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Chains and Pains

Randy Delp and Nikki Noble

    Doctor Roloff’s eyes peered over his bifocals at the man in shackles. The prisoner picked at his fingernails as he sat at the other side of the table. “We can wait all day if you like,” the doctor said. “You’re just hurting yourself.”
    “Story of my life,” the other man answered, not bothering to glance up from his cuticles.
    “I know. I understand you, but the police, they’re a little less understanding.”
    “You don’t know me. You sure as hell wouldn’t understand me.” The prisoner’s dark eyes flashed with anger as his gaze locked with the doctor’s.
    Roloff felt the tension compress the air in the little interrogation room. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, I apologize. I’m just trying to help you, Mr. Gerard.”
    Gerard bit his lip and looked away. He knew his life was over; he had known since the night he met the First. And part of him really wanted to help. He hadn’t wanted to do any of it and he hated the idea of those women’s families wondering what had happened to their daughters, wives, moms, and sisters forever. But what if they found out he was spilling his guts to the cops? Gerard looked at the chains that held him to the uncomfortable metal chair, his eyes following the links down to his waist. He hated the chains, feared them, but there were worse things than prison. He had seen what they were capable of...
    “Mr. Gerard?”
    Gerard shook his head. “I’m sorry, doctor. What was the question again?”
    “How many bodies should the authorities be looking for?”
    Something inside of Gerard screamed to keep his mouth shut, but, God, he’d been in this chair in this room for too long for too many days being endlessly questioned. He was so desperate for it to end, even if whatever came next was worse. He stared down at his fingers, horrified to feel burning behind his eyes and tightening in his throat. Damn it. “I don’t know,” he said at last, looking into the doctor’s earnest face for just a second. “I lost count at nineteen.”
    He watched as the doctor wrote 19 on his memo pad. From Gerard’s vantage point, it looked like 61, which might be closer to the truth, all told. “Then there could be more?” Roloff asked.
    Gerard nodded, feeling guilty and pissed at the doctor for breaking him down and at himself for being so fucking weak. “They all kind of ran together after a while.”
    The doctor set his pad aside. “You haven’t cooperated at all up until right now. Why should I believe you’re on the level?”
    Gerard looked at him with disgust. It was a lot easier to be mad at the doctor than focusing on what he’d done. He embraced that anger, pointing it at the doctor like a knife. “I’m not a liar. I’m a—a lot of things, but a liar isn’t one of them.”
    “Alright. But you’re going to have to provide us with something.”
    “Like what? You’re working for the cops.”
    “I thought we were going to help each other,” Roloff answered, sensing Gerard’s anger. “You help me write up a nice clean report and solve some of the city’s hundreds of missing person’s cases, and I help you stay off of death row.”
    The two men sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Gerard getting more and more agitated. “What the fuck do you want? What’s it going to take to get me out of these goddamn chains and back in my cell for a few hours?”
    “Tell me where the bodies are.”
    Gerard threw his head back and stared at the florescent light above his head with an exasperated sigh. “I can’t do that.”
    “Why? I thought we were helping each other here.”
    “I can’t tell you where they are because I don’t know.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know where the bodies are.”
    “That’s not possible. You’ve admitted that you abducted them. You say you know they’re dead. But you don’t know where the bodies are? Be serious.”
    “Go to my apartment,” Gerard mumbled.
    “I’m sorry, what was that?”
    “Just go to my apartment. Tonight. Be there at eleven p.m. and be alone.”
    “Mr. Gerard, that apartment has been empty since they arraigned you.”
    “Trust me, doctor. You go there tonight and wait and you’ll get all the answers you can handle.”
    The doctor collected his things and stood up. “Mr. Gerard, I’ll be getting in touch.” The doctor went to the heavy steel door and the guard let him out. The doctor was a few steps down the jail’s hallway. He heard the door slam and the guards hurried steps on the concrete floor as the guard caught up with him. “So, Dr. Roloff, is he still certifiably bat-shit crazy?”
    Dr Roloff shook his head. “Well, that’s an eloquent way of putting it.
    “This guy sits in his cell all day and doesn’t cause any trouble. It’s hard to believe he’s a psycho murderer.”
    Dr. Roloff didn’t break his stride. “That’s fairly common for people in his mental state. But don’t get me wrong. He’s still a very dangerous individual and should be handled with extreme caution.”

    Dr. Roloff left the prisoner holding area of the police station. He listened to his footfalls echo through the emptiness of the main lobby until he stopped at the locked door to the offices and scanned his identification badge, unlocking the door with a click. He walked through the hallway to Detective Craig’s office. The detective had paper spread all over his large metal desk. “Detective Craig?”
    Craig looked up from his papers. “Doctor, how did it go today?”
    “More of the same until the last minute, but we may have had a breakthrough. He said he lost count at nineteen victims but that there may be more. Then he insisted that he doesn’t know where the bodies are and told me to go to his apartment for answers.”
    “Do you think it’s a trap?”
    Roloff shook his head. “Even if I thought Gerard could plan something from prison, I don’t think he’s smart enough.”
    “The place has been completely stripped. There’s no way you’ll find anything we haven’t already found.”
    “I know that, but at the same time I feel he at least believes he’s telling the truth. I need to check it out.”
    “Alright. Do you want me to go with you?”
    “No. It’s just an empty apartment. I’ll be fine.”

    The guards followed Gerard back to his holding cell. It was a tiny cell, empty except for a cold, seat-less toilet and a narrow cot with a thin mattress. Gerard insisted he wanted nothing else in the room. The guard removed the shackles and chains and unlocked the door. Gerard walked past him into the room, the guard closed and locked the door, and Gerard stuck his handcuffed wrists through an opening in the door so the guard could unlock the cuffs. Once Gerard was secured, the guard walked away, the chains draped over his arm like an expensive jacket, rattling with each step. This was a routine they did daily, a well-choreographed dance between prisoner and jailer.
     Gerard shuddered at the sound of the chains and was glad to be rid of them for a while. He sat down on the cot that was suspended by bolts in the concrete wall. Gerard sat there; his only company now was his thoughts.

    Dr.Roloff opened the door to the apartment on the forth floor, the apartment once occupied by Alex Gerard. The apartment was dark. The doctor brushed his hand along the wall until he found the light switch. He flicked it, but the room remained dark. He flipped it again with no effect. “Guess it’s kind of hard to keep caught up on the light bill when your ass is sitting in jail,” Roloff said to himself as he walked to the windows.
    Roloff opened the blinds and yellow light from the street lamps spilled into the apartment. He pulled a small, silver tape recorder from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and pushed record. “July 26,” he said into the microphone, holding the recorder about a foot from his mouth. Mr. Gerard’s apartment is completely empty. I’m assuming the crime scene lab is now in possession of all of Mr. Gerard’s belongings.” He clicked Pause and started to look around.
    The bare wood floor echoed under the thump of each of the doctor’s steps as he walked to the middle of what had probably been a living room and looked at the stark white walls. He hit Record and said, “Investigators believe Mr. Gerard brought the victims here before murdering them and disposing of their bodies. Strangely enough, there was no blood or hair evidence found at this location. They can’t even find the bodies. The only thing they found that was strange was one hundred three pairs of underwear, women’s underwear. Authorities are afraid that the underwear isn’t allowed to convict.”
    Dr. Roloff looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten. He began talking into the recorder again. “I’ve been brought in use psychological questioning to crack Mr. Gerard, but he has been a rock. After weeks of questioning, this is the first lead he’s provided, telling me to come here and wait.”
    Pause. Dr. Roloff took a deep breath. The room was humid and musty, the air thick. The street below the window was quiet. Though cars lined the streets, there were surprisingly few people in sight, especially for the inner city.
    Radloff sat on the floor, his back to the open windows and waited, bored as he’d ever been and not knowing what he was waiting for. A breeze smacked the blinds and Roloff felt sleep creeping over him. He glanced at his watch. It was after three a.m. Geeze. He tried to talk himself into leaving, but his inner psychiatrist told him to wait it out. Gerard had told him to wait. But for what? His legs and lower back hurt, and as he stood to stretch the wooden floor started to vibrate.
    Roloff didn’t have time to think. The earthquake was vicious; the entire floor felt as though it were shaking back and forth. The doctor staggered to the bedroom doorway and braced himself in the frame, his eyes closed, praying that the old building wouldn’t fall down around him.
    As suddenly as it started, the shaking stopped. Through his still closed eyelids, the doctor saw a brilliant flash of light. He opened his eyes to find the light shooting up between the boards of the wooden floor in a square of illumination that was almost blinding. The fall of light was between him and the way out. He shielded his eyes with his hands. Record. “Something is happening.”
    No shit! His mind screamed.
    The brightness faded, but light still peeked up through the boards. Roloff started to walk toward the exit, wanting to get out before the building decided to come down. The strange light winked out and the doctor, wanting to reassure himself that he wasn’t hallucinating, walked directly over the place the light had been coming from. Then he stumbled over something sticking out of what had been a completely empty floor. The doctor bent close to examine the little object. In the gloom of the streetlights it was impossible to tell what it was. He wrapped his hand around it. Round. Small. Cold. Hard.
    Even as he realized it was a door handle, Roloff’s mind rebelled at the idea. There couldn’t be a cellar door in a fourth-floor apartment. Either he’d suffered a head injury during the earthquake or there had been some weird structural damage done to the building. He pulled the handle and the door popped open. Expecting to see down into the apartment below, Roloff was shocked to find that the door revealed a set of rough-hewn wooden steps.
    The doctor took his glasses off and rubbed his face, feeling as crazy as his most delusional patients. He slipped the glasses back on. Even as part of him, probably the sane part, screamed at him to get the hell out of there, he knew he had to go on from there, had to see what was going on for himself.
    The wooden steps creaked under the doctor’s feet. If it was a hallucination, it was certainly bordering on reality. The sight, sound, even the smell, was so real. At the bottom of the stairs was a musty dirt floor. The air was cool, amazingly cool considering how warm the apartment had been. And, even compared to the darkness upstairs, this place was gloomy. There were no windows or light bulbs or—hell—even torches. Where the strange light had been coming from, the doctor couldn’t tell. He raised his hand to speak into his tape recorder.
    The recorder wasn’t there. Roloff knew he hadn’t put it down. He knew it. He stared stupidly at his empty hand, even opened and closed it to make sure the machine really wasn’t there. He glanced around the floor around him to make sure he hadn’t dropped it and rubbed his palms together. The Sound of his dry palms scraping together seemed as loud as a wire brush scraping a sidewalk in this otherworldy silence.
    In the middle of the wall opposite the stairs was a wooden door with a strange character written on it in shimmering red paint. The sight of the symbol filled him with foreboding and an increasing sense of unreality. Other than the hieroglyph, the door was like any other, wood, obviously old, with a black porcelain handle. Roloff twisted the handle and pushed the door open with care. The rusty hinges screeched, piercing his overwrote nerves like a hot needle.
    Roloff cringed as the door howled its way open, and he stood still in the doorway and looked in. The room behind this door could not have been more unlike the room he had just come from. The space was unbelievably huge, so large that he couldn’t see any of the other walls or the ceiling and lit by candles burning in gilded chandeliers that seemed suspended in midair twenty feet above the ground. The light was low, but the doctor could tell the wall that he could see was beautifully covered in green and gold fabric, and the floor was ebony marble so perfectly polished that Roloff could see his reflection. Somewhere in that cavernous place, the doctor could hear something. Bells?
    He stepped into the hall and the door shut behind him with an explosive bang. Roloff jumped at the noise. It had been so loud in the silence that he wondered if his hearing had somehow been heightened. If so, perhaps his sense of smell had been heightened as well, for as amazing as that place was, it reeked. He had only gone a few paces into the room when he had to stifle a gag. He put a trembling hand over his mouth and nose, and even as he did so he saw a figure materialize in the semi-darkness and start walking toward him.
    As it approached Roloff thought it was a man, but as it came closer he knew it couldn’t be. This thing was an abomination of the human form. Its body was naked, male, totally hairless, and the sickening pallor of a creature that had never seen the light of day. Its skin hung like that of a geriatric bodybuilder, loose and wrinkled. The twisted form disgusted the doctor.
    “You have returned,” the thing rasped as it continued toward him. Even its voice was awful, like nails being swirled in a mason jar. Even in his terror, the doctor was dumbfounded. He had no idea what the monster was talking about. The creature sniffed the air. “But you are empty-handed,” it said.
    “I’m sorry?” the doctor responded.
    “Do not feign ignorance,” the thing said, “Your obligation, Gerard.”
    “You’re...you’re mistaken,” Roloff said, his voice high pitched in his fear. “I’m not Gerard.”
    The monster turned back into a shadow and sped at Dr. Roloff. It changed back into the hideous man inches from the doctor’s face and Roloff shuddered backward away from the man-thing as it smelled him. In the close proximity, Roloff saw that it had pointed ears and a nose that was so flat it could hardly be called a nose at all. It had two rows of filthy, shark-like teeth, and its breath was like death. The worst of all was its eyes. They were huge in comparison with those of a human, strange and colorless with absolutely no pupils. The thing was blind. “Who are you, then?” it asked.
    “I’m Dr. James Roloff. Gerard sent me here. He’s in jail for murder.”
    The twisted thing laughed wheezing, mirthless chuckle. “I knew that fool would fail. Are you a pawn in his game of deceit?”
    “No, I’m a psychiatrist. I was trying to help Mr. Gerard. He’s a very sick man.”
    “The human Gerard is incapacitated. Well, his slate must be wiped clean. We shall find him and deal with it ourselves.”
    “What—eh—who are you?”
    “So many questions you monkeys always ask.” The monster clapped its spider-thin hands and the noise of bells which Gerard thought he had heard when he entered the room was suddenly loud, coming from everywhere. Only it wasn’t bells. The steady clink-clink-clinking, slinking along the ground was chains and the chains were climbing Roloff’s legs, wrapping themselves around him like so many snakes, squeezing his chest tight, locking his arms to his sides and with a hand motion from the doctor, the chains hoisted Roloff into the air, suspending him four feet above the floor.
    A wrinkled smile cracked the creature’s face. “I am one of many, the beings that inhabit the Realm Between, and we are hungry. There is no food here, and though we can kill creatures on your side of the divide, we can not bring our prey through to us. So we need Feeders.”
    “Feeders?”
    “Humans that are willing to bring us meat.”
    “Gerard was a Feeder?”
    The thing clenched its fist and another chain wound its way around the doctor’s throat, squeezing just tight enough to let him know he shouldn’t talk. “Gerard was a fool, a slave to his lust. He sought his own prey, giving it to us only once he was finished with it. Nevertheless, he did bring us succulent feasts. Meat from human females is the tastiest, and once he had finished tormenting them, death was a blessing, really. However, now we are out of food.”
    The monster snapped its fingers and harsh light flooded down from above. Now Roloff could see rows of steel chains hanging down from the ceiling miles above, and he could see the others. The saggy-skinned beasts were hunched over piles of bloodstained bones, gnawing on the remains of the poor women Gerard had brought for them. As he watched one of the monsters sucked the marrow out of a cracked rib bone. “Now,” the monster said, “the question is whether you will bring us food or whether you will be food.”
    The doctor pictured himself being devoured by those pale outrages. “I’ll help you. Please, let me help you.” The doctor was hysterical, close to tears, when he felt the chains loosen and he fell, fell into blackness.

    Detective Craig was in his office compiling notes on the Gerard case when the black office phone rang. Craig picked it up. The voice on the other end was that of a panicked guard. “Detective, you’re going to want to get here now.”
    The detective rushed through the halls of the precinct and down to the holding cells. A nervous guard sat at his post actually trembling with fear. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
    The guard pointed down the row of cells. “Gerard, he’s dead,” the guard said.
    “How?” asked Craig, not wanting to believe the shaken guard.
    “Go look for yourself,” the guard said. “I’m not going back there.”
    Craig walked down to the last cell on the left. On the cold concrete floor lay Gerard, his eyes and tongue bulging from his purple head, the same shackles and chains he had been forced to wear in the interrogation room wrapped terribly around a neck that seemed twice as long as it should be.
    “How the hell did this happen?” Craig yelled as he hustled back to the guard’s station.
    “Watch,” the guard said, pushing rewind and then play on the bank of video recorder screens.
    The screen flashed into black and white, revealing the hallway. “Is there any sound on this thing?” asked Craig.
    The guard turned it up. Amid the back noise of the other prisoners’ cells a rattle of chains could be heard. As the guard and detective watched, the chains—seemingly of their own accord—clink-clinked-clinked their way across the floor and between the bars into Gerard’s cell.

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This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine. Saddle-stitched issues are no longer printed, but you can requesting it “re-released” through amazon sale as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of Down in the Dirt magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book!
Email us for re-release to order.