Excerpt from SLICES by James A. Moore

In the Oubliette, Where the Monsters Know to Hide

Here’s the thing. I had never, ever, been the first to approach Mary. She always initiated the conversations we had. So walking up to her, especially when she and Dave were back together, took a lot of effort. I’m not saying I was heroic or anything, merely that it wasn’t very easy. Okay, that’s a lie. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done from a social point of view. It went against all of my personal training and it felt completely and utterly wrong.

Dave was with her, of course, because they were almost always together when they weren’t dishing out the latest helping of teen angst. He leaned against the wall outside of the school and she leaned back against him, both of them smoking cigarettes and talking with their peers.

I made myself approach, fully aware of every single person watching me, and forced myself to stand in front of her.

“Ummm. Mary? Can I speak to you alone for a minute?” Dave looked at me like I was a new specimen of bug that he wanted to tear the wings off of, and scowled from behind her. It wasn’t that he felt threatened by my presence, I’m quite certain of that. Rather, it was that for the first time I was consciously in his geek radar.

Mary took her time looking in my direction, but when she finally did her eyes showed barely a hint of recognition. “Yeah, sure, Dean.” even her voice sounded different. She leaned back against Dave and pulled his head down to hers. All I could imagine was a dog trainer telling the large killer guard animal to behave.

He looked my way, and finally nodded, as if to give her permission to speak to a strange boy. Then Mary moved my way and led me a few yards off to the side.

“What’s up, Dean?” She was more alert again, more the Mary I knew. I found myself wondering which Mary was real, the one I saw or the one she showed to everybody else. Questions like that, I am certain, can lead to madness.

“I saw your father yesterday. At work.” She jumped a little at that. “He wanted me to tell you he misses you and to say that he was right. He has proof.”

Mary looked away from me and worried her lower lip with her teeth. I stood there and stared long enough that the silence grew awkward and then I started moving away.

“Well, that’s it. He just wanted me to tell you.” I waved, but she wasn’t looking at me. A few minutes later I left the area, puzzled by her reaction and equally surprised that Dave didn’t decide to make me into so much hamburger. Small blessings: I take them where I can get them.

She called my house at ten o’clock that night. The phone let out a scream and I half-jumped from my seat, unprepared for the sound. I wasn’t overly worried. The odds were good that it was my father; who had recently taken up the hobby of working himself nearly to exhaustion every day.

“Dean? I was hoping I had the right number.”

Damn it, she did it again and with ease. Just hearing her voice away from the usual context was enough to make me feel and think and do all the things I was trying not to do.

“Yeah, Mary, you got me.” I made myself take a deep breath. “What’s up?”

“Listen, can we get together and talk?” her voice sounded so miserable on the phone. I wanted to see her of course, but I don’t think there are too many people I would turn away who sounded that absolutely dejected.

“Sure. Of course. I’ll be over there as soon as I can. Are you at home?” I was hardly a rebel. I almost never broke the rules of the household, like taking my car out for non-work related situations. For Mary I’d have made a habit of it.

I was at her place fifteen minutes later, my hair combed and a decent looking pair of jeans on. I couldn’t very well have gone to see her in my underwear alone, now could I? And that was all I’d had on when she called. The advantages of being a bachelor in a house of bachelors, I suppose.

Mary was waiting for me at the bottom of the drive way. I knew right away that she wasn’t supposed to be out. Not on a school night. She climbed into the car and gave me a casual direction about where to go when I asked her if she had any place in mind.

We wound up at a diner not far from the school, but not quite close enough that we had to worry too much about being seen. She had her reputation to consider. It was a bitter thought, but it stuck there in my throat anyway.

Small talk didn’t exist. As soon as the waitress had left with our orders, Mary started explaining. “My father. What he said to you. Did he say anything else?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Only that he missed you.”

“Do you know why he’s in that place, Dean?”

“No,” I lied. “I never figured it was anything I needed to know.”

And did she know I was lying? Yes, I think she did. I think she knew the second I opened my mouth. And rather than lose her trust, I shrugged. And told the truth. “Well, I know he went there for some disappearances. I know you turned him in.”

“Yeah. I did.” She took a sip of cola from her drink and I watched the way her face looked. I could have stared at her for hours.

“Fair enough.” She spoke more to herself than to me when she said that. I decided to keep my mouth shut before I said anything else that could get me in trouble.

Finally she looked my way, her eyes dark green and as troubled as a turbulent sea. “I turned him in because he told me what he’d been doing.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked away. I know how hard it can be to talk about something personal and secret. “He showed me the pictures, and he told me how he’d done it and he wanted me to go next. He wanted someone he could trust.”

Ever heard that old phrase about your blood running cold? I knew in that instant what that expression meant. Twenty-seven people had disappeared and he’d wanted his own daughter, Mary, to be number twenty-eight.

“What, what was he trying to do, Mary?”

“He wanted to know what happens after death, but no one has ever been able to say, not really, not with the kind of proof that he wanted.” Mary looked everywhere around the area, everywhere but at me. “They didn’t disappear, Dean. He killed them. He put them into a machine and killed them. He-” She cut herself off and closed her eyes, trying to collect her thoughts and still stay calm. “He said it was supposed to send them to the other side of death and let them come back, but no one ever did, Dean. No one ever came back.”

“He murdered them?” It sounded worse when it was put that way. Oh, I knew he’d done something, had to have for them to lock him away and throw away the key like they did. But disappeared just didn’t sound as bad as murdered.

“Yeah. Only now he says he has proof that they aren’t dead. That’s what he meant. That’s what he wanted you to tell me.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know.” And again she sounded so miserable that I had to reach out, had to see if she was okay, and I touched her hand, pulled it closer, felt the texture of her soft flesh and the warmth and the rapid pulse that danced underneath my fingertips. She gripped my fingers with surprising strength and kept my hand her willing prisoner for a moment as we paused to let the waitress set down our food.

“I guess I have to believe him, or I have to believe that he's really insane.” She shrugged. “Not really much choice there, you know?”

“So what are you going to do about it, Mary?” I thought perhaps I could take a message or even give her a lift to the asylum. Maybe if she could see the man who’d been so much a part of her life in person, she could work it out.

“I want to go to his machine, Dean. I have to see it myself.”

Well now, I hadn’t been expecting that answer.

“You know where it is?”

And Mary looked at me, her dark eyes widening just a bit. “Of course I do. So do you.”

“What?”

“Haven’t you felt it? The way that place chills your skin?”

“What place…?” But even as I said the words, I knew.

 

***

It was a dark and stormy night. Of course it was, because, really, how can you have fun sneaking into an insane asylum if the weather is nice? The rain hadn’t started falling yet, but it was only a matter of time. The wind was a different story entirely. It howled and roared and blustered hard enough to suck the warmth away from my flesh and to take my slightly too long hair into a constantly whipping wave. Mary was smarter. She pinned her hair back and aside from a few small strands around her forehead she remained unmolested by sudden whipping locks.

We took a detour along the way, back to my house, where I picked up my small ring of keys for the Haddonfield Psychiatric Institute. Any other kid my age would have been stuck asking for the keys. My father being a trusting and pragmatic man, simply had a set made for me. I didn’t have a massive ring of the things like he did. I had keys for the supply closets and bathrooms. He was trusting, not stupid.

Those days he was also not home very much and on that night he still hadn’t made it to the place where we both lived. I wondered, not for the first time, if he’d found a woman to keep him company. It was possible. He was still a good looking man.

But he didn’t know all the facts; like that the storage room on the west side of the building had a window that had no bars. I knew, of course, because I used the room from time to time. It was mostly below the level of the landscaping and hidden by bushes. Somewhere along the way, it’d been missed when they were adding security. As the only thing stored in the room was cleaning supplies and it was well away form any of the patients’ quarters, getting into or out of the place was easy enough. I learned about it when I saw Tom Whittaker sneaking out one night to grab a few six packs of beers before the end of his shift.

I’d kept his secret, not because I felt what he had done was right, but because he was a nice guy and one of the unfortunate souls who had to deal with the patients regularly. I also let it go because it was New Year ’s Eve when he pulled the stunt, and I knew he’d be leaving just in time to celebrate with his family. A little extra booze couldn’t hurt too much, especially if he was drinking it after his shift.

At any rate, I knew about the window. And Mary and I used it. We had no problem getting into the asylum aside from my nerves screaming for me to let it go.

But I couldn’t do that. It was Mary. And maybe it was also that I wanted to know what a madman had managed to discover, what a murderer had learned when he threw away twenty-seven lives.

Mostly though, it was Mary.

The store room led to the west wing corridor, which as I knew full and well went in two directions. I could go left and head right for the offices, or I could go right and swing through the central building and the wards proper.

I didn’t make the decision, Mary did. She went left and I followed her. I never gave much thought to where the meetings took place between patients and their visitors. I’d never had a need to go into those special rooms. Mary had been there plenty of times and we used one of them as a resting place after we snuck inside.

“Do you know what room is your father’s?”

“No. But we don’t need to see him. We just have to get to the basement.”

“Are you sure about this, Mary? I mean, I work here and I’ve never seen a place for any sort of devices like the ones I read about your dad making.”

She sat against the wall of the dark room and put her head in her hands, breathing deeply, her eyes closed to me. “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ve been there.”

“How? When?” I wasn’t trying to be an ass, I was just trying to understand. As I’ve said before, there were large parts of the asylum that I had never seen, but I couldn’t fathom how Mary could have seen them if I couldn’t get into them with my father’s access. I couldn’t grasp how any sort of device that required seven industrial generators could be hidden without my father noticing when it went up, either. Those aren’t the sorts of things that can be relocated without a lot of very noticeable work.

Mary shot me a look when she opened her eyes again. It was one part explanation and five parts apology. She asked for forgiveness with those eyes of hers—brown again, a sign of her anxiety, or maybe just the lighting—even as she spoke words that were hurtful and impossible.

She simply said, “Your dad showed me.”

 

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