THE FIRST THREE SECONDS
1
The red phone rang, something it did often.
Dr. Jacob Morton answered, something he did every time.
A voice came on the other line and said the two words for which the doctor - he thought of himself not as “the good doctor” or “the bad doctor”, thought of himself oftentimes not really even as a “doctor”, per say, but as more of a scientist - had been waiting.
“I’m in.”
The doctor smiled. Others had expressed the same sentiment, but there was something different about this caller. Perhaps it was something in his tone, perhaps it was the way he hadn’t started with introductions and questions like all the others did, perhaps it was something beyond the rational. The doctor did not believe in God or fate or destiny or anything of the sort, but he did believe in resonance, and those two words rang truer than high C.
“You’re sure? Once you’ve committed, once you’re here, there will be no backing out. You will go where I want you to go and I will follow you there.”
As he spoke, the corner of the room before him darkened into an inky, impenetrable blackness that had too much essence to it to be a mere absence of light; She had come. The doctor’s smile spread as the last ringing dissonance of doubt soothed itself out.
“You will come to the facility today. Bring only that which is most dear and precious and irreplaceable to you. Everything else that you may need - pillows, blankets, toothbrush, et cetera - will be provided for you.”
There was a pause and the doctor’s heart skipped a beat.
Dammit, if this one is a -
“Okay. What’s the address?”
The doctor’s heartbeat doubled, matching the tempo of the soaring symphony of the delicious rightness, the essential fittingness of it all. Oh how very sweet, oh how -
But now was not the time for reflection.
The doctor answered.
The doctor set down the phone.
The doctor sat and watched a pinprick of pale, white light begin to form in the black corner like a flashlight shining through a poked hole in black fabric as he waited for the arrival of the man who would open for him the twisted, wrought-iron, and yet oh-so-thin gate to the afterlife.
2
In his body, he sat and awaited his next cue, hands resting loosely on the arms of the chair; in his mind, he was back in the original trials, in what he thought of as “tuning up”, the audial mess of tones and timbres that came as a precursor to the pregnant pause of the conductor’s lifted baton, which then gave birth to the first sliding notes of the symphony.
He breathed in deeply through his nostrils, taking in the memory of the acrid fumes which floated above the original subject in a perfectly unbroken cloud (unbroken, that is, until it was broken by that oh-so-wonderful whipping of wind, and oh, what a delightful moment that was) of the smoke trials, and as he passed his fingers over the rough lines of his easy chair, he could almost feel the gentle thruuuuum of the tightly-wound strings as he tested the soul-harp, could almost hear the slowing inhalations of the participant as the metronome of their heart dropped from allegro to moderato to adagio to, no pun intended, grave. He put out his tongue and tasted -
Thud thud thud.
Dr. Morton smiled and felt the glaze over his eyes begin to clear.
Three knocks - three, the perfect number, the number of wholeness, of circularity, of infinity, oh, how fitting those three knocks were, how beautifully in-tempo - roused the doctor from a hazy, pleasant reverie, and he rose and headed towards the door.
He smiled because those knocks did not, as such interruptions to silence are wont to do, shatter, but complete the melody; they were the timpony emphases to the soaring swells of the strings, the bass-drum beats to the haltering harmonies of the horns, the -
THUD THUD.
As he was reaching out for the door handle, two more knocks, which put pause to his smile and the flow of the music which was nearing its crescendo.
He damn near turned around then. Damn near went right back to his easy chair to simmer, to retune, to get back into the flow and prepare himself for yet another round of auditions. If it wasn’t perfect, if it wasn’t destiny, She might not come and he might not get the chance to face Her and to see, to hear what lay just beyond -
Mahler’s 5th began to play from somewhere in the distance - not in the house, but in his mind and the horrid, acrid odors of fire and smoke and roasting human remains began to drift towards him and the music was gone, banished by - no, sucked into - the black hole of death, leaving behind only an empty silence, devoid of meaning, of beauty, of music, and -
He opened the door, rudely interrupting the memory and saw a plain man made extraordinary by a thinness which, if one were to describe as “rail-thin” would be an insult to rails everywhere; this man looked lucky to be able to hold up the clothes which flapped dangerously in the wind around his gaunt body. The man’s eyes, under which hung great, dark bags - no, under which hung great, dark suitcases - were downcast upon the doctor’s opening of the door, but moved slowly up as the doctor stepped forward.
“Hello, doctor.” The man said and smiled. Several of his teeth were missing and those remaining were a muddy, yellow-going-on-brown that spoke of poor diet coupled with no care. The doctor took these in, his mind already spinning with calculations - oh, it won’t be long at all, it won’t - and smiled back with teeth that were considerably easier on the eyes.
“Hello. Please, come in.”
He stepped to the side and the man stepped without hesitation into the darkness of the small cottage. The doctor closed the door and followed the man down the hallway into the room where he was to die.
3
“How long did they give you?”
He glanced down at the clipboard, not because he needed a reminder of what to ask - he had had his part memorized for months now and played it with the expert grace and precision of a seasoned concert violinist taking on the Sibelius - but to give the man a modicum of privacy as he stripped down to the skin.
“Three to six months with proper care and treatment. A month without the treatment, which I did not take. Less if I were to continue to live the life I was living, and I’m not big on change, doc.”
The man pulled off his underpants and laid himself unselfconsciously on the table in the center of the room.
“And when was this?” The doctor asked, walking up to the side of the bed and placing his clipboard carefully on the table beside him.
“About three weeks ago.” The man said and grinned.
The man’s candor and the apparent glee he took in his own coming demise was, at first completely in tune so far as the doctor could hear, and his ears were finely tuned for such things; the problem was that, now that they were here in the lab, in this sacred space, a new movement had begun, one that was more of a scorrendo, and the man was still playing strepitoso, he wasn’t floating along the river, he was tromping loudly through it, he wasn’t -
The doctor once again shook the doubts from his head and nodded at the man.
“How are you feeling?”
“Pretty goddamn awful, to be honest with ya, doc,” the man said and coughed into his hand as though to emphasize the point. The doctor noted as it came back to rest by his side that it was speckled with blood. “Definitely been better, that’s for sure.”
The doctor nodded again and began to place small stickers all over the man’s body, small wires protruding from each.
“Do you believe in the afterlife, young man?”
“My name is - ”
The doctor raised his hand, stopping the words before they had a chance to form.
“No no no,” he said, his tone growing firm. “You will answer the questions I ask you and leave unanswered those I do not, understood?” He found it was easier not to know the names. Not because of a guilty conscience; no, it was merely far easier if the police came and stuck their nose into his business as they were wont to do with scientists ahead of their time.
The man grinned, revealing that rotting, incomplete set of teeth once more, and raised his hands in a peace gesture.
“Sure, sure, doc, I gotcha, you’ll have an extra large order of kicking ass, hold the taking names.” He chuckled at this and an expression of disgust crossed the doctor’s face. “To answer your question, I do not believe in the afterlife. I do not believe in God. I do believe in the devil, but I don’t think he’s a red guy with a pitchfork. Nor do I think he’s a pretty angel. I think he’s among us. I think he is us.”
The doctor continued his walk around, placing the last few wires, but paused at the very end of the man’s diatribe, trying to gauge whether he was being “funny” again or whether he was as mad as he sounded. The man looked completely earnest.
“I see” he said, speaking slowly, “and your beliefs about the soul?”
“Horseshit.”
The doctor nodded and placed the final wire.
“Well, that’s perfectly fair in a world obsessed with the quantifiable, with the material,” he said, stepping back, “and as a young man, I may have expressed the same sentiment,” though, in words not quite so colorful, he thought but did not say, “but ever since - well, these days, the soul is something of a… fascination for me.” He began to pace around the table, eyes going hazy, “Many cultures, when they speak of the soul, of the deepest emotions and desires and fancies of man, don’t explicitly come out and say that they believe the soul is in the chest area, but everytime they talk about things pertaining to the soul,” he tapped his own chest twice with the palm of his hand, “this is where their hands naturally go for emphasis. The Jews, on the other hand, when they speak of the deepest feelings and urges and machinations of the deeper self, refer to the kidneys - check the literal translation of the Hebrew from the Old Testament of the Bible if you don’t believe me.” He continued to pace, beginning to look like a university professor giving a particularly riveting lecture. “The Warndimani People in Southeast Asia have a rather novel idea, but one that, I will grant, does make a modicum of sense - they believe the soul rests somewhere in the genitals. There is no greater connection between two humans, so they say, than the act of sexual intercourse.” The doctor reached the patient’s head and stopped. “In all actuality, I have found that the soul is nestled somewhere right about…” he laid his finger gently into the hollow at the base of the man’s neck. “Here.” His eyes flicked upward and the patient saw, for the first time, a strange, net-like thing hanging directly above his neck near the ceiling. “Hence the positioning of the soul-harp.” The doctor smiled for the first time since meeting his new subject.
“Interesting stuff, doc.” the man said while picking decidedly uninterestedly at his teeth, “Though I gotta say, I think the Wandypandy people are probably the closest. Though, at least for men, it ain’t the soul that’s hanging in the ol’ dangling flesh bag, in my experience. It’s the brain.”
He cackled and once again alarm bells began to ring in the doctor’s head.
Could it be that I was wrong, could it be that he wrong, could it be -
He stood back and crossed his arms, doing a visual double-check that he had hit all the right areas to distract himself from the man’s continued… strangeness. Then, he turned on the monitors. The room was filled with the comforting beeping of the man’s vitals being read. He turned once again to adjust some of the machines.
“Are you on any pain medication currently?”
“Only the pain medicine as old as time, the kind you can get at any local gas station nowadays.”
A light came on in the doctor’s mind. Of course; the man was drunk. Dr. Morton could not smell it on him - had lost his sense of smell almost completely during his first run-in with Covid and had probably burned away the rest of it during the smoke trials, he thought - but suddenly his brashness made a whole lot more sense, and the doctor felt a sense of relief; of course the man was playing his part jaggedly. Of course his conversation was not the smooth harmonies for which he had left room out of his own parts; no one played as well drunk as sober, with the exception, maybe, of the great Amadeus, who was known to be quite the party animal.
Of course, he was finding more and more that the man was a bit of a fiend, drunk or not; but the drunkenness would bring about the end all the quicker, especially with his condition, and an idiot’s soul was a soul nonetheless, a thing that could be followed to the Great Wherever, and that was enough for Dr. Morton.
“Do you have family around somewhere? Or a charity to which you would like a sizable bequeathment to be made, as discussed in the flier?”
“Nope. Keep it. I don’t trust no charities and I ain’t got no family.”
The doctor nodded.
“Fine, then. I’m going to run a series of X-Rays to check on the progress of the cancer. Remind again of the type?”
“Stomach.”
“Okay, so I’ll run the X-Rays to check on that and then you can rest until the time comes. I also have light snacks - granola bars, fruits, the like - if you desire something to eat.”
“That’s okay, I’m saving my appetite for one final meal.”
The man smiled again and the doctor could not hold back a shudder at the sight of it.
“Do you know what you’d like that final meal to be yet? I can make a run to the store and buy the ingredients if I don’t have them already.”
Such a run would, of course, completely throw off the tempo - you didn’t leave the hall mid-symphony, not when the crescendo was just beginning, not when all the pieces had finally begun to swell into such sweet, sweet harmony.
“Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary. As long as you’ve got some meat, that will do me just fine.”
4
He was back in Germany, in his dorm at the University of Munich, looking out the window at the swinging spotlights which were drawing the eye of all in the area towards the Munich Hall of Music, where the orchestra had just begun to play. He knew instantly he was in a dream, because the hall was not yet the pile of burnt rubble and charred flesh that it had become just before he had left, just after the first time he had seen Her. He knew it was a dream, it had to be a dream - the place had been blown to hell in a statement by a group of eco-terrorists some thirty-odd years ago - and yet, still a pervasive fear ran through him, bright red alarm bells screaming, GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.
Still, he could not help but recognize that they were playing Mahler, symphony number 5, the piece that had once been his favorite but which was now to him a harbinger of death and ruin, and that the French horns had just begun their almost-cinematic wahhhhing as they climbed an arpeggiated chord before descending into a grumbling bass line that was almost too low to be heard, especially across all this distance.
Only, the distance wasn’t all that great, because now he was in the alley beside the symphony hall, a place he had frequented almost as much as his dorm. The Munich Symphony Orchestra played at least once a week and rehearsed nearly every day besides, and when he couldn’t scrounge enough together to buy a ticket, this alley would be his ticket; he had found that there was an emergency exit door that needed some repairs and was thus eternally open during business hours, and it lead to a small, tucked-away backstage room which was close enough to the stage to hear every beautiful note, but far enough away from the symphony hall that he had not, in his year and a half of sneaking in, been caught by a roving security guard or night janitor.
“No, no, no, no,” he muttered to himself, knowing that, by some strange dream logic, he was about to be moved again as he had been to this alley, except there was no movement, only a fade so fast he couldn’t see it and he was in his secret hallway.
Except, this wasn’t his secret hallway; the music ground to a halt and he realized that he was on the stage, right behind the double-bass section. No one turned to look at him; they froze exactly as they had been when he appeared. The audience remained staring straight ahead at the orchestra; the orchestra, instruments still in hand, maintained their focus on the conductor; and the conductor -
Only, that wasn’t the conductor. It wasn’t Hans Buscher, the man who had led the MSO for the past thirty-five years and who probably would have led it for another fifteen or twenty, had he not been reduced to so much toothpaste in the ensuing explosion. Whoever was behind the conductor’s stand was far taller, far skinnier, and was wearing a thick, black robe, more fitting for a religious service in the Middle Ages than for a showcase of the brilliance of the Great Mahler.
As he stepped closer to try to see around the shroud of a hood covering the conductor’s face, he realized that She was facing him. She hadn’t turned; there was no movement, smooth or otherwise of Her head in his direction; She simply wasn’t looking at him and then She was.
As he watched, the conductor lifted Her baton once again and brought it down in a violent arc so sharp he could almost hear it cutting the air and the orchestra kicked back in, only it was no longer Mahler, it was now a disarray of discordance, no one person sticking to one part, no harmonies riding smoothly on the backs of the soaring melodies of the great Austrian composer, only the horrid screeching of bow set poorly against string, the unmusical BLAT of a horn blown as though by a child picking the thing up for the first time, the booming RRRIIIIIP of the timpani’s head being burst to pieces by the anti-rhythmic banging of the drummer, and then there had been a split second of silence during which the hood had fallen back slightly and he could see Her face, She was looking at him and just before the world came apart at the seams, he heard her say, just as clearly as if she was right next to him,
“Not yet. Soon.”
And just as he turned to run -
BOOOOOOM!!
The doctor, who was not yet a doctor, saw white and only white for a split second, could hear only the resounding thunderclap that was the bomb, and then the fire alarm system began to kick in -
Except, the fire alarm system had been destroyed with the rest of the building, it was so much rubble, there had been no fire alarm going off after the explosion -
But there was now, and it was blaring louder and louder, digging into his ears with sharp talons of pain, tearing him, tearing him away from -
5
The dream finally shattered and the doctor’s red, bleary eyes opened in the dark room, the bright, shapeless impressions of the explosion still fading from his eyes as he surveyed all around him in a panic.
The alarm was real, present. It was blaring not from the ghost of a building thousands of miles away, but from the lab only a room over.
The doctor rushed out of bed and ran as quickly as his legs would take him towards death.
6
The man was convulsing on the table in the lab, emitting strange grunting, groaning sounds and the doctor began to worry. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; the man was dying of cancer, for cripe’s sake, cancer, not epilepsy! He was supposed to have been eaten from the inside out, slowly, surely, until he passed from this life to the next in a cloudy, hazy, confused, if not painless, daze; with him shaking and spilling about like so, it would be impossible to position the soul harp where it needed to be, and if the soul harp wasn’t positioned where it needed to be -
But no, better not to think of such things. Better to act.
The doctor stepped forward and grabbed the now-wheezing man, forcing him back onto the table as he looked at the vitals. Heart beat: 147 BPM. Blood pressure: 129/89 (my God, it should be at least 150/99 during an episode like this…)
“Nevermind what should be, you fool!” the doctor murmured to himself through a grimace. The man was still convulsing and flopping like a docked fish under his hands, but if he continued to hold him here until he calmed, he may not have enough time to position the soul harp just right, and so, after a moment’s hesitation, he left the writhing man on the table and turned towards the shelving on the opposite wall where he had left some restraints, just in case.
You see, everything is still in tempo; there has been some… improvisation… but everything is still going -
But his thoughts were cut off, not by another audial interruption, but by the sudden stopping of the audial interruption already underway; just as the doctor’s hands closed around the leather straps of the restraints, he heard the man go still on the table behind him, all the grunting and wheezing and thrashing stilled, leaving only the slowing beeping of the machines attached all over his body.
Oh no, dear God, he’s died, it’s over, it’s over, it’s -
But then he turned and shock stole away his next breath. At first, he could not believe his eyes; his brain simply refused to interpret the image his eyes were sending it. It wasn’t possible…
And yet it was. The man was sitting upright on the edge of the table, smiling at him. He was breathing heavily, sweat dripping from the end of his long nose in fat drops onto his bare legs and chest - had these things not been so, the doctor would have been convinced that he simply had not waken all the way from his troubled slumber, that the dream about the explosion of the Munich Hall had simply launched into this one about his experiment. But he could not doubt the tangy, sour smell of the man’s sweat or the feel of the woolen slippers on his feet, or the fear pulsing from his heart throughout his body as his mind scrambled to make sense of the sight before him. He did not need to scramble long; the man began to speak.
“The cancer part is true. It’s even stomach cancer. Unfortunately, though, I may have exaggerated some other aspects of my story; like, for example, how long I have left.” The man smiled and leaped from the table, his bare feet making heavy PLAP noises as they hit the linoleum floor of the lab. “But that doesn’t much matter, really. You want to see what’s after death and I want to help one more person get beyond its walls. We’re a perfect match.” The man smiled wider with those yellowing, rotten teeth and the doctor stumbled back once again, this time hitting his head on the shelf and sending a backup BP monitor and a few pill bottles tumbling noisily to the floor. “Of course, your findings will have to be more of the … personal sort, I think. And you won’t be able to report them. At least, I don’t think you will. Not unless all your fancy equipment here really works.” He took another step towards the doctor, ripping the cables from his body as he went, and the doctor began to eye the door in the opposite corner of the room. The man saw this and angled his approach so that the doctor would have to run directly at him to get to it.
“No, no, doctor, don’t you remember? There’s no backing out from this one. Your own words.” The man was about four feet away now, nearly within reaching distance, and the doctor could almost smell the sickness radiating off of him in thick, cloying waves, a smell like waste, like rot. The man took another step, smiling all the wider; one more and those gangly arms would be able to reach out and throttle him, and though the man was thin, he had about a foot of height on the doctor, who was also far from the greatest shape of his life.
Then, suddenly, just as the doctor was readying himself for a lunge at the door, the man leapt forward, hands out like the reaching claws of a buzzard honing in towards a fat field mouse and the doctor whipped around towards the shelf, grasping for something, anything with which he could defend himself, anything -
There was a feeling like a strong hand falling onto the meat between his right shoulder and his neck, and the doctor thought that the man had merely grabbed him until he felt teeth like dull fork tongs begin to sink, first into the cloth of his sleeping shirt and then into his flesh. He screamed and began to whack at man’s head like a man swats a particularly nasty spider - in quick, aggressive hits, as though he didn’t want his hand on the offending creature any longer than it needed to be - but the man was like a mad dog, jaw locked in place as he swung his head from side to side, trying to rip flesh from bone. The doctor screamed again - of course, even if there were any neighbors close enough to hear his screaming (there weren’t), the room was, he had thought as he applied the eighth layer of noise-deadening foam during the build, soundproofed better than Abbey Road studios - and felt a wave of revulsion crash through him as the man’s head came loose from his shoulder along with roughly half a dozen of his rotting teeth, which tumbled down the back of his shirt and clattered onto the floor in scatterings like a fortune teller’s dice.
The doctor did not hesitate; he twisted to the left and lunged toward the door. But the man did not hesitate either; spitting a mouthful of blood to the side, he leaped forward and sunk his fingers into the fresh bite marks on the doctor’s shoulder, sending rivers of liquid fire coursing from the wound all the way down his chest and back and another scream up his raw throat. The man grabbed the left side of his torso and, with a strength that seemed almost supernatural, picked the doctor up and threw him onto the exam table. The doctor’s head struck the cold metal of the table - the pillow and sheet he had put over it for the man’s comfort had been pulled off with his seemingly-miraculous rising only seconds earlier - and everything went dazzlingly white and blessedly silent for a moment.
And then the man was on him again, this time lunging for the base of his throat with his yawning, bloodied mouth, and as the doctor’s vision returned, blots of black that looks like freshly-spilled ink spilled bubbling into the hazy white resulting from what would probably have been a concussion-inducing blow, he saw that She was standing in the corner of the room by the door. Her hood was up, as it had been on that day all those years ago, but this time, it was drawn back far enough that he could see the papery-white surface of her face, which was dry as parchment and cracked as the desert ground during a record heatwave. She was smiling, her grin stretching, quite literally, he saw with a horror that was almost numbing, from ear to ear, the teeth forming it perfectly white, but just as cracked as the face which held them. No part of her body was moving, and yet she was coming closer to him, almost drifting as though she were a leaf skittering across a stretch of pavement in a light breeze, and the doctor was horrified to realize that suddenly her hands were stretched out towards him, the fingers at the end - the impossibly long fingers, the fingers which must’ve been at least a foot long each, maybe more - opening and closing like a child reaching for a toy just beyond their reach; only she wasn’t a child, he knew in that instant that she was old, older than time itself, that she had, perhaps, given birth to time, an act that had driven her mad and insidious in its strain, and that there was no going, the expression commonly used for death that one was going was absolutely absurd he realized in that moment of sick intuition, no one goes, She takes them, She collects them, She -
She was upon him now, and the lab and the man and his experiments and the music which had been swirling around in his head nearly since his conception 68 years ago all faded and all that was left was Her and the doctor screamed and the doctor was no more.
7
Sam was just getting to the good meat that sits just below the hollow of the throat when the doctor stopped his screaming and began to stare into the corner behind him. Sam stopped, gristle hanging like Spanish moss from the side of his mouth and sat up, looking around in that direction. There was, of course, nothing there, only the closed door and -
But was that a figure in the corner?
Sam’s heart stopped in his chest, something that had been happening a few times a day since his self-imposed fast as the cancer ate away at his now doubly-diminished flesh, a result of lack of potassium, among other things, but this time, he knew the arrhythmia had nothing to do with his health. There was something in the corner and it was beginning to move, it was -
But no, there was nothing there. It was only shadows, which had, of course, twitched with his movement as he had turned around to investigate whatever it was the doctor was staring at. They were thick shadows, dark shadows, but shadows nonetheless, and there was nothing to fear about shadows, nothing -
The doctor suddenly bucked underneath him and made a gagging noise like someone getting ready to vomit. Sam flinched back, expecting a spray of half-digested food to cover him momentarily, but the spray never came; instead, what came was a sudden whizzing, like something shooting up directly in front of him, a reverse assassination in which the sniper’s bullet shot from the body of its target back into the gun and Sam followed its path up towards the ceiling, where the thing the doctor had called a “soul harp” or some New Age shit hung suspended from thick cables. The strings in the middle of the instrument-thing were thrumming softly as though someone had gently brushed them a few seconds before, and as they vibrated gently above him, the machinery directly behind the doctor’s head kicked into gear, powering itself up, filling the room with the whirring of computer fans and the buzzing of electricity. Sam leapt down from the table and stumbled backward, knocking over the equipment which had, not so long ago, measured his vitals. Had they still been attached, their readings would have been nearly what the doctor had expected when he had entered the room.
Then he heard a click and the room was filled with the sound of the doctor’s screaming, which got farther and farther and farther away, carried by the sound of -
“Laughter?” Sam muttered to himself. Then the tape or the recording or the
(THE FIRST THREE SECONDS, IT WAS THE FIRST THREE SECONDS OF THE DOCTOR’S AFTERLIFE, JUST LIKE HE FUCKING SAID IT WOULD BE DEAR GOD WHY IS HE SCREAMING WHY IS HE)
whatever the hell it was kicked off and there was only silence in the room, only silence and Sam and the shadows and -
Sam fell back against the shelves in unconscious imitation of the doctor, grasping blindly for purchase as he felt his knees turn to jelly and his legs turn to melted butter.
There was a Thing standing in the room with him, just on the other side of the exam table. It wore a long, black hood, and he could see pale, white hands hanging below the billowing cloths of its sleeves and he thought the sight of it would drive him mad until the room went silent, silent except for Her voice sounding like the cracking of thick ice at the end of a long winter which spoke five words;
“Not yet. See you soon.”
Then, finally, blessedly, Sam fell to the ground, unconscious.
8
They wouldn’t give him a nightlight, no matter how much he requested it, and he requested it nearly daily. Night lights were not allowed on death row, and there would be no exceptions, especially not for a serial killer who also happened to be a cannibal.
“You better get used to the darkness, pal. Darkness is going to be your only friend pretty soon,” they told him, a sick delight adorning their voice like black tinsel on a dying christmas tree.
But it wasn’t the darkness in and of itself he was afraid of. No, not the darkness at all, She didn’t care about dark or light, day or night, old or young. He only wanted to be able to see Her coming. He was sick of looking at the shadows and not knowing.
When the police had found him - and how they had found him, he had no idea and cared not at all - the lights had still been on, thank God for that, and it had been daytime when they dragged him, not resisting at all, from the small cottage and into the car. The problem came after that, later in the night, when the lights had gone out and the shadows had come in to play. He had screamed himself hoarse that first night, screamed until the other men in county had gotten angry and beaten him into beautiful unconsciousness.
And then had come the trial - speedy, no question about that, a fair and speedy trial for the Eater of Easton - and now here he was, at death’s door, waiting.
His lawyer had tried to get him to plead insanity, to appeal the case, to do anything to prolong his life, but at the time, it had seemed foolishness; why delay the inevitable? Why keep pushing back what he may as well simply face right quick and get over with?
Only now, he was beginning to regret that call. Now he was scared. Now, he was absolutely petrified, because every night the darkness closed in and the shadows danced, only, as he made his further down this accursed hall of hell, as he moved closer and closer to his place of last residence, there began to grow a pinprick of light growing in the corner of his vision each night. Only, that wasn’t quite right, that pale-yellow glow that seemed more to envelop brightness than emit it, wasn’t quite light, it was more like anti-light, and every night, as he was nearing sleep, it would grow closer to him, and now that he was only weeks away from his turn in the chair, he was beginning to realize that it wasn’t anti-light either, it was her, it was Her parchment-cracked face growing closer and closer and closer, her voice cackling and cajoling at him, telling him over and over, “Not yet. Soon,” only, “soon” was nearly upon him, “soon” could nearly be counted on his fingers, and She was getting closer and the night was getting darker and Sam, Eater of Easton, the most infamous serial killer in recent history, was absolutely fucking terrified.
Epilogue
From The Wicked Local, October 2028 Edition…
EATER OF EASTON DEAD, EXECUTED BY ELECTRIC CHAIR JUST THIS MORNING.
By Jordan Hill
SOUTH EASTON - Samuel Patrick Harris was put to death this morning for the murder of 19 people, most of whom he partially ate, both before and after their slayings. Committed over the course of an astoundingly short four years, Harris had sent the residents of Massachusetts into a state-wide frenzy, especially those of Easton, where most of his crimes occurred.
Those in the execution room, including The Wicked Local’s own Gerald Hamber said that Harris had been pale, but mostly calm right up until the end.
Of the event, Hamber said, “as soon as they finished with the legal readings and proceedings and were preparing to put the hood over him and do all the last minute preparations, his head whipped around to the corner of the room and he began to scream something along the lines of, ‘please, not yet, it’s still not soon, please, please, get her away, away, away!’”
Hamber went on to say that…