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| A brother finds his sister has been traumatized in an assault only to wonder where fiction ends and reality becomes safe.... |
SUBMITTED BY: elizadeth
SUBMITTED ON: September 30, 2009 |
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| TYPE: |
| Story |
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| GENRE: |
| Horror |
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| DEDICATION: |
| Being told I'm crazy. |
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| STORY: |
Dark Shift
By Elizadeth Hetherington
“Where is she?” Billy’s eyes, heated brown, rested angrily on the receptionist. This was the emergency room, and by far not a new place to a city officer.
“Now, Billy, it’s like I told you. She’s an adult now and she has say in what we can do for her.” Clumsily, the female fumbled with her keyboard.
“Just tell me where she is!” he replied in fury. His hands clenched and a salty sweat developed in his palm. Waiting for her response, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the past— her smiles, and the humble feelings of comfort that they’d had in their younger years. “Estelle, can you just tell me where they put my sister?”
“Are you calm?” she inquired invasively. Billy clenched his teeth, irritated by the insensitive inquisition. He nodded mildly, but felt a terrible reality in untargeted hatred. Her timid grey eyes watched behind the thin glass of her spectacles, oblivious to the homicidal intent he had for his sister’s torment. “She’s in Room C.” He didn’t wait another moment, and strutted off down the hallway. The old woman’s directives were lost in the invisible echoes of his audible tunnel.
Billy couldn’t imagine that such a vicious assault should have happened to such an angel. She wasn’t just his little sister, but a humanitarian and a great counselor to the rape crisis hotline. He opened the white curtain to her room, and there she was as the most melancholy painting of the victims she’d soothed with her words and wisdom.
“Elizabeth?” he called to her. The sound of his voice was another puncture, the points of her smiles were now crawling down closer to Hell. Her face was still saturated, and a female nurse sat by her side unattached. “Baby girl, who did this to you?” Her face wouldn’t open. Her eyes wouldn’t reveal the matching orbs to her sensational brown ponytail, and her mouth would stubbornly ignore his questions.
The nurse commented in soft declaration, “She refuses to be touched. We can’t run a rape kit without her consent. Can you explain this to her?”
It was obvious, he thought morbidly. Her clothes were torn, nearly useless as if shredded by a lawnmower. Her face was badly beaten and blood had dried when it drained. As an officer, Billy had shamefully seen the results of a man’s insatiable quest of gratification. He reported sadly to the nurse. “She’s aware of this, I’m afraid. She deals with these facts consistently.” He gently touched Elizabeth’s hand, just to watch her flinch and scream weakly from a sore throat.
“If she refuses treatment, I’m afraid there isn’t much we can do for her. I strongly urge for you to help her accept treatment.” Elizabeth trembled with her eyes closed tightly.
“Elizabeth?” She shook her head slowly, her hysteria intensifying. Tears seemed to flow from her face while Billy softly said her name again. The reverberations of her throat released the air, and high pitched cries stemmed forth from a young woman’s throat. “It’s okay. It’s me, Billy. Can you see me?” She continued to shake her head. Billy looked up at the nurse. “Can you leave us for a moment?”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” she answered.
“Billy?” Her voice trembled in tens of syllables, but her call was answered with the love and compassion her brother had always delivered in their great devastations. His hands closed around her wounded fingers, listening attentively for her request. It was only months before that their mother joined their father in Heaven, but even then the moment didn’t seem so tearing of his heartstrings the way it was now. He lightly brushed his thumb along her ring finger, the only finger not sliced on her hand. Her face cowered again, her eyes still closed tightly. “Get me out of here,” she whispered.
“That’s it,” Billy announced to the nurse. “We’re leaving.”
“What about the kit? If she waits too long, we won’t be able to retrieve DNA from the-”
“Yes, yes, you’re talking to an officer of the law. First and foremost, you’re talking to a big brother, and my sister isn’t ready to deal with this yet. If she needs a few minutes or a few hours, we’ll be back when she’s ready.” Elizabeth’s teeth finally showed while she cried, but she took her hand away to cover her eyes. “Please, just discharge her to my care. I’ll stay with her until she’s ready.”
“I’ll fetch you a wheelchair. It’s customary in this hospital,” the nurse offered. Billy nodded and returned his attention to the shivering woman that was once his kid sister. Her cries were torment, her pain inexplicable and there was nothing he could find to say to undo the nightmare. A long minute passed after the nurse went for the chair that Elizabeth spoke again. “Turn the lights out, Billy. Turn out the lights.” She cried again, and Billy stroked her back lightly, noticing the bleeding cuts that caused her to flinch at his gentle touches.
The nurse returned and together they led Elizabeth into the wheelchair. Her breath sounded in echoes of breath and the inevitable slur of mucus. When she cried, every part of her voice was a sting to Billy’s heart. “Thank you,” he said kindly to the nurse. She nodded with concern and watched the officer take Elizabeth to his car. It was an endless horror story, she knew, that women often refuse to acknowledge the unfortunate as it occurs. Disheartened, the nurse squeaked her white shoes as she turned from the exit to return to the night’s emergencies.
Billy coached his sister into and out of his car, taking her without prejudice to the home they’d grown together within. It was a three bedroom house in need of superficial repair, but it was their home. He gently helped her onto the living room couch, brushing away the cookie crumbs that tattled of his sloppy manners. “Baby girl? Can you tell your brother what happened?”
“No!” she replied without haste. “I can’t say it or he’ll get you!”
“No one’s going to get me. Open your eyes,” he commanded. She shook her head furiously. “Come on, Elizabeth, open your eyes? I have something here that says that no one’s going to get away with hurting you?” Very slowly her flushed complexion exposed light brown eyes with a green highlight from overabundant tears. Billy held his badge in front of her face. Her scream was loud and high-pitched. A banshee in sheer despair, the panic surfaced in audible steam to shatter the ears that prayed for her recovery. A reflex, Billy’s hands covered his ears and she leapt from the sofa in terror. A half-empty can of soda spilled onto the floor with her spontaneous pounce. “Elizabeth?”
She had traveled only a short distance when she ran into a wall. She hit the floor quietly, seemingly unconscious. His concern and curiosity compelled him to tend to her exposed injuries. Beneath the shredded remains of her shirt, blood and scabbing was a process in slow progression. Billy stumbled a little in the hall, his thoughts dizzy in emotion, and stood with a slow heart in front of the bathroom mirror.
She used to tell him that there was nothing to fear in life because he’d either live, or he would die and never have the chance to complain again. In the mirror, a big brother was decorated in uniform and ornaments to narrate accomplishments. His eyes down against the sink, he pulled the ointment off the marble without the desire to see his honest reactions. He walked confidently as he approached her body and knelt beside her to not offset her comfort.
In slumber, she was so much more compliant. He would treat her hands and arms with care and consideration. Bandaged in many places, Elizabeth looked like a medical school project. Her facial scrapes were large, but were carefully cleansed and smoothed with triple antibiotic ointment. So peaceful and so broken, his sister rested in silence while he pondered the removal of her clothes. His fingers only grasped her shirt a moment before her eyes opened and her throat released a panicked scream. Like an insect, she seemed to move in one fast bound to the stability of the faded yellow wall of their hall. Billy watched her eyes close again and her face shiver.
“Elizabeth! It’s me!” he said. “Calm down!”
“Turn off the lights! Turn them off!” she screamed hysterically. “It’s John John!”
Sympathetic but alarmed, Billy lightly touched her forearms as she gained a weak sitting stance. “John John? Your imaginary childhood friend?” Elizabeth closed her eyes and covered them, her crying making inaudible any of her words. Billy could see her in that moment for what she felt—a little girl bullied by her imagination. Hiding behind her hands would only remind him of when a child’s psychology became his own punishment. She met her imaginary friend preceding the death of her grandmother. Afraid for her well-being, Billy turned off the lights, respectful to her childhood fears. “Okay, Elizabeth. The lights are off and John John’s gone.”
Elizabeth quivered in response, the gravity of her shirt revealing her naked breast to her brother in the absence of light. Billy looked away considerately and planted his arm around her. Slowly, her eyes opened to the darkness and saw nothing threatening in her path. Her cries seemed to weaken while her body soothed in time. A sudden sound, Billy’s radio beckoned.
“Steele, Steele, where are you?” a woman’s voice called. Startled by the interference, he grasped the black microphone from his shoulder.
“Go for thirteen,” he replied quietly. He could feel Elizabeth’s grip strengthen on his hand while in numbers and codes, it was explained to him that there was a double homicide on the other side of the small town of Brem. “Seventy-six.” Her eyes, open in the darkness were like small white orbs of control. It seemed so impossible just to slide back into the routine of reality. “I have to go for a little while.”
“No, no!” she yelled in desperation. “Please, Billy? Don’t leave me alone with him!”
“I won’t be long, baby girl. You just try to lay out here and get some rest.” Billy kindly invited her to the sofa, thinking frantically about when these delusions became so hard to deal with. “I think maybe the rape crisis line is stressing you out. Would you take something to help you sleep?”
She cried loud for a moment, but stood alone in front of him. Without another word, she walked to the sofa and rested herself amongst the remaining cookie crumbs. Billy pulled a blanket over her and spoke words of comfort as he readied his escape.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she whispered in shock. He knelt in the darkness and touched the bruises of her face. “When you see him, you’ll never stop seeing him.” Billy still couldn’t find the words to speak, obligation’s invisible arms pulled him toward the door. “When you can’t turn the lights off, he’ll burn you internally! Stay away from the light!”
He turned on the television as he left, a quiet consideration to help calm the declarations of a traumatized woman. “I love you; get some rest.” He pulled the door closed and walked quickly to his car. “Thirteen to Delta One, Need the twenty on the fifty-five.”
It seemed a short drive to the crime scene, a multilevel home in the best part of town. The front yard made no attempt to hide the bodies, as the lay completely visible beyond the barrier of two well-maintained hedges. “Steele!” A fellow officer approached him with irritation. “Two dead bodies, soon as the coroner calls it. Where were you?”
Billy lifted his head only slightly. The next standing structure to the crime scene was the glow of Brem’s accredited hospital. A man lay still at his feet, sliced and beaten to death it seemed. These injuries looked all too familiar, impaling him with regret not just for disbelieving a victim, but losing faith in his own blood. “I believe that my sister may have been assaulted at this scene. Collect whatever evidence you can, and I’ll bring her back. You can handle this, Hardy. Can’t you?” Uncaring and indifferent, Hardy gazed seriously into Billy’s face. “She’s still in shock, delusional and highly sensitive.”
“This is a double homicide! If we break protocol on this, we’re the laughing stock of Jager County! Are you going to help me process this scene or do I have to risk losing this conviction based on your nut-job sister?” Hardy stood tall and dark, provoking Billy to the point of surrender.
“She lost her parents not long ago and survived a mass attack tonight. You write your stories as you see them and I’ll write mine, Hardy. Elizabeth might be the only living witness we have to a serial, so I don’t want to hear your shit.” Billy gazed in the direction of the female victim. Glossy blue eyes rested open in a relevant stance of fear and sudden death. As he studied, her eyes shifted up to see him. “That woman’s alive! Get her to ER!”
Even in a hostile work relationship, common goals sometimes lubricate the frictions. Together, Hardy and Steele carried a limp woman to the hospital and sent her off on a stretcher. Hardy testified to the receiving doctor that he’d seen slight movement and witnessed her breath. Returning to the crime scene, there were no bodies to be found.
“The man?” Billy questioned frantically. Hardy looked around in disgust.
“You know? I don’t know why I ever listen to you. You don’t follow protocol, you don’t apply logic and you’re sloppy.” Hardy began collecting evidence.
“I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t know we had a body snatcher, but we still might have saved a woman’s life. Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
“No, we’re here to keep these killers behind bars so they can keep their hands off our sisters. Paramedics transport the victims. If we lose the evidence, we lose the proof, so get your ass to work or shut up so I can at least do my job,” Hardy entered.
He might have been an asshole, but he was right. When it came to Elizabeth, Billy often lost his grasp of logic. He took his flashlight out and surveyed the area in which the injured woman’s body was found. Brem wasn’t a large city and sometimes the duties of a law enforcement official were overwhelming in these great cases. He photographed shoe impressions and combed the lawn for foreign matter, but overall the scene was too clean. There was no blood drop of directionality leading to the yard. There were no weapons to explain the lacerations of the woman’s body, or signs of struggle. The scene was an impossible puzzle box.
He returned to Hardy’s victim, the snatched man and found a frustrated officer look at him with professional forgiveness.“Nothing, just ash.” Hardy’s technique was thorough and impressive; every ounce of ash was taken in sealed bags and placed carefully into the evidence transport. Billy placed his bags and surveys into the receptacle and closed the lid tightly. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what happened to Lizzie?”
Billy shook his head, exhausted and confused. “Whenever something happened when we were kids, she’d always tell us it was her imaginary friend, John John.”
“Sounds like lots of kids,” Hardy responded.
“John John’s a little different, I guess. My grandmother was blind and couldn’t read stories the way that most grandparents do, but somehow she managed to create the story of John John right before she died.” Hardy seemed mildly interested. It was reassuring after the tense introduction to their assignment. “Nothing like this, just a fall. After she died, Elizabeth told us that John John did it, or that John John was laughing at her. Our parents just told me that it’s normal for kids to have imaginary friends.”
“So, what’s this got to do with her assault? She claiming it’s John John?”
“Actually, yes. Our parents died in a restaurant fire a little while ago, as you recall, and until now I thought she was doing so well. It might take some time, but I’m sure she’ll help us find the killer as soon as she snaps out of this juvenile condition.” Hardy looked at the ground a moment, spying nothing to take into evidence. “I’m going to bring her into the hospital. The nurse was pretty sure that rape was apparent. I haven’t completely ruled it out.”
“Oh God no, not Lizzie!” Hardy’s compassion awoke and he took hold of the plastic receptacle. “I’m taking this in, and I’ll meet you back at the hospital.”
“Ten four,” Billy spouted in victory. It took only a fractional minute to roar the engine toward home again. When he arrived home, every light in his house was on and he could hear screams from within. His keys jingled in his clumsy hand while the sounds of her torture grew.“Elizabeth!” He opened his front door while bright lights nearly blinded him from the living room. He had no visual on the television, the cookie crumbs or his little sister. “Elizabeth?” The lights started to dim in flickers and energy spurts and the woman fell from the ceiling battered and nearly broken. The lights went out again and left only the light from the television to lead him. Limp and useless in his loving arms, he instantly prayed in his mind. She was so precious and kind, far too young to be taken and far too important to the prosecution of the outstanding predator. “Say something,” he begged in whisper.
Her breath was difficult, but love often manages to exert effort where there’s no energy to use. “Kill me,” she pleaded. Instead he wrapped her in a cozy brown blanket and carried her to his car. She was too weak to fight this time, and clearly exhausted from the torment of her own imagination. Driving her to the hospital droned en route as Billy accepted the possibility that Elizabeth had been the ill-mannered citizen that he was seeking; Perhaps the stress had snapped in her, and murder had become the abstracted helping hand she’d so often lend. He kept his silence, keeping a watchful eye on her eyes, calm and swollen shut. In both fiction and reality, his sister was suffering. At the emergency room’s entrance, she fell into the wheelchair as if no pain mattered anymore.
He felt it now, as he drove her into the familiar despair of Brem’s humble hospital. In his eyes, the horrors seemed to spread and he could almost see the phantom of John John. Shapes would appear in silhouette to outline the option of a strong beast. Billy was only eleven when Grandmother died, but it was old enough to know that she lived in misery and torment every day. He would not cry at her funeral, but the loss impacted him greatly. Now it was up to him, as her brother, to tell the stories, but he’d failed. Whether adolescence or life, he stopped having time for her.
His hand found hers as he rolled her slowly toward the examination room. “Don’t worry, Elizabeth,” he fabricated. “John John’s with me now, and you never have to see him again.”
“You see him?” Tremors of her face spoke pages of her imagination, the troubling history of violence played in her mind forcing her to retreat. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you, you weren’t supposed to see!” In the hospital’s bitter glow, she opened her eyes to look behind her to watch her brother’s paling face. Her heated brown irises shared with his dark eyes the solitary confinement of possibility, the stories that blurred the line between fiction and reality. John John’s laughter echoed immediately in his mind.
“Are you ready to do a few tests now, Elizabeth?” the nurse asked Billy’s sister. She held her head down in a gentle nod and he released her into the care of the medical assistant. “Thank you, Billy.” Sadly, he only felt the energy to wave, while the haunting sounds of a young boy’s laughter scatted across his mind. His heart pouted in anticipation to be heightened by the sudden transmission of his police radio.
“Steele, what’s your twenty?” was broadcast with the impatient voice of Officer Hardy.
“Brem Hospital, leaving premises.” He walked toward the entrance when Hardy pulled him into the first room. His expression was irritable and confused.“Where’s the woman we brought in?” he asked the officer.
“She was in this room, Steele. All that’s here now is ash, just like at the crime scene.” Billy pulled his flashlight from his belt and studied the loose gray powder that laid across the gurney. “How’s your sister? Can she talk?”
Maniacal laughter startled Billy and he saw a youthful yellow face in the dunes of human sand. Strong and stubborn, Billy would respond. “She’s in Room C. The nurse is examining her now. Go see her if you like.” No time for pardon, Hardy opened the curtain to the room, allowing blue and red lights from his car to ricochet from the white walls of the institution. In every light, John John wore another facial expression and wielded another blade.
There were three: three trespasses to his uniform, three massive incisions to his body, and three incidents that he’d refused to admit that fiction and reality sometimes parallel. They weave the unspeakable stories in the rules of logic and science that when spoken, the truth is no longer real, but a potential for absurdity. Wide eyed, John John finally appeared before him, a smirk across his glistening face and yellow eyes to sour Billy’s energy. He was just as Lizzie told him as children, a child made of glistening yellow gels and glass nails, a fire trapped inside.
He retreated to the counter of the emergency unit and took a hold of his flashlight, making John John all the more powerful. John John opened his mouth, with gnarling teeth of spiked diamond and intimidating laughter. His fingers fell upon the nurse’s last project before her woman patient disintegrated to ash. A needle waited still for the suturing of her incisions.
There was no escape from the ghost, and Billy remembered his grandmother again. Fear was optional in the eyes of the blind, and testifying was a risk once belief became fear. In the dark, John John never hurt anyone. Therefore Billy felt no option, as a happy condition of public protector. In his hand, the needle seated between his fingers. Pain was now just a story. He shoved the needle through his eyelid. The stings died, the visions faded and the ghost was no longer a threat to him. Successful double X’s written in sutures across his eyes, he was confident to commit himself to darkness to lock the phantom from reality again.
“Steele? What the hell are you doing?” Hardy’s voice was unmistakable.
“Take me to my sister,” he demanded forcefully. He listened to the sounds of Hardy’s feet hitting the floor before him, he sensed the winds of motion as he progressed and there was nothing left to be intimidated by. The sinister evil of Elizabeth’s imagination would be locked in his head for as long as he closed his eyes.
“She was just here!” Billy’s heart sank in that moment, wanting so much to know she was around, but in his mind the answer already waited. Forward, as if by instinct, his hands felt around the gurney and ashes massaged his hands. “There ain’t nothing there but ash, Steele.”
His hands shook while light gray matter painted colors to his flesh. Seemingly smiling, the torment had just begun. He called her name and cried aloud, but it was too late. John John mocked him from the confines of his mind.“Kill me,” Billy demanded.
Hardy had truly been tested that night in procedures, working relationships, and also to determine when a fellow officer was no longer suitable to wear the badge. He spent the remainder of night with eyes sewn shut, and the world safe from imagination. Billy did not resist the straightjacket when the officials arrived to escort him to his quarters, free of cookie crumbs.
There were only three: three piles of ash in only a few hours, three months in a dark sanitarium before John John finally burned him from the inside, and three orderlies that heard the story told of John John the lantern ghost.
Photo "Red Soul" Courtesy of Gloria Gypsy- Deth Star, 2008
www.scarycheerleader.com |
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| COMMENTS:
Rated on: October 17, 2009 10:02am by cryptkickerWhat a riveting tale. I enjoyed the whole immensely, but something about the quick turn of view from Billy to the nurse at discharge was really appealing despite having little bearing on the story. I think I just liked an outsider's quick perspective. Maybe the distance countered the torment felt by the main character and sister. I slipped off the tracks a couple of times with who was doing the talking around the final hallway scene, but yes, the story and concept and execution is wonderful as always.
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