write, and he always poured out the remainder of the bottle.

James rinsed the empty bottle and added it to the rest.
 

“I can’t keep doing this,” he said, shaking his head. He blinked. He remembered the faces of the dead. It was getting harder and harder to do. The faces of the old couple morphed into the faces of his parents. It was a struggle to keep them separate in his memory.
 

“I
can
keep doing this. It’s just writing. Lots of people dedicate their lives to much less important vocations.”

He picked up an envelope from the counter and tore open the flap with his index finger. He unfolded the bank statement and read it. With a mental calculation, he came up with an answer.

“I can keep doing this for another seventeen months, barring any unforeseen expenses,” he said to the paper. His whole life was an unforeseen expense.

James frowned and set the paper down.

He looked towards his desk.

CHAPTER 12: HOME

Diary of Thomas Hicks, 1977

I
CAN
’
T
DESCRIBE
HOW
happy I am to be home.
 

When I got up from my nap, it was still before noon and I was filled with energy. I’m
still
filled with energy. I’m so happy to have the prison behind me. I didn’t collect any real evidence of anything, but there’s something in that prison. I felt it. Soon, they’ll tear it down, and that terrible little cell will go with it.
 

I putter around in my office for a little bit, writing down my impressions of the prison and of Officer Fradeux. He’s a great, really
authentic
character. If I have one complaint, he might have been a little too “good-hearted guard-y” for my piece. I’m afraid if I round him out too much, he’ll make the whole story seem contrived. Then again, I could just leave him out. Nobody needs to know who walked me to the cell, or who came to rescue me. It’s enough to know that I spent the night in the place.

Jeremy calls after lunch.

“Hello?”

“Tom? How are you?”

“Absolutely fine,” I say. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I expected something, but I guess I never put too fine a point on it.”

“I know what you mean. It was definitely weird. There’s some odd stuff going on in that place. Chalk it up to optical illusions and strange electromagnetic fields or something. Thanks for all your help on the story. I’ll credit you properly when it’s published.”

“You’ll get a book out of this one,” he says. “I expect a piece of that action.”

I laugh. He’s fully aware of how much money I made off my last book. I took him to lunch on the proceeds—that accounted for about half of my profit. Most of the time, it’s tough to really read a person over the phone. But, sometimes, I can almost get a better feel from them when I’m separated by buzzing current down a copper wire.

“What’s going on, man?” I ask.

He’s silent. I’m about to ask again when he finally speaks.

“I, um, I don’t know if it’s anything, but I should tell you,” he says.

“What?”

“I was nervous about you last night, and I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, I knew you weren’t in any danger in an empty jail cell, but still.”

“No, I know what you mean,” I say, letting him off the hook. “Trust me, I had my moments. When you’re in isolation like that, you start to see things, and hear things…”

“It’s not that,” he says, interrupting me. “I was nervous about the numbers. You know the number series I was telling you about?”

“Sure,” I say. “You predicted yesterday’s date from the series, right?”

“Yeah,” he says with another pause. “I always just thought of it as the Blackburn-Lynch Series. I never gave much thought to its origin. Or, if I did know the origin at one point, I guess I forgot about it.”

“Blackburn-Lynch?”

“He was a big mathematician a few decades ago. He ended up being discredited because he came up with a lot of his theories while he was on heavy psychedelics. He would trip on acid and then dream up these crazy ideas.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, so aside from using his series for this calculation, I never gave it much thought. Do you know about complex numbers?”

“No,” I say. “You can skip the theory and just give me the history. I’m no good with math.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Anyway, I dug up his autobiography. Someone gave it to me as a joke a few years ago, and I knew I had it here. I looked it up to see if he talked about the origin of that series. Turns out, he talked about it quite a bit. There was some strange stuff there.”

I’m getting a little impatient at this point. Jeremy always gets right to the point. With this conversation, he doesn’t seem to have one. Instead of prompting him, I let my silence speed him up.

“Anyway, he had this crackpot idea. It was psychology more than math. He theorized that evil is inherent in life and it’s activated by patterns in nature. He suggested that with the right environmental conditions, evil could be created.”

“What does this have to do with a string of numbers?” I ask. I’ve seen the numbers that Jeremy applied to model the dates of the changeover of The Big Four. They were just numbers, like any others.

“Blackburn-Lynch thought that his series was an omen of evil.”

I laugh. In part, I’m laughing because the concept is pure insanity. Numbers—those squiggly figures on the page—represent real things, but they are not “real.” The other thing I’m laughing at is Jeremy. He’s such an intelligent, pragmatic, logical guy. It’s incredibly amusing to hear him so shook up about nonsense.

“Hold on a sec,” he says. “Just think about it. All your prisoners turned while in that cell, right? They went from ordinary, understandable criminals. Maybe a weak upbringing failed to teach them it wasn’t okay to steal. Maybe circumstances forced them into a position where they thought that crime was the only answer. But, before they went in that cell, you wouldn’t have imagined any of those men were capable of anything really horrific.”

“Mitchell was no saint,” I say.

“He wasn’t a
murderer
,” Jeremy says.

“A dozen people from a grocery store would argue that point—if they were still alive to argue.”

“You know what I mean. He wasn’t a murderer before he turned. I’m arguing the point that you were trying to make months ago. Why exactly are you taking the other side now?”

“I’m a reporter. We play devil’s advocate. It’s the fastest path to the truth.”

“The fastest path to an argument,” he says. “Anyway—long story short—Blackburn-Lynch says that his numbers will flip the evil switch given the right circumstances. You were in those circumstances last night. If nothing else, I thought it might make an interesting sidebar to your story.”

“Yeah, okay. That’s a good point. What’s the name of his book?”

“Don’t worry, you can have my copy. I’m all done with crackpots.”

I laugh. “I guess we won’t be speaking again.”

“Wrong again,” he says. “I’ll thank you for the hamburger you’ll buy me when your book is published.”